If I have nothing to hide then no one has legitimacy or even moral ground to stand on and spy on me.

The proper way to find and punish criminal/terrorist activity is to first prove reasonable suspicion of crime THEN investigate by gathering incriminating evidence, and not the opposite of fishing for incriminating stuff then slap criminal intent on it hoping it'll stick.

His short(ish) novel "The blue world" can't get old, as it is mainly an intemporal replay of much of man's history.

They just suffer.

No they don't. They're living an exciting life with ups and downs.

We humans are smart enough to convene agreements, and one almost universal such agreement is "I won't try to eat you if you don't either".

Thank you. I was born on September the 30th in 1980.

Multiverses can interact !

With the very recent forceful closing of the BitFloor BitCoin exchange, and the inavailability of bitcoin-24, another (european) exchange, there seems to be a crackdown on BitC exchanges going on.

What is needed, is a decentralised method for trading BitCs for other currencies, or else BitCoins can be made to be worthless by shutting down the current centralised, easily identified exchanges. I'd suggest Ripple but that technical solution seems to be going nowhere at the moment, alas.

Whether your money loses its value or the assets you can invest it in lose value, amounts to the same in the end: you get poorer. We're stuck between a rock (threat of inflation) and a hard place (a very real deflation and its conjoined-twin sister insolvency).

This explosion appears very similar to that of the AZF chemical plant near Toulouse in France, though (thankfully) smaller in damage and victims.

Fire and ammonium nitrate deposits... like match and dynamite.

The analogy is sounds, but not at all for the reasons you try to expose.

Bulb tulips were a popular way for investors to save their welth from massive devaluation caused by the practice of clipping gold coins, combined with the special rules of the dutch banking system (free coinage) and the massive influx of precious metals from newly discovered America: gold would flow into the dutch banks, get deposited at facial value in exchange for full(er) coins - or certificates of value which end up buying bullion for minting into fresh new coins, and get shipped back for more clipping and recycling by the princes of Europe. Buying bulbs and bulb stock was one way to escape the madness, much like buying bitcoins today is one way to escape the monetary madness. You can read more here about it.

...and which one it is, depends on the time period considered.

... it's a sticker that reads "bullshit", you slap it on the screen permanently.

Joke aside, who will debunk the dunkers ? Everything we know is false, for vaster and more elaborate definitions of "false" as science progresses.

I'm really wondering if the current French government even cares about France being seen as a serious country.

As a french citizen, I can assure you that the last few years have definitely demonstrated that our politicians will squander every last shred of credibility France still has, as long as it can even potentially give them a single vote back.

I mean, seriously... the very existence of Hadopi and its millions of euros worth of budget for nought ? The Florange debacle ? The Peugeot mess ? High-profile Minister posing in marinière with kitchen implements in hands on the cover of a magazine ? Government officials contradicting each other in matter of national policies ? The Twitterweiler communication mishap ? The list goes on and on and on...

Pretty much every member of our governments of the past decades has amounted to little more than a bad clown with delusions of grandeur, much to the population's pain and shame.

If that was true

It is true, as duly reported by athropologists, like theo ne I cited above. Within the same regions, the primitive farmers are more often victims of famine than their hunter-gatherer cousins living next door.

then why was agriculture even invented?

Because it allowed for planning and higher population density, in particular a much higher number of children.

how did agriculture based communities overtake hunter-gatherers in population, if there was no scarcity of food?

See the previous point. More population growth leads to morel and needed to sustain it, which is why agricultural peoples spread themselves, conquering the lands of hunter-gatherers until they had pushed them all onto least useable land.

Do you think people would spend that much energy if food was plentiful?

Surveys done by anthropologists show that both hunter-gatherers and primitive farmers spend about 20-24 hours of their week working at "producing" food, with a slight advantage in raw number of calories (2140 daily average) and much bigger advantage in terms of food diversity (upwards of 70 different plant and animal sources) going for the hunter-gatherers.

Switching to farming is not a matter of work spent (apart from the food diversity it's pretty much the same), it's a matter of being able to plan for the future and especially plan for feeding more children as well as securing food supplies in case of a catastrophe such as the Great Thawing Up of 15000 B.C.

I remember playing V-O back in 2004, for several months (as "Sacred Chao"). Back then we were already promised capships, player-owned space stations and sectors, and PVP-determined domination over the war sectors between the blue and red factions. There was some progress, at one point we could land aboard the automated frigates that would tour the galaxy, and man its turrets.

But, after all these years, there has been no more progress ? I'm underwhelmed.