I do not disagree with your sentiment, I just perceive Obama's dilemma as being such that he will loose face whichever way he goes so I think he is going to pick whatever is most favorable to him according to the people he cares to impress.

Otherwise, who is going to pay him $2mil a speech or give his daughters a cushy job so his future is secure......It's like drawing a line in the sand and having Russia bail them out when it appears that not only was it crossed, but they were pissing all over your sand castle while doing it.

I'm reminded of an old asterix and obelix cartoon where in one of the scenes, asterix is in a roman tower and obelix outside and they try to go to each other pummeling the Romans along the way just to realize they switched places and have to do it again. Near the end, a roman soldier cries out, maybe if we are quiet, they won't see us or something like that.

Go back and read what I said again.

Ignoring those differences is probably the "stupidest most arrogant statement I have read in a long time".

Also, I do not really care about what you think is barbaric. We are not Europe and Europe is not us. We have different ways and different outcomes and this is by design.

Or it could be simply internet penetration.

According to the US census stats, it appears that 86% of individuals in Massachusetts live in household that have internet access while only 64% in Mississippi do. (according to the Table 1. Reported Internet Usage for Individuals 3 Years and Older, by Selected Characteristics: 2012)

I would be interested in finding how much this usage or penetration correlates to the speeds or if it could be correlated to scores also.

How does it feel to have an imbecile demonstrate you to be wrong on both of the points you tried to make?

I was wondering the same thing. A possible answer might be that if the limb isn't there long enough, the ability to send the neurons along the proper paths may be lost so capturing them closer to home might be a better solution. Or it could be because the implants are already installed for other purposes in the patients they are studying and getting the control process to work is more important at this stage than how it is eventually used. It could be that they plan on moving the control devices later and taking advantage of the others.

Something else I was thinking about, how long before something like this can control the entire body making it possible for dead people to be artificially resurrected and have a computer installed in the brain. sort of electric zombies or something. Perhaps this will end up with robots being mind controlled also- where an operator thinks about grasping an object in a hazardous area and the robot does so as naturally as a human could via a prosthetic. This might make dangerous situations like entering a burning building or a fukishima type plant disaster easier due to a lot of the controls being created for human interaction verses remote robotics.

I've written multiple detailed comments to other people about specific claims about the science. If you wish to interpret them as saying "the greenhouse effect does not exist" that is your business, but it is not quite what I said and not what I was thinking.

You didn't "educate me" about anything. Fourier's own writings make it clear that he initially believed De Saussure's apparatus warmed via trapping of radiation, which we know today to be false. It worked by preventing convective cooling... just like a real greenhouse does. No "trapping of radiation" was involved... which we KNOW from hundreds of years now of observation of real greenhouses. Yes, I'm saying Fourier (at the time he wrote those notes) was wrong.

He later postulated that gas in the sky could work via a similar mechanism, holding energy by trapping radiation. However, he correctly noted that the effect in the atmosphere would not be the same, because it includes convection. The problem with this idea is that the first effect -- the radiation trapping -- did not occur at all (we know this from real greenhouses).

The point of the particular comment which you linked to above was not that the greenhouse effect does not exist (that's a different discussion). The point was that the "physics" it was based on was an incorrect conjecture by Fourier about De Saussure's apparatus. The effect did not exist in De Saussure's apparatus. All of the temperature is accounted for by absorption by the blackened cork, and lack of convective cooling.

You then go on to state that if there were no radiation trapping, all the radiation would go straight off to space and the earth would be very cold. But if you really believe that to be true, I suggest you look up how long it takes lunar regolith (in no atmosphere) to cool entirely by radiation once it rotates out of sunlight. You're in for a very big surprise.

http://www.dispatch.com/conten...

I'm not sure Obama can politically afford to get too carried away with bombing ISIS. Whether it is true or not, there is plenty of talk that Obama allowed this to happen by not keeping troops in Iraq longer. He blames the Iraqi government for not updating the SOFA agreements but people have been claiming that Hillary (presumable under Obama's orders) kept increasing demands that couldn't be met by the Iraqi government. He then declared his campaign promise has been realized and ended the war on terror to boot.

So how does he go back and say the war on terror is not over, how does he come back and say we need to go back into Iraq after claiming the people foreseeing this were nutters, how does he do this without giving credibility to all those decrying our exist from the world or who said if we did not lead in Syria, something evil would fill the void. The problem is, he seems to believe that if we mind our own business, the world will not hate us, will not want to kill us, and situations like this will not exist.

Now I will admit that all that may not be 100% true, but it is the perception people are getting and it is the perception he seems to be afraid of when he has to acknowledge his foreign policy was a failure, that his plans for peace didn't work. This is what he is up with, he is either claimed to be wrong on everything and allow it to happen, or he has to admit he was wrong and do something about it that goes against what he seems to believe.

I dropped that comic because it does appear that he is more occupied playing golf than the problems in the world. But to be fair, if you can golf somewhat well, it is a relaxing and peaceful time in which you can actually think things through. This is probably why so much business gets done on the gold course.

This is completely irrelevant to my point, which was not about the total energy budget.

THE PURPOSE of models is to do forecasting. So far, no models can accurately project the behavior of ENSO. Now we have a proposed cycle that supposedly drives or at least overwhelms ENSO, but is equally unpredictable. At least so far.

If the model can't forecast not just ENSO, but a larger cycle that supposedly drives or overwhelms ENSO, then the models are that much LESS useful for forecasting.

Get it? I made no comment about energy either staying or leaving. Conservation of energy is not relevant to this point.

I'm sorry but where have you been these last few months?

Iraq has been asking the US to send in the troops for a while now. We have been ignoring them and playing games claiming that the Maliki government caused ISIS to happen and more or less forced him out of office before we would help. Now we are doing limited bombings and offering strategy meetings with about 1000 troops in the area supposedly to protect US personnel. We were going to go in and rescue some people on a mountain but I guess they were either killed or escaped by other means. We did drop food and water I think.

http://www.dispatch.com/conten...

What kind of fantasy world do you and GP live in?

In order for the free market to take care of it, there has to be a free marker. There isn't. It's effectively a monopoly.

And that's why OP is also just so much garbage. This isn't anything "new" here. It's the same old shit monopolies have always done, once they realized they were monopolies.

I'd think your, and GP's, comments would be funny if they weren't so dangerously wrong-headed. Blaming monopolistic behavior on free markets is like blaming ISIS on democracy.

The Universal Service Principal is hardly a common concept yet there is the capability of other countries to allow competition both at an infrastructure and access level. I think you will also find that there is absolutely no USP for internet access above an abysmally low level.

I'm not even sure how this is relevant. In other countries, they throw acid in the face of women who do not cover their face and execute gays. What do we learn from this? Other countries do things differently and some things may pass as appropriate but it doesn't mean it will here.

And no, I'm not comparing torturing women or killing gays to giving away the internet, I'm saying that their structures are different, their governments are different, so what they do doesn't always line up with ours.

More fundamentally though I do not understand why you feel there should be no competition at a municipal level. A township has no requirement, legally or morally, to support a different township through subsidisation. And that is exactly what you are arguing by saying the cash cows need to exist to fund other areas. If a local government feels that its population is being inadequately served then it actually HAS the moral imperative to fix that if it can. Now if it invests in infrastructure which it then operates itself or sells to a private entity and as a result improves the standards for its constituents it has done EXACTLY what it exists to do.

Wrong.. The federal government as well as the local government have given these companies monopolies specifically in order to support different townships. It is all regulated at a government level and these companies have published rates on file at their state public utilities commission.

Now, by fixing it, you are correct. It is the duty of the local governments to impose rules that fix the broken monopolies and force them to invest in new infrastructure is that is necessary. And when they do, there is usually a rider placed on the bills like when one city decides that all their utility lines must be moved under ground (which is becoming a common occurrence today). So the city, and/or townships (in my state, they are two different things) can and should fix the problems. They just don't need to have the government competing with an entity it already controls and taking the low hanging fruits and sticking those entities with the more expensive clients.

Imagine if you owned a business that sold gasoline. You have a cost you have to recover. Now imagine the city stepping in and underselling you and using tax payer funds in order to do so. But while the city is not subject to it's own taxes, you are and while the city doesn't have to jump through regulatory hoops, you do. So what would you think about the city all the sudden driving you out of business with tax payer funds?