TIL a troll can have no idea what he's talking about but can somehow manage to find "solipsism" in the dictionary.

Simple fix: don't ever set your voicemail password.

I went over 10 years without enabling my dreaded voicemail, some people complained but I never budged. My current Director told me to set it up about six months ago. I did and used a random integer set from random.org as the password.

I can honestly say "I forgot my voicemail password" and let the thing fill up.

I had never heard of "microagression" before this article. That tumblr blog has plenty of whiny lulz, thanks!

You're quite right: ports really isn't difficult. It's just "different" from what I'm used to, so any difficulties are personal and self-inflicted. :)

It's my understanding that there was an attempt to affect the voting by limiting who had the ability to vote, simply because one of the lead developers was a prominent Upstart supporter. One interesting reference is here, though this is not the source I read about the vote manipulation from.

That said, I'm not overly familiar with how Debian elections are carried out. I only know what I came across in the last couple weeks when I was trying to get a grip on why major distributions were going so solidly with systemd, given issues that so many have found in the package. The trick to remember is that systemd is not the only solution to any {real|perceived} issues that sysvinit may have: There's also openrc and Upstart, to name two other alternatives, and they each have different solutions to bring to the table. Part of what made Linux what it is is the ability to choose what you want in your distro, to determine what you think is really "broken" and what the solution should be.

Honestly, I started getting migraines trying to wade through all the political crap. Proponents of systemd started to sound like American politicians (Democrat or Republican, take your pick; they both tell lies and break promises). It's mind-numbing, which I think is the point. I couldn't find a distro without systemd at all (this was a couple weeks ago, before I head of Devuan) so I wiped my Linux (Fedora) box and put FreeBSD on it.

Yeah, I'll have to learn how to deal with 'ports', but I won't have to deal with the nightmare that appears to be systemd.

Much like making your own shoes and it's a lost art for similar reasons.

I think if they compact all that "spent" uranium together into the volume of a three car garage, they might get a reaction...

You're American. Everything your country does is part of "a reverse robin hood scam".

Yes, it has. Globally every year since 1990 has been warmer than 1936.

Actually, that would be Steele city in North Dakota on July 6th, 1936. No other Canadian border state has ever recorded a temperature of 121 F. Also note that North Dakota and south Dakota both recorded record lows of -60 F and -58 F in 1936. However, as previously pointed out, North America is about 4.8% of the world's surface and around 16.5% of the land area A record-shattering warm year in the U.S. might be barely noticable in the global record. On average, the 2000-2010 decade was 0.5 C warmer than the 1930-1940 decade. Which means for 1936 to lift the global average, the average temperature in North America would have be 10 C above average for the entire year, if the rest of the world was experiencing merely average temperatures for the decade.

That's not an accurate quote. Even the quote you gave contradicts itself. It's also important to note that he was talking about 20 years from when he said that, and if you check your calendar you might note that it's not 2020 yet. Additionally, I'd bet he actually said "if the current trends continue" but it was dropped from the quote in the article because it wasn't pithy enough with the qualifier. Of course, we have seen a reduction in the rate of warming in surface air temperatures since 2000 so it may take longer to get there than he predicted, but the world has continued to warm, so it may still come to pass that England sees very little snow.

You just changed the definition of Social Justice Warrior (SJW). This is different from the definition you previously gave me, which is exactly my point: SJW is a label applied to people with a different political alignment than you and you project whatever flaws are convenient to make you right and them wrong onto them. It's too bad you aren't self-aware enough to see that you're doing it while you protest that you are not.

Is "thief" an identity? I say you're projecting an identity on a group of people you label as SJWs because I don't know if the group you think exists actually exists in any cohesive manner. Also, it's a bit like "racists" or "misogynists", most of the people you would put in the group probably wouldn't think they belong there. Often, I suspect the term is used to identify "people who have called me racist or sexist". I also suspect that more often than not the person has been called on their attitude multiple times and believes that since it's happened so often, the person choose to believe that there must be a conspiracy to silence them, rather than accepting that their beliefs or attitude is genuinely disliked for valid reasons by the people around them.

As far as I know there is not. There are people who use the terms too freely, but as far as I know, they are not part of any organised effort to police public behaviour.

I'm not arguing that the term needs to be changed. After all, what would be the point? I'm saying it is already effectively meaningless, much the way conservative talking heads have made liberal and progressive meaningless by ascribing it to virtually everything they don't like.

You've already projected the SJW identity onto them. I don't see how you can label a group and then claim it's not an identity.

This is your personal definition of SJW, it is not the same as the others I have been given, so it does appear that you are projecting your own personal beliefs about what is wrong onto this group and then dismissing their role in "civil society" based on what you think they have done. It seems like you're doing exactly what I said you would be doing.

Actually, I'm pretty sure that comments like that make my point. SJW is just another de-humanized group for people to project their personal devils onto.

Most of us are made by a woman, but I'll assume you mean the shirt. The people who are upset about this, and it doesn't seem like there's that many of them (your mention of this was the first time, I'd heard of it), are more upset that he wore it to a major press event and that no one thought to say, "Hey, before going on international television, maybe you'd like to change into something more appropriate?" To them, at least, this is indicative of a casual sexism endemic to the sciences and science reporting, where female scientists are judged by the appearance and male scientists by their accomplishments. The fact the shirt was made by a woman wouldn't actually matter to them and would appear to be disingenuous deflection because it's not the shirt, it's the where and the why it was worn that matters to the critics.

I would suspect that you're suffering from the false-consensus effect and projecting your beliefs onto other people in Gamergate, possibly also the halo effect with respect to the people who don't like Gamergate. Of course, if you are correct about Gamergate having a libertarian base, then everyone else would be relatively more authoritarian, virtually by definition since just about the only group less authoritarian than libertarians are anarchists.

Additionally, when I spent some time looking over the posts on the Gamergate hash tag, I noticed several references to culture war against the left, and in particular how offline conservatives should follow Gamergate's tactics (against Gawker and Kotaku) to deny left leaning publications advertisers, which is certainly not what I would expect from a mostly left leaning group that advocates against corruption in journalism. For that matter, why do some of these supposed libertarians think that censorship of views they dislike is a valid solution to "corruption"?

Beyond that, I wasn't actually talking about Gamergate itself, which is a somewhat random assortment of people who all happen to be outraged about vaguely similar things and have twitter accounts, but more specifically about the people who use SJW as a pejorative epithet (which may or may not significantly overlap the people in Gamergate). Of course, on the other hand, I'd never heard of the SJWs until a bunch raging Gamergaters start spewing it all over Slashdot, so there is that.

You must be new here, "SJW" is the new "liberal". As a straight white conservative male, everyone you hate is a obviously an "SJW", because it's just another synonym for evil, like liberal, progessive, gay or female.

Nothing, but I found it interesting to look at the price competitiveness of coal for new builds, which actually isn't very good and getting worse.

Natural gas appears to be the clear winner right now on pure price, even with a CCS system, they cost 2/3rds ($2.095 per KW to build) of what the cheapest coal plant without a CCS costs with comparable operating costs. Without a CCS system, they can get as low as 1/5th ($676 per KW to build) of what a new coal plant would cost with dramatically lower operating costs too.

Well there's a California wind power farm that covers 36 square kilometers and currently contains 490 turbines and generates 1,320 MW, with a planned capacity of 3,000 MW. So it looks like you can squeeze about 100 MW into a square kilometer (rounding up) than can be used for other purposes (such as agriculture or pasturage), so you'd have to dedicate 32,300 square km of land to meet the minimum power demand in ideal circumstances and 96,900 even we divide that by three. With 9,629,091 square km of land, you'd need to dedicate about 1% of the continental U.S. to meet that demand entirely using wind.

As a side note, it seems like the U.S. used 4.6 TW of power in 2013 (according to Wikipedia) so you've underestimated the amount of power the U.S. uses a bit. Also according to the Wikipedia, that's about 1/4 of the world's total electricity usage, used by less than 1/20th of the world's population. Apparently the average EU citizen uses electricity at about one half the per-capita rate of the average American. Anyway, using those higher figures, that would be about 1.5% of all of the contiguous United States land assuming you followed a wind-power only approach.