AkThhhpppt

Counterpoint: the only businesses that force VbV etc. I will deal with are airlines (because they all do), which meant the last time I flew transatlantic I took 800 euro out of my bank account and _walked_ to Air France's bank rather than use it. In _any_ other industry? They've just given my business to a competitor.

It is not in my interest to use a service _designed_ to lessen my protection from fraud.

(see http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2010/01/26/how-online-car...)

The article is about caregiving fathers; what if the employed parent is the mother, or the couple are gay and the child is adopted?

Why should the 'present' father get medals for doing things every mother is expected to do?

That's contrasting the University experience, which is wildly different.

And the "snooty British guy" stated he attended a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_school himself, which are most definitely state schools.

That's not just GMail, that's all compliant email handlers; it's part of the RFC. Unfortunately, it's not guaranteed that the site you're signing up to can handle that address format - Facebook doesn't...

What's preventing you running a VM to let you use it (and all the other helpful bits)?

There's a lot of distance between "can't" and "don't want to."

Or real names that looked like they might be fake (Violet Blue). Or that were foreign in a weird way (Hong Kong users). Or famous people they though might have been faking (William Shatner). Or...

Basically, the nym wars debacle demonstrated (if nothing else) that if you demand people's real names, know what you're asking for, and be prepared to support the multitude of naming conventions that exist worldwide.

It's sensible, but how is it Zen? In what way does it partake of the Buddha nature? :-)

Ok, where I say 'alien', imagine I said 'extra-terrestrial'.

We know the probability of the universe evolving intelligent life from scratch is 1. We know nothing about the probability of the universe evolving intelligent life from scratch twice, and the Fermi paradox implies we're very unlikely to ever find out more.

The aliens bit was continuing the GP's probability comparison, nothing more.

That's a fallacious comparison: E = mc^2, the discovery of the neutron, and the discovery of uranium's fissile nature told us very clearly how to get nuclear energy (getting nuclear energy _controllably_, however...). Special relativity told us exactly how much power was available. Solid physics.

With ZPE extraction, the physics doesn't give us any way of accessing the energy beyond the Casimir effect, which is pretty restricted. Actually powering anything is in the realms of perpetual motion machines; wikipedia discusses it better than I can here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-point_energy#Free-energy_...

(Edit: Rutherford did say the idea of nuclear energy was "hogwash", so you're right there...)

Inertia, I assume.

I'm a big believer in the universe as predicted by the Fermi Paradox, and that we'll only ever interact with "human-descended" intelligences.

My gut still says it's more likely we'll talk to aliens than harvest vacuum energy. Entropy says we don't get anything for nothing. (I Am Not A Theoretical Physicist, though - or a xenobiologist, for that matter.)

Because that's How It's Done. Programmers are almost the only people who routinely break it - because we're used to quoted strings being atomic units.

No; absent any other problems, it's a tiny effect. And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casimir_Effect#Applications

*Correction: and those who didn't assume it to be bollocks generally had not made up their mind one way or the other, and wanted the weapons inspectors to be given time to find out. When they were given the bum's rush out of Iraq by the Coalition, that persuaded many of the fence-sitters the skeptics were right.

No, it was more or less assumed to be bollocks. (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Blix#Iraq_disarmament_.27... for an idea of what we were hearing).

Um... I was on anti Iraq war demos when I was 18, because it was obvious to me Saddam Hussein had no WMDs. And I was _not_ alone in this assumption:

"In London, at least 750,000 people demonstrated in what police called the city's largest demonstration ever." Source: http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2003/Protest-Iraq-War16feb03...

Nature has been an unapologetic advocate of open-access publishing for as long as I've been reading it.

Perhaps IFTTT (http://ifttt.com/wtf) might be a start towards what you're looking for?

It's stated that he didn't have to go far; one of the reasons he didn't just abandon the car and walk was the amount of tools that he'd be leaving behind to be stolen, so...

The swing arm and one of the two main structural parts of the chassis broke. He'd want to have a welder with him.

There's an amazing sequence in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red Mars" describing the destruction of a space elevator in a terrorist attack: the cable digs a trench marking the equator of Mars as it wraps around the planet multiple times.

I don't know; "Potentially marginalized technologies: Consensus reality" is pretty special....

After doing some hunting, apparently I imagined them saying that. What I did not imagine was that it impacts score in results for their "recipe search" product - and it caused some consternation among the recipe blogging community at the time.

Terrorism is opposition to the current political setup. It's not _just_ that; there are other requirements (terrorism is a subclass of opposition, if you will) but I was simplifying in the service of an epigram. (",)

Terrorism is opposition to the current political setup.

Totalitarian regimes' innovation is making opposition to the current political setup terrorism.

Yes, but the "web of knowledge" folk were planning (ish) hand-added metadata to allow knowledge extraction by AI programs, with no real incentives or network effect to promote people doing that. Google got microdata (which are semantic annotation, if a lot less complicated than the old schemes) added to websites by saying they would include them in Pagerank calculation.

Yet again, Steve Mann was there first: http://cyborganthropology.com/Diminished_Reality

Sorry for the monomania, but the man really did pioneer a huge chunk of wearable computing and AR.

Google 'entrapment "ruby ridge"'

And they already have relevant patents, in a different arena: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_could_soon_augme...