During times of war or extreme stress can we be held liable for our actions? According to a new article from the Cornell International Law Journal there are fundamental differences in how the conscious and sub-conscious processes information. Our conscious mind is influenced by such factors as morality, emotion, and accountability ... while our sub-conscious seems to rely on training, motive, and pure spontaneity. The real question is - is the total sum of who we are contained in our physical ... Read this and 5 comments.

I remember going through countless setups of the newest flavors of Linux during the blossoming stage of the open-source OS about 8 years ago. Among the many options for bleeding-edge file systems was the ReiserFS - known (at that time) for being just as unstable as it was revolutionary. As the years progressed I began to fall in love with it - its speed, its compatibility with other file systems, and its general bleeding-edge-cool factor. Many of these features are personified in Hans Reiser, ... Read this and 17 comments.

I've always been critical of labels of any kind, (things like "Fundamentalist" , "Religiosity", "Liberal", etc.) where did we get the idea of a "cult" and who makes the rules for the label? What kind of relationship with a religion (or system of belief) is a "healthy" one? I think we all have the responsibility to challenge of any categorizations that we have in our minds, in doing so we give ourselves the opportunity to better define ... Read this and 5 comments.

Is software for sale not the worst idea ever? Whatever happened to the ideals of software's forerunners like the pioneers of the Unix OS (Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, etc.)? These programmers oftentimes worked for different companies and on different projects but shared resources and utilities for the furtherance of the science -- until, of course, the secularization of the industry by capitalists. Thank goodness for the GNU public license, the forerunner of open source. Imagine a world ... Read this and 25 comments.

Can there ever be a time when government is completely uninfluenced by religion? Here is an interesting article on our friend ... Read more.

If science saves us from religion gone bad, who or what will save us from science gone bad? Here is a great article in the Jewish ... Read this and 13 comments.

Is bacn becoming the new ... Read more.

Do the problems that are created with Wikipedia outweigh the problems that it solves? There have been a controlling group that has evolved among the wiki-editors much like most open-source projects...but is Wikipedia's praise premature...who's history should be qualified as absolute...the most well documented, or the most true? Historically, its always been the people with the biggest pocket-books that get the history set in stone...(ie. l'Hospital's rule, he didn't discover it just had the ... Read this and 1 comment.

I've been thinking about the nature of knowledge. Is knowledge overrated? Obviously it has its perks, you can explain stuff, and make stuff work, and it even feels really good to be smart...or at least smarter then your peers...but is it all that much better then, say...accumulating wealth? I mean man-kind has survived thousands of years with very little knowledge of how things have worked and they got along just fine...my question is not whether knowledge is important (because it is.) but, ... Read this and 4 comments.

I just sat through a surprisingly inspiring seminar on Customer Service. It forced me to do an overwhelming amount of introspection which can always make you feel uncomfortable. The speaker went beyond, "The customer is always right" and began to explore more about the reason we are the way we are. The epiphany I arrived at is that Customer Service is pertinent in every aspect of your life. People in general have a terrible habit called "mirroring", or duplicating the ... Read this and 1 comment.

Whats worse someone blowing smoke in your face or a kick in the pants? Are we justified in punching a person who knowingly damages the quality of "our" ... Read this and 13 comments.

Have any of you become completely overwhelmed by the amount of information that is so readily available to us? What are some fresh ideas for channeling this info...I was thinking about AI and my mind went on a tangent of endless ... Read this and 3 comments.