Be sure to check out Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. It's like Nineteen Eighty-Four but with a private industry spin, foreseeing things like flatscreens, reality shows, censorship... Great stuff.

If services start using Facebook as sole login credential - which Answers.com apparently hasn't done, but Spotify, for instance, has - what's there to prevent millions of users to register accounts like bjsjfo88803 or e93u9f39f for the sole purpose of logging in to other sites? I already do this for Youtube.

Thing is, oil will very soon be prohibitively expensive (we're talking a few decades, tops) and even coal will start to become scarce within a relatively short time span of only a few hundred years. Short I say? Yes. The earth's been around for some 4 billion years and we've been using up its stored resources in a miniscule amount of time.

And when that time comes, well, we'd damn well better have the techontopian future you're talking about or the problem is going to solve itself, likely in a very unpleasant way (starvation, war etc). We don't have a choice - no matter how inferior the renewable energy sources seem compared to fossil fuels, they're our only hope in the long run. The faster we can make the transition, the better.

"He'd always been frightened of ending up as one of those child prodigies that never amounted to anything and spent the rest of their lives boasting about how cool they'd been at age ten. But then most adult geniuses never amounted to anything either. There were probably like a thousand people as intelligent as Einstein for every actual Einstein in history. Because they hadn't gotten their hands on the one thing you absolutely needed to achieve greatness. They'd never found an important problem."

From Harry Potter and the methods of rationality by Eliezer S. Yudkowsky

Basically they're so small that quantum mechanical effects come into play.

I frequently host conference calls with people from other parts of the world. Every time I schedule them it takes something like two minutes for me to check the local time for everyone. It's a minor inconvenience, sure, but nothing I can't manage, it's just a matter looking it up. Same thing goes for traveling across time zones - I mean, you have to buy tickets, wait in line to check in the baggage, wait in line for the security check, wait for the gate to open, sit on a plane for several hours, and then to everything again in reverse order on your destination. Adjusting your clock, on the other hand, only takes a few seconds to do. Time zones are good. They were invented for a reason, and those reasons still stand. In fact, in China where the whole country runs on the same time for political reasons, the Western parts of the country has adopted an unofficial local time that better matches the sun's movement.

Maybe you're right... But I think you're forgetting something: human space exploration has values beyond the purely rational. Kennedy didn't propose putting a man on the moon because it was useful somehow, he did it to inspire his people, to win the space race against the Soviet Union, and to win votes in future elections. Just look at this speech - if Obama or someone else manages to put together a piece half as inspiring, then I think we will have a human on Mars within 15 years: http://webcast.rice.edu/speeches/19620912kennedy.html

That's a very valid point. Astronauts are versatile and orders of magnitude more useful for doing science in situ, but are also orders of magnitude more difficult to transport and keep operational there. Just the little matter of having to return to Earth poses a pretty big challenge.

On the other hand, if we keep limiting human space presence to low earth orbit then we'll never lower the barrier of getting humans into space - and that's where we want to be, eventually. Unmanned vehicles have their time and place, but they will only take us so far. It's like when airplanes replaced ships for long-distance travel - the planes were more difficult to build (and still are), they had many inherent weaknesses such as the need for long runways and tight security (still true), but in the end the pros outweighed the cons and we learnt how to handle the problems. That's what I hope will happen with human space exploration as well. Even very difficult problems can be solved if the gains are large enough.

I think we're quite a bit farther away from making robots as useful as humans than we are from launching a human mission to Mars.

As awesome as the rovers are, they're hopelessly, frustratingly inefficient. It's hard to control something located a dozen light minutes away. The total distance traversed by Spirit is 10 km and by Opportunity 27 km. Every single movement must be carefully planned before uploading the command so the rover doesn't get stuck in a sand dune or fall off a cliff somewhere. All the progress made by the Mars rovers in six years could probably have been accomplished by human astronauts in just a few days.

I bought a Sony Ericsson 8 years ago that had video call capabilities. I didn't even try it once, and it never took off anywhere in the world despite a huge number of phones and networks supporting it. Instead, people used the extra bandwidth to check their mail, surf the web and download ringtones and themes. Last year Apple tried with FaceTime (does anybody use that?) and now it's Google's turn. I don't see that it will pick up this time either.

Kind of funny to see that this feature, which for so long was believed to be the communication of the future, turned out to be a fiasco when the future finally arrived. Apparently we just don't want to see each other when talking on the phone.

Well, trouble is it doesn't really make sense to use evolution by means of natural selection to get a desired result. Artificial selection, like breeding dogs or horses, that's a good tool. But natural selection has no purpose or direction - it could just as well have created nothing but bacteria for 10 billion years until the Earth perished. If God used natural selection as a tool for creating humans, he must have tweaked it all the time, making these two individuals breed, making this asteroid hit the Earth at the right time and so on, effectively making it an artificial selection. While certainly possible - we're talking about an omnipotent being here - it would be an incredibly awkward way of running things.

Many people claim to believe in both evolution and God, but if you truly understand not only the first part of the theory (evolution) but also the second (by means of natural selection), then that should have consequences for your faith. I'm quite intrigued as to why more people don't talk about this issue - Richard Dawkins, for instance, has said it is this very insight that caused him to become an atheist. It's hard to combine a full insight into darwinian evolution with a belief in a god that created humans. In my experience most religious people simply don't understand or don't care about the theory.

The theory of evolution by means of natural selection was presented to the world in 1859. It has been widely accepted among biologists for at least 100 years, and has gotten even stronger support with every new discovery since then (genetics, chromosomes, DNA and so on).

From a scientific point of view, there is no controversy. Evolution is right and creationism is wrong, simple as that. Teaching creationism isn't presenting both sides of a controversial issue - it's lying to the students. This bill explicitely says "This section only protects the teaching of scientific information", so creationism should be exempt from its protection since it is, legally speaking, "not a scientific theory" (see McLean v. Arkansas 1981, Edwards v. Aguillard 1987 and Kitzmiller v. Dover 2005).

If the bill is intended to protect teachers who want to teach creationism or intelligent design, I highly doubt it will achieve its purpose.

Dude that's a mean accusation, pls refudiate.

I don't agree with you. In fact, I think we should have legislation that explicitly forbids arbitrary collecting and tracking of private information.

We're on a dangerous path if we allow anything as long as it's voluntary. Don't like to be tracked? Just don't visit the site! But what happens when more and more sites come with privacy policies that you don't agree with? You might not be able toavoid them all. Chances are you're required to have a Facebook or Google account to keep your job, and suddenly it's not all that voluntary anymore.

Sometimes I don't get how the same people who worry about government snooping and Big Brother happily put their entire life on Facebook for everyone to see. You should be less worried about the FBI and more worried about Facebook who owns your photos, Google who can read your mail and your local supermarket who knows what you buy and when. These aren't trivial issues. You should think about them.

Disclaimer: I'm a member of the Swedish Pirate Party, and I've been so for a few years. I've voted for them in the three most recent elections (two for the Swedish parliament and one for the EU parliament).

I definitely believe that this is a good move. Rickard Falkvinge is a very charismatic person, but also a controversial one. He's enthusiastic, he knows how to reach the headlines and has done a wonderful job of founding the party and establishing an awareness of these questions in Sweden. The problem is that he lacks political tact. He's committed at least two really bad faux-pas, one statement in which he defended the right to keep but not buy child pornography and one time when he asked for personal funding from the party members, suggesting as they would be gifts they didn't need to be taxed. On top of that, there is a common view that the Pirate Party is Falkvinge's own private project and that he is something of a cult leader.

Therefore it is great to have Troberg on board as a leader. She is less technical and more personal than Falkvinge, but first and foremost she's much better suited to running an organisation than Falkvinge ever was. She will be able to handle people without driving them off, she's competent and she radiates credibility in a way that a party with the word "pirate" in its name needs desperately. Falkvinge was great for kick starting the party but Troberg is just the right person to take it to the next level. She has a tough job though - the party flopped in the 2010 elections and without a lot of hard work there is a risk the party will dwindle and be largely forgotten well before the 2014 EU parliament elections.