Professor Dawkins,

I by far agree with you and many others that the biblical, deist god has no basis for existence.

Is there a formal school of thought that scientifically regards the god phenomenon as an emergent property of conscience at a social level, much as we could study conscience as an emergent property of complex neurological activity, or the economy as an emergent property of the rules of commerce? Couldn't such a consequent god* model, even if very different in nature from the deist model, be studied by science and thus bridge the gap between those who feel its existence and those who want to explain it?

Burt Crepeault
Canada

* I use the expression consequent god for two reasons: 1) it is logical and naturally explainable, as opposed to supernatural in essence; and 2) it comes as a consequence of conscience and therefore could be considered as a god of after, as opposed to a god of before in the creationist sense.

There there, now listen to this one sounding like a 10-year old saying 'I'm never going to kiss a girl'. If you haven't yet grasped that tastes change with time and that experiences begin to feel like "more of the same" after a while, I suggest you reread your post and take your own advice.

The question "Are you finding it harder, as you get more mature, to find something you want to play?" was clearly not intended at you.

From a purely functional perspective, this makes for better quality software in the end. More versions mean more unforeseen situations mean more testing mean in the end more bugs found and quashed.

Because...

You said it: they're morons with money. It's that same money banks need in order to keep growing. And as you know, growth of your customer base is the foundation of capitalism. You can't even sterilize them, that would be bad for business...

Mainstream films are not made by creative people, they're made by business people.

Weapons, blah blah, speed, blah blah (yawn).

It's not history. The real question here is: how much gold did they find on board?

...but their implementations do. Except for rare cases, profit is directly proportional to the amount of effort put in implementation and marketing of your idea. Therefore:

1) publish the idea. Odds are, no one will pay attention to it anyway.
2) start working on its implementation, get the details figured out, remove the obstacles
3) start making a fuss about it, attract attention
4) if someone else tries to patent it, they can't: idea is not original because your initial publication is prior art

If you make money in this endeavor, bonus. If not, you'll have learned many things, perhaps made new friends, found partners, attracted some attention, made yourself a name, found a goal in life, etc.

I suppose the trend is unstoppable by now as we all jumped right into it with our credit and debit cards. Still, I'm always amazed that people willingly pay to pay, that is, give a fraction of the transaction to some third party, just for allowing the transaction to take place. In the good old days of cash, the passing of money from one hand to another was free. Now it appears that every time I need to pay for something, I need to pay a little more. Is that really acceptable? Am I the only one who's not too excited by this?

This is something I totally subscribe to. Popularity of violent games and movies is an indication that a good proportion of the human (arguably mostly male) population has battle fever, an urge to get involved in conflict and to come out the winner. I would guess that this inclination has been present in our species for a long, long time and is not about to recede -- just look at the world today. And when there is no real action, we indulge in games, competitions, sports. Hey, aren't the Olympics (the modern ones) based on a model (the ancient ones) that is a proxy for war? Games have long been an outlet for people, allowing to fill a need that cannot be filled in reality at the moment. I can't go out and be a bad-ass hero that bludgeons hordes of ennemies? So be it, I'll rent a Vin Diesel movie or play Halo. Makes me feel good to a point that I would even stay away from the real thing. Enroll in the army and go make peace in Afghanistan? No thanks. That cowardly attitude, magnified to an increasing fraction of population, means peace, the real one. Pass the word.

[... hopeful, if naive, attempt to address this problem...] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1114137