John Cuthber

Imagine that - at some moment- I know the exact position of all the atoms in a volume of space. I can draw a box that doesn't include any of them and say that the box contains a vacuum. Very shortly afterwards that box will have stuff in it,but that's beside the point; at that "instant" it was empty. Unfortunately quantum mechanics tells us that's impossible. It's not just that I can't know the exact locations of the particles. The problem is that the exact position of the particles does not exist. The particles have wave functions that extend throughout space. A box here on earth can not strictly rule out containing a particle that would conventionally be considered to be on Mars. And then there's the problem of virtual particles popping in and out of existence everywhere.

I'm not sure the tests would tell me anything I don't already know.

I suspect that the worst thing you will have to put up with as a consequence of this is the smell of burned hair for a while.

Nice try. But if you use the right quote "Do to others as you would have them do to you." you will see that it does not mean"an eye for an eye" - in fact it pretty much means the opposite. So, which one do you actually think Islam means? Of course, the answer is both- just like Christianity. So, what you have (in both cases) is a "culture" where the scriptures are no use a as a guide to moral behaviour.

I don't think you missed the " point where evolution made it so homosexual couples can have kids without anyone else?" What you seem to have missed is that fact that humans are good at cooperating- at least as long as their prejudices don't get in the way.

I know of some societies with fewer guns. Have a look at the lists of robbers here. I accept there's some reporting bias but the US seems to have produced rather more than its fair share of armed robbers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_robbers_and_robberies And the first step to getting a society wirth fewerguns is to get a society that accepts that it's a good idea.

Doh!

Seriously? You just cited the Daily Mail as evidence? Wow! And even they have the decency to say "But the claim sexual behaviour can be predicted by such a high degree was described as 'bold' by British scientists."

If the "bad guys" had been willing to fight back this would have probably ended with 1 dead senior citizen. Now imagine what would have happened if none of the three people involved had a gun. Oh look! No incident at all. So, for no good reason, the other people present were put at risk- and yet someone is trying to portray this as a food thing. That shows how bad things have got, and why you need gun law reform.

Coating an alkali metal with a halogenated hydrocarbon probably counts as manufacturing an explosive under most jurisdictions.

The "traditional" answer to this is "When did you decide to be straight?"

http://xkcd.com/285/ Incidentally, while you say that you pointed out that the sort of truck that pumps cement could be used to pump cooling water - and I think you did; do you not accept that probably every concrete-pump-truck driver in Japan made the same suggestion? And they would, of course, have made that suggestion in Japanese, so their suggestion wouldn't have needed translation. So why do you think that it was your posting that someone listened to- rather than stacks of home-grown suggestions of something that was, in fact, pretty obvious? Believing that they did it because they saw your post on some web site or read your email is what suggests that you are delusional. The same goes for your other points; do you really think that you were either the first, or somehow most important, person to suggest what's pretty obvious?

If you judge someone who took vast sums of money from a company, and left it bankrupt- unable to pay it's current staff and the pensions of its former staff -as "successful" then our views clearly differ on that point. Tell me; would you judge someone who makes a good living by stealing cash from little old ladies in the street as "successful"? If not; what's the difference- morally rather than legally?

Plainly not generally true or we would all be dead. Most of us in the West live long enough to see our grandchildren grow up.

I guess you never worked for this guy- or any of the many like him. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3709379/The-unacceptable-body-capitalism-Shirtless-Sir-Shifty-catches-sun-relaxes-100million-superyacht-despite-MPs-damning-report-BHS-collapse.html Well,lucky you. But to pretend that these people don't exist is unhelpful.

Why not have that computer fly the plane all the time? Do you really think a computer can do a better job in unexpected circumstances that a person could?

Strictly, since he says "I have noticed that..." it may be that the statement is "true" in his world- but delusional. However, if you consider the bit where he says "atheists have never studied religion" inl ight of the observation that some people were theists and became atheists it is very difficult to see how one could believe it.. Hence my question about him being a troll; I can't distinguish what he has written from what a typical internet troll might write.

That which is asserted without evidence maybe dismissed in the same way. You are wrong. Just out of idle curiosity; how would you distinguish between yourself and a troll?

Here is a list Until that list gets longer, there's no reason for the thread to get longer.

I wondered where this statement "the confinement has withstood it" came from and I googled it. Apparently, you made it up- because it doesn't seem to appear elsewhere on the web.

Who knows- maybe I will. But there is still no necessity to kill criminals. That is objective:.It is based on a simple couple of facts. There is no need. and Plenty don't. You might want to, but that's not the same as needing to.

I nodded off fora bit there. Did I miss the explanation of the fact that the "chain of begettings" only includes something like 10% or 1% of the people it should have*, and yet the rest of the book should be regarded as essentially correct and complete? * It explains about 6000 years, but we know that there have been people for something like 10 or 100 times longer (depending on what you actually count as "people")so something like 90% or 99% of it is missing with no note of this fact, nor any explanation. Of course, the other problem is that the "chain" only goes back to the first human. The first life goes back a few thousand times longer. But, according to the Bible we were all made within a week or so. So the "chain" needs to go back not just 6000 years but nearer 3,000,000,000 So 99.98% of it seems to be missing. Seems a bit shoddy for the "word of God".

I presume there's some really good reason why you couldn't respond to what I wrote.

I said "So you are simply wrong." Not very nice- not remotely veiled- not really derogatory. Feel free to leave the debate, but don't kid yourself that you won any argument. Killing people unnecessarily is still wrong. Most of the civilised world has recognised that it is unnecessary to kill criminals.

Not, I fear, a profitable future doing so.