There's no guarantee the climate would swing back by itself, even over a period of tens of millennia. Perhaps previous interglacial periods didn't eliminate the ice caps completely, but the careless emissions of a technological civilization would be enough to push us over the edge this time around.
It's broadly accepted that it's possible for a planet's climate to tip over out of a metastable state and enter a runaway process from which there is effectively no return. We're fairly sure it happened on Venus (runaway greenhouse), and evidence is increasing that it happened on Mars as well (runaway refrigerator). These processes happened, we assume, without any help from intelligent beings. Our own planet, though, is receiving plenty of "help" from countries who refuse to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.
Also I think you're being over-optimistic about what help we can expect from technology in dealing with extreme climate swings even of a "temporary" nature. How much do you think it would cost to re-terraform a whole planet? Who would want to foot the bill? Looking around at the poor uptake of sound ecological practices in the richest nations - ironically themselves the dirtiest polluters - from grass roots all the way up to the top, I'd say people in general have a strong tendency to mortgage the future of their great-grandchildren in order to maintain their own presently comfortable lifestyle.
Remember, gross climate change is by nature a very slow thing compared to the span of a human life. And humans are not very good at planning over such long timescales. The longest timescale of interest to our political leaders is about from here to the next election I'm afraid. And the movers and shakers of the commercial sector are mostly concerned with the next quarter's financial results and their prospects for a fat bonus.
What happens in even fifty years' time is always regarded as someone else's problem by any people self-interested enough to have wound up in charge of anything big.
The late L. Ron specialized in what was more or less old fashioned space opera - typical Hollywood fodder - so what with that and the fact that his cult seems to have assimilated half of the citizenry of Beverly Hills...
Actually though I'm no fan of Scientology, that "Invader's Plan" decalogy wasn't a bad read in a page-turning potboiler kind of way. You can just imagine the movie financiers drooling as they comtemplate a series of ten badly scripted movies.
Geez...judging solely by the rate of book-to-movie conversions you'd think Philip K Dick was the only Science Fiction author who ever put pen to paper. Okay he was good and all that, but there have been many many good science fiction authors then and since. This just reflects a maddening lack of imagination on Hollywood's part (oh what a surprise).
With the northern ice cap gone, the Earth's overall albedo will be lower, hence the planet absorbs more heat from the sun, the temperature goes up, Antarctica starts to melt, the Ross ice shelf slips down into the sea, then sea level DOES rise, then with the southern polar cap gone, the albedo falls even further... I think you see where this is going.
Point of interest...I saw Sir Patrick Moore's monthly TV spot "The Sky At Night" on BBC this week, and as you might have guessed, this time around they chose to focus on Mars. There were a number of University egg head Mars experts on the show, all involved with various Mars probe projects, analysis of Martian meteorites etc. One of the questions Sir Patrick asked them was "what about terraforming?". I was shocked to see that not *one* of them spoke in favour of terraforming even as a long term goal! Every one of them was in favour of preserving Mars' natural state indefinitely. Red Party indeed!
If you must play heavy rock to your little girl though then I hope you are aware just how sensitive an infant's inner ear is. Do keep the volume down, or by the time she starts school she will have suffered irreversible hearing loss.
I only mention this because the bands you mentioned are most often enjoyed with the volume turned up near to maximum. Since you are apparently an aficionado yourself, it's quite possible that what is almost deafening to her already registers as barely audible to you. If you can't get your hands on a noise meter to check for yourself then at least get an opinion from a responsible parent who is known to have an intact cochlea (i.e. no history of loud rock music or other headphone use).
I don't know the truth about Mozart's age when he composed the variations on what English speakers refer to as "Twinkle...", but I remember being told he was four - and a quick Google check before I posted turned up a few accounts claiming he was five, so I left it there.
Yeah, we get it already, big cliffs, rocks, blah blah.
I is a bit slow in places. Not to everybody's taste I suppose. But there were even some book critics who were impressed with it so it can't be all bad.
You might get on better with "The Years of Rice and Salt". It's quite literary and has a relaxed pace in KSR's usual way, though it doesn't drag like parts of the Mars trilogy. No rambling descriptions of terrain.
I find the best time to read his books are when you're on holiday, lying by the pool, and don't have to be in a hurry to go anywhere further than lunch at the poolside cafe.
[...] my baby's toys. She seems to prefer Metallica over Twinkle Twinkle Little Star anyway
Does this mean there's no hope for the future of free music? At least the classic folk melody, popularized by a five-year-old W.A. Mozart, is out of copyright and the decomposed composer doesn't insist upon users buying the CD. Your child needs educating about media industry politics!
Hopefully it's just that your offspring's musical tastes are appropriate for her age group (i.e. seriously infantile - after all, my own kids were heavily into CMTV at that age...).
Now that's very interesting. In the light of their recent announcement about tying up with SuSE as a Linux reseller I mean. No doubt they are expecting IBM's Linux business to be hampered by all the FUD, and with this promise to provide a safe harbour to their own Linux users, they obviously expect to be able to take up some of the slack.
Either way, it looks like Linux adoption by large corporates (which is really the main thing under threat from all the FUD) will be fully protected. After all big companies don't tend to buy their Linux from CheapBytes, they get it from their main supplier which is usually going to be Sun or IBM or somebody like that. If they don't now, then they are probably soon going to want to.
Many of the smaller companies who don't want to pay the extra bucks that such blue-chip support entails, will probably be prepared to take a risk and keep on with what they are doing. After all if they can;eeasily afford to pay the premium for protection by IBM or Sun, then they won't want to pay these extortionate licence fees to (or indeed start *any* kind of business relationship with) a clearly hostile and desperate company like SCO, either.
SCO's only oppportunity to make money out of this therefore lies in this introductory special offer period where a single CPU licence is "only" $699. More cautious SMEs may view this as an opportunity to take out insurance.
If my logic is correct then the best way to derail SCO's plan must be to do everything in our power to discourage wavering SME's CFOs from signing up to the SCO Licence during the special offer period. By the time the price has gone up to $1399 or whatever, any incentive to do so will very likely have disappeared entirely. By then competition between Sun, IBM and the rest of the commercial Linux providers should have pushed down the real TCO of indemnified licences to a few hundred dollars. And SCO will be *fucked*.
Isn't it obvious - industry representatives must have had a quiet word with the head of this body. Very likely this "quiet word" involved sending them on an expensive holiday or presenting them with a gift of a new set of golf clubs or something like that. Or just a plain bribe perhaps.
The head of the ACCC has no business representing the interests of a multinational organization against the interests of consumers. That is the exact opposite of what he is there for.
I suggest that all concerned Australians should give up attempting to persuade him and instead campaign loudly for his removal. I'm sure his successor would get the message.
OTOH you'd perhaps be surprised what kids take in their stride these days. There is sex, profanity and plentiful references to drugs highly visible in all forms of media now - even billboard hoardings frequently have content that makes me gasp with embarrassment. If you're thinking you can prevent your kids from seeing any of this - well, good luck is all I can say.
Anyway my personal strategy, if I get to a bit in the story that's too explicit, is to say "dot...dot...dot" (they know what *that* means) or to mumble and say "we'll skip this part, it's too boring". Which, for them, it is.
But it's probably occurred to you, as it occurred to me only after posting my comment, that the pacing is probably much too slow for the vast majority of under tens. I still might try it with my kids, I'll soon find out if they're dissatisfied:-\
BTW, have you tried Stephen Baxter's Voyage and Titan? For yourself I mean. They're similarly grounded in hard scientific fact (and old/currently available technology). Oh yes, I forgot: Voyage is about Mars (and both of them are kind of space adventure stories with a bit more action in them so your kids might like them too).
If your company is thinking about purchasing one, it is your duty to warn the decision makers that the purchased item is unuseable.
Wishful thinking on your part. If your company is thinking about purchasing one, then your company is likely the sort of company whose thinking is done by accountants and MBAs, people who rarely value the opinions of those they see as socially inadequate propellor heads.
Also you will have a hard time convincing them that there is any significant risk of being sued for violating the GPL part of combined licence that is self-incompatible. In fact, by the time you get through explaining the GPL to them they may very well recoil in horror and recommend abandoning Linux etc. altogether.
Darl McBride knows this very well and that is why he believes his FUD will work. If he had thought that the tech community were sufficiently empowered to call his bluff and make themselves heard at board level then he would never have started this. But he also knows that after the dot com crash, the bean counters seized the opportunity to thrust the techies back into the server room - and tech concerns (and tech knowledge) are no longer represented at board level in any meaningful way, in most companies.
I adore watching good movies on DVD with my kids too. It's my favourite pastime.
Unfortunately, there simply aren't any good movies about Mars. I've seen them all, and Hollywood apparently just isn't interested in what the planet is really like.
Having said that, there is one very, very good novel though. Why don't you try reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars to them instead. The whole book is very much to the point as far as Mars itself goes. It also depicts well what real science and real scientists are like. I guarantee you will all be spellbound by the characters, their stories, and most of all by the planet itself. And by the end, all of you will know just about everything that is known as about Mars today.
Yes, it's not a children's book - but then neither is the latest Harry Potter book really, which my two kids (8 and 9) are desparate for me to finish reading to them - so they can read it again by themselves:o) Heck, this is a good idea - I think I'm gonna read Red Mars to them next.
It's fairly big already - about 20 arcseconds I should think - and I've taken a look a few times already the past few days (in my 10" F5 reflector, 4mm ultrawide plossl eyepiece, magnification about 300x). Why look now before opposition? Because it has already passed it's maximum declination in mid-to-late July, even then at about only 25 degrees above the horison where I am, and is now getting lower each night. Even at maximum elevation it was so low that atmospheric distortion mucks up the image quite badly.
In fact, although this is supposed to be the closest opposition for maybe the past 60,000 years, the low elevation means it's not really such a great observation opportunity for astronomers in the northern hemisphere. I was just about able to make out the southern polar cap and some blurred greyish surface features in the southern hemisphere.
If you live further South though, there should be some really spectacular views with Mars almost overhead. And it's so bright that you don't need a large telescope - just a good one. And an equatorial mount is a must, because the damn thing moves so fast.
No paradigm is disappearing here. The paper referred to is not online but I just read his shorter paper Zeno's Paradoxes - A Timely Solution which deals with the same subject matter specifically as it relates the those famous paradoxes.
Unfortunately, it's incoherent bullshit. Lynd's theory looks like nothing more than philosophical rambling, and it doesn't appear to solve anything that hasn't already been solved by more rigorous means. The whole thing falls apart as soon as you admit other solutions for Zeno. And there are other solutions.
The solution I favour is given by an upper limit to the granularity of time, eg the Planck Time. If it is not possible to measure an interval shorter than the Planck Time, then Zeno's analysis cannot constitute an infinite series and thus the paradox is resolved.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no guarantee the climate would swing back by itself, even over a period of tens of millennia. Perhaps previous interglacial periods didn't eliminate the ice caps completely, but the careless emissions of a technological civilization would be enough to push us over the edge this time around.
It's broadly accepted that it's possible for a planet's climate to tip over out of a metastable state and enter a runaway process from which there is effectively no return. We're fairly sure it happened on Venus (runaway greenhouse), and evidence is increasing that it happened on Mars as well (runaway refrigerator). These processes happened, we assume, without any help from intelligent beings. Our own planet, though, is receiving plenty of "help" from countries who refuse to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions.
Also I think you're being over-optimistic about what help we can expect from technology in dealing with extreme climate swings even of a "temporary" nature. How much do you think it would cost to re-terraform a whole planet? Who would want to foot the bill? Looking around at the poor uptake of sound ecological practices in the richest nations - ironically themselves the dirtiest polluters - from grass roots all the way up to the top, I'd say people in general have a strong tendency to mortgage the future of their great-grandchildren in order to maintain their own presently comfortable lifestyle.
Remember, gross climate change is by nature a very slow thing compared to the span of a human life. And humans are not very good at planning over such long timescales. The longest timescale of interest to our political leaders is about from here to the next election I'm afraid. And the movers and shakers of the commercial sector are mostly concerned with the next quarter's financial results and their prospects for a fat bonus.
What happens in even fifty years' time is always regarded as someone else's problem by any people self-interested enough to have wound up in charge of anything big.
You are the funmeister. Three laughs in one comment, damn you! Now I have to clean up all this coffee off my screen...
The late L. Ron specialized in what was more or less old fashioned space opera - typical Hollywood fodder - so what with that and the fact that his cult seems to have assimilated half of the citizenry of Beverly Hills...
Actually though I'm no fan of Scientology, that "Invader's Plan" decalogy wasn't a bad read in a page-turning potboiler kind of way. You can just imagine the movie financiers drooling as they comtemplate a series of ten badly scripted movies.
Geez...judging solely by the rate of book-to-movie conversions you'd think Philip K Dick was the only Science Fiction author who ever put pen to paper. Okay he was good and all that, but there have been many many good science fiction authors then and since. This just reflects a maddening lack of imagination on Hollywood's part (oh what a surprise).
With the northern ice cap gone, the Earth's overall albedo will be lower, hence the planet absorbs more heat from the sun, the temperature goes up, Antarctica starts to melt, the Ross ice shelf slips down into the sea, then sea level DOES rise, then with the southern polar cap gone, the albedo falls even further... I think you see where this is going.
Pass me the sun cream.
Still don't think it's funny, but I apologise unreservedly for my earlier outburst.
Dunno what came over me. It was clearly way past my bedtime.
What fuckwits modded up this drivel?
But in this case, it's bound to be an *evil* duplicate.
Professor Dolores Umbridge strikes again! Evil old b^H witch!
Point of interest...I saw Sir Patrick Moore's monthly TV spot "The Sky At Night" on BBC this week, and as you might have guessed, this time around they chose to focus on Mars. There were a number of University egg head Mars experts on the show, all involved with various Mars probe projects, analysis of Martian meteorites etc. One of the questions Sir Patrick asked them was "what about terraforming?". I was shocked to see that not *one* of them spoke in favour of terraforming even as a long term goal! Every one of them was in favour of preserving Mars' natural state indefinitely. Red Party indeed!
*sigh* ... Now we know how slow do things have to get before Slashdot is reduced to reposting last year's tech news.
If you must play heavy rock to your little girl though then I hope you are aware just how sensitive an infant's inner ear is. Do keep the volume down, or by the time she starts school she will have suffered irreversible hearing loss.
I only mention this because the bands you mentioned are most often enjoyed with the volume turned up near to maximum. Since you are apparently an aficionado yourself, it's quite possible that what is almost deafening to her already registers as barely audible to you. If you can't get your hands on a noise meter to check for yourself then at least get an opinion from a responsible parent who is known to have an intact cochlea (i.e. no history of loud rock music or other headphone use).
I don't know the truth about Mozart's age when he composed the variations on what English speakers refer to as "Twinkle...", but I remember being told he was four - and a quick Google check before I posted turned up a few accounts claiming he was five, so I left it there.
I is a bit slow in places. Not to everybody's taste I suppose. But there were even some book critics who were impressed with it so it can't be all bad.
You might get on better with "The Years of Rice and Salt". It's quite literary and has a relaxed pace in KSR's usual way, though it doesn't drag like parts of the Mars trilogy. No rambling descriptions of terrain.
I find the best time to read his books are when you're on holiday, lying by the pool, and don't have to be in a hurry to go anywhere further than lunch at the poolside cafe.
You wouldn't happen to know where I could pick up ... a shrubbery?
Your sig reveals why...these are not page turners or pot boilers, they are books to be lived in.
Does this mean there's no hope for the future of free music? At least the classic folk melody, popularized by a five-year-old W.A. Mozart, is out of copyright and the decomposed composer doesn't insist upon users buying the CD. Your child needs educating about media industry politics!
Hopefully it's just that your offspring's musical tastes are appropriate for her age group (i.e. seriously infantile - after all, my own kids were heavily into CMTV at that age...).
Now that's very interesting. In the light of their recent announcement about tying up with SuSE as a Linux reseller I mean. No doubt they are expecting IBM's Linux business to be hampered by all the FUD, and with this promise to provide a safe harbour to their own Linux users, they obviously expect to be able to take up some of the slack.
Either way, it looks like Linux adoption by large corporates (which is really the main thing under threat from all the FUD) will be fully protected. After all big companies don't tend to buy their Linux from CheapBytes, they get it from their main supplier which is usually going to be Sun or IBM or somebody like that. If they don't now, then they are probably soon going to want to.
Many of the smaller companies who don't want to pay the extra bucks that such blue-chip support entails, will probably be prepared to take a risk and keep on with what they are doing. After all if they can;eeasily afford to pay the premium for protection by IBM or Sun, then they won't want to pay these extortionate licence fees to (or indeed start *any* kind of business relationship with) a clearly hostile and desperate company like SCO, either.
SCO's only oppportunity to make money out of this therefore lies in this introductory special offer period where a single CPU licence is "only" $699. More cautious SMEs may view this as an opportunity to take out insurance.
If my logic is correct then the best way to derail SCO's plan must be to do everything in our power to discourage wavering SME's CFOs from signing up to the SCO Licence during the special offer period. By the time the price has gone up to $1399 or whatever, any incentive to do so will very likely have disappeared entirely. By then competition between Sun, IBM and the rest of the commercial Linux providers should have pushed down the real TCO of indemnified licences to a few hundred dollars. And SCO will be *fucked*.
--
"Proper fucked?"
"Yeah, proper fucked."
Isn't it obvious - industry representatives must have had a quiet word with the head of this body. Very likely this "quiet word" involved sending them on an expensive holiday or presenting them with a gift of a new set of golf clubs or something like that. Or just a plain bribe perhaps.
The head of the ACCC has no business representing the interests of a multinational organization against the interests of consumers. That is the exact opposite of what he is there for.
I suggest that all concerned Australians should give up attempting to persuade him and instead campaign loudly for his removal. I'm sure his successor would get the message.
I was thinking that too.
OTOH you'd perhaps be surprised what kids take in their stride these days. There is sex, profanity and plentiful references to drugs highly visible in all forms of media now - even billboard hoardings frequently have content that makes me gasp with embarrassment. If you're thinking you can prevent your kids from seeing any of this - well, good luck is all I can say.
Anyway my personal strategy, if I get to a bit in the story that's too explicit, is to say "dot...dot...dot" (they know what *that* means) or to mumble and say "we'll skip this part, it's too boring". Which, for them, it is.
But it's probably occurred to you, as it occurred to me only after posting my comment, that the pacing is probably much too slow for the vast majority of under tens. I still might try it with my kids, I'll soon find out if they're dissatisfied :-\
BTW, have you tried Stephen Baxter's Voyage and Titan ? For yourself I mean. They're similarly grounded in hard scientific fact (and old/currently available technology). Oh yes, I forgot: Voyage is about Mars (and both of them are kind of space adventure stories with a bit more action in them so your kids might like them too).
Wishful thinking on your part. If your company is thinking about purchasing one, then your company is likely the sort of company whose thinking is done by accountants and MBAs, people who rarely value the opinions of those they see as socially inadequate propellor heads.
Also you will have a hard time convincing them that there is any significant risk of being sued for violating the GPL part of combined licence that is self-incompatible. In fact, by the time you get through explaining the GPL to them they may very well recoil in horror and recommend abandoning Linux etc. altogether.
Darl McBride knows this very well and that is why he believes his FUD will work. If he had thought that the tech community were sufficiently empowered to call his bluff and make themselves heard at board level then he would never have started this. But he also knows that after the dot com crash, the bean counters seized the opportunity to thrust the techies back into the server room - and tech concerns (and tech knowledge) are no longer represented at board level in any meaningful way, in most companies.
Unfortunately, there simply aren't any good movies about Mars. I've seen them all, and Hollywood apparently just isn't interested in what the planet is really like.
Having said that, there is one very, very good novel though. Why don't you try reading Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars to them instead. The whole book is very much to the point as far as Mars itself goes. It also depicts well what real science and real scientists are like. I guarantee you will all be spellbound by the characters, their stories, and most of all by the planet itself. And by the end, all of you will know just about everything that is known as about Mars today.
Yes, it's not a children's book - but then neither is the latest Harry Potter book really, which my two kids (8 and 9) are desparate for me to finish reading to them - so they can read it again by themselves :o) Heck, this is a good idea - I think I'm gonna read Red Mars to them next.
It's fairly big already - about 20 arcseconds I should think - and I've taken a look a few times already the past few days (in my 10" F5 reflector, 4mm ultrawide plossl eyepiece, magnification about 300x). Why look now before opposition? Because it has already passed it's maximum declination in mid-to-late July, even then at about only 25 degrees above the horison where I am, and is now getting lower each night. Even at maximum elevation it was so low that atmospheric distortion mucks up the image quite badly.
In fact, although this is supposed to be the closest opposition for maybe the past 60,000 years, the low elevation means it's not really such a great observation opportunity for astronomers in the northern hemisphere. I was just about able to make out the southern polar cap and some blurred greyish surface features in the southern hemisphere.
If you live further South though, there should be some really spectacular views with Mars almost overhead. And it's so bright that you don't need a large telescope - just a good one. And an equatorial mount is a must, because the damn thing moves so fast.
No paradigm is disappearing here. The paper referred to is not online but I just read his shorter paper Zeno's Paradoxes - A Timely Solution which deals with the same subject matter specifically as it relates the those famous paradoxes. Unfortunately, it's incoherent bullshit. Lynd's theory looks like nothing more than philosophical rambling, and it doesn't appear to solve anything that hasn't already been solved by more rigorous means. The whole thing falls apart as soon as you admit other solutions for Zeno. And there are other solutions. The solution I favour is given by an upper limit to the granularity of time, eg the Planck Time. If it is not possible to measure an interval shorter than the Planck Time, then Zeno's analysis cannot constitute an infinite series and thus the paradox is resolved.
Or some chap called "Ibid" :o)