That didn't stop Gerald Ford.

You are assuming that no one would buy a game unless forced to by DRM... which must mean that you yourself wouldn't buy a game unless forced to by DRM.

Speak for yourself, pirate.

I'm sure the geologists will love to hear that what they're doing isn't science. After all, they deal with stuff that happens over millions or even billions of years.

It really depends on how much you care what the planet is going to be like in 50 or 100 years or longer.

Imagine I have a coin that I know from past experience is double-headed; it comes up heads 100% of the time. If I only consider my most recent flip, that's not enough data to prove that it was weighted for that flip. That doesn't mean it wasn't weighted for that flip. Of course it was weighted for that flip, it's weighted for every flip. But I didn't consider enough flips to prove it.

In an analogous way, considering the data since 1995 is not enough to prove that the earth has been warming. That doesn't mean the earth hasn't been warming since 1995, it means that you're not considering enough of the data.

We're talking about predicted warming rates of a fraction of a degree per decade. The atmosphere is not a uniform temperature bath, and there's a lot of reasons why temperature can go up and down independent of global warming - the data is very noisy compared to the predicted warming in a decade and a half. I don't know why the interviewer picked 1995 as the start year but all the answer really means is that 14 or 15 years is not a large enough sample period.

The actual climatologists have generally been pretty careful about not making predictions they can't support. It's the politicians and activists who have been running around making predictions that then don't come true. Anyone who says that global warming will do anything specific on a time scale of less than decades is probably not a climatologist.

It's true that there's no single observation that would falsify global warming in general. There's too much randomness in the weather to get anything useful from single observations; we're talking about predicted changes of a few hundredths of a degree a year, against much larger background fluctuations. Fortunately we have a hundred years or so of data which appears to trend upwards. If there were a few decades of new data which didn't have a clear warming trend, that might put a dent in the theory - although that would likely mean that there was some other effect buffering it, not that carbon dioxide isn't a greenhouse gas. (If you don't believe in greenhouse gasses, I have some wonderful oceanfront real estate on Venus to sell you.)

I'd hardly qualify myself as a True Believer here, but what it would take for me to reconsider would be a whole bunch of climatologists saying that global warming isn't happening. I can't say exactly what would make the climatologists change their minds, but it would probably involve computer models.

A 5'3", 170 lb (BMI=30) person like this is not going to spill into your seat. For airline seat purposes straight weight is probably a better indicator than BMI.

Microsoft's strategy for interacting with Open Source seems to be settling into the pattern of treating it like any other software. Instead of being pro-"Open Source" or anti-"Open Source" their reaction depends on the specific project.

Software that interoperates with, extends, runs on, or otherwise boosts Microsoft products: Good.
Software that replaces or competes with Microsoft products: Bad.

So, it would make perfect sense to Microsoft for them to try to lure open source projects built on top of OpenOffice.org, like plugins or whatever, to switch to building on Microsoft Office instead.

Exactly: not complying, getting dragged to court, and paying is an option. You're not obligated to open the source, you can just suffer the consequences of copyright violation instead.

I agree that that's not nice. But - this is the key point - he is winning the zone for his team. His actions contribute to fulfilling his objective within the game, and they are legal by the rules of the game.

It sounds to me that the entire purpose of the PVP zones is to have PVP fights, and people who aren't there to fight or interact with enemy players are abusing them for something contrary to the designer's intent. If someone comes along and does something mean to them, that's their fault for being in the PVP zone. If the designers wanted to provide a place where you can get the increased experience without the risk of having someone kill you they would just add it!