I don’t know about “should,” but from a strictly utilitarian point of view, the world is better off if those who can’t afford X are given X for free, in those cases where there is no cost for giving away X (eg, in software, where a copy is costless).

A little bit of numeracy is a dangerous thing. The fact that a claim is provable doesn’t mean it can’t also be mysterious and surprising. e^iπ + 1 = 0 is easily proven with high school math, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t special, or that mathematicians don’t find something mysterious in its tidiness. Similarly, the…

And God said: Let seven be six.

Geez, this one isn’t even an interesting picture of a 40-year-old vehicle. Is Gizmodo getting paid by the USAF for these?

Regardless of what the computer decides, the one on the left is much better — more detailed in clouds, dirt, oceans, etc, plus that weirdly sinister green shade. But who knows, maybe he improved it the second time round.

Books where I think I learned serious lessons about childhood, adulthood, and power, in approximate order of my early education (ages 8 to 14, more or less):

Same to you! Surprisingly civil conversation all round for the internet... This is why I love io9 — good content, good community.

I know I’m harping on this, but unlike many of the cool-things that appear on Sploid and are cross-posted to Gizmodo, these plane pictures offer nothing new. Gizmodo is a blog for new developments in technology, gadgetry, and science. This plane is from 1978! Where are the loving photo spreads illustrating the…

I agree we do disagree about our politics. You are to the right of me, it seems, particularly with regards to social and gender politics. Like Stephenson and you, I believe in evolution, vaccines, global warming, and other sciencey stuff. But unlike him and you, I find dismissive jokes about women and their bodies…

Again — “libertarian” wasn’t my contention. “Socially conservative” is probably more accurate. “Red-blooded American”, evolutionary psychology as applied to gender, a mildly eugenicist program to save the “best” of humanity, referring to women as “uteruses” in jest, etc. These things many not be an issue for you…

Won’t shut up, sorry. I approve of cross-posting, just not where the cross-post doesn’t also match the content of the cross-posted blog. Gadget news is different from military porn.

“Libertarian” was not my personal interpretation, although I agreed with it inasmuch as the American brand of libertarianism is deeply connected to American conservatism, as witnessed (eg) by the Pauls’ stances on gay marriage and abortion. But that’s a digression — my complaints were more directly about moments in…

Airplane-size windows in the capsule plus windows in the tube every couple hundred feet, and persistence-of-vision should take care of the rest.

I don’t think you can really distinguish “optimism” from politics. The movie presents a version of optimism, with great people building great things and a mass of sheeple too dumb to do anything, at best able to be grateful for what is given to them. Conservative politics is, at its core, about nostalgia: nostalgia…

Please stop cross-posting these on Gizmodo. Gizmodo is about new tech, not new pictures of old tech. You wouldn’t post a brand new photo-shoot of the iPhone 3G, or a Surface 1, or the original Chevy Volt. That’s old tech, and it’s old news. Same for these stupid fighter jets. There’s no problem posting them on Sploid…

I don’t want to make any claims about Stephenson himself, and as I said, I haven’t been able to finish the book, so if (as teddy21 above suggests) it turns out in a way that changes how one reads the first 10%, I’m totally open to that.

I’d like to see Bacigalupi debate Stephenson, since Seveneves has also just come out, and I assume is intended to be “optimistic” in confronting its catastrophe. I couldn’t get more than 50 pages into it though, since I found it’s form of techno-eugenic “optimism” to be too right-wing for my tastes.* But in any case,…

Are you guys getting paid for all these photos of fighter jets that have been appearing recently? Who the hell cares? Keep it in your military fetish sub-site. The F-35 is the most idiotic boondoggle in recent history — costs a fortune, has little operational need, and it doesn’t work to boot. If the military is…

Clearly that could only have been a controlled demolition. It was an inside job!

Great — see you back here in five years!