You're missing the bigger picture.

All have noticed we're moving to a "post-desktop", Bring Your Own Device (with corporate apps / VMs sandboxed on your tablet / phone / laptop).
This is _why_ MS has been experimenting with Windows8,etc.

Instead of concentrating on the share of "desktops" MS has, look at the share of tablets it has. And the number of laptops and tablets you've bought in the last 2 years vs the number of desktops.

MS is the big fish in the desktop pond, but that pond is drying up, and has been trying to jump into the laptop/tablet pond, and missed.

During the release cycle, you don't want unstable to be ahead of stable (too much) in case you find release-critical bug.
You want to be able to fix the bug found in testing, update the version in unstable without reverting and undoing stuff.

So, at this stage its quite normal for debian developers to do "next release" versions in experimental, or even just have them ready in branches on repos, until stable is released.

This time round, better "backports support is enabled. For example, I have a number of updates that didn't make it into Wheezy due to the release cycle. But the "backports" line is present (but not enabled by default). Turn it on, and within a month of Wheezy being released, most of the backlog of packages I have ready will be in backports.
e.g. a meteorology package "zyGrib": it moved to version 6.0 just after freeze, and the new version was rejected. However the desktop metapackage "Debian Meteoroogy' has a "recommends" dependency on it; which means when I build zyGrib in wheezy (already tested), post Wheezy release, 6.0.2 will transition into testing, and i'll upload the 6.0.2 into wheezy-backports, and anyone who installs wheezy in 2 weeks time with backports enabled will get it by default if they choose "Debian Meterology" on install.

True today, but at the time of the start of life (generally recognised as before 3.5 Gyr ago), Earth was pretty much free of oxygen. Thelarge oxygen atmosphere we know today appeared around 2.3 Gyr ago; life before this was Bacterial (technically: Archea) and based more on methanogenic and sulphur-breathing bacteria, much as we find in hydrothermal vents and extreme environments today (such bacteria ironically produce oxygen but are poisoned by it, so we don't see them on Earths surface).

More important for the 'space mineral' is that its components aren't lost. Iron-based minerals that were in the original rocks that formed Earth would have sunk to the core in the first few molten million years of Earths existence: the stuff we find on Earths surface were from fresh influxes after the "Hadean" molten phase of Earths history, when it had cooled down. These stayed on the now cool surface and were available for life.

Its not clear in the article, but its possibly because iron-based ("siderophilic") elements become trapped in the Earths core.

As the Earth forms and is a molten magma ocean, heavy iron (the largest part of the Earth) sinks to the core. It brings with it in solution siderophilic elements, and for that matter a lot of water, etc. Life on Earth then required fresh supplies of such materials delivered from space _later_ over the first few hundred million years, after the Earth had mostly cooled.

To Pick a not-so-hypothetical example, various intelligence agencies have been monitoring hospitals over the last decade or two to find wanted terrorists as they come to the west in disguise looking for medical treatment for cancer, etc.

So, if i'm a sysadmin in an Irish (or Swiss, or other non-NATO, neutral) hospital, and my internal databases get hacked, in such a manner that patients lives are put at risk / lost, and I _think_ I can trace the attack back to Virginia, what do I do?

Civilian lives lost due to foreign military activity would typically be called an act of war, no?

Add false data to the databases.

Create false identities, not just anonymous ones. Don't allow facebook, etc. to interlink.
Script this, add plugins for browsers to do this.
In shops, use discount cards with cash, and swap the cards regularly with friends.

Poisoning the databases, especially for "non-legal" transactions (i.e. don't lie when buying on the internet, but give as little
away as possible, and don't use real identities where monetary transactions are not involved - don't commit fraud)
means the existing data collected elsewhere is not trustworthy. It devalues the whole point of data harvesting and data mining,
much better than hiding data alone.

It also still allows the "correct" (non-evil) functioning of the system. Looking up my real name give my real details, when it matters,
allowing the site to interact with me the way it was advertised to. Searching for all "X" in the data give 90% garbage, and so mining
becomes pointless. Deal with customers properly.

because its economically trivial to hide the real missiles amongst decoys.
If you can't identify real missiles from those deliberately pretending to be missiles (never mind
missile-like stuff) , then you've already lost.

We already do something like this: IPCC projections. We do investigate previous projections to see how they worked / what they got wrong. Its a large part of what we do as scientists.

And you can do it too: the early models are still available (eg I think the EdGCM model is based on the early GISS model); these days you can run what used to take a supercomputer on your PC and repeat the runs.

But as climate scientists we're not in the business of playing "I told you so" with denialists. The 64 billion dollar question is : what will happen? we need to adapt and react to climate change, and knowing exactly whats happening is important: shrinking the error bars on those model runs translates to billions of dolllars of taxpayers money that needs / doesn't need to be spent : e.g. knowing the lengths of droughts, how much water needs to be stored. the scale of sea level rise, etc. This is why the climate models are important.

Most (all?) of the samples had "trace" quantities of horse (and some pig) DNA. But the DNA test is extremely sensitive: it could test positive if the same truck was used to transport cows and horses, not necessarily at the same time, never mind meat. The FSAI scientist in question is on record as saying that if thats all that happened, they would have privately / quietly warned the meat processors to clean up their act.
But one burger was found to be 29% horse, and hence the scandal. Later tests have since shown more samples showing up with significant quantities of horse meat (no pig, though).

But the tests were triggered by the Food safety authority being suspicious as to how burgers were being sold below the cost of the market price of the beef that was supposed to go into them ...

A better example:

You're in a plane and the engines cut out. You're at 30,000 ft (typical cruising height) moving at 500 knots, 60 miles from the airport. Assume an average airliner can do a glide ratio of 12:1.

Quickly, will you be able to make it to the airport, and how long would it take?

Now repeat the exercise in metric. 30,000 ft is approx. 10km. 500 kts is 926 kph (round to 900). 60 miles is 96 km, say 90km. Now you can glide 120km or so at a 12:1 ratio. You'll be there in less than 10 minutes.

The ability to do approximate round-figure calculations is important in our modern world. The lack of understanding of a sense of scale is behind a lot of our "unscientific" thinking, of evolution, climate, of our understanding of the scale of the universe ... How many people can name the size of an atom, of a galaxy?
For me, the practical benefit of metric / SI is that. The ability to move between sets of units: speed, distance, etc. and do sense-of-scale arguments quickly, to understand the picture. We can get precise numbers with a calculator (but we still need to have a rough estimate in our heads anyway to know that we haven't made a typo -- we're not travelling at 12 kph in our Boeing, for example).

In any field, I can come up with a "best handy" unit, and typically the Imperial units are close; e.g. pints if you're beer, etc. If the only thing I was ever going to measure was beer, I'd stick to pints or gallons. But as an active citizen, I need to be able to compare the energy capacity of coal, gas, nuclear, wind power to make an informed choice of our countrys' future. Lack of comparable units and skill in scale arguments is a serious problem, and metric helps.

No, look at the work involved. There is simply no way to do that, it takes too many compute hours

I'm calling you on this. Do it. Produce, or show someone elses results, that reproduce the historical record matching a current climate model, that doesn't show 1.5-6 degrees climate sensitivity for GHG doubling.
You may take as input to your model: (1) bathymetry and topography (2) land use, (3) ocean and atmosphere starting conditions, eg. the Levitus dataset, (4) volcanic and aerosol inputs, (5) solar output for the 1950-2000 period, ie. the inputs that went into the CMIP5 intercomparison project. Do it to at least a 5 degree global resolution, 5 vertical layers atmosphere, 5 ocean, monthly time resolution.

People dismiss models as "you can make a model do what you want", but no, you can't. We've done model intercomparison projects, comparing model output to observed records. NOBODY HAS MANAGED TO PUT TOGETHER A NON-GHG BASED MODEL THAT MATCHES THE OBSERVATIONS.

To be taken seriously, your model also needs to match the paleontological record, or give a plausible account thereof: ie. match the mean and variance in temperature records, globally and to at least a continental resolution.

Yes, but it is and will be probabilistic. See for example this on the Moscow heat waves, for example, and the discussions at RealClimate. Attribution studies are very expensive (in time and money, for computing ensembles), but are a key body of work over the last few years, and there is a section of the upcoming IPCC AR5 report summarizing it. The IPCC reports are
the best summary of the science, even though they are very conservative.

Yes, and I didn't go into details. I didn't mention desertification or deforestation, for example, but you're right about synergistic effects. For example I've been working providing data to a group at NUI Maynooth" studying the effects on forests: the (measured and predicted) lengthing growing season leads to multiple generations of tree-predating insects surviving. Some species may have difficulty surviving this, so foresters need to know 30 years in advance what species to plant.

Yes. The numbers I've seen say that the shortfall in wheat due to the Russian heatwave in 2010 equalled the crop production in Europe diverted to make ethanol under EU policy for 5% ethanol mix, for example.

Non-scientific, yes. The terms "sceptic", "denialist","AGW believer",etc are not pro- or anti-scientific, they're political.
And I will not shy from the politics. There are simply no proper sceptics left in the field. Ten, twenty years ago sceptics had some valid questions that needed answering: discrepancies in satellite records, ocean heat, Lindzens "cloud halo" theories, for example. But over the last decade or so, they've all been answered, with the best sceptics coming up with new evidence or results (eg. this), or quietly leaving the field. The remainder are simply denialists: unmoved and simply repeating the same disproved lines, not attempting to answer the questions scientifically but simply stall political changes they don't want.

Yes. For ACC vs bad farming practices, I'll leave that to ag. scientists, but here in Ireland for example we've seen a bad year, with yields down 20% or so (preliminary) due to bad weather: heavy rainfall. Now we've seen an increase in the rainfall similar to that predicted by our climate models (though not in details: we see a step-change in the rainfall in the 1970s for example I don't think the models have reproduced, but we have not enough climate/ocean measurements from that time to properly initalize the models, so I don't think we'll ever simulate the climate of the 1950s-1990s to within measurement error).
Could we scientifically attribute the rainfall this year to ACC? we could run a large ensemble model (such as the UK Met office did for Russia, 2010) but it would be exteremely expensive in computational time and scientist time, and would still lead a probabilistic result that denialists would dismiss. The preference instead is to concentrate our efforts on developing seasonal forecasting, and weather prediction for extreme events, to prepare and produce useful results for our changing world.

I prefer the term "Anthropogenic Climate Change", because I think Global Warming gives a too-soft impression of whats happening.

Yes, the world is warming, on average, but what kills is not the average temperature rising by one or two degrees, its drought,
extreme events such as storms, ocean acidification, etc. The danger is that people think we're heading for a Mediterranean climate here in N Europe, etc. and that global warming might not be a bad thing for chilly Ireland, for example, when massive droughts and crop failures (across Europe and elsewhere) are starting to threaten global food supplies.

Its ironic that the denialists also prefer the term climate change, because it sounds milder, but thats just the scale of the education exercise ahead of us.

Yes. You failed to enumerate and list every issue

Correct. I don't think it is possible to enumerate every issue, but your claim presumes otherwise.

Science proceeds by falsification. In the example of gravity - the work of Copernicus / Kepler / Newton disproved the existing Heliocentric view.
Newtons theory was/is an extraordinarily effective theory: it matched observations and produced predictions that came true for the next
three hundred years. Yes, it was superceded by Einsteins work, but in practice Engineers and Scientists use Newtons theory to this day for
almost all work. Hence, no I wouldn't say Newton was "spectacularly wrong", especially given the evidence available.

Because you can (almost) never prove a theory true, it looks dangerously possible to be dismissive of any idea you don't like.
But this isn't the case. Consider anthropogenic climate change (ACC): while our existing theories of climate are provisional, the opposing idea that there is no ACC is wrong. There is no theory that explains the observations without ACC.

Ok, by "faith" I mean accepting /believing without evidence. (belief is another dangerous word: I don't think scientists and religious mean the same thing by it, and I try to avoid it). Particle physicists didn't have "faith" it would be found. They provisionally accepted the hypothesis in order to investigate and test it. Holding and testing hypotheses are not faith; the "belief" is provisional and explicitly not accepted yet.

Nope, I've not looked at all the evidence. Vast swathes of phenomenology for example (the changes in species extent / growing seasons, etc due to climate change) I've accepted from my biologist colleagues without examining in any detail.
But others: I have explicitly examined the evidence, and been involved in doing so, for example in precipitation and temperature change in Ireland.
I've read all the reviews I can (eg the IPCC reports) and made a deliberate point of examining all the contrary evidence and papers I can and found them wanting. There was a sufficiently small volume that yes, it is possible to read it all. And over the last decade or so, its just about all been disproven.

In the larger picture: there is no countervailing theory. There is no theory or hypothesis that explains the observations without human-induced climate change. Our theories do predict the evidence, within observational and measurement error to the point that they are, I think, effective theories: that is, you can use them for policy purposes. Yes, I'm painfully aware of the limitations of the theories and models (working on them on a daily basis) and they will be improved. But "spectacularly wrong", as in unfit for use, no.

Many, but only one atom theory.

The atom theory is that matter is made up of atoms, finite quanta that cannot be infinitely subdivided.
Hence, you cannot have less than one atom of sodium, etc. The antithesis was that you could, that you could
infinitely divide the amount of a substance and still maintain that substance.

That atoms have subdivisions in themselves (protons, electrons, neutrons), does not negate the theory as originally stated.