I think Putin is crafty and Machiavellian is a great way to describe his choices.

But with that said, we don't have to assume Putin to be insane or foolish to concern ourselves with nuclear escalation. His gradual conquest of the Ukraine is a calculated risk that essentially says to NATO, "I bet you haven't got the balls to stop me, I can take what I want."

He's moving slowly and boiling the frog in the water slowly so that he can get what he wants with slower and safer escalation...but it's still escalation. He's planning to push until he himself is convinced that NATO is actually willing to go to war to stop him.

Basically, he's started a nuclear game of chicken, and the worst part about nuclear war is that the best outcome goes to the one who issues the first strike since it's hoped to at least partially blunt a portion of the counter-strike. In a nuclear missile crisis, you can't know when the point of no return is crossed because at that point, there's no response to the opponent's latest gesture of escalation, at that point the missiles are simply fired without notice to reduce the enemy's response time as much as possible.

I don't expect nuclear war to be imminent right now, but with the trajectory Putin is taking, I expect that he won't stop until he's pushed us all to the very brink of nuclear war, and the risk is that Putin may accidentally push us just a hair too far and find us in a situation that even he cannot de-escalate from since he won't know when he's overshot his limits.

What you'd need there is not file support, but server side support. If you're downloading a single file with all those formats, you're going to have to download everything at once. That's inefficient (important on mobile devices) and slow. Stuffing all the sizes into one container isn't the answer.

Instead, what you'd like is one URL to automatically send you the correct file(s) for your size(s). For example, you could put headers in the http request giving the desired resolutions and the response could have each of those sizes, in preference order. Basically have each image request turn into a CGI request for multiple files. More or less what this new tag is trying to do client side. Of course doing it client side, while less convenient all around, does have privacy advantages- you can't guess the device type from the sizes requested.

"We did not evolve eating carbs"

I'm confused, do you mean processed sugars or something rather than "carbs"?

I mean, carbs are all over the place. Fruits, roots, grains, etc. We had definitely evolved eating carbs, Isn't the trope of monkeys loving bananas suggestive of carbs as being a part of man's early diet?

That depends on whether the monstrous fuck-up is just extinction of one plant variety or Triffidized tobacco.

I keep seeing this complaint, but it doesn't make sense. Are people assuming that for every 1 police officer, they will hire 1 video reviewer to watch that officer for his entire shift? That's silly.

Any real-world application, would be local recording on the device. When an incident is reported, the police officer logs the time of his response just like he/she already does all the time. He/she turns in his camera, and any video corresponding to the officer's incident report is then archived and tagged to that incident. You don't need to save 12 hours of video per officer. You just need the time of the incident which will be very brief indeed. If you want more manual control of the evidence. Let the officer pick the video times he wants to log, submit it to evidence dept., evidence dept. fast-forwards through the video to simply verify the officer selected the right times to capture the incident (if not, kick it back to the officer to reselect his times and resubmit to the evidence dept.).

The result is 1) The officer is the only one picking out the video to archive, and no personal/private information will be submitted without the officer's consent. 2) Someone who isn't the officer is ALSO explicitly responsible for ensuring that a video of the incident was submitted to evidence that day. 3) You don't have 4 hours of video recording an officer just filling out paperwork.

A theory is something that has strong supporting evidence, and if you agree with Popper and Kuhn and various" Historians or Philosophers of Science", something that skilled people have tried to come up with alternatives, tested them, and the theory has survived where they didn't. Ideas that have been proposed, and maybe have a little supporting evidence, but are considered not tested enough, and not studied rigorously to see if they can be falsified, or if some other idea better fits Occam's razor, are called hypothesi (or often just interesting ideas until they get at least a little support). Yes, just who qualifies as skilled, which idea is actually simpler by the razor, how much testing is enough, and 'how much better at predicting what than the competing ideas are' are all somewhat subjective, and individual scientists are not exceptionally flawless at making those judgement calls. But that's true of just about everything. Science works because the method tends to correct for those subjective aspects, not make them more powerful as in so many other areas of human activity.

By this era, the theory that the sun was powered by Fusion of Hydrogen into Helium had a lot of evidence supporting it, such as the abundance of various elements in it and other stars, as determined spectrally. Try a web search for Hans Bethe if you want to know about the first evidence that helped raise this hypothesis to the status of theory, in 1930, although he didn't get the Nobel for his work until 1967. It's interesting to me that people are debating just what counts as a theory, and for this particular case, there's an exact date when a particular paper was published, and widespread agreement that this date and event is when the hypothesis got enough support to start calling it a theory. This is additional evidence that adds more support, and by the Philosophers of Science, ought to mean anyone who thinks they have a better idea will have to gather even more evidence and work even harder if they want their alternative to be taken seriously.
 

I'm sure that Von Neumann, Lemaître, Dirac, and Minkowski were concerned by the possibility of being put in a cell or killed (by the Spanish Inqusition, I guess).
Even Newton, who really was criticised rather unfairly for his Non-anglican variant Christian religion, apparently didn't feel the existing majority religion was going to lock him away or kill him.
Kepler, now there was a guy who had a real reason to worry, Bruno should have worried more. But since then? Historically, you had one period (the Counter-Reformation), when the Church of one region really had both the power and the intention to persecute non-Christian or variant Christian scientists, philosophers, and such. Evidently, that outweighs a lot of other eras and places. That the Roman Catholic church, 20 years before the trial of Galileo wouldn't, and didn't even have the means to conduct such a trial, and that there were other reasons for the sentence in G's case doesn't mean we should think religions ever act differently.
The sad thing is, most of your other points stand pretty well. If you said that movements like the one driving this proposed law can be compared to the Counter-reformation, or even the Inquisition, you would be on pretty solid ground.

Working on a crew may have been an option the workers got to choose (here's why):
1. When a government taxes peasants, it's sometimes awkward to use the revenues. Imagine you are the guy who has to actually process the payments from a lot of really poor farmer types. Peasants may only be able to pay you with a share of their harvest. If they can't hand you gold coins, or anything easily stored and lasting, you end up having to sell their wheat or whatever to get the taxes into a form you can use.You have limited time to do this before the wheat rots in place. If there's not a lot of durable goods in the hands of the average Joe, and every time you insist on being paid in something easy to handle, it just drives up the price for those things, there gets to be times when nothing the peasants can pay you in is worth collecting.
2. Those same peasants work hard in harvest seasons, but they have idle time in other seasons. In a place like Egypt, where there isn't a real cold season, you can put that idle time to working seasons where the peasants don't have all that much else to do. Wars work for that, but if you get a war started, it may keep going until next planting season (This is serious - it keeps being a factor all the way up to the US civil war. Even that late in history, farming season was still an argument for people who's hitch was up and didn't think they should be delayed mustering out because they needed to get back home to help with the crops).
3. So you need to have a work project that can be stopped when planting and harvest seasons come on, and restarted without much waste, and that the peasants and craftsmen can both contribute to. This way, when all the granaries are full, you can offer people a chance to work off their taxes instead of paying them off in goods. You make the work just easy enough that it looks like a good deal compared to a share of the wheat, animals, and such the farmers raise, give the craftsmen shorter hours or some other perks for making stuff for the project, and you also gain having peasants that are trained to think they have to pay their taxes one way or another. How hard you work the peasants depends in large part on just how many of them you want to take the pay-in-work option instead of the pay-in-goods option - that means you really can't work them as hard as slaves, or too many will pick the pay-in-goods option, but if you make it a token duty, they'll all pick pay-in-work, and you don't want that either, so you set up a system where you pass out some prizes for best team, bonuses in beer, and such so just the right percentage pick work.

It's technically better than slavery. In fact, it's a precurser to modern wage slavery. The Egyptians practically invented giving people a token reward that makes them feel they are doing better than being slaves, but doesn't cost all that much, AND finding something more controllable than a war to occupy the masses idle time.

Cradles have actually been found in archaological excavations, as the original article mentions. However, it also says the cradles as found don't have holes for ropes to tie them around the blocks, so we could be looking at a not very efficient design, for example one where the 'cradels" were really rockers which lay loose on the ground, and the workers have to keep building chains of rockers ahead of the blocks, piching up the trail or frockers as the block is moved, etc., or there's something we are missing, or the Egyptians didn't use these things for moving blocks (that last possibility seems really odd since the size of a cradle's straight edge seems to match really well with the correspondiing edge of the blocks). There's just enough ambiguity that professionals don't want to say the question is totally answered. The cradles actually found also don't really explain how bigger blocks, such as the 50 ton+ ones used to form the vaults over the inner chambers, and various statues and pylons were moved, but they could in principle. maybe someday, somebody will find some bigger cradles that match other objects equally well...

I'm going to propose the cradles were assembled around the blocks into rollers, but they were glued on. I have no evidence for that last, but what the hell.
I'd also like to point out, wood is somewhat scarce in that particular environment, and wooden items have both a low rate of preservation over archeological time and a high rate in post-dynastic days of getting burnt for fuel by people who didn't care about old stuff unless they could sell it, so we may never find ways to settle this question.
     

This is spot on. I have thin, cheap, builder-grade (i.e garbage) windows that were original to the home's construction in 1986. They leak heat like crazy but it'll cost $20k to replace them. Meaning I'd have to live here about a decade to make that cost back in energy savings. But I've also picked up a new job where relocating for 2-3 years is a strong prerequisite for advancement. The major outlays in energy efficiency that would make a big difference for me are incredibly wasteful from a financial perspective. I would love to get my windows replaced, improve wall insulation, get solar panels, solar water heating, the works...if it meant I could save money in the long run. But because I can't take any of that with me, or recover a decent portion back in the home's sale price, I'm never going to do any of those things until I move into a permanent home. Even when I think I'm settling in for the long term, life can be unpredictable, and I'll always have some uncertainty as to how long I'll live in a home before I'll want or need to move. Just last night I was reading in the local paper that a company is attempting to assert right-of-way to build an oil pipeline straight through my suburban NJ township to pipe oil to NYC, which will further impact my home value. Not something I had been planning on happening 4 years ago, but something I might have to move to escape from.

You started off pretty well with a reasoned and comprehensible response on the topic of what the future's energy generation profile might have to look like. ....Then you went waaaay off topic and into paranoid-insane areas and crash-landed into talking about Noah's ark and space space stations. Don't you hear how crazy that sounds? I mean, at least it was interesting, but joking aside, maybe get that checked out or something.

"Fundamental changes in the structure of most Linux distributions should not be met with such fervent opposition."

The more fundamental a change is, the more it changes everything - that's basically why we call it 'fundamental'. Making fundamental changes says there's a lot broken. If I said we need a program to fast track educating doctors for rural areas, that's a moderate change to the US medical system, and might a good or bad fix for one specific problem. If I say we need to shoot all existing physicians and substitute Qui-Gong practicioners, that's a fundamental change to American medicine. If someone asserts a change is fundamental, they have also implied the existing system is nearly or totally borked, so they have a very strong burden of proof shifted entirely to them for making that assertion. Unless they can meet that burden of proof, the other side should win any debates.
          The smart thing to do is to claim that a change is not alll that fundamental, and changes only a limited subset of things. For example, I could argue that gay marriage is a limited change, in that it is still based on a moral principle many of us respect (that the people choosing it are consenting adults with normal understanding), and not a more fundamental change (such as throwing out any moral base, including the principle of informed consent, so that pedophilia would somehow become legal). Notice how it's been mostly anti gay marriage advocates that are trying to paint the issue like everything under the sun will change if the other side wins - that's because many people have figured out how this burden of proof stuff works.

Even identical twins have only about a 50% chance of the second one developing Schizophrenia if the first one does. I guess that means Schizophrenia is a choice. Genetics is an aspect of etiology, and that may or may not include the etiology of sexual orientation. But, it's very risky to start aguing that people have a choice or else there has to be a gene that causes the effect 100% of the time, as nothing genetic works that way.

I know of one actual Bed and Breakfast that takes in normal clients through one set of ads, and runs other ads in BDSM magazines and such and serves as a dungeon for that clientel. They apparently rely on not scheduling people who don't know what's in the basement at the same time as those who do or something like that - maybe weekends are for whipsters. Is it possible this counts as a "bad actor"?
            Or what about people who are subletting property they only rent, against their rental agreement? Not that that's right, but I could certainly see the New York state authorities focusing only on those cases and ignoring a lot of owner landlords who rent out unsafe property, or worse, the ones who use goons to frighten or actually beat people who are protected from price increases by rent control, to force them to break their leases and free the property to be rented at a higher rate. Leaning on little old ladies is a pretty blatent kind of 'bad acting", but is it even on the radar in this case, or is it all about getting the low hanging fruit of renters who generally can't afford lawyers rather than landlords who can?.

Where do you think those blogs are getting their info from? Their large collection of reporters circling the globe and getting the real scoop? Or do they just check out the big news sites for 99% of their stories? (Hint: the answer is B). So you have yet another layer of obfuscation and bias in there. Congratulations, your news is even worse.