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Comment Re:Anyone who thinks they can change the weather.. (Score 1) 380

Oh get off it. You're just being a contrary to the point of hyperbole. And you're completely wrong.
Go read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclone
"This rate of energy release is equivalent to 70 times the world energy consumption of humans and 200 times the worldwide electrical generating capacity, or to exploding a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes."

Wikipedia also says that all nuclear testing amounted to 510 megatons of energy released.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield
I don't know how that related to all "all explosives ever detonated", but assuming that is the total, then it would take a hurricane ~1,000 minutes to match the energy. You were off by a factor of at minimum 1,000 with your hyperbole.

Now, disregarding that, you're simply wrong that we can't influence hurricanes. It's simple math. If the water 100m below the surface if 5 degrees cooler, and we clearly understand how every change in water surface temperature influences hurricane strength, you can easily calculate how much energy we need to expand to pump that water up and how long it will stay there before convecting back down, etc... You can come up with a straightforward figure for how many joules our fleet needs to expend, and judging by this patent, it's not an astronomical figure.

Stop spouting this whole "noble nature" myth. Humans got to be a successful, spacefaring civilization by engineering the hell out of our environment. Our water system, the land, etc. This is just the next step.

Comment Re:Not a robot conspiracy (Score 5, Informative) 235

It shouldn't have just been denied an oral presentation, it should have been caught by the program committee and never reviewed. You can't read 3 sentences of that abstract without knowing that it's garbage.

Presumably someone DID review this and deny it an oral, but didn't follow up with the program committee to make sure it was pulled entirely.

I've never been to a conference which pity accepts papers. CVPR, a IEEE conference on computer vision, has a 25% acceptance rate for posters. I think this paper is quite an embarrassment to IEEE.

The Courts

EFF Sues NSA, President Bush, and VP Cheney 267

VisualE writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will file a lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA) and other government agencies today on behalf of AT&T customers to stop the illegal, unconstitutional, and ongoing dragnet surveillance of their communications and communications records. The five individual plaintiffs are also suing President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney's chief of staff David Addington, former Attorney General and White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and other individuals who ordered or participated in the warrantless domestic surveillance."

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