Good thoughts.

Regarding self: without some wicked discipline, the needs of your present self overwhelmingly seem to outweigh consideration of what's beneficial to future you. Perhaps this is biological. The need to survive the day would trump some perceived future benefit.

Regarding insight: placing yourself into the vantage point of another is an important part of the key, but you still need objective and accurate self-appraisal. For me, that's the more difficult part.

I don't know. A week is a looong time on the internet not to be outdone.

Because even a blind squirrel will eventually find a loose nut behind the keyboard.

It's great we live in a relatively wealthy and enlightened time where the special needs of the few can be borne by the many. The things I'm taking daily for granted that others still only dream to do! And I still can't explain why I continue to allow myself to have an occasional bad day, despite this awareness.

Errr, the two conditions may not be mutually exclusive, but perfection is in the eye of the beholder.

The company alpha can control every brush stroke to his complete satisfaction and still be mistaken in his vision.

Eased out of the company he started in a garage, I believe Jobs was just the right mix of had something to prove and accurate vision. Being a hands-on-every-stage individual often implies an inability to delegate to or trust coworkers, so it isn't always a successful way to manage.

Embedding AI in the infrastructure of virtually everything in the first World has largely gone unnoticed, and indeed, once something wonderful is regarded as commonplace folks largely forget it is fueled by artificial intelligence.

AI has advanced, simply not in the way popular culture predicted it once would.

There will be little need for human-like replicants running about while humans themselves are inexpensively abundant.

Catering to our demographic.?.?

The corporatocracy will not have it's growth stunted regardless of political affiliation.

That would be a really great, plot twist of a movie...

Shit!

What if we're already eating intelligent life because there is no Babel Fish?

Nice,

and if they arrived here via interstellar travel, I assume seeing them means they had no intention of wiping us out.

I believe the GP has underestimated the ability of earthly religions to adapt quickly to reassure this phenomenon was something they saw coming.

I assume they have a group of smarter members of the Home World monitoring instruments strapped to their monkeys flight suits.

Religion is great comfort to the faithful believer, especially in times of great strife. It's value for this one reason alone implies the flexibility of false god belief to adapt to new information.

We do it in Science all the time.

I can buy the invisible unicorn as a plausible creature if a million life forms evolved to mammalian level on a million worlds... but calling them gay seems more like an explanation for why they are rare in this time/space continuum.

Outside the realm of computer savvy individuals like those who frequent /., the method you describe is simply beyond the capabilities of many who steal for a living.

(beyond the halls of this honorable posting forum), you can bet your bottom someone will be doing it by the end of the week.

I think I'd rather put up with the madness of the court's evaluation of each individual case of liberty, and whether or not they compromise the rights of others, than to have certain ones crossed off the list to begin with.