rkbabang

You'll find a lot of discussion of this in Dawkins' writings. But basically, postulating a god as an answer to these questions is just answering them with an even bigger question, so it's no answer at all. It's like saying in ancient times: "How does the sun work?" "God makes it work!" "Well, how does god work then?" While the correct answer we now know is nuclear fusion of hydrogen atoms under massive pressure from the star's own gravity well :) Exactly. I forgot who said that "religion is simply pretending to know things you don't know". Your guess is as good as mine what happened at the beginning to start the universe. But saying "God did it" is so unsatisfying to me, because 1) you have no idea if god did it or not. And 2) even if he did, my next question is where did he come from? Why does he exist? What is the meaning of god's existence? You think you've answered everything, but you've answered nothing. And the big problem is that, thinking you've answered everything, you stop searching for answers. As an atheist I'm perfectly happy with answering "I don't know", when I really don't. As far as consciousness goes. Again I really don't know, but I think it may be an emergent property of the network effect. In other words it is inherent in the highly parallel structure of our brain. I think once higher level problem solving evolved in big brained mammals, maybe by accident (random mutation), that maybe natural selection took over from there to refine it. I think bonobos and maybe chimpanzees are a lot more intelligent than most people think they are, and maybe conscious (do some research in this area you will be amazed at what bonobos have been taught to do), how do we know they don't have the mental capacity to be more civilized thinking beings or to think about thinking (sapience), but just lack the capacity to speak and thus develop language? Again, I don't really know any of the answers, but "god did it" is highly unsatisfying to me, because it explains nothing and there is no proof of any God doing anything.

If you do some serious introspection. I think you will find your "belief" in both God(s) and Government(s) springs from the same source. Your irrational fear of your fellow man. We really aren't all out to get you, you know. Man has evolved his aberration to theft and murder, as well has his need for social acceptance and wont to cooperate with his fellow man, because it has given us (as a species) a survival advantage to be so inclined. It does the individual no good to murder everyone he sees if the species does not live on. I look at morality as a "technology", i.e. something invented by man as a tool for man's survival. In the field of moral-tech, the non-aggression principle, I think, is the state of the art. There are some individual humans who wish to attempt to live via theft and violence. What we should do is work together to protect ourselves from such psychopaths and sociopaths, not give them permission to rob us to raise armies and build nuclear weapons as we do now. --Eric EDIT: Upon re-reading this I should clarify that I didn't mean "you" as in "Liberty", who I quoted, but "you" as in anyone who may be reading this and believing in either type of mythology (gods or governments).

I agree with most of the posts on this thread in that I miss Clinton. Compared with the enormous amount of blood on the hands of the last two who occupied that office, his Bosnia thing (and only bombing an aspirin factory once in a while) seems down-right Jesus-like.

You may enjoy this article, it goes over this very topic. Artificial Intelligence Will Defeat CAPTCHA — How Will We Prove We’re Human Then?

I haven't noticed any either, which I think, is an indication of the time Sanjeev spends filtering and removing them. ^^^^^^^^^^^^ +1

I don't think that receipt is real. Nothing on this menu has prices quite that insane. http://www.nikkibeach.com/sttropez/menu.php Of course there are no drink prices listed, but you'd think if it was $20 for a coke, a steak would be $500, where a T-Bone is only 45€ and many meals are much less than that. --Eric

Fairfax is my largest holding (about 29% as of right now). I have no idea why Prem wants to own even a single share of RIMM. I keep telling myself that he is smarter than I am, which is undoubtedly true, but still... Smart people can make mistakes and fall prey to logical fallacies and inconsistencies in their thinking too. I have this feeling that won't go away that he just likes RIMM because it is a local company, which hires people from a local school that he likes, that he wishes would succeed. Those are definitely not reasons to invest. Hopefully I'm way off base. Then again RIMM could go to zero and it wouldn't put a huge dent in Fairfax, which is why I still hold FFH.

I should have been more clear, when I use the term "capitalist" or "capitalism" I mean "free market capitalism" not crony-capitalism, state subsidized and state protected capitalism, not mercantilism. Bush is not a capitalist by my definition. I associate him and those like him with government not the market. Many have a distorted view of what a free market actually is. If you grow corn or make ethanol, for instance, and you can get the government to subsidize corn and require ethanol in fuel. You may be a lot of things, but a free-market capitalist isn't one of them.

Ethanol has nothing to do with a free market. It has everything to do with government regulations, laws, and subsidies. It is your government that is starving that Egyptian farmer not the cowboy capitalists.

I think if anything will save the US situation it will be the massive increase in energy production from the new oil/gas fields that will be coming online in the next decade. I'm generally bullish on the US economy for that reason alone. The stabilization of energy costs should help the economy recover in every other sector. North Dakota's oil/gas boom to get even bigger, official says Also speaking of "glass half full". Every glass I've ever seen has been completely full. What if a glass was really half empty?

They are on the hook, but there is a lot of hassle proving that you did not do anything to expose your personal information. It then also takes a week or two for them to return the funds to your account. Haven't experienced it myself, but a couple of people I know who had their cards fraudulently used said the experience was not fun...although they were both here in Canada. I would assume the protocol in the U.S. is not any different. Cheers! I've had it happen to me two or three times now. Honestly wasn't too big a deal, just called them up, and they resolved it. One of the times, BAC was so incompetent, they credited me twice! It has happened to me only once and I found out when citibank called me to ask me if I was the one who just used my card at a Wal Mart in NY (I live in NH), I told them no, and they told me that I wouldn't be responsible for the charge and they fedEx'ed me new cards overnight. --Eric

An unbelievable story of how a hacker took control of this guy's identity and destroyed all of his data in minutes. How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking "But I’m also upset that this ecosystem that I’ve placed so much of my trust in has let me down so thoroughly. I’m angry that Amazon makes it so remarkably easy to allow someone into your account, which has obvious financial consequences. And then there’s Apple. I bought into the Apple account system originally to buy songs at 99 cents a pop, and over the years that same ID has evolved into a single point of entry that controls my phones, tablets, computers and data-driven life. With this AppleID, someone can make thousands of dollars of purchases in an instant, or do damage at a cost that you can’t put a price on."

you don't need to privatize it. Just get rid of the laws forbidding private companies to compete with it on first class mail delivery then in a few years when fedEx, UPS and whoever else has it covered, shut it down. Those laws were passed in the mid-19th century to shut down Lysander Spooner's The American Letter Mail Company that was eating the USPS's lunch. The US Gov could have and should have gotten out of the postal business right then and there, but instead congress passes a law giving the USPS a monopoly. Spooner vs. U.S. Postal System by Lucille J. Goodyear 'Father of 3-cent Stamp' Spooner fought Post Office

Google Fiber signups going very well in Kansas and talks about expansion to other markets

Many of the questions are infuriating. Take this one: "The plaque the NASA astronauts left on the moon says, "We came in peace for all mankind." Would that be true if there were a commercial free-for-all in space?" I would have answered it: It would be much more true with private industry than with government. Private ventures compete with each other in the marketplace to provide goods and services humanity wants and needs. It is governments who fight wars and wreak havoc and destruction. While the US Government was placing that plaque on the moon it was simultaneously burning the flesh off children in south east Asia with napalm.

The other thing I think is notable is that Google Fiber is symmetric (i.e. upload speed is equal to download speed). My thinking is that they want to encourage content creation as well as content consumption. As for where is the demand for gigabit internet, I don't think there is a demand for it, but at that price I'd be buying it. Google is trying to create a demand and encourage content creation at the same time. If everyone had 1GB internet or even a lot of people had it, there would be high bandwidth consuming web applications that we haven't though of yet appearing all over the place.

I have a cheap phone with Boost Mobil, prepaid. I get voice at $0.10/min and text messaging at $0.10/message. No data. I put $10 on it every few months. I might be a tech guy, but I'm cheap. I wait until I get home and use the home phone to make most calls. My cell is very rarely used. I'd say less than 10 people have the number and they know that if they call it I most likely will not answer, because I keep the ringer off. My cell phone is for me to use when I need to, not for people to get in touch with me. My wife also has a similar phone with Boost and she uses hers less than I use mine.

You might want to think about a term life policy as well. At 30 you can get a $500K-$1M, 20-30 year term policy dirt cheap and that will at least protect your family until you are 50-60 years old. That's what I did 9 years ago when I was 30. I got a $600K term policy for 30 years. If I die my wife will not invest the way I am (she has no interest in investing), but she'll also have another $600K added to our wealth immediately, which should help and give her time to figure things out. The best plan of course is not to die.

I didn't read all of these, but this one I think nailed it: <i>"If I had to identify a root-cause of Microsoft's failure, it would be its voracious business practices in the 1990s. If you are in your mid-30s or older today, you grew up under this totalitarian regime -- and you hated it. And when you had the opportunity a decade or so ago, you were on the vanguard that led x86 server build-out with Linux, not Windows. To the degree that you had to care at all about Windows on the server, virtualization assured that it was in its own little box, never again to escape. And of course, you sure as hell don't trust Microsoft now: the last thing you'd ever do is buy a Windows phone or deploy on Azure -- you are of an entire generation that won't be fooled again. And what if you're younger than that? If you're in your 20s or younger, you probably just don't care about Microsoft -- though you might not get why the older folks get so frothy about them. But know that your luxurious apathy is because an older generation considered Microsoft's offenses to be capital crimes -- and meted out punishment accordingly. Microsoft proves that in technology you can get away with being predatory for a while -- maybe even a long while -- but not forever (at least not in a free society). And once the world moves against you, those that you so aggressively bullied will cheer your demise: you will never recover until you accept that you have failed your customers and violated their trust. Very, very few technology companies have gotten to a point of such vilification and recovered (indeed, the only example I can think of is IBM)."</i> I'm in the mid-30's and older tech crowd category who would never buy a Microsoft phone or tablet, simply because it's OS is from Microsoft. Maybe I shouldn't say never, but right now I couldn't imagine me doing so.

Excellent article. Politics is indeed a violent and primitive way to address social problems. The fact that it is still employed by us as a species goes to show how far our society still needs to evolve to become the civilized beings we can and should be.

Yes, Allen is a lot less boring than Ellison. Too bad Ellon Musk isn't 10-15 times richer. He'd definitely do some interesting things if he had $35 billion to play with.

I'm hoping for a Jurassic Park.

I've never used W8, but from the screenshots and descriptions I've read it looks like a perfectly functional OS for small-touchscreen devices (i.e. tablets & phones). I think what Microsoft is about to discover is that the user interface requirements of a small-touchscreen device do not work on a larger screen w/ mouse and keyboard type device, and visa-verse. This seems like it should be obvious, but apparently Microsoft thinks they can do one GUI to fit both types of devices. I don't think it will work. Of course Microsoft could solve this problem quite easily in W8 SP1 with a choice of selectable user interfaces, similar to the different window managers that sit on top of Linux (Gnome, KDE, Enlightenment, XFCE, etc). They wouldn't need 10 or 20 choices like Linux has, they would just need two. Call one Metro and the other Traditional and let the user choose the the preferred GUI for each device and even switch back and forth between them as you can in Linux. I agree with this article and others I've read, in its current form Windows 8 looks non-functional on a PC or laptop.

How about ending the insane wars and stop spending money they don't have? No, wait a minute, that makes too much sense. Governments wouldn't do that. Sorry. Continue your discussion.

Yes, that is what I am talking about. To the OS my creative Zen just looked like a portable drive which I could copy to and from. I could also connect it in Linux and copy to and from. My ipod forces me to use iTunes (which is not available for Linux). I know there are ways to get around this, but when you start hacking into it, the file names are all messed up and put in multiple subdirectories, it just isn't easy to manage. And I hate iTunes.