What's going on is the Tea Party is apparently dragging the republican party to the right of center (politically).
The Republican party has been well to the right of the center since long before there was ever talk about this Tea Party. The Tea Party is pulling them towards the extreme right abyss, where there be totalitarianism (just like at the extreme left). From an international point of view, even the Democrats are center-right. The US political system is unbalanced, with no credible left. Maybe one will spring up once the Republican party has crashed and burned and the Democrats have been pulled a little bit more to the right by non-extremist Republican refugees. It's even possible the new left will call itself "Republicans", just like in the early years of the two-party system.
entangling alliances set up after WW2 specifically to prevent an American retrenchment.
There's nothing of that sort. The US went to Iraq against the will of a majority the UN (it wasn't just France, who simply got scapegoated for speaking out a bit more loudly than everyone else). And that's a general pattern; whenever there's talk about intervening somewhere, the US are the ones enthusiastically firing up the rhetoric while mostly everyone else is calling for cool. It's so predictable that Russia has started exploiting this to make the Americans look like fools (I'm talking about the Syria chemical weapons debacle here). The "our allies asked our help" argument is just a convenient casus belli if your military-industrial complex begs to show off its shiny new toys. Truth is, if you're the biggest bully on the block, whenever there's conflict, you will be asked for help. Most often by both sides. All the US has to do is pick a "long-time ally" on the spot, then send the cruise missiles on the other guy's ass.
That would almost assume there was a big campaign of Democrat crossover voting for the candidate they like least, because he'll have a lower chance of winning against their candidate. I'm not discounting the possibility altogether, but it's a little bit far-fetched.
According to the climate scientists, there has been no increase in global temperatures during his entire lifetime.
That's most used climate myth #50. Also, you are behind on the denialist canon, which currently pins "the end of climate change" at 2010. Not that I can blame you for that; it's been revised so many times it's easy to lost track.
they engineer these for professional applications and then make a rebadged version to score an easy buck by conning ego-driven gamers. But what kind of defense is that?
the AGW scam is being promulgated by the powerful and those who hope to tag along with the powerful.
More powerful that the interest in fossil fuel? Who have been responsible for a significant fraction of the wars in the last few decades? Just to keep tabs, are we talking about the Illuminati, the Masons, the Elders of Zion or the New World Order here?
No, it isn't; just read some of the other posts in this thread. They're trying to sell it as an improvement over past attempts, and the overselling is what we're complaining about.
...Why do the Marshall Islands have a yearly rise increase almost 4 times the world average? Is it a low pressure zone? Are there Marshall Island glaciers that no one has discovered yet?
Mostly answered here and here. Please do read existing comments before posting.
There is a lot of information missing from this story, and it reeks of politics and money.
Oooh monies! That's right folks, it's the fearsome alternative energy cartel (the 21st century version of the lumber cartel)! Because everyone knows Big Alternative Energy has far more money to spend on lobbying and astroturfing than the poor innocent fossil fuel industry!
Any country that has nuclear reactors can be safely assumed to have a few strategic nuclear bombs stashed down a deep mine shaft. Plutonium has a 25000 year half life, so once you have them you have them.
Did you really not know that ordinary nuclear reactors don't produce useful quantities of plutonium? Breeders do, but they're less convenient to operate commercially. People are working on fixing that because breeders consume far less uranium and produce far less waste. This effort is somewhat controversial precisely because of proliferation fears; using breeders to produce electricity would probably even require important changes to the finer print of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Don't act obtuse. GP's question was to explain why, if you increase the volume of liquid water in the system, you'll see bigger sea level rises at some places than other places. The factors you're citing do explain that. They change nothing to the fact that it's rising pretty much everywhere, so the global increase of liquid volume is real. And precisely consistent with the observed effects of the observed warming.
I wonder what bunch of idiots modded parent to +5.
Not only that, if the US imposes CO2 tax or efficiency standards, this tax / these standards will also need to apply to imported goods, else they will be null and void. And in case GP has been living under a rock, the US imports a lot from China...
The EU has been playing this game for a long time: stealth market protectionism in the form of standards. You're using growth hormone or antibiotics to produce your beef? Too bad, you can't sell it here. The laborers that produce your clothes/gadgets are not treated humanely? Too bad, you don't pass the import standards.
While it is somewhat hypocrite to wave the "free trade" flag while doing this, I say "fsck free trade". This practice puts positive market pressure on other countries to improve things. Also, you need to be sure that your own companies can comply with the new standards before the foreign ones catch on, so you're effectively spurring innovation. Nothing but advantages.
First of all, at this point, it is misguided to talk about x86 as an architecture; there is generally little or no architectural overlap between two x86 processors that are a few generation apart. x86 is an instruction set, or even more correct, a family of instruction sets. The distinction is important, especially in the age of complex instruction decoders; a lot of the more complex x86 instructions are internally decoded into smaller pieces, and one could say that the CPU internally runs its own, different instruction set. The fact of supporting a certain instruction set nowadays says almost nothing about the underlying architecture.
So we're talking about an instruction set. One that was conceived in an age where manual coding in machine language was far more common than it is today; the original x86 instruction set was designed to be easy for a human bitpusher to handle, whereas newer instruction sets like ARM are more geared to get the most out of a decent optimizing compiler. What followed for x86 was extension upon extension, and the instruction set is now so byzantine that x86 is a very difficult market to break into; the design complexity of the decoder can probably be overcome, but all the cross-licensing between Intel and AMD cannot. The complex, organically-grown instruction set also leads to some waste of silicon in having to support all those instructions, and waste of performance/energy efficiency in that the instruction set is not designed from the ground up towards efficiency. People on the x86 side make a compelling argument that this has become negligible, but the fact remains that I'm still not seeing any x86 processor getting (unbiased) performance/W scores that are close to common ARM processors.
My first computer contained a Z80, a true 8-bit processor (your claim that x86 has 8-bit mode is false; the lowest common denominator for x86 is the 16-bit 8086, which you're probably confusing with the 8-bit 8080 which is not x86 compatible). More relevantly, I also have experience running scientific workloads on a whole zoo of processors. I have particularly fond memories of the later Alphas, which wiped the floor with everything up until and including the Pentium 4, and were very competitive even against Athlon 64 and Core2 performance-wise (but not price-wise). Repeat after me: x86 has zero inherent architectural advantage!!! The big advantages it has is (1) economies of scale and (2) the higher profits of a mass market that generate more revenue to be pumped into R&D. There hasn't been a kid on the block that could compete on these fronts - not until ARM came around.
While Intel is sitting on an impressive pile of cash and R&D potential, their attempts to match ARM in performance/W are so far unsuccessful when looking at non-biased benchmark results, and ARM has profited from this in establishing a mass market of its own. Things are about to get interesting from here onwards. I can't predict whether x86 or ARM will win. The outcome might be coexistence, with x86 keeping its dominance in the server room, workstation, office and hard-core gaming, and everything else becoming ARM. Whatever the outcome might be, I am firmly rooting for ARM, though. Technically, it's leaner, more rationally designed instruction set that is more frugal with resources (die size, cache & memory usage) and better reflects present-day usage cases. And the fact that it's relatively straightforward for a newcomer to license it and start making chips will bring some healthy competition onto the stage.
So many of those countries have tax rates that look like up to 51% individual -plus- a 25% VAT.
Nah, that's the extreme end. A better average for middle-class households in Europe would be 45% individual + 20% VAT (France, Germany, UK, and Spain and Italy are very close).
As opposed to the USA, where an average middle-class households household would face 30% individual (including state tax) + 7% VAT + 20% health insurance - still lower, but in the same ball park. Yes, that's right, health insurance is included in the individual tax in most of these countries, while in the USA, it is often withheld from your payroll, so that you don't realize you are (or your employer is) paying through your/their nose for it. And the lower-income households don't pay proportionally less for their health insurance, so it gets worse. I believe the absurd cost of health insurance is a major drag on the US economy and its financial health.
Sheesh, you seem to be going out of your way to misrepresent everything I'm saying here. The second idea (which, again, is just a thought experiment because it would probably be too oppressive to implement in reality) would be to forbid the mere possession of an operative higher-powered laser within the perimeter. Where did I say I would make it legal to shine lower-powered lasers at aircraft?!
To anticipate the next misrepresentation, no, making the high-powered ones illegal would not force the cops to search every car in the perimeter for them, just like the cops are not searching every car on the highway for illegal drugs or testing every motorist for alcohol. My point is, right now, it's very difficult for law enforcement to catch culprits in the act of shining a laser at an aircraft, so it's easy to avoid getting caught, or to say: "well yeah, you found me with a laser in the general area, but that doesn't prove it was my laser shining at the aircraft". With the oppressive second idea, if the cops have reasonable suspicion, they can search for a laser, and if they find a higher-powered one, they won't have to go through the legal trouble trying to argue it was you, because you shouldn't be in the possession of it anyway. If it's not a higher-powered one, it's still just as easy to get off the hook if the cops didn't catch you in the act, but it's not as bad an offense anyway.
And as for the difficulty to test power; the stronger retail lasers pointers have a hazard sticker attached to them. If the sticker is missing, or if the laser shows signs of tampering, then the cops have reasonable suspicion to investigate closer (but not with their remaining good eye).
...not to mention the noxious fluorinated compounds and the very low rate of conversion of electricity to chemical energy (stored in the form of metallic Aluminium). And you cannot even propose to use surplus power at night because an aluminium smelter cannot be turned off. Aluminium smelting is dirty business in the literal sense. It may be a suitable fuel for rocket boosters, where every bit of weight counts, but as far as cars are concerned, it's a step backwards from petrol.
So, what? You are asking for an exemption to allow illuminating an aircraft with a Class IIIa laser? Why?
So now it's forbidden to ask questions out of technical curiosity? What's next? "Why do you want to know that anyway? Are you planning to try something?" It's that line of thinking that paves the way towards tyrannic surveillance states.
If you really need to know, what I had in the back of my head is that it would be pretty straightforward to tell the TSA to add lasers > Class IIIa to the list of "check-in only" items, so that people in departure/arrival halls don't have them. That would be a very easy and inexpensive way eliminate a large fraction of potentially dangerous incidents. Yes, there will still be people attempting to shine high-powered lasers at aircraft outside the airport. (which would still fall under conventional law enforcement), but it's somewhat less easy to blind the pilots if the plane has already gained some speed and altitude. If you really want to go all-out oppressive, you could even propose a perimeter around airfields in which you get arrested if you are in the possession of an operative laser > Class IIIa. Bona fide laser pointer are never that strong, and technical lasers are usually not connected to a power source (and thus not operative) in transport.
How about the commonly sold 5mW Class IIIa laser pointers? I find it difficult to believe those causing flash blindness at the distances and speeds encountered when you're in a cockpit (physical explanation here). If those are not a problem, enforcing a law that prohibits aiming more powerful ones at aircraft would become a lot easier.
Sure, but encrypting the connection from the user to the provider is usually not a big deal for the modestly tech-savvy; most SMTP and IMAP daemons make it easy to enable encryption, and as a consequence, most providers do support it; it's simply up to the user to tick the box in their e-mail client. Inter-provider transit is much more problematic in that sense because it's out of the user's hand and can readily be sniffed by the NSA and the likes without anyone getting the wiser. I've always been wondering about the state of e-mail encryption in transit; this report confirms my suspicion it's pretty poor, and user-side public key encryption is still a must for really sensitive information; one can safely assume that everything else WILL end up in the NSA's data centers. Unfortunately, user-side public key encryption is a bit of a pain in a lot of settings; encrypting the SMTP connections between the providers would still be desirable, even though it doesn't protect the user against the providers themselves becoming compromised.
Regarding the "publishing quality results is what will get you that" part, I'd argue it's exactly the opposite. Maybe we have a different idea of quality, but really groundbreaking science is high-risk science and will rarely get you the prescribed frequent publications, especially early in a project. Dull "me-too" science will. So will milking out every small incremental finding in a separate publication and spending more time writing and revising papers than doing actual science. This is partially demonstrated by the fact that papers in "lesser" journals count just as much.(*) To me, this is a big part of what's wrong with the current state of science.
(*) At the same time, I feel we should do away with journal rankings and impact factors altogether. They're a relic from the pre-internet age, where it wasn't trivial to know the number of citations an individual paper or author gets. But that's a different discussion.
Slashdot Mirror
What's going on is the Tea Party is apparently dragging the republican party to the right of center (politically).
The Republican party has been well to the right of the center since long before there was ever talk about this Tea Party. The Tea Party is pulling them towards the extreme right abyss, where there be totalitarianism (just like at the extreme left). From an international point of view, even the Democrats are center-right. The US political system is unbalanced, with no credible left. Maybe one will spring up once the Republican party has crashed and burned and the Democrats have been pulled a little bit more to the right by non-extremist Republican refugees. It's even possible the new left will call itself "Republicans", just like in the early years of the two-party system.
entangling alliances set up after WW2 specifically to prevent an American retrenchment.
There's nothing of that sort. The US went to Iraq against the will of a majority the UN (it wasn't just France, who simply got scapegoated for speaking out a bit more loudly than everyone else). And that's a general pattern; whenever there's talk about intervening somewhere, the US are the ones enthusiastically firing up the rhetoric while mostly everyone else is calling for cool. It's so predictable that Russia has started exploiting this to make the Americans look like fools (I'm talking about the Syria chemical weapons debacle here). The "our allies asked our help" argument is just a convenient casus belli if your military-industrial complex begs to show off its shiny new toys. Truth is, if you're the biggest bully on the block, whenever there's conflict, you will be asked for help. Most often by both sides. All the US has to do is pick a "long-time ally" on the spot, then send the cruise missiles on the other guy's ass.
Apart from that, +1 good post!
That would almost assume there was a big campaign of Democrat crossover voting for the candidate they like least, because he'll have a lower chance of winning against their candidate. I'm not discounting the possibility altogether, but it's a little bit far-fetched.
After a grueling 5 seconds of googling...
... Sigmon found a denialist site. Good job! The parlor trick he used to get to this misleading conclusion is explained here.
According to the climate scientists, there has been no increase in global temperatures during his entire lifetime.
That's most used climate myth #50. Also, you are behind on the denialist canon, which currently pins "the end of climate change" at 2010. Not that I can blame you for that; it's been revised so many times it's easy to lost track.
they engineer these for professional applications and then make a rebadged version to score an easy buck by conning ego-driven gamers. But what kind of defense is that?
One that makes sense financially.
the AGW scam is being promulgated by the powerful and those who hope to tag along with the powerful.
More powerful that the interest in fossil fuel? Who have been responsible for a significant fraction of the wars in the last few decades? Just to keep tabs, are we talking about the Illuminati, the Masons, the Elders of Zion or the New World Order here?
No, it isn't; just read some of the other posts in this thread. They're trying to sell it as an improvement over past attempts, and the overselling is what we're complaining about.
...Why do the Marshall Islands have a yearly rise increase almost 4 times the world average? Is it a low pressure zone? Are there Marshall Island glaciers that no one has discovered yet?
Mostly answered here and here. Please do read existing comments before posting.
There is a lot of information missing from this story, and it reeks of politics and money.
Oooh monies! That's right folks, it's the fearsome alternative energy cartel (the 21st century version of the lumber cartel)! Because everyone knows Big Alternative Energy has far more money to spend on lobbying and astroturfing than the poor innocent fossil fuel industry!
Any country that has nuclear reactors can be safely assumed to have a few strategic nuclear bombs stashed down a deep mine shaft. Plutonium has a 25000 year half life, so once you have them you have them.
Did you really not know that ordinary nuclear reactors don't produce useful quantities of plutonium? Breeders do, but they're less convenient to operate commercially. People are working on fixing that because breeders consume far less uranium and produce far less waste. This effort is somewhat controversial precisely because of proliferation fears; using breeders to produce electricity would probably even require important changes to the finer print of the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
As for your plethora of other mistakes, see here
Well spoken! I for one don't believe in atomic theory, continental drift or mircowave background. I'd have to see the thing.... </sarcasm>
Don't act obtuse. GP's question was to explain why, if you increase the volume of liquid water in the system, you'll see bigger sea level rises at some places than other places. The factors you're citing do explain that. They change nothing to the fact that it's rising pretty much everywhere, so the global increase of liquid volume is real. And precisely consistent with the observed effects of the observed warming.
I wonder what bunch of idiots modded parent to +5.
Welcome to the world where that's demonstrably true. Explanations here and here.
Not only that, if the US imposes CO2 tax or efficiency standards, this tax / these standards will also need to apply to imported goods, else they will be null and void. And in case GP has been living under a rock, the US imports a lot from China...
The EU has been playing this game for a long time: stealth market protectionism in the form of standards. You're using growth hormone or antibiotics to produce your beef? Too bad, you can't sell it here. The laborers that produce your clothes/gadgets are not treated humanely? Too bad, you don't pass the import standards.
While it is somewhat hypocrite to wave the "free trade" flag while doing this, I say "fsck free trade". This practice puts positive market pressure on other countries to improve things. Also, you need to be sure that your own companies can comply with the new standards before the foreign ones catch on, so you're effectively spurring innovation. Nothing but advantages.
Instruction decode and control is over half the chip.
+1 Interesting! If true, this would actually explain the discrepancy between what the x86 fanbois say and the results "on the field".
First of all, at this point, it is misguided to talk about x86 as an architecture; there is generally little or no architectural overlap between two x86 processors that are a few generation apart. x86 is an instruction set, or even more correct, a family of instruction sets. The distinction is important, especially in the age of complex instruction decoders; a lot of the more complex x86 instructions are internally decoded into smaller pieces, and one could say that the CPU internally runs its own, different instruction set. The fact of supporting a certain instruction set nowadays says almost nothing about the underlying architecture.
So we're talking about an instruction set. One that was conceived in an age where manual coding in machine language was far more common than it is today; the original x86 instruction set was designed to be easy for a human bitpusher to handle, whereas newer instruction sets like ARM are more geared to get the most out of a decent optimizing compiler. What followed for x86 was extension upon extension, and the instruction set is now so byzantine that x86 is a very difficult market to break into; the design complexity of the decoder can probably be overcome, but all the cross-licensing between Intel and AMD cannot. The complex, organically-grown instruction set also leads to some waste of silicon in having to support all those instructions, and waste of performance/energy efficiency in that the instruction set is not designed from the ground up towards efficiency. People on the x86 side make a compelling argument that this has become negligible, but the fact remains that I'm still not seeing any x86 processor getting (unbiased) performance/W scores that are close to common ARM processors.
My first computer contained a Z80, a true 8-bit processor (your claim that x86 has 8-bit mode is false; the lowest common denominator for x86 is the 16-bit 8086, which you're probably confusing with the 8-bit 8080 which is not x86 compatible). More relevantly, I also have experience running scientific workloads on a whole zoo of processors. I have particularly fond memories of the later Alphas, which wiped the floor with everything up until and including the Pentium 4, and were very competitive even against Athlon 64 and Core2 performance-wise (but not price-wise). Repeat after me: x86 has zero inherent architectural advantage!!! The big advantages it has is (1) economies of scale and (2) the higher profits of a mass market that generate more revenue to be pumped into R&D. There hasn't been a kid on the block that could compete on these fronts - not until ARM came around.
While Intel is sitting on an impressive pile of cash and R&D potential, their attempts to match ARM in performance/W are so far unsuccessful when looking at non-biased benchmark results, and ARM has profited from this in establishing a mass market of its own. Things are about to get interesting from here onwards. I can't predict whether x86 or ARM will win. The outcome might be coexistence, with x86 keeping its dominance in the server room, workstation, office and hard-core gaming, and everything else becoming ARM. Whatever the outcome might be, I am firmly rooting for ARM, though. Technically, it's leaner, more rationally designed instruction set that is more frugal with resources (die size, cache & memory usage) and better reflects present-day usage cases. And the fact that it's relatively straightforward for a newcomer to license it and start making chips will bring some healthy competition onto the stage.
So many of those countries have tax rates that look like up to 51% individual -plus- a 25% VAT.
Nah, that's the extreme end. A better average for middle-class households in Europe would be 45% individual + 20% VAT (France, Germany, UK, and Spain and Italy are very close).
As opposed to the USA, where an average middle-class households household would face 30% individual (including state tax) + 7% VAT + 20% health insurance - still lower, but in the same ball park. Yes, that's right, health insurance is included in the individual tax in most of these countries, while in the USA, it is often withheld from your payroll, so that you don't realize you are (or your employer is) paying through your/their nose for it. And the lower-income households don't pay proportionally less for their health insurance, so it gets worse. I believe the absurd cost of health insurance is a major drag on the US economy and its financial health.
A certain country in northern Europe (Sweden, I think)
You might just as well say: "unsubstantiated fable ahead".
Sheesh, you seem to be going out of your way to misrepresent everything I'm saying here. The second idea (which, again, is just a thought experiment because it would probably be too oppressive to implement in reality) would be to forbid the mere possession of an operative higher-powered laser within the perimeter. Where did I say I would make it legal to shine lower-powered lasers at aircraft?!
To anticipate the next misrepresentation, no, making the high-powered ones illegal would not force the cops to search every car in the perimeter for them, just like the cops are not searching every car on the highway for illegal drugs or testing every motorist for alcohol. My point is, right now, it's very difficult for law enforcement to catch culprits in the act of shining a laser at an aircraft, so it's easy to avoid getting caught, or to say: "well yeah, you found me with a laser in the general area, but that doesn't prove it was my laser shining at the aircraft". With the oppressive second idea, if the cops have reasonable suspicion, they can search for a laser, and if they find a higher-powered one, they won't have to go through the legal trouble trying to argue it was you, because you shouldn't be in the possession of it anyway. If it's not a higher-powered one, it's still just as easy to get off the hook if the cops didn't catch you in the act, but it's not as bad an offense anyway.
And as for the difficulty to test power; the stronger retail lasers pointers have a hazard sticker attached to them. If the sticker is missing, or if the laser shows signs of tampering, then the cops have reasonable suspicion to investigate closer (but not with their remaining good eye).
...not to mention the noxious fluorinated compounds and the very low rate of conversion of electricity to chemical energy (stored in the form of metallic Aluminium). And you cannot even propose to use surplus power at night because an aluminium smelter cannot be turned off. Aluminium smelting is dirty business in the literal sense. It may be a suitable fuel for rocket boosters, where every bit of weight counts, but as far as cars are concerned, it's a step backwards from petrol.
Answered here.
So, what? You are asking for an exemption to allow illuminating an aircraft with a Class IIIa laser? Why?
So now it's forbidden to ask questions out of technical curiosity? What's next? "Why do you want to know that anyway? Are you planning to try something?" It's that line of thinking that paves the way towards tyrannic surveillance states.
If you really need to know, what I had in the back of my head is that it would be pretty straightforward to tell the TSA to add lasers > Class IIIa to the list of "check-in only" items, so that people in departure/arrival halls don't have them. That would be a very easy and inexpensive way eliminate a large fraction of potentially dangerous incidents. Yes, there will still be people attempting to shine high-powered lasers at aircraft outside the airport. (which would still fall under conventional law enforcement), but it's somewhat less easy to blind the pilots if the plane has already gained some speed and altitude. If you really want to go all-out oppressive, you could even propose a perimeter around airfields in which you get arrested if you are in the possession of an operative laser > Class IIIa. Bona fide laser pointer are never that strong, and technical lasers are usually not connected to a power source (and thus not operative) in transport.
How about the commonly sold 5mW Class IIIa laser pointers? I find it difficult to believe those causing flash blindness at the distances and speeds encountered when you're in a cockpit (physical explanation here). If those are not a problem, enforcing a law that prohibits aiming more powerful ones at aircraft would become a lot easier.
Sure, but encrypting the connection from the user to the provider is usually not a big deal for the modestly tech-savvy; most SMTP and IMAP daemons make it easy to enable encryption, and as a consequence, most providers do support it; it's simply up to the user to tick the box in their e-mail client. Inter-provider transit is much more problematic in that sense because it's out of the user's hand and can readily be sniffed by the NSA and the likes without anyone getting the wiser. I've always been wondering about the state of e-mail encryption in transit; this report confirms my suspicion it's pretty poor, and user-side public key encryption is still a must for really sensitive information; one can safely assume that everything else WILL end up in the NSA's data centers. Unfortunately, user-side public key encryption is a bit of a pain in a lot of settings; encrypting the SMTP connections between the providers would still be desirable, even though it doesn't protect the user against the providers themselves becoming compromised.
Regarding the "publishing quality results is what will get you that" part, I'd argue it's exactly the opposite. Maybe we have a different idea of quality, but really groundbreaking science is high-risk science and will rarely get you the prescribed frequent publications, especially early in a project. Dull "me-too" science will. So will milking out every small incremental finding in a separate publication and spending more time writing and revising papers than doing actual science. This is partially demonstrated by the fact that papers in "lesser" journals count just as much.(*) To me, this is a big part of what's wrong with the current state of science.
(*) At the same time, I feel we should do away with journal rankings and impact factors altogether. They're a relic from the pre-internet age, where it wasn't trivial to know the number of citations an individual paper or author gets. But that's a different discussion.