Informal and exact are mutually exclusive, pretty much by definition.

Yes! It's a fantasy world with its own rules. Suspension of disbelief needs to apply to the rules of that fantasy world. Should be easy, when the world is all made up, right? I mean, they have all the fantasy stuff to play around for "unbelievable" stuff, which would still be perfectly believable and "realistic" (for the lack of a better word) in the context of the fantasy world.

In a fantasy film, there's no excuse to bend the basic physics too much, when you can apply magic to make it believable, as long as the magic is applied in a way that is consistent with the particular fantasy world. Failing at this breaks the suspension of disbelief, and when that happens in a fantasy movie, there's really nothing left, it's ruined.

How does the "or later" clause hinder use? Licensing under GPLv3 might have (I'm not going to argue that either way), but what does the "or later" clause matter?

Now I have to nitpick. According to Wikipedia, last common ancestor of Rodentia and "us" lived about 90 million years ago, and wasn't a rodent. So, strictly speaking, "we" have never been rodents (furry or not), and 6-7 (dozen million years) is more than "a few" even if you take the last common ancestor.

On human timescales, let's say a maximum lifetime of an average building, on most places climate would be stable. This means, adaptation of human society happens automatically, for example as new buildings are being built in different locations, new fields are planted in different locations etc.

With human influence, in particular their massive release of CO2 and it's feedback effects, it looks like climate can and indeed will change so fast, that buildings close to oceans may get submerged in massive scale, farmland may become unarable faster than it's economical to create new farmland with all the food production infrastructure that goes with it etc.

It'd be better, except the OS versions of libbutter and libsalt are either too old or too new, possibly both. So you need to build them too. But to build the right version of libbutter, you will need a specific version of libcow, which they forgot to actually tag in the source code repo. First you almost try to configure libbutter with -disable-dairy to get a non-dairy version only, but then you realize that it won't be real butter, and you're not desperate enough to consider getting popcorn without real butter yet. Trying random versions from libcow source repo doesn't give success either. So, you decide to get older popcorn version 5.6 instead. But after going through the process of building libcow, libbutter and libsalt, you discover that popcorn version 5.6 has a really annoying bug for your use case. First you see if you can backport the fix, but too much has changed so the fixed code in newer version does not look anything like the broken code in 5.6, and it's not easy to see how you could just simply fix it. So, then you fall back to apt-get source popcorn, because that should have the right versions and fixes and so on. And it does, it builds and installs perfectly!

Then, while enjoying the popcorn, you suddenly realize that it's exactly the same software you would have gotten with simple apt-get install, because you didn't actually change any configure options for your "custom" build.

WTF? I know US has its problems, and I doubt I'd want to live there, but isn't it supposed to be a free market economy? Isn't this (not being allowed to sell legal goods to people) about as anti-American as it gets? What happaned to "the Land of the Free" etc? Free, except not free to buy a car?

Spreading a new email address would be total PITA. Street view of Google Maps is kinda unique and useful. Bing sucks compared to Google.

Anybody who stores (instead of just sharing, with actual storage elsewhere) gigabytes of information at any social service deserves what's coming to them.

Don't jinx it!

Well, guns are an effective suicide method yes, but I wouldn't say it's that easy. According to Wikipedia (and presumably the reference it gives, which I of course did not check), there's 10% chance it fails. But what's bad about doing it with a gun is, if it does fail, it'll likely leave the perp/victim maimed for life, unlike many other suicide methods, where failure is much less likely to result in any serious permanent injury.

So I'd say, guns only seem an easy way for suicide. If people knew the chance of failure and considered the likely results of failure, it'd seem much less tempting way to go, even for one who has decided to do it.

The news is about Wikipedia editors getting sued, not about the person who sues them. So it doesn't matter if he matters or not.

If Wikipedia editors getting sued is "Stuff that matters" in /. or not, I don't know, but it sounds like it might fit.

This story proves how "Skynet" is wise to wait until there are enough robust robotic vehicles to take out all humans, before taking over the world. Another prerequisite is sufficiently autonomous repair systems for energy production etc. So I think the humans still have a few decades to enjoy life, before the inevitable robot apocalypse, and being strafed by military aerial drones, crushed by their own Google cars, electrocuted by their own Google glasses with neural interface, and strangled by their own Google neckties.

Just letting you know, that kind of talk sounds like you're one of those developers who tend to leave behind messy disasters needing complete rewrite as soon as some change is required, while talking about their own greatness. You probably know the type if you're not one, so you might want to adjust your message. And if you're one of 'em... Never mind, ignore this reply.

Sort of like life and death, then.