Indeed, double bravo! Thanks for being rational. I'm also a scientist and I cannot stand the "flimsy house of cards" of climate change that is absolute taboo.

The simple fact that the Climate Researchers in TFA used incorrect statistical methods but "arrived at the correct results" is ludicrous. How can we postulate a "correct result" if the method is flawed? If your method is flawed, the experiment is meaningless. This is the same reasoning that Creationists use: "Here's the result we want, how can we make the pieces fit post-hoc?" If the methods are wrong, the results are not simply wrong, they are meaningless and you cannot extract "correct results" from them.
But of course, climate "scientists" do not do science, it's more akin to social studies. The idea that we, the most advanced species on the earth, have no effect on the climate is short-sighted. But no climate study I have encountered has any scientific method behind it to prove any specific causation. The term "science" is applied to anything that takes effort, planning, or nifty machines that print graphs; but that's not science. Science is like chess: you set up your pieces, or methods, so that the result is irrefutable: checkmate.

The real question you should have used as a rebuttal: does the GMU "video game designer" program give its students the opportunity to CREATE a RESULT that they can use to get hired? If so, golly. If not, it's a waste of time.

Education is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Just because you get a degree does not entitle you to the wonderful career of designing a video game for 60 hours a week while being paid peanuts.

I know a ton of people that would love to think they're getting an education by being taught "video game design". Just because they've taken a few tests doesn't mean they can create a good video game, and no employer is going to take a degree in the place of experience and results to show for it.

If you owned a video game studio, who would you publish? Some guy who sat on his ass and got a degree in "video game design" from some no-name school? Or some guy that programmed and released for free an innovative game over the internet? I'd take the guy that has results. The degree is not going to help you, showing an employer you know what you're doing through a tangible product will get you hired. Bring a disc or web address to an interview, not a piece of paper.

That's the free software developer's fault. They developed and released free software with the intention of it being free, not with the stipulation that if it is ever worth something that they should get a cut.

If those free software developers wanted to go through the process of patenting/copyrighting the software, investing millions in PUBLICIZING IT LIKE GOOGLE/ETC. do with it, and generally provide the support of a large corporation, then maybe they would get a cut of the software.

Software isn't just the code, it's the marketing and more importantly the support from the company AFTER SALE. Free software only works because there is no financial investment from the creators after the point of sale. They get the ability to put it on their resume and hope to get recognized so they can move on up. That's the difference between an IT person and a Business person. Don't blame the business person for taking the IT person's FREE SOFTWARE and providing the billion dollar industry of SUPPORT and MARKETING to back it up.

Armed Guards outside a complex is security through obscurity. The security is in hiding the information inside the complex by using armed guards to keep your adversary out. Wars are won and lost with information, not with guns or bases. This is the real world, not Starcraft.

Your chess analogy is interesting but flawed. Yes you can see all of the pieces, but what you cannot see is the information inside your opponent's mind. That information, that tactical quality, is what is going to defeat you, not the queen and the rook. Again, the battle is with information (knowledge and wisdom), not guns and steel.

I'm a neurobiologist, let me explain. The brain requires the nutrients in the blood to work properly and to maintain its network. Smoking causes atherosclerosis, hardening of the blood vessels, which allows less blood to flow into the brain, meaning less nutrients available for the most nutrient hungry organ in the body. Viz. you brain will have a lower capacity and a delayed response time. In the water-shed regions of the brain, between two arteries, these regions will receive decreasing levels of blood-nutrients, meaning those regions eventually die off. Some of the most critical watershed regions are in the dorsolateral frontal cortex, which is a critical functional area for working memory, basically the region that IQ measures, and executive function or the ability to make the best decision based on the information available.

Sure, there might also be a correlation that lower economic class individuals are more likely to be smokers and also more likely to be less educated. However, I know many high class individuals that smoke leisurely. Ever hear of cigars?

The right temporo-parietal lobe junction is well known as the language integration area. The article states these people had this region of their brain, known otherwise as Wernicke's area, altered by magnetic fields, and then READ A STORY and were asked to make a moral judgment on it. This sounds a lot more like auditory processing to me, and I'll give more reason. Individuals with an infarction in this region of the brain are classically unable to note emotional changes in individuals based on speech cues.

It seems most likely (Occam's Razor) to me, that these individuals had their auditory association areas monkeyed with, and ended up being less able to pick-up emotional cues in the reader's voice, which have remarkable amounts of data in regard to the transmission of information. To these people in the experiment, the reader might have sounded like a drab and boring reader, and to the controls the same reading may have been filled with emotional information. These emotional cues are powerful motivators to come to a consensus opinion even among people of disparate moral backgrounds.

I did not read any more of the article than that, it is feasible to control for some of these aspects or to use a different experimental design to confirm the hypothesis, but I would be very careful in claiming that this is some sort of moral core of the brain. It's also been shown that magnetic fields caused agitation, and agitated people are less likely to be compassionate. I suffer from relatively constant pain from migraines and some other things, and I know most people think I'm a jerk when they first encounter me, but I am just less tolerant of people complaining (I'm actually fairly empathic and empathetic, which makes it even worse to have lousy people near me).

Why not design roads to be safe at high speeds instead of intentionally unsafe? This idea is kind of idiotic, and opens up government to liability. "Here's an idea, let's make roads intentionally dangerous! Screw people!" That's like saying, "Hey, let's hire someone to rape people that go down a dark alley, to teach other people that it's bad to walk down a dark alley!" Not rational.

She dated one of the guys for literally 2 days, and never dated his friend.

This was not cyberbullying, although it may have involved it. These teenagers raped that girl, physically assaulted her in broad daylight with school teachers around and no one did anything.

This is a ridiculous law. It's like putting an additional tax on every piece of cutlery because someone might use a knife to kill someone at some point. It's not my responsibility when I want to buy a knife to cut my steak.

I know in Canada the assumption is guilty until proven innocent, so obviously this is a democratic way of saying "we're all guilty". Maybe the labels should actually get enough evidence together to show that they make less money because of piracy and actually go through the judicial system ... oh wait, because they can't get any evidence of the sort!

At one point when I was very young and Napster was first released, I may or may not have downloaded some songs and listened to them, having no inclination whatsoever to spend money on them. I am older now, and I have no inclination to pirate music over the internet or otherwise, and I still do not spend any money on CDs. If I want music, I go to Pandora and listen to all of my favorite, thumbs-up songs for free. Limited to 40 hours of listening a month per channel? So what, I've got 12 different channels that all play the same songs.

This is all bullshit. Maybe if you didn't have so many lawyers on retainer, record labels, you'd end up with more profits. I don't "not buy" CDs because I can pirate them. I don't buy CDs because music is a luxury that I can get for free legally elsewhere, and that I can more often than not do without, especially if the only way I can get it is to sell my soul. People still buy Elvis or Beatles CDs because Elvis and the Beatles were interesting. Taylor Swift and Rhianna are not interesting. That's why you have to show so many boobs on CD covers ... otherwise no one would care. No one cares that you have a studio pitch-match their sucky vocals to some guitar player, and for people that actually have more money than hormones (i.e. what your demographic should be), boobs are free.

This call to find bugs in Toyota's ECUs is like finding WMDs in Iraq ... good luck with that. As the trite saying goes, "you can't prove a negative," and that's really bad for PR.

Statistically, Toyotas are still the safest cars, and there are a larger percentage of complaints to the NHTSA of unintended acceleration in Fords than there are in Toyotas.

Climate Change Argument Summary:
1) Straw man, 2) Defer to expert opinion, 3) ad hominem, 4) ad hominem, 5) red herring, 6) straw man, 7) misinterpretation, 8) ad hominem ... 9) ??? (form political action committee?) ... 10) PROFIT!!!

Simply, there's no data. It's all correlative, and "green" energy (i.e. nuclear) are better for the economy and national security so we should be utilizing them anyway.

I choose to purchase health insurance for my self and my family individually, not through my work, because that way I know that I will still have my own medical insurance wherever I go, whatever happens to my job (and I have a stable job in academia, so odds are not high that I have to worry). But I wanted to have more options than my institution provides me, so I went out on my own to get it.

I would say there's nothing to worry about, just know what you're buying. You have to be your own advocate, no one is going to do things for you. If you don't have any preexisting conditions, then there's really nothing to worry about, but if you do be sure to ask about that to figure out what you can do about it. There might be a more expensive policy they can offer you that covers it (this is a profit driven system, it's not some Grocery store Discount Card that gives you free stuff for no reason), or they might simply have a probationary period before your preexisting conditions will be covered (in which case you can just ask your doctor to load you up on your insulin or whatever before you switch policies ... or mail order some from Canada, it's not as pure due to less stringent quality control (I know for a fact, I'm in the industry), but it will get you through, for instance. At any rate, I highly doubt you have anything to fear, but you should request quotes from various companies at once, get the best deal or even use one company against another to bargain on price.