That's the most interesting comment that I've had on my meta-moderation decision. Most people just flame me for it.
You bring up an interesting point. I probably won't change my ways, but I'll certainly consider this method of moderation.
Frankly, there probably just needs to be a new moderation system. This current one seems to be breaking down under the sheer volume of posts that we have.
You're right. There ARE other taxes to take into consideration. All provinces have a sales tax except Alberta, and there's the federal 7% GST which applies to all goods and services except food.
However, I don't feel these give a good sense of how much people are taxed, since these are sort of 'opt in' taxes. The less you buy, the less you're taxed. The less you drive, the less you're taxed. The only way to avoid income tax is by not working.
Since I don't smoke, drive very little (I commute by bike), don't drink, and tend to not buy too many things, I don't pay as much tax as someone else down the road who likes buying a lot of consumer electronics, drives a Hummer, and goes out every Friday to drink and smoke a lot.
The maximum tax rate in Canada at the federal level is 29%, and that kicks in when you make more than $113,000. Since the tax rate is progressive, you pay nothing on the first $8000, 16% on the money between $8000 and $35,000, 22% on the money between $35,000 and $70,000, and 26% on the money between $70,000 and $113,000.
The highest tax rate in the country is in Newfoundland/Labrador, and at it's MAXIMUM, you pay a TOTAL (that means including federal tax) of 47.02% on money over $113,000. Remember that the tax rate is progressive. If you make $113,001, you pay 47 cents of tax on that ONE DOLLAR, but everything below that is taxed at a lower rate.
Nowhere in Canada does you full tax approach 50%. You may be paying anywhere from 30% - 40%, depending on how good a job you have.
In Alberta (the lowest tax rate in the country - a flat rate of 10%), your personal exemption is $14,337 and the federal exemption is $8012. You pay 16% federal tax up to $35,000, and a flat 10% provincial tax.
So, we'll do provincial tax first. You only have to pay tax on $20667 because of the exemption. It's 10%, so you pay $2067 provincial tax.
Federally, you would pay tax on 26988. The rate is 16% in this bracket, so that's $4318. That's a grand total of $6385 on $35,000. That works out to a total of about 18% of your gross income.
Please stop saying that we're taxed at 50%. It simply isn't true. I've given you the number, and you can do the math yourself. NOBODY IN CANADA PAYS 50% TAX.
Whether or not there's corruption and waste in the government is another discussion. (Though it is worth noting that while the government pissed our money away, the books were still balanced. We haven't had a deficit budget in years.)
Oh, and here's where I got the tax info from. Check my math yourself. It's possible that I made a mistake, but the conclusion is still true.
Anecdotally, I find the interface under OS X to be faster and easier to use, and OS X as an OS considerably more stable. It handles greater loads for longer periods of time than my XP machine at work.
I won't claim that OS X and the iApps are perfect (I file bugs about interface problems all the time), and quite a lot of people don't like the way the finder works, or how the dock is implemented. However, I wouldn't say that XP works 'equally well'. At best, I find it performs adequately well. It manages to stay stable enough for me to do my work for a few days before I NEED to reboot (or it kindly arbitrarily does it for me), but I often find myself looking for menu options that aren't there, or trying to do things that may as well be entirely impossible. (The 'services' menu option that's available in every OS X application by default is something that's terribly useful now and then, and drives me nuts that XP doesn't have.)
In any case, everybody's personal experience is just that - personal. I could contest your points one by one, but I'm not really trying to convince you. I couldn't really let that comment go, though.
Given that I don't think that they work equally well, I would advise potential switchers to find an OS X machine and sit down and see if it does what you want, and if you can live with the differences to XP. As long as OS X stays on this track, I'll never buy another Windows box. I can work faster, longer and more enjoyably on a Mac.
I found VS6 to be better than VS.Net. VS.Net 2004 is better than the first version.
I still don't use it for anything except debugging (which VS.Net 2004 is EXCELLENT at). I use emacs, since the editor of VS isn't flexible enough to give me the functionality that I'm used to from emacs.
Frankly, VS just isn't stable enough. I have it crash several times a week for no reason, the intellisense stuff is too expensive sometimes causing VS to hang for several seconds while I try to SCROLL TEXT (something that should NEVER be slow, especially on a dual processor 1800+ MP), and it's source control integration sometimes doesn't work very well (with Visual Source Safe, which is a whole different set of problems.) At best, I'd call it a mediocre complete environment, with a really fantastic debugger.
Well, consider that the price to produce most of this stuff is quite high. Companies are trying to make back their investments in
1) Research 2) Design 3) Parts 4) Fabrication
If they sold everything on razor slim margins, they might make back the money on the parts and fab, but they're still out for research and design.
Trust that these corporations have gone and done the studies to see what price they should be offering this stuff at to maximize their profits and get as many of your dollars as possible. If something costs $5000, it's because selling it for $5000 makes them more money than selling a few more, but at $2000.
I was a big fan of virtual desktops when I was using Linux, and I have 8 (EIGHT!) virtual desktops here at work. At home, I haven't even bothered to look for something to handle that since expose. I find Expose cooler, more convenient and faster to use than multiple desktops. Get a mouse with a few extra buttons, and bind the expose commands to those extra buttons. It changes the whole experience.
When I look at Dashboard, though, I see a whole bunch of Widgets bunched together that you look at all at once. You bring up your dashboard, take a look at everything going on, then stow the dashboard.
Konfabulator sticks the widgets right on the desktop. You can look at them one at a time, place them where you want, etc. I think Konfabulator will keep their current user base, and probably grow it a little due to similarity when doing a google search. Someone doing a search for 'widget os x' will probably get a link to the Konfabulator site.
I'll probably use both at the same time. I have only one widget - a weather widget - and it's nice to always have it sitting there. When I need a calculator or something that I only need to call up once in a while, I'll hit my Dashboard key.
I don't think there's actually a problem here. After people get over the initial shock, they'll realize that there's enough difference to let both exist, and enough similarity to make both stronger.
Compare it to a new LCD TV. At least here, it turns out that the 30" display is only $500CDN more than a 30" LCD television. Apple's not charging an outrageous price, even if it is high. Apparently, the market is willing to bear that kind of price.
It's when this bites you in the ass that it's annoying. I bought the Crash Test Dummies album "I don't care that you don't mind", and I hated it, by and large. The single that they released from it, 'The day we never met' is fantastic, but all the rest of it is unlistenable to me.
The top selling 'game' for the PS2 when it was first released was 'The Matrix' on DVD.
Secondly, I don't know why everyone forgets that it's EASY to emulate the PS1...it's got the same main processor as a washing machine. You can't do that with a 700MHz PIII without PAYING for the 700MHz PIII.
The backwards compatibility of the PS2 is a nice bullet point, but it doesn't DRIVE sales. People that are seriously considering another console instead of a PS2 are rarely swayed by that ONE particular point. It's just another feature in a long list. With the XBox 2, it'll be one less feature in a different long list.
I suppose I agree; the poster doesn't seem to be someone already in the mix.
Still, it's pretty nice to have such a wide array of lenses to work with. Arguably, someone just starting should start with the low tech lenses so he can get a sense of what he's doing before moving to the high tech ones. Honestly, the manual lenses end up taking far better photos for us, and we can do things exactly as we like with them.
I suppose what I would actually recommend is some photography classes and a used Film SLR.:D
Here's a great review/comparison of the two cameras.
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikond70/page20. as p
The 300D is more commonly known as the rebel.
Pick the D70 if you want 1) A wide array of old lenses to choose from. (And I've heard that it's often more important to pick your lens than pick the body) 2) To take a lot of consecutive photographs. With our D70, we can take pictures at 1fps until the card fills - we aren't bound by the buffer like the Canons are. This is true for both compressed and RAW photos. (You need to make sure your memory card is fast, though.) 3) A lot of other things that I'm not going to list off the top of my head.:)
Either of those cameras is good, though. At my skill level (and possibly at your skill level, given the way you asked your question) it's hard to go wrong with either of these cameras.
The major advantage to the D70, in my opinion, is that the body is backwards compatible with old lenses. We have a Nikon F2 Film SLR, and our lenses fit and work perfectly with the D70. My wife's favorite lens - a 100mm macro - still takes great pictures with the D70. You're buying yourself into a line of cameras that have a lot of used lenses floating around.
Maybe he wants Microsoft to do useful things that make him (and presumably other people) more productive. Just because Apple did it first doesn't mean it's an idea that only Apple should have had. His entire point is that Microsoft is stagnant while OSS and OS X are moving forward, trying to tear away at MS marketshare. Unless they think about things like this, they're doomed to spin their wheels and slowly have their business eroded.
Why should his thought that.Mac is a good idea destroy his credibility. Your analysis is little more than opinion as well. Where's your credibility coming from?
(Incidentally, you've misunderstood his last point. He doesn't want MS to somehow open their APIs, he wants them to make it easy to migrate your stuff off your old machine onto your new machine. When I upgrade to a new OS, the largest waste of my time is getting and installing all the applications that I lost or that have become somehow incompatible.)
Possibly more than you realize. He KNOWS that there are newer choices out there for him, and yet he either can't be bothered to upgrade or thinks that it will reduce or destroy his productivity. In that way, he's considerably more like the average user, who is almost always unsure of whether or not they should spend their money on an upgrade.
It's probably also worth noting that he's not writing technical manuals or how-to books. A book like 'How the Web was Won' is more of an informational non-fiction book. He doesn't need to know anything about packet switching to analyze the state of the internet and its main controllers and contributors.
Just because you don't have problems doesn't actually mean anything. Your counterexample only shows that at least one person in the world DOESN'T have problems with XP. (Similarily, him saying that he has problems doesn't prove anything either.)
Personally, I'm forced to reboot at least once a week due to performance issues, and I usually get a crash once every two weeks at best. When I used XP as a home operating system, it was fine, but using it at work is painful.
I hear more people complaining about XP than enjoying it. That's certainly anecdotal, but anecdotaly, I also hear about more Linux and OS X users that enjoy their experiences.
Why are you so concerned with PRESENTATION? You should be trying to independently verify your NEWS when possible and reasonable. Why would you ever take that stuff for granted?
For example, I'm working on a game and we had it demo at E3. We were excited to read the coverage, and interestingly, some of it was incorrect. The reporters made little slips, but they're still giving their readers mis-information. I'm sure that normal journalists are the same. They're human, and prone to small mistakes here and there. Your news is likely slightly incorrect in many ways, every day. Why aren't you up in arms about how they're presenting it as FACT but it has all sorts of right or left-wing spin on it?
All media is subject to scrutiny, no matter how it's presented. Don't single out Moore's 'Mockumentaries' (which is how he actually presents them...I'm sure the Academy is the one that puts him in the 'Documentary' category) for being particularily misleading in its classification.
At the very least, it's worth noting that there's good CORRELATIONAL evidence that rising CO2 levels have an impact on the temperature. The graphs of global CO2 levels in the air match very closely with upward trending temperature graphs. You can find such graphs in some meteorology textbooks, and sometimes in geology textbooks.
When volcanoes erupt, the change in climate for a couple years is usually noticable and fairly immediate. Tokyo, IIRC, has a climate system all its own because of the density of its population. The city generates enough heat to modify the climate around it. (I think there was a/. article a while back that talked about this.)
It's worth noting that your assertion that we're in one of the colder times in the Earth's history is entirely incorrect. Starting in the late 1300's, the planet went through a 'little ice age' right after the 'Mediaeval Climatic Optimum'. Temperatures in the 1990s were already higher than they were around the year 800. About 18000 years ago, temperatures were roughly 4.5 degrees (celcius, of course) lower than they are now.
While it's true that the planet has been without ice caps (early in planetary development) and that life has existed in the past when it was warmer (nobody has ever disputed that), it's pretty irrational to believe that we have ZERO impact on our environment and air temperature. Further, just because the planet and life will survive doesn't mean that we can do what we like. It's entirely possible that we can make life very hard for ourselves, or cause the next mass extinction. The planet is tough. Something will definitely survive no matter what we do. I just want to be part of the life that survives, and I want a reasonable quality of life at the same time. If that means I have to pollute a little less now, that's no problem with me. It's not actually very hard.
Lastly, the source of MY information is the textbook 'Essentials of Meteorology' by C. Donald Ahrens. You can find the graphs and data that I'm talking about in chapter 13, about changing climate. I would politely request that you get off YOUR high horse, check YOUR facts, and stop haranguing other people about their lack of solid information until you get some yourself - or can at least quote your sources.
(BTW, to anyone that has access to this book, second edition - figure 13.10 is the one that shows that air temperatures tend to closely follow rising and falling CO2 levels in the atmosphere.)
...is that even IF these cars don't get the mileage that they claim, their emissions are so low that they fool the testers into thinking that less fuel is burning than actually is. Even if the cars were getting EXACTLY the same mileage as non-hybrid counterparts, the amount they pollute appears to be significantly less, which helps at least part of the problem.
The headline to this story is misleading, too. If you RTFA, Toyota notes that they've had only a few complaints, and most people seem to be getting close to the advertised mileage. I won't believe that the cars are doing exactly as well as promised - that never happens - but because the cars are lighter, more aerodynamic, and take advantage of a lot of excellent technologies, I won't believe that they're as 'wasteful' as other cars in their class.
Slashdot Mirror
Fortunately, for certain tax brackets, we have the GST refund once a quarter.
I agree, though. This is why I'm so strenuously against flat taxes. They benefit the rich and shaft the poor.
That's the most interesting comment that I've had on my meta-moderation decision. Most people just flame me for it.
You bring up an interesting point. I probably won't change my ways, but I'll certainly consider this method of moderation.
Frankly, there probably just needs to be a new moderation system. This current one seems to be breaking down under the sheer volume of posts that we have.
You're right. There ARE other taxes to take into consideration. All provinces have a sales tax except Alberta, and there's the federal 7% GST which applies to all goods and services except food.
However, I don't feel these give a good sense of how much people are taxed, since these are sort of 'opt in' taxes. The less you buy, the less you're taxed. The less you drive, the less you're taxed. The only way to avoid income tax is by not working.
Since I don't smoke, drive very little (I commute by bike), don't drink, and tend to not buy too many things, I don't pay as much tax as someone else down the road who likes buying a lot of consumer electronics, drives a Hummer, and goes out every Friday to drink and smoke a lot.
I'd like to know how you're paying 50% tax.
The maximum tax rate in Canada at the federal level is 29%, and that kicks in when you make more than $113,000. Since the tax rate is progressive, you pay nothing on the first $8000, 16% on the money between $8000 and $35,000, 22% on the money between $35,000 and $70,000, and 26% on the money between $70,000 and $113,000.
The highest tax rate in the country is in Newfoundland/Labrador, and at it's MAXIMUM, you pay a TOTAL (that means including federal tax) of 47.02% on money over $113,000. Remember that the tax rate is progressive. If you make $113,001, you pay 47 cents of tax on that ONE DOLLAR, but everything below that is taxed at a lower rate.
Nowhere in Canada does you full tax approach 50%. You may be paying anywhere from 30% - 40%, depending on how good a job you have.
In Alberta (the lowest tax rate in the country - a flat rate of 10%), your personal exemption is $14,337 and the federal exemption is $8012. You pay 16% federal tax up to $35,000, and a flat 10% provincial tax.
So, we'll do provincial tax first. You only have to pay tax on $20667 because of the exemption. It's 10%, so you pay $2067 provincial tax.
Federally, you would pay tax on 26988. The rate is 16% in this bracket, so that's $4318. That's a grand total of $6385 on $35,000. That works out to a total of about 18% of your gross income.
Please stop saying that we're taxed at 50%. It simply isn't true. I've given you the number, and you can do the math yourself. NOBODY IN CANADA PAYS 50% TAX.
Whether or not there's corruption and waste in the government is another discussion. (Though it is worth noting that while the government pissed our money away, the books were still balanced. We haven't had a deficit budget in years.)
Oh, and here's where I got the tax info from. Check my math yourself. It's possible that I made a mistake, but the conclusion is still true.
http://www.taxtips.ca/tax_rates.htm
Anecdotally, I find the interface under OS X to be faster and easier to use, and OS X as an OS considerably more stable. It handles greater loads for longer periods of time than my XP machine at work.
I won't claim that OS X and the iApps are perfect (I file bugs about interface problems all the time), and quite a lot of people don't like the way the finder works, or how the dock is implemented. However, I wouldn't say that XP works 'equally well'. At best, I find it performs adequately well. It manages to stay stable enough for me to do my work for a few days before I NEED to reboot (or it kindly arbitrarily does it for me), but I often find myself looking for menu options that aren't there, or trying to do things that may as well be entirely impossible. (The 'services' menu option that's available in every OS X application by default is something that's terribly useful now and then, and drives me nuts that XP doesn't have.)
In any case, everybody's personal experience is just that - personal. I could contest your points one by one, but I'm not really trying to convince you. I couldn't really let that comment go, though.
Given that I don't think that they work equally well, I would advise potential switchers to find an OS X machine and sit down and see if it does what you want, and if you can live with the differences to XP. As long as OS X stays on this track, I'll never buy another Windows box. I can work faster, longer and more enjoyably on a Mac.
I'd like to correct point 4 slightly: the music industry lobby isn't stronger, our laws and courts are just stronger.
I suppose that semantically, those are almost equivalent, though.
I found VS6 to be better than VS.Net. VS.Net 2004 is better than the first version.
I still don't use it for anything except debugging (which VS.Net 2004 is EXCELLENT at). I use emacs, since the editor of VS isn't flexible enough to give me the functionality that I'm used to from emacs.
Frankly, VS just isn't stable enough. I have it crash several times a week for no reason, the intellisense stuff is too expensive sometimes causing VS to hang for several seconds while I try to SCROLL TEXT (something that should NEVER be slow, especially on a dual processor 1800+ MP), and it's source control integration sometimes doesn't work very well (with Visual Source Safe, which is a whole different set of problems.) At best, I'd call it a mediocre complete environment, with a really fantastic debugger.
Absolutely. I think this is a really good idea.
File a bug with Apple. Occasionally, they actually do something about little things like this.
Well, consider that the price to produce most of this stuff is quite high. Companies are trying to make back their investments in
1) Research
2) Design
3) Parts
4) Fabrication
If they sold everything on razor slim margins, they might make back the money on the parts and fab, but they're still out for research and design.
Trust that these corporations have gone and done the studies to see what price they should be offering this stuff at to maximize their profits and get as many of your dollars as possible. If something costs $5000, it's because selling it for $5000 makes them more money than selling a few more, but at $2000.
I was a big fan of virtual desktops when I was using Linux, and I have 8 (EIGHT!) virtual desktops here at work. At home, I haven't even bothered to look for something to handle that since expose. I find Expose cooler, more convenient and faster to use than multiple desktops. Get a mouse with a few extra buttons, and bind the expose commands to those extra buttons. It changes the whole experience.
When I look at Dashboard, though, I see a whole bunch of Widgets bunched together that you look at all at once. You bring up your dashboard, take a look at everything going on, then stow the dashboard.
Konfabulator sticks the widgets right on the desktop. You can look at them one at a time, place them where you want, etc. I think Konfabulator will keep their current user base, and probably grow it a little due to similarity when doing a google search. Someone doing a search for 'widget os x' will probably get a link to the Konfabulator site.
I'll probably use both at the same time. I have only one widget - a weather widget - and it's nice to always have it sitting there. When I need a calculator or something that I only need to call up once in a while, I'll hit my Dashboard key.
I don't think there's actually a problem here. After people get over the initial shock, they'll realize that there's enough difference to let both exist, and enough similarity to make both stronger.
Compare it to a new LCD TV. At least here, it turns out that the 30" display is only $500CDN more than a 30" LCD television. Apple's not charging an outrageous price, even if it is high. Apparently, the market is willing to bear that kind of price.
It's when this bites you in the ass that it's annoying. I bought the Crash Test Dummies album "I don't care that you don't mind", and I hated it, by and large. The single that they released from it, 'The day we never met' is fantastic, but all the rest of it is unlistenable to me.
The top selling 'game' for the PS2 when it was first released was 'The Matrix' on DVD.
Secondly, I don't know why everyone forgets that it's EASY to emulate the PS1...it's got the same main processor as a washing machine. You can't do that with a 700MHz PIII without PAYING for the 700MHz PIII.
The backwards compatibility of the PS2 is a nice bullet point, but it doesn't DRIVE sales. People that are seriously considering another console instead of a PS2 are rarely swayed by that ONE particular point. It's just another feature in a long list. With the XBox 2, it'll be one less feature in a different long list.
What the other 'minor changes' are?
If me'n my wife didn't agree with you, we wouldn't have a D70. :)
I suppose I agree; the poster doesn't seem to be someone already in the mix.
:D
Still, it's pretty nice to have such a wide array of lenses to work with. Arguably, someone just starting should start with the low tech lenses so he can get a sense of what he's doing before moving to the high tech ones. Honestly, the manual lenses end up taking far better photos for us, and we can do things exactly as we like with them.
I suppose what I would actually recommend is some photography classes and a used Film SLR.
Here's a great review/comparison of the two cameras.
. as p
:)
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/nikond70/page20
The 300D is more commonly known as the rebel.
Pick the D70 if you want
1) A wide array of old lenses to choose from. (And I've heard that it's often more important to pick your lens than pick the body)
2) To take a lot of consecutive photographs. With our D70, we can take pictures at 1fps until the card fills - we aren't bound by the buffer like the Canons are. This is true for both compressed and RAW photos. (You need to make sure your memory card is fast, though.)
3) A lot of other things that I'm not going to list off the top of my head.
Either of those cameras is good, though. At my skill level (and possibly at your skill level, given the way you asked your question) it's hard to go wrong with either of these cameras.
The major advantage to the D70, in my opinion, is that the body is backwards compatible with old lenses. We have a Nikon F2 Film SLR, and our lenses fit and work perfectly with the D70. My wife's favorite lens - a 100mm macro - still takes great pictures with the D70. You're buying yourself into a line of cameras that have a lot of used lenses floating around.
Maybe he wants Microsoft to do useful things that make him (and presumably other people) more productive. Just because Apple did it first doesn't mean it's an idea that only Apple should have had. His entire point is that Microsoft is stagnant while OSS and OS X are moving forward, trying to tear away at MS marketshare. Unless they think about things like this, they're doomed to spin their wheels and slowly have their business eroded.
.Mac is a good idea destroy his credibility. Your analysis is little more than opinion as well. Where's your credibility coming from?
Why should his thought that
(Incidentally, you've misunderstood his last point. He doesn't want MS to somehow open their APIs, he wants them to make it easy to migrate your stuff off your old machine onto your new machine. When I upgrade to a new OS, the largest waste of my time is getting and installing all the applications that I lost or that have become somehow incompatible.)
Possibly more than you realize. He KNOWS that there are newer choices out there for him, and yet he either can't be bothered to upgrade or thinks that it will reduce or destroy his productivity. In that way, he's considerably more like the average user, who is almost always unsure of whether or not they should spend their money on an upgrade.
It's probably also worth noting that he's not writing technical manuals or how-to books. A book like 'How the Web was Won' is more of an informational non-fiction book. He doesn't need to know anything about packet switching to analyze the state of the internet and its main controllers and contributors.
Just because you don't have problems doesn't actually mean anything. Your counterexample only shows that at least one person in the world DOESN'T have problems with XP. (Similarily, him saying that he has problems doesn't prove anything either.)
Personally, I'm forced to reboot at least once a week due to performance issues, and I usually get a crash once every two weeks at best. When I used XP as a home operating system, it was fine, but using it at work is painful.
I hear more people complaining about XP than enjoying it. That's certainly anecdotal, but anecdotaly, I also hear about more Linux and OS X users that enjoy their experiences.
Why are you so concerned with PRESENTATION? You should be trying to independently verify your NEWS when possible and reasonable. Why would you ever take that stuff for granted?
For example, I'm working on a game and we had it demo at E3. We were excited to read the coverage, and interestingly, some of it was incorrect. The reporters made little slips, but they're still giving their readers mis-information. I'm sure that normal journalists are the same. They're human, and prone to small mistakes here and there. Your news is likely slightly incorrect in many ways, every day. Why aren't you up in arms about how they're presenting it as FACT but it has all sorts of right or left-wing spin on it?
All media is subject to scrutiny, no matter how it's presented. Don't single out Moore's 'Mockumentaries' (which is how he actually presents them...I'm sure the Academy is the one that puts him in the 'Documentary' category) for being particularily misleading in its classification.
At the very least, it's worth noting that there's good CORRELATIONAL evidence that rising CO2 levels have an impact on the temperature. The graphs of global CO2 levels in the air match very closely with upward trending temperature graphs. You can find such graphs in some meteorology textbooks, and sometimes in geology textbooks.
/. article a while back that talked about this.)
When volcanoes erupt, the change in climate for a couple years is usually noticable and fairly immediate. Tokyo, IIRC, has a climate system all its own because of the density of its population. The city generates enough heat to modify the climate around it. (I think there was a
It's worth noting that your assertion that we're in one of the colder times in the Earth's history is entirely incorrect. Starting in the late 1300's, the planet went through a 'little ice age' right after the 'Mediaeval Climatic Optimum'. Temperatures in the 1990s were already higher than they were around the year 800. About 18000 years ago, temperatures were roughly 4.5 degrees (celcius, of course) lower than they are now.
While it's true that the planet has been without ice caps (early in planetary development) and that life has existed in the past when it was warmer (nobody has ever disputed that), it's pretty irrational to believe that we have ZERO impact on our environment and air temperature. Further, just because the planet and life will survive doesn't mean that we can do what we like. It's entirely possible that we can make life very hard for ourselves, or cause the next mass extinction. The planet is tough. Something will definitely survive no matter what we do. I just want to be part of the life that survives, and I want a reasonable quality of life at the same time. If that means I have to pollute a little less now, that's no problem with me. It's not actually very hard.
Lastly, the source of MY information is the textbook 'Essentials of Meteorology' by C. Donald Ahrens. You can find the graphs and data that I'm talking about in chapter 13, about changing climate. I would politely request that you get off YOUR high horse, check YOUR facts, and stop haranguing other people about their lack of solid information until you get some yourself - or can at least quote your sources.
(BTW, to anyone that has access to this book, second edition - figure 13.10 is the one that shows that air temperatures tend to closely follow rising and falling CO2 levels in the atmosphere.)
...is that even IF these cars don't get the mileage that they claim, their emissions are so low that they fool the testers into thinking that less fuel is burning than actually is. Even if the cars were getting EXACTLY the same mileage as non-hybrid counterparts, the amount they pollute appears to be significantly less, which helps at least part of the problem.
The headline to this story is misleading, too. If you RTFA, Toyota notes that they've had only a few complaints, and most people seem to be getting close to the advertised mileage. I won't believe that the cars are doing exactly as well as promised - that never happens - but because the cars are lighter, more aerodynamic, and take advantage of a lot of excellent technologies, I won't believe that they're as 'wasteful' as other cars in their class.