Slashdot Mirror

Sigh.
I have tried to tell you over this last year, that OCO2 is showing for the last 2 years that China's CO2 emissions was growing (and not shrinking like you claimed). Now, it is growing FAST.
NOW, they were forced to admit to burning more coal. In fact, a minimum of 4.5% coal (it is likely to go higher next year when this group re-calculates 2018 for real).
You can see that China's energy usage, esp. Coal, along with gas that is at least partially made from coal (unknown how much is from coal, but unless CHina is burying the CO2, it generates more than just burning it) is growing VERY fast.

Then we see that China is ADDING ANOTHER 250-300 GW of COAL. Not replacing. This is ADDING. They are going on sites that have current coal and adding to them. Again, not replacing, but adding.
FOr the last year, I have told you that they were expanding, but you continue to claim otherwise. Yet, here are private space photos that positively prove that what your Chinese gov claims is not even close to true. China is building and they are building MORE than what is being acknowledged.

Now, you can continue to ignore the FACTS, and simply keep burying your head. But, I think that you have the same belief that I do, that all of the nations need to take responsibility and cut their emissions. And yes, China is more than developed enough to have them lower their emissions.

It's not too late, it's just getting harder the longer we do nothing about it. We have to radically change the way we live, but hardly anyone seems to be ready to do so. See here, why this is problematic: http://folk.uio.no/roberan/t/global_mitigation_curves.shtml

They're probably thinking of things like near-field synthetic aperture sonar. You can get images as clear as this, which gives the impression that water is no obstacle. Distance, however, changes what one can do, and there's quite a difference between passive monitoring and active monitoring as well.

Man, you're completely wrong. The Earth doesn't have a population limit. 8 billion is no closer than 1 billion. We can all live comfortable, luxurious lives. The problems we're facing have nothing to do with resource exhaustion (aside from petroleum), but inefficiency and pollution. We can absolutely produce goods without air pollution. We have sources of essentially limitless energy. We can absolutely use nuclear reactors to ship goods - no need for bunker oil. It's a question of economics and political engagement.

Cool. Get back to me when you've convinced the world to put a potential nuclear meltdown in every town and every cargo ship and drive EVs so they can use it for charging. Back in the real world, CO2 levels keep going up, up and away as countries like China go modern. After that comes India, Brazil and the rest of the developing world. Even if the population boom has subsided we'll still hit 10 billion people, that's another 33% growth.

The people who talk about reducing emissions are smoking crack, we're likely to double the world's CO2 emissions in the next 40 years if the technology doesn't evolve. Make that quadruple if everybody decides to pollute as much as Americans, because if they can why can't we? Whatever improvements we make will only make the explosive growth slightly less explosive unless we invent a working fusion reactor or something. Say what you want about nuclear but in the public opinion it's beating a dead horse. We're shutting existing reactors down, not building new ones.

http://folk.uio.no/kjstore/pap... "An average new immigrant represents a net government loss of 175,000 SEK ($20,500), given the baseline parameterization"

comparing at equal pressures gives more of an apples to apples comparison. Since you can clearly see how radically the temperatures fluctuate based on pressure.

Um, well yeah. The temperatures on different planets are very different, even at the same pressure - as you'd expect, given all the other differences, like distance from the Sun, cloud cover, chemical composition and who knows what else. I'm really not sure where you're going with all this. It certainly doesn't show that "the chemistry of the atmosphere makes almost no difference." It just shows that there are a lot of factors that determine temperature. The pressure may be "apples to apples" but nothing else is.

And of course the temperature goes up & down with the pressure at different altitudes; that's the Pressure-Temperature law I linked to earlier. Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't see what any of this has to do with the Greenhouse Gas effect.

As to trapping heat... CO2 is hardly unique in this feature nor do I see why it plays a special role in the Earth atmosphere.

What's different about CO2 compared to the other, stronger greenhouse gases like water vapour and methane is that it accumulates over a long time.

Water vapour is a stable quantity in the atmosphere (for a given temperature). Any excess simply precipitates out as rain. It doesn't increase, at least not until you start warming the air up.

Methane does accumulate, for a while - but it is broken down by UV light over a period of years, so it has only a short term effect as well. It can still be a problem (e.g. if melting permafrost like the Siberian Traps releases significant methane into the atmosphere, which is a real concern and could trigger other warming feedbacks), but it doesn't build up over a long time, so any direct effects of a methane pulse are short-lived.

CO2 takes centuries to be removed from the atmosphere. This is done by vegetation, to a small extent, but the vast majority of CO2 uptake is done by the ocean. Even so, this is a slow process. CO2 has been building up rapidly in our atmosphere, and even if we stopped emitting ALL anthropogenic CO2 tomorrow, it would still take centuries to return to pre-industrial levels. Worse, much of that CO2 being absorbed by the oceans is being converted to carbonic acid, which is resulting in ocean acidification - a decreasing pH that we've been observing for some time, and is already having measurable results on sensitive ocean ecosystems.

I had a hard time finding a graph for CO2 ironically... maybe you can help me out there.

I did find this which should serve: https://commons.wikimedia.org/...

Yep, that looks like a useful graph. It's certainly clear that water vapour has a bigger effect - but the primary point here is that CO2 also blocks outgoing energy. It's in addition to the effect of water vapour. Water doesn't "black out" the effect of CO2, it adds to it, trapping more energy.

While the water vapour effect is bigger, the CO2 effect is added to this - and that is steadily increasing, as the CO2 in our atmosphere increases. This is enough extra trapped energy to change the temperature equilibrium of our planet; we've done the maths. See e.g. Myhre '98 for how this is forcing value is derived, while Puckrin '04 compares our radiative flux models for a variety of greenhouse gas mixes with atmospheric observations, and finds them to agree well.

Have a look here for a comparison of the radiative forcing values of the significant greenhouse gases, particularly the Greenhouse Gases section and

As to the link, I think I cited the wrong link...

The new link does show corrections to a single satellite dataset - but there's nothing there even faintly close to the 0.6 degrees/year you were claiming. There are both positive and negative corrections that are a fraction of that, as they discover and account for factors like orbital decay.

There is your citation. Don't be stubborn or proud. It will undermine your intellectual credibility. Admit that and move on ;-)

As to zeta joules, I can't process that information... That means I can't audit it. And I don't like evidence that can't be audited.

Perhaps you should engage in further study, then - and until then, you'll have to accept that this evidence has been audited by expert reviewers, both before and after publication; by people who have enough experience in the field to understand what heat content is. This is how science works in every field.

That said, I don't understand your confusion. How would a temperature figure help here? Do you just want to see an overall degrees/year amount so you can decide subjectively if it's "significant" or not? It's rather more complicated than that.

18810.48 cubic km of water

Did I make another error here? Because these numbers are still no where near what they're talking about. That shows nearly five times the melting of that estimate. That's not even close.

That's because you're calculating from incomplete data. The 200 Gt/year ice loss figure I quoted was an estimate from a single paper that dealt only with the major ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica. To get a more accurate figure for all the sea level rise inputs, you also have to factor in the melting glaciers everywhere else in the world. This is further complicated by the fact that ice melt in different areas can contribute quite differently to sea level rise (e.g. if it's floating, or if shrinking ice extent decreases albedo, resulting in warmer water and thus more moisture uptake in the atmosphere, to name a couple of factors). Then on top of this you have to include the effects of thermal expansion, which is around 25% of the total rise.

For a more detailed discussion, you could start with Meier et al 2007, which for example estimates that 60% of sea level rise actually comes from glacier melting, not including the two ice sheets in Greenland and the Antarctic.

you're going to have to show a graph that predates the heavy emission of fossil fuels.

Take a look at Figures 5 through 7 in Church et al 2011, that I already linked to earlier.

Obviously satellite data doesn't go back that far, which is what Shepherd was looking at, but we have fairly good logs of tidal data going back hundreds of years. These are confirmed by sedimentary cores going back to 1300.

That shows a much lower rate of rise... I think they're saying inches per century

This is only looking at ice melt in some specific areas. A direct quote:

we quantify mass-change trends in 19 continental areas that exhibit a dominant signal... the net effect was + (1.1 ± 0.6) mm/year.

This is consistent with our calculations above, as it includes areas beyond Greenland and the Antarctic. But it does not include all global sources of sea level rise; besides, we can measure that directly.

What's more, the rate of sea level rise has itself been increasing. Prior to 1900 it was close to 1mm/year, but in the las

Not a troll but a genuine question - what's stunted about ASP.NET MVC?

ASP.NET MVC along with the other "web MVC" have really little to do with the real MVC as in the original smalltalk MVC described by Trygve Reenskaugs MVC. Web MVCs are bastardizations of the original concept, often only riding the name for recognition. I blame Struts and RoR for starting this trend.

I believe grand parent was referring to the original MVC which was a way to design interactive, event-driven GUIs. The original MVC was a recursive concept: The view could itself be a "tool" that in turn followed the MVC pattern. See http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygve...

As far as "web MVCs" goes, ASP.NET MVC is a really good one. But real MVC it is not. But that's a lost cause. An entire generation of developers have grown up believing that RoR and Struts were examples of MVC. In actuality, the designers og Struts and RoR grossly misunderstood the concept.

Copyright isn't the only way to get paid for writing software. A kickstarter approach lets you collect the money upfront rather than trying to track down people and make them pay post-hoc. Make a page detailing all the neat stuff the software (or the new version) will do, name your price, and see if the world wants it. It's turned out to work very well for computer games, for example.

Despite caring being perceived as a normal and natural expression of one’s humanity as a complete person, whether as male or female, “men are viewed as sexualised in predatory ways in our culture” (King, 1998, p. 76). For example, one expression of care, notably hugging, is regarded ambivalently in the wider society: “Society allows men to hug children at home. But outside of home, men don’t hug children or other men. They hug women” (King, 1998, p. 79). This ambivalent attitude toward men expressing care in physical ways (hugging, hand holding, permitting a person to sit on their lap) means that men who choose to work in elementary classroom contexts with children are monitored. Male teachers seen by others as performing atypical gender-identified behavior for men are marginalized and treated with suspicion (King, 1998).

Source: Hanson, P., & Mulholland, J. A. (2005). Caring and Elementary Teaching: The Concerns of Male Beginning Teachers.

In this study, the author used ethnographic and focus group interviews to examine the lived experiences of men who teach in the primary grades. Several themes arose from the men's narratives. First, the men are under closer scrutiny than their women peers regarding contact with the children. Second, there is considerable ambiguity regarding the kind of “male role model” the men feel they are expected to portray. Third, there is a sexual division of labor that reinforces the image of men as having different teaching styles than women teachers. In response to the cumulative effects of these phenomena, the men must adopt compensatory behaviors causing them to unintentionally reproduce traditional forms of masculinity.

Source: Sargent, P. (2000). Real Men or Real Teachers? Contradictions in the Lives of Men Elementary Teachers.

One of the common reasons given for this, including within the Male Teachers' Strategy, is that many men have a fear of false paedophilia accusations. The response of Education Queensland is to suggest setting up a support framework for teachers who are accused of sexual misconduct. While false claims of sexual abuse are devastating to those accused, there is little in this strategy that will help to develop challenging attitudes to the creation of this fear. The fear is most pervasive when men move in to non-masculinized areas of the curriculum and/or schooling sector. For example, when men move into early childhood their motives are often questioned (King, 2000, p. 9; see also Murray, 1996; Smedley, 1998; Sumsion, 1999). Such work is constructed within patriarchal societies as women's work and is devalued. The consequence of this is that men who want to teach young children risk being positioned as deviant, abnormal or lacking. That is, they are at risk of being seen as gay, 'effeminate' or a paedophile.

The risk that men pose to children in early childcare, and other educational settings, however, is an important topic that should not be trivialized (see Skelton, 1994; Cameron et al., 1999, chapter 7). There has been a significant amount of feminist political work carried out to get the issue of child sexual abuse on to the political agenda (see, for example, Kelly, 1988; Scutt, 1990; Segal, 1990). This work has seen the development of a number of institutions and legislation designed to protect children-in Queensland the Child Protection Act 1999 is one such law. It would be unfortunateif much of this work was undone in an attempt to attract more male teachers into the system. Rather, what is needed is not so much greater protection for men accused of sexual abuse of students, but rather a more thoughtful response. This would acknowledge that particular men, practising specific masculinities

Getting paid up-front ensures that the artist gets paid while freeing up our culture so that anyone can use it without restrictions. In fact, with a kickstarter-like model, it will be in the artist's best interests to make everyone share as many copies of his work as possible, as the more people enjoy it, the more will be willing to contribute to his next project. That's exactly the opposite of the copyright model, where it's in the artist's interest to persecute sharing.

I've written more about this on slashdot previously. I host a copy of that here if anybody's interested.

No, grandparent is right. The huge masses you describe are only needed if you assume that the background metric of the universe is unchanged. But if you are in a reference frame co-rotating with the world, then in that frame the whole universe is rotating at extreme speeds. This produces an extreme frame-dragging effect which makes it impossible not to rotate at or nearly at the same velocity as the other objects at that distance - no huge masses needed. This is an example of the more general Mach's principle.

For an example, look at the "rotating polar" example here. That's what you would have in the case where the earth is massless (the massive case is "rotating shwartzschild" on the next page (not to be confused with the Kerr metric), but the mass of the earth is so small compared to the effects of the rotating frame that it's not worth worrying about it). Here you can check that r=const, theta=pi/2 and dphi/dt = omega and dt/dtau = 1 (i.e. an object orbiting with angular velocity omega at distance r) fulfills the geodesic equation. This could be Proxima Centauri, for example. And that's for zero solar masses.

I think I found the figure you you're referring to. It's this one, right? I don't think that figure lets you distinguish small from zero due to its very poor dynamic range. A logarithic second axis would be much more informative.

Here is an example of an MTF from an experiment I've worked on. It looks quite similar to the figure on the Wikipedia page, and by eye one might think that's it's reached zero by 18000 or so. But consider the logarithmic version of the same graph. As you can see, the graph had only fallen by about 20 dB by that point, and even at the end of the figure it's only down by 45 dB or so. So I don't think the Wikipedia figure supports your point.

I think I found the figure you you're referring to. It's this one, right? I don't think that figure lets you distinguish small from zero due to its very poor dynamic range. A logarithic second axis would be much more informative.

Here is an example of an MTF from an experiment I've worked on. It looks quite similar to the figure on the Wikipedia page, and by eye one might think that's it's reached zero by 18000 or so. But consider the logarithmic version of the same graph. As you can see, the graph had only fallen by about 20 dB by that point, and even at the end of the figure it's only down by 45 dB or so. So I don't think the Wikipedia figure supports your point.

Good point on how we should invest our efforts in productive directions. More by me on that:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "

The question is, how much is Google part of the problem vs. part of the solution? I discuss here in relation to Google's "Virgle" Mars settlement April Fools joke of 2008: http://www.pdfernhout.net/a-rant-on-financial-obesity-and-Project-Virgle.html
----
So what am I really saying?
That we as a society are not going to happily get to Mars or the Asteroids or other star systems, or even just fix up Space Ship Earth, until we come to see the love of money as the problem, not the solution.
Or as made clear by Iain M. Banks:
http://folk.uio.no/thomas/po/the-culture.html
"Money is a sign of poverty, meaning that money only has a function in a scarcity economy, and therefore its existence betrays a pre-abundant (poor) society."
And so financial obesity is part of the problem, not the solution. ...
That $600 billion a year is spent essentially from fear of the human potential. From fear of "OpenVirgle". From *fear* the kids might actually figure out how to go to Mars instead of being profligate consumers and obedient cannon fodder soldiers. :-( That fear is still the fundamental basis of the two biggest institutions almost all of us spend almost all of our time (school and work). And so *fear* is what keeps more people from doing space settlement given how interesting it is and how much prosperity our mostly automated productive systems can pump out -- whether those free people work on OpenVirgle or choose another approach or another related good cause (Earthly sustainability). ... And it is likely fear that holds Google back from becoming a post-scarcity organization despite the continuing rush of exponential growth in technological capacity its planners surely must be predicting: ...
----

Intelligent mobile robots are near to totally transforming our society. And the transition might be quicker than we might expect, as robots can go from worse than human to better than human at some task almost overnight when there is an R&D breakthrough in some area. Here is one such example for manipulation, tossing and catching a cell phone:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation

One thing most people do not yet understand about robotics (especially in the hands of some place like Google) is that if you have millions of networked robots, all learning independently, they can pool that learning over the network. And that network can then learn very quickly. And so "performance" can improve very quickly, with millions of trial-and-error expe

While 15 meters really is not that much for elevation, especially when talking about tsunamis, it also depends on what event triggered the tsunami and that location.

I did my homework ; the locally-sourced tsunami of the North Sea basin are related to submarine landslips on the mid-Norwegian continental slope involving thousands of cubic kilometres of sediment (for comparison, the 1929 Newfoundland/ Grand Banks earthquake and tsunami involved on the order of a hundred cu.km). Run-up heights on the exposed coasts between me and the source region vary between 2 and 6m, so I'm looking at 10m as a working figure, and keeping 15m of freeboard from that.

If we had another Mjollnir (40km impact structure, 140-odd Myr, old Barents Sea) event, I might have a problem. But since everyone else on the continent would be having a bad hair day that day ... I'm not terribly concerned. And that 15m of freeboard is still a good chunk of insurance.

Good luck on your 4800ft of freeboard. That's you not worried about sea-level rise. You still need to be reasonably sure that rainwater (snow melt) will go away, and has somewhere to go to, so having a reasonable local slope was also an issue (about 2 degrees of slope at my location, down to the river level, which has 20-odd metres to drop in it;s last km to the sea).

It's not rocket science.

Actually, the biggest problem with reporting on sea levels is that the significant effects of gravity are often omitted:
http://harvardmagazine.com/2010/05/gravity-of-glacial-melt?page=0,0
http://www.cicero.uio.no/fulltext/index.aspx?id=8912

Life is unfair, and who will have the biggest issues with rising sea levels seems in line with that.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/luarm/ and for more info have a look at my PhD thesis:
http://folk.uio.no/georgios/MagklarasPhDThesisv3.pdf
Just to get a few ideas. The paper that describes LUARM can be found here:
http://folk.uio.no/georgios/papers/LUARM-WDFIAfinal.pdf
Some of the things in LUARM have been modified since the paper was written but the idea is the same.
GM

http://sourceforge.net/projects/luarm/ and for more info have a look at my PhD thesis:
http://folk.uio.no/georgios/MagklarasPhDThesisv3.pdf
Just to get a few ideas. The paper that describes LUARM can be found here:
http://folk.uio.no/georgios/papers/LUARM-WDFIAfinal.pdf
Some of the things in LUARM have been modified since the paper was written but the idea is the same.
GM

Just answering a question in your comment.

The basic principle was separation of data, views, and formulas (was this pre-figuring MVC?),

MVC was introduced in 1978's as part of the work by Xerox PARC.

Actually, Mtgox isn't that dominant any more, though it is still the biggest exchange. If counting by the number of individual exchange operations, it has been at about 35% recently. If you count by the fraction of bitcoins exchanged instead, you get a much higher number, about 70%. So clearly, the average transaction size on MtGox is higher than other places, probably because of more speculation happening there.

Which of these numbers are relevant for what would happen if MtGox were to disappear? I'm not sure, but I think the number of individual transactions, ignoring their size, might be the best one, as that could be closer to the number of individual users. If so, I think the disappearance of MtGox would be serious, but not a killing blow. I made some graphs of this based on some (incomplete) data I found:
http://folk.uio.no/sigurdkn/bitcoin/exch_count_rel.png
http://folk.uio.no/sigurdkn/bitcoin/exch_coins_rel.png

PS: Let's try not to invest so much emotion into these issues, shall we? Disinterested neutrality FTW.

Actually, Mtgox isn't that dominant any more, though it is still the biggest exchange. If counting by the number of individual exchange operations, it has been at about 35% recently. If you count by the fraction of bitcoins exchanged instead, you get a much higher number, about 70%. So clearly, the average transaction size on MtGox is higher than other places, probably because of more speculation happening there.

Which of these numbers are relevant for what would happen if MtGox were to disappear? I'm not sure, but I think the number of individual transactions, ignoring their size, might be the best one, as that could be closer to the number of individual users. If so, I think the disappearance of MtGox would be serious, but not a killing blow. I made some graphs of this based on some (incomplete) data I found:
http://folk.uio.no/sigurdkn/bitcoin/exch_count_rel.png
http://folk.uio.no/sigurdkn/bitcoin/exch_coins_rel.png

PS: Let's try not to invest so much emotion into these issues, shall we? Disinterested neutrality FTW.

How many transactions over $10,000 in value are being done with bitcoins (the minimum for these rules applying)?

During the last 30 days, 1248 transactions in USD above $10,000 in value were done at the major bitcoin exchanges, out of a total of 104,342 transactions involving USD during the same period, which makes up 1.2% of the transactions. In terms of the amount of money rather than the number of transactions, the numbers are $24.5M in transctions above $10,000 out of $69.3M in total, so 35% of all the money was exchanged in transactions of this size.

In compiling these numbers, I have added together transactions that were broken up into packets of smaller ones, i.e. a single sell order for 10x 20 bitcoins at $60 each would count as one transaction of $12,000. I have not added up transactions for different sell orders, though, so 1 bitcoin at $60 followed by 1 bitcoin at $65 would not be combined to $125. A proper analysis for what this law actually would apply to would have to be much more thorough than this, but hopefully this will give a rough idea of the situation.

PS. The current bitcoin speculation bubble seems to be in the process of bursting, for those interested: link

Actually, it is sort-of useful to get an old supercomputer. If you have the space, cooling and power for it - it's a great development and teaching platform, as well as letting you do trials or smaller runs without taxing your allocation on the bigger, national/international HPC systems.

I recently had the pleasure of giving away about a third of our recently replaced HPC cluster to the physics department of the university I work for, and they were very very happy indeed. (in norwegian)

Mod parent up! My first reaction was "F@#*( -- Charles Stross was right!" For the uninitiated, here's a summary and here's the full text of the mind bending novel Accelerando.

About the article, man that thing is a mess. Is it a translation problem, are the journalists who wrote it completely clueless, or are the researchers who discovered this organism extremely out of date with their classification? It reads more like a discovery from 1970 than 2012. :-/

A little bit of all of them, and the inevitable Chinese whispers you get with Murdochian journalism, where no "journalist" go check the source but only rewrite each other, and a little bit of sensationalism by the original journalist, Ynge Vogt.

The original article can be found in English at the University of Oslo:
http://www.apollon.uio.no/english/articles/2012/microorganism.html

What's enlightening by reading this article is that the scientists don't claim that this type of protozoan, collodictyons, is a new discovery (they correctly refer to them being discovered in 1865), but that they have created a new branch for collodictyons.

The GNU/Linux naming issue has nothing whatsoever to do with the use of proprietary blobs, even though your completely uneducated opinion is widely held. Read "Free as in Freedom" before trying to express yourself on the subject.

The more I read about all this stuff going on, the more and more I think of Accelerando by Charles Stross. The description in the news of these companies makes them sound like organisms trying to compete in an artificial world, with less and less connection to reality. Soon their actions will be run by programs, and will eventually become sentient :P (Book is available free online if interested, see http://www.jus.uio.no/sisu/accelerando.charles_stross/)

"Your species is obsolete," the ghost comments smugly. "Inappropriately adapted to artificial realities. Poorly optimized circuitry, excessively complex low-bandwidth sensors, messily global variables..."

— Accelerando, by Charles Stross

Just scrolled through the list at http://hackerspaces.org/wiki/List_of_ALL_hackerspaces . Took a peak at a couple of the active ones in Norway, and they are operated by university level student societies. See a potential for hackerspace ranges: open-closed/simple-advanced/chaotic-orderly. Would be a nice fit as a "club" type thing in college aswell.

This hackerspace: http://sonen.ifi.uio.no/ in Oslo apparently does "education fair" type work at http://www.gathering.org/ everey year.

We are building a new library with a "Newton room" in my home town, just across the road from the local college. The potential here is huge. Just have to find the time to goad some people into supporting this before my boy turns 15 ;->

If you're going to use python as a shell you don't use the simple interpreter, in which you will have to do all that. You use ipython, especially in its system shell mode. Then you just need to type this:

ls

All the power of python in your command line! You just don't get job control, because you're one layer up, running on bash or whatever. Perhaps some day someone will create a real python shell; that would be even greater.

Why don't we just wheel a wagon with a lead acid battery around?

No need for a wagon. This contraption gives me about 7 chargings of my Desire with a decent car adapter.

It would be interesting to revisit this thread and all of its comments in 10 years' time to compare notes on what really happened.

By then it may feel so anachronistic and quaintly out of place that the reader might well wonder why no lawmaking body could foresee the consequences of infinite copying, the end of artificial scarcity coming, and all of the consequences thereof.
No matter what SCOTUS ends up with as an opinion, the realities on the ground will be so different by then that one can wonder how much this really matters at all. (sorry for the cheerleader)

Maybe the real deal will be something along the lines of what Charles Stross wrote in his most excellent book Accelerando ?
The carcasses of the record business purchased by Russian organized crime and turned into a for-profit extortion racket, exacting demands for payment on things that were created by people who died fifty years ago...

Could you try putting something like this paper on your Nook and seeing if its readable? Perhaps post a few pics?

Of course you're probably already aware of it, but PDFs are generally not well suited for small-screen reading. I know you asked for testing with a Nook, but I put it on my Sony PRS-600 just for kicks.
It turns out that it works very well with the almost instant Zoom/Pan feature of the reader, no hassle at all to read and pan it. Unzoomed it's readable after I cropped it tightly, but of course the font get's very small. I know this was not what you asked, but here is a pic from my bad phone camera anyway. The contrast is perfect and the font is smooth when viewed on the reader.

This is very silly, as minor magnetic perturbations would make the mountains flail about wildly, just as trying to hold a magnet up in the air with another magnet is very difficult.

You mean difficult like this? Or how about this? Looks pretty easy to me. Minor magnetic perturbations would not make the mountains flail about wildly because they have a high MASS. It would take a great big magnetic fluctuation to do move a large mass. I wager that the only thing that could do that would be a magnetic pole flipping, but since the human race hasn't seen one of these in our recorded history we have no idea how they take place so I think we can forgive that one.

Here's an analysis of the number and response to reviewers' comments.

You ought to read a book on the philosophy of science: concensus plays no part in the process. Real scientists talk of experimental evidence when presenting a case.

Speaking of concensus, you realise that the existence of the MWP was almost universally held to be true until MBH produced their hockey stick graph. And even though the hockey stick work has been shown to be wrong by McIntyre & McKitrick and Wegman and the NAS, Mann et al are still trotting out variations on the theme. Now some persist in the belief that the NAS panel supported the hockey stick; I refer them to the following exchange with Dr North, the chair of the NAS panel:

CHAIRMAN BARTON. Dr. North, do you dispute the conclusions or the methodology of Dr. Wegman's report?

DR. NORTH. No, we don't. We don't disagree with their criticism. In fact, pretty much the same thing is said in our report.

I promised myself I wouldn't be a quote-quoter, but really, you guys make it too easy. The quote above from Hall most likely references this, from one Edsger Dijkstra:

“The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”

Unfortunately, you'll find a lot of people that think he meant "Submarines don't swim, you retard! So computers don't think!" It seems pretty clear to me that he means making computers think like organisms would be an inefficient and pointless gesture, as they are capable of something far less primitive.

(I found this quote in Accelerando, by Charles Stross, and loved it. It's Creative Commons, so you have no excuse not to read a little.)

The problem with this is that the museum that's is in possession of the fossil can't market it self using the name and picture of the thing... That's just not right...

That's true; it's just not right. Assuming that by "right" you mean "correct": The Natural History Museum of Oslo can, and does, advertise Ida with the name and picture.

Does video search really exist? I'm in Spain, and have selected English language and unfiltered results, but I only see "Web", "Images", "compras", "News" and "xRank". Oh, and the search results are abysmal:

Bing search for salad

When I had to work with Fortran 77, I just went to the first google hit for "fortran tutorial".

http://folk.uio.no/steikr/doc/f77/tutorial/

It's pretty straightforward, once you understand the archaic numbering and spacing requirements. Fun in a strange way.

Imagine those 100+ coal cars now needing to be flown from the mine to the power plant

Imagined!

Yes, SQL. If you keep your raw data in SQL, it is easy to export data to any format you might need now or in the future. LDAP gets you a long way, but you will sooner or later end up with several apps that don't support it. The result is horrible password sync hacks, multiple passwords per user, etc.

The idea is to put raw user info in SQL, including their clear-text password. Of course, lock down that SQL server like you've never locked down anything before! It should have a very limited interface for updating user data. Next, export user data to relevant external databases such as LDAP, NIS, SASL, that obscure sqlite app, Kerberos, DMZ services, etc, and you'll have much less pain keeping everything in sync.

An implementation of this scheme is running on many of the biggest universities in Norway, and is called Cerebrum, http://www.cerebrum.usit.uio.no/english.html. User administration happens through a frontend interface appropriately named BOFH, where users and admins can change data in a secure manner. Users can change certain of their own attributes, while admins have more power. It's worth checking out (although their sf.net wiki seems to be down at the moment, unfortunately).

Obviously you don't know jack about Java. It is a compiled language, you know, so the comparison to {shell|Python|Perl|PHP|anything text based and interpreted} is plain wrong.
You have two possibilities: binfmt_misc or wrap a JAR in a shell script

Well said.

In a related development, I saw something on tv this week (one of the Discovery channels - Science, whatever) that Shroedinger's wave equation provided the correct model for rogue waves at sea, and has led to an explanation of that phenomenon. Again, no claim that quarks causes rogue waves, but the math fit, led to a model, the model seems valid, a solution seems found.

http://www.math.uio.no/~karstent/waves/index_en.html

Use latexdiff to highlight changes:
Latexdiff example
(Disclaimer: I'm the creator of that webpage.)

Here's a recording I made of one of the Artcraft rolls, Chicago March on an untuned Duo-Art player piano, and with it's Duo-Art system out of operation, so it does not serve the quality of the roll complete justice!

I have myself a Duo-Art player piano, and have lots of those QRS Music rolls, and although the work of QRS is impressive, there were and are smaller roll producers, who made and makes much better quality music rolls, Artcraft being one of the very few who still makes such rolls. Since there's less mass production involved, the perforations are more accurate providing for better musical quality.

There are lots of old non-operational player pianos, as I have learned, in at least the english speaking parts of the world. One should look for one and pick it up, sometimes almost for free, and then learn how to restore it self, properly.

It is however important to have done research, so one picks a piano well suited for restoration, and which plays standard rolls!

Most people will have to have the regular piano part refitted and restored by a professional company or piano tuner, and then learn how to restore the player part of the piano, which is fully achievable. There are also professional player piano restorers out there, but then we are talking about expencive work a little in the same class as restoring, let's say perhaps not cars, however more like restoring small motor bikes or big furniture.

ALso important to know that restoring player pianos involves using original types of materials, which means hot hide glue and not epoxy which would ruin the possibilty to open up wooden parts and restore them again, later!

Also, it would be a huge mistake, to use PVC tubes instead of rubber tubes, since PVC dissolves and becomes 'goo' in 10-15 years time, while rubber, though hardering and eventually cracks, might last for 50 years depending on atmospheric conditions.

Restoring a player grand piano or an orchestrion however, could be compared to restoring a car, measuring the amount of work having to be done.

Back to Artcraft rolls; if you have a regular, or much better, a Duo-Art player piano, I can really recommend the Artcraft rolls, which are really well made, perforations being very correctly made, so the music doesn't sound so "mechanical", as with some other piano rolls. Chicago March is probably a bad example in that manner, however it was the recording I already had put on the web, a few years ago, or I would have linked to a better example of how fine-tuned those Artcraft rolls might sound on a well tuned operational Duo-Art piano.

Here are some interesting notes from Trygve M. H. Reenskaug, who originated the term "Model/View/Controller" while at Xerox PARC in the 70's.

http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~trygver/themes/mvc/mvc-index.html

He seems to be a pretty remarkable character... still hacking at the age of 78, with a note on his new project:

"The new project could well be very large and take many years.... I will post intermediate and incomplete results as they appear. Just in case."

Yes, you missed something. MVC is also one of the most misunderstood design patterns in the world. The modern use of the idea is not quite what the inventor intended it to be.

There, fixed that for you.

Actually, I have an image from the inside of Google Headquarters... lots of empty space :)

I wonder if they will be able to get some more high resolution images like:

High resolution image of Solar Granulation

And some animations: Sun spot #1 Sun spot #2