Mr. Helicopters, are you aware you are commenting in a thread about a country where public opinion, money as well as politics are aligned to create a solution? I understand you're from Texas, so it's hard to conceive that things are different outside of your backward little universe, but truly, claiming that nothing can be done "because politics" in an article where it is actually politics that works on a solution is even for Texan standards pretty darn stupid.

Let's take another analogy: suppose we're somehow capable due to our actions to melt the ice on Greenland and Antarctic in such large quantities that the sea-level rises significantly. Suppose it will rise by 10 meters if we don't do anything. Shutting down what we do completely would let it rise by a mere 5 meters. Doing something less than that will only bring us halfway, making it rise only 7.5 meters. The difference between 7.5 and 10 will still probably save millions of lives. There will still be cities destroyed, but fewer. Although your plane analogy is possibly much more relevant to the issue of global warming than my sea-level example, it does point out that your argument doesn't necessarily hold water.

I'm not sure that you've thought this all the way through. Imagine a world without copyright on software. Would the philosophy behind the GPL still be distinctive? I would say it would not: although it would make making the clause about distributing the 'preferred way of making modifications' untenable, it would allow everyone to modify and distribute source code if they have it, it would allow anyone to decompile, reverse engineer, modify and distribute. If I can distribute your binaries without repercussions, proprietary software would cease to exist. I'm pretty sure a world without copyright on software is RMS' dream.

GPL is called copyleft for a reason. Without copyright on software, the GPL does not need to exist. It's simply a countermeasure to copyright. Your argument about "force" and "choice" are only relevant in a world that accepts copyright as a given. The GPL does not accept that premise.

And you truly think this has been overlooked? Hallmark of a cook: scientists are stupid and have completely missed some obvious thing I came up with.

In most countries, if you frivolously take on a lawsuit and lose, you pay for the court procedure. You would indeed take up the courts time, but in the end, it is you who pays for that time. Revenue generation is unaffected (and incidentally, in these countries, revenues go to the state, not the police force).

No, if the property is worth $1,000,000, he can take a mortgage to pay the fine. And if the property can only ever make $20K a year, how come it's worth a million bucks?

Losen up. Your begging the question.

The scientific consensus is that the so-called "climate sceptics" have nothing to contribute. Just drivel. So they're shut out, like the creationists. Meanwhile, science continues.

A model is a hypothesis. The 'null' model is the one that states there is no relation between the variables. If your model is not better than this 'null' model, what have you shown exactly?

Europe was 1.2 degrees warmer than average in 2014, beating the record of 2011. Also Russia experienced a very warm winter. I think you have a bit of a bias to the North-American part of the Northern hemisphere.

I'm in Holland. Holland is in the Northern Hemisphere. We had the highest average temperature in 2014. The highest in 3 centuries. Hell, I remember March 9th 2014, having a barbecue with my family with 20+ degree celsius. Every month with the exception of August was warmer than average. 2015 is not a whole lot different: no winter to speak of, no frost, no snow, no ice. Temperatures are again in the high 10s. You might want to do a bit more research.

We're perfectly capable of predicting that a boiling pan of water will run dry, and even predict when exactly, without even having the faintest idea where exactly the next bubble will surface.

Yeah, the Founding Fathers truly fucked up this one. Thinking that by disallowing congress to infringe on the bearing of arms, a well-regulated militia would be formed. Automatically. What were they thinking? Look at these guys in the video: a well-regulated militia? No, bozos with lethal weapons. Epic logic fail.

I think it's pretty clear that the intent behind the second amendment was the perceived need to have a well regulated militia. In other words, if you want to carry a guns, sign up to join the national guard. The first amendment doesn't have such provisions. In practice, the very liberal interpretation of the second amendment outside of its original intent seems to be a wholly bad idea in densely populated regions. In rural areas, less of a problem.