All hail Google. Again.
Check it out at Gmail.com/call.
The geek inside me just jizzed his pants.
ROOTING FOR YOU! PART 2
5 hours ago
Content
Climategate: Just one of 94 "gates" Al Gore doesn't want you to know about
“The most telling point is that after spending $30 billion on pure science research no one is able to point to a single piece of empirical evidence that man-made carbon dioxide has a significant effect on the global climate.” Source
Well, we've all heard about Climategate and the scientific scandals designed to fool people into believing their Honda Civics were somehow warming the planet. But that was just the beginning. Here are 10 more "gate" scandals that have rocked the quickly vanishing global warming movement into oblivion (see source below for a link to the rest, and click on the title links for each one listed here):Claims of accelerating sea level rise are misleading.
2. African agriculture claim-gate
IPCC wrongly claims that in some African countries yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent by 2020.
3. AIT-gate and British High Court
35 errors or gross exaggerations are found in Al Gore’s Oscar winning mockumentary An Inconvenient Truth.
4. NEW! Alaskan glaciers-gate
Loss of glaciers in Alaska was grossly exaggerated.
5. Amazon rainforest-gate and here (NEW!) and here (NEW!)
IPCC cites “robust” source: green activist organisation WWF. WWF’s source was merely an anonymous brief on forest fire risks posted in 1999 and taken down four years later.
6. Antarctic sea ice-gate
Antarctic sea ice underestimated by 50%.
7. NEW! Authoritarian science-gate
The science says… Science is increasingly used as an instrument of authority to impose public policy.
8. NEW! Australia-gate Australia temperature adjusted upwards to show more warming.
9. Bangladesh-gate
IPCC inflates Bangladesh doomsday forecasts in 2007 4AR.
10. NEW! Biofuel-gate
Efforts to save the planet by using bio-fuels are in fact rapidly destroying it.
http://pgosselin.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/climate-scandals-list-of-94-climate-gates/
Sorry, hippies. I didn't mean to ruin your day.
Sorry, hippies. I didn't mean to ruin your day.
The WINDroid has arrived
Finally, my fellow geeks, the day has come. You can now pair your WIND Mobile unlimited voice and data plan to a new WIND-branded Android smartphone for under two bills. No contract of course.People have been waiting for months to see some droid goodness @ WIND and although you still won't get any high-end Nexus Ones or Samsung Vibrants directly from our favourite new carrier at this point, you can now pick up the Huawei U8100 compact touch screen smartphone. This device is basically identical to the T-Mobile Pulse Mini which is sold overseas and manufactured by Huawei as well.
It's quite basic with only a QVGA resistive touch screen but it's uber powerful at the same time as it runs Google's Android 2.1 right out of the box! Since Android is now the fastest selling smartphone OS in North America it only makes sense that WIND got on the bandwagon, and hopefully higher end models will be offered sooner than later.
Although let's be honest...those who are truly geekoids have already gotten their unlocked top of the line Androids running on WIND service. This basic model is targeted towards the budget friendly crowd and will be a hot seller. It will also introduce even more people to the supreme awesomeness of Google's Android software and overall radness of knowing you're helping to iKick Apple's arrogant ass.
Lucky as I am to be proudly working for WIND, I had the chance to play with this phone for most of the day and I have to admit I'm quite impressed. Sure it ain't no high res movie machine. It ain't no Snapdragon powerhouse. The keyboard can be a pain. But it does run Android, and that means a lot. It has instant access to thousands of applications and has a cool easy to use interface that people just love. It plays your own media and YouTube quite well and feels REALLY good in your hand. Perfect size for small pockets and for those who think devices like iPhones and Qwerty sliders are just too damn big.
The design is gorgeous, it looks and feels far more expensive than it really is. The only branding on the device is a WIND logo on the back cover and a start-up/shut-down screen saver. As far as I can tell the software isn't crippled at all and it's really a true Android experience.
Web pages load fast over both 3G and wifi, although the screen real estate and resolution hamper the experience somewhat. Still better than many higher end non-Android phones mind you, and it will be more than adequate for its target market. Facebook and Twitter are pre-installed, and countless more goodies await in the Marketplace.
There is a bit of lag at times depending on what's running in the background but I'm sure an upcoming upgrade to Android 2.2 Froyo will alleviate a lot of that. (Someone out there is probably already upgrading it, and I'm already stoked to see the results)
The new mini-droid is now officially available at WIND stores for a mere $160 + tax. I know this sounds like an ad for WIND, but I'll have you know that I ended up buying one myself. I'm posting this from my laptop which is tethered to my U8100 right now! This thing makes a great modem too, fyi. Ummm...yeah, and for that price, I simply cannot find anything to complain about. So, go get one. Or you could spend a day waiting in line and signing a three year overpriced contract for an overhyped phone that loses signal when you touch it. Ha. Or perhaps you just like the little picture of fruit on the back. Whatever.
I bet if you try this affordable droid instead, you'll end up on the Google train before you know it and you'll smartly spend your hard earned money on a Nexus One in no time... ;)
Bid Adios to the Anti-Global Warming Movement
Now that Harry Reid has abandoned cap-and-trade, the movement has no ideas left.Future historians will pinpoint Democratic Sen. Harry Reid's energy legislation, released last Tuesday, as the moment that the political movement of global warming entered an irreversible death spiral. It is kaput! Finito! Done!
This is not just my read of the situation; it is also that of Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate-turned-Democratic-apparatchik. In his latest column for The New York Times, Krugman laments that “all hope for action to limit climate change died” in 2010. Democrats had a brief window of opportunity before the politics of global warming changed forever in November to ram something through Congress. But the Reid bill chose not to do so for the excellent reason that Democrats want to avoid an even bigger beating than the one they already face at the polls.
Not only does the bill avoid all mention of an economy-wide emission cap through a cap-and-tax—oops, cap-and-trade—scheme, it even avoids capping emissions or imposing renewable electricity standards on utility companies, the minimum that enviros had hoped for. Beyond stricter regulations on off-shore drilling, it offers subsidies to both homeowners to encourage them to make their homes more energy efficient and the nation's fleet of trucks to use cleaner burning natural gas. This is not costless, but it is a bargain compared with the “comprehensive” action on energy and climate change that President Barack Obama had been threatening.
Krugman blames this outcome on—you'll never guess this!—greedy energy companies and cowardly Republicans who sold out. But the fault, Dear Paul, lies not in them, but in your own weakling theories.
The truth is that there never has been an environmental issue that has enjoyed greater corporate support. Early in the global warming crusade, a coalition of corporations called United States Climate Action Partnership was formed with the express purpose of lobbying Congress to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It included major utilities (Duke Energy) and gas companies (BP) that stood to gain by hobbling the coal industry through a cap-and-trade scheme. Meanwhile, the Breakthrough Institute, a highly respected liberal outfit whose mission is to rejuvenate the progressive movement in this country, points out that environmental groups spent at least $100 million over the past two years executing what was arguably the best mobilization campaign in history. Despite all of this, notes Breakthrough, there is little evidence to suggest that cap-and-trade would have mustered more than 43 votes in the Senate.
This means that lucre is not the only motivating force in politics. Indeed, lobbyists are effective generally when they represent causes that coincide with the will of constituents, which is far from the case here. Voters are reluctant to accept economic pain to address remote causes with an uncertain upside. Heck, they are dubious even when the cause is not so remote and has a demonstrable upside. Take Social Security and Medicare. It is a mathematical certainty that, without reform, these programs will go bankrupt, jeopardizing the health care and retirement benefits of tens of millions Americans. Even though the cost of action is far smaller compared with the cost of inaction, persuading voters to do something is an uphill battle.
Yet even in the heyday of the consensus on global warming there was never this kind of certainty. The ClimateGate scandal—in which prominent climatologists were caught manipulating data to exaggerate the observed warming—has significantly weakened this consensus. But even if it hadn't, climate change is too complex an issue to ever be established with anything approaching iron-clad certainty. Hence, it was inevitable that it would run into a political dead-end.
This is exactly what the Reid bill represents. Indeed, if Democrats backed-off from their grand designs to cut carbon emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 with sizable majorities in Congress and a “celestial healer” in the White House there is little chance that they will ever be able to accomplish anything better at a later date. And if America—the richest country in the world and the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases—won't act, there is a snowball's chance in Mumbai that India or China will.
Of course, authoritarian countries have a little bit more leeway than democracies to push unpalatable remedies. But it is not within the power of even China's autocrats to shove an energy diet down the throat of their people on the theory that the pain from it will be short-lived because it will trigger a search for better and cleaner energy alternatives—the totality of the green pitch for action.
This doesn't mean that there aren't a few more whimpers left in the global warming movement before it finally passes. On the international front, the buzz is that the Fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change currently in the works will be even more alarmist than the previous one. However, thanks to ClimateGate, it will give greater play to alternative voices. “Going forward, the general perception won't be one of consensus,” notes Cato Institute Senior Fellow Jerry Taylor, an expert on energy issues, “but one of increasing appreciation of disagreement on the issue.”
Domestically, green groups will prod the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions more aggressively. But this will be harder to do when Republicans inevitably make gains in Congress in November. Indeed, they will likely revive a Senate resolution floated by Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, banning the EPA from regulating emissions from stationary sources, which lost by just four votes last month. Global warming warriors are also talking about fighting the battle for emission cuts state-by-state. But they will lose on that front too. California, which embraced such cuts four years ago, is already facing a ballot initiative in November to scrap the law, as it loses business and jobs to other states. Indeed, the same collective action problems that prevent global action on climate change will inevitably bedevil state-level action too.
The global warming warriors will likely have to go through the five stages of grief before accepting that their moment has passed and the movement is dead. Thinkers more sophisticated than Krugman will no doubt point to many proximate causes for its demise beyond evil Republicans such as lack of engagement by President Obama, bad economic timing, filibuster rules, what have you.
The reality is, however, that the crusade was doomed from the start because of its own inherent weaknesses. RIP.
Bid Adios to the Anti-Global Warming Movement
Future historians will pinpoint Democratic Sen. Harry Reid's energy legislation, released last Tuesday, as the moment that the political movement of global warming entered an irreversible death spiral. It is kaput! Finito! Done!This is not just my read of the situation; it is also that of Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate-turned-Democratic-apparatchik. In his latest column for The New York Times, Krugman laments that “all hope for action to limit climate change died” in 2010. Democrats had a brief window of opportunity before the politics of global warming changed forever in November to ram something through Congress. But the Reid bill chose not to do so for the excellent reason that Democrats want to avoid an even bigger beating than the one they already face at the polls.
Not only does the bill avoid all mention of an economy-wide emission cap through a cap-and-tax—oops, cap-and-trade—scheme, it even avoids capping emissions or imposing renewable electricity standards on utility companies, the minimum that enviros had hoped for. Beyond stricter regulations on off-shore drilling, it offers subsidies to both homeowners to encourage them to make their homes more energy efficient and the nation's fleet of trucks to use cleaner burning natural gas. This is not costless, but it is a bargain compared with the “comprehensive” action on energy and climate change that President Barack Obama had been threatening.
Krugman blames this outcome on—you'll never guess this!—greedy energy companies and cowardly Republicans who sold out. But the fault, Dear Paul, lies not in them, but in your own weakling theories.
The truth is that there never has been an environmental issue that has enjoyed greater corporate support. Early in the global warming crusade, a coalition of corporations called United States Climate Action Partnership was formed with the express purpose of lobbying Congress to cut greenhouse gas emissions. It included major utilities (Duke Energy) and gas companies (BP) that stood to gain by hobbling the coal industry through a cap-and-trade scheme. Meanwhile, the Breakthrough Institute, a highly respected liberal outfit whose mission is to rejuvenate the progressive movement in this country, points out that environmental groups spent at least $100 million over the past two years executing what was arguably the best mobilization campaign in history. Despite all of this, notes Breakthrough, there is little evidence to suggest that cap-and-trade would have mustered more than 43 votes in the Senate.
This means that lucre is not the only motivating force in politics. Indeed, lobbyists are effective generally when they represent causes that coincide with the will of constituents, which is far from the case here. Voters are reluctant to accept economic pain to address remote causes with an uncertain upside. Heck, they are dubious even when the cause is not so remote and has a demonstrable upside. Take Social Security and Medicare. It is a mathematical certainty that, without reform, these programs will go bankrupt, jeopardizing the health care and retirement benefits of tens of millions Americans. Even though the cost of action is far smaller compared with the cost of inaction, persuading voters to do something is an uphill battle.
Yet even in the heyday of the consensus on global warming there was never this kind of certainty. The ClimateGate scandal—in which prominent climatologists were caught manipulating data to exaggerate the observed warming—has significantly weakened this consensus. But even if it hadn't, climate change is too complex an issue to ever be established with anything approaching iron-clad certainty. Hence, it was inevitable that it would run into a political dead-end.
This is exactly what the Reid bill represents. Indeed, if Democrats backed-off from their grand designs to cut carbon emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 with sizable majorities in Congress and a “celestial healer” in the White House there is little chance that they will ever be able to accomplish anything better at a later date. And if America—the richest country in the world and the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases—won't act, there is a snowball's chance in Mumbai that India or China will.
Of course, authoritarian countries have a little bit more leeway than democracies to push unpalatable remedies. But it is not within the power of even China's autocrats to shove an energy diet down the throat of their people on the theory that the pain from it will be short-lived because it will trigger a search for better and cleaner energy alternatives—the totality of the green pitch for action.
This doesn't mean that there aren't a few more whimpers left in the global warming movement before it finally passes. On the international front, the buzz is that the Fifth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change currently in the works will be even more alarmist than the previous one. However, thanks to ClimateGate, it will give greater play to alternative voices. “Going forward, the general perception won't be one of consensus,” notes Cato Institute Senior Fellow Jerry Taylor, an expert on energy issues, “but one of increasing appreciation of disagreement on the issue.”
Domestically, green groups will prod the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gas emissions more aggressively. But this will be harder to do when Republicans inevitably make gains in Congress in November. Indeed, they will likely revive a Senate resolution floated by Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, banning the EPA from regulating emissions from stationary sources, which lost by just four votes last month. Global warming warriors are also talking about fighting the battle for emission cuts state-by-state. But they will lose on that front too. California, which embraced such cuts four years ago, is already facing a ballot initiative in November to scrap the law, as it loses business and jobs to other states. Indeed, the same collective action problems that prevent global action on climate change will inevitably bedevil state-level action too.
The global warming warriors will likely have to go through the five stages of grief before accepting that their moment has passed and the movement is dead. Thinkers more sophisticated than Krugman will no doubt point to many proximate causes for its demise beyond evil Republicans such as lack of engagement by President Obama, bad economic timing, filibuster rules, what have you.
The reality is, however, that the crusade was doomed from the start because of its own inherent weaknesses. RIP.
Shikha Dalmia is senior analyst at a Reason Foundation and a biweekly columnist at Forbes. This column originally appeared at Forbes.
Android Beats iPhone in Smartphone Sales
Android is now the fastest-growing smartphone OS in both overall share and sales of new devices — and for the first time, people in the U.S. bought more Android phones than iPhones.
According to a Nielsen study released Monday, 27% of all purchasers of smartphones in the past 6 months bought an Android phone, up from 17% in a poll from the year’s first quarter. The Android OS jumped to 14% of overall smartphone share, just behind Windows Mobile at 15%. Apple dropped from 27% to 23% of new smartphone sales, but kept its 28% second-place position in the total smartphone user base.
The report is probably most troubling for Blackberry, which while still first overall in total smartphone users and new sales, has seen a steady decline in its share of new purchasers, from 45% a year ago to 33% in the recent quarter. Only 42% of Blackberry owners say that they want to purchase a Blackberry next, with a full 50% leaning towards either an iPhone or Android.
Nielsen’s data is not broken down by carrier, but it’s no coincidence that Verizon has heavily promoted the Motorola Droid and other Android phones over both Blackberry and Windows smartphones, while Motorola has in turn pushed against the iPhone, which is exclusive to AT&T. (See Motorola’s new ad campaign for the Droid, “No Jacket Required.”)
John Gruber, whose popular blog Daring Fireball is mostly about Apple news and products, commented: “How much of Android’s U.S. success is attributable to Verizon’s strength as the number one U.S. carrier? I.e., how different would these numbers look in an alternate universe where Verizon, not AT&T, is the iPhone’s exclusive U.S. carrier?”
Gruber also noted that by only counting smartphones, Nielsen’s statistics exclude the iPad and iPod touch, which run Apple’s iOS; including these non-phone mobile devices would give a better picture of the total market for developers targeting each of these platforms. But it’s unclear whether Apple benefits more by having devices like the iPad counted with smartphones or laptops: another new report by IDC shows that if iPads are added to the company’s notebook sales, Apple jumps to third place in the global mobile computing market.