Imagine everything you see is projected onto a hemispherical dome

Everything *we* see is put on our retina upside down and with a hole in it, and gets really crappy at the edges. Brainz. No wonder zombies like 'em. :)

...habits have you found effective for system administration?

I like to shut all the ports in the firewall. The sense of calm that descends on the servers is downright pleasant. Of course, then the phone begins to ring...

...is that something with the brain the size of a fruit fly can discriminate between a predator and a non-predator, and react defensively.

We really need to figure out how brains work, lol.

The point is specious. The LHC does not preclude inexpensive work, no matter how you look at it. It's just one tool.

all forms of Unix and Unix-like systems have built-in mechanisms that can be used for secure IPC (where the less-trusted component can be verified securely).

Huh. I was looking for a fast IPC mechanism under linux, also OSX, and all I found was TCP/UDP sockets. Secure IPC not required for my application. What did I miss?

Under AmigaDOS, a program would open a named port and that was the basis for some awesome very high speed IPC magic, typically facilitated by intermediate Rexx scripts. I sure miss that capability. Applescript is a raging horror of limitations.

also, aliens. And the illuminati. cuz, PANIC!

Corporate Oligarchy.

Good news: Just because it is depressingly true that the left side of the gaussian watches reality TV and believes the tripe fox news presents, that is in no way an indicator that scientists do so.

Science doesn't work like economics. More to the point, science actually works, quite unlike economics beyond the utterly simplistic. So as it turns out, past performance is an indicator of future performance in the case of science.

Then Einstein explained the photoelectric effect, and the rest, they say, is history.

Socks were invented in the stone age, and the rest is hosiery.

The mods deem this insightful?

On slashdot, the vast majority of mods are of the form "agree / disagree." "Insightful" usually means "that's exactly what I think, too." There's very little correlation between up moderation and quality, primarily because moderation is unaccountable, but also because the moderators are selected without regard for skill or ability in the area of, you guessed it, moderation.

Nobody quite knows why, though, as the end result is invariably something that's almost, but not quite, like viagra.

FTFY

How many times has this been said before, and proven wrong?

All of them. :)

Strong AI is possible, guaranteed. You're one example of it. The word "artificial" is utterly misleading. All it really says is "we know it exists in animals, and we choose to call any other example artificial, even if we're emulating the biological example."

There's nothing magical about the brain or brainops, superstition notwithstanding. It's just physics like everything else. Technology will get there, it's as inevitable as any other technology already invented, only more so, due to the immense potential for advancement on every front.

Presuming, of course, that we don't destroy ourselves before we get there. Sigh.

The existence of the LHC, as well as the type of discoveries made due to the LHC, in no way preclude discoveries elsewhere.

And as they would be discoveries, there's no saying if some are, or aren't, going to occur.

Inasmuch as cosmological theory is in complete disarray at this time -- "dark this" and "dark that", no certain knowledge of how the universe started -- added to which the fact that we can't yet see other worlds (but the tech to do that is approachable, given the appropriate industrial base), I think it's more than a bit premature to declare things like the LHC the last bastion of physics discoveries.