None of this actually matters. It doesn't matter if we "trust" the scientists or not. We know what is going on. We aren't stupid. The oil companies, tire companies, steel companies, etc. are out to maximize profits. They have covered the earth with roads, crushed the "small is beautiful" idea, used advertising to make us demand and buy more... we're heating up the earth by burning fossil fuels, but it makes businessmen money. It makes perfect sense for Conservatives and so-called "Libertarian" capitalist right-wingers to tell us all its a lie and just natural stuff or whatever for as long as possible. The longer they tell us its not really happening, or were not the cause, the longer the money rolls in. It is happening no matter what the scientists do or say, it is happening no matter how you look at the data, trust this or that person, think this or that. It is happening, and the humans who make money off it are acting perfectly "rational" in doing everything they can to deny it as long as possible. It's obvious as the nose on anyone face that this would happen. It doesn't matter what Al Gore or Rush Limbaugh or anyone else says. It's happening, we're causing it with our oil based economy, and all that really, really matters is when the average, ordinary people will say "enough". It looks like they won't, and we will keep going "Drill baby drill", and millions will be displaced, and millions will die. But it doesn't really matter, because life for most of us isn't real. it is just a dream. People in far off undemocratic or dictatorship countries make all our goods now. We don't feel the sting of our economy, of our products we use... we have no real unions to speak of, no real democratic or even libertarian (in the anarchist/socialist sense) power. There is just people playing these games, and us complaining about the weather which gets crazier all the time because of more and more moisture in the atmosphere.

This has nothing to do with Apple specifically, this is what capitalism with its outsourcing & all it's other nasty features does to human beings.

"Reason" magazine is just a crappy neo-objectivist right-wing rag. It's what Andrew Ryan reads while sitting on the potty.

How to Find Current NVIDIA Driver Version (on your computer) in Windows XP: START menu >> Control Panel >> NVIDIA Control Panel >> Help Menu >> System Information

What the slashdot summery didn't mention was that the "individualists" were actually authoritarian capitalist/free market Ayn Rand types, and the "communitarians" were really left libertarian/progressive libertarian/libertarian socialist/Noam Chomsky oriented types. The Rand types embrace authority and the destruction of the earth via pollution and the extinction of humanity via forced-technology driven by profit motive. The Chomsky types prefer grass roots, humanitarian, individualism-for-the-rest-of-us (and not just the elite) solutions. Why does this not surprise anyone?

Well, actually that isn't true. There is overwhelming proof that "all things in moderation" is true and a good rule to follow. You simply graph the use or intake of any prime motivator (sugar, internet/web, sex, humor, games) and you will see an area of the graph that represents enjoyment with low consequences... then you will see an area where it overflows into ruining a persons life because of not paying attention to other obligations, lack of exercise, body cant handle it because it's too much, other people hurt by ones actions and retaliating, missing all appointments, and so on. However, in this case, there's no proof that beating World of Warcraft has negative consequences. All we have to go on is a South Park episode where idiotic characters were depicted as becoming grossly overweight after playing the game (as opposed to, say, watching TV or spending time at work or in Church)

This is fluff of the type I used to see in WIRED, PCWorld, etc years ago. It is corporate back-patting garbage, of little interest to nerds and real programmers and engineers, many of us still unemployed because the Republicans destroyed America's economy. This is made-up tripe... kings and commissars anointing themselves with badges and awards for pretending to care about those of us below them. The emperor has no clothes. The idea of real and tangible freedom still shines brighter and truer than these corporate priests.

Why don't the people from the future who keep screwing with the present at least leave behind some helpful graffiti? Why did Higgs have to nickname it "The God Particle"? Didn't he have any idea of how silly that was? He could have figured out it was a bad idea because someone wrote a whole mystical book ("The Tao of Physics") just because someone named something in particle physics "The Eightfold Way" - it had nothing to do with mysticism, it was just a way of putting particles into patterns that insinuated some deeper structural possibilities. (like, say, being made of quarks, or having consistent characteristics like spin, charge, etc) Besides, every time we finally see proof of some hypothetical "god particle", a new hypothetical one comes along. You can't name scientific stuff after mystical or religious things without expecting people to behave kind of goofy.

Giving us what we want..what they were intended to do, in a short and simple way? Come on. Why should Symantec be any different from MTV? They will give us what we don't want while riding on their past claim to fame.

What about Max T. O'Connor AKA "Max More"? I thought he was the one responsible for the futurist/transhumanist/singulatiry religion/wishful thinking, not to mention magazines like MONDO 2000, WIRED, and now H+. I never heard of Ray Kurzweil before, but I guess it's mostly because I prefer to read about actual science and not evangelism. My experience with actual virtual reality and other technologies has led me to be somewhat less than hopefull about technologies based on corporate activity. There is an inherent corporate profit-motive that holds back and retards technological progress and affordability at a basic level. Most "extropians", "transhumanists", and such seem to also believe the whole religion is a vindication fro capitalism, which, if we just sit back and dont complain as our bosses order us around, will someday deliver the priomised land.

My friend in the army (stationed in Iraq) told me a couple months ago the way the insurgents were assassinating some soldiers was by using information from sites like myspace and facebook. I'm not surprised at all that this rule has been adopted.

The problem with stuff like this is it's intended to crush dissent against institutions like big business and governmental power, things which democracy and liberty in stuff like the Constitution of the United States were meant to keep the government stable and the people happy, because they would adjust their lives to the reality of their social and physical environment. If Americans all know they are being watched all the time and more and more "odd" behavior (not simply disliking your boss) they will appear "normal" on the outside yet will be increasingly psychologically screwed up on the inside. Didn't the 50's tell us anything? Human history has been a sort of narrative of the struggle between the people at large against the desire for small groups to amass control over their lives in order to extract wealth, etc. If Americans are monitored and watched all the time, how will the USA be fundamentally different from Maoist China? It's obvious this sort of technology would be used by the ruling powers... business, religion, the military, the police... to ultimately control human beings even when the reason human beings are disobeying the authorities is because something is fundamentally wrong with the authorities way of thinking. If you destroy the social contract (the unwritten rule that the ruling powers will only be allowed to rule so long as they actually serve the interests of the people who created the power in the first place as a means of managing more complicated things) you pave the way for a culture that produces nothing new, and gives birth to uninspired youth, and has no inoculation against forces that will eventually destroy that society because it isn't flexible in the face of chaotic nature at all.

Well, technically the star is already gone, if that's going to be visible any time soon. Though interestingly if we could reach it within our lifetimes we'd have to go back in time to do so and so it would still be there, pulsating like some giant infected slug, lol.

Yeah, when I went to a remote wooded area of central Maine with my family as a teen and a kid I was absolutely ASTOUNDED by how the night sky looked, and the ability to see the Milky Way, it is absolutely mind-blowing and wondrous.