"Excuse me Sir, can you confirm that you just asked to be connected to a Real Male Technician?, Thank you, **tappity tap** , In line with our terms and conditions we have cancelled your service with us. We don't accept customers who are Misogynistic Obnoxious Pigs, All our technicians are trained to the same exacting standards and gender plays no part in the level of service a customer will receive from our support desk. Thank you for being our customer and we hope you have better luck with your next choice of service provider"
**PLONK**

As an Australian, I am bitterly disappointed in my Government. Whilst the rest of the world is ramping up their climate protection measures, our government is ramping up their BIG Industry protection measures. This is the same government that believes that wind farms are an ugly blight on the landscape (and attempting to block many new farms) whilst allowing large coal mines to go ahead. Because a very quiet white propeller on a pole making no pollution is much more horrible to look at that a giant hole in the ground with dozens of house sized trucks dragging out overburden and dumping it in a giant dirty pile.

If you are worried about your access to coal is going to be reduced because your own Government is closing coal mines, don't worry! you can just come and buy a freighter load of coal for less than it costs to remove it from the ground!. And again, don't worry! the trucks used to extract the coal will have all the modern pollution preventing technologies applied to them.. so the environment will be protected.

Outside of the government there is an enormous ground swell of alternative energy research and technologies being installed by Joe Average in their own house.. Much to the governments disgust

I was on an overnight train between Cairo and Aswan in Egypt a couple of years ago. My passport was in my Pocket.. nice and safe. The passport of one of my traveling companions was in their backpack, on the shelf above their seat. In the morning they disocvered it gone. During the night, when we sleep, sombody had rifled through her bag and taken the passport and a few other things. (cant remember what else was taken).

The passport is the one thing you can loose when traveling that is going to cause serious inconvienence. without it you cant prove who you are. (Some non first world countries dont even ACCEPT non passport identification. so dont go trying to show off your drivers license issued in your home country.. )

I know its totally the wrong feeling to have, but when I see a CCTV camera I look around and feel safe.

The caveat on this is that I still see cameras in some places and think "OMG, They can see me naked!" But if I'm wandering around in (most) public places I find my brain thinking "Oh wow.. well, if I get roughened up by some nice gentlemen at least the police will be able to find the gents who did this to me and give them a stern talking to and a discouragment for that sort of future activity" [1]

I then feel guilty for thinking these 'safe' thoughts about CCTV cameras and wonder what the privacy and trust crazies [2] would think of me.

[1] please note: actual language used may infact me different.
[2] To be fair, most of the privacy and trust crazies I know are actually pretty damn fine people and ver down to earth.. except that one.. with the tin foil hat!.. DUDE! you arent fooling anybody!

Damn right!.. I use that one as well. Everybody[1] keeps telling us that the password must be secret. So I made it secret.
[1] The Royal Everybody.

Star Wars VII: Still Hoping ?

Heating Material, any material, up to 420C, takes a large amount of energy and thus expense. If you can develop a microbe that will perform this operation without the massive amount of input energy then you can save a lot of money. I'm unsure what the time costs are but there would be an argument that throwing a microbe into a vat of Gold Chrloide for a week COULD be cheaper than the heat cycle.

In fact the little pieces of plastic are apparently microscopic pieces of plastic suspended in the entire water column over a vast area of ocean.
The author, from the documentary above, mentioned that he (she?) travelled to the alleged area to see the plastic and then learnt about the lack of visible suspended solids AND the problem with the local sea life drinking the water and filtering the plastic particles into their own systems.

Probably the best way is to be popular within the group or at least NOT unpopular. As a popular person, your manager will see you as sombody who gets along with everybody else. This is espeically important in a "Star Team" group where all members are performing brilliantly. The manager will look at the people who get along and rate them higher than the people who are a little different. The manager will grade down the 'unpopular' staff because they always seem to be in conflict or the naysayers or such.

The above was my personal experience. I learnt pretty quickly in my career that I didnt really "fit in". whilst I got the work done I always got lower gradings on these kinds of things.

I would like to say that its something you can change but often its not somethign you can conciously change. Its your personality. it's who you are. there is no real changing of that. The reality is probably that the only way you could improve your rateing is move to a department where there are people less popular than you.

Hmm. wow that sounds really dodgey, doesnt it! :) Excuse me, I have to go and put in a job application that's just come up on the companys internal job board.