(Puts on pedantic hat.) You are correct that the Germanic/Old English "were" survives in words like "werewolf" and, for Tolkien fans only, "weregild" (as in "This I will have as weregild for my father's death" from the Silmarillion).

"Virile," however, comes from the Latin "virilis" via French. They are kinda sorta related but not really.

This is a gross oversimplification as any language scholar can tell you, but a fun exercise for any English language speaker is to study the roots of common "vulgar" vs. "high-class" words and find that their roots map very closely to Latin vs. Germanic. Old English was - once the native Celts and Romano-Britons had been displaced - largely a relic of its "Germanic" (Angles, Saxons, Jutes) conquerors and the language of the people. After the Norman Conquest in 1066 (Normans "Nord-mann" being transplanted Vikings who learned French) the language of the nobility in England became French (which was based on Latin) for hundreds of years. While over time the two melded together, you can still (again, oversimplifying) in many cases tell the upper-class terms for things (derived from French/Latin) from the lower-class terms for things (derived from Old English/Germanic). For example:

• Lower-class English term: shit (viz. German scheisse); upper-class English term: excrement (viz. French excrement)
• Lower-class English term: house (viz. German haus); upper-class English term: mansion (viz. French maison)

It doesn't hold true in all cases but it is in general a pretty fascinating window into the evolution of the English language, FWIW.

And this hypothetical search engine makes money how again?

Part of the problem here is a very poorly written (or edited) quote in the summary. The relevant quote from TFA is:

"Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today's renewable energy technologies simply won't work; we need a fundamentally different approach." (emphasis mine)

They aren't saying that today's renewables aren't good or important. They are saying that by themselves it won't get to where it needs to be, because carbon-emitting forms of energy will always be cheaper than the renewables of today (even including incremental improvements on those technologies in the foreseeable future), and the energy industry will always try to give people what they want: the cheapest energy possible. They then go on to posit (again from TFA):

"What's needed are zero-carbon energy sources so cheap that the operators of power plants and industrial facilities alike have an economic rationale for switching over within the next 40 years"

Of course, that's a bit like saying "I don't know how, but somebody should discover magic fairy dust." But they are not saying that they have the solution to the problem; they are saying that we collectively need to invest in finding some new, unknown rabbit to pull out of the hat because our current ones will never achieve their price parity objective.

Then how would people who want their purchases to help benefit this charity know how, when and where to buy it? Part of the rationale of doing something like this is that some consumers will want to modify their purchasing decisions or timing to support a cause they find valuable.

Let's say Crucial.com was going to give a portion of the profits on all RAM purchases on a certain day to the EFF. Wouldn't you rather know when/what products that applies to, rather than have Crucial announce "hey, we gave part of our profits from yesterday to the EFF. Hope you bought then!"

Ooh, lots of dubious assertions to riposte. :-)

There is nothing illegal about charging people different rates for the same thing unless the way you do it is in violation of regulated industry rules or non-discrimination laws. It is perfectly legal for me to sell identical used cars to you for $1000 and to the next guy for $2000 because you negotiated better. It is illegal for me to charge him $2000 because he's black and $1000 to you because you're white; or for my utility to charge you $200/kWh when the PUC says the maximum retail rate is $.00068/kWh. Similarly, there is nothing wrong for Disney to tell Apple they can put a Mickey Mouse icon for free on the Apple Watch but charge Microsoft $1M to do the same thing on the Microsoft Band. So no trademark legal danger there.

Was the day-care center in question non-profit? Otherwise then, no, it is not a noncommercial use. Either way, it's not whether it's commercial or noncommercial use that matters in trademark law. If I'm Disney and a nonprofit children's shelter calls itself the "Bambi Adoption Center," they are still infringing on my trademark just as much as if they were for-profit. I could be nice and let them license the Bambi name for a penny, which is not Disney's strategy... but either way it's still actionable infringement. While commercial/non-commercial may have some meaning in OSS/CCA licensing, it means diddly squat in trademark law.

Fair question but unfortunately the answer is:

• We wouldn't make a profit. We might make slightly more than selling it for scrap, but it's not like battle-worn Humvees fetch anywhere near what they cost us... that's why the military is (inappropriately) giving them away to the cops in the US.
• Ukraine is not exactly swimming in money to buy these things. Their economy has suffered 10% contraction in the past year and they can't even afford to subsidize the natural gas needed to keep their citizens alive this winter, now that Russia has jacked up the rates.
• Selling arms to Ukraine (or fast tracking its entry into NATO) would be a major provocation to Russia and would set the stage for a potential full-on NATO vs. Russia regional conflict. Putin has enough crazy in him that he can't be trusted not to do something extremely stupid that would hurt him more in the long run, but would be painful enough to both sides that there would be no "winner." That's a hornet's nest you don't want to poke until you have exhausted every other conceivable alternative.

Where does this keep coming from? He has not been charged with any crime in the US, nor have any judicial proceedings even been started against him. Sweden can't extradite him for this even if they wanted to. So why do people keep talking about this as a ploy to have him extradited to the U.S.? There is exactly as much proof (or even logic) that this whole thing is a US-led plot as there is that this was a plot by the U.K. to get him to flee there. Or that this was a plot led by Ecuador, Afghanistan or Vanuatu.

Apply Occam's razor (gently). Just maybe this is a guy who had sex with women in Sweden when they didn't want him to, and this is a crime in Sweden, and they want him back there to put him on trial... in Sweden. Just maybe.

This is something that has long bothered me: what do they do on the ISS that is "important science" worth all the money and hassle? I can go read a list of experiments on the station, but it all sounds like picayune little science projects to me. Can somebody who knows more about this than me give me some context on what the heck is Really Important about work done on the ISS? Or do we just send people and things to it Because It's There?

Precisely this. The whole case is in an idealistic sense understandable - if you are in college and you aren't challenging the real or imagined injustices of the world in some way, you're missing the whole point of being young enough to still be self-absorbed and righteous, but not old enough to be in the real world. But from a practical view, it's just a bunch of overprivileged Harvard kids looking for something to protest and wasting the time of our overburdened court system in the process. My 18-year-old me would applaud them but my current 40-year-old self thinks they should shut the f**k up and go do something useful instead.

Disclaimer: I know several Harvard alumni and count a few of them as my friends. I am probably unfairly biased against Harvard since in my experience these alums are (sorry friends) not noticeably smarter than everyone else - in some cases less so - in a way that justifies a Harvard degree being an automatic ticket to wealth and insider access. Which, unfortunately, it is.

Fair point, but Seattle is hardly a one-trick pony. Leaving aside Amazon... Microsoft, Boeing and Starbucks HQ are all major employers here. Just in tech alone, you also have Nintendo, Valve, Bungie, Disney Mobile and others here as well as satellite offices for Google, Facebook and (soon) Apple.

I think the point of the article (maybe?) is that Amazon is getting really big in Seattle, and the infrastructure here is already strained from the expanding tech industry. Amazon's growth could be more than the city can handle, dragging down quality of life for everyone.

No, no it is not. This is a pretty blatant forgery - for a step-by-step walkthrough of what's obviously faked about it (including screenshots of the months-old Google Maps images and others that were used) please visit here.

Giving this any credence by saying the case "gets stranger" is like reading some 9/11 truther's article and saying that it makes the truth behind the attacks "more puzzling." It doesn't. It just shows that some people are either disconnected from the truth or (in this case) willing to actively fabricate things to obscure it.

Umm... if Russian is not "releasing" this, why is Russian state television showing this and claiming it is real?

DOES NOT COMPUTE... NOMAD ERROR? ERROR? ERROR? EXAMINE.

You seem to think that you understand the politics of Internet peering, but I don't think you actually do. Not trying to be a jerk, but if you haven't worked on this stuff at a large ISP this whole question seems far more black and white than it actually is.

The question of settlement-free peering vs. transit is almost as old as the Internet. Network A is bigger, and Network B is smaller (or Network A has significant in/out flows of traffic while Network B has largely unidirectional traffic). There are not many Network As out there and lots of Network Bs. Network A should not need to spend the money to put in direct links of whatever size to all the Network Bs out there. It makes sense to do so with other networks the size of Network A but not for private connections of whatever size Network B wants. So Network A says to Network B, "No free soup for you. Buy bandwidth from someone who does peer with me (or pays me to peer), or you can pay me to connect directly." If Network B is buying bandwidth from someone who doesn't have big enough connections to Network A (or doesn't want to pay for bigger connections) then there can be congestion.

This is not new. It is not unique to Netflix. It is very common, in fact, with anyone using Netflix's traditional cheap-ass bandwidth provider, Cogent. (I use cheap-ass not as a compliment to Cogent's low rates but as a descriptor of the quality of their peering and transit links.) You can make a reasonable argument that Netflix is unique and should be given a pass on paying for transit because of customers of the ISP wanting that data. But from the ISP's perspective that creates a slippery slope (because everybody's traffic is important to someone) and all the smaller networks will want the same exception... maybe even to the point of being willing to sue over it or stage a damaging publicity war over it like Netflix did. For the big ISPs, they feel the need to hold firm on this question to avoid that slippery slope.

It sucks that peering is inherently political, and besides that nobody likes Comcast. But please stop trying to make the Netflix peering thing sound like something more nefarious than it actually is.

I am not sure that you understand what "study" means in a modern scientific sense. If there are any of those showing the efficacy of homeopathy, please provide links - I am genuinely interested in seeing them (not snide, seriously).

Now I am not sure that you understand what homeopathy means. Read the linked Wiki page to understand (it involves ingesting ridiculously diluted chemicals to purportedly cure illnesses on the utterly unsubstantiated theories of "like cures like" and "water memory."

I think what you're referring to is naturopathy, which is a whole different kettle of fish. My wife is a big believer in naturopathy, and while I think some of it is touchy-feely new age quackery, there is no dispute that naturally occurring plants, herbs and other medicinal sources can be effective healing tools. So no argument there.

My personal $.02 is that many people who prefer naturopathic medicine and oppose GMOs - my wife among them - do so not from a scientific viewpoint but from a moral viewpoint. Many of us would much rather trust things that grow naturally than are made artificially. But while it may ultimately prove true that some GMOs are harmful, I strongly believe that we should come to that conclusion through scientific study, not because we "feel" that something lab-created is inferior to something made by human science.

Nature made the Black Plague, tobacco, lard and the Destroying Angel mushrooms, too. Just because it's natural doesn't necessarily make it better for you, or make man-created things bad.