VLC is especially nice because I can play DVDs that I have placed on my harddrive for personal use. a 3TB harddrive holds quite a few DVDs. Then I can keep my massive collection in storage instead of having my living room cluttered with DVD racks. (Blu-ray too)

Same could be said about the closed source WhatsApp as well. We are expected to trust them? No thanks.

At least with an open API and open source clients the community can continuously audit privacy and security.

It's FUD, where is the proof of such things? They have access to the binaries of these apps, they can certainly hire a consultant to reverse engineer it. Why bother doing that when libel is generally not actionable in the US.

Sure, there are going to be mediating forces in the environment. Melting is an obvious one. The positive feedbacks have been getting the most attention because they are really scary. It appears that there are gas clathrates in the ground and under water that can come out at a certain temperature. The worst case is that we get an event similar to Lake Nyos, but with a somewhat different mechanism and potentially many more dead. The best case is a significant atmospheric input of CO2 and methane that we can't control.

I don't think I have to discount Trenberth. He's trying to correct his model, he isn't saying there is no warming.

Thanks.

McKitrick is an economist out of his field. Trenberth and Fasullo cite many of their other papers and the publications to which they were submitted, but it seems mostly not accepted. But their conclusion seems to be that there were other times in recent years that the rate of warming decreased for a time only for it to return to its previous rate. I only see the abstract for Kosaka and Xie, but they state "the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase."

No number is larger than any other number. Quantities are larger than other quantities. Numbers are symbolic entities that can represent a quantity, or not.

I imagine that the major financial companies make this part of their economic modeling. Most of them do publish weather-related and climate-related advisories regarding commodity and company price trends, etc. How detailed do they get? The wouldn't tell and I am the wrong kind of scientist to ask. Can we make a government or public one? Yes, the level of detail is the big question.

Oh, do I have to qualify that for you, like the hottest outside of a period of Milankovitch Forcing? Gee, maybe the Earth's orbit changed, like back then, and we just didn't notice.

Let's take a look at one of the references you cited:

A section of a draft IPCC report, looking at short-term trends, says temperatures are likely to be 0.4 to 1.0 degree Celsius (0.7-1.8F) warmer from 2016-35 than in the two decades to 2005. Rain and snow may increase in areas that already have high precipitation and decline in areas with scarcity, it says.

It sounds like we have reason to be alarmed.

Well, I am trying to get through to you. You wrote that the hiatus was widely acknowledged by scientists! It's like talking with someone who believes in god - they have no facts, and no facts will convince them, and they create their own "science" which is nothing of the sort to bolster their viewpoint. So, I tried another another argument. But let's go back to the first. Nobody credible believes in a hiatus.

Calling names isn't going to advance your argument.

Orbital models only have two variables when there are two bodies. In reality we are always dealing with an n-body problem. Regarding atmospheric models, we have weather, which is too chaotic to forecast, and climate, which should not be.

We could sit back 100 years and see what is happening then, so that we have lots of good data points, but potentially at the cost of widespread famine, death, etc.

We have excellent reasons to stop releasing sequestered carbon even if we ignore global warming.

If they can pull more people out of poverty, what the U.S. does won't matter to China and India because their domestic markets will be larger than the United States. Currently they have even worse social inequity than we do, and the poor performance of their own markets forces their own people to look elsewhere for work.

Yes, I'm also a solid Democrat. But this has been a long time coming and IMO it's even in line with Obama's recent agenda on the Middle Class! The problem with the guest worker programs is that they devalue the local workers by diluting the market for them. The effect is to create a sort of "disposable worker" from our own citizens.

Now, of course jobs can be sent overseas too, but if the alternatives are to have foreign workers work at home, or in the U.S., neither choice is a win for our own citizens.

It continues to seem silly to have such a thrust on STEM education in the U.S. when the job market for STEM workers consistently goes to overseas hires, whether they are here or in their home nations. We need to work on the job-export issue as well.

So if I converted your body to energy, and beamed it to the moon, then converted it back to matter, you would not consider that to be teleportation?
If I had to transmit your particles that would be very limiting, as particles with significant mass won't accelerated to the speed of light. Might be faster to put you in a rocket and transport you the old fashion way.

I think the flaw here has more to do with the process not producing an object in the same state except position. Than with your arguments from your narrow definition of teleporting.

It's a tough problem to fix. If we come down too hard on companies for hiring guest workers, they'll often open off shore offices. If I had a choice between competing with a guest worker and competing with someone working in a country that has a cost of living that is a fraction of mine, I guess I'd rather have the guest worker. At least he's paid marginally more an will pay US taxes. Either way I'm out of a job though.

1. need some rare expertise that our competitors have vacuumed up. (although working campus to hire grad students tends to work well)
2. want some work done, but don't want to pay full price.
3. want the person we hired for reason #2 to not quit and go to our competitor for more money.
4. want someone who isn't going to leave in the evening to pick up their kids from soccer practice or whatever nonsense people with families get involved in.
5. need people aren't likely to raise sexual harassment complaints against the manager in charge of the project.

It's not so much of a hoax, as there aren't enough American citizens willing to put up with bullshit tech companies.