rvkennedy

The reason most Hollywood material is adapted material, is that a movie is a hell of an expensive place to try out new ideas. A book costs little to write, and takes one person to write it. And there are lots of them, succeeding, or failing, on the strength of their ideas, writing and storytelling. Cinema has never been the place to run a lot of flags up the pole and see which one the public salutes.

If the US government ran the scientific community, that community would not have its strong consensus on climate change, because half of congress, and every other president, is committed to at least equivocating on whether that consensus exists. I'm afraid the link you posted does not cast Chris de Freitas in a positive light. If I knew of sloppy science that had been passed through peer review, I'd expect the person responsible to be excoriated, much more so if that work contradicted my own. This would not make me wrong, or the editor in question some kind of victim.

You have one good point though - money, be it from government or corporations, distorts the process. The procedures for the allocation of fund lead to too much being done in some areas, not enough in others. The academic economics profession has been a particular victim of this. The trouble with the idea that climate science has fallen victim to a grand counterfactual groupthink (if you don't like the 'c' word) is that the numbers, the physics, and the reasoned opinions of the vast majority of apolitical observers support the climate consensus.

As for Soviet science: did the Soviet Union promulgate any kind of false science that you're aware of? Not in the peer reviewed journals, to any great extent I know of. What would be the point? That's peer review in action. But who's trusting anything unconditionally here? As I said, we keep an open mind.

Why do we believe Hubble (expanding universe) over Hoyle (it's static)? Hoyle is a much more impressive figure than McIntyre, but his ideas have been tested over and over in many different ways, and found wanting. You could say that the expanding universe is just a theory, that it's unproven, because you could construct an elaborate static universe model that creates the red shift in some arbitrary manner, and causes distant stars to dim sufficiently that space is black and not white, and so on. You could create an elaborate theory that explains why things fall to earth but rejects both Newton and General Relativity. But it seems to me that the reason this doesn't happen is that it doesn't affect the bottom line of well-capitalized companies in the energy sector.

You are correct that we appeal to authority for most of what we know of science. But it's not Washington that's the authority, it's the corpus. And we trust it because it's constantly subjected to self-scrutiny. Voices like McIntyre's are heard, and either the whole of one single branch of science is engaged in a massive conspiracy to not listen, or he's probably wrong.

But we keep our minds open.

When people are worried about jobs and imagine that helping the environment would take extra effort that could be spent on the economy, they will convince themselves that the environment isn't that big of a deal. To realize that alleviating climate change would actually create new work, even new industries, takes more mental effort than the casual observer is prepared to expend.

That's normal people - the hacker set will generally seek out the unvarnished truth in more of an evidence-based way.

Not only that, but more than we could at this point imagine using in a long long time, and an inexhaustible supply of energy. I find it hard to believe that these resources wouldn't help us just a little with the seemingly intractable social problems. Those very often boil down to arguments over limited resources in the end.

In fact, I can't think of a major world conflict or problem that isn't at its root about the allocation of resources, and it's all there for us, right above our heads.

The effect creates an ion wind that transfers momentum to the surrounding air. Effectively, it's like a bladeless fan, but modern researchers have not been able to replicate the reported thrust - lifting 90lb - non-one's been able to lift more than a kilo as far as I'm aware.

http://blog.gaborcselle.com/2010/02/how-to-replace-imap.html

http://blog.webhooks.org/2009/02/13/restful-email-over-http/

HTTP has had about 20 years of use, development, testing - culminating in SPDY now, which could get even 40% faster in some cases. I'm not sure I can think of a good reason not to make the switch.

Really, wordpress.org users are the testers, wordpress.com users are the customers. I'd love to hear what the OP now recommends though, that would provide some good perspective.

It really needs a better UI but the possibilites are endless - you can design your own space missions, flybys, moonshots, anything really.

exactly the word I intended to use: but "sooner or later" can be a long time coming. I know POP still exists, hell, gopher still exists but I'd say it's been replaced in all practical terms.

every provider that supports IMAP still has to support POP3

In what sense - do you mean practically, or in some technical way?

for a new protocol to replace SMTP or even augment it, it would have to be designed, refined...

Right, but I restricted this to client-server. Any protocol you like can replace SMTP for client-server, simply by taking messages from the client, then sending them on via SMTP. This is how Courier provides mail sending via IMAP connections.

maybe it's the rate of change in things like HTML and CSS over the past few years that gives the false impression of being so easy to do.

It's not easy, and it won't be quick. But I like many slow, difficult things, I expect it to happen at some point. In fact there's already a draft RFC to for RESTful HTTP mail retrieval: http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-dusseault-httpmail-00

But it's not much compared to the seething shark tank that the web has been for the last twenty years. Sooner or later I think a RESTful HTTP or SPDY API will replace IMAP, and (for client-server comms at least) SMTP.

I think ccLoop is a side-issue, because they were addressing the problem of mailing list management. Contactually's approach seems to be wrong-headed to me, making the user send and receive more emails! But really it's more of a CRM system than a step forward for email, so perhaps it's solving a problem I don't have.

At comms.io, we're writing an email client. The idea is to work with IMAP, take on the lessons of Gmail, but modernize the experience, make it lightweight and transparent. If you've seen the Gmail interface lately, what I mean by lightweight is the opposite of that. Anyone who's interested in helping out, do get in touch.

On the one hand, ISP's offer "50Mb broadband", on the other they get the vapours when people actually use it.