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Comment The point isn't finding better sites (Score 2) 37

People have been talking off and on about how to bring science to poorer nations that necessarily deal with very small budgets. This is more about helping people in those poorer nations (giving smart kids in those nations something to strive for) than about making science better, although it does help with science advocacy among the global population.

Comment Orcs in this world are not "evil" (Score 1) 381

I'm going to assume that you are making assumptions based on other fantasy novels and games, but in the World of Warcraft, orcs are not inherently evil. Some of them are good, some of them are bad, just like any other mortal race on Azeroth. [TONGUEINCHEEK]Gnomes on the other hand, clearly are evil in the World of Warcraft universe.[/TONGUEINCHEEK]

Comment You're engaging in psychological projection (Score 1) 1223

Just because you like and dislike people based solely on their party designation, it does not follow that everyone else must be doing the same thing. Believe it or not, there are perfectly legitimate reasons to dislike Romney, hard though that may be for you to fathom.

If I may return to the topic of the original post, this doesn't exactly mean very much. Torvalds seems to launch expletive-laden diatribes in every direction. Sometimes his tirades are right on the money and sometimes they miss the mark by a very wide margin. The simple fact that Torvalds directed a bunch of expletives at Romney doesn't tell you a thing about Romney himself.

Comment Sticking your head in the sand doesn't help (Score 2) 160

90% of scientists from the relevant field as well as 90% of all scientists agree with anthropogenic climate change. In the world of science, this is what we call a "scientific consensus" and it's a pretty overwhelming one at that. If man is indeed affecting the climate, then at the very least we can reduce the things we are doing that affect it.

I can never get over just how fervent the climate change denialist religion is. On one side of the argument, we have 90% of all scientists, representing every conceivable nationality, set of political views, economic status, and funding source. On the other side of the argument, we have a small group of "scientists" from a single political ideology from a narrow range of customers all of whom draw their paychecks from oil companies, coal companies, and/or right wing think tanks. The most prominent, most published, most cited member of this group is someone either so incompetent he literally doesn't know degrees from radians, or is a staggeringly deceitful fraudster.

http://crookedtimber.org/2004/08/25/mckitrick-mucks-it-up/

Based on work of this quality, millions of conservolibertarians have concluded that 90% of the scientists in the world are participating in a vast and incredibly complex conspiracy to... what? Make American rightists feel bad? Conservolibertarians never seem to be very clear on the goals of this massive and complex international supposed-conspiracy.

Ah well. Once someone adopts a religious view, they will cling to it no matter what evidence is presented to them.

Comment Hyperbole? Maybe. (Score 1) 301

But the reason this has traction is that Microsoft has a long history of doing sleazy things to undermine those it considers competition. I do think Microsoft has improved in this regard and finally understands how it hurts their public perception when they do underhanded things to competitors, but the public still remembers how Microsoft used to be, and you can't really blame people for jumping to these particular conclusions. If Microsoft hasn't done so many things like this in the past, then stories like this wouldn't gain traction without firmer evidence to back it up.

Comment Stop. Stop. Stop. (Score 1) 301

Look, I'm a liberal, and I found this to be funny. He was pretending to be from Microsoft and was pretending to be a FOX News zombie, and in that character he listed off a bunch of phrases that any conservolibertarian might want to block for fear that any site using such a phrase might also contain information contrary to the usual right wing propaganda. I do not believe the author's intent was to offer any actual commentary on any of the phrases nor was there any intent in trivializing any of the issues associated with those phrases. It was simply a list of phrases likely to make a right wingnut fearful and/or angry.

The target of this humor was Microsoft and to a lesser extent conservolibertarians. I do not think any slight to the severity of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was intended.

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