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Comment Lucky me (Score 1) 91

I live in an area that is serviced by several cable providers as well as at least 2 *DSL providers.
We have chose to go with Astound http://www.astound.com/ , but Comcast and TWC are also available. On the *DSL side we can get Pac-Bell or CenturyLink. I've previously used SDSL with Pac-Bell and had good results but at a steep cost. About 2 years ago we decided to try Astound due to price issues and have been relatively happy with their performance, though customer service does lack a little in the technical skills area.
Earth

Study: Antarctic Sea-Level Rising Faster Than Global Rate 302

Posted by samzenpus from the how-high's-the-water-momma? dept.
An anonymous reader writes with this bit of good news for everyone who is waiting for their homes to one day be on the beach. Melting ice is fuelling sea-level rise around the coast of Antarctica, a new report in Nature Geoscience finds. Near-shore waters went up by about 2mm per year more than the general trend for the Southern Ocean as a whole in the period between 1992 and 2011. Scientists say the melting of glaciers and the thinning of ice shelves are dumping 350 billion tonnes of additional water into the sea annually. This influx is warming and freshening the ocean, pushing up its surface. "Freshwater is less dense than salt water and so in regions where an excess of freshwater has accumulated we expect a localized rise in sea level," explained Dr Craig Rye from the University of Southampton, UK, and lead author on the new journal paper.

Comment Re:old school ?? (Score 1) 382

by Archfeld (#47780387) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Are the Best Games To Have In Your Collection?

LOL, nah I can do without the tea or a blanket, but I could use a Newcastle. I had a pong machine, and a radio shack/tandy 16k computer as well, but my 1st machine was a heathkit I built in math class as a junior high student. I had a Atari 2600 and sadly I can still muscle memory my way through Adventure, long live the yellow Duck.
Now excuse me while I go play a game of pinball on my vintage Delta Queen, STILL 2 plays (5 balls) for .25.

As for age, it doesn't matter how old you are the phrase old-school makes you sound like a self-absorbed retard. Sadly looking at my comment I have to say the phrase douche bag isn't much better so I'll have to take the heat for that as well.

Comment old school ?? (Score 1) 382

by Archfeld (#47776495) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What Are the Best Games To Have In Your Collection?

#1 STOP USING 'old school', you aren't, and you sound like a douche bag.
#2 DICE - Zilch, 10,000, liar's dice...etc
#3 A deck of cards, Canasta, Bridge, Poker, Pinochle.
#4 Risk, Stratego, Masterpiece, Chutes and Ladders for the youngsters, and of course Monotony, aka Monopoly.
#5 Dungeons & Dragons, or more preferably Gurps, but any pen and paper RPG is awesome.
Earth

Climate Damage 'Irreversible' According Leaked Climate Report 708

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the midsummer-2045 dept.
New submitter SomeoneFromBelgium (3420851) writes According to Bloomberg a leaked climate report from the IPPC speaks of "Irreversible Damage." The warnings in the report are, as such, not new but the tone of voice is more urgent and more direct than ever. It states among other things that global warming already is affecting "all continents and across the oceans," and that "risks from mitigation can be substantial, but they do not involve the same possibility of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts as risks from climate change, increasing the benefits from near-term mitigation action."

Comment how about by offering to not screw you... (Score 1) 275

by Archfeld (#47745405) Attached to: Dropbox Caught Between Warring Giants Amazon and Google

If they promised not to 'steal' your contents and sell them to someone else or use them to market 'partner' services, or actually have and supply a real secure site. You know at some point Google will alter their ToS to allow them to use anything in their never-ending quest to track everything and everyone that ever touches the web in any manner.

Comment FTA... (Score 1) 62

by Archfeld (#47732101) Attached to: UPS: We've Been Hacked

each store is a independent computer node and not all are interconnected. That indicates to me that it almost has to be an insider/employee/contractor travelling from store to store implementing the malware ? It seems unlikely that a hacker group could/would have the organization to get around to that many states/stores.
Earth

Cause of Global Warming 'Hiatus' Found Deep In the Atlantic 465

Posted by samzenpus from the biggest-heatsink dept.
vinces99 writes with news about a study that may account for a slowdown in air temperature rises. Following rapid warming in the late 20th century, this century has so far seen surprisingly little increase in the average temperature at the Earth's surface. More than a dozen theories have now been proposed for the so-called global warming hiatus, ranging from air pollution to volcanoes to sunspots. New research from the University of Washington shows the heat absent from the surface is plunging deep in the north and south Atlantic Ocean, and is part of a naturally occurring cycle. The study is published in Science. Subsurface ocean warming explains why global average air temperatures have flatlined since 1999, despite greenhouse gases trapping more solar heat at the Earth's surface. "Every week there's a new explanation of the hiatus," said corresponding author Ka-Kit Tung, a UW professor of applied mathematics and adjunct faculty member in atmospheric sciences. "Many of the earlier papers had necessarily focused on symptoms at the surface of the Earth, where we see many different and related phenomena. We looked at observations in the ocean to try to find the underlying cause." What they found is that a slow-moving current in the Atlantic, which carries heat between the two poles, sped up earlier this century to draw heat down almost a mile (1,500 meters). Most previous studies focused on shorter-term variability or particles that could block incoming sunlight, but they could not explain the massive amount of heat missing for more than a decade.
Earth

Scientists Baffled By Unknown Source of Ozone-Depleting Chemical 303

Posted by Soulskill from the i-blame-the-schools dept.
schwit1 writes: Scientists have found that, despite a complete ban since 2007, ozone-depleting chemicals are still being pumped into the atmosphere from some unknown source. "Carbon tetrachloride (CCl4), which was once used in applications such as dry cleaning and as a fire-extinguishing agent, was regulated in 1987 under the Montreal Protocol along with other chlorofluorocarbons that destroy ozone and contribute to the ozone hole over Antarctica. Parties to the Montreal Protocol reported zero new CCl4 emissions between 2007-2012. However, the new research shows worldwide emissions of CCl4 average 39 kilotons (about 43,000 U.S. tons) per year, approximately 30 percent of peak emissions prior to the international treaty going into effect. "We are not supposed to be seeing this at all," said Qing Liang, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study published online in the Aug. 18 issue of Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. "It is now apparent there are either unidentified industrial leakages, large emissions from contaminated sites, or unknown CCl4 sources."

Comment a matter of scale (Score 1) 276

by Archfeld (#47715181) Attached to: Helsinki Aims To Obviate Private Cars

I can commute farther in the state of California than the entire nation of Finland. Solutions that are workable and even desirable in certain locations are not logistically feasible in others.
I was very impressed with the public transportation options in GB, but the distances there lend themselves to such.

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