Missile defense is the highest-costing R&D expenditure in our budget. Multiply 10 billion over 25 years, allowing for higher variances in the Bush and Reagan years, and I'm sure Peter's figure is about dead-on.
Meanwhile, I don't know if you remember but the Soviet Union fell a few years back. Thus making missile defense nothing more than an outrageously expensive white elephant.
If you make nuclear weapons obsolete, you reopen the door to global total war that was closed at Nagasaki. If nukes can't penetrate the defenses of warring nations, they will be free to send armies across their borders.
That isn't even remotely proven. It is simply a statement you are making.
Well, bellicose political rhetoric and cock-walking strutting around got us to the point where we thought we needed a fucking space-laser system to fight our enemies. For a fraction of that cost we could try diplomacy and negotiation. Also, I'm not sure the pressing need for a fucking shiny toy laser system is quite up there next to things like fixing our failing healthcare system or reigning in our out-of-control banks, and so on and so on and so on.
Finally, nuclear missiles and laser beams and expensive fighter planes were helpless against 19 assholes with box cutters. And they are equally useless against an enraged populace bucking under an unwanted "liberation" and an unwelcome occupation.
These things are toys for people who have their priorities so fucked-up it's impossible to understand how to start unwinding them.
They don't care about getting this right. Given the sociopathic behavior of health insurance companies these days, they are just as likely to turn right around and deny claims for hospitalization due to the flu on the basis that the patient failed to get a vaccine when it was available.
What you are really saying is that the you do not have control over the vast majority of people want. In America, corporations cater to what people want, or they die and die quickly.
LOL. What America are you living in? In America, the product is YOU. You buy what the corporation tells you to buy because it's shiny and you want it. With monopolies, you get to choose between the Starbuck's, and the Starbuck's across the street (h/t to Lewis Black for this delightful image). I'm sure it's fun to live in la-la Capitalism Is Great land, but down here we've got two choices: get fucked, or get fucked harder.
So, nothing about their stalking and harassment of Rudolf Elmer and his 6-year-old daughter could possibly be massively embarrassing to such a fine institution?
We had an issue recently in my own data center where we were trying to trace a probable network issue with our backups. However, we couldn't find a sniffer that had the capacity to capture the entire session. We had to go buy an 8-terabyte device to allow us to capture one night's worth of activity.
So it's funny if we have 210 million Internet users, how many NSA employees does it take to read all of our traffic every day, and if some of them call in sick how far behind do they get?
Oh, that's awful. I reaffirm my need to NEVER EVER EVER visit a Chiropractor. I have studied martial arts for 6 years now. Many chiropractors tend to show up in these classes for some reason. I've never figured out why. Sometimes they offer advice to me which I always categorically reject. One of them, after I broke a rib, gave me his card! As if I'd go to him for a fucking broken rib! There's nothing to do for a broken rib but let it heal.
One of the other side-benefits of studying MA is that I keep my musculature in relatively good shape. I credit that for my avoidance, at age 38, of any back problems. But if I DO have problems with my back, I'm going nowhere near a quacking chiro-doctor. No fucking way.
In regards to "evolution" being factual: If you mean by "evolution" the strict definition of "simpler animal forms becoming more complex over time," I'm afraid that is factual and not up for discussion or dispute unless you're a blithering idiot. If you mean by what mechanism that occurred, there's a lot of room for theory. But in the strictest sense, the fossil record shows unambiguously that simpler forms became more complex over time. Ergo, life evolved, has evolved, is evolving, does continuously evolve over time. That's just a consequence of biology.
Creationists denying that this occurred are as credible as the color-blind denying that the sky is blue. Frankly, they don't know what they're talking about.
Creationism is a load of fucking bullshit, and so is the DMCA. Seems reasonable that both should be assaulted. I'm certainly not afraid of someone "flaming" me over my disgust at the intellectual prostitution of Creationism, nor at the feeble legality of the DMCA. Sounds like peanut butter and chocolate, except with a light flavoring of BULLSHIT. Two horrible tastes that go together.
If CO2 levels are capped at present-day levels or reduced (as per the Kyoto Protocol) without remarkable innovation of a variety that no-one can presently demonstrate
So, those European/Japanese cars that get 50+ MPG are, what? Just not possible over here? Give me a break. Extremely powerful players in this heavily lopsided market have worked to create and maintain a highly inefficient energy economy because it makes them money. A bare handful of them would stand to lose if they were forced to clean up their act, and I maintain quite baldly that their needs really don't fucking matter in the long run. Increasing the US's net energy efficiency would immediately and rapidly benefit the sectors of the economy not currently involved in ass-raping consumers with wildly fluctuating energy prices. Kyoto deniers continually cast the equation in terms of how impossible it is to do anything but choke down our economy in order to comply, and then pretend by putting their fingers in their ears that dramatic and immediate improvements in energy efficiency, currently on display all over the rest of the world, are simply impossible here.
I asked for concrete explanations and didn't get 'em, so it's still a dead loss for you.
Explain to me, in concrete terms, how it is damaging to our economy to improve our energy efficiency. It's OK if you can't use big words, I understand.
No matter. If I'm wrong, nobody loses anything. If I'm right, you lose for eternity. I can't wait to see the stupid look on your faces then.
You won't. Ever.
Actually your being wrong means that a lot of people lose. They lose hours and days and weeks and months of their lives, wasted in prostrating themselves before an imaginary deity. People who believe out of fear lose their courage -- it's the first thing that goes. People who believe out of fear deliberately stop themselves from asking difficult questions of themselves, their communities, or their leaders. They lose the freedom of thought that might answer the real questions humanity needs answered. They lose the ability to ask questions that might make others uncomfortable.
You really haven't thought this through if you believe out of fear. You have made an implicit assumption that it's safer to believe in a fairy tale that is very readily demonstrated to be the fictional construct of a group of mere mortals. You've decided you don't have the time, energy, or courage to imagine that the universe is anything other than the echo of the most popular religion in town, despite the fact that you know there are numerous competing religions whose beliefs all differ, some of them quite drastically.
The equation I have used is first to postulate that there is only one true way the universe is. All of the religions of humanity are attempts to describe that one true way, and every one of them eventually is found wanting in some detail and superceded by another religion -- or supplanted by a scientific finding. You can think of knowledge as a vast circle, and of human knowledge as another, much smaller circle. The two form sort of a Venn diagram. Religion used to claim that it represented everything we needed from the vast outer circle. Science has been expanding the circle of what we truly, factually know for about five continuous centuries. This has meant that the circle of knowledge that religion can claim through ignorance has gotten smaller and farther away as science has advanced.
Ultimately, religion has had to give up on several fronts entirely. The shape, size, and age of the universe is now a description almost entirely covered in the circle of science. The age we know to a relatively accurate degree. The sequence of events following its creation we think we've got covered, down almost to the very first instant. The size we are not totally sure of, but we do have some upper limits. The shape is in dispute but not as much as it once was. The local area of our universe is much more accurately described and we know for certain that many of the religion-based assertions regarding the Earth were completely wrong, having actually explored some of those areas ourselves in person.
The whole point of this is; every time science has advanced, religion has retreated. This tells me that religion ultimately has nothing of importance to say about life, and being that I was raised without much of it, I find I can safely dispense of it entirely. I had no trouble concluding that it was just a bunch of stories made up by people who didn't know any better. That people still buy into it in this day and age is a sign of their lack of courage and imagination.
There have been thousands, possibly millions of documented miracles.
Documented how? Are they documented as in "I, a highly reliable member of this religious order, do attest that I witnessed these miracles take place." I think that's usually how it's done, isn't it? And of course, the witnesses are so interested in the truth of the events that they ruled out misunderstanding what they saw, slieght-of-hand, and outright fraud?
If a miracle were broadcast from Time Square on New Year's Eve with irrefutable scientific proof that it could not possibly have occurred without a supernatural explanation, people would still refuse to believe in it.
Not to pile on here, but what exactly are you talking about? If I read you right, you may be eligible for a million dollar prize if you are able to arrange such an occurance. And please note, very few make it past the "talking big" portion of Randi's test because it turns out they don't have the courage to stand up in front of highly trained observers and try to run a sham across them. Those that do invariably are caught faking it in some way.
Evolution and creation are not exclusive. The book of Genesis, read as an allegory, is almost perfectly consistent with our current understanding of the origin of the universe.
What bull is this? I can claim my next fart as an allegory of the origin of the universe. So Fucking What? Does the Book of Genesis reveal one single thing that is useful outside the context of a religious community? Stripped as it is of its role as the Book Of Knowledge, can the Bible be anything more than entertainment?
Did you know that the Shroud of Turin is encoded with three-dimensional information? A topographical relief camera, using only the shroud itself as data, can produce a three-dimensional image of a man's face. We don't have the technology to produce such an image artificially today, much less centuries ago when scientists claim the shroud was made.
There's a fact for you. Enjoy!
This isn't really a fact. It's an assertion of yours. You don't say who "knows" this or who has proven it. Furthermore, you make no compelling argument as to why three-dimensional images could not have been created in the past. Sounds a lot like the "intelligent design" premise: "This flagellum is too complicated for me to understand. Ugh! It must have been intelligently designed!"
There will still be jobs for people who want a lucrative career in changing bedpans, 'cause as far as I know you can't do that remotely. And we'll all have some lovely filth over here!
They got used to supporting liberal doctrines to earn their pay while democrats controlled congress.
Evidence, attribution, facts?
Now they moan and cry because somebody "moved their cheese", and they have to learn a new set of political doctrines to get their free drink from the government teet
Evidence, attribution, facts?
Global warming is a hoax
Evidence, attribution, facts? All are currently not on your side.
EVEN if it was real it won't hurt anything because the ice caps are like the ice that floats in your drink. They will shrink as they melt and the net change in sea level will be zero point zero inches.
Ok, it's you vs. a world full of genuine experts whose every prediction has so far come true. Who do you think wins?
If Global warming WAS real it would bring enormous benefit to mankind by dramatically increasing the amount of farmable land available - it would offset world hunger significantly
This I'll tackle myself -- fertile land is more than "land that is warm enough to grow crops." It's also "land that is sufficiently supplied with nutrients and stable topsoil." Heating up the tundra is in no way guaranteed to make it into a garden. And you sure as hell don't know what it will do. Not to mention that raising the temperature above, say, the Corn Belt will make it impossible to grow corn there, as corn fertilizes itself in a narrow range of temperatures NOT to exceed I believe 95 degrees F.
The best way to reduce any greenhouse effect is to fire a lot of useless scientists to decrease their spewing of hot gas.
I submit that the most just thing to do is make you live in the shit-infested, toxic weedlot of a world that your indifference will bring. The problem is, I don't want to live there also. So I'll settle for dismissing you as an ignorant, loud asshole.
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Missile defense is the highest-costing R&D expenditure in our budget. Multiply 10 billion over 25 years, allowing for higher variances in the Bush and Reagan years, and I'm sure Peter's figure is about dead-on.
Meanwhile, I don't know if you remember but the Soviet Union fell a few years back. Thus making missile defense nothing more than an outrageously expensive white elephant.
If you make nuclear weapons obsolete, you reopen the door to global total war that was closed at Nagasaki. If nukes can't penetrate the defenses of warring nations, they will be free to send armies across their borders.
That isn't even remotely proven. It is simply a statement you are making.
Well, bellicose political rhetoric and cock-walking strutting around got us to the point where we thought we needed a fucking space-laser system to fight our enemies. For a fraction of that cost we could try diplomacy and negotiation. Also, I'm not sure the pressing need for a fucking shiny toy laser system is quite up there next to things like fixing our failing healthcare system or reigning in our out-of-control banks, and so on and so on and so on.
Finally, nuclear missiles and laser beams and expensive fighter planes were helpless against 19 assholes with box cutters. And they are equally useless against an enraged populace bucking under an unwanted "liberation" and an unwelcome occupation.
These things are toys for people who have their priorities so fucked-up it's impossible to understand how to start unwinding them.
What would the Catholic Church's opinion matter on this topic?
I'm struggling with this because they represent a segment of our society that is steadfastly incurious and resistant to new ideas.
Or better yet, just watch his worthless propaganda empire go underwater with a pathetic gurgle.
Who but a bunch of racist old assholes is going to miss it in their news results?
Some stink more than others.
That there is no depth of stupidity and depravity to which copyright nazis will not go.
What does her singing ability . . . or your imagined imapct on her business . . . have to do with this. Assuming you know fuck-all about it.
They don't care about getting this right. Given the sociopathic behavior of health insurance companies these days, they are just as likely to turn right around and deny claims for hospitalization due to the flu on the basis that the patient failed to get a vaccine when it was available.
Oh. My. God. Proof positive that a fool and his money are soon parted.
The "review" of the cable said that it was good because he was tapping his foot to the music! Yes! Tapping his motherfucking foot!
So, nothing about their stalking and harassment of Rudolf Elmer and his 6-year-old daughter could possibly be massively embarrassing to such a fine institution?
Who the hell is going to read all that shit?
We had an issue recently in my own data center where we were trying to trace a probable network issue with our backups. However, we couldn't find a sniffer that had the capacity to capture the entire session. We had to go buy an 8-terabyte device to allow us to capture one night's worth of activity.
So it's funny if we have 210 million Internet users, how many NSA employees does it take to read all of our traffic every day, and if some of them call in sick how far behind do they get?
Knowing that there's intelligent life in the Universe would be a seriously big deal.
Being able to LEARN something from that intelligence would be an even bigger deal.
Giving up before we've found such life, especially considering the minuscule investment required, is chickenshit.
Finally, giving up is stupid. Suppose they find us first?
Oh, that's awful. I reaffirm my need to NEVER EVER EVER visit a Chiropractor. I have studied martial arts for 6 years now. Many chiropractors tend to show up in these classes for some reason. I've never figured out why. Sometimes they offer advice to me which I always categorically reject. One of them, after I broke a rib, gave me his card! As if I'd go to him for a fucking broken rib! There's nothing to do for a broken rib but let it heal.
One of the other side-benefits of studying MA is that I keep my musculature in relatively good shape. I credit that for my avoidance, at age 38, of any back problems. But if I DO have problems with my back, I'm going nowhere near a quacking chiro-doctor. No fucking way.
Creationists are deceitful, dishonest assholes with the intellectual integrity of a common streetwalker. Who knew?
In regards to "evolution" being factual: If you mean by "evolution" the strict definition of "simpler animal forms becoming more complex over time," I'm afraid that is factual and not up for discussion or dispute unless you're a blithering idiot. If you mean by what mechanism that occurred, there's a lot of room for theory. But in the strictest sense, the fossil record shows unambiguously that simpler forms became more complex over time. Ergo, life evolved, has evolved, is evolving, does continuously evolve over time. That's just a consequence of biology.
Creationists denying that this occurred are as credible as the color-blind denying that the sky is blue. Frankly, they don't know what they're talking about.
Creationism is a load of fucking bullshit, and so is the DMCA. Seems reasonable that both should be assaulted. I'm certainly not afraid of someone "flaming" me over my disgust at the intellectual prostitution of Creationism, nor at the feeble legality of the DMCA. Sounds like peanut butter and chocolate, except with a light flavoring of BULLSHIT. Two horrible tastes that go together.
So, those European/Japanese cars that get 50+ MPG are, what? Just not possible over here? Give me a break. Extremely powerful players in this heavily lopsided market have worked to create and maintain a highly inefficient energy economy because it makes them money. A bare handful of them would stand to lose if they were forced to clean up their act, and I maintain quite baldly that their needs really don't fucking matter in the long run. Increasing the US's net energy efficiency would immediately and rapidly benefit the sectors of the economy not currently involved in ass-raping consumers with wildly fluctuating energy prices. Kyoto deniers continually cast the equation in terms of how impossible it is to do anything but choke down our economy in order to comply, and then pretend by putting their fingers in their ears that dramatic and immediate improvements in energy efficiency, currently on display all over the rest of the world, are simply impossible here.
I asked for concrete explanations and didn't get 'em, so it's still a dead loss for you.
Explain to me, in concrete terms, how it is damaging to our economy to improve our energy efficiency. It's OK if you can't use big words, I understand.
You won't. Ever.
Actually your being wrong means that a lot of people lose. They lose hours and days and weeks and months of their lives, wasted in prostrating themselves before an imaginary deity. People who believe out of fear lose their courage -- it's the first thing that goes. People who believe out of fear deliberately stop themselves from asking difficult questions of themselves, their communities, or their leaders. They lose the freedom of thought that might answer the real questions humanity needs answered. They lose the ability to ask questions that might make others uncomfortable.
You really haven't thought this through if you believe out of fear. You have made an implicit assumption that it's safer to believe in a fairy tale that is very readily demonstrated to be the fictional construct of a group of mere mortals. You've decided you don't have the time, energy, or courage to imagine that the universe is anything other than the echo of the most popular religion in town, despite the fact that you know there are numerous competing religions whose beliefs all differ, some of them quite drastically.
The equation I have used is first to postulate that there is only one true way the universe is. All of the religions of humanity are attempts to describe that one true way, and every one of them eventually is found wanting in some detail and superceded by another religion -- or supplanted by a scientific finding. You can think of knowledge as a vast circle, and of human knowledge as another, much smaller circle. The two form sort of a Venn diagram. Religion used to claim that it represented everything we needed from the vast outer circle. Science has been expanding the circle of what we truly, factually know for about five continuous centuries. This has meant that the circle of knowledge that religion can claim through ignorance has gotten smaller and farther away as science has advanced.
Ultimately, religion has had to give up on several fronts entirely. The shape, size, and age of the universe is now a description almost entirely covered in the circle of science. The age we know to a relatively accurate degree. The sequence of events following its creation we think we've got covered, down almost to the very first instant. The size we are not totally sure of, but we do have some upper limits. The shape is in dispute but not as much as it once was. The local area of our universe is much more accurately described and we know for certain that many of the religion-based assertions regarding the Earth were completely wrong, having actually explored some of those areas ourselves in person.
The whole point of this is; every time science has advanced, religion has retreated. This tells me that religion ultimately has nothing of importance to say about life, and being that I was raised without much of it, I find I can safely dispense of it entirely. I had no trouble concluding that it was just a bunch of stories made up by people who didn't know any better. That people still buy into it in this day and age is a sign of their lack of courage and imagination.
Documented how? Are they documented as in "I, a highly reliable member of this religious order, do attest that I witnessed these miracles take place." I think that's usually how it's done, isn't it? And of course, the witnesses are so interested in the truth of the events that they ruled out misunderstanding what they saw, slieght-of-hand, and outright fraud?
If a miracle were broadcast from Time Square on New Year's Eve with irrefutable scientific proof that it could not possibly have occurred without a supernatural explanation, people would still refuse to believe in it.
Not to pile on here, but what exactly are you talking about? If I read you right, you may be eligible for a million dollar prize if you are able to arrange such an occurance. And please note, very few make it past the "talking big" portion of Randi's test because it turns out they don't have the courage to stand up in front of highly trained observers and try to run a sham across them. Those that do invariably are caught faking it in some way.
Evolution and creation are not exclusive. The book of Genesis, read as an allegory, is almost perfectly consistent with our current understanding of the origin of the universe.
What bull is this? I can claim my next fart as an allegory of the origin of the universe. So Fucking What? Does the Book of Genesis reveal one single thing that is useful outside the context of a religious community? Stripped as it is of its role as the Book Of Knowledge, can the Bible be anything more than entertainment?
Did you know that the Shroud of Turin is encoded with three-dimensional information? A topographical relief camera, using only the shroud itself as data, can produce a three-dimensional image of a man's face. We don't have the technology to produce such an image artificially today, much less centuries ago when scientists claim the shroud was made.
There's a fact for you. Enjoy!
This isn't really a fact. It's an assertion of yours. You don't say who "knows" this or who has proven it. Furthermore, you make no compelling argument as to why three-dimensional images could not have been created in the past. Sounds a lot like the "intelligent design" premise: "This flagellum is too complicated for me to understand. Ugh! It must have been intelligently designed!"
There will still be jobs for people who want a lucrative career in changing bedpans, 'cause as far as I know you can't do that remotely. And we'll all have some lovely filth over here!
Evidence, attribution, facts?
Now they moan and cry because somebody "moved their cheese", and they have to learn a new set of political doctrines to get their free drink from the government teet
Evidence, attribution, facts?
Global warming is a hoax
Evidence, attribution, facts? All are currently not on your side.
EVEN if it was real it won't hurt anything because the ice caps are like the ice that floats in your drink. They will shrink as they melt and the net change in sea level will be zero point zero inches.
Ok, it's you vs. a world full of genuine experts whose every prediction has so far come true. Who do you think wins?
If Global warming WAS real it would bring enormous benefit to mankind by dramatically increasing the amount of farmable land available - it would offset world hunger significantly
This I'll tackle myself -- fertile land is more than "land that is warm enough to grow crops." It's also "land that is sufficiently supplied with nutrients and stable topsoil." Heating up the tundra is in no way guaranteed to make it into a garden. And you sure as hell don't know what it will do. Not to mention that raising the temperature above, say, the Corn Belt will make it impossible to grow corn there, as corn fertilizes itself in a narrow range of temperatures NOT to exceed I believe 95 degrees F.
The best way to reduce any greenhouse effect is to fire a lot of useless scientists to decrease their spewing of hot gas.
I submit that the most just thing to do is make you live in the shit-infested, toxic weedlot of a world that your indifference will bring. The problem is, I don't want to live there also. So I'll settle for dismissing you as an ignorant, loud asshole.