LOL seems quite plausible to me! :)

APK's law perhaps? For him, I offer: "Sufficiently egregious mental incompetence is indistinguishable from intentional trolling"

Yeah, it takes a little while for him to froth out. It may also be that Slashdot is but one of his many bile ducts.
I do enjoy seeing him at work though! I've never been into sports, much less gymnastics, but the contortions APK goes through so he can claim he 'dusted' you and play the 'bitter taste of defeat yadda' violins every post are worth the exercise themselves. APK is a needy, needy little man - I bet this whole thread is a full-on mastabatorium for a crawly little mind like his.

Utter, utter bollocks. The two numbers aren't even in the same ballpark.

You remember there were a bunch of flights cancelled due to the volcanic ash cloud? They alone would have contributed more CO2 than the bloody volcano:

"The grounding of European flights avoided about 3.44×108 kg of CO2 emissions per day, while the volcano emitted about 1.5×108 kg of CO2 per day."

Wiki before inserting boot into chops next time.

Exactly. This is something I've seen small business struggle with, often taking the form of "But I could have bought a new PC for that much!" complaint after their vital not-backed-up business data has been recovered from a dead hard drive.

(there are many solutions to the above example, I'm using it illustratively)

You don't need the source code to make a patch for a binary - there are a million cracked computer games out there that were patched by third parties without access to the source.

Here, Let me help you.

I place a quantum singularity inside a special magic box. The gravitational pull of the singularity is so strong that no force in the universe can overcome its attraction with the bottom of the box. No force in the universe can lift the singularity out of the box.

I can however, lift the singularity.

I can lift the box containing it, if I exert enough energy, and in so doing, lift the singularity.

If we replace "Magic box" with "The whole damned universe", the trick still applies-- We are then just left with a real headscratcher, "Through what, did the universe get lifted?"

Questions like the above "paradox" don't really prove or solve anything. They just demonstrate that there is ignorance that needs to be overcome.

The pedant will argue that "but being unable to lift the singularity out of the box means he is not omnipotent!" or some similar nonsense.

To that, I direct you at the paradox of time's arrow. There really isnt a compelling reason for time to only flow in one direction. Reversal of time would cause the singularity to be impossible to contain inside the magic box. An omnipotent god can thus retain the rules that gravitational force is based on the inverse square of the distances between the centers of mass, and where one of the masses exerts infinite spacial curviture-- and still move the singularity out of the box-- from his perspective.

The notion of "Cant do something" is always based on the idea of something infallible. At best, using it as a defense against an infallible god, is just substitution.

No, Not an idiot. I simply used a rule in logic to demonstrate how your statement is ill-devised, and not conclusive. Specifically, if you can demonstrate how a foundational axiom in a statement can be false, you can falsify all logic predicated upon that axiom.

This principle is a foundational precept in applied logic. It helps logicians recognize when they are wasting their time with a question. Being such a simple test, I applied it to your inquiry, and found that inquiry to be lacking. Call it pedantry if you want to, but it wasn't without purpose that I did this.

God does not have to be physically inside THIS universe to *exist*. (as such, any presupposition that he MUST be constrainable by the rules of this universe is pure hubris unfounded by evidence.) There is a growing body of evidence that there are other universes besides our own, and that their very existences have subtle influences upon our own. It is one of the possible explanations for why the various massive particles in the standard model have the masses that they do, in fact. (Not the only one, and probably not the leading one, but that does not make stop making it be one of them regardless.)

Similar to how a turing machine can simulate any other turing maching given sufficient memory and time, a being that observes time differently from the way we do can use even a tiny and subtle form of influence to completely control our universe, because they can fully calculate all the outcomes, and always be able to influence the outcomes of all interactions. (EG, they know exactly where and how to nudge.) This subtle interaction is indistinguishable from random chance to observers from within our universe, so it cant be proven this agency is at work. This does not discount that it is possible, however.

Do I imagine some strawman like "angels strumming harps surrounding some dude in a toga floating on a cloud" when I contemplate 'god'? No. I contemplate something so alien from anything we know of or can conceive of that it defies attempts to imagine it. By definition, all it requires is agency by which to make decisions, ability to see all possible outcomes statically (Sees the universe as one giant markov chain, essentially), and a means by which to influence said universe, however subtle. If those conditions are met, the entity will be both omnipresent and omnipotent, as seen from our universe. AKA, 'god'

what it looks like, why it chooses what it does, or even how it thinks are moot, and the sole venue of philosophers and theists. Those things are inconsequential to "existence", which is what the hard atheist and the theist dispute.

So, I will return your question-- Are YOU an idiot, making presumptions of other people that are unfounded, and then running off with those presumptions as if they were truth?

No, that still has problems with implied factors.

Specifically, it implies gravity, and that god is bound to the rules of physical reality. If so, then naturally god cannot be omnipotent, as you are implying-- however, if god is not bound by the laws of physical reality, then god can make a boulder that is impossible to lift, yet still lift it.

Your argument relies on there being something infallible that is "underneath" god. (both figuratively, and literally,.) An unliftable object would be a quantum singularity-- You need an impossible surface to support having such a thing sitting on it, waiting to be lifted-- It also presupposes that god is limited by physical reality, rather than what religion implies, which is the inverse. (Physical reality is dependent upon god.) The axioms by which logic and physics are underpinned are based on the constancy of the physical universe, and if that constancy isnt constant after all -- but instead based on the influence of an omnipotent god-- then it does not follow to use it as a means to refute the existence of that god.

With all the implied fallacies in place, you simply become redundant in asserting that god cannot exist within the confines of the physical universe. That's fine and dandy. Physics says that too:

Something like god would represent unlimited energy potential, and thus have unlimited mass energy. Unless god was also of an infinite volume, he would rapidly create the universe's single most extreme black hole in very short order. Since this is not observed to be the case, god clearly does not exist in our universe.

As such, it is illogical to attempt to use logical foundations predicated on this presumption to disprove the existence of such an entity.

The assertion that there are no alternatives to the physical universe we see and interact with does not meet up with recent findings and theory.

So, rather than some infallible truth being presented, all I see is a poorly framed argument that reduces to redundancy, while disproving nothing of consequence.

*Agnostic, in case you were interested.

Thanks, you just validated the entirety of my last post to you. You couldn't have done a better job for me if you'd tried.

APK, how many other people behave as you do?

You don't know the answer because you've never really thought about your own behaviour nor considered how you appear to others.

As a fifty-something year old man you should be deeply ashamed by your childish antics, but as they say "there's no fool like an old fool" eh APK?

You are suffering from a mental illness - this is apparent to most people when they read your foolish prattle. Seek help.

No, of course not, there is a lower level of particle interactions. You can't really usefully compute them either.

Just add an aftermarket wifi access point to the ethernet connection, then you can attach any number of local network X clients to the X server. Tablets, laptops, et al.

Slap that bitch inside the dash or something. They usually eat 12v DC anyway, so it shouldnt be hard to wire in.

Just make sure you aren't a total retard. Put the broadcast power on the access point to the absolute minimum needed to service the vehicle's interior, and use WPA2. Also, set access restrictions on the SSH, Telnet, and other vulnerable services so that digital signature checking is in force.

Running a minimalist GUI on the X server would allow the vehicle to do all manner of interesting things during the day. It could even run as a node on Folding@home if you really wanted. I was thinking more along the lines of encrypted email clients with GPG and something like clawsmail though.

This is true of any parent who has ever emigrated anywhere (i.e., basically everyone's ancestors).

SInce the same is also true of any parent who didn't emigrate but stayed put (everyone else's ancestors), I myself don't see this as a real moral Dilemma

General "Buck" Turgidson: Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?

Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.