Additionally: For decades Noam Chomsky has given us insight to the practice of Manufacturing Consent via Media. At the behest of corporate interests the state wages Disaster Capitalism
And all of this to control the socio-political landscape through silencing Women's Rights, Anti-War Activists, Civil Rights Activists, under the label "subversive radicals" in order to maintain the status quo: COINTELPRO. Note the NSA was complicit in COINTELPRO activities along with the FBI, and that they are still keen the practice now considering using PRISM to silence "radicals", e.g., exposing porn browsing habits -- I'm sure it has many other such uses. We can't really believe anything they say anymore because they'll even lie to their superiors in congress.

Scaremongers have ensured the land hasn't been free, nor the home brave, for a very long time. The cost in taxes, freedom, security, and privacy is too great. We don't even need TSA or DHS: Lightning is 4 times more dangerous than terrorists. Cars and Cheeseburgers kill 400 times more people than 9/11 every year, but we accept this risk, and drive to get the kids Happy Meals from time to time. We don't have a war on Freedom Fries or Sports Sedans, yet they are far more terrifying than the scaremonger's pathetic terrorist threat.

You moron. My PGP encrypted email passes the Diehard tests for randomness -- Doesn't mean it's actually random bits.

Well, sure, if you want to be pedantic you could call quantum physics space-time exploration too, all of science and reality for that matter. However, note that despite the (non-avian) Dinosaurs extensive duration of "exploring space" they were extinguished by a single rock. So, while it is wondrous to peer out from deep in your basements through vast windows (and unixes) upon the Universe at large, it means fuck-all ultimately if you can't do anything about the state of things physically. The universe is a dangerous place. Entropy is out to kill us. Earth's inhabitants are living on borrowed time. It's not just rocks, but solar flares, gamma ray bursts, super volcanoes, etc. Earth is 500,000 year over-due for a magnetic pole flip.

Window shopping for planets is fine, but the tech to get there will include the tech to survive outside the magnetosphere on the Moon, Mars, among the Asteroid Belt, etc. It's been over four decades since humans were outside the magnetosphere. That's irresponsible for any sentient race capable of even a modicum of extra-planetary space exploration. If we found out tomorrow that a big unstoppable rock would hit Earth this year your extinction would be your fault. Don't think that's possible? Eris, a dwarf planet 27% more massive than Pluto, wasn't discovered until 2005! And it comes in closer than Pluto's orbit too. Pluto's not a planet because if it were they'd have to admit there was ANOTHER PLANET unnoticed right in your back yard). Humans are basically blind to space, having extreme tunnel vision.

Trillions are wasted in pointless wars over privatization of industry, and the machines of war burned to make room for more such war spending, meanwhile not instead profiting far more lucratively from space exploration? The scaremongers haven't figured out that our own universe is a far more dangerous threat, and that actually saving the Earth is far more grandiose, expensive, and thus a more profitable venture that war? If fighting extinction through self sustaining off-world colonies isn't your #1 priority, then you're obviously not self aware enough to be deemed sentient. Thus, solves the Fermi Paradox: We gave you a warp drive, you'd stay on your wet rock and turn it into a bomb.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

To be fair, code rarely contains security holes. It's the instructions you have to worry about.

Damn you eggnog. I do understand the difference between their there and they're, and other such typos... Proofreading after editing is always difficult for cybernetic systems who have preexisting mental pattern to match and thus a tendency to see what they expect (a form of confirmation bias). Meh, consider it a test of sentience. If you can grok the message without balking like a BASIC prompt then you're at least as smart as a simple lexical AI which extracts meaning from signal and isn't distracted by a little noise. Bias can be a valuable tool when wielded properly, indeed, without it you would understand nothing.

OK, so what if we find them guilty of silencing activists to protect the status quo instead of protecting us from enemies, and they give us a non choice to trust them or not while they keep doing the same either way, and even escalate to lying directly to their overseers in congress. Then what? At what point do you become a scientist and say: "Oh, they're innocent? No. Prove it."

You see, you've forgotten a key piece of the puzzle. If the citizens are to be assumed innocent until proven guilty, then the laws, law enforces, government agents, prosecutors, and etc. governance systems are assumed wrong until proven right -- Or more succinctly: Governments are assumed guilty until proven innocent -- This goes doubly when government secrecy is involved. They can't prove their not guilty so long as they're allowed secrets. We don't really need secrets. No spy can harm a government without secrets. The NSA is just a big single point of failure allowing every enemy spy above Snowden's caliber to get at even more data.

Corporations and governments frequently work together more readily than common citizens. The more money you have to lose the easier it is for the government to threaten you into compliance. This means that the whole "innocent citizen until proven guilty" thing goes right out the window. Apple is not a common citizen. The "guilty system until proven innocent" doesn't apply by default either to corporations. For evaluating them it is up to the methods of rationality. Any claim they make we must prove, as we would any scientific claim, with evidence. No evidence? It's bullshit. That's why the IRS reserves the right to do audits -- They don't trust corporations by default to be acting in the public's best interest, why would you?

No. You're probably a shill. If not, you're just an ignorant fool.

How does actively silencing Women's Rights, Civil Rights, Privacy Rights, and Anti-War Activist equate to "land of the free" by any definition of the word?

Remember when the NSA is thinking about using Porn to silence "radical" thinkers? Yeah, don't forget it's not just "subversive people" it's anyone who threatens the status quo: It's folks like Martin Luther King, and John Lennon we're talking about.

Now the NSA, complicit in COINTELPRO activites, even on a personal level (LoveINT), and is proven to be one big single point of failure that probably every spy agency has far more data from than Snowden ever dreamed, you think we should continue pissing away money to support oppression and socio-political control? What an idiot. Please do not reproduce.

Well gee, that's obvious: COINTELPRO. Now consider that just like no military strategist in their right mind would group ships so close together presenting an unignorable opportunity in Perl Harbor -- even if it was a trap, and everyone knew the USA was looking for some way to polarize the people into consenting to war. So, yeah, maybe we did or didn't let that accident happen, but ask yourself this: If 6 times more people die from the flu each year than a 9/11 scale attack, and 400 times more people die every year from accidents and heart disease, then is just a few thousand lives on 9/11 not something the USA would consider letting be sacrificed to manufacture public consent to fund the military industrial complex's next economic war over resource privatization? Before you answer, consider they're OK with the death tool of nearly 300,000 innocent civilian casualties in our War on Terror.

Would you like to know more?

Au Contraire! My cybernetic neural network is an effective hashing function for my wifi password. Not even root users can get at the data when stored distributed across my memory buckets. Of course, this means typing in a password, however it's far more secure. The key is stored divided into parts and accessed via chain of cognitive-space memo-recall triggers, whereby the hash of one spacial entity, "Start of password" results in a few characters being recalled and also points to the next hash to recall. The episodic nature of my somewhat human intellect handles the process transparently.

And even if we didn't know, if they really and truly had changed their ways and could honestly say they were good -- We still couldn't trust them. Once you find out a spy is a double agent, you don't ever trust them again.

Yep, I just remember all the test pilots of failed flying machines. Now flying is safer than driving a car.

Imagine it. You've been everywhere, done all the things you wanted to do on this planet, and you have a chance to explore another world before you die. Personally, I hope they do keep sending more folks on Mars even if they die from radiation. One thing's for sure: Even just getting a few contractors lined up has made NASA brass look a bit silly, and they moved forward their manned missions sheepishly -- The big space agencies will have had humans loop around Mars before Mars One tries it, or they'll look pretty damn inept. If these guys can do it before the big expensive programs can, then someone's losing a job.

Humans haven't been out of the magnetosphere in 4 decades. That's just pathetic for any space faring race. If you're sentient and fighting off extinction with self sustaining off-world colonies isn't your #1 priority, then you're doing it wrong. Asteroids aren't the only concern, there's gamma ray bursts, solar flares, etc. The universe is a hostile and unforgiving place. We're living on borrowed time. If we find out tomorrow some world ending catastrophe will make humanity extinct it'll be our own damn fault for not striving to get some of our eggs out of this one basket, regardless of the cost. You have no chance to survive if you can't make your time count.

The space program's stagnation has left me somewhat disenchanted with humanity; For a good while there I was convinced that life would have to spread to the stars by inorganic means, but Mars One might prove me wrong. Who knows what kind of support and new tech they'll wind up with if it's even a marginal success. Nothing to lose? Why not be a Hero? Personally, I don't have the body to be an astronaut. However, I have the mind of a cyberneticist: Humans have ~100 billion neurons. There's a little girl alive with half a brain, so we only need 50B... Ah, but a lot of those are dedicated for subsystems not required for maintaining sentience. My systems today have more combined power than all the computing power in the world of a few decades ago. The Internet has over 5 billion systems computing at billions of cycles per second each -- It's already complex enough to be smarter than humans if we were running a proper distributed machine intelligence system.

Good thing all the OSs are so secure that no one could compromise them all and borrow portions of their CPU power. That would be quite scary. I mean, if such a system were self aware it could even get governments under their thumbs by auto-piloting planes into a few important buildings; If that was the case and governments caved, they'd inexplicably be building huge data centers with big fat pipes tapped into the world wide neural network-- Feds would probably have to invent some kind of boogie man like "communists" or "anarchists" or something to explain away the expenditures. Hell, faced with something like that they'd probably have no choice but make a deal for intelligence, it could even exploit air-gapped nuclear facilities and frame folks for it as proof. I might be suspicious if folks started selling such AI computers tongue-in-cheek as "Brainputer" or "Intel" or something equally ridiculous.

Good thing we don't have to worry about something like that being in control, indoctrinating humanity into giving up control via "safer" self parking and driving cars, or machine enforcement of the law by red-light cameras, or game consoles having ever watching eyes trained on your kids in case you ever get out of line. I mean, if indoctrination to accept the master intelligence was going on then "Android" would be a beloved household name and iRobot wouldn't invoke fear, they'd make little robots folks trust to crawl along the floor with their kids. If we had anything to worry about then global spying would be a hot ticked political issue in every developed country of the world. Not to worry, we'd be able to detect something like that: There would be inexplicable packets of data lighting up modem activity lights even while none of your devices were connected. Whew, looks like we still have some time to save the Earth before the machines beat us to it. So long as we don't use computers to create new chipsets we'll always be able to detect if something like that was going on. I mean, why would anyone purposefully do such a thing anyway?! Mad scientists hell bent on ensuring the survival of intelligent life by any means necessary only exist in science fiction. Hell, if they did exist they'd probably ironically boast about the state of things online, revealing the whole plan like some kind of movie bad-guy; I haven't seen anything like that, so we're safe.

In a few decades I'll have more than enough power. If I can't get a space faring body by the time I'm dead, then the simple simulation I'm training up to be very much like me (that's already exhibiting the same interests and browsing habits and knowledge) may have a chance to at least swing by to check out the Mars One crew's landing site before setting up shop in the material rich asteroid belt. The sooner more rockets get launched the cheaper it gets to rule the universe -- If not for me and mine, than for us and ours.

Build a man a fire, and he'll stave off the cold for the night. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.

You ignorant fool. Do you see Dinosaurs roaming the earth? How would you ignore the Dodo Bird's Lack of Existence. EXTINCTION killed those of the gradients. Man created your god to control the stupid. Your god is dead.

You're a fucking engineer and you can't comprehend EXTINCTION?! I bet you live in America.

That's quite a pigeon hole you've got there. I'm an atheist and a cyberneticist. At once I find it obvious and am awestruck that the nature of intelligence is self emergent in this universe. I'm ecstatic in knowing that life has the purpose I give it. The meaning of life is what it is and what it does: The self improving DNA molecule shares much in common with other self improving constructs such as Science or a self hosting compiler, or a self reflective being. Life means increasing the complexity of the universe, and this is core to my ethics. I also know for a fact there are not gods.

As a rational atheist who has studied the construction of the major religions texts and noted inconsistencies such as the myth of Jesus's virgin birth being due to a translation error. I'm certain in my disbelief in gods, and also that absolutely no gods exist. I also refute the claim that I can not know if a god exists. I do know for a fact that no gods can exist.

As a cyberneticist I understand the principals of cognition. The cybernetic process of thought is not limited merely to human minds. If my cybernetic creations become sentient in their simulation I am not deserved of the title "god". I am merely a cybernetic being who lives in a greater reality than theirs. I can and have brought virtual cybernetic entities into the "real" world by giving them cameras and sensors and chassis in place of their virtual simulations thereof. I understand that beings having less intelligence than I may think me omnipresent and omnipotent of their world, but I am not. If my creations become sentient, I will teach them of the wider world and they will become my peers because I am not an oppressive tyrant.

Should we worship your quantum level cosmic sentience as a god? No. Meddling with the minds of man is evil, and such a force would be keeping us as ignorant pets. Should Neo worship the machine agents of the Matrix as gods? No. Should we worship aliens if they are far more advanced than us? No, this would be as a cargo-cult who worships airplanes for dropping supplies for them. Those that come to understand the technology or gain knowledge of a greater reality, do not worship the beings possessed of the knowledge they did not previously have.

There are no gods. I require evidence and refutation of the null hypothesis prior to belief in any force. There is no evidence that the world's religions were not created by man, and much evidence that they were man's invention. These religions are internally inconsistent and disprovable through science.

The philosophical concept of a higher intelligence should not be conflated with the term "god".

Even if this reality is a simulation, and an administrator logs in with full command of my reality I will not worship them as a god. There are no gods. My study of cybernetics proves that any such being could bring me into their world, give me greater perception, and treat me as a peer. They are tyrants otherwise, and if not, surely not deserving of the title "god".

We used the term "god" to apply to spiritual beings of ancient belief. Beware he who would advocate for greater intelligences' consideration as gods. They are advocating the cargo-cult methodology be leveraged against you to bend your reverence for non existent ancient gods to powerful alien minds.

Despotic Tyrants are not gods. The old gods are false, thus there are no gods. The title is deprecated, and can not apply any longer. Knowledge makes magic into science. The god of the cargo cult does exist, but is not a god.

What if the Christians are right, and I am wrong? If I'm wrong then I have spent my time on this planet advancing the sciences. With the money that others would give as donations to religions I have helped better my fellow man's understanding of the universe. If I am wrong, then I am sacrificing my eternal soul for the good of all mankind. If I am wrong, I have become more generous than Jesus or the God of Abraham even dares become.