As a motorcycle rider I can't leave this unanswered. If you collide with a motorcycle rider who happens to be in your blind spot it is not an accident but negligence on your side because you failed to look over your shoulder.

And, I admit, stupidity on the biker's part, because the first thing they tell you in motorcycle driving lessons is that cars are your enemies and they don't take prisoners.

The questions is whether 'faster' is fast enough. FWIW, faster might just mean 10 million years instead of 20. I'd prefer bringing down the CO2 levels in a shorter timescale; I'd like to see it happen.

Trees may not be terribly relevant, but I don't think it is wise to discard all contributions but The Big One (whatever it may be). Many small ones are just as good. Every tree that grows in a perviously empty space removes its mass (I'm counting only the C) as CO2 from the atmosphere. Of course trees die, but others grow in their place, and a healthy forest sustains its biomass. Plus humus, which tends to grow slowly but steadily. And you can just go and plant trees, which is not so easy (yet) with plankton. BTW: Planting trees has a number of beneficial side-effects.

I guess nobody speaks about it on slashdot because planting trees doesn't require uber-cool technology. It requires going outside and getting your hands dirty. This is the wrong audience here.

But there is a lot going on about reforestation outside of slashdot. There is e.g. the Billion Tree Campaign, and the Green Belt Movement.

Unfortunately, countries like Brazil can't stop deforestation even though they try. I assume it is very expensive to control such huge areas like the Amazon (approx. half the size of the US). According to Wikipedia the main reason for deforestation in Brazil is cattle farming. So it's about time to consider becoming a vegetarian.

I disagree. The CO2 problem continues to exist; it just doesn't get worse if we stop emitting CO2. We have increased the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere from somewhere below 300 ppm to 390 ppm by digging carbon up from underground and blowing it into the air. It is still there and continues contributing to the greenhouse effect until we remove it from the atmosphere.

My kids convinced me that planting lots of trees is one way to do it.

So true. But, hey, we are only trying to blend in. Seriously, it looks pretty much the same from the other side. And you started it :-P

So true, too. At least in Java, it seems overly complicated. I have to deal with dates rarely, perhaps once a year. And everytime I do it I wonder why all the convenient methods of the Date class are deprecated. So (if you want to avoid deprecated methods) you have to convert it to a Calendar and back with a number of steps in between. What could have been a one-liner ends up being an ugly beast.

Hm.. but even if it is good, you run on CET. Do your colleagues sometimes complain that you are an hour late? :-)

At least here in Germany we did it the wrong way. The government subsidizes those who feed green electricity into the grid regardless of where they buy their stuff. And German manufacturers can hardly compete with Chinese (in terms of price). In other words, a large part of our subsidies go to China, too. :-(

Actually the pirates gained 9% WRT the latest election, because they hadn't participated back then.

Actually, the representative of the pirate party just admitted on TV that they don't have a stance on many points yet, so it doesn't take much not to take them too seriously. But that's not a big issue IMHO. They'll be able to focus on their core issues first, then mature over time. OTOH, from my POV they don't seem to differ much from the green party (grassroots democracy, individual freedom, intellectual-ish and young-ish voters, etc.) so I fear these two might tear each other apart over details, like so many movements (e.g. Peoples' Front of Judea vs. Judean People's Front) before.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to tomorrow's Talk Like A Pirate Day. Arrrr!

You're probably right. That and coffee.

And a lack of social contacts. Did I mention that I am a physicist?

I wish our earth would rotate slower. My personal day length is somewhere around 26 hours. I have experimentally verified it during long holidays (when I studied physics I used to have 3 months of summer holidays with enough funding and nothing to do), where my perceived day would rotate roughly one cycle in a fortnight.

When I talked to others I found that this is more os less the same for a lot of people. I wonder why we haven't managed to adapt to a 24 hour cycle. Or maybe we did adapt, but our no-longer-hunter-and-collector lifestyle makes us un-adapt.

You mean the part where BMW claims the light is "pleasant to the eye"? I'm sure they claim their xenon light is pleasant to the eye, too. The question is to whose eye.

Yeah right. May I remind you that we (ze Germans) didn't ban The Life of Brian. And we don't collectively faint if Janet Jackson flashes her nipple for a split second.

I guess our fear of violence (and the negative effect it may have on minors) is sufficiently balanced by the US's fear of sex and blasphemy.

BTW, as others mentioned, Doom wasn't entirely banned, only not sold to minors. I played it a lot back then. I especially liked the Simpsons wad.