In engineering there is a quiet underground of folks who are smart enough to never patent the really good stuff. If the really good stuff gets patented, you are screwed out of using it once your MBA overlords Layoff/RIF/Right Size/Down Size/Work Force Manage/etc you into working elsewhere.
Can't wait to see if the guv-mint can contract someone to write tax software that tallies up any better than what they spent billions on for elections.
At least for the next decade or so increasing the existing gas tax would still get the job done. After that a one time road fee at the time of purchase, or yearly road fee as part of your registration would simply make more sense.
We need fewer taxes, not more. I'm fine with those taxes being adjusted as needed, but stop nickel and diming me dozens of different ways...
Insert any other operating system in there instead of Winbloze and the thought is just chilling. A state legislature banning Linux? OS X?
Maybe it's a testament to how crappy Mojave is, er I mean Vista, that you have to looks at the shoe being on the other foot to see why it is ridiculous.
Spot on. Big corps care much more about being sued for defamation, so they very rarely will officially say anything but to verify start date, end date, and job title. The usual policy is to not allow employees to officially give references, letters of recommendation, etc. I have yet to hear of anyone who got in trouble for giving a good reference anyway. Giving a bad one and opening the coupling up to a defamation suit would be a very bad career move.
That said, many industries are very inbread, and word of mouth spreads. So weigh your grumpy manager's influence in the "community" for possible future repurcussions. If you have colleagues who are more respected than this sleeze, don't sweat it. Contact HR, and unless they are really sleazy too, it'll go away pronto.
The best encryption/security is most easily foiled by humans:
1. I've seen many username/passwords posted with sticky notes on folks' monitors. Admins are partially to blame by imposing well intentioned, but impractical password rules, resulting in the necessity of users to write that crap down or end up perpetually calling the already overextended IT help desk and being shutdown for hours at a shot to figure out passwords.
2. I've seen combos to classified safes written in pencil behind the "Locked"/"Open" magnetic sticker (well, the digits were swapped, but c'mon!).
3. I've had numerous combos given to me for vaults and safes containing secret level materials that ALL followed a retardly simple pattern, making an 8 digit combo lock (4 two digit numbers) effectively a 2 digit one (XY-YX-XY-00). While convenient, it is stupid, and possibly illegal (not sure how the DOD feels about security folks intentionally dumbing down the security they mandate?).
4. I've had to have our uncleared maintenance dude break into the vault when our crap lock broke AGAIN. Acoustic ceiling tiles really should not be the last line of defense for secret files... We regularly had problems with the combo lock on that door as well, a modest shove would open it, on those occasions it actually latched.
5. I've had the security chick for a vault blow me off after I carefully explained how the combo lock on the vault was busted. It took two more attempts, and several days to get someone else to demand it get fixed (she and I had a mutual dislike, I wonder why...). If someone just entered the vault you could turn the knob and get in without the combo, the lock was not properly resetting.
6. I've seen vaults left with only the cheesy punch code combo lock securing things (nobody in the vault) for hours at a shot on weekends, while the dude responsible was off at an extended lunch. This was SOP. Prior jobs demanded vaults always either have a cleared and authorized individual for that vault inside, or that the real locks be spun. Even for bathroom breaks.
Good looking security with lax culture is worse than weak security with a vigilant user base.
Windows 7 really reminds me of Coca Cola Classic after the failed debacle of New COKE.
Perhaps by flubbing Vista sooo badly, they can get Windows 7 to look great, where as if Windows 7 were compared to XP with no major screw up inbetween it would have only come off as "nice", like that girl you'll never call back, instead of amazing like that first glass of water after a week in the desert.
Waste heat from one of these things is going to be comparable to the electrical output, and will require dissipating the waste heat. Either they'll need a cooling tower (the BIG part of any nuclear site!), or be placed next to a large river or lake. Folks sort of get upset putting nukes right next to their water supply and ecosystem, so both those alternatives suck.
I'm not as qualified as paganizer, as I usually work at much higher frequencies (mmwave). However, losses from the PA to the antenna are typically pretty low. The claim of 12x improvement imply the current interconnects are at best 8% efficient (utter BS!).
From the PA to the radiated signal you typically have:
1. On PA losses because of their design. For example they typically have at least 3 different output stages to span from just a few milli-watts (single HBT cell), up to full power (hundreds of milli-watts, hundreds of HBT cells). The parasitics of driving the unused cells at less than full power operation creates small losses, but I don't know a hard number for this.
2. Baluns/impedance transforms. PA's are typically class B operation with a load line that is just a few Ohms (3V Vcc, and hundreds of mA of DC power, so the RF loadline is pretty steep). Solutions are matching structures, or a push-pull architecture through a balun to transform up to 50 Ohms. These usually account for 0.5-1 dB of loss (10-20%) of power. The invention ignores this part of a cell phones design.
3. Multi-band switch. Missing in this article is that most phones are designed to operate on at least 2, often 3 frequency bands. Several PA's are used, each designed to cover only one band. A GaAs phemt switch is usually used to switch between the two or more PA die. The invention does not address this aspect of cell phone design. These chips are either integrated in with the PA chip (separate die in the same carrier), or in some cases done in a different chip.
4. Small line loss from the PA chip to the antenna do have modest loss, usually just a few tenths of a dB (few percent). The article addresses this aspect of things.
5. The antenna is a clusterfuck of design hassles, as it is often dual, or tri-band in nature. A lot of compromises go on with the antenna. Making it have multiple resonances to cover the bands is hard. Making it small is hard. Making it work with the crappy ground plane, user's hand and head, and technicolor plastic case is damn hard. The article glosses over all this, and talks about a single narrow band antenna scenario.
Yep, just saying it takes more energy (usually from fossil fuels) to make and machine an aluminum case than the total energy required and petroleum content contained in the plastic case.
I still think the aluminum cases are cool, and lust for one. BUT, calling them green is hogwash (well, green wash).
The energy it takes to melt that aluminum case down is more than the energy content of the equivalent plastic case. Just because the aluminum is "recyclable" is green washing.
I hate: 1. DVD's that lock you out of fast forwarding through the crap (long intros, FBI warnings, previews, etc). 2. Stupid itunes making it a hassle to give my wife a copy of something WE own legally (or often was free in the first place). 3. Anti-competitive prices on CD's, and music in general. There have been findings of fact showing anti-competivie behavior, but nothing done to stop it. 4. CD's that try to install crap on my machine (yes, you Sony). 5. DVD's that all prevent me from being able to make fair use of their content (using short clips for example) without becoming a criminal. 6. Retarded EULA's.
I want to own my own shit again!
I can't wait until my clothing starts coming with FBI warnings that the design is trademarked, pateneted and that I may only wear the shirt before Labor Day, and before 8 PM on weeknights. You just wait.
Desktop imacs are a bit limited for serious stuff (max RAM, only one internal HD, etc). The Mac Pro requires a second mortgage. It's sort of a use issue for those of us who need to do mroe than surf the web.
I went to UAF, as in University of Fairbanks Alaska. You don't get much more backwater than that for an engineering degree. My total loans for 6 years of school were 20k, with almost zero help from family, and thanks to working student jobs throughout (hence the 6 years to finish...). Most of the loans were from the first couple years before I could get decent summer jobs, with the last 2 years taking zero loans.
While I can't say I got the best engineering education out there, I did get a damn good one, and better than many of my peers from much better known schools (Berkely, Davis, etc). Like many things, you largely get out of it what you put into it. I worked my arse off, and get a good education, paying it off in about 5 years (and never having it overwhelm me in the mean time).
My sister in law is visting us right now, and for her BS in Biology she is still paying off the last ~16k (same as my total loans!) from U of M, a state school. Crazy.
My wife is going back for a better degree (she has one of those English "degrees"), and we planned it out for all cash. She works weekends, we live simple, and are actually slightly ahead of the plan for savings for the last two payments. Why is this ethic not better encourages by schools and society?
"Do many users need a faster PC? On a clean Windows box when are you waiting on the computer? I am not talking about games, scientist, or people using CAD/CAM. I am talking about the average user?"
At home I am an "average user". I do a little word processing, play a few older games (8 year old Wolfenstien, Doom 3, etc), check the web, very light picture manipulation, etc. My machine is no slouch, just a years old, decent graphics card, dual core, 2G of ram, etc.
Vista is a pig. It takes my machine a good 2 minutes to boot, and another coupel before it stops screwing around and is more or less responsive. Opening the programs list (which is the full screen long) has a long delay. Opening the control panel list, another looong delay.
I constantly run into goofies where things get boggy or stuttery after a few hours of operation (yes, I frequently root around for viruses and malware, and have never found anything). Vista is a pig. XP on my work machine is by far less problematic. My wife's imac has been hassle free for the last year since we got it. She has never rebooted out of frustration as I do at least 2-3 times a week.
My conclusion is that to run Vista, yes, I need a faster machine. The better conclusion is that if I can stay ahead of a twin core >2 GHz machine with 2G if ram, then I need a better OS.
In communications design, such as cell phones or digital TV, channels with low reliability (fading, burst interference, etc) are tasked with getting much better overall bit error rates than you'd think you could given all the crap spewed into the RF spectrum. I'm kind of confused by why the same techniques of forward error correction, interleaving, and such aren't employed more aggressively for hard drives (maybe they are more than I am thinking, maybe that's how you get to 10^-12 in the first place?). 10^-12 bit error rate is phenominally good compared to what most digital communications devices deal with.
Typically you throw away 20-30% of your available channel with extra bits due to the encoding (imagine hardware encoding by the hard drive as it writes the bits), but you are guaranteed that if you can get most of the bits right (I'm talking 99%, not 99.9999999%) you can get the original data back, or at least know that you didn't. Interleaving spreads the bits around, so one dead sector (or 10 in a row) can easily be rocovered automatically.
Constant annoyance with DRM, buggy software, windows bloat, etc just suck the fun out using my computer and playing games. So these days I might buy a game a year at best. Usually the experience of having it not run out of the box, having to download the upgrades, punching in the CD-Key (if I'm that lucky), shaking my head at the EULA, then finally getting to play it just isn't fun.
Topping off the experience is usually crappy performance, since I haven't upgraded my machine in the last few months, so I get annoying frame rates. Once I get online, of course everyone else has better machines, lots of cheats/hacks installed, so I just run around getting the crap blown out of me. Wheee!
Overall, solitare has the best fun to BS ratio of any game on my machine...
Target is no better in this regard, he just hasn't run into it yet. They require a reciept, or will do 2 "No reciept returns" per year if the item is $25, you are SOL, just like Walmart. Your only other hope is to use a credit card, as your reciept can be pulled up by the CC number.
Due to the publish or perish mindset at universities, scientific authors must be prolific. Putt's Law (good book) lampoons this quite well, roughly akin to an Amway style ponzi scheme. Sharing new knowledge with the larger community is no longer among any of the major motives for cranking out papers. Frankly the system punishes those who would compile and distill the huge number of obtuse and often stupid articles into a useable form for us rank and file engineers. Such useful efforts are not "new and novel", despite what would be a great service for those of us doomed to wade through the stacks and stacks of crap papers written in acadamia-ese.
In my job, a hardware design engineer, I find that most of the modern papers are indecipherable and irrelevant at best. Only occasional gems make it through and actually apply to my day job (of designing state of the art T&M hardware). By contrast, the old journals from the 70's and 80's easily have a 10:1 better signal to noise ratio, despite their dated nature.
One of the big success stories from the agriculture department (I think) decades back was the development of the low temperature processing of orange juice to make concentrate. It spawned a whole industry benefitting the whole country (and world). No patents or royalties, we the people just got to enjoy orange juice year round.
I have moral problems with the government getting patents in the first place, sort of a conflict of interest there...
Should be public domain, publish it to make it public domain.
There are many, many ways to pollute. In this case the argument is that the effect of particulate matter is have a net cooling effect, somewhat canceling out the CO2 (and methane, and other greenhouse gases) effects. As a result it appears that we've been underestiamted the effects of CO2, because we hadn't realized just how serious particulate matter in the atmosphere has been dimming the sunlight on the ground (to the tune of 6-15% depending on the continent).
So what? Well if we argue that we need to keep the global dimming up to the pace of global warming, we'd need to be pumping ever increasing amounts of particulate matter into the air, which is very very nasty for human health.
If on the other hand we continue down the road to making cars burn cleaner, forcing facotries and power plants to limit their assorted toxic and harmful emissions for the sake of human respitory health, we could see a dramatic acceleration of global warming as we continue to increase CO2 emissions, but decrease the cooling effects created by particulate emissions. In other words, as China, India, and other countries clean their act up we could be in for a real eye opener.
So your question of whether scientists make this shit up, and whether we have no effect? Well, if you RTFA, you'll see that the proponents of this global dimming/global warming tug of war can't exactly ask us to all stop emitting for a month to test their theories, so instead they jump on oppurtunities like the Olympics to put their theories to the test, and better refine their number (since the possible doom of the planet is not important to limit pollution for, but a couple weeks of corrupt sporting events is).
Nova had a nice show on this last week, well actually a repeat from 2006.
One fellow showed a pretty dramatic effect on weather in the US just from the lack of con trails (sp?) from jets being absent for 3 days following 9/11. Upshot claim was that Global Dimming accounts for masking roughly 50% of Global Warming's effect. Soot itself was not the chief reflector, but rather clouds with soot reflected much more sunlight than if the soot was not present, it changed the size of the drops and created many more locations for these small drops to accumulate.
The trouble I see with the argument of "Soot helps!", is that soot is temporary, eventually washing out of the air. CO2 is not. CO2 is rapidly saturating it's sinks and is steadily increasing in the atmosphere. So even if we tried to use lots of particulate matter to dim things, eventually the ever accumulating CO2 would swamp things out.
The other bit of warning from the Nova episode is that this cooling is localized to the downstream of the polluters. So by creating localized cooling you can really screw up historic weather patterns. They cited a simulation showing that if you looked at the pollution from the US in the 70's and 80's with the better understanding of the cooling, that it helps explain the long period of draught that screwed over Ethiopia. As our sooty emissions in the US got curtailed, Ethiopia's monsoons went back to a more typical pattern. We can change climate much faster than populations, species, forests, etc can adapt.
Though, if we flood New York and Florida, is that all bad?
Slashdot Mirror
In engineering there is a quiet underground of folks who are smart enough to never patent the really good stuff. If the really good stuff gets patented, you are screwed out of using it once your MBA overlords Layoff/RIF/Right Size/Down Size/Work Force Manage/etc you into working elsewhere.
Can't wait to see if the guv-mint can contract someone to write tax software that tallies up any better than what they spent billions on for elections.
At least for the next decade or so increasing the existing gas tax would still get the job done. After that a one time road fee at the time of purchase, or yearly road fee as part of your registration would simply make more sense.
We need fewer taxes, not more. I'm fine with those taxes being adjusted as needed, but stop nickel and diming me dozens of different ways...
Insert any other operating system in there instead of Winbloze and the thought is just chilling. A state legislature banning Linux? OS X?
Maybe it's a testament to how crappy Mojave is, er I mean Vista, that you have to looks at the shoe being on the other foot to see why it is ridiculous.
Do I get a free pony in every jewel case?
Do I need to make sure I use Blu spec cables to my speakers too, with copper rolled in the correct direction?
Audiophiles realy are the some of the most religious suckers on the planet. If I could only think of this crap first and profit from it!
Spot on. Big corps care much more about being sued for defamation, so they very rarely will officially say anything but to verify start date, end date, and job title. The usual policy is to not allow employees to officially give references, letters of recommendation, etc. I have yet to hear of anyone who got in trouble for giving a good reference anyway. Giving a bad one and opening the coupling up to a defamation suit would be a very bad career move.
That said, many industries are very inbread, and word of mouth spreads. So weigh your grumpy manager's influence in the "community" for possible future repurcussions. If you have colleagues who are more respected than this sleeze, don't sweat it. Contact HR, and unless they are really sleazy too, it'll go away pronto.
The best encryption/security is most easily foiled by humans:
1. I've seen many username/passwords posted with sticky notes on folks' monitors. Admins are partially to blame by imposing well intentioned, but impractical password rules, resulting in the necessity of users to write that crap down or end up perpetually calling the already overextended IT help desk and being shutdown for hours at a shot to figure out passwords.
2. I've seen combos to classified safes written in pencil behind the "Locked"/"Open" magnetic sticker (well, the digits were swapped, but c'mon!).
3. I've had numerous combos given to me for vaults and safes containing secret level materials that ALL followed a retardly simple pattern, making an 8 digit combo lock (4 two digit numbers) effectively a 2 digit one (XY-YX-XY-00). While convenient, it is stupid, and possibly illegal (not sure how the DOD feels about security folks intentionally dumbing down the security they mandate?).
4. I've had to have our uncleared maintenance dude break into the vault when our crap lock broke AGAIN. Acoustic ceiling tiles really should not be the last line of defense for secret files... We regularly had problems with the combo lock on that door as well, a modest shove would open it, on those occasions it actually latched.
5. I've had the security chick for a vault blow me off after I carefully explained how the combo lock on the vault was busted. It took two more attempts, and several days to get someone else to demand it get fixed (she and I had a mutual dislike, I wonder why...). If someone just entered the vault you could turn the knob and get in without the combo, the lock was not properly resetting.
6. I've seen vaults left with only the cheesy punch code combo lock securing things (nobody in the vault) for hours at a shot on weekends, while the dude responsible was off at an extended lunch. This was SOP. Prior jobs demanded vaults always either have a cleared and authorized individual for that vault inside, or that the real locks be spun. Even for bathroom breaks.
Good looking security with lax culture is worse than weak security with a vigilant user base.
Windows 7 really reminds me of Coca Cola Classic after the failed debacle of New COKE.
Perhaps by flubbing Vista sooo badly, they can get Windows 7 to look great, where as if Windows 7 were compared to XP with no major screw up inbetween it would have only come off as "nice", like that girl you'll never call back, instead of amazing like that first glass of water after a week in the desert.
Waste heat from one of these things is going to be comparable to the electrical output, and will require dissipating the waste heat. Either they'll need a cooling tower (the BIG part of any nuclear site!), or be placed next to a large river or lake. Folks sort of get upset putting nukes right next to their water supply and ecosystem, so both those alternatives suck.
I'm not as qualified as paganizer, as I usually work at much higher frequencies (mmwave). However, losses from the PA to the antenna are typically pretty low. The claim of 12x improvement imply the current interconnects are at best 8% efficient (utter BS!).
From the PA to the radiated signal you typically have:
1. On PA losses because of their design. For example they typically have at least 3 different output stages to span from just a few milli-watts (single HBT cell), up to full power (hundreds of milli-watts, hundreds of HBT cells). The parasitics of driving the unused cells at less than full power operation creates small losses, but I don't know a hard number for this.
2. Baluns/impedance transforms. PA's are typically class B operation with a load line that is just a few Ohms (3V Vcc, and hundreds of mA of DC power, so the RF loadline is pretty steep). Solutions are matching structures, or a push-pull architecture through a balun to transform up to 50 Ohms. These usually account for 0.5-1 dB of loss (10-20%) of power. The invention ignores this part of a cell phones design.
3. Multi-band switch. Missing in this article is that most phones are designed to operate on at least 2, often 3 frequency bands. Several PA's are used, each designed to cover only one band. A GaAs phemt switch is usually used to switch between the two or more PA die. The invention does not address this aspect of cell phone design. These chips are either integrated in with the PA chip (separate die in the same carrier), or in some cases done in a different chip.
4. Small line loss from the PA chip to the antenna do have modest loss, usually just a few tenths of a dB (few percent). The article addresses this aspect of things.
5. The antenna is a clusterfuck of design hassles, as it is often dual, or tri-band in nature. A lot of compromises go on with the antenna. Making it have multiple resonances to cover the bands is hard. Making it small is hard. Making it work with the crappy ground plane, user's hand and head, and technicolor plastic case is damn hard. The article glosses over all this, and talks about a single narrow band antenna scenario.
Yep, just saying it takes more energy (usually from fossil fuels) to make and machine an aluminum case than the total energy required and petroleum content contained in the plastic case.
I still think the aluminum cases are cool, and lust for one. BUT, calling them green is hogwash (well, green wash).
The energy it takes to melt that aluminum case down is more than the energy content of the equivalent plastic case. Just because the aluminum is "recyclable" is green washing.
That said, piss off green peace.
I might stop being spitting mad.
I hate:
1. DVD's that lock you out of fast forwarding through the crap (long intros, FBI warnings, previews, etc).
2. Stupid itunes making it a hassle to give my wife a copy of something WE own legally (or often was free in the first place).
3. Anti-competitive prices on CD's, and music in general. There have been findings of fact showing anti-competivie behavior, but nothing done to stop it.
4. CD's that try to install crap on my machine (yes, you Sony).
5. DVD's that all prevent me from being able to make fair use of their content (using short clips for example) without becoming a criminal.
6. Retarded EULA's.
I want to own my own shit again!
I can't wait until my clothing starts coming with FBI warnings that the design is trademarked, pateneted and that I may only wear the shirt before Labor Day, and before 8 PM on weeknights. You just wait.
Desktop imacs are a bit limited for serious stuff (max RAM, only one internal HD, etc). The Mac Pro requires a second mortgage. It's sort of a use issue for those of us who need to do mroe than surf the web.
A decent headless mini-tower mac at a fair price, and I'd snap one up in a minute.
I went to UAF, as in University of Fairbanks Alaska. You don't get much more backwater than that for an engineering degree. My total loans for 6 years of school were 20k, with almost zero help from family, and thanks to working student jobs throughout (hence the 6 years to finish...). Most of the loans were from the first couple years before I could get decent summer jobs, with the last 2 years taking zero loans.
While I can't say I got the best engineering education out there, I did get a damn good one, and better than many of my peers from much better known schools (Berkely, Davis, etc). Like many things, you largely get out of it what you put into it. I worked my arse off, and get a good education, paying it off in about 5 years (and never having it overwhelm me in the mean time).
My sister in law is visting us right now, and for her BS in Biology she is still paying off the last ~16k (same as my total loans!) from U of M, a state school. Crazy.
My wife is going back for a better degree (she has one of those English "degrees"), and we planned it out for all cash. She works weekends, we live simple, and are actually slightly ahead of the plan for savings for the last two payments. Why is this ethic not better encourages by schools and society?
"Do many users need a faster PC?
On a clean Windows box when are you waiting on the computer?
I am not talking about games, scientist, or people using CAD/CAM.
I am talking about the average user?"
At home I am an "average user". I do a little word processing, play a few older games (8 year old Wolfenstien, Doom 3, etc), check the web, very light picture manipulation, etc. My machine is no slouch, just a years old, decent graphics card, dual core, 2G of ram, etc.
Vista is a pig. It takes my machine a good 2 minutes to boot, and another coupel before it stops screwing around and is more or less responsive. Opening the programs list (which is the full screen long) has a long delay. Opening the control panel list, another looong delay.
I constantly run into goofies where things get boggy or stuttery after a few hours of operation (yes, I frequently root around for viruses and malware, and have never found anything). Vista is a pig. XP on my work machine is by far less problematic. My wife's imac has been hassle free for the last year since we got it. She has never rebooted out of frustration as I do at least 2-3 times a week.
My conclusion is that to run Vista, yes, I need a faster machine. The better conclusion is that if I can stay ahead of a twin core >2 GHz machine with 2G if ram, then I need a better OS.
In communications design, such as cell phones or digital TV, channels with low reliability (fading, burst interference, etc) are tasked with getting much better overall bit error rates than you'd think you could given all the crap spewed into the RF spectrum. I'm kind of confused by why the same techniques of forward error correction, interleaving, and such aren't employed more aggressively for hard drives (maybe they are more than I am thinking, maybe that's how you get to 10^-12 in the first place?). 10^-12 bit error rate is phenominally good compared to what most digital communications devices deal with.
Typically you throw away 20-30% of your available channel with extra bits due to the encoding (imagine hardware encoding by the hard drive as it writes the bits), but you are guaranteed that if you can get most of the bits right (I'm talking 99%, not 99.9999999%) you can get the original data back, or at least know that you didn't. Interleaving spreads the bits around, so one dead sector (or 10 in a row) can easily be rocovered automatically.
Constant annoyance with DRM, buggy software, windows bloat, etc just suck the fun out using my computer and playing games. So these days I might buy a game a year at best. Usually the experience of having it not run out of the box, having to download the upgrades, punching in the CD-Key (if I'm that lucky), shaking my head at the EULA, then finally getting to play it just isn't fun.
Topping off the experience is usually crappy performance, since I haven't upgraded my machine in the last few months, so I get annoying frame rates. Once I get online, of course everyone else has better machines, lots of cheats/hacks installed, so I just run around getting the crap blown out of me. Wheee!
Overall, solitare has the best fun to BS ratio of any game on my machine...
Target is no better in this regard, he just hasn't run into it yet. They require a reciept, or will do 2 "No reciept returns" per year if the item is $25, you are SOL, just like Walmart. Your only other hope is to use a credit card, as your reciept can be pulled up by the CC number.
Sorry to digress.
Due to the publish or perish mindset at universities, scientific authors must be prolific. Putt's Law (good book) lampoons this quite well, roughly akin to an Amway style ponzi scheme. Sharing new knowledge with the larger community is no longer among any of the major motives for cranking out papers. Frankly the system punishes those who would compile and distill the huge number of obtuse and often stupid articles into a useable form for us rank and file engineers. Such useful efforts are not "new and novel", despite what would be a great service for those of us doomed to wade through the stacks and stacks of crap papers written in acadamia-ese.
In my job, a hardware design engineer, I find that most of the modern papers are indecipherable and irrelevant at best. Only occasional gems make it through and actually apply to my day job (of designing state of the art T&M hardware). By contrast, the old journals from the 70's and 80's easily have a 10:1 better signal to noise ratio, despite their dated nature.
One of the big success stories from the agriculture department (I think) decades back was the development of the low temperature processing of orange juice to make concentrate. It spawned a whole industry benefitting the whole country (and world). No patents or royalties, we the people just got to enjoy orange juice year round.
I have moral problems with the government getting patents in the first place, sort of a conflict of interest there...
Should be public domain, publish it to make it public domain.
The world doesn't function without toilets very well either. You don't see plumbers making MBA wages now do you?
RTFA.
There are many, many ways to pollute. In this case the argument is that the effect of particulate matter is have a net cooling effect, somewhat canceling out the CO2 (and methane, and other greenhouse gases) effects. As a result it appears that we've been underestiamted the effects of CO2, because we hadn't realized just how serious particulate matter in the atmosphere has been dimming the sunlight on the ground (to the tune of 6-15% depending on the continent).
So what? Well if we argue that we need to keep the global dimming up to the pace of global warming, we'd need to be pumping ever increasing amounts of particulate matter into the air, which is very very nasty for human health.
If on the other hand we continue down the road to making cars burn cleaner, forcing facotries and power plants to limit their assorted toxic and harmful emissions for the sake of human respitory health, we could see a dramatic acceleration of global warming as we continue to increase CO2 emissions, but decrease the cooling effects created by particulate emissions. In other words, as China, India, and other countries clean their act up we could be in for a real eye opener.
So your question of whether scientists make this shit up, and whether we have no effect? Well, if you RTFA, you'll see that the proponents of this global dimming/global warming tug of war can't exactly ask us to all stop emitting for a month to test their theories, so instead they jump on oppurtunities like the Olympics to put their theories to the test, and better refine their number (since the possible doom of the planet is not important to limit pollution for, but a couple weeks of corrupt sporting events is).
Tinfoil hats reflect lots of sunlight, and should be included in the overall effort to fight global warming.
Nova had a nice show on this last week, well actually a repeat from 2006.
One fellow showed a pretty dramatic effect on weather in the US just from the lack of con trails (sp?) from jets being absent for 3 days following 9/11. Upshot claim was that Global Dimming accounts for masking roughly 50% of Global Warming's effect. Soot itself was not the chief reflector, but rather clouds with soot reflected much more sunlight than if the soot was not present, it changed the size of the drops and created many more locations for these small drops to accumulate.
The trouble I see with the argument of "Soot helps!", is that soot is temporary, eventually washing out of the air. CO2 is not. CO2 is rapidly saturating it's sinks and is steadily increasing in the atmosphere. So even if we tried to use lots of particulate matter to dim things, eventually the ever accumulating CO2 would swamp things out.
The other bit of warning from the Nova episode is that this cooling is localized to the downstream of the polluters. So by creating localized cooling you can really screw up historic weather patterns. They cited a simulation showing that if you looked at the pollution from the US in the 70's and 80's with the better understanding of the cooling, that it helps explain the long period of draught that screwed over Ethiopia. As our sooty emissions in the US got curtailed, Ethiopia's monsoons went back to a more typical pattern. We can change climate much faster than populations, species, forests, etc can adapt.
Though, if we flood New York and Florida, is that all bad?