It sounds pretty refuted to me, just from the summary. 80% of the plankton fell all the way to the ocean floor.
Yes...I read that, though I don't have access to the Nature journal article, just the abstract. Because of this, I cannot comment with much of a degree of knowledge. However, I can speculate. The issue is the efficiency of the "biological pump" in transporting carbon from the surface of the ocean to the ocean floor. As I understand it, the biological pump is a complex web of processes, where carbon is changed from one form to another. For example, a carbon dioxide molecule may be grabbed by a photosynthetic algal organism from the surface water. The algal organism dies, sinks, and is consumed by and becomes part of a decomposer. The decomposer dies, and is then consumed by another decomposer. That decomposer takes our particular carbon atom and combines it with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide by respiration. The carbon dioxide molecule is now dissolved in the ocean, and depending on water circulation conditions may reach the surface and be outgassed back into the atmosphere. In this case, the journey of our carbon atom illustrates the "inefficiency" in the biological pump in that the carbon atom didn't make it to the sea floor.
I think the issue might be the characteristics of the organisms produced by the iron fertilization, as well as the local conditions. The article mentioned that they were examining diatoms produced by the iron fertilization. Diatoms are microscopic silica shelled photosynthetic organisms. Since they are protected by silica shells, I would imagine that these organisms would both decompose less quickly and sink somewhat more quickly than other smaller organisms such as photosynthetic bacteria or algae. This could account for the high measured efficiency. Also I could speculate that the local conditions (temperature profile, water circulation pattern, etc) could also play a role. Thus your use of the word "refuted" seems a little premature, given the complex nature of these systems.
I don't think you understand marine biology very well. There isn't much life in the open ocean, certainly not beneath the reach of the sun. Yes, there is LIFE there, but it's not the vast, sprawling jungle you seem to imagine. It's more like a desert.
Yes, of course much of the ocean is a desert. But even deserts have life. And in a land based desert, when you add the limiting ingredient for life, which is usually water, life can suddenly surge in activity. In the case of the oceans, the limiting ingredient is said to be iron, and when you add that limiting ingredient, life, in the form of photosynthetic plankton grows very quickly. There are always a few organisms in ocean water, waiting to start exponential growth given the right conditions.
Sorry...I meant "...the methane will end up in the atmosphere" (where it will act as a greenhouse gas...as well as producing sulphur gas which as poisonous).
I took a course on oceanography a few years ago, and we actually studied this. I'll summarize my professor's powerpoint notes as best I can.
Iron is a limiting nutrient in phytoplankton growth. This is not in dispute. However if we are to add iron to the ocean in order to increase phytoplankton counts, and thus to increase CO2 uptake then we must consider several things. Firstly, how much CO2 will be semi-permanently transported to the ocean floor. In terms of percentages, if increased phytoplankton counts caused a CO2 flux in the surface layer of 50 Gt Carbon / year, the corresponding CO2 flux to the ocean floor would be about 0.7 Gt Carbon / year. This is due to the fact that the mechanisms of carbon transport from the surface to the sea floor (the "biological pump") is quite inefficient. Thus the increase in phytoplankton at the surface would have to be HUGE to transport meaningful amounts of CO2 to the sea floor.
Secondly, there may be dire unintended or undesired consequences of increasing the surface phytoplankton counts. Imagine we put significant amounts of iron in the ocean and imagine that surface phytoplankton counts increased significantly. At the surface we could get increased CO2 uptake and O2 production. But what happens when those phytoplankton die? They sink. And when they sink to deeper layers, other organisms would decompose them. Those decomposers would be oxygen breathers and would consume oxygen at the deeper layer. If their numbers increased due to increased dead phytoplankton, the decomposers could deplete the O2 levels in that level, creating anoxic zones at deeper levels in the ocean. In addition, some of these decomposers might be methane producing bacteria, especially in the absence of oxygen. That methane might make its way into the ocean. The worry is that the imbalanced increase in phytoplankton might result in an anoxic jellyfish ocean that would be rather unfriendly to fish like salmon, tuna, and the other common species that currently exist.
Unless the above arguments have been refuted, I don't know why iron fertilization is still being pushed as a realistic option. It seems to me that many decision makers are nearly completely illiterate in science.
In regards to their policies against video recording, I suspect they don't want a recurrence of the movie "Supersize Me" which did great damage to their image around the world. It was about a film-maker who spend an entire month (or more?) eating only McDonalds food. Whenever they asked him if he wanted supersize, he had to agree. The health results were predictably grim for the film-maker.
I'll believe they are truly sincere when they stop gluing their batteries into their flagship state of the art laptop. Here's a clue: When selling what is supposed to be the best top of the line laptop in the world, don't cut stupid corners. Policies seemingly designed to artificially limit the average lifetime of laptops should not be used on such a "premium product".
The above statement is basically true. If you broke up the entire Greenland ice sheet, the rise in sea level would be catastrophic. Mr. Gore does not say this will happen in the next 100 years. It is a conditional statement. If something happens, then something else will happen. The time scale is not certain, though given recent trends in melting, three feet by 2100 is not unlikely. A basic search of recent literature will support this.
A perfect example of how to be misleading without actually lying.
As opposed to the original parent post I responded to:
So the "twenty feet by 2100" thing is gone now then is it Mr. Gore, cause, gosh, that sure sold a lot of movies books and carbon taxes.
Which is an example of being misleading while actually lying
The Netherlands seem to be doing just fine below sea level. It might cause some economic harm, but it's not going to be a tragedy. Also, most low-lying islands are coral islands that follow sea level.
Do you have a clue how expensive the water management system in the Netherlands has been? Do you realize that the Netherlands is tiny compared with the areas under threat from sea level rise in the US alone? Hell, it's tiny even compared with Florida. Do you realize that duplicating the Dutch diking system for American coastal areas would likely bankrupt the country? Not to mention how future sea level rise will make it even more difficult for even the Netherlands to maintain the integrity of their diking system.
To make it clear, the article says that 32.2 cm rise will be from thermal expansion alone, not including the rise from melting glaciers. I've counted five misinterpreted posts so far. How can so many people be so obtuse?!
Well, we only have 88 years to deal with a foot rise in water. Damn, that's devastating, we'd better get right to work.
From the summary
...32.2 cm from thermal expansion alone...
I know it is easier to ignore reality, but I think the parent poster has gotten so used to ignoring science that he ignores the clear language in the article summary. Here is a fact: Most sea level rise will come in the end from melting glaciers. And the melting is accelerating.
So the "twenty feet by 2100" thing is gone now then is it Mr. Gore, cause, gosh, that sure sold a lot of movies books and carbon taxes.
Except that Gore didn't actually say twenty feet by 2100 in his movie. Here is a link to the transcript (pdf) of An Inconvenient Truth. I believe the passage that is often referred to occurs when Gore shows the maps of water inundated coast lines. Here is the transcript of that part of the movie:
If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida. This is what would happen in the San Francisco Bay. A lot of people live in
these areas. The Netherlands, the low-countries: absolutely devastating.
The above statement is basically true. If you broke up the entire Greenland ice sheet, the rise in sea level would be catastrophic. Mr. Gore does not say this will happen in the next 100 years. It is a conditional statement. If something happens, then something else will happen. The time scale is not certain, though given recent trends in melting, three feet by 2100 is not unlikely. A basic search of recent literature will support this.
You know, if this is your idea of corruption, living in a third world nation would be a huge fucking wake up call. This is not corruption. This is an inconvenience for two major multinational corporations.
The corruption in the US occurs at high levels of power. It doesn't happen as much at the local level, as you might see, say, in many South American countries, where bribes to local officials are par for the course. For examples, google the three words "industry", "written", and "legislation" in a single search. For me, the among the top matches are "Koch, Exxon Mobil Among Corporations Helping Write State Laws" and "Drone plane manufacturing industry is writing the legislation that governs their use in the US". Further cursory searching will show that this practice is endemic. And this doesn't include the already endemic practice of powerful corporations using their power to corrupt the public good by supporting or sabotaging other legislation not written by them.
If you don't think the above examples are corruption, I suggest you find a clear definition of the word. Here is the Oxford Concise Dictionary definition:
Corruption: dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power, typically involving bribery.
If you explore further the concept of corruption, you will see it is intricately tied with powerful politicians being dishonestly influenced by private interests into neglecting their sacred duty to support the Public Good. Read Rousseau's "The Social Contract" for a good introduction.
The sad part is that we cant change it. No matter WHO get's elected into congress, they are always outnumbered 300 to 1 by the bought and paid for senators that are there to do what the industry tells them to do instead of doing what is right.
Broader than that: Humans struggle with reasoning skills.
I would suggest that your comment indirectly implies an important root of the problem. Many in the social sciences attempt to study human society as if it were an ant colony, from a distance, as if the observer is separate from the observed. As we look at human beings and their foibles and faults, we seem to be led to the conclusion that humans are nothing like what we would wish. We don't seem to be rational. We often don't seem to be moral. We in fact seem to be rather despicable creatures. Leaving it at that, we are tempted to throw up our arms and say "to hell with humans, we are beyond help". All our idealism, our attempts to be rational, to be good seem hopeless and futile.
However I would like to take this further. Humans tend to be irrational. Humans tend to be selfish evil creatures. Our natural tendencies imply that we must try harder to overcome them. Because we tend to fall into irrationality, we must fight to be rational. Because we tend to be selfish and shallow means that we must try our best to nurture "the better angels in our nature". We will never "win" this battle. We will never vanquish evil and selfishness. But if we try, maybe, just maybe we can make our civilisation into a system that gives most of us a better and more fulfilling life.
I have used my Apple products for a long time as well. My concerns are largely based on speculation as to the consequences of Apple's gluing in batteries and soldering ram on what were previously fairly upgradable computers. In my area there are several mac specific computer stores that specialize in resurrecting old mac products. I worry that this will become more difficult. In other words, I worry that Apple is changing course on product durability.
I own a BMW "airhead" motorcycle (1993 r100rt). Many things on that bike are designed to be user serviceable. The manual for the bike came with instructions on how to adjust the valves, and the bike also came with a complete compact toolkit. The bike is designed to last for the long term, and many riders report getting 200k plus miles on them, which is a lot for a motorcycle. The new BMW's are a different story, and some jobs that should be "simple" can run you six hour mechanics bill.
I have a drier in my basement that is 25 years old. I did have the motor replaced three years ago, but other than that it works perfectly. I talk to friends about their current driers, and many of them see modern driers lasting about five years.
I also own a 2007 Macbook Pro. I intend to get 8 years out of it. I had the screen replaced in the last few weeks of my 3 year Applecare warranty. It has a new 750GB hard drive, and I will update to 1TB if I can. The machine is still decently responsive and the monitor is still bright. And I am quite sure that there is some functionary at Apple whose job description is to in effect foil the plans of users like me.
Actually, I once went to a presentation by someone who actually did have a job description like I describe above. He worked for another company I won't name, but he actually admitted that one of his main duties was to make sure that his company didn't "overbuild" the products he sold (his words). I suspect you can even take a course on it in an MBA degree...it probably has a title like "Product Lifecycle Management" or similar. It seems likely to me that companies will actually put effort into making sure their products won't last too long. Hell, they will likely spend more money to make a product last less long, if that contributes to their bottom line.
Meanwhile, our landfills swell, our emissions grow, and our middle class spends an increasing percentage of income on disposable trinkets that are in effect designed to self-destruct or lose usefulness in a predetermined amount of time. What is wrong with this picture?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fine. But because of my either my job or being the default "tech guy" in my family, I have probably been largely responsible for about 20 mac purchases by other people. I suspect that is above the average. Thus my assertion that I am a market leader.
Well, I have a 2007 Macbook Pro, and I have upgraded my ram to max, changed the HD twice, and replaced the battery three times. For me, the gluing of the battery and the proprietary HD are deal breakers. I mean it. Proprietary HD's are the kind of money grubbing thing that Hewlett Packard at its worst has done. This settles it. The bean counters are now fully in charge at Apple. I have been a strong Apple supporter over the years, but I am becoming increasingly displeased with the company. I've already gone for Android for my phone, and I will look into the viability of getting a Linux laptop as my next machine.
Apple had better be careful about pissing off tech savvy people. We are the market leaders. We set the trends.
Your comment is disturbingly informative. I'd heard a while ago about Gate's "donating" MS software to educational institutions, an act that looked suspiciously like a drug pusher giving out a few free hits to poor prospective addicts. But teaming up with Monsanto? Or textbook publisher Pearson? I'm sure MS will have nothing to gain if textbooks go 100% electronic. This guy is no Alfred Nobel.
I took a geology course a decade ago, and my professor discussed the previous theories of geology. Geosynclines were part of the idea to explain what we geologically observe. I don't have too much of an understanding of it, but it amounted to saying that landslides and similar types of sediment transport were responsible for the underwater landscape. My professor said that even back then it didn't make too much sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Judging from the conspiracy theories you listed above, I'll take the lead from Bruce Banner and say that your mind is a bag of cats.
It sounds pretty refuted to me, just from the summary. 80% of the plankton fell all the way to the ocean floor.
Yes...I read that, though I don't have access to the Nature journal article, just the abstract. Because of this, I cannot comment with much of a degree of knowledge. However, I can speculate. The issue is the efficiency of the "biological pump" in transporting carbon from the surface of the ocean to the ocean floor. As I understand it, the biological pump is a complex web of processes, where carbon is changed from one form to another. For example, a carbon dioxide molecule may be grabbed by a photosynthetic algal organism from the surface water. The algal organism dies, sinks, and is consumed by and becomes part of a decomposer. The decomposer dies, and is then consumed by another decomposer. That decomposer takes our particular carbon atom and combines it with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide by respiration. The carbon dioxide molecule is now dissolved in the ocean, and depending on water circulation conditions may reach the surface and be outgassed back into the atmosphere. In this case, the journey of our carbon atom illustrates the "inefficiency" in the biological pump in that the carbon atom didn't make it to the sea floor.
I think the issue might be the characteristics of the organisms produced by the iron fertilization, as well as the local conditions. The article mentioned that they were examining diatoms produced by the iron fertilization. Diatoms are microscopic silica shelled photosynthetic organisms. Since they are protected by silica shells, I would imagine that these organisms would both decompose less quickly and sink somewhat more quickly than other smaller organisms such as photosynthetic bacteria or algae. This could account for the high measured efficiency. Also I could speculate that the local conditions (temperature profile, water circulation pattern, etc) could also play a role. Thus your use of the word "refuted" seems a little premature, given the complex nature of these systems.
I don't think you understand marine biology very well. There isn't much life in the open ocean, certainly not beneath the reach of the sun. Yes, there is LIFE there, but it's not the vast, sprawling jungle you seem to imagine. It's more like a desert.
Yes, of course much of the ocean is a desert. But even deserts have life. And in a land based desert, when you add the limiting ingredient for life, which is usually water, life can suddenly surge in activity. In the case of the oceans, the limiting ingredient is said to be iron, and when you add that limiting ingredient, life, in the form of photosynthetic plankton grows very quickly. There are always a few organisms in ocean water, waiting to start exponential growth given the right conditions.
Sorry...I meant "...the methane will end up in the atmosphere" (where it will act as a greenhouse gas...as well as producing sulphur gas which as poisonous).
I took a course on oceanography a few years ago, and we actually studied this. I'll summarize my professor's powerpoint notes as best I can.
Iron is a limiting nutrient in phytoplankton growth. This is not in dispute. However if we are to add iron to the ocean in order to increase phytoplankton counts, and thus to increase CO2 uptake then we must consider several things. Firstly, how much CO2 will be semi-permanently transported to the ocean floor. In terms of percentages, if increased phytoplankton counts caused a CO2 flux in the surface layer of 50 Gt Carbon / year, the corresponding CO2 flux to the ocean floor would be about 0.7 Gt Carbon / year. This is due to the fact that the mechanisms of carbon transport from the surface to the sea floor (the "biological pump") is quite inefficient. Thus the increase in phytoplankton at the surface would have to be HUGE to transport meaningful amounts of CO2 to the sea floor.
Secondly, there may be dire unintended or undesired consequences of increasing the surface phytoplankton counts. Imagine we put significant amounts of iron in the ocean and imagine that surface phytoplankton counts increased significantly. At the surface we could get increased CO2 uptake and O2 production. But what happens when those phytoplankton die? They sink. And when they sink to deeper layers, other organisms would decompose them. Those decomposers would be oxygen breathers and would consume oxygen at the deeper layer. If their numbers increased due to increased dead phytoplankton, the decomposers could deplete the O2 levels in that level, creating anoxic zones at deeper levels in the ocean. In addition, some of these decomposers might be methane producing bacteria, especially in the absence of oxygen. That methane might make its way into the ocean. The worry is that the imbalanced increase in phytoplankton might result in an anoxic jellyfish ocean that would be rather unfriendly to fish like salmon, tuna, and the other common species that currently exist.
Unless the above arguments have been refuted, I don't know why iron fertilization is still being pushed as a realistic option. It seems to me that many decision makers are nearly completely illiterate in science.
In regards to their policies against video recording, I suspect they don't want a recurrence of the movie "Supersize Me" which did great damage to their image around the world. It was about a film-maker who spend an entire month (or more?) eating only McDonalds food. Whenever they asked him if he wanted supersize, he had to agree. The health results were predictably grim for the film-maker.
I'll believe they are truly sincere when they stop gluing their batteries into their flagship state of the art laptop. Here's a clue: When selling what is supposed to be the best top of the line laptop in the world, don't cut stupid corners. Policies seemingly designed to artificially limit the average lifetime of laptops should not be used on such a "premium product".
The above statement is basically true. If you broke up the entire Greenland ice sheet, the rise in sea level would be catastrophic. Mr. Gore does not say this will happen in the next 100 years. It is a conditional statement. If something happens, then something else will happen. The time scale is not certain, though given recent trends in melting, three feet by 2100 is not unlikely. A basic search of recent literature will support this.
A perfect example of how to be misleading without actually lying.
As opposed to the original parent post I responded to:
So the "twenty feet by 2100" thing is gone now then is it Mr. Gore, cause, gosh, that sure sold a lot of movies books and carbon taxes.
Which is an example of being misleading while actually lying
12 inches from thermal expansion alone. RTFS
The Netherlands seem to be doing just fine below sea level. It might cause some economic harm, but it's not going to be a tragedy. Also, most low-lying islands are coral islands that follow sea level.
Do you have a clue how expensive the water management system in the Netherlands has been? Do you realize that the Netherlands is tiny compared with the areas under threat from sea level rise in the US alone? Hell, it's tiny even compared with Florida. Do you realize that duplicating the Dutch diking system for American coastal areas would likely bankrupt the country? Not to mention how future sea level rise will make it even more difficult for even the Netherlands to maintain the integrity of their diking system.
To make it clear, the article says that 32.2 cm rise will be from thermal expansion alone, not including the rise from melting glaciers. I've counted five misinterpreted posts so far. How can so many people be so obtuse?!
The summary gives the 32.2cm rise as the amount from thermal expansion, not including the rise from ice melting.
From the summary
...32.2 cm from thermal expansion alone...
...as in not including glacial melt, which will in the end likely account for the majority of sea level rise
From the parent post
Well, we only have 88 years to deal with a foot rise in water. Damn, that's devastating, we'd better get right to work.
From the summary
...32.2 cm from thermal expansion alone...
I know it is easier to ignore reality, but I think the parent poster has gotten so used to ignoring science that he ignores the clear language in the article summary. Here is a fact: Most sea level rise will come in the end from melting glaciers. And the melting is accelerating.
So the "twenty feet by 2100" thing is gone now then is it Mr. Gore, cause, gosh, that sure sold a lot of movies books and carbon taxes.
Except that Gore didn't actually say twenty feet by 2100 in his movie. Here is a link to the transcript (pdf) of An Inconvenient Truth. I believe the passage that is often referred to occurs when Gore shows the maps of water inundated coast lines. Here is the transcript of that part of the movie:
If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida. This is what would happen in the San Francisco Bay. A lot of people live in these areas. The Netherlands, the low-countries: absolutely devastating.
The above statement is basically true. If you broke up the entire Greenland ice sheet, the rise in sea level would be catastrophic. Mr. Gore does not say this will happen in the next 100 years. It is a conditional statement. If something happens, then something else will happen. The time scale is not certain, though given recent trends in melting, three feet by 2100 is not unlikely. A basic search of recent literature will support this.
You know, if this is your idea of corruption, living in a third world nation would be a huge fucking wake up call. This is not corruption. This is an inconvenience for two major multinational corporations.
The corruption in the US occurs at high levels of power. It doesn't happen as much at the local level, as you might see, say, in many South American countries, where bribes to local officials are par for the course. For examples, google the three words "industry", "written", and "legislation" in a single search. For me, the among the top matches are "Koch, Exxon Mobil Among Corporations Helping Write State Laws" and "Drone plane manufacturing industry is writing the legislation that governs their use in the US". Further cursory searching will show that this practice is endemic. And this doesn't include the already endemic practice of powerful corporations using their power to corrupt the public good by supporting or sabotaging other legislation not written by them.
If you don't think the above examples are corruption, I suggest you find a clear definition of the word. Here is the Oxford Concise Dictionary definition:
Corruption: dishonest or fraudulent conduct by those in power, typically involving bribery.
If you explore further the concept of corruption, you will see it is intricately tied with powerful politicians being dishonestly influenced by private interests into neglecting their sacred duty to support the Public Good. Read Rousseau's "The Social Contract" for a good introduction.
The sad part is that we cant change it. No matter WHO get's elected into congress, they are always outnumbered 300 to 1 by the bought and paid for senators that are there to do what the industry tells them to do instead of doing what is right.
Three words: Campaign Finance Reform
What about largely secular nations like the Netherlands? Norway? Sweden? Don't they have very low crime rates?
And what about the US Southern states, where religion is fire and brimstone? Don't many of those areas have very high crime rates?
A quote from Aristotle:
At his best, man is the noblest of all animals; separated from law and justice he is the worst.
Broader than that: Humans struggle with reasoning skills.
I would suggest that your comment indirectly implies an important root of the problem. Many in the social sciences attempt to study human society as if it were an ant colony, from a distance, as if the observer is separate from the observed. As we look at human beings and their foibles and faults, we seem to be led to the conclusion that humans are nothing like what we would wish. We don't seem to be rational. We often don't seem to be moral. We in fact seem to be rather despicable creatures. Leaving it at that, we are tempted to throw up our arms and say "to hell with humans, we are beyond help". All our idealism, our attempts to be rational, to be good seem hopeless and futile.
However I would like to take this further. Humans tend to be irrational. Humans tend to be selfish evil creatures. Our natural tendencies imply that we must try harder to overcome them. Because we tend to fall into irrationality, we must fight to be rational. Because we tend to be selfish and shallow means that we must try our best to nurture "the better angels in our nature". We will never "win" this battle. We will never vanquish evil and selfishness. But if we try, maybe, just maybe we can make our civilisation into a system that gives most of us a better and more fulfilling life.
I have used my Apple products for a long time as well. My concerns are largely based on speculation as to the consequences of Apple's gluing in batteries and soldering ram on what were previously fairly upgradable computers. In my area there are several mac specific computer stores that specialize in resurrecting old mac products. I worry that this will become more difficult. In other words, I worry that Apple is changing course on product durability.
I own a BMW "airhead" motorcycle (1993 r100rt). Many things on that bike are designed to be user serviceable. The manual for the bike came with instructions on how to adjust the valves, and the bike also came with a complete compact toolkit. The bike is designed to last for the long term, and many riders report getting 200k plus miles on them, which is a lot for a motorcycle. The new BMW's are a different story, and some jobs that should be "simple" can run you six hour mechanics bill.
I have a drier in my basement that is 25 years old. I did have the motor replaced three years ago, but other than that it works perfectly. I talk to friends about their current driers, and many of them see modern driers lasting about five years.
I also own a 2007 Macbook Pro. I intend to get 8 years out of it. I had the screen replaced in the last few weeks of my 3 year Applecare warranty. It has a new 750GB hard drive, and I will update to 1TB if I can. The machine is still decently responsive and the monitor is still bright. And I am quite sure that there is some functionary at Apple whose job description is to in effect foil the plans of users like me.
Actually, I once went to a presentation by someone who actually did have a job description like I describe above. He worked for another company I won't name, but he actually admitted that one of his main duties was to make sure that his company didn't "overbuild" the products he sold (his words). I suspect you can even take a course on it in an MBA degree...it probably has a title like "Product Lifecycle Management" or similar. It seems likely to me that companies will actually put effort into making sure their products won't last too long. Hell, they will likely spend more money to make a product last less long, if that contributes to their bottom line.
Meanwhile, our landfills swell, our emissions grow, and our middle class spends an increasing percentage of income on disposable trinkets that are in effect designed to self-destruct or lose usefulness in a predetermined amount of time. What is wrong with this picture?
And of course, you are also TEH K-R4D AW3$0M3 !!!
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fine. But because of my either my job or being the default "tech guy" in my family, I have probably been largely responsible for about 20 mac purchases by other people. I suspect that is above the average. Thus my assertion that I am a market leader.
Yay, anecdotal evidence time!
Well, I have a 2007 Macbook Pro, and I have upgraded my ram to max, changed the HD twice, and replaced the battery three times. For me, the gluing of the battery and the proprietary HD are deal breakers. I mean it. Proprietary HD's are the kind of money grubbing thing that Hewlett Packard at its worst has done. This settles it. The bean counters are now fully in charge at Apple. I have been a strong Apple supporter over the years, but I am becoming increasingly displeased with the company. I've already gone for Android for my phone, and I will look into the viability of getting a Linux laptop as my next machine.
Apple had better be careful about pissing off tech savvy people. We are the market leaders. We set the trends.
Your comment is disturbingly informative. I'd heard a while ago about Gate's "donating" MS software to educational institutions, an act that looked suspiciously like a drug pusher giving out a few free hits to poor prospective addicts. But teaming up with Monsanto? Or textbook publisher Pearson? I'm sure MS will have nothing to gain if textbooks go 100% electronic. This guy is no Alfred Nobel.
California City May Tax Sugary Drinks Like Cigarettes
Funny. I don't usually drink my cigarettes.
I took a geology course a decade ago, and my professor discussed the previous theories of geology. Geosynclines were part of the idea to explain what we geologically observe. I don't have too much of an understanding of it, but it amounted to saying that landslides and similar types of sediment transport were responsible for the underwater landscape. My professor said that even back then it didn't make too much sense.