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But I -do- think that humans are certainly affecting global temperatures to some degree, and the end results could be, ah, problematic.

I'm not sure humans are yet capable of producing the quantities of pollutants necessary to create significant changes in the earths' climate.

With reports like this http://www.cmar.csiro.au/e-print/open/greenhouse_2 000e.htm

and others like it (I recall reading somewhere that, globally, volcanic eruptions during a more active year can expel more pollutants than the human race has since we discovered fire..can't find the quote/report dangit) along with a realisation of what an enormously large system we're talking about, and the enormous amount of "inertia" to be overcome making any significant change to such a system, I have a feeling we may be giving ourselves too much credit, that we may not be able to significantly change climate patterns even if we tried.

Cheers!

Strat

Why is this not announced by an *Australian* company?

http://www.solve.csiro.au/1104/article6.htm/

To elaborate on the magnet on the fridge analogy:

In its simplest incantation, work, or energy, equals force multiplied by distance.

Distance travelled: d = 0. W = F*d. Even lim(W, F->infinity) = 0 if distance travelled, d = 0. You can get energy out of the magnet only by moving it. Oh, sure - let's hold the magnet away from the fridge a centimeter, and let go. It moved - non-zero work! Except we had to expend energy to move the magnet that first centimeter.

And since I'm at it already:

- I won't mention the thermodynamics arguements many have already posted about

- It doesn't matter how many newtons of force a motor statically exerts - 1N or 1000000N - it's not linked to efficiency.

- The best way to measure efficiency is by a dynamometer. Versions I've worked with basically are generators which you directly hook up your test motor to. Knowing the properties of the generator (efficiency model, etc) you can figure out how much energy your motor is outputting versus how much energy you're putting into running the motor. You can find efficiency curves for any motor design you wish by spending some time with google. Why doesn't Flynn's website provide these? Don't give me any bull about patents; novel motor configurations are common.

- Despite its flaws, the peer-review journal system is still the most rigorous method of testing science. I don't need to search Science's website to tell you that "parallel path technology" will return 0 results.

- While racing solar cars, I've encountered motors running anywhere between 80 to 98% efficiency. That's efficiency defined in the traditional sense: mechanical power out divided by electrical power in. I found it funny that Flynn is trying to convince solar car teams to try out his motor design.

Give me some steel tubing, enough calculator solar cells, an electric lawnmower and my Swiss Army knife, and I'm sure I get farther in WSC2007 than Flynn. (Interestingly, the parallel path wiki says it can reduce solar cell surface area by 50%! Tell that to anyone who's raced a solar car and see how quickly they laugh)

I can tell you this is really really old news, the CSIRO Australia's premier scientific research body has been focused on the control of foreign pests for many decades. Australia is a unique land, during the ice age (40,000 years ago) it was connected to asia since then it has been cut off from the rest of the world. It has many unique species of flora and fauna, most of which are almost completely defenceless to foreign species such as cane toads, foxes, pigs, rabbits, fire ants etc etc. It's the reason why we have such strict quarintine laws and customs inspections, and why many here go by the moto "If it's feral it's in peril".

I firmly believe that the rise we are currently seeing is indeed the start of an accelerating trend. One that human activity has very little impact on, or if any, has been slowing the rise thus far by emitting clouds of smoke thus keeping temperatures artificially low. Now that we are cleaning up our soot emissions the CO2, and natural process that drive the climate, are regaining their direction. As you noted, we are woefully unprepared for such an event. I would say that we desperately need to start preparing, clearing the low lying areas, etc., but I'm realist enough to know that there is no feasable way to get the huge fraction of the human race that lives on coast lines to change their residence prior to a devastating catastrophy.

As to your comments about peak oil, read the literature more closely and in depth. Yes, oil execs and employees have started falling all over themselves to validate peak oil theories, but apparently, only because they suddenly realized that the peak oil nuts were their best friends. If the oil monopoly (removing Hussein took out the major producer who was not part of the Saudi, Kuwait, Exxon, Shell, Chevron cartel. Russia was broken up to let the cartel take over production there, next in line is Chavez in Venzuela) can convince the world that we have reached peak oil production then they have an indisputable excuse for maintaining higher prices and vastly higher profits. The peak oil advocates love to point out that oil production is down worldwide in recent years. but isn't it interesting that in fact it is down by almost the same percentage at every cartel field world wide. These fields are not connected and shouldn't be suddenly linked in their very close decreases in output capacity. Especially since peak oil states that we can not increase production, not that it will decrease and everyone, including the peak oil fanatics, is very quick to reassure their investors that they have plenty of in ground reserves for X number of years. I propose that this is evidence of global collaboration to set and maintain a specific level of output, regardless of the capacity that could be acheived if it were maximized. In fact, if you research the geophysical scientific papers on new sources and increasing recovery from old sources or souces that were previously inaccessible, you find that not only is there more oil available and accesible today than there ever has been before, but there is far more oil than than we have ever used combined. I would post links to these, but strangely all of the pages I had bookmarked over the last 10 years have disappeared or been replaced by peak oil pages. However, you can find some clue in the investment brochures and independent scientific reports. Now undoubtably these new sources and recovery techniques will cost more, so we have seen the last of cheap oil, monopoly or not.

I became interested in the science and economics of this because of my family's oil wells in west Oklahoma. In the late 60's and early 70's, during U.S. peak production, our 16 wells were producing approx. $200,000 in royalties per month. By the late 80's they were producing about $13,000 per quarter. Basically the oil company explained that, at that time, it cost $32 per barrel to produce from Oklahoma wells, and $6 per barrel to import from the middle east. So all of the wells were placed in maintenance mode, which is basically just enough pumped to lubricate the mechanicals, and at that rate the holding tanks were only emptied once per quarter, instead of weekly or twice weekly. When my mom sold th

The water comment is pointless, though, because the water acts as an amplifier, making man's contribution more important, instead of diluting the effect of CO2 forcing. An apparent 'lag' in temperature rises just means there is no naive linear relationship in play - our climate models can reproduce past temperature data, so that is no problem for the science.

The 97% looks like a made up statistic:
http://www.dar.csiro.au/information/image/CO2%2010 00%20years%20graph.gif

Shows the 12% have only appeared very recently, without corresponding volcanic events. And that's disregarding the effects of other lifeforms. In fact 'volcanic in origin' is a meaningless statement. How do you distinguish between 'origins' and recirculation effects? Most of the water you drink is urine in origin. Most of the people you meet originated from stardust.

In defense of wikipedia, though, the quote is from one of the fuzzy 'controversy' articles, which have a task of repeating claims without factual criticism.

If that were the case, why is there an exemption to the GPL for the specific case of loading a binary modules? If such an exemption were not granted, then distributing a binary module, which loads by dynamically linking it against the kernel, would mean that module itself must be GPL.

Where have you been? It has been the policy of the Linux kernel for a long time that it would never stablize a binary driver interface, in order to prevent people from not making their drivers open source.

I am pretty sure that is not the main reason for this policy (of course it probably depends on exactly who you talk to though).

As pointed out elsewhere by other posters, there are multiple issues :

1. Making a stable API makes it easier to distribute closed source modules (this could be a bad or a good thing, depending on where you stand on that issue)
2. Making a stable API benefits any driver writers and maintainers, open or closed source, because they do not need to keep updating and retesting their drivers for each and every kernel release
3. The most important of all IMHO making a stable API benefits users enormously because they do not have to recompile (and maybe even hand patch) drivers from outside the kernel tree when they upgrade a kernel version (a task well and truly beyond 99.9% of computer users, I assure you). Even for old hacks it is a royal pain in the behind, something that really makes you think twice about upgrading at all if you have any oddball hardware on your machine.

Pedantically speaking, SALT isn't the largest telescope in the southern hemisphere. There are plenty larger -- for example, the Parkes Observatory in Australia is 64 meters across. It doesn't match the size of the largest telescope in the northern hemisphere, either. To do so it would have to be as large as Arecibo, 305 meters across.

Or CSIRO, who actually invented the stuff.

http://www.csiro.au/index.asp?id=190resilin&type=m ediaRelease

... so to speak. No soul-eating registration required:

Harnessing flea power to create near-perfect rubber

As they say in osnews, devfs seems to have been removed from the kernel.

--
Dreamhost superb hosting.
Kunowalls!!! Random sexy wallpapers (NSFW!).

Oh no! Not the Japanese and Chinese! They have yellow skin and slanty eyes!

Idiot.

And this stuff is partly a product of Australia's CSIRO too.

If you use the map provided online by the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) who are located immediately to the South East of the reactor site, it's quite easy to locate the Lucas sight with Google maps.

I belive this is the Google maps image they're talking about, based on this map and some of the photos. This part of the facility is surrounded by security fencing, and it appears a new reactor is under construction at the time of the photo.

Any Australians who can confirm or correct?

Black Mountain
('strue! I swear!)
http://www.ento.csiro.au/quarantine/quarantine.htm l

I think the reason why people became "pro-patent in this case" is that the CSIRO actually use patents the way they were intended to be used. They invent something, then re-invest the money back into current research. They have been quietly doing this under various names since 1916 and have a very impressive record of practical innovation and basic research.

"...the ideas there such as OFDM and FEC, etc. are actually not all that ingenious." - CSIRO developed and patented the idea a decade ago, hindsight is always 20/20. As you say, anyone with a "deep understanding" could have thought of the idea but the fact remains that nobody did.

"I oppose anyone who wants to use them offensively" - The corporations that are now whinning about paying $4 per chip are the same ones that pushed hard for US IP laws to be adopted under the recently signed free trade agreement. To me, (an Aussie), it is poetic justice when a "non-profit" can screw a cartel of the largest "for-profits" with thier own rules. Before the 1980's corporations used to buy CSIRO patents for a pitance and the Australian public would watch as Agri-corps and Drug-pushing-corps turned govt funded research into a private cash cow. The use of licenses to make "for-profits" pay for basic research is one of CSIRO's greatest innovations.

Some examples of IP idiocy in Australia, patent for the wheel, Ugg boots.

I feel obligated to point out that if the government didn't get involved at all it would save even more money in taxes

Then all the IP would be owned by large multi-national corporations that would take the profits out of Australia and their R&D dollars as well.

How many multi-nationals do you think would give a shit about Australia's unique problems, such as the Cane Toad? http://www.csiro.au/index.asp?type=faq&id=CaneToad Control

Shitdrummer

http://www.csiro.au/

From that site:

CSIRO is Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.

As one of the world's largest and most diverse scientific global research organisations our work touches every aspect of Australian life: from the molecules that build life to the molecules in space.

Working from sites across the nation and around the globe, our 6500 staff are focussed on providing new ways to improve your quality of life, as well as the economic and social performance of a number of industry sectors through research and development.

These sectors are:

* Agribusiness
* Energy and Transport
* Environment and Natural Resources
* Health
* Information, Communication and Services
* Manufacturing
* Mineral Resources

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation is Australia's largest scientific research organisation - funded by the federal government here.

Australian government funded research organisation. Since it is never given enough money, it relies on patents such as these to fund basic and applied research.

CSIRO is the [Australian] Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. http://csiro.au/

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation - http://www.csiro.au/

Because google is so hard to use.
Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation

It's the Australian government research body, basically.

http://www.csiro.au/

http://www.csiro.au/

an Austrlaian research Body, to the best of my knowledge.

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization. It is funded by the Australian government.

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.

Kind-of a catch-all government sponsored department for scientific research.

See http://www.csiro.au/

The consensus among professional astronomers is still overwhelmingly in support of the existence of black holes.

Your second point about two neutron stars being unlikely to run into each other is not correct. Extensive studies of binary neutron star systems such as PSR B1913+16 and PSR B1534+12 provide stringent checks on general relativity. Each of these systems has two neutron stars orbiting each other with one of the pair also being detectable as a pulsar. Each component in the system is spiralling in towards the other.

The recent discovery of the first known binary pulsar system (see http://www.atnf.csiro.au/news/press/double_pulsar/ ) PSR J0737-3039 in 2003-4 using the Parkes radio telescope in Australia provides astronomers with an even better testbed.

In this system the two pulsars orbit each other every 2.4 hours, making them some of the fastest-moving stars known. As they orbit they lose orbital energy through gravitational radiation. They move closer together. The rate at which this happens can be determined and inital studies suggest the two pulsars will coalesce in about 85 million years. This system is about 1,600-2,00 light years or 550 parsecs distant from us. I can assure you that astronomers are actively observing and studying this system as it is allows them to test theories of gravity with incredible precision.

Neutron star collisions do/will occur and will produce strong gravity waves and most likely high fluxes of gamma rays.

There are now long-term projects monitoring pulse arrival times from pulsars across the sky with the aim of detecting gravity waves.

Certainly is. (-:

However, don't belittle Conrad Parker as a performer, living proof that not all Canucks are boring (he doesn't normally look like a con as he does in that photo, just acts like one sometimes :-) and there were many, many presenters who were attention-getting for their information rather than for their antics.

The innovation is more that we're going with the Web's model of finding information: i.e., hyperlinks. The capability for hyperlinking is sort-of present in lots of media formats, but we're really the first to advocate it as the future way of putting videos on the Web.

Additionally, the "freeform" annotation of the video serves very well for searching: it enables marking up a video in a way that's very meaningful for people. Try out the YAPC video on the example web there to see what I mean. The annotations are quite different from subtitles or closed captioning texts, and the hyperlinks allow you to dig deeper for information if you're interested in what the video is talking about. We're trying to make video a "first-class citizen" on the Web: when you can hyperlinking to specific time points inside video and out of the video to other Web content, video becomes part of the whole Web experience, rather than just a cool thing that you need to download some plugins to view.

This post hits the nail on the head.

- Andre (one of the Annodex developers)

Hi, the "preprepared complete file" is not significantly bigger at all. We store things in standard Ogg bitstream file, with an additional track (logical bitstream, in Ogg speak) to store the extra metadata (CMML) that we use to store the information about each clip. The CMML is absolutely tiny in comparison to the raw audio and video; for the videos we've got there as samples, the CMML consumes perhaps only a few kilobytes (out of maybe a dozen megabytes.)

We've designed Annodex and CMML with the Internet in mind, and have some mechanisms to keep it bandwidth-friendly. For example:

1. If you start playback at 5 minutes into the file, you don't play the first 5 minutes: the client sends the server timed URI, and the server will start serving out the media from 5 minutes only.

2. You can retrieve only the CMML from the media by setting a HTTP header of "Accept: text/x-cmml" in the HTTP request. We already have a proof of concept for search engines to use this, so they can search on the entire video (and create hyperlinks to the exact time points concerned -- no more scrubbing through an hour of video to get to the bits of information you were after!). The Firefox extension does this to grab the "table of contents" display from the server.

3. We've designed Annodex to be proxy-friendly, so that they can cache the audio and video, even for media that's served out at different times.

- Andre (one of the annodex.net developers)

Don't worry, they're working on it...

Don't worry, they're working on it...

Don't worry, they're working on it...

And also, here is the media release

no, but in the mean time, you can admire a photo of Dr Pfeiffer :)

The range over which you can read RFID information in any sort of portable (ie: non-obvious) fashion is limited to a few inches.

For now...

The main reason that the codes are purely numeric (other from the colon separator character) is the desire to retain as simple a relationship as possible with numeric values of latitude and longitude, as encoded directly into all but the leading character of each "cycle" of the hierarchy. Having said that, a case could be made for using a letter instead of a number for the leading character (since these are in effect a "special digit" rather than a number), however the decision has been made to use two existing precedents (WMO squares, see above, plus "Blue Pages" subdivisions of these squares), rather than introduce a new notation convention.

We are arrogant, mankind is, to think that because of a half-century of climate fluctuations, that we are all going to die tomorrow. Please, the climate has been changing in HUGE ways for much longer than the life-span of a human being.

Seems like you are the arrogant one, thinking you understand the theory and data behind global warming well enough to dismiss it all as bunk. Are you a climatologist? Have you studied the actual data? If you want to disprove something, you'll need some data to prove scientifically that such-and-such won't happen. You are also being idiotic, to infer that anyone ever said we're all going to die tomorrow. Nobody ever said that, so it's just a bullshit strawman statement. Furthermore, your ignorance of the significance of past climate change is appalling. Yes, the climate has changed in the past. Guess what happened in parallel with massive climate changes in the past? Mass extinctions.

The simple fact is, we're looking at a climate record going back 10,000 years where the only real temperature increase is a spike that's been happening in the last 100 years, at an ever-increasing rate. During the 9,900 years before that, it's almost flat in comparison. We've got glaciers that have been sitting around since the last ice age breaking up and moving faster than ever before. The evidence says something is changing. Our best hypothesis is that the cause is increased emission of certain gases that absorb heat, such as CO2 and methane. We call them greenhouse gases because of their scientifically observed heat-absorbing characteristics. We have directly observed evidence that the technology of the human race produces vastly larger quatities of such "greenhouse" gases every year than all the volcano eruptions in the world. There are six billion of us, and we are having a measurable effect on our world. Surprise. References: one two.

Global Warming is alarmism, coming from political agendas of people who want attention. Remember how we all laughed at those people who purchased electric generators and resurrected old bomb shelters for the Y2K scare?

But you're absolutely right. Just because some political agendas get mixed in with the real science, as always, then it all must be bullshit of the highest order. All scientists are liars and heretics, after all. Global warming is alarmism because there are no UFOs. The climate is changing in ways that haven't been seen in 10,000 years, but ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. These aren't the droids you're looking for. Move along, nothing to see here, folks. No problem. No big deal. We now return you to your regularly scheduled bread and circuses.

Gah.

No, that's wrong. Volcanoes on average put in 100-200 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere. Humans dump about 6 BILLION tons each year. Here is a reference. here is another

What kind of waste / pollution are we willing to accept with every new piece of consumer trash?

The embodied energy in such a product would be enourmous. Aluminum Can + Heating Elemet + long-distance-shipping from specialized cannery == really terrible product.

Brewing coffee is about the SIMPLIEST effort one can imagine. Do you own an insulated-bottle?

Driving consumer garbage like this in the marketplace is intolerable. Who wants filthy air and streams just to have a 100% convenient existence -- and a LOUSY cup of coffee !

Incorrect.

"The best microwave sounding unit estimate of average global temperature change in the lower troposphere for 1979-98 is an increase of 0.06C per decade. The error associated with this estimate is ±0.11C. " (Source) In other words, the temperature change could be as much as +0.17C per decade or it could be as little as -0.05C per decade! Even "corrected" for instrument readings the satellite record is showing virtually no significant warming and may even be showing cooling. That, to me, is doubt.

What was the conclusion from a panel that analyzed the difference between the surface and instrument record? According to the same link they determined that the increase in surface temperature is real (which wasn't the question but I guess they felt it necessary to reaffirm their position), that even though the highly accurate satellites disagree that this does not invalidate the surface record (interesting conclusion), that adjustments to satellite data have reduced the difference between the two records but there is still serious discrepancy, and finally came up with a "possible" explanation that lets both the satellite record and the surface record be right without reconciling the two. Basically they said that maybe the troposhere warmed slower than the surface. So rather than reject the surface record as inaccurate they basically raised a hypothetical possibility of why the satellite record doesn't agree. Or, perhaps, they should have considered the very real possibility that the surface record is just wrong.

In any case, most weather doesn't happen on the surface of the earth but a little bit higher. For questions of analyzing global warming the satellite record is still the better choice of datasets. Of course you still don't see much mention of that in the literature because it doesn't allow for as much scaremongering and, if the error is on the lower side of the data point, actually invalidates global warming over what has been often called the "hottest decade" in recent history.

On average, volcanos emit 200 million tons of CO2 per year. Human activity averages 26 BILLION tons per year.

See here, here or here, taken from an earlier Slashdot thread.

"Volcanoes are also sources of water vapour and carbon dioxide, but their contribution to the global budgets of greenhouse gases is very small. On the time-scale of decades to centuries, greenhouse gasemissions from volcanic sources cause negligible climate change."

"Present-day carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from subaerial and submarine volcanoes are uncertain at the present time. Gerlach (1991) estimated a total global release of 3-4 x 10^12 mol/yr from volcanoes. This is a conservative estimate. Man-made (anthropogenic) CO2 emissions overwhelm this estimate by at least 150 times."

This is good work, but what is so special about it?

Using image analysis, "computers" these days do:

- Automatisation of drug discovery screening tests
- Diagnosis of skin cancer
- Detection of early breast cancers
- All sorts of QA in assembly lines
- And much much more, these are just examples you can find googling a bit.

Why is this news? If you go to any computer vision, image analysis or pattern recognition conference, you'll find many similar applications.

Anyway white rice is fucking awful for you

Again, it is a staple in Asian diets. Not brown rice, either. And I don't think it's simply a matter of smaller portions or genetics -- when I lived in Asia I didn't notice the portions being significantly smaller than what I eat now. Why wouldn't we see a large amount of diabetes sufferers in the Asian population if white rice was so bad for the human body?

I fixed my propane BBQ

Mmmmm... ribs. You do know that meats wreak havoc on your digestive system, and in large quantities contribute to heart disease (though eating lean meats, as you mention, can avoid this), diabetes and gout.

So you know, I'm a carnivore and always will be. But let's not kid ourselves: if you just ate soy, vegetables and fruits for the rest of your life, you'd probably be much healthier overall (but a lot more miserable).

LiveJournal has turned out to be a really interesting online community, and it appears to have scaled up quite well too. A neighbourhood would be easy to add as an "interest".

Geocoding data is easy, searching on geocoding is also easy. Getting that integreated into tools that have been set up to do text is a bit more difficult. How do you let people freely define geometries, yet still have some way of searching and retrieving via text? C-Squares sounds cool, as it seems to give enough detail for most purposes, but as it's got a pretty distinct namespace, they use Google to do their search and retrieval:
C-Squares

Get calendars in there too (as a 4th dimension) ("show me people with an interest, in a place, at a time"), and the picture gets even more crazy. "Notify me when Bon Jovi is in my city".

Xix.

The above link from an anonymous coward points to a paper through some weird obfuscation that does just that. HTTP(P2P)

As I understand it, GenBank is just a catalogue of gene sequences, which is to say, the end results of data analysis. This is equivalent in the astronomy world to a catalogue of galaxies or stars or whatnot (which virtual observatories will also include). Of course you can get new science from such a database, but it's a very different kettle of fish to making available all the raw data that the geneticists used to derive the gene sequences in the first place, which could be even more useful (well, I imagine so, but perhaps it wouldn't be useful at all to other geneticists). So a virtual observatory is not mere hyperbole, IMHO, because it can be used to make what are effectively "new" observations of astronomical objects, as well as datamine previously compiled catalogues (a la GenBank, or in astronomy, NED or SIMBAD).

Erm, well, I'm rambling a bit so I'll shut up now.