I think it's useful to first pin down God solely by the properties required to make a first cause. That established can help those who wish to pin It down further through reference to media and personal experience.

There was once no time in our universe. Or if you're talking about any universe, you need something "out of time".

Isn't this spooky action at a distance a violation of General Relativity rather than causality?

As physics currently stands, that's right, the problem is under-constrained. So it can help to consider Occam's razor and religious literature that claims access to the supernatural.

Well unless physics comes up with something better, the first cause has to be eternal and powerfully instrumental. So God isn't B.O., but certainly an entity made of food could qualify.

The simulation argument is interesting, but what created the outermost level? I've tried, but I can't conceive of a pair of computational systems that can simulate each other.

Any hints to the nature of a non-causal existence?

The most comprehensible way for something be exempt from causality is for it to be eternal and supernatural. Add sentient and you've arrived at Deism. That is, if you need a first cause, something like a god is a parsimonious explanation.

Supernatural = anything goes. That is, God needs to be something that doesn't need or have an explanation.

Does anyone have a good response to the first-cause argument for the existence of God(s)? That is, is the creation of the ultimate progenitor of our universe from no-thing/no-laws best explained as being the act of an eternal and powerful supernatural entity, outside causality, that can be defined as "God"? Or is it easier to accept that something has always existed, perhaps allowing the definition of "always" to go beyond our time arrow?

Web-apps are hosted on a competitive platform with open standards called a browser, which allows applications to be modified to the user's advantage by extensions and user-scripts. Native apps are locked down.

From the user's perspective, advantage Web. From the developer's perspective, advantage native.

Will customization be stopped by adding DRM to HTTP, forcing use of blessed browsers?

A 10nm feature size is 1000 times smaller than the first 10um processes of the early 1970s. That is, one million transistors will soon fit into the space that one used to.

Unique content can be so much more than such stories behind the stories. Take the New York Times. The stories I read there aren't usually reporting, analyzing, or offering an opinion about current events that everyone else is covering. Instead they're descriptions of social or economic trends, or about new and interesting but little-known things in the sciences, arts, or business.

A lot of people don't do this.

Minivan taxis? More cars that sedans can't see past. Expect more rear-enders.

Because there's less competition, there's plenty of money to be made in jobs that are dirty, boring, or low in social prestige. The money can buy you an interesting life outside work, plus, like the welding guy, you can make your job more interesting by continually trying to improve, or by building a business around it.

Others will make the different choice of fulfillment at work in exchange for low pay. The jackpot is a fulfilling well-paid job, while the reverse is still the most common situation (which as long as the unemployment problem is properly dealt with, is being improved by automation technologies).

The article is talking about how it's now harder to follow the discussion around a Facebook post because Facebook is re-ordering the replies based on their assessment of their quality. This could be easily remedied by adding sort-by-time and sort-by-quality buttons.

There's another more fundamental problem with Facebook as a venue for non-trivial discussion:

Many sites are shutting down their forums and moving comments to their Facebook pages. I suppose their thinking is that the (mostly) real names cut down the work needed for spam and troll moderation, and there's built in mechanisms to push-propagate and virally spread their content. But Facebook's approach that places posts by both page owners and page users on timelines removes the ability of topics to bump, meaning that conversations around still-interesting posts unnaturally trail away.

Slashdot is similar — discussion is always moving on, there isn't the structure nor the features that would allow extended discussion on a story. Story comments are even locked after a few weeks, probably as an anti-spam device, but this could be remedied with pre-moderation of posts by low-karma posters by either discussion participants or the whole Slashdot community.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UjcqCx1Bvg&t=38s

I hope the old characters are integral to the plot and don't just appear in a token torch-passing at the start. I'm hoping more like Obi-Wan in the original movie.