We don't think linearly. Ideas spawn new ideas, and branch (like hyperlinks, right?!) to form a directed graph (like a mind map ... huh?) sometimes meeting up with other ideas.

Why would linear text be natural? It's not.

And the way humans have taken to hypertext like ducks to water should be a hint; maybe our brains are better suited to being able to follow ideas in a non-linear way.

If I were Chinese or Indian, I would be loving this. Imagine, my biggest competitor, ensuring their next generation is superstitious and ignorant. Perfect!

You are absolutely right. But a narrow definition of "god" can certainly help to establish the likelihood of his/her/its existence. As a result, I think it's pretty safe to say that Zeus, Ra, Ahura Mazda, and Yahweh (by some a.k.a. Allah) are all human fabrications.

For many (probably most) religious people, disbelief in every god of every known theistic religion is equivalent to atheism.

I agree that the possibility exists of an unknown entity responsible for the state (or at least existence) of the universe. And depending on how you define "entity" (e.g. "the laws of physics") that possibility is very high! So really, agnosticism or atheism boils down to what you are prepared to refer to as a god.

After a quick jump over to WolframAlpha, and it turns 160 EJ = 44.44 billion MWh = 5.07 million MW years.

Assuming they are all on TV (where, according to a-ha, the sun always shines :-) ), we would need 12,931 more of these power stations to produce 160 EJ per year. I'm guessing you'd need to multiply by 3 or 4 for 6 to 8 hours of full-capacity production a day.

(We'd still need to come up with a plan wrt oil by-products like plastic, but iirc you can make it (more expensively) using bacteria.)

I don't think it's a matter of people abandoning their wintel devices in favour of armdroids. It's about people with desktops also getting tabs (or whatever) and some people who don't have desktops also getting tabs, and phones, and maybe a fridge that runs Android too, for good measure.

The horse industry isn't dead. Neither is the propeller plane industry. They've just been superseded. One day the majority of computing devices won't be PCs and laptops. I don't think that's a far-fetched prediction.

Disclaimer: I'm writing this in the bath, using an HTC Desire.

A weekly letter in the post: "Your weekly Oceania status updates ... Your wife likes Jones the Postman. Friend suggestion: Jimmy Smith. You got on so well at Willesden Comprehensive, and he browsed you holiday snaps last week. He has probably forgiven you for tagging him in those drunken weekend pics. Mary Contrary would like to borrow some chicken feed in FarmCounty. Your mother has been getting an escalating number of calls from "Uncle" Philip. Perhaps have her round for tea and ask her what that's all about. Your clandestine tryst with Julia in the countryside did not go unnoticed. Love, forever, BB." It's just an attempt at a nationalised version of Facebook. At last, a Keynesian attempt at addressing unemployment and the recession, using good old ENGlish SOCialism.

Hi casualty, I'm a South African, and our democracy -- or our attempt at one -- is much younger than yours. I've been wondering for a while how a country might foster more voters like you; people who seem to me to be able to separate signal from noise. Is it just that you are very smart, and it is impossible to get a lot of your kind of vote because Joe Voter has an IQ of 104? Or can your level of political discernment be taught? It seems to me that South Africa could benefit from a wider understanding of the rights that a democracy brings the people, and both our countries could use a deeper understanding of the duty of the people to exercise those rights, otherwise they may wake up one day with fewer rights. i.e. Can education improve the intelligence and diligence with which democratic rights are exercised? Or must democracies necessarily devolved into plutocracies, followed ... eventually ... by revolution? Or is there a third option, perhaps a meritocracy where everyone has at least one vote, but, like some online communities, a signed code of conduct and community service earn you extra (but depreciable) votes? I can see a lot of potential flaws, but some communities seem to be getting it right. Could this be a model for a post-democracy?

contacts list does? Or is my phone a "destination", not a source?

Wow! That is very pretty! Here in South Africa we use Type M (BS 546) which has all the cons of the new British standard (big and bulky) with very few of the pros (earth prong opens live terminals in socket, but (usually) no fuse). THIS design looks like it offers all the good stuff, and works around all the ugly stuff -- although the sockets for "folded" mode use would need to ensure you can't accidentally touch the live prongs while inserting or removing.

Other posts here debate the surrender of anonymity, and the article presents Conficker as an example of how broken the Internet is. Spam is mentioned often too.

We *could* digitally sign our e-mails, and I *could* choose only to accept signed e-mails. I could even filter out e-mails signed by people who aren't in my address book, and maybe glance at the subject lines occasionally. Spam problem fixed! No Internet 2.0 required.

Now all we have to do is convince enough people sign their e-mails for this solution to be practical -- no small task.

Conficker is an easy one too. If the Internet was more heterogeneous, writing malware as effective as Conficker would require writing it for many platforms. The argument against the MS monopoly is the same as the argument against monoculture crop dependency. Nature has proven repeatedly how crap an idea it is.

So is an Internet 2.0 safer for EVERYONE, or just an attempt to support a fundamentally flawed OS deployment?

The New York Times ran a story, Dark Days for Green Energy, that takes a more bearish look at the situation.

Thanks for your reply rohan972. "Shotgun" answers my question, and I imagine it is a popular option. I didn't realise "assault rifle" is a contentious term. A quick wiki gave me this: "An assault rifle is a selective fire (automatic and semi-automatic) rifle or carbine firing ammunition with muzzle energies intermediate between those typical of pistol and high-powered rifle ammunition." The legal term "assault weapon" is defined here. Although that's not really my point. I was trying to determine where one should draw the line. "Shotgun" was the answer I was looking for.

My personal self-defense utopia would probably involve claymores (the mines, not the swords!) embedded in the walls of my lair, that I could trigger remotely.

My biggest concern about protecting myself using a gun is that I'm probably not as good at using one as whoever has just entered my house, or is holding one to my head as I drive into my driveway. My brother-in-law keeps 2 handguns in his house; a 9mm pistol for himself, and a smaller calibre revolver for his wife. He was a naval officer, but if those guns get cleaned annually it's a lot, and I'm sure they're fired less often. The last time I fired a weapon it was a .22 air rifle, over 20 years ago. The other guy is surely going to be quicker on the trigger. And I reckon I'm more likely to get out of a tricky situation by giving them the car or the TV than by shooting my way out.

You're right. It was meant rhetorically, and I was trying to convey that I think the lines are drawn too arbitrarily. It certainly is a big topic, but not one I'm all that interested in anyway.

I would say that "of the people" means that the government is representative. I reckon "by the people" indicates that the government is elected democratically, and "for the people" means that the government promotes the interests of the people.

In that respect, I think that safety is of primary importance, and is covered by the "for the people" part.

I also think that if every civilian chose, instead of using their vote, to use their handguns and shotguns instead, to take on an invasive, non-representative government, they would not get far. Not in the U.S. anyway. Not when they're up against A-10 "Warthogs" or AH-64 Apaches. It's ugly what 30mm rounds will do. Assuming, of course, that the civilians could get as far as coordinating their efforts.

Do you mean "social equality"?

Social equality exists in countries where citizens do not have RKBA, so RKBA is not the only way. In fact, I would consider that the cost of tertiary education in the U.S. compared to some European countries means that, in terms of equal opportunities, some states without RKBA have a higher level of social equality than the U.S.

I think it is the law that determines social equality, and that law is determined by the attitudes of the electorate and their capacity to implement their attitudes in law. Although the right to bear arms may be used to secure that capacity, with the advances in military technology achieved since the Second Amendment was codified, not accessible to civilians, I don't think the Second Amendment secures that capacity any more.

Is it sufficient to have a handgun?

Or should one rather keep assault rifles in the home?

The US Constitution protects your right to bear arms, but state laws limit exactly what arms you are allowed to bear. Are those laws reasonable? If so, why do they differ?

Let's imagine that you are only interested in defending yourself against an *average* attacker (burglar? car hijacker?) and not, say, a gang of heavily armed bank robbers, aeroplane hijackers, immigration control, or Marvin Heemeyer's bulldozer.

In that case, if the *average* attacker did not have a gun, and you had a reasonably good hospital nearby, your chance of survival would probably be better.

My son is 19 months old. Even your wife could kill him with her hands.

I see two logical conclusions to this: In a gun-free nation, your wife would have to be pretty good at a martial art in order to defend herself, or she could just rely on her brave, beefy husband. In the days before guns, that seems to have been the popular option.

In a gun-rich nation, by your argument, I should get my son a gun. You aren't going to deny my son's right to self-defence, are you?