To which measurements are you referring? Ground station measurements? Satellite measurements? Tree ring measurements? Other proxies?

Because none of those seem to agree on what's exactly happening with the global temperature. By some measurements, it hasn't risen at all in over a decade.

(and yes, they point to at least some, varying amount of warming that's occurred in the past century, but as the climate is never stationary, that's not necessarily something to worry about)

I'm not against data (though in the case of climate science, much of said data lacks accuracy, precision, or both), I merely question the methodology used in most cases, the selective use of data (specifically, ignoring data which disagrees with the apparently pre-arrived at conclusion), and the conclusions reached when poor data and poorer methods were used.

Your use of the word "denialists" seems to indicate you have a strongly-held belief, which makes reasonable argument impossible. Thus, we cannot explore tree ring data and atmospheric data which contradict ground station data, nor can we discuss ice core data, which is wholly lacking in the requisite precision to compare year-over-year, decade-over-decade, or even century-over-century values for either temperature or atmospheric composition. We cannot rationally debate the varying degrees of inaccuracy introduced into ground station data prior to the wide-scale deployment of computerized, standardized measurement. There are a whole host of perfectly valid issues with current data collection, methodologies, modeling techniques, and other aspects of climatology that become off limits the moment it becomes a topic of belief rather than a topic of rational discussion and debate.

I'm neither a religious zealot nor an oil company shill. I'm a scientifically minded, well informed individual whose only belief is that good science leads to truth. That I take issue with various aspects of modern climatology should not lead anyone to the conclusion that I'm the one who's somehow closed to a given thinking. Rather, it should lead one to consider whether those issues are valid and whether the popular way of thinking is actually based on good science. I'm of the opinion that much of the current work in climatology is based on a house of cards. I also recognize that poor data and poor methods sometimes still wind up leading to some truth. As such, I neither support nor reject the popular thinking on climate change as it relates to human beings' effects thereon. I do most certainly reject the idea that any of this is conclusive or that it's based on good science.

It isn't, and that doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong, either.

That said, I think most environmentalists are making the wrong argument. Rather than trying to convince the world that driving a car is destroying the planet, focus on the obvious, visible, irrefutable evidence we have of local environmental damage caused by human beings. Find me one AGW skeptic who doesn't think coal slurry and smog are real threats to the local environment and the humans who inhabit it. Find me one single AGW skeptic who doesn't think that fossil fuels are a limited resource which is becoming increasingly expensive and difficult to extract. There are plenty of angles to approach this where nearly everyone will agree, allowing progress to be made.

What I've found, however, is that many who hold firm belief in AGW demand all others also believe. This strikes me as religious zealotry; not evidence of good science. I see some (yet far less) of this from supporters of the Theory of Evolution (of which I am one). However, far more often, for supporters of the ToE, there's a genuine attempt to discuss specific complaints or questions. There's also plenty of specific, reproducible scientific evidence they're able to cite. This all seems quite absent anytime someone questions AGW dogma which leads me to think that perhaps there's less confidence in the science behind AGW than there is confidence in the groupthink of its non-scientist supporters.

How many of those Apple portables are running WIndows via bootcamp?

You're limiting it to homicides just like everyone else who's anti-gun.

What you're essentially saying is that someone who's robbed, raped, and damn near killed (but not quite) should be content with the fact that although they had no legal means of effectively defending themselves, at least their survival is keeping the homicide stats looking nice.

People who think guns are terrible like to point out the UK (which all but bans its citizens from owning firearms) has a much lower rate of gun deaths each year. First of all, limiting it to gun deaths is just plain stupid. Murder victims don't feel better because they're being murdered by something that isn't a gun. Their families don't have less grief because their family member wasn't killed by a gun. So let's drop that right now.

Secondly, let's look at total violent crime rates. Then let's remove violent crimes (including homicides) in which the "victim's" life choices have put them in a position where violence is to be expected (in other words, drug addicts, drug dealers, gang members, etc). If someone chooses to join a violent gang and another violent gang kills that person, I'm vastly less concerned about that and think it should be called out in the statistics. It isn't indicative of the risk of violent crime to ordinary law-abiding citizens.

That aside, when you compare the overall violent crime rates of the United States and nearly any other country on Earth, you find that the US is actually quite good. There's going to be a higher risk of homicide (but again, I'd like to see drug and gang related homicides and other violent crimes separated) in the US, but your risk of being the victim of violent crime overall (things like rape, mugging, serious physical assault, etc) are much lower. In fact, much, much lower. In the last stats I checked (which were probably for 2011), the UK (the gold standard for anti-gun folks) had an overall violent crime rate far higher than some of the worst cities in the US. When you took the whole US' combined statistics, it was something like 1/5th the violent crime rate.

There a lot of guns and people who like guns and own guns at balloon factories?

The point is that the presence of guns or people who like guns has no positive correlation (if anything, it has a negative correlation) with mass shootings. Hence, the reduction of available firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens would likely have little to no positive impact on reducing mass shootings.

But please do continue blabbering on about completely unrelated things in a futile attempt to make a non-existent point.

I'd be curious whether your opinion on this would change were the lives of your family being threatened by brutal savages before your eyes. Perhaps with the lives of those you love being taken before your eyes, you would come to see that there do exist circumstances where a peaceful, law-abiding individual must use deadly force to defend himself and other peaceful, law-abiding people from criminal savages that prey upon the vulnerable.

Don't take this to mean I wish any harm to come to you or those you love; rather, take it to suggest having the wisdom to empathize with those who've been in such a situation and the understanding to realize just how frighteningly common such situations are.

I initially thought you were talking about gun shows when you said "ZERO massacres". Then I saw that you'd qualified that with a year, so you weren't talking about gun shows.

Funny how in all those gun shows full of guns and people who love guns, there's never a mass shooting. It's almost as though it's not possible for an individual to successfully massacre large groups of heavily armed individuals.

I don't think the argument has ever been that less people will die if more responsible citizens have guns. Rather, I think the argument is that there will be less defenseless victims for the uncontrolled criminal savages to prey upon.

Firearms can be an equalizer which enable ordinary people to defend themselves from thieves, thugs, and tyrants alike.

This is great news for all you Hindenburg reenactors out there!

Bingo. This is the major driving force behind the move to virtualization: underutilized hardware. But systems don't scale up and down perfectly, so I can't pay $30 for enterprise grade servers with the processing power of a Pentium II and 10GB of RAM and disks that do 20 IOPS because I'm only ever writing some log files. I have to spend $3,000 for a server that's going to have much of its hardware sitting idle most of the time.

Because having one broken service bring down 40 others is bad and I don't want to have to bring down 40 other services to upgrade a piece of software or troubleshoot a bug. Also, there will be times where some of those physical servers would suddenly experience a huge spike in usage. For instance, the launch of a new piece of content, functionality, etc that makes a huge number of normally idle users either want or need to access the services all of a sudden. What you're suggesting has zero scalability, zero redundancy, zero service isolation, and zero resiliency to software glitches and user error. By completely isolating the OS, you're isolating the services on there and everything else. I can also set limits on hardware utilization so a runaway process isn't eating through the RAM, disk, network, and other shared resources.

The snapshots taken during risky operations take seconds to put in place, seconds to revert, and seconds to remove. It takes hours to image any reasonably large physical system. Enterprise backup solutions take seconds to do full backups of a VM once the first backup has been taken (essentially diffs against the vmdks). Shared enterprise storage allows further backups to be taken in case entire volumes or disk aggregates are lost/deleted/etc.

As for speed, I already talked about this. If you're talking about running an emulator on top of an OS (like VMware Workstation/Player/Fusion etc), then it's going to be slow and hog resources. If you're talking about a hypervisor running on bare metal hardware (like VMware ESX), then the common wisdom is you lose 5-10% of the performance of the system. Meanwhile, you gain scalability, redundancy, resilience, reliability, efficiency, and truly massive cost savings.

You have any number of options for disk. First of all, pick your disk technology. Need lots of space and very little actual performance? Go with SATA. Need a little more performance? SAS. Even more? SSDs. Still not enough? RAMSAN has products that'll knock your socks off and give you better performance at the disk than anything you've ever set up on a physical server before. You can even mix and match these technologies. Vendors like NetApp will let you attach disk shelves to filer heads of all different types. Put your disk-heavy VMs on SAS or SSDs, your backup/dump space on SATA, or install read cache with either flash memory or SSDs. Vendors like EMC give you true storage tiers wherein you have some SATA disks, some SAS disks, some SSD, etc and the system automatically moves data to faster or slower tiers of storage depending on how often it's used. So your most-used data ends up on extremely quick SSDs while the files you haven't opened in six months sit idle on cheap SATA disks.

You can then choose any number of ways to attach this storage. iSCSI, fibre, NFS; you choose. 10gig NFS works nicely in most cases, scales really easily, and requires very little in the way of infrastructure build-out. You can also limit how much storage performance an individual VM can grab to ensure nobody is getting starved. With things like Storage DRS, you can automatically have VMware Storage vMotion VMs between storage devices as load changes to ensure you aren't overloading one particular device.

With physical servers, you've got whatever the disks in there can give you. You might have 3, 5, 7 disks at most to work with and if you kick off some big job on that box, you're limited by what they can put out. The rest of the time, they're sitting there with unused performance. If you lose a disk, you need to get it swapped ASAP since you only have one or two spares in most cases. With VMs talking to enterprise storage, you've got your data spread across dozens of disks, so you've got all the performance you need when you need it. With tiers, the data you need most is coming very quickly. The storage space is better used because they're de-duplicating 4k blocks of data (your OS library files are the same on every box, why store 500 copies of them?). Lose a disk? Hot spares are ready to go and the SAN will phone home to the vendor for them to ship a replacement to you and to you so you know it's coming. In the meantime, it just drops a hot spare in and rebuilds parity with that.

There's a ton of other features you can use with enterprise storage, but the basics alone make it worthwhile. Disks sitting in a physical server are slower, less efficient, less resilient; just downright awful by comparison.

What something like VMware gives you that most SANs don't out of the box is extremely simple point-and-click manageability. Yes, you can do some of the storage-side stuff with SANs, but who cares if I can clone the data for an app server if I don't have an app server to use it?

So while some SAN technology can do some of the stuff VMware gives you (and a lot of these vendors now interact directly with VMware via APIs), you've never really had the complete package to make use of it before things like ESX.

You're running an emulating application on an OS. We're talking about running a bare-metal hypervisor on hardware. There's a huge, huge difference.

Common wisdom is that ESX will eat around 5 - 10% of the system's total performance doing all its work to keep all those various VMs up and running. When you look at the cost savings and increases in reliability, you can't beat it.

I don't run two servers on one machine; I run 40. That one machine costs 1/2 of what the 40 used to cost after accounting for the fact that everything is now stored on high-end enterprise storage devices rather than local disks that die all the time and those VMware licensing fees. The amount of money saved in datacenter space and power costs is absolutely staggering. That one machine is also vastly more reliable than any of the 40 it replaces. If it dies, I have many others that all those VMs can come back up on automatically with HA and DRS ensuring everything remains balanced and performing as expected. A dead server becomes a rare event that costs me as much downtime as pressing the reset switch on a physical box.

When I have a virtual server that's running low on disk space, I can simply increase its disk space either by adding additional disks on the fly or by enlarging the existing one. When a virtual server has an increasing workload that demands more RAM, I can hot-add it from 30,000 ft with no downtime. When someone's about to do something potentially risky like a software upgrade on a virtual server, I simply take a snapshot. If the whole thing goes wrong, I revert it. It takes 5 minutes and again, can be done from 30,000 ft. Need five new servers by the end of today? I can have them up in 2 hours. Need an identical copy of one that's already configured? Give me an hour. Need a demo system for one week out of each month? Easy, and it costs me nothing but some storage.

I don't know if you work in the tech industry, but if you do, I don't understand how you're still working in the tech industry without having at least some idea as to at least some of the advantages of virtualization. I have more control over more systems that cost me a fraction of what they used to and are now unimaginably more reliable. Even if you have 5 servers, I don't see how miss the benefits of virtualization. As for the overhead, if ESXi takes a GB or two our of the hundreds on a given physical box, so be it. It's saving so much money it's ridiculous.

The anticipated response from a child is to run and tell an adult.

The anticipated response from an adult is to quietly ask the individuals to cease their distracting conversation during the presentation.