While I think the parent has some reasonable things to say about gun laws I think giving someone who says:

In India, there was an attack a few years ago by Muslim terrorists and during that fully trained and higly experienced armed police were slaughtered as they ran into a Muslim. The reason is that normal people have hesitations, compulsions and morals. Muslims do not, so in the split second it would have taken these officers to determine they had run into an animal, they had already died.

A forum for their hateful speech isn't overcome by his reasonable statements on gun control. Stating that ANY sizable group of humans have no "hesitations, compulsions and morals." Is pretty bad in my book.

Sadly you are very much incorrect in your assertion that making religious organizations tax exempt "keeps them from being able to tell their followers who to vote for." Churches do this all the time; they send out emails encouraging their members to vote against things or vote for specific candidates. Sure they are not supposed to do this but there is absolutely no enforcement of this rule. Heck didn't the Catholic church sue the federal government over healthcare laws requiring uniform coverage of workers (please note that churches were exempt from this, only entities which are not directly tied to churches were bound by it)? If that isn't getting involved in the political system then I don't know what is.

My argument would be that corporations are incapable of suffering the same consequences as a citizen. They cannot be put in jail and they feel less (if any) social pressures from the citizenry around them. Furthermore, while I would agree that people should be allowed "to get together and make a movie criticizing some politician," and would support the delimitation between temporary corporations with stated single purpose goals such as this exercising the collective free speech rights of the share holders of said corporation, that is most certainly not the world we live in. If your argument is that the corporation is exercising the free speech rights of its share holders then no corporation should be allowed to make such an argument without the express permission of all share holders.

As it stands, publicly traded corporations have absolutely no responsibility to ensure the speech that the corporation is expressing is in line with that desired by the share holders. There is no requirement that corporations divulge those details to the public or their share holders. Thus I would say corporations are not expressing the free speech rights of their share holders.

The fact that businesses have stuck with MS over the past twenty some odd years indicates that your opinion does not represent the majority. Your points indicate that Windows is not the IDEAL desktop environment for any users but compared to the other offerings on the market it is, that is it is the dominate OS used in the world. You can argue all you want about how this that or the other thing is more "superior" but that is subjective. We have pretty much only one measure of what most people think is superior and that is market share and MS wins on that front.

All that being said I left windows for Linux, then was forced back to Windows, then went to OS X. I spend far less time trying to fix problems that randomly appear on OS X than I have on any other OS. That may very well be because I don't try the offerings every few years. But at the end of the day if you can't be bothered to change your OS because of the annoyances it comes with then it works for you and what one knows is almost always "superior" to a steep learning curve.

The Nexus Q is what is being discussed. Not the Nexus 7 tablet. Neither the Apple TV nor the Nexus Q have a screen.

While I agree that Microsoft has yet to create the extensive walled garden of Apple it has done so on a smaller scale in the past (see the browser wars). More topical is the fact that this is EXACTLY what they are planning with the new Metro App store.

I would imagine that you program the breaking mechanism to be active at the same time as the rotation motor.As heat builds up it causes the contact points to heat up and, since one is spinning at high rotational velocity, it can fly apart as the physical integrity is compromised. But that is just a guess.

I think you have one major flaw with your conclusions: Credit Card processing companies have absolutely no reason to make their systems secure if there are any costs associated with it. The main reason for this is that they pass all the liability onto the retailer. Their goal is the provide the most convenient method to pay a bill on the part of the card holder. Until there is a disruption in this market they will continue to ignore security and pass the costs onto the retailer.

As a scientist who has been integrally involved with both creating new and hiring existing scientists I find your blanket assertion to be rather insulting. Are you implying that the rate of bad scientists who get jobs is higher than say the rate of bad doctors who get jobs, or lawyers? Or are you just stating something that is so obviously true it lacks any substantial content? i.e. that you can point to a few bad apples in a large sample? Do you have any evidence to support your assertion?

If you irradiate a galactic dust with enough radiation to block out the visible portion of a supernova you will get dramatically increased thermal emission from the dust, this would very likely be visible. As now you have thermalized a large fraction of the energy released by the SN.

If a GRB went off in the Galaxy then a few years of increased radioisotopes would be the least of the indicators. A mass extinction would be associated with such an event as most of the ionosphere would be striped from the Earth causing cosmic rays to reach the surface, this would have dramatic and lasting effects on life. I also neither implied nor stated that this was associated with a GRB.

While supernova do not "stay lit in the sky for a very long time" you need to scale that with your time scale of the event. The Crab Nebula is the result of a supernova that went off in 1054 (Earth time) and was visible to the human eye for a period of approximately 2 years after it went off. There is no associated increase in radioisotopes for that event, thus indicating that a larger (likely closer as well) event would have to be the cause of the increased radioisotopes observed in 775.

Two problems with your hypothesis: 1) if the Earth was hit by a huge burst of radiation coming from the direction of the Sun it would have been recorded as a solar flare or something odd. 2) There would be remnants of such a nearby super nova clearly visible now and most assuredly in the months immediately following the event.

You are asking someone to prove a negative. There has been quite a bit of historical discussion about why this is essentially impossible. For instance I cannot prove that pigs do not fly. There is a large amount of evidence that they don't but that is not a proof. So if your level of "religious nut job" requires simply taking a lack of ANY evidence for something as sufficient to not believe in it then I don't see how anyone doesn't fall into that category. Do you believe pigs fly?

You draw this conclusion from a sample group of 2 with 2 groups? Not saying it is wrong but it seems more reasonable to conclude, from all the post here, that more data is needed to understand the issues that are creating the discrepancies. Furthermore, regardless of how genetically or socially predisposed a group is to avoid certain fields if that group represents a sizable portion of your society (i.e. women) then NOT having them in the work place can lead to some very bad internal social norms.

Did you actually read the article? The press release referred to in the summary and in the actual news articles (not the forum post you refer to) give current dates. The press release is for May 23, 2012. So, unsurprisingly, the reverse engineering for 40 year old tech has taken some time and has been continuously documented for at least the past few years but, CURRENTLY, Iran is claiming to be releasing it. That is news.