The jet stream is acting like that because the relative temperature difference between the air over the Arctic and the air over the tropics has decreased. (The Arctic has warmed a lot more than have the tropics.) And it's this relative difference that powers the jet stream. So the jet stream has slowed. Slowing down, it's more easily deflected in one direction or another. etc. Don't count on the variations being the same from year to year, they weren't even when the jet stream was moving more powerfully. All you can really count on is that it's slower, which means that weather patterns will tend to stay in one place longer. Both the hot ones and the cold ones. Because of this they may appear more extreme (one day of snow doesn't cool things down as much as a week of snow does).
N.B.: Some of the patterns WILL be more extreme, but not most of them. Most will just be moving more slowly.
You laugh, but an Ice Age *is* coming. It follows the great melt.
Here's the way it works. Firs things warm up. Ice melts. The oceans warm. etc. The things that we are seeing right now. Then a long time passes, and whatever caused the big melt stops. Perhaps we run out of fossil fuels. Things get back to normal. Then something else happens. Perhaps a volcano blows it's top and we have another "year without summer". Now the oceans are warm, so there's lots of water in the air, and the air gets colder than usual near the poles, so there's more snow than usual, and the snow the falls doesn't melt. In a couple of years things sort of get back to normal, but now the poles are more reflective, because of all that snow. And the oceans are still warm, so lots of new snow falls every winter. More than melts the next summer. The ice starts moving south. Eventually the oceans cool, so they stop evaporating so much moisture. But now there's the huge reflective area near the poles, so things stay cold for a long time...until something destabilizes them again. Possibly continental drift, opening the Arctic ocean to ready circulation.
Well, that's the abbreviation of one theory. According to that theory Greenland is a key to the current climate, but partially because it's blocking the circulation of the water in the Arctic Ocean. So it's encouraging an ice age. But it's not blocking it completely, so we teeter on the edge of ice age or big melt...and oscillate between the two given moderate-sized nudges.
You oversimplify. Warmer climate CAN mean more rain. It can also mean just "hotter and dryer", depending.... well, basically depending on land distribution and topography.
FWIW, warmer oceans mean more rain, but a lot of that may fall over those self-same oceans. Warmer land means drier...but it might be counterbalanced by the more rain. Note that land reacts a lot more quickly than ocean.
OTOH, the oceans have now been warming up for decades. So we *are* getting more rain. But the temperature difference between the poles and the tropics is decreasing. This means the jet stream is slowing down. THIS means that weather is more likely to get stuck in one place. Heat spells last longer, cold spells last longer, rain lasts longer, and dry lasts longer. (Note that this "longer" is measured in days or weeks, not in multiple months.) Generally this is summarized as "Weather becomes more extreme", but that's not quite right. Actually it just moves from place to place more slowly...and unpredictably. (OTOH, here the "more rain" gets into the act. Thunderstorms get more violent. So do Hurricanes and tornadoes. But I'm only counting the extreme events. It's not clear that they become more frequent, or that the mild ones decrease in number...well, at least not to me, I'm no weatherman. I just follow popularized science.)
That is claimed to be the primary purpose. Either the claim is a lie, or the patent system is so broken that it should be totally repealed. I suspect the claim is a lie, because otherwise it would not have been maintained in the broken condition since at least the invention of the telephone.
That only works if he can get a judgment against not only the company, but also the principle stockholders (if it has any) and the top management. Otherwise the safe parties can abscond with the money and start a new company, that the old company folds may not be significant if, say, the patents were already owed to a shadow company, and so can't be considered assets of the patent troll.
But I can hope that software patents will get ruled invalid, or illegal, or some such. It's the next best thing to all patents being ruled illegal.
I'm conflicted. On the one hand I *really* want software patents to be invalidated. On the other hand, I don't like copy-protection schemes (well, not most that I've ever encountered).
On the whole, I hope that software patents get invalidated. (Fat chance!) And that the patent troll not only loses, but has to pay not only court costs, but also the defendants legal fees. Plus a punishment fine. But making copy protection more difficult or more dangerous wouldn't be a total loss.
I certain you are correct... for a given value of roughly. They certainly didn't specify the position of each atom. And I really doubt that the simulated the positions of water molecules, though they possibly simulated hydration levels by subdivision of the cell.
The thing is, you need to decide which details are significant, and simulate those. If you pick the right selection, then specifying more carefully doesn't buy you much. E.g., you might gain by having a thermostat in each room, and possibly by having both one at floor level and one at ceiling level. But as you increase the density of measurement, each additional measure is less significant, and the controls to use the new data become more expensive.
It *MIGHT* be interesting to know whether the model even specified spatial dimensions. And into how many "simulation cells" the cell was subdivided. But I would make a bet that all such sub-cells didn't hold the same volume.
The interesting part is that at the time that he wrote it, someone at the University of California (in southern California, but I don't remember which campus) was doing a simulation of a lobster neural net. Don't know how detailed. And I don't know if he knew about it, but naturally one suspects that he did.
Sorry, but current plants have evolved to prefer the historical level of CO2. I'm sure that in enough time, or with enough genetic tinkering, they can be adapted to like a higher level, but that's not true of current plants. In warmer temperatures with high levels of CO2 they tend to grow taller and thinner, and to be much more fragile. Not good from the plant's point of view. Or, as it happens, from ours, as they tend to have a lot less protein/Kg. (N.B.: I presuming sufficient water. If it gets dryer things change slightly differently, but I don't remember the details, as I only read a Scientific American article a few years ago.)
You might ask who's disputing it. Some people would dispute that the sun rose this morning, especially if they could earn a buck by doing so.
From where I sit the evidence for global warming is pretty solid. Some details are in doubt, but not the fact. Explaining why the current evidence should be ignored isn't something that anyone has done in a valid way, unless you call political reasons valid. The explanations certainly don't make logical sense or scientific sense. However, I will admit that saying that global warming is happening is different from saying we should do something about it. Once you put a "should" into the argument, you aren't talking about science anymore, even though some scientists don't seem to realize this.
I, personally, have other reasons for feeling that an oil&coal-based civilization should be transitioned from as quickly as feasible. Global warming is just an additional reason. But then I also feel that cities shouldn't be built on top of the best farmland, and people build them there anyway. And I feel that the extraction of minerals (including helium, natural gas, and petroleum) should be heavily taxed, so that they can be reserved for later decades or centuries when they will be scarcer. (I don't trust "reserves", as governments have a long history of abusing those reserves for political reasons. But they are reluctant to cut taxes. [I'm including national parks as "reserves". Note the current pressure to lease those out.])
It was necessary, or nearly so, to build our civilization on oil&coal, but they foul the air, the water, and the earth. We should move to less destructive energy sources as quickly as possible. I will grant that this isn't a scientific argument, though some of the premises on which it is build are. And it's an argument that entrenched interests will always oppose.
OTOH, I'm not convinced that lithium batteries are a valid means to proceed. The construction of those batteries is, itself, quite destructive, so much so that I suspect electric cars that use them may be as polluting, over all, as their competition. Lead-acid is much less destructive to build, but it's a lot heavier, so not suitable for things that must be carried. So I think that lithium batteries should be reserved for cased where weight is *extremely* important. Like phones and laptops. And that electric cars should use lead-acid, or something else that isn't as destructive. Which means that it may be a bit early to switch to electric cars, and that work on super-capacitors should be pushed ahead with all reasonable speed. (There may be other reasonable competitors, but I don't know of them. Perhaps this new fuel-cell catalyst that doesn't require platinum will make fuel cells viable.)
For now probably the best thing is to tax mineral extraction, and to tax cars based on their efficiency... and the only way I can think to measure this is miles/gallon, which gives an unwarranted bonus to electric cars, so I can't claim it's totally fair. Since measuring individual cars is difficult, and would lead to corruption, probably high gasoline taxes are the best option (but *do* include diesel fuel!). Perhaps electric cars should be considered covered by taxes on electricity.
Note I'm talking about taxes on resource extraction AND on resource consumption. These are politically unpopular because they are clearly regressive taxes. And I admit that they are. So I'm also in favor of a negative income tax to counterbalance that.
Denying global warming is an illogical stance. Admitting it doesn't say what should be done. If it suits your political preferences you can just say "Sucks to be them." about the people who are hurt by it, but denying it just makes you look foolish to anyone with eyes and common sense.
Yeah. I notice how the summary only mentions a highly localized data set. I suspect that it doesn't generalize. But I'm not going to depend on Slashdot to clarify that, and having glanced at Nature before, I doubt that it would clarify things in under an hour or so.
If this is really important, it will show up in other places. If, as I suspect, it's a local effect, I probably won't hear about it again. I really doubt that Antarctic icesheets were falling away in Roman times. The evidence seems pretty good that that wasn't happening.
You may know much more about Buddhism than I do. E.g., I had thought Zen Buddhism originated in Japan, and was rather distinct from the Chinese schools. (It sounds like the same word, but that needn't indicate a common ancestor.)
OTOH, I got my ideas of Buddhism from basically Indian sources, and I consider the works prior to Bodhidharma to be more accurate in expressing the ideas of the Buddha. (Not that I've read that many of them. As I said, I'm NOT a Buddhist, which makes reading Buddhist theology onerous.) I suppose, except that I've heard it's not considered complimentary, I'd call my idea of Buddhism Theravada (small cart), as that seems to me to be the central core from which the other variants evolved. Since I don't "believe" in any of them, I'm not making a judgment about which is right, so much as which is central. But I clearly don't know *that* much about either the history or the philosophy, only enough to compare it with my way of thinking (perhaps incorrectly).
Still, one must remember that no description of a creed will describe everyone who adheres to it.
His point was, or appeared to be, that anyone could have posted that flyer. He did say, as what I interpreted as an exaggeration for effect, that they could have even done it themselves. He didn't say that was what happened.
What has North Korea got to do with communism? Even China is closer to being communist than they are, and to call China communist is to totally misunderstand the term. They aren't even Maoists, much less communist.
North Korea is just a hereditary dictatorship. The normal term for that is monarchy.
For that matter, I never even heard of communism being successfully used on even the scale of a large village. The Oneida Community was about the largest I've ever heard of that was successful, and even that failed due to the many features of communism that just don't scale.
Marxist-Lenninism never succeeded in the USSR. Lenin kept tinkering with it trying to make it work, but it never did. Stalin finished it off. Maoism had as much to do with the Chinese emperors as it did with Marxist "theology". It was successful, but it sure wasn't communism. And it decayed with the death of the charismatic leader ("emperor") into the current bureaucracy. It may be trying to do what's best for the country and its people (despite the endemic corruption), but it sure isn't communism.
What we in the US tend to call communism is any group the the government didn't like in the 1950's through around the late 1990's. This has nothing to do with any actual form of government, and encompasses cabals, monarchies, dictatorships, and even a democracy or two. What they have in common is being opposed to the political goals of the US (which often means not wanting to be economically raped). There may have been a communist group or two in the mess. It's impossible to tell given the distorting lens that is media news reporting. But I wouldn't bet on it. (Cuba, e.g., appears to be a liberal dictatorship. But given the distorted news coverage, I'm not even sure it's really liberal. And I'm not sure it isn't evolving into a monarchy.)
There are a very large number of Buddhists who would deny the link between atheism and materialism. (Admittedly, lots of Buddhists are also theistic. I've never been able to understand why, or how they reconcile it. And I say this as a materialist pagan...which also confuses a lot of people.)
IIUC, in traditional Buddhist thought the "gods" and "spirits" are delusional creations of the observing mind, and thus, while you should acknowledge them, you shouldn't believe in them. This makes sense to me. It's a spiritualism I can accept without a qualm, even if it isn't what I believe (which is actually about the same thing seen from a different perspective). Personally, I consider the mind to be a delusion, and the "gods" and "spirits" to be the underlying bricks out of which it is built, as a program is built using frameworks and libraries. And the whole thing is based on a material substrate (the brain, for people, or the computer for programs).
Note that neither of us, neither the traditional Buddhists not myself, consider gods and spirits as real. But while they consider the world to be illusion, I consider the mind to be illusion. In some sense its the same thing, as in both cases what we perceive isn't what's really there. I consider my belief better, because it has experimental evidence. They Buddhists, however, consider that evidence a part of the illusion of matter. Thus Bayesian reasoning cannot resolve initial bias, and doesn't always even converge. Still, the viewpoints agree over much of the range of evidence.
Do you need to believe that a god is real to be spiritual? I believe that a god is real in the sense that a subroutine is real. Do the avowed theists, who go to church on Sunday and ignore the rules of their god during the rest of the week have more actual belief? I've only rarely met an avowed theist who actually lived by the rules prescribed by their god. The claim of belief is not the actuality of belief, not even if they convince themselves.
Certainly I don't understand the connection between evolution and any formally described religion. The mosaic laws, e.g., say that you should honor your god before all others, but they don't say anything about believing in evolution (admittedly, if they'd thought about it they probably would have, but they literally couldn't think about it). Evolution isn't a god anymore than a light switch is. It's a description of an observed regularity (well, several observed regularities) in the physical universe. Nowhere in the bible, not even the new testament, does it say that one should ignore observed regularities in the physical universe. It does claim that god can set aside those regularities at a whim, but that's a very different claim. (One that *I* don't believe, but that's a separate matter.)
So. I see a clear link between materialism and my belief in gods, spirits, etc. And I don't consider myself an atheist, even though I do consider myself a materialist. I believe the gods to be more real than my perception of the keys that I am currently striking to write this message. This isn't to say that they are more real than the keys at some un-knowable level of reality. They aren't. The material level is the basis out of which ALL is created. But they are more real than my conscious mind.
Probably not. Perhaps a grad student or two. When I was at college the minimum load you were allowed to take was 12 1/2 units / semester. I think the measurement units have changed since then, but the concept probably continues.
What they need to do is fix the search so it works as well as it used to work, back before they made "global search" the default. They could also improve it's handling of newsgroups. (It seems to continually need to reload newsgroup messages that it's already downloaded),
I really don't know what's got into all the GUI designers recently, that they need to break things that are working perfectly well. First it was KDE4, then it was Gnome3, then Thunderbird. (I'm not mentioning Firefox, because so many others already have.)
KDE3 was the best desktop that Linux has come up with. KDE4 is nearly unusable. Gnome 2 is and adequate substitute for KDE3. Neither Gnome3 nor Unity is even approximately usable. It's to the point where I suspect the developer community is subsidized by Microsoft. But Google's Crome browser is an even less useful interface than the modified Firefox. Epiphany is a loss. I'm about to consider IceApe (used to be Mozilla.) Perhaps it's received bug fixes without having eager idiots breaking everything that works.
Re:Eucalyptus trees are a bio terror weapon
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Insects As Weapons
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The thing to remember is that:
You know that "future organism breeding now that thrives on coal ash and abandoned strip malls"? We won't llike the environment that they create.
Actually, that's too strong a statement. There's a microorganism that eats polyethylene, jet fuel, etc. and the only thing we've really needed to do so far is ensure that jet fuel is THOROUGHLY dehydrated. (It tends to clog jet engines, otherwise.) But we're quite likely not to like it.
Re:Eucalyptus trees are a bio terror weapon
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Insects As Weapons
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· Score: 1
Correction: SOME species of pine trees actually want to burn. This isn't, by any means, true of all of them. I don't think it's even true of most. It's also not alone in that preference. (If you want a quick guess, look a a ripe pine cone. It the cone is splay, then it doesn't want to burn. If it's tightly closed, then it likely does.)
Did you think mosquitoes didn't live in the Arctic? All it requires is the right species of mosquito and one infected person (well, and a vulnerable population).
The right species of mosquito didn't live in North America, so malaria wasn't serious north of New Jersey. But that's because we already have mosquitoes that liver further north, and the native carrier couldn't survive cold winters. (Even so, malaria was common in the northern US back in colonial times.)
Your mistake is thinking of malaria as a tropical disease. It's a disease of swamps and careless housekeeping. (My grandfather always made sure that his cow tank [where the cows drank] always had mosquito fish in it, to eat the larvae. But you also need to ensure that there are no puddles of standing water. Even a week can be too long...and it doesn't need to be a large puddle. An empty bowl, a stagnant creek, an old boot...mosquitoes don't need much water.)
It's probably correct, more or less. The climate isn't constant, and back around 1200-1300 there was a period called the "little ice age". Among other things, it wiped out the Norse colony in Greenland. For that matter, we've just recently left the "little climatic optimum". (I think around 20 years ago now.) This means that we can expect increased storms and unexpected weather. Basically things just get a bit less predictable. It *doesn't* predict that the changes will be in any particular direction, but it fuzzes up trying to understand any underlying systematic bias.
Personally, I believe the evidence is strongly in favor of increased global warming. But do note that word "global". Things won't be distributed evenly, and some places may even get colder (on the average).
For that matter, if the grandparent had gone back a bit further he could have had glaciers that covered much of England. It happened. It could happen again. But I'd be real surprised if it happened within my lifetime.
The weather has lots of "random" variation. Climate less so, but it's still present. (E.g., in the 1800's there was the "Year without a summer". It was caused by a volcano eruption. I count this as "random", because nobody could have predicted that it would happen then.) This doesn't mean that there aren't systematic variations. There are. But they can be hard to see through the noise. And CO2 is a systematic value. It can be difficult to see the effect that it's happening, but it's foolish (not just silly) to deny that it has an effect...in fact several effects, which makes things even more difficult to disentangle, since very few of the drivers have only one effect.
P.S.: I am not a climatologist. I just read lots of popularized science.
You are right that MS didn't usually use lawyers. But you need to consider that not all of their foul deeds were done against their customers. (or Apple either, of course). Apple has been all in favor of closed garden approaches since the days of the Apple ][, so that's nothing new. MS has been innovative in the field of EULAs. In that field Apple has been a follower.
As for "bans from the market", they didn't go for legal bans, but you might ask Stacker about being banned in other ways, or Novell, or WordPerfect, or...
For that matter, you could even ask IBM about how honest and ethical MS was. (Not that IBM was any shining light. I don't know about their current status, as currently I don't deal with them, and they don't have the large public interface that they used to.)
Apple's sole superiority over MS has always been that they prefer to sell elegant and well-designed merchandise. It still is. I suspect that with the departure of Jobs this will decay, as that's the kind of thing that usually happens. There are, however, exceptions.
Slashdot Mirror
IIUC:
The jet stream is acting like that because the relative temperature difference between the air over the Arctic and the air over the tropics has decreased. (The Arctic has warmed a lot more than have the tropics.) And it's this relative difference that powers the jet stream. So the jet stream has slowed. Slowing down, it's more easily deflected in one direction or another. etc. Don't count on the variations being the same from year to year, they weren't even when the jet stream was moving more powerfully. All you can really count on is that it's slower, which means that weather patterns will tend to stay in one place longer. Both the hot ones and the cold ones. Because of this they may appear more extreme (one day of snow doesn't cool things down as much as a week of snow does).
N.B.: Some of the patterns WILL be more extreme, but not most of them. Most will just be moving more slowly.
You laugh, but an Ice Age *is* coming. It follows the great melt.
Here's the way it works. Firs things warm up. Ice melts. The oceans warm. etc. The things that we are seeing right now. Then a long time passes, and whatever caused the big melt stops. Perhaps we run out of fossil fuels. Things get back to normal. Then something else happens. Perhaps a volcano blows it's top and we have another "year without summer". Now the oceans are warm, so there's lots of water in the air, and the air gets colder than usual near the poles, so there's more snow than usual, and the snow the falls doesn't melt. In a couple of years things sort of get back to normal, but now the poles are more reflective, because of all that snow. And the oceans are still warm, so lots of new snow falls every winter. More than melts the next summer. The ice starts moving south. Eventually the oceans cool, so they stop evaporating so much moisture. But now there's the huge reflective area near the poles, so things stay cold for a long time...until something destabilizes them again. Possibly continental drift, opening the Arctic ocean to ready circulation.
Well, that's the abbreviation of one theory. According to that theory Greenland is a key to the current climate, but partially because it's blocking the circulation of the water in the Arctic Ocean. So it's encouraging an ice age. But it's not blocking it completely, so we teeter on the edge of ice age or big melt...and oscillate between the two given moderate-sized nudges.
You oversimplify. Warmer climate CAN mean more rain. It can also mean just "hotter and dryer", depending.... well, basically depending on land distribution and topography.
FWIW, warmer oceans mean more rain, but a lot of that may fall over those self-same oceans. Warmer land means drier...but it might be counterbalanced by the more rain. Note that land reacts a lot more quickly than ocean.
OTOH, the oceans have now been warming up for decades. So we *are* getting more rain. But the temperature difference between the poles and the tropics is decreasing. This means the jet stream is slowing down. THIS means that weather is more likely to get stuck in one place. Heat spells last longer, cold spells last longer, rain lasts longer, and dry lasts longer. (Note that this "longer" is measured in days or weeks, not in multiple months.) Generally this is summarized as "Weather becomes more extreme", but that's not quite right. Actually it just moves from place to place more slowly...and unpredictably. (OTOH, here the "more rain" gets into the act. Thunderstorms get more violent. So do Hurricanes and tornadoes. But I'm only counting the extreme events. It's not clear that they become more frequent, or that the mild ones decrease in number...well, at least not to me, I'm no weatherman. I just follow popularized science.)
That is claimed to be the primary purpose. Either the claim is a lie, or the patent system is so broken that it should be totally repealed. I suspect the claim is a lie, because otherwise it would not have been maintained in the broken condition since at least the invention of the telephone.
That only works if he can get a judgment against not only the company, but also the principle stockholders (if it has any) and the top management. Otherwise the safe parties can abscond with the money and start a new company, that the old company folds may not be significant if, say, the patents were already owed to a shadow company, and so can't be considered assets of the patent troll.
But I can hope that software patents will get ruled invalid, or illegal, or some such. It's the next best thing to all patents being ruled illegal.
I'm conflicted. On the one hand I *really* want software patents to be invalidated. On the other hand, I don't like copy-protection schemes (well, not most that I've ever encountered).
On the whole, I hope that software patents get invalidated. (Fat chance!) And that the patent troll not only loses, but has to pay not only court costs, but also the defendants legal fees. Plus a punishment fine. But making copy protection more difficult or more dangerous wouldn't be a total loss.
I certain you are correct ... for a given value of roughly. They certainly didn't specify the position of each atom. And I really doubt that the simulated the positions of water molecules, though they possibly simulated hydration levels by subdivision of the cell.
The thing is, you need to decide which details are significant, and simulate those. If you pick the right selection, then specifying more carefully doesn't buy you much. E.g., you might gain by having a thermostat in each room, and possibly by having both one at floor level and one at ceiling level. But as you increase the density of measurement, each additional measure is less significant, and the controls to use the new data become more expensive.
It *MIGHT* be interesting to know whether the model even specified spatial dimensions. And into how many "simulation cells" the cell was subdivided. But I would make a bet that all such sub-cells didn't hold the same volume.
The interesting part is that at the time that he wrote it, someone at the University of California (in southern California, but I don't remember which campus) was doing a simulation of a lobster neural net. Don't know how detailed. And I don't know if he knew about it, but naturally one suspects that he did.
Sorry, but current plants have evolved to prefer the historical level of CO2. I'm sure that in enough time, or with enough genetic tinkering, they can be adapted to like a higher level, but that's not true of current plants. In warmer temperatures with high levels of CO2 they tend to grow taller and thinner, and to be much more fragile. Not good from the plant's point of view. Or, as it happens, from ours, as they tend to have a lot less protein/Kg. (N.B.: I presuming sufficient water. If it gets dryer things change slightly differently, but I don't remember the details, as I only read a Scientific American article a few years ago.)
You might ask who's disputing it. Some people would dispute that the sun rose this morning, especially if they could earn a buck by doing so.
From where I sit the evidence for global warming is pretty solid. Some details are in doubt, but not the fact. Explaining why the current evidence should be ignored isn't something that anyone has done in a valid way, unless you call political reasons valid. The explanations certainly don't make logical sense or scientific sense. However, I will admit that saying that global warming is happening is different from saying we should do something about it. Once you put a "should" into the argument, you aren't talking about science anymore, even though some scientists don't seem to realize this.
I, personally, have other reasons for feeling that an oil&coal-based civilization should be transitioned from as quickly as feasible. Global warming is just an additional reason. But then I also feel that cities shouldn't be built on top of the best farmland, and people build them there anyway. And I feel that the extraction of minerals (including helium, natural gas, and petroleum) should be heavily taxed, so that they can be reserved for later decades or centuries when they will be scarcer. (I don't trust "reserves", as governments have a long history of abusing those reserves for political reasons. But they are reluctant to cut taxes. [I'm including national parks as "reserves". Note the current pressure to lease those out.])
It was necessary, or nearly so, to build our civilization on oil&coal, but they foul the air, the water, and the earth. We should move to less destructive energy sources as quickly as possible. I will grant that this isn't a scientific argument, though some of the premises on which it is build are. And it's an argument that entrenched interests will always oppose.
OTOH, I'm not convinced that lithium batteries are a valid means to proceed. The construction of those batteries is, itself, quite destructive, so much so that I suspect electric cars that use them may be as polluting, over all, as their competition. Lead-acid is much less destructive to build, but it's a lot heavier, so not suitable for things that must be carried. So I think that lithium batteries should be reserved for cased where weight is *extremely* important. Like phones and laptops. And that electric cars should use lead-acid, or something else that isn't as destructive. Which means that it may be a bit early to switch to electric cars, and that work on super-capacitors should be pushed ahead with all reasonable speed. (There may be other reasonable competitors, but I don't know of them. Perhaps this new fuel-cell catalyst that doesn't require platinum will make fuel cells viable.)
For now probably the best thing is to tax mineral extraction, and to tax cars based on their efficiency ... and the only way I can think to measure this is miles/gallon, which gives an unwarranted bonus to electric cars, so I can't claim it's totally fair. Since measuring individual cars is difficult, and would lead to corruption, probably high gasoline taxes are the best option (but *do* include diesel fuel!). Perhaps electric cars should be considered covered by taxes on electricity.
Note I'm talking about taxes on resource extraction AND on resource consumption. These are politically unpopular because they are clearly regressive taxes. And I admit that they are. So I'm also in favor of a negative income tax to counterbalance that.
Denying global warming is an illogical stance. Admitting it doesn't say what should be done. If it suits your political preferences you can just say "Sucks to be them." about the people who are hurt by it, but denying it just makes you look foolish to anyone with eyes and common sense.
Yeah. I notice how the summary only mentions a highly localized data set. I suspect that it doesn't generalize. But I'm not going to depend on Slashdot to clarify that, and having glanced at Nature before, I doubt that it would clarify things in under an hour or so.
If this is really important, it will show up in other places. If, as I suspect, it's a local effect, I probably won't hear about it again. I really doubt that Antarctic icesheets were falling away in Roman times. The evidence seems pretty good that that wasn't happening.
Perhaps their neighbors don't want to move to allow THEM to move?
When there's lots of space to move into, needing to move isn't that big a problem. When there's no space, it is.
You may know much more about Buddhism than I do. E.g., I had thought Zen Buddhism originated in Japan, and was rather distinct from the Chinese schools. (It sounds like the same word, but that needn't indicate a common ancestor.)
OTOH, I got my ideas of Buddhism from basically Indian sources, and I consider the works prior to Bodhidharma to be more accurate in expressing the ideas of the Buddha. (Not that I've read that many of them. As I said, I'm NOT a Buddhist, which makes reading Buddhist theology onerous.) I suppose, except that I've heard it's not considered complimentary, I'd call my idea of Buddhism Theravada (small cart), as that seems to me to be the central core from which the other variants evolved. Since I don't "believe" in any of them, I'm not making a judgment about which is right, so much as which is central. But I clearly don't know *that* much about either the history or the philosophy, only enough to compare it with my way of thinking (perhaps incorrectly).
Still, one must remember that no description of a creed will describe everyone who adheres to it.
His point was, or appeared to be, that anyone could have posted that flyer. He did say, as what I interpreted as an exaggeration for effect, that they could have even done it themselves. He didn't say that was what happened.
You need to practice reading.
What has North Korea got to do with communism? Even China is closer to being communist than they are, and to call China communist is to totally misunderstand the term. They aren't even Maoists, much less communist.
North Korea is just a hereditary dictatorship. The normal term for that is monarchy.
For that matter, I never even heard of communism being successfully used on even the scale of a large village. The Oneida Community was about the largest I've ever heard of that was successful, and even that failed due to the many features of communism that just don't scale.
Marxist-Lenninism never succeeded in the USSR. Lenin kept tinkering with it trying to make it work, but it never did. Stalin finished it off. Maoism had as much to do with the Chinese emperors as it did with Marxist "theology". It was successful, but it sure wasn't communism. And it decayed with the death of the charismatic leader ("emperor") into the current bureaucracy. It may be trying to do what's best for the country and its people (despite the endemic corruption), but it sure isn't communism.
What we in the US tend to call communism is any group the the government didn't like in the 1950's through around the late 1990's. This has nothing to do with any actual form of government, and encompasses cabals, monarchies, dictatorships, and even a democracy or two. What they have in common is being opposed to the political goals of the US (which often means not wanting to be economically raped). There may have been a communist group or two in the mess. It's impossible to tell given the distorting lens that is media news reporting. But I wouldn't bet on it. (Cuba, e.g., appears to be a liberal dictatorship. But given the distorted news coverage, I'm not even sure it's really liberal. And I'm not sure it isn't evolving into a monarchy.)
There are a very large number of Buddhists who would deny the link between atheism and materialism. (Admittedly, lots of Buddhists are also theistic. I've never been able to understand why, or how they reconcile it. And I say this as a materialist pagan...which also confuses a lot of people.)
IIUC, in traditional Buddhist thought the "gods" and "spirits" are delusional creations of the observing mind, and thus, while you should acknowledge them, you shouldn't believe in them. This makes sense to me. It's a spiritualism I can accept without a qualm, even if it isn't what I believe (which is actually about the same thing seen from a different perspective). Personally, I consider the mind to be a delusion, and the "gods" and "spirits" to be the underlying bricks out of which it is built, as a program is built using frameworks and libraries. And the whole thing is based on a material substrate (the brain, for people, or the computer for programs).
Note that neither of us, neither the traditional Buddhists not myself, consider gods and spirits as real. But while they consider the world to be illusion, I consider the mind to be illusion. In some sense its the same thing, as in both cases what we perceive isn't what's really there. I consider my belief better, because it has experimental evidence. They Buddhists, however, consider that evidence a part of the illusion of matter. Thus Bayesian reasoning cannot resolve initial bias, and doesn't always even converge. Still, the viewpoints agree over much of the range of evidence.
Do you need to believe that a god is real to be spiritual? I believe that a god is real in the sense that a subroutine is real. Do the avowed theists, who go to church on Sunday and ignore the rules of their god during the rest of the week have more actual belief? I've only rarely met an avowed theist who actually lived by the rules prescribed by their god. The claim of belief is not the actuality of belief, not even if they convince themselves.
Certainly I don't understand the connection between evolution and any formally described religion. The mosaic laws, e.g., say that you should honor your god before all others, but they don't say anything about believing in evolution (admittedly, if they'd thought about it they probably would have, but they literally couldn't think about it). Evolution isn't a god anymore than a light switch is. It's a description of an observed regularity (well, several observed regularities) in the physical universe. Nowhere in the bible, not even the new testament, does it say that one should ignore observed regularities in the physical universe. It does claim that god can set aside those regularities at a whim, but that's a very different claim. (One that *I* don't believe, but that's a separate matter.)
So. I see a clear link between materialism and my belief in gods, spirits, etc. And I don't consider myself an atheist, even though I do consider myself a materialist. I believe the gods to be more real than my perception of the keys that I am currently striking to write this message. This isn't to say that they are more real than the keys at some un-knowable level of reality. They aren't. The material level is the basis out of which ALL is created. But they are more real than my conscious mind.
Probably not. Perhaps a grad student or two. When I was at college the minimum load you were allowed to take was 12 1/2 units / semester. I think the measurement units have changed since then, but the concept probably continues.
What they need to do is fix the search so it works as well as it used to work, back before they made "global search" the default. They could also improve it's handling of newsgroups. (It seems to continually need to reload newsgroup messages that it's already downloaded),
I really don't know what's got into all the GUI designers recently, that they need to break things that are working perfectly well. First it was KDE4, then it was Gnome3, then Thunderbird. (I'm not mentioning Firefox, because so many others already have.)
KDE3 was the best desktop that Linux has come up with. KDE4 is nearly unusable. Gnome 2 is and adequate substitute for KDE3. Neither Gnome3 nor Unity is even approximately usable. It's to the point where I suspect the developer community is subsidized by Microsoft. But Google's Crome browser is an even less useful interface than the modified Firefox. Epiphany is a loss. I'm about to consider IceApe (used to be Mozilla.) Perhaps it's received bug fixes without having eager idiots breaking everything that works.
The thing to remember is that:
You know that "future organism breeding now that thrives on coal ash and abandoned strip malls"? We won't llike the environment that they create.
Actually, that's too strong a statement. There's a microorganism that eats polyethylene, jet fuel, etc. and the only thing we've really needed to do so far is ensure that jet fuel is THOROUGHLY dehydrated. (It tends to clog jet engines, otherwise.) But we're quite likely not to like it.
Correction: SOME species of pine trees actually want to burn. This isn't, by any means, true of all of them. I don't think it's even true of most. It's also not alone in that preference. (If you want a quick guess, look a a ripe pine cone. It the cone is splay, then it doesn't want to burn. If it's tightly closed, then it likely does.)
Did you think mosquitoes didn't live in the Arctic? All it requires is the right species of mosquito and one infected person (well, and a vulnerable population).
The right species of mosquito didn't live in North America, so malaria wasn't serious north of New Jersey. But that's because we already have mosquitoes that liver further north, and the native carrier couldn't survive cold winters. (Even so, malaria was common in the northern US back in colonial times.)
Your mistake is thinking of malaria as a tropical disease. It's a disease of swamps and careless housekeeping. (My grandfather always made sure that his cow tank [where the cows drank] always had mosquito fish in it, to eat the larvae. But you also need to ensure that there are no puddles of standing water. Even a week can be too long...and it doesn't need to be a large puddle. An empty bowl, a stagnant creek, an old boot...mosquitoes don't need much water.)
It's probably correct, more or less. The climate isn't constant, and back around 1200-1300 there was a period called the "little ice age". Among other things, it wiped out the Norse colony in Greenland. For that matter, we've just recently left the "little climatic optimum". (I think around 20 years ago now.) This means that we can expect increased storms and unexpected weather. Basically things just get a bit less predictable. It *doesn't* predict that the changes will be in any particular direction, but it fuzzes up trying to understand any underlying systematic bias.
Personally, I believe the evidence is strongly in favor of increased global warming. But do note that word "global". Things won't be distributed evenly, and some places may even get colder (on the average).
For that matter, if the grandparent had gone back a bit further he could have had glaciers that covered much of England. It happened. It could happen again. But I'd be real surprised if it happened within my lifetime.
The weather has lots of "random" variation. Climate less so, but it's still present. (E.g., in the 1800's there was the "Year without a summer". It was caused by a volcano eruption. I count this as "random", because nobody could have predicted that it would happen then.) This doesn't mean that there aren't systematic variations. There are. But they can be hard to see through the noise. And CO2 is a systematic value. It can be difficult to see the effect that it's happening, but it's foolish (not just silly) to deny that it has an effect...in fact several effects, which makes things even more difficult to disentangle, since very few of the drivers have only one effect.
P.S.: I am not a climatologist. I just read lots of popularized science.
You are right that MS didn't usually use lawyers. But you need to consider that not all of their foul deeds were done against their customers. (or Apple either, of course). Apple has been all in favor of closed garden approaches since the days of the Apple ][, so that's nothing new. MS has been innovative in the field of EULAs. In that field Apple has been a follower.
As for "bans from the market", they didn't go for legal bans, but you might ask Stacker about being banned in other ways, or Novell, or WordPerfect, or ...
For that matter, you could even ask IBM about how honest and ethical MS was. (Not that IBM was any shining light. I don't know about their current status, as currently I don't deal with them, and they don't have the large public interface that they used to.)
Apple's sole superiority over MS has always been that they prefer to sell elegant and well-designed merchandise. It still is. I suspect that with the departure of Jobs this will decay, as that's the kind of thing that usually happens. There are, however, exceptions.
You have a short memory. Apple is no worse than MS has been. That may be faint praise, but it's justifiable.
Correction:
the stated "purpose" of patents is to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts
I'm a bit too cynical to believe that the actual implementation is that far from the stated purpose by accident.