Obligatory: https://twitter.com/trumpdba

Have you tried reading up on the details of the Galileo affair, or even on the history of scientific contributions made by Catholic priests who weren't treated as heretics? Do you even know about Gregor Mendel and Georges Lemaître? Even a quick Wikipedia search would have cured you of your ignorance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Isn't the whole point that WE are effectively that program.

We are getting closer and closer to being able to write something more intelligent than ourselves, make sure it's working properly, and then letting it loose.

The concern is that this might only happen once...

Except... he did go public with them.

Read up on your history. Scholars who published their theories about nature were very rarely persecuted for their research in 13th century Europe.

Seriously, that video was actually better than all three of the prequels combined.

Especially the Yoda bit.

I wish I was kidding.

Will this armed paramilitary wear brown shirts and make sure that any "abnormal" citizens are detained and interrogated?

You do realise that to most people in most parts of the civilized/first world, this sounds completely insane, right?

Two handguns for self defence? Insane. Guess what I have for self-defence in the first world country where I live? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not even a bat or knife. Times I have been violently murdered or robbed so far: 0.

A "standard" .223 carbine... that you can buy at a neighbourhood variety store. Insane.

A shotgun, "pretty typical for hunting small game". Insane.

Even more insane, though, is this idea that your hobby/paranoia (which are the two reasons you implicitly think people should have guns) outweighs other people's safety.

Where I live, you actually don't see guns, other than small handguns, in holsters, carried by the police. That's it.

Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Guns just make people way more effective at killing each other. That's what they are for. Take up archery, buy a can of mace, and stop being so completely ridiculous about your weapon-infested society.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/research/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-and-death/index.html

I'm probably an ignorant southerner, but isn't "Gold Coast" just a fancy name for "the outer suburbs of Brisbane"?

And if their maps wrongly placed their destination in completely the wrong place, they'd be equally screwed.

What's your point?

Before there is too much stupidity, if you've never been to Australia, please realise:

1. It's huge. Really huge. I live in one out of two of the closer-together cities in Australia, and they're about 800kms apart. In the other direction, the next major city is 2,500kms away.

2. It's mostly empty (in terms of civilization). Think of driving through rural Utah or Arizona, which are quite similar to the Australian bush.

3. It's mostly flat and full of similar looking landscape.

4. National parks and non-national park areas often look quite similar.

5. There's usually only one or two ways to get around in the country.

6. Mildura is a small town in the middle of bloody nowhere. If I was driving there from here I'd expect to pass through a handful of tiny settlements on the way.

So if you are relying on your GPS to get you somewhere outside a major city, it's actually quite plausible and reasonable that you might not have much idea that you're being led off in the wrong direction until you (don't) get there.

It's also quite plausible that you can die - it has happened before. People get lost, they run out of fuel, they don't have water, the temperature easily gets up into the 40-50C range and - dead.

Given that Windows 7 (what I use... haven't tried 8) still natively runs things designed for Windows 95 and 98, I'm not sure when or how you think Steam is going to "stop working" on Windows.

"It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree." -G.K. Chesterton

No, beer is utterly delicious, you just don't like it.

Oh, unless you mean mainstream American beer, which I agree, does taste like crap and is justifiably the cheapest in the world.

Or unless you want to do something really bizarre like using wifi to connect to a network...

You forgot the most important issue - we are currently doing a good job of causing climate change with a few billion of us using motorised land vehicles. There is no way known that the environment can sustain any significant fraction of the population moving to air travel as a commuting method.

We should be focusing on getting rid of the idea that individuals need 1+ tonne lumps of metal to get around, not finding new ways to pump out greenhouse gases.