My point was people did use it in many applications (church as well as science) back in the 1600-1700s when it was first used to name species.

And not speaking it in normal conversation doesn't mean it isn't or wasn't used. There are many thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of scholars *now* who can read it in order to read and study old texts. And in the 1600's when the biological taxonomy was first established, Latin was literally the common written language between scientists of a dozen different countries who may not even have been able to communicate any other way.

Yet none of your points has remotely disproved the green cheese hypothesis...

FTL is great, but this sounds more like MOO than FTL.

Gotta say, I hope they keep the ship design/customization relatively straightforward. In theory in MOO/GalCiv/etc was cool, but the tech tree/dev was so fast paced I always felt like ships were obsolete by the time you finished building them.

Sorry, but this dude looks like he works out 2 hours a day, and I think I heard him grunt when he picked it up. If the 5" thick body didn't already discredit that term (note: the original IBM Portable was NOT A LAPTOP).

You'd probably get bruises on your thighs if you put this on your lap, if you didn't get 2nd degree burns before that...

I don't disagree that coal has had more effect than nuclear on the environment, but your "fact" is completely wrong. Kind of sad, since if you had just kept to the facts it would have been a decent point.

And yes, the top 3 Google results (as per your suggestion) say you are wrong. Feel free to find a citation that contradicts your suggestion, though.

Meh. I'm sure there were many cases of species altering the ecology. It wasn't worldwide and (semi-)permanent until MUCH later. We didn't name an Epoch just because a particularly large population of predatory mammals reduced the population of prey in a region (which happens all the time).

Except it's not really using a *dead* language, it's using a popular academic language that was chosen back when people still LEARNED AND READ LATIN (and really, one with a structure that lends itself particularly well to the purpose).

Your current perspective on it is about as useful as someone 150 years from now saying "why they hell did we standardize one the metric system when we could have used plenty of other systems of measure?"

In the terms of "Epochs" it's total wankery (or in American English, mental masturbation ;)

It may even make sense to consider "the atomic age" as a new Epoch at some point in the distant future, but placing that date on it is pure politics, not science.

Wow, seriously?

You can define words to whatever you want them to be. PEOPLE MADE THEM ALL UP. DUH.

If you want to define a "pizza" as a giant cosmic object that can not be comprehended by humans, go ahead, but the rest of us will continue to think of it as a tasty flatbread covered with tomato sauce and cheese.

Though for you "thinking" seems to be more accurately defined as "mental masturbation"...

That's moronic. "Thinking", like all *words created by humans*, has a reasonably clear definition in many contexts that doesn't include electrons or evolutionary processes.

Bad analogy. Logical fallacy -5. Next time, try to think, don't try to swim.

"Out-thinks"? Basically it evolved not to produce a protein for part of the day because that resulted in better survival rates from more nutrients. Cool, but why call it thinking, even with quotes when we are big boys and girls and can understand evolutionary processes. Does Slashdot really have to resort to Buzzfeed fringy-worthy headlines these days?

I'd say the Russian sanctions are overwhelmingly correct. Putin has an 80% approval rating, which means the Russian people agree with what he did. In that case, they are going to need to accept the consequences of a recession in 2015. If Russia doesn't want to play nice with the rest of the world politically why should the rest of the world play nice with them economically?

In the case of NK, though, these sanctions are just for show. NK doesn't have a global economy to damage, and certainly doesn't have major trade relations with the US and EU. China will prop them up as they always have...

I'm not convinced that NK was directly responsible in this, either (if they FBI as they claim have strong unreleased evidence, release it!)

But if you actually RTFA (or RTF government document) this is not going to hurt "the people". The people in North Korea have no Internet access or money to invest in foreign banks.

In theory they are just targeting financial transactions of North Korean agencies and senior officials. In practice, come on, how many of them have significant financial transactions in the US, anyway? It's just more posturing in a 60 year long posturing battle between the US and NK that is so silly it makes Zoolander look like a serious documentary on male modeling.

And very targeted and embarrassing release of insider emails and documents doesn't really fit the North Korea theory very well. I mean, their *official spokesperson* released a statement (sic): "The U.S., a big country, started disturbing the Internet operation of major media of the DPRK, not knowing shame like children playing a tag." Just don't think they are going to be concerned that much with internal Hollywood politics when they can't even manage to translate one sentence into proper English.

Also, apparently the whole GoP reference and Interview theater threats only came up 3 weeks into the hack; one popular opinion is it was misdirection to muddy the investigation (if so, it sure worked!) And you'd think they'd lead with that if that was their original intent...

But anyway, at this point neither argument is very convincing. There just isn't any (public) hard evidence either way. Some claim the FBI has "proof they aren't showing" - if they want people to believe them, they might want to release that. The US government hasn't really built a very trusting relationship with its citizen these days...