It would be really easy to go for the cheap shot and say the euphemism most global climate change advocates are rooting for when speaking of "Deniers" is not "Heretic", but "Deluded". That said , I think there's an important place for deniers, they keep the scientific majority honest, pressure them to dot 'I's and cross 'T's. The problem has never been deniers, but corporate interests who use the denier's debate no matter it's validity, to justify continuing full steam ahead in crashing the environment in the name of quarterly profits.

Scholarly debate is essential to good science. Cherry picking conversations, data, and spending millions on promoting FUD, is bad social policy, economics and global resource management.

Just because the "scientific facts" bear out a round earth, evolution, relativity and anthropic global climate change, doesn't make these things either a religion, or a conspiracy. Consider instead that the huge, network of supporting research simply means that the probability of these things not being so, is now vanishingly small. Sorry if the truth isn't convenient. The good news is that there are solutions to current problems that open opportunities even for deniers, so we can all still walk away winners.

Friend, just having been around long enough to hear Bill Gates say "640K of RAM should be enough for anyone..."(apocryphal), the future human being may move energy and matter back and forth at will and your absurdity will seem as common as alkaline batteries to us. You just can't wisely make such presumptions.

Especially true considering the moon is rich in titanium and aluminum, and has no atmosphere to fight against and a tiny fraction of the gravity well. The moon is the better source for raw materials.

Actually I was thinking rather than my name, the message "We apologize for the inconvenience..."

Please tell me someone is working on a functional politician module! Our current analog devices suck to high heaven.

Not to mention the global "Fly-Eye" video you could collect real-time!

There will eventually be no job that a machine can't do better than human beings. That's the unarguable extrapolation of an asymptotic acceleration of technology. By itself, this isn't a problem. It only becomes a problem inside a Puritan ethic, that people are only worth what they produce, combined with an economic system that concentrates wealth at the top.

This process could create a society of human abundance, a golden age of human advance and evolution. However we're currently nailed to rails that will elevate a fleeting small handful of people to godlike wealth and power, and a devastated, oppressed slave class comprising the rest of humanity.

The future is coming, the only question is whether or not it'll be friendly to being human, and whether the feared terminators that might oppress us will be autonomous intellects, or the strike forces of human despots. We've made a very poor showing to date. The time to grow out of our primate baggage is short.

Any other conversation about this process is short sighted and misses the titanic transformative forces in process.

I think actually the issue in question is poking fun at those who have raised "Picking Nits" to an artform. Yes, its a wee bit childish.

Indeed... an original floppy disk with a note penned by the hand of Galileo himself, might have real historical value ;-)

Precisely, in fact the entire valid/invalid thing is moot. Because they chose to settle out of court, they are beholden to the legal whims of he with whom they settle. So no matter how egregious the terms and conditions, they are the terms and conditions to which they agreed.

Now a real interesting development happened a little while back, John Fogerty was sued by the current owner of CCR IP, for plagiarizing himself with his newer music (in the early 90s his career took off again when the 20 years of bondage ended and he could make and sell new music that didn't automagically belong to someone else.) In court the greedy bastard that sued him made it perfectly clear owning CCR wasn't enough, that even though he was no longer under contract, he had every intention of keeping John under his thumb for the rest of his natural life and take everything he made for his own benefit. The Judge informed said scumbag that a songwriter sounds like that songwriter because HE IS THAT SONGWRITER... that CCR songs sound like CCR songs and one would only expect that future songs by that artist might have a similar style. The case was crushed.

But here where it get's interesting. Part of the reason nuisance suits have been so effective is that defending them, leave you with a terrible court expense whether you win or lose. John asked the court, can I sue this ass-hat to recover my court costs? The judge said go for it, and John got most of 2 million dollars in court costs back. If these Corporate giants are so inclined, they might want to spank Eolas so hard that their great grandchildren hurt. This would set a very cool precedent to future Patent Trolls, yes, the rewards are great, but if your patent is 99% smoke and you go up against guy with legal larger than the population of Rhode Island, well you might just wanna think twice.

That and start-ups should get together and create Troll Insurance. Bring in the EFF and couple of other heavy hitters and clean this Troll problem up once and for all. By all means, someone infringes on your patent, your personal invention, you deserve recompense. You decide you're going to build a portfolio of bullshit patents to tax society because you're a greedy scumbag, not so much.

You've completely missed the primate drive to control and dominate. Wealth will concentrate and there be only a tiny handful of alphas. Unless we change it all up dramatically, the future is pretty bleak, and the extinction of this species is three, maybe four generations away.

All of this is utterly and completely moot in a society that pumps all the wealth into the hands of a vanishingly few ultra-wealthy at the peak of the fiscal pyramid, and in the process creates a financial vacuum under them. What you end up with is more and more convoluted ways for folks to survive on less and less, grabbing as many of the fast disappearing crumbs as possible. The problem isn't too many grabbers, too few crumbs or inefficiencies in past, present or future systems of crumb distribution for the masses. The problem is someone else has nearly all the crumbs and won't be happy until they've railroaded (through paid for legislation or social engineering) those few remaining crumbs right into their pocket.

Temp labor is just one more accommodation to fewer benefits, lower wages, longer and harder working conditions, and its just one more aspect of a system that intends to reduce the masses into drones, minimized into a laboring force which will ultimately be replaced by machines and who will find themselves superfluous in the grand designs of those in power. Children, please notice that lovely barbeque smell in the air... its your ass (and mine) on the grill.

I assume everyone knows what I'm talking about, but if you need a hit with the clue stick, Check out the comparative wealth of the Waltons (the Walmart heirs), (that's 6 people), was equal to the wealth of the bottom 30.2% (or over a 100,000,000 people) of the U.S. Which is why the workers at each and every Walmart receive in average over $1,000,000 in government aid and benefits to the poor (Walmarts benefits are paid for by your tax dollars.) That's the future of labor. As people fall off the end, we'll increasingly criminalize poverty and you'll work for slave wages in a privately owned prison factory. All the structures are already being put in place. Paranoid, maybe. Dystopian, you bet. Its just following the existing process through the simplest of extrapolations and the sheeple seem to just be lining up for the sheering.

We need to get passed the self obsession and look around. Its a mess, and if we don't clean it up soon...

Let me get this straight... If something is potentially corrupted with malicious behavior... the best solution is to render it to dust with a big hammer. Hmmmmmm, I wouldn't have gone there on my own, but suddenly D.C. is looking a whole lot more like "Whack-O-Mole".

That'll teach me to do this at 3:00 am with an eye infection... the actual number is $1,000,000 as if that weren't bad enough.

Really? No disincentive? Are you saying to me there is no bottom to the "How low can you go" paradigm? I mean how far can we be from finding that Soylent Green is a winning business model? You think maybe, just maybe we need to begin teaching our young leaders that "Profit" is not the only thing to be valued? That there is human dignity, respect for life an living, a world worth bequeathing to our posterity? It was discovered that the Waltons (heirs of the Wallmart estate) now hold more wealth than the bottom 30.5% of the country. That's 6 people, vs 100,000,000. Someone needs to take Linux on and make it the next Windows for both users and software providers. When did being a parasite evolve into a leading business strategy. Speaking of Walmart, one of the ways they got that money was by using your tax dollars to subsidize the wage of the working poor *to the tune of over a million dollars in social aid to Walmarkt emplyees, reducing Walmarts bottom line and every Walmart uses abou a $100,000,000 a year, which ultimately lines there pockets.