I would be interested to see more evidence, other than the "god gene", as to the genetic basis for religion. From my understanding, the genetic predisposition has more to do with determining whether or not someone is susceptible to believe in religion, but does not predicate what that belief is. If religious belief was largely predicated on genetics, we would probably see a more random distribution of belief systems.
Most of us do have a genetic predisposition to adopt a sexual orientation, it is possible that social influence is a factor in deciding what that orientation is. However, I believe the body of evidence points to genetics as the determining factor.
Why is it bigotry to say that homosexuality should be stamped out, yet not bigotry to say religion should be stamped out?
There is one difference between the two: religion is a choice, homosexuality is not.
The Astronomical Unit (AU) is known to most as the mean distance between the Earth and the Sun
The summary omitted the word "mean". The linked article has the correct description.
mine the cavity
I can't help but think that this was an appropriate freudian slip. Unless it was done on purpose, in which case: well played sir.
"An attacker who successfully exploited a Gadget vulnerability could run arbitrary code in the context of the current user," company officials said in an advisory issued Tuesday. "If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker could take complete control of the affected system."
Drug discovery is hard. Immensely hard. Failures are often and expensive and government is poorly equipped to make entrepreneurial decisions. That's why we currently rely on private companies to make the decisions on who is a good research and who is a bad researcher when a company in total only makes two or three really profitable drugs every decade. We can allow those companies to fail if they can no longer produce. It's a lot harder to let a government program "fail" like that.
I don't think the fact that the private sector is better equipped at making enterpreneurial decisions has been adequately proven by evidence (however, neither has the converse). One big problem with allowing private, for-profit, companies to be the decision makers in matters of public health has one major flaw: medications that yield high profits don't necessarily address real health problems (I'm thinking of Viagra and Cialis here), and medications that address real health problems will not necessarily yield high profits. The private sector has little interest in addressing health problems that are not profitable.
... if I make $1 a year and you make $255,999 a year together we "average" $128,000.
Your example would be more illustrative if you said 4 people make $1/year and one person makes $639,996/year, the average is $128,000 with only a single outlier (Perhaps Mark Zuckerberg subscribes to Linux Journal). The quoted statistic also doesn't account for the potentially more numerous Linux users who are too broke to subscribe to the Linux Journal.
This is another point against anyone who claims NASA, and going to space in general, is a complete waste of money.
This has always been a totally bogus argument, because you can't do a controlled experiment. Suppose that the US had never engaged in the Cold War propaganda exercise known as the space race. Later, suppose that the US had never gotten into pork-barrel projects such as the space shuttle and the ISS. What would the world have been like? We have no way of figuring out what scientific advances would have been made in this alternate history.
Although your point is true, the argument is that NASA and going to space in general is not a complete waste of money. No one is claiming that investing the money otherwise could not have yielded better results; in which case a controlled experiment would be required.
Work is the crab grass in the lawn of life. -- Schulz