Like I said, you could be correct. My bet, however, would be with the people who dedicate their lives to study such things. They are obviously fallible, being human - but they are still the best that we have.

I have to chaff a little bit at "assume". They don't blindly assume anything - the models that scientists have been working on for 30 or 40 years all say that the heat is still on earth. They have to "find" the heat to improve the models. You could be correct - the heat could be escaping through some mechanism that is not understood or currently measured, but that's not the high-percentage bet.

This is a common tactic I see on Slashdot: "How can Slashdot be praising x when they usually say y?"

The folks claiming that the "hiatus" is a denier hoax are not necessarily the same folks who published this paper.

Furthermore, the argument is not that "hiatus" is a denier hoax - any fool can see temperature readings have been flat in most measured areas. The counter-argument is typically that the Earth is really big and that surface measurements alone do not necessarily represent the amount of heat absorbed by the atmosphere. Where all of that heat has been going was where the speculation has been, with the usual supposition being "the ocean" or "the poles".

Sweeeeeeet.

But that's just a payment plan. Unless you have one of these crazy grandfathered plans, you are in fact paying more than if you bought your own hammer as it wore out.

No, and frankly that would be a bad policy as it would get rid of any motivation for you to move closer to where you work. Even so, it is very common for executives to get leased vehicles.

This isn't the tool (cellphone is to hammer) - this is the consumables (minutes is to nails).

I have to disagree. If you do business with the government, you lose some of the privacy that you would have in a private transaction. Secrecy in government is just too tempting to abuse.

The hardest part is the macro language. VBA is an unspeakable horror, but it is well-documented and there are 20 years worth of forum help posts online fixing whatever problem you are currently working on.

I'm not disputing what you claim, just saying that your use case is marginal. It's like snowmobiles. Some people use them for work. For the most part, they are toys.

I'm going to throw an assumption out there: very, very few people are doing this. Yes, you could - in theory - "dock" your phone/tablet and do productive things with it. But a really top-notch phone is going to cost you $600+ and a really low-end computer that can kick the shit out of it will cost $200. I think that anyone who can afford the monitor, keyboard, and high-end phone will probably not sweat the cheap cpu too much.

So in the end, while I'm sure there are people in the fringes doing productive things on their phones and tablets, for the vast majority they are toys. This is not meant to be a disparaging comment - I have a smartphone, I have tablets... but I don't do anything more productive on them than take short notes and check email. Mostly they are consumption devices.

Perfectly allowed? ISIS is being bombed by the US military!

(sorry for the obscurity)

Corporations are government. They get their charter from government, and most of the big ones have very tight ties to government through lobbying and contracts. Corporations now do almost all of the actual work that we typically associate with government. It's a way of letting us have a ruling class while still maintaining the facade of democracy.

And I guess at the end of the day, we could always pass a law revoking corporate charters. Good luck with that, though.

What you said is true, but obvious. Effectiveness on global CO2 levels aside, the CA program has been a success by other measures. They intended it to be a pilot program, and it looks like it has mostly worked out from a technical standpoint. They have demonstrated that the system is workable from an administrative and bureaucratic standpoint. Few people are silly enough to think that CO2 emissions can be handled on a local (or even national) level - but having what is effectively one of the largest economies in the world to use as an example is a pretty good start.

Well, here you go!

On the surface, it has been quite successful. But you have to remember that most of the reduction has come from natural gas displacing coal - which thanks to fracking would have happened even without the carbon trading.