Slashdot Mirror


User: Rei

Rei's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
16,444
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 16,444

  1. Re:Climate change is a security threat on CIA Teams Up With Scientists To Monitor Climate · · Score: 2, Informative

    No, the onus is on the scientists to provide evidence to support their claims, as it always is.

    That's what thousands of articles in peer-reviewed journals are -- which, like it or not, is the standard for science in this modern world.

    The ball is in your court.

  2. Re:Climate change is a security threat on CIA Teams Up With Scientists To Monitor Climate · · Score: 1

    Yes, you are right. I don't care what their opinion is, I want to see the evidence.

    Boy, too bad we don't have things called "journals" that contain many thousands of research papers on various aspects of the topic so that you could read what they all have. Sure sucks that "journals" don't exist...

    Meh, conjecture and amateur disbelief without having read any actual research papers (let alone thousands of them) is probably better, right?

  3. Re:Climate change is a security threat on CIA Teams Up With Scientists To Monitor Climate · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Remember that you implied some sort of danger, so you cannot possibly be talking about sea level rise: IPCC gives lowball of 19cm and highball of 59cm over 100 years, or between 0.19cm/year and 0.59cm/years. Might happen, but its not a threat to human life. Just walk away, folks.

    The next IPCC report will almost certainly have a higher forecast, as the research that's come out since then has shown those numbers to be significant underestimates. Expect a median forecast of about 1m in the next report. And the rate speeds up over time; the equilibrium rise for a 2C warming, historically, appears to be 6-9 meters.

    Maybe you are talking about drought? No, rainfall will increase if it gets significantly warmer.

    Both flooding *and* drought are forecast to increase (on average) in a warming world. Which you're likely to get depends on where you are; some regions will get both. Yes, you're absolutely right that warmer SSTs = more precipitation. But warmer surface temperatures also mean faster evaporation (dessication of soil, plants, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, etc). It also means less snow pack, meaning river flows will vary more dramatically between seasons (ice keeps many important rivers from drying out during the summer).

    Heat stroke? OK maybe, but offset by less hypothermia.

    Heat stroke, hypothermia, drought, and sea level rise -- that's all you've got? How about greater range for malaria and dengue-fever carrying mosquitoes? The spread of pine bark beetles? The loss of almost all of the world's coral? The loss of keystone species of calcium carbonate-shelled microorganisms? The complete loss of habitat for arctic sea ice-dependent species? Increased risk of extinction for 20-30% of species studied? More rapid intensification of hurricanes (i.e., less warning)? Increased risk of wildfire? Increased growth of ragweed? Increased spread in seaborne pathogens like V. parahaemolyticus? Increasing risk of drought and flood causing more crop failures (and the consequences of that)? Radical changes in ecosystems, including thousands of species of plants and animals already found by studies to be migrating poleward? Seriously, I could spend all day on this.

    It's not that a warmer climate is somehow a "worse" climate; it's a climate that neither life on this planet nor the way we've laid out our non-mobile infrastructure is adapted to.

    Humans will adapt, esp. us in the first world who have the resources for it. But this will come at the cost of economic growth; we'll be spending our resources to break even (for a random example, to get water to the increasingly-dry and already water-unsustainable desert southwest). Humans in poorer regions will have a harder time of it, and non-human species will suffer the most. We're basically recreating the PETM.

  4. Re:Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming .. on CIA Teams Up With Scientists To Monitor Climate · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There's also the issue that things just keep speeding up over time. For example, the Copenhagen's (failed) *goal* was to limit average global temperature rise to "only" 2 degrees celsius. Well, that'd mean "only" about 1 meter of sea level rise over the next hundred years. But the equilibrium sea level rise for a 2C temperature rise, historically, is 6-9 meters. It takes several hundred years for the planet to reach its sea level equilibrium, but we're talking about (among countless other things) 1/4 of the land mass of Florida going underwater. 1m is mostly just the everglades.

  5. Re:Climate change is a security threat on CIA Teams Up With Scientists To Monitor Climate · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I actually disagree with you on your assessment of the risk, there is no really good scientific evidence of a threat from CO2 (and I seriously doubt you can show me any good evidence of a link).

    Yeah, who cares what those rubes at the science academies of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, India, Japan, Russia, Sweden, the UK, the US, and many others have to say? (every national science academy statement being in agreement, none opposed)

  6. Re:Climate change is a security threat on CIA Teams Up With Scientists To Monitor Climate · · Score: 5, Funny

    Perhaps the CIA is just trying to infiltrate the climate to overthrow it and replace it with a more US-friendly climate.

  7. Re:I'm confused on New Research Suggests G-Spot Doesn't Exist · · Score: 1

    I take off my wizard robe and hat.

    Kinky. Do you put out the flaming cross first, or leave it burning?

  8. Re:Isn't the Moller Skycar ready Yet? on DARPA Kick-Starts Flying Car Program · · Score: 1

    Past few years?

    I was a fan of them back when I was in college in the late 90s. I stopped paying attention when they proved themselves incapable of moving beyond the prototype stage. Neat concept, but not a very capable company.

  9. Re:Ground vs Air on DARPA Kick-Starts Flying Car Program · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Fly-by-wire, with a special, hard-to-get license for manual flight and restrictions on where it can be used.

    Flying cars would also require a lot of safety features to ensure survivability in an accident or mechanical problem, including multiple engines with the ability to survive the failure of one or more of them, as well as vehicle parachutes launched by a spreader gun for rapid deployment, and possibly large airbags to cushion the landing of the vehicle itself.

    Hmm... you know, I bet you could have the firing off of vehicle-scale airbags *be* the spreader for your chute if you did it right.

  10. Re:Vaginas on /. on New Research Suggests G-Spot Doesn't Exist · · Score: 2, Informative

    This study is yet another piece of controversy on the topic. There have been peer-reviewed studies that have gone both ways on the issue.

    Probably the main complicating factor is that the G-spot is about stimulating skene's/paraurethral gland(s), aka, the "female prostate". What develops into the prostate in men develops into this in women. Our bodies are homologous; we develop from the same immature organs, just to different degrees, shapes, sizes, etc. The secretions from it match those of seminal fluid quite closely.

    Just like the prostate can be stimulated in men, so can the female prostate. The problem is that while it's smaller in women, it varies dramatically in size, and can even have degenerated so much that it's outright missing. So right off the bat, you have a huge selection bias problem that you need to neutralize in your studies. A woman with a missing female prostate may well have less stimulation by focusing on that one area, leading to the opposite effect in your study and canceling out positive results.

  11. Road2 on Ideas For Exploiting NASA's SRTM Data · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My company makes use of SRTM data in our Road2electric vehicle range calculator. To tell how far an EV will *actually* go, we need to do a full physics simulation, including driver modeling, real-time weather, real-time-traffic, and of course, terrain. We first rely on NED data and use SRTM as a fallback, since NED has both higher vertical and horizontal resolution. There's a new dataset out that goes above 60 latitude, so we may be replacing SRTM data with that soon, though.

    For those curious with some real-world downsides you get using such data in applications like this:

      * Bridges and tunnels don't show up, so we have to hack around them by recognizing such situations and accounting for them.
      * The altitude data doesn't precisely match up with the locations of the roads, and in rugged areas, it can make a big difference.
      * Random noise can introduce relevant artifacts into your simulation, so you need some smoothing.
      * Obviously, you have to interpolate between datapoints, although it's pretty trivial.
      * There are a few major errors in the dataset, places where you get huge vertical spikes (positive or negative) for one or more datapoints, then everything returns to normal. We actually make use of them to help line up our roads with the known points of the errors. ;)

  12. Possibilities on 5th Underhanded C Contest Now Open · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't have the time for something like this, but it seems to me a good possibility would be to have all of your inputs that the clerk fills out be contiguous in memory, including the destination, have the algorithm to figure out what destination to go to scan through the whole destination string looking for matches (rather than looking for an exact match) and taking the last one it finds, and have a broken bounds check for the length of that string so that the algorithm looks into the comments section as well.

    So, for example, if the clerk fills out the destination as "LAX" but writes in the comments section, "Do not confuse his bags with those owned by CID who is also going to a different final destination; they're very similar looking.", the bags would be routed to Cedar Rapids (CID) instead of Los Angeles (LAX).

  13. Re:Uh No on Bruce Schneier On Airport Security · · Score: 1

    Right. What a brilliant terrorist plot. Have three people involved, one to smuggle in a spade, another a whetstone, and another whetstone oil. And all the passengers just sit around while the people noisily sharpen the spade for 15 minutes. Versus, say, pre-sharpening frame components of electronics or breaking virtually anything rigid that will hold an edge.

    FYI, the spade was a last-minute part of my camping gear.

  14. Re:Tell it to the plastic clown on Uniforms For the Help Desk? · · Score: 2, Funny

    How about something like this? Even if they embroidered "IT" onto it, that'd still be great ;)

    (Waves hand) "This is not the operating system you are looking for."

    Or for a similar style, perhaps this.

    Just seems appropriate for the IT staff. ;)

  15. Re:Tell it to the plastic clown on Uniforms For the Help Desk? · · Score: 1

    Depends on what the uniform is like. What if it was an awesome henchman-of-an-evil-genius style uniform? Or perhaps something like the longcoats from Tin Man?

  16. Re:UI responsiveness on A Mixed Review For Google Chrome On Linux · · Score: 1

    It's not just UI responsiveness -- Chrome has great Javascript performance. If only setting opacity through Javascript didn't occasionally break Chrome with an "Aw, Snap!" error...

  17. Re:Nope on Bruce Schneier On Airport Security · · Score: 1

    Yeah, but every other flight would be blown up by terrorists.

  18. Re:Jurassic Park here we come! on Extinct Ibex Resurrected By Cloning · · Score: 1

    Poor phrasing. We do not descend from dinosaurs. Birds do.

  19. Re:Uh No on Bruce Schneier On Airport Security · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Except, as soon as you put measures in place to prevent one vector, the other vectors have an increased likelihood, because terrorists are not necessarily stupid.

    That argument is fallacious. It argues for no action against any type of threat whatsoever in any circumstance in any field of discussion. Forcing people off easy vectors onto harder vectors is not an illogical course of action. What matters is that the vectors are properly prioritized and the bar on what to defend against set appropriately. We're currently not doing this; the telltale sign of that would be that security would be proactive rather than reactive. And once again, I argue for a lower bar on what we defend against, not a higher one.

    That's not what Schneier is arguing at all, please go back and actually RTFA

    I did RTFA, and I recommend you do the same. He opposes targeting very specific "movie plot threats", but supports broadly-applicable investigative resources. Not once does he argue against prioritizing threats (he even does so himself, talking about how some circumstances are more dangerous than others). He simply sets a very low bar, only supporting actions that cover a wide range of possible threats.

  20. Re:Jurassic Park here we come! on Extinct Ibex Resurrected By Cloning · · Score: 1

    Of course, but they are only far removed cousins of the cool dinosaurs.

    You don't think the raptors were "cool dinosaurs"?

    BTW, even ratites have very advanced flight adaptations and aberrant skeletons for a dinosaur

    Yes, they are not "living fossils". But they are their direct descendants, and are overall quite similar in most regards.

    You could as well compare a kiwi with an echidna as they are both tetrapoda.

    Tetrapoda is a superclass. Maniraptora is a clade under the suborder Theropoda. Not anywhere close to equivalent.

  21. Re:Jurassic Park here we come! on Extinct Ibex Resurrected By Cloning · · Score: 1

    We do not share a common ancestor with dinosaurs. We are the descendants of synapsid reptiles, which were largely beaten out in the triassic by archosaurs (the ancestors of all dinosaurs, birds, and crocodilians).

  22. Re:Uh No on Bruce Schneier On Airport Security · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There is nothing wrong with listing possible attack vectors -- that should be the goal. Each should be weighed in terms of order of likelyhood, and any that are justified to merit preventive action should be handled.

    Now, the author is arguing that that bar on what merits action should be low. I agree. But if it's going to be high, as it currently is, it should not simply be based on "what they did last time".

  23. Re:Nope on Bruce Schneier On Airport Security · · Score: 5, Informative

    The odds of airborne terror are so low it's ridiculous that we focus on it as much as we do. Here's an excellent post on the subject:

    ----------

    Not going to do any editorializing here; just going to do some non-fancy math. James Joyner asks:

    "There have been precisely three attempts over the last eight years to commit acts of terrorism aboard commercial aircraft. All of them clownishly inept and easily thwarted by the passengers. How many tens of thousands of flights have been incident free?"

    Let's expand Joyner's scope out to the past decade. Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas.

    The Bureau of Transportation Statistics provides a wealth of statistical information on air traffic. For this exercise, I will look at both domestic flights within the US, and international flights whose origin or destination was within the United States. I will not look at flights that transported cargo and crew only. I will look at flights spanning the decade from October 1999 through September 2009 inclusive (the BTS does not yet have data available for the past couple of months).

    Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.

    These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 miles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.

    Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.

    There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

    Again, no editorializing (for now). These are just the numbers.

  24. Re:Uh No on Bruce Schneier On Airport Security · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We do all of these stupid things to pretend to have security that even the most brain-dead terrorist could work around.

    Can't bring liquids on board? Sure, but you can bring freeze-dried watermelon that you've reconstituted with a liquid of your choice onboard. Any sort of saturated porous or fibrous solid is fine. You can bring any sort of solid hydrate with you, too. Heck, on my way back from Christmas, I realized that I had reusable heat packs in my pockets, and that those were liquid. To keep them? I simply activated them so that they crystalized (releasing heat). Bam -- they're no longer liquids. But they're the exact same stuff.

    Can't bring knives on board? Heck, I had a freaking dull garden spade confiscated from me, as though I was going to hijack a plane with a dull spade. But you can sure as heck bring a glass or ceramic plate or other such object and break it into long, heavy, surgically-sharp shards in a cloth towel. You can also bring any sort of electronics or other devices with you whose internal frame components are made of long, sharp pieces of metal. Even if you personally sharpened them.

    Do they think terrorists are retarded? Do they think that they can't figure this sort of stuff out? No, they'd rather just put on this "Security Theatre" and inconvenience millions upon millions of travelers for no damned reason.

    If they actually cared about security, it would be obvious: the approach to dealing with threats would be proactive, not reactive. It wouldn't be a case of, "someone tried to blow up a plane with shoes? Everyone has to take their shoes off". Taking shoes off would come before someone tried it. Same with liquids and all of these other ridiculous regulations. They're just trying to pretend that they're on top of it, when what they're doing isn't helping anyone. It's just making flying a pain in the arse.

    One of these days, when I have enough time before a plane flight, I'm going to follow the letter of the rules while showing off (in a non-threatening manner) how easily they can be worked around: by attempting to cook a full four-course meal onboard a plane during the flight from my coach seat ;) Electric or allowed-chemical heat (no flames), minimal cook times, liquids pre-stored in dehydrated food or reconstituted from powders and water-fountain water past the security checkpoint, etc.

  25. Re:Jurassic Park here we come! on Extinct Ibex Resurrected By Cloning · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Dinosaurs still exist. We call them "birds".

    In particular, they're the decendents of the clade Maniraptora, which includes velociraptor. Many are still remarkably similar to their ancestors -- for example, compare these reconstructed skull images of oviraptors with modern birds (for example, the cassowary)