The present is looking more and more like Ghost in the Shell. I love it.

I have a 19 month old. People (including children) can be unimaginably bad, but it's not hopeless. So far mine's been a blast. Good kid. Is this better advice for children than logic and altruism?

Tame your inner beast by using its power to drive your ambition to create in and improve upon the state of the world and the people around you.

All of that depends on what kind of society we create to live in such a world, hopefully by instilling logical and altruistic values in our children. Obviously I'm being optimistic, probably unrealistically so, but think of what people just 100 years ago would have thought about modern society today. 100 years is nothing in terms of our species' history; we've crossed a threshold in our evolution due to technology, quickly leaving behind what we used to be for better or worse. The only things holding us back now are our primal instincts and education.

With respect to your comments about people having too much free time, there are two kinds of people. There's the guy who after retirement finds himself starting a small farm, working at the local grocery store or writing novels because he just needs something to do. Then there's the guy whose ideal use of time involves smoking crack, beating his wife over some inane argument, and ending up on COPS for us all to shake our heads at.

It's not something that would happen overnight, but all growth is painful and everything good we now have was born of suffering somewhere.

While the inevitable loss of more "menial" jobs (take no offense; I've had many myself) will suck for those affected, at some point we're going to end up with a civilization like in Star Trek TNG where people choose to work, as the provision of the basic necessities of life will have become largely automated. Of course, something "really bad" could happen before then (nuclear holocaust, plague, asteroid strike, supervolcano, gamma ray burst, etc.), but I hope someday we reach the point where robots handle the ugly bits and we all get to do whatever the hell we please without fear.

Go ahead guys, launch every nuke you've got. Or look up "balance of power" or "stalemate" or "mutually assured destruction" and shut the fuck up and sit the fuck down.

Mark must have gotten laid recently. Or had lunch with Richard Stallman. Or...

Along that line of thought, they actually have all the time in the world. Unless they accidentally bang their mother, of course, which changes everything.

Probably prohibitively expensive, but it would be nice if, someday, all that shit was underground. It looks horrible and is susceptible to lightning strikes, airplanes, helicopters (and now drones), falling trees, hurricanes, tornadoes and terrorist sabotage. And again, it just looks horrible. We bury fiber, copper, natural gas and water lines, so why is all our electrical strung up like the crack baby of a Christmas tree and a giant spider?

How small can they make nuclear reactors these days? Tesla could make the President's new "Beast" something like the Tumbler from the new Batman movies, with an extra 1000 HP thrown in for good measure.

...but it's not as bad as this:

http://eightvirtues.com/misc/2...
http://www.npr.org/2014/02/21/...

What in the unholy hell is wrong with people? I'm not religious, but my God.

Install nothing on my phone except what I can 100% (well, close enough) verify as being from a legitimate company (Google Maps, Twitter, etc.). No random but interesting-sounding programs, no games, none of that shit. My device is a phone/GPS/camera/browser/calculator. That it's nothing else not only doesn't bother me, I think it's great. My neck is in good order as well, as it doesn't gravitate toward a near-permanent state of 67.5 degrees. Many others seem to suffer from this, leading me to believe they have too much crap installed on their phone. Get help now, people; it's not as hard as it seems.

Last time I was there (a couple of years ago) you could fill your gas tank for about a dollar. There's also a guy standing there to fill your tank for you, who you generally give a tip larger than what it costs to fill it. Before going on a trip or vacation the common joke is who's going to pay for food and who's going to pay for gas.

Everything else however is damn hard to get and expensive. I wanted to get some blank DVDs to burn some movies and that was when I started to realize something really bad was going on there (other than the crazy pro/anti-government graffiti everywhere and steel bars over every window and door).

You'll still have to walk through it and spit out chunks of it? You suggest a dystopian quagmire. The "calming down" part I mentioned would be necessary to avoid that sort of pollution. We'd heal the place, then coexist with and balance it.

Awesome. Thought you were trolling for a second (that's how over-my-head your response was), but Wikipedia backs up the quantum dots reference. If civilization remains relatively cohesive for the next century the future will be pure ownage from our perspective. Someday we'll be at the cusp of extending life to near immortality. I think people will, in general, be calmer knowing they're not going to die of old age. A new renaissance for humans, and Earth.

"They smell very good and when they're cooked, many patients have described them as the most delicious mushrooms they've ever eaten."

Clearly this is proof of Intelligent Design. If I were God I'd definitely place these things everywhere they'd fit just to keep my people on their toes. Nature's land mines.