Okay. Not trolling, just stating a (possibly, to some) undesirable opinion...

The Koch brothers are old and are pandering to the demographic of old people who watch Fox News - who still vote - like (sigh) my mother (don't get me started). I wager that most youngsters forgot about Marxism five minutes after their high-school social studies final exam. The whole Communism / Socialism / Marxism is "evil" is nothing but cold-war propaganda used by people like the Koch brothers, Dick Cheney, etc... to try and scare / control the (older) unwashed masses - who might have actually been adults throughout the cold-war.

Pretty sure bombers typically don't advertise the phone number of the trigger device. I'm more worried about the case where Siri gains sentience and decides to kill all humans. Then I might be in "“immediate danger of death or great bodily injury" from a cell phone.

Don't be silly. Every new OS install will come with a WiFi tablet for all your desktop I/O needs via a RDP connection. No more gorilla arm as the tablet will be in your lap and you can sit where ever you like.

Yeah. And if I were just a small-time user of some bitcoin service, my "preparing" for questioning by law enforcement would be to get ready to tell them to get stuffed if they got pushy.

Pardon me. For the sake of accuracy, I must add that it depends on what dataset you are looking at. It is somwhere between 13 1/2 years and 18 years.

You don't know that it has no long-term effects on the trend. ENSO hasn't been understood long enough. THEORETICALLY, it may be true, but it sure as hell isn't proven. Even now it is not well understood... which was part of my point.

If you can't model climate over 10 years, you can't model it over 100. No reliable advance predictor of ENSO is known. Now they're saying there is a longer-term trend that they can't predict, either. At least so far. Which throws an even bigger wrench into the works.

But what's really funny is how this definition of "long term" changes with the temperature! Not all that long ago, warmists were saying "A trend has to be 10-12 years before it can be called 'climate'." But once the "pause" -- I'm being polite -- was about 16 years long they started saying 20 years, and 30 years. It's hilarious.

This "pause" is one month away from being 18 years long... only 1 year shy of the entire warming trend since 1979, which is what everybody was screaming about in the first place.

Yes, I've seen the "evidence". Probably a lot more of it than you. But unlike most folks, I've seen the evidence on both sides of the aisle. The evidence for warming was never very convincing and has become less so as time has turned up new evidence.

As a generalization, this is true enough. So, I will amend my comment. They might be genetic factors, but they aren't overt physical factors. The fact that males tend to be older when they mate is not a matter of sexual maturity, which generally comes long before then.

I highly recommend the Penn & Teller "Bullshit" episode "Holier Than Thou", which was partly about Mother Teresa.

I'm not sure if it's the whole episode but here's a link.

This. Also, it takes time to learn the vast amount of information that it takes for a human being to really be smart enough to manipulate its environment... which evolution has obviously selected for. Chimps, for example, often actually outpace human learning for up to 2 years, but then humans continue to learn while the chimp rapidly levels off. Keeping resource use to a low level during this long learning phase is likely a long-term survival trait.

Also it should be noted that another factor in humans' slow growth is already known: humans can only have babies with brains so big, before birth becomes a very big problem. So a longer period is needed for the human brain to grow to its adult size.

It is more accurate to say that boys and girls mature at different rates.

If you adjust for the probable influence of estrogen mimics in our current environment, human females start to mature sexually before males do, but actually finish their sexual maturation later. You are referring more to social factors than genetic: often males need to be older to establish themselves in order to semi-permanently mate, but that is not the same things as physical sexual maturity needed to procreate.

It sure was said to be stupid by a boatload of people on Slashdot when the rest of us tried to say it really was a slippery slope.

I have a feeling a lot of people will be looking back at what many of them call "crazy conspiracy theory" today when some of those things turn out to be real, too.

Of course many of them really are just crazy conspiracy theory. But not all of them. Real conspiracies can exist and have existed throughout history.

But there's another thing that some people don't account for: a lot of people, operating under the same (often but not always) erroneous assumptions or misinformation, can make it look like there is a conspiracy when it's really not conspiracy at all. Just a lot of people making the same mistakes.

... I need a new piano.

This just illustrates that government attempts at "surveillance" of their own citizens can be used against them, and actually constitute a very serious national security risk.

If they don't start getting that through their heads (which they really should have by now), they're in for a very serious surprise.

Better to it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Which reminds me...

It is NOT "competition" if the big boys are "dumping" their services at below cost in order to gain market share. Dumping is an anti-competitive practice which is illegal for very good reasons.

I don't know if technically dumping a service at below cost is illegal the same way as product dumping is, but if it isn't it should be. It is not competition, it is the exact OPPOSITE.