His point was that you just proved it. :/

This, especially this. Pushing petroleum through pipelines instead of on his railroads would make him very sad, and nobody wants to make one of the biggest DNC contributors sad, now do they?

Meanwhile the partisans will clog up Facebook and similar with variations of 'yay our Lord and Savior saved teh environmentz!' versus 'teh imperialz president OMG!'... ...while the fat cats laugh at the little people a little before they plan their next chess move (and lobbyists) in Washington DC.

Meanwhile the world begins to do its best impression of Titanic-Meets-Iceberg ever.

Fucking politics, gotta love it (eyeroll).

Please. Once Verizon gets done lobbying for a redefinition of "5G", you'd be lucky to see a 10% increase in bandwidth from 4G.

He's not too far off; I remember in the bad old days when I worked for a large poultry corporation; most of the illegals (nearly all from South of the US) that they hired on did exactly that - shipped as much money home to the family as possible, stayed 5-10 years, then went back home and used that cash pile to start a business back home as their career/nest-egg generator.

Not sure how many H1-B's do the same thing, but I'm willing to wager that it's not an inconsequential percentage.

(...and to be honest, if I were not American, I'd do the same damned thing.)

I think it's even worse than that. The survey likely doesn't show what the individuals who got their H1-B's through Tata and Infosys actually get paid, instead showing what the tech corp paid agencies like Infosys or Tata instead for a given individual. Contractors are contractors, after all - the rate paid to the contracting agency for a guy is way more than the guy himself will ever see. A corp can pay a rate of $50/hr to the agency (be it US or foreign), but the guy in the seat is lucky to see $30/hr of that, before taxes. Tata and Infosys devour the majority of H1-B visas, so it stands to reason that maybe they should be more specific on who they're surveying.

TL;DR: I may be wrong, but I suspect that the survey is bullshit, and that the reality is that the individual more often than not gets paid slave wages, while the tech company can still happily report paying "industry standard", since they pay that "average" rate to the agency.

I could be wrong, but given greed...

Replace "smoker" with "diabetic", "downs syndrome parent", "thyroid issue" (obesity), etc etc...

Once that box is opened, all bets are off as to what can be denied. ;)

http://www.exploreutah.com/Get...

*mic drop*

Hell, there's a lot of exceptions...

Most towns in Utah are laid out on a strict grid wherever possible (and often even where it isn't), with any given address denoting it's position in yards relative to the nearest Mormon temple. My home address there always read like coordinates, no matter which home I lived in (e.g. 2240 E, 840 S ). Here in Portland, it's a semi-grid that quickly gets tangled once you get out of downtown (and in many cases, not even that far out).

Then again, TFA seems like they're just stating that people like grid patterns, which makes sense considering that it makes the best use of divvying up the land without the whole zig-zag travel that some n-Gon grid (e.g. hexagonal/honeycomb) layout would introduce.

Hell, forget specificity - it would be nice if it could even make a good/bad prediction, or at least *something* close enough and concrete enough. We've seen predictions of an ice-free Arctic by now (nope), sea levels that should have risen at least 5-12" by now (nope), swarms of killer hurricanes (nope)... and mostly we see a lot of authorities having to go out of their way to explain why their 10-year-old predictions have turned to crap. It doesn't help that some of them have resorted to long circuitous loops of semi-logic to try at an explanation.

Seriously - this isn't about quibbling over a fractions of a degree here, it's about getting the trend predictions workable, at least enough that later events come to within at least the same zip code of confirming them. Put this way: According to Dr. Hansen's infamous 'hockey stick', we should have seen something affirmative by now... and instead of revisiting his hypothesis to see why it didn't stack up against the facts on the ground (which would be the scientific way to deal with failure), we see Dr. Hansen actively litigating against any big-name critic that hurts his ego by pointing out that he was (*gasp*) wrong. And no - don't get me started on the IPCC; it's become little more than a propaganda organ these days.

So yeah - it is relevant to have a working model that can at least predict a trend, especially in light of what these scientists are demanding of society as a whole. As long as the science itself remains broken, no one should take stock in it.

Before anyone comes swooping in to express their hurt little feelings via downmods, note that I *want* these scientists to have a working model, and to have some sense of accuracy, no matter how it turns out otherwise. So far, not only is there a lack of one, but a religious and ideological fervor has swept the whole damn field, making it a mess that has lost credibility (partially in some cases, entirely in others).

May want to read what you quoted... the condition was caused by one massive-assed volcano going off. No anthropogenic cause for that one. ;)

Wait - what burden? A white roof would lower cooling costs and at the same time likely last longer (esp. if it were metal instead of asphalt shingle) due to the smaller heat envelope. Sure you'd have to wash it once in awhile, but damn... that's not really much of a burden.

Didn't realize that ink was that expensive these days. He said they could merely change the local building codes, not pay for that change. It would effect new construction and renovation.

By the way - one would have to keep it sane; making the freeways and parking lots white may keep heat down and increase albedo, but I damn sure wouldn't want to drive on such a glare-factory, let alone try to navigate it in the Winter.

I doubt it would do much of anything to affect climate though, since (aside from tenured profs seeking prominence, politicians making megabucks off of AGW, and quasi-religious zealots who refuse to admit otherwise) most climate science is still grossly incomplete, too immature to predict much of anything with any accuracy. Show me a complete (enough) and (more importantly) competent working computer model of the Earth's climate, and a sufficient series of correct predictions made from it... then we'll talk. Until then, the field still has a very long, hard row to hoe.

All said and done, keeping good custody of the environment is a worthy goal and should be aimed for - I have no problems with building codes that aim for this, at all. But seriously, let's just do it because it's the right thing to do, not because of some pronouncement from yet another klaxon-happy hyperbole factory looking to get his name in the papers.

Depends on how many years span what he listed, how much equipment he's bought over that time, and a few ancillary factors.

Personally, I've been using Macs in some form or another (PowerBook, G4 Cube, Dual G5 PowerMac, currently have a 15" MBP) since the mid-1990s, and I've used/kept many of them for upwards of a decade before finally giving them away or selling them, no issues.

Anecdotes aside, consider that Apple sells like 25-35 million Macs each year - likely more as time goes on. Over the timespan listed (2011-2013), they sold maybe 70 million+ Macs or so, and even 100,000 defective Macs in that bunch (which is the likely upper end, with a generous amount of slop thrown in for charity) comes to what, a 0.1% defect rate? I *know* that HP, Dell, et al have much higher defect rates, but those don't get as much press because they're not Apple.

Not to troll, but you're right. The hardware costs a lot, but they're built like tanks for the most part. Yeah, it's OSX... whatever. Put what you want on it (but that takes the discussion off the topic...)

Anyrate, the biggest bennie is the complete and utter lack of shitware - no "trial" apps you cannot remove, no adware, no bullshit. I didn't have to blow away the HDD and install a fresh OS when I got it, and as a result, there was no scrambling or sorting through the driver mess (especially those "drivers" the OEM supply which slather on even more bloat and bullshit; quite honestly, one does not want or need these things, and they often destroy performance entirely.)

To be fair, nearly every OEM will provide a laptop with no shitware on it - if you're willing to buy something off the business model line and pay the difference, or if you order the damn things in bulk. Other sellers will do so if you're willing to pay a premium, because they're too often too small to give you the dirt-cheap pricing. Either way, the prices for doing this often put you in Apple territory anyway, so I figured fuggit - may as well take the plunge, buy something that will hold up to abuse, and run like a champ for the most part.

Yeah, but don't you have to strangle someone's baby or otherwise bump off some innocent party to prove your loyalty first?

(/me ducks, runs like hell...)

As sibling mentioned, I suspect that the majority of unpaid contributors (that is, folks who contribute without being paid to do so by an employer) are indeed college students. Hell, Linux itself was originally written when Linus was an unpaid college student (with a strong distaste for Minix, and who could blame the guy), so it's not as if the argument has no merit. Other sources of unpaid contributions would be retired devs who want to keep their brains sharp, or junior devs who get paid to write other stuff, but want to build up their resume without a degree or waiting to get years of experience (because let's face it: a kid whose resume says "I am an active contributor to the Linux Kernel - here's the URL listing my approved commits" is going to get a fuckload of notice by the hiring manager in a Linux/UNIX-oriented dev shop.)