LOL. Agreed.

Why, with all the plenty of cheap resources, technology, entertainment and knowledge, are people still complete assholes? There must be an asshole gene that natural selection has yet to make dormant.

H.R.x Commerce of Any Non Organism Shall Not Require Any Federal or States License

Oh no. It would be the Wild West of selling and buying. Everything would instantly catch on fire, gunmen would roam the streets, and somehow slavery would come back even though the law didn't apply to organisms. The state and central government regularly punish and reward businesses to enforce policy. A shame.

From personal experience, drinking while programming isn't so bad, although the increasing mental and physical clumsiness will eventually become a problem. Smoking weed while programming, on the other hand, is asking for trouble. If you're a designer brainstorming before coming up with a rough design document, weed's probably an ally in many ways. Programming, though, God help you. I suppose it adversely affects the ability to base one logical proposition upon another, which is generally bad for a series of equations relying upon the results of the previous for a useful result.

While playing games it depends on the game. If it requires the same sort of sequential, analytical processes as programming then you're doomed. If it's just a twitch game with simple goals and gameplay you'll be minimally handicapped. In any case, I can't imagine being high will improve your ability to play a game; just your enjoyment of it.

My greatest regret is attending high school. If I had fully indulged my obsession with computers at age 13 (in 1989) and forgone my high school "education" I would be in Bill Gates' shoes by now, throwing money at schools like it grew on trees. There's nothing wrong with using computers, but there's a big difference between playing Angry Birds and learning to program and reading Wikipedia. Computers are a tool; you can build a bridge or poke yourself in the eye.

For many, radioactive underwear is probably still a good idea, at least for the rest of us.

Well fuck it, just build an inverted spherical solar panel around the sun, crank out some Earl Grey, and blast the fucking thing near the speed of light to whatever starship ordered it. Problem solved.

Is this the world we live in now? Sad.

Would microwaving frozen food in a vacuum (or conversely under high pressure) make any useful difference in how evenly the food cooked? A lower pressure would lower the boiling point and a higher pressure would raise it. What about subtly modifying the wavelengths or amplitude? I'm not a physicist so I have no idea. Just throwing that out there to see if someone smarter than me can make it stick.

I had an epiphany while reading your post. The solution is to make it legal to steal phones. Everybody wins!

I don't know man, that sounds like the beginnings of A LOT OF WORK! Probably better to let sleeping phones lie.

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.