... where will the incentive for peace come from?

What evidence is there of an infinite universe that had no beginning?

Bear in mind also that if an infinite universe exists, which had no beginning, then light would also have had infinite amount of time to travel to here from absolutely everywhere else, and although the intensity of radiation that reaches a point is inversely proportional to the square of the distance to that point. the volume of space that is an average of some given distance away from a point is greater than an amount proportional to the square of the distance from that point, and so the number of things in that volume which produce radiation at that distance would be be correspondingly greater, more than cancelling out the inverse square relationship to the intensity of radiation reaching a point some fixed distance apart. Every point in the universe would be perpetually saturated in radiation that is reaching it from every other point in the universe, infinitely far away, and certainly things like life bearing planets could not exist.

Critical observation suggests that the universe is finite.

Before that happened, I hadn't realized how much of my profile was public, but I do now, and I've long since gone through the facebook privacy settings, and turned it all off so the info is no longer publicly visible. I'm just saying that the similarity between what happened to her and what happened to me is striking, especially with regards to the actual data that they obtained, and I thought that it could be the same thing. Facebook's default privacy setting suck, and not everyone necessarily realizes until something happens that they actively need to do something to keep unknown people from finding out about them. Prior to seeing this story, I also hadn't made any connection to any particular ads that I had seen on facebook, but that is also entirely possible. As I said, the reason I connected it to facebook at all was because of the image that they had, which I happen to use as my profile pic for facebook and which isn't used for anything anywhere else.

I don't think so... something strikingly similar to what she is describing happened to me as well, although in my case, it wasn't with a dating website. The website had clearly scraped facebook for its info about me. It got my full name, my city and postal code, and the image I was using for my main facebook profile pic, exactly as she described happened to her. In my case, if it hadn't been for the image associated with my name, I wouldn't have had a clue where they got the info, but facebook is the only place I happened to ever use that particular pic, so I had a pretty good idea what happened.

Experimental evidence suggests that the universe had a beginning. and that based on observation, this appears to have been about 13.8 billion years ago.

13.8 billion years ago is not an infinite amount of time. The universe is not infinite.

None of the companies that I've ever worked for exercise that principle.... in my experience, if you are incompetent at what you are asked to do, then you are fired. If you are just barely competent enough to keep your position past your probationary period, then this would come up during an annual performance review, with a critique on your work habits and what you can do to improve. If no improvement is noted over the next several months, you will be laid off. In my experience, if you are going to get promoted, you will need to go above and beyond what your job expectations are, and show the employer that you are capable of taking on greater responsibilities than what you were initially hired for, while still meeting all of the expectations of your current position. If there are no exceptions to the "Dilbert Principle", then how does that experience jive with promoting the least competent people to management, exactly?

Or are you incorrect about your assertion that there are no exceptions?

... when developers say "no", they soon find themselves unemployed.

Of course, one could theoretically argue that working for an employer who won't give due consideration to a developer's input isn't worth working for in the first place, but that nice little theory doesn't pay the rent. Oh, and try explaining to a future would-be employer about why your last job didn't work out... care take a guess how that will go down?

Of course, it might seem that working for yourself solves much of this problem, but even that still requires that you actually have paying clients, enough of them that you can support yourself on what they are willing to pay you. Of course, then you are actually back where you started, where saying "no" to a person who pays you money to do whatever it is that you do carries a risk of not getting paid by that person again. If you have enough clients, this may not be a problem to lose the odd one or two because they are dillholes, but getting to that point will take time... possibly many years... so until that time comes, you'll just have to do whatever the heck the person who is paying your salary tells you, unless you really have an affinity for living in a cardboard box on the street.

How was the latin phrase used incorrectly? It seemed entirely relevant, if you ask me.

As an exercise, define "human".

Isn't a cloud supposed to be, you know, *distributed*? So that this sort of thing doesn't ever happen, barring a catastrophe of no less than nation-wide proportions, where people are more liable to be more worried about other things than availability of said service anyways.

I would think this is more an illustration of a failure on Microsoft's part to properly implement their cloud services than it is indicative of a failure of such services in general.

Altruism has nothing to do with hurting oneself needlessly. It has to do with putting another's needs above one's own. In this study people were more willing to hurt themselves for money than they are willing to hurt other people for money. If money were not involved, there would not necessarily be any motivation to do either.

What if I'm in Saudia Arabia and am an atheist?

Even then.

I'm not suggesting if you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to hide, because that's actually a completely misleading argument that can be easily shown to be a false notion anyways.

Privacy, as I said, is created by two things, neither of which one is really in direct control of. The first thing is how polite other people are making a deliberate choice to be... invading someone else's privacy, for any reason, almost invariably amounts to rude behavior. Privacy is a courtesy that as civilized human beings, we should always extend to those around us. The world, however, has more than its share of rude people, nor can you really legislate that people not be rude to other people, so the measure of confidence you can have in privacy in this factor is entirely out of your control.

The other thing that creates privacy is something that you may have a small amount of indirect level of control over, which is how disinterested other people are liable to be in whatever it is you are doing. but the only way you really can influence this is by taking efforts to try and secure some measure of privacy for yourself, to the extent that you do not harm other people or infringe on their rights, and to a degree that the efforts that must be taken by others to overcome the efforts you have put in to secure some privacy are likely to outweigh how interested other parties might be in knowing about whatever it is that you are keeping private. Such measures might give you a greater feeling of confidence or security, but since you actually do not have any real control over what other people might want or how badly they might want it, I would still suggest that any appearance of privacy you may seem to achieve for yourself is still going to largely be illusionary. Certainly, if the efforts required to overcome whatever barriers you try to put in place to give yourself some privacy amount to needing to break the law, then you can probably have a high degree of confidence in how much privacy you have, as long as whoever might be interested in your private affairs has not been offered any legal immunity... and you certainly deserve to have legal recourse when someone infringes on your privacy in that regard... not because they infringed on your privacy, per se, but because of whatever law it was that they actually broke.

Just because I don't think people should really have any expectation of privacy at any time doesn't mean I think people should not have any right to do whatever is in within their own personal power and ability to directly control to preserve whatever privacy they feel they might be able to secure for themselves, to the extent that such efforts do not infringe on anyone else's freedoms or rights.

Except that society seems to function perfectly fine, even if not necessarily ideally, without everyone following the golden rule everywhere... which is what any kind of ubiquitous expectation of privacy actually generalizes to.

Where do people get the idea that privacy is some sort of inalienable right? I'll agree that it's a civic courtesy, and certainly it's impolite to disregard another person's privacy, but to that end, I see it as more of a social contract than any sort of actual right. I would suggest that any appearance of privacy we might seem to have is actually just an illusion offered by the fact that other people are either making a deliberate choice to be polite in that regard, or else they are simply not interested enough in what we think is private for others to be bothered with it. Either way, it's not something that you can actually control... its largely determined by what other people do or want.