Have you actually used a Norton product (e.g., 360) in the last couple of years? They used to have a bad reputation (and a well-deserved one at that) but their recent offerings are leaps and bounds better than the bloatware of the past.

The example that I always like to use is the Big Bang, which was first formulated by Monsignor Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian priest. At the time that it was proposed, it received significant disdain from the astronomical community, since most astronomers at that time believed that the Universe was eternal and static (the so-called "steady state") -- they felt that a beginning of space and time at some point in the finite past crossed over into the realm of religion and philosophy. On the other hand, the religious community (by and large) welcomed the Big Bang with open arms, since it was in accordance with the creation accounts of their particular belief systems.

But in the 80 years or so since the advent of the Big Bang theory, a funny (and depending on your point of view, sad) thing has happened: The two camps have almost completely switched sides. As the evidence came in, most astronomers and cosmologists came to accept the Big Bang. They saw the confirmation of Hubble's observations regarding the redshift of distant galaxies, the discovery of the CMBR, the evidence that the distribution of baryonic matter in the Universe is consistent with what is predicted by Big Bang nucleosynthesis, etc.

Unfortunately, for those segments of the religious community that have been hijacked by the rise of fundamentalism / fanaticism in the last 50 years or so, the Big Bang was no longer "good enough". The idea that the Universe came about in a dramatic cataclysm ("in the beginning...") became unacceptable since the timescale called for billions of years, rather than the six thousand or so that are dictated by a rigid literalist interpretation of the appropriate holy writ. It's not good enough that the prevailing scientific theory on the origin of the Universe calls for a beginning -- it's not fundamentalist enough.

The idea that science and religion are incompatible is poisonous and civilization-threatening. Getting back to the example, the idea that religious folks, of all people, should be opposed to the Big Bang theory is completely baffling. If I live to be a thousand years old, I'll never understand it. There's no shortage of beauty in modern science or ancient teachings; the conflicts (such as they are) are largely manufactured. And as you mention, the rising fundamentalist movement is a major player in this enterprise.

There's a difference between a troll and a crank. Ludwig was a crank.

The concept of compos mentis has been around for centuries. As it pertains to medicine, it is almost always a decision made by an individual's doctor.

The only role that "the government" has in the realm of assisted suicide is to establish the legal framework under which it operates. That's it. The decision to initiate the process must be made by a terminally-ill person of sound mind, and it must then be concurred with and carried out by medical professionals. Doctors, not bureaucrats. You're suggesting that "the government" will initiate and carry out the process on people that it considers to be (for whatever reason) undesirable, and that puts you squarely in the black helicopter and tinfoil hat camp.

Welcome to 1996, Tennessee!

Why do you assume that our "present models of the world" are insufficient to explain the existence of extraterrestrial life?

Apples and oranges.

Extraterrestrial intelligence, if it exists, is not (necessarily) supernatural.

Agreed 100%. We live in a society where adjectives like "educated" and "intellectual" are used as epithets rather than compliments.

The long-term prognosis for such a society is grim, to say the least.

...but I'm going to join the chorus of voices here.

Saying that something in the natural sciences is "just a theory" or "still a theory" belies a certain misunderstanding about the scientific method. It suggests a belief in a mythical finish line that an idea can cross, thereby making the transition from "theory" to "law". Natural science does not work in this way. Natural science is not in the business of "proving" anything. If you're interested in proof, you should become a mathematician.

Put another way, a physicist with a baseball in his hand does not say "If I throw this ball up in the air, I shall prove that it will return to the ground." Rather, he (or she) says "If I throw this ball up in the air, I *predict* that it will return to the ground."

You see, that is what natural science is about: theories and predictions. A scientific theory rises and falls on the basis of how well it explains past and present phenomena and how well it predicts future phenomena. If it fails to do this, it is amended, tinkered with, or (in some cases) outright discarded. But from a scientific perspective, there is never a point where scientists declare victory and make the claim that they have discovered universal, unswerving truth.

...is that Colbert's audience is in on the joke.

Both men are playing characters, but (by and large) only one of their audiences has picked up on that fact.

I remember occasionally hearing Beck's radio show on the weekend several years ago (before he got his nightly program on CNN/HLN). It was mainly stream-of-consciousness ranting and skits, and most of it was not even overtly political. And in his early days at CNN, it was more of the same. But then a funny thing happened. Beck gradually discovered that as he made exploratory leaps into the realm of right-wing paranoia, he generated more buzz (e.g., message boards and link aggregation sites on the Internet) and got higher ratings.

And so in the mid-2000s, the character that Beck plays on TV slowly evolved into what it is today. And much like primeval hominids making the leap from the trees onto the savanna, Beck's move from CNN to Fox News coincided with him turning up the right-wing crazy to 11 and ripping off the knob.

I don't know what Beck's personal politics are. For all we know, he may be a raging liberal in his private life. But he's not dumb -- he knows what side his bread is buttered on, he is acutely aware of the fear, prejudice, and (yes) ignorance of his core audience, he plays them like a piano, and he's laughing all the way to the bank. Under normal circumstances, I'd say more power to him. Unfortunately, he's also fostering an environment of alarming rancor and derangement in American society -- and that's something that he's going to have to live with long after he's gone off the air.

Part of the problem is that anybody who proposes DoD cuts is immediately labeled a dangerous agitator who wants to embolden our enemies and put American lives at risk. There's a large and well-funded industry that's dedicated to perpetuating this myth, and they're frighteningly effective at their job. If we're to ever get the deficit situation under control, it will require a certain degree of maturity from the electorate -- along with the realization that there's enough pork in the defense budget to make a bacon replica of the Hoover Dam.

We also need a certain degree of maturity and a solidly-grounded perspective on taxes, as well -- but that's neither here nor there.

I guess with my sewer-mouth, I won't need to apply for an astronaut post anywhere.

Well, you could have always flown with Pete Conrad.

I'd have to agree with Quiet_Desperation on this -- gaming is really subjective.

Personally, I loved Fallout 3. The typical response to this is "Yeah, well, that's because you didn't play the original games." While I didn't play Fallout 2, I did play the original Fallout, and I also played the hell out of Wasteland a full decade before that (I suspect that relatively few people can make this claim). So I'm not lacking for "classic Fallout cred". While Fallout 3 was not a perfect game (no game is), it was still one of the most immersive and enjoyable experiences I've had in a game for quite some time.

I mean, seriously -- at one point you're raiding the National Air and Space Museum to retrieve the S-band transmitter from the Apollo lunar lander so that you can hang it off of the top of the Washington Monument to get a pirate radio station back on the air. How can you not have fun doing that?

I'd agree that New Vegas (also a terrific game) was a bit closer to the spirit of the original Fallout; it went back to the traditional desert setting, it brought back things like character traits that provided both bonuses and impediments, and more of the choices that you made during your adventure affected the eventual outcome of the game (and even that was not absent from Fallout 3, despite what others have said). But that doesn't mean that Fallout 3 wasn't a truly great game (Game of the Year, as it were).

To me, "Oblivion with guns" is not an insult at all -- it's a compliment. Hell, elsewhere in this thread there are highly-rated comments stating that truly great sequels cannot simply be MOTS (more of the same), and yet many of the people who disparage Fallout 3 do so on the basis that it's a departure from the formula of the first two games. Make up your mind, folks.

Speaking of ego and nostalgia, I was also reminded of the story about how Jerry Pournelle got kicked off of the ARPAnet.