Einstein offered theories that could be checked by others. And were.

Of course there is. One powerful negative feedback is that CO2 lets less and less infrared radiation escape, so every new added CO2 atom in the atmosphere has less effect than the previous one -- it cannot block radiation which was already blocked by other CO2 atoms.

This is part of the reason why doubling of CO2 levels "only" causes a linear temperature rise. CO2 only has a logarithmic effect on the temperature.

Which is lucky. Anything more complex than bacteria would have trouble surviving the wild temperature swings that a linear correlation between CO2 and temperature would cause.

And then you try to open a mainstream news site, like the Washington Times article linked to earlier, and you are presented with a full-page list of sites the page wants to load content from. It turns out the CSS one is washtimes.com, and that is all that was actually required.

I wish requestpolicy would label links by how they got pulled in (CSS, image, script...)

It seems to be crucially dependent on the size of the area. Towns often have decent governments, cities more rarely, states ... only the small ones. The country...no.

That said, another factor is the number of more powerful groups looking over your shoulder. If a city or town becomes too corrupt either the state or the feds are likely to step in. (I don't know how analogous this is to Canada, but I suspect it's a global property.)

You are mistaken in equating the two. KDE attempts to serve a large user community, who have diverse interests. Gnome attempts to serve a large coprorate community who have diverse interests. There's a lot of difference in what their goals are. (Even given that I consider Gnome3 a mistake.)

OTOH, both are serving systems running on large general purpose computers. Both *can* be run headless, but neither is designed for that purpose.

If you're going to run on a small system you should pick a different desktop, if any. I can't even give any guidelines, as which is a good choice depends on which constraints you have, and if you're even considering KDE, something like blackbox would be unreasonable. You might look at fwvm.

That would be a good reason. Unfortunately there tends to be a very high noise level, and all people are subject to confirmation bias, so it doesn't usually work. Especially on general audience sites. Which is really unfortunate.

There needs to be a way in which the level of like/dislike can be measured, but that requires both closing the feedback loop and reducing the noise level. (If you don't reduce the noise level, only the noise ends up getting amplified.) But just TRY to design a filter that will do that job!

I don't use fancy features, and I NEVER experienced problems with KDE4, even 4.1. OTOH, I have not, and do not, think the user interface is as well designed. It's just better than Gnome3, which isn't hard. But the tools are nicer than xfce tools, so I end up useing KDE4 not because it's my preference, but because my preference isn't being maintained. KDE3 was the best desktop to use that I have thus-far experienced. (And Trinity wasn't as good the last time I installed it. Largely because it didn't work as well with the underlying system.)

FWIW Gnome2 was better than KDE4, but not nearly as good as KDE3. And just forget Gnome3.

Were you actually being a "Grammar nazi", you would note that "ex" is an abbreviated form of "ex-wife", "ex-husband", or "ex-spouse". (I don't think there are any other valid candidates in this usage.) As such it doesn't have a valid plural form except in the way that "sheep" is the plural of "sheep". This is because the different extensions from their plural in different ways. I mean, just consider "exives" or "exs". So if you elide the variety of spouse, then you simultaneously elide the plural form, and thus "ex" is the plural of "ex".

Stable? I doubt it. I've rarely had a (non-design) problem with a KDE desktop in the stable line. (None in the last year. Possibly none last year, but I'd need to check as I was doing some experimentation with other desktops.) The possibly valid arguement is that it is missing features, which I wouldn't know about, as I won't use MSWind due to license issues.

FWIW, xfce, which I have had occasional problems with, is my second choice after KDE. The existence of problems doesn't mean that there isn't a way to work around them. I prefer some of the ways in which it implements feature (from a user perspective, I don't design desktop software).

Alas, noise regulations prevent departures between 11pm and 7am at the Santa Monica airport.

Actually, I'm willing to believe what he says, i.e. "most of the complaints are about actual copyright infringement", without proof. That these don't get reported is what one would expect to see, and given how easy it is to make a direct copy, one would expect that to happen often.

So what? How much harm does an instance of copyright infringement do compared with censoring one instance of free speech. Even the great predominance being valid complaints would not suffice to justify this act, and in particular the requirement of difficult proof on the part of the poster rather than on the part of the complainer. (Additionally it should be relatively easy to prove genuine copyright infringement in any clear case, whereas proving that it isn't copyright infringement is likely to require purchasing something that may not be available, and in any case would enrich the unjust complainer.)

The law as written is grossly and intentionally unfair, and I cannot accept that ANYONE who uses it is doing so in good faith without extensive proof.

Actually, an indictment of all fundamentalist religions isn't unreasonable. Anybody who believes that their religious belief gives them the right to control your actions is not sanely civilized.

It is unfortunate, but to believe that this applies to a greater percentage of Muslims than of other religions is not unreasonable. The Koran is much more explicit that followers of their prophet must enforce the belief upon others than is any other scripture that I am aware of. Therefore people who take it seriously will seriously believe that they have the right to enforce actions upon others. Most things in the Old Testament can be worked around. The New Testament doesn't really say anything that directly claims that one has the right to coerce someone else to behave as claimes. Hindu writing are contradictory, speaking for several different dieties, only some of whom believe that one has the duty (or that some people have the duty, it's not clear that, e.g., anyone besides Arjuna as the duty to kill all their cousins) to control the actions of others. And nothing in the original writings of the Buddha even seem to imply such a duty. Now there may be other religions with those values, but I don't know of them.

OTOH, many Muslims are quite willing to give a mystical or metaphorical interpretation to those sections that are most repellent to me. (Personally, I don't understand how they can justify both beliving in the Koran and allowing people who know of the Koran to live without obeying is, but I'm quite happy that they are able to do so.) OTOH, I can't read Arabic, and I've only read one translation. Perhaps if I studied it more this would make sense.

Still, to me it seems that the Muslim religion is unique in requiring that everyone be coerced into following its teachings. Some other religions promise eternal damnation if you don't, but that's not the same thing as requiring change right now.

The Buddhists actually *are* relatively peaceful, though not entirely. And they Hindus don't even make claims in that direction. *Some* of their gods favor peaceful actions, others would like to bathe in blood. Read the Baghadvagita.

It is not clear to what extent the Roman Catholic Church actively supported the Nazis. It is clear that they came to an agreement to support the Italian Fascists...but that is really a different animal. It's also clear that the aforesaid church did not behave in a particularlly principled or noble way, and did not live up to its espoused principles, but my guess is that this was largely governed by justified fear. They knew that if they challenged a superior physical force no big daddy was going to help them.

If you said "mock scientific" point of view, I'd agree with you. He did not use science, but pseudo-science. like giving IQ tests to people who didn't speak English, and then classify them as morons. (I don't think that was Lindberg. That was Binet...the Binet of Stanford-Binet.) But Lindberg's science was no better.