Are you sure? The last glacial maximum was between 19-25000 years ago (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum) during which time vast portions of North America and Europe were covered in ice sheets.

19,000 years is a pretty short period of time in the grand scheme of things. To think the location I'm currently living was underneath a kilometer of ice less than 20,000 years ago, and no there are no glaciers anywhere close, the logical conclusion is the earth has been warming up for a lot longer than just the time since the industrial age. In fact, from what I understand about earth's history, we've been a majorly tropical planet for most of the time and ice cover is somewhat rare.

There's no doubt we have some effect on the changing climate (in regards to temperature via the greenhouse effect), but to say that is the mechanism causing the earth to warm seems like a huge jump from basic logic.

I'm curious, has any of these petitions resulted in anything besides a form letter response from a head of some department, as obviously the task of writing a response but doing nothing rolled down 4 levels of bureaucracy?

What was the point of this site anyway? What good is a petition of there's no action or even a vote as a result of it?

Easy. Musicians only get paid when they are working (performing), not for recordings of them working.

Now, the line gets a little fuzzier when dealing with commercial purposes, which is what copyright was designed for and absolutely where it should be applied. For example, if using a musician's works to draw people to your business/event, they should absolutely be compensated for it. It's also much easier to enforce (since commercial endeavours need to be in the public eye to attract customers) than private copying.

For non-commercial purposes though, private copying (i.e. enjoying art) should be encouraged. I also think this is the one spot torrent sites should be asked to pay for (as much as I love 'em). They deserve income for the value they provide in aggregating results and searching, but really are making money (advertising) off other people's works, which is a commercial endeavour. The people downloading however are doing nothing wrong.

So, if it's so easy to get a site taken down with SOPA, and this law unfortunately gets passed, would it not be very easy to launch a counter-offensive against the media companies themselves?

Some sort of coordinated launch of complaints which could render any profit generating portions of the media websites inaccessible?

I live in Edmonton, and actually kinda like the new law. I take transit downtown but also drive pretty heavily.

I can't recall the number of times I've almost been hit trying to cross the street downtown by someone on a cell phone. Something I've noticed through observation is that a driver's peripheral vision is really affected when talking on a phone - perhaps some study found the same conclusion. This makes using them in high population areas, ie. areas with crosswalks, very dangerous.

When driving, you should devote your full attention to it, if not for respect of the lives of those around you. I think we've shown it's irresponsible enough to warrant a fine, as is the case here. I wouldn't really call anything with fines under three figures and no jail time "draconian".

Volatility has nothing to do with what direction a stock is currently moving, only the magnitude of moves. Most finance sites publish a measure of a stock's voltility called Beta (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beta_%28finance%29) which measures the volatility of the stock relating to movement of the market as a whole.

You'll see AAPL has a Beta of 1.3, which basically means AAPL's stock will have swing 30% greater in whatever direction the market is moving (up or down - a negative Beta implies an inverse correlation).

This definitely qualifies AAPL as a volatile stock compared to Exxon with a Beat of 0.5. While shareholders are enjoying a faster trip up, they will assuredly not enjoy an equally fast trip down should the business/markets force the stock in that direction. That is volatility.

Yeah, I'm beginning to wonder how many letters they did get. I don't write to my MP that often, but on this issue I did write my MP and the Industry Minister.

I had a chance to try both an iPad2 and PlayBook recently. They are very fancy devices. Video on the playbook looked incredible. The iPad is almost ridiculously large compared to the PlayBook, which seems a better size for a tablet.

I'm still not sold on the future of tablets at all. Apple has created a market for the iPad, not for tablets. People love it because it's an Apple product, and conveys that coolness people look for when buying Apple products. I think Apple's recent quartlerly sales numbers are starting to show this, a smartphone for mobile and a laptop for larger tasks makes sense, I still can't figure out a slam dunk use case for any of these tablet devices.

Exactly, and, to show that it is a game of skill, you only need to show that some players are better than others (make more money). This is easy to do, there's many sites which track results and individual player ROI's. If it were a game of chance, over time everyone would have the same ROI.

Yup, we're seeing the normal progression of hot, new technology. I remember 5 or so years ago, Blackberries were the hottest thing around. They were the ultimate cool, and everyone who was anyone had to have one. Sounds like another product currently on the market, eh? Basing your investment decisions on the red hot product-of-the-day is a recipe for disaster, as every product loses it's day in the spotlight. It was about as silly to buy RIM stock a few years ago as it is to buy Apple stock today, when their main revenue source is a product at the peak of it's popularity.

I'm also going to throw SharePoint in the list of MS products you've never heard of but are wildly successful. Having worked with a number of major corporate IT departments over the last few years, I've rarely seen such a fast adoption rate of a platform.

No problem. I'll do it the day the fanboys admit they only buy the products because they love Apple!

Not that I've used either to validate the rating, but I could see it being valid. It would only take a handful of applications to reproduce the small subset of those 60k apps which bring greatest value to the tablet. If iPad app quality is anything like it is for the iPhone, I could reasonably see 50,000 of those apps only counting for one point when it comes to application support. I'm sure I could write 60,000 variations of 'Hello world' for the Xoom in short order... would that put them on the same footing to you?

I'd bet there's far more critical infrastructure connected to the internet than you realize. In most cases, it's because:

(a) the systems are operated or monitored by remote personnel. This is common for infrastructure that is in remote locations.
(b) multiple components of the infrastrcture need to communicate with each other.

Creating private networks for these instances is usually cost prohibitive.

See, this is our problem with consumerism. Your purchase is driven by style and price rather than function. Why do you want an electric vehicle "just because"? For the smugness?

I'll gladly consider an electric vehicle when it costs as much as the same gas version, goes as far on a charge as a tank of gas, and can "recharge" within two minutes.