Here's the difference between a 13 year old kid and a 30 year old man looking at an E3 booth babe:

13 year old kid: OH MA GAWD! She is soooo HAWT! Oooo she's talking to me and she's smiling and nice. She's totally hitting on me. If I had a car I take her to a hotel and bang her!

30 year old man: Stop pretending to flirt with me. You're not fooling anyone kid. You have as much interest in me as you would a bug, and pretending otherwise is really a turn off. The only reason your flaunting your lady lumps is to pay the bills, and we both know it. Thanks for the eye candy, though.

I appreciate a nice looking woman as much as the next guy, but having them dressed scantily trying to lure you in or sell something is really just unattractive.

It doesn't appear that you have given this much thought then. Snowden distributed the information (it's PPT, you can go and look at it yourself). The government immediately spins into damage control, but came right out and admitted that they were doing this. They even went so far as giving it legal justification, which immediately made me think of McArthy and the Red Scare nonsense.

Now the government says that Snowden is lying. But they just spent the past week or so explaining why the program exists and is legal. Huh? Then what is Snowden lying about? And if he is lying, then why are they going after him as a traitor? And if they are so hot bothered about lying, then why haven't they nailed the NSA chief to a wall when he LIED DIRECTLY TO CONGRESS ABOUT THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE?

In the before time, in the long long ago the internet was a forest of gigantic dicks. But now the community has matured and diversified into an incredible melting pot of dicks, douchebags, and the perenial favorite: assholes. There's even crossover's and new species now, like vaginal squids and cockgobblers, something not even dreamed of back when the internet was new.

  As a community, we have explored many facets of dickishness and assholery. And surprisingly, every time we think we have discovered all there is to know, some radical new asshat or douchebagel stumbles upon yet another new cranny of crevicedom.

So where once you only had a single choice, there is now a veritable cornucopia of internet cornholes. Enjoy the marvels of human depravity!

Perhaps creators of botnets were actually trying to help us. By turning all our machines into spam pumping zombies, all the NSA would see is an endless sea of useless noise. Collecting metadata then would be more worthless than not collecting information at all.

Too complicated. Just ride a bear.

Of course, rookie error #1 is getting involved in a land war in Asia and rookie error #2 is going in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.

All kidding aside, I'm not sure I like this idea. It's not really a good idea to announce your presence in an area where the natives could be restless and you could be considered "tasty".

It's crap like this that makes me wonder if things would have just been better if we paid the damn 3 penny tax on tea.

"Power don't come from a badge or a gun. Power comes from lying. Lying big and gettin' the whole damn world to play along with you. Once you've got everybody agreeing with what they know in their hearts ain't true, you've got 'em by the balls." -Senator Roark, Sin City

I wouldn't feel comfortable letting my FRIENDS have access to this kind of information, let alone complete strangers who actually have the power to lock me up indefinitely without trial for some nebulous classification like "terrorism". And the best part is, they don't even have to tell you why.

Do we need new memes now? In corporatist Amerika, government watches YOU! Or is it fascist? I remember as a kid it was all about how much better we were than the Soviet Union because of our freedoms. Yet here we are doing the same exact things we ridiculed them for.

We didn't do this crap when when we had that 800 lbs gorilla glaring at us with a fist full of nukes, but for some reason now it seems like our elected officials are climbing over each other to be the first to wipe their ass with the Constitution because a few fanatical wingnuts might try to kill a couple people with pressure cookers? For fuck's sake, we kill more of our fellow citizens BY OURSELVES each year than the combined total of terrorists attacks. You want a real terrorist? Heart disease. That crazy bastard kills a million people each year. Where's the trillion dollar bio-industrial complex to take on that freakin' terrorist?

I think perhaps the populace has kind of lost sight of what this country is supposed to be.

Hurray for Peter Pumpkinhead

You can't be that dense. By your reasoning, just about every aspect of science is "speculation".

Almost all non-trivial physics models are simulations. This includes everything from CFD's to weather and climate models. These simulations are built upon physical equations the describe the phenomena. These models are run against KNOWN CONDITIONS to see if the are accurately modelling the phenomena.

In the case of climate models, the models are initialized with pre-industrial conditions (with various small tweaks to the initial conditions to create what is known as an ensemble). Then the models are run forward to present day to see how well they modeled the KNOWN conditions that happened over that time period. And, not surprisingly, the climate models do a pretty good job. Keep in mind, these models are not STATISTICAL models. These are PHYSICAL models, i.e. modelling the actual physical dynamics of the earth's climate.

And even then, the models are just tools. The research used to the develop the models are based upon real world observations (historical as well as current). And this research has been ongoing since Fourier first proposed greenhouse gas theory back in 1824.

Speculation is someone saying "The moon is made of cheese!". Science is someone showing objectively that it isn't. Idiocy is looking at the science and disregarding it as nonsense since it goes against your belief that the moon is made of cheese.

Bullshit. You're ignoring the decades of research on these topics. You're ignoring the physics, and the simulations built on those physics. Now you may simply be ignorant of this, or you're being willfully deceitful, but either way these are certainly not "poorly understood phenomena".

That's because you have no idea what you are talking about. And it is people like you which make scientists not even want to bother to try and explain anything. If you don't even understand the most basic research concepts and results, why bother trying to explain something more advanced. You don't want to listen. You don't want to know. And that's perfectly fine. But you have no credibility even with someone who has a passing knowledge of the actual research,

This statement makes you're whole anecdote suspect. You can't write a computer virus in Java. Java is bytecode, and that bytecode can only be run by a JVM. There's no way you can put bytecode in a windows executable to have it run without embedding the whole JVM in there with it.

What you're probably referring to is an exploit, which takes advantage of potential security holes. But that's different than a "Java Virus". And no, Linux is not invulnerable to such exploits (several have occurred recently). If you think Linux somehow makes you magically safer, then you're fooling yourself. Linux systems get compromised as well via various exploits, poor administration, etc. .

Moral of the story: If you aren't vigilant against computer threats, then sooner or later you will become a victim. It doesn't matter what OS you run.

It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. A dark truth, but a truth nonetheless.

Of course supercomputers use Linux. Windows is not designed to be run in a supercomputer environment, nor is that the primary intended audience. And of course scientists use linux systems (or mac) to work with these systems for compatibility among other reasons.

When done well, being key. Scientists are not software developers or system engineers. I have come across very few scientists who have the ability to write decent code, let alone come up with clean workflows. But that is neither here nor there. An OS isn't going to make a difference in that regard.