The Constitution is implemented as interpreted by the United States Supreme Court.

There are a multitude of limits to freedom of speech, as there must be. Wikipedia has a good list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exceptions

As an extra data point: in Norway, we have the concept of protected speech, which refers to types of expressions which are covered by the Norwegian constitutional provisions for free speech. Advertisement, for instance, is not considered protected speech - which is why it's possible to ban false advertisement.

x86 is not a monoculture. That is an absurd claim.

All problems with the x86 instruction set have lay in its implementation, which differs wildly from processor set to processor set. The implementations of the ISA may have security issues, but there is no inherent insecurity in the x86 instruction set.

Actually, that's more or less something of a myth. If you look at the delay taken after a failed manned mission, for instance, the Soviets would take significantly longer time to look over their mistakes than the US would.

There were certainly quiet failures, but those have come out into the open by now. After the fall of the iron curtain and the declassification of Soviet space information, there was no discovery of any body of fatal accidents so massive that they indicate that the Soviet Union took, as you put it "losses in stride" to any greater extent than the United States did.

That's nothing. The Norwegian company that delivered the computing hardware and software for the F16 flight simulator, Norsk Data, was actually required by the US Air Force to deliver their software as punched cards for quite a few years after punch cards had really gone out of fashion.

Every software patch was the same - requiring staff to manually collate the source code punched cards - basically, manually merging patches.

Actually IIRC the DEC Rainbow just didn't have formatting capacity on its floppy controller. There is software to get PCs to format RX50 diskettes, and there is a single DEC with an RX50 that can be triggered to format RX50 floppies. Part of me wants to say that it was the Rainbow - that or the Pro 380...

You're describing "sticky shed syndrome", or hydrolysis of the polyurethane binding layer between the oxide and the base. Some tape brands are more susceptible to it than others. Storage conditions are another significant determinant.

Basically, humidity reacts with the glue that keeps the rust sticking to the plastic. If there was archival data of such significance, the tapes should have been "baked" - that is, slowly heated to a precise temperature which would re-dry the glue. After that, the tapes would probably mount fine.

If you had conferred with some people like the Computer History Museum (just down the block from the Googleplex), they would have helped you out.

Yeah, but that kind of defeats the point of Facebook's extremely powerful photo sharing systems, though.

Actually, there was a real, sensible (as things go in the field of nuclear deterrent) reason for them: The USSR did not at the time have anything that could deliver a payload with precision. Plus, they used big and slow bombers, which made it possible to intercept them. Thus, they employed a lesson from Ken Thompson in the future: "When in doubt, use brute force". :)

The design was not scaled down as such - it was a 100MT bomb; they simply substituted lead for U-238 in the tamper.

How on earth can you say my fallacy is that assumption when you're replying to a sentence which explicitly supposes it as a hypothetical?

If the next step in discovering what makes the world around us tick involves a slightly larger tunnel, I'm all for it.

But what if experiments were to conclusively prove that all aspects of personality can be explained by neurological processes? Then, consciousness would be tied to an observable, physical mechanism and then you would need to render the idea of a mirroring consciousness existing outside the observed - which is kind of a stretch, but those are not exactly news to theology.

The basic point that should be made is that just because something cannot be disproven does not mean that it is more likely than any other arbitrary and absurd claim. The reason the belief in a deity is taken seriously is because it is more widely held than the belief that we all stem from an invisible Coca-Cola dispenser inside the core of the Moon; the two claims have the same amount of intellectual merit.

I did not use "Stupid" as a noun to address you, I used the word as an adjective to describe the line of reasoning. Clearly.

"That's beside the point" means "it is not relevant to the argument I'm making", which is not the same as "That is irrelevant to global warming".

Yep, but scientific advances in a country act as an indicator of the technological and scientific standing of the nation at large (which more often than not are are advanced by the investments in those scientific advancements).

Think of the Apollo Space Program. Sure, it embiggened mankind, but the materials and computer competence required to build those rockets stayed in the US, and was just another government-funded cornerstone of the tech that made the US dominate the world economy to an extent that it's still coasting on the successes of yesteryear.

Arguing that climate science is wrong because of weather is like arguing that the theory of gravity is wrong because your helium balloon goes up. Stupid.
 

Yes, and Nelson Mandela should never have gotten the Peace Prize either. I mean, his work against Apartheid was sorely lacking in citations and his party program wasn't even accepted by any major peer-reviewed journal!
 

The whole POINT of the Nobel Peace Prize is to help a good thing become a bigger thing. Both by granting it visibility on the global stage and a little bit of dough, it's supposed to help it out. Gore does not operate a "cap and trade" business; that's government policy, not a business model. He does oversee some green investment funds, though.

Which kind of makes sense if you seem to be one of few people with deep pockets who realize what impact this will have on the profitability of different things.

Or my favorite:
EINE - EINE Is Not EMACS
ZWEI - ZWEI Was Eine Initially