I would blow Baroness Thatcher for a fission powered hover duck.

> And for people like HR reps, it would be better for everybody if we paid them to do nothing. Fucking nazis.

Agreed - I think they're damaging to society in general. They make it much more difficult to move jobs until you find something that works for you *and* the employer. They make it easier for the more dickheaded corporates to impose draconian working conditions.

I honestly wish they'd just fuck off and die en-masse in a fire.

It's the ultimate measure of biomass.

To be fair, if you spend any time on the Youtube hot-button topics like Creationism, you'll find that people can believe some seriously outré things.

It strikes me that widespread use of antivirals and antibiotics to treat obvious conditions will tend to favour the evolution of pathogens with unobvious results.

It's not difficult to imagine pathogens that are very hard to culture or otherwise detect which nevertheless cause immune flare-ups.

Evolution happens quite quickly at the microscopic level. Even at the small arthropod scale, I've seen big changes in insecticide resistance since I was a child. Fly sprays would kill flies with impressive effect when I was young, yet I now have a big can of permethrin insecticide that I've used once or twice and then given up on because it just doesn't work. Malathion-based nit solutions used to work. Now, they do not.

The generation time at the microscopic scale is a lot shorter.

Some seems to have created a platform game called 'Escape Goat', but sadly, there's no equivalent for 'Seating Duck'. It cries out to be given life as a companion to Toilet Duck, though, maybe as a way of gamma-irradiating toilet seats when you live in a house full of aim-challenged hairless proto-simians.

Science is a set of *methods*, an aspect of which is that to qualify as science you have to apply the methodology in all cases, not just the ones that aren't connected to your chosen superstition.

Meh, give me Saronite.

> I seriously doubt that Aristotle could have comprehended calculus or designed a Mars rover.

Based on the fond imagining that evolution has made *that* much difference in 150 generations?

For God's sake lose the apostrophe from 'Hand's'.

> That's hardly the scenario I'd be hoping to find myself in.

It would be relatively easy to establish a fitness criterion wherein you'd be happy about being rogered by The Man, day after day, year after year, until you die of overwork. It would become part of your moral imperative. Spooky, innit?

I'm pretty sure that the Devil has all the best lawyers.

(Speaking as an otherwise atheistic individual).

Assuming you could make the power transfer practical, there's nothing to stop you from implementing an identification protocol over the inductive connection. Sure, it could be spoofed, but at the end of the day, *anything* can.

> good reason why things like evolution and the big bang theory should remain

hmmm...

I, rather naively, thought that the reason for these theories was grounded in the science rather than in political expediency.

I've been using the 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 KDE install, along with 64-bit Windows 7. I had a couple of teething troubles with Ubuntu, and no problems whatsoever with W7. I've been using Linux off and on since the version 1 Slackware floppy distribution. I've seen Linux grow and change, and I've seen the same with Windows. The early versions of Windows were terrible, but there has been slow improvement over time. The worst mistakes made by Microsoft were the 'user as Admin' security policy, and the tremendous own-goal represented by ActiveX.

Windows 7 is tremendously reliable, fast on my AMD-Turion equipped Acer laptop, and it looks nice. I honestly don't understand the vitriol.