Even among the non-Apple devices there are still issues. The USB-Micro standard is fragile, uni-directional and has skinny-ass wires that can't cary much current for fast charging. The USB-C standard is anything but standard with a mixed bag of features and compatibility from device to device.

Apple's Lightening charger is nice that it works for all of Apple's recent handhelds and is reversible, but is incompatible for all the new laptops (USB-C). The Listening cable is also only good for ~2A of current meaning that fast charging is right out. But what good is a charging cable that only works one line of devices?

USB-C *could* be great and last us for the next 10 years if only the industry could standardize the standard. It would also be great if you could count on USB-C cables actually being 100% compliant and not worry that your E-Bay special was going to toast your new phone, or burn down your house. Judging by the plethora of shitty cables out there, I would guess that the standard is simply too expensive or too difficult to comply with.

I would definitely welcome a standard that could do something about the giant box of standard, half-standard, and proprietary cables that I've accumulated. We can do it with headphones and lights and HDMI cables (sort of), why can't we do it with phone and laptop chargers?

I agree completely. I do not like PHP, and I'm not doing any new projects in it, but PHP has arrived. They somehow made it fast, it has solid libraries, good tooling, and the language itself has a reasonable level of abstraction, without giving people too much rope (or is it parentheses?) to hang themselves with. If someone hasn't already become sick of PHP, there's not really any reason to leave now. Developing in Laravel with the Psy REPL is a pretty good experience. Composer works pretty painlessly, too. There's really not a lot to complain about these days, except that I think it's verbose and ugly, and occasionally limited in expression. On the one hand, you can't write the same kinds of one-liners that you can in Perl or Ruby, and on the other hand, you can't write the same kinds of one-liners that you can in Perl or Ruby. PHP is not for the people who like their code to be a perfect gemstone. It does get the job done though.

WordPress is its own separate self-sustaining ecosystem at this point, God help us. Nothing can save it, nothing can kill it.

If you're referring to the Big Rip, that's not currently believed likely. If you're referring to the black hole information paradox, there's probably not a lot of reason to believe that information can be destroyed. It's not really proven, but it's highly likely that information is a conserved property.

It's not like NSA is staffed by a bunch of sadistic bastards, evil robots, or maniacal traitors. They aren't evil on an individual level, simply because most people aren't evil. Psychopathy is rare, even if it is more prevalent in D.C. For the most part I'm sure they love their country.

Like you suggest, NSA did lie. Clapper lied to Congress with a straight face, on national TV. And perhaps the more important part is that they were caught lying, and this was widely publicized. It's at least possible that some unhappiness over this situation came home to roost. It's almost scary to think that Congress holds almost all the real power in this country, but they do at least theoretically have the power to bring NSA to heel when they want to. How effective their oversight is in practice? Probably beyond my pay grade.

Anyone's trust in the NSA should be extremely well informed and strictly circumscribed. However, this is the first indication that NSA has any sense of duty to the American people, or respect for the law, so I'm not going to shit on them for it. The larger failure is Congress' inability to defend the rights of American citizens.

No, that figure is correct unless thermodynamics is wrong. There is no effect which can reduce the warming below that threshold unless you find a new way to radiate energy to space. You talk about missing phenomena, but you have no real idea of the mechanism, so you don't actually know enough to suggest a plausible criticism or alternative. Suggesting that you know anything about this subject is therefore rather completely dishonest..Thanks for playing, have a nice day.

Doubling CO2 raises the temperature of the Earth by 3.7 W/m^2, or about one degree C. Water vapor is, as you say, not expected to be a moderating influence. I'm sure you've invented wonderful reasons to not believe in climate sensitivity estimates. You are an ignorant misanthrope, and a liar.

There's not really any conceivable way to do any such thing, nor any purpose which would be best served by it, and other side effects of that much energy expenditure would be of far more immediate concern. If my math is right, the energy required to move Mars to Earth orbit would be about 20x its gravitational binding energy. You probably don't want to just give it a big whack, and the list of things that would probably be easier would probably include disassembling the planet and moving it to a new orbit piecemeal.

It's always funny when one of you gets up on your hind legs and pretends to know something about this subject. The Earth is a very complex system, but take a look at it from 200km altitude in the IR band, and a very simple picture emerges. Either CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and increasing the concentration must raise the global temperature, or you have to find a new way to transfer heat to space and explain why this was not previously observed and explain why the observed temperatures are increasing anyway. Then explain why this phenomenon is also not observed in the atmospheres of Mars, Venus, or the Sun.

The theory of AGW was first published in 1896; it's older and better-established than Relativity. It's nice that you have some vague mudslinging to display, but I think that if you want to claim some vast ignorance of climate science, you should probably speak only for yourself.

Venus begs to differ. Or are you suggesting that CO2 has no effect at all in the atmosphere?

You should probably be aware of the reasons for the introduction of cgroups, the limitations of pidfiles with respect to process tracking, and the difficulties involved in setting resource limits for processes without kernel-level support. There may or may not be anything too badly wrong with systemd (hopefully not, as OpenRC is pretty similar), but people who are still clinging to sysvinit are fools.

So if science can't determine whether something is harmless in an absolute sense, maybe it doesn't try to make sense to insist on that being the relevant qualification. Maybe there's a more reasonable definition of 'harmless'. That would probably save us some pedantic sophistry.

You're defending a specious point presumably because you skipped the part where I didn't disagree with your conclusion. You are quite wrong about the lesser claim, and quite correct about GMO safety.

You can argue whether the government's position on tobacco and lead represented scientific consensus, but the CO2 story is unequivocal. Arrhenius published his theory of CO2-induced climate change in 1896, and Angstrom refuted it convincingly five years later. Over the subsequent five decades the foundations for the refutation were overturned, but you can find textbooks as late as 1950 which explicitly assign a minimal climatic role to atmospheric CO2.

Science got CO2 flat-out wrong. The lead, sugar, and tobacco industries all spread malicious and harmful science via the government, and poisoned Americans for decades. There are good reasons to believe that this is not true of GMOs, but science is far from infallible.

That's wonderful, but not the point of contention. There was valid science suggesting that these things were harmless. In the case of AGW there were several reasons to believe that CO2-induced climate change was impossible, which stood unchallenged for decades. Clearly that situation has changed, and again, this has nothing to do with the original claim that GMOs are safe, or whether lead, sugar, tobacco, or CO2 are actually harmful. However, while there are at best a handful of cases where the scientific process went awry, and while the majority of those involved private industry poisoning the well, there idea that science has never misidentified a harmful substance is not tenable.

As it happens, the "chequered history" of AGW is extremely useful as a way to shut up anti-AGW conspiracy theorists. It's kinda hard to sustain a story of scientific conspiracy that starts with the theory being disproved.