You mean I could have said, most people don't know what they're actually talking about, yourself included. Well that's okay, after all who doesn't enjoy poorer quality onboard sound where you get intermittent channel drops due to software locking IRQ and DMA channels; or enjoy the gloriousness of it causing BSoD's. It has gotten better, but it's sure not anywhere near "good enough." If it was, I still wouldn't be using a XonarDG.

Burma Shave.

Ok, how about this:

"Someone at Apple HQ sneezed."

Better?

Oh, now I went ahead and read TFA. It's all complicated and confusing.

The current thinking is indeed that viruses are an offshoot of 'modern' life (modern being sometime after the archea). These critters, because they contain gene sequences that seem to predate the prokaryote - eukaryote split and because we know that bacteria just love to transfer genetic information 'horizontally' - that is by tossing bits of DNA and RNA around so some unrelated organism can incorporate it into their genetic apparatus as opposed to simply eating it - that it may be that these big viruses started sometime after the RNA hypothesis took hold and created the first self replicating organisms. Or at least helped those first 'organisms' diverge and multiply.

At least it's a testable hypothesis. Once you have sequenced a number of the big virus genes and compare them you would presumably get an idea how old they are.

It would seem that even if this mechanism held, the critters would have had a long time to morph into another ecological niche so it would be hard to pin down what their function was (if any) at the beginning of life. But perhaps the Central Dogma is barking up the wrong tree after all.

No, it doesn't. They were all somewhat different up until the Telstar introduced the 32-panel, pentagon-and-hexagon stitching pattern, but it appears to me that remained unchanged for almost 40 years, from 1970 to 2006. The balls in between appear to have the same stitching pattern, just different printed designs.

It can't reproduce entirely on it's own, so it's not 'free living'. It does need a host. It's just it doesn't need the host for some of the tasks that most viruses need the host for.

It would seem that, instead of being a primitive form that was at the base of the the genetic tree, it's more likely to be an offshoot. It hijacked some additional molecular machinery from an extant organism rather that figuring it out on it's own.

I dunno.. my LEAF's maintenance schedule for the first 150K miles is pretty much "rotate tires, every 7500 miles, check brakes every 15,000". Checking the brakes, of course, involves checking the brake fluid levels, so there is a fluid. At 150K miles you do have to replace the oil used to cool the battery charger.

But, in general, EVs are very close to maintenance-free.

So you're saying that modifying game files and building a custom game patch in order to enable the settings isn't modding. But rather tweaking. Well if that's the case then everyone should be able to do it with no problem at all right? Oh they can't? Well what's the reason behind that, oh right it's because this is beyond the technical level of most people. See this is the difference between a basic "tweak" where files are easily accessible and modding where you're "modifying" files in order to change what's accessible/enabled/available.

If it was purely tweaking, this would be more akin to editing .ini files in say oblivion/skyrim/etc, it's not that however.

Let me start with a hardy fuck you soundblaster though, and finish by saying that "onboard" still isn't good enough. The majority of chipsets out there use realtek based sound solutions. In turn the drivers used are straight out of the gate realtek, with no polish. If you're lucky, the company who has them on their board might slap a fancy UI on them. They're well known enough to cause all sorts of issues from latency drops, to causing DMA/IRQ conflicts with other hardware. While it's fun to say "they're good enough" that's akin to saying, I can drive 80km on my new run-flat tires, it's good enough to get me where I need to go.

If you want a good sound, break down and blow the $50-80 on another card that has decent driver support. Your gaming/movie watching/audio listening/etc will thank you for it. Personally anything from Asus(xonar series), or HT Omega(if you really want to blow the money) will do you good, especially since they actually fix their drivers. And don't simply software disable functions like Soundblaster did on their LIVE! series cards.

I see the plot of a new Micheal Bay (or maybe J.J. Abrams) movie: The US military, unable to get qualified recruits to fight the new Zombie wars, takes a cue from the Zombie playbook and develops the technology to bring life old soldiers. After a bit of a difficult start, the program exceeds all expectations until the previously dead soldiers revolt at being put back in the grave and bring Washington to it's knees by filing for Social Security benefits.

It'll make great post-apocalyptic architecture.

This reminded me of the domes in Ergo Proxy.

Will this one be called "Mosque?"

That's pretty bad, although it's not that unusual for them to have terribly high standby draws like that. On the majority of them, there is a tangible difference in energy use though (as in you can touch them and feel the heat difference).

He said ice sheet. So we're supposed to ignore what he actually said and assume he meant something completely different? Um, no.

"I am not well read in this department" - wait a minute, you can give exact cites for research papers on sea ice, but don't even have a *general* conception of what percentage of the Antarctic ice sheet is gaining versus what is losing? Something tells me you're just grabbing cites you've never even read from denier websites.

Let me help you out with ice sheet. Pretty much all of the East Antarctic ice sheet is gaining, while pretty much the only area losing is the Antarctic peninsula and surrounding areas in West Antarctica. Now, they're losing *mass* a lot faster per unit area than the east is gaining mass, but in terms of area, the overwhelming majority of Antarctica is gaining ice. Because it almost never gets above freezing there, even in a warming world.

The 2010 paper was evaluating the failed CMIP5 predictions

If you'd actually read the paper, which you clearly haven't, you'd know that they themselves did the CMIP5 runs, it's not CMIP5 runs that had been done earlier. Do you even have a clue what CMIP5 stands for? Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5. As in, "there were four freaking phases that came before this one". CMIP5 is comprised of all of the latest models from all over the world. They didn't even start planning CMIP5 unitl September 2008. Your notion that this is some sort of review of old climate predictions just shows how terrible your understanding is of what you're talking about and how you don't actually read the papers that you cite, that you're just simply grabbing them from whatever denialist trash websites you read.