>I'm sure AMD fanboys will....

*perk*

There are still AMD fanboys? Where? ;-P

Perfectly legal in what jurisdiction? American jurisdiction does not apply to foreign citizens on foreign soil at all. Not even for murder, to make things clear. Now if his home country decides that's a crime, that's fine.

Julian Assange is not a traitor. The Rosenbergs were. You cannot be a declared an open citizen of another country and be a "traitor" to another. What he did was not even a crime, and the notion of extradition is dubious.

> By the way, if you don't see something inherently wrong with allowing a private company to print money with the government's snookered approval, you should.

Oh, there's plenty wrong with it, however what's worse is allowing a government to print its own money based on the political whimsy of the current issue de jure. Politicians absolutely don't have any restraint. The Fed does.

...of which around 160 were children...

FA-18's deployed from aircraft carriers with live pilots, alas, do this too.

Which is not to trivialize the matter. Rather, what I'm trying to say here is that this is part of the tragedy of warfare, and one of the reasons a nation really, really needs to think very, very hard about being militarily involved against anyone else. If you do, it had better be for a very fucking good reason, as innocent men, women and children are absolutely certain to die.

C//

This would have been an amusing time to file a $100 claim against them in small claims court. There's nothing quite like forcing them to employ their $400/hr legal retainer in order to get some attention.

I don't think it's just a calculus. It's humilating to be caught, and makes you angry. The combination of humiliation and anger at the same time leads you to want to lash out, but you're not going to further your humiliation further by confessing it, so all that's left to do is lash out, yes? Anyway, the one think I personally try to avoid succumbing to is the temptation to accuse anyone so lashing out of anything other than what they say. One reason for this is that if someone is hurt, and falsely accused of also doing something bad, you'll just be throwing fire on their already hurt self. So I usually don't remark at all, or express sympathy (no matter what I think).

My major criticism of btrfs is the horrid sync performance. Hosting virtual machines tends to require lots of small writes to disk that make btrfs incredibly non-performant.

ZFS has similar problems, FYI. If you run VM's on it, you have two choices. Buy SSD's for the ZIL, or disable the ZIL.

C//

It wasn't just perception that killed the housing market. The homes were objectively over valued. Things like rental value to investment cost actually matter. The change in perception involved people waking up to that.

80% profit? I can believe that NG was slow to submit, but this was not a government contract. Either that, or you don't really know what you're talking about here.

This could have back fired. Threatening to call someone at 8AM every day until some outcome occurs... this is not a good idea at all. Supposing you catch a narcissistic CEO (and aren't they all narcissistic?) in a bad mood (and can't you imagine them in a bad mood, the job is actually a high stress one), then one possible outcome is the next phone call you get is from their corporate counsel advising you to not to attempt to extort their executive staff.

C//

Well, sometimes we can think up things that are "better" that are nevertheless unfeasible and even possibly ethically dubious. Disabling "all"
  patents would put every major drug manufacturer out of business. Software companies, on the other hand, wouldn't even blink.

One reason I'm against software patents is that copyrights cover software companies adequately.

No. You aren't.

Deliberately rude, are we?

Political reasoning is abhorrently dishonest, even in really smart people. Curiously enough, the mind prevents us from seeing just how dishonest we are being with ourselves.

In my mind it's all about confirmation bias. Which is to say, when confronted with a larger list of facts to assess, human beings have a remarkable ability to select only a small subset of the facts and use those to confirm their beliefs. I encountered this last year. I will relay the anecdote.

Sometime last year a study came out that "proved" that caffeine drinkers who regularly drink caffeine induce no practical effect to themselves, and only restore themselves to what would be a baseline level. Over a twenty year period I have read summaries on many, many caffeine studies. This particular study stood alone as an outlier in a much larger field of study. I noted this with amusement and went on with my life.

One day not so long later, I was getting coffee at work. A coworker of mine intruded to attempt to tell me about the study. I cut him off cold, and was quite irritated. This coworker was Mormon. I did not need to mire in the narrowly minded comfort-confirmed mentality of someone who is able to learn nothing else. It's just sad, really.

Of course on the subject of global warming, the issue is political. I once heard a great definition of politics, once: "politics is who gets what". It's true. While politics is about many things, it's certainly about resource allocation, and when you consider it from that perspective, and decide to tolerate the notion that for human beings resource allocation will always be highly contentious, what you will do is become a bit jaded like me, which is to say, unsurprised, disdainful, and accepting of the ugliness of politics all at the same time.

C//

if the globe warms, but the temperature in a specific area of the globe remains well below freezing, that area could very easily accumulate more ice, particularly if the warmer globe carries more water vapour to that area than it otherwise would.