Religions are human-made institutions and thus, unlike God, are fallible. Your confusion of human-made institutions with God is the epitome of hubris. If you believe believe basic human rights came from God then why do you think humans running religions have a right to take them away?

This was the basic point the Founding Fathers were making when using the terms "Nature's God" and "their Creator" in the Declaration of Independence:

So what you are saying, that human-made religious institutions can take away inalienable rights bestowed by a Creator or by Nature's God, is the exact opposite of what the Founding Fathers said in their Declaration if Independence.

Don't you remember the riots and food shortages and the collapse of the entire infrastructure due to all of the Y2K bugs bringing down civilization as we know it?

Me neither.

Snowden was starting to get some very begrudging props for his role in the limited NSA reforms passed by the US Congress. This laughably ridiculous and unsubstantiated attack on him was deployed to help keep Snowden trapped in the traitor role.

The real danger here is that if the powers that be keep destroying their own credibility like this, eventually they will start to lose control and then all Hell will break loose. They seem to be reacting emotionally, not rationally and they seem to be losing touch with reality. It reminds me of the craziness of the last days of the Nixon White House. Only this time the problem goes much deeper. It is no longer a single person and the tight knit group surrounding him. The insanity has metastasized.

I was living on Cape Cod near the beach with a good view of Martha's Vineyard which was three or four miles away. Sometimes (very rarely) we would see a deer either swimming towards the island or getting out of the ocean from the direction of the island.

Whatever urge the deer had to swim across miles of ocean was probably not beneficial for survival of the individual so why would they do that? I concluded that although it was bad for survival of the individual, it was terrific for survival of the species since they would tend to not be locked into a specific geographical location and could migrate across significant barriers.

I think many humans have this same built-in wanderlust. In this sense many animals, including humans, have adapted to deal with climate change. I have even wondered if our inclination to warfare was beneficial because it caused the creative peace-loving types to spread out away from the crowds. I think the real problem is that we are not genetically prepared for a finite Earth. If the Earth were infinite then I think many of the grave challenges we face which threaten our species would not exist.

If he had noticably dark skin then he might have been shot dead instead of simply being arrested.

I feel your paean.

You are not reading it right. The standard library was re-implemented using the same API. That's why the government's stance would destroy the software industry as we know it because a complete re-implementation would still be covered by the copyright of the original implementation. This is exactly copyrighting an idea instead of a particular expression of an idea.

My guess is that the reason for this idiotic position is to intentionally kill off Linux and all independent software development in order to stop terrorism.

The Wikipedia explains:

Which is ostensibly a use tax on roads and transportation infrastructure.

Would you prefer a more Socialist approach to funding transportation and have people who walk, or bicycle, or drive less, or use a more fuel efficient vehicle subsidize people who get the most direct benefit from the roads and bridges? Or would you prefer to let our transportation infrastructure crumble?

In addition, since exhaust from motor vehicles is a large contributor to air pollution, a tax on gasoline can be seen as compensation for the external costs of burning fossil fuels. Laissez-faire free markets are notoriously bad at dealing with externalities fairly or efficiently. The lack of a gasoline tax or too low of a gasoline tax would be in effect a huge subsidy for fossil fuels.

An example of the tremendous economic inefficiencies of subsidies through insufficient taxing of externalities was the near total destruction of light rail in the United States. The fuel tax for commercial buses did not adequately reflect the advantage given to buses over rail due to the road infrastructure provided by the government. This led to the downfall and destruction of most of the light rail in the United States even though it is extremely more efficient than using buses.

Bullshit. All correctly observed phenomena obey the laws of physics. Funny thing is that the vast majority of observations that apparently violate the laws of physics turn out to be incorrect.

The current case is a good example. NASA used 100 watts and measured a force of 50 microNewtons. You would need a force 20,000 times larger than that to levitate an apple. Unless you increase the efficiency of the effect by many orders of magnitude then, even if it exists at all, it has no practical application.

In these sorts of situations where experimentalists measure a very very small effect (the measurement made in China, which was not in a vacuum, was over 100 times larger) and there is no reasonable theoretical explanation for the effect and the effect contradicts the established laws of physics then the explanation is almost always experimental error.

Bzzt. Wrong. Those conjectures were from from Paul March who is "an engineer at NASA Eagleworks". None of the authors are named March.

It is true that the small force that was measured was much greater than the even smaller force of a photon drive (hence my post and the quote therein) but it was still very small compared to the energy that was used and was orders of magnitude smaller (per kilowatt) than what March said would be needed for a practical device.

I agree that the result from China should not be trusted. On the other hand, the NASA results measured a significantly smaller force per kilowatt than what was measured in China. The article implies the NASA experiments measured 50 microNewtons with a 100 watt input. Or 2 Megawatts per Newton. So you would need 2 Megawatts of power to levitate an apple:

I trust the extrapolations of the computer model even less than I trust the experimental results from China. I think it is overly optimistic to pin one's hopes of a viable method of propulsion on a measurement of a force of 50 microNewtons from a device that is putting out 100 watts. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I see no signs of such evidence here. I think the laws of physics as we know them still hold and they experimentalists made a mistake, just like with Pons and Fleischmann (even though their claims did not violate basic laws of physics like these so-called results do).

The fine article says otherwise:

Best case scenario here is that 1,000 Newton/kW is 100% efficiency in which case their current efficiency is 0.1% or worse. If 1,000 N/kW is not 100% then their current efficiency is even worse than 0.1% in all experiments.

Also, note that Newtons measure force while kilowatts measure power so it makes no sense to express efficiency as a ratio of Newtons to kilowatts. For example, a c-clamp rated at 10,000 pounds-force will produce 44,000 Newtons for an indefinite period of time without consuming any energy/power after the initial tightening.

BTW, a 108 gram apple feels a force of roughly one Newton on the surface of the earth. Using 1 kilowatt to keep an apple suspended does seem extremely inefficient to me. Also note that I can keep an apple suspended indefinitely with a table and no ongoing energy expenditure.

Finally note that the one experiment that got close to one Newton/kW was not done in a vacuum. It would not surprise me if that one Newton of force could be explained by the light-mill effect.

I think you mean Lexxdysia. (link)

What you are describing is a photon drive where photons are the propellant. But the fine article explains:

The reason I don't believe it is real is the same reason I don't believe cold fusion is real. They put in metric ton-loads of energy and measure a very small effect. They say they will need to increase the efficiency by many orders of magnitude to create a practical device. I say they probably made a mistake somewhere and the tiny effect they measured is either noise or due to something else they haven't yet accounted for.

They say one of the limiting factors (aside from violating the laws of physics) is the political will to launch a large nuclear power plant into space. The solution is obvious: use Cold Fusion to power the EM drive. There is great efficiency here because they can get two Nobel prizes with only one gadget.