Once I see it doing what I want, I'll be interested. But in order to do that, it needs to be able to understand the action of the fiction I'm asking it to read. E.g. if it's reading "Alice in Wonderland" it needs to use a proper voice for Alice talking to herself as she falls down the rabbit hole. (And for the editorial comments interspersed.)

O,. and it needs to be able to do this without an internet connection.

While your points are good, this looks like negligence to me. So, yeah, our "justice" system needs reform, but that facility should be made to change it's practices. (Not that I'm sure this decision will cause them to do that.)

I guess you didn't read very carefully. They found a marker that appears 5 years before a diagnosis and also part of the mechanism of smoking and other things causing lung cancer AND potentially how to interrupt it. That's a good bit more than simply finding a well known correlation.

The problem is that TMI was NOT a really bad disaster. It was frightening, and could have been bad. Actually, though, it was quite contained. But the more reactors you have, the greater the chance of a really bad disaster. If one of these is small enough to be thrown around by a tornado, you have new possibilities of a really bad disaster. (I didn't check. I assume it's too heavy. But perhaps it could be broken open.)

OTOH, smaller reactors have a smaller "worst possible case". I'm not really convinced that they're a good idea, but I could be. (If it's intended for use in space, what happens if there's a catastrophic launch explosion? That might be a good use, if they can handle the heat, but I'd prefer that the fuel be mined on the moon.) Low probability accidents that are possible WILL eventually happen. (Or at least one should plan that way.)

It's a new model, so the only way to really know whether it's safe or not is to try. But modelling gives VERY useful indications.

WHY is it wonderful news? The reports I've seen say that small reactors are less efficient than larger reactors and have increased chance of dangerous results (though the size of the danger is smaller).

Just asserting that it *is* wonderful gives me no reason to believe you.

I "sort of" agree. But my estimate of this is low enough (cost-including-pollution vs benefits) that I don't think it should be subsidized including being granted favorable legal treatment. In fact I'd be in favor of eliminating bankruptcy protections for any damage it causes.

I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

I didn't mean to claim that I though trade secrets in code were a good thing, merely that they were a reason a company might not want to open their source code. Patents are not such a reason. (Also, I don't believe software patents should be valid. Copyright, yes. Trademarks, yes. Trade secrets, yes. But software should not be patentable. [And copyrights should have a much more limited duration.])

You left out "trade secrets". That would be plausible if the software were sufficiently innovative.

That's "tool using", not "tool making", but I wouldn't be surprised if dogs could to simple tool making. A cow was recently documented making a backscratcher.

If rolling a styrofoam ball is using a tool, adapting a towel to a flyswatter is making a tool. I'll admit that I've never met someone who was that limited. Everybody used to be able to whittle something, if not something fancy, but I think that knives are now generally not used that way. I don't even know if rubber bands are still used to launch folded paper (which is multiple instances of tool making).

I've never met a human who couldn't make a tool. Not a complex tool, but just a tool. Complex tools are a lot more difficult, but anyone who can adapt a towel to a flyswatter can make a tool.

To a constitutional literalist, much of what the federal government does is illegal. Unfortunately, the Constitution, if literally interpreted, would not work in a large society with fast transportation and fast communication. It was written for a country that was 90% rural, and where it could take weeks to travel to Washington, DC. It was also written for a country where most of the decisions affecting citizens were LOCAL. Town or county level.

And, yes, the government has clearly drastically altered to interpretations put on many sections, and ignored others. This was necessary because the Constitution is too difficult to amend. (Perhaps they would have done it anyway, but that's a separate argument.) E,g, there is no valid basis in the Constitution for any law either enabling or regulating a corporation. The founders generally didn't trust corporations, and to the extent that they were permitted, thought that they should be regulated a the state level or lower. Some of them thought that corporate charters should be for limited periods of time...but just imagine trying to build a transcontinental railroad without standardized legal corporate laws. (It's been done in other areas, but it sure wasn't easy.)

While true, that's like saying dirt can't exist without gravity.

Capitalism existed long before markets existed, and markets existed before people did. Fish cleaners staking out a site for their business in the ocean is a market. An amoeba storing resources for later use is capitalism in action. (I.e. it's getting stuff now for later use, accumulating capital.)

Most of the things that people attribute to capitalism are only the property of one "dialect" of capitalism. And corporate capitalism is itself a cluster of dialects, that exist under specific legal constraints, which vary with time and place.

So, yes, markets cannot exist without capitalism, as markets are about exchanging stuff, and capitalism is, basically, "the way one handles stuff". I suppose one could rephrase that as "the belief in the way one handles stuff", which would eliminate amoebas, etc., because they don't practice belief, but the way it's commonly used doesn't seem to imply belief.