If they aren't, then rising CO2 probably isn't helping and should still be reversed, and we might also look into other solutions for it.
As a scientists, it saddens me to see you make such a statement. IF C02 increases do not cause warming, then we should look to *increase* them. Why? It has been shown through hundreds of studies that plants perform better, produce more biomass, use less water when CO2 levels are increased. It has likewise been shown (again through actual physical experimentation) that decreasing CO2 levels leads to loss of plant life. Most any greenhouse grower can tell you of the difficulties in keeping enough CO2 present. Indeed, it has been experimentally (and theoretically) shown that increase CO2 concentration can turn marginal land into productive land. it is indisputable that increased CO2 concentration in our atmosphere means more plant life, which by the way means more life in general. It has been shown that more plants == more food == more animals.
So, we have the two:
More CO2 == good for plants
More CO2 == higher temperatures (which to an extent is good for plants)
If we consider for sake of discussion that B is a negative toward A, and B is determined to not be so, then we should further A.
The fact is we have more vegetation now than we did a few decades ago. This is an undeniably good thing. More vegetation increases biodiversity. Biodiversity has been tied directly (in a causative sense) to the health of an ecology. The more diverse it ecology of an area is, the healthier and more resilient it is. Furthermore it can be shown that increased CO2 availability leads to increased life.
1) Life as we know it is based on Carbon 2) CO2 contains carbon 3) Carbon sequestered miles or even hundreds of feet below ground is not available to be made into life 4) Releasing carbon from it's sequestered locations below ground makes it more available to be turned into biological matter (life).
Therefore, provided there are no harmful effects from CO2 increase that outweigh the positive effects, we should increase the CO2 level of our atmosphere. Given the size of our atmosphere and the process of life cycling carbon from CO2, if increased CO2 does NOT increase temperatures to a point where life is suffering a NET negative impact, we should seek to increase CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
So if CO2 level increases do not have a net and biologically significant increase in temperatures (as in other effects such as increased plant growth 'sequestering', and other climatological effects counter the effect of CO2), and there are no other net negative effects we should strive to increase CO2 production.
Now, before some of you go apoplectic (or more accurately continue to go apoplectic) at that comment, note that is not saying we should burn more oil. It means we should not be worrying about CO2 as a "pollutant", and turn our attention to things that are shown to be directly negative such as the various *zenes (such as benzene), or uranium (coal plant emissions). These items we have shown via experimentation to have detrimental effects on life. The burning of oil, among other sources, produces these. I still advocate a move from gasoline, just as I always have. GW has had no positive impact on this advocacy, and increasing or maintaining high CO2 production also bears no impact on it. One can advocate CO2 indifference while still advocating burning less and less gasoline.
WTF? The only logical conclusion from the (somewhat justified) claim that scientists show favor towards their funders' biases is that global climate change is more of a threat than the current scientific consensus (at least among American scientists) portrays.
Actually there are many logically correct possible answers. Among them is the fact that the current administration is not the ones who actually control the funding process.
Most of the government research finds outside of military R&D is not controlled or directly influenced by the government. Bush doesn't sign the checks.
Your assertion that your conclusion is the only logical one is illogical.
Put aside the whole "consensus" crap for a moment and think about this. Assume for sake of discussion the following:
1) Earth is warming 2) Mankind has had zero impact on it
If you wish to make an impact, you have a large hurdle in that you've not been able to make any despite believing you have. If the warming is entirely natural, then all the changes you thought we had made to the climate did not happen and all of your science, models, theories about how to stop it are completely incorrect (as if they are now) and useful only as a list of "well this didn't make a difference". Useful, yes but not in the frame of making things different. You'd have a roughly equal chance of making it worse if you could impact it at all.
Furthermore, if it is entirely natural, or that man's impact is statistically and demonstrably zero in effect, then where we should focus our efforts in coping with the natural cycle is in adjusting ourselves to the new climate.
It also matters what the cause is in another area. If Mankind didn't cause it, then the political and moral force of a lot of environmental regulations are dropped in the crapper. It is one of the reasons I've been advocating making changes for reasons that have nothing to do with GW. There are plenty of non-GW caused changes we should be making that we do not. By tying nearly the whole of emissions control, fuel economy, and so forth to anthropogenic GW, the entire foundation could and would fall like a house of cards if/when it is determined that lo and behold we humans didn't do it. It's a dangerous position to build upon. Particularly since the anthropogenic part is not fully finished and certain. No, consensus does not mean correctness. As mentioned elsewhere, scientists have in the majority been completely wrong before.
The cause of global warming is all theory, not fact. In science, theories must be falsifiable in order to stand a chance at validity. Where is the falsifiability of AGW? How does one prove humans did not cause GW? How does one prove that solar forcing, or orbital changes, or any other "natural" causes were no the source, at that a combination of them?
In truth, we can't without experimentation. Models do not count. They are not proven accurate enough to even be considered as experimentation. This problem is taking hold in more places than climatology. Models and other computer simulations are not a valid substitute for confirmational experiments. So how does one conduct actual experiments? The same way we always have. But it does require more than hiring a programmer to make a program that takes your inputs and spits out an output according to a list of algorithms.
It means building environments and validating the theories that make up the portions of the whole. It means taking these and integrating the portions into larger experiments. Yes, that means bigger laboratories and more "hard thought". But hey isn't this supposed to be important enough to justify that? If you can't build it up, you can't say you truly understand it.
There has yet to be a single GW model that has been demonstrated to accurately model the past climate changes, let alone today's alleged ones. As such no model on climate today is valid evidence of anything other than programming and money being spent. Today's climate models are no more valid than a Simcity or Civlizations game is.
I've been researching climate effects for a couple decades with the express desire to create a warming climate condition. The first model I played with was in the 1980's. The model can output pretty much what you want it to. Any halfway decent programmer knows that. They area gross simplification built upon a chosen set of rules. All of them. ANyone that tries to tell you otherwise is ignorant of the sheer complexity of our climate. Even small scale climates are non-trivial. If you want to make your model accurate you need to have a repeatable
both sides of the argument being heard' implies that there is equal support/strength on both sides,
No, it does not. Care to explain exactly why both sides must be equally supported or of equal strength in order to justify "being heard"? Does "Linux" get to be heard because it is equally supported by enthusiasts compared to Windows, or that is has as much mindshare or marketshare? Does the political minority get to be shut out because they are the minority?
The overwhelming consensus on this issue is that climate change is a phenomena brought about chiefly by societies burning of fossil fuels.
And we know that consensus is exactly how proper science is done, right? We all know the consensus is never wrong, right?
Consensus has been wrong about major issues. Such as the shape of the world, the safety of chemicals such as formaldehyde, the lethality of others, etc..
Yes, a million scientists can be wrong. So can a billion, or a trillion. What you, and others, are doing by arguing that "consensus says" is committing the fallacy argument of appeal to majority. Scientific "truth" (such as it exists) is truth regardless of the numbers who agree or disagree, believe or not.
You aren't allowed to suggest that linux may not be secure, or that the desktop environments for it are kludgy and half-assed, or anything else.
You can say it. Granted, you'll be asked to back your assertion up. But you can still say it. Why is people apparently such as yourself seem to think you should be able to say anything you want but that others should not be disagreeing with you? That's quite the double standard there.
The "linux community" is not wholy populated with, but has an overwhelming amount of straight-up zealots. No more so than Mac or Windows. I do think we have a higher amount of tilted zealots though. The straight-up ones seem toliek neckties too much to properly fit in with an hippy-like zealotous group such as us.
Now wait this gets funny. You said: It cannot be sanely and calmly discussed in the "linux community". Then you said among many other examples: Everyone else is wrong, and every fact they put forth just further proves how base of a bunch of liars they are....Linux remains on the fringe despite all its technical achievements. The community keeps it their with the sheer force of their assholetry.
I'll let my fellow zeolots handle your "on the fringe' mischaracterization. Perhaps you meant to write "I cannot sanely and calmly discuss Linux"? The hypocrisy in your post is so blatant as to warrant consideration as a poor attempt at satire. Hmm perhaps I was not "assholetry" enough... I'll try again. Linux is a proper noun and should thus be capitalized, as any decent high schooler knows, and it is wholly not wholy, and to be a more proper word it would be assholery. That enough?:)
Try realizing the nearly every one of your little rants there are no specific to Linux. Take w trip the www.thedailywtf.com and look for their screenshot posts. You will see every "UI sin" you post made there.
As far as convoluted settings, arcane config files (because ShowAlways=True is so arcane I suspect you may not understand it), Windows has the registry, and now with Vista additional UAC options. Yet there is still more. You've got older apps that need to have configuration changes to run on XP or vista. Ever run enterprise software on Windows such as monitoring? yeah, talk about wild-assed and unexpected. How about the different behaviours of various media programs in Windows. Yeah iTunes looks and acts like Outlook which acts and looks like Roxy's Media stuff, which looks and acts like... get the picture?
Odd assed error messages that don't tell you why something failed to run or install, but it dumps everything a geek would want to know about it, onto the screen.
As opposed to the Blue Screen of Death which tells you exactly what was wrong and how to fix it? or the MS send bug report dialog when applications are unexpectedly (to the OS) closed dumping output and telling you "an unexpected error occurred". No kidding? an UNEXPECTED error? you mean there are EXPECTED ones in there?;)
Inf act, not a single rant of yours is limited to Linux, UNIX, OS2, MacOS, OSX, Windows, etc. They ALL share them.
Finally, you might want to see someone about that martyr complex thing you've got going on. I hear there are all manner of "good drugs" to help you with that. Though I hear they may cause unexpected side effects.
A $1200 product being sold for $75 is probably either a) not a $1200 product, or b) a scam,
So when buying a new PC and deselecting the MS OS (at stores or sites that let you do that) results in only a 50 dollar, if any, drop in price, that OS being sold for several hundred dollars is either a scam or not a several hundred dollars product. Hmm guess you're right.
3. Someone could make some downright hilarious steve ballmer cyborg icons with minimal effort.
I dunno. I think a better one would be an animated one of his head from the jumping and flopping about on stage video) the head of a fish flopping about.
Why would anyone choose Google apps which have I estimate 5% of the functionality of Open Office ???
If they only need that "5%", why should they suffer the bloat for 20X as much stuff as they need?
Seriously, *most* people in an organization such as the FAA do not need word processors at all. *Most* people in an organization do not need Excel or Powerpoint either. Especially in organizations like the DOT or the FAA do not need external email and web either. Seriously. When businesses start realizing that in a large number of organizations there is no business need for much, if any, of an office suite and external email, they will see their costs start dropping like rocks in a pool. It's a positive feedback loop to an extent as well. Lower IT costs.
Sure we like being able to browse the web when we get bored at work, but from a business standpoint even many of us on/. probably don't need it. Developers, sales, marketing, certain management types (but not all), research, purchasers, etc. of course have business needs for such things as external email and web, and parts of an office suite as well.
Maybe I'm just a quick learner, but I can't see how Google Apps would require all that much training. Like everything of Google's that I've tried (with the exception of Google Ads, whose pricing structure remains mysterious), I found it had almost no learning curve whatsoever.
Am I really that much smarter than the people who work at the FAA?
Also, I live in a city that spans state lines, so having one state opt out would be a real hassle. You mean like how Indiana changed it's DST stuff last year, how Arizona (most of it anyway) doesn't participate? It'd be quite the eye opener for many to look at the various time zones. There is at least one city in the US that is split for time-zones, though I don't remember it's name. They've managed for years, decades even.
So, for all of those who dislike DST, try this: Just get up an hour later.
And get canned from your job for showing up an hour later. Brilliant. And for those who don't get fired or can get up later w/o affecting their work, they of course deal with all the monetary costs of the switch. Remember, this is a research project. We could be changing back in a year or two. Or changing yet another hour.
I say to hell with DST. We can save more on energy by much less disruptive changes than to change our clocks twice a year, and all the support calls etc. That result from it each and every year let alone changing the rules. Want to know what kind of propaganda is used? They tell us it "saves daylight and money". yeah, hear is the official word on what energy it "saves":
Studies done in the 1970s by the U.S. Department of Transportation show that we trim the entire country's electricity usage by about one percent EACH DAY with Daylight Saving Time.
WOW! ONE PERCENT EACH DAY. That means in 100 days we've cut our electricity consumption by 100%! Yeah, quick-minded people catch that they are playing word games. it may save 1% of that day's use, but that is not the impression given. And judging by the history of DST proponents, that is intentional. When you probe further you'll find admissions that for a significant portion of the DST changes, the changes have no measurable effect do to the simple fact that changing the clock doesn't change the sunlight available.
California is looking at doing a so-called "year round DST". In plain English it means they want to change their timezone permanently. They concluded that actual energy use would not lower appreciably, but that it would be "cheaper" by shifting the demand into cheaper-hours. Of course, those "cheaper hours" are cheaper because of the lowered demand. So shifting demand there won't have any long term benefits.
Contrary to popular belief we are not compelled by law to observe DST. We are only required to do so uniformly if we do observe it.
A study in February of 2007 concluded that this change has a 25% chance to increase net electricity consumption., and is 75% likely to only make a 0, 12, or 1% net reduction. This makes, sense. It's called the point of diminishing returns. Given the assertion that shifting when you use your lights can reduce the time using lights, it stands to reason that there is a point that changing it further will not lead to appreciable, if any, further improvements. This study was done on California, and concluded the percentages it did based on visibility times in the AM. However, further north the effects are slightly more dramatic in both temperatures as well as visibility. It may well be that the more northern latitudes will shift toward less improvement or more increases.
But hey, if you want extra light at the end of the day, leave work an hour earlier. It's just as justifiable as getting up an hour later and being late to work.;)
All the government needs to do to track is to mandate readers as part of commercial services. City transportation, airline, trains, Greyhound. Put them in police cars, streetlights, meters, signs. Mandate that in order to protect you or commerce, stores must have the readers at entrances and exits. Bars, especially, as well as any "adult" service. pawn shops to track who may be selling stolen goods. The library would be another prime candidate. Employers could be mandated to start having them as well. gotta stop them illegals you know, some of them might be terrorists, drug dealers, or other "evil doers". Many cities have "mysterious" boxes along the streets. Mysterious in that the general public doesn't really know what they do. Would you know if you walked by one of them that they were reading your tag?
In order to piece together your movements, it doesn't take many plot points. If I can spot your tag at the store, your work, and the occasional intersection that's all I need. From there I can start narrowing it down. Maybe the tracking software only tracks tags it's been told to, thus minimizing impact.
The catch here is that while this infrastructure is not currently in place, it can be rather quickly. Right now there is no incentive because there is nobody with the tags. But once they are in enough people, this impediment will be gone.
Mayhap it starts with criminals on release, maybe we start with sex-criminal. we start putting the readers in "sensitive" areas like the public buildings, the mall, stores, anywhere kids may be preyed upon. Maybe we then extend it as a means of tracking people without having them in jail. Gotta track the really nasty people like Martha Stuart you know.
Maybe we start requiring government people to have it, and thus the readers. Maybe we start mandating new automobiles to have readers that can periodically report GPS, time, and tag pairs.
Any any case, once the ball starts rolling it gets increasingly difficult to stop it. This is why there is, and should always be, concern over this.
Tracking millions of RFIDs is not impossible to a trained mind, or even a creative one. You break areas up into "cells" and thus have small numbers to work with and aggregate or federate the results up a chain. Kinda like maybe.. cellphones.
What isn't obvious is why people think short-range RFID is the same as battery-powered wild animal tracking collars. Are they just stupid?
Can you start out without insulting those you disagree with? Ad hominems are not indicative of a sound position. Perhaps other people have taken into consideration things you have not. Maybe, just maybe, some of us may know something you don't. Is that so inconceivable to you?
Anybody who's ever been involved in a business ethics issue knows that the ultimate bottom line is whatever you can get away with.
We see this in all walks of life. From business to politics (where it is all but mandated that you act this way), to private and personal lives. A business is not a sentient entity. it is comprised of people, and it is the people that do these things. By blaming "the company" or companies, you provide an easy escape goat for the behavior. By accepting and perpetuating this scapegoat the underlying problem can never be solved.
This is the abuse of classifying corporations as "people". It removes actual personal responsibility and accountability from people who can be punished to fines for a collective organization, an entity which does not possess sentient thought. People over time learn, an collective entity such as a corporation has a "memory" only so long as those who were impacted by the consequences allow it.
So people - media, pundits, politicians - continue to blame the collective instead of the perpetrators. And the problem continues.
Finally, people are starting to give us back as good as we are giving them. It's about time. According to the article, this has been the official policy of Canada for a couple decades now. They are simply choosing to enforce it now. Yes it is about time, about time Canada enforced it's own laws. This illustrates one of the reasons all laws should have sunsets. Laws that have sat on the books for so long w/o enforcement become obscure and candidates for abuse and sudden political hand wringing. For example, how many readers/posters assume that the current PUS President had anything to do with Canada's laws regarding this? Most, I would wager, since most don't RTFA.
Hopefully every country will start applying the full standard and stopping US government officials they don't like from entering as well. Then maybe we'll see some change here, and possibly a little humility.
Nope, won't happen. Even if every country did this, the diplomats and officials would be allowed. Even if they didn't exempt government officials, it still would not end it. How long have tariffs been going on? Virtually forever. At most what would happen is that the larger nations would get together and decide on an allegedly "common standard" and we would wind up with something called oh I dunno maybe the "North American Free Travel Agreement" that really didn't solve the problem just made it officially "uniform".
It would be filled with crap that would make things more expensive and no more secure. It might even include provisions to accept as crimes that which is not a crime in all countries. It certainly would include an international database of all things a government might want to know about potential visitors. Most of which would have nothing to do with security. In short order it would be extended to allow the signatory countries access to records to hunt for potential crimes such as tax evasion. From there, no telling how far it would go.
And Canadians would blame Americans and Americans would blame Canadians. And they would both be right.
Canadians are already being screened this way entering the US, why are Americans upset when Canada starts doing the same thing?
Why do you assume that the reporting of it implies we are upset? I say go for it. I consider it quite reasonable to report on governments' intrusion into our lives; the more reports the better. The level of government intrusion into the lives of people in this world (including the U.S.) is staggering and quite possibly higher than most of history.
For that matter, what would be wrong with being upset? If it led to rescinding this security theatre, would that not be a good thing?
You have to follow the chain. You claim they are the sovereign owner of something and that government shouldn't force them to use it in other ways.
But what is it they "own"? The spectrums they use are licensed to them by the federal government, (as if it really should be doing it). Stepping away from academic idealism, the facts are right now that the federal government has placed large barriers to competition in this space due to licensing of radio spectrums for use by competitors. Should the government be able to create such monopolies? No. Have they? Yes. Should they place additional conditions on those who seek de jure monopoly power and say it has to be open? IMO, absolutely. Particularly since tax dollars were used to build certain portions of that infrastructure.
Who are you? You are someone who has had the opportunity to chat over IRC over a wireless carrier kept from you because the government decided it had the right to create scarcity in the spectrum and then decide who can use it and for what purpose. The cell carriers have no interest in providing a pipe for you to use as you see fit. Why? Low pricing. Our society expects a flat-rate fee for access, and that flat-rate better be low. Very low. So low that your margin on each is minuscule.
Now compare that outlook to one of specialized and limited access capability. By locking you in and limiting what you can do they are not merely providing a pipe, and thus the expectation of very low price is gone (for now).
As a free market libertarian, would it be OK with you if the fedgov mandated that certain businesses could decide what cargo can be transported along the interstates that the fedgov built/maintains using tax money? or should anyone who can meet the technical requirements of cargo vehicles be allowed to transport people, packages, mail, food, etc. on them without paying some private company?
If the government did not license bands of the spectrum and thus create a false scarcity for them to control, I'd agree with you. Since the reality is the fedgov does precisely that, as a free market libertarian I can not agree with your conclusion. There is nothing inherently free market or libertarian in allowing the government to create and support a monopoly, and then cry free market or libertarian principles state that said monopoly dictate you leave it alone.
If you go into the middle of the rain forest, and dig down a couple of feet you hit sand. You would think that if trees were removing all this carbon from the atmosphere the layer would be a 100 feet deep.
Unless you know more about the process of decomposition and reuse in nature. Much of what passes as "common sense" is in fact wrong when it comes to areas beyond the basic topsoil level.
Decomposition requires many things. Among them ready access to oxygen. Once you go down a few feet, this oxygen supply gets sparse. Furthermore, so do carbon based components (i.e. formerly living material). Once outside of the narrow envelope of natural decomposition it... now get this... stops happening. Ever uprooted trees, or seen them uprooted? Most trees have a very shallow root depth - it is more important for their wind resistance capability that their root base be wide, not deep.
What would you expect to find, block of "sequestered" CO2 twenty feet down? Bah. Trees *are* mostly carbon - that's where they store it; in themselves. Biological carbon "sink" is fact, not idea. Bark and wood are carbon storage. Hint: why do you think burning wood releases CO2?
The ultimate fallacy in a lot of people's minds is that we are making carbon. In truth we are not. We only convert it from one form of carbon to another. Your notion that because sand sits a few feet down from the base of a rain forest (I'll assume you are right for sake of discussion) that trees and forests do not "sink carbon" is so fallacious as to be bordering on ridiculous.
I would say that most of the carbon 'sinking' is done by algae that dies and falls to the bottom of the ocean, where it is cold and oxygen is limited.
And you base this on what evidence? Or is it just more random assertion in an attempt to make yourself look smarter than your username indicates?
No, the worst thing that could happen is that it works on some other planet, but due to any of the myriad of differences the same technology has the opposite effect, or severe unintended effects when used on Earth; and then it is used on Earth.
The (annoyingly American) idea that we can solve any problem by simply throwing enough money and ingenuity at it needs to be extinguished, and fast.
You mean like the "annoyingly-European" notion that you can "solve poverty" by taking money from others and throwing it at the problem. Or the idea that you can "solve the education problem" by throwing more money at it. And of course the decidedly anti-American thought that only the Americans come up with such silly notions.
But let us examine your assertion directly. You assert that the "problem of Global Warming" can not be "solved" by money and ingenuity. What do you propose be done to "solve it" (we'll assume for sake of discussion that it is a problem)? No money and lack of ingenuity?
Do you believe that more efficient and clean means of power generation, power consumption, transportation, medicine, food, etc. require no money and no ingenuity? Will the mythological "Hydrogen Economy" spring into existence without money and ingenuity? How will people get around, how will goods get transported?
Whether you like it or not, it would take money and ingenuity to "solve the problem of Anthropogenic Global Warming".
The largest threat in the arena of global climate change is that the belief that it is anthropogenic takes hold and it is incorrect. While we play around with models that assume it to be true and thus concentrate the "money and ingenuity" on changing human activities, the global climate can be changing without us and we will get nowhere and be entirely unprepared for it. AGW conjecture proponents adamantly refuse to consider the possibility that they are completely wrong about the cause, and that the Earth may warm and cause trouble for our infrastructure without us having any impact on it. By assuming we can control it via "greenhouse gas emissions" we consign ourselves to working at that angle instead of preparing for the effects.
Historically, man has survived and flourishing by adapting more than anything else. We've apparently previously adapted to climatological changes far greater than we are allegedly facing, it stands to reason we can and should adapt to those in the future rather than believing we can change the world by spending our collective energy believing in unproven models and conjecture.
Something that is decidedly human is the ability to take a looming or extant tragedy or crisis and turn it into a positive. And yes, doing so is an example of ingenuity, and often it does take money.
And what about the reality of assumptions? All models are based on a set of assumptions. The question at hand is not whether the math is correct or "ordinary people" can run models, but about the underlying assumptions. As you state in your post, certain things are hard coded. These are assumptions. When the assumptions are wrong, so are the results. The invalidity of assumptions is the key problem with all models to date.
In order to get the assumptions right means doing a lot of work. Work that does not involve running simulations. It's called science. Hypothesis, experimentation, review, reformulate hypothesis. Repeat until all inconsistencies have been correctly resolved, and all observed phenomena have been accounted for and explained. Note that "running a model" does count as experimentation.
Those who run models do so based on assumptions they believe to be true, most of which have had no real work done to produce them (hence they are assumptions). For example, there is the assumption that CO2 is the cause of warming, not a result of it; the assumption that rates of CO2 growth will double, the assumption that humans are the cause.
And this last one is perhaps the most significant assumption. It is not proven, and I further submit that it can not be proven scientifically. This is the single largest problem with the Anthropogenic Human Warming "theory": it does not meet scientific criteria because it is not falsifiable. Falsifiable means that the means to prove it false do not exist. A significant test of models that purport to be accurate mus tbe able to correctly "predict the past". Yet none seem to try, and those that do tend to sweep their failure sunder the rug.
The underlying assumption to all "global warming" models is the exact effects of various gases and matter, the exact effect of which is not known, merely assumed. Each piece in isolation may have a known effect, but as nature shows us time and again what works in isolation rarely works "in the wild".
Running models based on unproven assumptions is not science. "Enabling" non-scientists to run models based on specific assumptions is not going to contribute to a better understanding anymore than writing cracker scripts for non-coders to run improves computer code.
Also great. How about prohibiting the collection and storage of data that is not necessary for business transactions in the first place ?
Nope, instead they (the fedgov) are going to require them to keep more and more data. Why? because the government wants it. It's reminiscent of the old bumper sticker/slogan that says "Don't steal, the government hates competition.". The government is increasingly interested in any little piece of data it can get on you for any reason it desires. Since the likelihood (given past and current experience) is that the government will be immune to this legislation, it serves only to increase it's own ability to abuse.
After all, if people are aware of the problems with private data and information being readily available and susceptible to crackers, they are less likely to be willing to let the government amass a prime target database. So by providing the theater that says such databases are secure, they pave the way to people ignoring or downplaying the risk of exposure to government amassed databases and thus are less likely to resist and/or object.
"But it makes it a crime to hid breaches!" you say? Sure, lots of things are crimes. There are so many legally defined crimes that one can be reasonably certain one commits one or more any given day in the US. Government's only control over people is to make them criminals, and as such the rise of "big government" is done through increasing the chances you commit crimes. But the mere criminalization of something does not in reality necessarily curb it. In this case it is theater.
For example, banks are legally required to report all thefts, embezzlement, etc.. However, in cases of small amounts many financial institutions keep them internal. Making them known can lead to reputational concern after all, and in dealings with the Fedgov they can increase your costs. Instead of it actually curtailing anything, the most probable scenario is that politicians and bureaucrats will instead point to the low numbers of reports as proof that they did something, that we are safer, and that this shiny new database of your information that the FedGov wants to create is not really at risk because people don't do that sort of thing anymore.
Increasingly companies are purging or not recording data that is not useful or needful to their business. This is for several reasons including cost of storage and reduced legal fees.[1] But this doesn't make the power hungry happy. So we get things like this: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/07/19 30228 instead.
1. When the fedgov knocks on the door and says "we want this data", it is much cheaper if you don't have said data and can reply with "we do not store that data and thus have none to turn over. It is also cheaper in that you can not have a privacy breach for data you don't have.
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If they aren't, then rising CO2 probably isn't helping and should still be reversed, and we might also look into other solutions for it.
As a scientists, it saddens me to see you make such a statement. IF C02 increases do not cause warming, then we should look to *increase* them. Why? It has been shown through hundreds of studies that plants perform better, produce more biomass, use less water when CO2 levels are increased. It has likewise been shown (again through actual physical experimentation) that decreasing CO2 levels leads to loss of plant life. Most any greenhouse grower can tell you of the difficulties in keeping enough CO2 present. Indeed, it has been experimentally (and theoretically) shown that increase CO2 concentration can turn marginal land into productive land. it is indisputable that increased CO2 concentration in our atmosphere means more plant life, which by the way means more life in general. It has been shown that more plants == more food == more animals.
So, we have the two:
More CO2 == good for plants
More CO2 == higher temperatures (which to an extent is good for plants)
If we consider for sake of discussion that B is a negative toward A, and B is determined to not be so, then we should further A.
The fact is we have more vegetation now than we did a few decades ago. This is an undeniably good thing. More vegetation increases biodiversity. Biodiversity has been tied directly (in a causative sense) to the health of an ecology. The more diverse it ecology of an area is, the healthier and more resilient it is. Furthermore it can be shown that increased CO2 availability leads to increased life.
1) Life as we know it is based on Carbon
2) CO2 contains carbon
3) Carbon sequestered miles or even hundreds of feet below ground is not available to be made into life
4) Releasing carbon from it's sequestered locations below ground makes it more available to be turned into biological matter (life).
Therefore, provided there are no harmful effects from CO2 increase that outweigh the positive effects, we should increase the CO2 level of our atmosphere. Given the size of our atmosphere and the process of life cycling carbon from CO2, if increased CO2 does NOT increase temperatures to a point where life is suffering a NET negative impact, we should seek to increase CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
So if CO2 level increases do not have a net and biologically significant increase in temperatures (as in other effects such as increased plant growth 'sequestering', and other climatological effects counter the effect of CO2), and there are no other net negative effects we should strive to increase CO2 production.
Now, before some of you go apoplectic (or more accurately continue to go apoplectic) at that comment, note that is not saying we should burn more oil. It means we should not be worrying about CO2 as a "pollutant", and turn our attention to things that are shown to be directly negative such as the various *zenes (such as benzene), or uranium (coal plant emissions). These items we have shown via experimentation to have detrimental effects on life. The burning of oil, among other sources, produces these. I still advocate a move from gasoline, just as I always have. GW has had no positive impact on this advocacy, and increasing or maintaining high CO2 production also bears no impact on it. One can advocate CO2 indifference while still advocating burning less and less gasoline.
WTF? The only logical conclusion from the (somewhat justified) claim that scientists show favor towards their funders' biases is that global climate change is more of a threat than the current scientific consensus (at least among American scientists) portrays.
Actually there are many logically correct possible answers. Among them is the fact that the current administration is not the ones who actually control the funding process.
Most of the government research finds outside of military R&D is not controlled or directly influenced by the government. Bush doesn't sign the checks.
Your assertion that your conclusion is the only logical one is illogical.
That said, it does not matter why it's warming.
It does if you mean to change it.
Put aside the whole "consensus" crap for a moment and think about this. Assume for sake of discussion the following:
1) Earth is warming
2) Mankind has had zero impact on it
If you wish to make an impact, you have a large hurdle in that you've not been able to make any despite believing you have. If the warming is entirely natural, then all the changes you thought we had made to the climate did not happen and all of your science, models, theories about how to stop it are completely incorrect (as if they are now) and useful only as a list of "well this didn't make a difference". Useful, yes but not in the frame of making things different. You'd have a roughly equal chance of making it worse if you could impact it at all.
Furthermore, if it is entirely natural, or that man's impact is statistically and demonstrably zero in effect, then where we should focus our efforts in coping with the natural cycle is in adjusting ourselves to the new climate.
It also matters what the cause is in another area. If Mankind didn't cause it, then the political and moral force of a lot of environmental regulations are dropped in the crapper. It is one of the reasons I've been advocating making changes for reasons that have nothing to do with GW. There are plenty of non-GW caused changes we should be making that we do not. By tying nearly the whole of emissions control, fuel economy, and so forth to anthropogenic GW, the entire foundation could and would fall like a house of cards if/when it is determined that lo and behold we humans didn't do it. It's a dangerous position to build upon. Particularly since the anthropogenic part is not fully finished and certain. No, consensus does not mean correctness. As mentioned elsewhere, scientists have in the majority been completely wrong before.
The cause of global warming is all theory, not fact. In science, theories must be falsifiable in order to stand a chance at validity. Where is the falsifiability of AGW? How does one prove humans did not cause GW? How does one prove that solar forcing, or orbital changes, or any other "natural" causes were no the source, at that a combination of them?
In truth, we can't without experimentation. Models do not count. They are not proven accurate enough to even be considered as experimentation. This problem is taking hold in more places than climatology. Models and other computer simulations are not a valid substitute for confirmational experiments. So how does one conduct actual experiments? The same way we always have. But it does require more than hiring a programmer to make a program that takes your inputs and spits out an output according to a list of algorithms.
It means building environments and validating the theories that make up the portions of the whole. It means taking these and integrating the portions into larger experiments. Yes, that means bigger laboratories and more "hard thought". But hey isn't this supposed to be important enough to justify that? If you can't build it up, you can't say you truly understand it.
There has yet to be a single GW model that has been demonstrated to accurately model the past climate changes, let alone today's alleged ones. As such no model on climate today is valid evidence of anything other than programming and money being spent. Today's climate models are no more valid than a Simcity or Civlizations game is.
I've been researching climate effects for a couple decades with the express desire to create a warming climate condition. The first model I played with was in the 1980's. The model can output pretty much what you want it to. Any halfway decent programmer knows that. They area gross simplification built upon a chosen set of rules. All of them. ANyone that tries to tell you otherwise is ignorant of the sheer complexity of our climate. Even small scale climates are non-trivial. If you want to make your model accurate you need to have a repeatable
both sides of the argument being heard' implies that there is equal support/strength on both sides,
No, it does not. Care to explain exactly why both sides must be equally supported or of equal strength in order to justify "being heard"? Does "Linux" get to be heard because it is equally supported by enthusiasts compared to Windows, or that is has as much mindshare or marketshare? Does the political minority get to be shut out because they are the minority?
The overwhelming consensus on this issue is that climate change is a phenomena brought about chiefly by societies burning of fossil fuels.
And we know that consensus is exactly how proper science is done, right? We all know the consensus is never wrong, right?
Consensus has been wrong about major issues. Such as the shape of the world, the safety of chemicals such as formaldehyde, the lethality of others, etc..
Yes, a million scientists can be wrong. So can a billion, or a trillion. What you, and others, are doing by arguing that "consensus says" is committing the fallacy argument of appeal to majority. Scientific "truth" (such as it exists) is truth regardless of the numbers who agree or disagree, believe or not.
You aren't allowed to suggest that linux may not be secure, or that the desktop environments for it are kludgy and half-assed, or anything else.
...Linux remains on the fringe despite all its technical achievements. The community keeps it their with the sheer force of their assholetry.
... I'll try again. Linux is a proper noun and should thus be capitalized, as any decent high schooler knows, and it is wholly not wholy, and to be a more proper word it would be assholery. That enough? :)
You can say it. Granted, you'll be asked to back your assertion up. But you can still say it. Why is people apparently such as yourself seem to think you should be able to say anything you want but that others should not be disagreeing with you? That's quite the double standard there.
The "linux community" is not wholy populated with, but has an overwhelming amount of straight-up zealots.
No more so than Mac or Windows. I do think we have a higher amount of tilted zealots though. The straight-up ones seem toliek neckties too much to properly fit in with an hippy-like zealotous group such as us.
Now wait this gets funny. You said:
It cannot be sanely and calmly discussed in the "linux community".
Then you said among many other examples:
Everyone else is wrong, and every fact they put forth just further proves how base of a bunch of liars they are.
I'll let my fellow zeolots handle your "on the fringe' mischaracterization. Perhaps you meant to write "I cannot sanely and calmly discuss Linux"? The hypocrisy in your post is so blatant as to warrant consideration as a poor attempt at satire. Hmm perhaps I was not "assholetry" enough
Try realizing the nearly every one of your little rants there are no specific to Linux. Take w trip the www.thedailywtf.com and look for their screenshot posts. You will see every "UI sin" you post made there.
... get the picture?
;)
As far as convoluted settings, arcane config files (because ShowAlways=True is so arcane I suspect you may not understand it), Windows has the registry, and now with Vista additional UAC options. Yet there is still more. You've got older apps that need to have configuration changes to run on XP or vista. Ever run enterprise software on Windows such as monitoring? yeah, talk about wild-assed and unexpected. How about the different behaviours of various media programs in Windows. Yeah iTunes looks and acts like Outlook which acts and looks like Roxy's Media stuff, which looks and acts like
Odd assed error messages that don't tell you why something failed to run or install, but it dumps everything a geek would want to know about it, onto the screen.
As opposed to the Blue Screen of Death which tells you exactly what was wrong and how to fix it? or the MS send bug report dialog when applications are unexpectedly (to the OS) closed dumping output and telling you "an unexpected error occurred". No kidding? an UNEXPECTED error? you mean there are EXPECTED ones in there?
Inf act, not a single rant of yours is limited to Linux, UNIX, OS2, MacOS, OSX, Windows, etc. They ALL share them.
Finally, you might want to see someone about that martyr complex thing you've got going on. I hear there are all manner of "good drugs" to help you with that. Though I hear they may cause unexpected side effects.
A $1200 product being sold for $75 is probably either a) not a $1200 product, or b) a scam,
So when buying a new PC and deselecting the MS OS (at stores or sites that let you do that) results in only a 50 dollar, if any, drop in price, that OS being sold for several hundred dollars is either a scam or not a several hundred dollars product. Hmm guess you're right.
3. Someone could make some downright hilarious steve ballmer cyborg icons with minimal effort.
I dunno. I think a better one would be an animated one of his head from the jumping and flopping about on stage video) the head of a fish flopping about.
Why would anyone choose Google apps which have I estimate 5% of the functionality of Open Office ???
/. probably don't need it. Developers, sales, marketing, certain management types (but not all), research, purchasers, etc. of course have business needs for such things as external email and web, and parts of an office suite as well.
If they only need that "5%", why should they suffer the bloat for 20X as much stuff as they need?
Seriously, *most* people in an organization such as the FAA do not need word processors at all. *Most* people in an organization do not need Excel or Powerpoint either. Especially in organizations like the DOT or the FAA do not need external email and web either. Seriously. When businesses start realizing that in a large number of organizations there is no business need for much, if any, of an office suite and external email, they will see their costs start dropping like rocks in a pool. It's a positive feedback loop to an extent as well. Lower IT costs.
Sure we like being able to browse the web when we get bored at work, but from a business standpoint even many of us on
But not everybody.
- A plane is about to land. Cancel or Allow?
- A plane is about to take off. Cancel or Allow?
You do know that this is essentially a large part of what the FAA does, right?
Maybe I'm just a quick learner, but I can't see how Google Apps would require all that much training. Like everything of Google's that I've tried (with the exception of Google Ads, whose pricing structure remains mysterious), I found it had almost no learning curve whatsoever.
Am I really that much smarter than the people who work at the FAA?
Quite possibly.
You mean like how Indiana changed it's DST stuff last year, how Arizona (most of it anyway) doesn't participate? It'd be quite the eye opener for many to look at the various time zones. There is at least one city in the US that is split for time-zones, though I don't remember it's name. They've managed for years, decades even.
So, for all of those who dislike DST, try this: Just get up an hour later.
And get canned from your job for showing up an hour later. Brilliant. And for those who don't get fired or can get up later w/o affecting their work, they of course deal with all the monetary costs of the switch. Remember, this is a research project. We could be changing back in a year or two. Or changing yet another hour.
I say to hell with DST. We can save more on energy by much less disruptive changes than to change our clocks twice a year, and all the support calls etc. That result from it each and every year let alone changing the rules. Want to know what kind of propaganda is used? They tell us it "saves daylight and money". yeah, hear is the official word on what energy it "saves":
WOW! ONE PERCENT EACH DAY. That means in 100 days we've cut our electricity consumption by 100%! Yeah, quick-minded people catch that they are playing word games. it may save 1% of that day's use, but that is not the impression given. And judging by the history of DST proponents, that is intentional. When you probe further you'll find admissions that for a significant portion of the DST changes, the changes have no measurable effect do to the simple fact that changing the clock doesn't change the sunlight available.
California is looking at doing a so-called "year round DST". In plain English it means they want to change their timezone permanently. They concluded that actual energy use would not lower appreciably, but that it would be "cheaper" by shifting the demand into cheaper-hours. Of course, those "cheaper hours" are cheaper because of the lowered demand. So shifting demand there won't have any long term benefits.
Contrary to popular belief we are not compelled by law to observe DST. We are only required to do so uniformly if we do observe it.
A study in February of 2007 concluded that this change has a 25% chance to increase net electricity consumption., and is 75% likely to only make a 0, 12, or 1% net reduction. This makes, sense. It's called the point of diminishing returns. Given the assertion that shifting when you use your lights can reduce the time using lights, it stands to reason that there is a point that changing it further will not lead to appreciable, if any, further improvements. This study was done on California, and concluded the percentages it did based on visibility times in the AM. However, further north the effects are slightly more dramatic in both temperatures as well as visibility. It may well be that the more northern latitudes will shift toward less improvement or more increases.
But hey, if you want extra light at the end of the day, leave work an hour earlier. It's just as justifiable as getting up an hour later and being late to work.
All the government needs to do to track is to mandate readers as part of commercial services. City transportation, airline, trains, Greyhound. Put them in police cars, streetlights, meters, signs. Mandate that in order to protect you or commerce, stores must have the readers at entrances and exits. Bars, especially, as well as any "adult" service. pawn shops to track who may be selling stolen goods. The library would be another prime candidate. Employers could be mandated to start having them as well. gotta stop them illegals you know, some of them might be terrorists, drug dealers, or other "evil doers". Many cities have "mysterious" boxes along the streets. Mysterious in that the general public doesn't really know what they do. Would you know if you walked by one of them that they were reading your tag?
.. cellphones.
In order to piece together your movements, it doesn't take many plot points. If I can spot your tag at the store, your work, and the occasional intersection that's all I need. From there I can start narrowing it down. Maybe the tracking software only tracks tags it's been told to, thus minimizing impact.
The catch here is that while this infrastructure is not currently in place, it can be rather quickly. Right now there is no incentive because there is nobody with the tags. But once they are in enough people, this impediment will be gone.
Mayhap it starts with criminals on release, maybe we start with sex-criminal. we start putting the readers in "sensitive" areas like the public buildings, the mall, stores, anywhere kids may be preyed upon. Maybe we then extend it as a means of tracking people without having them in jail. Gotta track the really nasty people like Martha Stuart you know.
Maybe we start requiring government people to have it, and thus the readers. Maybe we start mandating new automobiles to have readers that can periodically report GPS, time, and tag pairs.
Any any case, once the ball starts rolling it gets increasingly difficult to stop it. This is why there is, and should always be, concern over this.
Tracking millions of RFIDs is not impossible to a trained mind, or even a creative one. You break areas up into "cells" and thus have small numbers to work with and aggregate or federate the results up a chain. Kinda like maybe
What isn't obvious is why people think short-range RFID is the same as battery-powered wild animal tracking collars. Are they just stupid?
Can you start out without insulting those you disagree with? Ad hominems are not indicative of a sound position. Perhaps other people have taken into consideration things you have not. Maybe, just maybe, some of us may know something you don't. Is that so inconceivable to you?
Anybody who's ever been involved in a business ethics issue knows that the ultimate bottom line is whatever you can get away with.
We see this in all walks of life. From business to politics (where it is all but mandated that you act this way), to private and personal lives. A business is not a sentient entity. it is comprised of people, and it is the people that do these things. By blaming "the company" or companies, you provide an easy escape goat for the behavior. By accepting and perpetuating this scapegoat the underlying problem can never be solved.
This is the abuse of classifying corporations as "people". It removes actual personal responsibility and accountability from people who can be punished to fines for a collective organization, an entity which does not possess sentient thought. People over time learn, an collective entity such as a corporation has a "memory" only so long as those who were impacted by the consequences allow it.
So people - media, pundits, politicians - continue to blame the collective instead of the perpetrators. And the problem continues.
Finally, people are starting to give us back as good as we are giving them. It's about time.
According to the article, this has been the official policy of Canada for a couple decades now. They are simply choosing to enforce it now. Yes it is about time, about time Canada enforced it's own laws. This illustrates one of the reasons all laws should have sunsets. Laws that have sat on the books for so long w/o enforcement become obscure and candidates for abuse and sudden political hand wringing. For example, how many readers/posters assume that the current PUS President had anything to do with Canada's laws regarding this? Most, I would wager, since most don't RTFA.
Hopefully every country will start applying the full standard and stopping US government officials they don't like from entering as well. Then maybe we'll see some change here, and possibly a little humility.
Nope, won't happen. Even if every country did this, the diplomats and officials would be allowed. Even if they didn't exempt government officials, it still would not end it. How long have tariffs been going on? Virtually forever. At most what would happen is that the larger nations would get together and decide on an allegedly "common standard" and we would wind up with something called oh I dunno maybe the "North American Free Travel Agreement" that really didn't solve the problem just made it officially "uniform".
It would be filled with crap that would make things more expensive and no more secure. It might even include provisions to accept as crimes that which is not a crime in all countries. It certainly would include an international database of all things a government might want to know about potential visitors. Most of which would have nothing to do with security. In short order it would be extended to allow the signatory countries access to records to hunt for potential crimes such as tax evasion. From there, no telling how far it would go.
And Canadians would blame Americans and Americans would blame Canadians. And they would both be right.
Canadians are already being screened this way entering the US, why are Americans upset when Canada starts doing the same thing?
Why do you assume that the reporting of it implies we are upset? I say go for it. I consider it quite reasonable to report on governments' intrusion into our lives; the more reports the better. The level of government intrusion into the lives of people in this world (including the U.S.) is staggering and quite possibly higher than most of history.
For that matter, what would be wrong with being upset? If it led to rescinding this security theatre, would that not be a good thing?
SCALIX, which really doesn't do anything that Outlook does.
Hmmm perhaps because SCALIX is server-side and Outlook is client side?
It's called "none of the above" and should be on every ballot.
You have to follow the chain. You claim they are the sovereign owner of something and that government shouldn't force them to use it in other ways.
But what is it they "own"? The spectrums they use are licensed to them by the federal government, (as if it really should be doing it). Stepping away from academic idealism, the facts are right now that the federal government has placed large barriers to competition in this space due to licensing of radio spectrums for use by competitors. Should the government be able to create such monopolies? No. Have they? Yes. Should they place additional conditions on those who seek de jure monopoly power and say it has to be open? IMO, absolutely. Particularly since tax dollars were used to build certain portions of that infrastructure.
Who are you? You are someone who has had the opportunity to chat over IRC over a wireless carrier kept from you because the government decided it had the right to create scarcity in the spectrum and then decide who can use it and for what purpose. The cell carriers have no interest in providing a pipe for you to use as you see fit. Why? Low pricing. Our society expects a flat-rate fee for access, and that flat-rate better be low. Very low. So low that your margin on each is minuscule.
Now compare that outlook to one of specialized and limited access capability. By locking you in and limiting what you can do they are not merely providing a pipe, and thus the expectation of very low price is gone (for now).
As a free market libertarian, would it be OK with you if the fedgov mandated that certain businesses could decide what cargo can be transported along the interstates that the fedgov built/maintains using tax money? or should anyone who can meet the technical requirements of cargo vehicles be allowed to transport people, packages, mail, food, etc. on them without paying some private company?
If the government did not license bands of the spectrum and thus create a false scarcity for them to control, I'd agree with you. Since the reality is the fedgov does precisely that, as a free market libertarian I can not agree with your conclusion. There is nothing inherently free market or libertarian in allowing the government to create and support a monopoly, and then cry free market or libertarian principles state that said monopoly dictate you leave it alone.
If you go into the middle of the rain forest, and dig down a couple of feet you hit sand. You would think that if trees were removing all this carbon from the atmosphere the layer would be a 100 feet deep.
... now get this ... stops happening. Ever uprooted trees, or seen them uprooted? Most trees have a very shallow root depth - it is more important for their wind resistance capability that their root base be wide, not deep.
Unless you know more about the process of decomposition and reuse in nature. Much of what passes as "common sense" is in fact wrong when it comes to areas beyond the basic topsoil level.
Decomposition requires many things. Among them ready access to oxygen. Once you go down a few feet, this oxygen supply gets sparse. Furthermore, so do carbon based components (i.e. formerly living material). Once outside of the narrow envelope of natural decomposition it
What would you expect to find, block of "sequestered" CO2 twenty feet down? Bah. Trees *are* mostly carbon - that's where they store it; in themselves. Biological carbon "sink" is fact, not idea. Bark and wood are carbon storage. Hint: why do you think burning wood releases CO2?
The ultimate fallacy in a lot of people's minds is that we are making carbon. In truth we are not. We only convert it from one form of carbon to another. Your notion that because sand sits a few feet down from the base of a rain forest (I'll assume you are right for sake of discussion) that trees and forests do not "sink carbon" is so fallacious as to be bordering on ridiculous.
I would say that most of the carbon 'sinking' is done by algae that dies and falls to the bottom of the ocean, where it is cold and oxygen is limited.
And you base this on what evidence? Or is it just more random assertion in an attempt to make yourself look smarter than your username indicates?
No, the worst thing that could happen is that it works on some other planet, but due to any of the myriad of differences the same technology has the opposite effect, or severe unintended effects when used on Earth; and then it is used on Earth.
The (annoyingly American) idea that we can solve any problem by simply throwing enough money and ingenuity at it needs to be extinguished, and fast.
You mean like the "annoyingly-European" notion that you can "solve poverty" by taking money from others and throwing it at the problem. Or the idea that you can "solve the education problem" by throwing more money at it. And of course the decidedly anti-American thought that only the Americans come up with such silly notions.
But let us examine your assertion directly. You assert that the "problem of Global Warming" can not be "solved" by money and ingenuity. What do you propose be done to "solve it" (we'll assume for sake of discussion that it is a problem)? No money and lack of ingenuity?
Do you believe that more efficient and clean means of power generation, power consumption, transportation, medicine, food, etc. require no money and no ingenuity? Will the mythological "Hydrogen Economy" spring into existence without money and ingenuity? How will people get around, how will goods get transported?
Whether you like it or not, it would take money and ingenuity to "solve the problem of Anthropogenic Global Warming".
The largest threat in the arena of global climate change is that the belief that it is anthropogenic takes hold and it is incorrect. While we play around with models that assume it to be true and thus concentrate the "money and ingenuity" on changing human activities, the global climate can be changing without us and we will get nowhere and be entirely unprepared for it. AGW conjecture proponents adamantly refuse to consider the possibility that they are completely wrong about the cause, and that the Earth may warm and cause trouble for our infrastructure without us having any impact on it. By assuming we can control it via "greenhouse gas emissions" we consign ourselves to working at that angle instead of preparing for the effects.
Historically, man has survived and flourishing by adapting more than anything else. We've apparently previously adapted to climatological changes far greater than we are allegedly facing, it stands to reason we can and should adapt to those in the future rather than believing we can change the world by spending our collective energy believing in unproven models and conjecture.
Something that is decidedly human is the ability to take a looming or extant tragedy or crisis and turn it into a positive. And yes, doing so is an example of ingenuity, and often it does take money.
And what about the reality of assumptions? All models are based on a set of assumptions. The question at hand is not whether the math is correct or "ordinary people" can run models, but about the underlying assumptions. As you state in your post, certain things are hard coded. These are assumptions. When the assumptions are wrong, so are the results. The invalidity of assumptions is the key problem with all models to date.
In order to get the assumptions right means doing a lot of work. Work that does not involve running simulations. It's called science. Hypothesis, experimentation, review, reformulate hypothesis. Repeat until all inconsistencies have been correctly resolved, and all observed phenomena have been accounted for and explained. Note that "running a model" does count as experimentation.
Those who run models do so based on assumptions they believe to be true, most of which have had no real work done to produce them (hence they are assumptions). For example, there is the assumption that CO2 is the cause of warming, not a result of it; the assumption that rates of CO2 growth will double, the assumption that humans are the cause.
And this last one is perhaps the most significant assumption. It is not proven, and I further submit that it can not be proven scientifically. This is the single largest problem with the Anthropogenic Human Warming "theory": it does not meet scientific criteria because it is not falsifiable. Falsifiable means that the means to prove it false do not exist. A significant test of models that purport to be accurate mus tbe able to correctly "predict the past". Yet none seem to try, and those that do tend to sweep their failure sunder the rug.
The underlying assumption to all "global warming" models is the exact effects of various gases and matter, the exact effect of which is not known, merely assumed. Each piece in isolation may have a known effect, but as nature shows us time and again what works in isolation rarely works "in the wild".
Running models based on unproven assumptions is not science. "Enabling" non-scientists to run models based on specific assumptions is not going to contribute to a better understanding anymore than writing cracker scripts for non-coders to run improves computer code.
Also great. How about prohibiting the collection and storage of data that is not necessary for business transactions in the first place ?
9 30228 instead.
Nope, instead they (the fedgov) are going to require them to keep more and more data. Why? because the government wants it. It's reminiscent of the old bumper sticker/slogan that says "Don't steal, the government hates competition.". The government is increasingly interested in any little piece of data it can get on you for any reason it desires. Since the likelihood (given past and current experience) is that the government will be immune to this legislation, it serves only to increase it's own ability to abuse.
After all, if people are aware of the problems with private data and information being readily available and susceptible to crackers, they are less likely to be willing to let the government amass a prime target database. So by providing the theater that says such databases are secure, they pave the way to people ignoring or downplaying the risk of exposure to government amassed databases and thus are less likely to resist and/or object.
"But it makes it a crime to hid breaches!" you say? Sure, lots of things are crimes. There are so many legally defined crimes that one can be reasonably certain one commits one or more any given day in the US. Government's only control over people is to make them criminals, and as such the rise of "big government" is done through increasing the chances you commit crimes. But the mere criminalization of something does not in reality necessarily curb it. In this case it is theater.
For example, banks are legally required to report all thefts, embezzlement, etc.. However, in cases of small amounts many financial institutions keep them internal. Making them known can lead to reputational concern after all, and in dealings with the Fedgov they can increase your costs. Instead of it actually curtailing anything, the most probable scenario is that politicians and bureaucrats will instead point to the low numbers of reports as proof that they did something, that we are safer, and that this shiny new database of your information that the FedGov wants to create is not really at risk because people don't do that sort of thing anymore.
Increasingly companies are purging or not recording data that is not useful or needful to their business. This is for several reasons including cost of storage and reduced legal fees.[1] But this doesn't make the power hungry happy. So we get things like this: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/07/1
1. When the fedgov knocks on the door and says "we want this data", it is much cheaper if you don't have said data and can reply with "we do not store that data and thus have none to turn over. It is also cheaper in that you can not have a privacy breach for data you don't have.
...not to mention I bet they follow tradition and exempt the government from abusing privacy, failing to publicly report breaches, etc..