You don't have to know each other in real life to have a tight social group. It happens online too.

I'd rephrase it as: "These are not real friends, just people they stumbled upon on the Internet."

I don't use social networks but I have a feeling that's mostly what ends up happening.

For the record, it's also what most current AMD64 implementations support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Architectural_features

I agree with all the points you made, I was merely pointing out the reason this fire is self-sustaining, just as you observed.

Well, many of the ones that are pushing for patents/copyright/IP *are* stupid...

Actually it is a perfectly good argument as far as I'm concerned. I do believe no machine should be patentable. I don't believe the patent system achieves it's supposed goals at all, software or not.

I wasn't. I like my porn to be filmed from a little closer than that.

It's not a race, but it's nice to get to know more about the universe during your lifetime. Someone has to be the first to cross the line, and someone has to pay for it, otherwise science will just come to a standstill.

Well the significant argument in TFS is the idea that the confirmation could have happened a decade ago rather than now, which certainly would've made a difference in the development rate of theoretical physics. "In America" is just a free e-peen extender that comes with it, which CERN just got instead.

Had they not cancelled the Superconducting Super Collider, chances are high they would've also beat Aperture to the Supercolliding Super Button which history proved to be just a logical step away. Oh well. I'm not American anyway, my country didn't lose anything because it's never had anything to being with. Woohoo!

Office is on the way out because everything is becoming Web2.0 or even Web3.0-ized, negating the need for any manually composed document as inter-organization (as well as intra-organization) data passing no longer targets directly other humans but servers that automatically parse and process it. Windows is on the way out because the web is platform agnostic. Document professionals (for those things that still have to be done in document format such as instruction booklets) don't use Office, and most often don't use Windows either.

Sometimes it works. A few ages ago a friend gave me his old cellphone - one of those Samsung "Slim Line" ones - but at the moment it was uncharged; when I got it charged it turned out it was locked, I didn't have the password and couldn't get a hold of him to ask, so I figured 4 numbers couldn't be that hard and tried my best to guess. I couldn't. Fast-forward one week and I finally get around to asking him about the password.. What was it? 8888. The worst part is that I did try just enetering the same number, but stopped at 5555 because I thought "he can't be that naive". LOL

It'll be like living in a zoo, except now the zoo is huge, the animals include humans, and the zoo-keepers are human-invented machines. The question is not if, the question is when. The singularity will undoubtedly overwhelm any silly human politics or economics that try to restrain it.

3D printing doesn't really automate anything that's not already automatic, the only significant difference in this context is that it's cheaper and easier for lower quantities and smaller spaces than industrial methods such as injection molding. Of course patents and copyright will try to get in the way. Thankfully they'll fail miserably like they always do.

FTA:

(Yes, they could've made it clearer... This is just a camera and a projector sitting together.)

Before the grammar Nazis get me, here's the corrected version without the incorrect grammar: