Australia may be as big as the US, but what about population density? If 90% of it's people live in 10% of the area in one country while 90% are spread out over a much larger percentage in the other, that makes a big difference in what it takes to provide good infrastructure. How many miles of power lines, bridges, highway, sewers, railway is needed per capita in each country?

Science journalists William Broad and Nicholas Wade were writing about this back in 1982. See their book, Betrayers of the Truth: Fraud and Deceit in the Halls of Science . Science is a human enterprise. We have always trusted it more than we should. Better that our romantic notions about the objective standards of science be exposed for what they are than to continue believing them.

Yes, but the point was that ensuring license compliance, just like having to keep track of these other assets, costs money! License compliance for use of FOSS, costs nothing.

... could a purely analytical thinker possibly belief in, besides him or her self? What if that's not the real God? Analytical thinking is helpful for some truth and knowledge, but not all. Those who think it's all sufficient have made their own religion out of it.

Very true. That includes making a religion out of science (scientism).

You mean that you don't know the difference between God and Santa Clause? Even in concept?

Hitchens was wrong, ask his brother. http://www.amazon.com/The-Rage-Against-God-Atheism/dp/0310335094/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331675960&sr=1-1

I find this sort of thinking very "anti-analytical" and simplistic. The problem, rather, is that /. is largely populated by people who are undereducated when it comes to religion and who think that doesn't matter because they know so much about technology and computers. As if their competence in one area makes them good judges of the other. So they often do fall into the trap of "judging a belief solely on the merits of the stupidest people who believe in it" because they really don't know any more about religion than those people do and their own beliefs are predicated on the abandonment of analytical thought at least where religion is concerned.

"We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit. He who does not do so, understands not the force of reason." -- Pascal

/. karma be damned.

"C with classes" was the name given to the language before it was named C++.

“The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!" An interesting parallel.

We're all chauvinists when it comes to intelligence and civilization, aren't we?

Those rats must be pretty smart to have thought of all that. Now if they can only figure out how to avoid traps deliberately set for them after seeing their fellow rats caught in them beforehand.

You are right. C doesn't need to be replaced, just updated.

http://www.informit.com/guides/content.aspx?g=cplusplus&seqNum=551&WT.mc_id=IT_NL_CPlusPlus_2011_8_30

http://www.informit.com/guides/content.aspx?g=cplusplus&seqNum=552&WT.mc_id=IT_NL_CPlusPlus_2011_8_30

"Actually, it is a bit more complex than that - atheism was often not an integral part of the belief system for Marxist movements outside Russia. ..." Or, Cambodia and China. Good point about Marxism not being inherently atheistic. Yet it seems that where religion has been excluded, Marxist regimes are most repressive. As for Hitler, he appropriated a distorted Christianity for his own purposes. It wasn't like the Christian Church has any religious freedom or influence in Nazi Germany. Pastors who dissented were either killed or had to flee the country.

People have a right to support their own values in public no matter what they are based on. Organized religion does not manipulate government. It may manipulate people (voters), but so what? Voters are manipulated by all kinds of ideology. You have no more of a right that the government be influenced by your anti-religious values than others do for their religious ones. What sort of representation in government would you grant organized religion in return for taxing it? Separation of church and state works both ways. Many religious institutions do a better job of providing social services than the government and there are stipulations on how the funding is used, of course. This saves tax payers lots of money. More people have been murdered by atheist regimes (and in modern times) than by all religious ones put together. The influence of religion has given humanity far more in terms of hospitals, universities and other institutions that benefit society. We'd be far worse of without it than we are with it.