It's easy for Germany to have a feel good law about their own domestic manufacturing, because the bulk of that nation's income is from exports. How about we start sending all of our trash from German made exports to the USA back to Germany?
Guns DO work pretty good. So do small explosives. Of all ironies, Iraq proves the right wing view of the 2nd amendment. Get enough people on the ground with guns and explosives, and any government that does not have popular consent does not govern.
I'm not saying it would be easy to blow the towers and WTC7 up with explosives. I'm just saying you could do it with a small number of people.
Plus, with their secret mind control rays, the government could easily keep a small number of people's actions protected from a larger crowd. See "Operation Jedi Mind Trick". Lucky you had your metal reflection system mounted on your cranium, to disrupt those beams and get the truth to us!
"The Earth's surface temperature would be about 34C (61F) colder than it is now if it were not for the natural heat trapping effect of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and water vapor. Indeed, water vapor is the most abundant and important of these naturally occurring greenhouse gases. In addition to its direct effect as a greenhouse gas, clouds formed from atmospheric water vapor also affect the heat balance of the Earth by reflecting sunlight (a cooling effect), and trapping infrared radiation (a heating effect)."
I won't even begin to discuss how the role of tropical, or, any forest for that matter in CO2 uptake, might be overstated. That is, if you plant a tree, it will consume CO2 while it grows, but then, it stays even, dies, and rots, and releases methane, which is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2 is. To some extent, one could argue that chopping down all of the trees and making boards out of them would be the best way to sink carbon - if you knew trees would go back to take the place of the ones you cut down. The problem is, in the rain forest, they don't grow back, because the soil sucks.
Didn't humanity survive through multiple ice ages? Harshest climate change yet? I don't think so. The worst that happens in global warming is that sea levels rise up, some areas become deserts, and others become rain forests, if you believe the accuracy (which is suspect), of global climate computer models.
Woops, meant to say "All Windows applications assume that the message queue is on a single thread.... Apartment model threaded, as it were, rather than Free threaded, ala BeOS.
BeOS was pervasively multithreaded, throughout, and anticipated massively parallel machines at a time when everyone else thought that the Ghz race would continue indefinitely. BeOS was so multithreaded that even conventional window classes could be re-entrant. Whereas in Windows or any other desktop API that I know of, all of your messages come into your window in serial fashion, in BeOS, you could theoretically get a resize, mouse move, and keyboard event genuinely concurrently, each coming in an on another thread. As such, you couldn't just say the BeOS equivalent of SendMessage was a function call of sorts, as is the case of Windows. It required a lot of mental unwinding to get into it, but, in the end, the model was very, very cool and very very powerful.
Now, for Microsoft to go and say that they are going to reengineer Windows to be a pervasively multithreaded environment, implying something like BeOS, is almost as silly as Gil Amelio's once famous prediction, that, "Apple would just add true virtual memory into Copland", after the OS has been developed for quite some time. Making Windows genuinely and pervasively multithreaded would -break- everything, as all Windows applications assume that Windows messages come in on multiple threads. If they would do it, cool, but it would mean that porting.NET, COM, SDK, and every other application to this new Windows would be an enormously massive undertaking.
Or, Microsoft would just shit something together, and it wouldn't really be pervasively multithreaded....
Toyota Tundras are built in the US just like Ikea Furniture is. All the heavy duty work, like engines and transmissions, are in Japan.
As far as cars go, GM is quietly sneaking up on Toyota in the car market and has been for the last year. Toyota is running into cost and quality problems as it learns, that geez, if you build as many cars as GM, you actually run into an entire new class of problems based on sheer volume. Meanwhile, unlike 1973 and 1979, there's no easy victory for the Japanese over GM on gas mileage. GM cars do about as well as Toyota's do, and, the new Chevy Impala is a much cooler looking car than the lumpy old Camry.
Water vapor warms the atmosphere. Of that, there is no doubt. The problem is that as CO2 rises, it ever so slightly nudges up the temperature, which in turn kicks off more evaporation, and that, my friend screws up the climate even more. So yes, we are both right. But, if we were emitting water vapor ourselves, we would be skipping the CO2 step. I wonder if a study has ever been done on water vapor emissions?
The 18th century was the tale end of the Little Ige Age. I picked 1700 because it was unarguably pre-industrial, but even during the American revolution, the climate was much colder than it is today. There was a year without a summer, for one, and, one of the most famous moments of the American Revolution, George Washington crosses a Delaware river packed with giant chunks of ice, as it was freezing over. The Delaware NEVER freezes over any more. I have read that if not for global warming, we would actually be entering an ice age now, if you believed the Milankovich cycle and all of that stuff.
Unemployment in France indeed hovers above 10%, which is why the French did the unthinkable and elected Sarkozy.
The plug about Left vs Right is that the Left likes to paint itself as the Angels of the Environment, and, in retrospect, they have made two disasterous mistakes. Banning DDT contributed to millions of deaths from malaria, and, killing nuclear power aggravated global warming. This doesn't mean the right wing is perfect. If you take the Mauna Loa CO2 ppm measurements, you can roughly calculate the increase, in tons, in CO2 added to the atmosphere each year. Basically, you take the ppm, get the % of weight in the atmosphere, then, knowing the atmospheric pressure you can figure out that somewhere each year 4 - 8 gigatons of CO2 go into the air, and, of all surprises, that's about how much carbon is in the fuel that we burn. So, it's pretty reasonable to assume that the CO2 is coming from us. My point is, though, that, the origin of CO2 is ultimately irrelevant. We know that the CO2 is going up. And just as we know we need to build a levee when the water goes up, we know we need to manage the CO2 in the air, and part of that equation has to be sequestration, just in case something screwy is going on with the earth that we don't know about, or, just as likely, something screwy goes on with the earth, like, a big burst of methane hydrates erupts out of the ocean or yellowstone erupts. We just need to have a way to manage the atmosphere.
Why, I'll see your see misuse of scientific data by the right wing with a misuse of scientific data by the left!
a) Including 1990 as a base year for European emissions is wrong for a couple of reasons. First, up until very recently European economic growth has badly lagged that of the USA. When there is less growth, there is less emissions. Even now, European economic growth lags, as a rule. When you have 10% of your people unemployed, as the French do, it does not take them much CO2 to drive to work, as there is no work to drive to. Secondly, Europeans have been furiously gaming emissions in their own right. There's been rampant adjusting of the baseline in order to improve their own greenhouse picture. So, the real question is, are the Europeans actually seriously making their targets, or are they simply patting themselves on the back for the slow growth side effects of the nanny state.
b) The gases described by the convention do not include water vapor, which constitutes the bulk of global warming.
c) All climate conventions these days presuppose that a reduction in manmade emissions will correct the atmospheric balance of gasses, and, that, by doing so, our climate will revert to some imagined ideal state of 1700, which was in the middle of an ice age, and a billion people will easily starve to death because of a shortened growing season. This will be almost as stupid as the wide spread left wing opposition to nuclear power, which essentially doomed us to global warming to begin with. Really, if the USA had gone 100% nuclear, there would be no global warming, and, so really, all of this finger pointing at Republicans over global warming is an elaborate smokescreen to say that you Lefties once again f=== up the planet and want we superior Bush supporters to bail you out.
We told you what the answer was : Build Nukes. Build Hydro. If you don't like it, that's your problem.
I think anyone can see that humanity needs to manage the atmospheric mixture of gases. We manage the acidity of our soils to grow things, we build dams around rivers and levees around the sea. It only stands to reason that we should do battle with mother nature and preserve some happy mix of gases to benefit humanity. So, where is the call to actually build a technology that sequesters excess gases from the atmosphere? Why can't we research and build machines that eat CO2 and turn it into carbon and oxygen? Sure, the energy required to split that up is enormous, but, that's what nukes are for. Do we really seriously build an atmospheric management strategy that a geologically active planet with a radioactive core and a radically diverse ecosystem will not on occasion enter an atmospheric state on its own that we should control? What if we discover some giant CO2 source on the ocean floor that we never considered before?
Let's pursue a strategy of building nuclear plants to reduce our own emissions, and then, while we are at it, build a machine to manage the atmosphere.
In your cite, you have the Apostle John, saying "God is love." God never says: "I am love", nor does he ever say, "I am a nice guy." People in the Bible ascribe to God the trait of being filled with love, and nice, but, God Himself often says otherwise.
When Job mentioned his plight to God, God merely said that he is God and has the right to do what he wants, and Job is a peasant that has no clue. God doesn't justify why He allowed Satan to prosecute Job. He merely says that He is God, and therefor, He can.
God said told Noah that he wouldn't flood the world and kill everyone again, but, then he told his other prophets that he reserved the right to bring down flaming destruction, famine, pestilence and other destruction, instead.
Your ignorance of history is utterly amazing. You can't put Iraq in the same class of destruction that was Germany or Japan post world war II.
You claim Iraq was firebombed? Really? Firebombing involves thousands of bombs and hundreds of aircraft and kills 100,000 people at a pop. Show me the city in Iraq that was bombed like Dresden, or Berlin.
And, once again. Iraqis are killing each other! That's not America's fault. Nobody is making them do it. They do it on their own. The civil war is not the fault of the United States. If the Iraqi people truly wanted peace, they would have had it already.
Where was the civil war in Germany after World War II? Where was the civil war in Japan after World War II? It didn't happen.
Ok, brain surgeon. Tell me, what did the USA do to the Islamic world that was as bad as what the USA did to Japan during World War II? Has the Islamic world ever been firebombed, or nuked, or completely surrounded and starved? No. So what are they bitching about? Answer, nothing. Either the Japanese are a lot tougher the Islamic world, or, maybe, the problems of the Islamic world are more self inflicted than they would like to admit. Either way, it ain't America's fault.
Saying that there is suffering in the world as a disprove of God's existence is something of a strawman.
You have this supposition that if you were all powerful, there would be no suffering, when really, if you were all powerful, you might not give a damn, and only intervene from time to time to those of your creations that prostrate themselves enough before you because it is entertaining. Please show me any phrase in any scripture of any religion where God says "Hey, I am a nice guy."
Besides, science is ultimately illogical. We already know, from science, that the universe is screwed. Our solar system will die. Our planet will be destroyed - no matter -what we do-. Yet, we keep pushing on trying to learn more, with this faith that learning more will somehow make our lives better, yet, in the end, all of it is pointless. The sun will run out of hydrogen, swell up, and consume the earth, and all these creatures you want to save are all going to die, including humanity, if we are still stuck on earth. The best science can offer is that humanity will run from star to star, planet to planet, until there are no more stars, and the game is over.
Compared to that, a dickhead God seems kinda warm and fuzzy.
At the end of the day, parent's send their kids to MIT so they can go work for the likes of Steve Ballmer, and for the Islamic world to blame American interventions of 50 years ago for its problems today would be as silly as Americans blaming the British destruction of Washington DC for the American Civil War. They are completely unrelated.
Ballmer has plenty of people that could be EE chairs at MIT working for him. Technology is not just about solving engineering problems, it is about putting the right people together, with the right resources, and the right management, to create something that people are actually willing to pay for. Running that sort of an organization effectively is a talent in its own right, and that Microsoft is able to recover from its own mistakes and not blow its lead given determined competition speaks well of Ballmer's abilities. Windows 95 could have been Windows Edsel, Visual Studio.NET could have been Borland dBase for Windows, but, they weren't. Thus far, there really hasn't been a genuinely disastrous release of Windows, and that's a remarkable feat.
In contrast, the EE chair of MIT has a much smaller budget to work with, and by nature, less people. Further, he doesn't have any real sales goals to achieve, other than explore, and thus, completely lacks any context or understanding of what it actually takes to transform knowledge gained by science into something that people can actually use. All they have to do is continually kick out peer reviewed papers, staying at the forefront, and that, they can do, by keeping a big endowment to ensure they have the latest technological tools produced by corporations.
Similarly, your statements about Ron Paul and American Foreign policy continually miss the point. If one can argue that American involvement in Iran in the 1950s laid the groundwork for Iranian hatred of the USA, could we not also argue that centuries of Islamic invasions of Europe also led to the American involvement in Iran in the 1950s? I mean, the USA NUKED JAPAN TWICE, and Japan has bounced back rather swimmingly.
What the Islamic world seems to forget, as they rattle off all of the supposed abuses against the Islamic people, is that, for the last 30 years, the United States has been writing a check for several hundred billion dollars a year to them. Every year, in exchange for the extraction of oil, the Islamic people get -BILLIONS- of dollars from Americans. Were that money invested properly, the Islamic world could have easily solved all of its problems that contribute to its woes today. Where is the regional solution to a chronic water problem? Where is the investment in education and research? If, the Saudi princes had invested their billions into schools to teach their children calculus rather than memorize the Quran, there would be no Al Qaeda and the Islamic world would be well on its way to first world status. But instead, they take this money, build each other giant palaces, and then hire a bunch of british engineers to do publicity stunts like build kilometer high skyscrapers, and somehow, it is the fault of the United States that their people are a bunch of meteorite worshipping idiots.
I think Russia has overplayed its hand. Really, all Putin had to do was keep his mouth shut and let George Bush's self destructing presidency do the work of driving a wedge between the EU and the USA, and instead, Putin has played so badly over the last year that he actually makes Bush look good.
That's a tall order.
If Bush were to come to the G8 and have some imagination, he could improve his image drastically. He could cater to and recognize European cultural achievements, give the Europeans some concession, on -anything-, be it the war on terror, or more importantly, a commitment to do -something- about climate change. Even if the USA doesn't agree to climate targets per se, a real commitment to pay for all the research needed to meet them could ultimately prove as useful and would more politically tenable for all involved. It's not like research isn't needed - and on a number of topics from solar power, biofuels, nuclear power, wind, etc, a big mega billion dollar a year research commitment would sail through a Democratic congress. Bush, for all of his failings, seems to be handed one historic opportunity after another for greatness, and then blowing it. This one is easy. In one fell swoop, Bush could strengthen the transatlantic alliance more than it has been in a long time. Putin threw the fastball down the middle of the plate. Come on George, smack this one out the park, for once.
I have a Windows shareware site, and I have Linux site, and my Linux site gets 500 times as many hits a month as my Windows site does, and, from all over the world. So, at least my Linux content is more compelling.. but, I have put way more work into my Windows site than my Linux site, and I think I'm going to see what happens with my Linux site if I throw everything I have into it.
It's funny, figuring to cash in on being a rebel, I used to have a huge pro-Bush site, but I took it down when, after watching my hits, that a quarter of my traffic on my Linux site is coming from the EU. So, even though I am a bit disappointed that the EU doesn't appreciate the Wilsonian genius of George Bush:-), it reminds me that suddenly what was once local politics is now world wide. It's common in America to joke about blowing up the world, because, we are a fatalistic, self critical people. But, without that cultural context, the rest of the world doesn't understand that humor at all, and worse, takes it seriously.
And its not just me.
Local French newspaper clippings and interviews with French leaders, which have always had a paternalistic view of the USA, are suddenly available worldwide. So while US major media would never cover Chirac taking a few shots at the USA in a speech obviously meant for local French consumption, it still found its way to every conservative blog in the USA, and every conservative joke about Europe, such as Rumsfeld's "Old Europe" observation, really, as much as part of local American political canon as France's paternalistic view of the world. People look at all of this and might think transatlantic attitudes have changed, but, they haven't. We just know a lot more about our gossip about each other, and hopefully, the cooler heads of the world will rise to the occasion, and recognize that we are being shaped by the communications frankenstein that we have invented, back off from the ledge, and learn to speak in more measured phrases, knowing that, truly, the whole wide world is watching them.
As an American, I tend to view EU action against American companies with deep suspicion, and Microsoft is an American company.
But....
There has to be some interoperability imposed, because, the whole point of capitalism is competition to provide better products, and, no one can compete with Microsoft. Total dominance can be a cancer in its own right, and even General Motors in its heyday was not as powerful as Microsoft is now, and unlike General Motors, Microsoft actually is investing substantial sums of money into improving its products instead of sitting on their laurels. Microsoft is starting to pull away from everyone else with.NET developer tools, and Vista is a step ahead of Linux in many ways. It's already impossible for another company to compete with Microsoft across the board, from tools, to operating systems, to applications, and even now Microsoft is moving to reclaim a beachhead in consumer electronics long thought lost to the Japanese and Dutch. Microsoft's new coffee table is rather remarkable, and one has to wonder, how long will it be before we see Microsoft televisions?
Dude, the whole Detroit is against electric cars concept is a MYTH. There is absolutely no reason why GM or Ford's owners would want to do any favors for Exxon and vice versa. The facts of the matter are thus:
a) People do not want to buy electric cars at the price / performance point they can be offered at. Sure, some people moaned about their EV1 leases being terminated and the cars being crushed, but the vast majority of Californians turned their backs on the technology.
b) Mass production does not reduce commodities costs. If you have a battery with an ounce of platinum in it, it is going to be 3k, minimum, because, platinum right now is around 3k an ounce. Even good old gold is expensive.
The bottom line is, if people -really- wanted to buy electric cars, GM and Ford would most certainly make them, because they want to sell cars and honestly, features in cars at this point are just items that appear on a bill material and are associated with a marketing cluster analysis. But, as it is, most environmentalists are impoverished cheapskates, as well, and so, cannot afford or will not pay premiums on exotic vehicles at a high level of production.
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It's easy for Germany to have a feel good law about their own domestic manufacturing, because the bulk of that nation's income is from exports. How about we start sending all of our trash from German made exports to the USA back to Germany?
Guns DO work pretty good. So do small explosives. Of all ironies, Iraq proves the right wing view of the 2nd amendment. Get enough people on the ground with guns and explosives, and any government that does not have popular consent does not govern.
I'm not saying it would be easy to blow the towers and WTC7 up with explosives. I'm just saying you could do it with a small number of people.
Plus, with their secret mind control rays, the government could easily keep a small number of people's actions protected from a larger crowd. See "Operation Jedi Mind Trick". Lucky you had your metal reflection system mounted on your cranium, to disrupt those beams and get the truth to us!
Hey buddy, you are dead wrong.
1 10_051110_warming.html
l _3/climate_change_8.htm
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/11/1
"Evaporated H2O is a known greenhouse gas--a gas that absorbs and re-emits infrared radiation in Earth's atmosphere, thereby increasing temperatures"
http://www.greenfacts.org/studies/climate_change/
"The Earth's surface temperature would be about 34C (61F) colder than it is now if it were not for the natural heat trapping effect of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and water vapor. Indeed, water vapor is the most abundant and important of these naturally occurring greenhouse gases. In addition to its direct effect as a greenhouse gas, clouds formed from atmospheric water vapor also affect the heat balance of the Earth by reflecting sunlight (a cooling effect), and trapping infrared radiation (a heating effect)."
I won't even begin to discuss how the role of tropical, or, any forest for that matter in CO2 uptake, might be overstated. That is, if you plant a tree, it will consume CO2 while it grows, but then, it stays even, dies, and rots, and releases methane, which is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2 is. To some extent, one could argue that chopping down all of the trees and making boards out of them would be the best way to sink carbon - if you knew trees would go back to take the place of the ones you cut down. The problem is, in the rain forest, they don't grow back, because the soil sucks.
And people are bitching about Republicans coming around on Global warming?
Didn't humanity survive through multiple ice ages? Harshest climate change yet? I don't think so. The worst that happens in global warming is that sea levels rise up, some areas become deserts, and others become rain forests, if you believe the accuracy (which is suspect), of global climate computer models.
Woops, meant to say "All Windows applications assume that the message queue is on a single thread.... Apartment model threaded, as it were, rather than Free threaded, ala BeOS.
BeOS was pervasively multithreaded, throughout, and anticipated massively parallel machines at a time when everyone else thought that the Ghz race would continue indefinitely. BeOS was so multithreaded that even conventional window classes could be re-entrant. Whereas in Windows or any other desktop API that I know of, all of your messages come into your window in serial fashion, in BeOS, you could theoretically get a resize, mouse move, and keyboard event genuinely concurrently, each coming in an on another thread. As such, you couldn't just say the BeOS equivalent of SendMessage was a function call of sorts, as is the case of Windows. It required a lot of mental unwinding to get into it, but, in the end, the model was very, very cool and very very powerful.
.NET, COM, SDK, and every other application to this new Windows would be an enormously massive undertaking.
Now, for Microsoft to go and say that they are going to reengineer Windows to be a pervasively multithreaded environment, implying something like BeOS, is almost as silly as Gil Amelio's once famous prediction, that, "Apple would just add true virtual memory into Copland", after the OS has been developed for quite some time. Making Windows genuinely and pervasively multithreaded would -break- everything, as all Windows applications assume that Windows messages come in on multiple threads. If they would do it, cool, but it would mean that porting
Or, Microsoft would just shit something together, and it wouldn't really be pervasively multithreaded....
Toyota Tundras are built in the US just like Ikea Furniture is. All the heavy duty work, like engines and transmissions, are in Japan.
As far as cars go, GM is quietly sneaking up on Toyota in the car market and has been for the last year. Toyota is running into cost and quality problems as it learns, that geez, if you build as many cars as GM, you actually run into an entire new class of problems based on sheer volume. Meanwhile, unlike 1973 and 1979, there's no easy victory for the Japanese over GM on gas mileage. GM cars do about as well as Toyota's do, and, the new Chevy Impala is a much cooler looking car than the lumpy old Camry.
This is REALLY cool. Can you steer a poor man over to a FAQ on setting up such an MD device?
So would KDevelop then be a hot polish chick with big tits? That's what I'm talking about!
Water vapor warms the atmosphere. Of that, there is no doubt. The problem is that as CO2 rises, it ever so slightly nudges up the temperature, which in turn kicks off more evaporation, and that, my friend screws up the climate even more. So yes, we are both right. But, if we were emitting water vapor ourselves, we would be skipping the CO2 step. I wonder if a study has ever been done on water vapor emissions?
The 18th century was the tale end of the Little Ige Age. I picked 1700 because it was unarguably pre-industrial, but even during the American revolution, the climate was much colder than it is today. There was a year without a summer, for one, and, one of the most famous moments of the American Revolution, George Washington crosses a Delaware river packed with giant chunks of ice, as it was freezing over. The Delaware NEVER freezes over any more. I have read that if not for global warming, we would actually be entering an ice age now, if you believed the Milankovich cycle and all of that stuff.
Unemployment in France indeed hovers above 10%, which is why the French did the unthinkable and elected Sarkozy.
The plug about Left vs Right is that the Left likes to paint itself as the Angels of the Environment, and, in retrospect, they have made two disasterous mistakes. Banning DDT contributed to millions of deaths from malaria, and, killing nuclear power aggravated global warming. This doesn't mean the right wing is perfect. If you take the Mauna Loa CO2 ppm measurements, you can roughly calculate the increase, in tons, in CO2 added to the atmosphere each year. Basically, you take the ppm, get the % of weight in the atmosphere, then, knowing the atmospheric pressure you can figure out that somewhere each year 4 - 8 gigatons of CO2 go into the air, and, of all surprises, that's about how much carbon is in the fuel that we burn. So, it's pretty reasonable to assume that the CO2 is coming from us. My point is, though, that, the origin of CO2 is ultimately irrelevant. We know that the CO2 is going up. And just as we know we need to build a levee when the water goes up, we know we need to manage the CO2 in the air, and part of that equation has to be sequestration, just in case something screwy is going on with the earth that we don't know about, or, just as likely, something screwy goes on with the earth, like, a big burst of methane hydrates erupts out of the ocean or yellowstone erupts. We just need to have a way to manage the atmosphere.
Why, I'll see your see misuse of scientific data by the right wing with a misuse of scientific data by the left!
a) Including 1990 as a base year for European emissions is wrong for a couple of reasons. First, up until very recently European economic growth has badly lagged that of the USA. When there is less growth, there is less emissions. Even now, European economic growth lags, as a rule. When you have 10% of your people unemployed, as the French do, it does not take them much CO2 to drive to work, as there is no work to drive to. Secondly, Europeans have been furiously gaming emissions in their own right. There's been rampant adjusting of the baseline in order to improve their own greenhouse picture. So, the real question is, are the Europeans actually seriously making their targets, or are they simply patting themselves on the back for the slow growth side effects of the nanny state.
b) The gases described by the convention do not include water vapor, which constitutes the bulk of global warming.
c) All climate conventions these days presuppose that a reduction in manmade emissions will correct the atmospheric balance of gasses, and, that, by doing so, our climate will revert to some imagined ideal state of 1700, which was in the middle of an ice age, and a billion people will easily starve to death because of a shortened growing season. This will be almost as stupid as the wide spread left wing opposition to nuclear power, which essentially doomed us to global warming to begin with. Really, if the USA had gone 100% nuclear, there would be no global warming, and, so really, all of this finger pointing at Republicans over global warming is an elaborate smokescreen to say that you Lefties once again f=== up the planet and want we superior Bush supporters to bail you out.
We told you what the answer was : Build Nukes. Build Hydro. If you don't like it, that's your problem.
I think anyone can see that humanity needs to manage the atmospheric mixture of gases. We manage the acidity of our soils to grow things, we build dams around rivers and levees around the sea. It only stands to reason that we should do battle with mother nature and preserve some happy mix of gases to benefit humanity. So, where is the call to actually build a technology that sequesters excess gases from the atmosphere? Why can't we research and build machines that eat CO2 and turn it into carbon and oxygen? Sure, the energy required to split that up is enormous, but, that's what nukes are for. Do we really seriously build an atmospheric management strategy that a geologically active planet with a radioactive core and a radically diverse ecosystem will not on occasion enter an atmospheric state on its own that we should control? What if we discover some giant CO2 source on the ocean floor that we never considered before?
Let's pursue a strategy of building nuclear plants to reduce our own emissions, and then, while we are at it, build a machine to manage the atmosphere.
Threatening to nuke Europe over the deployment of an ABM system that a lot of people don't even think works....
Wow, that's a great way to make friends!
Pretty? Look at those teeth. I wonder if her car is up on blocks.
In your cite, you have the Apostle John, saying "God is love." God never says: "I am love", nor does he ever say, "I am a nice guy." People in the Bible ascribe to God the trait of being filled with love, and nice, but, God Himself often says otherwise.
When Job mentioned his plight to God, God merely said that he is God and has the right to do what he wants, and Job is a peasant that has no clue. God doesn't justify why He allowed Satan to prosecute Job. He merely says that He is God, and therefor, He can.
God said told Noah that he wouldn't flood the world and kill everyone again, but, then he told his other prophets that he reserved the right to bring down flaming destruction, famine, pestilence and other destruction, instead.
Your ignorance of history is utterly amazing. You can't put Iraq in the same class of destruction that was Germany or Japan post world war II.
You claim Iraq was firebombed? Really? Firebombing involves thousands of bombs and hundreds of aircraft and kills 100,000 people at a pop. Show me the city in Iraq that was bombed like Dresden, or Berlin.
And, once again. Iraqis are killing each other! That's not America's fault. Nobody is making them do it. They do it on their own. The civil war is not the fault of the United States. If the Iraqi people truly wanted peace, they would have had it already.
Where was the civil war in Germany after World War II? Where was the civil war in Japan after World War II? It didn't happen.
Ok, brain surgeon. Tell me, what did the USA do to the Islamic world that was as bad as what the USA did to Japan during World War II? Has the Islamic world ever been firebombed, or nuked, or completely surrounded and starved? No. So what are they bitching about? Answer, nothing. Either the Japanese are a lot tougher the Islamic world, or, maybe, the problems of the Islamic world are more self inflicted than they would like to admit. Either way, it ain't America's fault.
Saying that there is suffering in the world as a disprove of God's existence is something of a strawman.
You have this supposition that if you were all powerful, there would be no suffering, when really, if you were all powerful, you might not give a damn, and only intervene from time to time to those of your creations that prostrate themselves enough before you because it is entertaining. Please show me any phrase in any scripture of any religion where God says "Hey, I am a nice guy."
Besides, science is ultimately illogical. We already know, from science, that the universe is screwed. Our solar system will die. Our planet will be destroyed - no matter -what we do-. Yet, we keep pushing on trying to learn more, with this faith that learning more will somehow make our lives better, yet, in the end, all of it is pointless. The sun will run out of hydrogen, swell up, and consume the earth, and all these creatures you want to save are all going to die, including humanity, if we are still stuck on earth. The best science can offer is that humanity will run from star to star, planet to planet, until there are no more stars, and the game is over.
Compared to that, a dickhead God seems kinda warm and fuzzy.
At the end of the day, parent's send their kids to MIT so they can go work for the likes of Steve Ballmer, and for the Islamic world to blame American interventions of 50 years ago for its problems today would be as silly as Americans blaming the British destruction of Washington DC for the American Civil War. They are completely unrelated.
Ballmer has plenty of people that could be EE chairs at MIT working for him. Technology is not just about solving engineering problems, it is about putting the right people together, with the right resources, and the right management, to create something that people are actually willing to pay for. Running that sort of an organization effectively is a talent in its own right, and that Microsoft is able to recover from its own mistakes and not blow its lead given determined competition speaks well of Ballmer's abilities. Windows 95 could have been Windows Edsel, Visual Studio.NET could have been Borland dBase for Windows, but, they weren't. Thus far, there really hasn't been a genuinely disastrous release of Windows, and that's a remarkable feat.
In contrast, the EE chair of MIT has a much smaller budget to work with, and by nature, less people. Further, he doesn't have any real sales goals to achieve, other than explore, and thus, completely lacks any context or understanding of what it actually takes to transform knowledge gained by science into something that people can actually use. All they have to do is continually kick out peer reviewed papers, staying at the forefront, and that, they can do, by keeping a big endowment to ensure they have the latest technological tools produced by corporations.
Similarly, your statements about Ron Paul and American Foreign policy continually miss the point. If one can argue that American involvement in Iran in the 1950s laid the groundwork for Iranian hatred of the USA, could we not also argue that centuries of Islamic invasions of Europe also led to the American involvement in Iran in the 1950s? I mean, the USA NUKED JAPAN TWICE, and Japan has bounced back rather swimmingly.
What the Islamic world seems to forget, as they rattle off all of the supposed abuses against the Islamic people, is that, for the last 30 years, the United States has been writing a check for several hundred billion dollars a year to them. Every year, in exchange for the extraction of oil, the Islamic people get -BILLIONS- of dollars from Americans. Were that money invested properly, the Islamic world could have easily solved all of its problems that contribute to its woes today. Where is the regional solution to a chronic water problem? Where is the investment in education and research? If, the Saudi princes had invested their billions into schools to teach their children calculus rather than memorize the Quran, there would be no Al Qaeda and the Islamic world would be well on its way to first world status. But instead, they take this money, build each other giant palaces, and then hire a bunch of british engineers to do publicity stunts like build kilometer high skyscrapers, and somehow, it is the fault of the United States that their people are a bunch of meteorite worshipping idiots.
I think Russia has overplayed its hand. Really, all Putin had to do was keep his mouth shut and let George Bush's self destructing presidency do the work of driving a wedge between the EU and the USA, and instead, Putin has played so badly over the last year that he actually makes Bush look good.
That's a tall order.
If Bush were to come to the G8 and have some imagination, he could improve his image drastically. He could cater to and recognize European cultural achievements, give the Europeans some concession, on -anything-, be it the war on terror, or more importantly, a commitment to do -something- about climate change. Even if the USA doesn't agree to climate targets per se, a real commitment to pay for all the research needed to meet them could ultimately prove as useful and would more politically tenable for all involved. It's not like research isn't needed - and on a number of topics from solar power, biofuels, nuclear power, wind, etc, a big mega billion dollar a year research commitment would sail through a Democratic congress. Bush, for all of his failings, seems to be handed one historic opportunity after another for greatness, and then blowing it. This one is easy. In one fell swoop, Bush could strengthen the transatlantic alliance more than it has been in a long time. Putin threw the fastball down the middle of the plate. Come on George, smack this one out the park, for once.
I have a Windows shareware site, and I have Linux site, and my Linux site gets 500 times as many hits a month as my Windows site does, and, from all over the world. So, at least my Linux content is more compelling.. but, I have put way more work into my Windows site than my Linux site, and I think I'm going to see what happens with my Linux site if I throw everything I have into it.
:-), it reminds me that suddenly what was once local politics is now world wide. It's common in America to joke about blowing up the world, because, we are a fatalistic, self critical people. But, without that cultural context, the rest of the world doesn't understand that humor at all, and worse, takes it seriously.
It's funny, figuring to cash in on being a rebel, I used to have a huge pro-Bush site, but I took it down when, after watching my hits, that a quarter of my traffic on my Linux site is coming from the EU. So, even though I am a bit disappointed that the EU doesn't appreciate the Wilsonian genius of George Bush
And its not just me.
Local French newspaper clippings and interviews with French leaders, which have always had a paternalistic view of the USA, are suddenly available worldwide. So while US major media would never cover Chirac taking a few shots at the USA in a speech obviously meant for local French consumption, it still found its way to every conservative blog in the USA, and every conservative joke about Europe, such as Rumsfeld's "Old Europe" observation, really, as much as part of local American political canon as France's paternalistic view of the world. People look at all of this and might think transatlantic attitudes have changed, but, they haven't. We just know a lot more about our gossip about each other, and hopefully, the cooler heads of the world will rise to the occasion, and recognize that we are being shaped by the communications frankenstein that we have invented, back off from the ledge, and learn to speak in more measured phrases, knowing that, truly, the whole wide world is watching them.
Just imagine if Microsoft bought Apple.
As an American, I tend to view EU action against American companies with deep suspicion, and Microsoft is an American company.
.NET developer tools, and Vista is a step ahead of Linux in many ways. It's already impossible for another company to compete with Microsoft across the board, from tools, to operating systems, to applications, and even now Microsoft is moving to reclaim a beachhead in consumer electronics long thought lost to the Japanese and Dutch. Microsoft's new coffee table is rather remarkable, and one has to wonder, how long will it be before we see Microsoft televisions?
But....
There has to be some interoperability imposed, because, the whole point of capitalism is competition to provide better products, and, no one can compete with Microsoft. Total dominance can be a cancer in its own right, and even General Motors in its heyday was not as powerful as Microsoft is now, and unlike General Motors, Microsoft actually is investing substantial sums of money into improving its products instead of sitting on their laurels. Microsoft is starting to pull away from everyone else with
Dude, the whole Detroit is against electric cars concept is a MYTH. There is absolutely no reason why GM or Ford's owners would want to do any favors for Exxon and vice versa. The facts of the matter are thus:
a) People do not want to buy electric cars at the price / performance point they can be offered at. Sure, some people moaned about their EV1 leases being terminated and the cars being crushed, but the vast majority of Californians turned their backs on the technology.
b) Mass production does not reduce commodities costs. If you have a battery with an ounce of platinum in it, it is going to be 3k, minimum, because, platinum right now is around 3k an ounce. Even good old gold is expensive.
The bottom line is, if people -really- wanted to buy electric cars, GM and Ford would most certainly make them, because they want to sell cars and honestly, features in cars at this point are just items that appear on a bill material and are associated with a marketing cluster analysis. But, as it is, most environmentalists are impoverished cheapskates, as well, and so, cannot afford or will not pay premiums on exotic vehicles at a high level of production.