Take a damn class in ethics, especially metaethics, or read an overview of it; start here if you want. I'm not going to bother arguing an obvious troll, other than to ask the rhetorical "Who said anything about metaphysics?"

False dichotomy. You're assuming the only source of morality is a possible God, and that in the absence of said God anything goes. There are plenty of possible ways of grounding morality in something other than the edicts of a God, and those may all have different things to say about how humans ought to treat other animals. (There are also many possible conceptions of God and claims as to what he may or may not have said and what any such things may mean, so in either case it's not open-and-shut like you say).

Even if aliens are using radio waves, even we generally aren't broadcasting unencrypted analog signals. Most of our communication now is directed, encrypted, and digitally encoded, to the point that you'd only pick it up if you were lucky enough to pass directly between sender and intended receiver, and even if you did get it you'd have great difficulty discerning it from noise, and even if you knew already that it wasn't noise, you'd have a hell of a time making any sense of it would knowing the encoding and encryption.

For all we know, a lot of "random" gamma ray bursts and things we pick up are the Earth just happening to pass across some kind of interstellar communication channel, but we can't discern the message from noise and so have no idea there's even a message there.

Life is self-productive machinery: physical systems that transform flows of energy through them in a way that reduces their own internal entropy.

Everything traditionally considered life meets this formal definition, and essentially nothing else doesexcept computers, because the storage and processing of information constitutes a reduction of their internal entropy.

Robots, computers with fancy peripherals, are therefore alive.

(Doesn't mean we have to worry about the ethical treatment of computers though, because the bacteria all over your kitchen countertop that you happily exterminate every time you clean house are also alive, and we don't have to worry about ethical treatment of them. TFA is talking about sapient and therefore sapient robots though, and we would have to care about them.)

Communism was supposed to be a labor movement.

It's clear that whatever China has is not communism, if it ever was.

People like her often develop a problem with the world after the world repeatedly demonstrates that it has a problem with them.

Someone who transitioned over two or three decades ago like she did, back when the world was even less accepting and understanding than it is now, probably even more so than someone just starting the process today.

At 40 a person is statistically close to the middle of their probable lifespan, and that's neither inherently good nor inherently bad. I'm disappointed that there is no option for that. You're neither a younger nor elderly, you're middle-aged, but that's neither "in a good way" or derogatory, it just is. Anything good or derogatory there might be to say about you would have nothing to do with your age.

GP (not sure if that's you or not, both ACs) mentioned both 2 megabyte images from his current (7.2 megapixel) camera and a 2.1 megapixel old camera, and was apparently surprised that the 2 megabyte (presumably JPEG) files from his current camera have fewer artifacts than the 5872 byte JPEGs on the example site. I suspect he thought the 5872 number was kilobytes, i.e. a 5-6 megabyte file, which would explain why he would seemingly expect that to have better quality than the 2 megabyte files.

And bits per pixel times pixels only gives you a higher number of uncompressed bytes for the resultant files; compression should more than compensate for that, such as how his 7.2 megapixel camera which is presumably 32 bits per pixel doesn't therefore produce 28.8 megabyte files, but rather only around 2 megabytes files. If his old 2.1 megapixel camera was generating files that looked as crappy as the 5872 byte JPEG on the example site, they were probably (or at least hopefully) only a few kilobytes large each themselves.

Why are you surprised that a 5.8 thousand byte image has more artifacts than a 2 million(ish) byte image?

Offshoring and immigration are completely irrelevant to the "information wants to be free" debate. One is about labor relations, and asking the government not to enable (though immigration and tax policy) greedy corporations to force down the price of wages for local people just to stuff the pockets of corporate shareholders and executives. The other is about communication and not prohibiting any forms of it. They have nothing to do with each other.

There's no reason one approach has to block the other.

If there is a monopoly, it should be regulated as a common carrier.

If they don't want to be regulated as a common carrier, they have to let the competition in.

Let the ISPs themselves choose. Would you rather be a regulated common carrier monopoly or free to do as you like in a highly competitive market?

Either way, the users win.

Hosting is absurdly cheap though. I have a Dreamhost "unlimited" (for purposes of hosting a website, not being your personal backup, etc) plan that costs me less than $10/mo. The labor required to build and maintain a hobbyist site for a large community would be worth more than cost of hosting. So if you've got hobbyists who are enthusiastic enough to actually do the community-maintenance stuff to keep their online community running, gathering a measly 33 cents a day on average across all of them can't be that hard. If just one person in that community makes a decent enough living that a $10/mo donation to their favorite online community is trivial, then bam, hosting costs handled. Or ten fans who can each spare a buck a month?

It doesn't assign a heapiness value, though: it assigns odds of something being a heap. That still treats heaps as a crisp set. Compare: a probability function will tell me the odds of a die rolling a six, but it still either the die does or doesn't land on six; there is no "slightly six" in dice, there are just the odds of being either completely six or not. That's not the case with heaps: a collection of grains can be only slightly heapish, or very heapish, which is something different than being slightly or very likely to be (completely and unambiguously) a heap.

Europeans think 200 miles is a long distance; Americans think 200 years is a long time.

(And 2000 years ago is still pretty recent, even just as far as human history goes. That's closer to the Moon Landing than it is to the building of the Pyramids of Giza).

The formalism of use here is not probability, but fuzzy sets. The Problem of the Heap basically highlights that "heapishness" is not a crisp property; there is not a clear-cut line between heaps and non-heaps, rather the demarcation between heaps and non-heaps is fuzzy. A collection of grains of rice can be more heapish or less heapish, and sufficiently non-heapish (for a given purpose, context, etc) collections can be called simply "non-heaps", of sufficiently heapish collections likewise simply called "heaps", but there is never a sudden switch from heap to non-heap.

Probability doesn't express that properly, because it still speaks as though a given collection either is or isn't a heap, and adds the further complication that two different collections of the same number of grains may be a heap and not a heap respectively, though their odds of being a heap are the same.

Going back to chickens: it's not that over time, successive organisms got more and more likely to be chickens. It's that over time, successive organisms got more and more chickenish. Chickens are not a crisp set. Chickenishness if a fuzzy property.

But stillsufficiently chickenish birds came before sufficiently-chickenish-bird eggs, because a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken, not necessarily an egg containing a chicken embryo. (Consider: when you buy unfertilized eggs at the store, are those chicken eggs or not?)