Since broadcasting is pretty much a Federal power in Canada, I'm not sure, whatever the other flaws in Ontario's plans, whether they even have the constitutional right to do it.

In modern operating systems, the differences are in optimizations. A desktop might want to have more ticks dedicated towards foreground GUI apps (though I'm not even sure that matters is the age of multicore processors with gigs of RAM), whereas a server might want to dedicate more resources to I/O. But in most cases, at least with any software and Linux distro I've seen in the last decade, much of that can be accomplished by altering kernel and daemon parameters.

Windows does the same thing. The base kernel for Windows 8 and Server 2012 is the same; and it's licensing-triggered settings that determine specific behaviors. In an age of cheap storage costs, cheap RAM and fast processors, why in the hell would you want to ship multiple kernels/ What possible advantage would it gain, when you can just simply determine, either as an administrator, or based on licensing, the fine tuning of kernel parameters?

So many of the kernel's functions and optimizations can be altered now, there strikes me as no reason to ship entirely different kernels. Who does that any more? Even Windows kernels are largely the same, with optimizations triggered either by the registry or by the edition.

And your understanding is based exactly on what?

Christ, your position is little better than nilihism. Accepting, for instance, that several languages spoken in Eurasia are descended from a proto-Indo European language is not an article of faith, even if I don't have the linguistics skills to evaluate every single language that sits within that grouping.

You have any citations that aren't from lunatics?

What's needed is moving away from energy produced by fossil fuels. I'm asking all you who seem to reject AGW because the solutions, in your view, are "authoritarian", how you will deal with it? So, what tools would you bring to bear?

Because climatologists have never thought of looking at climate history...

The ignorance and arrogance in your poster is awe-inspiring. It's as if you have no fucking idea what climatologists base their theories on, and yet have decided they are wrong.

There wasn't a learned man in Europe who believed the Earth was flat. It may have persisted much longer in China, but in Europe and among Arab geographers, there was no one who seriously believed in the flat Earth. The Greeks had figured that out nearly 2000 years before Columbus ever accidentally ran into the Americas on his way to China.

Picking the "20 years of no warming" is simply cherry picking, and ignoring a time period 15 times longer that does show warming.

Ah yes, when your ideology runs up against science, invent cabals of evil scientists trying to fuck you over.

How are you any different than a Creationist?

And yet no one believes in phlogiston anymore. Science did what it was supposed to do.

I can think of plenty of examples of the old guard trying to hang on to discredited ideas. The Out of Africa theory of human origins, when it first came out, flew in the face of a general view among European experts that modern humanity had evolved in Eurasia. The old guard, to some extent, were more informed by racial biases (the very 16th-19th century idea that sub-Saharan Africans were somehow lower on the evolutionary chain), and indeed there were a few angry bastards, notably on the Continent, that clung to the idea of a Eurasian origin of H. sapiens even into the 1980s, when finally enough molecular data had been gained both from extant human populations and from the remains of ancient humans (including Neanderthals) that it became irrefutable that modern H. sapiens had a very recent origin (sometime between 200,000 and 150,000 years ago) in Africa.

And again, on the same general topic, for a long time the idea that modern humans and Neanderthals had interbred was viewed as completely invalid. mtDNA studies were flung in the faces of researchers who insisted that modern humans and Neanderthals had interbred in Eurasia. Those that insisted that the interbreeding had happened were tut-tutted, in some cases viewed almost as hippies. Indeed, even into the 1990s, the "consensus" view was that any interbreeding was so rare as to have had no impact on the genetic makeup of modern human populations.

Well, lo and behold, by the 21st century, better techniques for DNA extraction and genome mapping revealed that virtually all human populations outside of sub-Saharan Africa did have nuclear genes that came from Neanderthals.

So it strikes me that this, and numerous other examples, consensus that does not fit the evidence is always ultimately discarded. But that some consensus views are wrong does not mean all consensus views are wrong.

But you can't just simply ignore a whole body of work and go your own way. Despite the romantic notion that science is a series of bold new discoveries toppling old paradigms is largely bullshit. Yes, it may have happened on occasion, but for the most part, science is the steady building of knowledge, not the wholesale throwing out of old ideas. Take a truly revolutionary theory like General Relativity. Even Einstein was building on a body of knowledge developed by people like Maxwell and Lorentz, and he would have been the first to admit the debts he owed to his predecessors. In much the same way, quantum mechanics owes a great debt to Einstein, via his work on the photoelectric effect.

Providing it is understood, and I have to talk to a scientist who didn't believe this, that consensus is provisional, how is consensus bad?

First of all, I think you're just playing a hyperbolic game here. I don't know of any researcher who says "we need more authoritarianism".

But let's play a little game. Let's just say AGW is real, and there is time to reduce emissions sufficiently that some of the worst effects could be eliminated, or at least reduced. How would you go about reducing emissions?

I'll be very clear here, because I think this needs constant restating. Nature doesn't care about your ideology. The laws of physics cannot be altered because your philosophical, ideological and political beliefs run counter to them. If CO2, methane and other greenhouse gas emissions are increasing temperatures and altering the climate in a very short (geological) period of time, then it's happening, regardless of what your political slant would suggest.

The whole idea that science should be evaluated on anyone's ideology is madness.

An appeal to authority is not necessarily fallacious (that would be fallacious reasoning itself). If the authorities in question are generally recognized as actual authorities, then surely it does not follow that accepting, even provisionally, what they say is fallacious.

Look at it this way. The number of people that can actually work in physics, particularly in areas like QM and General Relativity, is by and large very small. Most people simply do not have the training in mathematics and theory to be able to understand anything but a laymans' approximations of the science.

So when you have an expert in the field who makes a statement about, say, the Inflationary Epoch of Big Bang cosmology, and that statement is in general accord with what other experts in the field say, then I'd say you're probably getting a statement that is a reflection of the science as it is at the time. It is not 100% reliable, but the whole nature of science as a discipline has the notion that 100% reliability is not achievable, so there is still plenty of room for new ideas.