OS X is supposedly UNIX but when I want to save things off the internet it will only let me go down one directory.

Have you even USED Mac OS X?

First off, "saving things off of the internet" is an application feature, not an OS feature. Second, if we're talking about Safari, it allows you to save files in whatever directory you want. By default it uses "Downloads", but you can either use Save As... or Download Linked File As... and specify a target directory. And if you don't like Safari, you can use Firefox, or Chrome, or hell, Lynx or wget if you like, and use their particular means of specifying target directories.

Why on earth are you quoting manufacturing costs in one case and retail costs in the other? Retail Blu-Ray discs cost around $25-$30 -- right around the same as your quoted 16GB USB key price. As I don't know the manufacturing cost of flash memory, and evidently you don't either, we have no basis to make a comparison.

Primarily because they are cheap to breed and raise, take up very little space, reach maturity quickly, and people usually don't freak out about experiments on mice the same way they would on (say) primates.

They are also an acceptable human analogue in that they generally respond to medication and treatments similarly to how a human would; there are certainly other animals which are better models, but there are logistical, economic and public relations issues with trying to keep hundreds of chimpanzees in order to punch holes in their ears.

While I like the sound of "the government shouldn't keep secrets", I'd like to point out that some of the secrets the US government keeps include things such as "the launch codes for its nuclear arsenal". Surely you aren't saying that these secrets should in be public knowledge?

I suppose you might argue that the US government shouldn't maintain a nuclear stockpile in the first place, avoiding this problem altogether, but there are plenty of other "should obviously be secret" pieces of information -- like the precise details of all of the security in place at Fort Knox -- which have absolutely no business being public knowledge, and yet the government has a perfectly good reason to be dealing with.

I am not saying that the government shouldn't be more open than it is. There are a shit-ton of classified documents which are classified for no better reason than "it would be embarrassing if people knew this", and I am in no way defending the government for either making the embarrassing mistake or for keeping it secret. However, it's insane to make a blanket statement such as "the US government shouldn't be allowed to keep secrets AT ALL", because that implies that they can't even keep their passwords private.

Corporations are legally persons. The fact that they can't get married doesn't prove they aren't persons under the law -- any more than the fact that my four-year-old son can't get married doesn't prove he's not legally a person. Some laws distinguish between legal persons and natural persons, and some laws distinguish between over-18 natural persons and under-18 natural persons. So what?

I don't know if I count analyzing every single possible permutation of outcomes as "ingenuity."

You do realize that's basically exactly what your brain is doing at a subconscious level, right? You just aren't aware of the process, so it seems like magic. The exact same way that a computer is magic to most people, because they have no idea what's going on inside the little box.

That may be true, but at the same time we have empirical proof that is possible to produce a computer as powerful as a human brain which weighs around three pounds and consumes less than 50W of energy. We know this is possible because we're all carrying such computers around in our skulls.

50 years ago you wouldn't have believed we'd ever be able to produce machines running at the absolutely absurd speed of 10MHz and carrying an entire *megabyte* of RAM. Nowadays we can fit a gigahertz of computer power with tens of gigabytes of storage, along with a screen and the battery to run it all day, in less than half a pound. The human brain clearly proves that vastly more powerful computers are possible at the same weight and power; why are you so convinced we'll never get there?

This sentence makes no sense. A JIT compiler produces compiled native code. So how can native code run faster than.... native code?

That's like saying "assembly code shouldn't be faster than C++ code, since they both end up as machine code". Generally speaking, the closer to the metal a language is, the more performance you can squeeze out of it. That's not to say that assembly is automatically faster than C, which is automatically faster than Java... but ninety-nine times out of a hundred a well-coded assembly program will be faster than the equivalent well-coded C program, which will in turn be faster than the equivalent well-coded Java program.

Modern JVMs and CPUs are fast enough that most of the time the difference isn't a big deal, just as modern C compilers are fast enough that we seldom bother with assembly anymore. But to argue that "there shouldn't be a difference because it's all just machine code anyway" is clearly absurd.

You'd be lucky to get 1fps doing that. Not only is iPhone texture upload horrendously slow, but glTexSubImage2D reprocesses the entire texture even if you just change a single pixel of it. Plus you need power-of-2 textures, so you're looking at a 512x512 texture upload every frame. Not going to happen. /iPhone game developer

It doesn't "definitely" mean an ARM processor any more than OS X "definitely" meant a PowerPC processor. OS X already runs on three different kinds of CPUs (ARM, PowerPC, and Intel), and it's certainly not impossible to imagine a fourth.

Even most of the iPhone OS itself already runs just fine on Intel chips, as any developer with access to the iPhone Simulator knows. I run iPhone apps on Intel all the time (though admittedly it requires a recompile).

Now, the new tablet will almost certainly run existing iPhone apps without modification, which either means an ARM CPU or a Rosetta-like technology to handle the emulation. I agree that the thing most likely has an ARM chip and will run existing apps natively. But we won't know for sure what chip it uses for a few more hours.

Maybe you should actually try USING one before deciding how intuitive or nonintuitive it is. It's actually a really fantastic mouse.

Why do you assume that people at seminary don't do that?

Because they still believe in the Bible. Anybody that applied serious scientific thinking to it wouldn't take it any more seriously than they do Greek mythology.

1) theory
2) You never heard of the bible, did you? Since you can't prove your "theory" of evolution, you must accept that the bible proposes a possible alternative . . . that is, unless you're like most slashdotters - ignorant.

I freely accept that any and every fact I perceive may be wrong. I might actually be a mental patient locked in a padded room, imagining I'm typing a message on Slashdot. I might be a butterfly dreaming I'm a computer programmer. I might be a brain in a vat, being fed neural impulses from a simulation of an artificial reality. Or, even more unlikely, the Bible might actually be true.

And....? Did you have some actual point to make? And for bonus points: are you a troll, or simply ignorant?

Where are all the transitional species?

This is an old, tired anti-evolutionary argument. The answer is that every single fossil we find is a transitional species. Unfortunately fossilization is an incredibly unlikely event, and a fossil surviving for tens of millions of years and then happening to be uncovered even more incredibly unlikely, so the fossil record simply doesn't contain every species that ever existed. We may never find the real ancestor of all modern birds, just cousins of it like Archaeopteryx. So what? The fact that birds evolved from dinosaurs is irrefutable.

The problem is the date for feathers keeps getting pushed back and there have even been early lizards found with what appear to be feathers.

I assume you're referring to Longisquama. There is good reason to doubt that those structures were even real, let alone feathers.

One massive gap is if birds evolved from dinosaurs where are all the tree dwelling dinos?

What are you talking about? First, the division between "bird" and "dinosaur" is entirely arbitrary. Birds, in a very real sense, ARE dinosaurs. We just draw an arbitrary line in the sand and say the things on one side are dinosaurs and the things on the other side are birds, but there's no hard and fast reason to draw the line at any particular spot. Archaeopteryx really doesn't look all that different from the raptors that came before it, and still has a very dinosaur-like head and no beak. Is it a bird?

Early birds were likely ground dwellers, just like the raptors they evolved from. We don't know precisely when tree-dwelling evolved, because we don't have enough fossils to be able to tell. I fail to see how this is a "massive gap"; it's a minor question at best.

Odds are birds branched off very early on and were a separate line of evolution so saying birds evolved from dinosaurs is kind of like saying we evolved from chimpanzee.s

Nonsense. Saying birds evolved from Archaeopteryx would be like saying we evolved from chimps -- not all that far wrong, but wrong. Saying birds evolved from dinosaurs is like saying we evolved from primates. Dinosaurs are a very, very big group, and there is absolutely no doubt that birds evolved from them.

While I wholeheartedly agree with your overall sentiment, I am compelled to point out that science does require faith in the basic assumption that the behavior of the universe is governed by laws.

For instance, if I perform ten billion trials where I drop an object and it falls to the surface of the earth, and the next time I drop it and it remains hanging in midair, science posits that there must be a REASON why the object did not fall. The law of gravity is not arbitrary, and if we find it to have been seemingly violated then either our theory is wrong (the real law of gravity differs from our imperfect understanding of gravity in a way that allows this behavior to happen) or our understanding of the situation is wrong (gravity was still in effect, but some other effect such as a strong updraft held the object aloft).

Religion permits this situation to be described as a miracle -- essentially, an arbitrary violation of the laws of the universe. Science doesn't, and requires us to seek a naturalistic explanation.

Now, I firmly side with the "we need to seek an alternate explanation for supposed miracles" side of things -- so far, the score is something along the lines of Science: 100000000000000, Religion: 0. However, it is important to understand that science does require the (very reasonable and thoroughly supported) assumption that the laws of the universe are not arbitrary and are never violated.