And further to this point: http://www.darwinawards.com/da...

I've been around military personnel who thought they were alone. When they aren't in a Life Or Death situation they can be immensely childish. I'm not saying for a moment that there aren't some very smart and respectable people working for every nation's military, but on average the culture is deliberately dumb and it's not where the best and brightest tend to go.

The internet would be a better place if people thought about things before they posted them, yes.

I'm torn, but I think I can resolve the conflict. This is a cool thing and aside from being a nuisance to astronomers I don't have a problem with it. However, if people are permitted to launch anything into space for no good reason there is potential for the sky to get very crowded and for the entire population of the world to have to deal with it. Therefore, as I see it, we have 3 options:

1: Ban satellites that emit bright lights entirely and shoot down any that are launched (if we can even do that).
2: Regulate satellite launches so that this sort of thing can be done without entering a tragedy of the commons scenario.
3: Adopt a laissez faire attitude and say that people can do whatever they want regardless of the consequences.

Given that clearly both of us find #3 unacceptable, we are therefore left to choose between #1 and #2. If we feel that #1 is the best option, then that is in effect to say that we are against this launch. If we prefer #2 then we can be for or against it, but we don't need to have a strong opinion.

So really, where you come down on this launch really comes down to which of those solutions you favour. Personally I don't feel a great deal of confidence in #2 working out at the moment, so I think I have to come down against this launch.

I hate Apple. My Dad had smartphones going back into the early 2000s, which replaced iPaqs and that sort of thing. The iPhone was monstrously better than anything that existed prior, and was the first device to make smartphones mass-market items. For the majority of the world, the iPhone was the first smartphone that mattered. While the post is technically incorrect, in practical terms it is as true as it needs to be for the topic at hand.

Not long ago I discovered that a few marine transport ships are enough to eclipse all of the emissions from vehicles in North America. Now you tell me that the textiles industry creates significantly more than that. North American and European cars are already far cleaner than those in the rest of the word, mostly thanks to electronic fuel injection and other forms of increased efficiency which we are all happy to have anyway. Then there are termite farts which to my knowledge far eclipse all of those things. So what exactly is the argument for focusing on reducingthe environmental impact of cars on this continent? Most of the low-hanging fruit was snapped up in the 70s and early 80s, so it really does feel like we are scrounging for peanuts.

The only argument I can see that isn't purely political is that those other types of pollution are difficult or impossible to control whereas domestic transport sort of isn't.

Nuts to Tesla, lets be clear that the first production car in space is going to be, for all intents and purposes, a Lotus. Even better, a Lotus modified such that it is even simpler (if heavier) and would actually be able to drive on Mars. Crap, I want to go to Mars with an electric Lotus Seven and a space suit. This is really setting off the fantasies. Can we put Audrey Hepburn in the passenger seat?

I don't get this about stoves. I have this conversation with people fairly frequently, where they talk about replacing a stove or electric heating system because it's inefficient. "No balls it's inefficient, that's how a heating element works" or something to that effect. I don't see how a 50-year-old appliance which serves no purpose other than generating heat can cost more to run than a brand new one.

Obviously this doesn't apply to fridges.

The point of reference is the human race, or if you like just physicists. They had already discovered it in a very important scientific sense (they found good reason to believe that it existed), but they didn't know where it was. Now they know where it is. From their perspective, they found something that had previously been missing.

Absolutely nothing that I said implied that the rest of your comment was incorrect, and in fact I believe my statement implied heavily that quite a lot of it is true. I am not the metaphysical solipsist you are looking for.

The word "missing" requires a point of reference. The only other interpretation would be that a missing object must violate the conservation of mass, which is clearly not what somebody means when they say that something is missing.

Well put, this is always what I think when I see these sorts of headlines. I do think this proof is interesting, but it claims too much.

I think where people err is in assuming that the universe running such a simulation needs to look something like the one we live in. Imagine if the character in Space Invaders began asking if it was in a simulation and concluded that it mustn't because as far as it knew the only possible actions one could take were move and shoot. Their universe contains no conception of "build a computer" or "write a program". Nor does it contain relativity, chemistry or medicine. Our universe does contain these things, yet we are capable of describing and simulating a huge number of systems which do not, as well as ones which obey quite different rules (look at the number of incorrect scientific theories we have managed to develop and test throughout the years).

We cannot disprove the hypothesis there is some universe which contains something we could identify as a simulation, but which also obeys rules of nature and logic quite different from our own. Some people may wish to defend that logic is true everywhere, but I challenge them to find a logician who can provide an answer to the question "Why are the basic rules of classical symbolic logic what they are?" that amounts to much more than "they just seem to be". We may not be able to conceive of a world in which they do not hold, but that does not preclude one from existing.

I agree with you entirely, but I don't think that applies in this case. The headline was fact-based and direct. You have to already have clicked through to the story in order to get what I think the author genuinely intended to be an amusing bit of character.

You have the right target, but I think you shot wide and hit a civilian.

Aside form being an asshole, Steve Jobs also has a history of intellectual theft and anti-consumer practices. I have yet to encounter an example of him doing anything to benefit anybody other than himself. Based on the evidence I have, he was a bad person by every definition of the term that I will accept. So lets not use him as the example, huh? Lets go with George Westinghouse or something.

I essentially agree with most of what you are saying, but I do have two points. Firstly, Musk spends his money on exciting new technology and solving problems rather than exciting new football teams and taking drugs. I think it's easy to lose sight of that fact when he opens his mouth. Second, have you driven a Tesla P85D? That car is a whole other weird kind of fast. I don't actually like it for a bunch of reasons, but if you want a GT car that will outrun most hypercars that would do it.

I see what you are getting at as far as public perception fo science goes. If my chemist friend tells me something about chemistry, then I will believe him so long as I have no glaring evidence against his statements. However, two points:

1. The process of science is not a religion. It is the opposite of religion because the actual beliefs one holds in pure science are not important, only the method by which one reinforces or discards them. In practice humans are flawed and this doesn't always work out, but in the long term this does seem to be how things play out.

2. I have learned that I should trust my chemist friend because "science delivers the goods". Because of scientists, mostly talking about things that are incomprehensible to the layperson, we have remarkable technology and have achieved phenomenal things both good and bad. The scientific community at large has earned a level of trust from the layperson because they have been reliable in the past far more often than mere chance would allow.

That last point leads me to another thought: if I follow a religion, the key principles that I am supposed to live by are laid out simply in a way that any idiot can understand. If one starts to ask more complex questions for example the nature of the trinity in Catholocism, the answer is usually either that it is unknowable or that only select members of the religious leadsership can truly understand. In contrast, scientists will make no bones about how complex the forefront of their fields are these days, but most of them will spend days trying to explain the underpinnings to you if you show an interest.

There are religious aspects to the way that the layperson treats science in the modern world, but that is simply part of a specialized society. I also trust the engineers at Mazda every time I get in my car, because they've built quite a few of them and they don't seem to fall apart en masse.