1) I think you missed my point. I wasn't talking about the relative merits of LibreOffice versus MS Office (and frankly, I think you are vastly overstating LibreOffice's merits). I was talking LibreOffice's ability to read and write Microsoft Office documents without error. Document format compatibility with windows is so important that (IMO) anything less than complete fidelity to windows is a failure. Because it means that huge swaths of the marketplace -- pretty much anyone who has to interact with someone else who uses windows -- will avoid using LibreOffice because they can't take the risk that their boss/teacher/co-workers won't be able to read their documents.

3) I haven't used Windows 8, but I'm willing to bet it's trivially easy to enable the start menu. The same cannot be said for disabling Unity and switching to something else.

4) If a user doesn't need to do much more than email, web browsing, and instant messaging, he can probably get everything he needs from the repos. But I'm willing to bet there's a lot of people out there who have at least one app that's not in the repos, or for which the repos have an out-of-date copy (Mediawiki, just to name one) And then Linux becomes a usability disaster.

5) Again, you missed the point. The lack of standardization in everything from package managers (Yum/apt-get) to desktop interfaces (Gnome/KDE/Unity) means that anytime a user encounters a problem and googles it, if he finds an answer at all, there's a pretty good chance that it apply to him because it pertains to a different distro/app. It also substantially increases the learning curve for any newbie and adds artificial barriers for experienced users to switch between distros. And there's no technical reason at all why this should be the case.

Here's what I think are the five biggest reasons, in roughly descending order of importance:
1) Microsoft Office - like it or not, Microsoft Office is by a huge margin the dominant office suite. You have a presentation to give tomorrow? You better make sure it works on that Windows/Office computer that is connected to the overhead projector. Fuck ups in document formatting/compatibility will not be acceptable. Morale of the story: Until an open source program can read and write Microsoft office documents at damn close to 100% fidelity to their windows counterparts, this will be a HUGE obstacle.
2) Games - Despite repeated predictions of its imminent demise, the PC gaming market should not be underestimated. To some extent, this is a viscous cycle: the Linux community ignores the potential increase in market share from gamers, and software companies ignore the Linux market (because it's too small to be economically viable).
3) Poor UI choices - Unity. Enough said.
4) Package installation/management - Let's say a hypothetical windows-to-linux convert wants to install a program. If he's using a distro that uses apt/yum, and if what he wants to install is available in the repositories, and if the distro is configured to use those repositories by default, then he's in pretty good shape. If any of these conditions doesn't hold, then our user is screwed. This is one area where Windows is light years ahead of Linux. If you get a Windows installer and run it, it installs with a minimum of hassle, and you'll never ever be told that your compiler is out-of-date or to use certain compiliation flags or to manually install a dozen dependencies.
5) Lack of standardization in configuration - It is not helpful to google a problem and get eight different answers depending on which distro you use. Like the poor UI choices, this is largely a self-inflicted wound.

"And by that time, we will have economically feasible solutions."

(1) You're ignoring the positive feedback mechanisms that make global warming so dangerous. A small increase in world temperature (which we're already experiences) tends to lead to decrease glaical cover, decreasing the earth's albedo and creasing the solar enrgy absored by the earth. It also warms the oceans, and causes them to release CO2. These in turn trigger more warming. So a little bit of prevention today tends to be much cheaper than dealing with it tomorrow.

(B) Your "solution" is essentially that we sit back and pray that some magic bullet comes down the pike. That's unrealistic in the extreme.

The work you're talking about was called 100 Authors Against Einstein - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Authors_Against_Einstein#Hundred_authors_against_Einstein

Let's go for the long hanging fruit first. How about we stop pumping/mining carbon based energy sources from the ground and burning them into the atmosphere. I bet that would drastically reduce the among of greenhouse gases released. (And would have the nice side effect of being sustainable and cheaper in the long run)

"it only takes one person with a cogent argument to disprove something." -- Wrong. It takes empirical evidence, not a cogent argument. The consensus view that the earth is getting warmer is backed by literally hundreds of published papers each of which cite physical evidence, measurement, models, etc. If there was a case to be made that the consensus view is wrong, there would have to be *some* evidence out there somewhere that contradicts the consensus view. There is not, and that' is why there are no papers describing it.

"There are way worse greenhouse gasses that don't even get filtered most of the time. Cause actually carbon dioxide isn't all that strong of a greenhouse gas."

This is an example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. What you said it true, but basically irrelevant. Carbon dioxide might not be the worst greenhouse gas, but (A) we release orders of magnitude more of it than any other green house gas. You could eliminate every methane emitter on earth and not make a dent in global warming because well over 90% of it comes from the CO2 we release. (B) Carbon dioxide-caused warming lasts far longer than any other green house gas. If we stopped emitting CO2 tomorrow, the warming we have caused will not dissipate for nearly a millenia.

"Funny how the chicken little's so easily dismiss all the climate scientists that disagree with the claim that the sky is falling and demonize anyone who attempts to point them out."

What's funny how all those alleged "climate scientists" cited in this letter have yet to publish a single paper that contradicts the consensus view that global warming is real and man-made: "That hypothesis was tested by analyzing 928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003, and listed in the ISI database with the keywords “climate change... Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position." -- http://www.sciencemag.org/content/306/5702/1686.full

Won't work. Once they've caused a disaster, they can simply declare bankruptcy. They would either have to put up the money into an escrow account in advance, or purchase insurance against such a possibility. (And greedy bastards that they are, the insurance companies can provide a very useful oversight role in such a role)

On the other hand, it strikes me as a fundamentally radical policy that we are willing to accept the possibility of long-term, effectively unfixable contamination of our underground water sources in exchange for a temporary fix to our energy needs.

"Police investigation closed with no support for there having been a hack." - Nice try. Here's a detail of the (competent, non-police) investigation into the hack: http://erratasec.blogspot.com/2009/11/climate-hack-used-open-proxies.html

"None of those eight committees investigated the actual allegations of misconduct found in the mails beyond "did you?". - do you have a citation to prove that? I didn't think so.

I've read the alleged smoking gun email - the one referring to "Mike's Nature trick." It was from the context of the conversation that the "trick" they were talking about was to make two divergent data sets (measured versus tree ring historic) match up. It only looks bad if taken out of context by someone who doesn't know what he is talking about. It was about as pathetic a smoking gun as you can get.

"I don't recall reading about any mass withdrawals in 2008." - There weren't any bank runs in 2008, but there have been before that (Thus proving that one company can, in fact, tank the economy) 2008, like 1929 and unlike 1837/1893/1907, was a market crash, not a banking crash.

"Notice how the recoveries from the panics of 1837, 1893, 1907 you mentioned were all much quicker than both the great depression and the current recession, when Keynsians made the policy." - I'm sorry, but you really couldn't be more wrong on the history here. The whole reason the Great Depression was so bad is because after the market crashed, the Fed raised interest rates and tightened the money supply, so that by 1933 the amount of money in circulation had dropped by 35%. This is the exact *opposite* of a Keynesian approach. (Even Milton Friendman - about as far from a Kenysian as you can get - pinned the blame on the Fed's contractionary policy in his A Monetary History of the United States. Ben Bernake, whose entire academic career centered on studying the causes of the Great Depression, famously apologized to Milton Friedman in 2002 on behalf of his predecessors, admitting that they made the depression much worse by using a contractionary approach) Futhermore, in 1936, as the Great Depression was starting to turn around, Congress began cutting back on New Deal spending, and the economy went into a double-dip.

"I think if you let them go through bankruptcy, sell off the good parts of the businesses, and discredit/fire the bad actors, within a year you'd have recovery. " -- That's a bit like saying that if the car that hit us had been going 30 mph faster, we'd have had a faster recovery. You think bad companies should have been left to fail, so you're rationalizing that letting them fail would have made the economy bounce back faster. It's wishful thinking. The truth is in 2008, when the CDO market froze (thus, under the mark-to-market accounting rules, rendering all CDOs worthless), if the government hadn't stepped in and started buying them, a huge chunk of wall street would have gone bankrupt. In turn, all of their subsidiaries would have shut down. People would have gotten laid off, and in turn would stop spending. Aggregate demand would have plummeted. More businesses would have gone under. It's much more likely we'd be facing 25% unemployment (instead of 11%) and a 10+ year to recovery (We're only in the fourth year of the current recession but it's starting to look better) It's already happened once (the great depression) and you haven't made any case for why it would be any better this time around. (In fact, since the economy is much more integrated and interconnected, it would almost certainly be far worse today than the Great Depression)

"I don't think the Fed should have been created, and I think we should still be on the gold standard" - yea, that's the problem there. Monetary policy might not be perfect, but the idea of abandoning it and going back to the gold standard is like saying that drills hurt, so we should abandon modern dentistry. Frankly, it's silly.

"Yet there are emails on public record and confirmed as being authentic from members of the climate science community to each other that show they are engaging in exactly the kind of behaviour you attribute (with no evidence) to other scientists." - if you're referring to the emails hacked from East Anglia University (the so-called "Climategate" emails) then you have been misinformed as to the contents of those emails: "Eight committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy#Inquiries_and_reports

"Republicans are not distrustful of Science, they are distrustful of politicized scientists and various hangers on." - This is flatly untrue. Republicans deny or abuse science when science interferes with their pro-business agenda (the tobacco-cause-cancer and CO2-causes-global warming denial being a great examples thereof), or when they want it to say things it doesn't (like about fetal pain in early stages of pregnancy). Go read this book.

Except the world trade center, post-collision, was not an oven. It was an open smoldering hole in the side of a building, with minimal insulation. That's why the smoke was pouring out instead of being retained inside the building.