Thanks for outing yourself as a stupid homophobe, but biologically, being LGBTQ is not particularly weird. I imagine your perception of such persons as being perpetually offended is strongly linked to your offensive attitude towards them. Are you perhaps able to fuck off in some permanent sense?
There is no legal requirement for one's signature to be any form of one's name. If I put "See ID" on the back of my card, I am fully prepared to argue that this is my legal signature. Also if I put "Fuck you" on there, which was the tactic of a legal student of my acquaintance with more brains than sense.
Causality actually does mean that there cannot be causeless events, and nothing in quantum physics changes that (so far). Your description of black holes is not particularly accurate. A black hole is 'merely' an extremely curved region of spacetime. PBS has a series on YouTube called 'Space Time' that will doubtless be informative, unless you'd rather not have facts interfere with your speculation.
Science is also a branch of philosophy, and logical positivism is a more-or-less valid view. It's not a currently popular view, but for most purposes one can indeed reconcile empiricism and statements which cannot be empirically tested: simply consider the unproven statement to be false. There are some downsides to that idea but it certainly cuts down on the number of Russel's Teapots one is obligated to believe in.
Generally, we would expect some degree of correlation for any two descriptions of the universe. Given the contradictory epistemological frameworks, it's not really possible for these to be meaningful coincidences.
I remember when I was a kid, and the glacier near my house lost twenty cubic miles of ice in ten years. The number of frost-free days in Fairbanks has doubled since 1950. Glacial ice loss has been most noticeable from the lower alpine and tidewater glaciers, which would be the most accessible and visible ones. I believe we're up to about fifty cubic kilometers per year for the state overall.
You can walk it back to people who live in places you care about, but there are any number of statistics to show that the Arctic at least is melting like gangbusters.
The "whole experience" is great, unless you're not a developer. I'm not sure where you're thinking the manpower to do this "extra work" is going to come from, nor how you think that the developers are going to compromise the features they find useful in order to make simple interfaces. If Linux fails to be what you want it to be, the problem is you, not it: changing how the ecosystem functions is not an option.
Linux never really feels whole or fully integrated from top to bottom.
I've used some excellent Linux UIs. MeeGo was actually quite nice for what it was. What you're saying though is not "I want it to work like this," but, "I want it to be developed as an integral whole." That's nice, but it's not the way that goes. If you want a polished UI, you have to supply the polish. Linux is more a base for product development than a product, and extremely useful in that regard, which is why millions of people are willing to write software for it. Having a nice experience for non-technical end-users is not a problem that many Linux developers are trying to solve. If you think that's a bad thing, I would say that your expectations should be adjusted rather than some misguided and presumably futile attempt to change the Linux ecosystem. Not only are we powerless to affect the organization and direction of so many disparate entities, but something like Linux would still need to exist.
I hope that ESR has finally earned the mediocrity he deserves, but the "cathedral and the bazaar" metaphor is still apt. You may get a very large and shiny tent out of this marketplace, but nobody's going to foot the bill for the stained glass. I feel that far fewer Linux developers are interested in seeing it become dominant in the desktop segment, and the people complaining loudest about its deficiencies are, well, not developers. A collaboratively developed environment is always going to be focused on the needs of the persons doing the development, and if that makes most people second-class citizens on Linux then unfortunately there's not much to be done. You'll pry my text config files and CLI out of my cold, dead fingers -- which is to say that these things, while they are anathema to novices, are hard business requirements for myself and many other developers. You're not going to reconcile that needs mismatch, you can only choose to optimize for one group or the other.
I'm sure I would be happy to see Linux in broader use, because to me that would require more people becoming developers. For persons wanting a free version of Windows I would have to suggest asking Microsoft to donate a license.
Linux is not an OS, it's a development paradigm. One can assemble open-source software into a commercial product, but that doesn't happen naturally. It's a build-an-OS kit, and the good news is that if you don't like a component, you can change it! The bad news is that you're forced to: there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. If you're signing up for being a part of the ecosystem, you have to accept that at some point an upstream maintainer is going to do something you don't like, and you won't have much recourse. I'm not completely clear on the difference between that situation and Microsoft forcing businesses to buy new versions of its products every few years, but if that's a sticking point then, well, no one ever got fired for buying M$, and I for one do not particularly care if Linux achieves wide penetration in the desktop market. It's adequate for my purposes there, and dominant in the market segments related to my employment, so I don't personally see much need for change.
Some people have 20 years experience, others have 2 years of experience repeated 10 times. If you have a fetish for sysvinit you're in the latter category. Also, if you hate on systemd but are fine with OpenRC, then you are probably unaware as to how many of your systemd objections are equally applicable there.
I'm moderating so I don't want to comment directly in the relevant thread, but I've been enjoying your responses in the "code examples" article. Apparently there are a lot of people who don't understand what "contractor" means, but you're doing a great job schooling them.
I have no idea how the movie will turn out, but the book Ready Player One was a pastiche of geek culture references from the 80s and lists of geek culture references from the 80s. It also featured characters with all of the depth of a cardboard cutout -- actually, on balance I think that's insulting to cardboard cutouts. If the RPO movie is better than the Dungeons and Dragons movie, then it can only be by heroic virtue on the part of the scriptwriters; the book should be avoided at all costs.
We've covered the permafrost issue here repeatedly. No, it does not melt into rich farmland. Most often, it melts into a bog: for an example see the entire North Slope. It would be easier to farm the Sahara.
Why don't you start here and let us know where you get hung up. The total energy captured by a century of fossil fuel use is going to have some relatively wide error bars, but it's almost exactly as much as required for the climatic shift you mention. Curiously enough, the relation of CO2 levels to ice ages was exactly the topic of Arrhenius' 1896 paper which originated the Theory of AGW. The exact number has varied slightly, but that a halving or doubling of CO2 levels could cause or reverse an Ice Age is an undisputed result for something more than a century now. If you've gone thus far without reading anything scientific on this matter, Arrhenius isn't a bad place to start. After that I imagine that you will be interested in the many reasons that his work was entirely dismissed for the next five decades, as being the best hopes for actually, say, coming up with a semi-plausible reason why AGW isn't true.
I'm not sure what in particular you're claiming doesn't exist (or is it just a need to be spoon fed?) but the science is most certainly out there. The "back of the envelope" science you're asking for is found in literally the oldest paper on the topic. Consider doing us the favor of reading it.
Clouds have both heating and cooling effects. CO2 makes the atmosphere opaque to outgoing longwave radiation globally, in the stratosphere. Even if everything you said were true, which is unfortunately not the case despite the research efforts of Dr. Lindzen among others, it still would not be sufficient to dispel the warming feedbacks.
If Earth was capable of runaway global warming then we'd have seen it long ago like on Venus, or rather not see it, because we'd be dead. If Earth was capable of runaway cooling then Earth would have dry ice glaciers like Mars. There's natural mechanisms that bounds the temperature rise and fall, both the rate and the extremes.
Thank you for taking the opportunity to restate your argument while ignoring mine. I love the ad hominem you tacked on at the end, but I'd like to remind you that the subject is physics, not politicians, dear.
Other than the short-term solar effects, it's also nice that we're otherwise on the downslope from the Holocene Climatic Optimum. The term "tipping point" is used too loosely. There is currently no expectation that humans can make any alterations to the atmosphere that would last longer than a few tens of thousands of years. I think it can be assumed that barring a sudden outbreak of common sense, fossil fuel use will continue to accelerate.
People talking about "tipping points" are something of a problem. Probably "inflection points" would be better. However, most people only talk about "runaway" warming because they're deniers who want to use it as a "reductio ad absurdum". There are a handful of researchers who have got up on their hind legs and said that a Venus-type runaway scenario is possible on Earth, and while this sort of thing cannot be entirely discounted, the consensus view is that we can't keep the atmosphere hot enough for long enough to enter a 'true runaway' scenario. On the scale of 10e4-10e5 years silicate weathering and other long-term sinks should take care of the excess carbon. However, unless you're good on waiting until then, that does leave us with a bit of a short-term carbon problem.
AGW is a theory of climate change. Theories of climate change were a response to the "static climate" theories (read: assumptions based on Christian theology). It was widely believed that humans could not affect the planet, but we kept finding evidence of ice ages, and so there were a number of theories of climate change that arose in the 19th Century. Just before the dawn of the 20th Century, a guy named Arrhenius proposed a CO2-induced theory of climate change, which after being considered debunked for five decades has gained near-universal support.
Deniers would like to believe that there is some naming conspiracy, which is at this point probably nothing more than a litmus test to see if you'll believe other kookery. Someone failed to inform the IPCC that they had the wrong acronym, I guess? But the conspiracy also assumes that you're not smart enough to figure out that, to the degree that there has been any change in terminology, it's because of Frank Luntz and George W. Bush. In actual fact, the terms "climate change" and "AGW" are closely related but distinct terms, which only tend to be synonymous when discussing current climate issues. I can't think why exactly this conspiracy theory would be meaningful if true, but you should probably avoid the argument unless the goal is to look incredibly stupid.
Almost as if there has been a natural control on global warming and cooling that has existed for millions of years.
There are several such sinks. Plants aren't a particularly good one, but CO2 also dissolves readily in water, and in the longer term silicate weathering is an excellent way to get rid of excess carbon. The problem is that those things aren't working well enough. We know they're not working well enough because the CO2 levels are rising.
Climate has not ever been stable -- that would be the 19th-century view of things. When we started discovering signs of Ice Ages, it was clear that this "warm years are balanced with cold ones" theory could not account for a world which produced mile-high glaciers across Europe. Various persons in the early 20th century calculated that, far from being stable, changes of the order of a few percent difference in albedo at the poles could begin a feedback cycle that would massively disrupt the planet. Of the various theories of climate change that resulted, carbon dioxide has proved to be the most concerning, since it has been known since the mid-19th century that many human processes produced large amounts of 'carbonic acid'.
So do you want to try again with an argument not from the 19th century?
Once upon a time, there was an enormous amount of phytoplankton in a warm shallow ocean, which died and sank and became carbon-dense oil precursor rocks. These migrated northward to be buried thousands of feet beneath the frozen wastes of what is now the North Slope of Alaska. The normal decay of plants and animals produces minuscule amounts of oil and is unrelated to the oil in the arctic, or the formation of large oil deposits generally. And whether there are "nutrients" in the dirt is actually rather irrelevant, because the difference between rock, sand, and frozen mud, and fertile soil is a whole ecosystem of fungi and bacteria.
It would be about as easy to farm the North Slope as it would be to farm the Sahara.
Specifically about 3.7 W/m^2 per doubling of atmospheric carbon, which works out to be about 1 degree C. Unfortunately, most of the world's surface also happens to be covered with reservoirs of a much better greenhouse gas, which not only is leaping to be a part of this atmospheric party, but which can be dissolved in exponentially greater amounts with increased temperatures. Not one of those kind and gentle exponents either, as anyone from the South ought to be able to attest.
Waste heat from human processes will also become an issue if our energy use continues to rise, but we have probably a few hundred years even assuming current growth rates continue indefinitely. In the meantime we have a feedback issue to deal with.
Meanwhile you ignore that the DNC literally RIGGED their primary, told the WaPo and Boston times what stories to run and when, how Clinton took over $100 million in BRIBES from Russia while secretary of state and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for outing yourself as a stupid homophobe, but biologically, being LGBTQ is not particularly weird. I imagine your perception of such persons as being perpetually offended is strongly linked to your offensive attitude towards them. Are you perhaps able to fuck off in some permanent sense?
There is no legal requirement for one's signature to be any form of one's name. If I put "See ID" on the back of my card, I am fully prepared to argue that this is my legal signature. Also if I put "Fuck you" on there, which was the tactic of a legal student of my acquaintance with more brains than sense.
Well played :)
Causality actually does mean that there cannot be causeless events, and nothing in quantum physics changes that (so far). Your description of black holes is not particularly accurate. A black hole is 'merely' an extremely curved region of spacetime. PBS has a series on YouTube called 'Space Time' that will doubtless be informative, unless you'd rather not have facts interfere with your speculation.
Science is also a branch of philosophy, and logical positivism is a more-or-less valid view. It's not a currently popular view, but for most purposes one can indeed reconcile empiricism and statements which cannot be empirically tested: simply consider the unproven statement to be false. There are some downsides to that idea but it certainly cuts down on the number of Russel's Teapots one is obligated to believe in.
Generally, we would expect some degree of correlation for any two descriptions of the universe. Given the contradictory epistemological frameworks, it's not really possible for these to be meaningful coincidences.
I remember when I was a kid, and the glacier near my house lost twenty cubic miles of ice in ten years. The number of frost-free days in Fairbanks has doubled since 1950. Glacial ice loss has been most noticeable from the lower alpine and tidewater glaciers, which would be the most accessible and visible ones. I believe we're up to about fifty cubic kilometers per year for the state overall.
You can walk it back to people who live in places you care about, but there are any number of statistics to show that the Arctic at least is melting like gangbusters.
Did you misspell 'Arrhenius', or were you unaware that the theory of AGW predates An Inconvenient Truth by 11 decades?
The "whole experience" is great, unless you're not a developer. I'm not sure where you're thinking the manpower to do this "extra work" is going to come from, nor how you think that the developers are going to compromise the features they find useful in order to make simple interfaces. If Linux fails to be what you want it to be, the problem is you, not it: changing how the ecosystem functions is not an option.
Linux never really feels whole or fully integrated from top to bottom.
I've used some excellent Linux UIs. MeeGo was actually quite nice for what it was. What you're saying though is not "I want it to work like this," but, "I want it to be developed as an integral whole." That's nice, but it's not the way that goes. If you want a polished UI, you have to supply the polish. Linux is more a base for product development than a product, and extremely useful in that regard, which is why millions of people are willing to write software for it. Having a nice experience for non-technical end-users is not a problem that many Linux developers are trying to solve. If you think that's a bad thing, I would say that your expectations should be adjusted rather than some misguided and presumably futile attempt to change the Linux ecosystem. Not only are we powerless to affect the organization and direction of so many disparate entities, but something like Linux would still need to exist.
I hope that ESR has finally earned the mediocrity he deserves, but the "cathedral and the bazaar" metaphor is still apt. You may get a very large and shiny tent out of this marketplace, but nobody's going to foot the bill for the stained glass. I feel that far fewer Linux developers are interested in seeing it become dominant in the desktop segment, and the people complaining loudest about its deficiencies are, well, not developers. A collaboratively developed environment is always going to be focused on the needs of the persons doing the development, and if that makes most people second-class citizens on Linux then unfortunately there's not much to be done. You'll pry my text config files and CLI out of my cold, dead fingers -- which is to say that these things, while they are anathema to novices, are hard business requirements for myself and many other developers. You're not going to reconcile that needs mismatch, you can only choose to optimize for one group or the other.
I'm sure I would be happy to see Linux in broader use, because to me that would require more people becoming developers. For persons wanting a free version of Windows I would have to suggest asking Microsoft to donate a license.
Linux is not an OS, it's a development paradigm. One can assemble open-source software into a commercial product, but that doesn't happen naturally. It's a build-an-OS kit, and the good news is that if you don't like a component, you can change it! The bad news is that you're forced to: there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. If you're signing up for being a part of the ecosystem, you have to accept that at some point an upstream maintainer is going to do something you don't like, and you won't have much recourse. I'm not completely clear on the difference between that situation and Microsoft forcing businesses to buy new versions of its products every few years, but if that's a sticking point then, well, no one ever got fired for buying M$, and I for one do not particularly care if Linux achieves wide penetration in the desktop market. It's adequate for my purposes there, and dominant in the market segments related to my employment, so I don't personally see much need for change.
Some people have 20 years experience, others have 2 years of experience repeated 10 times. If you have a fetish for sysvinit you're in the latter category. Also, if you hate on systemd but are fine with OpenRC, then you are probably unaware as to how many of your systemd objections are equally applicable there.
We all are probably due more respect than we're willing to give others, especially online.
I'm moderating so I don't want to comment directly in the relevant thread, but I've been enjoying your responses in the "code examples" article. Apparently there are a lot of people who don't understand what "contractor" means, but you're doing a great job schooling them.
I have no idea how the movie will turn out, but the book Ready Player One was a pastiche of geek culture references from the 80s and lists of geek culture references from the 80s. It also featured characters with all of the depth of a cardboard cutout -- actually, on balance I think that's insulting to cardboard cutouts. If the RPO movie is better than the Dungeons and Dragons movie, then it can only be by heroic virtue on the part of the scriptwriters; the book should be avoided at all costs.
We've covered the permafrost issue here repeatedly. No, it does not melt into rich farmland. Most often, it melts into a bog: for an example see the entire North Slope. It would be easier to farm the Sahara.
Why don't you start here and let us know where you get hung up. The total energy captured by a century of fossil fuel use is going to have some relatively wide error bars, but it's almost exactly as much as required for the climatic shift you mention. Curiously enough, the relation of CO2 levels to ice ages was exactly the topic of Arrhenius' 1896 paper which originated the Theory of AGW. The exact number has varied slightly, but that a halving or doubling of CO2 levels could cause or reverse an Ice Age is an undisputed result for something more than a century now. If you've gone thus far without reading anything scientific on this matter, Arrhenius isn't a bad place to start. After that I imagine that you will be interested in the many reasons that his work was entirely dismissed for the next five decades, as being the best hopes for actually, say, coming up with a semi-plausible reason why AGW isn't true.
I'm not sure what in particular you're claiming doesn't exist (or is it just a need to be spoon fed?) but the science is most certainly out there. The "back of the envelope" science you're asking for is found in literally the oldest paper on the topic. Consider doing us the favor of reading it.
Clouds have both heating and cooling effects. CO2 makes the atmosphere opaque to outgoing longwave radiation globally, in the stratosphere. Even if everything you said were true, which is unfortunately not the case despite the research efforts of Dr. Lindzen among others, it still would not be sufficient to dispel the warming feedbacks.
Nice try. Next time show your maths.
If Earth was capable of runaway global warming then we'd have seen it long ago like on Venus, or rather not see it, because we'd be dead. If Earth was capable of runaway cooling then Earth would have dry ice glaciers like Mars. There's natural mechanisms that bounds the temperature rise and fall, both the rate and the extremes.
Thank you for taking the opportunity to restate your argument while ignoring mine. I love the ad hominem you tacked on at the end, but I'd like to remind you that the subject is physics, not politicians, dear.
Other than the short-term solar effects, it's also nice that we're otherwise on the downslope from the Holocene Climatic Optimum. The term "tipping point" is used too loosely. There is currently no expectation that humans can make any alterations to the atmosphere that would last longer than a few tens of thousands of years. I think it can be assumed that barring a sudden outbreak of common sense, fossil fuel use will continue to accelerate.
People talking about "tipping points" are something of a problem. Probably "inflection points" would be better. However, most people only talk about "runaway" warming because they're deniers who want to use it as a "reductio ad absurdum". There are a handful of researchers who have got up on their hind legs and said that a Venus-type runaway scenario is possible on Earth, and while this sort of thing cannot be entirely discounted, the consensus view is that we can't keep the atmosphere hot enough for long enough to enter a 'true runaway' scenario. On the scale of 10e4-10e5 years silicate weathering and other long-term sinks should take care of the excess carbon. However, unless you're good on waiting until then, that does leave us with a bit of a short-term carbon problem.
AGW is a theory of climate change. Theories of climate change were a response to the "static climate" theories (read: assumptions based on Christian theology). It was widely believed that humans could not affect the planet, but we kept finding evidence of ice ages, and so there were a number of theories of climate change that arose in the 19th Century. Just before the dawn of the 20th Century, a guy named Arrhenius proposed a CO2-induced theory of climate change, which after being considered debunked for five decades has gained near-universal support.
Deniers would like to believe that there is some naming conspiracy, which is at this point probably nothing more than a litmus test to see if you'll believe other kookery. Someone failed to inform the IPCC that they had the wrong acronym, I guess? But the conspiracy also assumes that you're not smart enough to figure out that, to the degree that there has been any change in terminology, it's because of Frank Luntz and George W. Bush. In actual fact, the terms "climate change" and "AGW" are closely related but distinct terms, which only tend to be synonymous when discussing current climate issues. I can't think why exactly this conspiracy theory would be meaningful if true, but you should probably avoid the argument unless the goal is to look incredibly stupid.
Almost as if there has been a natural control on global warming and cooling that has existed for millions of years.
There are several such sinks. Plants aren't a particularly good one, but CO2 also dissolves readily in water, and in the longer term silicate weathering is an excellent way to get rid of excess carbon. The problem is that those things aren't working well enough. We know they're not working well enough because the CO2 levels are rising.
Climate has not ever been stable -- that would be the 19th-century view of things. When we started discovering signs of Ice Ages, it was clear that this "warm years are balanced with cold ones" theory could not account for a world which produced mile-high glaciers across Europe. Various persons in the early 20th century calculated that, far from being stable, changes of the order of a few percent difference in albedo at the poles could begin a feedback cycle that would massively disrupt the planet. Of the various theories of climate change that resulted, carbon dioxide has proved to be the most concerning, since it has been known since the mid-19th century that many human processes produced large amounts of 'carbonic acid'.
So do you want to try again with an argument not from the 19th century?
Once upon a time, there was an enormous amount of phytoplankton in a warm shallow ocean, which died and sank and became carbon-dense oil precursor rocks. These migrated northward to be buried thousands of feet beneath the frozen wastes of what is now the North Slope of Alaska. The normal decay of plants and animals produces minuscule amounts of oil and is unrelated to the oil in the arctic, or the formation of large oil deposits generally. And whether there are "nutrients" in the dirt is actually rather irrelevant, because the difference between rock, sand, and frozen mud, and fertile soil is a whole ecosystem of fungi and bacteria.
It would be about as easy to farm the North Slope as it would be to farm the Sahara.
Specifically about 3.7 W/m^2 per doubling of atmospheric carbon, which works out to be about 1 degree C. Unfortunately, most of the world's surface also happens to be covered with reservoirs of a much better greenhouse gas, which not only is leaping to be a part of this atmospheric party, but which can be dissolved in exponentially greater amounts with increased temperatures. Not one of those kind and gentle exponents either, as anyone from the South ought to be able to attest.
Waste heat from human processes will also become an issue if our energy use continues to rise, but we have probably a few hundred years even assuming current growth rates continue indefinitely. In the meantime we have a feedback issue to deal with.
Meanwhile you ignore that the DNC literally RIGGED their primary, told the WaPo and Boston times what stories to run and when, how Clinton took over $100 million in BRIBES from Russia while secretary of state and so on.
Well, no, those would be lies from Breitbart.