DigitalShadow

True security and safety are illusions that in reality are never possible. If someone is intelligent and very determined to do harm to others, they will find a way no matter what security measures are in place. While I believe it is reasonable to put in place measures that will deter the vast majority of attackers, I don't believe it is a good idea to completely disregard the rights and property of others in the name of enhanced security (for example, giving airport security the right to pretty much destroy any of your property because they are on a power trip and there is no legal recourse.)

I've never owned a car that wasn't manual transmission. Less stuff to go wrong, took about 2k off the price of the last car I bought, and on top of that you have more control. As for Toyota's, my first car was an '83 Camry. It was already 15+ years old by the time I got to it, but it ran better and had less problems than most of my friends relatively new cars.

I agree that the government is a bloated bureaucratic mess that struggles to get anything done, let alone done efficiently, but I haven't really seen much from the conservative side that indicates they do any better. When it comes to social issues, I tend to lean far more liberal, but as for the rest of it I firmly believe both sides are full of crap.

I would be genuinely curious to see some polls on what percent of people consider themselves conservative vs liberal. I don't get out of Utah much and sometimes it's hard to see through the overpowering conservativeness that is Utah. Edit: found some Gallup poll statistics ?Conservatives? Are Single-Largest Ideological Group Very interesting data there. I find it particularly interesting that in the 18-29 age group, there are more liberals than conservatives, which either means people become conservative with age (thankfully hasn't happened to me yet) or the statistics are going to be shifting the other way in the future.

I'd say it's either real or done by someone very very good who would probably not waste time on faking something that silly. Fur is ridiculously hard to get to look right when pasting in a picture.

xkcd - A Webcomic - Photoshops

They learned to like seafood, because apparently God's wrath only extended to land animals.

The universe as we know it is shaped by these constants, if the constants were different, the universe would be completely different, it might have no life of any kind or it might have a completely different type of life. Planet, stars, and black holes are phenomenon that happen to matter if the forces and constants are they way they are in our universe, can you really say with any accuracy that no new phenomenon and niches for life would occur if you changed the rules? It is true that life as we know it would not be sustainable if universal constants were much different, but that does not mean the universe was fine tuned for us, it just means that the life that exists now is fine tuned for the way the universe works, which a process like evolution seems ideal for. Try googling "sentient puddle."

A quick google search doesn't come up with anything that does specifically what you want and due to the nature of the software you are requesting, I would be wary of anything that you do find. I could create a simple program that does what you want, but as many people have stated, the legal and ethical implications of using such a program are serious.

Yes, humans are a type of ape, but ape is a rather ambiguous term to begin with. The main significance of clarifying that we did not evolve "from" the apes that exist today (which is what many people assume when they hear we evolved from apes) is that it helps answer the common question of "If we evolved from apes, why are there still apes?"

I didn't seriously believe he was advocating anarchy, hence the confused look after it. Isn't Libertarianism just yet another party allegiance though? What makes it immune to the political mess that the current major parties have fallen into?

If China executed all pirates rather than just a handful of them, I can assure you, piracy would see a sharp decrease in that region, if for no other reason that sheer population decline :)

So you advocate anarchy? I agree with what you said above, but I'm not really sure what you're advocating here.

Actually I think it's an incredibly useful way to handle crime, it's just not a terribly ethical way to handle crime.

I've actually been in a somewhat similar situation when I was around 19. I dropped out of high school senior year and my parents told me that if I wasn't going to pursue school, I would have to support myself. So I got a minimum wage job, lived in an apartment with a roommate to save money, taught myself programming skills in my spare time. To make a long story short, It was a long, bumpy road, but it all worked out and here I am now with a very nice software development job. If you're going to go the independent non college route, find any source of income you can, find a place to rent out a room, get your drivers license if you don't already have it, and save up whatever money you can for a used car. In the mean time, teach yourself all the skills you'll need for your desired job and build a portfolio. There are more than enough tutorials and online communities that would help with whatever whatever computer related career you choose (if I remember correctly, you do 3d modeling). If you want to go to college and can't get into BYU for whatever reason, I recommend finding a decent state school (I'm sure there's one that would have you) and asking your parents to cosign a loan. I'm not sure exactly what their motivations for kicking you out are, but I'm assuming they would at least want to support your education. Build a portfolio on your own and it really won't matter what school you graduated from, most tech jobs only care if you have a bachelor's degree or not, if they require it at all, your portfolio is far more important.

A sad number of people in my workplace truly believe, despite any evidence you could present to them, that Obama is not a "natural born US citizen." All of them happen to be republicans, but that doesn't say much because 90% of the office are republicans (I live in Utah).

You can even observe them in their natural habitat at Temple Square. :)

Ahhhh... The Pie pizza, or as I like to call it, "heart attack in a box." Seriously though, it is some GOOD pizza.

If my laptop breaks, I usually just send it back to the manufacturer, unless it is RAM or hard drive or something easy to get to. If it's past warranty, then it's probably time to upgrade anyway. I really hate the trend in making laptops difficult to take apart, on my current model I had to nearly disassemble the thing just to get the keyboard off.

Overpriced parts + inflated labor costs... sound about right for a typical repair shop :)

I don't think it's about telling God you're no longer following, I think it's about a symbolic gesture. If the person thinks the whole thing is anything more than symbolism, they kind of missed the point. With that said, if you don't have to strength to just walk away and not look back, I really don't think a silly ceremony will do much for you, but as I said, people like their ceremonies.

As an atheist, I think it's rather silly, but if you really need a symbolic gesture of your de-conversion, I don't see anything wrong with it. For some reason humans are big on ceremonies even outside religion. I couldn't help but laugh when I saw the hair dryer part in the article... almost spit my Mountain Dew out on my monitor.

Then they open your computer, point to where your hard drive should be and say "Here's your problem! That will be $200."

I'm sure there are some companies who could use someone who is tech savvy and can use google to troubleshoot simple problems. Just the other day, someone in our art department couldn't for the life of them figure out how to convert an animated gif into a video file of any format. 2 seconds of googling took me to a free application that would do it, but it makes my brain hurt that someone who has enough knowledge to make an animated gif could not use even the simplest google-fu.

In all the tech related fields, it is far more important to know how to quickly find and apply information that you don't know than it is to simply have memorized all there is to know about one thing. Without a good understanding of the underlying concepts involved though, the information you find googling will be fairly useless.