Let me first say that although I'm an atheist myself, I completely respect your right to be religious, especially since you came to it through thought rather than socialization or indoctrination.

I think you're a bit wrong about the article of faith you give as an example, though: scientists may take it on good faith (i.e. trust) that your results need not be checked, the difference is that you gave your methods, and your results can be checked. If there is another explanation for the results than the one you gave, this can also be investigated. The spectacular implosion of that Korean genetics lab is an example of this in action.

In other words, the results you got are very different to a miracle or a prayer being answered, because neither of those are repeatable or verifiable, and other explanations for those phenomena may exist, but you have no way of evaluating what is the cause.

That is the faith of religion, and it is very different to the trust that exists between scientists.

And you're anonymous.

Come to Hong Kong. The days of the skyscraper are far from over here - we don't have earthquakes, and we have no more land available - the population density here is 6480 people per square kilometre over the whole territory, but most of Hong Kong's land is unusable, so the real density in urban spaces is much higher. The official factsheet suggests 53 110 pp/sq.km, but wikipedia goes for 130 000 pp/sq.km in Mongkok, the busiest area.

  Here, there is nowhere else to go but up.But I agree with you, in any reasonable area, and especially in the States, it's better to build lower and sprawl.

There are plenty of card scanning apps for phones these days, and I personally hate standing there, tapping away at my phone while someone hand-holds me through spelling their name, and getting their e-mail address correct (all those underscores and dots and things are hard for people to verbalize).

I think it's far more effective to give the card. You may only hang on to it for as long as it take your phone to get the info from - but as someone else pointed out above, you can tell a whole lot more from a card than just a set of contact details.

I like the awesome certificate of authenticity on that. Looks totally legit.

More like, it's funny how the terms of service agreement works. I'm guessing that M.I.C. Gadget didn't have Mark Zuckerberg sign one, while Zuckerberg did get an agreement with whoever uploaded the photos (which btw you don't own, and so don't necessarily have rights to any revenue they generate).

And that's why we saw so many nations involved in aid and rescue after Katrina. The response there was totally people first, face later.

Very likely. You do realize that more than one thing can happen on the same day, right?

I'm with you there - I love going through the games, and perfecting my setups for each car and track according to my style of driving. Takes a long time, but you get a real feeling of achievement when you hook it up.

But other people may not enjoy the game in the way that I do, and they should be given the choice to unlock everything and go wild. It's their game, after all, they bought it.

Definitely. And there's a cult of personality about it all, too. I don't edit articles for Wikipedia, so I don't have their groupthink, but I can't help but feel that the entire campaign this year has been set up by some of the more fawning members of the Wikipedia community.

Personally, I could give rocks about Jimmy Wales. I might consider giving money to Wikipedia, though, if they just had the barometer of cash donated vs. cash that they ran in the previous years.

I'm not buying into any conspiracy theories, and I'm going to watch this develop with interest - at the moment I think there are many possibilities here, and this is something of uncharted territory in govt affairs.

That said, I think there is a motive for the US to be pulling the strings here. This is from the article::

The investigation stems from separate encounters Assange had with two women during his August visit to Sweden, where he was applying for Swedish residency and attempting to secure the protection of Swedish free-press laws for his secret-spilling website

Maybe it's just a way of preventing Assange from getting Swedish citizenship and the protection that this would afford? The Swedish govt can't give him this while charges hang over his head - whether they're true or not. Doesn't explain how they govt would get these particular girls on board or anything, but it is a somewhat plausible motive.

Another close prediction of the internet, and strangely of the kind of social networking that is taking over the net experience only now for many people, is "The Machine Stops" by E.M. Forster.

Written in 1909. Just over 100 years ago.

So it is possible to predict these things from nothing. It is pretty difficult though, and I'd argue that for someone who is making corporate money out of prediction, it would be counterproductive: what you need to be doing is showing the execs how they can be tweaking their current products and tech, not that they have to create whole new fields from scratch. And its this process that Kurzweil seems very good at: people pay him. I'm not sure whether he keeps his good predictions for paying customers, or whether the standard is the same as his public one, but he wouldn't be the first man to make use of a reality distortion field to make huge amounts of money, and he certainly won't be the last.

Except that in some instances, the areas where these posts are being made are in what the posters deem to be a closed room, and I'm sure you'd be mad as hell if your comments in private are purposely eavesdropped.

Obviously there is a lack of control over this by most users, and maybe their understanding of the tech they're using is limited, but by posting something on a wall in facebook and thinking that only their friends can see it because those are their privacy settings does make it private to them.

I tend to take your advice for most things, but still, it's stifling to live constantly thinking about whether you can safely voice your opinion. And in my opinion, that is not exactly a free society, either.

Studies have shown that comprehension levels this type of statement tend to correlate with levels of hair-pointiness.