It seems like you are really struggling to come up with reasons why this is a bad thing.
No, what is happening is you have made too many assumptions. Please tell me where I said that this was a bad thing.
If walking past a particular ride makes me want icecream, hell, I want there to be an icecream stand nearby.
Me too! Where did I say otherwise?
So, you go to their park, pay them money for the entertainment they provide, but somehow it's nefarious of them to more accuratly measure what the hell it is you want?
It sounds like you're the one with some repressed conspiracy theories. I never used a word even approaching the meaning of "nefarious." Has it occurred to you that perhaps I know a bit about data mining, and thus would comment on the value of this system from a data mining perspective?
The idea that this child tracker will somehow give them more info seems a little exaggerated.
Not at all exaggerated. Like you said, they can already track mass usage patterns in various ways. But now they can track where you go, personally.
You get all kinds of great things out of that. "People who eat hamburgers don't tend to ride the Crazy Lego Ship. Maybe it makes them feel sick? We should put less mayo on the burgers." Or perhaps people who shop in store XYZ don't tend to also shop in store ABC. Perhaps there is too wide an array of popular items in XYZ -- leading people to forgo any further shopping. This tells you you should move some of the popular items from store XYZ over to store ABC, and hike up all the prices a little bit. Since people arent' buying as much per location, they are less likely to notice a 3% price hike.
Maybe you find that people who walk past a certain ride are more likely to want to buy ice cream. This leads you to put more ice cream stands in that location. Maybe you're asking "Why the hell would a particular ride cause people to want ice cream?" Believe me, the company doesn't care why, but they'll sure as hell cash in on it.
The only reason you can't think of uses for this is because you (obviously) aren't the one getting paid to do it.
Considering that children don't usually wander far away from their parents, it would be reasonable to assume that where the child is, the parents also are.
Thus this is a nice way to get parents to consent to having their motions tracked as they move throughout Legoland, under the guise of helping "the children."
Imagine it... If you had a giant database of people's movements as they go through the park, you can more strategically position the food vending carts, move the rides and displays around in order to maximize the "candy aisle effect," etc.
So is it immoral to be denied the opportunity to watch television if you don't have a TV? Is it unethical to deny someone the right to use a telephone if they don't have the change for the pay phone?
First, the TV is a bad example. It's a one-way device. It's probably revolutionized laziness, but certainly not society. Even disregarding that, no, I don't think it is immoral for things to have costs. I think you are trying to change the topic.
You're obviously living in IdealWorld(tm). And it's a nice place. I've talked about it many times myself. The problem is I can't find it anywhere. Please tell me where it is if you'd be so kind.
It's simple. You are looking in the wrong direction. Try peering inside yourself.
I remember very clearly something my 6th grade teacher told me when I saw a kid swipe a soccer ball from another kid on the playground: "Life isn't always fair." Yeah, you might be right, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do everything within our power to make it fair. IdealWorld might not exist, but we can't just throw in the towel and give up trying to reach it.
Be rude to a police officer in most areas of the world and see how welcome you are to stay in that public space. See how many rights you have and how much the authorities care about your idealistic sense of morality and access.
People in authority have power trips. Those people are acting wrongly.
But in America, you have to have permits in many cases to assemble and exercise your right to express yourself.
You keep arguing from example. I don't see why. Things should stay the way they are because that's the way they are? Yes, you need a permit to hold a rally. This is due to some serious perversion of what used to be understood as a basic right. People can trample that right all they want, but it doesn't cause it to no longer be a basic right.
That seems analagous to respecting the right of a person with an infectious disease to mingle with non-infected people where he chooses because the alternative or sanctioning his behavior by limiting exposure is otherwise immoral. Again, another interesting difference between here and IdealWorld(tm).
Not a good analogy. Spam isn't like an incurable communicable disease. Filters are quite effective at stopping it. Should we let infected persons out into public? Give them a good medical mask and I say sure, go right ahead. What you seem to be arguing is that they should be locked up since that's the more convenient way to handle the situation from the uninfected public's point of view.
Yes, we are not living in IdealWorld. That's absolutely no excuse to keep trying to get there.
The Internet is a revolutionary communications medium. It is, as we speak, reshaping the way the entire human world interacts. It is unethical and immoral to deny anyone, anywhere, the opportunity to access the Internet.
We do not ban people from public spaces simply because they are rude.
We do not limit the freedom of people to express themselves as they wish. Be that messages of peace or Nazi hate propaganda.
Yes, in some countries the citizens are not allowed these basic rights. Those countries are backward in that respect.
It has been said that spam must be cut off at the source, not filtered, because filtering does not save the bandwidth that has been wasted. But this is the approach that is commonly taken in America and many other places where freedom of speech is considered sacrosanct! We do not prevent the KKK from publishing their hate literature. We simply refuse to read it. Yes, we might save many trees from being turned into the pulp that this hateful material is printed on, but we do not stymie free speech on a technicality like that!
Some argue that sending spam wastes other peoples' money. This is still not an excuse to cut off speech. If anything it indicates that the Internet's economic framework is flawed and must be fixed. There is absolutely no excuse to cut off speech.
Spam wastes bandwidth, yes. But to cut it off at the mouthpiece, to censor entire nations (be that censorship lawfully ordained or not), goes against all the principles of free speech and individual freedom we uphold in the USA and which also exist in many other countries.
We should not compromise any of these values simply because of a mosquito biting at our ankles. Find technical solutions that do not involve mass censorship and coercion.
It may not be apparent now, but in 100 years, unfettered access to the Internet will be as inalienable a right as all the others we hold sacred now.
That should be sKeptical. Dammit, of all the blunders that are becomming common usage this one drives me insane. It's because I read it with only one consonant at the beginning - an S sound, so it sounds like something having to do with a tank full of crap.
I suppose you also hate the word "score" because it looks like it should be pronounced "sore?" But since you are obviously a rabid prescriptivist, you would probably rail against changing the spelling to "skore" since "That's how we've always spelled it."
This alone should be enough to convince you that your prescriptivist viewpoint is moronic.
Oh, and BTW, "sceptical" is the common British spelling.
You, as with many other people, live only for the present.
*sigh* No I do not. I am trying to point out that with a system as complex as Earth it is impossible to point to any one action and say that it is the "cause" of something. I am not, and did never imply, that global warming is a "good" thing. The point is, we can't be sure that reducing CO2 emission is going to "correct" the current problems. Does this mean we shouldn't try? No, not really. But say we reduce CO2 emission, and global warming halts. Does that mean we were responsible for fixing it? No, not necessarily.
Please don't assume that I'm some kind of anti-environment wacko. I'm trying to talk on a slightly higher level here about the nature of cause and effect, and how this makes it very hard to come up with solid environmental policies.
The particle/wave duality thingy is not to be taken litteraly!
Richard Feynman would disagree -- he always believed that photons are fundamentally particles, not waves, and it was QED that allowed you to use wave descriptions in order to predict the behavior of the particles. Remember, this guy invented QED.
In my view, it is both a wave and a particle, and it is also neither a wave nor a particle. It is more of a "tendency" which can be predicted in certain contexts using certain mathematics. In such a universe I think the question of whether anything "literally" has a particular form or not is a moot one:-)
And my point go flying past another head at Mach 2.
First, you say this:
Maybe you've heard of the "multiplier effect"? Just as we were discussing Microsoft in the other story, and how it's "effect" on the computing landscape is out of proportion to the actual size of the company.
So, things which seem insignificantly small can have large effects, that's what you're saying? How can that be consistent with:
The "butterfly effect" is a nice theory, but in the real world, there's no proof that a butterfly farting in the rainforest will change anything in an significent way.
Anyway, the "butterfly effect" is fairly easy to demonstrate. Take any chaotic system you wish and change the starting parameters by a miniscule amount. After a certain amount of time the evolution of the system has totally diverged from what it would have done otherwise. A butterfly can indeed cause a hurricane, depending on how you define "cause." What it actually means for one thing to cause another thing is one of the key issues in my argument.
They're right because we are the dominant species on the planet (read monopoly) and there are certain responsabilities that go along with that.
Responsibilities? Where do they come from? What tablet are they written on? Who handed them down?
But anyway your position is as arbitrary as the one you acuse others of.
Do you even know what my position is? Because you've managed to completely misunderstand it so far.
My position is that there is no distinction between natural and unnatural, human or non-human, and "right" and "wrong" events in the grand scheme of life on earth. Does that mean I think we should choke the atmosphere with greenhouse gases? No, it does not. I am not attempting to justify the destruction of the environment. I am trying to point out that there is no "wrong" way for the future to unfold.
Ruining the planet and then blaming it on "natural causes" is not any better than the excuses copyright violaters come up with.
Please. I'm not making excuses for "ruining" the planet (if you can define what that means). I tried to clearly lay that out in my original post, but obviously your selective attention skipped over that part.
Either we're a part of the natural system as you posit in the first paragraph, and have the "right" to do damn well whatever we please for whatever reason we want, and it's all part of the natural cycle, or we are _not_ part of the natural system and therefore should limit the effect we have on said natural system, so we have every right to try and correct changes we made, because those changes weren't right in the first place. You can't have it both ways.
Right.. I was trying to get this point across via sarcasm but obviously failed miserably:-)
I believe some measurements show that species are daying off at a rate close to that of some of the big extinction events in history.
Are there any measurements of how many species are arising in the new conditions and how that compares to the extinction periods you reference?
I agree that it is a wise long term strategy to reduce our CO2 emissions. I don't think the effects of doing that will be predictable, though, and it's definitely not a magic bullet which is guaranteed to reverse the "damage."
What if reducing CO2 production causes such global social and economic strain that a new World War breaks out, resulting in a nuclear holocaust wiping out everything?
My point is the system is chaotic, and we can't assume that what appears to be a correct short-term strategy will turn out well in the end. There are an infinite number of variables to account for.
None of what I say should be construed as encouraging what we are currently doing to the environment. I think we are doing a number of very stupid things. All I'm trying to say is that the situation is not as easily controllable as people seem to think, and the ultimate results of what we are doing cannot be predicted.
Yes, but are ice cores accurate to less than a single degree C? This new report is a readjustment from a prior prediction of 0.34 to 0.43 degrees per year...
Interesting philosophical debate: If humans are a product of nature, and humans do something, shouldn't that still be considered "natural"? If the evolution of a species such as humans is then natural, and that evolution "naturally" results in technology which stresses an ecosystem in strange ways, is that bad? Is it good?
This is what really gets to me in these debates. Most people are unwilling to view humans as merely a part of the complex biological system that exists on the surface of the planet. I see no logical reason why the human species should be set apart specially from everything else, and no reason to arbitrarily define human actions as "unnatural."
I think the reason people are unwilling to consider this idea, is that they assume the reason it was brought up in the first place was to justify the trashing of the environment, under the guise that we are simply behaving "naturally." But seriously, that isn't the point. The point is, the Earth must be viewed holistically, as a system of many interacting and not always distinct parts. To think that we, as one small part, can somehow direct our actions in such a way as to favorably control its evolution, is arrogant and mistaken.
Life and climate are dynamic, chaotic systems. We've all heard of the Butterfly Effect. Even the smallest, insignificant action has profound effects on everything, given enough time. Are these effects good or bad? What causes them to be good or bad? Suppose that we are causing global warming, and in 100 years the world will be a tropical rainforest. All sorts of new species will evolve in the hot jungles of northern Canada. What "right" do we have to alter the Earth's climate, cooling it down, and preventing those species from emerging?
The fact is, global warming is a problem because it is a problem for humans. I don't think the Earth cares if species die off, and new ones emerge. It is a continual process of trying to come into equilibrium -- except the equilibrium is always shifting because of the billions of outside influences. Except this term "outside influences" is also a misnomer, because there are no truly "outside" influences -- the universe is one big system of cause and effect, and the closer you look at it, the harder it is to make distinctions between any of the parts.
Does any of this mean that we shouldn't do our best to curb our production of CO2? It depends, first of all, on what the immediate consequences to human civilization would be. Are we going to flood all our coastal cities? If so, it hardly makes sense to argue about whether the decision is "right" or "wrong" -- it's a matter of practicality. But if not... Suppose species are wiped out, migration patterns shift, ecosystems turn to deserts, deserts to to jungles, evolution gets a kick in the pants in general... Can somebody give me a fundamental, justifiable reason why that is "wrong?" Are natural changes only "right" if they are not guided by conscious awareness? Can you provide a justification for such an arbitrary viewpoint?
Define the average temperature on Earth. [...] Note that this quantity both has to be measured (in a consistent way over at least the past century) and predicted with climate models (over the next century) to be useful to derive policy from it.
Wien's Law relates the peak of the blackbody radiation curve to temperature. Satellites in space measure the heat radiation from Earth, and compute the temperature from the peak wavelength. If the satellite is far enough away from Earth to get a good view of the entire planet, then this a very good measure of the actual temperature averaged over the entire planet.
Yes, we do not have a century's worth of measurements, since we haven't had this technology for that long. What this means is that it's too early to select any drastic environmental policy of any kind.
It does make sense to do what we can, within reasonable limits, to curb the use of fossil fuels, even though we don't have a solid model to predict what our future impacts will be. I don't advocate investing trillions of dollars into something that might not work, but it certainly can't hurt to be a little conservative.
There are other reasons to reduce fossil fuel consumption aside from global warming, anyway. For one, we're eventually going to run out of it (well, not run out, but the price will increase astronomically).
Before you rip on PNG, why don't you read the damned spec!! Jesus.
Particularly notice the section on colorspace information, where there are clearly specified tables for defining the CIE x,y chromaticity of the R, G, B components, the white point, the image gamma, and the freaking ICC color profile.
It seems the software you use can't create gAMA tables in its PNG output. Hence it is your software that sucks, not the PNG format.
And this entire discussion is moot if the browsers don't support the gamma adjustment. Gonna blame that one on the PNG creators also?
Yes. But that extra ice is the part that sticks out above the water. The weight of the ice (including the part sticking out) is exactly the same as that of the displaced water. So when the ice melts, the resulting water will have precisely the same volume as the hole in the water displaced by the ice.
I don't believe light (x-ray, microwave radiation is light radiation) is usually considered a particle, even if it does have some particle tpye charateristics.:P
First, X-rays are definitely particles, as has been shown in various experiments. Also, X-rays are definitely waves, as has been shown in other various experiments. Light is both wave and particle.
Anyway, he wasn't talking about the X-rays themselves, or the microwaves themselves as the particles. What he meant was an X-ray tube is a particle accelerator. It operates by accelerating electrons through several hundred kilovolts, and slamming them into a metal target (tungsten). Hence it is a particle accelerator.
A microwave operates by a magnetron device, which is a circular chamber with a high voltage between the inner cathode and the outer walls. Electrons are emitted from the cathode and are accelerated toward the walls. However, a magnetic field causes them to spiral and create a rotating radial electric field which sweeps through a number of resonant cavities, which then resonate at microwave frequency. Hence a magnetron is a particle accelerator.
That's instantaneous bandwidth, which isn't as relevent as average bandwidth over the duration of the transfer. When the plane's stopped, bandwidth drops to 0 - but the plane has to stop for a period before completeing the transfer. The plane also has o accelerate at least twice (though once in a negative direction).
The computation doesn't really make sense for a single plane, because bandwidth is really how much data is capable of arriving at a certain point per unit time when the link is saturated. In this case, that depends on how close the planes can fly together in the air, which is dictated by FAA regulations. I'm not a pilot, so I'll guess 10 kilometers.
That means 556 airplanes could fit between NY and London, and they would arrive about 40 seconds apart from each other (given the 848 kph cruising speed). Assuming you have an airport capable of landing a plane every 40 seconds, that's 0.3 petabytes per second. At any one moment, 556*12 = 6672 petabytes are in the air.
A college degree does not confer skill. Skill must be demonstrated before it can be rewarded.
A college degree demonstrates the skill of hanging on to a long term project, which you may not always enjoy doing, for a four year period. You don't think that's worth anything?
All my friends at work my age who did not go to college also seem to have problems showing up to work on time (or showing up to work at all), getting things done when they need to get done, working efficiently in groups, etc. Sure, they are all smart and all skilled but they lack the skills that one acquires through four years of commitment to extremely difficult tasks which sometimes don't make sense or seem pointless. It's called higher education and its value isn't in what you learn, but what you do to learn it.
If I was hiring my own replacement, I'd sooner select a person with a degree in geology than a technically skilled but not college educated alternative.
That's one of the problems with computers right now. You do have to know how they work in order to program them correctly. Otherwise, you will almost certainly be introducing security holes and other obscure bugs.
This is a symptom of narrow-minded thinking. The OP could have been referring to COBOL programmers, Forth programmers, etc. There are plenty of languages where it is impossible to code a memory bug -- there are also plenty of niches where security is not and never will be an issue (example, fluid hydrodynamics simulation code -- do you really think you need to code "for security" in such an application?)
My mother spent the last 10 years programming big iron in COBOL, yet she is hard pressed to explain what "little-endian" means, and she has no knowledge of the inner workings of the machine, other than the fact that it has a CPU, RAM, and permanent magnetic storage. The concept of an "address" is alien to her. Despite all this, she is an excellent COBOL programmer, one of the best and most accomplished on her team, which consisted of over 50 people. She has obscure knowledge of IBM mainframe systems (from a software perspective) that I could never hope to match, even with years of study. The fact that she doesn't understand how the thing works internally has nothing to do with anything.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking the computer world is all about Linux, C, and late-night hacking sessions. You couldn't be further from the truth.
it's not under 100KB of code if it is zipped! you should count the *expanded* version of the code, as that is what is actually executed.
First, as others point out, it's only "gratuitously" zipped, and expands to not much more than the zipped size. This implies the code is compressed in the file by some kind of executable packer.
I don't see how that's any less impressive than generating the textures at runtime. Why draw a distinction between procedurally generating textures, and decompressing a compressed representation of the code? Both are "nifty tricks."
Are you suggesting that all corporations should halt all development and marketing of products whenever some of their officers get in trouble with the feds?
The key here is "former CEO" and "former board members." I highly doubt that the current administration of Tyco is at all interested in defending a bunch of ex-officers from federal prosecution. Why would they want to involve themselves in that?
Slashdot Mirror
No, what is happening is you have made too many assumptions. Please tell me where I said that this was a bad thing.
If walking past a particular ride makes me want icecream, hell, I want there to be an icecream stand nearby.
Me too! Where did I say otherwise?
So, you go to their park, pay them money for the entertainment they provide, but somehow it's nefarious of them to more accuratly measure what the hell it is you want?
It sounds like you're the one with some repressed conspiracy theories. I never used a word even approaching the meaning of "nefarious." Has it occurred to you that perhaps I know a bit about data mining, and thus would comment on the value of this system from a data mining perspective?
Did I say that? Did I seem panicked? I think not.
Not at all exaggerated. Like you said, they can already track mass usage patterns in various ways. But now they can track where you go, personally.
You get all kinds of great things out of that. "People who eat hamburgers don't tend to ride the Crazy Lego Ship. Maybe it makes them feel sick? We should put less mayo on the burgers." Or perhaps people who shop in store XYZ don't tend to also shop in store ABC. Perhaps there is too wide an array of popular items in XYZ -- leading people to forgo any further shopping. This tells you you should move some of the popular items from store XYZ over to store ABC, and hike up all the prices a little bit. Since people arent' buying as much per location, they are less likely to notice a 3% price hike.
Maybe you find that people who walk past a certain ride are more likely to want to buy ice cream. This leads you to put more ice cream stands in that location. Maybe you're asking "Why the hell would a particular ride cause people to want ice cream?" Believe me, the company doesn't care why, but they'll sure as hell cash in on it.
The only reason you can't think of uses for this is because you (obviously) aren't the one getting paid to do it.
Thus this is a nice way to get parents to consent to having their motions tracked as they move throughout Legoland, under the guise of helping "the children."
Imagine it... If you had a giant database of people's movements as they go through the park, you can more strategically position the food vending carts, move the rides and displays around in order to maximize the "candy aisle effect," etc.
First, the TV is a bad example. It's a one-way device. It's probably revolutionized laziness, but certainly not society. Even disregarding that, no, I don't think it is immoral for things to have costs. I think you are trying to change the topic.
You're obviously living in IdealWorld(tm). And it's a nice place. I've talked about it many times myself. The problem is I can't find it anywhere. Please tell me where it is if you'd be so kind.
It's simple. You are looking in the wrong direction. Try peering inside yourself.
I remember very clearly something my 6th grade teacher told me when I saw a kid swipe a soccer ball from another kid on the playground: "Life isn't always fair." Yeah, you might be right, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do everything within our power to make it fair. IdealWorld might not exist, but we can't just throw in the towel and give up trying to reach it.
Be rude to a police officer in most areas of the world and see how welcome you are to stay in that public space. See how many rights you have and how much the authorities care about your idealistic sense of morality and access.
People in authority have power trips. Those people are acting wrongly.
But in America, you have to have permits in many cases to assemble and exercise your right to express yourself.
You keep arguing from example. I don't see why. Things should stay the way they are because that's the way they are? Yes, you need a permit to hold a rally. This is due to some serious perversion of what used to be understood as a basic right. People can trample that right all they want, but it doesn't cause it to no longer be a basic right.
That seems analagous to respecting the right of a person with an infectious disease to mingle with non-infected people where he chooses because the alternative or sanctioning his behavior by limiting exposure is otherwise immoral. Again, another interesting difference between here and IdealWorld(tm).
Not a good analogy. Spam isn't like an incurable communicable disease. Filters are quite effective at stopping it. Should we let infected persons out into public? Give them a good medical mask and I say sure, go right ahead. What you seem to be arguing is that they should be locked up since that's the more convenient way to handle the situation from the uninfected public's point of view.
Yes, we are not living in IdealWorld. That's absolutely no excuse to keep trying to get there.
This is elitist and plain wrong.
The Internet is a revolutionary communications medium. It is, as we speak, reshaping the way the entire human world interacts. It is unethical and immoral to deny anyone, anywhere, the opportunity to access the Internet.
We do not ban people from public spaces simply because they are rude.
We do not limit the freedom of people to express themselves as they wish. Be that messages of peace or Nazi hate propaganda.
Yes, in some countries the citizens are not allowed these basic rights. Those countries are backward in that respect.
It has been said that spam must be cut off at the source, not filtered, because filtering does not save the bandwidth that has been wasted. But this is the approach that is commonly taken in America and many other places where freedom of speech is considered sacrosanct! We do not prevent the KKK from publishing their hate literature. We simply refuse to read it. Yes, we might save many trees from being turned into the pulp that this hateful material is printed on, but we do not stymie free speech on a technicality like that!
Some argue that sending spam wastes other peoples' money. This is still not an excuse to cut off speech. If anything it indicates that the Internet's economic framework is flawed and must be fixed. There is absolutely no excuse to cut off speech.
Spam wastes bandwidth, yes. But to cut it off at the mouthpiece, to censor entire nations (be that censorship lawfully ordained or not), goes against all the principles of free speech and individual freedom we uphold in the USA and which also exist in many other countries.
We should not compromise any of these values simply because of a mosquito biting at our ankles. Find technical solutions that do not involve mass censorship and coercion.
It may not be apparent now, but in 100 years, unfettered access to the Internet will be as inalienable a right as all the others we hold sacred now.
I do believe that half of zero is still zero :-)
I suppose you also hate the word "score" because it looks like it should be pronounced "sore?" But since you are obviously a rabid prescriptivist, you would probably rail against changing the spelling to "skore" since "That's how we've always spelled it."
This alone should be enough to convince you that your prescriptivist viewpoint is moronic.
Oh, and BTW, "sceptical" is the common British spelling.
*sigh* No I do not. I am trying to point out that with a system as complex as Earth it is impossible to point to any one action and say that it is the "cause" of something. I am not, and did never imply, that global warming is a "good" thing. The point is, we can't be sure that reducing CO2 emission is going to "correct" the current problems. Does this mean we shouldn't try? No, not really. But say we reduce CO2 emission, and global warming halts. Does that mean we were responsible for fixing it? No, not necessarily.
Please don't assume that I'm some kind of anti-environment wacko. I'm trying to talk on a slightly higher level here about the nature of cause and effect, and how this makes it very hard to come up with solid environmental policies.
Richard Feynman would disagree -- he always believed that photons are fundamentally particles, not waves, and it was QED that allowed you to use wave descriptions in order to predict the behavior of the particles. Remember, this guy invented QED.
In my view, it is both a wave and a particle, and it is also neither a wave nor a particle. It is more of a "tendency" which can be predicted in certain contexts using certain mathematics. In such a universe I think the question of whether anything "literally" has a particular form or not is a moot one :-)
First, you say this: Maybe you've heard of the "multiplier effect"? Just as we were discussing Microsoft in the other story, and how it's "effect" on the computing landscape is out of proportion to the actual size of the company.
So, things which seem insignificantly small can have large effects, that's what you're saying? How can that be consistent with:
The "butterfly effect" is a nice theory, but in the real world, there's no proof that a butterfly farting in the rainforest will change anything in an significent way.
Anyway, the "butterfly effect" is fairly easy to demonstrate. Take any chaotic system you wish and change the starting parameters by a miniscule amount. After a certain amount of time the evolution of the system has totally diverged from what it would have done otherwise. A butterfly can indeed cause a hurricane, depending on how you define "cause." What it actually means for one thing to cause another thing is one of the key issues in my argument.
They're right because we are the dominant species on the planet (read monopoly) and there are certain responsabilities that go along with that.
Responsibilities? Where do they come from? What tablet are they written on? Who handed them down?
But anyway your position is as arbitrary as the one you acuse others of.
Do you even know what my position is? Because you've managed to completely misunderstand it so far.
My position is that there is no distinction between natural and unnatural, human or non-human, and "right" and "wrong" events in the grand scheme of life on earth. Does that mean I think we should choke the atmosphere with greenhouse gases? No, it does not. I am not attempting to justify the destruction of the environment. I am trying to point out that there is no "wrong" way for the future to unfold.
Ruining the planet and then blaming it on "natural causes" is not any better than the excuses copyright violaters come up with.
Please. I'm not making excuses for "ruining" the planet (if you can define what that means). I tried to clearly lay that out in my original post, but obviously your selective attention skipped over that part.
Right.. I was trying to get this point across via sarcasm but obviously failed miserably :-)
I believe some measurements show that species are daying off at a rate close to that of some of the big extinction events in history.
Are there any measurements of how many species are arising in the new conditions and how that compares to the extinction periods you reference?
I agree that it is a wise long term strategy to reduce our CO2 emissions. I don't think the effects of doing that will be predictable, though, and it's definitely not a magic bullet which is guaranteed to reverse the "damage."
What if reducing CO2 production causes such global social and economic strain that a new World War breaks out, resulting in a nuclear holocaust wiping out everything?
My point is the system is chaotic, and we can't assume that what appears to be a correct short-term strategy will turn out well in the end. There are an infinite number of variables to account for.
None of what I say should be construed as encouraging what we are currently doing to the environment. I think we are doing a number of very stupid things. All I'm trying to say is that the situation is not as easily controllable as people seem to think, and the ultimate results of what we are doing cannot be predicted.
In short, we're on a really, really wild ride.
Yes, but are ice cores accurate to less than a single degree C? This new report is a readjustment from a prior prediction of 0.34 to 0.43 degrees per year...
This is what really gets to me in these debates. Most people are unwilling to view humans as merely a part of the complex biological system that exists on the surface of the planet. I see no logical reason why the human species should be set apart specially from everything else, and no reason to arbitrarily define human actions as "unnatural."
I think the reason people are unwilling to consider this idea, is that they assume the reason it was brought up in the first place was to justify the trashing of the environment, under the guise that we are simply behaving "naturally." But seriously, that isn't the point. The point is, the Earth must be viewed holistically, as a system of many interacting and not always distinct parts. To think that we, as one small part, can somehow direct our actions in such a way as to favorably control its evolution, is arrogant and mistaken.
Life and climate are dynamic, chaotic systems. We've all heard of the Butterfly Effect. Even the smallest, insignificant action has profound effects on everything, given enough time. Are these effects good or bad? What causes them to be good or bad? Suppose that we are causing global warming, and in 100 years the world will be a tropical rainforest. All sorts of new species will evolve in the hot jungles of northern Canada. What "right" do we have to alter the Earth's climate, cooling it down, and preventing those species from emerging?
The fact is, global warming is a problem because it is a problem for humans. I don't think the Earth cares if species die off, and new ones emerge. It is a continual process of trying to come into equilibrium -- except the equilibrium is always shifting because of the billions of outside influences. Except this term "outside influences" is also a misnomer, because there are no truly "outside" influences -- the universe is one big system of cause and effect, and the closer you look at it, the harder it is to make distinctions between any of the parts.
Does any of this mean that we shouldn't do our best to curb our production of CO2? It depends, first of all, on what the immediate consequences to human civilization would be. Are we going to flood all our coastal cities? If so, it hardly makes sense to argue about whether the decision is "right" or "wrong" -- it's a matter of practicality. But if not... Suppose species are wiped out, migration patterns shift, ecosystems turn to deserts, deserts to to jungles, evolution gets a kick in the pants in general... Can somebody give me a fundamental, justifiable reason why that is "wrong?" Are natural changes only "right" if they are not guided by conscious awareness? Can you provide a justification for such an arbitrary viewpoint?
Wien's Law relates the peak of the blackbody radiation curve to temperature. Satellites in space measure the heat radiation from Earth, and compute the temperature from the peak wavelength. If the satellite is far enough away from Earth to get a good view of the entire planet, then this a very good measure of the actual temperature averaged over the entire planet.
Yes, we do not have a century's worth of measurements, since we haven't had this technology for that long. What this means is that it's too early to select any drastic environmental policy of any kind.
It does make sense to do what we can, within reasonable limits, to curb the use of fossil fuels, even though we don't have a solid model to predict what our future impacts will be. I don't advocate investing trillions of dollars into something that might not work, but it certainly can't hurt to be a little conservative.
There are other reasons to reduce fossil fuel consumption aside from global warming, anyway. For one, we're eventually going to run out of it (well, not run out, but the price will increase astronomically).
Would you consider using a memory doubler (or tripler, or quadrupler) if it was done totally transparently in hardware?
Particularly notice the section on colorspace information, where there are clearly specified tables for defining the CIE x,y chromaticity of the R, G, B components, the white point, the image gamma, and the freaking ICC color profile.
It seems the software you use can't create gAMA tables in its PNG output. Hence it is your software that sucks, not the PNG format.
And this entire discussion is moot if the browsers don't support the gamma adjustment. Gonna blame that one on the PNG creators also?
Yes. But that extra ice is the part that sticks out above the water. The weight of the ice (including the part sticking out) is exactly the same as that of the displaced water. So when the ice melts, the resulting water will have precisely the same volume as the hole in the water displaced by the ice.
First, X-rays are definitely particles, as has been shown in various experiments. Also, X-rays are definitely waves, as has been shown in other various experiments. Light is both wave and particle.
Anyway, he wasn't talking about the X-rays themselves, or the microwaves themselves as the particles. What he meant was an X-ray tube is a particle accelerator. It operates by accelerating electrons through several hundred kilovolts, and slamming them into a metal target (tungsten). Hence it is a particle accelerator.
A microwave operates by a magnetron device, which is a circular chamber with a high voltage between the inner cathode and the outer walls. Electrons are emitted from the cathode and are accelerated toward the walls. However, a magnetic field causes them to spiral and create a rotating radial electric field which sweeps through a number of resonant cavities, which then resonate at microwave frequency. Hence a magnetron is a particle accelerator.
The computation doesn't really make sense for a single plane, because bandwidth is really how much data is capable of arriving at a certain point per unit time when the link is saturated. In this case, that depends on how close the planes can fly together in the air, which is dictated by FAA regulations. I'm not a pilot, so I'll guess 10 kilometers.
That means 556 airplanes could fit between NY and London, and they would arrive about 40 seconds apart from each other (given the 848 kph cruising speed). Assuming you have an airport capable of landing a plane every 40 seconds, that's 0.3 petabytes per second. At any one moment, 556*12 = 6672 petabytes are in the air.
A college degree demonstrates the skill of hanging on to a long term project, which you may not always enjoy doing, for a four year period. You don't think that's worth anything?
All my friends at work my age who did not go to college also seem to have problems showing up to work on time (or showing up to work at all), getting things done when they need to get done, working efficiently in groups, etc. Sure, they are all smart and all skilled but they lack the skills that one acquires through four years of commitment to extremely difficult tasks which sometimes don't make sense or seem pointless. It's called higher education and its value isn't in what you learn, but what you do to learn it.
If I was hiring my own replacement, I'd sooner select a person with a degree in geology than a technically skilled but not college educated alternative.
This is a symptom of narrow-minded thinking. The OP could have been referring to COBOL programmers, Forth programmers, etc. There are plenty of languages where it is impossible to code a memory bug -- there are also plenty of niches where security is not and never will be an issue (example, fluid hydrodynamics simulation code -- do you really think you need to code "for security" in such an application?)
My mother spent the last 10 years programming big iron in COBOL, yet she is hard pressed to explain what "little-endian" means, and she has no knowledge of the inner workings of the machine, other than the fact that it has a CPU, RAM, and permanent magnetic storage. The concept of an "address" is alien to her. Despite all this, she is an excellent COBOL programmer, one of the best and most accomplished on her team, which consisted of over 50 people. She has obscure knowledge of IBM mainframe systems (from a software perspective) that I could never hope to match, even with years of study. The fact that she doesn't understand how the thing works internally has nothing to do with anything.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking the computer world is all about Linux, C, and late-night hacking sessions. You couldn't be further from the truth.
First, as others point out, it's only "gratuitously" zipped, and expands to not much more than the zipped size. This implies the code is compressed in the file by some kind of executable packer.
I don't see how that's any less impressive than generating the textures at runtime. Why draw a distinction between procedurally generating textures, and decompressing a compressed representation of the code? Both are "nifty tricks."
The key here is "former CEO" and "former board members." I highly doubt that the current administration of Tyco is at all interested in defending a bunch of ex-officers from federal prosecution. Why would they want to involve themselves in that?
Just to add to your list... I've tried it with ethylene glycol (antifreeze) and that doesn't work either :-)