Saying that agnostic has in practice become the true absence of religion (as opposed to atheism which is "supposed to be") is not a sensible statement. It's like saying that sometimes people dye their hair, so in practice blue eyed people are the true brunettes.

One thing that's interesting is that nobody sits around talking about the absence of things. It doesn't make sense to sit in a circle and talk about how there are no robot showbusinessmen on Uranus that are re-enacting Earth's transmissions and rebroadcasting them with Faster-Than-Light technology to their home galaxy. Likewise, atheists don't sit around and talk about how there's no god.

So if you see atheists talking on the Internet, or go to atheist forums, then it's almost by definition that they are talking about religions (usually the dominant religion in their area, which in English-language forums is usually Christianity). And just like most informal groups of people, some of them are total jackasses about it.

Even so, a statement like this seems starkly opposed to reality:

I've seen an atheist argue that a condition of political office should be atheism, on the basis that admitting that you are influenced by things that aren't real means you are mentally incompetent in the worst way*, and I can see how that is like "forcing" others to believe as they do -- but this is not a common stance, even among the vitriolic internet atheists.

*I also know deeply religious people who got extremely uncomfortable with George Bush's "god talks to me" speech, because they might not agree with the atheist I just mentioned, but they follow his argument as far as thinking that it's really not a good sign if a powerful political leader claims to be hearing the voice of god in his head.

By any standard. The term undesirable is used because it's not specific.

It would not be sufficient, but the GP was not wrong in calling the GGP wrong, because the GGP said "it may indeed be neceesary to use a proxy or VPN".

That's like saying you can't be a Republican without campaigning against gay marriage. It is, after all, a cornerstone of the official Republican platform.

Despite references to papal infallibility and a highly structured organisation, Catholicisim is generally *not* a literalist religion. One of the fundamentals of Catholicism is that you must follow your conscience, even if your conscience is wrong and/or violates Church teachings ("Primacy of Conscience"). In fact it is sin to do something you believe in your conscience is wrong. Even if the Pope himself comes up and tells you with full authority that it is definitely not a sin to take advantage of a free refills policy, if you feel it's wrong, you don't do it. If Sotomayor believes it's wrong for the law to treat fetuses as morally equivalent to adult humans with respect to right to life, from the instant of conception, then it would be wrong of Sotomayor, as a Catholic, to do so.

They struggle with this, of course, because you can stretch "Primacy of Conscience" to mean anything and it's not supposed to be that loose. But the religion isn't one of sharp boundaries and thin lines between black and white and slavish binary rulesets. This is the religion that inspired the concept of Limbo, after all.

(FWIW I am not a Catholic, and it's no fallacy since I am an atheist and have no memory of being anything else)

How is that relevant? It's not there now, so arguments that Common Core is bad because of their social studies content are incoherent at best and likely dishonest.

If you want to take issue with Common Core social studies, then you have to take issue with that.

I don't know much about Common Core or US education, so I don't know whether Common Core is good or bad, nor whether it is better or worse or a little of both compared to what already exists. But I know that you can't conclude that the US Civil War is being removed from US classes by analyzing a textbook on rhetoric.

The Challenger explosion is often discussed in business classes without analyzing the underlying engineering principles at stake (often disguised so that people won't be biased in their go / no-go decision).

Why?

That's a fair point, but I do believe there are also programs that target the impoverished, including white people (mostly white people, just because there's more of them in the country).

This just doesn't happen to be that one.

Analogously, lots of people have problems other than a societal bias against them in tech. That's not what this is trying to solve.

Sometimes we don't try to solve all things for all people at the same time with the same solution.

Are these ancestors 15000 years old?

If not, yeah, there was a country already there. The colonists just didn't consider it a "real" country.

This is a discussion about H1B workers. They're in the country legally.

Sadly, this is not always true.

Also I hope you at least feel sorry for somebody who crossed the border as a child (as in, their parents took them).

Drinking and driving was one of the big causes in here, and it is illegal.

Aside from drunk driving, drinking is more likely to end in killing yourself. I think gun deaths are more likely to kill other people (aside from suicide, which I would personally exclude from gun violence statistics, but I know is a large number). Nobody talks about restricting access to guns for your personal health.

Also, the number of people who drink is much higher than the number who have guns handy, so this statistic doesn't really inform whether the threat of gun violence is or is not more deserving of regulation than the thread of excessive drinking deaths. *Also* guns are useful for intimidation in robberies and the like in a way that booze is not -- the negative effect of guns is not just death but also the imminent and credible threat of death. Of course on the flip side there are social ills associated with alcohol that are not generally deadly.

The comparison to pop is a little more sensible. However, even the "sugary drinks" ban people were talking about was nothing like prohibition -- it essentially banned selling in a large cup, without banning bottomless refills. I still think it wasn't quite right, but you're the only one talking about blanket bans. Or children, for that matter.

I am not making any statement on gun control (not derailing an article about drinking deaths) other than that there isn't a comparison that's both simple and reasonable between gun control and prohibition.

What is the difference?

How is detecting a violation like objects falling up different from detecting time?

I can only imagine you think the real test is some different scenario?

On a per capita basis, Canada is far worse than China or Russia and about in line with Canada (as of 2005, so right now I have no reason to suspect that things have changed drastically). Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

And the tar sands are helping to supply those US numbers.

It may be very true that if not for the tar sands, the province would be in trouble. That doesn't make it a good thing.

Personally I think it's a bit much to blame Alberta for the entirety of the oil industry. Yes, they are a major seller, but it's a convenient externalization (even for Albertans, since it's "other Albertans"). There's also buyers, and they are everywhere. Especially Alberta :), but everywhere.

No, I'm not an Albertan.

It's not at all clear to me that 3 dimensions are harder than 2 for navigation problems. Especially 3 mostly unrestricted dimensions vs. 2 dimensions where you are restricted to roads and certain directions.

It's possible for a thing to be both intuitive and awful.

It's not entirely clear that VR is going to displace PC gaming to that significant of a degree.

As a fairly avid gamer, most games I play are not in the first person perspective and I don't want them to be. I don't like FPS, and that's a huge portion of all first-person games (though I do like the sort of FPS-stealth-subgenre that encompasses Hitman, Dishonoured, Deus Ex, etc., and I can see how VR would be an asset there).

Platformers, most RPGs (the Elder Scrolls series is a popular exception, but I have never liked them), strategy and/or tactics games, most adventure games, most puzzle games, most "unique" / "indie" games, etc. -- these things and others are generally not first-person, and VR almost implies a first person perspective.

Most of those things I listed (aside from platformers) are already more popular on the PC than on console competitors.