Maybe he could've made a bigger contribution to the educational level of the country by volunteering to teach people to read, or computer science to poor kids in a rural or urban setting, or something more useful than this. Fine, make a blog post about it, then shut up and move on. Anything on this level is a complete waste of time and one's limited lifespan.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Zero-tolerance policies, in turn, require extraordinary stupidity.

I've been thinking about picking up a Raspberry Pi just to mess around with. Part of the appeal is running a very small, cheap, and open platform that I can tinker with as much as I want. Windows doesn't necessarily fit into that paradigm, and I think that will be true of a lot of other people. I have nothing against windows and have spent most of my career in that space, but I'd also like to spend more time in the Linux world. Why? Just because. That said, adding windows to the options for the RP may prove useful for people who aren't looking to experiment, but want a small utilitarian processor for various tasks and don't want to take the time to get familiar with Linux, etc. Again, it's not like someone has put a gun to your head and told you you had to use Windows on it.

Your response is pretty reasonable, but unfortunately, the American political and media climate is sprinting headlong into the "crazy zone," where most discourse is viewed through one political lens or another. Simply by stating that you want to see what science says about a subject can be taken to mean that you are a closet Marxist. Being skeptical of something that is a widely-held position means that you're a tinfoil hat wearer. The environment here is so hyper-charged that any kind of reasonable discussion is the except to how things are usually done. In the end, it means that any serious issue can't be effectively addressed, because any sort of compromise is automatically seen as a loss, not simply trying to take care of a situation.

I can't help but think that if the Senate voted affirmatively that climate change was real, then everyone would applaud them and the article would not have been posted. Like a lot of things, what seems to work and not work is very situational, based on whose ox is getting gored. That said, while it should not be particularly relative what a legislative body thinks of a scientific issue -- after all, scientists aren't voting on whether or not the Senate is deeply, hideously, irrevocably corrupt, stupid, and incompetent -- a political stunt like that sets the tone for a lot of people who are just looking to have their particular bias confirmed -- "Oh, hey, look what the Senate said...normally while I hate government, I'll put that aside for a second and be glad they agree with me! Murka, hell YEAH!" Overall, the fact that this vote took place shows just how badly science, along with everything else in this country, has become politicized. The political debate should be a non-starter, and efforts to reduce carbon emissions should simply be a policy like not dumping barrels of plutonium into the sea or letting rivers catch on fire.

Someone needs to really cash in on the idea of games which a) don't require you to buy a bunch of in-app purchases to actually beat the game, b) are yours to keep after you've paid the publisher/retailer some money, and c) don't make you feel like you just got raped after buying it. In other words, turn the clock back to the 90s before all the money grubbing got completely out of hand.

I'm reminded of the "Tzigane" in Alongside Night. It's really nothing but a black market, in this case for transportation. Most people will feel about black markets however they feel about the level of control with other political and social issues, so I won't dive into that...just interesting to see the parallels between real life and fiction.

It's long past time that we got out of the nationalist, playground bully mentality that we're stuck in, and start collectively working together to address global warming, resource depletion, and the fact that we will go extinct much sooner if we don't start looking at ways to get off of the Earth permanently. I don't really know how to get that ball rolling, except to say that people need to start decoupling these issues from politics and moral/religious squabbles, and recognize that it's a matter of shared survival.

Enough anecdotes usually warrant at least a cursory investigation, such as a certain type of plant creating a physiological effect...but I'd guess if you posted under your real name, you wouldn't make such a stupid statement.

While it's popular to launch on screeds about religion -- and some are valid, given some of the dumb stuff that comes out of the mouths of some religious people -- I'd point out that anarcho-primitivism, radical environmentalism, etc, have the potential to be just as damaging to the human race and launch us into a new dark age as well. Stupid is stupid, whatever the source.

On one hand, you have people pushing crap that's not even in the realm of plausible pseudoscience (like that pressure cooker doodad which was supposed to change the molecular arrangement of water molecules). On the other hand, you have the realm of vitamins and other alternative treatments which may not necessarily be shown to be effective in FDA-approved studies, but seem to offer genuine anecdotal evidence to their benefits. It seems like the happy medium would be to just stick these things in the category of "Unproven Quackery" and be done with it.

Steal from Peter to pay Paul...it works for the USG, right?

Ho hum. Try exercising some parental responsibility for a change.

Given that statement, I'm tempted to ask if your cat is capable of flushing the toilet and what that fact would mean for the average IQ in the Senate.

There seems to be no end to pinheads like this who run around and pontificate about crap they know nothing about. And, oh, hey, nice try impressing us with how sophisticated you are..."Oooh, look at me! I was at the museum of modern art! I'm ever so much better than you!" And, of course, she is part of the media class which spends a considerable amount of time glorifying violence to bring in entertainment dollars. The reality is that dumbshits like her owe most of their modern existence to "hackers" such as the Royal Society and others who refused to accept what they were told as conventional wisdom of the day and began "hacking" science and the natural world, producing great advances and inventions, and so on. I'll stop the rant now, and just say that useless flapjaws like her are the reason I ignore the major media...reading virtual fish wrappers like her column just wastes time I could spend doing more productive stuff which will actually help improve the lives of people instead of just making me look stupid in front of a national audience.