The most intriguing thing in this to me... ...is that they were able to identify 140 ISPs, presumably 130 or so of which were not owned by a regional monopoly phone company or a cable company.

The problem was the API let people write clients that removed the value to Google of running the service (i.e. the advertisements).

Google was willing to give the code over to any third party who wanted to commit to supporting it, and even host it on Google's infrastructure, if they were paid to do so, but there wasn't any way to monetize it, given the API split and the ad stripping by the clients of the API. Apparently stream bookmarking and privacy weren't worth sitting through the ads to anyone, as no one was able to come up with a viable business model that kept the good stuff, but was still able to be monetized enough to at least break even.

But hey, I'll happily join you to complain about stuff I no longer get free, too, if that will make you feel better, like those game cards you could get at Chick-fil-a in the mall, go down to the Walden Books, look up the answers in the almanac, and then go back to Chick-fil-a for the free food item because you got the right answer, and get the next game card.

So's Ketchup...

For the love of God, can we at least do something about ketchup?

Actually, you are erasing the index to the old newspapers, which is tantamount to erasing the old newspaper articles.

I'm glad to see that Europe has achieves a 0% recidivism rate, and look forward to the speedy rehabilitation ad release of SS-Obersturmführer Søren Kam, among others.

800 degrees C??? That's 1470 degrees F! Who has an oven that goes that high? That will turn just about anything into charcoal in under a minute.

Even 400 C-- 750 degrees F-- is quite a bit hotter than most ovens.

About six days, since you ask. Is that useful information?

Well, as the disclaimer says, Slashdot surveys aren't.

If "last" means "most recently purchased", how do you answer for a bulb purchased two years ago that's still working? Or, for that matter, a bulb purchased last month?

My answer to this question is rather variable-- I've been changing out pretty much all of my bulbs for LED lamps. And I don't necessarily buy the cheapest ones. However, as it turns out, the ones I bought most recently were a couple of candelabra LED bulbs for the front entry chandelier, and they were pretty cheap. I was, however, also looking at LED strips to replace 4-foot fluorescent tubes-- if that had been my purchase, it would definitely have hit the "over twenty dollar" mark. (EarthLED has these. Some of these require rewiring to remove the ballast, although the Philips ones apparently are drop-in replacements)

Excellent application for LEDs-- omni bulbs are far less efficient in that application than LED spots. (Any place where the required light is not omnidirectional is a good application for LEDs.)

...over many decades. Cars are driven on billions of trips-- trillions of miles-- per year. Really, truly, there are differences of many orders of magnitude here.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/in...

There aren't thousands of rocket launches.

It's not, and it also annoys me when people say that.

No single hurricane, heat wave, tornado, flood, wildfires due to drought, storm surge, hot summer, rainy winter is due to global warming, just as no single cold snap, hurricane free season, unseasonably cool spring, early winter storm is evidence that global warming isn't real.

Those are all weather. Climate is long term.

Trivially, no single car trip has an effect on global carbon dioxide. It's a collective effect. Being a collective effect does not make it nonexistent, but it does make it a problem hard to solve, since the problem is distributed.

So, here's an interesting question-- and I'm not being sarcastic here, I'm being real. Given that no one car trip has an effect on global carbon dioxide, but a hundred billion car trips do have an effect, what would be an appropriate approach to addressing this impact?

I don't recall ever making such a prediction.

Yep, that's pretty much correct. The Earth is, on the average, quite a bit cooler than it has been in the geological past. It does not always have ice caps.

It happens that this is the climate that we humans are used to, and we've rather built our habitats and our agriculture around. But, on a geological scale, a few degrees of warming, and melting the polar ice caps. is no big deal. It's not the end of the world.

--unfortunately, when we return the planet to the climate conditions of the Jurassic, we probably don't get the dinosaurs back. But then, if biological research keeps on track, we'll just make new ones.

Are you seriously arguing that if a criminal is caught on a surveillance camera, that must mean that they weren't doing anything wrong?

If he wasn't doing anything wrong, he could have done the download from his desk, not sneaking into a different institution on the other side of the city.

OK, what about it?

I have a challenge for you. Using google, or your other favorite index-search tool, find out how much carbon dioxide is released by a single Delta-II launch. Then, look up how much carbon dioxide is put into the atmosphere per year by fossil fuel burning. Compare these two numbers. Do they differ by orders of magnitude? How many orders of magnitude?

Based on your findings, do you think that a rocket launch has a significant impact on global carbon dioxide levels? Do you think it has a measureable impact?