Agnostics that hold no belief are atheists.
Agnostics that entertain any measure of belief are theists.
Agnosticism is a position taken with regard to knowledge.
Theism and atheism are positions based upon belief, faith. The one does not replace the other.
Agnosticism is about knowledge. the Theism / Atheism poles are diametric opposites: belief and non-belief. There's no middle ground definable by knowledge, or lack thereof.
Agnosticism is not a third position. You're either a theist -- that is, you hold some measure of belief in a god or gods -- or you're not, and you don't. From there, you can, if you like, assert a state of knowledge to bolster your choice, or a lack of a state of knowledge to do the same thing. But your position is still either you believe, or you don't.
The whole point about belief, or not, is that it is contingent upon faith. Knowledge is not.
Hope that helped some.
It would have been surprising if the US would have implemented treaties differently from every other country.
Why?
It does a LOT of things differently from other countries. It redefined "republic", just for starters.
...is a little monitor that hangs over your lips, showing a silent movie of your lips saying (in a loop) "I suspect I'm under surveillance" while underneath, you can be saying anything you like.
An interesting issue is, the photons that formed the image were not on their property at the time, nor do they have a legitimate claim to ownership of those photons just because they happened to bounce off their stuff. They probably bounced off a lot of other stuff, too. "My photon! MY PHOTON!" has more than a little bit of the ring of insanity about it.
If you don't want a photonic record of your actions, the sensible answer is to avoid photons that can form such a thing, i.e., stay inside your dwelling with opaque curtains drawn, erect a fence and a cover, etc.
The big challenge for atheism is not God; it is that of providing an alternative to Spock-ism. We need an account of our place in the world that leaves room for value."
Atheism is the lack of belief in a god or god. Nothing else. It's not about science, it's not about ethics, it's not about morals, it's not about values. When you say you're atheist, you're saying you do not hold any belief there is a god or gods. That's all. There's no dogma, no book, no set of "therefore we believe these here other thingamajigs", nothing.
If you want to know what an atheist thinks about something other than belief in a god or gods, you really must ask them, or you're simply letting your imagination paint a false picture of the world.
Using a drone would be an easy way to deliver an explosive device to someone.
The phrase you are looking for is "cruise missile".
You can deliver much nastier things than explosive devices.
Weaponized anthrax comes immediately to mind. Or VX. Or quite a number of things.
For real nastiness, you'd use something like smallpox. Or a modified influenza.
The gas bag itself was flammable; it wouldn't have mattered what gas was in it, when it disintegrated
In particular: The paint. It contained a mix of powdered aluminum and iron oxide pigments, in sufficient concentration to maintain a redox reaction.
You and I know this mixture as "thermite". It's really hard to get the reaction started - but an electric discharge can do it. (They tried to tether it with an electrical storm approaching. That would make one hell of a spark when the charged envelope comes near to connecting to the grounded mast - which is about when the fire started.) Once it's started, the reaction is essentially impossible to extinguish. The aluminum steals the oxygen from the iron oxide. The heats of formation of the two oxides differ so much that the energy released leaves the resulting elemental iron as an orange-glowing liquid and the aluminum oxide incandescent white-hot.
You are bound by the treaties your country signed.
Yes: You, and the states, and their courts, are bound by them (to the extent they are clear or were implemented by federal enabling legislation).
In fact, they have more legal weight in the US than laws passed by your own Congress.
NO! They have EXACTLY the same weight as federal law. Both treaties and federal law are trumped by the Constitution, and both are also creatures of Congress, They can be modulated, and destroyed (at least in how they are effective within the country) by congressional action.
The idea that they're any stronger or more permanent than federal legislation comes from a (very common) misreading of the Supremacy Clause:
This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby, anything in the constitution or laws of any state to the contrary notwithstanding.
This says that the Constitution, Federal Law, and Treaties trump state law in state and federal courts. It says nothing about the relative power among the three.
The misreading is to interpret "all treaties made
In fact the Supreme Court has spoken on the relation between the Constitution and treaties: In Reid v. Covert, 354 U.S. 1 (1957), the Supreme Court held stated that the U.S. Constitution supersedes international treaties ratified by the U.S. Senate.
Treaties are abrogated, at the federal level, all the time, and there are a number of mechanisms for doing so.
I agree... even 5 or 6 years ago, my father was visiting and asked to use my computer to check some things online... he sat down, ran the browser (Firefox at the time, which looks like the Firefox he has installed on Windows); he had to print out some PDFs he'd created that had his travel documents (hotel reservations and stuff), plugged it in, the window opened, he double clicked - they opened, he printed. Later I asked what he thought about using Linux, he said he didn't realize it wasn't Windows.
Of course, that's a simple example - he didn't do anything complicated, just double-clicked the Firefox icon and everything else was the same user experience, double-clicked some PDFs and the UX was the same... but while there are of course differences, anyone that can use MS Office could probably figure out Open/LibreOffice with little effort for all but pathalogical special cases.
Ubuntu user here... unless I'm installing something really odd (which, if you work for some municipality you probably shouldn't be doing on your work computer), software installation is just as easy - sometimes easier - than using Windows. The days of downloading something that won't install because of missing dependencies, so you download them and they won't install because of missing dependencies.... etc., etc., is long gone with pretty much every distribution.
Don't know how this will turn out, of course, they are all pretty much test cases, and I think some of them make these announcements just to get MS to make them really great deals, and I'm not saying it will definitely work... but when you whittle things down to what a company computer should have installed in it - office software, email clients, browsers, etc., then there's no fundamental reason why Linux shouldn't work (except that it's not MS... which is what most arguments seem to boil down to).
Surface Pro. I do like it.
The keyboard is nice. As you said, not ground-breaking. But as opposed to a lot of iPad keyboards, "it just works." Snap it on, snap it off. Is it Bluetooth? Honestly, I don't even know. I just know it works well. I assumed the connection was hardware based due to the 5 pins used for the connection.
Not specifically to you, but to many other commenters on this thread:
YES, there are other devices that can do THIS, or THAT. And YES, you can outfit an iPad with a whole bunch of different things to make it similar...but that is not the point. The point is that this is a very convenient device with the connectivity that I need/want. I can kludge together a super-duper tablet but that's not my aim. I much prefer the simplicity of buying something that's fully functional on day 1 and doesn't need anything else to be useful. (Insert comments about the keyboard not being included...)
I can pick up my Surface, with the keyboard as the cover, and go out into the world knowing that I am fully equipped to deal with whatever comes at me. A laptop would serve the same purpose, but it would probably be bigger (My Dell XPS 15 is great...but too big!). Most tablets are missing out on half of the features I need.
Also- I'm now a small** fan of Miracast, which is fully baked into Windows 8.1. There are still a lot of problems with it, but I've walked into a couple of situations with Miracast enabled monitors that I used and was happy with. It's nice that I don't need to add anything to make it work. And it's odd that my Surface is the 'it just works' machine, while iDevices need add-ons and software to make things happen.
**I wish my wireless displays would automatically re-connect, but I can imagine a lot of security based reasons not to do this.
It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.
