Since tax evasion is considered dishonesty, I don't see why is should be un-patentable. Patent all you like, but at the end of the day, if you use the method, it does not make it legal. Since it is illegal to do so, how do you track people or organizations who violate the patent and then enforce it?
If you ask me, I think it is a bit like patenting a method to crack a safe. You can patent it all you like, but there are very few situations when you can actually use it legally. Not only do you get on the wrong side of the law if you use it, but if someone does use it, it can carry a second charge for the patent breech as well.
 
On the one hand, if you encourage people to patent their ideas, the IRS would be able to use that knowledge to look for similar patterns when they suspect that an entity is defrauding the government. If on the other hand, you refuse to issue patents for this, there's going to be a need for investigators to reinvent the wheel, so to speak.

The amount of time that'll be freed up for humans to apply their abilities in other areas. Just because robots might do some of the work that we once used to do, does not in any way mean humans are going to be defunct. Even if humans stop working on menial and repetitive jobs, I'm certain we're not so un-innovative as to be unable to find things to do with ourselves.
 
I see huge potential opening up for work that mandates the need for what might be viewed or thought of as more human specialties.

I find it hard to believe that a lie is fabricated from any sort of moral standpoint whatsoever. When I make up a lie, I do it for reasons all my own. Morality is a distant second to whatever primary reason I might have.
 
For instance, I would not (if asked by a stranger on a bus) tell the truth about carrying a ton of money in my back pack. My primary motive has no moral inclination. It is driven by the perceived necessity for the safety of my belongings. Secondary would perhaps be perceived by some as a moral contradiction My parents might have said that it was evil to lie and that I would spend another agonizing eternity in hell. If such were the case, and if that were anything to do with morals, they're NOT MY morals, they're social morals.
 
Even if a magnet is somehow able to seize up my moral faculties, I would still be free to tell the Truth, or to tell a Lie based on intellectually reasoned stimulation. No amount of mental stimulation will be able to so that.
 
I admit however, that there is a possibility that one could be immersed into a state of "willingness to respond with the truth rather than the false", however, it would be more due to a mental state and a clever questioner than anything else. Ask the wrong questions and *blam!* your truth serum will fall apart. As long as the mind forgets that it is unsafe, irresponsible, unsuitable or whatever else, to tell a lie, it will not bother making up one. As soon as it realizes the situation, it will invariably fight off the influence and pull its inhibitions right back to where there are supposed to be.
 
That noted, I find it impossible to imagine how someone could be influenced to tell a lie every time s/he opens his/her mouth. I just don't see that happening.

I've seen custom scratch mods that would rock this one into insignificance. This guy's done a fair job certainly.. Pretty neat and clean work. Honestly though, even I could do a better job. I'm not a modding guru, but I know what I'm talking about.
 
If stuff like this is what slashdot has started accepting, I'm sorry but we're gonna lose the few intelligent readers that're still left.
 
There's a good chance this was approved by mistake. I find it hard to believe that this was done on purpose.

Well, technically, they're not all that new. But yes, we're now obliged to recognize our gut dwelling overloards. :)

Ah, there's a very good reason for keeping timezones. I'm amazed I even thought of it! :)
 
You see, If I live in India, which happens to be GMT+5.5 If I wanted to call someone up in the UK, I'd suddenly have a problem on my hands. On the one hand, I have no interest in calculating backward from the position of the sun in my sky. On the other, I'd be hard pressed to do the same based on the star patterns in my night sky if I wanted to call during my night. I might end up calling up while he's asleep, or while he's warming up his wife.
 
It all becomes much easier for me if I were to deduct 5.5 hours from my clock and figure out the current status of my clients sleep cycle based on my calculations and overlaying the result over my own sleep cycle.
 
Of course, having a standardized clock for the whole planet would have its conveniences, but the inconveniences far outweigh those. Once we've encapsulated the entire planet under a nice thick blanket of steel and start living in artificial days and nights to match our clocks, the tables will turn. But until then, we're going to be eating out of the hands of God, or something very much like him/her.

We corrupted them. Duh! :-D Or at least I like the idea.

It's plain as sin! Jellyfish Eggs of course!

It's probably safe to assume that any provider that stores your messages beyond what's required (purging from servers immediately post delivery, or not saving them in the first place) for proper functioning of the service, is a lousy choice for rioters and looters.
 
If these idiots had any sense, they'd send coded messages or use a different means of communication. It's not RIM's problem really. I for one, am against corporates spying and monitoring their people etc, but I have faith in my theory that people who are like minded as i am about privacy, would boycott companies and enterprises that embrace such ideologies.
 
For what it's worth, BBM ain't the real issue here. They never said they kept messages private, or that they are saved and stored for possible future retreival. In fact, it says so in their contracts! I find it hard to believe in mob stupidity.. All I can say really, is "What on Earth were those idiots thinking!?"

If there were enough antiprotons out there to be useful as a fuel-source, any probes sent through would have come out the other side shredded to the chips. Or am I still theorizing shit?

I for one would welcome our Jellyfish Overlords!

*salutes*

The problem is.. They say if you travel faster than light, time stops, and then starts rolling back on itself.. You'll be a time traveler and you'd be able to go into the past. Apparently, if you could catch that carrot, you could also go back in time, kill yourself as a kid and find yourself laughing paradoxically at the humor of it all.

My confusion is about how time could possibly roll back. It has no properties, except those we give it. Time does not travel... We just take time to travel.

a/b/g/n

The words you use sound ominously potent and are difficult for me to understand. Is there a book or source you could refer me to that would help me better understand simultaneity, invariance, closed loops etc.. Something closer to layman speak perhaps? I tried Wikipedia, but more than clearing things up, it's tossing my brain into a spaghetti wok. :(

..what bugs me, is the massive amount of inertia that's got people believing that Light is the fastest thing that there is out there. There's a speed 'C' and nothing can travel faster or it will go back in time. Light can travel that fast, but never any faster. Never ever! I'll probably never be able to explain why exactly it is that this frustrates me, but I'll try anyway.

First off, why does anything travelling faster _have_ to go back in time? Time is merely a concept that we humans have come up with in order to measure duration. Establishing for ourselves, causality and basically, placing eggs before chickens. However, our descriptions of Time are merely superficial. x seconds have passed.. blah blah. But when we get down to it, we have absolutely no way to know what time is. Aside from the basic fact that time is an "idea" that separates events, it is nothing else. Essentially though, it is a _concept_ and as such, has no other value. What is it made up of? Can it be modified or turned into something else? Can you break it up into its component pieces? (I don't mean breaking hours into minutes, and seconds etc. I mean as an entity or something truly physical in nature.) We can't even observe it. We can merely mark its passage by the sequencing of events that happen with its passage.

An effect cannot happen before its cause. That's understandable. However, just exceeding a certain velocity will not cause time to roll back. Or for that matter, to slow down. Ones _perception_ of time might be altered, but time itself does not change. It's all relative.

If you travel faster than light away from an object, your eyes will definitely see events happening in reverse. But that is because you are seeing light that has left the object that it reflected off of earlier and earlier due to the fact that you are overtaking photons as you zip ever onward. Meanwhile, an object you happen to be travelling toward, will have the opposite effect for exactly the same reason, but in reverse. Events occurring at the object will be perceived as happening faster than they actually are. However, Time itself has not changed. Your perception of it, as an observer inside a system might be different, but Time has not changed, gone backward nor forward. Time IS as Time HAS always been. A Concept.

Much like Thunder after Lightening.. We know the thunder was caused at almost the same time that the lightening was created. However, we hear it much later. When a train goes past us, we experience the Doppler effect. To a Blind man, It would seem as if the thunder was all there was and that it was caused at the moment that he hears it. He would have no cause to imagine that it was created at a time before it reaches his ears. It's the same with us and how we perceive photons of light. If we could perceive stuff that moved much faster than photons too, we would measure time using that as one of our indicators of passing events. As humans, we embrace most anything that seems convenient. Not always, but most often anyway. Why are we talking of time moving backward in the first place?

If someone can show me where it is that I'm going wrong in my understanding of this, I'd love to hear your thoughts. This has bothered me for a long time, and I know that I come off sounding silly to most of you who actually understand what I wish I could. However, I'd like to understand what you do, so.. Help? :)