Wow, way to not link to a study, but rather a Smithsonian blog talking about a Wordpress blog talking about a study. You clearly love your primary sources!

FYI, the study is just one of many. The study itself cites others, including:

20,000 birds/yr (Sovacool, 2012)
10,000–40,000 birds/yr (Erickson et al., 2001 and Manville, 2005)
20,000–40,000 birds/yr (Erickson et al., 2005)
440,000 (Manville, 2009)
573,000 (Smallwood, 2013).

The latter two include lattice towers, which are largely being decommissioned as unsafe to birds.

But hey, having varied numbers clearly means that if you can find a blog linking to another blog linking to a study that shows high numbers (among many different studies), then clearly the GP is "plain wrong", right?

And yes, even if we go with your choice study's mean of 234,012 annual bird deaths, that's still orders of magnitude less than many other types of human activities.

I have serious fears that we're facing an unduly high risk of a major wind spill here. :(

Yes, after 25yrs in the industry I have come to the conclusion that "what is it supposed to do?" is invariably the most difficult question to answer.

Yeah, but a crappy name is a matter of taste, not function.

My biggest beef is they changed how default file search operates in explorer on win7, old search just looked at filenames, new one looks inside files. Complete pain in the arse, I'm the gate keeper for a large cvs repository, I don't want a list of 5000 .c files when I'm searching for a particular .h file, I want a list with just the .h file in it. If they must try and compete with grep then a simple "look inside files" checkbox on the old dialog would have been better. Or better still put the search feature from Visual Studio into explorer as a separate "search in files" right click option.

Personally I think MS's tendency to kill useful stable features and move the carcass to a different UI location is a 'plot' to sell more MS training courses for non-technical staff.

The number of grammatical cases is irrelevant. Question: What's the difference between a grammatical case without stem changes and a postposition (opposite of a preposition? Answer: A space.

  That which is challenging, apart from stem changes, is the same thing that is challenging with helper words in general: when to use what with what. Picture a person learning English and trying to remember what to use with what. "I was scolding her.... over it? for it? about it? to it? around it?" "We were unhappy.... over it? for it? about it? to it? around it?" "She was dedicated.... over it? for it? about it? to it? around it?" And so forth. It's the same for people trying to learn which declension case to use in which context. But if the declensions are just suffixes without stem changes, then they're no different from postpositions. And often stem changes where they occur follow pretty predictable rules, often for pronunciation reasons.

Yes, because writing an opinion that differs from yours is clearly only possible by being paid to do so. *eyeroll*

Making public a lot of things that people suspected but didn't quite know did indeed damage relationships. Had he not released the documents, the relationships would have continued as before.

Whether or not the secret actions should have been authorized in the first place is an entirely different issue. From my perspective, having to stamp "secret" on an authorization to do things that you know would piss off your friends is a sign that you probably should not be doing these things, or make you re-evaluate who your friends are.

That link says nothing whatsoever about rules for government employee e-mail.

That's a link to rules about ISPs archiving e-mail that is the subject of a subpoena.

The link you give says nothing of the sort. The link states that a government may require an ISP to archive e-mail subject to a subpoena.

That has precisely nothing to do with State Department employees, nor does it say anything whatsoever about what e-mail addresses they use.

That is a great example of "ABCs"-- Argument By Changing the subject.

I've never quite understood: why would anybody want to get out of jury duty?

I've often suggested that, but this is the first time I've heard anybody else suggest it.

Yes: vote, but the candidates on the slate should be randomly selected from the population

I'm sorry, but I agree with that. If you on the UK want us to dam up our rivers and build roads out to geothermal areas and tap into our resources, and raise our local power prices in the process, all for the benefit of the UK, our government better damn well profit as much as possible from it and reduce our taxes / improve our services in exchange for that.

Unfortunately, xB and xD do not agree.

Readily replaceable intakes?

Seriously, fuck the fish.

You could find fans for a plan like that...

Better negotiate the contract during a Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn / Framsóknarflokkurinn (conservative) government. Samfylkingin would approve it under the condition that the Icelandic government's share of the sales are so high that you would barely save any money on the imported power, and Vinstri Grænir would outright reject it no matter what you offered. But Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn and Framsóknarflokkurinn would let you dam up whatever rivers you want and take gigawatts of power in exchange for a handful of shiny trinkets and a couple magic beans.