Here's hoping GOG or Steam can get their hands on some of these old titles and re-release them.

My replacement ended up being Google Reader. ;)

I tried Protopage. It was OK, but not as good as iGoogle.

That's just something conservatives say. In reality, a government is only so limited as its military might. A powerful military is a cornerstone of American conservatism.

I concede this: That such an economy cannot be "done" to people. This would come about as an emergent system and not as some big program.

There are more incentives in this world besides money or altruism. How about this? Imagine some catastrophe; I don't know, maybe something far-fetched like a super-storm hitting the east coast of the U.S. and knocking out power to a few million people for an extended period of time. Let's say some of these people possess some level of ingenuity and are rather inconvenienced by waiting for some utility company to restore power for them. They determine not to be caught in such a helpless condition in the future and invest considerable expense building out their own contingencies. Sure, their solution can't provide them with continuous, uninterrupted service, but at least they have some capability to take the edge off the suffering and make a bad situation more tolerable. And while they are waiting for the next rainy day, they are putting power back onto the grid.

Oh, it doesn't make a big impact at first; but suppose we take the scenario a little further along and imagine a future in which the climate regularly produces extreme weather of this nature. Who knows? It might happen in this pipe-dream fantasy world of mine. Soon enough, more and more people are wising up to this strange notion that self-sufficiency in some critical things is superior to dependency on remote systems run by experts. Madness, I know. There is a tipping point somewhere in which emergent complexity develops and your trillion-dollar problem has taken care of itself without the help of any money-pushing elites who have all the answers. It doesn't happen over night.

No, I'm saying small, localized generators could augment base load ubiquitously. It has nothing to do with giant wind turbines in your yard. $15k solar panels is a moot point since I am talking about a speculative economy in which such things become commodities because of their pervasiveness.

We have a wind farm within 30 miles, which is supplemental power, and a gas fired plant within 10 miles that is also supplemental. "Base load" comes from a coal plant some 200 miles away. When I am talking "local," I mean more local than that. Anyway, local gas and wind is already the direction I am talking about. The next step is to get more generators in homes and businesses. We could replace the coal fired plant with something more friendly to the environment since we would not require the output it provides.

Or change the economic infrastructure to a more sensible one where areas of production and consumption are as close to coterminous as possible. That is to say, supplement with local sources and rely less on centralized mega-sources. If most people had access to ubiquitous local wind and solar generators, base load would be supplemented everywhere. It might then be possible to utilize a "new-wave" source on a larger scale for the base load that isn't so much of a base load anymore.

Ok everyone, pay attention. Here is a fine example of one kind of tactic: Reduce this day's work to a statistic and compare it to other numbers that make it look insignificant by comparison. Yes, choose things that are ridiculous (like box cutters) or that we can't do much about (like lightning or shark attacks). Break other violent statistics into smaller buckets so they look less significant and wholly unrelated to the violence at hand. Finally, fail to mention other statistics altogether. This is how you abuse statistics to support your position. It's a great for that, I guess.

Actually, unlike the cold, irrational psychopathy of those who resort to such tactics (and of those who shoot kids), most of us aren't heartless bastards.

Today, someone has left a scar on America that is unrivaled by any ever inflicted by a fool and his box cutter. This was the work of violence and hatred directed toward the innocent and defenseless and should be counted as such. People are bereaved and some of them have lost their children, friends, and relatives in a senseless massacre. At this moment, and tomorrow, and through the Holidays, and for the rest of newly saddened and darkened lives, uncounted living individuals will now suffer in ways you and I will likely never comprehend. Our statistics simply don't account for those things, and it is a mistake of the highest stupidity or most deplorable callousness to even attempt to make such trivial arguments.

Whatever one's feelings are about this very alienable right to own and carry guns, on a day such as this one it does us credit that we wish to have never invented such things.

I think you misunderstand. I do not claim that values arise from any "religiously constructed ethics frame." I understand your use of the word, "religiously," to correspond with theism. Your own arbitrary definition of the good, and your claim of "relative and interchangeable ethics," is exactly what I mean. The subjectivity of good and evil signifies that all value judgments belong in a class of make-believe and imaginary things that are not universal nor provable; the same sort of things that Mr. Dawkins, paradoxically, thinks are bad.

My point is that the quality of being religious does not necessarily entail theism. What it certainly entails is a dogmatic faith in made-up stuff, such as the insistence that something is good or bad. Mr. Dawkins might prove that religion is irrational, but then he famously marches about telling us that the world would be better off without it. He's preaching his values and envisioning a world predicated upon them. That's what religious people do.

Dear Mr. Dawkins,

It seems to me that your epistemology of reason and empiricism is very good at teaching us how to understand objective reality but not how to value anything. Whenever a person makes a value claim, i.e. that something is good or bad, that person is essentially engaging in something akin to religion. I am unaware of any empirical tests for good and bad. Eric Hoffer reminded us that, though ours is a godless world, it is anything but irreligious; everywhere the True Believer is on the march... shaping the world in his own image. I believe your own efforts to shape an ideal society devoid of so-called "religion" are based in value judgments. Tell me, how are you different from those whom you criticize?

An entirely subjective opinion that justifies itself in a gross misrepresentation of the work entailed.

Maybe so. I wonder how the tech landscape would begin to change if people started looking increasingly to small businesses and family trades for their employment. I have a suspicion that the large-scale industry, which is already in the hands of an increasing few, would still survive. I bet the sinecure management positions we invent for ourselves in these wealthy areas could disappear and the industry would end up adapting pretty well.

Surely many people did better than mere subsistence farming before the age of the mass-production economy.

Besides, we've learned some things since then. What are the possibilities? Are there ways to express technical innovation through local economies? How could local economies cooperate? Could independent coterminous spheres of consumption and production integrate to replace a global economy?

Anyway, there might be a mass movement somewhere in all of that, but I suppose it's something people would do because they wanted to try it. Maybe they would get sick of being cogs in a machine or something, and figure that even subsistence farming is less boring than whatever cubicle they presently pass their days in. :)

Let's dump the mature money economy too!

I'm in favor. Local and family businesses sound pretty good to me.

Isn't that what our mass-production consumer society does already? The question is, how much of who we think we are is due to some sort of fabrication?