So if your kid wears a pirate costume with a jolly rodger eyepatch or hat, it's ok to beat him up as he's already excused himself from polite society?

The point of the Pirate Party is to work within polite society to change it via political action. I think you suffer from pirate confusion.

Many people who run Linux don't have the expertise among their own employees to properly manage it. This is why they hire other companies to do it for them. This is not an indictment of Linux nor would it be an indictment of SaaS. In fact, the major business model of the FSM is to give the code away and provide services to maintain and fix the code for clients. Are you really indicting that business model as non-free? I thought I'd never meet anybody who was stricter that RMS but...

Well, the fix is to periodically sync your data to your own machines and have code that could replace the SAAS if you wanted it to. At that point the SAAS vendor is just providing you with convenient, quick access to the cloud and if they go away, you can just buy some hardware and rapidly be back in business for your own stuff at a degraded speed.

But nobody does this which is why SAAS is a bad idea for anything other than 'nice to have' uses that you could live without.

The Green Bay Packers are citizen owned. Look how their corporate structure is set up and you'll find that it's quite distinct from what is normally done in private corporate structure.

The problem is that TWC is entering into corporatist arrangements to limit competition (the franchise agreements) and then taking fat corporatist profits for inferior offerings. What should happen is that the city simple doesn't renew their franchise agreement and opens up for competition. That's not sexy enough so they go for socialized provision instead.

Hopefully the city spins it out, privatizing Greenlight, and then kills the franchise agreement. That would be the best outcome. It would all depend on how bad the original franchise agreement was and that's a big unknown.

I believe that catching RIAA lawyers in a blatant lie to the court that they knew was a lie is sanctionable. If you can prove a lack of honesty (i.e. the FSF has clear evidence showing that these people knew that they were representing a lie to the courts as truth) then they should be on the road to disbarment.

The problem is that the scientists are acting like politicians. There is absolutely zero scientific motivation to prefer prevention over mitigation but the whole thrust of the IPCC push has been to create a drumbeat in favor of prevention via massive government action.

Such political statements have been called science and that's the real problem.

If you recall, there was an admitted NASA error on the heat data, a y2k type error that when corrected led to 1934 being the hottest year, and 3 of the 5 hottest years on record occurring before 1940.

GISS shows flat/cooling since 1/2001, HADCRUT is flat/cooling since 4/1997.

Funny enough, the biggest cooling has shown up in 2007 and 2008. The previous 8 years are more of a "pause" in previous warming. The punchline is that your graph ends in 2006. The graph also has a huge spike around 1998 (major el nino) while the accompanying data table purporting to explain the graph has no spike bit runs uninterrupted higher through 2007. Something's not quite right there.

Reducing emissions sucks up money that could be spent elsewhere better. At the margin this has pretty bad effects (ie people die). The reality is that anytime you divert large amounts of money to something, people in the third world die. The precautionary principle is a huge middle finger raised by rich self-indulgent 1st world paranoids to the poor of the world.

The negative/flat trends have lasted about 10 years now.

So since we're about half way there with a 10 year end to warming while CO2 levels continue their march upwards, isn't it time to maybe back off the idea that we must charge ahead with horrendously expensive solutions *now*, *now*, *now* and wait a bit to see how things play out?

Everybody who's saying the discussion is over and there's a scientific consensus has "left the drawing board". We've got a 10 year pause and 2 years of cooling going on and none of the models predicted it. We've got "missing heat" and grossly oversimplified models. We've got a recognition that weather is initial condition dependent but faith that somehow climate is not.

So yes, there's a problem.

Sorry, I've lost my gallows humor on this subject.

Enlighten me o noble p!ngu with something other than snark. The plain fact is that we're talking about lots of lives and huge piles of money one way or another. It isn't just a simple statistical calculation once you start playing in that arena.

Ok, fair enough. We're half way there at 10 years right now and you have people shouting consensus science and that further argument is illegitimate ranting from bought and paid for "deniers". So let's say this global warming "pause and cool" continues for another 10 years, you think that there's going to be no consequences when you and the rest of the scientific community do your about face and announce that there's a new long term trend?

Do you have any idea how many people are going to die due to the lost economic growth and unavailable funds that are going to be poured instead into global warming regulation and CO2 prevention over the next ten years?

The problem is the AGW guys shouting that the argument is over and that there's a consensus and everybody should just shut it and get in line. To hell with that. That's not science, but rather a nasty form of political orthodoxy.