Yeah, Mars Attacks Again, Mission to Mars Revisited, National Lampoon's Vacation to Mars, Lord of the O-Rings - The Two Launches, Star Wars XVI - Attack of the Green Clowns, 2003 - A Space Affair, Star Trek 12 - In Search Of A Borg Franchise, Die Hard IX - Yeehaa, Martians! and, finally, the new version of that old TV show My Friend Martian starring Wil Wheaton.
Or having an Inflatible You to stick in your chair and fool the PHB.
The last time I went to the US (3 weeks in '98 doing tech support liason for our US subsidiary) I stuck a cardboard Me in my chair. Not to fool the PHB, but to act as a scarecrow so my co-workers wouldn't steal the CD-RW, scanner or any of the other cool toys I had accrued over time. I also regularly took polaroids of my desk to see if anything had gone missing.:-)
You're right, they were better. Alas, they didn't show up high enough in my hasty Google search. Eric needs a revolution to improve his Goggle ranking.;-)
This
article was linked from the article in the post.
Excerpt:
In the October 20 issue of The Astrophysical Journal, Gray and Simon Ellingsen, of Australia's University of Tasmania, report on new observations (partially supported by the SETI Institute) designed to test this idea. Their new try was made at the 26-meter radio telescope in Hobart, Tasmania. This southern hemisphere instrument could continuously follow for most of a day the patch of sky (in the constellation of Sagittarius) where the "Big Ear" was pointing when it found the 'Wow' signal. They made six 14-hour observations, and even though their telescope was rather smaller than the venerable Ohio State antenna, they still had sufficient sensitivity to find signals only 5% as strong as Wow's 1977 intensity. They also covered five times as much of the radio dial as the original "Big Ear" telescope.
Bottom line? No dice. To quote from their article, "no signals resembling the Ohio State Wow were detected..." Of course, if the signal's repetition cycle were much longer than 14 hours, then even this careful experiment could have easily missed it. But as Gray and Ellingsen point out, if the signal were really this infrequent, then the chance to have found it in the first place was very slim.
So was the Wow signal our first detection of extraterrestrials? It might have been, but no scientist would make such a claim. Scientific experiment is inherently, and rightly, skeptical. This isn't just a sour attitude; it's the only way to avoid routinely fooling yourself. So until and unless the cosmic beep measured in Ohio is found again, the Wow signal will remain a What signal.
Easy. A light year is like a leap year, except we set it on fire to light up the place a bit. A parsec is a fast-paced multiplayer cross-platform 3D Internet space combat game.
Or, it could be that a light year is the distance that a photon would travel on a standard solar year, in vacuum, while a parsec is the distance from which the radius of the earth's orbit would subtend an angle of one second of arc. One parsec is roughly 3.26168 light years.
Google is mother, Google is father. Worship Google.
Imagine our embarrassment when They finally arrive and want to be taken to our leader and we realize we have to let them meet George W. It's going to be Mars Attacks all over again...
'notobviuous'. UUNet had that as the password needed to access the UUCP modem box. You needed a 'real' login/password combo to actually access the server behind it, but this one just cracked me up everytime I saw it. I imagined a PHB telling a tech to come up with a password that wasn't obvious and he cheerfully complied.:-)
Other good ones are 'obscure' and 'secret', always fun if someone asks you for the password.
-What's your password?
-It's obscure.
-Good, but what is it?
-I told you, it's obscure.
-OK, let's start at the top, what's your login?
-It's secret. No, really! No, not the comfy chair!
Because one of them adds bogus costs like charging extra for "experimental media" until there's almost nothing left and then takes your copyrights, claiming you did "work for hire" for them. That's why.
I imagine one could also remove mountains to allow remote viewing of approaching territory.
Wallhack!
Other than that, it's not that often that territory actually approaches you. Then again, I heard a story of a mountain going to see this Mohammed dude once...
North Vietnamese military and and Viet Cong deaths are estimated at 850000
That sounds like the 'old' numbers.
The Hanoi government revealed on April 4
(1995) that the true civilian casualties of the Vietnam War were 2,000,000 in the north, and 2,000,000 in the south. Military casualties were 1.1 million killed and 600,000 wounded in 21 years of war. These figures were deliberately falsified during the war by the North Vietnamese Communists to avoid demoralizing the population.
http://www.rjsmith.com/kia_tbl.html
You do have a point in the south, though. Let's say 3.1 million then, that gives a ratio of 54 which still is higher than for the invasion of Iraq (so far, that is - the numbers and ratios are bound to change).
That's true, but it's going to be a while to get an accurate count, what with whole divisions surrendering one day and attacking coalition forces the next...
the US has lost 24 soldiers and has gained a large portion of Iraqi territory, and has killed at least 1000 Iraqi soldiers
1. So far, you have gained a lot of empty desert and resentment among the local population.
2. That's a kill/death-ratio of 42 (not 800). In Vietnam, 5.1 million Vietnamese were killed, compared to 50,000 Americans. That was a ratio of 1 to 100 and you still lost that war.
You do know that the levels of CO2 have been a lot higher before?
Of course: When dinosaurs roamed the earth. Please try to stay serious, won't you? This is a serious matter.
At what time in history do you consider the earth to be "perfect"?
Not perfect, just less influenced by us. The CO2 levels were fairly constant during our entire rise from Cro-Magnon to pre-industrial times, ie until roughly 100 years ago. Those are the levels consistent with the climate that we have adapted our society, habitation zones and comfort levels to.
high levels of CO2 will _decrease_ the warming. [link1 [co2science.org]]
Read the study in your link: That's a local effect. In fact, the very same local effect that I brought up in my last post, the loss of the Ocean Conveyor that will bring colder climates to north Europe and the Americas. Also, that study does nothing to disclaim the possible link between global warming and the loss of the Conveyor, which in itself would be a disaster for millions of people.
& [link2 [agu.org]]
The temperatures in the higher atmosphere are not linearly connected to the temperatures at ground level. This link is poorly understood, but in general it seems that the ground (which, after all, is where we live) is currently getting substantially warmer while the upper atmosphere is cooling off. Whether the earth as a whole is cooling or heating up is semantics, the point is that something is drastically affecting our climate patterns and rapidly rising levels of CO2 coincides almost perfectly with this rapid change, making it a prime suspect. Cutting back on our CO2 emissions to what they were before we started burning large amounts of oil is a prudent and, I believe, necessary move.
I do not consider there to be any "greenhouse gases" since no one really knows the net effect of having them in the atmosphere
I will personally grant you some money towards flying you to Venus for in-depth, personal studies.:-) I'm actually surprised anyone still has doubts about that. Do you have any facts to back up this belief of yours?
Odd, I don't remember you being stupid. Maybe that's what being away from FidoNet too long does to a person.;-) I'll try one more time, really slowly: There is no deciding on who gets the good weather. We simply cut back greeenhouse gas emissions to the levels we had 100 years ago and see what happens. If we're affecting the weather, it will normalize the effects to the natural levels. If we're too tiny to have an impact, at least we tried and we'd be much better prepared for the changes that are a-coming. That is a win-win situation. If we do nothing, we're in a lose-lose situation - if we're causing it, we'll tip the scales and become extinct, if we're not causing it, we would have stuck our heads in the sand to long to adapt.
We're too tiny.
In that case, there should be no harm whatsoever in reducing our emissions to the levels we had 100 years ago.
Yes, which is something natural - it has done that before
Very large rocks have hit the earth before, killing most higher life forms. That's a natural phenomenon. Should we gladly accept the next one or try to stop it? Where do you draw the line? Are you advocating that it's OK for humans to double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere but not try to reduce the levels again because it would be interfering with natural processes? This does not make sense to me. If you're wary about messing with mother Nature, you should abhor increasing the emissions in the first place, not steps taken to reduce them back to natural levels.
My whole point is that NOTHING says that what we're seeing is unnatural, caused by humans, or even dangerous.
I can't really argue against the first[1], only the other two points. Changes in the climate are indeed naturally occuring. Does this mean that we have to help them along, especially since we will not have time to adapt our lifestyles nor bodies to them? I don't think so. If you're on a bus going downhill with no brakes, would you step on the accelerator instead of at least trying to stop it somehow?
Yes, of course I am advocating changing those 'natural' behaviours since they are indeed extremely dangerous: Stopping the Ocean Conveyor would put an end to the Gulf Stream, throwing large parts of the eastern north Americas and north Europe into the same kind of weather patters and temperatures currently seen in Siberia. There would be catastrophic droughts in the entire American midwest and other areas of the world which are today regarded as farm land would be turned into deserts for possibly decades, probably centuries. As long as there's even a minute risk that we're causing it this time, we'd need to stop and back up, real fast. What kind of evidence would you accept, BTW?
And yes, if there was a conceivable way of stopping the magnetic poles from shifting, I'd advocate that too. Holding back the next ice age to keep people from starving? Yep. Building a dam to generate electricity? Sure. Strip-mining foreign countries to make steel for the frame in my motorcycle? I'd rather not. Accepting minor environmental impact so I can have a computer and sit on Slashdot debating crap all day long? Hell yes! I'm not really keen on living in a cave, never knowing if I'll have or be lunch, which basically is what your idea of allowing all natural occurences have their path leads to in the end.
The weather changes are ALREADY dangerous as thousands of people are killed, directly or indirectly, by the changes in climate. The last decade has seen no less than TWO so called 100-year floods in the Midwestern US. Just look at the recent weather in Sweden. The last five winters we've had bears no resemblance to the winters of my childhood.
[1] I can't argue against it in the sense that there's inconclusive evidence that says we're doing it, but just consider the timing: Is it reasonable to assume that the emergence of our increase of greenhouse gas emissions and changing weather patterns at the same time is simply a coincidence?
Where we live, it's illegal to think about that.;-) We don't need that many new nukular plants, what we need is an awareness that it's time (for a lot of reasons) to stop spending resources we don't have and it's time to think about rebuilding our energy systems to adapt to the circumstances. When the oil runs out, it's too late.
Look, it's very simple, logically: You detect an adverse effect which we shall call E. Just before this effect was noticed, possible causes A, B, C and D also occured. A, B and C are beyond our control, but D isn't. Now, is it logical to keep doing D just because E could be caused by any of the other three reasons, in combination or alone? I put it to you that the logical conclusion must be to stop doing D and see if it helps E any. Going on about an imaginary "risk" that would suddenly appear when stopping D is just silly, after all we did just fine not doing D just moments ago.
Cows are more likely to cause any effects compared to cars.
And rows upon rows of millions of cows (Dr. Seuss would be proud of me) are a natural phenomenon since when, exactly? Humans do other things than drive cars, you know. For example, I drive a bike.;-)
(Not to mention that 65 million years ago the mean temperature of the earth was 10 degrees celsius higher. I guess the dinos drove a lot of SUVs...)
So you are advocating not only that we skip cutting back on emissions, but also that we deliberately increase them, try to create a few thousand more active volcanoes, killing off all the large mammals (including ourselves) and crawl back into the holes we lived in before we took to the trees? Is this a plan to manufacture more crude oil?
Well, I don't think Gaia would mind, but there are a few billion others that may have a problem with that plan. While we're at it, 4 billion years ago, it was waaay warmer than that. Let's go there instead, shall we?
The current increase in temperature is a bit drastic to be natural. We're not talking 10 degrees in 65 million years here (and just look at the changes in climate we've had since then) but in the range of tens of degrees in the last decade. At this rate, we will not have time to adapt.
Why then are the most recent increases of such concern? First, because the most recent increases are occurring at rates that have not been observed since the last ice age (IPCC 1995) and have only previously been observed in association with dramatic shifts in climate. Second, the dramatic increase in carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere over the past 150 years (from about 280 parts per million to about 360 parts per million) is largely due to anthropogenic (human-caused) effects (IPCC 1995).
In an important paper published in 2002 in Nature, oceanographers monitoring and analyzing conditions in the North Atlantic concluded that the North Atlantic has been freshening dramatically--continuously for the past 40 years but especially in the past decade.4 The new data show that since the mid-1960s, the subpolar seas feeding the North Atlantic have steadily and noticeably become less salty to depths of 1,000 to 4,000 meters.
This is the largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments.
At present the influx of fresher water has been distributed throughout the water column. But at some point, fresh water may begin to pile up at the surface of the North Atlantic. When that occurs, the Conveyor could slow down or cease operating.
Signs of a possible slowdown already exist. A 2001 report in Nature indicates that the flow of cold, dense water from the Norwegian and Greenland Seas into the North Atlantic has diminished by at least 20 percent since 1950.
Slashdot Mirror
Because.
FYI: Spanish carmaker Seat makes a Cordoba. Rust is not included in the standard package, I believe. :-)
The end of the world will not be televised.
Yeah, Mars Attacks Again, Mission to Mars Revisited, National Lampoon's Vacation to Mars, Lord of the O-Rings - The Two Launches, Star Wars XVI - Attack of the Green Clowns, 2003 - A Space Affair, Star Trek 12 - In Search Of A Borg Franchise, Die Hard IX - Yeehaa, Martians! and, finally, the new version of that old TV show My Friend Martian starring Wil Wheaton.
The last time I went to the US (3 weeks in '98 doing tech support liason for our US subsidiary) I stuck a cardboard Me in my chair. Not to fool the PHB, but to act as a scarecrow so my co-workers wouldn't steal the CD-RW, scanner or any of the other cool toys I had accrued over time. I also regularly took polaroids of my desk to see if anything had gone missing. :-)
Hey, I've patented that word!
Jeff B.
Nah, thanks. Although I almost friended you just to be the first, I just couldn't bring myself to it. Sorry.
Just watch The Matrix again. :-)
You're right, they were better. Alas, they didn't show up high enough in my hasty Google search. Eric needs a revolution to improve his Goggle ranking. ;-)
And you can find the ATA drivers here. ;-)
Wow. Now you see it, now you don't. I wonder where the previous FP went?
So you're saying that since they used their digits to encode the plans, that makes them digitally encoded? Sounds reasonable to me. :-)
Excerpt:
Or, it could be that a light year is the distance that a photon would travel on a standard solar year, in vacuum, while a parsec is the distance from which the radius of the earth's orbit would subtend an angle of one second of arc. One parsec is roughly 3.26168 light years.
Google is mother, Google is father. Worship Google.
Imagine our embarrassment when They finally arrive and want to be taken to our leader and we realize we have to let them meet George W. It's going to be Mars Attacks all over again...
Other good ones are 'obscure' and 'secret', always fun if someone asks you for the password.
-What's your password?
-It's obscure.
-Good, but what is it?
-I told you, it's obscure.
-OK, let's start at the top, what's your login?
-It's secret. No, really! No, not the comfy chair!
Because one of them adds bogus costs like charging extra for "experimental media" until there's almost nothing left and then takes your copyrights, claiming you did "work for hire" for them. That's why.
Wallhack!
Other than that, it's not that often that territory actually approaches you. Then again, I heard a story of a mountain going to see this Mohammed dude once...
That sounds like the 'old' numbers.
You do have a point in the south, though. Let's say 3.1 million then, that gives a ratio of 54 which still is higher than for the invasion of Iraq (so far, that is - the numbers and ratios are bound to change).
That's true, but it's going to be a while to get an accurate count, what with whole divisions surrendering one day and attacking coalition forces the next...
1. So far, you have gained a lot of empty desert and resentment among the local population.
2. That's a kill/death-ratio of 42 (not 800). In Vietnam, 5.1 million Vietnamese were killed, compared to 50,000 Americans. That was a ratio of 1 to 100 and you still lost that war.
Of course: When dinosaurs roamed the earth. Please try to stay serious, won't you? This is a serious matter.
At what time in history do you consider the earth to be "perfect"?
Not perfect, just less influenced by us. The CO2 levels were fairly constant during our entire rise from Cro-Magnon to pre-industrial times, ie until roughly 100 years ago. Those are the levels consistent with the climate that we have adapted our society, habitation zones and comfort levels to.
high levels of CO2 will _decrease_ the warming. [link1 [co2science.org]]
Read the study in your link: That's a local effect. In fact, the very same local effect that I brought up in my last post, the loss of the Ocean Conveyor that will bring colder climates to north Europe and the Americas. Also, that study does nothing to disclaim the possible link between global warming and the loss of the Conveyor, which in itself would be a disaster for millions of people.
& [link2 [agu.org]]
The temperatures in the higher atmosphere are not linearly connected to the temperatures at ground level. This link is poorly understood, but in general it seems that the ground (which, after all, is where we live) is currently getting substantially warmer while the upper atmosphere is cooling off. Whether the earth as a whole is cooling or heating up is semantics, the point is that something is drastically affecting our climate patterns and rapidly rising levels of CO2 coincides almost perfectly with this rapid change, making it a prime suspect. Cutting back on our CO2 emissions to what they were before we started burning large amounts of oil is a prudent and, I believe, necessary move.
I do not consider there to be any "greenhouse gases" since no one really knows the net effect of having them in the atmosphere
I will personally grant you some money towards flying you to Venus for in-depth, personal studies. :-) I'm actually surprised anyone still has doubts about that. Do you have any facts to back up this belief of yours?
Odd, I don't remember you being stupid. Maybe that's what being away from FidoNet too long does to a person. ;-) I'll try one more time, really slowly: There is no deciding on who gets the good weather. We simply cut back greeenhouse gas emissions to the levels we had 100 years ago and see what happens. If we're affecting the weather, it will normalize the effects to the natural levels. If we're too tiny to have an impact, at least we tried and we'd be much better prepared for the changes that are a-coming. That is a win-win situation. If we do nothing, we're in a lose-lose situation - if we're causing it, we'll tip the scales and become extinct, if we're not causing it, we would have stuck our heads in the sand to long to adapt.
We're too tiny.
In that case, there should be no harm whatsoever in reducing our emissions to the levels we had 100 years ago.
Very large rocks have hit the earth before, killing most higher life forms. That's a natural phenomenon. Should we gladly accept the next one or try to stop it? Where do you draw the line? Are you advocating that it's OK for humans to double the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere but not try to reduce the levels again because it would be interfering with natural processes? This does not make sense to me. If you're wary about messing with mother Nature, you should abhor increasing the emissions in the first place, not steps taken to reduce them back to natural levels.
My whole point is that NOTHING says that what we're seeing is unnatural, caused by humans, or even dangerous.
I can't really argue against the first[1], only the other two points. Changes in the climate are indeed naturally occuring. Does this mean that we have to help them along, especially since we will not have time to adapt our lifestyles nor bodies to them? I don't think so. If you're on a bus going downhill with no brakes, would you step on the accelerator instead of at least trying to stop it somehow?
Yes, of course I am advocating changing those 'natural' behaviours since they are indeed extremely dangerous: Stopping the Ocean Conveyor would put an end to the Gulf Stream, throwing large parts of the eastern north Americas and north Europe into the same kind of weather patters and temperatures currently seen in Siberia. There would be catastrophic droughts in the entire American midwest and other areas of the world which are today regarded as farm land would be turned into deserts for possibly decades, probably centuries. As long as there's even a minute risk that we're causing it this time, we'd need to stop and back up, real fast. What kind of evidence would you accept, BTW?
And yes, if there was a conceivable way of stopping the magnetic poles from shifting, I'd advocate that too. Holding back the next ice age to keep people from starving? Yep. Building a dam to generate electricity? Sure. Strip-mining foreign countries to make steel for the frame in my motorcycle? I'd rather not. Accepting minor environmental impact so I can have a computer and sit on Slashdot debating crap all day long? Hell yes! I'm not really keen on living in a cave, never knowing if I'll have or be lunch, which basically is what your idea of allowing all natural occurences have their path leads to in the end.
The weather changes are ALREADY dangerous as thousands of people are killed, directly or indirectly, by the changes in climate. The last decade has seen no less than TWO so called 100-year floods in the Midwestern US. Just look at the recent weather in Sweden. The last five winters we've had bears no resemblance to the winters of my childhood.
[1] I can't argue against it in the sense that there's inconclusive evidence that says we're doing it, but just consider the timing: Is it reasonable to assume that the emergence of our increase of greenhouse gas emissions and changing weather patterns at the same time is simply a coincidence?
Where we live, it's illegal to think about that. ;-) We don't need that many new nukular plants, what we need is an awareness that it's time (for a lot of reasons) to stop spending resources we don't have and it's time to think about rebuilding our energy systems to adapt to the circumstances. When the oil runs out, it's too late.
Look, it's very simple, logically: You detect an adverse effect which we shall call E. Just before this effect was noticed, possible causes A, B, C and D also occured. A, B and C are beyond our control, but D isn't. Now, is it logical to keep doing D just because E could be caused by any of the other three reasons, in combination or alone? I put it to you that the logical conclusion must be to stop doing D and see if it helps E any. Going on about an imaginary "risk" that would suddenly appear when stopping D is just silly, after all we did just fine not doing D just moments ago.
Cows are more likely to cause any effects compared to cars.
And rows upon rows of millions of cows (Dr. Seuss would be proud of me) are a natural phenomenon since when, exactly? Humans do other things than drive cars, you know. For example, I drive a bike. ;-)
(Not to mention that 65 million years ago the mean temperature of the earth was 10 degrees celsius higher. I guess the dinos drove a lot of SUVs ...)
So you are advocating not only that we skip cutting back on emissions, but also that we deliberately increase them, try to create a few thousand more active volcanoes, killing off all the large mammals (including ourselves) and crawl back into the holes we lived in before we took to the trees? Is this a plan to manufacture more crude oil?
Well, I don't think Gaia would mind, but there are a few billion others that may have a problem with that plan. While we're at it, 4 billion years ago, it was waaay warmer than that. Let's go there instead, shall we?
The current increase in temperature is a bit drastic to be natural. We're not talking 10 degrees in 65 million years here (and just look at the changes in climate we've had since then) but in the range of tens of degrees in the last decade. At this rate, we will not have time to adapt.
Wood's Hole Research Center - The Warming of the Earth
Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute - Abrupt Climate Change: Should We Be Worried?