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.

Law enforcement began as [any given region's] largest street gang, long before recorded history.

You mean that that was in the brief period where it was a relatively popular idea to make law enforcement something better than that

As a Californian, it sure would be nice for the drought to end, but the last time El Niño struck, a mountain fell on my house. It's still there, the house holding back the mountain. I'd like to not repeat that experience.

Here in California we have four seasons just like everywhere else:

Sunny
Hot
Flooding
On Fire ...what, you don't have On Fire where you come from?

The original Liberal Arts (a term which literally means, more idiomatically translated from ars liberalis, "skills [needed] of free men") were, funny enough, mostly things that we would consider branches of mathematics today, and thus STEM fields.

First there was the "trivium" (from whence our word "trivial", because these skills were considered so basic and elementary):
- Grammar
- Logic (now considered a branch of mathematics)
- Rhetoric

But then there was the "quadrivium" which followed that:
- Arithmetic (obviously a branch of mathematics)
- Geometry (obviously a branch of mathematics)
- "Music"
- "Astronomy"

The last two are the most interesting ones, because "music" was not about playing instruments or singing, it was essentially harmonics, the study of "number in time"; and likewise, "astronomy" was not about the actual particulars of celestial bodies, but was essentially dynamics, the study of "number in space and time". These complemented geometry as the study of "number in space" and arithmetic as "number in itself".

In short, the quadrivium, which was over half of the original Liberal Arts, was entirely things we'd now consider mathematics; and a third of the remaining portion in the trivium, logic, would also be considered mathematics today. Five sevenths or over 71% of the Liberal Arts were all math subjects.

These were all intended to prepare one for the study of philosophy, which at that time encompassed what would become the natural sciences of today. (In the middle ages philosophy was in turn considered to be essentially in a support role to theology, but of course you'd get that kind of attitude in the continent-wide theocracy that was old Christendom.)

The Liberal Arts were to teach people how to communicate their thoughts coherently, rigorously, and persuasively, and to be able to think quantitatively about things in themselves and also their relations in space and time, all of that for the purpose of conducting the kind of broad and deep critical thinking about of the world we live necessary to live life as a free individual and to preserve the freedom of one's society.

Dismissing all of that for "science lol stem envy much" is the start of the road to serfdom.

I remember when the Redmond faithful used to go on about needing Windows to get "real work" done. My work must not be real because I can do it on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS. I find myself using my Android tablet more and more for work and all my social media promotions.

The operating system is becoming less relevant every day. People are choosing devices, not operating systems.

Just want to say I love the idea in your sig.

First the militarization of small town police departments, SWAT teams for serving routine warrants, rising incidents of shocking brutality and now law enforcement has devolved to the point of being little better than a band of petty thieves. This is getting pathetic and scary. Foreign countries are issuing warnings about the conduct of U.S. law enforcement personnel. Am I the only person who has a problem with that?

Sounds like someone figured out the basis for the holodeck on the Enterprise.

I would think, if the stuff kept flying off the shelf like that (even is only due to one customer), you would just stock more of it and then sell more of it. Stock enough to let her buy all she wants and still have enough left over for everyone else who wants to buy it to get theirs too.

there are always people in third world countries who will do the same work as you for peanuts.

I remember spending hours untangling Bangalore Spaghetti Code. One application used a 2,000 character url string that passed the administrator user name and password in plain text. Cheaper does not mean better. People over there can work for peanuts because they live in cardboard ghettos. Maybe we want our people to have indoor sanitation, running water and electricity.

Maybe we should be considering trade barriers instead of feeling like we need to compete with starvation wages in every third world hell hole on the planet.

All our hopes and dreams revolving around deflecting asteroids and comets all hinge on being able to detect them far enough out to make an intercept. Makes me think we should really reconsider the priority we put on manned space missions, particularly generational missions. Otherwise we stand a good chance of getting snuffed out as a species if we hang around here long enough. Asteroids and comets are not even the most dangerous threats we face.

Reference frame is irrelevant to this question. If you, in whatever reference frame, measure travel distance as 80 mile and speed as 80mph, you will measure travel time as 1 hour. Others in other reference frames may measure different travel times, but they will also measure correspondingly different distances and speeds; and whatever they measure as 80 miles will still take what they measure as 1 hour to traverse at what they measure as 80mph.

Attackers have used the Linux vulnerabilities on unmaintained servers to gain access, escalate privileges to allow remote control of the machine

Holy misleading headline, Batman! Any server that's not maintained is vulnerable, how is this news other than it's a Linux server botnet? OMG unpatched servers are vulnerable to hackers!