They're not altruistic enough to leave the current oil in the ground I don't see why this oil would be different.

Sure they may delay a few years, but people tend to be a lot more altruistic when it isn't costing much. The moment I point out you're sitting on a ton of oil is the moment you start to rationalize reasons that pumping oil isn't so bad.

Don't worry. I'm sure congress will do the right thing and point to this wasteful spending as a reason to cut funding to NASA.

It's legal but it's still a bit douchey. This is why cities make horrible convoluted suburbs now, to thwart this exact kind of action.

Actually they might have the right idea. The info the media will be most interested in is the gossipy Sony exec emails, and those things only really have legs for one news cycle.

So a lawsuit does two things, first it causes a bunch of papers to run things by the lawyers first, this could slow down some of the reporting until the news cycle has finished.

Second it gives them another related bit of news to report about, so the email contents are now part of the previous news cycle and the Sony lawsuit threat is the new news cycle.

So was the US not practising Christianity in the 1850s? Because there were a lot of slaves with a lot of Christian endorsements of their condition.

So is the problem Islam, or the contemporary expression of Islam in specific regions and among specific populations?

The problem with just blaming Islam as a whole is you blame a whole lot of people with beliefs completely unrelated. It would be like pointing at the Westburo Baptist Church and saying Christians are homophobic.

I don't deny Islam is the language they use to express their extremism, and to the extent that the Koran and Hadiths lay out some fairly brutal rules Islam does bear some blame.

But you can find justifications for slavery and sex slaves in the Old Testament as well.

I didn't claim that. I claimed that some Americans were joining the military for the same reasons that some Muslims become terrorists, to defend their religion and culture against its perceived enemies.

And yes, this occurs:
Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.

...

This is hardly the first time something like this has happened. We’ve had soldiers painting Bible verses on turrets of tanks and on bombs on airplanes. We’ve had soldiers handing out Bibles to the locals. The Pentagon and the American government seems to understand that this is very, very bad for American credibility in the Muslim world because it sends the message that this is a religious war of Christianity vs Islam.

And don't forget Ann Coulter

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war.

That sounds a hell of a lot like terrorist ideology to me except she's able to carry out her religious war via army instead of suicide bomber. Don't you think there were a few people who thought like Ann Coulter and joined the military? Enough to rival the number of Muslim terrorists?

I'm not saying Iraq war=terrorism or Drone attacks=terrorism, but I will say that a lot of people who turn to terrorism in the Middle East would be able to fulfil those urges as soldiers in the West.

I said nothing about "preaching". I said, Muslim faithful are compelled — by their religion — to fight for spreading Islam world-wide and to establish a Califate.

There is nothing of the kind in the Bible.

He's fighting and promoting, same way the IRA did.

IRA's fight was purely secular — nothing in Catholicism insists nor mandates the sort of things they've done. Muslims, once again, must fight other religions — in order to remain good Muslims. Because Koran — which they believe to be the word of God verbatim — says so.

Crusades? Residential schools? Inquisitions? The mechanisms are different but Christianity has it's own long history of aggressive attempts to spread the faith.

To be fair we are bombing ISIS territories and various Arab nations (via drones) and killing a crapload of non-military forces.

I'm guessing they're able to rationalize attacking our civilians without too much trouble.

I'm not trying to defend them, they're as ridiculous a caricature of villainy as you can get, but they're a product of the east west dynamic much more than a product of Islam.

The Iraq war?

I'm not saying they launch terrorist attack from the military. I'm saying that they're motivated by the same clash of civilizations desire to defend their culture and religion. Some might be perfectly good soldiers not doing anything wrong, and some might be responsible for some of the really ugly atrocities that Western militaries sometimes perpetrate.

The US army is steeped in Christianity, if the tables were turned do you think all of those soldiers would be content to stay on the sidelines while a Muslim superpower exerted its will over the West?

You think the guy in the Cafe is preaching? He's fighting and promoting, same way the IRA did. And asking why Christian terrorists aren't attacking the West is like asking why Wall Street bankers aren't mugging people at gunpoint. They aren't using those methods because they've got far less costly ways to get what they want.

Because they don't have to.

If you're a religious fanatic in the Middle East and want to kill Christians you become a terrorist.

If you're a religious fanatic in the West (or Australia) and want to kill Muslims you join the army.

I'm not trying to equate soldiers with terrorists, just pointing out why the comparison isn't valid.

You're always going to have a subset of people who will dedicate their lives to fighting and killing whom they perceive to be enemies. If they identify as Christian they simply join a western military and get to fight Muslims without sticking out, if they identify as Muslim they become terrorists because that's the only way to join the war.

My interpretation is that Islam is just like any other religion. A bunch of people who think their religion wants them to be perfectly nice and peaceful, and a bunch of others who think it demands they cleanse the Earth of non-believers.

If you followed the attacks in Canada you noticed that the attackers were recent converts to Islam. Their attacks weren't motivated by Islam, they were motivated by ISIL's culture of terrorism and enabled by whatever personal demons caused them to jump headlong into a new religion. Islam is just the language that ISIL uses to communicate that culture.

I think it's plausible it's the best script he's ever read.

After all, how often does he get to read the script before it gets rewritten multiple times to appeal to all the target demographics.

By default OS X groups windows by application, so if I have 5 terminals open (quite common) it's a pain to find the one I want. Similarly the lack of multiple desktops is a pain. I'm sure there's a way to change both these things (I've installed stuff for multiple desktops before) but it's not as easy as I've found in Linux.

Plus the application management systems like ports and fink have fewer packages and aren't as well integrated into the system.

It's not that it's impossible to go outside the box, it's just that the system works best if you stay in the box.

Then go to the store, but a Toshiba laptop, and install OS X on it.

The garden is more pronounced for their iOS products but the history of Apple is one of rigorously limiting their products to ensure a good user experience.

No argument here, but I think the reason they only promised that narrow range is because they thought their user experience would be best with that narrow range.

In the Apple universe sadly enough.

I'm one of the rare people who finds Linux (and popular Linux Desktop Environments) to be much more user friendly than OS X. The reason for this is fairly simple, I can easily make my Linux boxes work and interact the way I want, but with Apple... not so much.

I think that's integral to the Apple philosophy of the walled garden. They figure out what they want the product to do, they figure out the workflows, then they build the product so that the given workflow works really well and seamlessly. If you want to do something a little different it's not great, but it works. If you want to do something real different like play oggs or use a different client then there's a very simple solution, don't bother.

I don't think the aim is necessarily anti-competitive, I think they're just trying to protect their walled garden. If Realplayer has a buggy client that screws up syncing that's Realplayer's problem, if they have a buggy client that screws up the sync to the iPod that's suddenly Apple's problem. If you want to understand why all the Apple fanboys go around bragging that Apple just works it's because Apple doesn't let them do any of the things that don't work.

Actually I think he might have a point.

Squatters have started raising pigs on the site of Peru's Nazca lines - the giant designs best seen from an airplane that were mysteriously etched into the desert more than 1,500 years ago.

"We get 120-180 reports or alerts about encroachments every year," Alva said. "For my colleagues in the rest of Latin America, who get two or maybe five cases per year, that figure is unbelievable."

It's not like they unsealed a tomb, careless people have been tromping around these things for millenia from early European explorers to various locals to backpacking douchbags who look up the location on google maps.

And yes it caused damage, but they didn't wreck the figure anymore than any of those previous groups wreaked it. It's like touching a painting in a gallery, your individual poke won't leave a mark, but if a bunch of people do it the painting will be ruined.

I think that's probably the main motivation for the comments, first they're rightfully offended by Greenpeace attempting to expropriate their heritage to try and make a viral video. But moreover they're worried that Greenpeace will inspire copycats to visit the sites, and it won't take a lot of that before you start seeing visible damage.