As a professor, I have two tasks that I must perform in every class I teach. I must educate my students, and I must evaluate their work. No one has ever explained to me how the 'evaluation' process can reasonably work in an on-line setting. Nothing is stopping me from enrolling my girlfriend's cat in an on-line degree program and taking all his tests. I assure you, Marvin's grades will be very good, but I don't suggest you hire him; he would be sleeping on the job an awful lot.

It's a shame, because I think that for many students, these kinds of programs could provide an education as good or better than a traditional classroom for a much lower price. But until there is a good reason to take the final transcript seriously, I don't think it will ever really catch on.

Hmmm... is it possible to meta-mod the "Infomative" mod on the parent post as "Funny"?

I'm curious, do you have any specific examples in mind? Because it seems to me that, for most manufacturing companies, the cost of energy is dwarfed by the cost of labor, which can already be found much cheaper in other countries (China being the primary example). I would guess that many companies that continue to manufacture in U.S. have very good reasons for remaining here, besides cost. (For example, military manufacturing, power generation, etc). We're simply not the dominant country for manufacturing anymore, and that's not likely to change anytime soon.

However, a huge share of global business is in products developed or marketed by U.S. firms. A major point of the regulations, reinforced by TFA, is to spur technical development which allows U.S companies to stay in front in this respect. China will eventually improve it's greenhouse-gas emission regulations; they don't want their coastal cities flooding any more than we do. If, by that point, US companies have off-the-shelf tech that China can buy to meet those regulations, they will, and US companies will continue to lead.

Agreed. The aerosol question is interesting. I was only commenting on the relationship between greenhouse gases and solar output. I agree that these are not the only factors. I don't know of any serious (ie peer-reviewed) model which attributes nearly as much recent warming to solar output as ggs.

Well, yes, but the amount of H2O in the air is relatively stable.

Correct. Other bodies in the solar system are warming as well. Climate scientists know this. In fact they know there are a number of factors which can influence the temperature here on Earth. That's why they've performed many experiments and collected enormous amounts of data to determine to what extent each factor could possibly be responsible for the warming we've seen. Greenhouse gasses unquestionably contribute far more to recent warming than solar activity, although solar activity is definitely a factor. This is all summarized on the Wikipedia entry for Global Warming (with appropriate sources).

As a broader point, science is hard. Blogs, news reports and movies will never accurately convey it, and often intentionally mislead. The only thing that makes sense to me is to trust the scientists. The (US) National Academy of Science in particular is filled with very, very smart people and has a historical record of speaking purely from scientific considerations (ie, it's objective). They believe that anthropogenic climate change is real and significant. No scientific body of remotely comparable credibility disagrees; virtually all similar institutions from other countries have reached the same conclusion.

I'm not a climate scientist, so I don't know with firsthand certainty the truth of the matter. But, forced to choose (for example, as a factor when deciding whom to vote for) I listen to the most trustworthy organization I can find. And their conclusions are clear.

I don't know quite who you mean by we, but Newton (along with many, many others) actually were trying to describe physics when they created mathematics. As stated above, it's not too much of a surprise that they eventually got it right.

Another vote here for Sage. On the open-source side of things, nothing comes close, because everything else that's any good (Maxima for example) is included within Sage, in a fairly transparent way. (I.e., the user doesn't need to know she's using Maxima.) Secondly, the (free) support is awesome. If you spend a little while learning Python and the basics of Sage, and you still have questions, the response time at sage-support at googlegroups is incredible.