A wet tissue can win a debate amongst the Republican presidential candidates. It just needs to stay quiet.

When Rand is pitted against someone with real knowledge - he simply fails.

Yes, 98-2012 period was unexpected - for some unknown reason atmospheric heating got uncoupled from the ocean heating. So Antarctic melting intensified and Arctic ice loss skyrocketed while the general air temperature growth slowed (it has NOT stopped). The last couple of years the coupling has returned with a vengeance and we'll all be seeing its results soonish.

So yes, if you want to nitpick IPCC then you should provide context and full information. Not just convenient sound bites.

Uhm... I've been using front-loaders pretty much the whole life (and was shocked to find out that they are rare in the US) and I've never had a problem with mildew, except that one time when I left my clothes in the washer for one week. An empty run with a regular detergent fixed it (the clothes were ruined, though).

Detergent (and even good old soap) doesn't kill _all_ bacteria and spores, but it's pretty efficient in killing most of active bacteria and fungi (link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm... ). That's more than enough to delay the onset of mold long enough for the clothes to dry.

No, your washing machine turns on sometime during the night, in the morning you put your clothes on a clothes line (drier? what is it?) and go to work. By the evening your clothes are dry.

Are you a Markov-chain based nonsense generator?

For a couple of hours after being washed with a detergent? No, it doesn't.

People on Kauai, HI do this all the time - by setting a timer on a washing machine (electricity prices 8x the national average are a good motivator) . You can also pre-heat water during the nighttime or use solar water heaters during the day.

And why do you trust FreeBSD developers?

Thank you for demonstrating so succinctly that a text-based format can be utterly incomprehensible and there are no real downsides for a well-designed binary format.

Uhm... Have you actually LOOKED at FreeBSD? It's even more aggressive than systemd in pulling dependencies into the core tree!

You've just described BusyBox - it's been with us for about 15 years. Yet the sky hasn't fallen.

"Must be an ordinary text file" - is that a law of nature? Why should it be a text file?

Oh, and systemd does not delete bad log files. It simply rotates them, preserving corrupted files from any further corruption.

Nuclear weapon EMP is greatly exaggerated.

A rule of thumb is, if your devices are affected by an EMP of a nuclear explosion and you're not inside a bunker/tank/whatever then you shouldn't worry about it. Because you're dead.

Besides, even the largest solar flares won't produce much magnetic flux to affect anything less than grid-size. Remember, flares themselves do not produce magnetic field themselves, they affect the Earth's geomagnetic field instead.

Air conditioning is pretty efficient. A 3kW (electric) unit can provide about 6kW (thermal) of cooling power which should be enough for most houses in most of the US during the night. And during the day you can use the nice friendly Sun to power your air conditioner directly.