Here's what I want in a new version of Windows: a) awesome compatibility - It should run every piece of Windows and DOS software ever written...and do it well. Moreover, it should be able to use ANY windows device driver ever written for my beloved favorite hardware. b) it should boot up in less than 10 seconds and do hardware checking in the background. c) It should provide a simple console to show ANY communications by any process with anything external to the system and have a right-click option to permanently stop or restrict any process. d) it should recognize and translate any common CD, DVD or digital media format into video and/or music out of the box. e) nothing should be able to execute without my explicit prior approval that I can easily and freely revoke with a simple console. f) Nothing should ever be able to modify the registry without my explicit approval at the time of the modification and there should automatically be a permanent time-stamped backup made prior to a modification.
a) we can't rely on the consumer making the 'right' choice without our help. b) people will still use incandescents unless we stop them c) non-incandescent bulbs will not 'win' unless we make them the only choice
from this, we must conclude that either 1) people are idiots or 2) incandescent bulbs are not as 'bad' as claimed or 3) democrats are just smarter than everyone else
Other items perhaps worthy of a ban by the democrats:
horse-drawn carriages, hot air balloons, sailing ships, hand saws, outhouses, and biplanes as these all have 'better' alternatives.
'Bans' take all other factors out of the decision on what to use. The only real screw-in alternative to an incandescent bulb is the 'compact fluorescent' bulb although the LED screw-ins may eventually improve their performance and lower their cost enough to make them another alternative. However...the CFL bulbs have a lot of limitations. They have very low light output when they are powered up and need several minutes to warm up enough to reach full output. That makes them a very poor choice for lighting fixtures that are powered up for only a few minutes at infrequent intervals. The lifespan of a CFL bulb decreases dramatically to the same or less than an incandescent bulb when powered up for only short periods of time. Even when warm, the CFL maximum light output decreases by 20 to 30 percent over the life of the bulb. CFLs generally have a lower light output than a comparable incandescent bulb if you rely on the manufacturer 'equivalent to a xx-watt bulb labelling so your room, when lit with CFLs in the same lighting fixtures, is likely to be quite a bit dimmer. CFLs are supposed to have a life of 6,000 to 15,000 hours but my experience in real-world use has been less than 2,000 hours at best. Finally, CFLs are a very poor choice for any lighting that is not in a heated space as they will not even start in cold temperatures and, if they do start in cool temperatures, will put out a very low amount of light. In spite of these limitations, CFLs are an excellent choice in some locations such as a heated space that is powered up for long periods of time. However, the 'ban' will result in CFLs being used everywhere with predictable poor results. A 'ban' for something like a light bulb is like using a hammer to swat a fly...heavy-handed with poor results.
The AGW alarmists point to every climate and weather event as evidence of impending disaster. Tornadoes, hurricanes, forest fires, heat waves, and, now, rain in Mecca, are all blamed on global warming. Here we have the arctic ice extent darn near disappearing this summer which was supposed to be some sort of evidence of disaster and yet...it's barely even noticed. Why? Because nothing significant with respect to climate, weather, or planetary environment has happened as a consequence. If the arctic ice extent is unusually large this winter, will the alarmists exhale with sighs of relief? No, of course not. They will point to that as further evidence of impending disaster. The fundamental problem with the alarmists point of view is their assumption that somehow we can 'control' planetary co2 levels and thereby 'control' the climate. The Earth's climate has fluctuated wildly in the last 50,000 years...and it will certainly fluctuate wildly in the future despite anything we do. The Earth was obviously much warmer than it is now just a few hundred years ago when vikings were settling in Greenland and the summertime arctic ice extent then was likely 'zero.' If there is a 'planetary emergency' it is in the increasing degree of small-minded thinking by people who want to keep things the way they are rather than adapt to change.
No, while the early ships might be prone to the gamma ray bursts, the newer ships will have emission controls that will eliminate 99.99 percent of the gamma radiation.
The software (and a consistent user experience) is waaaay more important than the hardware. Five years hence, we will be running on new, stronger, and faster hardware and the ability to move the HTML5 stuff along to the new hardware will be key. How many times in the past have we seen people complaining about the performance in the present and then new hardware appears almost immediately that makes the performance 5x faster, providing that the software will run on the new hardware? There's a reason why x86 is still the most widely-used set of instructions, decades after 8088 processors have gone to the scrap heap. So...Zuckerberg was wrong to move to HTML5 too quickly and he's wrong...again...for dumping it.
Amazon theoretically pays royalties of 35 to 70 percent of the retail price of their Kindle e-books to the copyright holder. However, what is not perhaps so widely known is the 'Amazon Gotcha' which is: "As the publisher, you (the author) set the "list price" for your content. Amazon.com reserves the right to set the retail price at our sole discretion. See the Pricing Page and Terms and Conditions for information on how royalties are calculated. Please note, We reserve the right to set the retail price we charge for the books you provide to us. We may offer your book at a price below your list price if, for example, the price at which a competitor sells your book, or the price at which we sell a physical edition of your book is lower than your list price. In that case, if you chose the 70% royalty option, your royalties will be calculated off of this offer price for sales that qualify for the 70% royalty option. If you chose the 35% royalty option, you will be paid off of the original list price you chose.
What does this mean? Amazon can set the price at anything they want to, including "zero." Guess what 70 percent of zero is? So...when Amazon is restricting content as TFA refers to, by claiming that the content is already 'freely available on the web' they are dissembling since a goodly portion of their kindle store is already 'free.' The main reason for Amazon's action is more likely embodied in the Amazon statement "we are not confident that you hold exclusive publishing rights." Amazon is happy to sell content for free because it builds their Kindle brand but they don't want there to be any chance of a copyright violation coming back to them as a costly claim.
Facebook is a monstrous data bucket that is never full and is never emptied. We've already seen job applicants being asked for their facebook logon info so that potential employers could see what was stored on facebook. People want a way to communicate informally with friends and family without those personal communications being stored, tracked, and logged for 50 years and then distributed to irrelevant future data leaches. The Diaspora distributed approach is the direction that this needs to go.
I rarely use Windows and then only because something absolutely requires it. Like the TFA author, removing unwanted cruft from the desktop (and system) is a key reason I dislike Windows. For example, Windows Update repeatedly nagged to install Windows Media Player 11 (the newest one) which I finally did to watch (I thought) DVDs. However, as many of you probably know, Windows Media Player 11 will NOT play DVDs. Instead, it advises you that the necessary decoder is not present on the system and points you to places where you can purchase the decoder 'plugin' for a price of anywhere from $15 to $30. Okay, fine, now it's time to dump (uninstall) the newly-installed Media Player 11 but...not so easy is that. It can only be removed by (according to Microsoft) either 1) booting to safe mode and running something called 'appwiz.cpl' or, if 1) doesn't work, then 2) running something as '%windir%\$ntUninstallwmp11$\spuninst\spuninst.exe'. This is just one small example but, generally, Microsoft decides what the user should install, use and see and then makes it extremely difficult for you if you try to stray off of the reservation.
The agreement between our current scientific understanding of evolution of life and the Book of Genesis is pretty good considering that Genesis was written 4,000 years ago by several uneducated authors who had likely never traveled more than a few miles from their home village and were relying on even earlier oral traditions. The creation sequence described in Genesis is 1) light, 2) Earth's rotation to provide day and night, 3) dry land on the Earth, 4) plants and vegetation, 5) moon and sun to mark night and day, 6) fishes and birds, 7) mammals and all kinds of terrestial creatures, 8) Man. Our current scientific understanding of the evolution of life is 1) big bang to create all space, time, and mass, 2) stars form, 3) pre-earth forms, 4) moon forms from impact of planet with pre-earth, 5) oceans condense, 6) early life, both photosynthetic and non-photosynthetic, arrives in ocean and on whatever 'land' exists in warm earth with no polar ice, 7) life evolves in oceans to more complex multi-cellular forms, invertebrates, and then vertebrates (fishes), 8) More dry land forms and life forms colonize it, 9) mammals, 10) man. The key thing is that both creation accounts rely on a sequence of events arising from creation out of nothing at all which is counter-intuitive to our imagination working alone. If you put most of us down in a little village 4,000 years ago and asked us to describe creation, we would likely either say 'it's always been this way,' or 'the gods formed everything from the raw materials at hand.'
Inkjet printers have a lot of advantages. They do a much nicer job on color than laser printers do. They're smaller, lighter, and use a lot less power. Moreover, the power they use while they are sleeping (which is most of the time for home printers) is a lot less than a laser printer. The only thing that makes them expensive are the cartridges which cost $15 to $40 a pop and don't last nearly as long as a laser toner pack. That's a shame because one of the inkjet makers (Lexmark, Canon, HP, Epson) could/should have stepped forward and started selling a refillable ink cartridge which would have had a simple refill valve or cap or something on top where you could take the $6 a quart ink and squirt it in to top it off. One quart would last for about 150 refills. That would make inkjet printers cheaper by far than laser printers. Why don't inkjet makers do that? The answer is that they could never get past the razor/razor blade idea where they make all of their money from the ink cartridges and the printer is just the 'razor' that people buy so that they will be locked in as a customer of the ink cartridge 'razorblades.' In this case, though, that way of thinking like an MBA is killing a very nice technology.
PC makers are basically packaging other people's hardware and software to make a low-margin system that users can use to manage their data. Just about everyone has figured out by now that the hardware and the software don't matter anymore because they are a commodity. What does matter is the D-A-T-A that that hardware and software is managing. Consider...if someone steals your computer, they get maybe $200 worth of resellable hardware and software and that's only if your computer is fairly new. But all of those documents, photos, collected data, records, etc....are priceless to you if you lose them. If you've got them backed up somewhere on something, you go buy another computer and you're rolling again with the backup. If it isn't backed up, it's a life-changing loss. So no one cares anymore if their computer is the fastest or has the latest version of Windows. All they care about are things that help them to keep their data safe like ease of backup, access to cloud storage, and familiarity and comfort with their software and hardware.
Perhaps Armstrong never did fail a 'drug test' but that does not address what he was doing. The USADA says he was doing blood doping which is basically injecting your own red blood cells back into your body to increase the oxygen carrying capacity of your blood. If you have skilled medical professionals helping you with this, as Armstrong allegedly did, it can be undetectable. The USADA also says Armstrong was using the drug EPO but avoided its detection by using smaller amounts administered intravenously, rather than ingested, so that it did not appear in urine samples. The USADA also says that Armstrong was using testosterone injections. Since testosterone is a naturally-occurring hormone, it is expected to be present in the body. The bottom line is that if you have a sleazy medical team that knows how to beat the tests helping you beat those tests, then to say 'I never failed a test' is...disingenous. Armstrong was busted cold because all of those people helping him were forced to turn against him...and he knew it. That's why he stopped fighting the USADA. If he had not, there would have been hearings and they would have been public and the testimony would have destroyed whatever tiny shred of credibility and respect that Armstrong has remaining to him. Finally, Armstrong DID fail a drug test. According to the USADA website: "Additionally, scientific data showed Mr. Armstrong’s use of blood manipulation including EPO or blood transfusions during Mr. Armstrong’s comeback to cycling in the 2009 Tour de France." By 2009, they had finally figured out what Armstrong was doing and what to test for and they had the deadwood on Armstrong. Armstrong was busted...cold.
You're accusing God of being soft on rape so I've got to point you to that pesky 6th commandment: 'Thou shall not commit adultery.' For Christians, adultery is any voluntary sexual relation outside of marriage. If a man rapes a woman, the man is guilty of adultery but not the woman.
If we are going to compare the health care of other countries with the United States, we should also compare the lifestyle differences between the US and other countries that affect our health and, therefore, the health care that we require. Generally, people in the US eat more crap, get less exercise, indulge in more promiscuous sex, and use more dangerous drugs than people in most other countries. Those things all cause serious disease that takes a lot of expensive medical care to manage before the patient ultimately succumbs. If a hypothetical Joe Blow wants to use meth, inject himself with heroin, eat steak for dinner every night, sit on the couch playing xbox till 1am while drinking diet pop, and then go of to the bars to drink and pickup a new sex partner for the night, he's going to be a high-roller at the local hospital as well.
Cowboy Neal and most here are sayin: 'the Win 8 GUI sucks for desktops...I'll stay with Win 7...M$ is screwed.' But...no, Microsoft will do great with this. Here's why. Most desktop computers already run Windows, either XP or Win 7. Microsoft will keep selling and supporting Win 7. Microsoft will make just as much money (perhaps even more!) selling Win 7 seats as they will selling Win 8 seats. There fore, Microsoft does not care if desktop users like Win 8 or not. All that matters is that the table space adopts it. If it does, then...mission accomplished. If it does not, then here comes win 9. In the meantime, Win 7 keeps rolling along.
so many examples of this: a) the airbus pilots on the plane from Brazil to France that crashed into the sea and killed everyone because the airspeed indicator failed and the plane went into a flat spin that the pilots lacked basic flying skills to recover from, thanks to heavy dependence on computer autopilot. b) most high schools no longer offer auto shop c) most grade schools no longer teach cursive writing d) most kids not only don't write code (vbasic, c++, js, whatever) but they don't even know what 'code' is. e) most of my young neighbors would never swing a hammer or wield a shovel, not because they can't but because they have better more entertaining things to do f) high school kids now would rather work for minimum wage in a 'cool' place than make a lot more money doing construction labor
When Al Gore and other politicians start saying 'the time for discussion is over' on such a complex subject, technically-trained people know that the time for discussion and study is just starting. This article summarizes an interesting study that points to warmer temperatures in roman times. Archaeological studies also support this. For example, many of the seaports that those Romans used are now far inland thanks to a lower sea level due to cooling temperatures. AGW believers minds are firmly closed to any idea that does not include imminent peril from 'hockey-stick' warming. The reality is that the support for AGW caused by atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations rests on very crude computer models of the global climate that will probably be the subject of horse laughs 50 years into the future.
Microsoft is always talking about what they're gonna do. They need to just shut up and actually DO something. Their last innovative product was when they created the GUI version of the spreadsheet and called it 'Excel.' Since then, the innovation has been a little slow. The problem starts with Ballmer. He is not thinking about cool stuff that can be done with tech. No, he's thinking about how he can make money doing cool stuff that others are doing. As they say in Texas, Microsoft is all hat and no cattle.
Don't confuse the lack of accountability for those shady, problematic voting machines with online voting. A voting machine is a terminal connected intermittently to a central server that tallies up the key presses on each of its terminals. Being allowed to vote is nothing more than being given exclusive access to a terminal for a brief period of time. The possibilities for fraud with such a system are...enormous...and unpreventable. Online voting, OTOH, would be a remote browser client that would each have to be authenticated with a unique user ID of some kind. Once authenticated, the voting preference of that ID would be updated according to the voter's selections and the result saved in a database. Each ID would be anonymous but could also be used by the holder to check on his vote at a later time to ensure that the vote had been registered correctly and was being maintained correctly.
'Renowned' scientists and worry-prone smart people have been railing and ranting about imminent earthly catastrophe for a very long time. Without exception, they have never been correct. The problem is that the Earth, as a system, is far too complex for our current crude modeling and understanding to be used to forecast anything correctly about. Those 22 scientists don't have any idea of what really will happen to the Earth in 5 years, 100 years, or 500 years, and for them to claim some sort of insight to use as a warning is misleading at best and a damnable lie at worst. In the end, all they really have are worries about disastrous possibilities. That's fine for debate and discussion but it is not anything that should ever be used to make any plans for the future or to guide politicians. As an example, 50 years ago worry-prone smart people were predicting that the Earth would run out of fossil fuels completely within 30 years, that 'overpopulation' would lead to widespread famine, that epidemics of deadly viral disease would sweep the population, that the Earth was headed toward a new ice age, that nuclear power would lead to inexpensive energy, that pollution of air and water would make large portions of the planet uninhabitable, etc. Forecasters of the future, even if they are worry-prone smart guys, should be approached with caution.
Actually, the agreement between our current scientific understanding of evolution of life and the Book of Genesis is pretty good considering that Genesis was written 4,000 years ago by several uneducated authors who had likely never traveled more than a few miles from their home village and were relying on even earlier oral traditions. The creation sequence described in Genesis is 1) light, 2) Earth's rotation to provide day and night, 3) dry land on the Earth, 4) plants and vegetation, 5) moon and sun to mark night and day, 6) fishes and birds, 7) mammals and all kinds of terrestial creatures, 8) Man. Our current scientific understanding of the evolution of life is 1) big bang to create all space, time, and mass, 2) stars form, 3) pre-earth forms, 4) moon forms from impact of planet with pre-earth, 5) oceans condense, 6) early life, both photosynthetic and non-photosynthetic, arrives in ocean and on whatever 'land' exists in warm earth with no polar ice, 7) life evolves in oceans to more complex multi-cellular forms, invertebrates, and then vertebrates (fishes), 8) More dry land forms and life forms colonize it, 9) mammals, 10) man. The key thing is that both creation accounts rely on a sequence of events arising from creation out of nothing at all which is counter-intuitive to our imagination working alone. If you put most of us down in a little village 4,000 years ago and asked us to describe creation, we would likely either say 'it's always been this way,' or 'the gods formed everything from the raw materials at hand.'
Your facts are incomplete. The biggest greenhouse gas, by orders-of-magnitude, is water vapor...not the condensed vapor we see as clouds but the vaporized water that we experience as humidity and which your list does not even include. Human behavior has no effect on atmospheric water vapor. Your assertion that our records indicate that average temperature over time has increased is misleading. Our 'records' of temperature measurement that mean anything at all wrt to climate conditions go back only a few decades. Prior to that, there were very few temperature records being kept and they tended to be air temperatures measured in a few locations where large numbers of people were living. If you go back more than 300 years, there are absolutely no temperature records at all. Instead, we have attempted to infer climate conditions by analyzing tree ring data, ice layer thickness, and similar things. If someone says they know what the air temperature was in Paris in March of 1680, they are either lying or guessing. That is a fact. It is also a fact that large portions of the planet have been covered with sheets of ice at several times in the last 100,000 years and no one knows why. It is also a fact that our present climate is an interglacial warming period.
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Here's what I want in a new version of Windows:
a) awesome compatibility - It should run every piece of Windows and DOS software ever written...and do it well. Moreover, it should be able to use ANY windows device driver ever written for my beloved favorite hardware.
b) it should boot up in less than 10 seconds and do hardware checking in the background.
c) It should provide a simple console to show ANY communications by any process with anything external to the system and have a right-click option to permanently stop or restrict any process.
d) it should recognize and translate any common CD, DVD or digital media format into video and/or music out of the box.
e) nothing should be able to execute without my explicit prior approval that I can easily and freely revoke with a simple console.
f) Nothing should ever be able to modify the registry without my explicit approval at the time of the modification and there should automatically be a permanent time-stamped backup made prior to a modification.
etcetera...
A ban means:
a) we can't rely on the consumer making the 'right' choice without our help.
b) people will still use incandescents unless we stop them
c) non-incandescent bulbs will not 'win' unless we make them the only choice
from this, we must conclude that either
1) people are idiots
or
2) incandescent bulbs are not as 'bad' as claimed
or
3) democrats are just smarter than everyone else
Other items perhaps worthy of a ban by the democrats:
horse-drawn carriages, hot air balloons, sailing ships, hand saws, outhouses, and biplanes as these all have 'better' alternatives.
'Bans' take all other factors out of the decision on what to use. The only real screw-in alternative to an incandescent bulb is the 'compact fluorescent' bulb although the LED screw-ins may eventually improve their performance and lower their cost enough to make them another alternative. However...the CFL bulbs have a lot of limitations. They have very low light output when they are powered up and need several minutes to warm up enough to reach full output. That makes them a very poor choice for lighting fixtures that are powered up for only a few minutes at infrequent intervals. The lifespan of a CFL bulb decreases dramatically to the same or less than an incandescent bulb when powered up for only short periods of time. Even when warm, the CFL maximum light output decreases by 20 to 30 percent over the life of the bulb. CFLs generally have a lower light output than a comparable incandescent bulb if you rely on the manufacturer 'equivalent to a xx-watt bulb labelling so your room, when lit with CFLs in the same lighting fixtures, is likely to be quite a bit dimmer. CFLs are supposed to have a life of 6,000 to 15,000 hours but my experience in real-world use has been less than 2,000 hours at best. Finally, CFLs are a very poor choice for any lighting that is not in a heated space as they will not even start in cold temperatures and, if they do start in cool temperatures, will put out a very low amount of light. In spite of these limitations, CFLs are an excellent choice in some locations such as a heated space that is powered up for long periods of time. However, the 'ban' will result in CFLs being used everywhere with predictable poor results. A 'ban' for something like a light bulb is like using a hammer to swat a fly...heavy-handed with poor results.
The AGW alarmists point to every climate and weather event as evidence of impending disaster. Tornadoes, hurricanes, forest fires, heat waves, and, now, rain in Mecca, are all blamed on global warming. Here we have the arctic ice extent darn near disappearing this summer which was supposed to be some sort of evidence of disaster and yet...it's barely even noticed. Why? Because nothing significant with respect to climate, weather, or planetary environment has happened as a consequence. If the arctic ice extent is unusually large this winter, will the alarmists exhale with sighs of relief? No, of course not. They will point to that as further evidence of impending disaster. The fundamental problem with the alarmists point of view is their assumption that somehow we can 'control' planetary co2 levels and thereby 'control' the climate. The Earth's climate has fluctuated wildly in the last 50,000 years ...and it will certainly fluctuate wildly in the future despite anything we do. The Earth was obviously much warmer than it is now just a few hundred years ago when vikings were settling in Greenland and the summertime arctic ice extent then was likely 'zero.' If there is a 'planetary emergency' it is in the increasing degree of small-minded thinking by people who want to keep things the way they are rather than adapt to change.
No, while the early ships might be prone to the gamma ray bursts, the newer ships will have emission controls that will eliminate 99.99 percent of the gamma radiation.
The software (and a consistent user experience) is waaaay more important than the hardware. Five years hence, we will be running on new, stronger, and faster hardware and the ability to move the HTML5 stuff along to the new hardware will be key. How many times in the past have we seen people complaining about the performance in the present and then new hardware appears almost immediately that makes the performance 5x faster, providing that the software will run on the new hardware? There's a reason why x86 is still the most widely-used set of instructions, decades after 8088 processors have gone to the scrap heap. So...Zuckerberg was wrong to move to HTML5 too quickly and he's wrong...again...for dumping it.
Amazon theoretically pays royalties of 35 to 70 percent of the retail price of their Kindle e-books to the copyright holder. However, what is not perhaps so widely known is the 'Amazon Gotcha' which is: "As the publisher, you (the author) set the "list price" for your content. Amazon.com reserves the right to set the retail price at our sole discretion. See the Pricing Page and Terms and Conditions for information on how royalties are calculated. Please note, We reserve the right to set the retail price we charge for the books you provide to us. We may offer your book at a price below your list price if, for example, the price at which a competitor sells your book, or the price at which we sell a physical edition of your book is lower than your list price. In that case, if you chose the 70% royalty option, your royalties will be calculated off of this offer price for sales that qualify for the 70% royalty option. If you chose the 35% royalty option, you will be paid off of the original list price you chose.
What does this mean? Amazon can set the price at anything they want to, including "zero." Guess what 70 percent of zero is? So...when Amazon is restricting content as TFA refers to, by claiming that the content is already 'freely available on the web' they are dissembling since a goodly portion of their kindle store is already 'free.' The main reason for Amazon's action is more likely embodied in the Amazon statement "we are not confident that you hold exclusive publishing rights." Amazon is happy to sell content for free because it builds their Kindle brand but they don't want there to be any chance of a copyright violation coming back to them as a costly claim.
Facebook is a monstrous data bucket that is never full and is never emptied. We've already seen job applicants being asked for their facebook logon info so that potential employers could see what was stored on facebook. People want a way to communicate informally with friends and family without those personal communications being stored, tracked, and logged for 50 years and then distributed to irrelevant future data leaches. The Diaspora distributed approach is the direction that this needs to go.
I rarely use Windows and then only because something absolutely requires it. Like the TFA author, removing unwanted cruft from the desktop (and system) is a key reason I dislike Windows. For example, Windows Update repeatedly nagged to install Windows Media Player 11 (the newest one) which I finally did to watch (I thought) DVDs. However, as many of you probably know, Windows Media Player 11 will NOT play DVDs. Instead, it advises you that the necessary decoder is not present on the system and points you to places where you can purchase the decoder 'plugin' for a price of anywhere from $15 to $30. Okay, fine, now it's time to dump (uninstall) the newly-installed Media Player 11 but...not so easy is that. It can only be removed by (according to Microsoft) either 1) booting to safe mode and running something called 'appwiz.cpl' or, if 1) doesn't work, then 2) running something as '%windir%\$ntUninstallwmp11$\spuninst\spuninst.exe'. This is just one small example but, generally, Microsoft decides what the user should install, use and see and then makes it extremely difficult for you if you try to stray off of the reservation.
The agreement between our current scientific understanding of evolution of life and the Book of Genesis is pretty good considering that Genesis was written 4,000 years ago by several uneducated authors who had likely never traveled more than a few miles from their home village and were relying on even earlier oral traditions. The creation sequence described in Genesis is 1) light, 2) Earth's rotation to provide day and night, 3) dry land on the Earth, 4) plants and vegetation, 5) moon and sun to mark night and day, 6) fishes and birds, 7) mammals and all kinds of terrestial creatures, 8) Man. Our current scientific understanding of the evolution of life is 1) big bang to create all space, time, and mass, 2) stars form, 3) pre-earth forms, 4) moon forms from impact of planet with pre-earth, 5) oceans condense, 6) early life, both photosynthetic and non-photosynthetic, arrives in ocean and on whatever 'land' exists in warm earth with no polar ice, 7) life evolves in oceans to more complex multi-cellular forms, invertebrates, and then vertebrates (fishes), 8) More dry land forms and life forms colonize it, 9) mammals, 10) man. The key thing is that both creation accounts rely on a sequence of events arising from creation out of nothing at all which is counter-intuitive to our imagination working alone. If you put most of us down in a little village 4,000 years ago and asked us to describe creation, we would likely either say 'it's always been this way,' or 'the gods formed everything from the raw materials at hand.'
Inkjet printers have a lot of advantages. They do a much nicer job on color than laser printers do. They're smaller, lighter, and use a lot less power. Moreover, the power they use while they are sleeping (which is most of the time for home printers) is a lot less than a laser printer. The only thing that makes them expensive are the cartridges which cost $15 to $40 a pop and don't last nearly as long as a laser toner pack. That's a shame because one of the inkjet makers (Lexmark, Canon, HP, Epson) could/should have stepped forward and started selling a refillable ink cartridge which would have had a simple refill valve or cap or something on top where you could take the $6 a quart ink and squirt it in to top it off. One quart would last for about 150 refills. That would make inkjet printers cheaper by far than laser printers. Why don't inkjet makers do that? The answer is that they could never get past the razor/razor blade idea where they make all of their money from the ink cartridges and the printer is just the 'razor' that people buy so that they will be locked in as a customer of the ink cartridge 'razorblades.' In this case, though, that way of thinking like an MBA is killing a very nice technology.
PC makers are basically packaging other people's hardware and software to make a low-margin system that users can use to manage their data. Just about everyone has figured out by now that the hardware and the software don't matter anymore because they are a commodity. What does matter is the D-A-T-A that that hardware and software is managing. Consider...if someone steals your computer, they get maybe $200 worth of resellable hardware and software and that's only if your computer is fairly new. But all of those documents, photos, collected data, records, etc....are priceless to you if you lose them. If you've got them backed up somewhere on something, you go buy another computer and you're rolling again with the backup. If it isn't backed up, it's a life-changing loss. So no one cares anymore if their computer is the fastest or has the latest version of Windows. All they care about are things that help them to keep their data safe like ease of backup, access to cloud storage, and familiarity and comfort with their software and hardware.
Perhaps Armstrong never did fail a 'drug test' but that does not address what he was doing. The USADA says he was doing blood doping which is basically injecting your own red blood cells back into your body to increase the oxygen carrying capacity of your blood. If you have skilled medical professionals helping you with this, as Armstrong allegedly did, it can be undetectable. The USADA also says Armstrong was using the drug EPO but avoided its detection by using smaller amounts administered intravenously, rather than ingested, so that it did not appear in urine samples. The USADA also says that Armstrong was using testosterone injections. Since testosterone is a naturally-occurring hormone, it is expected to be present in the body. The bottom line is that if you have a sleazy medical team that knows how to beat the tests helping you beat those tests, then to say 'I never failed a test' is...disingenous. Armstrong was busted cold because all of those people helping him were forced to turn against him...and he knew it. That's why he stopped fighting the USADA. If he had not, there would have been hearings and they would have been public and the testimony would have destroyed whatever tiny shred of credibility and respect that Armstrong has remaining to him. Finally, Armstrong DID fail a drug test. According to the USADA website: "Additionally, scientific data showed Mr. Armstrong’s use of blood manipulation including EPO or blood transfusions during Mr. Armstrong’s comeback to cycling in the 2009 Tour de France." By 2009, they had finally figured out what Armstrong was doing and what to test for and they had the deadwood on Armstrong. Armstrong was busted...cold.
God chose not to outlaw rape
You're accusing God of being soft on rape so I've got to point you to that pesky 6th commandment: 'Thou shall not commit adultery.' For Christians, adultery is any voluntary sexual relation outside of marriage. If a man rapes a woman, the man is guilty of adultery but not the woman.
If we are going to compare the health care of other countries with the United States, we should also compare the lifestyle differences between the US and other countries that affect our health and, therefore, the health care that we require. Generally, people in the US eat more crap, get less exercise, indulge in more promiscuous sex, and use more dangerous drugs than people in most other countries. Those things all cause serious disease that takes a lot of expensive medical care to manage before the patient ultimately succumbs. If a hypothetical Joe Blow wants to use meth, inject himself with heroin, eat steak for dinner every night, sit on the couch playing xbox till 1am while drinking diet pop, and then go of to the bars to drink and pickup a new sex partner for the night, he's going to be a high-roller at the local hospital as well.
Cowboy Neal and most here are sayin: 'the Win 8 GUI sucks for desktops...I'll stay with Win 7...M$ is screwed.' But...no, Microsoft will do great with this. Here's why. Most desktop computers already run Windows, either XP or Win 7. Microsoft will keep selling and supporting Win 7. Microsoft will make just as much money (perhaps even more!) selling Win 7 seats as they will selling Win 8 seats. There fore, Microsoft does not care if desktop users like Win 8 or not. All that matters is that the table space adopts it. If it does, then...mission accomplished. If it does not, then here comes win 9. In the meantime, Win 7 keeps rolling along.
so many examples of this:
a) the airbus pilots on the plane from Brazil to France that crashed into the sea and killed everyone because the airspeed indicator failed and the plane went into a flat spin that the pilots lacked basic flying skills to recover from, thanks to heavy dependence on computer autopilot.
b) most high schools no longer offer auto shop
c) most grade schools no longer teach cursive writing
d) most kids not only don't write code (vbasic, c++, js, whatever) but they don't even know what 'code' is.
e) most of my young neighbors would never swing a hammer or wield a shovel, not because they can't but because they have better more entertaining things to do
f) high school kids now would rather work for minimum wage in a 'cool' place than make a lot more money doing construction labor
...next thing you're going to say that 'cee-ment' and 'concrete' aren't the same thing.
When Al Gore and other politicians start saying 'the time for discussion is over' on such a complex subject, technically-trained people know that the time for discussion and study is just starting. This article summarizes an interesting study that points to warmer temperatures in roman times. Archaeological studies also support this. For example, many of the seaports that those Romans used are now far inland thanks to a lower sea level due to cooling temperatures. AGW believers minds are firmly closed to any idea that does not include imminent peril from 'hockey-stick' warming. The reality is that the support for AGW caused by atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations rests on very crude computer models of the global climate that will probably be the subject of horse laughs 50 years into the future.
Microsoft is always talking about what they're gonna do. They need to just shut up and actually DO something. Their last innovative product was when they created the GUI version of the spreadsheet and called it 'Excel.' Since then, the innovation has been a little slow. The problem starts with Ballmer. He is not thinking about cool stuff that can be done with tech. No, he's thinking about how he can make money doing cool stuff that others are doing. As they say in Texas, Microsoft is all hat and no cattle.
Don't confuse the lack of accountability for those shady, problematic voting machines with online voting. A voting machine is a terminal connected intermittently to a central server that tallies up the key presses on each of its terminals. Being allowed to vote is nothing more than being given exclusive access to a terminal for a brief period of time. The possibilities for fraud with such a system are...enormous...and unpreventable. Online voting, OTOH, would be a remote browser client that would each have to be authenticated with a unique user ID of some kind. Once authenticated, the voting preference of that ID would be updated according to the voter's selections and the result saved in a database. Each ID would be anonymous but could also be used by the holder to check on his vote at a later time to ensure that the vote had been registered correctly and was being maintained correctly.
This flaw apparently affects only Intel chips as the vulnerability does not exist for AMD 64-bit chips.
'Renowned' scientists and worry-prone smart people have been railing and ranting about imminent earthly catastrophe for a very long time. Without exception, they have never been correct. The problem is that the Earth, as a system, is far too complex for our current crude modeling and understanding to be used to forecast anything correctly about. Those 22 scientists don't have any idea of what really will happen to the Earth in 5 years, 100 years, or 500 years, and for them to claim some sort of insight to use as a warning is misleading at best and a damnable lie at worst. In the end, all they really have are worries about disastrous possibilities. That's fine for debate and discussion but it is not anything that should ever be used to make any plans for the future or to guide politicians. As an example, 50 years ago worry-prone smart people were predicting that the Earth would run out of fossil fuels completely within 30 years, that 'overpopulation' would lead to widespread famine, that epidemics of deadly viral disease would sweep the population, that the Earth was headed toward a new ice age, that nuclear power would lead to inexpensive energy, that pollution of air and water would make large portions of the planet uninhabitable, etc. Forecasters of the future, even if they are worry-prone smart guys, should be approached with caution.
Actually, the agreement between our current scientific understanding of evolution of life and the Book of Genesis is pretty good considering that Genesis was written 4,000 years ago by several uneducated authors who had likely never traveled more than a few miles from their home village and were relying on even earlier oral traditions. The creation sequence described in Genesis is 1) light, 2) Earth's rotation to provide day and night, 3) dry land on the Earth, 4) plants and vegetation, 5) moon and sun to mark night and day, 6) fishes and birds, 7) mammals and all kinds of terrestial creatures, 8) Man. Our current scientific understanding of the evolution of life is 1) big bang to create all space, time, and mass, 2) stars form, 3) pre-earth forms, 4) moon forms from impact of planet with pre-earth, 5) oceans condense, 6) early life, both photosynthetic and non-photosynthetic, arrives in ocean and on whatever 'land' exists in warm earth with no polar ice, 7) life evolves in oceans to more complex multi-cellular forms, invertebrates, and then vertebrates (fishes), 8) More dry land forms and life forms colonize it, 9) mammals, 10) man. The key thing is that both creation accounts rely on a sequence of events arising from creation out of nothing at all which is counter-intuitive to our imagination working alone. If you put most of us down in a little village 4,000 years ago and asked us to describe creation, we would likely either say 'it's always been this way,' or 'the gods formed everything from the raw materials at hand.'
Your facts are incomplete. The biggest greenhouse gas, by orders-of-magnitude, is water vapor...not the condensed vapor we see as clouds but the vaporized water that we experience as humidity and which your list does not even include. Human behavior has no effect on atmospheric water vapor. Your assertion that our records indicate that average temperature over time has increased is misleading. Our 'records' of temperature measurement that mean anything at all wrt to climate conditions go back only a few decades. Prior to that, there were very few temperature records being kept and they tended to be air temperatures measured in a few locations where large numbers of people were living. If you go back more than 300 years, there are absolutely no temperature records at all. Instead, we have attempted to infer climate conditions by analyzing tree ring data, ice layer thickness, and similar things. If someone says they know what the air temperature was in Paris in March of 1680, they are either lying or guessing. That is a fact. It is also a fact that large portions of the planet have been covered with sheets of ice at several times in the last 100,000 years and no one knows why. It is also a fact that our present climate is an interglacial warming period.