Precisely! The cow fart thing has been deliberately overblown by vested interests (ie: evil environmentalists want to take away your hamburger!!!!). The fact of the matter is that today's cow fart is tomorrow's cow food. Of course if we could stop cows farting and burping we could reduce our overall impact on climate but the real climate related problem not just with with cows but with agriculture in general is land use, ie: flattening forests and scrub land, draining wetlands, etc, to make way for pasture, shrimp farms, etc.

At the end of the day there aren't too many cows or pigs on the planet, there are too many people. However according to said vested interests uttering the simple fact that overpopulation is the root cause of the current environmental collapse somehow means that I want to start exterminating humans en-mass? - Not at all, I just happen to be concerned that collectively we appear to be behaving with all the forethought of a jar of fermenting yeast and as a consequence my three grand kids may suffer the same fate if we fail to reverse that trend.

Jaws was a great movie, however it was just a fucking movie.

Mosquitoes kill around one million people a year worldwide.
Domestic dogs kill over 3000 people a year worldwide (over 50,000 if you count rabies).
A kick to the head by a cow or horse kills about 40 people a year in the US alone.
ALL species of sharks combined have killed an average of 4.2 people a year worldwide over the last decade.

Too bad you feed your brain with fear rather than facts.

Sure, Eisenhower warned of the problems but lets try something radical like reading the entire speech. Here's some context to whet your appetite...

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction....[snip]...But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions....[snip]....In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

In other words, Eisenhower saw the overwhelming power of the MIC as essential for peace and at the same time was warning the nation about the potential of a home grown Hitler.

You are missing the point, people won't burst into flames because of AGW. However the Arab spring was preceded by the worst drought in the the history of the fertile crescent (the birthplace of agriculture). People didn't suddenly log on to facebook and find out they were living under tyrants. There were food riots in Cairo and other major cities BEFORE the uprisings, almost 10% of Syria's total population just walked away from their farms and went looking for work in the cities.

Go and find out why that one guy set himself on fire in the public square, and why it resonated across the Arab world. Don't believe the "hunger for freedom" bullshit, these people were hungry for bread.

Yes, but you can't go back in time and discover what would have happened if they didn't mass vaccinate. Sure dumb luck may have caught all five cases before it spread further, but do you want to bet your life on dumb luck?

You're arguing that people put their faith in the title people wear rather than the diametrically opposed philosophies they follow. The fact that you have so many people disagreeing with you demonstrates that is not the case. What you are claiming is that what Karl Popper called the "republic of science" (AKA scientific consensus) has no place in Science and that you must personally test each and every claim. That is a ludicrous claim, it demonstrates an immature understanding of philosophy and epistemology. It's also the same old argument climate deniers and creationists use when they claim that "consensus" has no place in Science, it's simply an emotional reaction that puts ones mind at rest when confronted with evidence that unsettles it.

Of course the real problem with your argument is that unlike religion, Science does not claim absolute truth. It claims to have the most accurate answer available at this point in time. A point more eloquently expressed by Asimov in his essay The Relativity of wrong

The fact that you have just questioned Mandella without consequence provides strong evidence that there is no barrier to questioning Mandela other than self-censorship.

Yes, Science is a philosophy, the scientific method is the implementation of that philosophy. The only faith required by Science is that the real world exists and can be observed by others.

Sure, appealing to authority is unscientific but to assume there is no qualitative difference in the opinions of the two groups simply implies you think that all opinions are equal. Many people do express that ideological view, but they obviously don't believe it since nobody would go to the hairdresser to get their appendix removed.

What you are really talking about is informed trust. Why do you trust scientists to follow the scientific method and report honestly? Why do you trust wise men to selflessly mediate between you and your imaginary friend? Why don't you trust the barber to cut your appendix out?

More than that, skepticism is the fundamental principle that Science is built on, and it's no accident that it is shunned by religion. Climate deniers, creationists, flat earthers, etc, are not skeptics. A genuine skeptic practices self-skepticism (ie: questions and tests their own beliefs), refusing to change one's opinion in the face of overwhelming contra-evidence is dogma, AKA pseudo-skepticism.

..and he is preventing you from getting a speeding fine. What's the problem?

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need". - Karl Marx.

In otherwords everyone is a "worker" in a communist society (despite what you may think of bureaucrats and politicians). Marx thought that it would work because the communist movement belived technology was the road to equity. However they also belived that property above and beyond personal need was a barrier to the efficient use of technology and resources. Mao was a true communist in this respect in that he pulled down the "barrier" by forcing everyone to become a pesant farmer. The result was that millions starved to death.

I was a teenager when they finally booted out the gang of four. In the 40 years since that time China has dragged more people out of poverty than the rest of the world combined by directing it's economy towards feeding, housing, and employing it's own people. It's a remarkable turn around, the only economic feat I can can think of that comes close to this kind of growth was the rise of Gengis Kahn.

Both the US and China practise "crony capitilisim" (moderate facisism) these days, they just implement it differently. Actual reasearch (as opposed to ideological naval gazing), into what makes a productive stable society indicates that the sweet spot for income disparity is somewhere around 10:1, ie: the top 1% earn 10X as much as the bottom 1%. Currently China has one of the worst equity ratings in the world, the US and Russia are about even but not that far behind China.

Go watch the last minute of Apollo 11 if you want "terror". Aldrin's heart rate went through the roof while Armstrong's kept plodding along normally, which just goes to show it's more scary being the passenger than the driver.

Insightful? - I think the mods missed your joke.

A small price to pay for the knowledge that Sydney is 40,000 subway cars from Melbourne.

Yes, the math behind the system in TFA was discovered by none other than John Von Neumann, who is also credited with inventing the aritechture that all modern computers are based on. FPGA routing and layout design uses path finding algorithms, the similarity is that they are both optimisers. MinMax, path finding and other optimization algorithms are all part of a branch of maths called Operations Research, or simply "logistics" to Americans. It gained it's original name and it's connection with computers during WW2.

I helped build a dispatch system similar to the one in TFA for a large telco in the 90's that planned and dispatched jobs for 6,000 linesmen and technicians. The thing spent all night calculating the most efficient plan only to have a half dozen PHB's screw it up at 5am with unwritten rules such as Senator Dick Waver needs his phone fixed now! It would then spend all day trying to work around their manual overrides via 2min partial optimization runs. That $100M system would now run on a cheap laptop. It's grandchild is still a "mission critical" system but I imagine the PHB's have got enough hardware grunt to recalculate on the fly these days.

To be honest efficient planning wasn't the original reason they implemented the system, getting the workers into a company van they could take home (union), with a laptop and phone backed by automated dispatching (engineering), meant they (PHB's) could sell $600M of prime real estate the (ex-government) depots had been sitting on for over half a century.