This is an incredibly strange point to try to make when an ENORMOUS amount of people are paying the CABLE company for their basic Internet.

There is a vast difference between purposely and decisively choosing to sell a product at a loss in order to enter a market and unintentionally losing tons of money because nobody wants to buy your products.

If you're suggesting that they should lower the price (into loss territory) in order to increase sales quantity and hence revenue and market share, I'd counter that there still is a big difference. I'll gird my loins and enter fanboy territory and claim that the XBox was similar enough to its contemporary competitors that it was relatively easy to sway the masses. Folk simply seem to be voting strongly with their wallets on the Surface. In essence, it's not deemed on par with the competition. Couple this with the app environments and Microsoft has a rather steep uphill battle here.

I feel it would be helpful to pause, step back... way back and draw some comparisons to another rather significant paradigm shift.

Today, grab someone of (Abrahamic) faith and ask them how they can believe in their holy text(s), nay how they can even have faith at all, given that we now know the Earth revolves around the Sun rather than other way around. With a very high degree of likelihood, this person will look at you like you're crazy. Indeed, how often have you heard folk clamoring that Epicycles be taught alongside Kepler? Why not? Why not teach both and let the children decide?

The funny thing is that this is exactly what was going on a few hundred years ago. We've been here before. Let me repeat that. It may seem ridiculous today. But this same sort of controversy raged over the sun and planets in much the same fashion. It's hard to draw too many parallels because of the differences in political, education and religious institutions. But you can BET if we'd just figured this out now, you absolutely would have the same patterns. So let's pause and think about the past...

It took about two hundred years to plod through this controversy to get to the point where nobody questioned things, nobody fought for Aristotle over Copernicus, nobody worried how to interpret Joshua 10 in light of our new understanding. TWO HUNDRED YEARS.

I would not be surprised if it takes this long for us to move beyond this controversy over Evolution. Furthermore, I fully expect the result to be largely the same. At some point Young Earth Creationism in all its forms will fade into a distant memory. The modern forces seem just to cancel themselves out. On the one hand, all relevant information is incredibly available. But on the other hand, the Internet fosters filter bubbles. Nonetheless, there are plenty of signs that we'll progress through this... eventually.

Will faith disappear? Will religions just fold up? Not at all. Again, looking back at the Copernican Revolution as a guide, everyone will just move on.

Umm... No.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_an_expanding_universe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Rip

We have no idea how large the universe is. But the current estimates of the radius of the observable universe is about 45 billion light years. That's how "far" we can see. And this is indeed due to the expansion of the universe essentially moving distances apart faster than light can travel. Furthermore, it's not just that we won't "catch up"... It seems rather likely that it's gonna get worse over time - to the point we won't be able to see much at all (relatively speaking).

There are couple of problems with your quip. First, it seems this chap isn't going after money. The article suggests he is seeking only a refund... for all he deems swindled by this. Second, he doesn't seem to have sued more than his immediate interface in this chain of commerce. That is, he's simply trying to hold Apple to their apparently declared obligation.

Actually, however, there are a number of reasons to sue multiple parties in many cases regardless of the amount of money sought. Sometimes it's pretty clear who did you wrong. Here it seems rather clear that Apple made a particular promise prior to a proper appreciation or understanding of the intent of AMC. But often it's not entirely clear. Next, suing all involved parties forces them all to get their act together (individually and collectively) since if any party doesn't show at court judgement may default against them regardless of actual guilt/responsibility. Sadly, it seems litigation is often required to get multiple bureaucracies to work together... or against each other. Which brings us to another reason - getting your opponents' lawyers to do your work for you as they endeavour to show the other defendant guilty.

I'm not quite sure I entirely follow your logic or agree with your assumptions/conclusion.

You're surmising it doesn't make economic sense to use these as weapons simply because you've assumed the international community will be able to dictate that the offender dismantle the entire fleet of satellites?

Let's back up a bit. Not that it's entirely clear in your portrayal, but if country 1 is the only country with these things... and a lot of these things... I don't think it would be an "oops" moment after the attack. I think it would be a "...this Death Star is FULLY OPERATIONAL" moment.

This wouldn't be dampened by MAD unless many countries had similar weaponized satellites in similar quantities. This also wouldn't have the stigma of fallout, radiation or other lingering effects. It may also likely be able to be scaled to knock out someone walking to work or entire cities. It would make as much as economic sense as the ability to control masses ever has.

At least one science fiction book had this as a premise. My Google-Fu is weak at the moment. But I seem to recall the general idea was the French took over the world in exactly this manner. Mind you, this had nothing to do with the plot...

Bizarre?

Regardless of your opinion an Snowden or any related matters, his actions do not seem bizarre as long as you properly weight his motives. I don't think he was trying to force a comparison between the US and other countries.

I would suggest his primary concern was to avoid extradition - you know... as in what most people are hoping for when they seek asylum for any odd reason. Given the far reach of the US in today's world, his choices were/are rather limited.

Why is this chap still in jail?

I've read the articles. Maybe my Google-Fu is weak today. But I cannot find anything that explicitly states why either he was denied bail or the bail was set ludicrously high.

Having to go to court for this is silly enough. But did a judge seriously deem this teen so much a threat as to deny him bail? I'd really like to know because it would seem to me a judge is who should have added some sanity to this issue.

Nice try boss.

I really don't have any free time.
(these aren't the droids you're looking for)

I'm totally swamped... really...

We have so much work, you shouldn't even begin to think of headcount reductions. But if you are, I hear Jimmy may have some free time...

Let's say I'm gungho for incorporating bugs into my diet. Seriously, let's just make this assumption to consider things a bit here. Next, let's assume I'm completely selfish and care not at all about "the environment". That is, let's just even the playing field and evaluate "bugs" just on the merits regarding two factors: nutritional benefit; cost (to me).

Now... why would I want to eat bugs again? For protein? Let's assume so. These days, it seems protein goes from about 4 cents a gram (dairy, etc.) up to 9 cents (high quality meat). If I buy freeze-dried mealworms of the quality you feed birds, it seems to work out to about 6 to 8 cents/gram of protein. And some seem to suggest if you want such for human consumption, you may need to pay more for higher quality. I cannot easily find where to purchase grasshoppers in bulk, but it seems grasshoppers would be more expensive. Crickets may be cheaper though.

In essence, however, if you're willing to eat what you feed your pets the cost seems to be in the same realm as "normal" protein sources. If you want "better", you'd be paying in the range of high quality meats. So, no... bugs aren't persuading me on cost alone.

What about nutrition overall? Some tout the protein/fat ratio of some insects. Let's be honest. This doesn't matter at all unless you're willing and able to replace most or all of your protein intake with insects. Until then, you can manage your daily fat/carb/protein mix at a higher level. But that brings me to the next point...

It would seem you could reduce this cost to next to nothing by growing these critters yourself, as in the Lepsis. But that's silly. You still have to feed the critters. So your cost isn't zero. But more important for consumption purposes... what RATE can an eager bug-eater produce these things? I can see nothing here that states the expected rate of production here. I would imagine if I wished to incorporate this into my diet, I would start with at least 1oz/day. If I wanted full protein replacement, I'd need about 20oz/day. It would seem difficult to imagine home production of such.

As far as I can tell, this product is a cute novelty with no real practical purpose.

It may indeed seem a good thing to archive all this sort of meta-data in order to facilitate some sort of specific data-mining operation. Proper controls may indeed be in place so that appropriate warrants must be obtained to look through the data for any particular individual or group.

But all of this depends heavily on trust. Do you TRUST your government (and all future versions of such) to constrain themselves to appropriate usage of the data and indeed for the integrity of the data overall? If you cannot see yourself trusting your worst imaginable politically opposite cretin with such power, this really ought not to be something you'd support.

What in the world would prevent a government from altering the data as they see fit to crucify whoever they'd like? You'd need not have an ironclad case for conviction to destroy folk. Just sufficient "evidence" to link them with child-pornography, drug-lords, or whatever may be deemed reprehensible and let the media finish the tar-and-feather job.

Maybe the various service providers maintain their own copies of the data. Maybe not. But the "old" way of depending on CALEA to turn on a tap after a warrant seems far less susceptible to blatant abuse than a system where all the taps are supposedly taken ahead of time.

Time to get a jump start on terraforming Mars.

We may want to send Bruce Willis out there to steer this one INTO the planet.

This is where things get interesting.

The ability to direct kinetic weapons accurately from above is very likely to be of huge military importance in the future. I imagine that it's far easier to nudge an asteroid slightly so that 40 years hence it won't hit Earth than it would be to redirect it to target any particular spot on entry. Indeed, I imagine for any particular asteroid, there would only be so many places it could be forced to hit.

However, I cannot help but imagine that in multiple governments may start by working together with various satellite systems to push asteroids around. But decades into the future this may be a weird sort of arms race to see who can push the asteroid the most to get it to smack the enemy.

This doesn't appear to be a case where the measurement is changing over time. That is, it seems many here are misinterpreting the summary to suggest that things are different NOW relative to THEN.

Instead, things are different if we measure THIS WAY vs. THAT WAY. But we can still go back and measure both ways. If we use the old method(s), we get the old result.

That's what's creating the angst. Theorists cannot see why the two methods would differ. And they've checked and rechecked their work. Experimentalists have also checked and rechecked their work.

This is one of those "that's funny" things that becomes rather interesting.

You seem like a reasonable chap, given to reasoned thinking.

However, you have a gross error in your reasoning. You're treating "on average" as if it meant some sort of uniformity. Climate Change in no way shape or form is going to occur in a fashion where changes are uniform.

For a rather good synopsis of the varieties of ways this plays out, please read the recent World Bank report. Even things one might expect to be uniform (such as sea-level rise) won't be for a variety of rather interesting reasons.

As you've stated, plants don't do well with high heat and low humidity. Unfortunately, this is exactly what's predicted for much of the mid-latitudes over land (think much of US, China, Mediterranean). These areas are likely to see (on average... chuckle) roughly twice as much temperature increase as ocean or tropical areas. Plus the bulk of this extra precipitation/humidity is going to occur over the oceans, not over land.

Furthermore not only is the earth not going to become "like a rain forest", a good chunk of the rain forest itself will be replaced with grassland. Indeed, the conversion of the Amazon basin (predicted for massive drying) via forest fire, dieback, etc., is in and of itself a massive positive feedback effect (massive immediate carbon release; long-term huge net loss in carbon sink with grass replacing forest) that awaits us if things continue unabated.