It only means that if you have your head buried too far up your ass to see what's going on in the world around you.

What i'm doing is correcting his misunderstanding of the reality of the subject. What you're doing is suggesting we (atheists) ignore people being beheaded, or doctors being killed, because the murderers just "don't agree with us." If that's the case, then please let me be the first to say: fuck you.

A "Carrington-level" event nowadays would most likely be much less disruptive, as back then all the early radio and spark gap stuff was well under 50 MHz, which is where almost all of the natural noise winds up in the spectrum. Ever notice, for example you can hear your shaver motor on an AM radio but not an FM one. This is not due to AM vs. FM, (well, it is a little) but mostly due to the fact that AM is about 1 MHz and FM is about 100 MHz, well above the "static line" around 50 MHz.

It would take a much stronger signal than back then to cause the same level of disruption. Not saying that can't happen, but modern radio communications are quite a bit more robust than they were back over 100 years ago.

Normal people don't speak hex. User number A00 would be too confusing in most cases.

Remember stuff like this needs to be cop-proof. I used to design software for their dispatchers to use, and they aren't super intuitive with computers for the most part, like most of the other cops unless it's specifically part of their job. A lot of things had to be dumbed down so they could use and understand it easily.

No insult is meant here, it's just they are very busy with their jobs and having to be familiar with many different tools and systems; radio, weapon(s), forensic stuff, etc. so the amount of time they have to invest in training and learning about new tools has to be balanced among many competitive things they need to be current on. Plus, in an emergency situation, they want tools they don't have to expend a lot of extra thought on how to use.

Hence, anything designed for them to use has to be reasonably fail-safe, intuitive to use, bulletproof and easy to understand to be successful. My software was used for over 10 years by several local departments, so I'd consider that a success.

All good points - yet another point of failure, as others have pointed out.

Plus, there is the more tinfoil hatty aspect of this too - How nice and easy to use a directed EMP to disable any such weapons (presumably of the bad guy only). Nice to be able to mass disarm a whole crowd of them if "necessary"...

You're making the mistake of conflating "religion" and "value system." Those two things are NOT the same. Everyone has a value system, not everyone is religious. There are many religious people out there who do despicable things every day purely because they're not decent people to start with, and your God scaring them, or giving them the promise of heaven if they're good, isn't enough to break them of their nature.

As for the implication that Stalin and Mao acted the way they did because they were driven by some atheist agenda, you're a fucking idiot. Mao was an anti-imperialist, while Stalin went from being a Greek Orthodox priest in training to common criminal. Your implication is the same fucked in the head bullshit that "christians" who want to attempt to show they're superior to others (while being either stupid or liars) trot out quite often. The difference is, you didn't mention Hitler, which some of the more stupid try to suggest wasn't christian.

The atheistic perspective is: you claim there's a God.. prove it. If you can't even show a single shred of evidence (and there never ever has been a single shred of evidence), then you're nothing more than delusional, and believe in fairy tales. I would suggest that the value system of someone that is delusional is what should be in question.

It sounds like a religion to you because you don't have a basic understanding of what's being said, most likely because you are religious.

A religious person says: There is a God.

An atheist says: Prove it.

Until the religious person can prove it, or even show a shred of evidence for it, it's nothing more than some bullshit delusional fantasy.... which is exactly where religion has remained since it's inception by the human species.. in all forms. There has never, ever, in an instance, been a single shred of evidence for a God, or many Gods. Period.

I don't give a shit what a religious person believes, until they start forcing their delusion onto me or other people.. then, if they don't bring some evidence or proof, they're just some fucked in the head delusional asshat who should be heavily medicated in a rubber room somewhere.

I would posit further than that by saying that a person who needs the carrot and stick approach that religion gives is morally weak to start with. A good person will do good; a bad person may do good if the carrot (heaven), or stick (hell), is strong enough to deter them from acting bad.... but that doesn't make them a good person, it simply makes them less likely to suffer the stick in life for acting their nature.

As for the point of the article, it's bullshit. The author of the article is saying that unless we start using science as a religion, in the same dogmatic, emotionally driven way, then it's useless. Complete and utter bullshit. Science that meets those standards isn't science, it is a religion.. and it doesn't reflect reality, only someones desires. The article is a thinly veiled attempt to say: science is bad, religion is good. Bullshit.

I have a huge cornal mass ejection after eating too much creamed corn and prunes...

+1 Beat me To It Award... :D

A light trail, or fireball, comes about from the object heating up and burning off from the friction of hitting the atmosphere. An object moving fast enough will form a bow shock that will punch through the atmosphere and minimize friction. For an object to move that fast, yet make this small of a crater, the object would have to be very small (maybe baseball sized), and most likely have a very steep entry angle (>75 degrees)... but it's very possible.

Back in the 60's/70's when people actually started thinking about collisions, and considering the damage they could do (as well as how to possibly eliminate a threat like Project Icarus from MIT), one book listed one of the worst case scenarios is a large, very fast mover hitting the oceans, as not only would it cause massive tsunami, it's bow shock could push both the atmosphere and the ocean water out of the way, and deliver a direct strike to the crust at a thinner point cause all sorts of problems.

Which is odd because the book was supposed to be a science book. Oh wait....

First, it's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.... second, traveling 20,000 leagues submerged is quite possible for current US subs. In 1960, the USS Triton completed a circumnavigation of the globe, entirely submerged... roughly 10,500 leagues (given the path they took).

If, on the other hand, you're assuming Verne was talking about depth, then i assume your day job is (was) that of Khan Noonien Singh's space combat tactical adviser (circa 1982).

....and for the obligatory copy/paste/link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Clearly at around 52,000 feet, Verne was off a bit (the Mariana Trench wouldn't even be sounded for another 5 years from his books first publishing).... then again, he was kinda spot on about electricity.

Technically they had the choice of opting to make their own, with the default setting to use the federal site if they didn't make their own. Most of those are them federal government haters that decry "big" and "intrusive" federal government, yet continue to suck money out of the feds to make up for their shortcomings in their states economy.... and when they're given the chance to reduce that "intrusiveness," they opt to be lazy bitches and use the feds site.

Actually, you could have said that about Iran.. until someone fucked it all up. But more to the point, 15 of the 19 September 11 hijackers were citizens Saudi Arabia. I'd suggest you pretty much have it ass backwards.

http://atimes.com/atimes/Middl...

Iran is the mess it is now (from our perspective) directly because the US fucked them over in 1953. We have a bunch of clueless myopic idiots who's first and only thought is to dump more weapons anywhere there's a problem in the world, without giving second thought to how that's come back to bite our asses time and time again. If we quit listening to these numb-nutted war neo-cons, maybe we wouldn't keep finding ourselves in bad situations decades later.... although with the whole Iraq/Afghanistan thing, it didn't even take decades.

You'd have to ask him to be sure, but i understand those gay, interracial, midget, sailor, bestiality, latex, bdsm sites are brutal when it comes to viruses.... well, actually, any site with a sailor on it... i guess the rest of that is kinda moot.