Devil's advocate: Then you're teaching what the statisticians who supposedly polled, for example, climate scientists tell you to. Frankly I have absolutely no knowledge of their methods, nor do I know enough climate scientists to make a statistically significant rebuttal. Do they ask every graduate in every country? Do they do telephone surveys? How many people don't answer those surveys because surveys are retarded?

I don't for a moment think that the religious arguments have any merit, but at the same time, I hear a lot of people touting "Scientists believe X." Which scientists where? I'd really appreciate knowing the margin of error on that statistics, which people specifically were polled, and especially, which weren't. I don't know the bias of any of these statements, and as far as I can recall, I've never, ever seen it mentioned. Considering that that is extremely important in social statistics, it seems lacking.

Yes, programmers shouldn't program in their off time, just like artists shouldn't draw and singers shouldn't sing. Which, unfortunately, a lot of people believe.

"What are you doing?" parents and peers always say. "You're wasting your life." And they keep doing it because they want to.

I say screw people like you, and more power to people like them.

People who say that never go into why copyright infringement isn't theft. Understand, in the following, that IANAL, and it will show, but I think it's important anyway.

Copyright and sales licenses are agreements between people--none of them me, you'll note--that so-and-so gets to profit from sales of a particular work. So-and-so, being so caught up in the idea that this license is exclusive, creates artificial scarcity and does other kinds of social engineering to drive up prices. They use the legal system--which was created to stop or punish abuses of power--to make sure the license remains exclusive, even though what's happening isn't sales of the work; it's free distribution, in ways that violate the exclusivity clause of the license.

Basically, piracy is "But you said only WE can do that! Make them stop! Mom! He won't stop! Make him stop! I want to be a millionaire! Make him stooooooop!"

If your representatives were behaving exactly as you wanted them to, they'd be making your case before the House and/or Senate. If they were really good, they'd find a way to leverage the wit and knowledge of their constituents to make the argument more powerful.

Representing you is. their. job. It is what the job exists to do. Voting on any particular measure is only a small fraction of representing you, and therefore is only a small part of their responsibility.

If you had a full computer (mail, etc), displays around the house, TVs, Radio, and an audio system that moved the sound (and voice input) with you... you might be able to do interesting things. Audio notification and voice input from everywhere; video notification and text input from various places around the house.

But the problem is that it's still more about "cool" than function. "I don't have to look at my phone to get text messages" is crucial in the car, but not at home. "I can always get notified of new mail" is a problem solved by smartphones; it's only a minor inconvenience to carry one around the house. And while you may be able to come up with a plausible use for networked lights if you stretch it, the advantages over dumb wiring aren't all that high.

Arguably, "home automation" might be better suited for office environs than home environs; smart locks, location awareness, power control, lights, etc... it makes more sense for you to invest in infrastructure when you never know who will need what services when, or where. But a house is just a house; it's what, four people on average; unless you live in a mansion, you're not controlling dozens of doors or hundreds of lights. It's "cool", it's playful, but it's not what I would consider practical.

"Cloud, cloud, drive, spam, box, spam, and drive. It hasn't got much spam in it..."

I was going for a monty python reference, but I'm sure enterprising netizens will find a way to put the other kind of spam on there, too.

I may be speaking from inexperience here, but the problem you're highlighting is a big circular clusterfuck.

Going back to ancient times, once a book is published the first time, it can be copied. When book-copying labor (scribes with pens) was scarce, books were scarce--but at the same time, anyone could be in the business of copying books, if they had the education and a steady hand; demand for more books was virtually infinite, as there were plenty of libraries or individuals that would pay for a copy of, say, philosophy, or math, or something else interesting. (Of course, it was dependent on local demand specifically, or any travelling traders you could sell to, and those are different...) When book copying first became industrial (printing press), book publication (both copying and first edition) became a centralized industry, with a large overhead that had to do with labor, machine costs, and transportation. But because you were doing it in bulk, you could absorb the overhead with margins on each book sold instead of sustaining yourself on a sell-by-sell basis.

The book industry now faces two problems: it's incredibly easy to print things (albeit in variable quality), and book copying is now digital: instantaneous and costing virtually nothing. We are back where we were at the beginning, where anyone could get into the business of copying books--and thanks to digital communications, books created anywhere can be printed and distributed anywhere. Book publication as a centralized industry can only exist with the digital equivalent of mercantilism, which means that book publication as an industry needs to use its money as a leverage to prevent the industry from collapsing.

Basically, if the entire book industry collapsed in a pile of dust tomorrow, and there never again was a centralized book publishing regime, we wouldn't lose access to many books. There would be lots of scanning and trading, and a lot of books published digitally and independently, either to be printed locally or used on some sort of reader. Maybe--maybe--certain authors that could only thrive on a centralized industry would fail, but a new decentralized industry would be born. Basically the only people who really, severely don't want that to happen are people who depend on the system as-is, and unfortunately, many of them have been filling out their wallets on those margins for a long time. It'd be nice for them to stop being selfish, but their worldview and their current jobs rely on this system, so I guess it's only to be expected that they think in those terms.

Agreed, I'd feel a lot better if part of this competition was zero (not "acceptably low") false positives. Some backwards places in the world (yes, I am speaking specifically of America) being accused of sex crimes is a Bad Thing and will ruin your entire life, even if the accusation is baseless. It is not acceptable to create an algorithm that will ruin innocent people's lives with some probability, if used for its intended purpose.

They make high precision scales, and they're going around the world saying, "Look how our scale gives a different mass measurement for the same object in different places." In the video on their site they talk about how they do in fact go out of their way to adjust the scales for local gravity (wherever they're being shipped to? Somehow?), but they could push that emphasis more.

What they're showing is that the mass reading (as opposed to weight reading, which is accurate) is not consistent when you move them around the world, and that their instruments in particular are sensitive enough to be affected. That's true and important, but they should be making more of a fuss about their calibration services if they're going to be showing off that sensitivity.

Million-dolar spacecraft have been lost for less. Units matter.

I don't know why a company that made scales would make that particular mistake, but then, if NASA can do it, who am I to judge.

I don't see the problem. All he has to do is roll doubles.

Occasionally, and I know this may surprise you, people use exaggerated language in order to complain about something which is, admittedly, a minor issue.

Like how your mom complains about your "microscopic" dick. I know it's very small, but it's biologically impossible for it to be so small you need a microscope.

I was discussing violent videogames elsewhere on the internet and brought this up:

Not to mention that the idea is that the entire tube holds a vacuum, which buoys it up, and it's held DOWN with tethers. How do you even construct that? There are no cranes to LEO. Even if you put them in place, and empty out the gas slowly so that it rises (without coming to a sudden stop at the end that breaks a tether), each segment is probably hundreds of pounds of metal. Imagine being miles in the air, wrestling with an enormous hunk of metal that's tied to the earth in what you can only hope is the right position, in order to get the end to line up with the last piece...

Well, okay, it sounds like a heck of an exciting job. But it also sounds like it could go wrong so terribly easily...

Jobs: If you're driving under the influence, you've showed you're either negligent, or actively willing to endanger yourself and others for a night's entertainment. I understand your argument about "a grown man, having two drinks with a meal"--but it's just a drink. Most restaurants have something else you can quench your thirst with that won't make you unable to drive. If you're so (pardon the term) drunk on the taste and sensation of a beer with your dinner that you're in danger of going over, maybe you can't be trusted to know the limit in the first place.

Go figure that people might not consider you a pristine employee. I mean sure, you might do a very good job at whatever it is they hire you for. You might also be a surly, insensitive jackass that ends up breaking property or assaulting people, which may in turn cost them more than you'll ever be worth.

Insurance: Drunk drivers kill a lot of people every year. In addition to it being a tragedy, for the insurance co.s, it's a business matter. How do YOU propose that they tell the difference between a person who drives drunk (or tipsy) but have been lucky so far, and people who might die, kill, create enormous medical bills, or wreck expensive property tomorrow?

Fines: These are laws about public safety. You're complaining about paying money because you were caught endangering others. I'm not sure I trust you behind the wheel in any event, knowing that. Let alone that you consulted a lawyer about how to act if (when eventually?) you get caught doing something that could kill people, and took the advice to heart.

It's not like there's no corruption and malevolence in the police, or that there's nowhere that police do a shitty job of keeping people safe. But if you want to make an argument like that, pick something other than harsh drunk driving laws.