Who could afford to send a telegram, or visit a doctor? Not the lower classes, except in absolute emergencies. And there was almost no middle class to speak of back then.

Being a lord in a giant castle may not seem so bad, but the life of the peasant majority doing the actual work was far less rosy. Of course, it's not entertaining to hear about somebody's life of toil, so any movie or book about 'the past' focuses on the idle upper crust - apparently leading some people to think everyone lived like that.

They charge $1350 to publish an article.

You don't need Van Eck phreaking for that. Mugabe reportedly cooked the Zimbabwean election by closing polling stations early in areas known to support his rivals. Seemed to work well enough for him - and that was traditional paper ballot voting fraud, no voting machines required.

So are fossil fuels. They just happen to store energy from an epoch when there was a lot more CO2 in the air - not necessarily a situation we want to return to.

There's a fork that combines everything into one window.

Have you tried stripping the binary?

#include <string>

int main() {
std::string s = "What am I, chopped liver?";
cout << s;
return 0;
}

Obligatory xkcd

Most people don't even remember the original wiki. It contains some neat programming discussions though...

Music Created by Learning Computer Getting Better

I wonder why these water vapor trolls get worried about a few drops of transpiration from a plant when there's an entire rolling, splashing ocean out there. I'm pretty sure that's a larger source of atmospheric water vapor, and it's been there longer than humans have, so it's obviously not having much of a detrimental effect.

...Unlike digging up fossil fuels that have been buried since before humans existed and releasing that carbon into the atmosphere - an irreversible process until we develop an efficient way of turning atmospheric carbon back into oils and other storable compounds. E.g. algal biofuels.

Bah, your advances are trivial. I'm creating a cow that excretes a tasty white liquid for human consumption. I've also invented various ways of fermenting the liquid to create Yoghurt (TM) and Cheese (TM), patents pending.

Great article. I've come across several people trying to claim that watering your lawn causes more irreversible damage than driving an SUV. Of course that ignores another key difference ... carbon released from fossil fuels isn't going to turn back into coal anytime soon, but evaporated water frequently comes down as rain.

Indeed. The only way (on a non-geological timescale) to keep carbon out of the atmosphere is to convert the plant tissues into a solid or liquid form, e.g. some kind of biofuel, and store it. Alternatively, burn it instead of fossil fuels - that won't keep it out of the atmosphere, but it will prevent some extra carbon from being released.

This kind of article reminds me of "we thought the Amazon rainforest removed CO2 from the atmosphere but scientists say it actually releases it!!!11!" articles. Duh! Is the carbon cycle really so difficult for the average person to understand? :-/

Although there are different degrees of anonymous. Someone can have their online ID completely separate from their real world ID, but if they've spent time establishing an online id and reputation by racking up, say, 1000 posts, that makes them less likely to fling out douchebag remarks than a real anonymous coward.

Although, as AI improves it may well become possible for those with enough computing power to group together online accounts based on writing style. If you have one account attached to your real name, one that isn't, and enough posts in both to reveal your personal writing habits, don't bank on being anonymous forever.