In addition to this, the real reason we do not have a budget is that the last budget past was an emergency budget. That gave our fearless leaders an opportunity to cram the bill full of special cashouts for their friends. Unfortunately, under current conditions they would never get those passed. So instead, they pass continuing resolutions - so that the same friends continue to get rich, but no one can single out a bad line item...

You can't. So stop trying!

What you do is ask each person if they are a terrorist, while they person is being observed by essentially a high tech lie detector. Those that pass, go through easily. The 1% that don't get individual attention, and still pass through more easily than before.

This isn't rocket science - Israel is already doing this!

This is a bad test, by the way - no one is saying that CO2 cannot be used as a greenhouse gas at high concentrations. People are arguing about the relative effect of a change from 300 ppm to 350 ppm. This can be modeled, but there are so many interdependancies in the atmosphere that the models end up unable to actually be predictive.

Anyway, the other author of this report went on record recently saying that Richard Muller went too far in his statements. She says that the interesting thing is not that they did show consistent warming up to 1990, but rather that the interesting part is that the warming stopped suddenly in 1998 or so. So during a period where CO2 was steadily rising, temperatures remained stable.

She went on further to say that the big news item is not that they have proven or disproven anything - the news item is that there is now a non-AGW biased data source to use, that agrees in essence with the existing sources. (Which also show that the temperature has stopped going up.)

The part holding the cameras was made from plastic, because he didn't have enough time to machine it. It melted when the rocket hit mach 3+, because of the compression shock wave that formed in front of it. (Commonly misreported in the media as "air friction")

Essentially, the plastic thing poked out of the rocket. The mach 3+ air had to be brought to a dead stop right in front of it. The way it does that is by forming a high pressure shock right in front of it. Basic physics, when you compress air is gets hot - in this case, melting the plastic rocket bits...

He was going Mach 3+ - the plastic melted from the heat from the mach shock wave. (Typically reported incorrectly in the media as "air friction")

Don't tell my son that, OK?

In 1,000,000 years, your descendants will effectively be gods, right?

Do you believe this is the first time through that evolution? On what basis?

Well, that might be a reason to reject certain religious strands...

"So if your kid doesn't learn do you torture him for eternity..."

No, you damn him. Put literally, you stop him. If he does not become a responsible adult, you do not give him the root password to the universe. As a child, he may consider that torture for all eternity, but hopefully he will grow up some day.

  "Do you give them (or at least expose them to) hundreds of slightly different sets of rules and just hope they'll find the right one..."

If he is going to give you the root password to the universe, perhaps it would be a good idea for you to not require specific instruction on what the "right rules" are. Perhaps you should be able to look at a new situation, and figure out the morality questions in it.

Your arguments are against a particular form of religion that you don't like. In my experience, most religions have a part of the truth - only you can decide what parts are good and what parts are bad.

In my chosen religion, we are here because we chose to be. We judged for ourselves that the value gained by enduring evil exceeded the unpleasantness of the endurance period. There were many who rejected that choice and are not here. Of course, that opens a whole new can of metaphysical worms...

Why do we create our children the way we do?

Why do you expect it to be different for a god?

Don't you think that in 1,000,000 years your descendants will be effectively gods? How will they raise their children?

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?"
* God doesn't prevent "evil" for the same reason you allow you child to fall sometimes. Kids have to fall in order to learn how to walk.

. Then he is not omnipotent.
* The only thing that can stop him is himself - just like a child's view of a parent.

Is he able, but not willing?
. Then he is malevolent.
* Is it malevolent to not give your child candy before dinner? To let your child play soccer and get his leg broken? To fail a math exam because he didn't study?

Is he both able and willing?
. Then whence cometh evil?
* "Evil" is unfortunately a prerequisite for learning. One of the most important things to learn in this life is that many things a child sees as "evil" are in fact "good".

Is he neither able nor willing?
. Then why call him God?"
* Like most parents, I doubt he really cares that much what you call him. But he does occasionally need to swat your bottom...

No, the real issue is that under the "gold standard", the money supply is related to gold finds - which are random events. It's not like the supply of gold is actually fixed. So someone could find a huge gold vein tomorrow, and crash the world economy. Just like printing money, but done by individuals!

Also, there is simply the unavoidable result of a fixed currency:

Country X says "my dollars are worth exactly 1 Y", for any option of Y. You take your money, and short lots of X dollars. Then you counterfeit X's currency (or wait for someone else to counterfeit it). Now your "short" position is worth more than you paid for it. Country X's only hope is to deflate their currency voluntarily each year, to account for counterfeiting.

This happened to the US several times, and that is why we are now off the gold standard. It's amazing how few people bother to figure that out before advocating the gold standard!

In this way, it is much like Communism: "It only doesn't work because no one does it right!" The fact is, expecting a government entity to impose limits on itself in order to make a plan work is tautologically identical to saying it doesn't work.

Interestingly enough, the normal drag paradigm does not apply, however.

It is more accurate to look at it as if the air molecules wander over, attach to the satellite for a while, and then wander away. The key difference being that the side of the object facing orthogonal to the orbit "drags" almost as much as the front. So a cube is actually better than a cylinder or cone! (Not better than a sphere, though)

Weird stuff!

Obviously you do not understand Emacs - nor do you understand the laws of physics.

Any claim the economic output can be divorced from physical resource constraints is fantasy

Ok, I will prove this wrong. I invent the cheese dog.

I have not changed anything physically. I took existing cheese, and an existing dog. I assembled them in a new way, and created value! Before, there was only boring hot dogs, now there is infinite flavor.

As we get more stuff, the possible combinations of that stuff increases exponentially. Forever. Regardless of limits on amount of stuff. Infinite complexity.

Economy is not the amount of stuff we have. It is the value of that stuff to humans.

No, it depends on the quality of the design/plan. A perfect design would require only that a butterfly flap its wings, and the umbrella would fall out of a mountain, fully formed.