Comment crAss (Score 5, Informative) 100
No shit.
Every minute playing chess would be better spent [fill in your personal alternative here]
Perhaps people like, y'know, playing chess as a game? It's interesting, it passes the time, and it's actually quite challenging to become even moderately good at the game. The fact that algorithms can play chess is irrelevant, playing chess is not an activity that humans play algorithmically - they learn to play it intuitively, using pattern recognition and a bit of analysis, not exhaustive analysis and a whole bunch of rules, tables and a large database of known games to draw on. Chess programs employing 'simple' heuristics don't beat every human player - top players can still beat the top programs, though it's getting close. The programs in typical chess implementations do beat novice players, but in turn they are easily beaten once you get better at the game.
It's like saying there's no point playing soccer because a machine that can fire balls into a net could be easily built that would beat a human goalie every time. It really misses the whole point.
crease the fluidity of information and ideas by taking actions to flatten the organization
What does that even mean? How can you 'crease the fluidity' of anything? Sound suspiciously like typical management-speak, and I don't think that's what MS needs at all.
The last few years I've thought it would be awesome if I could watch the fireworks from a small private plane.
Sorry to be the one to break it to you, but watching fireworks from a plane is likely to be a big disappointment. Because you can see so much area from a thousand feet or so, the fireworks become comparatively tiny, and also often viewed against a background of urban lighting which makes them hard to see. Even huge public displays like the Sydney NYE displays look pretty unimpressive from the air. Fireworks are only impressive when viewed from the ground against a dark sky, close to their launch point.
Not believing in a deity means accepting on faith that the universe came into existence without the help of a deity.
Certainly there are aspects of belief and "faith" even in an atheistic viewpoint, because there are some things that we simply don't know and, probably, cannot know. But saying "god did it" is a very absurd fallback, because it begs the obvious, childish, yet profound question, "where did god come from?" Adding another level of complexity to explain away the already difficult complexity we're faced with doesn't make the problem simpler!
The optimum committee has no members. -- Norman Augustine