"Experts" have been incorrectly predicting that vast swaths of humanity would startve to death at least since Malthus. How can claims like this still be taken seriously?
Large swathes of humanity HAVE starved to death since Malthus. if you look at this list of famines, and count the deaths since Malthus, the estimates are 33-75 million people. And that is only the ones we know about; more than two thirds of those famines have no body counts listed. The number could be several hundreds of millions. And that's not counting people who starved to death in conditions that were not officially labelled as famines. I find it very easy to take such claims seriously, especially when the global population continues to grow larger. The world is not getting bigger, but our need for food is. And with such a shocking history of miserable death, how much brighter can the future be unless things change?
What part of "A paper published in Science finds summer Arctic Sea Ice extent during the Holocene Thermal Maximum 8,000 years ago was "less than half of the record low 2007 level." don't you understand?
I'm not taking a stance on the validity of the sentence, but it does pretty much address your concerns.
Actually if you read the comment he was replying too, the bit you quoted was referencing a different paper. He was asking about the first bit, which apparently was from a paper published in Nature Geoscience. And he is free to have concerns about the comment he was posting on; apparently you were unable to comprehend it properly when you read it either.
The Hindu and the mesapotamian flood legends are older than the Old Testament. They must all have a common ancestor.
Why? It seems perfectly plausible to me that different flood legends might trace back to different actual floods.
Indeed, and there are many known examples of floodings. There are known sites of cities around Europe, and indeed other parts of the world, that have become flooded by the sea for various reasons at different times, like rising global seas levels, delta marshland where people built slowly sinking, isostatic rebound, earthquakes, etc. The dodder bank was once an island in the North Sea that just eventually washed away thousands of years ago, because it was basically a big pile of mud and gravel, likely a massive glacial alluvial deposit. Stories of sudden flooding around the world (and they are not all from the levant or semitic sources) can be treated as plausible, because we know that it is likely there were sudden releases of massive amounts of water into the ocean, for example the English Channel is thought to have been gouged out by rushing waters from a massive glacial meltwater lake covering much of the North Sea. Multiple disparate events can plausibly have given rise to flood myths around the world, especially given that as a species we tend to have our population centres concentrated along coastlines.
But that is exaclty what happens all the time. Look at the Celtic language family. Celtic existed across Germany, France and Spain before arriving in the western isles of Europe. It must have done; all theories, both this one and competing ones, say the language family originated in easter Europe, and we know celtic culture existed in Germany, France and Spain. Therefore, the origin of the language family is somewhere other than where the languages are now (sometimes) spoken.
You missed the point that the language was pushed out it's own back yard. English is still spoken in England and Spanish is still spoken in Spain. I don't know enough about Italy to know if Latin was "pushed out" or just evolved into Italian.
The study is dealing with an 8000 year time frame. People in England 2000 years ago didn't even speak a Germanic language, never mind about modern English.
Translation: I have found a meme that I can continually repeat to rationalize away any disturbing finding. Now come on kiddies, let's BURN MORE OIL!!!!
Nice strawman you built there. I never said anything about burning oil or touched on energy at all in my post.
I'm all for alternative energy sources where they make economic and practical sense.
Economic to the general populace or economic to those who benefit from not paying the for the full cost of their actions?
One data point on a scale covering millenia doesn't prove anything. It only tells us that, *right now*, there seems to be less arctic ice than there has been over the last decade or four.
We know that global climate has changed radically over the ages, from much warmer than now to much colder than now.
We simply don't have data spanning enough time to know whether this is natural or not.
At the timescales you are talking about, having enough data on the past is irrelevant. We would need instead to have data on a sample of similar planets with similar chemical compositions, in similar orbits around stars of similar age size and luminosity, with a similar distribution of landmasses and a similar ecosystem. Bit of a tall order. Just because something happenned in the past doesn't mean it will happen again, and the longer the timescale involved in any cycle, the more chance that things will be different the next time around due to different starting or external conditions to the cycle. We won't have a repeat of pre-carboniferous conditions. Even if we dug up all the coal and oil in the world that we can find and released them back into the atmosphere, tectonic processes will have slightly changed the chemical balance at the surface. The earths orbit will be slightly different, it's rotational speed will be different, the moon will be further away than back then. The amount of light hitting us from the sun will be different. If you want to talk about massive timescales, what nature decides to do to us should be given a judicious shove in the direction we want things to happen, because nature doesn't care about us.
Why don't you be honest and abandon all pretense that you're basing your opinions on science and the scientific method.
Whenever someone mentions unusually cold temperatures in a single winter or even a decade or two, well, that's just weather. Why isn't the reverse true?
What you advocate isn't science, it's evangelism.
Strat
Why don't you be honest and just admit that you are trying to say science doesn't know, so we should do nothing? I like your little "evangelism" dig. Suggesting that climate theory is a religion.... haven't heard that one before.
Translation: I don't like BlueStrat's perfectly calm, rational point, so I'm going to argue against it with emotion, wave my hands around, and come up with some meaningless term that sneers at his point without SOUNDING too sneery. oh, I know -- "meme." Yeah, that'll work.
So, I have a question for you. Do you consider yourself scientifically minded and skeptical? Do you think it's the OTHER guys who post on emotion, looking for anything that confirms their pre-existing notions? Because -- surprise! -- that's exactly what you just did. Kind of humbling, isn't it? BlueStrat made a perfectly scientific point -- this observation, in and of itself, doesn't mean much, because our data set is so small. We've only been making these observations since (I think) 1978 -- an eyeblink in geologic time.
There is nothing rational about saying we just do nothing about a bad situation because we haven't observed in the past how those situations play out. BlueStrat's post basically boils down to "this is probably just nature at work, and we haven't directly observed nature scientifically for a long enough period to know if this is a temporary condition".
We haven't directly observed arctic sea ice cover for very long, but the trends in our observations tie in very closely with other related more long term direct observations, and for much further back in time through indirect methods. The data is not meaningless, and accusing someone of being "emotional" when they post a sarcastic comment rather than regurgitate the thousands of rebuttals that have been made in the past is just you trying to sound reasonable about your cunning plan to do absolutely nothing.
Corporations being "persons" is a 500 - 600 year old doctrine of law. Back to the Maritime and before to about the time North America was even discovered. Investors stopped financing trade voyages because they would be 100% liable if the ship went down. They many times lost their homes, money and land to pay the families of those lost on the ship. The Corporation simply created a legal "person" to take on that liability and limit the investors losses to the amount they invest.
It was nothing new created by the Supreme Court. Corporations are made of people. Yes they can be killed (aka Dissolved) and individuals within it can be personally liable for their actions.
You are talking about limited liability companies. This was a way to encourage entrepeneurs, and limit any loss from their ventures to what they had invested. It did not in any way confer personhood on the company. And under modern laws, surely if a company is indeed considered a person, then should they not be freed from their slavery to shareholders?
Um... I missed the point where this firmly puts the carbon in the ground, and does not heat up the surrounding atmosphere enough to cause carbon release. Since this sounds to me like a giant bunch of heaters installed in a cold area, maybe you could show me what obvious detail I have overlooked?
Installing a bunch of heaters in a cold area assumes the intruduction of an external power supply to fuel those heaters. This plan does not include introduction of external energy to the local system.
AC is probably correct. Hydrogen fusion will produce stuff. Most of that should be helium. Some other elements will likely end up up in the mix too, in much smaller quantities.
Explain where all the CO2 we produce went. We KNOW how much we produce from burning fossil fuels et al. 30 billion tons a year.
And the increase in atmospheric CO2 is about equivalent to about 17 billion tons of CO2 a year.
But if it were the trees dying off doing it
a) where is all the 30 billion tons of our production going to
Much of it is going into the oceans. There, it is leading to acidification of the water, which could have much more dire consequences for the global ecosystem than "global warming". All of the shelled creatures in the seas have calcite shells, which could be more difficult for them to grow/maintain in more acid waters. And since many of them are near the bottom of the food chain....
On a global scale, maybe, but many cities have become what is known as "heat islands."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island
That is not because of heat directly generated by human activity, but a change in the heat retention properties of a large area of land due to human engineered changes in the landscape.
Not quite. The CO2 maybe sweeped under the carpet, but if you would actually read the paper, page 21 shows that there may be a significant amount of excess heat produced by the process, which needs to be release to the environment. The CO2 is not the problem. The heat is?
So, in order to combat global warming, we install 400+ heaters on Antarctica? I'm sure the science behind it will work, but my initial response is: uuh... what?
They aren't really talking about introducing any additional energy into Antartica. They said the power supply would be local wind turbines. So the only real heat difference will be the heat taken out of the CO2 and released into the remaining atmosphere. That should create small, localised heat bubbles in the atmosphere, which would probably be fairly rapidly dissipated by winds. And even if it does have a noticeable effect during the summer, the Antarctic interior winter atmosphere has relatively little moisture for trapping heat radiated back towards space, and very little incoming sunlight. I imagine it would all start being radiated out to space easily enough come April every year.
I'd agree with both of the other replies. Less overtly political on the author's part than Banks, but does deal with political struggles in his books. Less high-tech than Banks, battles in space in Asher's work are fought with energy weapons but also projectiles and things that go boom. It doesn't have the same utopian setting, the Polity is not post-scarcity and is ruled by a mostly benign but still iron fisted AI overlord who will not think twice about sacrificing billions of lives if it is likely to aid its goals.
the overwhelming body of scientific literature shows that AGW does exist, and localised weather is not really a good indication of it (though some, especially those in the media, try to make it so).
Where do you propose to define the cut-off point between weather and climate though? One is the average of the other. You can lose a lot of detail when you average everything.Don't know about where you live, but where I am, the weather has been strange,. Two of the last three winters had countryside buried in snow and ice for weeks on end where we usually get occasional frosts. So far this year, we've had dry sunny weather in spring when it usually rains, and it has been pissing rain all summer so bad that my father (cattle farmer) gave up on the land ever drying out and started making silage last week, ripping the ground to shit with tractors while still having to give fodder to the cattle. In the middle of the summer. Maybe its just a few strange years in a row in my little local area. But the weather has been really fucking weird for a few years. And people all across the world are saying the same thing.
Not hard-science fiction, more like ultra violence in a futuristic space-faring setting with some attached storyline. I've only ever met one other person who'd ever even heard of him, but I love his stuff.
precisely because of the US government's fondness for spying on everything.
Yet again another ridiculous claim without a single reference to support it.
Please point to any credible source that documents the REASON the US "screams" protectionism about data storage.
Also please point to one documented incidence of the US "screaming" protectionism with regard to other country's data storage laws.
Coastal cities are the least of our problems. Sea walls are easy to construct. What is more difficult is ecology and agriculture management. Species going extinct at an accelerated rate will cause severe issues with pest control, as insects can migrate more easily and breed faster than larger lifeforms. Agricultural activities could be extremely adversely affected, as climate shifts may turn productive land into swamps/dustbowls. New areas of productive land may be opened up, yes, but they might take centuries to become fully productive due to soil growth rates. In the meantime, our agricultural infrastructure will need to be moved out of areas that are no longer feasible into the new areas. That is assuming that climate changes are from one stable state to another; intervening periods between equilibrium points will likely be incredibly chaotic and drawn out over several years. Will climate change be good or bad? The final outcome might be either. The intervening period will be horrible.
and yet countless gay people's lives *are*, in part because they're expected to just smile and deal with it
Thats not really a good excuse. If they said something about it and let people know how they felt, and then it continued, that would be grounds for a harrassment complaint. Everybody slags other people. The point of it is for humour's sake, not for being a deliberately viscious cunt. We all make jokes about things that will hurt other peoples feelings, because they are funny jokes and help us get through the day. Most of us try to make jokes we think will not hurt the feeling of those listening to us, or sometimes deliberately crafted at those in earshot in the knowledge that even being the butt of the joke, they will laugh as well. If someone hides some aspect of their personality and chooses to later sue based on jokes I made about that how am I supposed to respond? I can imagine things I would kick peoples teeth in for if they said them about my mother. I might say those very same things myself about my mother in a joking fashion.
People can demand respect all they want, but it is a two-way street. Everyone makes jokes about things, and everyone excludes from jokes those present they do not wish to insult. If you want not to be insulted by the things I say, don't insult me by lying to me about who you are. If you are not comfortable with being yourself in my presence, you should not be in my presence. Whether that means you have to go or I have to go can be decided by the gods of HR, but I for one am not going to live my life trying to second guess those listening to anything I say.
Maybe this is just because I'm Irish, and we're all whipped mammy's boys, but anyone here being sexist had best be prepared to defend themselves from the verbal (or possibly physical) lashing any real woman will bestow upon them.
Slashdot Mirror
"Experts" have been incorrectly predicting that vast swaths of humanity would startve to death at least since Malthus. How can claims like this still be taken seriously?
Large swathes of humanity HAVE starved to death since Malthus. if you look at this list of famines, and count the deaths since Malthus, the estimates are 33-75 million people. And that is only the ones we know about; more than two thirds of those famines have no body counts listed. The number could be several hundreds of millions. And that's not counting people who starved to death in conditions that were not officially labelled as famines. I find it very easy to take such claims seriously, especially when the global population continues to grow larger. The world is not getting bigger, but our need for food is. And with such a shocking history of miserable death, how much brighter can the future be unless things change?
What part of "A paper published in Science finds summer Arctic Sea Ice extent during the Holocene Thermal Maximum 8,000 years ago was "less than half of the record low 2007 level." don't you understand?
I'm not taking a stance on the validity of the sentence, but it does pretty much address your concerns.
Actually if you read the comment he was replying too, the bit you quoted was referencing a different paper. He was asking about the first bit, which apparently was from a paper published in Nature Geoscience. And he is free to have concerns about the comment he was posting on; apparently you were unable to comprehend it properly when you read it either.
Why? It seems perfectly plausible to me that different flood legends might trace back to different actual floods.
Indeed, and there are many known examples of floodings. There are known sites of cities around Europe, and indeed other parts of the world, that have become flooded by the sea for various reasons at different times, like rising global seas levels, delta marshland where people built slowly sinking, isostatic rebound, earthquakes, etc. The dodder bank was once an island in the North Sea that just eventually washed away thousands of years ago, because it was basically a big pile of mud and gravel, likely a massive glacial alluvial deposit. Stories of sudden flooding around the world (and they are not all from the levant or semitic sources) can be treated as plausible, because we know that it is likely there were sudden releases of massive amounts of water into the ocean, for example the English Channel is thought to have been gouged out by rushing waters from a massive glacial meltwater lake covering much of the North Sea. Multiple disparate events can plausibly have given rise to flood myths around the world, especially given that as a species we tend to have our population centres concentrated along coastlines.
But that is exaclty what happens all the time. Look at the Celtic language family. Celtic existed across Germany, France and Spain before arriving in the western isles of Europe. It must have done; all theories, both this one and competing ones, say the language family originated in easter Europe, and we know celtic culture existed in Germany, France and Spain. Therefore, the origin of the language family is somewhere other than where the languages are now (sometimes) spoken.
You missed the point that the language was pushed out it's own back yard. English is still spoken in England and Spanish is still spoken in Spain. I don't know enough about Italy to know if Latin was "pushed out" or just evolved into Italian.
The study is dealing with an 8000 year time frame. People in England 2000 years ago didn't even speak a Germanic language, never mind about modern English.
Nature is hard at work on the issue. http://www.labnews.co.uk/news/giant-cloud-of-space-alcohol-found/
MMMmmm. Cannabis beer....
Translation: I have found a meme that I can continually repeat to rationalize away any disturbing finding. Now come on kiddies, let's BURN MORE OIL!!!!
Nice strawman you built there. I never said anything about burning oil or touched on energy at all in my post.
I'm all for alternative energy sources where they make economic and practical sense.
Economic to the general populace or economic to those who benefit from not paying the for the full cost of their actions?
One data point on a scale covering millenia doesn't prove anything. It only tells us that, *right now*, there seems to be less arctic ice than there has been over the last decade or four.
We know that global climate has changed radically over the ages, from much warmer than now to much colder than now.
We simply don't have data spanning enough time to know whether this is natural or not.
At the timescales you are talking about, having enough data on the past is irrelevant. We would need instead to have data on a sample of similar planets with similar chemical compositions, in similar orbits around stars of similar age size and luminosity, with a similar distribution of landmasses and a similar ecosystem. Bit of a tall order. Just because something happenned in the past doesn't mean it will happen again, and the longer the timescale involved in any cycle, the more chance that things will be different the next time around due to different starting or external conditions to the cycle. We won't have a repeat of pre-carboniferous conditions. Even if we dug up all the coal and oil in the world that we can find and released them back into the atmosphere, tectonic processes will have slightly changed the chemical balance at the surface. The earths orbit will be slightly different, it's rotational speed will be different, the moon will be further away than back then. The amount of light hitting us from the sun will be different. If you want to talk about massive timescales, what nature decides to do to us should be given a judicious shove in the direction we want things to happen, because nature doesn't care about us.
Why don't you be honest and abandon all pretense that you're basing your opinions on science and the scientific method.
Whenever someone mentions unusually cold temperatures in a single winter or even a decade or two, well, that's just weather. Why isn't the reverse true?
What you advocate isn't science, it's evangelism.
Strat
Why don't you be honest and just admit that you are trying to say science doesn't know, so we should do nothing? I like your little "evangelism" dig. Suggesting that climate theory is a religion.... haven't heard that one before.
Translation: I don't like BlueStrat's perfectly calm, rational point, so I'm going to argue against it with emotion, wave my hands around, and come up with some meaningless term that sneers at his point without SOUNDING too sneery. oh, I know -- "meme." Yeah, that'll work.
So, I have a question for you. Do you consider yourself scientifically minded and skeptical? Do you think it's the OTHER guys who post on emotion, looking for anything that confirms their pre-existing notions? Because -- surprise! -- that's exactly what you just did. Kind of humbling, isn't it? BlueStrat made a perfectly scientific point -- this observation, in and of itself, doesn't mean much, because our data set is so small. We've only been making these observations since (I think) 1978 -- an eyeblink in geologic time.
There is nothing rational about saying we just do nothing about a bad situation because we haven't observed in the past how those situations play out. BlueStrat's post basically boils down to "this is probably just nature at work, and we haven't directly observed nature scientifically for a long enough period to know if this is a temporary condition".
We haven't directly observed arctic sea ice cover for very long, but the trends in our observations tie in very closely with other related more long term direct observations, and for much further back in time through indirect methods. The data is not meaningless, and accusing someone of being "emotional" when they post a sarcastic comment rather than regurgitate the thousands of rebuttals that have been made in the past is just you trying to sound reasonable about your cunning plan to do absolutely nothing.
Corporations being "persons" is a 500 - 600 year old doctrine of law. Back to the Maritime and before to about the time North America was even discovered. Investors stopped financing trade voyages because they would be 100% liable if the ship went down. They many times lost their homes, money and land to pay the families of those lost on the ship. The Corporation simply created a legal "person" to take on that liability and limit the investors losses to the amount they invest.
It was nothing new created by the Supreme Court. Corporations are made of people. Yes they can be killed (aka Dissolved) and individuals within it can be personally liable for their actions.
You are talking about limited liability companies. This was a way to encourage entrepeneurs, and limit any loss from their ventures to what they had invested. It did not in any way confer personhood on the company. And under modern laws, surely if a company is indeed considered a person, then should they not be freed from their slavery to shareholders?
Um... I missed the point where this firmly puts the carbon in the ground, and does not heat up the surrounding atmosphere enough to cause carbon release. Since this sounds to me like a giant bunch of heaters installed in a cold area, maybe you could show me what obvious detail I have overlooked?
Installing a bunch of heaters in a cold area assumes the intruduction of an external power supply to fuel those heaters. This plan does not include introduction of external energy to the local system.
AC is probably correct. Hydrogen fusion will produce stuff. Most of that should be helium. Some other elements will likely end up up in the mix too, in much smaller quantities.
Explain where all the CO2 we produce went. We KNOW how much we produce from burning fossil fuels et al. 30 billion tons a year.
And the increase in atmospheric CO2 is about equivalent to about 17 billion tons of CO2 a year.
But if it were the trees dying off doing it
a) where is all the 30 billion tons of our production going to
Much of it is going into the oceans. There, it is leading to acidification of the water, which could have much more dire consequences for the global ecosystem than "global warming". All of the shelled creatures in the seas have calcite shells, which could be more difficult for them to grow/maintain in more acid waters. And since many of them are near the bottom of the food chain....
On a global scale, maybe, but many cities have become what is known as "heat islands."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_heat_island
That is not because of heat directly generated by human activity, but a change in the heat retention properties of a large area of land due to human engineered changes in the landscape.
Not quite. The CO2 maybe sweeped under the carpet, but if you would actually read the paper, page 21 shows that there may be a significant amount of excess heat produced by the process, which needs to be release to the environment. The CO2 is not the problem. The heat is? So, in order to combat global warming, we install 400+ heaters on Antarctica? I'm sure the science behind it will work, but my initial response is: uuh... what?
They aren't really talking about introducing any additional energy into Antartica. They said the power supply would be local wind turbines. So the only real heat difference will be the heat taken out of the CO2 and released into the remaining atmosphere. That should create small, localised heat bubbles in the atmosphere, which would probably be fairly rapidly dissipated by winds. And even if it does have a noticeable effect during the summer, the Antarctic interior winter atmosphere has relatively little moisture for trapping heat radiated back towards space, and very little incoming sunlight. I imagine it would all start being radiated out to space easily enough come April every year.
I'd agree with both of the other replies. Less overtly political on the author's part than Banks, but does deal with political struggles in his books. Less high-tech than Banks, battles in space in Asher's work are fought with energy weapons but also projectiles and things that go boom. It doesn't have the same utopian setting, the Polity is not post-scarcity and is ruled by a mostly benign but still iron fisted AI overlord who will not think twice about sacrificing billions of lives if it is likely to aid its goals.
the overwhelming body of scientific literature shows that AGW does exist, and localised weather is not really a good indication of it (though some, especially those in the media, try to make it so).
Where do you propose to define the cut-off point between weather and climate though? One is the average of the other. You can lose a lot of detail when you average everything.Don't know about where you live, but where I am, the weather has been strange,. Two of the last three winters had countryside buried in snow and ice for weeks on end where we usually get occasional frosts. So far this year, we've had dry sunny weather in spring when it usually rains, and it has been pissing rain all summer so bad that my father (cattle farmer) gave up on the land ever drying out and started making silage last week, ripping the ground to shit with tractors while still having to give fodder to the cattle. In the middle of the summer. Maybe its just a few strange years in a row in my little local area. But the weather has been really fucking weird for a few years. And people all across the world are saying the same thing.
Not hard-science fiction, more like ultra violence in a futuristic space-faring setting with some attached storyline. I've only ever met one other person who'd ever even heard of him, but I love his stuff.
As if the US is the only country that invades people's privacy? Nice try.
Yeah, screw those hippies in Europe. We should be like North Korea, or Zimbabwe, or Iran.
precisely because of the US government's fondness for spying on everything.
Yet again another ridiculous claim without a single reference to support it.
Please point to any credible source that documents the REASON the US "screams" protectionism about data storage. Also please point to one documented incidence of the US "screaming" protectionism with regard to other country's data storage laws.
http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=American+data+centre+privacy+laws
Coastal cities are the least of our problems. Sea walls are easy to construct. What is more difficult is ecology and agriculture management. Species going extinct at an accelerated rate will cause severe issues with pest control, as insects can migrate more easily and breed faster than larger lifeforms. Agricultural activities could be extremely adversely affected, as climate shifts may turn productive land into swamps/dustbowls. New areas of productive land may be opened up, yes, but they might take centuries to become fully productive due to soil growth rates. In the meantime, our agricultural infrastructure will need to be moved out of areas that are no longer feasible into the new areas. That is assuming that climate changes are from one stable state to another; intervening periods between equilibrium points will likely be incredibly chaotic and drawn out over several years. Will climate change be good or bad? The final outcome might be either. The intervening period will be horrible.
and yet countless gay people's lives *are*, in part because they're expected to just smile and deal with it
Thats not really a good excuse. If they said something about it and let people know how they felt, and then it continued, that would be grounds for a harrassment complaint. Everybody slags other people. The point of it is for humour's sake, not for being a deliberately viscious cunt. We all make jokes about things that will hurt other peoples feelings, because they are funny jokes and help us get through the day. Most of us try to make jokes we think will not hurt the feeling of those listening to us, or sometimes deliberately crafted at those in earshot in the knowledge that even being the butt of the joke, they will laugh as well. If someone hides some aspect of their personality and chooses to later sue based on jokes I made about that how am I supposed to respond? I can imagine things I would kick peoples teeth in for if they said them about my mother. I might say those very same things myself about my mother in a joking fashion.
People can demand respect all they want, but it is a two-way street. Everyone makes jokes about things, and everyone excludes from jokes those present they do not wish to insult. If you want not to be insulted by the things I say, don't insult me by lying to me about who you are. If you are not comfortable with being yourself in my presence, you should not be in my presence. Whether that means you have to go or I have to go can be decided by the gods of HR, but I for one am not going to live my life trying to second guess those listening to anything I say.
Maybe this is just because I'm Irish, and we're all whipped mammy's boys, but anyone here being sexist had best be prepared to defend themselves from the verbal (or possibly physical) lashing any real woman will bestow upon them.
IPCOP. If you have an old computer lying about, you can set it up as a firewall, with a transparent proxy using Dan's Guardian as a web filter.
I'm the exact opposite. I love peas & mash together. In fact, I'd say the best way to have mashed potatoes is with peas, stuffing & gravy mixed in.