The first amendment guarantees he can say whatever the hell he wants about the other numbered rights, nobody is forcing you to agree with him.

Our gun laws worked exactly as advertised, after a string of US style mass shootings in the late 80's / early 90's the laws banning semi-automatics were introduced, the catalyst being the Port Arthur massacre that claimed 30+ lives. Since the laws were introduced 20+yrs ago there has not been another mass shooting in this country. Since mass shooting had been rare the effect on the murder rate was insignificant. Gun deaths are still around 200 souls per year, there are towns in the US that have a higher rate than our entire country, this fact has nothing to do with the law and everything to do with the culture inherited from our colonial past.

This may be extremely difficult for an American to understand but "self-defence" is not a valid reason for granting a gun license in this country. Nobody living here needs a semi-auto rifle/shotgun, and very few of us would want one anyway. However before you start raving how stupid we Aussie's are, what other country can you name where the leader can go for a regular morning jog in the street without a small army of heavily armed body guards following him around?

Do you really believe a shotgun will deter the most powerful military machine the world has ever known from doing whatever the fuck it wants to do? Fact is, if they truly wanted to "trample your rights" they would have been trampled already.

Sorry but that's the Fox news definition.

"Free" - as in anyone is free to participate in the market.
"Market" - A set of rules governing trade, normally created and enforced by governments, eg: property law.

In other words the all too common Fox definition of "free market" is actually an oxymoron.

We get to tax arseholes who think drawing a taxable wage from their company is for schmucks.

Coincidently the Slashdot 'thought of the day' below reads -"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann"

That's just silly, I agree reading is a good habit to get your kids into but you don't broaden a child's education by restricting stimulation to your preferred mode of communication. If you want to "unplug your kids" take them camping, out of radio range on an unpowered site, and yeah, take some books for bedtime. I assure you they will gain more from the camping experience than the joy of curling up with a good book.

"Scientific computer models" ARE mathematical equations. The physics model in a FPS, the scientific one that simulates air pressure in climate models, or shoots a space probe through a gap in Saturn's rings, they are all using Newton's equations to model the behaviour of an object.

There are generally two types of equations used to build scientific models, whether it be on paper or silicon. The ones that bend to calculus are said to have an "analytical solution" and can be solved with pen and paper, but the majority of problems encountered in nature, engineering, FPS, etc, do not have an analytical solution, they require a supercomputer to crunch the numbers into an answer.

The proper name for "number crunching" is numerical calculus, which is why Babbage called his clockwork computer a "difference engine". In fact the term "computer" comes from the name of the first human job made obsolete by what was arguably the first modern computer, Turing and Co's computer was funded during the height of WW2 because it replaced large numbers of human computers that had the tedious and error prone job of "number crunching" artillery tables.

It's a concern that was addressed decades ago, nuclear batteries such as the one on Cassini are tested by shooting them out of an artillery gun directly into a block of steel several feet thick. The battery weighs about 35kg, the plutonium inside it weighs less than a kilo. Sure, nothing is truly indestructible, but you need more than an exploding rocket (or uncontrolled re-entry) to crack one of those things open.

The universe is finite, it's size is defined by the rate of cosmic expansion, we know this because we can observe it.
The Universe is probably infinite but we have no way of knowing other than math.

Some people may interpret Sagan's musings that way, but most are just now coming to appreciate that the "self" is not a ghost that inhabits our bodies, it's actually the universe itself experiencing what it is to be human. Our physical and emotional experience is a tiny subset of the Universe's experience. More simply put, if you want to say the universe is god, then we are god's eyes.

What do you mean "dinosaurs failed to adapt", there are several of them flying around in my garden right now!

Watson is an automated research department that extracts related facts from unstructured text much faster than any human, like any other research department it does not tell management what to do with those facts. Optimizing business processes like JIT supply chains is a branch of math called "operations research" (logistics if you are american). Much of it is closely related to computer science, which itself is a branch of maths, O/R and AI are only tangentially related to each other.

The problem with optimizing the bottom line of a company the size of IBM is "feedback", ie - optimising a market giant like IBM will induce a change in the market itself, the changed market changes the optimal solution. The other hassle is that the problem space of optimising IBM for profit is so big that any methods use to find the optimal solution will only ever be able to find local maxima. Some humans still do this better than computers, which is why humans are the ones building computers and asking them the questions.

I think you mean CO not CO2, carbon monoxide is deadly at low levels because it "steals" oxygen from your bloodstream to become CO2. Death from CO2 is simply suffocation, therefore it cannot cause problems if there is "sufficient oxygen",

I think what he is trying to say (and you are inadvertently trying to prove) is that - everyone thinks their way is the middle way. Realise that all the people you and I call extremist think that we are the crazy ones.