MoviePass changes it's business model faster than new the Javascript community mints new frameworks. It's exhausting. Last Tuesday it was $9.95 a month and you can see three movies every full moon plus you get SoundCloud for free on weekends and next week it'll be $15 a month and twice a week someone will break into your home, tie you to your couch, and force you to watch John Travolta's latest space opera, and they will also bill you for a potion of the food in your fridge.

I get whiplash trying to keep up with their constant quest to find a profitable business model, and somehow it still hasn't occurred to them that "bring in more money than you spend" is the only viable solution.

The movie theaters are worried about the movie going experience becoming devalued in the minds of customers.

A couple of years ago, if you and a friend went to the movies, it cost $20 for the tickets. Now, with movie pass, it costs $0 for the tickets. People are starting to think that "going to the movies" is more or less free.

but movie pass is going to fail. There is simply no way for them to be profitable. So some day in the not-too-distant future, movies are going to start costing $20 again. But if people have been conditioned to think that movies are free, there is going to be a lot of resistance to suddenly paying $20 again, and attendance will drop as a result.

Seems like they're trying to play games to control speech worldwide.

There's no "seems like"; that is explicitly what the Austrian court ruled. "We don't like this, therefore it is illegal around the world."

He spams his books with hundreds of fake positive reviews, drowning out the honest, negative reviews. "Taking he average" doesn't work, because there's so little signal compared to all the noise.

I'm proposing my own new legislation, the No Exploitation of 9/11 Act. According to this act, any politician who tries to justify their legislation by invoking the terror attacks of September 11th, 2001 will be immediately removed from, and forbidden from ever again holding, any public office. Goddamned vultures.

Bullshit. The Paris attackers did not use encrypted communications.

Was this an intelligence failure? Possibly. Was it an intelligence failure due to a lack of backdoors and/or laws against cryptography? Absolutely not.

I think I see why you're confused. The curse was an effective way to kick off the revolt, yes. Not any way to start an earthquake, though. Reality doesn't work that way.

OK, let's squash some of this nonsense right now.

I never believed the 2010 Haiti Erthquake was caused by a voodoo curse, and I'm astonished that anyone interpreted that post in that way. What I found anthropologically interesting is that something like Robertson's "satanic" invocation seems actually to have taken place. Not actually "satanic", but within Robertson's impoverished terms of reference that's about the only way he could describe an invocation of the loa.

I believe, and have repeatedly said, that the supposed "scientific consensus" on CAGW is not a conspiracy but an error cascade. I think most scientists are honestly trying to do right, but have been overly credulous about data and models that have been (and continue to be) fraudulently manipulated by a tiny minority of them. Those of you who think this makes me some sort of nut are going to have some explaining to do when measured GAT drops out of the bottom of the IPCC's 95% confidence band, which looks set to happen before the end of 2014.

I might reply to some of these other questions at more length, but these two deserved to be dispatched immediately

But the password to my email has to be sixteen characters, with at least one upper case, one lower case, a number, a symbol, an umlaut, a character from the pinyin alphabet, and one of those Arabic squiggles. Assholes.

"That's a battery!" "Correct, horse!"

Yes, Kuhn was full of horse puckey. Not only doesn't his book describe science outside of physics at all well, it doesn't even correctly describe 20th-century physics, its ostensible paradigm (using the word correctly now) case.

Years ago I wrote a more detailed takedown in Brother, can you Paradigm?

The only amplification I'd write today is that the shifts between large theoretical models generally (and contrary to Kuhn's claims) go smoothly in physics because test by correct prediction of experimental results is so difficult to argue with. The soft sciences have more trouble setting up repeatable experiments, so it's easier for people to hold on to broken theoretical models.

It's not just about "those" tabs. I don't need the IGN Guide to Skyward Sword showing up on my work computer, either.

I really do not want the tabs I browse at home automatically opening up on my work PC. Or my phone, for that matter. Three different media, used for three totally different purposes. It's cool that they figured out how to do this, but I can't see myself ever actually using it.

The biggest flaw is that this is an expensive piece of custom equipment. No criticism of Dr. Jansen intended; he made the gadget he wanted to have. But I would like to see a design that is less expensive and mass-produced

Dr. Jansen agrees with you. From the Mark 2 Design Philosophy section:

Accessibility (cost): "To create something that was as inexpensive as possible, so that people might easily have access to them without having to worry about the cost".
Comment :: This is something I don't feel I did very well on. A ballpark estimate for the component cost of a single Mark 1 was about $500 when I constructed it, which feels like too much. For every household to have their own Tricorder, it feels like something around $100 to $200 is a more accessible price range, and to have one in every child's hand such that they might easily learn more about their worlds both in and (especially) outside of school, that number likely has to be under $50. Thankfully, much of the cost comes from sensors (which are rapidly decreasing in cost), and from PCB production (which is almost negligible in quantity).

Call it Monolith.

Once a week, work out. Go balls out for one minute, rest for one minute, repeat. Stop after twenty minutes.