You can't disentangle evidence from expectation; evidence is precisely that which causes you to update your expectation (and is meaningless beyond that). If you try to form probability theory without initial expectations, you get paradoxes. So we can only coherently define facts in terms of our final expectations, not the evidence, which is a vanishing intermediate value.

Well, I'm more than 99.9% confident that the aforementioned chocolate teapot doesn't exist - and I suspect you are too. Yet you seem unhappy with calling that a fact.

Do you refuse to state anything as fact, then? I think it's less likely that such a thing exists than that Jefferson wasn't actually the third president, or even that I'm actually a brain in a vat imagining things. If you require absolute certainty to call something a fact, that goes against the common use of the word (and the purpose of language is communication and all that). If you accept that it's reasonable to call our (fallible) observations and inferences about the physical world facts, it seems absurd to say that nonexistence of x isn't a fact when we're 99.9% confident that x doesn't exist, and we call y a fact even though we're only 99% confident that y is true; why is "x doesn't exist" treated differently from "x is blue"?

Given that your genetic "web" grows exponentially, that doesn't actually sound terribly impressive. What proportion of the general population are at least as closely connected as some of the people you mention?

The standard counter to that is: reasonable people would state as fact "there is not a chocolate teapot orbiting the sun at around the same distance as Neptune". It's not that we know anything to imply there isn't, it's that we have no possible reason to imagine such a thing would exist, and no evidence to even suggest it does.

Well, I'm sure I got my money back. I don't know the law well enough to say that every account is covered.

For a regular bank account you get your money back when that happens.

The rise of better android handsets to overtake the iPhone was predicted again and again. And then it happened.

/for myself with the transformer I'm already there

How did you get dvorak? If I could put my transformer keyboard into dvorak my life would be complete.

Sure, it's mostly the same for end users, but someone has to manage the insane build process. I remember gnome being dropped from Slackware because just packaging it was taking up too much of Pat V's time.

Mostly, portability. Qt-based programs are easy to port to even quite silly systems; porting libxml and all the other random libraries different parts of gnome is a lot of effort. Thus there's a fairly complete kde on e.g. windows, wheras only a handful of individual popular gnome programs have been ported.

Disagree, and I think the relative popularity backs me up. Have you read the post from rosegarden's author (wish I could find it) talking about moving from gtkmm to qt?

That this is true is really the worst thing about the gnome approach. C++ and GObject are indeed basically the same thing (and vala makes this even clearer), but Gnome chose to reinvent the wheel, throwing away all our existing experience and tool support with C++.

Then frankly you've never flown blind in turbulence, and remember that's the situation we're talking about. If your airspeed and pitch indicate that you're stalling, you damn well pitch forward; if you don't, 99 times out of 100, you stall and crash.

Amazon sent me a set of unsolicited recommendations recently. I was about to push the spam button, and then noticed it was actually a pretty good price for some things I actually wanted.

(And it did feel pretty creepy, but only because they were offering me money off if I bought Strike Witches and Dance in the Vampire Bund together)

Again, if you want to claim religion gives you a good moral standard then it's your obligation to give us examples of this. l If you're claiming that having agreement on moral standards is objectively good irrespective of what those moral standards are, then you're going to have to explain why and how. There are plenty of places where people who strictly follow the bible/catchecism will act less morally than those who follow their own consciences (e.g. treatment of homosexuals), and so I don't see why having everyone do the same wrong thing is better than having half do wrong and half do right.

There's a selection bias here; the kids who died aren't here posting about how all that stuff never hurt them.

As life gets better it becomes more valuable, and smaller and smaller dangers become unacceptable. That's progress for you.

If you don't know your friends' financial situations then how can you be confident they're unlike your own? The histogram for musical ensembles looks pretty unlike that for the general populace. Heck, if I could guess your race from those of your friends (and statistically I almost certainly could), then there's a good enough correlation between that and financial history that the friendship graph gives useful financial history information that I'm legally barred from getting the obvious way.

What do you gain by owning those things? The value of things is what you do with them, not what they are. If I'm buying the car and I've got a choice of pay now or interest free over three years, you bet I'm gonna take the loan and put the money in stocks. And hell, if it ever gets to the stage where I can make more money by defaulting then why the hell not? The bank agreed to the terms (they wrote them, even), and they wouldn't hesitate to screw me over if there was more profit for them in it.

Also, if you bought your home without a loan then you're already pretty damn privileged. I'm guessing top-5% income-wise, and most likely a similar family background. Tell me I'm wrong.