Actually, no journal is fully immune, no matter how prestigious. Worse than that, top-notch journals like Science and Nature require sensational stories, which makes them more likely to publish skillfully hyped-up reports than honest ones that acknowledge their own limitations. The best science is often found in mid-range journals that accept longish and seemingly boring manuscripts, with nothing swept under the rug.

Thank you for setting this straight. I wish I had mod points...

It harms my Linux experience because nowadays some software developers support Ubuntu and then claim they support Linux.

Interesting point, but don't you think there are ways to achieve that without spying on Israel? Intelligence on Iran, added to shared knowledge with Israel, should be enough. Really, one could figure out that it would be silly to go to war with Iran, based on publicly available information alone.

What do you think tells us more about the Tea Party: this (rather short and generic) party platform, or the everyday discourse and actions of party members in the political life of the country?

I know a lot of political parties, in several countries, who can put forward a lovely one-page platform that I largely subscribe to. It doesn't mean I actually support any of those parties.

You comment is indeed a flamebait.

On the other hand, I just love your username, it's a fairly uncommon reference that's always nice to see mentioned.

You did a fair amount of C? Just refresh your knowledge of C, and you'll be back to business in a few days.

The notion of human rights seems quite foreign to Russia's leaders today. This follows the incredible state-sponsored persecution of LGBT people, which taps into (and caters to) the already fairly widespread homophobia in large parts of the population.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/opinion/russias-anti-gay-crackdown.html?_r=0

What if you were banned from entering the EU for saying that? Maybe you don't care about the EU and don't want to travel there. Or maybe you do.

At any rate, you might like to hear an explanation.

I can certainly see your point. And yet, Syria now presents a major difference with, say, Iraq in 2002: the country is *already* at war. Entire cities nearly razed, thousands of victims, fighters and civilians alike, large-scale gas attacks, war crimes on both sides... Western strikes cannot make Syria cannot descend into chaos, because it's already there.

So, while I doubt that an attack would make things any better, I can hardly see how it could make them worse. Iraq was by no means a nice place to live under Saddam, but most people got by somehow. That is less and less the case in Syria anyway.

Obviously you don't use python.

Ooh, that does ring a bell. There was this protocol for transfering files, what was it called again? Started with F... something something. Would be completely useless today, I'm sure, now that we have Google Drive...

As pointed out by others, you can't intercept an email on its way to tax it, but you can always catch it at its final destination. Here is an idea that doesn't involve a government tax.

As you rightfully point out, I bear some cost for each message I receive, so I could pass on this cost to the sender by demanding a fee for reading the message. Essentially this would need a credit system where my incoming mail server can silently drop any message that doesn't come with a small electronic payment of some form.

For any person with whom I have a normal, symmetric communication, this just cancels out, but those who want to spam me would have to pay for that priviledge.

Obviously, implementing such a credit system to be both reliable and inexpensive is a major technical challenge, but certainly something that I'd like to see explored.

It makes some sense to me, if you just cut it a little slack for being an old phrase. I can hear a difference between asking a question and begging it, in that just asking it leaves the answer open. There is something more insistent and less honorable in "begging", it doesn't leave people much of a choice. As in: "Would you rather help me feed my hungry child or be a heartless bastard?", which is definitely begging, and not exactly begging the question, but close enough.

I think the classic phrase is, Reiser's razor.