Keep in mind that hundreds of millions of years of extinctions and adaptive radiations have taken place between then and now. It's not only a question of whether insects can exist at the larger sizes they once grew to, but also whether they'd be competitive enough to take back their former ecological niches from the current incumbents. To use a tech analogy, it's like asking whether a flip phone can dominate the premium phone market in 2014, because they once dominated it in 2005.

Judging from the range and distribution of insects alive in the present, it seems that for most insects, small size and rapid reproduction are the way to go for them. Their body plan, with it's less efficient circulatory system, and less complex brains, seem to put them at a disadvantage if they began to grow larger. Remember that there are a vast array of mammals and birds that specialize specifically in preying on insects.

You mention a phone booth in a historical site, so I'm thinking maybe you didn't recognize what the more ahem, "modern" phone booths looked like? They're pretty inconspicuous unless you're walking by them.

Really? Here on slashdot, the bastion of conservative tech news, you'll be downvoted? Psshh.

You've fallen victim to an pretty obvious problem, which is greedy reductionism. If you actually studied biology, one of the least "STEM-y" of the physical sciences, you would realize that objects can be analysed on multiple levels, and a lower level analysis is not inherently more useful or germane than a higher level analysis (although in the physical sciences, it often is, this is not necessarily the case all the time, especially when dealing with human behaviour, which is why sociology and psychology are both equally valid fields).

Lots and lots of things are less ignorant than epyT-R.

In many countries around the world, that would probably be easily doable. But it probably has a higher level of difficulty in China and Russia. For the short term, Snowden is probably very safe in China. They're probably going to take... steps... to ensure this PR gold mine remains at their doorstep for now while they figure out how best to use him.

Think about it, the USA loves castigating China about their human rights record. Snowden "disappearing" would mean the shoe would be on the other foot when the HoS of the two countries meet.

He (Snowden) worked in Intelligence, and probably knows a good deal more about the diplomatic relationship between China and the USA than most of use commenting here. There's always a chance he might be wrong, but there's no chance he didn't choose Hong Kong for perfectly rational and logical (albeit to him) reasons.

OS X has never been the king of performance or speed. Responsiveness and a clean, elegant UI? Yes. Winning benchmarks left and right? No. Companies making apps for Macs generally don't make them because OS X is the most efficient or performant OS on the market, and this news isn't going to make them switch to Linux. Also, because for most people the main reason for buying an expensive Mac is OS X, they aren't likely to switch to Linux because the OpenGL driver works slightly faster.

Yes, keep thinking it's because people have thin skin, and not that they're being insulted based on their group all their lives, while you are not.

Listen up Captain Clueless, when someone uses a word for a woman's genitalia to insult a certain woman, they're definitely not doing it because they think woman as a group are wonderful people. It's like when straight people say "I don't care if you're gay, just don't be a faggot!", or when white people say "I don't care that you're black, just don't be a nigger.". Whatever their justifications, it's obvious that this person is not your friend, they imagine themselves above you, able to judge you as a representative of your group, and will move against you or hurt you if they think they can get away with it. A woman/gay person/black person that agrees with this line of thought ("don't be a "), has internalized a lot of self-hatred.

Yes I do. Like I said, using gendered insults says a lot more about the person using them than the person being insulted.

Here's what your logic is missing shitface: you're using a word for female genitalia as an insult. When you do this, you're basically saying that being female, or possessing a vagina, is an insulting state of existence. Gendered slurs, they don't say good things about the people that use them.

Slashdot has become, in the last few years, more of a conservative techie site than just a plain techie site. It's not completely conservative, but especially when issues of gender, race and prejudice come out, you'll notice the skew.

Shhhhh! Evidence is not what these MRA types have a wealth of.

Definitely j.

My guess is a lot of slashdotters, especially the MRA crowd, don't have much nice things to say about women in general. Their silence is actually a measure of respect, instead of discrimination (in their minds at least).

Not only this, but being arthropods with considerably more primitive nervous systems than mammals, it's yet to be determined if they (insects) even feel pain the same way we do. The reason why mammals such as bears and dolphins seem "cuddly" is because our close evolutionary heritage show characteristics in common between species that elicit a protective and nurturing instinct even between species. Naturalists have filled pages and pages full of anecdotes of mammalian predators who have spared and even gone on to raise young mammals of their prey species; the nurturing instinct is strong and not very discriminating.