You bring up a good point about much higher levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. But you have to keep in mind: all of these changes in the past are associated with mass extinctions. The faster the change happened, the more species died.
The change from Permian to Triassic period caused a 95% extinction. The next biggest extinction was the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction, also due to rapid climate change.
Seriously, if you want it to look different, just get windowblinds and you're done.
What could microsoft do better?
get functionality like windowblinds built-in and make it easy to use
incorporate ability to mount ftp drives
fix built-in defrag too to allow it to move page file so you can shrink partition to minimum size
get rid of the abysmal ribbon and change menus in office to allow typing (ie. type commands/keywords instead of browsing through menus/toolsbars)
how about improving built-in notepad to not suck ass? year 2014 and notepad still chokes while opening large files
same with ms paint, is this a joke? it hasn't changed since 1996! either improve it by adding modern features to it, or get rid of it.
get rid of IE intergrations. wasn't there a lawsuit about this
include a pdf reader that's not a full-screen piece of shit, get rid of fullscreen craps, this is a desktop os, not a phone/tablet/phablet.
how about an ability to run exes in sandboxed mode? ie. catch all file/registry access, report it, undo it.
no, instead they're adding "eye candy"...
Also survived the typhoon:
floating hypodermic needles & other man-made trash
plastic beach ball someone threw into the ocean a year ago
a message in a bottle
coconuts
They make it sound like it's a big deal, but the long story short: a floating metal tube designed to be in water survived being splashed with water. That is not an accomplishment. If there were people on this metal tube and they survived, that would have been an accomplishment.
In 2014 alone, Internet service providers have spent close to $19 million lobbying on net neutrality
Imagine how much more fiber optic cable you could have deployed for $19000000.. and that's just this year and we're just barely halfway through the year!
Internet is a public utility, and a monopoly. ISPs need to be regulated accordingly, end of story.
http://futurenewstoday.blogspot.com.au/2009/06/did-solar-flare-knock-air-france-447.html
The crash of Air France 447 was caused by pilot error, not a system failure. That news article is from 2009, solar flare was just a stupid speculation until they found the black box. The black box showed the pilots kept pulling the nose up causing a stall.
What if the electricity fails? What if the camera breaks? What if this, what if that? People had the same kind of very strong objections to fly-by-wire systems, and we've had planes for decades with no physical links between the controls in the cockpit and the control surfaces that move the plane. The number of accidents caused by failure of a fly-by-wire system? None. There are so many redundancies in these systems, it makes it very unlikely to fail.
Next... seeing outside isn't particularly important. Pilots don't really need to look out the window on these planes for flying. Especially when the plane is in fog or clouds, looking out the window can be actually confusing and disorienting and it's much safer to to look a the instruments. When coming in for a landing, the runway has a guidance system that guides the plane right onto the runway (ILS).
Plus, you can actually get a much better view of the outside using cameras and screens.
This being said, this is not an invention and it's not patent-worthy. As others mentioned, NCC-1701 had a viewscreen instead of a window... almost half a century ago.
To be effective, you don't have to convince "a government", you have to convince all major governments. And you have to convince them to do something that will cause living standards to fall for years to come.
1. Governments are run by people who do the bidding of the "kings". The government is nothing but a middle-man between the people and the kings. Government is a puppet that the kings rattle around to shift the blame away from themselves, aka "we're law abiding, rule following kings; we just happen to make the rules and the laws because we have the government in our back pocket". So replace "government" by what the government really stands for: the kings... and you have my original argument. The kings are better off with their $20 trillion bank account, and they're not going to sabotage themselves in order to make the world a better place for everyone at their own expense.
2. Using the $20 trillion worth of fossil fuel will cause living standards to fall for everyone for centuries to come. Not using the fossil fuels will cause living standards to fall a lot for the kings and their entourage but not much for anyone else. When you do the math, 7 billion people whose living standards fall for centuries vs. living standards falling a lot for a few thousand kings... not to mention if the standard of living of the kings goes down a bit it simply means they have a luxury yacht with a half dozen strippers, instead of a mega-luxury-yacht with dozens of strippers... but if the standard of living for the other 7 billion falls, it means half of them will starve to death.
You're right in the fact that there is no real dilemma... there is no dilemma because they have no conscience and they feel no empathy.
Suppose you had a bank account with $20,000,000,000,000 (20 trillion) in it. That's so much wealth that it can be considered infinite for all practical purposes. There is no monarchy, but with that much resources in your name, you are practically king for life, your children are king for life, your children's children are king for life.
Then one day some hippies tell you that you shouldn't withdraw your money from this bank because it will destroy the lives of billions of people. They're saying we need to invest in renewable energy so save ourselves. So you face a dillema:
A. Keep your infinite bank account, and be the king of a world where billions of people are doomed.
B. Give up your infinite bank account, and be a nobody in a world where everyone is much better off.
What do you choose? What do they choose? Keep in mind, most of those who have this infinite bank account are not the compassionate kind of people.
Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated. -- R. Drabek
