Producer: No! Leave it in - a minor human slip will make it more believable.

Turns out that the demographics didn't have much effect on where the war was started.

Your wife, like all other scientists and amateurs with sufficiently powerful telescopes, is in on the conspiracy.

(Is she evil, or did they threaten to kill her cat if she didn't cooperate?)

I recently saw an article (here?) about a study that found that subscribing to conspiracy theories correlates strongly with a low self-image.

But you've got to research it while drinking heavily, so you'll understand the stories from the perspective of the intended audience.

I have a little scar in one eyebrow where my younger brother poked me with a hot coathanger while toasting marshmallows at the beach. I'm about half an inch from being blind in one eye due to a campfire.

They also tend to contain a lot of superstition, prejudice, ignorance, outright nonsense, and religious/social/political spin.

(Just like secular literature.)

That second link has been posted here recently enough that my browser still shows it as visited. It *uttterly* failed to support the claims of the person who posted it, leaving the impression that they hadn't actually read it. Or maybe read it and didn't understand it. Or maybe read it and understood it, but thought they could get away with misrepresenting it. Who knows...

In your case... uhm... what claim about history, religion, or ghost stores do you think it supports? Merely posting a link doens't win a vague argument, nor does it make your personal beliefs real.

Hitler would have pushed the button just before he pulled the trigger.

MAD only works when all the owners of knukes are reasonably sane.

Why should you even care about your own personal survival and comfort? Obviously most people do, but that's a far cry from should.

Even if God exists, why should you do what he commands? Even if the answer is back to "because he will punish you if you don't", why should I avoid punishment? That is, come back to the first question up there: why should I care about my own personal survival and comfort?

Most people do care about their own personal survival and comfort, sure. But then a lot of people just do have empathy for others too. Then again, a lot of people do get sadistic pleasure from hurting others too —sometimes the same people as have empathy for others too, just in different circumstances. And a lot of people probably would obey the commands of something they considered God, if not just to avoid punishment, then just because a lot of people just do obey supposed authorities, whether they should or not. (Look at the Stanford Prison Experiment. Or the Nazis who were "just following orders").

Asking what people do do isn't going to tell us anything about what they should do, and when you start asking what people should do and why, "God says so" doesn't really add much to the conversation. Maybe we'd better take a few steps back and start asked what exactly "should" even means, and how the heck we're supposed to assess the truth or falsity of "should" propositions in the first place.

I lost it as soon as he got to "by definition" and making room for God. As soon as you get into arguing about things from definitions you're doing analytic philosophy and if you're just saying "by definition" without offering support for why that is the right definition, you're probably doing it wrong.

As a frequent user of the CentOS-6.5-x86_64-minimal.iso install image, I can see that its still not *as* thin as the author describes but none of the unnecessary bits are included and its super-easy to customize.

Straw man. We don't know what kind of conference this is.

...nah, somebody's already got it parked.

You know when it's trolling click bait when you see:

...at the top of a /. summary.

nVidia technology fell into the past through a wormhole.
Luckily it was properly static-bagged, because it actually went back to 1912 and had to be stored until a computer could be developed to interface to it