Is this the world we live in now? Sad.

Would microwaving frozen food in a vacuum (or conversely under high pressure) make any useful difference in how evenly the food cooked? A lower pressure would lower the boiling point and a higher pressure would raise it. What about subtly modifying the wavelengths or amplitude? I'm not a physicist so I have no idea. Just throwing that out there to see if someone smarter than me can make it stick.

I had an epiphany while reading your post. The solution is to make it legal to steal phones. Everybody wins!

I don't know man, that sounds like the beginnings of A LOT OF WORK! Probably better to let sleeping phones lie.

The present is looking more and more like Ghost in the Shell. I love it.

I have a 19 month old. People (including children) can be unimaginably bad, but it's not hopeless. So far mine's been a blast. Good kid. Is this better advice for children than logic and altruism?

Tame your inner beast by using its power to drive your ambition to create in and improve upon the state of the world and the people around you.

All of that depends on what kind of society we create to live in such a world, hopefully by instilling logical and altruistic values in our children. Obviously I'm being optimistic, probably unrealistically so, but think of what people just 100 years ago would have thought about modern society today. 100 years is nothing in terms of our species' history; we've crossed a threshold in our evolution due to technology, quickly leaving behind what we used to be for better or worse. The only things holding us back now are our primal instincts and education.

With respect to your comments about people having too much free time, there are two kinds of people. There's the guy who after retirement finds himself starting a small farm, working at the local grocery store or writing novels because he just needs something to do. Then there's the guy whose ideal use of time involves smoking crack, beating his wife over some inane argument, and ending up on COPS for us all to shake our heads at.

It's not something that would happen overnight, but all growth is painful and everything good we now have was born of suffering somewhere.

While the inevitable loss of more "menial" jobs (take no offense; I've had many myself) will suck for those affected, at some point we're going to end up with a civilization like in Star Trek TNG where people choose to work, as the provision of the basic necessities of life will have become largely automated. Of course, something "really bad" could happen before then (nuclear holocaust, plague, asteroid strike, supervolcano, gamma ray burst, etc.), but I hope someday we reach the point where robots handle the ugly bits and we all get to do whatever the hell we please without fear.

Go ahead guys, launch every nuke you've got. Or look up "balance of power" or "stalemate" or "mutually assured destruction" and shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down.

Mark must have gotten laid recently. Or had lunch with Richard Stallman. Or...

Along that line of thought, they actually have all the time in the world. Unless they accidentally bang their mother, of course, which changes everything.

Probably prohibitively expensive, but it would be nice if, someday, all that shit was underground. It looks horrible and is susceptible to lightning strikes, airplanes, helicopters (and now drones), falling trees, hurricanes, tornadoes and terrorist sabotage. And again, it just looks horrible. We bury fiber, copper, natural gas and water lines, so why is all our electrical strung up like the crack baby of a Christmas tree and a giant spider?

How small can they make nuclear reactors these days? Tesla could make the President's new "Beast" something like the Tumbler from the new Batman movies, with an extra 1000 HP thrown in for good measure.

...but it's not as bad as this:

http://eightvirtues.com/misc/2...
http://www.npr.org/2014/02/21/...

What in the unholy hell is wrong with people? I'm not religious, but my God.

Install nothing on my phone except what I can 100% (well, close enough) verify as being from a legitimate company (Google Maps, Twitter, etc.). No random but interesting-sounding programs, no games, none of that shit. My device is a phone/GPS/camera/browser/calculator. That it's nothing else not only doesn't bother me, I think it's great. My neck is in good order as well, as it doesn't gravitate toward a near-permanent state of 67.5 degrees. Many others seem to suffer from this, leading me to believe they have too much crap installed on their phone. Get help now, people; it's not as hard as it seems.