How is this even a question. James Tiberius Kirk made the original series what it was - a really cool, minimalist SCI-FI odyssey that delivered great stories with nicely integrated moralizing. I honesty believe that the quality of the original series goes far deeper than campy special effects and occasional marginal acting.

The whole idea of an academic ecosystem distinct from the reality that the rest of the world operates in is an elitist adaptation of medieval socio-political structures. Granting someone an insulated job from which they can not be removed is ridiculous under any conditions. Whether someone publishes a peer reviewed article on something is irrelevant to whether they know what they are talking about in the current model.

The REAL peers are the folks doing work in the profession day in and day out. As a rule most peer reviews are conducted by people with a decidedly academic focus - the experts in the field are working day jobs that don't afford them time to participate in silly self congratulatory exercises.

The only non-academic institutions that have something like tenure are US federal government jobs - yours to loose. Neither one provides us an example of healthy thinking or efficient and innovative work products.

Both right and left wing economics are Keynsian at their roots. The Austrian model is the only one that works - economies are more organic than formulaic because they are comprised of organic components.

Maybe I misunderstood your use of left/right - it may be a symptom of context. In the US, the "right" typically fights for the right to bear arms while the left typically pushes for gun control. This is not universally true, but I suspect that more than 90% of the candidates that identify themselves as "left" are pro gun control.

The assertion regarding taxes on the wealthy is disingenuous. I have been directly affected by high tax rates and I am not in the 1%. The question is not who's hands you put money in, the question is how do you generate more money. Giving money to the poor has been proven to seize the recipients in an iron grip of dependency.

There is no FACT that taking money from business owners increases investment. When I pay the taxes I pay now I simply can't afford to pay someone else to do jobs that I can do on my own. THAT is a fact. The government is the single least efficient means for putting oney into anyones hands.

Our (US) founders knew these - they wrote that when more than 50% of the population becomes dependent on the remaining portion of the population due to government influence then their experiment would have failed.

Cite evidence please. While I think both parties are a joke, this statement is just plain silly

I think you may be confused. Is gun control typically a platform for the left or right? Are property rights more often abused by the left or right (think about the effects of profound regulation via EPA etc.).

De-regulation destroyed the economy? Really? You might want to brush up on your history and economics.

I am constantly amazed at arguments in favor of whatever government action folks want that base their premise on the trustworthiness of government. Why does anyone think they can trust a government? Now I am certainly not an anarchist, however I take the same view of centralized government that the founders of the US took - powerful central governments will inevitably grow and be corrupted because they are comprised of humans who are imminently corruptible.

It amuses me to see folks distrust a corporation and turn to the government as if the people in a government job are somehow more moral or ethical than those in private sector. They are all made of the same human stuff, all just as corruptible - the only meaningful difference is that the humans in government wield the power of massive force to accomplish their goals.

The government has NO business getting involved with cyber security any more than they do getting involved with how I secure my house or car. The government sucks at doing things efficiently and using best practices - the examples are legion.

People need to take personal responsibility for their systems and decisions.

Our home standby generator runs itself for 20 minutes every 7 days - just a low end 15kW model. It doesn't provide any metrics via remote (that requires add-in modules from Generac).

I sure hope you fire them more often than every 6 months! Weekly maintenance runs make a lot more sense. Leave an engine unused for 6 months over a long period of time and you will create more maintenance problems than you can imagine.

I don't think it is fair to accuse me of being disingenuous - while it is true that I don't agree with evolution I would like to see an honest and open dialog in which people can present facts as facts, theories as theories and be free to disagree with theories until they are established as fact.

It may be true that this bill is intended to discourage critical thinking about science, but what many folks (not necessarily you) seem to be pushing for is to censor the discussion rather than engage in open debate about theories that we simply don't know to be fact.

No, I am not holding anybody to an impossible standard. We can make whatever claims we need to about geological processes, stellar evolution etc. I am only asking that we distinguish between things we can know as fact and things that we must suppose as theory.

It is important to understand the distinction between fact and theory so that further improvements can be made in any discipline. If a researcher finds facts that collide with a theory, he must be comfortable declaring a theory to be in error.

What we should teach in schools is that a fact is distinguished from a theory in certain ways, that facts and theories both provide meaningful aids in understanding our world but that they are not equivalent. Further, when we teach a theory in school, we should teach it as a theory not as a fact. Student should know what we know for certain and what we have had to derive from the facts available to us.

Are you suggesting that there is no meaningful distinction between what we (or the sound scientist) might call a fact versus a theory?

While there may be subtle (or not so subtle) shifts in meaning based on context, I think it is fair to say that no one would assert that we can use the words theory and fact interchangeably in science or any other discipline.

No reasonable scientist would accept a theory as having the same weight as a fact. In the event that an observed fact conflicts with a theory, good science calls for us to reformulate the theory based on the facts. We do not discard facts when they conflict with a theory.