Perhaps those with "half a functioning brain" do in fact treat their assumptions as facts. Especially when the assumptions agree with their prejudices.

The rest of us, i.e. those with a fully functioning brain, allow for multiple possible scenarios - at least until there's some proof to narrow them down.

If you have to factor in parking tickets into cost/benefit analysis, you are doing it wrong.

So you did the smart thing, right?
-bought from BB
-ordered from amazon
-got it from amazon.
-returned the one from BB

"grunt" means soil in russian.

Nonsense. I've never heard of college dorm where they clean your room for free.

Library

is where you can browse and read on impulse. With the added benefit of not having to pay for it. I don't remember the last time I bought a book which was not a textbook or children book (for my children that is)

This one isn't:

You missed the part where AMD has devs working on the open driver as well.

As for the rest of your rant, everyone knows the fglrx driver sucks on Linux. What has changed is that ATI is now a subdivision of AMD, and the future of ATI graphics on Linux will be the open driver that is being (rapidly) developed as we speak, and in the end it'll be much better than anything NV is willing to provide.

Anyone brave enough to use that in-development version of AMD's open driver already knows what the future is going to look like. Give AMD another year or two to stabilize the open driver and bring it up to speed on chip support, performance tweaking, and handling corner-cases, and once that work makes it into the mainstream Linux releases, they will end up changing the world of Linux graphics support (as we've known it) forever.

After all, their driver will be entirely found within either the kernel (KMS) or Xorg itself (DRM/Mesa), so you'll no longer need a separate binary blob/package just to get hardware-accelerated 2D & 3D (anyone with AMD-ATI hardware will thus get all this goodness right out of the box, as soon as they install Linux). And thats just for starters...

#1. Some of the data was deleted (obviously, it has been mentioned many times).

#2. Some of the data was contractually banned from being shared (the Met is working on getting this fixed, sent requests to 180 counties).

Secret and deleted data is NOT a good basis for anything, and the Met agrees, and wants to redo it transparently over the next three years.

I hope the Met gets permission to do that, I would love some really transparent / open process work around this.

I was shocked when I found out that stuff based on "secret" or unpublishable data, or deleted data was allowed to be written up in a peer reviewed journal. How the hell do you review something you can't see the data to?

While this is a 'pressing' issue in the west, and they there is a strong bias for action, screwing it up and having bad science will have a huge impact on how it is viewed by India and China in the future... it is worth doing it all in a hyper-transparent and straightforward way.

Most of the anti-AGW crowd is simply doing armchair, a-priori reasoning behind why AGW is false. "Humans are too puny to have an effect!" they say, or "The climate has changed drastically fast even without humanity being around!" Often there are political reasons for holding this position--certain arguments on how to deal with GW are certainly political in nature, and may come into conflict with one's own dogma, and thus psychologically one may be predisposed to oppose GW on that basis.

HOWEVER, that does not mean that some people that argue for AGW do not fit into the same shoes. Remember, just because you are "correct" does not mean your reasoning is. Naturally, someone that hates big business and "the man" may also psychologically have a reason to believe in AGW--another reason to rage on about the status quo.

If I was a betting man I'd bet for AGW, but really I know the science behind it is quite complicated and I know I'm nowhere near competent to make a good, solid argument on the matter, so I must approach the issue with a tempered agnosticism while leaning a bit towards the AGW side because that's the verdict by a vast majority of hard-working PhDs, and I highly doubt that climatologists consist of some dark, left-wing communist sect of economy-destroying conspirators. That is what true skepticism is, noncommitance (particularly emotionally) to a position particularly when you are not an expert on it. Many on both sides of the GW debate are not skeptics but reactionaries with their thought ruled by political underpinnings. Most of the people I know that rant about how AGW is a fraud no absolutely nothing about the mechanisms scientists go about acquiring the data on past climate conditions.

I'm an idiot? Are you trying to tell me that the difference in the cost of powering the network equipment, and paying customer service people, and pushing paperwork and maintaining hardware for someone who downloads 100GB/month is that much different from the cost of powering the same switch for someone who uses 10GB/month? I'm the idiot? Run a business or shut up? Don't be an ass. It's a stupid argument. Yes, providing bandwidth to customer costs money, and nobody is arguing that. The point is that the carriers see an opportunity to raise prices while rationalizing it by saying that people that download more should pay more. But the fact is, they aren't spending any more to provide those customers with the product. In fact, they've taken billions from the taxpayers and done next to nothing to improve capacity. THEN, even though the network is funded more and more by the taxpayers, they want to control what the customers can do with it. If you're cool with that, then good luck with that.

No. Under the current system, the first to invent has 1 year (I think) to use the invention without worrying about "race to the Patent Office" that exists in the "first-to-file" countries. If anything, changing the system to the "first-to-file" rule would result in more filings because companies would be pressed to file as soon as possible to establish priority. Instead, the Congress should clarify the non-obviousness requirement and perhaps require USPTO to hire examiners with experience in the software development to review software patent applications.