Yes, browsers have indeed become so complicated. It's not just Mozilla, Google's putting even more resources on Chrome than what Mozilla can afford. A browser is now essentially an operating system (see FirefoxOS) that can do pretty much everything *and* needs to do it in a way that's secure against untrusted code (JS). On top of that, Mozilla is involved in projects that reach beyond just the web, like the Opus audio codec and the Daala video codec that I'm personally involved in (there's many more of course).

We've been conducting a geo-engineering experiment by increasing the CO2 content of the atmosphere and, so far, it isn't going well.

You're right. As an experiment to show CO2 causes warming it totally has sucked, because it shows in fact the opposite - over a decade without warming even as CO2 emissions continue to increase.

It's quite obvious at this point temperature changes have very little correlation to CO2 added to the atmosphere. Which was only logical one you realized what a tiny part of the atmosphere CO2 really is... so our percentage increases of it add little in terms of absolute amounts.

You are assuming that a warming climate is more helpful, but you could have a warm dry desert

Wrong. A warmer climate releases more moisture into the atmosphere from the oceans, which winds up on land. You always have a net positive effect on moisture...

This has also been noted in explanations of why snowfall amounts are up in some areas.

Deserts are the result of specific weather patterns not allowing moisture to flow to a region, but it always goes somewhere...

We also have proof of this simple fact, the medieval warm period was a fair amount warmer than we are now, and it was in fact a great time for agriculture.

Lastly, you are again ignoring jungles which are as hot as deserts... you seem to think that a great amount of heat automatically means desert which is very far from the truth.

But the most rise we are predicted to see anyway is about 2-3C.

If the climate were generally cooling, I'd agree with the thought we need to figure out how to stop or slow it.

But a warming climate? That has far more helpful benefits than downsides for life in general and biodiversity across the planet. You have only to look at the jungle compared to that arctic to realize that...

So please do NOT screw up whatever warming process is underway and move us to a cooling phase.

It's only "warming" in the sense of a global average

Which also has not been warming either for the past decade or so. :-)

For which, there are a lot of excuses but not much warming... all that time CO2 has continue to increase so obviously what temperature changes there are, is disconnected from CO2.

They were taking OTA signals and retransmitting them across the internet for profit without paying the broadcaster a dime.

I could do that myself legally (I do so all the time, recording over the air signals and replaying them later on other devices), so why couldn't I pay someone to put an antenna somewhere for me?

The key was they really did have one antenna per customer, so it was exactly that - an antenna rental.

So why do YOU see anything wrong with that?

> if your software product confuses someone with almost 20 years of experience in computing, you're doing it wrong

Speaking of which... Software developer with over 20 years of experience here... I tried to figure out iTunes WTF?! How can they make something so confusing? I just wanted to take 10 mp3s and put them on my daughters iphone. "If you continue I will erase everything on the iphone"...?!?! nope nope nope nope...

Then exactly three days after his successor at the IMF was sworn in, suddenly the prosecutor dropped the charges and admitted that the case was bogus.

And this part of the story should have been an even bigger media circus than the initial accusation, but mysteriously wasn't. Hmm....

No. The Party put them in office; the "people" didn't really have a choice. Here's how it works:

1. The Party (doesn't matter which one, R or D) gerrymanders the district so that the other party has no chance
2. The Party chooses a crook to run under its flag.
3. Nobody else runs because they can't possibly win
4. Since only the Party Crook is on the ballot, he wins because half the "people" are too stupid to abstain or write in somebody

You might try to argue "well the people need to be smarter then," but you have to remember that the people are A) stupid to begin with and B) bombarded with propaganda and indoctrination from birth specifically designed to make them forget they have choices.

Does the National Weather Service need that computing power all the time, or could they buy it during major hurricanes from cloud services?

Don't worry, most of those jobs will go away soon. Amazon's newer warehouses use Kiva robots to move merchandise around to picking stations. Picking is still manual; the computers do all the thinking, the humans just pick up what the laser pointer points at. But Bezos owns a robotics startup working on automating that. At Amazon, being replaced by robots isn't a future problem. It's here now.

Customer service is already mostly automated. It's can't be long until customer service chat is with a computer, not a human. Then Amazon will need fewer people.

Yahoo doesn't have a search engine. They resell Bing. Yahoo got out of search five years ago. So this is puzzling. One could see Bing paying to be the default in Firefox, but what's the gain in running it through Yahoo?

I don't have the numbers to prove it but using the Amazon service to find video to watch is horrific. I can only imagine Amazon is paying them for inclusion, because otherwise the numbers cannot be worth recording...