What I find most amusing, is that at least according to the credits, they had him do his own voice, on episodes in which he only came through as a voice. I mean you shouldn't need the actual guy, when a text to speech program would be indistinguishable from his real voice.

Well where I'd have to disagree, is that we know what sucks... We know what sucks for life, that evolved in the conditions of earth. We can't even imagine what life outside of our conditions are, assuming it is possible. Sometimes I think assuming that the nearest life, is most certainly going to be needing a water ritch atmosphere with oxygen hydrogen and CO2 in the atmosphere, is similar to coming to the conclusion that if we find inteligent life similar to us, we should expect them to speak chinese, because that is what the majority of inteligent life capable of complex communication in which we are familair with speaks

*we've already terraformed it, developed a society, met other life forms, declared war, and the new planet is now uninhabitable due to the weaponry used in that war.

A society isn't exactly an area that "opting out" is plausible. A police officer can't exactly take the time to determine whether or not someone opted into the "save me if someone is holding a gun to my head" plan, The fire department can't wait for the fire to spread from your proporty before begining to fight it, we can't exactly set up a "food tested to be safe" and "eat at your own risk" sections of the grocery store, A good portion of things that are paid for by taxes, are things that just have to be do it for everyone in the area, or don't do it at all sort of things. Humans have already learned that creating a society with more than 50-100 people, involves some form of infrastructure, and everyone in that society has to chip into that infrastructure. If anarchy worked, there would be a first world country that has an anarchy you could move into. Unfortunately natural selection did not favor such societies, they died out or were invaded and taken over by societies that actually had a functional military etc...

While I agree with the fact of the rediculousness of how the government can do crime in many ways that would otherwise be illegal. Equating taxes to it is just plain stupid. Taxes are logical payments for services in which the government can and does provide. IE the roads, the oversight into companies to prove that our food isn't entirely relabeled rat droppings, fire departments etc.. Now is it done perfectly or even well? Not in the least, but no matter what a functioning society is going to need a tax system. Even if a perfect rebuilding of government happened, taxes would absolutely be a necessity.

Actual security that will protect people from themselves, costs a lot more than compensating the 2% of that 66% who actually get hacked. Person gets hacked for his own stupidity, company may or may not need to compensate the victim. lets say this amount comes to $100 per 1,000 users as a high estimate pulled out of my ass. Company B uses real security, that somehow completely eliminates fraud, blocks users out after 3 wrong passwords, and requires really complex passwords. Users keep forgetting their passwords, support is now overwhelmed, company pays $400 per 1,000 customers on support.

This I have to second. Really that is the problem with the majority of MMORPGs these days. WoW is actually closer to an exception, in the sense that the hours to get to cap, are pretty small compared to the amount of time one spends in raids etc... after getting to cap, compared to many other MMO's in which there is no point in the game in which partying becomes the standard, or said point is so insanely far down the road that under 10% of players reach it. What baffles me is how many players complain when it is harder to solo than to group up. If the game makes grouping easier, but soloing harder, then people who want to work harder and solo can. When the game makes grouping the hard way and soloing easier, then the 10% that want to group up, spend 2 hours looking for a group, because 95% of players are going to go the most efficiant way no matter what, and the people who actually want to have fun and group up, have to spend hours trying to find others. I've always considered solo MMORPGs analogous to inviting a whole bunch of friends over to play solitare.

You are behind the times on most of these, the news stories of police stations experimenting with the tech, and making porn came out weeks ago (there's even an app for making porn already). Crime on the other hand I imagine backfiring rather quickly, gives great easy to access evidence for the police after your arrest, there are better sneakier devices to do that out now, that don't involve ties to a big company that tracks everything you do. But hey we've got people posting their ill gotten gains on facebook and then getting supprised that they are arrested all the time, so nothing new here. Casinos? what kind of dumb casino's are we talking about here. Again tiny hidable cameras have existed for years, glass by comparison is bulky, blatently visible and well known already. Casinos are not known for having poorly trained staff, and being behind the curve on technology (ones that aren't, don't stay in business long). When it comes to illegal actions, glass is just a terrible choice.

Not to mention the secondary cost, lets assume testing is the same on both situations, a car goes out to the manufacturer, update is applied, update botches, car software system is bricked. The dealer can pull a spare hard drive or whatever it is stored on out of the back, get the car up and running etc... Now OTA update botches, does the dealer make a house call to swap out the car's storage, or do they pay for a tow truck? When an update fails and the device is rendered unusable... getting a car to the location to be repaired is considerably more expensive than a phone.

Safety + security indeed, which in this case are one and the same. Imagine someone manages to spoof an OTA update for your car, and it is a trojan horse causing your car to go into a serious wreck etc... Potential side effects could be devastating.

people subject to views outside of logic, may switch between them at random. Also very few if any religions explicitly say anything against life on other plannets, if christianity is what we are talking about, it says nothing to oppose life on other plannets, it simply never mentions the concept at all. Just as it never mentions kangaroos, koala bears or the american continent. If a spacecraft were to land on earth, the only thing christians would see different is in spite of us being clearly technologically inferior to them, christians would still hold to the idea that humans are made in the image of god, and thus the aliens must have been created by god to serve us in some way.

Creationist is a pretty bad example. first off being a creationist, doesn't bar people from science in any field. When a creationist or anyone else sets forth data or experiments, it is put through the peer review process and tested for validity. Someone already pointed out, newton was a creationist, but his laws of motion worked just fine within their context. He also believed in alchemy. His belief in alchemy and the supernatural, had no impact on the acceptence or rejection of his physics. Nor does his brilliance in physics, give alchemy a free pass into accepted science. The assumption that all laws of physics, are subject to change at the whims of a supernatural being, of whom we cannot get to break the laws under controlled conditions because he doesn't like being tested, will not be accepeted by the scientific community, but that has no bearing over whether the scientific community will accept a testable provable claim, made by someone who holds beliefs that are untestable or flat out rediculous.

You seem to be under the impression that the community of home PCs listens to slashdot users and follows what the geeks say. If that were the case we really would have the year of the linux desktop, as software developers rush to get their software compatible with linux. Or the common user does not pay attention to the geeks, but rather has a bias towards what is familiar to them and gets in the way the least. win 7, was familiar to the common users, programs opened more or less identically to how they did on windows XP, or if they were unlucky, vista while they had it. The average joe does not pay attention to slash dot banter, or ask the geek down the street or do any research, they walk into best buy, ask the geek squad what he recomends, tests the floor model to see how fast facebook loads on the 1,500 dollar computer they were recomended and consideres that full research. When they do the facebook checking stage, and it isn't identical to what they are used to, they freak out and exclaim how much they hate the new operating system.

Historically speaking, google is one of the least likely companies to actually sue using their patents compared to any other large company. Barring situations in which someone else is already suing them over a stupid patent, and them pulling one out to say OK you are infringing on X call it even. Not saying they are perfect, but within the industries they are fighting in, google is usually the least retarted about patents.

right, but that's the thing. Humans do have to commit some extent of the tables etc... into their memories, How much space humans can devote to it, of course varies human to human, but saying a human can use them, and a computer can't would be hypocritical. Unless we can quantify exactly how many tables the grandmaster has memorized, and forced the computer to use that exact quantity.