I disagree.

Fair enough: electricity is fungible, and it doesn't matter what powers what (if it is even possible to tell).

If you had said enough /power/ for all homes then I'd agree there too, but that is much more difficult than generating enough energy, because you have to deliver it reliably and match the demand curve. By only counting the energy you are saying two things:

1. That the non-domestic part of the grid will reserve enough spare capacity to cover any shortfall from renewables.

2. That you can dump an unlimited amount of energy onto the non-domestic part of the grid and still count it towards your target, even if it isn't actually needed at the time.

I'm not saying that increasing renewable capacity in this way is a bad thing - it depends on the details, and in any event I'm not from the US so won't have to pay for it. The claimed outcome sounds overstated though.

I can remember much the same being said about Internet Explorer, which went from well over 90% usage share to more like 20% over the last 10-15 years (with much of the decline happening before mobile became an important factor).

An entrenched monopoly can be difficult to dislodge, but that doesn't mean it will last forever. Microsoft has also lost a lot of ground that would have protected Windows had it held onto them - control of the web browser and wordprocessor being the two main ones.

(Imagine if every website used ActiveX - that would be a problem for competitors. There are plenty of market niches were similar problems still exist, but for mainstream users I don't see any insurmountable barriers to migration now.)

Now it may very well be that what replaces the Windows desktop isn't called Linux. It might not even be Linux-based, or run on what we would currently recognise as a desktop PC. (The most effective challengers so far have been Android and IOS, which satisfy two and three of these conditions respectively.) Microsoft could also stay there longer by upping their game. Nothing lasts forever, though.

Fermions => cats

Bosons => cows

(Bosons can be herded into the same quantum state, fermions cannot on account of the Pauli exclusion principle.)

You're right that the country weightings don't account for the difference by themselves, but there is also the difference between counting users versus pageviews, and it would be unsurprising if there were differences between the types of websites sampled by the two companies.

Correction: it seems that Net Applications do count unique users per site, and it is per day not per month, so most of the discrepancy must be due to a different mechanism from the one I described above. Apologies for the belated fact checking.

The figures do count users rather than traffic, and while they claim to weight by traffic, the data source they appear to be referring to is stated in terms of users. If that is so then it would remain the case that they are counting traffic which is not real: users presumed to be online for more days per month than they are, and to visit more websites than they do. That is less likely to result in a very large discrepancy, but could very well be enough to account for the difference between Net Applications and other published figures.

It isn't just their correction algorithms, it is the whole basis of what they are trying to measure. Consider this.

I probably use IE once or twice a month, but Firefox and Chrome several thousand times in the same period. So far as Net Applications are concerned that counts as one user for each of the three browsers. Meanwhile, over in the Duchy of Grand Fenwick you might have a user who doesn't bother installing Firefox or Chrome because he uses the Internet so little, but who probably counts as several users for IE once the statistics are corrected[1].

The result is that IE could dwindle to a negligible fraction of total web traffic and Net Applications might still show them ahead in terms of users - even if their correction factors were spot on (which I doubt). I'm sure they're doing their best in their own terms, but it's difficult to see what the figures they are producing are useful for. The StatCounter sample may be biased, but at least their results bear some resemblance to the traffic that a web site is actually likely to receive.

[1] No offence intended to readers from the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.

Er, you do realise that it is several years since Windows was the most common OS (longer if you include embedded systems). It's a great example of the network effect at work, but shows how it can both give and take away.

Yes, but the ultimate goal is communication, and to that end some change is useful, some is harmful - and almost any change will have the effect of making older texts less readable.

Think of descriptivists as scientists and prescriptivists as engineers (albeit, it must be said, not always very good ones). I think there is a role for both.

Not just the costs, but also whether the energy is dispatchable.

Power sources which can be turned on and off at short notice - such as gas and hydro - are economically more valuable than ones which can't - such as coal and nuclear. (Some nuclear plants can be ramped up and down, but the capital costs are so high and the fuel costs so low that it doesn't win you much.)

Any of the above are considerably more valuable than sources which are both non-dispatchable and intermittent, such as wind and solar. (How much more valuable depends on factors such as the shape of the demand curve, and how much of the rest of your capacity is gas and/or hydro. Intermittent sources can work quite well in some locations, others not so much.)

It would be a fallacy if background levels were fixed and unavoidable. They're not. So long as people are allowed to and choose to travel by air, and live in areas with above-average background radiation, it is reasonable to argue that nuclear power should be held to a similar standard.

(Granted that medical imaging is different because you would normally be doing it for a good medical reason.)

0.25 mSv is a measure of the dose received, not the radioactivity emitted. A given amount of radioactivity inside your body will result in a larger dose than the same amount outside, so the effects you describe should already have been allowed for.

Besides, if you believe in the LNT model (which current standards are based on) then it makes little difference whether you give 0.25 mSv/yr to ten people or 2.5 mSv/yr to one person (both being well below the level at which acute effects become significant). Bioaccumulation is an issue, but merely having an uneven distribution should not be.

Bear in mind that the safety precautions needed to prevent very low level emissions are different to those needed to prevent catastrophic meltdowns. Focussing attention and resources on the former rather than the latter isn't necessarily in the best interests of safety.

I'm told that they contributed a few libraries too, but with cryptic names like glibc they surely can't be that important.

The main reason is that burial is fairly safe whereas rockets are not.

Let's put my comment back into context. I was talking about forgetting to bind a private network service to the loopback interface. That would normally be done by an administrator. If an administrator is acting maliciously then you have fairly serious problems with or without a local firewall. In fact, this is a pretty good demonstration of my point that if you are going to use a firewall to protect against that kind of threat then the firewall wants to be on a different box (eg. a router or dedicated firewall), not the one that you are expecting to be compromised.

To be clear: I'm not saying that firewalls should never be used on Linux-based hosts (that would be ridiculous), only that they are not a necessary part of running Linux securely in the way that they are for Windows.