PowerPoint - nothing else even comes close. As engineers we don't care about it, but there are just as many people who live and die by the PowerPoint presentation (literally in some cases, as the US military leadership is sadly all about the PPT these days).

SmartArt is freaking magic for some people. It's exactly the sort of automation that LaTeX would be great at, but presented visually, not as "yet another programming language for those geeks." Like VI or EMACS, PowerPoint will always be with us: it's that central to a culture.

Pardon me... do you see anywhere here where I claimed it was responsible for "all" the melting?

Attributing words to me that I didn't write is the only lie here. Why did you do that?

This. I am tired of people using technology just because, even if it is less efficient than doing it the old fashioned way. Texting is a great example of billions of hours wasted on conversations that could have been over and done in seconds otherwise. Metro interface is another example where a UI that is efficient on something with no better alternative input methods is forced on a platform that has much more preferable and efficient input methods.
At least we have to give companies credit for believing in their own technology. The AT&T store uses tablets to assist their customers. It would be much faster to do so on a desktop, but they are attempting to make people believe that the technology can be used for stuff like that so the people will buy it. And it CAN be used for purposes like that, just not very efficiently. I had to sit with a friend at one of these stores for about an hour while a guy attempted to perform a simple transaction (obtain a new SIM card) on the pad, and eventually he went to one of the desktops and 5 minutes later we were done.

What makes you think "Steve Goddard's" blog is "anti-science"? Because it doesn't conform to your world-view? That's name-calling, not an argument.

Goddard examines raw data records and compares against the "adjusted" data. This is what allowed him (and others) to show the massive amount of manipulation that is done to data that comes out of NCDC, and GISS in particular. GISS has been widely criticized for questionable manipulation of its data sets, and in fact not long ago it was found (by who? your "anti-science" Steve Goddard that NCDC was improperly "infilling" as much as 40% of its data in some cases from temperature stations that were offline or did not even exist.

Not only that, NCDC publicly admitted that infilling was a problem, that they had known about it (for some unspecified time), and that they "intended to fix it" at some unspecified time in the future. Nobody knows how long they had known about it or when they intend to fix it.

Obviously, nobody needs to "fix" something that is working properly.

Granted, Goddard got some things wrong in the beginning, but lately he's been getting a lot more right, as even GISS has admitted.

Further, your sources are not all "independent", since most of them incestuously rely on the same questionable data sets. It doesn't have to be "a conspiracy" or "lying", if they all work with the same questionable data. This is a valid point that people have been making for well over a decade.

So don't sit there and tell me what your vaunted sources say, until you address the data they are all using. There are KNOWN serious problems with it. Not just minor problems; big ones.

You suspect incorrectly. My "collection" consists of web links to official data, of course, it's not all right here on my hard drive. But I do have it. Don't expect me to post it all here on Slashdot. Regardless, your "suspicions" are irrelevant.

I see you didn't read my comment very well, AND have poor analysis skills. First, the conclusion is drawn from the second paper, which references the first. Second, the Argo array has been measuring the upper-level sea temperatures since 2005. THOSE temperatures are no surprise and have already been accounted for.

Deep ocean warming was the last gasp attempt to show that the CO2-based warming models were sound, by discovering the "missing heat" that they predict. There is none. Therefore the CO2-based warming models are unsound.

You can try to obfuscate this fact all you like, but it really doesn't get much simpler than that.

Seriously? Do you know absolutely nothing about the subject you are discussing, and pretending to refute me on?

Even the latest IPCC AR report, which is of course based largely on the questionable mentioned data above, admitted that warming in the last 15 years has been a paltry 0.075 degrees C. Read it yourself. 10 seconds on Google can find the actual report.

If there wasn't a real "pause", why would Pachauri say this in 2012? Doesn't IPCC represent what alarmists have been claiming are the majority of "mainstream scientists"?

Hadley Centre/CRU temperature records -- the ones that largely started this whole alarmism thing -- themselves now show no warming for over 17 years.

This continued claiming that the trends in temperature data are significantly upward, when the actual "trend" is far smaller than the error bars, must stop. It's garbage science.

The problem has never been "Islam", and wanting to eliminate terrorists has nothing to do with being anti-religion. The problem is, as has happen so often throughout history, a bunch of people who self-identify with a particular religion are being steered by leaders who claim that religion as a tool to get followers.

The problem must be solved within the leadership of Islam. The honest leaders of the religion need to become more vigorous about this - expel those inciting violence, denounce them as heretics, cause a schism, all the same shit that the Catholic church had to go through in centuries past.

National leaders who are not religious leaders need to do what they can to support that. When someone with religious authority denounces a terrorist religious leader as such, of course that terrorist group will try to kill that authority. The state can offer protection.

Completely separate form religion, we should be bombing the fuck out of assholes who start conquering, looting and raping their neighbors like it was the middle ages! America still has some strength, and there's a growing territory where women have become property, and are being raped daily. Where men re being executed out of hand for having the wrong religion. Where they're partying like it's 999. We can't let that cancer grow - humanity mustn't slide back into barbarism.

I don't know anyone who has done time. At least not more than a day or two in a city jail.

I think they picked the Czar they did for his marketing skills, not his medical skills.

You need a larger C: drive.

Windows doesn't have enough space for your temp directory for the code base you are working on.

Waterfall vs Agile. Waterfall, you get the spec, go and code. Agile you get lucky to code a couple of hours a day, the rest is ALL spec gathering, and then you stay up all night for the sprint right before you submit the code for user acceptance testing.

Yes it is sort of

It should be no different than any other evidence of a crime. If your car was stolen and used to rob a bank- or they just think it was-, similar circumstances would happen.

However, with the cash and asset forfieture it is a little backwards where the only evidence of any crime is the fact that it is in your posession and few times are there any charges filed at all.

But nontheless., there is a legal process no matter how horrid or abstract it may be. This does make it different than a law enforcement officer stealing identities and trying to impersonate people in order to ensnare people they otherwise would have no clue existed.

Oh.. and you do not have to convince me about how evil asset seizure is. I'm just saying at least there is a process.

They most certainly did vote to change the rules in the recent past. No one but you in this thread is denying that and we are actually discussing the fact it may have been limited to hudicial nominies and can just as easily be done again to seat a Surgeon General. My claim is the reason it has not happened is because even if they did, not enough democrats would vote for him to pass.

You mean except when they did it about a year ago to get around needing a super majority?

If it wasn't just done, your point would have more weight. But then i would point out that the position is not unmaned, there is an acting S.G. in place and has been ever since the post became vacant. Its just not a political shill doing the job right now.