“But I don’t see how one’s going to start a newspaper stunt without being political. Is it Left or Right papers that are going to print all this rot?”

“Both, honey, both,” said Miss Hardcastle. “Don’t you understand anything? Isn’t it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and terrified of the other? That’s how things get done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us–to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is.”

“I don’t believe you can do that,” said Mark. “Not with the papers that are read by educated people.”

“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader that can be gulled. All our difficulty comes from the others. When did you meet a workman who believes in the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair Flats. He is our problem. We need to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They are all right already. They’ll believe anything.”

I have to disagree. Those labels change from family to family and even person to person depending on their personal beliefs, their church, sect and priest/pastor/rabbi ..... Unless you are talking about absolute fundamentalists. The truth is a person's religion gives you a possible look into a person's values but it will not be accurate enough to rely on.

He should stick to something he KNOWS about - like biology.

His other claims are largely bias - uninformed by fact or context.

There were protests about the film in Libya. How does his "theocracy" argument even apply to a country that was a secular state - more like Cuba? Iran, with a religious institution at the head of government, saw no such unrest.

Dawkins is a bigot. He unfortunately uses his impressive scientific and academic credentials to bolster the audience for his bigotry, and conflate the domains of his expertise to support his prejudice.

I presumed that it meant that they will fade away for hundreds of billions of years (into the future).

... Others fade away slowly over hundreds of billions of years, longer than the cosmos has been around.

Frohlich analyzed 67 earthquakes recorded between November 2009 and September 2011 in a 43.5-mile (70 kilometers) grid covering northern Texas' Barnett Shale formation. He found that all 24 of the earthquakes with the most reliably located epicenters originated within 2 miles (3.2 km) of one or more injection wells for wastewater disposal.

Pity that there is now a bunch of lunatics trying to make printable guns. The world will not be a better place when everyone and their dog can download and print their own guns.

Everyone on /. already knows correlation != causation. People that drink 2L bottles of soda on a regular basis are going to high higher BPA and higher obesity.

Just happened to hear an NPR interview on the way back to the office. The researcher described most of the 80% as regulating the expression of the protein codes. Brace yourself Slashdot: he called it the 'operating system'.

A lathe might work for a pistol, but for any rifle that uses a modern cartridge with modern powders, a lathe isn't going to cut it.

Where do you live that these groups don't overlap much?

before WW2 most people could barely read or not read at all and the only job they could get was working on a farm. serving in the military and getting some war booty was more exciting. back in those days graduating high school was a major achievement.

now in the first world the vast majority of people know how to read, have a high school education and a lot have higher education degrees. why would these people want to join the army, crawl through the mud and be shot at or blown up? for minimum wage salary?

Except Americans. Unless it matches their beliefs in religon, politics, nature and economics.