8/10th of a second? True, I didn't. I wasn't even accurate to three decimal places.

My point was that you can go as far as you need. A stop-watch can go to six or seven places. A clock to two or three. A digital watch to four or five. An atomic clock to fifteen. Your appointment calender to maybe one and a quarter.

Sure. Bad people do bad things. But crazy beliefs make good people do bad things.

Trivial example, young Mormons are supposed to do "missionary" work, which generally involves them going door-to-door annoying people. Can you accept that by angering hundreds of people, day after day, you personally are making the world a worse place? Many Mormons feel that too. (I've heard some talk about the doubts they had while doing this, and the lack of effectiveness.) So why do these good people do something they feel is bad? Because it's part of their religion. That's it. If it wasn't part of their religion, they'd stop. If the central Temple said it's no longer required, they stop.

What concerns atheists is that religion essentially praises and rewards irrational beliefs. And that seems like a bad habit to get into.

Don't forget Yoda who hid in a forest rather than train up new Jedi to assist the rebellion.

[This is made worse by the prequels (isn't everything), since there's a machine that can read your Jedi-potential. Meaning that over the 18 years since Revenge of the Sith, Yoda & Obi-Wan could have had a hundred non-Jedi agents out quietly testing kids across the galaxy for Jedi-potential, steering them to Dagobah for training.]

I'm puzzled what you think you are proving. Science doesn't know what happens inside a black hole, therefore... science is religion?

Unlike a religion, scientists admit they don't know what happens inside a black hole. They don't have unevidenced faith in what happens inside a black hole.

Even the theorists who are trying to come up with ideas of what's happening inside a black hole know damn well that their theories are nothing unless they can come up with a way of gathering evidence to differentiate between the rival theories. They don't come up with a theory and then stop looking because they have Faith in the Answer. [Actually, some do. But they stick out precisely because it is so un-science-like. For example, that's why we call climate deniers, "deniers" not "skeptics".]

This is even weirder. Hitler was a raving nutter, therefore... religion is good?

It sucks.

As do your arguments.

Nope. I'm gonna check whether they actually exist before I propose.

(Fool me once...)

Curses!

What if the is a god, but not a Christian God?

Pascal's Wager only works if there isn't a god. If there is a god, but you pick the wrong religion, you're just as boned as if you simply don't believe. If multiple religions claim to be True, and none can offer real evidence, logically you should believe in none of them.

Hell, even if it is the God of the Christian bible, but the stuff that Christian ignore in the OT really are important (Suffer not a witch to live, shellfish is an abomination, if a farmer mixes two types of crop he is to be stoned to death, do not take the Lord's name in vain.. etc etc.)

There are many literal claims made by many religions, in regard to Creation or their own subsequent history, which have been shown to be false.

For example, in the Christian (and Hebrew) bible: We know that young Earth creationist interpretation of Genesis is not possible. We know that not just the date, but even the pattern of creation is Genesis isn't what happened. We know that there is no sign of the events in Exodus (not the ten plagues, nor the escaping slaves, nor the Red Sea parting) in spite the Egyptians meticulously recording other such events (plagues, escaping slaves, weird events). Likewise the slaughter of the First Born in Jesus' time. We know that many of the battles in the bible didn't happen or couldn't have happened as written (the "Walls" of Jericho, for example). We know Jerusalem at the supposed time of David was a goat-village, not a major power as claimed. We know that much of the OT was not written when it was claimed, and can't go back beyond 800-900BC (and probably dates to around 700BC), due to references not matching actual history. (Even small things, like the foundation story of Abraham having pack-camels, which weren't domesticated until before 1000BC.)

Essentially whenever religions make factual, testable claims, they almost always turn out to be false. (So often, in fact, that finding a true claim in a religion or myth is really interesting and unusual.)

The FBI did a study where they took a large number of fingerprints (fifty thousand, IIRC) from their database and fed them back in. They got close to 100% match. They routinely regurgitate this as proof that fingerprint databases are near-foolproof.

Problem is they took copies of the highest quality fingerprints (those taken at arrest) and compared them to the same scans. It's like testing whether a neural-net AI can recognise dogs vs horses in pictures by showing the same images you used to train it (not even fresh scans of the same pictures, but the same digital files, pixel-for-pixel.) Now imagine imprisoning or even executing people based on that system.

What they've never done is compare more realistic crime-scene quality fingerprints from volunteers known to be or not-be on a database.

There have, however, been many cases of convictions based on fingerprint evidence being later over-turned by DNA evidence. There are also many cases where people were fingerprinted and the system linked them to someone else already on the system, being forced through the long and painful process of proving they are not that other guy.

A long time ago one of them murdered a large number of children at a Jedi private school.

Swatch time (beats) is stupid. Better to simply decimalise the day. Using Japanese/computer date-format, you would have a time-stamp that is 2014/10/26.58194... to as many or as few significant digits as you choose.

...diagonal?

Probably need to flip around two. Instead of the small blue-tooth thing slaving off the big cell-phone thing, have a big non-cell tablet that slaves off a small cell-connected handset. The handset is thus free to be as optimised as you want. A cross between a Pebble and an old-style dumb phone. e-Paper display and simple low-power processor for long battery life, small keypad, flip or slider for length when talking, etc. While still being, like Pebble, able to have 3rd party apps. The tablet can then be as large you are comfortable carrying around, without trying to use it as a phone.

You would always carry your handset, focus on that as your phone, while your tablet goes back to being your portable internet device/document-reader/etc which you only take with you when you might need it, and only pull out when you go online or when you prefer to use a big screen to access the handset's functions (address-book, texts, etc.)

Yes, do accept that.

It stops people being hysterical and stupid about non-issues?

And yet Boeing is having to hire Blue Turd to develop their next family of large rocket engines for the USAF.

It seems that the much vaunted "experienced" players don't know how to build new rocket engines any more, whereas the non-show vanity project has actually designed and built new generation rocket engines within living memory. (LM is even worse, they have to use surplus Russian engines.) Meanwhile, the first SLS launches will reuse the 25yr old engines off the retired shuttle orbiters; not "engines of the same design", the actual engines pulled off the last three orbiters, burning them up on the first two flights (2017, 2021. No further launches are funded.)

Orion is a poor design, with no mission. The mission it was design for (lunar orbit) is no longer the national goal, and it's completely unsuited to the mission that is the national goal (BEO). It's over-weight, over-priced, and behind schedule.

SLS is a terrible design with no mission beyond its own existence, and is just appallingly overpriced. Boeing is receiving $2.8b for the first two SLS first-stages, in spite of them just being extended shuttle ET's with those recycled SSMEs attached. That's in addition to prior funding Boeing received for designs, reviews, production changes, etc. Just the unit cost. $1.4b each. For just the first stage. This is when NASA projected the SLS launch costs would be $650m per unit for the whole system, including integration and launch ops.