The opposite of "knowing" is not "not knowing". That can easily be remedied. If you do not know, you ask someone who does know, and then you know too.

Well, no. How do you know if the guy you asked actually knows anything about the matter but is simply making shit up as he goes or reciting some half-remembered factoid he heard from an unknown source? You can't. You can double-check, and quadruple-check, and so on, but ultimately every model of the world rests on unproven assumptions. After all, they're subject to the incompleteness theorems and as such can't be self-contained.

But then again none of this matters, since science vs. religion was never about knowledge but simply a case of two memetic complexes - or, if you prefer, "gods" - fighting for territory in the noosphere. Humans merely get sucked into the fight due to being the physical platform on which the noosphere rests.

The fact is that, as always, those who found it are basically screaming "sensational discovery, mystery XYZ is finally solved", while other scientist are more cautious. It's the old theme of "sensationalism versus business as usual", dangerously close to the stance of attention whores.

"Business as usual" is competition over limited funding, and that means marketing your accomplishments to show you can deliver results. Let's not look down on attention whores when We The People are the johns.

The force between free quarks increases with distance to about 10,000N, then remains constant (no, I have no idea how this makes any sense, but it's what I read).

According to Wikipedia it's because gluons, which mediate the Strong Force interaction between quarks, also feel said force themselves (that is, they carry color charge(. So rather than disperse with distance like, say, photons do, they tend to stick together and form "ropes".

So it's analogous to how a flashlight loses power faster than a laser.

The Hacking Team is just business, and a business is amoral.

The Hacking Team consists of humans, and as such is incapable of being amoral. They're simply evil.

A business exists to maximise its own profit as it sees fit, and it should be free to engage in whatever behaviour that is in the interest of its owners.

"Should" why? No one has any kind of obligation to help maximize your profits.

If it succeeds by performing questionable acts, it is the fault of us, the society, which enable it to proceed that way.

The society is responsible for the loophole existing in the first place, and the company is responsible for exploiting it. Blame is not an either-or game.

Especially, it is the liability of the governments that hired THT in the first place.

What if those governments rebranded themselves as "corporate states"? Then they could claim they were simply companies maximizing their profits, which would make them blameless, according to you.

I find your comment offensive and a micro-agression against me and my kind. This is hate speech.

No, it's not. Whether you are offended or not is irrelevant. What makes something hate speech is that it attacks a group, making them more of an acceptable target for future attacks. Hate speech is, in other words, the propaganda campaign that precedes every war and atrocity in human history. That makes hate speech not just speech but also an action, the first blow that starts chipping off the preceived humanity of the target that protects them from violence.

Is someone simply being a jerk? Then it's just speech, offensive or not. Is someone working themselves up into a rage in preparation for an attack? Then it's hate speech.

Probably, but by that time, you'll have to give control of your implants to your employer, and they will turn them on and off at will.

Which seems unlikely, since implants are a part of you, and the candidates for positions requiring high security tend to have other options. It's the McDonald's staff that needs to worry about such requirements.

The cars are not designed to stop criminal actions.

Mine has locks.

IMO that is the reason why advertising is morally reprehensible. It's manipulative mass mind control.

Of course it is. And as people get more used to it and filter it out, it becomes harder to manipulate them in general - even by the politicians and special interest groups. So I guess it's a case of the Invisible Hand accidentally smacking the 1% on the face.

My first thought was that the entire point of the site was to BE a blackmail scheme.

Correct. From the article: "In a long manifesto posted alongside the stolen ALM data, The Impact Team said it decided to publish the information in response to alleged lies ALM told its customers about a service that allows members to completely erase their profile information for a $19 fee."

Now if you just add that the smart people end up hiring the stupid people to be armed and around them to protect them while decrying the evils of guns, you might have a solid theory on your hands.

Nope. People who believe violence will keep them safe will arm themselves, directly or indirectly. Intelligence doesn't enter into it, one way or another, any more than it does with any other basic instinct.

It seems like all the largest mouth pieces against guns sure have a lot of them around in the hands of hired help to protect them.

There's a running joke that the most vocal gay bashers are closet gays themselves. It's the same principle at work here. Internal contradictions tend to make people search for scapegoats.

Google is as good as a centralized search engine is likely to get. But any centralized entity has an inherent evolutionary disadvantage in the Age of Information: it can be censored.

In fact, a CS degree is not proof that you can code, it is proof that you understand the theory of Computer Science.

More to the point, it's proof that you have massive student debts so you're likely to put up with abuse to keep repaying them.

The problem is that most of the time, voters are two dumb to actually understand the issues at stake or the consequences of their actions. Fix the dumbness, and you fix all sorts of other cultural mal-consequences (not just clumsy politics and gimme-dat laws).

Make people smarter and the issues and consequences will simply become more complex. They're not some external invariance, after all, but a function of those very same people's behaviour and mental make-up. So every organization must deal with the fact that its decision makers are going to be too dumb for the job. That's not something that can be avoided, and consequencetly the success or failure of the system can't be blamed on the intelligence of the participants. It is, instead, a function of the system itself.

For all their faults, democracies tend to be more effective than autocracies precisely because they make it easier for members to participate, which leads to greater collective intelligence: a greater pool of ideas and more chances to call out really dumb ones. If we need smarter societies still, we need to continue developing them further, not wish for some general population intelligence boost that wouldn't solve the issue even if it happened.

Sadly, a lot of societies seem to be going backwards towards the less efficient autocratic model right now. Natural selection will take care of that in due time, but combined with all the challences our species is currently facing, the process can get pretty unpleasant.