Not to dis little Al, but he was not able to get a job as a teacher and was working as a patten clerk in a govt job. How does this make him qualified to shake physics to the bone and unseat Newton's well accepted laws of physics?

No we are not in a deep solar minimum. The Maunder Minimum was a deep solar minimum, and most solar guys think the Ort, Wolf, and Spoor minimums were longer and deeper than our current mini minimum.

Well training them for unemployment might be an improvement over the current system.

I have a lot of questions about this, but for starters here is one. What did the "script" look like? Was it simply a blue book or loose leaf note book written in crayon (not likely I know; or was it more like the formatted output from a printer? What did it say on the front (if anything); something like "Unthinkable" on the front and a if the first few pages described what a terrorist should do to commit an unthinkable act I can see how this might make a TSA guy think it was worth a second look. Next I want to know just how long this guy was "detained"? If he was able to make his flight it does not seem like such a big deal to me. I have been "detained" by TSA guys while I had to boot my laptop and they put their grubby paws on my DSLR. Not to say it was enjoyable and I certainly was not impressed when a female TSA agent looked through the view finder of my DSLR and said this is OK, it is a camera; because the lens cap was still on and she had no way of knowing if the camera was bogus or not. But the bottom line was I was able to get on my flight on time, even if there were finger prints on my camera and laptop. If this guy made his flight it looks more like a PR stunt than something we should gripe about. And I do find it strange no one seems to care if he made his flight or not.

For a bunch of geeks I am shocked that no one has mentioned how cropping is related to Megapixels. Even when super telephoto lens are used it is common for digital images to be cropped for many reasons; and this means that 12MP image you captured is not only 8 or 6 or maybe even 4 MP. And this issue gets even more important when you are using a low end digital camera with fixed or limited lens selection. Classic example is parent takes a pix of their kid at graduation stiitin 100 feet from the kid on stage. The kid is less than 1/20 of the total area of the image. If you have plenty of MPs you can crop out the plane in the sky and the phone lines above the kids head, but if you are MP limited you are stuck.

I have a little different perspective on this whole thing. I dont spend much time watching the tube, and when I do it is business shows on business channels, mainly for fast updates on economic stuff. Fact of the matter is that FOX and FOX NEWS are both money making operations; much more so than things like the GE run NBC. It is also a fact that a TV network needs to put faces in front of a tube, not good shows in back of a tube. All that being said I am still pissed about Trippin the Riff not being on the air; but I do have the DVD.

Sure the guys who get the research bucks have been vetted properly. Unless they agree with Al Gore they dont get money.

Since only about half the peeps vote it may not be as bad as you make it out.

When I am not wasting my time on slashdot I sometimes waste my time observing the sun through a HA solar filter (which I paid way too much for) on a telescope (which I paid way too much for). I also waste my time reading books by guys like Willie Soon or books with titles like "The Sun Kings". Not to mention I have been reading astronomy books and mags with articles on stuff like planet climate issues since way before Al Gore invented the internet. It is clear to me that all the climate models we have now are crap. When NOAA released the code for their models guess what kinda criticism they were met with. First the models had poor documentation, variable names were too short and did not always describe the variable accurately, and there was lots of spagetie (sp) code. Wait a sec, that is what my boss said about my last program; never mind. Not to mention that the models were very time specific and could not be applied over long time periods or time periods in the past. Lets face it we can not say if it is gonna rain tomorrow or not most of the time; how can anyone say what the temp will be 10 years from now. But the real problem I have with the GW guys is no one really says just how much CO2 has increased in percentage terms over the last ten, twenty, one hundred, or one thousand years. This is because it is less than 1/10 of 1%. You really need very specialized instruments to measure such a small increase; not to mention the CI when measuring such small changes. Then there is the fact that we have great pix of ice sheets decreasing in size over the past 10 years or so. Problem is these ice sheets are on Mars (and the moons of Jupiter); so we really cant blame this on man made warming. I definitely think we need to clean up our act; but am not sure if every one rode a bike to work the temp would change at all.

Well I have not seen this mentioned so far; but since mostly geeks post on /. I am not really surprised. For you guys that cut class the day they taught ECON 101 here is the Cliff's Notes version. As with most things wiki is your friend as a starting place. Hauser says as marginal tax rates increase the wealthy reduce, hide, under report defer, or otherwise decrease reported income. He notes that under Ike the marginal tax rate was 91%, but over the years it was reduced to 28% under the current prez. But tax revenue over the period from Ike to W has remained constant at about 19.5% of GDP. The point is high marginal tax rates may seem progressive in theory, but in reality low marginal tax rates have produced more progressive tax collections. Here is the blurb from wiki The Tax Foundation has made the claim that the tax cuts signed by U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, contrary to popular belief, actually made the U.S. tax code more progressive, not less. They state that in 1980, before Reagan's tax cuts, the richest 1% paid 19.05% of all federal income taxes, and by 1988, after Reagan's tax cuts, their share had increased to 27.58%. Likewise, in 2001, before Bush's tax cuts, the richest 1% paid 33.89% of all federal income taxes, and by 2006, after Bush's tax cuts, their share had increased to 39.89%. [17] However, several issues arise from their arguments. Tax cuts on the top 1% are by definition regressive changes. And citing the results from years after the tax code changes were enacted discounts the changes in incomes. For example, someone earning a higher income but paying a lower tax rate still might pay higher taxes than they did before the tax code was changed. This is just what you would expect from Hauser's Law. But there is more. Problems with progressive/regressive tax collections may be an interesting side argument; but we are suppose to be talking about the economy. There does seem to be agreement that high marginal tax rates have a negative impact on the economy in general. When rich guys defer income by reducing business activity not only do they pay less taxes; jobs are lost. So the question is what is the right marginal tax rate? You don't want it too high (the 91%under Ike was probably too high) or the economy will suffer; but you also dont want it too low or tax revenue will drop (but we dont seem to have a good feel for what the lowest marginal tax should be). As wiki says until Hauser's Law is reconciled with other economic data making progress in setting optimal marginal tax rates will not be an easy job.