So traditionally Jews used their father's name as a surname e.g. 'ben Moshe'. In the late 18th Century various governments, including the Austrian Empire, tried to integrate Jews more fully, both by granting them rights as citizens, and by forcing them to adopt some of the local customs, such as having a hereditary surname. Napoleon did the same thing. In Czarist Russia, the Jews were allowed to choose surnames. In most of the German states, well.

Zuckerberg ('sugar mountain') got off lucky. We also had Mandelbrot ('almond bread'), and various of the type pleasant word + natural feature, e.g. Goldbach ('gold brook') or Rosenblum. Those people who were unlucky, well...

Long story short, the type of compound surname he has is very strongly associated with Germanic Jewish ancestry. And yes, as far as that goes, he's Jewish. The linked article goes into more detail, and is pretty interesting, if you have a spare minute.

Well, yes, I suppose venality is an acceptable grounds for almost anything.

No, you cannot obtain a divorce in the normal sense as a Roman Catholic. The closest you can get is an annulment.

A decree of nullity does not dissolve a marriage. It declares that a specific union, thought to be a marriage by all appearances, did not include, from the beginning, the proper intentions and/or capacities for a valid marriage according to Church teaching and thus was not fully valid.

There's a pretty short list of what is considered acceptable grounds for annulment. See also Matthew 5:31-2 and Matthew 19. My family used to joke that they believed in murder but not divorce, as a way to keep the relevant spouse on their toes. You should try again with a different analogy.

Personally, I prefer living in a universe where causes precede effects. We've verified relativity often enough to be pretty sure of its accuracy, and while it doesn't explicitly rule out FTL, it does tie it to causality. So we have three options: [a] relativity is (very) wrong. [b] FTL is possible, or [c] causality is preserved.

Relativity has been tested on small scales and large. We've built bombs and reactors that take advantage of the mass-energy equivalence, and our GPS systems need to account for a couple of relativistic effects. Some hopelessly muddled individual with an axe to grind against intelligentsia suggests that Dark Matter is an invention to patch a hole in relativity, but while patching relativity would be a crowning achievement for any physicist, our observations suggest that whatever the unknown factor is, it's not likely to be a problem with Einstein. Even if it was, it would be a correction for intergalactic distance scales, and not really relevant to our struggles to get through local 4-space.

Out of the two remaining options, the last thing I need is some time traveler mucking up history; my brain isn't equipped to deal with nonlinear time. It's okay for you to make another choice, just be very careful about what you're choosing, just in case you get it.

They're typically called Inuit, not Eskimo, unless you want to lump a bunch of other tribes into the mix. Eskimo is apparently a perjorative in Greenland, and is generally a term used by the clueless.

Beyond that, the Alaska Native peoples got something less of a raw deal than the rest of the indigenous populations. No one took their land, in most cases they reside where they have for milennia. Also, in the 70s when they put the pipeline in, they formed all Alaskan tribes into regional Native Corporations, so each Native is a shareholder and receives dividends. The corporations get preferential bidding on contracts, so mostly they don't do too badly, and there's a steady supply of free money for each shareholder, plus compensation from the State, a lot of free education and medical services, and other assorted benefits. They also were introduced to alcohol, firearms, and snowmachines, for what that's worth.

The guy you responded to is right, however: there are very few natives up there, less than 15,000, and they live a fair distance from the oil fields -- the nearest settlement, Barrow, is a 40 minute flight, according to Google.

And not to detract from the rest of your ranting, but this is actually a non-issue. I'm always down for a good anti-'merica rant, I'm something of an ex-pat, if I can really even be said to be from there, but let's find a different pretext, shall we?

First, there is no such thing as eagerness to tap the Arctic, so I have no idea why this article exists; it's a big troll. The TAPS pipeline has had declining volumes for decades. There's been talk (for years) of a gas pipeline but it's pretty much not going to happen, for a number of reasons that no one really gives a shit about.

Second, I'm from Valdez, Alaska. I was there for the spill, and for about twenty years afterwards. The long-term environmental impact is practically nil. Fish stocks recovered quickly, same with sea otter and sea lion populations, shorebirds, etc. The spill happened about twenty miles from my hometown. Yes, in a few beaches you can dig down and find a thin sheen of oil in the shale, but it doesn't seem to affect the critters much. Massive oil spills are not necessarily all that big of a deal.

Thirdly, the oil companies have small spills fairly often, and while the existing methods of cleanup may not scale, it's less of an issue all the time, and not necessarily the end of the world if it does happen. Also, there's not actually all that much opportunity for a large spill: we don't have gushers up there, or supertankers, and the pipelines can be shut down pretty quickly. They're monitored to some degree, usually with 'smart pigs' which travel inside the pipeline cleaning wax deposits and checking for damage. There was an incident a few years back where some drunken yahoo shot a hole in the pipeline, but it did not result in a large spill.

My sister works on the North Slope, in the oilfields. It's actually a really sensitive area environmentally, and the oil companies have to report even tiny spills. Also, it's really hard to build on permafrost without it melting and subsiding into a huge bog. You can't even drive cars on it without tearing it up, they use smaller golfcart type things most of the time. The wells and pads are as small as they can be. I'm not going to eulogize the oil companies for having a good environmental record up there, but they have been limited by the terrain, perhaps more effectively than regulations might have done.

This panel has its head up its collective ass, though, and this story is just trolling. It's not inevitable that there will be a big spill, and it's not necessarily a problem if it happens, and it's not something that we don't know how to deal with. There are a lot of current methods for cleanup that probably wouldn't work so well there, and I'm sure it's worth someone's time to figure out what the best way to clean up big oil spills in Arctic conditions, but "inevitable big Arctic oil spill" is just sensationalism. In other words, it's horseshit, and you've all been had.

You must be confused about what I wrote. Why would I explain how absolute truth is not scientific, and then claim something as absolute truth. "Well supported by empirical evidence" is as close to truth as science gets.

I'm getting the idea you're using "verify" in the sense of "prove." To dispense with this idea, I present this article for your perusal (it was the first google result for 'scientific verification').
I'll excerpt some relevant bits for you:

Thanks for playing, have a nice day.

No, I am afraid that you are in grievous error.

You do not, clearly, but that is actually how science works. We have two categories of scientific theory, the falsified and the yet-to-be falsified. Theories (mark you, not hypotheses) which have yet to be falsified are considered true.

Not in the context of science. There is no such thing as "proof" or "certainty" in this context, either. If you want to continue playing semantic games you'll have to find another player: these are well-defined terms.

Most measurements are in some sense indirect. They can still be strong evidence for a theory; even null results (notably, Michaelson-Morley) can be valid and useful observations. I'm sorry if you wish, like Thomas, to personally probe the mysteries of the universe, but we are not endowed with a universal perspective nor even vision beyond a tiny spectrum. You cannot directly observe subatomic particles; they exist regardless. However, to most definitions of the term, the CMBR is a direct measurement: it is residual radiation from the Big Bang. We don't have to be there to see it; we have a snapshot. We have other evidence, but that alone should be sufficient grounds for the theory. There are no competing theories for this observation -- one might say that it is "settled science". In the same way with AGW, almost everything we know about physics would have to be (wildly) wrong for it not to be true.

You don't seem scientifically literate, and I include the adverb as a courtesy. You may feel free to redefine "evidence", but it won't change anyone else's definition, and it definitely doesn't discredit the observations. It's a pretty bizarre departure from reason; I'd ask what belief you're sheltering from reality, but I think we'll all be the better for not knowing.

I quite like how the Chrome OS works, although I'm probably going to do a factory reset, pull the drive, replace it with a larger one, and install a real Linux -- running Debian via crouton doesn't seem to be stable.

I know you have a not-entirely-retarded axe to grind about cloud services, but let's think for a minute about how this must have been implemented. This device is not a thin client, and it does not boot off the network nor Internet. In point of fact it does have local storage, albeit not much, and in no sense is it "all online". The apps are written with HTML/CSS/JS, but you can certainly run them offline, and create and save documents as you like. Documents you create are associated with your Google account, and they are generally mirrored to Google Drive. This allows one to reset the system more or less at will.

There are a lot of dumb people in the world, and before you start labelling others as such you might want to check your assumptions. Unless you just like tilting at strawmen, of course.

In Science, there is no distinction between verification and supporting empirical evidence. The question of whether or not something is scientifically truth is entirely empirical. Scientific theory is the best description of these observations that we have at any given point. It is probable that every scientific theory yet invented will be superseded at some point by a better explanation.

You should know all this. Either your nick is well-earned or you're just playing games with semantics.

To address the specifics of your ignorance, the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is unambigous evidence for the Big Bang. There is approximately zero chance of the Big Bang cosmology being disproved at this point; steady-state cosmology is as dead as geocentrism. The only less credible theory would be...you're not a Young-Earth Creationist, are you?

I ran across an article which is hilarious in hindsight, relating some of the drama about the use of the closed-source tool BitKeeper for managing the Linux kernel. You told Linus to "cool it", and whether or not that worked, the result was the git source control management tool. This in turn has led to GitHub, and an increase in open-source projects, although it's hard to measure such things at the best of times. Do you feel like you were on the right side of that debate? Do you think git deserves the hype it gets, or do you think that mercurial might have done just as well in its place? Which source control tool do you use?

You are on record as being rather firmly against private ownership of firearms. Frankly, I thought this extremity of anti-gun zealotry was a Republican myth, a straw man used to rile the rabble. I understand that people in less civilized territories will on rare occasion use guns for murder and atrocity, I am not aware of this impulse being a general hazard of gun ownership.

I'm from Alaska. All the people that I know who have guns have only ever used them for hunting. I'm less sympathetic to those who can acquire an alternate hobby besides shooting, but there are yet many places where hunting is a means of subsistence. I've known many people to bow-hunt, but I suspect if your dinner depended on your marksmanship you might prefer the more effective instrument. Does your plan involve screwing hunters as well as the millions of other lawful citizens?

Originally we are a revolutionary state, and I believe the People yet preserve the right to revolution. Furthermore, Mao was right about the origins of political power: violence is the defining characteristic of government. Do you believe that the 'tree of liberty' is no longer hematophagic? Else, by what means are we intended to obtain and keep self-governance?

Let's not equate you being "discriminated against" by so-far-mostly-polite comments on a message board, to people being discriminated against by denying them spousal rights. It's also incorrect to suggest that marriage is somehow a religious institution -- it most certainly preceded all current religions. In point of fact it is primarily a legal construct, which is why we discuss it in terms of civil rights and not e.g. theology.

No one really cares about Eich, it's just an excuse for opination. Your opinion appears to be incorrect and impolite. Personally, I don't see what difference it might make to you whether I should choose to be married to a man or a woman, but you needn't attend the ceremony. I will console myself with the knowedge that the tide of opinion is flowing against you. This discussion is obsolete: each day brings the death of old reactionaries and the birth of scores who will not be taught to hate.

P. S. Reason being preferable to ad hominem invective, you might disengage your spleen from your keyboard.

I think that the United States has a vested political interest in controlling the sale of oil. Which is not to suggest that you are wrong per se, but I think that the US oil policies are better understood in the context of hegemony than fair trade. However, the oil industry has been putting all of their propaganda efforts towards lifting this ban; I mark a half-dozen articles in Forbes alone within the last two years. As long as they can keep away from any concerns about national security, they might get their wish.

The slides are here. While I respect the idea that video is an inefficient means to convey information but, since this is an issue that you seem to care about, you may want to take the time to educate yourself. I believe it is possible to speed up playback of youtube videos. This article conveys some similar points, but not much depth. Here is an architectural overview.

Why don't you go over some of this information, and we can take this conversation over again from the top. You should find most of your concerns answered. I'm not particularly interested in spoon-feeding it to you, however -- please accept my apologies on that score.