Stop buying boutique shit, dumbass. Get it from the garden store like the rest of us. It only costs a few bucks a yard.

Real actual skeptic here (I think). Is the internet reducing religious affiliation because people are being exposed to different opinions? Or is the internet addictive, and does it subsume all of its occupants' time? Atheists are so eager to claim success that they don't even remember to check for confirmation bias and apply occam's razor.

Religious affiliation is correlated with increased mental health and a strong local community. The outspoken minority of religious fucks make the rest look bad to the undiscriminating outsider (oblig).

From where I stand, it looks like people are getting more extreme than their churches. They want to subjugate and punish and judge, and go against all the good parts of their religions. So they are leaving the churches in droves, and taking their hatred and ignorance to the internet. This may be a result of sampling bias (see oblig link above), and begs for good science to be done.

What the hell guys, if you're going to try and design something to replaced an entrenched convention, you might as well go whole hog. Oh wait, no, I know... their website isn't in Esperanto because such projects always fail.

And look at you, buying into the government's blame-shifting. This is the opposite of Nuremberg -- don't blame us, we were only giving orders! Blame the eeeevil companies that did the deed, not the innocent government who merely demanded compliance with threat of imprisonment or worse, fines!

No, you see all of the images from the paper right up at the top. The kicker is that it can only do monochrome. So your x-ray voyeur shots will only work for girls and boys wearing full-body paint under their clothes. Or maybe you can illuminate them with lasers. I'm sure nobody will notice.

Maybe that's because Stalin was a totalitarian, which totally jives with the conservative mindset. Want to know who else conservatives didn't celebrate the demise of? Hitler. Is that because conservatives are evil? No. It's because they're too blind with greed to recognize any evil other than "taxes" (which they desperately depend upon to keep their businesses solvent).

I wonder... could we force them to keep metametadata? Y'know, summaries of what fields were copied out of what databases of what companies on what days? That way, we could still have a snowball's chance at proving that individual customers had their privacy impinged. Of course, this is all rhetoric: no, we can't force them to keep anything, and no, we wouldn't have a snowball's chance at proving shit against the fed. Fun idea, though, having a government that behaves responsibly.

That's a pretty nosy question if I've ever heard one. But since you ask, it smells pretty nosy.

Right... so... you want to be sheltered from the worst news from the unprivileged, because you feel powerless to stop it? Tell that to the people in that situation, with significantly less power to stop it! Yes! Let's not talk about the bad things in the world unless the newspiece has a button that you can personally click to solve that problem. That's exactly how problem-solving works. Who knows why the press never thought of that!

No, the downside is that the muddy seafloor is chock full of life. The energy absorbed by that seafloor churns the mud, continually stirring around nutrients, plankton, eggs and sperm, algae, etc. A huge amount of sealife spawns in this mud -- stop churning it, and you kill everything there. And as these things usually go... killing a huge number of species tends to open a door to noxious, invasive, damaging monocultures.

Hire and train real 13 year-old girls to seduce 'predators' online and lure them into an IRL meeting. Duh.

No. The program does not check itself. You rely on faulty humans for that part. Duh. There's gotta be some fault in the rigor or you'll never get your math paper published.

I'll undermine your 'proof by authority' by pointing out that the best you can possibly get from my assertion is a fallacy of false generalization. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that GP is correct. Some mathematicians are unsatisfied by computer proofs. Possibly most mathematicians. I've apparently gone on record calling the majority of mathematicians "idiots". Worse, I'm on the job market. Good thing my real name isn't on this account!

If I get tenure, I'll get to put my name to my opinions. If I'm a tenth as cranky and outspoken as Doron Zeilberger, I'll be satisfied.

You're the imaginative one, aren't you? Distributed proofs tend to duplicate work -- at least k contributors prove every claim, and each contributor should have some portion (maybe log(# contributions) or so, IIRC) of their work double-checked by an expert. Sure, it takes k times longer, but you can design it to take advantage of statistics to certify the proof more trustworthy than the average math paper.

I wish modern mathematicians believed the math that they prove day after day for undergrads. If they did, this wouldn't be controversial.

Maybe out in Granola Country. Where I'm from, we measure in Hummers.