That's what I was thinking too: I'd assume it would be like being at a bank drive-through window and that someone is watching me through a camera, so might as well tell that person thank you. Or some people might assume the car is being remote-controlled, and be telling that person thank you. Doesn't seem like odd behavior to me. I doubt many of those people are actually just thanking the car.
I'm sorry, what? Three sharks wash up on the beach and die and it's suddenly an article on climate change and Trump hating? Really grasping for newsworthy stuff?
Something here doesn't pass the sniff test. I mean, articles are often biased but the headline says "dismissed" while the text states that the expired three-year terms weren't renewed. Goldman says "what's the scientific reason for removing...", thereby both indicating that this is anti-science, and they they are being forcibly removed. Then she says that it's the other people inserting politics into science.
I don't know the whole story but just offhand this sounds incredibly one-sided. The EPA spokesman said there are hundreds of applicants, yet another individual stated that he has never known someone on the board to not be reinstated at the end of their term. So there's basically been the same 18 people for years and years? How open-minded and non-political is that? Sounds like the three-year term has been merely formal. Is there anything "scientific" about that?
Many commenters here seem to not have grasped the entire story. I am a licensed professional engineer so I had an interest in finding out what was going on.
Review the article and you'll see a series of letters spanning a couple of years. The first at the bottom was (I thought) gracious, requesting more information, who he had talked to, and what "services" he referred to providing, and kindly informing Mr Jarlstrom that he really ought not to advertise his services as engineering services, since that is a violation.
He repeatedly insisted on doing so, until the most recent letter informed him that since he insisted on it, he was to be fined for it. It is him who is making a big deal out of this, not the board.
Now whether or not he actually does have good information is a different point, but so far I have not seen any indication that he was willing to work with the board in providing them with the requested details.
I used it recently at work to write a research paper. The formatting and presentation is much more professional than anything created in Word. My wife and I also republished some public domain works, re-typesetting the books and cleaning up the pictures. The Memoir class was invaluable for this. Other than that I guess it's mostly letters and little projects of my own.
Once the police begin using these "safety" devices that prevent others from using the gun, then it should become widespread.
Extra safety measures sound great until you try to implement them. I don't know of any biometric safety method that is reliable enough to stake your life on. Grip recognition sounds great until the system fails, you don't get your "calm and collected grip", you have to use your other hand, or you get injured somehow. There are some magnetic ones that work if you are wearing a magnetic ring and these seem reliable but only work for revolvers. People who want to impose these measures don't shoot guns themselves apparently. It's like imposing efficiency standards that are unattainable.
When it's reliable enough for the police, it will be reliable enough for everyone else.
I thought Roger Ebert's comments after Columbine were interesting:
"Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.
The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."
In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy."
That's right. I hardly see why because one guy predicts the end of the world, it's Slashdot worthy.
And as is pointed out below, Christians for the last 1900 years have understood the "this generation will not pass away" as referring to the judgement at Jerusalem in the destruction of the temple (a sort of coming of Christ).
And keep in mind that some of the best logicians in history have been Christians. There are some in modern times that send their brains on a vacation but Scripture has been well-defended over the years as completely consistent with itself. Every single supposed contradiction has been dealt with if you're willing to give an honest look and not quote out of context.
This type of language doesn't convince anyone of your point, and most of you are preaching to the choir in any event. Though you rail on Christians and their stupidity (or at the very least, religious "nuts"), there are a decent number of agnostic or atheist who find evidence for the evolutionary theory lacking.
Let's get one thing straight: I don't know of anyone who questions micro-evolution so arguments with those examples are straw men. Everyone recognizes changes in successive generations of dogs. However, many, including scientists, are skeptical of macro-evolution, or that a dog will become anything but a dog. Bacteria has been cited. At the end of 10,000 generations it is a different bacteria, yet it is still bacteria.
The problem is a philosophical one, not a scientific one. Evolution is a uniform theory that explains the world in a naturalistic way. If you assume it is a purely naturalistic world, it's the only option you've got. Otherwise the only alternative appears to be belief in some higher intelligence or God.
I've searched for evidence. Unbiased evidence. Pored over Wikipedia articles, websites, I read "Origin of the Species", and frankly, the rosy evidence that is presented is shown through rose-colored lenses. The problem is,
everything looks like evolution if you assume it, and evolutionists make a priori assumptions just like everyone else. Don't pretend it's purely unbiased science, recognize your assumptions, study your epistemology. Many clever people can make up reasons behind why things happened the way they think it did. Darwin and Dawkins both talk about the eye and explain how it could have evolved step by step. That doesn't prove that it did though, or even prove that it is possible. Darwin's book gives many "stories" of how one thing could have led to another. It's a good explanation of how things got from point A to point B, but it doesn't prove that it actually did. It only looks that way if you assume that's how it happened.
And as a Christian myself, I have absolutely no problem studying the world. I am fascinated by every part of science, by exploration, by discovery. Yet I do so with the base assumption that God made it for our enjoyment. I can think and reason for myself too, but my basic assumptions are different. Are my discoveries then invalid or diminished? What about those of Newton, Henry, Faraday, or Maxwell (all Christians by the way)?
Mod me down for a rant AND for being off topic but....
I love how every time a story like this comes out somebody immediately, unprovoked, starts bashing Creationists. Is it because of insecurity or do you think it's cool? Well it isn't. It's puerile.
Oh, and while I'm here, posting something and appending "you insensitive clod" is way too overused. Just like the "3. ?????? 4. Profit!!" used to be.
I appreciate the informative posts that break out of the mold and actually give reasons, rather than an aping conformity to what is posted over and over again.
That's a very good concern to have. The great thing about homeschooling in the US today (as opposed to even 25 years ago) is that there is a vast wealth of material to draw from. There are so many companies now competing for offering homeschooling material that there is no reason that a parent couldn't do it. Some of it is quite good in fact. From my own experience, the lessons were well-explained by the material, so much so that I could teach myself (which was excellent preparation for university). For those parents who aren't comfortable with that route or have less self-motivated children, there are video lessons that go through subjects like chemistry, calculus, etc.
My mother never knew beyond high-school math, I was doing basic calculus in jr. high. Many cities have good support groups with classes taught by those knowledgeable in those fields. The best thing is, a parent can give personal attention to a specific need that a public school teacher, with 40+ kids, cannot.
Though apparently by "ultra-fanatic" you mean any religious group, I couldn't agree more. It's precisely the reason why I intend to homeschool any children I have;)
Leading the world in the number of papers published is not equivalent to leading to world in scientific research.
An old professor of mine has said that he has been shocked by the number of times he's been reading a paper by a Chinese researcher and found large sections of the paper copied verbatim from one of his own. In a country that is so competitive in publishing papers, I'm sure many succumb to the pressure and temptation. That's not to say that there are good, original advances being made, but I'm not quite as optimistic as the news title leads one to believe. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/rapidpdf/274/5286/337.pdf
The whole point is moot anyway until life is discovered on other planets. Does the Vatican just think that we're close to that discovery? Why debate something that is still hypothetical when making a decision now will affect absolutely nothing.
I'm not quite so sure that every president ignored nuclear power. For example, I know Reagan pushed for it in California at the very least. I think it's safe to say that the people of the US as a whole were afraid of it and therefore ignored it as a viable option.
My experience is my evidence, but you have yet to cite anything except unjustified opinion and I'm tired of hearing people who are prejudiced right from the start. I even qualified my statement by saying that perhaps it is just that like-minded people hang around each other so maybe I didn't have a broad enough sampling.
It just seems as though you're making broad, all-encompassing statements as though you know exactly what is happening in every home-schooling family. You don't, and neither do I. My main point still stands: you cannot say that "most" parents just goof-off. It's analogous to me telling you that most parents who send their kids to public school don't care about their education. There is nothing to show that. The evidence is quite to the contrary, be it personal experience or statistical.
I'm still not trying to make the claim that home-schooled children will always be better equipped. However, they are not nearly as ill-equipped as some people make them out to be. Keep an open mind.
My own experience being home-schooled was quite the opposite. I had been accustomed to poring over books for hours without a break and to see students in class, checking their cell phones, working out crosswords, and showing a complete lack of respect..... well it was appalling quite frankly.
And there's another thing. Perhaps this was again just my experience but I found that I had the ability to actually teach myself things because I would read the textbooks. Most of my undergraduate classmates seemed to have missed out on this. So rather than being "woefully unprepared" for higher education, I found myself more prepared than 99% of my classmates.
I wonder how you can definitively say that "most home schooling parents do goof off." How many families have you observed?
I am currently a graduate student in Electrical Engineering and I know of two other homeschoolers beside myself in the college of engineering. I was the top graduate in electrical engineering, one of the others I knew was the top Junior (I reviewed GPAs for an honor society) and a third is a WW Allen Scholar and is a very bright, hard-working individual in Chemical Engineering. I'm sure there are others that I don't know about and I'm sure there are some who are not so hard-working or smart. But out of my sampling of three, "most" (none really) seemed to have parents who goofed off.
Being a home-schooler myself I have actually come into contact with a lot of families who home-school and of the 20 high-school-age children or so that I know personally in town, 4 of them were National Merit Scholars and the rest have been accepted with scholarships to various universities. Again, where is your proof of "most parents" goofing off?
I do not doubt that there are some. In my experience meeting with well over 50 home-school families and over 100 kids I never had that experience. Maybe because we were all like-minded, I don't know. I have only ever met one person that knew someone who did "goof off" as a home-schooling parent. So to provide an omniscient blanket statement that says "most home schooling parents goof off" seems quite a stretch to me.
Every parent I know who home schools, does it because they/want/ their children to have a better education, not because they want to be lazy. And with the amount and type of material out there, parents don't have to be geniuses themselves. My mother didn't know beyond basic Algebra but through the curriculum she bought I was able to learn Calculus at about 14. So please, don't make general accusations without any evidence. In fact, the evidence is quite the opposite than what presupposed notions would indicate.
The point of that statement was to say that not all (or even necessarily most) scientists are agreed. It drives me up a wall when people make that broad claim. If they mean climatologists then that should be specified.
Excellent post. The question really is whether humans are causing it or whether it is merely a part of earth's natural cycle.
And I would like to point out that it is not yet a consensus among scientists that global warming is not part of a natural cycle, or that humans are causing it. According to the survey cited in this article:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/01/19/eco.globalwarmingsurvey/index.html
Climatologists are 97% agreed that humans are causing it, Petroleum geologists are at 47% and meteorologists are at 64%. I think engineers would be even more skeptical though one might argue that they don't have the expertise. And consensus alone doesn't mean anything. When one is among a group of people wearing rose-coloured lenses, one tends to view everything through rose-coloured lenses. Everything then begins to look like human-caused global warming.
Regardless of whether it is true or not, the way that most countries are going about it is almost laughable. At least they are trying to do something but no one talks about whether it is most the most cost-effective method. For example, spending millions to cut down on emissions from vehicles in the UK. It's admirable, but how much does it all help? Will it prevent global warming by even one hundredth of one degree C during the next ten years? Highly unlikely. Yet if they were to paint the streets white to reflect sunlight, that could potentially help a lot more and be significantly cheaper.
I worked for MyLaptopGPS.com for a couple of years. They do pretty much what is being asked, offering the ability to delete certain files and even transfer files off of the laptop before deletion. This is in addition to the tracking-over-IP ability.
I saw some other comments to the effect that most thieves don't try to reformat, look for covert software, or things like that. That's true based on my experience. Most thieves either want to resell or use it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's what I was thinking too: I'd assume it would be like being at a bank drive-through window and that someone is watching me through a camera, so might as well tell that person thank you. Or some people might assume the car is being remote-controlled, and be telling that person thank you. Doesn't seem like odd behavior to me. I doubt many of those people are actually just thanking the car.
I saw an interview with him where he described himself as a "classical liberal".
I'm sorry, what? Three sharks wash up on the beach and die and it's suddenly an article on climate change and Trump hating? Really grasping for newsworthy stuff?
Something here doesn't pass the sniff test. I mean, articles are often biased but the headline says "dismissed" while the text states that the expired three-year terms weren't renewed. Goldman says "what's the scientific reason for removing...", thereby both indicating that this is anti-science, and they they are being forcibly removed. Then she says that it's the other people inserting politics into science.
I don't know the whole story but just offhand this sounds incredibly one-sided. The EPA spokesman said there are hundreds of applicants, yet another individual stated that he has never known someone on the board to not be reinstated at the end of their term. So there's basically been the same 18 people for years and years? How open-minded and non-political is that? Sounds like the three-year term has been merely formal. Is there anything "scientific" about that?
Many commenters here seem to not have grasped the entire story. I am a licensed professional engineer so I had an interest in finding out what was going on.
Review the article and you'll see a series of letters spanning a couple of years. The first at the bottom was (I thought) gracious, requesting more information, who he had talked to, and what "services" he referred to providing, and kindly informing Mr Jarlstrom that he really ought not to advertise his services as engineering services, since that is a violation.
He repeatedly insisted on doing so, until the most recent letter informed him that since he insisted on it, he was to be fined for it. It is him who is making a big deal out of this, not the board.
Now whether or not he actually does have good information is a different point, but so far I have not seen any indication that he was willing to work with the board in providing them with the requested details.
I used it recently at work to write a research paper. The formatting and presentation is much more professional than anything created in Word. My wife and I also republished some public domain works, re-typesetting the books and cleaning up the pictures. The Memoir class was invaluable for this. Other than that I guess it's mostly letters and little projects of my own.
Once the police begin using these "safety" devices that prevent others from using the gun, then it should become widespread.
Extra safety measures sound great until you try to implement them. I don't know of any biometric safety method that is reliable enough to stake your life on. Grip recognition sounds great until the system fails, you don't get your "calm and collected grip", you have to use your other hand, or you get injured somehow. There are some magnetic ones that work if you are wearing a magnetic ring and these seem reliable but only work for revolvers. People who want to impose these measures don't shoot guns themselves apparently. It's like imposing efficiency standards that are unattainable.
When it's reliable enough for the police, it will be reliable enough for everyone else.
I thought Roger Ebert's comments after Columbine were interesting:
"Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.
The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."
In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy."
That's right. I hardly see why because one guy predicts the end of the world, it's Slashdot worthy. And as is pointed out below, Christians for the last 1900 years have understood the "this generation will not pass away" as referring to the judgement at Jerusalem in the destruction of the temple (a sort of coming of Christ). And keep in mind that some of the best logicians in history have been Christians. There are some in modern times that send their brains on a vacation but Scripture has been well-defended over the years as completely consistent with itself. Every single supposed contradiction has been dealt with if you're willing to give an honest look and not quote out of context.
You definitely have a favorite adjective...
This type of language doesn't convince anyone of your point, and most of you are preaching to the choir in any event. Though you rail on Christians and their stupidity (or at the very least, religious "nuts"), there are a decent number of agnostic or atheist who find evidence for the evolutionary theory lacking.
Let's get one thing straight: I don't know of anyone who questions micro-evolution so arguments with those examples are straw men. Everyone recognizes changes in successive generations of dogs. However, many, including scientists, are skeptical of macro-evolution, or that a dog will become anything but a dog. Bacteria has been cited. At the end of 10,000 generations it is a different bacteria, yet it is still bacteria.
The problem is a philosophical one, not a scientific one. Evolution is a uniform theory that explains the world in a naturalistic way. If you assume it is a purely naturalistic world, it's the only option you've got. Otherwise the only alternative appears to be belief in some higher intelligence or God.
I've searched for evidence. Unbiased evidence. Pored over Wikipedia articles, websites, I read "Origin of the Species", and frankly, the rosy evidence that is presented is shown through rose-colored lenses. The problem is, everything looks like evolution if you assume it, and evolutionists make a priori assumptions just like everyone else. Don't pretend it's purely unbiased science, recognize your assumptions, study your epistemology. Many clever people can make up reasons behind why things happened the way they think it did. Darwin and Dawkins both talk about the eye and explain how it could have evolved step by step. That doesn't prove that it did though, or even prove that it is possible. Darwin's book gives many "stories" of how one thing could have led to another. It's a good explanation of how things got from point A to point B, but it doesn't prove that it actually did. It only looks that way if you assume that's how it happened.
And as a Christian myself, I have absolutely no problem studying the world. I am fascinated by every part of science, by exploration, by discovery. Yet I do so with the base assumption that God made it for our enjoyment. I can think and reason for myself too, but my basic assumptions are different. Are my discoveries then invalid or diminished? What about those of Newton, Henry, Faraday, or Maxwell (all Christians by the way)?
Mod me down for a rant AND for being off topic but....
I love how every time a story like this comes out somebody immediately, unprovoked, starts bashing Creationists. Is it because of insecurity or do you think it's cool? Well it isn't. It's puerile.
Oh, and while I'm here, posting something and appending "you insensitive clod" is way too overused. Just like the "3. ?????? 4. Profit!!" used to be.
I appreciate the informative posts that break out of the mold and actually give reasons, rather than an aping conformity to what is posted over and over again.
I agree, if you're going for a nice, clean, but snazzy sort of easy-to-get used to Windows feel, try Mint. It updates as regularly as Ubuntu does.
Wait, didn't a genetically programmed kill switch fail to work in Stargate Atlantis?! Does Rodney know about this?
That's a very good concern to have. The great thing about homeschooling in the US today (as opposed to even 25 years ago) is that there is a vast wealth of material to draw from. There are so many companies now competing for offering homeschooling material that there is no reason that a parent couldn't do it. Some of it is quite good in fact. From my own experience, the lessons were well-explained by the material, so much so that I could teach myself (which was excellent preparation for university). For those parents who aren't comfortable with that route or have less self-motivated children, there are video lessons that go through subjects like chemistry, calculus, etc.
My mother never knew beyond high-school math, I was doing basic calculus in jr. high. Many cities have good support groups with classes taught by those knowledgeable in those fields. The best thing is, a parent can give personal attention to a specific need that a public school teacher, with 40+ kids, cannot.
Though apparently by "ultra-fanatic" you mean any religious group, I couldn't agree more. It's precisely the reason why I intend to homeschool any children I have ;)
Right.... because state schools are completely unbiased.....
Leading the world in the number of papers published is not equivalent to leading to world in scientific research.
An old professor of mine has said that he has been shocked by the number of times he's been reading a paper by a Chinese researcher and found large sections of the paper copied verbatim from one of his own. In a country that is so competitive in publishing papers, I'm sure many succumb to the pressure and temptation. That's not to say that there are good, original advances being made, but I'm not quite as optimistic as the news title leads one to believe.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/rapidpdf/274/5286/337.pdf
The whole point is moot anyway until life is discovered on other planets. Does the Vatican just think that we're close to that discovery? Why debate something that is still hypothetical when making a decision now will affect absolutely nothing.
I'm not quite so sure that every president ignored nuclear power. For example, I know Reagan pushed for it in California at the very least. I think it's safe to say that the people of the US as a whole were afraid of it and therefore ignored it as a viable option.
My experience is my evidence, but you have yet to cite anything except unjustified opinion and I'm tired of hearing people who are prejudiced right from the start. I even qualified my statement by saying that perhaps it is just that like-minded people hang around each other so maybe I didn't have a broad enough sampling.
It just seems as though you're making broad, all-encompassing statements as though you know exactly what is happening in every home-schooling family. You don't, and neither do I. My main point still stands: you cannot say that "most" parents just goof-off. It's analogous to me telling you that most parents who send their kids to public school don't care about their education. There is nothing to show that. The evidence is quite to the contrary, be it personal experience or statistical.
I'm still not trying to make the claim that home-schooled children will always be better equipped. However, they are not nearly as ill-equipped as some people make them out to be. Keep an open mind.
My own experience being home-schooled was quite the opposite. I had been accustomed to poring over books for hours without a break and to see students in class, checking their cell phones, working out crosswords, and showing a complete lack of respect..... well it was appalling quite frankly.
And there's another thing. Perhaps this was again just my experience but I found that I had the ability to actually teach myself things because I would read the textbooks. Most of my undergraduate classmates seemed to have missed out on this. So rather than being "woefully unprepared" for higher education, I found myself more prepared than 99% of my classmates.
I wonder how you can definitively say that "most home schooling parents do goof off." How many families have you observed?
/want/ their children to have a better education, not because they want to be lazy. And with the amount and type of material out there, parents don't have to be geniuses themselves. My mother didn't know beyond basic Algebra but through the curriculum she bought I was able to learn Calculus at about 14. So please, don't make general accusations without any evidence. In fact, the evidence is quite the opposite than what presupposed notions would indicate.
I am currently a graduate student in Electrical Engineering and I know of two other homeschoolers beside myself in the college of engineering. I was the top graduate in electrical engineering, one of the others I knew was the top Junior (I reviewed GPAs for an honor society) and a third is a WW Allen Scholar and is a very bright, hard-working individual in Chemical Engineering. I'm sure there are others that I don't know about and I'm sure there are some who are not so hard-working or smart. But out of my sampling of three, "most" (none really) seemed to have parents who goofed off.
Being a home-schooler myself I have actually come into contact with a lot of families who home-school and of the 20 high-school-age children or so that I know personally in town, 4 of them were National Merit Scholars and the rest have been accepted with scholarships to various universities. Again, where is your proof of "most parents" goofing off?
I do not doubt that there are some. In my experience meeting with well over 50 home-school families and over 100 kids I never had that experience. Maybe because we were all like-minded, I don't know. I have only ever met one person that knew someone who did "goof off" as a home-schooling parent. So to provide an omniscient blanket statement that says "most home schooling parents goof off" seems quite a stretch to me.
Every parent I know who home schools, does it because they
The point of that statement was to say that not all (or even necessarily most) scientists are agreed. It drives me up a wall when people make that broad claim. If they mean climatologists then that should be specified.
Excellent post. The question really is whether humans are causing it or whether it is merely a part of earth's natural cycle.
And I would like to point out that it is not yet a consensus among scientists that global warming is not part of a natural cycle, or that humans are causing it. According to the survey cited in this article:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/01/19/eco.globalwarmingsurvey/index.html
Climatologists are 97% agreed that humans are causing it, Petroleum geologists are at 47% and meteorologists are at 64%. I think engineers would be even more skeptical though one might argue that they don't have the expertise. And consensus alone doesn't mean anything. When one is among a group of people wearing rose-coloured lenses, one tends to view everything through rose-coloured lenses. Everything then begins to look like human-caused global warming.
Regardless of whether it is true or not, the way that most countries are going about it is almost laughable. At least they are trying to do something but no one talks about whether it is most the most cost-effective method. For example, spending millions to cut down on emissions from vehicles in the UK. It's admirable, but how much does it all help? Will it prevent global warming by even one hundredth of one degree C during the next ten years? Highly unlikely. Yet if they were to paint the streets white to reflect sunlight, that could potentially help a lot more and be significantly cheaper.
Here is a highly recommended video on alternative solutions:
http://reason.tv/video/show/621.html
I worked for MyLaptopGPS.com for a couple of years. They do pretty much what is being asked, offering the ability to delete certain files and even transfer files off of the laptop before deletion. This is in addition to the tracking-over-IP ability.
I saw some other comments to the effect that most thieves don't try to reformat, look for covert software, or things like that. That's true based on my experience. Most thieves either want to resell or use it.