I was curious. For all the complaining I've heard from Republicans about 'evil liberals who want to take our guns', I'd never encountered anyone who actually wanted to do that. It's possible that I need to get out more.

I could have emailed him directly I suppose, and I did just now, but you and I seem to disagree on what is an appropriate interview question. Others seemed to have covered the technical questions. I did ask another more topical question, but I think Bruce answered it directly in the comment thread. I apologize for any inconvenience, but note that it seems to have spawned quite a bit of discussion. I suppose I would have hoped for less attention on the subject, but it's too late now. Given the negative reactions from yourself, other commenters, and the slightly less than entirely polite response from Bruce, I may think twice the next time.

I did ask another question about Open Source, which Bruce answered immediately in the comment thread. I discovered that he was against the private ownership of firearms via his personal site, and like I said, I thought that his position was mythical. I am sure that he also has opinions about those other matters, but he doesn't advertise them. I apologize for any inconvenience.

An alternative would be to use Tree Style Tabs, and placing the tab bar on the side of the screen. I find it answers quite well, and I didn't notice the tab UI change. I have a habit of opening a bunch of links from e.g. a wikipedia page, browsing each for a while, perhaps opening deeper links, and then wanting to close the whole tree. If you think that might match your browsing habits, give TST a try.

I use firefox on an atom netbook with 2GB of RAM, with 20-200 tabs open at any given time. I occasionally debug javascript as part of my work activities, so I have a ton of web development plugins installed, plus a tab tree plugin, plus SQLite Manager, and then of course NoScript, Adblock, etc. I'm using Crunchbang Linux, and Iceweasel 30 from Debian backports.

If you have the time, you may want to try some debugging, because this is not quite the most limited x86 machine sold in anything that we might call recent history, but damn close to it. Performance has never been an issue. Good luck.

I don't know about stupid and incompetent, but you're entirely wrong as to the fundamentals of the 2008 financial crisis.

It's nice to make this about individual responsibility, but that's just not what happened. You probably heard the terms "credit default swap" and "mortgage derivatives" but didn't understand them. Essentially what was happening was major financial companies found that they could package up a bunch of low-rated mortgage-backed securities, hide the information about the individual loans, and turn a bunch of shitty loans into an AAA-rated security, and then trade the risk to someone else. Moody's and S&P were getting their cut from rating these things, and did not even have the information to be able to rate them properly. Then we have the credit default swaps, which were a little-understood and unregulated market, but essentially a way for companies to trade debt as if it were an asset, specifically all of the risk they were exposed to as part of these MBS deals. The concept of trading debt as an asset is not new, but it really only works when you have a good idea of how risky the debt is. There was a booming market[1] in these credit default swaps right up until the first wave of foreclosures hit and the MBS market started crumbling, and then whoever was left holding the bag got screwed.

Banks generally don't do stupid things, even when the government wants them to. They sure as shit don't advertise things that are going to lose money. There were a lot of people with a vested interest in pinning this on the individual consumer and the government, but the seeds were sown with the repeal of Glass-Steagal. The federal loan program ticked along quietly for over a decade, but the mortgage market exploded due to the derivatives market. Taking a shitty subprime mortgage and packing it into an AAA-rated security was like printing money. There was no governmental obligation to offer NINJA loans, for example, and yet Wikipedia has a lovely advertisement offering free money to essentially anyone with a pulse. The loans peaked in 2006; 2008 marked the first round of foreclosures.

Wikipedia has a good but lengthy article on the subprime mortgage crisis, and "The Big Short" is a good read that covers the origins and fallout of the crisis. You can also read the Financial Crisis Inquiriy Commission report. In point of fact, reading anything about the subject would be an improvement in your understanding; your specific theory has been destroyed in any number of sources. It's a complicated subject, and to be honest the exact details of a lot of these things escape me, but you have seized upon a simple answer that suits your preexisting beliefs. Start from the evidence and work backwards instead -- why did Bear Stearns collapse? It wasn't because they were issuing mortgages. This will save you from looking like an ignorant Wall Street stooge in the future.

[1] "The volume of CDS outstanding increased 100-fold from 1998 to 2008, with estimates of the debt covered by CDS contracts, as of November 2008, ranging from US$33 to $47 trillion"

It's perhaps unlikely at this point that we will ever develop anything which we will recognize as "true" AI. We may have to first develop a theory of what intelligence actually is, but until then the Turing test will have to do. Siri, Watson, and even Cleverbot are equal to the A.I. of the science fiction of yesteryear, but are considered mere "parlour tricks" today. AI research must be a depressing study in that respect, similar to commercially viable fusion power -- no matter how much progress is made, the ultimate goal is never less distant.

This post brought to you by a machine learning algorithm.

Wait, do we suddenly not trust buses now? I wouldn't mind late-night services, but having the same route availability 24/7 would be a pointless waste of money. It should be obvious that far fewer people travel at night.

If I had a boss, and he suggested that I work overtime hours, and that entailed transportation issues, I would insist on reimbursement for travel expenses. Then I would schedule a daily taxi pickup, and have the number of a couple other alternative services handy just in case. I'm not going to address the rest of your fearmongering except to say that while you may have an argument against specific situations, you fail to make a general case against public transportation.

The reason that many people own cars is twofold, first that we design cities to be primarily accessible by cars (at least during the age of cheap oil), and secondly the automotive industry destroyed alternative transportation. Given that we're burning millions of years' worth of oil annually, I would say that the age of the personal automobile is rapidly passing. Whatever problems public transportation has, we will have to solve.

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.