It's just a toilet seat that reports when somebody's on it. Everybody poops! There's nothing to worry about!

Until you realize that it's able to find usage patterns, and your insurance rates go up because they think you may be getting colon cancer.

Everything's connected, and I don't want every facet of my life being reported to some corporate overlord.

Does it have to be soda, and does it have to be in the head?

What about a nice, hot cup of McDonalds Coffee in the crotch?

OK, fine... But I'm going to pick a soda with the stickiest ingredients available.

Dogs have been eugenically engineered by humans for tens of thousands of years, and are therefore an artificial life form. They usually eat food that comes from a factory, and is artificial. Since you have an artificial life form eating artificial food, it's excreting artificial poop. Its urine is water that has been polluted by artificial processes. Hence the impact study.

By some definitions, anything created by a human is artificial, so all of our bodily wastes are artificial.

The museum of natural history?

If Skyrim has skeleton archers and beserkers, why not skeleton dinosaurs?

Scratch that - 9H is the pencil hardness scale:

(reference: https://iloome.wordpress.com/t...)

9H is hard enough to resist keys & knives, though.

Remember the 2008 Apple that overheated constantly because Steve Jobs didn't like fans?

Actually, no...

Which model is that? The Macbook Air came out around that time, but it has fans.

I'm convinced the 'SapphireGlass' display 'leaks' were iPhone-6 sized prototypes for the tempered glass screen protectors sold by a variety of manufacturers, for pretty much every model of smartphone.

Zagg, for instance boasts theirs has a hardness of 9H, which is in the same range as Sapphire.

Also known as the global strategy of how to handle North Korea.

North Korea is resource poor, bankrupt, and starving - it took decades to build up nuclear capabilities, but they did it.

ISIL has oil, and lots of it. Sure, you could make selling their oil 'illegal' like blood diamonds, but the strategy didn't stop DeBeers from trading blood diamonds, and it won't stop the oil companies.

ISIL may not be able to obtain nukes, but they are well funded enough to do other terrible things to nations who would just as soon ignore them.

Wifi is so totally secure:

I mean... Where would I find someone who knows how to crack the mighty WPA2-PSK you probably use to secure your whole network?

How could you possibly think any wireless communications are secure anywhere? *especially* blue-tooth and WiFi.

I'm really not sure about the "not replacing IPv4"...

Most Comcast customers have IPv6 now, and it's been silently working for quite some time.

I've taken the time to instrument my connection, and a lot of my traffic is IPv6. (The lion's share of bandwidth is IPv6, but that's easy to pin on Netflix.)

Oh yeah. Bring up phones. Those land-lines have REALLY gotten more reliable and useful in the last 60 years haven't they? I mean, look at the horrible phone track records for emergency service and reliability in 1954 after all.

> It's exactly the same calculation for anything anybody calls a 'natural monopoly'. Absent an interfering government, the money flows to the best service provider.

I suppose that's why municipal water is so expensive, unreliable and horrible in the US, whereas such an "incredibly difficult" service as data transfer works cheaply and flawlessly under the wonderfully popular and incredibly excellent Comcat, Verizon et al. "services". </puke>

oh, so I should sit on the magnet and spin?

Oh, so we're clear... you are an upside-down Science is my God nut. Meta-physics (one little branch of philosophy) is responsible for pretty much every branch of scientific inquiry you're fond of... and that's just the philosophical pinky flexing.

Let me know when your experiments are done growing your own brain in a vat with perfect forward predictability and you're able to "prove" the universe is the never changing holographic crystal you always thought it was in the first place...

You know, as opposed to something a bit more chaotic and interesting that us mere mortals can never quite get a complete handle on...

> For some people it is downright emotionally difficult.

Actually... for everyone it ALWAYS is. That's the nature of world-view.

It's just that, it's often very difficult to understand someone else well enough to know enough about their world-view to put it in any kind of real jeopardy. (ie: discomfort)

In fact. It's actually a personal attack to begin tearing apart someone's understanding of the world when they aren't interested and don't want to participate.

Part of why so many folks get fired up about what should/shouldn't be presented to young students and how it should be offered up.

Seems to me the problem is anyone who:

a) wants to push Secularism out of schools in favor of Christianity
b) wants to push Christianity out of schools in favor of Secularism

Most other folks I don't have a problem with.

Want to be Philosophically Naturalistic? Go ahead, don't push it on me when I don't ask for it.
Want to be Christian? Go ahead, don't push it on me when I don't ask for it.

(pushing things on innocent kids goes double, I can actually handle the shoving better than they can)