Why? In large part because it was an easier migration from OS/2 to XP than to anything else, that's why.

And OS/2 was there because in the late 1980s and early 1990s IBM was backing it and the other available choice was SCO Unix.

The top is the President, unless someone has evidence he gave an order to stop the spying and it was disobeyed.

Oh? Has the NSA defied a direct Presidential order?

If and when Obama, head of the Executive Branch, tells the NSA to stop collecting, and they keep collecting anyway, then we can start talking about how the NSA is only beholden to its own agenda.

In the meantime, there's no reason at all to believe the buck does not stop with the President. This is not "NSA spying" any more than that the war in Iraq was the "Department of Defense's war".

No.

It's not like Obama has issued an order for the NSA to stop domestically collecting metadata right now. If he did that and the NSA kept collecting, then there would be an issue about whether the NSA was "by nature beyond oversight".

Rather, what we have here is the NSA doing what the President has told them they can do. Pretending the NSA is a rogue agency is simply letting the person in charge - the President - off the hook.

The atmosphere is, on the books, $0 in assets. That doesn't mean you can phase out use of the atmosphere and not wreck the economy. Imagine how much damage the economy would take if you stopped people from using the atmosphere and instead required that they acquire necessary gasses from non-atmospheric sources.

Scotland will still be part of the EU,

No, it won't still be a part of the EU. As a newly-independent state, it does not inherit membership in any limited-membership treaties. Scotland will have to petition for admission to any such it wishes to join, including the EU. It will then, under EU rules, have to get the unanimous consent of all EU members to join the EU.

I know the SNP says otherwise; the SNP is spouting nonsense.

Now, it's highly likely that the EU will be willing to let it in. However, there's no way it'll be let in without satisfying the rest of Europe on entry conditions.

This is why, in fact, there's no major question on what currency Scotland will use at all. It will either use the Euro from day one or use a local currency locked in the ERM II with the auto-glidepath to joining the Euro, because agreeing to do that will be a condition of joining the EU (nobody has any reason to give the Scots a way to take the Swedish dodge).

Scotland will not get any of the Thatcher-negotiated rebate, because none of the members of the EU have any reason to give it any part; the real wrangling will be between UK-EWNI and France on how much of the Scottish-proportional portion the UK keeps and how much is eliminated.

Scotland will at the same time assume a proportional portion of the British debt, because every EU member looking at its own separatist movement and its own debt will want to make the point to their separatists that independence won't mean escape.

I mean, Kerry's the guy who as Senator led the charge to kill the Integral Fast Reactor back in '94, easily making him one of the 100 people alive in the world today who are personally most responsible for carbon emissions. So, when the fucking asshole talks about the threat of climate change, is he bragging about his role in causing it?

Yes, I know. Reminds me of Micrografx Mirrors and WLO.

Wayland's an effort to stuff a pointless layer of abstraction underneath X on Linux in order to make performance worse and debugging more difficult.

(Yes, yes, they say it's an effort to replace X. But look at how they're doing the compatibility with X - running a full X server on Wayland in order to run X apps. Then look at how much effort they've put into making Wayland portable to other varieties of *nix.)

It wouldn't be a "publicly acceptable reason" if it didn't have plausibility at a first glance.

The question, then, is if any of the reasons given actually have any merit, as opposed to mere plausibility. Which would require someone to come up with an example of when a CLA actually saved a project, or a lack of a CLA actually killed a project.

The basis is that Nokia is a bunch of idiots that actually tried to do manufacturing in India, showing all the judgment they did when they went with Windows Phone as a platform.

See, India's intelligentsia, by and large, doesn't like manufacturing. It might be necessary to some degree, but, offered a chance to replicate Taiwan or China's success by starting with cheap manufacturing, they'd decline. They want to jump straight ahead to a service/software economy via education rather than pass through an intermediate step of actually making physical things. So the basic self-interested counterbalances that you'd see elsewhere ("But we need to learn from Nokia so we can do this!" or "We need to treat Nokia well so others will build plants here too!") are weakened.

So, there's going to be a new owner for the factory, and thus there's an opportunity to extract protection money. After all, it's not like India wants manufacturing anyway.

Well, mostly, because this way people don't send me fundraising letters.

. . . I saw this headline and expected to see something about the use of lead and mercury in attacks on commercial shipping.

Oh, yeah, that's Heinlein, all right, as exemplified by his very next book, Stranger in a Strange Land.

Look, Robert Heinlein was a writer of speculative fiction. The whole damn point was to extrapolate, odd consequences included. Which is why you get such radically different results (Double Star, Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, for example, all having completely incompatible takes on modern democracy) depending on what premises Heinlein was playing with at the time.

Ideally making the point to the thoughtful reader that the reader's society and that society's accepted theories, conscious and unconscious, are just as guilty of absurdities as those explored in the books. But some readers are too dense to notice that, and some are so invested in the propriety of their absurdities that they abandon all rational thought in their defensive denouncements.

Kinda-sorta. In this context, they mean the known type of neutrinos, at high energy (and thus mass), as opposed to an undiscovered WIMP.

There are all sorts of issues with this, especially when you get into which is why undiscovered WIMPs are favored.