In what sense are these people "customers"? They haven't bought a copy of Windows in six years, and let's be honest most of them never bought it in the first place. Microsoft doesn't have to care if they're mad.

Also, the reason given for their failure to switch, the disaster that was Vista, is idiotic. Windows 7 was a perfectly adequate OS -- and I say that as a Mac/Linux guy. They've had seven years to get over their grief and move on to 7, or switch to Mac or Linux.

The only reason for sticking with XP that I have any sympathy for is that your business is dependent on old hardware that doesn't support a modern OS. But once again, if your third-party vendor hasn't released a driver or software update in seven years, you're a moron for continuing to rely on them.

With the failure of so many blue cities and states, it should be increasingly more obvious that their philosophy/ideology is wrong

The states with the lowest GDP growth in 2012 were South Dakota, New Mexico, Wyoming, Delaware, and Connecticut. (2 blue, 2 red, 1 purple.)
The states with the highest GDP growth in 2012 were North Dakota, Texas, Oregon, Washington, and Minnesota. (2 red, 3 blue)

Just the fact that ND and SD are on opposite ends of that list should convince you that economic vitality has almost nothing to do with political partisanship.

Remember the days when this story wouldn't even have made the local paper? Seriously, 25 years ago your average school saw one of these every few years. It headlined the school paper, the local cops investigated, but the FBI? National news? Heck no.

Who needs terrorists when we now pay large corporations and government agencies to spread panic? Quit terrorizing the nation to protect your job security and let me know when something actually blows up.

The difference between the U.S. and other places is frontier mentality. Unlike most places in Europe, rural America still carries a tradition of independence and do-it-yourself attitude from the frontier days. The wealthy urban right actively encourages this spirit in the rural right, and uses it to push the rural right to vote against their economic interests.

The only other place I know like it is Australia, where (correct me if I'm wrong) rural areas also tend to lean right.

1984, Ciudad Juarez: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radevents/1983MEX1.html

Get your paws off me, you damn dirty ape!

Nope. Chimps aren't human, and don't deserve civil rights. Especially not Second Amendment rights. ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhxqIITtTtU )

But seriously, that doesn't mean we're free to treat 'em badly. We tend to draw a black-and-white distinction between persons and nonpersons. If it's a nonperson, we can do whatever we want with it, torture, butchery, it's all good. But it's not that simple. Living things exist on a spectrum of intelligence and "person-ness", from bacteria to plants to fish to cats to chimpanzees (and from fertilized egg to full-term fetus, if you want to go there). Our morality needs to reflect that.

So no, chimps don't get rights. But they should get the respect they're due as almost-persons.

I think it does: HLY numbers in the east rose at the same time they fell in the west. (There's no pre-2003 data for these countries, of course, so we're missing part of the trend, but the pattern agrees with my hypothesis.)

But in looking at the data in more detail, there's another issue I noticed: it appears that Eurostat changed its method for calculating HLY in 2004! If so, that would make comparison before and after the switch impossible.

Yes, that's where migration comes into it. Once these countries joined the EU, many of their residents moved into Western Europe, changing the health statistics of those countries.

So what else happened to the European Union after 2003? Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Hungary joined the E.U. in 2004. These countries have huge numbers of elderly people in relatively poor health as a result of mediocre Warsaw Pact health and nutrition. This will obviously lower the overall health of the EU average, but I'm willing to bet a bunch of them migrated to other EU countries and depressed the stats for individual nations.

Don't think I'm arguing against immigration here: the effect is to increase the health of the European continent overall, which is a good thing.

Pythons: Python owners love 'em, so why are sales still low?
Erotic fursuits: Furries love 'em, so why are sales still low?

Because the enthusiasm of enthusiasts has nothing to do with appeal to the public.

Wind power generation is an extremely high maintenance activity. I mean ridiculously costly and time consuming to keep the damn things running. Now multiply that by 2000. Worst Idea Ever. Wind power is fail.

As far as I can tell, an individual turbine isn't so bad, but wind is high maintenance because you need a lot of them. The "times 2000" factor is already in there, so no fair putting it in twice.

As for high maintenance, have you been inside a nuke plant recently? It's not exactly a one-man operation.

My point is, if you're going to claim something is high maintenance, you have to say "compared to what?"

"Your numbers are more than double the actual number of turbines required"

Total output of all Fukushima nuclear plant units = 460+4*784+1100=4700 MW
Output of turbine currently installed = 2 MW
Turbines needed to match nuke plant output = 2350, when all are operating at full capacity.

My 500 figure was assuming 7 MW turbines, but those haven't actually been installed yet.

"Anyway, so what if we need a lot of them? There is plenty of space and the total cost is still lower than nuclear, including all maintenance etc. It's not like anyone will be fishing there any more. I don't see a problem."

Oh, I'm all for building another thousand turbines, I hope they do. But nobody's ponied up the money to build them yet: my point was that what's been done so far has negligible impact.

Oh, that's nice. Add another *five hundred* turbines and you'll come close to matching what was lost when the nuke plant shut down. On a windy day.

The public tends to vastly underestimate the energy output of wind turbines. I'm not arguing that wind is pointless -- far from it! But two wind turbines is just an empty symbolic gesture. Two thousand wind turbines ... now you're talking.

Crawl back into your caves, you fucking troglodyte shitholes. How the fuck do you think fire was invented? How about the fucking stone knife? Some dude pounded on some rocks to see what would happen. I'm sure he should have been gathering berries for his tribe instead, but no, he decided to fuck around with rocks. And what happened? Civilization happened, you barbarian asswipes.