Again with the confusing 'scientists' and 'papers'. 2/3 of the *papers* did not take a position, presumably because what they were researching did not actually cast any light on the question, not it would be absurd for them to 'take a position'. Of the papers in the study whose subjects actually implied one conclusion or other about AGW, 97% implied the conclusion that AGW is occurring.

The study authors were just being properly careful in explaining that they took a large corpus of papers which *might possibly* imply one or the other conclusion about AGW, then found the ones which *actually did*, and compared how many of those implied one conclusion and how many implied the other. The fact that it happens to be 1/3 of the papers they looked at which fit into this group is not particularly interesting, but if that information hadn't been included, _someone_ would've complained about it.

"The original (implicit) claim is that when 97% of scientists agree on something, it must be right"

No, it isn't. The original explicit claim is that 97% of papers agree on something, yet most media outlets are incorrectly applying the concept of 'balance' and making it appear as if there is far more disagreement within the scientific community.

Right, this is one of the two things that irks me the most about this debate: how both sides tend to assume the 'environmentalist' side is some sort of happy-clappy kum-ba-ya singing Mother Earth thing.

It's not. Well, you know, the nutty kum-ba-ya singing Mother Earth types think so, but we can safely ignore them. For sane people, global warming is not a problem for the globe. The earth's a big spinning ball of rock, it'll be a big spinning ball of rock practically forever, no matter whether the temperature goes up or down two or five or ten or fifty degrees. Plus, it's not conscious and doesn't have any feelings. The Earth is going to be just fine.

Global warming is a problem for people. The most 'conservative' folks, those who think things are pretty good and we shouldn't mess with them too much and who pride themselves on being sensible and taking the long view, should be the most worried about global warming, for several reasons. One, a world which is five degrees warmer is a world that from a human perspective is massively different. You want your life to go on pretty much as before? You damn well don't want it to be ten degrees hotter than it was 100 years ago. Two, the longer we delay taking action, the more extreme and disruptive the action we wind up having to take is going to be. That alone is against 'conservative' principles, but the double whammy is that once that action becomes sufficiently extreme and disruptive, the only agencies that are practically capable of carrying it out will be national governments. You want a solution to global warming which doesn't involve massive, unilateral government action (and if you're a small-state conservative, surely you do!), you should be out in the streets right now to make sure it happens before it's not practical.

The other thing that narks me off no end is people who seem to think Priority Number One should be 'the economy', and Priority Number Two should be the environment. Erk-err. Precisely the wrong way around. You can only have an economy in an environment. We can keep building coal-burning power plants and oil pipelines and everyone makes money in the very short term, but once the level of emissions and consequent global warming gets too high, the result will be an economic catastrophe as much as an environmental one. Really, if you want to be a hard-headed conservative pragmatist, the only reason an environmental catastrophe is a catastrophe at all is because it is inevitably also an economic catastrophe.

Don't worry folks, the manufacturers have this in hand. By next year the accepted minimum screen size for a flagship phone will be 17", and cellphone thefts will be rendered impractical because by the time your poor thief has backed up his pick-up truck and got his accomplices to help him heave your phone into the back, the cops will have arrived...

You forgot '- think that eating seafood and the occasional hamburger counts as vegetarian'

"English major Kirk McDonald, president of online ad optimization service PubMatic, informed college grads that he considers them unemployable unless they can claim familiarity with at least two programming languages"

We're talking about the *advertising* industry, right?

In that case I can claim familiarity with two programming languages, no problem. I also claim familiarity with advanced astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and Elvis Presley, who I met in his vacation home on the Moon.

https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/anaconda.git/commit/?id=da565b769979a031f318dbc727b9888e4f1fb37c

"Revert "Add signal handlers for controlling password entry visibility." (#958608)."

I'm pretty sure that Monty knows the size of the MySQL install base.

"thinking they know what is best for everybody"

I'm curious as to how you expect maintainers to write software. Take an opinion poll on every line?

How would a maintainer who didn't think they know what was best for everybody ever write a line of code? Just guess?

"Is Buying an Extended Warranty Ever a Good Idea?"

It certainly is, if you're using the 'smash it with a hammer after two years and get a new one' upgrade strategy.

The point is that AMD is writing an open source driver for its own hardware, about which it obviously knows everything. The Nouveau driver is being reverse engineered. It would be amazing if a third-party reverse engineered driver performed better than a first-party one. So the comparison is pretty unfair to the Nouveau devs, who are doing an excellent job given the limitations they're working with.

It would just be a lot clearer if the summary noted these nuances and gave the story "AMD pretty good; Nouveau devs saints; NVIDIA F-".

We have this wonderful feat of technical engineering called 'the wheel', which allows even unpowered puny humans to transport large quantities of goods!

In other words: get a granny cart. Problem solved.

"So, he lied, and took advantage of peoples pro-female bias...People genuinely believe that men SHOULD have to work harder to get ahead. That's why they're mad. Because their prejudice is heartfelt."

Yeah...no. The tech press wants to jump on a story about a female-led startup *precisely because there are so few female led startups*. That hardly suggests that being female is an advantage in the environment. If he'd actually managed to create a viable company then it may be interesting, but he didn't; just threw up a website and told some lies. No-one actually gave him any money.

"IF Unity and Gnome 3 had taken the time to FIRST fully develop their products while at the same time fixing existing products"

Why do you think this is a thing that's even possible? So far as I can recall, it has never - *never* - been done.

Windows 1.0 was a bare bones window manager. Even the first widely successful Windows series - 3.x - was pretty crappy in its first incarnation, 3.0, and did not take off until 3.1. The first major revision to the 3.1 interface - 95 - was panned at the time and substantially tweaked in 98. And I don't have to say anything about Windows 8 at this point, I'm sure.

MacOS was constantly revised; I'm not familiar with its early versions but I'm sure they bore little resemblance to later ones. The first release of OS X was heavily criticized and from a UI standpoint incomplete; it was massively tweaked between 10.0 and 10.4.

The first version of Android - same story. Android didn't really start to be a polished interface till 2.x or even 4.x.

iOS, same story again. The first version didn't even allow *apps*, for Pete's sake.

So - name me a single computer UI which actually arrived fully formed in its first version? And if you can't, why on Earth do you think 'somehow make 1.0 the full finished product' is a viable development methodology for computer UIs?

"Still no package version numbers or install time remaining when the packages are being installed though - both blatantly obvious requirements!"

Why is "package version numbers" a 'blatantly obvious requirement'? What actual use is it? If anything it's debugging info, and it is stored in the appropriate logs. Just because you're used to seeing it doesn't mean that seeing it is of any practical use.

Install time remaining is not practically possible to determine reliably. It's a classic progress bar problem. We don't know how long the installation of each of the remaining packages is going to take. If we printed it we'd just be guessing.

"The Anaconda interface is still LUDICROUSLY SHOUTY (yes, much of it is fully capitalised and even adds bolding on top of that!)"

Capitalization is not inevitably shouty. That applies to written communication. It does not necessarily apply to user interfaces.

"It has a nasty mixture of size units (yes, it's possible to see K, MB and GB all on the same screen)"

Why is this nasty? If a partition is 20MB big you probably want to see '20 MB', not '0.02 GB', but if it's 500GB big, you want to see '500 GB', not '500000 MB'. You can enter sizes in any common format in custom partitioning, it understands them all.

"and the option - if it exists - to "use all remaining space on device" when creating a new partition (which you're surely almost always going to need?) didn't jump out at me."

we could probably write this down somewhere, but just specify any size that's bigger than what's remaining, and it'll be rounded down to all remaining space.