In fact, I have a real problem with the whole "sacrificing your children" motif of the Bible, whether it is Abraham sacrificing his son, Lot offering his pubescent daughters to a horny mob or God sacrificing his son. It all seems to be pointing humanity to a self-destructive, counter-survival path. Sort of a throwback to the worship of Moloch.

Snowden revealed that the US was spying on its own citizens. This is something that our much-vaunted "free press" should have done long ago, but failed to do. According to some commentary on NPR, it cannot be shown that Snowden actually endangered any US agents. He did however, cost the US government a good deal of money, mostly in implementing damage control vis a vis PR. Snowden is a greater patriot than any of the congresspeople who voted to pass the Patriot Act.

My own first exposure to Unix was my first internet account, a dial-up using a 1200 baud modem. That connected me to a Unix server. I recall thinking at first that I was lost. But as I began getting used to the Unix command line, I started wishing my computer had an OS like that, instead of the DOS 3 it was running on. My first Linux distro was actually Caldera OpenLinux which I believe morphed into Suse. A couple years after that I stumbled onto Slackware and have been using that ever since.

That might put me "back in the day".

Both my home desktop and laptop run on Slackware 14.1. I am not familiar with either Debian or Redhat, beyond knowing the names, so I'm not sure where Slackware fits in.

What's interesting about the Johnson/Weld ticket is that both were reelected as Republican governors by large margins in Democratic states. So, even if they get wedged in through a Congressional desire to not have Trump or Hillary, even without Libertarian support in Congress, they may get a more done than many might think.

There is quite a large faction of the Libertarian party who are not happy at all about the Johnson/Weld ticket precisely because they are too moderate. One Libertarian activist, L. Neil Smith, recently published a rant in which he was trying to convince Libertarians to vote for Trump, because Johnson and Weld are not real Libertarians. That one left me scratching my head. Trump is even less Libertarian than either of them.

Most of my own political posts are simply shares, with no comment from me. Once in a while, I will comment on it before sharing, but I try hard to not come off like I am implying that anyone who disagrees with me is stupid. I may not always succeed, but I try. I did unfriend one person, an actual long-time friend of mine from my teen years, because of his political posts. Though calling them "political" posts may be overly generous. They were all about how 9/11 was an inside job, how the government is poisoning us all with "chemtrails" and the Newtown shooting was a "flase flag". Reading his stuff just got to be too exhausting. I do have FB friends in all political flavors though, Dem, Republican, Socialist, Progressive, Communist, Anarchist, and more.

And you are writing this using a set of technologies that would not even exist if NASA had not had to figure out how to put computers into space capsules. Do you not see the irony of this?

I remember Gopher well. It was my go to resource for everything on the 'net from new software to travel weather reports. I kind of miss it.

Most likely we should probably be concentrating on interplanetary expeditions now, but interstellar trips may not be as far in the future as you think. It is true that we currently do not have the technological wherewithal right now for Star Trek type space flight, but a generation ship is not out of the question. In 1998, NASA launched Deep Space 1. This runs on an ion drive rocket engine generating 1/50th of a pound of thrust. Not much compared to traditional chemical rockets, but it is capable of constant thrust for a very long time. Given sufficient fuel, such an engine is capable of eventually reaching an appreciable fraction of light speed. Here is a link to an article discussing ion drive propulsion and the Deep Space 1 mission: http://science.nasa.gov/scienc...

"The Sun is a bit older, I believe around 4.567 years old." Oops, I meant to say 4.567 BILLION years old, my bad!

Actually, the Earth is only about 4.5 billion years old. The Sun is a bit older, I believe around 4.567 years old. It is the Universe itself that is 13.8 billion years old. Einstein held out for quite a long time believing in the "steady state" theory of cosmology, the idea that the Universe had always existed pretty much as we see it today. He originally rejected the Big Bang notion of the origin of the Universe precisely because that theory implied a "moment of creation" for the Universe. He did not believe in a personal God who takes an active part in the unfolding Universe. His God was the god of Spinoza, an impersonal entity consisting of the sum total of the Universe and all the physical and mathematical laws that drive it.

I have long thought it possible that we are the first intelligent beings in our galaxy. Not too likely, but a distinct possibility. It is an even more remote possibility that we are the first intelligent life in the Universe. It is a no-brainer that life could not have evolved anytime before the very first stars to form became super-novae, blowing the heavier elements necessary for life into the inter-stellar medium. The question becomes then, how soon after those very first stars blew did life become possible?

Reality is, life is messy. Violent too. Humans are not the first species to cause the extinction of other species. That process probably started when the first cyanobacteria began polluting the Earth's atmosphere with the deadly poison, oxygen. We may be the first species though to understand the effects we have on the environment and to consciously attempt remediation.

I disagree with this, partly because I don't subscribe to the alarmist notion that global warming is going to cause global life threatening catastrophe and largely because anything we do to try to reverse global warming stands a good chance of backfiring. A couple years ago an experiment was done in the Arctic involving reflectors to preserve the ice cap. The experiment was successful in that it brought down the local temperature in the immediate area. The problem is that this kind of solution has the potential to set up a positive feedback loop that could cycle out of control. In an effort to reverse global warming, we might cause more damage with too much cooling, which would be worse than the warming. I do not accept at all that the warming caused by human activity is going cause Earth to become a hothouse for reasons I have stated elsewhere (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5024323&cid=46741263). In this instance, it seems likely that doing little or nothing may be the best possible solution.

I do not actually deny that humans are contributing to climate change, so much as refuse to concede that it is any great cause for alarm. If the CO2 content of the atmosphere at the dawn of the Carboniferous Era was around 2000ppm, today's value of 400ppm, while double what it was before the Industrial Revolution, is pretty snall change. And life was thriving at the dawn of the Carboniferous Era, else we wouldn't have today's coal and oil deposits. True, we are returning SOME of the carbon that has been locked away for millions of years back to the atmosphere, but not all of it. Very likely nowhere near enough to cause temperatures to climb to what they were during the Carboniferous Era. A great deal of the oil is used to make plastics, fertilizers and other agricultural chemicals, and the carbon contained in those items is not being returned to the atmosphere. Also, a great deal of the CE CO2 was dissolved into the Earth's oceans and fresh waters and subsequently redeposited as gypsum, limestone and other carbonates. That carbon is not going back into the atmosphere anytime soon either. If the Earth's atmosphere ever does return to the state it was in during the Carboniferous Era, it will most likely be due to extended periods of massive volcanic plume eruptions similar to those which created the Siberian Traps