Who did you think will pay the taxes? Businesses large and small, and the people who work for them. If the local government has to put up the taxpayers' money then they damn well better get that money back (something which is not happening with any sports stadium project that I've ever seen).

Glassification (mixing waste with sand, heating, and turning the stuff into glass) works really well. Stable, leak-proof, easy to handle. Hanford was going to start glassifying waste there a couple of decades ago, and some idiots gave the contract to Bechtel. Bechtel put up a building, got the equipment delivered, found it wouldn't fit into the building, and left it out in the rain all winter while they cashed their check. Not sure why the project didn't get re-started, I've never heard any actual objections to the process.

The best place for waste disposal is the bottom of the oceanic trenches, where it will be subducted into the Earth's mantle. The military objects of course, claiming that unidentified "enemies" might steal it. Of course if they have the ability to reach the bottom of the oceanic trenches and dig shit up then they probably already have the technology and money necessary to do considerably worse things than spread around some radioactive glass.

What point? Where you claim that I said temperature has no effect on snow packs? Or the one where you claim that I said humidity is the only factor in local weather? No, I didn't bother to "address" them, they're such fraudulent strawmen that it's not worth the effort. Yes, I'm quite aware of the prehistoric glaciers, go look up Milankovich Cycles. Oh, and go ask an Australian what they thought of the weather the last six months.

No, I'm saying you can't use the NBT protocol to transmit over the Internet. There's no routing information so your router has nowhere to forward it to beyond itself. Go ahead and remove TCP/IP and install NetBEUI on your network card and try it. You can't get there from here.

NetBEUI is a transport-level protocol. Routing happens at the network level.

Think about a city spending $100 million to subsidize a sports team. In order for the city to make that back the team would have to generate (at a 30% tax rate) $350 million in revenue that would otherwise not exist without it. Local taxable revenue, not earnings for the owner's Bahamian bank account. How often do you think that happens?

**Sigh**

You really have no concept of the difference between climate and weather, do you? If you want to use the Rockies as your example then look at the very old photos of Glacier National Park, and then look at pictures taken from the same viewpoint today. Your high snow pack is weather, the receding glaciers are climate. It's depressing to look at my photos of the Cordillera Blanca that I took in 1987 and images of the same peaks today. Even then I was late, photos in the museum from half a century before showed both sides of the Rio Santa valley covered with glaciers, only the eastern side still had white peaks then.

I always like RKeeper's (large Moscow-based POS system) quick-and-dirty solution: make all the POS machines use NetBEUI. Can't route, the only way to get to the machines from outside is through remote controlling the server.

Of course not, there wasn't anything like a "scientific community" until the mid-19th century. Prior to that pretty much all scientific work was done by or for wealthy hobbyists, or engineers actually hired to do something else (like Leonardo da Vinci). Our current culture and level of technology is a direct result of that change.

In Seattle's case taxpayers had just coughed up almost half a billion dollars to put up a new football and baseball stadium, in the process destroying the much-loved King Dome and flattening the south end of downtown, and then gave naming rights and enormous tax breaks to the teams' owners to boot. The Sonics declared that they needed a new stadium which was going to cost as much as the other two combined, even though they couldn't reliably fill their current location, **and** they wanted to site it in a rather historic part of the city, **and** they were going to demand all parking revenue for a decade or more even though they weren't paying to build the structure. Seattle appropriately told them to take a hike, and I wish they had told the Mariners and Seahawks the same thing a few years before.

So Ballmer wants to buy a sports team? All I can say is, "Who gives a flying fuck?"

Sure, but on the other hand municipal trash removal ceased for centuries at a time. No one living more than a block from the river is going to haul their trash any further than the abandoned lot down the street if they don't have to. And motor vehicles have only been around for a little more than a century, do you have any idea how much waste horses produce? In some cities of Europe there is a paved street, a meter or more of accumulation, another paved street, more accumulation, and the current modern street, the homes on the street have been altered (including being torn down and used for fill, as you correctly point out) to accommodate the changed street level.

The amount of it is surprising, as the Arctic (not Antarctic) ocean is fairly cut off from the rest of the oceanic circulation patterns. BTW, currents mostly stay in horizontal bands separated by different temperature and salinity gradients, there is very little vertical circulation (few exceptions, like the Humbolt Current, but that's the general rule). Plastic in the benthic depths would pretty much have to be carried there by the sinking of near-surface organisms.

Why do conservatives have such a difficult time understanding the difference between weather and climate? Oh, that's right, short-term limited-complexity thinking is endemic in that mindset, changes that take decades or centuries to develop are unfathomable, and local effects are somehow supposed to be able to be extrapolated to cover the entire planet. Locally, Mount Baker and Mount Rainier have been trading world record snowfall levels, and the cons think it disproves global warming. Climatologists and meteorologists are quite aware it's actually because the warmer ocean evaporates more water causing more precipitation.

My bad, I meant Pantheon in Rome. Brain burp.

When we were in Rome a few years ago there was a ruin undergoing excavation in the middle of the city. You could walk over to the edge of the excavation and look down about 7 or 8 meters to where the work was being done, since the subsequent 20 centuries of occupation had added that much elevation. There are places like the Parthenon which have been in continuous use and are in a slight dip in the terrain because trash was not allowed to accumulate there. IIRC they had to stop a planned subway expansion because the tunneling kept running into archeological sites.