The TV is a notoriously poor venue to get information from.

If you think most philosophers will say that all the puzzles are solved, you haven't met many philosophers. Even the most fervent philosophy professors I've met would stop short of saying that their views are bulletproof. By it's nature, philosophy it a field without a whole lot of hard evidence. If there were a rigorous way to gather concrete evidence and draw falsifiable conclusions for some question X, we'd stop saying question X was a philosophical question and instead say it's a scientific one.

I don't know for certain that there is or isn't any gods. I'm not even sure that they're a coherent enough concept to say for sure whether they exist or not. If a tribe in the south pacific points to a wood totem and calls it their god, then sure, it exists, but it has no relevance to most people's notion of a god. A child's notion of a god as a sky wizard is very different from a theologians idea of a omnimax deity, which is just as different as a philosophers notion of a divine watchmaker, which is just as different as someone else's notion of a pantheistic one-with-everything entity . Some views are clearly wrong. Some views can be rationally discussed and debated. Some views are self-contradictory to the point where you can't reasonably ask the question.

[Citation needed]
Also, even if true, argument from authority. On top of that, without a consensus on the properties of such a being you haven't really gotten anywhere.

Science requires a falsifiable claim and sufficient evidence gathered to show that the claim holds up under scrutiny. Exactly how would I go about falsifying your claim to a creator? What evidence could I give you that would make you say you were wrong? What evidence have you gathered so far that might support your claim? What if I claimed there were a committee of creators instead of just one, how would you determine which of us is right?

There is insufficient data to make any claims at all regarding such a probability. State your evidence. Here's a hint: "Well, it's just too perfect" isn't evidence.

Why? Even if I spotted you the existence of a creator, there would still be nothing you could say about that creator. Look at it this way: I'm sitting on a chair. What can you tell me about the chair I'm sitting in? How many legs does it have? Does it have arm rests? What's it made of? Does it swivel? Is it comfortable? How could you even answer the questions without being able to touch or see or use any method to measure the chair?

Such as?

What if there were a malevolent creator that gained power by belief? In such a case it could be considered evil to convince people to believe. The problem is, there's no basis for such a claim either way.

Do you ever challenge your beliefs about the existence of unicorns? Or fairies? Or alien abductions? Or whether we're all controlled by Reptilians? If you're a rational human being, you probably don't give much thought to any of these because you don't have any convincing evidence that any of these are true or are even likely to be true.

Now imagine that there were a few billion people who kinds sorta believed that the Reptilians existed, but couldn't actually agree with each other about their characteristics, history, or motivations and thought that all the other groups of Reptilian believers were being mislead by false Reptilian prophets. Now, you've grown up in a household believing in a specific view of Reptilians, but then you meet others who believe different things, and then you ask yourself if you actually have any reason to believe that Queen Elizabeth II is actually a 12 foot tall space lizard from another dimension. You realize that you don't have any evidence for this, so you say "she's probably just a nice old lady with a fancy hat". But then you have friends who still think she's a Reptilian, and they say "Well, someone's controlling the world". What would you even say to that? Do you think you could provide any evidence that they wouldn't dismiss as being engineered by the Reptilians? What if you lost friends or family because they couldn't accept that you didn't believe that such creatures existed? At what point would you stop even thinking about the possibility of Reptilians in your day to day life and just not want to talk about it because it's so absolutely baffling to you?

To anyone not reading the wikipedia link, the economic downturn in question is the one in the the early 2000s. (just for clarification)

Sure you do. It's called a loan. Lots of people get them. They finance all sorts of things, like homes, cars, college educations, etc. Most people with mortgages have a far worse ratio of debt to income than the federal government and pay much higher rates.

The people managing game companies are by and large just like every other manager: extroverts who think that everyone else thinks like them. Also, they're idiots who don't understand what they're managing.

But praise be to the few gaming companies that actually understand their customer base (Valve and Paradox spring to mind).

What about video games? Clearly they can transmit and produce emotions, tell a story, etc, etc, as good as any other art form. But just as clearly, they can be patched, modified, and may have to synch to technical advances. Was Portal an artistic creation or an engineering creation?

Sounds totally legit guys. Nothing to see here, no sir. I'll just pick up that can.

If an agency can ignore court orders unilaterally, exactly what is stopping them from doing any illegal thing that they want to do? Surely we can at least have a set of independent judges with security clearances who can preside over cases where "national security" comes up.

You can't lift a country out of poverty by just paying more and more people wages that are below the poverty line.

It's the difference between tracking any given person and tracking every given person.

Doubtful. It's much more likely that the brain applies very simple rules for when a ball is coming towards you:

If the ball looks like it's moving left, move left.
If the ball looks like it's moving right, move right.
If the ball looks like it's sinking in your view, move forward.
If the ball looks like it's rising in your view, move back.

If you do these things and the standard line up your glove between the ball and your eyes to catch it, then you've got a pretty darn good chance of catching the ball, no need to have the brain doing any sort of Diff Eq. Most motion actually follows heuristics and best guesses like this way more than any sort of mathematical precision.

Not actually true.

The only one of those that may be plausible may be better healthcare. I don't see many poor people living in something like the Palace of Versaille or eating as voraciously as Louis XIV