Not like, just use. I've had this Yahoo e-mail address for about 11-12 years. Kinda hard to let that go away.

Oh FFS. This is the point where I should defend my trade.

Instead I'll ask you a question:

What stops you from working on what you like and spending time with your friends and family?

The answer is absolutely NOTHING.

Start a commune, join the Amish, emigrate in Panama, do whatever leads you to that goal. The problem is that you won't and you'll continue to find scapegoats instead of looking in the mirror.

No it's not a conundrum. If you accept the existence of God you also accept that it's unknowable. Rational knowledge cannot play any role in this acceptance , only the mystical type.

So it's true: you can't prove that God exists, you can't prove that God doesn't exist. The act of believing or not is thus a choice, with no rationality (other than cultural factors) involved.

People keep forgetting that there are two sides to the Turing test: on one you have the AI and on the other the human observer.

The really sad part is that you can pass the test not only through improving the AI, but also through dumbing down the human counterpart. I believe that this is what happened here.

The achievement system is also a great part of it.

... from a very, very long time ago. It deals with the same topic, but it's much better. So good that I chose to take it as a mantra of my own. Definitely worth reading: link

Oh well, this is how I've done it and since it works... I figured I shouldn't skip any steps.

It was an XML glitch, corrupting the config.xml and/or shared.xml files, which are locally stored. They need to be removed manually, since a reinstall won't touch them. Anyway, this led to a surge of traffic to skype.com, the predictable /. effect and a lot of FUD.

Step 1: Uninstall Skype

Step 2: Go to %AppData%\Skype\YourUsername rename config.xml to config.bak

Step 3: Go to %AppData%\Skype rename shared.xml to shared.bak

Step 4: Reinstall Skype

Step 5: Profit!

... on the "known" part. It seems like a fairly intelligent move to me. It is indeed a low probability scenario that someone will actually release smallpox as a biological weapon, but still the consequences of such an outlier would be devastating enough to warrant the adoption of such a policy.