I'll second Rob's recommendation of Neil Gaiman's American Gods; even my friends who aren't horror/fantasy/comics readers loved that book.  Just about everything Gaiman writes is worth reading.

...with the possible exception of his short story Snow, Glass, Apples.  Not because it's bad (it's brilliant), but because you can never again enjoy the original Snow White story after reading it.

Bah!  Philistine!

In a little grassy bay between tall clumps of Mediterranean heather, two children, a little boy of about seven and a little girl who might have been a year older, were playing, very gravely and with all the focussed attention of scientists intent on a labour of discovery, a rudimentary sexual game.

"Charming, charming!" the D.H.C. repeated sentimentally.

...Then, turning to his students, "What I'm going to tell you now," he said, "may sound incredible. But then, when you're not accustomed to history, most facts about the past do sound incredible."

He let out the amazing truth. For a very long period before the time of Our Ford, and even for some generations afterwards, erotic play between children had been regarded as abnormal (there was a roar of laughter); and not only abnormal, actually immoral (no!): and had therefore been rigorously suppressed.

A look of astonished incredulity appeared on the faces of his listeners. Poor little kids not allowed to amuse themselves? They could not believe it.

"Even adolescents," the D.H.C. was saying, "even adolescents like yourselves …"

"Not possible!"

Stop being so anti-Progressive.  Embrace the Brave New World!

Note the real organizational rot in the Commissioner's answer.  He can't answer whether this stuff is inappropriate because he's looking at it from "outside the case".  

If you take him at his word, it means he believes that in the course of such investigations, there are cases where such invasiveness would be appropriate.  He assumes, as uncontroversial dogma, that the agency should take an imperial view of its power, that it has the basic prerogative to make whatever demands might satisfy some internal group of bureaucrats.

He doesn't find such abuse out of line. He merely lacks the background information to know whether a particular cabal of autocratic bureaucrats were being arbitrary with one odd looking question.  He can not contemplate a world where such a question is always inappropriate, period, because such a world places a hobbling constraint on his favored domain of power.

Prof Epstein is right that the novelty of the technology is not the issue for 3D printed guns.  But both professors are wrong about the ability to stop it.  There is no specific-use hardware to ban or regulate, nor can you monitor for suspicious data on the printer itself.  (Congress may eventually try, but they will fail just as badly as when they tried to regulate encryption.)

The problem space is very clear:  censoring or suppressing information, plain and simple.  If you want to talk about the morality, or predict the success, of such an effort, you need only look to the history of censorship of information.

Final nitpick:  Prof Yoo, the better analogy isn't the publishing of nuclear designs in the 1970s, it's the publishing of The Anarchist's Cookbook during the same decade, and its successor the Jolly Roger's Cookbook in the early days of the Internet. The mere attempt to suppress such information lead to widespread distribution of it, beyond the reach of any banning authority.  It even started a grassroots distributed editing effort, as various writers on proto-Internet BBSes began augmenting and updating the Cookbook's information on their own.

I'm not so worried about the data security; we're pretty good at cryptology. I am worried that this bandwidth use will get buried in the annual overhead reports, baked into our operational assumptions, that we won't realize it can be yanked out of our control until the bandwidth is badly needed.

It's one thing to scale back your military commitments.  It's quite another to fail to keep up with your military infrastructure.  That's "end of empire" stuff, a sign of collapse, when you stop investing in logistical support for outpost/border troops.  Nationally embarrassing defeats tend to happen more from thinly supported deployments, than from tactical brilliance on the other side.

Hayek's assertion of the price mechanism as the best organizer of mankind's efforts and localized knowledge, is one of the greatest contributions to modern economic debate. Most benefits and defenses of the free market flow from this foundational thought.

It also explains why he would be less willing to contemplate centrally planned infrastructure outlays.  While the need for such arrangements might be empirically, informally obvious, it is nearly impossible to create rational pricing models for infrastructure.

Blue Ant is the name of a fictional company in William Gibson's latest trilogy of books.  Pattern Recognition is my favorite present day/near-future novel of the last decade, which I had re-read shortly before signing up to Ricochet.

(It's also the name of a real life Australian company that specializes in Bluetooth and wireless accessories, which I did not know until after I made the avatar.)

My picture is something I hacked together from an outline I found somewhere and a lazy Photoshop gradient.  Apparently there are also real world ants which are blue:

...but they're a bit too freaky looking for me.

None of the above.  I've seen the computer code they use to generate climate models, and it is the purest form of Garbage In->Garbage Out I have ever come across.

I am closest to #2:  I think a raw read of accurately recorded temperatures shows a slight warming trend, but the current state of our knowledge is so abominably bad (from a scientific perspective) that there is no way we can claim to know why such a trend exists.  We can't even reliably say whether the recent trend is more than just noise in the planet's history, a random-walk rounding error instead of an actual trend.

The first problem is there are actually fewer accurate readings than people realize.  This is compounded by a second massive problem:  we don't have models remotely near the needed complexity to ferret out root causes, even if we did have good data to feed them.

Science by consensus is junk; science by repeatable, observable proof is king.  By that metric, climate scare-mongering is little more than junk science hubris.

(Incidentally: warning about climate change instead of warming is like whining about water being too wet.)

I was going to write a sarcastic response, but I couldn't be bothered to summon up any wit.

I'll play devil's advocate and support the existence of the USPS, if not its practices.

A crucial function of government is to maintain contact with its citizens.  One cannot govern a territory without knowing its physical boundaries, and a government over a people must know who it is actually governing.  Postal and messenger services have been found necessary by every major empire/kingdom/state going back to antiquity, along with maintenance of the roads such messengers traveled.

If a nation-state is defined by a physical border, and citizens as those residing within that boundary, then even a strictly minimalist federal state needs a way to catalog these physical realities.

The US needs some way to coordinate 320 million people across 152 million locations, and if it wasn't called USPS it would have some other alphabet soup name.

Now, there is no reason that such contact must be maintained daily, merely reliably.  You could slash USPS delivery to 1-3 days a week and still carry out the needed functions of government.  And if there was real commercial need for more frequent delivery, complementary private services would spring up (after removing the USPS monopoly over post boxes).

(I swear, the currency conversations I obsess over only spring up when I take a brief Ricochet break...)

King Banaian is right, Bitcoin isn't a Ponzi scheme.  You could suspect its creator Satoshi as the guy at the top who needs everyone else to buy in so he can be paid off, but the payoff mechanics would be complicated beyond pyramids or Ponzis.

I say this as someone with a few Bitcoins still in his virtual wallet from 3 years ago:

Bitcoin is an ingenious invention, a brilliant design, a critical tool against top-down financial autocracy... and I will never take it seriously or embrace its use.

It is a legitimate currency.  But it is not money, by definitions used since the beginning of recorded history. You can play with currency, BTC or $ or €, but you should never put your faith in it.

Bitcoin (and its spinoffs) is the only currency in existence that require substantial infrastructure to merely exist, much less transact. The inherent third party/counterparty dependency is both feature and bug. Model risk is something you tolerate in your weather forecasts, not your money.

I'll stick to gold and silver, thanks anyway.

Well, since coders code, developers develop, systems analysts analyze, and managers manage, the architects decided they needed their own verb to describe the magic they inflict on our development cycle.  I'm a deputized member of the grammar police, but it's only fair to let them have their own buzzword.

(I'm not sure what the User Interface/Experience guys do, other than open dozens of bug reports on text alignment.)

But I'll stand with Rob and draw the line at "impactful".

As a currently bearded conservative (it helps me blend in with the liberal hipsters), I agree that the primary benefit is not shaving.

As for tips, probably the best I can give is that beards seem to "grow in" differently each time.  When I had a beard in college, it refused to cover specific parts of my face, curled up immediately at the skin, and itched quite a lot.

Recently, through a renewed laziness in shaving, I grew a beard and shaved it off three times (for complicated reasons) over the course of the last two years.  Each time, it covered slightly different areas on my cheeks and grew out to different lengths.  It is much straighter now, longer, and softer, and doesn't itch at all.  Most other guys I've talked to agree it will stop noticeably growing and "stay" in a pattern after some few months. Unless you have one of these epic faces.

Bottom line:  if it starts itching, or comes in patchy, shave it off and start again.  Eventually your face will cooperate.

As someone steeped in IT buzzwords, I assure you "architecting" is actually a word.  Mostly used by systems architects desperate to justify their existence when a new platform is being rolled out... but still, the concept does refers to something (theoretically) useful.

Yet another way intentional inflationary policies sap the livelihood of average citizens.

We keep hearing how technological miracles will make things cheaper and better, everything from energy to health care to education.  Simple retort: do any of the official economic projections have actual price deflation built into them? If not, is there some insight into the future they would care to share with the rest of us?

James, I highly suspect an increased tax burden is viewed by the Obama team as a feature, not a bug.  They've already admitted that moving to the European-style socialist utopia of their dreams would require higher middle class tax "contributions".  Getting those taxes via hidden inflation, instead of the messy process of democracy, is a bonus.

Pretty sure Blockbuster started putting those together in its declining days.  They were back in the rows no one ever visited, in the non-New Release category aisles stuffed with VHS tapes of unknown D-list movies and Jerry Lewis comedies.

(I haven't been inside a Blockbuster for a good 8 years, not sure how they handle things now.)

Isn't it funny how Blockbuster's classification system would do mixes like Comedy/Drama, or Comedy/Action, or Comedy/Horror, but you never see categories like Gay/Sci-Fi or Gay/Children & Family or Gay/Horror?