Well, I do believe that Emacs has C-x M-c M-fixcat, but if you're looking for veterinary software specifically, instead of a PUSS (Primordial Universal Sapience Simulator), VIA appears to come highly recommended--at least by their marketing materials.

On the other hand, you might want to drop the SOAP.

It's late. I should probably sleep.

Hats off to you! Holy shit, you managed to do the impossible. Folks, get out your checkbooks! I won't get into the middle of the AGW debate itself, but rather your huge gaping logical error:

First, you state that the effects are "almost surely completely unpredictable". Then you make a prediction, drawing the conclusion that the effects are "quite likely insignificant". For fucks sake, if you don't have a model with good predictive power, you certainly can't draw any "quite likely" conclusions. Your proper response should have been that "the effects are unknown" if no model exists with good predictive power.

Insofar as that statement isn't gibberish (that is: not very far) it's anti-science.

Here's a question for you: is it a "scientific fact" that the impact of an extraterrestrial body occurred at the KT boundary and cause the mass extinction associated with that world-wide discontinuity in the geological record?

A fair majority of scientists concerned with the question certainly think so. But there are some notable hold-outs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

People whose area of expertise is directly relevant to the question at hand, who bring up cogent if not compelling counter-arguments, alternative interpretations of the evidence, facts that appear to be in contradiction to the impact theory, and so on.

Yet they don't have a crowd of anti-scientific loud-mouths calling them "Denialists" or accusing them of being shills for "Big Paleontology."

They sometimes get into heated discussions at scientific meetings, but that's the way science works: there is no limit on the questions we can ask and if we have evidence and Bayesian argument we get a seat at the table, no matter how wigged out the ideas might seem ab initio.

Only in the area of AGW has the arena become a completely political one, where anti-scientific loudmouths compete with shills for Big Hydrocarbon, and everyone ignores the serious question, which is: given its almost certain human activity is adding about 0.25% to the Earth's energy budget (1.6 W/m**2) and we have almost no idea how the climate will respond to that (despite what climatologists sometimes claim about their unphysical models) how do we best respond?

There is a loud and well-funded contingent who believe in "abstinence only" solutions, despite those having failed in every other case they have been applied to (drugs, alcohol, contraception...)

There are green-energy people promoting solar, wind, algal biodeisel, biomass, and other carbon-neutral forms of energy generation and storage.

There are people working on better battery tech (Heinlein's "shipstones").

There are people saying we should seriously consider nuclear power as the only currently known working alternative to base-load coal.

There are people saying we should investigate geo-engineering to stablize CO2 levels.

And there are people saying that since we don't know what is going to happen we should do nothing (see: Shills for Big Hydrocarbon, above)

All of that important stuff in the middle gets drowned out by the anti-scientific loud-mouths and bullies allied with the first and last of those groups, who do nothing but spew gibberish like "climate change is a scientific fact" as if that added something to the debate rather than helped to quell the debate we should be having.

"Scientific literacy" is not or should not be knowledge of discoveries, but a willingness to practice the discipline (not method) that is science: the discipline of testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference. If you aren't practicing that discipline, you are almost certainly an enemy of science, because that is the natural state of the human mind.

All of these words need entries:

You're not under arrest. You're being detained. Russia or the US?

Target. (You're not being targeted, you're just being incidentally collected.)

War. (When did Congress declare the last one?)

I managed to miss that in the news, but it's absolutely a load of bullshit and it needs to go. Just in case anyone else missed it like I did:

From NDR:

From NDR:

Oh, and a sample of the rules. Do you read Linux Journal?

// START_DEFINITION /*
These variables define terms and websites relating to the TAILs (The Amnesic
Incognito Live System) software program, a comsec mechanism advocated by
extremists on extremist forums.
*/

$TAILS_terms=word('tails' or 'Amnesiac Incognito Live System') and word('linux'
or ' USB ' or ' CD ' or 'secure desktop' or ' IRC ' or 'truecrypt' or ' tor ');
$TAILS_websites=('tails.boum.org/') or ('linuxjournal.com/content/linux*'); // END_DEFINITION // START_DEFINITION /*
This fingerprint identifies users searching for the TAILs (The Amnesic
Incognito Live System) software program, viewing documents relating to TAILs,
or viewing websites that detail TAILs.
*/
fingerprint('ct_mo/TAILS')=
fingerprint('documents/comsec/tails_doc') or web_search($TAILS_terms) or
url($TAILS_websites) or html_title($TAILS_websites); // END_DEFINITION

I'm not entirely sure what you're suggesting about the Post, Bezos, the CIA, and the NSA ("CARRIER LOST..." Now that that's out of our system, let's continue.) in relation to each other and over what turf, but they're saying "not nice" things about the NSA in 24kt gold words.

With their track record? Care? Scrupulous care? Insert incredulity here.

For bonus points, try searching that page for the word 'illegal' or 'unlawful'. You will not find it. Words containing 'legal' appear only twice. The use of 'lawful' occurs once, in 'lawfully', where they claim:

So, they don't lawfully qualify as being targeted. So it's not actually targeting is what they're arguing. (Also, a load of BS.)

Your assignment is a load of BS. A PR spin piece can say lots of things, but the headline and the top of the fold is where most readers stop. Anything more than a quick skim is unlikely--and you are prime evidence of that. You didn't even get TFH. Even worse, you didn't read the first sentence.

Now, that word... explicit. I don't think it means what you think it means. Did you mean IMPLICIT?

It says that ordinary internet users (Americans and others) outnumber legally targeted foreigners. At no point does that sentence explicitly state that Americans were targeted illegally. It merely says that ordinary users outnumber "legally targeted foreigners". It DOES NOT state that collection was considered to be illegal for Americans. You can infer that all target collection on foreigners that was not legal was illegal, but it doesn't state whether or not Americans having their data collected was illegal.

What you're doing is making an inference from something implied by that statement.

Now shut the fuck up and go away already until you learn to read. FFS...

You mean to say you didn't read the headline--which was the first reference of only two. That's some real close reading there.

You're agreeing with me. Note how I put "untargeted" in quotes...

We have two? I only see one from here...

The amount of spin applied to the article is incredible. It reads like a propaganda piece designed to have snippets quoted out of context. Good soundbites.

Which appears to imply that we only target foreigners... Since Americans are "untargeted" they don't deserve a mention.

And then they never balance out that "At one level" until three paragraphs later.

Then, they spend most of the article on a fucking fluff piece about the content of some romantic messages. What the fuck is this shit?

PR spin piece, through and through. They managed to ruin an actual news story.

I use Python both professionally and for fun (and C and C++ professionally) and don't get this impression at all. Major upgrades to shipped languages take time. The willingness to impose one-time incompatible changes for the sake of long-term improvements takes guts, and can certainly go wrong, but can very well be worth it.

As someone who worked in C and C++ pre-standardization, I recall (perhaps erroneously) that the new standards broke a fair bit of existing code, albeit in minor ways. And of course Microsoft's broken C++ compiler in Visual Studio 6 resulted in a vast amount of borken code when they finally caught up to the rest of the world.

That said, I haven't moved to Python 3 yet, although I believe all the libraries I really care about have now migrated. I tend toward late-adoption, though, and my sense of the Python community is that everyone accepts we are eventually going to move to 3. Big changes take years, so it's no surprise that lots of developers are still on 2.x. The real watershed will be when a few major libs (wxPython, say) drops 2.x support.

In contrast, my impression of Perl 6 is that it's the language of the future, and always will be. It appears so different from Perl 5 that it's a little weird the same name is being used, and it has mostly resulted in sucking the oxygen out of Perl 5 development.

Reading between the lines, it looks like it is a thin layer of mixed carbon and hydrogen with a structure that they have not yet properly characterized but which they have shown has the properties required for transparent electrodes in solar cells.

Specifically, they say the properties of the layer can be controlled by the properties of the polymer they start with, which suggests that it partakes in the polymer's nature, which would mean it is more than just a single layer of carbon atoms.

They may be being cautious and simply saying it is "graphene-like-enough" for this application, but having not fully characterized it may not want to claim it is "truly" graphene, which is a fairly vague term for a variety of single-sheet carbon materials that may have a variety of defects, in just the same was as "paper" is also fairly vague (from tissue to construction.)

No, but Rpy can.

I've used R, and it really has a lot of strong points, but I prefer to access it these days via Rpy, which gives me all the power of R along with everything else I get from Python (other libraries, better application development frameworks, etc.)

Both R and Python are real programming languages that are going to be completely useless to non-programmers, so neither of them is a SAS replacement, but of the two, I'd choose Python+Rpy over R for flexibility, power and ease of use (the latter is of course a strongly personal preference... if you really think like a traditional stats geek R will likely seem nicer, as it is clearly created for and by such people.)