They burn something like 99% of their takeoff weight just to get to orbit. Their biggest cargo is their own fuel.

Where's the research on mass drivers/railguns, or tethers, or any of the "scifi" types of propulsion?

Slate's columnists not only demand that we accept the most apocalyptic interpretation of the data as gospel (scientists are not used to using terms like 'believe' and 'denier', but okay, the Maoists take taken over the issue)

Again, you're painting with a broad brush, and you seem to have no idea what the people you're talking about actually believe in. I'm a scientist, I don't vote, I'm a libertarian on most issues, and I'm pessimistic about our ability to actually do anything about global warming, but I still think the so-called skeptics are lying sacks of shit. Most scientists I know feel the same way, not because we're committed to some utopian vision of. . . cap-and-trade legislation? - but because we hate seeing paid shills distort the evidence and accuse our entire community of bad faith. It's the same reason that creationism drives us batty.

but that we automatically reject every proposed solution. We're all going to die, because that's the just fate Gaia intends for us as punishment for being fat and eating meat. We can't go nuclear to eliminate carbon! We can't bioengineer better crops!

Okay, time to back that up: when has Slate published screeds against a) meat-eating, b) nuclear power, c) bioengineering? I know for certain that they've run multiple articles in support of bioengineering, and I can remember at least one or two making fun of vegetarians. And it's not like you need to look very far to find a "left" outlet supporting your favored policies; the New Yorker just ran a very critical article about an anti-GMO activist that basically ended with the statement that only bioengineering would save the world.

What I would really like to see is a leftist site that reclaims the spirit of Roosevelt. If we have problems like climate change, energy shortage, war and poverty, let's attack them by building the giant public infrastructure projects that Steinbeck waxed so lyrical about. An energy independence Apollo would address all of these problems at once.

Liberals have been talking about this idea for years, usually by analogy to the Manhattan Project rather than Apollo. You don't see it getting wider reporting because everyone with a brain realizes that it has a snowball's chance in hell of getting through Congress.

yes, Slate's columnists seem to have sensed that the anti-vaxers have crossed a line in their Luddism

You're still grappling with a straw man. Slate writers have repeatedly denounced anti-vaxxers in fairly strong terms, and I have yet to see a single article taking the opposing view. More generally, they've been strongly anti-pseudoscience. You're assuming bad faith by making it sound like Slate has only grudgingly decide that there's a limit to their left-wing lunacy, rather than being firmly opposed to such nonsense on principle. If their "readership" really consisted of hardcore Luddites why would the editors consistently go out of their way to piss them off? Besides, you find find people saying stupid shit on virtually any Web forum - every Slashdot post about creationism inevitably attracts a slew of pissed-off religious fundamentalists, but I don't go around complaining that Slashdot's readership consists of superstitious morons.

Over in 1. Was going to post the same thing.

PS Redhat, you're not a desktop OS, you don't need hotplugging automounting USB webcams or eleventy config files and a giant daemon to start things, you need them to be stable and simple and manageable.

their No Nukes anti-vax GMO-free science illiterate readership.

Uh, which readership would that be? I've been reading Slate almost daily for a while now, and they've been very consistently against the anti-vaxxers and, to a lesser extent, haven't had much sympathy for the anti-GMO crowd either. They even employ Phil Plait, who rarely misses an opportunity to denounce scientific illiteracy. Perhaps you confused them with Salon?

To the bridge of Khazad-dum!

Oh, you said BALOG...

It's not a bad idea, provided that there's no concept of a conversation. There's no negotiating or acknowledgement that needs to happen, simply a car announcing what it's doing.

Baking in more than this to the spec or implementation will only fuck it up.

Everyone immediately disables SELinux, and people need to reinvent how they manage the system, all for no real return, unless you're one of the .1% who those technologies are targeted at. Make your system normal Unix, not weird Unix, and people will stay interested. Companies don't like moving targets.

Climate has always changed, the concept of "Damage" is only relevant to those affected by it. But lets pretend that they're the same thing, because it will gather more clicks.

Blimey, in about 1998 this old guy from the Jo-Hos knocked on my door and presented me with some literature including something about how "all scientists" believe in god, especially the Great Fred Hoyle, so God must be there.

It also said that "scientists are telling us" about this vast, untapped wealth of hydrocarbon deposits on the deep sea beds in the form of these methane thingy-ma-bobs, so God had provided us with all the energy we'll ever need. He's a great guy that God dude! He didn't mention atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and global warning, though.

So, the Jo-Hos are right. God is really there! And we will never run out of energy!

Slackware does things The Right Way(TM). I've been using it since 1995 as my main distro with a brief detour into SLAMD64 in 2007 when I bought a 64-bit AMD and Slackware was still x86-32.

I've had the misfortune to have to suffer Debian. RedHat/CentOS, Ubuntu and Arago for work over the years, but Slackware is the best. Everything I've learned from Slackware has empowered me to be productive with all of those other distributions.

why?

Learning a language that comes from a completely different school of thought (i.e. "paradigm") will give you a far larger perspective than only having learned one language or family of languages. For example, if all you ever saw was C++, Java and C# your world view would be extremely limited. Someone who has learned a little FORTH, LISP and Smalltalk, not to mention various assembly languages, would be an order of magnitude more productive than you, produce fewer bugs and be able to think of more good solutions to difficult problems.

If all you ever do is write GUIs for the corporate Oracle or MS database, then stay in your C# paradise.

But they don't have to make new hardware that "runs all past stuff" because the other 999,999 people out of a a million will simply buy the new one.

Whose to blame here?

One day Slashdot is fellating Amazon and Google for their Cloudiness, the next they're accused of corporate evil for being Walmart-A or Walmart-B.

The only thing I see is a consistent bias towards and demand for free crap. Are there any adults on Slashdot anymore?

It's a product of its times - with many more "computer science" people in the field, math says you're much more likely to run across crappy ones than you were before. (Not a bell curve issue, the bad ones are more memorable) Add in the H1B headwobble factor, and you have a lot of shitty java code, doing things because it can not because it should. Add in a corporate culture where time to market trumps reliability or maintainability, and you have a management philosophy that rewards the above behaviors.
Java is shitty because the world has turned.