When I was a child, my elderly neighbor grew pears, and they were the best pears. My parents live in the same house, and the pear trees my elderly neighbor grew are still in the same spot, still alive.

The pears on those trees aren’t the same anymore. They turn meally before they get soft, and they never get sweet enough. They don’t have the same strong flavor, and they don’t bake up well in desserts.

She taught me many things about growing plants, but never anything about what she did for the pear trees. So now pears aren’t what they’re supposed to be, and the reason is lost to me.

IANAL, and this is oversimplifying. Copyright protects the creative elements of a game, including the specific way that a game is coded (so you cannot decompile a game, modify all the art assets, change the code a little, and then sell it), and possibly aspects of the gameplay required to give it a specific “feel”.

If you want a solid legal defense for cloning, you could have one team that describes the original game in a way that removes the creative elements, and a second team that works from that description to make a new work. This works for other works, too; I can write my own “book about an orphan that learns he has magical powers, goes to a school to learn to use those, and ultimately battles and defeats the powerful dark wizard that killed his parents”, but can’t sit down following the story elements of Harry Potter for my new Barry Cotter book series.

Ultimately the line is what you can convince a judge and/or jury is “different enough”.

At least in the US, government policy has meant that getting a drug to market is an extremely high bar. This means that funding the wrong drug can waste a billion dollars or more of time, material, trained researchers and lab space, etc.

Funding drugs by popular attention, private donation, kickstarter, or anything like that is likely to produce a bunch of scams and even more waste.

Funding drugs by having the government select which ones to study is likely to produce several gigantic financial boondoggles that are dragged on because some Senator wants the jobs wasting the money creates to remain in his state, or something.

If we want more drugs to come out, the best thing to do would be to reduce the cost of making a drug legal to sell, like by lowering the proof required for efficacy, or by alleviating the doctor shortage by permanently increasing the number of medicare funded residency slots.

That’s only if it’s on a GFI. The resistance to Earth for a typical human is well below the “boy this space heater sure is drawing a lot of power” line that a breaker detects.

You can know that it doesn’t do something without knowing what it does. For example, there’s a light switch in my house in a room with a light. I know that flipping that switch does not turn the light on… But I don’t know what it does.

This could be better than existing pressure balance based mixing systems, assuming it allows you to adjust the hot vs cold pulse width

It’s the difference between “We must be on God’s side” and “God is on our side”.

When the Iraq war kicked off, there was a priest at my parents’ church that spoke out against it (as he explained it, “love your enemy” is one of the most challenging things Jesus asked of his followers. It doesn’t mean “forgive someone that cuts you off in traffic” it means literally whoever your enemy is, you must love, care for, and protect them, even if it means self sacrifice or dying to do so). Attendance at his sermons dropped by 60 or 70% for years. Eventually I think people started to come around, but he died before there was widespread sentiment against the war. I’m no longer religious, but I miss that priest.

Whoever made this picture doesn’t know about Fishing Mexico, and I’m disappointed by that.

When you account for inflation, oil prices today are in line with oil prices in the early 2000s. The price is too low, and the risk is too high for massive infrastructure spending that would extract more oil from Venezuela to be worth it.

Possibly, green energy technologies are now on a trajectory to overtake fossil fuels altogether - and they are already a factor in driving the price of fossil fuels (and therefore the profitability of many wells and mines) down substantially. If that happens, the long term value of Venezuela’s oil reserves, without suitable infrastructure already built for extraction, could be close to zero.

In line with small government ideals, the best thing to do is let companies decide whether and how much to invest, but that won’t be a headline worth showing off. So Trump is trying to make $100B happen, and believes that that (alone) will restore the Venezuelan economy to the way it was.

Easy, when two guys have the same first name, just enjoy them both the same amount. Give good/bad advice to make up the delta.

That’s a much better question, though! “Here’s a stack trace and the source code. Walk me through where to go from here.”

Most places use at least some open source software, so most places can do this, and if you ask your sys admin team nicely, there’s probably some stack traces available, hot off the prod.

Also, if you put the same wine in different bottles, they pretty reliably prefer (and describe the rich complexities of) the more expensive bottles.

I knew an audiophile that believed the government had top secret technology for additional audio channels in surround sound setups, like 17.7 or something. I tried very hard to explain how you can buy an off the shelf 128 channel recorder/playback device, and have as many channels as you can feasibly buy and set up, and the reason a lot of media was recorded in 5.1 was because a 5.1 setup was considered at the upper end of what people would be willing to pay for. He moved his target in response, to now the government has top secret 1000 channel audio equipment.

I don’t know what the equivalent of the wine world is, but I hope never to meet it.

That’s the Medditerain’t, right there.

I’m sorry for being so much more money for other projects since February.

We need to ban fully automatic transmissions.

In set theory, sets containing an infinite number things are relatively easy to describe. For example, “All the counting numbers” is a set with an infinite number of things in it.

Many sets with an infinite number of things have a one to one correspondence to each other, meaning that we can describe a function that takes elements of one set as an input, gives elements of the other set as an output, and spans both sets - no element is skipped on either side.

“All the even counting numbers” has a one to one correspondence with “All the counting numbers”. You can look into Hilbert’s Hotel for a good demonstration of how this works.

Not all sets with an infinite number of things correspond with the set of all counting numbers, because some are fundamentally bigger. This difference in size doesn’t happen just once (e.g. there are countably infinite sets, and uncountably infinite sets, and that’s all we need to know), there are actually an infinite number of sets of progressively bigger infinite numbers of elements.

Because this is a confusing mess, we needed a way to keep track of how infinitely big each infinitely big set is, and the aleph cardinalities are the preferred way to do that. Any set with cardinality of aleph zero (aka “aleph null”) has a one to one correspondence with any other set with cardinality aleph zero. The same is true for every other aleph cardinality. Two sets of cardinality aleph thirty seven have a one to one correspondence with each other.

Anyways, busy beaver(tree(aleph omega)) is the biggest number.

They throw a pretty great tea party. Everything else is as described.

1. Not everything is going to evolve into crabs.

2. I’ve read a wikipedia page about the Dunning Kruger effect, so I understand it as well as an expert.

3. Name brand Band-aid self adhesive sterile bandages really are that much better. If you grew up using anything else, your parents didn’t love you, or you were extremely poor (or both).

4. Tryptophan is not the thing that makes you tired after overeating on Thanksgiving. It’s mostly carbs, and the fact that so many people uncritically repeat this easily disproven lie is a sign of how little concern for the truth almost everyone has, almost all the time.

You’re really going to put that up against “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” by Mariah Carey?

The hard part is finding someone else that also wants to discuss ferns.