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Comment This is why open source is so important (Score 1) 1

Forget about the fact that NCsoft has taken customer monies for subscriptions and the abilitiy to buy ingame items that it will now never deliver. NCsoft has cut the players off from their data. City of heroes was a tool for creating and fleshing out a players fantasy. The data the 3d models the records of achievements are all trapped in ncsofts servers and after the shutdown date will likely be nothing more than a set of discs in Iron Mountain or some other storage facility where they will never see the light of day again.

The whole concept behind copyright and publishing was to make certain that creative works would be preserved, that they would not be lost. This kind of activity completely subverts the process. Could you imagine if J.D. Salinger decided the EULA on "The Catch in the Rye" lets me revoke the rights, and since the work could be better i am going to turn off all the copies ?

Comment Nice to see someone taking obviously needed steps (Score 1) 71

The mind boggling thing is that we are still actually arguing the need for this in the U.S.

When ATT was the phone company we made DAMN certain it couldn't extend or leverage its monopoly position. Stopping ISPs from leveraging their monopoly duopoly position to controlling your content choices is a no brainer.

Canada

Canadians #TellVicEverything In Response To Bill C-30 84

First time accepted submitter beerdragoon writes "In order to protest the government's new Internet snooping legislation, some Canadians have started a somewhat unorthodox protest. Vic Toews, the minister responsible for tabling the legislation, has had his twitter account bombarded with tweets regarding the boring, banal aspects of regular Canadians' lives. The idea is that since Toews wants to know everything about your personal life, we should oblige him and #TellVicEverything."

Comment Re:Well unbiased reporting is the real fantassy (Score 1, Insightful) 877

Its a pure appeal to emotionalism and its playing with the data the way a magician plays with expectations. Whats worse when you think about it 98 was the hottest year on record, and we have had 13 years of ever increasing levels of CO2 production you would think 2011 should be hotter ?

Wow a data point which is at best not impressive has been transformed into a brickbat. God forbid you question the common sense of trying fuel our automobiles with corn, the power grid with wind because that brickbat and whole bunch of equally specious will be thrown at you.

Comment Well unbiased reporting is the real fantassy (Score 0) 877

"It's long past time to face facts: the Earth is getting hotter, and to deny it is an exercise in fantasy."

Seriously not much ideological bias. I can't imagine a more anti science, more anti reason way to try and beat down people you disagree with than the above. The fact that it has managed to gain a foothold in political circles and the wider world is a great indictment of democracy, and the best argument imaginable for not giving government more power to try and solve our problems.

Earth

Permafrost Loss Greater Threat Than Deforestation 272

Pierre Bezukhov writes "Emissions from thawing permafrost may contribute more to global warming than deforestation this century, according to commentary in the journal Nature. Arctic warming of 7.5 degrees Celsius (13.5 degrees Fahrenheit) this century may unlock the equivalent of 380 billion tons of carbon dioxide as soils thaw, allowing carbon to escape as CO2 and methane, University of Florida and University of Alaska biologists wrote today in Nature. Two degrees of warming would release a third of that, they said. The Arctic is an important harbinger of climate change because the United Nations calculates it's warming at almost twice the average rate for the planet. The study adds to pressure on United Nations climate treaty negotiators from more than 190 countries attending two weeks of talks in Durban, South Africa that began Nov. 28."

Comment Re:Climate change ceased to be a scientific issue (Score 1) 585

Its 2011 I remember perfectly well when climatologists were saying I would be under a glacier by now because people were burning fossil fuel.

I also remember how we got more global warming because people cleaned up the emissions from burning fossil fuels.

I guess the future isn't what it used to be.

Comment Re:No the models they mean are like these... (Score 1) 585

I have to think you are trolling.

Because there is no way anyone could read.

you are picking a hundred year window, and saying anyone that uses a different window is wrong. If we were to take a 1000 year window we would be in decline.

and fail to graph that the person making that comment understood there were longer term and shorter term cycles and was pointing them out.

If you haven't subtracted out the natural cyclic variance from the signal you don't have anything that you can actually attribute to CO2.

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