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You're not being anti-intellectual, but you're overlooking the fact that it's a precise, technical language, used in post-structuralist philosophy to describe and analyze social reality (e.g. by Deleuze, Foucault et al.), and is very rigorously formulated in the relevant texts. I guess any academic jargon would look "absurd" by a(n in regard to this domain) layperson.

The idea that one can translate words without understanding what is being said, seems rather similar to an idea that one can infer the meaning of words from their constituent letters. Meaning not only works simultaneously on so many technically inaccessible levels (context, expectations, allusions, previous experiences, etc.), anything mildly interesting (not to mention proper literature), is based by definition on a deviation from established meanings.

Related: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/04/lourdes-gps-mis...

Exactly. The monetizing of web services thru advertising, while extremly common now, is nothing but a short term (self-destructing) strategy, it can not be viable for the long future.

Also this one: The problem is that, acclimation aside, Pudding is still a cat — an innate master of not doing what you want him to do.

It seems there's a very simple solution to this problem....

This is like a Rorschach test for Startup people.

This is certainly correct vis-à-vis the real implications, but usually not the behavioral tendencies. In a way most "virtual lives" seem more similar to the real life of actors and public figures, i.e. persona-oriented.

Also, doesn't each human require some 20-30 years of training from birth in order to be able to answer such questions? This fact seems to be constantly ignored.

...or an inconsequential assemblage of organic molecules; forming and disintegrating in the blink of an eye.

But must an explanation always be a functional one? This seems extremely limited and limiting. Certainly the shape of the body, like every complex system, has some contingent or incidental characteristics to it (e.g. five fingers, various eye colors, etc.). It also stands to reason that every animal would have some unique manifestations of its differentiation from all others; it would obviously be a fallacy to consider such differentiating traits as necessarily important in and of themselves.

national [economic] security

But don't such things already happening on the ground (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi )?

Actually, for a layman, it's really nice to see a survey of the field accompanied, as it is here, by its underlying real-life politics, economics and other human factors; not something easily accessible normally.

    "At a meeting not long after he joined in 2014, 
     Mr. Vidra, using a profanity, told the magazine’s staff
     that he wanted to break stuff..."

Well, I guess hie did.

A somewhat less nuanced response, that (despite a lively conversation) never made it to the front page: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10831261

app killer?

Well, I actually feel it concerns much more than simply money. The avant-garde - be it technological, artistic or intellectual - has always shown a tendency to join forces with the darkest of regimes during the early stages.

I can't help but be reminded of a sentence by Theodor Adorno:

    Keineswegs weiß man bestimmt, wie die Fetischisierung
    der Technik in der individuellen Psychologie der 
    einzelnen Menschen sich durchsetzt, wo die Schwelle ist
    zwischen einem rationalen Verhältnis zu ihr und jener
    Überwertung, die schließlich dazu führt, daß einer, der
    ein Zugsystem ausklügelt, das die Opfer möglichst
    schnell und reibungslos nach Auschwitz bringt, darüber
    vergißt, was in Auschwitz mit ihnen geschieht.[0]
    

In short: the fetishization of technology makes its creators forget for which purposes their wonderfully efficient tools will finally be put to use.

[0] Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, S. 91

Only if you'd assume the fallacy that an enunciation could ever be "literal" in its meaning. I'd argue this actually points at a structural undecidability which is essential to language.

nice, so it literally means its opposite as well.

well, as you would say in Hindi: Kutte ki dum kabhi seedhi nahi hoti.

Well, it's Searle after all. It's always funny to re-read Derrida's attack on his problematic line of thought[0].

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limited_Inc

The large font size might also relate to the unavailability of cheap mass-produced reading glasses, perhaps it was aimed at an educated older readership.

It's indeed just a spectacle, political theater, but it is based on a wide-ranging acknowledgment of man-made climate change, which is of great importance.

But surely, any physical state would be available to you only as a representation, and not directly. Meaning, that in order to make it decidable, you'll probably have to look at it differently.

I find "Librarians in uproar" a wonderful oxymoron.

In fact, already in Godard's 1972 film Tout va bien, it is said (quoted from memory): "the Press has signed its own death sentence, when it has decided to rely on ads for its survival."

"Der SPIEGEL: Die BILD-Zeitung für Abiturienten." - Volker Pispers

Looks like an outtake from Nathan Barley.