Not that anecdotal evidence counts for anything, but I've had a similar experience.

In my case it was an anti-Europe comment that triggered it, as apparently a large contingent of Slashdotters are europhiles (or actually Europeans).

And really, if someone posts something you really didn't like, wouldn't your impulse be to go look up his user page and mod down every comment that can still be modded? You can mod down a comment that ticked you off only once, but you can hurt his karma far more.

They don't claim their CEOs wrote and sang the songs.

This is as unethical (or ethical) as ghostwriting, where the issue isn't one of legal copyrights but one of moral rights. The only difference is, I guess, for celebrities and politicians, we expect them to use ghostwriters—we do not yet expect students (who should be learning to write) to use ghostwriters.

That sounds completely reasonable, especially the havoc you can expect if you chmod files to 666 in a real multi-user environment.

If you wanted to share files, you would chmod the directory to 1777 (which is good, 7 being a good number).

and let god sort them out...

If written Hebrew is any indication, God doesn't bother with vowels either, apparently.

Lastly: Who would want to print their newspaper in the morning? Physical newspapers are convenient because of their wide format.

Er, really? I'd kill to have newspaper printed letter-size, two-(or three-)column. The size of most newspapers is unwieldy, and especially if i'm trying to read it while walking (a frequent occasion as I commute on foot and pick up a free local daily on the way), i have to fold it over so that it's letter-size; or the wind blows it all over the place.

As for who would actually want to get newspaper on paper, well, presumably people who are not stuck to their computer all day and don't have a Kindle, iPad, etc. And some quaint people still like things printed on paper, like books; I don't understand them but they do exist.

Having a paper in Nature is the gold standard in research

And why do you suppose it is? Impact factor. And what affects the impact factor? Number of citations. And who generates these citations? Academic researchers.

If this boycott/controversy leads to scientists at UC (and elsewhere) disliking Nature, it'll have an impact on its impact factor which may negate whatever benefit non-UC researchers may got from reduced competition.

In any case, the academic journal publishers charging exorbitant fees are ... potentially shooting themselves on the foot—the fewer institutions maintain their subscription, the less likely it'll be for their articles to be cited in new articles published in other journals.

I know this taxpayer is saying, "why can't our idiot local governments publish their routes so Google, Garmin, etc. can include them in their databases?"

If you have a Garmin GPS, one where you can load new maps, you have no excuse: footpaths, stairways, and trails are often listed in OpenStreetMap, although I guess the thoroughness of the map might depend on whether there have been people in your area who have been active in mapping.

Well, I readily admit that I'm not a flat tax expert. (though I believe I described and criticized the flat tax approaches to poverty I'm familiar with; I didn't say there were none). What am I missing?

In case of Fair Tax, you are missing prebates.

I think other "flat" tax proposals include standard deductions (although lower than what we have now) to make sure that the really poor people aren't hit with the tax.

This isn't to say, of course, that Fair Tax doesn't have other problems (mainly the difficulty of doing two things simultaneously; repealing the 16th amendment and raising a new tax), but being regressive isn't one of them.

Somebody could have a big income, but spend like a person with an avereage income. How will you disproportionally punish him for doing well?

Why, by running high inflation and heavy regulation & taxing of businesses.

High inflation ensures that this big miserly border-line treacherous criminal will lose any money he saves in banking account, etc, forcing him to invest that money into businesses, if he wants to maintain the value of his money.

Once you've forced him to put the money into businesses, then you take the money from the businesses with various fees and what-not. (Some tweaking and fixes will be necessary, such as banning of owning gold and silver by members of public, as well as a ceiling on interest rates banks can pay on savings, but the general idea remains the same.)

There are many, many ways to "spread the wealth around" even without a progressive income tax. Progressive income tax just makes it easier.

Illegal immigrants can earn legal income, legal in the sense that they get to keep the money sans taxes.

Illegal income would be drug money and the like.

Not to mention that IRS is charged with taxing all income, legal and illegal. That's how people like Al Capone were brought in on tax evasion charges, rather than the bigger crimes they've committed (but couldn't be proven in court).

And I'd have thought the opposite. Someone stating "I believe there's a supernatural presence here in this room. I have no proof of it. I have no evidence of it. There's nothing that's ever indicated this to be true other than writings that are thousands of years old and were carried by the oral tradition for some number of years before ever even being written" would seem to be operating outside the objective world of science.

I don't know how other believing scientists do it, but here is how I have come to reconciliation: science does not explain everything. Furthermore, if a god like God of Christianity exists, then by all descriptions, he exists outside our universe (otherwise he would be a finite and limited god), not subject to the physical laws that bind this universe.

In physical sciences, we study the mechanisms of the world, but nothing beyond that. We describe how gravity works and how strong nuclear forces work, but not how they came to be. We can break things down to the fundamentals, but as is logically necessary, the fundamentals remain unexplained (there's a saying in mathematics: "God made the natural numbers; everything else is man-made").

As I have said, nothing in the physical sciences today precludes existence of God. Most of it do not even contradict the Bible provided that: (1) you interpret the initial few chapters of Genesis as being figurative, not literal and historical; (2) you allow for miracles—experimental science, just because of the way it works, can only deal with events and circumstances that can be recreated again and again, time after time; miracles are by definition one-time occurrences that cannot be subjected to rigors of experimental methods.

In the end, faith does come down to a personal matter, so any categorical statement may turn out to be wrong. But for every potential reason one might think physical scientists might be inclined less to believe in a god, there's an argument to be made that they might actually be more inclined. One example: you might think that mechanically minded people, who see the world as a big machine with no unexplained parts, wouldn't want a meddler like a god—but then, mechanically minded people also might be more inclined to believe in an intelligent designer who made that machine.

Buddhism is hardly a minor religion (fifth largest according to wikipedia) and one of its precepts is not to take any life.

Indeed. But I think few Buddhists follow that precept. First, only the monks are required to lead a vegetarian life (so that they may not kill in order to eat). Second, I don't know exactly how they justify their actions, but even Tibetan monks engage in acts of terrorism/insurgency against China. (I'm not saying that the acts, if what the Chinese allege are true, are wrong in itself; I'm just saying, as an outsider, that any act of violence, even for a good cause, seems to be in contradiction to the faith.)

I think the biggest strike against Buddhism as a promoter of world peace is its limited impact: its influence is largely limited to Asia; I know of no significant Buddhist groups in U.S. or Europe and not because of any persecution against Buddhists. I think Buddhism is too passive a religion to have any worldwide impact. Even in Korea, where Buddhists outnumber Christians 2 to 1 (or better, I think), the modern culture is more sharply defined by Christian churches and the church-goers than Buddhist temples and their faithfuls (and I think a good number of present and past Korean presidents have been Christians, not Buddhists).

Every generation has had its share of apocalypse. Perhaps on this single pale blue dot we could promote pacifism as the ideal and agree to just not kill each other over the ideas in our head. Respecting differences and promoting the good of all - undivided, is more scalable than bickering and bloodshed?

Ah, so that is the religion you would like to see. I can respect that (even while thinking it unrealistic).

Unfortunately, the religions we do have on this earth do not aspire to or approach such idealism. Not the major ones, anyway (how many followers does Taoism have?).

scientists, in general, do not have strong views against religion. Scientists are used to politely disagreeing with people that do not share their views, and having their views challenged and proven wrong.
it is the uneducated that have complete certainty in their opinions want to kill everyone that disagrees with them.

That's a rather uneducated view of scientists. Speaking as a scientist (physicist, in particular), scientists can be a contentious lot, in matters they care about. It may be that a lot of scientists just don't care for religion, but that's not to say scientists are somehow natural pacifists.

You don't have to go far to find examples of educated scientists who have been responsible for many deaths, out of religious or nationalist zeal, from Maj. Hasan (to the extent you consider psychiatry a "science") to the physicists at Los Alamos at the end of World War II.

Scientists are not angels. They are human, who are no better than the general population.

I'm also willing to bet that people in hard sciences, like physics, chemistry etc are far more likely to be atheists than for example sociologists or historians.

As a practicing physicist, I'd be willing to bet against that.

Aside from the fact that academics do tend to be less religious for whatever reason (just as they tend to be more liberal for whatever reason), I don't see why physicists or chemists would be more likely to be atheists than historians, psychologists, or biologists.

For one, most of our work does not contradict religious doctrines—in fact, the Catholic Church was very happy about Big Bang theory when it was proposed—or deal with anything religious, meaning whether you believe in a god or not should have no impact on whether you can perform the necessary work, experimental and theoretical.

In another, if you believe there is this hostile environment in the academia for believers, in hard sciences, your work at least can be judged by relatively objective standard (i.e. is the experiment reproducible? does the theory predict verifiable experimental results?), meaning believing scientists have better chance of surviving in physical sciences.