SCNR ;-}

• provides customers with a comfortable customer service layer between themselves and the engineers and programmers at those companies
• There is [a] single point-of-contact for all things [Windows]-related
• most people already know how to use Windows

Must be a parallel universe where proprietary vendors' customers are better off (for putting their money down) in any, let alone all, of the above respects.

Worse than that, if you only publish one out of 20 studies, you are reporting noise.

Actually it is not tax free. It counts as an improvement to the home, and so your (or our landlords) property taxes go up.

As long as fingers are breakable, so will be encryption.

So you seem to be saying that global warming is a critical issue, we will all die, must be stopped at any cost, BUT only with my preferred solution.

Color me not convinced. If the issue was real, engineers would be making the solution recommendations not politicians, and the solution would be applied technology not taxes.

What did Obama say? Elections have consequences?

It would be nice if no matter who got elected, things basically stayed the same. But if we can't have that, don't complain when the guys you don't like do things you don't like when elected.

(Specifically, this is why rule by presidential fiat is awful. But it was no less awful under Obama.)

They do suffer from confirmation bias, however. If my model says there will be no warming, and everyone else's model says there is warming, I "fix" my model until it agrees with everyone else.

See this issue in action while Millikan et al calculates the electron's charge:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

I am a pilot - from what they are saying on the air, it sounds like they hit some turbulence that caused massive structural damage. If the pilots had been in a working cockpit, there would have been at least a broken transmission. No clicks means the pilots couldn't push the talk button (which is on the control wheel, where there hands would be anyway).

Probably an in air breakup, nothing they could do. Hopefully they find the cause and prevent recurrence - unfortunately, accidents are often the way that new safety rules are created.

(Condolences to all involved)

That really isn't necessary. I'm the condo president of one of the largest buildings in downtown Chicago. Every other year, we have an energy audit done on the building. We basically implement the plan that has the highest return. No coercion is required.

The people that ran the building before it became a condo were not very good managers. Our first couple projects had a 180 day payback period! But now we are looking at payback periods of 15 years or so, which is still worth it if you finance the work.

Good management will make building more efficient over time. Poor managers eventually get replaced by good managers, because the building is worth more to the good manager. There is no need to hold guns to peoples head in the name of the environment.