“[Adrian Bowyer] doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life in court trying to prevent people from doing with the machine the one thing it was designed to do. “You are brought to the point where you have to say ‘this is a self-replicating machine, the onl

“When the reporter went to check out the new age-verifying machines… he soon discovered that the machines equipped with face-recognition cameras would let him buy cigarettes when he held up a 15-centimeter (6-in) wide magazine photo of a man who looked

Old but still very, very pertinent.

Some debate in the comments about the incandescent-bulbs-as-electric-heating effect. All I’d say is, grid-powered electric room heating is, of course, much less efficient than gas or oil, but there are plenty of houses that do only have electric heating.

Thorough review. Some criticism of Dan Ariely’s ‘Predictably Irrational’.

“He realizes, with a sense of overwhelming purpose bordering on religious epiphany, that he must use his new-found funds to reconstruct the exact circumstances of the moment to which that déjà vu referred… It’s a “forensic procedure.” This sounds like

“I think it would be more accurate to regard Skinner’s Beyond Freedom and Dignity as a kind of Rorschach test. The fact that it is widely regarded as pointing the way to 1984 is, perhaps, a suggestive indication of certain tendencies in modern industrial