Adam503's comments

I don't think that's true.

Ubuntu does manage to install itself on pretty much almost any desktop.

That's quite an accomplishment. Remember the Debian install horror stories? That's pretty much history now.

The ubuntu orange and purple makes NASCAR race days look tasteful and understated though. I spend my release days at the Kubuntu table now.

Sorry, but students that get admitted to Columbia aren't real tough to motivate.

Sal Khan has already had millions of every kind of everyday students young and old chose to set aside their video games and sat down and work their math at KhanAcademy.org. Some nuns are starting sainthood talk for Sal at some Catholic schools.

Nuclear industry: "We swear we're telling the truth this time about thorium. Honest."

Too bad the nuclear industry has lied so many times about risks about real current nuclear technology risks and real current costs nobody can trust whether what they are saying might be really true or not about future technology.

How many weeks/months was the nuclear industry lying about everything single thing it said about Fukushima?

At the NSA reading our e-mail.

I can tell you one thing, the answer is NOT increasing tuition and cutting financial aid. 100% certain increasing tuition and cutting student financial aid is the wrong answer.

Looks like you didn't check your talking points, once again.

"So who is John S Theon?

John Theon was not Hansen's supervisor.

The usual denialists (e.g. The Register) are excited because some guy they never heard of before has joined Inhofe's merry band, writing:

    "I appreciate the opportunity to add my name to those

who disagree that global warming is man made."

M. J. Murphy has some information about Theon. It seems that Inhofe's claim that Theon was Hansen's supervisor is completely untrue:

        Theon wrote to the Minority Office at the

Environment and Public Works Committee on January 15, 2009. "I was, in effect, Hansen's supervisor because I had to justify his funding, allocate his resources, and evaluate his results. I did not have the authority to give him his annual performance evaluation...

    Read the last bit closely. Being "in effect" Hansen's

supervisor is here contrasted with being "in reality" Hansen's supervisor--being the guy who gives Hansen his annual performance appraisal, in other words--which, frankly, does linguistic violence to the term.

Gavin Schmidt writes:

    Dr. Theon appears to have RETIRED from NASA in 1994, 

some 15 YEARS AGO. Until yesterday I had never heard of him (despite working with and for NASA for the last 13 years). His insights into both modelling and publicity appear to date from then, rather than any recent events. He was not Hansen's 'boss' (the director of GISS reports to the director of GSFC, who reports to the NASA Administrator). His "some scientists" quote is simply a smear - which scientists? where? what did they do? what data? what manipulation? This kind of thing plays well with Inhofe et al because it appears to add something to the 'debate', but in actual fact there is nothing here. Just vague, unsubstantiated accusations.

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2009/01/so_who_is_john_s_the...

Got anyone that isn't so old one suspects they'll say anything to keep from having to go back to the nursing home alone.

The primary guy the oil companies use to claim the science on global warming isn't settled is a geologist who has taken money to testify as a expert in courtrooms for both cases related to global warming and a court case about Intelligent Design/evolution. He doesn't believe in evolution either. Surprise!

Did you even read your own link?

"...Mr Justice Burton said he had NO COMPLAINT about Gore's CENTRAL THESIS that climate change was happening and was being driven by emissions from humans."

Again... What part of "ALL Nobel Prize winning scientists agree global warming is threat to humanity." do you not understand?

EVERY single Nobel Prize winning scientist has TURNED DOWN the big money the oil companies would have paid any/every them to lie and re-state the oil companies global warming talking points.

Every single one of them has agreed and stuck with the evidence showing global warming is a serious threat to mankind.

That's what we're cutting Social Security and Medicare for... so some Goldman-Sachs or UBS investment banker can guzzle $1000 bottles of wine and vomit them back up again.

Here's one investment banker's first hand version of what investment banking really has become...

"...My first job out of Cornell was on the trading floor at UBS. So when news would hit the wire about an American company closing a domestic factory, I felt a good deal of conflict as I watched the company’s stock price go up as a result. Those sorts of factory closings had ruined my neighbourhood, my city, and many of the people I’d grown up with. I was not alone in this feeling, but there were not many of us, either. One of my British friends from the training programme, who later became a currency trader, once told me: “I mean Christ, mate, every time they close a factory in Wales the goddamn market goes up. The whole system’s a little fucked, don’t you think?” And of course it was. The question was how to deal with it.

The easiest thing was buy into the system, convince ourselves that there was no other way to live. A few semesters worth of economics classes certainly helped; the in-house economics classes taught by the bank helped even more. The financial markets operate on the principle that, at our core, we’re all basically shit: selfish, self-interested creatures. There’s a whole branch of economics devoted to proving that if you help someone, say, run in front of a speeding train to push another person out of the way, you are actually acting out of self-interest, not altruism; that what most of us would consider humankind’s cardinal virtues - love, honor, compassion - do not actually exist.

The idea that we’re nothing more than selfish animals is an attractive philosophy to a person pulling down a few million dollars a year. It is a philosophy that negates guilt. The guilty feeling a normal person gets while visiting a Third World country is the same feeling a senior investment banker gets when they see a working class neighborhood in Birmingham or Philadelphia. When your paycheck could cover the salaries of a few hundred nurses or teachers, you need some explanation for why that’s okay. The only one that really works is that life is a pure meritocracy. That whether rich or poor, we’re all getting what we deserve.

The fact is, I became pretty good at making this argument myself. Until a roommate of mine, a guy named Mark Brewin, asked me: “So is that really what you want to be? A selfish animal?” “It’s not like we have a choice,” I said. “No,” he said. “You always have a choice. It’s just easier to pretend that you don’t.” Ouch. The strangest thing was, this thing I’d wanted for so long, this chance to become wealthy, was causing me more internal conflict than anything I’d ever done. I began writing a second novel, about a kid from the provinces who comes to Wall Street and is both drawn in and horrified by the culture of excess.

I understood it well. I put on 45 pounds in my first year at the bank, and, as you might guess, it was not from eating McDonalds. Occasionally I ate stuff like sushi, but mostly it was steak. We went to the good places like Sparks, Peter Luger’s, and the Strip House. We tended to look down on chains like Morton’s and Ruth’s Chris-they were for car dealers or stock brokers, not traders. Regardless of where we ate, we ate in quantity. My standard strategy was to order half a dozen appetisers, plus a steak and lobster, plus a few desserts and much wine as I could drink, as long it was under a few hundred dollars a bottle. Followed by a digestif, typically a 30-year-old port. There’s not any way to justify this except to say I was trying to catch up to my colleagues. We would treat those restaurants like Roman vomitoriums. And it wasn’t the food so much as the wine. Being a junior employee, I couldn’t really order bottles that cost more than a few hundred dollars, but the senior guys could get nicer stuff - Opus One, Chateau Latour. As long as we were out with a client, the bank paid. I remember being stunned the first time I saw a dinner bill for ten grand. But that was just the beginning.

What it boiled down to was austerity for everyone else and rampant consumption for ourselves. I never saw anyone literally set fire to money, but I did drink most of a bottle of 1983 Margaux ($2,000)...."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/american-ex...

Nobody debunked "An Inconvenient Truth. What part of "ALL Nobel Prize winning scientists agree global warming is threat to humanity." do you not understand?

There is no more controversy about global warming in the scientific community than there is about evolution. Both concepts are considered settled.

There lots of discussion in the corporate owned media because oil companies buy a whole lot of television time falsely claiming the science on global warming isn't settled.

I wonder if Don Henley knows the record companies are now trying to define musicians legally contract employees. All that music Don Henley recorded wouldn't belong to musicians. Musicians would be contract labor. Those rights would all belong to the record companies.

Comcast customer service has a resemblance to retail shopping in the old Soviet Union. Ohh... you think it can't possibly be that bad. You get stuck having to take your cable box to a Comcast customer service center. You'll see.

I suspect the content owners are going to get a big load of IP addresses from the ISPs and file a big huge pile of criminal charges or civil lawsuits against the people who the ISPs finger. The ISPs will then pretend to act hurt when the content owners violate this agreement.

Give your internet account to a fine business establishment who doesn't do something as ridiculous as trusting Time Warner or Comcast with confidential customer information.

Willing to cut the guy a break, huh? How big of you.

Are you willing to actually do any work to improve it, or give a big cash grant so KhanAcademy.org can hire those professional programmers to help out?

More proof that no good deed goes unpunished.

Will you be putting up your own website of free programming tutorial videos done the way you think they ought to be done? Will you offer to volunteer your time to Khan Academy.org to produce programming videos the way you think they should be done?

Yeah... that's what I though.

You're wrong. The Mozilla Evernote add-on is broken right now. The Chrome Evernote addon is working fine.

How are Mozilla developers like you going to keep my Evernote add-on working in Mozilla now? You guys will be breaking all the add-ons every 3 months, too.

Mozilla developers needs to be thinking about more than what is convenient for Mozilla developers. There's a whole of eco-system of add-ons, themes, etc that other people provide that makes for Mozilla you are going to be breaking every couple of months now.

Firefox isn't just killing their Enterprise customers. This is going to hurt all the users who like to use add-ons with Firefox.

I'm an Evernote premium user. New versions every 3 months means the Evernote add-on gets broken for a month every 3 months. That's not gonna work.

At 30,000 ft.