That isn't true. Sports don't exist to be elitist and show others that you're better than they are.

That is the definition of "competition".

You find competition in everything whether you are talking elite coders, spelling bee champions, among sales people and amongst companies.

Some people said Steve Jobs was "elitist".

Competition brings out those characteristics. Sports is a way that it is done where the arena is physical prowess.

>A lot of phenomena in astrophysics are ridiculous, but real.

No there are many ideas in astrophysics. We don't know if they are real.

Dark matter? Maybe or maybe not. Dark energy? Maybe or maybe not.

Hawking radiation? It is an idea, it hasn't been proven or disproven.

Speed of light limitation? Probably, but how are neutrinos that have mass going 99.9999% the speed of light? That should require almost infinite energy shouldn't it?

Big bang? A large body of evidence points to a time limit to the beginning of the universe, but cosmic background radiation is the only stronger evidence of a big bang --- yet this could have another explanation.

Cosmic inflation? Could be a non-starter for reasons we currently don't have a handle on --- case in point, it is only happening *far away*. Supernova are used as standard candles, but what if we had different looking supernova 10 billion years ago and our measurements are wrong, therefore inflation isn't happening.

Astrophysics is an emerging field, even now. There are few ways to test all the ideas.

Many of the theories of the exotic blackholes rest precariously on a shaky house of cards, because there is no convenient way to test the ideas.

The ipv6 traffic is probably almost all cellphone bandwidth.

A guess.

Maybe for voting, I don't see your argument on the freedom of speech thing or the other ones.

And land was cheap and plentiful and plenty of trees to cut down and make log cabins.

Not many very apartment renters back then, as you seem to apply was going on.

In 1948, the United States voted for that declaration.

"n 10 December 1948, the Universal Declaration was adopted by the General Assembly by a vote of 48 in favor, none against"

This was the West announcing their idea of human rights.

(see Wikipedia)

If negative mass and positive mass collide, what would happen?

They are supposed to be opposites, and let's presume they cancel each other out ...

What could they cancel out into? You still have to conserve the energy.

High energy photons can create particles with mass if they strike matter, what kind of photons would the negative mass particles be related to?

Even positive and negative mass don't cancel out, would having a lot of positive mass and negative mass in the same area cancel out gravity?

What role does the Higgs play in negative mass?

I'm no particle physicist, but negative mass seems to integrate very poorly into the system here.

And presumably negative mass would have particles of some sort, some sort of unusual electrons or quarks or protons or maybe none of those --- but all mass as we know it interact with photons (neutrinos excluded?), so presumably negative mass would need to reflect light or absorb it.

I want to give the pizza guy a $2 tip. Do I really want to get his email address, register online, have him register online, get his mobile phone number and all of that.

How is your suggestion even in the same universe as "more convenient than cash"?

Are we assuming all transactions humans do are with merchants?

Naive as hell !

Crappy list of examples, I'm sure there are hundreds of examples: 1) What about if I want to buy your [insert bike or computer or whatever]? 2) Baby sitter? 3) Kid's allowance? 4) Pay some kid kid to mow yard. 5) Underground transactions (illegal stuff)

The importance of cash will continue to decline with transactions with merchants, but it will never remotely approach "cashless".

Back in the 1960s after the moon landings, people would have expected we would be well past Mars by now. Probably Jupiter, Saturn or other stars.

The moon landings happened 45 years ago!!

I see no evidence of any programming that "learns" or is the slightest bit adaptive.

And immortality wouldn't help --- evolution is powered by the failures dying off.

And although slightly off the topic, what good would immortality be when advances in genetics will make humans better.

And immortal 2014 human living in the year 3000 would be like a Homo habilis hanging around us. Would be genetically obsolete.

This article is --- well --- shortsighted, bordering on the naive.

You aren't right in a technical sense on this at all. It scary what Javascript and WebGL can do and the speed of it, but what is really scary is what a mess Javascript is in 2014 --- makes Perl look like BASIC. No need to obfuscate Javascript in 2014. Also I'm not sure if technologies like NaCL and WebGL should be in the future --- I guess, but it will be coming.

But more to the question, what kind of web is this leading to ...

I used Adblock and Flashblock right now just to have a half-way decent experience on the internet to avoid a ghastly internet flash ads from downloading untold GBs of data/video/audio to annoy me without a way to mute it.

The internet is a train to nowhere and no one is driving it, big corporations will turn it into a minefield of advertising (which is FINE, by the way) but rip apart everything good (involuntary flash ads, bandwidth, speed, shitty cross-domain javascript, DRM, turn web standards into circuses) to get there.

Steve Jobs back 3 years did a rant again Flash, which at the time and still now embodies the villanous nature of plug-ins.

And with WebGL and video streaming and DRM in HTML5 --- your internet may get turned into a turdball --- just to waste everyone's bandwidth to show ads you will never click.

Which rights of yours are being assaulted when politicians and 1%ers use Google privacy requests to snuff true information and private dissent under the guise of "privacy".

One man's right to "privacy" is another man's right to control your information.

My "right" to privacy can be used to conceal fraud, criminal activity, bad press and do it with the brute force of government on my side.

And the brute force of government is the power to make you poor, to have you arrested, to put you in jail if you do not comply.

That.

UFOs, Bigfoot, Ghosts!

You would think the modern age of cameras in everyone's phones would produce evidence-a-plenty of these kinds of things.

But reality is far less interesting than we want it to be ...

No magic, no supernatural stuff --- and sadly no bigfoots or aliens that bother to come here and snatch cows.

If it floats in water, it is going to get hit by perpetual exposure to UV radiation.

The same way sailors get sun burnt very quickly. UV gets reflected by water, enlarging the exposure. UV tears apart molecular bonds, which is why, for example, the ozone layer is so important.

YouTube video has developer labouring away making an XXX app ...