This is horse shit. I've worked with plenty of religious folks that are great at solving problems.

This is very much true. I knew several very good engineers when I went through college, one of whom took his Christianity very seriously and still does today. It is to his credit that he put up with my obnoxious ribbing over his beliefs.

And I have to say that, even if Christianity is a big fairy tale, at least it promotes a morality that is just and peaceful within that society. The PC dogma that has largely replaced Christianity in the Western world as the defacto religion is definitely lacking in that respect. I used to question the response that older Christians would have when I would ask them difficult questions about their religion. Sometimes they would eventually say that if it wasn't for religion, people wouldn't behave nicely. I used to reply that people are nice, surely religion is taking the credit for something it's not responsible for.

But now I see how society has turned out a few decades later as Christianity is withering and on the defensive, and I certainly question my former attitude. It seems that there is more evil these days and it is held in check far less effectively, both by the liberal attitude of "anything goes" which gives tacit approval for the criminally prone to explore criminality, and the other generally liberal attitude that we should allow murderers to live out the rest of their days in prison, and even regularly grant them the opportunity to con parole boards for a chance at freedom their victims never have. So as a practical matter, in some ways Christianity looks better than the current alternative.

If you're against Christian teaching and you think you're an analytic thinker, I challenge you find out what's wrong about the content of the bible and find an convincing argument why people who believe in Christ are doing it in vein.

I'm aware that some people take their religion pretty seriously, but mailining it has to be at the fringes of even the most extreme fundamentalist practice.

That's funny. The harder I think about that comment, magically, the more sense it makes.

Exactly. One should never secure military grade computer systems with passwords like "Joshua" that will fail a simple dictionary attack (let alone open them up to public login).

... when you pry it from my cold, dead hands.

It would have been interesting to see how many people rate our ability to create a self-sufficient off-world colony somewhere. My guess is that it would be easier than mind uploading, which is the only other option (besides the pessimist's option, extinction) that is not physically impossible, given our current understanding of physics.

You see this bullshit all the time from people who never took more than BIO 100 and presume that humans work like bacteria. Turns out, they don't. The proof of that is first world nations. They all have at most low population growth, and many have neutral or negative population growth. The "human bacteria" theory says they should be the prime places for a massive booming population. There's abundance in everything and IMR is low so population should explode... But it doesn't.

I'd be a bit more circumspect about my ability to judge the long term growth rates of humans just two generations after the introduction of the contraceptive pill and Roe vs Wade. It's like the equivalent of spraying some dilute poison in the petri dish that most but not every bacterium is affected by and thinking that the long term growth rates can be predicted by the growth rates of that bacteria in a few hours.

Maybe not exactly like it. Maybe a BWB or flying wing might have better payload/range, considering that the replacement would be able to be made more aerodynamic due to the availability of more powerful computational devices than a slide rule. However, possibly not that much better that the investment is going to be worth it.

To be honest though, the government has been doing this sort of thing for a very long time. Hopefully they can at least use the data they have to catch some murderers and child molesters.

Perfectly said.

You must be AC because you don't have a regular slashdot account. If there are people on slashdot who troll or enjoy so-called "troll exchanges" they wouldn't be site regulars.

So your contention is basically that there is a hypothetical large contingent of people who read slashdot - a site that is "New for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" - just for the humor? And that seemingly obtuse and thick headed people aren't just well... being obtuse and thick headed? Sorry, I just don't buy it. Hanlon's Razor and all.

What's fun about throwing your money away? If you're smart enough to realize that with an analysis of the probability of winning the lotto with respect to the payoff, it's not worth it, you are probably smart enough to figure out where to put your money and effort so that on the balance of probabilities your life will get easier over time.

That is interesting. Back then people were supposedly paid $1 for one day's work. So $1 back then = $200 today. A half cent then would be $1 today. So if we wanted to get rid of other equivalently useless coinage, we would dispense with every denomination below $1 (not that I would advocate it).

Source:
http://www.coinfacts.com/half_cents/half_cents.html