You know what's even more frightening? Your post led me to dig a bit into the Fermi paradox and following one link or another I arrived at the commemoration event [35th anniversary of the Wow! signal] at Aresibo. Wiki reads:

In 2012, on the 35th anniversary of the Wow! signal, Arecibo Observatory beamed a response from humanity, containing 10,000 Twitter messages, in the direction from which the signal originated.[13][14] In the response, Arecibo scientists have attempted to increase the chances of intelligent life receiving and decoding the celebrity videos and crowd-sourced Tweets by attaching a repeating sequence header to each message that will let the recipient know that the messages are intentional and from another intelligent life form.[14]

Imagine if the aliens actually get that signal! Celebrity videos? Tweets? I can just imagine the response "Well, obviously there is NO intelligent life on that planet, so we can use it to test our fully armed and operational battle station. Fire at will, commander!"

Depending on how it's implemented, the whole system may depend on a central server that facilitates the initial key exchange (prekeys). That, in itself, seems like a massive compromise vector. Why should users need to trust a third party server for key exchange? It'd be much better to use a system like ZRTP where the users are expected to compare fingerprints out of band.

There is a method of key exchange that doesn't use the server (KeyExchangeMessage), but it isn't clear whether the user gets to choose which method is used (or whether there is even a system to verify fingerprints). On the [ convenient --- secure ] scale, this system looks to be dialed way toward convenient. Transparent to the users, both for good and bad.

" I'd say the more you believe in the 10 Commandments, the less happy you should be about them being used a political cudgel."

Religion is not more and not different than Superstitious politics, so the cudgel is required and has a divine mandate.

I see what you did there.

One need not be "religious" to oppose Theism any more than one need be superstitious to oppose Superstition.

Their motivation (objecting to Superstition can be valid disagreement and protest without being "hate") is irrelevant to their Constitutional rights.

If one group can make monuments to their _beliefs_ on public ground, so can others.

"A better question is this: what is this article from the transportation age doing here in the information age?"

One word: Dicedot.

Uhhh...why would they want to? The cell phone market is a shark tank right now, between the big Chinese companies like ZTE and Huawei cranking out some nice low end smartphones to LG and their sliders to Samsung dominating the high end frankly they couldn't pick a worse time to be a hardware maker.

Say what you will about the deal but they kept all the profitable bits and sold the ones that were going downhill, a smart move in my book. Thanks to Android being the Windows of mobile you'll see a huge race to the bottom and while Samsung may be able to carve out a slice at the high end everybody else? Having to make due on razor thin margins.

Typing is maybe #1 among the courses in highschool that I remember and that has had a concrete benefit to me. That said, each of my kids has been taught keyboard in 3rd or 4th grade so it's not highschool material any more.

"SIXTH COMMANDMENT Thou shalt not kill. "

There is disagreement on that from some quarters where "kill" is interpreted as "do murder". Murder is vague enough in a Superstitious sense to allow killing anyone.

Polling on interracial marriage showed it increased in acceptance at a fairly steady rate of 1% per year.
Polls show acceptance of gay marriage rising 2% per year. It's currently about 55% support vs 39% against.

Approval of gay marriage is overwhelming among the younger generation, who largely view it as a civil rights issue. The strongest opposition among senior citizens, who are literally dropping dead day by day. There is nothing that can stand against the force of a generational shift.

You lost this fight. You lost this fight several years ago. YOU are the gadfly that has been swatted. Get used to the word "bigot", because you're going to be hearing increasingly often.

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It takes almost noting to design in user access to batteries, RAM, hard disks and other parts.

The main reason to block upgrades is to coerce replacement, and that makes sense when your target market can easily afford to replace their computers often.

The Thumpers aren't going to change and the point isn't to change minds of those permanently locked into Superstition.

The way to fight Superstition is to expose how it works. The reaction of the Thumpers will blow back and make them look even more foolish.

No believe should be free from discussion, including satire and ridicule, Not mine, yours, or theirs. The goal of Superstition is not to compete in the marketplace of ideas, but to control the market. Some Superstitionists still kill those who don't obey their version. but all lies are toxic.

Try driving away on a slippery surface on a slight inclination with a car with traction control. You'll never get anywhere, unless you can disable it.

Where did you get that idea? Watch this video, starting 34 seconds in.

And how exactly does panspermia get a lift here? It's not as if catching a lift in interstellar space would have been any easier at that stage than now. I suspect with the level of energetic activity from quasars and the like, it would have been even less likely.

Even Tolkien got a little irritated with CS Lewis's rather simplistic take. CS Lewis was a lot of things, but what he never was, no matter how much those who so dearly love to quote him may believe it, any kind of learned Biblical and theological scholar. At least Tolkien had the decency to stay away from the kind of allegorical Christianity that so damaged Lewis's works.

At any rate, even if I considered someone like St. Thomas Aquinas a far more potent Christian theologian, I still think their beliefs are utter claptrap. Building a more complex and consistent mythology doesn't make it any less a mythology.