I suspect that the reason that Europe has a large Muslim population is the same as the reason that America has a large Mexican population: cheap labor. That and colonial ties to their countries of origin (this is certainly the case of France and Algeria, and the U.K. and Pakistan, India, and much of the Middle East) , as well as the fact that they are just much closer to the Middle East than we are.

Radical Islam in Europe seems to be the new punk for disaffected Muslim youth; their parents had enough of that crap back home, which is why they moved. What better way for a surly teenager to annoy his parents than to hang a bin Laden poster on his wall. Kind of like Che in the 60's (who was, by the way, every bit as batshit crazy as bin Laden, if not more so.) This will pass. Eventually, standing on the sidelines and watching life pass you by loses its charm.

If the European left seems crazy, a recent history of genocide will tend to push the needle into the red in any conversation about immigrants, outsiders, or other races and cultures. As for Muslims voting socialist, that doesn't seem likely, as socialists tend to be atheistic. Canada's recent turn to the right is largely attributed to an influx of immigrants who find the right's regard for religions more appealing. It's more likely that poor Muslim immigrants in Europe don't vote at all.

There seems to be a misconception that religion is separate from politics, and that the involvement of religion in politics is somehow an aberration. This is a belief that is based upon the very recent and historically brief period in which many Western countries have observed this separation. This period now seems to be coming to an end, by the way, with blasphemy laws making a major comeback, within and outside of the West.

But unless a religion specifically prohibits political involvement (and very few do), it is not only true to say that religion is political, but that religion is politics. Expressing disappointment that it is used by unscrupulous people as a tool of political and social control is a bit like being shocked and surprised that a handgun can be used to shoot someone. That is what it is for. All ideologies (and religions are ideologies) are morally neutral; they can be used for good or evil. They are simply tools. It hardly matters that the Soviet or Maoist regimes were not, strictly speaking, true Communist states. Communism is still vilified, and quite rightly so. It hardly matters whether the rulers are true believers or not. As always, religion is considered by the people to be true, by the wise to be false, and by the rulers to be useful--useful because it cuts through all debate with the claim "God says so!", and you can't refute this because God isn't taking his calls. It leaves the rulers free to do as they please, and what psychopath would not drool at such an opportunity? Don't worry about an atheist like Richard Dawkins. He's honest. Worry about an atheist like Karl Rove, who says in public that he is not fortunate enough to be a man of faith, calls believers "the crazies" in private, but can still deliver the evangelical right to any candidate for a price.

As for Constantine, he believed whatever was convenient, put the symbol of Apollo on his shield beside that of Christ to hedge his bets on who the people of Rome would support, and presided over the Council of Nicea to make damn sure that the religion would come out to his liking and benefit. He certainly had little use for its tenets, beyond killing anyone who disagreed with him, which was a practice he was already long accustomed to.

Agnosticism is orthogonal to belief or lack of belief. An agnostic simply says he doesn't know. Very few atheists claim to be certain that there is no God (and Richard Dawkins has never made that claim), and you may be surprised to learn that most believers don't claim to know either--that is why it's called faith.

Agnosticism is a weasel word used by atheists who want to avoid having arguments with believers, because as soon as you say atheist, they all line up to convert you. Do you believe in God? No? Then you are an atheist. Knowing has nothing to do with it.

Yeah, pretty much. As you get older, learning means knowing what to forget. You learn patterns, and forget the specifics. In the past 12 years, I've had to work on 6 gaming platforms, 7 languages, 4 development platforms, 8 API's, and on web, console, PC, and Java targets. This is the nature of the business. I would love the luxury of working on any one of these for more than 6 months, but that has never happened.

And I'm 52.

If you want a chance at anything to do with game development, graphics, visualization, AI, physics, etc., it's all math, all the time! So too with efficiency of algorithms, which will come up in an advanced job interview with any of the major companies (Google, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) I have never gotten rid of my university math textbooks, because I have to refer to them a lot. If you actually want to do anything creative (which is what you will have to do to go beyond standard business software) you will have to break those equations up and and understand how they work.

Uh, yeah, they have. They've crashed several times.

Bitcoins are guaranteed by computer, while real currency is supported by people and resources--you know, real things.

Currency is a social phenomena. Machines really don't count.

er.. bawdier... damn you Slashdot, you make me think in BANDWIDTH!

Ha ha... and before that... well, read Plato's Republic. The youth of his day were being ruined by the pan pipes, and by the baudier passages of Homer! And some of the early Greeks claimed that literacy was ruining youth because they could write things down, rather than committing things to memory.

Face it, most gamers exchange television time for game time, because gaming is more engaging. The real divide is between active and passive--between television and other activities. It turns out that kids who play video games are as likely to go out and play other games. I love video games too, so much that I was a game developer for 15 years, but on a beautiful sunny day, I have to get out and cycle, run, walk, read a book under a tree, or if there's a lake nearby, swim, paddle a canoe, or sail. If I don't exercise at least an hour a day, I feel slovenly, and I can't sleep well.

But the main divide that Zimbardo and Duncan pay no attention to is between extraverts and introverts. Introverts are viewed with suspicion by our salesman society; we're pathetic broken losers. We should be out pressing the flesh, chatting people up, engaging in team sports (notice that all of the ones I engage in are solitary.) But because we don't, there is obviously something wrong with us. And so, they go in search of the reason we are so pathological.

By the way, video games must be pathological, because they're NEW!

Porn isn't new. And many of the most successful pickup artists I've ever met had huge porn collections. Frankly, the difference I noted between guys who got laid a lot and those who didn't was that the good pickup artists were much more callous, more manipulative, and used women like sex toys. But never mind, that's a sign of maturity. Or maybe women are just as immature as men. This is nothing new, either. Feminism was supposed to address this, but so far, it hasn't made a dent.

Nor do they notice the trend that has been going on for a century: in an age of increasing specialization, the gestation period for everyone, both men and women, is getting longer. The Bar Mitzvah is at 13--at one time, this is when you became a man, and you were ready to start a family then. A hundred years ago, few went to any school beyond what we would now consider elementary school: age 13 to 15. Then we went on to high school, age 17 to 20. Then college, age 21 to 23. Bachelor's Degrees, age 22 to 25. Now advanced degrees, age 25 to 30.

Material expectations are now also much greater. You must have a car, a house, a steady job, to raise children. And the strategy of parents is different; while my parents and earlier generations had as many children as possible, hoping that some would survive, most parents now wait and bet everything on one, two, or three, expecting them all to survive.

The world has changed. But the doomsayers have not.

Because, you know, it's not like any legitimate content is shared by BitTorrent.How nice of them to block WoW updates. And it sure gets rid of those pesky linix torrents--I can certainly see why Microsoft is backing this.

Well said! Political self interest is not the same as rational self interest. I do like my life style, which I try to make as low energy as possible, but I have no wish to starve, live on gruel, or subsist on back breaking labour--all of which are likely outcomes in we do not find an alternative to oil, and if we do not address the challenges of global warming;. The anti-global warming pedants fail to understand that we are trying to preserve their lifestyle, not abolish it, and that we are asking them to make small sacrifices to that end--and that, if they don't, the sacrifices they will be required to make will break them utterly, and will be measured in the blood of their loved ones.

You can start with Wikipedia and follow on from there. The effect of prayer is basically placebo.

Of all of these, World Peace is the most likely--read Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, which details the decline of violence in the world and proposes explanations for it. Pinker's thesis is not a theory in search of data, but a mountain of evidence in search of an explanation. All of the technological innovations listed here will probably require us to divert resources from military spending to scientific research on a grand scale. Even human extinction is unlikely. Our worst scenarios may result in massive loss of life, but since humans are as tough and resilient as cockroaches, we can probably count on a large number of humans surviving them, albeit in conditions we would consider less that optimal.

There is some possibility that the rhythmic nature of the sound might have long term effects on health, or that some high frequencies might effect mood and therefore health.

This, of course, is entirely conjectural, and would need some solid evidence to back it up. Without that evidence, I would be inclined to chalk it up to folk superstition, encouraged in part by the anti alternative energy noise machine, which gave us, amongst other urban myths, the notion that florescent bulbs would require hazmat teams to clean up your house if they broke, because they contained some mercury (hint: the florescent tubes we've been using in offices for 70 years now contain more mercury.)

And let's not forget sports. When are one of these clowns going to ask for a ban on high school football? College football? Never? Of course not, despite the towering mass of evidence that demonstrates that this is a major source of violence in our society. This is not about violence, this is about being a demagogue, which means pounding upon minorities for the benefit of majorities. And who gives a fuck about nerds, right? Jocks rule the world, still, so football gets a pass.

This is all bullshit.

A little humility would actually go a long way to addressing the problem. Unfortunately we have so many populist demagogues out there right now, telling people not to trust 'elites' (that is, anyone who knows more on a subject than the demagogue, which pretty much includes anyone who knows anything at all) that humility has been banished from our culture. Even amongst the educated, post-modernism teaches that all opinions have equal merit. The low-brow political bullshit seems to be a recurring feature of democracy, but the high-brow bullshit is new, and is often used to neutralize opposition to the low-brow stuff. This is what we have to get rid of.

So while there may be no such thing as Truth (with a capital T, the thing that ideologues and the clergy try to sell you) we need to bring that truth, you know, the sort of thing you need to get by everyday.

By the way, I'm obviously the best choice for leader, since I'm so intelligent that I have realized that I suck at everything, which obviously makes me the most competent person out there...