Also, weird, but isn't this Richard Madden, aka Robb from Game of Thrones? Haha.

January Jones isn't a prostitute?

I would also like one of these with my time machine... but could I get one that looks less like a cardboard cut-out or shrinky-dink and more like a real girl? I've kind of got a "thing" for real girls.

Yeah, I'm with Mike on this. I call shenanigans.

Okay.

Same thought.

Ha! I often forget to check the dates on articles. In that case, glad you came back! Enjoy.

There's a film made by cutting together all the Apollo missions (if memory serves) as though they were all one long journey — very little or no commentary that doesn't come directly from NASA footage. It's 80 minutes long, and utterly gorgeous. Takes you through prep, staging, launch, journey, the Moon, return trip,…

My reading comprehension skills failed me!

I agree with this point — the universe isn't short on helium, so it's hard to get too panicky here — but there was a note in the above article/link: helium is a component of rocketry? I know stuff about stuff, but I don't know shit about real legitimate rocket science, so... if we start running out of helium in…

I immediately saw this video and thought, "THAT is a useful skill in a survivalist sense. I'm glad I watched this. You never know." I'm not normally the alarmist or survivalist-type, but, you never know. Having food but having no way in. That would suck.

Yeah, I think it breaks down to a kind of speciesism, I wouldn't deny that, but it's an interesting quasi-existential kind. I could conceivably doubt your genuineness if I was the one who created you from whole cloth (or mine was the species that created yours in similar fashion). Part of that is clearly speciesism —…

It occurs to me, since we're ranting, raving, and roving down this road, that one problem is simply communication. If I ask an AI, "Are you an individual? Do you have a sense of who you are, as a self, as a separate entity?" And the AI responded (mimicking human responses, as per its base program/etc), "Yes, I am me.…

I would say that's exactly right. The arguments for and against freewill make an easy(ish) example of that phenomenon. We cannot say definitively that freewill exists, whether we have some or none or total agency in our actions and lives, and yet we do feel like we have it, we feel like freewill exists, and obviously…

Nah.

That's the really interesting question, I think.

(Okay, yes, I admit, I'm also responding to comments in a year-old article. Ha. So?)

Although the rules and expectations that dictate protocol around an FPS game are far more restrictive and simple than the rules and expectations that dictate protocol around a blind peer-to-peer chat dialogue, they're both dictated by protocol and expectations. It's not unrestricted at all, in the sense you imply, and…

Heh.

I like that the man who invented PayPal and founded one of the most successful private space ventures and is dedicated to putting colonists on Mars (and yes, who founded Tesla Motors) is breezily referred to as "a car mogul," like he's heir to Chrysler or something.