He was also an obese asthmatic and died from the strain of trying to run away from a volcano.

Oh, sexconker, you and your stories - "the study is wrong", "beer kills brain cells".... Now let's go back to that ... building ... thingie ... where our beds and TV ... is.

You're right, I should apply my critical faculties and take his own words with a big grain of salt. Clearly he's not a reputable source even concerning himself.

And that's good for Commerce, how? And Penn State?

So if I understand your logic:

1. CRU emails cleared ->
2. Climate "hoax" strengthened ->
3. Governments everywhere introduce massive new taxes "just in case" ->
4. Chamber of Commerce gets huge new budget for some reason ->
5. CoC panel members all get their fat bonus payoffs, along with all the other panels that cleared CRU ->
6. Vast global conspiracy involving government departments in most developed countries AND all major universities and scientific institutions AND their member scientists, who have all risked destroying their careers to fake all their studies and somehow share in this tax bounty - and nobody talks, no actual evidence is produced, the poor fossil fuel industry is just an innocent victim, and taxpayers around the world get stuck with a world running on renewable fuels with minimal pollution a few decades early.

Yep, makes perfect sense, far more sense than it being the fossil fuel industry that is doing their very best to deny all the evidence and sabotage any possible price on carbon, because they don't have hundreds of billions in profits and trillions more in potential assets at risk. No incentive there!!!

While I personally see a device like this (sorry... ROBOT!) of rather limited use for testing prepared dishes, I can see great utility for it for testing ingredients. You could have a standardized, unambiguous way to rate the quality or at least properties of a given product, be it meat, fruit, vegetables, etc. I bet cultivar breeding programs in particular could really benefit from this - "Well, I was hoping that this new mango would be a huge innovation, but actually it's almost identical to a Keitt. Though to be fair its mouthfeel is somewhat like a Carrie, and it does have a small amount of a new novel aromatic compound..." Just a single mass produced sensor package that measures a wide range of different properties at once in a repeatable, universal manner. If such a thing could become widespread, I'd bet half of the "cultivars" out there would pretty much disappear, having been shown to be essentially identical to others.

Citations? What evidence is there that the Department of Commerce has a financial interest in a global warming hoax, or Penn State U? Eagerly awaiting your failure to reply.

Do you have a reference for that? The first link I looked at just said

So there could be various reasons for them to not want to share data (such as too much time & effort required) - but wanting to hide evidence against global warming, is not one of them. The GPs implied accusation that the science was fudged has been thoroughly and repeatedly disproved.

Frederick Seitz? The physicist who, in your own link, admits he took money from tobacco and oil companies? Any reason we should be listening to his opinions over the thousands of climatologists and other scientists?

That interview made very interesting reading, like where he dodges the questions of undue influence from vested interests, and instead tries to accuse the interviewer of being unduly influenced (by persons unknown), providing no evidence of his own but talking over the top of any mention of actual peer-reviewed studies. I see no reason to consider him a reputable source.

Go into the Settings/Apps list, tap any app you don't want, Uninstall any updates, and Disable it. That frees up all the writable space taken by that app, stops it from consuming CPU cycles, and hides it from your app drawer. Takes seconds, can be easily done by the average consumer, and provides all the results they're looking for.

Not enough for a power user? You don't even want it taking up bytes on your read-only /system partition? Google allows you to do that too, by making it easy to unlock your phone, root it, edit the system partition, flash new ROMs etc, and by providing the source to the latest version of Android so that third parties like CM can give you fully customised software on your hardware - and you don't even have to give up access to Google's closed Android apps to do it, if you don't want to.

I really don't see how any of this is "being evil", especially when you compare it to the offerings of the other major mobile systems.

What angers people is that multinational corporations like Apple (and Google and many others) collect a lot of revenue from many the countries they operate in - but somehow make such tiny profits in those countries that they pay tiny taxes.

Taxpayers in those countries pay for infrastructure and services that the multinationals' local offices depend on, consumers in those countries contribute greatly to their revenues, yet see very little return in corporate taxes thanks to the profits being funnelled away to tax havens via disproportionate expenses for intangibles like internal licencing fees (for example, there's a big Google R&D office in Australia, but the results of that work are given away to Ireland and licenced back, at a cost that eats up most of Google's local profits). It's a legal loophole that governments are increasingly unwilling to tolerate.

I know you'll go far to defend Apple from any perceived attack, but the "simp(sic) truth" is that these methods of minimising tax/revenue ratio to maximise their profits deprive their host countries of tax income that is badly needed to continue providing services that all depend on, including the multinational's offices and their own employees.

There's a lot of things there you're attributing to me which I really don't think I've ever claimed or even mentioned. I don't appear to be speaking your language, and you seem to be ignoring the points I'm trying to make, so yeah, another unproductive "discussion" on the internet. All the best.

If you want to put it that way, then all of science is educated guesses. Engineering too. Only maths is certain.

The scientific method recognises that absolute detachment is difficult, if not impossible, and endeavours to minimise that. Again, the "you have it or you don't" black & white viewpoint doesn't at all match what we see in the real world, where few if any scientists can claim to be absolutely detached from their work - but we've still been getting useful science done for centuries, despite that. Plenty of good science has been done regardless of attachment to the results - if you can be rigorous enough about your methodology. If your methods are beyond reproach, your results are too, despite any personal investment.

They are not "opinions" or "guesses". They are probabilities, backed by a great deal of evidence - like virtually everything in science. Higgs Boson existence? Probability. The Big Bang? Probability. Quantum mechanics? Yeah, a lot of that. To be scientific, a theory does not have to be a certainty at all; the probability just needs to be carefully quantified, and backed by observation and/or experiment.

Citation needed. The IPCC reports all state their conclusions in probabilities, which are carefully quantified, and are backed by citations of peer-reviewed studies at every stage. The vast majority of the evidence presented in the IPCC reports has proved under very close examination to be solid (NOT absolutely certain, but of sound scientific methodology). This is why they are accepted as, not the gospel truth, but the best information on the subject that we have, by every major scientific institution and government, as well as by the great majority of scientists (and nearly all climatologists).

I do agree that this is the source of the controversy. Solutions are indeed often political, but unfortunately all too often, peoples' political views about some of the solutions contaminate their views of the science, which usually leads to claims that the science itself is being politicised. I disagree with that.

If only we could do that. Unfortunately, there are still far too many strident voices still trying to undermine the science, which blocks any reasonable discussion of solutions. If those voices actually had any peer-reviewed evidence of a quality that could convince a reasonable number of experts, that would be fine, but sadly these dissenting voices tend to rely on volume instead.

I'm also of the opinion that many people misunderstand the solutions that have been proposed (for example, see all the claims that a phased transition to a carbon-neutral economy would be a disastrous burden on society, whereas many economists are seeing it as an opportunity for actually reducing the many existing external costs of carbon emissions).

The EPA guidelines are in line with the level of risk: very, very little. If you want to cut your mercury exposure, don't stop using CFLs, stop eating seafood.

As for the Bridges case, you should read the Maine EPA's account. CFLs were new back then, and they had decided to use her case to learn more about what sort of advice they should give for dealing with broken bulbs. So they sent someone with a meter because they wanted to learn more, not because that's standard practice. The carpet was already intended for removal as part of a rennovation. They took readings all over the room. The only place with "high" levels was right where the bulb broke - not in the ambient air, not anywhere else on the carpet, not on the toys, not even under the carpet where it broke. I say "high" because even the levels right where it broke weren't actually high, just over Maine's long-term exposure guidelines (which is obviously not applicable to a temporary event). Moving the meter even six to eight inches away rom the breakage point dropped the levels way down. She was told that the bulb breakage was "of negligible health concern". However "the homeowner expressed particular nervousness about exposures to mercury even in low numbers", so they told her what she could do if it bothered her, one of which was calling a cleanup contractor. And of course any private cleanup contractor will charge you an utter fortune. The Maine EPA came back two days later after the story hit the news, before anything had been done in the house. The area where the bulb broke had dropped down below Maine's limit.

The case was ridiculously blown out of proportion.

Are you reading the same webpage I am? Where does that say you're supposed to bag up your bedding and pillow and toss them into the garbage - "EPA's words"? It says no such thing. It basically says open the windows for 5-10 minutes and shut off your HVAC, scoop up the fragments, use tape to get the little bits, wipe it, put all the waste in a sealed glass jar or plastic bag, and properly dispose of it. Ooooh, terrifying! And at the bottom of the page it says:

What if I can't follow all the recommended steps? or I cleaned up a CFL but didn't do it properly?

Don't be alarmed; these steps are only precautions that reflect best practices for cleaning up a broken CFL. Keep in mind that CFLs contain a very small amount of mercury -- less than 1/100th of the amount in a mercury thermometer.

Clearly you're reading that page from a bizzarro universe where it says something like "If you break a CFL and don't move out of your house and entomb it in a concrete shell then you'll get electro-cancer that will kill you and all of your descendants."