Well, I think it's certainly plausible that, although Jacob's brother was the smoke monster we saw active on the island, he wasn't the *only* smoke monster that has ever existed on the island. There were people on the island before Jacob/MiB ever got there. Doesn't seem too much of a stretch to imagine that the MiB wasn't the first guy to get tossed down the golden-hole (indeed, the skeletons we see down there attest to that).

That's all well and good, I suppose. But when you pay money for an online good and the seller reneges on the deal to deliver, just don't come crying to the government-run courts or police, okay?

(Emphasis mine)

What exactly is the "true value of the stock"? If your answer has anything to do with the future (future revenue, future earnings, etc.), please explain how you're able to know the "true value" of anything which has yet to happen.

Radialpoint actually provides a really good security suite (Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware, Parental Control + loads of other features) for free through its "user community" program: http://radialpoint.net/home/

This is the same security software that ISPs like Verizon, Rogers, Bell Canada, Virgin, etc... charge their customers anywhere from 8$-12$ a month to use.They give away a limited number of copies for free in order to collect crash data and improve the product that's ultimately delivered to ISPs, kind of like a perpetual beta test. The software itself is powered by the latest BitDefender engine for real-time, on-demand and scheduled scanning. It also lets you use WebSense to do parental controls.

They even have a Mac version that's freely available through their site. Check it out!

Probably not so anonymous anymore!

I'm afraid you're mistaken. I am quite confident when asserting the universal negative, "God does not exist". I am also confident, for exactly the same reasons, when asserting, "There are no married bachelors", or "Five sided squares do not exist".

Far from being "logically indefensible", or "unproven and unprovable", logic requires that we affirm these truths.

Where are you getting this data that it is no dangerous from any other flu?
From wikipedia:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swine_flu, seasonal flu has a death rate of
This if you go over here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_flu_pandemic_by_country
My country (Canada) has a death rate of ~1.15%, where globally the death rate is .8%. Obviously the numbers aren't perfect since the number of confirmed cases are estimates, but where is your citation that "is actually less dangerous than any other human flu strain which has hit the population."

When you're complaining about not producing enough, you're advocating for increased efficiencies and productivity. Sure, producing enough to cover every possible "rainy day" is not in the cards, regardless of economic system; producing as much as we can is the best we can do. If you're advocating trading production for some other goal, you're going to produce less, not more.

By employing that idled portion of the labor force, you would increase supply; but, you'd also increase demand. Profit would grow as efficiencies of scale take hold.

"Idle", as in un- or under-employed. Whether or not your example fits into this definition depends upon who is doing the valuing, I suppose; the laborer or the employer.

A laborer working at his peak 100% of the time may be perfectly efficient from the employer's perspective. But a more balanced, lower stress approach may provide more value to the laborer (and, in the long run, the employer) than such robotic efficiency.

In what way is idling a large portion of the labor force--wasting all those hours of potentially productive labor--efficient? That's like burning crops as they stand in their fields, or throwing coal into the sea. That's not efficiency; that's a waste.

They keep failing because their incentive structure is all messed up.

I'm not sure why you think those two goals are mutually incompatible. Idle labor is pretty inefficient.

Unfortunately, most of the newspapers in Canada are owned by one company, CanWest Global, which has exerted its editorial control over city papers so they match the the political leanings of its owners (first helping the Liberal party, now the Conservatives).

In their world, politicians acting on voters wishes is 'buying votes', while lobbyists using the promise of campaign contributions to get favourable legislation passed is 'Democracy in Action'.

It's the same kind of logic that makes 30 copies of crappy pop songs worth over a million dollars.

I'm talking about backwards causation as a general principle.

Says who? What is the definitive study of backwards causation? I'd like to see some sources which claim that violating causality would not cause experimental problems. What about simple particle physics experiments where we are working on microscopic scales?

You're not understanding my point. I didn't say the calculations or experiments would be difficult. I said that in any experiment where future events would have to be taken into account, you couldn't make definitive statements about your results. If I do an experiment to show A causes B and future events can also cause B, there is no way for me to state definitively that a seemingly positive result is caused by A and not some future event I can't control for. This is what makes causality so essential for science.

This seems to be a poor understanding of time reversal symmetry. Particle physics works if you run time forward, or if you flip its sign and run time backwards. But that does not mean the same thing as what you said above. You can look at an experiment with each event in reverse, but you can't, for instance, say that event 2 was caused by event 1, but event 1 was caused by event 3. It only can follow the laws of physics if the causal order is 123 or 321.

The idea of 'backwards' causation has obvious major problems. First of all, you run into causal paradoxes. But more importantly, if the outcome of your experiment rests on future events, how can you do science? Every result becomes meaningless because you don't know if a future event caused it.