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.

Depends entierly on the atheist. Some start from a Buddhist background. In fact, so ARE Buddhists. (My main problem with Buddhism is that all the arguments are phrased in terms of inevitable reincarnation of something...Buddha was a bit opaque about just what, so I'm not certain that I can't believe it, but I'm sure not certain that I can.)

My personal problem has to do with the nature of the evidence, and the unreliability of even disinterested eye-witness testimony. The only gods I'm certain of are those that I've encountered (I *think* they're the same things that others have called gods), and they appear to be mental phenomena. (I'd say psychic, but that term has been so misused that it would be even more likely to be misunderstood.) They appear to be sub-linguistic mental phenomena that are probably the same things that Jung called archetypes. The roots from which all mental functioning is buit. These features seem to be shared by many (all?) people, though it's hard to be sure, and some of them even seem to be shared with other mammals. (Well, dogs to be specific. I don't understand cats well enough to comment about them, and the evidence is quite weak even for dogs...being more along the lies of "consistent with the theory" than "experimental proof", but then that's true even for other people.)

Also, your attribution of certain beliefs as originating with Christianity is highly suspect. Many Christian practices and beliefs came from Mithraism. Others from Judism. And Others from Hellenistic Greek philosophy. Just how much originated with Christianity is extremely dubious if, in fact, anything did except a bit of clever phrasing and some political tactics. Certainly the equality of people before the gods was neither unique with Christianity, nor universally held by Christians. (See, for one example, "The Divine Right of Kings". It was also held in many times and [Christian] places that the more powerful were more loved by god. The Puritans, e.g, made it explicit. "Material success the the manifest sign of divine favor." That's not an exact qoute, as far as I know, but it could be.)

Are you sure that's a state law? My understanding was that it in the contract the store had with the credit card company.

But given that this appears to be a long-standing and profitable business prractice, what effect would you expect giving them a negative rating to have?

Please justify that statement. It seems to me that in a truly free market you would even be free to murder the competition. That's the way it works in the closest thing to a free market that exists....the black market.

Didn't the summary say this behavior had been legitimized by the courts?

But perhaps another court would decide differently. Perhaps you could take them to small claims court...but how would you get them to pay up if you won?

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.

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.

That's, to me, a new example of the problems with systemd.

So far the only one that's sounded serious is the "won't fix" reply to a report of logfile corruption. But there have been a humongous number of complaints about different small problems.

To me systemd sounds like a bad idea. I don't really know. The problem appears that it's going to be hard to avoid, and with so many small problems, it's quite likely that there are some serious one.

A question in my mind is "What problem does it fix?" The only answer I've heard is that you can boot faster. This doesn't impress me, as I rarely boot my computer, and when I do I often want many of the steps to happen slowly enough that I can tell what is going on.

My suspicion is that systemd is a very bad direction to go. I'm remembering that mono was also sponsered by Red Hat. And even if I grant the best of intentions, big chunks of code tend to break more often and be harder to fix.

My interpretation is fully deterministic in the same sense that their was. Probabilistic is meant in the "sum over histories" sense that multiple histories yield the same present, so you can't reasonably pick just one and say "That's what came earlier", but you instead have a spread of probabilities of linkage. I interpret that probability as the strength (weight) of the link. From each past the probabilities to all the futures it links to sum to 1. Similarly from each present the probabilities of all the pasts it links to sum to 1.

The difference between out models is that EWG, at least in the presentation that I read, only considered forwards (toward the future) links. I see no reason to believe that this is a correct interpretation. (I'm not sure about chronology, but I believe the EWG model was created prior to Feynman's Sum over Histories approach being derived. This difference is probably the result of that.)

2- Safety concerns: with baby and/or young children I felt I would rather not add RF generator inside my home. I know we are immersed in RF from everywhere, making some a few meters away is another level. I didn't want to add that. Just in case.

Ham radio operators -- of which I am one -- spend their lives immersed in more RF at various frequencies from kHz to GHz than you can possibly compare to unless you work at a broadcast radio or television station. And hams are one of the oldest demographics in the USA. So many 80 and 90 year olds, it's really kind of amusing. RF is not your enemy at wifi router and cellphone levels. Not even close.

I've been pretty much bathed in RF for the last forty years. I'm very healthy other than a few allergies I've had since I was a kid. Of course, I'm active, too -- but if RF at these levels was a problem, I'd *have* a problem by now.

Baloo, at least, needs to be sufficiently visible that you can turn it off. It eats up an incredible amount of CPU time to, for me, no benefit. KWallet has it's points, but it's not THAT great. In my use case sticky-notes would be quite reasonable for passwords. Just don't make them accessible over the net (i.e., to other programs running on the same machine). I'm not worried about shoulder surfers. As for Akonadi...I had no idea what it was until I just now looked at the web page, and I still don't know if it is of *ANY* value to me. But if it doesn't take up CPU time when I'm not using it, I guess it doesn't do much harm.

OTOH, I find Gnome3 unusable. Gnome2 was decent...I preferred it to KDE4, but then I preferred KDE3 to Gnome2. xfce would be a good system, but when I tried it, it got confused about which window was on top of which (more specifically, windows tended to get stuck under the menubar at the top of the screen). It's usable, but with several misfeatures, so currently I'm using KDE4. I'm also wondering about razorQT, but I don't want my window manager to be flakey, and the last I heard razorQT was in very late alpha. I've also heard about LXQT recently. Don't know what it's status is, but it isn't in the system repository, and this makes me dubious.