And the only reason that the primary method of providing healthcare is insurance is because of government tax laws for businesses.
Other modernized countries have either government-guaranteed private health insurance (insurers not allowed to refuse customers) or they just have an all-government system, and it is really not breaking their banks.
There is a problem with people who have chronic, recurring problems. The thing is, at that point that person is essentially a charity case - whether it's charity through higher premiums everyone else pays or through a government mandate, they are someone who costs more to keep alive than they will produce with their life. The insurance model breaks down.
No, that does not break the insurance model. Risk analysis is about figuring how many people need to be charged what to pay for everybody, and averaging out costs, informed by probability theory. Some losses are part of the model. Quantifying them is the challenge. Eliminating losses from insurance is fraud, because if insurance pays for no losses then insurance provides no value.
I once asked a cop in a coffee shop if he could hear the car alarm across the street and if he saw what set it off. He barely looked up from his traffic tickets to smirk, and brag that he never bothers with car alarms. Somebody had just put a dent in my car, so I didn't really find it humorous, or clever. But we were talking about courts, not cops.
There is significant uncertainty in all of these areas. And based on all that uncertainty, it is impossible to draw hard conclusions about which way this plays out.
Or do you rely, to make your rhetorical points, on a less exact definition of "significant" than is required of a scientist, to use the same word about a research subject? Scientists really are held by their profession to higher standards than the carbon industry spokespersons who are the scientists' opponents in the public "debate" about climate and related policy. Policy itself is a proper subject of debate, but science is not, and yet here we are, debating the facts themselves, not only the policies we should adopt to deal with the facts. Coal and petroleum corporations have countered the best science with scientifically unsupported, factually incorrect talking points, and for decades they have been very successful in that little game. And now, data thieves' motives are being assumed as pure as the driven snow and their "findings" taken at face value, parroted without analysis by the leading "news" sources, who have made no effort to ascertain who the data thieves are, what their motives were, and which petroleum and coal corporations paid them to do their heist (obvious motive, basic journalistic integrity requires trying to find the answer to such an obvious question), before treating the thieves with ultimate credulity, and in the process baselessly impugning the life's work of dozens of scientists directly, and thousands more implicitly.
My thesis is that such corporatist "success" (cheating, really, which is a very different thing from bona fide success, thus the "sarcastic quote marks") is directly the result of the professional constraint by which scientists are not permitted to just say a thing is "significant," but must quantify any significance we assert, at the risk of our careers. Scientists work by the most exacting rules of any profession in the world, while corporate-sponsored opponents play around, virtually no-holds-barred. Your comment about a "foregone conclusion" is particularly ironic in this context, because everybody knows that the most profitable spin is always the foregone conclusion for which any corporation will pay. If something similar is true of even one climate scientist whose work has helped prove The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect, the burden of proof has yet to be met. Even once. That is significant, statistically! Zero out of all climate scientists have been proven corrupt. Saying mean things about others and being frustrated when one's hypothesis is found to need further refinement is not scientific malpractice, it's just human, and that's the worst that the stolen University of East Anglia files show.
So before I refute, with scientific research results in the public domain, each of your five assertions of global uncertainty ("nobody knows" as opposed to you don't know) about specific relevant facts of global warming and related policy, I am just asking you to quantify how much uncertainty you assert that there is in the leading science. Alternatively, you could admit that your own uncertainty is specific to you and at least to some degree commensurate to your personal ignorance of the relevant facts, and therefore not necessarily indicative of what full-time professional climatologists do or don't know and with what certainty it is known, and can be known to diligent voters. I don't ask you to agree immediately that everything predicted by current coupled ocean-atmospheric global circulation models is a 100% accurate forecast, only to recognize that what you don't know is not neces
Okay, so it wouldn't have been impossible to find the old "Go!" language, and that's a fair point, but I'd check the professional journals only for features of the new language that I think are innovative and novel, to make sure that they really are. For the uniqueness of the name, I don't think that's typical. I would expect that "has anybody on the development team heard of a language with this name?" would usually be an adequate check. In fact, I'd go further than that. From what I have read, most languages have been created with the expectation that if the creators don't already know of a language having the same name, there isn't one (or it isn't being used widely enough to matter, which may also apply directly here), and that method has worked flawlessly until now.
As long as they both use the same programming languages, one science researcher can pick up a colleague's software project relatively seamlessly because they are by assumption studying the same reality (string theorists excepted, of course, but even they have a 1 in 11 chance). The nature of the physical world they're trying to study imposes some "agreement" on developers in science to a greater degree than elsewhere, much like a Sci-Fi program with at least one season of back story, or a spy story with several novels already made into movies. Outside of science, the only externally imposed structure would be "the profit motive" or "the hobby motive" neither of which necessarily have any mitigating effect on gratuitous, counterproductive acts of personal ambition because only in science is reality necessarily the ultimate arbiter of every dispute. And even then, a lot depends on the quality of scientists one's assigned to work with.
No, actually he meant "anachronicity," similar in construction to the word "synchronicity" but denoting events mistimed rather than synchronized. Given the meaning of the noun "anachronism" he replaced the suffix correctly to turn it into an adjective meaning, basically, exhibiting the attribute of similarity to an anachronism. Just because it hasn't been used yet... well, good dictionaries list the origins of words, and each had to be used for the first time somewhere, by somebody. A linguist would really appreciate the moment of this event, a word being used for the first time.
OSS should get suspend support and anything else it lacks in comparison to ALSA even if insignificant. Here's a hint, why doesn't Ubuntu hire the OSS author and get it more friendly in these last few cases for the end user?
It doesn't look to me like he is saying "we should be using OSS because the author doesn't use suspend on his computer," he's saying OSSv4 is better audio software, and should be made to work with features like suspend because OSS has the best potential to be a general solution for audio engineers, video gamers and casual users who just want to listen to.flac audio while we code, and be able to catch up on the day's news afterwards (Flash/swfdec/etc). ALSA does fine for me, in the latter use case, but if I find OSS automagically installed and working as well or better after the next time I apt-get dist-upgrade, that's okay. And if that solves problems for other users, why not? Just because ALSA is good enough for me doesn't mean I object to something being adopted that's better for others, and no worse for me. I haven't used PulseAudio myself, but it looks like his case is not that none of its features have merit but that it is a performance reducer, so its good features would be more useful in conjunction with a more efficient stack, which he obviously wants to be based on OSSv4.
Problems should be fixed directly, not in a roundabout matter (sic) as is done with PulseAudio, that garbage needs to go. If users need remote sound (and few do), one should just be easily able to map/dev/dsp over NFS, and output everything to OSS that way, achieving network transparency on the file level as UNIX was designed for (everything is a file), instead of all these non UNIX hacks in place today in regards to sound.
I do know enough about Linux programming to know that makes good sense. And he gives credit to PulseAudio where he feels credit is due, as a high quality mixer.
As you can see, ALSA's API can also output to PulseAudio, meaning programs written using ALSA's API can output to PulseAudio and use PulseAudio's higher quality sound mixer seamlessly without requiring the modification of old programs. PulseAudio is also able to send sound to another PulseAudio server on the network to output sound remotely. PulseAudio's stack is something like this: [very complex, low-performance-looking diagram]
It seemed more like a balanced analysis than a rant to me, especially if the things he says about sound quality and latency are true.
Services like Gmail and Hotmail are the worse offenders when it comes to false positives because you never know when you have been filtered since their blacklists are private.
If that is frequently a problem for you, then you are a SPAMMER. Even if you're small-time, and therefore technically not a "mass mailer" by number of e-mails, you are still sending a significant enough proportion of your messages to uninterested parties to apparently be dark grey listed, by your own version of events.
You must be new here. In fact, your user ID # proves that you are, even more so than I am. In my months as a frequent but not regular/.er, I have noticed that most of those who frequently comment consider censorship to be fully included in the category "stuff that matters" and that those who self-identify, either implicitly or explicitly, as "nerds" tend strongly to oppose censorship. I suspect that you will either come around to this way of thinking, at least learn to appreciate its merits even if you continue to think the/. mainstream is "extreme," or you will just go away, perhaps after some interval of unfulfilling trolling or perhaps more quickly and less noisily, depending on your character, about which I don't pretend to know. We don't all necessarily intend to be unfriendly to disagreement, certainly not when it appears genuine and intellectually honest, but censorship is always worse than what it purports to correct. Always.
The similarity to censorship of granting corporate overlords unearned claims of control over "intellectual property" is trivially obvious, and therefore left as a gedanken exercise for the reader.
Wrong. You need to think, about why your would-be recipients have chosen to use Gmail and other services which provide greylisting and other anti-SPAM technologies that might make your attempts to send e-mail challenging.
Services like Gmail and Hotmail are the worse offenders when it comes to false positives because you never know when you have been filtered since their blacklists are private.
SPAM filters are not intended for your convenience as a mass e-mailer, they are intended for my convenience and the convenience of every other unwilling recipient of e-mails from people like you, and your characterization of Hotmail and Gmail is therefore completely incorrect. As a former recipient of mail filtered by Hotmail's blacklists and current recipient of mail filtered by Gmail's, I can tell you authoritatively that they are not comparable. Maybe they were before Google acquired Gmail and then Postini, but I started using Gmail just about the time that they acquired Postini, in fact because of that, and they work very well together -- for their intended users, not for people trying to send me unsolicited commercial e-mails. Hotmail and Yahoo were both horrible at that last time I used them and I have no intention of ever going back. Gmail does not falsely mark e-mail intended for me as SPAM, and if the messages you send are treated the same by Gmail and Hotmail, either you are a SPAMMER or an incompetent.
It's also safe to say that you know as well as I do that none of the above rely entirely on blacklists and that the differences in their performance are due more to the quality of their greylisting algorithms than to blacklists, and that users have the opportunity to help fine-tune greylists by removing any false positives from our SPAM folders within 30 days, a more than adequate interval for anybody to whom e-mail is an important communication medium in the first place.
If your mail isn't getting to its desired recipients, that's your responsibility as a listserv administrator, or whatever job title has landed you this responsibility about which you're bitching. You know of the existence of greylisting, Postini, etc. Talk to your webmaster. Have one sentence inserted to the subscription web page, warning subscribers that because you send e-mail en masse (or use more weaselly language to explain why they need to take extra efforts to receive your "important" communiqués if that is your wont), your messages are likely to be marked as SPAM at first, until the user fishes your e-mails out of their SPAM folder and marks it "not SPAM." You, not those you desire as customers, need to think about why victims of SPAM messages chose these services in the first place. We are not computer science majors because we are not interested in using the computer for the sake of using the computer. We use the computer only to accelerate the accomplishment of productive work, not to add new tasks whose only impact on our chosen profession is to make our real work more digitized, which the rest of us understand is not a "value add" in and of itself. The services you're bitching about are for my convenience as a non-IT user of the computer, not for yours in the IT department. These "microcomputer" devices and the commercial software written and sold for use with them, have been advertised as having the potential to improve our efficiency and if you are not capable of living up to that promise offered by the IT industry across the boards in every product and service you punks sell, then it is time for you to find a new line of work.
It's not their problem, and handing out free ice cream to every citizen at the expense of our grandchildren is better for their re-election campaign than being fiscally responsible.
Here in the real world, it isn't "every citizen" who's receiving "free ice cream" it's the corporate "elite" who squandered enormous gains in productive ability on over-leveraged speculative "investments" -- put simply, they pissed it all away on high stakes gambling -- then got bailed out by the larger collective, the nation. If any collectivist model has failed, it's corporate business model and the perversion of democratic government financed by corporate lobbying.
I know, backwards compatibility. But, if the medium is a hemisphere, it doesn't have to move. The "laser" would be a much smaller moving part so it could be made to move faster, improving access times.
Communication on the internet is not the "wild west"; it is subject to the same laws as the rest of the world. If someone libels someone, they are held liable under the same principles.
(emphasis mine)
That looks sensible to me, and it looks like a firm basis on which to argue that internet-specific legislation is not and never was needed, except possibly to unequivocally classify all defamation on the internet, either as libel or as slander. And the most useful way for legislators to do so would be by editing or amending earlier defamation laws, not by writing new ones. This would have clarified the applicability of existing statute and precedent to what is merely a new means of transmitting text; instead, what our "REPRESENTATIVES" have given us, the general surplus of internet-specific statutes such as CDA promotes an illusion among internet users, that the internet is fundamentally different and beyond the scope of previous law, a false impression of legal ambiguity that is clearly detrimental to the rule of law.
Small plants are more expensive to build, more expensive to maintain, and intrinsically less efficient.
False. This obvious "invention" was available in the public domain through all the debates about wind power, in which monopolists claimed that only one wind speed could generate power for any given turbine. Not to take away from the team that has finally brought it to market, but neither an electronic switch nor variable resistance are novel concepts. The only reasonable explanation for this taking so long is industrial conspiracy, illegal collusion. The Third World can do it. Expense is not the reason that we have not.
Coercive monopolies for utilities guarantee that we use over-priced and obsolete technologies, nullifying the presumed benefits of "economies of scale". Only residential, user-owned solar and wind power will solve the United States' energy problems, which stem from the petroleum oligopoly and local utility monopolies. Nuclear power is for suckers, and our country's corporatistGOP "leadership" diminishes our credibility and negotiating power on nuclear energy with un-chummy countries like Iran and Pakistan, in addition to the pollution and fraudulent deception of US "customers" who are deprived of options by government collusion with petroleum corporations and Bechtel, the largest recipient of US nuclear tribute.
The cost for 100 TB of data storage from Newegg is currently $9322. So the cost for 100 backup systems, distributed geographically, would probably be less than a million dollars, after government bulk purchase rates are figured in. When we are giving 7,000 times that amount to the banks, etc., and hoping that they will be able to survive and pay the loans back, I don't think the cost is too much to worry about, when the figure calculated is an obscene amount of redundancy.
I concur with your $1,000,000 estimate. It might be 10 times more to use all of the newest and very most reliable hardware and with armed Blackwater guards, the sky's the limit. The cost might also be 10 times less with used parts from eBay and bargain real estate, which is basically falling from the sky thanks to Cheney/Bush, but my guess is that $1 million is right around the center point where value and cost are at the optimum ratio -- more than adequate performance, but not so much more than adequate that money is wasted. The only thing you missed is that the cost of the failed asset redistribution plan is not a mere 7000 times the estimated cost to store the White House's files, it's 700,000 times more. 7000 times one million is only seven billion. Henry Paulson's taxpayer giveaway to failed "lenders" costs seven hundred billion USD, so you need another factor of 100. 7000 times is already a dramatically large multiplier but the reality is 100 times worse again, and considering risk analysis, it's even worse than that.
Redundancy in information storage is considered desirable because each copy reduces the total risk of losing all copies, or increases the probability of retaining at least one copy of each bit if you're a glass-half-full type. But in bailouts, redundancy normally is the result of criminal recidivism and considered a bad thing itself, in addition to the crime leading to bailout, because each repeat suggests higher risk of subsequent needs for bailout, recidivism.
Obviously, a foreclosed homeowner or bankrupt recent student with outstanding education loans (for education that might or might not have been outstanding) or car owner with no means of paying back our loans has made one or more financial mistake and would benefit from a personal bailout. Equally obvious are two crucial differences between us and AIG, Citi and Bear Stearns. Correctly estimating the risk of loans is not our primary duty, and we have each made just one such mistake, or very few. We're better at their jobs than they are. At a maximum, any one person is highly unlikely to ever be guilty of one or few of those mistakes because credit applications include existing debts and past repayment history. We should of course assume that some borrowers have multiple loans they can't repay, but the point remains, the number is very small compared to seven hundred billion.
The bottom line is that a bankrupt homeowner, or bankrupt recent college graduate, or bankrupt credit-enabled purchaser of such a poor investment as a depreciating motor vehicle, each demonstrate just one poor financial judgment, in a field which is not our specialty and not a measure of our professional ability. AIG, Citi and Bear Stearns, demonstrated incompetence in their own professions, in their roles as our lenders and as investors in more such loans, so unwise they necessitated their own, brand-new euphemism: "troubled" assets. They have made each and every one of the same mistakes as all of their customers, multiplied by the total number of their financially overextended customers. The fact that lenders' behaviors have led to a need for even one bailout demonstrates redundant incompetence by each company needing bailing out, compared to one or few financial mistakes by working borrowers in need of a bailout. A broke teacher or carpenter or other laborer is still good at his job, still good for something. The same cannot be said of a broke banker. Failed financial companies are by definition an unjustifiable cre
Are we even sure that Global Climate Change is something that we need to stop?
Yes.
Why?
Because Earth is where we live, and the known, proven results of CO2 pollution from coal and petroleum combustion are all bad for humans. So far, those results include more and severer storms and floods and other weather disasters, rapidly rising sea levels, melting glaciers and polar ice, and destruction of ocean habitats due to increased dissolved CO2, and the vast majority of us intend to keep our home habitable. May the horrible job markets of the near future be worst of all for former mortgage-backed securities traders, lenders who encouraged "liar loans", Blackwater mercenaries, and Exxon's global warming deniers.
Temperature certainly varies with location, and different locations correlate to higher and lower mean temperatures than others, but that still does not imply that distribution does matter.
Radiative transfer codes
Codes? What?
... have to take the atmospheric lapse rate into account in order to correctly calculate the total greenhouse effect.
You better re-route power through the transporter system before the plasma injectors fry, the trilithium crystals crack and you have an enormous anti-matter mess on your hands. Quickly, or Chief Engineer LaForge will be irate.
But the overall point remains true: the greenhouse effect doesn't go away just because the gas is in an open system.
Right, except that the Earth is not "an open system" thermally, except with respect to radiation. We don't exchange heat by conduction because space is a vacuum and we don't exchange heat by convection for the same reason. So, as a first approximation, Earth is a 2/3 closed thermal system, and higher CO2 concentration closes it further to emission, but we continue to absorb sunlight in proportion to the planet's albedo, and does not decrease as CO2 concentration increases.
Distribution is not relevant to the question of whether global warming is happening, or how severe it is, because we're talking about a global phenomenon. For any concentration, variations in distribution only make the global problem even worse some places than others, and the measured variations in distribution don't even do that. Distribution could in no possible way make the difference between "problem" and "no problem" as the GP claimed.
Adding local differences of less than 1% to existing models will help make predictions even more accurate, not call the basic prediction of global warming into any question. That is the claim I refuted. Distribution is irrelevant to the question, "is global warming happening as a result of human CO2 pollution?" which is the question being disputed in the exchange of comments you just joined. Way to be off-topic.
You do know that the CO2 forcing that is "proven" only occurs in closed systems with uniform CO2 distribution?
Untrue. In closed systems with uniform CO2 distribution, the phenomenon is simplistic enough to show first-year science students, being taught for the first time the reason for a "control" system or group, and an "experimental" one that differs by just a single variable, to positively identify the cause of observed differences in the two groups. A real scientist, before humiliating yourself by opining publicly about things you don't understand, would have considered that absorption and emission spectra of substances are identical for all particles of any given atomic composition, whether atoms or molecules. Every carbon dioxide molecule, therefore, has the same non-emission behavior in the infrared band regardless of its location and regardless of what other substances are in its vicinity. CO2 concentration matters, not distribution.
Having non-uniform distribution means there are escape routes OUT of the Earth's atmosphere
Liar. "Having non-uniform distribution" only means that some types of particle are more or less prevalent in some regions than others. Gases mix very efficiently, and do not vary by location much anyway, as the NASA AIRS study you cited actually proves. What such a variation does not change is the total number of carbon dioxide molecules, and the behavior of all carbon dioxide molecules with respect to infrared radiation. It does not matter how they are "distributed". The cumulative effect is identical. Even if Some areas are perceptibly worse than others, the least CO2-dense areas today are worse than the most CO2-dense areas just six years ago.
Given that we have multi-decadal weather patterns, and the sun itself (where we get all the damn heat to start with) is on a 11-year pattern, and with the data we have, we cannot yet break our temperature down into what cycle is responsible for what amount of temperature variation.
I can.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ensofaq.shtml#pred_mon
Identifying long-term statistical trends in data that include short-term statistical variations is not as complicated as liars like you try to make it seem. I refer the interested, honest reader to a detailed discussion of statistical methods in climate science:
http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/sap1-1-final-appA.pdf
The warming trend is clear and honest people know it. Last month:
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/20081216_climatestats.html
Read the recent NASA AIRS satellite paper that describes two hemispheres with completely different carbon cycles and distributions.
NASA portrays those data as potentially helpful in further improving the accuracy of climate change predictions, which are already very accurate. 'Our results show carbon dioxide there can vary by nearly one percent and that the free troposphere is like international waters--what's produced in one place is free to travel elsewhere,' he said. Summary: (1) The variation you mentioned is "nearly one percent" (2) the wind mixes it very efficiently (3) as I already explained, as long as the average concentration remains elevated, a little local variation is irrelevant. NASA, its data, and its analysis do not say what you claim they say, liar.
Suppresses symptoms in a way that encourages exacerbating the root problem.
If we computer-model the effects on agricultural output, public opinion, and public policy, I think we'd see that gimmicks like this would stabilize temperature in the short term, but increase energy consumption, without any built-in preference for clean sources of that energy, which in turn will worsen the root problem it purports to help "solve" in a long term that is less than two decades. That timeframe is only an estimate, but this looks like a stupid idea that will only benefit partners/shareholders/patent holders and the like. Besides, solar energy is now competitive in price with petroleum and its advantage will only grow as oil reserves continue to be depleted, reducing the total amount of easily-available petroleum.
This [original "peak oil" theory, or "Hubbert's peak"] does not mean that the world is running out of oil: it means that we are running out of the cheap pumpable oil that has fueled the economic development of the 20th Century.
The global oil production curve is simply a composite of the contributions of individual nations. However, different countries are in varying stages of production. Some peaked long ago (the USA peaked in 1970 -an event predicted by Dr. Hubbert in 1956), some will peak very soon (the UK in 1999), and some are a long way away from peaking - see graph below. These latter countries will soon find themselves supplying an ever increasing proportion of the world's oil needs as we pass the global Hubbert Peak.
They are of course the major Middle East producers, the largest of them being Saudi Arabia. Their share of the world oil market will probably exceed 30% in 1999. The last time this happened, in 1973, it allowed them to trigger a world oil crisis. In contrast with 1973, the changes in 1999 will be permanent, as they will be based on resource constraints as opposed to politics.
Slashdot Mirror
insurers not allowed to refuse customers nor to withhold from their customers any care prescribed by doctors, in the civilized countries
And the only reason that the primary method of providing healthcare is insurance is because of government tax laws for businesses.
Other modernized countries have either government-guaranteed private health insurance (insurers not allowed to refuse customers) or they just have an all-government system, and it is really not breaking their banks.
There is a problem with people who have chronic, recurring problems. The thing is, at that point that person is essentially a charity case - whether it's charity through higher premiums everyone else pays or through a government mandate, they are someone who costs more to keep alive than they will produce with their life. The insurance model breaks down.
No, that does not break the insurance model. Risk analysis is about figuring how many people need to be charged what to pay for everybody, and averaging out costs, informed by probability theory. Some losses are part of the model. Quantifying them is the challenge. Eliminating losses from insurance is fraud, because if insurance pays for no losses then insurance provides no value.
I once asked a cop in a coffee shop if he could hear the car alarm across the street and if he saw what set it off. He barely looked up from his traffic tickets to smirk, and brag that he never bothers with car alarms. Somebody had just put a dent in my car, so I didn't really find it humorous, or clever. But we were talking about courts, not cops.
I have FOI2009.zip and grep, so echo $SMOKING_GUN or shut the fuck up, bitch.
There is significant uncertainty in all of these areas. And based on all that uncertainty, it is impossible to draw hard conclusions about which way this plays out.
Or do you rely, to make your rhetorical points, on a less exact definition of "significant" than is required of a scientist, to use the same word about a research subject? Scientists really are held by their profession to higher standards than the carbon industry spokespersons who are the scientists' opponents in the public "debate" about climate and related policy. Policy itself is a proper subject of debate, but science is not, and yet here we are, debating the facts themselves, not only the policies we should adopt to deal with the facts. Coal and petroleum corporations have countered the best science with scientifically unsupported, factually incorrect talking points, and for decades they have been very successful in that little game. And now, data thieves' motives are being assumed as pure as the driven snow and their "findings" taken at face value, parroted without analysis by the leading "news" sources, who have made no effort to ascertain who the data thieves are, what their motives were, and which petroleum and coal corporations paid them to do their heist (obvious motive, basic journalistic integrity requires trying to find the answer to such an obvious question), before treating the thieves with ultimate credulity, and in the process baselessly impugning the life's work of dozens of scientists directly, and thousands more implicitly.
My thesis is that such corporatist "success" (cheating, really, which is a very different thing from bona fide success, thus the "sarcastic quote marks") is directly the result of the professional constraint by which scientists are not permitted to just say a thing is "significant," but must quantify any significance we assert, at the risk of our careers. Scientists work by the most exacting rules of any profession in the world, while corporate-sponsored opponents play around, virtually no-holds-barred. Your comment about a "foregone conclusion" is particularly ironic in this context, because everybody knows that the most profitable spin is always the foregone conclusion for which any corporation will pay. If something similar is true of even one climate scientist whose work has helped prove The Carbon Dioxide Greenhouse Effect, the burden of proof has yet to be met. Even once. That is significant, statistically! Zero out of all climate scientists have been proven corrupt. Saying mean things about others and being frustrated when one's hypothesis is found to need further refinement is not scientific malpractice, it's just human, and that's the worst that the stolen University of East Anglia files show.
So before I refute, with scientific research results in the public domain, each of your five assertions of global uncertainty ("nobody knows" as opposed to you don't know) about specific relevant facts of global warming and related policy, I am just asking you to quantify how much uncertainty you assert that there is in the leading science. Alternatively, you could admit that your own uncertainty is specific to you and at least to some degree commensurate to your personal ignorance of the relevant facts, and therefore not necessarily indicative of what full-time professional climatologists do or don't know and with what certainty it is known, and can be known to diligent voters. I don't ask you to agree immediately that everything predicted by current coupled ocean-atmospheric global circulation models is a 100% accurate forecast, only to recognize that what you don't know is not neces
Okay, so it wouldn't have been impossible to find the old "Go!" language, and that's a fair point, but I'd check the professional journals only for features of the new language that I think are innovative and novel, to make sure that they really are. For the uniqueness of the name, I don't think that's typical. I would expect that "has anybody on the development team heard of a language with this name?" would usually be an adequate check. In fact, I'd go further than that. From what I have read, most languages have been created with the expectation that if the creators don't already know of a language having the same name, there isn't one (or it isn't being used widely enough to matter, which may also apply directly here), and that method has worked flawlessly until now.
This is understandable, an "oops" not a scandal.
As long as they both use the same programming languages, one science researcher can pick up a colleague's software project relatively seamlessly because they are by assumption studying the same reality (string theorists excepted, of course, but even they have a 1 in 11 chance). The nature of the physical world they're trying to study imposes some "agreement" on developers in science to a greater degree than elsewhere, much like a Sci-Fi program with at least one season of back story, or a spy story with several novels already made into movies. Outside of science, the only externally imposed structure would be "the profit motive" or "the hobby motive" neither of which necessarily have any mitigating effect on gratuitous, counterproductive acts of personal ambition because only in science is reality necessarily the ultimate arbiter of every dispute. And even then, a lot depends on the quality of scientists one's assigned to work with.
No, actually he meant "anachronicity," similar in construction to the word "synchronicity" but denoting events mistimed rather than synchronized. Given the meaning of the noun "anachronism" he replaced the suffix correctly to turn it into an adjective meaning, basically, exhibiting the attribute of similarity to an anachronism. Just because it hasn't been used yet ... well, good dictionaries list the origins of words, and each had to be used for the first time somewhere, by somebody. A linguist would really appreciate the moment of this event, a word being used for the first time.
On the other hand, it probably is already listed in more thorough dictionaries and there's really nothing to see here, move along.
OSS should get suspend support and anything else it lacks in comparison to ALSA even if insignificant. Here's a hint, why doesn't Ubuntu hire the OSS author and get it more friendly in these last few cases for the end user?
It doesn't look to me like he is saying "we should be using OSS because the author doesn't use suspend on his computer," he's saying OSSv4 is better audio software, and should be made to work with features like suspend because OSS has the best potential to be a general solution for audio engineers, video gamers and casual users who just want to listen to .flac audio while we code, and be able to catch up on the day's news afterwards (Flash/swfdec/etc). ALSA does fine for me, in the latter use case, but if I find OSS automagically installed and working as well or better after the next time I apt-get dist-upgrade, that's okay. And if that solves problems for other users, why not? Just because ALSA is good enough for me doesn't mean I object to something being adopted that's better for others, and no worse for me. I haven't used PulseAudio myself, but it looks like his case is not that none of its features have merit but that it is a performance reducer, so its good features would be more useful in conjunction with a more efficient stack, which he obviously wants to be based on OSSv4.
Problems should be fixed directly, not in a roundabout matter (sic) as is done with PulseAudio, that garbage needs to go. If users need remote sound (and few do), one should just be easily able to map /dev/dsp over NFS, and output everything to OSS that way, achieving network transparency on the file level as UNIX was designed for (everything is a file), instead of all these non UNIX hacks in place today in regards to sound.
I do know enough about Linux programming to know that makes good sense. And he gives credit to PulseAudio where he feels credit is due, as a high quality mixer.
As you can see, ALSA's API can also output to PulseAudio, meaning programs written using ALSA's API can output to PulseAudio and use PulseAudio's higher quality sound mixer seamlessly without requiring the modification of old programs. PulseAudio is also able to send sound to another PulseAudio server on the network to output sound remotely. PulseAudio's stack is something like this: [very complex, low-performance-looking diagram]
It seemed more like a balanced analysis than a rant to me, especially if the things he says about sound quality and latency are true.
Backwards compatibility. Doesn't mean anything, I just like saying that.
Services like Gmail and Hotmail are the worse offenders when it comes to false positives because you never know when you have been filtered since their blacklists are private.
If that is frequently a problem for you, then you are a SPAMMER. Even if you're small-time, and therefore technically not a "mass mailer" by number of e-mails, you are still sending a significant enough proportion of your messages to uninterested parties to apparently be dark grey listed, by your own version of events.
No, it only counts as "hivemind" when people cannot explain why they believe something, which you know goddamned well is not the case here.
You must be new here. In fact, your user ID # proves that you are, even more so than I am. In my months as a frequent but not regular /.er, I have noticed that most of those who frequently comment consider censorship to be fully included in the category "stuff that matters" and that those who self-identify, either implicitly or explicitly, as "nerds" tend strongly to oppose censorship. I suspect that you will either come around to this way of thinking, at least learn to appreciate its merits even if you continue to think the /. mainstream is "extreme," or you will just go away, perhaps after some interval of unfulfilling trolling or perhaps more quickly and less noisily, depending on your character, about which I don't pretend to know. We don't all necessarily intend to be unfriendly to disagreement, certainly not when it appears genuine and intellectually honest, but censorship is always worse than what it purports to correct. Always.
The similarity to censorship of granting corporate overlords unearned claims of control over "intellectual property" is trivially obvious, and therefore left as a gedanken exercise for the reader.
Wrong. You need to think, about why your would-be recipients have chosen to use Gmail and other services which provide greylisting and other anti-SPAM technologies that might make your attempts to send e-mail challenging.
Services like Gmail and Hotmail are the worse offenders when it comes to false positives because you never know when you have been filtered since their blacklists are private.
SPAM filters are not intended for your convenience as a mass e-mailer, they are intended for my convenience and the convenience of every other unwilling recipient of e-mails from people like you, and your characterization of Hotmail and Gmail is therefore completely incorrect. As a former recipient of mail filtered by Hotmail's blacklists and current recipient of mail filtered by Gmail's, I can tell you authoritatively that they are not comparable. Maybe they were before Google acquired Gmail and then Postini, but I started using Gmail just about the time that they acquired Postini, in fact because of that, and they work very well together -- for their intended users, not for people trying to send me unsolicited commercial e-mails. Hotmail and Yahoo were both horrible at that last time I used them and I have no intention of ever going back. Gmail does not falsely mark e-mail intended for me as SPAM, and if the messages you send are treated the same by Gmail and Hotmail, either you are a SPAMMER or an incompetent.
It's also safe to say that you know as well as I do that none of the above rely entirely on blacklists and that the differences in their performance are due more to the quality of their greylisting algorithms than to blacklists, and that users have the opportunity to help fine-tune greylists by removing any false positives from our SPAM folders within 30 days, a more than adequate interval for anybody to whom e-mail is an important communication medium in the first place.
If your mail isn't getting to its desired recipients, that's your responsibility as a listserv administrator, or whatever job title has landed you this responsibility about which you're bitching. You know of the existence of greylisting, Postini, etc. Talk to your webmaster. Have one sentence inserted to the subscription web page, warning subscribers that because you send e-mail en masse (or use more weaselly language to explain why they need to take extra efforts to receive your "important" communiqués if that is your wont), your messages are likely to be marked as SPAM at first, until the user fishes your e-mails out of their SPAM folder and marks it "not SPAM." You, not those you desire as customers, need to think about why victims of SPAM messages chose these services in the first place. We are not computer science majors because we are not interested in using the computer for the sake of using the computer. We use the computer only to accelerate the accomplishment of productive work, not to add new tasks whose only impact on our chosen profession is to make our real work more digitized, which the rest of us understand is not a "value add" in and of itself. The services you're bitching about are for my convenience as a non-IT user of the computer, not for yours in the IT department. These "microcomputer" devices and the commercial software written and sold for use with them, have been advertised as having the potential to improve our efficiency and if you are not capable of living up to that promise offered by the IT industry across the boards in every product and service you punks sell, then it is time for you to find a new line of work.
It's not their problem, and handing out free ice cream to every citizen at the expense of our grandchildren is better for their re-election campaign than being fiscally responsible.
Here in the real world, it isn't "every citizen" who's receiving "free ice cream" it's the corporate "elite" who squandered enormous gains in productive ability on over-leveraged speculative "investments" -- put simply, they pissed it all away on high stakes gambling -- then got bailed out by the larger collective, the nation. If any collectivist model has failed, it's corporate business model and the perversion of democratic government financed by corporate lobbying.
I know, backwards compatibility. But, if the medium is a hemisphere, it doesn't have to move. The "laser" would be a much smaller moving part so it could be made to move faster, improving access times.
Communication on the internet is not the "wild west"; it is subject to the same laws as the rest of the world. If someone libels someone, they are held liable under the same principles.
(emphasis mine)
That looks sensible to me, and it looks like a firm basis on which to argue that internet-specific legislation is not and never was needed, except possibly to unequivocally classify all defamation on the internet, either as libel or as slander. And the most useful way for legislators to do so would be by editing or amending earlier defamation laws, not by writing new ones. This would have clarified the applicability of existing statute and precedent to what is merely a new means of transmitting text; instead, what our "REPRESENTATIVES" have given us, the general surplus of internet-specific statutes such as CDA promotes an illusion among internet users, that the internet is fundamentally different and beyond the scope of previous law, a false impression of legal ambiguity that is clearly detrimental to the rule of law.
Small plants are more expensive to build, more expensive to maintain, and intrinsically less efficient.
False. This obvious "invention" was available in the public domain through all the debates about wind power, in which monopolists claimed that only one wind speed could generate power for any given turbine. Not to take away from the team that has finally brought it to market, but neither an electronic switch nor variable resistance are novel concepts. The only reasonable explanation for this taking so long is industrial conspiracy, illegal collusion. The Third World can do it. Expense is not the reason that we have not.
Coercive monopolies for utilities guarantee that we use over-priced and obsolete technologies, nullifying the presumed benefits of "economies of scale". Only residential, user-owned solar and wind power will solve the United States' energy problems, which stem from the petroleum oligopoly and local utility monopolies. Nuclear power is for suckers, and our country's corporatist GOP "leadership" diminishes our credibility and negotiating power on nuclear energy with un-chummy countries like Iran and Pakistan, in addition to the pollution and fraudulent deception of US "customers" who are deprived of options by government collusion with petroleum corporations and Bechtel, the largest recipient of US nuclear tribute.
If particular records are classified as private, does that mean what's on them can be used in court to convict him of private crimes?
Anything classified "private" as in "personal" should certainly not be protected by any "Executive Privilege" and 100% unprotected from subpoena.
The cost for 100 TB of data storage from Newegg is currently $9322. So the cost for 100 backup systems, distributed geographically, would probably be less than a million dollars, after government bulk purchase rates are figured in. When we are giving 7,000 times that amount to the banks, etc., and hoping that they will be able to survive and pay the loans back, I don't think the cost is too much to worry about, when the figure calculated is an obscene amount of redundancy.
I concur with your $1,000,000 estimate. It might be 10 times more to use all of the newest and very most reliable hardware and with armed Blackwater guards, the sky's the limit. The cost might also be 10 times less with used parts from eBay and bargain real estate, which is basically falling from the sky thanks to Cheney/Bush, but my guess is that $1 million is right around the center point where value and cost are at the optimum ratio -- more than adequate performance, but not so much more than adequate that money is wasted. The only thing you missed is that the cost of the failed asset redistribution plan is not a mere 7000 times the estimated cost to store the White House's files, it's 700,000 times more. 7000 times one million is only seven billion. Henry Paulson's taxpayer giveaway to failed "lenders" costs seven hundred billion USD, so you need another factor of 100. 7000 times is already a dramatically large multiplier but the reality is 100 times worse again, and considering risk analysis, it's even worse than that.
Redundancy in information storage is considered desirable because each copy reduces the total risk of losing all copies, or increases the probability of retaining at least one copy of each bit if you're a glass-half-full type. But in bailouts, redundancy normally is the result of criminal recidivism and considered a bad thing itself, in addition to the crime leading to bailout, because each repeat suggests higher risk of subsequent needs for bailout, recidivism.
Obviously, a foreclosed homeowner or bankrupt recent student with outstanding education loans (for education that might or might not have been outstanding) or car owner with no means of paying back our loans has made one or more financial mistake and would benefit from a personal bailout. Equally obvious are two crucial differences between us and AIG, Citi and Bear Stearns. Correctly estimating the risk of loans is not our primary duty, and we have each made just one such mistake, or very few. We're better at their jobs than they are. At a maximum, any one person is highly unlikely to ever be guilty of one or few of those mistakes because credit applications include existing debts and past repayment history. We should of course assume that some borrowers have multiple loans they can't repay, but the point remains, the number is very small compared to seven hundred billion.
The bottom line is that a bankrupt homeowner, or bankrupt recent college graduate, or bankrupt credit-enabled purchaser of such a poor investment as a depreciating motor vehicle, each demonstrate just one poor financial judgment, in a field which is not our specialty and not a measure of our professional ability. AIG, Citi and Bear Stearns, demonstrated incompetence in their own professions, in their roles as our lenders and as investors in more such loans, so unwise they necessitated their own, brand-new euphemism: "troubled" assets. They have made each and every one of the same mistakes as all of their customers, multiplied by the total number of their financially overextended customers. The fact that lenders' behaviors have led to a need for even one bailout demonstrates redundant incompetence by each company needing bailing out, compared to one or few financial mistakes by working borrowers in need of a bailout. A broke teacher or carpenter or other laborer is still good at his job, still good for something. The same cannot be said of a broke banker. Failed financial companies are by definition an unjustifiable cre
Are we even sure that Global Climate Change is something that we need to stop?
Yes.
Why?
Because Earth is where we live, and the known, proven results of CO2 pollution from coal and petroleum combustion are all bad for humans. So far, those results include more and severer storms and floods and other weather disasters, rapidly rising sea levels, melting glaciers and polar ice, and destruction of ocean habitats due to increased dissolved CO2, and the vast majority of us intend to keep our home habitable. May the horrible job markets of the near future be worst of all for former mortgage-backed securities traders, lenders who encouraged "liar loans", Blackwater mercenaries, and Exxon's global warming deniers.
What about the heat produced by the equipment that does the spraying ?
The "inventor" of that boondoggle does not expect it to adversely affect profit margins within the next four fiscal quarters.
Distribution does matter,
s/does/could, under different conditions than we have, and only to a different dispute than scorp1us and I were having ...
.. because the adsorption spectrum of CO2 depends on its temperature,
"Did you mean: absorption spectrum?"
The photon frequencies [or, c/f = lambda, wavelengths] that a substance emits and absorbs are distinct concepts from chemical absorption and adsorption. The concept "adsorption" does not apply to the optical property I was discussing, frequency-dependent photon emission.
... and its temperature depends on location.
Temperature certainly varies with location, and different locations correlate to higher and lower mean temperatures than others, but that still does not imply that distribution does matter.
Radiative transfer codes
Codes? What?
... have to take the atmospheric lapse rate into account in order to correctly calculate the total greenhouse effect.
You better re-route power through the transporter system before the plasma injectors fry, the trilithium crystals crack and you have an enormous anti-matter mess on your hands. Quickly, or Chief Engineer LaForge will be irate.
But the overall point remains true: the greenhouse effect doesn't go away just because the gas is in an open system.
Right, except that the Earth is not "an open system" thermally, except with respect to radiation. We don't exchange heat by conduction because space is a vacuum and we don't exchange heat by convection for the same reason. So, as a first approximation, Earth is a 2/3 closed thermal system, and higher CO2 concentration closes it further to emission, but we continue to absorb sunlight in proportion to the planet's albedo, and does not decrease as CO2 concentration increases.
Distribution is not relevant to the question of whether global warming is happening, or how severe it is, because we're talking about a global phenomenon. For any concentration, variations in distribution only make the global problem even worse some places than others, and the measured variations in distribution don't even do that. Distribution could in no possible way make the difference between "problem" and "no problem" as the GP claimed.
Adding local differences of less than 1% to existing models will help make predictions even more accurate, not call the basic prediction of global warming into any question. That is the claim I refuted. Distribution is irrelevant to the question, "is global warming happening as a result of human CO2 pollution?" which is the question being disputed in the exchange of comments you just joined. Way to be off-topic.
You do know that the CO2 forcing that is "proven" only occurs in closed systems with uniform CO2 distribution?
Untrue. In closed systems with uniform CO2 distribution, the phenomenon is simplistic enough to show first-year science students, being taught for the first time the reason for a "control" system or group, and an "experimental" one that differs by just a single variable, to positively identify the cause of observed differences in the two groups. A real scientist, before humiliating yourself by opining publicly about things you don't understand, would have considered that absorption and emission spectra of substances are identical for all particles of any given atomic composition, whether atoms or molecules. Every carbon dioxide molecule, therefore, has the same non-emission behavior in the infrared band regardless of its location and regardless of what other substances are in its vicinity. CO2 concentration matters, not distribution.
Having non-uniform distribution means there are escape routes OUT of the Earth's atmosphere
Liar. "Having non-uniform distribution" only means that some types of particle are more or less prevalent in some regions than others. Gases mix very efficiently, and do not vary by location much anyway, as the NASA AIRS study you cited actually proves. What such a variation does not change is the total number of carbon dioxide molecules, and the behavior of all carbon dioxide molecules with respect to infrared radiation. It does not matter how they are "distributed". The cumulative effect is identical. Even if Some areas are perceptibly worse than others, the least CO2-dense areas today are worse than the most CO2-dense areas just six years ago.
Given that we have multi-decadal weather patterns, and the sun itself (where we get all the damn heat to start with) is on a 11-year pattern, and with the data we have, we cannot yet break our temperature down into what cycle is responsible for what amount of temperature variation.
I can.
http://www.cpc.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ensofaq.shtml#pred_mon
Identifying long-term statistical trends in data that include short-term statistical variations is not as complicated as liars like you try to make it seem. I refer the interested, honest reader to a detailed discussion of statistical methods in climate science:
http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap1-1/finalreport/sap1-1-final-appA.pdf
The warming trend is clear and honest people know it. Last month:
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2008/20081216_climatestats.html
Read the recent NASA AIRS satellite paper that describes two hemispheres with completely different carbon cycles and distributions.
NASA portrays those data as potentially helpful in further improving the accuracy of climate change predictions, which are already very accurate. 'Our results show carbon dioxide there can vary by nearly one percent and that the free troposphere is like international waters--what's produced in one place is free to travel elsewhere,' he said. Summary: (1) The variation you mentioned is "nearly one percent" (2) the wind mixes it very efficiently (3) as I already explained, as long as the average concentration remains elevated, a little local variation is irrelevant. NASA, its data, and its analysis do not say what you claim they say, liar.
If we computer-model the effects on agricultural output, public opinion, and public policy, I think we'd see that gimmicks like this would stabilize temperature in the short term, but increase energy consumption, without any built-in preference for clean sources of that energy, which in turn will worsen the root problem it purports to help "solve" in a long term that is less than two decades. That timeframe is only an estimate, but this looks like a stupid idea that will only benefit partners/shareholders/patent holders and the like. Besides, solar energy is now competitive in price with petroleum and its advantage will only grow as oil reserves continue to be depleted, reducing the total amount of easily-available petroleum.
This [original "peak oil" theory, or "Hubbert's peak"] does not mean that the world is running out of oil: it means that we are running out of the cheap pumpable oil that has fueled the economic development of the 20th Century.
The global oil production curve is simply a composite of the contributions of individual nations. However, different countries are in varying stages of production. Some peaked long ago (the USA peaked in 1970 -an event predicted by Dr. Hubbert in 1956), some will peak very soon (the UK in 1999), and some are a long way away from peaking - see graph below. These latter countries will soon find themselves supplying an ever increasing proportion of the world's oil needs as we pass the global Hubbert Peak.
They are of course the major Middle East producers, the largest of them being Saudi Arabia. Their share of the world oil market will probably exceed 30% in 1999. The last time this happened, in 1973, it allowed them to trigger a world oil crisis. In contrast with 1973, the changes in 1999 will be permanent, as they will be based on resource constraints as opposed to politics.