There's a fair point that grad students are probably on average a bit underpaid for the work they perform (research+ marking etc.) even if the hourly rate is good, the limited official hours etc. are not all that great.

But ya, if you can't live on what you're going to get paid as a grad student and don't have other means, don't go. Pick a degree where you can get money for grad school and can get a job on the side or go back to school when you have the financial means to support it.

Show me the government or corporation willing to invest into seed ships they don't control the fate of, and I'll start caring about the technical side of it. Technical feasability doesn't mean much, the problem is, as always, people.

Cue the rabid

So far it's just you talking... that's such a weird pattern, this fantasizing about opponents who never show up... your motives may be pure, but your equipment is kinda broken.

You steal the docs, you're responsible for their provenance afterward. Not a hard concept.

So if you're born as a Jew in Nazi Germany, you are responsible for not registering for deportation and whatever consequences that entails? It's not a hard concept indeed, it's just that what subscribing to this logic makes you is what's the trouble here.

Further: we all agree he handed them over to the Russians, right?

What are you even talking about?! He handed all he had in bulk over to two newspapers.

I see I'm arguing with subhumans.

Debate over -- I win.

You're a dumb, cowardly fuck, is all.

Doesn't being able to remember the faces of classmates and getting to know each other because that's what people do when they have even the slightest common bond inside a larger group of strangers, also suffice?

People run in circles to try and have god added to the picture

Are you talking to me? Pah. I call out broken logic when I see it, is all. And I also note the hybris of pretending to have any sort of "full picture" that makes any sense at all, defending it from introducing elements which don't. That's some pretty dumb shit, and the strawmen about religious people are expected compensation.

because in the next heartbeat they then want to tell us all about exactly what he's like

Right now, you are telling me how I am like -- take your idiotic projections to someone else, you will have no fun here.

Finding something is exciting when it's how you find out something exists -- if it just confirms what you more or less knew anyway, it's not really.

But oh well, I don't really have time to discuss: somewhere out there, there are two stones with a bigger stone in the middle that has exactly the same mass as the two other stones. The three stones form a 17Â angle. I know it doesn't sound like much when I say it, but just wait until I found that formation.

What goal did I shift, from where to where? You could repeat unfounded claims like that as often as you want, and I won't ever have to concede fuck all :(

A few times a week, I realize that everything is everything, any further claims are likely to be false. What we consider objects or individuals is just an aspect of everything, indivisible from the rest. It's just that this would leave me with nothing to do, so I shake it off quickly ^^

Time is such a universal concept... in that it only applies inside the universe, as far as we know. Furthermore, since undoubtedly something exists, we either have to assume it's possible for something to come out of nothing, or for something to have existed since forever, "just because". So then why not grant this to a theoretical god, too? It's not really logic when you apply it that selectively.

I think even the weirdest god you could dream up would not make reality any weirder, it'd be like a drop in the ocean. Considering that, it's hilarious with how much seriousness we debate what is real or true and who is right when it comes to the final things, and if there is no higher being to see this and have a good chuckle at it, it would have need to be invented.

You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid... You refuse to do it because you want to live longer... You're afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you're afraid someone will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand.

Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.

-- Martin Luther King, Jr. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?... )

Not sure if continuing to not buy something you wouldn't buy anyway qualifies as boycott, but it's the thought that counts :)

Well, because when one is making up arbitrary things, they might as well be remotely interesting, and based on my whims.

Seriously though, that it is teeming with life is the *one* thing that sets Earth apart from the other planets we know so far. That's kind of the whole big deal about it. If this criterion doesn't matter, then why care about "Earth-like" at all? What about the Jupiter-like and Neptune-like and Venus-like planets being discovered all the time?

Oh wait, that would be silly, because we already know the universe is incredibly big, and just about anything we just define by size, orbit and mass is going to exist in abundance, including round things roughly the size of Earth.

It's not just about read/write speed, the main strength of SSD is random access times. Even putting a billion harddrives together gains you nothing there.

What are governments "competing" about? If anything, many are competing against the people they are supposed to represent.

The nature of the state, and the nature of the secrets, does matter. State secrets are not automatically holy. Fuck what any law ever written, past, present and future says on that matter. Laws are born out of a desire for justice - they do not define justice, they have to answer to it.