Probably true, but I'd sure like to see proof.

IIUC, the provision in the constitution for the legislature to reign in the executive is to refuse to pass any appropriation bills. ANY. Because the executive was known to intentionally pervert the intention of any bill that was passed.

Of course, that means that the feds would shut down. Originally that was much less of a big deal. These days...there aren't many places to homestead anymore. But it means shutting down Social security, the treasury, the military, the TSA, the Air traffic controllers, the FCC, etc. Somehow people don't seem to be quite willing to do that. The Feds have taken over many jobs that were intended to be done by the states. And they've used legal interpretations to weasel their way into all sorts of nooks and crannies where dislodging them would grossly inconvenience or endanger people. Because of this, shutting down the government would not be looked on kindly by the vast majority of citizens. Some of this was done with good intentions, but good intentions or malicious, it was done, and no other organization exists to do many of the jobs that need doing.

FWIW, congress is allowed to define whatever it chooses as "grounds for impeachment". If I recall correctly the only definition is "High crimes and misdemeanors", and that term is not further defined. But your point about "If you don't have the votes for legislation, you sure aren't going to have them for impeachment." is quite valid.

I do agree that the case is just grandstanding, though. IIRC the president can decide that he refuses to allow himself to be sued. (Otherwise every president would end up spending all his time defending himself against claims of impropriety...even before he took office.)

A lot of times it is. Remember, you don't only need to count the comparisons that you do, but also that of everyone else studying the same problem. ONE of you is likely to find a result by pure coincidence.

Care to suggest a *method* for stopping this kind of abuse?

We are clearly headed into an era of coupe d'etats, as the government is acting in ways that remove all belief in it's justice, so there will be small interest among the citizenry if one gang of theives and murderers ousts another. But a way to reform the government before this occurs is not obvious.

That's what people hoped, but all he promised was change. Perhaps he delivered.

Where did you get that idea that tool usage is recent? People and Chimpanzees both use tools, so the conservative assumption would be that tool use pre-dates the split between the species. And it's not like it requires immense brain power. Crows use tools. Some of Darwin's Finches use tools. And many others. (Too many to list.)

The problem is, most of the tools are wood or straw, so they don't tend to be preserved. The ones I listed are all modern species, and the reason for that is that if we didn't watch them using the tools, we wouldn't know that they did. There's no evidence at all that it's recent along ANY of the gene lines. (For that matter, I believe that British Great Tits learned to use tools to pry the caps off milk bottles to get at the cream. This is a species that has, I believe, otherwise only been observed to use tools in nest-building.)

Depends on the layman. Still, there could be species that are radically different from any currently extant. E.g., I believe that all current species that have blood rather than ichor use either copper or iron as an oxygen transporter...but there could be something else. Also, all known species use 4 DNA codons (AGTC) or RNA codons (substituting Uracil for one of those...I'd need to look up which). It could be that there were earlier species that had more (or fewer) than four. That would be pretty much of a shock....though proving it from a fossil would be really tricky. They could find that feather-like things emerged as soon as multi-cellular animals. Etc.

Mind you, these are just examples. It would be REALLY shocking if one of them were true. But that there should be something equivalent that was true wouldn't be surprising, though any particular example would be quite surprising. Like feathers on a T.Rex. Or the brontosarus having the wrong head (so now it's an apatosarus, which isn't anywhere near a good a name, and the head is very different).

Well, my system's a bit old, so a usb boot won't work. I *do* have a couple of live CDs, but ... I just prefer to avoid THAT kind of hassle.

OK, unicode still doesn't post. And loading the comments took about 5 minutes. (2 minutes the first time, 5 minutes the second time.) The posting/loading problem is an obvious bug. My suspicion is that the problem with unicode is that they just didn't fix the problem that the old slashdot had...i.e., not handling unicode.

It's a very good thing they've decided to fix some bugs before they roll this out, as it appears to currently be a very early beta. And they're wasting huge amounts of space, but that should be easy to fix, if they are so inclined.

How are they supposed to let the folk who run the site know how upset they are? At least it was under the first post, which is pretty much always a throw-away.

P.S.: I may not be as upset as he is, but I'm not fan of Beta, either. I *am* currently testing it, and it's not really terrible, but that's all I can say in its favor.

P.P.S.: This is just to test how it reacts to unicode:
OK, it looks good before I post it, but it didn't show up in the preview...so now I'll post. (It was largely Greek letters.)

An earlier post by another proponent of OpenRC said that it was still too beta to be adopted, even though he regretted it.

That said, if reports about window managers beginning to rely on systemd are valid, this may have been a foced move. I, personally, see no reason to move from sysvinit, but if KDE starts to perform poorly, because it's assuming that it can depend on systemd to supply some services....well, I'd be unhappy.

Did you intend that to make any sense? If you did, you need to explain a bit more.

When is the last time you hand configured your monitor, putting in desired refresh rate, etc.?

I'm not convinced that this is a good move, but I'm also not convinced it's a bad one. I don't know. It's beyond my area of expertise.

FWIW, I don't understand why the init process needs to be changed. My feeling is pretty much "It ain't broke, so don't fix it.", but there may be valid reasons. Two different groups of people seem to think so.

Personally, I prefer the traditional init system from UnixV...but then I also prefer grub over grub2. I like to be able to edit my scripts easily, and not dig through several files and try to puzzle out the documentation. (In the case of grub2 my puzzling out the documentation hasn't been that successful...I frequently need several attempts to get a change that would have been simplicity itself in grub. OTOH, I've only got one machine that I can use, so any change is difficult. If I make a mistake, I may need to reinstall the whole system. I can't just look up an answer on the internet...because that requires the machine to be working.)