"Elemental carbon is not typically found in gaseous form in the atmosphere, however, CO2 is generally found in gaseous form in the atmosphere."
You missed the entire point.
If carbon and oxygen are joining to form CO2 (the actual pollutant we should be worried about, if those scientists are correct, which I question), THEN it is the CO2 that we should be concerned about. Why "carbon pollution" but not "oxygen pollution"? After all... oxygen is poisonous. Carbon is pretty benign. But in reality, neither one is the alleged "actual substance of concern" here.
Actually, this report says providing a pipeline for the oil, so that oil can be processed and used, won't increase CO2 because the oil is going to be utilized anyway, through other means, if not via the pipeline. (Meaning, stopping the pipeline doesn't stop the oil.)
Right. That should be what the debate is about, anyway. But OP and the NYT article linked to in OP do imply that it is carbon itself that we should worry about.
I believe some of what environmentalists are also concerned about is leaks and spills from the pipeline along the way. Though, given the number of incidents using train tank-cars, I can't imagine the pipeline being worst. I imagine, ultimately, it would be better than shipping by train/truck.
I agree, and I hope that is so. My main concerns here are: (A) is China going to open-air burn that oil with few environmental controls [which is part of the pollution debate, or should be], and (B) are the owners and operators of the pipeline going to be held responsible for ALL the costs, and ALL the problems, as they should be?
"Water is a pollutant in certain cases. It would pollute the atmosphere in high concentrations, at which point we should be concerned about its concentration; not its mere presence. The same goes for CO2, which, of course, you already know, as it has been explained to you over and over. Again: stop being a pedantic ass."
You again, eh?
Why do you so consistently move the goalposts, rather than debating the actual point I made in my original post?
Answer: (A) because it was correct, and (B) since it was correct, you had to find something else to argue about.
I answered GP in the context of his own post. I wasn't being "pedantic", I was making an observation about his own assertion. For which I have no reason to apologize, least of all to you.
"You understand that when people talk about "carbon pollution", they mean carbon dioxide, right?"
I would also like to point out that the New York Times article linked to by OP very definitely DOES imply, in at least several different places, that carbon per se is a pollutant we need to worry about today. Which is both stupid and wrong.
"Difference being that lots of oxygen in the atmosphere is typically okay, while lots of carbon isn't. You were just explained this in the post you're replying to, and you wonder why you get modded troll? Protip: you're a troll."
Do you know the slightest thing about what you are discussing?
"Carbon" is NOT put into the atmosphere in huge quantities, at least by the Western world. Particulates are strictly regulated.
It is CARBON DIOXIDE, not carbon, that is the alleged culprit here. Do you have these WHOOSH moments often?
But despite the FACT that it is CO2, that is accused by some scientists of being a big problem and carbon is not, this article referenced by OP still tries to imply that carbon, all by itself, is a major problem. But IT ISN'T. Period.
You are displaying exactly the misconception I was talking about in my first comment. Get it through your head: CARBON is not an atmospheric pollutant we need to worry much about in the Western world. Particulates are already strictly regulated. And in most of the rest of the environment (i.e., other than the air) it is simply not a significant problem at all.
"You understand that when people talk about "carbon pollution", they mean carbon dioxide, right? You clearly do, since you say as much at the end of your post. So why are you talking as if anyone is concerned about free carbon particles floating around? We all know we're talking about CO2."
Sure. For now. But will it stay that way? Probably not.
Understand something: regardless of whether climate scientists are correct about CO2-based warming, it isn't just about the science. It's also about control. The phrase "carbon pollution" is no accidental turn of phrase, and Al Gore doesn't "accidentally" own shares in companies that profit from "warming" scares.
Strictly regulating CO2 would give the government unprecedented control over the air. Control of "carbon", if the idea could be promoted enough, would give government control of virtually everything except maybe minerals and refined chemicals.
In the same way that saying "piracy" when you really mean "downloading", saying "carbon pollution" instead of CO2 does the control freaks' work for them.
These things don't happen by accident. That's not "conspiracy theory", it's just a fact. What something is called has a very strong effect on public perception.
"Yea, you'd choke to death long before you'd die of carbon poisoning."
It probably isn't enough to choke on but you'd likely develop lung disease before long.
"And pollution is context based. If it's causing a measurable externality from the quantity of the compound in the environment, then it is a pollutant."
Sure. But by that definition, water is a very major pollutant, too. We should probably be very concerned about its presence.
"Now, see how far it gets you when millions of people fleeing the coastlines drive your property prices down."
In order for that to happen, the seal level would have to rise significantly, and at a far higher rate than it actually has been rising over the last century.
Even if IPCC's worst-case projections were correct, you have about a century before it would be a meter above where it is now. Better start fleeing.
"Anything is a pollutant when large quantities are somewhere they shouldn't be."
That doesn't justify the recent "fad" of "carbon pollution".
I mean, your point is correct of course but scarcely relevant to this situation. The carbon in CO2 is no more a demon than the oxygen in CO2. And even if ALL the carbon in CO2 were free carbon particles in the air, it still wouldn't be very poisonous. (You might get black lung eventually, but that doesn't make it a "poison" in the conventional sense.)
But again: even in the case of CO2 (which is what people are really referring to -- so far -- when they say "carbon pollution"), carbon is truly no more of a "culprit" than oxygen is.
"The long-awaited environmental impact statement concludes that the Keystone XL pipeline would not substantially worsen carbon pollution..."
Pretty hard to "worsen" something that doesn't exist... Carbon is NOT a pollutant.
Funny, you don't hear anybody talking about "Oxygen Pollution", even though oxygen makes up more of CO2 than carbon does, and in fact in high concentrations oxygen is poisonous, but carbon is not.
The meaning of words are defined by their popular usage, while the correctness of astrology is determined by whether its predictions are correct to a statistifically significant degree, therefore your analogy is false.
The meaning of words is eventually determined by popular usage. But it doesn't vary as much as you seem to think.
It is quite possible -- even common -- for popular usage to be different from the technical meaning of a word.
Even though current popular slang may say otherwise, NoSQL means "No SQL". Non-relational and "key-value store" mean non-relational. They are NOT the same things.
Further, my last sentence was not intended as "an analogy". It was simply an observation that popularity does not indicate correctness.
A JVM is not a "version" of Java. Java is a language. JVM is the runtime interpreter that is tweaked for particular hardware.
So, just as I have stated several times now: There were only 3 official versions of Java. The implementation on various hardware (JVMs) could vary. But that's a different subject. There were still only 3 different versions of Java. Any incompatibilities (again, just as I stated before) were on the hardware implementation (JVM) end.
Of course not. This is just as stupid as asking if you could calculate somebody's phone number.
Not really. Although I didn't see much in the stats given that require much of anything from Wolfram Alpha. A spreadsheet would have done as well. Though maybe it was easier to do via Alpha.
More to the point: from OP
"Also, given how player and coaching rosters vary from year to year, the teams taking the field can change radically between meetings."
Comparing how the teams did when facing each other in past years isn't really going to give you a whole lot of useful information. Better to compare how they did against other teams, this year.
About the only thing that cannot be easily explained was the crushing fractures that some of the party displayed. Although the (again, rather mundane) theory of an avalanche could explain that too.
To the best of my knowledge, the story of radiation is not supported by any of the original records.
"...but neglected to note that it was actually the entire face missing, and that the cause for why it was missing was well-established: they found the woman face-down in a ravine on the edge of a stream that would have caused her face to essentially decompose... "
No, it wasn't the entire face. And while the Cracked author might have been wrong about that, the point remains that her situation wasn't "extraordinary" in any way.
"And the orange glowing spheres that Cracked claims were just people adding a spooky factor for the sake of doing so? Those spheres were actually reported by a wide-ranging group of people spread out over the region, and the reports came in repeatedly over the course of a couple of months. They were later confirmed to have been ICBM tests being conducted by the Soviets."
These aren't original records. You are quoting a Russian news story that was written 50 years later. (Well, okay... 49 years.)
Not all of the authors at Cracked are idiots, and many of their articles (but of course by no means all) are well-researched. Did you bother to check the references in the story? It's an old article so some of the links are broken.
But the Cracked author did not think this up. He was simply echoing what many others have been saying about the incident. Every "weirdness" that was actually documented at the time has a rather mundane explanation. There has been a lot of build-up of the story over the years that doesn't appear anywhere in the official record.
And, as I stated earlier: Occam's Razor suggests that the more mundane the explanation, the greater the likelihood of its truth.
"Because they trade away everything good computer science strives for in exchange for being easy to type and so that uneducated people can call themselves programmers without having to educate themselves."
That's not really an answer. It's as vague as the GP to whom I was replying. What "things"?
Using Ruby as an example (because it was already used here): please explain what "things" it trades away? I am not aware of any. Not counting raw performance. That is one of the mentioned "known issues" with dynamic languages.
But what else? I am interested to know what "things" these are.
"Here is the problem with a crappy ultra expensive solution from Oracle or Microsoft. It can't scale and prices go up on an expontential basis if you try to make it do so. Zdnet a few years ago put in a price tag for running youtube.com on Oracle's database instead of Google's NoSQL solution. The price tag was almost $8,000,000,000!!"
You don't have to use Oracle's paid version. Almost all you're getting for your money is tech support. (Well, maybe a BIT more, but not much.) MariaDB is plug-and-play compatible (plus some enhanced features) and is free and open-source.
"NoSQL does not mean no sql. It means not only sql. For quick webscale performance you need low latency in the milliseconds."
You mean "for quick, massive-scale performance". Lots of modern, large web businesses use MySQL or PostgreSQL and have no complaints.
And yes, "NoSQL" does mean "no SQL". It is not appropriate to say "SQL is not designed for this", because SQL has nothing to do with that. You were referring to the database engine. SQL is just a query language and has about zero to do with the database engine. But in general, by popular usage, when most people say "NoSQL" what they actually mean is "non-relational", like for example key-value data stores. But while most "NoSQL" databases are non-relational, using "NoSQL" to mean non-relational is just plain technically wrong. I admit it has been a popular thing to do, but so what? Astrology is popular too.
"It is nice when you have small data and an employer who already has a license but outside of this for a startup traditional relational databases can't cut it for big data on a shoe string budget."
Anybody who is trying to design for genuinely "big data" on a "shoestring budget" is an idiot. Amazon is big data. Ebay is big data. Joe's Surplus Warehouse is not big data. If the company becomes wildly successful, it might get to BE big data someday... but for the vast majority of startups, a relational database works just fine.
All this was part of my point: while non-relational databases might be all the rage, their actual justified use-cases are relatively rare. I can easily find you lots of articles by folks telling everybody how their decision to go with a non-relational database turned out to be a very bad decision. But then you can find them yourself easily enough.
Slashdot Mirror
"Elemental carbon is not typically found in gaseous form in the atmosphere, however, CO2 is generally found in gaseous form in the atmosphere."
You missed the entire point.
If carbon and oxygen are joining to form CO2 (the actual pollutant we should be worried about, if those scientists are correct, which I question), THEN it is the CO2 that we should be concerned about. Why "carbon pollution" but not "oxygen pollution"? After all... oxygen is poisonous. Carbon is pretty benign. But in reality, neither one is the alleged "actual substance of concern" here.
Typical Slashdot. An accurate and technically correct comment about sloppy reporting gets modded "troll".
Looks like I offended somebody's religion again.
Actually, this report says providing a pipeline for the oil, so that oil can be processed and used, won't increase CO2 because the oil is going to be utilized anyway, through other means, if not via the pipeline. (Meaning, stopping the pipeline doesn't stop the oil.)
Right. That should be what the debate is about, anyway. But OP and the NYT article linked to in OP do imply that it is carbon itself that we should worry about.
I believe some of what environmentalists are also concerned about is leaks and spills from the pipeline along the way. Though, given the number of incidents using train tank-cars, I can't imagine the pipeline being worst. I imagine, ultimately, it would be better than shipping by train/truck.
I agree, and I hope that is so. My main concerns here are: (A) is China going to open-air burn that oil with few environmental controls [which is part of the pollution debate, or should be], and (B) are the owners and operators of the pipeline going to be held responsible for ALL the costs, and ALL the problems, as they should be?
"Water is a pollutant in certain cases. It would pollute the atmosphere in high concentrations, at which point we should be concerned about its concentration; not its mere presence. The same goes for CO2, which, of course, you already know, as it has been explained to you over and over. Again: stop being a pedantic ass."
You again, eh?
Why do you so consistently move the goalposts, rather than debating the actual point I made in my original post?
Answer: (A) because it was correct, and (B) since it was correct, you had to find something else to argue about.
I answered GP in the context of his own post. I wasn't being "pedantic", I was making an observation about his own assertion. For which I have no reason to apologize, least of all to you.
WHOOSH
"You understand that when people talk about "carbon pollution", they mean carbon dioxide, right?"
I would also like to point out that the New York Times article linked to by OP very definitely DOES imply, in at least several different places, that carbon per se is a pollutant we need to worry about today. Which is both stupid and wrong.
"Difference being that lots of oxygen in the atmosphere is typically okay, while lots of carbon isn't. You were just explained this in the post you're replying to, and you wonder why you get modded troll? Protip: you're a troll."
Do you know the slightest thing about what you are discussing?
"Carbon" is NOT put into the atmosphere in huge quantities, at least by the Western world. Particulates are strictly regulated.
It is CARBON DIOXIDE, not carbon, that is the alleged culprit here. Do you have these WHOOSH moments often?
But despite the FACT that it is CO2, that is accused by some scientists of being a big problem and carbon is not, this article referenced by OP still tries to imply that carbon, all by itself, is a major problem. But IT ISN'T. Period.
You are displaying exactly the misconception I was talking about in my first comment. Get it through your head: CARBON is not an atmospheric pollutant we need to worry much about in the Western world. Particulates are already strictly regulated. And in most of the rest of the environment (i.e., other than the air) it is simply not a significant problem at all.
Your "argument" is idiotic pointless pedantry.
Shut the fuck up, you stupid cunt.
Hahaha. And THIS is supposed to be an example of adult, enlightened discussion?
Hahahahaha. That was great. I needed a good laugh today.
"You understand that when people talk about "carbon pollution", they mean carbon dioxide, right? You clearly do, since you say as much at the end of your post. So why are you talking as if anyone is concerned about free carbon particles floating around? We all know we're talking about CO2."
Sure. For now. But will it stay that way? Probably not.
Understand something: regardless of whether climate scientists are correct about CO2-based warming, it isn't just about the science. It's also about control. The phrase "carbon pollution" is no accidental turn of phrase, and Al Gore doesn't "accidentally" own shares in companies that profit from "warming" scares.
Strictly regulating CO2 would give the government unprecedented control over the air. Control of "carbon", if the idea could be promoted enough, would give government control of virtually everything except maybe minerals and refined chemicals.
In the same way that saying "piracy" when you really mean "downloading", saying "carbon pollution" instead of CO2 does the control freaks' work for them.
These things don't happen by accident. That's not "conspiracy theory", it's just a fact. What something is called has a very strong effect on public perception.
From an economic standpoint it's basically a pipe from Canada to China.
Seems like it. And from that perspective, my biggest concern is: who will pay for it?
Is it being built entirely with money from the special interests involved? (Should be yes.)
Will it have minimal environmental impact under normal conditions? (Should be yes.)
Will the owners be responsible if ANYTHING goes wrong? (Should be yes.)
Etc. If any of those answers are "no", then it should not be built. But don't trust Obama to decide bases on those criteria.
"Yea, you'd choke to death long before you'd die of carbon poisoning."
It probably isn't enough to choke on but you'd likely develop lung disease before long.
"And pollution is context based. If it's causing a measurable externality from the quantity of the compound in the environment, then it is a pollutant."
Sure. But by that definition, water is a very major pollutant, too. We should probably be very concerned about its presence.
"Now, see how far it gets you when millions of people fleeing the coastlines drive your property prices down."
In order for that to happen, the seal level would have to rise significantly, and at a far higher rate than it actually has been rising over the last century.
Even if IPCC's worst-case projections were correct, you have about a century before it would be a meter above where it is now. Better start fleeing.
"Anything is a pollutant when large quantities are somewhere they shouldn't be."
That doesn't justify the recent "fad" of "carbon pollution".
I mean, your point is correct of course but scarcely relevant to this situation. The carbon in CO2 is no more a demon than the oxygen in CO2. And even if ALL the carbon in CO2 were free carbon particles in the air, it still wouldn't be very poisonous. (You might get black lung eventually, but that doesn't make it a "poison" in the conventional sense.)
But again: even in the case of CO2 (which is what people are really referring to -- so far -- when they say "carbon pollution"), carbon is truly no more of a "culprit" than oxygen is.
Rather predictably, someone has already modded my post "troll"... although I honestly have no idea who or what I'm supposed to be trolling.
I guess maybe I offended somebody's religious beliefs.
"The long-awaited environmental impact statement concludes that the Keystone XL pipeline would not substantially worsen carbon pollution..."
Pretty hard to "worsen" something that doesn't exist... Carbon is NOT a pollutant.
Funny, you don't hear anybody talking about "Oxygen Pollution", even though oxygen makes up more of CO2 than carbon does, and in fact in high concentrations oxygen is poisonous, but carbon is not.
The meaning of words are defined by their popular usage, while the correctness of astrology is determined by whether its predictions are correct to a statistifically significant degree, therefore your analogy is false.
The meaning of words is eventually determined by popular usage. But it doesn't vary as much as you seem to think.
It is quite possible -- even common -- for popular usage to be different from the technical meaning of a word.
Even though current popular slang may say otherwise, NoSQL means "No SQL". Non-relational and "key-value store" mean non-relational. They are NOT the same things.
Further, my last sentence was not intended as "an analogy". It was simply an observation that popularity does not indicate correctness.
A JVM is not a "version" of Java. Java is a language. JVM is the runtime interpreter that is tweaked for particular hardware.
So, just as I have stated several times now: There were only 3 official versions of Java. The implementation on various hardware (JVMs) could vary. But that's a different subject. There were still only 3 different versions of Java. Any incompatibilities (again, just as I stated before) were on the hardware implementation (JVM) end.
Of course not. This is just as stupid as asking if you could calculate somebody's phone number.
Not really. Although I didn't see much in the stats given that require much of anything from Wolfram Alpha. A spreadsheet would have done as well. Though maybe it was easier to do via Alpha.
More to the point: from OP
"Also, given how player and coaching rosters vary from year to year, the teams taking the field can change radically between meetings."
Comparing how the teams did when facing each other in past years isn't really going to give you a whole lot of useful information. Better to compare how they did against other teams, this year.
#StupidShitPeopleThinkIsSmart #FAIL
Indeed. Classic case of treating the symptom rather than the cause.
Pardon me. I meant to add:
About the only thing that cannot be easily explained was the crushing fractures that some of the party displayed. Although the (again, rather mundane) theory of an avalanche could explain that too.
To the best of my knowledge, the story of radiation is not supported by any of the original records.
"...but neglected to note that it was actually the entire face missing, and that the cause for why it was missing was well-established: they found the woman face-down in a ravine on the edge of a stream that would have caused her face to essentially decompose... "
No, it wasn't the entire face. And while the Cracked author might have been wrong about that, the point remains that her situation wasn't "extraordinary" in any way.
"And the orange glowing spheres that Cracked claims were just people adding a spooky factor for the sake of doing so? Those spheres were actually reported by a wide-ranging group of people spread out over the region, and the reports came in repeatedly over the course of a couple of months. They were later confirmed to have been ICBM tests being conducted by the Soviets."
These aren't original records. You are quoting a Russian news story that was written 50 years later. (Well, okay... 49 years.)
"That is a bunch of bullshit. There were several JVMs and then all the bits that are different on each platform were different on each platform."
Although I knew better already, I took a quick glance at the history of Java on Wikipedia and Google anyway, and both show this to be quite wrong.
Not all of the authors at Cracked are idiots, and many of their articles (but of course by no means all) are well-researched. Did you bother to check the references in the story? It's an old article so some of the links are broken.
But the Cracked author did not think this up. He was simply echoing what many others have been saying about the incident. Every "weirdness" that was actually documented at the time has a rather mundane explanation. There has been a lot of build-up of the story over the years that doesn't appear anywhere in the official record.
And, as I stated earlier: Occam's Razor suggests that the more mundane the explanation, the greater the likelihood of its truth.
"Because they trade away everything good computer science strives for in exchange for being easy to type and so that uneducated people can call themselves programmers without having to educate themselves."
That's not really an answer. It's as vague as the GP to whom I was replying. What "things"?
Using Ruby as an example (because it was already used here): please explain what "things" it trades away? I am not aware of any. Not counting raw performance. That is one of the mentioned "known issues" with dynamic languages.
But what else? I am interested to know what "things" these are.
"Here is the problem with a crappy ultra expensive solution from Oracle or Microsoft. It can't scale and prices go up on an expontential basis if you try to make it do so. Zdnet a few years ago put in a price tag for running youtube.com on Oracle's database instead of Google's NoSQL solution. The price tag was almost $8,000,000,000!!"
You don't have to use Oracle's paid version. Almost all you're getting for your money is tech support. (Well, maybe a BIT more, but not much.) MariaDB is plug-and-play compatible (plus some enhanced features) and is free and open-source.
"NoSQL does not mean no sql. It means not only sql. For quick webscale performance you need low latency in the milliseconds."
You mean "for quick, massive-scale performance". Lots of modern, large web businesses use MySQL or PostgreSQL and have no complaints.
And yes, "NoSQL" does mean "no SQL". It is not appropriate to say "SQL is not designed for this", because SQL has nothing to do with that. You were referring to the database engine. SQL is just a query language and has about zero to do with the database engine. But in general, by popular usage, when most people say "NoSQL" what they actually mean is "non-relational", like for example key-value data stores. But while most "NoSQL" databases are non-relational, using "NoSQL" to mean non-relational is just plain technically wrong. I admit it has been a popular thing to do, but so what? Astrology is popular too.
"It is nice when you have small data and an employer who already has a license but outside of this for a startup traditional relational databases can't cut it for big data on a shoe string budget."
Anybody who is trying to design for genuinely "big data" on a "shoestring budget" is an idiot. Amazon is big data. Ebay is big data. Joe's Surplus Warehouse is not big data. If the company becomes wildly successful, it might get to BE big data someday... but for the vast majority of startups, a relational database works just fine.
All this was part of my point: while non-relational databases might be all the rage, their actual justified use-cases are relatively rare. I can easily find you lots of articles by folks telling everybody how their decision to go with a non-relational database turned out to be a very bad decision. But then you can find them yourself easily enough.
Fads are fads, and recognizing them when they come around is a learned skill. Nobody is perfect at it, but getting caught up in one can be costly.