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You link doesn't indicate any default rate for subprime above historic levels.

Ok, I'll provide another one then: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/14/AR2007061400513.html

"The problems arose last year as the housing market softened, driving down home prices and making it more difficult for cash-strapped borrowers to sell their homes or refinance their way out of trouble. The most dramatic fallout took place in the subprime market, which caters to people with blemished credit or other factors that make them a risk to lenders. Those borrowers entered foreclosure at a rate of 2.43 percent, up from 2 percent the previous quarter. The percentages seem small, but they are far above norms, particularly in a healthy economy. "

Then "subprime" loans began to default at a rate still well below historical averages, causing the crisis. At the time of the first crisis (the collapse of the derivatives), subprime loans were defaulting at rates *below* historical norms.

Umm, data or cite? By mid-2007, subprime default was already well above norms. The earliest time you could possibly say CDOs were getting wonky was mid 2007, though it's probably closer to mid 2008 (just look at the graph spikes): http://mbaadmin.americaeconomia.com/system/files/value.pdfP Even this article chalks "first feeling the tremors" to early 2007: http://bonds.about.com/od/derivativesandexotics/a/CDO.htm

Face it, the defaults proceeded the CDO collapse. They _had_ to. The value of a derivative can't collapse unless the underlying asset it's tied to collapses.

But I'll give you a chance to go edit Wikipedia and link to it again, but if it's like last time, Wikipedia won't say what you say it says.

A far step above your method of proof, namely stating "I'm right, believe me", and then going back to your own world.

But that's unrelated to my assertion, that the meltdown wasn't caused by subprime loans defaulting above historic levels. The *sole* cause of the crisis was rich white make bankers lying about risk. All it took was one loan defaulting to cause the whole system to collapse.

Except that the meltdown was already in progress about a year a half before they even started mentioning derivatives. And it was a hell of alot more than "one loan". There were record numbers of foreclosures: http://www.kansascityfed.org/Publicat/ECONREV/PDF/4q07Edmiston.pdf

"Residential foreclosures in the United States have been rising very rapidly since 2006. In the second quarter of 2007, the share of outstanding mortgages in some stage of foreclosure stood at 1.4 percent, near historic highs and up from less than 1 percent a year earlier. The number of mortgages entering the foreclosure process reached an all-time high in mid-2007"

"In the second quarter of 2007, 0.65 percent of all mortgages entered foreclosure. To put this Chart into perspective, before 2006 the new foreclosure rate reached 0.5 percent of all mortgages only once. Since the third quarter of 2006, the new foreclosure rate has persistently been near or above that rateâ"an unprecedented event over the last 38 years."

Do you research this stuff at all? Hell, just look at Chart 4 -- the subprime ARM foreclosure spike began in mid-2005.

Crashing prices caused speculators and rich people to default. Then the market went into a free fall. If the rich and speculators hadn't defaulted, the full crash wouldn't have happened. If the bankers hadn't committed trillions of dollars of fraud, the crash wouldn

expensive crack-heads on my development team? http://alcoholism.about.com/od/slang/g/rock_star.htm/

T-mobile has no roaming charges, the only way you might get hit is if you live on a US boarder town.

Seconded. Given that America has been involved in conflict more often than not, it's not hard to see why many foreign countries don't care much for us.

See: http://americanhistory.about.com/library/timelines/bltimelineuswars.htm

Personally, I don't hate America, but I see it like Carl Schurz: "My country, right or wrong. If right, to be kept right, if wrong, to be set right." Setting things right means accepting the truth: that America does not always act as a well-behaved world citizen. Like a petulant child, it needs to be held accountable.

It's already been done.
http://chemistry.about.com/cs/generalchemistry/a/aa050601a.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_transmutation

The costs are too exorbitant today, but fusion should change that.

"Hugo Campos got an implanted cardiac defibrillator shortly after collapsing on a BART train platform. He wants access to the data wirelessly collected by the computer implanted in his body, but the manufacturer says No.

If he wants information about his heart, why isn't he talking to his cardiologist?

Someone who knows his medical history? Someone who can interpret the data correctly?

Does the manufacturer have the data he wants?

What Is Follow-Up Like with ICDs?

After your ICD is implanted, the doctor will want to see you four to six weeks after surgery to make sure the surgical site is fully healed and to answer any additional questions that may have occurred to you in the interim. Afterward, the doctor will usually want to see you in the office two to four times per year. During all these visits, your ICD will be wirelessly "interrogated" using the programmer. This interrogation gives the doctor vital information on how the ICD is functioning, the status of its battery, the status of the leads and whether and how often the ICD has needed to deliver therapy - both pacing therapy and shocking therapy.

Some modern ICDs have the capacity to wirelessly send this kind of information to the doctor from your home, through the Internet. This "remote interrogation" feature allows the doctor to evaluate your ICD whenever needed, without requiring you to come to the office. Even if your ICD has this remote feature, however, the doctor will want to see you in the office at least once a year.

The Implantable Defibrillator

Oh, of course. There is no rest of the world, the ocean simply falls off into space about 2 miles off the coast of America.

Because foreign countries don't have entities which prohibit distribution (read want $$$$)? BBC iplayer requires you to be in the UK. I guess the rest of the world doesn't exist to them either... I am unable to watch many streaming services auf Deutch due to my geolocation. I guess the rest of the world doesn't exist to them either? My choice in recommendation was based on the assumption that the GP is American. Perhaps if he was speaking Korean another recommendation would be in order... where is your recommendation?

TLDR: Licenses, how do they work?

After a few weeks on constant painkillers for her back,

The non-specific pain could have been a symptom of addiction to the original painkillers.

> Yes, Bacula is the only real solution

What a minute. Really?

OP is asking for a linux console application that can perform a backup over multiple block devices (in this case externally attached hot-plugable drives like USB), and Bacula is what you come up with as the *only* real solution? Obviously you've never heard of dump.

http://linux.about.com/od/commands/l/blcmdl8_dump.htm

Considering that the words "forty" and "fifty" are very similar, yes, I expect it was a slip of the tongue. Every president (and indeed, every other politician, executive, and other celebrity) has made just as many mistakes. They're human. It happens.

Do you expect the act of inauguration to somehow free a person from all distractions? Or does it magically provide an extra few hours a day to set aside for practicing upcoming speeches? Or is it just this particular person that's under examination, when the last president was just as bad?

It's a simple fact of life that people often mix up thoughts while speaking. It's so common that nobody notices everyday occurrences unless they're particularly egregious. When the speaker is a celebrity, though, suddenly it's a big deal that supposedly reflects negatively on the intelligence of the person. We all know perfectly well what the speaker intended, so why is a misspoken phrase so important?

Remember, this is a design patent case.

It's not just rounded rectangles and a black bezel. It's rounded rectangles, a black bezel, this AND that AND other things.

Note the the "AND" - it all has to add up to be significantly infringing. It doesn't have the same requirements as a utility patent. Moving an icon would not likely be unique enough to get you a utility patent, but it could well be PART of a design patent.

Victoria, British Columbia still dumps raw sewage DIRECTLY into the ocean and has a thriving tea-party/creationist/anti-AGW style movement fighting any and every effort to fix it.

I really don't think we'll ever worry too much about not meeting our fat requirements...

Protein in cow milk is 30–35 grams of protein per liter. That's about 8 grams of protein per 8 oz cup.

Using myself as an example, the below calculation has me at 91 grams/daily. That's 3 liters of milk.

How to Calculate Your Protein Needs:

1. Weight in pounds divided by 2.2 = weight in kg
2. Weight in kg x 0.8-1.8 gm/kg = protein gm.
Use a lower number if you are in good health and are sedentary (i.e., 0.8). Use a higher number (between 1 and 1.8) if you are under stress, are pregnant, are recovering from an illness, or if you are involved in consistent and intense weight or endurance training.

Example: 154 lb male who is a regular exerciser and lifts weights
154 lbs/2.2 = 70kg
70kg x 1.5 = 105 gm protein/day

source: http://exercise.about.com/cs/nutrition/a/protein_2.htm

The government of China has been using strategies like these for decades in order to drive up and sustain the trade imbalance, and it's well documented and well known. They're also known to make contributions to US politicians who look the other way.

The difference with these Chinese loans is they are clearly going to support an unprofitable business model. These Chinese manufacturers will never be able to make a profit at the prices they're selling at, they will have to raise prices in the future in order to make a profit. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's basic accounting. Airbus has received government loans to develop new aircraft (and Boeing certainly did protest as they do not receive similar loans) but this was for a fixed cost item (the aircraft's development) which was expected to generate a future return which would be used to repay the loan. If the loan was to cover a loss on every aircraft sold, you can bet that would be a scandal.

Even with the bailouts and economic stimulus, the money was loaned out under the condition that it would be used by the companies to make changes to their businesses to regain profitability, which they did. It was not used to offset the cost of selling vehicles at a loss. Companies which were loaned money and failed to pay it back were allowed to fail. The were not given new loans to finance a loss on product sold.

Quite probably a deliberate typo.

They do a good job but they ripped it (unintentionally or not) from this guy's routine. Yes this is the Pachelbel's Canon rant. Pachelbel's Canon is a baroque piece that follows roughly the I V vi IV progression. And as shown in both videos, it's probably more correct to say it's the progressions being reused, and how that is key since it is redundantly obvious that chords like notes are more limited and are always reused. Or like letters in the alphabet... there are only 26 but they can make millions of words (in many languages) depending on how they are ordered, or their progression.

For anyone who this flies over, it is really quite simple. We have seven notes in the traditional western scale (sometimes called the ionian mode by music geeks). In grade school we first learn the musical scale as doe ray me fa so la tee doe. That's eight because we repeat the root (do'h). If we looked at a piano we can play starting from middle C, and get the same scale by playing the key for the C note, then D, E, F, G, A, B, C.

We can also play the scale using chords instead of individual notes, and this is key to understanding progressions. But if we want to play the scale using chords for the C scale (called the harmonized scale), each chord needs to be made up of notes from only the C scale. If we played a harmonized scale in D, the notes of every chord would all need to belong to the D scale. This happens to work not too badly with a couple of minor (small pun here) changes. To keep it short, another important concept is that often the scale is enumerated. The first note of any scale is 1, the second 2. Usually this is done in Roman numerals. So a C in the C scale is I, the B is ii, the E is iii, the F is IV, the G is V, the A is iv, and the B is viib5 (the last one, minor seven flat 5 is a bit messed up, yeah). The upper and lower case is important, because upper case means a major or dominant chord and the lower case means minor.

We use the roman numerals because they can just be moved around to any scale. Say D, where the scale is D, E, F#, G, A, B, C#, D. So I, V, vi, IV as in Pachelbel's Canon, or the Axis of Awesome's Four Chords, is D, A, Bm, and G. Since you know it's I, V, vi, IV you can move it to the key of C and play C, G, A, F. If you were playing blues, the most common progression is I, IV, V (so you'll hear people saying, "hey, it's just one four five", and then often the key). You can hear a musician at a jam sometimes say, "there is a I, vi, ii, V turnaround." A very common turnaround and a type of progression.

So it is these chord progressions (encoded in roman numeral notation) that are really important not so much the chords. Take for example the progression: I, III, IV, iv... That is the first four bars of Radiohead's Creep. But it is also the first four bars of a 1920s Bessie Smith tune called 'Ain't Nobodies Business; covered very successfully later on by Jimmy Witherspoon, BB King and Ruth Brown(key of Bb), and the BOMB, Freddie King (key of Db... with a I, vi, ii, V turnaround :).... and borrowed by Radiohead (no turnaround... and nothing wrong with using the progression, like the article points out, there is limited set of progressions that sound good to people, their going to be reused).

To try to explain the reason for major and minor in a short space (it is is dense but should be understandable if you have even a little musical knowledge): Remembering the C scale is C, D, E, F, G, A, B: The first note is C

I actually have 2 old A4000's in a closet somewhere that I've been willing to revive but have been postponing because I'm not sure I have a monitor that can handle the signal, plus I very much doubt the disks will spin up anyway : they've not been powered since the year 2000. That said, the longer I keep putting this off, the bigger the chances I'll never get to my (then) beloved .mod collection / Fidonet archive.

I've been holding some 1.2 GB disks in storage in the hope they'll be recognized by the A4000 and actually hope to copy the data from the old disks (200Mb-ish) to the new disks. I'm a bit wary about doing so on the Amiga directly fearing that any malfunction on behalf of the disk might fry the motherboard/disk controller of the Amiga.

The most logical approach thus seems to be to start up my old trusted PIII and do the operation on that one. The question that comes to mind is though : what software is out there that can reliably copy a FFS partition from one drive to a (much larger) drive ? From what I've read ( http://linux.about.com/od/fsy_howto/a/hwtfsy10t02.htm ) Linux can do R/W on FFS partitions so in theory simply installing Ubuntu should do, but I'm wondering if anyone has ever done this and if so, how well does it handle (potentially) corrupted data ? Maybe I should start out with ddrescue ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dd_(Unix)#Data_recovery ) to create a file-image and see how far I can get using the tips found in this topic... and worry about getting it actual use later on... (I should have my Workbench disks around somewhere (if readable!) and could probably simply re-install the OS on the 'new' disks and then copy everything across from the PIII (linux) to the Amiga using some ArcNet cards I have... again, if they still work ... lot's of if's here =P

The most common table created layout has a navigation bar on the left side of the page and the main content on the right. When using tables, this (generally) requires that the first content that displays in the HTML is the left-hand navigation bar. Search engines categorize pages based upon the content, and many engines determine that content displayed at the top of the page is more important than other content. So, a page with left-hand navigation first, will appear to have content that is less important than the navigation.

Using CSS, you can put the important content first in your HTML and then use CSS to determine where it should be placed in the design. This means that search engines will see the important content first, even if the design places it lower down on the page.

The people building those offices, studios, factories, restaurants, and mines put their lives at risk. Money at risk? Christ, man, your priorities seem a bit skewed to me.

Sally Ride taught the world about how our lives should never be taken for granted. Farewell Dr. Ride. http://womenshistory.about.com/od/aviationspace/p/sally_ride.htm . Ms. Ride's Facebook resume: www.facebook.com/sallyridescience/info . http://library.thinkquest.org/4034/ride.html . Wikipedia http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Ride

Reagan couldn't get the cuts he wanted through the Democrat senate even though they promised him when he increased spending to pull out of the recession they would cut spending afterwards. http://uspolitics.about.com/od/usgovernment/l/bl_party_division_2.htm

That's a visual guide, look for the control of senate during his terms.

Some of our best spending control was in the 104th when the republicans forced Clinton to balance the budget. I wouldn't mind a house and senate controlled by R's and a president controlled by a D if it worked out the same.

Wow Elon is a billionaire now? He wasn't one at the time he started Tesla and SpaceX. One rumor is his first wife divorced him some time back because he was having a cash flow problem at the time. I knew he was doing better now that Tesla actually sells cars and SpaceX got all those launch contracts and Falcon 9 is flying but that is certainly interesting to know. You can check out his previous track record. AFAIK he had ~200 million at the time.

While it's certainly not a bad idea, I'm not even sure if acid-free paper is needed, newspapers are now routinely used to date excavated garbage, they remain readable for up to 50 years http://environment.about.com/od/recycling/a/biodegradable.htm, obviously without any special care (they were in the trash, after all).

The biggest problem with the "You don't need an SUV" argument is that people tend to buy and do what they want, not what they need. Examples are: I didn't have to go to my cabin last weekend, but I went anyway. I didn't have to pick my home/work so I'd need this commute, but I like living in the suburbs. I didn't need to get a SUV, but I like the high driver's seat. Limiting yourself to only the things that are strictly necessary may work in wartime but otherwise people will do what they want. Same goes for all the stuff I buy, of course I could go all Buddhist monk and only own a handful of things, it's a very eco-friendly life style but I like my way of living with gizmos and gadgets and appliances and whatnot. The only reason SUVs took a nose dive is because gas prices hit owners straight in the wallet, the greenies talked before too any nobody listened.

But there are working examples - the Honda FCX Clarity, for example (Top gear review)

That car - the size of an Accord, more or less - has a range of 270 miles, which is comparable to gas cars. So the tanks may be heavy, but not so much that they make the car impractical.

And remember, battery power needs big breakthroughs before it will be mainstream: fast(ish) charging batteries are in the works, but fast-charge reduces the operating life of the battery. And the battery packs - as they are now - are very expensive. The only workable solution seems to be a battery-rental infrastructure, which would require a lot of cooperation, and would a lot of details (how to make a standard pack that would work with SUVs, sports cars, vans, and sedans, for example).

iOS doesn't run on computers it runs on phones and tablets. And no there are lots of other browsers for iOS: (out of date list).

From what I read, using the iPhone Configuration Utility app for Enterprise users, you can disable WiFi and bluetooth in the provisioning.

I think that exposure to multiple religions can a be a good thing.

http://atheism.about.com/od/atheistschildren/a/kids_teach.htm

It may depend on the model of the MINI. The Clubman is at the bottom of the list of stolen cars:
  http://usedcars.about.com/od/avoidingproblems/a/Top-10-Least-Stolen-Cars.htm

The fact that many MINIs have manual transmissions may have something to do with it. Seeing a stick shift might be enough to deter the average punk joy rider.

I agree. Grammar is a bit like neckties insofar as it is possible to function without one but when you wish to gain admission into establishments where they are required, neckties become indispensable. There are places where precise grammar is needed to reduce ambiguity and establish clear meaning but the primary function of grammar is to establish linguistic register. http://grammar.about.com/od/rs/g/registerterm.htm

The Iraqi Information Minister?

http://politicalhumor.about.com/library/jokes/bljoke-iraqinfominister.htm

Sure, but that does not make it a country - but as I said, it depends on how you define "country", see Scotland is not a country for a list of reasons why Scotland might not be considered a country.

(Texas and Hawaii also have their own Senate and Constitution etc. but that does not make them countries).

Who says a single command line utility need to do that? I can do it in a single command line, though.

newspost -s "More pics" -p posting.par $(for I in *.jpg ; do G=upload/${I%.jpg}.gif ; djpeg -pnm $I | pamscale -xsize 320 -ysize 240 | pnmquant 256 | ppmtogif > $G ; echo $G)

And before you call 'BS', note that I habitually type long, involved command-lines like that (not including all the [website.name] crap Slashdot inserted). That particular one above finds all the JPEGs in the current directory, resizes them to 320x240, quantizes them to 256 colors, writes them as GIFs, and uploads them to USENET.

And that's kinda the point of the command line. There doesn't need to be one application that fills whatever baroque need you have at the moment. Instead, you can string a bunch of smaller tools together to get there.

Also, a 2012 report shows Arizona companies have applied for 4,387 work visas. The average salary for these positions is $75,473. The most recent U.S. Census data (compiled through 2007) shows the average salary in Arizona is $47,750. So something tells me the people who might actually have these visas are not the same people who are getting pulled over in beat-up white Ford pickup trucks.

If a flunked math student can discover a theory of relativity [...]

I hope you're not referring to Einstein, because he never flunked math. See http://physics.about.com/b/2007/09/19/physics-myth-month-einstein-failed-mathematics.htm and http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1936731_1936743_1936758,00.html.

In fact, Einstein absolutely needed math to make the theory of Relativity.

Also, calm down :)

No, lots of plants produce cyanide (in form of free CN ions) ...

Apple seeds also contain cyanide compounds,
    http://chemistry.about.com/b/2007/09/12/yes-apple-seeds-and-cherry-pits-are-poisonous.htm

They only "seem out of place" to the people who still keep a hard relation between place and activity. That limitation is artificial and dies as soon as technology allows us to perform activities anywhere.

Some centuries ago it would "seem out of place" to watch a performance on your living room. Unless you were the king and had a palace. Now we're all kings.

So by that statement I should fly to Rome, go to the Coliseum and watch YouTube? No, that's part of the problem with this disjointed reality nonsense. "Yeah I'm going to Trajan's column and update my FourSquare status." Part of being there, doing real things, not virtual things, is that you have all of your senses as part of the experience. Not just your hearing and sight. You mention watching a performance in your living room, that's because your living room is frankly boring and putting a TV in it brought something exciting to a boring location. Don't kid yourself when you think that all of these new technologies are actually making things better for your quality of life. Part of having a tablet for flights is that for hours on end I get to look at the back of airline seats and somebody's head, it's a boring place, therefore the technology makes sense but if I'm in Rome I want to see the sights, hear the sounds and all of the sensory things such as feeling the heat in my shoes and smelling the cat poo at the Coliseum not by choice but because there are thousands of cats who occupy it.

So in my original observation when I saw a couple at a restaurant, they weren't interacting verbally or acknowledging each other, they were stuck to their damn tablets. Now, that's their choice granted but if you're that disconnected from what's going on around you and who you are with, then why go? I guess by what you're saying the next great thing is we'll all have tubes stuck in us and we'll be sitting in a vat of goo generating electricity.

Google results like this one?
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-teenage-mind/201102/does-marijuana-cause-cancer

or this?
http://lungcancer.about.com/od/causesoflungcance1/f/marijuana.htm

At best, you can say that there are no definitive studies linking the two, but it appears that most combustibles emit carcinogens when burned.

I'm not saying that's a reason to ban marijuana, but, like with tobacco, users should really make informed choices.

MyCleanPC is a horrid piece of fraudulent software that infected my parents' computer and caused their house to burn down with them in it. MyCleanPC is fraudware that should be investigated by the FTC, FBI, and Department of Justice. I recommend that you never even visit the MyCleanPC website. I recommend that if you made the mistake of installing MyCleanPC that you take the infected computer outside and beat it with a hammer until the pieces left are each small enough to fit in a thimble. Do not recommend MyCleanPC to anyone you know unless you want them to hate you.

MyCleanPC is a horrid piece of fraudulent software that infected my parents' computer and caused their house to burn down with them in it. MyCleanPC is fraudware that should be investigated by the FTC, FBI, and Department of Justice. I recommend that you never even visit the MyCleanPC website. I recommend that if you made the mistake of installing MyCleanPC that you take the infected computer outside and beat it with a hammer until the pieces left are each small enough to fit in a thimble. Do not recommend MyCleanPC to anyone you know unless you want them to hate you.

MyCleanPC is a horrid piece of fraudulent software that infected my parents' computer and caused their house to burn down with them in it. MyCleanPC is fraudware that should be investigated by the FTC, FBI, and Department of Justice. I recommend that you never even visit the MyCleanPC website. I recommend that if you made the mistake of installing MyCleanPC that you take the infected computer outside and beat it with a hammer until the pieces left are each small enough to fit in a thimble. Do not recommend MyCleanPC to anyone you know unless you want them to hate you.

MyCleanPC is a horrid piece of fraudulent software that infected my parents' computer and caused their house to burn down with them in it. MyCleanPC is fraudware that should be investigated by the FTC, FBI, and Department of Justice. I recommend that you never even visit the MyCleanPC website. I recommend that if you made the mistake of installing MyCleanPC that you take the infected computer outside and beat it with a hammer until the pieces left are each small enough to fit in a thimble. Do not recommend MyCleanPC to anyone you know unless you want them to hate you.

MyCleanPC is a horrid piece of fraudulent software that infected my parents' computer and caused their house to burn down with them in it. MyCleanPC is fraudware that should be investigated by the FTC, FBI, and Department of Justice. I recommend that you never even visit the MyCleanPC website. I recommend that if you made the mistake of installing MyCleanPC that you take the infected computer outside and beat it with a hammer until the pieces left are each small enough to fit in a thimble. Do not recommend MyCleanPC to anyone you know unless you want them to hate you.

Peanuts are very dangerous to some people. They could certainly be used as a weapon, though that's not why they're banned:

http://foodallergies.about.com/od/adultfoodallergies/f/nutsatschool.htm

It seems odd to me that you haven't heard of this problem since it's been so widely publicized, but maybe that's only the case around here.

Dionysius (II) was a fourth century B.C. tyrant of Syracuse, a city in Magna Graecia, the Greek area of southern Italy. To all appearances Dionysius was very rich and comfortable, with all the luxuries money could buy, tasteful clothing and jewelry, and delectable food. He even had court flatterers (adsentatores) to inflate his ego. One of these ingratiators was the court sycophant, Damocles. Damocles used to make comments to the king about his wealth and luxurious life. One day when Damocles complimented the tyrant on his abundance and power, Dionysius turned to Damocles and said, "If you think I'm so lucky, how would you like to try out my life?"

Damocles readily agreed, and so Dionysius ordered everything to be prepared for Damocles to experience what life as Dionysius was like. Damocles was enjoying himself immensely... until he noticed a sharp sword hovering over his head, that was suspended from the ceiling by a horse hair. This, the tyrant explained to Damocles, was what life as ruler was really like.

Damocles, alarmed, quickly revised his idea of what made up a good life, and asked to be excused. He then eagerly returned to his poorer, but safer life.

... For those of us not up on our Classical stories.

Buddhism is not Christianity. It's medieval Catholicism in which the patent lawyers and company executives would spend eternity in a nasty place

Nope, that's not quite right either. I agree with the "There is no good or bad karma, there is only karma", but karma still isn't some sort of cosmic justice. It works a lot differently.

"What have we 'fixed' so far, anywhere, on a scale comparable with the destruction we have caused? What is the technological answer to Sahara, which was turned into a desert thousands of years ago?"

Pennsylvania used to have rivers that caught fire. Now they are much cleaner. The air is many places in the USA is cleaner from regulation of car exhaust. In general, North America has been reforesting over the last century now that most people no longer burn wood for heat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforestation#Examples

Some fisheries in the oceans have been protected and started to recover. Nature can rebound very quickly when given the chance, which given so many people live in cities in mainly a political issue at this point.

Right now, about half the land in the USA goes to raise grains to feed to livestock in factory farms, producing meat that overall is probably shortening our lives (see Dr. Joel Fuhrman's website, the Rave Diet site, etc.). If we started eating more vegetables, we'd free up plenty of land for wilderness (half the USA) and be much healthier. So, both lifestyle and technology affect carrying capacity for humans on the Earth.

To reforest the Sahara might be a big project, but it is not clear that desertification is entirely human-caused, and it may relate more to global climate changes in thousand long year cycles. But, in any case, the way nature makes fertile soil is to weather rock, so we can grind up rock and spread it as slow acting fertilizer. Then we need to protect the appropriate succession of plants and make sure they have water until they change their climate to be water attracting. See the real:
http://remineralize.org/
And the fictional:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Planted_Trees

However, global warming will turn Canada and Siberia into much more diverse biological areas eventually, so there are both good points and bad points about climate change. Overall, plants grow better with more CO2. The issue is more how to deal politically with the externality that, after lots of burning of fossil fuels by the USA and other industrialized countries, some people living on islands or in coastal areas or in areas with more storms will suffer, while people living in Canada and Siberia may end up much better off. That is a deep political question for a world with no unified government and no unified economic model that can account for externalities.

There are many solutions to environmental problems. Whether we decide to implement them is mainly a moral social choice about priorities (and to a lesser extent an issue of education that alternatives exists or imaginatively coming up with even better ones).

For example, how can we run out of metals on the Earth? Where do you think metals go after they are used? Why can't we just recycle them? Yes, it takes energy to mine landfills, but the universe if full of energy, with a vast amount reaching the Earth's surface every day from the sun, and with people even working on ways to tap into fusion energy or the zero-point energy of the quantum vacuum. Also, btw, right now I've heard the US automotive industry is a net producer of metal, as people switch to smaller cars and cars with more carbon fiber and plastic.

Other ideas include "Plan B" by Lester Brown:
http://environment.about.com/od/activismvolunteering/a/lesterbrown.htm

The big problem is that by claiming there are no solutions, you are contributing to a climate of negativism that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy if people start fighting over perceived scarcity rather than create more abundance for all with the same technology. There are plenty of solutions. The issue is just whether we implement them (or put our minds to imagining even better solutions).

Resolution is only one dimension.

Where are the full 12 bits per R,G,B dynamic range screens? or full 16x16x16 color range?

Even your normal 8x8x8 bit LCDs are fake, and usual 6bit, that flicker fast between patterns to achieve the fake 8bit range.

http://compreviews.about.com/od/multimedia/a/LCDColor.htm

Well, not exactly.

Poor folk have fewer diversions and escapes from daily life (and more reason to desire them). I've seen poorer folk do "reburns" ('recycling' leftover tobacco from others' cigarette butts), "rollies" (buying loose tobacco then rolling it in papers, as loose tobacco usually costs less per ounce), and buying "loosies" (illegal, but it happens a lot anyway, especially as the price goes up.)

Also, your argument that higher taxes will cause smokers to quit is a lot like the argument that making narcotic drugs illegal was supposed to cause drug use to go down. The latter has obviously not happened, and has in fact increased... especially among the poor.

http://chemistry.about.com/od/onlinecourses/Online_Chemistry_Courses.htm