I frankly doubt that not using sonic cannons to look for new sources of oil would be an extinction level event. The GP is exaggerating, but so are you.

This. As is often the case with /., it's an all or nothing deal. There's no way in hell that anything the publishers or record labels provide the authors and artists could actually be worthwhile. What antiquated notion! Anybody can produce a bestseller in their bedroom or record the best label of the year in their garage.

Editors are very important. They're the sanity check of the author. They're a reliable and honest reader. They help form the books by taking the often jumbled and incoherent source material that was jotted down in hundreds of sittings, sometimes in the wrong order, and shaping that into the final product. While some authors can do without them, few books would be just as good (let alone better) without an editor's involvement. This is also why good publishers can be distinguished from bad publishers on multiple levels, not just on who they sign up.

The same thing can be said about record labels, but I'm not going to go into detail. The point is: YES the publishers, record labels and all that have been exploiting content creators and taking a much too large part of the pie. That does not however mean that they are of no use whatsoever.

If progress means the end of books (be they virtual or physical) and the decay of culture around the globe, I don't want your progress.

I'm guessing because A) Japanese manufacturers have been focusing on fuel cells and B) electricity in Japan is quite expensive, reducing incentive to use it. Japan's power grid is also fairly strange and I'm not sure it'd be able to bear heavy electric car usage.

And that's also the case for the US. Wait, you think Massachusetts and Texas have the same values? I could pull any two states and the discrepancies would be fairly large. The US is just as much of a patchwork of political and cultural lineage as Europe is, the major difference being that they all speak (mostly) the same language.

So it's basically like real life?

Oh, so you've been browsing the internet.

I'm not a fan of FiiO, but it's definitely better than what you could get from onboard audio.

If you're an audiophile, you're probably using USB audio or S/PDIF, which don't need a discrete sound card, paired with an external DAC worth many times the price of a Creative soundcard and without the extraneous bells and whistles. If you're a gamer, you're on a headset, often again USB. If you're an average user, your speakers are too crappy to notice the difference.

As far as I can tell, the only use case that truly benefits from a discrete card is 5.1+ surround systems which support the latest Dolby/DTS techs, as those often aren't supported by onboard sound.

That's a load of horseshit that only a quick perusal would let you figure out. There was no "scientific consensus" that the Earth was flat; back in Ancient Greece it was already well known that the Earth was a globe and its radius was estimated with remarkable accuracy. That's before the term "science" was even coined, those were natural philosophers. The idea that the Sun orbited the Earth was much more religious than it was scientific; people went to great lengths to make up incredibly complex systems so that they could match their religious sensibilities that the Earth was the center of the universe. Science as it is now known has only really existed since the dawn of the Scientific Method, which appeared much later than either of those discoveries.

As for the plum pudding model, it was, key word, a model. Of course people knew it wasn't actually anywhere near a plum pudding! It was just the best representation they could give at the time and which fit the data they had at the time. The important element to note is that all subsequent models were more and more precise, but none invalidated previous data and conclusions. They refined the model, they allowed us to make more predictions and to be more accurate, but they didn't outright rebuke previous results.

Nobody said never to show Scheme, but there's a difference between doing a "Computer Languages" course with Scheme or even a "Functional Languages" course and putting Scheme as the sole language for the introductory course. The latter is completely insane, unless you like a 90+% drop-out ratio.

Humans however don't particularly care if there are three or four spaces before a line. Humans do not care at all whether spaces and tabs are intermingled.

At the rate of growth of Foxconn, I think Foxconn being is a synonym for Chinese.

Two of those aren't scientific doctrines, and there isn't an overwhelming agreement from their respective communities on which side is the correct one. Skepticism on global warming science is just some more bullshit that Republicans feed you, frankly. Armchair scientists are a plague, not healthy.

I'm sorry but that is extremely wrong. Science isn't math: it doesn't prove. The best you can do as a scientist is gather data and construct a model which fits this data. You then attempt to predict things and confirm those predictions with more data. The longer the model holds up, the more likely it is to be "right", but it's always just a model and it always could be shown wrong tomorrow.

When a claim such as "97 percent of climate scientists believe human activities are causing global warming." is given, what it means is that 97% of climate scientists currently accept the model that humans are causing global warming. It means that, according to the data they have available and the models they have analyzed and/or constructed, the notion that humans drive global warming is prevalent in just about every model that accurately fits the data.

The only reason this whole thing is political (or a debate in the first place) is because there are people who stand to lose significantly from environmentally friendly measures and a move away from hydrocarbons.