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Comment Re:Adam: three named sons+unnamed sons and daughte (Score 1) 1121

> The fact that no human being could live 800 years also disproves this account, unless the guy expects "god-level magic" to be an acceptable explanation.

If you accept the premise 'god creates the universe from nothing', 'god enables a human to live 800 years' is not really that far-fetched, is it?

Comment Re:Explanation (Score 1) 491

> So the majority of citizens live in countries that have the death penalty and actively use it. The list of countries that have abolished it includes many small nations with low population numbers. It isn't fair that you use that number to support your stance on the death penalty, because those low-population states get extra representation in the results.

Except that GP said most governments. If schneidafunk wanted to make this into a popularity contest rather than (by accident?) presenting a verifiable statement (which just so happens to be very false) perhaps they should have said so, rather than implying that most countries in the world would resort to worse barbarism than is currently practised in the USA.

It seems the USA like to pretend they are somehow better than the rest of the world. It would be nice to see them hold themselves to standards that are equal or higher than the rest of the world.

Comment Re:As a professional, I would say... (Score 1) 183

> Fast typing helps, but I think your son would find this boring.

Writing documentation is also considered boring by many, but learning how to type fast now will speed it up by a factor of two or three. Imagine how many hours of boredom will be saved over the rest of his life. Imagine the same advantage when communicating by email with other students and co-workers.

I definitely considered my typing course to be fairly boring *at the time*, but looking back it is one of the most useful things I've learned in my youth.

Government

New York Passes Landmark Gun Law 1591

New submitter mallyn points out that the state of New York has become the first state to pass a new gun control law since the school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary last month. "Called the New York Safe Act, the law includes a tougher assault weapons ban that broadens the definition of what constitutes an assault weapon, and limits the capacity of magazines to seven bullets, down from 10. The law also requires background checks of ammunition and gun buyers, even in private sales, imposes tougher penalties for illegal gun use, a one-state check on all firearms purchases, and programs to cut gun violence in high-crime neighborhoods. ... New York's law also aims to keep guns out of the hands of those will mental illness. The law gives judges the power to require those who pose a threat to themselves or others get outpatient care. The law also requires that when a mental health professional determines a gun owner is likely to do harm, the risk must be reported and the gun removed by law enforcement." Meanwhile, the Obama Administration is expected to propose a new federal assault weapons ban later today.

Comment Re:No, the question is: what happened (Score 2) 78

Your "The sun isn't getting hotter"-article is looking at decades, not millions of years. What the sun has been doing since the 1980s is quite irrelevant to its evolution on larger time-scales. Even your water-vapor article concludes that the oceans could be boiled away if the earth were hotter, in the second to last paragraph.

Do you even read your own references?

Comment Re:Call me old-fashioned... (Score 1) 233

Okay, that changes things. Not only has the device a secret backdoor decryption thingy (whatever that might be), the CPU will also send (easily detected) packets over your network, but nobody has detected these packets yet because of... reasons. And the Chinese are *so* interested in you that they would risk getting caught performing something as bizarre as this scheme of yours just to get a glimpse at your facebook friends.

This conspiracy theory of yours sounds rather far-fetched.

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I'd rather just believe that it's done by little elves running around.

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