> Oil strategy [...] consisted only of the pie in the sky neo-con theory that the US could dominate the mid-east and central asia militarily.
That's all I was claiming, on that score. Still, one could argue that the policy could at least be supported on energy policy grounds, as the principals knew very well what would happen if they *didn't* go on this smash-and-grab raid.
Agreed. I think an easy conscience will be one of luxuries that citizens of the world's superpowers will be forced to abandon in the end. Everyone else will either be murdered or left to starve. I don't think it will be necessary for goverments to come clean though. There is plenty of evidence that populations are more than willing to turn a blind eye as long as things seem to be going in their favour eg. Nazi Germany, post-911 "Red States" (just for starters).
You don't understand, it's nothing personal. In the first place, Europeans don't hate ordinary American people as such. But it's not ordinary American people who are running the show. Most ordinary American people don't even know or understand what their government are doing, including (especially) most the ones who think they *do* know. The only problem we have with (some) ordinary Americans is their slavish tendency to believe whatever line of bullshit they are fed by the political and corporate establishment on Fox and CNN and disbelieve everybody else.
Secondly, global politics isn't about good and bad, it's about the exercise of military and economic power and control of information, to pursue the interests of the groups you represent.
To cut straight to the chase: I promise you that Washington's invasion of Iraq had nothing at all to do with liberating anyone and everything to do with gaining control of significant oil supplies in order to forestall an imminent and rapid worsening of the ongoing energy crisis.
To the extent that forestalling the effects of "peak oil" will keep everyone in the US comfortable for a couple of years longer than would have been the case without the Iraq invasion, you could say that the US govt's actions were beneficial for the US public. But because it is only a temporary fix, this is a policy that doesn't lead anywhere other than to further wars, both military and economic. It only buys time. But time for what?
If the US government were interested in the long term future of the US economy there would already be two crash programs in effect: one to reduce the nation's debt, and another to reduce dependence on oil, the latter starting with both a significant increase in tax on gas station pump prices right now (with much of the increase being spent on development of renewable energy sources - wind, wave, geothermal, solar, nuclear) and an aggressive program of public education aimed at decreasing domestic fuel consumption. These are the only actions that could make a positive difference.
I am talking about massive investment here, not the peanuts that is currently being spent or even considered. It is just not happening though. Instead the actions that *have* been taken, in toto, contribute to one goal only - to prevent the public at large, for as long as possible, from cottoning on to what will happen when either one of the following two scenarions hits:
(1) the growing disparity between global demand and global supply of oil pushes the price up (slowly at first, then over 5-10 years up to the $200-$400 a barrel range); (2) one or more of the world's larger economies decides to divest their national reserves of hundreds of billions of dollars, in favour of something more stable and less inflationary - massively devaluing the dollar overnight and precipitating a complete collapse of the US banking system within days.
Both of these scenarios are on our doorstep right now. The Iraq adventure was intended to address both. But it will not solve either problem for long.
While the US very probably intended an expanded military presence in the Middle East to make OPEC think twice about redenominating oil sales in Euros (coming as it did right after Saddam Hussein did the very same thing), it hasn't made much difference to Iran who intend to open their own petrochemicals trading exchange on March 26, just ten weeks away. They are expected to offer at least some contracts denominated in Euros, and possibly all. Russia has also been making noises about moving their own oil and gas sales onto the Euro. And China already unpegged their currency from the dollar last summer.
I raise the question of what the US government thought they were buying time for, with their current economic, energy and foreign policies. Now the longer they manage to prolong the current situation the worse it will get for the unknowing public at large when these crises do finally emerge. As far as the economy is concerned it will be like falling off a cliff ed
Don't kid yourself. If the US continues with its current geopolitical strategy of propping up its economy by knocking over whichever country looks like it has lunch money to steal, WWIII will be the US against everyone else. I think all the major players realize that now. There's no point siding with the US because in the long run the US is doomed. Unless you guys manage to wean yourselves off the oil real quick and stop printing worthless money - and I don't just see that happening.
The Galileo project went ahead against the US govt's wishes. It's a strategic necessity for Europe to have its own system because we know damn well we can't rely on the US being an ally forever. Not any more.
1. This is a summary not an original paper, if you want discussion of methodology and estimated accuracy & precision then go to the original sources and follow-up papers. It's in appropriate to pick holes in the methodology when you need to be reading something else entirely to get the facts on that.
2. This is a balanced scientific report. The paragraph you pointed out just shows honest scientists doing their job. They are not attempting to explain the mechanism, only reporting the basic data in a way that is easily digestible. That's why I picked this one to show you - it's as clear and "to the point" as you can get.
Under these circumstances it is very easy to cherry-pick the paragraph including the disclaimers and ignore the actual results themselves. Which is what you have done. You have pointed out every aspect of the paper except the actual result itself. There is a name for this - it is called "intellectual dishonesty". There is another name for it as well. It is called "wasting my time".
Guess what - this isn't some sort of college debate or a political game, this is the fate of your world. But you'd rather pick dishonest arguments built on simple fallacies, than spend one moment trying to discern the truth. Some people just don't want to be helped. No surprise I guess - in your other post you didnt even attempt to answer my point that your position is held only by people of your political stripe, i.e. the position you are taking is a political one not a scientific one. This is plainly ludicrous - you can't win a scientific argument by making a political one, and you can't learn the truth if you only listen to people who agree with you and label everybody else a "communist". Jesus - what fucking century do you think you are in?
In the end it comes down to the numbers, but the US right is an isolated and rapidly diminishing minority on the global warming issue. I'm through wasting time with you. You deserve to choke on your own shit - and you will - and it will be nobody's fault but your own. Good riddance.
Ice carries various substances suspended in frozen bubbles and in solution. Some of those substances can be used to date the ice fairly accurately. And some of those substances are greenhouse gases like CO2. Deep cores of polar ice have revealed the concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide at various points in the past.
Now Google for the following terms: polar ice cores CO2 OR "carbon dioxide".
If you cant be bothered here is a short summary of what you would learn if you did:
At the beginning of the industrial age about 150 years ago the concentration of atmospheric CO2 started rising faster than at any other time in the past 420,000 years and it has continued to rise at that rate ever since then. Not only that, it is now 130% higher than at any previous time in the past 420,000 years. You can also see how atmospheric CO2 fluctuations have always been positively correlated with temperature throughout that entire period except that during the industrial age the CO2 has risen so fast that the temperature hasn't caught up yet.
That's it.
If you are having trouble "seeing" the data in the graph, here is a hint. Ignore the five roughly saw-tooth peaks that occupy all those hundreds of millennia. They are just the interglacial periods. Instead look at the very extreme right hand edge of the graph where the red line goes absolutely VERTICAL hugging the edge of the graph representing a rate of increase faster than anywhere else on the graph. That line is where the data points for the past 150 years are. Also note that this is the only place where the red line reaches so high up the graph.
Note that this is graph shows an accumulation of data from similar experiments repeated over and over again by different teams of researchers with different ice cores, with broadly the same findings in each case.
So just looking at the graph alone you can see that CO2 levels have been increasing at an *unprecedented* rate ever since we started burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale, and they now greatly exceed any of the historical fluctuations provided by nature (or preindustrial man) before that. But read the text for a fairly balanced analysis.
Regarding global warming - I doubt anybody has the time or inclination to bring the 25 years of painstakingly collected evidence round to your house and spoonfeed it to you. Go see for yourself. By this point anybody who *still* doesn't get it is either just not actively looking in any scientifically reputable place and getting their information only from state-sanctioned or corporate-establishment-managed sources, or else they have seen the data and are just too conceptually disabled to draw the obvious conclusions. There comes a point when healthy skepticism ceases being skepticism and becomes obstinate stupidity. It's your responsibility and no-one else's.
It should surely tell you something, to realize that for virtually everybody else (including the scientific community) the debate moved on long ago (it's no longer about whether global warming is real, or whether the biggest contributor is the energy consumption of industrialized societies; it's now only about damage limitation). Looking at it empirically, virtually the only "skeptics" left are those of a right wing persuasion within your own country. This strongly implies that the nonbelief that you subscribe to can only survive as part of the particular constellation of memes that go under the label "US Conservative". Which in turn strongly implies that the only information you are taking in is from your peers in that group, ruling out any possibility of education or enlightenment. So I did know, when I wrote that very mildly ad-hominem diatribe, that I would convince you of nothing directly. I do know what a reasoned argument looks like and I can't do it for such a complex subject in thirty minutes especially when the only adversaries left are completely entrenched. But it was still worth a shot in that I might shame you into investigating the subject *properly* for yourself. If you still can that is, if you even have the intellectual equipment to help you tell the difference between a significant experimental observation on the one hand and a meaningless bit of establishment-sponsored smoke and mirrors on the other. I don't really know how hard this is for non-scientists. I suspect hard. For the sociopolitically indoctrinated, harder still and maybe downright impossible.
In any event, and this explains my bad mood this past couple of days, I am far less worried now about the knock-on effects of global warming than I am about "Peak Oil" wihch I am ashamed to say only just hit my radar very recently. For most people lucky enough to know what "comfort zone" means this will have a much more shocking and easily graspable impact than climate change. Not to mention permanent, and inescapable, and ever worsening, and already appearing on the horizon right now. There's little comfort to be had in the knowledge that it will force the people of the US (along with everyone else) to cut their consumption drastically in a way that Kyoto couldn't. In a sense, for those not immediately threatened global warming is yesterday's news - but the harsh winters and hurricanes and floods and droughts and disappearance of coastal areas that come with it will only make a post-Peak Oil world harder for the unlucky survivors to deal with.
Exactly, the energy isnt coming from the plant but from the chemical oxidation of one of the electrodes and the chemical reduction of the other, driven by the difference in electronegativity between the two metals and mediated by the net migration of charge carrying particles in solution. Not necessarily any net change of energy in the lemon, or tree, or glass of seawater.
Congratulations on being the first completely stupid idiot I have spotted so far this year. I'm obviously not spending as much time on slashdot as I used to.
Get this: there is a broad and deep consensus among the international scientific community that global warming is both real and largely responsible for the climate change we are now seeing (and which - thank God for irony - seems to have it in for the biggest atmospheric carbon emitting country in the world).
It is only the rich US elite and a few paid lackeys who have been publicly pretending otherwise even though they all know very well - Bush included - what the score really is. Their own scientists told them the truth even when they'd been instructed to provide a report more supportive of US Energy policy. The report had to have its conclusions edited out before publication. The elite intend to protect their own interests for as long as they can get away with it - and by the way in case you hadn't got it yet, their interests do not coincide with yours or mine.
With regard to the specific news under consideration: here is some kindergarten science for you. Trees are carbon accumulators. They take carbon out of the atmosphere and turn it into solid material that goes into the ground. So what if they seep microscopic quantities of methane? Trees are net carbon sinks. This is the trouble with you lot: to you, every factoid you hear has an equal weight - so all the Washington spinmeisters have to do is pay somebody in a white coat to count up the mouse farts and you'll then believe that mice are responsible for global warming, never mind the 7.5 billion barrels of oil the US consumed last year.
Stop getting your science from the Fox News and the National Enquirer and try finding some real climate scientists to talk to before you go spreading more misinformation.
It's a nail in the coffin all right, but the nail is theirs, and the coffin is yours.
Hey why not couple it with one of those touch-sensitive screens - then you can type on the screen while watching movies on the keyboard!!
Bah. What a load of self-indulgent shite. Two words, mate. Peak Oil.
Civilization is right now on the verge of falling apart permanently - and we are at the beginning of a century of global war for the very last of the planet's natural resources if the US gets its way - and here you are still drooling over the ultimate symbol of the very overconsumption that brought us to this point of no return. It's obscene.
Save your pennies and buy a good sleeping bag instead. You very soon won't be able to afford the 25 Watts or whatever your fancy keyboard needs to power itself up anyway. With or without an actual computer attached to it:o\
It's not right to say that AGP lasted a long time because, if you remember, there were backward-incompatible changes in the specification as the clock multiplier increased from 1x,2x up to 4x and then 8x, with the voltage decreasing from 5V to 3V to 1.5V. You can't run a recent AGP card in an older AGP slot, and this meant for a lot of people that upgrading their CPU not only meant upgrading their motherboard as well (and very likely the memory too) but also forced them to upgrade their video card at the same time. With the retail cost of aftermarket components being what it is, under these circumstances it can be cheaper just to replace the entire computer.
You know, I was thinking exactly the same thing - somebody whispered "make this go away" into the ear of some senior Washington official.
It's worth noting that the banks are pretty heavy blackberry users, where these devices are ubiquitous right down to the very lowest level of management. They would be inconvenienced by any extended Blackberry outage. So draw your own conclusions. You know what they say - "follow the money".
Thank you ML for those very eloquent words, I'm going to bookmark that post because I've often tried to express these very sentiments to my friends and associates but ultimately failed to convince, presumably due to my own ineptitude. I never imagined these ideas being put so succinctly. Merry Christmas.
Not intererested in management...then either you just won't care, or you will be on the technical career track for which very much the same strategy applies.
Two steps down from CTO...either you are talking about a very flat management structure, which you can completely ignore as the same strategy applies in terms of gaining the required visibility to qualify yourself for increases in salary grade and learning opportunities, or you are really already quite senior in which case you'd hardly be asking this.
Those are the two best questions I've seen on here tonight.
The answer to the first will reveal if there are any systematic problems with the role likely to get you feeling disgruntled enough to go looking for another job.
The second does two things - it marks you out as a guy/girl who wants to align him/herself with the big picture (something that relatively few technical people care to do), and the answer to it will tell you to what degree your efforts in the role are likely to be seen as significant for the company's fortunes. That's important if you have any ambition to move up the management ladder because unless you manage to associate yourself with successful high profile projects you will be effectively invisible to those who control access to training and promotion.
The "astronaut candidates" were briefed on this by the programme's chief special effects guy posing as an astrophysicist and spacecraft engineer. By this point everyone had already established that these hapless inmates were lacking a clue or two, and the lecturer had no trouble in running the whole antigrav thing by them with a mixture of mumbling and hand-waving and hiding behind a rather unkempt beard.
There was in that performance a remarkable resemblance to one or two of my biochemistry professors at university back in the day so it was entirely convincing.
Maybe you should switch to viewing in "nested" mode - then you'll see that I wasn't replying to you, I was replying to the anti-UN dada21. What an itchy trigger finger you have.
Slashdot Mirror
> Oil strategy [...] consisted only of the pie in the sky neo-con theory that the US could dominate the mid-east and central asia militarily.
That's all I was claiming, on that score. Still, one could argue that the policy could at least be supported on energy policy grounds, as the principals knew very well what would happen if they *didn't* go on this smash-and-grab raid.
Agreed. I think an easy conscience will be one of luxuries that citizens of the world's superpowers will be forced to abandon in the end. Everyone else will either be murdered or left to starve. I don't think it will be necessary for goverments to come clean though. There is plenty of evidence that populations are more than willing to turn a blind eye as long as things seem to be going in their favour eg. Nazi Germany, post-911 "Red States" (just for starters).
You don't understand, it's nothing personal. In the first place, Europeans don't hate ordinary American people as such. But it's not ordinary American people who are running the show. Most ordinary American people don't even know or understand what their government are doing, including (especially) most the ones who think they *do* know. The only problem we have with (some) ordinary Americans is their slavish tendency to believe whatever line of bullshit they are fed by the political and corporate establishment on Fox and CNN and disbelieve everybody else.
Secondly, global politics isn't about good and bad, it's about the exercise of military and economic power and control of information, to pursue the interests of the groups you represent.
To cut straight to the chase: I promise you that Washington's invasion of Iraq had nothing at all to do with liberating anyone and everything to do with gaining control of significant oil supplies in order to forestall an imminent and rapid worsening of the ongoing energy crisis.
To the extent that forestalling the effects of "peak oil" will keep everyone in the US comfortable for a couple of years longer than would have been the case without the Iraq invasion, you could say that the US govt's actions were beneficial for the US public. But because it is only a temporary fix, this is a policy that doesn't lead anywhere other than to further wars, both military and economic. It only buys time. But time for what?
If the US government were interested in the long term future of the US economy there would already be two crash programs in effect: one to reduce the nation's debt, and another to reduce dependence on oil, the latter starting with both a significant increase in tax on gas station pump prices right now (with much of the increase being spent on development of renewable energy sources - wind, wave, geothermal, solar, nuclear) and an aggressive program of public education aimed at decreasing domestic fuel consumption. These are the only actions that could make a positive difference.
I am talking about massive investment here, not the peanuts that is currently being spent or even considered. It is just not happening though. Instead the actions that *have* been taken, in toto, contribute to one goal only - to prevent the public at large, for as long as possible, from cottoning on to what will happen when either one of the following two scenarions hits:
(1) the growing disparity between global demand and global supply of oil pushes the price up (slowly at first, then over 5-10 years up to the $200-$400 a barrel range);
(2) one or more of the world's larger economies decides to divest their national reserves of hundreds of billions of dollars, in favour of something more stable and less inflationary - massively devaluing the dollar overnight and precipitating a complete collapse of the US banking system within days.
Both of these scenarios are on our doorstep right now. The Iraq adventure was intended to address both. But it will not solve either problem for long.
While the US very probably intended an expanded military presence in the Middle East to make OPEC think twice about redenominating oil sales in Euros (coming as it did right after Saddam Hussein did the very same thing), it hasn't made much difference to Iran who intend to open their own petrochemicals trading exchange on March 26, just ten weeks away. They are expected to offer at least some contracts denominated in Euros, and possibly all. Russia has also been making noises about moving their own oil and gas sales onto the Euro. And China already unpegged their currency from the dollar last summer.
I raise the question of what the US government thought they were buying time for, with their current economic, energy and foreign policies. Now the longer they manage to prolong the current situation the worse it will get for the unknowing public at large when these crises do finally emerge. As far as the economy is concerned it will be like falling off a cliff ed
Peak Oil. It's now.
Don't kid yourself. If the US continues with its current geopolitical strategy of propping up its economy by knocking over whichever country looks like it has lunch money to steal, WWIII will be the US against everyone else. I think all the major players realize that now. There's no point siding with the US because in the long run the US is doomed. Unless you guys manage to wean yourselves off the oil real quick and stop printing worthless money - and I don't just see that happening.
The Galileo project went ahead against the US govt's wishes. It's a strategic necessity for Europe to have its own system because we know damn well we can't rely on the US being an ally forever. Not any more.
1. This is a summary not an original paper, if you want discussion of methodology and estimated accuracy & precision then go to the original sources and follow-up papers. It's in appropriate to pick holes in the methodology when you need to be reading something else entirely to get the facts on that.
2. This is a balanced scientific report. The paragraph you pointed out just shows honest scientists doing their job. They are not attempting to explain the mechanism, only reporting the basic data in a way that is easily digestible. That's why I picked this one to show you - it's as clear and "to the point" as you can get.
Under these circumstances it is very easy to cherry-pick the paragraph including the disclaimers and ignore the actual results themselves. Which is what you have done. You have pointed out every aspect of the paper except the actual result itself. There is a name for this - it is called "intellectual dishonesty". There is another name for it as well. It is called "wasting my time".
Guess what - this isn't some sort of college debate or a political game, this is the fate of your world. But you'd rather pick dishonest arguments built on simple fallacies, than spend one moment trying to discern the truth. Some people just don't want to be helped. No surprise I guess - in your other post you didnt even attempt to answer my point that your position is held only by people of your political stripe, i.e. the position you are taking is a political one not a scientific one. This is plainly ludicrous - you can't win a scientific argument by making a political one, and you can't learn the truth if you only listen to people who agree with you and label everybody else a "communist". Jesus - what fucking century do you think you are in?
In the end it comes down to the numbers, but the US right is an isolated and rapidly diminishing minority on the global warming issue. I'm through wasting time with you. You deserve to choke on your own shit - and you will - and it will be nobody's fault but your own. Good riddance.
Tell you what, I will give you this one thing:
a nning/New_Data/
Ice carries various substances suspended in frozen bubbles and in solution. Some of those substances can be used to date the ice fairly accurately. And some of those substances are greenhouse gases like CO2. Deep cores of polar ice have revealed the concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide at various points in the past.
Now Google for the following terms: polar ice cores CO2 OR "carbon dioxide".
The top link:
http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_Pl
If you cant be bothered here is a short summary of what you would learn if you did:
At the beginning of the industrial age about 150 years ago the concentration of atmospheric CO2 started rising faster than at any other time in the past 420,000 years and it has continued to rise at that rate ever since then. Not only that, it is now 130% higher than at any previous time in the past 420,000 years. You can also see how atmospheric CO2 fluctuations have always been positively correlated with temperature throughout that entire period except that during the industrial age the CO2 has risen so fast that the temperature hasn't caught up yet.
That's it.
If you are having trouble "seeing" the data in the graph, here is a hint. Ignore the five roughly saw-tooth peaks that occupy all those hundreds of millennia. They are just the interglacial periods. Instead look at the very extreme right hand edge of the graph where the red line goes absolutely VERTICAL hugging the edge of the graph representing a rate of increase faster than anywhere else on the graph. That line is where the data points for the past 150 years are. Also note that this is the only place where the red line reaches so high up the graph.
Note that this is graph shows an accumulation of data from similar experiments repeated over and over again by different teams of researchers with different ice cores, with broadly the same findings in each case.
So just looking at the graph alone you can see that CO2 levels have been increasing at an *unprecedented* rate ever since we started burning fossil fuels on an industrial scale, and they now greatly exceed any of the historical fluctuations provided by nature (or preindustrial man) before that. But read the text for a fairly balanced analysis.
Draw your own conclusions.
Regarding global warming - I doubt anybody has the time or inclination to bring the 25 years of painstakingly collected evidence round to your house and spoonfeed it to you. Go see for yourself. By this point anybody who *still* doesn't get it is either just not actively looking in any scientifically reputable place and getting their information only from state-sanctioned or corporate-establishment-managed sources, or else they have seen the data and are just too conceptually disabled to draw the obvious conclusions. There comes a point when healthy skepticism ceases being skepticism and becomes obstinate stupidity. It's your responsibility and no-one else's.
It should surely tell you something, to realize that for virtually everybody else (including the scientific community) the debate moved on long ago (it's no longer about whether global warming is real, or whether the biggest contributor is the energy consumption of industrialized societies; it's now only about damage limitation). Looking at it empirically, virtually the only "skeptics" left are those of a right wing persuasion within your own country. This strongly implies that the nonbelief that you subscribe to can only survive as part of the particular constellation of memes that go under the label "US Conservative". Which in turn strongly implies that the only information you are taking in is from your peers in that group, ruling out any possibility of education or enlightenment. So I did know, when I wrote that very mildly ad-hominem diatribe, that I would convince you of nothing directly. I do know what a reasoned argument looks like and I can't do it for such a complex subject in thirty minutes especially when the only adversaries left are completely entrenched. But it was still worth a shot in that I might shame you into investigating the subject *properly* for yourself. If you still can that is, if you even have the intellectual equipment to help you tell the difference between a significant experimental observation on the one hand and a meaningless bit of establishment-sponsored smoke and mirrors on the other. I don't really know how hard this is for non-scientists. I suspect hard. For the sociopolitically indoctrinated, harder still and maybe downright impossible.
In any event, and this explains my bad mood this past couple of days, I am far less worried now about the knock-on effects of global warming than I am about "Peak Oil" wihch I am ashamed to say only just hit my radar very recently. For most people lucky enough to know what "comfort zone" means this will have a much more shocking and easily graspable impact than climate change. Not to mention permanent, and inescapable, and ever worsening, and already appearing on the horizon right now. There's little comfort to be had in the knowledge that it will force the people of the US (along with everyone else) to cut their consumption drastically in a way that Kyoto couldn't. In a sense, for those not immediately threatened global warming is yesterday's news - but the harsh winters and hurricanes and floods and droughts and disappearance of coastal areas that come with it will only make a post-Peak Oil world harder for the unlucky survivors to deal with.
Exactly, the energy isnt coming from the plant but from the chemical oxidation of one of the electrodes and the chemical reduction of the other, driven by the difference in electronegativity between the two metals and mediated by the net migration of charge carrying particles in solution. Not necessarily any net change of energy in the lemon, or tree, or glass of seawater.
Congratulations on being the first completely stupid idiot I have spotted so far this year. I'm obviously not spending as much time on slashdot as I used to.
Get this: there is a broad and deep consensus among the international scientific community that global warming is both real and largely responsible for the climate change we are now seeing (and which - thank God for irony - seems to have it in for the biggest atmospheric carbon emitting country in the world).
It is only the rich US elite and a few paid lackeys who have been publicly pretending otherwise even though they all know very well - Bush included - what the score really is. Their own scientists told them the truth even when they'd been instructed to provide a report more supportive of US Energy policy. The report had to have its conclusions edited out before publication. The elite intend to protect their own interests for as long as they can get away with it - and by the way in case you hadn't got it yet, their interests do not coincide with yours or mine.
With regard to the specific news under consideration: here is some kindergarten science for you. Trees are carbon accumulators. They take carbon out of the atmosphere and turn it into solid material that goes into the ground. So what if they seep microscopic quantities of methane? Trees are net carbon sinks. This is the trouble with you lot: to you, every factoid you hear has an equal weight - so all the Washington spinmeisters have to do is pay somebody in a white coat to count up the mouse farts and you'll then believe that mice are responsible for global warming, never mind the 7.5 billion barrels of oil the US consumed last year.
Stop getting your science from the Fox News and the National Enquirer and try finding some real climate scientists to talk to before you go spreading more misinformation.
It's a nail in the coffin all right, but the nail is theirs, and the coffin is yours.
Bah. What a load of self-indulgent shite. Two words, mate. Peak Oil.
Civilization is right now on the verge of falling apart permanently - and we are at the beginning of a century of global war for the very last of the planet's natural resources if the US gets its way - and here you are still drooling over the ultimate symbol of the very overconsumption that brought us to this point of no return. It's obscene.
Save your pennies and buy a good sleeping bag instead. You very soon won't be able to afford the 25 Watts or whatever your fancy keyboard needs to power itself up anyway. With or without an actual computer attached to it :o\
What about Linux and the GNU command line tools? Sine qua non. Maybe these were considered too obvious but I dont see why that should disqualify them.
LOL! If I could buy you a pint for that I would!
> 'Effect' is used as a noun. 'Affect' is used as a verb.
Mostly. But not always:
effect (v) to accomplish or produce
affect (n) the conscious subjective aspect of feeling or emotion
It's not right to say that AGP lasted a long time because, if you remember, there were backward-incompatible changes in the specification as the clock multiplier increased from 1x,2x up to 4x and then 8x, with the voltage decreasing from 5V to 3V to 1.5V. You can't run a recent AGP card in an older AGP slot, and this meant for a lot of people that upgrading their CPU not only meant upgrading their motherboard as well (and very likely the memory too) but also forced them to upgrade their video card at the same time. With the retail cost of aftermarket components being what it is, under these circumstances it can be cheaper just to replace the entire computer.
You know, I was thinking exactly the same thing - somebody whispered "make this go away" into the ear of some senior Washington official.
It's worth noting that the banks are pretty heavy blackberry users, where these devices are ubiquitous right down to the very lowest level of management. They would be inconvenienced by any extended Blackberry outage. So draw your own conclusions. You know what they say - "follow the money".
Thank you ML for those very eloquent words, I'm going to bookmark that post because I've often tried to express these very sentiments to my friends and associates but ultimately failed to convince, presumably due to my own ineptitude. I never imagined these ideas being put so succinctly. Merry Christmas.
Not intererested in management...then either you just won't care, or you will be on the technical career track for which very much the same strategy applies.
Two steps down from CTO...either you are talking about a very flat management structure, which you can completely ignore as the same strategy applies in terms of gaining the required visibility to qualify yourself for increases in salary grade and learning opportunities, or you are really already quite senior in which case you'd hardly be asking this.
Those are the two best questions I've seen on here tonight.
The answer to the first will reveal if there are any systematic problems with the role likely to get you feeling disgruntled enough to go looking for another job.
The second does two things - it marks you out as a guy/girl who wants to align him/herself with the big picture (something that relatively few technical people care to do), and the answer to it will tell you to what degree your efforts in the role are likely to be seen as significant for the company's fortunes. That's important if you have any ambition to move up the management ladder because unless you manage to associate yourself with successful high profile projects you will be effectively invisible to those who control access to training and promotion.
The "astronaut candidates" were briefed on this by the programme's chief special effects guy posing as an astrophysicist and spacecraft engineer. By this point everyone had already established that these hapless inmates were lacking a clue or two, and the lecturer had no trouble in running the whole antigrav thing by them with a mixture of mumbling and hand-waving and hiding behind a rather unkempt beard.
There was in that performance a remarkable resemblance to one or two of my biochemistry professors at university back in the day so it was entirely convincing.
Then if he has a work colleague called Basil, or even Barry, he can invite him by saying "Are you coming to the Foo Bar, Baz?"
Maybe you should switch to viewing in "nested" mode - then you'll see that I wasn't replying to you, I was replying to the anti-UN dada21. What an itchy trigger finger you have.
I see...so, if some Republicans are corrupt, then we can assume Republicans and Republicanism itself are all evil? Is that what you're saying?
You mean like this?
Piffle! Just use a smaller value of Planck's constant! Easy. :o)