In general you are correct, but if you use a nice OTA they'll eat it. Case in point: Tried to take a Cambodia Air flight + hotel package I'd booked through Expedia, and when the plane broke they... did not move expeditiously to arrange a replacement. So I took the next flight out on my own dime. Complained about that to the airline they said nope booking V class no refunds no credit doesn't matter the plane never took off. Kinda miffed. Whined to Expedia.co.th and they were like OH WHY YES FULL FLIGHT REFUND AND FIRST NIGHT OF HOTEL TOO!
So yeah, if the OTA likes you, it works. However, note they prefixed that with "We don't want to lose you as a customer, so..." That's most likely the trick here.
> There is plenty of historic evidence of positive feedback - insolation changes alone are not sufficient to account for past changes in climate -
Not necessarily. Could just mean that actual drivers are misunderstood and/or intentionally buried. A particularly good example of the latter would be the Svensmark theories, which the CAGW alarmists refuse to engage with but just keep constantly being corroborated, why here's one that went public just the other day:
> Its 'stability' has encompassed a very broad range of conditions, many of which would be very uncomfortable for human civilisation as we know it.
Most notably, Ice Ages. Which only started when C02 dropped below 500ppm or so; so let's get the concentration up that high at least, THEN we can talk about whether pushing it up more might be a good idea or what.
> Let's turn things around. We know that there *are* feedbacks - they are irrefutable from basic physical arguments. Are you saying that it just happens that these all balance each other out?
I don't pretend to that much insight. I'm only interested in climate voodoo^H^H^H^H^H^H science enough to have an opinion whether the state of current knowledge merits me packing my bags for Iqualit and start building beach condos in the Arctic Archipelago, or whether Haida Gwa'ii would be an appropriate choice, or staying here in Vancouver will work out fine. Which looks like the best bet so far.
> Hence, as you know, water vapour can amplify the GH effect of CO2.
An example of how the alarmists seize on every theoretical positive feedback for their models and ignore negative feedbacks which the observable long term stability of the climate demonstrates must exist, otherwise the first really big volcano eruptions would have charbroiled the planet.
For this particular case, the initial feedback is indeed positive but by actual satellite measurements turns out overall to be strongly negative due to cloud albedo effects and release of latent heat at height above the optically thick CO2/H2O layers of the atmosphere, this second of which is strongly marked in the tropics, exactly where the fantastical "tipping point" of the over the top hysterics would occur first if not for this negative feedback; and CAGW alarmism is disproved by the real world observations again.
> Who questions this and are they credible?
Can't find it again with a quick Google, sorry. The argument outline was that if C02 actually had its assumed infinite utilization of radiative capacity, the nighttime temperature profile as C02 rises would be going up faster than the overall temperature which it is not, therefore our current warm period is likelier to be related to declining cloud cover pace the Svensmark theories than it is to C02 rise. Since even the correlation is untestable without at least several more decades of accurate cloud cover measurement than the 1979-present which is actually available, I didn't bother bookmarking it. The point wasn't that this particular argument has any great chance of being correct and of magnitude enough to amount to a complete disproof of CAGW theory, it's that it not being trivially refutable demonstrates that much of this "settled science" is treated as axiomatic in the models but has no actual physical proof underlying it.
Indeed. And the biggest of those is water vapor, by an overwhelming margin.
Some even question whether there's *any* IR left over in the proper bands for C02 to make a difference. Patterns of night warmth are intriguingly suggestive of the contrary.
For purposes of driving a system response, the change is not the 40% of a particular component. The change is 0.00012, or 1.2% of 1% of the overall composition.
It is intuitively ridiculous to a numerate person that a chaotic system could possibly be so finely balanced that a 0.00012 composition change has positive feedback effects of any observable significance. If that were so, "it would have gone off the rails billions of years ago" is the common sense presumption.
Mind you, some intuitively ridiculous things are in fact true. But it's reasonably evident at this point that CAGW is not going to turn out to be one of them.
Nobody rational disputes that anthropogenic C02 will have a primary warming effect.
In exactly the same fashion that nobody rational disputes that anthropogenic H20 will raise the ocean level when I spit into it.
That the magnitude of this effect is concerning -- or even observable! -- any more in the first case than the second, that is unproven and looking less likely all the time as evidence accumulates that the solely positive feedbacks that IPCC-selected models assume are just not in accord with reality.
Any reconstruction less than Milankovitch cycle scale is cherry-picking. Your link to three decades is not qualitatively superior to the decade and a half of standstill enough to in any way merit "completely false".
For a particularly fascinating recent paper calling the hypothesis of C02 driving into question, check out:
Six identified oscillations with NO -- repeat, NO! -- parameter fitting result in an almost spooky close match to instrument records. Not a single model used in any of the IPCC reports can produce backcasting even laughably comparable to that.
And as an extra bonus, unlike the alarmists who appear to consider no actual observation whatsoever a possible falsification, which makes them priests and not scientists, you will note on page 451 that we have a very specific testable prediction of this theory, namely that temperatures have just begun to freefall in a mirror image of the 70s-90s period where why yes the slope of C02 concentration did coincide with temperature rise for a couple decades. If temperatures don't keep plummeting as this paper predicts, I'll cheerfully agree in a year or two they were clearly wrong. If the global anomaly does drop by half a degree over the next decade or so as this model implies and no CAGW supporter I am aware of admits as a possibility currently, will you agree that they've got climate drivers identified substantially correctly and the idea that 400 parts per million of something had any chance of primarily driving any positive feedback process always was as ridiculous as those of us who are numerate figured out at first glance?
Actually, no, that looks like a 9mm round or a.380 ACP. If it was a.22, then the bullet would take up rather more of the cartridge length and you'd notice the larger rim,.22 being rimfire and all.
Hmmmm... actually, doing a quick SAAMI specs Google, I'll revise that first guess to that round most likely being a.32 S&W Short. They look pretty close to the more common calibers of my first guess, and that cartridge is only rated for 14500 PSI, which makes it a pretty compelling choice of commonly available caliber for a gun whose chamber is plastic. Still consider firing it a "great idea, you go first" kind of experience, mind you...
Yep. There's so many poverty traps in the way benefits are lost that it's basically impossible for anyone with two kids to ever make a financial case for joining the workforce without questionably high valuation of downstream wage increases. And not doing so, of course, absolutely guarantees poverty.
The immediate reaction is well scale this and scale that so that there's always marginal utility to working harder, but the patchwork of eligibilities and overlapping jurisdictions makes that darn near impossible to do adequately, and even attempting it an easily gamed bureaucratic nightmare.
Switzerland is usually a good place to look at how a society manages to reconcile libertarian ideals with communitarian practicality, and if I understand correctly the way they've squared this particular circle is that families are responsible for a person's welfare before the State steps in, and if you can assume a traditional family structure and a sense of shame in not being able to provide for yourself as is still a fairly good assumption in Switzerland, that reduces the problem down to the point where the burden on the public purse is not overly significant.
However, trying to follow that model in America would be rather problematic. If there's any sense of shame at all left in robbing your fellow citizens by means of government, it sure isn't evident anywhere.
Here in Vancouver Safeway pretty routinely has 20% off iTunes card packages, sometimes even with Air Miles 1 per $ to boot.
I've sometimes wondered how the math of $100 - $20 - ~$15 (Air Miles are a roughly 1:1 travel rewards system, so they're about 30 apiece) - $2 (the 2% cash back from the credit card I buy it with) leaves enough to cover costs on the Apple side. Certainly, anybody who thinks that "missing" 30% is all dropping straight into Apple McDuck's Money Vaults is pretty clueless about... well, everything, really.
And as somebody mentioned above, those of us who were lucky to get 20% of retail for boxed software back in the day, plus we had to make the damn boxes and ship them, really don't have the time of day for any whiny kid bitching how hard dealing with Apple is these days.
Nope; the CET temperature record, our longest instrumental record, shows that the beginning of the 1700s had a steeper slope than the last couple decades. So even that position doesn't hold up soundly. We're somewhat unusually higher than the 350-year trendline right now yes, but that'll have to continue for another 18 years and top the ending in 1730ish warming cycle before unprecedented in magnitude and length is a true statement.
"Instrumental measurements of the Sun alone already tell us that solar changes don't line up with the recent period of warming."
Anyone who claims this is either
A) Unaware of the Svensmark theories and the support the CLOUD experiments provide, which makes them not worth engaging because of their demonstrated ignorance of the field; or
B) Denying actual, physical, science in favor of unfalsifiable theory; which makes them not worth engaging because they are actively attempting deceit.
For those who wish to follow up and make their own decisions on this or the other issues mentioned, wattsupwiththat.com is a decent source to find discussion of a wide variety of contrarian issues and positions that the government-dependent cliques attempt to deny.
Both reproduce just fine on land as well as ice. That we think of them as ice breeding now is due to mankind's predation. See Farley Mowat's 'Sea of Slaughter' for a good rundown on how it's us that pushed their remnants into the areas we think of as native today.
The correct scale on which to consider the evolution of their Arctic adaptations in general is the 2.58 million years since the current Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation started. Which puts us in the only about 27% or so of geological record in which there's been permanent ice at the poles. Just to put this global warming hysteria over a handful of degrees into a proper context.
> First, it is still hotly debated when the next glacial period is due, and most geological studies I've read actually put it at closer to 50,000 years from now.
You're misremembering that I'm pretty sure. Quick google shows this at the BBC couple weeks ago:
"The last Ice Age ended about 11,500 years ago, and when the next one should begin has not been entirely clear...In the journal Nature Geoscience, they write that the next Ice Age would begin within 1,500 years - but emissions have been so high that it will not..."
Everything I've read is that the average is about 11,000 years before the next one starts, which means if we were on average track the Little Ice Age would have been the start of the next one. If the Modern Warm Period recovery is due to us, well then good for us I say!
> But even if the next ice age were imminent, and you actually cared about preventing it, you'd argue for saving our fossil fuels and doling them out slowly to stabilize against the gradual cooling, when we need them, rather than using them all up now and overshooting, when we don't.
A clever argument, but no: I'd argue for throwing up nuclear power stations now so they can pump out water vapor when the need arises. Water vapor is a way more effective GHG than CO2 is. Indeed, it's not actually clear that water vapor leaves enough stray IR around in the appropriate wavelengths for CO2 to have anywhere near the effect that IPCC models assume. That we're not seeing temperatures rise under clouded conditions as much as under clear conditions is a fairly sound piece of evidence that it doesn't, and the Modern Warming Period is likelier to be due to historically low cloud cover, pace the Svensmark cloud seeding theory; all the 20th C. warming can be explained by a 2% decrease in cloud cover without having to invoke GHG at all.
But since we only have 30 years of reliable (ie, satellite) cloud cover measurements, anything before being deduced from ship's logs and the like, and being able to measure the Sun's activity in any kind of quantitative fashion is of similar lack of vintage, we have no idea what changes in cloud cover there's been; nor how the models should account for them. Currently accepted models assume, with absolutely no supporting evidence for that assumption whatsoever, that they are a positive feedback. Actual measurements are unclear but support more the idea that they're actually a negative feedback. Should have a pretty good clue either way in another five-ten years or so.
> Uh, an Ice Age would not kill off the entire world's population.
Pretty much it would, as a matter of fact.
Thing is, there's two things about Ice Ages; first the ice thing, but more importantly, they're *dry* in the parts that aren't covered by ice. Which means biomass plummets even more than you'd expect from the temperature. And cereal crops are particularly hard hit, which cuts out the foundation of basically everything except fishing that feeds people.
After you account for these knockon effects, the estimates for how many people could be fed in an Ice Age range from 400 million worldwide down to a few tens of millions.
"Catastrophic" AGW has that beat all to hell. So go global warming go!
Short scale: We're climbing out of the Little Ice Age, just a hair above the three-century trendline right now, but not unprecedentedly so; early 1700s had quicker warming than the last half-century.
Long scale: We're approaching the end of an interglacial period, and that's when it's warmest.
> Regardless of the cause, that change must be stopped,
No, we should do our damnedest to speed it up, and hope to God the alarmists are right in everything they say. The wildest forecasts I've heard are that a billion, maybe a billion and a quarter, will be killed off by AGW. Beats the hell out of the six and a half billion or so that would be killed off by the next Ice Age, which we're a bit overdue for already; and if they are right than we can get the average temperature up 6, hey that's just about the amount than an Ice Age lowers it. How convenient!
Good bit warmer than now. We can tell because in Greenland receding glaciers are exposing Viking settlements, where beech tree stumps can be found in permafrost.
>... Before 800?
Good bit warmer than it was just before 1300. We can tell because receding glaciers in the Alps are exposing Roman trading routes through passes that were considered permanently glaciated until the last few years; and unknown in the records extant at the time of moderate climate in Greenland, evidenced above.
>... Before 300?
It is generally suspected that the Minoan Warm Period was warmer than both the Roman Warm Period and Medieval Warm Period because of descriptions of crops grown, but there's no "go look for yourself" smoking guns like the above.
Re:Let Us Remember the Chinese Workers instead
on
Steve Jobs Dead At 56
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· Score: 1
> let us remember all the Chinese workers who commited suicide
Let us remember that the suicide rate of the 1 million+ workers at Foxconn is less than a third of Chinese as a whole.
Reducing suicide rate by two-thirds is a pretty decent accomplishment.
> My music library contains somewhere on the order of 30k files; I'd gladly pay $25 to replace all the crap automagically.
One note here, it seems from initial reports that your $25 gets you 20k songs max. I would suspect that's probably a licensing limitation, along the lines of iTunes allowing you to only burn 5 copies of a playlist to CD back in the day.
Still, I'm with you, $25/yr to keep more music than I can plausibly listen to in adequate for mobile quality handy in the cloud sure strikes me as a massively worthwhile deal for time saved compared to backing up and syncing to my half-dozen iDevices myself; and I'm pretty darn sure it's likely to strike a lot of other iDevice users the same way. Even leaving completely aside the whole amnesty debate.
"It's possible that this is either an oversight or that Apple deliberately kept the old JavaScript engine for web apps in case it broke functionality that the app was depending on."
No, it's a security thing. This was noted when people first found out about Nitro.
"apparently iOS 4.3 features JS JIT. did they lift restriction from the kernel that prevented mmap-ing rwx memory pages? hmm."
So in 4.3 they've lifted it for Safari.app and only Safari.app. Presumably they will lift it in future for at least web app bookmarks; UIWebView in general might be somewhat more problematic security-wise, but we shall see.
"Can you (or since you are unwilling, anyone else) point to where in the license the FSF position is codified in legal language instead of baboon like posturing"
I quoted the "baboon like posturing" of the Free Software Federation's Brett Smith, which is the reason VLC is not in the App Store today.
Or perhaps you have an explanation of why VLC is not in the App Store today that is not reliant on the "baboon like posturing" of the Free Software Federation's Brett Smith? Absent that, I will take his "baboon like posturing" and the consequent removal of VLC from the App Store as being conclusive evidence of the actual issues at hand, and your blathering as of no consequence.
"There's nothing at all about the App Store that prevents this, as long as your provide all of the code for your project somewhere everyone can get to."
You appear to utterly misunderstand the FSF's position. From the PC Magazine article on the VLC flap:
"The GPL gives Apple permission to distribute this software through the App Store. All they would have to do is follow the license's conditions to help keep the software free," wrote the Free Software Federation's Brett Smith earlier this year. "Instead, Apple has decided that they prefer to impose Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and proprietary legal terms on all programs in the App Store."
You see "source" mentioned anywhere there? Nope. That's because it's not about the source. It's about restricting distribution to signed binaries, and about reserving the rights to remote kill malware and suchlike. There is no issue with source, as my Wolf3D example shows nicely. The issue is that the FSF refuses to accept that a consumer device capable of exploiting the user's personal and financial information really does need to have its access curated, and although sure Apple's current policies could use significant tweaking, there's no way that they can ever both satisfy the FSF and be responsible to their nontechnical users.
If the source were included (or included as an option) in the download,
That's exactly how id does it for instance, pop open the Wolf3D.ipa iTunes installed and hey presto there it is.
> would that resolve the issue?
No, the alleged issue -- the biggest, anyways, there's a few more -- is that you can't redistribute the binary (well, you can to jailbroken devices or developers who can run codesign themselves, but in the general case you can't). Source doesn't come into it at all; anyone who claims source distribution is an issue should be gently corrected that there is no impediment to including all GPL-required assets in the.ipa iTunes provides, and pointed at the live example of Wolf3D should they need to prove so to themselves.
Since there is no way in hell... and nor should there be, anyone who is sane enough to recognize security concerns attendant on any responsible smartphone provider will accept... that Apple will ever allow unsigned binaries access to their devices, this issue is effectively unresolvable until the FSF pulls its head out and accepts that the general public really, truly, should have code signing protection, remote malware killswitch, etc. for their smartphone devices; there's just too much personal and financial information available there for any responsible company to not do their best to lock down the platform.
And if you're not the general public, you can go right ahead and take the developer option mentioned above, and for the foreseeable future you'll probably be able to take advantage of the jailbreak option too. So there really is no issue here, to people who are reasonable enough to consider the user instead of just their rabid Apple-hating zealotry. 'Tis strange indeed that whilst the TOS of Android Market are similarly infringing in all the ways that are alleged to matter wrt remote kill and so forth, the Apple-bad crowd never seem to notice...
Slashdot Mirror
In general you are correct, but if you use a nice OTA they'll eat it. Case in point: Tried to take a Cambodia Air flight + hotel package I'd booked through Expedia, and when the plane broke they ... did not move expeditiously to arrange a replacement. So I took the next flight out on my own dime. Complained about that to the airline they said nope booking V class no refunds no credit doesn't matter the plane never took off. Kinda miffed. Whined to Expedia.co.th and they were like OH WHY YES FULL FLIGHT REFUND AND FIRST NIGHT OF HOTEL TOO!
So yeah, if the OTA likes you, it works. However, note they prefixed that with "We don't want to lose you as a customer, so..." That's most likely the trick here.
> - what would Twitter know about improving revenue exactly?
http://www.mopub.com
Pretty much the only noticeable Google competitor left standing up until yesterday. RIP.
> There is plenty of historic evidence of positive feedback - insolation changes alone are not sufficient to account for past changes in climate -
Not necessarily. Could just mean that actual drivers are misunderstood and/or intentionally buried. A particularly good example of the latter would be the Svensmark theories, which the CAGW alarmists refuse to engage with but just keep constantly being corroborated, why here's one that went public just the other day:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682613000862
> Its 'stability' has encompassed a very broad range of conditions, many of which would be very uncomfortable for human civilisation as we know it.
Most notably, Ice Ages. Which only started when C02 dropped below 500ppm or so; so let's get the concentration up that high at least, THEN we can talk about whether pushing it up more might be a good idea or what.
> Let's turn things around. We know that there *are* feedbacks - they are irrefutable from basic physical arguments. Are you saying that it just happens that these all balance each other out?
I don't pretend to that much insight. I'm only interested in climate voodoo^H^H^H^H^H^H science enough to have an opinion whether the state of current knowledge merits me packing my bags for Iqualit and start building beach condos in the Arctic Archipelago, or whether Haida Gwa'ii would be an appropriate choice, or staying here in Vancouver will work out fine. Which looks like the best bet so far.
> Hence, as you know, water vapour can amplify the GH effect of CO2.
An example of how the alarmists seize on every theoretical positive feedback for their models and ignore negative feedbacks which the observable long term stability of the climate demonstrates must exist, otherwise the first really big volcano eruptions would have charbroiled the planet.
For this particular case, the initial feedback is indeed positive but by actual satellite measurements turns out overall to be strongly negative due to cloud albedo effects and release of latent heat at height above the optically thick CO2/H2O layers of the atmosphere, this second of which is strongly marked in the tropics, exactly where the fantastical "tipping point" of the over the top hysterics would occur first if not for this negative feedback; and CAGW alarmism is disproved by the real world observations again.
> Who questions this and are they credible?
Can't find it again with a quick Google, sorry. The argument outline was that if C02 actually had its assumed infinite utilization of radiative capacity, the nighttime temperature profile as C02 rises would be going up faster than the overall temperature which it is not, therefore our current warm period is likelier to be related to declining cloud cover pace the Svensmark theories than it is to C02 rise. Since even the correlation is untestable without at least several more decades of accurate cloud cover measurement than the 1979-present which is actually available, I didn't bother bookmarking it. The point wasn't that this particular argument has any great chance of being correct and of magnitude enough to amount to a complete disproof of CAGW theory, it's that it not being trivially refutable demonstrates that much of this "settled science" is treated as axiomatic in the models but has no actual physical proof underlying it.
Indeed. And the biggest of those is water vapor, by an overwhelming margin.
Some even question whether there's *any* IR left over in the proper bands for C02 to make a difference. Patterns of night warmth are intriguingly suggestive of the contrary.
A good example of what I mean by innumeracy.
For purposes of driving a system response, the change is not the 40% of a particular component. The change is 0.00012, or 1.2% of 1% of the overall composition.
It is intuitively ridiculous to a numerate person that a chaotic system could possibly be so finely balanced that a 0.00012 composition change has positive feedback effects of any observable significance. If that were so, "it would have gone off the rails billions of years ago" is the common sense presumption.
Mind you, some intuitively ridiculous things are in fact true. But it's reasonably evident at this point that CAGW is not going to turn out to be one of them.
Nobody rational disputes that anthropogenic C02 will have a primary warming effect.
In exactly the same fashion that nobody rational disputes that anthropogenic H20 will raise the ocean level when I spit into it.
That the magnitude of this effect is concerning -- or even observable! -- any more in the first case than the second, that is unproven and looking less likely all the time as evidence accumulates that the solely positive feedbacks that IPCC-selected models assume are just not in accord with reality.
Any reconstruction less than Milankovitch cycle scale is cherry-picking. Your link to three decades is not qualitatively superior to the decade and a half of standstill enough to in any way merit "completely false".
For a particularly fascinating recent paper calling the hypothesis of C02 driving into question, check out:
http://www.clim-past.net/9/447/2013/cp-9-447-2013.pdf
Six identified oscillations with NO -- repeat, NO! -- parameter fitting result in an almost spooky close match to instrument records. Not a single model used in any of the IPCC reports can produce backcasting even laughably comparable to that.
And as an extra bonus, unlike the alarmists who appear to consider no actual observation whatsoever a possible falsification, which makes them priests and not scientists, you will note on page 451 that we have a very specific testable prediction of this theory, namely that temperatures have just begun to freefall in a mirror image of the 70s-90s period where why yes the slope of C02 concentration did coincide with temperature rise for a couple decades. If temperatures don't keep plummeting as this paper predicts, I'll cheerfully agree in a year or two they were clearly wrong. If the global anomaly does drop by half a degree over the next decade or so as this model implies and no CAGW supporter I am aware of admits as a possibility currently, will you agree that they've got climate drivers identified substantially correctly and the idea that 400 parts per million of something had any chance of primarily driving any positive feedback process always was as ridiculous as those of us who are numerate figured out at first glance?
Actually, no, that looks like a 9mm round or a .380 ACP. If it was a .22, then the bullet would take up rather more of the cartridge length and you'd notice the larger rim, .22 being rimfire and all.
Hmmmm ... actually, doing a quick SAAMI specs Google, I'll revise that first guess to that round most likely being a .32 S&W Short. They look pretty close to the more common calibers of my first guess, and that cartridge is only rated for 14500 PSI, which makes it a pretty compelling choice of commonly available caliber for a gun whose chamber is plastic. Still consider firing it a "great idea, you go first" kind of experience, mind you...
Yep. There's so many poverty traps in the way benefits are lost that it's basically impossible for anyone with two kids to ever make a financial case for joining the workforce without questionably high valuation of downstream wage increases. And not doing so, of course, absolutely guarantees poverty.
The immediate reaction is well scale this and scale that so that there's always marginal utility to working harder, but the patchwork of eligibilities and overlapping jurisdictions makes that darn near impossible to do adequately, and even attempting it an easily gamed bureaucratic nightmare.
Switzerland is usually a good place to look at how a society manages to reconcile libertarian ideals with communitarian practicality, and if I understand correctly the way they've squared this particular circle is that families are responsible for a person's welfare before the State steps in, and if you can assume a traditional family structure and a sense of shame in not being able to provide for yourself as is still a fairly good assumption in Switzerland, that reduces the problem down to the point where the burden on the public purse is not overly significant.
However, trying to follow that model in America would be rather problematic. If there's any sense of shame at all left in robbing your fellow citizens by means of government, it sure isn't evident anywhere.
Here in Vancouver Safeway pretty routinely has 20% off iTunes card packages, sometimes even with Air Miles 1 per $ to boot.
I've sometimes wondered how the math of $100 - $20 - ~$15 (Air Miles are a roughly 1:1 travel rewards system, so they're about 30 apiece) - $2 (the 2% cash back from the credit card I buy it with) leaves enough to cover costs on the Apple side. Certainly, anybody who thinks that "missing" 30% is all dropping straight into Apple McDuck's Money Vaults is pretty clueless about ... well, everything, really.
And as somebody mentioned above, those of us who were lucky to get 20% of retail for boxed software back in the day, plus we had to make the damn boxes and ship them, really don't have the time of day for any whiny kid bitching how hard dealing with Apple is these days.
"cherry picked parts"
Errrrrrrr .... which part of "longest" is unclear to you?
For an accusation of "cherry picking" to not be nonsensical, there needs to be more than one cherry to pick from, my not so clever friend.
> How about a link to that dataset
Why, yes. Yes, my not so clever friend, I can certainly help you there.
http://letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=CET+temperature+record
Nope; the CET temperature record, our longest instrumental record, shows that the beginning of the 1700s had a steeper slope than the last couple decades. So even that position doesn't hold up soundly. We're somewhat unusually higher than the 350-year trendline right now yes, but that'll have to continue for another 18 years and top the ending in 1730ish warming cycle before unprecedented in magnitude and length is a true statement.
Well, that's it for this exchange.
"Instrumental measurements of the Sun alone already tell us that solar changes don't line up with the recent period of warming."
Anyone who claims this is either
A) Unaware of the Svensmark theories and the support the CLOUD experiments provide, which makes them not worth engaging because of their demonstrated ignorance of the field; or
B) Denying actual, physical, science in favor of unfalsifiable theory; which makes them not worth engaging because they are actively attempting deceit.
For those who wish to follow up and make their own decisions on this or the other issues mentioned, wattsupwiththat.com is a decent source to find discussion of a wide variety of contrarian issues and positions that the government-dependent cliques attempt to deny.
Both reproduce just fine on land as well as ice. That we think of them as ice breeding now is due to mankind's predation. See Farley Mowat's 'Sea of Slaughter' for a good rundown on how it's us that pushed their remnants into the areas we think of as native today.
The correct scale on which to consider the evolution of their Arctic adaptations in general is the 2.58 million years since the current Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation started. Which puts us in the only about 27% or so of geological record in which there's been permanent ice at the poles. Just to put this global warming hysteria over a handful of degrees into a proper context.
> First, it is still hotly debated when the next glacial period is due, and most geological studies I've read actually put it at closer to 50,000 years from now.
You're misremembering that I'm pretty sure. Quick google shows this at the BBC couple weeks ago:
"The last Ice Age ended about 11,500 years ago, and when the next one should begin has not been entirely clear...In the journal Nature Geoscience, they write that the next Ice Age would begin within 1,500 years - but emissions have been so high that it will not..."
Everything I've read is that the average is about 11,000 years before the next one starts, which means if we were on average track the Little Ice Age would have been the start of the next one. If the Modern Warm Period recovery is due to us, well then good for us I say!
> But even if the next ice age were imminent, and you actually cared about preventing it, you'd argue for saving our fossil fuels and doling them out slowly to stabilize against the gradual cooling, when we need them, rather than using them all up now and overshooting, when we don't.
A clever argument, but no: I'd argue for throwing up nuclear power stations now so they can pump out water vapor when the need arises. Water vapor is a way more effective GHG than CO2 is. Indeed, it's not actually clear that water vapor leaves enough stray IR around in the appropriate wavelengths for CO2 to have anywhere near the effect that IPCC models assume. That we're not seeing temperatures rise under clouded conditions as much as under clear conditions is a fairly sound piece of evidence that it doesn't, and the Modern Warming Period is likelier to be due to historically low cloud cover, pace the Svensmark cloud seeding theory; all the 20th C. warming can be explained by a 2% decrease in cloud cover without having to invoke GHG at all.
But since we only have 30 years of reliable (ie, satellite) cloud cover measurements, anything before being deduced from ship's logs and the like, and being able to measure the Sun's activity in any kind of quantitative fashion is of similar lack of vintage, we have no idea what changes in cloud cover there's been; nor how the models should account for them. Currently accepted models assume, with absolutely no supporting evidence for that assumption whatsoever, that they are a positive feedback. Actual measurements are unclear but support more the idea that they're actually a negative feedback. Should have a pretty good clue either way in another five-ten years or so.
> Uh, an Ice Age would not kill off the entire world's population.
Pretty much it would, as a matter of fact.
Thing is, there's two things about Ice Ages; first the ice thing, but more importantly, they're *dry* in the parts that aren't covered by ice. Which means biomass plummets even more than you'd expect from the temperature. And cereal crops are particularly hard hit, which cuts out the foundation of basically everything except fishing that feeds people.
After you account for these knockon effects, the estimates for how many people could be fed in an Ice Age range from 400 million worldwide down to a few tens of millions.
"Catastrophic" AGW has that beat all to hell. So go global warming go!
> Then, WHY is there global warming?
Short scale: We're climbing out of the Little Ice Age, just a hair above the three-century trendline right now, but not unprecedentedly so; early 1700s had quicker warming than the last half-century.
Long scale: We're approaching the end of an interglacial period, and that's when it's warmest.
> Regardless of the cause, that change must be stopped,
No, we should do our damnedest to speed it up, and hope to God the alarmists are right in everything they say. The wildest forecasts I've heard are that a billion, maybe a billion and a quarter, will be killed off by AGW. Beats the hell out of the six and a half billion or so that would be killed off by the next Ice Age, which we're a bit overdue for already; and if they are right than we can get the average temperature up 6, hey that's just about the amount than an Ice Age lowers it. How convenient!
> What was it like ... Before 1300?
Good bit warmer than now. We can tell because in Greenland receding glaciers are exposing Viking settlements, where beech tree stumps can be found in permafrost.
> ... Before 800?
Good bit warmer than it was just before 1300. We can tell because receding glaciers in the Alps are exposing Roman trading routes through passes that were considered permanently glaciated until the last few years; and unknown in the records extant at the time of moderate climate in Greenland, evidenced above.
> ... Before 300?
It is generally suspected that the Minoan Warm Period was warmer than both the Roman Warm Period and Medieval Warm Period because of descriptions of crops grown, but there's no "go look for yourself" smoking guns like the above.
> let us remember all the Chinese workers who commited suicide
Let us remember that the suicide rate of the 1 million+ workers at Foxconn is less than a third of Chinese as a whole.
Reducing suicide rate by two-thirds is a pretty decent accomplishment.
> My music library contains somewhere on the order of 30k files; I'd gladly pay $25 to replace all the crap automagically.
One note here, it seems from initial reports that your $25 gets you 20k songs max. I would suspect that's probably a licensing limitation, along the lines of iTunes allowing you to only burn 5 copies of a playlist to CD back in the day.
Still, I'm with you, $25/yr to keep more music than I can plausibly listen to in adequate for mobile quality handy in the cloud sure strikes me as a massively worthwhile deal for time saved compared to backing up and syncing to my half-dozen iDevices myself; and I'm pretty darn sure it's likely to strike a lot of other iDevice users the same way. Even leaving completely aside the whole amnesty debate.
"It's possible that this is either an oversight or that Apple deliberately kept the old JavaScript engine for web apps in case it broke functionality that the app was depending on."
No, it's a security thing. This was noted when people first found out about Nitro.
"apparently iOS 4.3 features JS JIT. did they lift restriction from the kernel that prevented mmap-ing rwx memory pages? hmm."
http://twitter.com/mraleph/status/43030240175468544
So in 4.3 they've lifted it for Safari.app and only Safari.app. Presumably they will lift it in future for at least web app bookmarks; UIWebView in general might be somewhat more problematic security-wise, but we shall see.
"Can you (or since you are unwilling, anyone else) point to where in the license the FSF position is codified in legal language instead of baboon like posturing"
I quoted the "baboon like posturing" of the Free Software Federation's Brett Smith, which is the reason VLC is not in the App Store today.
Or perhaps you have an explanation of why VLC is not in the App Store today that is not reliant on the "baboon like posturing" of the Free Software Federation's Brett Smith? Absent that, I will take his "baboon like posturing" and the consequent removal of VLC from the App Store as being conclusive evidence of the actual issues at hand, and your blathering as of no consequence.
"There's nothing at all about the App Store that prevents this, as long as your provide all of the code for your project somewhere everyone can get to."
You appear to utterly misunderstand the FSF's position. From the PC Magazine article on the VLC flap:
"The GPL gives Apple permission to distribute this software through the App Store. All they would have to do is follow the license's conditions to help keep the software free," wrote the Free Software Federation's Brett Smith earlier this year. "Instead, Apple has decided that they prefer to impose Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) and proprietary legal terms on all programs in the App Store."
You see "source" mentioned anywhere there? Nope. That's because it's not about the source. It's about restricting distribution to signed binaries, and about reserving the rights to remote kill malware and suchlike. There is no issue with source, as my Wolf3D example shows nicely. The issue is that the FSF refuses to accept that a consumer device capable of exploiting the user's personal and financial information really does need to have its access curated, and although sure Apple's current policies could use significant tweaking, there's no way that they can ever both satisfy the FSF and be responsible to their nontechnical users.
If the source were included (or included as an option) in the download,
That's exactly how id does it for instance, pop open the Wolf3D.ipa iTunes installed and hey presto there it is.
> would that resolve the issue?
No, the alleged issue -- the biggest, anyways, there's a few more -- is that you can't redistribute the binary (well, you can to jailbroken devices or developers who can run codesign themselves, but in the general case you can't). Source doesn't come into it at all; anyone who claims source distribution is an issue should be gently corrected that there is no impediment to including all GPL-required assets in the .ipa iTunes provides, and pointed at the live example of Wolf3D should they need to prove so to themselves.
Since there is no way in hell ... and nor should there be, anyone who is sane enough to recognize security concerns attendant on any responsible smartphone provider will accept ... that Apple will ever allow unsigned binaries access to their devices, this issue is effectively unresolvable until the FSF pulls its head out and accepts that the general public really, truly, should have code signing protection, remote malware killswitch, etc. for their smartphone devices; there's just too much personal and financial information available there for any responsible company to not do their best to lock down the platform.
And if you're not the general public, you can go right ahead and take the developer option mentioned above, and for the foreseeable future you'll probably be able to take advantage of the jailbreak option too. So there really is no issue here, to people who are reasonable enough to consider the user instead of just their rabid Apple-hating zealotry. 'Tis strange indeed that whilst the TOS of Android Market are similarly infringing in all the ways that are alleged to matter wrt remote kill and so forth, the Apple-bad crowd never seem to notice...