Reading the title, I thought this news post was about a Pink Floyd publicity stunt. I’m still not sure it isn’t

You mean to say it should be backed by, say, the Ubuntu repo? It is.

Let's recap: you claimed that 40 years ago people thought animals didn't feel pain. I called bullshit. You spent 10 seconds reading wikipedia and quoted a part of an article that you thought proved your point. I pointed out that the article didn't say what you thought it said. You came back with "oh, you must kick your dog."

Well, it's clear you're just too smart and clever to argue against.

Ah, so you ignored the "as humans" part. Do animals suffer an the negative emotional experience? I don't know. Do they suffer a negative sensory experience? Perhaps in your rush to prove that you're an idiot, you missed this passage:

"There are two distinct components to pain: the sensory component called "nociception" and the aversive, negative affective state. Nociception allows detection of noxious stimuli and enables a reflex response to move an appendage or whole body away from the source. This capacity is found across all major animal taxa.[3] Nociception can be observed using modern imaging techniques, and a physiological and behavioral response to nociception can be detected but, there is currently no objective measure of suffering."

So, animals do feel pain, we just don't know if it requires them to go to therapy to be able to deal with the overwhelming emotions brought about by their parents not loving them enough.

Damn hippy.

> Forty years ago, people believed that humans were the only species that experienced pain. (It's true).

Bullshit. I mean [citation needed]. I suppose the rest of your rant is equally truthy.

They were sued in Swedish court (as can be seen in the Aug 5th blog entry), and we haven't had trial by combat for the last 700 years around here. Sorry!

FYI, Bambi (the Disney movie character) is male.

Yeah, well - it was going to prison he did the first time he disappeared. Ironic, isn't it? Furthermore, I'm haven't a clue how it works in the US - but here in Sweden a marriage is a legal economic partnership which implies mutual economic liability (I'm going to be a bit surprised if it isn't roughly the same in the US). Entering a new partnership without declaring nor disolving the previous partnership would be viewed as a fraud in any other circumstance, so why not when the partnership is labeled "marriage"?

RTFA. The first one was left without any explanation, and to the second one he said that he was divorced.

Huh. I have a B.S. in Mathematics. Some schools offer two tracks for Mathematics, one a BA and the other a BS.

If they do, not all is lost! ::))

(My kids range from soon 11 to soon 2 y.o. And they have the same whitish un-tan I had myself when I was the same age.)

I have discovered that siblings get back at you when you get kids of your own.

All my kids will think of is LEGO, that's what they spend all their money on. Myself, I'm thinking of giving them an Arduino, a couple of motors, sensors and diodes and install Processing/Wiring on their computer - just to see what they'll come up with.

I was with you all the way to "remove". If it's a one way ticket, chances are there are only psychopaths and narcissists left! ;)

Does that imply that it would be permissible för 8 y.o. kids to get behind the wheel of a Marsian rover? I'd say that would make my kids enthusiastic emigrants... ;)

I found that pretty funny too. I also find it painful to see heatmap used in a cartographic sense.

I've been developing GIS software since 1996, and I have to tell you that while no one toolset is ideal, I've found ESRI's the easiest to use in a production environment. I've use most of the open source GIS tools, even written some papers on them (that apparently were good enough to be cited by other authors), and yet I keep coming back to ESRI's suite.

Perfect, no. Better than the alternatives? definitely. I also like the developer community around ESRI's products - much more friendly and helpful than those associated with OS products. IMHO of course.