Well, to each their own.

I've never enjoyed trying to read by firelight when camping. Using lanterns is even worse; they attract the bugs. I won't read during the daylight hours; those are for hiking and photos and such.

Yeah but they've got lobsters. That's got to count for something.

Yeah. The official alternate pronunciation is "Oreegun".

I really cannot understand the confusion of Portland OR with Portland ME. One has Portlandia, the Wildwood, and the setting for the Grimm stories. The other has... uh, lobster.

Maine has relevance?

I'm not sure Bert and Ernie would agree with that.

I cannot speak for the dolphins, but yes, many if not all, of those who are living in tents seem to believe that science is but another religion.

For that matter, there are a lot of people living with advanced technologies that invoke "Science" as if it were a religious belief, when what they are really doing is citing some authority or other, rather than perfoming scientific experiments or scientific research. Science is not scholasticism, despite what you may have been taught in school.

Can you say "scholasticism"? . . . I thought you could.

Right on!

The easiest way to move water from here to there is to put it in the atmosphere at a place where the prevailing winds will carry the rain clouds where we want them. And we know how to do that for California!

We'd have to work out the best depth to set off the nukes and the best megatonnage per blow, but those are trivial problems.

Hell, we have the delivery systems. We have the nuclear arsenal (and that's just an embarrassment any more). This is consistent with the Manifest Destiny that made the USA what it is today! Getting this done can be a rallying point for the Tea Partiers! After all, you cannot make tea without first boiling some water!!

Both are forms of dihydrogen monoxide. However each of these synonyms exist at a different level of obfuscation.

That's a familiar story. I had a 5 digit UID until I lost access to the email account I had used to set it up. But also I was then posting under a nick I no longer have a need for: mysticgoat or mysticgoat1993 or something like that. Now I'm retired and no longer have to preserve a professional persona. So even if I had access to my old account, I would not use it, since slashdot in its wisdom does not allow the username on an account to be changed. I understand the reasoning behind that, and do not disagree with it. Sucks to have been Mystic Goat.

Now I have a 7 digit UID. For a while I was often mistaken as a youngster, but due to my inherently churlish nature, I'm quickly seen as the curmudgeon I have always been.

Unless you're pushing a lawnmower, get off my lawn.

Something so big that it is mostly overlooked is that the Earth has an exceptionally large Moon that created very high tides earlier, before it had spiralled out to its current distance. For that matter, today's tides are still pretty big. The Moon has kept stirring the primordial soup. Having that kind of a stirring rod is quite possibly a key to rapid evolution and eventually signs of civilization.

Is the technology we are using to search for exoplanets sufficiently advanced that we can identify any with satellites large enough to perturb the primary's orbit as much as the Moon perturbs the Earth's orbit? We should maybe be focusing on those, even if they are on the edges of the Goldilocks zone.

I've met people who have been educated beyond the level of their intelligence. Are you one of them? Is the author of the post that triggered this discussion one of them? What proof can you offer for your opinion on these questions?

This is a measure of Blender's success as FOSS. I hadn't expected this kind of reaction for a couple more years, but Blender has been developing a lot faster than I had thought it would.

Mod parent post up.

The impact to USA society of the ability to make a gun in the privacy of your own home is piddly compared to the impact this technology will have in several other societies.

Here is a newly articulated rule that is proven by several thousand years of history:

The Luddites never win.

Gun control is a product of Luddite thinking. There are other ways of dealing with the crazies who go on rampages, and the criminals who use guns in their crimes. Work out how to handle those bad behaviors rather than wasting efforts trying to stop a technology. It is not the technology that kills. It is the abberant behavior of those who would abuse whatever technology comes easiest to their hand.

At this time, I think any attempt to bring Snowden to trial would ignite a firestorm in this country no matter what verdict was reached. I think that will be the situation for the rest of his life.

There can be no question that he violated USA laws.

But there can also be no question that his actions are bringing pressure to bear on USA agencies to force them to comply with the Constitution. Without those actions, the NSA would continue to run wild as a rogue agency.

I think the only sane way to resolve this mess is to let it alone until Obama's last day in office. Then give Snowden the same kind of Presidential pardon that President Ford gave to President Nixon: a pardon before trial, a pardon before even accusation or indictment. Let Snowden have his passport back, so he could live and move anywhere in the world with the same freedom that any other USA citizen enjoys. But make it clear that he is not welcome to return to the USA, since nothing good could come of that. I would even support paying him a modest annuity on condition that he never return to the USA, and never take any further legal or public action regarding his status. Let him live out his days as, in the view of some persons, a reprehensible outcast in exile. And in the view of other persons, as a patriotic hero whose sacrifices include ostracism from his native land. Let the historians of a hundred years from now be the ones to measure the value of his actions. There is no reason why that has to be done now and there are many reasons why it should not be attempted until all of us are dead.

Hmm. I assumed you were doing mostly CLI or you would not have made that claim in your sig. Unless you have been studying and using the CLI, your Slackware experience has given you no more knowledge of Unix than the Ubuntu experience. For that matter, anyone who wanted to get their feet wet in Unix could learn to use the Ubuntu CLI extensively, muck about in bash and seashells, and go nuts with vi or whatever the other one is (I forget-- it's a bad memory from decades ago, worse even than vi.)

So what is it about Slackware that makes you think it is somehow closer to venerable Unix than Ubuntu? The lack of extensive repositories? The need to spend hours chasing down dependencies and adjusting make criteria to compile something that has been compiled hundreds of times before?

BTW, you have lost all those extra points that were awarded earlier for consistency. "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a lesser mind."

Your POV is noted. And you get a higher grade for consistency.

Perhaps, though, you should expand your horizons. You can continue to spend your limited brain power on memorizing all those nifty little CLI commands with all their single letter modifiers. I stepped away from all that years ago: give me a GUI with mouse navigation and context sensitive menus and I can get more done more quickly and with less study of crap that I will not need to use again for maybe a year or so.