I'm feeding a troll I'm sure - but I'm in a weird mood. So stuff it.

I love the circular reasoning in "The bible is the proven word of God. You really don't need any more proof than that." - so it's proven by the fact that it is proven. Hm. Rightio then.

Then there's a no-true-scotsman fallacy of if you've read it and don't believe it, then you've not really read it. Hm. Rightio then.

I'd love to understand why Bible believers think that, for non-believers, the Bible in particular is special?
Seriously - for someone who already doesn't believe in god(s), what would make them believe the Bible over the Torah, the Qur'an, the I Ching, the Guru Granth Sahib, the Principia Discordia or "There and Back Again" as a text of divine inspiration?

Finally - I have read the Bible several times. Fascinating read really (till you get to all the post-gospel stuff near the end to the new testament - I really don't care about early christians' "How are you doing over there then?" letters for example...)
But enlightenment did not come. Instead, the more I read the Bible the more I find it's just a curious collection of old folk tales and legends (old testament) combined with a dogma assembled by committee (new testament).
And Christians rarely live their lives strictly according to scripture btw. The average christian violates an awful lot of it whilst handwaving huge chunks as being "irrelevant" in the modern church (!). Which is fine if you accept that you're not living strictly according to the book. But don't pretend you are.

Finally - frankly, if it were written today the Bible would have a very rough time with censors. It's seriously lurid in parts. Incest, rape, slavery (both labour-based and sexual), extremely graphic violence, inciting racial hatreds... Much of which is presented as a good thing! It would probably be banned these days. I certainly will consider carefully when my son will be ready to understand the adult themes in the Bible for sure. I don't want to give him nightmares.

I don't believe in scientific results. I believe in science as a process (in the same way that I can say I believe in Democracy as a process [for better or for worse!])

I would hope many scientists would hold a similar view, but I cannot speak for them.

In terms of cosmology - science attempts to unravel the chain of causality that resulted in the world we see today. To do this, it is assumed the universe works today much like it always has (and tries to determine the edge conditions that define that). It is also assumed that there is a point beyond which causality can no longer be followed (or that it loops back on itself or whatever. That there is a beginning, anyway - that' it's not just "turtles all the way down"). Now admittedly they're big assumptions but they seem to hold up so far, and without those assumtions the questions become meaningless in the first place.

So what happens then is that you work backwards, until a point is found for which there are multiple possible explanations. Then evidence is gathered based on experimentation and observation about which of the options seems most likely. As part of this process new options might get introduced.

What you end up with is the most likely set of explanations for the way the universe came to be the way it is, based on what we know today and what we can observe today.

It's not a presented as fact, but rather what is termed a "theory" for science, based on probability. Note that in this case the word "Theory" avoids presenting something as absolute fact whilst providing the implication of a comprehensive and somewhat tested framework, and still leaving the door open for testing and even disproving. It doesn't mean "Guess".

As for "believing" that " the elements needed to create the big bang came into existence of their own accord and that the laws of physics decided to invent themselves." - this isn't a belief per se, but part of the assumption that the chain of causality ends somewhere. If something "caused" the big bang (er - other than the big bang itself), then by definition the big bang wasn't the start of the universe, but we have to go back further. So if you assume it started somewhere then you have to assume that "before" that was unknowable, as it cannot be traced back.

In this regard - if there was a "creator" - it is/was either one that can interact with/affect the observable universe or not. If it is, then we can push the start of the universe back to be the "start" of the creator. But if not then the issue is meaningless from a scientific standpoint.

One could argue however that thanks to nuclear weapons research (including this example) - we've not had a major worldwide conflict in nearly 70 years, after having two in 30 years. We also understand a lot more about fundamental physics thanks to the side benefits of weapons research and that helps medicine, the energy industry, and may help the space industry down the track...

Bad stuff happens. We move on and in some way usually learn from it. That's life

Doctors are human and there are still big holes in our knowledge of disease and of human biology, so yeah it's entirely possible that a given doctor's advice may not be the best way to actually go for a given persons' case/illness. Doctors give advice based on the best knowledge available at the time (to them. No one person can know all of modern medicine and still have time to consult!).
Changing techniques based on empirical evidence is very scientific.
I'd imagine that doctor was/is very interested in the mechanisms of how the alternate approach worked and investigated it (or wrote up the case to allow others to investigate)
So you've actually given a brilliant example of why science works.

And glad to hear she lasted longer than usual and sorry to hear that ended btw

Fair point, however in this particular case it's unlikely to be US interests (eg, CIA) performing the intrusion. Given the Australian "relationship" with US security agencies, I wouldn't be surprised if we'd already volunteered all the conceivable data on the new ASIO HQ to the US, sent in triplicate. They probably use ASIO sensitive documents as scrap paper at CIA headquarters. There's little information AU doesn't willingly and happily hand over to the US (sadly)

Exactly this

As long as governments create and enforce a monopoly on the creation of these kinds of goods through copyright and laws permitting import control of copyrighted goods, then the government has the right and responsibility to interfere when those that monopoly is abused by unfair market manipulation.

On the other hand, if the government explicitly required grey market imports to be considered as legitimate as the white market, then pricing can set as the publishers please, since they'll always have to compete against their own pricing in other regions

basically yeah - globalism and international trade is a two way street - they can't have their cake and eat it too

Our distributor for most stuff at work (one of the big guys in AU) has the irritating tendency to send an oversized box... with no packing material.

For example, I have literally opened boxes with a single sheet of paper in them - that are on the order of a cubic metre.

Not so big a deal for paper of course (just bewildering) but when you get components shipped the same way (often with one, completely insufficient, plastic airbag pack in the box too, rattling around with the part) it makes you wonder what they guys in the warehouse are thinking, and whether their management is happy with what that must be costing in unnecessary shipping and return costs (we pay the same in shipping for a given item regardless of the size of the box it was packed in, but if the boxes are oversized, then less fit on a truck and that has to affect the pricing or contract with their logistics company)

Simple solution - extend the Tor protocol to allow directly addressing and reporting Tor Onion addresses, then include a TOR router set to relay with the main windows-based torrent apps (obviously linux based ones people can configure their own for), particularly uTorrent.

Then everyone wins - we reduce the load on exit points by torrenters, and we increase the number of internal relay servers, and all tor access gets auto-magically anonymized.

An employee can't voluntarily agree not to leave an employer? Wow. I could understand if they were prohibited when used as standard one-way employment conditions, but where it's a clear quid pro quo that seems strange. I was under the impression that it was quite the norm in executive agreements for example...

In that case, Employer A should be using agreements with the employee to make poaching harder. E.G. promotion and training in return for fixed term employment with high penalties for early exit or no-compete clauses. Then its the employees decision to agree to the non-poaching arrangement (or not) rather than rigging the market around the employee.

Sadly then, in that case the kindest solution is to put them down.

He's a Victorian Senator (and is in the half of the Senate that got elected 2010 and won't be up again next election). I didn't vote for him (NSW here) - in fact I doubt many people at all actually voted for him (below the line on the ballot paper). Thanks to the way the senate gets elected combined with the inertia of the two major parties (the coalition might as well be one party these days), it'd actually be rather hard to vote him out - He's second on the ticket, so as long as Victorian Labor manages to get two seats worth in the 2016/2017 elections (not too hard) he's back in.

What I don't understand is how he's survived two prime ministers and countless cabinet shuffles in the exact same post. Normally ministers get rotated around a bit more, especially when they're as troublesome and controversial as Conroy. While I hate the idea of an Abbot-let Coalition government, the thought of another 3 years minimum of Conroy screwing up the IT & communications industries in Australia bothers me deeply.

From a business perspective, I would expect it depends on whether it's more profitable to copy-and-be-sued, or to acquire, surely?

First: IANAL

What scares me about this license change is that Google is attempting to prevent, apparently in perpetuity, those agreeing to the license terms from doing anything involving fragmentation of Android (web links? Mentioning on Slashdot comments?), or from promoting a software development kit "derived from the SDK" - that presumably includes older, legitimate forks.

I didn't even realise that it was legal (or at least, enforceable) to prevent someone from doing something completely unrelated to the licensed material at issue in a one-sided license agreement. Like preventing people from doing things that "may cause or result in the fragmentation of android". That would be like the license requirement requiring users not to hop on one leg for the rest of their lives as a result of agreeing.

Hopefully the definition of "SDK" in the first section of the license [1.1: "The Android Software Development Kit (referred to in this License Agreement as the "SDK" and specifically including the Android system files, packaged APIs, and Google APIs add-ons)..."] is specific enough to not apply to derived works of the Apache-licensed source of the SDK in AOSP's repo's.