When one activist website tell you that the earth is warming, and another activist website tells you that the earth isn't warming, it's a good idea to check the actual scientific data to determine which activist website is getting the facts wrong. Here's an 18 year graph. The earth has in fact been warming over the last 18 years.

Here's the 50 year graph. That's a neat website that lets you generate graphs over any date range. If you want to play with it, just be sure to update the year-values for both series 1 (the red graph) and series 2 (the green graph).

There was also an unexpected surge in heat being pulled from the atmosphere into the deep ocean. This has recently pulled a vast amount of heat off of the typical graphs of surface-level atmospheric temperature. This is why air-temperature-graphs gives a false impression of somewhat slower warming the last few years.

Air is extremely low density. Very little of the global heat resides in the atmosphere, and what does show up in the air is extremely variable as heat shifts between the air and the land&sea. In fact the atmosphere only accounts for 2% of global heat content. The land surface temperatures are about 8%. The massive oceans account for 90% of the planet's heat content. Here's a graph of ocean heat over the last 50-odd years. The vast majority of heat ultimately goes into the oceans. That graph shows that there has been absolutely no slowing in the rate of global heat increase. Global warming hasn't paused. Global warming hasn't stopped. Global warming hasn't slowed.

There doesn't exist ONE scientific body of national or international standing that still denies man-made global warming. The last national or international scientific body to dissent was, comically, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists back in 2007. Yep, even the oil geologists stopped denying it seven years ago.

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The only true theists I have known flew airplanes into buildings.

I have also met a lot of people who describe themselves as theists, but I am so blinded by my own ideology that I am utterly incapable of understanding anything outside it, therefore I just fucking made up my own definition that fits into my dysfunctional understanding.

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No, you're missing his point.
He's an utterly awful excuse for a human being. He has absolutely no understanding of, and absolutely no interest in, any moral framework that isn't based on obedience to a precivilized mythological authority.

When someone vigorously makes the argument that they would be utterly selfish people who murder rape and steal if they were an atheist - therefore atheists are immoral - the proper response is to point out that makes THEM vile evil people, not the atheists.

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Translation: You don't understand atheism, therefore your personal religion gets to claim all credit for any and all positive common-sense-truths.

Christianity incorporated things that were widely accepted as true or good long before Christianity existed, and which are widely accepted as true or good in societies that have never had contact with Christianity.... and you want to claim Christianity somehow "owns" them, and that atheists cannot interdependently agree with them.

I do not need to believe in Native American animal spirit guides to come to the conclusion that it's a good idea to avoid violence.
I do not need to believe in Reincarnation to come to the conclusion that it's a good idea to avoid violence.
And I sure as heck don't need to believe in your even sillier walking-talking snake stories to come to the conclusion that it's a good idea to avoid violence.

There are pure-logic reasons to come to that conclusion.
There are good reasons to come to that conclusion which may range beyond a strict definition of "pure logic", which have absolutely nothing to do with invisible mystical magical beings.

One of the great things about atheism is that we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Christianity that is true or good. Just as we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Judiasm that is true or good. Just as we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Islam that is true or good. Just as we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Native American religion that is true or good. Just as we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Buddhism that is true or good. Just as we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Hinduism that is true or good. Just as we see absolutely nothing wrong with adopting anything in Confucianism that is true or good.

Atheists don't define "morality" as obedience to some random religion's claims about what some invisible-silent-magical-man wants. We are free to accept the best examples of morality and the best teachings on morality and the best reasoning on morality, from anywhere. Jesus said a lot of very wise things. Buddha said a lot of very wise things. Confucius said a lot of very wise things. I see no shame as an atheist, taking the best that Christianity has to offer. But there's no way in hell you can claim Christianity has some monopoly-ownership on the idea of non-violence.

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Agreed. It's awesome how science is getting a better and better understanding of how much of the universe is hospitable to us-like life. But it's always mentally-painful when stories like this make loudly-screaming-assumptions that we are a typical, or exclusive, model of what life in the universe looks like. The most trivial problem with the current story is that undersea or underground us-like life won't be much bothered of the atmosphere gets nuked with radiation. Stretching things a bit, we have no idea if gas giant planets could support some sort of life in the ocean-like depths of their atmospheres. And to go onto the deep unknown, there's about 6x as much dark matter as regular matter. The little we do know about dark matter does give some cause to doubt it's suitability for life, but our understanding of dark matter and our understanding of unlike-us life is far too thin to make any reasonable assumptions on the subject. Is there life out there? It's looking increasingly inevitable that more us-like life does exist, but we still know far too little to presume that we aren't a wildly a-typical form of life.

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>"in order to offer good driver incentives"

You can't determine if someone is a "good driver" from a phone. PERIOD. Speed, G-forces, where you are driving, when you are driving, NONE OF THAT determines if you are

1) Leaving reasonable following distance
2) In control
3) Alert and paying attention
4) Using proper signaling
5) Courteous
6) Familiar with the limits of function of the vehicle
7) Defensive/predictive

etc. They seem to think that if you brake hard, accelerate faster than some "typical norm", or corner too hard, you are a bad driver... and that simply is neither true nor fair.

Nicotine probably causes less harm to the human body than caffeine or sugar. Perhaps you are thinking about something else?

>"Many drugs with abuse potential such as nicotine and opiates, as well as marijuana, pump up the brain's dopamine levels, which can induce feelings of euphoria."

Exactly how does one "abuse" nicotine? What ridiculous grasping to put nicotine into the same sentence as opiates and marijuana when it comes to getting "high". It is also never used for pain killing. You might as well have included caffeine and sugar in the list. It blows the credibility of the article and makes it seem totally desperate.

If wanting to be alert and have good sleep patterns, then you would do well to not use caffeine at all. It is not some miracle, it is like any other drug- it builds dependence and nothing is "free"... the energy you might gain is made up for by energy lost later.

I know this sentiment might not be a popular view (apparently) in the tech crowd, what with coffee, tea, caffeine pills, caffeinated sodas, caffeinated soap and other such nonsense.

I don't know why the hell they went with Oracle.
I'd have taken the job for $201 million dollars.

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You will instantly and consistently get shut down on Wikipedia.

The reason for that is that you are a Truth Crusader. It doesn't matter if you are Right or Wrong. Wikipedia shuts down Truth Crusaders on EITHER sides of any issue by simply declaring that Wikipedia is not a place to debate, or resolve, matters of Truth. Wikipedia pages are not filled with "Truth", Wikipedia content accurately reflects the content of "Verifiable Reliable Sources". If "Reliable Sources" consistently state something which happens to be false then Wikipedia is going to ACCURATELY report that that is what Reliable Sources say.

(Some might comment on the contradiction of "Reliable Sources" which contain false information. The world is an imperfect place, and no one can expect perfection in anything. The definition of "Reliable Source" is a set of criteria that establish a broad class of sources as reasonably reliable in general, independent of the fallibility of any particular source on a particular thing. So yes, a Reliable Source can be wrong, and Wikipedia will accurately reflect that wrong information up until the point when other Reliable Sources correct that information.)

If you want to wage a Truth Crusade exposing the "myths about Auschwitz", then Wikipedia is not the place to do it. Wikipedia does not and will not lead on that subject, nor will it lead on any other subject. Wikipedia follows. Wikipedia follows Reliable Sources. If and when you convince Reliable Sources to expose myths about Auschwitz, Wikipedia will gladly update to accurately report what those Reliable Sources say.

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That sounded like an interesting idea.... for about 30 seconds.
Then I realized that it wouldn't solve anything, it wouldn't improve anything. It would just make things worse. Much worse. People would just start waging war over credibility. When it comes to notability, simple, you dig up three reliable sources on a subject and BAM, YOU WIN! Fight over. Inviting fights over credibility would be a never ending flamefest disaster.

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My issue is that they were comparing on-line hard drive backup to off-line bluray but with an expensive and fancy robot system. Which is not quite a "fair" comparison. The Bluray drives also have to be connected and use power. The robot uses power. A spun down stand-by hard drive uses only about 0.75 watts! That means you could have half a PETABYTE of ONLINE storage for about the power of a single traditional lightbulb.

At the rate hard drive density keeps going up, it seems optical storage just can't keep up. We have seen this happen with CD, then DVD, and now bluray. Doesn't help that the prices on bluray discs were kept way too high for far too long.

Hard drives are now 4TB for $150! Bluray is still around $1/disc for quality, but each is just 25GB. That means you need 160 discs to equal one hard drive that costs slightly less, writes and reads a hell of a lot faster, and actually takes up considerably less space.

I am not saying hard drives for backups is ideal in all cases, but it certainly is a much more attractive option in many ways.

>"Their data can be restored more quickly"

Than a hard drive? I think not.

> "the Blu-ray system doesn't need to be powered when the discs aren't in use, it uses 80% less power than the hard-drive arrangement, cutting overall costs in half."

Say what? When my backup hard drives are not being used, they also use zero power because they are not plugged in. And when they ARE plugged in, they "power down" after a few min of no usage, which I think is like 1% of normal power.

The density of storage for bluray is also not better than hard drives, and the writing is much slower. I also don't see how transport is so much better than laptop hard drives. Bluray MIGHT be cheaper, depending on how you value your criteria... and the discs are more rugged (if that even matters).

I couldn't agree with your post more.

My major problem with is with ANY content- ads or not, that has autonomous animation. I can't stand it. Doesn't matter how big or small, I can't "tune out" something moving in my peripheral vision.

I wouldn't mind small and non-animated ads, without timebombs or flyouts or mouseovers, but it seems like those just don't exist anymore. So I feel I am FORCED to browse with Adblock.