but violence is fun. there aren't any laws against being an asshole so too many fucks can go around legally bullying everyone and there's nothing you can do about it legally.

You can ask them to stop... or you can go somewhere that the owner can tell the glasshole to get lost or be charged with trespassing.

the only recourse these days is to kick someone's teeth in and wipe the smug look off their face.

When violence becomes the "only recourse" to something that is not, by itself, physically threatening in any way, one may want to consider whether or not there is something already seriously wrong with their own world view.

It's absolutely no different than those who have gone around killing nonbelievers in the name of religion.

And a person smugly proclaiming that it is their right to become physically violent in retaliation is any better?

And I cannot wait to see people who kick the shift out of glassholes facing legal consequences for thinking that they somehow have a right to enforce what they believe on others through violence.

I don't go slow. I go the speed limit... and I will usually be in whichever lane I need to be in to get where I need to go. Whether that's the left lane or the right, barring unusual traffic conditions which may necessitate that I move into a different lane, depends on which way I'm going to ultimately have to turn when I turn off of the road I'm on. Pretty much every time I ever mention this subject on slashdot, somebody invariably brings up this left lane issue, but as I've said, I've been driving for nearly 30 years now and honestly, I'm not remotely worried that I'll ever receive a ticket for going the posted limit in the left lane just because there may be a lot of people all around me who want to speed.

I've never so much as received any warning for driving the speed limit when others all around me are speeding heavily. I am unconcerned about the alleged possibility of it happening.

I'll be in whichever lane I need to be in to get where i need to go. I also drive the speed limit... I'm not going to feel even slightly responsible for making you angry just because you might want to speed but are stuck behind me. Feel free to circumnavigate my vehicle if you want to speed. I don't.

Been driving for nearly 30 years now and haven't yet encountered a situation that I sincerely felt warranted driving in excess of the limit. I've accidentally gone over the limit on occasion, of course, but I'll usually be driving exactly on it, unless road conditions are bad enough that driving slower is warranted. I also keep lane changes to a minimum, finding whatever lane that I need to be in at the earliest opportunity for me to safely do so, and staying in it until I need to turn.

Fair enough... observable evidence seems to suggest that it is of a finite age. Obviously if we are interpreting the data incorrectly then our conclusions can be invalid.

Of course, by that reasoning, the conclusion that God does not exist based on evidence (or the lack thereof) can be an equally invalid conclusion based on a misinterpretation of available data as well.

Politicians tend to be very wise....

You kinda tanked your credibility by starting a sentence that way....

It's not remotely logically impossible for the universe to have always existed, but based upon the evidence that we have so far, it appears that it did not. Our scientific sampling, therefore, consists only of things which are of finite age, but that doesn't mean that's all that exists.

I would maintain that a God who is powerful enough to have created everything else that exists must be necessarily beyond or above reality as we can ever hope to understand it... transcendental is a term I've often heard used, but I dislike the term because the word "real" itself can refer to a set of numbers in mathematics, and transcendental numbers are part of the real number set, so I am more partial to terms like "superreal" or "sureal". Trying to prove the existence of something which such characteristics using only what is real is kind of pointless, since it is very easy to start with an assumption that only real things can exist, and anything which exists must necessarily be real. As logical as this assumption might be, bear in mind also that even logically valid assumptions do not necessarily have to be true. This assumption does not hold in mathematics for example (most complex numbers are not real, for instance, but prior to their discovery any so-called "number" with properties that did not fit those of real numbers was assumed to not exist at all), so I'm of the opinion that the assumption that it must hold anywhere else in particular needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

Any of them, other than the Conservatives actually.... all of the other parties were quite vocally against the extreme copyright reform that the Conservatives wanted to push through, but it passed anyways because they have a majority of seats.

Truth be told, there was a lot of good stuff in the copyright reform that the conservatives had come up with.... the single biggest problem with it was that although it used language which seemed to support fair dealing, it simultaneously rendered those privileges moot in the context of using any copyrighted work that utilized "technological protection measures". Most unfortunate.

I worked for Elections Canada during the election before last, and previously, 2 elections before that one. So I actually did count the ones that were at my polling station. The numbers that I reported were not fudged at all... if the numbers that are published genuinely did not reflect actual votes, what reason would I have to think that I am so special that my results would always be kept intact but others wouldn't?

Also, everyone who does any counting is accountable to other people, and there is no one person at the top of it all. Dishonesty in reporting would stick out in that system like a sore thumb unless everyone was accountable to had the exact same political agenda and interest in falsely representing the numbers, which is not statistically likely.

Something at some point only had to come into being spontaneously from nothing if there as ever a point where it did not exist.

We know that the universe itself is a finite age, and it did not always exist.... we can only make a similar claim about God by extrapolating from what we know about the universe, but extrapolating from a data size of one is mathematically invalid and can easily produce flawed conclusions.

Why can't you talk to your H1B friends?

You are far from the first person to attempt what essentially amounts to tax evasion on allegedly legal grounds... let us know how that works out for you in a year or two.