Consider the average benefits that people on food stamps get. For PA, this is about $128 a month, or about $30 per week, or just over $4 per day. That photo ID could then be considered three days worth of food.
According to the labor department, the poorest 20% of American households manage to squeak by making an average of $10k/year (after income tax, before payroll tax). That's just over $800/month. Could you afford your mortgage or rent on $800/month? There are over 24 million Americans in the lowest quintile who manage to eke out a living with that much income, and for them $13.50 really could be three days worth of food.
This doesn't even get into the part about how the IDs were supposed to be free, but the free ID didn't exist until a couple weeks ago. Or that there are multiple counties in PA with no PennDOT facilities to get these IDs, and that even more counties have one PennDOT facility open one day per week. Do you think these people can just hop on a bus from the middle of nowhere to the neighboring county? Or that they could walk? Certainly they can't drive, since they have no license.
And you don't need a photo ID to cast a ballot as a dead, committed, or imprisoned person, from the safety of your own home using an absentee ballot. No need to show up in person to the polls and risk the chance of being caught in the commission of a felony.
Photo ID will NOT stop dead people from casting absentee ballots. So many people just do not seem to get that simple fact. Lots of dead people cast ballots for Bill Stinson, and they were almost all done with absentee ballots.
Beat that strawman all you want, I never said what I thought this guy loved or hated. I'm not convinced that he even knew Samsung owned Seagate (I didn't), but it's possible.
I'm saying it's disingenuous to choose 1993 for evaluation when the trial he participated in happened in 2012.
*If* he wanted to take out his grudge against Seagate, punishing the current owner would be one way to accomplish that, especially if Samsung had bought Seagate recently. Reading about such a purchase in the newspapers could have triggered unpleasant memories.
Remember, Seagate bankrupted this man. A person could reasonably hold a grudge for the rest of their life against the corporate entity that bankrupted them.
Again, though, allow me to pre-emptively take the strawman down. I'm not saying the foreman did or did not have a grudge against Seagate, or that he did or did not seek to take it out on Samsung. I am ONLY saying that it makes perfect sense to look at who owned Seagate during the trial. It also makes sense to look at who owned Seagate during the bankruptcy, as well.
The point was that even if you have trouble thinking up circumstances where people can get by in modern society without ID, we are talking about millions of people, and some not-insignificant portion of these people will have crazy reasons for not having an ID. They sound ridiculous, and probably are, but it's a fact that they exist.
For example, some elderly people who were born at home may not have a birth certificate. That's why PA had to relax the rules about requiring a birth certificate (...five months after the law passed!) Other people who got married and changed their name can't get an ID because their registered name doesn't match the one on the birth certificate. Again, these are very very small percentages, but a small percentage of millions of people can add up to real votes.
At least my fiancee's brother was honest about why he wants voter ID laws. It has nothing to do with preventing fraud. In his opinion, if you don't have an ID, you mustn't be a contributing member of society, and therefore do not deserve the right to vote. I have a feeling that many people who support these laws feel just like him, but they lack the honesty to admit it and instead use voter impersonation as a pretext.
Have you ever been to Philadelphia? Having a car isn't necessarily a luxury, it's a liability when you have nowhere to park it. If you have no car, and you don't smoke, you have no need for a driver's license. Or maybe you're married and you have no license because your husband does all the driving and buys all the cigarettes and booze.
And I'm not saying that in-person fraud is exactly zero, or that the poll workers will notice. What I'm saying is that there is a much higher risk of being caught committing a felony in person than committing that same felony by absentee ballots or manipulating the voting machines.
Notice how I also provided evidence supporting my assertions that voter fraud does exist, and notice that voter ID laws do absolutely nothing to stop the documented instances of voter fraud. I'm supposed to just trust you that in-person voter fraud is rampant based entirely on hypotheticals, while you just ignore all the other real instances of voter fraud that these laws can't stop?
Also, why would the PA GOP push so hard for voter ID that includes an expiration date? I mean, if you are who you say you are, it doesn't matter if your ID has expired or not...unless you were intentionally trying to prevent students from using their college IDs, because such IDs often do not have expiration dates.
had their wives and dogs shot for allegedly cutting slightly too much off of a gun barrel (wiki:Randy Weaver).
Wow, is that an exaggeration if I ever heard one.
Randy Weaver was brought to the authorities' attention for selling sawed-off shotguns, yes. However (from Wiki...)
"This was compounded by Weaver's failure to appear in court to answer these charges. Weaver's original court date was Feb. 19 1991; it was changed to the following day, but Pretrial Services sent Weaver a notice citing the date as March 20. As a result, Weaver missed the hearing and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest, with the U.S. Marshals Service directed to serve it. By Feb. 27, it was widely known that Weaver had been given the wrong date. The U.S. Marshals Service wanted to allow Weaver the opportunity to show up in court on March 20, but the U.S. Attorneys Office sought a grand jury indictment on March 14 for Weaver's failure to appear. This convinced Randy and Vicki Weaver that he had no chance of a fair hearing."
Doesn't sound like a sawed-off shotgun is the reason his wife got shot. Never mind that a Justice Department review found Horiuchi's second bullet was fired unconstitutionally (the one that killed Vicki Weaver while she was holding her 10-month old daughter), and that deadly force policy was standardized across agencies in the aftermath of Ruby Ridge, so the likelihood of your wife getting shot for you selling a sawed-off shotgun is even lower today.
Thanks. I live in PA so I'm kinda interested in how this is playing out.
Especially interesting is that the PA Supreme Court send the ID law back to the lower court to try again. It was a 4-2 vote.
The 2 were the Democrats, who wanted an immediate injunction. The third Democrat sided with the three Republicans in giving the lower court a second chance...because if he ruled the way he wanted to, it would have split 3-3 and the lower court decision would have held.
1) The risk is that you're standing in front of people who live in the same community as the voter that you are impersonating. The risk is that you can't go back to the same polling station under a different name because they could remember your face.
Seriously, call me a liar if you want, but you know that it's far easier to affect an election using different methods, like absentee ballots, shredding registrations, or manipulating the voting machines. The ultimate point which you dance around so desperately is that all of these known methods of fraud, that have sometimes cost an election, CANNOT BE CAUGHT BY VOTER ID LAWS.
So you're telling me that even though we have almost zero evidence of in-person voter fraud, and we have tons of evidence of other types of fraud, that you still think this is the appropriate path to take? If the Democrats couldn't prove that some regulation was necessary and effective, the GOP would scream bloody murder.
2a) You fail hard at reading, don't you? The voter-only IDs didn't exist until late August. Oh look at the date on that Huff Po piece....September.
Also, you have to wonder, why would the authors of the legislation pass it eight months before the election, and then only make free IDs available two and a half months before the election that requires them? Doesn't that sound at all fishy to you? Unless, of course, you're trying to disenfranchise voters.
3) My example was not about "EBIL REPUBS", Mr. Strawman (and your little Red Herring about slavery, too!). I take it you skipped the piece on Bill Stinson...a Democrat that stole the election.
Allow me to summarize the point again. Voter fraud exists. Voter fraud has stolen elections. But in-person voter fraud is very rare, and you risk becoming a felon, and it just doesn't scale to the size necessary to steal an election. Voter ID laws do absolutely jack shit in stopping the other forms of voter fraud that we CAN prove has happened. It doesn't matter how long ago any example was (Stinson was nearly 20 years ago!), the point is to describe voter fraud that affects elections and cannot be stopped by Voter ID laws.
And the other ultimate point which you totally ignored - assume voter ID laws stop X illegitimate votes, but disenfranchise Y legitimate voters. Is X greater than Y? Because with HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of registered voters in PA who don't have state-issued ID, even if you went with some ridiculously low number like 0.1% of them, that's still thousands of votes...do you really think there are thousands of in-person voter fraud attempts, when there are other much easier and less risky ways to affect elections?
1) Think about this for a second. If you want to commit a felony, would you rather commit the felony in person where you can be caught, or would you rather commit it anonymously via absentee ballot?
2a) You know that "free" ID you were supposed to get? Take PA, where the law was passed in the past seven months (March 2012). That "free" photo ID did not exist until late August! Up until then, they were requiring everyone to get the standard photo ID - the one that costs money and requires a higher burden of proof. Imagine your surprise when you go to PennDOT and try to get your "free" photo ID, after you manage to get a ride there (did you know that something like six counties in PA have no PennDOT facility, and another 13-ish counties have one facility open one day a week?)...only to discover that you actually do need to pay for your ID.
2b) What you need an ID for in modern society is a red herring when it comes to voting. Almost 20% of the registered voters in Philadelphia do not have a state-issued ID! Regardless of this fact, how do you define a "significant" amount of people without ID? If this law ends up preventing more legitimate votes than preventing fraudulent votes, is that significant enough for you?
3) I think you're mistaken when you think "no one" is trying to prevent real people from voting. You know that firm that the Republicans are disowning lately, Strategic Allied Consulting? The owner back in 2004 was caught throwing away registrations from voters who registered Democrat. The GOP knows that in-person voter ID is practically nonexistent, and that elections are really stolen with absentee ballots or just by manipulating the voting machines, like these eight people in Clay County, Kentucky, including a judge.
Voter fraud is real, but in-person voter fraud is very rare (see 1 for why). So if the GOP is really interested in honest elections, why are they focusing on the rarest form of fraud? None of these ID laws would stop any of the documented instances of voter fraud that I have mentioned in this post - at least one of which resulted in an actual stolen election.
This reminds me of the ruling by Judge Posner when he dismissed both Apple's and Motorola's lawsuits against each other because they couldn't agree on a rate. If e.g. the 1.5-2.5% range applies to the whole portfolio, Apple (and Posner!) interpret this to mean that using "one percent" of the portfolio means one percent of the fair rate, because any other rate is a “nonlinear royalty” and “mathematically disproportionate". Motorola failed to argue that buying the whole portfolio is like buying in bulk, and that it is reasonable and fair to provide bulk discounts. You could even say that bulk discounts constitute a "nonlinear royalty".
What this ultimately means is if Moto has 100 patents, and someone uses only one, what rate should they pay? 1% of fair rate, or "up to" 50% of fair rate?
Their reasoning seems to be that *if* Motorola was in breach of contract by not licensing its patents to MS at RAND rates
Does *anyone* have any sort of concrete evidence as to what a reasonable rate is? I haven't seen anyone anywhere actually put any sort of specific values on this. I would especially love to see this fair and reasonable rate compared against the rate that Microsoft licenses their patents to Android manufacturers.
And here we are, September 2012, and the appeals court says look, I know DHS was told to do public comment and it's been over a year and they still haven't done it, but they promise they're really going to do it this time in March 2013, so we're going to take their word for it even though they ignored the previous court order for a public comment period.
Any characterization other than "cave" fails to describe the situation in historical context.
What huge usability impact? You can copy and paste files directly to and from your VM. You're already running AV software on the host OS, right? Scan the files after copying them over; this is safe unless you can launch your exploit by the mere act of copying the file.
Besides, the main reason to use a browser appliance isn't that it's safer to download files - it's just as dangerous as using a browser running on the host OS - but that a web page loaded by the browser inside the VM can't compromise your host OS. It's easy for me to decide whether or not I want to run some file that I downloaded - it's much harder for me to stop a hijacked ad server from dropping an exploit through some Adobe Flash 0-day.
Get a Linux VM and install the latest version of Firefox/Chrome on it. Then back up the image.
Every time you want to use the net, run the VM and browse through that. It's called a Browser Appliance.
Bonuses: Most malware doesn't target Linux. Even if it did, your host OS is Windows. And if you restore the VM snapshot every time you shut it down, even if you did get hacked it will be gone without interfering with the rest of the computer.
barakn did a great job of tearing your arguments apart, but I would like to add...
6) This is only true if CO2 is the limiting factor. If water or nitrogen or something else are the bottleneck for plant growth, excess CO2 will have little to no impact.
7) Coal and oil are what is known as *sequestered* carbon. The carbon in those fossil fuels is not part of the atmosphere, it is locked away where it has no impact. Burning those fossil fuels puts that carbon back into the atmosphere where it can enhance the greenhouse gas effect.
Does it matter whether this is man-made or a natural cycle? Is "natural" climate change going to somehow be more forgiving to our society and economy than man-made climate change of the same magnitude?
I never understood this line of reasoning, excessive climate change is bad regardless of who is responsible.
Also, regarding methane, there is 200 times more CO2 (380 ppm) in the atmosphere than methane (1.75 ppm). Additionally, methane stays in the atmosphere on the order of decades, while CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years.
An engineer famously observed that California's rolling blackouts a few summers ago could have been prevented had they merely painted white the roofs of all public buildings in that state.
You mean the rolling blackouts caused by Enron's illegal market manipulation as a result of partial deregulation passed by former CA governor Pete Wilson? I'm pretty sure that white roofs or not, Enron would have still caused that debacle.
About that IRA...does anyone have any idea how Romney managed to get such a huge IRA? Everything I have read suggests that it's practically impossible to get that much money into an IRA, given the time frame during which Romney was making contributions.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, let's keep it real, indeed.
Consider the average benefits that people on food stamps get. For PA, this is about $128 a month, or about $30 per week, or just over $4 per day. That photo ID could then be considered three days worth of food.
According to the labor department, the poorest 20% of American households manage to squeak by making an average of $10k/year (after income tax, before payroll tax). That's just over $800/month. Could you afford your mortgage or rent on $800/month? There are over 24 million Americans in the lowest quintile who manage to eke out a living with that much income, and for them $13.50 really could be three days worth of food.
This doesn't even get into the part about how the IDs were supposed to be free, but the free ID didn't exist until a couple weeks ago. Or that there are multiple counties in PA with no PennDOT facilities to get these IDs, and that even more counties have one PennDOT facility open one day per week. Do you think these people can just hop on a bus from the middle of nowhere to the neighboring county? Or that they could walk? Certainly they can't drive, since they have no license.
And you don't need a photo ID to cast a ballot as a dead, committed, or imprisoned person, from the safety of your own home using an absentee ballot. No need to show up in person to the polls and risk the chance of being caught in the commission of a felony.
Photo ID will NOT stop dead people from casting absentee ballots. So many people just do not seem to get that simple fact. Lots of dead people cast ballots for Bill Stinson, and they were almost all done with absentee ballots.
Beat that strawman all you want, I never said what I thought this guy loved or hated. I'm not convinced that he even knew Samsung owned Seagate (I didn't), but it's possible.
I'm saying it's disingenuous to choose 1993 for evaluation when the trial he participated in happened in 2012.
*If* he wanted to take out his grudge against Seagate, punishing the current owner would be one way to accomplish that, especially if Samsung had bought Seagate recently. Reading about such a purchase in the newspapers could have triggered unpleasant memories.
Remember, Seagate bankrupted this man. A person could reasonably hold a grudge for the rest of their life against the corporate entity that bankrupted them.
Again, though, allow me to pre-emptively take the strawman down. I'm not saying the foreman did or did not have a grudge against Seagate, or that he did or did not seek to take it out on Samsung. I am ONLY saying that it makes perfect sense to look at who owned Seagate during the trial. It also makes sense to look at who owned Seagate during the bankruptcy, as well.
That's a bit disingenuous, don't you think? After all, the foreman was making his decisions in 2012, which is after Samsung owned Seagate.
...okay...
The point was that even if you have trouble thinking up circumstances where people can get by in modern society without ID, we are talking about millions of people, and some not-insignificant portion of these people will have crazy reasons for not having an ID. They sound ridiculous, and probably are, but it's a fact that they exist.
For example, some elderly people who were born at home may not have a birth certificate. That's why PA had to relax the rules about requiring a birth certificate (...five months after the law passed!) Other people who got married and changed their name can't get an ID because their registered name doesn't match the one on the birth certificate. Again, these are very very small percentages, but a small percentage of millions of people can add up to real votes.
At least my fiancee's brother was honest about why he wants voter ID laws. It has nothing to do with preventing fraud. In his opinion, if you don't have an ID, you mustn't be a contributing member of society, and therefore do not deserve the right to vote. I have a feeling that many people who support these laws feel just like him, but they lack the honesty to admit it and instead use voter impersonation as a pretext.
Have you ever been to Philadelphia? Having a car isn't necessarily a luxury, it's a liability when you have nowhere to park it. If you have no car, and you don't smoke, you have no need for a driver's license. Or maybe you're married and you have no license because your husband does all the driving and buys all the cigarettes and booze.
And I'm not saying that in-person fraud is exactly zero, or that the poll workers will notice. What I'm saying is that there is a much higher risk of being caught committing a felony in person than committing that same felony by absentee ballots or manipulating the voting machines.
Notice how I also provided evidence supporting my assertions that voter fraud does exist, and notice that voter ID laws do absolutely nothing to stop the documented instances of voter fraud. I'm supposed to just trust you that in-person voter fraud is rampant based entirely on hypotheticals, while you just ignore all the other real instances of voter fraud that these laws can't stop?
Also, why would the PA GOP push so hard for voter ID that includes an expiration date? I mean, if you are who you say you are, it doesn't matter if your ID has expired or not...unless you were intentionally trying to prevent students from using their college IDs, because such IDs often do not have expiration dates.
had their wives and dogs shot for allegedly cutting slightly too much off of a gun barrel (wiki:Randy Weaver).
Wow, is that an exaggeration if I ever heard one.
Randy Weaver was brought to the authorities' attention for selling sawed-off shotguns, yes. However (from Wiki...)
"This was compounded by Weaver's failure to appear in court to answer these charges. Weaver's original court date was Feb. 19 1991; it was changed to the following day, but Pretrial Services sent Weaver a notice citing the date as March 20. As a result, Weaver missed the hearing and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest, with the U.S. Marshals Service directed to serve it. By Feb. 27, it was widely known that Weaver had been given the wrong date. The U.S. Marshals Service wanted to allow Weaver the opportunity to show up in court on March 20, but the U.S. Attorneys Office sought a grand jury indictment on March 14 for Weaver's failure to appear. This convinced Randy and Vicki Weaver that he had no chance of a fair hearing."
Doesn't sound like a sawed-off shotgun is the reason his wife got shot. Never mind that a Justice Department review found Horiuchi's second bullet was fired unconstitutionally (the one that killed Vicki Weaver while she was holding her 10-month old daughter), and that deadly force policy was standardized across agencies in the aftermath of Ruby Ridge, so the likelihood of your wife getting shot for you selling a sawed-off shotgun is even lower today.
Thanks. I live in PA so I'm kinda interested in how this is playing out.
Especially interesting is that the PA Supreme Court send the ID law back to the lower court to try again. It was a 4-2 vote.
The 2 were the Democrats, who wanted an immediate injunction. The third Democrat sided with the three Republicans in giving the lower court a second chance...because if he ruled the way he wanted to, it would have split 3-3 and the lower court decision would have held.
Too bad voter ID laws won't stop dead people from voting via absentee ballots.
1) The risk is that you're standing in front of people who live in the same community as the voter that you are impersonating. The risk is that you can't go back to the same polling station under a different name because they could remember your face.
Seriously, call me a liar if you want, but you know that it's far easier to affect an election using different methods, like absentee ballots, shredding registrations, or manipulating the voting machines. The ultimate point which you dance around so desperately is that all of these known methods of fraud, that have sometimes cost an election, CANNOT BE CAUGHT BY VOTER ID LAWS.
So you're telling me that even though we have almost zero evidence of in-person voter fraud, and we have tons of evidence of other types of fraud, that you still think this is the appropriate path to take? If the Democrats couldn't prove that some regulation was necessary and effective, the GOP would scream bloody murder.
2a) You fail hard at reading, don't you? The voter-only IDs didn't exist until late August. Oh look at the date on that Huff Po piece....September.
Also, you have to wonder, why would the authors of the legislation pass it eight months before the election, and then only make free IDs available two and a half months before the election that requires them? Doesn't that sound at all fishy to you? Unless, of course, you're trying to disenfranchise voters.
3) My example was not about "EBIL REPUBS", Mr. Strawman (and your little Red Herring about slavery, too!). I take it you skipped the piece on Bill Stinson...a Democrat that stole the election.
Allow me to summarize the point again. Voter fraud exists. Voter fraud has stolen elections. But in-person voter fraud is very rare, and you risk becoming a felon, and it just doesn't scale to the size necessary to steal an election. Voter ID laws do absolutely jack shit in stopping the other forms of voter fraud that we CAN prove has happened. It doesn't matter how long ago any example was (Stinson was nearly 20 years ago!), the point is to describe voter fraud that affects elections and cannot be stopped by Voter ID laws.
And the other ultimate point which you totally ignored - assume voter ID laws stop X illegitimate votes, but disenfranchise Y legitimate voters. Is X greater than Y? Because with HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of registered voters in PA who don't have state-issued ID, even if you went with some ridiculously low number like 0.1% of them, that's still thousands of votes...do you really think there are thousands of in-person voter fraud attempts, when there are other much easier and less risky ways to affect elections?
I'll see your "single person unable to vote" and raise you three more.
www.aclupa.blogspot.com/2012/07/voter-id-trial-day-4-real-people-real.html
Please read those stories about actual real Pennsylvania registered voters who are struggling with this law.
1) Think about this for a second. If you want to commit a felony, would you rather commit the felony in person where you can be caught, or would you rather commit it anonymously via absentee ballot?
For example, the special election of Bill Stinson in 1993 in PA was overturned because the election was stolen...with absentee ballots.
2a) You know that "free" ID you were supposed to get? Take PA, where the law was passed in the past seven months (March 2012). That "free" photo ID did not exist until late August! Up until then, they were requiring everyone to get the standard photo ID - the one that costs money and requires a higher burden of proof. Imagine your surprise when you go to PennDOT and try to get your "free" photo ID, after you manage to get a ride there (did you know that something like six counties in PA have no PennDOT facility, and another 13-ish counties have one facility open one day a week?)...only to discover that you actually do need to pay for your ID.
2b) What you need an ID for in modern society is a red herring when it comes to voting. Almost 20% of the registered voters in Philadelphia do not have a state-issued ID! Regardless of this fact, how do you define a "significant" amount of people without ID? If this law ends up preventing more legitimate votes than preventing fraudulent votes, is that significant enough for you?
3) I think you're mistaken when you think "no one" is trying to prevent real people from voting. You know that firm that the Republicans are disowning lately, Strategic Allied Consulting? The owner back in 2004 was caught throwing away registrations from voters who registered Democrat. The GOP knows that in-person voter ID is practically nonexistent, and that elections are really stolen with absentee ballots or just by manipulating the voting machines, like these eight people in Clay County, Kentucky, including a judge.
Voter fraud is real, but in-person voter fraud is very rare (see 1 for why). So if the GOP is really interested in honest elections, why are they focusing on the rarest form of fraud? None of these ID laws would stop any of the documented instances of voter fraud that I have mentioned in this post - at least one of which resulted in an actual stolen election.
This reminds me of the ruling by Judge Posner when he dismissed both Apple's and Motorola's lawsuits against each other because they couldn't agree on a rate. If e.g. the 1.5-2.5% range applies to the whole portfolio, Apple (and Posner!) interpret this to mean that using "one percent" of the portfolio means one percent of the fair rate, because any other rate is a “nonlinear royalty” and “mathematically disproportionate". Motorola failed to argue that buying the whole portfolio is like buying in bulk, and that it is reasonable and fair to provide bulk discounts. You could even say that bulk discounts constitute a "nonlinear royalty".
What this ultimately means is if Moto has 100 patents, and someone uses only one, what rate should they pay? 1% of fair rate, or "up to" 50% of fair rate?
Their reasoning seems to be that *if* Motorola was in breach of contract by not licensing its patents to MS at RAND rates
Does *anyone* have any sort of concrete evidence as to what a reasonable rate is? I haven't seen anyone anywhere actually put any sort of specific values on this. I would especially love to see this fair and reasonable rate compared against the rate that Microsoft licenses their patents to Android manufacturers.
I suggest reading up on this case a bit...
In November 2010, EPIC sued DHS because the body scanners suck. http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/11/05/158250/epic-files-lawsuit-to-suspend-airport-body-scanner-use
In July 2011, a court found that DHS had improperly deployed the scanners by not providing a period for public comment. The court allowed the scans to continue on the condition that they have a public comment period. http://news.slashdot.org/story/11/07/17/0143233/Court-Approves-TSA-Body-Scans-But-Calls-For-Public-Comment
By July 2012, there had STILL not been a public comment period. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/07/11/2113239/dhs-still-stonewalling-on-body-scanning-ruling-one-year-later
And here we are, September 2012, and the appeals court says look, I know DHS was told to do public comment and it's been over a year and they still haven't done it, but they promise they're really going to do it this time in March 2013, so we're going to take their word for it even though they ignored the previous court order for a public comment period.
Any characterization other than "cave" fails to describe the situation in historical context.
Is there an agreement with the government of Somalia? Where it's so congested that a drone nearly crashed into a large passenger plane?
What huge usability impact? You can copy and paste files directly to and from your VM. You're already running AV software on the host OS, right? Scan the files after copying them over; this is safe unless you can launch your exploit by the mere act of copying the file.
Besides, the main reason to use a browser appliance isn't that it's safer to download files - it's just as dangerous as using a browser running on the host OS - but that a web page loaded by the browser inside the VM can't compromise your host OS. It's easy for me to decide whether or not I want to run some file that I downloaded - it's much harder for me to stop a hijacked ad server from dropping an exploit through some Adobe Flash 0-day.
Get a Linux VM and install the latest version of Firefox/Chrome on it. Then back up the image.
Every time you want to use the net, run the VM and browse through that. It's called a Browser Appliance.
Bonuses: Most malware doesn't target Linux. Even if it did, your host OS is Windows. And if you restore the VM snapshot every time you shut it down, even if you did get hacked it will be gone without interfering with the rest of the computer.
barakn did a great job of tearing your arguments apart, but I would like to add...
6) This is only true if CO2 is the limiting factor. If water or nitrogen or something else are the bottleneck for plant growth, excess CO2 will have little to no impact.
7) Coal and oil are what is known as *sequestered* carbon. The carbon in those fossil fuels is not part of the atmosphere, it is locked away where it has no impact. Burning those fossil fuels puts that carbon back into the atmosphere where it can enhance the greenhouse gas effect.
Somehow my links didn't make it into the post.
CO2 and CH4 concentrations in the atmosphere: http://www.skepticalscience.com/methane-and-global-warming.htm
CO2 and CH4 lifetime in the atmosphere: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhouse-gases-remain-air
Does it matter whether this is man-made or a natural cycle? Is "natural" climate change going to somehow be more forgiving to our society and economy than man-made climate change of the same magnitude?
I never understood this line of reasoning, excessive climate change is bad regardless of who is responsible.
Also, regarding methane, there is 200 times more CO2 (380 ppm) in the atmosphere than methane (1.75 ppm). Additionally, methane stays in the atmosphere on the order of decades, while CO2 stays in the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years.
An engineer famously observed that California's rolling blackouts a few summers ago could have been prevented had they merely painted white the roofs of all public buildings in that state.
You mean the rolling blackouts caused by Enron's illegal market manipulation as a result of partial deregulation passed by former CA governor Pete Wilson? I'm pretty sure that white roofs or not, Enron would have still caused that debacle.
According to Wiki, for half a century the US Constitution was hermetically sealed inside a glass container with helium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermetic_seal
behooves. If you're going to correct someone's spelling, it behooves you to avoid such simple errors.
IRA
About that IRA...does anyone have any idea how Romney managed to get such a huge IRA? Everything I have read suggests that it's practically impossible to get that much money into an IRA, given the time frame during which Romney was making contributions.