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I'm sorry, driving is not a right in the US.

John

Are you sure about that?






That's what all of about three milliseconds of Google time found me.

I'm sorry, driving is not a right in the US.

John

Are you sure about that?






That's what all of about three milliseconds of Google time found me.

Though if ESA members want the extension to happen, they should be fully prepared for associated costs (perhaps Russia too

Well, fuck, if we don't have the capability to launch humans into space (and our track record over the past 10 years indicates we won't), why not? Abandon ISS, and let the first nation with manned orbital spaceflight capabilities claim it as salvage.

Renting one module for reality show might help... ;)

Not as crazy as it sounds. If it's abandoned, why restrict the game to nations? Let the first corporation with manned orbital spaceflight capability claim salvage rights and turn it into a hotel. There might even be grounds in international law for that.

And if we can establish that as a precedent, we're one closer to Mars, bitches!. First guy to land there owns the whole. fucking. planet. :)

Just because the States has abandoned the race for technological supremacy in favor of Jesus-freakery doesn't mean some other bunch of humans can't try to claim the high ground. I love the States. I came here because my country had given up on technology. (OK, so you can laugh at my fuckup. Too late for me to do anything but laugh at it either...)

Bottom line is I don't care who does it, but somebody's gotta get us offa this rock, and I've swallowed my pride and stopped caring what kind of cloth patch is on their uniforms.

ICE? Seriously? Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, that was formed in March of 2003? Yeah, they f'd up big by not preventing 9/11 in...2001.

INS, as it was called back then, was so incompetent that it issued the dead hijackers visas after 9/11. It then promoted the people responsible for the fuckup into positions of non-responsibility.

INS was always the most dysfunctional of the Federal bureaucracies, and splitting it into ICE (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the beating-up-Mexicans side) and CIS (Citizenship and Immigration Services, who is in charge of issuing visas to dead hijackers, while simultaneously ensuring that it takes 5-10 years for a dude with a Ph.D to get a green card) is no different.

As the old Soviet/Russian joke about the GRU/KGB/FSB goes: Old bureaucracies never die, they just change their names.

("In Post-9/11 America, old bureacracies change their names, but they never die! Whatta country!")

I know it's in my sig but I'd like to hear your well thought out rebuttal to this. Then you might be taken seriously.

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion--when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing--when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors--when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you--when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice--you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot."

No, it's just the logical conclusion of a culture of worshipping money

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=1826

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor--your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made--before it can be looted or mooched--made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.'

"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss--the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery--that you must offer them values, not wounds--that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade--with reason, not force, as their final arbiter--it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability--and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

"But money is only a tool. It will take

Huh? So? Was the W3C cowering in fear all those years? Did they make poppy in their pants because IE was dominant? Did Universities stop researching Unix kernels because NT became popular? Blaming MS is a simple tactic aimed to generate the "us vs them" primal response. Admittedly only a moron would fall for that, then again, this is slashdot..

Microsoft has a long and demonstrable history of engineering non-compliant standards,

so? software standards are very much unlike standards in the classical sense. Software Standards in many cases can hold back innovation. Individuals are not free to add cool stuff to the any web standard unless some random committee OK's it. Probably why things like XUL will take ages to show up in all browsers. It doesn't help that in most cases you have your competitors on the commitee board too who are going to deliberately slow down the process till their product is done..

leveraging their superior market share to create their own standards and drive out the competitors.

BTW, since Mozilla added XUL, they created their own standard, and by your definition they're leveraging their market share to drive out competitors. AmIRite?

Clearly Standards can be do much good in enforcing fair competition in the market place. But don't let this fool you into thinking that they are some sort of panacea for the broken web.

Whether that's fair or not is not really our call, because courts have already ruled on it. Internet Explorer spent years developing this business model, but then MS got slapped on the pee-pee for it.

Do you blindly agree with everything any judge has to say instead of thinking for your self? Or do courts never make mistakes? You should take a look at some of the controversial rulings judges have made in your country of residence. I bet you wont agree with all of them.

Read these if you are truly interested.

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=88

http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=613

(Yeah, I'm sure Micro$oft paid them off. Shh. Lets keep it between us)

Huh? So? Was the W3C cowering in fear all those years? Did they make poppy in their pants because IE was dominant? Did Universities stop researching Unix kernels because NT became popular? Blaming MS is a simple tactic aimed to generate the "us vs them" primal response. Admittedly only a moron would fall for that, then again, this is slashdot..

Microsoft has a long and demonstrable history of engineering non-compliant standards,

so? software standards are very much unlike standards in the classical sense. Software Standards in many cases can hold back innovation. Individuals are not free to add cool stuff to the any web standard unless some random committee OK's it. Probably why things like XUL will take ages to show up in all browsers. It doesn't help that in most cases you have your competitors on the commitee board too who are going to deliberately slow down the process till their product is done..

leveraging their superior market share to create their own standards and drive out the competitors.

BTW, since Mozilla added XUL, they created their own standard, and by your definition they're leveraging their market share to drive out competitors. AmIRite?

Clearly Standards can be do much good in enforcing fair competition in the market place. But don't let this fool you into thinking that they are some sort of panacea for the broken web.

Whether that's fair or not is not really our call, because courts have already ruled on it. Internet Explorer spent years developing this business model, but then MS got slapped on the pee-pee for it.

Do you blindly agree with everything any judge has to say instead of thinking for your self? Or do courts never make mistakes? You should take a look at some of the controversial rulings judges have made in your country of residence. I bet you wont agree with all of them.

Read these if you are truly interested.

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=88

http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=613

(Yeah, I'm sure Micro$oft paid them off. Shh. Lets keep it between us)

The link doesn't work unless you drop the final slash; http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5384

I read Malcolm Gladwell's book about a month ago and I just finished Steve Martin's new book, Born Standing Up, this morning. What I found remarkable was that Steve Martin's book exactly parallels the process that Malcolm Gladwell talks about.

Steve Martin's book begins:

"I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success."

There are other parallels such as having the opportunity to work at Disneyland from a young age and being exposed to performance and magic tricks. The most important point is that Steve Martin spent years and years refining his craft.

----

Also, interesting is this very positive review of Gladwell's book by Tomas Sowell, an ultra-conservative economist (Gladwell is an obvious liberal)
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5384/

All economists agree that government spending is important during times of contraction, as it helps to make up the shortfall in the economy from the side of the consumer, and helps "stimulate" the economy. Another advantage of government spending is that it's usually an investment in infrastructure that will last many decades and provide a platform for future growth in the economy.

This is patently false. Not all economists agree that government spending is a "good thing" in times of contraction. Here is an economist who argues that it is a bad thing: http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5408 He is by the way a staunch conservative/libertarian who tends to support Republican politics (although I have seen him write columns condemning "spend, spend" Republican policies).

Africa capitalist? check out http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=2000 Here's the thing with poverty. Widespread poverty only exists when governments tax so much that there becomes no point to trying to advance. What's even worse, that wealth is then giving to the so-called less fortunate so they can reap the benefits of other's hard work, giving them no incentive to also improve their situation. Poverty is something that will always exist in any society, even in a completely free market capitalist system. poverty will always exist because there will always be people too stupid or too lazy to make a good living. Don't get me wrong though, you don't need to be intelligent to live well in a capitalist system. The common man in a capitalist system lives much better off than the average person in say, Africa or south America. Most countries have a limited amount of economic freedom, the moment you become well off the government starts extorting wealth from you.

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5374

Don Luskin puts it well

Well .. I haven't read Atlas Shrugged and now I may want to.

You might also want to check into Alan Greenspan's background. His essay Gold and Economic Freedom appeared in Ayn Rand's (nonfiction compilation of essays) Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.

Read Greenspan's 1966 essay, and compare it to this speech from Atlas Shrugged, which was published in 1957. (Good speech; it stands on its own, and it gives away no spoilers.)

Then you'll be ready for Atlas Shrugged, and your final exam question: Was the real-life Greenspan (who joined the Federal Reserve, rejected the Gold standard in favor of fiat money, and as recently as a few years ago suggested at the bottom of the interest rate cycle that subprime mortgages were a great idea) styling himself after the character of Francisco D'Anconia?

how is it racist to acknowledge that the average black IQ is 85 (vs 100 for whites, and slightly higher for some other groups)?

Because correlation != causation ... acknowledging to different to attributing IQ to skin colour. Let's say that IQ was instead to do with economics and that groups of humanity (of all races) have at times failed and at other times flourished... societies can be destroyed and education can fail, whereas other groups of society grouped by location, gender, race or age can grow and prosper. Don't think about it as race, think about it as how people group themselves based on their perceived identity or commonalities. Cultural Isolation has a much larger statistical affect,

As it turned out, the research showed that the average IQ difference between black and white Americans -- 15 points -- was nothing unusual. Similar IQ differences could be found between various culturally isolated white communities and the general society, both in the United States and in Britain. Among various groups in India, mental test differences were slightly greater than those between blacks and whites in the United States. In recent years, research by Professor James R. Flynn, an American expatriate living in New Zealand, has shaken up the whole IQ controversy by discovering what has been called "the Flynn effect." In various countries around the world, people have been answering significantly more IQ test questions correctly than in the past. This important fact has been inadvertently concealed by the practice of changing the norms on IQ tests, so that the average number of correctly answered questions remains by definition an IQ of 100. Only by painstakingly going back and recalculating IQs, based on the initial norms, was Professor Flynn able to discover that whole nations had, in effect, had their IQs rising over the decades by about 20 points. Since the black-white difference in IQ is 15 points, this means that an even larger IQ difference has existed between different generations of the same race, making it no longer necessary to attribute IQ differences of this magnitude to genetics. In the half century between 1945 and 1995, black Americans' raw test scores rose by the equivalent of 16 IQ points. -- Capitalism Magazine

If you are trying to say that black IQ is lesser then I'd put it back on you -- where's the genetic cause of this? Where's the genetic flaw that afflicts black people? It's only then that you'll have evidence, other than your pointed statistics with racist implications.

Erm, if the side you're speaking of is the one I'm thinking of, the LAST time they "tried" to give us universal health care "in the first 100 days!" they ended up bringing us HMOs and PPOs... which, from a guy who worked for years in a medical office, has done far more damage to American health care, and many of us STILL have no coverage.

Ummmm, it was Nixon who bought us the HMO, not Clinton, if I understand your attempted innuendo. Sorry to put a gaping hole in your argument. I still agree with your point about the damage done to American health care.

The investors laugh. This planet we will own, they ask, is it Earth? No? Well, then, how much is it worth? The investors explain to the Mars expert: Owning Mars-getting all the way to Mars and back-is getting to first base. In order to have a successful venture, a venture to invest in, the property must be valuable.

How valuable? $10 billion? Hardly. A successful, manned Mars mission, according to the most optimistic estimates, would take a minimum of 10 years from planning to completion. Venture capital firms, in order to justify their high-risk investments, seek a minimum of 10 times growth in their investment over five years. And they want to be able to "cash out"-to sell their initial investment if they want to. Assuming that the $10 billion would be spent smoothly over the 10 years (i.e., tying up the capital an average of five years), means that after the successful mission, Mars would have to be worth at least $100 billion in order to justify the investment of $10 billion. A hundred billion is almost $3 an acre.

Now, even after a successful, manned Mars mission, why would other investors pay the original venture capitalists $100 billion for Martian land? (Why would they even pay $100 million, or one million?) The land would be almost completely undeveloped. For anyone to invest in such a risky proposition, there would have to be a reasonable chance for the land to be worth at least 10 times as much five years later-one trillion dollars, 15 years after the beginning of the original project.

That's almost $30 an acre. Today, you can still buy range land in New Mexico for $40 an acre. And that is with Earth's atmosphere included, and substantially lower transportation and energy costs.

And the reason they keep going is because, by and large, they don't pay for it. Third-party "insurance" picks up the tab. If you don't pay for something yourself, the tendency is to try to milk it for everything you can get. This is why universal health care is a boondoggle. It will only be more of the same problem.

In the US, calling it "insurance" is really a misnomer anymore. It's not just for unforeseen catastrophes. It's more like a payment plan system that covers even "maintenance" and routine expenses.

How much faster would genetic modification be than traditional breeding in search of resistance?

It will be interesting to see how far this has to go before people realize that nature, unlike GMO, is *known* to be dangerous -- cf. malaria, DDT and Rachel Carson.

I would love to go found a colony on Mars. Get a dozen men, a dozen women, make sure there's a doctor or two, an engineer or two, and forbid any lawyers or CEOs. It'd be just like the Mayflower... Only without the natives and smallpox...

Harry Binswanger once suggested that we pull out of the various "no private property in space" treaties, and declare something like this:

"The first person to land on Mars, and to live there some specified minimum duration (such as a year), and to return alive owns the entire Red Planet."

Sign me up. Hell, sign me up even if it's a one-way trip. That sounds like an adventure.

I assume you might be talking about Atlas Shrugged?
Don't ruin it for me, I just got done with Francisco's Money Speech

Antitrust

When antitrust cases are about complex technical subjects like Microsoft and the market for PC operating systems, or Hughes/Echostar and the market for satellite TV broadcasting, it's easy just to throw up your hands and assume that the government's experts must be right. But when an antitrust case is about ice cream, you don't have to be an expert to form a solid opinion.

Take a look at the Federal Trade Commission's decision this week to block the proposed merger of Nestlé Holdings and Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream on antitrust grounds. The issues at stake are so simple that the injustice, arbitrariness, and sheer absurdity of American antitrust regulation jump out with breathtaking clarity.

The FTC decision allows the government to disrupt a voluntary and mutually sought combination of two private businesses. The decision also slashed a billion dollars in market value from Dreyer's stock as soon as it was announced.

The FTC believes "that the elimination of Dreyer's would likely lead to anticompetitive effects in the market for superpremium ice cream." Before this action, did you even know that there was something called a "market for superpremium ice cream"? Well, now you know.

Imagine, if you will, an incredibly complex diagram covering a wall in the office of a Ph. D. at the FTC. The diagram is titled "The Market for Food," and the hierarchical scheme branches from there to include every possible food group. Now erase everything that isn't under "The Market for Deserts," and then erase everything that isn't below "The Market for Frozen Deserts," and then erase everything that isn't beneath "The Market for Ice Cream." Not much of the diagram remains (we're already down to something the size of a postage stamp). But now erase "The Market for Cheap-o Ice Cream," "The Market for Regular Ice Cream," and "The Market for Premium Ice Cream." What you have left is about the size of Abraham Lincoln's nostril on a penny. This is "The Market for Superpremium Ice Cream."

In this tiny little sub-sub-sub-sub-market, Dreyer's brands Dreamery, Godiva, and Starbucks battle it out with Nestlé's Häagen Dazs and Unilever's Ben & Jerry's. The big issue, according to the FTC -- or the reason why government intervened and cost Dreyer's shareholders $1 billion -- is that "this deal will reduce the number of significant competitors from three to two" and "would likely raise prices and reduce choice for consumers." Even if you think the government should be concerned with such matters, none of this action means a thing unless you accept "The Market for Superpremium Ice Cream" as a meaningful reality.

Who's to say this market is of any importance? Who's to say it needs the government to interfere with its private business decisions?

What if consumer choice in "The Market for Superpremium Ice Cream" was narrowed to a single brand and prices became astronomical? What if "The Market for Superpremium Ice Cream" vanished from the face of the earth altogether? So what? Consumers would simply choose from the dozens of remaining premium, regular, and cheap-o ice cream brands. Or they could switch to some other desert. Let them eat superpremium cake!

Even if "The Market for Superpremium Ice Cream" needed to be policed for competition, who's to say that the correct number of competitors is two rather than three? Is it always better to have more competitors in a market?

In this country we have only two political parties of real influence. Would we be better off with more parties, as is the case in Italy and Israel? Maybe we would, and we are free to have them -- or not. But in the category of ice cream -- or rather, superpremium ice cream -- we are not free to have less than three competitors positioning for space in the superpremium ice cream aisle.

And why should we necessarily be concerned that prices might rise with a drop

Higher insurance rates / costs from accidents don't damage the economy, they actually contribute to it. You may not be happy paying $100 more to your insurance that you could put elsewhere, but its certainly not hurting the economy at all. If anything, the bugs in IE contribute to the economy, as more money is required to move through the system to account for them.

Sounds like the broken window fallacy to me. This doesn't add any money to the system unless the victims are all misers. At best, it simply diverts it from one path to another.

...this Pope is the Antichrist.

Thank heavens I'm an athiest.

In related news, Walter Williams wrote a great editorial on El Hefe's condemnation of people trying their damnedest to keep what they fucking earn.

According to this article:

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4448

The foam that broke off was from the old foam....but it was stock piled BX 250. This foam weakens with age.

Here's a great link that helps illustrate the "problem" with healthcare in the US by asking why is there no car insurance crisis.

... to which the answer is no. "Caring about race" is racism, no matter which way you spin it - whether you're parading around in white sheets, or demanding scholarships because of the colour of your skin, you're still a racist. See here for an excellent pictorial explanation if you're still confused.

Sounds like more government regulation.

Sounds like more government regulation.

Environmental extremists are extremely bad for the real environmental reform.
So there was no smile on my face because I was dead serious.

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4780

http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=13367

http://www.fff.org/comment/com0512c.asp

http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/Ecoterrorism.asp?L EARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_Ameri ca&xpicked=4&item=eco

During the past two decades, radical environmental and animal rights groups have claimed responsibility for hundreds of crimes and acts of terrorism, including arson, bombings, vandalism and harassment, causing more than $100 million in damage. While some activists have been captured, ecoterror cells - small and loosely affiliated - are extremely difficult to identify and most attacks remain unsolved.

http://www.cdfe.org/conference.htm
Washington (CNSNews.com) - As concerns about eco-terrorism mount on Capitol Hill, there is more finger-pointing aimed at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which admits to having provided financial support to a group allegedly connected to the terrorism.

But while PETA acknowledges that some of its money has in the past gone to the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), and to the legal defense funds for several Animal Liberation Front (ALF) members, the organization denies that any of its money "goes toward illegal activities."

Multiply this experience with that of his like-minded colleagues and you clear evidence that the politicization of global warming is a self-sustaining and corrupt.

And given that anything involved with government, which is political by nature, is necessarily politicized, you now have the demolition of the myth that publicly funded research is somehow more immune to corruption and bias as compared to privately funded research.

This is so because all disbursers of funding MUST be selective in choosing who gets grants. So, either he rolls the dice and chooses randomly, or he picks who gets funded by some standard. Well, what's a bureaucrat to do, especially if he isn't up-to-date on the latest things going on in the field? This is bureaucracy, remember, so he's not likely to risk funding mavericks. He'll start off with safe choices, the ones who are already highly regarded in their fields -- you know, the establishment.

But soon, he starts getting calls from Congressman. This one's my wife's second cousin... that one will employ my brother's firm... this one will give me the political capital I need to crush someone I don't like .... this one will help me force those damn video game companies to do as I think they ought.... and on and on.

Eventually, he'll start discovering just how much leverage he has, and he starts picking and choosing what serves his *own* political agenda -- and BAM, you have Trofim Lysenko or some other sort of Little Dictator. That is how an Establishment is formed and maintained -- a process that can never fully come to fruition in an all-private, un-politicized research market, because there's no means to suppress the independents.

Private funding can be used in that manner by unscrupulous corporations also, but that sort of thing has a hard built-in limit -- reality. There's only so much a company can or wants to get away with, and their funding is limited by the depth of their pockets (whereas government is only limited by the depth of YOUR pockets). It's one thing for cigarette comapanies to keep trying to fudge the facts on cigarette dangers, but you won't see them try to convince anyone that they can be used as baby diapers.

If such constraints existed in the political realm, we'd have communism's 100+ million victims back.

LOL, you are new at this internet thing, right? Exactly how far do you think you have to go to find claims that global warming is a hoax?

Pointing out that the overwhelming majority of such articles in the popular press have zero scientific credibility is merely a public service, and it has NOTHING to do with what the BBC is looking for. The BCC are looking for real, scientific arguments against global warming that have been suppressed by the scientific establishment. You won't find it on some internet tabloid, if it exists at all. It is more likely to be on the homepage of some fringe university researcher in danger of getting fired.

No one would remember Rodney King if someone had not caught the police beating him on video

This country really needs more so-called conservative justices. By "conservative", I don't mean conservatives pushing their agendas from the bench (like O'Connor), I mean justices who follow the Constitution (like Scalia).

Scalia ruled that it is okay for the federal government to prohibit individuals growing marijuana in their own homes because that impacts "interstate commerce." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich

Judge Thomas said that the people involved in this case "use marijuana that has never been bought or sold, that has never crossed state lines, and that has had no demonstrable effect on the national market for marijuana.

So please don't hold Scalia up as some kind of paragon of purity. He makes shit up when it's in his ideological favour just as the other justices do.

The difference is, they find them in reputable, peer reviewed journals, and written by people who actually understand climate science.

Ahh, so you understand climate science do you? Let's just test that little assertion shall we? Pop quiz:

1. 99.9% of all carbon on Earth is located in the:
   • Lithosphere
   • Atmosphere
   • Biosphere
   • Oceans
2. The largest contributor of carbon to Earth's atmosphere is:
   • Soil erosion
   • Burning fossil fuels
   • Respiration of organisms in the biosphere
   • Deforestation
3. Each year, ____ gigatons of carbon are contributed to the atmosphere by fossil fuels.
   • 4-5
   • 2-3
   • 6-7
   • 8
4. US government studies have concluded that fertilizing the ocean with iron sulfate could remove ____ gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere in the first year alone.
   • 8
   • 2-3
   • 4-5
   • 6-7

For all four questions, the first answer is the correct answer. If you didn't already know this, please reconsider posting unless you plan to quote someone more educated on the subject than yourself... like for instance, "Dr. Hurricane" William Gray.

I am convinced myself that in 15 or 20 years, we're going to look back on this and see how grossly exaggerated it all was. The humans are not that powerful. These greenhouse gases, although they are building up, they cannot cause the type of warming these models say - two to five degrees centigrade with a doubling of the greenhouse gases.

There's a lesson in this.

Hey Dixie Chicks, and the rest of your mistreated ilk, do you now know what censorship is?

Actually loosing a tile or two doesn't matter. Actually when they switched, tile damage went up dramatically. Read about it here - http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4448 .

Environmentalists have lied to us for years. Here is a link to the founder of Greenpeace exposing what he has put us through - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/04/14/AR2006041401209.html . I admire his courage for coming clean in such a public manner. Unfortunately there are still a lot of anti-nuke nuts out there. Looking at my electric bill, I wish they would go away.

Envoronmentalists have also helped us a great deal. For example eliminating Tetra-ethyl-lead ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetra-ethyl_lead )- a catalyst used to slow down the raction of gasoline burning (a catalyst either speeds up or slows down a reaction by definition). They have also done a lot of other good like taking CO (carbon monoxide) out of the atmosphere from gasoline engines. They said convert it into harmless CO2, a gas that plants need, a gas that promotes life. A "greenhouse" gas and that is a good thing. Plant trees too. Now they are telling us that CO2 causes global warming and it must be eliminated or we all die!

So the real trick is knowing if they are lying to us or they have something to what they are saying. Take a stand, ban di-hydrogen monoxide! See http://www.snopes.com/science/dhmo.asp

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. This is spin pushed by the NEA and people fal for it year after year. Teachers' salaries are right in line with, and somewhat higher mostly, other professionals at their degree level. Far more than they deserve, considering teachers are consistently those who themselves performed the worst in school. I'm sure you've heard the expression "those who can't do, teach" and it's true here in spades. Perhaps if we start holding teachers accountable we'd attract teachers with work ethic and professional pride, rather than those who simply want to ride the NEA gravy train.

I think you are mistaken.

For most of human history there has been destitute poverty for a large number of people.

With the gradual discovery and transformation to Competitive Free-Market Capitalism, initially in the UK starting several hundred years ago and then in her allied and close countries followed by the rest of the world, the problem partially solved.

Many attempts at eradicating poverty have existed... Technology, communism, etc. But only Capitalism has been so successful by requiring equality and justice in trade and society as a whole, and making slight over production the norm, instead of under production. Thus leading to the solution of poverty for the masses.

However, Most haters of Capitalism ignore the fact that no other system has eradicated poverty as much as a Just, Equal, Competitive Free-market Capitalist Society, where people are free to invent and solve problems and go about their own business of creating wealth from their hard work, and keeping their wealth.

This is the solution to most of poverty. And it seems that the solution to the rest of poverty has not yet been found.

See links:
The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
The Historic, Economic and Philosophic Case for Laissez-Faire
What is Capitalism?
The Destitution of Pre-Capitalist Europe

Poverty is caused by; war; lack of equal justice; barriers to free trade; very high tax (stopping from people keeping the wealth that they themselves have created); subsidies (causing those competing with the subsidised or those forced to give the subsidy to become poorer); and many more reasons.

For most of human history there has been destitute poverty for a large number of people.

With the gradual discovery and transformation to Competitive Free-Market Capitalism, initially in the UK starting several hundred years ago and then in her allied and close countries followed by the rest of the world, the problem partially solved.

Many attempts at eradicating poverty have existed... Technology, communism, etc. But only Capitalism has been so successful by requiring equality and justice in trade and society as a whole, and making slight over production the norm, instead of under production. Thus leading to the solution of poverty for the masses.

However, Most haters of Capitalism ignore the fact that no other system has eradicated poverty as much as a Just, Equal, Competitive Free-market Capitalist Society, where people are free to invent and solve problems and go about their own business of creating wealth from their hard work, and keeping their wealth.

This is the solution to most of poverty. And it seems that the solution to the rest of poverty has not yet been found.

See links:
The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
The Historic, Economic and Philosophic Case for Laissez-Faire
What is Capitalism?
The Destitution of Pre-Capitalist Europe

Poverty is caused by; war; lack of equal justice; barriers to free trade; very high tax (stopping from people keeping the wealth that they themselves have created); subsidies (causing those competing with the subsidised or those forced to give the subsidy to become poorer); and many more reasons.

For most of human history there has been destitute poverty for a large number of people.

With the gradual discovery and transformation to Competitive Free-Market Capitalism, initially in the UK starting several hundred years ago and then in her allied and close countries followed by the rest of the world, the problem partially solved.

Many attempts at eradicating poverty have existed... Technology, communism, etc. But only Capitalism has been so successful by requiring equality and justice in trade and society as a whole, and making slight over production the norm, instead of under production. Thus leading to the solution of poverty for the masses.

However, Most haters of Capitalism ignore the fact that no other system has eradicated poverty as much as a Just, Equal, Competitive Free-market Capitalist Society, where people are free to invent and solve problems and go about their own business of creating wealth from their hard work, and keeping their wealth.

This is the solution to most of poverty. And it seems that the solution to the rest of poverty has not yet been found.

See links:
The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
The Historic, Economic and Philosophic Case for Laissez-Faire
What is Capitalism?
The Destitution of Pre-Capitalist Europe

Poverty is caused by; war; lack of equal justice; barriers to free trade; very high tax (stopping from people keeping the wealth that they themselves have created); subsidies (causing those competing with the subsidised or those forced to give the subsidy to become poorer); and many more reasons.

For most of human history there has been destitute poverty for a large number of people.

With the gradual discovery and transformation to Competitive Free-Market Capitalism, initially in the UK starting several hundred years ago and then in her allied and close countries followed by the rest of the world, the problem partially solved.

Many attempts at eradicating poverty have existed... Technology, communism, etc. But only Capitalism has been so successful by requiring equality and justice in trade and society as a whole, and making slight over production the norm, instead of under production. Thus leading to the solution of poverty for the masses.

However, Most haters of Capitalism ignore the fact that no other system has eradicated poverty as much as a Just, Equal, Competitive Free-market Capitalist Society, where people are free to invent and solve problems and go about their own business of creating wealth from their hard work, and keeping their wealth.

This is the solution to most of poverty. And it seems that the solution to the rest of poverty has not yet been found.

See links:
The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
The Historic, Economic and Philosophic Case for Laissez-Faire
What is Capitalism?
The Destitution of Pre-Capitalist Europe

Poverty is caused by; war; lack of equal justice; barriers to free trade; very high tax (stopping from people keeping the wealth that they themselves have created); subsidies (causing those competing with the subsidised or those forced to give the subsidy to become poorer); and many more reasons.

For most of human history there has been destitute poverty for a large number of people.

With the gradual discovery and transformation to Competitive Free-Market Capitalism, initially in the UK starting several hundred years ago and then in her allied and close countries followed by the rest of the world, the problem partially solved.

Many attempts at eradicating poverty have existed... Technology, communism, etc. But only Capitalism has been so successful by requiring equality and justice in trade and society as a whole, and making slight over production the norm, instead of under production. Thus leading to the solution of poverty for the masses.

However, Most haters of Capitalism ignore the fact that no other system has eradicated poverty as much as a Just, Equal, Competitive Free-market Capitalist Society, where people are free to invent and solve problems and go about their own business of creating wealth from their hard work, and keeping their wealth.

This is the solution to most of poverty. And it seems that the solution to the rest of poverty has not yet been found.

See links:
The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
The Historic, Economic and Philosophic Case for Laissez-Faire
What is Capitalism?
The Destitution of Pre-Capitalist Europe

Poverty is caused by; war; lack of equal justice; barriers to free trade; very high tax (stopping from people keeping the wealth that they themselves have created); subsidies (causing those competing with the subsidised or those forced to give the subsidy to become poorer); and many more reasons.

For most of human history there has been destitute poverty for a large number of people.

With the gradual discovery and transformation to Competitive Free-Market Capitalism, initially in the UK starting several hundred years ago and then in her allied and close countries followed by the rest of the world, the problem partially solved.

Many attempts at eradicating poverty have existed... Technology, communism, etc. But only Capitalism has been so successful by requiring equality and justice in trade and society as a whole, and making slight over production the norm, instead of under production. Thus leading to the solution of poverty for the masses.

However, Most haters of Capitalism ignore the fact that no other system has eradicated poverty as much as a Just, Equal, Competitive Free-market Capitalist Society, where people are free to invent and solve problems and go about their own business of creating wealth from their hard work, and keeping their wealth.

This is the solution to most of poverty. And it seems that the solution to the rest of poverty has not yet been found.

See links:
The Morality of Self-Interest and the Facts that Support It: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
The Historic, Economic and Philosophic Case for Laissez-Faire
What is Capitalism?
The Destitution of Pre-Capitalist Europe

Poverty is caused by; war; lack of equal justice; barriers to free trade; very high tax (stopping from people keeping the wealth that they themselves have created); subsidies (causing those competing with the subsidised or those forced to give the subsidy to become poorer); and many more reasons.

Under Sarbanes-Oxley, the government, without any evidence of possible fraud, has free reign to scour a company's books to determine whether they "fairly" represent the company's finances and do "not contain any untrue statement of a material fact or omit to state a material fact."

Then as an environmentalist, you know that no one is arguing over whether or not the mean global temperature has increased in the last X number of years. The argument is over whether or not human activity is the cause of it. There is also some disagreement over what effects the increase in global temperatures will have/are having. For instance, global warming crackpots like to blame our recent spat of hurricanes on global warming. World renowned professor of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, Dr. William Gray says, and I quote:

I mean, there's almost an equation you can write the degree to which you believe global warming is causing major hurricanes to increase is inversely proportional to your knowledge about these storms.

...

You know, most of meteorological research is funded by the federal government. And boy, if you want to get federal funding, you better not come out and say human-induced global warming is a hoax because you stand the chance of not getting funded.

So much for the "everyone agrees" B.S. you read here on Slashdot constantly. Quickly now Global Warming Jihadist! Find a link between the professor and an oil company or the whole sham will collapse!!

Why does everyone feel compelled to contribute to the environmental debate when very, very few have studed environmental science?

I have a four year degree in Environmental Science. I am also a registered Democrat, if that makes any difference to you... I think global warming theory (Humans->Greenhouse Gasses->Global Temp Increases) is unmitigated crap. I agree with you though: "Debating" global warming here on Slashdot, if you can call it that, is absolutely pointless, because not one of these nut jobs can be bothered to offer any evidence to support their theory. Further, their suggested solutions, assuming their theory is correct, are generally unrealistic *and* inadequate at the same time. Watching these people parrot each other is disgusting, really.

Posting anonymously because I have already modded down several "Oh Noes!!1! Teh SKY IS TEH FALING!!ONE!ONE!!1" rhetoric wielding crackpots and posting under my login name would undo those mods.