Another benefit to the manufacturers in blocking this - if owners can repair, they can also improve. They currently get lots of money in repair parts, where are they if someone finds a way to make the equipment last longer?
This seems counterintuitive - of COURSE OEM parts are better - but what if the design could be modified so the parts last longer? This would never occur to me, except I worked with equipment that did just that. I won't give the brand name, but the manufacturer had a firm "no modifications" clause in their contracts. Why was this bad? Because their hydraulic system had NO filtration, so all the wear products stayed in the oil, increasing wear and tear, leading to seals, valves etc, dying well before they would with a better-designed system. Adding filtration would be a trivial engineering exercise, and would have saved thousands in replacement parts per year per machine, but we were explicitly forbidden from doing so.

b) & c) are really the same thing - the long approval process is due to the intense regulation, which is due to the fear.
Thing is, that fear is well-founded. You can guarantee that without stringent regulation, corners would get cut until we got accidents. The "modular, small" idea has some merit. but they would still require stringent quality control and regulation, which will scare away the self-proclaimed "innovators" who figure that if they just build enough of them, they'll get the kinks out.

Pretty much by definition, photosynthesis removes CO2 from the atmosphere - It creates carbon compounds from atmospheric CO2, thus increasing biomass.
Your statement is logically equivalent to "Water doesn't get you wet unless you come into contact with water."

That's not what happened - they borrowed the money to take the company private, using a loan secured by the company - they basically just borrowed the value of the stock they didn't already own. So, less than the company was worth.
Since that was a loan made to the company, the company was responsible for paying it.
in the meantime, the people who set up the deal got nice big commissions, and kept control of the company, milking it for "management fees" and the like as long as it could keep up both the fees and the interest payments.
Now, the company is going under, the assets will pay some fraction of the debts. The people who made the deal in the first place walk away with all the money they collected over the last 13 years.
I am not a financial expert, but that's the general idea.

Funny how one extreme use case is held up as an excuse for not changing things. Using the "200 miles" as a distance limit is telling, as it assumes that the technology will not improve at all, when it has already improved a great deal in the last decade.Charging technology is also improving greatly, it's ridiculous to assume that there won't be sufficient charging capacity installed as the number of electrics on the road increases.
Consider this - auto driving cars would be able to convoy to reduce energy usage, and smoother traffic flow from auto-driving vehicles would reduce slowdowns and jams. That alone will greatly improve evacuation efficiency. This technology is rapidly approaching market, any electric car produced in 10 years should be capable of this functionality.
So, instead of 10 hours on the road to go 200 miles, we have the scenario of 4 hours on the road, followed by an hour to charge, and then back on the road to go another 200 miles before the old-style cars would have made it to the first stop. (Though realistically we should see 300-400 miles between charges)

The question is to get YOU to read the citations, which would show you that the citations do not actually support the conclusions. It's trying to spoon-feed *you*.

No one is claiming that greenhouse gasses trap all the heat, only that they reduce the heat flow. The term "heat trap" is not intended to imply that all heat is trapped, it is neither insightful not useful to pretend to be confused on the subject.

Pretty simple - there WASN'T a "pause" from 1998 to 2015. 1998 was well above the trend - an outlier, with both 1997 and 1999 significantly lower. 2015 was the first year that was higher than 1998, but the preceding and following years were not much lower - so the 3 year (or 5 year, or 10 year) average for the late 90s was significantly lower than the average for the last few years.

So at best you could say "There was a huge drop from 1998 to 1999, then steady warming, temperatures have been rising since 1999." Which sounds pretty odd, but is much more accurate than any so-called "pause".

If you are on this page, you probably understand something about signal processing and statistics -ask yourself why people have been saying there was a "pause" when the data - whether statistically analysed or just plain eyeballed - shows no such thing.

No. In the natural course of things, CO2 follows warming. Now, for the first time in the record, CO2 is leading temperature while temperature changes faster then ever recorded, AND in the opposite direction from the trend prior to the use of fossil fuels.. So this is literally unprecedented, Perhaps you should pay attention to the people who actually gather the data instead of the people who deliberately misstate it?

So what you're saying is that conservatives are more conscientious, but not when it comes to electing people who are actually conservatives. Is that correct?
  I think this is pretty much a "no true Scotsman" argument - you've decided that liberals must be lazy, so any lazy person is a liberal in your eyes, and any hard-working one is a conservative. As you don't know the politics of everyone you encounter, it's easy to pigeonhole your co-workers and then ignore any evidence that contradicts your assumptions. You're dismissing the elected conservatives as liberals, which is very telling, as they certainly work to spread conservative values, and have the support of the half of the voters who self-identify as conservatives.

But the real question - in my experience, women are more conscientious than men. Across the board - they are more likely to double-check their work, they dot and cross various letters as appropriate, they are prone to make sure their work is right, whether it's washing dishes or debugging code or soldering circuit boards.

So as conscientiousness is a highly valued trait, if my observations are scalable across the IT industry, wouldn't this indicate that we need more women in the field? And that we should examine factors that may be driving them out of an industry that needs them?

It's not just "better PR and more customers" - "Raw talent" doesn't cut the mustard when you're a pain in the ass to work with. "Works well with others" is part of the core skillset. Obnoxious or abusive behavior reduces other people's productivity, particularly when you assume they can't do the work and thus refuse to co-operate with them.

I think you mean "the most highly educated women, those in academia, having higher standards". Granted, it seems like hate to the guys who don't measure up...

Yes.

It's part of the cycle - (very simplified)
Carbon in food gets eaten, in the form of carbohydrates.
that carbon is combined with oxygen when the body processes the carbohydrates to release energy to keep the body running, this makes make CO2
That CO2 is released into the air.
Plants absorb the CO2 from the air and convert it to sugars/starches/whatever, using energy from the sun
Those sugars, starches, etc get eaten.
So any carbon that is "stored" in life forms is temporary - it will eventually get released in the form of CO2, barring geological capture.

The carbon cycle is integral to understanding how CO2 increases and decreases "naturally" - there is a seasonal cycle, but over a year, as much CO2 is released by natural sources as is absorbed by natural sources. (there are minor natural sources and "sinks", but they are dwarfed by the biosphere)

The artificial "non-cycle" is
Carbon or carbon containing materials are gathered.
They are combined with oxygen to release energy, thus releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. So all the carbon that is harvested for fuel becomes part of atmospheric CO2.

Now, since the natural cycle is fairly "balanced", the level of CO2 in the atmosphere stayed relatively constant over historical time - until the industrial revolution, since then it has been rising steadily.

So any discussion of carbon in this area is referring to carbon that is already part of the CO2 in the atmosphere, or is going to be. It's easier to say "carbon" than to say "carbon-based fuels and the CO2 they produce".

"Commercial Space Flight" without rockets? Using what? Pixie dust? Build a scramjet with 60s technology? Yeah, that woulda worked.