Not a whole lot more to say on the subject. Do some swings and get-ups once or twice a day, and you'll be fit and trim. Unless you eat trash and guzzle carbonated sugar water all day. In which case, you're fucked no matter what you do.

You'd know it if you saw it. It's unmistakable, and it's breathtaking, the first time you see it in all its glory. I remember the first time like it was yesterday. I was 10, and at a summer camp in the wilds of West Virginia, right next to a national forest. 50 miles to the nearest city, nearest small town was ~10 miles away. I was out walking across the athletic field one night, and happened to look up. Nearly fell over, because the milky way was so astonishingly bright and beautiful. I grew up in a city, too, and I'd had no idea what an unpolluted night sky looked like.

You should make it happen, at least once in your life. Really helps to put things in perspective.

I won't argue that there isn't something wrong with the fact that those businesses paid so little in taxes, but I do wonder why your ire seems to be directed at the businesses themselves, rather than the dysfunctional government which allows the loopholes. If what they did is legal, then why wouldn't they take advantage of the loopholes to preserve value for themselves and their shareholders? When you do your taxes, do you take all of the deductions available to you, or do you take some sort of moral high road out of patriotic duty? I'm annoyed that my net worth isn't enough to let me play the same games. Hoping that the US tax system will become fair is useless. What most folks don't recognize is that making adjustments to the tax code is a powerful tool for Congress-critters to reward or punish friends and foes. Probably more powerful than earmarks, because it's subtle.

Bob is a PINK unicorn, you damned dirty heathen!

I don't typically respond to ACs, but I'm genuinely curious about what I got wrong. Please enlighten me.

What's your point, exactly? That my faith in the logic of math and science is equivalent to Sarah Palin's faith in the veracity of Genesis as an explanation for why we're all here? If so, that's pretty stupid. You seem to be saying that because I abdicate responsibility for understanding every detail of how the A320 I'm in gets and stays in the air, that I've put faith in someone else and therefore it's exactly the same thing as placing faith in L. Ron Hubbard's claim that Galactic Overlord Xenu blew up billions of rebels on Earth 85 million years ago and their souls hang around to cause mental illness today.

Yeah, that makes sense, thanks for pointing it out. I never would have made that connection.

My theory, having been raised fundamentalist Pentecostal and losing the scales over my eyes in my late teens: Religious people fall into one of three categories:

1. Completely incurious and uninterested in anything which contradicts or otherwise isn't addressed by a literal interpretation of their scripture (never mind that the scripture often contradicts itself!).
2. Recognize that religious belief is not necessarily completely logical but are OK with that and don't try too hard to reconcile religion and science beyond a weak "god of the gaps" approach.
3. Some combination of the two, usually moving in the direction of 1 -> 2... In my experience, this is the dangerous time for religious belief, as a person with enough curiosity and/or intelligence will begin to recognize how completely illogical (and perhaps damaging) fundamentalist belief is, and may well become completely disillusioned with the whole thing. An individual starting on the 2 side of things may not feel that religious belief is as pernicious as one moving from 1 -> 2 and may be more comfortable with keeping it as part of their cultural identity.

So to more directly answer your question, most religious people aren't interested in trying to develop a more nuanced form of belief, because it requires a LOT of work! If A is actually possible, then maybe B is too, and well let's think about C too, oh, and then there's D..Q, etc. etc. I suspect that this mental shuffling is why personal-belief style religions (e.g. evangelical christianity) tend to attract more rigid people than hierarchical and paternalistic religions (e.g. catholicism, eastern orthodox, islam, etc), where the thinking is done by a select few who get a lot of reinforcement from their peers (other clerics) and the predigested Deep Thoughts are passed down to the faithful who happily believe without taking responsibility for forming the basis of their belief.

Have you ever actually met one of these people who devoutly and fervently believe in the non-existence of God? Really? Insecure theists love to imagine (at some level, perhaps not concretely) that there is some kind of Anti-Church where all the Atheists go every Sunday and not-believe in their God. The idea that there could be people who don't believe in anything in particular just Does Not Compute for them.

For most of human history, the vast majority of us have all believed in the existence something other than the physical world (be it a well-developed mythos like modern religions, or simple animism, or something in-between). The concept of just plain old not-believing is not something those who have been steeped in belief are wired to "get". At least people who believe in something else are comprehendible (but WRONG!) to them.

The reality, as so many other have pointed out, is that atheism is a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby. Or to go all Zen about it: A Believer asked a non-believer what he believed in. The non-believer replied, "Mu." The Believer was not enlightened, and went away more confused and hostile than ever.

A useless distinction to allow insecure folks some kind of pointless illusion of non-confrontational middle ground. Either you're a Believer, or you're not. Period. Have some courage in your (non-)convictions.

Lustre is pretty cool, but it's not magic pixie dust. It won't break the laws of physics and somehow make a single node faster than it would be as a NFS server. It's for situations when a single file server doesn't have the bandwidth to handle lots of simultaneous readers and writers. A "small" Lustre filesystem these days usually has 8-16 object storage servers serving mid-high tens of TB. The high end filesystems have literally hundreds of OSSes and multiple PB served. The largest I know of right now is the 5PB Spider filesystem at Oak Ridge National Labs.

One nice thing about Lustre on the low end is that you can grow it... Start out small and add new OSSes and OSTs as you need them. This often makes sense in Life Sciences and digital animation scenarios where the initial fast storage needs are unknown or the initial budget is limited (but expected to grow). But if you're never planning to get beyond the capacity of a single node or two, Lustre is just going to be overhead. I don't know much about the other clustered filesystem options.

You do realize that words have commonly-accepted meanings, right? Your argument makes as much sense as me going around claiming that up is down and black is white and insist that because there's no institute of official English language my use of those words is perfectly valid.

"ir" == "not"
"regard" == "consideration"
"less" == "without"

ir- + regard + -less == "not (without consideration)" == "worthy of consideration"

Yes, one could argue that "irregardless" is a valid grammatical construction, but it's invariably used to mean the opposite of what the construction would imply (to anyone who gives a shit about language and effective communication of ideas).