Well, actually that isn't true. There is overwhelming proof that "all things in moderation" is true and a good rule to follow. You simply graph the use or intake of any prime motivator (sugar, internet/web, sex, humor, games) and you will see an area of the graph that represents enjoyment with low consequences... then you will see an area where it overflows into ruining a persons life because of not paying attention to other obligations, lack of exercise, body cant handle it because it's too much, other people hurt by ones actions and retaliating, missing all appointments, and so on. However, in this case, there's no proof that beating World of Warcraft has negative consequences. All we have to go on is a South Park episode where idiotic characters were depicted as becoming grossly overweight after playing the game (as opposed to, say, watching TV or spending time at work or in Church)

This is fluff of the type I used to see in WIRED, PCWorld, etc years ago. It is corporate back-patting garbage, of little interest to nerds and real programmers and engineers, many of us still unemployed because the Republicans destroyed America's economy. This is made-up tripe... kings and commissars anointing themselves with badges and awards for pretending to care about those of us below them. The emperor has no clothes. The idea of real and tangible freedom still shines brighter and truer than these corporate priests.

Why don't the people from the future who keep screwing with the present at least leave behind some helpful graffiti? Why did Higgs have to nickname it "The God Particle"? Didn't he have any idea of how silly that was? He could have figured out it was a bad idea because someone wrote a whole mystical book ("The Tao of Physics") just because someone named something in particle physics "The Eightfold Way" - it had nothing to do with mysticism, it was just a way of putting particles into patterns that insinuated some deeper structural possibilities. (like, say, being made of quarks, or having consistent characteristics like spin, charge, etc) Besides, every time we finally see proof of some hypothetical "god particle", a new hypothetical one comes along. You can't name scientific stuff after mystical or religious things without expecting people to behave kind of goofy.

Giving us what we want..what they were intended to do, in a short and simple way? Come on. Why should Symantec be any different from MTV? They will give us what we don't want while riding on their past claim to fame.

What about Max T. O'Connor AKA "Max More"? I thought he was the one responsible for the futurist/transhumanist/singulatiry religion/wishful thinking, not to mention magazines like MONDO 2000, WIRED, and now H+. I never heard of Ray Kurzweil before, but I guess it's mostly because I prefer to read about actual science and not evangelism. My experience with actual virtual reality and other technologies has led me to be somewhat less than hopefull about technologies based on corporate activity. There is an inherent corporate profit-motive that holds back and retards technological progress and affordability at a basic level. Most "extropians", "transhumanists", and such seem to also believe the whole religion is a vindication fro capitalism, which, if we just sit back and dont complain as our bosses order us around, will someday deliver the priomised land.

My friend in the army (stationed in Iraq) told me a couple months ago the way the insurgents were assassinating some soldiers was by using information from sites like myspace and facebook. I'm not surprised at all that this rule has been adopted.

The problem with stuff like this is it's intended to crush dissent against institutions like big business and governmental power, things which democracy and liberty in stuff like the Constitution of the United States were meant to keep the government stable and the people happy, because they would adjust their lives to the reality of their social and physical environment. If Americans all know they are being watched all the time and more and more "odd" behavior (not simply disliking your boss) they will appear "normal" on the outside yet will be increasingly psychologically screwed up on the inside. Didn't the 50's tell us anything? Human history has been a sort of narrative of the struggle between the people at large against the desire for small groups to amass control over their lives in order to extract wealth, etc. If Americans are monitored and watched all the time, how will the USA be fundamentally different from Maoist China? It's obvious this sort of technology would be used by the ruling powers... business, religion, the military, the police... to ultimately control human beings even when the reason human beings are disobeying the authorities is because something is fundamentally wrong with the authorities way of thinking. If you destroy the social contract (the unwritten rule that the ruling powers will only be allowed to rule so long as they actually serve the interests of the people who created the power in the first place as a means of managing more complicated things) you pave the way for a culture that produces nothing new, and gives birth to uninspired youth, and has no inoculation against forces that will eventually destroy that society because it isn't flexible in the face of chaotic nature at all.

Well, technically the star is already gone, if that's going to be visible any time soon. Though interestingly if we could reach it within our lifetimes we'd have to go back in time to do so and so it would still be there, pulsating like some giant infected slug, lol.

Yeah, when I went to a remote wooded area of central Maine with my family as a teen and a kid I was absolutely ASTOUNDED by how the night sky looked, and the ability to see the Milky Way, it is absolutely mind-blowing and wondrous.

And yet, somehow, all of us earn money, and all of us spend our money, and all of the money is coming from somewhere and going somewhere, and the economy continues. I have thought of this issue myself. The existence of piracy offers us two choices. One is to have a more repressive, un-libertarian and un-democratic society in order to preserve the old ways, and the other is to change our behavior fundamentally and move on to new ways to do things. It was the big corporations that wanted us all to have computers in the first place. Has anyone ever even noticed that the problem with, say, advertising on the Internet, is that the ads are unfairly shoved at us, and always abotu things we don't need or want? Similarly, what ways can we think of that the music and film industry have made finding media we actually like (and paying a fair price for it) more difficult and inconvenient? I have mixed feelings about piracy, but I do believe that it says a lot about the idea that something fundamentally has to change, and that people like Richard Stallman were right all along.

So are you actually willing to store nuclear fission waste in your apartment or your back yard?

Holy cow! All we need to do is have this working with the virtual keyboard ( http://www.virtual-laser-keyboard.com/ ), and we have a computer that has input/output devices that are mostly light!

The irony here is that Intel/IBM/Microsoft are a success because someone got away with cloning the PC's BIOS or original operations ROM and/pr programming "toolbox" (I think?)... while the Apple company may have have a superior computer, OS, and a nice friendly PR but made computers few of us could afford because nobody was able to get away with reverse-engineering them.

Sony has great name-brand popularity and PR, like McDonald's, but lots of lousy products preprogrammed to fail.

Based on what you just wrote, the high rate of male suicide in Lithuania and other former USSR satellite countries, member countries and still existent Russian autonomous republics should also be disregarded as having anything to do with the recent past history or political structures, policies or behaviors. The reality is, market rule (the real name for the "free market") when unregulated and left alone (especially in corporate form) produces expensive, complicated, high-maintenance, fragile and self-destructing technology that may get the job done quickly and efficiently but soon turns to crap because we're supposed to spend more money *on a new one* within a few months or years, and constantly hire these "contractors" to do this work. Stockholders with their projected future quarter profit expectations and the nature of the corporation itself create this situation from which the human individual is nearly powerless to escape from if they just sit around waiting and hoping things will get better but never take any kind of active opposition against it. While the USSR was hardly a "socialist" country - more of a state-capitalist one - there were opportunities to escape market rule's effect on technology that produced inexpensive and robust technology, which became more rugged and effective over time as bugs and kinks were worked out. I do wish Russia and it's surrounding countries could have something of a grass-roots democratic and libertarian socialist (also known as progressive libertarian or left libertarian) society and technological approach, but sadly the high amount of nationalism, racism, xenophobia and authoritarianism has pretty much ruined the prospects for such things for now.