Agnosticism is about knowledge. the Theism / Atheism poles are diametric opposites: belief and non-belief. There's no middle ground definable by knowledge, or lack thereof.

Agnosticism is not a third position. You're either a theist -- that is, you hold some measure of belief in a god or gods -- or you're not, and you don't. From there, you can, if you like, assert a state of knowledge to bolster your choice, or a lack of a state of knowledge to do the same thing. But your position is still either you believe, or you don't.

The whole point about belief, or not, is that it is contingent upon faith. Knowledge is not.

Hope that helped some.

...is a little monitor that hangs over your lips, showing a silent movie of your lips saying (in a loop) "I suspect I'm under surveillance" while underneath, you can be saying anything you like. :)

An interesting issue is, the photons that formed the image were not on their property at the time, nor do they have a legitimate claim to ownership of those photons just because they happened to bounce off their stuff. They probably bounced off a lot of other stuff, too. "My photon! MY PHOTON!" has more than a little bit of the ring of insanity about it. :)

If you don't want a photonic record of your actions, the sensible answer is to avoid photons that can form such a thing, i.e., stay inside your dwelling with opaque curtains drawn, erect a fence and a cover, etc.

Orwell was an Optimist

The big challenge for atheism is not God; it is that of providing an alternative to Spock-ism. We need an account of our place in the world that leaves room for value."

Atheism is the lack of belief in a god or god. Nothing else. It's not about science, it's not about ethics, it's not about morals, it's not about values. When you say you're atheist, you're saying you do not hold any belief there is a god or gods. That's all. There's no dogma, no book, no set of "therefore we believe these here other thingamajigs", nothing.

If you want to know what an atheist thinks about something other than belief in a god or gods, you really must ask them, or you're simply letting your imagination paint a false picture of the world.

Yes! You're both presenting a perfectly defensible argument against marketing and reinforcing my original point! Because geeks tend to abhor marketing, we dismiss its significance, and are perennially gobsmacked as to why an intrinsically emotional, manipulatable species is so susceptible to emotional manipulation.

So long as humanity is what it is, reason will only ever get you so far. You either need to blow the doors off with a staggeringly amazing thing, or come to terms with the fact that every single entity who might care about your thing has feelings, and bending those feelings in your favor can work wonders.

It's not all bad, though; emotional manipulation works under much the same constraints. Unless you're a Level 80 Snake Oil Salesman with a hat full of luck, you're going to have a very hard time making your thing last if it doesn't live up to the hype--and your reputation will suffer for it.

It's pretty straightforward, to my mind. With the exception of all but the most staggering technological advancements, widespread adoption of new technology typically requires:

1. a sound implementation,
2. a robust support infrastructure, and
3. an effective marketing campaign.

Geeks, for a variety of reasons, tend to respect the first, grok the second, and abhor the third. I personally believe it's what drives our perpetual cycle of incredulity on this subject--because we so detest the last part of this equation, we refuse to see its importance in getting all those squishy, distracted, emotional bags of water to adopt cool new stuff.

NFC has never had the effective marketing campaign in the US, and only kinda had the support infrastructure. The iPhone has incredible inertia on the marketing front, and Apple have clearly done the legwork on building a good starting lineup of financial institutions and retailers for Apple Pay. It remains to be seen whether this'll be sufficient to make NFC catch on, but it's easily the closest we've come to covering all three of the bases above.

Though with a bit of luck, that could actually lead to people not driving in conditions where they would be much better off staying put

And if luck goes against us, the inclement weather lands mid-day, and everyone has to get home from work, or is halfway home from work when the car throws up its hands, pulls over, and gives up.

Me, personally, I can generally avoid driving on snow days, but a lot of people simply don't have that luxury. Walmart and McDonalds and the rest of the service and retail industry don't close at the first sign of snow and they tend to be less than generous when staff claim difficulty getting to work.

Maybe the manufacturers of formula can use this as a marketing angle.

All of these tests and such aren't being done so they can release an autonomous car tomorrow, its an ongoing process and will take time.

That's understood.

It "passed"?

Would your or I pass a drivers test if we couldn't handle weather, road construction, roundabouts, "specific turns", and had our mom in the back seat reaching over to take the controls whenever we weren't sure of ourselves? Of course not.

When it passes a drivers test that'll be a big day. But that test in 2012 was not that day. There's much to celebrate, and as you said its an ongoing research project. But it didn't pass a Nevada drivers test. So why say it did?

It did very well, impressively well, for an autonomous vehicle even... but its still well short of being issued a drivers license, which is what an actual pass of an actual test would imply.

its a research project and the media seems to have an agenda to make autonomous cars into the boogeyman

Because the hype machine says it passed a drivers test, leading to the inference that its ready to be let loose on the streets, when CLEARLY they are no where near ready in actuality.

If the majority of people would vote (at the ballot and with their wallets) for their own rational self-interests once in a while, and not what the silver-tongued TV sound bite sold to them, this would happen much more often. My cynical side tells me that few will ever appreciate the value of abstract principles in and of themselves, but the self-interest angle should be at least achievable.

Clearly this particular Puritannical (shallow, phoney) "moral" crusade must prevail. We must make certain that small children NEVER see a woman's nipple!

but at one point "research" showed that jeans were responsible for higher risk of cancer

I honestly can't tell whether you misspelled "genes" or there's actually a study that shows there's a correlation between cancer and wearing denim trousers.

ISIS is a splintercell that has been cut off of support from Al Queda. Al Qaeda has publicly stated this. It was born of members that were based out of Syria, Iran and Iraq

All true.

. I believe that if Saddam was still in power, that they would most likely be worse then they are now, because they Saddam regime would have politically aligned themselves with their cause,

Assuming it would have existed as a significant entity in the first place. Which it wouldn't have. It would have just been some minor radical splinter with low membership, and no real influence.

You used the phrase "born" when you described it. And that is an apt metaphor -- WE are one of its parents. We planted the seeds that enabled it to grow.

You cannot tell me that you believe that a random sheep farmer with no internet access has the capability of teaching himself how to build a IED or Suicide Vest.

Of course not. If we hadn't been there he'd still be farming sheep. And his sons would be learning to farm sheep instead of joining groups like ISIS.

The majority of civilian casualties happened outside of the primary conflict,

And they wouldn't have happened if we hadn't gone there. You can bleat they were not our "fault" all you like, and I agree we generally didn't go around killing civilians on purpose or anything like that. But the reality remains that our presence there provoked that response.

The infrastructure we destroyed meant they couldn't get their kids to the hospital when they were sick, or led to the water being undrinkable or the food spoiling leading to the spread of disease which culled the older and weaker. And the survivors? What do they do? The economy is screwed, they've lost loved ones... the government is a shambles, the police collapsed, local power groups are de facto in charge, they are angry and they need to blame someone. They are ripe for recruitment and radicalization. To strike back at another religious faction and America and anyone else that is proximate that isn't "them".

Often times our actions aren't to just protect the interests and Freedoms of just ourselves, but to help liberate the innocent from a tyrant as well

It doesn't matter how good our intentions wee, we manufacture groups like ISIS, and Al Qaeda with our so-called 'world police' activity.

They had no trouble failing me for not being able to navigate certain traffic situations correctly on my first drivers test. Had I said, well "I can't do that yet" that would not have resulted in a pass.

So the car failed. Let it fail. Its no big deal that it failed. Constructing an illegitmate pass for headlines just stirs pointless controversy.

This test shows that there's lots of good progress, but that's it.

As for driverless cars actually being ready ? No where near close.

Requiring the driver to be ready to jump in while in action is absurd to the point of not even considering it.

Stopping the car, and handing the controls over is still going to lead to tons of problems. Cars stopping at railway crossings and round abouts and then just sitting there jamming traffic... because the driver fell asleep 30 minutes ago. (And why SHOULDN'T the driver fall asleep -- he's tired, bored, and not doing anything... what do you expect will happen)

Until self driving cars reach the long term goal of being responsible for driving in basically anything a human is currently expected to cope with they can't rise to being more than a novelty, or some limited highway auto-pilot cruise control system.

Because even if it CAN usually handle the daily commute, if it can't handle it ALL THE TIME its a bad idea.

Today when there's snow in a city that doesn't get snow that often its a mess. And that's with mostly drivers who drive every day, know the route they are going like the back of their hand, know where the tricky / problematic spots are etc, and know know how their cars handle at least in normal conditions. And its a mess.

Now, lets substitute that with a city full of drivers who only drive 3 - 4 times a year, are completely out of practice, have no real experience with their car, and only have a general imprecise sense of the route they need to take -- and lets do that on a day the self driving cars collectively decided they can't handle the conditions.

That would be like me driving my grandmother around every day everywhere she needs to go, and then when the weather is at its worst... "Hey grams, yeah, I know you've only driven this car a handful of times yourself in the last 5 years, but your license is still valid, so how about you take the wheel today?". And doing that accross an entire city.

Yes, that will work out well.