Great. The last thing I want is for the NSA to be spying on my virtual avatar self. He's probably out there in WoW planning some terrorist act.

That makes it more valuable, but I'm not sure that makes it more useful. The purpose of money should be to encourage the exchange of labor, or at least the abstract representation if it. This increases the incentive to hoard the currency, which in turn would minimize not maximize productivity.

I wonder if the sensors themselves interfere with the bees.

I think the scenarios handle the worth of the individual being sacrificed differently. In the clinical case, the individual is not just being killed, but they are objectified as a set of resources that can be exploited. In the train case, the individual is killed due to being in the wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time. I think most people would make this distinction out of empathy. That is, they may be more ok with dying due to an unfortunate set of circumstances, and they may not be ok with dying to suit other peoples' functional needs.

The problem isn't that you need to dumb it down. It's that, as the op says, you need to memorize a fuckload of chemicals, equations, and the particular circumstances under which they occur. The memorization task is made particularly difficult when you're dealing with concepts that you don't consciously interact with on a day to day basis. I think the process of teaching ochem could be improved if we take into account the limitations of the human brain. The brain tends to have a capacity of remembering 2-5 things, but that capacity is significantly increased when we start chunking and creating meaningful links between those concepts. It might then be easier to group the ~50 items-to-be-memorized into smaller groups, to facilitate memorization. Or deal with fewer chemicals in greater depth. It might also be useful to stress skills in navigating the text rather than outright memorizing it. Eventually, a body of knowledge gets so big, that it requires a longer time to learn.

It's opt in and facebook doesn't have the authority to send a swat team to my door? Sure the government can read facebook posts and then send the swat team, but in that case, I'm explicitly putting information out in the open. With a telephone call or email, I have an implicit assumption (a big one nowadays), of privacy.

Actually, there is some evidence that your personality is shaped by your interaction to external stimuli. Cognitive psychologists have found evidence to suggest that we experience the world in an embodied fashion. That is, when we think about cool ice tea, we simulate the concept by activating neurons that would be responsible for interacting with the object: site, touch, taste, etc. The same could be said for mood, as we use metaphors such as warm or cold to describe our temperament or our perceived temperament of others. When it comes down to making precise definitions such as mood and personality, the brain can present some rather fuzzy grey areas. That is, there is still a lot we do not know about it and it's hard to know precisely what impact our bodies have on its development.

Ben Bergen provides a nice review of lit in his book: Louder Than Words.

To add to your statement, TFA indicates that results specifically from prisoner's dilemma are only valid for Western cultures, or rather that they haven't been thoroughly investigated in other groups. I imagine this is true for a large number of studies that perform culturally sensitive experiments such as word association, reports on participant's perceptions, etc. This is pretty much basic science, where your experimental results are true for the randomized group your sampling from but cannot be generalized to other groups without verification. This does not necessarily invalidate other types of experiments or the field as a whole. Rather it presents new evidence, which can be used to refine our theories.

Drew Curtis had some interesting ideas on fighting patent trolls. In cases, like this, you ask the patent trolls for explicit evidence of infringement, in which case, this puts the burden of proof on them. This isn't legal advice, but could provide some direction as to fighting back. Drew Curtis How I beat a patent troll

if we are legally prohibited from unlocking our phones to make any modifications to the software or firmware?

I said this half-jokingly as many of these disruptive changes have been made in response to Apple's popularity and explosion in the tablet/phone market.

I see these OSs merging in terms of how they perceive user tasks. The old Unix/Windows model was that you had a bunch of applications running simultaneously, which the user had to manage themselves. In Mac, it feels like the emphasis is on working with one application at a time. This can be seen when the (File, Edit, View, etc) menus change context with respect to the selected application. Unity, and it looks like Gnome 3, are moving in this direction.

For users who are used to one style, completely revamping the UI also means revamping and disrupting everyone's personal workflow. What if I want to browse and code simultaneously? If the UI prohibits such behavior, than I'll have a hard time getting work done.

I don't have a problem with the changes, but I do have a problem with these changes getting shoved down everyone's throat without proper support to revert to a classic look. A lot of the 'core' features that are being added, could simply be mods on top of the existing desktop instead of the buggy restructuring that's currently going on.

After a few more iterations, it'll look just like OS X.
:P

Just a minor correction, but Amazon is slightly better in that you can buy a non-DRM mp3 and back it up to your hearts delight (provided you register a computer to download from them). But otherwise, your point does stand that physical media has intrinsic value due to owning it. I dread the day when we go pure digital and lose fundamental rights not just to music/movies but books (i.e. knowledge) as well.

Yes, but why do women have to be the ones to stay home? Aside from the first 6 months or so of nurturing, any household task that can be handled by a woman could be handled by a man. Having some kind of work/life balance is good. Dumping all those responsibilities on an individual just because of their gender or some historical notion of roles is unjust.

On that note, his sample size seems a bit small...