I think "Spiderman" is a better story, with more or less the same message. We should replace the Bible with it. And maybe in a thousand years people will have forgotten that it's a fiction.

This is a complete misunderstanding of darwinism, not a flaw in it. Evolution does not happen when random chaotic interactions happen, it happens when three things are there:
- we have "stuff" that can reproduce itself (heredity)
- there are random mutations when the reproduction happens (changes)
- there are limited resources, so not every "stuff" has a chance to reproduce (selection)

Note that 1) it doesn't only apply to organisms but also to molecules, so even random chaotic interactions among atoms form stable structures and 2) the random mutations are only part of the process; without selection there is no evolution.

You may think it's unlikely that evolution via natural selection is the cause of our existence, but there is no doubt that the process of evolution happens and can create complex stuff from seemingly random interactions. It's easy to simulate on a computer. That'll never prove the process happened on earth, but that proves that the process does work as we thought it did.

That sounds much better than the other option: a position where a new contradictory fact couldn't change anything would be blind faith? Science is a quest for truth. If you're searching for truth, you must be able to change your mind. Blind faith, on the opposite is hoping that truth fits your beliefs, and disregarding facts that are contradictory to your beliefs. Is that a better position to be in?

Why wouldn't astrology be scientific? It makes predictions and we can check whether its predictions are good or not, statistically, so it seems perfectly scientific. It has been disproven many times, but that doesn't make it any less scientific, it's just scientific and false.

Nah, that's just an opportunity to go from 9912 to 210001 in one release.

You should try XFCE. I recently made the switch due to un-ending frustration with the new Ubuntu; it mostly looks the same as Gnome 2, or can be configured to, but it's more configurable, and its window manager is better than Metacity. And for some reason the bugs I attributed to my video driver must have been Metacity bugs, since they all disappeared.

It's not a travelling salesman problem, it's a shortest path problem, and as such is much easier. For the distance between two specific people, you'd need the Dijkstra algorithm, and for the distance between any two people, you could use Floyd-Warshall. This one is in O(n^3), where n is the number of users; that's a big number, but it's nowhere near the (supposed) complexity of the TSP.

They should really call it Firefox 1108, and release one per month. If that's too slow, they can just add the day too, Firefox 110816 sounds really advanced.

Playing the lottery is being called a tax on the mathematically challenged because we know the expected payoff is negative. We (reasonable people) don't know the expected payoff of SETI, so it's a bet, not a tax or a scam. Most research is a bet.

(Please note I'm not trying to convince you, as you made it clear with your flat-earther comparison that you can't be convinced. I'm just stating my opinion for the sake of other readers: http://xkcd.com/386/)

First of all, the OP seemed to question de belief that "there is something out there", not the belief that SETI can detect anything. Wikipedia says our galaxy is supposed to contain about 50 billion planets, so the belief that more than one might be inhabited doesn't strike me as unscientific or religious (given that we know of one that is inhabited).

I don't have much hope in SETI as it stands today, but I don't think they expect to catch random radio waves, I think they're hoping to catch a powerfully broadcasted "hello world", from much farther than our own solar system.

I'm not part of SETI, never invested money in SETI and never will, because I don't believe they stand a chance of detecting anything. There goes your 'believer' ad hominem.

I assumed you meant that it was unscientific to believe in ETI today, with our current knowledge, because we only had the Drake equation. Did you mean that we have other evidence that could make it scientific, but the SETI guys only rely on Drake, so they're not scientific? If so, I stand corrected. If not, I think I addressed your argument, but feel free to ignore it and continue feeling unjustly attacked.

I'm wondering how you calculated that probability of [b]ZERO[/b]. I have no idea about the number of advanced civilization out there, but the only one I know of did broadcast messages to potential neighbours. Granted, it did so for a very short time, so that probably wasn't very effective, but it tried, and it might try again.

You probably mean that that probability is not zero, but is too low for us to spend money on it. That would be a bit more reasonable, wouldn't it?

The OP's message claims it is unscientific to believe that there is "something out there", it says nothing about broadcasting EM, or likelyhood of detecting things that actually are out there. There are many good criticisms to SETI's approach, calling it religious or unscientific just isn't one of them.

SETI is about belief that something may be out there. You don't search for something if you don't believe it might exist, what a surprise. What's unscientific is believing, like you seem to do, that we are very special and that there can't be intelligent life on the other billions of planets in the vicinity.

Once upon a time, SETI opponents relied on the fact that we didn't know if there were exoplanets. Now we discovered hundreds of them. What's your theoretical basis for claiming that life can only appear on Earth?

Would you have a reference, regarding Gingko having an impact on healthy citizens? I've done some research in the past and found no study saying that.