Note that only countries with over 10 requests have been included and that the population data is circa 2008/2009.

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Durkin intentionally ignores the last twenty years or so of climate data, which shows a huge divergence between the prediction of the solar-radiance model (which predicts temperature reduction) and the actual data which shows a sharp increase in global temperature. We are in fact going through the warmest period of climate since man invented farming. Durkin conveniently terminates his graphs at 1988.

The scariest part lies in something that was mentioned in Durkin’s film as an argument against human produced CO₂ as a cause of global warming– that the warming didn’t coincide with the post-war industrial boom.

This can hardly be accounted as an argument for his point of view, as climate effects often lag behind their causes by as much as several hundred years. Unfortunately for us the lag between carbon emission growth to temperature increase simply means that it might take us as many years or more between the time we finally hit the breaks on our carbon emissions to when we see the benefits, meanwhile we’re probably in for a hell of a ride. Literally.

As a side note, if anyone is interested, one of the prevailing theories of why we have only felt the effects of our emissions in the last twenty years is because the oceans were capable of absorbing a large amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but we have since saturated them.

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The article details attempts by schools around the world to ban unhealthy candy, which brought about a new type of dealer — the candy man: William Guntrip is a junk food dealer, and is making almost $100 daily selling junkfood on the playground.

The economic angle in the article is “some markets are irrepressible” and I agree completely.

Educate and regulate, do not ban.

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I suggest mandating that corporations’ true record become an inherent part of their identity.

Suppose the sum of each corporation’s criminal fines in the previous fiscal year compared to its revenue be normalized against other corporations to a score from 40 (Failed) to 100 (A+ Excellent) and be made mandatory to display next to the corporate name, logo and all brands. This includes the brand appearance in graphic logos, press releases, sponsorships, advertisement — the works.

As public awareness grows would a consumer choose a Nike F(tm) or a ShoeBrand A+ product?

Technorati tags: Politics, Corporations

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This is the case not because Office 2007 is especially buggy or resource-heavy but because it is an almost complete rewrite. The user-interface and user-experience are completely different from previous versions.

For computer savvy individuals this may be a boon, as it can be fun to learn a new product — however — for IT managers that will have to bear the budgetary burden of retraining entire corps of minimum and medium wage office grunts to use the new version, this is a definite bust.

This, along with the fact that it takes only one copy of Office 2007 and a Visual Basic macro to convert all the Word documents stored in the corporate database into an open (or more open, at least) XML-based format, voids any justification that previously existed to prevent switching an organization to OpenOffice or other alternatives.

To put it simply: “If we have to re-train the entire organization anyway, why not re-train to something that costs us less? Let’s switch to OpenOffice!”

The retraining costs pull the rug from under the last argument a Pro-Microsoft IT manager may use to justify his budget request. The largest part of Total-Cost-of-Ownership for office productivity suites is the training of personnel. If before, one could standardize on Microsoft Office because that is the suite that people came with prior experience for, this is no longer the case — it is a different product, as different from Office 2003 as OpenOffice is, and even more so!

Microsoft’s sales-force are obviously aware of this chink in their armor as I’ve had reports that they are offering free re-training for Israeli government IT departments in exchange for joining as Office 2007 beta-sites. While Microsoft is trying to create a critical mass for Office 2007 not only for this reason but also to bootstrap the usual must-upgrade-to-open-Word-documents cycle, the fact they are doing this during the beta period is indicative that they are aware of their weakness. Usually they wait for the official product release to do this, so to allow those who can’t open a later-version document the chance to buy the product immediately…

The bottom-line is that open-alternative advocates who want to make use of this temporary weakness of Microsoft’s must collaborate now to raise awareness of the alternatives and inspire appreciation of the hidden training costs of upgrading to Office 2007.

Microsoft does not let its guard down very often, it is time for the tides to turn.

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Neoconservatism might look like it has one or two good ideas at first. This illusion comes because one of the core pillars of neoconservatism is the notion that some things are worth fighting for.

At first glance it seems surprising that many of the leading neocons are Jewish intellectuals as the elite U.S. Jews have a history of strong pacifism. But if you take a closer look you will see that for many Jews, pacifism stops at a very defined point — where it clashes with the certainty that without U.S. intervention Nazi Germany would have won World War II and successfully eradicated most if not all of the Jewish people.

Now– once you cross the line to believe that some things are worth fighting for, it is hard to know where to stop.

For future want-to-be neocons, I’ll give you a two part clue:
1. Unless they really (really!) ask for your assistance don’t bend over backwards to meddle in other peoples’ business.
2. Otherwise, fight your own wars and only the real ones, not the concocted ones.

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While seeing the first video, I felt at first a very strong cognitive dissonance as a fellow commenter on SE described it.

The dissonance arose because usually it takes intelligence and self-awareness for a person to be able to laugh at himself. As I don’t consider George W. Bush to be intelligent or self-aware, seeing him take part in his own roast gave me a start.

At first, seeing Bush make fun of himself seemed to say:
“I am not detached from reality– obviously I know what people are saying and can even laugh at it — But I am doing what I think is right and never mind my popularity”.

Holy Gristles Batman! It almost made me like the guy, but only for a few seconds, because–

Next I watched Stephen Colbert really fire up that roast and it was while watching the amazing testes that Colbert demonstrated, noting that each and every one of his jokes were about the real substance and not superficial back-slapping slapstick, that it finally clicked:

Bush’s PR guy is a fucking genius.

In G.W’s ‘roast’ by Steve Bridges the jokes were related to his occasional mispronunciation or his ‘cowboy’-ish nature. To rephrase: the jokes involved every trait of the president (and not the presidency) that the media focused-on that have nothing to do with his policy.

So it boils down to being just another type of spin, albeit an ingenious one that is designed to make it seem like the reason Bush is disapproved by two thirds of the American public is because he stumbles in his speech and not because his administration is the worst, most corrupt and least democratic administration since Nixon’s.

The message that Bush’s PR guy tried to convey is that this president’s low approval ratings are a temporary popularity glitch that will blow over while Colbert’s message was that the low approval ratings represent a dissatisfaction with a presidency riddled with corruption and incompetence. Colbert didn’t spare the correspondents themselves and skewered the media for allowing Bush to spin it all his way.

Colbert made it obvious to me that without him for balance the correspondents would have returned to stuffing their smug faces without flinching, right after Bush used them to further spin his agenda.

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