I'm sorry, but what planet have you been living on for the last 20 years. Our supreme court (with special kudos for justices Kennedy and Scalia), just defined corporations as people with the first amendment rights to buy elections. Judges across the land have been giving large corporations anything they damn well want without the slightest concern to the damage done to society, and I for one am thrilled that this judge actually had;

1. A positive measurable IQ.
2. A sense of the urgency of this decision.
3. A grasp of the implications facing society and business if the wrong decision were made
4. And a basic idea just how bogus Oracle's claims were.

It almost gives me faith in the system when someone does something so right, and for the right reasons. Now someone needs to buy Oracle a speedo with an ice bag in the front... take down some of that pain and swelling...

A meter rise in sea level plus more Cat 4 and 5 storms will make a bunch of costal regions HIGHLY flood prone, whether they are now or not.

You sir are a wise man. Here in California, we used to have a 5 mile wide "No Build Corridor" near the San Andreas fault in San Bernadino. No problem, it was sparsely inhabited dessert. As more and more folks moved out to what they call the "Inland Empire", the size of that corridor kept shrinking, cuz the real estate folks were howling to the State Gubernment that the laws were taking the very bread out of their chillens mouths. California has a very powerful Real Estate lobby (which can tell by the fact that 98% of our state's estuaries have been turned into marinas, waste treatment plants, or landfill, all for and because of Real Estate agents.) Soon they were putting mobile homes within a 100 yards, because heck their mobile homes right, who cares if they move a little... their mobile. Today, you can travel out to San Bernadino and go to the eastern edge of town and if you look real close at the diagonal line running from top left to bottom right of the Google map, you can see the meeting of the Pacific and North American plates. You can also see the fault has been littered with housing developments. Because who should be denied the breathtaking adventure of seeing their home split down the middle and travel in 2 different directions at 60 mph!

People are stupid, and greedy, and they have a real poor memory. If you let'em they will stick their head right in the lion's mouth to see where the lamb went. That's why we pass laws to protect us from ourselves. Sadly who will protect us from the greedy buggers who buy the people who are supposed to protect us. Sigh!

Clearly the folks scoffing not only didn't read the article, but are using poor information. When scientists originally predicted a 59cm rise in sea level by end of century, they were surprised and dismayed to find that the "Actual Rise" was significantly greater than expected and then were forced to revise the prediction to a meter. This is still a very conservative prediction. There is significant probability that the rise will be greater, perhaps significantly. This is particularly significant because when you add that meter to the substantial increase of serious storm surge from more frequent category 4 and 5 hurricanes (another gift from climate change), you have a significant coastal region which is going to be impacted in a number of really unhappy ways. To not use the information in hand to make intelligent plans based on best available information is tantamount to religious fanaticism, whether the religion is Gawd base or more Ideology centered. The smart money is on folks building floating homes on the N.C. Coast. Happy sailing!

Unfortunately a lot of government contracts have all kinds of built in ways for vendors to bid low at the front and charge high at the back (particularly if a high level government official who somehow makes out is willing to run interference.) The Deputy Mayor says this was a good contract... perhaps there's a new McMansion in the Hamptons? Country Club Membership? Pools, Tennis Courts? Yacht? Heck, that wasn't a good contract... that was a great contract!!!

This is essentially the only way to run this experiment, if you run all the cores at this speed, fusion is initiated, a black hole forms and time runs backwards!

It was North Koreans trying to get information for their missile program!!!

You can't speak to NASA until you make it through their airspace... welcome to vertical bureaucracy!

Angry man screams into cell phone standing near a small dock "Dammit I said ORE Dog not OAR Dog!!!"

Sorry but you NAV was made in Thailand... its a He/She!

Of equal relevance, we have spent endless hours here cheering the creation of a $25 laptop in India and the Khan Academy in the Silicon Valley in the hopes of providing a future of enlightenment and self determination for societies steeping in ignorance and superstition. Here is the need, hand out, eye wide open. Perhaps this is the time and and place for people to say to those who would attack innocent girls for improving themselves, This is unacceptable behavior.

Clearly you understand neither carbon nor ocean salinity. Human beings have in fact decreased the overall salinity of the ocean and raised the sea level as well as dramatically increased the CO2 levels in the ocean as carbonic acid. We can measure those things. CO2 occurs naturally in the atmosphere. If by human enterprise and the act of burning materials with carbon in them, you dramatically increase the CO2 in the atmosphere, you have polluted the atmosphere by definition. When human activities produce byproducts that impact the normal function of an environmental process or ecology, that is called pollutions. Even if the stuff you're polluting with may have value in say Scotland becoming a wine growing region. It's going to promote wildfires in say someplace like Minnesota and other places that aren't typically noted for wildfire, and worse promote the conversion of global rainforests into desserts. I can take perfectly good clean water. Put it where it will cause an environmental disaster, lets say in some fragile but vital dessert habitat. I've now made that habitat great for old men in golf shoes and lounge singers, but I've destroyed the natural habitat that was already there, and that could be called pollution. It depends on who wins, who loses, and who's getting paid. When Los Angeles sucked the Owen's Valley dry in the early 1900s. L.A. would say they were building a dream. The farmers in the Owens Valley who were wiped off the map would describe it as a nightmare.

Using you salt example, If I dump a billion tons of salt into the San Fransisco bay, the way California agriculture interests did when they tried to flush the salt out of the central valley from years of indiscriminate irrigation, then salt would become a pollutant. By the way, it had tragic consequences killing millions of birds and other local animals as well as ruining a number of estuaries along the Sacramento Delta, essential for fish reproduction. That pollution had profound economic and environmental impact. We addressed that by improving irrigation techniques and preventing the dumping of contaminated salt water into our lakes and waterways.

We need to manage CO2 in exactly the same way (and yes, that includes removing it from industrial exhausts.) The good news, is that a lot of bright folks see industrial exhaust as a gold mine for the production of biofuels. See, cloud has silver lining... just bring adequate technology to the party.

See that's the problem of if I can't see it, its not happening. Or worse, if I don't understand it, its not a problem. There are a million things that depend on precise balance and happen in infinitesimal quantities. NO2 happens in the junctions of your synapses in mind numbingly small quantities and lasts as NO2 for only nanoseconds. However, without that happening you cease to function. 1 pound of botulina toxic properly distributed is enough to kill the entire human population several times. You haven't the foggiest clue which species or processes are critical to the continued function of our ecosphere, how can you begin to measure what is or isn't significant without understanding that living things have indirect and profound impacts and implications.

Our planet functions on virtually countless feedback cycles, so when something over here shifts another system over there picks up the slack and tends to recenter the system. Increase the heat, more clouds and earth reflects more sunlight. Up to a point. Once you exceed the normal capacity for the "Global System" to absorb more energy/ CO2/ heavy metals/ plastic... whatever, then old systems breakdown and subtle but significant shifts begin to make themselves evident as fundamental perturbations in the existing system.

The change in carbonate vs carbonic acid in the ocean is telling (and making life for carbonaceous shelled sea life growingly more difficult.) The loss of glaciers and polar marine ice while possibly enhancing navigation, is already having significant impact both in rising sea levels and changes in ocean salinity. In fact a recent report suggests that as much as 40% of the increased sea level and reduced salinity is directly attributable to human enterprises over the last 2 centuries.

CO2 is in fact toxic, but not in the quantities one is likely to see on an earth that isn't in catastrophic environmental meltdown. I don't see such a meltdown happening in my lifetime of that of my grand children's. However there is a potential avalanche of greenhouse gases soon coming where the warming caused by CO2 triggers a sudden explosion of methane from decaying permafrost in the high latitudes and potential release of massive methane ice seeps in the ocean. Its all tied together. Its a little like someone saying I need some wire while driving a truck, and having your passenger go under the dashboard and cut you some. You might get away with that for a little while, but sooner or later something really nasty will happen. Why would anyone, keep cutting. Its silly. There's no need. The only folks who would truly suffer are the incredibly rich executives at companies that sell us our fossil fuel fix (and by the way the warnings of jobs are coming from the folks who I would suggest are far more worried about their golden parachutes and fat campaign contributions.) Let's simply make the move to saner energy sources, by all means nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, add OTECs, Tidal hydro generation, new hydrogen technologies. Nobody can tell me that it would be more difficult to build a sustainable energy economy than to send a man to the moon 1960. We actually have sufficient technology to resolve our own problem today, all we lack is the leadership and will to implement it.

I'd outlaw sexual intercourse for Rick Santorum, until he stops trying to legislate everyone else's sexual practices.

Hey Beavis... he said Wang... Huh,huh,huh,huhuhuhuh.