Not so much proving your point as complicating the issue. You'll note that the article still claims a ground level, regional cooling effect. The effects of heat higher up aren't well studied. The study being conducted in Beijing may help clarify matters, one way or another.
More accurately, you pay Apple a great deal of money so you have exactly one person to blame if you get a crash. BSODs in Windows are (99% of the time anyway) a matter of bad third party drivers. Apple has an easier time of it because they only support a small range of hardware in predictable configurations; MS has to test enormous numbers of drivers for every conceivable x86/amd64/ia64 configuration. Linux splits the difference; in theory they support the greatest number of configurations, but in practice support for new hardware comes slowly, and with no guarantees.
This has actually been proposed a number of times (without the personal attacks), but rejected for two reasons:
Potential lawsuits from the driver developers
Inability to be sure of the actual cause of the crash in kernel mode
The latter problem is more important. Problem is, kernel mode code can do *anything*, including write to other modules' memory space. So if a driver "baddisplay.sys" accidentally wrote to an uninitialized pointer that just happened to point to the memory space of "goodprinter.sys", but didn't fail as a result (remember, no real memory protection in kernel mode), and "goodprinter.sys" later reads the screwed up memory and fails, it will look like a problem in "goodprinter.sys", even though "goodprinter.sys" behaved correctly (dying when faced with an irrecoverable error).
This is why the "Problem Reports and Solutions" only provides information after conferring with MS. When it gives you an answer, it's because someone at MS took a look at your crash dump (or someone else's dump which exhibited the same problem), figured out the actual cause of the crash, and linked the crash and solution together. If it blamed the module automatically, you'd spend time harassing a perfectly innocent printer manufacturer, and MS would need to hire even more lawyers.
(Disclaimer: Former MS employee, this is only what I was told)
Ah, but in the upper atmosphere, absorbing it is almost as good as reflecting it. As long as a substantial amount of the energy is radiated back out into space (either by reflection, black body radiation, or a combination thereof) rather than being trapped closer to Earth, it doesn't matter.
My school had mandatory co-ops (paid internships) in order to earn a bachelor's degree. In my experience, most companies paid interns between one half and two thirds the standard full time rate, after factoring in benefits. Without a degree or significant full time work experience, they rarely go higher.
On the other hand, it can be a great foot in the door if you do well; a company that may not have hired you full time under normal circumstances may be more favorably inclined if you demonstrate your skills in an internship. Many smaller companies won't hire new grads without a period of internship; they prefer to get a sense of your ability to contribute before committing to a full time offer.
Carbon Dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) increase heat retention. Soot (and other opaque particulate matter) reflect heat before it reaches us. The trick is determining the effect of each in isolation. The temporary reduction in soot emissions in Beijing gives us a chance to see the effect of soot in isolation (or close to it).
This isn't exactly new ground (we've previously observed the effect of increased particulate matter in the wake of large volcanic eruptions), but it's one of the few times we see it in reverse, triggered by human activity.
Well, it was missing one thing: The ability to get your items back from pickpocket children. There was one child outside a bar in the Den that was supposed to pickpocket you. Problem was, rather than remove the child (which would break a whole lot of scripts), it was simply made invisible in the British version. So you'd randomly lose items and have no way to get them back.
As other commenters have posted, computer worms could be considered a form of life under a purely reproductive definition. And I was not implying that mechanical devices capable of reproducing themselves are trivial, simply that it's a very low bar for "life". Compare the difficulty of:
Building a machine that can assemble copies of itself
Building a machine that can assemble new versions of itself that are more efficient at producing their own offspring, can independently acquire fuel, find ways to continue reproduction under adverse conditions, all without requiring human aid beyond initial manufacture
Just to be clear, what I listed was only a subset of the definition. If you want a more formal definition, there is a decent one here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life#Definitions
Fire for instance, fails on homeostasis (no regulation of state to maintain equilibrium), organization (no cell structure; while I don't think we should require cellular structure, you do need some organizational principle), and no adaptation.
The reason your school taught you that is because the definition of living usually taught in schools includes such characteristics as:
Metabolic function
Physical Growth
Independent reproduction
just to name a few. Viruses don't possess any metabolic function (they use the host cells hijacked machinery), they don't grow (once created, they are essentially static objects until they bump into a cell), and they have no means of independent reproduction (again, the hijacked cells reproduce the virus).
On the other hand, many people simplify the definition of life to solely the ability to reproduce (independently or not), which makes viruses alive, but also makes prions alive, and makes it fairly easy for humans to "create life" in the form of self-reproducing machines.
Yeah, but they aren't thought of when programmers code name fields. I have a friend with a "van ***" name (*** for privacy, since the name is a corruption unique to him and his sisters due to Ellis Island name changes). While the problem is being fixed at larger companies, smaller companies frequently:
Yup. At least you've got 20 years to plan your budget for that ungodly extra 10 cents a gallon for gas. If you save a buck or two a month, I'm sure you'll find a way to pay for it.
FYI, I'm heading home, so I won't be around to respond further. I had fun with this. Hope you did too.
I didn't say anything about the amount of oil. The DOE reports say that for me. Production wouldn't begin until 2017, there would be no effect on the market through 2030. As a kicker "Because oil prices are determined on the international market, however, any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant." Doing a little back of the napkin math, a *really* optimistic projection would have us reduce prices by no more than 10 cents a gallon (not until 2030 mind you), assuming OPEC doesn't reduce output to compensate. I'm sorry if I'm so selfish as to think that isn't a particularly impressive return.
As for relative risks to the environment, I'm less concerned about the tankers, more about the drills. The odds of a hurricane hitting Saudi Arabia: Small. The effects of a spill in the middle of a lifeless desert: Minimal. Not the case for the Gulf Coast.
Because the number of gallons needed to pollute are less than the number needed to influence the market? If I added ten million barrels of oil to the market today, no one would even notice (aside from a possible hiccup if people thought it would continue). If I spilled 0.1% of that oil on California or Louisiana coastlines, we'd have a multi-billion dollar cleanup job on our hands.
You're probably trolling, so this is a waste, but oh well. Seriously though, who honestly says things like "you can't take the risk that people might be helped"?
On the topic of oil shale: Oil shale requires a lot energy and water to convert into oil. It costs more to extract. It has net emissions over 40% higher than oil. And it produces toxic byproducts that have to be isolated to avoid contamination of water supplies. Source (first one I came across, feel free to look for others): http://www.mcclatchydc.com/256/story/45748.html
I'd rather pay a bit more for oil that isn't quite as bad for my air and my water. If there is ever an actual crisis (and no, $4/gallon is not a crisis, call me when it hits $10), it'll be there for us, but why the all-fired hurry?
You do realize that (assuming linear supply/demand correlation, not a given, plus close enough for estimates) a 0.2% reduction in the price of gas (from a base of $4/gallon) would mean it costs $3.992/gallon. I'm sure all the poor people will be jumping for joy that they saved almost a penny per gallon.
The poll seems suspicious to me. While 69% favor drilling, only 51% think it will have any impact on gas prices. What motivation drives the 18% (or more, since some might believe it would lower prices but still oppose it for environmental reasons) who favor drilling, but don't think it will affect prices? Were 20% of the respondents oil company execs?
On reflection, it occurs to me that at least with the diet and exercise regimen, you're not beholden to medicine, so you could theoretically keep the affliction under control under any circumstance, which does make it closer to a cure (since everyone, no matter the means, has access to it). Of course, using a pill to substitute for exercise would undo that benefit.
In any event, I realize I'm being overly pedantic. I not trying to bait, I'm sorry to have given that impression.
It's actually simpler to design a weak (but competent) chess player than a weak (but competent) Scrabble player. With a chess player, you simply trim the number of moves you search ahead through. With Scrabble, what do you do? Intentionally provide it with a really sucky dictionary? Not check to see if you can attach a word at half the locations on the board? Every move in chess has a predictable impact on the board and your opponent's moves. Aside from denying access to triple word score tiles, there isn't a whole lot of long term strategy in Scrabble, there aren't any obvious ways to adjust the skill of a computer opponent without cheesy handicaps.
I'm just saying that right now, if I choose to have a piece of the ice cream pie my company brought in for a birthday party, my worst concern is brain freeze. If I have Type II diabetes, and I'm exercising regularly and have a slice of the pie, I might need a shot of insulin. When your life is significantly impacted by a disease, I don't consider it cured.
Personal example. I have asthma. When I take Claritin and use an inhaler, I don't have symptoms. I'm not cured.
America simply announcing there will be plenty of oil by its commitment to drill will drop prices over night.
America has nowhere near the amount of oil reserves you think it does. Saudi Arabia has over ten times what we do, Canada roughly nine times more. If we extracted every drop of our proven reserves today (roughly 21 billion barrels, maybe another 5-10 we are unsure of), we still consume about 21 million per *day*. About three years worth of oil, then we're done. And it would still cost money to extract it all.
America announcing there will be plenty of oil by increased domestic drilling would cause OPEC countries to laugh themselves to death overnight, nothing more.
A trillion? Really? Most sources I see online put the total proven reserves under U.S. jurisdiction at 21 billion barrels total. Adding on some speculative fields, it's still nowwhere near 100 billion, let alone a trillion barrels.
As for your emotion based argument on your little girl's shoes, it is fairly clear that *nothing* the U.S. could do right now would have a measurable longterm impact on gas/diesel prices in the next 5 years, let alone before your daughter outgrows her current pair of shoes.
Sometimes the world changes. Cheap gas was a fluke. Raging about how unfair it is won't solve anything. Find ways to use less gas. Economize on the things you can, and saving $50 (or whatever children's shoes cost nowadays) is not that hard. I just saved myself about $20/month in electric bills by buying a new $400 fridge. Pays for itself inside of two years and works better too. Sell an SUV, buy a lightly used Civic, the price of gas doesn't matter as much anymore. The world doesn't owe you cheap gas, and shooting the messenger gets you nowhere.
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Not so much proving your point as complicating the issue. You'll note that the article still claims a ground level, regional cooling effect. The effects of heat higher up aren't well studied. The study being conducted in Beijing may help clarify matters, one way or another.
More accurately, you pay Apple a great deal of money so you have exactly one person to blame if you get a crash. BSODs in Windows are (99% of the time anyway) a matter of bad third party drivers. Apple has an easier time of it because they only support a small range of hardware in predictable configurations; MS has to test enormous numbers of drivers for every conceivable x86/amd64/ia64 configuration. Linux splits the difference; in theory they support the greatest number of configurations, but in practice support for new hardware comes slowly, and with no guarantees.
This has actually been proposed a number of times (without the personal attacks), but rejected for two reasons:
The latter problem is more important. Problem is, kernel mode code can do *anything*, including write to other modules' memory space. So if a driver "baddisplay.sys" accidentally wrote to an uninitialized pointer that just happened to point to the memory space of "goodprinter.sys", but didn't fail as a result (remember, no real memory protection in kernel mode), and "goodprinter.sys" later reads the screwed up memory and fails, it will look like a problem in "goodprinter.sys", even though "goodprinter.sys" behaved correctly (dying when faced with an irrecoverable error).
This is why the "Problem Reports and Solutions" only provides information after conferring with MS. When it gives you an answer, it's because someone at MS took a look at your crash dump (or someone else's dump which exhibited the same problem), figured out the actual cause of the crash, and linked the crash and solution together. If it blamed the module automatically, you'd spend time harassing a perfectly innocent printer manufacturer, and MS would need to hire even more lawyers.
(Disclaimer: Former MS employee, this is only what I was told)
Ah, but in the upper atmosphere, absorbing it is almost as good as reflecting it. As long as a substantial amount of the energy is radiated back out into space (either by reflection, black body radiation, or a combination thereof) rather than being trapped closer to Earth, it doesn't matter.
My school had mandatory co-ops (paid internships) in order to earn a bachelor's degree. In my experience, most companies paid interns between one half and two thirds the standard full time rate, after factoring in benefits. Without a degree or significant full time work experience, they rarely go higher.
On the other hand, it can be a great foot in the door if you do well; a company that may not have hired you full time under normal circumstances may be more favorably inclined if you demonstrate your skills in an internship. Many smaller companies won't hire new grads without a period of internship; they prefer to get a sense of your ability to contribute before committing to a full time offer.
Carbon Dioxide (and other greenhouse gases) increase heat retention. Soot (and other opaque particulate matter) reflect heat before it reaches us. The trick is determining the effect of each in isolation. The temporary reduction in soot emissions in Beijing gives us a chance to see the effect of soot in isolation (or close to it).
This isn't exactly new ground (we've previously observed the effect of increased particulate matter in the wake of large volcanic eruptions), but it's one of the few times we see it in reverse, triggered by human activity.
Umm... I think by definition it works in reverse. Just flip the device around.
Well, it was missing one thing: The ability to get your items back from pickpocket children. There was one child outside a bar in the Den that was supposed to pickpocket you. Problem was, rather than remove the child (which would break a whole lot of scripts), it was simply made invisible in the British version. So you'd randomly lose items and have no way to get them back.
Just to be clear, what I listed was only a subset of the definition. If you want a more formal definition, there is a decent one here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life#Definitions
Fire for instance, fails on homeostasis (no regulation of state to maintain equilibrium), organization (no cell structure; while I don't think we should require cellular structure, you do need some organizational principle), and no adaptation.
The reason your school taught you that is because the definition of living usually taught in schools includes such characteristics as:
just to name a few. Viruses don't possess any metabolic function (they use the host cells hijacked machinery), they don't grow (once created, they are essentially static objects until they bump into a cell), and they have no means of independent reproduction (again, the hijacked cells reproduce the virus).
On the other hand, many people simplify the definition of life to solely the ability to reproduce (independently or not), which makes viruses alive, but also makes prions alive, and makes it fairly easy for humans to "create life" in the form of self-reproducing machines.
Neither Germans nor Chinese: http://www.snopes.com/business/misxlate/ancestor.asp
Yup. At least you've got 20 years to plan your budget for that ungodly extra 10 cents a gallon for gas. If you save a buck or two a month, I'm sure you'll find a way to pay for it.
FYI, I'm heading home, so I won't be around to respond further. I had fun with this. Hope you did too.
I didn't say anything about the amount of oil. The DOE reports say that for me. Production wouldn't begin until 2017, there would be no effect on the market through 2030. As a kicker "Because oil prices are determined on the international market, however, any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant." Doing a little back of the napkin math, a *really* optimistic projection would have us reduce prices by no more than 10 cents a gallon (not until 2030 mind you), assuming OPEC doesn't reduce output to compensate. I'm sorry if I'm so selfish as to think that isn't a particularly impressive return.
As for relative risks to the environment, I'm less concerned about the tankers, more about the drills. The odds of a hurricane hitting Saudi Arabia: Small. The effects of a spill in the middle of a lifeless desert: Minimal. Not the case for the Gulf Coast.
Because the number of gallons needed to pollute are less than the number needed to influence the market? If I added ten million barrels of oil to the market today, no one would even notice (aside from a possible hiccup if people thought it would continue). If I spilled 0.1% of that oil on California or Louisiana coastlines, we'd have a multi-billion dollar cleanup job on our hands.
You're probably trolling, so this is a waste, but oh well. Seriously though, who honestly says things like "you can't take the risk that people might be helped"?
...are we not a Capitalist country any more?
No, we're not.
On the topic of oil shale:
Oil shale requires a lot energy and water to convert into oil. It costs more to extract. It has net emissions over 40% higher than oil. And it produces toxic byproducts that have to be isolated to avoid contamination of water supplies. Source (first one I came across, feel free to look for others): http://www.mcclatchydc.com/256/story/45748.html
I'd rather pay a bit more for oil that isn't quite as bad for my air and my water. If there is ever an actual crisis (and no, $4/gallon is not a crisis, call me when it hits $10), it'll be there for us, but why the all-fired hurry?
Pollution of our waterways. Depending on your point of view, not a huge cost, but then again, not a huge gain either.
You do realize that (assuming linear supply/demand correlation, not a given, plus close enough for estimates) a 0.2% reduction in the price of gas (from a base of $4/gallon) would mean it costs $3.992/gallon. I'm sure all the poor people will be jumping for joy that they saved almost a penny per gallon.
The poll seems suspicious to me. While 69% favor drilling, only 51% think it will have any impact on gas prices. What motivation drives the 18% (or more, since some might believe it would lower prices but still oppose it for environmental reasons) who favor drilling, but don't think it will affect prices? Were 20% of the respondents oil company execs?
On reflection, it occurs to me that at least with the diet and exercise regimen, you're not beholden to medicine, so you could theoretically keep the affliction under control under any circumstance, which does make it closer to a cure (since everyone, no matter the means, has access to it). Of course, using a pill to substitute for exercise would undo that benefit.
In any event, I realize I'm being overly pedantic. I not trying to bait, I'm sorry to have given that impression.
It's actually simpler to design a weak (but competent) chess player than a weak (but competent) Scrabble player. With a chess player, you simply trim the number of moves you search ahead through. With Scrabble, what do you do? Intentionally provide it with a really sucky dictionary? Not check to see if you can attach a word at half the locations on the board? Every move in chess has a predictable impact on the board and your opponent's moves. Aside from denying access to triple word score tiles, there isn't a whole lot of long term strategy in Scrabble, there aren't any obvious ways to adjust the skill of a computer opponent without cheesy handicaps.
I'm just saying that right now, if I choose to have a piece of the ice cream pie my company brought in for a birthday party, my worst concern is brain freeze. If I have Type II diabetes, and I'm exercising regularly and have a slice of the pie, I might need a shot of insulin. When your life is significantly impacted by a disease, I don't consider it cured.
Personal example. I have asthma. When I take Claritin and use an inhaler, I don't have symptoms. I'm not cured.
America simply announcing there will be plenty of oil by its commitment to drill will drop prices over night.
America has nowhere near the amount of oil reserves you think it does. Saudi Arabia has over ten times what we do, Canada roughly nine times more. If we extracted every drop of our proven reserves today (roughly 21 billion barrels, maybe another 5-10 we are unsure of), we still consume about 21 million per *day*. About three years worth of oil, then we're done. And it would still cost money to extract it all.
America announcing there will be plenty of oil by increased domestic drilling would cause OPEC countries to laugh themselves to death overnight, nothing more.
A trillion? Really? Most sources I see online put the total proven reserves under U.S. jurisdiction at 21 billion barrels total. Adding on some speculative fields, it's still nowwhere near 100 billion, let alone a trillion barrels.
As for your emotion based argument on your little girl's shoes, it is fairly clear that *nothing* the U.S. could do right now would have a measurable longterm impact on gas/diesel prices in the next 5 years, let alone before your daughter outgrows her current pair of shoes.
Sometimes the world changes. Cheap gas was a fluke. Raging about how unfair it is won't solve anything. Find ways to use less gas. Economize on the things you can, and saving $50 (or whatever children's shoes cost nowadays) is not that hard. I just saved myself about $20/month in electric bills by buying a new $400 fridge. Pays for itself inside of two years and works better too. Sell an SUV, buy a lightly used Civic, the price of gas doesn't matter as much anymore. The world doesn't owe you cheap gas, and shooting the messenger gets you nowhere.