If you want to take away the Kimster's internet, you talk to China. That's where the wires go.

That was on the planet Zooby. On Earth, the president has better things to do. What have you been reading (or smoking)?

Every word of your comment is right on. Not many here will understand that, and that's why DDJ is going.

Crap, no mod points.

Is that you, Vlad?

December 27, 2004 at 21:30:26 UT, a burst of gamma rays from SGR 1806-20 passed through the Solar System. The burst was so powerful that it had effects on Earth's atmosphere, at a range of about 50,000 light years.
At 00:58:53 UTC on Sunday, 26 December 2004, an undersea megathrust earthquake occurred in the Indian Ocean which caused a tsunami which killed 250,000 people.

and I can't find the word asshole. I can only assume you are all fans.

As usual the media are twisting the report into an end of the world horror story, when in fact it's anything but:

To be sure, there are some paragraphs in which they have medium or high confidence of this or that, for instance more people are killed by natural disasters when they occur in poor countries. Well, smack my ass and call me a monkey, good thing the UN spent millions on a showy conference in Africa to tell us that. It was in Africa of course, because that's where they want the rich countries making all the CO2 to send trillions of dollars. That is the purpose of the UN (if most of the members were honest enough to tell you).

You can see the report for yourself here: http://ipcc-wg2.gov/SREX/

I don't game, but after reading too many of these posts, apparently the majority reason is to play games. Does that mean, when the gamers get older, MS will go out of business, or are there always more where they came from?

At work and at home I depend on ssh, and I don't understand why anyone would prefer a GUI front end for ssh, rather than just using it the normal way from the command line.

I think you should cut him/her a break. Microsucks is so many more keystrokes.

A couple blasts from a giant frickin' laser canon.

I did not interpret the graph that way and was confused by what you said, but now I have finally RTF summary for the graph and see that they make a caveat that the 2004 temperature is based on only one year, but the rest of the chart has a resolution of 300 years! So, any fluctuations in the past that might have risen above the 2004 value have been lost due to the smoothing.

Too bad. Not very useful for making your claim.

Wikipedia claims "In terms of the global average, temperatures were probably colder than present day" during the Holocene climatic optimum (my emphasis), but admit that the optimum did not occur at the same time in the northern and southern hemispheres.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_climatic_optimum

PS. Good catch regarding the speleotherm data, but the graph based on it sure looks a lot like the one you linked to on Wikipedia, and both indicate a general downward trend (with the Medieval Warm Period as a slight deviation), and in fact, looking Wikipedia's 5 million year chart, there is clearly a long term downward trend during this current ice age, as well.