Nitric oxide (NO) is fine, but nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is classified as an extremely hazardous substance, and kills tens of thousands annually in the UK alone. And that's in addition to the particulates formed, which kill millions globally.
Maybe read up a bit more before waving stuff off as fake news.
Sure sure. And one day I hope to see you cite studies that actually say what you claim (or at least that you read them more carefully first). Until then I'll keep pointing out the gap between your claims and the actual data.
As long as you don't admit that the models are wrong, you're opposed to science.
Oh the irony.
Sigh. Fine, we'll do this again. Yes, of course the models are not perfect - they do not (and cannot) predict every last short-term wiggle. To a "black and white" viewpoint then that means they're *always* wrong - even when they reliably nail the long-term trend for over thirty years. This of course does not mean they are not still very useful to climatologists that know how to use them (and as long as you don't admit that, you're opposed to science, yes?)
So with that out of the way, when the models don't match closely to what we observe, we want to know why, so that we can improve them. From your own first link (again):
..both internal variability and external forcing contribute to the ‘slowdown’. The externally forced contribution is due to the combined cooling effects of a succession of moderate early twenty-first century eruptions, a long and anomalously low solar minimum during the last solar cycle, increased atmospheric burdens of anthropogenic sulfate aerosols, and a decrease in stratospheric water vapour
As you point out, internal variability (ENSO etc) alone is very unlikely to account for the discrepancies, but your own citation says that internal variability and the short-term external forcings listed above are responsible for the so-called "pause" (in tropospheric warming specifically), and the models do not adequately account for these (again, no surprise to actual climatologists). Meanwhile, other (and more important) climate models are tracking nicely; for example, "ocean warming estimates over a range of times and depths agree well with results from the latest generation of climate models" (which is accelerating rapidly).
if you think the cause was volcanoes and solar activity, this paper talks to you. You'll have to find some other explanation.
So when your first link from 2017 explicitly calls out volcanoes and solar activity (among other things) as significant factors, you cite a paper from 2013 (four years out of date) to claim that it can't be those - despite that same paper explicitly not ruling out external forcings like those as being a factor. You really need to read your own citations more closely.
Seriously, do you look at this and say, "Oh yeah, that's right"? If so, what is wrong with you?
I look at that and say, "I see it's 5 years out of date, big surprise". Then I say "what is that graph even representing? There's no labels". Then I look at moreup-to-datedata. (NB I'm assuming from your example that you're fine with linking to images on blogs, but at least try to use something current and well-sourced?)
Nuclear is certainly a reasonable solution for some cases. It's expensive, has waste issues, and the risks of major failures are not non-zero (particularly if attacked), but it's still a good option where there aren't better options.
But you haven't explained what you've got against renewables. Not only are they inexpensive (and still getting cheaper), fast to build, low-risk, well-understood (we've been using solar and wind for a long time), minimally polluting, scalable up and down, and (as many studies have now shown) can absolutely be used to provide large amounts of grid-quality power when widely deployed with plenty of redundancy and a little storage (of which there are numerous proven grid-scale solutions already commercially available, from pumped hydro to reflow batteries and compressed air).
Which is why that paper attributes discrepancies to external forcings like volcanism and unusual solar minimums, rather than internal variability. Do we have to go through this all over again?
Do you have any further reading on that? I'm curious about comparative numbers.
In any case, we're fast approaching the point where the tradeoff won't be necessary anymore, so hopefully we can start saving some of the 2-3 million lives lost each year to PM2.5 effects.
As usual, you can't just assume it's that simple. PM2.5 particles can also be formed by chemical processes from precursor NOx emissions, adding to the levels from direct emissions.
In fact, according to this study, secondary formation of PM2.5 from NOx emissions can be surprisingly high:
Based on an analysis of the composition of the PM2.5 measured in the United States, the percentages of the PM2.5 formed by precursor NOx and VOC compounds is quite variable. The portion of PM2.5 comprised of all secondary components (sulfates, nitrates, ammonium, organic carbon) varies anywhere from 30% to 90% of all PM2.5.
You didn't even look at the link, did you? Nor was I "refuting" the paper - you seem to be projecting your own idea of motives rather than reading what I'm saying. The link merely offered updated comparisons between model projections from various dates, and current observations of actual temperatures, such as in this graph. If you believe that's in error, do please cite something.
If you have a link to a non-paywalled version of the paper then I'd be interested to see more detail, but the quote I showed above specifically describes the solar variations, volcanism etc as the externally-forced contribution, and clearly distinct from internal variability (maybe read it more closely). The models use long-term averages & expected values for these forcings, so e.g. an actual volcanic eruption (or no eruptions at all) will of course give different results - potentially far outside normal model parameters, if the eruption is a significant one.
Perhaps this is the source of your confusion over the paper? If you think otherwise, please cite what makes you believe that.
Of course the models are "deficient", in that there are a whole range of external forcings that they can only approximate, in addition to internal variability. They're never going to be perfect; there are always going to be discrepancies in parameters like human sulphate emissions or the deviation from average levels of volcanic activity in a given year. That's why they do multiple runs with a range of likely values, and update those runs as we find out more. The paper was written as a part of the effort to identify which particular external parameters are responsible for the observed discrepancies.
But that's a long way from "fully admitting them to be wrong", as you claimed. I'm sure you realise (even if the Daily Caller doesn't) that short-term imperfections do not make models useless, so I'm assuming you're misrepresenting this for a reason. Or perhaps you're just unaware that recent years' temperatures have now caught up to (and in some cases exceeded) the most likely business-as-usual projections from even 30 year old model runs - entirely validating the oft-made point that while climate models cannot predict all short-term variations, it usually averages out in the long run.
"Price made a whirlwind tour of primitive areas, examined the natives superficially, and jumped to simplistic conclusions. While extolling their health, he ignored their short life expectancy and high rates of infant mortality, endemic diseases, and malnutrition. While praising their diets for not producing cavities, he ignored the fact that malnourished people don't usually get many cavities."
I read the paper (at least the part that wasn't paywalled), which is how I know you deliberately left out fairly important qualifiers from your quote, like where it says the problems are "partly due to systematic deficiencies in some of the post-2000 external forcings". The other parts are due to internal variations like ENSO, as I said.
And maybe you missed the bit where it describes those external forcings (emphases mine):
..both internal variability and external forcing contribute to the ‘slowdown’. The externally-forced contribution is due to the combined cooling effects of a succession of moderate early twenty-first century eruptions, a long and anomalously low solar minimum during the last solar cycle, increased atmospheric burdens of anthropogenic sulfate aerosols, and a decrease in stratospheric water vapour.
So yeah, the models didn't incorporate correct forecasts on eruptions, anomalous solar minimums, and human emissions - perhaps because it's kind of difficult to predict those things, so the models are run with a selection of the most likely conditions. No surprise if unlikely conditions produce anomalous results, but that's why the model runs are updated with the new data.
The points I was trying to make is that the models don't even try to predict things like volcanoes or solar variations, but are run with our best estimates of those forcings, so you can't blame the models if those estimates are off. And also that external forcing anomalies can just as easily swing the other way, so they generally average out in the long term. Climatologists know this well, but deniers just love to shout "broken models!" at any variation regardless of cause.
Which is why the paper goes on to conclude that it wasn't just "internal variability" but also external forcings that contributed to the discrepancy.
So in addition to the ENSO cycle going through an extended period of transferring heat into the oceans, the paper highlights cooling from a number of volcanic eruptions, AND a long & anomalously low period of solar activity, AND higher than expected human sulphate emissions - which all combined to temporarily slow warming beyond the models' most-likely predictions. And we've already seen average temperatures shoot up recently as those external forcings reduce again.
But given that any of those anomalous short-term forcings could just as easily swing the other way in the future - resulting in average temperatures temporarily beyond the models' predictions - the long-term trend is not significantly affected.
The only "fault" in the models was that they did not (and could not) take ALL possible random forcings into account, but relied on any short-term anomalies to average out over time. Which surprised nobody that knows how such models work, but still seems to be a popular straw man for deniers to wave around.
Yes, you can re-lock the bootloader as easily as unlocking it, and have been able to since the Nexus S. Unlocking will of course always wipe user data, and on some devices re-locking may wipe it as well.
And if they both appear to make reasoned arguments that happen to reach different conclusions (as is often the case)?
If they're flawed, it should be a simple task to show their flaws.
Rarely is it so simple. Simple flaws in an engineering analysis would be obvious to competent engineers, so are usually spotted long before publication (and are unlikely to be made in the first place, if the engineers are competent). Any flaws that survive review by other engineers are unlikely to be easily spotted by a layman.
Otherwise you could... draw no conclusions
You can certainly draw conclusions, but they're not going to be anywhere near as reliable as the conclusions drawn by someone with more expertise. If two doctors advise different treatments, would you ask a plumber to judge which was best? Or would you ask a specialist doctor with more expertise?
I was asking for the reasoned opinions of those engineers.
Isn't that exactly what's set out in the original analysis?
If you'd like to hear more detail about that analysis, perhaps specifically concerning the points that Thunderf00t raises then sure, I'm right with you there, and would like to know more myself. Although what often happens then is that the debate gets quickly bogged down in arguments over numerous technical minutiae that are difficult to verify without the experience and training that generally defines expertise, and lay onlookers are left none the wiser.
I'm merely suggesting that when an expert gives a reasoned analysis and a non-expert says they're wrong, it's wisest to assume that it's not the expert who's made the mistakes.
OTA upgrades always verify the hashes of the files they're upgrading before anything starts. If you've managed to root your locked device without modifying system files then it will upgrade fine (but usually leave you without root afterwards). If you have modified system files then the upgrade will fail that check before it upgrades anything, and you'll have unroot it & restore the system to stock (or re-flash the stock OS image) to get OTAs again. This rollback protection won't affect that.
No, it's recognising expertise. If an engineer says it works and a biochemist says it doesn't, who are you going to believe, the one who has experience and training in that field, or the one who doesn't? Only someone who has relevant expertise can effectively judge the validity of an argument.
If the biochemist has actually hit upon a valid point, then you'd expect engineers to confirm that, but when he's directly contradicted by engineers then it's considerably more likely they have knowledge in their own field that he hasn't taken into account.
As is made clear further down, the rollback index does not prevent custom ROMs, old versions, or anything else from being installed IF the device's bootloader is unlocked - as has always been the case when installing custom ROMs.
All it does is prevent locked devices from being downgraded (to a presumably less-secure version that could be exploited). Locked devices are locked for security, so this is entirely expected behaviour. If you would rather take control and manage your own security, you can unlock the bootloader at any time (at least on Google's own devices; YMMV with other vendors). Then you can install anything you want.
“I wanted to know whether crime rates go up when immigrants come into the country—plain and simple.” He found that, contrary to the assumptions of many Americans, the answer was a clear “no” for violent crime.
Kind of you to cite evidence to bolster the GP's claim, but it does make your last sentence look particularly ironic now.
Indeed; creators of fundamentally important technologies are always of interest. As a similar example, if a new and promising encryption technique might get widely adopted, wouldn't you prefer to know exactly where it camefrom?
There's good reasons why it's easy to install Linux on 10yo PCs but Google can't update Android even on its own phones for more than a few years, and those are all down to device drivers. PCs have well-documented processors, standardised BIOS, common hardware interfaces, and nearly all the main hardware APIs are open and well-understood (notable exceptions include high-level 3D graphics acceleration chips). Anyone can write something that will boot and run on nearly any PC (or VM) in the last 25 years.
That's not what the phone world looks like. Even without carrier complications, smartphones are built on a limited range of proprietary SoCs whose hardware interfaces are jealously guarded by their manufacturers, who supply specific binary driver blobs for each model under strict NDAs to companies that buy enough. Any OS HAL has to be tailored to those driver blobs, usually by the phone's manufacturer when they build the hardware. New SoC (new drivers), or new OS, and this has to be done again. If the SoC vendor exits the market (like TI did), you're out of luck. It's a huge job for organisations like Cyanogen/Lineage to blindly juggle existing closed drivers with continuing lower-level OS changes, papering over the growing gaps (especially if the HAL source isn't available) for each different device, and results are not always ideal.
postmarketOS hasn't attempted to tackle most of these drivers yet, even for the few devices it boots on. FirefoxOS has the same issue, with support only for the few specific devices it was tailored to, and porting MeeGo, Maemo, Sailfish, Tizen, WebOS, Ubuntu Touch, or any Linux distro would have to be done in the dark for each and every different phone.
Google's new Android O release (due today) hopes to alleviate this somewhat with Project Treble, a standardised driver interface layer that SoC vendors can interface to, regardless of model or vendor or (hopefully) AOSP updates. There's still carrier- and manufacturer-specific changes to worry about, but in theory new releases of vanilla Android could be installed on Treble-compliant platforms with minimal effort, and maybe even older devices could have Treble layers written for them, ensuring continued support for years to come.
And yet we do have a base-10 numbering system, so designing our units and prefixes around that makes a lot of sense. As do units that don't require dozens of arcane constants to convert between them.
There are very good reasons why all scientists and nearly all countries switched to SI units long ago.
a) There's far more concern over Greenland's melting than Iceland or Alaska b) If the volcanoes pre-date the glaciers - then why is the ice melting now? That implies increasing heat. If much of that new heat is actually from increasing vulcanism rather than climate (I've seen no evidence about proportion) then that is itself a concern - is an eruption imminent?
I haven't personally verified relativity myself, but my GPS still works. Just like vaccination, it's been repeatedly tested and proved over decades by scientists and statisticians from countries all over the world, and peer-reviewed papers for each of these experiments are freely available to those who care to look.
I'd cite you some links, but that'd probably just strengthen your belief in the myth.
Slashdot Mirror
Nitric oxide (NO) is fine, but nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is classified as an extremely hazardous substance, and kills tens of thousands annually in the UK alone. And that's in addition to the particulates formed, which kill millions globally.
Maybe read up a bit more before waving stuff off as fake news.
Sure sure. And one day I hope to see you cite studies that actually say what you claim (or at least that you read them more carefully first). Until then I'll keep pointing out the gap between your claims and the actual data.
As long as you don't admit that the models are wrong, you're opposed to science.
Oh the irony.
Sigh. Fine, we'll do this again. Yes, of course the models are not perfect - they do not (and cannot) predict every last short-term wiggle. To a "black and white" viewpoint then that means they're *always* wrong - even when they reliably nail the long-term trend for over thirty years. This of course does not mean they are not still very useful to climatologists that know how to use them (and as long as you don't admit that, you're opposed to science, yes?)
So with that out of the way, when the models don't match closely to what we observe, we want to know why, so that we can improve them. From your own first link (again):
..both internal variability and external forcing contribute to the ‘slowdown’. The externally forced contribution is due to the combined cooling effects of a succession of moderate early twenty-first century eruptions, a long and anomalously low solar minimum during the last solar cycle, increased atmospheric burdens of anthropogenic sulfate aerosols, and a decrease in stratospheric water vapour
As you point out, internal variability (ENSO etc) alone is very unlikely to account for the discrepancies, but your own citation says that internal variability and the short-term external forcings listed above are responsible for the so-called "pause" (in tropospheric warming specifically), and the models do not adequately account for these (again, no surprise to actual climatologists). Meanwhile, other (and more important) climate models are tracking nicely; for example, "ocean warming estimates over a range of times and depths agree well with results from the latest generation of climate models" (which is accelerating rapidly).
if you think the cause was volcanoes and solar activity, this paper talks to you. You'll have to find some other explanation.
So when your first link from 2017 explicitly calls out volcanoes and solar activity (among other things) as significant factors, you cite a paper from 2013 (four years out of date) to claim that it can't be those - despite that same paper explicitly not ruling out external forcings like those as being a factor. You really need to read your own citations more closely.
Seriously, do you look at this and say, "Oh yeah, that's right"? If so, what is wrong with you?
I look at that and say, "I see it's 5 years out of date, big surprise". Then I say "what is that graph even representing? There's no labels". Then I look at more up-to-date data. (NB I'm assuming from your example that you're fine with linking to images on blogs, but at least try to use something current and well-sourced?)
Nuclear is certainly a reasonable solution for some cases. It's expensive, has waste issues, and the risks of major failures are not non-zero (particularly if attacked), but it's still a good option where there aren't better options.
But you haven't explained what you've got against renewables. Not only are they inexpensive (and still getting cheaper), fast to build, low-risk, well-understood (we've been using solar and wind for a long time), minimally polluting, scalable up and down, and (as many studies have now shown) can absolutely be used to provide large amounts of grid-quality power when widely deployed with plenty of redundancy and a little storage (of which there are numerous proven grid-scale solutions already commercially available, from pumped hydro to reflow batteries and compressed air).
Which is why that paper attributes discrepancies to external forcings like volcanism and unusual solar minimums, rather than internal variability. Do we have to go through this all over again?
Do you have any further reading on that? I'm curious about comparative numbers.
In any case, we're fast approaching the point where the tradeoff won't be necessary anymore, so hopefully we can start saving some of the 2-3 million lives lost each year to PM2.5 effects.
As usual, you can't just assume it's that simple. PM2.5 particles can also be formed by chemical processes from precursor NOx emissions, adding to the levels from direct emissions.
In fact, according to this study, secondary formation of PM2.5 from NOx emissions can be surprisingly high:
Based on an analysis of the composition of the PM2.5 measured in the United States, the percentages of the PM2.5 formed by precursor NOx and VOC compounds is quite variable. The portion of PM2.5 comprised of all secondary components (sulfates, nitrates, ammonium, organic carbon) varies anywhere from 30% to 90% of all PM2.5.
Except that only one of them has, y'know, real practicing climatologists citing peer-reviewed studies.
But it's no wonder you seem to be misinterpreting things if you won't even look at what's being said.
You didn't even look at the link, did you? Nor was I "refuting" the paper - you seem to be projecting your own idea of motives rather than reading what I'm saying. The link merely offered updated comparisons between model projections from various dates, and current observations of actual temperatures, such as in this graph. If you believe that's in error, do please cite something.
If you have a link to a non-paywalled version of the paper then I'd be interested to see more detail, but the quote I showed above specifically describes the solar variations, volcanism etc as the externally-forced contribution, and clearly distinct from internal variability (maybe read it more closely). The models use long-term averages & expected values for these forcings, so e.g. an actual volcanic eruption (or no eruptions at all) will of course give different results - potentially far outside normal model parameters, if the eruption is a significant one.
Perhaps this is the source of your confusion over the paper? If you think otherwise, please cite what makes you believe that.
Of course the models are "deficient", in that there are a whole range of external forcings that they can only approximate, in addition to internal variability. They're never going to be perfect; there are always going to be discrepancies in parameters like human sulphate emissions or the deviation from average levels of volcanic activity in a given year. That's why they do multiple runs with a range of likely values, and update those runs as we find out more. The paper was written as a part of the effort to identify which particular external parameters are responsible for the observed discrepancies.
But that's a long way from "fully admitting them to be wrong", as you claimed. I'm sure you realise (even if the Daily Caller doesn't) that short-term imperfections do not make models useless, so I'm assuming you're misrepresenting this for a reason. Or perhaps you're just unaware that recent years' temperatures have now caught up to (and in some cases exceeded) the most likely business-as-usual projections from even 30 year old model runs - entirely validating the oft-made point that while climate models cannot predict all short-term variations, it usually averages out in the long run.
From one of Price's more critical reviews:
"Price made a whirlwind tour of primitive areas, examined the natives superficially, and jumped to simplistic conclusions. While extolling their health, he ignored their short life expectancy and high rates of infant mortality, endemic diseases, and malnutrition. While praising their diets for not producing cavities, he ignored the fact that malnourished people don't usually get many cavities."
I read the paper (at least the part that wasn't paywalled), which is how I know you deliberately left out fairly important qualifiers from your quote, like where it says the problems are "partly due to systematic deficiencies in some of the post-2000 external forcings". The other parts are due to internal variations like ENSO, as I said.
And maybe you missed the bit where it describes those external forcings (emphases mine):
..both internal variability and external forcing contribute to the ‘slowdown’. The externally-forced contribution is due to the combined cooling effects of a succession of moderate early twenty-first century eruptions, a long and anomalously low solar minimum during the last solar cycle, increased atmospheric burdens of anthropogenic sulfate aerosols, and a decrease in stratospheric water vapour.
So yeah, the models didn't incorporate correct forecasts on eruptions, anomalous solar minimums, and human emissions - perhaps because it's kind of difficult to predict those things, so the models are run with a selection of the most likely conditions. No surprise if unlikely conditions produce anomalous results, but that's why the model runs are updated with the new data.
The points I was trying to make is that the models don't even try to predict things like volcanoes or solar variations, but are run with our best estimates of those forcings, so you can't blame the models if those estimates are off. And also that external forcing anomalies can just as easily swing the other way, so they generally average out in the long term. Climatologists know this well, but deniers just love to shout "broken models!" at any variation regardless of cause.
Which is why the paper goes on to conclude that it wasn't just "internal variability" but also external forcings that contributed to the discrepancy.
So in addition to the ENSO cycle going through an extended period of transferring heat into the oceans, the paper highlights cooling from a number of volcanic eruptions, AND a long & anomalously low period of solar activity, AND higher than expected human sulphate emissions - which all combined to temporarily slow warming beyond the models' most-likely predictions. And we've already seen average temperatures shoot up recently as those external forcings reduce again.
But given that any of those anomalous short-term forcings could just as easily swing the other way in the future - resulting in average temperatures temporarily beyond the models' predictions - the long-term trend is not significantly affected.
The only "fault" in the models was that they did not (and could not) take ALL possible random forcings into account, but relied on any short-term anomalies to average out over time. Which surprised nobody that knows how such models work, but still seems to be a popular straw man for deniers to wave around.
Yes, you can re-lock the bootloader as easily as unlocking it, and have been able to since the Nexus S. Unlocking will of course always wipe user data, and on some devices re-locking may wipe it as well.
The one who makes a reasoned argument.
And if they both appear to make reasoned arguments that happen to reach different conclusions (as is often the case)?
If they're flawed, it should be a simple task to show their flaws.
Rarely is it so simple. Simple flaws in an engineering analysis would be obvious to competent engineers, so are usually spotted long before publication (and are unlikely to be made in the first place, if the engineers are competent). Any flaws that survive review by other engineers are unlikely to be easily spotted by a layman.
Otherwise you could... draw no conclusions
You can certainly draw conclusions, but they're not going to be anywhere near as reliable as the conclusions drawn by someone with more expertise. If two doctors advise different treatments, would you ask a plumber to judge which was best? Or would you ask a specialist doctor with more expertise?
I was asking for the reasoned opinions of those engineers.
Isn't that exactly what's set out in the original analysis?
If you'd like to hear more detail about that analysis, perhaps specifically concerning the points that Thunderf00t raises then sure, I'm right with you there, and would like to know more myself. Although what often happens then is that the debate gets quickly bogged down in arguments over numerous technical minutiae that are difficult to verify without the experience and training that generally defines expertise, and lay onlookers are left none the wiser.
I'm merely suggesting that when an expert gives a reasoned analysis and a non-expert says they're wrong, it's wisest to assume that it's not the expert who's made the mistakes.
OTA upgrades always verify the hashes of the files they're upgrading before anything starts. If you've managed to root your locked device without modifying system files then it will upgrade fine (but usually leave you without root afterwards). If you have modified system files then the upgrade will fail that check before it upgrades anything, and you'll have unroot it & restore the system to stock (or re-flash the stock OS image) to get OTAs again. This rollback protection won't affect that.
At best, it's an appeal to authority.
No, it's recognising expertise. If an engineer says it works and a biochemist says it doesn't, who are you going to believe, the one who has experience and training in that field, or the one who doesn't? Only someone who has relevant expertise can effectively judge the validity of an argument.
If the biochemist has actually hit upon a valid point, then you'd expect engineers to confirm that, but when he's directly contradicted by engineers then it's considerably more likely they have knowledge in their own field that he hasn't taken into account.
As is made clear further down, the rollback index does not prevent custom ROMs, old versions, or anything else from being installed IF the device's bootloader is unlocked - as has always been the case when installing custom ROMs.
All it does is prevent locked devices from being downgraded (to a presumably less-secure version that could be exploited). Locked devices are locked for security, so this is entirely expected behaviour. If you would rather take control and manage your own security, you can unlock the bootloader at any time (at least on Google's own devices; YMMV with other vendors). Then you can install anything you want.
From your own link, very first paragraph:
“I wanted to know whether crime rates go up when immigrants come into the country—plain and simple.” He found that, contrary to the assumptions of many Americans, the answer was a clear “no” for violent crime.
Kind of you to cite evidence to bolster the GP's claim, but it does make your last sentence look particularly ironic now.
Indeed; creators of fundamentally important technologies are always of interest. As a similar example, if a new and promising encryption technique might get widely adopted, wouldn't you prefer to know exactly where it came from?
Settings -> Security & Location -> Find My Device, has separate toggles for "Remotely locate this device", and "Allow remote lock and erase".
There's good reasons why it's easy to install Linux on 10yo PCs but Google can't update Android even on its own phones for more than a few years, and those are all down to device drivers. PCs have well-documented processors, standardised BIOS, common hardware interfaces, and nearly all the main hardware APIs are open and well-understood (notable exceptions include high-level 3D graphics acceleration chips). Anyone can write something that will boot and run on nearly any PC (or VM) in the last 25 years.
That's not what the phone world looks like. Even without carrier complications, smartphones are built on a limited range of proprietary SoCs whose hardware interfaces are jealously guarded by their manufacturers, who supply specific binary driver blobs for each model under strict NDAs to companies that buy enough. Any OS HAL has to be tailored to those driver blobs, usually by the phone's manufacturer when they build the hardware. New SoC (new drivers), or new OS, and this has to be done again. If the SoC vendor exits the market (like TI did), you're out of luck. It's a huge job for organisations like Cyanogen/Lineage to blindly juggle existing closed drivers with continuing lower-level OS changes, papering over the growing gaps (especially if the HAL source isn't available) for each different device, and results are not always ideal.
postmarketOS hasn't attempted to tackle most of these drivers yet, even for the few devices it boots on. FirefoxOS has the same issue, with support only for the few specific devices it was tailored to, and porting MeeGo, Maemo, Sailfish, Tizen, WebOS, Ubuntu Touch, or any Linux distro would have to be done in the dark for each and every different phone.
Google's new Android O release (due today) hopes to alleviate this somewhat with Project Treble, a standardised driver interface layer that SoC vendors can interface to, regardless of model or vendor or (hopefully) AOSP updates. There's still carrier- and manufacturer-specific changes to worry about, but in theory new releases of vanilla Android could be installed on Treble-compliant platforms with minimal effort, and maybe even older devices could have Treble layers written for them, ensuring continued support for years to come.
And yet we do have a base-10 numbering system, so designing our units and prefixes around that makes a lot of sense. As do units that don't require dozens of arcane constants to convert between them.
There are very good reasons why all scientists and nearly all countries switched to SI units long ago.
a) There's far more concern over Greenland's melting than Iceland or Alaska
b) If the volcanoes pre-date the glaciers - then why is the ice melting now? That implies increasing heat. If much of that new heat is actually from increasing vulcanism rather than climate (I've seen no evidence about proportion) then that is itself a concern - is an eruption imminent?
I haven't personally verified relativity myself, but my GPS still works. Just like vaccination, it's been repeatedly tested and proved over decades by scientists and statisticians from countries all over the world, and peer-reviewed papers for each of these experiments are freely available to those who care to look.
I'd cite you some links, but that'd probably just strengthen your belief in the myth.