So you're frustrated with evolution.

What's your counter-theory? God drops by regularly and plants a few new species? Hardly seems like a conventional creation myth.

Do you believe the timeline that includes dinosaurs? Where'd they come from, etc?

See... it all comes back to deadbeat skydaddy, or to us continuing to examine and study and use the scientific method. You have fun over there with your flavor of crazy; I'll be over here with curious skeptics and a nice sharp occam's razor.

OK, let's stipulate for a moment that the thought that a rock created life is superficially absurd.

Equally absurd is inventing a belief system predicated on an unseen sky-daddy that created it (out of what and from where?), sans any evidence.

OK, so now I'm done stipulating anything except that the universe exists and lacking evidence to the contrary, we're going to have to figure it's origin out without skydaddy, who's a deadbeat of epic proportions.

A scientist doesn't get insulted by either of these prospects. We just go to work piecing together the cosmic data and trying to see what that data and our understanding of the rules can tell us.

The funny thing is, the earth is so freaking young compared to universal age, it's 3 generations plus some slack just counting stars like itself. Throw in hot/short-lived stars, and the estimates go up to double-digit estimates of the number of stellar generations possible in the 10+ billion years before Sol was ignited.

From these earlier generations, supernovae create rarer elements. Give them literally hundreds of millions of years to a billion years to spread around and recoalesce and form another star system.

In each new star system, collect that stuff into planets. If the planet has fluids, things'll mix nonstop. With very little time on a planet with fluid components, all sorts of compounds form. Oxides. Carbonates and Nitrates. Tons of other molecules. Small organics (hydrocarbons, mostly). Let them group up via natural sorting mechanisms (erosion, siltation, wind-wash, crystalization, freeze/thaw cycles). Bombard these with the occasional external burst of energy (fire, lightning, or that sort of decay of adjacent material).

There's an old saying: nature abhors a vacuum. In the case of thermodynamic economics (how much energy in, how much energy out), this is applicable because any time a reaction can either release a lot more energy or happen more efficiently than another and trigger at a lower potential energy, it will. Stuff that burns, will. Stuff that oxidizes, will. Etc. So, about the time that some complicated compounds form that don't have an easy release (don't burn, don't oxidize, don't dissolve), they'll accumulate. And when something comes along capable of exploiting that energy, it will.

More complex mechanisms? Same gradual increase in complexity. When an organic compound forms that rips apart secondary compounds for energy and similar organic compounds as residue/waste, the process becomes self-sustaining. Let it fizz and expand for even a few years and it'll spread until it consumes every such resource on the planet and then 'dies off' (no input, no output... but not technically dead since the limiting factor is a lack of inputs. Every time something generates a few more tasty molecules, they are short-lived, being ripped apart by our fizzy proto-life compound. When a few such fizzy protolifes exist and happen to overlap in a way that fizzy 1 eats 2, generates 3 which eats 4 and 2 and generates 1, you've now got mechanisms that cycle. Let them cycle for decades or generations. New cycles form. After a few thousand years (not much needed), there are literally hundreds of these cycles, and the number of complex compounds is growing.

The first 'life' would have been this sort of cycle, accomplishing little more than molecular dissolution of something. Something simpler than an enzyme acting on a bunch of hydrocarbons, maybe. I'm not a biologist: ask one what they'd consider the lowest example of life. ... get what I'm saying? It ain't a ROCK that creates life. It's statistical improbabilities that boggle your mind being bested by the sheer quantity of material and time: 10^50 atoms and time for them to undergo 10^20 reactions apiece (former # googled, latter one is an ass-pull: a possible reaction every few seconds).

Yeah, there's gaps in our model. Again, I'm not a biologist so I'm not sure where the gaps are. I've always been curious about them, but not enough to ask around. I see that DNA is inordinately more complicated than methane, for example.

But the gaps to our understanding are fewer than a decade ago, and far-far-far fewer than we were carrying around a century ago. And so far, the need for divine involvement ain't the theories making inroads. And while the universe has a 15 billion year head start, we've got more time ahead of us than we have in recorded history: we'll keep exploring and trying to understand, I hope.

T/L; DR: Go ahead and get pissed all you want; the 'insult' is undefeated. Sorry. And I don't need faith: I just look back at history and the remarkable successes of the scientific process. I **trust** it, because it doesn't say I have to believe 'a rock created life' or not. Scientific knowledge just says what is so.

Um, that word 'FACT". I do not think it means what you think it means. Anecdote !=fact. Ditto for anything you expect us to believe 'just 'cuz I said so'.

Liberal economists aren't Keynesians (Krugman, for a moderate liberal; socialists for the opposite extreme), there most certainly are valid nonAustrian economic models. IANAE, but it sure seems to me that we're seeing another demonstration of how Austrian pure-play capitalism is as bad an economic model as pure socialism/communism. I prefer social engineering via regulated capitalism: Balance wins handily over either extreme.

That paragraph about gun control is a bread-n-circuses distraction to left/right economic positions, and as such matters as little as abortion (and is certainly not a litmus test for either part).

Everyone pays taxes (so of **course** you are affected by them despite not being a 1%er), but most of us in the US are paying less than we would have during the 50's, 60's, 70's. The social safety net is alive and well in Germany, despite it being the healthiest economy in the developed/1st world. But they're aggressively taxing businesses, then using the proceeds to keep manufacturing in-country.

Giving money to the poor is loaded language. The depression was **solved** by handouts and governmental borrowing/deficit spending (the government giving poor people money and jobs when nobody else would hire due to illiquidity of finances and markets).

Well, that and Hitler.

Likewise, the stimulus worked this time around, although Krugman and other economists are building up plenty of evidence that more would have been better. The US House's Republican plan of Austerity economics aren't helping and seem to be pushing toward rekindling another Recession.

Grants and other 'given' money helps the weak/infirm/old survive with dignity and helps the children of the poor and helps people bootstrap themselves out of poverty. Tax breaks for the wealthy, OTOH don't trickle down nearly as well as Reagan and the Heritage Foundation pretend.

Government inefficiency is a bogus meme: Social Security has repeatedly been analyzed and scored better than private pensions for their operational efficiency. Ditto many other government programs -- you've fallen for a conservative talking point there. As for them being the least efficient means of putting money into an economy, nothing could be further from the truth: A $1 tax increase diminishes your personal spending less than a buck, since you (as a healthy middle-class wonk) were investing/saving part of it. OTOH, a buck in the hand of anyone near the poverty line gets spent that week. All of it. Every time. By the time that welfare buck cycles twice through local economies (once if it went to WalMart or other corporations that suck the profits out while they pay their staff less than a living wage), it's usually kicking the ass off the fractional buck given to you or me.

As for that founding fathers quote: it's one great man's opinion, taken out of context and across 200+ years. Relying on it as gospel is your most absurd prose of all. I honestly can't imagine a quorum of flaming liberals like our founding fathers liking Washington or Wall Street or most of your other claims.

Ya wanna fix the economy? Change international trade regulations, reinstate a steeper progressive tax structure, and stop spending half our taxes on war. Then, maybe we could stop pretending like the only options for healthcare are the extremes being debated and start emulating nations whose healthcare laws are working better than ours (Frontline did a nice show a few years ago comparing US, Germany, the UK, Japan and another nation's, for reference). Then let's talk seriously about the long term -- we can adjust retirement rules and tax rates (raise the ceiling, set different rules for knowledge workers and blue-collar jobs that literally physically wear out the people doing them by 55 -- the number of unemployable old construction workers at your local homeless shelter should break your heart). Pick a ceiling above which nobody deserves an untaxed inheritance (I think $5M per person inheritance is spectacularly sufficient -- Paris Hilton can either get frugal or get a frickin' jorb).

There's a lot of issues of deep national/global concern that are worthy of debate, but we're not even talking about those things -- mainstream media isn't looking into the little nuanced things we should be debating; it's not as sexy as the Tea Party vs the 98%.

tl;dr: baloney. Look for opinions that disagree with yours before you declare your beliefs to be facts.

Yaaay, Libertarians: can't sway enough percentage points to be mentioned let alone win most elections, but think everyone else (including all those people whose safety they'd infringe upon or whose livelihoods they'd crush in their oversimplified socioeconomic experiments) should just concede anyway. The hubris is astounding.

Testify, brother!

My favorite SQL Prima donna was a guy that sr mgmt thought was a prodigy; they overrode our objections and put him solo on a project. Not knowing basic shit like normalization, his app hinged on queries that make my eyes to water just thinking about them a decade later: if QueryName matches name1 or name 2 or name 3 or name4, then again for every other advanced search field. The pinnacle was the advanced search query. It went on for a dozen pages, several just querying 8 wildcardable keywords against almost all columns. Since everything was one huge flat file of redundant columns, indexing couldn't save it. 'Find me commercial plumbers in zipcode X' often timed out after 10+ minutes and would peg one of 2 cpu's on the E450 we were using.

Two encounters like that bozo convinced me that Prima donnas are a project-killer sort of risk, even if (like code-smell) you sense the problem long before you can articulate the specifics. (NOTE: primadonna != smart or brilliant or savant).

I'm dumbfounded at how much overlap there is between the 'gospel of wealth' and rand sects.

FTFY. And seriously, WTF, christians? Camel? Eye of Needle? Seven deadly sins? Moneychangers? Which part of the bible implies this selfish greedheadedness?

Ratfucker slashcode just ate my comment.

Came here to call you a pedant and point out that some of us like iphones because we already have too many other avenues for puttering; sometimes it's nice just to have a phone. Ok, a phone plus games and twitter and gps and media and email and.... but I'm ok that my 4s is NOT where I focus my hackerly urges. I don't have time for all the projects queued up in my home office (or as my wife calls it, that "damn mountain of electronics"). Lost my orig. comment trying to grok why slashcode was ignoring my html tags (my ul's and li's didn't yield bullets!!!) so you don't get a list this time.

I promise, it isn't fear or wanting Apple to be my mommy...

We've finally found step 2 for the underwear gnomes:

1) Steal underwear
2) Make crazy amounts of money via an undisclosed job.
3) Profit!

Actually, enterprise issues regarding data synchronization quickly make get problematic.

Have just watched a migration from private mail servers to cloud-based email. Months in, it quickly became apparent that a few short days or even a few weeks of pain associated with migrating users cold turkey (and then importing requested data from Notes once it had become static) would have been astronomically less cost and pain compared to wiring the connector and having two frameworks alive (and borking the sync in weird mediocre ways) simultaneously for months. Keep in mind, 'just migrating email' ends up meaning email plus antispam plus accounts plus calendars plus messages plus archives plus attachment storage plus service accounts (and changing hardcoded email addresses in code) plus security plus distro lists... etc, etc etc.

It can be straightforward (but not trivial) to export static data from SQL or another known framework and migrate it into similar frameworks. And it's not much harder to translate (like SQL into non-relational (NoSQL or similar) frameworks): Understand the data, design to the new constraints and advantages, plan migration, do a trial of the migration, then cycle thru again with more or all (depending on how well the first migration went).

Doing so on data that remains alive and breathing gets damned hard fast. Even if there are migration tools, are they ok with transactional data changes? If one side of the migration fails, do both frameworks get messages to cancel the transactions? What about record deletion? How is that synchronized? Given that the new cloud vendor may have few customers (insert tiny #) customers, does a well-tested connector exist between your old and new data stores? What about all in-house apps using the data? Are there mobile apps or custom code or ERP connections to your data server? What about data structure changes between the two: nothing maps perfectly.

Ugly. Just Ugly.

And that's a planned migration. Now think of going the other way. As TFA hints at, we all can write the headline and article now for going the other direction the day some cloud provider implodes: Company Widgetcorp declared bankruptcy today. Their tragic fall from stalwart Rusell-2000 midcap manufacturer to receivership happened unexpectedly: Their cloud-based XXX provider shut off servers without warning less than 60 days ago, and Widgetcorp was never able to recover critical processes and data.

I LOL'd. A friend from up here in the wild west of USA that now lives in Brisbane constantly reminds me of this: we have Grizzly bears (Yey us, we win on large omnivores), a couple kinds of biting flies, mosquitoes (but no malaria), hobo spiders and rattlesnakes (who rattle to warn you away; some call them the gentlemen of the desert). You have god knows how many distinct species of dangerous snakes, spiders, flies, lizards, sting rays, crocodiles, various invertebrate seaborne killers, bugs, spiders, and I'm guessing the occasional dingo and tazmanian devil.

Which reminds me -- we have wolverines. A very few at best. That are reclusive. So reclusive that many don't believe they still exist in the lower 48.

Oops, meant to say Pepsi was 2nd in their market, not 2nd tier. Bad fingers.

Maybe.

OTOH, they've got a billion customers with authenticated accounts. They could implement mobile purchasing, federated identity (communicate with your friend via any/all contacts they have in FB: no more address books and phone numbers!).

P/E is useful. But there are a substantial number of companies with high P/E's. AT&T, Red Hat, Amazon (is far over 100).

As for unrealistic market caps for someone making pennies per customer: Pepsico has a similar net worth and they're a 2nd tier sugar-water retailer with a much more expensive delivery infrastructure.

Maybe.

I watched the last 8 mins of trade and **SAW** the huge buys (didn't know who was making them at the time). Something's sour here, indeed.

Having said that, either you're engaging in pureplay sophistry or your understanding of how stocks prices, market cap, and profit interact are pretty damn weak. Handwavy bullshit everywhere.

Market cap is useful. Personally, I only care once I see P/E, which is a Share Price vs. Profit ratio. Newbie rule is that high P/E's (above 10-20) are signs of inflated stocks. Right now, stuff I buy has values like 12, 17, 11, 48, and 7. Seeing n/a or - makes an investor's job harder, since it means 'we lost money last year'.

Applying just this rule, here's what we get: I was considering Red Hat (RHT - hate 'em, but they're 'executing' a profitable business better than Ubuntu or Suse), but dropped that idea because they've got a P/E of 71. Eew, Fsck That. Everyone else already is overpaying a 'but they'll grow' premium for RHT; so much so that RHT has to about triple in size to be worth my investing in a company I can't stand. OTOH, I overruled disdain and bought MSFT at a P/E of 11.

From there, what you can do to find an economic edge is limitless. Stock trading's possibilities for seeking an edge via statistics and predictive models is the proverbial "elephants all the way down".

Back to FB's value: Let me take your 2nd 'graf and say the truth vs. your spin: The conditions under which FB would really be worth $100B are that someone buys all shares available at the asking price associated with $100B, and/or if FB has profitability and business growth that fit such a share price. The first one's getting some serious propping up by institutional investors. That's spooky as fsck.

So, let's look at Facebook's P/E: 88.xx -- (whistles /) Huh. That's pretty damn steep. It really is analogous to AOL-TimeWarner's albatross pricing. Or a bunch of dot-coms. But it's also close to RHT at 71. And freakin' AT&T is selling at a P/E of 48.

Again, what's Facebook worth? Well, a good question is: Between RHT, T (AT&T) and FB (all overvalued according to P/E) : which one's going to do a better job of carving new income streams and profitabilities out of the next 3 years? And if FB deflates to 30 bucks a share, would you change your opinion if it was more profitable per share than T and RHT? If we shrink FB shares to make a P/E of 12, we get '

No conclusions offered -- I'm just watching the show. Full disclosure: I own some MSFT and T, but no FB or RHT. My brother bought some FB, though. When I started writing this, I would have said 'dumbass brother'. Given the ways I could monetize a billion users without even touching their personal information... hmm.

I'm not a geologist, but the quantity of slate and shale I saw hiking the green mountains makes me doubt there's nothing there.

And going at the question another way, the Dakotas were hardly hotbeds of petrol -- natural gas and shale oil projects are huge employers in NoDak right now. Idaho's never been good for coal or petroleum, but gas is interesting enough to someone with deep pockets to cause preliminary drilling near Payette (if memory serves). And Idaho saw LOTS of legislative fury as the state preemptively denied counties/towns any control over fracking. Yep, politicians that never shut up about local control all lined up and voted to completely deny any local control on fracking chemicals or processes.

Something stinks, and I'm betting it's energy-extractive industry working fast and quiet before revealing their hand.

Looking forward to those cornfed seabass; YUM.

You keep saying 'will' and 'would'; I think you meant 'could', 'might' and 'hypothetically but unlikely'.

In order: system costs: stagnant incomes over the last 30 years are a greater risk to who can afford what than the depreciated cost of autonomous tech. What you're complaining about here is akin to thinking cars became unaffordable due to OnStar. Visit any used car lot with cars under $2000 and you'll see an increasing number have airbags, even though the **replacement** cost of a couple airbags is $1400-1800. Besides, at some point in automotive autonomy, about half of my 'pick up kids', 'take kid to soccer practice', 'pay X for something my kid signed up for' PITA's that waste a few hours of my household's adult time become the seriously sweet: "tell car to get/deliver X". For people just scraping by while working 2-3 crappy jobs, that could be amazingly helpful. Especially in the 80% of america where public transit (or even bike/pedestrian-friendly paths) don't exist. Ditto for seniors with failing senses. Ditto for long family trips: parents are too tired from work to drive HOURS to a family party over the weekend, but if dad or mom can doze in the pDriverseat and we just wake up in Sheboygan.... SWEET!

Authorized Roads: I'm pretty sure that nobody's even remotely to a point where your car gets to overrule you. If we get there, maybe I'm ok with being able to ban dumbass kids from leaving ruts across my fields in spring.

Roadmap Updates: First, from a sensor perspective: it can't just be GIS/GPS data -- that alone doesn't let a car drive safely. And given how quickly reality stops resembling GIS/GPS, there's little chance a car will ever be able to consider GIS/GPS as a primary decision source. Detours (especially crisis-caliber-but-geophysically-tiny ones, like some temporary asphalt laid to let cars avoid a huge hole excavated in a roadway) and hackers and overrides FTW.

Since considering these is a good idea, here are some others:

Waste / Carbon Dioxide / Peak Oil / Global Warming: Removing the opportunity cost of having to drive a car might dramatically increase miles driven annually, since the car might evolve from dumb tool into a much busier courier.
Elasticity of Traffic Demand: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
Other paradoxes of tweaking the ease of driving: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downs-Thomson_paradox , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess'_paradox