Counterpoint. What indications are there that the teachers are doing their jobs well? It's not necessarily the case that the technology is better, and the whole mess certainly reeks of a pork-filled lobbyist scheme... but really, how would that be different from the other public school offerings in play? It's not really possible to evaluate how effective the technology will be until it's out in the field, after all, so we may as well let the experiment run its course, now that the bills are paid.

Untrue. It's totally possible for something to break up and be carried off by the currents without reaching the bottom. It takes craftsmanship to make a sub sturdy enough to sink properly.

Historically, investment in renewables has been been token, since all of it's been overshadowed by continual increases in the use of fossil fuels. That's not even 'slowing down' that's just 'accelerating less quickly'. Some individual countries have been retooling, sure, but all that's been doing is taking a bit of price demand off the coal, making it more attractive an option to emerging economies. A giant solar plant in the Sahara would be a step in the right direction, for sure, but people have been talking about that kind of thing for years... it remains to be seen whether they can actually make good on their promises. Since the default option is 'all the governments in the region are essentially broke, and thus decide to build a few more coal plants instead', I remain skeptical.

Yeah... that's exactly what I was getting at, only you seem to have missed the point.

You just mentioned a 10000 year period, followed by an 800000 year period. That's a lot of time, and our accuracy of monitoring the data over that sort of scale decreases the further into the past we go. This blurs our analysis down to the big picture; we know we are dealing with a system that operates on geological time, changing slowly over hundreds of thousands of years as it moves between ice ages and warm periods. Naturally, the atmospheric composition changes with it... indeed, the changes of atmospheric composition are one of the only things that we can be sure of... hence statements like your own 'levels not experienced in the past 800 000 years'. Well... those levels did exist back then. And there is a natural process that swings the earth between those extremes.

Bear in mind, again, that this is NOT good news. 'Oh, it's natural warming, so we don't have to do anything about it.' Bzzzt, wrong. Dead wrong. The portion of the warming that is not caused by humans is the scarier part, because it's a lot harder for us to do anything about. Just how much is our fault, and how much isn't is more tricky of a question than you seem to assume... there's more to climate than atmospheric composition, after all. Even so, that's not a [i]useful[/i] question. The useful questions, again, are 'so, how much are temperatures going to be changing, and how fast?' and 'what can we do about it?'

This.

People are finally starting to get over the 'climate may be changing' thing, a process which has long been delayed by the heavily politicized 'why' question. It's more accurate to think of it in terms of climate changing due to a number of factors, some of which humans are responsible for, than to entirely assign blame one way or another. For one thing, it's not remotely accurate to say that climate change is something humans are totally responsible for; to do so is to ignore natural cyclical fluctuations of that climate.

Of course, causation aside, it remains a fact that the climate is changing. 'How much' remains a useful question. So does 'how can we affect the rate of change'. That's always been the root of the political problem, of course. Half-measures like alternative energy and emissions reduction are essentially a token gesture, of little real effect; slowing the train down a little doesn't change its direction. Ultimately, since human population continues to increase, human energy consumption will do the same... and trying to stop or even slow that means trying to reduce population or increase poverty, which is grim as hell. There's certainly a little wiggle room there... but the problem is so vast that a really serious solution would look like 'replace all coal plants everywhere with nuclear'. Yes, nuclear; wind and solar just won't cut it, you need a serious power source to solve serious problems, unless you're trying a 'solve the problem by killing a bunch of people and impoverishing the rest' solution.

Even so, there's another side to the 'rate of change' issue. Even if we developed a magical solution that completely eliminated all human contribution to global warming starting tomorrow, the fact remains that there are still natural factors out there that are changing the climate in ways incompatible with our needs as a species. That's a long-term problem, but one that will eventually need solving. Ultimately, it'll mean stuff like geoengineering. Even if the seas are 'scheduled' to rise 20 metres, it's certainly possible to hold back the tide... but it'll take a hell of a lot of work to make that happen.

This is an excellent point. If I search with my middle name, no hits; but I share the firstname-lastname of a journalist, so I get stuff about him if I search like that.

Kinda sorta. All possible locations already have random words... if you want to change those words to some other word, they charge money for that. Probably not worth it, obviously; anyone doing so now is essentially speculating on the expansion of the system... like trying to buy up common domain names on a newly-opened TLD in order to sell it off later and/or benefit from hypothetical traffic to come once people start using that corner of the net.

Pretty much, yeah... an interesting idea, but more or less useless, in my opinion. The only advantage words have over numbers is that words can be easier to remember. Unfortunately, these words are only accessible online. If you have web access, then more or less by definition you have a device that you can takes notes on. Accordingly, you can record exact coordinates with essentially the same amount of effort it'd take to record random words.

The tinfoil is strong with this one.

Probably because they feel that human lives are more valuable than satellites, despite the fact that there are more humans in existence than satellites. That's not to say that we should not do dangerous things because of the risk to humans, but it remains a good thing when people survive a potentially fatal accident. Similarly, a lot of people do, in fact, value lives over money, to the degree that the design of dangerous things like rockets (and, y'know, cars and such) involves careful precautions to preserve human life, as opposed to valuable objects.

Even if you didn't care overly much about human lives, though, the safety aspect still needs careful examination in a case like this. After all, satellites are expensive, so if you've got a system that regularly puts them up, but sometimes fails catastrophically, you definitely want to spend some time finding out what causes the catastrophic failures, so you can make that not happen. If for no other reason than to prevent your expensive satellites and such from blowing to bits, since you usually can't just safely eject those in the course of a failed launch.

I don't know about that. "Do not drink from the water the goat just pissed in" remains a sensible rule, even after all this time. Different centuries, different goats, but the principle remains sound.

No, the sales and marketing industry is built around making people want to give you money. Fraud at worst, not theft. This is different from those industries based around taking money, which includes banks, governments, burglars, and extortionists.

Feasibility ultimately boils down to cost-efficiency. If renewable energy was ultimately as cost-efficient as petroleum, this wouldn't even be a discussion. Profitability is a side issue; there are costs, and someone needs to pay them, whether it's a government, or a corporation, or you the consumer. Ignoring the economic reality doesn't make it go away; renewable energy is currently less cost-efficient than petroleum. Therefore, spending money on renewable energy produces more expensive power than does petroleum. Therefore, governments pushing renewable energy are under more budgetary pressure, corporations investing in renewable energy are less profitable and more prone to failure, and consumers whose energy needs are met by renewable sources have less wealth in real terms.

Gravity is also not God, and it also does not require worship. But the fact that you are bound by it, and might prefer not to be, doesn't mean you can ignore it's reality.

Efficiency curves. Sure, as the oil supply continues to be used up, it'll get less and less efficient to extract it, leading to higher prices, leading to alternative petroleum sources, like those produced by fracking and such, to become more feasible. Even so, those options are chosen because they remain more cost-effective than the renewable options. The renewable options are slowly getting more efficient, as the technology improves... but given the rate of improvement, they'll remain less efficient than petroleum-based solutions for some time now.

When renewable energy really does become feasible, it won't be in a sudden big news moment. It'll come slowly, over time, as the technology slowly improves to the point where it's able to compete with the slowly degrading efficiency of fossil fuels. That is, notably, a point in which the price of energy will be higher than it is today. That, right there, is what 'peak oil' will really look like; not a bang, but a whimper.

That'd actually be a good thing, really. I mean, it's short-term terrible about civilian casualties and the destruction of a city and all, but long-term, the investments in space technology and meteor detection would be vastly more positive for everyone in general than any of these other wars have been.