This is not strictly true. The point of taxes on carbon emissions is that it helps to reduce externalities- costs that party A incurs and party B must pay, without an actual economic link between them. For instance, power plants currently emit pollutants (including greenhouse gases). Those pollutants ultimately result in costs (health care cost increases, infrastructure development to deal with changing climate, environmental reclamation costs) that are not paid by the entity that reaps the benefit from incurring them - the power plant operators. By placing a tax on the polluting activities, we cause those entities to pay for the costs that they are incurring. That cost more fully reflects the actual cost of the good that they are providing- electricity produced from coal, which levels the playing field for alternative energy sources which do *not* incur such external costs. *That* is the point of such taxation- to *level* the playing field by actually making every pay for all of the costs that they incur to society.

This is true, but all major client models take this into account. The cooling effect from particulates is vastly smaller than the warming effect from concurrently emitted greenhouse gases.

Some of us like to learn useful concepts, not memorize things that are either useless or better handled by machines. I don't know most of the telephone numbers that I use with any regularity, and I consider that to be a good thing, not an indication of someone who doesn't want to learn.

It's easier to hit keys above the "home row" than it is to hit keys below it.

They might be different in theory; they are not in practice. In addition, in Objective-C, C, and C++, NULL is, in fact, (void *)0L. This is not something that is likely to *ever* change, given the absolutely enormous body of code that assumes that (!pointer) is identical to (pointer == NULL); this is not something limited to x86.

Also, char *pointer = 0; being anything other than 0 is rubbish. There are systems for which 0 can contain valid data, and therefore you must be able to assign 0 to a pointer.

Hmm, yes, that might be a better reading of his intention. That said, it's probably worth pointing out that 'nil' is used *far* more often than 'Nil'; few (if any) standard Cocoa APIs return Nil. The only time I've really seen it used is specifically to be placed into collections.

nil and NULL are identical; they're just casts of 0. The reason that you can send messages to nil is that the objc_msgSend() function (the runtime bit that does the actual message lookup and call on objects) does a NULL check for you and immediately returns 0 if you're messaging nil/NULL.

Sure they are. They're interested in low-hanging fruit, and this will catch a whole lot of it.

No. Data suggests that global warming is very real. Models suggest a certain future continued warming.

The two should not be confused. The historical record is not a model.

Not all of us, let me assure you.

The beginning of action in the EU to mandate a specific charger is what caused the mobile phone manufactures to agree on such a standard- they decided it would be in their interest to pick one they liked rather than having one forced upon them.

He fired shots during the standoff, as he reported in one of the status updates.

Well, the problem with that argument is that the exact same music player is present on the iPhone- so it's clear that this isn't just a "well, we're just a cell phone, how you can you expect us to play music well?" situation.

Uh, you should check the sales numbers on iPods before claiming that its a dead fad. It might be *dying* (the numbers are generally dropping year over year), but it's far from *dead*. The iPod is remarkably long-lived as far as tech gadgets are concerned, actually.

Oh, I'm not opposed to the briefing at all. I just think that the content needs to be reviewed in light of current society (eg, how to fasten a seat belt).

As for the exits: you don't need a briefing for that if you have any experience- you'll see them as you find your seat. Again, a new flyer could use to have them pointed out, but that's not the part of the briefing that I'd object to.