Probably because ideology isn't really important to most people, who just want stuff that works. They don't care if they're running X or Wayland/Weston or Mir. And Shuttleworth definitely does not have contempt for the open source community in general...just the developers who don't follow his lead. Which definitely isn't cool, of course, but those developers don't represent everybody.

After my old laptop with a highly-customized Arch Linux setup died, I went back to Ubuntu (which I've used since Warty Warthog!) because I didn't feel like spending the time to mess with stuff anymore. My personal laptop is currently sitting on 12.04 LTS. I might upgrade once 14.04.1 is released in August, depending on how reviews are. It looks like they didn't choose as many cutting-edge packages, so it may not be as big of a problem as the first releases of previous LTS editions were (remember the time they shipped an LTS release with a beta version of Firefox?).

I'm using Mint 16 Cinnamon at work, so I could be convinced to switch, but my wife and kids are used to Unity by now. I have a terminal shortcut pinned near the top of the sidebar, so I get around easily enough.

Actually, AOO 4.0 was the first one to have a sidebar (their answer to the ribbon?), and LO copied it later. Also, there are Apache developers committing a nontrivial amount of code to LO (one article I read said 400 of 3000 bugfixes in LO 4.1 were submitted by people with apache.org email addresses).

Excel is actually pretty nice for quick, one-off, interactive data browsing and visualization. I see that pivot tables are present in OpenOffice and LibreOffice now, so I don't see any reason to use Excel over one of the free options, because they're all absolutely terrible at anything beyond the aforementioned use case. Anything more involved and anything you'll have to repeat on further data sets should absolutely not be done in a spreadsheet (I personally prefer Python with the MATLAB-like libraries).

My library has a digital subscription to Mental Floss magazine, which I check out every time I remember it (I'm doing so now, thanks for reminding me). The best part about newspapers and magazines (analog or digital) is that, when I pick them up, I read stories I would not otherwise seek out. Mental Floss is especially cool because of the interesting trivia represented as infographics, and their featured interviews are almost always awesome even if not very well known (two recent ones: Bill Watterson and Neil deGrasse Tyson [before Cosmos, that is]).

I have a six year old, and this is mostly true. There are a large number of non-standard pieces, which makes digging for pieces much more frustrating. On the other hand, there are a lot more possibilities when it comes to building things with articulations. My son builds robots all the time (cannibalized from various robot sets), and I showed him how using a ball-and-socket joint at the shoulders and hips, and a hinge joint at the knees and elbows makes it more like us. And he doesn't know any better, so he uses those non-standard pieces for decorations anyway. Some of that is, as another poster said, partially because of all the tie-in sets out there, but we tend to stay away from those. The Creator series, which literally has full instructions for three different models using the same set of blocks, should be everybody's first stop (and they're cheaper than tie-in sets anyway).

As for the article, my son has played with the smallest size Legos since he was almost 4, and my daughter started even before she turned 3 (to keep up with her brother). Even though they do play on phones and tablets and gaming systems, they spend more time with Legos than anything else...and that's by choice. I'm not saying this in an attempt to brag here, I'm saying, parents, get your kid Legos, and build stuff with them. You know you'll enjoy it, too.

...and a whole lot of marketing, I should have added.

The reason tablets became popular is because people had begun to use their phones in similar ways, and the price wasn't too outrageous. Microsoft had tablets before they became popular, too, but they didn't kick off the tablet craze. Pioneering technology is one part tech, ten parts timing.

I just started a new position where they had just figured this out and split the team into two. A couple of our developers trend toward the surly, and they would get a bit short with our customers (who are internal customers, but customers nonetheless) when interrupted. Which totally makes sense, by the way, because it kills productivity, but it was causing issues on all sides. Now we have this separation and process where our customers no longer contact us directly but fill out a quick report that automatically contacts the newly-formed ops team. We don't have to bother the developers except in extreme cases, and the folks who specialize in troubleshooting handle almost every issue. And even though I joined the ops team, but I still squash bugs and add minor features so the dev team can focus on the big stuff. This literally just happened in the past few months, but the improvement in our metrics for the most recent release was pretty impressive.

Note that the guy at the PC doesn't care what happens to the sentient creatures, doesn't interact with them in any way after he starts the universe, and doesn't take any portion of the sentient creature with him for all eternity.

You have it wrong, anyway. The vast majority of these creatures would say that they were Created. Some would simply accept this, having been taught so ever since birth, specifically with the knowledge that questioning their beliefs is one of the worst things they could do. Some others would look at the rules and realize that, had the rules been different, they would not have existed at all. They would see that as proof as a Creator and (through some further leap of logic) the rest of their beliefs, even though such a "proof" of the former does not in any way imply the latter. Still others would simply take Pascal's Wager and hope that their particular religion is the correct one.

To epilepsy, probably not. But blind and deaf people are known to have enhanced other senses to make up for it. Note that they don't just train themselves to pay more attention to senses they do have, but the brain actually "rewires" itself to use visual or auditory processing centers for processing other senses. Incidentally, this is why cochlear implants do not work as well as expected when the person has been deaf for a long time: the person receiving it is already using that part of the brain for other things. (source)

The underlying point still stands, though. The drawbacks of blindness or deafness far, far outweigh the benefits. Only a few potential counterexamples like Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles might exist, though we'll never know how popular they might have been had they not been blind, and certainly not every blind person has musical talent on that level.

Ouroborosin would make them eat themselves, which is a whole other thing. The drug you're describing would probably be called cannibalis. I can just see the tagline: "Cannibalis: giving parasites a different kind of the munchies."

I agree that you say the opposite, but there are subtleties in this issue that can easily be missed by someone (like me) who hasn't followed this story very closely. I believe the nuance that mods have missed in your post was that Brendan Eich didn't just donate to some generic Prop 8 campaign as most news stories say. There is no such thing as "the Prop 8 campaign." There were several groups of people running campaigns to support Prop 8, and some of them were...mean-spirited, to put it lightly. The particular group that Eich supported ran ads with the underlying message that gay parents are doing harm to their children, and that rejecting Prop 8 would be harmful to children in general. Once I understood that (see this story, for example), your arguments made a lot more sense.

I don't know about that. I mean, we try our best, but I wouldn't say we're good at it.

A November 2013 paper (so, after AR5) pointed out that HadCRUT4 has no data from the polar regions, which might mean the most drastic warming -- in the Arctic -- is not taken into account (source). Obviously this will spur some further research, but whether it's true or not, there is an option c) the global mean surface temperature change has been underestimated.

That might be generically true (I'll take your word for it), but the way it's happening -- absorbing CO2 -- is causing ocean acidification. We know this for sure, and it's a bad thing for current ocean life. Between that, overfishing, and pollution from oil and nuclear accidents, we're messing up a rather important food source. True, it may adapt as you implied in a later post, but it will cause upheaval in the meantime. In addition, I know researchers have proposed links between warmer oceans and extreme weather events like the polar vortices causing the cold snaps this year, that is, warmer oceans weaken the jetstream. But I don't know how much traction that has among climate scientists.

I just looked at those sections, and to me it reads, "these (Multi-Model Ensembles and Perturbed-Parameter Ensembles) are the types of simulations we've taken into account [9.2.2], these are their weaknesses [9.2.2.1-2], and this is how we combined them to evaluate them as a whole [9.2.2.3]." Perhaps you're referring to the direct quote "...collections such as the CMIP5 MME cannot be considered a random sample of independent models," which is repeating the weakness described in 9.2.2.1, which is that a lot of models in that set use components from other models in the set. To me that makes perfect sense because we do that in engineering all the time: reusing model components that (seem to) work well. I can see why that would seem fishy, though. It'd be nice to see someone dig into that and see what components are reused and how they might bias the results.