Here is an implicit admission that there is such a thing as a "hiatus" from the predicted increase in global temperature. Most of the recent stories have suggested that the planet was past the point of no return, that the antarctic ice cap was doomed, that the arctic would soon, be ice free, that sea levels were on the verge of dramatic increase, that drought caused by planetary warming was accelerating, and so forth. The entire idea of human-caused global warming is based on information we have that the the atmospheric concentration of co2 is increasing and computer models which suggest that this increase in co2 concentration would lead to an increase in global temperatures due to heat being prevented from radiating back into space. But...what if the computer models are...dare we say it...wrong? What if the earth's albedo changes due to changes in atmospheric water vapor and condensed water (clouds) that are not modeled? What if the solar output changes leading to planetary heating and cooling cycles stretching over centuries? What if the amount of heat radiation into space that is being blocked by carbon dioxide is far less than predicted by the modeling due to kinetic gas mixing and reradiation? What if the amount of heat originating from the center of the earth is varying more than we expect and affecting our surface climate? If our crude computer models attributing climate change solely to simplistic effects of carbon dioxide heat absorption are...wrong, one result would be that planetary surface temperatures might not actually increase as the models have predicted. Now, though, the co2/AGW proponents are attributing exactly this effect to an increase in subsurface ocean temperatures. However, there is obviously no long-term data on these temperatures making any such prediction fanciful at best. To put this into perspective, if all of the solar radiation striking the earth in a one-year period were to be absorbed by the earth's oceans and none of it were re-radiated into space, the temperature of the earth's ocean waters would increase by only about 0.2 C in that year. Now, consider that even AGW proponents will concede that 99.99 percent of that solar radiation is re-radiated into space and the temperature variations in the deep ocean would be very small and lost in the 'noise' of the measurement precision and absence of historical data for comparison. TFA is nothing but interesting conjectural speculation based on very limited data and certainly not the definitive 'answer' suggested by the slashdot article title.
A large amount of radioactive material was released into the ocean where it will remain in the food chain for decades. Approximately 100,000 people are unable to return to their homes and a large area of land in a country where land is scarce and precious is uninhabitable. But...that's just the short term. Long term: Japan will have to deal with electric power shortages for years until their power generation can be rebuilt with new technology. Hundreds of billions of dollars will have to be spent over the next 20 years to decommission the mess at Fukushima and attempt to decontaminate the surrounding downwind land. All of this was avoidable...but happened because the resident village idiots were able to prevent realistic plans from being implemented for electric power generation at Fukushima. The Onagawa power station was closer to the earthquake epicenter and yet it survived undamaged thanks to a losing battle by the resident village idiots to ensure that it was built according to their idiot plans. They lost at Onagawa but 'won' at Fukushima. Idiots who said...why spend a lot of money on a bigger seawall at Fukushima? Idiot engineers at GE who said 'there's no need for a failsafe design for something that will never happen,' and idiots who say 'what's the big deal about a meltdown?'
Those cool features described in the TFA, like the HUD display for test
messages, twitter, iTunes, etc. leads to something politely called 'distracted
driving' and less politely called 'Being an Asshole' which last
year killed 3,328 people and injured 421,000. As a long-time
biker, I often see the drivers working their smartphone whilst swerving
through traffic and chatting up their passengers and I've damn near
become one of the 421,000 (or the 3,328) more than once.
Rather than provide fancy new 'heads up' displays for drivers or
built-in smart phone driver docking stations for drivers with
their 'heads up' their ass, we should be working on roadside electronic
surveillance and longer prison sentences for the drivers who kill
people while using their smartphone.
"Every single one of those damnable windmills is slowing-down the air and making it more turbulent as a trade-off for spinning the generator..."
This is so dumb, it's actually funny. Those 'windmills' do not create or consume energy. They are an energy transfer device. The take an insignificant amount of energy (relative to the atmospheric total) out of the moving gases in the atmosphere and transfer it to another location. There, that energy is released as heat into the...(wait for it)...atmosphere where it contributes (in an insiginificant small way) to convective heating that drives more...wind.
...not. Advocates of nuclear power point to the relatively-low (compared with other fuel types) operating cost of nuclear power plants but tend to disregard the construction and dismantling costs. In this case, the dismantling cost is estimated at $4.4 billion and that's before dismantling has even started. Worse, still, though was the little nugget in the article stating that the spent nuclear fuel would be indefinitely stored on the site in steel cannisters until the federal government comes up with a long term solution. Yeah, I know what you're thinking...'so what's the big deal about a little spent nuclear fuel in a few steel cannisters?' Well, those will require long-term expensive oversight and security and, even with all of that, will likely eventually begin releasing contamination into the environment as vigilence is relaxed due to future financial constraints, corrosion, etc. That spent nuclear fuel remains dangerous far after we, our descendants, their descendants, and their descendants are alive...and that amount of time is probably beyond the limit of any earthly vigilance anyway. Don't buy into the 'nuclear power is cheap and environmentally-friendly' arguments. It's not either one of those...and never will be (fission-based power anyway). Better to have coal-fired power plants. Even better to have wind and solar power. Better still to just use less.
Eliminating the only power plant will probably end electrical service for Gaza...and that will be hardship. No power means no pumps for water and sewage, no air conditioning or heat, no light, no electric cooking, no computers, no digital controls, etc. Electricity is a requirement for comfortable modern living. But...Hamas chose to launch not one, but hundreds, maybe thousands of missiles at Israel. The people in Gaza chose to accept the missiles or at least look the other way. Hamas was elected by the Gaza population to be their leaders...another choice. Launching missiles at someone is...war...and war is not comfortable, safe, clean, easy or without cost. When you go to war, people die and those left behind are going to be without comfort until the war ends. If Hamas was in Canada and chose to launch missiles at Boston, the United States would never rest until every last one of the missiles was eliminated, Hamas was destroyed, and a new more-friendly government had taken Hamas's place. As it is, Israel has been remarkably restrained. Yes, thousands of Gazans will likely die before the war is over. That is war. War kills. Gaza chose war. War has arrived. Be glad that there is no war whereever you are and never, never, never choose war.
...is that it doesn't bring anything new or better to the table and Microsoft is blind to that. It doesn't have a better user interface, better performance, more or better apps, or a significantly lower price. Microsoft wants to control the smart phone business just as it was able to control the desktop computer business...but it is too late to the party.
The article was posted by someone who does not appear to have been around computers in industrial applications. Computers have been used for at least 4 decades for maintenance planning in large facilities as well as other areas such as transportation routing, product blending, production scheduling, etc. The maintenance activities for the London tube or the NYC subway are likely also being planned and scheduled using some sort of similar system even if the uptime result is not as good as Hong Kong.
This is a project that would only make sense to people who have no understanding of 1) how large and detailed the planet's surface is, and 2) how numerous and complex the sources of carbon dioxide are. These are people who think of carbon dioxide as a 'pollutant' to be eliminated rather than as an essential molecule for all life on the planet. In the landscape of their thought processes, they likely imagine that they are searching for hidden smokestacks from coal-burning power plants. It is absolutely unbelievable that this project got funded and shows the depths to which some scientific inquiry has sunk.
Running Windows on Intel would perhaps give you a platform with numerous built-in 'backdoors' for helpyourselves access by americans. Like the chinese, the russians want to have their own backdoors and not someone elses.
"To me, it means that there is no evolution, that man sprang fully formed and didn't come from a long evolution of different animals."
The Biblical sequence on creation is light => sky => earth => plants => stars => sun/moon => fishes => birds => animals => man => woman so humans were at the end of that process.
The current scientific understanding of creation is more like light => stars => earth => moon => prokaryotes => plants => fishes => mammals => man so humans are still at the end. Evolution, or natural selection, is an obvious phenomena that we observe around us every day of our lives, on everything from dog appearance to human hereditary conditions to software products. It is equally obvious (to me anyway, your opinion may differ) that the universe, our world, and all life was created by God. Science has yet to present any natural biological process that can account for the origin of the universe, the beginning of life on our planet, or the origin of the complex multicellular sexual beings that we are. Moreover, the existence of 'humans' dates back only a few tens of thousands of years...a tiny, even miniscule, amount of time on a planet with a 4 billion year history.
Most would say that 'creationism' is the belief that a divine entity created the universe. That is definitely not a minority opinion in the Catholic Church, the Church of England, or among Christians in general. All that anyone can say, based on our present knowledege, is that the universe had a finite beginning at a time in the distant past...and arose (or was was 'created')...from nothing. Neither 'science' nor 'Christianity' nor 'creationism' can prove any sort of causality between the beginning of the universe and anything else. It is not doing students any favors to keep them in the dark about any of that. Certainly it is impossible to legitimately 'teach' students that there is any sort of scientific proof that a divine entity did NOT create the universe.
If Microsoft made, licensed, or distributed a competitive mobile device, people would choose to buy it over iPhones or Android phones. However, they don't and people don't and so those great minds at Microsoft look at the situation and say 'we've got to knock off our competitors' rather than 'we've got to have a product that people prefer over our competitors.' If Microsoft can use it's patent acquisitions to force Google to pay big royalties, they can drive up the price of Android phones and make them less-attractive to buyers, who will then theoretically be more likely to look at Microsoft devices. That's one way to help buyers make the 'right' choice but it is not a very stellar example of a free-market economy in action. Microsoft would probably be more at home making smartphones on a captive basis for the Communist Chinese government, complete with built-in Bing filtering. Microsoft is an enormous wet blanket on technical innovation and moving technology forward and things will probably not improve until they are a shrunken shell of their present self...which will probably take another 10 or 15 years.
Okay, then take McMurdo Station. It's on the coastline. The average 'high' temperature there in January (the warmest month) is only 31.6F...still below freezing...and that's the high temperature for the warmest month. But, if we're talking about the antarctic continental ice sheet, the Amundsen-Scott temperatures are more representative than coastal temperatures which, like temps at all coastal locations worldwide, are moderated by the presence of the ocean as an enormous heat reservoir. There is not a lot of climate data available for most of Antarctica but your boneheaded presumption that a coastal temp is more representative of ice sheet air temperatures than an interior measurement is narrow-minded and demonstrates a desire to adjust the data to fit preconceived beliefs. A more scientific approach is to ask questions and then attempt to answer them with the best data available. Is the Antarctic ice sheet melting? Satellite data has suggested that it is. Why? Your 'warmer' preconceived answer to that question is 'the melting is caused by warmer antarctic air temps due to climate warming caused by carbon dioxide' and yet there is no data at all to support that while there is some data suggesting that geothermal heat input (see TFA) is having an effect.
Just a few days ago, global warmers were suggesting that Antarctic
ice losses were doubling due to global warming. Of
course, the problem with that is that the warmest temperature recorded
at Amundsen-Scott South pole station during the last 12 months
was -21F in January, 2014 which is not exactly bikini weather and is
still 53 degrees F lower than the temperature needed to melt
water. Obviously, if antarctic ice is melting, it is due to
volcanic or geothermal heat inputs rather than balmy surface
temperatures brought about by too much carbon dioxide.
I can see why this deal is good for Sprint (they grow in size at a cost way cheaper and easier than self-growth) and T-Mobile (they get a lot of money) but this is most definitely NOT good for cell phone customers. Reducing the number of competitors from 4 to 3 will just increase the market leverage of the surviving 3 providers which will result in their product offerings and service plans being less competitive for cell customers. Do they think we are idiots? Reduced competition is great for the bottom line but leaves customers with fewer choices and higher costs. Beyond a certain size (which all 4 companies are way past) there are no economies of scale that would result in lower costs for a merged company. There is only less competition that allows higher prices. So...cell phone companies...what's wrong with having 4 companies compete for my dollar instead of 3? Aren't you in favor of free-enterprise and capitalism? Or are you all becoming socialists?
There's nothing great about the 'start' button. When it first appeared in Windows 95, no one jumped up and down and shouted 'eureka!' It was just a way of providing users with a reference point for key functionality...starting apps, shutting down, seeing a short semi-custom menu of options, finding system stuff, and so on. I use a non-window os and there is no 'start' button and there never has been one...and no one misses it. Windows 3.1 and NT 3.1 did not have a 'start' button. The 'start' button is even a semi-retarded non-intuitive way of centralizing stuff. For example, as has often been pointed out over the years, clicking on 'start' to shutdown is not exactly the cleverest way of doing things. (My system has a button cleverly labelled 'shutdown.') But...but...but...the 'start' button was missed for just one reason...because windows users are used to it. So, when Microsoft takes it away and does not replace it with anything comparable, users complain. We would happily click on 'kill' or 'terminate' or 'stop' or 'don't do that anymore' or a frowny-face or whatever, as long as it was...the same. Putting the 'start' button back...in 2015...kind of misses this point. By that time, we users will be used to something else.
The warmest temperature recorded at Amundsen-Scott south pole station during the last 12 months was -21F in January, 2014. For those unfamiliar with the physics of water phase change or the fahrenheit scale, that balmy temperature is still 53 degrees fahrenheit below the freezing point of water. If there is melting going on in Antarctica, it must be due to subsurface volcanic activity and not bikini weather at the antarctica beaches.
Sadly, Toyota is as wrong about hydrogen cars as Thomas Edison was about alternating current. There are two enormous problems with hydrogren. First, it is expensive to produce from either water or natural gas due to the wasted energy that is released as oxygen or heat, respectively. Second, storage of hydrogen on a mobile vehicle (or anywhere) is very difficult and requires either very high pressure containers or complex and costly adsorption systems. Electric vehicles are obviously the future, either standalone or combined with hybrid electric/internal combustion motors.
The old DOT-111 standard for tank cars was horribly inadequate. They have adopted a new DOT-111 standard for new cars being built but they have not required the companies that own the older tank cars to upgrade. Most of the tank cars being used in the US are not owned by the railroads but by the companies doing the shipping. If the NTSB and DOT would come out with an emergency order to use only new-standard DOT-111 tank cars or use DOT-112 tank cars, the problem would be largely fixed. The old-standard DOT-111 tank cars are easily punctured in a derailment and cause horrific fires while new-standard DOT-111 tank cars and DOT-112 tank cars do not. Obviously, companies do not want to spend a lot of money to upgrade but that is not even the reason for the foot-dragging which is related to the huge increase in crude oil shipments requiring tank cars for which only the old-standard DOT-111 tank cars are available. There needs to be a crash program to upgrade and retrofit. This isn't rocket science. What is missing is not 'national will' or even 'money' but 'leadership' from the NTSB and DOT, the very people who are wringing their hands and saying nothing can be done.
Was recently in Italy and had to beg a kindly local woman to buy me a train ticket with her card as the ticket machine would not accept either cash (in the wrong denominations) or my magnetic stripe card. They're probably used to us visiting 3rd-worlders.
If a pair of black holes are present in a quiet galaxy, perhaps there are also black holes present where there aren't any galaxies at all...'between' galaxies. Maybe black holes were the driver for all galaxy and star formation and maybe there are more black holes than there are galaxies. Maybe way way more. Maybe such black holes are the missing dark matter that we are searching for.
For example, the Bush family. Here is an entire multi-generational family that has never enjoyed any sort of commercial success that would lead to great wealth and yet they are all obviously very wealthy despite having done nothing but serve in federal government. Or...another example, the Kennedy family. These people are not fine examples of our best, brightest, or bravest and and yet they obviously have their hands on the levers of power and influence as well as wealth.
Jenny McCarthy is obviously not a mental giant but...give her credit for changing her mind. Before she had kids, she might have thought vaccines were the spawn of satan but after becoming a Mom, maybe they didn't look so bad. From TFA, sounds like she's wanting 'one poke per visit' to the Doctor which is a whole lot better than those parents who refuse to give their kids any vaccines whatsoever. This Slashdot article seems pointless other than to try and make the case that Jenny McCarthy is a hypocrite and bring out some discussion about vaccines. However, we have to cut McCarthy some slack on the hypocrite charge as people are allowed to change their mind with the passage of time.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is an implicit admission that there is such a thing as a "hiatus" from the predicted increase in global temperature. Most of the recent stories have suggested that the planet was past the point of no return, that the antarctic ice cap was doomed, that the arctic would soon, be ice free, that sea levels were on the verge of dramatic increase, that drought caused by planetary warming was accelerating, and so forth. The entire idea of human-caused global warming is based on information we have that the the atmospheric concentration of co2 is increasing and computer models which suggest that this increase in co2 concentration would lead to an increase in global temperatures due to heat being prevented from radiating back into space. But...what if the computer models are...dare we say it...wrong? What if the earth's albedo changes due to changes in atmospheric water vapor and condensed water (clouds) that are not modeled? What if the solar output changes leading to planetary heating and cooling cycles stretching over centuries? What if the amount of heat radiation into space that is being blocked by carbon dioxide is far less than predicted by the modeling due to kinetic gas mixing and reradiation? What if the amount of heat originating from the center of the earth is varying more than we expect and affecting our surface climate? If our crude computer models attributing climate change solely to simplistic effects of carbon dioxide heat absorption are...wrong, one result would be that planetary surface temperatures might not actually increase as the models have predicted. Now, though, the co2/AGW proponents are attributing exactly this effect to an increase in subsurface ocean temperatures. However, there is obviously no long-term data on these temperatures making any such prediction fanciful at best. To put this into perspective, if all of the solar radiation striking the earth in a one-year period were to be absorbed by the earth's oceans and none of it were re-radiated into space, the temperature of the earth's ocean waters would increase by only about 0.2 C in that year. Now, consider that even AGW proponents will concede that 99.99 percent of that solar radiation is re-radiated into space and the temperature variations in the deep ocean would be very small and lost in the 'noise' of the measurement precision and absence of historical data for comparison. TFA is nothing but interesting conjectural speculation based on very limited data and certainly not the definitive 'answer' suggested by the slashdot article title.
A large amount of radioactive material was released into the ocean where it will remain in the food chain for decades. Approximately 100,000 people are unable to return to their homes and a large area of land in a country where land is scarce and precious is uninhabitable. But...that's just the short term. Long term: Japan will have to deal with electric power shortages for years until their power generation can be rebuilt with new technology. Hundreds of billions of dollars will have to be spent over the next 20 years to decommission the mess at Fukushima and attempt to decontaminate the surrounding downwind land. All of this was avoidable...but happened because the resident village idiots were able to prevent realistic plans from being implemented for electric power generation at Fukushima. The Onagawa power station was closer to the earthquake epicenter and yet it survived undamaged thanks to a losing battle by the resident village idiots to ensure that it was built according to their idiot plans. They lost at Onagawa but 'won' at Fukushima. Idiots who said...why spend a lot of money on a bigger seawall at Fukushima? Idiot engineers at GE who said 'there's no need for a failsafe design for something that will never happen,' and idiots who say 'what's the big deal about a meltdown?'
Those cool features described in the TFA, like the HUD display for test messages, twitter, iTunes, etc. leads to something politely called 'distracted driving' and less politely called 'Being an Asshole' which last year killed 3,328 people and injured 421,000. As a long-time biker, I often see the drivers working their smartphone whilst swerving through traffic and chatting up their passengers and I've damn near become one of the 421,000 (or the 3,328) more than once. Rather than provide fancy new 'heads up' displays for drivers or built-in smart phone driver docking stations for drivers with their 'heads up' their ass, we should be working on roadside electronic surveillance and longer prison sentences for the drivers who kill people while using their smartphone.
"Every single one of those damnable windmills is slowing-down the air and making it more turbulent as a trade-off for spinning the generator..."
This is so dumb, it's actually funny. Those 'windmills' do not create or consume energy. They are an energy transfer device. The take an insignificant amount of energy (relative to the atmospheric total) out of the moving gases in the atmosphere and transfer it to another location. There, that energy is released as heat into the...(wait for it)...atmosphere where it contributes (in an insiginificant small way) to convective heating that drives more...wind.
...not. Advocates of nuclear power point to the relatively-low (compared with other fuel types) operating cost of nuclear power plants but tend to disregard the construction and dismantling costs. In this case, the dismantling cost is estimated at $4.4 billion and that's before dismantling has even started. Worse, still, though was the little nugget in the article stating that the spent nuclear fuel would be indefinitely stored on the site in steel cannisters until the federal government comes up with a long term solution. Yeah, I know what you're thinking...'so what's the big deal about a little spent nuclear fuel in a few steel cannisters?' Well, those will require long-term expensive oversight and security and, even with all of that, will likely eventually begin releasing contamination into the environment as vigilence is relaxed due to future financial constraints, corrosion, etc. That spent nuclear fuel remains dangerous far after we, our descendants, their descendants, and their descendants are alive...and that amount of time is probably beyond the limit of any earthly vigilance anyway. Don't buy into the 'nuclear power is cheap and environmentally-friendly' arguments. It's not either one of those...and never will be (fission-based power anyway). Better to have coal-fired power plants. Even better to have wind and solar power. Better still to just use less.
Eliminating the only power plant will probably end electrical service for Gaza...and that will be hardship. No power means no pumps for water and sewage, no air conditioning or heat, no light, no electric cooking, no computers, no digital controls, etc. Electricity is a requirement for comfortable modern living. But...Hamas chose to launch not one, but hundreds, maybe thousands of missiles at Israel. The people in Gaza chose to accept the missiles or at least look the other way. Hamas was elected by the Gaza population to be their leaders...another choice. Launching missiles at someone is...war...and war is not comfortable, safe, clean, easy or without cost. When you go to war, people die and those left behind are going to be without comfort until the war ends. If Hamas was in Canada and chose to launch missiles at Boston, the United States would never rest until every last one of the missiles was eliminated, Hamas was destroyed, and a new more-friendly government had taken Hamas's place. As it is, Israel has been remarkably restrained. Yes, thousands of Gazans will likely die before the war is over. That is war. War kills. Gaza chose war. War has arrived. Be glad that there is no war whereever you are and never, never, never choose war.
...is that it doesn't bring anything new or better to the table and Microsoft is blind to that. It doesn't have a better user interface, better performance, more or better apps, or a significantly lower price. Microsoft wants to control the smart phone business just as it was able to control the desktop computer business...but it is too late to the party.
The article was posted by someone who does not appear to have been around computers in industrial applications. Computers have been used for at least 4 decades for maintenance planning in large facilities as well as other areas such as transportation routing, product blending, production scheduling, etc. The maintenance activities for the London tube or the NYC subway are likely also being planned and scheduled using some sort of similar system even if the uptime result is not as good as Hong Kong.
This is a project that would only make sense to people who have no understanding of 1) how large and detailed the planet's surface is, and 2) how numerous and complex the sources of carbon dioxide are. These are people who think of carbon dioxide as a 'pollutant' to be eliminated rather than as an essential molecule for all life on the planet. In the landscape of their thought processes, they likely imagine that they are searching for hidden smokestacks from coal-burning power plants. It is absolutely unbelievable that this project got funded and shows the depths to which some scientific inquiry has sunk.
Running Windows on Intel would perhaps give you a platform with numerous built-in 'backdoors' for helpyourselves access by americans. Like the chinese, the russians want to have their own backdoors and not someone elses.
"To me, it means that there is no evolution, that man sprang fully formed and didn't come from a long evolution of different animals."
The Biblical sequence on creation is light => sky => earth => plants => stars => sun/moon => fishes => birds => animals => man => woman so humans were at the end of that process.
The current scientific understanding of creation is more like light => stars => earth => moon => prokaryotes => plants => fishes => mammals => man so humans are still at the end. Evolution, or natural selection, is an obvious phenomena that we observe around us every day of our lives, on everything from dog appearance to human hereditary conditions to software products. It is equally obvious (to me anyway, your opinion may differ) that the universe, our world, and all life was created by God. Science has yet to present any natural biological process that can account for the origin of the universe, the beginning of life on our planet, or the origin of the complex multicellular sexual beings that we are. Moreover, the existence of 'humans' dates back only a few tens of thousands of years...a tiny, even miniscule, amount of time on a planet with a 4 billion year history.
Most would say that 'creationism' is the belief that a divine entity created the universe. That is definitely not a minority opinion in the Catholic Church, the Church of England, or among Christians in general. All that anyone can say, based on our present knowledege, is that the universe had a finite beginning at a time in the distant past ...and arose (or was was 'created')...from nothing. Neither 'science' nor 'Christianity' nor 'creationism' can prove any sort of causality between the beginning of the universe and anything else. It is not doing students any favors to keep them in the dark about any of that. Certainly it is impossible to legitimately 'teach' students that there is any sort of scientific proof that a divine entity did NOT create the universe.
If Microsoft made, licensed, or distributed a competitive mobile device, people would choose to buy it over iPhones or Android phones. However, they don't and people don't and so those great minds at Microsoft look at the situation and say 'we've got to knock off our competitors' rather than 'we've got to have a product that people prefer over our competitors.' If Microsoft can use it's patent acquisitions to force Google to pay big royalties, they can drive up the price of Android phones and make them less-attractive to buyers, who will then theoretically be more likely to look at Microsoft devices. That's one way to help buyers make the 'right' choice but it is not a very stellar example of a free-market economy in action. Microsoft would probably be more at home making smartphones on a captive basis for the Communist Chinese government, complete with built-in Bing filtering. Microsoft is an enormous wet blanket on technical innovation and moving technology forward and things will probably not improve until they are a shrunken shell of their present self...which will probably take another 10 or 15 years.
Okay, then take McMurdo Station. It's on the coastline. The average 'high' temperature there in January (the warmest month) is only 31.6F...still below freezing...and that's the high temperature for the warmest month. But, if we're talking about the antarctic continental ice sheet, the Amundsen-Scott temperatures are more representative than coastal temperatures which, like temps at all coastal locations worldwide, are moderated by the presence of the ocean as an enormous heat reservoir. There is not a lot of climate data available for most of Antarctica but your boneheaded presumption that a coastal temp is more representative of ice sheet air temperatures than an interior measurement is narrow-minded and demonstrates a desire to adjust the data to fit preconceived beliefs. A more scientific approach is to ask questions and then attempt to answer them with the best data available. Is the Antarctic ice sheet melting? Satellite data has suggested that it is. Why? Your 'warmer' preconceived answer to that question is 'the melting is caused by warmer antarctic air temps due to climate warming caused by carbon dioxide' and yet there is no data at all to support that while there is some data suggesting that geothermal heat input (see TFA) is having an effect.
Just a few days ago, global warmers were suggesting that Antarctic ice losses were doubling due to global warming. Of course, the problem with that is that the warmest temperature recorded at Amundsen-Scott South pole station during the last 12 months was -21F in January, 2014 which is not exactly bikini weather and is still 53 degrees F lower than the temperature needed to melt water. Obviously, if antarctic ice is melting, it is due to volcanic or geothermal heat inputs rather than balmy surface temperatures brought about by too much carbon dioxide.
I can see why this deal is good for Sprint (they grow in size at a cost way cheaper and easier than self-growth) and T-Mobile (they get a lot of money) but this is most definitely NOT good for cell phone customers. Reducing the number of competitors from 4 to 3 will just increase the market leverage of the surviving 3 providers which will result in their product offerings and service plans being less competitive for cell customers. Do they think we are idiots? Reduced competition is great for the bottom line but leaves customers with fewer choices and higher costs. Beyond a certain size (which all 4 companies are way past) there are no economies of scale that would result in lower costs for a merged company. There is only less competition that allows higher prices. So...cell phone companies...what's wrong with having 4 companies compete for my dollar instead of 3? Aren't you in favor of free-enterprise and capitalism? Or are you all becoming socialists?
There's nothing great about the 'start' button. When it first appeared in Windows 95, no one jumped up and down and shouted 'eureka!' It was just a way of providing users with a reference point for key functionality...starting apps, shutting down, seeing a short semi-custom menu of options, finding system stuff, and so on. I use a non-window os and there is no 'start' button and there never has been one...and no one misses it. Windows 3.1 and NT 3.1 did not have a 'start' button. The 'start' button is even a semi-retarded non-intuitive way of centralizing stuff. For example, as has often been pointed out over the years, clicking on 'start' to shutdown is not exactly the cleverest way of doing things. (My system has a button cleverly labelled 'shutdown.') But...but...but...the 'start' button was missed for just one reason...because windows users are used to it. So, when Microsoft takes it away and does not replace it with anything comparable, users complain. We would happily click on 'kill' or 'terminate' or 'stop' or 'don't do that anymore' or a frowny-face or whatever, as long as it was...the same. Putting the 'start' button back...in 2015...kind of misses this point. By that time, we users will be used to something else.
The warmest temperature recorded at Amundsen-Scott south pole station during the last 12 months was -21F in January, 2014. For those unfamiliar with the physics of water phase change or the fahrenheit scale, that balmy temperature is still 53 degrees fahrenheit below the freezing point of water. If there is melting going on in Antarctica, it must be due to subsurface volcanic activity and not bikini weather at the antarctica beaches.
Sadly, Toyota is as wrong about hydrogen cars as Thomas Edison was about alternating current. There are two enormous problems with hydrogren. First, it is expensive to produce from either water or natural gas due to the wasted energy that is released as oxygen or heat, respectively. Second, storage of hydrogen on a mobile vehicle (or anywhere) is very difficult and requires either very high pressure containers or complex and costly adsorption systems. Electric vehicles are obviously the future, either standalone or combined with hybrid electric/internal combustion motors.
The old DOT-111 standard for tank cars was horribly inadequate. They have adopted a new DOT-111 standard for new cars being built but they have not required the companies that own the older tank cars to upgrade. Most of the tank cars being used in the US are not owned by the railroads but by the companies doing the shipping. If the NTSB and DOT would come out with an emergency order to use only new-standard DOT-111 tank cars or use DOT-112 tank cars, the problem would be largely fixed. The old-standard DOT-111 tank cars are easily punctured in a derailment and cause horrific fires while new-standard DOT-111 tank cars and DOT-112 tank cars do not. Obviously, companies do not want to spend a lot of money to upgrade but that is not even the reason for the foot-dragging which is related to the huge increase in crude oil shipments requiring tank cars for which only the old-standard DOT-111 tank cars are available. There needs to be a crash program to upgrade and retrofit. This isn't rocket science. What is missing is not 'national will' or even 'money' but 'leadership' from the NTSB and DOT, the very people who are wringing their hands and saying nothing can be done.
Was recently in Italy and had to beg a kindly local woman to buy me a train ticket with her card as the ticket machine would not accept either cash (in the wrong denominations) or my magnetic stripe card. They're probably used to us visiting 3rd-worlders.
If a pair of black holes are present in a quiet galaxy, perhaps there are also black holes present where there aren't any galaxies at all...'between' galaxies. Maybe black holes were the driver for all galaxy and star formation and maybe there are more black holes than there are galaxies. Maybe way way more. Maybe such black holes are the missing dark matter that we are searching for.
Forget the beer price...think of the cows! No more 'brewing by-products.' That's gotta be a whole lot better than what the replacement will be.
For example, the Bush family. Here is an entire multi-generational family that has never enjoyed any sort of commercial success that would lead to great wealth and yet they are all obviously very wealthy despite having done nothing but serve in federal government. Or...another example, the Kennedy family. These people are not fine examples of our best, brightest, or bravest and and yet they obviously have their hands on the levers of power and influence as well as wealth.
Jenny McCarthy is obviously not a mental giant but...give her credit for changing her mind. Before she had kids, she might have thought vaccines were the spawn of satan but after becoming a Mom, maybe they didn't look so bad. From TFA, sounds like she's wanting 'one poke per visit' to the Doctor which is a whole lot better than those parents who refuse to give their kids any vaccines whatsoever. This Slashdot article seems pointless other than to try and make the case that Jenny McCarthy is a hypocrite and bring out some discussion about vaccines. However, we have to cut McCarthy some slack on the hypocrite charge as people are allowed to change their mind with the passage of time.