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I'm not surprised we're finding new species back then as we're still finding new species now.

Also consider between Yoho and Kootnay we may not be getting precisely the same habitat. Just go for a walk outside and the ecosystem can vary wildly within a small geographic area. And with a 100,000 year gap (not sure how accurate that number is) that's enough time for a few new species to evolve, go extinct, or even migrate into or out of that ecosystem depending on climate conditions. Just 10,000-12,000 years ago we had megafauna like mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, and giant beavers roaming North America, over the history of the earth I'd expect there's been a LOT of different species.

There's also the number of species to choose from, in both Yoho and Kootnay only a small subset of the species from those ecosystems were preserved and recovered, even if it was the same ecosystem and habitat you'd expect to get different subsets.

Algorithmic information theory (AIT) explains very clearly and simply why we are still writing text-based code. AIT is based on the idea of measuring the amount of information in a series of bits (or bytes or however you want to chunk it) based on the size of the smallest possible program that can create the series.

There are simply not enough bits of information in a GUI based coding system to create the algorithms we want/need to create. Even though almost all programming languages have a lot of redundancy built-in in order to make them easier to understand, programs written in these languages still have a much greater amount of information than what is available by simple point-and-click which is equivalent to a series of multiple choice questions. For example 80 multiple choice questions with 100 options in each question only give you the information contained in a line of 80 ASCII characters.

Shouldn't there be a simpler, more robust way to translate an algorithm into something a computer can understand? One that's language agnostic and without all the cryptic jargon?

I believe people have tried to make universal programming languages. I don't think any of them caught on in the sense of replacing coding in real programming languages. And for very good reasons. One problem is the conflict between simpler and more robust. Shorter programs require higher information density and hence less redundancy and robustness. If you want to make a language simpler by reducing the number of keywords and special symbols then you will force programs to be longer or harder to understand or both. In the limit of the shortest program possible, the program itself appears to be a random series of bits, every one of which is significant. If there is any pattern or bias in the bits then it is not the shortest possible program.

OTOH, some higher level-languages such as R or MatLab (Octave) do make it easier to express many algorithms. This is mostly because they have vector and matrix data types. Their forerunner in many ways was APL which has a fairly high information density partly because it uses a wider range of characters than are available in ASCII. Perhaps you should learn R or Matlab or maybe even Mathematica. These languages give you a high-level means of expressing algorithms in a way that computers can understand.

The summary reminds me of the lollipop Perlisim:

When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop.

That's why most Americans are unbelievers in Global Warming.

Thankfully, that's yet another thing you are wrong about.

"Americans' belief in the reality of global warming has increased by 13 percentage points over the past two and a half years, from 57 percent in January 2010 to 70 percent in September 2012. At the same time, the number of Americans who say global warming is not happening has declined nearly by half, from 20 percent in January 2010 to only 12 percent today.
"For the first time since 2008, more than half of Americans (54%) believe global warming is caused mostly by human activities, an increase of 8 points since March 2012. Americans who say it is caused mostly by natural changes in the environment have declined to 30 percent (from 37% in March)."
- See more at: http://environment.yale.edu/cl...

The real problem is the fact that we have things like the "executive order". The executive order did not exist pre-civil war, which was not about ending slavery, but about ensuring the presence of a central banking authority.

Our United States is not the same as the one in the original Constitution, composed of voluntary States, but is founded upon General Orders 100 (a.k.a The Lieber Code), and most especially upon General Orders 100 Article 2:

"Martial Law does not cease during the hostile occupation, except by special proclamation, ordered by the commander in chief; or by special mention in the treaty of peace concluding the war, when the occupation of a place or territory continues beyond the conclusion of peace as one of the conditions of the same. "

There has never been a "special proclamation, ordered by the commander in chief" or a "treaty of peace concluding the war", and all laws since then have been based upon this form of "martial law", and not the Constitution we have been taught about.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19t...

Well, from the linked resource, you can download the whole thing as a PDF. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.

archive.org has several different formats as well.

https://archive.org/details/Th...

Is it available as an Ebook?

Yale has digital scans and you can download the whole thing as a PDF.

Well, from the linked resource, you can download the whole thing as a PDF. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.

Nope.

You are correct that they are padded when they are loaded in memory. but on disk (at least with ELF)

You are making an incorrect assumption here. (Hint: I said "libSystem", not "libc".)

the size of segments is specified in bytes, not pages.

OK, let's look in a little more detail:

$ size -m hello
Segment __PAGEZERO: 4294967296
Segment __TEXT: 4096
Section __text: 77
Section __stubs: 12
Section __stub_helper: 36
Section __cstring: 14
Section __unwind_info: 80
Section __eh_frame: 72
total 291
Segment __DATA: 4096
Section __program_vars: 40
Section __nl_symbol_ptr: 16
Section __la_symbol_ptr: 16
Section __common: 32
total 104
Segment __LINKEDIT: 4096
total 4294979584

The Mach-O specification says:

For best performance, segments should be aligned on virtual memory page boundaries—4096 bytes for PowerPC and x86 processors. To calculate the size of a segment, add up the size of each section, then round up the sum to the next virtual memory page boundary (4096 bytes, or 4 kilobytes). Using this algorithm, the minimum size of a segment is 4 kilobytes, and thereafter it is sized at 4 kilobyte increments.

And that's not necessarily space in the file:

Segments that require more memory at runtime than they do at build time can specify a larger in-memory size than they actually have on disk. For example, the __PAGEZERO segment generated by the linker for PowerPC executable files has a virtual memory size of one page but an on-disk size of 0. Because __PAGEZERO contains no data, there is no need for it to occupy any space in the executable file.

although if a segment is being paged in from the file, it'll be padded on disk so that you don't get extra cruft from the following segment when you fault in the last page of the segment.

It's been ages since I dealt with ELF (back in 1988), but I suspect that the same is done there. This version of the ELF specification seems to suggest that it is.

I.e., they may be specified in units of bytes, but they might also be padded to a number of bytes that's a multiple of the page size.

The entry point of an elf executable is not main(), it is a function called _start()

That dates back well before ELF, all the way to PDP-11 UNIX's a.out format.

which is provided by gcc or glibc (I can't recall)

On Solaris with Sun C^W^WOracle Studio, it's provided neither by GCC nor by glibc; on *BSD, it's definitely not provided by glibc, and if clang is used, it's obviously not provided by GCC.

If the super volcano were a Twinky, how big would it be?

According to this reputable source, the volume of a Twinkie is ~140 milliliters and the volume of the goo inside is 42.8 ml or ~30.5% of its total volume.

If Yellowstone's magma chamber is its goo and its volume is 200 cubic kilometers (low estimate), then the Yellowstone Twinkie itself would have a volume of ~656 cubic kilometers. If Twikie's W:L:H dimensions follow the ratio 15:39:11 then the Twinkie would be ~18.2 kilometers on its longest side, or 716,535 inches.

But supervolcanic calderas tend to form in roundish not Twinkie shapes, so it would be best to use the circular Ding Dong or its ellipsoidal counterpart, the Long Dong.

Or at least, they are not sending the signals they think they are sending.

The signalling theory was introduced by Spence in his 1973 paper Job Market Signaling.

His basic idea is to view the employer as buying a lottery ticket when he hires an employee. He knows extremely little about the attributes of the potential employee that he is really interested in and thus has to draw inferences from easily observable attributes such as "education, previous work, race, sex, criminal and service records, and a host of other data".

Many of these attributes cannot be modified (e.g. race and sex) but those that can be modified and especially those where the cost of improving the attribute is low compared to its impact on the employer can be manipulated by the prospective employee to signal the employer about his qualities.

Spence primarily views education as a signal for work potential but he readily admits that it might, e.g. be rather used as a signal for status instead. However, the important point is that "signaling costs are negatively correlated with productivity" (or with whatever other property you want to signal your potential employer about).

Someone who has a high work potential will be more willing to get an education because getting an education will be cheaper for him than for other people - not just in terms of money (although you could argue that scholarships, a lower chance of not successfully completing the degree, ... can make it cheaper in terms of money) but also in terms of "psychic and other costs", e.g. time. Someone who already has a high social status will find it easier (i.e. cheaper) to get an ivy league education to signal this status to his employer than someone who intends to get that education solely to mislead employers about his true social status.

Although different signals can be appropriate for different types of work, the signalling value of getting an education is not about the content about that education. You aren't primarily demonstrating that you learned any useful skills. In fact the signaling value of an otherwise completely useless education might be even higher than that of an education that has a very reliable return in terms of real-world applicable skills, e.g. most mathematicians are not hired because they need theoretical math skills for their job but because mathematics has a reputation for being insanely hard. For the vast majority of people it doesn't make sense to study mathematics because the cost would be far too high and the rl skills learned are low. The same goes for almost any PhD degree - the knowledge learned while earning the degree is way too specialized to be of any use to your employer - but the fact that the cost of getting a PhD was so low to you (because you are so awesome) that you felt it economically worthwhile to get one anyways is a strong signal to any prospective employer.

That's the way those who think that signals are important (there are other theories that explain the value of education in terms of accumulation of human capital) think that signals do work. And correspondingly these are the signals they think they are sending by getting an education. Now, how do you disagree?

His analogies to computer engineering are mostly false, as biology operates according to physical and chemical rules. Not Ohm's Law. Not digital logic. You can engineer biology to mimic digital logic, but it's truly analog governed by biomolecular interactions and stochastic dynamical processes.

(human) brains are both analog and digital simultaneously.

even if you argue it's really all analog, the fact that you can mentally process digital logic means that you are digital computer... with lots of extra features. :)

Wow, your going to go there, you picked about the worst cases you could. I could bother doing the same thing with coal and quickly show far worse pollution and death figures, but you can google that all by yourself. So let's take your worst case scenario and run with it (you have researched these things, right?). How many people were killed in these or all other nuclear related incidents? How much actual damage was done?

Now compare those numbers to your favorite form of green energy, how about windmills? Go on, google this and tell me how it compares. Why don't you compare pollution figures while your at it. Remember your windmills require the very rare earths that come from these types of mines.

Okay, now that you've bothered to do a bit of research scale your numbers of for world wide power and tell me what they would look like. You see, if strip mining is done in a place like Greenland they will bother with these pesky things called environment regulations. The Chinese don't do that and as a result they have cornered the market. You can't get rare earths from Unicorn farts and rainbows, you have to get them out of the ground. Better we do the mining, so that it can be done responsibly.

VPN via Sweden, are you freakin kidding me - you might as well cc all your data to GCHQ directly!? Sweden's NSA Spy Links “Deeply Troubling”, or check out the professors blog for ongoing abuses on all fronts by the Swedish authorities. Whatever cred Sweden may have established during the cold war years, they have more than used up and are still digging down. The country (well its political leaders) can't be trusted - not a good place to do business anymore.

If any country near the UK has some semblance of credibility, perhaps try Iceland as the first hop for your VPN. They are even trying to promote themselves as a naturally cooled server hub, which is nice...

I'd be surprised too, as the Tea Baggers tend to think that climate change is some kind of made up science (Yale Climate Change Study).

However, that result is consistent with the other study which showed that people who hold a strong position only get more certain of that position as the get more information, regardless of what the information says. So you'd expect more scientifically-informed climate deniers to deny more strongly than less-informed client deniers.

It's also worth pointing out that the Tea Party movement as such has no position on climate change at all.

I'd be surprised too, as the Tea Baggers tend to think that climate change is some kind of made up science (Yale Climate Change Study).

However, that result is consistent with the other study which showed that people who hold a strong position only get more certain of that position as the get more information, regardless of what the information says. So you'd expect more scientifically-informed climate deniers to deny more strongly than less-informed client deniers.

It's also worth pointing out that the Tea Party movement as such has no position on climate change at all.

I'd be surprised too, as the Tea Baggers tend to think that climate change is some kind of made up science (Yale Climate Change Study).

In fact, the fertility rates in the developed world are much less than in poor regions. The fertility rates in sub-Saharan Africa are more than twice that of the developed world. Therefore a poor person's carbon footprint is much higher. http://www.econ.yale.edu/~pschultz/cdp925.pdf

The ability to make financial contributions used to be better regulated by laws such as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, that was unfortunately overruled by Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission of 2010. The latter ruling is what makes such contributions a First Amendment right for corporations, as if they were also natural persons instead of just legal persons.

Furthermore, at the State level over half of all elections in the United States are already publicly financed, so why would it be so impossible to do at the Federal level? For example, there's the Patriot Dollar idea. Whichever way it's done, it sure would cut back on the corruption we see in Congress today.

He also admits, he doesn't know what the heck he's talking about:

"my objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have."

http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2151

He's not an expert on the current science. Taking his advice is like asking a guy who wrote COBOL in the 60's about something like open stack.

Most Indians outside of their educated middle class do not speak English.

Even as late as the Revolution, at least half of France could not understand French as it was spoken in Paris. Up until the beginning of the 20th century, this was also the case with most European countries: those in rural areas spoke their own dialects and used their own peculiar systems of weights and measures that changed from village to village.

How quickly it takes to adopt and converge on a national language depends on how long it takes to build decent road networks, modern civil bureaucracies and public schools. (Mass media can help immensely, too.)

It just so happens that China's own nation-building and language convergence is taking place now during our lifetimes, and is being compressed into a whirlwind 30-40 year period, rather than being stretched over a one-and-a-half centuries of industrialization as with the Europeans.

As far as the oysters, if it's a recurring problem how come it doesn't appear to have been a problem until recently for oyster farms that have been in existence for decades?

Well, according to Patrick Moffitt's comments on the Yale360 article, this did happen before in recent decades.

I want to make sure I understand you-- are you saying that if CO2 had not increased due to fossil fuel use- that the upwelling event would not have killed the oyster spat? What caused the nearly identical oyster spat mortalities in the 1940's, 60's and 70's?

This is the nature of observation bias. My bet is that this has been going every few decades since the end of the last glacial period, 12k years ago. But it's only now, when we've become hypersensitive to any climate-related phenomena, that it gets tied to climate change.

And I would throw your observer bias comment back in your face. You appear eager to accept anything that appears to be evidence against the effects of CO2 on our climate and oceans.

I at least looked at the research first before discounting it. But I will say this. The claims about near future effects from AGW are extraordinary. A huge portion of this sort of research claims large effects from minute changes in climate. A slight increase in CO2 content of sea water leads to a huge mortality in oyster spat. I don't buy that because most natural environments are highly variable. If oysters were that vulnerable to CO2, then I think they would have died off some point in the last few million years.

My view is that the first manifestation of near future global warming will be shifts in the snow line (due to the moderate positive feedback between increasing temperature and reduced occurrence of high albedo snow cover. But even that will be obscured by the ongoing shift northward of plant species following the end of the last glacial period.

For example, I live in Yellowstone National Park at the present time. Up to around 8,000 years ago, the park was buried by a massive ice field. Anything larger than a microbe living in the park today came in after the ice retreated. For the lodgepole pine (the most common tree in the park), a generation is something like 20 to 40 years. So there is somewhere around 200 to 400 generations of lodgepole pines since the end of the last glacial period.

Thus, I suspect there's still going to be a slow colonization of these areas by other sorts of trees (for example, aspen, firs, and spruce) as the soil continues to build up. That would be easy to confuse with evidence for AGW since it comes from a warming climate, but just a warming climate 8,000 years ago rather than a warming climate now.

I think the most compelling AGW evidence so far is pine bark beetle infestations. First, they are comprised for the most part of native beetle species to the area. This rules out aggressive invasive species. Second, the worst hit areas tend to be where one would expect the greatest degree of AGW effect, areas which usually receive enough snow each winter to change the albedo of the landscape for months at a time and which historically have been cold enough to dampen the beetles' enthusiasm.

But once again, we run into the problems of observation bias. We don't have many centuries or millennia of observation to determine if the current outbreaks of warm winter weather and beetles are unusual or not (or at least get some idea of how frequent such outbreaks are).

The complexities of sea level is a fascinating subject. Ocean currents and prevailing winds can cause the water to pile up higher in places that it would otherwise be. The gravitational attraction of the Antarctic ice sheet causes sea level to be higher for thousands of miles around the continent than it would otherwise be. IIRC it's about 20 feet higher along the coast of Antarctica. More here.

The problem is an issue from British Columbia through Washington into Oregon but I suppose you would consider all of that area local too. Here is an article from Yale360 on the subject. If you read the comments though you'll like the ones from Patric Moffitt as he supports your position. There are a number of factors in oyster larvae mortality, acidification being only one of them. Since I'm no expert on the subject I'll continue to listen to what scientists studying the problem have to say but there appears to be no doubt that acidification is going to affect ocean ecosystems as it progresses.

Actually, it's more like Nikolai Bukharin's hysterical personal letter to Stalin on the eve of his execution:

For example:

...
5) My heart boils over when I think that you might believe that I am guilty of these crimes and that in your heart of hearts you think that I am really guilty of all of these horrors. My head is giddy with confusion, and I feel like yelling at the top of my voice. I feel like pounding my head against the wall. What am I to do? What am I to do? ...

I wanted to validate the claims that Gates is guilty. Gates related money is actually limiting the health of people in nations the West considers poor. If Bill Gates really wanted to save the lives of people in poverty he would agree that patents don't matter for medicine in many situations. It's a myth that progress in medicine depends on putting patents before people. We must allow generic and patent free drugs to reach more people, and it would not cut into the massive profits of the drug company stocks held by the Gates Foundation.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2003/06/mother-jones-daily-briefing-0?page=3
>> see the reporting by John Litchfield of the London Independent 2003
Litchfield quotes Doctors without borders and notes the lack of affordable generics

>> Read reporter Greg Palast
"let me let you in on a little secret about Bill and Melinda Gates so-called "Foundation." Gate's demi-trillionaire status is based on a nasty little monopoly-protecting trade treaty called "TRIPS" - the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights rules of the World Trade Organization. TRIPS gives Gates a hammerlock on computer operating systems worldwide, legally granting him a monopoly that the Robber Barons of yore could only dream of. But TRIPS, the rule which helps Gates rule, also bars African governments from buying AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis medicine at cheap market prices"
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4103.htm

"The Bush Administration has also prevented a positive resolution to one crucial issue left unresolved at Doha. Currently, TRIPS allows countries to produce generic drugs through compulsory licensing, but requires that such drugs be used predominantly for the country's domestic market. That means that countries cannot export generic products thus produced - even to countries where there are no patents"
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/vi/node/285

As an English intellectual property and antitrust lawyer I read the piece by David Resnik and Kenneth De Ville (2002) with both interest and surprise. It is startling to suggest that a country with the democratic credentials of the United States should, as a matter of public policy and indeed on apparently "moral" grounds, prefer private monopoly rights to the lives and welfare of its citizens.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ajb/summary/v002/2.3smith.html

By pouring most contributions into the fight against such high-profile killers as AIDS, Gates grantees have increased the demand for specially trained, higher-paid clinicians, diverting staff from basic care. The resulting staff shortages have abandoned many children of AIDS survivors to more common killers: birth sepsis, diarrhea and asphyxia.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gates16dec16,0,3743924.story

ORLY?

Not so much, no. There is some history you may be missing. Although that focuses on the Soviets, the National Socialist government is woven into the narrative. I think it is well worth the time.

Many of their program demands are familiar socialist themes:

Program of the National Socialist German Workers' Party

11. That all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished.

Breaking the Bondage of Interest

12. Since every war imposes on the people fearful sacrifices in blood and treasure, all personal profit arising from the war must be regarded as treason to the people We therefore demand the total confiscation of all war profits.

13. We demand the nationalization of all trusts.

14. We demand profit-sharing in large industries.

15. We demand a generous increase in old-age pensions.

16. We demand the creation and maintenance of a sound middle-class, the immediate communalization of large stores which will be rented cheaply to small tradespeople, and the strongest consideration must be given to ensure that small traders shall deliver the supplies needed by the State, the provinces and municipalities.

17. We demand an agrarian reform in accordance with our national requirements, and the enactment of a law to expropriate the owners without compensation of any land needed for the common purpose. The abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land.

The National Socialist Party is about as accurate a name as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Actually the National Socialist Party name is accurate. There is some history you may be missing. Although that focuses on the Soviets, the National Socialist government is woven into the narrative. I think it is well worth the time.

They had a program with demands as well: Program of the National Socialist German Workers' Party
   

They were National Socialists as opposed to the communists who were international socialists.

You might find this more than a little enlightening. (Well worth the investment of time.)

You may also want to view their demands: Program of the National Socialist German Workers' Party

The answer as usual is in history. The Fifth Amendment's roots are in common law as a protection from authorities compelling people from confessing through torture and other intimidation. The assertion that protection against this is a separate right is not historically accurate.

http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/993/

>>First, I pointed out that Dyson has no scientific training in the highly technical subject matter from which he dramatically differs from consensus scientific view.

>. That's absurd. His "training" is irrelevant. The matter at hand is the area of his expertise.

Yeah you're playing word games. Expertise and training and mastery of a domain and ability to do productive research in a field and a million other noun phrases are all the same thing- do you comprehend the technical matter and the work of the researchers in the field and can you make contributions to advance that understanding ?

Dyson has none of this in this field, by his own direct admission, which you have attempted to dance around with your word play. Have some more, liar-

From Yale's website:

http://e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2151

Dyson about an interviewer:

"he wanted to write a piece about global warming and I was just the instrument for that, and I am not so much interested in global warming.

He portrayed me as sort of obsessed with the subject, which I am definitely not. To me it is a very small part of my life.

I don't claim to be an expert. I never did.

I simply find that a lot of these claims that experts are making are absurd. Not that I know better, but I know a few things.

My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it's rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have.

I think that's what upsets me."

That "not knowing much" fact he cites, that state of "not being an expert" that he mentions, that "not knowing better" has consequences. One of those consequences is he floats notions which the people who do know the field reject out of hand as impossible. That is not some badge of honor, that is just being wrong.

Only Sara Palin and her ilk take that as a sure sign you're right.

Only narcissists believe that, when faced with that situation, the thing to do is to throw away the accumulated knowledge and hard won agreement of technical experts who have spent their professional lives comparing their predictions to reality and submitted themselves to the rigours of peer review. People whose models' predicted results have been repeatedly borne out and whose work in effect constitutes humanity's deep knowledge of a field and go by gut.

Sara Palin and, oh yeah, Freeman Dyson.

Dyson can't "take issue with the way climate science is done" or "take issue with their techniques" or "find flaws in their methodology" or any other of a million ways to express the same idea because he doesn't understand them. That's what happens when you don't DO the work- you don't understand the work.

So, heh, I guess you actually didn't address any absurdity. But feel free to raise your own hand in victory *in exactly the same way Dyson declares his meanderings to be relevant*.

>>Oh, how foolish you are. That is sooo far from what he actually said.

I think the above disposes of that idea....let the reader be the judge.

The rest of your post consists of broad, baseless and meaningless screeching about *how environmentalists have destroyed science* etc etc which are just typical of your kind. You have the belief that by speaking words, you have the power to make the ideas in those words reality.

You also have the idea, with Dyson, that if facts disagree with you, it's all political and that you should be given the power to decide what facts are facts.

That and all that flows from it, in this case denial of an impending disaster which will put the blood of millions on yours and Dyson's hands , is the reason why conservatism has moved from being just weird and sad to dangerous and an existential threat to civilization.

We had this happen once last century. For a long time, America slept . Then it awoke to the danger- and over the objects of many conservatives- did what it needed to do.

The only difference this time is it's not just America who's going to awake to the danger and do what needs to be done. It's the entire world.

wind is intermittent; but it doesn't melt down, and storage can be done with hydro, pumped hydro or electric cars

But you need to plan to replace the wind turbines about every 12 years, and this cost must be factored in to the cost of the power.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/9770837/Wind-farm-turbines-wear-sooner-than-expected-says-study.html

Hydro is mature. All the good locations already have hydro plants; and environmentalists are trying to get existing hydro plants torn out to benefit river wildlife, so just forget about building new hydro plants.

I'm pretty sure pumped hydro storage is in a similar situation... you need a giant reservoir uphill of a source of lots of water you can pump. Where can you build a new one of these, and will the environmentalists approve?

Using a decentralized group of electric cars as an energy-storage system is an interesting idea, but I don't think you can dependably store very much that way in the near future.

I have hopes for molten-salt solar plants, which can keep producing power after the sun goes down because the salt holds so much heat. And it would be cool if we could work out a good way to use hydrogen to store excess energy from wind or solar... but it takes a lot of electricity to strip hydrogen out of water, and hydrogen is tricky to store.

And just as you will face opposition to building more hydro, you will face opposition to building solar in the desert.

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/its_green_against_green_in_mojave_desert_solar_battle/2236/

Nuclear is more expensive than wind, and is also poor at load following; you normally find nuclear needs hydro as well; because it's so expensive to build it runs flat out and then the hydro does the load following- nuclear is better for baseload.

I agree with your final statement; nuclear is indeed better for base load and not good at load-following. But probably natural gas is a better near-term way to reliably follow loads.

By all means get renewables into the mix, but don't make the same mistake the U.K. made, wasting huge sums of money on a system that doesn't work very well. (Right when demand is most heavy in winter, the wind farms stop producing. Quote: "In winter, when the most intense cold period coincides with a high pressure front, most wind turbines do not work.")

http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/article-2008055/Energy-giants-want-billions-windfarms.html

One no-brainer idea: homes and businesses in warm places (Arizona, Florida, Texas, etc.) should have solar panels on the roof. This will produce peak power during peak demand times (when everyone is running the air conditioning, the sun will be shining). This is only a tiny part of the overall energy picture, though, and will happen on its own as the cost of solar panels keeps falling.

Of course nature is dangerous, but not tested? Ever heard of evolution and selection?
Breeding also works since thousands of years and not only 25.

Independant GM research is almost non-existent:

http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/13/opinion/la-oe-guriansherman-seeds-20110213
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/companies_put_restrictions_on_research_into_gm_crops/2273/

http://earthopensource.org/files/pdfs/GMO_Myths_and_Truths/GMO_Myths_and_Truths_1.3b.pdf

Please stop spreading lies.

Could OTEC help produce algae for biofuel?

AFAIK nutrients are a serious constraint on the large scale use of algae for biofuel. For pilot plants you can always dump in fertilizer, but on a large scale it might be different, due to the energy required to make that fertilizer and the fact that there is a limited supply of phosphates. Even sewage has its problems, as there is a limited supply (though some contribute much more than others) and it may be better used for agricultural fertilizer (humanure). However, deep ocean water often contains lots of nutrients because dead plankton tend to sink. That's why you get lots of phytoplankton (green water) in parts of the ocean where there are upwellings. Could the deep water that's brought to the surface for OTEC be used to fertilize algae grown for biofuel?

You also forget the AIR POWER that the Americans brought to bear on Germany's manufacturing cities and supply lines. Without manufacturing, the German war machine collapsed.

Completely inaccurate. The British began large-scale bombing of Germany in early 1942, while the US began bombing in mid-1942. Combined raids started in mid-1943.

What did German military production do during that time period? This chart (.pdf, page 32) shows production rising almost continuously from 1941 until it peaked in July 1944. Other sources show various production components also peaking in 1944, e.g. tanks. (This massive increase in production is typically credited to Albert Speer, who was appointed as Armaments Minister in early 1942, although the linked paper disputes that.)

In the meantime, on the Eastern Front, the Soviets won the Battle of Stalingrad in February, 1943, after which they relentlessly pushed the Germans back across Russia and Eastern Europe.

In fact, strategic bombing had a minimal impact on German production, and Germany's military reversals certainly weren't due to inadequate materiel.

A Yale professor named John H. Langbein wrote an interesting paper comparing our system of plea bargaining with the medieval European law of torture. It is a very interesting read.

Did anybody else smell something funky when reading the assertion that Cities are more environmentally friendly than the countryside? The first article linked seemed to talk only about lower emissions resulting from more efficient per capita household energy consumption and transportation costs. I wonder what would happen if we account for all the other goods the urbanite consumes, the emissions for their transportation, etc. After all Industry plays the bigger role in pollution. And that is not even to mention that pollution is not a one-dimensional variable, but a highly complex concept involved intense non-linearities. As we have seen above - again we see shit is more complicated than we gave it credit.

What really made me sick about the article (which you see everywhere these days) is the assertion that since the population will grow to the size of 9 billion people "we must accommodate this growth". Yay! Lets grow the human population until we reach the very boundary of the planet's capacity so that random fluctuations can result in major catastrophes and risk life on the planet for the whole human race!

Its not like I think country side dwellers are saints - I am sure they consume and pollute more than they did a few hundred years ago - its just I recon that the null hypothesis should be "low concentrations of human population are less polluting the high concentrations". Don't mistake this for an argument for everyone going to the countryside - I argue for limiting population growth. The ecosystems we live in are highly non-linear and this means we can be facing extreme fluctuations as the result of relatively small events. This is an argument for environmental conservatism - and the argument made well by Nassim Taleb in his new book is that when dealing with complex systems fraught with non-linearities which evolved over long time we should assume anything we do effects the system adversely, and the opposite assertion is the one that needs proving.

States? States have nothing to do with this. Believe it or not, states are not some all powerful entity bravely feuding with the federal government over peculiar institutions.

The US Sentencing Commission was intended to standardize federal prison sentences, so that persons who committed similar federal crimes ended serving similar sentences, regardless of which district judge or parole board they appeared before.

Stith, Kate and Koh, Steve Y., "The Politics of Sentencing Reform: The Legislative History of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines" (1993). Faculty Scholarship Series. Paper 1273.

it's fair in that it's consistent, but it's unfair in that it may not be wise. Like most Bureacracies, it's a triumph of mediocrity over the capriciousness of individual persons.

(Morrill Tariff caused the US Civil War)

No it didn't. Slavery and the fear that Abraham Lincoln would put an end to it caused the US Civil War. Don't believe me, believe the Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union which was passed by the South Carolina convention days after they voted to secede:

A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.

Semantic and Conceptual Development: An Ontological Perspective, 1979, Harvard University Press.

Frank C. Keil's web page

This paper has an excerpt of his earlier work: look for Figures 1 and 2, the predicability tree and ontological tree.

Glad to see more independent verification of Keil's work!8-))

If Samsung gave a shit about workers, they'd stop poisoning the workers at their own plants. http://e360.yale.edu/feature/toxics_in_the_clean_rooms_are_samsung_workers_at_risk/2414/

oh, I think you overestimate the "not a worry" of the desert: http://e360.yale.edu/feature/its_green_against_green_in_mojave_desert_solar_battle/2236/

e.g., "At the request of the Office of Cooperative Research, the Inventors shall execute assignments or other documents assigning to the University all their rights in the invention and any patent applications or resulting patents on the invention. " Quoted from this page.

The gravitational pull of the arctic ice (or lack of it) is on of the most influential factors:
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_secret_of_sea_level_rise_it_will_vary_greatly_by_region/2255/

Or read the Hamas Covenant, for example:

"The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that...This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement."

"The Zionist invasion is a vicious invasion. It does not refrain from resorting to all methods, using all evil and contemptible ways to achieve its end. It relies greatly in its infiltration and espionage operations on the secret organizations it gave rise to, such as the Freemasons, The Rotary and Lions clubs, and other sabotage groups. All these organizations, whether secret or open, work in the interest of Zionism and according to its instructions. They aim at undermining societies, destroying values, corrupting consciences, deteriorating character and annihilating Islam. It is behind the drug trade and alcoholism in all its kinds so as to facilitate its control and expansion."

"Woman in the home of the fighting family, whether she is a mother or a sister, plays the most important role in looking after the family, rearing the children and embuing them with moral values and thoughts derived from Islam. She has to teach them to perform the religious duties in preparation for the role of fighting awaiting them. That is why it is necessary to pay great attention to schools and the curriculum followed in educating Moslem girls, so that they would grow up to be good mothers, aware of their role in the battle of liberation.

She has to be of sufficient knowledge and understanding where the performance of housekeeping matters are concerned, because economy and avoidance of waste of the family budget, is one of the requirements for the ability to continue moving forward in the difficult conditions surrounding us. She should put before her eyes the fact that the money available to her is just like blood which should never flow except through the veins so that both children and grown-ups could continue to live."

"Art has regulations and measures by which it can be determined whether it is Islamic or pre-Islamic (Jahili) art...Man is a unique and wonderful creature, made out of a handful of clay and a breath from Allah. Islamic art addresses man on this basis, while pre-Islamic art addresses the body giving preference to the clay component in it."

I don't know anyone [who was a skeptic] who became a believer in global warming.

You mean like Richard Muller who quite famously denounced anthropogenic global warming only to come to the same conclusion by his own means? Yeah, that opinion piece by him opens with "Call me a converted skeptic."

Oh, I get it, after it turns out that his research didn't back up your "beliefs", he must never have been a skeptic to begin with, right? Or perhaps when you made that statement you meant that you just don't know Richard Muller personally?

Political word games have always been such a pain in the ass.

But you are right that while peer reviewed journals move one way, the population moves the other:

The most striking result is the increase in the proportion of Americans who express strong doubt or rejection of the reality of global warming through their free associations. In 2003, only 7% of Americans provided “naysayer” images (e.g., “hoax,” or “no such thing”) when asked what thought or image first came to mind when they heard the term “global warming.” By 2010, however, 23% of Americans provided “naysayer” images.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp

read that and get back to us about anti-semitism.

go ahead. just read the first page.

quoting from the hamas 'charter':

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp

This Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS), clarifies its picture, reveals its identity, outlines its stand, explains its aims, speaks about its hopes, and calls for its support, adoption and joining its ranks. Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts. It is a step that inevitably should be followed by other steps. The Movement is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished and Allah's victory is realised.

note, they did NOT say israelis. they said JEWS.

you want a godwin, I'll give you a godwin. modern day moslems are the modern day nazis.

its there in their own damned writing! they are not ashamed of this view in the least!

now, try to find us any official writings where the jewish state OR jews, in general, seek the global destruction of ANY group of people. ANY. (you won't find any since this is not a core principle of the jewish people.)

my, how different those two groups are, huh?

Best missile defense shield : peace treaty.

Unfortunately it contradicts article 13 of the Hamas covenant.

http://yalecollege.yale.edu/content/free-expression-peaceful-dissent-and-demonstrations