There is a market for news, so the "news industry" is not going to fail. What will die will be ways of monetizing the news that don't make sense any more. The more you prop up news organizations using bad revenue models, the harder you make it for new viable plans to compete.
Actually it's a stereo depth sensing camera. That makes it able to do things like extracting your 3D skeleton in actual 3-D space rather than just in a 2D plane. So it gives it a lot more versatility than the eyetoy, which was just restricted to a 2D plane.
You can use a pen input if you really want to and the touch screen has a fairly high resolution sensor grid
That's a crap experience and I'm sure Apple knows it. I'm betting next rev of the iPad will have a stylus. They just didn't have a chance to getting working along with everything else they had to make happen to get the iPad out in a reasonable time frame. So it got cut along with the camera. It'll be there in a future version.
Sounds like X-files and Twin Peaks
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Both The X-Files and Twin Peaks used this formula of just throwing more and more weird riddles and sci-fi mysteries at the viewer with answers always seemingly to come in just a few more episodes. I never saw Lost, but it sounds like a repeat of that. The Matrix series was a condensed movie version of this phenomenon. I wish writers would just come up with a story that has an ending and tell it. Joss Whedon seems to be the only TV writer who can actually manage to do that.
Tell that to Microsoft, who wanted to give you a browser built into their operating system. They weren't even preventing you from doing something, just giving you some extra functionality built-in. Yet I seem to recall the DOJ and European Unions had some issues with that.
As far as I know, Scientific American is not a peer-reviewed publication. It is a non-fiction entertainment magazine aimed at a well-educated, scientifically literate audience. What their editors want to do is up to them. But I suspect some of the editors felt that Lomborg's research was fishy, and so they were interested in finding some well researched and documented rebuttals to Lomborg's claims.
Interestingly, Lomborg recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times where he spouts many views about what we need to do to fix the CO2 problem, seemingly forgetting entirely that he used to claim that it wasn't a problem that needed to be solved. Seems even Lomborg is skeptical of his own former skeptical self these days.
I was too young in the 70's to remember the ice age predictions. But I do consider the fact that I don't remember anything about it from the 80's as a good indication that it was a much feebler and uncertain prediction than the current predictions of warming. Steven Schneider in his book mentions that he was one of the people who published in a paper in the 70's stating that human activities might trigger an ice age. But there was absolutely no certainty behind the statement. This was back when they first discovered that aerosols like sulfates could have a cooling effect, but they still had very little data about the magnitude of that cooling, and it wasn't clear then if it was greater or less than the warming caused by greenhouse gasses. So his statement was more like IF the aerosol cooling turns out to be big, THEN we may be headed for another ice age.
I think by the 80's they were pretty certain that the cooling effect wasn't sufficient to overwhelm the warming, and since then, for the past four decades, we've had increasing certainty in warming.
I want the anti-GW argument to be ROCK solid before I'm willing to just dismiss offhand the evidence that we are going to irreversibly make earth inhospitable to humans.
So, why isn't the converse just as valid?
I forgot to address this adequately. The converse is not logically valid from a risk management perspective. Say an automobile manufacturer discovers that 5% of its accelerator pedals are affected by some potentially fatal defect, and you own one of their cars. That implies that the overwhelming odds (95%) are that your car is not among those affected. Do you think most people would say "That's ok, Manufacturer, you don't need to do a recall, we know that each of us is not very likely to have this problem"?
Think of it this way, if we had 100% confidence in the pro-GW research and 0% confidence in the anti-GW research, then it would be clear that we should invest at least as much to prevent disaster as those disasters would cost us (lets assume we're also 100% confident in the efficacy of our investments). Likewise, if the percentages were reversed we'd not invest a dime. But the situation we're in is more like, let's say, %50 confidence in GW research, 50% confidence in anti-GW. So let's say that means dire consequences are 50% likely. If that's the case we still should invest in hedges against the bad outcome at a level commensurate with the risk involved. The potential downside here is pretty huge -- meters of sea-level rise and mass species extinctions significantly impairing our lifestyle. To me it's clear that even at the 50/50 level (GW/AntiGW) we need to take preventative action. At the 25/75 level I still think action is warranted. Even at the 10/90 level, I'd still want to begin to take some action like aggressive investments in alternative energy. So the numbers just aren't symmetrical. 90/10 pretty clearly means "take action", but 10/90 doesn't means equally unequivocally "take no action".
The other peculiar thing here is that regardless of whether you believe in GW, getting ourselves weaned off oil is a good thing that would have benefits of its own.
Yes the earth is coming out of an ice age so we would expect to be at a plateau about now.
and what leads you to this conclusion? which dataset are we using here?
Temps reconstructed from ice cores. See Hansen's book or just about any serious book or site on global warming.
Ok. So we are looking at this. Only plateaus I see are at the bottom end of the cycle. The temperature spikes, then decays. We are currently at a spike. Please show me on the graph why we should be in a plateau.
Ok, I see what your gripe is. Yeh, by "plateau" I didn't mean tens of thousands of years of relatively flat temperatures. Just that we should be maxed out about now.
You have a gun pointed at your head. Person A shows you evidence it is loaded. Person B shows you evidence it is not. If you value your life, you better be absolutely sure Person B is correct before you let someone pull the trigger. If you aren't absolutely sure, then you best not pull that trigger until you are.
That analogy has so many biases it isn't even funny. First, you assume that it is a fact that it is dangerous (a gun).
It is not an assumption, rather what a truckload of research has been pointing to. But if you prefer let's say it's dark and it looks like it might be a gun, but you're not sure. The analogy is still fine.
Second, you assume that the bullet has enough propellant to kill you.
That's pretty much the same thing as saying the gun isn't loaded. Or that it might actually be pointed at your foot and not your head. Put that in if you like. The analogy still works.
Third, you assume there is no consequence for not allowing the trigger to be pulled (and if don't think that carbon limits won't hurt the poor of the world, you should go count the # of Indians and Chinese that were lifted from poverty in the last 20 years).
This I'll grant you. The analogy does not include possible side effects of action. However you are making a false dichotomy: solve the climate problem or help the poor. Any action we are able to take now on climate will help improve our options in the future should the dangerous effects of AGW prove to be true. And furthermore, significantly rising sea levels and changing weather will probably have a much greater adverse effect on the poor and disadvantaged than anyone else. So not doing anything to stop GW may also end up being equivalent to hurting the poor.
Fourth and finally, you assume that it's that gun and not some other thing behind your head that you aren't looking at because you are so fixated on the gun that might to kill you.
So you're advocating ignoring a known threat just because there might be other unknown threats? That just seems silly.
The point being that the evidence that GW is insignificant really needs to completely overwhelm the evidence that it is, and it's just not doing that yet.
But we don't live in a perfect world. If you drive, you risk getting into a fatal accident. If you walk, you risk tripping and breaking your neck. An asteroid can crash into the planet and wipe out all of humanity. That view is perfectly fine if there is no cost in making the decision. Once there is a cost, then cost/benefit comes into play.
I totally agree with you there. You'll note that I made no suggestions about what policy actions to take. I merely said we need to take the threat seriously. But I believe there is much we can do without sending global economies to the brink of disaster. As the science evolves we must be prepared to react. But doing nothing now is a poor choice. We at least need to invest heavily in green
Yes the earth is coming out of an ice age so we would expect to be at a plateau about now.
and what leads you to this conclusion? which dataset are we using here?
Temps reconstructed from ice cores. See Hansen's book or just about any serious book or site on global warming.
The problem is we're at the plateau but CO2 is now FAR higher than it was during any of the previous plateaus over the last few hundred thousand years.
So are the number of humans (and human artifacts (cities, roads)), cows and corn farms on this world. All contribute to warming. The point being you have to show it is significant.
You have a gun pointed at your head. Person A shows you evidence it is loaded. Person B shows you evidence it is not. If you value your life, you better be absolutely sure Person B is correct before you let someone pull the trigger. If you aren't absolutely sure, then you best not pull that trigger until you are. The point being that the evidence that GW is insignificant really needs to completely overwhelm the evidence that it is, and it's just not doing that yet. I for one am glad that folks like Michaels and Lindzen are doing their darndest to prove that the climate is A-OK. It keeps the other guys on their toes, and gives us greater confidence in what comes out the other end of the process unscathed. Given the uncertainties involved in climate science, it would be scary if there were no contrarian voices out there.
You may not believe CO2 makes much difference, but at this point you would have to call that a faith position
er, why? Did you read the link?
If nothing else in the system changes, a doubling of CO2 from the preindustrial levels is estimated to produce a temperature rise of 1.2 to 1.3C (2.2 to 2.3F). Again, the calculation is straightforward and there is little controversy about the figure among scientists. Now recall that over the last century and a half CO2 levels have risen from a preindustrial 280 ppm to around 380 ppm. At the same time global average mean temperature has risen (depending on who you believe) 0.8 to 1.0C.
I don't think I am unreasonable in thinking 1degC isn't that significant. Mind you, I didn't check his math, but the logic is sound.
I put the link on my reading queue, and skimmed it. Does look interesting, thanks. Unfortunately I don't have time to really pore over it in detail at the moment. But initial reaction is this. If the climate is so complex, how could a "straightforward calculation" be expected to give you anything other than a very gross ballpark figure? About 1-2 degrees not being significant, I have two points. 1) Temps in the Eemian were about that much higher than now, yet sea levels were several meters higher (source: Hansen, Storms of my Grandchildren, and his paper http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126). We don't know the cause for sure, but a good guess would seem to be that the higher temps caused ice caps and glaciers to melt. 2) 1 degree is on the low end of current predictions.
because there's significant evidence that indicates doubling CO2 will increase global temps by like 2-5 degrees C.
SHOW ME REFERENCES. Tell me exactly how the calculated ~1degC inflates to 2-5degC. From what I have gathered, the 2-5degC is the faith position here.
That's the IPCC AR4 conclusion. If you know anything about climate science, I would assume you'd have heard of it and be aware of its major conclusions.
Further investigations like the recent work by Lindzen and Choi may revise our understanding of the role of CO2, but so far alternate explanations are far from being
Pick any issue out there, if there is money to be made, some people will be trying to exploit it to make a profit for themselves. Global warming is no different. Profiteers emerge anytime there is a big change in how things are done. It doesn't mean the need for change isn't there or that the change should not be made.
Oh please. I don't claim to be a real scientist, just a guy on slashdot who has done his reading. I'm happy to call folks who don't believe in AGW whatever you'd like me to. Denier may not be the most accurate label to use, given the spectrum of beliefs out there, but the fact is there are most definitely global warming deniers out there. It does accurately describe the people who are crowing now about how global warming being "disproved" because of blizzards in Europe and North America this year.
But sorry if I offended you. I think the label Hansen uses, "contrarian", is a good one, but it doesn't seem to have caught on.
I mentioned Pat Michaels and even mentioned his position that global warming will not be dangerous. Yes the earth is coming out of an ice age so we would expect to be at a plateau about now. The problem is we're at the plateau but CO2 is now FAR higher than it was during any of the previous plateaus over the last few hundred thousand years. You may not believe CO2 makes much difference, but at this point you would have to call that a faith position, because there's significant evidence that indicates doubling CO2 will increase global temps by like 2-5 degrees C. Further investigations like the recent work by Lindzen and Choi may revise our understanding of the role of CO2, but so far alternate explanations are far from being totally convincing.
Very interesting. Thanks for pointing that out. I just figured it must be the contrarians since some of them have been using it to argue that even warmists don't believe in warming anymore. If it really was Frank Luntz who came up with the term, it's quite ironic.
Troll? Ok, parent is wrong about denialists inventing the term "climate change", but is mostly right on.
I'm really surprised that in a site full of supposedly technically savvy people that there are so many here who haven't really looked at the evidence, or looked at it and somehow came to the bizarre conclusion that there's nothing to worry about. I've read about 6 books on climate change in the past few months, both by deniers and by warmists, and spend a lot of time reading blogs like realclimate and climateaudit, and if there's anything that's clear it's that anyone who claims to have all the answers is full of crap. Claiming that the science indicating global warming could be a problem is all fabricated nonsense is really right up there with claiming the moon landings never happened. Yes there is uncertainty in the data we have, but that cuts both ways. There's at least as much uncertainty in the claims made by deniers as warmists. So to latch onto denier arguments and say "see! it's all a hoax!" is just ridiculous. Seriously, you people need to read Hanson's Storms of My Grandchildren. Then Schneiders Science as a Contact Sport. Also read Michael's "Climate of Extremes". Even he (a "denier") says right near the beginning "Global warming is happening. Get over it." His is the only denier book I've read that isn't full of obviously incorrect hooey, so I recommend it. (His position is that it's happening, but we can't do anything about it, and we didn't cause it, and it may even be beneficial).
But seriously people. Educate yourselves a little bit before you go spouting off moronic statements like kimvette above. Watching Fox news and reading conservative blogs does not count as educating yourself!
I think it would help a lot if the USPTO would contact authors of the patents and papers listed in the "prior art" section and ask for their input.
The problem the patent officers seem to have is that they are clueless as to what is obvious to a practitioner of a specific domain. Well, those prior art links usually give you a set of pointers to some people who are specialists in the area. They're precisely the ones you might want to consult and who might have an interest in patents in that area.
Unfortunately, with the broken legal system around patents, no inventor will want to look at patent filings because it would open 'em up to treble damages down the road if the patents go through.
Sigh.
Also if it's closed source then *somebody* must have sold you the license to it and if you get in trouble you can go back to them and drag them into the lawsuit too. If it's a typical open source project, then there's really nobody you can lean on if someone finds you're infringing. At least that's another reason I've heard for licensing code from $big_corp rather than using something open source.
Google Groups serves as a face to Usenet, yes, but it also advertises itself as a place to create new groups which are hosted by Google, as an alternative to setting up your own mailing list. I suspect the jQuery folks are using a Google hosted group. The spam situation is indeed ridiculous, and Google could indeed do something about it. They even have "report spam" buttons on all the messages, but so far as I can tell clicking on those buttons has no effect. At the very least it should hide the messages from me that I mark as spam. But no, it doesn't even remember which messages I've marked as spam from login to login. They've just dropped the ball for some reason.
The cell phone company Au in Japan was giving Pleos away as some kind of sign-up premium for a while. A deal like that could potentially account for a big chunk of those 500K-1M units all by itself.
Except it's not that great for small mobile devices because you need an input surface big enough to accommodate up to 10 fingers at once.
I'm not really sure why the submitter was so ga ga over this. It's a neat idea to use different numbers of fingers to determine the "scale" drag and zoom operations happen at, but for instance Apple's been specializing gestures on finger-count for a while now. And I'm not sure it's going to be that easy to remember (or accurately execute) the concept of "3 fingers means window" "4 fingers means desktop". In real life I don't have to ever think about how many fingers I'm using to manipulate something. It seems like it would be unnatural and unintuitive to have to always keep that in mind. Something (like current window managers) that specialized actions based on *where* they take place would be better I think. I.e. do a zoom gesture near the titlebar of a window, and the window zooms. Do it near the task bar and the desktop zooms. etc.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a market for news, so the "news industry" is not going to fail. What will die will be ways of monetizing the news that don't make sense any more. The more you prop up news organizations using bad revenue models, the harder you make it for new viable plans to compete.
Actually it's a stereo depth sensing camera. That makes it able to do things like extracting your 3D skeleton in actual 3-D space rather than just in a 2D plane. So it gives it a lot more versatility than the eyetoy, which was just restricted to a 2D plane.
That's a crap experience and I'm sure Apple knows it. I'm betting next rev of the iPad will have a stylus. They just didn't have a chance to getting working along with everything else they had to make happen to get the iPad out in a reasonable time frame. So it got cut along with the camera. It'll be there in a future version.
Both The X-Files and Twin Peaks used this formula of just throwing more and more weird riddles and sci-fi mysteries at the viewer with answers always seemingly to come in just a few more episodes. I never saw Lost, but it sounds like a repeat of that. The Matrix series was a condensed movie version of this phenomenon. I wish writers would just come up with a story that has an ending and tell it. Joss Whedon seems to be the only TV writer who can actually manage to do that.
Tell that to Microsoft, who wanted to give you a browser built into their operating system. They weren't even preventing you from doing something, just giving you some extra functionality built-in. Yet I seem to recall the DOJ and European Unions had some issues with that.
As far as I know, Scientific American is not a peer-reviewed publication. It is a non-fiction entertainment magazine aimed at a well-educated, scientifically literate audience. What their editors want to do is up to them. But I suspect some of the editors felt that Lomborg's research was fishy, and so they were interested in finding some well researched and documented rebuttals to Lomborg's claims.
Interestingly, Lomborg recently wrote an op-ed in the New York Times where he spouts many views about what we need to do to fix the CO2 problem, seemingly forgetting entirely that he used to claim that it wasn't a problem that needed to be solved. Seems even Lomborg is skeptical of his own former skeptical self these days.
I think by the 80's they were pretty certain that the cooling effect wasn't sufficient to overwhelm the warming, and since then, for the past four decades, we've had increasing certainty in warming.
And here's another rebuttal.
I want the anti-GW argument to be ROCK solid before I'm willing to just dismiss offhand the evidence that we are going to irreversibly make earth inhospitable to humans.
So, why isn't the converse just as valid?
I forgot to address this adequately. The converse is not logically valid from a risk management perspective. Say an automobile manufacturer discovers that 5% of its accelerator pedals are affected by some potentially fatal defect, and you own one of their cars. That implies that the overwhelming odds (95%) are that your car is not among those affected. Do you think most people would say "That's ok, Manufacturer, you don't need to do a recall, we know that each of us is not very likely to have this problem"?
Think of it this way, if we had 100% confidence in the pro-GW research and 0% confidence in the anti-GW research, then it would be clear that we should invest at least as much to prevent disaster as those disasters would cost us (lets assume we're also 100% confident in the efficacy of our investments). Likewise, if the percentages were reversed we'd not invest a dime. But the situation we're in is more like, let's say, %50 confidence in GW research, 50% confidence in anti-GW. So let's say that means dire consequences are 50% likely. If that's the case we still should invest in hedges against the bad outcome at a level commensurate with the risk involved. The potential downside here is pretty huge -- meters of sea-level rise and mass species extinctions significantly impairing our lifestyle. To me it's clear that even at the 50/50 level (GW/AntiGW) we need to take preventative action. At the 25/75 level I still think action is warranted. Even at the 10/90 level, I'd still want to begin to take some action like aggressive investments in alternative energy. So the numbers just aren't symmetrical. 90/10 pretty clearly means "take action", but 10/90 doesn't means equally unequivocally "take no action".
The other peculiar thing here is that regardless of whether you believe in GW, getting ourselves weaned off oil is a good thing that would have benefits of its own.
Yes the earth is coming out of an ice age so we would expect to be at a plateau about now.
and what leads you to this conclusion? which dataset are we using here?
Temps reconstructed from ice cores. See Hansen's book or just about any serious book or site on global warming.
Ok. So we are looking at this. Only plateaus I see are at the bottom end of the cycle. The temperature spikes, then decays. We are currently at a spike. Please show me on the graph why we should be in a plateau.
Ok, I see what your gripe is. Yeh, by "plateau" I didn't mean tens of thousands of years of relatively flat temperatures. Just that we should be maxed out about now.
You have a gun pointed at your head. Person A shows you evidence it is loaded. Person B shows you evidence it is not. If you value your life, you better be absolutely sure Person B is correct before you let someone pull the trigger. If you aren't absolutely sure, then you best not pull that trigger until you are.
That analogy has so many biases it isn't even funny. First, you assume that it is a fact that it is dangerous (a gun).
It is not an assumption, rather what a truckload of research has been pointing to. But if you prefer let's say it's dark and it looks like it might be a gun, but you're not sure. The analogy is still fine.
Second, you assume that the bullet has enough propellant to kill you.
That's pretty much the same thing as saying the gun isn't loaded. Or that it might actually be pointed at your foot and not your head. Put that in if you like. The analogy still works.
Third, you assume there is no consequence for not allowing the trigger to be pulled (and if don't think that carbon limits won't hurt the poor of the world, you should go count the # of Indians and Chinese that were lifted from poverty in the last 20 years).
This I'll grant you. The analogy does not include possible side effects of action. However you are making a false dichotomy: solve the climate problem or help the poor. Any action we are able to take now on climate will help improve our options in the future should the dangerous effects of AGW prove to be true. And furthermore, significantly rising sea levels and changing weather will probably have a much greater adverse effect on the poor and disadvantaged than anyone else. So not doing anything to stop GW may also end up being equivalent to hurting the poor.
Fourth and finally, you assume that it's that gun and not some other thing behind your head that you aren't looking at because you are so fixated on the gun that might to kill you.
So you're advocating ignoring a known threat just because there might be other unknown threats? That just seems silly.
The point being that the evidence that GW is insignificant really needs to completely overwhelm the evidence that it is, and it's just not doing that yet.
But we don't live in a perfect world. If you drive, you risk getting into a fatal accident. If you walk, you risk tripping and breaking your neck. An asteroid can crash into the planet and wipe out all of humanity. That view is perfectly fine if there is no cost in making the decision. Once there is a cost, then cost/benefit comes into play.
I totally agree with you there. You'll note that I made no suggestions about what policy actions to take. I merely said we need to take the threat seriously. But I believe there is much we can do without sending global economies to the brink of disaster. As the science evolves we must be prepared to react. But doing nothing now is a poor choice. We at least need to invest heavily in green
Yes the earth is coming out of an ice age so we would expect to be at a plateau about now.
and what leads you to this conclusion? which dataset are we using here?
Temps reconstructed from ice cores. See Hansen's book or just about any serious book or site on global warming.
The problem is we're at the plateau but CO2 is now FAR higher than it was during any of the previous plateaus over the last few hundred thousand years.
So are the number of humans (and human artifacts (cities, roads)), cows and corn farms on this world. All contribute to warming. The point being you have to show it is significant.
You have a gun pointed at your head. Person A shows you evidence it is loaded. Person B shows you evidence it is not. If you value your life, you better be absolutely sure Person B is correct before you let someone pull the trigger. If you aren't absolutely sure, then you best not pull that trigger until you are. The point being that the evidence that GW is insignificant really needs to completely overwhelm the evidence that it is, and it's just not doing that yet. I for one am glad that folks like Michaels and Lindzen are doing their darndest to prove that the climate is A-OK. It keeps the other guys on their toes, and gives us greater confidence in what comes out the other end of the process unscathed. Given the uncertainties involved in climate science, it would be scary if there were no contrarian voices out there.
You may not believe CO2 makes much difference, but at this point you would have to call that a faith position
er, why? Did you read the link?
If nothing else in the system changes, a doubling of CO2 from the preindustrial levels is estimated to produce a temperature rise of 1.2 to 1.3C (2.2 to 2.3F). Again, the calculation is straightforward and there is little controversy about the figure among scientists. Now recall that over the last century and a half CO2 levels have risen from a preindustrial 280 ppm to around 380 ppm. At the same time global average mean temperature has risen (depending on who you believe) 0.8 to 1.0C.
I don't think I am unreasonable in thinking 1degC isn't that significant. Mind you, I didn't check his math, but the logic is sound.
I put the link on my reading queue, and skimmed it. Does look interesting, thanks. Unfortunately I don't have time to really pore over it in detail at the moment. But initial reaction is this. If the climate is so complex, how could a "straightforward calculation" be expected to give you anything other than a very gross ballpark figure? About 1-2 degrees not being significant, I have two points. 1) Temps in the Eemian were about that much higher than now, yet sea levels were several meters higher (source: Hansen, Storms of my Grandchildren, and his paper http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126). We don't know the cause for sure, but a good guess would seem to be that the higher temps caused ice caps and glaciers to melt. 2) 1 degree is on the low end of current predictions.
because there's significant evidence that indicates doubling CO2 will increase global temps by like 2-5 degrees C.
SHOW ME REFERENCES. Tell me exactly how the calculated ~1degC inflates to 2-5degC. From what I have gathered, the 2-5degC is the faith position here.
That's the IPCC AR4 conclusion. If you know anything about climate science, I would assume you'd have heard of it and be aware of its major conclusions.
Further investigations like the recent work by Lindzen and Choi may revise our understanding of the role of CO2, but so far alternate explanations are far from being
Thanks for pointing that out. I had assumed it came from pro-GW camp since anti-GW folks constantly use it as a bludgeon against them.
Pick any issue out there, if there is money to be made, some people will be trying to exploit it to make a profit for themselves. Global warming is no different. Profiteers emerge anytime there is a big change in how things are done. It doesn't mean the need for change isn't there or that the change should not be made.
Oh please. I don't claim to be a real scientist, just a guy on slashdot who has done his reading. I'm happy to call folks who don't believe in AGW whatever you'd like me to. Denier may not be the most accurate label to use, given the spectrum of beliefs out there, but the fact is there are most definitely global warming deniers out there. It does accurately describe the people who are crowing now about how global warming being "disproved" because of blizzards in Europe and North America this year. But sorry if I offended you. I think the label Hansen uses, "contrarian", is a good one, but it doesn't seem to have caught on.
I mentioned Pat Michaels and even mentioned his position that global warming will not be dangerous. Yes the earth is coming out of an ice age so we would expect to be at a plateau about now. The problem is we're at the plateau but CO2 is now FAR higher than it was during any of the previous plateaus over the last few hundred thousand years. You may not believe CO2 makes much difference, but at this point you would have to call that a faith position, because there's significant evidence that indicates doubling CO2 will increase global temps by like 2-5 degrees C. Further investigations like the recent work by Lindzen and Choi may revise our understanding of the role of CO2, but so far alternate explanations are far from being totally convincing.
Very interesting. Thanks for pointing that out. I just figured it must be the contrarians since some of them have been using it to argue that even warmists don't believe in warming anymore. If it really was Frank Luntz who came up with the term, it's quite ironic.
Troll? Ok, parent is wrong about denialists inventing the term "climate change", but is mostly right on. I'm really surprised that in a site full of supposedly technically savvy people that there are so many here who haven't really looked at the evidence, or looked at it and somehow came to the bizarre conclusion that there's nothing to worry about. I've read about 6 books on climate change in the past few months, both by deniers and by warmists, and spend a lot of time reading blogs like realclimate and climateaudit, and if there's anything that's clear it's that anyone who claims to have all the answers is full of crap. Claiming that the science indicating global warming could be a problem is all fabricated nonsense is really right up there with claiming the moon landings never happened. Yes there is uncertainty in the data we have, but that cuts both ways. There's at least as much uncertainty in the claims made by deniers as warmists. So to latch onto denier arguments and say "see! it's all a hoax!" is just ridiculous. Seriously, you people need to read Hanson's Storms of My Grandchildren. Then Schneiders Science as a Contact Sport. Also read Michael's "Climate of Extremes". Even he (a "denier") says right near the beginning "Global warming is happening. Get over it." His is the only denier book I've read that isn't full of obviously incorrect hooey, so I recommend it. (His position is that it's happening, but we can't do anything about it, and we didn't cause it, and it may even be beneficial). But seriously people. Educate yourselves a little bit before you go spouting off moronic statements like kimvette above. Watching Fox news and reading conservative blogs does not count as educating yourself!
I find it fascinating that such a huge proportion of the population is fascinated by watching other people run around and get sweaty.
I think it would help a lot if the USPTO would contact authors of the patents and papers listed in the "prior art" section and ask for their input. The problem the patent officers seem to have is that they are clueless as to what is obvious to a practitioner of a specific domain. Well, those prior art links usually give you a set of pointers to some people who are specialists in the area. They're precisely the ones you might want to consult and who might have an interest in patents in that area. Unfortunately, with the broken legal system around patents, no inventor will want to look at patent filings because it would open 'em up to treble damages down the road if the patents go through. Sigh.
Also if it's closed source then *somebody* must have sold you the license to it and if you get in trouble you can go back to them and drag them into the lawsuit too. If it's a typical open source project, then there's really nobody you can lean on if someone finds you're infringing. At least that's another reason I've heard for licensing code from $big_corp rather than using something open source.
Since one of the three designers of Go is Ken Thompson (designer of C), I would doubt that.
According to Wikipedia C was designed by Dennis Ritchie. Ken Thompson worked on Unix and Plan 9.
He's not the spiderman guy. He's the "I'm a PC" guy from the Apple commercials.
Google Groups serves as a face to Usenet, yes, but it also advertises itself as a place to create new groups which are hosted by Google, as an alternative to setting up your own mailing list. I suspect the jQuery folks are using a Google hosted group. The spam situation is indeed ridiculous, and Google could indeed do something about it. They even have "report spam" buttons on all the messages, but so far as I can tell clicking on those buttons has no effect. At the very least it should hide the messages from me that I mark as spam. But no, it doesn't even remember which messages I've marked as spam from login to login. They've just dropped the ball for some reason.
The cell phone company Au in Japan was giving Pleos away as some kind of sign-up premium for a while. A deal like that could potentially account for a big chunk of those 500K-1M units all by itself.
Except it's not that great for small mobile devices because you need an input surface big enough to accommodate up to 10 fingers at once.
I'm not really sure why the submitter was so ga ga over this. It's a neat idea to use different numbers of fingers to determine the "scale" drag and zoom operations happen at, but for instance Apple's been specializing gestures on finger-count for a while now. And I'm not sure it's going to be that easy to remember (or accurately execute) the concept of "3 fingers means window" "4 fingers means desktop". In real life I don't have to ever think about how many fingers I'm using to manipulate something. It seems like it would be unnatural and unintuitive to have to always keep that in mind. Something (like current window managers) that specialized actions based on *where* they take place would be better I think. I.e. do a zoom gesture near the titlebar of a window, and the window zooms. Do it near the task bar and the desktop zooms. etc.