[Citation Needed]

And no, clonal colonies aren't really a single organism that has been alive for a long time, just because they're still physically connected. By that logic, a woman who's still connected to her child via an umbilical cord, even at 9 months, would register as a single organism.

Sorry but there's something I forgot to add to my previous post:

When you encounter determined criminals who go out of their way to stab someone by making them file blunted knives or make home-made shivs, you make prosecuting them a ton easier. The weapon becomes evidence of premeditation. This allows the judicial system to remove them from society much more successfully.

You're assuming person A is determined to kill person B in all scenarios, by any means necessary. Take for example a crime of passion, in which the person experiences what is technically temporary insanity. They will try to inflict harm (although inflicting death may not be a conscious goal), and will use whatever weapon is convenient at the moment (rather than being able to plan ahead enough to file your knives to points).

Keep in mind, in the UK, guns aren't anywhere near as readily available as they are in the US. So with an utter lack of guns, stabbing with a knife would be the first weapon you default upon. But with nothing but non-pointed knives available, you'll have to default to another less effective weapon (assumably less effective otherwise, you'd have gone for that other weapon first, right?).

Sure you've got flashlights and ballpoint pens, and woodchippers, but those are a helluva lot harder to kill someone with. Repeated blows from flashlights, dull pens, or a wrestling match toward a woodchipper buy the victim much more time and opportunity to get help or get away. A pointed knife entering anywhere into the chest cavity is almost instantly a game-over for them.

You can't just say blunted knives are bad due to worst-case scenarios. A pragmatist should consider the average-case as well. If there is a benefit to be had in average-cases, well, why not do it? Nobody ever claimed blunted knives would make murder nearly impossible, but it's a decent enough handicap.

As well as French reinforcements.

I'm gonna venture a guess and say you hate religion so much you feel the word "faith" has a dirty connotation which you don't like being associated with yourself. If this is the case, you're either unfamiliar with more general usage of the word "faith" or you're being overly defensive (personally I assume it's the former).

Either way, it's entirely your own error. The word faith can be used interchangeably with words like trust or belief. Trust, belief, and faith, can exist in the presence of supporting evidence. For example: "I believe the theory of blahblahblah is correct in the presence of this evidence here". Do note that this (hypothetical) evidence would not necessarily proof of the theory, so you can't say it is absolutely known with certainty to be true, so the applicability of faith isn't excluded.

(That said, I have to say I don't see this evidence you referred to. Please cite me a country who's economy is more laissez-faire yet also enjoys superior consumer safety & quality compared to us).

You trust the drug companies when they pull these sorts of shenanigans? http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/03/0348243

Game theory says that the free market economics could arguably work, but only in scenarios with perfect (or near perfect) information among all players. Making fake medical journals kinda highlights the fact that they're not willing to allow such an ideal market to exist. Why? It's not in their interest to do so, so they don't. Common sense right?

I'm okay with somebody in a government agency substituting their will for my own if they possess superior knowledge concerning how to go about testing for what I could consider to be harmful to my interests. Given what is poisonous to Ben is likely also poisonous to Jerry, it's not unreasonable to say that government screening of toxic materials in food is universally in everyone's interests. If they know how to test for this crap, let them. They'll be better at the lab work than I would be. (not to mention, I don't have the time to test for toxins in all my food before I eat it).

Nothing in the law forces companies to practice less-safe or less-healthy policies than they wish. Nobody is forcing Monsanto to genetically engineer anything that contaminates non GMO crops. If companies in a free market are able to produce safer food/drugs when big brother isn't looking over their shoulder, why don't they do it now? Specifically, give me an example of how the FDA would prevent a food producer from selling me cleaner food than what they currently sell me.

I'll take the results of a regular lab-tests over someone's "reputation" any day. Regulators' tests can also can be used to establish certainty something is safe before harm occurs. This is valuable because preventing damage is always cheaper, easier, and more effective than trying to remediate it after it's been allowed to occur.

So you're saying a system where criminal charges are applied after people are hurt (without any attempt to protect them from that harm) is better than a system where periodic FDA sampling of the milk or baby formula verifies its safety before my child ingests it? You're advocating a system where people only know whether their baby's food is poison based on how many other people's babies have died. How is that a better system?

Furthermore, if the only thing preventing consequences for bad behavior is a court room, I think consequences would be more a function of who has the more expensive lawyer, rather than who suffered damages. And lets not even get into how we throw someone into jail when the harmful product was imported from a foreign country...

BTW, the FDA also regulates things like lasers. Lasers used at shows by casinos (which may be too close to airports, blinding pilots and potentially killing many people at once), and lasers used to correct somebody's vision. Do YOU prefer to rely on reputations or government regulators before somebody permanently alters your eyes, potentially blinding you for life?

Government regulation first came about because most people demanded it after bad things happened to them or people that could have been them.

You've found one high quality product or service you like and you're attempting to use it as proof that all products/services are good and high quality. The problem is that, besides this being an obvious logical fallacy, we know from simple experience there are bad products and bad services.

I have a family member who works in the FDA, and I've heard stories about "don't eat this", or "don't eat that" due to what they've historically found them guilty of. People nowadays DO still try to scam the market with unsanitary food. It occurs on a daily basis. Without the FDA, you'd end up eating quite a bit of this stuff.

I get it. You believe and have faith in the free-market system and this gives you incentive to criticize anything that challenges your free-market dogmas. But meanwhile in the real world, people are trying to feed you poisonous crap, and will do so unless government intervenes. Wishing otherwise doesn't make it so.

If you don't believe that your food's quality would drop the day they deregulate the food industry, I've got a nice cool glass of melamine laced milk to show you...

Back in the year 325, you could get away with burning scrolls to censor heretical texts.

But nowadays we have something called the Internet. Good luck erasing *anything* that's remotely interesting about a controversial multi-national religious cult.

We already tried the libertarian style economics. Crack open a history book and read about why government started regulating things. It invites itself to stock manipulation, trust schemes, unsanitary products, child labor and hazardous working conditions. No single social construct should be responsible for everything, not government, nor corporations. The goal should be balance.

Sure, let them fail. In the meantime, the products or services they provided will become unavailable to consumers while we wait for new companies with less experience. That experience usually helps make whatever they produce more efficient than what the startup company which would try to replace them would do. A high corporate-death/corporate-birth turnover rate would make for a painfully unstable economy.

When all the meat-producers practice unclean methods, they don't have to convince you of jack. You will have to buy somebody's cheaply produced yet unsanitary meat because it's the only thing available on the market. It's not like this hasn't happened before.

I'd love to hear how a free-market fundamentalist would justify deregulating something like, say, an airline industry, and simply let them decide what is and isn't safe in terms of airline maintenance. The only way for consumers to abandon something like an unsafe airline would be for people to first start dying (otherwise how would you know it wasn't safe?).

Government can have proactively improve the quality & safety of products and services whereas consumers in a purely free-market airline industry can't always do the same. Free-market consumer decisions are almost always reactive, occurring after somebody has suffered damages or purchased damaged goods. There is no incentive in free-market economics to do anything beyond what you must in order to make a buck. Government (who's sole motive isn't greed for money, but rather fear of being elected out of office) serves as a good check against a company, who's sole responsibility is to make a profit for whomever owns the company. Lust for power checks lust for money. Not perfect, but better than no check at all.

Free-market economics have had failures throughout history. Not just in terms of corporate-failures, but in terms of public health, public safety, and quality of life. Ignore history at your own peril.

Sorry, but galaxies and solar systems don't evolve because they aren't adapting to anything nor do they self replicate.

Turned tail? What makes you think America stopped going out of cowardice? You can only collect so many moon-rocks before people start to ask the question of whether or not it's worth the billions of dollars it costs to keep going.

Btw, "China" and "better technology"? I'm gonna have to call [citation needed] on that one. If I didn't already know you were trying to be serious, that would be interpreted as a funny joke. China doesn't compare to most developed nations in terms of innovation. Especially in terms of quality of technology. Their idea of "innovation" is making cheap rip-offs of what others have designed.

Uh, hopefully this isn't news or anything, but well, we already won that race. Several decades ago. When the available technology was crappier. In fact, we went more than once, so we've lapped them multiple times.

Frankly, I think NASA's better off moving on to one of the next two big space-race checkpoints:
1) Mars (I'm sorta "meh" about that one).
2) Find a way to clean up all of our orbital debris. (While not glamorous, this is going to be a prerequisite for us becoming a space-faring species).

Do not confuse tree-huggers with environmentalists or environmental scientists.

Nuclear is considered "green" by many simply because it's the lesser of two evils (compared to coal). It produces half as much CO2 (the reason it produces any is due to ore refinement). In reality, there's more ambient radiation surrounding coal plants than nuclear plants.

Regarding wind: Any bird that is clipped by a windmill is as good as dead, the tips of those sucks spin much faster than they appear, but ultimately, windmills didn't even come close the killing as many birds as windows do. For an endangered species of bird, I can see someone arguing against a wind farm in a specific flyway, but otherwise it seems silly to me.

Hydro: Moot. We've already put a dam in every place that we could think. I doubt anyone will be tearing any dams down for any reasons.

Solar: That is a strawman. No serious parties are claiming solar should be regarded as an undesirable option.

Fact: The term "Pollutants" normally includes any material which is significantly detrimental to an environmental system. The EPA's job isn't just to protect human health, but to protect environmental systems as well.

Dumping sufficiently concentrated salt water wherever you please can easily be illegal, such as brine waste from a reverse osmosis plant. Not just because it may contaminate drinking water aquifers or reservoirs, but also because it damages ecology.

Dumping pure, clean, but very hot water wherever you like is considered thermal pollution. It doesn't take a genius to know why either. Warmer water leads to less gas solubility, less gas solubility leads to less dissolved oxygen in water, not enough dissolved oxygen in water leads to dead fish and anything else in water that needs O2. When they die, decomposition eats up all the remaining O2 in the water. Eventually anaerobic bacteria take over the system.

And that's just warm water we're talking about, something obviously non-toxic right? Forgive my reluctance to subscribe to this idea that non-toxic pollutants are somehow harmless.

BTW, CO2 may not be toxic to us, but it is having toxic effects on certain systems right now, specifically coral reefs. Elevated atmospheric CO2 has led to elevated dissolved CO2 in oceans. This results in the formation of carbonic acid, which is messing with the ocean's pH.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification

In addition, there is research pointing out that vegetation can suffer when CO2 passes a certain threshold. Triggers that keep their stomata open include light, humidity, and CO2 concentration. Normally more CO2 absorbed into the stomata is fine, but unfortunately they can't absorb CO2 without also losing water. At a certain point, the extra CO2 is useless due to limiting nutrients, and they'll be less able to retain water.

Taking all of the sequestered carbon (coal/oil) that we can possibly find and putting that carbon into the atmosphere over a couple generations is not a small change. You can't double the concentration of CO2 within a time frame that amounts to a blink of an eye by geological/evolutionary timescales without the biota suffering. Evolution is too slow.

Slashdot appears to have cut off a sizable chunk of my post, so allow me to continue with a 2nd post...

Yes, direct evidence is unlikely, but we've got enough indirect evidence to prove black holes & neutron stars exist, so it's not unreasonable to assume that we could find sufficiently convincing indirect evidence for string theory.

Lastly, the use of the world theory here is arguably legit. Not in a scientific context, but rather in a mathematical context. Ever heard of Set theory, game theory and chaos theory?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory#Fields_of_study_called_.22theories.22

Those are fields of math, and until there are experiments, arguably string theory is too.

You take take something obviously false like ghosts and attempt to compare it to whatever you'd like to cast disrepute on. Classy. Second, to have a ghost detector, you're required to first know that ghosts exist (otherwise then your ghost detector isn't really a ghost detector).

Also, you don't seem to recognize the long history of advances in science which were purely mathematical to begin with. For example: Black holes were first predicted mathematically, without any observations to back it up. Did scientists ignore it?. Hell no. Even neutron stars were originally just theoretical too. Whenever a physicist started doing calculations involving black holes or neutron stars, did people crap all over their work and berate it to the point of halting interest in the subject? Were they castigated for exceeding the bounds of the Theory of General Relativity?

Eventually we got the technology to test both of those ideas, and the vast majority consensus is that black holes and neutron stars exist. There's no evidence yet that rules out the possible existence of sufficiently convincing indirect evidence for string theory. Yes, direct evidence is unlikely, but we've got enough indirect evidence