And first most important greenhouse gas is water vapor. Regardless of the truth of AGW, it is not immediately obvious that smog in cities indicates or leads to a significant effect in the atmosphere. I believe in AGW but let's not claim the climate science is easy to understand or obvious. This is why I get angry when AGWers equate those that disbelieve in AGW with creationists; the principles behind evolution are much easier and more intuitive to understand than climate science is.

you shouldn't have been downloading engineering diagrams linked from 12(and under)chan.

Note that many modern file systems use journaling or copy-on-write, both of which have the effect that writing to the same file does not necessarily write to the same block. DBAN takes care of this problem, though.

Depends on the circumstance. Yes it is hard to download 10,00 child porn images and over 40 hours of videos. One image however? I am pretty sure there is more going on here than just this one image. Was he suspected of something else? Someone really not like him? Was he a thorn in someones side? The FBI knows they have better things to do, especially if it took them a year to knock on his door. They could have only known about him downloading that image when he downloaded it most likely from a trap. If it was mislabeled and downloaded from an FBI server set up to find people downloading these images I would be all over an entrapment case like I might have to go to jail for 20 years. He would be best served however by not going public about this because if he does go to jail and someone recognizes him, well that wont make you any friends.

Politics drives it. In the US, no politician dares look soft on crime. Advocating ridiculously long sentences is a quick and easy way to bolster an image. And failing to be tough is an even quicker way to end a political career. Huckabee is getting flak because one man he let out early has shot and killed 4 police officers. Type "Dukakis" into a search engine and one of the first things that shows up is Willie Horton.
You are half right. Looking tough on crime never hurts, on the other hand, most people would agree that unsupervised furloughs for people spending life in prison for murder may not be the best idea(thus William Horton).

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The government isn't likely to snap and go postal with me as an innocent bystander.
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Oh, how utterly wrong you are. Why not ask the 22-year old man being sent to prison over this? He's an innocent bystander to.

Running C++ in a browser app? Can't see that one blowing up in anyone's face.

Of course, the big probale is you need a language that can be made to run in a very secure sandbox. Java, python, and related languages could be made to do so with some work. They run on VM's or have an interpreter. But C++? If you're talking about creating a new implementation that runs in an interpreted/virtualized/sandboxed environment and has built-in memory management thrown in, then that might be a possibility. But then again, why would you want to do that when there are so many other ones out there.

~X~

Sun is also making a JWebPane which will be Java port of WebKit. First as part of JavaFX, but it will be an actual Swing component.