What's so damned special about relationships? If it's about equality, then tell me, why does a childless married couple pay less in tax than a widow with a child who earns the same as the couple? I'd say the widow's relationship to the child matters to society, the couple's relationship doesn't matter to anyone but them.

Why is it legal to discriminate on the basis of marriage?

Why does any government in a secular country have anything at all to do with marriage?

A large proportion of the time it ends with MS sending patches. On Patch Tuesday the damned thing is useless for an hour sometimes. Other times I have to reboot it to make it usable.

Windows: "Quality? Why make a quality product when crap sells so well?"

That's the coward's way out, using drugs, where 90% of your synthesis has been done for you by already by some Big Pharma company selling pseudoephedrine to people who need to clear their noses.

"Now get me my phenylacetic acid... bitch!"

For that to work you need actual hard rules that everyone can agree on.

Sure, electricians and plumbers disagree around the edges (ask a plumber about sharkbite if you want to lose a few hours of your life) but there's a huge chunk that's accepted practice for good, demonstrable and easily definable reasons.

Software is still the wild west, and we're still figuring out how to do it properly.

Yup, Cisco and Microsoft are all about this.

Give your local college a shit tonne of free network gear, heavily subsidize CCNA material/testing, totally worth it when a college basically turns their networking course into a Cisco networking course and everyone who graduates leans towards Cisco products going forward (at least initially in their career).

Indeed, comes down to what you want out of your system. Also update frequency isn't as important as the software you choose to run. I happen to mostly use stable stuff that doesn't change much: openbox+xfce for wm, mplayer, and palemoon specifically because I got tired of firefox adding shit I didn't want and taking away stuff I did. I use gentoo and generally do an update every few weeks, but it's been awhile since I did an update and anything radically changed.

With my servers it's much the same story. Most of the stuff I'm using (apache, postgres, nfs, etc..) has been stable for some time, so though I do an update every few weeks, very little changes.

On the other hand, if I was using the latest ubuntu and kde/gnome and vlc and firefox and all that, every update would probably entirely change my system. One day I'd launch firefox and find out that the URL bar was now on the bottom or something to make way for a big facebook widget and my program menu would disappear because gnome decided that Microsoft was on to something when they eliminated the start menu and providing too many options in a list like that was confusing to users.

The problem stems from the currency. The EU consists of sovereign states that are not bound together as tightly as states in the U.S., but their economies are now coupled by the Euro.

Can you imagine if places like South Carolina and Mississippi had to pay California back all the money they receive in federal funding from California taxpayers? They'd have to throw up their hands and start using Confederate dollars again.

As a geek who uses Gentoo, I find extra dependencies means extra stuff to break down the road. Anything relating to media or desktop environments is still very much in flux, and I've found when something goes wrong on an update, it's almost always some gnome or kde library that some random package pulled in for the print dialog or some media lib (I wish ffmpeg and libav would kiss and make up..).

These days I avoid gnome completely (systemd caused a lot of headaches, and most of them tied back to gnome somehow, and even before that gnome was a fairly common update breaker), and am hesitant to install things with direct dependencies on kde.

Obviously on more user-friendly distros this is probably a lot less of an issue, even less so if you just use things in the default configuration, but if you like to do things your own way, avoiding boatloads of dependencies to make one thing work is definitely a good idea imo.

Indeed, k3b used to be elegantly simple.. then they added the bloat.

And CD burning is one of those things that is a huge hassle to do from the command line because it involves multiple steps with intermediary files and long chains of options. It's one of the few things where I just want some basic GUI where I can add a bunch of files and click a "burn these to a CD please" button and let it sort it all out.

Figures; in the U.S., party affiliation is the most reliable predictor of one's opinion about global warming, but if you dare suggest around here that someone's opinion is influenced by politics, you get modded to hell.

And just as I predicted (and got troll-modded for saying), conservatives are already pretending this paper says something it doesn't, and spinning a new zombie lie:

NewsMax: Researchers: Earth Facing Imminent Ice Age

It's a pretty bold assertion to claim that increasing the concentration of one of the atmosphere's most optically active constituents by 30% won't have any significant consequences on temperature.

Do you have anything to back that up, other than your political leanings? What makes you believe that rising CO2 is not a significant problem, and what is it that you understand about CO2 and the history of climate on planet Earth that physicists and climatologists don't?

I had occipital lobe epilepsy (i.e. in the visual cortex), and while seizures began with visual hallucinations, I was never susceptible to flashing lights. There was no response to them even on an EEG.

The strangest case of a trigger I ever heard was the woman who had seizures every time she heard the voice of Mary Hart on Entertainment Tonight.

Can you imagine solar irradiance falling by 60% over 30 years?

Radiance is proportional to the fourth power of temperature. That's a huge dependence, so timothy and sycodon have got that going for them. Even so, we know the temperature of the photosphere is 5777 K. Since 5777 * (1 - sqrt(sqrt(1-0.6))) / (2030 - 2015) = 80, that implies an 80 degree drop every year across the entire sun, which would have been noticed a long time ago.

These two are skeptical that Earth's atmosphere might be several degrees warmer decades from now, and they're ready to back that up with a claim that the sun's entire atmosphere is cooling down 80 degrees every year.

And they cite a paper that didn't imply that at all. What are these guys smoking?

Uh, your very argument is a prime example of how modern politics seems to be working.