Your entire elaborate argument is based on a false premise.

As I said, the road damage is exponential with the weight. It is proportional to the axle weight to the fourth power.

Fuel economy is roughly linear with weight, or even less than linear (big rigs get much better MPG per ton than smaller vehicles). Therefore, fuel taxes don't begin to recover the extra costs of heavier vehicles.

Who has made the stupidest argument you've ever heard now? You might look in the mirror.

Your hypotheses that road damage is caused solely by the pressure on the top few millimeters of the road is highly questionable. The Prius is not going to be pounding down through the structure of the concrete nearly as much as your super-duty pickup hauling a huge boat.

I do agree that big rigs should be paying drastically more in fees than they do. However, industry lobbyists will always trump common sense.

Since road damage is exponentially proportional to vehicle weight, heavier trucks *should* be paying more in fees.

There is no reason that we have to pick one and abandon work on the others. I don't see that the same resources go into solving more than one, except that the meteor and volcano problem have one solution in common - be on another planet when it happens.

The clathrate problem and nuclear war have the potential to end the human race while it is still on one planet, so we need to solve both of them ASAP.

Go to a friends house and turn on their flat-panel TV. 99% of the time, it will have frame-rate interpolation turned on; which basically means that any content they see on that TV will be at 60 or 120 Hz. Even movies shot at 24.

More and more often as I do presentations to executives, they don't understand why my TVs look so "juddery" compared to what they expect -- it's because at home they're watching everything at 120Hz.

So no -- most people are happy with high frame rate most of the time, and that percentage is getting larger quickly. I am a big 24fps fan, but I believe the days are numbered.

No, we are not doing things that are artificial at all -- we are making things that could be far more real.

The Dolby Vision TVs will have reasonable controls to set brightness and contrast, but one of the selling points to the studios is that we will strive to maintain the artistic intent of the original. The blacks will be black, the whites will be white, and there will be an unprecedented (but realistic) amount of contrast.

It turns out that in high dynamic range content creation, the most important thing is not that the picture be brighter overall; but that there is an increased range between midtones and highlights. In current production, skin tones are set to about half the maximum brightness in the scene. This means that the brightest things in the image (say, a glint off of a chrome bumper) can only be twice that bright; where in real life it's more that 100 times that bright. So, leaving the midtones about where they are, and giving brighter highlights makes the image look better in a way that you have to see to understand. Or, you can just look out the window.

As the article states, two of the most important changes in this standard are high dynamic range (HDR) and wider color gamut (Rec. 2020) images. I have been working on this with Dolby Laboratories for the last few years, and whenever we bring in movie directors, cinematographers, colorists, or studio executives to see our ridiculously HDR wide-color-gamut display, their jaws hit the floor. The ability to reproduce the dynamic range and color gamut of real life is breathtaking. One of the studio executives, when asked if she could see the difference said "Do I look like a potted palm?"

You will see the difference, and you'll be able to see it from across the room. HDR and wide color gamut combined with UHD resolution is a revolution.

I know this sounds like a sales pitch (ok, it is!) but I've been working in the film business for 30 years before I started working on this; I know what creatives want, and this is it. I spent that time working on CG visual effects, and I think that HDR will have a comparable impact on filmmaking that VFX did.

The Dolby Cinema theaters opening in the next few months will have similar extreme dynamic range and wide color gamut. They look astonishingly better as well.

Wait and see. It's coming, and it's not far away.

Normal in a race.

"Closed course. Professional driver. Do not attempt."

Looks like you need to get a bumper sticker with Calvin pissing on a Honda.

Your car is trying to tell you that you're about to roll it.

You do realize that most cars sold in the last couple of decades have computers that can override your inputs and monkey around with your brakes whenever you're trying to speed up or slow down the vehicle?

Sure, there are going to be mediating forces in the environment. Melting is an obvious one. The positive feedbacks have been getting the most attention because they are really scary. It appears that there are gas clathrates in the ground and under water that can come out at a certain temperature. The worst case is that we get an event similar to Lake Nyos, but with a somewhat different mechanism and potentially many more dead. The best case is a significant atmospheric input of CO2 and methane that we can't control.

I don't think I have to discount Trenberth. He's trying to correct his model, he isn't saying there is no warming.

Thanks.

McKitrick is an economist out of his field. Trenberth and Fasullo cite many of their other papers and the publications to which they were submitted, but it seems mostly not accepted. But their conclusion seems to be that there were other times in recent years that the rate of warming decreased for a time only for it to return to its previous rate. I only see the abstract for Kosaka and Xie, but they state "the multi-decadal warming trend is very likely to continue with greenhouse gas increase."

No number is larger than any other number. Quantities are larger than other quantities. Numbers are symbolic entities that can represent a quantity, or not.

I imagine that the major financial companies make this part of their economic modeling. Most of them do publish weather-related and climate-related advisories regarding commodity and company price trends, etc. How detailed do they get? The wouldn't tell and I am the wrong kind of scientist to ask. Can we make a government or public one? Yes, the level of detail is the big question.