Except humans, they are a big existential threat to humanity.

And yet I don't see we going genocidal on each other. Oh, wait. It all makes sense now.

As is, SSL has no enforcement whatsoever, of course its exploited and abused, that's my point.

As for passports, they are faked, yes, but not all the time. In whatever country, you're totally and utterly screwed if caught with a fake passport. The real world isn't spy movies you know?

Governments aren't about trust, they are about compliance. You can be unhappy and distrustful all you want, but if you aren't posting from jail, odds are that you wouldn't fake SSL certificates just as you don't fake passports.

It doesn't need to be perfect, after all, just better than the meaningless system we have now.

Oh, I see. Induction is solved because we can show, based on empirical evidence, that our empirical evidence is correct. Great.

The more charitable way to describe that is "bootstraping". People in the know sometimes shorten it to BS ;) But only when they don't want to say its circular reasoning.

Nah, that first post can't be the coolest.

Entropy says that if it really was the coolest, it would also be the last.

See, deducing across universes is easy.

Is this novel, or complex, in any way? Aren't aspects and business intelligence covered in the first half of CS courses?

Why is 'call backs' in quotes? They probably are just callbacks, nothing arcane behind it.

I guess venture capital and headlines really are all about the buzzwords.

I knew it! Hollywood couldn't write 4 lines without fucking one up.

To be fair, the others aren't capitalized correctly either. So they only got 'Hollywood' right, and it must be because that's copyrighted.

Alright, it's definitely authentic.

Actually, that's a bit of a misinterpretation of knowledge. And religion.

Assuming knowledge is a justified/rational/reliable/whatever true belief, there can be still religious knowledge. Now, most scientists wouldn't consider "mystical revelations" as a valid source of knowledge, being irrational/unreliable/whatever, but there's a lot of difference between a random belief and a supernatural-based belief, and religious scholars have made this distinction for centuries. There are lots of other non-empirical knowledge sources after all, math, logic, introspection, and so on, and faith could just be one of them.

What you're describing is a kind of relativism so extreme I don't think it has serious proponents. Not educated, anyway.

I'm not defending paranoia, but if I were planting a cache in a crowded place, and receiving suspicious looks, and was still determined to put it there... what would be the problem of chatting up someone nearby (like a vendor that sticks around), showing how it works, asking where he thinks would be a good spot (just to engage, no need to actually listen :).

At worst it would be someone uninterested, but capable of clearing this kind of misunderstanding before panic mode. At best its someone that thinks its cool and joins in afterwards.

Seriously, I'm not a "people person" at all but this is just common sense.

Conspiracy nut guesswork really is something. Dome the stars are painted on? Really? That's absurd!

You assume the government did actually launch the probes. It's all a setup. Can't you tell between a real engineer and an actor?

What we should be asking is why is Hollywood behind it. Stick with the facts.

Would your otherwise "wasted" time directly provide NASA funding or lead to legitimate new discoveries?

I'm not trying to be adversarial, but even from a cynical point of view, things still look better than the alternatives.