Meanwhile, the countries who were targeted by anti-proliferation measures have all either developed the bomb anyway or proven that they can do so if they choose.

Having lost that battle, let's lower the bar of admission, and recruit ever smaller and more volatile states to join the nuclear club.

Seriously, did you snag that four digit UID on eBay?

I actually suspect that thorium proliferation is manageable enough given the potential benefits, but I won't be pressing forward at the level of analysis you seem to find adequate.

1000 people brave enough to brag about putting their names on a non-binding list. News at 11.

How many would even make it up a naked gantry ladder to the Apollo crew cabin? Mount the podium with the list on top of the naked ladder. One side of the ladder for going up, the other side for going down. No cage. No occupancy limit. The total gantry height was a bit over 100m, so that's about the right height. Make it sturdy and relatively stiff to crossing breezes.

The naked sign-up ladder would be on roughly the height scale of Perry's Victory and International Peace Memorial.

At the time of the release of WinNT (mid 1990s), Linux was not an alternative.

It was a superb alternative to getting any work done. I'm sure that many of the people who chose to fight those battles saw some upside from their foolish devotion further down the road. But it was a long road. WinNT wasn't even much of a lock-in all by itself. But so many corporations just couldn't wait (this was the dotcom boom, remember?) to encapsulate mission critical business-logic in VB for IE4. Fifteen years later, their successors are wailing "will this rogering ever stop?" Convenience, self-determination, market relevance: pick any two. Lesson learned.

What Microsoft is presently doing is established practice in the enterprise life cycle. When lock-in is your cash cow, and competitors are making your technology irrelevant, take all you can get. Few corporations with a cash cow as large as Microsoft's are found at the innovative fore-front until the cash cow is slaughtered.

If they must kill the beast to re-invent themselves, it makes good sense to first fill their pockets. The only real question here is whether they should pay this windfall out to their existing shareholders, or reinvest these funds to stick around at the top of the heap.

Disencumbered of the cash cow, does Microsoft still have what it takes to remain technologically relevant?

Man's pollution on a cosmic scale is essentially zero, the universe is already pre-polluted

The average density of the universe is about one proton per cubic meter. The vast majority of the visible universe is pristine vacuum. Plus, nearly every galaxy holds at its core a matter-disposal rip-heap of eternal safe-keeping.

Bear in mind that we now know there's a very small leak into the surrounding environment at around 60 nano-kelvin (*). Before we route too much of our crap to the galactic disposal unit, perhaps we should learn from our mistakes on the slimy blue marble and perform a rigorous environmental impact study on anthropogenic black-hole warming, just in case bumping it up to 61 nano-kelvins triggers a dark matter landslide. (By the "it's all about us, every time, and in every way" anthropic principle, every bulk coefficient of our local environment is fluttering around a precarious and exquisitely tuned value optimal to survival as we presently know it.)

(*) For simplicity I use the Hawking temperature for a solar mass black hole. From the equation at Wikipedia, this appears to scale inversely with mass. Possibly the right temperature involves division by another factor of 4 million to account for the correct mass of the galactic darth Timbit (local idiom for doughnut hole). I'm getting 15 femto-kelvins without a napkin. Let's not be brash and mess with this number anthropogenically without really thinking things through, to solve some minor problem with space-based pollution in some gossamer filigree of the pristine vacuum.

One would think it might be easier just to toss our junk in the direction of the Local Void. This, however, amounts to carting your garbage uphill.

Wikipedia: The Milky Way's velocity away from the Local Void is 270 kilometres per second (600,000 mph). Voids are hugely repulsive.

Contribution is not a complex thing. It just requires the will to pay what was promised.

You've contradicted yourself in two short sentences. Contradiction often sneaks in right behind the word "just".

But I agree with you in the long run. Once we eliminate death, insolvency, greed, stupidity, usury, and politics there will be nothing to it. This is only half as hard as it sounds. There's a fair amount of overlap among those items.

Hells bells, they removed the progress bar on mini player. I don't use my partner's iMac all that much, but I do use it to manage voice diction and to sync podcasts onto our iPod. Some of my dictation files are long. Without a progress bar, it's really difficult to note and return to critical thoughts. But I only used iTunes as a stopgap measure, so I can sit back and enjoy the suffering of others more deeply invested.

What a triumph of populist design over broad-minded utility. There's a fair amount of frustration, annoyance, and anger out there over Apple's random feature regression of the moment. I used to tell people to install Ubuntu because, you know, we had continuity all figured out. Since the Unity debacle, I keep my mouth shut.

Apple also removed the multiple window feature. So much for workflow equity. How do people live in a world with no feature continuity? I would have never guessed at the outset of PC era thirty years ago that things could go this direction, and people would stand for it. It's pretty much my personal definition of low self-esteem to see someone suffer a major setback in their workflow equity and go "oh, well". Maybe I should have completed Learned Helplessness 101 after all. I'm starting to think it really is a life skill _and_ you save a fortune in Tums.

The foolishness we all felt back in the day that upgrades were built on top of what you had already delivered. Turns out we could have just randomly discarded any feature that bored us or seemed inconvenient to maintain, and without any explanation to the customer, either. Shit, did we ever do things the hard way.

It's only evolution if there's a reasonably clear link between your genetic makeup and your ability/probability to reproduce.

Two errors here. First, you mean fitness, not evolution. Second, only the charismatic megafauna of our genetic endowment has a "reasonably clear" one paragraph synopsis. Try to figure out whether a small affinity change of some obscure serotonin receptor involved in bone growth regulation is deleterious or not. I dare you.

The rest of your post seems to be spinning around the observation that the genetic fitness function is shaped by cultural memes, which are themselves co-evolving. It's almost as if natural selection has no master plan.

Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine you have a cluster of ten genes where having eight of the A alleles makes you a genius, nine make you more than a little batshit, and the full set of ten make you A Scanner Darkly on a bad trip. On the other side, having five or fewer amounts to destination short bus. Clearly the A alleles of these genes code for smartness, and we all want that.

But then, if two eights pair up and start a family, you end up with The Royal Tenenbaums.

What happens within the population to the proportion of A alleles of this gene cluster? For the vast majority of people, an extra dose of the A allele would boost their intellectual powers and presumably their reproductive fitness. There would broadly be an increase. But then you lose enough to Van Gogh attrition that it cancels out the bulk upward drift.

Likely outcome: a barber pole that spins, but goes nowhere. Yet everyone presumes there's some direction clearly labeled as "up" within the genetic pell mell.

I listened to a podcast recently where a professor said that his students are routinely shocked to discover that simple voting systems contain cycling majorities.

If Condorcet's paradox disorients, what's really going on in evolution is Kowloon Walled City (which had a population density of 1,255,000 inhabitants per square kilometer before it was torn down, roughly what you'd get if everyone in Texas moved to Manhattan, as they framed it at 99% Invisible).

We really ought to step back most of the time and view evolution as a kind of ideal gas law, as something best understood at the sweep of statistical mechanics. Yes, every atom is doing something explicable if you prefer to drill down. So was every inhabitant of Kowloon Walled City, more or less.

1 light year ^ 3 * 10 kg/liter / mass of sun

And it works.

A cubic lightyear of lead has roughly 4.3e21 solar masses. We're talking fourth floor penthouse of the H-R diagram. Finding out what happens when this block of material is released from the uniform density tractor beam is probably harder than achieving an accurate regatta start on a windy day the day after an epic pub crawl. You'd need an assload of litz wire to release the uniform density tractor beam instantaneously over such a large volume.

Hamilton reaches for the jack-knife he forgot to bring. I wonder why that came to mind.

Sure it is. In fact, it's almost always wrong. But it's wrong in a useful way, and it's steadily getting less wrong.

You're having so much fun being glib because you can no longer remember that you're missing the point.

There's something deeply wrong about using "wrong" as a synonym for "could be improved". Why don't we just standardize the terminology and refer to an AAA- credit rating as "defective"?

The people who try to make hay out of science being "wrong" barely believe in the circumstances where the wrongness of science would come into play: the first minute after the big bang, the billion year evolution of black holes. It's almost like your optician flashing up the fine print then observing when you stumble over a few words that your literacy is suspect.

So true. We're a tiny bit sketchy on the behaviour of matter heated to 200 billion degrees. Say it now, I know we can: science is wrong. Not wrong like your aunt, but wrong in the most rigorous conceivable sense.

We don't have a problem with wrong. We sometimes have a problem with glamorous batshit.

Is the anthropic principle even science? I've heard mention recently from two distinct source a "change of substrate" novel entitled Dragon's Egg. My conjecture is that any interesting life form will view its universe as "finely tuned". Seth Lloyd has a definition of complexity oriented toward where the action occurs: complexity that results from short programs, but only after they run for a long time. You end up with a frothy foam of tractability and intractability. I conjecture that's where life becomes possible, in any substrate. And it will always appear finely tuned. But when we finally meet the cheela, we'll discover no common ground whatsoever in how we construe the fine tuning. The cheela will be totally obsessed with some filigree of gluon plasma structure and our wonderful periodic table and its ionic oddball partnerships will appear to them as some totally arbitrary patten expressed by Rule 30.

We're pretty sure that universes that don't exist are lifeless. Does this observation belong at the far end of the spectrum of very weak anthropic principles? What a crock of flamboyant batshit.

The coolest thing I've come across recently that had somehow not come to my attention is the Helium flash.

This runaway reaction quickly climbs to about 100 billion times the star's normal energy production (for a few seconds) until the temperature increases to the point that thermal pressure again becomes dominant, eliminating the degeneracy.

OK, this is normal.

The helium flash is not directly observable on the surface by electromagnetic radiation. The flash occurs in the core deep inside the star, and the net effect will be that all released energy is absorbed by the entire core, leaving the degenerate state to become nondegenerate.

Wait a minute, here, I'm accustomed to factors of 100 billion showing up on the instruments. The neutrino flux is spectacular enough to act as a cooling mechanism. They're bombarding us in numbers we can barely conceive, yet our science is so weak we can barely detect them. Well, they do slip out of maximum security solar confinement like a hot knife through butter.

The mean free path of a photon in intergalactic space is about 10^23 km (10 billion years), and these are positively garrulous by comparison. The mean free path of a neutrino is one light year of solid lead, whereas the average density of the universe is about one proton per cubic meter. To a neutrino, the entire universe is about as substantial as Bruce Willis in a movie where every review begins with a spoiler alert.

You aunt is wrong about some object in front of her very eyes, yet we apply no statute of limitations on wrongness 50 magnitudes out.

When Ian McKellen couldn't make a sufficiently robust "ugh" for his beat-down by Sauramon, they carted him off to a screening room, slapped on some headphones, set up some microphones, and starting playing the Phantom Menace.

I think the original Star Wars was a virtual particle emitted from the vacuum state followed by a long foreclosure by the Bank of Heisenberg. The whole experience integrates to zero.

The reason is simple, it's because Lucas is getting to viewers at a much younger age, with a more widely distributed product.

So the calibration pinnacle on your scale of cultural importance is Dr Seuss, Bugs Bunny, Walt Disney, and Norman Rockwell? I'm pretty sure that Kubrick and Kurosawa were important influences on both Spielberg and Lucas. By your metric, it's surprising we remember Newton at all.

I've grown to hate just about any idea with an immediacy transform embedded inside, because its so much a tool of the newly wealthy to forget that they ever stood on the shoulders of giants whatsoever. In the immortal words of Finding Nemo: "Mine." Seagull logic 101.

Lucas chose a curious path to illustrate the foreboding nature dark side of the force: by making the next five movies. When we were slow to catch on, he added Jar Jar. No wonder artists drink.

We just discuss computer parts endlessly, right? I hope some smarter moderators show up soon.

I don't mind so much about the decline in the participation standards, if there has in fact been a decline (not counting the glory days when the lamers had five digit ids).

What I tremendously resents is the decline in the wording of the story summaries, which become ever more useless and trollish by the minute. It's not the people here that will drive me away. It's the decline in story summaries and the attitude of the editorial oversight which permits this to happen.

If we had a moderation system to assign "vague-assed trollery" to the story submissions, I would instantly tweak my filter such that I never see these stories again (and the 300 comments out of 500 adjusting the crookered picture frame).

The only reason I haven't jumped ship already is that most of the alternatives have been violently Twitterized. I'm determined to think in full paragraphs. I just can't wait for the headline "Generation Z rediscovers the paragraph." Maybe if I'm lucky--and live long enough to see it--the paragraph will become retro cool.

Surprises me they chose an island as the the northern terminus. I'm suspecting the undersea observation network has something to do with it.

There's no coping. There's NO coping at all.

I've thought hard about this for a long time, and I don't agree. Biological systems can't be so fragile as all that, or we wouldn't be here. The central feature of positions like yours is that you think every change or set-back is additive (if not multiplicative). I don't think this turns out to be true in complex systems. Fermi estimation argues against it. It could potentially be pretty rough. Rough enough that you can even remember the time when life without coffee seemed like a big deal. I don't think one can know how rough it might get without living through it.

On the other side, we have no precedent to believe we're capable of pulling off the political solutions required to forestall global warming. Many people seem to think that if we run around shouting about how we have a climate change gun pointed at our heads, that we'll suddenly become able to engage in global consensus like never before. This seems to come from a similar place as the belief that capital punishment deters crime. The majority of criminals aren't rational when committing the most serious crimes. They become more rational when facing arrest. What's the rational action when arrest leads fairly directly to the electric chair?

Between our political capacity to forestall global warming and our ability to cope with the mess that results, I put longer odds on the former. Maybe in the next iteration of collective planet destruction we can build on our (failed) effort this time around to take the wise action. Perhaps 300 years from now global collective action to avert nasty outcomes will seem like child's play. I don't think we're that species yet.

In its last quarter, Apple made about 50 billions and achieved an increase of around 25% of its earnings. Yet the value of its stock dropped because analysts expected more. What kind of message do you think this situation sends to executive?

If the executive is math literate, it sends the message that the street's valuation lead the harvesting of value.

For example, on an apple farm, one might survey the number of apples on the trees in August and predict an all-time bumper crop, but then the weather does something funky in early September and the harvest is only the best harvest of the past decade.

Wow, isn't that amazing. Smart people anticipate future fairly accurately, then make corrections on the day.

I hope you've got youth, because you're light on discernment. Or maybe you're wealthy enough to retire whatever age you might be because you shrewdly jumped on the Apple IPO six months before they delivered the first iPhone. Isn't it amazing what Apple has managed to accomplish in six short years with no previous history or market reputation.