Who would you think would be sued on what grounds?
There's no action possible on the DMCA, because you can't show that the person who made the claim knew that it was fake. Under the law, as I understand it, the person who files must have a reasonable belief that the notice is valid. I think you need to show not that he should have known that it was invalid, but instead that he did know. And no penalties can be issued against the person who told him to file.
The only reasonable way around this that I can see would be to consider UMG together with its agents to be one person. Even then it would be quite difficult to show that they (i.e., it) knew this was a fake claim.
You mentioned the penalties "for fake notices". Sorry, but that's not correct. There are penalties if the person who files the notice knows that the notice is fake. If they are following instructions from someone else that they can claim a "good faith belief" in the honesty of...like their client...then no penalties can be issued against anyone no matter how many fake notices are filed.
No. I don't guarantee that his numbers are correct, but it's not a "methane has a life of x years in the atmosphere", but rather a half-life. And when the methane degrades, it leaves CO2 behind. So it continues to have an effect.
I don't think there's any simple equation that would handle this. You'd need multiple equations with multiple variables. But that's too complex to think about quickly, so it gets oversimplified. 20 years is about 2 half-lives (a bit less). But, again, the degradation products aren't completely inert in the relationship either, so you need to increase that variable at the same rate that you decrease the one relating to methane.
I haven't worked out the numbers, but he could be right. Particularly as in the statement he appears to be summing the warming produced. (If he's right it's probably because he's quoting someone who *did* work out the numbers, and oversimplifying it as he reports it.)
No. It's a common mistake. It's caused by believing that the "Open Source Community" is a cohesive whole, and can be considered as a unitary entity. It's also caused by negotiations taking time, and while they are in progress the environment changing before anyone has made any real commitments. But you need to remember that the FOSS community has very little tensile strength. They pull apart easily, with some going one way and some another.
Additionally, the changes being proposed are specifically designed to enhance the appeal to other corporate entities, and NOT to appeal to the majority of FOSS developers.
Still, every FOSS project that's both large and successful needs some source of financial support. And any piece of software that is "opened" to FOSS needs a good project leader. And good project leaders for FOSS projects are a really scarce resource. And *one* characteristic that leader need to have is that he already understands the code. Whoops! If the project has just been open, guess who the possible candidates are.
There's all sorts of people who treat FOSS as some sort of "magic pixie dust", and many to most of them are community members. This doesn't mean that they aren't ignorant, or even willfully ignorant. Most FOSS projects fail. Repeat: Most FOSS projects fail. Tell it to yourself 20 more times. The successes are because there's lots of FOSS projects. Some are run by people who are both skilled and lucky.
This is definitely true. And one of the reasons is that you don't see UltraViolet very well, or InfraRed, either. False color images are the only way to show the information.
Trusting the Iranian PR less than the CIA PR is either impressive or stupid. (Depending on how much you trust the CIA PR.)
The CIA PR is totally untrustworthy. You can't even depend on them to lie. I would guess that the Iranian PR is slightly more trustworthy, because they have a bit less practice at lying. But I would find myself incapable of trusting them less than I trust the CIA, even if I thought they were equally practiced.
When I considered buying a PS3 it was *solely* because it would support Linux. I didn't do it, partially because of some other dick moves that SONY had made. Now I'm quite grateful, and am satisfied that I will never buy anything from SONY again.
But I was considering buying a PS3 because of the Linux support. *YOU* may not have been advertised to, but *I* was.
Why should I assume that because he doesn't need to be re-elected, he's not corrupt? That doesn't make any sense.
I will agree that I know of no evidence that he's on the take. I won't go any further than that. This is a corrupt decision. If the law actually justifies it, then the law is corrupt. I don't, however, believe that the law justifies it. I believe that the judge, or possibly the judicial process, is corrupt.
You don't need to be taking bribes to be corrupt. Not that I'm certain he wasn't taking bribes, but I know of no evidence that he was. This, however, doesn't prevent the decision from being corrupt. And it doesn't prevent me from believing that those who intentionally support such a decision from being corrupt. If it's not their financial ethics that are corrupt, then it's their sense of justice. (I will grant that the court system no longer even seriously pretends to be intended to produce justice, but that is it's sole rationality for existing. [Not the sole basis. I'm aware of enabling legislation, and consider that totally beside the point.])
IIUC, the problem is the wording of the law. What it takes is one person to make the (fraudulent) claim and another person to file the claim while plausibly believing the claim of the first person.
IIUC, the penalties only apply to the person filing the claim if he doesn't believe the claim is valid. Nice, huh? So if the judge decides to believe that you knew you didn't own the copyright, or that rather that the person filing the DMCA objection didn't believe that the entity he was representing owned the copyright, then the penalties apply. But if the judge decides to believe that you filed the claim "in good faith", then there are no penalties.
If I'm correct, there aren't any penalties for making a false claim, only for filing a claim that you know or believe is false.
Don't count on the hospital being a decent fall-back. I got an attack of what turned out to be celluliits on a Friday night, and spend around 12 hours in the emergency room fainting, vomiting, etc. before I ever saw a doctor. I ended up with a week of intravenous anti-biotic treatment. Sometimes it's not that bad, but you can't count on it.
These days if I need help, I usually ask a neighbor, or wait until Monday. The Emergency room is only if you're likely to die otherwise...and then don't expect help. You might get it, but don't expect it.
P.S.: Don't count on athlete's foot being a minor problem. After several recurrences of cellulitis I got to a doctor who identified the cracks between my toes as the entrance site of the bacteria. Then... well, the answer turned out to be hunks of raw wool between my toes, changed every day. This was difficult as tracking down a supply of un-dyed raw wool fiber was... interesting. Drugstores don't carry that kind of thing. Eventually I found it at an on-line supplier of goods for Spinners.
No. Every system is vulnerable to trojans (barring the embedded systems, of course). Viruses, however, are something else. Most varieties of system are not host to viruses (though this wasn't always the case). Worms are, again, something else. They can infest any system using certain networking protocols.
I can't give you the technical distinctions between these classes, but they exist and are significant.
N.B.: Linux could be a lot more secure than it is. No questions about that. But only at the cost of being slightly less convenient.
P.S.: Is Android host to viruses? It may be, I don't know. But note that this would be because of features which are different between Android and Linux. (There are, indeed, a lot of those.) Generally, however, when I hear that Android is host to malware, I assume that what is being talked about are trojans.
Were *you* duped? Then you weren't paying attention. While he was running for president he voted in favor of FISA. So you should have known all along that he was lying through his teeth. But he was probably still the best of two bad choices. (And don't talk about the third party candidates. The only plausible reason to vote for any of the ones I investigated was that they had no reasonable chance of being elected. Nobody sane will invest the time and effort required to run as a third party candidate. Actually, I doubt that anyone sane will even invest the time and effort required to run as a major party candidate, but at least there there's a measurable probability that you'll get elected.)
The system is thoroughly corrupt. But it's probably not bad enough that violent overthrow of the government would make things better. (It almost never does.)
"Worse than" is a bit difficult to quantify if you don't specify how you're measuring. It has, however, never been friendly to freely transferring information from one of their systems to that of a competitor. Not from the days of the Apple ][+. The only (small) exception is when the marketplace is so dominated by their competitor that if they don't allow information to transfer, they'll need to shut up shop.
That said, they've ususally had some really nice payoff for not being able to transfer the information, like storing more data / floppy disk than the competition.
Don't ever buy any music with the Universal label. Or, for that matter, any RIAA member company.
Lest you forget, SONY is the RIAA member company that gifted people with CDROMs that came with rootkits. And they weren't even charged with criminal computer trespass. They essentially got off free, except for a very minor amount of bad PR. (Minor as in "most people will never have heard of it". For that matter, it wouldn't surprise me to find that there are still many computers out there running that rootkit.)
No, I *don't* have to give the Gnome3 team credit for trying. If you specify what they were trying to do, then maybe I'll give them credit. E.g., if you specify that they were trying to make a window manager for a tablet computer, then I'll give them credit for trying, but if you don't specify I just going to think of them as being a pain in the ass, and while I'll admit they've accomplished that, I don't think credit is the right term for how I feel.
And the complaints about Gnome2 are still correct. It's a desktop that suits my use-case (though not as well as KDE3), but the crippling of user customization was not a desirable feature, and it destroyed the utility of the interface for many users who found Gnome1 perfectly adequate, because they could easily customize it. Gnome2 is a lot less flexible. If it does what you need, it's fine. If you need something that isn't there, you may not be able to customize to to do what you need. More accurately, it may be easier to do it in Java or Smalltalk or EMACS.
So the people who really needed the customizable features left for another environment, and stopped complaining. This didn't mean they hadn't been abused.
Well, Gnome2 became "good enough" for most uses, and new users never knew what they missed. But Gnome3 is next to unusable on a desktop. Others have said that it's also bad as a touch screen GUI, though I can't speak to that.
There still isn't a good replacement for some of the things that one could do with Gnome1. You can do it by programming in C and calling system libraries, but that's not really a decent replacement. (Mind you, I said "that one could do". I could never do them, because my interests didn't lead me to develop that skill set. OTOH, Gnome2 hasn't provided much in the way of improvement over Gnome1 for my purposes. There's a few things, but nothing that couldn't have been implemented in Gnome1...they fall more along the lines of refinements.
Please be aware that when I mention a Window Manager above, I'm talking strictly about the user interface, and not about the libraries. In some ways the libraries have improved dramatically. The GUIs, however, have retrogressed (from my point of view, and for my use-case).
IIUC, MATE require that your system be able to run Gnome3. Because of this I doubt that I could even try it.
And the "classic mode" that Gnome3 reverts it's install to is eye-burningly ugly. Black, for gods sake, panels. I could probably work around it, but I'd need to do it all over again every upgrade. So when Debian stable stops supporting Gnome2, I'll try something else. Even KDE4 is better than Gnome3. Gnome2 is better than KDE4, and KDE3 was better than Gnome2. Perhaps Pearson will finish their Trinity edition of KDE3. Perhaps LXDE will fix their broken support of left-handed mice. If all else fails I'll switch to KDE4.
(Yeah, I'm not considering FVWM or blackbox. Sorry, they don't fit my use-case. I am considering a few others, but they're currently rated below KDE4 for my purposes.)
N.B.: **FOR MY PURPOSES**. One size does NOT fit all. I don't have, or desire, a tablet. If I did, then Gnome3 might be a reasonable choice. But I'm damn well not going to use it on a desktop. MATE is promising, but if it requires Gnome3 to run, then it's not compatible with my hardware. (Am I satisfied with my hardware? No. But it's what I've got. And if I had extra cash I wouldn't want to spend it on fancy video drivers, but rather on more RAM, larger hard disk, better backup, etc. If I replace the system and it comes with a fancy video card, I still won't want to spend CPU cycles that way. (I even disable most of the fancier stuff that Gnome2 comes with.) I *DO* understand that this isn't everybody's use case, but it's mine. And it makes me despise Gnome3, and the designers who discarded the Gnome2 GUI, And the designers who discarded the KDE3 GUI. And Unity, which is, for me, not any better at all than Gnome3. (Well, I don't really despise the Unity designers. They didn't destroy a perfectly adequate interface to push their brand new atrocity. But I sure can't use Unity.)
This is, perhaps, true, but China was already densely populated (in the fertile areas) before Mao took over. This is due to a long history of the government encouraging this by various means. (Most, admittedly, weren't actually designed to increase population, but they had that effect.)
OTOH, you can't blame it all on the Chinese (lots of it though). High infant mortality tends to cause an explosion in births/person, and repeated foreign incursions gave China periodic episodes of high infant mortality. This, I believe, caused a net upwards trend in the population. It's also one of the areas that has been civilized for the longest period. That has led to a slow upward trend in the population relative to almost everywhere else. Then there's Confucius, who encouraged large families. (The Taoists and the Buddhists didn't either encourage or discourage them, in all, but Confucius was VERY family conscious.)
It's worth noting that at Fukishima many of the main problems appear to have been with spent fuel rods that they just didn't have anywhere safe to store without power. Similar US plants are reputed to have the same problems.
You might want to read what Piers Antony wrote about Lester Del Rey as a editor. You might revise your opinions. Granted, Lester Del Rey was an unusual editor. But he was an editor, and a good one. And he was hired by a publisher to run his section the way he thought it should be run.
I will grant that this doesn't speak of how most editors act, and of the relations of most publishers with their authors. But don't do a blanket condemnation.
FWIW, and just in the field of Science Fiction magazines (are they all gone now?) most editors were successful writers. Not top writers, but not failed ones, either. If you're a top writer, you'll want too large a salary, so they aren't interested, and if you're a failed writer, they don't trust your taste. (Both strike me as reasonable considerations.) E.g. John W. Campbell, Jr. published over 10 books and numerous short stories. He was a much better editor than an author, but he certainly wasn't a failed author. Neither was Stanley Schmidt or Damon Knight. Don't know about H.L. Gold and can't think of any other editors off the top of my head.
Somehow this argument sounds like the argument for continental drift before plate tectonics.
OTOH, I note that the another comment denies that the mathematical fit is all that good. This isn't really convincing, as I heard similar denials of continental drift before a plausible mechanism was discovered.
Still, if that it so you can expect it to continue to be rejected in a way that seems to you unreasonable UNTIL you come up with a plausible mechanism (for charge separation?). Personally I'd look at friction of intestellar gasses around the ejection plumes from black holes. Friction is well known for causing charge separation between, e.g., fur and glass. Now you've got to come up with your analogs to fur and glass...or come up with some other mechanism. But until you provide a plausible mechanism, this theory will be rejected without reasonable examination. Expect it.
Well, sorry, but we CAN'T calculate how long the galaxy will be around. At least not if you are willing to still consider it "the galaxy" after it merges with Andromeda. That depends on the rate of increase of dark energy, which we don't even have any good ideas about. (Or if we do, I haven't heard of them.)
I sort of doubt that dark energy is increasing rapidly enough that the Andromeda-Milky Way super-galaxy will disintegrate, but I haven't heard any REAL reason to doubt it. It's clear that eventually everything beyond the local cluster will be too far away for light to reach us from them, however, unless the rate of expansion slows for some unexpected reason. (OTOH, there may be nothing but black holes and black dwarf stars, and an occasional small red or brown dwarf left by then. So it's probably not worth worrying about.)
It could still leave out galaxy, eventually, via a gravity slingshot. I'll admit it's quite unlikely (and I'm not even sure how unlikely) but it's possible.
P.S.: I haven't calculated things out, but this might require that it be near a supernova explosion, in which case while the mass might leave out galaxy, it might not be fair to call it Voyager. But I suspect a pair of close binary neutron stars could give it enough velocity without even noticing.
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Yes. That's the way I understand it to be written, and that's the way it's been applied in every instance I've heard of.
Caution: IANAL. But that's the way it was analyzed at one time on Groklaw.
Who would you think would be sued on what grounds?
There's no action possible on the DMCA, because you can't show that the person who made the claim knew that it was fake. Under the law, as I understand it, the person who files must have a reasonable belief that the notice is valid. I think you need to show not that he should have known that it was invalid, but instead that he did know. And no penalties can be issued against the person who told him to file.
The only reasonable way around this that I can see would be to consider UMG together with its agents to be one person. Even then it would be quite difficult to show that they (i.e., it) knew this was a fake claim.
It might be easier to sue them for libel.
No. The DMCA is a lousy law.
You mentioned the penalties "for fake notices". Sorry, but that's not correct. There are penalties if the person who files the notice knows that the notice is fake. If they are following instructions from someone else that they can claim a "good faith belief" in the honesty of...like their client...then no penalties can be issued against anyone no matter how many fake notices are filed.
No. I don't guarantee that his numbers are correct, but it's not a "methane has a life of x years in the atmosphere", but rather a half-life. And when the methane degrades, it leaves CO2 behind. So it continues to have an effect.
I don't think there's any simple equation that would handle this. You'd need multiple equations with multiple variables. But that's too complex to think about quickly, so it gets oversimplified. 20 years is about 2 half-lives (a bit less). But, again, the degradation products aren't completely inert in the relationship either, so you need to increase that variable at the same rate that you decrease the one relating to methane.
I haven't worked out the numbers, but he could be right. Particularly as in the statement he appears to be summing the warming produced. (If he's right it's probably because he's quoting someone who *did* work out the numbers, and oversimplifying it as he reports it.)
No. It's a common mistake. It's caused by believing that the "Open Source Community" is a cohesive whole, and can be considered as a unitary entity. It's also caused by negotiations taking time, and while they are in progress the environment changing before anyone has made any real commitments. But you need to remember that the FOSS community has very little tensile strength. They pull apart easily, with some going one way and some another.
Additionally, the changes being proposed are specifically designed to enhance the appeal to other corporate entities, and NOT to appeal to the majority of FOSS developers.
Still, every FOSS project that's both large and successful needs some source of financial support. And any piece of software that is "opened" to FOSS needs a good project leader. And good project leaders for FOSS projects are a really scarce resource. And *one* characteristic that leader need to have is that he already understands the code. Whoops! If the project has just been open, guess who the possible candidates are.
There's all sorts of people who treat FOSS as some sort of "magic pixie dust", and many to most of them are community members. This doesn't mean that they aren't ignorant, or even willfully ignorant. Most FOSS projects fail. Repeat: Most FOSS projects fail. Tell it to yourself 20 more times. The successes are because there's lots of FOSS projects. Some are run by people who are both skilled and lucky.
This is definitely true. And one of the reasons is that you don't see UltraViolet very well, or InfraRed, either. False color images are the only way to show the information.
Trusting the Iranian PR less than the CIA PR is either impressive or stupid. (Depending on how much you trust the CIA PR.)
The CIA PR is totally untrustworthy. You can't even depend on them to lie. I would guess that the Iranian PR is slightly more trustworthy, because they have a bit less practice at lying. But I would find myself incapable of trusting them less than I trust the CIA, even if I thought they were equally practiced.
When I considered buying a PS3 it was *solely* because it would support Linux. I didn't do it, partially because of some other dick moves that SONY had made. Now I'm quite grateful, and am satisfied that I will never buy anything from SONY again.
But I was considering buying a PS3 because of the Linux support. *YOU* may not have been advertised to, but *I* was.
Why should I assume that because he doesn't need to be re-elected, he's not corrupt? That doesn't make any sense.
I will agree that I know of no evidence that he's on the take. I won't go any further than that. This is a corrupt decision. If the law actually justifies it, then the law is corrupt. I don't, however, believe that the law justifies it. I believe that the judge, or possibly the judicial process, is corrupt.
You don't need to be taking bribes to be corrupt. Not that I'm certain he wasn't taking bribes, but I know of no evidence that he was. This, however, doesn't prevent the decision from being corrupt. And it doesn't prevent me from believing that those who intentionally support such a decision from being corrupt. If it's not their financial ethics that are corrupt, then it's their sense of justice. (I will grant that the court system no longer even seriously pretends to be intended to produce justice, but that is it's sole rationality for existing. [Not the sole basis. I'm aware of enabling legislation, and consider that totally beside the point.])
IIUC, the problem is the wording of the law. What it takes is one person to make the (fraudulent) claim and another person to file the claim while plausibly believing the claim of the first person.
IIUC, the penalties only apply to the person filing the claim if he doesn't believe the claim is valid. Nice, huh? So if the judge decides to believe that you knew you didn't own the copyright, or that rather that the person filing the DMCA objection didn't believe that the entity he was representing owned the copyright, then the penalties apply. But if the judge decides to believe that you filed the claim "in good faith", then there are no penalties.
If I'm correct, there aren't any penalties for making a false claim, only for filing a claim that you know or believe is false.
Don't count on the hospital being a decent fall-back. I got an attack of what turned out to be celluliits on a Friday night, and spend around 12 hours in the emergency room fainting, vomiting, etc. before I ever saw a doctor. I ended up with a week of intravenous anti-biotic treatment. Sometimes it's not that bad, but you can't count on it.
These days if I need help, I usually ask a neighbor, or wait until Monday. The Emergency room is only if you're likely to die otherwise...and then don't expect help. You might get it, but don't expect it.
P.S.: Don't count on athlete's foot being a minor problem. After several recurrences of cellulitis I got to a doctor who identified the cracks between my toes as the entrance site of the bacteria. Then ... well, the answer turned out to be hunks of raw wool between my toes, changed every day. This was difficult as tracking down a supply of un-dyed raw wool fiber was ... interesting. Drugstores don't carry that kind of thing. Eventually I found it at an on-line supplier of goods for Spinners.
No. Every system is vulnerable to trojans (barring the embedded systems, of course). Viruses, however, are something else. Most varieties of system are not host to viruses (though this wasn't always the case). Worms are, again, something else. They can infest any system using certain networking protocols.
I can't give you the technical distinctions between these classes, but they exist and are significant.
N.B.: Linux could be a lot more secure than it is. No questions about that. But only at the cost of being slightly less convenient.
P.S.: Is Android host to viruses? It may be, I don't know. But note that this would be because of features which are different between Android and Linux. (There are, indeed, a lot of those.) Generally, however, when I hear that Android is host to malware, I assume that what is being talked about are trojans.
Were *you* duped? Then you weren't paying attention. While he was running for president he voted in favor of FISA. So you should have known all along that he was lying through his teeth. But he was probably still the best of two bad choices. (And don't talk about the third party candidates. The only plausible reason to vote for any of the ones I investigated was that they had no reasonable chance of being elected. Nobody sane will invest the time and effort required to run as a third party candidate. Actually, I doubt that anyone sane will even invest the time and effort required to run as a major party candidate, but at least there there's a measurable probability that you'll get elected.)
The system is thoroughly corrupt. But it's probably not bad enough that violent overthrow of the government would make things better. (It almost never does.)
"Worse than" is a bit difficult to quantify if you don't specify how you're measuring. It has, however, never been friendly to freely transferring information from one of their systems to that of a competitor. Not from the days of the Apple ][+. The only (small) exception is when the marketplace is so dominated by their competitor that if they don't allow information to transfer, they'll need to shut up shop.
That said, they've ususally had some really nice payoff for not being able to transfer the information, like storing more data / floppy disk than the competition.
Don't ever buy any music with the Universal label. Or, for that matter, any RIAA member company.
Lest you forget, SONY is the RIAA member company that gifted people with CDROMs that came with rootkits. And they weren't even charged with criminal computer trespass. They essentially got off free, except for a very minor amount of bad PR. (Minor as in "most people will never have heard of it". For that matter, it wouldn't surprise me to find that there are still many computers out there running that rootkit.)
No, I *don't* have to give the Gnome3 team credit for trying. If you specify what they were trying to do, then maybe I'll give them credit. E.g., if you specify that they were trying to make a window manager for a tablet computer, then I'll give them credit for trying, but if you don't specify I just going to think of them as being a pain in the ass, and while I'll admit they've accomplished that, I don't think credit is the right term for how I feel.
And the complaints about Gnome2 are still correct. It's a desktop that suits my use-case (though not as well as KDE3), but the crippling of user customization was not a desirable feature, and it destroyed the utility of the interface for many users who found Gnome1 perfectly adequate, because they could easily customize it. Gnome2 is a lot less flexible. If it does what you need, it's fine. If you need something that isn't there, you may not be able to customize to to do what you need. More accurately, it may be easier to do it in Java or Smalltalk or EMACS.
So the people who really needed the customizable features left for another environment, and stopped complaining. This didn't mean they hadn't been abused.
Well, Gnome2 became "good enough" for most uses, and new users never knew what they missed. But Gnome3 is next to unusable on a desktop. Others have said that it's also bad as a touch screen GUI, though I can't speak to that.
There still isn't a good replacement for some of the things that one could do with Gnome1. You can do it by programming in C and calling system libraries, but that's not really a decent replacement. (Mind you, I said "that one could do". I could never do them, because my interests didn't lead me to develop that skill set. OTOH, Gnome2 hasn't provided much in the way of improvement over Gnome1 for my purposes. There's a few things, but nothing that couldn't have been implemented in Gnome1...they fall more along the lines of refinements.
Please be aware that when I mention a Window Manager above, I'm talking strictly about the user interface, and not about the libraries. In some ways the libraries have improved dramatically. The GUIs, however, have retrogressed (from my point of view, and for my use-case).
IIUC, MATE require that your system be able to run Gnome3. Because of this I doubt that I could even try it.
And the "classic mode" that Gnome3 reverts it's install to is eye-burningly ugly. Black, for gods sake, panels. I could probably work around it, but I'd need to do it all over again every upgrade. So when Debian stable stops supporting Gnome2, I'll try something else. Even KDE4 is better than Gnome3. Gnome2 is better than KDE4, and KDE3 was better than Gnome2. Perhaps Pearson will finish their Trinity edition of KDE3. Perhaps LXDE will fix their broken support of left-handed mice. If all else fails I'll switch to KDE4.
(Yeah, I'm not considering FVWM or blackbox. Sorry, they don't fit my use-case. I am considering a few others, but they're currently rated below KDE4 for my purposes.)
N.B.: **FOR MY PURPOSES**. One size does NOT fit all. I don't have, or desire, a tablet. If I did, then Gnome3 might be a reasonable choice. But I'm damn well not going to use it on a desktop. MATE is promising, but if it requires Gnome3 to run, then it's not compatible with my hardware. (Am I satisfied with my hardware? No. But it's what I've got. And if I had extra cash I wouldn't want to spend it on fancy video drivers, but rather on more RAM, larger hard disk, better backup, etc. If I replace the system and it comes with a fancy video card, I still won't want to spend CPU cycles that way. (I even disable most of the fancier stuff that Gnome2 comes with.) I *DO* understand that this isn't everybody's use case, but it's mine. And it makes me despise Gnome3, and the designers who discarded the Gnome2 GUI, And the designers who discarded the KDE3 GUI. And Unity, which is, for me, not any better at all than Gnome3. (Well, I don't really despise the Unity designers. They didn't destroy a perfectly adequate interface to push their brand new atrocity. But I sure can't use Unity.)
This is, perhaps, true, but China was already densely populated (in the fertile areas) before Mao took over. This is due to a long history of the government encouraging this by various means. (Most, admittedly, weren't actually designed to increase population, but they had that effect.)
OTOH, you can't blame it all on the Chinese (lots of it though). High infant mortality tends to cause an explosion in births/person, and repeated foreign incursions gave China periodic episodes of high infant mortality. This, I believe, caused a net upwards trend in the population. It's also one of the areas that has been civilized for the longest period. That has led to a slow upward trend in the population relative to almost everywhere else. Then there's Confucius, who encouraged large families. (The Taoists and the Buddhists didn't either encourage or discourage them, in all, but Confucius was VERY family conscious.)
It's worth noting that at Fukishima many of the main problems appear to have been with spent fuel rods that they just didn't have anywhere safe to store without power. Similar US plants are reputed to have the same problems.
You might want to read what Piers Antony wrote about Lester Del Rey as a editor. You might revise your opinions. Granted, Lester Del Rey was an unusual editor. But he was an editor, and a good one. And he was hired by a publisher to run his section the way he thought it should be run.
I will grant that this doesn't speak of how most editors act, and of the relations of most publishers with their authors. But don't do a blanket condemnation.
FWIW, and just in the field of Science Fiction magazines (are they all gone now?) most editors were successful writers. Not top writers, but not failed ones, either. If you're a top writer, you'll want too large a salary, so they aren't interested, and if you're a failed writer, they don't trust your taste. (Both strike me as reasonable considerations.) E.g. John W. Campbell, Jr. published over 10 books and numerous short stories. He was a much better editor than an author, but he certainly wasn't a failed author. Neither was Stanley Schmidt or Damon Knight. Don't know about H.L. Gold and can't think of any other editors off the top of my head.
Somehow this argument sounds like the argument for continental drift before plate tectonics.
OTOH, I note that the another comment denies that the mathematical fit is all that good. This isn't really convincing, as I heard similar denials of continental drift before a plausible mechanism was discovered.
Still, if that it so you can expect it to continue to be rejected in a way that seems to you unreasonable UNTIL you come up with a plausible mechanism (for charge separation?). Personally I'd look at friction of intestellar gasses around the ejection plumes from black holes. Friction is well known for causing charge separation between, e.g., fur and glass. Now you've got to come up with your analogs to fur and glass...or come up with some other mechanism. But until you provide a plausible mechanism, this theory will be rejected without reasonable examination. Expect it.
Well, sorry, but we CAN'T calculate how long the galaxy will be around. At least not if you are willing to still consider it "the galaxy" after it merges with Andromeda. That depends on the rate of increase of dark energy, which we don't even have any good ideas about. (Or if we do, I haven't heard of them.)
I sort of doubt that dark energy is increasing rapidly enough that the Andromeda-Milky Way super-galaxy will disintegrate, but I haven't heard any REAL reason to doubt it. It's clear that eventually everything beyond the local cluster will be too far away for light to reach us from them, however, unless the rate of expansion slows for some unexpected reason. (OTOH, there may be nothing but black holes and black dwarf stars, and an occasional small red or brown dwarf left by then. So it's probably not worth worrying about.)
It could still leave out galaxy, eventually, via a gravity slingshot. I'll admit it's quite unlikely (and I'm not even sure how unlikely) but it's possible.
P.S.: I haven't calculated things out, but this might require that it be near a supernova explosion, in which case while the mass might leave out galaxy, it might not be fair to call it Voyager. But I suspect a pair of close binary neutron stars could give it enough velocity without even noticing.