However, this website should be integrated as part of a mandatory test that every internet user must take to renew their internet license.

Failure to identify that site as promotional material for an upcoming movie would lower your test score. Similarly, forwarding chain emails would also make you lose a few points.

If you fail the test, your internet license would then be suspended until you take the test again. Additionally, you would have 30 days to attempt to renew your breeding license, if you have one.

It's the only way to be sure.

You are ultimately accountable for yourself. Your thoughts are your own, and your feelings are your own.

This is difficult to accept, as throughout your life, particularly at its beginnings, you have internalized other people's voices and reactions as your own. You have acquired "triggers" or "button" that can be pushed, often unwittingly, by people around you.

It is a arduous but necessary first step to stop and admit to yourself that you are responsible for everything that you do, and that no matter how easy it would be to blame others for your reactions, it would be a falsehood.

Nobody can make you feel anything unless you allow them to. By recognizing and acknowledging the power you have over yourself, you can free yourself from emotional shackles, and gain the ability to establish more mature relationships with others.

This is consistent with the idea that the government works for the people.

The government spends a large amount of money toward software purchases, which serves some short-term goals, but don't improve the public good substantially.

If instead the government had a strict policy that any and all software purchased or funded with public money must be open-sourced under a license recognized by the OSF for example, then every tax dollar spent on software would in fact have a much greater chance to improve the overall software landscape. (And yes, some of that software would have to stay unpublished for reasons of national security, but that should be a small minority of all software purchases.)

To the counter-argument that open-source is a threat to the software industry, I say "Baloney!":

The software industry does not strive on re-writing the exact same functionality over and over, nor does it strive by reselling the same old code ad infinitum. That is stagnation and artificially inflated profits.

On the contrary, but having more and more open-source building blocks available to all, the software industry becomes both challenged and enabled to reach higher and to produce items that were unattainable before.

This makes no sense. Have you ever seen a gay man? Where did you get the idea they had the body of a woman?

Your questions is roughly as meaningful as "Which is taller, an asian man or an african man?"

Yes, let's do "drastic action X" and watch the Afghan people throw away centuries of culture of local warlords, embrace western-style democracy, and rejoice as McDonalds spontaneously pop everywhere overnight.

The cold, unpleasant truth is that there's nothing to win there, particularly not by quick and forceful military action.

Osama bin Laden is just a figurehead. He might already be dead, he might not, and it doesn't make a lick of difference.

The position supported by empirical evidence so far is that since your consciousness is an emergent property of your central nervous system, when that system ceases to function, your consciousness ceases as well.

Now, if you're into ignoring the evidence available to you, and you'd rather make-believe that we are magical being able to survive the death of our material shell, then all bets are off.

My favorite make-believe scenario would have to be the computer simulation hypothesis, which allows for a number of entertaining possibilities:

- the folks in charge of the simulation could be super-impressed by your artificial ape brain and decide to copy/paste it in other parts of the simulation, or even in other simulations altogether (tada, reincarnation AND heaven in one fell swoop!)

- you weren't actually an AI character, but you were a player in that simulation. You wake up, look at the time, and remember that you have a long meeting scheduled with X'chlansberg about a new space highway. Yawn.

- your first cycle of virtual incarceration is over. Prepare for 39 more cycles to expiate your high crimes against the space chancellor.

etc.

First, a disclaimer: I'm a n00b to this site.

However, I don't think this is what this site is about, and I doubt there's a budget for it anyway.

What you want here is a reputation system. Unfortunately, while it's easy to build a reputation system that indicates which users have been around a while and appear to say things that other users like (aka the reward points), it's much harder to build a reputation system that indicates which users are right.

Interestingly, the same problem occurs in scientific publications, where you don't want to let any clown spout some non-sense. There, they "solve" the problem by having editors, and peer-reviewers. It has all sort of negative side-effects, such as delays from writing to publication, errors that make it through and facts that are filtered because of editor and reviewer biases, etc.

But if you accept that your system isn't going to be perfect, then it may be worth trying to attract domain experts to your site, verify their credentials, then give them the ability to pass down credibility points to other users based on their posts. On top of that, add meta-moderators on top of it that will mostly check that domain experts only give credibility points for posts that fall within their recognized expertise. Spend a few years tweaking the many variables of such a system just right, and you may have a winner.

One way this can be true is if God is outside of the universe. To help you think about it, pretend that the universe is a computer simulation and that God is the nerd who's programming the simulation and watching it run.

It's not hard to imagine that she has built tools that allow her to pause, save, load, rewind and fast forward the simulation.

As such, she can know anything she wants about the simulation at any given stage, and she can edit any aspect of that simulation as well.

That places God outside of time (since time in that simulation is just one of many variables that can be arbitrarily tweaked), and makes her all-knowing and all-powerful, as far as that simulation is concerned, which happens to be all we know.