No, the stakes are: it was possible for one side to strike a devastating blow with no retaliation whatsoever. That's not what you want in a nuclear war. Without MAD everything breaks down. You do not want that.

It doesn't take that much "skill" to make a fire with a bowdrill, honestly. My brother was into this kind of thing. It turns out that the choice of wood, string, and a decent bow make a _huge_ difference. E.g. I saw him get a glowing ember from his drill setup in less than a minute, and in less than 90 seconds had a handful of flames. Impressed by how easy it looked, I traipsed into the woods, found some sticks of various sizes, with no thought whatsoever to their suitability, made a rough bow, carved out a notch, got a rock and started going at it. Half a day later, I could barely get smoke. I didn't know why. He let me use his setup, and within two minutes I too had an ember.

You need a wood that grows straight, has little resin, and is somewhat dry for the drill, and a flexible but stiff wood for the bow. A soft maple is excellent. It needs to be dead and dry, not green (obviously). You want a good solid leather string that will grip the drill nicely. You want a good amount of tension in the bow, but not too much. The drill should be between 2 and 3 cm wide, around 15 to 20 cm long. For the base you want a somewhat harder wood with a little more resin. Oak is good. Gather good kindling to catch, often by peeling bark into super thin strips and making a little nest of them. The glowing ember will come from the dust of the drill being worn down and getting hot. For the top you want a rock not much bigger than the palm of your hand, so that you can get a good grip on it and put some weight to keep the whole system stable. You want to get a nice point on the drill on the rock side and if possible scratch a bit of a hole into the rock so the point from the drill fits. If you can find some lubrication of some sort for the top that helps.

After the notch in the base gets worn in and the friction part of your drill gets worn into the appropriate shape, it is not actually that hard to make a fire in less than a few minutes. I've done it.

The issue is that there are no developers there. There are just users talking authoritatively at other users. You get no inflow of information and the same rumours, bad advice, scaremongering stories are stated again and again.

For example: One person blogs about KMS now working on Intel cards and how plymouth will use this, next person says that nvidia and ati wont be supported by plymouth, the next person blames his system crash on plymouth as that was the thing that was on the screen during the boot, the next person worries how it is impossible to remove plymouth now, the next cries out a conspiracy theory of how the systems are locked-down and freedom is suppressed, the next complains that time is wasted doing this work rather than fixing feature X which he told to a friend once in the pub, yet no one has come running to fix.

None of these things are true and at no point does a developer step in to say "I understand the system and here are the facts". Primarily because there are no developers, just packagers. And though the entire process of spreading fallacies, everyone feels great about themselves thinking they have contributed something. They haven't.

I install whichever OS they ask for. I also install Windows XP and getting the accelerated drivers for that is actually a pain. Why all three? Because there are Suse fans who feel most comfortable using Suse. Because there are multiprocessor simulators which are distributed only in .deb packages. Because, and I really must strongly emphasise this, there really isn't much of a difference between the distributions and there are no dragons!. They are all collections of the same software. If I solve a bug on one, it is the same solution on the others. This is why I feel strongly that distros should upstream their efforts. But perhaps most importantly, I do this because I want people to be comfortable using their computers. The reinstall cycle is about once every 2 years. I would appreciate you not insinuating people being mentally deficient on the ground that I put in more effort that is strictly necessary, after all the open source community is driven by people who put in more effort than the minimum necessary to get the job done, in order to make others' lives better

[citation required]
And not just a post by an Ubuntu user who heard it off a friend. I hear this every day and never met anyone who has supporting evidence. Along with "Fedora is just for servers", "Fedora uses bleeding edge so nothing works" and "there be dragons in them hills".

I install Ubuntu, Suse and Fedora on university machines on a daily basis. There is no massive discerning difference between these distributions that makes one much easier for 3d drivers than the other. All three have package repos for proprietary drivers and are as easy to set up.

And that's the entire point. Ubuntu has a massive following of very vocal non-coding users. I contribute an upstream project and I often go to the Ubuntu forums looking for any bugs people have found. These are swamped with hundreds of trolls, moaners and flamers. Most will explain how much of a waste of time a particular project is, how the coders are morons and how things are getting worse every day, while smugly pretending to be uber-experts in everything. None of them would ever consider investigating bugs, talking to people upstream, downloading the code, submitting patches. This is not contributing back to the community.

All this noise distracts from the real contributors who actually do the work, quietly, productively and without much of a fanfare.

Ubuntu community gives as much to the open source community as 4chan gives to the modern art movement.

Fossil fuels store ancient solar energy...perhaps the poster meant "with only energy recently collected from the Sun"?

What if a solar plant produced gasoline as its output...would that count as "solar powered"?

Yes, I can see a new motto for the Feds:

"We're here because you're all too stupid to do the right thing."

"Oh, and we get to decide what the right thing is. That'll be $5. *gun in face*"

???

Your post is balanced on a tower of incorrect unstated assumptions.

He basically says that being able to move products and goods without taxation caused this scenario where labour can be sent over-seas to a country with lower wages. This generally means that either that country has all the jobs or other countries have to lower their wages to stay competitive.

There is no mythical place with the cheapest labor prices and an infinite supply of labor. When an employer enters a new country and wants to hire people, they have to increase the wage they offer those workers in the market in order to compete. Those workers actually benefit by doing this.

This also reflects the quality of products and services, since you are paying substandard wages

Sub-what-standard wages? Where does the "standard" wage come from?

and basically taking people who need money to survive

Everyone needs money to survive.

and not people who work because they enjoy it.

Rare breed, they.

On the flip side, the middle class in the more prosperous nations are left without the jobs they'd need to get by,

Oh, are they? They couldn't possibly think up new, better, more enjoyable jobs could they?

or they'd take sub-standard (for their country) wages and scrape along the bottom.

I am missing the assumption that you are apparently stuck on that there is some kind feeding trough of jobs that people, like cattle, line up for...?

Apparently you are also missing the very obvious fact that consumers who buy goods actually benefit because the goods are cheaper.

It's like a broken record with you protectionists. Chinese jobs are bad! US jobs are good! If local jobs are better than foreign jobs, it seems somewhat arbitrary that you choose nations as your granularity. Why not states? Are Arkansas jobs worse than Texas jobs? What about California jobs versus Idaho jobs? Those labor markets have radically different wage profiles--is "exploiting" cheap labor in Detroit bad for the expensive labor market in California? Why stop there? Why not get upset that *any* jobs exist outside your town? Or your family?

Hey, don't buy that hammer, my brother makes hammers!?

Except that they don't. At least, no more than anybody else. Possibly less, actually.
In the US, Christians are about 80% of the population, but over 90% of convicted criminals.

Could it be that Christians are very active in prisons, and that convicts (who have little to lose) are more than happy to "turn to God" to make early parole?

Hate to break it to you, but high and low tide occur twice (each) per day, and tide schedules shift by about 50 minutes each day. They can also vary due to other factors such as wind conditions, shape of the harbor, ocean conditions, phase of the moon (interaction between the Sun's tidal effects and the moon's), etc. If this was happening every day at the same time, I find it highly unlikely that tides were the root cause.

Use a helicopter....what could possibly go wrong?

Sorry to burst your bubble, but ads do not influence Google search results. Search results are computed and ranked completely independent of ads. It doesn't matter how much you pay Google for your ad campaign, it won't influence what is shown in the search results. Search engine optimization on the other hand....

Wow, your comment is absolutely laden with objective reasoning, and does not demonize those you disagree with as bad people, at all. Seriously, you believe that all people who hold a libertarian viewpoint want to screw everyone else and get a license to fuck everyone else over? This is the starting point of your reasoning?

I'm coming around to your viewpoint. Oh wait, nope.

People rarely think their positions through in my experience. Or they just gloss over all the bad parts because what happens won't affect them in the least.

There, fixed that for you.