It's funny that you feel this way about conspiracy theories (I mean US people), because the subject transforms into either not believing *at all* in conspiracies, or believing *all* of them. Don't you think the world is more complicated? Don't you think that with your attitude you'll be missing real complots when they happen? Oddly enough, this attitude is only present in the US, any idea why?

I wouldn't say raising a human up to adulthood is cheap...

never

would you read a speech from a Mullah speaking of internet? no, why? you don't care a shit about that illiterate piece of ...

wow! this is an amazing fact... why should that be? The pope is an idiot, obviously, no one intelligent will ever defend the want of substituting reality with a fairy tale; it is coward and childish, and well studied in psychology. In the future this kind of people will be treated, and of course no one will ever read on their opinions, as if they had something important to say.

Oh my fucking god.... we are so willing that all those fucking believers disappear and lets us build a world without dellusions...

The church is not the exclusive enemy of atheists, it is of everybody civilized. But more than the church, it is the fact that most world population prefer to believe in something than to check it.

are you saying it is dropping in the USA? I thought there they had the record of believers per citizen...

Optimal control theory gives you a function (trajectory over time, or acceleration vector over time) which minimizes a given functional (a function of functions) in this case I imagine that the total amount of fuelt spent (with the constraint that it reaches the lifetime desired). Summary: find the trajectory x(t) such that Fuel(x(t)) is minimized. This algorithm is well developed, you can even use it in quantum mechanics (give the desired hamiltonian(t) such that the evolution of the state is such and such at the end of the evolution, with the minimum of $whatever achieved along time).

I bet that in a thousand years from now we will consider life as anything having a)enough presence of nonequilibrium thermodynamics states, and b)the ability to perform universal computation (either classical or quantum, or maybe another yet undiscovered more general thing). This could include, as foreseen by Asimov, lakes of superconducting metals in remote planets. Will vegetarianism in the future include moral attitudes for superconducting helium inside high field magnets? Will we see an invasion of Earth by superconducting metal intelligent beings on a hunt-those-superconducting-torturers/bastards?

Maybe in Pluto there is a colony of intelligent robots (which communicate through gravity waves, i.e. civilizations withouth a theory of quantum gravity wouldn't detect their communications) and they are waiting for our civilization to build enough autonomous electronic components, so that at a given point they will send a signal/virus, take control of all our electronic infracstructure and take on planet's control. The threats of civilization always come from possibilities that we weren't able to imagine.

Glorious! Where are the +5 funny+5youmadethepointinasentence=+10 ?

The fallacy lies in the fact that results are present at all levels of abstraction. Doing an effort is already a result, at least for sentient beings, who modify their own personality and virtues just by the mere "trying". The result of failure or success is another step in the results chain, which again modifies the personality of the person. This is why someone before said that this method could be dangerous: you have to evaluate the obvious effects but most importantly the effects on the personality after two decades of application of such methodology.

He can only save US against the will of its own people.

arrgggghh! I thought photons didn't have mass and this was the reason why they could travel at light's speed (apart from a small effective mass coming from virtual electron-positron pairs creation along propagation). When I heard the sentence, in the background there was a violin string breaking too.

It's called social rebellion, coming from an anarchist extra lobe in spaniards' hearts. They fuck you, you fuck them. Once equilibrium is restored, we can go back and reopen discussion with media, to plan what the future should be like. At the moment we have to be pirates (soft pirates, we don't go around with a knife in the mouth assaulting SGAE yelling "for Tutatis") in order to compensate for revolutionary tax that they have imposed on CDs and other materials.

By the way, I don't see any real discussion of future plans on how the arts business should be managed in an ideal society. Example: have you ever heard anyone talking about a science-like management of artists? they would receive fellowships/short-term-contracts and fight for resources just like scientists do. Only the good ones survive this sieve, and end up having a merit-based stable job. People now will come with the argument that art cannot be judged on absolute values....bullshit. Talk to real understanders of arts and they will tell that good art can be distinguished from bad art.