XnView is being ported. Beta versions:

http://www.xnview.com/en/downloadunix.html

globally this decade has been warmer
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20100121/ ( I know, this link is used bloody everywhere in this discussion - but noone seems to care to read it)

possible amnesty on its $1.27 billion Nevada tax maneuverings.

So, Washington is proposing that Microsoft get amnesty on a completely legal activity (yes, the Nevada activities are completely legal)? And here I thought we usually gave amnesties for criminal acts, not legal acts.

Note, by the way, that NOT giving them amnesty on their perfectly legal past activities amounts to an ex post facto law - which is perfectly unconstitutional....

Only fundamental research into particle physics. There are plenty of equally fundamental research areas (genetics if you are practically-minded, math if you're not) which don't require billion dollar budgets.

Personally, I see the whole "physics is the ultimate science" as a con to graft in more grad students.

I have located an even more recent paper, written by a scientist working for NOAA (a reputable scientific body), using NASA's own data, that shows that the lower stratosphere is not in fact cooling as the greenhouse models call for. Rather, it is warming. Which in turn means the greenhouse warming models are fundamentally flawed...

Interesting paper. Of course, it doesn't say (or even imply) that "greenhouse warming models are fundamentally flawed." The stratosphere cools as CO2 increases because the "emitting layer" moves higher into the troposphere, so it emits less long wave radiation because temperature decreases with altitude in the troposphere. Because that radiation normally warms the stratosphere, the stratosphere cools. But other factors can warm the stratosphere, like anthropogenic methane and water vapor. Also, increased ozone warms the stratosphere, which is why the paper you cited actually suggests that "the reversing trend may relate to a possible recovery of stratospheric ozone concentration."

In reality, global circulation models (GCMs) are validated in a more robust fashion than examining a single variable in a single paper. After running an initial condition ensemble to average away the weather, and a multi-model ensemble to average away non-systematic errors, GCM output is compared to paleoclimate reconstructions and instrumental records (though the mean climate can't be independently verified because of model "tuning"). The GCM response to forcing events such as volcanic eruptions can be compared to reality. The CO2 sensitivity implied by the GCM can be compared to independent estimates from the last deglaciation. Chapter 8 here is a good source for background information concerning climate models and their evaluation.

I could go on about this for hours, pointing out reams of data and studies that do not support the idea of man-caused global warming... but I have already made my point: the plain FACT is, nowhere near "all" our evidence points to man-caused global warming. There is a great deal of counter-evidence, and much of the evidence on the "pro" side is now under suspicion because of some questionable practices used.

Maybe you understand the physics behind these arguments better than I do, but the overwhelming majority of the evidence I've seen says that abrupt climate change is happening because of anthropogenic greenhouse gases like CO2. Considering that this conclusion has been subjected to extensive independent verification, I also don't see any reason to be concerned about any questionable practices that have been floating around the tabloids. The few stories that weren't complete nonsense simply showed that scientists are human-- that countering the never-ending deluge of misinformation from nonscientists is stressful enough that they need to vent to each other privately via email.

I can sympathize. If every one of these climate skeptics put as much energy into getting a graduate physics education as they do into reading crackpot blogs and hurling insults at me online, maybe I'd have more time to work on my actual research...

This follows from my finding that, on the evidence and on a proper interpretation of the law, a person makes each film available online only once through the BitTorrent system and electronically transmits each film only once through that system.

This is a very strange argument. If I torrent a movie and let it seed indefinitely, I will almost certainly have distributed more than one copy of the film. Did the justice really believe that torrenting is a one-for-one kind of activity where a downloaded work is uploaded once and only once? I haven't read the decision, but I wonder how much of it concerned downloading versus uploading.

These comments don't really alter the basic thrust of his decision, but they do give one pause to wonder how much the justice really understood about the mechanisms of the "BitTorrent system."

I'm on 3 in Australia and got my Nexus One yesterday. Loving it - just gotta make sure you disable data while roaming (which is an option luckily) because 3 are evil bastards and charge you 50c/mb while roaming which just happens often due to 3 being crap.

I haven't RTFA but maybe this update will improve the 3g....

So they're concluding that performing a complex multidisciplinary task requiring thinking, planning and problem solving skills, but that is also fun improves student performance and learning?

I'm shocked!

As an Earthling I get more spam from the US than anywhere else...

Stats (so as a Briton, I should probably keep quiet about spam-by-country.)

You mean the much anticipated Langoliers??

They are not dishonest they've stated they're making a $1. There is nothing that says you have to take more unless you're some low wage loser that has to get minwage because of a federal or state welfare by fiat scheme.

They're not assholes for building up a successful company while not being as malevolent as microsoft.

They're not selfish as the money they are not paid, unlike some CEO's sucking up bailout welfare, can go to their employees or stock holders.

They and their company have not been selfish at giving back to the world in several ways through open source code and monetary contributions to a wide variety of charities.

Hint: Just because people disagree with you, does not mean there is a conspiracy of astroturfers working against you.

Sometimes, people just don't agree with you.

They don't consider computational efficiencies due to complexity. For instance, if you count items by marking tally marks on sticks, then to count something into the billions, you run out of trees in the world to make those sticks. However, if you use indian-arabic notation, marking down 9 billion 500 thousand 201 takes up this much room: 9,000,500,201. That's it. This is the kind of computational efficiency that cannot be predicted. The human brain is a pretty fast computer and visual/audio singal analyzer, plus social nuance analyzer, etc, probably running around roughly 5 to 70 Hz semianalog. Though there are quite a few braincells, building supercomputers with equivalent number of transistors would most likely not give the same computational performance. There is a guess that the interconnectivity, the synapse density between the neurons is what makes the difference. The computational efficiency comes from complexity. In this sense, a neuron, like a notation number, instead of representing a single tally mark, can represent something like the 5 in the 9,000,500,201 billion. Its function and performance is super-enhanced by increased complexity of what it can do - it can be a number from 0 to 9, and it can be a placeholder. Such things can create an order of magnitude increase in efficiency, that Moore's Law analyses cannot predict. The move to multicore processors is most likely the only way to keep up with Moore's law, and currently this move is in its infancies. We know the brain is multicore-like, "interconnectedness" based. When eventually we have a few trillion cores interacting on a cpu, we might discover, by trial and error, methods of increased efficiency. We might even understand how our own brain works from playing with chips, as opposed to understanding it from brain research, since the ethical issues coming from the machine direction are much easier to deal with (or are they?) Low intelligence automation and robotization is an easy ethical question, and it will be welcome thing for humanity, but the big problem with increased supercomputing power and understanding how the brain works is the problem of artificial intelligence.

Currently we know of no other beings smarter than us, humans, in the universe. That's a big deal. Silicon based solar-robotic lifeforms might be able to spread through the vacuum of interstellar universe, they would not be interdependent on chemical lifeforms like those on planet Earth. Where would that leave hydrocarbon-water-chemical life as we know it? We love and care about nature around us, and even if we don't, we ultimately have to act as if we did. The interdependence of life eating life, plants being the photosynthesists, sort of holds the collective interests together, and makes all Life function as one. Though this rule of interdependence is not explicitly expressed in the behavior of lifeforms - and I wonder if some of the prehistoric mass-extinction events were not simply caused by the appearance of a new predator/virus/bacterial disease and the level of life activity simply reduced and reset to a new lower level balance being able to deal with that predator/virus/bacteria - currently all ecosystems function as a ecosystem, with no predators being "super successful", in a selfish, survival of me without the survival of everything around me attitude, the simplistic Darwinistic principle. Predators currently have an interest in the ecosystem beneath them functioning at a high level. Even space stations based on solar panel derived artificial-light using water-hydrocarbon-photosynthetic life farming would still be an ecosystem like ours. Solar panel derived fat/sugar/protein chemical synthesis in metal pots may be easier to deal with in a space station than a full scale ecosystem and farming, where only humans exist, and maybe just a very few species of plants and animals. Compare the farm to a jungle. All humans really need is the farm to survive, land with a few species of crops and few species of animals, or even just the cement/metal/glass city, and the jungle, and the variety of life it carries, may forever disappear. Even today, with the exception of a few "primitive" cultures, we don't know how to coexist in harmony with the jungle. Then comes the question of simply artificial intelligence with just simple batteries that does not need fat/sugar/protein, that does not even need an atmosphere or a space station, just a pure robotic solar being floating in the vacuum of space, being able to manufacture more of itself from asteroid rocks, living an eternal life. No death. No sex. No interdependence. No love.

I know your being sarcastic but ...

PAYUP as an australian tax payer I would like to
get my money back for

"Black Box" flight recorder
Aircraft Navigation (DME)
Penicillin (production in commercial amounts)
Cochlear implant
Contact lenses (long wearing)
Anthrax Vaccine
Heart Pacemaker
Relenza (flu medication) .......
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distance_measuring_equipment

http://www.questacon.edu.au/indepth/clever/100_years_of_innovations.html

Apart from the lower vulnerability of trains already mentioned by other posters, the key thing about planes is that they can be used as guided missiles which makes them dangerous to targets other than themselves. A hijacked train is limited by it's tracks and in most cases has a simple counter measure (switch off the power supply) to stop it once you find out it is misbehaving.