The sun does play some role in Jupiter's weather, but not nearly as much as it does on Earth. Our atmosphere is almost exclusively driven by solar input, on Jupiter 2/3 of the energy in the atmosphere is coming from the interior of the planet. This means sun or no Jupiter would still have very active meteorology, the Sun just adds an extra layer of complication to an already complicated fluid dynamics problem.
Given the full article implies the chimp exhibited this behavior regularly, I would say it's a simpler assumption that he gathered the rocks with the intention of throwing them. Also, it was a relatively recent discovery than many primate (and a few other animal species) use tools in the wild. I suspect there are very large gaps in the observational records of primates such that a blanket assertion that this behavior has never been observered would be untenable.
In general I agree with you that the other possible effects are far scarier than the sea level rise. My point is framing the debate in terms of monetary cost is likely to get more people to listen to you than trying to convince your average person to worry about ecological damage they're unlikely to directly observe. Unfortonately, for many people responsible environmental practices aren't a concern until it is in their backyard.
It's because most of the world's population lives very near to the coast, and a great deal of developed coastal land is less than 2m above sea level. Moving that much infrastructure "three feet uphill" would cost a lot compared to the cost of addressing the problem in the first place. It also means places like Manhattan become much more prone to flooding and the effects of storm surges. One meter could be the difference between a strong winter storm being a nuisance versus flooding the subways. Sea level rise is most talked about because it's one of the most tangible effects and one whose economic costs are easiest to calculate. If you can frame global warming as an economic argument many more people who might otherwise say "so what?" start to listen. Convincing them to pony up now to avoid a catastrophic economic cost later is a different matter, given how short sighted some people seem to be. Unfortunately short term greed frequently wins over long term prudence, especially if you don't expect to be around to suffer the consequences of your actions.
A nitpick: Your second link is a graph of SO2 emissions, not CO2. You're not comparing the same things. However, if you look at the bottom of the page you linked to you may have discovered this which in fact supports the argument you were trying to make.
You are conflating short-term outliers with long-term trends. A cold couple years (or even a cold decade) relative to the previous peak of the late 90s to early 2000s doesn't mean the warming trend has stopped. It would take many years of observations to make any sort of declaration as to a trend relative to the last several decades of warming. Given a cooler period was predicted (caused by ocean/atmosphere cycles) I don't think it's safe to say the overall warming trend has stopped. Especially claiming right now that the warming is over because the last few years have been cooler than before is just statistical idiocy.
Why is that so hard to believe? We've already radically altered the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere on a global scale. From the book sitting on my desk: preindustrial CO2 concentration was 280 ppmv, concentration in 1990 was 353 ppmv. At the time this book was written in 1994 estimated accumulation was 1.8 ppmv/yr with trends suggesting that number would only increase. Current figures are 385 ppmv. We have increased the total concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere on a global scale by nearly 38% of pre-industrial levels, and it is the dominant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere in terms of total radiative forcing. I realize the concept that billions of creatures who are so tiny in comparison to the place they inhabit can have such a huge impact is mind-boggling to some, but the reality is the evidence suggests we are doing it.
Oh, and the textbook I was looking at is Global Physical Climatology by Dennis Hartmann.
As someone who works in the advanced tech industry (which sees a lot of government contracts), our salaries are generally a lot more than our equivalents at government funded labs. So, don't be so sure privatisation is necessarily cheaper.
Umm... wow. This is all just so wrong it makes my brain want to explode. We do know what causes coronal heating (hint: it has to do with magnetic fields, charged particles, and low densities, a very similar thing happens in earth's atmosphere). And we found the "missing" neutrinos (turns out they oscillate types).
There also seem to be a lot of engineering jobs in CA that fall into weird grey areas that let them work around the IT professionals rules. I was hired as a "researcher" by my company, but in reality I spend half or more than half of my time programming (to the point they started specifically giving me software design tasks). I think I would meet all of those exemption requirements now, but I certainly didn't start at $36/hr fresh out of school;)
You should make yourself clearer if you want to avoid troll mods;-) And as far as redefining laws, I think my points on the judicial system stand. With regards to the state laws it clearly fell within the jurisdiction of the courts given there was a legitimate conflict between laws.
If you are familiar with the saying "your right to swing your fists around ends where my nose begins", then "your right to 'a legal and financial contract between two people' ends when I have to subsidize it."
You should be very, very careful with that kind of logic, because it can be twisted in ways you never intend. I don't have children, why should my tax dollars subsidize you having any? What if I want to attach strings saying you can only have one? Similar logic also applied to interracial marriage (although I hate making that comparison). Also, the typical homosexual household of two men is less likely to have children (where most of "your" tax dollars go), and statistically have a higher household income (and thus pay more in taxes). So who really subsidises whom?
In essence, I think your logic fails on a premise of basic fairness. If you agree to offer benefits to all people you cannot categorically deny them to a small group of people simply because you don't like them, there needs to be a sound, rational reason. And if you're talking about the promotion of a family unit, what about gay/lesbian couples with children? In this case, no matter how much you disagree as to the makeup of their family unit, you are in essence denying them protections available to any other family. A deadbeat dad who skips child support and never married the mother has more rights to take care his children than one of the two partners in a homosexual relationship that has adopted children and raised them since birth. Then there's hospital visitations rights, legal protections on property if one partner passes away, etc. etc. etc. Clearly the current legislative climate isn't friendly to homosexual families, but they're going to happen anyway, so who's really promoting family values now?
The real legal issue, all social considerations aside, is that the state has agreed to provide various legal and financial benefits to any two individuals who are willing to enter into a contract of marriage with no obligation that they procreate. Some of said states also have equal protection and anti-discrimination laws that include sexual orientation as a protected status similar to race. This is where the conflict is, fullstop. You cannot simultaneously pass laws granting equal protection to a group of people while simultaneously denying access to recognized benefits that are available to anyone (including every other group with protected status) but one group of people. Hence, the recent Massachussetts and California court cases were NOT "activist judges" or whatever else you want to call it but squarely within the realm of a clear conflict of law.
Granted, sexual orientation is not currently protected in federal legislation (it is in various executive orders but that's a different ball of wax), so the case really relies much more strongly on the "spirit" of the law than a literal conflict.
I figured Slashdot would be discussing that one, but more likely, most of Slashdot agrees with the free software, and gun examples, but a few have wished to discuss homosexual marriage. I'm happy to oblige of course, but it is somewhat discouraging to see my effort to answer questions be rewarded as troll scores, perhaps like Patry, I should just delete all my posts and give up.
Some of us enjoy a polite debate on other issues, even if your viewpoint is totally maddening to me:-P I have some gay/lesbian coworkers/friends, some of them have families (with children), so to me the viewpoint you take on marriage is completely counter-intuitive and frustrating. I'd like to show you her and her partner and their two happy, well-adjusted, and bright children and have you tell me why you think they shouldn't be allowed all the same benefits as any other family just because they both get called "mommy". And I think the reason you get the troll mods is because for most of us on/. this debate
As I said before, I encourage people to change laws the 'proper' way (education, proposal, vote) and 'object' to discarding democracy in order to implement one's own agenda.
A few points here. One, the 'proper' way can be very difficult to achieve as a minority group with a long history of discrimination against it. While societies attitudes do eventually change as they accept the new realities, it is usually the 'improper' challenges to law that lead the way for later 'proper' change.
One role of the judiciary is the interpretation of the letter and spirit of the law, and the constitutionality of said laws. This serves three purposes: 1) in certain situations different areas come into conflict, 2) sometimes the law is unclear, and 3) a check on the 'tyranny of the majority'. In this instance, anti-discrimination laws and interpretations of constitutional protections of equality have come into direct conflict with law that define marriage in a way that is perceived as unequal to a minority group. I would say this is exactly the function of the judiciary and the 'proper' course of action given the circumstances.
Even though there has been a dramatic shift in cultural opinion there is still significant resistance towards changing the law (or repealing the plethora of newly enacted laws) through your 'proper' ways. Like it or not, judicial review is a longstanding tradition in our democracy, and chances are several laws you wouldn't like have been tossed out because of it. Simply because this is a hot-button social issue does not make it any less the function of the court to decide a legitimate conflict of law.
And my last point, marriage has rarely been about procreation. This has been the primary function of marriage in some societies at some points in history but certainly isn't the only (or even primary) role marriage has always fulfilled. It wasn't long ago in our own society women often had little choice over their husband. Marriage in Western society has a long history of being as much a political and financial tool as one to foster procreation. Several societies don't even have a concept of marriage as we recognize it, and some don't explicitly limit to man and woman. So, as a secular and multi-cultural nation, why should we allow a primarily religious notion to inject discrimination in what is functionally a legal and financial contract between two people?
A supervolcano is what happens when you have a hot spot underlying continental crust. The thickness of the overlying crust and the magmas that form as a result of the different geochemistry are what give you a supervolcano. When you have a hot spot underlying basaltic oceanic crusts you get Hawaii. This isn't to say they can't be partially underwater , they're just not going to occur in the deep ocean.
I'm running WRT54G v8 and so far I've never had to reboot it. I think my record uptime is about 6 months, and that's always been due to power outages. The only issue I've encountered with it is that it occasionally freaks out and randomly decides to boot every device and reassign IP addresses (my DHCP is set so IPs never expire). While that's annoying, it's only happened about 3 times in a year. All of my other issues have been related to the network cards I was trying to use and NOT the router. I had a POS Belkin USB wireless for my laptop after the original network card crapped out, but it has had issues with every router it's tried to talk to. And my netgear wireless card for my desktop should just go in the trash, it won't hold a connection with any wireless device for more than 10 minutes.
I personally find the whiteboard to be an extremely valuable tool for coding, but anything I write on it is barely even pseudo-code. I've seen far too much code written by guys who are excellent at programming but fail miserably at planning. Their code is always technically correct and does what it needs to do, but when it comes time to upgrade it because project requirements have changed it can be a real bitch because it wasn't thought out with maintainability in mind. Before I even fire up my editor of choice I have a complete program design worked out on the whiteboard showing all of my objects/classes and their methods and members and how everything fits together. The hard part of writing good code isn't the actual coding, it's the design. I learned that the hard way after trying to think at the keyboard too many times and ending up with code that bit me in the ass later. It also had the benefit of noticeably speeding up my development time and significantly reduced my debugging to largely finding typos. When you have a good design in hand the code practically writes itself, it's rare I have to spend a significant amount of time on specifically how to implement anything in a given language.
What I'd be interested in a whiteboard test is if a candidate can think through a simple design and lay out a plan of action that any reasonable coder should be able to implement, not specifically write down every step of the algorithm. For example, I recently wrote a library to handle NITF files. It's a non-trivial file format to implement (but certainly not the most difficult). I'd be interested in seeing if a candidate starts down a torturous procedural approach on the whiteboard or if they'd notice immediately that about 95% of the formatting nastiness can be handled by a single recursive object in a tree.
Slashdot Mirror
The sun does play some role in Jupiter's weather, but not nearly as much as it does on Earth. Our atmosphere is almost exclusively driven by solar input, on Jupiter 2/3 of the energy in the atmosphere is coming from the interior of the planet. This means sun or no Jupiter would still have very active meteorology, the Sun just adds an extra layer of complication to an already complicated fluid dynamics problem.
Given the full article implies the chimp exhibited this behavior regularly, I would say it's a simpler assumption that he gathered the rocks with the intention of throwing them. Also, it was a relatively recent discovery than many primate (and a few other animal species) use tools in the wild. I suspect there are very large gaps in the observational records of primates such that a blanket assertion that this behavior has never been observered would be untenable.
Don't forget the telephone sanitizers.
In general I agree with you that the other possible effects are far scarier than the sea level rise. My point is framing the debate in terms of monetary cost is likely to get more people to listen to you than trying to convince your average person to worry about ecological damage they're unlikely to directly observe. Unfortonately, for many people responsible environmental practices aren't a concern until it is in their backyard.
It's because most of the world's population lives very near to the coast, and a great deal of developed coastal land is less than 2m above sea level. Moving that much infrastructure "three feet uphill" would cost a lot compared to the cost of addressing the problem in the first place. It also means places like Manhattan become much more prone to flooding and the effects of storm surges. One meter could be the difference between a strong winter storm being a nuisance versus flooding the subways. Sea level rise is most talked about because it's one of the most tangible effects and one whose economic costs are easiest to calculate. If you can frame global warming as an economic argument many more people who might otherwise say "so what?" start to listen. Convincing them to pony up now to avoid a catastrophic economic cost later is a different matter, given how short sighted some people seem to be. Unfortunately short term greed frequently wins over long term prudence, especially if you don't expect to be around to suffer the consequences of your actions.
A nitpick: Your second link is a graph of SO2 emissions, not CO2. You're not comparing the same things. However, if you look at the bottom of the page you linked to you may have discovered this which in fact supports the argument you were trying to make.
You are conflating short-term outliers with long-term trends. A cold couple years (or even a cold decade) relative to the previous peak of the late 90s to early 2000s doesn't mean the warming trend has stopped. It would take many years of observations to make any sort of declaration as to a trend relative to the last several decades of warming. Given a cooler period was predicted (caused by ocean/atmosphere cycles) I don't think it's safe to say the overall warming trend has stopped. Especially claiming right now that the warming is over because the last few years have been cooler than before is just statistical idiocy.
Well, if sacred cows are the best hamburger, I'm guessing whatever you made with politicians would be highly toxic and inedible.
The Large Hairball Collider?
You've clearly never lived in the Midwest :-)
Why is that so hard to believe? We've already radically altered the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere on a global scale. From the book sitting on my desk: preindustrial CO2 concentration was 280 ppmv, concentration in 1990 was 353 ppmv. At the time this book was written in 1994 estimated accumulation was 1.8 ppmv/yr with trends suggesting that number would only increase. Current figures are 385 ppmv. We have increased the total concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere on a global scale by nearly 38% of pre-industrial levels, and it is the dominant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere in terms of total radiative forcing. I realize the concept that billions of creatures who are so tiny in comparison to the place they inhabit can have such a huge impact is mind-boggling to some, but the reality is the evidence suggests we are doing it.
Oh, and the textbook I was looking at is Global Physical Climatology by Dennis Hartmann.
As someone who works in the advanced tech industry (which sees a lot of government contracts), our salaries are generally a lot more than our equivalents at government funded labs. So, don't be so sure privatisation is necessarily cheaper.
Umm... wow. This is all just so wrong it makes my brain want to explode. We do know what causes coronal heating (hint: it has to do with magnetic fields, charged particles, and low densities, a very similar thing happens in earth's atmosphere). And we found the "missing" neutrinos (turns out they oscillate types).
I play this game every day I drive to and from work, it's called Commuting in Los Angeles.
There also seem to be a lot of engineering jobs in CA that fall into weird grey areas that let them work around the IT professionals rules. I was hired as a "researcher" by my company, but in reality I spend half or more than half of my time programming (to the point they started specifically giving me software design tasks). I think I would meet all of those exemption requirements now, but I certainly didn't start at $36/hr fresh out of school ;)
You should make yourself clearer if you want to avoid troll mods ;-) And as far as redefining laws, I think my points on the judicial system stand. With regards to the state laws it clearly fell within the jurisdiction of the courts given there was a legitimate conflict between laws.
You should be very, very careful with that kind of logic, because it can be twisted in ways you never intend. I don't have children, why should my tax dollars subsidize you having any? What if I want to attach strings saying you can only have one? Similar logic also applied to interracial marriage (although I hate making that comparison). Also, the typical homosexual household of two men is less likely to have children (where most of "your" tax dollars go), and statistically have a higher household income (and thus pay more in taxes). So who really subsidises whom?
In essence, I think your logic fails on a premise of basic fairness. If you agree to offer benefits to all people you cannot categorically deny them to a small group of people simply because you don't like them, there needs to be a sound, rational reason. And if you're talking about the promotion of a family unit, what about gay/lesbian couples with children? In this case, no matter how much you disagree as to the makeup of their family unit, you are in essence denying them protections available to any other family. A deadbeat dad who skips child support and never married the mother has more rights to take care his children than one of the two partners in a homosexual relationship that has adopted children and raised them since birth. Then there's hospital visitations rights, legal protections on property if one partner passes away, etc. etc. etc. Clearly the current legislative climate isn't friendly to homosexual families, but they're going to happen anyway, so who's really promoting family values now?
The real legal issue, all social considerations aside, is that the state has agreed to provide various legal and financial benefits to any two individuals who are willing to enter into a contract of marriage with no obligation that they procreate. Some of said states also have equal protection and anti-discrimination laws that include sexual orientation as a protected status similar to race. This is where the conflict is, fullstop. You cannot simultaneously pass laws granting equal protection to a group of people while simultaneously denying access to recognized benefits that are available to anyone (including every other group with protected status) but one group of people. Hence, the recent Massachussetts and California court cases were NOT "activist judges" or whatever else you want to call it but squarely within the realm of a clear conflict of law.
Granted, sexual orientation is not currently protected in federal legislation (it is in various executive orders but that's a different ball of wax), so the case really relies much more strongly on the "spirit" of the law than a literal conflict.
Some of us enjoy a polite debate on other issues, even if your viewpoint is totally maddening to me :-P I have some gay/lesbian coworkers/friends, some of them have families (with children), so to me the viewpoint you take on marriage is completely counter-intuitive and frustrating. I'd like to show you her and her partner and their two happy, well-adjusted, and bright children and have you tell me why you think they shouldn't be allowed all the same benefits as any other family just because they both get called "mommy". And I think the reason you get the troll mods is because for most of us on /. this debate
A few points here. One, the 'proper' way can be very difficult to achieve as a minority group with a long history of discrimination against it. While societies attitudes do eventually change as they accept the new realities, it is usually the 'improper' challenges to law that lead the way for later 'proper' change.
One role of the judiciary is the interpretation of the letter and spirit of the law, and the constitutionality of said laws. This serves three purposes: 1) in certain situations different areas come into conflict, 2) sometimes the law is unclear, and 3) a check on the 'tyranny of the majority'. In this instance, anti-discrimination laws and interpretations of constitutional protections of equality have come into direct conflict with law that define marriage in a way that is perceived as unequal to a minority group. I would say this is exactly the function of the judiciary and the 'proper' course of action given the circumstances.
Even though there has been a dramatic shift in cultural opinion there is still significant resistance towards changing the law (or repealing the plethora of newly enacted laws) through your 'proper' ways. Like it or not, judicial review is a longstanding tradition in our democracy, and chances are several laws you wouldn't like have been tossed out because of it. Simply because this is a hot-button social issue does not make it any less the function of the court to decide a legitimate conflict of law.
And my last point, marriage has rarely been about procreation. This has been the primary function of marriage in some societies at some points in history but certainly isn't the only (or even primary) role marriage has always fulfilled. It wasn't long ago in our own society women often had little choice over their husband. Marriage in Western society has a long history of being as much a political and financial tool as one to foster procreation. Several societies don't even have a concept of marriage as we recognize it, and some don't explicitly limit to man and woman. So, as a secular and multi-cultural nation, why should we allow a primarily religious notion to inject discrimination in what is functionally a legal and financial contract between two people?
A supervolcano is what happens when you have a hot spot underlying continental crust. The thickness of the overlying crust and the magmas that form as a result of the different geochemistry are what give you a supervolcano. When you have a hot spot underlying basaltic oceanic crusts you get Hawaii. This isn't to say they can't be partially underwater , they're just not going to occur in the deep ocean.
What do you have against Canada?
That would require there be something about the planned MMO in TFA.
But Netcraft confirms... ah hell, who cares anymore.
I'm running WRT54G v8 and so far I've never had to reboot it. I think my record uptime is about 6 months, and that's always been due to power outages. The only issue I've encountered with it is that it occasionally freaks out and randomly decides to boot every device and reassign IP addresses (my DHCP is set so IPs never expire). While that's annoying, it's only happened about 3 times in a year. All of my other issues have been related to the network cards I was trying to use and NOT the router. I had a POS Belkin USB wireless for my laptop after the original network card crapped out, but it has had issues with every router it's tried to talk to. And my netgear wireless card for my desktop should just go in the trash, it won't hold a connection with any wireless device for more than 10 minutes.
I personally find the whiteboard to be an extremely valuable tool for coding, but anything I write on it is barely even pseudo-code. I've seen far too much code written by guys who are excellent at programming but fail miserably at planning. Their code is always technically correct and does what it needs to do, but when it comes time to upgrade it because project requirements have changed it can be a real bitch because it wasn't thought out with maintainability in mind. Before I even fire up my editor of choice I have a complete program design worked out on the whiteboard showing all of my objects/classes and their methods and members and how everything fits together. The hard part of writing good code isn't the actual coding, it's the design. I learned that the hard way after trying to think at the keyboard too many times and ending up with code that bit me in the ass later. It also had the benefit of noticeably speeding up my development time and significantly reduced my debugging to largely finding typos. When you have a good design in hand the code practically writes itself, it's rare I have to spend a significant amount of time on specifically how to implement anything in a given language.
What I'd be interested in a whiteboard test is if a candidate can think through a simple design and lay out a plan of action that any reasonable coder should be able to implement, not specifically write down every step of the algorithm. For example, I recently wrote a library to handle NITF files. It's a non-trivial file format to implement (but certainly not the most difficult). I'd be interested in seeing if a candidate starts down a torturous procedural approach on the whiteboard or if they'd notice immediately that about 95% of the formatting nastiness can be handled by a single recursive object in a tree.
My sig seems strangely appropriate.