I figured I would go ahead and invoke Godwin's Law. Your "insightful" fascists diatribe, which I fixed for clarity, seemed an appropriate place to start.

Wait a second. You can harvest poor people to fuel my Hummer? My opinion of the viability of Green Technologies has just changed. Starting my soylent green corporation tommorrow!!!

When Driod gift cards hit the Walmart checkout isle the iPhone rein will come to an end. There is of course no such "plan" yet of course. If Google can somehow manage to link the chrome web app store, Google TV and the Andriod app store to one gift card, then given Driod's expected market share it's hard to see how Apple will compete when they keep punishing their developers like this.

I honestly never understood the opposition to religion as concept. The organizations and leaders that commonly claim association with religion certainly but why the broad hatred towards all things religious. The most logical answer always seemed "we can't say for sure". Those that show extreme hatred for the religious view always struck me expressing emotional backlash against being forced to sit through a Sunday sermon full of contradiction and no scientific foundation.

Every reasonable conversation I have ever tried to have on the subject seemed to spoiled by some previous unreasonable argument that someone had to endure in the past. It always struck me as odd that reasonable people who both likely agreed with the concept of "Do unto others..." often ended up with complete disdain for each other because of the specifics of dogma and prejudicial generalizations about the people associated with either side.

It's funny we consistently have debates about how Apple through non support is killing flash off. And you make a good point about how Silverlight has the potential to take over the web from W3C. I would argue that Flash/Flex is already way ahead of Silverlight and has the install base.

Developers here may hate flash/flex but it pushes the envelope in terms of features. And as the article pointed out having a third party push us to a Rich Internet over the monolithically slow W3C process isn't so bad.

As a developer I have no sacred cows and am pretty agnostic in terms of what I develop in. I will pick up whatever platform the web is now running on. What I do care about is install base and features. I want web apps to be as powerful as desktop apps. Give me the best platform for building a Rich Internet. I'd love to see an open spec HTML 5 and JS win this race if JS was easier to debug in and HTML 5 had the feature set. But for that to happen, you're right, W3C needs to step it up.

Lets say he's right that all alien societies do succumb to VR instinct fulfillment and abandon all further progression of society. Perhaps our universe is filled with the empty husks of species that progressed to the point where they could tap their own pleasure center neurons and then died out.

If you believe that by pointing this out we can somehow prevent our species from succumbing to the same result, then the problem of the paradox comes right back. As these aliens species must have had the same reservations before they fell to the darkness of VR.

Or he believes to be so clever that no alien species could have pointed out this trap in time. So they all fell to ruin. But we are more clever so we can prevail, now that we know, whilst all of the others have clearly epic failed.

Or he is just a philosophical pessimist languishing in the doomy juices of determinism. As no amount of pointing out the impending doom will change the course. Thus the paradox is avoided and we all get to die a pleasure filled VR death.

Or he is just doing some geeky mental imagination masturbation and wants to share the "fruits" of his labor.

The last choice I actually have the most respect for as it might eventually lead to something useful. Possibly sowing the "seeds" of other great ideas.