Religion has numerous, concrete benefits, which I listed above and which you haven't responded to at all.

Yes, that's been shown to be true. So has the placebo effect. The apparent fact that believing a thing makes you happier or healthier doesn't make the thing actually true. That gets back to my point about religions either being true or not. There are thousands of mutually contradictory religions. It's not possible for them to all be true, therefore there are people out there who are happier and healthier because they believe stories made up by other people long ago. Maybe there's one true religion, or set of religions that are close enough, but that still leaves a lot that are just wrong. If religion means something, we should see the happier or healthier effect in the people who picked the right one. Do we? Or is simply believing something good enough?

Really, I think the strongest arguments for how incredibly unlikely our intelligent civilization is come from what we know about evolution and the big bang - the universe would be very, very different if some things had gone slightly different at the big bang

We have no idea how likely or even possible it was for those "things" to go differently. We may be a very probable universe. There may be many improbable universes, of which we are one. If things had gone slightly differently, maybe we'd be debating this on Mars. Maybe life would be everywhere. Wild speculation is rather pointless, and doesn't argue for religion at all. Religion is just more comfortable for people who are uncomfortable admitting that we just don't know some things.

There's a rather vast gulf between saying such a thing COULD happen because Asia had advanced math before the West, and presenting evidence that such a thing actually did happen.

It's Wright, by the way. Sounds the same as write, but it's spelled differently.

So does the United States, a federation that believes in angels and that god is on its side

The US is composed of 300 million people, some of which believe that.

...and which requires school children to recite a pledge of allegiance every day

No they don't. When I was a kid, pretty much everybody recited it in elementary (primary) school, but by high school (the last 4 years) it was soundly ignored by pretty much everyone.

I don't think computer efficiency is the goal in many cases, and it often shouldn't be. I don't have a fixed amount of computer time to burn in my life, I have a fixed amount of time. If I can throw more hardware at a problem and make it finish faster, that's usually good. In some cases, it's mandatory. I could run a big weather model on a single CPU desktop with a small number of cores (and a lot of memory). It'd finish eventually, but long after the weather it was supposed to predict has happened.

You're right in what you're saying. That single desktop would me more efficient in some sense, but it would also not be at all useful for many real world problems.

Almost. We need a way to tell upstream that we reject particular traffic, so don't send us any more of it. Getting a DDoS from X.X.X.X? Dear ISP, blackhole X.X.X.X for $TIME. ISPs should, in turn, do the same. It's complicated a bit because by nature a DDoS doesn't come from one IP, but many, and further IP spoofing, but I don't see how it can be fixed at the endpoint.

They're supposed to have a thermal shut off that prevents that. I tried that as a kid and thought I broke the hair dryer. :-)

Depends on your goal. If you need something up to 140F, yeah, hair dryers will work fine. Heat guns go to 1,000F. Given laptop innards get hot, I'm pretty sure 140F isn't adequate to resolder the board.

I see a lot of movies, but I disliked the last Hobbit movie enough that I have no interest in seeing this one.

I suppose I find it less interesting and simply factual. People respond well to having a number to try to move, or a goal to try to reach. Knowing this about myself, it's a useful tool to have.

The one thing I wouldn't mind changing is having a vendor that keeps all the data local rather than uploading it to servers somewhere. I don't care too much that it's uploaded to servers somewhere, but it'd be a nice plus if I had the option to keep everything local. Then again, I use sites that have a social fitness component, so I'd probably still share. Maybe what I want is just the option to restrict the vendor from sharing, and the right to permanently delete the data when I'm done with it.

So which set of laws are you going to choose to enforce?

Neither. US laws aren't applicable to North Korea, and North Korean laws aren't applicable here. I'm arguing that the correct moral and ethical standard is that we are not liable for what other people say. If Sony did something wrong, that's on Sony, not the U.S. government or the U.S. people. Do you feel compelled to apologize for me holding an opinion you disagree with? You shouldn't. You're not responsible for what I say, any more than the U.S. government is responsible for what Sony says, which by the way they only "say" in a work of ficiton, that happens to be a comedy.

it would stand to reason that the diplomatic solution would be the most rational of actions.

No, that reinforces the false notion that the government is responsible for things its private citizens say. That may be difficult for a dictatorship to understand, but it's the truth. Just go take a look at all the people on the planet who have at one time or another chanted "death to America", and notice how very many of them we've attacked for it. That would be, what, none? I suspect if the roles were reversed, our response would be something between total indifference and "That's tacky."

The diplomatic solution is to say what's true. Whatever it is in the movie you guys are ticked about, we didn't say. Apologizing for what other people do has always seemed like nothing more than a meaningless statement to me.

No one ever said that they could co-ordinate 18'000 attacks simultaneously. No one's worried about that.

+1 Insightful (if I had mod points today). This is exactly what I came here to say. The major chains likely thought there was a sufficiently greater than 0 chance that they'd target at least one, and it might be theirs.

If it gets to that level, as it just did, Sony ought to back off and your government ought to step in to do something -- I know exactly what my country would do: publicly apologize for the insulting movie, as a sign of respect, and move on.

On that, I differ quite strongly. Just like the bottom of my Slashdot tab says "Comments owned by the poster.", comments made by American citizens are not owned by the government, nor should the government have anything to say about it, including apologizing for them. I suppose if asked, the government should simply say that: "The movie was the product of Sony and doesn't reflect the opinions of the U.S. government." Just like every other movie the U.S. government isn't involved in. And that's the end of it.

Time spent on a bus is time spent not doing things I need to be doing, unfortunately, since many of them require my physical presence to do. The bus route from work is 90 minutes. Driving takes 30. Giving up 2 productive hours of my day is too high a cost. If I could telecommute on the bus and count that as work time, I could do it, otherwise it's a non starter.

That, by the way, is someone who doesn't like driving and will be first in line for self-driving cars (when they're affordable, not when they're toys for people with lots more money than me).

This is really important.

A buddy of mine posted an article the point of which was something like "never enact a law you're not willing to kill to enforce." Because, at the end of the day, that might be how you enforce it, and this is exactly that sort of case.

I don't care if this guy sells cigarettes. Seriously, of all the wrongs in the world, this is one I can't possibly care about. I don't want someone choked out because they might be selling cigarettes. I don't want them accidentally killed, for sure. Worst case, write the guy a ticket and go on your way. Best case, repeal the law and officially stop caring whether this some guy sells cigarettes or not.

I like the theory of "then vote their sorry asses out" but have come to the conclusion that the reason we still have a lot of these problems is that they really can't be solved without large, damaging changes to the entire system (we're basically trying to legislate to force people to stop being assholes).

I like the theory but have come to the conclusion that it doesn't work because people don't actually do it. People should have a list of things they demand of their officials, and vote out everybody who doesn't meet them. Few do. Some do, for issues like abortion, guns, etc, but a lot of people who vote vote for a party. And of course, a lot of people just don't vote at all.

You can't legislate people not being assholes, but you can legislate putting them in jail when they do it. That's pretty much the entirety of the criminal code, after all.