For those of you just tuning in, "rUK" is a term scots use to denote the "rest of the UK" aka England and Wales.

Google isn't helpful with this one, you have to ask someone lol

It makes sense though that the nutjobs feel emboldened. As Snowden revealed, the government really is watching. And is Obama going to do anything about it? Hahahahaha. no. His perfectionist personality is currently disengaged from anything resembling a mess.

You're hoping for some future technology to save us all--a deus ex machina.

Is it incorrect to have hope for the future when it comes to technology? If you told someone from 1959 that in 10 years we would have our human deus ex machina moment all the way to the moon, and then go walk around on it...the response would probably be incredulous. But after so much win happening all around us every day, isn't a bit premature to suggest that we can't collectively come up with a solution by simply giving the science or the market time to cook up something more effective than an edict from above could provide?

"Big Oil" works out pretty well for everyone right now. Eventually we'll be complaining about "Big Algae", I'm certain.

Predicting the weather and predicting the climate are too very different things.

Whoosh. I know you're educated about that specific point, but my point with my flawed comparison is that half-baked logically-flawed ideas will become serious obstacles when you present an idea that suggests you might have to do anything resembling austerity. Like cutting meat out of your diet, for example, which if you suggest it most people will give you a pretty forceful and vehement rejection outright. Facts are out of scope at that point.

Honest answer from a denier. I've found myself jumping on the climate change skeptic bandwagon, and there are a bunch of different reasons for that, none of them having to do with the actual hard data or the models, or any of the details of the science, except for some specific tidbits that enable my skepticism. (For example, most of the models I've looked at predict milder summers and warmer winters in my particular area, and flooding in areas, not nearby, where people I don't like currently habitate)

People (myself included) don't want to hear it for the same reason that people get huffy when you mention that whole food veganism is bar none the best diet to avoid cancer and heart disease. They'll just point out the few that stil get cancer, and still get heart disease. Or smokers when you point out the cancer risks...plenty of smokers don't have a problem and live to healthy old age.

But, you CAN find a positive. If you point out that the hottie jogging down the street is always a non-smoker, and always either a vegan or a Paleo with higher than average vegetable intake, no one can really argue with that one, and if you ask one of them they'll confirm that observation every time.

When the climate change topic comes up, my brain automatically translates that the punitive corrective measures bandied about over the years...Carbon Tax, Environmental Regulation, and all the other proposed measures that wind up trading modest pollution levels for wideband economic austerity.

I know it is frustrating when you're trying to get people to stop polluting and people want to turn a blind eye to it and keep going about their business. Yet, basing your argument on science models that can predict the climate 10 years into the future yet somehow can't predict the climate tomorrow...yeah, if there are ANY holes whatsoever in your argument when you're preaching austerity, everyone is going to focus on the holes in the argument, no matter how small or short-sighted.

I think you'll find less resistance from me or anybody else if you focus on things that elicit a positive image...like pushing increased research funds for cleaner burning engines, real fuel production alternatives like algae. Things that benefit everyone, AND reduce environmental impact. But by default I'm going to automatically assume your motive is to argue for higher taxes and economic austerity, and of course I'll get turned off pretty quick.

You're certainly entitled to your point of view, but don't try to tell me what I believe.

I think of the feminist concept as just a tool, in the toolbox of the modern miserable, sex-obsessed, bossy, and manipulative woman. The people who use that tool come off as power hungry and getting off on control. You could call that viewpoint insecure, or you could call it being annoyed by people who look at life through terms of how much power they have and what is holding them back from getting more, and don't have much else to talk about. To each their own.

You're comparing apples and oranges as far as the technical details. I'm saying Win 3.x let me continue when it saw problems, and NT could also do that.

I'd like to have the *option* to continue to save my work even if there was a chance of data corruption. For example, take the common NT blue screen IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. That fact that my buggy network driver tried to access paged memory in the wrong sequence is miles away from catastrophic. And it certainly doesn't take priority over something I've been working on for hours. IRQ 0 is me, motherfuckers!

Rather, it is capable of recovering, it just won't bother.

At least Windows 3.x would let you TRY to continue. Half the time the system would be stable enough to save work. NT-based windows? Hah. Sorry. Baleeted. That project you were working on all day and forgot to save? Yep, we at Microsoft are just in the way. its all still there, good luck keeping the RAM powered while you transfer it to a breakout board. Oh, and good luck finding your data, we made sure to fragment the hell out it, because a scrambling allocator is obviously better than actual security.

hold down these three buttons and cycle power

Those kind of features are normally customer request, unfortunately. Nothing can be done.

the terribly bad design we typically see in embedded

Most people just don't have the raw mental horsepower to write low-level or OS-level code and have it work GOOD.

It takes god-like powers, a will of steel, a precient intuition, a mind like a steel trap for details, a dashing appearance, the ability to leap over tall buildings in a single bound, and be very well endowed to be able to pull it off. It isn't something you can throw at a kid fresh out of college and zero experience for cheap without running into problems because it takes a few years of practice to evolve into a diety with phenominal cosmic powers.

I'm pretty sure a rich white guy posted this.

You realise that the ancient Greeks knew the Earth is round, right?

Aww, he's trying to argue. Look at him use his words! Such a good boy.

Your pie in the face comparison is invalid. It suggests disaster has already struck. The only disaster that has ever struck flies in the face of what you and other scientific midgets who can't read a simple spreadsheet detailing results of core samples...the next ice age. It is coming. Bring on more carbon.

Millions of people repeating the experiments of others to put a bullet point in the education section on a CV may or may not mean anything. How many lives have been improved by this experiment? Where is the utility? Just follow the money, and you'll find it...

What meme? That was entirely spontaneous, honestly, grammatical errors and all. I'm sure you realize though that once you start treating things as indisputable facts you have left the realm of science.

Gravity, no matter how many times you drop your beer bottle, no matter how many times you have watched the same consistent yet mysterious universal force bring it shattering end, is just a theory. I don't care if every expert and every crawling worm on this planet believes the same exact thing in the same exact way, it could still be wrong. Is the earth still flat?

Climate science is not physics. It is in its infancy and I believe it deserves a healthy dose of skepticism, *especially* when people get creepily religious about it. If predicting the future were as simple as putting 1 mcg of Freon-12 in a a sealed test tube of 500 mL 50% O3 and declaring that 25-50 years from now that is what happens to the entire planet, then I would expect the most powerful cluster of supercomputers on the planet to be able to predict if is going to rain next weekend better than the farmer's almanac.

There is zero demonstrable practical output or progress in terms of human progress or human suffering to show for all the work and money that has gone into this field over the last 30 years, and anyone who puts any stock in it is no better informed than the creationist who believes that the world is 6,000 years old, because all of the world's leading bible scientists sat on their hemorrhoids and confirmed the same values while trying to infer the entire history and trajectory of the universe using a single pre-scientific-method cultural document transcribed from one culture's oral tradition, that described some details of some other culture's cultural events.

Even so, 20 years ago, I had one computer, one monitor, and one TV, and each of those was expected to last 4 to infinity years. Today? 3 TVs, 4 laptops, two desktops, a tablet, a netbook, and 6 monitors, and I'm periodically replacing it all about every 2-4 years. The expanded market just increases your upgrade load. Everyone I know has a desktop, a laptop, and a tablet (even if the desktop is only used once a year for taxes). I only see more and more variety of these things at the electronics store. I'm pretty certain the bitching you hear about a shrinking desktop market has everything to do with more companies competing and lowering costs, than number of units actually sold. I'm still buying desktop computers at a rate of once every two years, and I have been since at least 2004.

I can think of some more skeptical reasons.

Or the Ozone layer is perfectly fine now, and repairing itself, albeit slowly, and said scientists currently have their hand out and need to come up with an excuse to fill it.

Or, the "Ozone Hole" was a natural occurrence all along, and had nothing to do with CFCs, because CFCs are so flipping heavy whoever construed all of it isn't on the ocean floor is a dunce...etc