Surely you know that the production of photovoltaic solar cells produces quite a bit of highly toxic waste? There's also the fact that both wind and solar have extreme problems providing baseline power and really are only good for supplemental power.

Nuclear does produce waste but it's a highly concentrated waste that can actually be refined and reused. There are also several modern reactor designs that mitigate most of the risk and produce much cleaner waste. The myth of "renewable" energy production has been a black hole that we've poured research and subsidy dollars into, dollars that could have gone toward revamping electrical transmission infrastructure, nuclear generation research, and building the latest and safest reactor designs.

I'm all for solar, wind, etc. where it can supplement baseline electrical generation or provide power in out-of-the way locations but we can't rely on it for all of our energy needs.

Of course it does. The problem is then accurately correlating that data to a temperature model. There's still considerable debate about how to go about matching the ice core and tree ring to the climate of the time period. Even a small error in these calculations can result in data that's off significantly.

Putting up a wall like this will only serve to shut down all discussion. If you even had a chance to convince people that your side is correct you lost that chance once you effectively said that anyone who disagrees with you is a moron.

That being said there are actually very few people who would say that there's no climate change. The debate is not about if there's climate change or not, the debate is:

1. How much of the change is man-made
2. Does the climate change cause more harm than good
3. What can be done to reduce or eliminate the harmful side effects of climate change

Now, within those parameters perhaps curbing the production of greenhouse gasses is a good idea but it can't just be assumed. Even if it's found that cutting down on greenhouse gasses is a good solution how should we go about it? Those are the debatable issues.

So take a deep breath, calm down, and have a rational discussion. The rest of us will give you a moment to start over with a clean slate.

The generators that run the pumps require venting to operate and even if they had piping for the venting it would still be difficult and costly to build a watertight seal around them. We're not talking about a couple of kilowatt generators here, these are fairly bulky installations.

What you do instead is place them behind walls or on top of high points that would place them out of reach of a anticipated reasonable high-water mark. This is a risk vs reward assessment that should take into account the serious risks involved in the case of a possible nuclear accident.

In this case they chose a level of risk that didn't pay off. Should they have increased the height of the wall, costing them more but reducing the risk? Probably but then again we don't have all the information that went into the decision.

To add to this, the energy doesn't have to be a massive amount used up in a quick burst. You can perform some of the acceleration over a period of time on a circular racetrack and then launch it once it has a good deal of its final energy. Obviously this will require a good deal of engineering to get right but there's already been a lot of work done on this topic.

This is an old idea that should have been implemented long ago. Fuel tanks can survive much higher g-forces and can be built and launched relatively cheaply compared to satellites and personnel.

In fact, fuel is just about the perfect candidate for a mass driver where energy can be stored up and then released in a burst into a linear induction motor or similar technology. This means that much less expensive and less polluting energy sources can be used in the launch as opposed to most rocket fuels. It's also inherently safer since you don't have a 5000 degree F flame that you need to feed and control.

Once the fuel tanks are exhausted they can be converted into modules for space stations or spacecraft, probably much more efficient than building them to survive a re-entry to get re-used. Why waste all the energy it took to get them up there and the energy it would take to send up a pre-built module when you can design the tanks for re-use?

Yeah, there's a lot of complexity that I'm doing some hand-waving around but it's still a great concept that should be developed further.

I really appreciate the calm, collected, and clear responses in the face of what is clearly a very contentious topic for many people. It's also great to get some insight into the internals of a popular project.

Keep up the good work, Growl is a very interesting project and it is definitely driving UI development. Having an open-source project like this available for browsing and contributing to the source code does a great deal for programmers both established and new.

Many applications do just what you're asking. Click on the Finder and if there aren't any open windows it will pop one open with your default directory. Click on Mail and if you don't have a mail browser window open then it will open one.

It's an application-defined behavior and most of Apple's applications do something when they don't have an open window and their dock icon is clicked. Some 3rd party applications don't follow this UI principle and, yes, it's a shame when they don't.

It is? All you have to do is glance over at the dock, everything that's running has a dot next to its icon. If that's not clear enough for you then you can always just clear out the non-running apps in your dock and only let the running apps show. Now EVERY app in the dock is a running app.

If we're talking about applications with open windows (which is what would show up in the Windows' Taskbar) then just use Apple's Mission Control. Every running application will have its own group of windows, grouped with the icon for the application. It's quick and easy to see what's running and pick a window.

Also remember that under Mac OS a running program that doesn't have any open windows doesn't need to use that many resources. It will stay in memory and possibly do some processing but if its resources are needed they can be reclaimed by the system and the application will be put in a suspended state, its memory will be paged out to disk, its running threads will be suspended or given a lower run priority, etc. Thus you can keep a lot of applications running in the background without windows and not worry that they'll slow you down much.

Not to mention the file system and underlying OS operations, notification services, location services, and so on. There's a lot of things that run in the background under iOS and more cores is just going to help them run more smoothly.

My "theory" is that there are a lot of apps that can benefit from having additional cores to run threads on. It doesn't matter if it is the front app doing parallel processing or "background" apps that have registered tasks to be run. Additional cores will get used on iOS devices and they provide additional flexibility to the software.

A lot of that sort of stuff is also hardware-accelerated where you hand off a stream to the appropriate API and the device will encode/decode using hardware features while using very little CPU.

Of course there's threading in iOS. There are examples to be found if you google for them.

You do know that iPhone apps can do quite a lot in the background, even if only one app can have focus at one time, right? Right now apps are deliberately curtailed to only certain background activities because of the limitations of the amount of cores, adding in more cores and more powerful cores will allow apps to do more in the background.

The limitation of being able to interact with one app at a time is due to UI constraints. Even on a regular computer there isn't much case for multiple programs being visible to the user at one time. For the most part a user isn't able to fully interact with multiple programs at a time, the usual case is to view a document in one app while doing work in another. A better solution to this is to allow programs to share their display engines so that a single program can run and display documents from other programs while only having one program running at a time.

The model of one application running with a few lighter weight processes doing background work makes sense for devices with tight resources and that's the model that iOS is attempting to follow.

In the past I've run a couple of labs with a few dozen Macs.

I don't know outside of the US but my experience in the US is that a repair takes a few days at most. Apple next days a box to you, you pack the computer and it next days back. They take a day or two to repair it and then they next day it to you.

Or you can bring it to a local Apple-authorized service center and they'll usually have it done in a day or so if they have the parts, an extra day if they have to order parts.

I think the longest time I've seen an Apple repair take was 4 or 5 days for some obscure part they had to order.

This is not debugging circuitry. This is a normal serial interface that has been known about for a good long time and is even talked about in Apple's documentation. You do need to have a breakout cable to access the serial lines but once you have that it works just like any other serial port does under Darwin.