"I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education. This is the true corrective of abuses of constitutional power."

--Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Charles Jarvis, 1820

This could only be modded funny by people who aren't scientists. I've lived my entire life in a community of research PhDs (entire immediate family and friends) and very few of them aren't religious. Every religion is represented (Christianity, Judaism, Islam, etc.)

Most do not view holy books as literal truth like religious fundamentalists, but rather guidelines and proverbs on the meaning behind life and how to live it well. Nor do they believe in creationism and other pseudoscience. But there are a large number of chemists, biologists, virologists, toxicologists, medical doctors, etc. that go to church, temple, mosque, etc.

207, or 190 without sovereignty disputes. So Microsoft expanding to 180 is only missing between 10-27 countries in the entire world.

Dear Mr. Lucas,

Please tell this to whomever wrote and directed episodes 1, 2, 3. A lack of identifiable characters the audience can connect with was one of the biggest problems. Please refer that guy to Plinkett's reviews and this guy, who point this out, quite clearly.

In fact, you might consider firing that "director/writer" guy you've got, and finding talents like you did when you hired Lawrence Kasdan, Leigh Brackett and Irvin Kershner to write and direct Empire Strikes Back. Their story still holds up many years after the special effects have become dated. Lawrence Kasdan is still alive. Maybe he knows some good people. Maybe they could do a re-imagining of 1, 2, 3 that would actually be watchable.

Ground surface temperature data (GISS, HadCRUT3, and most of NOAA's data) is extremely problematic as the landscape around them has changed considerably in the 100+ years of instrument measurement (ie: cities/towns have been built around or close to most of them). The most reliable are the ones in rural locations that haven't changed much in 100 years, but those are few and far between.

100 years is extremely short-term in the perspective of Earth's varying temperatures. However if you want reliable short-term data, make sure you're looking at satellite data (UAH, RSS) rather than ground. It has its problems too, but it's much more accurate as it takes into account wider areas and other spheres of the atmosphere. We have 30+ years of data now.

The famous hockey-stick you mention used tree rings as it's proxy. Tree rings are one of the most problematic proxies, as millions of other factors besides temperature could contribute to their sizes. It's a good place to start if you have nothing else to go on, but... there is much better data out there.

For long-term data, ice cores are the most accurate proxies we have (such as Vostok), as their layers haven't moved in centuries.

It's the 21st century here in Japan. Any shoji screens still in houses are usually decorative or a just to give a little visual privacy.
We use real walls.

Following the Fukushima quake, all phone networks were down to allow for emergency traffic only (I live in Tokyo). Internet was the only way to get a message out for a while. I sent a quick email to family who hadn't woken up in the states yet, because I was sure it would be on the news networks when they woke up.

However, the following few days, people I barely knew or hadn't spoken to in ages, started coming out the woodwork, asking if I was okay. This feature is not a bad idea. It sure beats my mother plastering messages all over my wall, trying to tell people I'm okay.

Try DuckDuckGo

This.
The reason proprietary copyright cases get money is because they claim lost sales (damages).
It's hard to claim lost money when you're giving GPL'd code away.

I live in Tokyo. No one is being evacuated. No one has ever been evacuated from here as far as I know, even during the crisis. The blog post you linked, as well as the Al Jazeera broadcast within it, talks about a citizens' group who is trying to tell the government that we need to evacuate.

During the crisis, many other countries "suggested" that their nationals fly back. And some countries had their embassies fly their people out, free of charge. If that's the "evacuation of Tokyo" you're talking about, it's a bit disingenuous.

Actually, anyone can measure the background radiation in their area with fairly cheap devices. And many independent people post their findings on aggregated maps. I watched a number of these fairly carefully for a while after the crisis. To put it into perspective, Rome has much higher background radiation than Tokyo, because the granite buildings give off a slight amount.

The news broadcast talked about average people testing the dirt. It's fairly easy. I'd imagine the actual results are similar to the background radiation, but there are no specifics in your linked article about where and how they got their numbers. The soil near the plant is bad, no doubt. But I'd like you to cite a more reliable source for the Tokyo numbers.

There's radiation everywhere in the world. It's the amount and type you have to look at. The "small amount" that can cause illness or cancer that they mention on the Al Jazeera piece is actually one particle. You are being bombarded with multiple particles of radiation every second that you're out on a sunny day or flying in an airplane. Yet one particle, at any time, may hit a part of DNA and screw up the cell's ability to inhibit cancer.

The Al Jazeera segment also shows a borderline abusive mother who won't allow her child to go outside because of her fear. Yet she claims she can't move away from Tokyo (the most expensive place to live in Japan) for financial reasons. And the size of the rooms shown in the news segment suggest a fairly expensive house/apartment in Tokyo. She's probably using the idea of losing her or her husbands job as the excuse. It's cognitive dissonance. If she wanted to, she could easily find a low paying job anywhere outside of Tokyo, live in a slightly smaller place, and live fairly well (because the cost of living would be so much less).

The mother looks like a borderline case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Children like her child are the true casualties, but not in the way your blog posting suggests.

Medical treatment varies greatly from disease to disease, from country to country.
If you're looking for a general overview of the quality of care in a country, look at the survival rates of the widespread ones within a group.

For example, if judging cancer survival, you might look at prostate, breast, colon, and rectal.
"The highest survival rates were found in the U.S. for breast and prostate cancer, in Japan for colon and rectal cancers in men, and in France for colon and rectal cancers in women, Coleman's team reports."

Currently alpha.
It hasn't been released yet.
Can we call it born?

Another headline
might be more appropriate.
Perhaps we can say:

"The Haiku OS,
has been in prenatal care,
40 trimesters."

Which is an argument I've heard against GNU/Linux or F/OSS in general by people who are ignorant of it. It all depends on the situation.

Multiples of 12 are almost always more convenient mathematically then multiples of of 10, as they're already divisible 4 ways (2, 3, 4, 6) from 3 prime factors (2 x 2 x 3) rather than 2 ways (2, 5) from 2 prime factors (2 x 5).

But it's doubtful humans would switch unless we get 12 fingers.

This is wrong as far as I know. Libreoffice is the latest OpenOffice with Go-OO fixes and some plug-ins merged in. Go-OO was made during a time when developers were getting frustrated that OO development was stagnating and they weren't being allowed to include improvements and fixes. So they made them available elsewhere, at go-oo.org

LO will continue to fork, but for now, it's OO with bug fixes and improvements. They even used the same version number, 3.3, because "The Document Foundation and most of the software's developers saw LibreOffice as being a direct continuation of OpenOffice.org"

So I'm curious what you mean when you say OO does something LO doesn't, as I can't think of anything. LO is currently the same product (plus a few fixes/addons).