You must have a decent surplus on your take-home paycheck to talk like that. Any tax increase at this point means I have to cut something else that can be cut, like how much I spend on food for my family, or planning to not take a vacation so I have something going into savings to counter what is coming out for emergencies/car repairs/etc. The Social Security tax increase has already taken place, my first paycheck in December was almost $50 smaller due to the Medicare and SS taxes increasing. This isn't a January 1st thing, I'm surprised more people haven't noticed. Maybe that's Congress's hope, we'll just not notice, they've all gone home to their family Christmas vacations, when they come back maybe/hopefully something else will come up and the whole matter will slide and they won't have to cut spending as much.

You missed category 4, those who add in psychology, anthropology, etc and factor in the "human animal" into "science", understand a bit of history and human nature, grasp the effects of social constructs on human activity and belief systems, and find those who espouse "science" as end all and be all's curious blindnesses to be telling and realize in the end they don't have to explain or understand it all and it is not required. Seriously, no one has that kind of time, in the end, outside our particular areas of expertise, we all end up placing faith in someone for what we believe. Every one of us has a great amount of faith given to something(s) in our existence.

Free will would mean that the decision is not predictable from the starting conditions, otherwise it isn't free will. The poster you are responding to was demonstrating how it is possible for God to be omniscient without being responsible. Your statements are based on the assumption there is no free will and all subsequent actions after the initial conditions are 100% predictable. I believe that to be an incorrect assumption. Also, perfect for what or to what end? How exactly are you determining what is perfect for God? It would seem to me that you have no actual way to give an accurate measurement for perfection. For example, the perfect baseball bat is going to involve a lot of pain for a tree, and one heck of a lot of "abuse" of the wood before perfection is attained. For all we know our current existing universe is merely a "buffer/sander" for helping to perfect sapient life into its perfect final form. So you appear to make another assumption, that this universe, this physical universe, and our short existence in it, is the end all and be all of existence. That is another assumption I would disbelieve. Those kinds of assumptions, well, when religious people make similar assumptions, we tend to use the word "faith".

Most groupons I see for my area are generally around a 50% discount, not 60-80%.

As far as I'm aware, the vendor is able to cap the number of groupons offered. A popular local restaurant groupon a while back was limited to 750 (which went so fast it was too late for me by the time I noticed).

Again, you are positing a scientific investigation of the physical universe in your hypothesis about the testability of religion. You assume that "correct religion" involves miracles and smitings, i.e. physical phenomena, where religious believer does X which generates result Y. Do you always get Y when you do X with a human being? No, of course not, we're not programmed robots. So it would be silly to view God has some repeatable phenomena or universal rule, for one religious example.

I would posit there are spiritual laws, just like their are physical laws. God is an engineer, of course. So different religions might get similar results for some sorts of actions, regardless of the non-spiritual trappings they tossed on them. But that's just a hypothesis/speculation. As a Christian I believe the universe has an active, personal creator who remains fully engaged with his creation, so things can be modified as necessary.

There has also been a high amount of agreement at various times in history on very incorrect scientific beliefs. Again, more or less correct is more important than how many opinions there are.

The basic tool for determining truth is logic (Greeks etc, i.e. philosophy - "the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, esp. when considered as an academic discipline."). Thus we reason and debate to find the truth. "Science" is a particular application of logic in the form of the scientific method for investigating the physical universe.

As an aside, according to the Bible, human beings are spiritually dead because of sin. I posit this means our ability to perceive the supernatural/spiritual universe is very limited. Our inability to see the spiritual universe accurately does not invalidate it one way or the other, and we are left dependent on logic as a tool and what can be inferred indirectly from how the non-physical manifests to us as human beings. The anti-religious wants to believe that science will eventually map out the human biological entity to show that every action we take is predictable by physical laws, thus reducing us to "mere machines". This is a faith belief, just like my belief that we each have a spiritual soul as well as our physical spirit and body.

The correct answer in that case is that while there's no evidence, the question is not answerable.

You are trying to be right by avoiding properly qualifying your answer. You meant was that since there is no scientific physical evidence, the question is not answerable by science. I'm glad we agree.

Actually there's a lot of agreement on that.

If scientists disagreed as much as religious people, it wouldn't mean "somebody is more or less right", it would mean nobody knows what they're talking about.

Maybe, maybe not. It depends on whether or not you're about to under go a paradigm shift or not. If you plot scientific agreement versus the timeline of history, you see lots of disagreement by scientists. And any case, arguments that "x% majority of scientists believes Y" has no value. The truth is the truth, and how many people believe or don't believe in it doesn't change what the truth is.

No, it means someone is more or less right. The universe is what it is, we are trying to determine what the truth is. Our understanding may contain elements of the actual set of truth, and it may contain elements not in that set. So our current understanding is not the total set of truth. Those with more actual truth in their understanding are more right, those with less are less right (by empirical weight, I'm sure you could try to make an argument on another basis by trying to assigning different weighted values to each truth or subset of truth).

Not yet, but clearly this Siri board member thinks it will be...

Yup, take a look at many of the posts here, which make it abundantly clear that very few people took the time to read Haught's reply either.

Religion is man's attempt to answer that question, i.e. why am I here? Science can't address it. So either you go with total ignorance and avoiding the question, or you engage in religion (or call it philosophy or whatever floats your boat, the name can change, what you are doing doesn't - it is an important question that science can't directly address as it deals with aspects of the universe and existence that exist outside the physical universe, though how interconnected the two are has a lot of room for debate).

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Ask three different physicists how the universe came into existence (the mechanism) and you can get three different answers. So? Somebody is more or less right, that's all it means.

"...ology" is "the study of", nothing more or less. It doesn't make something scientific to be an ology, though if applicable, you most certainly can use the scientific method. Or logic, etc. It is something that exists that can be studied.

Amazing how few people apparently went and read Haught's letter.

No, this is a very good thing. We actually should want these companies to start suing the living daylights out of each other, killing product introductions with actions like this, etc. That will hopefully drive the pain threshold high enough for big companies to the point they will get behind serious patent reform. As they have the money and own the politicians, once they start backing it we should see it get done.

Given the product life-cycles in this market, the scheduling of the case would appear to be tantamount to a ruling for Apple. By that time next year we'll be looking at a whole new generation of hardware, either on the market or on the way to the market.

I grew up in Oregon, were voters are used to enforcing their will upon the state government by directly passing laws which can be submitted to a vote by all registered voters with the appropriate number of signatures and once vetted by the state attorney and presuming the resulting law passes any state supreme court challenges. So if the legislators do something the voters don't like, they can expect to see it overturned at the next state wide election. The voters forced tax increase limits on the state government using this method back in the 80s. I am always amazed in other states were people do not have abililty of direct democratic intervention, how passive and sheep-like the voters can be.

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In this case, apparently laws passed by the California state legislation can be brought up to a referendum of the voters of the state to see if they stay or go, and the state legislation is trying to repass the law the originally passed in a new form that would remove the right of the voters of California of putting the law to a referendum so the voters, and not the PAC-bought legislators, could decide this crucial state issue.

I do not know if the voters in California have the same ability to pass laws directly as in Oregon. If not, then what the legislation is doing will prevent the voters, and as we know government's must be under incredible pressures to ever reduce tax income (absolute income, i.e. they may reduce the tax rate in good times as the economic growth will still result in an increase in the money they can spend). This is why state governments like to diversify the ways they collect taxes, death by a thousand nibbles instead of one big gulp, and the tax payer becomes the frog being heated slowly in a beaker.

It's nice to see a state government working so hard to remove the right of their voters to have any say in the matter...

A fetus isn't brain-dead in the same meaning. We are talking about two different conditions.

The difference between the various things you list (fetus, pinky, eggs) is that the normal course of biological behavior with no outside intervention is for a pinky to remain a pinky (well, of course you see the original cells totally replaced by new cells, but one does not spontaneously sprout a baby off one's finger as a normal biological process), an egg to eventually be discharged and die, and a fetus to grow into an adult human being. The woman's actions would be deliberate actions to alter the normal course of biological development. So time displacement is in affect, because the fetus will become a human being. It takes a deliberate intervention (or a statistically small chance for miscarriage etc) to halt that process. It will happen unless you abort, don't eat right, etc. If you do not feed and take care of a person in a coma, they will die. Your action (and in-action is an action) results in their death. So it is not a perfect analogy in a one-for-one correspondence, but an excellent analogy for time displacement and the nature of a human being. If you quantify a fetus as non-human based on lack of consciousness/brain activity and inability to sustain itself outside the womb, then a person in a coma is an excellent comparable analogy. And yet you would not rule them to be merely biological flesh that can be terminated as wished, you would argue they are still a human being with rights. They might one day come out of their coma and resume full function as a human being. The fetus will grow and develop into a fully functional human being. This is not some special process that takes external intervention (as per your pinky example), this is a normal human biological process.

The status is not the same. The brain dead person will not develop a new brain and begin functioning as a normal biological process. The baby/fetus will.

You can disagree all you want, and are entitled to your opinion. The vast majority of all crimes go unpunished - should we get rid of laws against murder, rape and arson? I think (or perhaps unfortunately hope) that you are stereotyping the pro-life position to see it as putting women in prison. But then again, I have no idea how much my pro-life beliefs concur or disagree with any more formal or universal expression. I think we make murder illegal, and I think we make sure kids are properly educated as age appropriate to all legal aspects of sexuality, have access to birth control, etc. You must carrot with stick, otherwise the stick loses some of its justice. Sure ignorance of the law is no excuse, but ignorance should be weighed at least as to intent in deciding an appropriate punishment. There are other punishments or costs that could be weighed.

The baby did not commit a crime against his mother. There are many things in life that are unfair, some horribly unfair. These are not excuses for something unfair to be done to another party. Should we kill children with Down's Syndrome because they are a greater expense for society, have a reduced life span and a quality of life perceived as lesser? Should we kill a baby because a monster attacked and deeply hurt their mother? My stand on it is that society and government steps up, that financial and other necessary support is given to the mother so that she can carry the baby to term without more than the loss of the nine months (i.e. still going to college, smacking people who would attach stigma, etc - I realize it is a complex subject not treatable in a few sentences here). Then after delivery, she can either choose to keep the baby or give it up to the state (adoption/foster care/etc). Incest is just another form of rape, differing only in that the monster doubles the hurt by being someone who should have protected.

There are always chances of situations beyond the norm and scope of understanding - that's why we have judges and juries - the system requires active human intervention. If the baby threatens the life of the mother? Just how common is this? How rare? I suspect we are talking a very small fraction. Then put it in the hands of a judge/medical panel/experts to determine the risk and react appropriately to attempt to save both lives. There is risk in all we do, there are no guarantees. I could walk outside and get hit by lightning. I could die of a brain aneurysm that would not have shown up on an MRI before it killed me. I could win the lottery. I could have a stroke in a spot where no one noticed until I had substantial brain damage. To murder a human being merely because of another's emotional turmoil and extremely unfortunate life circumstances seems to me to be very unfair. Two wrongs do not make a right.