They don't have feet, they're an entity... what they need is to be sucker-punched in their Accounting department and then kicked repeatedly in the Legal until they promise to stop being a dick.

Hey don't push your politics on me, man!

Well... here's where I turn to Dawkins (in his written word, not his spoken; he has very little patience for the indoctrinated, which is of course understandable). In his books he quite eloquently espouses the appeal of a life spent in pursuit of knowledge, and the wonderful purity of trying to do good for its own sake, and realising that we DO have power over our own lives and our own choices.

He also has an awesome knack for breathing life into what may previously have been thought of as fairly dusty subjects. Even though I already considered myself an undoubted atheist and moderately well-versed in the ways life worked, I was nonetheless engrossed in his treatment of natural selection in The Blind Watchmaker! I actually just took it down off the shelf last night because it's been 6 months since I read it last, and funnily enough it's the only non-fiction book I've ever considered RE-RE-reading (I have a good memory for books, I hardly ever put any through a second iteration).

His TV appearances and debates are enjoyable for a difference reason - it's funny seeing stupid ideas get shot down, but it's in his written work that he really shines, since there he can truly be an illustrative, positive force, and not just The De-stupidator. :)

Well, it's not really optimism but rather a feature of the scientific method if you think about it - while it certainly is POSSIBLE for false information to enter the repository that we call 'scientific knowledge', and this certainly happens on a regular enough basis with small things (as people pose and test new hypotheses, and they are then refuted or confirmed as the years pass), the overall trend will ALWAYS be an increase in the breadth (range) and resolution (accuracy or precision) of our knowledge. The scientific method, when applied properly, is inherently self-correcting. :)

Now, this can be likened somewhat to certain open source projects, which while yes they may be available for anyone to scrutinise and attempt to submit improvements (like scientific knowledge), there may always be areas that don't receive much attention, and these bit can contain 'bugs' for some time... but as soon as those parts become relevant and more frequently used, the bugs will be ironed out relatively quickly.

Even if every country in the world converted to official theocracies tomorrow, I believe this progressive course would not be significantly slowed unless they started killing scientists and people who think like scientists.

Sure thing matey - we all stand on the shoulders of giants... some generations are destined to be the equivalent of giant human pyramids (great leaps in the collective knowledge), while others may have to settle for being shoulder pads (little incremental refinements) ;)

I think it has more to do with our metabolisms, but ok. :)

I pray to the Sacred Spaghetti that this day may come sooner rather than later!

Whatever happens, I certainly plan on moving to Sweden before I start a family - they have one of the only school systems I would consider putting my own children through (pretty much anywhere else I'd homeschool). They also have a lower mindvirus infection rate than most other countries. ;)

He can afford really good treetops though. And louder shouting. In many languages.

As soon as I saw this topic, my first thought was "holy crap, that's a lot of comments in a short time", and my second was a memory of that Sliders episode where actors and jocks weren't glorified, but the biggest nerds were the superstars with the big ad deals etc - I want to live in that world, lol.

Oh, also, I remember how much it sucked finding out there were people smarter than me (I mean, by more than a little bit) when I was about 13-14... but at least then it was still just a handful of people I'd met online and offline, plus a few hundred people I'd just heard about... I can't imagine what it must be like to be more ignorant than most of the people you meet, that must be so scary and depressing *shudder*

The sooner the masses get educated the sooner we divert at least SOME of our resources away from 'defence' and into more worthwhile pursuits, though I doubt the reigning oligarchic corporatocracy would allow such a farce (in their eyes) to come about. :( They haven't been constantly diluting the education and upping the mass-meds to try and make people SMART, after all. :/

Ew, furry alert :/

j/k, this is cool stuff lol

One of the good things about science is that even if a new (fundamental) idea is hard to get accepted, at least you know that *eventually* it'll make it into the paradigm... since in time more and more people will 'discover' the same truths as yourself (if it's correct and supported by experimentation etc).

The same cannot be said for getting new moralities or updates ways of thinking added into a religion or other doctrine of societal behaviour.. since many such human-borne mindvirus botnets have internal checksum tests that attempt to reject access to the network from nodes that have defective/altered installations - or attempt a reinstall with factory defaults.

Experts Exchange doesn't have their useful content (answers) actually concealed - you just have to scroll down past 2 pages of ads and categories and voila, there it is. At least, this has been the case the dozen or so times I've searched for something and clicked through to them from Google so far this year, and I don't use any agent switcher or any other funky stuff (just NoScript and latest FF, if they obscure it through javascript then that'd be why).

I always get a chuckle when people complain about them, since as far as I can tell, they're being defeated by a scrollbar :D

No, I was going on information from Portugese members of the MMORPGs I used to play.

Citizens of several countries (Poland, Portugal, Brazil, Philippines, a few others) tended to be quite nationalistic in-game and tagged their nicks with BR, pl, etc, so it made them easier to identify, and though perhaps I'm wrong about Portugal certainly the BR/PH often mentioned they were playing in groups rather than at home.

This made it more interesting when people got ripped off, of course, since it meant the targets were very concentrated - infect or hard-hack one machine, get 50 accounts.. from what I hear heads did roll (figuratively) ;)

I have an excellent write-up of a 'hack-back' we performed against a pissant who installed keyloggers on some comps at the local nerd hangout to do just this (steal MMORPG accs) a few years back - I'll post it sometime if it's appropriate :)

At first I thought, "No, wait, maybe he's talking about computer ownership in Japan..." but I see that's not statistically different from US/Aus either:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of_Internet_users (there's no direct computer ownership listing)

On a side note, there are certainly several countries where many people who have access to computers and the net don't have their OWN computers; making use of large 'net cafe' industries instead - Brazil, Portugal and the Phillipines, for instance. This would play havoc with the idea of restricting the syncing of ONE device to only ONE computer, and requiring a device to be wiped if it syncs with another comp, a la Apple.

PrefBar allows you to change your user-agent, you may be able to use it to impersonate a GoogleBot (they seem to be indexed by google so it's worth a shot). I can't test it just now as I have 58 tabs open and some of them have large flash videos loaded, but this may be just the thing to facilitate your tripe-viewing in future. :)

Are you claiming to be a better tool?

So you're already a convert? Let it all out, brother! ;)

"Corn?? When the hell did we have corn?? ... Bugger, out of paper towels!"

How long have you known you're autistic?

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Disclaimer: I have ass-burgers, so I'm allowed to make relevant puns. You know, like Chris Rock can make jokes about those of his melanin-endowed persuasion being delinquent and a drain on society, or wops and lebs can make awesome shows like Pizza . :D

Yeah, sheesh.. #373 is the ability to select "scrambled" or "sunny side up" for your Hero's breakfast before hitting the road. o.O