And is that why our heart is on the left side?  (this is almost a serious question)

That is not counter-intuitive at all.  Such bubbles are legions in a free market, at all scales.   Members of a family exchange stuffs without using money.     Many workers co-operatives exist.  And I'm sure you can find many other examples of communism-inspired organizations.  In a sense, communism is allowed in capitalism, provided it stays voluntary.

It kind of sound like you do, though.  At least because you keep saying "islamic civilization".   At school I was told that the arabs preserved and developed antique knowledge during the european dark ages and that it allowed renaissance.  You keep associating religion to that and it's difficult not to see it as proselytism,  but I'm Ok to give you the benefit of the doubt.

And as I said, their advance in science at this time had probably little to do with their religion, and was rather due to their geopolitical situation at this time, which is quite complex.  It would be absurd to promote a religion just because it happened to be the religion of a great civilization at some time in the past.   There were lots of them, I bet you just pick the one you currently believe in, or the one which corresponds to your ethnicity.

Today I've learnt that a black hole made of pure energy is called a kugelblitz.

http://youtu.be/4fuHzC9aTik
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelblitz_(astrophysics)

Well, maybe he has a few hundred millions invested already, besides of these 12 millions.

"Prix de fabrication"?  Donc tu ne cherches pas à faire de profit avec ce livre?  Dois-je en conclure que la version électronique est disponible gratuitement?

No.  But one of the premisses of the story is based on something similar.

Have you watched The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya?  

The problem with this conception is that such an idea of God is far, far away from the conceptions of organised religions.  In particular, in such a "theist" picture of God, humans do not play any particular role.  God does not care about them more than he cares about ants.

As I said, extraordinary claims that we have no way to verify, either for practical or ethical reasons, are condemned to remain inside the domain of myths.

Indeed it's important to mention that the subject should be capable of describing what happened in the room if he claims that he was actually floating outside of his body.

I suggest we write a word on his front-head and we make sure there is no mirror in the room when he wakes up.

It makes it an interesting subject of study, but unless you can reproduce those circumstances and observe the claimed effect, skepticism is natural.

These phenomenons can turn into myths, by the way.  They are related facts that are plausible (I don't think near death experiences are actually post-mortem or surnatural, but other topics might have some plausibility), but for whom we do not have any way to test the truth.  The modern form is the urban legend, I guess.

It has been witnessed, but nobody has ever been able to reproduce the experience at will.   It's like cryptozoology:  some people say they have seen weird animals, but when we go to the place and have a look, no matter how hard we try, we never see anything.  So you just can't believe those witnesses blindly.  On the opposite, when someone wants to check if Jupiter exists, I've never heard of anyone claiming it doesn't.  It's quite reliable.

Unfortunately, I must admit there is some truth in this.  I believe in a lot of scientific concepts, and yet I don't understand them all.  At some point to believe in science you have to put some faith in scientists.

On the other hand, does that mean that science is nothing but a modern kind of religion?  I don't think so.  At least with science, you have the theoretical possibility to learn how to understand or experience things you did not understand nor see by yourself.

For instance, I've never seen Jupiter through a telescope.  So to me it just looks like a very bright point in the sky (I've watch it several times).  But if one day people suddenly start questioning the fact that it looks like what we currently know it looks like (i.e., a huge cloudy planet with a big red storm on the south hemisphere), at least I could buy a telescope and figure it out by myself.   That's a big difference:  no religion provides any practical procedure to test its truth.

So?  With this kind of argumentum ad populum, I guess there would be no one to advocate for open-source licenses at all in the first place, considering how little popular they were at some point in the history of computing.

If the benefit you're talking about is only about mass adoption, I do not care.  Even if it means a "better quality", I do not care either.  I prefer to use a Free Software rather than a proprietary software, even if it has a lower quality.

Maybe.  But it is much, much closer to reality than is your RBE, for instance.

I'm going to make it probably too simplistic, but to me it just fills the gaps of our knowledge and understanding of the World.  When something happens and we don't know why, this makes us uneasy.  To feel better, we sometimes just say "it happened because someone did it, somehow".  "God" is just one of the many words we created to call it.

I thought you meant that information requires consciousness to exist.  Whether this consciousness comes from a human, an inhabitant of the Alpha Centauri system or a God-like being does not matter.  Consciousness is consciousness.

Information has quite an accurate scientific definition nowadays.  It even has a mathematical formulation.  It's one of the basic concepts of thermodynamics, which means that it is used to analyze matter on molecular level and thereby define notions such as temperature.  And I assure you, to do so physicists do not need to assume that anyone has a full awareness of the exact position and momentum of all existing particles.   It even goes beyond than that if you want to talk about quantum mechanics, but this is probably off topic.