You missed the big one.

Todd the Teacher.

Men have been practically excluded from teaching, by being painted with the sexist assumptions
that they are all child molesters and pedophiles with nothing positive to contribute.

In comparison to this particular problem, an imbalance in programmers is nothing.. bias in the
teaching of our children should be a huge priority, and yet, its not....

Fukushima WAS a natural disaster, stop trying to pretend otherwise. It was caused by the earthquake!

Or do you consider large numbers of the deaths also to not be natural, because people were hit by debris from buildings that broke up, trapped in
cars, etc? Pretty much the same thing.

The point is it has caused next to no deaths, whereas the main disaster did - and yet people rant on about the one that really didnt impact.

Get some damn perspective.

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

Be careful with that link, you may just learn something....
Especially if you remove the oil producing countries (they burn a lot as a side effect of providing oil to the other countries, and have low populations..).

The third world (and in fact second world) produce small amounts per capita, or are you going to argue against per capita, so we can all laugh at you?

You are just making those things up with a bunch of scary sounding negative buzzwords.

Removing guaranteed job security in NO way created a race to the bottom, in fact quite the opposite.
You are ignoring the fact that once true competition can be restored (perhaps I should say IF) then
teachers who are good are freed to seek high wages, teachers who are not good are suitable penalised
(and therefore have a reason to try harder, perhaps gain extra training, or ar least not just slouch around
treating students like dirt), and quality of education may actually improve.

I like your attempt at a threat at the end, it really dlivers the message, and the message is 'we consider your
children to be our gravy train insurance, give us anything we want, OR ELSE!'.

There is a lot of very solid research around the fact that unionisation in government funded (and I know, not all
teaching is government funded, just the majority..) jobs is NOT in any way desirable. Workers in the public
sector already have protection, its called the democratic system. Unions are for workers in the private sector
who dont have a democratically elected government handing other peoples money to them..

If you really want to see the endgame of strong controlled unionisation of workers look internationally at schools.
There is a strong correlation between freedom of a school in teacher employment, and quality of students
education, NOT THE OPPOSITE AS YOU IMPLY! Schools with well paid GOOD teachers attract more students,
get more support, have more involved parents, and thrive - however having the GOOD teachers is critical to that.
Steamrolling all teachers into an 'equal playing field' through strong strict unionisation, tenure, etc simply means
there is little reason to excel as a teacher.

I truely feel sorry for many star teachers these days, who often end up (due to their true love of the children) spending
a huge amount of time pickup up the pieces of incompetent teachers who simply dont care, and who get paid just
as much, basically to show up.

Sad, really.

Fair enough, perhaps then you would like to list the wars he has started lately?
Or perhaps just listing the top 10 countries to start wars in the last 20 years would be a good start?

Or is desperate sabre (even if its a wooden sword..) rattling somehow worse than actual killing of people?

Its called perspective, and it is desperately needed.

So what you seem to be claiming is that your power companies costs of generating power is approximately double the price they sell it to people?
Doesn't that seem a touch surprising to you?

The 'common' situation, as pointed out above is not a $0.14 sell/$0.02 buy ration, which does make sense, its a full credit in kWh for what you infeed. So you get to use them as a free storage facility.
I suspect what you are talking about is only the excess generation payments, rather than the load transfer facility.
You should probably think about the other half of the equation a little, and perhaps investigate the costs of a full capacity battery/supply system with replacement
costs factored in (5 years lifespan on the batteries is pretty good before they hit 50% capacity..).

No, YOU are missing a big point.
You get no 'peak shaving' because 1) the peaks are very rarely during high solar output hours (there is no midday peak), but far more
importantly, 2) the solar users ARE USING THEIR OWN POWER AT PEAK. now, I know you will argue that there is a net reduction of
peak load, which is true, but there is also an equal reduction in generated income associated with the fact that the people using solar
are far more likely to be low net users. The result is a smaller market of higher peak users - meaning again higher prices for other users.

ITS ALL A SUBSIDY FOR SOLAR USERS. Its pretty much that simple. There is zero valid economic reason to pay them to much for uncontrolled
generation. In fact I bet you could make good money with a moderate sized generation facility if you could force them to pay you that much for
your infeed power...

Argue all you want about the goodness of solar, but why should one set of consumers subsidize another set in such a blatant way?

Because they are usually required to pay customers a lot more for feed-in power than they can generate it for, with no allowance for their internal cost overheads, etc.

Basically they become a free power storage and backup facility only paid for any extra usage) for the customers, which is great for adoption, but means that non solar customers are adding further subsidy to the solar customers (over and above the common subside via taxation/government grants).

Not that I am against private solar - I have it myself, but using the grid as backup/storage is somewhat unfair in the big picture.

Some pricing plans are a bit more in line with reality, but regulators push hard to make it 'simple for the consumer' which really tends to end up meaning
'subsidize the solar users'.

You mean just like Linux has for quite some time?

After all, these hardware random sources feed the entropy pool, however are certainly not its only source.
Hell, applications can even contribute to the pool as they wish, and that is not considered an issue no matter how non-random their contribution is.

FreeBSD and its reliance on the Yarrow approach is much more 'sensitive' to its PRNG source(s), so its about time they caught up..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki//dev/random

Then again, random numbers tend to be treated almost as a religious argument rather than a technical one.

And? Motorcycles can approach and even exceed 100mpg, and without the horrible environmental load of building a prius, making its battery pack, and disposing of it all..

Care to try again?

No, no they do not, not even close..

As an example, my 1800cc high performance cruiser (which ignoring race bikes is a real fuel guzzler) does about 20% better than my 3l high efficiency bmw turbo diesel (which is a very efficient engine for its output).
My sports bike does about the same as the diesel, and my race bike is much worse (on the track.. as you would expect).
A steppie I had once upon a time did over 100mpg around town.
A honda CB700x (a very nice commuter/touring bike) does over 60 mpg combined.
Hell, a Yamaha VStar 1300 cruiser gets 78mpg open road.

there used to be an argument against bikes because few had catylytic converters and therefore had higher NOx, etc than small cars, although most these days do so that is pretty much long gone.

Care to try again?

Yes, yes you can.
So long as you want to destroy the handling that is.

But then in America racing is straight, gently left, repeat, right? ;)

A 240z is (with some work) a VERY well balanced racing car, drop a V8 in the nose and it is not..
If you want more power, there are MUCH better ways to address that.

(yes, have track driven 240zs in several forms..)

In this particular case (male teachers) it is far more about the painting of all males as child molesters and rapists who cannot be trusted around children.

But yes, the huge feminisation of many aspects of society, including schooling, is a major factor. Most male teachers end up seeing their views ignored,
themselves patronised, and their care values bought in to question on a continual basis, basically to marginalize their position as a teacher.

After all, 'think of the children!'

Astroturf much?
Just out of interest, since I could with a bit of free cash, how much is AMD paying for shilling these days?

You really REALLY need to look at what you are testing.

We are heavy users of OpenGL, and care critically about its performance.
And from that point of view, you are very VeRy wrong.
all current intel GMA implementations (even the super rare super-cache based implementations) are
terribly terrible slow compared even to old 8800gt.
we are talking significantly less than half the performance in many more advanced uses.

Yes, they can flat shade a limited number of polys quite well, and even do a little multitex, but its not
2001 any more.. we expect a little more these days.

Hit them with a few more advanced techniques and they really hit the wall, fast.
Not quite as fast as earlier GMA of course, but certainly not comparible to real hardware.