There's lots of evidence of global warming right now, and many peoples' lives have been directly impacted. But I can't help you if you don't bother to learn about the world around you.
And beyond that the last time CO2 levels were at 400 ppm sea level was some 60 or 70 feet higher than they are now. It may well be that much sea level rise is already baked in and it's just a matter of how much time it takes to get there. Less than 500 years I'd imagine.
It's really hard to know, unfortunately. The rate of melt of Greenland appears to have nearly doubled in just the last ten years. At the current rate, it would take something like 7500 years for Greenland to melt entirely. But the rate is likely to increase. By how much? It's hard to say.
Nah, they did that for the same reason that they screwed up on the sea level rise: they're far too conservative. If you look at the estimates of climate sensitivity, they cluster pretty closely around 3C per doubling of CO2 as a best-fit. A few of them permit a 1.5C sensitivity as possible, but there's no reason to believe that's remotely likely as those are in the minority. Other studies permit 5C of warming per doubling of CO2, but again, that's not very likely.
The biggest errors with the IPCC come from their habit of understating just how bad the warming is. To be fair, this may make political sense: the organization is, after all, intended to provide advice to policy makers, and overestimating global warming could give fuel to the denialists who want to claim that it isn't happening. But they have a tendency to go too far sometimes (the sea level issue was particularly egregious).
Then please explain to me why the 2007 IPCC report manipulated the data (and used old, bad data) in a rather dishonest way that halved the estimated future sea level rise?
They used a low estimate of future temperature increases (lower than the best-fit temperature estimates they reported elsewhere).
They extrapolated out to only 2095 instead of 2100.
They used a model of sea level rise that predicts a past sea level rise that is only 2/3rds the measurements.
See here for a detailed discussion of the IPCC's screwup with sea level rise.
Given that sea level rise estimates have so far significantly underestimated the rate of sea level rise, and the fact that nobody (to my knowledge) has successfully built a model of the melting rate of glaciers that is anywhere near as fast as observations, the smart money is on the upper part of that range (possibly even higher, if we're very unlucky).
Sure, if you pick some really short periods (say, 5 years), there may not appear to be any warming. Or there may appear to be a huge amount of warming.
But that's just because the Earth's temperature varies quite a bit from year to year, largely due to the El Nino Southern Oscillation (which exchanges heat between the atmosphere and the ocean). So it's foolish to take such short periods of time and claim they mean something for the overall trend.
There are also ways to lie with graphs that make it look as if certain longer periods show no warming, such as using monthly data to increase the variation in the graphs, and picking out a specific year that was warmer than the years before and after as a starting point. But if you look at the full data set, especially if you smooth it with a 3-year or 5-year window, the warming trend is clear as day, and hasn't changed all that much for the last three decades.
No. But we'll kill a lot of species, and humans around the world will have a lot of difficulties. Sea level rise is one of the most significant impacts of global warming, for example. Miami and the surrounding area have already had to shut down a number of wells closer to the Ocean as sea level rise has caused saltwater to enter the aquifers. They've also been having problems with their sewer system. And that's after a rise of just a couple of inches. The total rise by 2100 could be as much as 6 feet (current best fit is around 3 feet, but we've been consistently underestimating the rate of sea level rise), which would bury a number of low-lying islands and some of the flatter coastal areas such as much of the US coast along the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.
So, you're asking whether or not the scientists did their jobs? Yes. They did. They used the best available information to make the temperature records as accurate as possible.
But ultimately issues like this don't make a significant difference to the overall conclusion that the Earth is warming. They just change a few trailing decimal places on how much it's warming. So if your real question is, "Can climate scientists making an error here call into question that the Earth is warming?" then the answer is a flat no.
It'll be interesting to see how AMD does this time around. Apparently they're making use of HBM (see here for an in-depth description). If they make good use of this technology, which seems likely, they could produce a pretty dramatic increase both in performance and performance per watt. It seems unlikely that nVidia will be able to compete with older-generation GPU's (nVidia will be using similar memory technology next year, so if AMD pulls ahead, it probably won't be for all that long).
Pretty sure it would get more Muslims pissed off, making them more likely to attack rather than less.
Do you really think that some group outside the US saying, "If you don't stop supporting Israel, we're going to set off dirty bombs in multiple US cities," would make the US kinder and gentler?
I frequently have quite a few up. I'll keep tabs up if I plan to go back to them later. Once it goes above about ten tabs or so, though, it becomes pretty worthless and I just close them all.
I've had memory issues with Chrome a few times, but usually due to the Flash plugin, and things stay pretty zippy as long as I disable Flash (especially nice because usually the only thing it impacts is it makes for fewer annoying ads).
More like around a billion dollars per year for several decades. Google currently has over $60 billion in cash.
Google's business is doing quite well, and this will probably continue as long as its leadership is pretty decent at business. That's not to say Google can't fail, but it would take a long period of really bad management decisions for that to happen.
Apparently it's commonplace in some locations around the world for the phone vendor to set you up with a random Google account so you can just pick up the phone and use it.
They were counting active users, which I'm pretty sure means having sent or read an e-mail, probably within the last 30 days. Also, I'm pretty sure you actually have to set up your Gmail account specifically before it exists (it's just that doing so is trivial once you've got a Google account). So users who never bother to open the e-mail, and users who have multiple accounts but only ever read one, should not be counted.
Of course, it's always possible that the people collecting this data are making mistakes and overcounting people in ways that are easy to correct. Software bugs do exist. And it can sometimes be a bit difficult to correct a bug when that bug is making your product look better.
Sort of. But that is only really an analogy for the cables that connect various pieces of the Internet together. The real complexity of the Internet is in the services which supply or route data. So your information has gone through one tube: how does it know which tube it should go to next in order to get to its destination? And when you load a webpage, where does that information come from, and how is it built so that millions of people can all look at the same information at the same time?
So it's really a tremendous oversimplification, as the "series of tubes" describes the most uninteresting bits of the Internet.
What Google is asking for here is the ability to create competing Java VM's. What Oracle is asking for is a complete monopoly on all Java VM's everywhere.
Giving Oracle a monopoly on the Java language is bad for everybody. It prevents, for example, somebody coming up with a new operating system that supports Java apps without Oracle building creating the Java library implementation for that platform.
Our economy is not dependent upon IP. There is far, far more money in effectively IP-free industries (such as fashion).
It's just there there's a relatively small number of powerful interest groups that push IP, and the case for IP sounds reasonable to those who lack the imagination to consider other ways of funding inventors and artists.
Huh? Apple doesn't disable sideloading. If they did, it would be impossible for anybody to develop mobile iOS apps, or test apps for other developers. I have a few sideloaded apps on my iPhone right now.
I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding the malware problem with iOS/Android. It really isn't an issue with sideloading, as far too few people take the time to do that sort of thing. What it is is a problem with apps in the official stores that do things the user doesn't expect, such as record and report their personal information. The improved permission scheme in Android M should make this a bit harder, as most malware will have to have a reason the user understands for a specific permission.
I think the bigger reason that iOS has less of a problem here is that Apple has a much more stringent system for getting apps onto the app store than Google does.
Yes, per-permission settings are the new way to do app permissions in M. They prompt for the permission when the app needs it, so it's much more clear what the permission is used for. In settings, you can view all of the permissions for an app, or all of the apps that have requested a specific permission.
I'm not sure how well this feature will work with current apps. It will be interesting to see. But it sounds to me like a really positive development.
It's saying that the people hosting cloud servers (and other large-scale computing) are buying more servers. This is an indication that people are doing a lot more computing, as large-scale computing tends to be more efficient due to the ability to load balance among a much larger fraction of users.
Same here. However, most coders I know aren't all that into video games. So it's really not clear to me that this is a significant factor. A huge number of people that are or were into video games never became coders.
Video games were a huge motivator for me learning programming when I was younger, but I don't think many people take that lesson away from playing games.
Most of the people in prison today are there for non-violent drug offenses, and the police in the US are wildly inconsistent in how they apply drug laws. How much of this might be down to just the police departments being assholes?
Slashdot Mirror
There's lots of evidence of global warming right now, and many peoples' lives have been directly impacted. But I can't help you if you don't bother to learn about the world around you.
And beyond that the last time CO2 levels were at 400 ppm sea level was some 60 or 70 feet higher than they are now. It may well be that much sea level rise is already baked in and it's just a matter of how much time it takes to get there. Less than 500 years I'd imagine.
It's really hard to know, unfortunately. The rate of melt of Greenland appears to have nearly doubled in just the last ten years. At the current rate, it would take something like 7500 years for Greenland to melt entirely. But the rate is likely to increase. By how much? It's hard to say.
Nah, they did that for the same reason that they screwed up on the sea level rise: they're far too conservative. If you look at the estimates of climate sensitivity, they cluster pretty closely around 3C per doubling of CO2 as a best-fit. A few of them permit a 1.5C sensitivity as possible, but there's no reason to believe that's remotely likely as those are in the minority. Other studies permit 5C of warming per doubling of CO2, but again, that's not very likely.
The biggest errors with the IPCC come from their habit of understating just how bad the warming is. To be fair, this may make political sense: the organization is, after all, intended to provide advice to policy makers, and overestimating global warming could give fuel to the denialists who want to claim that it isn't happening. But they have a tendency to go too far sometimes (the sea level issue was particularly egregious).
Then please explain to me why the 2007 IPCC report manipulated the data (and used old, bad data) in a rather dishonest way that halved the estimated future sea level rise?
They used a low estimate of future temperature increases (lower than the best-fit temperature estimates they reported elsewhere).
They extrapolated out to only 2095 instead of 2100.
They used a model of sea level rise that predicts a past sea level rise that is only 2/3rds the measurements.
See here for a detailed discussion of the IPCC's screwup with sea level rise.
Given that sea level rise estimates have so far significantly underestimated the rate of sea level rise, and the fact that nobody (to my knowledge) has successfully built a model of the melting rate of glaciers that is anywhere near as fast as observations, the smart money is on the upper part of that range (possibly even higher, if we're very unlucky).
Sure, if you pick some really short periods (say, 5 years), there may not appear to be any warming. Or there may appear to be a huge amount of warming.
But that's just because the Earth's temperature varies quite a bit from year to year, largely due to the El Nino Southern Oscillation (which exchanges heat between the atmosphere and the ocean). So it's foolish to take such short periods of time and claim they mean something for the overall trend.
There are also ways to lie with graphs that make it look as if certain longer periods show no warming, such as using monthly data to increase the variation in the graphs, and picking out a specific year that was warmer than the years before and after as a starting point. But if you look at the full data set, especially if you smooth it with a 3-year or 5-year window, the warming trend is clear as day, and hasn't changed all that much for the last three decades.
2-3 feet is a low estimate by 2100. Recent sea level rise has exceeded the model used to calculate that estimate by about 50%.
No, it's very likely. Parts of Miami and the surrounding area will probably be underwater by mid-century, for example.
No. But we'll kill a lot of species, and humans around the world will have a lot of difficulties. Sea level rise is one of the most significant impacts of global warming, for example. Miami and the surrounding area have already had to shut down a number of wells closer to the Ocean as sea level rise has caused saltwater to enter the aquifers. They've also been having problems with their sewer system. And that's after a rise of just a couple of inches. The total rise by 2100 could be as much as 6 feet (current best fit is around 3 feet, but we've been consistently underestimating the rate of sea level rise), which would bury a number of low-lying islands and some of the flatter coastal areas such as much of the US coast along the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico.
You're joking, right? All measurements have errors and biases. Direct measurements have much smaller errors and biases than proxies.
So, you're asking whether or not the scientists did their jobs? Yes. They did. They used the best available information to make the temperature records as accurate as possible.
But ultimately issues like this don't make a significant difference to the overall conclusion that the Earth is warming. They just change a few trailing decimal places on how much it's warming. So if your real question is, "Can climate scientists making an error here call into question that the Earth is warming?" then the answer is a flat no.
It'll be interesting to see how AMD does this time around. Apparently they're making use of HBM (see here for an in-depth description). If they make good use of this technology, which seems likely, they could produce a pretty dramatic increase both in performance and performance per watt. It seems unlikely that nVidia will be able to compete with older-generation GPU's (nVidia will be using similar memory technology next year, so if AMD pulls ahead, it probably won't be for all that long).
Pretty sure it would get more Muslims pissed off, making them more likely to attack rather than less.
Do you really think that some group outside the US saying, "If you don't stop supporting Israel, we're going to set off dirty bombs in multiple US cities," would make the US kinder and gentler?
I frequently have quite a few up. I'll keep tabs up if I plan to go back to them later. Once it goes above about ten tabs or so, though, it becomes pretty worthless and I just close them all.
I've had memory issues with Chrome a few times, but usually due to the Flash plugin, and things stay pretty zippy as long as I disable Flash (especially nice because usually the only thing it impacts is it makes for fewer annoying ads).
More like around a billion dollars per year for several decades. Google currently has over $60 billion in cash.
Google's business is doing quite well, and this will probably continue as long as its leadership is pretty decent at business. That's not to say Google can't fail, but it would take a long period of really bad management decisions for that to happen.
Apparently it's commonplace in some locations around the world for the phone vendor to set you up with a random Google account so you can just pick up the phone and use it.
They were counting active users, which I'm pretty sure means having sent or read an e-mail, probably within the last 30 days. Also, I'm pretty sure you actually have to set up your Gmail account specifically before it exists (it's just that doing so is trivial once you've got a Google account). So users who never bother to open the e-mail, and users who have multiple accounts but only ever read one, should not be counted.
Of course, it's always possible that the people collecting this data are making mistakes and overcounting people in ways that are easy to correct. Software bugs do exist. And it can sometimes be a bit difficult to correct a bug when that bug is making your product look better.
Sort of. But that is only really an analogy for the cables that connect various pieces of the Internet together. The real complexity of the Internet is in the services which supply or route data. So your information has gone through one tube: how does it know which tube it should go to next in order to get to its destination? And when you load a webpage, where does that information come from, and how is it built so that millions of people can all look at the same information at the same time?
So it's really a tremendous oversimplification, as the "series of tubes" describes the most uninteresting bits of the Internet.
What Google is asking for here is the ability to create competing Java VM's. What Oracle is asking for is a complete monopoly on all Java VM's everywhere.
Giving Oracle a monopoly on the Java language is bad for everybody. It prevents, for example, somebody coming up with a new operating system that supports Java apps without Oracle building creating the Java library implementation for that platform.
Our economy is not dependent upon IP. There is far, far more money in effectively IP-free industries (such as fashion).
It's just there there's a relatively small number of powerful interest groups that push IP, and the case for IP sounds reasonable to those who lack the imagination to consider other ways of funding inventors and artists.
Huh? Apple doesn't disable sideloading. If they did, it would be impossible for anybody to develop mobile iOS apps, or test apps for other developers. I have a few sideloaded apps on my iPhone right now.
I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding the malware problem with iOS/Android. It really isn't an issue with sideloading, as far too few people take the time to do that sort of thing. What it is is a problem with apps in the official stores that do things the user doesn't expect, such as record and report their personal information. The improved permission scheme in Android M should make this a bit harder, as most malware will have to have a reason the user understands for a specific permission.
I think the bigger reason that iOS has less of a problem here is that Apple has a much more stringent system for getting apps onto the app store than Google does.
Yes, per-permission settings are the new way to do app permissions in M. They prompt for the permission when the app needs it, so it's much more clear what the permission is used for. In settings, you can view all of the permissions for an app, or all of the apps that have requested a specific permission.
I'm not sure how well this feature will work with current apps. It will be interesting to see. But it sounds to me like a really positive development.
It's saying that the people hosting cloud servers (and other large-scale computing) are buying more servers. This is an indication that people are doing a lot more computing, as large-scale computing tends to be more efficient due to the ability to load balance among a much larger fraction of users.
Same here. However, most coders I know aren't all that into video games. So it's really not clear to me that this is a significant factor. A huge number of people that are or were into video games never became coders.
Video games were a huge motivator for me learning programming when I was younger, but I don't think many people take that lesson away from playing games.
Most of the people in prison today are there for non-violent drug offenses, and the police in the US are wildly inconsistent in how they apply drug laws. How much of this might be down to just the police departments being assholes?