I know a few lawyers that would jump on that comment. Of course "health care" businiesses in general and HCSC in particular are notoriously disinterested in anything but the management's pay checks and bonuses. What other sector would pass out mugs that read "May Your Cup Always be Half Full" - no joke.
They agree on HOW to learn about those things. There's a huge gulf between empirical observations and explanatory theory. There are plenty of cosmologists around that do not accept the Big Bang theory even now - in fact, there are probably proportionately more now than 20 years ago. There are thousands of climatologists, geologists, meteorologists, and physicists who think that anthropogenic globe warming is crap. Few, if any, though disagree with the opposing theoreticians about the fundamental methods required to actually gain an understanding. What is interesting from an anthropology-of-science view point is that often these divisions between theory-based cliques lies along the divide between observation-based theory and theory-based observation. Theory-based observation expects observations to help verify theory, while observation-theorists often take any unexpected observation as grounds for new theory. The division that emerges is from the basic divide between mind sets that are convinced they have an explanation and mind sets that are convinced they have found a shortcoming the popular theory does not cover. Cliques tend to nucleate around issues and - ideally - new or modified theory emerges. The disagreement is not a bad thing necessarily, but occasionally it can devolve into what amounts to gang warfare.
Bullies are scum. No 'if onlies,' no 'buts.' There's no reason why a kid with difficulty understanding social cues should spend grade school making sure an upper grade bully got fat off his lunch money. No one 'makes' a bully steal your stuff, throw tarred rocks at you or generally lurk around for a chance to otherwise make your life miserable. All understanding the social cues offers is the knowledge of whom to avoid. There's a reason so many bullies go by handles like "Chopper," "Dumbo" and "Buddy" (all ones that I knew personally) and it isn't because they're brightest bulbs in the lamp. However, my dad always said 'don't get mad, get even.' I expect that Buddy never did understand why when he stole my home work he still got D's, and I still got A's.
Great, this could put a whole new light on lost baggage:
"Dear Mr. Jones. Your baggage was fired Tuesday. It should have arrived at the ISS before you did. Unfortunately, the capture system failed. The capsule has entered an unstable, atmosphere grazing orbit and will burn upon re-entry in about two weeks. We're sorry, but this loss is covered in the waiver you signed.
Sincerely,
A. Pratt"
There are several published surveys of criminals in prison investigating what they do, how they evaluate targets, and what conditions discourage them from operating in given localities. The risk of being shot by a victim is a major factor. Apparently even criminals are capable of minimal cost-benefit analysis.
Actually, the mineral as specified in your example is a natural substance - "rock mineral". While modern and moronic patent examiners might indeed grant a patent on the mineral they should not have done so. The treatment in your example is novel and an invention and therefore should be patentable. Patenting the mineral itself forecloses on a fact of nature and as such would preempt any investigation of other properties of the mineral by anyone not holding the patent until the patent expired, regardless of how those properties were applied. Suppose for instance that lurking in the catalytic properties of the mineral was a trait that would - say - convert copper to a room-temperature superconductor - no such thing, but just suppose. That use of the mineral could in no way be construed as an infringement on your medical method for treating cancer using the mineral. Your persistence in defending a patent of a naturally occurring mineral would have delayed the advancement of science in general, physics in particular, and technology as well, merely because you are "protecting" your "discovery." In fact given the results of the University of Mississippi's attempt to patent tumeric, it seems possible that even your method of treatment might not be patentable if any prior art could be demonstrated.
You plainly don't know science, and apparently missed the educational boat as well, if you are seriously pitching that "ivory tower" metaphor. If I assume your post is serious and not troll bait, you've been paying to much attention to the media declarations about nullities like "scientific consensus." There is not one field of science where there is uniform consensus among practitioners about anything. In very field you will find that the practitioners are divided into cliques, some of whom may have the media's and the politicians' ears and some of whom do not. These divisions would not exist if there was a true acceptance among the practitioners that a given theory was _the_ way things work. Not only that, science is not a democracy and the fact that a view is widely accepted is no assurance that it is true. If this were true, we would still be using Ptolemaic cosmology and fires would burn because of phlogiston.
You will often find many individuals in a field who treat some particular theory as the right one. I'm inclined to think that about plate tectonics for example. That does not mean that the currently preferred explanation is the correct one or the last word. There are dissenters in every field (even some geologists who doubt plate tectonics), even in fields that look pretty well settled, and they are dissenters (justifiably so) because the current and preferred explanation is _not_ quite adequate to all data available in the field. This the case from archaeology to cosmology, and as long as a given theory is not adequate to all phenomena addressed in a study area, that area will continue to be a science.
The chief reason monocultures are a threat is that they represent a point source of failure. A single worm or trojan targeted at a weakness on a ubiquitous piece of software can take down every system exposed to it. If only a third of the systems exposed to a threat are vulnerable, the toxicity - so to speak - of the threat is far less. It is fairly obvious that no OS presents absolute security. The first Internet worm after all ran on Unix systems. Linux also has its hazards otherwise we would not have chkrootkit installed and running periodically.
Microsoft, though, is far and away the easy target because it IS the big target out there. We who adhere to OS's with lower target cross-sections salute your bravery and also thank you for volunteering to take point.
There are other targets of opportunity for black hats though, including Apache, Java, Flash and other utilities that are potentially more widespread than Windows, since they run on multiple OSs. However, the creators of cracks for these systems still seem to expect that the underlying OS will be Windows. So again, we thank you for being the proud targets you are.
My view is that a text should supply sufficient information to get a handle on a subject or an area of study. It can't provide activity - that's a teacher's job - and besides, if I saw an "active book" I'ld probably shoot it on principle. The teacher's business is to persuade students to think, help them take in and apply information logically and critically, the text's task is to inform the thought process.
Courses where the "material" is in part or as a whole a matter of opinion: history, politics, history, anthropology, history, economics, etc. create a problem for this process for several reasons. The biggest is that special interest groups, i.e. minorities, "authorities," text book authors, etc., each have their own take on things and think it is as reliable as gravity. School boards, being elected bodies, as a rule are not made up of well-educated literate people with a feel for the fuzziness of much of what we (as our own special interest group) take for granted. Consequently, in Kipling's words they are often "lead by the loudest throat." The history of India, which has recently played such a part in California educational debate for instance is so immense and complex that even the inhabitants of India cannot agree on large parts of it. It is absurd to expect the California State Board of Education to be able to identify a good, well rounded book on Indian history that does not peeve someone. They listen to the loudest throats and cross their fingers in hopes the loud ones aren't whack jobs.
I'm not certain this can ever be mitigated let alone fixed.
You really should check things like article links more carefully if you want to quibble about "news" versus "discussion." The summary link: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/04/small-windmills-test-results.html, astonishingly is to a "journal." It is the author of the journal article that asserts that "small" windmills "are a swindle." The references to "design" by the OP also appear to derive from an uncited link: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/09/urban-windmills.html, to another journal article that debunked small windmills as a poor investment, or as the authors of the linked article put it "fundamentally flawed." There is in fact apparently nothing in the summary by the OP that does not appear to derive from a "journal" source, if you consider that important. So, evidently it really IS news, wouldn't you say?
Actually, you can argue quite readily that evolution - at least the genetic diversity aspect - is driven by entropy. When you run that diversity over a selective grid, you get an illusion of "progress" which is what creationists frequently confound with evolution. Since it isn't, the whole issue is and has always been a debate over a strawman.
Photosynthesis relies on more than light to do the job. They would still require CO2, H2O, and various critical minerals and amino acids, not including all the raft of other things a biologist would list. So, the question, "what do they eat" is a really interesting one.
You know, thinking about it, since photosynthesis relies on CO2 as a key component to synthesize carbohydrates, possibly they've found a counter for global warming! I'm sure none of the existing AGW climate models include a atmospheric, CO2-fixing bacteria factor.
I suspect that these early trauma are what lead me to a degree in anthropology. It didn't really help since none of the choices offered were ethnicities in the anthropological sense at all! Anthropologically, two are "races" in that inappropriately broad, sweeping sense that "race" has come to be used, two are geographic affiliation choices, and one is a catch-all. None are "ethnic" as an anthropologist would see it, at least when I was completing my course work.
When I was in high school, back before there WERE cell phones or digital cameras, we were asked to identify our "ethnicity," whereever the "ethnicity" was a quarter or more of our ancestry - as part of the initial efforts at "affirmative action" I think. Anyway the choices were "White, Black, Native American, Iberian, and Other." Since my mother was half Portugese, I put down Iberian. I was called in by an examiner and asked to explain, and I cited my twenty-five percent Portugese descent. This lead to a confusing interchange where the fellow attempted to convince me that Portugal was not "Iberian" - since the Portugese didn't speak Spanish - while I pointed that you can't get any farther west on the Iberian penninsula without getting wet. Since then whenever asked about ethnicity, I check "Other" and write in "Lusitanian." It generates an occasional baffled look, but at least I'm not subjected to irrational geography lessons.
I don't regard either Windows or Linux as "less useable." Linux is "infinitely" less expensive though, and for me that is an important point. I'ld rather learn more than spend more.
Since I don't use firewire on anything, I can't speak to the issue there. However, with USB, "it just works" pretty much covers the ground. This also is true of cd and dvd drives I've installed. Windows always whines - as you say - about the drivers. Once that's done, both OSs do the job.
Setting the locale should be effectively all you have to do in any major Linux distro. The "control panel" isn't named that and isn't where it would be in XP. You set locality and languages. My daughter does this in linux with no difficulty, and has introduced me to some really good Russian rock music and musicians such as DDT and Zemfira.
The real bottom line to running linux is simple willingness to spend time learning. I use XP at work, and linux primarily and XP secondarily at home. Ten years ago patience was not an option and linux was somewhat more arcane than Windows 98. At this time, IF you have equivalent experience with both OS's, any major linux distro is arguably going to be a quicker basic install and easier to maintain than XP. For one thing as far as maintenance goes there is no registry to get futzed up every month or so - my experience is that the registry getting gummed up is XP's chief reason for sluggishness. The sole upside that Windows has presently is the few really useful software pieces - such as Adobe Photoshop - that run natively in XP.
I've heard the complaint that hardware support is a problem in linux, and again, ten years ago it was a pretty esoteric issue, what with editing printer drivers and such - but it often was something that could be dealt with using a text editor - I wrote a little access script for a usb microscope that worked for as long as I had the 'scope. These days, there is little to chose between linux and XP. In fact, for USB hardware that can be accessed as mass storage, linux is far easier. I don't need to add drivers to download photographs for instance, or to use a thumb drive. XP still seems to flinch and blink rapidly when ever new hardware appears and needs a driver before the hardware can be accessed.
So, don't confuse the weight of your experience with Windows with 'ease of use,' it's an illusion. Your knowledge makes Windows easier and also makes linux _appear_ more difficult.
Not really. The real trouble is that there is no longer any social consensus regarding what makes a "good" teacher. Fundamentalists for instance don't want their kids taught bad things like sex education and "evilution." Liberals don't want the kids taught capitalism; conservatives don't want the kids taught Marxism. Social relativists don't wan't kids taught that some language format or some kind of logic is better than any other "way of knowing." And, some don't want anything "offensive" taught.
The OP never bothered to read the article, or has some strange ideas about carbon dating. The article title is just wrong. The 13C/12C ratio doesn't offer a date of any kind. What it has been used for, as the article says, is to infer when life begins to be an important player in the planetary environment. The article explains that a researcher has identified flaws in how the ratio is estimated. Nothing what-so-ever to do with "carbon dating." Instead it has to do with estimated dates of the ratio changes. The dates are probably Uranium based dates (you can't date anything more than about 50,000 years old using radiocarbon). The C13/C12 ratio estimated from proxies FOR that date are apparently in error.
The weather is never "the same as it used to be" and never has been. There is no homeostatic state to which the climate tends on any scale of less than about 100,000 years or so - the Milankovitch Cycle. Enough of those cycles and you might argue for an average state that the climate tends to cycle within - a temperature range between about 2 degrees C warmer than the present and about 8 degrees C colder. Shorter random oscillations also occur and superimposed on those are even shorter oscillations that also appear random. This is visible in the younger portions of the Vostok ice core data and the EPICA ice data for instance. (You can find the comparative chart of Vostok and EPICA delta O18 for the last 3,000 years on Wikipedia). The more pronounced short term oscillations would be termed Dansgaard/Oeschger events. The present - as of 1998 - slight warming does not even come up to more than a slight bit of noise in that data.
There are all kinds of really good reasons to clean up the atmosphere from better health to better astronomy. Climate "trends" is not one of them.
Certainly we are. From a geological and archaeological standpoint, the effects won't be significant to life on the plant. During most of the period of vertebrate life on this planet atmospheric CO2 has been many times higher than the present, which may be the lowest it has been in the last billion years or so. Life thrived throughout that span.
However, you are right. The real question is whether the effects are are important to humanity, and if they are, how they are. Even slight warming - or cooling - will adversely effect millions.
Contra Gore, we really don't know what we "should" do about whatever effects we are having on the climate. CO2 warming is only one human-generated climate effect and far the most difficult to measure. Look at the "global dimming" that affected much of the globe from the 1950s through the 1990s - and continues to effect large regions at present. That is readily measured, has clear effects on crop productivity, and during the '70s very likely had a role in the expansion of the Saharan desert in northern Africa.
Claiming responsibility for "global warming" is a comforting thought, because it gives us an illusion of potential control - and idea of what we must do - and if things don't improve, then we know who to sue. But if we were to eliminate our CO2 contribution, what would that do? Can we even be confident it would a "good" idea? The cycle reflected in the Vostok ice core and similar ice cores indicates that _right_now_ we should be sliding into a new glacial epoch for the next 30,000-50,000 years or so. During the last glacial epoch the Baltic, Russia, Scandinavia, Ireland, Scotland and England were under immense ice sheets, and most of the rest of Europe was only marginally habitable. North America was in a similar case. Canada was uninhabitable and so was the Great Lakes, the Dakotas, Idaho, Montana and New England.
Presumably, the same process that would reduce CO2 emissions would also reduce dust and particulates, which would still leave other, lesser human generated climate effects - and the natural trend. If the particulates and dust don't go away, the dimming effects could compound a natural cooling trend. Think of _those_ geopolitics. Russia's steppes become _less_ productive (and they aren't called the "famine steppes" for nothing). Starvation will not improve the ambient mood there.
Prehistorically and historically the solution to your home becoming inhospitable is to move. When entire landscapes become inhospitable, nations move, or die. Just ask an Irishman. At present, there is no space for climatically displaced nations to migrate. They will not willingly sit quietly and starve, and they will not willingly forget who they are. Nor will there be many willing host nations, happy to sacrifice land and living standards to strangers. Conflict is pretty much inevitable. In the current global situation, regardless of which direction the climate moves in - and it will move - the results will not be pleasant.
So, I reckon that climate change is inevitable, and I can't see that anything we do would actually make things better for the human race in its present situation. The current debate about global warming seems to suppose upon the one side that we can "put it back like it was." While on the other, that we are unimportant in the scheme of things. But we can't put it back, and we are affecting things. We should proceed from there.
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I know a few lawyers that would jump on that comment. Of course "health care" businiesses in general and HCSC in particular are notoriously disinterested in anything but the management's pay checks and bonuses. What other sector would pass out mugs that read "May Your Cup Always be Half Full" - no joke.
They agree on HOW to learn about those things. There's a huge gulf between empirical observations and explanatory theory. There are plenty of cosmologists around that do not accept the Big Bang theory even now - in fact, there are probably proportionately more now than 20 years ago. There are thousands of climatologists, geologists, meteorologists, and physicists who think that anthropogenic globe warming is crap. Few, if any, though disagree with the opposing theoreticians about the fundamental methods required to actually gain an understanding. What is interesting from an anthropology-of-science view point is that often these divisions between theory-based cliques lies along the divide between observation-based theory and theory-based observation. Theory-based observation expects observations to help verify theory, while observation-theorists often take any unexpected observation as grounds for new theory. The division that emerges is from the basic divide between mind sets that are convinced they have an explanation and mind sets that are convinced they have found a shortcoming the popular theory does not cover. Cliques tend to nucleate around issues and - ideally - new or modified theory emerges. The disagreement is not a bad thing necessarily, but occasionally it can devolve into what amounts to gang warfare.
Bullies are scum. No 'if onlies,' no 'buts.' There's no reason why a kid with difficulty understanding social cues should spend grade school making sure an upper grade bully got fat off his lunch money. No one 'makes' a bully steal your stuff, throw tarred rocks at you or generally lurk around for a chance to otherwise make your life miserable. All understanding the social cues offers is the knowledge of whom to avoid. There's a reason so many bullies go by handles like "Chopper," "Dumbo" and "Buddy" (all ones that I knew personally) and it isn't because they're brightest bulbs in the lamp. However, my dad always said 'don't get mad, get even.' I expect that Buddy never did understand why when he stole my home work he still got D's, and I still got A's.
Great, this could put a whole new light on lost baggage: "Dear Mr. Jones. Your baggage was fired Tuesday. It should have arrived at the ISS before you did. Unfortunately, the capture system failed. The capsule has entered an unstable, atmosphere grazing orbit and will burn upon re-entry in about two weeks. We're sorry, but this loss is covered in the waiver you signed. Sincerely, A. Pratt"
There are several published surveys of criminals in prison investigating what they do, how they evaluate targets, and what conditions discourage them from operating in given localities. The risk of being shot by a victim is a major factor. Apparently even criminals are capable of minimal cost-benefit analysis.
Do you mean to say that if a photo of your wife appeared like this you wouldn't contact her for a date? Tsk!
Actually, the mineral as specified in your example is a natural substance - "rock mineral". While modern and moronic patent examiners might indeed grant a patent on the mineral they should not have done so. The treatment in your example is novel and an invention and therefore should be patentable. Patenting the mineral itself forecloses on a fact of nature and as such would preempt any investigation of other properties of the mineral by anyone not holding the patent until the patent expired, regardless of how those properties were applied. Suppose for instance that lurking in the catalytic properties of the mineral was a trait that would - say - convert copper to a room-temperature superconductor - no such thing, but just suppose. That use of the mineral could in no way be construed as an infringement on your medical method for treating cancer using the mineral. Your persistence in defending a patent of a naturally occurring mineral would have delayed the advancement of science in general, physics in particular, and technology as well, merely because you are "protecting" your "discovery." In fact given the results of the University of Mississippi's attempt to patent tumeric, it seems possible that even your method of treatment might not be patentable if any prior art could be demonstrated.
The only lots I ever met against bare arms were fundamentalist Muslims and OSHA.
You plainly don't know science, and apparently missed the educational boat as well, if you are seriously pitching that "ivory tower" metaphor. If I assume your post is serious and not troll bait, you've been paying to much attention to the media declarations about nullities like "scientific consensus." There is not one field of science where there is uniform consensus among practitioners about anything. In very field you will find that the practitioners are divided into cliques, some of whom may have the media's and the politicians' ears and some of whom do not. These divisions would not exist if there was a true acceptance among the practitioners that a given theory was _the_ way things work. Not only that, science is not a democracy and the fact that a view is widely accepted is no assurance that it is true. If this were true, we would still be using Ptolemaic cosmology and fires would burn because of phlogiston.
You will often find many individuals in a field who treat some particular theory as the right one. I'm inclined to think that about plate tectonics for example. That does not mean that the currently preferred explanation is the correct one or the last word. There are dissenters in every field (even some geologists who doubt plate tectonics), even in fields that look pretty well settled, and they are dissenters (justifiably so) because the current and preferred explanation is _not_ quite adequate to all data available in the field. This the case from archaeology to cosmology, and as long as a given theory is not adequate to all phenomena addressed in a study area, that area will continue to be a science.
The chief reason monocultures are a threat is that they represent a point source of failure. A single worm or trojan targeted at a weakness on a ubiquitous piece of software can take down every system exposed to it. If only a third of the systems exposed to a threat are vulnerable, the toxicity - so to speak - of the threat is far less. It is fairly obvious that no OS presents absolute security. The first Internet worm after all ran on Unix systems. Linux also has its hazards otherwise we would not have chkrootkit installed and running periodically.
Microsoft, though, is far and away the easy target because it IS the big target out there. We who adhere to OS's with lower target cross-sections salute your bravery and also thank you for volunteering to take point.
There are other targets of opportunity for black hats though, including Apache, Java, Flash and other utilities that are potentially more widespread than Windows, since they run on multiple OSs. However, the creators of cracks for these systems still seem to expect that the underlying OS will be Windows. So again, we thank you for being the proud targets you are.
My view is that a text should supply sufficient information to get a handle on a subject or an area of study. It can't provide activity - that's a teacher's job - and besides, if I saw an "active book" I'ld probably shoot it on principle. The teacher's business is to persuade students to think, help them take in and apply information logically and critically, the text's task is to inform the thought process.
Courses where the "material" is in part or as a whole a matter of opinion: history, politics, history, anthropology, history, economics, etc. create a problem for this process for several reasons. The biggest is that special interest groups, i.e. minorities, "authorities," text book authors, etc., each have their own take on things and think it is as reliable as gravity. School boards, being elected bodies, as a rule are not made up of well-educated literate people with a feel for the fuzziness of much of what we (as our own special interest group) take for granted. Consequently, in Kipling's words they are often "lead by the loudest throat." The history of India, which has recently played such a part in California educational debate for instance is so immense and complex that even the inhabitants of India cannot agree on large parts of it. It is absurd to expect the California State Board of Education to be able to identify a good, well rounded book on Indian history that does not peeve someone. They listen to the loudest throats and cross their fingers in hopes the loud ones aren't whack jobs.
I'm not certain this can ever be mitigated let alone fixed.
Just accord such blogs a generalized Amicus curiae status.
You really should check things like article links more carefully if you want to quibble about "news" versus "discussion." The summary link: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/04/small-windmills-test-results.html, astonishingly is to a "journal." It is the author of the journal article that asserts that "small" windmills "are a swindle." The references to "design" by the OP also appear to derive from an uncited link: http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/09/urban-windmills.html, to another journal article that debunked small windmills as a poor investment, or as the authors of the linked article put it "fundamentally flawed." There is in fact apparently nothing in the summary by the OP that does not appear to derive from a "journal" source, if you consider that important. So, evidently it really IS news, wouldn't you say?
Actually, you can argue quite readily that evolution - at least the genetic diversity aspect - is driven by entropy. When you run that diversity over a selective grid, you get an illusion of "progress" which is what creationists frequently confound with evolution. Since it isn't, the whole issue is and has always been a debate over a strawman.
You know, thinking about it, since photosynthesis relies on CO2 as a key component to synthesize carbohydrates, possibly they've found a counter for global warming! I'm sure none of the existing AGW climate models include a atmospheric, CO2-fixing bacteria factor.
I suspect that these early trauma are what lead me to a degree in anthropology. It didn't really help since none of the choices offered were ethnicities in the anthropological sense at all! Anthropologically, two are "races" in that inappropriately broad, sweeping sense that "race" has come to be used, two are geographic affiliation choices, and one is a catch-all. None are "ethnic" as an anthropologist would see it, at least when I was completing my course work.
When I was in high school, back before there WERE cell phones or digital cameras, we were asked to identify our "ethnicity," whereever the "ethnicity" was a quarter or more of our ancestry - as part of the initial efforts at "affirmative action" I think. Anyway the choices were "White, Black, Native American, Iberian, and Other." Since my mother was half Portugese, I put down Iberian. I was called in by an examiner and asked to explain, and I cited my twenty-five percent Portugese descent. This lead to a confusing interchange where the fellow attempted to convince me that Portugal was not "Iberian" - since the Portugese didn't speak Spanish - while I pointed that you can't get any farther west on the Iberian penninsula without getting wet. Since then whenever asked about ethnicity, I check "Other" and write in "Lusitanian." It generates an occasional baffled look, but at least I'm not subjected to irrational geography lessons.
From now on I will describe myself as being from Australia (a small country near New Zealand).
Wouldn't that actually be a "small continent" near New Zealand?
Well, look at the bright side. It is not bad news for Microsoft. ;-)
Since I don't use firewire on anything, I can't speak to the issue there. However, with USB, "it just works" pretty much covers the ground. This also is true of cd and dvd drives I've installed. Windows always whines - as you say - about the drivers. Once that's done, both OSs do the job.
Setting the locale should be effectively all you have to do in any major Linux distro. The "control panel" isn't named that and isn't where it would be in XP. You set locality and languages. My daughter does this in linux with no difficulty, and has introduced me to some really good Russian rock music and musicians such as DDT and Zemfira. The real bottom line to running linux is simple willingness to spend time learning. I use XP at work, and linux primarily and XP secondarily at home. Ten years ago patience was not an option and linux was somewhat more arcane than Windows 98. At this time, IF you have equivalent experience with both OS's, any major linux distro is arguably going to be a quicker basic install and easier to maintain than XP. For one thing as far as maintenance goes there is no registry to get futzed up every month or so - my experience is that the registry getting gummed up is XP's chief reason for sluggishness. The sole upside that Windows has presently is the few really useful software pieces - such as Adobe Photoshop - that run natively in XP. I've heard the complaint that hardware support is a problem in linux, and again, ten years ago it was a pretty esoteric issue, what with editing printer drivers and such - but it often was something that could be dealt with using a text editor - I wrote a little access script for a usb microscope that worked for as long as I had the 'scope. These days, there is little to chose between linux and XP. In fact, for USB hardware that can be accessed as mass storage, linux is far easier. I don't need to add drivers to download photographs for instance, or to use a thumb drive. XP still seems to flinch and blink rapidly when ever new hardware appears and needs a driver before the hardware can be accessed. So, don't confuse the weight of your experience with Windows with 'ease of use,' it's an illusion. Your knowledge makes Windows easier and also makes linux _appear_ more difficult.
Not really. The real trouble is that there is no longer any social consensus regarding what makes a "good" teacher. Fundamentalists for instance don't want their kids taught bad things like sex education and "evilution." Liberals don't want the kids taught capitalism; conservatives don't want the kids taught Marxism. Social relativists don't wan't kids taught that some language format or some kind of logic is better than any other "way of knowing." And, some don't want anything "offensive" taught.
The OP never bothered to read the article, or has some strange ideas about carbon dating. The article title is just wrong. The 13C/12C ratio doesn't offer a date of any kind. What it has been used for, as the article says, is to infer when life begins to be an important player in the planetary environment. The article explains that a researcher has identified flaws in how the ratio is estimated. Nothing what-so-ever to do with "carbon dating." Instead it has to do with estimated dates of the ratio changes. The dates are probably Uranium based dates (you can't date anything more than about 50,000 years old using radiocarbon). The C13/C12 ratio estimated from proxies FOR that date are apparently in error.
The weather is never "the same as it used to be" and never has been. There is no homeostatic state to which the climate tends on any scale of less than about 100,000 years or so - the Milankovitch Cycle. Enough of those cycles and you might argue for an average state that the climate tends to cycle within - a temperature range between about 2 degrees C warmer than the present and about 8 degrees C colder. Shorter random oscillations also occur and superimposed on those are even shorter oscillations that also appear random. This is visible in the younger portions of the Vostok ice core data and the EPICA ice data for instance. (You can find the comparative chart of Vostok and EPICA delta O18 for the last 3,000 years on Wikipedia). The more pronounced short term oscillations would be termed Dansgaard/Oeschger events. The present - as of 1998 - slight warming does not even come up to more than a slight bit of noise in that data.
There are all kinds of really good reasons to clean up the atmosphere from better health to better astronomy. Climate "trends" is not one of them.
Certainly we are. From a geological and archaeological standpoint, the effects won't be significant to life on the plant. During most of the period of vertebrate life on this planet atmospheric CO2 has been many times higher than the present, which may be the lowest it has been in the last billion years or so. Life thrived throughout that span.
However, you are right. The real question is whether the effects are are important to humanity, and if they are, how they are. Even slight warming - or cooling - will adversely effect millions.
Contra Gore, we really don't know what we "should" do about whatever effects we are having on the climate. CO2 warming is only one human-generated climate effect and far the most difficult to measure. Look at the "global dimming" that affected much of the globe from the 1950s through the 1990s - and continues to effect large regions at present. That is readily measured, has clear effects on crop productivity, and during the '70s very likely had a role in the expansion of the Saharan desert in northern Africa.
Claiming responsibility for "global warming" is a comforting thought, because it gives us an illusion of potential control - and idea of what we must do - and if things don't improve, then we know who to sue. But if we were to eliminate our CO2 contribution, what would that do? Can we even be confident it would a "good" idea? The cycle reflected in the Vostok ice core and similar ice cores indicates that _right_now_ we should be sliding into a new glacial epoch for the next 30,000-50,000 years or so. During the last glacial epoch the Baltic, Russia, Scandinavia, Ireland, Scotland and England were under immense ice sheets, and most of the rest of Europe was only marginally habitable. North America was in a similar case. Canada was uninhabitable and so was the Great Lakes, the Dakotas, Idaho, Montana and New England.
Presumably, the same process that would reduce CO2 emissions would also reduce dust and particulates, which would still leave other, lesser human generated climate effects - and the natural trend. If the particulates and dust don't go away, the dimming effects could compound a natural cooling trend. Think of _those_ geopolitics. Russia's steppes become _less_ productive (and they aren't called the "famine steppes" for nothing). Starvation will not improve the ambient mood there.
Prehistorically and historically the solution to your home becoming inhospitable is to move. When entire landscapes become inhospitable, nations move, or die. Just ask an Irishman. At present, there is no space for climatically displaced nations to migrate. They will not willingly sit quietly and starve, and they will not willingly forget who they are. Nor will there be many willing host nations, happy to sacrifice land and living standards to strangers. Conflict is pretty much inevitable. In the current global situation, regardless of which direction the climate moves in - and it will move - the results will not be pleasant.
So, I reckon that climate change is inevitable, and I can't see that anything we do would actually make things better for the human race in its present situation. The current debate about global warming seems to suppose upon the one side that we can "put it back like it was." While on the other, that we are unimportant in the scheme of things. But we can't put it back, and we are affecting things. We should proceed from there.