Bullshit. The injunctions against certain food were based simply on the personal preference of a few people with schizotypal personalities. This video is a very engaging explanation of the connection between craziness and religion via OCD-type behavior.

Partial disproof of what you say can be found in the middens of Ancient Near Eastern people: civilizations eating pork and shellfish lived next door to Jewish civilizations that didn't, and there's no indication one thrived worse than the other.

Don't throw the "ignorant" label around unless you're prepared to be stuck with it yourself in face of evidence.

NGS here. "Don't live for others, live for yourself" is indeed the correct translation.

If some evil mad scientist were to undertake building a device to systematically destroy creative thinking in humans, I doubt he could do better than the TV programming of this past decade.

Not really, no.

1. Energies at the Large Hadron Collider are likely to peak at 14 teraelectronvolts

2. breaks down at the quantum level. This energy is in the order of 1018 gigaelectronvolts

3. 100 trillion times more energetic than the LHC

If I convert all those frighteningly big numbers to scientific notation, I get:

1. 1.40 E 13
2. 1.02 E 12
3. 1.00 E 14 * 1.40 E 13 = 1.4 E 27

The parent is saying that the LHC puts out about 10x as much energy as that at which we lose all idea of what's happening. He's also saying that 1.02 e 12 is 100 trillion times 1.4 E 13. Something is not right here. Anyone care to set him/me/us straight?

As a decent, loving, law-abiding atheist, I fully second your statement. I'd upvote you if I had points today.

This crap only fools Christians. It's all made up, fercripesakes! Don't y'all have an 8th commandment or something that stops you from lying?

I was going to make the Harrison Bergeron comment too - you beat me to it.

Next up: Mandatory headphones with gunshots going off in the ears of intelligent students to avoid discriminating the stupid.

I think Bono should help the poor media industry by doing good will tours for the Taliban in Afghanistan. It's said they love music and musicians.

I absolutely agree that church-like but secular organizations would be a tremendous boon to mankind.

While we're on the topic of starving children, take note that the Christian churches of the world do their utmost to keep condoms and other forms of family planning out of the hands of the poor buggers in developing countries, thereby GREATLY exacerbating the problem of unsustainable, miserable, squalid overpopulation.

I'm happy to say I had only one problem with 9.10: In some cases buttons in the Eclipse GUI could not be mouse-clicked. The "OK" button would assume its "pressed" look but would not do anything. It was possible to click such buttons using the keyboard, however.

Thankfully, I was not the first with this problem and found a solution on the 'Net: You can set the environment variable

GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true

before starting Eclipse and then everything will be fine. Well, as far as that problem is concerned, anyway.

I object strenuously to any allegation that I'm "hiding my racism and bigotry" behind anything. There are huge populations of people I just don't like, and I see not the slightest reason to hide that fact.

Irrespective of the reasons, these people hate our guts. All the good reasons you cite don't change that. Treating them with political correctness isn't going to make their hatred go away. Am I obligated to be polite to people who would kill me if they could? Not in my book I ain't.

That's the beauty of the thing: If we stop burning fossil fuels, we'll be creating less of a heat-capturing blanket around the planet, which will compensate at least in part for the greater amount of energy released by us.

Long-term strategies will be needed to balance the whole thing out, but fusion would help give mankind a few more decades in which to get their act together.