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Don't think atheism is a religion? Prove it to everyone by conclusively disproving the existence of God; otherwise, it's just a system of philosophy like every other religion.
You're right, just like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
How much energy would be needed to capture and convert enough CO to fill a car's gas tank?
CO only exists for a short while after it has been released into the atmosphere. When it has mixed with air, it fairly quickly reacts with the oxygen in the air to form CO2.
I know, and as a supplementary option it might be okay. But I strongly oppose those who argue that we don't need any local power generation, since all the power we want is available in the Sahara desert.
Meanwhile we have deserts that are receiving orders of magnitude more solar energy than the world currently uses, that could be harvested using technology we have today.
It could work in the US, which has its own deserts. But do you really think that we in Europe want to give Muammar Qaddafi and his neighbors a big red on-off switch for our entire electricity grids? We cannot rely on these unstable states, which means that we must generate our own power.
Other than the generator and battery, nothing electric of any importance.
I'd call running lights pretty important, especially where I live (see below).
Push-start or roll it down a hill, pop the clutch, and you're driving the next 800 miles passing all the cooked cars.
Only in daylight, which in December/January lasts roughly from 9 am to 3 pm here in Stockholm, Sweden. When it is dark 18 hours each day, you need lights.
Of course, in the summer the reverse happens. In June/July, dawn is roughly 3 am and dusk is roughly at 10 pm, and the sky isn't completely black even in the middle of the night.
I'd hate to see what would happen if all our energy usage was electric instead of burning stuff.
So you think your car doesn't use electricity? Ever heard of spark plugs, starter motors, instruments, electric fuel pumps, electric cooling fans, lights, not to mention electronic engine control units? There are hundreds of electrical systems in a car.
though it will use a bit to counteract the tiny atmospheric resistance that exists even at that altitude
I'd say that it probably doesn't have to use any fuel for that. The ISS is at a similar altitude, and it is boosted to a higher altitude a few times a year, but the ISS is intended to stay in orbit for a long time. Since the X-37B is only intended to stay up for nine months, it is possible that it does not need any boosting. Besides, it is also possible that it can minimize the drag by using a certain attitude profile, such as pointing the nose forwards. If horizontal w.r.t. the ground (inverted or not), it might even be able to use its wings to counteract the aerodynamic resistance, like a glider.
I'm no expert, but I believe it is quite possible to track nukes' origins based on their radioactive signatures. This was done in "The Sum of All Fears". (Yes, I know it's a movie, but Clancy is known for better realism with such details than your average scriptwriter.)
I read the book, and the method seems reasonable, so I see no reason why it shouldn't be possible. It is highly likely that different plants around the world will generate material with slightly different isotope ratios, thus enabling the tracing of the material if a sample could be obtained from each plant. But even if (as is highly likely) hostile states refuse to give you a sample, a sample from just friendly states would be better than nothing, since then you could rule out those as sources.
This issue has the potential to radicalize more people than Al-Qaeda ever dreamed of.
And their violent reaction has a potential to radicalize more people in the opposite direction than the nationalist and neo-nazi groups could ever dream of. A dozen or so more violent actions, a few murders in the name of "protecting Muhammad", and even reasonable people might start thinking that a Holocaust on all Muslims wouldn't be so bad.
Never forget that not only Muslims can be(come) violent radicals. Nationalist parties that want to stop immigration and deport Muslims are on the rise in Europe, and the Muslim extremists are helping them more than any propaganda speech ever could. Non-extremist Muslims should keep this in mind when defending or supporting the extremists.
And if you're so "big and brave", rather than sitting there and cowering behind your Facebook cloak of anonymity, show your *REAL* conviction and belief in Free Speech - go sit outside a mosque and hand out your cartoons, then I'll start believing you.
Doing that alone would just be immensely stupid. Doing it with a thousand friends, all armed to the teeth and willing to use their weapons, would be fine.
4. Yes, they were just a few drawings...that were published to billions of people.
Mostly by Islamic imams, trying to incite hatred and violence. The cartoons were published in local newspapers, but imams living in Denmark felt offended and wanted to use their connections in the middle east to really stir things up, thinking that they could get the Danish government to harshly punish the cartoonists. That the Danish prime ministers stood up for the cartoonists, and explained that freedom of the press is non-negotiable, infuriated them even more. But anyway, the blame rests entirely with the Danish imams, who spread the cartoons in the middle east. Because of the extreme reactions, many people around the world started publishing the cartoons themselves.
Had the imams just swallowed their anger, the cartoons would just have been known to the local newspaper audience. They made sure that they would become famous around the entire world.
Right, but if everyone sits there insisting "Respect is earned" then nobody ever respects anyone
Not necessarily true. You can have a baseline amount of respect for people you don't know, but whether they lose respect or gain respect is decided by their actions. Islam hasn't made anything to earn respect for a very long time, while doing everything it can to lose whatever baseline respect we might have. In fact, Islam has lost so much respect because of its actions that it is approaching negative infinity on the respect meter.
I don't respect Islam, I just respect peoples' rights to believe whatever they want and as long as they don't impact my life doing it, they can do what they like.
So you don't give a rat's ass about Muslims threatening or assaulting people over a few cartoons? I mean, "as long as they don't impact your life".
When they assault our freedoms, they impact my life, despite the fact that I have never drawn any Muhammad cartoon. I cannot accept that our rights are encroached by their silly "sensitivities".
The "draw Muhammad day" sounds closer to me blasting my music
Sensitive Muslims are free not to go to the site and watch the pictures, so it's not a good analogy. Blasting your music would be more in line with dropping leaflets with the cartoon of Muhammad with the bomb in the turban on every major Islamic city.
Asking us to outwardly respect their religion
They are not politely asking us to respect their religion, they are demanding us to respect their religion, or else... Demanding respect is like asking for contempt. Respect is earned by those who make themselves worthy of respect. People who demand respect are the opposite. They get nothing else than contempt, and they have only themselves to blame.
west need to understand the Islamic faith and respect it.
Respect has to be earned, and Islam is not earning any respect with the current actions of its minions. They look like crybabies that scream aloud when not everyone does what they want. They threaten people with death and destruction left and right because of a few cartoons. That does not earn any respect, it does the opposite. It makes more and more people feel repulsion against Islam, which is obviously trying to turn back the clock to the dark age. Hopefully, Islam will fail.
Oh, so you think that denying the holocaust is ok as well and should in fact be encouraged in order to preserver freedom of speach, and that those offended are hyper-sensitive extremists?
Yes, I think that denying the Holocaust should be legal. But why does that mean that it should be encouraged, and why would that help preserving freedom of speech? The evidence is clearly in favor of the Holocaust having existed, but that does not mean that it should be a crime to say that you don't believe it happened. Of course you would be ridiculed and criticized, but freedom of speech does not mean freedom from criticism.
I also find the comparison somewhat ridiculous. The Holocaust was a genocide of enormous proportions, and it is understandable that people are very upset when you claim that it didn't happen. It is not in any way comparable to a few cartoons. It is not understandable that people are so upset about a few cartoons that they threaten to kill the cartoonist or even actually physically assault him, nor is it understandable that you demand that freedom of speech should be curtailed because of it.
And let's pretend while you're walking down the street, a Muslim person runs up to you, pointing at you and accusing you of being a pedophile, say. By your argument, you'd not be allowed to take offence at that...
No he didn't. You are allowed to take offense at the actions of other persons, it is your right to protest in a civilized manner. It is your right to consider him an idiot. What is not your right is to physically assault him or threaten him with violence because of what he said. The same goes with the cartoons.
I don't really see why having a right to not be physically assaulted means that nobody is allowed to be offended. Free speech does not protect speech that everyone agrees with, as such speech does not need protection. Free speech protects speech that some people may consider offensive, repulsive and/or sacrilegious. You are allowed to be offended by someone's speech, but if you assault the speaker or threaten him with violence, you carry all the blame. You can never blame your violence on being offended by speech.
Besides, if you have no grounds for your accusation, accusing a specific living person of crimes is not protected by free speech. It is called defamation, and you can do prison time for it. Mohammed is no living person, so defamation laws do not apply to him. IANAL though.
You probably mean that they would be ahiggsists. Atheism does not mean rejection or non-belief in just about anything, it means rejection or non-belief in a theistic god. So unless you think that the Higgs boson actually is god, you would be wrong.
That said, perhaps your parents old lawnmower had a monster engine.
Or they simply kept the lawn pretty neatly trimmed, at least during the summer (it's pretty hard to mow the lawn when it is covered by four inches of snow).
The two motorized lawnmowers they have owned have been one gas version with a 3.5hp four-stroke engine, and one electric version (when they got tired of the gas fumes and exhaust) with a ~1200 W motor.
Now, as for the weed eaters, I've never seen any with steel wire.
And I just guessed that it would be steel wire. We never had any grass trimmers ourselves, so I never really have the chance to take a closer look.
Hydrogen, once split, is a very small molecule, and like helium, is hard to store in a pressure vessel because it will slowly walk right through the walls of the vessel, even Monel metal ones.
I'm aware of the many problems of storing raw hydrogen, but cheap production of hydrogen does not mean that the end product is hydrogen. Hydrogen is also an important raw material for e.g. the Fischer-Tropsch process, which combines hydrogen with carbon monoxide and results in liquid hydrocarbons. As we all know, liquid hydrocarbons do not have the storage and handling problems of raw hydrogen, but since the process to create them uses hydrogen as a raw material, a cheap source of hydrogen would certainly be very useful.
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Everything is toxic in the right concentration.
NoScript blocks all executable content on a web page, including Java applets, Javascript, Flash, etc, and lets you decide which ones to allow on a per-site basis.
Don't think atheism is a religion? Prove it to everyone by conclusively disproving the existence of God; otherwise, it's just a system of philosophy like every other religion.
You're right, just like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
How much energy would be needed to capture and convert enough CO to fill a car's gas tank?
CO only exists for a short while after it has been released into the atmosphere. When it has mixed with air, it fairly quickly reacts with the oxygen in the air to form CO2.
That wouldn't help. CO reacts fairly quickly with the O2 in the air to form CO2.
I know, and as a supplementary option it might be okay. But I strongly oppose those who argue that we don't need any local power generation, since all the power we want is available in the Sahara desert.
Meanwhile we have deserts that are receiving orders of magnitude more solar energy than the world currently uses, that could be harvested using technology we have today.
It could work in the US, which has its own deserts. But do you really think that we in Europe want to give Muammar Qaddafi and his neighbors a big red on-off switch for our entire electricity grids? We cannot rely on these unstable states, which means that we must generate our own power.
Other than the generator and battery, nothing electric of any importance.
I'd call running lights pretty important, especially where I live (see below).
Push-start or roll it down a hill, pop the clutch, and you're driving the next 800 miles passing all the cooked cars.
Only in daylight, which in December/January lasts roughly from 9 am to 3 pm here in Stockholm, Sweden. When it is dark 18 hours each day, you need lights.
Of course, in the summer the reverse happens. In June/July, dawn is roughly 3 am and dusk is roughly at 10 pm, and the sky isn't completely black even in the middle of the night.
I'd hate to see what would happen if all our energy usage was electric instead of burning stuff.
So you think your car doesn't use electricity? Ever heard of spark plugs, starter motors, instruments, electric fuel pumps, electric cooling fans, lights, not to mention electronic engine control units? There are hundreds of electrical systems in a car.
though it will use a bit to counteract the tiny atmospheric resistance that exists even at that altitude
I'd say that it probably doesn't have to use any fuel for that. The ISS is at a similar altitude, and it is boosted to a higher altitude a few times a year, but the ISS is intended to stay in orbit for a long time. Since the X-37B is only intended to stay up for nine months, it is possible that it does not need any boosting. Besides, it is also possible that it can minimize the drag by using a certain attitude profile, such as pointing the nose forwards. If horizontal w.r.t. the ground (inverted or not), it might even be able to use its wings to counteract the aerodynamic resistance, like a glider.
I'm no expert, but I believe it is quite possible to track nukes' origins based on their radioactive signatures. This was done in "The Sum of All Fears". (Yes, I know it's a movie, but Clancy is known for better realism with such details than your average scriptwriter.)
I read the book, and the method seems reasonable, so I see no reason why it shouldn't be possible. It is highly likely that different plants around the world will generate material with slightly different isotope ratios, thus enabling the tracing of the material if a sample could be obtained from each plant. But even if (as is highly likely) hostile states refuse to give you a sample, a sample from just friendly states would be better than nothing, since then you could rule out those as sources.
This issue has the potential to radicalize more people than Al-Qaeda ever dreamed of.
And their violent reaction has a potential to radicalize more people in the opposite direction than the nationalist and neo-nazi groups could ever dream of. A dozen or so more violent actions, a few murders in the name of "protecting Muhammad", and even reasonable people might start thinking that a Holocaust on all Muslims wouldn't be so bad.
Never forget that not only Muslims can be(come) violent radicals. Nationalist parties that want to stop immigration and deport Muslims are on the rise in Europe, and the Muslim extremists are helping them more than any propaganda speech ever could. Non-extremist Muslims should keep this in mind when defending or supporting the extremists.
And if you're so "big and brave", rather than sitting there and cowering behind your Facebook cloak of anonymity, show your *REAL* conviction and belief in Free Speech - go sit outside a mosque and hand out your cartoons, then I'll start believing you.
Doing that alone would just be immensely stupid. Doing it with a thousand friends, all armed to the teeth and willing to use their weapons, would be fine.
4. Yes, they were just a few drawings...that were published to billions of people.
Mostly by Islamic imams, trying to incite hatred and violence. The cartoons were published in local newspapers, but imams living in Denmark felt offended and wanted to use their connections in the middle east to really stir things up, thinking that they could get the Danish government to harshly punish the cartoonists. That the Danish prime ministers stood up for the cartoonists, and explained that freedom of the press is non-negotiable, infuriated them even more. But anyway, the blame rests entirely with the Danish imams, who spread the cartoons in the middle east. Because of the extreme reactions, many people around the world started publishing the cartoons themselves.
Had the imams just swallowed their anger, the cartoons would just have been known to the local newspaper audience. They made sure that they would become famous around the entire world.
this nasty minority has ceased power
I think you meant "seized power" (i.e. hijacked power). Ceasing power would mean quite the opposite, as in abdicating from power.
So you are living in fear, despite claiming the contrary in another post.
Right, but if everyone sits there insisting "Respect is earned" then nobody ever respects anyone
Not necessarily true. You can have a baseline amount of respect for people you don't know, but whether they lose respect or gain respect is decided by their actions. Islam hasn't made anything to earn respect for a very long time, while doing everything it can to lose whatever baseline respect we might have. In fact, Islam has lost so much respect because of its actions that it is approaching negative infinity on the respect meter.
I don't respect Islam, I just respect peoples' rights to believe whatever they want and as long as they don't impact my life doing it, they can do what they like.
So you don't give a rat's ass about Muslims threatening or assaulting people over a few cartoons? I mean, "as long as they don't impact your life".
When they assault our freedoms, they impact my life, despite the fact that I have never drawn any Muhammad cartoon. I cannot accept that our rights are encroached by their silly "sensitivities".
The "draw Muhammad day" sounds closer to me blasting my music
Sensitive Muslims are free not to go to the site and watch the pictures, so it's not a good analogy. Blasting your music would be more in line with dropping leaflets with the cartoon of Muhammad with the bomb in the turban on every major Islamic city.
Asking us to outwardly respect their religion
They are not politely asking us to respect their religion, they are demanding us to respect their religion, or else... Demanding respect is like asking for contempt. Respect is earned by those who make themselves worthy of respect. People who demand respect are the opposite. They get nothing else than contempt, and they have only themselves to blame.
I don't think that it can be understood by civilized people. Only barbarians can understand killing someone over s cartoon.
west need to understand the Islamic faith and respect it.
Respect has to be earned, and Islam is not earning any respect with the current actions of its minions. They look like crybabies that scream aloud when not everyone does what they want. They threaten people with death and destruction left and right because of a few cartoons. That does not earn any respect, it does the opposite. It makes more and more people feel repulsion against Islam, which is obviously trying to turn back the clock to the dark age. Hopefully, Islam will fail.
Oh, so you think that denying the holocaust is ok as well and should in fact be encouraged in order to preserver freedom of speach, and that those offended are hyper-sensitive extremists?
Yes, I think that denying the Holocaust should be legal. But why does that mean that it should be encouraged, and why would that help preserving freedom of speech? The evidence is clearly in favor of the Holocaust having existed, but that does not mean that it should be a crime to say that you don't believe it happened. Of course you would be ridiculed and criticized, but freedom of speech does not mean freedom from criticism.
I also find the comparison somewhat ridiculous. The Holocaust was a genocide of enormous proportions, and it is understandable that people are very upset when you claim that it didn't happen. It is not in any way comparable to a few cartoons. It is not understandable that people are so upset about a few cartoons that they threaten to kill the cartoonist or even actually physically assault him, nor is it understandable that you demand that freedom of speech should be curtailed because of it.
And let's pretend while you're walking down the street, a Muslim person runs up to you, pointing at you and accusing you of being a pedophile, say. By your argument, you'd not be allowed to take offence at that...
No he didn't. You are allowed to take offense at the actions of other persons, it is your right to protest in a civilized manner. It is your right to consider him an idiot. What is not your right is to physically assault him or threaten him with violence because of what he said. The same goes with the cartoons.
I don't really see why having a right to not be physically assaulted means that nobody is allowed to be offended. Free speech does not protect speech that everyone agrees with, as such speech does not need protection. Free speech protects speech that some people may consider offensive, repulsive and/or sacrilegious. You are allowed to be offended by someone's speech, but if you assault the speaker or threaten him with violence, you carry all the blame. You can never blame your violence on being offended by speech.
Besides, if you have no grounds for your accusation, accusing a specific living person of crimes is not protected by free speech. It is called defamation, and you can do prison time for it. Mohammed is no living person, so defamation laws do not apply to him. IANAL though.
If CERN were atheist about the Higgs Boson
You probably mean that they would be ahiggsists. Atheism does not mean rejection or non-belief in just about anything, it means rejection or non-belief in a theistic god. So unless you think that the Higgs boson actually is god, you would be wrong.
That said, perhaps your parents old lawnmower had a monster engine.
Or they simply kept the lawn pretty neatly trimmed, at least during the summer (it's pretty hard to mow the lawn when it is covered by four inches of snow).
The two motorized lawnmowers they have owned have been one gas version with a 3.5hp four-stroke engine, and one electric version (when they got tired of the gas fumes and exhaust) with a ~1200 W motor.
Now, as for the weed eaters, I've never seen any with steel wire.
And I just guessed that it would be steel wire. We never had any grass trimmers ourselves, so I never really have the chance to take a closer look.
Hydrogen, once split, is a very small molecule, and like helium, is hard to store in a pressure vessel because it will slowly walk right through the walls of the vessel, even Monel metal ones.
I'm aware of the many problems of storing raw hydrogen, but cheap production of hydrogen does not mean that the end product is hydrogen. Hydrogen is also an important raw material for e.g. the Fischer-Tropsch process, which combines hydrogen with carbon monoxide and results in liquid hydrocarbons. As we all know, liquid hydrocarbons do not have the storage and handling problems of raw hydrogen, but since the process to create them uses hydrogen as a raw material, a cheap source of hydrogen would certainly be very useful.