You keep talking about a large asteroid that is definitely on a collision course with earth. This is an error. There have been large asteroids that been on collision courses before. There may be more, but it is not certain. Because it is not 100% probable that an unknown large asteroid is currently on a collision course with earth none of your argument is valid, and your arguments about increasing probabilities are incorrect.

Your argument would be valid (but pointless) if you said: "if there is at least one more asteroid on a collision course with earth then the probabillty of impact on a particular day increases with each day it does not strike". Of all the asteroids that strike earth of a given size, one of them is the last.

If you think fuzzy is bad look at anything called quazi-something in maths. It may as well read not-actually-anything-at-all-like-something. That one is my pet peeve

When people write a paper for publication they have to differentiate their approach from previous approaches. You seem to have latched onto deep as an imprecise description of the number of layers. It is not. It is an accurate distinction in comparison to previous approaches. Because previous approaches were limited to about (not exactly) two layers it makes the definition of the label a little fuzzy, but the partition into shallow / deep approaches is crisp.

The problem comes when you try larger inputs. Regardless of constant factors if you are playing with O(2^n) algorithms then n will not increase above about 30. If you start looking at really weird stuff (optimal circuit design and layout) then the core algorithms are O(2^2^n) and then if you are really lucky n will reach 5. Back in the 80s it only went to 4, buts thats Moore's law for you.

When you refer to this hypothetical steambox as open, what makes you assume that it will be? If it is custom hardware there is no reason to assume that it will be any more open than competing consoles. Linux on the inside doesn't guarantee root access, and if they drop bios for a signed bootloader it would be difficult to get into. The DRM in the system will be derived from steam, so I would assume that online activation will be mandatory. The piracy rate could actually be lower than the currently existing consoles as none of them enforce mandatory online activiation. It could also completely kill the second-hand game market for this device, so the economics of the market would quite new. As you wrote ealier, it would be up to Value to prove that gamers would buy into this market, although I assume the studios would love it.

Was about to post this. Also steal a part of ringbring's business model and pick up other supplies on route: popcorn, chocolate, soda, pizza etc.

Probably more showers... But they are less fun.

(that I'm too lazy to read the article for) is does this mean an end to passwords, and the beginning of proper identity management in the browser. I would love to authenticate myself once to the browser, and then have it negotiate identities with each website.

We have motorised desks at work. There is a pair of push switches on the front and they raise and lower maybe 1.5m (3-4ft). As long as you have fairly long cables on everything these make the transition very easy. It does make quite a difference as you can stretch your legs for an hour or two and then switch back. Oddly enough I've ended up in a weird slouched position with the chair reclined and the desk close to the floor, meh, the broken ergonomics are probably more to do with me than the office.

Fair enough, I think that I skipped over your penultimate paragraph. I'm not the poster that you were replying to though...

Yes, "among". Mankind taking a step off of this rock for the first time is a huge deal. It is as big as the other achievements that you list. Although Armstrong did not achieve it alone, most of the rest of your list are not solo endeavours either.

No. You are taking an extremely superficial view of the problems and claiming that we know the solutions. If you take your points together then they claim that we can build a viable closed eco-system. The experiments that have been conducted so far show that we cannot. We still do not know how to engineer a closed-loop that can survive for more than a few months and every experiment so far has had to shut down or risk killing the participants.

Sure we know how to build bunkers - do we know how to do large scale construction in a hard vacuum? Can we build a fission reactor large enough for a small city, launch it by rocket and land it on another orbital body? Or is it so easy to assemble it over there using our well-developed space construction skills?

It must be some utopian blend of crack in that pipe that you are smoking. Nobody is claiming that we can't learn how to do these things given the will and the experience, but to claim that they are already solved problems is just ridiculous.

Indeed, just because binary was good enough for the first few millenia of civilisation did not stop the invention of octal in the 19th century. It did not stop the widespread adoption of decimal across the world in the '60s (apart from america), and hexadecimal is currently being established as an international standard. Who knows? By the mid-century we may have progressed as far as a base-25 system.

What do you mean focus on playlists rather than albums? The only thing that I use playlists for in iTunes is overlapping sets of genres, I use albums the rest of the time.

Oh dear, you don't seem to grasp the point so well. If I replace a single processor that performs a task with a set of parallel processors then I cannot claim the power is reduced just because the time is shorter. The energy consumed depends on both the time and the power use of the set of processors. Given the discussion that followed in that thread it is quite clear that understanding the distinction would have added something.