Cool, you keep giving her sacks of potatoes and understanding why she's angry. I'd rather give her a box of chocolates, and not understand why I got laid.

Judea Pearl and others have done a lot to work that out. It's the science of answering "what if". It's not impossible.

When is the last time a large population of Jews had their belongings confiscated, were required to register with the government, and were confined to special neighborhoods?

Considering all that old housing, I'd say probably.

It's kind of funny that you can be walking around here in a normal neighborhood, turn a corner, and suddenly see a house or row of houses that you're sure must cost a million $$ or more. And most of them are so breathtakingly beautiful....

Eh, living in Pittsburgh currently I promise you there's still a lot of very cheap housing here within a bus ride of Pitt/CMU/Google. Hell, I know PhD students who bought houses/apartments. Sure, if you want to live within a few blocks of those places it can get a bit pricey, but that's true anywhere.

But haven't you heard? Since there is no commonly accepted definition for what constitutes a "right", we can use it to mean whatever we want. Basically, if you really really want something, call it a right. Then your opposition will be left in the awkward position of either admitting that they're denying you "your rights", or trying to explain why what you're claiming to be a right really isn't (and those explanations typically don't fit in the 30 second intervals between commercials).

"Even science itself rests upon articles of faith." Only if you regard science as a search for Truth (with a capital T). I don't. I think most scientists don't, either. To me, science is a tool. A tool with a staggeringly good track record of getting things done. That's why I find it expedient to regard scientific consensus as truth (with a lower case t) for all practical intents and purposes. Similarly, I am not an atheist because I believe god doesn't exist. I am an atheist because there are no useful guiding principles which imply belief in god to be sane (let alone belief in a particular god).

"An object stays at rest unless acted on by an outside force" I find it amusing that you use pseudo-scientific language to "disprove" scientific claims.

That, or it's not politically useful to [try to] impeach a president for shit they know they're going to do themselves in 4, 8, 12, or 16 years

I was just thinking that. Perhaps part of the reason for the perceived difference in mathematical ability is that women are more willing to be honest about not understanding something? And being a PhD student in a highly mathematical field, let me assure you, most of the time none of us know what the fuck is going on, so pretending would make a big difference...

Oh, well, it sounds like your experience is much more representative of things than mine. I've only had two PCs since 2006. Good to know that my impression was overly pessimistic.

Well I'm not surprised that you can configure a machine so that under linux you get good performance, but if you pick some decent and otherwise random hardware, chances are much higher that you will have slow/broken 3d performance if you slap on some reasonably popular distro, than if you go with windows. It is irrelevant to most of us that there exists at least 1 person on the planet who has managed to run minecraft well under linux, as long as most of us have a great sense of trepidation every time we run, well, virtually any graphics intensive application.

And before you accuse me of being a windows fanboy or something, I'm posting this from ubuntu.

Oh gee, I wonder who this anonymous commenter might be??

Yeah but none of them work well in linux. Half crash, the other half are slow or glitchy. Let's face it, we're not going to get good 3D on linux until a) someone makes some decent drivers, and b) X dies.