I sincerely detest your conclusion. It is also based on a fallacy, as there is no "absence of an external interfering force".

Your belief that Eastern Europe developed democracy without external influence shows your total ignorance about recent European history. Eastern Europe has received massive funding from the EU to build infrastructure and ensure economic development. Equally important is the political and economic integration across Europe, and the military strength of the USA that brings stability and a sense of security. The democratization of Eastern Europe is the result of determination and massive investments, and this is by the way the norm. Think about how the US treated Germany and Japan after WW2.

Those examples are in stark contrast to the how Iran has been influenced from the outside. Both the USA and USSR opted to support both sides of the Iran-Iraq war
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_aid_to_combatants_in_the_Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War
Meaning simply that a conflict in the middle east was in the interest of both super powers, playing divide and conquer. Or was that also because of some cultural phenomenom?

To state that culture is the ultimate force in political developments is simply naive. Not only naive, it is dangerous. People like you scare me.

Since when was massive blodshed a common path to democracy? You will have a hard time finding empirical support for that claim.

Good point about the batteries. If I was in charge of this research project, we would develop a fuel cell to generate electricity directly from ATP. Just route some blood through it. Now THAT would be awesome.

It appears that he controls it without watching... So my guess is that he is in fact imagining left hand movements. After all that is what his neural system is trained to do. In order to get it right later they just need to wire him up correctly.

No, you misunderstand. They ATTACHED it!

Amen. The Linux distros seem to be constantly growing new subsystems, while consistently adding complexity and abandoning the time tested unix principles. Configuration of the GNOME startup is the most outrageous example. It is so horribly opaque that the recommended way to switch window manager is

(From the man page of metacity on Ubuntu hardy) How is this better than a single line in .xinit or .xsession?

This is so douglas-adamsish... Reads very much like an excerpt from The Guide!

Don't you think more transparency would lead to more people actually caring? If you want people to devote time and energy on "caring" about corruption in government, you need to provide information that is clear and accessible.

What if the linux kernel developers would all hide the details about who did what and just every once in a while release thousands of new lines of code which they would share all responsibility for? Would that spark interest for someone curious about kernel development?

If every change to a congress document could be linked to the representative that committed the change, it would provide you with a clear view on relevant information.

Today the level of detail we know about a legislation stops at who worked on it and who voted for it. That means: every bill has a majority of the congress behind it, and everybody (read: nobody) takes the blame for the corrupted details.