EU to ban cars from cities by 2050 – Telegraph

EU to ban cars from cities by 2050 – Telegraph.

Very sad…

Breitbart.tv » Shocking Audio: Rep. Dingell Says ObamaCare Will Eventually ‘Control the People’

Breitbart.tv » Shocking Audio: Rep. Dingell Says ObamaCare Will Eventually ‘Control the People’.

Whoops!  An inadvertent moment of honesty from Rep. Dingell.

Setting up a VPN connection on Mac OS X

If you’re new to OS X, here is a great step-by-step instruction guide to setting up a vpn connection.

Mac OS X 10.5 VPN.

Once you have that done, you may wish to connect to your Windows machine at work.  Download and install the Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection Client for Mac here.  The combo is working remarkably well for me.

Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels | Environment | guardian.co.uk

Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

This will hit some of my enviro-fanatic friends quite hard.  This report was always the proof cited to support the wild predictions in the IPCC report.  Now that it has been withdrawn, due to the inaccuracy of the “settled” science on which it was predicated, it’s my turn to turn up my nose in that condescending manner and lecture them about science.  Damn, I can’t keep a straight face.

Why Is Winter Snow Extent Interesting? « Watts Up With That?

Concerning the record snowfall in the nation’s capital, the last refuge for the scoundrels who shrilly protest the taunts from skeptics is a condescending lecture about how a few snowstorms are insufficient evidence to derive long term climate trends.

While it’s true that isolated weather events are not reliable indicators of broader trends, these particular storms are wonderfully ironic in that they are serving to illustrate an undeniable trend of increasing snow coverage in the northern hemisphere.

Why Is Winter Snow Extent Interesting? « Watts Up With That?.

How appropriate that Washington, after giving us all a snow job on climate change, is getting one of their own.

BP, ConocoPhillips and Caterpillar Pull Out of Climate Partnership – WSJ.com

BP, ConocoPhillips and Caterpillar Pull Out of Climate Partnership – WSJ.com.

The jig is up on the Global Warming blackmail scheme.  Three major energy companies are backing out of the Climate Action Partnership – which is nothing more than a lobbying group for energy companies whose main purpose is cutting deals with congress and the White House in exchange for preferential treatment in climate related tax legislation.

Make no mistake, these companies bear a large portion of responsibility for furthering the hoax of AGW.  By refusing to fight, and turning to negotiation instead, they publicly accepted the premise of the scam and used PR campaigns to try to persuade the media and the duped population that they were “greener” than the rest.

Fortunately, now that the IPCC reports have fallen apart and the authors disgraced, the big stick that had been used to beat these companies into submission is gone.  Let’s hope the executives of these companies will stop facilitating fascism and redirect the money budgeted for “green initiatives” to better energy and job producing projects.

Texas to challenge US greenhouse gas rules | Reuters

UPDATE 1-Texas to challenge US greenhouse gas rules | Reuters.

It’s about time the EPA’s ridiculous C02 regulations were challenged – especially in light of the collapsing IPCC science surrounding the issue. Go Texas!

Global Warming Hoax Reports begin Trickling into US Media

The Washington Times is running a story today that summarizes the damning statements made by professor Phil Jones in the wake of Climategate.  Wesley Pruden characterizes Dr. Jones as “an archbishop in the Church of Global Warming.” An excellent analogy, but not one that will be well received by the congregation.

The New York Post is also running a similar story that puts Phil Jones’ BBC interview under the same unfavorable light.  It also goes a step further and mentions the myriad errors in the IPCC reports that have been flowing forth.

It should be noted that both these stories follow yesterday’s UK Daily Mail story very closely.  Kudos to the British Press for following this story.

Finally the venerable Wall Street Journal is running a story that concentrates on the IPCC scams.

The major network news channels are still devoid of any coverage on these issues, and I honestly don’t expect that to change.  Nevertheless, these news stories in this market represent a a truly remarkable shift in the media’s attitude about Global Warming’s “settled” science.

Climategate U-turn: Astonishment as scientist at centre of global warming email row admits data not well organised | Mail Online

Disgraced Climate Scientist, Phil Jones PhD.

This is a shocking admission to hear from Dr. Phil Jones – of all people. It’s very satisfying to hear one of the main scammers admit that the “settled science” created by a “consensus” of over “2500″ scientists is – and always has been – a complete fraud.  However, that’s not news to people who have studied the issue.

What’s more amazing is the utterly horrible state of the data that has been the bedrock of studies used to justify billions in government spending.  To call it ‘amateur’ would be a gross insult to students and aspiring professors everywhere.

That a tenured professor trusted as gatekeeper of the most influential global temperature data sets would allow it to fall into such a disorganized state – and portions of it to be “lost” – borders on the criminal. Does that sound a little too “James Hansen” to you?  Consider this: Dr. Jones is well aware that these data sets underpin the IPCC reports and myriad other studies.  His efforts to thwart freedom of information requests is well documented in the Climategate emails.  He should be keenly aware of how much public spending has been wasted (including grants to his university and department) as a result of his work.  He knew his position was unsupportable, yet perpetuated the illusion to the best of his ability.  This is fraud at its most basic level.

Were it not for the leaking of the Climategate emails, and his subsequent dismissal, Dr. Jones would not be in his desperate, depressed state, discussing crucial details that the rest of the Global Warming Machine wish would remain hidden and unpublished.  As things stand, he is progressively betraying the sacred cows of the AGW industry.  “Climate experts” have long equated skeptic’s assertions with that of denying the holocaust, and now we have these bullet points directly from one of the founding fathers of the man-made global warming zealots:

• Data for the “hockey stick graph” is missing.
• There has been no global warming since 1995.
• Warming periods have happened before – but not due to man.

The unraveling of the hoax is delicious to observe.  It will be interesting to see how long it is able to survive in the United States, where this information is subject to a complete media blackout.  Thank God for the internet and independent news outlets.

Climategate U-turn: Astonishment as scientist at centre of global warming email row admits data not well organised | Mail Online.

Using AJAX with Spring MVC

Update Since the release of Spring 3.0, AJAX with Spring MVC has been greatly simplified.  SpringSource hosts some excellent sample applications demonstrating Spring MVC, and the “mvc-ajax” sample uses a dead simple technique for accomplishing what I’ve described below.  If you’re using Spring 2.5, read on.  Otherwise, browse to the SpringSource samples repository and benefit from the major upgrades in 3.0.

There are numerous ways to incorporate AJAX with Spring MVC, but many of the solutions I researched added far more complexity than I thought necessary to meet my needs.  What I wanted was a way to simply update a section of a page using any Javascript library my little heart desired.

The confusing portion of all this was the fact that a Spring MVC controller normally returns a ModelAndView object, and all I wanted was a String (either html or json).  I found the answer in Spring’s own Image Database example code.  I learned that, instead of returning anything, I could map a call to a void method and write to the OutputStream instead.

If I want to invoke an AJAX search call for a list of providers, I can do the following:  Using jquery for this example, I can have a function that is called by some event on the page that retrieves a String from the server based on the passed parameter.  The second function is simple a callback that updates the appropriate portion of the page.

function searchProviders(type){
$.get("search.html", {type: type}, displayDisplayResults, "html");
}

function displayDisplayResults(html){
$('#providerList').append(html);
}

On the back end, using an annotated Spring Controller, I map the url to my void method.  Spring makes the OutputStream available in the controller methods as long as you include it as a parameter in the method signature.

@RequestMapping
 public void search(@RequestParam("type")String type, OutputStream outputStream) throws IOException {
 List<Provider> providers = providerService.getProviders(type);
 StringBuilder providerList = new StringBuilder();
 for (Provider provider : providers) {
 providerList.append("<li><a href=\"").append(baseUrl).append("/appointment/index.html?providerId=").append(provider.getId()).append("\">")
 .append("<span>").append(provider.getName().trim()).append("</span>")
 .append("<span class=\"arrow\"/>")
 .append("</a></li>");
 }
 outputStream.write(providerList.toString().getBytes());
 outputStream.flush();
 }

My content is written directly to the OutputStream (which I’ve dutifully flushed) and my javascript code takes care of the rest.  The update is finished and I don’t have to worry about a ModelAndView or Spring’s implementation of the Dojo framework.

For those who prefer using json, check out this helpful project: spring-json.sourceforge.net