... it was in 1883. How many observatories did Earth even HAVE back then? This was before radar, before computers, before telephones. Normal photography was in its infancy and astrophotography didn't exist yet. Telescopes were still aimed by hand. Whatever it was, I can easily believe that only one guy on Earth just happened to be observing the Sun during daytime and saw a transit of objects that nobody else reported.

Funny how people with an agenda can take things out of context. The author of that article is of course, a right-wing ideologue. However the information I have read suggests that cosmic rays may have "some" effect on climate, but that effect is not fully understood. And the sun? Yeah I'm sure it's the reason Earth stays warm, but it's not getting any closer to us. Is the Earth warming up? Sure it is, for the moment. That much is indisputable. But is it warming up FOR ALL TIME? Highly unlikely. Is man the cause? Again, unlikely. Can man have any effect on it at all, through a change in behavior or anything else? Ha! No. Our biosphere is far too complex and resilient to be undone by such small effects. Earth was around for billions of years before man arrived, and will be here long after we're gone. It went through many warming/cooling cycles, most of which were due to a combination of factors that didn't include mankind, and occurred on a scale surpassing all the energy we have produced since the invention of fire. As with previous "greenhouse" eras and ice ages, nature will eventually balance the equation again this time as well. However, that doesn't make for a very entertaining Discovery Channel special, and is too complex to be covered in an hour. The current climate change "debate" is mainly pseudoscience blended with public relations, playing on ignorant people's fears and bordering on religious hysteria (do you "believe" in global warming? What kind of scientific question is that??). So why is there continued fear about it, mainly from people who are decidedly NOT climatologists? So that a wooden public speaker like Al Gore can continue to get lecture gigs I guess.

It is the movie studios' property, and people are stealing it without paying. It doesn't belong to "humanity", it has an actual owner.

Competition between consumer products always eventually distills itself down to a 2-horse race (in this case, iOS vs Android). There is basically no room in the market for a 3rd one. If Microsoft wanted any chance at all of competing, they should have introduced this phone 2 years ago before Android established itself, or they should have targeted a different market.

No, actually it doesn't conform to broadcasting standards because it contains lyrics suggesting that MTV actually plays MUSIC VIDEOS.

I supported the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but I do not support the way they were handled. I do think the military-industrial complex should have been abolished long ago. Why? Because what has it done to protect us, really? Vietnam? It didn't help us win. Grenada? Yeah right. A banana republic with a few Cuban troops that our Salvation Army could have whipped. Panama? See above. Gulf War I? We didn't win that war, remember? We stopped just short of victory, a violation of one of the most fundamental principles of war that history has ever taught us: never leave an aggressor intact. We had to go back and do the job right in 2003. Somalia? We were trying to help those people, they started shooting at us, so we left. Confrontation with Saddam's forces while enforcing the no-fly zones and inspectors? Come on. We had about 20,000 troops in theater at the time. We don't need to spend $400b a year to maintain THAT, or any of our other troop commitments around the world. Iraq War and Afghan War? We took an army with a military doctrine of slowing down a Soviet tank advance across Europe just long enough for our ICBMs to reach Moscow, and tried to use it to fight two major land wars in Asia. Big mistake. We SHOULD have immediately instituted a draft after 9/11, converted factories to war production, raised a massive army (like, 5 million men), and when the time was right, rolled into Iraq with at least a million strong. The PROPER way to occupy a country you defeat is to make sure your occupying troops are in every city, town and village so they can establish ORDER. That wasn't done. You can only spread 100,000 troops so far in a country if 28 million. And we have all seen the results. They always make the same mistakes, thinking you can do war "on the cheap". You can't. But I am encouraged by Secretary Gates' plan. It may be a step in a direction we should have gone in decades ago.

And still people criticize us for sending in troops to impose order and stability, in a place that never had it to begin with. I got news for you bleeding hearts. If you want to help those people, re-establish law and order first. Once that is done, the business of distributing food and water, rebuilding infrastructure, re-establishing basic public services like sanitation etc, becomes infinitely easier.

...where merit counts for nothing, and need is all that matters. Kinda like what's happening in this country now. Who cares what you accomplish; people with more power than you have decided you earn too much money and that it must be taken from you to be given to those more "deserving".

Please, for the love of God, reality TV must be stopped. It has already degraded our culture and ruined our ability to appreciate anything urbane or tasteful. Garbage like this is just the final insult. Please, just stop.

I am with you guys. The US has become a paranoid culture bogged down with ultimately useless regulation and curbs on individual freedoms, thanks to 9/11. I said it then and I say it now: I would rather we turned Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Sudan, Iraq, Iran and Syria into radioactive parking lots, than lose what we were. But it's too late now. Osama has already won, especially when he has so many anti-government radicals in this country who are willing to provide aid and comfort to his cause. Welcome to the new reality.

And people thought the Republicans were bad...

It's way too late now obviously, but can we get rid of the "24 hour" news cycle and return to the "network news at 6 and 10pm" tradition? You know, before outlets like CNN, Fox etc had to go out and MAKE news because there wasn't enough to report, or have to bring on a bunch of clueless talking heads to fill time with speculation and innuendo that doesn't advance the story one iota? Back in the days when news outlets had enough time to RESEARCH stories, INTERVIEW relevant participants, CHECK their facts, and assemble it all in a format that a news anchor with actual INTEGRITY (i.e. Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings, Edward R. Murrow, etc) could then present to the public?? Sigh... I guess not...

Come on people, use your heads. Just like, I dunno, flying a commercial jet at low altitude over NYC, making a game about a battle in an ongoing war where many of the people involved are still fighting is just a bad idea, and shows not only insensitivity but also questionable taste.

It is a game. No matter how realistic the fighting is, it won't be like the real thing. It therefore trivializes the very real aspects of war that the soldiers who were there must have gone through. I'm glad the game was canceled, but I question the intelligence of those who greenlit it to begin with. At some point during the creative process, somebody must have had the courage to say "hey guys, maybe we shouldn't be doing a game like this so soon after the real event". But maybe not.

I agree with the first guy. He won't be slowed down by this, he will gain encouragement from it like any megalomaniac would. Luckily Planet Earth is rapidly running out of people who take him seriously, and oddly enough most of it is his fault. Once there is nobody left and his pathetic attempts at self-promotion fall on deaf ears, I am betting he will turn to violence to call attention to himself again.

An asinine observation like this shows just how out of touch Sony really are. The initial arguments over which console hardware was "better" came down to the same thing it always has: seeing is believing. And Sony's claims of having superior hardware to the XBox360 rang hollow when the actual games look and play only "as good" as their 360 counterparts (or actually WORSE in many cases). Honestly, which game do you think showcases its console's strengths? Resistance, or Gears Of War?

Sony has some serious damage control to do here, and they had better wake up and smell the ashes. They have given up nearly all the game exclusivity deals that normally would have driven a nail into the coffin of any competitor (even Microsoft). Final Fantasy XIII is coming to both platforms. They lost Tekken. Even the bread and butter of the PS2 days, Grand Theft Auto, is superior on the 360 for many reasons. Overall the evolution of game development for PS3 has not come along like they expected and still lags behind its older, cheaper rival.

Sony had better lose the corporate arrogance and start helping their developers, cut their prices and start landing some console exclusives, or they're going to lose the whole show. The only thing that has kept them in the game has been the phenomenal success of the Wii (not considered by me to be a "next generation" platform), along with the XBox "red-ring-of-death" disaster that has created the perception among buyers that the console is unreliable. Otherwise this war would be over.