You are right!

To begin with, they don't speak English! And adding to that, they do not use dollars as their currency!

But there is a limitation in range. Unless you actively go to your neighboor who is in front of his home and actively touch him with the tool, it is very difficult for you to harm him. But with a laser that potent you can easily harm him without moving.

I don't know about USA laws but I think that you need a licence to operate such a dangerous machinery. And DIY vehicles are not allowed in the road unless they pass a complete inspection and get registered.

Not to forget that cars serve an useful function for a great part of the population, while the utility of 40W lasers for the common user seems marginal, at best (and no, saying than "in ten years it will be different" is not a reasoning).

Could you pick some better analogies, please?

As other posts tell, if you want X to pay you for a work, you need to convince X that such work is interesting to him. Just saying "I want to open source it" is not going to impress anybody

An option, if the product has a functionality common enough, would be the possibility of creating a base of developers (that may add some useful functionality) and users (aka as "testers").

This can be combined with a marketing or "coolness" approach so that such company can be seen as providing something for free (don't they give free pencils?).

Photographers? Talk about painters.

In the tomb of a Pharaoh (I think it was Rameses II), some of the painting was about his "crushing victory" in Qadesh. Turns out the "crushing victory" consisted in avoiding being crushed himself.

As long as there is a way to transmit information, there is a way of lying. News at 11.

That would explain why, when someone claims that he can read the program and can predict the future, the more sensible people laugh at them.

I had no idea DNF had been released!

Note: I do not condone slavery or appartheid as a form of politics, but it is just a theory for the results

Maybe what the researchers have found (given the history of humanity) is that in a country with several ethnics groups you can have a ruling elite that concentrates capital and act as a whole to keep their privileges, and an oppressed, cheap workforce without rights to be used as a source of "profits"

That said, anyway it probably is just a structural development; Great Britain and Germany in XIX century, and Great Britain and Japan in XX century could not have been any more homogeneous yet they did way better than said, the heterogeneous Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires.

Since nobody really expects these means of dying(*1), the answers are not relevant.

(*1): In fact nobody expects dying, unless you get at a very old age.

I understood that /. editors are not going to come to my house to execute me with the method I selected (why does this remember me "The meaning of life") so I will die of the usual heart attack, traffic accident, old age, etc.

So, I chose the coolest death I could think of (from an external point of view, of course).

That said, given your stance, why did you vote at all? Maybe if you hadn't voted you would have got immortality!

My bet? They profited from the syrup properties.

It was an insider operation. Workers of the reserve dipped inside the vats each day; when they arrived home they just had to remove from their bodies and clothes and into the vat.

I will follow your logic and see how it scalates: If your time is truly meaningless, you should leave your job and family, go to live to the step of a granite mountain and start carving your name (or whatever inspired words you chose); this action doesn't hurt. You have nothing to lose, which means there is only potential for you to gain.

When I see someone doing things like that (ok, not exactly that, but trying to present themselves "for posterity"; look at political leaders for clues) I know that they are not doing that for posterity, but for the fuzzy warm feeling of being so "important" that the posterity "needs their words".

You stated that

. If this satellite is useful, it means that then we would no longer be alive, not to say conscious. It is like buying a bumper sticker that you can only put when your car is in the junk yard.

In the event, I won't care about the futility of existence because I will be dead. And, as I do know now that I won't care then, I don't care now. That does not mean that I would like to die now.

Also, who told you existence has(or has to have) a meaning (other than itself)?

That is not the issue being discussed. What the GGGP said (and I agreed) that the project is just an (expensive) form of a "I was here" graffitti... and has the same uses ("hey, surely people who walks by this wall in the future will be VERY interested to know that I was here and I did a graffiti here"). And at least you can meet the graffiter in person someday, but this satellite is thought to be found when nobody is here to be met.

What is that you want, the alien version of goatse?

Anyway, more seriously, the Armstrong / Aldrin photo in the moon is a good idea, but the "state of the art technology" will become obsolete and meaningless to ourselves in perhaps half a generation, that is a bad example.

But the utility of that contraption kicks in only after we are no more, so your argument will no longer be valid.

So I agree with the GP. Also, I find depressing that some people are counting on the extinction of mankind, and are more worried about the time after that and some hipotetical aliens (who may not even exist or come close to Sun, let alone find a piece of debris around a dead planet).

In essence, this gets to be both a silly and depressing idea. Great boooh.