> I am all about being correct. And in this case, Islam is no more or less violent than Christianity is, if you judge it according to the respective holy book.

Irrelevant even if it were true which I don't think it is. A religion is more than some set of books. It is a social phenomenon with some correlated distribution of values. Things like women's rights and education (or lack thereof), acceptance of corporal punishment and stoning to death, or tolerance towards other religions (or its lack thereof), or the distribution of moderate vs extremist fundamentalists who are ready to kill and die for their cause (fat tail distribution). It is in this neutral, objective, practical light that you can safely say that from the viewpoint of Western civilization, Islam is a more violent religion than Christianty, without risking your holy PC-ness status.

> it was the US that initiated a coup
> US friendly dictator
> Ayatollah Khomeini
> armament through the US
> has been destabilized by US
> cement US influence

Blah blah irrelevant points from a moral high ground wannabe who doesn't mind to consequently live in a permanent conflict zone that Western Europe may become.
For it is a terrorist act in France, committed against a French newspaper's stuff, by muslims living in France, killing French Caucasians and Muslims in the process, in the name of Allah. Or are you a violence apologist for whom having suffered collective injustice is a good reason to give a license for killing anyone and everyone they feel like, because it's against their values? What if hiding women behind veils is against my values, can we relativize away my violent revenge then, or would you (in this hypothetical case) call me a terrorist or racist? Only Caucasians can be racist?

Never mind, a PC apologist will bring up whatever centuries outdated or otherwise irrelevant point just to be righteous, pretentious and deserving of his Moral High Ground and transcendent liberalism.

> And in fact the criminals who murdered these 12 people are not followers of Islam though they claim to do it in the name of Islam. And the vast majority of those who are Muslim in the world do not condone nor celebrate these kind of murders done in the name of Islam, and really do want, as most of us do, peace.

Does it mean that we can't draw some correlation between such acts, and a specific religion, maybe in an attempt to understand and avoid the causes? Statistics could do a good job, going through potential explanatory variables and assessing the predictive power of each.

In other words, who the hell cares if these terrorists weren't "proper" muslims, and what's your measure anyway for how good an adherent is? All aspects around this specific massacre relate to religious (muslim) issues.

And please don't make the rookie mistake of equating murders. There will always be social outcasts and nuts who load their weapons and go for the neighboring school, subway etc. But let's not sweep together religious fundamentalist terrorism with gangster & maffia crime with nutcase shootings. .....

Reading through a number of comments from many of us, it seems like a commonality among the overly PC, relativizing crowd is to bend the truth by highlighting irrelevant details and glossing over relevant ones. It's pretty transparent. There is a systemic link between a specific religion and the erosion of Western values. Even if the terrorist events are just the fuel or the casus belli for the process. This opinion does not make me a hater of Islam or Muslim people, or prejudiced. From a reasoning perspective: I'm OK with an Arabic person next to me on the subway because him being Arabic does not make him significantly more likely to commit a terrorist act there and then (or ever). There is a roughly equal, incredibly tiny chance that the guy (whether Arabic or Caucasian) next to me is crazy or fundamentalist or on a revenge. BUT this does not mean that we can't detect pattern in the data, and lawmaking everywhere might be able to reduce incidence rates by, for example, not allowing all kinds of sometimes militant teachings in the odd mosques in European cities. Btw. I appreciate a lot about Middle Eastern culture and most people I got to know from that region.

> > They bombed the London Tube for Allah...

> "Allah" is just Arabic for "God".

It's alright then?

Or did you think the GP was in any significant way (other than nitpicking) ambiguous and maybe some fraction of the readers didn't connect the word Allah with Islam?

Btw. interesting titbit.

You are trying to relativize things.
Just because you find a data point here and a data point there this does not make the two sample sets similar.
Muslims killing Christians, or killing Muslims who integrated (e.g. the policeman) isn't lessened by muslims being violent to other muslims more often. Because if you feel comfortable in your Western values (which seems to motivates your naive, overly PC attitude) and want your children and grandchildren to enjoy those values and allowed to live by them, then you'll realize that a handful of terrorist in the name of ideology can do an awful lot of reduction to those civil liberties you exercise, for example, through inducing self-censorship of media, and through increased police state presence and surveillance. It is from this vantage point that your Yemen example is much less relevant, other than of course, helping understand (and trying to address) the root causes. I'm not lessening the importance of the Yemen massacre, but not all horrible inhuman acts are equally relevant offsetting points in all debates involving Islam.

Yours is the argument that "if we play nice with them, they will play nice with us". But then you attribute values to them which are unsupported and are only reflective of your own values (with hundreds of years of historical evolution behind them that's very different to the hundreds of years of history to others), i.e. not only it is wishful thinking, but it is clueless, and insulting to everyone's intelligence, no matter which value system they follow.

> If Muslims are integrated into modern Western society,

this is a BIG if - because many simply don't care to, don't want to or can't integrate, and such processes can take a hundred years or more anyway, even there is a stable trend towards integration. Also, check the demography, like differences of childbirth rates and immigration rates. Do some critical thinking on this.

> then religious fanatics will have no power over them.

Citation needed. Unless, of course, you define "being integrated into modern Western society" to mean "religious fanatics will have no power over them" in which case, of course, it just becomes a tautology.

Well intentioned, PC persons on the West, who try to reason from the perspective of their own value system, are like doctors who continue to believe that tapping blood or whatever ineffective method they are accustomed to is the best approach, despite evidence that it isn't effective. They may well risk the well-being of their own children.

Intended consequences ("purposes" of the terrorist act) aren't even very relevant (other than to understand root causes), and desirability of outcome shouldn't be evaluated with reference to a terrorist's purpose (if what a terrorist purports to achieve is automatically opposed by their 'enemy', then they could control their 'enemy' by declaring the contrarian purpose - would be stupid, wouldn't it?). Outcomes should be evaluated from the vantage point of what's desirable for the society as a whole, or for Western civilization, or your family. And one of the most easily inferrable outcomes is lessened *freedom of speech* through the immediate and very effective self-censoring mechanisms that are immediately observable even despite the uproar of Western media.

So on all these points, try to think through the situation and don't automatically assume that your first impulses represent some kind of generally accepted truth or consensus among members of liberal democracies or good people or whatever. Stick to things that can be reasonably well defined, are realistic on a reasonable timescale, or best, that can be observed directly.

I've been laughing, reading your tongue-in-cheek humor until your last sentence... then realized that maybe you actually meant what you wrote...

I really like the DoD document. It is fairly approachable, e.g.

http://ctnsp.dodlive.mil/files...

"a strategic policy issue for the United States with
regards to the UOG boom will be the possibility of using our domestic energy resources for
geopolitical influence, in effect turning the tables on the current major oil producers"

I'm looking forward to a World where, for example, Eastern Europe and even Germany are not held hostage by Russia just because there is more oil under their soil and they tend to raise militant leaders into power. Some European countries aren't cozy with Russia because of being fans, but because of being left behind by the EU when it comes to energy independence and alternative sourcing.

The material is also one of the first examples of mainstream recognition of unpredictable, accelerating technological progress, and shows the fig to those who claim that the singularity is no more than the rapture of the nerds or new age-ism. Even discounting for the not too veiled bias of the material to argue for more resources in order to retain technological leadership.

Not all flying cars looked new. Some of them looked like 5 year old cars.

I went from Lisp to JavaScript and have the same sentiment about it. JavaScript is an acceptable Lisp, especially with the awesome V8 engine and the performance war it triggered, sans the infix notation. One can even program with expressions only and (almost) no statements. Ternary is like Lisp if; comma operator is like progn. Not that I'm proposing this style in general.

And how about now? Are the conditions still present for quantum fluctuations to happen? If so, could another universe come into existence side by side?

Double counting of benefits is common in PR and gets automatically filtered by the spam detector of the brain, but seeing it in a technical discussion is novel.

Further drop tests revealed that the sapphire glass screen was not likely to break when embedded in a liquid metal casing.

As a reference, a strenuous ride on a bicycle generates about 500W of kinetic energy. Probably a light arm curl of one arm could easily generate 5% of that. 25W does not sound like much, because the Glass probably uses a few Watts, and 5 minutes of arm curl for every hour of use would be socially unacceptable, it would look funny.to say the least. Not to mention the contraption that one would need to wear on his arm to harvest the energy.

I'm sure a special shoe could easily generate many watts just by the wearer walking, and it is socially acceptable (at least outside the US).

Or there could be a special hat, which would have three functions:
- solar cells on the top
- casting a shadow so that less power is needed for the display projector
- being able to switch between augmented reality and virtual reality

It could look like this proven design: http://bit.ly/160kqxD