Not sure what you are trying to compare here - is it a relative reduction (per head) or an absolute amount?

For an absolute amount the US went from 20t to 17.5t meaning it's still one of the biggest polluters per capita. Or are you looking at the effort expend to reduce the problem? So the US went from 20t to 17.5t - which would be 12.5% - considerably less than the 20% reduction achieved in Germany. So the US put less effort in.

What you seem to be using for (some) of your comparisons is the absolute amount of the relative reductions. That's ... imaginative.

On top of that - this is per head: the US also grew its population at the same time. The actual reduction is less then it appears while the population in Germany stayed roughly the same, so the 20% you see is what you get. The difference between what the US needs to accomplish and what it has actually done is huge.

In any case, given that we need to reach roughly a 55% reduction, even those countries which put the most effort in are well short of the goal.

The blame are the idiots that scream that we must all adopt a protocol that has done LITTLE TO NOTHING TO DROP EMISSIONS.

I don't know if Kyoto is the best way forward. Fact is, the US didn't join, Germany joined. Germany made a lot more progress than the US.

In fact, all I have seen is an outsourcing of jobs to 3rd world nations whose emissions then jump faster then the meager savings that were in the developed nations.

Well Kyoto didn't bankrupt Germany, and the outsourcing of jobs from the US to third world nations can't have been caused by Kyoto given that the US didn't join.

The blame will NOT be USA.

The blame should be on the US for being one of the biggest polluters per capita, and for being - among those free, wealthy and educated countries in the west - the one which makes one of the smallest contribution to solving the problem. You should compare yourself to the best, not to the worst.

That said: there is plenty of blame to go around for China and India - using the West's technology to jump ahead by a few hundred years means they have to act according to modern standards, too. There is plenty of blame to go around for the Europeans as well: overall their reductions are not much better than those in the US, and they fall well short of where they should be, even in the best cases.

So, quit being a fool and look at the facts. Even when you use something as irrational as emission per capitia, America comes up selling of roses in terms of turning things around, while others, esp. those under kyoto and fast growth nations, stink to high heaven.

Only with the help of vodoo mathematics, by any reasonable standard America is among those doing the least.

I agree with you: the biggest problem now are China and India. It's no longer correct to put the blame entirely on the US.

That said, if the US would get of their ass, then together the West could probably force China and India to move as well. They are both dependent on trade with the West. (And the other way round, to be sure - but that gives both sides some leverage, no side has to accept entirely what the other one wants.)

Canada can barely manage with two languages.

Don't know about that, but Switzerland manages with four official languages. In the UK English is the default language, but there are minorities speaking Welsh, Scots Gaelic and Irish. In France you have (among others) native speakers of German, Basque and Corsican. Belgium (somewhat unsuccessfully) has to manage with three official languages: Dutch, French and German. Germany also has Sorbian as an official language in a (rather small) region. Spain has as co-official languages Basque, Catalan, Galician and Aranese. Etc.

I don't believe there is any country in Europe which really has a single common culture. (Which doesn't mean that the inhabitants have nothing in common, though.) That's one of the reasons why Nationalism has failed in the past. Doesn't mean that the EU dream will work, but at it's core it's an attempt to find an answer to Nationalism's failure.

An ATOM-based tablet might not be ideal now, but maybe Intel has already plans to offer something more competitive to ARM. It makes sense to have an already ported OS available once that comes out.

Apart from that, I think an x86 version of Android might be interesting for a TV settopbox. Together with a WIImote instead of a touch screen it would provide a nice user interface, and you could use standard processors for that, not just Atoms.

Still, if some females mutate so that they don't want to mate with the modified males (maybe they are able to detect a different smell or slightly different markings or whatever), then their offspring will have a better chance than those of females who do. If that preference were genetic they would pass it on to their offspring. As a result their genes would become prevalent and soon the modified species would become extinct.

Maybe such a mutation won't occur before the species dies out, though.

Well historically it seems that when people see a good chance that their children will survive, they'll raise fewer children. So bizarrely: reducing the risk of malaria might reduce population growth at the same time.

Forget about the mosquitoes - how can we get the program started to eliminate Chihuahuas?

People share stuff with each other on social media sites. Companies want to get in on that - if someone shares info about their products, that's advertising - fairly cheap advertising. On top of that - this is coming from people's friends, so it's probably much more effective advertising - it is more likely to be read, and more likely to match the receiver's interests.

It seems fairly stupid for a company not to have a Facebook presence under these circumstances.

Well I hope they only let companies join which are at least 14 years old.

who needs portables (for work)?

Well, I work in a fairly disfunctional company, I like to have a laptop so I can get some work done while attending useless meetings.

Besides, history is important.

I agree, but how many history graduates do you need? We have a lot more graduates now than we used to have 50 years ago. That makes sense in some fields, because a high-tech economy needs better qualified workers. Did our need for history graduates significantly increase, though?

That's part of it, but it's not all. There is a tradeoff between convenience for the admin and convenience for the user, too. I've worked in many different engineering companies, and the level of service provided by IT varies wildly. They've all come to different arrangements about the distribution of convenience. Of course that has to do with resources as well as the skill set and motivation of the people involved on both sides.

This kind of conflict itself happens between lots of other departments as well - engineers and techdoc people frequently hate each other and engineers and marketing usually don't have a loving relationship either.

What makes IT stand out more is not the conflict itself, but that they have so many interfaces. Since everyone has an interface with IT, everyone has a chance to hate them as well.