Why do you only want to give criminals the right to carry guns?

Maybe that's a sign that the Singularity is indeed going to happen. The whole idea is that the speed of technological achievements continues to increase to the point new advances start coming faster than we can follow them. After the Singularity you're presumed to live like this: you start to become acquainted to the last industrial revolution-like development, with all it entails in terms of new technologies, and you hear it's already 20 generations behind, individual technological achievements within each of those revolutions so numerous they can't even be numbered. Then you start to vaguely and very superficially try to get a glimpse of what they were about and 50 new revolutions happened in the meantime...

Science fiction just isn't possible when science goes faster than your writing. At best you start writing fantasy as the difference isn't clear anymore.

Walking is a privilege, not a right.

I've once read an article by a guy who managed to escape a dictatorship. He said that no country truly appreciates freedom until it's gone through a few decades of fascism and/or of a dictatorship of the proletariat. It seems it's time for the USA to have such an "enlightening" experience. The good side: afterwards things will improve. The bad thing: a restoration usually happens only two or more generations down the line.

Well, at least your grandchildren will see it.

The vegetarian position isn't that we aren't predators, it's that we can chose to not be predators. I know people who did in fact make the fully informed choice of continuing to eat meat after pondering the pros and cons along multiple moral dimensions, and others like myself who've chose to stop eating meat, but most people never make a choice proper, they just go along with the flow. IMHO that amoral automatism is worse than actually opting for either alternative.

By the way, deriving a moral position (an "ought", in the case "I ought to eat meat") directly from a set of attributes (an "is", in the case "my body is able to digest meat") is usually considered a weak argument or even a fallacy. It usually requires an added goal system or similar to become strong. Check the is-ought problem for details.

No, no, no. Just as worshipers. The slaves are the robots. As for the soldiers, you only need them to deal with troublemakers, and a satisfied populace doesn't cause problems (to you at least). Besides, why risk revolutions and the like if doing things slowly can be as much effective? Link perfect, permanent fun to giving up on babies and over time the issue of too much useless people existing solves itself. It's win-"win" all around!

It's more likely that some kind of guaranteed minimum income will be adopted once robots are cheap enough and productive enough for the rich to not mind sparing a small percentage of all the surplus they produce to keep the masses in house getting high with access to 24 hours per day of American Idol / sports / reality TV / video-games / porn / sex, all for the cheap, cheap cost of a free vasectomy / tubal ligation. Bread and circus. Brave New World, not 1984, with most people utterly satisfied. No revolts, no demands, no nothing, all the while the 1% steadily moves into the 0.1%, then 0.01%, then 0.001%... with extended life, then immortality, then cybernetic augmentation...

YES! I take that as a great compliment! When you're learning a language you're usually so awful that native speakers notice you're foreigner and compliment you for your efforts: "You can speak English very well!" The actual measure of competence is when you become good enough for people to start thinking you're a bad native speaker instead of a merely good non-native one. So, thanks! :-)

By the way:

You're contradictory. ;-)

Yes, plain English, no doubt. Too bad it remains meaningless English at that.

But that's the sad thing about "defenders of the Truth" such as you really. They are always so CERTAIN of their certainty that everything and everyone is an enemy or a misguided fool from which Truth must be Protected. And thus offense, dismissal, ostracism, even persecution arise.

Me, I content myself in being a simple "seeker of the truth", always asking "how?" and "why?" and ready to change and already having changed dozens of time in my life. I pity defenders really: they miss so much...

By the way: ethimologically "idiot" means the person that keeps repeating the same patterns again and again. What does it make of someone who keeps using "You're an idiot" as her standard reply? ;-)

LOL, aren't we defensive? :D

Actually, I'd prefer a peer-reviewed journal article published in a respected academic journal and confirmed by independent researchers, but in an emergency a Slashdot post will do. ;-)

Wow, you have an interesting way to not answer. I guess that's because you cannot. You have an intuition, and it's more or less inarticulable, so you work around it in circles instead of facing it directly.

Here's a hint: our minds (and I don't mean simply "brains", I mean minds) are defective. Look "within yourself" for any real answer and you're looking into a shattered mirror full of shadows, false starts, invalid conclusion and fantasy intuitions and perceptions. Base yourself on those and you're deluding yourself under the veil of Maya. That, basically, is all there is to it.

See, this is an excellent example of what I mean! You've provided a nice black box, "awareness". But here's the question: how does "awareness" work? Open the box and show me what's inside, step by step, then I might be convinced. Otherwise I'll take it to be a synonym of "MAGIC!!!", in this exact way, with capitalization and exclamation marks:

"The simplest most logical solution (...) is that god is the sum total of MAGIC!!! in the universe."

With the added benefit that it even sounds better! :-)

The problem is that the solutions usually take the form of a black box with a name tag attached that's supposed to solve the problem. I personally am a big fan of classic philosophy and advanced theological thinking, they're simply awesome. But the solutions they arrive at always rely on some bit of mystery that you must take at face value, otherwise things don't work.

Free will is a prime example. Whenever you try to crack it open and figure out how it works you end up with a deterministic formulation. So you only have two options really: either you assume there is this free will attribute no matter how nonsensical it looks when observed under the cognitive equivalent of a tunneling microscope, or you give up and assume that free will is a perceptual error, and then moves to the much simpler problem of figuring out why we instinctively believe there is such a thing when it makes no sense.

Another good example is the classic theist concept of the prime mover as God, which in turn is a pure one without moving parts, that somehow is at the same time will, and goodness, and power, and law, and knowledge, and action, and planning, and outside of time and space, and containing time and space, and ourselves etc., all of this more or less just because. It all sounds amazing, and it indeed is, but when you stop, take a step back and look at it critically you're really left only with a big question mark, and a question mark, no matter how incredible is the sentence that comes before it, isn't an answer.

So it isn't that those thinkers didn't arrive at solutions. It's just that they're bad solutions. But I agree that most science fanbois would benefit immensely from actually knowing those answers so as to at least not go around reinventing the wheel again and again and again...

Precisely! And for the same reason there were no Capitalism regimes, ever!

As Galileo used to say to those who told him the Moon was perfectly spherical because there were an invisible substance filling the valleys: "Yes, the invisible substance is there, but on top of the mountains, making the Moon's surface even more rough!"

They could have a level scale for every different content. Let's say you start a character at "snow region" and does all its content, thus becoming a specialist at surviving there. You'd be a "snow specialist level 10". But your knowledge doesn't transfer to deserts. Or forests. Or dungeons. Or alien worlds. Or dream dimensions. Etc. etc. etc. So whenever you want to experience a specific new content you start that kind of content at level 1 and have to progress to become proficient at that.

Then comes a new forest expansion. It could extent the "forest" range to 20 or whatever. So you create a new player and want to experiment the new content, you go to the original forest region, get to 10, then sidestep directly to the new expansion, continuing from 11.

Alternative options: do it based on creature types, or magic types, or whatever really.

In short, there are ways to make things works so that you can expect to experience old content and new content without having to advance through 80 levels of unrelated stuff or being jumped to level 90.

Because here in Brazil the government underfunds everything military or related due to the fact that since two decades every civilian government we've had was composed of people who were enemies and/or were persecuted by said military during our dictatorship, and hence deeply, deeply dislike them.

ABIN in particular is a joke. They have no actual technological prowess nor are they going to develop any. Maybe on the very long-term they do, but right now nope, not a chance.