I loved mine, bought it about the same time. I stopped powering on last month.

Amen. This might even be the solution to China's gender disparity... if only Asians were good at video games.

When she told me she was a necrophiliac, I should have gotten the hint!

This article is definitely worth a read if you want to get past the controversy. The bottom line is that the science is still out, but fracking is at least theoretically not nearly as dangerous as movies like Gasland would have you believe, barring the sort of human error which always ends up causing problems. The shale which is being broken up is far below the waterline, often seperated from the water supply by thick layes of solid rock. Still, I can't say I would want it being done anywhere close to where I live.

You admit climate science is on the defensive, but say there is only "hearsay" that detractors may have behaved in a way that put them there? What about, say, multiple mass email hackings? Does that not count as supporting evidence that detractors are taking pot-shots at climate scientists? Your professional opinion, evaluating the way these academic-specialists (read: "nerds") handle their private interpersonal communications, seems to be predicated on the notion that climate scientists should know how to deal with constant criticism (presumably of the non-factual, science kind, because otherwise it would be handled!).

You are judging the way the institution is functioning while completely denying the realities of the environment in which it is functioning. Of course there will be internal dysfunction when all your experts have been personally and professionally attacked for months by parties who are hurt by this science. I'd imagine that their conduct is unprofessional because it's the only way to keep even climbing out of bed and going to work. Their output, as science, necessarily stands on it's own because that's what science does. My point (as you so well paraphrased in your first sentence) stands.

How is decarbonisation of the economy inevitable if the time to act never comes? Does the concept of "too late" not exist for you? Should we just keep waiting until it actually is too late? I think the moral panic and press to act quickly is essential to anything getting done, and it should never have taken this long.

Doesn't matter how these adults were acting. Do the emails show that their science was flawed? Or does their science hold up under scrutiny?

That you are trying to disparage their work by highlighting their character makes me thing it their science is good. Otherwise we'd all be arguing the merit of their science and public discussion of their character on /. would amount to secondary gossip. Email etiquette is not something nerds get riled up over.

Google tried this already with Google Wave. Nobody wanted it.

so she probably hasn't actually hung out with the rank-and-file attendees at these conferences much this past decade.

But we are hanging out! This is hanging out. This is hanging out, isn't it?

We must find a way to neutralise the xenophyophores resistance to heavy metal before it can do to us what it did to the Intrepid. Quickly, slingshot George Carlin around the sun so he can find us William S. Preston and Theodore Logan!

...but those dresses look awful. Probably why I'm not a fashion critic.

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Of course human nature is changed by systems. Before money, humans didn't live, breath, and eat money like people do today. When there is a shortage of something, people compete. When there is an abundance of something, people share. Beyond that, human nature is shaped entirely by the systems that surround it, and likewise shape those systems by interacting in it.

Humans used to kill each other all the time. Now it rarely happens (directly), because of a system of crime and punishment. By nature, individuals were sick of being attacked, so they created a system to protect themselves.

That said, you probably meant it is foolish to think you can change human nature from the top-down. Justice may be enforced top-down, but obviously its origins are from the the very grassroots up. Just because you weren't alive when it happened doesn't mean your nature as a person wasn't affected by the justice system, or political system, or that the it was a foolish endeavour.

If you can come up with a system which is so beneficial that even those people who profiting from the status-quo would want to switch to it, then you can change human nature.

Wouldn't Google Wave fit the bill for collaboration on legislation pretty well? With the release, they've been heavily pushing a new "Add email address" feature to current Wave users which just sends invites, so it should start spreading pretty quickly if creative people in the beta can actually make it useful for something. That plus the gradual federation of servers and diversification of clients, just like email, could make XMPP the collaborative protocol of the next decade. Seems like the right direction to head in, anyway.

Hmmm, not for me. Note there are two scaling options, regular and "smooth" scale. http://img148.imageshack.us/g/kolourpaintsmooth.png/