The right thing to do would be to make engineering toys that aren't "for" anyone.

Make a toy that stands on its own merits, then market it to everybody. It's not a "science kit for girls", it's just a science kit, and it's advertised across all applicable demographics, regardless of gender.

I did not say both were equally probable. I said they're equally reasonable, which is to say that believing either requires no more of a leap of faith than the other, and neither has more evidence than the other.

Perhaps we should apply the same examination to this "law of nature" as you have to the idea of a supernatural being?

The theories which underlie the idea of a spawned universe are conjecture, based on the idea that our universe exists in an unobservable space adjacent to another universe, and that given the right set of circumstances, our universe could have been created, with the initial collapsing quantum effects being manifest in now-our dimensions as the Big Bang.

Unfortunately, we have no proof of this. We can invent mathematical theories that come close to describing a multiverse where such an event is possible, but we have no proof that those theories are actually correct. There is no surviving evidence of their use in the Big Bang, and currently no means to travel beyond our universe to observe those "laws of nature" directly. To note your final concern, those theories also have not produced any testable predictions, as far as I know.

In short, such a "law of nature" is as much a human invention as a story of an extradimensional intelligence that likes to create sentient creatures in his spare time. For the purpose of satisfying the human desire to know everything, both are sufficient tales.

There is precisely nothing, apart from ignorance, that isolates a church from science. It is worth nothing that the ignorance to which I refer is both yours and the church's.

The point of a faith is to reconcile the human desire for knowledge with the understanding of the unknowable. Humans are smart enough to grasp that there is a limit to our observations. Common limits are the experience after biological death, the spacial boundaries of the universe, and the historical events prior to the Big Bang. These are things that currently we do not know about, and cannot know about, beyond vague guesses. Those guesses are a mix of the very-limited theories we have (like assuming that the rules of our universe extended before our universe had formed) and pure faith. It is just as reasonable to say that a God created our universe as it is to say that another universe deformed and spawned our dimensions.

Between the extremes of "known" and "cannot be known", however, there is a wide gap of "we don't know yet", and that is the domain of science. Science gives us the ability to know more, and push the unknowable limits out further. We may be able to invalidate a few religions with our discoveries, but there will always be certain limits to our knowledge, and beyond those limits, faith will still hold sway.

There are a few churches that have not only accepted the role of science, but embraced it. Now the pope is saying that climate change is not a matter of faith, but of science. He's acknowledging that we know enough about our planet to know that we can affect it, despite previous assertions by more-ignorant church members that only God could affect a planet's climate. This does not invalidate the religion, but merely declares that science is still something for humans to deal with, not deities.

Plutonium dioxide has an 88 year half life, and is water insoluble. When RTGs are used, they're heavily encased and designed to survive catastrophic launch failures, and have done so, only to be collected and reused on later launches. If they had put an RTG on Philae, your chances of being harmed by it would have been approximately equal to your chances of being devoured by an Indomitus Rex. Unless you're planning to break into the sealed casing, slice off a chunk PuO2, and put in in a sandwich, you'll probably be okay.

It would have massed about 1/10th the solar panels and lasted longer. "Justified" doesn't enter the equation.

It's actually cheaper than trying to maintain only a loose synchronization. You just use prebuilt time equipment, which is almost always built for unnecessary precision, and have the service stop if the times are too far out of sync (indicating that a server stopped getting updates). If you have several servers in several sites, a single site losing its time service is not a big deal, as the service will fail over to the other sites. However, if none of your time clocks can handle the leap second, you'll lose all of your servers at the same time, as they all realize they aren't getting updates.

It's a hazard of having a uniform environment. Unfortunately, uniform environments are also far more cost-efficient to manage.

Similarly, a five-minute offset will prohibit logins and group policy updates. If your Windows Time Service configuration is pushed via group policy, you're kinda screwed, and you'll need to have a local admin on site to nudge the clock in the right direction.

It's a forum that gets Slashdotted all day, every day.

I know a guy who wrote about some of his research, and it was Slashdotted. He analyzed the traffic pattern, and though I can't find that analysis any more, he estimated the budget it'd take to survive the story's front-page run without downtime. It was not a small number.

Extrapolate that to running all day, every day, and serving more than a simple static HTML page, and even with the improvements in technology, we're still going to be dealing in numbers where the rounding error is larger than the staff's paychecks.

Well, yeah.

Frankly I don't see the problem with merely owning any of the aforementioned items. The problem comes when you point them at other animals, or the things that other animals care about. What's so inherently wrong with using a weapon on your own property without harming anyone?

I'd like to see laws constructed such that the moment you intend to cause harm with a weapon, regardless of how big that weapon is, you have committed a misdemeanor. Actually cause harm, and you get upgraded to a felony, with various names and punishments proportional to the actual harm done and the potential harm the weapon could have caused.

Unfortunately, laws are not structured that way. Rather, they're built around knee-jerk panicked responses to the latest horror. I blame the legislators, and the scared people who pressure them to make bad decisions.

And that was, and continues to be, the single biggest mistake of optimistic utopian predictions. Not the "more leisure time" part, mind you, but the "enjoy" part.

If you want to live at a standard set by the 1920's, you can... Living with cheap goods, no electronics, and an hourly factory job, you can meet those basic needs pretty easily. If you're working only a few hours per week to meet those minimal expenses, however, your copious leisure time will be quite boring by modern standards. Knowing what else is available, it takes quite a lot of discipline to maintain that nice simple life.

We realized that we like advancing progress. We like our iPhones, laptops, Internet, movies, and TV shows. We like these things so much that we're still willing to work a full-time job to have them.

This is the single biggest mistake of pessimistic dystopian predictions: The assumption that somehow we're sitting at the absolute maximum of progress, and the precariously balanced economy will topple down the hill on the other side.

The reality is that human nature has not changed. We always want to have the best the world can offer. If that means working just as much as our parents did for a low wage, so be it. At the end of the day, we'll still be able to go to our air-conditioned home, turn on the trillions of transistors in our gaming computers, and play a video game that runs more computations in five minutes than were executed during the entire Apollo 11 mission.

We don't have any more leisure time than we did when those "world of the future" exhibits were built. What's happened instead is that both our working and leisure time have become more effective. At work, we do in an hour what would have taken a team of people several days to accomplish, because our tools are so greatly improved. At play, we routinely spend our time doing what once would have been once-in-a-lifetime activities, because our toys are so greatly improved.

Utopia? We are living it and don't even see it

Either way, the legislature, being comprised of representatives of the jurisdiction involved approved such an action. By extrapolation, that means that the entire jurisdiction approved and agreed to pay taxes to benefit others in the area.

That's how a republic works.

Which really means that the cost of the system doesn't double, but rather that $65/month of taxes are going to this project's costs, rather than building that new skate park, nature trail, or a new sign for city hall. Again, the represented constituents chose (likely indirectly) to spend their budget this way.

And I will happily pay my 30-cent share while those Massachusetts guys help cover the cost of my town's badly-needed $100M school renovation. You see, a long time ago, our two states (and several others) decided to unite to help each other improve their collective lives. Now referred to as the "United States", each member state's citizens pay some taxes into a pool to go toward projects throughout the entire aggregate society.

The total cost of the system will be less than it would be if the $90M only covered a single town. It's impossible to say what your non sequitur is trying to prove.

While I don't remotely agree with the NSA's bulk surveillance program, what you describe is called a "circuit split," and it happens all the time. In fact, it's one of the best indicators that the Supreme Court will take up a case.

Good.

Honestly, I'd rather see more stories edited to be less inflammatory. Most of the crap we get on here seems to be pushed to the extremes of "hate these guys" or "love those guys". It's nice to see some small attempt at real journalism, even if it is fueled by corporate politics. I'm hoping it will spread.