Must have been a tough decision to go with 'windows standard' font rendering by default. People must be so used to crappy blocky rendering that smooth stuff might scare them away from a new browser.
This browser drags my XP installation into the 21st century.
Quite the contrary.
This is the first time climate change has certainly contributed to the violent deaths of people incinerated in their own homes.
First world people too (not those third worlders we are used to watch die).
It's not just a matter of your emissions killing some rare frog somewhere, it's now people.
This realization would turn the environment vs people argument on it's head, but instead, knowing people, it will result in even more vehement denial.
So really its 'non greenies' that are 'human haters', or more accurately : 'people that don't give a shit about anyone but themselves' are 'people that don't give a shit about anyone but themselves'
My view on relational DBs is that architecturally they are a bad way to implement software.
I think they should be just used for tables with indexs, no stored procs or triggers anything else.
There should be code written in the language of your choice to control all the transactions and business logic etc.
Giving out database schemas as an interface and giving out database logins to client software is a disaster IMHO. Much richer, more explicit and typesafe interfaces can be provided by modern programming languages than are possible with DB scripting procedures.
The DB providers have a vested interest in developers using all their more complicated, DB specific features to avoid their product being a mere commodity.
But like any other API or technology on offer, it is just as much what you reject that makes good software as what you accept.
In summary I think the relational DB as a marketable technology may be dead, as to my way of thinking it is just an API that does indexs on tables larger than memory and knows all the searching tricks and disk access performance tricks necessary to scale to large data sizes.
I'd guess that lots of the peices would gain some kinetic energy from the collision, and they would move in random directions.
Probably not many pieces will be able to stay in orbit, which I understand requires fairly particular velocity and angle tangential to planet surface.
Your comment about clouds was interesting. I looked it up and the best I could find was a response to a comment on RealClimate :
Whether clouds are a positive or negative feedback depends on where they form (higher clouds have a net positive forcing), how 'thick' they are and how long they persist. You can make innumerable logical deductions about which way the cloud feedback 'should' go, but our current best observations and modelling have not been able to pin down even the sign of the net response. Some models therefore show small negative feedbacks, some show small positive feedbacks - though in neither case are the responses dominant over the more important feedbacks.
I must ask what made you focus on the Antarctic when the Artic lost 1 million square kilometers of ice two summers ago - or 1/4 of its summer minimum : Cryosphere Today
Also FYI the arctic is cooling meme has expired : Real climate
Your points about future nuclear technology I read with interest.
However I must note that you said it would still be dangerous stuff.
Its the dangerous stuff part that make the cost of managing the waste for the foreseeable future prohibitive, and a potential terrorist target.
Your numbers for solar thermal I'm guessing are for peak output from trough fields.
I actually work in the field of solar thermal, and did some quick calcs on the system I am working on at work, and I would say that it would be about 70MW per square mile continuous.
Anyway there are many square miles of arid land around that can be used, so the amount of land is not something I would focus on.
Your point taken about the silver bullet, however there are some bullets that are looking particularly non shiny, non aerodynamic, and likely to disable the firearm which are best discarded.
Political affilition - I must have gleaned from : "money than the democrats want to steal from the people of the US" - sorry I shouldn't assume so much.
You are wrong. Solar thermal can use shit land thats good for nothing, unlike bio fuels.
Have a look at the calcs, but to run the whole of Australia using solar thermal for all energy including transport and electricity needs only 40 x 40 km in central Australia, and thats without any improvements to technology thats been proven since the early '80s.
Sorry, you're also not educated in physics.
All the energy we make ends up as heat. Doubling the amount of heat we make will do nothing to increase the temp of earth because we could never become significant relative to the 1300 W/m2 the sun puts in.
To alter the temp of earth we would need to do something really clever like adding or removing infra red resonating gasses to the atmosphere ( like CO2), or change the reflectivity of large parts of the surface area of the earth (Like melting a million km2 of polar ice here and there).
Good theory though, honestly I dont want to break your addiction to facts, facts change the more you know. It's great that you are thinking about the problem.
Nothing is fully renewable that is suitable for realistically providing power for the typical modern life.
That statement is nothing but false. Why do people feel the need to perpetuate this rubbish ? And as usual it turns out they are conservatives / right wing / republicans.
Yes thats right, the educated world has rejected nuclear because of a well funded fear campaign orchestrated by all those large renewable energy corperations.
Analyse the cost of nuclear including decomisioning, insurance, waste management, monitoring and security costs for thousands of years. Figure out the net present value.
Nuclear is not feasable by any stretch of the imagination.
To make it feasable you need: A government that wants nuclear weapons, a goverment that is willing to accept insuarance, and waste costs for on behalf of thousands of future goverments and years of people.
Sounds like Mr right wing - "we dont like the government interfering" needs the government to make his nuclear dream come true.
I really don't understand why the right wingers arent jumping into the economic oportunities of the green revolution. Or maybe the smart ones are, and some others are happy to just live in fear and remember the good old cold war days.
Agreed. Even if we run out of a particular resource building wind tubines for example, in 20 years or so we can knock them down and recycle the material, and build more and better ones that use less of everything.
Why because engineering and science will improve and the energy source is reneweable.
Progress, continuous employment, economic growth and no costly lagacy are all properties of renewable energy.
Non renewables are technological, ecological, economic and societetological dead ends.
No, if the USA were to cut back 75%, the USA would find itself a technological super power, exporting green technology to China and India.
China and India are reducing the carbon intensity of their economic growth, and will be selling green tech to the USA if the USA doesn't turn its course quite rapidly.
iWork shouldn't need admin password to install. It's just a user level app.
Should be drag and drop install for non admin users.
Making every application need an "installer" is not a mac like experience, and reduces security by making users think typing in admin passwords is normal when installing user apps.
I do C++ with dvorak.
Being able to type better means variable names are more likely to be english, as you aren't abreviating as much.
You point out some examples of punctuation that is worse in dvorak.
I would say that -> is easier to type on dvorak.
. and , and " and (template arguments) better too - top row being easier to access than bottom row - less finger bending.
_ can be an important character too depending on how much you use it for names.
Punctuation aside, english typing is far more important, as keywords, library typenames, and often user typenames are english.
Dvorak Users:
I want the truth, and want to be 'right' in the long term.
We are rational and can follow a logical argument.
The short term cost of retraining is less than the long term gains of a better layout so we switch.
Learning, science and logic are my friends.
Qwerty Users:
I want to be 'right' now.
There are many of us and we don't like change.
We can construct arguments to support our position.
The ability of the human mind to construct irrational arguments to agree with what a person wants to believe never ceases to amaze me.
Forget global warming, evolution, and other science vs irrational mob arguments. This is the clearest case of irrational thinking amongst them.
Have a look at the keyboard in front of you.
There are three rows of letter keys.
It makes sense that this should be the 'home' row as it is the middle position up / down the keyboard.
Now have a look at the keys under your hands : 'ASDF JKL';
Does it make sense to put a J under your right hand index finger given it's infrequent use in english ?
Which keys are the hardest to reach ? T, Y, both relatively common in english, especially T (with left hand).
Put your hands on the desk. Tap your fingers on the desk sequentially inwards and outwards. Notice how much more coordinated you can make them rolling inwards ?
Now lets have a look at english:
Patterns of vowels and consonants following each other.
Consonents and vowels occur regularly grouped like th,ch,wh,oi,ei,ou,st.
Some letters are more popular than others.
Now lets put common two letter groups next to each other, consonants under one hand and vowels under another and attempt to put popular letters within easier reach.
This is pretty much the dvorak layout.
Type 'the' on qwerty. Type 'the' on dvorak.
Can you honestly think that qwerty could be better for typing english ?
Fridges, cool rooms etc are performing bulk thermodynamic work and need lots of electricity.
The controller, and network are performing logic operations that need not consume any significant power.
In practice a fridge might use a few hundred watts when on, a cool room could use kilowatts, and the logic to make them complement renewable energy supplies could be implemented on a device that uses only 1 W.
By monitoring cloud cover for photovoltaics and wind for wind turbines the fridges can predict energy supply fluctuations and pre cool them selves, and allow them selves to heat up slowly during times when electricity prices are higher.
With future high penetration of renewables, smart demand management and real time pricing is a far cheaper and more intelligent way to acheive grid security than installing batteries all over the place.
Ultimately the value of energy is a function of supply and demand, and devices able to operate in this market intelligently will reduce the need to design grids for as higher peak demand, and increase the maximum percentage of zero storage renewables allowable.
Technology like this shows the backwards thinking behind energy commenters who use the term base load power as a reason why we can't convert to renewables.
Some smart fridges and soon some plug in cars, and real time energy pricing, and the whole "base load" concept is gone.
So, As you see, ALL of humanity can only contributes x% of CO2, so Global Warming is FRAUD
1 - Your numbers are wrong, it is only CO2 from carbon outside the Biosphere that is the problem
2 - Unfortunately you have made a bad assumption here.
The only variable that we have control over is CO2 from fossil fuels. We have almost zero control on the water vapour.
There is a lot of greenhouse effect that we actually want, it is what stops us from freezing to death in the cold of space whenever the sun goes below the horizon.
The small changes are enough to significantly alter the climate that we and our fellow species have become accustomed to recently.
Your quote should read:
So, As you see, ALL of humanity can only contributes x% of CO2 but a lot of it comes from fossil fuels, so Global Warming is caused by enhancing the greenhouse effect
I have watched Linus talk about git on google tech talks, and am inspired to use it. Unfortunately I think I need a tool like TortoiseSVN for git because I am a git.
Yeah, waste of money just like mufflers, sewerage connections, and garbage collections.
You should see my place, piles of garbage, and sewage everywhere - the price people pay to get a good image.
I actually offset the emissions from my travel and car.
There is no way I would buy carbon offsets based on tree planting.
For tree planting to work you have to guarantee that the forest remains there for ever. Which is rediculous
It is much easier for carbon offset companies to fund the difference between grid and renewable energy, thus keeping coal in the ground, thus offseting the carbon around the same time as you generated it, and solving the problem at hand by pushing renewables the learning curve towards grid parity.
Science is not about the scientist, whether they are infallible, reputable or anything else.
Science is based on rational arguments and has equal value whether the work of a six year old, Al Gore, Jim Hansen, God, or anyone else.
I doubt that people are shocked at your ignorance, they are more likely shocked at your irrationality.
All of the science behind the IPCCs findings are there for you to read. So is volumes of litrature on evolution. You could contribute greatly to the worlds knowledge by finding errors or extra information that refutes either. Until then expressing baseless opinions ultimately sourced from irrational religious belief systems will not win you any arguments or respect on matters of science.
I've been hearing since elementary school telling me that by 2000 most of florida's coast would be under water.
That lack of predictive accuracy made me a skeptic.
I am not sure about this but the highest informed sea level rise I have seen is about 0.5 m by 2050.
Note that all of the modelled sea level rises do not include 'non linear' effects, simply because we don't know enough to predict them. So there are real possibilities that sea level rise will be much greater if effects like water lubricating glaciers underneath turn out to be significant.
However, that doesn't make them ready for prime time (ie making global policy decisions, shooting our energy infrastructure in the foot, etc.)
I disagree.
There are two possibilities for whether climate change is real or not. Real and Not Real.
The largest scientific effort undertaken by humanity to date says that Real inequivical, and is 90% certain to be caused by our carbon emissions.
Note that the IPCC only accepts as fact things that have unanimous support amoung thousands of member scientists.
There are two possibilities for how we might conduct ourselves in the coming years. We fix it or don't fix it.
The cost of fixing it is important but most studies show that it will be some small fraction of economic growth
So that gives us four possible outcomes
Fix it and its not real - not a disaster slowed economic growth, recoverable, skeptics say I told you so
Fix it and its real - not a disaster slowed economic growth, recoverable
Don't fix it and its not real Skeptics proven correct, unaffected economic growth, we fight over the remaining fossil fuels in an increasingly polluted world (by things other than CO2 because it has been proven not to effect climate), before moving to renewables anyway.
Don't fix it and its real Disaster mass extinction , political unrest, starvation.
The choice is easy, unless you are involved in coal or oil, or just have ideological hatred of the thought of rich people having to do anything that might benefit more than just themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems really quick, great UI improvements.
Must have been a tough decision to go with 'windows standard' font rendering by default. People must be so used to crappy blocky rendering that smooth stuff might scare them away from a new browser.
This browser drags my XP installation into the 21st century.
Alex
Quite the contrary.
This is the first time climate change has certainly contributed to the violent deaths of people incinerated in their own homes.
First world people too (not those third worlders we are used to watch die).
It's not just a matter of your emissions killing some rare frog somewhere, it's now people.
This realization would turn the environment vs people argument on it's head, but instead, knowing people, it will result in even more vehement denial.
So really its 'non greenies' that are 'human haters', or more accurately : 'people that don't give a shit about anyone but themselves' are 'people that don't give a shit about anyone but themselves'
GW was renamed climate change by US liberals because it sounded less threatening.
What you are saying is :
They said it would change.
It did change.
But it would have changed anyway.
So I don't believe them.
Can I suggest that the issue may be worthy of a more detailed study ?
Meshing will never be the same again.
This is really educational for kids (and adults) to learn about structures.
My view on relational DBs is that architecturally they are a bad way to implement software.
I think they should be just used for tables with indexs, no stored procs or triggers anything else.
There should be code written in the language of your choice to control all the transactions and business logic etc.
Giving out database schemas as an interface and giving out database logins to client software is a disaster IMHO.
Much richer, more explicit and typesafe interfaces can be provided by modern programming languages than are possible with DB scripting procedures.
The DB providers have a vested interest in developers using all their more complicated, DB specific features to avoid their product being a mere commodity.
But like any other API or technology on offer, it is just as much what you reject that makes good software as what you accept.
In summary I think the relational DB as a marketable technology may be dead, as to my way of thinking it is just an API that does indexs on tables larger than memory and knows all the searching tricks and disk access performance tricks necessary to scale to large data sizes.
I'd guess that lots of the peices would gain some kinetic energy from the collision, and they would move in random directions.
Probably not many pieces will be able to stay in orbit, which I understand requires fairly particular velocity and angle tangential to planet surface.
Your comment about clouds was interesting. I looked it up and the best I could find was a response to a comment on RealClimate : Whether clouds are a positive or negative feedback depends on where they form (higher clouds have a net positive forcing), how 'thick' they are and how long they persist. You can make innumerable logical deductions about which way the cloud feedback 'should' go, but our current best observations and modelling have not been able to pin down even the sign of the net response. Some models therefore show small negative feedbacks, some show small positive feedbacks - though in neither case are the responses dominant over the more important feedbacks.
I must ask what made you focus on the Antarctic when the Artic lost 1 million square kilometers of ice two summers ago - or 1/4 of its summer minimum : Cryosphere Today
Also FYI the arctic is cooling meme has expired : Real climate
FYI the 9 years of cooling : Real climate
Agreed - none of the lake, and island anecdotes are useful.
Your points about future nuclear technology I read with interest. However I must note that you said it would still be dangerous stuff. Its the dangerous stuff part that make the cost of managing the waste for the foreseeable future prohibitive, and a potential terrorist target.
Your numbers for solar thermal I'm guessing are for peak output from trough fields. I actually work in the field of solar thermal, and did some quick calcs on the system I am working on at work, and I would say that it would be about 70MW per square mile continuous.
Anyway there are many square miles of arid land around that can be used, so the amount of land is not something I would focus on.
Your point taken about the silver bullet, however there are some bullets that are looking particularly non shiny, non aerodynamic, and likely to disable the firearm which are best discarded.
Political affilition - I must have gleaned from : "money than the democrats want to steal from the people of the US" - sorry I shouldn't assume so much.
You are wrong. Solar thermal can use shit land thats good for nothing, unlike bio fuels.
Have a look at the calcs, but to run the whole of Australia using solar thermal for all energy including transport and electricity needs only 40 x 40 km in central Australia, and thats without any improvements to technology thats been proven since the early '80s.
Sorry, you're also not educated in physics.
All the energy we make ends up as heat. Doubling the amount of heat we make will do nothing to increase the temp of earth because we could never become significant relative to the 1300 W/m2 the sun puts in.
To alter the temp of earth we would need to do something really clever like adding or removing infra red resonating gasses to the atmosphere ( like CO2), or change the reflectivity of large parts of the surface area of the earth (Like melting a million km2 of polar ice here and there).
Good theory though, honestly I dont want to break your addiction to facts, facts change the more you know. It's great that you are thinking about the problem.
Nothing is fully renewable that is suitable for realistically providing power for the typical modern life.
That statement is nothing but false. Why do people feel the need to perpetuate this rubbish ? And as usual it turns out they are conservatives / right wing / republicans.
Yes thats right, the educated world has rejected nuclear because of a well funded fear campaign orchestrated by all those large renewable energy corperations.
Analyse the cost of nuclear including decomisioning, insurance, waste management, monitoring and security costs for thousands of years. Figure out the net present value.
Nuclear is not feasable by any stretch of the imagination.
To make it feasable you need: A government that wants nuclear weapons, a goverment that is willing to accept insuarance, and waste costs for on behalf of thousands of future goverments and years of people.
Sounds like Mr right wing - "we dont like the government interfering" needs the government to make his nuclear dream come true.
I really don't understand why the right wingers arent jumping into the economic oportunities of the green revolution. Or maybe the smart ones are, and some others are happy to just live in fear and remember the good old cold war days.
Agreed. Even if we run out of a particular resource building wind tubines for example, in 20 years or so we can knock them down and recycle the material, and build more and better ones that use less of everything.
Why because engineering and science will improve and the energy source is reneweable.
Progress, continuous employment, economic growth and no costly lagacy are all properties of renewable energy.
Non renewables are technological, ecological, economic and societetological dead ends.
No, if the USA were to cut back 75%, the USA would find itself a technological super power, exporting green technology to China and India.
China and India are reducing the carbon intensity of their economic growth, and will be selling green tech to the USA if the USA doesn't turn its course quite rapidly.
No measured quantity will ever be an integer. It may be a real value rounded to the nearest integer, but not an integer.
low integer millisecond response times makes no sense anyway.
Agreed. The oxyboron tag is one of the wittiest single word comments that I have ever seen.
iWork shouldn't need admin password to install.
It's just a user level app.
Should be drag and drop install for non admin users.
Making every application need an "installer" is not a mac like experience, and reduces security by making users think typing in admin passwords is normal when installing user apps.
I do C++ with dvorak.
Being able to type better means variable names are more likely to be english, as you aren't abreviating as much. You point out some examples of punctuation that is worse in dvorak.
I would say that -> is easier to type on dvorak.
. and , and " and (template arguments) better too - top row being easier to access than bottom row - less finger bending.
_ can be an important character too depending on how much you use it for names.
Punctuation aside, english typing is far more important, as keywords, library typenames, and often user typenames are english.
Dvorak Users: I want the truth, and want to be 'right' in the long term. We are rational and can follow a logical argument. The short term cost of retraining is less than the long term gains of a better layout so we switch.
Learning, science and logic are my friends.
Qwerty Users:
I want to be 'right' now.
There are many of us and we don't like change.
We can construct arguments to support our position.
The ability of the human mind to construct irrational arguments to agree with what a person wants to believe never ceases to amaze me.
Forget global warming, evolution, and other science vs irrational mob arguments. This is the clearest case of irrational thinking amongst them.
Have a look at the keyboard in front of you.
There are three rows of letter keys.
It makes sense that this should be the 'home' row as it is the middle position up / down the keyboard. Now have a look at the keys under your hands : 'ASDF JKL'; Does it make sense to put a J under your right hand index finger given it's infrequent use in english ?
Which keys are the hardest to reach ? T, Y, both relatively common in english, especially T (with left hand).
Put your hands on the desk. Tap your fingers on the desk sequentially inwards and outwards. Notice how much more coordinated you can make them rolling inwards ?
Now lets have a look at english:
Patterns of vowels and consonants following each other.
Consonents and vowels occur regularly grouped like th,ch,wh,oi,ei,ou,st.
Some letters are more popular than others.
Now lets put common two letter groups next to each other, consonants under one hand and vowels under another and attempt to put popular letters within easier reach.
This is pretty much the dvorak layout.
Type 'the' on qwerty. Type 'the' on dvorak.
Can you honestly think that qwerty could be better for typing english ?
Fridges, cool rooms etc are performing bulk thermodynamic work and need lots of electricity.
The controller, and network are performing logic operations that need not consume any significant power.
In practice a fridge might use a few hundred watts when on, a cool room could use kilowatts, and the logic to make them complement renewable energy supplies could be implemented on a device that uses only 1 W.
By monitoring cloud cover for photovoltaics and wind for wind turbines the fridges can predict energy supply fluctuations and pre cool them selves, and allow them selves to heat up slowly during times when electricity prices are higher.
With future high penetration of renewables, smart demand management and real time pricing is a far cheaper and more intelligent way to acheive grid security than installing batteries all over the place.
Ultimately the value of energy is a function of supply and demand, and devices able to operate in this market intelligently will reduce the need to design grids for as higher peak demand, and increase the maximum percentage of zero storage renewables allowable. Technology like this shows the backwards thinking behind energy commenters who use the term base load power as a reason why we can't convert to renewables.
Some smart fridges and soon some plug in cars, and real time energy pricing, and the whole "base load" concept is gone.
So, As you see, ALL of humanity can only contributes x% of CO2, so Global Warming is FRAUD
1 - Your numbers are wrong, it is only CO2 from carbon outside the Biosphere that is the problem :
2 - Unfortunately you have made a bad assumption here.
The only variable that we have control over is CO2 from fossil fuels. We have almost zero control on the water vapour. There is a lot of greenhouse effect that we actually want, it is what stops us from freezing to death in the cold of space whenever the sun goes below the horizon.
The small changes are enough to significantly alter the climate that we and our fellow species have become accustomed to recently. Your quote should read
So, As you see, ALL of humanity can only contributes x% of CO2 but a lot of it comes from fossil fuels, so Global Warming is caused by enhancing the greenhouse effect
I have watched Linus talk about git on google tech talks, and am inspired to use it.
Unfortunately I think I need a tool like TortoiseSVN for git because I am a git.
Yeah, waste of money just like mufflers, sewerage connections, and garbage collections.
You should see my place, piles of garbage, and sewage everywhere - the price people pay to get a good image.
I actually offset the emissions from my travel and car.
There is no way I would buy carbon offsets based on tree planting. For tree planting to work you have to guarantee that the forest remains there for ever. Which is rediculous
It is much easier for carbon offset companies to fund the difference between grid and renewable energy, thus keeping coal in the ground, thus offseting the carbon around the same time as you generated it, and solving the problem at hand by pushing renewables the learning curve towards grid parity.
Science is not about the scientist, whether they are infallible, reputable or anything else.
Science is based on rational arguments and has equal value whether the work of a six year old, Al Gore, Jim Hansen, God, or anyone else.
I doubt that people are shocked at your ignorance, they are more likely shocked at your irrationality.
All of the science behind the IPCCs findings are there for you to read. So is volumes of litrature on evolution. You could contribute greatly to the worlds knowledge by finding errors or extra information that refutes either. Until then expressing baseless opinions ultimately sourced from irrational religious belief systems will not win you any arguments or respect on matters of science.
I've been hearing since elementary school telling me that by 2000 most of florida's coast would be under water. That lack of predictive accuracy made me a skeptic.
I am not sure about this but the highest informed sea level rise I have seen is about 0.5 m by 2050.
Note that all of the modelled sea level rises do not include 'non linear' effects, simply because we don't know enough to predict them. So there are real possibilities that sea level rise will be much greater if effects like water lubricating glaciers underneath turn out to be significant.
However, that doesn't make them ready for prime time (ie making global policy decisions, shooting our energy infrastructure in the foot, etc.)
I disagree.
There are two possibilities for whether climate change is real or not. Real and Not Real. The largest scientific effort undertaken by humanity to date says that Real inequivical, and is 90% certain to be caused by our carbon emissions.
Note that the IPCC only accepts as fact things that have unanimous support amoung thousands of member scientists.
There are two possibilities for how we might conduct ourselves in the coming years. We fix it or don't fix it.
The cost of fixing it is important but most studies show that it will be some small fraction of economic growth
So that gives us four possible outcomes
Fix it and its not real - not a disaster slowed economic growth, recoverable, skeptics say I told you so
Fix it and its real - not a disaster slowed economic growth, recoverable
Don't fix it and its not real Skeptics proven correct, unaffected economic growth, we fight over the remaining fossil fuels in an increasingly polluted world (by things other than CO2 because it has been proven not to effect climate), before moving to renewables anyway.
Don't fix it and its real Disaster mass extinction , political unrest, starvation.
The choice is easy, unless you are involved in coal or oil, or just have ideological hatred of the thought of rich people having to do anything that might benefit more than just themselves.