\The fact that the vast majority believes AGW is undeniably real and even some kind of immediate threat to our species makes it even more unlikely that any real evidence will ever be gathered. Why bother to gather evidence about something that the majority of the world has already decided is undeniably true? These days scientists (and I use that term loosely) focus on refining and reinforcing the argument in favor of AGW. Not so much on proving that it exists.
Also, the fact that the majority of scientists believe that gravity is undeniably real makes it even more unlikely that any real evidence [to the contrary] will ever be gathered. Why bother to gather evidence about something that the majority of the world has already decided is undeniably true? These days scientists (and I use that term accurately) focus on refining and reinforcing the argument in favor of gravity. Not so much on proving that it exists.
One of the reasons science works is that people quit arguing about stuff they already know is true, and go work on useful things instead.
"But second, that tack is unlikely to get anywhere with the 17 percent or so of highly-engaged Americans who reject the idea of a *naturally* warming planet, and are highly motivated to disregard anything that says otherwise."
There, fixed. Both sides apparently have highly motivated reasoning going on, no reason you can't turn the sentence around the other way
No, there is a difference: one of them is actually true.
Climate change is big business. Those in the profession who don't push the agenda end up hungry.
Either that, or the scientists overseeing grant funding are actually competent, and don't waste money on crackpots who fail to grasp even the most basic results in the discipline.
Maybe if the warmists tried persuasion, posting from their login account instead of calling everyone a scientifically illiterate jerkface dweeb as AC, they might be winning more people over to their point of view.
I'll be happy to call you a scientifically illiterate jerkface dweeb from my login account.
Dangerous driving is epidemic in the United States. This is a sensible response to a massive public health problem. What we really need is driverless cars and the abolition of consumer operation of vehicles, but in the meantime let's have:
(1) Much stricter licensing requirements, including mandatory defensive driving courses and road tests required for renewal, paid for by much higher license fees.
(2) Strict enforcement of traffic laws, including red light cameras and speeding cameras.
(3) A complete end to "right turn on red".
(4) Immediate loss of license for drivers at fault in any injury accident.
Driving is a licensed activity, like piloting an airplane. There is no expectation of privacy.
They might block port 25, can't very well block http: and https: ports, now can they?
Yes... They can just put all http requests through a transparent proxy and drop https altogether. And many do.
I personally haven't found this to be much of an issue. Port 443 traffic gets passed along pretty much everywhere I've tried it, including places that block 25 and even ssh traffic.
... I run my own IMAP servers. A third party can't release something that a third party doesn't have. (Nothing, of course, is keeping the upstream mail relay from keeping copies of all the messages they send on to a local IMAP machine, but I would be very surprised if it were currently common practice.)
The other reason I run my own IMAP/postfix server is to get around bullshit port blocking at hotels and the like. They might block port 25, can't very well block http: and https: ports, now can they?
I don't know about anybody else, but when I put something on the searchable web, it's because I want other people to read it, including (maybe even especially) my friends. Why would I be at all surprised or upset if they actually search for it and read it?
If you don't want people to find pictures of you you with that beer bong or in that cosplay fetish outfit, maybe you shouldn't have put them up on the internet in the first place.
Chandra isn't seeing X-ray emissions from the gas, it's seeing X-rays being absorbed by the gas. Specifically, observing 8 X-ray sources hundreds of millions of light-years beyond the gas, it was discovered that some of the X-rays from those sources were being absorbed, and it was possible to deduce the temperature of the absorbing gas.
Whoops. My bad, But my point still stands: the light is being absorbed by oxygen ions at a temperature of a million Kelvin: what do you think is ionizing them?
When people refer to temperatures in a galactic halo, they absolutely mean to imply that the halo is somewhere close to thermal equilibrium.
Hold on a second... so they just discovered the Galaxy is surrounded by gas that's the same temperature as the surface of the sun, and is 300,000 lightyears across... possibly extending far into other galaxies... I'm going to take a wild stab here and say that, if that's true it probably pervades the entire universe... Isn't this the biggest scientific discovery in the past decade? What effect does this have on Dark Matter, Dark Energy, etc... etc...
It has been known for a long time that the intergalactic medium is hot enough to be ionized. That part is not news. The thing that's news is that the hot gas makes it possible to account for the baryons in the Milky Way halo, which were previously undetected.
When a physicist talks about "temperature" in this context it's just short-hand for "average velocity"... it doesn't necessarily imply thermal equilibrium, even. So 1e6K means a high average velocity. Now, if it were a dense gas there might be collisions that would do things like excite electrons into higher states, which would then decay by emitting photons (light), and so the gas would lose thermal-kinetic energy over time.
In a sufficiently diffuse gas, loss processes like this are very slow because the chances of collision are very slow, so it can stay "hot" (that is, have a high average velocity) for a long, long time.
Uh, no. If the collision rate weren't high enough to excite electrons into higher states, it wouldn't be radiating X-rays, which is how Chandra detects the gas. Not a whole lot is known about gas in halos like the Milky Way's, but clusters have been extensively studied, and the gas is pretty close to thermal equilibrium, but not exactly. Hot cluster halos are ubiquitous, and it's not terribly surprising that more isolated galaxies have hot halos as well. The gas heats from loss of gravitational potential when it falls into the halo, and it stays hot because there are few cooling mechanisms, and because subsequent infall repleneshes it.
There is all kinds of spam in these bookstores. People go out and grab open licenced content and then package it as an ebook and try to sell it for $0.99.
Except that isn't what what the author was actually doing. From TFA:
"I have had a handful of requests that the Arch Linux Handbook be made available for the Kindle platform. It seemed like an odd request, given that the latest version of the Beginners’ Guide is already freely available in electronic format online. However, I had some free time this week and tried the conversion. It wasn’t difficult and I uploaded a version of the Handbook to the Kindle app store"
This seems entirely reasonable, and absolutely nothing like the spamming you describe. And it was fully compatible with the license on the material, which is specifically intended to facilitate exactly this kind of use. So why was Amazon equating the two?
This is happening (at the State university level anyway) because "State" universities have had huge fractions of their state funding taken away from them, often without the ability to raise basic tuition to a level which is sufficient to cover costs. Universities should cover the costs of providing online homework (a bulk fee to the publisher for acccess to online materials, for example) as part of the necessary infrastructure for teaching. Even textbooks. But they don't. Furthermore, online homework, clickers, and the like allow universities to pack classes with more students without having to pay for personnel such as additional faculty or TAs. And the student pays. Private schools at least can set tuition levels at a point where students at least know what their costs are going to be and can make an informed decision about the value of a degree.
This situation sucks. But it's fundamentally an issue of government. Are states going to fund their "state" universities at a level which makes them affordable to students, or not? If college students started voting more, and voting for candidates who support education instead of demonizing teachers, universities, science, or anything else vaguely intellectual-sounding, then maybe candidates would listen. Until then, politically apathetic college students are going to be fucked the moment they set foot on campus.
My keyboard doesn't have a "Super" key. And if it did, if I'm running an application I don't commonly use, I often don't know the name of it, so I would like a categorized menu of software to choose from.
OK. Hit alt-F2 or click on the Ubuntu icon, then the little applications icon at the bottom. It will provide you with a categorized list of everything installed on your system. In my experience, I very infrequently need to do this, so it is absolutely no problem to use one whole extra click relative to the Gnome 2 application menu.
I ditched Gentoo when the "rolling release" schedule you so highly praise decided to upgrade libc. Practically the entire system stopped working. I haven't touched Gentoo since 2005, so maybe things are better now, but it left a bad impression.
I stuck around a little longer, but finally threw in the towel on Gentoo after the expat-2.0.x upgrade debacle in 2009. Never again.
The bastard stepchildren of Ubuntu are never going to be as well looked afer as the main tree. Better to go with another distro if you want something optimized for a different environment.
I may be the only person on Slashdot who thinks so, but I have been using Unity for several months now, and I really like it. I don't like absolutely everything about it, but the package as a whole is very usable, attractive, and reliable. (And yes, I frequently use the command line, have many windows upen at once... bark bark woof woof.)
Grousing about how much better Gnome 2 was is just reactionary noise. Kudos to Ubuntu for valuing simplicity and elegance!
Slashdot Mirror
Show me the numbers. Not someone's opinion about what they mean, but a detailed description of each experiment and the raw data that resulted.
They already have: it's called the scientific literature. It's not their fault you haven't taken the time and effort to read and understand it.
\The fact that the vast majority believes AGW is undeniably real and even some kind of immediate threat to our species makes it even more unlikely that any real evidence will ever be gathered. Why bother to gather evidence about something that the majority of the world has already decided is undeniably true? These days scientists (and I use that term loosely) focus on refining and reinforcing the argument in favor of AGW. Not so much on proving that it exists.
Also, the fact that the majority of scientists believe that gravity is undeniably real makes it even more unlikely that any real evidence [to the contrary] will ever be gathered. Why bother to gather evidence about something that the majority of the world has already decided is undeniably true? These days scientists (and I use that term accurately) focus on refining and reinforcing the argument in favor of gravity. Not so much on proving that it exists.
One of the reasons science works is that people quit arguing about stuff they already know is true, and go work on useful things instead.
Actually, it explains several apparently unrelated anomalies.
And FYI, MOND is very good at explaining galaxy rotation curves, but utterly fails at the other stuff.
Sorry, but I don't remember what the other stuff is or how dark matter explains it.
- Galactic cluster X-ray masses.
- Cosmic large-scale structure.
- Absence of photon diffusion damping in Cosmic Microwave Background fluctuations.
- Gravitational lensing (for example, the Bullet Cluster
- Concordance cosmology
None of these things are explainable without dark matter. This whole "no evidence other than that discrepancy" stuff is simply ignorant.
"But second, that tack is unlikely to get anywhere with the 17 percent or so of highly-engaged Americans who reject the idea of a *naturally* warming planet, and are highly motivated to disregard anything that says otherwise."
There, fixed. Both sides apparently have highly motivated reasoning going on, no reason you can't turn the sentence around the other way
No, there is a difference: one of them is actually true.
Climate change is big business. Those in the profession who don't push the agenda end up hungry.
Either that, or the scientists overseeing grant funding are actually competent, and don't waste money on crackpots who fail to grasp even the most basic results in the discipline.
Nah. It's gotta be the conspiracy.
Maybe if the warmists tried persuasion, posting from their login account instead of calling everyone a scientifically illiterate jerkface dweeb as AC, they might be winning more people over to their point of view.
I'll be happy to call you a scientifically illiterate jerkface dweeb from my login account.
Does this help? You're welcome.
Yes, let's legislate countless people into using inadequate public transportation (if it even exists in their area)
I forgot: (5) Steeply increase gasoline taxes, with the funds earmarked for public transportation.
Dangerous driving is epidemic in the United States. This is a sensible response to a massive public health problem. What we really need is driverless cars and the abolition of consumer operation of vehicles, but in the meantime let's have:
(1) Much stricter licensing requirements, including mandatory defensive driving courses and road tests required for renewal, paid for by much higher license fees.
(2) Strict enforcement of traffic laws, including red light cameras and speeding cameras.
(3) A complete end to "right turn on red".
(4) Immediate loss of license for drivers at fault in any injury accident.
Driving is a licensed activity, like piloting an airplane. There is no expectation of privacy.
I thought I was just behind the times with my POP3 email. Apparently, it was foresight.
Morell, is that you?
They might block port 25, can't very well block http: and https: ports, now can they?
Yes... They can just put all http requests through a transparent proxy and drop https altogether. And many do.
I personally haven't found this to be much of an issue. Port 443 traffic gets passed along pretty much everywhere I've tried it, including places that block 25 and even ssh traffic.
Is your IMAP server hosted on your own machine or co-located, or "in the cloud"?
On my own machine. Co-lo would be pretty pointless, now wouldn't it?
That wasn't Petraeus, it was John Allen, who was Petraeus' successor, and until a few hours ago was on track to be the Supreme Commander of NATO.
Holy fuck, what is the matter with these people?
... I run my own IMAP servers. A third party can't release something that a third party doesn't have. (Nothing, of course, is keeping the upstream mail relay from keeping copies of all the messages they send on to a local IMAP machine, but I would be very surprised if it were currently common practice.)
The other reason I run my own IMAP/postfix server is to get around bullshit port blocking at hotels and the like. They might block port 25, can't very well block http: and https: ports, now can they?
I don't know about anybody else, but when I put something on the searchable web, it's because I want other people to read it, including (maybe even especially) my friends. Why would I be at all surprised or upset if they actually search for it and read it?
If you don't want people to find pictures of you you with that beer bong or in that cosplay fetish outfit, maybe you shouldn't have put them up on the internet in the first place.
Here's the correct link. Cool space mission.
Depth Perception
Binocular galactic vision!
The European Space Agency is already doing this. HTH.
Chandra isn't seeing X-ray emissions from the gas, it's seeing X-rays being absorbed by the gas. Specifically, observing 8 X-ray sources hundreds of millions of light-years beyond the gas, it was discovered that some of the X-rays from those sources were being absorbed, and it was possible to deduce the temperature of the absorbing gas.
Whoops. My bad, But my point still stands: the light is being absorbed by oxygen ions at a temperature of a million Kelvin: what do you think is ionizing them?
When people refer to temperatures in a galactic halo, they absolutely mean to imply that the halo is somewhere close to thermal equilibrium.
Hold on a second... so they just discovered the Galaxy is surrounded by gas that's the same temperature as the surface of the sun, and is 300,000 lightyears across... possibly extending far into other galaxies... I'm going to take a wild stab here and say that, if that's true it probably pervades the entire universe... Isn't this the biggest scientific discovery in the past decade? What effect does this have on Dark Matter, Dark Energy, etc... etc...
It has been known for a long time that the intergalactic medium is hot enough to be ionized. That part is not news. The thing that's news is that the hot gas makes it possible to account for the baryons in the Milky Way halo, which were previously undetected.
When a physicist talks about "temperature" in this context it's just short-hand for "average velocity"... it doesn't necessarily imply thermal equilibrium, even. So 1e6K means a high average velocity. Now, if it were a dense gas there might be collisions that would do things like excite electrons into higher states, which would then decay by emitting photons (light), and so the gas would lose thermal-kinetic energy over time. In a sufficiently diffuse gas, loss processes like this are very slow because the chances of collision are very slow, so it can stay "hot" (that is, have a high average velocity) for a long, long time.
Uh, no. If the collision rate weren't high enough to excite electrons into higher states, it wouldn't be radiating X-rays, which is how Chandra detects the gas. Not a whole lot is known about gas in halos like the Milky Way's, but clusters have been extensively studied, and the gas is pretty close to thermal equilibrium, but not exactly. Hot cluster halos are ubiquitous, and it's not terribly surprising that more isolated galaxies have hot halos as well. The gas heats from loss of gravitational potential when it falls into the halo, and it stays hot because there are few cooling mechanisms, and because subsequent infall repleneshes it.
There is all kinds of spam in these bookstores. People go out and grab open licenced content and then package it as an ebook and try to sell it for $0.99.
Except that isn't what what the author was actually doing. From TFA:
"I have had a handful of requests that the Arch Linux Handbook be made available for the Kindle platform. It seemed like an odd request, given that the latest version of the Beginners’ Guide is already freely available in electronic format online. However, I had some free time this week and tried the conversion. It wasn’t difficult and I uploaded a version of the Handbook to the Kindle app store"
This seems entirely reasonable, and absolutely nothing like the spamming you describe. And it was fully compatible with the license on the material, which is specifically intended to facilitate exactly this kind of use. So why was Amazon equating the two?
OB xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/
This is happening (at the State university level anyway) because "State" universities have had huge fractions of their state funding taken away from them, often without the ability to raise basic tuition to a level which is sufficient to cover costs. Universities should cover the costs of providing online homework (a bulk fee to the publisher for acccess to online materials, for example) as part of the necessary infrastructure for teaching. Even textbooks. But they don't. Furthermore, online homework, clickers, and the like allow universities to pack classes with more students without having to pay for personnel such as additional faculty or TAs. And the student pays. Private schools at least can set tuition levels at a point where students at least know what their costs are going to be and can make an informed decision about the value of a degree.
This situation sucks. But it's fundamentally an issue of government. Are states going to fund their "state" universities at a level which makes them affordable to students, or not? If college students started voting more, and voting for candidates who support education instead of demonizing teachers, universities, science, or anything else vaguely intellectual-sounding, then maybe candidates would listen. Until then, politically apathetic college students are going to be fucked the moment they set foot on campus.
My keyboard doesn't have a "Super" key. And if it did, if I'm running an application I don't commonly use, I often don't know the name of it, so I would like a categorized menu of software to choose from.
OK. Hit alt-F2 or click on the Ubuntu icon, then the little applications icon at the bottom. It will provide you with a categorized list of everything installed on your system. In my experience, I very infrequently need to do this, so it is absolutely no problem to use one whole extra click relative to the Gnome 2 application menu.
I ditched Gentoo when the "rolling release" schedule you so highly praise decided to upgrade libc. Practically the entire system stopped working. I haven't touched Gentoo since 2005, so maybe things are better now, but it left a bad impression.
I stuck around a little longer, but finally threw in the towel on Gentoo after the expat-2.0.x upgrade debacle in 2009. Never again.
The bastard stepchildren of Ubuntu are never going to be as well looked afer as the main tree. Better to go with another distro if you want something optimized for a different environment.
... bark bark woof woof.)
I may be the only person on Slashdot who thinks so, but I have been using Unity for several months now, and I really like it. I don't like absolutely everything about it, but the package as a whole is very usable, attractive, and reliable. (And yes, I frequently use the command line, have many windows upen at once
Grousing about how much better Gnome 2 was is just reactionary noise. Kudos to Ubuntu for valuing simplicity and elegance!