Fvck off with stealing my focus. I am the human, I'm the one who should decide what window is the most important. You don't need to help me by popping up request dialogs and email notifications in the middle of my typing, thereby screwing up not only my document, but also my train of thought.
Do you brilliant designer people ever actually use a computer? WTF is wrong with you?
MOSCOW, May 29 (Prime-Tass) -- A heat wave has hit Russia in recent days, with the temperature breaking records.
Monday was the hottest day in May in Moscow since records began to be kept 120 years ago, with the temperature hitting 32.2 degrees Celsius, the Moscow Meteorological Bureau reported.
The hot weather caused fires at 14 electric power substations in Moscow.
To find out, Mr. Sumaila spent a decade building up two huge databases, using hordes of research assistants travelling the world. One database showed the price of each type of fish in every nation since 1955; the other showed exactly what each country's fishermen were being paid for. This, combined with Mr. Pauly's fish-stocks databases, allowed him to see why the fish were disappearing.
What he discovered, and documented in a series of fascinating research reports last year, is that the self-balancing nature of fishing is thrown out of kilter by the widespread government practice of giving fishermen subsidies for boat building and, especially, fuel. This money, which he described as "bad subsidies," are exactly equivalent to the scale of overfishing - the subsidies make the difference between a renewable resource and a dying resource.
Not only that, but fuel subsidies, he discovered, are responsible for the continuation of the most devastating practice in fishing, bottom trawling, which tears up the sea and destroys species. Countries pay $152-million a year in fuel subsidies to trawlers, which accounts for 25 per cent of their income. And the profit they make is only 10 per cent.
"Without subsidies," he concluded, "the bulk of the world's bottom-trawl fleet [would] operate at a loss, thereby reducing the current threat to . . . fish stocks."
Without "bad" subsidies, which amount to $20-billion a year worldwide, there would be fewer people in the fishing business around the world. But Mr. Sumaila concluded that this process would actually give the world more fish.
"There is a potential to actually increase the catch if we can agree to reduce the scale in the short term," he said, "and avoid subsidizing the industry too much in the long term."
I f**king hate subsidies.
Globe and Mail - A dose of global cod-liver oil - May 26, 2007 (full text for subscribers only)
Apparently I have neglected to rant on here about the stupid car Sens flags. I hate inefficiency. Why don't you just attach a giant Sens drag parachute to your car while you're at it.
Attaching two flags to the windows of a medium-sized car causes it to burn an extra litre of fuel per hour, according to Antonio Filippone of the University of Manchester's School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering.
Mr. Filippone carried out the research for a paper called "What is the fuel wastage from the flag on your vehicle?"
"The extra drag generated by these flags can reduce a car's fuel economy by up to three per cent during a one-hour journey," he found.
He estimated that flags flown on their cars by half a million England soccer-team fans during last year's month-long World Cup tournament burned up at least 1.2 million litres of extra gas and released an additional 2.8 million kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere.
I thought The Black Dahlia would be an interesting noir-ish mystery, but instead, while it has nice set decoration, it is long and boring and complicated. It goes on and on and on... and quite frankly at some point (after the world's least-secret 1esbian nightclub, which was much more boring than it sounds) I gave up.
Didn't finish watching.
Not recommended.
In the trend of long, dull movies, you can add The Good Shepherd. While I'm sure it is accurate that bland, cold men from Yale went about attempting to construct a world order with mixed and often disastrous results, I'm not sure I have to watch it unroll hour after hour.
PS Super-smart spy guys, here's a hint: if a woman wants to sleep with you, she is a always a spy and the room is bugged. You might not want to tell her, say, all of your top secrets.
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