... who always thinks RSA is South Africa at first? It really had me for a minute with the "watering hole" thing. First thing I think of is a muddy pond surrounded by hyenas and giraffes and such...

Not to sound like a total douche but I try to drive as efficiently as possible. At first it was a personal finance issue since I noticed that driving efficiently saved me considerably over the course of a year. Now that I make decent money it's less about that and more that I don't have any particular reason to be wasteful. And since I'm not trying to impress anyone out there and not driving 500 miles a day, frankly I'd rather give as little money to oil companies and car makers as is humanly possible. If the app was on Android I would probably have already pre-ordered one...

So I'm a nerd who works in a chair all day, but I also weight train at least 3 times a week and run competitive times in everything from 5Ks to half-marathons, AND I used to weight about 320lbs (I weigh around 160 now). The trick? I treat it like I do everything else I love to do: I think of my workouts as ways to fix, tinker, and improve (dare I say, hack?) my body. It's easy to think of our computers (or whatever we work with daily) as important extensions of our physical selves, but we seem to do this to the detriment of our actual bodies. I wouldn't let one of my systems limp along with broken hardware/software and have spent hours or days fixing problems, so why shouldn't I commit half an hour a day (to begin with) to my own physical upkeep? It turns out that although it was a seemingly IMPOSSIBLE struggle at the onset, after several weeks I began to really genuinely enjoy it! Running in particular got me hooked because it's the sort of thing you can keep working on, and continue improving, without ever feeling like you're stagnating if you do it right. It seems to me that anyone with the typical geek mentality could easily change their mindset to feel the same way. Of course, it's just my experience, and therefore anecdotal at best, but still my 2 cents.

Yes, it does sound more like a religion...

There is a bigger issue here, though. If we assume that people can create communities online, and that we should take this as evidence of a "space" for these avatars, then how does morality work in such a space? How about governance? Laws? Would/should these concepts apply only in the space itself? Currently, there is no effective governing body within "cyberspace" (cringe) that acts solely within that same space. Instead, the assumption is made that there exists a mapping of the members of the "online community", the avatars, back to human people in the real world, and we attempt to govern the human people accordingly. The problems with this are many, this site seems to exist to list them. As just one of the many examples, what if behavior is legal in the person's place of residence, but is perpetrated against someone in whose country it would be illegal? Should there be an International Court of Cyberspace? What about crimes perpetrated by online "beings" outside of control of people in the real world? The behavior of viruses of even just buggy software that are unintentional? If we want to go ahead and say that cyberspace is real, then shouldn't we be able to define a governing body whose jurisdiction is online and who punishes/reforms avatars? This seems absurd if for no other reason than that any mapping from people to avatars is not injective. Although it is amusing to imagine the CyperPolice putting my Slashdot avatar in CyberPrison until I learn to shape up. It is this very absurdity that makes me want to agree that the notion of some sort of online "space" is just simply invalid. It seems that any definition of space, in as far as it should apply to people and governance, needs to include the ability to meaningfully govern within the space itself. A corn field is a space, because the governance of a community of people within that space can enact laws with repercussions within that space. And perhaps that example sums it up. Avatars are not people, they are not really much of anything other than a sequence of electrical impulses and magnetic fields, and even then only by a system of assignment, and so cannot be governed as avatars. Because of this, there can be no cyberspace in this sense.

For a second there I thought maybe this was a late April fool's joke...