I disagree that those are working. Yes, they can target you from cookie data, and that works to show you ads. But what I've notices is I get TONS of "targeted" ads for stuff I just bought. I don't need a hotel room right after I just booked one. I don't need any of this stuff I bought yesterday, or last week. And while I recognize what I did to get certain "targeted" ads, I do nothing based on them, and no one I've ever talked to ever click on them or buy anything based on seeing them. So as far as I can tell they don't really work to improve revenue.

There have actually been studies that have demonstrated that, but for some reason the marketers still spending money on them haven't been clued into it yet. Yet.

Yes, and they are throwing it at all kinds of ideas hoping something pays off big before it dawns on all the marketing folks that "Internet advertising" is practically worthless, and the market collapses. A British study recently estimated that everyone could have ad-free Internet for something like $29 / mo. That would be a bargain, particularly when you realize it would also eliminate all the web poisoning by people trying to game the advertisers.

Good troll. I was really, really tempted to give you a "Funny" mod. Here's some kudos instead.

Pft. Not if we can get Elizabeth Warren to run!

She could have created that account and posts herself. I haven't seen a police report to back up the claim that she "notified authorities". She has previously been caught lifting someone else's art for use in her money-making efforts, as well as trolling 4-chan then claiming she didn't know anything about 4-chan. In short, she is not a credible figure.

Well, then it looks like her marketing campaign (because that's what this is) seems to be working. The YouTube comments don't look like anything worse than you can find on many YouTube videos - it has to be the most inane set of commenters anywhere on the Internet. The set of threats from the one Twitter account certainly justifies calling the authorities, but there is no evidence it is a real person and not part of her marketing campaign.

No doubt Romney's campaign used the term, but it was in widespread use long before then. Everything that I've read indicates that Hillary's primary campaign actually coined the term, so you might have a point that it was a campaign that promoted, but both of those were presidential campaigns, not "shady machinery of high-profile congressional campaigns."

You might be able to argue that "Death panels" was "engineered by the shady machinery of high-profile congressional campaigns" (Sarah Palin is credited with coining the term), but definitely not "Obamacare" (the media promoted that one), or "Birthers", which was certainly an organic meme, to describe people questioning Obama's origins. It's also a form of the "something-ers" form of describing a group (deniers, anti-vacciners, etc.), which as I recall sprang out of calling the 9/11 conspiracy theorists "truthers".

Actually, some of them (such as Joshua Halpern a.k.a. ‘Eli Rabett’) are paid directly by taxpayer funding to blog on places like realclimate.org. So, yes, there is a financial motivation.

As far as "well what's wrong with that if they are telling the truth", that always seems to be the go-to, but it apparently is only acceptable to trot out this defense for alarmists, and never for skeptics like Watt. The minor and late-to-the-game contribution from Heritage that alarmists use to beat Watt over the head with is nothing but a red herring and ad hominem used to distract from debate on the real issues anyway, and it pales in comparison to Peter Gleick's fraud and forging of documents to discredit his opponents.

Be that as it may, you seem to be under the impression that these guys have some interest in "truth" or "honesty", and that is simply not the case. As Gleick demonstrated, they have no interest in truth, and any will use any means to further their agenda. They are only interested in science when it supports that agenda, and when it doesn't they will throw out science and use other tactics instead. There are many examples of editing of comments on the site, decption and lies, etc., - there is no real discussion allowed. That's not surprising since it is run by Fenton Communications, run by David Fenton, an unapologetic anti-Semite and propagandist that would have made Goebbels proud.

The point of the site isn't even to promote science, it's to promote "consensus".

Exactly. Funny they mention Puppet, it's the default used in Red Hat's latest Dev Ops initiative, OpenShift.

Dude, the question was about Enterprise servers. Do your development on Mint, that's just fine, but are you really going to deploy your production enterprise application on a farm of ... Mint servers? really?

That sounds more like a methodology to me. The "belief system" part is only related to the value of the methodology. That's fine, but science itself is a methodology, as I think you have described here.

I certainly agree with your assessment of it, and that the methodology is the important thing to teach, not the facts or even thoroughly tested hypotheses. Everything flows from core principles. As you have done, you can describe your belief system as a faith in the scientific method. But that's something else.

There are, of course, some very clear opposing bases for belief systems in general, which often come down to faith in a higher power or faith only in empirical evidence. But you can pick either one and still do science.

Incorrect. You could have at least tried to check Wikipedia before posting ignorant comments. This is directly from their page (check the link if you want source references).

In its 2010 case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the United States Supreme Court overturned sections of the Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (also known as the McCain-Feingold Act) that had prohibited corporate and union political expenditures in political campaigns.[5] Citizens United made it legal for corporations and unions to spend from their general treasuries to finance independent expenditures related to campaigns, but did not alter the prohibition on direct corporate or union contributions to federal campaigns.[6][7] Organizations seeking to contribute directly to federal candidate campaigns must still rely on traditional PACs for that purpose.[8]

Stop getting your information from partisan comedians. It's an embarrassment.

Actually, it operates on exactly that principal. The owners and operators of the site are financially dependent on the ideas espoused in the articles, and are in fact publicity whores with more interest in popular opinion that truth.

Which is why I can't understand the myopic thinking around what to do about climate change. It seems the alarmists are adamant that the agenda should be to curtail use of energy by a combination of stopping use of fossil fuels, reduction of energy use generally, and limiting human habitat to allow conservation of wildlands. It's a "hunker-down" approach which, yes, may give humans more time. Yet, if, as they claim, it's human habitat (and thus future generations of humanity) that are in danger and need preserving, it seems clear that their strategy is one that will only buy time.

The only way to ensure the long-term viability of humanity is to spread. Whether that is colonization of space, the solar system, or multi-generational ships to other stars, is not entirely relevant, only that there must be an effort in that direction. Crawling back and tightening the apron strings to mother earth only means that humans will never grow up and leave the nest. Perhaps this is the civilization firewall that explains the Fermi paradox.