Holy shit, how can people be so clueless. You think an unemployed programmer should just pack up his family, ditch his mortgage, and move to fucking Vietnam to work for a dollar a day? When is he going to find the time to learn a language, while he's struggling to feed his family? How's he going to afford the trip? What makes you think his chosen country will even allow him to immigrate in the first place? What makes you think there will even be jobs there, if the problem is technology making human labor unnecessary?

No, you know what he can, should, and will do? He'll fucking murder you, and take your stuff. If your world view relies on the underclass laying down and dying for your convenience, you're going to be in for a rude, and fully deserved, awakening.

I suppose because Segway the first fairly successful version, no one else can make one? I seem to recall that the idea here of Mac clones were touted as perfectly acceptable, but of course Apple is Evil.

Whether or not you were indoctrinated in religion when you were young and impressionable, if you haven't experienced God the only rational choice is that the question doesn't matter.

As to indoctrination, I think you're putting way too much weight on that. One fellow I drink with sometimes was brought up in a strict Baptist family in Kentucky, yet he is absolutely convinced that God can't possibly exist. Another guy I knew was brought up by atheists, and had a religious experience when he was strung out and homeless.

As to "why Jesus" it's because of what he taught (The Buddha was certainly full of wisdom, I learned a lot about Buddhists when stationed in Thailand). Basically, love everybody. Treat folks like you want to be treated. Don't judge.

I don't think Jesus and Buddha would have had much to argue about except that reincarnation thing, and maybe karma.

funny, of course the norm for humans isn't leaders elected by votes.

Sure it is, and even dictatorships acknowledge this. What is a cult of personality or state propaganda but an attempt to persuade people to vote for the current leader and system, either formally or with their feet? What is brutal oppression other than an attempt to secure votes through intimidation?

You can't rule without the consent of the ruled, and a formal voting mechanism is simply a means of establishing who has it in a public and unambiguous way.

Because this isn'tStack Overflow.

Only thing Microsoft does is handle the servers,

And Xbox One. It wouldn't particularly surprise me if this was a backroom deal to intentionally bloat the game to make it look heavier, and by extension the XO more powerful.

When you have 128 FLACs playing back at the same time, the dynamics change.

You can't stream 128 uncompressed audio streams from the HDD simultaneously, which means they have to be preloaded, which means you could just as well store them in compressed form on HDD and uncompress during loading.

kids have already jumped ship. once their parents started 'fb-ing' they figured it was time to find something else.

they won't last in the spotlight forever. the whole social networking thing is like a swarm and swarms never stay in one place forever. another will pop up and the swarm will go there (or a few places).

the thing that annoys me the most is that webmasters seem to feel compelled to put up those stupid F and T icons and to join in that nonsense. if you are a company, you 'have' to be on both of those mindless services.

I'd like to see some icons that proudly state 'I'm NOT on fb or tw. I have no icons and nothing for you to follow me on'. I'd have more respect for the business if they put THAT on their website.

yes! cool idea.

bring back the coasters and start a new service called silverbook !

yeah, it has 'book' in it, so you can assume the US based corp attorneys will be all over that. "you used OUR word. we own that. stop it!". sigh.

Note that "listening" and "reading" are verbs that describe activities, not beliefs. So TFA in fact agrees with nobebeast's interpretation.

So he contradicted himself in the article. ;-) Actually, I'd wonder how (if at all) he tested whether it was the beliefs or the activities that had the observed effect.

And we might note that both are possible. We have a word for beliefs that have pharmacological effects: "placebo". People tend to think that placebos are ineffective, but a number of studies have turned up cases of placebos having an effect on people who believe that they are actual medicines. In particular, belief that X can have an effect on a specific brain activity can easily lead to X having just that effect on people who believe that it will.

But the real problem with religious beliefs is that they have a history of leading to very negative effects on non-believers who encounter the believers.

It seems that these days, adding "with drones." to any old headline makes it newsworthy.

Yeah. Why would a tech site has any interest in autonomous(?) robotic couriers flying around the city? Tell me something about the sci-fi future we were supposed to have already!

Any increase in resource consumption results in an increase in price. Any increase in production results in a reduction of price. If the system gets to a point where consumption outpaces production then the price rises, and it can rise a lot! This results in people using less of the resource and finding alternatives.

The collapse results when neither the supply (because all oil fields are already producing all they can) nor the demand (because you must get stuff from place to place somehow) are elastic, and are forced past each other. At that point the resulting shocks going through the system tear it apart, and individual parts die from losing their inputs and outputs.

The problem is that developing alternatives takes time and energy; they don't simply materialize the moment you need them. But until that moment, it always makes more short-term profit to not invest in the research, so no one does. Add the enviromental groups who complain no matter what solution anyone tries, be it a nuclear plant or even a windmill, and you have a system reaching a local optimum optimizing for a dead end.

It's a great business opportunity. You can sell that land at a high price to gun nuts.

And then the gun nuts can combine work and play by selling tickets for zombie banker safaris.

"Honey? That guy who repossessed our home 20 years ago is a Chernobyl zombie now. I know where we're vacationing this year."

You're just redefining terms in contradictory fashion. There was no appeal to a divine being, hence no theocracy.

The essence of theocracy is not an appeal to a divine being. The essence of theocracy is claiming your national system reflects the "natural order of reality", which in times past was described in terms of gods and in Soviet Russia in terms of ideology, which described the both history, future and such details as how to make frost-proof wheat (with predicatable results). It even had its priest class: the Communist Party. It persecuted heretics and killed them, after extorting a confession about dealing with the Devil - excuse me, "counter-revolutionaries". And so on and so on.

In other words, theocracy is perhaps the ultimate expression of human hubris and unwarranted self-importance.

Putting the leader on a pedestal is not the same as saying the supernatural ruler in the sky has blessed your rule.

No, but claiming the entire world is going to see the light and join your nation because fate says so is.

The cost of this is extreme - by some estimates, most people pay 30-60% of their earnings for the year to support such a structure (if you don't understand the average 22% cost of goods as embedded income taxes, google for the Harvard economics study).

And after they do, the remaining 70-40% is still enough to cause the obesity epidemic. Percentages are meaningless when comparing two different cakes; it's the final size of your slice that matters.

And the more the US outsources, the less will be there when the USD loses its value.

Someone once likened private enterprise to the strong workhorse of economy. Well, guess what? Workhorses don't plow the fields unless the farmer makes them, they just sit around and eat the seed corn. Shake off the laizzes-faire, grab the reins and force the companies to send production back home.