Think of the impact this would have, if many of the data-recording points for temperature were slowly surrounded by urbanization or in the 'heat shadow' of urban areas?

http://www.john-daly.com/ges/surftmp/surftemp.htm

He makes a compelling case, the refutation of which has been on the order of "of course they considered this, they're experts"...when there's no trace of such analysis or correction applied to East Anglia conclusions or IPCC reports through at least 2005 (after which I stopped bothering to read them).

Why to be skeptical of the findings?

The main reason they doubt it is because it contradicts quasi-religous dogma.

I'd love it if Lego replied:

  "We're not portraying the revered Hagia Sophia mosque of Istanbul (which, btw ISN'T EVEN A MOSQUE since it was secularized in 1931)...no, we're portraying the Hagia Sophia CHURCH, the most holy church in Christendom until it was conquered by 'the religion of peace' in 1453."

What's "whiny bitch" in Byzantine?

I'm sure California's $427 billion public debt has NOTHING to do with this.

Positive!

http://www.usdebtclock.org/state-debt-clocks/state-of-california-debt-clock.html

"that's actually sometimes a bit harder than you may be used to."
That's what she said.

No, seriously though - a couple of friends of mine who are gay say they avoid this crap like the plague because what might ostensibly start as something well-intentioned often just ends up being queer-chat-line-hookup-central.

They've both said to me (entirely separately, they don't know each other) that they're frankly sick of the 'homofication' of everything. If they game, they game and don't really care to 'carry the banner of queer society' over everything they do. If someone says "that's gay" or "you fag" they understand that for at least the last 10 years it hasn't actually even meant that you engage in homosexual activity (cf. South Park).

I mean geez, it's not like helicopters of commandos are landing to storm armed compounds in the middle of cities, to kill the most wanted terrorist ever (who's been 'hiding' there in plain sight for years).

Oh, wait...

Did he 'disclose responsibly'?
I know nothing of the case aside from the summary, and /. summaries often are entirely wrong.

But: "...I thought it was egregiously negligent for AT&T to be publishing a complete target list of iPad 3G owners, and I took a sample of the API output to a journalist at Gawker.'..."

Posting AT&T exposure details to a journalist?
Telling AT&T their data is exposed, getting ignored/whatever, THEN taking to a journalist - something entirely different.

http://www.dndclassics.com/product/17158/B2-The-Keep-on-the-Borderlands-(Basic)?it=1
Keep on the Borderlands, module B2. Originally printed 1979 - 34 years ago.
Selling for $4.99 as pdf.
I bought that module at Jolly's Games in Southtown, Bloomington MN in the summer of 1980, for, as I recall, about $5.

Yeah, SURE that's going to work, I'm certain of it.

Private Note to WotC: FUCK YOU YOU REMORSELESSLY GREEDY PIGS.
Seriously? You *first* re-engineer the rules for what, the FIFTH time in 15 years(?), expecting your "fans" to buy new rules and supplements, and now you want to sell ancient crap for the same price it sold for 30+ years ago? Seriously?
"We don't want them to go to torrent sites. Why not give them a legal route?"

Too late. Personally, I've probably dropped well over $2000 on D&D products over the decades, not to mention 4 Gen Cons (UW Parkside 2x, Milwaukee 2x). You come out with NEW content, I may buy it. Keep trying to squeeze blood from old, ancient content? I'll buy it for $1 from the used-game bins at the gameshop down the street.

...but damn it made me chuckle to think about spending my day in a lab "exposing rodents to minor explosions".

Hell, I pretty much did that research throughout the 6th grade. Amphibians as well.

I'd imagine that these guys are the ones that would see the most value in the sorts of long-duration persistent experiments in putting repeaters, etc. into aerostats, drones, even low-altitude satellites, etc - it would seem that getting the hardware into the stratosphere would provide three huge advantages:
1) on a tactical level it gets your hardware up out of the reach of people, generally. I have to imagine that vandalism, theft, and malicious mischief makes the maintenance of (even something as capital-cheap as) a cell network a bloody challenge (sometimes literally)
2) on a more strategic level, having these things up out of (easy) reach of a government can likewise somewhat allow the carrier to maintain a neutrality as far as traffic that they might otherwise find difficult. Governments have many, many ways that they can put pressure on carriers organizationally and financially, sure, but at least this would remove one lever. (OK, it wouldn't be removed; a government could likely take down a persistent UAV given enough motivation - but launching a ground to air missile is a little more obvious and blatant.)
3) finally, to have the hardware easily-removable from the geographic area.

"...To do that electronically would be cost-prohibitive..."

Huh?

OK granted, I understand that from the later context of the article, they're not just talking about an electronic library (which, let's face it, isn't much more than a gussied-up ftp server), they're talking about a whole social program where they loan out e-readers.

Electronic public library - great idea, easy way to make e-texts available to the public. Many public libraries already offer this service, but the service varies from community to community and there's really no reason for doing it that way. You could just as easily and more efficiently have a STATE-level electronic library and eliminate the redundancies of (for example) MN having 87 different public library systems each with their own little ghetto of users, access, and licenses.

Electronic lending of ebook readers - approaches the catastrophically stupid. So instead of lending BOOKS which are durable, relatively cheap, nearly-zero-cost once you've purchased them, you want to loan out e-readers which are fragile, expensive, and offer little utility to a typical reader above that of a normal book (as well as significantly lower readability, depending on the kind of book)? It's one thing if you're decommissioning physical libraries and the e-reader program is to allow the public to access those inventories, but if you're just talking about another social program to loan electronic gadgets to poor people, is it really the best time economically to be EXPANDING social service programs?

I'm sure legions of potheads will jump in here to tell me how pot is harmless.

I can assert that isn't true from personal experience.

In my fraternity days, as a freshman I met and ended up being friends with a guy fairly similar to myself. Bright, introverted, we got along really well for at least 3-4 months. Then he discovered the joy of weed. From the first joint in his life, he quickly progressed to constant indulgence, and his room became a haze of bluish smoke.

Finally we went on a freshman bus trip and he brought along what I thought was a huge bag - roughly the size of a softball, maybe a little larger - and he smoked that gone in about 3-4 days.

He became a different person. Distracted, apathetic, unresponsive, glassy eyed. I can't say he became stupid, he 'discovered' apparently that if you study baked and then take the tests baked, you do just fine. I think he graduated with a 4.0 anyway.

But he was a wholly different, dislikeable person. I missed my friend.

Who knows, right? Maybe he was an addictive personality that would have similarly destroyed himself in alcohol or other drugs.

All I can tell is that the person I met and grew to like was not eventually the person he became in a very short while. And that was ENTIRELY due to weed. I watched it happen.

But go ahead, keep telling yourself that marijuana's harmless, it hasn't changed you at all.

I mean, it's about the only part of the gun that's easier to make at home than the magazine.

Seriously, does anyone NOT see that the banning of 'large magazines' is about the most meaningless, worthless feel-good legislation one can write?

...if it went the other way, nobody would listen to Chicken Little any more.

Sure, the ongoing concept of robots that can do something eventually is specifically novel, but the idea of submerging (concealing) something in the ocean for later activation and use is the old idea of captor mines - a concept at least 50-60 years old.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_60_CAPTOR

Their concept is little more than a replacement of the torpedo/warhead with a robotic intelligence-gathering module.