PLEX is losing track of why they even have paying customers in the first place. My Smart TV does the multi-platforms content search quite well ,thank you very much. I no longer care for other platforms' content when I open PLEX; I want to browse and then stream my local content FAST and with no excuses for transcoding especially on LAN.

My wife and I were both very early Gmail users (our lastname@gmail.com) and we both get a ton of accounts signup email this way. First, reset the passwords, and then go to lengths to lock them out of their own accounts. As the final blow, once you've modified all detail about their account, just change the account email address to something else entirely. The last step is to fend-off any recovery attempt. Even if they gave any details to customer service by phone (supposedly), by the time they do their old account has zero identifiable data that they can latch on to recover it.

- Has been operating on conventional rail (cost $ vs. $$$ for maglev) since 1981.
- Is holding the world record of 574,8 km/h on conventioanl rail since 2007.
- Is linking all major cities in France and some abroad (Belgium, Germany, Netherlands, UK).
- Has commercial speeds of 280km/h for the oldest ones, to 320km/h for the current generation.
- Costs a fraction of the price of the maglev.

But, YMMV. And by all means go Japan !

Exactly! Theory is essentially free. You just sit down and stare at a wall and maybe write some damn equations on it. There's no need to test those theories, or to even pay the utility bills for the scientists who create them. The best scientists work on a pro-bono basis because they have transcended the need to eat, sleep, or pay their staff a living wage.

That's not a reliable solution actually, since a sophisticated AI would be able to modify its own programming.

See also: Robocop.

This is the perfect time to remind everyone of this comment made by Linus back in 2008: "...Digg users - you're all a bunch of Wanking Walruses".

To which Ubuntu forum users massively agreed that this would make a great release name !

This leads me to wonder if a good space based weapon wouldn't be to just dump heat into an enemy ship and cook the people inside without worrying about punching through the armor. If you can exceed their ability to radiate heat, wouldn't that cook them fairly quickly?

Almost almost: Science often progresses by finding which things are false (that is the method of Null Hypothesis Testing), but the ultimate outcome is learning which things are true through this process.

I hear what you're saying but I think that you're a bit off target because you're ignoring the complex realities of living in a world where there is so much scientific knowledge.

Just because I do not understand at a subatomic level how an LED works, this does not mean that my belief in its ability to light up a room is a magical one. It is sufficient for me to believe that SOMEONE on this earth knows how it works, and that if, given a few years, I could learn this knowledge for myself. Whether something is magic or science is not a function of whether the information concerning its function currently resides in my head, but rather that it exists somewhere in the world, and could, in principle, be learned, if time were no obstacle.

For example, tell me this: imagine that a person used to understand the principles of flight, but is now in their 90's and has lost that information. Has their belief in airplanes switched from science to magic?

Disclaimer: I am a scientist. I have been running experiments and creating models for years. I have over 30 publications in peer-reviewed journals.

I read the summary and thought that this article might be on to something, but on reading it I don't think the author really understands science at all.

Here are some excerpts that I find particularly disagreeable:

"Science is not the pursuit of capital-T Truth. It's a form of engineering "

Absolutely not. Science is indeed in pursuit of Truth. The author criticizes Aristotle's form of "research", quite rightly, but then throws the baby out with the bathwater when he says this.

"Because people don't understand that science is built on experimentation, they don't understand that studies in fields like psychology almost never prove anything, since only replicated experiment proves something and, humans being a very diverse lot, it is very hard to replicate any psychological experiment."

This is factually incorrect. There are many Psychological phenomena that can be reproduced reliably. The Stroop effect, the Simon effect, visual illusions..

"What distinguishes modern science from other forms of knowledge such as philosophy is that it explicitly forsakes abstract reasoning about the ultimate causes of things"

This is completely incorrect. A core goal of science is to understand the cause of things by developing abstracted understandings of them (i.e. theories).

I know nothing about this author, but from the article, I suspect that he is trying to reconcile his beliefs in science and religion by convincing himself that science cannot answer the big questions, it's just for making airplanes and computers. I could be wrong of course (--- very important scientific principle)

You've discounted one of the linked articles (for a reason I understand but don't entirely agree with). What about the other? Does finding a reason to discount one piece of data allow you to discount all of it, in your opinion?

 

One word of caution about proclaiming the involvement of these pesticides in bee deaths is recent findings that these pesticides are not found in the reproductive regions of plants:

http://entomologytoday.org/201...

Here's another study from last year which found no link between pesticides and bee deaths:

http://www.producer.com/daily/...

It's a popular and appealing story, but recent data suggest that it may not be true!

Also, don't you understand how competitive science can be? For the time being we're stuck with anti-competitive oligopolies in oil and banking and several other industries. But not in science. If a few scientists had good evidence that Climate Disruption was wrong, do you suppose they would keep quiet and maintain the front? No way! They'd all be scrambling to publish first. It'd be a bombshell, like figuring out how to build a usable quantum computer and breaking many and perhaps all of our public key encryption schemes.

Sadly this last point you make isn't true at all. Speaking as a scientist I can point to quite a few cases where a scientist who could clearly prove that the establishment was wrong were ignored and ridiculed.

The best example is Ignaz Semmelweis, who could easily prove that washing his hands prior to surgery or delivering babies led to fewer fatalities. He was mocked by the scientific community, and eventually institutionalized and beaten to death.

I wish that science functioned differently but it doesn't. Therefore one cannot conclude that there is a huge incentive to disprove global warming. Such a paper is actually quite hard to publish, and even if published such a finding could easily disappear, silently ignored, into the oblivion of our vast scientific literature.

I don't know where the GP got the 3-times figure, (which seems way too high), but there is little doubt that Germany's renewable energy policy has caused significant problems for consumers, and ironically, may end up increasing overall CO2 emissions now that new coal-plants are being brought online to patch the inadequacies of the renewables.

Here is a link:
http://www.spiegel.de/internat...

 

Actually what is happening in Germany is a not an entirely rosy picture for the renewables industry. Their energy prices have been spiking, while simultaneously CO2 emissions have been increasing as a consequence of their new policies.

As evidence of the uncomfortable position that German is now in, their Vice Chancellor is reported to have said :

“The truth is that the Energy U-Turn (“Energiewende”, the German scheme aimed at pushing the “renewable” share of electricity production to 80 % by 2050) is about to fail”
“The truth is that under all aspects, we have underestimated the complexity of the “Energiewende”
“The noble aspiration of a decentralized energy supply, of self-sufficiency! This is of course utter madness”
“Anyway, most other countries in Europe think we are crazy”

Unfortunately my German is too rusty to confirm this for myself, but here's the video feed if anyone is interested in seeing it:

http://www.1730live.de/sigmar-...