Properties of minds are subjective, your deity has a mind, ergo your purpose is subjective. Objective purpose makes as much sense as elephant beaks.

No it really isn't. One is an ontological statement "deities exist". The other is just expressing a preference "my life is worth living, regardless of deities existing". The number of assumptions you have to make to justify the first is far larger, and they are far less intuitive. To accept that I believe my life is worth living you have to accept that I exist, that I am alive, and that I think my life is worth living. I can provide evidence for all of these things that I suspect will meet your standards. You are unlikely to be able to provide me with sufficient evidence that deities exist.

Agreed. I also like to keep in mind that while we can be objective about the facts (almost all nuclear plants release hardly any extra radiations say, or that the rates of extreme failure modes (meltdowns, etc) have been repeatedly underestimated), we cant be objective when it comes to things like how much we value our children's future over our grandchildren's. These aren't really things which are objective and so even when we have all the facts we can still disagree about what the right course of action is.
We also have to deal with the how many 'facts' aren't facts because people more interested in getting their own way than in truth have distorted the issue (from both sides, although more harmfully from the nuclear industry in my opinion). Whether it is the nuclear industry failing to disclose the real nature of accidents or environmentalists producing misleading estimates of extra cancer cases it seems hardly anyone cares about the truth in this issue any more and leaves me with serious doubts about what I can and cant trust.

You are wasting your time I'm afraid. There are just too many people out there who cant imagine how anyone could come to a different perspective on controversial issues and how abuse of rhetoric can be polarising. If you can please take comfort in the fact that while I disagree with your point of view I can understand how someone with different facts, experiences and values could come to a different conclusion about nuclear power to the one I have. I appreciate your efforts to keep the discourse civil.

H1b isn't immigration, it is indentured servitude. You want to take the H1b program and replace it by giving more green cards to skilled individuals we can talk.

You think companies using the government to distort the labour market and engaging in global price fixing is capitalism?

Scrap the H1B program and give more foreign tech workers green cards and we will talk about capitalism. Indentured servitude does not make a free market.

Stop government fixing currency rates for the express benefits of large corporations and to the detriment of smaller players and we will talk. Price fixing does not make a free market.

Stop taxing labour at a far higher rate than corporate activity thus making the labour market favour the buyer and we will talk. Effective monopsony pricing does not make a free market.

Capitalism my arse.

I'm running a custom kernel on my netbook because the integrated graphics on the shitty motherboard wasn't supported by the version in the then contemporary version of Ubuntu (or Mint, or a couple of other distros I was looking at). I know what a kernel is. I still run Ubuntu. I will probably switch my personal machines over to Mint next time I decide I want a change, but most of the time Ubuntu just works and the forums are useful and friendly. Probably because they aren't populated by people who don't consider someone who doesn't know what a kernel is a 'real' user.

Context? For genocide.

You are justifying genocide, and to do it you are advocating tyranny. There is a difference between the computer programs I write and the people that YHWH mercilessly slaughters, the computer programs I write are not sentient. If I create twenty thousand synthetic intelligences and then delete them then I am guilty of genocide and an thoroughly unpleasant individual unworthy of worship.
Why the quotes around genocide there by the way? If I intentionally slaughtered two entire cities worth of people and wiped out their culture what crime do you suggest I am guilty of?
Besides YHWH is supposed to be omniscient and omnipotent, he cant 'fuck up'. Extermination and death as a punishment for failing to comply precisely with his instructions are part of his plan. And the reasoning you are espousing here has been used to justify wholesale slaughters through the years.

And this is exactly my point, one cannot simply avoid 'enduring' the Bible by not reading it. The reasoning it promotes, the beauty of it's poetry and allegory, the foundation of much of the Western tradition (for better and for worse) is infused with that documents legacy.

I've never read Twilight. I still have to endure it in the sense it is a part of wider culture. It is allowed to be a part of wider culture and I have to put up with it to the extent that this represents a collection of everyone else freedom of expression. I'm allowed to not be happy about it.

That said I agree there is some wisdom in the Bible, and some good poetry too. Same goes for the Quran and the Vedas and a whole bunch of other holy text. They didn't end up holy texts by accident.

On the other hand you quoted that nice poetic section of Ecclesiastes immediately after referencing us to a section in which YHWH commits one of his minor genocides and punishes a woman for the grave sin of checking over her shoulder. All this shortly before an act of incest which due to constraints of the lineage had to be an essential part of his plan. I'm sure there are some good bits in Twilight too, doesn't mean I don't consider it the female equivalent of rape porn.

No, as much as it would be nice to split things up like this the real world is messier.

You have implicitly labelled the UK as a constitutional monarchy, but it really isn't if we are going to be as literal as you are. It is more like a theocracy if we are talking about how the power is supposed to be derived. Of course how the power is *supposed* to be derived doesn't matter as much as how it is actually sourced, something you clearly recognise because you highlight the sovereign role of the people in a republic.

Both the UK and the US are a mixture of oligarchy, republic, democracy and theocracy, but they are by an large oligarchies. Ironically more so the US than the UK because the US has legalised bribery on a massive scale. Both have democratic components which can override the oligarchs wishes acting as a sort of ultimate veto, and in both the pretence of republican values have to be maintained which affects the politics.

The simplest thing to do is to label both the US and the UK as representative democracies and be done with it, recognising that the meaning of the word democracy here reflects the ultimate way in which power is distributed.

The Muslim Brotherhood are getting attacked because they are taking precisely the step necessary to ensure Egypt has one and only one free and fair election. Yes this move to free software is a good thing and indicates they aren't prepared to be tied to Western corporate control, but at the same time the new constitution and the resulting permanent sectarian divide it will set up is not good for Egypt. People in the West are criticising it because we have made similar mistakes in our past, and paid for them with dictatorships.

Okay, can you cite a peer reviewed publication which makes that prediction (a new ice age) with the certainty you claim? Time magazine is not a peer reviewed publication and if you get your science from the media then you will just get bad science. Back in the 70s, even though global temperatures had been reasonably stable (or possibly declining) most scientists were predicting global warming would dominate global dimming. As the evidence of the last 40 years came in most scientists (who were defying the current trend of global temperatures) because almost all scientists, at least the ones who do climate research.

Your bad science teacher and the fact that science journalists aren't worth a piss in the ocean doesn't mean the scientists had it wrong. Go read the peer reviewed literature, I promise you for ever paper you have implying we may be approaching another ice age I can find 3 going the other way.

You know you don't have to rely on Time magazine and unnamed researchers (I actually know which ones you are referring to in so far as the ones proposing global dimming would have a significant effect, although Time couldn't get them to go on record to say what they wanted so they had to invent a source - 'climatalogical cassandras'). You can read the peer reviewed literature. You know the problem with doing that? As far back as the 1970s researchers were, broadly speaking, predicting global warming. There wasn't a consensus and they was plenty of doubt, but more thought the greenhouse effect would dominate.

You might want to go take a closer butchers at those cycles, the thing that amplifies them from little changes in temperature to big swings is CO2, precisely the gas we are now dumping into the atmosphere.

Agreed. I've used a fair chunk of languages and you can learn from each of them (although sometimes what you learn is 'don't do things this way', I'm looking at your early versions of Visual Basic and all versions of brainfuck (i still prefer brainfuck to VB though). Python isn't perfect and it isn't for everyone (some people get real grumpy about meaningful white space), but if you haven't programmed before then it is a good place to start. If not python then something designed with teaching in mind, say Pascal. You will eventually want to pick up something like C and you wont be a complete programmer till you've written at least one piece of software which is full of buffer overflows, misused pointers and mallocs that don't do what you think they do, but you don't have to start there. Also worth giving something like Haskell a go just to screw with your brain. But start with something like python.

We did. The result of the thinking and design process was the ILC. Now we have thought for a bit and come to the conclusion that to examine our thinking we need an accelerator. The ILC has been on the drawing board for a long time now, we have known we would need it since before the LHC even began construction. Now don't get me wrong, I would love it if your idea was put into practice, I'm a theoretician. But basic research needs experiments, I cant do everything on my own and funding me to the exclusion of my experimental peers would be a waste of the taxpayers money I'm sorry to say.