I happen to believe in trials. So did the founding fathers.

Great, that makes three of us. We can start with Clapper and Alexander, since they're easy to apprehend and Snowden isn't. We don't even have to extradite them from Russia or Hong Kong. We can send some Federal marshals to pick them up after breakfast tomorrow. Sound good to you?

Can't sleep nights.

We really need a revolution soon, or I think we're going to find that we don't like where we end up. I know it sounds trivial because these are all free services, and most of what's communicated on them is trivial anyway. Still, it's transforming the Internet into a less free place, where we're all at the whim of a small handful of companies. I think it's a bigger problem than we've yet realized.

(Shrug) The next revolution will be co-opted to sell ads, just like the last one was. I don't know what we need, but it's not another "revolution."

(Shrug) DRAM is a lot cheaper than my time.

In other news, U233 decays into Sn120 through antiproton emission. Hatmakers' stocks are up 140%.

Oh, wait, no, actually, further research reveals that the last part was caused by your post.

Physicists spend their time actively trying to poke holes in the Standard Model. Climate scientists seem to start from a conclusion and then look for evidence supporting it.

We need things like regulations and unions because business has no morality; and left to their devices they will do anything they see fit.

Yeah, unlike, say, unions and governments.

What in the fuck is going on?

As best I can tell, what's happening in the UX world is similar to what happened to fashion and hairstyles in the 1970s. (Almost) everybody just went crazy overnight for some reason. Some kind of brain parasite, maybe, carried by cats or birds.

The trend will eventually recede as quickly as it arrived, as plagues always do. Then we'll see functional, user-configurable interface design come back into favor. I've given up, personally. I'm just going to stop complaining and wait it out. It doesn't pay to be the only sane guy in the asylum.

No, not Enzo Ferrari, Elon Musk.

Circuit Cellar's still around, and not half bad, actually.

Communist personality cults are just another religion. Don't agree? Go to North Korea and tell them they're "atheists." They'll send you home in a box.

Note that everything I said still applies if the IPCC is right but consistently unable to prove their case. Confounding factors are a massive hazard on geologic timescales as short as the ones for which we have genuinely reliable data. A ten- or twenty-year cooling trend could have the same effect as outright failure of the models.

Point being, we shouldn't put climate science and evolution in the same basket. They are not on equal footing. To pretend otherwise is to invite a cultural disaster.

h) The AGW "debate" in the USA closely resembles the Creation-vs-Evolution "debate", ie. a never-ending game of Whac-a-Mole against arguments that sound plausible but never stand up under scrutiny, no matter how convinced the creationists were when they were parroting them. One side has to spend vast resources to produce hard evidence, the other side doesn't feel they have any burden of proof whatsoever, they just make stuff up.

Actually it doesn't resemble the Creation/Evolution debate at all, and I get the heebie-jeebies when someone says it does. One of my favorite charities, the National Center for Science Education, has gone down this path recently and I wish there were a good way to talk them out of it.

Climate models are based on just that -- models. We could still wake up one day, slap ourselves in the forehead, and admit that our computer models are either grossly in error, or missing one or more key factors that would change their output drastically. The map is not the territory, science is not a democracy or a popularity contest, and climate modeling is not a "settled science." I don't care who says it is, and I don't care what percentage of climate scientists agree. It just isn't. Sorry, but that's not the way these things work.

On the other hand, we are absolutely not going to wake up one day and realize that we have the basics of evolution wrong. There is absolutely no possibility that we will discover that humans are not, in fact, descended from earlier hominids. There is absolutely no possibility that we will discover that we don't have ancestors in common with modern apes. That isn't going to happen. Too many independent lines of evidence have come together, making consistent predictions, providing confirmable explanations, and withstanding intense scrutiny.

My fear is that the global-warming thing will prove to be a red herring, as usually happens whenever "B...b...but 99% of scientists agree!!!11!" is the primary argument in favor of a theory. When that happens, it's going to be almost impossible to keep the Creationists and other assorted modern-day flat-earthers from gaining the influence over public education and popular culture that they've always dreamed of.

(Shrug) They're good multimeters. Unlike the Chinese toy knock-off, the safety certifications printed on the Fluke actually mean that they meet those standards, and the CE mark on the Fluke doesn't stand for "China Export."

To professional users and serious hobbyists, these factors are important.

I'm sure quite a few Indian and Chinese automakers would love to see the franchised dealer-only model go away.

Actually you may have hit on the real issue -- these dealership laws are really just old-fashioned protectionism in disguise.