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Comment Re:So, really... (Score 1) 83

He didn't really discuss the software in the demo, but it looked fairly polished (not surprising from a professional software engineer) and if you noticed even had a PiPhone logo boot screen. It was certainly a lot more work to do this than the people who claim to have "built their own computer".

Comment Re:Thank God (Score 4, Interesting) 328

The manufacturers are pretending to develop electric cars. They have an interest in preserving the status quo. When GM first developed an electric concept car, they named it the "Impact". It's hard to imagine a scarier name for a small, light-weight car. They cancelled the EV-1 despite the customers who loved it.

Comment Re:not poor (Score 2) 390

I could not afford a car until I had been working for a year after grad school. While in school I had a 3rd floor walk-up and a 10-speed bike. My Hungarian landlady taught me how to make Chicken Paprikash. Buying whole chickens, fresh vegetables, rice and flour in bulk is cheaper than prepared foods (except I still bought macaroni and cheese, of course). I worked as a dishwasher, graded exams, repaired equipment in the EE lab, ran statisical analysis for researchers, whatever I could get. It's not hard to get by if you can live simply and are willing to work. The city where I went to school, Pittsburgh, has great parks and museums and the best football team in the world.

Comment Re:civilizations' bottleneck (Score 1) 393

And that is why we do not hear any intelligent radio transmissions from other star systems.

But does it explain why there's apparently no intelligent postings on Slashdot?

There were originally equal amounts of facts and anti-facts. Computer Scientists are still trying to explain why anti-facts now make up 99.999% of the postings.

Comment Re:Knowledge (Score 1) 1037

Apparently you know a thing or two about the bible, maybe you can solve something that has puzzled me for a while now.

God punished Adam and Eve for eating from the tree when he forbade them. I.e. for breaking his law. So far, so good. But why did he put the trees in there in the first place? He's God. He's all mighty. He could have put the trees wherever he pleases. Especially since, being omniscient, he must have known that they will break his law. Being omniscient, he must have known that they will not heed his law. So he punished them for doing what he knew they would do, which he himself could easily have avoided.

You are missing the point of the story. Before eating the fruit, they didn't know what good and evil were, hence they didn't know that eating the fruit was wrong. It was a certainty that they would eat the fruit and learn right and wrong by committing wrong.

Like many ancient legends it is an explanation of something that people had observed and didn't understand. In this case, why do animals act in innocence and people act with knowledge of consequences? How did we become different from the other animals?

Comment Re:trees have branches (Score 5, Insightful) 1037

Perhaps being an atheist requires blind faith as well. If you are an atheist you have a belief that all hell won't be applied to you for adopting your belief system.

No. You just have to believe that none of the 20 different afterlifes posited by religions is true, instead of believing that one of them is and the other 19 are false.

Even science itself rests upon articles of faith. For example assuming that the laws of physics are the same all over the universe is irrational and arbitrary.

No. Its just the simplest explanation in the absence of evidence to the contrary. Support for it comes from everything we observe of distant stars and galaxies, which seem similar to our own.

That being the case the entire cosmology presented by science becomes very fishy. Quantum mechanics hints that physical reality is not actual and quite an illusion in itself.

No, Quantum mechanics says that at the realm of the very tiny or the very fast, our everyday model of physical reality is not accurate.

We can postulate that all science does is falsely attempt to decode segments of the illusion. It suggests that a rabid, backwoods, Baptist, in a fever of religious excitement and an atheist are as far as logic goes equals.

That must make the rabid, backwoods Baptists very happy.

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