Says you. The last ice age lasted about 15-20 thousand years, and the previous warm period lasted about the same. Given that the last ice age ended 16 thousand years ago, I imagine we could see another ice age any time in the next 5 thousand years.
Also, the geological record shows that life was most prolific at its warmest, and most mass extinctions occurred during the ice ages.
Have you tried Microsoft Word or Open Office in the last decade or so? Do you have a laptop? A lot of schools even give students laptops as part of their school gear. A capable laptop with OO.org, Google Docs, or MS Office can be had by a student for about the price of one schoolbook. It won't be a screamer, but a couple hundred bucks is all you need and you can mark up documents on the fly. You can even collaborate with others on the same document without having to continually print out new copies.
This shit has been around a long friggin time. Please step into at least the 20'th century, you're embarrassing yourself.
This is basically a case of EA screwing GameStop by screwing GameStop's customers. I imagine if they lose GameStop will be going after EA to get their money back.
it is not The Lego Group's fault for false advertising.
It would be if the Lego Group were the ones to remove the missing 243 pieces, and then demanded extra money to get them back.
That's -exactly- what has happened, the box says nothing about it being one-time-use content, just that it comes free. When a person sells it, especially given its digital nature, you expect that free content to come with it. By all rights it should, the original purchaser has no right to the content once they've sold the disk.
However EA is charging $15 for it when the box says it is free, making a used game more expensive than a new game.
False advertising.
Gamestop is getting sued here because they are the ones selling the used games. If they lose, I expect they'll be suing the pants off of EA for exactly the same thing - false advertising.
It's same as the tolerance movement - everyone should be tolerant of everyone else, and if you aren't tolerant we're going to beat the shit out of you until you are.
There is nothing free about the "free" software movement. They believe everyone should do it their way, and nobody should have the choice to do it any other. And god forbid you should ever change your mind and eventually decide to sell your services for money. Then you are Satan's unholy hellspawn.
The FSF is so full of bullshit it has put me off the whole FOSS movement. I still go for it if it's free and if it's good, but whenever I see "FOSS" anywhere on the web page, I immediately expect a sub-standard product, and I'll probably have to sift through six of what are essentially the same thing in order to find anything usefull.
Yup, but obviously this 40 year old island was millions of years old, and only human-generated global warming over the last 200 years could have caused its destruction over the course of the last 40 years.
Seriously, this island was 2 meters tall and 40 years old, even at their most dire figures the sea level rose all of 3 inches in that time. How the hell was that the cause? I would imagine it was more like 40 years of erosion finally took the thing down. The last few bits of destruction are always the fastest, in a month you'll see no trace that this island ever existed.
And hey guess what? It didn't solve the problem, India and Bangladesh are still fighting over the area!
Global warming isn't what we should be warming. Periods of high warmth (even higher than now) are when civilizations boomed and species thrived. It's when things eventually go south and get cold that we see mass extinctions.
Go back about 400 years and look at what happened during the Little Ice Age, it wiped out millions across the globe. Yet that was just a minor dip, still incredibly warm compared to the last true ice age. Temperatures in some areas averaged 20 degrees less than they do now, and the global average temperature fluctuations were in the neighborhood of 10 degrees (from high to low to high again) over the course of a few decades. That's devastating. It killed off all of the large mammals in the previous ice age, and the human population had been reduced to as little as 5 million people globally. This is when Sapiens emerged as the dominant human species.
So we should be preparing for climate change, but global warming makes things easier on us, not harder. Yeah, coastal people will be displaced, so what? They'll be even worse off when it all cools again. It's the cold weather we need to start preparing for, because when the ice age hits it will hit hard and fast, and hopefully we'll be in a position to survive it.
First, 20,000 years ago the climate changed for other reasons
And you don't think those exact same processes are happening now? The current fluctuations in temperature are nothing new, why they'd suddenly be caused by us is a complete mystery to me. Influenced slightly I could see, but caused? Come on!
Second, 20,000 years ago we didn't have over 100 million people living in cities near the ocean. Over the next century, these millions of people will be displaced, or the land they're on will be protected, at a cost of trillions of dollars [pbs.org]. If we can avoid it by spending much less money, say, only one trillion dollars, it makes economic sense to do so.
And yet the rate of global warming was 1,000 times greater than it is now.
I'm guessing he's never seen a destructive earthquake, even though we just recently had two globally publicized events.
You know the kind I'm talking about, where one side of the street rises 10 feet and the other side drops 10 feet in a matter of minutes?
Yeah, plate tectonics move REAL slow.
Here's a hint for the GP: Plate tectonics move slow on average, but if two plates collide that are not in an abduction/subduction relationship then massive amounts of energy build up and hundreds of square miles can move many feet in just a few minutes. It might take 200 years for that energy to build up, but when it reaches the breaking point - POP!
Note that a lot of mountains were formed this way, so that should give you some perspective.
For what it's worth, the Indian scientist blames global warming even though the Bay of Bengal has historically had abnormally high sea level changes, and the recent changes have been extremely abnormal. The rest of the world's rate of change hasn't risen like this, only the Bay of Bengal. So what halfway intelligent scientist would automatically attribute that to global warming, when there is obviously something else going on?
The island was created 40 years ago by a hurricane, you didn't see global warming dumbasses claiming it was a massive drop in sea level caused by global cooling (which is what was hip at the time), why would the abnormal rise in sea level, localized to the bay of bengal, be caused by global warming? It's that kind of thing that pisses me off and muddies the whole issue. There is no way this was caused by global warming unless it's an indirect effect which they haven't spent nearly enough time studying to determine. They just throw it out there like it's the cause of all the world's problems. Assholes.
Why, the next Ice Age!! It was global cooling everyone was worried about, and it was the exact same stuff that was supposed to be causing it (but in different ways).
Besides, the burning of fossil fuels does not predict the current cooling trend over the last decade - global temperatures peaked around 98-2000 and have been on the decline ever since.
According to our CO2 levels, it should be a steady rise with perhaps some light fluctuations from year to year, a decade of cooling doesn't fit.
Blaming CO2 is far, far too simplistic, especially when you ignore the source of 100% of our heat, 80% of which it provides directly. Can you guess what that is? And do you ever wonder if it has a climate of its own?
Admittedly, trying to justify it with everything that happens is moronic. Weather patterns are massively complex. In the end, what you have to look at is the year to year trend, and by that measure, 200X was the hottest decade on record.
Is that why global average temperatures have been falling since 1998? The 90's were just as hot, but they were on the rise. It's a cooling trend now, and CO2 levels haven't slacked off one bit, so that's obviously not the primary cause. We're back down to the average yearly temps we were about 15-20 years ago, and every year is colder than the one before. In fact, the winter of 2008 was the coldest since the 1930's.
If all your graphs stop at 2000, you aren't going to get a good picture of temperatures up to 2009.
On top of that, there are a number of methodology issues with a lot of the more lazy studies - like the fact that a lot of temperature studies use temperature readings from inside metropolitan areas without taking into account the urban heat island effect. Cities are much hotter than the surrounding areas, and while that does contribute to overall warmth if the majority of your readings are from cities, you will have a skewed result.
Combine poor methodology with good timing and you can get some pretty insane results.
When you only look back a couple hundred years, the global warming figures look absolutely frightening. Go back about 1000 years and it doesn't look nearly as bad. Go back about 20,000 years and you start to wonder if we should be cranking up the global furnace as fast in order to make the next Ice Age, which is inevitable and devastating, not quite so bad. On that time scale the current warming trend is insignificant and irrelivant. How do you compare a change of less than a degree over the last 150 years (which was coming out of a mini-ice age) to fluctuations of 10-20 degrees over the course of a few hundred years which is what occurs in an Ice Age?
Beginning when my daughter was 3, I would play "classroom" with her. I taught her letters, later at 4 I taught her how to count and add little drawings of things to make totals. By the time she was 4.5 she could add and subtract simple numbers with symbols.
But all this was done with MAX 10 sessions of one on one 10-30 games.
You can do the exact same thing with reading and writing, and basic physics. History and science are a little trickier, but once a kid has reading down start sending interesting history and science books their way and before too long you've got a ten year old who has a better education than most high school graduates. Get your kid a library card ASAP and encourage her to explore the library and there will be no stopping her.
If you make mnemonics an early part of a child's schooling all of the few things that can be taught no way other than rote memorization will come much faster as well.
I believe you and he are on the same page. He's speaking against the assembly-line style math teaching in school these days, which produces in 12 years people who can barely multiply.
Obviously, once size does not fit all, and only a small number of kids are actually able to get the full math education out of the current system, for most it is a complete waste.
Same with reading/writing, history and science.
Mass schooling is a joke, and we've got the absurd costs and piss poor scores to prove it.
The truth is, the math they spend 6 years teaching in school can be learned to proficiency in all of 6 months. The way it's done is all wrong.
Look at how a child learns to speak. That's a very complicated skill that children learn relatively quickly with zero formal instruction. There is in fact no real way to formally teach a person to speak. There is a system, and the child must listen, watch, and figure it out on their own because they won't understand anybody else says or does anyway. You can speed it along by giving them more opportunities to listen and understand, but they teach themselves.
Math shouldn't really be different. What the hell does "1" mean? Well, it means a single item. How can you learn that except by seeing a single item and associating it the symbol for one? Obviously, the numbers themselves are half part of language and half math, but they are the foundation for the language of mathematics, and all of mathematics is nothing more than a description of how those numbers interact. You can't effectively teach that by having kids write out their times tables a billion times. They'll be really good at times tables for three or four years, but they won't necessarily understand what's going on under the hood and how to extrapolate that to larger systems and concepts.
Basically, the standard method of teaching math in the US is extremely inefficient.
Actually, learning to do math that way instead of in a classroom would teach a kid 100x faster than the shit they do in school. It'd take him a week to learn how not to get screwed instead of 6 years.
Trial by fire is a very efficient and effective way to learn.
Symbolic logic is a total mystery to me. I've failed every logic course I've ever been in.
I know my numbers, but arithmetic on pen and paper still sucks. I hate it with a passion. Learning how to do square roots in 7'th grade by pencil and paper was torture. Thank god for calculators.
Slashdot Mirror
Says you. The last ice age lasted about 15-20 thousand years, and the previous warm period lasted about the same. Given that the last ice age ended 16 thousand years ago, I imagine we could see another ice age any time in the next 5 thousand years.
Also, the geological record shows that life was most prolific at its warmest, and most mass extinctions occurred during the ice ages.
Have you tried Microsoft Word or Open Office in the last decade or so? Do you have a laptop? A lot of schools even give students laptops as part of their school gear. A capable laptop with OO.org, Google Docs, or MS Office can be had by a student for about the price of one schoolbook. It won't be a screamer, but a couple hundred bucks is all you need and you can mark up documents on the fly. You can even collaborate with others on the same document without having to continually print out new copies.
This shit has been around a long friggin time. Please step into at least the 20'th century, you're embarrassing yourself.
If they are saving money on ink, I imagine they must be using inkjet. I can't imagine they'd be some obscure ink-pour method. Maybe an ink-dip?
And regardless of the opacity, you're pumping out light at near full power 100% of the time.
I would also imagine the most common type of display would have the largest impact, but that's just me. :)
Bingo.
This is basically a case of EA screwing GameStop by screwing GameStop's customers. I imagine if they lose GameStop will be going after EA to get their money back.
it is not The Lego Group's fault for false advertising.
It would be if the Lego Group were the ones to remove the missing 243 pieces, and then demanded extra money to get them back.
That's -exactly- what has happened, the box says nothing about it being one-time-use content, just that it comes free. When a person sells it, especially given its digital nature, you expect that free content to come with it. By all rights it should, the original purchaser has no right to the content once they've sold the disk.
However EA is charging $15 for it when the box says it is free, making a used game more expensive than a new game.
False advertising.
Gamestop is getting sued here because they are the ones selling the used games. If they lose, I expect they'll be suing the pants off of EA for exactly the same thing - false advertising.
I'd thought that after all this time he was finally wising up and accepting what everyone else on the planet was saying.
I assume by "everyone else on the planet" you actually mean "the incredibly small minority of Linux fanatics".
News flash, 99% of people on the planet don't give a shit about Linux or anything related to Linux.
You are joking, right? You can't possibly be serious.
It's same as the tolerance movement - everyone should be tolerant of everyone else, and if you aren't tolerant we're going to beat the shit out of you until you are.
There is nothing free about the "free" software movement. They believe everyone should do it their way, and nobody should have the choice to do it any other. And god forbid you should ever change your mind and eventually decide to sell your services for money. Then you are Satan's unholy hellspawn.
The FSF is so full of bullshit it has put me off the whole FOSS movement. I still go for it if it's free and if it's good, but whenever I see "FOSS" anywhere on the web page, I immediately expect a sub-standard product, and I'll probably have to sift through six of what are essentially the same thing in order to find anything usefull.
No, they had the core libraries for .Net 4.0 in before Microsoft released .Net 4.0. Generally they are a year to two years behind.
Maybe with some practice your reading comprehension will improve. :)
Yup, but obviously this 40 year old island was millions of years old, and only human-generated global warming over the last 200 years could have caused its destruction over the course of the last 40 years.
Seriously, this island was 2 meters tall and 40 years old, even at their most dire figures the sea level rose all of 3 inches in that time. How the hell was that the cause? I would imagine it was more like 40 years of erosion finally took the thing down. The last few bits of destruction are always the fastest, in a month you'll see no trace that this island ever existed.
And hey guess what? It didn't solve the problem, India and Bangladesh are still fighting over the area!
Global warming isn't what we should be warming. Periods of high warmth (even higher than now) are when civilizations boomed and species thrived. It's when things eventually go south and get cold that we see mass extinctions.
Go back about 400 years and look at what happened during the Little Ice Age, it wiped out millions across the globe. Yet that was just a minor dip, still incredibly warm compared to the last true ice age. Temperatures in some areas averaged 20 degrees less than they do now, and the global average temperature fluctuations were in the neighborhood of 10 degrees (from high to low to high again) over the course of a few decades. That's devastating. It killed off all of the large mammals in the previous ice age, and the human population had been reduced to as little as 5 million people globally. This is when Sapiens emerged as the dominant human species.
So we should be preparing for climate change, but global warming makes things easier on us, not harder. Yeah, coastal people will be displaced, so what? They'll be even worse off when it all cools again. It's the cold weather we need to start preparing for, because when the ice age hits it will hit hard and fast, and hopefully we'll be in a position to survive it.
First, 20,000 years ago the climate changed for other reasons
And you don't think those exact same processes are happening now? The current fluctuations in temperature are nothing new, why they'd suddenly be caused by us is a complete mystery to me. Influenced slightly I could see, but caused? Come on!
Second, 20,000 years ago we didn't have over 100 million people living in cities near the ocean. Over the next century, these millions of people will be displaced, or the land they're on will be protected, at a cost of trillions of dollars [pbs.org]. If we can avoid it by spending much less money, say, only one trillion dollars, it makes economic sense to do so.
And yet the rate of global warming was 1,000 times greater than it is now.
Hmmm...
I'm guessing he's never seen a destructive earthquake, even though we just recently had two globally publicized events.
You know the kind I'm talking about, where one side of the street rises 10 feet and the other side drops 10 feet in a matter of minutes?
Yeah, plate tectonics move REAL slow.
Here's a hint for the GP: Plate tectonics move slow on average, but if two plates collide that are not in an abduction/subduction relationship then massive amounts of energy build up and hundreds of square miles can move many feet in just a few minutes. It might take 200 years for that energy to build up, but when it reaches the breaking point - POP!
Note that a lot of mountains were formed this way, so that should give you some perspective.
For what it's worth, the Indian scientist blames global warming even though the Bay of Bengal has historically had abnormally high sea level changes, and the recent changes have been extremely abnormal. The rest of the world's rate of change hasn't risen like this, only the Bay of Bengal. So what halfway intelligent scientist would automatically attribute that to global warming, when there is obviously something else going on?
The island was created 40 years ago by a hurricane, you didn't see global warming dumbasses claiming it was a massive drop in sea level caused by global cooling (which is what was hip at the time), why would the abnormal rise in sea level, localized to the bay of bengal, be caused by global warming? It's that kind of thing that pisses me off and muddies the whole issue. There is no way this was caused by global warming unless it's an indirect effect which they haven't spent nearly enough time studying to determine. They just throw it out there like it's the cause of all the world's problems. Assholes.
You know what was predicted 50 years ago?
Why, the next Ice Age!! It was global cooling everyone was worried about, and it was the exact same stuff that was supposed to be causing it (but in different ways).
Besides, the burning of fossil fuels does not predict the current cooling trend over the last decade - global temperatures peaked around 98-2000 and have been on the decline ever since.
According to our CO2 levels, it should be a steady rise with perhaps some light fluctuations from year to year, a decade of cooling doesn't fit.
Blaming CO2 is far, far too simplistic, especially when you ignore the source of 100% of our heat, 80% of which it provides directly. Can you guess what that is? And do you ever wonder if it has a climate of its own?
Admittedly, trying to justify it with everything that happens is moronic. Weather patterns are massively complex. In the end, what you have to look at is the year to year trend, and by that measure, 200X was the hottest decade on record.
Is that why global average temperatures have been falling since 1998? The 90's were just as hot, but they were on the rise. It's a cooling trend now, and CO2 levels haven't slacked off one bit, so that's obviously not the primary cause. We're back down to the average yearly temps we were about 15-20 years ago, and every year is colder than the one before. In fact, the winter of 2008 was the coldest since the 1930's.
If all your graphs stop at 2000, you aren't going to get a good picture of temperatures up to 2009.
On top of that, there are a number of methodology issues with a lot of the more lazy studies - like the fact that a lot of temperature studies use temperature readings from inside metropolitan areas without taking into account the urban heat island effect. Cities are much hotter than the surrounding areas, and while that does contribute to overall warmth if the majority of your readings are from cities, you will have a skewed result.
Combine poor methodology with good timing and you can get some pretty insane results.
When you only look back a couple hundred years, the global warming figures look absolutely frightening. Go back about 1000 years and it doesn't look nearly as bad. Go back about 20,000 years and you start to wonder if we should be cranking up the global furnace as fast in order to make the next Ice Age, which is inevitable and devastating, not quite so bad. On that time scale the current warming trend is insignificant and irrelivant. How do you compare a change of less than a degree over the last 150 years (which was coming out of a mini-ice age) to fluctuations of 10-20 degrees over the course of a few hundred years which is what occurs in an Ice Age?
Yes, but obviously that sandbar had been there for millions of years since the 70's and we destroyed it with our man-made global warming.
Where was cap and trade when we needed it most?
Beginning when my daughter was 3, I would play "classroom" with her. I taught her letters, later at 4 I taught her how to count and add little drawings of things to make totals. By the time she was 4.5 she could add and subtract simple numbers with symbols.
But all this was done with MAX 10 sessions of one on one 10-30 games.
You can do the exact same thing with reading and writing, and basic physics. History and science are a little trickier, but once a kid has reading down start sending interesting history and science books their way and before too long you've got a ten year old who has a better education than most high school graduates. Get your kid a library card ASAP and encourage her to explore the library and there will be no stopping her.
If you make mnemonics an early part of a child's schooling all of the few things that can be taught no way other than rote memorization will come much faster as well.
I believe you and he are on the same page. He's speaking against the assembly-line style math teaching in school these days, which produces in 12 years people who can barely multiply.
Obviously, once size does not fit all, and only a small number of kids are actually able to get the full math education out of the current system, for most it is a complete waste.
Same with reading/writing, history and science.
Mass schooling is a joke, and we've got the absurd costs and piss poor scores to prove it.
The truth is, the math they spend 6 years teaching in school can be learned to proficiency in all of 6 months. The way it's done is all wrong.
Look at how a child learns to speak. That's a very complicated skill that children learn relatively quickly with zero formal instruction. There is in fact no real way to formally teach a person to speak. There is a system, and the child must listen, watch, and figure it out on their own because they won't understand anybody else says or does anyway. You can speed it along by giving them more opportunities to listen and understand, but they teach themselves.
Math shouldn't really be different. What the hell does "1" mean? Well, it means a single item. How can you learn that except by seeing a single item and associating it the symbol for one? Obviously, the numbers themselves are half part of language and half math, but they are the foundation for the language of mathematics, and all of mathematics is nothing more than a description of how those numbers interact. You can't effectively teach that by having kids write out their times tables a billion times. They'll be really good at times tables for three or four years, but they won't necessarily understand what's going on under the hood and how to extrapolate that to larger systems and concepts.
Basically, the standard method of teaching math in the US is extremely inefficient.
That book was an incredibly interesting read.
It makes a lot of sense too.
Actually, learning to do math that way instead of in a classroom would teach a kid 100x faster than the shit they do in school. It'd take him a week to learn how not to get screwed instead of 6 years.
Trial by fire is a very efficient and effective way to learn.
Damnit, blew the whole thing, I learned via Old Math, not "New" Math.
Hello, I'm a victim of New Math.
Symbolic logic is a total mystery to me. I've failed every logic course I've ever been in.
I know my numbers, but arithmetic on pen and paper still sucks. I hate it with a passion. Learning how to do square roots in 7'th grade by pencil and paper was torture. Thank god for calculators.
What's changed?