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Religions have been adapting to discoveries of new intelligent live for as long as they've been around. Like the inhuman savages that European Christians discovered in the New World 500 years ago. Christianity would struggle a bit with the notion that these aliens clearly aren't children of Adam and Eve, and the fundamentalists would probably have to give up on their 6000-year-old Earth-centric universe, but they'd quickly move on to preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to them.

Spirit and Opportunity

The notion that Facebook supports free expression is really quite laughable. You don't even need to be a government to get Facebook to censor images for you. Their content-reporting system allows one self-appointed censor to complain anonymously about an image they don't like (such as two clothed men about to kiss, or PG13-level partial male nudity), and if the complaint gets assigned to someone equally homophobic, the image gets deleted and the person who posted it gets blocked, with no effective method of appeal. The whole Facebook content-policing system is rigged heavily in favor of bullies and censors.

Blu-ray is already a physical-media format that we don't need. The CD isn't obsolete simply because a higher-capacity disc came along to replace it; it's obsolete because there's a better way to music files: the internet. The DVD is on the way out for the same reason. In fact, if not for the streaming rights being a licensing clusterfuck, Netflix would have completely shut down its DVD-mailing business by now. We don't need another higher-resolution media format. We just need a convenient way to watch movies at whatever resolution our display devices can manage, and that's the internet + a licensing clearinghouse.

Health care still uses faxes. Lots of semi-confidential information + routine signature requirements + an industry staffed largely by computer-illiterates = an amazing quantity of images of sheets of paper transmitted via the switched telephony network.

While it's true that low-interest voters tend to be low-information voters, there is also the problem that highly-interested voters are often highly misinformed voters. You have fundamentalist preachers frightening their congregations to vote in favor of bans on same-sex marriage by telling them horror stories about gay couples adopting babies to molest; or dogmatic political organizations telling their members to vote against a candidate because she's going to take their handguns and hunting rifles away, when all she said was that she'd look into restricting sales of assault weapons. Voters who haven't been mainlining bullshit propaganda crafted to "mobilize the base" can actually have a better grasp of the truth.

Another human that you create is not a "semi-autonomous bot". It is a self-aware person, and is held responsible for its own actions. Maybe if you can demonstrate that your bot is sentient and fully autonomous, that'll get you off the hook.

I assure you that the Louis Vuitton handbag was a knock-off.

One thing in Apple's favor is that their primary competitor (still Microsoft) keeps doing so many things wrong with their software. I recently bought a Surface Pro (for the hardware, which is on par with Apple's in terms of quality design and manufature) and Windows 8.1 has managed to break so many of the things they'd finally gotten right in Vista 2.0 (Win7).

"I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, "for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

"But," says man, "[that article in the Wall Street Urinal says that science] proves that you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. Q.E.D."

"Oh dear," says God, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.

– excerpted from Douglas Adams (for the cretins in the audience)

Is it time to revive the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put jobless youth to work planting trees (among other things) during the Great Depression? It famously "brought together two wasted resources, the young men and the land, in an attempt to save both."