Of course, if we then claim that this hyper-advanced alien civilization loves us and is opposed to gay marriage then we start to get on shaky ground

I'm counting on God existing and making sure the Bulls beat the Nets by at least 7 points tonight. Because He loves me.

"How, precisely, did we move from inorganic chemistry to thought, again?"

It's hubris to think that because we don't have an answer, one does not exist.

Not knowing, and admitting you don't know, is one of the hardest and best things for a human to do. That way lies wisdom.

Certainty is for pussies.

Did not know that. You can still capture something. An F-117 (not a big aircraft, really) at 10000 feet would (rough calc) cover 15 pixels on my 5mp non-zoom cell phone camera - possibly enough to identify shape.

Give it a try. It's not the size, it's the lack of contrast looking into a daytime sky.

By your logic, all I need to do is add my own invented clause to the phrase "by your logic", and show that any point you're trying to make is also ridiculous!

Well, your argument did amount to, "If those UFO sightings by pilots, police, air traffic controllers, physicians, etc were really real, why don't they have selfies with them? Boom!"

It wasn't my phrase that made the point you were making sound ridiculous. I can't take the credit.

What I find weird is that the kajillion-fold increase in personal video recording devices over the past few decades seems to have scared away all the UFOs.

Have you ever tried to record an aircraft from your cell phone? It really doesn't work.

By your logic, if cell phone recording was the only way to establish something's reality, commercial aircraft don't exist either.

This is such horseshit. Regardless of what you think of UFOs, of the hundreds of thousands of UFO sightings, many reported by military people, law enforcement and people trained to observe aircraft, hardly any of them resembled anything like a U2 spyplane.

Last time I checked, a U2 spyplane was not really capable of hovering motionless and then accelerating to the horizon in a moment. Nor were they gigantic triangular craft.

I don't think for a second that there are aliens from Ork involved with the UFO sightings that have been common for the last five millennia, but I doubt more than a handful were people who were seeing U2 spyplanes. Who knows fuck-all about what those UFOs really were or whether they were inside or outside the observers heads? But at the moment, I'm not prepared to believe a goddamn thing the CIA says about anything. In my opinion, they're a bigger threat to people's safety and sanity than practically any outside threat, including North Korea, Iran, Russia or Israel (who are all plenty bad),

Now, if you want to tell me that the abductions people have been reporting for the past 40 years are the CIA, I may buy that, because they are some sadistic motherfuckers who love putting things up peoples' asses, as we have learned from recent government leaks. Yeah, anal probes, mutilations, etc, that sounds just like the CIA's speed.

And... yeah, read that the way I meant it, and not with the error in the second paragraph that totally reversed my intended meaning. Damnit.

I don't think that's true. It's an incomplete, awful implementation with a community made of a bunch of sometime technically-adept, usually socially-inept, often blinded by greed fanatics.

That doesn't mean the idea of a trustless distributed ledger isn't completely useless, just that none of the current implementations are ever going to be successful in the long term. They've done pretty well at transferring money from 'little people' to Chinese mining operations and scammers around the world, though. They're so good at it, the victims keep cheering the effort on and recruiting new victims.

This is why I just keep all my valuables in my pocket.

OK, that's funny. I'd give you mod points, but I traded them for crack.

I think the point was that Norse Security looked at this as if it was a criminal investigation as opposed to a political finger pointing match.

Except those weren't their fingers they were pointing and waggling at each other.

You don't need the whole safe, just the lock.

Especially considering that the NKVD was disbanded in 1946...

Well, considering that in North Korea it's still 1945, I stand by my original statement.

I believe that Sony is a bigger threat to me and my welfare than North Korea and the NKVD.

Google Contributor (contributor.google.com) strives to come close by letting you pay a small amount for each ad it replaces.

It doesn't stop Google from collecting your information, though. They just don't serve you ads. Instead, they serve you to other corporations.

Google Contributor does absolutely nothing to stop Google from tracking anyone. In fact, it gives them additional personal information.

Maybe you didn't understand what I was saying. I want to be able to use Google services without being tracked in any way shape or form, and I'm willing to pay for the privilege. Same goes for Twitter, etc.

Until I am able to do that, I'm just going to block ads, use Blur, Privacy Badger and any tool that lets me confound Google's ability to monetize me. I am not a consumable.