Correction: It's GNU/Stallman.

The "for the sake of argument" was strongly implied.

If it's been 400 years since the Maunder Minimum, and assuming we peak on temperature right now, wouldn't that mean the new minimum is still a problem for our [great-]+grandchildren?

Nothing less than access to a nuke in 10 years, probably.

All philosophies depend on presuppositions. If the presuppositions are wrong, then everything that comes from those premises cannot be reasonable sustained. But that's the point. Science takes this a step further by adding the deductive property of falsifiability to test the presuppositions for truth.

No, I do not believe I am confused. Charles Sanders Peirce, the father of modern scientific inquiry, believed that the tri-part mathematics of logic (induction, deduction, and abduction) applied equally to philosophy, mathematics, the social and natural sciences, and squishy meta-physics. This is as late as the 1870's. Today science stresses the deductive property of falsifiability as essential to science (and sets it apart from philosophy and mathematics, which are therefore not true sciences), but that is a relatively recent concept, as I said above.

You may think it folly, but the historical fact is that up until about 200 years ago, the Venn diagram between mathematicians and theologians was pretty inclusive. Newton and Pascal wrote more prolifically on theology then they did math. When education was rare, and education in philosophy (and thus inductive logic) was rarer, the same people had to wear many hats, and their output in those disparate fields hewed pretty closely together.

This is false. Rational theories are the cornerstone of philosophy; that much is correct. But the whole point of systematic theology is that for the prescribed axioms, the proofs are indeed rational. You do not agree with many or most of those fundamental presuppositions but that does not make the theology, in and of itself, irrational per se. Theology is absolutely a philosophy. Your beef is clearly with religion or spiritual faith (which, while relying on theology, is a belief system and not a philosophy).

Theology, when taught from a neutral viewpoint, is a philosophy. Science and math were also, at one time, considered "philosophies", in that they, all three, relied on inductive proof techniques developed by the classical philosophers. With the development of the scientific method, however, science stands apart on a new basis of testable hypotheses. It is my understanding that math is considered by many to not be a science on this basis.

See, this one guy said I should use his custom HOSTS file to block this stuff...
/duck
/run

Probably because you haven't yet realized that the Halloween Emails were 17 years ago.

Maybe it's time to move on.

I have a hard time siding with anyone using software patents offensively. Fuck these guys and their patents. And if Apple asserts software patents in a non-defensive manner, fuck them, too.

He's got a lot to say, and a captive community to say it to.

Wow, yes I did. That imagery is... interesting.

The "Internet of Things" concept may be new to our households, but the military has been using it for as long as they've had wigwams waving their little flags around. For military commanders, access to accurate, comprehensive data is an extreme force multiplier.

I'm 36. These newfangled gizmos and widgets the kiddos are using these days confuse and bewilder me. I'll be rocking on my porch with a bag of Werthers Original in case anyone needs me.