This is as creepy as it can get, spying in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vza_bMuy42M

This is why you shouldn't trust proprietary software. Once they have the market they don't care about the small operating systems, and there's nothing you can do about it (other than writing a free alternative). The problem is that once gnash can play flash10 files Adobe will release a new standard.

No, they forced a product to people who never wanted it. Then they made it *by default* to leak out private details. Then they made the "turn off buzz" option not really working.

Why is anything about the Space Shuttle secret in any case? Space projects should be open to the public and there shouldn't be any secrets. If the technology is secret the human species won't get much utility out of that huge spending.

What a good reason to switch to free health care.

And the first tank was an expensive death trap. And the first car was useless. And the first airplane couldn't fly very far at all.

Brakes can overpower the engine, but only for a moment. At highway speeds they will overheat quickly, maybe before the car has stopped fully, and after that the brakes are useless.

When Google does a huge scale for profit copyright infringement, they'll make a profit sharing deal. When a student shares 1 song to his friend non-commercially, he gets a $100 000 fine. That's justice in modern world. Corporations are above the law.

Why does the government have to give out any kind of loan guarantees? In my country at least the goverment loans nothing, and the private sector builds then. In fact, there's many companies waiting in a line to build new nuclear power plants.

It's better to have slightly more global warming than to let billions suffer. We can adjust to global warming through technology, and ultimately control the climate easily through geoengineering etc. Global warming is one of the smallest existential risks, and technologies such as biotech, nanotech and (greater than human) AI will solve this problem quite easily.

The obvious value is to destroy an threat to their existence, or to use the planet's resources for computation.

The only true and long term solution to poverty is industrialisation. You simply can't "build factories" and think industrialisation happens magically. You need to think a way to make Africa a better place to invest than China/India. And that will be really difficult. The wage difference is not large, China has really good education system, and China is quite stable politically and has reasonable infrastructure. So, the more money is used to make investing more viable in the Africa, the less problems there will be. Luckily, every year as China is getting more wealthy, the wages are also increasing. That makes Africa a better place since it will have cheaper workers. Of course, to be precise, industrialisation is already happening in different places in Africa. But progress will take a long time.

Why is it that some people simply don't want to understand how things work nowadays? I think that's a sign of how the society is getting more stupid as time goes on. Sure, devices itself are getting more complex, so it's harder to understand how they work, but even a general idea is rewarding to know (for me atleast). However, when something doesn't work, the most obvious thing is to understand how the device works, so you can know what's happening, and maybe how to fix it. Yet it seems modern people simply wan't to brush that aside and live in world they have no idea how it functions.

Parenting should and is regulated. I've never believed in the idea that parents somehow "own" their children. If the parents don't give a neutral, healthly upbringing then the government should step in and take the children away. There is no "right religion" to choose, they shouldn't brainwash the children into any religion. It's okay to teach facts about religions though.

So, if you beat up somebody, you'll probably get less jail time than refreshing a website several times using a script?