The portrayal of behavioral addiction as just being due to the addict being weak-willed has not been current for several decades. If you know any psychologists, I would suggest asking them about the subject -- it's quite interesting. There are methods of treating addiction, but telling them to just quit doing it is very rarely successful.

Most addicts initially made poor choices to get themselves into the situation that they are in. But once they are, they need help to get back out. We don't deny people medical care if they injure themselves in pursuit of an extreme sport, for instance -- so why deny people medical help to recover from an addiction?

An addiction is not just a "time sink." It's an addiction when you can't stop a behavior, even when it is harming your life.

Acknowledging that some people are addicted to internet usage, and need help, is not the same as saying that the internet is "bad." There's no need to get so defensive about it.

This is mostly due to the belief of many congressmen (along with most of the voting public) that the office of President is really that of Supreme Legislator.

What next, are you going to tell me that when I buy a cheese slicer with a dozen attachment doohickeys from an informercial for $19.95, it's not actually a $300 value?

"Correlation is not causation" only applies when a study yields an incorrect result. When the conclusion is correct, then obviously correlation does mean causation.

You know that you just suggested that we focus on consuming green products, right?

If samzenpus had bothered to read the article, he would know that it explains, very clearly, that Galileo was right on the question of why ice floats. He was apparently wrong in some of the reasoning that he used to explain another effect (a disc of ebony floating on water due to surface tension).

Maybe samzenpus should go back to posting more science fiction...

I bet you could get a lot of investors on board with a plan to use solar power to convert atmospheric CO2 into building materials. Just don't tell them that the super-secret device that does so is called a "tree."

If people started buying these, I would expect businesses that deal with parking problems to reserve some extra-small spaces for these cars -- most likely desirably-located spaces, in order to encourage people to use them. That's why you'd use it.

On the other hand, XxtraLarGe isn't the one that keeps promising to do stuff that is beyond his power and authority to do.

That's not what the article or the summary said. It said "The migration will save the government some 1.5 million euro per year on proprietary software licences."

Now, one thing that's obviously being missed in the (1.5 million euro / 120k PCs) calculation is that the article says that it's 1.5 million euro per year. I'm not sure how they would do their licensing (if they pay Microsoft a yearly fee of 1.5 million for all their office installations, or if that's the average cost of required upgrades each year, or whatever), but obviously you can't just assume that they get each copy of office for 12.50.

I wouldn't consider it morally wrong to eat the dead, assuming that the rights of the person weren't violated while they were alive. There are several practical reasons why doing so is a bad idea, of course, but "that hunk of flesh used to be a person" really isn't one of them.

That's actually a valid question. My response is that you follow someone's will because the living have made a promise to do so. Keeping your word is important (or, at least, it should be); regardless of whether or not the person you gave it to is dead.

On the other hand, I definitely do not believe in doing something just because "that's what dear old dead Dad would have wanted," or similar. Life is for the living, not the dead.

Yeah, obviously I had a brainfart on translating "1500s" to a century.

As far as the societal-level changes that you mention go -- there are still a lot of places in the world where attitudes and culture are a lot closer to 1500s Europe than they are to modern society in the US or Europe. But people can and do come from those places and manage to assimilate reasonably well.

I don't think that the comparison with "elderly" people is completely relevant, given that the original statement was that they wouldn't be able to hold down a job. Elderly people, for the most part, don't hold jobs either. It's fair to assume that someone who chooses to be put to sleep for five hundred years expects that they have a fair amount of time remaining to them, and so we're probably looking at people that are capable of learning new skills and using them.

(Yes, the whole "freeze Dad after he's dead" scenario doesn't really fit there -- but that's kind of a silly idea in the first place; I don't think that's really going to catch on.)

There are a lot of jobs that people do that don't necessarily require much, if any, use of modern technology; most obviously many jobs that involve manual labor. For that matter, how many non-elderly people really keep up with "technology" in more than a superficial way?

Depending on their walk of life, I would not be at all surprised if they had a better work ethic than the average American. There's no reason why a curious and motivated 14th-century person couldn't learn enough to get along in modern society, especially if they get some initial help.

If somebody was offering one-way trips to 2500 right now -- assuming that I was convinced that the technology involved would actually work -- I'd do it without hesitation. There's plenty of us without any particularly strong ties who would go for something like that -- and many reasons beyond the whole "uncurable disease" one.

Only if you're able to send people out at the rate that people are being added to the population.

At current birth/death rates, that's in the neighborhood of 200,000 people per day. Given that it's very difficult to imagine a technological leap anytime in the foreseeable future that would allow a migration on that scale, we're going to have to get a handle on our population growth -- one way or another -- long before mass migration will be an option.