Anyone who calls AGW a "religion" should be taken with a grain of salt.

Ever heard of nylonase?

But it's still the same "kind" of animal. Therefore evolution is false.

I have no idea what you mean by "right-in-their-face boots-on-the-ground reality." I'm not a physicist, but to my knowledge, classical mechanics and such are essentially solved. It sounds to me like you're criticizing physics for becoming complex while investigating a complex reality. If it's too complex for a layperson to understand, well that's just too damn bad -- what's true is true.

Don't tell the politicians that. Anything that could get them to prioritize education and science in this country is worth it. If it takes fear of China, then so be it.

Should a university fire an employee just for believing God created the world in six days? No -- although if they're a cosmologist, that will certainly have an impact on the quality of their publications.

Should a university fire an employee just for believing God created life on Earth? No -- although if they're a biologist, that's not a good sign.

Should a university fire an employee just for believing the Earth is 6,000 years old? No -- although if they're a geologist, I'm not sure how they'll get any work done.

But this is is a situation that just doesn't occur. I get the feeling that too many of these people watched Ben Stein's propaganda piece Expelled and got all up in arms about it. Well you know what, if Texas wants itself to become an educational wasteland, so be it; I'll just move somewhere else.

My guess is he meant "distribution," but seeing how he keeps using that same word it's anyone's guess.

Oh, the irony! It burns! Nintendo thinks cheap games are a risk to the industry? I guess that means the Wii is one of the biggest threats to the industry ever created.

Most human attributes have a genetic component, if not necessarily an obvious one, or a simple one, or a direct one. Why not religion?

I guess they saw what was going on in Egypt and felt jealous.

Are any of them made of marble?

Funny, I was just trying to install ProFTP on Debian stable yesterday. Couldn't get it to work at all.

I've already merged with my chair, so this works out perfectly for me.

Utilitarianism is prescriptive in that it says "the best outcome is X, so you should work to achieve X."

While utilitarianism works in theory, the problem is that it only works in theory. It seems to make sense to say "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few", but when you get down to it, who gets to make those decisions? As Dostoevsky showed, no one should try to play games with peoples' lives.