You seem to have a strange divergence from reality.

The deal is four billion dollars cash, the rest in stock. Facebook's net income for 2013 was $1.5 billion. The deal ate up 35% of Facebook's cash on hand, so there's not necessarily any debt here to make up, and all things being held constant, my math would have them in the green again within three years.

I don't think that Facebook has any more chance of long-term success than those people silly enough to sell operating systems, but at the moment they're both pretty good rackets. This is a heavy investment for Facebook, but they're not an untalented bunch; they have by necessity made a very fast pig out of a PHP application, and they have (apparently) a lot of money to throw at a new market. Can anyone really say that this makes less sense than whatever chunk of Google's $6.8B R&D budget is going to autonomous vehicles and Glass?

Besides, you're giving Zuckerberg & co. far too much credit for long-term thinking.

The NSA can notify whoever they want to as long as there is a public process for it. However, they should stay the hell away from that for the most part because they are a branch of the United States military and it's fucking retarded and treasonous to use military force against its own society.

This is the whole reason we have rules of evidence. We intentionally restrain the investigative branches of our civil justice system, because few citizen can entirely avoid lawbreaking, even aside from cases of civil disobedience. We also restrain these bodies because their consequences are often swift and terrible, and the mere association with crime, the suspicion only of guilt, can be enough to end a man's reputation and career. Laxity in evidentiary procedure is not really a problem we need to have. You also have a right to all the evidence used against you, specifically so that you can challenge it. Secret evidence is a hallmark of the Star Chamber, not the US Justice System.

The bigger issue though is the military nature of this investigative body. I'm sure that to some degree we are justly hoist on our own petard for our treatment of our allies, but freedom from military action is a right of all citizens. Where concerns our martial foes, we have far fewer legal restrictions on actions. War is not civil. War is Hell. We do not bring Hell home, and we do not visit arms against the shores that bore them. If we are not to raise arms ourselves against this treason, then let justice come swiftly.

But what if GP is already using Beta?

Straw man. Try what I actually said: we already have the most expansive prison program in the world, and it is objectively bad at rehabilitation. You should probably be trying to justify either the current system or your idea that somehow it's not punishing people enough. Also we might cover whether punishment or rehabilitation is the primary purpose of a prison system.

Nice soundbite though. Reactionary, fallacious and obvious: a jab to please even the most thoughtless. I hope you didn't stay up too late writing it.

There is indeed a difference. Please pardon my rhetoric; my argument is not necessarily academically rigorous. However, if we can reverse my intention with that remark, and suggest that a criminal record is an excellent way to be unemployed or otherwise in an impoverished state, the statistics range are supportive. Some of them were even shocking; one document I read indicated a low four-figure annual income for some groups. An exaggeration, one can only hope. I also do not think it beggars belief to suggest that e.g. a starving man might steal a loaf, but since he cannot be proven to do so, you must have a valid objection. I had considered striking the term, and mere laziness prevented me. Again, your pardon. If you have further argument for increased incarceration, please do continue.

We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, and you're arguing that not enough people are being jailed? Poverty is causally linked to crime! Assault, rape, and robbery have been in decline for years, and prison sentences have been lengthening.

It should be a surprise to no one that statistics on the income level of incoming prisoners are heavily biased towards the lowest levels of income. Income statistics for released felons are even worse. We stigmatize prison to such a degree that it destroys people's ability to earn a living afterwards, and you wonder why we have a >60% recidivision rate. Our "corrections system" is fundamentally broken, and by all measures worsening. Isn't prison supposed to prevent people from returning to a life of crime?

I am appalled at your ignorance, and the idea of a higher incarceration rate is vile. If you have no human compassion, have at least the sense to see when a solution isn't working.

Yes, yes, Gnome3 depends on logind/systemd. Also ConsoleKit ceased development. It's almost as if they think it's a better technology. But hey, you want to install a massive monolithic DE, it's gonna pull in some dependencies that you may or may not like. That is not Debian's problem, actually -- if they showed any signs of being amenable to discussion on the matter, then you might complain to the Gnome developers.

This vote ignored the issue of what kind of default the default should be, because it only had one question that was being decided. It is unlikely to be the end of the discussion on the matter, so I am sure that all those with opinions will get their fair say -- just not on this vote. I realize that the vote may not have gone your way, but those grapes were probably sour anyway.

What if you win, and Dice decides that they, like so many of /.'s other owners, can't make a dime off the site as it is?

Because as far as I can tell they already have made that decision, and the beta is the only thing keeping them in this game at all. What are you going to do when you get your wish, the Beta goes away -- and the rest of the site with it? Congratulate yourself on your victory, no doubt.

I want them to have an open development process. I want Slashcode to be on github, and for all this bile to be replaced with an adult conversation, an issue tracker, and a mailing list. Failing that I see no reason for profanity or vandalism. It is not a necessary part of anything, especially not civil disobedience. Hatred begets hatred, and the haters have not the bargaining power that they think they do. There is nothing to stop Dice from pulling the plug on the whole show, and if the site is destined to dry up and blow away in either case, I don't want my lasting memories of the place to include this uninhibited flood of vitriol.

No, it is loathed by a small, vocal, percentage of system administrators, who have very little in the way of technical arguments at their disposal. This vote may be considered evidence in that respect.

There is very little to recommend init scripts. I dismiss arguments that they are any easier for any average mortal to deal with than any other piece of code, and there is very little justification for wasting CPU time on a non-interactive process. Additionally, this will merely be a default -- those who want slow boots, or think cgroups are evil, can go ahead and install systemv-init and purge systemd. Or, since systemd, d-bus, pulseaudio, and wayland are evidently the future of Linux, the malcontents can install BSD -- it comes with a free chip for your other shoulder.

The idea of military specialists of whatever type being employed against the society they belong to, is treasonous and fucking retarded no matter what legal acrobatics are employed in their defense.

You may have some sort of mystic devotion to the law, but I believe laws are made by (generally corrupt) men for their own interests, and I am familiar enough with the world outside the borders and political influence of the United States to know there is an enormous difference between legality and rightousness. The U.S.A. may not be the kind of country where you are expected to bribe every public official however minor -- we generally reserve that for higher office. It takes a special kind of idiocy to use military forces against their homeland, though.

Government at its core is the body to which we have delegated our inherent right to violence -- a right being defined in this case as something which cannot be taken from you. We delegate this right to others, specialized in its use, with the express understanding that [a] as applied to civilian life, the exercise of violence by police will be applied fairly and equally as men can manage, and [b] that the unrestricted expression of this (as embodied by military force) be only employed against our enemies. War is hell, and we do not bring hell home.

Snowden is a patriot, and the NSA is treasonous -- whether or not the law can be made to serve whichever purpose. Beyond all other argument, potentially felonious violation of the law is so common with the continual proliferation of laws that lawfulness cannot be the only measure of either justice or rightousness. May all those who support the NSA have a fair trial.

You're assuming that none of these 'clones' would be any good. This is not a solid premise. First demonstrate that only Nintendo could have created these works.

I think Zynga is a good counterexample; I am sure they have some original content but they mostly seem to use concepts that originated elsewhere. There is no reason in a world with more limited copyrights that some other company could not take whichever IP and run with it, and create a product at least equal to the original. I would imagine that it would actually spur developers to create new content or gameplay, as opposed to the rent-seeking unending sequels that get published today.

You forget that Google has not written their own OS. They have customized the kernel and written their own display manager, among (to be fair) a fairly respectable number of other changes. However, they started with Linux, and

uname -s

will still return 'Linux'.

You have more or less the Filesystem Heirarchy Standard, a limited but unixy shell, and anyone who has cut their teeth on the command line should feel at home. It doesn't by default let you install packages from the command line, but that's to be expected: the biggest security threat to a system is the user, and they need to be able to support a specific subset of features, as opposed to every combination of packages and configurations.

Point being though, they got 98% of the system for free, and the changes they made have been mostly in a fairly common vein. They're hardly the first to create a Linux-based appliance. And of course they get to draw on all of the Chrome-browser efforts.

With regard to your general point, it must be remembered that Microsoft originated the idea of an operating system as being something that was sold directly to consumers. At the risk of being predictive, that is beginning to seem like a bizarre anomaly, and it is difficult to see where any other future business could possibly duplicate their success, even the future Microsoft.

That was actually Mussolini's favorite definition of fascism: the union of the corporation with the state.

This I have to see as the union of two bad ideas: the first being the indefinitely chartered corporation, the second being the idea of indefinite copyright. I stop short of saying that copyright itself was a mistake, but it didn't always exist, and if patronage was good enough for Michelangelo...

No, I mean decades, because I have actually read the research papers coming out of the various climate study organizations in the State of Alaska. I can single out studies by the University of Alaska Fairbanks as being particularly informative on the subject of ice sheet loss. Overall temperatures in the Arctic have risen at about twice the global average since the 1950s. Ice sheet loss was about 52 cubic kilometers per year until the 1990s, when it essentially doubled. As might be expected, glacial retreat is greatest for low-altitude glaciers, which happen to be the most accessible and visible. Or would be if they weren't retreating so fast; we have glacier viewpoints where you cannot even see the glacier any more. Other fun facts: the number of frost-free days in Fairbanks, AK have increased by 50% over the last century. Villages that have been protected for millennia by sea ice are having to be moved.

If you're going to make an argument, make it with facts. Unfortunately the facts are against you, so you may want to revise your beliefs.

The Earth is 70% covered with water, which is in continual phase transition depending on local temperature. The most important transition for these purposes between liquid and gaseous states. Given that there is almost always some liquid water which will under no great provocation become gaseous should the atmosphere be capable of absorbing it, we can for most intents and purposes say that the atmosphere is saturated with H20. There is precisely zero we can do about that. Looking down the list of gases which are present in non-trivial amounts in the atmosphere, and which also contribute to the greenhouse effect by absorbing long-wave radiation, CO2 is clearly the biggest concern. Discounting the seasonal variations, the largest natural contributions to the carbon cycle are volcanic. In past eras volcanism has been responsible for some rather extreme extinction events. At our current rates of CO2 emission, humanity has been putting even the largest-scale volcanic events to shame. An eruption the size of Mt Pinatubo would, as I recall, represent about a day and a half of human CO2 emissions. An eruption on the scale of the Yellowstone supervolcano could be had twice annually without equalling our impact. We are still a couple orders of magnitude away from the largest CO2 outgassings the world has ever seen -- but we're working on it. And you must keep in mind that even spectacular events like the Deccan Traps happened over millenia and gigaannums. We are almost certainly changing the composition of the Earth's atmosphere at a rate unprecedented in its existence.

Discrepencies between theories and observed results are common in all fields, and in most cases do not affect the validity of those theories. Certainly not to the point where one would question, e.g. the greenhouse effects of carbon dioxide, which may be trivially demonstrated with any transparent container and a thermometer. In point of fact, since it is such an obvious property, it should come as no surprise that the idea of CO2-induced warming is about 200 years old. We may also point out, since you mention it, that the variation in solar irradiance is on the order of .1% over its 11-year cycle. This is still worth accounting for in a mathematical model, but being a fairly stable cycle it of course has a minimal effect on the error factors. I don't wish to belabor the point, but variance has nothing to do with predictability: consider any harmonic oscillation.

We may touch on the necessity for mathematical models and their use: a simple and fairly useless model would be to consider the Earth as a perfect blackbody, which can only tell us that this ideal Earth would have a temperature of ~6 degrees C. A less bad model might consider the atmosphere as a column of layered gases, from which one could derive some useful indications of what effect they have in various proportions. Again, a higher partial pressure of carbon dioxide will result in greater absorbtion of outgoing long-wave radiation, i.e. a "greenhouse" effect. Since warmer air can contain more water, and since the supply of water may be considered to be inexhaustible, a naive calculation would show that increasing the partial pressure of CO2 would lead to arbitrarily large temperatures, a la Venus. Since we know from experience and paleontology that this does not occur on Earth, we may be extremely thankful for various countering forces in the biosphere which ensure that this is not a runaway effect -- so far.

The problem is, of course, that our atmospheric changes are drastic and unprecedented. We rely on of life in order to balance out our carbon equation, but we're also doing a wonderful job of deforestation and various other forms of damage to our environment. At this point we are merely hoping that enough of these various other species are able to survive the Great Anthropogenic Extinction Event in order to ensure our own survival.

You may not be an idiot. You are deeply ignorant; this is grade-school level science. You are also close-minded, apparently unwilling to seek out the answers to your questions. You also are reactionary, and unwilling to listen to learned experts on the subject. Or, equivalently, you are unable to distinguish between expertise and its opposite. At which point, pray tell, should we start respecting your ignorance? Beyond this, you seem to be focused on pedantry concerning the term "global warming". I make no remark on this save to say that it is a shame that your mind has so well adapted itself to the meanest comprehension.

I have made no predictions; I leave that to my betters. I give merely the briefest overview of the physical systems, and hope for all our sakes that they may be useful. I am sure that while I can probably answer any other objections that you might have, you should probably take more active steps in acquiring new knowledge, such as consulting the FAQ on realclimate.org. An undergraduate course in Atmospheric Science might also be recommended; you may wish to examine MIT's OpenCourseWare offerings in that respect, and there are also a number of free texts available online: I will single out Jacob's Introduction to Atmospheric Chemistry. Thank you for reading, and I apologize for any strain on any one's attention.