Ok well lets look at periods of gross warming in the past and see what happened.
If you look at the numbers of eco systems and carbonate platform types (james 1983) then these numbers increase hugely and peek at the warmest periods major transgression, while they collapse in the interveaning cool phases, where of course you have major regressions.

So yeah it is more complicated but not necessarily in the way you think

Meh make that we are already at 6 billion ma bad

Totally agree it is the lack of long term view that is the problem. It's only when you have enough life experiance that you can see that the world is not black and white. The problem is that people die/retire too young and the new folk merrily repeat the errors of the past.

Going back to comments in other part of the thread about population; I would argue that population is being held up as some sort of boogie man, the "Do this and the Boogie man will get you" line is just stupid.

We are already at six million, if we just have business as usual we will all most certainly overpopulate. So regardless of what we do about lifespan "at some point in time" we will have to enact something that holds the population in check or actually decreases it. How big a number we elect for is up for grabs. But at some point it has to stop.

In the future: We can carry on with our fixed population size, imposed via whatever methods are "acceptable" and we will have options:
1.Everyone can live short lives and breed.
2.Everyone can have very long lives with limited breeding (remember natural attrition)
3.Some mixture of 1 and 2 i.e. half living long lives and half breeding.

I would suggest options 2 and 3 would give us the best options for maintaining peace and advancing in all areas of our lives.

If people don't know how to fill their time and don't want to live long that is not a problem for society, provided it has not invested too much in them.

Your comment reminds me of those leveled at the japaneses in the 70's and 80's.

Who says the Chinese planes will be cheaper?

They may be better engineered more fuel efficient more economical to service and run.

Take a good look at what just happened in the high speed train arena to see how quickly they can turn a technology around.

It worries me that folk in the west so seriously underestimate developing countires. Most worrying is the misplaced belief that we will somehow be the ones producing all the IP.

We have set up our economies to have such strong and far reaching IP protections to that we will be well and truely sharfted when the IP is owned and developed overseas and enforced here.

You seem to be making a few assumptions there about rate of growth and rate of sea level rise there.

Carbonate sedimentation don't work like clastic sedimentation

http://sepmstrata.org/seqstratCarbHierarchies.html

So leave the carbonates alone stop the destructive fishing which may be breaking them up and you give the island a chance. Main risk to carbonates is to great an influx of sediment muddying the waters.

I sit at work then used to come home and sit, it sucked, I was beginning to feel crap.. So built a treadmill workstation at home...I wish I had done this years ago.

Bought a second hand tread mill from ebay, used a lifefitness st55 put a shelf behind it to hold the PC and monitors and a simple shelf across the handles for keyboard.

Typing gets a bit jittery over 5kph on a 4% incline but below that its fine. You get a reasonable amount of exercise or even a good workout and still do all the stuff you would have otherwise done sitting down.

Really if you have been thinking about doing this just do it...

Now I just have to persuade them to let me have one at work.

The wind blows ........Tumbleweed rolls by...........guess the world will never find out the secret of his magical energy source.

Do you think maybe he was paid off by big oil?

Then you are welcome to deploy this magical technology. It is a free comercial environment. There are no end of large investors more than willing to chuck unimaginable sums of money into such a technology. If you feel that you can do this then lets see the numbers...... or just stop whining about it and do it yourself, really no one is stopping you.

The oil industry is there because of the econmonics of energy, historiaclly it has just not made sense to do anything else. There will come the day when we can replace a good part of our dependance but we are not there yet. However like I said if you believe you can do it, then do it yourself, it probably the most important thing you could do with your life and far preferable to us rather than eco-whining on slashdot

What I haven't seen above is a suggestion for sources of valuable research areas.

I would check out innocentive.com to see if there is anything there which is in your field of interest.

In all seriousness,

How do you know your dog doesn't need an invisible sky fairy. For all we know animals may have religious beliefs

You have to take into account there is a huge difference between small indi companies and larger game developers. If you have invested a lot of money up front to make your game. You need to recoup that as quickly as possible (time value of money). You also need to be certain that you have made enough noise compared to all the competing products out there. Your investors will not be happy if you left this very important area to chance. Advertising, PR etc are all hugely expensive, you have to be sure your product will make the biggest splash.

This process costs money. Sure you can do without it but lets face it many games are a bit lame, If there games are launched they will probably only make a fraction of what it would have made with a publisher pushing it for you simply becuse the whole viral thing would not work for you

Did this remind anyone else of the star trek Crystalline entity?

Reading through the comments here I would suggest the following thought experiment.

1.Take an adult stem cell,
2.Regress it to an embryonic state
3.Profit

Or

3.Allow it to differentiate into an egg precursor cell (not sure how this would happen but it must happen because all the eggs in a womanâ(TM)s ovaries come from the same single ball of stem cells)
4.Nurture it into an egg cell
5.Fertilise it
.
7. Profit

So adult stem cells - embryonic stem cells ⦠whatever!