If anyone thinks that preloaded software on PCs is bad, they have never seen crap that AT&T installs on their phones.
The thing that bothered me most about my last phone (a Samsung w580i) was not the shareware-like games and other apps they preinstalled on it, it was that the web browser is accessible from a easy-to-bump button on the keypad, and the phone doesn't bother asking you "are you sure you want to spend $0.01 per KB to access an auto-refreshing webpage?" when the button somehow gets bumped in your pocket.
The phone also includes several "password-lock this program" settings, but the web browser is not one of the things that can be locked.
They can disable data on your line, which solves the problem, except then you can't send or receive MMS messages (even if you have the "unlimited picture and text messaging" package which includes unlimited MMS messages).
So you're hosed either way.
At least the iPhone doesn't come with any pre-loaded AT&T software - they don't even bundle the quite handy myWireless app or the equally handy (from AT&T's perspective) "Mark the Spot" app, both of which I would not have objected to them bundling at all. I guess I'm saying Apple has done quite well at keeping AT&T from digging their claws too deep.
I notice a handful of developers who have a beef with the way Apple runs their App store, but do any users actually care?
Nope, they don't. A friend of mine (who has a track record of being very... pro-Apple) who is not a developer told me that the only people complaining about Apple's development policies are "whiny bloggers" (his words) and that he thought clarifying the submission rules would result in far too much bad PR for Apple to make it worth it for them. Bad PR, you ask? He said it's because it would expose the exceptions they're making for their wealthy partners, which would be bad PR for them, and therefore they shouldn't do it.
Oh, and he didn't have a problem with this behavior.
[citation needed] (In particular, do you have numbers more recent than Q1 2010?)
Gartner does not agree. Granted, Android is growing quickly, and that's certainly a good thing, but it's a bit premature to say it's currently outselling the iPhone.
I've faced the same problems with developing for any Apple product since the original Macintosh computers were released.
Apple has never controlled which apps you could run on their computers before iPhone OS, and they were certainly never in a position to force third-party developers to stop distributing Mac software after it was already for sale.
I don't see how you could have had the same problems since the original Macintosh, because the situation that enables their behavior - the App Store - did not exist until much more recently;)
That really depends who you ask. The NPD report put Android's market share higher than Apple's at the end of Q1 (sorry, no link handy), but Gartner says Apple outsold Android by 6% in Q1 2010 and by 11% in Q4 2009. Android didn't even sell enough to get its own line in Q3 2009, but they mention in the text a few paragraphs after the table that Android had 3.5% of Q3's sales. If Apple outsold Android the last three quarters, I have a hard time believing that Android's market share was higher than Apple's at the end of Q1. Yes, Android's sales are growing, but if you believe Gartner then mathematically Android's market share is still quite a bit smaller than Apple's. That's not guesswork, it's just math (again, if you believe Gartner).
The problem with these statistics is that they all use different methodology. I don't know how Gartner gets their numbers, but NPD does online surveys and extrapolates based on that (and they don't include corporate or enterprise users). I'm not saying NPD is doing it wrong, I'm just saying that all these "market share" statistics come with a giant asterisk.
4. Our website contained a contest... After 10,000 people downloaded our free app and created a free character, we would give a free iPod Touch to one of them. Apple called us today and said that we aren't allowed to give away Apple products from a website associated with the app. They said we can give away a Zune HD, but not an iPod Touch.:-|
I would have just replaced "iPod Touch" in my contest description with "touchscreen media player". It wouldn't be mentioning Apple's product, so they couldn't complain, but the prize could still be an iPod Touch and everyone would still know exactly what you mean anyway.
So he should invest time and money into developing a free demo version of an app that he'd be able to sell... eventually... maybe? If Google ever bothers to finish expanding their app store's international capabilities?
The shortsightedness of some people amazes me.
(You don't invest in a market that doesn't exist yet on the assumption that it will eventually exist. You wait until you have some assurances that the market will exist by the time you're done with development. In this case, the "market" we're talking about is actually the Australian Marketplace for Android, but my comments are applicable to markets in general.)
Better a hundred valid and useful and killer apps get rejected from the AppStore, than have one worthless, thoughtless, uninspired app be approved.
You'd rather be deprived of a hundred useful apps than have to scroll the list past a single worthless app?
It should be pointed out that the app in question is not merely a "picture frame" app - yes, it displayed your pictures in the background, but it also displayed widgets of your choosing on top of those pictures. Want to have your RSS feeds, or the clock+weather, or whatever else, available at a glance, without just listing the info on a black screen? Then the OP's app is the kind of thing you'd be looking for. I'm all for banning worthless apps, but I don't think the OP's app is one of them.
On a more serious note, a (slightly?) more acceptable reason for knowing about Species 8472 would be from playing Star Trek Online, which Cryptic will be releasing once its "Season One" open beta ends later this year. (Which is to say, I'll dust off my lifetime subscription when they release the Season Two patch.)
An even worse problem is that Apple's followers don't seem to see a problem with Apple keeping the rules secret from the developers writing for Apple's platform.
I'm having a huge argument with a friend right now about this. He thinks it would be a huge PR mistake for Apple to publish concrete, clear App Store submission rules, and that therefore they shouldn't do it. (His reason? People would be pissed about all the exceptions to the rules that Apple makes for wealth developers.)
And he doesn't have a problem with Apple favoring wealthy app developers even when it harms the independent and small business developers.
(If you're curious, we were talking about Apple's "no scripting" rule, which they conveniently ignore for developers like EA and PopCap.)
A friend of mine was driving at 25mph on the snowy freeway. There was a good 200 yards between him and the next car ahead of him. The lane to his right was pretty much stopped. Some girl pulled out of the stopped lane into his lane like five yards in front of him; he swerved left to avoid hitting her, lost control because of the snow, spun, and ended up denting her rear side door.
Totally her fault, right? That's not what the judge decided. My friend got fined for "losing control of his vehicle". No penalty to her.
Sad to say, it seems that if the victim is a woman who cries enough, it doesn't really matter whether the guy driving the car did anything wrong. I suspect it's worse if the woman actually gets hurt.
So you believe it's unreasonable to present credentials when you bought it with a credit card?
Actually, Visa's merchant agreement states that the merchant must not require ID before purchase. Merchants who refuse to let you pay for the thing with your Visa without showing ID are violating their merchant agreement. (I'm not sure, but I would guess other merchants have similar clauses, though my American Express has my picture on the back anyway.)
Back on topic, I don't think a one-time online activation is unreasonable, but before today I was concerned they'd do the same thing that EA did with C&C4 (require always-connected internet even in single-player), so it's nice seeing a company realize what others are doing wrong. It's not enough to get me to buy Starcraft 2, as it was actually one of my less pressing concerns, but at least it's something.
On top of that, some cars already do what IBM wants, albeit without actually checking if you're at a stop light, and without potentially giving control of your engine to a remote computer.
My Civic Hybrid will shut off the engine if you're stopped on level-ish ground for more than a few seconds, as long as you're holding the brakes - as soon as you let go of the brakes, the engine kicks back on. It seems to me that this is a cheaper and more general solution to the problem IBM is trying to solve, since IBM's solution doesn't save any gas if you're sitting at a regular old stop sign for ten minutes waiting for traffic to clear up.
On one hand there is data and publications from thousands of scientists. On the other side there is very.... little. Taking one person from each side is irrelevant.
Two things.
First, I'm not just taking one person from each side, I'm using an example from each side, and prominent ones at that. When you compare viewpoints in any other field, it's common to use the prominent members of that field as examples of each viewpoint. Why is that suddenly unacceptable here?
Second, if it's as clear-cut as you seem to think it is, why does even the head of the CRU think there isn't sufficient data for the debate to be considered over?
My opinion is that the political momentum behind AGW is such that they (politicians) have put more scientific weight behind the idea than it actually has, and the general public has simply accepted it as fact when in truth it's just a theory.
Hey, I thought I heard scraping sounds. Those were the goalposts being moved. Now it's "disasterous" warming, eh?
No. But it's disastrous warming that pro-AGW people want me to be worried about! It's never "OH NOES THE WORLD WILL GET WARMER BY ONE DEGREE!" Instead, they go off on how the ice caps will melt, species will die off, etc etc etc. In other words, disaster.
You seriously don't believe the pro-AGW crowd is pushing the disaster angle? I suggest you crawl out from under that rock.
First you say it doesn't matter how many scientists believe what, then you say a consensus is important.
It seems you misunderstood me. I meant that the precise ratio of pro:anti is irrelevant to my argument, not irrelevant in general. Specifically, if one of the more prominent pro-AGW people doesn't think the issue is sufficiently settled (the debate is not over, he said), then clearly there is not a scientific consensus on the matter, despite what our political leaders want us to believe!
Do you doubt me? How about I quote Obama's press secretary: "Uh, I don’t think [global warming is], uh, anything that is quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore." (I'd link directly to the youtube video I transcribed that from, but it was taken down.)
Another issue you're ignoring is that as divided as scientists are regarding global warming, even among the "the climate is changing" crowd there isn't a consensus that it's our fault. (That is, the "A" in "AGW" is still in dispute even among those who believe the "GW" in "AGW".)
At any rate, as I've mentioned before, we have plenty of reasons to switch to "greener" power sources and reduce pollution - reasons which have nothing to do with climate change - so it's dumb to postpone all action until after the AGW debate is settled. Why can't we switch to nuclear merely because it's cleaner than coal, regardless of what effect coal plant emissions have on the climate?
We're basically postponing a solution most of us agree is necessary in order to argue about which problem we're going to use the solution to solve. Who cares? Let's just agree on the solution, and move on.
By your definition anyone who is opposed to any for any reason is merely a "NIMBY". That's silly - you're ignoring the actual meaning of NIMBY for the sake of calling people NIMBYs.
A "NIMBY" is someone who opposes something merely for its proposed location (usually due to its proximity to the one objecting).
If you don't want something in some location for actual reasons (however misguided), you're by definition not a "NIMBY".
I didn't link to it to refute AGW, I merely linked to it to show that even AGW supporters aren't nearly as sure about it as they like to pretend.
At any rate, he's choosing his words very carefully, because in the same article he agrees that there has been no statistically significant planetary warming since 1995.
In other words, he claims "I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed", but he also admits that that warming is not statistically significant.
So... he's basically saying that our significant emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases since 1995 have not affected global temperatures in any statistically significant way.
That being true, why are we so worked up about CO2 emissions? It doesn't make any sense.
I'll say this yet again - there are plenty of other reasons to switch to "greener" energy sources, so it's really stupid to postpone a switch to those energy sources until the AGW debate is sufficiently resolved.
You're trying to avoid answering the question by pretending I'm asking the wrong question. The fact remains, some pro-AGW climate scientists have been reluctant to share their data (why, if they're so sure they're right?), and some scientists whose jobs were explicitly "study climate change" remain skeptical of AGW (and here I'm thinking of the NASA guy).
Why should I believe one over the other?
And then you take into account the fact that guys like the (pro-AGW) CRU's director (you know, the "global climatology" kind of guy you're talking about) will explicitly agree that since 1995 there has been no statistically significant planetary warming...
What incentive do I have to be worried about disastrous planetary warming, when 14 years of data shows no statistically significant warming?
It doesn't really matter what the ratio of pro:anti AGW scientists is, precisely. It matters that contrary to what our political leaders want us to believe, there is not a generally accepted scientific consensus on the issue. And if there's no generally accepted scientific consensus on an issue, shouldn't I be worried when we make policies based on it?
As I've said before, there are plenty of reasons to switch to "greener" energy sources. It's absurd to hang it all on the outcome of the AGW debate - that just wastes time.
I've had several conversations with environmentalists who don't want nuclear power because of nuclear waste, regardless of where that waste ends up or what is done with it (and even recycling it is not acceptable to them!), and because of the perceived danger of catastrophic meltdown.
These aren't "not in my backyard" people, these are "not at all" people.
There are plenty of reasons to switch away from fossil fuels as it is, so it's stupid to hang the whole thing on something as controversial as AGW.
But now, instead of just working on switching to e.g. nuclear power we're wasting tons of time and money arguing on a global scale about what exactly (if anything) we want to do about global warming or climate change or whatever they're calling it these days.
I don't think it's true that the "vast majority" of scientists support the AGW theory. But don't ask me, ask the CRU's Phil Jones:
It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view.
Having been the director of the CRU, Phil Jones is definitely in a position to know whether "the vast majority" of scientists support AGW - and here he is, publicly stating that he does not believe the vast majority of climate scientists think the debate is over, nor does he himself think so!
What I gather from this is that the scientists actually researching climate change are not nearly as sure about its cause as their political supporters want us to believe.
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I don't see the problem here.
Because it won't be long before other carriers follow AT&T's lead.
The Samsung w580i does Yahoo (and MSN) via SMS messages too, but a) it sucks so I only used it briefly, and b) I had unlimited texting...
If anyone thinks that preloaded software on PCs is bad, they have never seen crap that AT&T installs on their phones.
The thing that bothered me most about my last phone (a Samsung w580i) was not the shareware-like games and other apps they preinstalled on it, it was that the web browser is accessible from a easy-to-bump button on the keypad, and the phone doesn't bother asking you "are you sure you want to spend $0.01 per KB to access an auto-refreshing webpage?" when the button somehow gets bumped in your pocket.
The phone also includes several "password-lock this program" settings, but the web browser is not one of the things that can be locked.
They can disable data on your line, which solves the problem, except then you can't send or receive MMS messages (even if you have the "unlimited picture and text messaging" package which includes unlimited MMS messages).
So you're hosed either way.
At least the iPhone doesn't come with any pre-loaded AT&T software - they don't even bundle the quite handy myWireless app or the equally handy (from AT&T's perspective) "Mark the Spot" app, both of which I would not have objected to them bundling at all. I guess I'm saying Apple has done quite well at keeping AT&T from digging their claws too deep.
I love extrapolating :)
I notice a handful of developers who have a beef with the way Apple runs their App store, but do any users actually care?
Nope, they don't. A friend of mine (who has a track record of being very... pro-Apple) who is not a developer told me that the only people complaining about Apple's development policies are "whiny bloggers" (his words) and that he thought clarifying the submission rules would result in far too much bad PR for Apple to make it worth it for them. Bad PR, you ask? He said it's because it would expose the exceptions they're making for their wealthy partners, which would be bad PR for them, and therefore they shouldn't do it.
Oh, and he didn't have a problem with this behavior.
*sigh*
B) it is now outselling iPhone
[citation needed] (In particular, do you have numbers more recent than Q1 2010?)
Gartner does not agree. Granted, Android is growing quickly, and that's certainly a good thing, but it's a bit premature to say it's currently outselling the iPhone.
I've faced the same problems with developing for any Apple product since the original Macintosh computers were released.
Apple has never controlled which apps you could run on their computers before iPhone OS, and they were certainly never in a position to force third-party developers to stop distributing Mac software after it was already for sale.
I don't see how you could have had the same problems since the original Macintosh, because the situation that enables their behavior - the App Store - did not exist until much more recently ;)
Android phones now outsell iPhone OS phones
That really depends who you ask. The NPD report put Android's market share higher than Apple's at the end of Q1 (sorry, no link handy), but Gartner says Apple outsold Android by 6% in Q1 2010 and by 11% in Q4 2009. Android didn't even sell enough to get its own line in Q3 2009, but they mention in the text a few paragraphs after the table that Android had 3.5% of Q3's sales. If Apple outsold Android the last three quarters, I have a hard time believing that Android's market share was higher than Apple's at the end of Q1. Yes, Android's sales are growing, but if you believe Gartner then mathematically Android's market share is still quite a bit smaller than Apple's. That's not guesswork, it's just math (again, if you believe Gartner).
The problem with these statistics is that they all use different methodology. I don't know how Gartner gets their numbers, but NPD does online surveys and extrapolates based on that (and they don't include corporate or enterprise users). I'm not saying NPD is doing it wrong, I'm just saying that all these "market share" statistics come with a giant asterisk.
4. Our website contained a contest... After 10,000 people downloaded our free app and created a free character, we would give a free iPod Touch to one of them. Apple called us today and said that we aren't allowed to give away Apple products from a website associated with the app. They said we can give away a Zune HD, but not an iPod Touch. :-|
I would have just replaced "iPod Touch" in my contest description with "touchscreen media player". It wouldn't be mentioning Apple's product, so they couldn't complain, but the prize could still be an iPod Touch and everyone would still know exactly what you mean anyway.
So he should invest time and money into developing a free demo version of an app that he'd be able to sell... eventually... maybe? If Google ever bothers to finish expanding their app store's international capabilities?
The shortsightedness of some people amazes me.
(You don't invest in a market that doesn't exist yet on the assumption that it will eventually exist. You wait until you have some assurances that the market will exist by the time you're done with development. In this case, the "market" we're talking about is actually the Australian Marketplace for Android, but my comments are applicable to markets in general.)
Better a hundred valid and useful and killer apps get rejected from the AppStore, than have one worthless, thoughtless, uninspired app be approved.
You'd rather be deprived of a hundred useful apps than have to scroll the list past a single worthless app?
It should be pointed out that the app in question is not merely a "picture frame" app - yes, it displayed your pictures in the background, but it also displayed widgets of your choosing on top of those pictures. Want to have your RSS feeds, or the clock+weather, or whatever else, available at a glance, without just listing the info on a black screen? Then the OP's app is the kind of thing you'd be looking for. I'm all for banning worthless apps, but I don't think the OP's app is one of them.
It's only a problem if you bought Elite Force 2.
*hides his CD case*
On a more serious note, a (slightly?) more acceptable reason for knowing about Species 8472 would be from playing Star Trek Online, which Cryptic will be releasing once its "Season One" open beta ends later this year. (Which is to say, I'll dust off my lifetime subscription when they release the Season Two patch.)
An even worse problem is that Apple's followers don't seem to see a problem with Apple keeping the rules secret from the developers writing for Apple's platform.
I'm having a huge argument with a friend right now about this. He thinks it would be a huge PR mistake for Apple to publish concrete, clear App Store submission rules, and that therefore they shouldn't do it. (His reason? People would be pissed about all the exceptions to the rules that Apple makes for wealth developers.)
And he doesn't have a problem with Apple favoring wealthy app developers even when it harms the independent and small business developers.
(If you're curious, we were talking about Apple's "no scripting" rule, which they conveniently ignore for developers like EA and PopCap.)
A friend of mine was driving at 25mph on the snowy freeway. There was a good 200 yards between him and the next car ahead of him. The lane to his right was pretty much stopped. Some girl pulled out of the stopped lane into his lane like five yards in front of him; he swerved left to avoid hitting her, lost control because of the snow, spun, and ended up denting her rear side door.
Totally her fault, right? That's not what the judge decided. My friend got fined for "losing control of his vehicle". No penalty to her.
Sad to say, it seems that if the victim is a woman who cries enough, it doesn't really matter whether the guy driving the car did anything wrong. I suspect it's worse if the woman actually gets hurt.
This was in Utah, too...
iPhone OS 4 will support keeping Skype and other similar programs running in the background (essentially), if you hadn't heard.
So you believe it's unreasonable to present credentials when you bought it with a credit card?
Actually, Visa's merchant agreement states that the merchant must not require ID before purchase. Merchants who refuse to let you pay for the thing with your Visa without showing ID are violating their merchant agreement. (I'm not sure, but I would guess other merchants have similar clauses, though my American Express has my picture on the back anyway.)
Back on topic, I don't think a one-time online activation is unreasonable, but before today I was concerned they'd do the same thing that EA did with C&C4 (require always-connected internet even in single-player), so it's nice seeing a company realize what others are doing wrong. It's not enough to get me to buy Starcraft 2, as it was actually one of my less pressing concerns, but at least it's something.
I think you meant to reply to my parent post, not to me ;)
On top of that, some cars already do what IBM wants, albeit without actually checking if you're at a stop light, and without potentially giving control of your engine to a remote computer.
My Civic Hybrid will shut off the engine if you're stopped on level-ish ground for more than a few seconds, as long as you're holding the brakes - as soon as you let go of the brakes, the engine kicks back on. It seems to me that this is a cheaper and more general solution to the problem IBM is trying to solve, since IBM's solution doesn't save any gas if you're sitting at a regular old stop sign for ten minutes waiting for traffic to clear up.
How do you know the company running the satellites isn't using Microsoft products? ;)
On one hand there is data and publications from thousands of scientists. On the other side there is very .... little. Taking one person from each side is irrelevant.
Two things.
First, I'm not just taking one person from each side, I'm using an example from each side, and prominent ones at that. When you compare viewpoints in any other field, it's common to use the prominent members of that field as examples of each viewpoint. Why is that suddenly unacceptable here?
Second, if it's as clear-cut as you seem to think it is, why does even the head of the CRU think there isn't sufficient data for the debate to be considered over?
My opinion is that the political momentum behind AGW is such that they (politicians) have put more scientific weight behind the idea than it actually has, and the general public has simply accepted it as fact when in truth it's just a theory.
Hey, I thought I heard scraping sounds. Those were the goalposts being moved. Now it's "disasterous" warming, eh?
No. But it's disastrous warming that pro-AGW people want me to be worried about! It's never "OH NOES THE WORLD WILL GET WARMER BY ONE DEGREE!" Instead, they go off on how the ice caps will melt, species will die off, etc etc etc. In other words, disaster.
You seriously don't believe the pro-AGW crowd is pushing the disaster angle? I suggest you crawl out from under that rock.
First you say it doesn't matter how many scientists believe what, then you say a consensus is important.
It seems you misunderstood me. I meant that the precise ratio of pro:anti is irrelevant to my argument, not irrelevant in general. Specifically, if one of the more prominent pro-AGW people doesn't think the issue is sufficiently settled (the debate is not over, he said), then clearly there is not a scientific consensus on the matter, despite what our political leaders want us to believe!
Do you doubt me? How about I quote Obama's press secretary: "Uh, I don’t think [global warming is], uh, anything that is quite frankly, among most people, in dispute anymore." (I'd link directly to the youtube video I transcribed that from, but it was taken down.)
Another issue you're ignoring is that as divided as scientists are regarding global warming, even among the "the climate is changing" crowd there isn't a consensus that it's our fault. (That is, the "A" in "AGW" is still in dispute even among those who believe the "GW" in "AGW".)
At any rate, as I've mentioned before, we have plenty of reasons to switch to "greener" power sources and reduce pollution - reasons which have nothing to do with climate change - so it's dumb to postpone all action until after the AGW debate is settled. Why can't we switch to nuclear merely because it's cleaner than coal, regardless of what effect coal plant emissions have on the climate?
We're basically postponing a solution most of us agree is necessary in order to argue about which problem we're going to use the solution to solve. Who cares? Let's just agree on the solution, and move on.
By your definition anyone who is opposed to any for any reason is merely a "NIMBY". That's silly - you're ignoring the actual meaning of NIMBY for the sake of calling people NIMBYs.
A "NIMBY" is someone who opposes something merely for its proposed location (usually due to its proximity to the one objecting).
If you don't want something in some location for actual reasons (however misguided), you're by definition not a "NIMBY".
I didn't link to it to refute AGW, I merely linked to it to show that even AGW supporters aren't nearly as sure about it as they like to pretend.
At any rate, he's choosing his words very carefully, because in the same article he agrees that there has been no statistically significant planetary warming since 1995.
In other words, he claims "I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed", but he also admits that that warming is not statistically significant.
So... he's basically saying that our significant emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases since 1995 have not affected global temperatures in any statistically significant way.
That being true, why are we so worked up about CO2 emissions? It doesn't make any sense.
I'll say this yet again - there are plenty of other reasons to switch to "greener" energy sources, so it's really stupid to postpone a switch to those energy sources until the AGW debate is sufficiently resolved.
You're trying to avoid answering the question by pretending I'm asking the wrong question. The fact remains, some pro-AGW climate scientists have been reluctant to share their data (why, if they're so sure they're right?), and some scientists whose jobs were explicitly "study climate change" remain skeptical of AGW (and here I'm thinking of the NASA guy).
Why should I believe one over the other?
And then you take into account the fact that guys like the (pro-AGW) CRU's director (you know, the "global climatology" kind of guy you're talking about) will explicitly agree that since 1995 there has been no statistically significant planetary warming...
What incentive do I have to be worried about disastrous planetary warming, when 14 years of data shows no statistically significant warming?
It doesn't really matter what the ratio of pro:anti AGW scientists is, precisely. It matters that contrary to what our political leaders want us to believe, there is not a generally accepted scientific consensus on the issue. And if there's no generally accepted scientific consensus on an issue, shouldn't I be worried when we make policies based on it?
As I've said before, there are plenty of reasons to switch to "greener" energy sources. It's absurd to hang it all on the outcome of the AGW debate - that just wastes time.
I've had several conversations with environmentalists who don't want nuclear power because of nuclear waste, regardless of where that waste ends up or what is done with it (and even recycling it is not acceptable to them!), and because of the perceived danger of catastrophic meltdown.
These aren't "not in my backyard" people, these are "not at all" people.
There are plenty of reasons to switch away from fossil fuels as it is, so it's stupid to hang the whole thing on something as controversial as AGW.
But now, instead of just working on switching to e.g. nuclear power we're wasting tons of time and money arguing on a global scale about what exactly (if anything) we want to do about global warming or climate change or whatever they're calling it these days.
I don't think it's true that the "vast majority" of scientists support the AGW theory. But don't ask me, ask the CRU's Phil Jones:
It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view.
Having been the director of the CRU, Phil Jones is definitely in a position to know whether "the vast majority" of scientists support AGW - and here he is, publicly stating that he does not believe the vast majority of climate scientists think the debate is over, nor does he himself think so!
What I gather from this is that the scientists actually researching climate change are not nearly as sure about its cause as their political supporters want us to believe.
I elaborated a bit on this very point back in February.