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Comment Re:Age of Consent? (Score 1) 192

My understanding of it is that since Facebook is US-based, they made the rule in order to abide by the local law. Since everyone still has to abide by Facebook's rules on the website, you would still be subject to it. I don't know enough about the law to tell if it is technically illegal for a U.S. site to get personal information from 12-year-olds in other countries, but my guess would be... it is still illegal.

Comment Re:Still Humans? (Score 1) 409

Even though genetic drift isn't as big of a factor anymore, there's still the matter of a dramatically altered environment - not so much in a, "global warming," sense as a, "humans have lately been adapting to a completely different definition of fitness than the one that got us to where we are now," sense. The main thing that comes to mind is sexual selection. If nothing else, the centuries will tend to look kindly on the families that are best at attracting mates, keeping them, and seeing to it that their kids are able to do the same. What's more, while we don't have much in the way of natural predators anymore, we still occasionally get someone with a mutation that gives them an edge, and in that case the genes tend to spread like wildfire. As a semi-relevant example: It used to be that most people couldn't drink cow's milk without puking. Soon after it was discovered, though, it became apparent that those who could stomach this new food had an almost flukish advantage, and so over time we've gotten to the point where most people have inherited the ability from some ancient milk-drinker or another. In summary, it will be a long time before humanity technically develops into a different species, but along the way we'll probably become super hot and learn to drink milk.

Comment 1000-year Language Barrier (Score 2, Interesting) 409

Defining a human as someone who casually refers to him or herself as, "Human," in the linguistic sense common at this moment in 2009, the last of them will probably show up in ~1000 years, as natural drift in pronunciation and usage cause everyone to gradually move towards newer (and hopefully, but probably not, better) terminology. What's more, the people of the future may well have a mindset that is completely alien to us by then, no thanks to 4chan and implanted commlinks.

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Some of my readers ask me what a "Serial Port" is. The answer is: I don't know. Is it some kind of wine you have with breakfast?

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