Thanks for the information. Volcanoes are amazing things. I remember when Mt. St. Helens erupted. It caused enormous damage and yet not too many things are extinct because of it. To have so many extinctions linked to one timespan seems to indicate something much more than just a series of volcanoes. Of course any life suffering from a cataclysmic event would not be helped by a long series of eruptions.

That should be km^3 of course, silly.

The summary states that over 750,000 years the volcanoes emitted 1.1 E 6 km^2. Over that timespan it doesn't seem like much, a bit more than 1 km^2 a year. This does not seem that significant.

For instance, the Bardarbung volcano in Iceland, which erupted this year, has already produced 1 km^2 of lava, and has no sign of stopping. At that rate, for 750,000 years it would be close to the magnitude of the volcanoes in the summary. And yet the impact of Bardarbung on earthly climate is close to negligible - we are not yet extinct in any case. For an extinction event one would expect something a bit more drastic, it would seem to me.

Some info on Bardarbung here

In Soviet America, voters don't chose their representatives, rather the representatives choose their voters.

Stalin is reported to have said that he takes little account of who votes, but rather it is he who counts the votes that matters. Politics in American have done him proud... it matters not who votes, but where you vote that counts. One vote in a swing state is worth thousands of votes in the so called "safe states". In fact with most districts there isn't even a meaningful contest.

Tyranny by definition is rule without mandate. When less than 50% of the people vote, and of them not all the votes have equal political value, then I think it is safe to state that the USA has perhaps crossed the line into tyranny.

Yet some tyrannies can be quite nice to live in.

I've been using BSD for a long time, both in OpenBSD and FreeBSD. FreeBSD is fantastic. I use mostly just plain Xorg and i3 window manager. With emacs, LaTeX and conkeror I can accomplish all that I need to do, and do it efficiently. However you can put as many bells and whistles on your installation as you want. True, you could do that with linux but there are some very important advantages with using FreeBSD:

1/ ZFS file system. This alone is worth switching to FreeBSD. If you don't know what it is, learn how to use it. What is extremely useful is doing "zfs send" of snapshots to another machine. Need more storage? Just add a disk to the pool. ZFS is very much production grade in FreeBSD 10.1.

2/ Jails. These are better than VirtualBox in my humble opinion, but they do have a learning curve. The advantage is putting each jail on a zfs filesystem where you can do snapshots of different stages of your application deployment and if something doesn't work you can simply rollback. Yes, I know you can do this with VMWare and the rest but jails allow me to access the filesystem directly in the command line and in general it is much more intuitive for my work habits. Note that you can also install jails of different flavors - for instance a debian jail where you can run everything just like it is on linux.

VirtualBox works just fine on FreeBSD, but I'll admit I haven't used it much.

3/ General simplicity of the system. Linux is fastly becoming as non-unix like as possible [though to be fair GNU is Not Unix]. Just a simple install of Ubuntu and you will see tons of processes running that you sometimes wonder what they are all up to. This may provide some utility for some people, but most people will never use those features. In FreeBSD I know exactly what each process is doing and it is very easy to turn off or enable as I desire. FreeBSD provides me control because I know the system, and the system is easier to know because it is much simpler and in my opinion more coherently designed.

4/ Much better documentation. FreeBSD (and BSD in general) has a good reputation for providing documentation. Almost everything you need is in the handbook. Also there is a lot of stability in the way things are done. Often in Linux the entire manner of doing things is changed from one version to another. Plus there are no monstrosities like NetworkManager which are opaque and not very well documented.

5/ More secure - a system is only as secure in as much as you know how it is working and what it is doing. In this case FreeBSD is more secure because I know more of what it is doing. With Ubuntu giving web searches every time you try to find a file on your machine, there is just asking for trouble.

6/ The system is more responsive. FreeBSD simple feels more 'alive' in the sense it is doing only what you want it to do. You don't have to wait for that useless application to stop doing what it is doing because it is not there. You don't need to wait for the indexing of the harddrive to give you back control of the system, as you decide when it should be done, etc. But I think even the UI elements are much smoother even on large desktops like KDE. The scrolling of windows for instance seems much more responsive than it is on linux, but that could be due to all sorts of factors.

As to your particular needs:
A/ Minecraft works just fine. http://minecraft.gamepedia.com...
B/ I have no idea, but an acquaintance tells me it works. In the forums they mention FreeBSD so someone must be using it.
C/ Mplayer works just fine, but I've seen a lot of people use VLC.
D/ Firefox works extremely well, though I use Conkeror which is simply a different shell to the same browser.
E/ Flash works with a multiple of different options.
F/ No idea to be honest about OpenRA. If there is source code I'm sure you could get it to run. At the very worst there is a linux-emulation layer.
G/ All the major Desktop Environments are in the ports tree. KDE, Mate, Gnome, Openbox and XCFE can also be installed with precompiled packages.
H/ Not an expert on this, but you can check out the handbook, as it seems to say yes: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/ha...
I/ Qt is in the ports tree.

Literally, you can do with FreeBSD whatever you want. If you want to experiment, perhaps try some of the various guides:
https://cooltrainer.org/a-free...

If you want to just stick in a DVD and have it all done for you, I would suggest going with PC-BSD: http://www.pc-bsd.org/

Good luck to you !

A non-extensive List of Reasons why OpenBSD is better than linux:

1/ OpenBSD's mascot is a puffer fish. Puffer fish can kill you. Penguins are simply parasites living on property no one wants anyway.
2/ OpenBSD's project leader has better hygiene than RMS
3/ OpenBSD's project leader is also more dictatorial than Linus
4/ It's BSD which means it has the karma of open source and you don't need lawyers managing each release cycle.
5/ OpenBSD assumes the world is a bad place. Linux is just hoping no one will do something bad.
6/ It doesn't update stuff simply because it can, but because it has to. Linux just updates stuff because they can, and stuff breaks.

Perhaps someone else has something to add?

Seriously, it just works. If you like what you have, keep using it! Not like I'm going to force you to quit using whatever you have.

OpenBSD is fantastic. Thanks to the developers who spend so much time to make it work well!

You forget that this is for the Municipaliity of Turin. That is to say that it is not only government workers, but Italian government workers.

Having lived in Italy for several years, I can say that this is about as far from a for-profit industry as one can get, so cost is not really an issue. Nor does the government have a reputation for doing things quickly. The situation is perfect for OSS.

I dare say the changeover will give the workers something more interesting to do than just file papers. Sure there will be a lot of complaints, cursing, arguments and excited hand gesticulation about how the computer doesn't work like it should, but that is completely normal in Italy.

Linus is right, GCC is braindead. Its code is purposely opaque and has huge maintenance problems. This is not the first time GCC is the source of suffering. I remember the bug in 2.95 causing all sorts of grief.

It would be interesting if the kernel devs switched to clang like FreeBSD has done. Even just the threat of doing so could give at least a good rivalry and competition usually means the one who improves the fastest will survive.

*casualty

"In war, the first casuality is truth".
Aeschylus (525 BC - 456 BC)

Res eo magis mutant quo manent.

Actually, by definition, faith is:

defn: : strong belief or trust in someone or something.

Thus your ability to confirm is based upon a certain trust in the validity of the scientific process. It does not mean that it is unreasonable, but simply that it is of something that you cannot observe.

As far as the 'duplicated independently', certainly that increases the validity of the measurement. But the question arises: what if there is only one instrument that can measure the phenomenon [such as CERN] ? How much is this really duplicated independently? If the ruler is marked wrong, everyone will be measuring wrong. The foundation of science is more subtle than just the ability to duplicate observations.

The fact that you COULD observe it, doesn't mean you actually will. Thus, until you actually observe it yourself, your knowledge of reality is still coming through faith. For one, you believe that the person telling you these things actually knows what he is talking about, and also that he is not attempting to lie to you. I very much doubt that many could afford a telescope that could see Titan, and so their knowledge will never rise above a simple belief that the scientist knows better than he does and he is not deceptive.

Faith in a human being can go wrong, but, let's be honest, there just isn't enough time, nor talent, nor energy nor equipment to verify everything that the experts say. Our knowledge of these things comes through hearing them from others, and thus implies at least a rudimentary faith in their competence and veracity. I might add that the confidence we have in the findings of others is necessary for the progress of human knowledge. No one would get very far if each of us had to rediscover calculus or remeasure the basic physical constants of the universe. It is faith in the metaphysical assumptions of truth, veracity and verifiability that make science possible, but the large corpus of observation is largely based on confidence in another human being.

I might add that the criteria of 'duplication' in many of the most advanced areas of physics are close to impossible for all but a very select few. Not everyone can build a hadron collider in their backyard....

The article doesn't really specify how the 90% were spied upon. It could simply be as a consequence of recording a telephone from a known suspect. I imagine that even a terrorists normal activity consists of many mundane things that involve innocent people: they order pizza, they go to bars, they buy things in stores, etc. Of course if someone is under surveillance, all these innocent people also get involved by the simple fact that they become somehow possible accessories in his crime. I would imagine that 90% of the activity of any criminal, including organised crime, is fairly innocuous, and innocent people will be also recorded because of this.

What I would really like to know is how much of this gathering of information is a consequence of the gathering of information on a possible suspect or simply a mass gathering of data about everyone with the filter applied afterwards. If the suspect is already under surveillance, I imagine that the innocent population would tolerate a loss of privacy simply because that person is a threat. If it is the other way around, that is that information is gathered indiscriminately in order to search for possible suspects, then it is extremely dangerous.

The fact that the Post does not describe in detail these findings makes the article more sensational than useful in my opinion.