I think that what the cop in your video did is just great - it didn't cost anything but reminded a couple of people on the scene (and 600k more on Youtube) that gods are just people like us and lowered the threshold to be in contact with them. However, if I were a cop, I wouldn't want to do that in front of a camera: I'd be scared shitless that it might cause a storm of "What?! A cop playing around? While in duty? On taxpayer money?!"

Three things are pretty well established (among both psychologists and economists):
a) Perceived happiness equals actual happiness (If we look at the brain activity near pleasure centers, we notice that how happy people say they are has very strong correlation with active those areas are. So if Antti from Finland rates his happiness at 60 and Ted from USA rates his happiness at 70, it's likely that Ted is actually happier and it's not just that they would have different scale due to culture, language, social class, etc...)
b) Absolute wealth increases perceived happiness only up to about 2000 dollars a month (If we look at countries below that threshold, average income correlates strongly with perceived happiness. Above that limit, very little)
c) Relative wealth to your peers increases happiness constantly (Look at essentially any country and you can bet that the wealthiest quarter is happier that the poorest quarter, even if the poorest quarter about reaches the threshold mentioned in b)
I don't have the time to write all evidence/arguments behind the above claims but if you're interested, I do recommend either the British economist Richard Layard's book Happiness: Lessons from a New Science (note: despite the name, it isn't any new age / self-help book) or getting up to date on the basics of modern psychology.

That being the case, it's a bit silly to make comparisons to medieval times and look at absolute wealth. Sure, we can say "Most of the poor no longer need to worry about starving to death in western countries" and that is a huge, happiness-increasing thing over the middle ages. But comparing their absolute wealth to aristocrats is more or less useless, because they are likely to be a lot less happy than the aristocrats (due to having low wealth and status relative to others instead of being considered the privileged elite of the society).

Also, you're pretty comfortably middle class so when people talk about the poor, they don't talk about people like you... but that's getting a bit offtopic.

Nokia is the name of the city where the company was incorporated in 1871.

As for the story... I've been waiting for this to happen. I'd love to see them succeed but I have very hard time imagining that it'll actually happen. I guess their best bet is staying afloat a while and hoping that Nokia decides to buy them back.

It's true that you need to download and install them yourself... But they are offered by Microsoft for free in their poweruser tools, are very lightweight and work well. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb545027

A couple of years ago I was quick to promote Linux over Windows due to higher reliability. Now I don't remember when was the last time that my Windows crashed but I've had numerous problems with Linux (On Ubuntu, last two times I allowed the package manager to make a major version update have broken the whole system. I then tried to install Mint, it crashed half a dozen times before I was finally able to get the whole installation through and then enabling two monitors broke X. I've had little interest to go back and find out what's the problem). I used to run Linux and just use Wine and VM when I had to use some windows app, now I run Linux inside a VM on Windows when I need to do programming.

Meanwhile, ever since Windows 7 came out, I've felt that Windows has better usability than the Linux desktops I've tried and massively better usability than the Mac I have to use at work.

I know that I've only given some anecdotes and opinions but while I understand that they aren't statistically significant, I use Linux, Mac and Windows nearly daily (iOS development, web-development and entertainment use) and I'm pretty sure that my recent lack-of-hate towards Windows is indicating that something has changed for the better.

Meanwhile MS is still in charge of the second most popular game console (Wii is the most popular but for somewhat different target audience), have gained some increase in market share on smartphones, are launching tablets and I don't think that the current year of Linux on Desktop is going to threaten MS any more than the previous ones.

So.. yeah. I'm not usually this "pro-MS", I hate Metro as much as the next geek, I have had to develop for WP7 and don't have much nice things to say about it, don't remember when was the last time I had any interest to try out Internet explorer and so on... but I still think that everything after the flop that was Vista, MS has been improving its act.

They might be sending message to the wider public: "Oh, you saw documents that state we are up to something really evil? Well... you can't know whether they're accurate or planted by us. If you were certain they were accurate, you might be willing to risk it all to do the right thing but now that you aren't certain... Do you feel lucky?"

The point of censorship is never to prevent access to information by a few dedicated people. It is to allow the masses - who want to feel like good people - a way to shield themselves from everything evil the government does so they have a way to rationalize to themselves why they don't do what they know to be the right thing. This is exactly that.

The discussion was about whether other nations have the right to criticize USA for not pulling its weight when it comes to development aid. I noted that the nations that criticize USA for it give out more both relative to their population and relative to the size of their economy so they do have the right to criticize.

Finland has 1/60th of the population and 1/46th of the yearly budget of USA but by your logic these shouldn't be taken into account when comparing the two? The amount of responsibility that a nation should bear has nothing to do with the size of that nation? We should only say "Okay, USA give more to charity than Finland, so Finland has no right to criticize"?

If you answered "yes" to all of the above, are you willing to extend that logic to pollution. Look, USA pollutes the world MASSIVELY more than Finland (and remember, the higher population doesn't matter). How evil is that?!

I can understand why people dislike misleading marketing but why is it a positive thing if something is made in the USA? Humans are humans everywhere and companies are not more evil if they employ 100 people in Korea than if they employ 100 people in the USA (especially when they can probably employ 200 people in Korea instead of 100 people in the USA) I guess you could make a point about it being wrong because of the financial support (tax credits, etc.) that companies receive for staying in the states but most of the time the bureaucrats/politicians who award them do know how many people the companies employ so I doubt there is that much cheating going on...

If companies dodge tax (make their profit in one country, taking advantage of all the infrastructure, etc. provided by that country but then pay 0% taxes to some remote island), that's unethical and obviously just gaming the system. But if companies just employ people who don't ask so high material rewards that the planet can't support it in the long term, I have hard time seeing what's wrong.

Sure, most of the documents weren't important and some that were should probably have stayed secret... but that means they would've had to cherry pick which documents to publish. If they'd have cherry picked, people would have said "You obviously have some agenda, as you cherry pick documents that present [entity we like] in a bad light".

Also, by publishing everything they allow people to analyze not only what there was but also what wasn't there.

Also, there is no way that they would've been able to know what documents were important and what not. In some countries the press cross-checked the leaked stuff with their politicians' negotiations and foreign trips, saw if their politicians' public statements matched the data found in documents, etc... but there is no way that Assange or even some major newspaper would've been able to do that all alone.

So... yeah. I am not in the "everything government/officials do should be public" camp as I think officials should be able to do their work and have honest exchanges between each other without the press being able to take quotes out of context to produce artificial scandals... but I don't think that saying "Only x% of the published documents were important" is that good argument.

Citation needed.

I find what you say funny because USA already gives about half the aid compared to other heavily industrialized nations.

You are aware that USA development aid is 0.21% of GNI, right? Sweden, Norway and Luxembourg top 1.00%, Denmark and the Netherlands top 0.80%, Belgium, Finland, France, Ireland and UK top 0.50%, Switzerland 0.40%, Germany 0.39%, Canada 0.34%, Australia and Austria both at 0.32%... If you'd prefer to compare donations per capita, you'd not fare any better (Germany+UK+France exceed USA development aid by themselves though the population is a lot lower).

So, you think it should be cut to one fourth, then?

It's rare to see the EU parliament - composing of over half a dozen groups, each of which is umbrella organization for dozens of parties from many countries - to be as united as they were now. They voted not only against the internet restricting laws but also against the kind of shady activity that occurred during ACTA preparations. Whatever the commission says now, I doubt they've got the balls to bring ACTA - or nearly identical equivalents with different name - back anytime soon... it would be such an act of disrespect towards the parliament that things could escalate far more than anyone is willing to risk "just for copyright".

I think we're safe at least until June of 2014 (next parliamentary elections in EU)... that is, of course, unless same provisions are brought back in a bill that also mention child pornography. EU legislators are pretty weak against the "think of the children" argument.

The carbon credits you refer to, otherwise known as cap-and-trade, is pretty simple and great system that combines the best of free markets and government regulation. There is a consensus that we need to lower emissions and most people agree that some form of regulation from the government is needed. The problem is that it's very difficult to create a set of rules that work as intended.

For example UK recently built a massive power plant that runs on biofuel and what actually happens is that they transport the fuel all the way from Canada to be burned in UK. Why? Environmentally it would be better to burn it in Canada but UK provides greater incentives for such power plants. We could try to fix every small issue like that - both internationally and inside countries - but we'll always be left with incomplete (and increasingly complex) set of regulations that encourage to do stupid things. We need a free markets based solution that discourages polluting, not regulations that encourage finding workarounds.

Cap-and-trade is exactly that system. Rights to pollute are auctioned and the acceptable amount of pollution is slowly reduced over time, which encourages solutions that efficiently reduce pollution but discourages expensive solutions that provide relatively little benefits. The economic incentive for any environmental decision is directly relative to how much it actually helps the environment.

Now... that all said, there are some flaws. First of all, for the system to work perfectly, (nearly) all countries should participate and all pollution (be it traffic, energy, industrial...) should be distributed like that. Certain aspects need tweaking (For example, a ton of greenhouse gases released to the upper atmosphere by airplanes are about as harmful as two tons of such gases released at ground level...) and others are difficult to handle just through cap-and-trade (relatively small amount of pollution to a very important wildlife sanctuary, for example) and one can argue that the way that the pollution rights are currently distributed is unfair towards developing countries... even so, the concept is great and with a little more effort put into cap-and-trade, it could allow us to abolish huge amounts of inefficient regulation and incentivize us to reduce pollution as efficiently as possible.

A single use of pot every now and then might is not that harmful, but active/heavy use does cause you to become more passive, self-centered and other psychological issues (I'm pretty sure I've seen studies about both but I would be perfectly fine making that claim just based on the anecdotal evidence). Now, you may say "Sure, but active/heavy use of alcohol... or indeed, any brain chemistry altering substance... causes just as bad issues!" and I'm not going to deny that. The big difference however is that with alcohol there is inbuilt protection mechanism.

If you are already somewhat productive member of a society (student, at least part-time work, whatever) it's a lot harder to get into the habit of drinking heavily several nights a week than it is into smoking pot several times a week. There is a significant amount of people affected by alcoholism so I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, I'm saying that if there wasn't hangover, the amount would be a lot larger.

This is actually not intended as arguing against the legalization. I do see potential for reducing organized crime (where I live, soft drugs are a major source of income for groups with far more nefarious activity), gaining some tax dollars/euros and the more philosophical aspect of not denying people the right to choose to do something that's harmful to them. (Though, I live in a nation with good public health care, social security, etc. and in a society like this, a point can be made that people have a duty towards society to not do stupid shit to themselves, from eating too much fastfood to using drugs) I'm just not confident that "The only real problem comes from intoxicated drivers" holds true or that pot is less dangerous than cigarettes/alcohol just because the risk of lung cancer is smaller.

I know that you had tongue in the cheek as you wrote that post but I believe that both you and other might still think that augmented reality games and imagination are somehow comparable... which they really aren't.

Think of reading a good book. You're enjoying a form of art where one talented individual (or group of such) carefully crafted something. Everyone gets the experience just as intended by the artist, but then each individual's personal views, life experience, etc. is combined with the artwork and everyone gets unique experience. The beauty of any artwork is exactly in the combination of being able to examine something just as it was designed and interpreting that based on your own personality.

Now, consider just coming up with a cool story inside your head. I'm not saying that's worse than reading a book, but it's entirely different thing, because you're no longer experiencing something as it was designed by the artist.

Steven Pinker on the Myth of Violence

No two (relatively) liberal democracies have ever waged a war against each other.