Nor are they trying to. So that works out pretty well.

(The plan is to reduce carbon emissions by keeping the area near the plant nice and cool.)

Both. Some bacteria make ammonium from nitrogen, which keeps it in the soil. Others dump it in the air as N(2) and N(2)O. Local conditions limit how much gets mineralized into ammonium naturally. If there's enough oxygen around, other bacteria make it into nitrates, which then feed more plants. I reckon if they're planted sparsely, removed regularly (and composted properly), or rotated with nitrate-hungry plants, quite a lot would stay in the dirt. So, yeah, fertilizer and stuff, although some nitrogen is gonna float away no matter what.

Every presidential nominee since 1988 has graduated from either Harvard or Yale. More than 25% of the 108th Congress was from the Ivy League. Twenty percent of Congress attended private schools before college. Fifteen current Representatives attended community colleges. No Senators did so.

The average Senator has more than $15,000,000 in disclosed assets; the average Representative, more than $5,000,000; in fairness, the wealthiest in Congress have hundreds of millions, while the poorest have millions in liabilities. (Most also have considerable assets they aren't required to report, such as private home values.) A few Reps come from backgrounds of poverty, and quite a few more are from blue-collar families. All current Senators, as far as I can tell reasonably quickly, have backgrounds of upper-middle-class or higher.

I'm sure state and local politicians have more diverse backgrounds, but at the federal level there's unquestionably a tendency toward lifelong wealth and privilege.

Eh? The Kingdom of Egypt was Islamic. The Revolution of 1952 got rid of the notion of state religion, although of course the people of Egypt are still predominantly Muslims.

Farouk abdicated after the coup, which was not about religion, but corruption and the popular feeling that he was a British puppet. It wasn't a bloodless uprising but it was short, the death toll was light, and AFAIK the only civilian casualties were police who fought in opposition. That revolution paved the way to the modern, relatively liberal Egypt we know today.

No, Windows 1.0 (not trademarked then, tho') was the Microsoft Windows Operating Environment. I still have the original box, disks, and manuals and I'm lookin' at them right now. The manual lists 1.0 as the version, although it's not on the box anywhere.

The FCC can't imprison you. Only Congress (at the Federal level) can pass laws with prison time. FCC rules are administrative, which is more akin to civil than criminal law. At most, the FCC may investigate certain crimes, but those crimes were defined by Congress, and a law enforcement body would have to make the arrest.

That's not to say I think they should be given authority; the last thing we need on the 'net is a gang of holier-than-thou thugs armed with the power to fine and a giant banhammer. These guys have a long history of misdirected moral crusading, corruption, and arrogance, and they should be relegated to maintaining only the technical aspects of communication in America -- and that under close supervision when money is involved.

Just to be a pedant, I think you're confusing one of Asimov's essays with Sturgeon's Law ("Ninety percent of everything is crud"). Asimov wrote an essay about becoming a writer, claiming that only perhaps 1% of prospective writers were published, and only 1% of those were published a second time, and so forth. It's an easy mistake, I s'pose, since Sturgeon also wrote sci-fi. (Of course, Asimov wrote a lot so I might've overlooked that quote, but it doesn't sound like him and I can't find it anywhere.)

It's worth noting that Asimov's 1% rule is no longer really true but Sturgeon's Law marches on.

Strange, the first part of my post got eaten between preview and submit. I posted the numbers the state used, which are based on research, rather than idle speculation like your argument.

They came up with the figure that, in the initial phase, this would save a driver $16 a year in gas, and when it's fully ramped up, $20 per year. Overall, they estimate it reducing statewide emissions by 700,000 tons of CO(2). You have a nice-sounding argument; they have the results of actual empirical testing. Even the groups opposing these rules aren't disputing that the rules will be effective, and those guys are industry pros with engineering degrees and everything.

You need to post the results of real tests rather than intellectual exercises.

Sure you can; I phrased that poorly. I meant comment formally, not comment on Slashdot. The rules are open to public comments before they're set in stone, but you have to live here to do so.

But you're still a damned fool for arguing that things ain't the way they are, like the man who saw an elephant and said "there ain't no such animal". If you want to argue with the results of controlled testing, argue with the methodology, or find or perform a study that gets different results. Waving your arms and spouting theory is meaningless when compared to empirical research.

This from gzipped_tar, the wife beater.

Okay, not really, but I'm making a point. Everything I see out there shows Lego actively opposing domain squatting both as it applies to their stuff (but avoiding suing squatters) and as a general principle. I see no accusations, credible or not, of them squatting, although I confess I'm not looking too hard.

Unless you're calling defensive domain registration "squatting", but you'd be the first I've heard make that argument.

Tiny multiplied by 23,000,000 is not always so tiny.

Now, if the glass significantly impacts signal transmission, that could be an issue, but that's entirely separate from claiming that the regs will have no benefit. However, the criticism on these grounds so far are all "may" and "could" degrade communication. If it prevents GPS, 911 calls, and tracking parolee ankle bracelets, it's a problem; if it makes it slightly harder to tune into WKRP at the edge of their broadcast range, I'm not too worried. The state's current response, suggesting that antennae be used, seems disingenuous for a variety of reasons. I'd prefer this be evaluated more thoroughly before the rules pass.

Either way, it would be pretty stupid to require the regulation on vehicles with no A/C, regardless of any other issues.

But let's bear in mind that these rules are not yet passed. If you have a problem with 'em, and you're a Californian, you can go ahead and comment on 'em before they're published. Do so, by all means, but don't be a damned fool and argue the quantifiable aspects of them without better numbers of your own.

Lego. Zippo. They're out there, although few and far between: Small companies that actually make things and aren't cutthroat because they're the best at what they do, that live on reputations of quality--real quality, not the word "quality". And more often than not, they end up selling out to huge conglomerates that either wisely let them do their thing in peace (Ben & Jerry's), or milk their reputation while letting them rot (Singer). But there are a (very) few out there that stay independent and manage to not be evil without it being a marketing strategy.

That's a bit of exaggeration on both sides, don't you think? On one end, I can't imagine that even a planetary-scale project would span that great a time period. There's knowledgeable estimates that think we can make significant progress in decades and make it completely human-habitable in a few centuries.

On the other end of things, we can make fairly accurate predictions. Look at the first moon landing; America's best engineers came up with a one-decade estimation and hit it pretty much right on the nose. We can't predict everything that will happen in the world over the next year, no, but why do you think we'd have to in order to plan a task? We don't stop construction of a building because there may be a city fire, or a nuclear war, or any number of possible but unpredictable events that would ruin the project.

That may be true, but it's really hard to get the gold out of seawater, and the exchange rate for fish poop and clam shells is really bad right now. So in practical terms it's probably better for them to just buy the land.

They've been living there quite happily for roughly 2000 years; I'd call that doing okay in the long term. Rainfall isn't really a problem, because, see, these are islands, and rain sort of goes down into the ocean. There's no hurricane season, so that's not much of an issue to my knowledge. The occasional tsunami is devastating, but the trade-off is easy access to shipping, a forgiving climate, and lots of seafood, which to many is worth the risk.

Can't disagree with you there, except inasmuch as saying it "has been" exploited. Oceans are rising at about 3 mm/year, so while there's cause for concern and planning, I don't think they need to evacuate just yet. As noted in the summary, they're quite wisely diversifying their investment by trying to buy an emergency backup homeland.