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.

As a sysadmin, a lot of the job is doing stuff that *prevents* loss. Unfortunately, bean-counters often don't really understand how properly configured/supported firewalls and security appliances are important, because they don't *MAKE* money.

True enough, but it also called him an inventor, which is misleading.

I've got a bunch of PCI DVB/capture cards that are in the same boat. They *could* be useful if I had drivers for them, but alas, they do not.

My personal disfavorite is software that depends on dongles which have OS-specific drivers. The software *WOULD* work on the newer OS if the dongle had a driver that allowed it to authenticate (of course, dongles suck in general).

where are the iPhone, Android, Symbian, etc versions of BBM!

Uh, well for Google Play, it'd be here, and for iDevices it would be here

I still agree that their argument is dumb though. People develop apps for a platform where it will sell, and that has nothing to do with net neutrality. I find it annoying that I can't run [game/software X] on Linux, but that has nothing to do with my ISP or internet service.

Yes, and they have expensive lawyers, which means that dealing with them costs a lot of time, and money. You may get satisfaction, but it will be many dollars and months if not years away.

Nothing in that article disputes the confidence that the past decade was hottest. It simply disputes which year in that decade was the worst. Nor does it dispute that the trend is increasing temperature per year.

Well, we have perfectly good reasons to stop releasing sequestered carbon (by burning oil for fuel) even if we are to ignore the atmospheric output of the process. We have to work progressively harder to get a given energy input. Technological advances that allow us to extract additional sequestered carbon, like fracking, are not infinite in nature. Eventually we must reach an energy balance between the energy required for extraction and the source of energy extracted. So changes in the direction of reducing release of sequestered carbon and finding other energy inputs to society, or reducing the need for those inputs, are called for regardless of whether it is going to get too warm.

Decreasing doesn't mean reversing. And we have physical observation of ice melting, and releases of previously-sequestered gases on sea bottoms, underground, etc. These things all take a heat input. What happens when those buffers are spent and there is nothing to sink the heat input?

Had we depended solely on experiment for everything, we would know much less about the world today. When direct experiment is not possible we still have observation and modeling, and certainly that is science. And of course most of our models do scale, simply because of long observation at all scales. Were this not the case, we would still be arguing about the heliocentric theory, because we can not move planets and suns in order to prove it from first principles, and the orbits of planets would not necessarily scale to suns, etc.

Sure, the earth has large processes that regulate each other, but there is nothing purposeful in their existence and positive feedback is as likely as negative. The Earth is as likely to be naturally fragile as naturally robust. So you can not place faith in unseen processes that will tend to mediate insults to the environment.

If there is some unknown non-anthropocentric cause for climate change, we are still in the position of having to resolve the issue through some modification in society's behavior, rather than consign the victims.

It's not surprising that fitting a model to something so complicated takes more work. But it's irrelevant when the thing actually modeled gets progressively hotter.

Yes, I know. but it's more polite than telling them where their head really is. :-)

Um. That dozen years was the hottest dozen in history. Much more clearly than any individual year was the hottest. You might wave away one year as inaccuracy. But not 10 or more. See the NOAA data here.