That's the point, in 50 years we'll have the technology to access more oil (whether or not that will be economically feasible is entirely another matter, but we'll leave that aside for now.) However even the optimists agree that we only have about 50 years left of oil that we can economically access _right_now_.
So if we've got 50 years, no problem. However if we tried to support the entire population of earth at the same level as the US we'd run out of that same easily accessible oil in two to ten years, and whether or not we'll have the necessary technology in ten years is doubtfull. Even if we have the technology it will be expensive, and no one was saying that we would actually be _out_ in 50 years, just that demand would exceed supply, so prices would skyrocket, so it makes little difference if prices skyrocket due to shortages of the use of untested new technology. In either case we'd be in a world of hurt.
So five earths if we want enough oil for everyone and still have that 50 year time span to figure out how to get more oil.
The rate of discovery of new wells has been going down since the 60's or 70's (i've got reference material for this, unfortunatly not here) and the wells they've been finding have on average been smaller ones.
The experts, which i am not, and i suspect neither are you, have been predicting that we will start running out of oil in 10 to 50 years. There is of course quite a lot of friction between the people at the two ends of the spectrum, but no respectable geologist goes much beyond 50 years. Even the people who think we don't have any serious worries say 50 years, they figure that by then we'll have new energy sources or new technology to use oil shale or tar sands.
So if we just increased supply five times over, we'd start running out of oil sometime between two and ten years in the future.
I don't think anyone is arguing that seeing massive increases in oil prices in ten years could have catastrophic consquences. The people who argue that we have 50 years say that's pleanty of time to develop solutions to the problem, and they may be right. Ten years probably isn't enough. Two years certainly isn't.
So sure, we'd need five earths in order to give us the same 50 years to work out a solution, or one earth that's going to face massive economic disruption and possible collapse in less than a decade.
1. Internet - the Internet is a worldwide, universally accessible network because of private action. That the original concept was conceived by defense researchers doesn't make it a government project. It was built by the market.
It was built by the market _after_ the government helped defined the standards that would insure that everyone can talk to everyone else.
Let's take another communication format that _wasn't_ designed by the government, cellphones. My cellphone gets crap reception in my apartment, but other people get great reception with their carriers. Cellphones can either not communicate with other carrier's systems, or charge a surcharge. If the free market had been totally responsible for the net, you'd probably get told you couldn't go to certain sites cause you logged on to the wrong ISP or from the wrong zip code, and would charge you to to communicate with the different network and see the webpage.
2. A continent-spanning highway system would have happened without government action. It wouldn't have been as expensive because it would have grown along with the demand for it, and it would have happened later. The money saved would have been directed by the market into more productive activities than paying for an idle highway system.
That's a _great_ idea! I live in california and drive on four different highways to get to work every day, so i've seen quite a bit of construction. I don't have the figures to back me up, but i really suspect that it would have been a lot cheaper to build the highways two or three lanes wider in the first place than to go through the painfull process of shutting down part of the freeway at a time so they can rip up what they had before and expand it. Not only does undoing what was already done cost money, but i'm sure they can't work at full efficiency because of the problems of dealing with existing traffic. I really doubt that any money would be saved by building smaller highways first and then letting them "grow with demand."
3. Educational system. Everything in the free market is first affordable only to the rich, and slowly becomes affordable to all. Computers and cars are a good examples. Only government action interferes in this process.
Funny, basic education has almost always been available to everyone in the US for free, and a lot of effort has been put into making sure that advanced education is reasonably afordable. Seeing as how that is probably one of the reasons the US advanced technologically so quickly i fail to see how government "interference" in this matter is a bad thing.
4. Manned space program. Wouldn't have happened yet. There's no profit in it. The money spent on it would be instead spent on activities which are more valuable to people.
Speak for yourself. I'm a person, and i think it was quite valuable. Not only do we have the wonder of the fact that we've been to the moon, we have all the technological advances that resulted from the space program.
The only advantage I can begin to imagine would be a large reusable shuttle that you didn't have to launch from Earth every trip, but you still have to launch cargo, crew, fuel and supplies for each trip, and you have to have a pretty big ship or several small ships to get this hypothetical space-based shuttle furnished for another trip.
If you have a station at L1 you can launch the pieces of the spacecraft up from earth in parts and assemble it there, and it only has to be able to withstand whatever gravity or thrust you expect it to experience during it's mission.
On the other hand, if you build it on earth, it has to be able to survive the many G launch from the surface of the earth up into space, which would require it to be built much heavier and therefore be less efficient once it leaves earth's gravitational field.
Why carry all that extra weight around when you can construct it in orbit instead and dodge the whole issue?
Funny, a lot of great civilization collapsed when resources ran out, even though economics should have resulted in increased production of the limited resources.
Anyone who could have figured out how to produce more grain at the end of the Roman Empire would have become very rich and powerfull indeed, but despite the demand, no on managed to pull it off.
Just because people _want_ to produce more of a certain resource doesn't mean that they'll _suceed._ Technology helps, but only so much.
They didn't move on. They first arrived on the island by way of wooden canoes, and at the time the place was covered by palm trees. They used the palm trees to make more canoes so they could do deep water fishing which as you said formed a large part of their diet.
They had all the resoruces they needed, so their population boomed. Then they started cutting down more and more of the trees, for the canoes, possibly for grazing, and for use in the production of the statues (rollers for the large stones and weaving the fiber into rope for hauling.) After awhile, guess what, all the trees were gone. Not only no more statues, but no more new canoes either. After the last canoe rotted/broke/whatever, not only were they cut off from their staple food supply, they couldn't even get off the island to go somewhere else better.
I don't think the "relatively limited number and variety of resources" make it a bad model, because when they arrived it had all the resources the needed to create a thriving society. However overpopulation and misuse of those resources led to depletion and eventually the collapse of their civilization.
Overall it sounds like a good model for the earth to me. It will just take us longer because the earth is so much larger, but in the long run it can happen to us just as easily as it happened to them if we're not carefull.
"E.O Wilson, the famous naturalist, claims it would now take four Earths to meet the consumption demands of the current human population, if all humans consumed at the rate of the average North American." Not only do I find this type of quote offensive, I think it is a lie/untruth/bullshit.
The US uses more than 25% of the world oil production, but has less than 5% of the world's population. That would mean 5 Earths to support a global population all using the same amount per capita as the US.
I'm failing to see where the lie/untruth/bullshit is. Sure that's a limited example, but i expect that the rest of the USs resource usage is generaly within the same range as it's oil usage.
That sounds like a bit of wishfull thinking. True, with a large population base there is more "room" for viruses and bacteria to experiment, but no guarantee that they'll come up with anything effective enough to bring our population back into check. And even if some new disease develops there's no guarantee that we won't figure out how to destroy it before it does too much damamge.
Living systems _tend_ to self correct, or at least the one example we have has always done so. But guess what, if it had failed at some point in the past, we wouldn't be here to talk about how cool and self-corecting it is, would we?
Just imagine that two dozen life bearing planets fizzled out for every earth-like planet that has (so far) suceeded, and the ghosts of their inhabitants are bitching about how the Gaia theory is a crock of shit.
Another thing that's stupid is that they claim that 98% of the land that can grow crops have been farmed. That is just ludicrous, and reminds me of the other wackos that claim that it would take 8 Earths or whatever to support everyone at the level of the US. There are numerous technological solutions to creating more farmland. Sheesh, how about irrigating the desert? How about huge multi-level greenhouses built in the middle of nowhere?
I don't know most of the factors that go into the 8 earths or whatever estimate, however i do know a few figures.
The US uses more than 25% of the world's oil production. That means the entire world could support four USs. However the US has less than 5% of the world's population, so you'd need to supply 20 of them. 20 USs, four of them per planet, comes out to 5 planets.
I suppose that production could be ramped up to deal with the increased demand instead. However the optimistic estimates for how much oil is left say we've got 50 years to go before we start to run out. Increase production five times over and suddenly we've got less than a decade left.
I'm willing to bet that the rest of the figures work out equally well if you check them rather than wishing them away.
California already tried to get water from Washington, and they said hell no. Washington has been experiencing water problems of it's own for the past several years and doesn't really want to be shorting themselves out for the sake of California or any other state.
As for technology providing solutions, Washington and California have some of the most productive agricultural land in the world, bu7t a lot of it has been paved over to build shopping malls and parking lots and such. Technology may have some of the answers, but humans are prone to apply those answers to the wrong problem.
Geez, don't get so caught up in the linguisitics. Is "transmiting information" perhaps a better term for you?
Sharing information is the _only_ thing the web is about. It's all just 1s and 0s. If you're not doing any sharing you must be looking at a black screen, however seeing as how you seem to be reading Slashdot and sharing your opinion with us, i rather doubt that's the case.
Sure, a lot of places put a price on the sharing of information, either monetary or social, but once the price is paid sharing commences. Every pixel you look at and every byte you send out is information being shared. When you're not sharing information you're not using the web, you're just sitting there doing nothing.
"Can anyone give me a non-religious argument why, at some stage in the possibly distant future, that the workings of the brain won't be entirely comprehensible to humans?"
It's pretty simple really, no system is capable of fully understanding itself.
You can't build a computer that is capable of running a perfect simulation of the universe, because doing so would require as many or more "bits" or information as are availble for use in the universe.
Now at this point we get into the semantics of what is meant by "entirely comprehensible to humans." Clearly i do not need to "know" every single neuron in my own brain in order to say i completly comprehended my own brain, at least i hope not, or the task is impossible.
This is not to say that i think it's unlikely that we'll understand our own brains very well at some point in the future. However somewhere between the point where we are now, and the point where each of us has total self knowledge of our own brain, there is a barrier that we can not pass. Although we may all have opinions about what "total comprehension" means, and about which side of the barrier it will fall on, there's no knowing absolutely for certain that it is indeed possible.
The claim wasn't that any changes would necessarily be a problem, but that there would be a clear difference between before and after, which Kurzweil isn't taking into account.
I doubt that "dual consciousness" applies, but "death" damn well does!
If you took you and your copy and stuck them in a room together and told them that one of them would have to be killed before they would be let out, neither one would be very blase about volunteering to be the one to die, despite the fact they're both theoretically the same.
Actually, that would be a very interesting Prisoners' Dilema. If you knew yourself to be honorable, you would probably try some game of skill or chance to decide who would be the one to die. However given that you're identical you would have even odds at any type of contest you could come up with.
The only way to get a distinct advantage would be to decide to do away with the fairplay and commit to a sudden suprise attack, however if you start thinking that, isn't your copy likely to be thinking about it too? And if they're thinking about it, shouldn't you attack right now before they make up their mind to do so?:)
Either you kill the old body and have it's fork of your conciousness die, or you have two of yourself. I'm not sure if the human mind could cope with the trauma of first finding itself in a new body, then seeing its old body die. It sounds simple enough, but it would take quite an adjustment!
You think it's tough for the _copy_?? What about the original?
"Okay, the transfer is complete, we're going to have to kill you now."
"Hey! Wait a minute! It didn't work! I'm still here in this body!"
"Well of course you are, but the copy of you is doing just fine, so you need to die now in order to maintain the illusion of continuity of consciousness."
"But I don't want to die! That's why I signed up for this!"
"Sorry, you should have read the fine print. Now, we have a number of Suicide Packages available for your convience, or for an added fee you can take advantage of our Euthanasia Program."
Good thing you're advising people not to do this, cause you _know_ that he's going to end up suing Slashdot and everyone who said that his site should get slashdotted:)
Why would the beetle spend all that time accumulating those chemicals without the proper means for mixing them safely?
It's pretty damn obvious, other plants and animals do it all the time, it's called "I'm poisonous! Don't eat me!" and works very well as a method of helping the species as a whole propogate, so i see no problem with the beetle accumulating one of the chemicals.
Once that's been accomplished, then random mutation can cause it to start producing the other chemical and storing it as well. So what happens when some animal catches the beetle and eats it, crushing the body and allowing the chemicals to mix? "This is great! Now not only am I poisonous, I _explode_ if you eat me!"
So you've now got the two chemicals stored away safely in your body, and a very clear evolutionary advantage for doing so. "Of course, it would be really great if i could actually scare away or injure my attacker without blowing myself up in the process."
So now starts the evolutionary search for a way to safely mix the and eject the chemicals without killing itself in the process. The mixing chamber may have been an intermediate step that was originally used during death throes to insure a proper mix of the chemicals for a final suicide explosion, rather than depending on the chemicals getting mixed up while the animal chewed the beetle up.
It is a difficult process to evolve i'm sure, just not as impossible as creationists make it out to seem. As a rule them seem to have difficulty understanding the benefits of intermediate stages.
Note that there are probably thousands (or tens of thousands?) of posinous plants and animals, but only the one Bombardier Beetle. Anyone know if there are any creatures that have reached the intermediate stage and just explode what they're killed? Finding such a species would pretty much be the death knell to this case for the creationists, unfortuantly finding the right combiantion of chemicals may be so rare that the Bombardier Beetle is the only one currently alive that has accomplished it.
(And yes, i'm anthropomorphizing quite a bit, but that doesn't affect the basic validity of the idea)
It's not a self-contradiction, clearly all life is unnatural. This would imply that all live on Earth should be destroyed to return it to it's early pristine, lifeless state:)
The pyramids were constructed in levels, and the open spaces inside were laid out as the levels went up, so 99% of the workers would always have been exposed to open air and sunlight.
A few stone carvers might have needed to go in to put some final touches in, and some people would have needed to carry the sarcophagous and treasure in, but that wouldn't have taken very many people or very long.
Have the archeologists themselves had any particular problems with ventilation?
Um yeah, it wouldn't be any different. Now explain to me why we should kill a few thousand or tens of thousands of them, at a cost of a few hundred or thousand lives and billions of taxpayer dollars to us, just to have nothing change?
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Offtopic of what? Someone posted something that could be interpreted as a troll, and someone commented on it. Trying to moderate meta-moderation is just a waste of mod points, and not very nice either.
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Hey! If i was the guy in 21-b i'd want to hear about it!
So if we've got 50 years, no problem. However if we tried to support the entire population of earth at the same level as the US we'd run out of that same easily accessible oil in two to ten years, and whether or not we'll have the necessary technology in ten years is doubtfull. Even if we have the technology it will be expensive, and no one was saying that we would actually be _out_ in 50 years, just that demand would exceed supply, so prices would skyrocket, so it makes little difference if prices skyrocket due to shortages of the use of untested new technology. In either case we'd be in a world of hurt.
So five earths if we want enough oil for everyone and still have that 50 year time span to figure out how to get more oil.
Assuming that the optimists are right of course.
The experts, which i am not, and i suspect neither are you, have been predicting that we will start running out of oil in 10 to 50 years. There is of course quite a lot of friction between the people at the two ends of the spectrum, but no respectable geologist goes much beyond 50 years. Even the people who think we don't have any serious worries say 50 years, they figure that by then we'll have new energy sources or new technology to use oil shale or tar sands.
So if we just increased supply five times over, we'd start running out of oil sometime between two and ten years in the future.
I don't think anyone is arguing that seeing massive increases in oil prices in ten years could have catastrophic consquences. The people who argue that we have 50 years say that's pleanty of time to develop solutions to the problem, and they may be right. Ten years probably isn't enough. Two years certainly isn't.
So sure, we'd need five earths in order to give us the same 50 years to work out a solution, or one earth that's going to face massive economic disruption and possible collapse in less than a decade.
It was built by the market _after_ the government helped defined the standards that would insure that everyone can talk to everyone else.
Let's take another communication format that _wasn't_ designed by the government, cellphones. My cellphone gets crap reception in my apartment, but other people get great reception with their carriers. Cellphones can either not communicate with other carrier's systems, or charge a surcharge. If the free market had been totally responsible for the net, you'd probably get told you couldn't go to certain sites cause you logged on to the wrong ISP or from the wrong zip code, and would charge you to to communicate with the different network and see the webpage.
2. A continent-spanning highway system would have happened without government action. It wouldn't have been as expensive because it would have grown along with the demand for it, and it would have happened later. The money saved would have been directed by the market into more productive activities than paying for an idle highway system.
That's a _great_ idea! I live in california and drive on four different highways to get to work every day, so i've seen quite a bit of construction. I don't have the figures to back me up, but i really suspect that it would have been a lot cheaper to build the highways two or three lanes wider in the first place than to go through the painfull process of shutting down part of the freeway at a time so they can rip up what they had before and expand it. Not only does undoing what was already done cost money, but i'm sure they can't work at full efficiency because of the problems of dealing with existing traffic. I really doubt that any money would be saved by building smaller highways first and then letting them "grow with demand."
3. Educational system. Everything in the free market is first affordable only to the rich, and slowly becomes affordable to all. Computers and cars are a good examples. Only government action interferes in this process.
Funny, basic education has almost always been available to everyone in the US for free, and a lot of effort has been put into making sure that advanced education is reasonably afordable. Seeing as how that is probably one of the reasons the US advanced technologically so quickly i fail to see how government "interference" in this matter is a bad thing.
4. Manned space program. Wouldn't have happened yet. There's no profit in it. The money spent on it would be instead spent on activities which are more valuable to people.
Speak for yourself. I'm a person, and i think it was quite valuable. Not only do we have the wonder of the fact that we've been to the moon, we have all the technological advances that resulted from the space program.
If you have a station at L1 you can launch the pieces of the spacecraft up from earth in parts and assemble it there, and it only has to be able to withstand whatever gravity or thrust you expect it to experience during it's mission.
On the other hand, if you build it on earth, it has to be able to survive the many G launch from the surface of the earth up into space, which would require it to be built much heavier and therefore be less efficient once it leaves earth's gravitational field.
Why carry all that extra weight around when you can construct it in orbit instead and dodge the whole issue?
Anyone who could have figured out how to produce more grain at the end of the Roman Empire would have become very rich and powerfull indeed, but despite the demand, no on managed to pull it off.
Just because people _want_ to produce more of a certain resource doesn't mean that they'll _suceed._ Technology helps, but only so much.
They had all the resoruces they needed, so their population boomed. Then they started cutting down more and more of the trees, for the canoes, possibly for grazing, and for use in the production of the statues (rollers for the large stones and weaving the fiber into rope for hauling.) After awhile, guess what, all the trees were gone. Not only no more statues, but no more new canoes either. After the last canoe rotted/broke/whatever, not only were they cut off from their staple food supply, they couldn't even get off the island to go somewhere else better.
I don't think the "relatively limited number and variety of resources" make it a bad model, because when they arrived it had all the resources the needed to create a thriving society. However overpopulation and misuse of those resources led to depletion and eventually the collapse of their civilization.
Overall it sounds like a good model for the earth to me. It will just take us longer because the earth is so much larger, but in the long run it can happen to us just as easily as it happened to them if we're not carefull.
The US uses more than 25% of the world oil production, but has less than 5% of the world's population. That would mean 5 Earths to support a global population all using the same amount per capita as the US.
I'm failing to see where the lie/untruth/bullshit is. Sure that's a limited example, but i expect that the rest of the USs resource usage is generaly within the same range as it's oil usage.
Living systems _tend_ to self correct, or at least the one example we have has always done so. But guess what, if it had failed at some point in the past, we wouldn't be here to talk about how cool and self-corecting it is, would we?
Just imagine that two dozen life bearing planets fizzled out for every earth-like planet that has (so far) suceeded, and the ghosts of their inhabitants are bitching about how the Gaia theory is a crock of shit.
Theoretically those who were rich enough to fortify their domicile and smart enough to stay inside would do well too :)
I don't know most of the factors that go into the 8 earths or whatever estimate, however i do know a few figures.
The US uses more than 25% of the world's oil production. That means the entire world could support four USs. However the US has less than 5% of the world's population, so you'd need to supply 20 of them. 20 USs, four of them per planet, comes out to 5 planets.
I suppose that production could be ramped up to deal with the increased demand instead. However the optimistic estimates for how much oil is left say we've got 50 years to go before we start to run out. Increase production five times over and suddenly we've got less than a decade left.
I'm willing to bet that the rest of the figures work out equally well if you check them rather than wishing them away.
("Running out" being defined as passing the point of peak production, at which point demand will be greater than supply.)
As for technology providing solutions, Washington and California have some of the most productive agricultural land in the world, bu7t a lot of it has been paved over to build shopping malls and parking lots and such. Technology may have some of the answers, but humans are prone to apply those answers to the wrong problem.
Sharing information is the _only_ thing the web is about. It's all just 1s and 0s. If you're not doing any sharing you must be looking at a black screen, however seeing as how you seem to be reading Slashdot and sharing your opinion with us, i rather doubt that's the case.
Sure, a lot of places put a price on the sharing of information, either monetary or social, but once the price is paid sharing commences. Every pixel you look at and every byte you send out is information being shared. When you're not sharing information you're not using the web, you're just sitting there doing nothing.
It's pretty simple really, no system is capable of fully understanding itself.
You can't build a computer that is capable of running a perfect simulation of the universe, because doing so would require as many or more "bits" or information as are availble for use in the universe.
Now at this point we get into the semantics of what is meant by "entirely comprehensible to humans." Clearly i do not need to "know" every single neuron in my own brain in order to say i completly comprehended my own brain, at least i hope not, or the task is impossible.
This is not to say that i think it's unlikely that we'll understand our own brains very well at some point in the future. However somewhere between the point where we are now, and the point where each of us has total self knowledge of our own brain, there is a barrier that we can not pass. Although we may all have opinions about what "total comprehension" means, and about which side of the barrier it will fall on, there's no knowing absolutely for certain that it is indeed possible.
The claim wasn't that any changes would necessarily be a problem, but that there would be a clear difference between before and after, which Kurzweil isn't taking into account.
If you took you and your copy and stuck them in a room together and told them that one of them would have to be killed before they would be let out, neither one would be very blase about volunteering to be the one to die, despite the fact they're both theoretically the same.
Actually, that would be a very interesting Prisoners' Dilema. If you knew yourself to be honorable, you would probably try some game of skill or chance to decide who would be the one to die. However given that you're identical you would have even odds at any type of contest you could come up with.
The only way to get a distinct advantage would be to decide to do away with the fairplay and commit to a sudden suprise attack, however if you start thinking that, isn't your copy likely to be thinking about it too? And if they're thinking about it, shouldn't you attack right now before they make up their mind to do so? :)
You think it's tough for the _copy_?? What about the original?
"Okay, the transfer is complete, we're going to have to kill you now."
"Hey! Wait a minute! It didn't work! I'm still here in this body!"
"Well of course you are, but the copy of you is doing just fine, so you need to die now in order to maintain the illusion of continuity of consciousness."
"But I don't want to die! That's why I signed up for this!"
"Sorry, you should have read the fine print. Now, we have a number of Suicide Packages available for your convience, or for an added fee you can take advantage of our Euthanasia Program."
Good thing you're advising people not to do this, cause you _know_ that he's going to end up suing Slashdot and everyone who said that his site should get slashdotted :)
It's pretty damn obvious, other plants and animals do it all the time, it's called "I'm poisonous! Don't eat me!" and works very well as a method of helping the species as a whole propogate, so i see no problem with the beetle accumulating one of the chemicals.
Once that's been accomplished, then random mutation can cause it to start producing the other chemical and storing it as well. So what happens when some animal catches the beetle and eats it, crushing the body and allowing the chemicals to mix? "This is great! Now not only am I poisonous, I _explode_ if you eat me!"
So you've now got the two chemicals stored away safely in your body, and a very clear evolutionary advantage for doing so. "Of course, it would be really great if i could actually scare away or injure my attacker without blowing myself up in the process."
So now starts the evolutionary search for a way to safely mix the and eject the chemicals without killing itself in the process. The mixing chamber may have been an intermediate step that was originally used during death throes to insure a proper mix of the chemicals for a final suicide explosion, rather than depending on the chemicals getting mixed up while the animal chewed the beetle up.
It is a difficult process to evolve i'm sure, just not as impossible as creationists make it out to seem. As a rule them seem to have difficulty understanding the benefits of intermediate stages.
Note that there are probably thousands (or tens of thousands?) of posinous plants and animals, but only the one Bombardier Beetle. Anyone know if there are any creatures that have reached the intermediate stage and just explode what they're killed? Finding such a species would pretty much be the death knell to this case for the creationists, unfortuantly finding the right combiantion of chemicals may be so rare that the Bombardier Beetle is the only one currently alive that has accomplished it.
(And yes, i'm anthropomorphizing quite a bit, but that doesn't affect the basic validity of the idea)
It's not a self-contradiction, clearly all life is unnatural. This would imply that all live on Earth should be destroyed to return it to it's early pristine, lifeless state :)
A few stone carvers might have needed to go in to put some final touches in, and some people would have needed to carry the sarcophagous and treasure in, but that wouldn't have taken very many people or very long.
Have the archeologists themselves had any particular problems with ventilation?
Um yeah, it wouldn't be any different. Now explain to me why we should kill a few thousand or tens of thousands of them, at a cost of a few hundred or thousand lives and billions of taxpayer dollars to us, just to have nothing change?
I've played Kill Dr. Lucky, The Big Idea, and Brawl, and liked them all, and heard good things about a lot of the rest.
Offtopic of what? Someone posted something that could be interpreted as a troll, and someone commented on it. Trying to moderate meta-moderation is just a waste of mod points, and not very nice either.