Possible, but seems unlikely. Every species has that level of hysteria? And what about the species born early enough in the universe's history that they didn't have much reason to worry about the Filter?

The simplicity of "form follows function" is really all you need to know. But keep up with the "simplicity is an anathema in your book" hooey; it's kinda funny.

Probably because partner videos and claimed videos tend to use Flash even on PCs set to use HTML5.

While this is really neat, it is yet more of the accumulating evidence that there are no substantial barriers to intelligent life arising or even arising in the early universe. This suggests that something is wiping out civilizations, possibly something the civilizations themselves all do. This problem is known as the Great Filter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter (Strictly speaking the Filter is whatever makes massive, interstellar, civilizations apparently rare, but it looks like most of the Filter really is at or beyond our rough tech level.) The Great Filter could be nuclear war, or epidemics, or biological warfare, or bad nanotech, or possibly something we haven't even thought of that comes completely out of left field. But the evidence for it is growing. This is scary.

Without Flash, what's the preferred way to deploy vector animations of the sort seen on Homestar Runner, Weebl's Stuff, Newgrounds, Dagobah, and Albino Blacksheep, without bloating them by a factor of 10 by rendering them to WebM?

That depends. Do you live in a country where Google's Music Key service is available?

Something worth considering. We associate snow with cold, so it's tempting to see more and frequent snowstorms as disproof that the planet is warning. However temperature is only one of the constraints on snow. The other is moisture.

I have lived here in Boston over fifty years, and in the 60s and 70s the December climate was bitterly cold and *bone dry*. In recent decades there has been a marked tendency toward warmer AND wetter Decembers and Januaries, and thus frequent significant snow storms in December (almost unheard of) and January (rare until the 90s).

This storm was particularly intense, and in my town got two feet or more. This has happened on six prior occasions, once in 1888, and five times since 1969.

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Oh, far from it!
[tasteless_joke] I'd rather put all government employees in work camps [/tasteless_joke]
By which I really mean to say, if you're just going to ascribe ambitions to me wantonly, why not go big?

If one enjoys teaching, is it really work?

Are you asserting that government employees should work for free? Wouldn't that be, essentially, stealing their labor from them? A shockingly immoral thought.

Are you referring to?

For example, cannibalism and child molestation are two taboos that remain substantially beyond the pale.

What marriage issue? Marriage remains marriage, despite the liars. The real bummer on the equality front is that the analysis has not arrived at the libertarian realization that marriage should not be a province of the state, period.
Instead, we have the spectacle of one definition of 'Morality' being supplanted by another, and you sanctimoniously pretending that it's not an equal and opposite imposition. [golf clap]

More generally, Vivaldi wrote more than forty operas. Which, I think is the actual reference - he founded/wrote Opera.

I don't even see the code. All I see is blonde, brunette, redhead...

Suck it youngsters!

I live in Virginia Beach and still have a copper POTS line with Verizon -- my TV and internet are via coax from Cox. Having copper has it's advantages, like (1) still working in an extended power outage, (2) not having to pay for the replacement battery in the eMTA modem and (3) being able to get phone service from third-party provider. Once you switch to FiOS or simply phone over fiber, you're stuck having to use Verizon over that media and they will *not* ever switch you back to copper.

During one of the last bad hurricanes that caused an extended power outage of a few days, copper landlines were of the few working phones (land or wireless) in my neighborhood / area. I've only been w/o phone service *once* here since 1985, when the power when out across the city for over a week after a hurricane, when the Verizon generators finally ran out of fuel.

There'd be precedent for that in the European Union. England had a law in effect from 1571 through 1597 to make failure to wear a British-made wool cap in public a crime.