...because I know some harry-nosed wombats who would prefer it if we weren't.

-S

If I say "Ghosts aren't real", I get moderated informative. If I post "That particular Ghost you call god isn't real", I get moderated troll.

Marry Me.

-S

Because the censorship covered by the First Amendment deals only with the Government.

Exactly. In the US, Republicans and Democrats alike have embraced outsourcing of government services to private companies as a means of saving money.

But what we've lost as a result is accountability, regulation and Redress. No one seems to have considered the consequences of splitting up the Public Square into a million little private squares, each setting its own rules and standards. Or, perhaps, they have considered the consequences and then gone and done it anyway.

-S

personally I love the absurdity of their story lines. It just wouldn't be Doctor Who without it.

I agree with you its the absurdity that makes Doctor Who.

The problem I have with the rebooted Doctor Who is that the plots make absolutely no sense - even within the framework of the show. Its like the writers continually write themselves into corners that they aren't clever enough to write themselves out of. So... they just keep letting "impossible things happen."

My favorite counter-example: the movie Time Bandits. That film was totally absurd, just like Doctor Who, but it all made sense. You never got the feeling the writer was messing with you.

-S

Its true that Science can't prove, in the mathematical sense, the non-existence of God simply because you can't mathematically prove a negative. But that's true of everything in Science, including crazy ideas such as Gravity, Electromagnetism and Kepler's laws of planetary motion.

The old trope, "Absence of proof is not proof of absence" misses the point. Absence of Evidence IS Evidence of absence.

So, it makes perfect sense to me that people with a higher level of education ( people with more evidence ) would see less need for God or a prescriptive religion.

-S

...it will pop your microwave popcorn simply by dangling the bag 6 inches from the antennae.

Now that's power!

-S

Can you imagine spending your day reading nonsense like:

Contexts are selected and combined into new information structures called alternates, which are combinable with contexts into preferred situations. The preferred situations in turn are combinable with the foregoing components into meta-situations.

I mean, it sounds like the output of an unholy mind-meld between a scientist and a marketing manager.

-S

The other guilty party here is us, and by us, you do mean us, among everybody else [LAUGHS] in the media. We aired an interview with Heap back in May, and we were quite impressed with his story. You say that Heap has proved to be catnip for the media. Why do you think his narrative is so appealing?

That's an admission you don't hear too often in the press, oblique though it was.

-S

Now THAT is a movie I'd pay money to see.

-S

My Catholic 8-Ball says: "Signs point to Yes."

-S

CGI animators, in some sense, have a much easier task then the roboticist. Its much easier to program a full musculature into an animated character than to physically build a robotic one.

The difficulty of all this is exemplified by Robert Zemeckis' dismal "Polar Express" and "A Christmas Carol". Even when capturing hundreds of control points on the faces of the actors, you're still left teetering on the edge of the Uncanny Valley.

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" and "Avatar" were more successful because they did complete surface capture of the actors faces rather than point-capture.

Which gets back to the difficulty of making robots appear human. Its the same problem, magnified 1000 times by the fact that, in essence, you have to pack the equivalent of a millions of "control-points" into the robots face.

Not an easy task.

-Sean