brettbh

Sorry, but you dragged yourself into it ;-)

So, tell me: did you understand the point that Mark was attempting to make here or are you too as thick as a wall?

Yup, it looks good but a fail to see how the concept can be regarded as green in any way other than colour!

>> In 90% of the companies that I work with that statement is NOT TRUE, they are there because they are CHEAPER but that is not "off shoring" that is the issue. Offshoring is when the send an entire corporate function to say India, the people in India's ONLY value is CHEAP.<< Do you bitch and complain when Nissan builds a US car factory? Do you bitch and complain when McDonalds opens a “restaurant†in another country? Do you bitch and complain when an overseas company opens a branch in the US? Do you bitch and complain when Dell sells its computers in other countries? No? Then why the heck should you bitch and complain when a US company decides relocate a portion of its operations? Do you want US companies to be able to compete internationally on a level playing field? Or would you prefer to see them made non-viable by an additional tax burden? Would you prefer US companies to be able to reduce costs by offshoring in the same way that other companies in other countries can reduce costs by offshoring? Or would you prefer them to become non-competitive? I mentioned previously that, "during the 1800's, the Luddites resisted automation in the weaving industry fearing that it would lead to job losses, yet that automation actually made the industry so efficient that it resulted in jobs being offshored from India to the UK." But that's not where the story ends. Industry in Asia eventually caught up and the jobs that had been offshored to the UK ended up being re-offshored back to India. For decades, we have seen a steady relocation of manufacturing jobs from the US to China and other countries where products can be made for a reduced cost. Has that led to mass unemployment in the US? Nope, the US economy has continued to expland with jobs being created in other sectors. Now some of those jobs are being relocated and, as happened with displaced manufacturing jobs, will be also be replaced with jobs in other sectors. The point here is that offshoring is an economic inevitability and there is nothing that countries can do to prevent it without impacting on the ability of companies to compete in international markets. >>Many offshore call centers for example have people that have a hard time understanding your language and most are reading from a script, vary from the script and they suddenly have computer problem and ask you to call back later, the ding the company twice, once for the first call and the second time if you call back.<< Yup, and the same can be said for many US-based call center staff.

>>In the US in certain areas it borders on criminal fraud.<< In the majority of countries, it is a criminal offence punishable by a fine or imprisonment or both. >>out sourcing" is destroying many economies because it not being used to grow a business but only to reduce cost, in some cases to the point of destroying the long term life of the business. At some point, governments may have to tax outsourced jobs to force companys to retain the skill sets needed to keep a business viable.<< Tax a company that chooses to offshore a portion of its operations and you run the risk of that company offshoring its entire operations. Offshoring is an inevitability and it's nothing new. In the UK during the 1800's, the Luddites resisted automation in the weaving industry fearing that it would lead to job losses, yet that automation actually made the industry so efficient that it resulted in jobs being offshored from India to the UK. Swings and roundabouts. Countries and companies that embrace offshoring will prosper; countries and companies that attempt to resist it will suffer. Note too that offshoring is often about more than cutting costs. Visit the US campus of Microsoft or any other major technology company, and you'll find that there are numerous non-US workers. Those workers are not there because they are cheaper than US workers, they are there because they are better than US workers. Like many other western counties, the US needs to invest more in education in order to produce people with better skills. Once that happens, companies will have less incentive to import workers and/or to offshore jobs.

An evil looking bunch, without doubt!

>>It's not something you can make a living out off.<< Oh, but it is. Not much of a living, maybe; but a living nonetheless. Especially when the welfare is paid in addition to some other fraudulently non-declared source of income. >>It's just an ugly idea some people have that sick and unemployed people somehow have chosen being so.<< Complete hogwash! In every country that has a welfare system, that system is abused. That's not to say that there are not valid claims (there are), but there are also enormous numbers of false or fraudulent claims.

Yup! It's the Jade Goody of the motor world!

Bloody hell! That thing is uglier than a lard bucket full of baboon bums!

I assume that you drive in a different manner to the EPA: As a means of reflecting real world fuel economy more accurately, the EPA adds three new tests that will combine with the current city and highway cycles to determine fuel economy of new vehicles, beginning with the 2008 model year. A high speed/quick acceleration loops lasts 10 minutes, covers 8 miles (13 km), averages 48 mph (77 km/h) and reaches a top speed of 80 mph (130 km/h). Four stops are included, and brisk acceleration maximizes at a rate of 8.46 mph (13.62 km/h) per second. The engine begins warm and air conditioning is not used. Ambient temperature varies between 68 to 86 °F (30 °C). List of UK fuel economy ratings.

Yup, but sometimes probably should be a good enough standard of proof upon which to base a decision. Leap from the top of the Space Needle, and you'll probably die - so don't do it. Keep on as we are doing, and we'll probably cause climate change - so don't do it. The recent glut of unusually hot years is incredibly unlikely to happen in a stable climate. Eduardo Zorita of Germany's Institute for Coastal Research and colleagues calculated the probability of this happening in a range of scenarios. A key consideration is that the weather one year is not independent of the weather the year before. If it were, the odds of having any given temperature would be the same each year, and the likelihood of getting a such a 17-year cluster would be tiny – on the order of 1 in 10 trillion. "An anomalous warm year tends to be followed by a warm year," says Zorita, because of the way oceans store heat and release it slowly. "A devil's advocate could argue that the clustering of warmest years at the end of the record could be simply due to chance, since the climate system has a natural memory." However, even when Zorita included this natural feedback in his model, but excluded global warming, the odds of observing the cluster of record-breaking years was still about 1 in 10,000. "We cannot ascribe the anomaly to any particular physical factor, like anthropogenic greenhouse gases," says Zorita. "But our conclusions are consistent with those of the fourth IPCC report," which states there is a very high probability that human emissions are causing global warming. More.

Scientists say they now have unambiguous evidence that the warming in the Arctic is accelerating. Computer models have long predicted that decreasing sea ice should amplify temperature changes in the northern polar region. Julienne Stroeve, from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, told a meeting of the American Geophysical Union that this process was under way. More.

Abnormal conditions prove nothing. Could an overall warming result in unusually cold conditions in some locations? Maybe. Maybe not. We simply do not understand enough about climatic drivers to be able to say for sure. Heck, we don't even understand the causes of events which are known to have a major impact on our climate: El Niño and La Niña. As I have said previously, all we can do at the point in time is to accept the word of the world's leading climate scientists who have concluded that man's actions are very probably causing the climate to warm.

Huh?

It'd save more than 350 hours each year in an environment with 1,000 desktops. Or, rather, it would if it worked!

I thought that Kawaii was an island in the Pacific? See, I knew that you watched too much TV!

I thought Tufts was a dog show :mellow:

Erm, which is exactly what I said: The money saved should be used to increase the incomes of the bottom and mid-level earners and to better support health, education and other essential services. While I do think that welfare rates should be increased (for genuine cases of need), I also think that welfare systems should be radically overhauled to make being workless a much less attractive proposition. There should be compulsory work schemes, more comprehensive validation of claims of being unable to work due to ill health, penalties for people who become pregnant while receiving welfare (you can have as many children as you like, but don’t expect the state to support them) and, in appropriate cases, compulsory rehabilitation. The minimum wage should also be increased. In Kansas, the basic MW is $2.65 with hours in excess of 46 being paid at one and a half times that rate ($3.95). This means that the MW for a 50 hour week is a paltry $137.70. Shocking! I am not suggesting that Bill Fuld, CEO of Lehman Brothers, should have his $45 million compensation package reduced to the same level as a burger cook in McDs, but the gap should undoubtedly be closed. That said, in Fuld’s case, maybe he does deserve to paid at the same rate as a whopper-flipper!

What fun would that be? Plus, enforcement by the police would have an obvious cost impact. Hunting, OTOH, could be licensed, creating a revenue stream which could be put into environmental causes.

I am not suggesting that people be given for nothing. On the contrary, I think that the majority of countries need to completely overhaul their welfare systems to make unemployment a much less attractive option. What I am suggesting is that we need to ensure that the money is shared evenly. I do not think that a single, standard wage should be applied to all workers, but nor do I think that CEOs should receive multi-million dollar compensation packages – compensation packages which are, in one way or another, paid for by Joe Public. I can only assume that you must be one of the 5% as, if you were not, you’d see a real problem with this ... Take a random 100 Americans with a combined wealth of $10,000 (to keep the math simple). 5 of those Americans will share about $5,000 between them - $1,000 each; the other 95 will share the remaining $5,000 between them - about $50 each. And the split is even more inequal in some other countries.

Yup, this thread really illustrates the problems associated with obtaining information from ad-supported websites. The more content a website has, the greater their ad revenue will be and so quality takes second place to quantity. And, if you ask a blogger to write a green tip each day at $20 a pop, you can bet your bottom dollar that he'll find something to write about each day - and, more often that not, he’ll do that by reworking (mis)information from other websites. Here’s a recent example which appeared on numerous Windows websites, trickling down from blogger to blogger to blogger with each being paid for the submission and/or collecting the ad revenue: When you have a computer with a recent model CPU, chances are it's a dual-core CPU. Both Intel & AMD have been producing dual core CPU's for a few years now. By default, Windows Vista will only use a single core during boot-up. You can easily change this from the System Configuration utility: 1) In Vista's Start Search type msconfig & hit the [Enter] key on your keyboard 2) Once System Configuration has started, select the Boot tab and click the Advanced Options button 3) Check the Number of processors check box, and choose 2 for the number of processors (Figure) 4) Click OK twice. In my testing this reduced my boot-up time around 5 seconds. http://www.helpwithwindows.com/WindowsVist..._Boot_Time.html “In my testing ...†Haha! Caught in lie! You didn’t really test this at all, did you, Mr Blogger? Had you done so, you would have discovered that this setting did not decrease your boot speed at all! Why? Because the tip is BS! By default, Vista does not use only one core of a dual or quad core proc during boot, it actually uses all of them. The number of procs option in MSCONFIG exists so that users can change the default behaviour (set Vista not to use all cores) during diagnostics/troubleshooting. But back to Dan's RAM tip. I’d guess that he obtained it from some commercial website which had copied it from some other commercial website that had posted it without checking it’s accuracy simply in order to obtain the ad bucks. And that’s how misinformation is spread. And misinformation is why people end up buying things like bamboo USB sticks instead of doing things that may really help them become more environmentally-friendly! I'm not being critical of websites which are supported by ad revenue, but people do need to remember that the primary goal of many such sites is not to help people help the environment, but to make bucks for the owner of the website.

Specially trained student-sniffer hunting dogs would probably be the best solution.

Additional oversight may stop abuses of the market, but it would not stop money being channelled from the bottom of the pyramid to the top. Take a random 100 Americans with a combined wealth of $10,000 (to keep the math simple). 5 of those Americans will share about $5,000 between them - $1,000 each; the other 95 will share the remaining $5,000 between them - about $50 each. And the split is even more inequal in some other countries. The fact is that there is only so much money to be shared around, and way too much of that money is channelled to those at the top of the pyramid. The playing field needs to be levelled. Salaries should be capped and additional taxes imposed on the super-rich. The money saved should be used to increase the incomes of the bottom and mid-level earners and to better support health, education and other essential services. I'm not suggesting that everybody be paid an identical wage or that our economic systems should prevent people from becoming wealthy; I'm simply suggesting that the money needs to be shared out in a way that benefits the majority of people, not the minority.

The deal revises (and supposedly strengthens) the ETS in addition to introducing a number of other measures/targets.

But do you really think that this is a sound economic model? Do you really think that it’s in the best interests of the majority of the population?