At some point, though, the atmosphere will become essentially opaque to long infrared, and from that point on, additional CO2 won't increase the rate of global warming. It will, of course, continue to acidify the oceans, and continue to make it more difficult to return to the previous level.
P.S.: I have NO idea how close we are to the point at which the atmosphere becomes essentially opaque to long infra-red. I doubt, however, that the scale is linear. Probably logrithmic.
The North pole is closely surrounded by land. Sufficiently closely that in the near past, the entire Arctic Ocean was essentially unpassible in the winter, and dangerously treacherous in the summer. This means that with sufficient humidity, snow would fall and remain throughout the summer. This is not a good basis for glaciation, as increased weight would cause the snowpack to sink, but it facilitates glaciers forming on the encircling land.
He's wrong when he claims that the cycle of the earth's orbit is sufficient to start a glaciation, but it sets the stage for any time when the oceans are warm and there's a cold couple of summers (perhaps caused by a volcano) for the glaciation to commence. And to spread.
Actually, I'm probably oversimplifying it too, as he certainly was. There's lots of intermingled factors. Warm oceans are necessary, as otherwise you don't have enough percipitation. You won't get it happening at the South Pole (unless you count Antarctica), because there's no land closely restricting the oceanic flow. Etc. If the Arctic Ocean were slightly more tightly enclosing, then you wouldn't need to wait for a propitious point in the orbital cycle to get your ice age. If it were a bit more open, then even that wouldn't suffice...depending. And the depending on is depending on the oceanic currents. If teh Bearing Strait were wider, you'd get a lot more flow of water through between the Pacific and the Atlantic. This would make everything colder EXCEPT the areas right around the pole. Those would be warmer. ETC.
Are there any well defined techniques for determining how may possibly fatal low probability events are extant? I doubt it. You may be able to say "Of the things we've considered, there are these things which each have this probability", but you can't calculate the things you haven't considered...which is most of the universe. Granted the liklihood of being stomped on by Godzilla is too low to consider, there are lots of things "metaphorically similar to Godzilla" that are more probable.
(I'm saying Godzilla rather than Zombie attack partially because this is WRT Japan, and partially because it's WRT nuclear power, and I've always considered Godzilla to be a metaphor for atomic power...though there are lots of other candidates, including Tsunami, that also fit "big, powerful, destructive...", and are thus metaphorically similar.)
You CAN'T calculate unconsidered risks. People normally dismiss them, because they aren't likely to happen within the lifespan of and within the sensory range of a homo habilis, and that's where we spent most of of recent evolutionary past. So we discount both future rewards and future costs.
If you're going to be pedantic, then to call someone a thug you would need to be asserting that they are devoted to the worship of Kali. And that they abstained from attacking women, holy men, or mad men.
Words don't retain their original meaning, and goon no longer means a hired bully. Either a dolt or a unemployed bully would also qualify under modern usage.
The extra layers are so that it's not immediately obvious which messages are encoded with the one-time pad version. That can be important information, and delaying it's recognition can be an important plus. (And only a few messages should really require a one-time pad. For most a lighter level of security should suffice.)
Ah. And where do I find one of these politicians running for a state or federal office. (Locally I do find a few, but they are rare even at that level.)
P.S.: Saying you will protect my interests and doing something else doesn't count. I can always find politicians that will do that.
P.P.S.: I'm moderately satisfied with my Representative. I despise one of my Senators, and am not overly pleased with the other. I'm contemplating voiting, Green, Libertarian, or Socialist next time.
From S.Korea's viewpoint, that might be a reasonable decision, given the range of available options. But use encryption on anything sensitive, and enought things that aren't (including some noise). And if it's really sensitive, use a one-time pad system (and encrypt that, too, just to break their heads against). And avoid English even on trivial stuff. Korean with lots of current slang should require the use of limited resources to understand.
N.B.: This won't stop them, except the one-time pad. But it will raise the cost of snooping to the point where it will be limited.
Yes, but the timeout doesn't need to be shorter than a few minutes (depending on the context). I'd also prefer that the administrator accounts not be remotely accessible even if you have the correct password. And if someone local is doing it...find out who it is, and stop them.
But many of the steps that could be taken to prevent the problem are relatively low-impact. These also aren't taken.
I do agree that security professionals tend to overemphasize low probability events. If they didn't have that mindset they wouldn't be security professionals. But there are lots of things that could be done, that are low impact, that AREN'T done because it would require management to authorize it, and the people who understand it can't communicate the importance to management. And lots of things that are almost "security theater" are done just because they are easy to explain.
In your situation it sounds like what you need to do is impose a short timeout after each failed password entry, and lock the account after 3-4 consecutive failed password entries. Perhaps you could just impose a temporary timeout on the account after each failed attempt, increasing after each consecutive failed attempt, but I don't think I've ever seen such a system in use.
There's a good argument that this kind of thing should be routine anyway as long as it's reasonably easy to unlock the account. (I.e., the user has to be able to contact tech. services in a timely manner, and they need to be able to deal with it quickly.)
Thank you for finally providing an answer that made sense.
Outside it that, I fully understand that attitude of people who don't like change for the sake of change...I'm one of them. Having to learn a new configure language is a pain when I'd rather be doing something else. But if there's a valid reason, that makes things more acceptable.
That is currently true. It's not clear that it will continue to be true. Sand and carbon are rather plentiful, and so is Nitrogen. There have been some experimental circuits built that don't use much else, and they included transistors, resistors, inductors, and memory diamond. They aren't currently practical, and I really doubt that they'll be practical in a decade, but if prices go up enough, then they eventually will be...though there's lots of development work yet to be done.
P.S.: Rare earths aren't actually rare, they're just hard to separate, and good ores of any particular one are uncommon. And we haven't been intentionally using them for very long, so there hasn't been extensive development work on mining them. Until recently some mines originally built to extract them had been being closed as unprofitable. Now I've heard they're being re-opened, because now there's a market.
Lack of imagination isn't sadism. Neither is lack of belief in an attractive imagined solution. It may, or may not, be wrong, but that's a separate question.
You *are* aware the the populations in industrial countries are declining, aren't you? That's one of the reasons that Japan is putting so much effort into home-care robotics. They've got an increasingly elderly population, and they discourage immigrtion, so they need something to take care of the elders. Most industrial countries give that role to immigrants, but as industrialization spreads this is going to be problematic.
OTOH, the population is still rising, and a collapse because of limited resources before we get down to a sustainable level isn't improbable.
This relies upon the meaning of the amendment being enforced by court decisions. Sorry, but I'm quite skeptical that this will happen.
Court decisions have more frequently extended the power of the federal government than limited it. Frequently at the expense of the state governments, but when the right was supposed to reside in "the people or the state", moving it from the states to the feds is a regressive act. (I'll grant you that many states have given them reasons for the move, but that's a separate issue.)
E.g.: The Warren Court, during the Civil Rights movement, extensively moved power from the states to the feds. They appear to have had the best of intentions, but the long term results are mixed. The result is that instead of having several states with extremely repressive governments, we have a country with a moderately repressive government, and a highly intrusive one. It also helped abate the most extreme racial injustices...though recently we've seen some steps backwards on that ground from the federal level.
IIUC, the provision in the constitution for the legislature to reign in the executive is to refuse to pass any appropriation bills. ANY. Because the executive was known to intentionally pervert the intention of any bill that was passed.
Of course, that means that the feds would shut down. Originally that was much less of a big deal. These days...there aren't many places to homestead anymore. But it means shutting down Social security, the treasury, the military, the TSA, the Air traffic controllers, the FCC, etc. Somehow people don't seem to be quite willing to do that. The Feds have taken over many jobs that were intended to be done by the states. And they've used legal interpretations to weasel their way into all sorts of nooks and crannies where dislodging them would grossly inconvenience or endanger people. Because of this, shutting down the government would not be looked on kindly by the vast majority of citizens. Some of this was done with good intentions, but good intentions or malicious, it was done, and no other organization exists to do many of the jobs that need doing.
FWIW, congress is allowed to define whatever it chooses as "grounds for impeachment". If I recall correctly the only definition is "High crimes and misdemeanors", and that term is not further defined. But your point about "If you don't have the votes for legislation, you sure aren't going to have them for impeachment." is quite valid.
I do agree that the case is just grandstanding, though. IIRC the president can decide that he refuses to allow himself to be sued. (Otherwise every president would end up spending all his time defending himself against claims of impropriety...even before he took office.)
A lot of times it is. Remember, you don't only need to count the comparisons that you do, but also that of everyone else studying the same problem. ONE of you is likely to find a result by pure coincidence.
Care to suggest a *method* for stopping this kind of abuse?
We are clearly headed into an era of coupe d'etats, as the government is acting in ways that remove all belief in it's justice, so there will be small interest among the citizenry if one gang of theives and murderers ousts another. But a way to reform the government before this occurs is not obvious.
Where did you get that idea that tool usage is recent? People and Chimpanzees both use tools, so the conservative assumption would be that tool use pre-dates the split between the species. And it's not like it requires immense brain power. Crows use tools. Some of Darwin's Finches use tools. And many others. (Too many to list.)
The problem is, most of the tools are wood or straw, so they don't tend to be preserved. The ones I listed are all modern species, and the reason for that is that if we didn't watch them using the tools, we wouldn't know that they did. There's no evidence at all that it's recent along ANY of the gene lines. (For that matter, I believe that British Great Tits learned to use tools to pry the caps off milk bottles to get at the cream. This is a species that has, I believe, otherwise only been observed to use tools in nest-building.)
Depends on the layman. Still, there could be species that are radically different from any currently extant. E.g., I believe that all current species that have blood rather than ichor use either copper or iron as an oxygen transporter...but there could be something else. Also, all known species use 4 DNA codons (AGTC) or RNA codons (substituting Uracil for one of those...I'd need to look up which). It could be that there were earlier species that had more (or fewer) than four. That would be pretty much of a shock....though proving it from a fossil would be really tricky. They could find that feather-like things emerged as soon as multi-cellular animals. Etc.
Mind you, these are just examples. It would be REALLY shocking if one of them were true. But that there should be something equivalent that was true wouldn't be surprising, though any particular example would be quite surprising. Like feathers on a T.Rex. Or the brontosarus having the wrong head (so now it's an apatosarus, which isn't anywhere near a good a name, and the head is very different).
OK, unicode still doesn't post. And loading the comments took about 5 minutes. (2 minutes the first time, 5 minutes the second time.) The posting/loading problem is an obvious bug. My suspicion is that the problem with unicode is that they just didn't fix the problem that the old slashdot had...i.e., not handling unicode.
It's a very good thing they've decided to fix some bugs before they roll this out, as it appears to currently be a very early beta. And they're wasting huge amounts of space, but that should be easy to fix, if they are so inclined.
Slashdot Mirror
At some point, though, the atmosphere will become essentially opaque to long infrared, and from that point on, additional CO2 won't increase the rate of global warming. It will, of course, continue to acidify the oceans, and continue to make it more difficult to return to the previous level.
P.S.: I have NO idea how close we are to the point at which the atmosphere becomes essentially opaque to long infra-red. I doubt, however, that the scale is linear. Probably logrithmic.
N.B.: I am not a climate scientist.
The North pole is closely surrounded by land. Sufficiently closely that in the near past, the entire Arctic Ocean was essentially unpassible in the winter, and dangerously treacherous in the summer. This means that with sufficient humidity, snow would fall and remain throughout the summer. This is not a good basis for glaciation, as increased weight would cause the snowpack to sink, but it facilitates glaciers forming on the encircling land.
He's wrong when he claims that the cycle of the earth's orbit is sufficient to start a glaciation, but it sets the stage for any time when the oceans are warm and there's a cold couple of summers (perhaps caused by a volcano) for the glaciation to commence. And to spread.
Actually, I'm probably oversimplifying it too, as he certainly was. There's lots of intermingled factors. Warm oceans are necessary, as otherwise you don't have enough percipitation. You won't get it happening at the South Pole (unless you count Antarctica), because there's no land closely restricting the oceanic flow. Etc. If the Arctic Ocean were slightly more tightly enclosing, then you wouldn't need to wait for a propitious point in the orbital cycle to get your ice age. If it were a bit more open, then even that wouldn't suffice...depending. And the depending on is depending on the oceanic currents. If teh Bearing Strait were wider, you'd get a lot more flow of water through between the Pacific and the Atlantic. This would make everything colder EXCEPT the areas right around the pole. Those would be warmer. ETC.
P.S.: I am not a climate scientist.
Are there any well defined techniques for determining how may possibly fatal low probability events are extant? I doubt it. You may be able to say "Of the things we've considered, there are these things which each have this probability", but you can't calculate the things you haven't considered...which is most of the universe. Granted the liklihood of being stomped on by Godzilla is too low to consider, there are lots of things "metaphorically similar to Godzilla" that are more probable.
(I'm saying Godzilla rather than Zombie attack partially because this is WRT Japan, and partially because it's WRT nuclear power, and I've always considered Godzilla to be a metaphor for atomic power...though there are lots of other candidates, including Tsunami, that also fit "big, powerful, destructive...", and are thus metaphorically similar.)
You CAN'T calculate unconsidered risks. People normally dismiss them, because they aren't likely to happen within the lifespan of and within the sensory range of a homo habilis, and that's where we spent most of of recent evolutionary past. So we discount both future rewards and future costs.
If you're going to be pedantic, then to call someone a thug you would need to be asserting that they are devoted to the worship of Kali. And that they abstained from attacking women, holy men, or mad men.
Words don't retain their original meaning, and goon no longer means a hired bully. Either a dolt or a unemployed bully would also qualify under modern usage.
The extra layers are so that it's not immediately obvious which messages are encoded with the one-time pad version. That can be important information, and delaying it's recognition can be an important plus. (And only a few messages should really require a one-time pad. For most a lighter level of security should suffice.)
Ah. And where do I find one of these politicians running for a state or federal office. (Locally I do find a few, but they are rare even at that level.)
P.S.: Saying you will protect my interests and doing something else doesn't count. I can always find politicians that will do that.
P.P.S.: I'm moderately satisfied with my Representative. I despise one of my Senators, and am not overly pleased with the other. I'm contemplating voiting, Green, Libertarian, or Socialist next time.
From S.Korea's viewpoint, that might be a reasonable decision, given the range of available options. But use encryption on anything sensitive, and enought things that aren't (including some noise). And if it's really sensitive, use a one-time pad system (and encrypt that, too, just to break their heads against). And avoid English even on trivial stuff. Korean with lots of current slang should require the use of limited resources to understand.
N.B.: This won't stop them, except the one-time pad. But it will raise the cost of snooping to the point where it will be limited.
Yes, but the timeout doesn't need to be shorter than a few minutes (depending on the context). I'd also prefer that the administrator accounts not be remotely accessible even if you have the correct password. And if someone local is doing it...find out who it is, and stop them.
But many of the steps that could be taken to prevent the problem are relatively low-impact. These also aren't taken.
I do agree that security professionals tend to overemphasize low probability events. If they didn't have that mindset they wouldn't be security professionals. But there are lots of things that could be done, that are low impact, that AREN'T done because it would require management to authorize it, and the people who understand it can't communicate the importance to management. And lots of things that are almost "security theater" are done just because they are easy to explain.
In your situation it sounds like what you need to do is impose a short timeout after each failed password entry, and lock the account after 3-4 consecutive failed password entries. Perhaps you could just impose a temporary timeout on the account after each failed attempt, increasing after each consecutive failed attempt, but I don't think I've ever seen such a system in use.
There's a good argument that this kind of thing should be routine anyway as long as it's reasonably easy to unlock the account. (I.e., the user has to be able to contact tech. services in a timely manner, and they need to be able to deal with it quickly.)
Thank you for finally providing an answer that made sense.
Outside it that, I fully understand that attitude of people who don't like change for the sake of change...I'm one of them. Having to learn a new configure language is a pain when I'd rather be doing something else. But if there's a valid reason, that makes things more acceptable.
That is currently true. It's not clear that it will continue to be true. Sand and carbon are rather plentiful, and so is Nitrogen. There have been some experimental circuits built that don't use much else, and they included transistors, resistors, inductors, and memory diamond. They aren't currently practical, and I really doubt that they'll be practical in a decade, but if prices go up enough, then they eventually will be...though there's lots of development work yet to be done.
P.S.: Rare earths aren't actually rare, they're just hard to separate, and good ores of any particular one are uncommon. And we haven't been intentionally using them for very long, so there hasn't been extensive development work on mining them. Until recently some mines originally built to extract them had been being closed as unprofitable. Now I've heard they're being re-opened, because now there's a market.
Lack of imagination isn't sadism. Neither is lack of belief in an attractive imagined solution. It may, or may not, be wrong, but that's a separate question.
You *are* aware the the populations in industrial countries are declining, aren't you? That's one of the reasons that Japan is putting so much effort into home-care robotics. They've got an increasingly elderly population, and they discourage immigrtion, so they need something to take care of the elders. Most industrial countries give that role to immigrants, but as industrialization spreads this is going to be problematic.
OTOH, the population is still rising, and a collapse because of limited resources before we get down to a sustainable level isn't improbable.
To defund the NSA would signal the intent of congress, but I'm rather certain that the executive could find a way around that **IF THEY SO CHOSE**.
But you are definitely right that the fact that they choose not to do so speaks volumes.
This relies upon the meaning of the amendment being enforced by court decisions. Sorry, but I'm quite skeptical that this will happen.
Court decisions have more frequently extended the power of the federal government than limited it. Frequently at the expense of the state governments, but when the right was supposed to reside in "the people or the state", moving it from the states to the feds is a regressive act. (I'll grant you that many states have given them reasons for the move, but that's a separate issue.)
E.g.: The Warren Court, during the Civil Rights movement, extensively moved power from the states to the feds. They appear to have had the best of intentions, but the long term results are mixed. The result is that instead of having several states with extremely repressive governments, we have a country with a moderately repressive government, and a highly intrusive one. It also helped abate the most extreme racial injustices...though recently we've seen some steps backwards on that ground from the federal level.
Probably true, but I'd sure like to see proof.
IIUC, the provision in the constitution for the legislature to reign in the executive is to refuse to pass any appropriation bills. ANY. Because the executive was known to intentionally pervert the intention of any bill that was passed.
Of course, that means that the feds would shut down. Originally that was much less of a big deal. These days...there aren't many places to homestead anymore. But it means shutting down Social security, the treasury, the military, the TSA, the Air traffic controllers, the FCC, etc. Somehow people don't seem to be quite willing to do that. The Feds have taken over many jobs that were intended to be done by the states. And they've used legal interpretations to weasel their way into all sorts of nooks and crannies where dislodging them would grossly inconvenience or endanger people. Because of this, shutting down the government would not be looked on kindly by the vast majority of citizens. Some of this was done with good intentions, but good intentions or malicious, it was done, and no other organization exists to do many of the jobs that need doing.
FWIW, congress is allowed to define whatever it chooses as "grounds for impeachment". If I recall correctly the only definition is "High crimes and misdemeanors", and that term is not further defined. But your point about "If you don't have the votes for legislation, you sure aren't going to have them for impeachment." is quite valid.
I do agree that the case is just grandstanding, though. IIRC the president can decide that he refuses to allow himself to be sued. (Otherwise every president would end up spending all his time defending himself against claims of impropriety...even before he took office.)
A lot of times it is. Remember, you don't only need to count the comparisons that you do, but also that of everyone else studying the same problem. ONE of you is likely to find a result by pure coincidence.
Care to suggest a *method* for stopping this kind of abuse?
We are clearly headed into an era of coupe d'etats, as the government is acting in ways that remove all belief in it's justice, so there will be small interest among the citizenry if one gang of theives and murderers ousts another. But a way to reform the government before this occurs is not obvious.
That's what people hoped, but all he promised was change. Perhaps he delivered.
Where did you get that idea that tool usage is recent? People and Chimpanzees both use tools, so the conservative assumption would be that tool use pre-dates the split between the species. And it's not like it requires immense brain power. Crows use tools. Some of Darwin's Finches use tools. And many others. (Too many to list.)
The problem is, most of the tools are wood or straw, so they don't tend to be preserved. The ones I listed are all modern species, and the reason for that is that if we didn't watch them using the tools, we wouldn't know that they did. There's no evidence at all that it's recent along ANY of the gene lines. (For that matter, I believe that British Great Tits learned to use tools to pry the caps off milk bottles to get at the cream. This is a species that has, I believe, otherwise only been observed to use tools in nest-building.)
Depends on the layman. Still, there could be species that are radically different from any currently extant. E.g., I believe that all current species that have blood rather than ichor use either copper or iron as an oxygen transporter...but there could be something else. Also, all known species use 4 DNA codons (AGTC) or RNA codons (substituting Uracil for one of those...I'd need to look up which). It could be that there were earlier species that had more (or fewer) than four. That would be pretty much of a shock....though proving it from a fossil would be really tricky. They could find that feather-like things emerged as soon as multi-cellular animals. Etc.
Mind you, these are just examples. It would be REALLY shocking if one of them were true. But that there should be something equivalent that was true wouldn't be surprising, though any particular example would be quite surprising. Like feathers on a T.Rex. Or the brontosarus having the wrong head (so now it's an apatosarus, which isn't anywhere near a good a name, and the head is very different).
Well, my system's a bit old, so a usb boot won't work. I *do* have a couple of live CDs, but ... I just prefer to avoid THAT kind of hassle.
OK, unicode still doesn't post. And loading the comments took about 5 minutes. (2 minutes the first time, 5 minutes the second time.) The posting/loading problem is an obvious bug. My suspicion is that the problem with unicode is that they just didn't fix the problem that the old slashdot had...i.e., not handling unicode.
It's a very good thing they've decided to fix some bugs before they roll this out, as it appears to currently be a very early beta. And they're wasting huge amounts of space, but that should be easy to fix, if they are so inclined.