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First of all lets look at this picture, and absorb what it means http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

There is a similar picture for the Ewing Family of the classic TV series Dallas, with Larry Hagman, Victoria Principal, etc, but I'm not gonna post that, because it's more depressing. But this is the situation is similar with all fossils, they are nonrenewable, though we do have like 200 years worth of coal in the US, as opposed to almost none in the rest of the world, except Russia, and some other places. Coal is dirty, especially the mercury in it. If they could find a way to not reprocess it, or postprocess it, but preprocess it, as in, use process heat to hydrogenate it, convert it to low molecular mass liquid fuels, then get the mercury out of it with things that really love mercury, like selenium, then mix it with a whole lot of air, and burn it, because once it's really high temperature and really high volume stack gas, it's difficult to scrub. Plus it's a CO2 emission, greenhouse gas, so even pure CO2 emitted is not that great.

So let's look at the carbon neutral alternatives at http://mff.dsisd.net/Biomass/B...

As you can see fossil fuels make up a whole lot of the pie chart - oil, coal, natural gas are fossil. The remainder are the good stuff. Out of the remainder nuclear is the only high potential suddenly increasable energy source to compensate for the loss of others, as hydro is great, but anything dammable is already dammed, it's like 99% utilized and it gives nowhere enough to meet everyone's basic energy needs, next there are wind and solar but they are not very energy rich, though more terrorist safe, but cannot be used in a centralized concentrated location, unlike nuclear, and if the yeoman farmers each have a windmill and a solar plant, they could use the free electric they get unmonitored to make well dried and packaged chlorate salt + charcoal - like Oklahoma city bombs against the feds, from plain road deicing salt, something the authorities don't really want, plus they lose the micromanagement tools to the population, that lets them keep everyone on a tight leash. For biofuels, every drop of biofuel comes at the expense of food on the table, and agriculture is already pushed to pretty max (except ocean farming, there is a lot of unutilized "arable in a plastic bag" sea area - hello Japan), and without Haber Bosch nitrogen it would not be able to support the world population already, let alone take away arable area from it for biofuels. Wind can coexist with food farming, but solar blocks the sunshine from food crops on a farm (well, most of it, there might be ways to create semitransparent greenhouses, that both let through enough light for the crops, but harvest a decent amount of electric too.) But the energy density of renewables sucks, compared to high profit nuclear, the only issue being nuclear proliferation around the world and terrorists. But the powers that be might want to create an energy pinch on purpose, as starving the population will create a stop to the population explosion, and set in a competitive environment of the old days, Old World Order, with princes, private armies, and constant non-nuclear feuding between them. And, someone smart said somewhere, it does not comes up on Google as if it were blocked, but it seems that human knowledge, science technology so far have advanced much faster in the footsteps of the sword than the plow. Unfortunately. But bringing back the nobility and Old World system could be a reason for not fixing the energy issue on purpose for now, because that will fix the overpopulation issues, but also bring back mass starvation, similar to the likes of the Irish Potato Famine, where, because of private property rights, the British crown could export grain from Ireland in massive quantities, yet leave the private farmers, the bulk of the subject population, starving.

That too. I agree. But Obama did go after the NASA budget. I mean in his own mind he means well, especially when faced with financial crises around the globe, austerity measures, welfare for corporations, unemployment, and money to feed mouths, in comparison the missions to Mars with a remote control toy, or even the images of distant galaxies from the Hubble telescope, are not really that important when considering austerity measures, and making sure everyone is well fed. As a beautiful picture of a distant galaxy shown to a hungry child is not going to help that child when he's hungry, instead he needs food on the table, so that's how you make decisions on how to prioritize and spend money when the money is tight. As that's the track record of NASA, not an actual, functioning livable independently existing spinning cylinder space station, nor a productive, self sustaining without constant shipments from Earth, Moon base, that keeps expanding. Nobody is gonna pay for a space program that needs constant shipments from Earth for basic needs, such as food, in the long run. But hopefully one day, maybe even in our lifetime, when I look up at the Moon, I will see glittering little lights from the dark portion of the C shaped new moon, the light coming from Moon bases there, similar to what Earth looks like at night, such as http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/imag... Then the muslims with their crescent flags are gonna be upset, because its' not gonna be a true crescent anymore, but maybe they can modify it and combine it with the Subaru logo, of the Pleiades showing the 7 sisters stars, such as Alcyone, Atlas, Merope, Electra, Maia, Pleione, Sterope, Taygeta, Celaeno (that's all 9 of them 7 sisters) http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... and http://www.constellationsofwor... or however many major Moon bases there'll be at the time.

Like this one? http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

Not to worry, lots of other styles in attendance as well. Wikipedia only has one photo of attendees, and it happens to be this one.

They calculated that construction accounted for 12% of the 66 figure, so about 8 gCO2/kWh. They quote a 1GWe PWR as requiring "170,000 ton of concrete, 32,000 ton of steel, 1363 ton of copper, and a total of 205,464ton of other materials". So let's play around with that figure a bit. At a cap factor of 0.8 (fairly average for nuclear. I know they quoted 0.66, but that's comparing nuclear from 30 years ago to renewables today, which is dishonest), that's 800 MW 24x7 for the PWR. How many wind turbines would that need to provide? Well, even assuming a very neat cap factor of 0.35 for wind (almost unobtainable on land), we'll need 326 of these babies (I'm using a 7.5MW turbine instead of 1.5MW because that's what I have materials data on - this is, if anything, favorable for wind, as materials overhead per MW is smaller with larger turbines), which aggregated together, would mass almost 1.6 million tons of concrete, 105 thousand tons of steel and other metals for the machine housings and generators and ~110 thousand tons of GRP fiberglass epoxy resin for the blades (and guess where those plastics come from). This is multiple times more material than is needed for the nuclear plant and considering wind turbines are designed to last ~20 years not the 40-60 years as nuclear plants are, the impact would be much more dramatic, yet the paper lists onshore wind as 10 gCOe/kWh with a straight face. On construction alone an equivalent wind farm would probably exceed nuclear over all of its lifecycle, even using their own figures.

• Pebble bed reactors have extremely large numbers of moving parts, the exact opposite of reliable.
• It used high-pressure helium for coolant, of which there isn't much on the planet and on scale-up it would almost certainly cause shortages.

I have to agree with Bill Gates here again, in that modern computer modeling is a night and day difference between then and now. Back when the THTR-300 was designed (construction started in 1971, so design was done in the mid 60s), this(*) was the state of the art in supercomputers and this was still the most common way of solving mathematical problems and so people could not help but make bad decisions that had to be tested and failed experimentally. Nowadays we can digitally simulate to extreme minutiae the conditions that designers back then could only guess at. Today the uncertainty in reactor design isn't in the thermodynamics part anymore - we've got that down pretty well by now - it's in the materials science and how materials respond over time to various environments, i.e. our simulation granule has shrunk considerably from being whole subsystems of the plant to almost the molecular level. To claim that nuclear designs can't work because there were mistakes made 40 years ago is the same as to say that hydrogen fuel cells can't work, because look at what happened to Apollo-13.

(*) "With performance of about 1 megaFLOPS, the CDC 6600 was the world's fastest computer from 1964 to 1969,"

Oh, Solar and Wind look ugly.
  http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/PS20andPS10.jpg
  http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/files/2010/07/wind-farms-1.jpg

I'm glad coal and nuclear are so beautiful then.
  http://assets.inhabitat.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2011/08/coal-regulations-537x331.jpg
  http://assets.inhabitat.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2011/05/RatcliffePowerPlantBlackAndWhite-537x384.jpg

Corrosion.

This has been essentially resolved very early on:

An out-of-pile corrosion test program was carried out for Hastelloy-N which indicated extremely low corrosion rates at MSRE conditions. Capsules exposed in the Materials Testing Reactor showed that salt fission power densities of more than 200 W/cm3 had no adverse effects on compatibility of fuel salt, Hastelloy-N, and graphite. Fluorine gas was found to be produced by radiolysis of frozen salts, but only at temperatures below about 100 C.

Operating it will also be a nightmare. Can you put a diver into molton salt to fix things?

What the? Why would you go for a dive in a super-heated radioactive salt at above 500 C? Below ~400C the salt solidifies, so no, you can't go dive in it any more than you can go for a dive in a salt mine. Moreover, I think you misunderstand the design of the core region of most molten salt reactors. They aren't great big tanks which you can move around in. Most are designed as a series of narrow tubes which the salt is pumped through, lined by moderator (typically graphite), all surrounded by a neutron reflector (usually heavy steel). Molten salt reactors are projected to be cheaper precisely because they don't require super-large forged pressure vessels. Regardless, even fairly large (in terms of capacity) PWR pressure vessels aren't really that big that you'd send a diver into it, even assuming anybody ever did that (fuel is loaded by crane from the top while the pressure vessel is open and completely submerged in water).

"expected effect: increased fossil fuel emissions due to sporadic running". Not sure what this is supposed to mean.

There are many problems with running thermal power plants, especially those with large boilers, sporadically, because they have lots of thermal inertia. For example, a lignite power plant has a minimum output level of ~30% - that's just a limitation of the thermodynamics of the system. If at a given point there's too much renewable capacity on the grid, the plant operator is forced to shut down completely. If, however, at some later point, say 6-8 hours later, renewables lapse again, the coal plant operator is told to perform a restart, but with a large coal plant it's not that simple to just load in new coal and throw in a match. They need to reheat the furnace, because otherwise the coal just won't burn. To reheat say a 600 MW lignite plant takes ~100000 liters of fuel oil - that's vaporized and blown into the furnace and burned and only after that the first coal can start to come in. All of the created CO2 and extra cost for the plant operator goes up the smoke stack and hasn't produced a single kWh. This is true, though to a lesser degree, for CCGT as well - large thermal inertia of the boiler and reheat system that is lost every time it's shut down and restart. The only guys who don't suffer from this significantly is OCGT, but they have terrible CO2 emissions per kWh compared to CCGT.

That Germany did not improve its CO2 emission despite a massive investment in renewables is primarly because they decided shut down nuclear power first rather than coal. A reduction is expected for the future when renewables start to replace fossil instead of nuclear.

If you have a look at the CO2/kWh graph I sent you, you'll notice that the reduction trend line starts in 1990 and the renewable buildout somewhere around 1999 and it hasn't really had much of an effect on the figure. In fact, when I do a linear fit on the first derivative of the CO2/kWh data, it appears as though the reduction trend will be slowing down an

This is a wind turbine.

You call that a wind turbine? This is a wind turbine.

What's with the name calling and vitriol? Usually I see people reacting this way when they hold and defend beliefs that are based on faith rather than hard data.

In any case, you should re-read what I wrote: "given that most of Germany's wind power is installed near the norther sea shore and Denmark & Poland are there too". A localized loss of wind is going to affect a majority of production in both Germany and Denmark. We've mapped wind resources out very accurately, you know.

If all the Euro countries has been as nuclear-dependent as France, the heat wave of 2003 would have been an even greater disaster and there would have been a fuckton of coal power needed as many of the hydro plants were also underperforming.

So obviously the other non-nuclear countries in Europe during 2003 were running on clean pixie-dust. Oh wait, no, reality just kicked in, the electrical grid was already burning coal to begin with, so I can't see how burning less coal during most of the year would be a bad thing.

Erm, when it's too hot to get enough water for cooling & the water levels are low enough to restrict hydropower & this would affect any "heat-engine based power plant", exactly what are you using as your "dispatchable short-term backup technology" to produce electricity?

Systems which either do not use large amounts of water cooling, such as OCGTs, diesel backup generators and/or high-temperature reactors or those which do not discharge coolant water into lakes and instead use cooling towers. High-temp reactors are especially attractive as their higher operating temperatures allow for efficient air cooling and lots of very interesting high-temp chemistry to be done using this waste heat.

Now the intermittency of solar & wind are well-known and in the case of sunshine, it's highly predictable. And it looks like some countries have done a remarkable job of forecasting 24-48 hr wind production for more than 5 yrs. This won't solve the issue of prolonged lulls, however but it's not yet a major problem.

Prediction isn't the problem! Even *if* you have 100% accurate predictions, if the predictions are for a 1-2 week wind lull (and these *do* happen) and you don't have a whole separate set of electrical generation facilities online and ready (and who's gonna pay for that?), then your power grid is toast. If the answer is just to install as much gas backup as necessary, then account for them in your solar & wind plant capex and include its CO2 emissions from intermittent running in your carbon budget, otherwise it's just greenwashing and pretending to be economical & green when really you're not.

the real cost and it's significantly higher than what we're led to believe.

Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Besides, even if the prices were kept artificially low - I don't see French rate payers complain. Their level of taxation is lower than that of wind-Denmark and if the government can provide all of the necessary services and "refund" portion of their taxes in lowering the cost of electricity while meeting the carbon constraint, then what's not to like? Compared with Denmark, where taxes are higher, electricity costs are higher and CO2 emissions are higher, I'd say the French are getting much more bang for their invested buck. And that's what it ultimately comes down to: can the country afford the low-CO2 push and deliver on the promise and France has shown that the answer to both is yes over two decades ago. All of the rest of the issues you throw up are just distractions.

Bottom line is that I'm not convinced any single tech is capable of handling the electricity needs of modern nations in a rapidly warming world, not nuclear & not renewables. Barring some miracle breakthrough, we're going to keep on needing a mix.

And I never said nuclear is the only saving grace. I already said that the French grid is 15% hydro and I applaud their efforts to introduce some renewables on the periphery where it's sensible and economical. What they did do most right, though, is that they undertook the big savings effort early on (replac

Well, I think the first two films are a mixed bag. I rather liked getting meet Radagast, and to see what Gandalf was up to in Dol Guldur.

A screenplay adapted from a book has to stand on its own as well as live up to the book. Where the movies have fallen down is living up to the book. The consensus of my writer friends is that the screenwriting team (Walsh, Boyes, Jackson and del Tormo) doesn't trust Bilbo to carry the story, which deeply undercuts the themes of THE HOBBIT. Lack of respect for THE HOBBIT novel is pretty common among LotR fans. They often dismiss it as "just" a fairy-tale -- an attitude which would have disgusted Tolkien himself. It would have been better if writing this screenplay had been entrusted to someone who loved THE HOBBIT for itself, and understood it better.

Surprisingly, I thought the non-canonical character Tauriel was one of the best parts of the movies. Yes, she was there to give the story a so-called "strong female character", but that's a silly objection. Writers always put characters in stories for some reason; the question is whether they fit in and come to life. I think adding a strong non-canonical character is better than giving so much screentime to a weak but canonical one: Legolas. No disrespect to Orlando Bloom, but the writers dont' give him much to work with. The part could have been played by the CGI model they used in the action scenes.

One of the reasons I'm accepting of the whole Tauriel subplot is that it carries a deeply Tolkienian theme: the love between mortal and elvenkind. That was a profound part of Tolkien's personal mythology. On the gravestone he shares with his wife Edith, he added "Luthien" to her name and "Beren" to his. So I don't view weaving that theme into a dramatic treatment of the HOBBIT story as disrespectful to the author at all.

Thanks. This is useful to the discussion. Crucially, the Gaza Strip (139 sq. mi) has a population of ~1.8M and is only roughly a quarter of the size of New York City (468 sq. mi). It is blockaded even at sea by Israel. Where the fuck are the civilian CHILDREN supposed to run and hide even if they are sufficiently warned in advance of a strike? And I have one more question -- why the fuck aren't the Israelis targeting Hamas (terrorist group) leadership in the same way the US targeted Al Qaeda and Taliban leadership? There's no reason for a modern day military such as Israel to be pulling the trigger on civilians. It's disgusting.

The Hercules, aka Spruce Goose, is not amphibious: it's a seaplane, period.

This is an amphibian: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

Natural radioactivity is mainly something that hits you from the 'outside'... it hits your skin

Except for the ~5kBq of K-40 in your nerves. And the C-14 in all of your tissues. Also, cosmic radiation doesn't stop on your skin - it's comprised of extremely high energy particles at 1 GeV or more. Those sort of energies make the radiation from nuclear reactors seem like child's play. That is not to say that you'd rather be inside of a nuclear reactor - most definitely not, the flux there is many orders of magnitude larger - but it does show that cosmic rays don't just "hit your skin", but instead fire right through you and irradiate your internals quite easily.

First of all a healthy person has no Uranium or Thorium in his body.

I'd be careful with throwing around superlatives like "none", but it's probably fair to say that the abundance of actinides in most humans would be classed as "trace" at best.

you are again mixing up external radiation by natural sources with radioactive elements incorporated into the body

Except that both K-40 and C-14 are both natural and inside your body. In fact, we use C-14 abundance in tissues to date when organisms died. Whether something is or isn't natural has no bearing on where it is harmful.

The fallout is measurable every where in north Japan.

This statement, while true, is misleading, or at the very least oversimplified. We have extremely sensitive measurement equipment, but the mere detection of the presence of a radionuclide does not in itself imply any danger from it. What needs to be assessed is the particular type of radionuclide, its abundance and sample distribution, in order to be able to at least roughly assess the potential biological impacts. In pretty much any scoop e.g. topsoil you'd be able to find all manner of toxic stuff, from mercury through arsenic, lead and even to uranium - this is simply a consequence of the magnitude of Avogadro's number.

I'll leave you with just one tiny factiod: long-haul flights are associated with elevated exposure to cosmic rays, easily 20-30x sea-level background and comparable to some of the hotter parts of the Fukushima exclusion zone. This has been repeatedly assessed and demonstrated. As such, one would expect to find radiation-related cancer clusters among airline crew, who spend a sizable amount of their lives in this elevated radiation environment. And yet, no reliable evidence for this has been found so far.

Of course he approved it! The Democrats put a retard in office, because he would be easy to control! He obviously suffers Microcephilia, he has a head the size of a baseball! http://www.halloweenforum.com/... , http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... Contrast and compare.

https://www.google.com/search?...

All the Raspberry Pi in a gameboy box stories you could ever want.

You have to wonder what the progression of these will be

Raspberry Pi does Coleco Football
http://www.evl.uic.edu/aej/526...

Raspberry PI does Merlin
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

Probably not this
http://retrothing.typepad.com/...

Seeing as people are still selling and making new ones and I am sure the people doing so actually guard their rights.

Because stuff on the moon HAS to have been placed there by a human hand. It is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE for ANYTHING to be put on the moon without the wise, guiding hand of a sentient being.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

You could just crack a book and find the answers yourself. Most of the physical factors are measured by satellites.

You're not even bothering to make an argument, you're just claiming personal ignorance. I may or may not be guilty of "sloppy thinking", but you are entirely unqualified to judge that. As an example:

Assumption #7: "Mostly transparent" means we can ignore transparency as a factor (and opaqueness).

No, it means that about 85% of incident radiation reaches the surface. Compare the difference in area of the red and yellow curves here.
We're not talking about "transparency" or "opaqueness" here, because the issue isn't about the opacity in general but rather a few specific wavelengths.

Assumption #6: "The effect of the atmosphere is to slow radiation." Really? Perhaps not so much a mere assumption as simply sloppy thinking. Does it slow all radiation? What does it mean to "slow" radiation? How do we precisely define "slowing" of radiation? Can we measure it in real systems? Can we be certain that we fully understand this phenomena and how to apply it in models? Is this really "the effect" of the atmosphere - surely an atmosphere can have more than one?

No, gases only absorb radiation in specific bands. "Slowing" means that a photon is absorbed, then re-radiated some time later. This process happens often. Yes, it can be very precisely measured by satellites and in laboratory conditions. Yes, we understand this phenomenon very well, both in terms of the quantum mechanical aspects and the atmospheric effects. We have also measured this on other atmospheres in the solar system, including the sun's atmosphere. That is "the effect" of the Earth's atmosphere on outgoing long-wave radiation, which is the subject at hand. There are many details about how exactly this happens that are out of scope; consult any undergrad text on atmospheric physics.

I'm not going to bother with the rest of your "assumptions" except to say that no one is assuming anything, the answers are just complex. Don't confuse a simple explanation with the entire one, that is sloppy thinking. Figuring out what happens in the brain is complex; figuring out how light travels through gases is easy. Figuring out, with a satellite, the effect of the atmosphere on various wavelengths of light, is easy. Calculating the direct effect of certain gases, knowing that they only absorb radiation in specific spectra, is a little more complex, but still not that hard.

"Someone was wrong once, therefore you're wrong." Fallacy.
"Explain it to me like I'm five." No. I'm not going to write a textbook on slashdot. The information is available -- start on Wikipedia, then maybe ScienceOfDoom or SkepticalScience. You're not smart enough to ask questions that don't have answers -- that's what the scientists are doing. If you feel insulted, good, maybe if enough people tell you you're ignorant, you'll feel compelled to do something about it.

What is the "will of hundreds of thousands of people in Ukrainian East", exactly? We heard demands of wider autonomy, making Russian an official language. These things are going to be granted with the new constitution and reforms, and it has been promised by a new-elect President Poroshenko on numerous occasions. It is also, as it happens, something plenty of people are waiting for here, in Odessa. Waiting peacefully, no guns, no killings, no kidnappings, bank robberies, rape, organ trade, etc.

Let's continue with a proof by picture.
Typical Maidan protesters: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...
Typical "eastern Ukraine protesters": http://i0.wp.com/cyprus-mail.c...

Are you going to argue that the latter do not, in fact, represent a covert intrusion of armed special forces, criminals, ex-military from a nice peaceful country to the East? Which is not known for annexing another part of Ukraine just recently, waging war in Georgia in 2008, destroying most parts of it's own Chechnya region in two wars 10 years ago?

Truly failing is one thing, being perceived as fallen by a biased is quite another, isn't it?

Russia, who has been arming the rebels

"Russia, which is the rebels."

Why do people persist with the pretence that these are local separatists merely being armed by Russia. They are Russian military, lead by a "former" GRU officer with no ties to the region except his current operation and who reports directly to his HQ in Moscow.

Likewise, mobile SAM systems, including the Buk missile platform, is not like a MANPAD or RPG, where you can spend an hour or two showing the locals how to point'n'shoot. You need 10-12 people, in multiple vehicles, all with proper training. These are not operated by locals "with Russian assistance", they are operated by the Russian military.

One missile control console

Hell, they were even able to enlist "Weird Al" Yankovic.

a heap, especially of metallic ore or of waste from a mine.

Origin : early 16th century: from Old Norse bingr âheapâ(TM).

Example : here is a pile of useless waste from the 19th century oil-shale workings just outside Edinburgh.

No, seriously. Google it!

Micro$loth's marketing department fucks it up. Again.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

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

Try looking at actual data [woodfortrees.org]. That's the RSS data, which is inherently better than spotty surface station coverage in that it directly integrates the entire lower troposphere. That's a slightly negative trend that's going hard on twenty years...all with CO2 levels worth panicking over according to some.

Ok, what makes the RSS data better than the UAH MSU satellite data? If you're ignoring that you're just cherry picking.

Nothing in particular. Here's the last 10 years (you know, the 10 years with the highest CO2 levels in history) of UAH data, showing a dead flat temperature trend. The point being, warming has definitely paused on around a decadal time scale. Will it last longer? That's a very interesting question. Solar activity, despite being near a maximum in the 11 year cycle, is low. The interesting thing is that the next cycle (forecast to begin roughly around 2020) is predicted to be extremely low - so low that a sunspot will be a rare event for 12-15 years (weak solar cycles are also longer). Such low cycles have historically been associated with quite significant temperature drops. So, we may in fact see flat or declining temperatures through 2035 or longer. That will be quite a shock for the alarmists if it works out that way. :-)

BTW, it may not be only lower solar irradiance that's responsible for lower temperatures, there may be other effects having to do with the solar wind and/or the solar magnetic field.

The fact is that RSS is using an older satellite for their data and may have some issues with deteriorating orbits and sensors that aren't properly accounted for.

Citation? My understanding is that RSS and UAH are two independent analyses of the same data. The relevant Wikipedia article contains no mention of such a thing...

At any rate, this chart shows the close agreement between the two datasets.

Topical complaint from a Wikipedian about anonymous checkusers being granted access to Wikipedians' private information, on the talk page of a Wikimedia Foundation trustee: Why Did You Support Granting Private Information of Editors to Anonymous Administrators?

Xbox Live came out in the fourth quarter of 2002. By that time, EverQuest had already been out for three and a half years. So I must be misunderstanding what you mean by "serious thing".

Everquest was niche. You need an Everquest subscription to play it. Ultima online needed another subscription. XBox Live simplified everything established and made it acccessible to casual gamers.

If you call At Ease "new".

Windows 8 looks just like At Ease. Can't tell the difference.

Nope, that was Kerry Clendinning in 1992. In System 7, Apple made each "desk accessory" run in its own process and stored them in separate files within the Apple Menu items folder instead of resources in the System file. By doing this, Apple turned the Mac's Apple menu into a rudimentary quick launch menu.

I can see how it similar, but you yourself say it's rudimentary. MS made the Star Menu part of the actual user experience.

Honestly, what company *does* innovate?

Xbox Live came out in the fourth quarter of 2002. By that time, EverQuest had already been out for three and a half years. So I must be misunderstanding what you mean by "serious thing".

Everquest was niche. You need an Everquest subscription to play it. Ultima online needed another subscription. XBox Live simplified everything established and made it acccessible to casual gamers.

If you call At Ease "new".

Windows 8 looks just like At Ease. Can't tell the difference.

Nope, that was Kerry Clendinning in 1992. In System 7, Apple made each "desk accessory" run in its own process and stored them in separate files within the Apple Menu items folder instead of resources in the System file. By doing this, Apple turned the Mac's Apple menu into a rudimentary quick launch menu.

I can see how it similar, but you yourself say it's rudimentary. MS made the Star Menu part of the actual user experience.

Honestly, what company *does* innovate?

:I don't like the word Bing .... I've never really cared for it

Too right. It makes me think of Bing Crosby, the 1950's Brycreemed guy with jug-handle ears who sings that dreary "White Xmas" song on continuous loop in every shopping mall from about mid-October every year. Otherwise it reminds me of a silly children's board game (can't remember what it's called) where you have to shout "Bing!" or "Ping!" or something like that when you think you have won.

The "small percentage" I mentioned was in reference to this. You can argue if you like that a ~ 27.3% increase is large but I disagree, since climate sensitivity to CO2 is widely acknowledged to be based on a geometric progression.

As I've said, we've increased CO2 by ~40% but your link refers to the CO2 rise between 1900 (290 ppm) to 2000 (369 ppm) which is an increase of ~27.24%. But we're actually living in 2014, and CO2 in real life is now at ~400 ppm because we're increasing it so rapidly that even NOAA websites rapidly go out of date. That's a ~37.93% increase even if you take "1900" to be the start of the the Industrial Revolution.

Also, climate sensitivity is logarithmic, not geometric. But it's hard to remember that our CO2 emissions are probably more rapid than any events in the last 300 million years. Even logarithmic climate sensitivity allows for accelerating warming if the CO2 concentration rises faster than exponentially. Since 1960, atmospheric CO2 concentration has risen faster than exponentially. Tamino showed this by taking the logarithm of the Mauna Loa measurements and noting a statistically significant acceleration.

We also need to keep in mind, though, what percentage that is of the overall atmosphere: (CO2 % of all atmosphere [wikimedia.org]. Which is a very small percentage indeed, even though Wikipedia puts it higher than NCDC does in the above page.

Why do we need to keep that in mind, any more than we need to keep in mind the very small percentage of alcohol or LSD in the bloodstream? The same percentage increase of ~40% also occurs when we notice that before 1850 there were ~4 kg of CO2 over each square meter of Earth's surface. Now there are ~6. We did that.

Then you claimed I hadn't notified you after I wrote this article until "much later" when I'd actually notified you within a few hours. Will you retract your claim, or is "much later" actually defined as a few hours in Janeland?

First, as I mentioned to you before elsewhere, it isn't an "article". It doesn't meet any standard definition of "article". It's a rambling, ongoing diatribe that reads like little more than a monument to your ego.

Second, as I have clearly explained to you several times, when I discussed this with you after that time I was also referring to LATER posts of yours, not the first one. Not that it really matters, because afterward is still afterward. You might disagree with my interpretation of "much later" in regard to the original post, but that's your opinion.

After that you gave me no notice at all of most of your distortions, in which you took even more comments of mine out of context, assigned wholly imagined meanings and motivations to them, and "argued" with them all by yourself, where you didn't have any fear of being contradicted. (Why? Because I don't care about you and don't visit your website every day... nor should I be forced to do so in order to incessantly correct your mis-characterizations of my words.)

The rest of your rant is loaded with similar bullshit. Yet again you are trying to mislead people for personal, and apparently rather strange, reasons of your own.

I will repeat what I wrote in another thread: all you are doing by indulging in this obsession is making yourself look foolish. I understand that you don't seem to think so, but that causes me some concern. Others have written about it before here, too.

Do you still dismiss flat statements like "the CO2 increase is attributable to human activity" as disingenuous

This is a classic example of your attempts to distort my comments. First, I might have ignorantly denied that C02 increases were due to human activity, years ago. I have not intentionally made any such statement in recent years, since I do not believe any such thing. But more to the point is this:

... and claim that we're only contributing a small percentage despite the fact that ~200% of the CO2 increase is attributable to human activity?

The "small percentage" I mentioned was in reference to this. You can argue if you like that a ~ 27.3% increase is large but I disagree, since climate sensitivity to CO2 is widely acknowledged to be based on a geometric progression.

We also need to keep in mind, though, what percentage that is of the overall atmosphere: (CO2 % of all atmosphere. Which is a very small percentage indeed, even though Wikipedia puts it higher than NCDC does in the above page.

Further, you appear to be claiming that we have contributed about "200% of the CO2 increase" ourselves, when that is simply not logically possible. While we might have produced 200% as much CO2, if so obviously much of it has been absorbed in one way or another by the environment. While you might have a problem with that, it is a completely separate argument. It is not possible for us to have contributed "200% of the increase", because only 100% of the increase actually exists. Once again you demonstrate a bizarrely weak grasp of logic for someone who presents himself as a scientist.

Do you still link to "PSI" blog posts accusing scientists of fraud because Dr. Salby said accumulation of human emitted CO2 is somehow unphysical? Do you acknowledge these "PSI" accusations of fraud are baseless, or do you think they're honest, true and correct?

If my memory serves (and it may not), I linked to that page once in the past. A

Yeah, so just replace one of the cells with [whatever] and jump the wires around that one.

Fortunately, I had the presence of mind not to point this out to the agent who insisted that I power on my laptop. The battery was dead, so I offered to plug it in for them. The agent just rolled her eyes and let me by. I think she was delighted to have confiscated my open bottle of gin. Still wasn't as fun as the time I was dressed military surplus fatigues and playing a tin whistle; the National Guardsman with the M-16 was nice about it, asked a few questions, and let me be. Another time I was asked if the picture of Gauss on my laptop was of a Frenchman. He was happy to learn that he was, in fact, German.

Life was a lot more fun when I was bugshit crazy. Remember kids, the Somebody Else's Problem field is real. No one likes hassling someone who is weird enough to actually be (or at least seem) unpredictable.

We are building new coal plants to replace old ones. And bottom line we phase coal power out. 2013 was an all time low for brown coal btw.

Wow! Is attending brainwashing sessions a required activity in Germany? The reality is opposite: coal power in Germany is rising and 2013 was the highest coal year since 1990 ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/w... ). Meanwhile, more coal power plants are being built. Goals to reduce CO2 emissions by 2020 won't be met.

That ten-line program will always do exactly what it was programmed to do, neither more nor less.

Just because you understand and algorithm (or you invented it and implemented it yourself, even) doesn't mean that the algorithm can't produce complex results that you never would have anticipated yourself. Consider the mandelbrot fractal, for example. It is generated by pretty much the simplest algorithm you can imagine, but it still results in a surprising and beautiful structure. Just because something is following an algorithm slavishly doesn't mean it can't result in arbitrarily complex behavior.

The CPU in your computer is always running the same fixed algorithm, as specified through its wiring diagram. It does exactly what the designers at Intel, AMD, ARM etc. designed it to do. Nothing more, nothing less. But it still results in a huge amount of different behaviors - games, word processors, physics simulations, image manipulation - that were not anticipated by the CPU designers. Of course, in the case of a computer, those extra behaviors come in the form of specially crafted data that is fed into the CPU (via its attached memory) by humans. I'm certainly not claiming that your computer has general AI. But my point is that doing "exactly what it's programmed to do, neither more nor less" is not really relevant here.

It may well be possible to create general AI by having a very simple, fixed algorithm operating on a large, dynamic data structure. At a fundamental level, that's how our intelligence works - a simple, fixed algorithm (the laws of physics) operating on the configuration of particles that make up our brains. I don't think such a low-level approach is the most efficient way of going about constructing a general AI, though.

Just because it has a similar population density does not make it a valid comparison. Look at the two maps below, Nearly a quarter of their 5.4 million people live in Helsinki alone. If all of them have 100mbs connections or better it will be easy to have an average speed 5x the USA even if those in rural areas have no internet connection at all. I know it is popular to hate on the US for doing a crappy job rolling out broadband but we really have to stop comparisons to countries that are distinctly different. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi... http://education.randmcnally.c...

There's good evidence to believe that unicorns (genus Oryx ) exist in this universe. See, for example, this photo. And some people find evidence of God in cosmology.

I'm under the impression that a lot of the "holdings" are works of the United States Government, which enter the public domain upon publication. Works created by a government contractor still have a copyright, but I'm not sure to what extent the "holdings" include those.

Another one:
5. You are learning skills that will likely be useful for decades.

Unlike GUIs, the *nix shell hasn't changed that much since the nineteen-seventies. [1] [2]

Thanks to the Unix Philosophy [3], the system is more future-proof than other operating systems.
I don't think it would be unreasable to expect it to still look, feel, and work similar in, say, the fifties.

[1] Screenshot of Unix Version 6, released 39 years ago in 1975
[2] This site will let you emulate Unix V6 in your browser
[3] "Basics of the Unix Philosophy"

It will work by making the wearer look like a schizophrenic who's off his meds. Here's the patent drawing: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/47/Dt2wrr.jpg

Calendar reminders. That's it. I don't always keep my phone in my pocket and sometimes I have the thing on silent. It's worked out well for me. I tried the email and facebook notifications, but I really don't care about missing those things. For me the whole point of email over phone calls is that you don't have to drop what you're doing because somebody has something to tell you.

Now I've always worn watches; I like them. I like being able to glance to see the time. I also like the quick, crude analog timing function of a rotating bezel, although I can live with a digital stopwatch. And I like a good looking watch; for me this means simple, functional elegance. I think the best looking watch ever made was the Rolex Submariner, although I'd never spend that kind of money. Generally cheap watches are too cluttered for my taste, but you can find a reasonable Submariner knock-off around $80 (e.g., an Invicta 8926OB).

It's not a matter of impressing people with how much I spend. One of my favorite watches costs only $35 (Timex Expedition T45181). I like it because it is simple, functional, and aesthetically pleasing in a subdued way.

But with the Pebble any question of aesthetic elegance goes right out the window. It's an ugly hunk of plastic. It will not impress anyone. But then, missing an appointment because your phone is in your coat pocket on silent isn't going to impress anyone either. The Pebble does one critical thing (other than tell time) and does it really well. Most of the time that makes it my go-to watch. On weekends I go for my Submariner knock-off, or if I'm doing something that will beat up the watch I'll go for the Timex.

How exactly?

Depends which temperature proxy you look at, but on average, nope.

Of course there may have been warmer days in the "recent" past, but we have no records of that, so the article's claim stands. And your claim requires ignoring most of the various proxy reconstructions that have been done, so it doesn't hold up either.

I was talking about the horny sixties. :-) But I get what you meant.

There are situations where one could sue anonymously ( http://www.legalmatch.com/law-... ), and they should still have copyright protections ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/w... ) but proving themselves to be the actual authors and have standing to sue might be difficult?

You must be joking. Ansel Adams was a master of detail and dynamic range. You linked to what appears to be the worst reproduction of any of his work I've ever seen.

Look at this picture instead. It's the same one, except not butchered.

This drone was in Brazil and I'm talking about the laws I know, which is Danish law - if you take a picture in Denmark, they can ask you to remove it and you must comply.

Apparently, you don't know your own laws:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w...

Violent Crime rates are the lowest they've been for decades: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

Yet "Justifiable Homicide" by the police when attacked has almost doubled: http://tacreports.org/storage/...
(i.e. their response is more violent)
While the number of citizens killed by police in general has remained the same despite the reduction in violent crime.

Police murdered while on duty is at a 50yr low, so it's not like they are in some new mortal danger.
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

They are all closer to us than the Moon and no one actually needs to be in space for the satellites to work.

So as far as "space" goes, they're in our living room.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

And yes, they are an obsolete "big energy" way of doing things.

You think biodiversity and climate haven't changed radically in the last 4.5 billion years? You think the earth is static state? Have sea levels fallen and risen before?

No, I think that the current warming is primarily caused by human activity, and that this is putting extinction pressure on great swathes of a wide range of ecosystems, is responsible for the observed acceleration in sea level rise.

Forbes is using NOAAs data.

They're not understanding that the increase in CO2 is responded to my a warming over the following decades though. Scientific sources are better, and Forbes' opinion pieces are appallingly unscientific when it comes to climate change.

The economist reported the 25% number

So they did. A well researched and intellectual publication. Not scientific as such, but educated. It gets a pass.

Yet, still no warming during that time

Not quite true. There has been warming.

That is because the CO2 greenhouse effect is weak and marginal compared to natural causes of global temperature changes.

Not even close to correct. Completely wrong. Every time you decompose global warming into the response to natural and anthropogenic forcing it looks something like this. Most or all of the observed warming is anthropogenic. Every time you look at what is applying radiative forcing it looks like this. Anthropogenic forcing dominates, and of the anthropogenic forcings, CO2 forcing is the largest part.

There is no question in the scientific literature that most of the current warming is likely anthropogenic. About 0% of scientific organisations and 0% of scholarly papers refute this fact. We know it better than we know an asteroid impact killed the dinosaurs.

Or maybe the President is just one person who is put in charge every 8 years. While this building stays permanently, and is filled with people who are probably experts at convincing newly elected Presidents.

1 temporary President versus the permanent Military Industrial Complex. Democrats and Republicans are identical on the "true power" issues The "big money" stuff. They are very different on a lot of other things that truly do change our lives though, so I still think it is worth thinking about those other issues as well.