And you just described why I don't play MMO's. Why pay to "play" a game that's just designed to keep you playing as long as possible (fun doesn't even enter into the equation)?

You're right, and I've felt the same way. But your perspective starts with the assumption that you don't want to interact with the other people that are playing.

MMO's is the principal way that I stay in touch with old friends and family members. We play WoW, we hang out in Second Life, we play board games online- especially Ticket to Ride and some others. One of my sons is in the Army. I've got family members in multiple states, and we spend time together every day. How many dads spend time with their wife, kids, and parents every single day? Even though we're all over the world, we're together every day and generating new memories and experiences together.

In Second Life, you can go learn other languages, spend time with brilliant creators from all over the world. I know and see every day people from Japan, Singapore, Germany, and Great Britain. People that are currently in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil. The last few years of co-mingling with people from all over the world has been very enriching for me; I didn't really do that before virtual worlds. (Exchanging email or chatting some in IRC isn't the same as goofing off interactively, at least it has not been for me.)

Your point about MMO's being boring is spot on. But people themselves are not always boring, at least the cool ones aren't. MMO's and virtual worlds let people spend time together and dissolve geographical and cultural boundaries. This is why someone might want to play them. Because the game itself is just a computer has limits to how entertaining it can be, but spending quality time with valued friends and family is priceless.

Historically, and still true for the majority of content it is not delivered on a "channel" specific to the subscriber. Its essentially "broadcast" over the cable network, and subscribers tap into the broadcast... As systems move to digital delivery it becomes feasible, but requires much more investment than simply the physical cable/fiber network. To do what you describe would require an "exchange" which would receive content from all supported providers, and a means ot switching incoming streams to individual subscribers.

You're basically describing, say, Ethernet, right? Packets, broadcast to everybody, then routers and switches to route and filter... This was a radical idea in 1960, but it's pretty well trodden territory now. I mean, Hulu.com or Amazon Video On Demand pretty much accomplishes everything stated above, right?

My hatred for RealNetworks defies rational analysis. And with good reason: they fried my machines really hardcore with some of their intrusive can't-remove-this crap way back when, and I never got over the emotional anger. They've cleaned up their ways since then, so I hear. And they were a big part of what inspired me years ago to set myself up to where I can reformat a machine without much effort and zero loss, so some good has come out of it.

I do share some of GP's hatred for Real, and it was well earned and fairly rational. My rational analysis is: they can bite me. I know some of the people from Real though, and they're awesome. Just saying I can't forgive rea networks for some things they did to my pc's in the 90's, or that I let them do when I wanted to play some sound and video and installed their stuff.

No, starting from scratch isn't fun. First you have to spend over a month just learning the learning skills...

Important to note: Eve's time-based training system can at first glance seem like it's going to take a very long time to get where you want to be. But it's way better in many ways than the traditional leveling system in two ways:

• Wow or any other MMO takes at least that much time. It's going to take you a month or 3 to get to max level in Wow. Only in Eve, you're not chained to your keyboard. You're free to pursue whatever aspects of the game interest you most while you're training. And there are many more aspects than there are in other MMO's.
• In Eve, you can be useful to your friends even before you're a badass. In level-based games, if you're not on par with your teammates' levels, you're useless. Not so in Eve. You can jump in and play with your friends pretty close to right away-- always helpful to have another gun (or at a minimum, target!) along. This is one of the many ways in which Eve is similar to the innovative ideas of UO.

No, the security measure is not forgivable. Don't even bother with hypothetical situations ("But if we could save someone's life ... "). Student privacy is more important than a lost laptop. Grok that concept.

Once you've got that down the gullet, there are no hypothetical situations in which this behavior becomes permissible. If we can't take the photos by remote control, then there's no point discussing situations in which such a photo might be justified.

Others have pointed out that this is about the most worthless way possible of recovering a stolen laptop. True. (Yes, there are one or two anecdotal examples. Don't forget to figure these as a percentage of total stolen laptops.) But even this point is a footnote to the point above.

The "Alan Hills" Mars meteorite has triggered interest in a type of bacteria temporarily coined "nanobacteria". The alleged bacterial fossils in the meteorite have been criticized as too small to be bacteria.

Since then the search for earthly equivalents has taken off. Some of the candidates appear to be either non-living, or on the borderline, including curious objects found in human blood.

And it tickles the question of how small a bacterium can get and still be "alive". It's too new of a field to make any definitive conclusions, but does show the value of exploring outer space. It makes us ask questions and explore areas we might otherwise ignore.

(Although the meteorite did not come from a space mission, it's recognition as being from Mars is based on data from the two Viking landers of the 1970's.)

Flip it around then. Do you actually believe that the government of the US does the will of its citizens? Really?

Believing that is at least as near-sighted and weak in critical thinking as believing that there are powerful forces at work behind the public faces of the government. The government does the will of rich lobby groups, and the consent of the people is bought through marketing, secrecy, and deception.

You make an interesting point. But computers have a couple of important advantage over humans in this area. Computers can read a lot faster than people. In theory, they could watch movies a lot faster. They have direct connections to the internet. Also, computers are much more scalable than a human brain-- we can add more nodes and processing power to a computer system, but not to a human brain.

Also, an AI doesn't necessarily need to be developmentally similar to a human at all. They may not actually need time to mature like people do. Granted, if they don't grow up the same way we do yet are intelligent, then they will likely seem very alien to us. But while it may take some amount of wall clock time to nurture a new AI, they don't necessarily need the same amount of time to develop that a human would.

Agreed. In civilized countries we have really excellent infant mortality rates. We have instant global communications, and overnight worldwide delivery and travel. Tons of different diseases, essentially made obsolte. And technology has done a lot for us. Keep in mind that comptuers do many jobs for us today that used to be done by people, such as coordinating appointment schedules, taking messages, operating elevators, delivering documents, retyping edited documents... There's likely a list of these types of things longer than anyone would care to read. Also look at the means food production: farm automation, techniques, and technology have enabled huge swaths of the population to devote their attention to other things.

The sad part is most of those other things people devote their time to is just other flavors of slavery designed to protect the wealth of the rich. I don't have the numbers on this, but it wouldn't surprise me if available leisure time and family and friends time has dropped since the industrial and information revolutions rather than raised.

Technological change has also brought about much negative change that no one would have expected, either. Such as for all the low infant mortality in the first world, it's as bad as ever or worse in the third world (right? I'm not sure about this, just guessing). Who would have guessed in 1890 that we'd be on the verge of emptying the oceans of fish? Or that the widely held ability to destroy most life on the planet is the main thing keeping us from destroying life on the planet.

And surely not many people believed that ThoughtCrime and big brother would ever really happen. But it is. If you don't believe me, there's certain keywords you should try Googling every night and see what happens to you.