I think you have to look at where the funding comes from for Republican and conservative causes. Don't just look at candidate funding, even election advertising has a lot of funding that isn't straight to the candidate.

Although there might be no shortage of self-employed Republicans, they don't really call the shots for the party. It's the very deep pockets who do.

The UK is Great Britain, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, some other pieces, and some of those are partially self-governing (I don't know much about how the Irish Free State works, etc). And then we have the ex-colonies and client states which still consider the Queen their head of state.

I will believe the science is settled when the journals that carry articles about climate stop rejecting articles that are not "in line" with the alleged settled science, especially those articles that are brought forward by scientists who don't put the word "climate" in front of "scientist" or "researcher" when they describe themselves.

"Science" is about exploring boundaries and ideas, and a "memory hole" has no place at all in science. "Science" is about evaluating the data and resulting theories, not the person bringing the data and theories forward. "Science" is about recognizing new facts and incorporating them into existing theories...or throwing out the old theories when the new facts require those theories to be stretched all out of shape to shoehorn in the new facts, much like politicians gerrymander the boundaries of voting districts to achieve a desired result.

Why have the various predictions been so drastically wrong? That says the science is not settled. If it were, the results would better match the predictions. Especially the doomsday predictions. Not to mention the flip-flops between "global warming" and "global cooling" -- how does the settled science square with those changes in view? I'm reminded of the boy crying "Wolf!"...

I agree that there are trends in temperature change that needs to be watched closely, but I disagree that there is one "magic" solution. Indeed, I look at reduced industrial CO2 emissions as only one of many things we should look to do. For example, have you considered growing grass on the roof of your house, and on the body of your car? How about roofing over car parks, and growing plants on them? Have you looked into dense, CO2-consuming flora on the top of your office building? How many trees have you planted on your property, especially large-leaf ones?

"Climate change" is not a "Someone else's problem" -- it's YOUR problem, too. Why do I see lots of talk but little personal action? Show us how to solve the problem, don't just say "you do it."

have a great deal of respect for you

Sorry, I should have made it more obvious that I was writing tongue in cheek about the monarchy. Not about SpaceX though. I'm pretty impressed.

It doesn't work to do this with a democratic government. We need a monarchy :-(

It seems to me that SpaceX is on the path to a solution that might be affordable by a single administration, though.

What you can do is use quantum teleportation to "transmit" (in a manner of speaking) a real (or complex) number, i.e. a quantum superposition, which in theory could contain infinite information, by using only a couple of classical bits. This real number can't be observed directly - you can only tell whether it's less than or greater than a specified number by appropriately designing your observation - but until you observe it, it can be further processed in its full precision as a superposition at the receiver end using quantum operations. What you can do with this internal (uncollapsed) infinite information is up to you, e.g. as part of a quantum factoring or search algorithm, until you finally collapse it and read out some yes/no answer. All in theory of course; in practice you have noise and other sources of error.

Clearing the underbrush can *reduce* the amount of CO2 to be produced. Pull and chip that brush, don't burn it. Use the chips as ground cover to better protect seeds and hold water, both which promote good tree growth. Chips can be used in playgrounds instead of sand or dirt, particular chips from softwood brush. When my father was in the forest service, they cleared out brush "by hand"; the only time they lit any fires was when they needed to set a backfile to halt or steer a moving path of flame.

I suggest you increase your range of research. Specifically, find the study for the Tahoe Basin showing how the suppression of forest fires has increased the fuel load in the forests of the basin for the past 30 years. More fuel means hotter fires. Also, add "fire ecology" to your search parameters. In this one respect, man *has* affected the ecology, by suppressing limited fires that eat up the excess fuel that can lead to large crown fires and "firenados."

And where do you get your information? A wildfire may not be burning above-ground, but the fire can continue underneath the topsoil. Forest fires are not considered "out" until they have been thoroughly soaked with water over a period of months. In the Sierras, that's after the first big snowstorm of the season. Snow captures the heat and melts, and the resulting water will go into the root tunnels and snuff what's left of the fire. And the loss of coverage *can* affect climate, but only in a local area and not on a continent, let alone the planet. But that doesn't affect your premis: a single fire does not "climate" cause.

If Boeing was interested in getting people into space, more than a handful of them would be there. The fact is that it has taken a company that was outside of the system, with a tiny fraction of Boeing's funding, to make more progress than Boeing has.

And of course it's in the U.S. interest to make sure the Russians have an active and completely up-to-date source of rocket engines for their nuclear missles.

In this vein, I wonder what it is we are paying the Chinese to do?

I do this. Also, once every year or two, I scan all the pages and make a nice pdf file of each volume. I put bookmarks on pages that I think I may want to look up quickly (often these correspond to physical bookmarks such as little sticky notes) and also bookmark start of month or start of new project. My bookshelf, with 5 linear feet of notes over the years, fits on a thumb drive. In practice, I typically look up things in the pdfs rather than the physical notes. I intend to dispose of the physical notes someday, at least the very old ones (ego has prevented me from doing so thus far), but even if my house burns down my notes are safely stored away on a remote backup.

You may want to read my entire message again. It was about comments like yours, not about the cleanup initiative itself.

The message I linked to at least adds several lines to a file called "symhacks.h" to deal with limits regarding the length of symbol names (which is probably required due to a limitation of the used object file format on that platform, and hence not easily resolvable by changing the compiler or linker).

Conversely, I think part of the current cleanup is that it's not just a cleanup of bad/dangerous code, but also throwing away functionality/support that the people performing said cleanup personally don't consider to be relevant. It's their full right to do so, of course, but it's a rather bad example if the intention is to show how badly OpenSSL is supposedly maintained.

I'm not sure why you put this conditionally, since there obviously is such a demand.

It's most annoying, and couter-productive, to audit code when the lack of formatting gets in the way. The first thing I do when I get a piece of messy code is run it through a beautifer first. In one case, that one action made the bug shine like the sun on a clear day. Who audits using diffs? The audit needs to cover ALL the code.