The real story is a lot more complicated that TFA indicates. The new el nino is just starting and it's six months out of phase with the usual timing. So instead of starting six months late, it could just as well be seen as starting 6 months early in the next cycle. And more importantly, it is now combined with a phase change in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The two cycles combine to produce a much stronger warming effect. The negative PDO was responsible for the impression that warming had slowed. Now that it has reversed the warming will not just return to pre-1998 levels but will be much stronger. This could last for the next 10 to 15 years. Hopefully by then people with short attention spans will have realized that the planet is irrevocably getting hotter.

It was annouced today that former General David Patraeus (former head of the CIA, former commander of US forces in Afghanistan) has been allowed to plead guilty to one misdemeanor count of disclosing classified information after providing large amount of secret info to his mistress and biographer. Should Petraeus, who was motivated by vanity and sex, get a better deal than Snowden who was motivated by love of country and his own idealistic morality? I think not.

Snowden may be using what leverage he has left. He has not yet disclosed all the information he obtained so the US government might cut a deal to avoid further disclosures.

There is a reason that Glacier National Park has fewer zombies. It has fewer people to start with so there would be less "feed stock" to make zombies. But there is a reason there are so few people in the area. It's very cold and hard to survive there. So maybe Key West would be a better alternative. And of course, if everyone tries to get to GNP, it will be very crowded with people... and zombies.

" imposes rules on broadband Internet services that were written in the era of the steam locomotive and the telegraph."

Oh, you mean back in the days when giant corporations used their monopoly status to squeeze huge amounts of money out of their customers in the absence of competiton? Those days?

Yes, some beekeepers use a queen excluder. But they can cause problems. For example, worker bees, which can pass through the excluder, move eggs around all the time. So if they move an egg across the excluder into an area where the queen cannot spread her supression pheromone, the workers may decide to raise a new queen on the "wrong" side of the excluder. Also, you have the issue of worker-laid eggs which make up about 10% of all the eggs laid in a hive. If the queen pheromone is not stong enough in the "excluded" part of the hive, those worker eggs will be raised as queens.

Nobody who raises bees only opens their hive twice a year. Once is enough to harvest honey. And honey can be harvested when the hive is opened for other reasons. So the reduction in work is miniscule and comes at a great cost in terms of equipment cost. Also, the exposure of honey on the tap is very dangerous to the hive because it will attract all kinds of parasites and bee preditors. Yellow jackets and Japanese hornets will be drawn to the honey and will end up attacking the hive.

Sorry but this is ridiculous. For one thing, taking care of bees involves moving frames around for many reasons other than collection of honey. So you are not going to create a hive that never has to be opened. Honey collection is not the main reason for opening a hive.

And bees to NOT obligingly lay their eggs only in the brood frames. There will be eggs, and thus baby bees in the honey section as well, so when you turn the tap you will get baby bees.

Those 300 pages of regulations codify how the internet has always been. These regulations were necessary becasue the ISPs embarked on a new plan to squeeze content providers. They wanted to be paid both by the subscriber and by the content providers. But by nature these ISPs are utilities because they rely on access to the public domain in the form of conduits, telephone poles, street rights-of-way, and municipal owned fiber. Bu using Title II regulation, the FCC ensures that competitors like Google Fiber will have the same access to the public domain assests. That is the only way to have competition for the last mile of the network.

When I clicked on this story, I checked my Privacy Badger listing. It showed 3 trackers operating on Slashdot:
b.scorecardresearch.com
cdn.taboola.com
googlea....doubleclick.net

I'm using Privacy Badger (from the Free Software Foundation) to block all three.

Actually "the" indefinite article is not required. "The" definite article is also acceptable.

The title of this post refers to "intellectual property". There is no such thing. There are patents, copyrights, and trademarks. But none of these is property. If they were we would not need a special part of the US Constitution to deal with these things (Article 1, Section 8). Because none of this is "property" it is not covered by property law.

And that's the problem. Patents, copyrights, and trademarks exist to further innovation. They represent a monopoly limited in time and held by the innovator who created the thing that is patentable, copyrightable, or tradmarkable. But when we treat those temporary monopolies as property that can be bought and sold, inherited and used as collateral, we have destroyed the impetus to innovation and replaced it with an impetus to profit even at the peril of innovation.

And so we have the ridiculous spectacle of a copyright extended and extended ... even beyond the lifetime of the innovator. How does a copyright encourage creativity in a dead person? The solution to all of this is simply to return to the original short terms of these monopolies and not to allow property law, buying and selling of rights, to insert it's corrupting hand into the crucible of creativity.

As Linus makes clear, there is no decrease in non-paid contributions. They are a smaller percentage becasue more professionals are now being paid to develop Linux. That is a good sign becasue it means more businesses see Linux development as something worth investing in. And it's probably the same people doing the programming. Previously they would have to do it for free but now they get paid. Nothing wrong with that.

That's the point of the GPL. It doesn't matter if one or many projects are disfunctional. The code they produce is available to everyone so they still contribute to progress on software that belongs to everyone. What could be more democratic?

Yes the article says "growth in Google's primary business, search advertising, has flattened out at about 20 percent a year" But a constant growth RATE year after year is not flat. It is exponential growth. It is compounded growth where each 20% increase is an increase over and above the 20% increase of the previous year. Where else can you get a 20% compounded interest rate on your savings?

User defined launchers (apps, locations, folders) and user configurable docking panels were standard until Gnome 3. Even the "Classic" Gnome that came with Ubuntu 12.04 allowed launchers with a bit of scripting. But the newest Gnome requires detailed .desktop file fiddling to set up launchers.

Xfce permits user defined launchers with a right-click on the desktop. And docking panels for those launchers are easily configurable.

Unity and Gnome take away the simple usability features that make a desktop efficient. I understad why Unity is doing this. Their vision is to be one desktop for PCs and mobile devices. Everything has to work from menus on a small screen. It's harder to understand why Gnome is following along without even the option of launchers and panels on a PC.

Bottom line is that Xfce works and improves usability of the desktop. That's all I can ask.