I'm not going to presuppose what Exxon knows or thinks -- but this is called hedging your bets. Aside from maybe being pathological, it's completely rational to fund both a "debunk global warming" campaign and a "deal with global warming" program, especially if the latter stands to earn you money. (Hell, they're just companies. They don't really care if in the future they can't sell oil, as long as by then they have a bigger revenue stream.)

There's no need to qualify that with "geological". It's absurdly hard to get an experiment to give you "pure", accurate results. Real world data is an exercise in pain.

any third party means anyone

so the cool diablo 3 background is not a piece of art?

drawings, paintings, sculptures are more present in your daily life, than you think. even if they are painted for promotion, they do have to be painted or be drawn - and get paid for.

also, painting with a digital stick to draw a digital image compared to an oilpainting is only different, because digital sticks are still new.

you are right about your differentiation between investor and sponsor, however it is not true, that paintings, sculptures are not made for money, as it is not true, that games/video/music is made for money only.

A while back I tried to start a trend by tagging such stories with "pimpmyblog", but it never really caught on.

I wrote this here years ago, but it bears repeating: Libertarianism is the carrying out of fascism by other means. The one thing it precisely does not guarantee is liberty.

Ah, but those ten seconds of pure unadulterated anarcho-capitalism, before someone with power and money realizes that no rules means they get to make the rules, would be fucking sweet. =)

Legislation, yes, but not this kind of legislation. If I buy, for example, a fridge or a washing machine in the EU, there will be a sticker like this one on the front telling me how energy efficient it is. This tells me how much energy it uses in one year, and I can multiply this by my energy cost per kWh and know how much it will cost me to operate annually. I can then do the same thing with the fridge next to it and see if it's worth buying a slightly cheaper one, and if I buy the more expensive one how long it will take to recoup the price difference. Most electrical goods come with a similar sticker now. No products needed to be banned, you just make consumers aware of the total cost ownership, and the market sorts it out. It's now difficult to find anything new with a poor energy rating because people just don't buy them.

Maybe I'm not giving the general public enough credit, but I don't think any solution that requires people to do math in their heads is going to work. On top of that, for most people, money you have to spend over the next 5-10 years is not the same as money you have to spend at purchase time, even though it should be.

Glad i don't live there. ( and hope their stupidity doesn't spread ).

The economics of this situation is more complicated than "costs more money = bad." People don't take energy efficiency into account when they make a big purchase like this. That means it's in the best interest of the manufacturer to save 5 bucks on manufacturing costs, even it means an extra $100 in electricity bills for the consumer. Legislation is the only really effective way to balance out the costs in a case like this, unless you can figure out how to make people pay for the electricity up front.

I'm pretty sure this would be a huge blow to the adult website industry. How many people would willingly visit those sites if they knew their name and identification was being taken down every time? It wouldn't eliminate every visitor, obviously, since a lot of people pay for those things with credit cards, but it would be enough to cause some serious damage.

Just because it wasn't available in the US doesn't make it prior art. Prior art has no such restrictions.

Yes it does. 35 USC 102(b) refers to inventions in use or offered for sale in the US only. You can maybe get around that if the owner's manual or service manual was available to the public and addressed the relevant features, since publications don't have that restriction; but as for the car itself, only domestic availability counts.

They don't? Since when?

A PS3 is effectively useless when it isn't up to date with latest greatest firmware. You are not allowed to sign in on the PS3 network without latest firmware, that means no online games, no software updates, no buying new games from the online store etc.

Sony fucked up, they have to clean up their mess.

Or, more accurately in this case, you buy it, we break it.

Probably the same reason they used to charge *YOU* ridiculously high prices for textbooks that they forced you to use, when other cheaper/better alternatives were available. That's what universities do.

I thought it said genetic mutation for less sheep. That could cause problems in alabama...

You've obviously never been to Alabama. Who needs sheep when you have cousins and sisters?

>The idea that technological advance is as inevitable as a law of nature is a fallacy. It usually relies on us getting lucky because somewhere an enabling technology or knowledge was discovered. [...] American Indians never discovered a wheel, by the way.

Actually, the Aztecs *did* invent the wheel. It's just that they only used it for toys. Why? No horses. Go read Guns, Germs, and Steel. Technological advances do rely on *somebody* *somewhere* getting lucky, as well as a social/economic/technological system that can exploit it. With as large as the world is now, that might not be much of a problem. There is a lot of room for new memetic mutations, and we have a very complex ecosystem where new advances can take root.

>Moore's Law is already at its limit. The next step is two-prong: parallelism and hybrid (analog-digital) chips.

Not quite. Moore's Law is about number of transistors per area, not clock speed. I realize I'm slightly out of touch with computer technology, but last I checked, Moore's Law is still holding, even though clock speeds have topped out. Hence the drive towards parallelism.