It's not just multi-nationals. I do it as well, for my personal consulting. HK is a great, low-tax/no-tax jurisdiction as well, and just $1500 can get you set up there.

NOW we know why Apple always has problems with daylight savings time and leap years...

The House is the one that creates the budget - not the Senate. The Senate can amend and send back - but that would mean taking the bill up in the first place, which is something that Senator Reid refuses to even allow...

And? The Metro UI app is as simple as the Windows 7 app to add a user. It's the same thing - just with different looks...

I guess you're not aware of how a budget works... The House proposes, the Senate votes/approves, the President signs. Two of those three entities are in the hands of the Democrats - and absent a budget, the previous allocations (with pre-determined increases for inflation and the like) stay in effect. Hard to change the budget when neither the Senate nor the President want to pass a budget...

Right click on the "Windows" logo in the lower left corner. Select Control Panel. You get exactly the same control panel as you had in Windows 7 - and it's trivial to create users, add/remove programs, change hardware settings, etc. Try it - it's pretty darn simple!

As far as starting stuff up, I have several of my more oft-used programs pinned to my taskbar, and several links on the desktop. Compilers, CAD packages, MATLAB, all pretty easy to get to, and simple to run. Seriously, there is VERY little difference between the Windows 8 desktop and Windows 7 desktop. You do not need to use the Metro UI if you don't want; I rarely use it (other than the quickly access little-used programs, a couple times a week).

Satellites are also ground truthed via independent radiosonde data collected throughout the air column.

Big ocean upwellings/sinks; El Nino/La Nina are the opposite peaks of an oscillation in the Pacific ocean. Why would we expect only one peak to cause a climate disruption?

I don't really see any difference between the Windows 8 desktop and the Windows 7 desktop - other than the Start button. Do you mean the OPTIONAL Windows Metro UI? No need to ever use that, you know...

Sure... Here's an article about the constant "adjustments" to HadCRUT that cause it to constantly lower past temperatures, and increase current temperatures. Additionally, HadCRUT is based on 5+ degree latitude/longitude "cells" that are extremely coarse, and use just 1300 points worldwide for all land mass... And none for much of the oceans (the overwhelming number of measurements are limited to established shipping lanes). Why wouldn't a satellite with full-world coverage be more accurate and higher resolution?

No, they're not ignorable - they are, in fact, correlated with big El Nino/La Nina events. For example, 1997/1998. That hints that it's driven mainly by natural cycles, and that in-between - those flat areas - when CO2 is steadily increasing, we see basically static temperatures. If CO2 was the primary driver, then wouldn't you expect to see temperature trends that roughly mimic the increase in CO2?

But the years in-between. If you had a constant increase in heat from constant increase in CO2, we'd see atmospheric temperatures increasing regardless of EN/LN effects; those would still cause spikes, but we'd still see a continual trend. From WoodForTrees, looking at the raw data, we don't see it. It's flat - or slightly declining - between each of the large EN/LN events. The atmosphere apparently doesn't heat up until we have such an event.

So then man can't do much - it's nature pulling or pushing heat in/out of the system... Because when we try hard (like now with increasing CO2) we don't see any increase in temperatures. But when nature burps (a big El Nino) we see a spike. I'd say we're driven primarily by nature, not man...

And a slight drop since 1997. If you look at RSS, it was essentially flat from 1979 to 1996, then the big 1998 spike happened, then flat since then. It's not really an increasing trend, but a flat/stable with a single big step function that happened in 1998. If it was driven by man, we'd expect to see a relatively consistent, ongoing rise, wouldn't we? Rather than two basically flat/declining periods with one big step function year between...