Nobody, on their death bed ever says ... "I wish I spent more time at the office".

Regret doesn't have an era.

While you are 100% accurate about when "personhood" begins (being Philosophical), we do know that premature babies as young as 24 weeks of gestation have been born, and survived. Would you at least say that was at least one likely boundry of "personhood"?

The problem is, that the Blue State abortion fanatics refuse to establish even a baseline, because they know that once that line is drawn in the sand, it can be argued for movement. They refuse to even define the line in the sand, because they are just as fanatical as the Red State crowd on this issue.

Making it about Red State anti scientific types, when it is much more nuanced than that, is a disservice to the discussion.

Here is my suggestion for "personhood", legal scientific accurate. Personhood starts the moment the fetus (baby) is able to survive outside the womb. We know when that is, because we have proof via example.

Beautifully refuted. Thank you.

I can remember reading several articles which stated that cryonics doesn't work because the freezing process is not perfect - it does not stop decomposition, which older frozen specimens were starting to show. Why do people still spend money on this?

See, you've looked at this entirely the wrong way.

Yes, all these suckers currently having their heads frozen have basically wasted their money. But instead of pointing and laughing, look at it this way - We might someday benefit as a result of using these corpsesicles as guinea-pigs to learn how to slow the clock of decay that starts at the moment of death.

No, Walt Disney and Matheryn Naovaratpong will never see this universe again; but what we learn from them might buy us an extra five minutes to get proper treatment after a heart attack or stroke.

So, ix-nay on the "wasting your money" bit! Instead, encourage your rich but scientifically-ignorant friends to "preserve" their bodies "for the future"!

Not at all. I'm perfectly happy for people to believe anything they like. However, I absolutely object to giving them tax breaks on the basis of their belief system or to support an organized supernatural belief system. For one thing, as has been pointed out it clearly violates the separation of church and state (as do many other silly things, such as the references to God on currency, and yeah, I oppose those too because they do not speak for me or for a Hindu who believes in Gods, not (the Judeo-Christian) God, or for a Buddhist, or for many others. The state has no business even obliquely endorsing belief in the supernatural, especially given the lack of evidence for anything supernatural to sensibly believe in.

You clearly seem to have Obama on the brain, BTW. Curious, since this discussion isn't really about Obama -- it is a conservative principle to not force religious belief down people's throats and there was never any constitutional reason to give religions of any sort tax breaks (as I said, the Bill of Rights directly and specifically prohibits mixing church and state).

As for judging organizations about being a cult or not being a cult -- that's what is done NOW, when the Federal Government has to decide whether or not any given group of people who adhere to some absurd belief constitute a religion or a cult. The only rule that is consistently applied is that "old" absurd belief systems are grandfathered in and try to stomp on "new" absurd belief systems with hobnail boots, so anything new is a cult, anything old is a religion. So Jehovah's Witnesses, who were never anything but a cult and remain so today, are part of a religion in spite of the fact that some of their religious practices with their children actively endanger those childrens' lives. Ditto Mormanism. Ditto some of the other offshoots of Christianity with their tinhorn messiahs (there are a bunch of them out west and across the south). But Islam or Methodism or Catholicism aren't cults, because a lot of people believe in them instead of only a few. There's no more evidence for any world religion than any other -- zero equals zero -- but numbers apparently matter.

I disagree. I don't want to distinguish a religion from a cult at all. I want none of them to have any sort of legal protection or legal persecution, provided that they obey the common secular law, which includes taking care of your children and giving them blood-based products (like plasma or a blood transfusion) if they need them medically and so on. Including tax protection.

Look, if you wanted to join a chess club, you wouldn't try to deduct your dues. Why should you get to deduct your dues if you join a God club?

rgb

You put your newborn in a daycare so you can earn more money? That is one of the most selfish things I have ever heard. How do you get a +5 Insightful is beyond me. You kid needs you more than you need more money. Period.

I'm an acolyte of the Don't Make Up Stupid Theories About Everything Coming From Nothing Because a Big Guy In The Sky Made It So Without Evidence. Especially don't try to sell them as revealed truth (without evidence) in contradiction to all of the other equally absurd and related theories that are sold as revealed truth (without evidence) that were invented by unbelievably primitive cultures to establish political-religious hegemony. As for "all human wisdom that existed in the past is foolishness" -- quite a lot of it was. Not all of it. You know how we can tell which is which?

I didn't think so, but a big hint is this -- NOT because it is written in scripture, NOT because it is believed by a large or small fraction of the human population, NOT because they are the words of somebody famous, NOT even because the "wisdom" isn't overtly inconsistent and hence isn't a priori impossible.

In the meantime, I'm not a big fan of the everything came from nothing theory simply because it isn't terribly consistent with physics. I much prefer everything came from everything, or if you prefer, the gobsmackingly obvious observation that "nothing" is not a state that has ever been observed or that can reasonably be inferred from observations of that which we can measure. But whether or not you yourself think that everything came from nothing (ex nihilo) because there wasn't really nothing, there was God, and God, while not really something, was enough to make something out of nothing or whatever tangled web of irrational logic you want to make up or accept as "ancient wisdom" concerning "creation" in a Universe with an apparent empirical law of conservation of mass energy, otherwise known as the "we have never, ever, seen an act of creation" law) I am highly allergic to giving the name "God" to my own ignorance, allowing it to fill the gaps in my understanding as the easy way out.

What happened before the alleged Big Bang? Was there "nothing"? Was there "something"? Is the visible Universe part of a much larger structure of existence, most of which we simply cannot see? Sure, all of these are perfectly lovely questions and I have no answers to them. How could I? We simply cannot see, and until we can there is no good reason to prefer one "answer" (otherwise know as "hypothesis" since they are only provisional answers) over another and only silly people would spend a lot of time arguing over the enormous range of possible answers, let alone fighting wars and blowing themselves and others up when people refuse to accept one particularly silly hypothesis without evidence or any reasonable hope of obtaining evidence.

But do as you like.

And BTW, I don't have an iPhone. Honestly, I'm not even sure what your implication is when you assert that I do. Are iPhones satanic atheist instruments? Does the fact that Ask Siri is more likely to reveal an evidence-supported truth than Ask the Old Testament grate on you?

rgb

The obnoxious cliques of senior editors with god complexes make it virtually impossible to correct anything of substance. And Jimbo cares fuck-all about it as long as enough people click the donation button.

Sure, you can get into revision wars over whether to use the word "which" or "that" in a given context; but fixing a factual error? Good luck!

"Citation needed!"
"But the old, wrong version didn't have a cite either."
"Doesn't matter, it stays, and my minimum wage burger flipping ass has just banned you for daring to challenge me, you pompous PhD-wielding expert in this particular field!"

Speed doesn't matter, Congrestion matters. You can have all the "speed" you need, but if the network is congested it doesn't matter. I could have a 10Gig link, and it wouldn't matter if somewhere between me and the other end, it is congested.

You can have your 80 MBS Cable connection, and be able to pull the full 80, but if you're congested down the line, speed doesn't matter.

Here is a test, set up a BitTorrent of some popular Movie ISO, set it to FULL SPEED to your desktop/laptop. Then setup a console (XBOX) to Netflix, and see how good your Netflix is.Now run your Speedtest while watching a movie, downloading a torrent at the same time. Your "speed" doesn't matter, and your SpeedTest will reflect that you're not getting your 80 MB speed, but that is not accurate, because you are.

Filed under "what could possibly go wrong"

Let's repeal the tax-exempt status of all religions! There isn't the slightest good reason that they should be tax exempt in the first place. For one thing, they are organizations devoted to coercing and conditioning the young to believe in absurdities. For another, they wield political power and influence and I don't want my own tax dollars making up the deductions taken by those individuals who are directly or indirectly supporting political positions I don't agree with. For a third, it is semantically and epistemologically impossible to differentiate a "religion" from a "cult". All religions began as cults and are cults still -- they both consists of a group of people who claim special and absurd knowledge of things that cannot be independently and objectively verified or observed and who want to convince others that accepting this "knowledge" as true will grant them equally special status promised, curiously enough, only as a part of the knowledge that must be accepted.

The two words refer to the same thing, at most separated by a scale factor. Either we make pastafarianism a tax-exempt religion or allow special tax concessions to any Subgenius preacher claiming to spread the word of J. R. "Bob" Dobbs, or Methodism and Judaism and Islam and Catholicism and Scientology and... (the list continues, and continues) should all have all forms of special status revoked. Religion can be a tax-paid-dollar supported club all it wants, but the idea that money paid into a kitty to be given to somebody to support a building and employee whose sole purpose is to promise people ludicrous rewards or tortures and to believe in magic should some how have the same status as money given to (say) UNICEF or Care is absolutely ridiculous.

So please, sign this petition. If we make Scientology financially untenable, maybe then we can tackle the next 100 cults on the same list.

rgb

So, you can't stick a 5 pin connector into a six pin hole?

And you have more faith in users than I do.

Looking at the Wikipedia Article and the images for the different pinouts for the M.2 Specification, I have serious concerns about the ability to inadvertently flipping the cards, and inserting them upside down. Take a look at the B vs M configuration, which is exactly a mirror of each other.

UNLESS there is part of the spec that I am not seeing about another notching somewhere, the ability to flip these over and inserting them wrong is going to be a huge issue. And looking at all the examples on the page, I don't see anything to mitigate against inserting these upside down.

Speed rarely matters.

Speedtest and other such metrics often fail because the ISP codes routing to support better than real results.

What really matters is capacity of the whole network. Does the network itself route efficiently for all protocols and destinations. Speed is just one indicator of capacity, but isn't the be all, end all measurement.

At work, I sit on the end of a Gig pipeline out to the internet, Capacity is fine. Speed doesn't indicate what the capacity limit is. As long as you have capacity, speed is not ever going to be issue. The problem is when Capacity is near max, the speed suffers (symptomatically), however it is still possible to have speed tests succeed when capacity is impacted by watching for speed tests and giving network priority to those, while neglecting regular traffic, giving the appearances of speed where capacity is at limit, producing inaccurate results, "my speed is fine, but Netflix is still buffering"

Give me real monitoring tools, and I'll show you where the network problems are, and it is rarely "speed".

What use does the average person have for any photo of outer space objects?

What use does the average person have for photos of their trip to the Grand Canyon? For that matter, what use does the average person have for any space exploration (as distinct from the more practical application of communication satellites)?

Humans interact with our world in a very vision-centric manner. It "means" more to us to see cool high-res color photos of some distant astronomical object than "knowing" the far more useful data about the makeup of its atmosphere.

And like it or not, that mean NASA gets more funding for cool pictures than for doing hard science. People care far, far more about the Mars rovers because they empathize with those plucky little robots still carrying on despite adversity (and sending back pictures to prove it), than because they fulfilled their primary mission objectives.