Yes you are correct that the climate has changed plenty of times in the past. The question is: How do you know that? Let me answer for you: Some dedicated researchers figured it out for you, told you, and you believed them. As you should, since they know what they're talking about.

Do you realize how much overlap there is between the people saying the thing you automatically believe, and the people saying the thing you automatically don't?

Fuck "common knowledge". Climatologists sure as fuck are aware that the climate has changed before without human intervention. Yet they have ample reason (as in evidence) to suggest this change is different, and those reasons even take into account previous change. Maybe you should tell one of them how the Sahara was a savannah, and therefore anthropogenic global climate change isn't occurring, because that's such a good argument!

So yeah. You won a fight against an imaginary layman less educated than yourself. Congratulations. Of course your implied counter-logic of "climate change happened before, therefore this time isn't our fault" is equally flawed.

If you get rid of the "common knowledge" aspect of your post, you're basically saying "Scientists say X which is true, and that obviously means the scientists who say Y are wrong." Except the scientists who say X don't agree with that conclusion. I wonder why? Oh yes, because it's bullshit. Your knowledge is no better than that of the strawman you burned.

yes, people in the usa are not starving

BECAUSE OF WELFARE YOU MORON

hello???

as for the self-initiative destroying, self-esteem destroying aspect of welfare: this is 100% real

so let's kick them off welfare so they can starve instead. because that's so much better for people than low self-esteem. pffffft

and it will decrease crime too, because after they are done being shot by irate homeowners protecting their food or dying in the streets without food, crime will go down! see this is all bourne out by societies without welfare: no one is starving in the slums of india, crime is nonexistent in the slums of nigeria

you're ignorant beyond belief

I think Tolkein is a bit overrated as far as educational value goes. The books are too long and I don't see the themes being that interesting to discuss or write about. Sacrifice & temptation? There's just not much to debate about.

Ender's Game is a shorter read and much more interesting for it's political and moral commentary. A selection of some of the short stories form Asimov's "I Robot" and Bradburry's "Martian Chronicles" might be good.

I really enjoyed "Heart of the Comet" http://amzn.com/0553763415. It has some interesting topics. Possible essay questions:

• If human kind begins to genetically modify itself do you think the modified people will experience discrimination and resentment from the natural humans?
• Do you believe the earth government was justified in trying to destroy the comet? Why or why not?

I think the best Sci-Fi uses differences in alien values to examine our own values and to discuss morality.

Xenocide in the Ender's Game series is one of these. Did the aliens commit murder or was it something else? Does their intent and ignorance free them from guilt? When Ender killed the alien was it murder?

Also, "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell. http://amzn.com/0449912558 This one is pretty heavy. Read it if you haven't. It involves a Jesuit priest making first contact with aliens.

"Fleet of Worlds" by Larry Niven & Edward Lerner

• Themes on slavery, natural human rights, morality.

Which in my mind is the real crime here. I wonder what fraction of a percentage of the US military budget would allow us to publish these documents on gold leaf?

Given the superiority of 7z the popularity of rar is a fucking mystery, I blame net effects.

Another troll, but I'm bored.

If you installed GPS on your car, and then published your driving habits online, I'm not convinced you'd have a right to complain based on a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Then again, agencies, departments, and branches of government are not private citizens, either. And yes, I think their actions should be both freely-available and in bulk-searchable form.

I'm also in favor of a Corporate death penalty.

I mean both, because they both do not have a capital. But EU is seen as the capital of the EU, because the most important politics take place over there.

More like 20 errors per 24 hours of operation. Computers that do not run 24/7 will see fewer errors per day, of course.

How likely is a bad bit to cause a serious problem? The bulk of RAM is used for data, not code. Data is read more often than written. Most of the time, the bad bit was in unused memory, or passes unnoticed as one wrong pixel in an image containing a million pixels, or didn't go bad before being used. Just taking a big guess here but I'm thinking about 1% of the bad bits cause a serious problem, rare enough compared to real software bugs that it's easy to lump it in. We'd notice our computers are flaky if it happened much more often than that. With an error rate almost as high as 1 per hour, bad bits can't be crashing the OS in more than about 0.001% of occurrences. Else we couldn't possibly get uptimes of many years.

Good call. I haven't worked in C in almost a decade now and reversed the concepts in my mind.

I would still expect that interactions with an array stored in a block of memory being directly accessed in C++ with out bounds checking would execute faster than interacting with a generic list in .Net.

A generic list, even if it is array based, is going to be on the stack an array of pointers to other points of the stack and the heap.

Sorry about the confusion, my bust.

-Rick

No, because it's still a closed system. The solid contents of the planet are continually moving towards the sun (the freshly-deposited rock is always pushing the older rock towards the hot side via gravity) But the overall center of gravity of the planet never changes position relative to the star since the momentum of the solid part of the planet is counteracted by the momentum of the atmosphere moving in the opposite direction. So the planet itself always stays the same distance away from the star.

Don't you mean socially-and-religiously-conservative-era propaganda?

Your analogy makes no sense. The video card doesn't have to care about what particular technology the display uses, only the range of vertical and horizontal frequencies it supports. The video signal is the same, whether you use a CRT, a LCD, o whatever.

Hopefully, at that point people will finally get over the whole "nuclear is bad" meme - because, well, they want their cars to work - and we start building more nuclear power plants.

I bought an HL-1240 in 2001 for $300 ($100 less than HP's cheapest laser at the time). The printer (and the stock toner cartridge) have lasted me through 2009 without any issues (I print occasionally, and it's nice to never have toner dry-out). Over the years, Brother supplied XP and Vista drivers (despite the fact that none of these OSes were out when I bought the thing), and good CUPS support meant it worked well on OS X and Linux.

I only had to buy a replacement recently because the toner cart got damaged, and I had to choose between a new cart ($50 or more) or a new printer ($120). I decided to see how much the technology had improved in 8 years, so I bought the Brother HL-2170W. On XP and OS X, the wireless configuration was a breeze, and it has worked without a hitch. The Linux support for the wireless is more involved - there is a CUPS driver, but you'll have to configure the wireless manually.

The new printer is even faster than my old one, and because it's wireless, I can stick it in whatever damn room I please. And the networking already supports IPv6, so I can depend on this network printer being future-proof.

No. Its the sun spot activity that's letting more cosmic rays in, they even mention it in the article.