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The Max Planck Institute has a Web page that tells us who he is. Below is a quote from his resume.

"Born on July 23, 1945 in Oberhausen. Study of physics, doctorate Imperial College of Science and Technology (1971), German Habilitation in physics Heidelberg Univ. (1977), Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (since 1984)."

Below is a list of his awards.

Patten Prize of Indiana University
Science Award of the Donors' Association for the Promotion of Sciences and Humanites in Germany
Honorary Professor Univ. of Arizona, Tucson
Honorary Doctor Technical Univ. Berlin
Honorary Professor Univ. of Leeds, England
Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Dr. Morfill must be a brilliant scholar as the Russian Academy of Sciences rarely grants membership to scientists who are not Russian citizens.

Here is an interesting question. Why have Germans (like Dr. Morfill) accomplished so much in science and technology? Does culture, genetics, or a combination (of both) explain their scientific prowess? Note that Albert Einstein is a German (with a Jewish heritage).

Wrong.

Looking at the cosmic ray particle spectrum (google 'cosmic ray spectrum') one can see stuff at 10^20 eV, that is a lot higher energy than the couple of TeV these particle accelerators achieve (no mean feat). Here's a list of some observatories that look at cosmic rays:

Pierre Auger Observatory : http://www.auger.org/index.html
HESS : http://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/hfm/HESS/
MAGIC : http://magic.mppmu.mpg.de/
Icecube http://icecube.wisc.edu/

Looking at the cosmic ray particle spectrum (google 'cosmic ray spectrum') one can see stuff at 10^20 eV, that is a lot higher energy than the couple of TeV these particle accelerators achieve (no mean feat). Here's a list of some observatories that look at cosmic rays:

Pierre Auger Observatory : http://www.auger.org/index.html
HESS : http://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/hfm/HESS/
MAGIC : http://magic.mppmu.mpg.de/
Icecube http://icecube.wisc.edu/

You should be aware that McIntyre (of climateaudit.org) has been implicated in publishing a paper McIntyre and McKitrick (2005) that tries to reinstate the medieval warm period by censoring the data used in analysis. Furthermore, there paper fails statistical verification tests - it's mathematically unsound. Just something to be aware of. Note that the scientific community does listen to McIntyre, despite this proven intellectual dishonesty. The US temperature record was changed slightly when McIntyre correctly pointed out an aberation in 1999-2000 US data, due to data collection technicalities.

Anyway, are you saying that the simple equation you provided fits temperature measurements on Earth? Earth's temperature variations must be due to a change in atmospheric pressure then, right? The equation for Venus isn't really that useful, since it's known that CO2 doesn't actually trap very much heat. So fill in the numbers for Earth... and we'll see where that goes.

like what is the decrease in transmission for various wavelengths for say a ten meter insulated tube with various atmospheres, is it still logarithmic over atmospheric distances?

You can see a diagram here, that shows water, ozone and CO2 cooling and heating various parts on the atmosphere, at specific wavelengths. This diagram is reproduced from Claugh & Iacono (1995), you can read the original paper if you want to see how to get from raw data to the diagram.

I would like to know, quantitatively about feedback, the length of CO2 in the atmosphere, clouds, and many other processes, either from first principles, or experiment, and somewhat fundamentally, the calculated standard deviation of the weather for 1 year, 2 years, etc.

It sounds to me that you want me to dig up the details on climate models. They are in the IPCC reports. They don't include standard deviations for weather, but they do include averages and standard deviations for climate change. You can find them on here. The models come with documentation for how they are put together, data visualisation tools, point estimates, and standard deviations (which are required to make point estimates meaningful).

Just an alternate view

Michael Tomasello at Max Plank Institute http://email.eva.mpg.de/~tomas/ would argue that what is innate is a child's sensitivity to social cues, not the basics of grammar.

Slashdotters sarcastically refer to humans as "sheeple" sometimes, but it isn't so far off the mark. We're very sensitive to herd behavior from birth, and talking is one of those things that the herd does. The diaper change that your baby displayed early communication during was a routine social event that provided a lot of repetition, making it rich for doing an analysis of repeated patterns.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_linguistics

See also:
Elizabeth Bates
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Bates
Brian MacWhinney
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_MacWhinney

As already mentioned in a previous comment, the article is somewhat speculative and it is a little bit late to verify the experiment. The standard accepted practice for claiming the detection of a GW is to observe the event with at least 2 detectors which are separated far enough to not measure the same external disturbances (but preferably 3 or more spread around the world so that you can do proper triangulation of the source). One single glitch might be a cosmic ray, lightning, dust falling before your detector, an earthquake, an instrumental error, anything. We see more of those than we like. One glitch measured at different observatories within the time it takes to travel at lightspeed (a few ms) at different observatories around the world might give you a nobel prize.

One book that is high on my 'to read' list is Gravity's shadow, which supposedly describes not only Weber's experiments, but also its reception by the scientific community and the eventual downfall of Weber's reputation.

OpenVMS had both "impersonation" and "capabilities" (or "privileges") (See here). Where from they have actually came to WinNT.

Capabilities might be hard to spot, because in *nix universe (of which VMS is distant relative) they are bound to access to special files (normally under /dev in *nix and magic file names in VMS). By defining who has access to the special files, you define their capabilities.

I'm not a VMS historian so I cannot tell when the features went into the OS, yet AFAIK most of VMS development and core feature were stabilized by mid 80s. E.g. ACLs in VMS apparently appeared in 1984. Probably googling for "vms history" would bring more info. (Name change to "OpenVMS" happened in 1991.)

Instead of a gamma-ray glow map as seen from the Sun, I'd like to see 3d renderings of a whole galaxy where they artificially color dark matter to show where it is.

I believe that was the first picture. Of course it was 2-D in the article, but it had to have been based off of a 3-D model. Maybe the researchers could create a Quicktime VR movie that we could spin.

According to the Glasnost test, for the first time since I've had access to a tool to test for it, Comcast isn't fscking with BitTorrent transfers:

How are folks verifying and actually proving the ISPs are throttling traffic instead of the traffic being slow because of heavy use in the area? How do you prove something like this to a regulator?

Here's one way http://broadband.mpi-sws.mpg.de/transparency/bttest.php

I am learning German now and can agree with most of what you say, but...

(the grammatical sex of every noun, the many irregular verbs, etc.)

The gender of words is indeed a pain (there is no "pointer" as in my original language, Italian, where the word ending usually gives away the gender), but it seems people are quite tolerant of errors. In the latest number of Max-Planck-Forschung, the op-ed on the first page had a gigantic blunder in the article title: Eine Name, der verpflichtet. It's this article (it has of course since been corrected, but I do have a paper copy).

However, German irregular verbs are nothing particularly difficult. As in English, you only need to memorise past tense, participle, and maybe in addition whether to change second and third person of the present tense. Try my language—we have four verb conjugations (you only have one, two if you count irregular verbs as "differently regular"), each with 110 forms, and that's only the regular ones. Then come the irregular ones, that sometime lack parts (we don't have a past participle for "to shine". Really.).

What I find really difficult in German is syntax. I don't have a problem with a language putting its verbs always last (such as Japanese, which I know only superficially), or always second (such as Norwegian, which I do speak), but how on earth you manage to mix these two systems is something I haven't really fathomed yet. Separable verbs are also a major pain in the rear.

That being the case, Mr. Greenspan, you may want to consult a Latin dictionary for your next book so you can make sure not to use a fake word for your title.

but I did want to make sure that people have their facts straight.

That being the case, Mr. Greenspan, you may want to consult a Latin dictionary for your next book so you can make sure not to use a fake word for your title.

..oh, and BTW boys and girls, according to results of the glasnost test run not more than 48 hours ago, Comcast is STILL inserting bogus TCP reset packets into BitTorrent streams; TFA says that Comcast had agreed to stop doing that. Big surprise! They're LYING.

Well Comcast is still resetting bittorent for me.

Tested this morning with http://broadband.mpi-sws.mpg.de/transparency/bttest.php

Still multiple resets. Yes, torrents do complete, but much more slowly than on my neighbors ASDL which has half the speed rating of my comcast connection.

So they lie.

• Download something popular
• Call your ISP
• Read their terms of service
• Glasnost
• pcapdiff
• Vuze plugin.

• Enable protocol encryption.
• Change the port number to something other than 6881.
• Tunnel through TOR or some other commercial VPN.

You are missing the many times RTEMS has left the Earth. Ignoring numerous satellites that are or were in Earth orbit, we have the Venus Express, Electra circling Mars, and the Dawn mission on its way to the asteroid belt. And later this year RTEMS is running on both the Herschel and Planck payloads.

I am sure RTEMS users can attest to more applications but those cover this end of the solar system.

GNU/Linux is not the only open source software that is out of this world. :-D

This is utter bollocks even by the standards of slashdot. Do you bother to even look at a subject before forming an opinion? Ozone is a pollutant at ground level, but CFCs in the upper atmosphere do most definitely break down ozone. "The scientists, Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland, won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work showing how chlorofluorocarbons destroy ozone." -- http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/208.html

When sunlight is breaking down ozone, it's doing its job if you like - it's protecting us from the relatively harmful UVB rays from the sun But wait, it's not the simplistic idead of the sun destroying ozone, because it is the same radiation that causes O2 (oxygen) molecules to form O3 (ozone).Wow.. You have some severe reading comprehension problems. I never said the sun destroys the Ozone. It is the same process that creates it. The UV radiation creates the Ozone in the upper atmosphere and in the process filters it out. The Ozone isn't a process that protects the earth as much as it is the product of a process that protects the earth. There are other natural ways Ozone is created that don't directly involve the sun. They are typically the ground level polution you mentioned earlier.

And BTW, if your referencing Wikipedia, you might as well admit that your short on answers. Wikki is not the place to go for accurate information. It's history has shown that.

If you ever put your theory to a real chemist they will probably beat you about the head with a copy of "Introduction to Inorganic Chemistry" - or whatever similar volume is to hand.

Yawn.. This come from the guy who didn't read what he was replying to enough to understand what was said. Good one there skippy. Go back and reread it, it your having problems still, ask me or ask one of your friends to help you. There is no shame in asking for help when you obviously need it.

Ozone is a pollutant at ground level, but CFCs in the upper atmosphere do most definitely break down ozone. "The scientists, Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland, won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their work showing how chlorofluorocarbons destroy ozone." -- http://www.atmosphere.mpg.de/enid/208.html

When sunlight is breaking down ozone, it's doing its job if you like - it's protecting us from the relatively harmful UVB rays from the sun But wait, it's not the simplistic idead of the sun destroying ozone, because it is the same radiation that causes O2 (oxygen) molecules to form O3 (ozone). ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_depletion )

If you ever put your theory to a real chemist they will probably beat you about the head with a copy of "Introduction to Inorganic Chemistry" - or whatever similar volume is to hand.

Here's another webpage that uses color very efficiently to transport an important message link

Speaking of voxels, octrees, and a terabyte (TiB that is; 2^40 bytes):

Cosmology simulations take as much memory as you can throw at them. You think a few exabytes is big, but that's just peanuts to space!

This one is one is the most complex (by most measures) cosmological simulation ever run, using just over 10 billion particles and nearly the entire terabyte of the computer's available memory:
http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/galform/millennium/

They ran it on a 512-CPU IBM p690, which took about 28 days of parallel runtime. (2^40) / (10^10) ~= 100 bytes per particle, which is high by maybe 50% but accounts for overhead and is a reasonable value. The paper reports ~200 Gflops sustained, which is certainly memory bound in any distributed N-body simulation, giving ~5*10^17 total floating-point ops.

They only did total output at 64 output timesteps because each of those took about 300GB for ~20TB total, which filled up a decent sized storage rack 3+ years ago (and still). The contemporary highest-detail galaxy clusters were modeled with as many as 3 million particles, but the simplest interesting "structures" (the dark-matter halo detection threshold was 20 particles) contained 20~100 particles.

Now for the cool stuff:
- there are ~400 billion galaxies in the observable universe, even if galaxy surveys (Sloan, etc.) catalog only a small fraction of them
- reasonable (i.e. "useful") resolution for typical structures of interest (quasars, typically) is ~1~10 million particles; better if you can get it

So:
You have to model dark matter halos with useful precision. Even if you are satisfied with modeling whole galaxies as point-like objects:
(4*10^11 galaxies) * (100 bytes/particle) = 4*10^13 bytes ~= 40 TB
(~10^12 CDM particles) * (100 bytes/particle) = ~100TB
=> allowing a little slush, 200TB of RAM would get you some very valuable theoretical simulation data of an object/construct/whatever that approaches literally the size and complexity of the observable universe at a galactic scale. More memory will just make that even better, too.

Desktop memory doubles say, every 2 years; look at the typical "consumer" systems the last few years: ...
1994: 16MB (P1... wow; 16 is a little high for '94 I guess)
1996: 32MB
1998: 64MB
2000: 128MB
2002: 256MB
2004: 512MB
2006: 1GB
2008: 2GB

We want to see when we have about 100,000 times as much memory as now, which is about 16.5 doublings, each of which take around 2 years, so we should see this some time around 2035-2040 on consumer grade machines. A purpose-built supercomputer can contain, say, 1000 times the consumer amount, so today's 4~50TB supercomputers need to double, drumroll.... 2~5.5 times. The top supercomputers will probably have 200 terabytes of ram within 2 years, and the lowly supercomputers cosmology simulations have to settle for will probably have that within 10-12 years; i.e. by 2020 (yeah, it's getting closer!).

It may even be possible to do quad-precision floats in hardware, which would be beneficial for cosmological simulation (or any N-body simulation), and that will cost a doubling too. And after a petabyte or so, the resolution gets *really* interesting because you can start modeling macro-scale systems of micro-scale (you know, individual atoms or stars) as long as you know the force laws, and you can start finding those out numerically if you don't. So there's plenty of use for *truly* astronomical, dizzying amounts of memory way, way beyond one measly terabyte.

The group in Germany that did the experimental work specializes in doing measurements of pressures of ~100 GPa. It looks like they use diamond anvils, http://www.mpg.de/bilderBerichteDokumente/dokumentation/pressemitteilungen/2004/pressemitteilung200408022/index.html . So, okay, this would be a really earthshattering development if it led to superconductors that work at room temperature and at ordinary pressures, but it sounds like that may not happen. We already have superconductors that work at liquid nitrogen temperatures, and liquid nitrogen is as cheap as milk.

Yeah, we have sources. Mine was written by a large chunk of the world's climate scientists summarizing several thousand peer-reviewed papers. Yours is one guy going who thinks they're wrong. Same thing, really, right?

Let's check the quality of this great work of yours. :) The core section on your page is Alternate Explanations of Warming. Surely *they* have read what they're debating against, right?

If you really want to irritate an AGW supporter, ask about the sun. To AGW supporters, only a Luddite would check the sun?s output when they could instead be obsessing over the increase in CO2 by 0.009% of the atmosphere. When they looked at the problem, the IPCC decided that over the last 50 years, the sun has been irrelevant to warming

BZZT, wrong! They did no such thing. The entire 106 page chapter 2 is titled, "Changes in Atmospheric Constituents and in Radiative Forcing". Most of the several hundred peer-reviewed references have to do with solar input reaching the Earth in one way or another. Around fifty to a hundred of them have to do with the sun itself.

Seeing yet why you should read this report before you debate? No? Then let's continue.

Note that the blue band in this chart (described in more detail in the last section), the IPCC thinks that without man, the world would have cooled over the last 50 years

That graph does not appear in the WG1 report on solar variability. They do, however, cite papers reconstructing solar variability through many completely different, independent means (Schatten and Orosz, 1990; Lean et al, 1992; Lean et al, 1992; Hoyt and Schatten, 1993; Lean et al, 1995; Solanki and Fligge, 1999; Lean, 2000; Foster, 2004; Y. Wang et al, 2005; Dziembowski, 2001). The results are all quite small -- an RF increase of 0 to 0.65 W/m^2 since the Maunder Minimum (the planet currently receives about 1300W/m^2). The older studies, especially the Lean ones, tend to be higher, and the newer studies lower. The report discusses how an underlying assumption of those studies was disproven, and the newer studies take that into account. If you want to learn more about any of those methods, the references are right there. They go on to explain the reasons with half a dozen more references.

But it turns out, interestingly, that solar irradiance may be close to its highest point in centuries. Al Gore says that current global temperatures are the highest they have been in 1000 years. A new study by the Institute of Astronomy in Zurich says that the "sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the previous 1,000 years." Related?

*Included*. What, you think they just ignore studies they don't like? Sami Solanki, the author of the report linked, is even a contributor to the IPCC report. Amazing how they try to spin him as being part of their little denial group when he doesn't believe that at all.

We can look at solar output over large time frames by looking at the production of carbon-14 (less is produced in years of high solar activity, and vice versa). The analysis below used the ratio of oxygen isotopes in the stalagmites to estimate the water temperature at the time they were formed.

You're right -- you can! And so did the IPCC, which further makes obvious that the author of your page never even read the report. "An initial effort reported exceptionally high levels of solar activity in the last 70 years, relative to the preceeding 8,000 years (Solanki et al, 2004). In contrast, when differences in isotopes records are taken into account and the C14 record corrected for fossil burning, current levels of solar activity are found to be historically high, but not exceptionally so (

If the Magnetic Vortex Core (http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDocumentation/documentation/pressReleases/2006/pressRelease200611281) technology ever makes it into the hard-drive markets, it will considerably reduce the size of these drives. Densely packed cores would mean less movement, thus lesser power, and higher stability - and yes, less weight. SSDs would be quite expensive and slow when compared with drives built on Vortex Cores. Lets see what the future has in store.

The oceans are currently absorbing 7 billion tons of CO2 more than they outgas each year, with terrestrial absorption at 5 billion tons net per year.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/CarbonCycle/carbon_cycle4.html (NASA's Earth Observatory site is currently offline)
(alternate link) http://www.visionlearning.com/library/module_viewer.php?mid=95

Solar irradiance does directly track historical temperatures; however, the past 30 years have shown increasing temperatures with steady solar irradiance.

Direct satellite measurements of solar irradiance find no rising trend since 1978, the start of measurements. Sunspot numbers have leveled out since 1950. The Max Planck Institute reconstruction shows that irradiance has been steady since 1950 and solar radio flux or flare activity shows no rising trend over the past 30 years.

An increase solar irradiance would warm all layers of the atmosphere as there would be more heat radiating through all atmospheric layers back out to space. An increased greenhouse effect would reflect more heat to the surface, thus warming the lower atmospheric layers and cooling the upper atmospheric layers. The second case is what is being observed.

http://www.mps.mpg.de/dokumente/publikationen/solanki/c153.pdf
http://www.pmodwrc.ch/pmod.php?topic=tsi/composite/SolarConstant
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Sunspot_Numbers_png
ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/STP/SOLAR_DATA/SUNSPOT_NUMBERS/MONTHLY.PLT
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Solar_Cycle_Variations_png

The Max Planck Insitute for Meteorology disagrees with you:

http://www.mpimet.mpg.de/en/presse/faq-s/ist-die-abwaerme-der-menschen-wichtig-fuer-das-klima.html

A back of the envelope calculation shows that 1 kW average would correspond to over 20,000 calories (food calories, so actually kilocalories), over a 24 hour period. 100 watts seems more reasonable.

There are indeed many issues with the mind that can be fixed purely through therapy, meditation, religion, what-have-you... However, why is it so difficult for you to accept that there possibly are problems that simply cannot be fixed that way? Chronic pain can also be managed under some circumstances via the same means, but that does not make the pain caused by chronic disease any less real, or have any less of a physical cause.

There are plenty of folks who know a heck of a lot more about medicine than you or me that also believe that depression can be caused by chemical regulation issues:

http://www.biopsychiatry.com/serotonin/genetic.html

There is evidence that the chemical imbalances have a genetic nature, which would certainly suggest a physical issue with the structure of the brain of victims.

http://www.mpipsykl.mpg.de/pages/english/info/news/mpifirst.html

That the emotions experienced by the human brain can be affected by physical phenomena, is commonly accepted, and doesn't require a belief in anything.

Can you provide evidence that a common root cause of depression is a physical disorder?

Certainly.

Until tests were developed for Thyroid malfunction, many people were simply thought to be lazy, unmotivated, and/or gloomy folk. (or hyper-active and irritable, depending on what was wrong with it) (There are other symptoms of Thyroid malfunction, but not all sufferers have the more obvious physical ones.) When the Thyroid was discovered to be the cause of these problems, treatment became relatively straightforward. (One medical test almost all people with suspected clinical depression (or anxiety) undergo is a test of Thyroid function for just this reason.) Just because we don't know the trigger for most clinical depression and can't find crap visibly falling apart in the brain doesn't mean it does not have a physical cause; it could just mean we haven't found it yet.

There are plenty of other well-known physical problems in the brain that can cause depression: Alzheimer's, tumors, malformed glands, physical trauma...

In my somewhat limited experience with those close to me, I have seen that for clinically depressed folks, therapy works to help the patient cope with the mind-breaking stress of a depressive episode; helps to keep them from killing themselves, even when every instinct is screaming that all is hopeless; it can help the patient live something outwardly resembling a normal life, even when they can barely pry themselves out of bed. In that way, depressive patients are lucky that it is a disease of the mind... the disease can managed to keep it from killing you while a drug regimen is sought. But when a proper drug regimen is found, the problem simply goes away (or at least gets quite a bit better). Drugs don't always work, but they are the best tool we have right now when therapy doesn't work either.

It is absolutely correct that treating the brain purely as a physical organ can lead to grave errors in diagnosis and treatment. Anti-depressants are completely ineffective in those that are not suffering from depression. Anti-depressants will not cure grief caused by the loss of a loved one, they will not cure apathy caused by the loss of a job, they will not fix anxiety caused by a big test coming up. Grief is a natural response to loss, anxiety is a natural response to stress. A doctor prescribing anti-depressants in those circumstances is being lazy and likely hoping the placebo affect will fix things. Likewise, a therapist that does not refer a patient to a MD for chronic depression where there are no triggers in their life and the therapy is utterly ineffective in curing the depression is also not making a correct decision.

The brain is, in the end, a physical organ that can have physical issues, just like the rest of the body; it is not immune from defect

Related links: * LDX@MIT
* Physics of magnetically confined fusion [pdf]
* The main principles of magnetic fusion
* Magnetic fusion experiments at LANL
* High density magnetic fusion
* Has a good bit on magnetic confinement
* Can a magnetic field be used to contain plasma?
* International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor
* What's happening in fusion?
* Design of magnetic fields for fusion experiments [pdf]
* Wikipedia article on the topic
* Magnetized target fusion bibliography
* Plasma physics bibliography
* Databases for plasma physics

* Plasma physics laboratories
* List of plasma physicists
* Plasma on the internet

As for the people that confuse this 'molecular gastronomy' with 'Engineered food' and preprocessed food, you miss the point. It is about taking the normal ingredients, you could even get it from the organic food store if you want, but trying to understand what the background-cause is of, for example, the cake that went wrong, or how to make a well-done steak. This can all be done without any chemical additives, just using good ingredients and the knowledge of the cooking process. This knowledge is still lacking a lot, it is very complicated physics and chemistry here, you also need to have a background in both to fully understand what is happening.

According to Shannon, a signal bering maximal information is (to a naive receiver) indistinguishable from noise! http://email.eva.mpg.de/~lachmann/papers/physicalL imits.pdf (PDF warning)
-ACtion_at_a_distance

In fall of this year the CSBF will be launching the Sunrise payload from Fort Sumner NM. On board will be the E-Link system from Esrange, Sweden. 10 Mbit to line of sight @ 125000 Ft. Approx 350 miles. (They use a 6 ft dish at the ground station and 10 watts at both ends) Frequency approvals through the US gov are already approved.

So there...

HA!

Link:

http://www.mps.mpg.de/solar-system-school/lectures /space_instrumentation_2006/barthol_Sunrise.pdf

In fact, it is an advantage that this is older. Here is a review article by the authors: http://www.mps.mpg.de/projects/sun-climate/papers/ solphys-2004.pdf. This image from thier website http://www.mps.mpg.de/projects/sun-climate/image/C limate.gif basically says the same thing I did here: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/executive-summ ary.html, the Sun is not responsible for the current warming. You can find the caption for their figure here: http://www.mps.mpg.de/projects/sun-climate/results .html as figure 5.
--
Rent solar for what you pay now: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

In fact, it is an advantage that this is older. Here is a review article by the authors: http://www.mps.mpg.de/projects/sun-climate/papers/ solphys-2004.pdf. This image from thier website http://www.mps.mpg.de/projects/sun-climate/image/C limate.gif basically says the same thing I did here: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/executive-summ ary.html, the Sun is not responsible for the current warming. You can find the caption for their figure here: http://www.mps.mpg.de/projects/sun-climate/results .html as figure 5.
--
Rent solar for what you pay now: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

In fact, it is an advantage that this is older. Here is a review article by the authors: http://www.mps.mpg.de/projects/sun-climate/papers/ solphys-2004.pdf. This image from thier website http://www.mps.mpg.de/projects/sun-climate/image/C limate.gif basically says the same thing I did here: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/executive-summ ary.html, the Sun is not responsible for the current warming. You can find the caption for their figure here: http://www.mps.mpg.de/projects/sun-climate/results .html as figure 5.
--
Rent solar for what you pay now: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

As a followup to my own comment, here's a link to the press release at the Max Planck institute concerning the misinterpretation of these results:

http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDocumentati on/documentation/pressReleases/2006/pressRelease20 0601131/index.html

Please have a look at a presentation I gave in the EP to interested assistants and MEPs about this. Although it may not be that clear without the accompanying commentary, I hope it still can clarify some of the important points.

Basically, the problem is that it does not only apply to commercial scale copyright piracy and trademark counterfeiting, but also criminalises

• Alleged trademark confusion, e.g. Burger King v. Wholebake, or L'oreal SA & Ors v Bellure NV & Ors

• Infringements on database rights. As you may know, database rights only apply in case a "substantial investment" occurred, but how is a competitor supposed to know this in advance? Further, case law on this new "right" is still very much in development (slides 14-15 of the presentation, e.g. a case about a company selling an electronic version of a phone directory )

• Non-piracy related copyright infringements: e.g. Deutsche Bahn (the German national railway corporation) has been convicted for copyright infringement, because it altered the plans of the architect which designed their new Berlin railway station in a way which the architect considered to be infringing on his copyright. Another very nice on: a museum which is being sued for repairing an artwork which consisted of a urinal, because that person who destroyed it considered the "destroyed urinal" as a work of art in itself.

• Then there are also registered and unregistered design rights, which like database rights are not examined at all for validity. If you start threatening criminal prosecution for infringing on "right" which may not be valid in the first place, you get really chilling effects in the market place.

If you have time to read only one background paper on this completely idiotic and misguided directive, have a look at the position paper of the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys. But those of the Law Society of England and Wales and Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law are also very good. You can find a lot more position papers on FFII's IPRED2 workgroup page under "External opinions"

Unlike the software patents directive, this is not a case of big companies vs small ones. Pretty much everyone except for the IFPI (music publishing industry) are trashing this directive like there's no tomorrow. And if you want to know why it is nevertheless being pushed through by the Commission, read my ENDitorial in the previous EDRI-gram.

The problem could be that infringement is not the same as piracy. The FFII explains where to draw the line. Their recommendation is to adopt the definitions of the Max-Planck-Institution .

On the one hand civil rights group advocate to criminalise piracy and counterfeit while the proposal of the Commission actually criminalises "all infringements". Plus "incitting, abetting infringements", that is very very broad, hmm? The Open Rights Group explains it very well.

It is not about piratebay or piracy and counterfeit, it is about ordinary online businesses where 'infringement' is unevitable and a matter of everyday business. You get alerted by the rightsholder and take content down. Else a civil court will process the case. When you are a manager of an online community as Youtube, it is not the police that arrests you for "inciting infringements" of intellectual property rights, infringements by user generated context. That would change. Due diligence could well be interpreted as 'intentional infringement'. Someone posts copyright protected content in your web forum, you become a criminal. In civil law there are already similar interpretations.

Or think of grey cases. How easy is it to infringe a trademark or a patent? Because we don't really know the scope of the right.

The business case against ipred2 is very good. Reportedly even the BSA was against it.

We are not talking about rational anti-piracy regulation but insanity which messes up IPR regulation and criminal law.

http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDocumentati on/documentation/pressReleases/2003/pressRelease20 030718/index.html

what.. like under-water volcanic activity..

or like..

300 degree C sea vents.. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/08/05081 9123850.htm

yea.... no corrolation.. must be my SUV causing icebergs to melt..

The Max Planck Society has an article on this very subject, written all the way back in 2004. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research found that the variations in solar activity matched similar variations in Earth's mean temperature for about 120 of the last 150 years. However, the last 20-30 years have seen no appreciable increase in solar activity while Earth's mean temperature has risen "dramatically". http://www.mpg.de/english/illustrationsDocumentati on/documentation/pressReleases/2004/pressRelease20 040802/

Check out Mars Viking lander. It used a "nodding" mirror with a 12 pixel array for its camera. This link gives a very detailed discussion on the Viking camera. http://dragon.larc.nasa.gov/viscom/first_pictures. html A rather large slide show document gives a very high level overview of different imaging devices used in space probes. http://www.mps.mpg.de/solar-system-school/lectures /space_instrumentation/11.ppt#281,1,Slide1

DNA isn't an especially robust molecule. It probably didn't survive that long. It is prone to a variety of reactions that will degrade it over time relatively quickly. Though it was originally thought to survive much longer, DNA older than a million years is now considered pretty dubious, and is likely contamination from other sources, such as soil microbes, or it is degraded fragments with no meaningful signal left in them (e.g., older DNA extracted from fossils tens of millions of years old contains roughly equal left and right amino acids, whereas living tissues contain all left ones, implying the DNA has been severely degraded). Previous discoveries from fossils tens of millions of years old (e.g., from old amber) have proven unreproducible. There's a good review in this PDF format paper by Hofreiter et al., 2001.

By contrast, some organic molecules, such as collagen, are much more durable than DNA, and could plausibly survive much longer in the right conditions, such as if embedded in the minerals that form bone. This general fact has been known for a long time (those papers are from the 1960s and are both PDFs), though how old such remains might ultimately be found is still uncertain. Also, even if the organic molecules were severely degraded, it doesn't mean they vanish completely -- some degraded C-bearing organic residue might remain as long as it wasn't dissolved away, and it could still preserve the shape of the original tissues, even if it wasn't compositionally the same anymore.

Some organic molecules are extraordinarily durable and occur as fossils routinely. The sporopollenin that forms the cell wall of spores and pollen is like the "plastic garbage bag" of organic materials. It can survive multiple passages through the digestive system of animals, and still be intact. Fossil pollen and spores are often recovered from sedimentary rocks essentially unchanged, except for a bit of thermal alteration, and geologists use potent acids like concentrated HCl and HF to dissolve the minerals away, but the pollen and spores are untouched!

Finally, even if the organic molecules themselves get destroyed (e.g., it isn't, say, collagen anymore), minerals could precipitate in contact with the soft tissues and preserve their shape at microscopic scale. The soft tissue isn't actully there, but the structure is. Such preservation is rare, but is known for other types of soft tissues in an older dinosaur (the linked example of the dinosaur Scipionyx does show soft-tissue structures, such as intestines, but they are all mineralized).

You're neglecting recent progress in the field; as stated in the FTA for traversal it's all about coherence. Note that coherent traversal (read SIMD friendly) has been transposed to other hierarchies, grid, bvh, bih... you name it.

Scan-line will remain mainstream as long as it will be the only method with a cheap specialised hardware implementation in town, even if objectively it doesn't make much sense.

"It's not like this is being ignored or anything...." Yes....basically it has.

"It's not like this is being ignored or anything...." Yes....basically it has.