but no lives depended on my 6502 code.

I am sure the guy(s) who came up with apple maps said the same thing. If I remember correctly they were *almost* wrong.

No shit. I would have put it more like this:

"different approach to international diplomacy"

in other words: Ain't Gonna Happen.

Go right ahead and point me to where a decline in Antarctic ice was a forecast of AGW.

You do know that - below freezing - there's an inverse correlation between temperature and snowfall, don't you? And I really hope you know that it's very rare that temperatures rise above freezing in the vast majority of Antarctica, whether you add a couple degrees to the temperature or not, right? Or did you not know / ever consider that?

Just because you didn't realize something that should have been really bloody obvious to you doesn't mean it was a scientific prediction by your straw-man scientists.

AEI, for one. $10k for any paper that attacks the IPCC reports. There's other public offers out there, too. And I'm sure they're outnumbered 100 times over by not-so-public ones.

Nothing we could have done in the last 100 years would have made a bit of difference with respect to what you mention.

Well, except possibly for doing something to reduce eastern population booms by a few billion people. The couple hundred million people in the west with the economic latitude to pursue the type of stuff laid out in TFA won't make a bit of change, relative to four billion people digging coal in China, sprouting up on the subcontinent, overgrazing in Africa, and plowing down rainforest in Central and South America.

You want any of this to change? Stop having so many babies in places that can't afford them.

Which is why when you read you don't have to care if it is a tab and three spaces, two short tabs or 8 spaces. Using a non-visible character for control is just a bad idea. And don't even get me started on code clarity - what I find clear to read vs what you do vs what a compiler demands - ICK! To put it into web terms, go try posting something about how the new (place your browser here) is going to impose its manufacture's CSS on every page, ignoring the user's css prefs, hell even ignoring the page authors css and see what kind of firestorm you light off, and with good reason. Code should be no different. Especially when it comes to white space as commands.

As far as amateurs, the barrier to entry for programming is far less than for working with electricity. Which requires more training - writing an Apple Store app, or safely changing out the breaker box in your basement?

Changing out your breaker box. Hands down. There is no arcana, English as a language, no IDE, no security, no graphics to work out, no logic. You almost can't buy the wrong materials, and if you actually ask the guy at the store you won't and after that it is pretty much tab A, slot B, kind of work. It is so easy that most munis don't require that a licensed electrician do the work. Oh, and for the small fee to the city you have to pay for the permit theey have a guy come out to inspect the work to make sure you didn't screw up.

I am a programmer and I have a vague idea where to start with making an app for iOS, but specifics? It would take me longer to dig them up than driving down to the local hardware store to buy a breaker box and some fuses. In short, you posted as if electrical work was "a vocation requiring rare talents, grueling training, and total dedication" while trying to down play programming. I agree that programming really isn't that hard, but there is a reason programmers get paid what they do.

Corr: That should read "doesn't lose much IR transmission as a consequence of neutron bombardment like happens in higher frequency bands" - accidentally lost that middle part. Fused silica and fused quartz (especially the latter, but also the former) blacken under neutron exposure, losing transparency; it's even done intentionally to make jewelry. But the papers I ran into when researching the topic showed that this effect isn't very pronounced in the IR band.

Agreed. But that doesn't mean it doesn't make sense to embark on big projects. Rather than a "Hey, we're going to walk somewhere new" sort of thing, I'd like to see work on one of any number of space-related megaprojects - for example, a launch loop and/or fallout-free nuclear rockets**. Something that could actually lower the cost of access to space to the point that it doesn't take a vast effort to go walk on another celestial body.

** - There's so many competing designs it's hard to know where to start. My personal concept I've mulled over is a variant of the nuclear lightbulb concept, but instead of the fused-silica bulb containig a gas or plasma core reactor which requires some unknown containment method, the concept calls for a dusty fission core (akin to a dusty fission fragment rocket), which can be electrostatically contained. The energy would be released in the infrared, not visible or ultraviolet (as in a conventional lightbulb concept), but that's fine - fused silica is also transparent to infrared, and moreover doesn't lose much IR transmission as like happens in higher frequency bands; the lower radiation rate of infrared would be compensated for by the huge surface area of the dust radiating it. The simultaneous huge amounts of electric output (from fission fragment deceleration in a grid) could be used in part to run a microwave beam, creating a plasma sheath in ducted atmospheric air surrounding the bulb (airbreathing mode) or injected gas surrounding it (rocket mode) to aid in IR absorption and keep as much of the heat away from the (reflective) walls as possible. A VASIMR-ish mode is possible if you use low gas injection rates and a magnetic nozzle. In space, gas injection could be terminated altogether and the core could be opened up to run in dusty fission fragment mode and get Isp figures in the lower hundreds of thousands. To make up for the problems with using the standard dusty fission fragment rocket proposal's (heavy) moderator in such a high power environment, my thoughts were to have it operate as a subcritical reactor with a spallation neutron source as the driver - after all, there's no shortage of electricity to run an accelerator if you're decelerating a good chunk of the fragments; you don't even have to deal with Carnot losses.

You tell 'em, Ayn! You'll be rich enough to afford your own space program any day now - or at least you would be, if it wasn't for all those Liberal Looters derailing you to get themselves a free ride!

"Plot idea: 97% of the world's scientists contrive an environmental crisis, but are exposed by a plucky band of billionaires & oil companies." -- Scott Westerfeld

Not if you're the Russian intelligence services, the prime suspect behind the hack. Anyone want to bet that this was part of the same initiative that brought us the more recent scandals of Russian state funding for European anti-fracking groups and American lobbying against LNG export approval?

Whatever it takes to keep your main market open, dependent, and buying your main exports in vast quantities, I suppose.

So now that it turns out that this was done in conjunction with the Maldives government, what's your deal?

Is it that you prefer to leave hackers and carders out there robbing people and businesses?

I'm not the biggest fan of America (actually look forward to renouncing my citizenship as soon as I'm able), but seriously, I think you prematurely Godwinned.

That seems to be precisely what his public defender is saying today (see elsewhere in this thread). And that it was done in cooperation with the Maldives government. So it looks like if there's a scandal here it would be the Maldives government breaking their own laws (although I personally have no clue if that would be illegal in the Maldives, or even what legal grounds would have been used)

According to his public defender:

A Federal Public Defender on Guam, John Gorman, has been appointed to represent him.

Gorman told PNC News today that he was informed by federal officials that the U.S. Secret Service arranged with the Maldives Government to "detain" Seleznev as he was about to board a plane back to Moscow this past Saturday, July 5th. He said Seleznev was then flown on a charter flight here to Guam where, the Federal authorities said, the actual "arrest" was made.

1. He was arrested in Guam. He was detained in the Maldives, but not arrested there.
2. You can't call it a "kidnapping" if it was done in conjunction with the Maldives government (the local authorities).

Did the Maldives government break their laws by doing this action with the Secret Service? Beats me, I'm not a Maldives legal professor. But if there's anyone who would have the authority to order someone in the Maldives detained, I would think it would be the Maldives government.