Perchance could this congress and administrations approach, method, and ideology driving the drafting and passing of this particular bill be an utter disaster and for no reason what so ever related to any point brought up or repeated ad infinium via any commentator on Fox News? If thousands of pages of legislation could be summed up in one word being "good" or "bad", isn't it perfectly possible both "sides" could be right for all the wrong reasons? The mass majority of people I know are completely apathetic to this entire process, are not following the debate in any way, but generally trust the government at least in so far as they do not believe there is anything they can do even if they did care, and they hope that things get better.

And though it was a draft version of several iterations ago, I do not know a single person other than myself that has read in its entirety ANY version of the health care bill. I would be confounded to believe that anywhere near an upper limit of 10% of congress independently read the entire bill even once.

When I read it, I did not think it was a very good or very well thought out plan. Not fire and brimstone OH GOD WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!!! but just that it was so extreme disproportionately to how well it seemed to be thought out, I personally was not a fan of it. Well intended goals are not enough to make a good rule of law, and with all the games being played on both sides, this debate is too serious to enact major, sweeping legislation that will rule over people that actually do good things in this world like doctors, and people that build and manage hospitals, or medical equipment, or just about ANYBODY involved in the medical field in so far as they make decisions over what to do with their bodies as much as the patients do.

Yeah, so screw Ailes, screw Fox, screw Obama, and every corrupt member of Congress.

This is like taxing my Honda to pay for the Toyota recall.

It's patently ridiculous; but in this rent-seeking based corpocracy, it doesn't surprise me that they'd try it.

And Ford. Oh wait, that one's doing well, so we can't mention them. Unions aren't actually the root of all evil. People like to bash them, but they still do important things for the workers of the world.

I don't recall a top military official in the U.K. or France threatening to vaporize Los Angeles. I do recall a high ranking Chinese general making that threat.

They solve this problem by putting active radar transponders on board the aircraft. When the transponder receives a radar pulse, it sends a signal of its own which is picked up by the ATC radar. This is the same technique that ATC uses to monitor many civilian aircraft as well.

When my wife got an MRI when as part of the process to determine if she had Alzheimer's Disease, which turned out to be the case, she experienced a clearing of her mind during the MRI which lasted for about a day. When I reported this to the neurologist, she frowned upon it. I wonder if anybody has reported this effect, or whether it is even a real effect.

And that's why modern x86 processors are basically RISC processors with a decoder on them for legacy x86 instructions. Your comments haven't been insightful for quite some time now.

Interesting link. Yes, it looks like you could build a vortex that way. But there's nothing in that paper that describes how you could draw off that energy into useful work.

The fans at the air inlets at the base that help initiate the vortex become generators, making use of the air that streams into the base of the vortex to generate power.

Thanks for the info on Mars, but you failed to mention any reasoning for the other planets warming such as Uranus, maybe Neptune's warming.

Because you didn't ask about them. Duh.

The only part of Uranus itself that is warming is its northern hemisphere. Its southern hemisphere is cooling. Why? Because it's becoming freaking spring on Uranus. This is the pathetic quality of denier "research".

Uranus's moon Triton is warming because it's entering its summertime. It's extremely sensitive to albedo variations. Comparing atmosphere-less or low-atmosphere bodies with no oceans to a body with an atmosphere and huge oceanic heat sink is ridiculous, because there's such a huge difference in thermal inertia, so small changes have greater effects on the former.

Neptune is also entering spring, and is experiencing the exact same thing as Uranus -- one hemisphere warming while the other cools.

I can tell by your line of argument that you believe in one of the dumbest denier lines -- the "solar output is increasing!" argument. Right. The sun is changing without us noticing it. The freaking sun, the most intensively studied object outside of Earth. We watch it from all over the surface, from satellites in orbit, from satellites at the Lagrange points -- but it's sneakily warming everything without us noticing! That tricksy sun!

Can you see how ridiculous that argument is?

There's an entire chapter in the IPCC report about solar variation, which cites the current research papers on solar output and its impact on Earth. Dozens of them. Please read them. Need links? If you'll actually read them, I'd be glad to dig them up for you.

Your statement of consensus of CO2 relating to Global Warming is such example. While CO2 may indeed be a contributing factor, you fail to mention that the factor may be as little as a fraction of a percent.

No, it is not. The forcing from CO2 within its confidence interval dwarfs all other forcings within their confidence intervals. The only one that comes close is methane.

If you keep water vapor in the picture, CO2 is finally in the strong single digits of a percentage of a greenhouse gas present in our atmosphere.

Water vapor makes up about 35-70% of the planet's greenhouse effect, depending on the time of year and weather. Water vapor causes both warming and cooling, as clouds increase the planet's albedo. Water vapor, however, is *not* forcing because it has a very short average atmospheric residency (days to weeks), while CO2 has an very long atmospheric residency (hundreds of years). If you took all of the water vapor out of the atmosphere, we'd be back to normal in just a couple months. In short, the average amount of water vapor-induced warming will always be a response to whatever *other* factors are forcing the climate (along with some random fluctuation -- we call that fluctuation "weather").

In the long term (hundreds of thousands of years), you see the exact same thing with CO2. On the order of hundreds of years, CO2 is forcing. But on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years, it averages out as just a response to other factors -- a feedback. For example, Milankovitch cycles drive Earth's glacial and interglacial periods. However, the amount of forcing they provide is significantly less than the temperature variations between glacials and interglacials. The rest is made up of feedbacks. The warm phase of Milankovitch cycles leads to increased emissions of CO2, amplifying their warming trends.

Another example someone gave was watts per meter. The Earth showed warming of about 1 watt per square meter.

Actually, about 2.4W/m^2, but let's go on.

If you want to picture them as little lightbulbs, picture them inside a vacuum-sealed cooler (our planet drifts in a vacuum).

When you stand next to a fire, do you feel warm because of the radiant energy, or the CO2 being created?

Horrible analogy, for several reasons.

1) Most of the exhaust from a fireplace goes up the chimney, not into the room.
2) CO2 has essentially no effect on such small scales. When you're talking just a couple meters of CO2, it's effectively transparent. If you want to talk *miles* of CO2, however, that's a different story.
3) A much closer example in your analogy would be your home's insulation. The fire is playing the role of the sun, and the home's insulation is playing the role of the planet's atmosphere at slowing heat loss. It's still not a perfect analogy, but it's much closer.

If built, the towers would be the second (and third) tallest structure on earth, behind the Burj Khalifa that opened this week.

If they didn’t know the girl very well and didn’t get the movie reference, it’s quite easy to understand why someone would take it literally.

You have to be especially careful when you’re kidding in print. It still has to be obvious that you’re joking even without the tone of your voice to tip people off.

Inferring that something is a possibility is still not the same as receiving a threat. That was my whole point.

Legally, we have to make the distinction between your feeling threatened or your inferring a threat, and someone actually threatening you. They are not the same things.

No, you want the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act.

The terrorists won. We, as a society, live in terror. Thanks George, and thanks Congress. And, thanks to all the freaky little nobodies who constantly chant "What if?" and "Think of the children!"

At some point, people have to face their fears, and just fucking get over it. Hey, when I was a kid, I was afraid of the dark. I got over it. Try it, everyone.

Yes, I just MIGHT be murdered by some drug crazed freak the next time I run to the convenience store late at night. Am I going to let that stop me?

Yes, Amanda just MIGHT be serious about stabbing someone in the throat. Chances are, she's just venting. And, a bunch of pussies have allowed that venting to disrupt their miserable little fearful lives.

Maybe they should have stayed in Mama's basement.....

I had problems a few years back with VLC repeatedly and randomly crashing. I didn't look into the issue much at all, since I found that MPlayer worked fine, and I have been using that ever since. Don't know if it was a system config issue or hardware or something else, but that has definitely turned me off of using VLC afterwards.

Take that as you will, definitely not anything but an anecdotal experience, but VLC (at least a few years back) was definitely not perfect.

Cheers