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.

It's an analogy.

Taiwan is an island. It wouldn't matter if the People's Republic of China, Republic of China, United States, and United Nations all deny it is one; it clearly is surrounded on all sides by water. "According to who?" is a pointless question; it's an observable fact. If the PRC, ROC, US, and UN all denied it, it would simply mean they're all denying reality.

Similarly, Taiwan is a sovereign nation. It doesn't matter if the People's Republic of China, Republic of China, United States, and United Nations all deny it is one; it clearly is not actually under the control of China or anyone else and just as clearly is not in control of the mainland. "According to who?" is a pointless question; it's an observable fact. That the PRC, ROC, US, and UN all deny it simply means they're all denying reality.

Possible, yes, it just seems less likely than the existence of WIMPs.

The trouble is the Bullet Cluster lensing pretty much requires non-visible matter, even with the theories that assume relativity is wrong at large scales. It seems you can reconcile TeVeS with the Bullet Cluster using lots of neutrinos instead of WIMPs, but then when you plug that sort of neutrino abundance in TeVeS, you apparently get other inconsistencies elsewhere.

(Now, apparently STVG manages to handle the Bullet Cluster and galactic rotational curves without WIMPs . . . it'll be interesting to see what happens when people poke at that a bit more.)

Maybe. Physics does have people working that line (TeVeS with massive neutrinos to explain the Bullet Cluster, Moffat's STVG). But WIMPs still are considered the most likely candidate.

Even if the PRC, ROC, US, and UN all declared Taiwan a peninsula, it wouldn't change the fact that it is an island.

Wait, you want to abolish the police?