This is, of course, all premised upon the allergy actually being this serious
Hence my point - if the allergy is this serious then how is safe for them to go out in public, let alone take a plane? Even then suppose the person next to them had just eaten nuts before getting on board?
Their "disability" is that they cannot eat nuts so how does me eating nuts affect them? An appropriate level of understanding is that I do not prepare nut-containing food for friends who are allergic (and being very fastidious about it if they are more sensitive).
Allergies that can kill are no joking matter, and a nut free zone might be a better solution....
So perhaps the best solution would to not allow these nuts with allergies on board? If their reaction is so severe as to be life threatening just from being in the same room (and an extremely well ventilated room with excellent air filtration at that) as a bag of nuts then it is clearly not safe for them to be out in public where anyone might be eating nuts. If the problem is that they are scared to be in a room with nuts because they are allergic to them then this is a psychological problem of theirs and not a medical requirement at which point it becomes reasonable to ask why I should have to give up my freedoms instead of them giving up theirs.
And later:
Pope Urban VIII personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in the book,
Indeed, it was Galileo's political antagonism, not his ideas, that got him trouble. Imagine that.
Hmmm.....you might have wanted to include the rest of that sentence you quoted from the article:
Pope Urban VIII personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in the book, and to be careful not to advocate heliocentrism.
Sorry but forbidding the advocation of scientific knowledge is pretty much anti-science. Galileo may well not have helped himself by being somewhat politically antagonistic but the overwhelming picture is that the Catholic church was happy to support science as long as science did not come up with any discoveries which went against what they decided was the "truth". That would be like saying that you support freedom of speech as long as I don't say anything which you disagree with....it really isn't support at all. The church certainly supported education but their support of science is far more questionable.
Of course the Catholic church, for the most part, is not like that now and does support and listen to scientists - indeed as a physicist I've often thought it would be really interesting to have a chat with one of the astronomers from the Vatican observatory to hear their take on science. But that does not mean that in the past they were so enlightened.
Science is dispassionate, that doesn't mean the scientist have to be weak, meek, and keep their heads down for fear of pissing off some fools or otherwise.
True...but neither does it mean that we have to go out of our way to piss off people either. It is enough to state the truth and correct it when others get it wrong. You do not need to go the extra mile and call them an idiot for getting it wrong - that is extremely counter-productive when trying to educate others about what you have discovered.
Definitely a good time to check out Jupiter and the four Galilean moons
Yes it was - a beautiful view though at -24C outside it was a tad on the cold side! The moons were nicely balanced two on each side. Now my kids can say that they saw the Galilean satellites for the first time exactly 400 years after Galileo first saw (three of) them - thank you Slashdot!
Note that if a soul can exist without a body after death, then it can exist without a body any other time, too.
Why? The genetic information of a butterfly lies within a caterpillar and yet a butterfly cannot exist without being a caterpillar first. So there is no logical reason that what you say has to be true - it might be the way the universe works but there is no reason to suggest that it MUST be the way things work.
Why should it have to be associated with a body before birth?
Perhaps that is the way that things work? There is no scientific or logical argument that you can make for or against this because there is no scientific evidence for the existence of a soul. If you believe that we do have a soul then it is just as consistent to argue that it is created at birth as it is to argue your position. Nothing in any of your posts has provided any support that your position is inherently more logical or consistent than that of more established religions. You have to remember that just because you believe a thing it does not make it right.
I understand that this is a belief that you hold dear and I have no problem with that. Just don't criticise others for having different beliefs that yours which are no more, or less logical that your own.
Sorry - I did not mean to suggest that software engineers cannot understand the code. The problem is that they don't understand how it will be used, which is not their fault because, being research, we don't exactly know how the code wil be used either! Most of the code we use in particle physics is in a constant state of flux because we are always finding out new detector issues we have to fix or new analysis techniques etc. So it is very hard to sit down and say "we need some code to do X,Y and Z" since X may change and we probably don't know what Z is yet!
As you say communication is the key but I think that it is very hard to have a good enough level of communication for many applications due to the very fluid nature of the problems being dealt with. If you have a fixed, relatively static problem (like developing a common tool/utility/library for research) then I agree a software engineer would be extremely useful there but this is not where most coding happens and so a culture has developed of writing code ourselves which can also make it hard for those of us who would on occasion like to hire a software engineer to do so because the usual response is: "why should we give you money for that when you can write the code yourself (or get your students and postdocs to do it)" usually follwed with an argument about how the money is needed for electronic engineers to design boards etc.
I'm trying to figure out how anything but Fermions can be "collided".
This is a very sensible question given our "everyday" understanding of collisions. The problem is because you are thinking of the particles as billiard balls which bounce off each other but that it not really what is happening.
Instead of two balls think about two magnets moving towards each other with like poles facing so that they repel. If they are not moving too fast then the magnets will collide and bounce off each other's magnetic fields without ever touching each other. Now suppose the magnets were each 100 times smaller. At that size you could push them a lot harder against each other and they still would not touch. If you shrank them even more then the energy would get even higher and, as far as we know, the fundamental particles like gluons and quarks have no minimum size (or if they do have one it is so small that we have never collided too with enough energy to see it). So our collisions are really just the fields of each particle interacting with one another. In the case of a gluon this is field of the strong nuclear force.
I hope that addresses what I think was the conceptual thinking that led to your question. However there is also a more technical issue in that, as you say, the Pauli Exclusion principle applies to fermions in the same state. However since both the gluons or quarks will have different momenta (they travel in opposite directions and the magnitude will also differ) the exclusion principle would not apply even to quark collisions because their states are not the same.
It's quite shocking isn't it? And not just a "this code isn't very pretty" problem either, but the instability of the thing is remarkable.
Remarkable? Its legendary! ROOT has the dubious distinction of including the worst piece of programming I have ever seen. When adding some extract I/O objects in separate header files to a program, generating dictionaries etc. I suddenly had the linker complaining about duplicate symbols. After spending just over a day trying to figure out why and getting more and more confused I finally demonstrated that ADDING A COMMENT to the code fixed the problem!
Staggered that ROOT was somehow breaking the C++ standard in ways I had not even contemplated I spent another day tracking this down to an automatically named function which used the C preprocessor line number directive as the only variable part of its name. So, if you happened to have the classdef (IIRC) macro on the same line in two header files ROOT would generate identically named symbols. The result was that something as simple as adding or removing a comment could fix or cause a duplicate symbol problem!
Far, far worse than all that though was that when I submitted a nice bug report illustrating the problem and pointing out the macro which was at fault they claimed that this was NOT A BUG and did not need fixing! ARGH! I only ever use ROOT through the Python interface now since it shields you from so much of the pain....just not all of it unfortunately!
"...then hand over their work to skilled software engineers that are qualified to turn it into good software."
As a physicist I only have to look at the code we use and write to see your initial point (try looking at ROOT from CERN for C++ that will make you want to cry!). However your solution simply does not work. You cannot "hand it over" to a non-expert in the area because the usage and purpose of the code is something that they do not understand and so the result will be unusable (there was one program I remember as a grad student which was a beautiful design but the overhead was so large that one senior physicist calculated that he would be retired before it had finished one pass through the data!). The best scientific code I have seen is generally written by an expert in the field who has experience of good software design. Even close collaboration between physicists and software engineers rarely works because neither side is willing to compromise functionality for design or vice versa.
LHC was designed to shed light on why there is matter at all in this universe.
No, it was designed to determine why fundamental particles have mass. It may shed some light on the matter/anti-matter imbalance but that is not its primary design goal.
But, matter is not all that matters, there is also justice.
Indeed there is. First it is worth mentioning that law is not the same as justice and never has been. It is a best approximation to the concept that we have come up with but laws are by no means always just. Additionally since the LHC is built in Europe and NOT the US it is European law/justice which is relevant. So frankly this study is not worth the paper it is written on since US courts can huff and puff all they like and make not one whit of difference - expect perhaps preventing US groups from working on it which, since it is already built, will probably only caue a delay in analyses. Of course it would be very damaging to US physicists and even this threat will make it harder to convince the international community to build any future facilities in the US where such idiocy apparently has a better chance of success.
Its seems there is nothing anybody can do, mostly because nobody really cares.
Correction: nobody really believes the idiots going around predicting the end of the world. This is a very good sign because it shows that deep down the majority of people really do believe in science and not what the latest scaremonger with a tenuous grasp of reality thinks will garner them the most attention.
One guy on the site is even ranting about the LHC actually being a "quark cannon"
Actually his credibility is lost there. The LHC is far better described as a gluon collider. The cross-section for gluon-gluon collisions is a lot larger than for quark-quark.
For example, you wrote: "as a reincarnationist you believe that "this purely physical process" causes a pre-existing soul to be placed into the body" --that is FALSE.....What a just-fertilized ovum is, nor more and no less, is the equivalent of a "Potentially Available For Occupancy"
What is the huge significance to the time delay between birth and "occupancy"? Frankly I see no logical difference whatsoever to simply saying well the soul is created sometime later as well. Hence I take this as confirming my original statement, thank you.
Have you ever considered the possibility that some (not all) still-births are the result of NO soul deciding to claim that body?
No, I consider them the result of either birth defects or trauma inside the womb (such as strangulation by the umbilical cord). Of course I could also argue that in these cases no soul was created for them as well. Again I fail to see how your philosophy is in any way whatsoever more logical than those you deride.
All the illogic you perceived, regarding my philosophy, derived straightly from your own ridiculous assumptions about it.
No I derived them from the incredible similarity to the beliefs that you were deriding as illogical. In fact these exchanges show that, not only do you have very similar beliefs but that you have the same narrowminded-ness and inability to admit that you might, just possibly, be wrong that leads to religious conflicts. In addition your philosophy seems to be dreaming up mystical explanations for events that we actually have scientific explanations for...not a good sign if you are trying to argue logical consistency.
Personally I have no problem with you believing what you want - just don't start trying to claim that somehow you have a vastly superior, logically consistent belief and then get annoyed when someone points out your hypocrisy.
You have no basis for assuming that a just-fertilized cell must immediately in some fashion be associated with a soul.
Read my post carefully. I did not propose any alternatives I was just pointing out that your beliefs (assuming that you are the same AC) are no more (or less) logically inconsistent than any other religion's. I was not proposing an alternative I was just pointing out that you are the proverbial kettle calling the pot black.
It's just that those terrorists without engineering degrees won't even make the news due to ineptitude.
Given the (thankful) ineptitude of some of those who do make the news I wonder if they would not have been more effective as terrorists if they had stuck to being engineers and built a few bridges or buildings.
Meanwhile, most organized religions are just plain stupid, since they believe logically inconsistent nonsense (example, the notion that the purely physical process of cell-fertilization can cause a nonphysical entity like a soul to begin to exist, or even more stupidly, force God to create a soul for it).
....and yet as a reincarnationist you believe that "this purely physical process" causes a pre-existing soul to be placed into the body. Could you explain how this is significantly different given that we have no physical knowledge of souls? While you are at it, it would also be nice to know how you explain the increasing number of souls...I suppose you could have some spare ones floating around but then does that mean you think there is a maximum number of living entities possible in the Universe at any one time?
If you are going to attack other people's belief's as "logically inconsistent" it might be nice to check that your own beliefs don't fall clearly into that category.
Have the light lean forward when a good bit of the time they are strung from wires above.
There is an easy solution to that - don't hang your lights from wires way above the road so that the driver in the front car has to lean forward over the dash board to see the damn things. One of my pet peeves about driving the US is how awkward it is to see the lights at some junctions because they are so high. Indeed the first time I drove at night I almost ran several red lights simply because my eyes were on the road and the lights were suspended well about it and not where I was looking. While I was there for several years and got more adapted to it but they are still harder to spot than lights on poles at the side of the road.
You mean like UK traffic lights? These do sometimes get covered a little by snow but rarely get completely covered over despite the snow being very wet and sticky. Of course the other helpful thing is that the temperatures rarely stay below zero for too long so any snow covering will last a day at the most. However, even up in the north where the snow sometimes comes in almost horizontally I've never seen a covered light, even with the new LED ones.
human beings are a 1 centi-hertz CPU, and US legal precedent excludes any activity they perform unaided from patenting.
Interesting. However Think about the 100s (for the sake of argument only!) it takes to boot an OS. In this time your 3GHz CPU is running approximately flat out (we'll ignore the extra cores). Since a human is a centi-hertz in your estimation one human will require 300,000,000,000 times more time to perform the same operations or just short of 1 million years. So if the task takes far longer than a single human life expectancy is it reasonable to argue that it is a task that a human being can do unaided? Personally I hate software patents but I don't think that you can defeat them with this argument - even if you tweak the numbers it will be hard to get the 5 orders of magnitude which you need.
The rate of development of technology in the US is extremely high--but this doesn't mean that the technology is deployed there.
Therefore the country where it IS deployed is the more advanced. When I moved to the US from Europe I was amazed at how technologically backwards the place was considering the huge amount of tech development that goes on there. The amount and type of technology you encounter in everyday life is certainly far behind Europe and now living in Canada things are more advanced, but still not quite as much as Europe. Its true that some of the newest gadgets may get released in the US first but when it comes to applying technology to existing products (like the car) the US is surprisingly far behind.
I'm assuming the GP wanted it to come back intact. Ever watched baggage handlers load luggage?
Yes. I used to regularly bring back beer from the UK to Canada in glass bottles and never had one break. If you pack them round well with clothes it is not a problem.
Given that they make those announcements at 200dB
Really? You might want to check this chart. At 125 dB cound can cause physical pain, at 180 decibels you will cause the death of hearing tissue and 194 dB is the loudest, sustained sound possible. Since I would estimate that onboard a jet the ambient sound is around 60-70 dB I would estimate that the announcements are around 70-80 dB i.e. up to twice as loud as a normal converstation. However since a loud rock concert is 115 dB and this is what they are trying to recreate it is not unreasonable to assume that a volume of 90dB or more is used which would be twice as loud as the announcement. Hence it IS is real problem.
Yes you are - you are just not allowed to have it in the cabin with you. There is nothing preventing you from checking it.
my girlfriend was denied a blanket because "we are taking off".
That is a reasonable safety issue, not a security one. They do not want bags, blankets etc. blocking seat rows in the event of a emergency at take off and landing where they are most likely to occur and where there is no time to clear things away if one does happen.
i'm not allowed to FUCKING LISTED TO MUSIC..... i don't like being waken up unless necessary.
Again this is a safety issue. They want to make sure that you can hear any emergency announcements at take off and landing when there is very little time to act. In Canada now you are allowed to wear headphones connected to the plane's internal audio (which will presumably play any announcements).
However your post does demonstrate a predictable reaction to all the stupid, assinine "security" rules which they keep throwing at us. Eventually people will get so irritated and annoyed by all the idiocy that they will stop listening and obeying all these rules because, if they know that 50% of them are stupid then perhaps the other 50% are as well. At that point you lose the willing cooperation of passengers and end up with a net reduction in safety.
Anglicans have, as I understand, nullified their priesthood after their separation
Not really - the Catholic church "nullified" the Anglican priesthood after separation however Anglicans do not acknowledge that as valid. Historically there is evidence to show that the chain of laying on hands from bishop to bishop back to the apostles is at least as unbroken as the Catholic chain.
Reality check:
- Wealth makes right
- Might makes right
Wrong. Wealth and might mean that you don't have to care whether you are in the right or not - you can just do what you please. However it does eventually catch up with you as resentment against you builds. Looking at history the lifetime of "super powers" has been continuously decreasing with the increase in communication. Rome lasted several centuries, the British Empire a couple of centuries and the US will be lucky to make it to one century.
Slashdot Mirror
This is, of course, all premised upon the allergy actually being this serious
Hence my point - if the allergy is this serious then how is safe for them to go out in public, let alone take a plane? Even then suppose the person next to them had just eaten nuts before getting on board?
Their "disability" is that they cannot eat nuts so how does me eating nuts affect them? An appropriate level of understanding is that I do not prepare nut-containing food for friends who are allergic (and being very fastidious about it if they are more sensitive).
Allergies that can kill are no joking matter, and a nut free zone might be a better solution....
So perhaps the best solution would to not allow these nuts with allergies on board? If their reaction is so severe as to be life threatening just from being in the same room (and an extremely well ventilated room with excellent air filtration at that) as a bag of nuts then it is clearly not safe for them to be out in public where anyone might be eating nuts. If the problem is that they are scared to be in a room with nuts because they are allergic to them then this is a psychological problem of theirs and not a medical requirement at which point it becomes reasonable to ask why I should have to give up my freedoms instead of them giving up theirs.
And later:
Pope Urban VIII personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in the book,
Indeed, it was Galileo's political antagonism, not his ideas, that got him trouble. Imagine that.
Hmmm.....you might have wanted to include the rest of that sentence you quoted from the article:
Pope Urban VIII personally asked Galileo to give arguments for and against heliocentrism in the book, and to be careful not to advocate heliocentrism.
Sorry but forbidding the advocation of scientific knowledge is pretty much anti-science. Galileo may well not have helped himself by being somewhat politically antagonistic but the overwhelming picture is that the Catholic church was happy to support science as long as science did not come up with any discoveries which went against what they decided was the "truth". That would be like saying that you support freedom of speech as long as I don't say anything which you disagree with....it really isn't support at all. The church certainly supported education but their support of science is far more questionable.
Of course the Catholic church, for the most part, is not like that now and does support and listen to scientists - indeed as a physicist I've often thought it would be really interesting to have a chat with one of the astronomers from the Vatican observatory to hear their take on science. But that does not mean that in the past they were so enlightened.
Science is dispassionate, that doesn't mean the scientist have to be weak, meek, and keep their heads down for fear of pissing off some fools or otherwise.
True...but neither does it mean that we have to go out of our way to piss off people either. It is enough to state the truth and correct it when others get it wrong. You do not need to go the extra mile and call them an idiot for getting it wrong - that is extremely counter-productive when trying to educate others about what you have discovered.
Definitely a good time to check out Jupiter and the four Galilean moons
Yes it was - a beautiful view though at -24C outside it was a tad on the cold side! The moons were nicely balanced two on each side. Now my kids can say that they saw the Galilean satellites for the first time exactly 400 years after Galileo first saw (three of) them - thank you Slashdot!
Note that if a soul can exist without a body after death, then it can exist without a body any other time, too.
Why? The genetic information of a butterfly lies within a caterpillar and yet a butterfly cannot exist without being a caterpillar first. So there is no logical reason that what you say has to be true - it might be the way the universe works but there is no reason to suggest that it MUST be the way things work.
Why should it have to be associated with a body before birth?
Perhaps that is the way that things work? There is no scientific or logical argument that you can make for or against this because there is no scientific evidence for the existence of a soul. If you believe that we do have a soul then it is just as consistent to argue that it is created at birth as it is to argue your position. Nothing in any of your posts has provided any support that your position is inherently more logical or consistent than that of more established religions. You have to remember that just because you believe a thing it does not make it right.
I understand that this is a belief that you hold dear and I have no problem with that. Just don't criticise others for having different beliefs that yours which are no more, or less logical that your own.
Sorry - I did not mean to suggest that software engineers cannot understand the code. The problem is that they don't understand how it will be used, which is not their fault because, being research, we don't exactly know how the code wil be used either! Most of the code we use in particle physics is in a constant state of flux because we are always finding out new detector issues we have to fix or new analysis techniques etc. So it is very hard to sit down and say "we need some code to do X,Y and Z" since X may change and we probably don't know what Z is yet!
As you say communication is the key but I think that it is very hard to have a good enough level of communication for many applications due to the very fluid nature of the problems being dealt with. If you have a fixed, relatively static problem (like developing a common tool/utility/library for research) then I agree a software engineer would be extremely useful there but this is not where most coding happens and so a culture has developed of writing code ourselves which can also make it hard for those of us who would on occasion like to hire a software engineer to do so because the usual response is: "why should we give you money for that when you can write the code yourself (or get your students and postdocs to do it)" usually follwed with an argument about how the money is needed for electronic engineers to design boards etc.
I'm trying to figure out how anything but Fermions can be "collided".
This is a very sensible question given our "everyday" understanding of collisions. The problem is because you are thinking of the particles as billiard balls which bounce off each other but that it not really what is happening.
Instead of two balls think about two magnets moving towards each other with like poles facing so that they repel. If they are not moving too fast then the magnets will collide and bounce off each other's magnetic fields without ever touching each other. Now suppose the magnets were each 100 times smaller. At that size you could push them a lot harder against each other and they still would not touch. If you shrank them even more then the energy would get even higher and, as far as we know, the fundamental particles like gluons and quarks have no minimum size (or if they do have one it is so small that we have never collided too with enough energy to see it). So our collisions are really just the fields of each particle interacting with one another. In the case of a gluon this is field of the strong nuclear force.
I hope that addresses what I think was the conceptual thinking that led to your question. However there is also a more technical issue in that, as you say, the Pauli Exclusion principle applies to fermions in the same state. However since both the gluons or quarks will have different momenta (they travel in opposite directions and the magnitude will also differ) the exclusion principle would not apply even to quark collisions because their states are not the same.
It's quite shocking isn't it? And not just a "this code isn't very pretty" problem either, but the instability of the thing is remarkable.
Remarkable? Its legendary! ROOT has the dubious distinction of including the worst piece of programming I have ever seen. When adding some extract I/O objects in separate header files to a program, generating dictionaries etc. I suddenly had the linker complaining about duplicate symbols. After spending just over a day trying to figure out why and getting more and more confused I finally demonstrated that ADDING A COMMENT to the code fixed the problem!
Staggered that ROOT was somehow breaking the C++ standard in ways I had not even contemplated I spent another day tracking this down to an automatically named function which used the C preprocessor line number directive as the only variable part of its name. So, if you happened to have the classdef (IIRC) macro on the same line in two header files ROOT would generate identically named symbols. The result was that something as simple as adding or removing a comment could fix or cause a duplicate symbol problem!
Far, far worse than all that though was that when I submitted a nice bug report illustrating the problem and pointing out the macro which was at fault they claimed that this was NOT A BUG and did not need fixing! ARGH! I only ever use ROOT through the Python interface now since it shields you from so much of the pain....just not all of it unfortunately!
"...then hand over their work to skilled software engineers that are qualified to turn it into good software."
As a physicist I only have to look at the code we use and write to see your initial point (try looking at ROOT from CERN for C++ that will make you want to cry!). However your solution simply does not work. You cannot "hand it over" to a non-expert in the area because the usage and purpose of the code is something that they do not understand and so the result will be unusable (there was one program I remember as a grad student which was a beautiful design but the overhead was so large that one senior physicist calculated that he would be retired before it had finished one pass through the data!). The best scientific code I have seen is generally written by an expert in the field who has experience of good software design. Even close collaboration between physicists and software engineers rarely works because neither side is willing to compromise functionality for design or vice versa.
LHC was designed to shed light on why there is matter at all in this universe.
No, it was designed to determine why fundamental particles have mass. It may shed some light on the matter/anti-matter imbalance but that is not its primary design goal.
But, matter is not all that matters, there is also justice.
Indeed there is. First it is worth mentioning that law is not the same as justice and never has been. It is a best approximation to the concept that we have come up with but laws are by no means always just. Additionally since the LHC is built in Europe and NOT the US it is European law/justice which is relevant. So frankly this study is not worth the paper it is written on since US courts can huff and puff all they like and make not one whit of difference - expect perhaps preventing US groups from working on it which, since it is already built, will probably only caue a delay in analyses. Of course it would be very damaging to US physicists and even this threat will make it harder to convince the international community to build any future facilities in the US where such idiocy apparently has a better chance of success.
Its seems there is nothing anybody can do, mostly because nobody really cares.
Correction: nobody really believes the idiots going around predicting the end of the world. This is a very good sign because it shows that deep down the majority of people really do believe in science and not what the latest scaremonger with a tenuous grasp of reality thinks will garner them the most attention.
One guy on the site is even ranting about the LHC actually being a "quark cannon"
Actually his credibility is lost there. The LHC is far better described as a gluon collider. The cross-section for gluon-gluon collisions is a lot larger than for quark-quark.
For example, you wrote: "as a reincarnationist you believe that "this purely physical process" causes a pre-existing soul to be placed into the body" --that is FALSE.....What a just-fertilized ovum is, nor more and no less, is the equivalent of a "Potentially Available For Occupancy"
What is the huge significance to the time delay between birth and "occupancy"? Frankly I see no logical difference whatsoever to simply saying well the soul is created sometime later as well. Hence I take this as confirming my original statement, thank you.
Have you ever considered the possibility that some (not all) still-births are the result of NO soul deciding to claim that body?
No, I consider them the result of either birth defects or trauma inside the womb (such as strangulation by the umbilical cord). Of course I could also argue that in these cases no soul was created for them as well. Again I fail to see how your philosophy is in any way whatsoever more logical than those you deride.
All the illogic you perceived, regarding my philosophy, derived straightly from your own ridiculous assumptions about it.
No I derived them from the incredible similarity to the beliefs that you were deriding as illogical. In fact these exchanges show that, not only do you have very similar beliefs but that you have the same narrowminded-ness and inability to admit that you might, just possibly, be wrong that leads to religious conflicts. In addition your philosophy seems to be dreaming up mystical explanations for events that we actually have scientific explanations for...not a good sign if you are trying to argue logical consistency.
Personally I have no problem with you believing what you want - just don't start trying to claim that somehow you have a vastly superior, logically consistent belief and then get annoyed when someone points out your hypocrisy.
You have no basis for assuming that a just-fertilized cell must immediately in some fashion be associated with a soul.
Read my post carefully. I did not propose any alternatives I was just pointing out that your beliefs (assuming that you are the same AC) are no more (or less) logically inconsistent than any other religion's. I was not proposing an alternative I was just pointing out that you are the proverbial kettle calling the pot black.
It's just that those terrorists without engineering degrees won't even make the news due to ineptitude.
Given the (thankful) ineptitude of some of those who do make the news I wonder if they would not have been more effective as terrorists if they had stuck to being engineers and built a few bridges or buildings.
Meanwhile, most organized religions are just plain stupid, since they believe logically inconsistent nonsense (example, the notion that the purely physical process of cell-fertilization can cause a nonphysical entity like a soul to begin to exist, or even more stupidly, force God to create a soul for it).
If you are going to attack other people's belief's as "logically inconsistent" it might be nice to check that your own beliefs don't fall clearly into that category.
Have the light lean forward when a good bit of the time they are strung from wires above.
There is an easy solution to that - don't hang your lights from wires way above the road so that the driver in the front car has to lean forward over the dash board to see the damn things. One of my pet peeves about driving the US is how awkward it is to see the lights at some junctions because they are so high. Indeed the first time I drove at night I almost ran several red lights simply because my eyes were on the road and the lights were suspended well about it and not where I was looking. While I was there for several years and got more adapted to it but they are still harder to spot than lights on poles at the side of the road.
You mean like UK traffic lights? These do sometimes get covered a little by snow but rarely get completely covered over despite the snow being very wet and sticky. Of course the other helpful thing is that the temperatures rarely stay below zero for too long so any snow covering will last a day at the most. However, even up in the north where the snow sometimes comes in almost horizontally I've never seen a covered light, even with the new LED ones.
human beings are a 1 centi-hertz CPU, and US legal precedent excludes any activity they perform unaided from patenting.
Interesting. However Think about the 100s (for the sake of argument only!) it takes to boot an OS. In this time your 3GHz CPU is running approximately flat out (we'll ignore the extra cores). Since a human is a centi-hertz in your estimation one human will require 300,000,000,000 times more time to perform the same operations or just short of 1 million years. So if the task takes far longer than a single human life expectancy is it reasonable to argue that it is a task that a human being can do unaided? Personally I hate software patents but I don't think that you can defeat them with this argument - even if you tweak the numbers it will be hard to get the 5 orders of magnitude which you need.
The rate of development of technology in the US is extremely high--but this doesn't mean that the technology is deployed there.
Therefore the country where it IS deployed is the more advanced. When I moved to the US from Europe I was amazed at how technologically backwards the place was considering the huge amount of tech development that goes on there. The amount and type of technology you encounter in everyday life is certainly far behind Europe and now living in Canada things are more advanced, but still not quite as much as Europe. Its true that some of the newest gadgets may get released in the US first but when it comes to applying technology to existing products (like the car) the US is surprisingly far behind.
I'm assuming the GP wanted it to come back intact. Ever watched baggage handlers load luggage?
Yes. I used to regularly bring back beer from the UK to Canada in glass bottles and never had one break. If you pack them round well with clothes it is not a problem.
Given that they make those announcements at 200dB
Really? You might want to check this chart. At 125 dB cound can cause physical pain, at 180 decibels you will cause the death of hearing tissue and 194 dB is the loudest, sustained sound possible. Since I would estimate that onboard a jet the ambient sound is around 60-70 dB I would estimate that the announcements are around 70-80 dB i.e. up to twice as loud as a normal converstation. However since a loud rock concert is 115 dB and this is what they are trying to recreate it is not unreasonable to assume that a volume of 90dB or more is used which would be twice as loud as the announcement. Hence it IS is real problem.
i'm not allowed to take beer back from germany
Yes you are - you are just not allowed to have it in the cabin with you. There is nothing preventing you from checking it.
my girlfriend was denied a blanket because "we are taking off".
That is a reasonable safety issue, not a security one. They do not want bags, blankets etc. blocking seat rows in the event of a emergency at take off and landing where they are most likely to occur and where there is no time to clear things away if one does happen.
i'm not allowed to FUCKING LISTED TO MUSIC..... i don't like being waken up unless necessary.
Again this is a safety issue. They want to make sure that you can hear any emergency announcements at take off and landing when there is very little time to act. In Canada now you are allowed to wear headphones connected to the plane's internal audio (which will presumably play any announcements).
However your post does demonstrate a predictable reaction to all the stupid, assinine "security" rules which they keep throwing at us. Eventually people will get so irritated and annoyed by all the idiocy that they will stop listening and obeying all these rules because, if they know that 50% of them are stupid then perhaps the other 50% are as well. At that point you lose the willing cooperation of passengers and end up with a net reduction in safety.
Anglicans have, as I understand, nullified their priesthood after their separation
Not really - the Catholic church "nullified" the Anglican priesthood after separation however Anglicans do not acknowledge that as valid. Historically there is evidence to show that the chain of laying on hands from bishop to bishop back to the apostles is at least as unbroken as the Catholic chain.
Reality check: - Wealth makes right - Might makes right
Wrong. Wealth and might mean that you don't have to care whether you are in the right or not - you can just do what you please. However it does eventually catch up with you as resentment against you builds. Looking at history the lifetime of "super powers" has been continuously decreasing with the increase in communication. Rome lasted several centuries, the British Empire a couple of centuries and the US will be lucky to make it to one century.