Well, if you would like to put simplified words into my mouth, how about I return the favor? "The coal barons told me you are going to outlaw my car, and I will have to walk to work! You are a big chicken, and there is no such thing as global warming!" That's your argument. Saying that this is "science" is a slur. As I mentioned, we don't have a set of planets on which to do double blind experiments to determine by scientific proof that our current climate is about to heat up significantly. But I know these things:

1. Carbon dioxide absborbs infrared radiation better than other components of our atmosphere. Thus, when the planet heats up on the bright side, carbon dioxide lets the light through, because it is transparent to visible light. Then, when the earth rotates, the warmed earth radiates heat into space. I learned to calculate "blackbody radiation" in college, and I understand the basic principle here. So increased carbon dioxide traps more heat. It is somthing like putting a layer of foil on your house to prevent radiative losses. You probably have such a layer of foil on your own house.

2. Burning fossil fuels in the atmosphere releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The amount we are putting into the atmosphere is significant, and above all historic levels.

3. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are above all historic levels.

From these three points, it is reasonable to hypothesize that AGW is real. Going back to the earlier point, we have no set of planets to confirm with double blind experiments. The system is incredibly complex, and there is no hope for absolute certainty without said set of planets. There are many subsystems and interlinks and feedback components, so each time we look at something that seems to suggest AGW, there is always room for doubt that other causes are in play. But doubting at this point is not very reasonable. It's as if someone took a gun from a drawer, pointed it at another person, fired the gun, and the other person dropped. I would suggest that the one person shot the other. Science? Not according to you. We don't know the gun was loaded with live ammunition. What if it was a blank, and the other person dropped for an unrelated reason, such as a heart attack? We don't know this. What if this is just a movie set, and we are watching a movie being filmed? Yes, yes, all great questions. While you were asking, the murderer escaped. ("But we don't know he was a murderer!" Do you like having words put in your mouth to make you seem ridiculous?).

Here's the thing. Nobody wants to take away your car, or outlaw electricity. Stop listening to the fear mongers. They are sitting on a trillion dollars worth of fossil fuel reserves, and they want you to be scared that [admitting AGW] = [walk to work, if you even have a job left]. Actually, a domestic renewable energy industry would create more non-exportable jobs, and more middle class, healthy and clean jobs than fossil fuel production. So here's your new equation. [admitting AGW] = [drive a Tesla to work].

Couldn't agree more. The parent poster (Karmashock) stated, " They noted less sea ice, they noted the walruses, they noted AGW, and just linked A to B to C without bothering to any science in between. That is my problem." So, Karmashock would have liked a scientific study showing how AGW led to the Walrus landing. So, when an abberation occurs, it can't be accepted as related to anything else, unless there is some "science in between". Really, it is too late for that. The abberation has already occured. Do we *now* start a study on the frequency of Walrus landings? Where is the baseline behaviour? How long should the study last? 10 years? Sure, let's study the Walruses for ten years. Maybe we can get a science award for our troubles. It reminds me of a situation in Africa, where a local doctor was fighting Ebola with some success with an AIDS drug. The doctor reasoned that Ebola and AIDS had some similar charactaristics, and that there were known antiviral drugs to treat AIDS. He tried one drug, and it didn't seem to work. He tried a second, and the mortality of his 15-20 patients dropped to 13%. A reporter interviewing him asked if he thought he should wait for some clinical studies before using the antiviral. He scoffed, and said that he was trying to save as many lives as he could. There was not time for clinical studies. When you have a disease with a 70% mortality rate, and it is infectious, you are talking about a serious threat. You need to use your brain, and take some educated guesses. AGW is a serious threat, and we don't have a set of planets on which to do double-blind experiments to satisfy Karmashock's thirst for science. We need to use our brains, and take some educated guesses. If we wait around for all the studies to come in, the situation, be it ebola or AGW, may be out of control.

You moron! Jefferson wasn't even at the Constitutional Convention! He did not write patnets into the Constitution!

"...the laws were made by people with no standards in the first place." I think you are right. Thomas Jefferson had no scientific evidence when he wrote patents into the constitution, passed the first patent laws, and examined the first patents. He was a very dumb person, with no standards!!!!! He should have randomly divided the country into sections, randomly assigned some sections to have a patent system and others not to have a patent system, and then ascertained the monetary effects of a patent system on the different sections of the country using double blind techniques. Only then should he have been allowed to write patents into the constitution.

"The patent system encourages pharmaceuticals to pump out drugs aimed at those who have almost no chance of surviving the cancer anyway. This patent distortion costs the U.S. economy around $89 billion a year in lost lives." When I read this, I felt that the Economist article lost all credibilty. It is very hard to know anything about the actual monetary effects of patents in the economy. Then add the uncertainty of drug research, and the uncertainty of lives that are saved even with known drugs (not imagined drugs stimulated by an hypothetical patent system). And then, placing a dollar value on the saved lives. Really? $89 billion. Not $93 billion? Not $400 million? Not 800 billion? Are you sure lives are not actually saved under the current regime, compared to most alternative non-distorted patent systems? Given the uncertainties, getting the right order of magnitude would be a challenge, and two significant digits is absurd.

Your example of the Dog and Chicken rests on the idea that only one animal is killing the chickens. If you don't know what is killing the chickens, and maybe it is two or three dogs, then locking one dog in the house doesn't prove the dog's innocence. It only proves that the dog is not the only thing killing the chickens.

While I am a supporter of the Second Amendment, your logic doesn't disprove that guns don't increase violence, only that guns are not the only possible cause of violence. But I think we all knew that already. People somehow manage to be violent without guns. Even when you take away people's arms, they still have legs.

You can't dig a hole in the ground to provide an internet connection, the same way you can with water and septic. For electricity, you could always buy a generator, although that is a much inferior solution than a grid connection. But you can't buy an Internet. The nature of a "net" is that it is cooperative and shared. It makes sense that millions of people would collaborate to connect themselves to the Internet, rather than taking an every man for himself approach.

The telecoms lack even one electron volt of shame. Don't you think the main issue is that these telecoms filed a lawsuit to prevent millions from getting broadband connections? That their image is already so blackened, they don't worry how this might appear? How did rural folks become the bad guys for you in this story?

The OP claimed that the +2 charge inside the black hole would suck in a couple electrons, and become neutral, due to the black hole charge . For this to happen, an electrostatic field must emanate from within the black hole, attracting electrons outside the black hole. If this were the case, then then objects within the black hole could communicate with objects outside the black hole, by redistributing the charges inside the black hole. Do you see where this is going? Yes, the emanation of an electrostatic field from a black hole would imply that light could emanate as well. This is straight out of Maxwell's equations. You can't separate charge from electromagnetic theory, or from special relativity, or general relativity.

The link you provide references star-sized black holes having a small charge. The equations deal with changes in the location of the gravitational radius, or Schwartchild radius, at which a given quantity of matter forms a black hole. Yes, charge may affect the formation of the hole, and the vary radius at which it forms, as noted in the link you provided. Once formed, however, the charge contained in the hole will not affect charges outside the event horizon.

You requested that I "Think of the charge as being spread over the event horizon, rather than simplifying the object to be a point charge." That is an interesting request. I usually think of the event horizon as a space-time barrier between the inside of the black hole, from which nothing can escape, and the outside. Space time itself is curved to a point of ripping, so that everything inside is ripped off from the outside. Your suggestion that a charge could be smeared across the event horizon is novel, at least to me. I would certainly have to look at constituent quarks, if I were to examine the suggestion carefully, since the micro black holes would have an event horizon much smaller than the radius of the original protons. Quarks are point-like particles in the standard model, iirc, and would not lend themselves to smearing across an event horizon. See, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quarks. Would you suggest that the charge could be smeared out away from the quark it is associated with? Could the quark be inside the event horizon, and maybe some fraction of the fractional charge be located outside the event horizon?

I think you are imagining a probability distribution function of the protons (and constituent quarks) in flat spacetime superimposed over the black hole created by the protons. Spacetime is curved around a black hole for all purposes, including the calculation of probability distributions. Remember, a probability distribution function is a function of space and time. If space gets curved, the probability distribution function gets curved. To imagine the charge distribution unaffected by the localized spacetime curvature misses the point of what a black hole is, and the typical behavior of the underlying charge-carrying constituents of the protons.

By arguing with the original poster, I'm not trying to say that LHC will necessarily create black holes that will suck in the earth. But these are not easy things to think about. Who is to say that a new theory about the nature of space and time will not make us change our calculations about micro black holes? Our thinking about space and time is, in my opinion, stubbornly primitive, and non-physical. We are overdue for a usable theory unifying the standard model with general relativity. There is a basic conceptual dissonance between QCD and GR. Nothing I've seen from the superstring folks suggests that they are about to calculate the behavior of a black hole created from two protons at LHC. In the absence of such a theory, it strikes me as ignorance, plain and simple to accuse anyone of ignorance, plain and simple. Yep, we're all ignorant, plain and simple, of the final theory. And some people are even ignorant of the standard model, general relativity, and all their useful predictions. Even those hurling insults.

1. The charge of the black hole is completely irrelevant. Remember how a black hole got it's name? Not even light, a time-varying electromagnetic field, can escape it. Likewise, an electrostatic field can't escape a black hole, because of the extreme local curvature of space-time.

2. "Evaporation" of black holes by Hawking radiation depends on particle/antiparticle pairs being created spontaneously from the vacuum at the event horizon of the black hole, with one half of the pair being captured, and the other half radiating away. Hawking makes an energy conservation argument that this process constitutes evaporation. It obviously has not been tested. Calculating the rate of evaporation would not be trivial, and would involve many "assumptions" (e.g., guessing). A convincing and accepted theory of quantum gravity has not yet emerged. Which leads to...

3. In the absence of an accepted, experimentally verified theory of quantum gravity, all your name calling ("Luddites") and hand waving ("an exciting, interesting, and completely harmless development") will probably not convince anybody, one way or the other. And finally...

4. People who live in glass pots shouldn't get stoned.

What hit scientists is Rupert Murdoch's media machine, spewing out more anti-science garbage. Again, he has created the "news" by making such a big deal about this on Fox, then he has the WSJ comment about how important this "news" is. What hit scientists is willful ignorance, taken at face value by a public who forgets that the owner of these "news" organizations started out in the US running a supermarket tabloid, the "Star". He learned a lot about the public running that rag. It shows in his influence on the WSJ.

" this judge should be fired or even tried for treason. his crime is THAT great; its a threat to some fundamental privacy that the constitution (once) allowed us. those who seek to over-rule constitutional laws ARE traitors. look it up."

Judges are immune. Why? The judges say so. Look it up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stump_v._Sparkman. In 1971, Judge Stump ordered a 15 year old girl sterilized for being "slow", in violation of her rights. No hearing for the girl. No lawyer protecting the girl's interests. No notice to the girl. She was told that she was getting her appendix out. When she found out later, and tried to sue, Supreme Court said Judge Stump was absolutely immune from prosecution.

There is also an appeal possible. The appeals court already told this judge not to decide the case (by summary judgment), and allow a jury trial. Something tells me that the appeals court is going to be slightly perturbed with the behavior of this judge.

I have tried to install linux a few times over the years on my home PCs. I recall trying Knoppix, Red Hat, Mandrake. Sooner or later, I hit a snag, whether it was installing, mounting drives, sharing modems, browser flakiness, or getting the network to function, and, after struggling to solve the problem(s), I gave up. I recently tried installing Ubuntu 8.10, and had no problems on two desktop computers. I put my wife on Linux, and she has no problems. This was easier than a Windows 98 installation, the last OS I successfully tried to install. I am getting ready to become a Linux preacher, and am planning to put it on my relative's computers when I see them in the summer. Linux really is better this year, as far as I can tell. I am finally willing to try putting it on my laptop, which is the center of my business and my formal education. My laptop provides my news and a substantial portion of my personal communications. Previously, I would not have risked messing up a working machine that mediates so much of my life. Now, I feel like NOT installing the Ubuntu distribution is a bigger risk. I know I am just one person, but I am not a super early adopter. I am the type to wait for things to be ready for prime time. This year, in addition to linux being more secure than Windows, it is easier to use. Previously, "harder to use" was a showstopper for me. For me personally, I predict this will be the year of Linux. And also for my wife, my two daughters, my brother, my two sisters, and my parents.

Whoops again. I thought the comment "I hope that was intentional, but I can never tell on the internet." referred to "despite" not "mute". I corrected someone on the "despite your face" malapropism, not the "mute point" one. I'll shut up now.