Social interest isn't a result of religion, it's a sentient response to family group and/or swarm behavior. While we have no way of proving motive in animals, other species exhibit self-sacrificing and/or self-risking behavior.

Many breeds of dogs will defend another from threat, even animals not of their own species, though such episodes are usually the result of (social) bonding. Bees have continued to survive by many individuals sacrificing themselves for the good of the queen. Dolphins engage in swarm fighting against foes that would overpower any given one.

While self-interest is a large factor in surviving, the ability to recognize another, that other's interests, and act in those interests instead of ones' own is the hallmark of any species that could be considered social.

I'm not a religious scholar, but it seems that it was a convenient way to align populaces for peace, war, or nearly anything in between. Look at the might of Sharia law in Islam as an example. Handed down by men - yes, religious experts, but still men - on situations not directly covered by existing religous text. Can you argue this concept hasn't been used for conflicting purposes across the geoscape? Indicating what? Decentralized alignment.

As such, I don't belive religion to be a direct evolutionary trait, but rather an exploitation of an evolutionary trait - our social and cognitive abilities.

Ok, let's put this in context, I've seen car registrations pointed to here, so I'll start there.

An automated radar gun catches your car speeding at 70 mph in a 45 zone, and the camera only gets the license plate for whatever reason - does that give the state the right to issue a warrant in a similarly automated manner for the owner's arrest? No. Because the car, the license plate, and the VIN might be registered to one person, but the infraction may have been executed by a car theif, a run-away teen, or a spiteful soon-to-be-ex-spouse. This is why a pair of cameras are part of speed cameras, because a face is personally identifiable (putting the questions about adopted procedures aside).

The same thing could be applied to IPs or hell even if each machine had its own ID, only on a larger scale. The time to download some movie is not insignificant, but could be hidden out of sight of roomates, siblings, what have you if need be. Shared machines using the same IP might have seperate logon info to subpeona, but what if the final steps of a damaging hack job were executed from a library public machine? It becomes more complex than the IP alone, and the same mentality should be the default approach when dealing with private IPs. IPs are not personally identifiable, because no one beside those physically present can identify who was operating the device at the time. Even logon information may have been compromised (surely /.'ers know many people who don't use secure passwords at home), leading to a potentially stream of framing/fraud crimes when the system is exploited for its naïve scope.

In short, the operator is at fault, not the machine being commanded. If we want to move to biometric logons as the norm, that will be quite expensive for such a small issue.

Scientology anyone?

Your face structure doesn't have to reflect conviction and confidence in your skills, the rest of your presentation does. Take some of your spare time and take an interest in fashion if you're that worried about it - There are ways to make any body type stand out in a good way with the clothes you wear and HOW you wear them.

As to your 99% certainty, let's not discount the interviewer's ability to conceal intentions. You maybe have won your way to the finals, but in the end a better personality 'fit' was chosen.

This market is definitely discouraging, but don't let it drive you out the running. Follow up with the interviewers and ask for feedback. You may not get critical feedback, but you may get something useful.

Most eloquently put. I second this statement.

You are right about the use adding value. It occurs to me that licensing to internet radio stations is an alternative for RIAA execs, but in reality something like that isn't nearly as complicated as what goes into fine-tuning a final recording these days, and could be handled by indie music makers with some minor counsel. Let's not get into the pay-per-use argument for media though, if the public let that model succeed, we'd all be daily criminals. No, the way forward is for the market to adjust to the conditions it now faces, but I'll not be redundant about digital media from above.

As to Shakespeares' value, you're right about the works inspired by him, and you are right about the current scene being poorer if his material was managed with modern mindsets about media, but no matter how much the media companies would love to push it, having multi-century monopolies on anything not only cripples innovation, such as adaptions of Shakespeares' work, but would also create a slow pressure of discontent from customers and artists alike, much like the public backlash to DRM or tongue-in-cheek slang like the Copyright Term Extension Act being synonymous to "The Mickey Mouse Protection Act", only worse.

I agree. Put up a reasonable sized-monument for the sentimental types and call it good. If we start worrying about a historical landmark that's literally made of silicon dust, where does it stop? development regulations that limit seismic activity through machine use for fear of 'shaking' the footprint out of existence over the course of 500 years? What about a random meteor hit just the right spot? Oops, there goes the history argument. Seriously, geo-map the moon like we did Earth and our GPS system, plot the points of landing and point to that record as the history of the moon.

It's made of dust, people!

The LHC is just the start. When we have more tools at our disposal, being able to hack the atom, even if we can only do so to one subatomic partile beyond electrons, will likely provide radical new answers to great problems, and make new things possible. Imagine what you could do if we found a reliable way to increase or decrease molecular mass? Granted, there are likely alternate consequences to something like that, like the new atom not being able to hold any chemical bonds, but only the future will tell.

That's the pie-in-the-sky version of corporations. The way you've described communism is exactly the way corpoartism works - which is to say neither of them is consensus-based. Who decides what gets said? Management and the PR team. Who decides what gets made? Management and marketability teams. Who decides what processes to use to achieve goals? Management, safety, and financial controllers. Who decides customer protcol, dress code, internal procedures? Management. The workers are your citizens, the deciders are your government.

Almost all social organizations, no matter which side of the fence you are on, will trend toward this pyramidic form of power structure. Yeah, there's exceptions, but to date, they remain just that, exceptions.

To believe that a corporation is somehow the sum of wills of its employees is naïve, realizing that individual skills come together to benefit the pyramid structure is closer to the truth, but realizing that making decisions that influence the lives of many 'under' someone describes both communism and corporations is even closer. Yes, there are vast other differences, they simply don't include the set you attempted to put forth.

Very true. We had a hard enough time with rights for a people of color, and then women after that, neither gap has really gone away even today. Can you imagine the problems with a created sentience and many who would cry rights of ownership over sentience?