10 years ago, and I was a late-comer to the idea.

Oh hey, I'll just fix that for you:

- The universe did not come from nothing. Thermodynamics prevents this.
- The universe did not create itself. Thermodynamics prevents this.
- The universe was not created.

Cheers!

Atheists tend to have much smaller brain regions for [a part of the brain responsible for causing religious experiences].

Yes indeed. Evolution does trend towards improving species.

Educated stupid scientists never understand 4 sided universal timecube.

I was just asking Tess about her act, and all she would tell me was that the show was big -- bigger on the inside than the outside. So I guess there was a lot of seating. A bunch of folderol, if you ask me. But at least we had box seats.

Science works without even the existance of ultimate causes and absolute truth.

Yes, it does, but that doesn't in any way disqualify it in reaching for fundamental answers, or in working with those ideas so that we have handles on them that are consensually experiential, testable, and repeatable. Superstition provides no tools whatsoever for resolving such questions. Or questions of far lesser import, for that matter.

My long-term general confidence in discovering more and more, deeper and deeper about reality, which is very high, lies entirely with science -- and with technology, science's prolific assistant / toolbox.

Wouldn't an indoctrination by society of an expectation for others to follow the rules be a suitable enough reason for one to follow that same rule?

In other words, society is perpetuated through an evolved sense of peace. To follow the "Golden Rule" is to benefit society. Society is not a God, it is a social construct with the power to self-enforce the rule, if need be.

religion concerns the ultimate causes of things and, again, by definition, science cannot tell you about them.

Religion concerns mythology -- things people make up out of whole cloth. Faith, belief, credulous acceptance without backing facts, consensually demonstrable evidence, or testability -- not knowledge.

Science does indeed concern itself with the ultimate cause(s) of things; what TFS fails to understand is that just because there is no answer *yet*, that doesn't mean that there won't be, or that there can't be. We've really only been seriously at this with more than stone knives and bearskins for a hundred years or so. Directly because of science, we already know a great deal more than religion ever managed to determine in thousands of years over thousands of varieties of made-up ideas and almost unimaginable depths and expressions of faith.

The penultimate cause of things is indeed 100% in science's domain and, if indeed there is an answer that can be expressed in the physics humans can understand, the odds are at least decent that we'll figure it out. Using science. Not religion.

There's very little point, or sense, in giving religion credit it has not earned, nor in ceding to it whole chunks of reality it has shown absolutely no ability to pull back the curtains from.

> a beefier laptop running ESXi to replace the servers

--Mind if I ask what the brand + model is? I've been wanting to do an ESXi box for the last few years on the cheap and just haven't found the right equipment yet. If I could do it used for ~$400 it would be a done deal...

whether (in light of what's known) default strong encryption for everything is something users should just get whether they like it or not.

There are many unsolved problems for making strong end to end secured communications work. Key management is only one. A bigger and even more complicated problem is that people derive significant benefits from sharing their message contents with big, powerful third parties, for example spam filtering, importance filtering, ability to search 10 years of email from a cheap battery powered device, ability to receive messages when all personal devices are offline, ability to reset passwords if they are forgotten and so on.

To make truly end to end communication ubiquitous you would have to find a way to recreate all these features in the purely decentralised end to end context. Otherwise "giving" e2e crypto to people "whether they like it or not" is a quick way to find an angry mob with pitchforks outside your house. A lot of people care a lot more about those features than (somewhat theoretical) privacy against the NSA.

> Kind of unscientific, n'est pas?
 
...I'm sorry sir, we only have Hershey's.

/ couldn't resist
// should not be obscure

Here in divorce-centric NY, they WILL find ways to serve papers on you. Having a GOOD lawyer who knows state law helps. The judicial system doesn't approve of evaders.

When I filed for divorce in NY (I'll be very brief), my master manipulator STBX evaded the servers. She was an ex-deputy of the Sheriff department and learned of papers through the "old boy network". When she was at home she parked the car at an undisclosed location and no one answered the door. She was known to wear wigs for disguise and they could not find her on campus. All the places and events she was known to frequent, she could not be found.

The judge heard testimony from the servers that they were unable to serve papers on her after six months of trying. My lawyer and the judge had never seen a case this bad. At that time, she told me to contact her through her mother. I had a GOOD lawyer and he cited NY state law that in the event that a family member has been designated a contact, then papers can be served on that family member.

My mother-in-law never even knew we were separated and she went through the roof when she got the papers. Then the very next day her lawyer responds, and this timing of events was used in my trial before a very impressed judge.

Without going into details, the whole episode stretched out years longer than it should had for a simple divorce case and the judge cited her intentional abuse of the legal system in his ruling to prolong the process.

Did it end there? Nooooo.... when I found a buyer for the marital residence she refused to sign the papers, in violation of the stipulation. The same judge, with my divorce case fresh in his memory, wanted that broad in his court in two weeks. She was working at a state camp for the summer and I provided precise directions of the location of this camp for the server. Knowing her tactics, he posed as a delivery person carrying a parcel that required her signature. He delivered the parcel - and the papers. She never expected it, and probably forgot that years ago I wrote down those instructions when she called me out to that camp because her car broke down.

For a flight that doesn't reach orbit and stay there with the environment in 0G for at least a few orbits, I wouldn't pay anything. Heck, I won't pay a commercial airline to fly because the ratio of inconvenience to convenience+enjoyment is too high between the (id|patr)iot act's enforced paranoia and the seating designed by one-legged, one-armed engineers. Now an oceangoing cruise liner, that's something else again. I loves me a nice cruise. It's even worth going first class, which it definitely isn't in a commercial airliner.

However, for a flight that *does* go to orbit and stays a few turns, and doesn't require a spacesuit, and for which I could have a very private cubby with a view for two for the orbital duration, I might part with as much as five thousand for two seats, just for those few hours. They'd have to let me take my camera, though.

Which means I'm not going to get to go. :) Unless they build a space elevator or several in my lifetime. And apparently the materials science there is either too difficult, or nearly so. Oh well. There's always Firefly reruns.