Convenience comes at a price.
You can buy your bread and butter at the local grocery with all your neighbors watching.
Or you can disguise and go to the other end of town, which takes time and increases traffic.

The researchers here are biased: They certainly are interested in finding such an effect because that would make them famous. So they not only need to prove there is an effect, but that effect must be larger than their bias.

Could you be more specific what's wrong with Google's offer? So far Google didn't do anything wrong, so no reason to assume they will. They provide a free service, they provide you options for downloading all your stuff, there is no lock in. And about data-mining: They probably do, but this doesn't hurt you at all. And as long as they don't do anything bad or wrong with all that information you don't need to care. And so far there is no sign of them doing the wrong thing.

Sure, in general they can coexist. No argument there. But as you say, this holds only as long as the religious people stay off the realm of science. And since that realm is growing over the years, religion has to retreat more and more. A thousand years ago it was fine having religion making claims about the nature of rainbows and lightnings. Today science conquered that turf by delivering better explanations. Unfortunately Christians have a problem with updating the bible, and this is what upsets people.

A philosophical background doesn't prove anything. As long as religion takes some random text from some random book as the only truth it is arbirary. On top of it is even an arbitrary interpretation what should be taken literally and what's allegory.

And if String Theory indeed were unfalsifiable it would be completely useless. And making fun of it would be appropriate. Its supporters of course do know this and claim it is falsifiable. The whole idea of science is to create a *useful* model of the world.

As I said, religion is arbitrary, you can claim whatever you want, so it is easy to come up with more arguments. But those arbitrary arguments are certainly not reasonable.

And here this is a good thing, because you cannot reason with religious believers. This is why those guys usually have a big advantage: They are not bound by logic or reason, they can say the most crazy things and their followers swallow it dutifully. The only way to argue against them is to make fun of them. Which is what Coyne did.

They do it for security. It's OK if you don't understand it. You apparently don't like Google. That's OK as well. But neither is a good reason for posting hate-speech.

They had better come up with alternative proposals what to do with the babies when there is no full-time Nanny around.

Of course it's not an excuse and not a defense. The same applies to the Muhammad-Cartoons, they hurt people and the author should have known that. But in both cases hurting people wasn't the primary goal, it was more like accepted collateral damage.

Not if they ask everybody to publish their opinion there.

Please don't twist the facts, there wasn't any personal harassment of the living, none of them was even mentioned. Maybe they took it personally, but that's up to them and that applies in both cases.

The Muslims didn't ask for it. The people here did by inviting everybody to post his opinion.

Not aimed at hurting. He wanted to make fun or maybe just draw attention. There is no reason to assume he intended to hurt those people. He didn't even know them.

It's similar to the Muhammad cartoons: Somebody makes fun about a dead guy, offending people who care deeply about that guy. So if those cartoons are considered Free Speech the same should apply here. Even more so because here we hurt maybe a few dozen people, with Muhammad it was many millions.