I'm not a geologist so I largely don't know what I'm talking about, but I am from northern Nevada and the region has some very unique geological features. The Black Rock Desert was part of a very large lake at various points in the past, and is in a very seismically active region. Does anyone know to what extent other factors could also explain the evidence described in the article? To the layman (me) he seems like he's really stretching a couple ideas, so is this really a likely scenario?
Property is not an absolute right in that not everyone is guaranteed property, however, you do have the right to be generally secure from the government seizing your property. If the government is taking private property in the form of taxation, it better be made damn clear why exactly they feel the need to take that particular piece of property. I'm pretty conservative about this as I'm sure you can tell, so I'm skeptical whenever the government takes something from a private citizen. Simply explaining it as general obligation to society does nothing to convince me. If the government wants to tax rich folks more, why not increase the upper tax brackets in a straightforward method? Wouldn't that be more effective than only taxing people when they die? I believe it is simply an attempt to make another grab at private wealth in an underhanded fashion. Besides, it increases the complexity of tax law, allowing for the extremely wealthy to minimize the amount they pay by manipulating the system
Kinda lame, but I guess we just agree to disagree. I do get a distinct impression that you have an extremely hostile view towards property owners because of the language you use. Wealth is not a bad thing. Creating wealth is a positive benefit to society. It should not be punished. If it wasn't for individuals saving and investing capital, other people wouldn't have jobs. There would not be growth in industry. You should encourage people to amass large amounts of capital in your country, not discourage. The view of the government taking from the bourgeoisie as being a good thing needs to die.
Because that money was already "earned". It was already taxed. You shouldn't be punished for passing your property on to someone else after death, particularly family. It's not new wealth being created using benefits paid for by the taxpayer, therefore there is little justification for it. One of the most important duties of government is to protect private property (the most important purpose depending on who you talk to, I'm guessing you don't believe that). Half of your property shouldn't go to the government just because you died. That doesn't really serve much of a purpose. It's just an arbitrary grab by the feds because they can.
And approximately 70% of Americans own homes, which throws off the average quite a bit. Either way, a HUGE amount of the population is worth over $200,000. Hell, 10% of the population are millionaires.
How would you propose to give everyone an equal opportunity without leveling the playing field?
You don't. It's impossible. Poor people will never have the same opportunities as the wealthy. If two people are equally hard working and intelligent, the wealthy one is always going to finish "ahead." The real question isn't if they have an equal opportunity, but a fair opportunity. You shouldn't be trying to take away the wealth that people have worked hard to accumulate, you should look at trying to elevate those who are less fortunate. Unless the estate tax goes directly into an inner city school district or a scholarship fund for underprivileged kids, I highly doubt it's doing a goddamn thing to "level the playing field."
Remember, that's not $2,000,000 in cash. It's total assets. In your proposal, pretty much every person in the United States that is a home owner would be taxed at 50% of their assets whenever the head of the household died. If the government is forcing people to sell their houses in order to pay the "death tax", that would be a Very Bad Thing. I think we can all agree on that. Besides, most millionaires in the US are small business owners, and they've already paid a tax on the income earned (sometimes multiple times depending on the type of income).
You don't just go throwing around additional taxes because you can, you actually have to provide some reason behind it. Your proposal would bring even more people into a ridiculous tax, and put additional strain on the middle class. Regardless of how you feel about the current estate tax, that is a very bad idea. A more reasonable proposal from *your* perspective would be to raise the percentage taken by the estate tax, or provide a sort of progressive "estate tax bracket" that would put more of a burden on the extremely wealthy. That way the burden is still put upon the billionaires and such without shifting it onto the middle class.
Sorry for being an asshole in advance, but I don't think you addressed my points. Once again, rants and hyperbole. You provide no evidence either through statistics or historical example of how Mexico is worse off because of the United States. Since the passage of NAFTA (which you attacked) per capita income across Mexico has jumped dramatically. Poverty has decreased. Life expectancy has increased. The number of people employed, especially in northern areas around Monterrey and Tijuana, has also increased dramatically. People have more jobs and are making more money. This doesn't mean that there isn't poverty in those areas (especially border towns such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez) but it has gotten better.
It's pretty obvious that we disagree fundamentally on some issues surrounding farming. Organic farming is great if you can afford it, but when people are starving it's a pretty tough sell. I think it's great that people actually have food to eat and can do something else besides subsistence farming. Because of the increased food production in Mexico, there is nowhere near the level of hunger there was in the 1940's.
Interestingly, indigenous peoples with a very simple way of life typically have far more leisure time than you, or I, or these mass-farming Mexicans.
That's just romantic crap. Farming is hard as hell. It's not like subsistence farmers work 5-6 hours a day, then go home and discuss poetry. They work 24 hours a day because if they don't, they starve to death. There's a ridiculous notion out there that life used to be simple and idyllic back when everyone was on a farm. Well, it wasn't. It was hard, it was dirty, and it wasn't glorious. By using modern farming techniques, we allow people to perform more advanced jobs and more easily avoid things like famine.
The idea of us not having leisure time is also ludicrous. I have plenty of leisure time, and I don't work particularly hard. I also don't have to worry about starving in the next year because the crop didn't come in well. You can live a comfortable life (one person) making $25K a year in most of the country if you give up the obsession on owning lots of cool toys. That's a fairly easy salary to obtain working 40 hours a week (unbelievably easy if you're educated).
If libertarians these days can't even understand Ayn Rand, then I'm sure as hell glad very few have won elected office. A libertarian that can't grok Ayn Rand is like a green that struggles with Bambi.
OK, you started out good but you ended up sounding like an ill-informed maniac. There is no way you can attribute the US or NAFTA as degrading the quality of life in Mexico. Absolutely no fucking way. We give billions of dollars in aid to Mexico. Mexico was one of the first countries to undergo the Green Revolution, with major help from the US. This started Mexico's move from an agricultural economy, and allowed them to become a net exporter of food instead of importing. By moving manufacturing into northern Mexico, the quality of life and wages of Mexicans in cities like Monterrey and Tijuana has grown dramatically. We have done this all while taking in the largest immigration in our country's history, caused mostly by mismanagement resulting from incompetence and corruption within the Mexican government.
Illegal immigration is a serious problem and needs to be addressed, but attributing Mexico's problems to the US is one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard. You seem to be making the claim that Mexico's political and economic troubles are largely caused by the US, which is certainly not true. What possible advantage do we gain by having tens of millions of mostly poor Mexicans flooding into our country? Do you actually think that our foreign policy is to make Mexico as poor as possible so we can pay someone two dollars an hour less to pick lettuce? That doesn't make any goddamn sense. It's like claiming that because we took advantage of cheap Irish and Chinese labor in the 19th century, the US was responsible for the poverty that caused their emigration in the first place. The two simply do not connect.
Perhaps you would like to expand on how, exactly, we have lowered the standard of living in Mexico. Historical examples and statistics would be welcome, instead of just rants and hyperbole.
Turkey is not a modern country by any means unfortunately.
I think you meant to say that Turkey is not a modern country by all means. Despite the obvious flaws, Turkey is still a very cool place, and millions of miles ahead of most Muslim countries. One thing many other posters are avoiding is that repressions of some freedoms which Westerners would consider essential is one of the major reasons why Turkey has not adopted Sharia law. In many ways restrictive laws such as these have protected secularism. It's not always as simple as it seems on the surface.
Just to clarify, Turkey does acknowledge that the Armenians were killed, they just claim that it was a result of the war and was not intended as genocide. This is just as bad as claiming it didn't even happen, as the evidence overwhelmingly shows it to be an attempted (and largely successful) ethnic cleansing.
the mainstream outlets have tried and will continue to fail to subvert and commoditize it because these movements thrive (esp like punk) by going against the mainstream. Kids will never (I hope) accept corporations telling them what is cool (except maybe apple).
Tell that to the labels selling albums by Green Day, Blink 182, The Strokes, et al and companies like Zumiez and Hot Topic (internal motto "We sell rebellion"). Remember when skateboarding was only for the hardcore and it scared the shit out of pretty much everyone outside the scene? Now it's just another sport that kids pick up when they're young. That doesn't mean that there aren't underground scenes, but corporations are unbelievably good at taking an underground culture and packaging it to wanna-be rebellious youths, absolutely maiming it in the process. In fact, that is many companies' sole reason for existing. Why do you think 50 Cent sold 20 million albums in the US? It wasn't because he's a good musician, that's for damn sure.
I could see them sidestepping this by playing older music from bands that were once independent but are now signed to a major. Larger markets (LA/NY) might be able to get around it also because many national acts are still considered local. This coupled with the relatively small fine seems like a slap on the wrist. It's hard to say without more about the specifics of the deal, however.
But is there not a profound difference between monotheism and polytheism?
Yes and no. Of course theologically speaking there is a large difference, but to the layman it might not matter that much. As an example, one thing that Catholics did when converting Africans in the Caribbean and Brazil was show them how similar the saints were to the African gods. It was easier to teach them something that was similar to the belief system that the slaves already held instead of completely reversing the beliefs of previous religions. Saints serve a similar purpose to the believer as the various Gods do in a polytheistic religion. Although theologically distinct, praying to the god of the ocean and praying to the patron saint of fisherman both accomplish the same thing. As a result of adapting already existing African beliefs to Catholicism in order to more easily convert the slaves, you see many bizarre religious beliefs that are completely unique to the Americas, even in areas that are mostly Catholic and have been for centuries.
Saints are not gods. And if the different beliefs serve the same needs, how come Romans and Christians did not get along better?
As I said before, theologically they are distinct, but it is easier to adapt existing beliefs than to completely introduce a new system. Another different type of example is holidays. The holiday we call Christmas has existed for a very long time, much longer than Christianity has been around around. Instead of completely changing the holiday or adding a new one to the calendar, Christians just adapted it to celebrate Jesus' birth. No one knows for sure when Jesus was born, and it probably wasn't in the middle of winter, but it works. Ideas adapt in the same way. Some ideas may die out, but others change and stick around for a very long time.
As for the Romans and Christians not getting along, that had nothing really to do with whatever needs their respective religions fulfilled. I think you would agree that the French government and the German government both fill the same set of needs for their citizens, but that doesn't mean that they don't occasionally go to war with each other. Even people that have the same religious beliefs fight wars against and persecute each other.
The problem here is not just that Microsoft was talking about doing something to hurt the market share of another company, but rather that the method they were looking to use was of a monopolistic nature.
How the hell is this a problem? Nothing ever happened. If you could look inside any large corporation (including Apple) you would find that they have considered making terribly illegal decisions. A lot of corporations actually *do* very bad things. There's no need to rip on Microsoft for considering something that may have been illegal when they actually *did* other things that were illegal. Considering a crime is not the same as committing a crime. This is a ridiculous argument.
That reaction is even more ridiculous when you consider that Microsoft didn't drop support for Apple. Apparently "Microsoft once considered doing something that might've been bad, but decided against it" is now news.
it's always been interesting to me the number of religions which develop independently across different cultures and which seem to have similar themes. Generally there is a creator or creators and good forces as well as bad. Religions with a single God usually have other characters, such as patron saints or legends of profits, to make it more interesting. The creator or gods or spirits are often "above" looking "down" from heaven, the sky, the sun, Mount Olympus. There is often a Hell or "underworld" and it, conversely, is often bellow. Sacrifices are common across cultures, as are ordained priests or priestesses and temples or churches which are filled with ornate objects to honor the deity.
I would challenge that many of the similarities you describe didn't, in fact, develop independently. It can at least partially be explained by cultural exchange. For example, our (Western, Christian) image of God as the old white-haired powerful guy and our idea of hell owe a lot to the Greeks. The belief and worship of saints in Christianity can be attributed to polytheistic beliefs that existed before Christianity and were adapted. There are a lot of examples of this. There has always been a high amount of cultural exchange between different societies, even millennia ago. When you compare cultures that had little if any contact with the Eurasia/Africa landmass you see more dramatic differences in beliefs. I do believe you are correct that the different beliefs serve the same needs, however.
It's also interesting that in the Northwest US, where a majority of people migrated from other places within the US, there is a very high percentage of people who don't claim a religion. Similar thing about the US in general where most of the people are descended from Europeans, but are generally more religious than Europeans. It would seem pretty obvious that religion is more a situation of environment than genetics. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be inquiry into the matter, but count me highly skeptical.
You can't "disprove" theism scientifically because it does not deal with the physical world. It doesn't provide any testable theories. Same thing (almost) with atheism. I say almost, because if God *does* exist, then he *could* reveal himself sometime and disprove all atheists.
You can't use empirical data to answer metaphysical questions. It just doesn't work.
Well, technically he is right, as those activities do burn more calories than jogging. It's just that it's extremely difficult to sustain deadlifting or sprinting for very long. If you have a brisk circuit workout (which is much, much faster than most people lift weights) you will burn a lot more calories than jogging over the same time interval. Jogging is better over a longer period of time, however, because lifting heavy weights and sprinting tends to wear you out quickly.
Apparently this is more Sony innovation in the "SIXAXIS" sense: bad mouth the innovator when people praise the idea, and then come back and "invent" it themselves and pretend it's some huge new feature, that they'd been planning for years!
I can understand why the may not want "innovation" of that kind leaked, instead preferring to very carefully "manage" the PR to try and pretend this is some great new idea and not just a crappy knock-off of both X-Box Live and the Wii's online services.
Right, because Nintendo invented motion sensing in video games. Just because they announced it first doesn't mean that Sony wasn't planning on including it also.
Every video game company takes other people's ideas and uses them. The Wii's online services you praise greatly are largely knockoffs of other existing services. You consider avatars, polls, and news and weather updates original? Please. Xbox Live took things that PC games had been doing for over a decade and simply moved them to the console. Get the stick out of your ass.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a geologist so I largely don't know what I'm talking about, but I am from northern Nevada and the region has some very unique geological features. The Black Rock Desert was part of a very large lake at various points in the past, and is in a very seismically active region. Does anyone know to what extent other factors could also explain the evidence described in the article? To the layman (me) he seems like he's really stretching a couple ideas, so is this really a likely scenario?
Property is not an absolute right in that not everyone is guaranteed property, however, you do have the right to be generally secure from the government seizing your property. If the government is taking private property in the form of taxation, it better be made damn clear why exactly they feel the need to take that particular piece of property. I'm pretty conservative about this as I'm sure you can tell, so I'm skeptical whenever the government takes something from a private citizen. Simply explaining it as general obligation to society does nothing to convince me. If the government wants to tax rich folks more, why not increase the upper tax brackets in a straightforward method? Wouldn't that be more effective than only taxing people when they die? I believe it is simply an attempt to make another grab at private wealth in an underhanded fashion. Besides, it increases the complexity of tax law, allowing for the extremely wealthy to minimize the amount they pay by manipulating the system
Kinda lame, but I guess we just agree to disagree. I do get a distinct impression that you have an extremely hostile view towards property owners because of the language you use. Wealth is not a bad thing. Creating wealth is a positive benefit to society. It should not be punished. If it wasn't for individuals saving and investing capital, other people wouldn't have jobs. There would not be growth in industry. You should encourage people to amass large amounts of capital in your country, not discourage. The view of the government taking from the bourgeoisie as being a good thing needs to die.
Because that money was already "earned". It was already taxed. You shouldn't be punished for passing your property on to someone else after death, particularly family. It's not new wealth being created using benefits paid for by the taxpayer, therefore there is little justification for it. One of the most important duties of government is to protect private property (the most important purpose depending on who you talk to, I'm guessing you don't believe that). Half of your property shouldn't go to the government just because you died. That doesn't really serve much of a purpose. It's just an arbitrary grab by the feds because they can.
And approximately 70% of Americans own homes, which throws off the average quite a bit. Either way, a HUGE amount of the population is worth over $200,000. Hell, 10% of the population are millionaires.
Say what? Most of the founding fathers were part of the wealthy aristocratic class.
You don't. It's impossible. Poor people will never have the same opportunities as the wealthy. If two people are equally hard working and intelligent, the wealthy one is always going to finish "ahead." The real question isn't if they have an equal opportunity, but a fair opportunity. You shouldn't be trying to take away the wealth that people have worked hard to accumulate, you should look at trying to elevate those who are less fortunate. Unless the estate tax goes directly into an inner city school district or a scholarship fund for underprivileged kids, I highly doubt it's doing a goddamn thing to "level the playing field."
Remember, that's not $2,000,000 in cash. It's total assets. In your proposal, pretty much every person in the United States that is a home owner would be taxed at 50% of their assets whenever the head of the household died. If the government is forcing people to sell their houses in order to pay the "death tax", that would be a Very Bad Thing. I think we can all agree on that. Besides, most millionaires in the US are small business owners, and they've already paid a tax on the income earned (sometimes multiple times depending on the type of income).
You don't just go throwing around additional taxes because you can, you actually have to provide some reason behind it. Your proposal would bring even more people into a ridiculous tax, and put additional strain on the middle class. Regardless of how you feel about the current estate tax, that is a very bad idea. A more reasonable proposal from *your* perspective would be to raise the percentage taken by the estate tax, or provide a sort of progressive "estate tax bracket" that would put more of a burden on the extremely wealthy. That way the burden is still put upon the billionaires and such without shifting it onto the middle class.
Sorry for being an asshole in advance, but I don't think you addressed my points. Once again, rants and hyperbole. You provide no evidence either through statistics or historical example of how Mexico is worse off because of the United States. Since the passage of NAFTA (which you attacked) per capita income across Mexico has jumped dramatically. Poverty has decreased. Life expectancy has increased. The number of people employed, especially in northern areas around Monterrey and Tijuana, has also increased dramatically. People have more jobs and are making more money. This doesn't mean that there isn't poverty in those areas (especially border towns such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez) but it has gotten better.
It's pretty obvious that we disagree fundamentally on some issues surrounding farming. Organic farming is great if you can afford it, but when people are starving it's a pretty tough sell. I think it's great that people actually have food to eat and can do something else besides subsistence farming. Because of the increased food production in Mexico, there is nowhere near the level of hunger there was in the 1940's.
That's just romantic crap. Farming is hard as hell. It's not like subsistence farmers work 5-6 hours a day, then go home and discuss poetry. They work 24 hours a day because if they don't, they starve to death. There's a ridiculous notion out there that life used to be simple and idyllic back when everyone was on a farm. Well, it wasn't. It was hard, it was dirty, and it wasn't glorious. By using modern farming techniques, we allow people to perform more advanced jobs and more easily avoid things like famine.
The idea of us not having leisure time is also ludicrous. I have plenty of leisure time, and I don't work particularly hard. I also don't have to worry about starving in the next year because the crop didn't come in well. You can live a comfortable life (one person) making $25K a year in most of the country if you give up the obsession on owning lots of cool toys. That's a fairly easy salary to obtain working 40 hours a week (unbelievably easy if you're educated).
If libertarians these days can't even understand Ayn Rand, then I'm sure as hell glad very few have won elected office. A libertarian that can't grok Ayn Rand is like a green that struggles with Bambi.
OK, you started out good but you ended up sounding like an ill-informed maniac. There is no way you can attribute the US or NAFTA as degrading the quality of life in Mexico. Absolutely no fucking way. We give billions of dollars in aid to Mexico. Mexico was one of the first countries to undergo the Green Revolution, with major help from the US. This started Mexico's move from an agricultural economy, and allowed them to become a net exporter of food instead of importing. By moving manufacturing into northern Mexico, the quality of life and wages of Mexicans in cities like Monterrey and Tijuana has grown dramatically. We have done this all while taking in the largest immigration in our country's history, caused mostly by mismanagement resulting from incompetence and corruption within the Mexican government.
Illegal immigration is a serious problem and needs to be addressed, but attributing Mexico's problems to the US is one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard. You seem to be making the claim that Mexico's political and economic troubles are largely caused by the US, which is certainly not true. What possible advantage do we gain by having tens of millions of mostly poor Mexicans flooding into our country? Do you actually think that our foreign policy is to make Mexico as poor as possible so we can pay someone two dollars an hour less to pick lettuce? That doesn't make any goddamn sense. It's like claiming that because we took advantage of cheap Irish and Chinese labor in the 19th century, the US was responsible for the poverty that caused their emigration in the first place. The two simply do not connect.
Perhaps you would like to expand on how, exactly, we have lowered the standard of living in Mexico. Historical examples and statistics would be welcome, instead of just rants and hyperbole.
I think you meant to say that Turkey is not a modern country by all means. Despite the obvious flaws, Turkey is still a very cool place, and millions of miles ahead of most Muslim countries. One thing many other posters are avoiding is that repressions of some freedoms which Westerners would consider essential is one of the major reasons why Turkey has not adopted Sharia law. In many ways restrictive laws such as these have protected secularism. It's not always as simple as it seems on the surface.
Just to clarify, Turkey does acknowledge that the Armenians were killed, they just claim that it was a result of the war and was not intended as genocide. This is just as bad as claiming it didn't even happen, as the evidence overwhelmingly shows it to be an attempted (and largely successful) ethnic cleansing.
Tell that to the labels selling albums by Green Day, Blink 182, The Strokes, et al and companies like Zumiez and Hot Topic (internal motto "We sell rebellion"). Remember when skateboarding was only for the hardcore and it scared the shit out of pretty much everyone outside the scene? Now it's just another sport that kids pick up when they're young. That doesn't mean that there aren't underground scenes, but corporations are unbelievably good at taking an underground culture and packaging it to wanna-be rebellious youths, absolutely maiming it in the process. In fact, that is many companies' sole reason for existing. Why do you think 50 Cent sold 20 million albums in the US? It wasn't because he's a good musician, that's for damn sure.
I could see them sidestepping this by playing older music from bands that were once independent but are now signed to a major. Larger markets (LA/NY) might be able to get around it also because many national acts are still considered local. This coupled with the relatively small fine seems like a slap on the wrist. It's hard to say without more about the specifics of the deal, however.
Yes and no. Of course theologically speaking there is a large difference, but to the layman it might not matter that much. As an example, one thing that Catholics did when converting Africans in the Caribbean and Brazil was show them how similar the saints were to the African gods. It was easier to teach them something that was similar to the belief system that the slaves already held instead of completely reversing the beliefs of previous religions. Saints serve a similar purpose to the believer as the various Gods do in a polytheistic religion. Although theologically distinct, praying to the god of the ocean and praying to the patron saint of fisherman both accomplish the same thing. As a result of adapting already existing African beliefs to Catholicism in order to more easily convert the slaves, you see many bizarre religious beliefs that are completely unique to the Americas, even in areas that are mostly Catholic and have been for centuries.
As I said before, theologically they are distinct, but it is easier to adapt existing beliefs than to completely introduce a new system. Another different type of example is holidays. The holiday we call Christmas has existed for a very long time, much longer than Christianity has been around around. Instead of completely changing the holiday or adding a new one to the calendar, Christians just adapted it to celebrate Jesus' birth. No one knows for sure when Jesus was born, and it probably wasn't in the middle of winter, but it works. Ideas adapt in the same way. Some ideas may die out, but others change and stick around for a very long time.
As for the Romans and Christians not getting along, that had nothing really to do with whatever needs their respective religions fulfilled. I think you would agree that the French government and the German government both fill the same set of needs for their citizens, but that doesn't mean that they don't occasionally go to war with each other. Even people that have the same religious beliefs fight wars against and persecute each other.
How the hell is this a problem? Nothing ever happened. If you could look inside any large corporation (including Apple) you would find that they have considered making terribly illegal decisions. A lot of corporations actually *do* very bad things. There's no need to rip on Microsoft for considering something that may have been illegal when they actually *did* other things that were illegal. Considering a crime is not the same as committing a crime. This is a ridiculous argument.
That reaction is even more ridiculous when you consider that Microsoft didn't drop support for Apple. Apparently "Microsoft once considered doing something that might've been bad, but decided against it" is now news.
I would challenge that many of the similarities you describe didn't, in fact, develop independently. It can at least partially be explained by cultural exchange. For example, our (Western, Christian) image of God as the old white-haired powerful guy and our idea of hell owe a lot to the Greeks. The belief and worship of saints in Christianity can be attributed to polytheistic beliefs that existed before Christianity and were adapted. There are a lot of examples of this. There has always been a high amount of cultural exchange between different societies, even millennia ago. When you compare cultures that had little if any contact with the Eurasia/Africa landmass you see more dramatic differences in beliefs. I do believe you are correct that the different beliefs serve the same needs, however.
I'm pretty sure that *was* his argument.
That you like to make up statistics?
It's also interesting that in the Northwest US, where a majority of people migrated from other places within the US, there is a very high percentage of people who don't claim a religion. Similar thing about the US in general where most of the people are descended from Europeans, but are generally more religious than Europeans. It would seem pretty obvious that religion is more a situation of environment than genetics. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be inquiry into the matter, but count me highly skeptical.
You can't "disprove" theism scientifically because it does not deal with the physical world. It doesn't provide any testable theories. Same thing (almost) with atheism. I say almost, because if God *does* exist, then he *could* reveal himself sometime and disprove all atheists.
You can't use empirical data to answer metaphysical questions. It just doesn't work.
Well, technically he is right, as those activities do burn more calories than jogging. It's just that it's extremely difficult to sustain deadlifting or sprinting for very long. If you have a brisk circuit workout (which is much, much faster than most people lift weights) you will burn a lot more calories than jogging over the same time interval. Jogging is better over a longer period of time, however, because lifting heavy weights and sprinting tends to wear you out quickly.
I don't know, this Top Gear video looks pretty good. The quality's as good as what I would expect to get in an over the air broadcast.
Right, because Nintendo invented motion sensing in video games. Just because they announced it first doesn't mean that Sony wasn't planning on including it also.
Every video game company takes other people's ideas and uses them. The Wii's online services you praise greatly are largely knockoffs of other existing services. You consider avatars, polls, and news and weather updates original? Please. Xbox Live took things that PC games had been doing for over a decade and simply moved them to the console. Get the stick out of your ass.