GOES-R's mission logo really need the StayPuft Marshmallow Man in it....

Umm. I get where you're coming from, but then by the same measure, he did in fact add 1 country to that list and is now seriously looking at adding another....

No. My contention is that it should be viewed as an enormously wealthy, enormously powerful entity that impacts our lives in an increasingly dramatic fashion.

The US government is the most powerful organization ever to exist on the planet.

My point is more that this very organization shouldn't and in reality is not very good at being an true arbiter of "fairness".

Love your analogy.

It too bad our vicious dog that protects is is off the leash and has bred an entire pack and now has us backed into a corner....

If the government really gave a shit about "fair share" for taxes, then they'd charge a flat rate percentage for everyone.

Instead they set up a Byzantine network of policies, tax breaks, and incentives and are shocked, shocked when people and companies actually use them or even modify their behavior to get around them.

I'm getting pretty sick of our government complaining about how poor it is and how everything would be better if us taxpayers, Apple included, would just give them a "fair share" of our money.

If you look at the balance sheet of the US, the money it takes in in taxes makes it by a good margin the richest entity in the entire world. To here members of our government continually bemoaning how the richest people and companies "owe" it more makes me sick. The richest person has two orders of magnitude less net worth than what the government makes in taxes each year. The richest companies are a full order of magnitude smaller in full valuation than the governments annual take.

Our goverment is poor (in debt) only because it sees fit to spend way more than the truly massive amount of money it takes in an effort to exert its power to make us (the citizens, and the world at large) act in the way it wants us too. Enforcing a nanny state and a global Pax Americana is a very expensive undertaking.....

Nothing. In fact if the previous poster had been paying attention that already happened in 2008.

No government devised by man will ever bring equal prosperity to all of its citizens. The most they can do is bring equal misery. We've seen quite a few that managed that.

Yet your guy has a list of names of people he want to kill with drones, often times in countries we are not at war with. Sometimes they're American citizens.

I agree that Bush did bad things and ratcheted back our freedoms. But Obama just got in there and EXPANDED the ratcheting back of more of our freedoms. Except you just cheer him on because he's your guy.

You have a blind hatred of Bush and a blind love of Obama. Your blind to the continual increase of the governments power over us because you've been duped into thinking this is a sporting event with two opposing teams.

Blind assholes like you and like those on the other "side" are costing us our liberty.

Fuck you.

No, what it proves is that climate forcing due to CO2 is likely non-linear in impact. It also may indicate negative feedback loops responding to the changes. Also, since we're not measuring a closed system there are a huge number of possible things causing the current climate response.

This shit is really really really complicated. About the only thing I'm certain of is that all our models for climate so far are not good enough.

Imagine a metal cymbal shaped as a sphere with no holes in it floating free in the air. Now hit that cymbal with a mallet that is longer than the diameter than the cymbal. But hit the cymbal on the inside of the sphere. Oh and the interior of the sphere is a vacuum.

There you go, there are a few impossible geometries (and other things) in that scenario.

Bullshit. One car can't leave a train and then proceed to a different location from the other cars, while the rest of the cars keep moving along.

This is an enormous difference.

Everyone who continually spouts on about mass transit always takes the first step of discounting how much flexibility and independence matter in transit.

With this type of breakthrough we can get the benefits of the train (energy savings earned from the streamlining of the group of cars' movement), plus still retain flexibility (cars can leave the "train" dynamically).

Landsat pixels are 30m. It is a moderate resolution satellite, not a high res one.

Its a tradeoff, you get better time coverage and a larger viewing area with larger pixels, you get worse coverage and a smaller image with smaller pixels but better detail.

Also other factors affect coverage, which in the best case is once every 16 days. So a few cloudy days or gaps in the data and the pixels won't change very fast.

Yeah, youtube has nothing that anyone wants to watch. They ought to just shut it down already, its just a wasteland with no viable content at all.....

I would be willing to be that if the BB gun happened at a school, the zero tolerance policies would have pushed the prosecution of that to 11 as well.

In cases like this the school systems actively encourage overreaction by other authorities to back up their assertions about why these policies are right and necessary.

Your last line is spot on.

Zero tolerance policies are for zero brained educators.

Yes! Then you can look even more nerdy using them.