"Just as the absurd acts which prohibited the sale of game were virtually repealed by the poacher, just as many absurd revenue acts have been virtually repealed by the smuggler, so will this law be virtually repealed by piratical booksellers. At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot. On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions. The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living." from: A SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF COMMONS ON THE 5TH OF FEBRUARY 1841 by Thomas Babington Macaulay

All of the things you mentioned are straw man arguments that no sane climatologist would maintain. That aside, as far as you question of whether AGW can be falsified. I'd maintain it doesn't really matter. This entire issue sets my teeth grinding every time it pops up, from both sides. Climate change is a meaningless term, of course the climate changes. Anthropomorphic climate change is a meaningless term, of course humans affect the climate. The questions of course are how much, and in which direction, and does it make a damn bit of difference or is it a statistical blip buried in the overall climate drivers of water vapor, solar output, earth's axial tilt and/or pink unicorn farts. No, AGW cannot be falsified in any meaningful human timescale, because we're talking about things that take thousands of years at a minimum to make an impact. So for everyone on both sides of this meaningless debate who have already decided you know all of the answers, congratulations. Good thing you won't have to worry about the consequences of being right or wrong, because you'll be long dead by the time the human race knows with any degree of certainty one way or the other.

What?

I've written 4 popular greasemonkey scripts and two extremely targeted FF extensions for small web communities. Jetpack always struck me as being promoted by people who had an oversized view of their own importance. Check out how active Jetpack discussion is on the userscripts.org forum: http://userscripts.org/forums Yeah. Come back when you have something interesting that works, until then leave me alone.

This is all very nice, but if you haven't noticed it's impossible to punch someone over the internet, which is what the article is about.

I'm the police chief of Austin, Texas, and I'm a PC!

Been in CA for a year now, and after a few months here had a chance to climb the 'hill' (1500') behind my house and see a relatively large fire that was about 50 miles away. Although I couldn't see the flames because they were on the other side of the mountains from where I was, the smoke clouds... wow. Absolutely stunning, if you didn't know any better you would swear that a good old fashioned A-bomb had gone off. That sick pinkish hue and the mushroom shape were really creepy to look at.

Except that isn't how it works anymore. When the 20 years is up, Roche simply signs agreements with and pays generic drug manufacturers not to market a generic form of Tamiflu. Not exactly on topic, and I tend to agree that a working 20 year patent on a drug with regulation on the generic buyout shenanigens is ultimately better than no patents at all, but just thought I'd throw that out there.

funniest tag on a post ever

Thanks, until I read your post the universe was starting to make sense. I'm going to go crawl into a corner and cry a little now.

Let me get this straight... You created us, then imbued us with a desire over all others to go out and procreate. Then you created a whole host of nasty bugs, microbes and viruses that would kill us when we carried out that desire, AIDS being just one. Then you coded in the ability to have us resist AIDS, and turned around and COMMENTED OUT THE CODE!? Seriously, wtf? Is it still all about that apple? Dude... let it go man, it's been like a zillion years!

So you're saying the only thing that would give this kind of improvement would be to replace the copper/aluminum heat sink with one of similar size made out of pure diamond? Anyone making those yet?