Whoever sets up the lunar base, do you mind also putting a Pirate Bay server up there, too? I never finished downloading the second season of Hannibal.

Wasn't "passive-aggressive" at all. I'm genuinely concerned when I see someone get uncharacteristically upset over what may be a simple missed point.

I don't do passive-aggressive very much. I'm more the aggressive-aggressive type if I have reason to lash out. I also don't much care for sarcasm unless it can't be avoided.

For fuck's sake, this is the last comment like this I am going to respond to!

Take it easy. You're getting all worked up for nothing.

It's a new year. Make the best of it and learn to deal with your stress level. You'll live a longer, healthier life.

Oh, goodness, you pick the hottest year in history and when the next few years don't **quite** equal that extreme point confidently declare that the entire century and a half observed warming trend is invalid? Really? Look up 'statistical outliers' and try to comprehend the concept and then get back to us. By the way, 2014 is now the hottest year on record, you're going to have to reset your talking point.

still do not completely understand all of them

They've been studying and modeling the electron for over a century and still do not understand everything about it, either. That doesn't stop us from using them to operate these magical boxes that we communicate with.

The Doctrine of Papal Infallibility originated in the First Vatican Council in the late 19th century. Before that the pope was just a man. A very powerful man, but not the font of god's direct word.

For all reasonable considerations our atmosphere is in fact a closed system, and what does escape can be quantified. Gravity and the magnetosphere keep escaping gasses to a minimum. Albedo varies over time but is measurable to within a remarkable number of decimal points by satellite. Anything that is not reflected is absorbed, either by the atmosphere itself or by the water and land below it. Re-radiation is also measured by those same satellites.

Of course other climate events affect overall global temperatures, and of course there are other 'forcings' at work. My 4th grade niece would set her hands on her hips, look at you, and say, "Duh!" Are you of the rather absurd opinion that the models that people have labored over refining for decades don't attempt to include them? I would highly recommend that you look at a few of them, you will be surprised at the work that goes into the process of modeling (I know I was).

I see. So there should be consequences for acts of vandalism, other than the parents can "mend" his ways.

We wouldn't want the poor whittle kiddies having to face consequences. That make might them sad pandas.

Land clearing? Where? Every renewable energy installation that I have ever seen except hydro has been sited in already open land. Even in northern Michigan the wind farms are located on existing farmland, the farmers just plow around the foundation of the thing and continue on their merry way. The best sites are areas that are already bare because of local weather and other environmental conditions, and you will probably be shocked to find that those are the primary places that they are located.

You really think that it's better for a Third World country to have to buy coal from the US or Australia until the end of time, rather than have a power source that will need no imports for the next two decades? You don't work for the World Bank or IMF by chance, do you?

In the case of the above poster, I don't think he's bright enough to figure out how to create a user account. Most of the time it seems to be people who are too cowardly to have their name associated with their beliefs. Several times Mr. AC has told me that I was stupid for posting something that can easily be tracked back to my actual name because future employers might take umbrage. (My reply has always been that I wouldn't have wanted to work for people like that anyway.) It's typical of the breakdown of the whole online forum format though, which is too bad because it's my favorite type of online discussion.

Emails are copyrighted already.

Everything you make is copyrighted, to you.

That people don't understand this is, "weirdly", common.

The question of whether you could enforce action against infringers and/or whether reproducing those emails is against the copyright is another thing entirely and down to local law.

But, pretty much, this post is copyrighted. There may be a line somewhere that assigns the copyright in it to Slashdot (I don't think there is, Facebook tried that and couldn't get away with it), but otherwise it's mine. All comments are the property of the poster, remember.

And when you're talking about the contents of an internal email from a workplace, almost certainly those are the intellectual property of the employer - whether expressly stated or not.

It's not a question of "if".

And I'm pretty sure that a government organisation tasked with intercepting communications has some exception in the law for copying, reading and storing your email for a certain period of time. It's come up in the UK news for GCHQ, for instance.

In the same way you can't sue your ISP for copying your packets to this forum in the first place, or Slashdot for storing them, as there is an inherent permission granted by you posting.

Nope. If you want to actually affect the outcome of the election, the optimal strategy is to vote for the candidate that you like the most out of the two viable candidates. If you vote for anyone else, that's a wasted vote. Worse, because you didn't vote for your preferred viable candidate, your throwing away your vote cost the one you prefer a vote, effectively giving a vote to whoever you dislike the most.

If you really don't care which candidate wins, then you're not paying attention. Sure, neither candidate is perfect, particularly the ones that can make it through the process, but do you _really_ think that Gore would have done exactly the same thing that Bush Jr did? Idiots voting for a third party candidate threw that election, and the result was horrible. Please don't encourage that behavior in the future.

The tearing up of the Constitution actually got well and truly under way by the tyrant Lincoln

You could go back to John J Marshall.

In fact, if you really want to look at the history, you could say the Constitution was "torn up" before it was even ratified. It was never anything but a counter-revolutionary document intended to create rule by the elite.

You read the ratification debates, you'll see what I mean. It's ugly the way the impulse for liberty and democracy was thwarted by a bunch of wine snobs who didn't want to pay their taxes or give up their slaves.

And Carter. And Ford

Probably the only two since Kennedy who were NOT sociopaths. Whatever you think of their politics, they seem to have been decent human beings. You can't say that about anyone who came after.

Look, all this isn't remotely believable. You clearly compounded that account's massive spamming attempts by needlessly quoting obscenely huge chunks of his nonsense. [Rujiel, 2014-12-28]

Needlessly? How else should I debunk his baseless claim that I was "rude and insulting" when Jane/Lonny Eachus was actually just projecting his own obscene insults onto me? And if you have a better approach in mind, why not just suggest that better approach rather than repeatedly suggest that I kill myself?

Are they hiring you losers while still in high school these days? The bar for paid oil trolls sure is a low one--any stupid thing to prevent the discussion of the oil cartel's impunity. Do the world a favor and kill yourself. [Rujiel, 2014-11-20]

He's a paid shill and so are you--no amount of verbose whining on your part could hide the role of spamming you were playing in that thread. [Rujiel, 2014-12-28]

Once again, Rujiel accuses me of being a paid oil shill. But once again, why would the oil industry pay me to debunk the same baseless accusations they're helping to spread? I've been debunking misinformation about climate from Jane/Lonny Eachus and many others for 5 years now. Again, why would the oil industry pay me to do that?

... Save our collective unconscious from your fevered ego--kill yourself. your net sum contribution to society is at a negative. [Rujiel, 2014-11-26]

Really? Among other things, I've contributed open source software to estimate mass changes on the surface of the Earth using GRACE satellite data. Here's my dissertation which explains the methods. Does that count for anything, or should I kill myself?

Your response is akin to someone who has just spent the last hour rolling in his own shit and flinging it at passers-by, standing up all at once and asking the surrounding crowd what's wrong. You're seriously so bad at this. Even your employer would be better off if you killed yourself. [Rujiel, 2014-11-30]

I really don't understand why people like Jane/Lonny Eachus and Rujiel are filled with so much hatred. However, sociology research suggests that people are less likely to hurl abuse at other people after seeing their faces. So here I am at JPL's open house explaining that our CO2 emissions are melting ice sheets. And here's a clip from the Weather Channel where I explained (at 19m36s and 26m34s) how NASA measures these ice sheets from space.

Rujiel, now that you've seen my face, do you still hate me so much that you still think I should kill myself? Or would you like to retract those odious statements?

Nor have they "egotistically proclaim[ed] that they alone can solve mankind's problems, from aging to space travel." Nor "all the talk of exploration." Nor "shoot endangered animals on safari".

Seriously, the guy is nothing but a walking strawman.

There's plenty of things you can criticise the "PayPal mafia" and NewSpace over, especially Thiel and Branson respectively, but nothing that the Professor is going on about even comes close to a valid criticism. (Or even something that has anything to do with reality.) It's bizarre that someone would say it, but crazy that a major newspaper would actually publish it.

A) "recently", for something that's over a decade old, suggests that he's only just heard about it and because he only just heard about it, thinks it's new.

B) "fleets of rocket ships" is how a child would see it. Suggesting the guy is not only ignorant, but is surrounded by ignorant people.

VG won't be doing anything special, (although even a private sub-orbital system is new; nothing like SS2 exists. X-15 with passengers and open space.)

But Musk already has the cheapest launcher on the market (perhaps ignoring a few micro-launchers), is about to develop fly-back first stage (something the industry has been wishing for since the early sixties), and is developing a private manned capsule, and is developing a heavy lift launcher that costs less than any other medium-lift launcher on the market even if they doesn't achieve reusability, and he's working with NASA to develop a Saturn V F1-class engine for a Saturn V class launcher, and he wants to go to Mars.

Not breaking new ground? What the fuck does this idiot want from them, a warp drive?