Because, you know, it's not like any legitimate content is shared by BitTorrent.How nice of them to block WoW updates. And it sure gets rid of those pesky linix torrents--I can certainly see why Microsoft is backing this.

Well said! Political self interest is not the same as rational self interest. I do like my life style, which I try to make as low energy as possible, but I have no wish to starve, live on gruel, or subsist on back breaking labour--all of which are likely outcomes in we do not find an alternative to oil, and if we do not address the challenges of global warming;. The anti-global warming pedants fail to understand that we are trying to preserve their lifestyle, not abolish it, and that we are asking them to make small sacrifices to that end--and that, if they don't, the sacrifices they will be required to make will break them utterly, and will be measured in the blood of their loved ones.

You can start with Wikipedia and follow on from there. The effect of prayer is basically placebo.

Of all of these, World Peace is the most likely--read Stephen Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, which details the decline of violence in the world and proposes explanations for it. Pinker's thesis is not a theory in search of data, but a mountain of evidence in search of an explanation. All of the technological innovations listed here will probably require us to divert resources from military spending to scientific research on a grand scale. Even human extinction is unlikely. Our worst scenarios may result in massive loss of life, but since humans are as tough and resilient as cockroaches, we can probably count on a large number of humans surviving them, albeit in conditions we would consider less that optimal.

There is some possibility that the rhythmic nature of the sound might have long term effects on health, or that some high frequencies might effect mood and therefore health.

This, of course, is entirely conjectural, and would need some solid evidence to back it up. Without that evidence, I would be inclined to chalk it up to folk superstition, encouraged in part by the anti alternative energy noise machine, which gave us, amongst other urban myths, the notion that florescent bulbs would require hazmat teams to clean up your house if they broke, because they contained some mercury (hint: the florescent tubes we've been using in offices for 70 years now contain more mercury.)

And let's not forget sports. When are one of these clowns going to ask for a ban on high school football? College football? Never? Of course not, despite the towering mass of evidence that demonstrates that this is a major source of violence in our society. This is not about violence, this is about being a demagogue, which means pounding upon minorities for the benefit of majorities. And who gives a fuck about nerds, right? Jocks rule the world, still, so football gets a pass.

This is all bullshit.

A little humility would actually go a long way to addressing the problem. Unfortunately we have so many populist demagogues out there right now, telling people not to trust 'elites' (that is, anyone who knows more on a subject than the demagogue, which pretty much includes anyone who knows anything at all) that humility has been banished from our culture. Even amongst the educated, post-modernism teaches that all opinions have equal merit. The low-brow political bullshit seems to be a recurring feature of democracy, but the high-brow bullshit is new, and is often used to neutralize opposition to the low-brow stuff. This is what we have to get rid of.

So while there may be no such thing as Truth (with a capital T, the thing that ideologues and the clergy try to sell you) we need to bring that truth, you know, the sort of thing you need to get by everyday.

By the way, I'm obviously the best choice for leader, since I'm so intelligent that I have realized that I suck at everything, which obviously makes me the most competent person out there...

Yes, it has been warmer, and no humans were involved. Or existed. Which is the bloody point, you fool. Humans rely on a particular ecosystem that exists within a narrow range of temperature. So, if you can survive by grazing on ferns, like the herbivorous dinosaurs, then you won't have a problem. But if you rely on things like wheat, corn, vegetables, etc, and the animals that also live in this ecosystem, then you will have a major problem.

It gets worse. Species evolve in geological time, which is a lot slower than the climate is changing. So we're going to witness massive extinctions, and the replacements that we will need won't be around for thousands of years. And since genetic engineering consists of tweaking existing species, rather than producing radically new ones, the question is: how long can you go without food?

Thank you, Mr. Murdoch. We can always count on you for honest journalism. (/sarcasm)

Neil DeGrasse Tyson, in his talk at last years TAM, showed us a world map that illustrated the number of new scientific research papers filed by country. In 2000, the U.S. was still a leader. Then he showed the 2008 map, and the U.S. looked like a deflated balloon. My comment at the time was that primary research shows you applied research ten years down the road, and industrial innovation 20 years down the road. Guess I was right.

Tyson's point was that the Bush administration's defunding of pure science was reflected in the map. Much as libertarians don't like to hear this, private research goes into low hanging fruit. Primary research is too risky, particularly since, if done right, it enters the public domain. Only a handful of companies do this (IBM and Google, take a bow--Apple and Microsoft, sit down.) Medical advances are particularly susceptible to this. The computer revolution came from NASA and the Apollo project, the internet came from DARPA funding of AT&T for the creation of resilient network (those same Bell labs are now beggars at the table of Alcatel, a French company.)

Every other country that is a major player is spending a lot on primary research, and this funding is coming from the government. It's infrastructure, it lays the road for the business of the future, and its the one area where the government excels. China is spending a fortune on this, and we've exported all of our know how to them already, When IBM farms out manufacturing to another country, they send their engineers there to teach the manufacturers exactly what to do, and many other companies do exactly the same thing. They know almost everything we know, but we don't know everything they know--not anymore.

The Greatest Generation, the people who grew up in the depression and fought the Axis, understood responsibility. They did a lot of things wrong, but they knew how to work together towards a better future, and our standard of living is the result of that. Can you imagine rubber and silk drives today? Americans couldn't even be bothered to pay higher taxes for Iraq and Afghanistan, even while they made noises about supporting the troops. It's time to grow up and carry not only our weight, but more than our weight, and pass a torch that burns brighter for our having held it. So the next time you hear the latest Fox demagogue complaining about taxes, and demanding lower taxes, imagine how his belly aching would have sounded in the 40's.

And Amen again. I worked at a high profile startup that went defect back during the dot.com days, working 60 to 100 hour weeks. I never got a penny of the back pay they owed me, and the guy who worked most of those hours with me died three years later from congestive heart failure caused by stress (he had an otherwise healthy lifestyle). So this isn't just about the quality of your life; it could mean the difference between life and death.

Bingo. When you go to a different place, you don't want to be somewhere where the sun rises at 11 PM and sets at 12 AM. You want a normal day, and the timezone tells you what the range of that day is. Timezones don't interfere with travel, they facilitate travel.

Look, can we just start ignoring libertarians? I mean, when someone is wrong once, you shrug. When they're wrong ten times, you raise an eyebrow. But when they're wrong hundreds of times, they need to be added to the twit filter. These people are the new bolsheviks, who also promised that the state would vanish under their leadership. Never trusted the communists, don't trust the libertarians. Same shit, different bucket.

Even if it doesn't devolve into barbarism, it will draw pirates like flies. And who will they turn to when the pirates occupy their little utopia and steal everything they have? After giving the finger to the rest of the world, who in the world would raise a finger to help them?

I suspect that our rather commonplace legal definition is quite workable; a person is free when they act for their own reasons, but is considered to have been determined to do something, and therefore not free and responsible, when a physical cause circumvents their reasoning. So a person with schizophrenia is not guilty by reason of insanity, because brain dysfunction in this case trumps normal cognitive processes. Likewise the case where someone is acting under duress, and situational determinants outweigh normal decision making. Physical determinism due to normal brain function is irrelevant; like any computer, the proper functioning of the mind requires orderly brain function. Randomness due to any cause does not yield freedom, only determination by random causes, so quantum effects are also irrelevant--this whole line of argument is a red herring. This is where the fallacy lies.

The distinction between reasons and causes is analogous to software and hardware. The randomness introduced by power irregularities or a defective chip does not make a computer free, it makes the computer crash. The hardware must behave in an orderly and deterministic manner for the software to function properly. We find all of this highly mysterious because our intuitive grasp of physical reality is quite limited and often wrong. We have a limited understanding of matter, less understanding of energy, and almost no intuitive grasp of information theory. We have the equations, but like Douglas Adams' 42, they don't mean a damn thing to us. When we say that materialistic explanations are reductive, it is because our own perceptions of these explanations are highly reductive. We simply don't understand them, and we think they are much simpler and limited than they actually are. As Richard Feynmann said, if you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don't understand quantum mechanics. The problem with Penrose and Chopra is that they think they understand quantum mechanics.

One might object that you can do what you want, but you can't want what you want, but cognitive therapy, not to mention a host of much older cognitive and emotional disciplines, actually addresses this. You can change your character--it's not easy, but it can be done.

They didn't read postmodernists, but they are taking cues from people who did--these arguments have been used by the tobacco lobby and by anti-evolutionists, and now have a broad vogue amongst New Agers and defenders of religion. They may not know the jargon, but ideologues of all persuasions find themselves at war with reality. Evidence must therefore be a conspiracy, and the more compelling the evidence, the larger the conspiracy. Postmodernism is, after all, largely a conspiracy theory--the scientific/political/economic elite have brainwashed us into believing their truth. It isn't actually possible that someone may really know more. They're just bullies, and come the revolution, there will be no truth, so everyone will have to listen to the poor downtrodden postmodernist academics, too.