You and I know perfectly well that there is no invisible friend running the universe

Prove it, then. Is your faith any better than theirs?

After you have some unpleasant experience -- break up with your girlfriend, argument with your boss -- just walk into another room and start doing something else

we wouldn't need AdBlock at all. For example, who complains about ads on the Google search page? The ads are highly relevant, and largely unobtrusive. If advertisers were smarter, they'd go one step beyond Google and give the consumer direct control of their ad placement. I don't mind ads when I'm buying, but when I'm not, I want them out of the way. Sounds like a UI problem to me. How hard would it be to solve?

Read the full text of the Fair Labor Act if you want to get a sense of just how deep down the rabbit hole government regulations go. I'm sure we all rest easy at night knowing that people making sugar beet molasses do not get overtime pay.

The provisions of section 207 of this title shall not apply for a period or periods of not more than fourteen workweeks in the aggregate in any period of fifty-two consecutive weeks to any employee who (1) is engaged in the processing of sugar beets, sugar beet molasses, or sugar cane into sugar (other than refined sugar) or syrup;

This is the key point. Compliance is a "systematic solution" -- a process that leverages IT architecture, coding practices, and human behavior to meet a set of standards.

I believe that this is exactly the kind of scenario that the new "team" version of Dropbox is aimed at fixing.

Dropbox is about backups and disaster recovery. It's a terrific service for SMBs who are worried that important files might get damaged, corrupted, lost, or stolen. They do NOT claim to securely store, they only claim to securely communicate. You want secure storage, you have to encrypt the file that gets backed-up on Dropbox yourself.

So, no, Dropbox is not your solution to PCI, SOX, or HIPPA. All of those standards require a whole heckuva lot more that just using a great online backup solution. The real question ought to be why anyone even remotely would think that Dropbox is providing solutions in this space. They're either trying to cast some good ol' FUD because they work for the competition, or they're just plain incompetent.

To say that Evernote "kicks butt" is a bit of an overstatement, don't you think? OneNote has the edge in organization (sections, tags); Evernote has the edge in cross-platform (web, mobile). Personally, I don't use either product, I use Zim because I need extreme cross-platform support. I only mentioned OneNote because that's an MS product, as is Courier.

What honestly could the Courier have done you cannot do with an iPad and the right application?

Take a look at http://youtu.be/GlpftPSuXe4 The big difference is that everything in the Courier is oriented towards keeping a journal of your content, whereas everything in the iPad is oriented towards presenting you with someone else's content.

Any by "orientation", I mean the whole panoply of user interaction, presentation, persistence, cataloging, etc.

for a content-creation-oriented user interface. The iPad is abysmal at content creation. Maybe MS could take its Courier ideas and use it to make a really spectacular, touch-based version of OneNote that could run on existing tablets -- any OS, not limited to Windows. Keep the split-screen functionality, just do it in software, not hardware. I'd buy it.

"And you are designed by millions of years of evolution ..."

A great example of some of the difficulties of stating evolutionary theory fairly. You can't say that evolution "designed" something, because evolution is a response to external conditions that affect reproduction. It is a weeding-out process. Thus, you'd have to say something like, "Over millions of years of evolution, some external sound source, whose effect on people whose sensitivity to sound was either narrower or broader than today, and which resulted in those people not reproducing at the same rate as today, has resulted in a selection of people who have a painful reaction to the sound of fingernails on chalkboards."

And if you can "prove" that line of reasoning, you are a better man than I. Evolution, fairly stated, requires a pretty significant level of faith.

This report has not been peer-reviewed, and no one should draw any conclusions yet. The "pre-publication" of this report is reportedly the work of the report's primary author; none of the co-authors were consulted. The Daily Mail is reporting that one of the co-authors, Prof Judith Curry, has even begun to distance herself from the report. I predict that nothing good will come of this pre-publishing gambit; this entire approach will confuse rather than clarify, and real science will bear yet another black mark.

All without external power! Using only gravity!

Instead of recording just the actors live and having to rely on CG to recreate everything else, with this we could film all physical objects live, and decorate it with CG, like an updated form of rotoscoping. I, for one, would welcome the demise of green-screen films. CG is still unconvincing, no matter how much money they keep spending on it. I still notice it. every. single. time.

A interesting response, esp. on the topic of people not being informed enough to make a good decision. I think we've all been involved in coding projects that were designed by committee, and know how that turned out.

However, we can't really trust only the people who know enough, because ethics is not a function of knowledge. Consensus forces a group morality on all actors, and that is really its primary benefit. No one is going to let anyone else rip the group off.

So, isn't it remarkable that our Founders understood that power must be divided, that representation must be balanced between pure democracy and elite rule, and that by building in the possibility of perpetual change in leadership, they were guaranteeing that change would happen peacefully, generally.

Some guys, those founders.