So, let me get this straight. Right-wing government employees are saying the bill is good, while left-wing government employees say it's bad? So, by my model, the bill must either reduce government spending, or reduce government power over people. Given the current GOP, the former is right out, and it's the latter. How am I doing so far?

I rather expect I've spent far more time researching this than you. But you've at least looked at the Vostok ice core data, right? You know it's normal to have a spike in temps every 100 k years, usually followed by a sharp decline and return to glaciation, but for some reason that didn't happen 10 k years ago, and we've had a very unusual stable period of climate? And that the mechanism for all this is still mysterious, with hypotheses still at the "maybe this would fit the data" stage?

Absent human activity, a return to glaciation would fit the historical data. But you knew that right? You're not just saying fashionable things, surely. Maybe you just prefer kilometers of ice covering most the land area over rising waters - I guess that's a personal preference

Climate science is still in it's infancy, the climate itself is a chaotic set of feedback cycles upon feedback cycles, and we've only started modeling the simplest stuff. Political posturing and demagogy is ancient and well-studied, however.
 

So then, forcing the EPA to base that decision on publicly available science (actual peer reviewed papers and such), is fine then, right?

I don't think this bill is anything to do with global warming - the EPA has over the years pissed off many, many people by telling them they can't build on their own land "because reasons". It's one thing for the EPA to tell you the land you own is nearly worthless because "here's the established science that says your land use would hurt everyone else", most people are fine with that, but when they say "we're not even going to tell you why, we're basing it on secret stuff" is seriously not the kind of government America should have.

Hell, I'm not even sure we're screwed. I believe that the most probable future is the return of glaciation in the ongoing Quaternary Ice Age, and we'll be glad of all our CO2 to keep the glaciers out of Central Europe and the US for another century or two once it starts. One things for sure: the economic damage from a significant drop in temp (which we're 10k years overdue for) is worse than the equivalent rise in temp. For all that rising sea levels will suck, glaciers covering most of the temperate zones is worse.

That's not even the right question. The right question is: how much money will we save by reducing CO2 emissions by X, to at least 1 significant figure of accuracy? How much will it cost to make that reduction, to at least 1 significant figure of accuracy?

We don't know shit when it comes to that sort of prediction, and without that, policy is pure fashion statement and political posturing, not science-informed.

Or, you know, make a library with the stuff you actually need, as it will (likely) be a tiny slice of the whole of jQuery.

Right, it's the kind of immersion that matters. Now if we could only get movies where the characters weren't 2-dimensional. "The goggles, they do nothing!"

I don't need peripheral vision to feel part of a game world, as long as I can look around the world from a first-person or over-the-shoulder view (it would help a lot in racing games, since there your too busy with other controls to also look around with your hands). It's been ambient noise, clever soundtrack, and attention to detail (so that you can guess what the place smells like, and are happy not to much of the time) that provide immersion of any sort- I'm not just my eyes.

I really liked ST6 (I also like 3, but I seem to be the only one). And Shatner - he was great IMO as Denny Crane (maybe typecasting as well, but it worked better than Kirk I think).

"Immersion" is about script and character and (literary) world building, not technology. The most immersive games I've played were all old enough to have terrible graphics, but they had lots of interesting detail in the world to get lost in.

Oh, right, like Shatner was so much better as a director - that wonderful ST5.

Supermarket scanners have often used synthetic sapphire for some time now (decades?).

The top execs at the biggest companies are far from untouchable - they get fired by the board more often than you think (Balmer is a recent famous example; I think I've worked at 3 companies now where the board fired the CEO and most of his reports).

Wow, I would have showed up 1 minute late every day just for the entertainment value. But then, I never did pretend classes and grading were going to be important in the real world.

But what the in-falling observer sees as the spatial axis, the distant observer sees as the time axis. And special relativity means distance is a matter of perception, and all of this must vary smoothly. There's no way to make stacked cubes work with those requirements - it's bad enough to allow for smooth rotation of axes in Euclidean space, but with the continuously varying metric of GR it's right out.

The sibling post is on the right track. Informaton density requires mass density, and mass density distorts space, putting limits on what's possible. The whole idea of the Planck length comes from that in the first place.

Because of the way black hole formation works, if you have a fixed density in a small region of space, with no black hole, if you extend that density to a large enough region of space you get a black hole - exactly according to surface are being the limit.