I can speak for this. I know people who have saved their project over 100,000 dollars in hardware alone (not to mention the associated procurement costs) by networking with other IT people in the hyper-mega-global corporation. Simply put, his small project was beginning to blossom with a limited budget, and they needed a relative small SAN in order to expand. A friend he had made in another department was upgrading to a faster, larger SAN, and selling off the old SAN. Over a cup of coffee the two admins quickly figured out that the old SAN would work perfectly for their needs, and cost a fraction of buying a new, but similar SAN.

I'm sure many stories like this can be exchanged. As parent stated,

What a total scam. My carbon footprint is less that 10% of Al Gore's but he justifies his 10x + carbon footprint because he buys "offsets". What a bunch of crap. What justifies anyone having carbon offsets to sell? Why am I not able to sell my "offsets" to Al ?

But they're not decisions, it's just luck. Whoever happens to hear that a meltdown is happening screws over someone who's taking a nap.

I make money. Someone else has to lose it.

The point of the stock market is to invest in the success of a company, not to compete with other investors. If the company flops, all of its investors should lose. It shouldn't be about which investor gets to their laptop first to dump the stock on some poor unwitting buyer.

Nope. Maybe a majority of Slashdot thinks it is ok not to download files, that doesn't mean that others don't find it morally wrong. From a moral standpoint, I believe people can charge whatever they want for what they create, and I can choose whether that is reasonable or unreasonable. If it is unreasonable, I ignore it and find a product that is reasonable. Deciding that they are unreasonable and doing whatever the hell you want very easily can be interpreted as morally wrong.

Global figures. We here in Norway are on the same latitude as Siberia and it's not remotely as cold. Sahara is a desert and yet it's on the same latitude as India where there's rain enough for a billion people. Weather patterns can change, local climate can change, wind patterns can change to flip all of that around. And the climate isn't static, for example >a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_nino">El nino is quite well studied and shows you cant expect a year over year steady trend. The global trend if you look at decades or centuries is still quite clear, with or without cherry picking data it is on the rise.

The story has too many "simple observations" in it to be plausible. - "The patient was well aware of the fact that she had no vagina" Well, that's a relief! - "She had never had a period" Am I missing something here? How exactly would this happen given her condition?

LOL. See, difference between taxes and equity venture-funded capitalism, is that in the latter, you can actually get your money back, or even get profit back, and you get to choose to put your money into a venture/equity fund.

Of course, seeing your signature, its obvious that you dislike competition and pray at the alter of big, all powerful government. Perhaps you should move to Europe. They love big unaccountable government.