Thirty years is really only enough for very short term fluctuations, anyway. It's like measuring the changes in weather throughout a day vs throughout the week or month or year, or several years. It's about the shortest span you can go, and you should expect there to be a lot of variation both high and low.
We are currently in the middle of a climate "summer" if you will, given a few thousand years (hopefully not less than that, but it won't matter anyway for anybody alive today) it will be climate "wintertime", which will suck royally.
Small fluctuations over a short period of time won't have any affect on what will ultimately happen in the long run. The whole climate change debate depends heavily on how long your time-line is, because if you take a wide enough view the current trends are absolutely meaningless, one way or the other. If you take a short-term view, the current trends are absolutely frightening.
The auto-follow feature was set for people you had repeated correspondence with - i.e. lots of gmail conversations.
In other words, this 9 year old wasn't introduced to the person with the "sexually charged username", whatever the hell that means, the kid had been talking to this guy many times well before Buzz launched.
Buzz just made it plain that the two had been corresponding for some time now.
I swear, politicians have to be some of the dumbest fucking people on earth, it drives me insane sometimes.
Not really. Politicians are by and large cowards, seeking maximal power with minimal responsibility.
You just hit the nail on the head, and that is why there is going to be a massive changing of the guard in the US Congress at the next election cycle. The Democrats stuck their neck out to force legislation they've wanted for the last century, and it will cost them.
Thanks to Bush, the Republicans became very unpopular, and the Democrats gained a super-majority in the senate. They've since used that power force several extremely unpopular bills onto the American people. To give you an idea of how unpopular it was, US Congressmen generally tow the party line on votes, you can usually predict how someone will vote based on their party. In this case, the Dems had an almost 2/3 majority in both houses, but the bill was so unpopular it took several tricky deals just to pass with a simple majority. There will be hell to pay come election time, but it doesn't matter, they've achieved a goal they've been after for 80+ years.
At least in the case of Stalinist Russia, happiness wasn't the goal.
It was his stated goal, that's what got him into power. He was going to "fix" the inequality between the bourgeois and the proletariat. He sure fixed it all right, fixed it permanently in place with the proletariat impossible to remove and the bourgeois impossible to rise. The new proletariat weren't industrialists, however, they were the government.
Except that US hasn't ever had a war on its on land besides Independence war.
Doh! The Public School System strikes again!
And technically, the land wasn't ours until after the War for Independence, so according to you there has never been a war on US soil. Nice. I suppose Pearl Harbor doesn't count as US soil either, so we're all good right?;)
Global temperature change would likely be beneficial to as many areas of the planet as it would be detrimental.
According to the geologic record, global warming is almost universally beneficial to life, while global cooling is almost universally detrimental. The exception to that are areas that are prone deserts. The funny thing is, when the warms, the big deserts get bigger because there are geographic reasons they cannot get water, and higher temperatures don't help that. However, when it cools, the big deserts shrink a little, but smaller "cold deserts" start popping up all over the place. This is because the Earth's atmosphere holds more water when it is warm. More water + warmer temperatures = larger tropical regions, which are the densest areas of life on the planet.
And what have you to say about the change in CO2 levels? Currently 380 ppm, and climbing, versus 280 ppm for millions of years.
You do realize that a billion years ago CO2 made up 20%(ish) of the atmosphere, and O2 was almost non-existent, right? Where did all that CO2 go? It had to go somewhere, and something had to put it there. Hmmm... lets think about that for a minute.
It was integral for the formation of life on this planet. The original bacteria that all life began as may not have formed at all if the earth's atmosphere were rich in oxygen. They make up the largest bio-mass on the planet by a large margin. They are extremely industrious too, in fact they were pivotal in taking our atmospheric CO2 levels down and raising the O2 levels that are necessary for more complex life to evolve. Where the hell do you think all that oil we've been burning comes from? Bacteria put it there, over and over and continuously. I can tell you they are still doing it, because I work on an oil field and hydrogen-sulfide gas - which is produced by live bacteria is extremely deadly - comes up with the oil, and builds up in oil storage containers because of the bacteria. These bacteria are still performing the same processes that put the oil in the ground millennia ago.
Furthermore, warming trends have always been a boon for life on the earth. Life has thrived the most when it was warmest, and on a geological time scale we are in a warm, but not peak, period.
Steady for millions of years, then a climb starting around 1750, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
The Mann "hockey stick" study was debunked a decade ago, originally by a pair of Canadian statisticians, but others who have tried to reproduce his results have failed (he has refused to release his raw data, as well). It has only stayed in usage for political reasons - it is the only study that shows a pronounced spike for the current time period while showing . Mann's methodology was seriously flawed - in fact, 90% of his data came from a single tree ring (which covered up to 1850), the rest was from various weather station reports from 1850 onwards. Furthermore, he smoothed his data. That's not uncommon for data coming from multiple sources, you throw out the extremes and take the mean, but it is uncommon when your data comes from a single source, like Mann's. When other tree cores are taken from the surrounding area are added to the study the picture changes, and when you take cores from around the globe the picture becomes even clearer.
The Mann "hockey-stick" graph absurdly unrepresentative of the truth. In fact, other more comprehensive studies have shown that about 1,000 years ago temperatures were on par with what they are now, with some decades being even warmer than now - particularly just before the "Little Ice Age" that started in the 1300's and ended around 1750.
Go back about about 16,000 years ago (primarily ice core data and sea floor sedimentary rock cores) and you see a sudden, massive spike in temperatures over the course of about 50 years or so as the earth came out of an ice age. The global temperature rose about 20 times higher than it has in the last 150 years, and it did so in 1/3 the time. It also peaked at a higher global temperature than it is now, and on average over the last 15,000 years the temperature has been slowly dropping. There have been several surges back up and a couple significant drops, but on average it is going down even if you include the current upward trend. There were only about 5 million people on the earth at the time of this great warming period; it could not possibly have been man made. It was part of a natural glacial/intraglacial cycle that has been going on for ages (and I mean that in the literal, millions-of-years sense).
Not many people doubt that the global temperatures are on a current warming trend. What people doubt is the absurd notion that mankind is the sole cause of such war
You'd need different sets of colors for each camera or you'll get cross-contamination between cameras. It would be better to just spin the object. The other option is to use specific wavelengths and filter out the light profiles for each camera.
I take it neither of you read about what all went into making the big blue aliens in Avatar believable.
After motion and performance capture, after running very refined automated scripts to tweak the movements and expressions, the Navii were squarely in the middle of the "uncanny valley", which is the effect that the closer you get to human-like expression without being correct the creepier and less-realistic a model feels.
It took thousands of hours of hand-tweaking the expressions and body movements to sufficiently pull those models out of the uncanny valley and make them believable. The current state-of-the-art does not address this yet, and you'll still have to put thousands of man-hours to get that last bit of realism to make the 3D characters believable. The less they look human the easier it is to do, so expect it to take some time before we see human 3d models that are just as believable as the real thing.
It grabbed your interest enough to go read the article, without giving you enough detail that you didn't need to read the article at all.
I'd say they nailed it. If all summaries were like this, we wouldn't have to say "RTFA!!" quite so much. We'd still have to say it, because a lot of people don't even read the summary, let alone the article, but every little bit helps.
Oh hey, just realized it's relevant, but starting Thursday I'll be an IBM shill, I can't wait! Working for HP sucks.
Just for clarification though, does posting on/. instead of doing the job I'm being paid for count as being paid to post on/.? I'm certainly being paid while posting on/....
Nobody can prove that anything doesn't exist. You can't prove a flying horse doesn't exist. It's the nature of proofs, you can only prove what is, not what isn't. Such things are impossible.
...plastic orange markers attached to the wall that looked just like oversized spears.
There was nothing less safe about it, crashing into one of these would have been no different that hitting the wall itself. However, they looked deadly as all hell, so people slowed down.
Slashdot Mirror
A guy doesn't do his job thus saving taxpayer dollars...
Minor correction, continue on!
why is noone talking about them
What does Peter Noone have to do with any of this?
Of course, who doesn't? ;)
Thirty years is really only enough for very short term fluctuations, anyway. It's like measuring the changes in weather throughout a day vs throughout the week or month or year, or several years. It's about the shortest span you can go, and you should expect there to be a lot of variation both high and low.
We are currently in the middle of a climate "summer" if you will, given a few thousand years (hopefully not less than that, but it won't matter anyway for anybody alive today) it will be climate "wintertime", which will suck royally.
Small fluctuations over a short period of time won't have any affect on what will ultimately happen in the long run. The whole climate change debate depends heavily on how long your time-line is, because if you take a wide enough view the current trends are absolutely meaningless, one way or the other. If you take a short-term view, the current trends are absolutely frightening.
Yeah, they're almost as bad as global warming alarmists!
Frickin climate change deniers...
They have propellers, not wings.
Not to be pedantic or anything.
Oh yeah, lets not show any respect at all to one of the greatest AI minds in history because you happen to dislike churches.
Asshole.
The auto-follow feature was set for people you had repeated correspondence with - i.e. lots of gmail conversations.
In other words, this 9 year old wasn't introduced to the person with the "sexually charged username", whatever the hell that means, the kid had been talking to this guy many times well before Buzz launched.
Buzz just made it plain that the two had been corresponding for some time now.
I swear, politicians have to be some of the dumbest fucking people on earth, it drives me insane sometimes.
Yep, and amazingly, it's still better than any other option.
As Churchill put it: “It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.”
Not really. Politicians are by and large cowards, seeking maximal power with minimal responsibility.
You just hit the nail on the head, and that is why there is going to be a massive changing of the guard in the US Congress at the next election cycle. The Democrats stuck their neck out to force legislation they've wanted for the last century, and it will cost them.
Thanks to Bush, the Republicans became very unpopular, and the Democrats gained a super-majority in the senate. They've since used that power force several extremely unpopular bills onto the American people. To give you an idea of how unpopular it was, US Congressmen generally tow the party line on votes, you can usually predict how someone will vote based on their party. In this case, the Dems had an almost 2/3 majority in both houses, but the bill was so unpopular it took several tricky deals just to pass with a simple majority. There will be hell to pay come election time, but it doesn't matter, they've achieved a goal they've been after for 80+ years.
Gaia kills people with ice ages, and it's going to do that anyway. Might as well make things cozy while we can.
At least in the case of Stalinist Russia, happiness wasn't the goal.
It was his stated goal, that's what got him into power. He was going to "fix" the inequality between the bourgeois and the proletariat. He sure fixed it all right, fixed it permanently in place with the proletariat impossible to remove and the bourgeois impossible to rise. The new proletariat weren't industrialists, however, they were the government.
Sound familiar?
Except that US hasn't ever had a war on its on land besides Independence war.
Doh! The Public School System strikes again!
And technically, the land wasn't ours until after the War for Independence, so according to you there has never been a war on US soil. Nice. I suppose Pearl Harbor doesn't count as US soil either, so we're all good right? ;)
Global temperature change would likely be beneficial to as many areas of the planet as it would be detrimental.
According to the geologic record, global warming is almost universally beneficial to life, while global cooling is almost universally detrimental. The exception to that are areas that are prone deserts. The funny thing is, when the warms, the big deserts get bigger because there are geographic reasons they cannot get water, and higher temperatures don't help that. However, when it cools, the big deserts shrink a little, but smaller "cold deserts" start popping up all over the place. This is because the Earth's atmosphere holds more water when it is warm. More water + warmer temperatures = larger tropical regions, which are the densest areas of life on the planet.
And what have you to say about the change in CO2 levels? Currently 380 ppm, and climbing, versus 280 ppm for millions of years.
You do realize that a billion years ago CO2 made up 20%(ish) of the atmosphere, and O2 was almost non-existent, right? Where did all that CO2 go? It had to go somewhere, and something had to put it there. Hmmm... lets think about that for a minute.
It was integral for the formation of life on this planet. The original bacteria that all life began as may not have formed at all if the earth's atmosphere were rich in oxygen. They make up the largest bio-mass on the planet by a large margin. They are extremely industrious too, in fact they were pivotal in taking our atmospheric CO2 levels down and raising the O2 levels that are necessary for more complex life to evolve. Where the hell do you think all that oil we've been burning comes from? Bacteria put it there, over and over and continuously. I can tell you they are still doing it, because I work on an oil field and hydrogen-sulfide gas - which is produced by live bacteria is extremely deadly - comes up with the oil, and builds up in oil storage containers because of the bacteria. These bacteria are still performing the same processes that put the oil in the ground millennia ago.
Furthermore, warming trends have always been a boon for life on the earth. Life has thrived the most when it was warmest, and on a geological time scale we are in a warm, but not peak, period.
Steady for millions of years, then a climb starting around 1750, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
The Mann "hockey stick" study was debunked a decade ago, originally by a pair of Canadian statisticians, but others who have tried to reproduce his results have failed (he has refused to release his raw data, as well). It has only stayed in usage for political reasons - it is the only study that shows a pronounced spike for the current time period while showing . Mann's methodology was seriously flawed - in fact, 90% of his data came from a single tree ring (which covered up to 1850), the rest was from various weather station reports from 1850 onwards. Furthermore, he smoothed his data. That's not uncommon for data coming from multiple sources, you throw out the extremes and take the mean, but it is uncommon when your data comes from a single source, like Mann's. When other tree cores are taken from the surrounding area are added to the study the picture changes, and when you take cores from around the globe the picture becomes even clearer.
The Mann "hockey-stick" graph absurdly unrepresentative of the truth. In fact, other more comprehensive studies have shown that about 1,000 years ago temperatures were on par with what they are now, with some decades being even warmer than now - particularly just before the "Little Ice Age" that started in the 1300's and ended around 1750.
Go back about about 16,000 years ago (primarily ice core data and sea floor sedimentary rock cores) and you see a sudden, massive spike in temperatures over the course of about 50 years or so as the earth came out of an ice age. The global temperature rose about 20 times higher than it has in the last 150 years, and it did so in 1/3 the time. It also peaked at a higher global temperature than it is now, and on average over the last 15,000 years the temperature has been slowly dropping. There have been several surges back up and a couple significant drops, but on average it is going down even if you include the current upward trend. There were only about 5 million people on the earth at the time of this great warming period; it could not possibly have been man made. It was part of a natural glacial/intraglacial cycle that has been going on for ages (and I mean that in the literal, millions-of-years sense).
Not many people doubt that the global temperatures are on a current warming trend. What people doubt is the absurd notion that mankind is the sole cause of such war
You'd need different sets of colors for each camera or you'll get cross-contamination between cameras. It would be better to just spin the object. The other option is to use specific wavelengths and filter out the light profiles for each camera.
I take it neither of you read about what all went into making the big blue aliens in Avatar believable.
After motion and performance capture, after running very refined automated scripts to tweak the movements and expressions, the Navii were squarely in the middle of the "uncanny valley", which is the effect that the closer you get to human-like expression without being correct the creepier and less-realistic a model feels.
It took thousands of hours of hand-tweaking the expressions and body movements to sufficiently pull those models out of the uncanny valley and make them believable. The current state-of-the-art does not address this yet, and you'll still have to put thousands of man-hours to get that last bit of realism to make the 3D characters believable. The less they look human the easier it is to do, so expect it to take some time before we see human 3d models that are just as believable as the real thing.
I disagree.
It grabbed your interest enough to go read the article, without giving you enough detail that you didn't need to read the article at all.
I'd say they nailed it. If all summaries were like this, we wouldn't have to say "RTFA!!" quite so much. We'd still have to say it, because a lot of people don't even read the summary, let alone the article, but every little bit helps.
The Shat was a lot smoother than that anyway, he just used way too many commas in his speech.
To, boldly fragment, what, no man, has, fragmented before. That's more his style, and it isn't incorrect. It's just strange.
Three fragments, actually. "Justice delayed is justice denied." was the only complete sentence.
"This." "Is a contradiction." and "Always." are all fragments.
Baby fatality is creepier.
Oh hey, just realized it's relevant, but starting Thursday I'll be an IBM shill, I can't wait! Working for HP sucks.
Just for clarification though, does posting on /. instead of doing the job I'm being paid for count as being paid to post on /.? I'm certainly being paid while posting on /....
Come on, everybody knows Frosty Piss is an SCO shill. He's getting paid to say those things.
Nobody can prove that anything doesn't exist. You can't prove a flying horse doesn't exist. It's the nature of proofs, you can only prove what is, not what isn't. Such things are impossible.
Read a little closer:
...plastic orange markers attached to the wall that looked just like oversized spears.
There was nothing less safe about it, crashing into one of these would have been no different that hitting the wall itself. However, they looked deadly as all hell, so people slowed down.