Glad to see appreciation for MF Doom. The Sift has 0 appreciation for hip-hop, I have no idea of why, a little bit of racism, hatred for mainstream, too many dorks, too many burning man types? I don't know.

I mean you look at the hits for some of these artists and it's beyond hundreds of millions of hits if not a billion in some cases. Innovators like MF Doom, Dr. Octagon & Big L never got anywhere close to that sort of popularity.

The new Aesop Rock that came out this month is fucking awesome. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZVlSqjjkic as well as the new Death Grips; open your minds.

The full version was recently released on steam, it's pretty fun but doesn't add many gameplay innovations over the demo thing they released for the comp
http://store.steampowered.com/app/322500/

"REACH! Partnership School is an innovative Baltimore City public middle and high school operated by Civic Works. We prepare students for college and careers in Healthcare and Construction. Graduates of REACH! Partnership leave the school with certifications that let them start jobs or apprenticeships as nursing assistants, pharmacy technicians, carpenters, or electricians. "

I doubt it will go further than a grand jury, but apparently they are possibly going to face criminal charges. http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/education/blog/bs-md-ci-school-slapping-video-20160301-story.html

I was 13/14, games back then were magical. Anytime I was on a plane or in the car I was reading PC Gamer or CGM drooling over the demos (or shareware!), ads, previews and reviews. Remember those days? When information on gaming was largely through print?! I still remember those Dark Forces previews, I could have shot a load. PC gaming at that point really was fucking cutting edge.

1997 & 1998 also hold a special flame in gaming for me - 1997: Ultima Online (actually learned HTML and had a website for UO cuz I was a NERD), Fallout, GTA, Age of Empires, Dungeon Keeper, Quake II, Myth (incredible multiplayer component probably even still).

1998: Starcraft, Half-Life, Baldur's Gate, Thief, Grim Fandango, Fallout 2, Tribes, THIEF, Unreal, Commandos.... so many innovative games back then. Now we just build on them over and over and over again

One of the things chimps will do is drag tree branches around for use in dominance displays in which they run at rivals, hair on end, screaming, throwing rocks, making as much noise as possible.

Jane Goodall described one of her chimps who discovered he could bang gas cans together to create an enormous racket, and in the use of which artificial aid he rapidly advanced from relatively low status to alpha.

Chimps use tools in other ways such as when 'fishing' for termites, or most incredibly for me, making absorbent sponges from chewed up leaves or moss. They learn these behaviours from each other: some chimp groups use some tools, some use others, some use none, and innovations spread rapidly within groups.

@Lawdeedaw

I think that's a bit of a flawed argument and hardly what's wrong with the US economy. It would be silly to halt the automation* of driving. Not only is it likely to lead to safer driving but reducing the costs of shipping everything will in effect lower the costs of virtually all goods and improve living standards. Government may have a role to retrain workers or to provide unemployment support but it's not there to prop up industries that are obsolete. No one wants to go back to the days of typists and secretaries and for good reason.

I would rather blame the entrenched firms with their lobbyists protecting their turf through the corrupt political contribution system. If you look at Google Fiber for example: Verizon, Comcast and the like have been mounting various political and legal challenges to keep them from growing and to protect their margins. Free market economies work because new market entrants erode profits over time through innovation. Instead you have politically maintained trusts.

if you outlaw or overly control variance/divergence/difference in thought, you'll end up with a nation of copycats instead of innovators.
uh oh, ... wait....

The director of the movie "You're Next" applauded this 'homage'.

So wonderful

The Simpsons’ couch gag has become a great place for innovative filmmakers and artists to show off their take on the iconic nuclear family and the many denizens of Springfield. From the creators of Rick And Morty, to Don Hertzfeldt, Guillermo Del Toro, John K., and many others, all have left their individual stamp on the opening of the classic show and its opening segment. Now another artist has thrown his hat in the ring, albeit unofficially, with a gruesome blending of The Simpsons with Adam Wingard’s film You’re Next.

Lee Hardcastle is an experienced stop-motion animator that has applied his craft to a segment in The ABCs Of Death, a mash-up of Frozen and The Thing, and even a music video for the group Gunship. Now Hardcastle has brought that same off-kilter horror sensibility to his proposed couch gag for Springfield’s first family with a possibly NSFW-ish (due to clay violence and gore) and fairly disturbing short. Hardcastle’s couch gag opens serenely enough before devolving into a home invasion pastiche just like You’re Next—much to the appreciation and applause of Adam Wingard himself. It’s unclear although unlikely that Fox will actually use this couch gag on screen, but maybe it will help boost Hardcastle’s chances for crafting a Treehouse Of Horror intro/segment.

Yes! Yes!! Yes!!!
I love this on so many levels. It's a beautiful melding of recycling, innovation, art, ecology, engineering, exercise, job training, self sufficiency, etc. This is how I want to see 3rd world countries to better themselves, in ways that better their lives without falling into the same traps 1st world countries have that destroy their priceless environments for convenience or profit. 1st world countries could learn something from that too.
*promote

That basically means that the only way an action scene can be good is via realism, and that's not true.

I would agree so much as to say that I don't think that Avengers scene was necessarily great, but it is good. I want to preface this first with I'm not a huge Avengers fan. I'm honestly not a big comic book fan either, so this isn't coming from a fan boy.

Why was it good? First off, it is very plot connected. It demonstrated Tony Stark being forward thinking and anticipating the Hulk potentially going Hulk and hurting/killing people... It's the same for his motivation to construct what became The Vision. It stays within both his and Hulk's character. Stark maintains his wise cracking self, even when it's not probably appropriate.

Immortality? Hardly. It conveyed how much damage could be done. IE, buildings and stuff didn't just get destroyed because, LOOK! STUFF BLOWING UP! The scene actually demonstrates the flaws/vulnerabilities of both Stark and the Hulk. Stark didn't just beat him, and that was that. They were very lucky nobody died (admittedly pretty conveniently). It took a bit of good luck for Stark to stop the Hulk that there was a huge building under construction nearby. It shows that even just the Hulk could potentially overpower whatever Stark cooks up to stop him, let alone whatever actual Supervillian comes along who is actually scheming to destroy/enslave the world, and he can make mistakes despite his best attempts (which is brought about Ultron as well). It demonstrated the Hulk's fragility of setting him off. Yet it also demonstrated that without Stark, the Hulk would have continued smashing and destroying. That was one of the themes in the movie, that technological innovation is something we need, yet can destroy us all.

Was it potentially overdone and there was some stuff that they could have toned down to keep with that darker ethos? Sure. The scene ain't perfect, but it's really damn good.

You certainly have a choice in how you use the electricity.

I think YOU missed the point, if you can only sell your power for 8 c perkwh, and pay 36c per kwh, and you sell ALL the power you make, then buy it back later, YOU are subsidizing the power company, who makes 28c on every kwh you sell them. No one is subsidizing that 8c they pay(I would hope, 350% profit is already insane) so what "high feed in tariff" are you talking about?

The power grid is fairly smart, and takes into account the amount being produced by ALL sources, and shuts/ramps down those not needed. For you to be sending power when it's not required would require more PV generation than the entire grid uses, because ANY other generation could be put on hold until night. The certainly DO do this on a 'few hundred times per second' basis, at least here in the US. Solar generation may jump up and down on individual systems, but the total amount fed to the grid by all solar systems in an area is fairly stable, and doesn't jump radically from a cloud...come on.
Here, peak power is at peak temperature time, mid-late afternoon, when businesses turn up the AC and people get home, exactly when PV makes the most power, I can't speak for AU.
The point being that the grid CAN and DOES adjust rapidly to account for all generation methods, and it does already shift production because some of the need is supplied by PV.

Not so, the return on energy invested is at least double the return on coal in the long term...for the consumer, that's why you save money VS the electric company in the long term.
It's certainly not cheap or easy to deal with the waste in the US where the company(s) (and the taxpayer when it goes bankrupt) has to pay for destroying major river systems because of inevitable waste releases...as happened recently and repeatedly. Only if you ignore most of the actual costs of coal can you think it's cheaper, if you count all the costs, it's FAR more expensive.

ALL the power/energy needed to produce PV panels is reflected in their cost...100%.
Again, to be a bad way to reduce carbon pollution, you MUST assume it takes more carbon to make a panel VS the amount of carbon pollution it saves VS coal power production of the same amount of KWH. That's simply not the case by a long shot, so it does significantly reduce CO2 production, by around 20-30X vs coal. Even in Germany and Denmark, where it's often overcast, they found ....
"solar PV works out to about 50g of CO2 per kWh compared to coal's 975g of CO2 per kWh, or about 20x "cleaner."" In places with better weather, it can be up to 40X.
http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/how-much-co2-does-one-solar-panel-create

Once again, my electric company doesn't pay me a dime, it trades me power based on peak and non peak hours. Yours on the other hand makes 350% profit on every kwh you produce. I save cash because making (and USING) my own power is FAR cheaper than buying (mainly) coal produced power from the electric company. No "high feed in tariff" required at all. No feed in tariff at all, in fact.
It obviously makes an inroad on reducing carbon because, beyond the panel's production and shipping, there's ZERO carbon, unlike coal which produces more carbon per 10 KWH than it likely took to make each of my 20 panels, meaning they pay off their carbon debt in about 100 hours of sunlight, and are total carbon savers for the rest of their 20 year lifespan.
If we're going to fix climate change, we need to be HONEST about energy production, not compare 150%-350% of the cost of one production source with 5% of another production source to be able to say the 5% source is better.

HAHAHAHAHA!!!! Nuke requires a jump in your bill (even with the HUGE government subsidies the nuke industry gets at every step), but it's better than home mounted PV which SAVES you >50% off your 20 year power costs without a taxpayer cent?!?!? Please think about that.

I'm not basing my figures or thoughts on any study, but on my own personal, long term, economic experience with a system.
As someone who purchased a solar system for purely economic reasons, and has found it to be a HUGE cost saver over buying coal/nuke power from the electric company, all without counting subsidies at all, and even considering I paid top dollar for my system and have battery backup (that produces nothing but cost thousands), I'll simply say you're completely wrong in your assessments based on my own dispassionate, no child having, purely economical experience and leave it there.
I'm happy saving 50% of every power/dollar, you are accepting of giving away around 80% of your power/dollars to the power company. That doesn't make solar unworthy, non-"green", or economically unviable, it makes it a TERRIBLE choice for YOU because you're doing it wrong, and your electric company is punishing you rather than incentivizing you.

Patent Law has completely stifled innovation and development. We're being held back technologically, so a few can profit off us.

The tax level in Norway has fluctuated between 40 and 45% of GDP since the 1970s. The relatively high tax level is a result of the large Norwegian welfare state.

You literally dwarf the US tax rate per person, almost by double the amount.

You have a VAT tax of 25%, among the highest in the world. My equivalent is sales tax, which is 8.25% on the dollar, and it should be 2.5% lower than that, but Austin is a super-left city that taxes extra to cover all their feel good plans.

To be clear, the average Norwegian household pays roughly $70,000 per year in tax. Including the state’s oil income, government tax revenue exceeds $100,000 per household.

Discretionary spending is kept to an extreme minimum, because you don't have much left after taxes. The cost of living and recreation in Norway is through the roof compared to other countries.

Workers come to the office, punch a clock, shuffle papers, and go home. There is no cultural drive to work hard and get promoted. Norway has created a system that makes it virtually impossible to pull ahead of your peers financially. In fact, culturally, there is a thing where you are NOT supposed to do better than someone else.

What major worldwide innovations or brands do we get out of Norway? None that I can think of offhand, but here is a list of some of their more important companies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_of_Norway.

So, you get taxed a ton, cost of living is incredibly high, there is no incentive to do better than anyone else, and in return you get to have free stuff like healthcare and education. Not that it matters really, because once you get out of school you get to become a worker bee drone. Unless of course you move to another country and get to achieve something there.

So, yeah, enjoy your hive mind country. As screwed up as mine is, at least there is a chance to become something if you work hard and invest correctly.

I'm intrigued by the different strategies they seem to have taken with regards to different markets.

The US market has been covered here already. Living off the grid, buffer for power outages, etc.

But they appear to market the Powerwall as a decentralized buffer system for our regional/national grid, as a means to shave off the spikes in power usage at times when both wind and solar fail to meet expectations. Seems like a virtual power plant of Powerwalls would be an alternative to gas turbine plants. Add some pumped-storage hydroelectricity in Norway and the Alps, and the need for standby power plants would be vastly reduced.

Additionally, they are probably aiming at the time when diminishing feed-in tariffs for PV panels make it more attractive to charge batteries instead of feeding into the grid.

However, even if they manage to sell only a handful of Powerwalls, it'll force all the other players to get off their fat asses for once. Politics managed to kill the local solar industry and the big players came up with fuck all in terms of meaningful innovation over the last years.
Yes, I'm looking at you, Siemens!

I don't really have a problem with a weaponized robot. It's no different to a tank or a fighter plane really. The question of "robots" is largely irrelevant. Robots are just another tool that has been weaponized, something that humans have done with everything.

We took knives and made swords.
We took cars and made tanks.
We took planes and made bombers.
And we've almost certainly got some killer satellites.
So putting a gun on a robot isn't really any different than giving one to a soldier, except it can be more easily repaired.

The question is about AI. Once you get an AI and put it in control of a machine, it can probably use that machine to kill you. OTOH, once you put a human in control of a machine, the human can probably use that machine to kill you.

But we're going to develop robots and we're going to develop AI and sooner or later, someone is going to put the two together. You can't ban innovation (well, you can, but it won't stop it). So I'd much rather we build and understand the technology. That's how we learn.

Fundamentally, it's how we use these weapons that will determine our fate, and right now, we're not using them very well.