In 2003, Republicans controlled the house and the senate, I cannot find evidence for your claim that Democrats blocked regulatory legislation which would have prevented the US housing crash. http://uspolitics.about.com/b/2008/09/18/republican-congress-talked-about-financial-reform-but-did-nothing.htm In fact, given the disdain Republicans have for any form of governmental regulation, I find your claim doubtful

The data we have from ice cores goes back at least 250,000 years (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_core), what you're talking about is satellite mapping of the sea ice extent. For the record, the ice in Greenland is at least 110,000 year old (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenland_ice_sheet), so, uh.... go peddle your FUD somewhere else coward.

Interesting observation, in an environment where people are trained to use firearms, the weapons are strictly controlled, why not enforce the same good sense in a civilian context?

Surely they mean botched?

You mean clouds?, the effect you're referring to is highly dependent on the size of the water droplets. So high levels of water vapour do not necessarily entail high levels of solar reflectance but it does directly entail a positive feedback effect on global temperatures. If you've got references to back-up your assertions, by all means, provide them. But I suspect that anyone using the phrase "Global Warming Alarmists" whilst arguing a point related to climate science has little actual interest in the Science.

Apparently in this universe, sanity prevails, Glen Beck still has his own TV show though, so lets not get carried away :P

Ah!, well said, I've got an Archos A70 and I'm very pleased with it. Not as polished as the iPad for sure but certainly excellent value for money.

The only thing Apple is pissed about is the fact that Amazon is using the App Store to market Android apps. It's specifically mentioned in item 23 of the lawsuit . This is how monopolies are maintained with the blessing of the state, through the use and abuse of stupid patents.

That's exactly what I was thinking, unless AOL is doing something ' amazing ', it's very much likely that the requirements of their DB infrastructure are similar to that of everyone else. The way everyone else solves these problems is through a marraige of well-designed infrastructure and reactive software systems, asfaik. That said, it still sounds uber cool and the ultimate DB toy/tool.

It is perverse, no doubt about that, but there is a logic to it, everything is about knowledge, complex interlinked systems like the global economy are constantly changing and as a result so is the information we have about it. Any trader with the ability to take this raw data and convert it into knowledge about the future value of a stock can make money. It's not simply taking money from someone, it's exploiting the fact that they haven't recognised the true value of the stock. That's the theory anyway.

The real insanity starts when you try to nail down the true value of a stock based on responses to millisecond changes in the markets. No human could ever function like this, so algorithms are encoded with our flawed theories of how to recognise the "true value" of a stock. Assuming the markets behave (or, in more recent terms, consistently increase in value), it's all good, but as soon as the markets start to behave irrationally, these algorithms go apeshit, exacerbated by the fact that there's thousands of these systems all following their own crazy formula, in real time, with real money, now that is perverse.

It's good to see these trolls taking a hit for once, it always seems like they've got the upper hand, especially with the dysfunctional patent system.

wow, buddy, you just made a ton of sense with that comment. If it was possible to rate the comment, "god-like in its apprehension of the problem", that's what you'd be getting.

insect sex is notoriously violent, insects do not use sex as a bonding mechanism so there's no pleasure, in the sense we know, associated with it. Many different species have developed various strategies to work around this, such as scrapers on the end of the males penis to remove rivals sperm. I kid you not, god help me, I'm after a bottle of wine and can't be bothered finding the link.

add the ip address and/or hostname of all the hosts you use to access your servers into /etc/hosts.allow. If denyhosts picks up 3 failed logins from a single ip address, that address is added to /etc/hosts.deny, if this happens to be your machine (and you're having a bad day entering your password), you could get locked out of your system.