Don't like proprietary apps on your tablet? Then flash your own choice of completely FOSS rom. CyanogenMod makes a few, and so do many others.
Granted this is (a little) beyond the average user - but the average user *wants* most of those proprietary apps and services; it's just you that doesn't want them (and if it's beyond you as well, you could always pay someone to do it for you).
Well yeah. The Android apps you would miss out on are (only) the ones that are designed to require Google's cloud services specifically (Drive storage, Maps navigation, Google's voice search, Play games syncing etc). No big surprise there.
There are entire categories of apps which don't need any cloud services of course, and many others where the apps are written to use alternative services, or where the bulk of the app is entirely usable even when a given service is unavailable (e.g. when sold through Amazon's app store). In all cases though, it's the developer's decision, and Google's cloud service APIs are completely optional & not part of the base Android framework.
What record? You linked to a blog that picks quotes from a book written by a mining consultant and an economics professor. There's no record visible there - no context, no dates, nothing hard - only someone allegedly repeating claims from authors with obvious agendas, that we can't begin to verify. Oh, and an unreferenced op-ed with loaded language and unproved allegations that gives no actual contrary data, but only raises questions from a known skeptic (Lindzen) while ignoring the opinions of all the other scientists mentioned.
But you go ahead and believe whatever random opinions you like. We'll just stick to the data that's been repeatedly verified in a dozen different ways.
Thanks; still looking for citations though, esp. for 1) and 3).
2) From my link:
As a major measure to improve energy and economic structure, the plan aims to cut coal consumption in the total energy mix to below 65 per cent by 2017, down from 66.8 per cent in 2012.
... which is admittedly not that significant, but it's also not "increasing the coal being dug" as you claimed (at least not relatively).
4) Agree that China's promises are not exactly iron-clad, but unless you have a reliable citation that says the opposite, as you claim, then we have to go with their publicly stated position. I see no reason to accept your opinion over their "top climate negotiator".
5) Still not sure where you're going with the locally-made AE point. Everything here indicates they're moving away from coal and increasing their nuclear, natural gas, hydro etc.
The Martian atmosphere is about 0.6kPa, compared to Earth's 101kPa. It's just not dense enough to move anything more substantial than dust.
I think you need some citations. And if you're going to declare a post "total BS", perhaps your rebuttals should be on point? Kinda like this:
1) China "will be"? UN says 28.6%, not quite "over 1/3" as you originally said.
2) China is indeed focusing on reducing pollution, but they're also cutting coal consumption, not just consuming it differently. They're using GreatPoint's catalytic hydromethanation process of coal gasification, and the CO2 produced is captured, not released.
3) Primarily stopping desertification as I said, but 500,000,000 hectares of fast-growing trees are a not-insignificant CO2 absorber, as the Chinese are quick to point out.
4) China's top climate negotiator said that China has pledged to cut its carbon intensity by 40-45% by 2020 from 2005 levels. Coal plants are no longer being approved in polluted provinces like Beijing, and their nuclear power program is one of the most ambitious programs in the world.
5) Huh?
China's emissions growth is slowing, as it has implemented its own carbon trading scheme and started cleaning up the worst-polluting of its power plants.
Additionally, China has planted over 500,000 square km of trees in the north, as a desertification barrier and carbon sink. This is the largest artificial forest in the world (twice the size of Britain), and they plan to continue increasing this through to 2050.
Little known fact: It is a legal requirement for all Chinese over the age of eleven to plant at least three trees a year.
Well, them and all the climate scientists with their pesky evidence.
For a guitar amp, certainly.
For a stereo system, if it's clipping you're doing it wrong. Precise audio reproduction is the game there, and tubes aren't terribly precise.
95% of requests were over the Internet, rather than in person - no surprise there, it's more accessible. We have no idea how many of the documents were available to be accessed this way, though.
No wait, we do. FTFA:
In late December, as outrage over the library closings grew, her department posted answers to 19 questions online. It gave the total size of the print collection as 660,000 items. Some 30,000 departmental publications are available online and more documents are being digitized. But many books can’t be digitized due to copyright laws.
So only 4.5% of documents are available online (assuming departmental publications == print collection, which I'm not sure about). Too soon to start throwing out entire collections, it seems - if ever.
This is nothing like Google Glass, or the Oculus Rift. But it is a direct competitor for Sony's HMZ head-mounted personal displays, only a little cheaper & crappier.
I applaud your effort to bring actual data to the discussion, but I'm not certain those links support your claim of temperatures "equal to or higher than todays". Closest I could find in the first paper was:
The level of warmth during the peak of the MWP in the second half of the 10th century, equalling or slightly exceeding the mid-20th century warming, is in agreement with the results from other more recent large-scale multi-proxy temperature reconstructions
(emphasis mine)
The second link was paywalled, but the abstract says northern Sweden experienced "similar levels of summer warmth in the medieval period (MWP, c. CE 900–1100) and the latter half of the 20th century". Hard to pin down the comparison dates, but again, not "equal or higher than today".
The third link says that some reconstructions of northern Sweden and Finland specifically have indeed been up to 0.6C warmer 2000 years ago, when compared to the 1951-1980 mean (rather than today's warmer temperatures), but also says that proxy reconstructions can vary wildly, by 1.5-3C, depending on which Scandinavian record is used, and finishes with:
We conclude that the temperature history of the last millenium is much less understood than often suggested, and that the regional and particularly the hemispheric scale pre-1400 temperature variance is largely unknown.
So basically, it was certainly fairly warm in Europe during certain past periods, but the evidence is not reliable enough to say exactly how warm, and no paper supports the claim that it's "equal or higher than todays" temperatures. In any case, Europe in general (and Sweden/Finland in particular) are only one part of the global picture; temperatures were relatively low elsewhere in the world even during the MWP.
It is literally free from China to AU as well; most Chinese/HK vendors ship here for free these days, and to most other destinations.
Those high prices are from the US to Australia; why is that? US international postage prices seem huge to us - more than shipping from AU to the US. Amazon (when it deigns to ship here) are often much cheaper, like $9-$20, but that's still more than e.g. from the UK, let alone China.
Both should respect each others property and businesses and laws
Guess who sets out those principles of international respect for property, businesses etc? The same WTO that you want shut down.
The US agreed in 1995 to abide by the WTO's principles and rules. If they no longer want to, they're free to withdraw, but they can't expect other nations to respect the rules if they won't.
Exactly what Antigua is saying. There's earnings to be made by violating US copyrights.
Don't like it? National sovereignty; too bad.
If you want to put yourself on the map, publish your own map.
