Slashdot Mirror

"at a rate far far less than predicted by all your models." Patently False. They aren't rising as fast as the worse case scenarios the media likes to report. They are rising within model predictions.

Actually, he is more right than you are. Let's compare, shall we? Plot the trend from 1990 - 2050, and compare with observations.The IPCC even revised their 2013 report from the 2nd quarter, downgrading their predictions from 0.13-0.33 per decade to 0.10-0.23 per decade. That's near the BOTTOM of the model's predictions, so it seems even the IPCC isn't buying that the models are accurate.

They claimed in AR5 that the observations were within the model predictions from AR4, but their OWN GRAPHIC tells a different story.

B) IF you are implying there is an increase in the energy output of the sun, we would know becasue we measure it pretty accuratly. The rising trend does NOT correlate with the Suns activity.

Actually, that's not accurate. True, it does not correlate with the sun's total solar irradiance but the models ignore anything else, such as spectral variability. There have been plenty of correlations made with solar activity, earth's orbit, Milankovitch cycles and cosmic rays. You might want to review a few of these papers on solar influence of climate change.

" Has a habit of touting every storm or weather incident (even earthquakes) as proof of global warming, " um, that's the media, not scientists who are experts in that field of study. However, there will be an increase in the energy of events. This can be stronger storms, or more storms,. The bottom line: more energy expressed over time.

Well you can claim that if you want to, but in fact it's a compromised media and activist climatologists. Like the ones that made a trip to Antarctica as a marketing exercise and alarm people about the disappearing ice (it didn't work out for them), like James Hansen, like Michael Oppenheimer, like John Harte.

" Has a habit of touting every storm or weather incident (even earthquakes) as proof of global warming, " um, that's the media, not scientists who are experts in that field of study. However, there will be an increase in the energy of events. This can be stronger storms, or more storms,. The bottom line: more energy expressed over time.

"No True Scotsman", then?

"We have also had some of the coldest incidents in recorded history in recent years as well." As expect by climate change models, dumb ass. The term climate change is older the global warming, BTW.

Yes, as everything and nothing is all evidence of climate change. There are so many predictions, EVERY event is confirmation and NO event can shed dispersion upon it. Does that really sound like science to you?

4) We put out far more CO2 then can be absorbed by the pre-industrial climate cycles.

Pure conjecture. The FACT is that the correlation between increasing CO2 followed by increased warming is not very good.

...are that it's proved to be a completely inappropriate way of measuring the age of a sample, particularly for older samples.

In fact for any sample over 2000 years old the errors are absolute.

So in fact, this is big, big news.

I'd be curious to see where it's been "proved" to be an inappropriate way of age measuring, since carbon-14 dating closely correlates with tree ring data out to 26,000 years back, using the INTCAL04 data group, which is internationally recognized as valid, and likewise it correlates well with deep ocean sediments, coral, cave rock formations, and other sources, all of which give similar age data to radiocarbon dating, which is currently using the INTCAL09 data for correction, that is internationally recognized as valid out to 50,000 years. So, if there's a problem with radiocarbon dating, the same problem is also affecting how fast sediments accumulate, coral grow, and stalactites form, and I've never heard of anyone suggesting anything that can affect all those, at the same time, and alter them all in a proportional manner. If you've any suggestions for something that could do that, I'd love to hear about it.

Java is faster then C++ for any non trivial use case. This is because of 2 reasons:
- It compiles more natively then C++: C++ is compiled for just "Windows", while Java is hotspot compiled at runtime (where necessary, after a startup delay) to "Windows XP SP3 Intel processor".
- A garbage collector is faster for non-trivial use cases then malloc because it can free entire chunks of memory at once. When someone walks into your living room with muddy shoes, it's more efficient to mop the entire room then it is to clean only the footprints with a toothbrush.

As a planning solving programmer, I 've seen this in practice.
Planning problems are problems that run for hours and do virtually no IO, they simple take up all the CPU power and evaluate an exponential of billions solutions.

Real-world use case performance competitions prove that Java implementations are faster then C++ implementations:
- Terrabyte sort benchmark: http://sortbenchmark.org/
- International timetabling competition: http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/itc2007/

Java does have downsides over C++: it has a terrible warmup time and it loves to grab and hold lots of RAM, because garbage collectors work faster with more RAM. So in use cases like gedit/kate/jedit where startup time is more important than performance, I'd stick with C++.

I think I read the same article. It looked more like 1 group proclaiming 'victory' without even review. I'm not a proponent of either, I just think it is an interesting subject. I read an article (derived from) here http://nam2008.qub.ac.uk/press/2008-09-release/ just last month, which is why I posted.

Yep. Mac users are androgynous.

They are also smug with no good reason, unlike Linux users.

Come on Roland, give us a break . . . you obviously don't understand what your writing about. Your analogies make no sense, your summarize is full of gross holes and you're trying to "sex-up" plasmons by calling a natural phonomena a technology and saying that it's something "new" when it is not. And seems you're doing this to attract hits to your blog so that you can sell ad space.

I know this post is harsh, but I have to say that it appears that you are attempting to exploit the /. community for your own personal financial gain. We /. readers aren't as gullible or stupid as you seem to think . . .

'Pay close attention to shipping or contact addresses located in countries with a high reported incidence of online fraud and many e-commerce web sites have found a high incidents of on-line fraud as well, such as Africa...'

News to me. I always thought of Africa as more a continent with a rich and diverse assortment of tapestries of culture. With great cultural variances within groups of cultures and subgroups within those groups and so on...

This is pretty much the same for all indigenous peoples from all continents across the globe. The only reason we can think of the United States as having a sort of unified culture is because at critical junctures of forming our own identity as a people we had devised means of communication and transportation This is the reason that whether you go to Ann Arbor Michigan, Toms River NJ, Seattle, Southern California, Denver, (you name it) a suburb is a suburb is a suburb. All this had been done after we had already colonized this continent, which until then previously had previously as diverse a population of greatly differing cultures as any indigenous area of the globe.

I remember going to Lollapolooza (lots o' poor losers) back in 93. Someone had a table setup with a sign above it reading "African Food"....'Hmm..wonder what that tastes like'. So, I wander over there and ask her what kind of 'African' food they meant. It was loud so she kind of shouted back at me...'IT'S...AFRICAN...FOOOD!'...(as if I couldn't read the big bold letters above her). 'Ah! I see! What KIND of African?'...'Nigerian'...'What kind of Nigerian? Yoruba or Ibo?' Which I later found out is more popularly known as Igbo. But you could have properly referred to the plate in front of me as either.

This question really kind of floored her. And it shouldn't have. It really kind of annoys me when greatly divergent groups of people get lumped together like that. Just as it pisses me the fuck off when people speak of all Native Americans as if they were just "Indians" (as if there were quite literally no difference between a Lakota, a Navajo, a Lenape, a Choctaw, Oglala, Onendaga and and what have you)...it really pisses me off when people start speaking of Africa as if it were a "country". It's NOT!

I saw something similar to this a few weeks ago at an Engineers' Week presentation. One company was showing their planar "parabolic" reflectors. It was basically a fixed-beam rectangular reflectarray that duplicated the funcionality of a parabolic dish. It would still need a feed at the focus of the reflectarray.

Of course it can! All we have to do is convince everyone to learn it in addition to whatever languages they already speak. People will learn it in droves! Everyone will quickly become proficient, damn the effort! All so that we can easily speak to our electronic devices and save those poor natural language parsing software developers from needless effort. Forget all those neural-networks and whatnot. Let's do it the hard way, like men!

They'll even make movies in Silbo, because everyone will be fluent and will want to completely immerse themselves!

Doh. Props to you and turgid on this one. I should have remembered this from hearing the Well-Tempered Clavier for the first time and asking what it meant. (Turns out it doesn't necessarily mean the same thing, but that's a whole other story.)

If the kids know how to use Free Software, then they'll know how to RTFM

Well, for those like myself who are forced to beat their heads against the wall that is Fortran, there's a great introduction over at the Queen's Universoty of Belfast. So far it's told me all the basic syntax stuff I need, so it makes a really handy reference.

As for Fortran 77 [shudder] (and yes, I have to work with it regularly...), a search for prof77 readily yields a relatively tiny document that contains pretty much all the F77 information you'll ever need -- it's shockingly complete considering its size. I recommend finding a .ps version.

2) The Hindenburgh (Gas tanks tend to burn, pressurized gas cylinders tend to explode)

How are you wrong? Let me count the ways:

1) The Hindenburg did not burn because it was full of hydrogen. It would have burned had it been filled with helium. Some guy at NASA proved it.

2) Gas tanks do not tend to burn. There are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of them not burning all over the world right now. You probably have several hundred very near you as you read this (in automobiles, in lawnmowers, etc.).

3) Pressurized gas cylinders do not tend to explode. There are hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of them not exploding all over the world right now. You probably have several dozen very near you as you read this (fire extinguishers, propane tanks, medical oxygen tanks, helium tanks to blow up [inflate] children's ballons, etc.).

4) The Hindenburg was not a gas tank, nor was it a pressurized gas cylinder.

5) Nothing about the Hindenburg has anything to do with the idea of using hydrogen as a fuel. The Hindenburg ran on kerosene. Saying the Hindenburg "proves" hydrogen is dangerous is like saying the Kursk "proves" nuclear power is dangerous since it was a nuclear sub (or that Three Mile Island "proves" that electricity is dangerous since that's what it was making).

And as for your first point about all the energy used to "make" the hydrogen, you miss the point entirely. There are dozens of ways we can (and do) make hydrogen, some better than others. There is only one way to make gasoline. At least hydrogen will give us some options, one of which is make it from gasoline as needed.