The question of what section of DOMA was covered by the ruling may be academic. The Justice Department wasn't enforcing DOMA before. I'd be very surprised if they started enforcing separate pieces of it now.

Pssst... I think he's got his ranking scale inverted. That would put somebody like Ed Witten as the smartest and D.P. at the other end of the scale. He might be off by one too. Did he start counting at 0 or at 1?

I believe that most people in the world are good and generally trustworthy. I think that most of them will help, if they can. From what I can see, their ability to help is severely limited. Mostly by the laws of physics, mathematics and unintended consequences. There is a limited amount of arable land. There is a limited amount of water. There is a limited amount of energy to use to support a civilization. As a civilization, we don't know exactly where we are with respect to the hard limits, but there are numerous indications that we've exceeded some of the limits.

To just wishfully assume that we'll pull some rabbit out of the hat and push all those limits back just when we need to, frightens me. It frightens me because I think it stops people from thinking about the hard alternatives that might avert the die-off.

That's some of my own wishful thinking too. I wish that we could avoid a major die-off. But, given our history so far. I don't see civilization acquiring enough wisdom, selflessness, or resources to avoid it.

And exactly what is going to get all this extra food production going? Good wishes?

If the food is going to be produced in the western economy it's going to have to be sold for enough money to cover the cost of increasingly expensive fertilizer, seed, land, labor, and fuel that mechanized agriculture uses. If it's going to be produced in the under-developed parts of the world, the productivity of the local farmers is going to have to be increased dramatically. There's no plausible mechanism for that sort of productivity increase.

If you look at the agricultural commodity markets (in particular the price spikes), a lot of the price elasticity seems to be gone, which may be a sign that the mechanized agricultural industry is at maximum capacity. We may be only a couple of crop failures away from food rationing.

Another indication may be the "Arab Spring" upheavals. A number of the press reports credited food riots with starting the unrest.

The server system doesn't have to be running an X-Server to present X-client applications on remote desktops. With X and network transparency, you have a choice.

The electric car that's sitting in my garage right not has enough smarts built into it now to only charge when the utility rates are the cheapest, as published by the electric company that is providing my electrons. They even have a special rate schedule and meter to work with the car charger. Find another piece of FUD.. (The car is a Ford Focus EV.)

I work every day on 2 or 3 X based systems with all the individual windows coming to a triple-headed X desktop driven by an Nvidia GTX 660.

Even the netbook that's driving my FDM printer runs X clients remotely, very nicely and Cura displays its 3D renders from the netbook to the X desktop system just fine using OpenGL remote. By the way, the netbook has NO OpenGL hardware.

On that same X desktop machine every Linux Steam game that I've tried works without any problem.

You want to re-invent the wheel, go right ahead, don't let me stop you. Just quit trying to displace something that works amazingly well for everything I want with some spatch-cocked thing that you cooked up to scratch your own itches.

And stop making asinine claims that nobody wants to do what I do every day.

I leased a Focus Electric and drove it through about half of this winter in Minnesota. I initially was only going to drive it through the easy months, but this winter gave me examples of almost every sort of ugly possibility.

The car did well enough through all the ugliness that I'm going to use it year round. The range did drop off dramatically on the days when it was about 0 (F). But my commute is only 7 miles, so there was really no problem with using it for getting to work. The other thing that helped was that the car could be warmed up while it was still plugged in. I was also going to get a stage 2 charger installed, but with my typical daily use, the car is fully charged off 110 after midnight. I don't think I'll get a stage 2 charger until I get a second electric.

And that's just an excuse to be as lazy as you choose.

"OMG, I can't instantly fix every problem in the world, so I'll just do nothing but carp about it. And, then tell everybody how right I was after it all falls down."

The burden of proof is yours mr. AC Find any list of refused papers and prove that they are good science and that they disprove AGW.

Prove it That proof would be a list of research proposals denied because they questioned AGW.

What's going on? Did that talking point come back to the top of the rotation on the script engine in the deniers boiler room?

There is another consensus working here. The consensus is that You are crazy and ignorant. And to balance things out,You are completely misguided. If I want to read freeper like junk, I'll go looking specifically for it.

Prove it. Provide a corroborated list of documented instances of research proposals being turned down.

Anecdotes that you read someplace on the interwebs do not qualify as evidence.

You have the cause and the effect reversed (what could possibly be the cause of that???)

The cause is the melting of the Greenland icecap. The effect is that the decrease of mass in the Greenland icecap (caused by the water running into the ocean) caused the center of mass of the Earth to shift, which in turn caused the axis of rotation of the Earth to shift beyond what would be normally expected by precession and nutation.

Why does the stupid have to be so loud. Is there a volume knob for it someplace?