Yes, but at the same time, paying for an internet line to be run to your house can actually cost more than your house in rural areas...

So you're rich enough to afford a house, you enjoy the quality of life of a rural area, but you want other people to subsidize your utilities. Hey, why not demand that other people drill your well, dig out your septic tank, and pay for your solar panels too?

Of course, other people already subsidize your insurance if you live in a beach house, and roads and bridges to the middle of nowhere, a lot of which goes to the already well off or one percenters.

The total is 47,600 gtc. That's 60 times as much carbon as is currently in the atmosphere. Currently, the atmosphere is 0.04% CO2. So, if we put all the fossil carbon back into the atmosphere, we'd have 2.4% carbon dioxide. ... Which brings me to the other thing that's changed. Early, single-cellular life was adapted to whatever temperature the Earth was at

Most of that carbon is irrelevant because it can't possibly be released. Putting all recoverable fossil fuel reserves into the air might possibly get us as high as 2000 ppm, roughly what existed during the Jurassic and Cretaceous ages. There were no catastrophic positive feedback mechanisms and no runaway greenhouse effect (and the sun is not significantly hotter today than back then). The climate was warm, the ice caps had melted, sea levels were a bit higher, huge land animals roamed the continents, and mammals and primates prospered, but it was a fine, livable earth, arguably nicer than what we have today. Really, stop the pseudoscientific fear mongering.

Goodie, two corrupt banks backed by UK tax payers want to leave an independent Scotland.

Sounds to me like just the kind of thing independence is actually supposed to accomplish.

Unfortunately, they are probably just saber rattling.

Salmond has been saying 18 months, that's his timetable.

That's a tentative timetable for formal independence; it says nothing about a timetable for how economic or other relations change. And even that tentative timetable can be changed and postponed at will.

The fact remains that there is nothing in the vote that either mandates a timetable or necessitates any kind of "messy or painful split", and pretending otherwise is FUD.

Just like power lines, roads, and anything else that is best maintained by enforcing artificial monopolies at some level

I see your error...

That's nonsense. There is as much economic and financial data on Scotland as there is on the UK as a whole. Independence introduces a small degree of political uncertainty in the short term, which may raise the cost of borrowing slightly, but that's likely no worse than what you face before an election.

He's obviously talking about the short term, not in some possibly long-term future where everything is sorted out.

The referendum just asks "Should Scotland be an independent country?" It doesn't specify a timetable or how the transition is going to happen. The suggestion that there are "immediate" or "short term" consequences itself is unfounded scare mongering.

it's true that the split will be messy painful and could cause recession on both sides

But that isn't true, it's just more FUD. The only reason that would happen is if the UK and/or EU get vindictive for political reasons. Otherwise, the transition can be as gradual and careful as people wish.

For tech start-ups, funding will be tougher to find and more expensive, there will be no local banks, access to EU markets and the freedom of movement will be curtailed

Yes, because of course no bank would ever want to be in a new country with an educated workforce, low unemployment, and lots of natural resources! Small places like Luxembourg and Switzerland are absolutely barren, devoid of banks, money, or access to markets! The poor people of Liechtenstein and Monaco are starving and barely literate! Don't turn Scotland into a dump like Norway!

(That was sarcasm, for the sarcasm-impaired.)

What you prefer - endless exponential economic growth combined with a liveable planet - is not on offer by the universe we inhabit.

Bullshit, I said no such thing. That's both a straw man and a false dichotomy.

Fossil fuel use is self-limiting: there is only so much of it we can burn, and even if we burned all of it, we'd still be on a livable planet (where do you think fossil fuel came from?). Furthermore, fossil fuel use is going to be limited far more effectively through economic development and free markets; if governments don't intervene, we'll likely stop using fossil fuels much sooner and deal with climate change much better than if governments do intervene in the way climate change activists advocate.

Your error isn't with what you desire for the long term future of the planet, it's with the harmful policies you advocate: ineffective and corrupt policies justified as solutions to the wrong problems.

For some definition of "economy", right? If it's not sustainable, it's not economy.

Humanity has never lived sustainably. Sustainability is neither a desirable nor an achievable goal.

Personally, I'd prefer a liveable planet to any amount of money.

Well, fortunately, there is no evidence that climate change will make the planet overall less livable. At worst, climate change will impose some temporary costs on some vested interests.

On the other hand, it is clear that the kind of programs people propose to combat climate change are not only ineffective but economically destructuve.

I prefer a livable planet and a free society and a high standard of living to a livable planet in which people live in non-free societies and in poverty.

Have some common sense!

Yes, please do!

It's easy to throw together a new language and compiler. The question is whether it has the credibility and features to build a large user community. I see nothing in Rust that makes me believe that it does. Whether Swift is a better or worse programming language doesn't matter as much as that its adoptions by Apple pretty much guarantees that there will be programmers, books, tools, and libraries.

Sea ice cover (and that means surface area, not volume) matters a great deal "in the context of models", because it changes reflectivity.

(Of course, while various descriptive parts of climatology are scientific, climate models are little more than the reading of goat entrails and based on numerous guesses and assumptions. They also haven't been very good at actually predicting the future.)

Gore didn't even lie. He said there was a strong chance it could be ice-free in the summer months within a few years.

Properly pronounced political propaganda always leaves wiggle room.

it's another one of those misquotes trotted out by people with an axe to grind and a terrible education.

Everybody should have "an ax to grind" with progressives, given how destructive their policies have been.

I'm not just referring to the (particularly common as Slashdot) climate change deniers who dismiss all sorts of careful analysis of data and theory for some unspecified null hypothesis

No, what we deny is not the scientific conclusions, but the applications of it. "We must limit carbon emissions" does not follow, scientifically or otherwise, from "it is getting warmer due to carbon emissions".