Agreed. What they are predicting is not a population increase in Africa, but a devastating population collapse. What Africa is currently undergoing is the baby boom, when a scattershot reproductive strategy (have lots of kids, no birth control, and hope some live) meets modern medicine. But Africa does not have the food, resources, or social capital to support this, unlike the first world during their baby boom. Emigration is not an option either; the first world has already begun to face the limitations of cultural assimilation, realizing that a large population from a culture with low social capital cannot reasonably be expected to assimilate to the norms of a country with high social capital without massive disruption. The habits and traditions just aren't there. Tribal warfare--gang violence--and zero sum economics (you get rich only by taking from others; a common idea in Europe until only three or four centuries ago, and probably less) are still the norm in sub-Saharan Africa. They're like us, but a few centuries back.

Was there reason to suspect improper practices? We've been having a lot of problems in Canada with the Conservative Party (currently the party in power.) Is this a follow up on previous known practices?

All true. Too many people have this cartoon image of those they disagree with as being comic book villains, cackling with glee while plotting their next nefarious act. What this misses is the reality of motivated reasoning, by which people convince themselves of opinions of convenience--those which are flattering, consoling, or advantageous to themselves. They don't know they're lying. Even Hitler thought he was going to heaven, not in spite of what he did, but because of it.

And here's the killer question: how do you know that you're not doing the same thing? Serious philosophers and skeptics agonize over this all the time. There is actually a method to determine this, but that would take a book, not a posting.

George W. Bush was not an evil man. In most ways, he was exemplary--smart, considerate, funny, well read, disciplined. But he was a terrible president, grossly incompetent (and as much as I like Obama, he has not impressed me yet.) Bush's trust in Donald Rumsfeld, whom Gerald Ford called the worst person he had ever met in government, is a testimony to this. Rumsfeld really was a bad man, whose ambition trumped all other considerations, but in this regard he is actually quite rare.

Bad politicians are usually not bad people. They really do believe they are doing the right thing, but they came to believe this largely because they wanted to. The idea that this might be morally suspect is actually quite new; religion is a product of the same kind of reasoning, and witness how long it has been given a free pass. A new standard of ethics is being created, and it is still in its earliest stages. Don't be fooled by the cartoon version of reality.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of Eno--Music for Airports, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, or checkout Prophecy Theme from the Dune soundtrack. The rest of the Dune soundtrack, by the way, was done by Toto, who did a surprisingly good job.

Actually, don't give up on music quite yet. Music with lyrics will distract you--Tom Waits, Bob Dylan, or Lou Reed would take all of your attention. But a lot of techno can actually function as white noise (which is why a lot of coders in a busy office swear by it)--the beat gives you an adrenaline boost while the content vanishes. Bach and other forms of baroque music can also serve the same function; it fades into the background but has a calming effect, and many people consider it the sound of ordered thought.

Well spotted. Because it is obviously the role of the state to enforce obsolete business models. Especially when the ruling party is paid by the people who are dependent upon them. No bias at all there. Nothing to see here. Move along.

It sounds like most of the controls are wired controllers--that is, if the controller electronics or computer have become faulty, you no longer have a way to control the car. It's a bit like playing a game and having your controller stop responding while your character goes running into a room full of bosses, only in this case, you're the character. This is a lot more common in cars today that most of us are aware; there are many cars out there that have millions of lines of code designed to prevent you from making a catastrophic mistake, but who knows what can happen if this goes wrong. The steering seems to be the only thing that was still available in this case.

I suspect that the reason that Europe has a large Muslim population is the same as the reason that America has a large Mexican population: cheap labor. That and colonial ties to their countries of origin (this is certainly the case of France and Algeria, and the U.K. and Pakistan, India, and much of the Middle East) , as well as the fact that they are just much closer to the Middle East than we are.

Radical Islam in Europe seems to be the new punk for disaffected Muslim youth; their parents had enough of that crap back home, which is why they moved. What better way for a surly teenager to annoy his parents than to hang a bin Laden poster on his wall. Kind of like Che in the 60's (who was, by the way, every bit as batshit crazy as bin Laden, if not more so.) This will pass. Eventually, standing on the sidelines and watching life pass you by loses its charm.

If the European left seems crazy, a recent history of genocide will tend to push the needle into the red in any conversation about immigrants, outsiders, or other races and cultures. As for Muslims voting socialist, that doesn't seem likely, as socialists tend to be atheistic. Canada's recent turn to the right is largely attributed to an influx of immigrants who find the right's regard for religions more appealing. It's more likely that poor Muslim immigrants in Europe don't vote at all.

There seems to be a misconception that religion is separate from politics, and that the involvement of religion in politics is somehow an aberration. This is a belief that is based upon the very recent and historically brief period in which many Western countries have observed this separation. This period now seems to be coming to an end, by the way, with blasphemy laws making a major comeback, within and outside of the West.

But unless a religion specifically prohibits political involvement (and very few do), it is not only true to say that religion is political, but that religion is politics. Expressing disappointment that it is used by unscrupulous people as a tool of political and social control is a bit like being shocked and surprised that a handgun can be used to shoot someone. That is what it is for. All ideologies (and religions are ideologies) are morally neutral; they can be used for good or evil. They are simply tools. It hardly matters that the Soviet or Maoist regimes were not, strictly speaking, true Communist states. Communism is still vilified, and quite rightly so. It hardly matters whether the rulers are true believers or not. As always, religion is considered by the people to be true, by the wise to be false, and by the rulers to be useful--useful because it cuts through all debate with the claim "God says so!", and you can't refute this because God isn't taking his calls. It leaves the rulers free to do as they please, and what psychopath would not drool at such an opportunity? Don't worry about an atheist like Richard Dawkins. He's honest. Worry about an atheist like Karl Rove, who says in public that he is not fortunate enough to be a man of faith, calls believers "the crazies" in private, but can still deliver the evangelical right to any candidate for a price.

As for Constantine, he believed whatever was convenient, put the symbol of Apollo on his shield beside that of Christ to hedge his bets on who the people of Rome would support, and presided over the Council of Nicea to make damn sure that the religion would come out to his liking and benefit. He certainly had little use for its tenets, beyond killing anyone who disagreed with him, which was a practice he was already long accustomed to.

Agnosticism is orthogonal to belief or lack of belief. An agnostic simply says he doesn't know. Very few atheists claim to be certain that there is no God (and Richard Dawkins has never made that claim), and you may be surprised to learn that most believers don't claim to know either--that is why it's called faith.

Agnosticism is a weasel word used by atheists who want to avoid having arguments with believers, because as soon as you say atheist, they all line up to convert you. Do you believe in God? No? Then you are an atheist. Knowing has nothing to do with it.

Yeah, pretty much. As you get older, learning means knowing what to forget. You learn patterns, and forget the specifics. In the past 12 years, I've had to work on 6 gaming platforms, 7 languages, 4 development platforms, 8 API's, and on web, console, PC, and Java targets. This is the nature of the business. I would love the luxury of working on any one of these for more than 6 months, but that has never happened.

And I'm 52.

If you want a chance at anything to do with game development, graphics, visualization, AI, physics, etc., it's all math, all the time! So too with efficiency of algorithms, which will come up in an advanced job interview with any of the major companies (Google, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc.) I have never gotten rid of my university math textbooks, because I have to refer to them a lot. If you actually want to do anything creative (which is what you will have to do to go beyond standard business software) you will have to break those equations up and and understand how they work.

Uh, yeah, they have. They've crashed several times.

Bitcoins are guaranteed by computer, while real currency is supported by people and resources--you know, real things.

Currency is a social phenomena. Machines really don't count.

er.. bawdier... damn you Slashdot, you make me think in BANDWIDTH!

Ha ha... and before that... well, read Plato's Republic. The youth of his day were being ruined by the pan pipes, and by the baudier passages of Homer! And some of the early Greeks claimed that literacy was ruining youth because they could write things down, rather than committing things to memory.

Face it, most gamers exchange television time for game time, because gaming is more engaging. The real divide is between active and passive--between television and other activities. It turns out that kids who play video games are as likely to go out and play other games. I love video games too, so much that I was a game developer for 15 years, but on a beautiful sunny day, I have to get out and cycle, run, walk, read a book under a tree, or if there's a lake nearby, swim, paddle a canoe, or sail. If I don't exercise at least an hour a day, I feel slovenly, and I can't sleep well.

But the main divide that Zimbardo and Duncan pay no attention to is between extraverts and introverts. Introverts are viewed with suspicion by our salesman society; we're pathetic broken losers. We should be out pressing the flesh, chatting people up, engaging in team sports (notice that all of the ones I engage in are solitary.) But because we don't, there is obviously something wrong with us. And so, they go in search of the reason we are so pathological.

By the way, video games must be pathological, because they're NEW!

Porn isn't new. And many of the most successful pickup artists I've ever met had huge porn collections. Frankly, the difference I noted between guys who got laid a lot and those who didn't was that the good pickup artists were much more callous, more manipulative, and used women like sex toys. But never mind, that's a sign of maturity. Or maybe women are just as immature as men. This is nothing new, either. Feminism was supposed to address this, but so far, it hasn't made a dent.

Nor do they notice the trend that has been going on for a century: in an age of increasing specialization, the gestation period for everyone, both men and women, is getting longer. The Bar Mitzvah is at 13--at one time, this is when you became a man, and you were ready to start a family then. A hundred years ago, few went to any school beyond what we would now consider elementary school: age 13 to 15. Then we went on to high school, age 17 to 20. Then college, age 21 to 23. Bachelor's Degrees, age 22 to 25. Now advanced degrees, age 25 to 30.

Material expectations are now also much greater. You must have a car, a house, a steady job, to raise children. And the strategy of parents is different; while my parents and earlier generations had as many children as possible, hoping that some would survive, most parents now wait and bet everything on one, two, or three, expecting them all to survive.

The world has changed. But the doomsayers have not.