Moreover, insurance becomes largely irrelevant when you get into the "run over with a truck" territory that this particular shipment was in.
Why? You said they did pay your $100 claim after all.
Also, FedEx never offered me insurance when I told them what I was shipping and its value.
No idea what you're talking about. You generally fill out the form yourself, and select what insurance you want.
I'd roughly estimate that FedEx has caused me at least $800 worth of uncompensated losses in the past 5 years, regardless of what insurance or delivery terms I paid for, because of unprofessional and incompetent behavior.
Your experience is most definitely atypical. You must be shipping unbelievable numbers of packages to get that much damage. I have yet to have one package seriously damaged by UPS or Fedex (or DHL).
So predictions of global warming could be 100% off.
I said no such thing, and you know it.
Indirectly, yes. If 1/3rd is insignificant noise, then the next 2/3rds must not be all that important either.
By all means, just try to justify your repeated claims that 1/3rd is insignificant noise, and that huge mistake there should be disregarded, but the other 2/3rds couldn't possibly be wrong. How you can come up with such nonsense, I suppose I'll never understand.
I feel I'm somehow losing brain cells each time I read what you've written, so I'll leave it at at.
How can any sane person possibly not realize that a 33% change to a minor contribution does not turn it into a major contribution? [...] but which do not substantially increase overall solar forcing relative to anthropogenic forcings, and thus do not "explain" how CO2 is not responsible for most of the warming;
Ah, I think I finally get it. So you really don't understand one bit what you're talking about...
That 1/3rd is the amount of global warming that can be attributed to increased solar output, which was previously assumed to have been caused by anthropomorphic effects. That's not 1/3rd of some small phenomenon, that's a 33% adjustment in their overall prediction.
Incidentally, not only is an error of 1/3 routine in many engineering calculations, but many engineering systems are overdesigned to absorb errors of 2 or more.
You're right. So predictions of global warming could be 100% off. Sounds good to me. I'll agree with that.
It's just very non-trivial to do in a significant and comprehensive way, which is why people have been looking at mitigating CO2 emissions as a better solution.
No, it is quite trivial if done properly. Simply mandate that when it comes time to redo exposed surfaces, they must be white/reflective/etc. The difference in price is a fraction of a percent.
There is no way you can rationally suggest that stopping all consumption of fossil fuels is a cheaper solution. ("better" is too vague a term to even argue)
Recording a live audience, however, works perfectly (as in TV sitcoms), and it's just as good an alternative to actually being among an audience (like in a theater).
The margin of error is not highly relevant when it doesn't actually change the outcome.
A 1/3rd margin of error changes the outcome. Two * seperate 1/3rd errors COMPLETELY change the outcome.
In other words, you are going to ignore the vast amounts of evidence which disagree with your opinion, and go with your gut.
No, in other words, I'm going to look at the vast amounts of evidence, and form an opinion.
They didn't notice, because the solar contribution is so small that a 1/3 difference is hard to even pull out of the noise.
That makes no sense what-so-ever. 1/3rd is noise next to the other 2/3rds? That's idiotic.
You might as well say 50% is so small that it's noise, that was drowned out by the other 50%.
If a 1/3rd difference can be missed, the random NOISE must be able to hide absolutely anything.
There is not a large margin of error on the relative contributions of anthropogenic vs. solar forcings.
What the hell is it that you don't get about 1/3rd? How can any sane person possibly not realize that being off by 33% is a large margin of error?
When did it "go wrong"?
Number being wrong by 33%, with no other evidence suggesting that MAYBE the numbers are off.
When an expert designs a rocket that will make it to the moon, but it runs out of fuel 2/3rds of the way there, something has gone terribly wrong.
"We can't evolve a single-celled organism into a human being in a lab, therefore we can't study evolution scientifically" is the kind of argument I see out of them.
Steps of evolution have been observed, and repeated, in the lab. That fits perfectly well in the scientific method. Of course, some of the higher level hypothesis are harder to test.
You don't have to create a duplicate Sun in the lab in order to observe the Sun and determine how it works.
Knowledge of the Sun is actually quite limited, and nobody claims to be able to make complicated, accurate short-term predictions about it. Still, being able to create balls of plasma in the lab has greatly helped scientific understanding of stars.
Claiming "computer models don't count" is tantamount to saying that you cannot predict anything based on any scientific theory.
No. Computer models are based only upon the variables we understand, and they've never been accurate on a large scale, such as the entire planet.
Mathematics is fine for simple proofs, but until there's a computer model of the earth that can accurately demonstrate observed climate changes, based upon real (past) data, they can't be considered accurate representations.
CO2 is not a "minor factor",
There was a "may" in there, you chose to ignore. My point was, IF X isn't causing the observed problem, no amount of regulation of X is going to fix it. No matter how "robust" your policies may be.
And my entire series of posts repeatedly explains why that might not actually be the case. You like to ignore, wave your hand and disregard them, etc. You seem to enjoy ignoring what I actually say.
Yes, in your fantasy world.
Funny, you're the one who doesn't seem to have much grip on reality, and just blindly hangs on to your belief system, and dismiss all evidence to the contrary without a second thought.
Please, tell me what the "real" factor is
I've made no claims as such. Just that there could easily be such factors, going unnoticed in current studies, as there have been in past studies.
and what these easy and cheap mitigation policies are.
Solar output is pretty easy... Reflective or otherwise light-colored surfaces on any and all exposed man-made objects, where possible. Buildings, roads, etc.
2) Tickets are expensive, and teenagers have plenty of other places they can go.
3) Tickets (and snacks) are expensive. For the cost of a couple such gatherings, you can afford your own projector.
4) The time between theatrical and home release is ever shrinking, and frankly, you have to be an awfully screwed up individual if you can't stand the wait.
5) It's usually far easier to order foreign films than to find a theater showing them.
psychologists have done studies showing that people actually subconsciously like the ooohs and aahs and laughs and startles of their fellow popcorn munchers at a movie.
Something which can be trivially easily simulated. It just isn't... yet.
I was specifically referring to the performance penalties associated with x86 interrupts (as opposed to other platforms). Something MSI doesn't appear to address, AFAIK.
"If you want to create a better computer, you'll you'll end up with an Amiga". It's more or less what they're describing here.
That's what he's describing, but I don't believe for a second that's what it's going to be...
I don't believe for a second practically ANYONE is going to buy an expensive, multi-socket motherboard, just so they can have higher-speed access to their soundcard... Ditto for a "physics" unit.
This exists solely because CPUs are terrible at the same kinds of calculations ASICs/FPGAs are incredible at. That will be the only killer app here.
Video cards are a good example on their own. CPUs are so bad, and GPUs are so good, that transferring huge amounts of raw data over a slow bus (AGP/PCIe) still puts you far ahead of trying to get the CPU to process it directly. And it works so well, the video card companies are making it easier to write programs to run on the GPU.
And GPUs aren't remotely the only case of this. MPEG capture/compression cards, Crypto cards, etc. have been popular for a very long time, because ASICs are extremely fast with those operations, which are extremely slow on CPUs.
The situation is much more like x87 math co-processors of years past, than it is like the Amiga, with independent processors for everything.
It is likely that, in time, integrating a popular subset of ASIC functions into the CPU will become practical, and then our high-end video cards will be simple $10 boards, just grabbing the already-processed data sent by the chip, and outputting it to whatever display.
Then maybe AMD and Intel will finally focus on the problem of interrupts...
Adjusting variance in solar output by 1/3 still does not come close to making solar variations a dominant effect.
That's pure straw man. I didn't say anything about what was "dominant." What I said was that the margin of error must have be at least 33% since the increased solar output was unnoticed.
You can't support your point by making up an example of an obviously false scenario that "experts" all believe.
It's called an analogy. Just because someone is called an "expert" doesn't mean you can't question them, and have to believe whatever they offer up.
Who would you prefer to defer consideration to?
No one. Hard as it may be, sometimes you have to use your own brain for more than watching TV.
It is not so primitive that it can't detect the huge effect of anthropogenic global warming.
Yes it is. They've shown themselves completely unable to distinguish between anthropogenic and solar changes. They were off buy up to 1/3rd before, and none of the experts noticed. Sounds pretty primitive to me, but maybe a large margin of error sounds advanced to you.
Any time science improves you can claim that the previous science was "mistaken" and therefore no science is trustworthy.
No, you can't. That would be completely baseless. We're talking about the same scientists, using the same models, with the same primitive data, and the same primitive understanding. There haven't been giant leaps in understanding climatology since the last time it went wrong.
That is completely false.
No, it isn't. The scientific method requires experimentation, observation, repeatability, etc. Without being able to create a duplicate earth in the lab, much of the scientific method is impossible. And computer models don't count, any more than any other "experiment on paper" would.
Take a look at the error bars in the IPCC report regarding, say, natural vs. anthropogenic forcings.
Take a look at any global warming study from 10 years ago, and tell me what they THOUGHT their own margin of error was back then...
It means that policies need to be developed that are robust under the range of uncertainty that exists.
No, it means people shouldn't be so quick to restrict CO2, when it may well be only a very minor factor, and easily (cheaply) counteracted by simpler methods than tearing down power plants, and strict emission controls.
At this point, we do understand climatology well enough to know that CO2 and other anthropogenic effects are reponsible for most of the warming we've seen,
Prove it. "we" didn't know enough just a few years ago, before knowledge of increased solar output caused scientists to adjust their numbers by up to 1/3rd, again with global dimming, and again when the fact that plants and soil will emit some greenhouse gases when they are warmed.
Somehow the climate models didn't pick-up that something was wrong with the numbers before those discoveries. So I fail to believe there's been a world of improvement in just a few years. I'd very much like to see a comprehensive summary of other possible causes, and any kinds of feedback loops on the planet, which may account for even more of the warming, and therefore adjusting the numbers for man-made warming even further.
We have far more than correlational evidence for CO2-based global warming: we know a direct causal mechanism that links the two (the greenhouse effect), and the predictions of this theory match observations.
See above. The numbers "matched" before. Now they've been dramatically adjusted as other discoveries were made, and I'm supposed to believe they still match now? So would another 40% difference also match, relegating the human factor down to 20% or less of the observed global warming?
The considered opinion of experts is always a good argument.
No, it isn't. What if most Earthquake "experts" predict California is going to fall off the face of the Earth, into the Pacific Ocean, within a year?
How about if 9 out of 10 doctors believe you have a disease, for which there is no test, and where the knowledge of the disease is so poor that even the list of symptoms requires significant interpretation?
And in those cases, would you decide upon incredibly expensive, terribly destructive and irreversible solutions to the problem?
Experts are not always right, but it is absurd to dismiss what experts think simply because they may be wrong.
No, it's irresponsible to defer all consideration to them, particularly when it's understood that the science in the specific field is rather primitive, they've made numerous mistakes in the recent past, the scientific method doesn't apply well, and the current best-evidence has a huge margin of error.
the asshats on this thread who think they know better than thousands of scientists
False logic.
How many scientific studies have been reported on/. only to be dismissed by many people saying "correlation != causation"? Why does everyone forget that, when the subject is global warming, or some other issue they like?
Guess what, scientists make mistakes. They have made mistakes on global warming, and continue to make mistakes. Scientists never claim global warming is a fact, they only speak to their own observations.
Those who are quick to react to global warming are on ground just as shaky as those who are slow to accept it.
the deaths from air pollution, by many estimates, exceed the number of deaths from traffic accidents.
Even if true (which I very much doubt) coal and oil is only a minor source of air pollution. Things like pesticides are far more significant. Here in CA, the San Joaquin Valley is one of the most polluted areas in the state, partly because of the large amount of agriculture.
Not to mention that people (rightly, IMHO) are more concerned about things that kill young people, as opposed to things like pollution, which are accumulated, and will basically only kill the very old and infirm. If car accidents could be relegated to only killing 90+ year-olds, people wouldn't be so concerned about them. Ditto for guns, global warming, and melt-downs at atomic power plants, if you want to go that way.
However, the same things that will reduce CO2 emissions (taking fossil-fuel powered cars and coal-fired power stations out of service) will also tackle some of the biggest sources of these other pollutants.
Actually, switching from coal-fired plants, to wind turbines, could well make things worse in certain circumstances.
For instance, here in CA, the San Joaquin Valley is one of the most polluted areas in the state, also partly because of it's geography. Being a valley, it's harder for pollutants to escape and disperse. In the hills around the area would be a great place for wind power generation, but that would even further restrict the escape of pollutants, making the area that much worse. Possibly inhabitable.
It's a similar situation for Los Angeles as well. The best place for wind turbines would be the mountain path over which the winds and pollution takes to leave the basin. Slowing the wind means much more pollution stays there, poisoning the tens of millions of people for much longer than it otherwise would.
So, your argument isn't as nearly so straight-forward as you make it out to be.
Sort of like if a flood is caused by a storm and not by a dam breaking then we don't have to try to swim.
No, it's more like if a flood is caused by a storm and not a dam breaking, we don't have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars reinforcing dams around the country...
In fact, I'd be surprised if Kazaa would operate at all behind NAT if it couldn't determine it's public IP address (although I admit that I don't know why the IP address is there if not to tell other nodes how to route replies).
(For the record: I don't know Kazaa... I know Gnutella)
P2P programs work fine behind a firewall/NAT, without public IP addresses, and without forwarded ports. The ONLY problem is when BOTH nodes are behind a firewall/NAT. And even there, there is a workaround that can be employed with the use of a 3rd party that doesn't block incoming connections (though I haven't heard of any P2P protocols currently use this method in the wild).
To connect to the P2P network, your computer connects out to other hosts which aren't blocking incoming connections. Once you have, you can receive messages from anyone on the network, as the message will propagate (broadcast) through the network, and be ignored by every host but yours (based on a generated unique ID, nothing to do with IP address). In fact, at this point, you have no idea what the IP address of any node, except the few you are directly connected to, is.
If the file you can accept inbound connections, and want a file on a host that does not accept inbound connections, you broadcast a "push request" over the P2P network. When the proper node receives it, it makes an outbound connection to YOUR IP address, and then starts transferring.
The point of all this being, you can share files, without accepting inbound connections. You can download files from others without accepting inbound connections. And you can participated in the P2P network (communications, searches, etc) and all of the above, without your P2P program knowing your public IP address.
A good question would have been "Have you ever seen anything other than a public IP address in a Kazaa packet?"
The answer would be: "Yes, all the time."
That said, there is still plenty of reason to believe an IP address in a Kazaa packet could have been forged.
Global warming is such a politicized issue from both sides, and a lot of money from both environmentalists and big oil is going into 'proving' it, that it's really quite difficult to know what is happening at all.
The level of scientific understanding of the issue has NOTHING to do with how much money, and how much politics is involved. That has an effect on how much you hear about it... and how hard the public is being pushed to believe one side over the other (usually in lieu of evidence), but has no effect on the science at all.
The science is a bit sketchy, because we just don't understand climatology remotely well enough to give a conclusive answer.
It isn't the money or the politics that has caused scientists to go back and change their estimates of the impact of greenhouse gases, every time a new phenomenon is discovered. It's the politics that tells you to either ignore that fact, or to exaggerate it.
Personally, I'm quite saddened that the supposedly smart people here on/. take such a hard line on the issue, mostly in favor of cutting emissions, despite the fact that the/. mantra that "correlation != causation" is being selectively ignored here. Or that doing something, for the sake of doing something, is not a good idea. And that facts aren't a matter of democracy, so "most scientists" isn't a good argument at all.
Note: I'm not trying to say that global warming isn't man made, or that it is... I'm just pointing out that taking such a hard line, in either direction, is crazy. These misguided arguments are just the ones I see most here, because the hard line anti-CO2 crowd seem to be the loudest and most modded-up, while the pro-CO2 crowd gets modded-down and their comments refuted quite quickly by many.
Those of us in the middle, looking for better science before telling people to jump off of either cliff, get pretty well ignored, or drowned out by the same, baseless arguments above, like "even if we're completely wrong, we should do it anyways."
reputable scientist will claim that every fraction of a degree in temperature increase is due to human influence on our atmosphere but they do know that the methane and carbon dioxide that we put continually pump into the atmosphere acts as a solar trap and can't help but raise the overall temperature of the planet.
Yes, but unless you can conclusively say exactly how much of a percentage the greenhouse gases are to blame, you can't make a good policy decision on how valuable limited emissions is, and how much effort should be spent on other, more relevant areas.
Yeah, but the energy conservation measures and emission controls of the 1970s and 80s in California are the shape of things to come. Their disastrous impact on the state left it gutted and rudderless... except they didn't.
Major regulations, up to now, have always been based on forcing industry to use EXISTING and relatively inexpensive technologies.
With CO2, however, there is no existing technology to cut emissions, short of extremely expensive measures like sequestering it underground, or just cutting electricity production to less than 1/3rd what it currently is.
If there was some catalytic converter that would make CO2 into some other innocuous agent, most people would be all for it. However, telling everyone they have to cut emissions of CO2 by unknown means, or just stop all activity, would be devastating.
You have to get the technology developed first, before you can start requiring it.
Notebook keyboards are crap. There's no inherent reason they have to be, but they all are.
The keyboard is right above all the hot components, so your keyboard gets quite uncomfortably warm.
The keyboard is mounted a couple inches in-front of the screen, forcing you to sit uncomfortably close, unless you're part orangutan.
Touchpads suck. Trackballs were damn good, but you can't find them on notebooks newer than 486s.
Laptop screens aren't on-par with desktop screens. Usually cheaper, lower contrast, and less adjust-ability.
With the design, their footprint is much larger than a normal desktop.
The cooling fan inherently has to be inches away from you, unlike a desktop, which you can set on the floor, or even further away from your ears.
The cooling fan in notebooks has to be small, making it much louder and higher pitched than the cooling solutions on desktops. With low power components, you could make a completely fanless desktop rather easily... Though, low-speed 80mm fans are good enough, IMHO.
Because of notebook's aggressive power saving features, notebook hard drives are much noisier, as the read arm quickly and noisily snaps back to autopark position. Acoustic noise management, combined with basic shock mounting, makes recent (read, 100GB+) desktop hard drives easily quieter than notebooks. Seagate in particular.
I'm getting a bit tired of this, so let's speed this up...
No matter what size and speed, notebook hard drives will be more expensive, slower, noisier, etc.
No serial/parallel/PS2/etc.
Video and sound sucks horribly.
Using USB keyboards/mice/soundcards/etc. makes your desk a god-awful mess of tangled wires.
Expansion is very difficult and expensive. I would never recommend a system without multiple PCI slots.
Good luck finding replacement parts at reasonable prices if anything should ever go wrong with your machine. Good luck reusing that old LCD when you upgrade systems.
If you use external keyboards, mice, and monitor, you're just one small step away from a desktop, and you can save a load of money and inconvenience by just making it a REAL desktop to begin with.
Used Thinkpads etc. can be had for reasonable prices,
"Reasonable" is far, FAR more expensive than a low-power desktop.
and their build quality still kicks the crap out of the average desktop components,
No. I don't know what "average" is, but every computer component I buy costs just a few percent more than the cheapest crap you can find, and comes with at least a 3-year warranty on components that may potentially fail. Asus/MSI/Gigabyte for motherboards... Seagate for hard drives (5years)... Seasonic PSUs. etc.
I asked the guy at the returns counter (nobody there) if they matched their online price, and he said they didn't because they were different systems (or something like that).
Odd... I did exactly the same thing a year ago, and got no argument at all. It was a much bigger discount, too.
You can be a snide as you want, but the fact is your numbers were an order of magnitude off. Strange that you act like it doesn't matter now, despite the fact that you felt the overwhelming desire to post your figures, in reply to my own, which showed (guess what!) that it would "never be profitable from an electricity generation point of view".
it would have to be let flow downstream or else you aren't getting any power out of the mills.
No. There needs to be SOME amount of water going over the LAST water wheel. It can be a very small amount... small enough that it evaporates within a mile or so.
Every bit of energy you pull out of a river slows it just a bit more, and causes more to pool upstream, and less flowing downstream. There is no way around it. Just look at any dams. That is inherently how any hydro power works. It can just be harder to see on a smaller scale, like smal water wheels.
In fact, because of that you realistically couldn't approach using "100%" of the energy in the river anyway.
Show me ANY volume of flowing water, and I'll show you how to extract work out of it. Even a trickle. You can't hit 100%, obviously, but pretty damn near it.
The only real consequence would be that you slowed down the river, which would cause sediment to build up
You obvious have no idea what you are talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? You said they did pay your $100 claim after all.
No idea what you're talking about. You generally fill out the form yourself, and select what insurance you want.
Your experience is most definitely atypical. You must be shipping unbelievable numbers of packages to get that much damage. I have yet to have one package seriously damaged by UPS or Fedex (or DHL).
Indirectly, yes. If 1/3rd is insignificant noise, then the next 2/3rds must not be all that important either.
By all means, just try to justify your repeated claims that 1/3rd is insignificant noise, and that huge mistake there should be disregarded, but the other 2/3rds couldn't possibly be wrong. How you can come up with such nonsense, I suppose I'll never understand.
I feel I'm somehow losing brain cells each time I read what you've written, so I'll leave it at at.
Ah, I think I finally get it. So you really don't understand one bit what you're talking about...
That 1/3rd is the amount of global warming that can be attributed to increased solar output, which was previously assumed to have been caused by anthropomorphic effects. That's not 1/3rd of some small phenomenon, that's a 33% adjustment in their overall prediction.
You're right. So predictions of global warming could be 100% off. Sounds good to me. I'll agree with that.
No, it is quite trivial if done properly. Simply mandate that when it comes time to redo exposed surfaces, they must be white/reflective/etc. The difference in price is a fraction of a percent.
There is no way you can rationally suggest that stopping all consumption of fossil fuels is a cheaper solution. ("better" is too vague a term to even argue)
Laugh tracks suck, because they're artificial.
Recording a live audience, however, works perfectly (as in TV sitcoms), and it's just as good an alternative to actually being among an audience (like in a theater).
The analogy holds fine, unless you completely change it, which is exactly what you did. THAT is why I pointed out you were being idiotic.
You're completely off topic here. The question wasn't if greenhouse gases are responsible or not. The question is, IF THEY AREN'T...
Changing the topic isn't debate of any kind. It's not quite a straw man, but close.
A 1/3rd margin of error changes the outcome. Two * seperate 1/3rd errors COMPLETELY change the outcome.
No, in other words, I'm going to look at the vast amounts of evidence, and form an opinion.
That makes no sense what-so-ever. 1/3rd is noise next to the other 2/3rds? That's idiotic.
You might as well say 50% is so small that it's noise, that was drowned out by the other 50%.
If a 1/3rd difference can be missed, the random NOISE must be able to hide absolutely anything.
What the hell is it that you don't get about 1/3rd? How can any sane person possibly not realize that being off by 33% is a large margin of error?
Number being wrong by 33%, with no other evidence suggesting that MAYBE the numbers are off.
When an expert designs a rocket that will make it to the moon, but it runs out of fuel 2/3rds of the way there, something has gone terribly wrong.
Steps of evolution have been observed, and repeated, in the lab. That fits perfectly well in the scientific method. Of course, some of the higher level hypothesis are harder to test.
Knowledge of the Sun is actually quite limited, and nobody claims to be able to make complicated, accurate short-term predictions about it. Still, being able to create balls of plasma in the lab has greatly helped scientific understanding of stars.
No. Computer models are based only upon the variables we understand, and they've never been accurate on a large scale, such as the entire planet.
Mathematics is fine for simple proofs, but until there's a computer model of the earth that can accurately demonstrate observed climate changes, based upon real (past) data, they can't be considered accurate representations.
There was a "may" in there, you chose to ignore. My point was, IF X isn't causing the observed problem, no amount of regulation of X is going to fix it. No matter how "robust" your policies may be.
And my entire series of posts repeatedly explains why that might not actually be the case. You like to ignore, wave your hand and disregard them, etc. You seem to enjoy ignoring what I actually say.
Funny, you're the one who doesn't seem to have much grip on reality, and just blindly hangs on to your belief system, and dismiss all evidence to the contrary without a second thought.
I've made no claims as such. Just that there could easily be such factors, going unnoticed in current studies, as there have been in past studies.
Solar output is pretty easy... Reflective or otherwise light-colored surfaces on any and all exposed man-made objects, where possible. Buildings, roads, etc.
2) Tickets are expensive, and teenagers have plenty of other places they can go.
3) Tickets (and snacks) are expensive. For the cost of a couple such gatherings, you can afford your own projector.
4) The time between theatrical and home release is ever shrinking, and frankly, you have to be an awfully screwed up individual if you can't stand the wait.
5) It's usually far easier to order foreign films than to find a theater showing them.
Refute what?
You have no argument.
Something which can be trivially easily simulated. It just isn't... yet.
I was specifically referring to the performance penalties associated with x86 interrupts (as opposed to other platforms). Something MSI doesn't appear to address, AFAIK.
No, of course not. The two I have are just for aesthetics...
Except for the fact that you're wrong...
You're just a complete idiot aren't you?
That's what he's describing, but I don't believe for a second that's what it's going to be...
I don't believe for a second practically ANYONE is going to buy an expensive, multi-socket motherboard, just so they can have higher-speed access to their soundcard... Ditto for a "physics" unit.
This exists solely because CPUs are terrible at the same kinds of calculations ASICs/FPGAs are incredible at. That will be the only killer app here.
Video cards are a good example on their own. CPUs are so bad, and GPUs are so good, that transferring huge amounts of raw data over a slow bus (AGP/PCIe) still puts you far ahead of trying to get the CPU to process it directly. And it works so well, the video card companies are making it easier to write programs to run on the GPU.
And GPUs aren't remotely the only case of this. MPEG capture/compression cards, Crypto cards, etc. have been popular for a very long time, because ASICs are extremely fast with those operations, which are extremely slow on CPUs.
The situation is much more like x87 math co-processors of years past, than it is like the Amiga, with independent processors for everything.
It is likely that, in time, integrating a popular subset of ASIC functions into the CPU will become practical, and then our high-end video cards will be simple $10 boards, just grabbing the already-processed data sent by the chip, and outputting it to whatever display.
Then maybe AMD and Intel will finally focus on the problem of interrupts...
That's pure straw man. I didn't say anything about what was "dominant." What I said was that the margin of error must have be at least 33% since the increased solar output was unnoticed.
It's called an analogy. Just because someone is called an "expert" doesn't mean you can't question them, and have to believe whatever they offer up.
No one. Hard as it may be, sometimes you have to use your own brain for more than watching TV.
Yes it is. They've shown themselves completely unable to distinguish between anthropogenic and solar changes. They were off buy up to 1/3rd before, and none of the experts noticed. Sounds pretty primitive to me, but maybe a large margin of error sounds advanced to you.
No, you can't. That would be completely baseless. We're talking about the same scientists, using the same models, with the same primitive data, and the same primitive understanding. There haven't been giant leaps in understanding climatology since the last time it went wrong.
No, it isn't. The scientific method requires experimentation, observation, repeatability, etc. Without being able to create a duplicate earth in the lab, much of the scientific method is impossible. And computer models don't count, any more than any other "experiment on paper" would.
Take a look at any global warming study from 10 years ago, and tell me what they THOUGHT their own margin of error was back then...
No, it means people shouldn't be so quick to restrict CO2, when it may well be only a very minor factor, and easily (cheaply) counteracted by simpler methods than tearing down power plants, and strict emission controls.
Prove it. "we" didn't know enough just a few years ago, before knowledge of increased solar output caused scientists to adjust their numbers by up to 1/3rd, again with global dimming, and again when the fact that plants and soil will emit some greenhouse gases when they are warmed.
Somehow the climate models didn't pick-up that something was wrong with the numbers before those discoveries. So I fail to believe there's been a world of improvement in just a few years. I'd very much like to see a comprehensive summary of other possible causes, and any kinds of feedback loops on the planet, which may account for even more of the warming, and therefore adjusting the numbers for man-made warming even further.
See above. The numbers "matched" before. Now they've been dramatically adjusted as other discoveries were made, and I'm supposed to believe they still match now? So would another 40% difference also match, relegating the human factor down to 20% or less of the observed global warming?
No, it isn't. What if most Earthquake "experts" predict California is going to fall off the face of the Earth, into the Pacific Ocean, within a year?
How about if 9 out of 10 doctors believe you have a disease, for which there is no test, and where the knowledge of the disease is so poor that even the list of symptoms requires significant interpretation?
And in those cases, would you decide upon incredibly expensive, terribly destructive and irreversible solutions to the problem?
No, it's irresponsible to defer all consideration to them, particularly when it's understood that the science in the specific field is rather primitive, they've made numerous mistakes in the recent past, the scientific method doesn't apply well, and the current best-evidence has a huge margin of error.
False logic.
How many scientific studies have been reported on
Guess what, scientists make mistakes. They have made mistakes on global warming, and continue to make mistakes. Scientists never claim global warming is a fact, they only speak to their own observations.
Those who are quick to react to global warming are on ground just as shaky as those who are slow to accept it.
Even if true (which I very much doubt) coal and oil is only a minor source of air pollution. Things like pesticides are far more significant. Here in CA, the San Joaquin Valley is one of the most polluted areas in the state, partly because of the large amount of agriculture.
Not to mention that people (rightly, IMHO) are more concerned about things that kill young people, as opposed to things like pollution, which are accumulated, and will basically only kill the very old and infirm. If car accidents could be relegated to only killing 90+ year-olds, people wouldn't be so concerned about them. Ditto for guns, global warming, and melt-downs at atomic power plants, if you want to go that way.
Actually, switching from coal-fired plants, to wind turbines, could well make things worse in certain circumstances.
For instance, here in CA, the San Joaquin Valley is one of the most polluted areas in the state, also partly because of it's geography. Being a valley, it's harder for pollutants to escape and disperse. In the hills around the area would be a great place for wind power generation, but that would even further restrict the escape of pollutants, making the area that much worse. Possibly inhabitable.
It's a similar situation for Los Angeles as well. The best place for wind turbines would be the mountain path over which the winds and pollution takes to leave the basin. Slowing the wind means much more pollution stays there, poisoning the tens of millions of people for much longer than it otherwise would.
So, your argument isn't as nearly so straight-forward as you make it out to be.
No, it's more like if a flood is caused by a storm and not a dam breaking, we don't have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars reinforcing dams around the country...
(For the record: I don't know Kazaa... I know Gnutella)
P2P programs work fine behind a firewall/NAT, without public IP addresses, and without forwarded ports. The ONLY problem is when BOTH nodes are behind a firewall/NAT. And even there, there is a workaround that can be employed with the use of a 3rd party that doesn't block incoming connections (though I haven't heard of any P2P protocols currently use this method in the wild).
To connect to the P2P network, your computer connects out to other hosts which aren't blocking incoming connections. Once you have, you can receive messages from anyone on the network, as the message will propagate (broadcast) through the network, and be ignored by every host but yours (based on a generated unique ID, nothing to do with IP address). In fact, at this point, you have no idea what the IP address of any node, except the few you are directly connected to, is.
If the file you can accept inbound connections, and want a file on a host that does not accept inbound connections, you broadcast a "push request" over the P2P network. When the proper node receives it, it makes an outbound connection to YOUR IP address, and then starts transferring.
The point of all this being, you can share files, without accepting inbound connections. You can download files from others without accepting inbound connections. And you can participated in the P2P network (communications, searches, etc) and all of the above, without your P2P program knowing your public IP address.
The answer would be: "Yes, all the time."
That said, there is still plenty of reason to believe an IP address in a Kazaa packet could have been forged.
The level of scientific understanding of the issue has NOTHING to do with how much money, and how much politics is involved. That has an effect on how much you hear about it... and how hard the public is being pushed to believe one side over the other (usually in lieu of evidence), but has no effect on the science at all.
The science is a bit sketchy, because we just don't understand climatology remotely well enough to give a conclusive answer.
It isn't the money or the politics that has caused scientists to go back and change their estimates of the impact of greenhouse gases, every time a new phenomenon is discovered. It's the politics that tells you to either ignore that fact, or to exaggerate it.
Personally, I'm quite saddened that the supposedly smart people here on
Note: I'm not trying to say that global warming isn't man made, or that it is... I'm just pointing out that taking such a hard line, in either direction, is crazy. These misguided arguments are just the ones I see most here, because the hard line anti-CO2 crowd seem to be the loudest and most modded-up, while the pro-CO2 crowd gets modded-down and their comments refuted quite quickly by many.
Those of us in the middle, looking for better science before telling people to jump off of either cliff, get pretty well ignored, or drowned out by the same, baseless arguments above, like "even if we're completely wrong, we should do it anyways."
Yes, but unless you can conclusively say exactly how much of a percentage the greenhouse gases are to blame, you can't make a good policy decision on how valuable limited emissions is, and how much effort should be spent on other, more relevant areas.
Major regulations, up to now, have always been based on forcing industry to use EXISTING and relatively inexpensive technologies.
With CO2, however, there is no existing technology to cut emissions, short of extremely expensive measures like sequestering it underground, or just cutting electricity production to less than 1/3rd what it currently is.
If there was some catalytic converter that would make CO2 into some other innocuous agent, most people would be all for it. However, telling everyone they have to cut emissions of CO2 by unknown means, or just stop all activity, would be devastating.
You have to get the technology developed first, before you can start requiring it.
Notebook keyboards are crap. There's no inherent reason they have to be, but they all are.
The keyboard is right above all the hot components, so your keyboard gets quite uncomfortably warm.
The keyboard is mounted a couple inches in-front of the screen, forcing you to sit uncomfortably close, unless you're part orangutan.
Touchpads suck. Trackballs were damn good, but you can't find them on notebooks newer than 486s.
Laptop screens aren't on-par with desktop screens. Usually cheaper, lower contrast, and less adjust-ability.
With the design, their footprint is much larger than a normal desktop.
The cooling fan inherently has to be inches away from you, unlike a desktop, which you can set on the floor, or even further away from your ears.
The cooling fan in notebooks has to be small, making it much louder and higher pitched than the cooling solutions on desktops. With low power components, you could make a completely fanless desktop rather easily... Though, low-speed 80mm fans are good enough, IMHO.
Because of notebook's aggressive power saving features, notebook hard drives are much noisier, as the read arm quickly and noisily snaps back to autopark position. Acoustic noise management, combined with basic shock mounting, makes recent (read, 100GB+) desktop hard drives easily quieter than notebooks. Seagate in particular.
I'm getting a bit tired of this, so let's speed this up...
No matter what size and speed, notebook hard drives will be more expensive, slower, noisier, etc.
No serial/parallel/PS2/etc.
Video and sound sucks horribly.
Using USB keyboards/mice/soundcards/etc. makes your desk a god-awful mess of tangled wires.
Expansion is very difficult and expensive. I would never recommend a system without multiple PCI slots.
Good luck finding replacement parts at reasonable prices if anything should ever go wrong with your machine. Good luck reusing that old LCD when you upgrade systems.
If you use external keyboards, mice, and monitor, you're just one small step away from a desktop, and you can save a load of money and inconvenience by just making it a REAL desktop to begin with.
"Reasonable" is far, FAR more expensive than a low-power desktop.
No. I don't know what "average" is, but every computer component I buy costs just a few percent more than the cheapest crap you can find, and comes with at least a 3-year warranty on components that may potentially fail. Asus/MSI/Gigabyte for motherboards... Seagate for hard drives (5years)... Seasonic PSUs. etc.
Odd... I did exactly the same thing a year ago, and got no argument at all. It was a much bigger discount, too.
You can be a snide as you want, but the fact is your numbers were an order of magnitude off. Strange that you act like it doesn't matter now, despite the fact that you felt the overwhelming desire to post your figures, in reply to my own, which showed (guess what!) that it would "never be profitable from an electricity generation point of view".
No. There needs to be SOME amount of water going over the LAST water wheel. It can be a very small amount... small enough that it evaporates within a mile or so.
Every bit of energy you pull out of a river slows it just a bit more, and causes more to pool upstream, and less flowing downstream. There is no way around it. Just look at any dams. That is inherently how any hydro power works. It can just be harder to see on a smaller scale, like smal water wheels.
Show me ANY volume of flowing water, and I'll show you how to extract work out of it. Even a trickle. You can't hit 100%, obviously, but pretty damn near it.
You obvious have no idea what you are talking about.