The purpose of patents were to offer a government enforced monopoly for a specific period of time, and to compensate the public for the costs and effort of the enforcement, the patented method had to be described in sufficient detail to allow those skilled in the arts to reproduce the method. Today the purpose seems to have been corupted, but that is what it was. My opinion is most software patents are both insufficently unique and insufficently described to deserve patent protection; and what protection there is, is of to long of a duration to promote advancement of the field.

Wikipedia has a good article on pneumonic plague, I'm sure that not "all" the victims were of the pneumonic form as the disease often starts in a population in the bubonic form frequently spread by fleas which can progress into the more contagious and more virulent pneumonic form; so while rats and rat fleas don't get the sole blame, they still get their share.

If Netflix is directly connected to AT&T's network, it should be relatively easy to throw up a banner that says "AT&T U-verse may not be capable of providing a complete user experience" to AT&T customers. Netflix would SOL without customers and AT&T would be SOL without content.

Their choke point is the last mile, those poor old twisted pair copper DSL just can't handle what's expected of modern broadband. AT&T has plenty of fiber in the ground and on the poles but from the DSLAM to the house it's twisted copper.

Are you getting paid by SS to astroturf slashdot?

Emerging research is increasingly supporting a global rather than regional MWP such as

Observed increases in ocean heat content (OHC) and temperature are robust indicators of global warming during the past several decades. We used high-resolution proxy records from sediment cores to extend these observations in the Pacific 10,000 years beyond the instrumental record. We show that water masses linked to North Pacific and Antarctic intermediate waters were warmer by 2.1 ± 0.4C and 1.5 ± 0.4C, respectively, during the middle Holocene Thermal Maximum than over the past century. Both water masses were ~0.9C warmer during the Medieval Warm period than during the Little Ice Age and ~0.65 warmer than in recent decades. Although documented changes in global surface temperatures during the Holocene and Common era are relatively small, the concomitant changes in OHC are large. Pacific Ocean Heat Content During the Past 10,000 Years

I swear the next time I get mod points, anyone who sources either skepticalscience.com or wattsupwiththat.com is going to get -1 overrated; unless the comment is specificly about the sites rather than a topic on the site.

The predictions of the computer models have been quite good at predicting past event, but are consistently wrong at predicting future events, the simple truth is we don't even know what we don't know about the climate yet.

Actually they are predicting 0.3C-4.8C for the century, the upper value is 16 times the lower value. A temperature rise of 4.8C would be pretty devastating, where .3C is barely worth a yawn. A range of 16 times yo me indicates that the "settled Science" isn't very settled or very scientific.

Nuclear propulsion enables you to go fast and each knot of extra speed is considerable less wear and tear on landing aircraft. If Iran were really serious about protecting what legitimate interests they have, Helicopters and STOL aircraft based on more modest carriers would be a better fit.

It's just not as effective to train your boarding parties with a CGI as it is with a physical mock up. I'm not saying they are actually going to try and board a Carrier, but when some numb-nuts cousin of somebody who can kill or disapear you on a whim says to do something stupid, you just do it.

What could he really talk about, the creation story in genesis is a whole 2 pages long (and even repeats itself); he couldn't talk about what is in the Bible for more than a couple minutes.

Well lets see,

The national maps show temperature anomalies relative to the 1981–2010 base period. This period is used in order to comply with a recommended World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Policy, which suggests using the latest decade for the 30-year average. For the global-scale averages (global land and ocean, land-only, ocean-only, and hemispheric time series), the reference period is adjusted to the 20th Century average for conceptual simplicity (the period is more familiar to more people, and establishes a longer-term average). The adjustment does not change the shape of the time series or affect the trends within it. NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC)

I didn't pick out the dates, reality did.

Interesting the much hated 1%ers get a little over 21% of the income, if we took it all it wouldn't do jack to the debt or the deficit.

I honestly believe that because individual income tax rates are higher the corporate rates and additionally because to the liberal expenses that corporations are given, I wouldn't be one bit surprised if tax revenues didn't increase if corporate taxes were completely eliminated.