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Natural variability no doubt dominated early on. That is no longer the case. Here is the atomospheric CO2 and delta forcing between each 50 year period. (DeltaF=5.35ln(C/C0)Wm^-2)

1750: 277 ppm CO2 to start

1800: 280 ppm / deltaF=0.06 Wm^-2

1850: 284 ppm / deltaF=0.08 Wm^-2

1900: 295 ppm / deltaF=0.20 Wm^-2

1950: 312 ppm / deltaF=0.30 Wm^-2

2000: 369 ppm / deltaF=0.90 Wm^-2

2014: 397 ppm / deltaF=0.39 Wm^-2

You can see that between 2000 and 2014 we've had a greater forcing than between 1900 and 1950. (source = ftp://data.iac.ethz.ch/CMIP6/i...)

1) Explain the first graph in 3 sentences and why it perfectly matches the suns day cycle: https://www.eia.gov/todayinene...

2) Explain the graph on page 21, in 3 simple sentences and admit that all your recent posts are wrong: https://www.ethz.ch/content/da...

3) Explain the first graph here https://www.weforum.org/agenda... and explain the correlation to my question 1)

Stop making an idiot of yourself.

Sorry if using Texas as a simple to follow example annoys you, or if you don't find the examples simple to follow. Well if you don't find it simple to follow, my suggestion is: "stay out of discussions you are not competent to join".

What we have here is a problem of centralization. Switching to other centralized solutions isn't what we need. Decentralized solutions need to be invented.

You might have missed it, but the parent poster did mention that GitLab is opensource.
That means you can also deploy locally to your own server.
You don't need to host everything at http://gitlab.com/ you could be hosting on you own server as https://gitlab.ethz.ch/ or https://gitlab.sib.swiss/ did.

It's a possible solution for semi-decentralized hosting.

And the GIT DCVS is fully *decentralized* by definition, as pointed by others.

How in the actual fuck is this possible? They have an audio an audio signature of every song built in?

Yes. And this is not surprising; the data needed to identify songs is tiny. Essentially it's just vectors (big numerical arrays), they don't need to store the whole mp3.

More and more can be done locally on the devices. For instance, look at what is actually needed to detect English speech using CMU sphinx:
https://github.com/cmusphinx/p...
(look at the hmm model)

This used to require huge computing power and storage, but now it can work on a mobile device.

Another example: once upon a time you needed Google datacenters to do gender and age recognition on photos. Now you can download pre-trained models for that, and the result can fit on a mobile device. Or you can download the entire dataset (500k photos of celebs) and train it yourself on your own servers;
https://data.vision.ee.ethz.ch...

Or you want a model to recognize basically any kind of object in a photo?
https://github.com/tensorflow/...
(there's a model specifically designed to run on mobile devices)

i know it's disturbing but this is where things are today. Just a few years ago, this XKCD comic was true:

https://xkcd.com/1425/

Now you can actually download the code and models to do that completely offline and in a few ms.

Actually, Einsteins PhD was not on relativity: https://www.research-collectio...

Apparently, you are unable to determine the nature of a dissertation. Einstein did have a "Dr. Phil" from the Section for Mathematics and Natural Science of the philosophical faculty of the University of Zurich. The topic was about determining molecular diameter. That is about as "Physics" as it gets.
Link: https://www.research-collectio...

So, yes, Einstein did have a degree in Physics.

...it was physically impossible for the top tenth (or however much it was) of each WTC to pulverise COMPLETELY the lower, much larger (and much thicker steel beams) part... How did the core columns manage to collapse all the way down? Detached core columns at the point of initiation of collapse would - by definition- have taken the path of least resistance - i.e. vertical core columns would have slid sideways and NOT HIT other vertical core columns below. After a short period of time the collapse should have been arrested, and over.

Here, have a link to a paper:
"The first part of this paper presents an experimental investigation on explosive spalling of six full-scale normal strength reinforced concrete slabs subjected to conventional fire curve ISO834 and severe hydrocarbon fire curve, performed at the Fire Research Centre, University of Ulster, UK focusing on concrete thermal behaviour and the explosive spalling phenomenon. Each slab was loaded with 65% of its BS8110 design load and was heated from the bottom side only. Temperatures profile was recorded at three depths within the slabs and the moisture content was also measured before and after the tests."

If that's not enough info for you, you can read this entire PhD thesis on the topic.

i.e. at high temperatures high-strength concrete comes apart. If the temperature is high enough it will lose all cohesion.

The airplanes were fully fueled. The fuel basically ignited on crash and flooded the top floors and then dripped down over the elevator shafts and stairs. The temperature was high enough that the concrete lost cohesion and you basically ended up with what looked like a controlled implosion. OBL was a civil engineer. He certainly had the know how to analyze the problem and know this would happen in the first place.

Although this modular arithmetic (e.g., base-3) angle they are working at might be theoretically interesting, there probably aren't enough killer applications to make it worthwhile to make a special ram that runs modular arithmetic configurations. Just like historical so-called Graphics ram (which didn't really do graphics, but optimized bit-planes clears/masks, simple blends and window operations) eventually didn't survive the march of DRAM economics which greatly favors standard products over niche products.

I think that the most intriguing part of multi-state ReRAM would be to take advantage of the fact that neural network like computation is becoming interesting enough to potentially break out the niche product category. ReRAM has the potential to be implemented in a way that enables a so-called Neuromorphic ReRAM. This would not only take advantage of the continuous spectrum of storage (not just the binary/ternary representation), but also some of the other properties of ReRAM.

Check out this paper as an example...

This of course won't replace traditional computing, (just like quantum computing won't replace traditional computing), but might be some use for ReRAM other than yet another storage device (which just happens to be multi-level under the hood).

I've had a chance to be involved in the technical setup of the clinical trial. It is truly fascinating to see the system at work. It will be 8 patients in total by mid-2018, so we'll have to wait until then to see if it truly works.

Restoring walking is a first step because it is also easiest to begin with because walking is largely based on reflexes. These reflex networks are typically preserved after spinal cord injury, but the person is no longer able to activate them voluntarily, thus losing the ability to walk. With electrical stimulation and an extensive rehabilitation program, the aim is that the person regains some of this voluntary control.

Restoring arms and hands function will be the next step. Tasks involving these limbs however, require fine motor control and are less reliant on reflexes. This means that remnant reflexes cannot be exploited and relearning tasks will be much harder (if not impossible...).

My hope is still that one day we can have a paralyzed patient compete in the cybathlon exoskeleton race but with the implanted electrical stimulator instead of an actual exoskeleton.

You may joke, but if this is the actual image from the experiment, it DOES look like a normal printer running low on ink
https://www.ethz.ch/en/news-an...

My favourite mind bleach after reading any piece of C++ code. Arguably, some things in that could be extended, but still...

You are right - though in this court case, it's not the downloaders they are going after, but the uploaders. The ratio becomes immaterial as your bittorrent will seed as soon as you leech. Even though it may be 0.001% of the file, it is still regarded as seeding AND as it contributes towards the full 100% of the file, you are a 'sharer'.
So I give all of Slashdot (for free) this bit of knowledge:
http://www.bitthief.ethz.ch/
It's primitive but works as tested.
Also PLEASE look at this as a nerd solution to a technical problem, i.e. using torrents for downloading only.

Even better, make a global grid so that there will always be a buyer and seller of energy. http://www.ethlife.ethz.ch/arc...

NOAA and NASA use SATTELITES to get the SURFACE TEMPERATURE?

No, troposphere.

See Spencer RW, Christy JR. Precise monitoring of global temperature trends from satellites. Science 1990 for an early discourse which suggests preferring satellite measurements over ground based thermometer networks for global climate studies. The idea that a few precise instruments with truly global coverage will give the most accurate picture of global change over time. It's a no brainer really. Even if there is a discrepancy with actual temperatures, one adjustment would be necessary and relative anomaly over time would remain spot-on. A better tool.

"[Spencer] Global temperatures have generally been estimated from surface temperature records, but there has been much debate regarding, for example, whether these data provide evidence of recent greenhouse warming. The primary source of uncertainty is the relatively sparse distribution of thermometers over the surface of the earth. [...] Our data suggest that high-precision atmospheric temperature monitoring is possible from satellite microwave radiometers. Because of their demonstrated stability and the global coverage they provide, these radiometers should be made the standard for the monitoring of global atmospheric temperature anomalies since 1979. Their use will allow relatively precise monthly determinations of the locations and magnitudes of temperature change events. The resulting data should provide a greater focus of scientific debate on why temperature anomalies occur rather than whether they occur."

Also, Tropospheric temperature trends:history of an ongoing controversy (Peter W. Thorne et. al.) 2010 which revisits the debate, gives a nice introduction to various homogeneity adjustments ('retroactive' adjustments that attempt to reconcile instrument and site to reality) applied to both satellite and ground datasets. They basically 'punt' in the end, saying in effect that global temperature measurement is a Big Tent and there's room enough for everybody, we'll all just massage it a bit here and there until it's perfect.

Why would NASA jump into that Big Tent, join with NOAA and others to incorporate surface measurements into a final product that they use to issue statements like "2014 Was the Warmest Year In the Modern Record" by an amount that is within the range of statistical error, when their own satellite data shows otherwise?

Here is where I become openly bitter and say flat out: there is a hysteria party going on and anything that doesn't fit the narrative gets tossed into the margins. Perhaps there is something fundamentally wrong with accurately measuring tropo temps by high resolution satellite. If there is, it hasn't 'surfaced' yet. In fact, everyone agrees that they are in almost perfect concordance with other sources. Almost. And what form does this almost take?

The satellites say no warming over the last 18 years. I believe the satellites.

I have a more difficult time believing the aggregate result of the Big Tent, which puts a heavy weight on dozens of disparate instrument types placed in thousands of places, where is the instrument's own drift, local weather variables, with a product that is subject to a raft of adjustments, (take no prisoners: ON) presented by a group of people who seem to be (unscientifically) personally and emotionally vested in selling anthropogenic catastrophe. What is the aggregate error of the Big Tent? Enough that announcing a temperature record by 0.02C is an irresponsible and disingenuous thing to do?

THAT is why even here on Slashdot, the brief snipe dissing Judith Curry get modded +I INSIGHTFUL and my comment pointing out the existence of statistical error is awarded -1 TROLL

It's shameful. Frankly, I'm amazed that the folks here on Slas

Climate models may one day mature to something beyond the basket of hypotheses they are now, but none of them have yet been successful in predicting climate data, except where the null hypothesis also predicted that data.

Wrong. Manabe and Wetherald predicted in the 1960s that greenhouse warming would cause the stratosphere to cool when the troposphere warmed, whereas increasing solar intensity (the null hypothesis) would cause both the stratosphere and the troposphere to warm simultaneously.

The observed temperature trends agree with the greenhouse warming predictions and disagree with the brightening sun predictions.

Subsequent modeling work predicted dozens of ways in which the greenhouse warming and brightening sun would produce different patterns (e.g., greenhouse gases would cause nighttime temperatures to warm more than daytime temperatures, whereas increasing the brightness of the sun with no change in the greenhouse effect would cause days to warm more than nights). And today when we look at the patterns of observed warming, they overwhelmingly agree with the greenhouse warming predictions and disagree with the brightening sun predictions.

Not sure what you mean by few references...All these were on that page.

http://www.grida.no/publicatio...
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncli...
http://www.weatherzone.com.au/...
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs...
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/...
http://www.copenhagendiagnosis...
http://www.iac.ethz.ch/people/...
http://www.aip.org/history/cli...
http://www.aip.org/history/cli...
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/resea...
http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
http://www.realclimate.org/ind...
http://web.archive.org/web/201...

As for Dyson...two imporat words you dont find in his biography are "climate scientist".
In fact, he rather quite well falls into the science trope of the phsycist who insits on talking about things outside his realm of expertise.
(There's even an XKCD for that, though I am missing the link atm)

.... maybe the slahdot stub should have had a link to hear from the horse's mouth?

In this interview Matthias Troyer puts his team's results into the correct context.

Algorithms and Data Structures - http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/W...

and while you're at it

Compiler Construction
  - http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/W...

Let's program in Oberon-2!

Algorithms and Data Structures - http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/W...

and while you're at it

Compiler Construction
  - http://www.ethoberon.ethz.ch/W...

Let's program in Oberon-2!

I know this is always a popular theme. Life may not be as we know it. However proper analisis makes it less likely than water based carbon life for a number of reasons. Methane as the base solvent however works at lot better that the reaching silicon based life suggestions.

Quite simply you need some form of universal solvent to provide mobility to produced compounds. Water is just so hard to beat for this. Methane is not polar so at the very least "life" would not be able to use hydrophilic/Hydrophobic properties of base building blocks to control structure. Note this is not just used to fold proteins, but also the formation of bi lipid membranes. In fact it is postulated that the first stages of life was the spontaneous formation of such membranes.

Then there is the temperature problem. Liquid methane is cold. Really cold. A lot of reaction are just not going to happen at all at these temperatures. So having a viable metabolism would be challenging.

But carbon based life is certainly a lot more plausible in methane than these silly silicone based life forms everyone likes to suggest. For a start silicon does not form lots of stable compounds with itself and other elements. Unlike carbon. It does not oxides into easily removed/dissolved compounds. There is no effective solvent for most longer chain silicones ..etc.

And the real kicker is that a planet that has silicon will also have carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen etc around as well. Temperatures where complex compounds/chains are stable but interesting reactions also happen tend to be close to where water is a liquid. Also don't forget just how much of the current elements are essential to life. Its often more than people think. http://umbbd.ethz.ch/periodic/

Bottom line is that water is practically magical in its solvent like properties and carbon is a freaking miracle. Its hard to see where they can be beat or anything else can come even remotely close.

But even carbon based life in water has vast scope to be very different to us. Even the hard sci fi gets this totally wrong (alien life will not be food that is for sure. Biocompatibility == 0). It may not be amino acids that are the blocks of whatever passes as proteins. Even if it is it will not be the same ones and almost definitely not 20 like we have. Instead of DNA is could be something quite different (but there will be some information store, we know that). There may not be any RNA like intermediary. In fact if alien life did look a lot like us, ie DNA (even if it was different bases) amino acids with some overlap of our own, it would be quite a strong case of common origin. There is simply no real evidence that there should be convergent evolution to the particular set of DNA/RNA/Amino acids we have here.

And it could be far simpler than even the simplest bacteria (which are bloody complicated). For example you could have something that just has plasmid like loops of "DNA" floating around with no structure, blobs of cell just buds off all the time. And by chance alone some of these buds has enough of the different plasmids to rinse and repeat.

But non carbon based, non water solvent life is definitely not nearly as likely as many people think. Too much sci fi, and not enough numbers. We have a very good understanding of chemistry and even an alternative metabolism hasn't even been suggested outside arm waving and doctor who level science.

I would like to point out a theory where a solar lull also results in lower global temperatures -- in a way that may be complementary with the UV-centric approach taken in TA... Svensmark's theories on cosmic rays and their effect on cloud formation. See this documentary Svensmark: The Cloud Mystery. Radiation-seeded cloud formation was first observed by Charles Thomson Rees Wilson in 1896. In BBC: Connections, Death In The Morning (index to 38:15) James Burke describes the events that led to WIlson's great invention, the cloud chamber. I highly recommend the entire Connections series, especially the original first season which begins with "The Trigger Effect".

On clouds... another Good Watch is the BBC documentary on the phenomenon of Global Dimming, especially its opening minutes where David Travis of the University of Wisconsin measured a 1 degree C change in temperature ranges in the days following 9/11, when all aircraft in the US were grounded. This (shocking!) correlation, that could only be ascribed to a particular human activity -- a lack of contrail cloud seeding -- reminds us that our contribution to climate might far exceed pure-chemical CO2 causation.

On clouds... while researching contrails years ago I had a true what-the-fuck moment to see that NASA had also noticed significant human triggered cirrus cloud formation but managed to leverage the presence of cirrus (Minnis et. al) into a net warming effect. This has led to extraordinary ideas like enlarging ice crystal size in cirrus by seeding to 'reduce' this 'warming' effect. I am old school and any claim that increased clouds (of any kind) are net-warming and not net-cooling is an extraordinary claim and should be confirmed by an extraordinary level of proof, not just computer energy-budget models of incoming versus outgoing long-wave radiation. And I'm glad to see that the cirrus net effect is not yet decided by everyone.

On survival during the coming solar minimum... those jolly old River Thames Frost Fairs look like a a real tonne of funne, but faced with the likelihood of global cooling it behooves us to fast-track the development of Thorium based energy. Because MSR/Thorium is the answer for both Global Warming and Global Cooling. I am generally behooved these days.

Also... the timely development of molten salt reactors and supplying the globe with cheaper grid-energy would improve the human race. It would help to offset the effect of driving on women's pelvises by relief from washing clothes by hand.

___
Obligatory bump to the Thorium Alliance and my own letters on energy,
To The Honorable James M. Inhofe, United States Senate
To whom it may concern, Halliburton Corporate

The opportunity to introduce a new operating system platform with sufficient critical mass to overcome existing standards is an opportunity to introduce advances in OS theory, and languages, that have been achieved over the decades. Hell, f all they did was adopt the A2 operating system with Active Oberon it would be an advance over Linux/"C".

http://cvg.ethz.ch/mobile/press.php

The technology also allows the 3D capture of faces, giving a third dimension to portraits, profile pictures or images of loved ones.

Having a convenient way of getting 3D models of everyday objects, users will now be able to copy real-world objects by scanning a full 360 degree model of an object. The resulting 3D model can be used for visualization or augmented reality applications, or even be used for 3D printing, potentially at a remote location, effectively enabling the user to replicate an object.

so you can now use your smartphone to generate a photorealistic 3-D model of anyone's face, that can be replicated on a 3-D printer as a mask.

Are there any 3-D printers out there that print rubber, or would this still be a 2-step process (print the mould, then make the mask)?

Since this app purports to do all processing on the phone, you could use it on anyone, stream the model back to some parked van, and have a doppleganger ready to go in minutes.... smacks of Mission: Impossible.

Well, our body is well evolved to handle natural sources of radiation which, nonetheless, can absolutely harm us.
We can handle a surprising amout of damage from UV, which luckily does not penetrate our entire body. And we've evolved to handle certain other kinds of radiation damage, heck, there's that evidence of hormesis. I don't know how that applies across the wholebody, nor how persistently high levels over a lifetime might cause an issue.

I also don't know how to address all the sources you listed because, well, I don't know much about this, that's why I was asking here. I did look for solar flux at radio frequencies here: http://www.astro.ethz.ch/people/pdf_files/benz/LBReview_thermal.pdf and if I'm reading the units right, it is not even close to being on the same scale, but... not sure really.
And I certainly don't know the power of all those other various sources.

But, this was interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBm

So, seems to me from that chart and inverse square estimate, that a cellphone up close against you would have 500x the wattage of an FM radio station 10km away. Not that that dude's research was necessarily exculpating FM radio stations.

Glancing at the technical data here...
http://www.bag.admin.ch/themen/strahlung/00053/00673/03012/index.html

Seems like a baby monitor transmits about 100mW which is about 1/5th the power of the phone and of course not pressed against the flesh. Sooo.... if the cellphone is cranking out 500mW at say 1cm from some part of the body you might be concerned about, and the baby monitor is cranking out 100mW but 100cm away, then presumably the baby monitor is 1/50,000th the concern of the cell phone, right?

Didier Sornette pioneered these ideas almost ten years ago. Look for example here. The same law is behind many natural and social phenomena (stock market crashes, bestseller book diffusion, etc.). I used this stuff to predict stock market crash points with limited success. A very intriguing argument, however.

why is poverty still possible

The problem is that there still remains too much socialism and regulation of free market activities in much of the developing world. A graph of economic freedom versus per capita GDP tells the story. Countries with lower economic freedom tend to have lower GDP per capita, correlation=0.67.

The good news is that the adoption of less socialism and more capitalism (especially in India and China) has lead to less global income inequality:

"The period between 1988 and 2008 witnessed the first decline in global income inequality since the Industrial Revolution"

I'll admit that the best thing Gates could do is to research why it is so hard to eliminate entrenched power structures that continue to keep low levels of economic freedom present in many developing countries, and what could be done to change things there.

In days of old, before the Black Ships came and the secret of hose gartering that never ravels was lost and forgotten, Niklaus Wirth figured this out and bequeathed us Wirth's Law.

Back when the building RSX-11 executables larger than one MB that would consistently execute in real time required manually mapping memory for the taskbuilder step, software engineers had to write rockin' code just to survive in the field. We were all computer scientists by necessity. Today, though, the barrier is pretty low; just slap together a bunch of Java modules some anonymous 13-year-old wrote in a GUI and call it programming.

Are doomed to repeat it. Espionage is nothing new and it's been around for centuries. The plans for the Atomic Bomb were stolen by people who were sympathetic to the Soviets.

Sometimes technology can be given away, stupidly, when somebody is trying to build better relations or is reverse engineered like the TU-4 bomber.

While we've been concerned with Cyber Espionage it's still nice to see that old fashioned bribery and cunning are still in use and that countries and competitors will still go to whatever lengths are necessary to steal technology. We've allowed billions in technological innovations to be stolen and given away and it will come back to haunt us.

It's a 2012 siggraph (Asia) paper. Here's the link with the video.

http://graphics.ethz.ch/publications/papers/paperKus12.php

Are you really denying that conventional transistors weren't switching at 600+ ghz in the mid 2000s?

I will deny that. From a article published in 2009:

"Over the last few months, Bolognesi and his students have managed to beat the record for the switching speed of AlGaN/GaN HEMTs on silicon substrates several times in a row: the record is now 108 GHz. 'Other groups had only managed 28 GHz up to now using similar technology, so we are almost four times as fast', says Bolognesi, putting his team’s achievement into perspective."

Just in case you're wondering, HEMT transistors are able to operate at higher frequencies than ordinary transistors.

What does it break down into?

Structurally, Glyphosate is a remarkably simple-looking compound, as far as organic structures go. You have a carboxyl group on one end, a secondary amine in the middle, and a phosphate on the other end. There are no halogen groups, heavy metals, or other exotic hetero-atoms. It can be degraded to common biological substrates, by common microorganisms, in a remarkably short sequence of steps: http://umbbd.ethz.ch/gly/gly_map.html

Obtaining "magic bullet" selectivity with a structure this simple is only possible thanks to engineering the crop itself. You can be sure that pesticides intended for non-engineered targets (like the weed killers people put on their lawns) are more complex-looking beasts.

Get ready to cream your pants:
http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_52_0/doc/html/boost_units/Examples.html#boost_units.Examples.DimensionExample

and http://se.ethz.ch/~meyer/publications/OTHERS/scott_meyers/dimensions.pdf

One of the things I like about FreeBSD is their openess to languages (in contrast to OpenBSD, who think C is the only language around...)
Throughout the years, FreeBSD developers reached out for what they thought were the best languages for the job: Modula-3 (for cvsup, though now deprecated), Forth on the boot loader (ideal, right? Can drop you into a little Forth shell), Ruby for ports infrastructure. In that way, they are not prejudiced about programming languages. Users contribute a great deal too. All the things you get in Debian (lots of languages).

FreeBSD developers also have ported important innovations that are open-sourced but lacking in Linux, because of pure ideology (the GPL doesn't play well with others): Apple's Grand Central Dispatch (a framework that implements concurrency *correctly*), and LLVM (which as a side effect, brings C blocks (effectively, closures for C).

Additionally, many vendors support FreeBSD. I, for instance, run Eiffel on FreeBSD (for the world's best introduction to Object Oriented Programming: A Touch of class. Common Lisp has vendors that support FreeBSD (LispWorks, Franz), and so has Smalltalk (Cincom, Smalltalk/X). All these vendors have free products and commercial support.

There's nothing stopping anyone from doing whatever they want with C++ on FreeBSD. But seriously, C++? Shouldn't you be looking at D?

I do FPGA design for a living, and I will sing the praises of the vhdl mode, which is the single greatest piece of software for us hardware guys, ever.

I think rsync pretty much provides all you need in one tiny command-line to get data from A to B.

But if you want to increase your resilience against failing network connectivity, and make sure you don't delete anything that hasn't been properly copied to your server, I suggest you take a look at datamover: http://www.cisd.ethz.ch/software/Data_Mover

Essentially, it's a daemon written in Java that monitors an outgoing directory. Everythings that is written in there gets safely copied over to a central storage drive. Behind the scenes, they use rsync to do the copying, but it's wrapped in tons of features that improve the reliability of the moving process, like a quiet period before a file gets moved (good for applications that write their output incrementally and sporadically into files), multiple retries on network time-outs, high-water marks, data transformation (e.g. compression) during the move process, etc. It also is very anal about sending you emails for anything that could possibly be a data integrity problem.

We rely on it to store the raw data from scientific experiments. With the proper configuration, your holiday pictures should be just fine.

One of the amazing consequences of the Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser theorem (KAM) is that the Earth orbit is stable, despite the influence of Jupiter. Stable in this context means that the orbit perturbations caused by Jupiter and the other planets don't cause the Earth orbit to move too close or too far from the Sun, causing dramatic changes of temperature.
Chaos theory when gravitation is involved is not so chaotic as one could expect: the KAM theorem tells us that multi-body systems governed by gravitation law have intrinsic stability regions.

Closed source client: who knows if it's secure or incompetent?

That's a fair point, and I agree with it. It's still way better than Dropbox, and they do take the question seriously themselves. From their Security page:

Privacy and Security

Wuala protects your privacy: In stark contrast to most other online storage services, all your files get encrypted on your computer, so that no one - including the employees at Wuala and LaCie - can access your private files. Your password never leaves your computer.

Wuala employs the 256 bit AES, 2048 bit RSA and SHA-256 algorithms for encryption, signatures and integrity checks. If you're interested in how Wuala manages encryption, have a look at our publication on Cryptree.

http://dcg.ethz.ch/publications/srds06.pdf

Some want to download ONLY and not share. The only reason they share is because they are forced to. Try setting your client to 0 bytes upload (whilst downloading) to stop sharing and therefore becoming legal. You just can't do it because the software won't let you. Why is this significant? Because the software itself is forcing users into 'criminal activity'. There are thousands+ out there who want the product (like FTA shows) but do not want to be liable or risk liability.

First, I don't see how that relates to my post. Second, there are torrent clients that don't upload as well as other methods like RS/MU/etc and newsgroups.

Also the physical loss of purchased digital media is not the same as blowing up the lawnmower and having to buy another one. That's because of the nature of digital media. You can't replicate your lawnmower, but it is possible to replicate digital content so all of a sudden, the rules change. Those rules include 'leasing' or the right to use the software. Just because you pay for it doesn't give you full rights over it. If you want full rights, then buy the rights for it.

That the way it is.

But is != ought. Just because it happens to be that way right now according to the legal code of many countries doesn't mean it should.

Well said. A good way to think about and to organize your sanity checks is to follow Bertrand Meyers' practice of programming by contract. If you check preconditions and postconditions in your code (even if only during test runs), you'll catch all sorts of misbehaviour early.

In this PDF, there's a nice chart (figure 2.15) on page 29 that plots energy density (Wh per liter and per kilogram, separately) and price (per Wh) of Li-Ion batteries. Unfortunately, it ends at 2005.

He said he wants something that is easy to implement, and only reason he is going with open source is because then he doesn't have to ask for purchase approval. Which IMO is a really stupid reason and will hurt in the long run - it's insane to take worse software just because you don't want to ask your boss if it's okay to buy this one.

Horse shit. I've seen projects die because they couldn't get software through the approval process. Better to try 10 apps that are free and run in userspace (so no need to get IT involved for an Administrator install) than to wait for management approvals, budget cycles, and IT support, and never get the project done. If I'd done that on the job, I'd have been fired for taking too long to do my work.

I also resent the implication the "free" means "worse."

Sorry to burst your bubble, but if you want good support and easy implementation, you have to look for normal paid-for solutions. Besides, open source is not synonym for free. This is especially true with specialized software or something you want good support for. Open source just means you get the code aswell, so you can implement your own additions (without use of plugins) or change it.

I'm guessing you haven't used R. Not only is there a thorough user manual, but there are books from most major statistical and instructional groups on how to use R, AND the R-help mailing list answers every R question I've ever had about it, AND there are local R user groups where you can get support similar to how LUG's work.

But unless you get an product from a company that is spending money to develop it, you never get good software and good support. No one can make both because everything in this world costs money, and developers have to live too. Open source and free software model works well for the likes of Google and Firefox because the developments get paid by money made with advertising. Statistical analysis software, and other specialized software is a different matter.

Please shut up. If your assumption were true, R would not exist. R exists, so you're just an asshat.

My advice to the original poster: Use R if you have any familiarity with programming. Any higher level math/stat course OR experience with basic programming will let you get started in R. If you've been doing this all in Excel already, you're probably ready to hop into R. If you're still uncomfortable, I'm sure one of the people who value your academic library could help out.

Yes, but they don't mention the enforcement of the access control - that's left up to the apps. At least that's what I heard in a talk by a guy from my Uni group; he's doing a case study on NHS, with regards to access control policies and testing, so I take him to be a pretty authoritative source. Here's a link to a paper.

I have overlooked several really important references!

Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat wrote a book recently that is a wonderful introduction to advanced General Relativity...that is, once one has read Hartle and other books, has some understanding of the basics of GR, Choquet-Bruhat's General Relativity and the Einstein Equations is a great introduction to advanced concepts (e.g., the conformal change of coordinates to use York time slicing in the ADM formalism, etc.).

Hans Ringstrom's Cauchy Problem in General Relativity is a great introduction of the mathematics related to the ADM foliation of spacetime into space-like hypersurfaces. I wish I knew about it when I started studying the ADM formalism!

Demetrios Christodoulou's Mathematical Problems of General Relativity I (freely available online as lecture notes) is something I just stumbled upon...but it looks like quite a good reference!

Roger Penrose's Techniques of Differential Topology in Relativity discusses the mathematics underlying Lorentzian geometry (the light cone geometries, necessary and sufficient conditions for a Riemannian manifold to be Lorentzian, topological implications for a Lorentzian manifold, etc.).

10cm carbide blade table saw: http://www.bastli.ethz.ch/index.php?page=bastli_circularsaw including vacuum attachment.

Video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTVCvn05nYQ&feature=player_embedded

I'm totally out of my depth on this (so please forgive my ignorance...) but perhaps if I'm understanding properly we've already got a start on rectifying THz radiation.

Second, you mentioned the “0.3C per decade” prediction from emission Scenario A, but you’ve repeatedly ignored Scenario B which Hansen himself called “more plausible” in 1988. [Dumb Scientist]

That’s great, but I’m not talking about Hansen88, but AR1, which focuses on Scenario A. It’s possible this was done to scare politicians into action, but when one reads it, the +0.3C increase appears to be the best guess. [ShakaUVM]

No, what you and Michaels are doing isn't "great" in any sense of the word. Again, by "summarizing" the IPCC AR1 WG1 report as though it only gave one scenario, you pulled a "Pat Michaels".

As I've explained ad nauseum, the dynamical nature of climate models means that evaluating a GCM ensemble requires comparing projected forcings to the actual forcings. In other words, each scenario is an "if-then" statement: "If greenhouse gas concentrations rise at rate X, then temperatures will rise at rate Y." You and Michaels not only chopped off the first part of that sentence, you both presented it as the only scenario... which "coincidentally" makes it seem like scientists are discrediting themselves by making bad predictions.

The correct approach is to open the AR1 to the Annex on page 333, and examine the rates of CO2 rise given in the top-left of figure A.3. Scenario "A" (BaU in that plot) only applies if CO2 levels exceed 400ppm by 2010, which hasn't happened. The top right graph also shows that methane rises to over 2000ppm in that scenario by 2010, and once again that hasn't happened either.

Just like in Hansen88, AR1's scenario B is the closest match to the actual forcings. That's not really surprising, considering that Hansen was a contributing author for sections 6 and 8, table 2.2 on p52 repeatedly references Hansen88's radiative forcings and corrects a typo on p9360 of Hansen88, and chapter 3 repeatedly references Hansen88. Unsurprisingly, the emissions scenarios used in both studies seem very similar.

I thought you'd be able to learn something from the eerie parallels between your mistake and Michaels's, but apparently I was wrong. Again.

Unlike many other scientists, I don't think Michaels is lying because his "rebuttal" seems to indicate that he's trying to draw conclusions based entirely on each scenario's legend, and that he doesn't understand the difference between dynamical and empirical models. If he thinks that climate models are empirical, it makes sense that he wouldn't understand the reason for making three different projections. In that case

It's a safe assumption.

Actually, it's probably a safe assumption that this is just a way to extract $1.3 billion of funding out of the EU in order to pay for a bunch of supercomputers and interdisciplinary research. It's apparently part of something called FuturICT, a submission to the EU's Flagships initiative, which is to say that it is meant to be ambitious - here a codeword for 'infinitely improbable'. FET Flagships are long term initiatives on a budget of around 100 M€ Euros per year.

You can get a copy of the proposal from here. It's a bunch of hand-wavy maybes. Most of the proposal is taken up with the interesting observation that knowing stuff about stuff is a prerequisite to revolutionising education, understanding and fixing the world economy, identifying financial crises before they happen, identifying innovations before they catch on, solving transport problems, creating a whole new scientific paradigm ('science 2.0'), fixing energy consumption and making us all safer. However, they have letters of support from George Soros and various other luminaries, so presumably the EU will assume (or already assumed) that they know what they are talking about.

Testosterone, by itself, does not cause aggression. http://e-collection.ethbib.ethz.ch/eserv/eth:266/eth-266-01.pdf includes a description of a double-blind study of testosterone administered to women (due to more reliable dosing). In this case, the belief that they had received testosterone made them more aggressive, but actually receiving testosterone made them more likely to find cooperative solutions.

There are plenty of ways that higher testosterone levels could be linked with people being more aggressive or selfish, without testosterone actually causing any of that. Correlation, as indicated in this study, does not indicate causation, no matter how convenient the excuse is for asshole men.

(One note: testosterone isn't a product of the dick. It is metabolized in the testes, ovaries, placenta and the adrenal cortex.)

Antenna design for hand-held devices at these frequencies and power levels is not exactly trivial, and minimizing the effect of the human body (hand) on the antenna characteristics is the subject of much research in the industry.

http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&fileOId=1152137

http://www.rfm.com/corp/appdata/antenna.pdf

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120848913/articletext?DOI=10.1002%2Fmop.23715

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/11208/36089/01710996.pdf

http://e-citations.ethbib.ethz.ch/view/pub:18638

http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v49/v49-156.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Hands-effect-Shahla-Moradi-Shahrbabak/dp/3639175425

http://www.google.com/search?q=effect+of+hand+on+antenna&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&ei=GbZBTOP-NIP-8Aaw_aUZ&start=10&sa=N

http://rfdesign.com/mag/505RFDF1.pdf

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijap/2009/491262.html

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F4913660%2F4957855%2F04958011.pdf%3Farnumber%3D4958011&authDecision=-203

http://wireless.per.nl/wireless/articles/08_WIC_correlated_coupled_MIMO.pdf

http://www.impinj.com/WorkArea/linkit.aspx?LinkIdentifier=id&ItemID=2563>

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.66.2119&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://202.194.20.8/proc/VTC09Spring/DATA/02-07-08.PDF

AND THAT'S IN JUST THE FIRST THREE PAGES OF MY GOOGLE SEARCH!!!!!!!!!!

Note that this "antennaphile" site called the iPhone 4's antenna design "cool", and said to expect to see other manufacturers adopting similar designs.

Note that the forum thread linked below says that your hand can affect a GHz-band antenna from as far way as 3cm. So where on a phone that is FAR less than 1cm. thick are you going to place that antenna that WON'T have "hand-effects" to some degree? Now, factor in the fact that the FCC MANDATES that the antenna be on the LOWER half of the phone (where your hand naturally grips!), and you can readily see that, as Jobs stated (and demonstrated), EVERY cellphone suffers from the presence of the user. Keep that in mind when you hear people proclaim "NO other phone has these issues." WRONG! EVERY cellphone struggles mightily with this limitation (the presence of the user), during EVERY SINGLE CALL and with EVERY SINGLE USER.

I disagree, but feel free to enlighten me.

Ok, I will.

Antenna design for hand-held devices at these frequencies and power levels is not exactly trivial, and minimizing the effect of the human body (hand) on the antenna characteristics is the subject of much research in the industry.

http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&fileOId=1152137

http://www.rfm.com/corp/appdata/antenna.pdf

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120848913/articletext?DOI=10.1002%2Fmop.23715

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/11208/36089/01710996.pdf

http://e-citations.ethbib.ethz.ch/view/pub:18638

http://www.waset.org/journals/waset/v49/v49-156.pdf

http://www.amazon.com/Hands-effect-Shahla-Moradi-Shahrbabak/dp/3639175425

http://www.google.com/search?q=effect+of+hand+on+antenna&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&ei=GbZBTOP-NIP-8Aaw_aUZ&start=10&sa=N

http://rfdesign.com/mag/505RFDF1.pdf

http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijap/2009/491262.html

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=http%3A%2F%2Fieeexplore.ieee.org%2Fiel5%2F4913660%2F4957855%2F04958011.pdf%3Farnumber%3D4958011&authDecision=-203

http://wireless.per.nl/wireless/articles/08_WIC_correlated_coupled_MIMO.pdf

http://www.impinj.com/WorkArea/linkit.aspx?LinkIdentifier=id&ItemID=2563>

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.66.2119&rep=rep1&type=pdf

http://202.194.20.8/proc/VTC09Spring/DATA/02-07-08.PDF

AND THAT'S IN JUST THE FIRST THREE PAGES OF MY GOOGLE SEARCH!!!!!!!!!!

Note that this "antennaphile" site called the iPhone 4's antenna design "cool", and said to expect to see other manufacturers adopting similar designs.

Note that the forum thread linked below says that your hand can affect a GHz-band antenna from as far way as 3cm. So where on a phone that is FAR less than 1cm. thick are you going to place that antenna that WON'T have "hand-effects" to some degree? Now, factor in the fact that the FCC MANDATES that the antenna be on the LOWER half of the phone (where your hand naturally grips!), and you can readily see that, as Jobs stated (and demonstrated), EVERY cellphone suffers from the presence of the user. Keep that in mind when you hear people proclaim "NO other phone has these issues." WRONG! EVERY cellphone struggles mightily with this limitation (the presence of the user