Religion is very easy to reach and abuse.

Flip it around - there are billions of religious people who don't kill anyone

How many of them don't kill because they just think it's wrong? And how many say "Wow, I sure would have liked to have killed someone except my religion says it's wrong." Only in the latter case does religion deserve any credit.

But the desire to kill comes from within

Yes. But it takes an organizing philosophy to rally others around you to commit atrocities. Religion is very, very good for that. As such, religion is highly dangerous. It's like ordnance left lying around, just waiting for the right terrorist to come along and use it.

miss the fact that it doesn't take religion to convince people to kill and otherwise mistreat one another

That is true. But religion provides a very powerful organizing principle for sociopaths to justify their actions and to convince others that they're right. In this way, religion is similar to other theoretically-fine but practically-disgusting ideologies such as communism.

Science can prove nothing. The scientific process is all about coming up with a theory of how things work and then looking for evidence that disproves it. If such evidence is found, then the theory is refined to take it into account. In that way, ideally, scientific theories converge on the truth... but there's no way to prove they're true.

Linking science with god is ridiculous. It's like saying we can prove mathematically the existence of invisible pink unicorns. The sentence may be syntactically correct, but it has no meaning.

I'm not much of a gamer, but the Unicomp keyboards are excellent for typing. They are, however, quite noisy, so may not be appropriate for a crowded office.

If you have games that require abuse of the keyboard, I would not use an expensive mechanical keyboard... let the games kill the cheapie membrane ones.

I don't have any Model Ms, but I do own a bunch of Unicomp keyboards that use the same technology. Anyway, my kids were definitely not brought up on those keyboards, but after trying them they absolutely fell in love with them. I haven't tried any of the other mechanical keyboards in the original article, but I think the Unicomp keyboards are miles ahead of membrane or laptop keyboards.

I'm basically a fairly liberal person, but when I read about "progressive" scientists wanting to "construct new strategies for parenting", my inner reactionary boils over.

I have three kids ranging in age from 12 to 20. I agree that spanking is a bad strategy; I never used it. I also agree that timeouts are useless, especially for very young kids. For very young kids, a stern reprimand delivered immediately after the undesired behaviour usually works. For older kids, removing a privilege is quite effective provided you don't make empty threats. Don't threaten anything you're not prepared to carry through; kids can smell a bluff a mile away.

But letting a kid cry it out until they sleep through the night? That's a godsend. My first daughter was not sleeping through the night even at 11 months. Finally one night I said "That's it, I don't care how hard she screams, we are NOT going in there."

It was a couple of hours of hell. And then 19 years of bliss.

All you really need to be a decent parent is to love your children and to have common sense. Unfortunately, the latter is sometimes in short supply, especially among people "on a mission to change parenting." That itself is a cringeworthy label.

Won't that cause lots of radiation?

... I apologize for my somewhat undiplomatic language, but the current wire payment system is a cluster-fuck of fail.

My company is based in Canada and accepts wire payments from Canada, the US, Europe, Australia, South Africa and the Middle East. Half the time, we see mysterious deposits appearing in our account without any useful identification. We ask our customers to specify invoice numbers when they make a payment. Sometimes that comes through. Mostly it does not. Sometimes we don't even get any indication as to who the money is from.

So then we need to phone our bank and they take days to track down who just paid us. It's a total nightmare.

I'd welcome wholeheartedly anything that can improve the situation.

Bush was spinning; it was all PR to avoid fanning the flames. But he was wrong. Islam is not peace; it is war by definition, since Muslims are commanded to convert non-Muslims by force.

the majority who peacefully practice that same religion

You cannot peacefully practice Islam. It is simply not possible. Islam divides the world into Muslims (dar al Islam) and non-Muslims (dar al harb, literally house of war) and Muslims are commanded to convert non-Muslims by force. This is a fundamental tenet of Islam.

Those millions of peacful Muslims we all hear about are simply choosing to ignore or rationalize away the parts of Islam they choose not to practice.

That is precisely the danger of Islam. The vile aspects of it appeal to the mentally ill and unstable and turn them into jihadis.

I'm not sure if BarbaraHudson is herself "t" in LGBTt, but perhaps she should study Islamic response to homosexuality and transgenderism before defending Islam.

What I find terrifying is how quickly supposedly intelligent people descend into clumping massive groups of people together and scream terrorist.

Look, Islam itself is quite objectively disgusting. There are so many horrible things in the religion that I don't really want to enumerate them here for you; just do a Google search.

The only reason most Muslims are not violent is that most Muslims reject or rationalize away the disgusting parts of Islam. However, the underlying vile philosophy persists and periodically infects the minds of vulnerable losers, turning them into jihadis. At some point, the Western world has to ask itself it can tolerate this dangerous ideology to spread within our societies or if we need to take proactive action ourselves to monitor what's being taught and expel those who preach extermism.

Most Muslims are peaceful, but Islam itself is a noxious brew of racism, hatred and barbarity. The only reason most Muslims are peaceful is that they're human enough to reject the horrible parts of their religion.

What's really needed is an Islamic reformation that purges the Qu'ran and other Islamic religious texts of all the disgusting passages. But that, alas, is blasphemy and will never happen. Instead, Islam will continue infecting vulnerable people and turning them into killers, just like some sort of infectious mental illnes.

I think a similar "market peak" will eventually occur with phones in the near future

I'm not sure about that. Apple is extremely good at driving people to buy new things as a fashion statement, even if the underlying technology is more-or-less the same. That's the problem: Consumer electronic goods are becoming fashion items and that's extremely bad for the environment.

As for another poster who wrote Shitty firmware and an abandoned or poorly supported product is a perfectly good reason to throw something out, well maybe. But I was talking about old, perfectly functional devices.