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I'd suspect that any of Matisse's works will pass any reasonable test as non-pornographic. But you can probably get results that actually are pornographic by letting tin eye search for Gustave Courbet's "l'origine du monde" . (Possibly NSFW)

Around 35% increase since 1832 from 270ppm to 370ppm

http://www.lib.utah.edu/services/prog/gould/1998/Figure_6.gif

Emission rate of 7 billion tons/year

http://img.tfd.com/wiki/5/56/Global_Carbon_Emission_by_Type.png

if you doubt that humans are having significant impact then take a gander at this graph

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png

and no just because i think we're making the planet hotter now doesn't mean i think we were involved in the formation of the Sahara, the two are unrelated. The Sahara is there because of prevailing winds combine with the positions of other nearby land masses, not global average temperature. The Sahara was actually larger than it is now during the last ice age.

Let the people who understand climate science do climate science.

There's also an occasional issue about this in the UK. There's an interesting article here, and a guide to freedom of panorama internationally on wikimedia commons.

The screenshots look relatively ugly because of the hashed-together-demo quality of the environment textures. But it's not a texture demo, it's a raytraced lighting demo.

Bare in mind this is ray tracing at a very rough and ready stage, but the potential is enormous. If you want to see the sort of effects it can achieve, check out some professional 3DSMax/VRay renders.

There's a nice render here for illustrative purposes.

That's just a single frame with high quality textures, but it surely shows the potential.

This is nothing, you should see the size of CowboyNeal's market cap!

Here it is, this is the cap he wears when he goes down the market, selling second-hand wank mags.

A good analysis, I only note the following:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Caucasus-ethnic_en.svg

The ethnic group does indeed span the mountains.

That said, it's been pretty obvious for years now that Georgia and Russia were going to go to war, and Putin has been looking to flex his muscles. Former KGB agent, no love for the west, suddenly fat on oil revenues, an adjacent country threatening to join NATO... yeah.

(1) CO2 is generally a Good Thing as far as biological processes go. What makes you think that life with previous high levels of this trace gas would be unpleasant for human beings?

Because at the time the CO2 levels were very high, it was also very warm. Much warmer than humans generally find comfortable.

(2) Your CO2 positive feedback loop argument doesn't hold water because we know that CO2 levels were higher in the past and yet the Earth did not turn into Venus and we still had ice ages afterwards.

That doesn't show that there's no possible positive feedback loop, only that there are factors that can stop or reverse such a system (e.g. a greater number of CO2 hungry plants springing up in the environment that is now more favourable to them).

The other problem is that the argument that CO2 increases can cause the temperature to rise significantly has not been substantiated experimentally. Even theoretically, there is no "from the ground up" explanation (i.e., devoid of handwaving) of how this should actually happen.

It's a generally established consensus that it is a factor in warming (along with other potential "greenhouse" gases). Note that the term "greenhouse" is a fairly simple and accurate depiction - just like the glass of a greenhouse, it traps the heat.
I'm not saying CO2 is the ONLY factor, nor am I saying that it's necessarily even the most important, but it's certainly an established fact that a significant amount of CO2 can have this kind of effect (you could even do such an experiment yourself if you wished - a can of compressed CO2, a lightbulb, a small box and a thermometer should do the trick.

(3) Saying temperatures are rising much faster than we should be suggests you're buying into the now comprehensively debunked hockey stick reconstruction. The hockey stick really is indefensible at this point. The evidence is simply not there for claiming the current rate of temperature rise is unprecedented.

Sorry, I don't know of this "hockey stick" reconstruction you're talking about. I assume from your wording that it's some kind of graph shaped like a hockey stick that shows extreme warming and is probably often shown in the US where this problem is still actually considered a debate rather than fact (in the rest of the world, no-one is debating it...it's considered fact). I just did a quick Google search, and the graph looks a little extreme really, but I haven't seen the data for or against that particular graph, so I can't comment really.

(4) Your response to my point about negative feedback is a non sequiteur. You say that we appear to be speeding up some natural process (I'm not sure I buy that, but let's go with it for now) and that the consequences of this may be bad (especially if you believe climate modellers can do what they claim, which is pretty much way beyond what any other modellers claim to be able to do). So we ought to do something to reduce the effect we're having.
The problem with this is that it's argument for action from a position of ignorance.

Yes, that's correct - it's an argument for action from a position of some ignorance about the potential results of our current action.

The argument for inaction *now* goes like this:
- we do not have convincing evidence that the current situation is our fault (e.g., the mean temperature hasn't changed much over the last ten years despite increasing CO2 emissions);

The thing is, that if you look at this or this, you're just going to say that all you see is that we came out of a "little ice age" recently (I don't disagree with that by the way), so I'm not going to point at those graphs

(1) CO2 is generally a Good Thing as far as biological processes go. What makes you think that life with previous high levels of this trace gas would be unpleasant for human beings?

Because at the time the CO2 levels were very high, it was also very warm. Much warmer than humans generally find comfortable.

(2) Your CO2 positive feedback loop argument doesn't hold water because we know that CO2 levels were higher in the past and yet the Earth did not turn into Venus and we still had ice ages afterwards.

That doesn't show that there's no possible positive feedback loop, only that there are factors that can stop or reverse such a system (e.g. a greater number of CO2 hungry plants springing up in the environment that is now more favourable to them).

The other problem is that the argument that CO2 increases can cause the temperature to rise significantly has not been substantiated experimentally. Even theoretically, there is no "from the ground up" explanation (i.e., devoid of handwaving) of how this should actually happen.

It's a generally established consensus that it is a factor in warming (along with other potential "greenhouse" gases). Note that the term "greenhouse" is a fairly simple and accurate depiction - just like the glass of a greenhouse, it traps the heat.
I'm not saying CO2 is the ONLY factor, nor am I saying that it's necessarily even the most important, but it's certainly an established fact that a significant amount of CO2 can have this kind of effect (you could even do such an experiment yourself if you wished - a can of compressed CO2, a lightbulb, a small box and a thermometer should do the trick.

(3) Saying temperatures are rising much faster than we should be suggests you're buying into the now comprehensively debunked hockey stick reconstruction. The hockey stick really is indefensible at this point. The evidence is simply not there for claiming the current rate of temperature rise is unprecedented.

Sorry, I don't know of this "hockey stick" reconstruction you're talking about. I assume from your wording that it's some kind of graph shaped like a hockey stick that shows extreme warming and is probably often shown in the US where this problem is still actually considered a debate rather than fact (in the rest of the world, no-one is debating it...it's considered fact). I just did a quick Google search, and the graph looks a little extreme really, but I haven't seen the data for or against that particular graph, so I can't comment really.

(4) Your response to my point about negative feedback is a non sequiteur. You say that we appear to be speeding up some natural process (I'm not sure I buy that, but let's go with it for now) and that the consequences of this may be bad (especially if you believe climate modellers can do what they claim, which is pretty much way beyond what any other modellers claim to be able to do). So we ought to do something to reduce the effect we're having.
The problem with this is that it's argument for action from a position of ignorance.

Yes, that's correct - it's an argument for action from a position of some ignorance about the potential results of our current action.

The argument for inaction *now* goes like this:
- we do not have convincing evidence that the current situation is our fault (e.g., the mean temperature hasn't changed much over the last ten years despite increasing CO2 emissions);

The thing is, that if you look at this or this, you're just going to say that all you see is that we came out of a "little ice age" recently (I don't disagree with that by the way), so I'm not going to point at those graphs

2 wind-up orbits around the sun, 2 gravitational slingshot maneuvers by Venus, one each by Earth and Jupiter, all with only 1 course correction. Then *7 years* later it goes into orbit around Saturn! Oh, and it is powered with Plutonium.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bd/Cassini_interplanet_trajectory.svg

It then sweeps by Enceladus 22 times, drops a probe on Titan, and does countless other science experiments and images

this is why the call it "rocket science". wow

makes you realize how someone might fo'get about metric and english systems.

I just happen to know the best man for the job

"Greetings children...I'm here to put you back on schedule"

(incase the above is removed)

I was reading around a little bit, And i found an article explaining the next step for spaceX. Apparently they have a new Rocket type of rocket in development:
SpaceX

Copyrights should only last 20 years as well. Lets all just start acting like that is the case.

Sweet! Guess what just came out of copyright?

It was good enough for us back in the day, we programmed, word processed and communicated with TVs as monitors all with some proficiency and only minor... alright perhaps moderate eyestrain.

The colors, fonts, and interfaces were designed with ultra-low res displays in mind. While say, 12pt times new roman and arial are not.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/AppleII.jpg Just look at this, that is a what, 6 inch screen? Barely larger than the 5 1/2 inch floppies next to it, in a picture taken from 4 feet away, compressed in a jpeg, and you can still make out all the letters.

Hell, here is a guy browsing the internet on an Apple II When what you want is text, pretty much anything will suffice. http://www.sics.se/contiki/perspective/browsing-the-web-from-an-apple-ii-with-contiki.html It's not ideal but CRT monitor/tvs were made better back then, they had finer controls and were just sharper, I used some old commodore monitors for years for video projects, probably the sharpest non-hd TV you can get that doesn't run you in the thousands, that and they are very stackable so you can have a tower of monitors.

If this lawsuit succeeds the native americans could only sue the catholic church for slander and defamation eg: saying they had no souls and could be slaughtered like animals or however manifest destiny is justified.

Except the Catholic Church never did either of those things. They're urban legends.

About your first allegation, it suffices to say that there's no point in converting something that has no soul. Besides, the Catholic Catechism teaches that everything that self-moves possesses a soul, and among those, everything that moves by virtue of reason to be human, body shape or color not being requirements. (Yes, Catholicism is "aliens ready" since the Middle Ages.) Case in point: the most important Catholic theologian for the first 1200 years of Western Church history, Saint Augustine, was black.

As for your second point, back in the beginning of the discoveries, you already had important Catholic theologians, such as Francisco de Vitoria, one of the creators of modern international law, writing extensively against the European subjugation of the New World. European crowned princes, of course, did it anyway. Politicians are the same, no matter whether they're in a monarchy or in a democracy.

Good reasons to criticize the Church do exists, but these two surely aren't listed among them.

.

The Blind Dead

While it is true that the Pope had their eyes burned out so they couldn't find their way back from Hell after they were burned at the stake, they still seem to do alright now and then.

. . . to mount the S3 bucket as a disk, you obviously need root access. But if you do, JungleDisk is hard to beat IMHO.

Not really. If the server kernel has FUSE enabled, and the user space tools are installed, any user member of the related group can mount a "jungledisked" S3 bucket in his userspace without the need for root access.

Thats no reason to question the sincerity of a man on a mission to relieve poverty while dressed in a $10,000 Armani suit.

When I see Bill Gates, 'expensive clothes' is not mu first thought.

After all the most vocal supporters of female circumcision are older women whom themselves have been circumscribed

We need to stop circumscribing men and women both.

In the netherlands the intercity trains have a quiet section.

I've never been to the Netherlands, I would be interested to know how those sections work. Is there a door between the talking and quiet sections (perhaps separate cars)? A lot of US planes have only a single non-partitioned cabin. It would be hard to contain the volume of others' conversations without some sort of physical barricade.

I assume the same as the UK, where one coach generally has "Quiet coach" notices. You're not meant to talk, use phones, or listen to music in them. On a busy train it doesn't really work, but if there's somewhere else to sit people generally respect it.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:FGW_HST_Standard_Class_coach_A_headrest_cover_2005-06-09.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:FGW_quiet_carriage_-_Help_us_keep_the_peace.jpg

In the netherlands the intercity trains have a quiet section.

I've never been to the Netherlands, I would be interested to know how those sections work. Is there a door between the talking and quiet sections (perhaps separate cars)? A lot of US planes have only a single non-partitioned cabin. It would be hard to contain the volume of others' conversations without some sort of physical barricade.

I assume the same as the UK, where one coach generally has "Quiet coach" notices. You're not meant to talk, use phones, or listen to music in them. On a busy train it doesn't really work, but if there's somewhere else to sit people generally respect it.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:FGW_HST_Standard_Class_coach_A_headrest_cover_2005-06-09.jpg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:FGW_quiet_carriage_-_Help_us_keep_the_peace.jpg

Map under the lakes of Titan? We can't even do that with EARTH's oceans yet.

Get a clue, fool

Wikipedia needs your penis movies. You would think that with anonymity and with the rare opportunity to flaunt their packages in front of the world, people would be tripping all over themselves to upload their junk, but sadly it just isn't so. </sarcasm>

Have you seen the video conversion instructions on Wikimedia commons? They appear to include instructions that cover all of your complaints, including rotation. If those instructions are lacking ... whats that Wikipedia motto? You can edit? Your Wikipedia userpage says you're a PHD in computer engineering? I suspect hat "you can edit" also applies to ffmpeg2theora. :) Good points though!

How could you not understand the claim?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/KDE_4.png

Look how the "R" pushes against the "o" in Root, how the "F" is against the "r" in Fresh, and how the "T" is against the "o" in Tools. Look how the "T" is right up against the "r" in Trash.

Look how freakishly wide the "H" is in Help and the "V" is in View. Look how weirdly thin the "F" is in File and the "T" is in Tools. "W" in general just looks strange.

Some letters are properly spaced from their siblings, and others are jammed right up against each other. Some letters are cartoonishly wide while others are strangely thin. Maybe you don't notice or care about any of this, but it's a lack of professionalism and attention to detail that has lasted for years. They keep rewriting their panels and shells and file managers, but they still won't change the goddamn font!

My keyboard has €, ü, ä, ö, ... and a few other keys that I can't type because I don't know the HTML escape codes for them!

And with multilingual downloads, and webpages for that sake, someone will always think they can auto detect your language. I'm always presented with German when I hit upon them. Naturally I don't speak a word of German, though I've gotten quite good at finding illogically placed language options buried in German menus.

Heh. I have the same problem on my home computer... but maybe it's because I use a German keyboard and have set all my regional settings to German for some illogical reason. (incidentally, not my keyboard: my keyboard has the '# key inset to the right shift IIRC, and oddly enough I can't find a picture that illustrates that.)

The solar constant is the total EM radiation from the Sun, not just visible light! Not only is most of that filtered by the atmosphere ( http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Solar_Spectrum.png ), but you're losing a bunch more in that conversion efficiency of solar panels is quite narrow in bandwidth.

What is it about LaTeX that makes it so special? Can't scientific documents be laid out correctly in a word processor? I ask out of ignorance, not rhetoric.

Easy: try typing this into a word processor.

Thats why I said you need a change in culture.

You're talking about culture and technology as if they're two separate things, but they aren't at all; each influences the other.

Take the modern American lifestyle, which people openly call an automobile culture. That technology has deeply shaped the culture, and that culture shapes the technology. The recent rise in American cities of a cycling culture also has a symbiotic relationship with technology. Improvements in clothing, cycles, and locks started things out. Now we have things like Internet-enabled carshare and innovation in maintaining bike lanes and traffic management.

Telling me you need to optimize for stupid project managers reeks of fail as well.

I think stupidity isn't the only reason people make bad choices. Sometimes it's because they're inexperienced, busy, tired, desperate, curious, or just optimistic. If the DVCSes are being sold as making branching and merging much easier, then you can bet that many people will say, "Great! More branching will solve all of our conflict problems." I've seen entire companies of otherwise smart people make this mistake.

So far, my take-away from this thread is about what I came in with. DVCSes are great for the sorts of dispersed teams that created them. But I'm not seeing a compelling need for them for more typical commercial teams. If you're not branching and merging a lot, then they apparently bring no upside but do have a downside risk of misapplication.

You live in a desert in the middle of a fucked up shithole wasteland.

This is Dubai. Notice anything, moron?

I notice that they still execute people for being homosexual. Yep, shithole indeed.

You live in a desert in the middle of a fucked up shithole wasteland.

This is Dubai. Notice anything, moron?

I guess the big question is, with all the weaponry we have lying around, why bet on one? I say machine gun nuke the thing to kind of coral it away from us. Send em up 2 or 3 at a time. One to divert the asteroid and the other two to slow/vaporize the mess the first one made. The wiki says we have somewhere around 10,000 in the US alone, so if an asteroid comes, lite it up!

But what if your nuke doesn't make it and destroys the only bridge out of town?

I guess the big question is, with all the weaponry we have lying around, why bet on one? I say machine gun nuke the thing to kind of coral it away from us. Send em up 2 or 3 at a time. One to divert the asteroid and the other two to slow/vaporize the mess the first one made. The wiki says we have somewhere around 10,000 in the US alone, so if an asteroid comes, lite it up!

Here a picture of the road to hell. It runs through that building. Looks like a sub-orbital photo, and in 1921 I doubt the proper license was acquired.

Since the NASA images are public domain, they could have saved themselves the trouble of setting up their own website by loading them to this media archive.

Or Sea Britain!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/97/3AJD06SeaBritain.jpg

I'm almost 33, and despite having a computer science engineering degree, love for the CS... I'm also thinking about studying nursery, because of the aging population and the demographic problem happening in Spain. In Spain (Europe), where I live, we're entering into an ugly economic downturn, showing no problems for the IT in the beginning, but I expect labor problems for 2010, as the economy contraction gets worse (similar to the previous 1993-1996 spanish recession).

It's not just for the money, but for survive. Also, nursery jobs have 6h shifts, instead of the 9h+ of the IT field (including 1h for lunch time, so 40h became 45 or more), with by far, greater life quality! (in Spain a 30h/week nursery job is paid similar to a 40h/week IT job).

The radioactive trefoil looks awfully similar to a film reel...

This isn't for those guys this is for

for use by four-star generals, fleet admirals and federal officials at the level of assistant secretary and above.

; You honestly don't think they are going to ferry Obama for 36 hours inside on of these C-17 Globemaster III sitting on nylon webbing seats and staring at palletized cargo in the center isle.

When I was in the army (early 80's) we flew on an air force C-130 from Frankfurt to Crete. The 'seats' were just web straps. The 'facilities' was a small, rectangular urinal

C-130's haven't changed at all, of course. They're still the 1950's cracker boxes they've always been. I flew 14 hours on a C-141 to Saudi back in 1990 for Desert Storm. Sling seats, sitting with your knees interlocked with the person across from you... nightmare. In 2001 I got to make almost the same flight on a C-17... quite a difference. You can walk down the center! It has a real aircraft lavatory! The seats... well, the seats are still sling seats, but they're much better designed with a more sophisticated frame. Less like a cargo net and more like a beach chair.

They'll get mine when the peel it from my cold dead fingers....

moses

Well, for one, most of us would be using these, and IBM would be doing at least well as they already are.

Paint it black, make a giant white-gloved hand reaching out of the ground and tell the neighborhood kids you buried Mickey Mouse in your backyard...fun for the whole family.

He probably meant plate boundary. The San Andreas fault represents the boundary between the Pacific and North American plates, and movement along plate boundaries is both more common and of a usually higher magnitude than inner-plate fault movements.

It's a game of playing the statistics and risk, like anything else.

Looks like Merlin's fashion choice was ahead of its time! (no pun intended)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/4/44/PatBenatar-CrimesOfPassion.jpg/200px-PatBenatar-CrimesOfPassion.jpg

Crimes of Passion? Hell yeah I'll permit it.

This is ridiculous. I could see why in general you don't want large numbers of people selling their votes, but an individual? Come on! I mean, if Microsoft payed all its employees bonuses to vote one way in an election, that definitely shouldn't be allowed, but a 19 year old kid? (And the ironic thing is that if Microsoft chose to do that, they would most likely get away with it).

It's incredible that people choose to live by the letter of U.S. law when it comes to persecuting others and getting their way (see, for example, the RIAA), but they'll make all kinds of exceptions and protections for themselves (in the case of the RIAA, they won't hesitate to install spyware on their customers computers if they can get away with it, like the Sony rootkit, for one example).

This applies much more widely than just this situation. The motivation and sentiment of a law needs to be kept in mind when interpreting it, but unfortunately it rarely is. For example, read The U.S. Declaration of Independence. What do see? A bunch of people fed up with the way their government treated them. And yet it is the very words that the same people wrote later in the U.S. Constitution that these modern day idiots use to condemn helpless individuals. Yet I have a feeling that if you take a look at the personality of these modern day politicians etc., it would be the very kind of people that the founders of this country rebelled against: people in power that don't care about the fate a few "small" individuals that have no power over them. I'd like to see the person who made those comments go to prison for any amount of time at all. He probably wouldn't survive because he used to wiping his ass with silk and eating nice meals all day long. And yet he has the nerve to indignantly help in throwing a 19 year old into prison! Ridiculous. I think this jackass should be put on trial himself just for his ridiculous comments.

He'll solva da problem

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/d5/Father_Guido_Sarducci.jpg/200px-

Dats da one

Interestingly enough, that's also the color scheme used here...

Powell lied to the UN to help start the Iraq conflict. Remember the vial of anthrax? Hows that war going? How much WMD did the US find? He's unfit to be county dogcatcher let alone VP. He's going down in history as Bush's lapdog.

I love how bad these prediction systems are. Its hilarious. Even more hilarious when people agree.