THIS is the sort of piracy that I think any intelligent human being opposes.
Except for those of us who think that songs over 30 years old have already been STOLEN from the public domain. Or are you talking about the post-'79 Beatles?
If you're downloading music at work, it probably is stealing...of company time.
Many government offices have sane guidelines that include that the allowance of a strictly limited amount of personal use is permissible: e.g. occasional personal internet use. A (legal) song or two would easily fit under these guidelines. (whether you're allowed to have the software to play it on a work machine is another matter). It strikes me that this is a sane policy for any company.
They're scientists in other disciplines who's primary goal is to write programs to figure out problems in their own fields of study.
I'm a scientist who started with a programming background. Scientists doing tiny projects like the above (short scripts) can get away with this. I do it all the time. But when scientists try to scale their project up (into say a scientific package to be used and shared by others) watch out! They produce the worst code, full of globals, spaghetti, messes, ugliness that's a nightmare.
At the very least, scientists should have a course in a language that makes them think about types, containment, scope, modularity etc. otherwise you end up with code that makes reproduceability (a key to good science) nearly impossible.
My take on the topic of Fortran is that it is not important to learn in school. I've written a lot of Fortran, but with a strong background in C it was not hard to learn when it was necessary for me to.
I've got a strong C background, and just ported a C program to Fortran (to interface with some scientific libraries doing highly parallel stuff). It was easy (F95 not F77), and in fact when I showed my code to Fortran programmers they said "derived types in fortran? I didn't know you could do that (you can)." I made much better structured code from having an C with OO background. Hardest thing was shifting thinking in arrays (0 vs 1 indexing) when you spend your life picturing how C arrays map explicitly to memory, the indexing seems artificial.
Also, after C, weakly-typed interpretive languages (python, PHP, perl) were a piece of cake.
In college? I learned Ada. Because in 1988 Ada was "the wave of the future." What a waste of time!
Way to go. We already have a national weather service [noaa.gov]. Why would you encourage the government to create yet another redundant service.
Ok, I'm a scientist working in NOAA. A lot of what NOAA does is very short-term tactical (weather, tsunami warnings, fisheries, etc.) At the same time, we're being asked more and more to do "climate" things (long-term). But as it stands, a lot of people good at the short term are making it their "second jobs" to do the long-term needs. It's clear that thinking long term, either in prediction (and ability to predict), designing research, or developing contingency plans and analysis requires a different level of thinking and set of agency goals (not harder or easier just different).
The "climate" work includes not just weather modeling but impacts analysis on biology and economics (ecosystems, agriculture, forestry, fuel prices) and includes lots of data from multiple agencies (NASA, NOAA, etc.). This isn't just a "global warming belief" dependent either; the idea is that long-term planning and risk analysis for climate contingencies is a Good Idea regardless.
Right now, the fact is, we're being requested and required by congress, communities, and people in general to do this one way or the other. If can become the focus of a dedicated group rather than a lot of disconnected people's second jobs, it's more efficient.
"Lookit dem baddddd ol' PIE-RATES! See!? They's breakin' da LAW!!!"
No, you miss the point. I refuse to hide from a bully who's stealing what's rightfully mine. If a corporation profited from a copyright for, say, 30 years, then it's mine, it's yours, it's everyone's, it's part of our culture and not part of their monopoly. I should be able to use a 1967 Disney movie the way Disney at the time used stories of a similar age.
If an unjust law protects the bully, I prefer to stand up and say "lookit how this baaddd law is criminalizing ordinary people who are trying to reclaim parts of the culture that belong to them."
Stop listening to music on the radio, don't buy any new CDs (used is fine), turn off your TV (and cable/sat/uverse), and don't go to the movies.
I'm sorry, but bull. They have stolen something from us, the public, by locking it away from the public domain. It's like saying: "The thieves stole my car. I'm letting them keep it but I'll show them--I won't pay for their gas!"
It's absurd. What we should have is proper and appropriate civil disobedience against institutionalized thievery. Conduct full and free exchange of anything more than 30 years old.
Functionally unlimited compared to the past. And that's why I'm for calling anything above the 20-40 year range outright institutionalized theft from the public domain.
Putting aside, for a moment, the fact that 1.5*2 is a lot closer to 3.35 than 1.5*3, a large proportion of that 3.35 Terawatts/year is not converted into heat.
Er, rounding upward makes more sense when you know you're quoting the max. efficiency. The amount that goes into non-heat work and the efficiency of the generators are all squishy.
But anyway, throughout all of this I'm talking about redirection. Taking that much mechanical energy (dissipated during natural events of a hurricane) and instead dissipating it as Something Else (through the whole electricity-generating process). The whole point of the calculation is simply to say that the effect (good, bad, or indifferent, replacing fossil fuel dissipation or not) is likely to be noticeable rather than negligible. (And I don't doubt for a moment that the noticeable effects might be a huge improvement on those we notice from fossil fuels). Picturing "a few hurricanes" is a reasonable thing to picture in terms of putting it in context, both in overall size and in thinking about the scale of the effects if the wind turbines are "more concentrated".
I think an engineer/scientist/physicist would ask: how significantly do these things impact their surroundings?
I think the first thing an engineer would do is grab the back of an envelope. Here we go (numbers from interet sources). U.S. annual energy use, 3.35 Terawatts/year. Wind energy dissipated during one hurricane: 1.5 Terawats. So we're talking about sucking up or redirecting into heat at least 3 hurricanes a year (several more with conversion inefficiencies).
That's...err... not insignificant, come to think of it.
Don't ask how many libraries of congress that would accelerate.
Of course it's probably been sitting in a warehouse for three years...
Not necessarily, when using (for example) the Dell website under the Federal customer option, XP is a standard choice--- got a truly new XP laptop (newest hardware) 1-2 months ago.
Several/many Federal agencies already have done this as a agency-wide policy, i.e. "XP is fine, we're not officially approving or allowing Vista purchases". (Though I approve in general I'd prefer if it was left to IT in agencies to make the choice, not legislative mandate).
Might the increased amount of biomass serve to improve fisheries?
It has been proposed for years. But it is (1) not economical compared to fish farming and (2) you're just as likely to get, from blooms, lots and lots and lots of jellyfish.
If we assume that an animal stores in its body all of the CO2 from plants it eats throughout its lifetime, then I suppose so...
And that's the rub. A good rule of thumb is that for every step in the food chain, 90% of material (carbon) is lost as respiration (C02 back to the environment). So zooplankton eating phytoplankton and sinking is 10% as efficient as phytoplankton sinking. Fish eating zooplankton is 1%. Whales 0.1%. Etc.
Slashdot Mirror
THIS is the sort of piracy that I think any intelligent human being opposes.
Except for those of us who think that songs over 30 years old have already been STOLEN from the public domain. Or are you talking about the post-'79 Beatles?
"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
Yah, this sort of behavior should be called the Tarkin Effect, not the streisandeffect as currently tagged.
Because one day Child A is going to open one of those black boxes that has the sticker: "WARNING: ELECTRICAL SHOCK...
My personal favorite.
Well, I've got some output for them from my analog hole if they want it.
Folded it up, put it in an envelope with a tamper seal, that went into another tamper evident envelope and that went into the safe.
And just to be sure, don't tell anyone at all the combination of the safe ;).
[Agency] personnel may use the Internet for non-official use (Internet searches, e-mail, etc.) provided:
-Use does not adversely affect the employee's performance or accomplishment of the [Agency] mission;
-Use is during non-working hours; and
-Use does not reflect adversely on [Agency], e.g., does not result in any appearance of impropriety or unnecessary costs to the Federal Government.
If you're downloading music at work, it probably is stealing...of company time.
Many government offices have sane guidelines that include that the allowance of a strictly limited amount of personal use is permissible: e.g. occasional personal internet use. A (legal) song or two would easily fit under these guidelines. (whether you're allowed to have the software to play it on a work machine is another matter). It strikes me that this is a sane policy for any company.
They're scientists in other disciplines who's primary goal is to write programs to figure out problems in their own fields of study.
I'm a scientist who started with a programming background. Scientists doing tiny projects like the above (short scripts) can get away with this. I do it all the time. But when scientists try to scale their project up (into say a scientific package to be used and shared by others) watch out! They produce the worst code, full of globals, spaghetti, messes, ugliness that's a nightmare.
At the very least, scientists should have a course in a language that makes them think about types, containment, scope, modularity etc. otherwise you end up with code that makes reproduceability (a key to good science) nearly impossible.
My take on the topic of Fortran is that it is not important to learn in school. I've written a lot of Fortran, but with a strong background in C it was not hard to learn when it was necessary for me to.
I've got a strong C background, and just ported a C program to Fortran (to interface with some scientific libraries doing highly parallel stuff). It was easy (F95 not F77), and in fact when I showed my code to Fortran programmers they said "derived types in fortran? I didn't know you could do that (you can)." I made much better structured code from having an C with OO background. Hardest thing was shifting thinking in arrays (0 vs 1 indexing) when you spend your life picturing how C arrays map explicitly to memory, the indexing seems artificial.
Also, after C, weakly-typed interpretive languages (python, PHP, perl) were a piece of cake.
In college? I learned Ada. Because in 1988 Ada was "the wave of the future." What a waste of time!
Giving this a +5 insightful is kind of ironic don't you think?
Somebody mod this guy up!
And what could be more random than a bunch of dice with different unknown bias used together?
Unless there's a tendency to say, chip around a pip, so (for example) 6s accumulate more chips than 1s...
I think he was referring to things like strange noises at night, doors opening and closing, food missing from the fridge...
...cats and dogs sleeping together...
...that people who are stupid enough to pay Apple's inflated prices for their products really are stupid.
And that's why they're shopping at REI.
Way to go. We already have a national weather service [noaa.gov]. Why would you encourage the government to create yet another redundant service.
Ok, I'm a scientist working in NOAA. A lot of what NOAA does is very short-term tactical (weather, tsunami warnings, fisheries, etc.) At the same time, we're being asked more and more to do "climate" things (long-term). But as it stands, a lot of people good at the short term are making it their "second jobs" to do the long-term needs. It's clear that thinking long term, either in prediction (and ability to predict), designing research, or developing contingency plans and analysis requires a different level of thinking and set of agency goals (not harder or easier just different).
The "climate" work includes not just weather modeling but impacts analysis on biology and economics (ecosystems, agriculture, forestry, fuel prices) and includes lots of data from multiple agencies (NASA, NOAA, etc.). This isn't just a "global warming belief" dependent either; the idea is that long-term planning and risk analysis for climate contingencies is a Good Idea regardless.
Right now, the fact is, we're being requested and required by congress, communities, and people in general to do this one way or the other. If can become the focus of a dedicated group rather than a lot of disconnected people's second jobs, it's more efficient.
"Lookit dem baddddd ol' PIE-RATES! See!? They's breakin' da LAW!!!"
No, you miss the point. I refuse to hide from a bully who's stealing what's rightfully mine. If a corporation profited from a copyright for, say, 30 years, then it's mine, it's yours, it's everyone's, it's part of our culture and not part of their monopoly. I should be able to use a 1967 Disney movie the way Disney at the time used stories of a similar age.
If an unjust law protects the bully, I prefer to stand up and say "lookit how this baaddd law is criminalizing ordinary people who are trying to reclaim parts of the culture that belong to them."
Stop listening to music on the radio, don't buy any new CDs (used is fine), turn off your TV (and cable/sat/uverse), and don't go to the movies.
I'm sorry, but bull. They have stolen something from us, the public, by locking it away from the public domain. It's like saying: "The thieves stole my car. I'm letting them keep it but I'll show them--I won't pay for their gas!"
It's absurd. What we should have is proper and appropriate civil disobedience against institutionalized thievery. Conduct full and free exchange of anything more than 30 years old.
last for the life of the author plus 75 years.
Functionally unlimited compared to the past. And that's why I'm for calling anything above the 20-40 year range outright institutionalized theft from the public domain.
I grew up LDS...
I did a little too much of that stuff in the '60s.
Iain M Banks
Speaking of which, let's not forget the term Meatfucker.
Putting aside, for a moment, the fact that 1.5*2 is a lot closer to 3.35 than 1.5*3, a large proportion of that 3.35 Terawatts/year is not converted into heat.
Er, rounding upward makes more sense when you know you're quoting the max. efficiency. The amount that goes into non-heat work and the efficiency of the generators are all squishy.
But anyway, throughout all of this I'm talking about redirection. Taking that much mechanical energy (dissipated during natural events of a hurricane) and instead dissipating it as Something Else (through the whole electricity-generating process). The whole point of the calculation is simply to say that the effect (good, bad, or indifferent, replacing fossil fuel dissipation or not) is likely to be noticeable rather than negligible. (And I don't doubt for a moment that the noticeable effects might be a huge improvement on those we notice from fossil fuels). Picturing "a few hurricanes" is a reasonable thing to picture in terms of putting it in context, both in overall size and in thinking about the scale of the effects if the wind turbines are "more concentrated".
I think an engineer/scientist/physicist would ask: how significantly do these things impact their surroundings?
I think the first thing an engineer would do is grab the back of an envelope. Here we go (numbers from interet sources). U.S. annual energy use, 3.35 Terawatts/year. Wind energy dissipated during one hurricane: 1.5 Terawats. So we're talking about sucking up or redirecting into heat at least 3 hurricanes a year (several more with conversion inefficiencies).
That's...err... not insignificant, come to think of it.
Don't ask how many libraries of congress that would accelerate.
Of course it's probably been sitting in a warehouse for three years...
Not necessarily, when using (for example) the Dell website under the Federal customer option, XP is a standard choice--- got a truly new XP laptop (newest hardware) 1-2 months ago.
Several/many Federal agencies already have done this as a agency-wide policy, i.e. "XP is fine, we're not officially approving or allowing Vista purchases". (Though I approve in general I'd prefer if it was left to IT in agencies to make the choice, not legislative mandate).
Might the increased amount of biomass serve to improve fisheries?
It has been proposed for years. But it is (1) not economical compared to fish farming and (2) you're just as likely to get, from blooms, lots and lots and lots of jellyfish.
If we assume that an animal stores in its body all of the CO2 from plants it eats throughout its lifetime, then I suppose so...
And that's the rub. A good rule of thumb is that for every step in the food chain, 90% of material (carbon) is lost as respiration (C02 back to the environment). So zooplankton eating phytoplankton and sinking is 10% as efficient as phytoplankton sinking. Fish eating zooplankton is 1%. Whales 0.1%. Etc.