I see this argument again and again, and quite frankly I have to agree with Zuckerberg. People are dumbasses! Not the people you refer to though, but rather the people constantly making said argument.

How much do you think it costs to host a site like Facebook? Servers, storage, electricity, bandwidth.. Facebook is massive, and the simple fact of the matter is they have to generate income to sustain their existence, regardless of your blind ideologies.

That being said, I'm not a huge fan of ads or information gathering, but I'd rather have a small text-based Google ad informing me about online electronics stores, robotics and other somewhat interesting stuff than the huge Flash obscenities of old!

Far more interesting (and relevant) is the effects of hormonal prevention on women's libidos. I don't recall which studies I'm thinking about exactly, but it is a well established fact that women ovulating find high levels of testosterone (e.g. muscles, dominant behavior, general manlyness) attractive while women on the other side of the hormonal scale (pregnant, menstruating, etc.) find typical "female" features more attractive. If a female body is in "get baby!"-mode, she prefers manly men who can protect her offspring as well as contribute good genes. If it's in "has baby!"-mode, she prefers the emotionally available, "soft" man. Hormonal prevention works by tricking the female body into thinking it's pregnant all the time. The result? Tokyo Hotel is hot, burly, hairy men have fallen out of fashion. Seriously.. look at teens these days. The guys generally considered attractive are the semi-anorexic ones with no hair except the neatly styled stuff on their heads. Ask your mother and grandmothers about their taste in men and the answer is likely to be "Butch and if possibly, hairy!". True story!

And how's that working out for ya? (Not saying the other suggestion seems all that much better..)

I would have you check out Sensory Substitution. I feel I'm ranting on about this every time something like this comes up and no one cares. Why is that? The TVSS (Tactile Visual Substitution System by WiCab) provides its users with a 20x20 grayscale image and the Forehead Retina System provides 512 taxel (tactile pixel) vision, all with no surgery. In addition, the BrainPort (also by WiCab) can be hooked up to an accelerometer to provide a sense of balance to people who's inner ears have been damaged. Hell, one can even add new sensory information through some existing channel (f.ex. FeelSpace), and the brain will integrate it thanks to sensomotoric correlations. The blind can already see. We've had the needed technology since Dr. Bach-y-Rita started experimenting with cameras, solenoids and sensory substitution in the 60's.

All that stuff seems perfectly buildable for an enthusiastic DIY'er. Chances are you are just like me though, knowing full-well that it could be created but leaving the actual work and invention/innovation to someone with more skills. =P

There FTFY

I don't get this, it seems so simple. There are a fair amount of games out there where you don't have crosshair except when you use a sight of some sort. When you do, the game could just cut the images to your non-dominant eye making the game 2D (like it's "always" been and like it would in most cases be in the real world). What's the big deal?

How about using the same type of lenses (in the 3D-glasses) that are routinely used in progressive bifocals, only rotated 90 degrees? That way, you could make the lens work harder to focus on something closer (have the lenses be more powerful closer to the nose) and relax more as you approach infinite convergence (when your eyes are parallel, whatever that is called).

It still wouldn't solve the problem of actually blurring everything in the background when you look at something close (and vice versa) but it might help with the head aches some people complain about by making the experience more natural on the eyes themselves.

What irritates me is that people always have to talk about what happened before The Big Bang. All matter was created in The Big Bang. Time is an artifact/property (me lacking a better description) of a universe consisting of matter. Ergo, time itself did not exist until the very first tiny bits of matter came into being. This seems significant to the discussion, yet it's hardly ever brought up. Please explain..?

Hey, I love the movies (yes, all 6 of them). I'm not into all this "My Star Wars wang is bigger than yours, because I'm smart enough to only like the old ones!"-stuff.

Still, the whole Balance thing just seems like a massive plot hole, or major fuck-up or lust-for-power by the Jedi, neither which fits the whole Jedi "thing" they have going. Every other sentence they talk about the Dark Side and Sith and all that jazz, which is natural because this struggle is at the core of the entire series. Considering that, it's a wee bit of a stretch to justify it by saying "Meh, they were probably thinking about something else than the all-encompassing, absolutely vital, potentially major league destructive Balance for 6 movies straight. =P

I never got this discussion, or the seemingly huge plot hole and/or Jedi fuckup. Anakin is prophesied to bring balance to the Force..

Ok.. so how does this mean training him isn't the worst idea ever in the history of the universe..? I mean, hundreds of powerful, wize Jedi on the Light side. One single (albeit powerful) old Sith Lord on the Dark side. WTF? Did these Jedi, in all their wisdom, actually think that "Bringing balance to the Force" meant "Giving the by far most powerful side even more gunpower."..?

Chronologically or by worth? =P

From Wikipedia: "A robot is an automatically guided machine which is able to do tasks on its own.." How are we not robots? Ok, so we're not made from steel, silicone and plastic but we are computer controlled machines, robots, all the same (albeit a wee bit more complex than what we are building at the moment).

Why should input to this immense, self-organizing computer be any different than output? Read up on Sensory Substitution (or augmentation, or perceptual augmentation, or whatever you feel like calling it).

Just as you say, the brain would figure out how the arm worked if allowed to explore and test. The same thing is true about sensory information presented to the brain through the skin, as long as there is a correlation between the signals going out and the signals coming in. What's the reasoning behind thinking that dropping the wire from the skin to the brain and just "plugging it right in there" would make a difference? Be it the correlation between telling your body to turn, feedback from the inner ear and proprioception and feedback from the feelSpace belt, or the correlation between sending random signals to a prosthetic arm and observing what happens.. I'm pretty sure the brain would figure it out on it's own.

You might be trying to be funny, but imagine for a moment being paralyzed down south. Think prosthetic penises won't be a hugely marketable item once they figure out how to make the feedback good enough that sensomotoric relations can take care of the rest and they figure out how to measure sexual excitation to initiate *cough* inflation..?

It's a brave new world (of Japanese one-on-one gang bang and gallons-of-synthetic-jizz-bukkake porn)!