Tyson's tweet parodies one of the most recognizable of all bible verses: "For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord." That is definitely trolling, in the sense of making a statement which is almost correct, but in which a certain segment of people will find an error that requires correction. It's trolling like parodies of the lord's prayer. It's trolling like a picture of Mohammed eating a BLT.

Of course, through most of history, mankind's greatest thinkers have been religious. Many of them, including Newton and Einstein, believed that the observations they made and the laws they discovered were evidence of divine power.

Sadly, especially among Christians, there seem to be two branches: the "thinking man's" religion and the "authoritarian" religion. The thinking man's version encourages discussion and debate. It encourages questioning, because through those questions one comes better to understand his faith. It accepts that the source of that faith can not be described explicitly, but must be discussed through metaphor. The authoritarian version renounces doubt and considers questions to be threats. It equates faith with loyalty to the figurehead and insists on plain language that admits no room for interpretation. The authoritarian version is always more popular.

Not all gun owners are so reserved.

The problem with easy access to guns is not the responsible owners. The problem is that every time you sell a gun to someone, that person might be a stalker, or crazy, or just have real problems controlling his rage. The problem is that every gun sold is a gun open to theft. The problem is that the easier it is for you to get a gun, the easier it is for criminals to get guns, and they're not nearly as reluctant to use them.

Taking an American hostage is hugely more fun than getting some ransom. You take a French dude hostage and maybe you get a few million dollars out of it - but that doesn't really buy much military hardware or support very many jihadis for long. It happens in quiet, so you don't get any PR out of it. If you just want money, it's easier and more certain just to rob a couple of banks. You take an American hostage, though, and you can be sure of whipping the most powerful government on the planet into an irrational frenzy. They'll make big threats, blow up a few wedding parties, and generally, brazenly, demonstrate themselves to be nationalistic assholes. If you're interested in gaining support for your own nationalistic pride, there's no better way than to get the other guys to make asses of themselves.

It's not like they're going to moor it in downtown Baltimore, and 10,000 feet is really not that long. I would expect they can keep this thing and the entire length of its tether, safely within the boundaries of an army base, where it would pose little risk to the public. Remember, these guys lob artillery shells around on a pretty regular basis and they almost never hit any interstates or shopping malls.

Yes

People will happily buy terrible shoes. Quality has nothing to do with economic success.

You may be too young to remember, but this "Congress has to learn to live within a budget" drumbeat has been going on since at least 1980. Most of the tax cuts we have had, including Reagan's, were intended to force congress to cut spending. The only three out of the past 40 year that federal spending has decreased year-over-year are 2010, 2012, and 2013, most of which can be attributed to expiration of the massive bailout/stimulus programs. (If you do the math in inflation-adjusted dollars, then you can find another couple of years in the early 90s where spending declines)

So, the "right" appears to be very good at reducing taxes, but not very good at reducing spending. The "left" is not very good at reducing spending, but at least they seem to realize that income has to rise to meet spending.

Good lord, that's awful. In Atlanta, Comcast is $45 for 20MB+basic cable. It goes up to $55 if you decline cable. Ooma is $4/month for phone, so I never even consider 3-way bundles

No, a false flag would be the intelligence agency itself going out and bombing a train or hijacking an airplane while masquerading as Islamic terrorists. ie: committing atrocities while waving a false flag. Intelligence agents badgering an otherwise unwilling suspect into meeting with someone selling a "bomb" is entrapment.

If someone has made up his mind what the facts will show, then separates violent activities into those considers to be religiously motivated and those he considers simply criminal or mental-health related, then one should be suspicious that his list propagates a No-True-Scotsman fallacy. One should be suspicious that his bias prevents an impartial presentation of facts.

Many of the 'Islamic terrorist' attacks happen within conflict zones or occupied regions. Many Catholics violently opposed occupation by Nazi Germany: are their bombings terrorism?

Exactly. Buying and selling property is real estate speculation.

Now, buying property because you want to build apartments on it and collect rent would be an investment, or buying an office complex because you think it will provide more income than its costs, but buying something with the sole intention of selling it to the next sucker is speculation

If it's a blog like /., where people show up to read or participate in discussion more than the actual post, then every lost reader degrades the community and degrades the content that attracts the other readers.

Ad-supported web sites are asking for an exchange of time. So much of my time spent filtering through ads in exchange for so much of their time spent generating content. Based on that exchange, most content providers seem to massively overvalue their content.

Remember that ad-supported web sites are actually competing against hobbyists. People who will happily spend, from their own pocket, money on hosting in order to play on the internet. To have "their" web site and community. To have a place where they can vent their rage or express their creativity. If your professional web site can't generate content better than what people are willing to give away for free, then you may lack a viable business model.

No, advertising today is just the easiest way to monetize a web site. Seriously: sign up for google, and you can make money from grandma visiting the latest grandbaby picture album. Even if it's only a few cents, why the hell not? The vast majority of web content provides no relevant income to its creators, not enough to pay for hosting, definitely not enough to pay for dinner.

If you make advertising pay less, or just make it harder than creating a google account, then people who are actually serious about making a living off internet content will switch compensation models. Their content is likely to become more valuable, because there won't be a hundred other morons out there doing exactly the same thing.

On a normal day, I visit probably two dozen different websites - a mixture of electronic versions of traditional journalism, "web 2.0" blog aggregators, storefronts, and specialty sites. Devaluing network advertising isn't going to hurt the storefronts or professional journalists (who, even today, collect some subscription fees). It might encourage the reddit/wordpress world to impose subscriptions, which would certainly reduce discourse. Most of the specialty sites I visit are people's hobbies - they spend $10, $20, or $200/month on these things from personal passion and because their real life work gives them the means to do so. They're not going to change if the ad networks dry up.

The interesting thing will be, once they successfully turn your operating system and applications into a service, whether their service, running on your hardware can be compelled to transmit data from your hardware to the FBI. Or to the FSB, since MS has offices in Russia.