That's because launch system designs don't just appear out thin air. They have to be paid for.

What's more, there isn't enough money in the world to pay for a launch system project that is "privatized" the way politicians mean "privatized": undertaken by contractors with no competition and no money of their own at stake.

Well, here's one possible effect and cause scenario that occurred to me.

Start with a healthy person who has a generally positive view of humanity. That doesn't mean he believes every human is good and honest; he relies on his critical thinking to know when an offer is too good to be true and his social perception to sense when someone is trying to put one over on him.

Now give him some brain damage so that his critical thinking and social perception don't work so well any longer. How does he react? He falls back on simple, generalized rules. Since he can no longer tell a dishonest man or scheme from an honest one, he takes the default position that everyone and everything is dishonest.

You can see this at operation in the country. I've lived over fifty years in this country and cynicism is at an all-time high. But strangely enough, so is credulity. We've become a nation of cynical suckers.

We've already bettered typical human cognition in various limited ways (rote computation, playing chess). So in a sense we are already living in the age of intelligent machines, except those machines are idiot savants. As software becomes more capable in new areas like pattern recognition, we're more apt to prefer reliable idiot savants than somewhat capable generalists.

So the biggest practical impediment to creating something which is *generally* as capable as the human brain is opportunity costs. It'll always be more handy to produce a narrowly competent system than a broadly competent one.

The other issue is that we as humans are the sum of our experiences, experiences that no machine will ever have unless it is designed to *act* human from infancy to adulthood, something that is bound to be expensive, complicated, and hard to get right. So even if we manage to create machine intelligence as *generally* competent as humans, chances are it won't think and feel the same way we do, even if we try to make that happen.

But, yes, it's clearly *possible* for some future civilization to create a machine which is, in effect equivalent to human intelligence. It's just not going to be done, if it is ever done, for practical reasons.

Of course you should stand up when someone else is bullied. What I object is drawing generalizations about nerds, or men from the fact that some men, and some nerds, don't know how to behave.

This kind of overgeneralization is pernicious. For one thing, that actually feeds into the misconception that such behavior is somehow normal for men. "You politically correct folks have it in for *men* who act like *men*!" "No, we have it in for people who act like jerks."

I remember once, years, ago, a friend of mine told me she wanted her new boyfirend to spend time hanging out with me.

"Why?" I asked.

"So he can see that men aren't icky," she said.

I was mortified. In a weird way people on both extremes of this issue agree on the way "men behave"; they just disagree on whether it's icky or not. Well, bugger that.

I generally agree with the tenor of your post; yes we do have to stand up for what's right. But... but... but... is the problem here really an absence of moral clarity? Do we really need to stand up and say, "going on a murder spree is wrong!"?

Or lets be a little more serious, would it have made a difference if more of us got up and said, "misogyny is wrong" ? Alright, MISOGYNY IS WRONG.

I understand feeling the need to stand up and say *something*, but a world in which that makes any difference to anything other than our feelings is beyond anything I can imagine. Maybe doing something to make ourselves feel better is important. Maybe it will alleviate *other* ills. But I don't think standing up to misogyny it's going to stop crazy guys from going on a rampage, especially *this* crazy guy, who had a lot more problems than misogyny.

If we need to do anything in response to this situation, it would be to find t a better way to respond to someone who has obviously lost it and is making threats of violence. That's a lot harder than just standing up and being counted, though.

First of all, let's point out the obvious: Rodgers killed twice as many men as women.

Which doesn't mean I'm saying violence against women isn't a serious problem, or that I don't care about the two women he killed. Gad are we really that simple-minded that it has to be one or the other? I'm only saying that Rodgers shouldn't be held up as THE paradigm for the way men treat women. Rodgers knew when he posted his manifesto that he was, in effect, writing his own obituary. He deliberately framed his future actions in full, cynical knowledge of society's sexism.

Let me make what should be an obvious point here: we shouldn't accept Rodgers' framing of his actions, for the simple reason he was a twisted person with a nasty agenda. Yes, his stated views on women were ugly, but going by his actions he hated *humanity* and chose targets of opportunity. He not only robbed James Hong, George Chen, David Wang and Christopher Michael-Martinez of collectively some two hundred years of lifespan. He successfully exploited our knee-jerk credulity so as to erase those kids from our consciousness as victims of his crimes.

As for "what is wrong with nerds?", that begs the question. Is there a problem with "nerds"? What is a "nerd" anyway?

The reason for media nerd chic is that feeling marginalized is ironically something most people can identify with. So is feeling emotionally vulnerable, and sometimes even isolated. And we all make regrettable and sometimes embarrassing mistakes in conducting our relationships with other people. But that doesn't mean we can't understand that "no means no", or that it's unpleasant and threatening to have unwanted attentions forced on you.

So if by "nerd" you mean "aggressively unpleasant person who blames other people for their reaction to his obnoxious behavior," well most of us aren't that kind of "nerd". The blockhead opinions of people like that have nothing to do with us.

If by "nerd" you mean "non-coformist who'd rather live with some degree of social marginalization than not act like himself," then you have to show us that this is tantamount to being an obnoxious and possibly violent twerp, which I don't think it is.

Those idiots who cheered Rodgers on are not my fault either. Maybe they're in part my problem, as they are a problem for everyone who has to live in the same society as they do. I may feel *concern* over their actions, but I don't feel a shred of guilt. Somebody else made them blockheads, not me.

Well... I've had a second generation Kindle; a Nook Color; and a second generation Kindle Paperwhite. I agree that the primary desiderata for an ebook reader are reading convenience and comfort. That doesn't mean that the ability to mark up texts or even to enter text isn't useful for most readers some of the time, and for a few readers quite a lot of the time.

There's more than one kind of reading. I often do in-depth novel reviews, sometimes detailed critiques of unpublished manuscripts. I find the highlighting and note-taking functions indispensable. On my paperwhite they're more than adequate for most readers, but for me I often give up and return to reading on my laptop.

Textbooks are another example of a different kind of reading. They don't work that well on eBook readers, (a) because the eBook readers are designed for novels and don't display things like diagrams and pages of equations well and (b) they don't lend themselves to being dog-eared, marked in the margins, or stuck with yellow stickies.

At this point the Paperwhite is nearly the perfect casual novel-reading machine. Oh, the stuff it does do could be improved in various marginal ways, but not so's I'd toss my perfectly good Paperwhite aside and shell out a hundred or two bucks for a better casual novel reading machine. But I would consider it for one that had better highlighting and markup, or which worked better for journal article PDFs and textbooks.

That's the key if you're a device designer: knowing when the marginal effort should be put into bells and whistles and when it should be put into basics. Steve Jobs was a master of that. He knew when the time was ripe to field a *basic product*, and then coached the early adopters on the upgrade treadmill with regular additions of well-thought-out marginal improvements.

What a brave new world that will be.

Well, to play devil's advocate for a moment, that would leave "belief" up to the opinions of the individual.

Imagine Alice and Bob are both physical anthropologists. They both agree that evolution is the parsimonious explanation for the fossil record, but Alice believes it actually happened; Bob, an evangelical Christian, thinks of it as a useful model.

We all have a number of useful models in our head we know are untrue, or rather mostly untrue. I have a number of inconsistent models of the atom in my head, including a laughably wrong on in which the atom looks like a miniature solar system. That's the one I use when, for example, I need a mental picture of an atom's behavior in static electricity. My picture of the Solar System, for that matter, is schematic. It even has lines along which the planets travel, as if they were slotted into grooves rather than moving in general relativistic geodesics.

Now on technical questions of physical anthropology, Alice and Bob are in complete agreement. If there is such a thing as "scientific literacy", they are functionally equivalent. Their areas of disagreement aren't scientific, they're *metaphysical*. Alice contemptuously calls Bob's beliefs "Last Thursdayism", but name calling, even clever name calling, isn't much of an argument. There's no basis whatsoever upon which they can resolve their disagreements, which, happily, takes that disagreement outside the realm of science.

The overall level of scientific literacy is woefully low, and this particular data point doesn't happen to cluster nicely with the others.

Thought experiment: suppose your test of driving law literacy discovered that knowing you are supposed to stop if possible on a yellow light correlates poorly with knowledge of other traffic laws. So you toss out that question. This means that a subject can in theory get a perfect score on your driving literacy test without knowing one of the most basic things about driving laws.

The reason that people (usually social scientists) do this kind of thing is (a) it's often useful to do so and (b) they don't understand statistics.

What Kagan is doing here is he is re-engineering the concept of "scientific literacy" so he can treat it as a "parameter". It's not. You can get twice as many answers right on the test, but that doesn't make you "twice as scientifically literate" because that's a meaningless statement. The truth is you need to know certain things like conservation of energy, the germ theory of disease, and evolution to be functionally literate in science

I'd modify this answer to be: not yet.

At this point we don't understand what the impact of many driverless cars will be. It makes sense *for now* to require a licensed human driver be ready take over the vehicle in case the robotic control begins to conduct the vehicle incorrectly.

Later, as we gain more experience with autonomous vehicles and the systems become both more sophisticated and more proven, we'll reach a point where he have hard, data that proves having a human driver handy doesn't statistically have any benefit. At that point there's no rational reason to require a human driver even be aboard.

Even further down the road, we might even lock human drivers out of control of their vehicles, at least on public thoroughfares. If people want to drive they'll have to do it on closed tracks where they don't endanger anyone.

I wish the experimental subjects well. If the procedure works, they will not only be saving themselves, but many future patients whose injuries can't be treated quickly enough. And if the procedure becomes routine, it may someday pave humanity's road to the stars.

I haven't, but we were discussing this over the dinner table, and the consensus is that he must have given off major creepy vibes.

It raises an interesting question: what if he had simply received training in not sounding creepy? Interesting, because I think something like that really could set someone on the path to becoming successfully socially integrated, but it could also transform someone from a creepy sounding psychopath into a charming psychopath.

Can in fact be made from plant sources (e.g. sugar -> sugar alcohol -> artificial resin). No doubt early versions of the process won't yield much, if any reduction in environmental impact, but at least in principle the process could be made sustainable.

I wouldn't be surprised if plant based epoxies started in appearing soon in eco-chic products along with bamboo. I mean, hemp-and-bamboo composite -- among a certain crowd that would sell like hotcakes.

That's easy to think because it's easy to forget about the species that we used to have, but don't any longer.I'm old, so I do remember the species we used to have back in the 60s. but are long gone, like the rock crab, which is way better eating than the tiny Asian shore crab that displaced it.

Another thing to remember is that Florida is a very big state, so if you simply list all the edible invasive animals, it seems like a cornucopia. But if you look at the situation in habitat by habitat, the situation looks different.The problem these things is that they don't have native predators -- they overwhelm the resources within a habitat. That means you lose everything else in that habitat that was dependent, directly or indirectly, on resources consumed by the exotic. That includes many desirable native species.

Take Tilapia. Of course the're edible, they're a popular aquaculture fish, but they're not *great* eating. They're like tofu: it's all about what you cook them *with*. When they take over a body of water, they displace native fish that are actually *better* eating. So instead of a nice bass, you end up catching a mediocre white fish you can buy cheaper than bait at the supermarket anyway.

Or Asian carp. They are indeed edible, in fact good if you know how to prepare them, but they also displace many, many desirable native gamefish: bass, crappie, catfish, trout and salmon, all of which are superb eating. For a whole list of edible animals you might not be aware of, you get one in their place. That's a raw deal.