This is a huge problem. Many U.S. Government agencies have yet to move off of IE6. Especially the military. Mostly due to IT management contracts that require the gov't to pay for every little upgrade action. For a simple upgrade, one agency gets tagged per profile per month by the company that runs their IT. That same company has a policy of being 2 versions behind current. Meaning, it is actual policy to be running IE6, Office 2003, and XP/Server 2003. The approval process is so overtaken with red tape and time that most give up trying to get upgrades. One agency just recently removed NETSCAPE from their builds. NETSCAPE!

All it takes is a hostile government to set up a few magnet sites, get banner ads deployed, and bam, your U.S. Government has rampant infections. Is it any wonder we read, from time to time, about gov't employees being prohibited from going to certain sites?

Another thing to point out, Bing is the only other search engine on the market that can compare to Google's search results, and often times it is a good alternative if you weren't able to find what you were looking for. Being the only other option available, naturally you're going to get some extra traffic that way.

You have presented a far more insightful answer. My comment was intended to be glib rebuttal to a comment that implied that it was a quick easy fix.

Soot: Course particulates wash out fairly fast. Fine particulates in the upper atmosphere act to cool the surface. Fine particulates near the surface. Don't know. The latest plant at Genesee (my neighbor) has no visible plume at all. They really are quite good at cleaning up their emissions.

C02: I think the IR that can be blocked by CO2 is mostly blocked now. I suspect that further CO2 releases will have an increasingly marginal effect. Still some. Beyond my knowledge to calculate.

Thermal: Overall a 1 GW solar photoelectic plant will be a worse thermal source than at 1 GW coal plant -- at the location. The solar plant will locally put in about 9 GW of thermal (figureing 10% efficient cells) The Coal plant about 2 GW thermal (figuring 33% thermal efficiency) If you take into account the light that would be absorbed anyway by the land the solar plant is on, that 9 GW is much smaller. Comes out to pretty much of a wash either way. But the coal plant is adding energy that hasn't been seen for a long time.

This post shows that the issue is complicated. All the posential solutions have difficulties. At present my take on the potential answers:

1. If we are going to burn coal, burn it in solid carbon fuel cells. This has the advantage of much greater efficiencies, and the CO2 is already separated for sequesterization. This technology is still experimental.

2. If we are going to do solar, solar thermal shows more promise, with the potential to store enough heat for night time operations. Photo solar has promise for off grid use, but currently, battery technology is a sticking point. (The thought of recycling a household's worth of lead acid batteries every three years for every household is daunting.)
Both technologies require specific climates to be efficient. (But see Germany. If ever there was a place where solor shouldn't work...)

3. Wind for suitable sites mixes better with agricultural, pastoral, and recreational use than does solar. Of the completely renewable sources, I think it is cheaper per generated watt hour.

4. High altitude wind power is an interesting concept that avoids most of the intermittency problems.

5. If EEStor's batacitor is real and comes to market it will change the entire picture, both for stationary and mobile energy use.

6. Nuclear may be part of the solution. Frankly I would prefer to have a nuclear reactor as a neighbor than the 2.5 GW coal-thermal plant that I have now. (And I mean neighbor-- Its mine starts 1 mile from my house.)

Yes. I think it's called a mouse.

Really, you could just use the mouse wheel combined with a single key modifier (hold a key on the keyboard) that would rotate whatever plane (X/Y/Z) you wanted when you spun your mouse wheel.

this would seem to put handheld HELL-guns within an order of magnitude of the striking power offered by conventional small-arms. A 9mm pistol bullet has about 750 joules muzzle energy: a 5kg portable HELL-ray weapon would put out this much energy in a blast less than a second long.

I can't get the article to load, but that claim sure underwhelms me. So the author thinks it would be useful to put something that emits the equivalent of the muzzle energy of a 9mm (presumably Parabellum) pistol round per second? Even if that meant the beam had the destructive potential of such a round, it would be a ridiculous weapon for a very expensive, very fast fighter plane—they have automatic cannon that fire armor-piercing, tank killing shells, they have electric "gatling guns" that can fire thousands of rounds a second, they have missiles that can kill or destroy at great distances. And we're supposed to think it's a good idea to mount the equivalent of a pistol on such a plane? As for blinding enemies...well sure it might work for that. But why not just obliterate them?

In any case, comparing the kinetic energy of a projectile to the energy of a laser beam is not useful. While energy is pretty much irrelevant in pistol calibers (they are just good for making holes), the kinetic energy of a 5.56 NATO round can cause considerable damage if it tumbles inside you. A tungsten or depleted uranium 2cm cannon projectile has a lot more energy, and does correspondingly more damage. The problem with a laser is that unless you can deliver a lot of energy in a very small amount of time, you will wind up spreading that energy over a large surface area as your beam moves over your target, which is presumably not holding still and offering itself for frying. Then there are other factors that mitigate the effects of lasers as weapons; for example, if you manage to vaporize some metal on your target, the cloud of vapor may diffuse your beam, thus preventing it from doing further damage. A laser is also going to have trouble shooting through clouds, fog, or even rain.

I'm not saying we're never going to get science fictional blasters, but this is a long way from a useful weapon. By the way, does the 5kg include the battery? How many seconds of continuous fire is the battery good for? Dang, wish I could get the article to load.

So what kind of tax would you want? Property? Income?

Actually, I was talking about tax exemption of the COS. If currently they rake in $x, all of it tax exempt, then if their tax exempt status were to go away, they would have to take in $(x+y) from their members in order to net the same $x they previously got.

Income tax, you mean?

Everything is taxed.

Mowing lawns is taxed – if you're also working a second job that earns enough to put you in the taxable population. You're supposed to report it as secondary income.

Even letting a stack of money sit in the bank and accrue interest is generating taxable income.

the States need a Constitutional Council
They do. It's called a Supreme Court.

A 93% reduction in the energy cost of running the coolers. NOT a 93% reduction in total cost, because replacing fans with plumbing and using expensive synthetic coolant is going to cost more. The cooling system is probably more expensive to build than generic fans/HVAC. It'll probably cost more to maintain as well, since now there will be occasional leaks that will destroy some equipment.

Why? It's perfect.

Having to enter the card number a second time would make people suspicious. I'd probably stop right there. In any case it's a considerable hassle, so I'd shop somewhere else.

It'd have the very nice side effect of killing such programs, due to having one being probably a loss instead of a profit.

Science fiction from decades past just called, they want their storyline back.

Hey, if this is idle I can be a smarty-pants about this.

Do you? I mean, really, were you that stoned during your high school government class?

putting legislation online at least five days before it's voted on. That's Congress' (Pelosi and Reid) responsibility, not the President's.

allowing congressmen enough time to read legislation rather than ramming it down their throats at 2am. That's Congress' (Pelosi and Reid) responsibility, not the President's.

And ending backroom politics. That's Congress' (Pelosi and Reid) responsibility, not the President's.

get rid of the lobbyists That's Congress' (Pelosi and Reid) responsibility, not the President's.

midnight bills, etc That's Congress' (Pelosi and Reid) responsibility, not the President's.

Well, if Hell really is freezing over, does that mean Global Warming is a hoax?

It's not as if that's written in stone!