Right. That's what I was getting at. 'I think, therefore I am', is about the only provable true statement. Every other thing in the entire universe, even sheer logic, can be a lie, despite what Decartes tried to do. We might just think we grasp that 2+2=4. There might, for example, be no such thing as '2' in any sense, or 4, or addition. I mean, we can imagine the layout of a fictional house of TV, but it's not true, and doesn't even have to exactly fit if you were to put all the rooms together.
But there has to be something that thinks the incorrect fact is true. Even is conciousness is some sort of illusion, that just bumps it up a level, where where 'a computer' thinks it thinks wrong things are true. I must exist, even if everything I know about 'I' is wrong, because only things that exist can 'know' anything in any sense, correctly or incorrect.
Also, it requires that 'not-I' exist and contain all the things 'I' am not. (For example, the 'correct' version of things I am incorrect about.) Not-I, of course, could be just a confused part of I, and just generating all this on the fly.
It is possible that this logic is incorrect, but no one's ever been able to figure out how, because, if the 'logic' is 'incorrect', that, itself, implies the existence of two things, the correct logic (not-I) and the incorrect logic (I).
It actually is a very neat logical Catch-22, and the only philosophical, mathmatical, or scientific claim I've ever heard that is based solely on itself.
Well, traditionally, the solution was male-only armed forces, so unless they have some reptilian DNA in them, they couldn't reproduce. I don't recall any stories about a member of the military spontaneously changing gender, so that worked pretty well, barring the few women who managed to slip in. (Although I have no evidence that any of said women were already women when they joined.)
With the demand for women we now have joining, the only real solution is an entirely homosexual force. (Technically, we could just have one gender be homosexual, but that's a bit risky. If both are, the odds of two hetrosexual people of opposite genders who accidently slipped in is greatly reduced.)
Except in this case the problem is that the toads didn't do what they were supposed to do, so didn't solve anything, and that the toads, themselves, are not causing any 'harm'. They just killing things dumb enough to eat them, certain wildlife is endangered and sparse this is a real threat.
Having them die after a few generations might make sense, but not here, because by the time they did that, the other species would still already be gone.
Well, part of the plane analogy that didn't quite make it across was that we had limited (fossil) fuel in the first place, and we know when we took off, and still know, we need to switch airplanes to a solar-powered one or nuclear or whatever sometime in the next fifty years.
And then we discovered that the engine is on fire. Hey, why don't we stop now and switch to that other plane? Meanwhile, we can cut fuel to that engine and slow down a little.
But, you see, while passagers are grumbling about having to move all their luggage, and developing counties who have just gotten airplanes are pretty annoyed, the real resistence is coming from the airplane owners, who haven't even tried to develop any alternate airplanes despite the fact we've known we needed them for 50 years. Why? Because they might be less in control of them.
Okay, that analogy is getting pretty tortured, but that's where I was going with that.
I don't know how that makes anything I said 'Wrong'.
What I said is that we don't know it's being caused by human beings. It seems a logical assumption, but too many people have money invested and hence are fighting that conclusion.
However, it is happening, period, and it will screw us up unless we can figure out how to stop it, no matter what the cause is. We know the earth's temperature will go down if we reduce the CO2. Q.E.D.
That's all anyone should say about global warming. Anything else introduces the possiblity of debate.
See, that way it doesn't matter if it's the CO2 that's making it warmer, or some fictional sun temperature increase, or a natural climate change. Earth warming=Will kill us. Less CO2=Earth gets cooler.
Excpet that breaking off or sliding into the ocean is more than likely caused by, yes, melting. Sheets of ice that have been there for thousands of years don't just randomly decide to take a walk.
That's exactly what I've always thought. It's not unfair at all, the record company can't lose any more money on people than they lose now. However, that 100% probably needs to be 120% or something, because it actually is a somewhat risky business, they won't accept merely exactly recouping their losses.
But, anyway, the point is that at some cash point, above what they spent on it, it flips around and the record company get a pre-negotiated amount for each song and album sold. Not a percentage, a specific amount, decided when the album is cut. And the record company has no say in how much it's sold for. (Even if you start giving some copies away for free, you still have to pay, so it would be a good idea to put a buffer in the standard price.)
In addition, the artist now has to pay for packaging and shipping the stuff. But, and this is the important thing, they can actually choose another company to do that if they want. The original record company would still get payments for helping at the start and promotion and whatnot, but they can say 'Okay, now we want someone else to actually make the discs.'.
I.e, it is, in essense, exactly opposite how it's done now. Instead of paying the artists a royalty, pay the record company one for its original investment.
And I'd even put in a clause that the artist can, using some standard math, project how much the album would make over the next ten years or whatever, and just pay the record company off and own everything free and clear.
There are some weak spots to this plan, for example it might be a good idea to give the record company 100% of the money they put in it plus all money made the first two months or something, (i.e, don't start counting until the third month.) otherwise there is actually no point in promoting it...they'll make the money back regardless.
I don't know exactly needs to be done, but 'royalties' need to be flipped completely around, and, just as importantly, not related in any to 'costs' of the other party, which invites all sorts of padding and silliness.
He had to pay Michael Jackson for the music in 'I'm Fat', just like he had to pay Don McLean for the music to American Pie.
He didn't pay anyone for the lyrics of either. I'm Fat has obviously original lyrics, and while 'The Saga Begins' is obviously about Star Wars episode 1, merely summerizing the events in a copyright work have traditionally been allowed under fair use.
It is not, however, a parody, either of American Pie or Star Wars. It describes it in a silly way, but a parody has to be a 'spoof' of the original material, and just writing silly but unrelated lyrics to existing things isn't that.
Al doesn't do as many 'parody' songs as people think. The best example I can think of is 'Smells Like Nirvana', which completely skewers Smells Like Teen Spirit. And he makes many songs which are parodies of love songs in general, and you could call his polka versions of songs a sort of parody of the music. And 'Albuquerque' is a very absurdist parody of 'story' songs like 'Paradise by the Dashboard Lights', although many people don't get that and just think the entire song is stupid and pointless, which is of course the point.
But singing about Pentiums instead of Benjamins or a bus ride instead of a shootout or Yoda instead of Lola isn't a 'parody' of that song. An important point of parody is that it should clearly be mimicing in a funny way something, even if you don't know the original work and don't really understand the jokes. Merely describing something in a funny way isn't the same thing, and neither is merely reusing music or lyrics and attaching something related.
Weird Al is perfectly willing to sing songs not written by himself and pay for the lyrics, just like he pays for the music for his parodies.
In fact, there's at least three kinds of songs he does:
Takes other songs, and puts new lyrics to them. He pays for the music.
Takes other songs, and puts new music, usually polka, to them. He pays for the lyrics.
Write original songs with original music. A lot of these are 'love songs', or, at least, songs that sound like love songs if you don't actually listen to them. He obviously doesn't pay anyone for these.
That is, indeed, central to Cartesian thinking, but that isn't what 'I think, therefore I am' is. That statement is merely defining that something must exist named 'I'. (And, like I said, logically, a not-I must also.)
While Descartes said a lot of other stuff about truth independent of observed reality, I don't know why you're saying 'I think, therefore I am' includes that. The only thing that demonstrates is 'I am'.
And you're right in that Descartes would never say the rest of the universe is a lie, and I didn't mean to imply that was where he was going with that statement. However, just that statement alone allows for the rest of the universe to be anything because it makes no conclusions about it, just 'I'.
Or, if the ice is melting and calving faster in Antarctica, it may be because of increased deposition rates on the land itself, forcing the ice to churn back into the sea faster, but no net extra water?
Yes, that's what's happening now.
But there are models that not only predicted that would happen if the temperature rose, but that it will not continue to happen if the temperature keeps rising. Right now, we're evaporating from the sea only, so Antartica is getting bigger. Soon, we'll evaporate from Antartica, and at that point, we are fucked, because we don't know of any possibly way to reverse that...it's just going to keep getting hotter there.
And while models predicting changes in temperature are in dispute, the models predicting what will happen in Antartica if temperatures rise are not. It's not going to be straight-forward melting that's happening in the artic, but it is the problem, because the artic isn't going to change the sea level. (OTOH, melting the artic will completely screw up everyone's weather.)
And I don't know where all these crazy physics came from. Melting ice at either pole, whether it's cooling the ocean streams in the north or finally having snow in the southern 'desert' that is Antartica, can't counter anything. Nothing inside the thermodynamic system that is Earth can change how hot the planet is. The only way to cool it down is to remove heat into space, or stop heat from getting here from space.
And it's not really going to 'buffer' anything either. That's like talking about how it's safer to fall from higher up because it takes longer to hit the ground. In a sense, this is the buffer, right now.
If an organization made up of like-minded people or companies exists, and the people or companies behave in a certain way, it is not incorrect to call those group of people the organization name.
For example, people talk about how the NRA votes. The NRA does not, in fact, vote, nor does it actually tell people how to vote, but its members do vote.
People use the RIAA as a synomyn for 'the recording industry', because not only does it claim to represent the industry, but it actually has 'recording industry' as the first two words in its name. Actually, people use RIAA to mean 'The large trust that is the recording studios', which isn't exactly the 'industry', but whatever.
The question is, is this a recording industry problem, or is this merely a single recording label problem? You seem to think it's the latter, but given how much the recording industry abuses artists, I have a feeling it's happening on other labels, too. One label may come up with some new abusive idea, but months years later it's in every contract. It's a trust, different labels aren't going to start offering better deals or the whole thing falls apart.
As Al points out, this makes no sense at all. While it would be nice if he made more, he should at least make the same amount, becaue he does the same amount of work. It's the label that does slightly less work on downloaded music.
For your information, Gore was elected to the House in 1976, and, for further enlightenment, the House of Representatives is the other branch of, yes, Congress, where Gore said he was. Congress!=Senate. But it's fun to watch that little same factoid of misinformation about 1984 get repeated over and over, I guess you're all using the same talking points.
And, yes, ARPAnet already existed then, although I have to point out it didn't use TCP/IP until 1983, and that is the earliest traditional point that 'The Internet' started. Nothing before that can be called 'The Internet', and many people date it even later.
However, the ancestory between ARPAnet and 'The Internet' is almost entirely false. The actual links that the internet evolved from were made from NSFNET, which was made in 1986, linking five high speed computers operated by the NFS with high-speed T1 connections. It was hooked to ARPAnet via gateways, as were JANET and HEANET, but those were not 'ARPAnet'. ARPAnet was old and slow and essentially useless by the time it was shut down in 1990.
NFSNET continued to operate and everyone linked to it, until 1995 when the last link was sold off to private industry. And it became 'The Internet', along with some other networks it managed to pull along.
To put it another way: No organization still has IP numbers that were routed over ARPAnet. People do still have NFSNET-assigned ones that have been routed continually since 1987 or whenever, although obviously other organizations have been in charge over the years. This current internet is the NFSNET's child, not the ARPAnet. The ARPAnet was just a prototype. Yes, the technology was developed there, and yes Gore had nothing to do with it.
However, he had everything to do with funding NFSNET, which actually provided free fast servers and a fast enough connection made the whole thing useful, and let commercial organizations connect to it, which they couldn't do with ARPAnet.
In otherwords, he not only did what he said, he did exactly what he said. It's other people who have conflated 'The Internet' with TCP/IP or the web or ARPAnet that have it wrong. He didn't invent, or even fund, any of that. Before Al Gore, everyone had to use slow links and awkward multiple gateways that were mostly email and usenet. Then he funded 'the network of networks', and quite knowingly opened it up for everyone to use and hook to, and that thing became The Internet. He passed a law that created the network we would come to call 'The Internet'.
He actually excluded everything that holds CDs, so the only option is to convince him that one of those things isn't that bad.
However, the actual solution is: Use less CDs, and actually spend the minute it takes to put them back where they go.
Anyway, I store my CDs in three different places:
I have a 100 disc book for my original CDs and drive backups. I use this about twice a month, and the rest of the time it is safe on my shelf. I never take it out of the house. I'm actually considering getting a fire safe for it along with some other stuff, as soon as I can find one that actually will keep CDs from melting. Sounds silly, but it's probably 2000 dollars worth of stuff, total, and my backups.
When I get a CD, I make a backup. I keep all my backups, and movie rips, in other disc books. These go in and out all the time, but, hey, I can always make another backup.
I keep all my downloaded TV series and some large multi-CD backups that I don't use that often on different spindles.
OTOH, if you have, say, a bunch of TV shows ripped to DVD, that would be ideal for a spindle or two.
Of course, if you're storing a bunch of unrelated and hard to order CDs on a spindle, you could always just arbitrarily number them 1-50 or whatever, with the number written clearly in the same place on each CD, and then write down in your computer what each number is.
The ocean itself isn't showing any temp increase either.
You idiot, it's not supposed to. Ice is melting into it, so it's actually getting colder in places.
What is this, elementary school physics? Have you never noticed people putting ice into their drinks before, or did you just not grasp why they did that?
You cna't just randomly change the climate at this point in time. Yes, the earth will recover. Hell, so will humans.
However, probably 50% of us will die. Half of that slowly. Combined with the slow but unhaltable destruction of large coastal cities.
So you've got: Random redistibution of arable land. People starving to death. People without homes. Natural disasters like flooding and tornados and hurricanes happening...
Look, if anything deserves the term 'apocalypse', that does. It would be complete chaos and the destruction of human civilization.
This is a common assumption, but fails in one major regard: Human beings already live certain places.
That seems obvious, but if you randomly start changing the weather patterns, you get things like tornados and hurricanes where places can't handle them, you suddenly put ten times the rainfall somewhere and rivers can't handle it and people get flooded, you get coastlines going up ten feet and completely screwing up every coastal town that exists, which is like 30% of all large towns, you get all sorts of wildlife dying...
And you get nice, usable weather...where no one lives. Sure, people might move there...or they might not. Of course, you might get, for example, usable weather in a previous desert, but you sure as hell don't have usable soil. And you might have fine weather in the midwest, except that Canada gets huge amounts or rain and the Mississippi starts jumping all over the map for a decade or so, which completely screw shipping up in the entire US, not to mention destroying half a dozen cities.
If we could rewind time and make these changes happen ten thousand years ago, sure, humans would be fine. Doing it now, in the days where I eat food that is four days old that originated three hundred miles away...it would be a disaster. Huge portions of the population would starve. And we already have hundreds of people die during short heat waves, imagine how many would die during permanent ones.
Seriously, people. Emissions are bad, even discounting the CO2. Radon, mercury, lead, soot in general...
Fossil fuels are limited. Many people talk about what will happen when we 'run out' of oil, but that's not what's going to happen. Prices will just go up and up and up and up. You'll be able to buy oil in the year 3000...it will just cost a thousand times as much.
That, right there, is enough to try to curb what's going on.
And while global warming might not be entirely our fault, it would be pretty damn amazing if we weren't speeding it up, and couldn't slow it down by cutting back CO2.
I swear. We're in a plane that's has an engine fire, and we're arguing about how big it is and who's fault it is and what's going to happen. Hey, I've got an idea. Let's try to land the damn thing. Yes, we might crash anyway, or explode before we get there, and it might be no one's fault, or the fire might be out by the time we land, or...who cares? Just carefully set the damn plane down, we can't get where we were going in this plane anyway, we have to switch to another plane, and if we stay in this one, it might explode, so pardon me if I want to switch planes a little early. (Looking at oil prices, I have to question exactly how 'early' it is.)
Actually, what you meant is we can't prove the universe exists.
We can, philosophically, prove we exist, or at least I exist:
I think, therefore I am.
In other words, whatever is doing the thinking about this concept must exist in some sense. Everything else in the whole universe could be a lie, but there has to be something being lied to.
Actually, that proves there are at least two things in the universe. Me, and not-me. There has to be a part of the universe that is me thinking, and a part that isn't my conscious thoughts. (Of course, it could be my unconscious thoughts.)
Some laws are laws because they don't explain anything. They just say 'Here is the math'. There is the theory of relativity, but e=mc^2 is a law...it's true no matter what theory explains why it is.
What's really fun in quantum mechanics, where we have a lot of well-defined laws, and a lot of competing theories that all propose different meanings for the laws.
No, it's valid to say a theory is bogus if it isn't, in fact, provable or disprovable. Some things aren't bogus because they're 'wrong', they're bogus because they're not even a scientific theory.
And it's certainly permissable to point out obvious facts that seem to put the theory in dispute.
I mean, I can say 'My cat can fly, but it doesn't like to, as it is lazy. But if I hurl it from a fifty-story window, it will carefully float to the ground in defiance of gravity, exceeding no more than five miles an hour.' That is a valid scientific theory. The premise leads logically to the objective, testable conclusion.
It also violates several well-accepted laws of physics and biology, and even common sense, and has never happened in known history, and there doesn't seem to be any supporting evidence of it. You pointing that out before I do the cat-drop isn't 'bogus', and neither is refusing to use this theory until I have some evidence.
What people often fail to understand is that there is a 'reasonable test' in science. If what you propose seems reasonable and explains something, it will be accepted until disproved or other competing theories arise. If it doesn't seem reasonable, they will wait for it to be proved before using it. And anything which alters basic premises seems unreasonable be default.
Scientists don't like to admit this, but, really, they should. It would get rid of all sorts of cranks who stat yammering about 'conspiracy' when scientists ignore their perpetual motion machines.
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Right. That's what I was getting at. 'I think, therefore I am', is about the only provable true statement. Every other thing in the entire universe, even sheer logic, can be a lie, despite what Decartes tried to do. We might just think we grasp that 2+2=4. There might, for example, be no such thing as '2' in any sense, or 4, or addition. I mean, we can imagine the layout of a fictional house of TV, but it's not true, and doesn't even have to exactly fit if you were to put all the rooms together.
But there has to be something that thinks the incorrect fact is true. Even is conciousness is some sort of illusion, that just bumps it up a level, where where 'a computer' thinks it thinks wrong things are true. I must exist, even if everything I know about 'I' is wrong, because only things that exist can 'know' anything in any sense, correctly or incorrect.
Also, it requires that 'not-I' exist and contain all the things 'I' am not. (For example, the 'correct' version of things I am incorrect about.) Not-I, of course, could be just a confused part of I, and just generating all this on the fly.
It is possible that this logic is incorrect, but no one's ever been able to figure out how, because, if the 'logic' is 'incorrect', that, itself, implies the existence of two things, the correct logic (not-I) and the incorrect logic (I).
It actually is a very neat logical Catch-22, and the only philosophical, mathmatical, or scientific claim I've ever heard that is based solely on itself.
Well, traditionally, the solution was male-only armed forces, so unless they have some reptilian DNA in them, they couldn't reproduce. I don't recall any stories about a member of the military spontaneously changing gender, so that worked pretty well, barring the few women who managed to slip in. (Although I have no evidence that any of said women were already women when they joined.)
With the demand for women we now have joining, the only real solution is an entirely homosexual force. (Technically, we could just have one gender be homosexual, but that's a bit risky. If both are, the odds of two hetrosexual people of opposite genders who accidently slipped in is greatly reduced.)
Oranges can already blind you.
Assuming, of course, you were dumb enough to sit there while someone poured large amounts of citric acid in your eyes.
Having them die after a few generations might make sense, but not here, because by the time they did that, the other species would still already be gone.
Well, part of the plane analogy that didn't quite make it across was that we had limited (fossil) fuel in the first place, and we know when we took off, and still know, we need to switch airplanes to a solar-powered one or nuclear or whatever sometime in the next fifty years.
And then we discovered that the engine is on fire. Hey, why don't we stop now and switch to that other plane? Meanwhile, we can cut fuel to that engine and slow down a little.
But, you see, while passagers are grumbling about having to move all their luggage, and developing counties who have just gotten airplanes are pretty annoyed, the real resistence is coming from the airplane owners, who haven't even tried to develop any alternate airplanes despite the fact we've known we needed them for 50 years. Why? Because they might be less in control of them.
Okay, that analogy is getting pretty tortured, but that's where I was going with that.
I don't know how that makes anything I said 'Wrong'.
What I said is that we don't know it's being caused by human beings. It seems a logical assumption, but too many people have money invested and hence are fighting that conclusion.
However, it is happening, period, and it will screw us up unless we can figure out how to stop it, no matter what the cause is. We know the earth's temperature will go down if we reduce the CO2. Q.E.D.
That's all anyone should say about global warming. Anything else introduces the possiblity of debate.
See, that way it doesn't matter if it's the CO2 that's making it warmer, or some fictional sun temperature increase, or a natural climate change. Earth warming=Will kill us. Less CO2=Earth gets cooler.
Excpet that breaking off or sliding into the ocean is more than likely caused by, yes, melting. Sheets of ice that have been there for thousands of years don't just randomly decide to take a walk.
That's exactly what I've always thought. It's not unfair at all, the record company can't lose any more money on people than they lose now. However, that 100% probably needs to be 120% or something, because it actually is a somewhat risky business, they won't accept merely exactly recouping their losses.
But, anyway, the point is that at some cash point, above what they spent on it, it flips around and the record company get a pre-negotiated amount for each song and album sold. Not a percentage, a specific amount, decided when the album is cut. And the record company has no say in how much it's sold for. (Even if you start giving some copies away for free, you still have to pay, so it would be a good idea to put a buffer in the standard price.)
In addition, the artist now has to pay for packaging and shipping the stuff. But, and this is the important thing, they can actually choose another company to do that if they want. The original record company would still get payments for helping at the start and promotion and whatnot, but they can say 'Okay, now we want someone else to actually make the discs.'.
I.e, it is, in essense, exactly opposite how it's done now. Instead of paying the artists a royalty, pay the record company one for its original investment.
And I'd even put in a clause that the artist can, using some standard math, project how much the album would make over the next ten years or whatever, and just pay the record company off and own everything free and clear.
There are some weak spots to this plan, for example it might be a good idea to give the record company 100% of the money they put in it plus all money made the first two months or something, (i.e, don't start counting until the third month.) otherwise there is actually no point in promoting it...they'll make the money back regardless.
I don't know exactly needs to be done, but 'royalties' need to be flipped completely around, and, just as importantly, not related in any to 'costs' of the other party, which invites all sorts of padding and silliness.
He had to pay Michael Jackson for the music in 'I'm Fat', just like he had to pay Don McLean for the music to American Pie.
He didn't pay anyone for the lyrics of either. I'm Fat has obviously original lyrics, and while 'The Saga Begins' is obviously about Star Wars episode 1, merely summerizing the events in a copyright work have traditionally been allowed under fair use.
It is not, however, a parody, either of American Pie or Star Wars. It describes it in a silly way, but a parody has to be a 'spoof' of the original material, and just writing silly but unrelated lyrics to existing things isn't that.
Al doesn't do as many 'parody' songs as people think. The best example I can think of is 'Smells Like Nirvana', which completely skewers Smells Like Teen Spirit. And he makes many songs which are parodies of love songs in general, and you could call his polka versions of songs a sort of parody of the music. And 'Albuquerque' is a very absurdist parody of 'story' songs like 'Paradise by the Dashboard Lights', although many people don't get that and just think the entire song is stupid and pointless, which is of course the point.
But singing about Pentiums instead of Benjamins or a bus ride instead of a shootout or Yoda instead of Lola isn't a 'parody' of that song. An important point of parody is that it should clearly be mimicing in a funny way something, even if you don't know the original work and don't really understand the jokes. Merely describing something in a funny way isn't the same thing, and neither is merely reusing music or lyrics and attaching something related.
Weird Al is perfectly willing to sing songs not written by himself and pay for the lyrics, just like he pays for the music for his parodies.
In fact, there's at least three kinds of songs he does:
Takes other songs, and puts new lyrics to them. He pays for the music.
Takes other songs, and puts new music, usually polka, to them. He pays for the lyrics.
Write original songs with original music. A lot of these are 'love songs', or, at least, songs that sound like love songs if you don't actually listen to them. He obviously doesn't pay anyone for these.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or really stupid. ;)
That is, indeed, central to Cartesian thinking, but that isn't what 'I think, therefore I am' is. That statement is merely defining that something must exist named 'I'. (And, like I said, logically, a not-I must also.)
While Descartes said a lot of other stuff about truth independent of observed reality, I don't know why you're saying 'I think, therefore I am' includes that. The only thing that demonstrates is 'I am'.
And you're right in that Descartes would never say the rest of the universe is a lie, and I didn't mean to imply that was where he was going with that statement. However, just that statement alone allows for the rest of the universe to be anything because it makes no conclusions about it, just 'I'.
Or, if the ice is melting and calving faster in Antarctica, it may be because of increased deposition rates on the land itself, forcing the ice to churn back into the sea faster, but no net extra water?
Yes, that's what's happening now.
But there are models that not only predicted that would happen if the temperature rose, but that it will not continue to happen if the temperature keeps rising. Right now, we're evaporating from the sea only, so Antartica is getting bigger. Soon, we'll evaporate from Antartica, and at that point, we are fucked, because we don't know of any possibly way to reverse that...it's just going to keep getting hotter there.
And while models predicting changes in temperature are in dispute, the models predicting what will happen in Antartica if temperatures rise are not. It's not going to be straight-forward melting that's happening in the artic, but it is the problem, because the artic isn't going to change the sea level. (OTOH, melting the artic will completely screw up everyone's weather.)
And I don't know where all these crazy physics came from. Melting ice at either pole, whether it's cooling the ocean streams in the north or finally having snow in the southern 'desert' that is Antartica, can't counter anything. Nothing inside the thermodynamic system that is Earth can change how hot the planet is. The only way to cool it down is to remove heat into space, or stop heat from getting here from space.
And it's not really going to 'buffer' anything either. That's like talking about how it's safer to fall from higher up because it takes longer to hit the ground. In a sense, this is the buffer, right now.
But some stuff is just too much a hassle, and I'm not entirely sure why I should care enough to figure out how to merge a dozen CDs together.
For example, people talk about how the NRA votes. The NRA does not, in fact, vote, nor does it actually tell people how to vote, but its members do vote.
People use the RIAA as a synomyn for 'the recording industry', because not only does it claim to represent the industry, but it actually has 'recording industry' as the first two words in its name. Actually, people use RIAA to mean 'The large trust that is the recording studios', which isn't exactly the 'industry', but whatever.
The question is, is this a recording industry problem, or is this merely a single recording label problem? You seem to think it's the latter, but given how much the recording industry abuses artists, I have a feeling it's happening on other labels, too. One label may come up with some new abusive idea, but months years later it's in every contract. It's a trust, different labels aren't going to start offering better deals or the whole thing falls apart.
As Al points out, this makes no sense at all. While it would be nice if he made more, he should at least make the same amount, becaue he does the same amount of work. It's the label that does slightly less work on downloaded music.
For your information, Gore was elected to the House in 1976, and, for further enlightenment, the House of Representatives is the other branch of, yes, Congress, where Gore said he was. Congress!=Senate. But it's fun to watch that little same factoid of misinformation about 1984 get repeated over and over, I guess you're all using the same talking points.
And, yes, ARPAnet already existed then, although I have to point out it didn't use TCP/IP until 1983, and that is the earliest traditional point that 'The Internet' started. Nothing before that can be called 'The Internet', and many people date it even later.
However, the ancestory between ARPAnet and 'The Internet' is almost entirely false. The actual links that the internet evolved from were made from NSFNET, which was made in 1986, linking five high speed computers operated by the NFS with high-speed T1 connections. It was hooked to ARPAnet via gateways, as were JANET and HEANET, but those were not 'ARPAnet'. ARPAnet was old and slow and essentially useless by the time it was shut down in 1990.
NFSNET continued to operate and everyone linked to it, until 1995 when the last link was sold off to private industry. And it became 'The Internet', along with some other networks it managed to pull along.
To put it another way: No organization still has IP numbers that were routed over ARPAnet. People do still have NFSNET-assigned ones that have been routed continually since 1987 or whenever, although obviously other organizations have been in charge over the years. This current internet is the NFSNET's child, not the ARPAnet. The ARPAnet was just a prototype. Yes, the technology was developed there, and yes Gore had nothing to do with it.
However, he had everything to do with funding NFSNET, which actually provided free fast servers and a fast enough connection made the whole thing useful, and let commercial organizations connect to it, which they couldn't do with ARPAnet.
In otherwords, he not only did what he said, he did exactly what he said. It's other people who have conflated 'The Internet' with TCP/IP or the web or ARPAnet that have it wrong. He didn't invent, or even fund, any of that. Before Al Gore, everyone had to use slow links and awkward multiple gateways that were mostly email and usenet. Then he funded 'the network of networks', and quite knowingly opened it up for everyone to use and hook to, and that thing became The Internet. He passed a law that created the network we would come to call 'The Internet'.
He actually excluded everything that holds CDs, so the only option is to convince him that one of those things isn't that bad.
However, the actual solution is: Use less CDs, and actually spend the minute it takes to put them back where they go.
Anyway, I store my CDs in three different places:
I have a 100 disc book for my original CDs and drive backups. I use this about twice a month, and the rest of the time it is safe on my shelf. I never take it out of the house. I'm actually considering getting a fire safe for it along with some other stuff, as soon as I can find one that actually will keep CDs from melting. Sounds silly, but it's probably 2000 dollars worth of stuff, total, and my backups.
When I get a CD, I make a backup. I keep all my backups, and movie rips, in other disc books. These go in and out all the time, but, hey, I can always make another backup.
I keep all my downloaded TV series and some large multi-CD backups that I don't use that often on different spindles.
Of course, if you're storing a bunch of unrelated and hard to order CDs on a spindle, you could always just arbitrarily number them 1-50 or whatever, with the number written clearly in the same place on each CD, and then write down in your computer what each number is.
The ocean itself isn't showing any temp increase either.
You idiot, it's not supposed to. Ice is melting into it, so it's actually getting colder in places.
What is this, elementary school physics? Have you never noticed people putting ice into their drinks before, or did you just not grasp why they did that?
Thank God someone else understands.
You cna't just randomly change the climate at this point in time. Yes, the earth will recover. Hell, so will humans.
However, probably 50% of us will die. Half of that slowly. Combined with the slow but unhaltable destruction of large coastal cities.
So you've got: Random redistibution of arable land. People starving to death. People without homes. Natural disasters like flooding and tornados and hurricanes happening...
Look, if anything deserves the term 'apocalypse', that does. It would be complete chaos and the destruction of human civilization.
No.
This is a common assumption, but fails in one major regard: Human beings already live certain places.
That seems obvious, but if you randomly start changing the weather patterns, you get things like tornados and hurricanes where places can't handle them, you suddenly put ten times the rainfall somewhere and rivers can't handle it and people get flooded, you get coastlines going up ten feet and completely screwing up every coastal town that exists, which is like 30% of all large towns, you get all sorts of wildlife dying...
And you get nice, usable weather...where no one lives. Sure, people might move there...or they might not. Of course, you might get, for example, usable weather in a previous desert, but you sure as hell don't have usable soil. And you might have fine weather in the midwest, except that Canada gets huge amounts or rain and the Mississippi starts jumping all over the map for a decade or so, which completely screw shipping up in the entire US, not to mention destroying half a dozen cities.
If we could rewind time and make these changes happen ten thousand years ago, sure, humans would be fine. Doing it now, in the days where I eat food that is four days old that originated three hundred miles away...it would be a disaster. Huge portions of the population would starve. And we already have hundreds of people die during short heat waves, imagine how many would die during permanent ones.
Mod parent +1, Duh.
Seriously, people. Emissions are bad, even discounting the CO2. Radon, mercury, lead, soot in general...
Fossil fuels are limited. Many people talk about what will happen when we 'run out' of oil, but that's not what's going to happen. Prices will just go up and up and up and up. You'll be able to buy oil in the year 3000...it will just cost a thousand times as much.
That, right there, is enough to try to curb what's going on.
And while global warming might not be entirely our fault, it would be pretty damn amazing if we weren't speeding it up, and couldn't slow it down by cutting back CO2.
I swear. We're in a plane that's has an engine fire, and we're arguing about how big it is and who's fault it is and what's going to happen. Hey, I've got an idea. Let's try to land the damn thing. Yes, we might crash anyway, or explode before we get there, and it might be no one's fault, or the fire might be out by the time we land, or...who cares? Just carefully set the damn plane down, we can't get where we were going in this plane anyway, we have to switch to another plane, and if we stay in this one, it might explode, so pardon me if I want to switch planes a little early. (Looking at oil prices, I have to question exactly how 'early' it is.)
Actually, what you meant is we can't prove the universe exists.
We can, philosophically, prove we exist, or at least I exist:
I think, therefore I am.
In other words, whatever is doing the thinking about this concept must exist in some sense. Everything else in the whole universe could be a lie, but there has to be something being lied to.
Actually, that proves there are at least two things in the universe. Me, and not-me. There has to be a part of the universe that is me thinking, and a part that isn't my conscious thoughts. (Of course, it could be my unconscious thoughts.)
Some laws are laws because they don't explain anything. They just say 'Here is the math'. There is the theory of relativity, but e=mc^2 is a law...it's true no matter what theory explains why it is.
What's really fun in quantum mechanics, where we have a lot of well-defined laws, and a lot of competing theories that all propose different meanings for the laws.
No, it's valid to say a theory is bogus if it isn't, in fact, provable or disprovable. Some things aren't bogus because they're 'wrong', they're bogus because they're not even a scientific theory.
And it's certainly permissable to point out obvious facts that seem to put the theory in dispute.
I mean, I can say 'My cat can fly, but it doesn't like to, as it is lazy. But if I hurl it from a fifty-story window, it will carefully float to the ground in defiance of gravity, exceeding no more than five miles an hour.' That is a valid scientific theory. The premise leads logically to the objective, testable conclusion.
It also violates several well-accepted laws of physics and biology, and even common sense, and has never happened in known history, and there doesn't seem to be any supporting evidence of it. You pointing that out before I do the cat-drop isn't 'bogus', and neither is refusing to use this theory until I have some evidence.
What people often fail to understand is that there is a 'reasonable test' in science. If what you propose seems reasonable and explains something, it will be accepted until disproved or other competing theories arise. If it doesn't seem reasonable, they will wait for it to be proved before using it. And anything which alters basic premises seems unreasonable be default.
Scientists don't like to admit this, but, really, they should. It would get rid of all sorts of cranks who stat yammering about 'conspiracy' when scientists ignore their perpetual motion machines.