No, you ban it. The people that then lose their ill-gotten plantations can go pick cotton. They can consider themselves lucky that they aren't punished more directly.

The north even had slavery at an earlier point in history. Plenty of blame for slavery all around.

But the Civil War still boils down to slavery.

Again, I agree - but it doesn't make it any more moral to keep piling debt up for our children. The debt is a bigger travesty than overtaxing.

By "taking away their property"? Please...

There was no moral duty to prop up a fundamentally corrupt way of exploiting people.

Unless you are talking about the sex trade, there is nothing even close to approaching what was happening in the US South in the 1850s.

Slavery may not have been the direct reason cited for Southern succession, but it was most definitely the cause. Remove slavery and you have no motivation for any of the other stuff. Slavery was a major political football at the time, forcing even the admission of new states to be forced around the issue. Succession only became a real possibility once it became clear that free states would dominate the slave states politically. The South certainly had other grievances, but even collectively they don't add up to succession.

People are exactly the same as they were 150 years ago. I imagine the exact same thing would happen: Texas would declare itself independent. There would be a thorny issue of a bunch of federal property still in Texas. For a short time, there would be an uneasy peace as the Texans tolerated US forces within their borders. Eventually, someone would do something aggressive and you would have war.

I have to agree. I tend to fall on the "reduce spending" side of things - but top priority should be balancing the damn books.

He's got a bad case of verbal diarhea and a love of hearing himself write. He is not insightful; he's a blow-hard.

Nonaya eggheads is gonna last through the zombies, man.

I think the article is firmly tongue in cheek. There is no practical use here, but it is a fun way to teach some fundamentals of geometry and statistics.

Each time I watch a two-hour movie on the 6W device, it uses around 43 kJ. On the 120W device a two-hour movie uses 864 kJ - a delta of 821 kJ per movie. Given the 2000MJ number you provide, that's over 2400 2-hour movies until break-even... might be my lifetime total.

You need to take it up with Dr. Seuss! :)

Gnome has become an abysmal piece of drek not worth the effort of spitting on. The only reason I ever use it is because some configuration options for various distros are only released for the Gnome desktops on those distros. I use KDE day to day, with the sole exception of the Rhythmbox music player (which itself is just a "lesser of evils" choice -- every Linux music player I've tried sucks in some way or other.)

Gnome 2 was usable. I liked Gnome 2. I would have happily stuck with Gnome 2 and reasonable enhancements to it.

But nooooooo, the development team for the Gnome project knew "better" than everyone else how a computer should operate. They totally screwed the power user with Gnome 3, creating an unholy abortion that doesn't work well with mouse and keyboard and doesn't work well with a touchscreen. It is the worst of "both worlds", and even implements a number of widget metaphors that testing showed people didn't like as far back as 1990.

The Gnome dev team is full of egotistical idiots, and I, for one, can't wait to see them all hit the curb.

The software is open source. If the project dies, the useful bits will be picked up and forked, and all the drek they've shoved down user's throats can wither away and die a horrible, painful, screaming death as far as I'm concerned.

Now you are talking past me as well.

If a project has no users, what matter is it which license it uses?

I think you are talking past one another. Much of the interest in LLVM has come at the expense of GCC. So while GCC is not "abandoning" the GPL, certainly there seems to be a certain flow in actual users toward less-restrictive licenses. I have personally been affected by this, choosing FreeBSD rather than Linux for my server because of ZFS.

I think the nationalism is a hard-learned lesson from long ago... other than some dry academic reasons, there is little tying the entire US together. While there is plenty of anti-immigrant sentiment in the US, I think the strong vein of pro-immigration comes from a blunt reality: the majority of people can directly trace back one or more ancestors who came from another country. Anyone who wants to tie themselves nationalistically to the Statue of Liberty only has to be told that it has a pro-immigration slogan as one of it's most prominent features. It's also self-sustaining... once 10% or so of the population is an immigrant for a long period of time, it becomes normal. More importantly, it becomes impossible to become nostalgic for the "good old days" before immigration. Even the anti-immigrant sentiment that you get today is more anti-Hispanic than anything else.

I have no doubt that other countries have a more progressive attitude towards sex equality, but that wasn't what I was addressing. That's why I added the disclaimer to my comment about not knowing how history will judge us.