While I share the general sense of outrage at China's heavy-handed government oppression, including grotesque overspending on ill-conceived megaprojects that largely benefit a small number of high-placed stakeholders (three Gorges Damn, the Olympics) at the expense of the public good, I'm not sure that - at least in America - we're not living in a glass house. Let me rephrase the above to show why:
I share the general sense of outrage at the US's under-handed government oppression, including grotesque overspending on ill-conceived megaprojects that largely benefit a small number of high-placed stakeholders (The Iraq War, Prescription Drug Act) at the expense of the public good.
I am human. That's what makes my humanity special.
If there has ever been a more circular, self-agrandizing statement than this I've certainly never seen it.
animistic earth worship... You believe that every living thing has some sort of a spirit within it.
This is a joke, right? I write that, "all thinking meat is the same" and you think I believe in magic spirits? Wow.
the fact of the matter is, if there is no god, the earth is just a rock, and it doesn't matter one whit if human beings exterminate all of the bears, lions and tigers.
The fact that you are unable to value anything without a magic sky-daddy telling you what is good and bad, what is right and wrong, what is important and unimportant is entirely your problem. I assure you that the hundreds of millions of atheists around the world are perfectly capable of valuing biodiversity and the beauty in the natural world without having to be ordered to do so under penalty of eternal torture by a comicbook superhero who lives in the clouds.
You have this fantastic assumption that you can make a deal with a biosystem, as if, a giant rock whirling around a ball of fusing hydrogen gas is capable of signing and living up to a contract.
"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel at this moment more anxiety for the safety of my country than ever before, even in the midst of war." - President Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864 in a letter to Colonel William F. Elkins
Lou Dobb's War on the Middle Class is filled with data, stats and examples about corporate lobbying and influence in Washington for those who are interested.
One other WTO-related thought: with the dollar plummeting, now would probably be a good time for nations to redouble their efforts to pay off WTO/IMF debt.
I was living in a Gulf country a few years ago when the government there conducted the census. They just sent out an army of 20-somthings with PDAs to do the surveys. I believe most of the survey was multiple-choice, but there were some numeric entries (how much I earned per month and what y rent cost, for example). You could do those with multiple-choice too, obviously, with a selection of ranges.
The whole census survey took about 15 minutes. They collected a lot of data - I'd say there were between 60 and 80 questions. Since I'm a geeky sort of person, I asked the kid how it worked and he showed me - the PDA (a Compac Pocket PC) just ran a macro in MS Office which dumped each survey as a file into a folder. That folder synced via wireless/mobile-phone link to where the main data center was.
The country has a population of about 4 million, and he said there were 200 people doing the survey for several months. Seemed pretty straightforward, and I can't imagine it cost that much - certainly labor and not the PDAs was the primary expense.
What is your test for determining what is human, and what is not
My whole point, which you obviously missed, is that there is nothing inherently special about being human. Humans are just another species of mammal. Our bias in this regard is not religious or even cultural; it is biological. You clearly fail to recognize that we are hardwired to think of our own kind as privileged and superior to every other living thing on this planet. If you are a Christian who adheres to doctrine, then you believe all other living things were created along with us 6,000 years ago and placed here for our reckless disposal. To me, however, we are not special. All thinking meat is the same - and deserves the same respect, rights, and protections (indeed, anything that thinks at all is the same, and I anticipate intelligent machines to have rights within my lifetime). Logically the measures that are important here, as I already mentioned and which you - again - obviously missed, are simply the capacity for self-awareness and for suffering. By this logic, an adult chimpanzee should be given much more respect, rights and protections than a few million unthinking, unfeeling human cells. Most sensible people who don't talk to imaginary friends or harbor delusions of life after death automatically understand and agree with this.
, and why is that test any better than mine.
Because it is based on logic and reason, and not on the hopelessly outdated superstitions of a random Middle Eastern tribe from the Bronze Age who thought that the Earth was flat and was created 2,000 years after the Babylonians invented beer.
And then, if killing all the frogs isn't good enough, you go and kill your offspring like so much tissue. You talk about sustainable living and having good practices, and here you are wrecking the planet and killing millions of unborn children so that you can pretend reproduction is a recreational pasttime.
You actually had me intrigued there for a moment, since the issue of estrogen pollution of waterways is interesting. But then you just couldn't keep your own insanely irrational, schizoid-dysfunctional religious garbage to yourself.
Killing millions of unborn children? Newsflash: an embryo is not a child. Any dog or cat, not to mention chimpanzee or dolphin, has a vastly greater capacity for both suffering and self-awareness than any newborn human infant, let alone a human fetus or embryo. Yet I'm guessing you're not a vegetarian, since it's not in the Bible.
Your transparently obvious beliefs in the soul and Heaven and Hell are the only possible explanation for being stupid enough to be pro-life. By calling abortion murder, you reveal your morality to be derived from ancient magic books instead of logic and rational thinking. This disqualifies you from rational discourse.
Pro-life AND pro-war? I'm anti-hypocrite, thanks very much.
For what it does - provide a secure computing platform - one could argue that the older it gets, the better it becomes. Could your typical script kiddies and ID theives who normally 'hack' by downloading the how-tos for exploits from somewere.ru actually hack a 70s-era mainframe? Yeah, good luck with that.
And if it's got electronics in it, then it's either "Made in Taiwan" or, increasingly, "Made in China." I'm guessing that outsourcing production of the components is the explanation for this gaff. Or maybe it's just coincidence that our nuke nosecone ended up in Taiwan and not, say, Portugal or the Maldives?
it's not uncommon for computers, textbooks, backpacks, projectors, or anything that is not locked up or chained down to disappear.
This is where you want eyes in the sky. Seriously, I WANT cameras in the ceiling to discourage theft. It's ludicrous to have to be afraid that some asswipe is going to steal anything "that is not locked up or chained down." Get cameras, and then people just won't be able to get away with it. Then if some moronic grad student is stupid enough to throw away tens of thousands of dollars spent on their degree - and possibly tank their career as well - in exchange for $20 selling used textbooks back to the bookstore, then that's just good entertainment material for fark.com and youtube.
Definitely moronic flamebait. Wright's comments aren't even that inflammatory - that's the media spin at work. Watch them - only one is utterly baseless, the bit about HIV/AIDS being a conspiracy. The rest is readily defensible. If he was a white pastor, nobody would even bat an eye at this. As a hardcore atheist, I've seen much scarier foaming-at-the-mouth psychotic religious rantings than this guy's stuff.
On top of that, to blame Obama for what someone else says? Ridiculous. And Obama's speech afterward? Amazingly good for a politician. That's the person you want answering the phone at 3am, not the whining candidate who was dumb enough to lie through her teeth about "running for cover under sniper fire" at the airport in Bosnia, only to have video footage appear on youtube 12 hours later showing her landing where she was greeted by the president and his daughter, who read her a poem right there on the tarmac.
I'm guessing that the 'Orb' device this DirectX architect guy's company is putting out is supposed to deliver the advantages of consoles that you describe through the PC. I'm not sure it'll work, but the idea does have some merit. Also, the guy did mention that the whole idea of DirectX in the beginning was to give game developers a way to completely bypass all the OS crap and go direct to the PC's hardware, thereby improving not only performance but security, etc. At Generation 10, DirectX is no longer like that at all - it runs inside Vista and so it carries all of Vista's liabilities.
The idea of the Orb just plugging into a PC to parasitize its resources - processing power, memory, internet access, etc - makes pretty good sense. This could either be a piece of hardware plugging in as a peripheral, in which case it really would be like a console, or it could just all be done in software, in which case it would capture the original intent of DirectX and provide a virtual console on the PC.
Your points are all still valid, but the stuff this guy has to say that's interesting is how his company is going to address exactly the things you mention.
Again, the spirit of your ideas is commendable, but you're getting away from what the intention of a public auction is. In the latest round of complexity you've introduced, you're essentially suggesting that instead of companies bidding on a public resource they would like to use, they are instead bidding on a government contract - in this case, the government wants consumers to have telecom services and is shopping out the contract to a private services company. An analogy would be roads: the government wants the public to have roads, so they hire a private contractor to build and maintain them according to spec. This is a perfectly acceptable way of doing things; it is quite common; and it is very much like what you are suggesting. Frankly, the reason why the government chose to auction the public airwaves instead of hiring contractors, I honestly don't know. America does things a bit differently. In most other developed nations, telecoms are either contracted as described above just like other utilities, or they are state-owned just like other utilities. You can visit Sweden or Korea or Japan or France and decide for yourself whether public utilities and telecoms are superior to the private ones we have in the US.
Probably you've not worked in a contract bidding environment before. Awarding contracts to the lowest bidder is usually a recipe in disaster, whether for a goods or for a services order. If you're NYC and you want a new bridge built, for example, do you just automatically award the contract ot the lowest bidder? Of course not. Why? Because companies underbid and lowball each other to get the job, then get halfway through and say, "sorry, we need more money." Then what do you do? You're stuck. You have to hire the company that you really think is going to get the job done best. A tiny three man firm that bids $10,000 to refurbish the entire Brooklyn Bridge is probably not going to be able to get the job done. Similar logic applies to the idea mentioned in the above post about the investment required to adequately serve the market using the bands available at auction, and that's one reason why the idea probably wouldn't work.
The other big reason I mentioned already is that there is not going to be motivation for companies to lower their prices as long as profit is in the equation. The parent poster did say it was about pricing, since the main criteria for 'best' proposal was outlines as the one that is cheapest for consumers.
The spirit of your idea is commendable, but in practice it is difficult to motivate any major for-profit enterprise to voluntarily lower its prices. There would have to be a direct line to profit in doing so, otherwise it just isn't going to happen. I can't think of any way to keep profit in the equation while lowering prices other than flat-out government subsidy, and the last thing you want is the government providing more corporate welfare.
The obvious solution is to remove profit from the equation. As for how, well, that's the tricky part.
Human beings have this illogical obsession with originality and authenticity. Look at synthetic vs real diamonds, generic vs name brands, anything vs Apple, etc.
You might be interested in the concept of conspicuous consumption. It's the idea that humans make extravagant displays of wealth and/or power as a mechnism for broadcasting and possibly elevating social status. Something like, "Look at me, I'm so rich and powerful I can afford to buy food and clothes for prices 100 times higher than the stuff costs to make, so you should be interested in me." 'Interested' here means both sexually and socially. The peacock's tail is a parallel example: it says to other peacocks, "look how great I am, I'm so superior that I can afford to drag around and put calories into growing this ridiculous tail even though it could make me a lion's breakfast, therefore you should be interested in me."
Your analogies are entertaining, but moot. You miss the point: science and religion are both methods for attempting to understand truth (i.e. that which is consistent) in the universe. Brakes and motors are not both systems for making cars accelerate. Breathing and playing the piano are not both methods of performing Bach concertos. Kittens and rocks are not both mammals.
As for your assessment of my understanding of spiritualism, claims without supporting arguments prove only one thing: that the person making the claim is a fool.
Your response ignores the entire bottom of my original post. Again: refer to Christopher Hitchens for a critical analysis those individuals who claim to be Christian while not adhering to Christian Doctrine. Many (perhaps most) so-called 'moderate' Christians, for example, do no believe in the literal truth of the resurrection or virgin birth any more than they believe in the literal truth of Genesis or Deuteronomy.
There are very strong arguments against Stephen Jay Gould's famous, "non-overlapping magisteria" to which you are refering. The simplest is one you yourself alude to: the only realm to which science does not apply is 'outside' the context of the observable, knowable universe. The trouble is, anything that can affect the universe is part of the universe - that's what 'the universe' means. Anything outside the observable, knowable universe is therefore simply unreal; ergo, it either does not exist or it doesn't matter whether or not it exists. Postulations about God may lie outside the realm of science, but anything outside of that realm is unreal and therefore doesn't matter.. And you'll note, here, that there can be - by definition - no distinguishing between what is 'exists outside reality' and what is simply imaginary. That is why science and religion are irreconcilable: science is solely about what is real and religion is indistinguishable from make-believe.
As for the claims of any particular relgion, what is the basis for believing one set of beliefs indistinguishable from make-believe is any better than another? Why are the beliefs of iron-age nomadic Middle-Eastern tribesman better than those of bronze-age Chinese villagers? If you want an explanation for where the universe came from, certainly there are more imaginative fictions available. In my opinion, the most interesting are those that are actually plausible. The "our reality is just a computer simulation like the Matrix" explanation is interesting, since it at least has the merit of being possible.
I guess what he really seems to want--and again I should qualify that this is how it seems to me--is to demonstrate that science and religion are irreconcilable, which is simply untrue.
This is almost certainly why you disagree with and dislike Dakwins in the ways you do. Religion and science are NOT reconcilable. Religion is about accepting assertions as true without any logical or evidential basis, and acting/organizing/living accordingly. Science is about accepting no assertions without a solid logical and evidential basis. They are very nearly the antithesis of one another.
It is possible you are confusing religion with what is commonly termed "spiritualism." Spiritualism is largely the celebration of mystery, and is therefore essentially the enjoyment of agnosticism. This is not at all what the vast majority of organized Abrahamic religion is. For examples of spiritualism confused with religion, see Christopher Hitchens's critical analysis of individuals who call themselves Christian while adhering to none Christianity's doctrine.
Well it depends on how you define "kill for profit." If you mean kill with a GLOC or a piano wire, then no, most monopolized industries don't kill for profit. But if you account for deaths that the company (or group of companies) could have prevented either through action or inaction but didn't expressly for the purpose of profit then I think you're actually out on very thin ice here. The monolithic pharmaceutical and health insurance companies knowingly "kill" thousands of people each year for profit. The manufacturers of cigarettes knowingly "kill" millions of people each year for profit. If you brought these charges up in court, it'd be 'wrongful death' instead of 'murder', but killing is killing and dead is dead as far as most people are concerned.
Nonsense, Dawkins is exceedingly smart. What he doesn't have is extensive training in the philosophy of religion, which causes him to make statements that sometimes woefully misrepresent the religious perspective.
I follow Dawkins pretty closely and while you're right that he's exeedingly smart, I think your claim that his statements wofeully misrepresent religion is pretty much completely wrong. Dawkins - and Hitchens, Harris and Dennett - are all very careful to qualify their statements as only applying to fundamentalists or extremists unless they are explicitly criticizing the moderate majority for the 'cover' it provides for extremism. All of the examples I've seen to the contrary are quotes out of context. Scientists in general, and particular those as eminent as Dakwins, go to great lengths to avoid making sweeping generalizations and blanket statements - those almost invariably get us into trouble.
Perhaps what you mean is that Dakwins is politically incorrect and hurts people's feelings with his frank (and indisputably accurate) assessment of religion and religiousity and religiously-motivated behavior. I agree with many atheists that Dawkins' blunt "brutally honest" tactics may actually be undermining his cause insome respects, but I think it would be very difficult indeed to make a case against Dakwins on the basis of him being inaccurate or misrepresentative in any way.
I'm with you on this. Unfortunately, it's you and me and maybe 50 other people. There's just no way the other 300 million people in the country will consider buying one of these things any time soon.
It should be run like 'cannon ball run'. You drive non stop first team wins.
I'm not sure what point a nonstop race proves. How often do people drive 3000 miles without stopping any longer than to refuel? Maybe truck drivers, but the race's vehicle specs didn't sound much like a semi's to me. Plus, I didn't see anything in the specs about the car requiring its own toilet facilities. Or maybe it'll just be astronauts in diapers driving?
I don't think the rules will allow for you to chase it with a big generator truck to recharge the car every 200 miles... Sneaking in behind shopping malls or something every 200 miles and plugging it into an outside wall outlet is probably not going to work.
So the other teams have big tanker trucks chasing their cars? Oh, that's right, there's a gasoline infrastructure in the United States so they'll be able to refuel. Well as it happens, there's an electrical infrastructure too, and vehicles like the Tesla Roadster carry a portable charger to enable plugging into to any ordinary power socket.
The only real concern here is recharge time making all-electric entrants less competitive in terms of overall speed.
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I share the general sense of outrage at the US's under-handed government oppression, including grotesque overspending on ill-conceived megaprojects that largely benefit a small number of high-placed stakeholders (The Iraq War, Prescription Drug Act) at the expense of the public good.
If there has ever been a more circular, self-agrandizing statement than this I've certainly never seen it.
animistic earth worship ... You believe that every living thing has some sort of a spirit within it.
This is a joke, right? I write that, "all thinking meat is the same" and you think I believe in magic spirits? Wow.
the fact of the matter is, if there is no god, the earth is just a rock, and it doesn't matter one whit if human beings exterminate all of the bears, lions and tigers.
The fact that you are unable to value anything without a magic sky-daddy telling you what is good and bad, what is right and wrong, what is important and unimportant is entirely your problem. I assure you that the hundreds of millions of atheists around the world are perfectly capable of valuing biodiversity and the beauty in the natural world without having to be ordered to do so under penalty of eternal torture by a comicbook superhero who lives in the clouds.
You have this fantastic assumption that you can make a deal with a biosystem, as if, a giant rock whirling around a ball of fusing hydrogen gas is capable of signing and living up to a contract.
Your incoherence continues to amaze.
Lou Dobb's War on the Middle Class is filled with data, stats and examples about corporate lobbying and influence in Washington for those who are interested.
One other WTO-related thought: with the dollar plummeting, now would probably be a good time for nations to redouble their efforts to pay off WTO/IMF debt.
The whole census survey took about 15 minutes. They collected a lot of data - I'd say there were between 60 and 80 questions. Since I'm a geeky sort of person, I asked the kid how it worked and he showed me - the PDA (a Compac Pocket PC) just ran a macro in MS Office which dumped each survey as a file into a folder. That folder synced via wireless/mobile-phone link to where the main data center was.
The country has a population of about 4 million, and he said there were 200 people doing the survey for several months. Seemed pretty straightforward, and I can't imagine it cost that much - certainly labor and not the PDAs was the primary expense.
My whole point, which you obviously missed, is that there is nothing inherently special about being human. Humans are just another species of mammal. Our bias in this regard is not religious or even cultural; it is biological. You clearly fail to recognize that we are hardwired to think of our own kind as privileged and superior to every other living thing on this planet. If you are a Christian who adheres to doctrine, then you believe all other living things were created along with us 6,000 years ago and placed here for our reckless disposal. To me, however, we are not special. All thinking meat is the same - and deserves the same respect, rights, and protections (indeed, anything that thinks at all is the same, and I anticipate intelligent machines to have rights within my lifetime). Logically the measures that are important here, as I already mentioned and which you - again - obviously missed, are simply the capacity for self-awareness and for suffering. By this logic, an adult chimpanzee should be given much more respect, rights and protections than a few million unthinking, unfeeling human cells. Most sensible people who don't talk to imaginary friends or harbor delusions of life after death automatically understand and agree with this.
, and why is that test any better than mine.
Because it is based on logic and reason, and not on the hopelessly outdated superstitions of a random Middle Eastern tribe from the Bronze Age who thought that the Earth was flat and was created 2,000 years after the Babylonians invented beer.
You actually had me intrigued there for a moment, since the issue of estrogen pollution of waterways is interesting. But then you just couldn't keep your own insanely irrational, schizoid-dysfunctional religious garbage to yourself.
Killing millions of unborn children? Newsflash: an embryo is not a child. Any dog or cat, not to mention chimpanzee or dolphin, has a vastly greater capacity for both suffering and self-awareness than any newborn human infant, let alone a human fetus or embryo. Yet I'm guessing you're not a vegetarian, since it's not in the Bible.
Your transparently obvious beliefs in the soul and Heaven and Hell are the only possible explanation for being stupid enough to be pro-life. By calling abortion murder, you reveal your morality to be derived from ancient magic books instead of logic and rational thinking. This disqualifies you from rational discourse.
Pro-life AND pro-war? I'm anti-hypocrite, thanks very much.
For what it does - provide a secure computing platform - one could argue that the older it gets, the better it becomes. Could your typical script kiddies and ID theives who normally 'hack' by downloading the how-tos for exploits from somewere.ru actually hack a 70s-era mainframe? Yeah, good luck with that.
And if it's got electronics in it, then it's either "Made in Taiwan" or, increasingly, "Made in China." I'm guessing that outsourcing production of the components is the explanation for this gaff. Or maybe it's just coincidence that our nuke nosecone ended up in Taiwan and not, say, Portugal or the Maldives?
This is where you want eyes in the sky. Seriously, I WANT cameras in the ceiling to discourage theft. It's ludicrous to have to be afraid that some asswipe is going to steal anything "that is not locked up or chained down." Get cameras, and then people just won't be able to get away with it. Then if some moronic grad student is stupid enough to throw away tens of thousands of dollars spent on their degree - and possibly tank their career as well - in exchange for $20 selling used textbooks back to the bookstore, then that's just good entertainment material for fark.com and youtube.
On top of that, to blame Obama for what someone else says? Ridiculous. And Obama's speech afterward? Amazingly good for a politician. That's the person you want answering the phone at 3am, not the whining candidate who was dumb enough to lie through her teeth about "running for cover under sniper fire" at the airport in Bosnia, only to have video footage appear on youtube 12 hours later showing her landing where she was greeted by the president and his daughter, who read her a poem right there on the tarmac.
The idea of the Orb just plugging into a PC to parasitize its resources - processing power, memory, internet access, etc - makes pretty good sense. This could either be a piece of hardware plugging in as a peripheral, in which case it really would be like a console, or it could just all be done in software, in which case it would capture the original intent of DirectX and provide a virtual console on the PC.
Your points are all still valid, but the stuff this guy has to say that's interesting is how his company is going to address exactly the things you mention.
Again, the spirit of your ideas is commendable, but you're getting away from what the intention of a public auction is. In the latest round of complexity you've introduced, you're essentially suggesting that instead of companies bidding on a public resource they would like to use, they are instead bidding on a government contract - in this case, the government wants consumers to have telecom services and is shopping out the contract to a private services company. An analogy would be roads: the government wants the public to have roads, so they hire a private contractor to build and maintain them according to spec. This is a perfectly acceptable way of doing things; it is quite common; and it is very much like what you are suggesting. Frankly, the reason why the government chose to auction the public airwaves instead of hiring contractors, I honestly don't know. America does things a bit differently. In most other developed nations, telecoms are either contracted as described above just like other utilities, or they are state-owned just like other utilities. You can visit Sweden or Korea or Japan or France and decide for yourself whether public utilities and telecoms are superior to the private ones we have in the US.
The other big reason I mentioned already is that there is not going to be motivation for companies to lower their prices as long as profit is in the equation. The parent poster did say it was about pricing, since the main criteria for 'best' proposal was outlines as the one that is cheapest for consumers.
The obvious solution is to remove profit from the equation. As for how, well, that's the tricky part.
You might be interested in the concept of conspicuous consumption. It's the idea that humans make extravagant displays of wealth and/or power as a mechnism for broadcasting and possibly elevating social status. Something like, "Look at me, I'm so rich and powerful I can afford to buy food and clothes for prices 100 times higher than the stuff costs to make, so you should be interested in me." 'Interested' here means both sexually and socially. The peacock's tail is a parallel example: it says to other peacocks, "look how great I am, I'm so superior that I can afford to drag around and put calories into growing this ridiculous tail even though it could make me a lion's breakfast, therefore you should be interested in me."
As for your assessment of my understanding of spiritualism, claims without supporting arguments prove only one thing: that the person making the claim is a fool.
Paul had it right.
As for the claims of any particular relgion, what is the basis for believing one set of beliefs indistinguishable from make-believe is any better than another? Why are the beliefs of iron-age nomadic Middle-Eastern tribesman better than those of bronze-age Chinese villagers? If you want an explanation for where the universe came from, certainly there are more imaginative fictions available. In my opinion, the most interesting are those that are actually plausible. The "our reality is just a computer simulation like the Matrix" explanation is interesting, since it at least has the merit of being possible.
This is almost certainly why you disagree with and dislike Dakwins in the ways you do. Religion and science are NOT reconcilable. Religion is about accepting assertions as true without any logical or evidential basis, and acting/organizing/living accordingly. Science is about accepting no assertions without a solid logical and evidential basis. They are very nearly the antithesis of one another.
It is possible you are confusing religion with what is commonly termed "spiritualism." Spiritualism is largely the celebration of mystery, and is therefore essentially the enjoyment of agnosticism. This is not at all what the vast majority of organized Abrahamic religion is. For examples of spiritualism confused with religion, see Christopher Hitchens's critical analysis of individuals who call themselves Christian while adhering to none Christianity's doctrine.
Well it depends on how you define "kill for profit." If you mean kill with a GLOC or a piano wire, then no, most monopolized industries don't kill for profit. But if you account for deaths that the company (or group of companies) could have prevented either through action or inaction but didn't expressly for the purpose of profit then I think you're actually out on very thin ice here. The monolithic pharmaceutical and health insurance companies knowingly "kill" thousands of people each year for profit. The manufacturers of cigarettes knowingly "kill" millions of people each year for profit. If you brought these charges up in court, it'd be 'wrongful death' instead of 'murder', but killing is killing and dead is dead as far as most people are concerned.
I follow Dawkins pretty closely and while you're right that he's exeedingly smart, I think your claim that his statements wofeully misrepresent religion is pretty much completely wrong. Dawkins - and Hitchens, Harris and Dennett - are all very careful to qualify their statements as only applying to fundamentalists or extremists unless they are explicitly criticizing the moderate majority for the 'cover' it provides for extremism. All of the examples I've seen to the contrary are quotes out of context. Scientists in general, and particular those as eminent as Dakwins, go to great lengths to avoid making sweeping generalizations and blanket statements - those almost invariably get us into trouble.
Perhaps what you mean is that Dakwins is politically incorrect and hurts people's feelings with his frank (and indisputably accurate) assessment of religion and religiousity and religiously-motivated behavior. I agree with many atheists that Dawkins' blunt "brutally honest" tactics may actually be undermining his cause insome respects, but I think it would be very difficult indeed to make a case against Dakwins on the basis of him being inaccurate or misrepresentative in any way.
Education.
I'm with you on this. Unfortunately, it's you and me and maybe 50 other people. There's just no way the other 300 million people in the country will consider buying one of these things any time soon.
I'm not sure what point a nonstop race proves. How often do people drive 3000 miles without stopping any longer than to refuel? Maybe truck drivers, but the race's vehicle specs didn't sound much like a semi's to me. Plus, I didn't see anything in the specs about the car requiring its own toilet facilities. Or maybe it'll just be astronauts in diapers driving?
So the other teams have big tanker trucks chasing their cars? Oh, that's right, there's a gasoline infrastructure in the United States so they'll be able to refuel. Well as it happens, there's an electrical infrastructure too, and vehicles like the Tesla Roadster carry a portable charger to enable plugging into to any ordinary power socket.
The only real concern here is recharge time making all-electric entrants less competitive in terms of overall speed.