Regulated prostitution is far safer than black market prostitution, for both parties, so you are really arguing for legalization...

I'm guessing this is just a rehash of the stuff demoed here...

http://www.ted.com/talks/pattie_maes_demos_the_sixth_sense.html

I agree with the ideal, but the specifics behind the situation don't support it. If a band can make significantly more money by playing at large venues with relatively expensive tickets, most will probably do so. Easiest workaround to me, just pirate the albums to save money for the concerts. No moral qualms, you're still giving them all the money you can afford to give.

The process would probably involve shotguns and slander.

So the Visigoths are going to come wipe us out now? It's very difficult to draw good 2000-year-old analogies...

"Usually leads to children" -> see Idiocracy

"and then pay taxes" -> look up "poverty" and the tax code

Anyway, that's certainly not the reason citizens would support such policy, that's just straight-up bigotry. Example, my father said he would move to a new state if his state legalized gay marriage. And there are a lot of others like him...

Sounds nice, but how do you enforce it? What if you claim to be "working on the implementation" of the patent in preparation for production, does that count? How many units do you have to produce? Maybe they can make 1 widget per year that utilizes the patents.

I think one solution could be the following: damages for patent infringement calculated based on the value the patent-holder has already produced through the implementation of the patent. Example: company A has a patent for product X, company B infringes. If A has produced N units of X, then B must pay damages equivalent to some multiple of the market value of the N units of X. So, if N = 0, B pays nothing.

This has the benefit that a popular, valuable product would receive commensurate protection. Perhaps some future extrapolation could be involved as well, in order to better protect young products. Or maybe keep full patent protection for a short time, like 2 years, to give the patent holder time to get the product to market.

Sequel: "Pwni"

And the third title, "My Little Pwni"?

>what if the energy or mass requirements are nuts?

That's one of the points I was getting at.

Warp bubble? Star Trek is one of the better mainstream sci-fi universes, but let's stick to extrapolations based on known physics...

The resolution to the Twin paradox is not that they both have aged the same, it is that the twin who remained in an inertial rest frame undergoes gravitational time dilation in the view of the traveling twin. The traveler still ages less.

Nice thing about information is that you don't need to hand-deliver it. I imagine a large space-based coherent light source would do the trick.

There's enough reasonable conjecture within theoretical physics to support the notion that space may be "foldable". I think the bigger leap is simply being able to instigate it in a manner that is useful to us. Being able to simply send information (say photons) between two distant points of space instantly would be a big enough leap. Sending atoms and more is another matter. :)

You extrapolate from the "folded road map" analogy that there is some distance between the adjoined points comes from the "road map" having thickness, but this is not true for a mathematical plane (any d-dimensional object has no size in the d+1 or greater dimensions). And at any rate, it isn't clear whether traveling in an extra dimension, once expanded, would be a serious issue or not.

I say by the time we're sending anything sentient beyond the solar system, it'll either be an AI or a human consciousness ported to a computational system. At this point, lifespan is essentially meaningless, of course. Not to mention, this overcomes other huge hurdles such as acceleration limits and spaceship sizes.

Err today, fucked tomorrow?

Ebert is mostly talking about how games "can never be art", so to disprove that, I am just saying that they have the possibility to be art--not that this has been explored to any large degree.

Not sure if you meant it this way but...there is no such thing as an intrinsically artistic medium: the media are the sandboxes for art, not art themselves. Is a language artistic? You could argue it is a good platform for art, but not art itself. Perhaps a language that was carefully constructed by someone could be considered art, like Tolkien's elf language, but there was no intention behind the development of the common world languages.

Or if you meant it this way...if a medium allows for art, that doesn't mean all creations using it must be in some way artistic. When I take a picture of something just for utility, say a posted trail map so I can recall it later, this is not art, but the photographic medium still allows artistic expression. Most videos games are in this vein: still useful (i.e. fun) but not artistic.