interesting definition of proof you have there. you've collected up some myths, tidied them up into current vernacular and presented them as proof of the existence of a deity, which is utter bullshit. The same bullshit, by the way, that happened at the Council of Trent, where all the diverse religious writings concerning the new heretical Jewish religion of "Christianity" were collected up, filtered, and proclaimed canon. Are all those vienna fairytales true simply because the Brothers Grimm collected them up into a single source?

Right, and if God is a perfect being, then he must also have the perfection of existence. There, we've got the whole ontological status of gods squared away. While we are at it, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? That answer proceeds from the same fucking train wreck of unprovable assumptions that your hypothesis is built on, the foremost of which is that a god actually exists, so go for it, dude.

No, and no. Tyson has been trolling religious nutbars for decades. He didn't give in to criticism, he just twisted the knife when people demanded clarification. Make no mistake -- religion is more of threat to our species than global warming and nuclear winter combined. More than three-quarters of the population of the planet's last existing superpower are religious, and nearly half of them believes their messiah is going to return to them in their life time. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand that these nutbars have exactly zero interest in solving the problems confronting our species because they truly believe that they aren't going to be around to have to deal with them.

well, that is the problem with dealing with dictators. He may not be able to give any of our real estate "escape velocity," but he doesn't need to. He just needs to kill half a dozen theater goers in any movie theater anywhere on the planet that defies his edict. Fox News will makes sure the rest of the planet hears about it, and suddenly he goes from dismissable loon to credible threat, which is exactly what he (and his equally lunatic father before him) have wanted all along.

As you say, electric companies just want to buy their energy cheap and sell it dear. Nothing inherently wrong with that. But they actually do have a love for a particular distribution model, if not a particular means of generating power. They are scared of the decentralization of power production, which smart grids coupled with residential rooftop solar installations represent. Koch Industries is the largest player in domestic energy production in the US. They have billions and billions of dollars invested in the centralized production of energy, so they are fucking scared of decentralization, and rightly so. Sadly, instead of embracing decentralization and adjusting their business model, they are successfully lobbying state legislatures and publicly-run utilities to create laws and regulations that make it damn near impossible to get a residential smart grid up and running.

Hmmm. If everybody adopted your approach, the world economy would collapse. Capitalism doesn't work in a rational market space, which is what you would create if everybody actually considered the value of an item, and not just its price, before acquiring it. Fortunately for our global economy, hardly anybody understands the difference between value and price. As long as businesses can continue to successfully exploit that ignorance, the global economy will survive.

wtf...? Dude, the internet was designed to allow American nuclear weapons research facilities (both private and governmental) to distribute their data so that they could survive a Soviet first-strike and continue to develop weapons. This was back in the early 1970's, and it was called DARPANet, after the US government think tank that funded its development, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. Seriously, it wasn't until the late 1980's and early 1990's that "the outpost of freedom" you are talking about began to take shape. Ironically, it wasn't on DARPANet that the whole subversive aspect of anonymous information exchange got governments noticing computer networks. It was the crude dial-up serial connections between PC hobbyists and their bulletin board networks. But it didn't take long for US government-funded researchers to scale up the hobbyists' point-to-point protocols with a couple of powerful tools that made distributed applications way easier to write -- network news transport protocol and unix-to-unix encoding - culminating in a store-and-forward distributed database nicknamed USENET which hitched a ride on the government-funded DARPANet. Thanks to USENET, developed after the dial-up BBS days but sharing the same spirit of information freedom, did the real power of network anonymity begin to manifest. This power was suddenly available to anybody who actually paid attention in their undergraduate CS courses. By the end of the 1990's HTML pretty much took over for NNTP and UUencoding, and the power of anonymity was available to anybody, not just engineers, scientists, and geek hobbyists. Look up Endless September for what happens when millions of middle-class American morons obtain cheap and easy access to a planetary information network -- that is what happened to your outpost of freedom -- people noticed it and turned it into a cesspool.

I'm going to speculate that you probably don't get much dead-tree journalism in your diet, which is why you seem to think this is some kind of trend. This was Journalism 101 prior to the advent of HTTP. Journalists used the 5 W's -- who, what, when, where, and why -- to establish a consistent framework for their audience. Including the individual's age helps establish the who and (possibly) the why part of the context for the audience. Unfortunately, the context-free environment made possible by HTTP has pretty much rendered conventional journalism protocols moot; establishing a consistent framework for the audience is kinda pointless, if the audience can switch contexts by simply clicking on a link. You can occasionally see some journalism online that still uses pre-HTTP conventions, but it is getting rarer, not more common.

hmmmm...interesting definition of cheat there. rocket jumping and jump strafing are possible within the rules of any quake game, including the single-player campaign. If the rules don't forbid it, how is it cheating? Being elite means (among other things) being able to recognize and exploit useful emergent behavior. That is one of the things that made the quake engine great -- it was complex enough that interesting (read: novel) phenomenon like rocket jumps could emerge from the fixed and extremely limited physics of that engine.

you have to think in Russian! :)

Sid Meier, you rock.

Compromising safety and reliability in the name of performance is a tradition in car culture. "Jailbreaking" is a relatively new term; but functionally, I don't think it is all that different from what we called "hot rodding" back in the day.

Yes, it is hard to grind the beans, because it wakes up everybody in the house. If you are living alone, it's not an issue, but when you are sharing your life with somebody (especially somebody who likes to sleep late) It's hard to ignore the convenience factor of a Keurig. My wife brought a Keurig into my life when I first met her. The coffee tastes like boiled dirt, of course, but the ease (and silence) with which you can produce a cuppa is stunning.

No. You are wrong on both counts.

First, not all science is useful to the public, and in fact some science has the potential to harm it greatly, if it were furnished to the wrong people. I certainly don't want the science gained by government bio-warfare researchers, atomic weapons specialists, and neuroscientists studying torture methodologies to be readily available to anybody who wants it.

Second, climatology is not reproducible. It is a strictly observational science, like astronomy -- you can't do reproducible experiments on the climate, anymore than you can do reproducible experiments on a galaxy a billion light years away. It is still science, but it can never produce reproducible results. By demanding reproducible results as a matter of law, Schweikert is making it impossible for the EPA to cite climate models to support regulations aimed at curbing emissions. It will also make it possible for industries to challenge and overturn existing regulations that were supported by these now-illegal climate models.

:)