The US pretty much could have nuked any nation on earth at will from 1945
Probably not immediately from 1945 - one of the concerns of the US war effort was that they had used up all of the refined uranium on the Japan bombs. And USSR had the nuke only a few years later. But what delivery system would the US have used? If the USSR couldn't deliver a nuke to US soil, then it is unlikely that the US could've done the reverse - the Strategic bomber capabilities of both nations were pretty evenly matched, and U.S. bomber designs were quickly reverse-engineered for USSR production.
The old Soviet Union had no effective to deliver a nuclear weapon to the continental US until the early to mid sixties.
The Russians had ICBMs in the 50s that could probably have hit the US. Sputnik showed the world that they had the technology and it worked.
What really gets to me is deliberately running over cyclists. As far as I can see, this should be treated as attempted murder (what do you expect will happen when you run over somebody with a heavy, motorised vehicle?).
Faulty logic. People do stuff that they know (or should know) will hurt them all the time. They do it a lot when driving cars, anyway, why should bicycles be any different?
No, the reason is because pretty much everyone else in the world has the sense to realise that bicyclists are pedestrians. They don't belong in the road any more than joggers or skateboarders.
In the UK pedestrians are allowed to walk on the road. The Highway Code states:
"If there is no pavement keep to the right-hand side of the road so that you can see oncoming traffic. You should take extra care and be prepared to walk in single file, especially on narrow roads or in poor light, keep close to the side of the road"
In fact, bicycles are (afaik) the only vehicle which you have a right to use on the roads. For every other vehicle you must have a valid driving license.
There was no national call to action (for example..."we're going to put unemployed auto workers to work building an all-new high-speed rail system to link our urban areas" or "we're going to use this opportunity to completely replace our power grid, because we lose such a high percentage of power to inefficiency of the lines"
America seems to be somewhat unique in its hatred of such government-run projects - there are many people who have denounced Obama's proposed national high-speed rail network as "socialist" and it will be an uphill struggle to get legislation passed. The Chinese administration, in comparison, can decide to build those networks and immediately procure the funding without the legislative battle. Slavoj Zizek has been proposing a very interesting hypothesis recently - that the Chinese have actually discovered a system that is more efficient, and more productive, than the capitalist liberal democracy that the rest of the world has moved towards in the last century. Maybe it will be a turning point in the development of our civilisation.
Another interesting observation is that China is racing ahead with these projects, with economic growth expected at 8% this year, and yet has very little enforcement of patent or IP protection. Coincidence? The bullet trains are a great example of the lack of IP enforcement leading to rapid development, with Siemens technology finding its way into Chinese designed and manufactured trains.
I see this as a way to siphon off funds to be redirected to more social programs
TFA: "Mr. Obama’s request, which will be announced on Monday, would add $6 billion over five years to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s budget."
How is increasing NASA's budget and enabling it to buy space launches from private companies "siphoning off funds to be redirected to more social programs"? Your political bias is leading to illogical reasoning.
Measurement of pH of standard distilled water shows variances of + or - 0.1 all of the time.
Perfectly distilled H20 does have a pH of 7.0. Actual measured values will vary due both to the resolution of measuring instruments, and contamination of the sample - principally absorption of CO2. With expensive equipment and a pure sample (e.g. from nuclear grade resin purification) the sample variance should be lower than ±0.1
You realise that this isn't a peer-reviewed paper, right? It's just a poster presentation at a conference. Calls for posters go out to everyone, even PhD students who have barely started their research, it's just a presentation of what you're doing, and is not supposed to be taken as finished, published, reviewed research.
Morner used "coring, levelling, sampling and carbon dating". Conspicuously absent from this list is any direct measure of sea level from tide gauges or satellites." Sea level rise at tropical Pacific and Indian Ocean islands by Church, White and Hunter published in 2006 in the journal Global and Planetary Change looked at data from tide gauges and satellites and found: "In the Indian Ocean, the tide-gauge records at the Maldives indicate large rates of relative sea-level rise in agreement with Singh et al. (2001) and Woodworth (2005), and in disagreement with Morner et al. (2004)...."
The groups of people in #1 above attack the economist in #2 because he isn't promoting the "right" solutions.
Wrong. Scientists are skeptical about the proposed solution because it involves radical geo-engineering on a global scale in a way that has never before been attempted. If it was a guaranteed-to-work solution, that would be great. But how many engineering projects on the scale envisaged work perfectly first time? And remember that if we screw it up, we might not be able to fix it. I can entirely understand why an economist would love a relatively cheap engineering solution, but the reality from the perspective of an engineer is that it would be very, very tricky to pull off correctly first time. Imagine putting a man on the moon without first doing the Low Earth Orbit, or the animal testing and launches. It's that kind of difficult.
Calling it a myth when its entirely correct shows how out of touch Nature is with actual science.
Yeah, all of the scientists and journals are wrong..
The pH of the oceans is in constant flux and cannot be absolutely constant.
The problem is not that the meters can masure to this accuracy its the fact that sea water's pH varies by at least 0.1 pH on very short timescales.
There are many possible sources of experimental variance. That is why scientists use statistics to quantify variance. It is entirely possible to carry out T-tests on the sample data to discriminate between pH changes.
So you can't crack a book on science and you have no clue how climate parameters are measured and collated.
I recommend you read some basic books on experimentation and statistics e.g. Statistics for Experimenters. It is clear that you don't understand how experimental data is gathered, and you don't understand how statistics can be used to quantify and validate deviations between mean values.
the CO2 levels that are most quoted as being the targeted level is from the 1800s or so.
But that isn't even true. The IPCC stable target (2007 report) is 450ppm CO2 - a level that is above the current 387ppm, and well above the 284ppm of 1832.
there is no link between rising CO2 and temperature rise except in the reverse sense: temperature rises and then 800-1000 years later, CO2 rises in delayed response.
The reported change in the average pH of 0.1 is below the measurement error of even well calibrated instruments.
Fail. The very best (very expensive!) meters have an accuracy of ±0.002 pH units. (and besides, multiple replicates and statistical analysis is used to increase accuracy and reduce individual variance - or did you seriously think that scientists only sample a single point in the sea with a single meter to determine temperature change?!)
The Maldives had a sea level fall in the 1970s followed by stasis since. Tuvalu's sea levels have remained stable during that time.
But after the climate gate emails came out I started looking at stuff a little closer. The disturbing thing is not the hockey stick graph itself, but the fact that they're STILL defending it.
The conclusion that we are making the world warmer certainly does not depend on reconstructions of temperature prior to direct records.
And:
Most researchers would agree that while the original hockey stick can - and has - been improved in a number of ways, it was not far off the mark. Most later temperature reconstructions fall within the error bars of the original hockey stick. Some show far more variability leading up to the 20th century than the hockey stick, but none suggest that it has been warmer at any time in the past 1000 years than in the last part of the 20th century.
The "Hockey Stick" was investigated by the 2006 report of the US National Academy of Science, which found:
The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world.
"The disturbing thing is not the hockey stick graph itself, but the fact that they're STILL defending it.
Are you accusing the US National Academy of Science of being part of a conspiracy? Or of being incompetent? Because the report they wrote, at the request the U.S. Congress, endorses the hockey stick.
See, this is what I've noticed about/. in the last 5 years or so - seems to be inhabited by people who can't subscribe to any anti-anthropogenic cuased global warming argument. So, anything which is said against the AGW argument gets modded down.
What I've noticed is the opposite - that as soon as a/. discussion appears on climate change, all kinds of "climate skeptic" posters appear with accounts that haven't been used in a long time, or with accounts that have posted solely on climate change discussions, and the same tired old arguments that get modded up again and again. How many times has the "Mars and Pluto are warming" meme been modded up on/.? How many times has "they can't predict the weather next week, how can they predict it in 100 years!" been modded up? "It's the Sun", "It's Milankovitch cycles", "Alarmist! Leftist! Warmist!".... and so it goes.
(Having written the above, it occurred to me to check the account NeoTron; I was unsurprised to find a new Slashdot account, posting solely on climate change issues. This is becoming a familiar pattern.)
the weather man can't predict the weather for the comming week. but for some reason you think they can predict the weather 100 years into the future accurately?
You confuse weather prediction and climate prediction, which are two completely different things.
Weather prediction: tomorrow will be windy, with light showers, 23 degrees.
Climate: in 100 years the global mean temperature of the world will increase by x degrees with variation y degrees and probability p.
Or to give another example - make a cup of coffee. The water was boiling and will cool over the next ten minutes. At any given point in time, it is extremely difficult to predict the exact position and temperature of individual molecules within the cup, but you can be pretty certain that after 10 minutes the temperature will have cooled to a given point, within some range of experimental variance.
Why do climate skeptics constantly deride scientists who accept AGW as wanting everyone to live in caves? Has anyone ever met a single scientist who wants to roll the clock back several thousand years, to a time without science, without progress, and where religion and obedience to an invisible god was all that the vast majority of humanity cared about?!
I don't even understand where this concept could come from - all of the conveniences and benefits of modern life were brought about by the enlightenment - the embracing of science and a rational understanding of the world. How could scientists possibly benefit from rolling the clock back? I can see how the religious would benefit, but scientists? It makes no sense.
Not true. Not even the Daily Mail cherry picked quote says that the claim was known to be false. The actual quote was:
"We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was 'grey literature' [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors."
So, they knew that one source hadn't been peer-reviewed, but quoted from it, and were relying on internal and external reviewers to find any problems with that source. This is a completely different thing to knowingly making up and publishing fraudulent data.
There is a logical contradiction in your reasoning:
This seems to validate all the "deniers" claims that global warming is just a fraudulent industry designed to keep funding going for the scientists involved by scaring people.
So global warming is a fraud - there is no global warming, and hence no problem?
That's why they get so angry at anyone who comes up with an alternate solution to the problem [nytimes.com].
But now global warming is real and is a problem?
(For the record, Levitt is not a "denier" - he writes "Like those who are criticizing us, we believe that rising global temperatures are a man-made phenomenon and that global warming is an important issue to solve. ")
No you can't. You missed the fact that this PC is being sold in Europe. The UK equivalent of Walmart is ASDA (which is owned by Walmart). The only desktop PC they sell at the moment is this thing, which costs £400 - the equivalent of €460. So the "slashvertised" PC being discussed is about 100 Euros cheaper than the best you could buy at the UK's "Walmart". It's probably a similar story in the rest of Europe.
Just like all the idiots who, when asked by the airport staff if there's anything dangerous in their bags, think it'd be funny to say "yes, a bomb!" ha bloody ha.
The IRA gave coded telephone warnings a few minutes in advance. This was NOT to allow civilians time to escape, or reduce the number of civilian casualties.
No, since the IRA did bomb and kill civilians and were pretty unrepentant about it. Coded warnings can amplify the effect of an attack - or even make an actual attack unnecessary. Why bother with a real bomb when a simple telephone message can shut down 40 train stations and cause an estimated £34 million damage? For every real bomb you can call in many times that number of coded threats, causing huge economic losses.
There's a bit in the Real Dolls documentary where they're talking to one of the creators of Real Dolls and ask about the weird requests that they have turned down. Young people is the obvious one. They also had a dog breeder who wanted a Real Dog because he was "tired of hurting his dogs". And how about the guy who sent in photos of his pensioner mother asking if they could make a Real Doll of her?
But when it comes to real controversy, as usual the Japanese already got therefirst.
It's time we recognized that the interesting things about "life" are all just products of the fact that all kinds of systems can convey self-replicating entities of some sort, and they tend to be interesting and undergo evolutionary processes and etc. Whether they are non-biological DNA bundles, cellular organisms, oddly folded proteins, crystalized clay, etc.
It goes further than that - almost everything that is built is a product of evolution. Bicycles, planes, cars, the computer, have all been subject to the process of evolution. The fact that they can't self-replicate does not mean that the evolutionary process isn't present. No life can replicate without the necessary supporting environmental conditions, and if one of those prerequisite environmental conditions happens to be the presence of humans and amounts of refined steel and other materials, how is this any different to a bacteria requiring sugars and oxygen?
Slashdot Mirror
The US pretty much could have nuked any nation on earth at will from 1945
Probably not immediately from 1945 - one of the concerns of the US war effort was that they had used up all of the refined uranium on the Japan bombs. And USSR had the nuke only a few years later. But what delivery system would the US have used? If the USSR couldn't deliver a nuke to US soil, then it is unlikely that the US could've done the reverse - the Strategic bomber capabilities of both nations were pretty evenly matched, and U.S. bomber designs were quickly reverse-engineered for USSR production.
The old Soviet Union had no effective to deliver a nuclear weapon to the continental US until the early to mid sixties.
The Russians had ICBMs in the 50s that could probably have hit the US. Sputnik showed the world that they had the technology and it worked.
What really gets to me is deliberately running over cyclists. As far as I can see, this should be treated as attempted murder (what do you expect will happen when you run over somebody with a heavy, motorised vehicle?).
A motorist who deliberately drove into a cyclist, left him lying in the road critically injured and then tried to cover his tracks has been jailed
A 63-YEAR-OLD disabled woman has been found guilty of dangerous driving after she deliberately rammed a cyclist off his bike as he rode home from work.
Faulty logic. People do stuff that they know (or should know) will hurt them all the time. They do it a lot when driving cars, anyway, why should bicycles be any different?
When it comes to sharing the road with cars, many people seem to assume that such accidents are usually the cyclist’s fault — a result of reckless or aggressive riding. But an analysis of police reports on 2,752 bike-car accidents in Toronto found that clumsy or inattentive driving by motorists was the cause of 90 percent of these crashes.
ignoring stop signs
Some cyclists do those things, and I can understand why it is frustrating for other people, but it rarely causes accidents: 2% of cases where cyclists were seriously injured in collisions with other road users police said that the rider disobeying a stop sign or traffic light was a likely contributing factor.
ignoring bicycle lanes when they don't need to turn left.
I suppose you mean "turn against oncoming traffic" - left turns are certainly not a problem here... anyway, the main reason for avoiding bike lanes in cities is people parking in cycle lanes. The Door Prize: Cyclists killed by dooring - a list of cyclists killed because of motorists opening their door in the cyclist's path. It happens all the time - I had it happen to me once, and now I will never use a cycle lane that has cars parked along it or in it.
No, the reason is because pretty much everyone else in the world has the sense to realise that bicyclists are pedestrians. They don't belong in the road any more than joggers or skateboarders.
In the UK pedestrians are allowed to walk on the road. The Highway Code states:
"If there is no pavement keep to the right-hand side of the road so that you can see oncoming traffic. You should take extra care and be prepared to walk in single file, especially on narrow roads or in poor light, keep close to the side of the road"
In fact, bicycles are (afaik) the only vehicle which you have a right to use on the roads. For every other vehicle you must have a valid driving license.
There was no national call to action (for example..."we're going to put unemployed auto workers to work building an all-new high-speed rail system to link our urban areas" or "we're going to use this opportunity to completely replace our power grid, because we lose such a high percentage of power to inefficiency of the lines"
America seems to be somewhat unique in its hatred of such government-run projects - there are many people who have denounced Obama's proposed national high-speed rail network as "socialist" and it will be an uphill struggle to get legislation passed. The Chinese administration, in comparison, can decide to build those networks and immediately procure the funding without the legislative battle. Slavoj Zizek has been proposing a very interesting hypothesis recently - that the Chinese have actually discovered a system that is more efficient, and more productive, than the capitalist liberal democracy that the rest of the world has moved towards in the last century. Maybe it will be a turning point in the development of our civilisation.
Another interesting observation is that China is racing ahead with these projects, with economic growth expected at 8% this year, and yet has very little enforcement of patent or IP protection. Coincidence? The bullet trains are a great example of the lack of IP enforcement leading to rapid development, with Siemens technology finding its way into Chinese designed and manufactured trains.
I see this as a way to siphon off funds to be redirected to more social programs
TFA: "Mr. Obama’s request, which will be announced on Monday, would add $6 billion over five years to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s budget."
How is increasing NASA's budget and enabling it to buy space launches from private companies "siphoning off funds to be redirected to more social programs"? Your political bias is leading to illogical reasoning.
Absorbing all of that is what killed your economy.
The German economy is far from dead. Germany is the world's second largest exporter (or possibly third) and was one of the first nations to exit the global recession way back in q2 2009. Germany has 7.7% unemployment. United states has 10% unemployment.
Measurement of pH of standard distilled water shows variances of + or - 0.1 all of the time.
Perfectly distilled H20 does have a pH of 7.0. Actual measured values will vary due both to the resolution of measuring instruments, and contamination of the sample - principally absorption of CO2. With expensive equipment and a pure sample (e.g. from nuclear grade resin purification) the sample variance should be lower than ±0.1
http://gsa.confex.com/gsa/inqu/finalprogram/abstract_54486.htm
You realise that this isn't a peer-reviewed paper, right? It's just a poster presentation at a conference. Calls for posters go out to everyone, even PhD students who have barely started their research, it's just a presentation of what you're doing, and is not supposed to be taken as finished, published, reviewed research.
Here's something to consider:
Morner used "coring, levelling, sampling and carbon dating". Conspicuously absent from this list is any direct measure of sea level from tide gauges or satellites." Sea level rise at tropical Pacific and Indian Ocean islands by Church, White and Hunter published in 2006 in the journal Global and Planetary Change looked at data from tide gauges and satellites and found: ..."
"In the Indian Ocean, the tide-gauge records at the Maldives indicate large rates of relative sea-level rise in agreement with Singh et al. (2001) and Woodworth (2005), and in disagreement with Morner et al. (2004).
The groups of people in #1 above attack the economist in #2 because he isn't promoting the "right" solutions.
Wrong. Scientists are skeptical about the proposed solution because it involves radical geo-engineering on a global scale in a way that has never before been attempted. If it was a guaranteed-to-work solution, that would be great. But how many engineering projects on the scale envisaged work perfectly first time? And remember that if we screw it up, we might not be able to fix it. I can entirely understand why an economist would love a relatively cheap engineering solution, but the reality from the perspective of an engineer is that it would be very, very tricky to pull off correctly first time. Imagine putting a man on the moon without first doing the Low Earth Orbit, or the animal testing and launches. It's that kind of difficult.
Calling it a myth when its entirely correct shows how out of touch Nature is with actual science.
Yeah, all of the scientists and journals are wrong..
The pH of the oceans is in constant flux and cannot be absolutely constant.
The problem is not that the meters can masure to this accuracy its the fact that sea water's pH varies by at least 0.1 pH on very short timescales.
There are many possible sources of experimental variance. That is why scientists use statistics to quantify variance. It is entirely possible to carry out T-tests on the sample data to discriminate between pH changes.
So you can't crack a book on science and you have no clue how climate parameters are measured and collated.
I recommend you read some basic books on experimentation and statistics e.g. Statistics for Experimenters. It is clear that you don't understand how experimental data is gathered, and you don't understand how statistics can be used to quantify and validate deviations between mean values.
the CO2 levels that are most quoted as being the targeted level is from the 1800s or so.
But that isn't even true. The IPCC stable target (2007 report) is 450ppm CO2 - a level that is above the current 387ppm, and well above the 284ppm of 1832.
there is no link between rising CO2 and temperature rise except in the reverse sense: temperature rises and then 800-1000 years later, CO2 rises in delayed response.
Fail. New Scientist Climate Myths: Ice cores show CO2 increases lag behind temperature rises, disproving the link to global warming
The oceans are not acidifying.
Fail. Between 1751 and 1994 surface ocean pH is estimated to have decreased from approximately 8.179 to 8.104 (a change of 0.075).
The reported change in the average pH of 0.1 is below the measurement error of even well calibrated instruments.
Fail. The very best (very expensive!) meters have an accuracy of ±0.002 pH units. (and besides, multiple replicates and statistical analysis is used to increase accuracy and reduce individual variance - or did you seriously think that scientists only sample a single point in the sea with a single meter to determine temperature change?!)
The Maldives had a sea level fall in the 1970s followed by stasis since. Tuvalu's sea levels have remained stable during that time.
The CIA disagree with you: "Maldives: Environment - current issues: depletion of freshwater aquifers threatens water supplies; global warming and sea level rise; coral reef bleaching" How sea level rise has affected the Maldives Tuvalu is concerned about global increases in greenhouse gas emissions and their effect on rising sea levels, which threaten the country's underground water table
But after the climate gate emails came out I started looking at stuff a little closer. The disturbing thing is not the hockey stick graph itself, but the fact that they're STILL defending it.
How many times will the "Hockey stick was wrong" meme get modded up? New Scientist have an interesting analysis of the hockey stick: Climate myths: The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong, quotes:
The conclusion that we are making the world warmer certainly does not depend on reconstructions of temperature prior to direct records.
And:
Most researchers would agree that while the original hockey stick can - and has - been improved in a number of ways, it was not far off the mark. Most later temperature reconstructions fall within the error bars of the original hockey stick. Some show far more variability leading up to the 20th century than the hockey stick, but none suggest that it has been warmer at any time in the past 1000 years than in the last part of the 20th century.
The "Hockey Stick" was investigated by the 2006 report of the US National Academy of Science, which found:
The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world.
"The disturbing thing is not the hockey stick graph itself, but the fact that they're STILL defending it.
Are you accusing the US National Academy of Science of being part of a conspiracy? Or of being incompetent? Because the report they wrote, at the request the U.S. Congress, endorses the hockey stick.
See, this is what I've noticed about /. in the last 5 years or so - seems to be inhabited by
people who can't subscribe to any anti-anthropogenic cuased global warming argument. So, anything
which is said against the AGW argument gets modded down.
What I've noticed is the opposite - that as soon as a /. discussion appears on climate change, all kinds of "climate skeptic" posters appear with accounts that haven't been used in a long time, or with accounts that have posted solely on climate change discussions, and the same tired old arguments that get modded up again and again. How many times has the "Mars and Pluto are warming" meme been modded up on /.? How many times has "they can't predict the weather next week, how can they predict it in 100 years!" been modded up? "It's the Sun", "It's Milankovitch cycles", "Alarmist! Leftist! Warmist!" .... and so it goes.
(Having written the above, it occurred to me to check the account NeoTron; I was unsurprised to find a new Slashdot account, posting solely on climate change issues. This is becoming a familiar pattern.)
the weather man can't predict the weather for the comming week. but for some reason you think they can predict the weather 100 years into the future accurately?
You confuse weather prediction and climate prediction, which are two completely different things.
Weather prediction: tomorrow will be windy, with light showers, 23 degrees.
Climate: in 100 years the global mean temperature of the world will increase by x degrees with variation y degrees and probability p.
Or to give another example - make a cup of coffee. The water was boiling and will cool over the next ten minutes. At any given point in time, it is extremely difficult to predict the exact position and temperature of individual molecules within the cup, but you can be pretty certain that after 10 minutes the temperature will have cooled to a given point, within some range of experimental variance.
they... want us to live in the fucking stone age
Why do climate skeptics constantly deride scientists who accept AGW as wanting everyone to live in caves? Has anyone ever met a single scientist who wants to roll the clock back several thousand years, to a time without science, without progress, and where religion and obedience to an invisible god was all that the vast majority of humanity cared about?!
I don't even understand where this concept could come from - all of the conveniences and benefits of modern life were brought about by the enlightenment - the embracing of science and a rational understanding of the world. How could scientists possibly benefit from rolling the clock back? I can see how the religious would benefit, but scientists? It makes no sense.
was known by him to be false when it was made
Not true. Not even the Daily Mail cherry picked quote says that the claim was known to be false. The actual quote was:
"We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was 'grey literature' [material not published in a peer-reviewed journal]. But it was never picked up by any of the authors in our working group, nor by any of the more than 500 external reviewers, by the governments to which it was sent, or by the final IPCC review editors."
So, they knew that one source hadn't been peer-reviewed, but quoted from it, and were relying on internal and external reviewers to find any problems with that source. This is a completely different thing to knowingly making up and publishing fraudulent data.
There is a logical contradiction in your reasoning:
This seems to validate all the "deniers" claims that global warming is just a fraudulent industry designed to keep funding going for the scientists involved by scaring people.
So global warming is a fraud - there is no global warming, and hence no problem?
That's why they get so angry at anyone who comes up with an alternate solution to the problem [nytimes.com].
But now global warming is real and is a problem?
(For the record, Levitt is not a "denier" - he writes "Like those who are criticizing us, we believe that rising global temperatures are a man-made phenomenon and that global warming is an important issue to solve. ")
No you can't. You missed the fact that this PC is being sold in Europe. The UK equivalent of Walmart is ASDA (which is owned by Walmart). The only desktop PC they sell at the moment is this thing, which costs £400 - the equivalent of €460. So the "slashvertised" PC being discussed is about 100 Euros cheaper than the best you could buy at the UK's "Walmart". It's probably a similar story in the rest of Europe.
Just like all the idiots who, when asked by the airport staff if there's anything dangerous in their bags, think it'd be funny to say "yes, a bomb!" ha bloody ha.
The IRA gave coded telephone warnings a few minutes in advance.
This was NOT to allow civilians time to escape, or reduce the number of civilian casualties.
No, since the IRA did bomb and kill civilians and were pretty unrepentant about it. Coded warnings can amplify the effect of an attack - or even make an actual attack unnecessary. Why bother with a real bomb when a simple telephone message can shut down 40 train stations and cause an estimated £34 million damage? For every real bomb you can call in many times that number of coded threats, causing huge economic losses.
In general, women aren't any fun sexually
What? What!?!
Man, are you doing something wrong...
There's a bit in the Real Dolls documentary where they're talking to one of the creators of Real Dolls and ask about the weird requests that they have turned down. Young people is the obvious one. They also had a dog breeder who wanted a Real Dog because he was "tired of hurting his dogs". And how about the guy who sent in photos of his pensioner mother asking if they could make a Real Doll of her?
But when it comes to real controversy, as usual the Japanese already got there first.
It's time we recognized that the interesting things about "life" are all just products of the fact that all kinds of systems can convey self-replicating entities of some sort, and they tend to be interesting and undergo evolutionary processes and etc. Whether they are non-biological DNA bundles, cellular organisms, oddly folded proteins, crystalized clay, etc.
It goes further than that - almost everything that is built is a product of evolution. Bicycles, planes, cars, the computer, have all been subject to the process of evolution. The fact that they can't self-replicate does not mean that the evolutionary process isn't present. No life can replicate without the necessary supporting environmental conditions, and if one of those prerequisite environmental conditions happens to be the presence of humans and amounts of refined steel and other materials, how is this any different to a bacteria requiring sugars and oxygen?
Good find. The correct link is: Science Letters - Time for DNA Disclosure