An external firewall/VPN is a workaround, not a solution.

With Trump, Biden, and half of congress being against freedom of speech, reasonable protections against liability, the right to privacy, and general civil liberties, I no longer believe that this is a decent or safe place to live. Does anyone have good suggestions for expatriation to South America? Chile seems nice...

That's an easy thing to assume until you get a clearer picture of what they go through: https://www.theverge.com/2019/...

I haven't a doubt in my mind that what they're going through is legitimate, and I'm glad they're getting recompense.

I'm very interested in your book, as I regret having never taken calculus. I do travel rather a lot though, and have little space for physical books. By chance, would you consider selling it in ebook form?

The best option for everyone would be an open source app app that uses an open standard protocol to talk directly to my bank with no information leakage to any middlemen. Why does this not exist? As it currently stands, my Android phone won't let me use Google Pay without using stock firmware and a locked bootloader due to that damn SafetyNet check. I know why SafetyNet exists, but I really don't see the difference between having to tell my bank that my token has been stolen and used for fraud versus my physical card being stolen and used for fraud.

Why not embed a checksum of the original document (probably just the plaintext) in every URL? It would allow search engines to help find archived copies of the document on other sites, and would be a trivial thing to automate in the major blogging engines. Heck, Apache/Nginx could be easily extended to automate this, along with a 404 handler that would generate a search query for the checksum it received. Good idea/bad idea/better idea?

Not USB-powered, but could work:
http://www.amazon.com/Monitor2Go-15-6-HDMI-Portable-Monitor/dp/B00AYH7AIE

It's 15", has a 1600x900 resolution, and does everything else perfectly. I doubt it would be hard to get one of those portable battery extenders to interface with it and make it untethered as well as portable. Something like this, perhaps? http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005NGLTZQ

Let's say that it's a perfect simulation of a womb, but is scalable and can sustain a human from conception all the way through human development and to the point where cells stop dividing due to old age. If the human is never detached from the machine, yet goes through all the same phases that you and I do, at what point do we consider it alive? Do we ever consider it alive?

Ah yes, you're the second one to catch me not defining things well. No one disputes that evolution happens, not even creationists. What I meant to ask was if the idea of common descent was necessary for science. Most scientists are quick to rush in and say that it is, but I still don't know why. Does all science really fall apart if we don't believe all life came from a single cell?

I'm not trying to push any ideas here, just wondering why this one gets so much time devoted to it when we could be doing other things.

OK, you don't like ID or creationism. I can work with that, since I actually didn't come here to try and push those ideas. You don't have to be a dick about it.

Macroevolution is defined as the changing of one species into another species. The examples you provided are dogs turning into dogs and moths turning into moths. This is microevolution, which is not in dispute.

Lets get back to my main question for a second. Is the idea of common descent really necessary for science? Does the scientific method really fall apart if this isn't accepted?

Question: If we build a machine that can take a human egg and sperm and produce a child with the same methods that a womb would, at what point in that process would life begin, since the child did not have to exit a woman?

Allow me to clarify: When I was referring to evolutionary theory, I was referring to the ideas of common descent and macroevolution. Microevolution is all that's necessary to understand antibiotics, vaccines and everything else we depend on in our daily lives. Anyone who denies microevolution is a fool. I mostly was wondering what would happen to science if macroevolution/common descent were to disappear.

As an aside, there is a difference between ID and creationism. ID knows the limits of scientific discovery and stays within them for the purpose of an alternate explanation for the origin of life (and doesn't really care what that may be). Creationism doesn't know those limits, and will gladly travel outside the realms of science to 'prove' its claims.

Why do we need an origin story? It seems to me that if evolutionary theory, intelligent design, and creationism were to all disappear, science would be just fine. We don't need to know that a robotic arm assembled a car to know every detail of how the car works.

Additionally, if there was no observation of the event and the process cannot be repeated, isn't it outside the realm of scientific discovery anyway?

I work in a storage test lab. I've had several enterprise SSDs die randomly. They just drop off the device list in the middle of a stress test. I'd suspect it was due to a bad controller, but we didn't have time to dissect it and find out, so we just ordered a new one. It's happened from a myriad of manufacturers (who shall not be named). Granted, most of the drives that have died so far were engineering samples, but the final revisions we got later were the same hardware with updated firmware. While most SSDs are supposed to be resilient to most hardware failures, there's always a single point of failure somewhere.

My needs for switching away from Window$ to Linux are as follows: 1. There needs to be a good video editor for Linux (one that is better than Cinelerra, here's hoping that Lightworks does the trick) 2. Better games support (Wine mostly does the trick, but it's not quite there yet) 3. Better multi-touch trackpad support. The main thing I miss about my old Mac is the ability to assign keyboard shortcuts to gestures. 4. Fix the power regression issue and add graphics switching support. I'm a laptop user, this is important. I actually prefer the GIMP to Photoshop, but it's UI on non-Linux systems is abysmal, so I'm stuck with Photoshop for now. I'm disappointed by Unity and Gnome3, but LXDE has filled that hole rather nicely. Pretty much everything else about Linux I prefer to Windows/OSX, I just have certain needs that aren't being met.