They are being biased against the "right" kind of people. So it's all fine. Remember: Racism, sexism, etc, etc are all fine so long as you are targeting the Right People(tm) and so long as you are doing it For The Greater Good(tm). :P

Bombus sonorus -- the Sonoran Bumblebee -- is a common North American desert species.

To answer your question every critter has it's range. Even you do. Visited Antarctica recently? Or Mars?

If you were a bumblebee you'd have a range of about a quarter of a kilometer from your nest. In rare instances you might go as far as 800m distant. And therein you can see why climate change poses an adaptation challenge to bumblebees.

Bumblebee colonies die every winter. The old queen perishes and the new queens hibernate until the spring then disperse to a new nest site. So you can see that the species can only relocate northward at a fraction of a kilometer per year -- although it may have better luck moving vertically -- to higher altitudes where a convenient mountain is handy.

Species that adapt well to climate change either have individuals with large ranges, or they hitch a ride on critters that travel long distance. For example mosquito species have lifetime ranges on the order of 2-3 km, but the Asian Tiger Mosquito (Aedes albopictus), which breeds in small containers of water, usually spends its life within 100m or so of where it hatches. The Tiger Mosquito species was introduced to the US at Houston in 1985 and fifteen years later it was found all over the United States. How is this possible if an individual lives its entire life within a 100m radius of its hatching place? I went to a presentation at CDC Fort Collins where their arthropod borne disease doyen plotted out the spread of Ae albopictus and showed it followed the route of the US Interstate Highway system. Eggs and pregnant individuals hitched a ride. That's because cars and trucks provide things that mosquitoes are attracted to: people to bite and tiny pools of water trapped in spare tires or crevices of the machine for egg-laying. Note that Ae albopictus larvae are known to arrive in the US in a shipments of that "lucky bamboo" you can buy in Chinatown; those stalks hold maybe 20-30 ml of water. It takes a "container" with only a tablespoon or two of water to transport viable larvae.

Now back to bumblebees. Because bumblebee colonies are small (typically 50 individuals to 50,000 for honeybees) and temporary, bumblebees don't stockpile honey. So unlike honeybees humans have no reason to transport them deliberately. Likewise cars and trucks aren't attractive to bumblebees so it's rare that a new queen will get an accidental ride north with a human. So bumblebees are poorly adapted to a rapidly changing climate.

I for one applaud this trailblazing official who is paving the way by providing a roadmap for other officials to follow while going down the road to more efficient government and leading the drive towards a more fiscally responsible America.

Now if only somone could give us a car analogy

They don't need a bomb squad anyway: Hartsfield International Airport sits literally right in the middle of Hapeville but is considered part of Atlanta and patrolled by APD. They have bomb squad members stationed there and they could be mobilized for any potential threats in the surrounding area. The city of Hapeville could then take the money saved put it into infrastructure because there are some very rough areas around there.

I have the same format as one of my email addresses, but I have a very uncommon name (as far as I know it is the only occurrence of that name in the world for people still living-although Google does bring up the name in a fiction book someone apparently wrote). However, I once got a call from a guy who I did not know I think asking if was going to play goalie for them at a soccer match. I had no clue what he was talking about, but the guy did have my name. The week before I had a guy (might even have been that guy) text me and ask if I was going to come look at his car to buy. I've always found those 2 instances to be somewhat odd, but nothing weird (like credit cards in my name that I don't have) has ever come up on a credit report.

Or someone just happened to use a similar email address and misstyped theirs. Are you actually getting emails regarding unpaid bills for the cable company, or is it just simple account-type stuff like changing passwords? Or charges attempting to be made against any of your credit cards? If you are getting emails once a month, it sounds to me like someone put in the wrong email and when they go to pay it online they change the password because they can't log in. And even if there was an unpaid balance, the first thing they would do is send the bills to the physical address they have on file or to the holder of the card that was used to intially set up service, which is also where any collections would likely start.

Hell, 10 years ago I used to get recordings on my phone that someone had overdue movies at Blockbuster. I didn't immediately assume someone was using my identity to steal movies from them in some criminal enterprise, I just figured they had put in a wrong number.

Does this mean we can now copy every Uwe Boll movie with impunity?

Given the current state of Java-inside-the-web-browser, I don't see how they could do any worse than Sun/Oracle did...

It's a scam that's been shut down, but it's impossible to put a nail in its coffin because it's not one company doing it. The FTC tracked down a bunch of companies at the start of this year and forced them to fork over $700,000 in compensation, and it didn't even make a dent in the volume of calls.

"Cardholder service" scams are low success rate, high volume affairs which require only a small number of people to run and thus are easy to shut down and start up again under a different corporate entity. The only way to stop them is to make all low success rate, high volume telemarketing businesses intrinsically unprofitable, and the only way to do that is to charge for all calls.

This can be a nominal amount that wouldn't interfere with normal calls, it just has to be enough to deter calls that have very little chance of accomplishing anything useful. Ten minutes of a US minimum wage employee's time will cost a company $1.20, so let's set the level of pain at less than 1/10 that: every time a call is connected, $0.10 should be deducted from the caller's account and credited to the recipient's account. That way parties that call each other equally will tend to come out even.

Not necessarily. If a company takes proceeds from stock and uses that money to invest in, say, infrastructure, that takes resources which are then comsumed (lumber, steel, oil, etc). Sure, the companies that produce these resources get money from that transaction, but there is still money that is locked into those materials. And in cases like China where you literally have shopping malls and entire cities sitting empty there are literally millions of dollars just decaying away. As for the rest of the money, it gets more and more diluted as it passes through the hands of multiple companies and people in the form of wages, payments for goods/services, savings deposits, etc. 1 person with $1,000,000 can have a muhc larger impact on an economy than 1,000,000 people with $1 because he can focus all of that money in one place while the people with $1 can do very little becuase that money might go everywhere.

So basically some of that money does disappear as it is sunk into things whose cost can never be recouped and a lot of the rest can get so spread out and distributed that it loses a lot of the economic power it had that it also might as well not exist.

You should have told them that the previous business had closed and you run a new business for Mail Hare Removal and then proceed to ask them how they would like the body disposed of and your shipping options.

I think I'll wait until I start reading about farmers going out of business due to price competition from indoor produce growers.

The upside of wave power is that water is relatively dense, and thus moving water carries a lot of energy in a small volume. The downside is maintenance costs... they don't call water the "universal solvent" for nothing, and salt water in particular tends to eat anything you leave in contact with it for very long.

Very true... it's hard to compete with a fertile field in a nice climate, if you have access to one. I'm surprised nobody has pointed out the obvious applications in locations where viable outdoor environments aren't available, though -- e.g. in space, or on Mars.

Well that may be so. But as you get older you get less patient with people wasting your time.

Let's say you're 90 years old. You're using a webmail system which does everything you need it to do. Then some manager has a brainwave and suddenly all the functions are somewhere else. How much of the 3.99 years the actuarial tables say you've got left do you want to spend dealing with that?

It's not just 90 year-olds. Take a poll of working-age users and find out how many like the MS Office Ribbon; how many people are cool with the regular UI reshuffling that takes place in Windows just to prove you're paying your upgrade fee for software that's "new"?