Not far from where I type, the Great Centralia Coal Fire has been burning out of control since 1962 - despite all attempts to put it out. If the USA can't do it, why should you think China can?
Mythbusters is not bad as entertainment - certainly better than that 70s show - but science?
It is to laugh!
My favorite was when they proved that hitting a wooden dowel with an arrow always resulted in a split down the grain, regardless of speed, point of impact, or any other factor they managed to notice. From that, they concluded that Robin Hood could not possibly split one arrow with another. Amount of time spent doing historical/archeological research to determine whether 14 century archers preferred end-to-end straight-grained wood for their arrows? Zero. Zip. Nada.
The one where they "prove" Archimedes' mirror couldn't work is almost as funny, though. They actually used a previously sunken ship for a target without considering the effect that total saturation might have on the flammability of wood!
I love watching those guys with actual scientists in the room. It's just like MST3K!
I use undirected quoting everywhere except m4 programming. Are you accusing me of using proper english punctuation? If so, thanks! Nobody's ever accused me of that before, I'm honored.
If your statement was meant literally, I think you will find that your car does go faster if you "encourage" the driver with your buggy whip.
In written english, all paired punctuation marks are directed, which means they point inwards at what they enclose. Usually the left-side marks and right-side marks are mirror images of each other (like these parentheses).
Due to the limitations of the (horrendously badly engineered) standard PC keyboard, there are no left-hand double quote marks available, and the single quote marks do not properly mirror each other. So it is often impossible to type correct english on a PC.
Most of us shrug, and soldier on - ignoring the rules and using only right-hand marks, or using the left-hand single quote twice to fabricate a left-double-quote. Fabricated quotes don't look right and undirected quoting is faster (it also mimics the syntax of most programming languages, although m4 and some typesetting languages use directed quoting) so the former strategy has come to dominate the on-line world lately.
Younger people like yourself, who may have seen far more computer-typed text than hand-written or professionally printed text, don't automatically see undirected quoting as "wrong" and vaguely disturbing. Perhaps you've also never noticed the correct use of directed quoting in magazines and books. To me, it looks wrong no matter how you do it - possibly because when I was a child teachers still insisted on correct handwriting technique. Which is why I hate this keyboard I'm using!
Pumping previously sequestered carbon into the atmosphere cannot help but to change the energy absorbtion characteristics of the planet as a whole. To say otherwise is to ignore basic physics, I think, and I don't think it would be hard to devise an experiment to demonstrate this. Note I am not that kind of scientist, though!
Calculating average temperatures across the planet is mostly just an indirect, half-assed way of monitoring the change in atmospheric carbon. I met the guy who coined the term "global warming" about a decade ago, and he told me the worst thing he ever did in his scientific career was popularize that term. Pretty strong coming from a guy who once purposely contaminated a forest with plutonium!
It's clear that at some point, if you have enough carbon available, you can modify the environment - in the most obvious extreme by making the air unbreathable to mammals. We probably don't have the abillity to do that through human industry, unless we get really serious about it and start kicking off volcanoes with nukes on purpose. Maybe not even then; and I'm not in favor of doing the experiment, personally.
We don't really know where the tipping point is that will make human life impossible. It may have already passed - weather patterns may have already begun an inexorable change to a higher energy state that will wreak some yet-unforseen havoc on our species. Or, perhaps there is some counterbalancing factor that will restore equilibrium without human intervention, that we have not yet triggered. Or a thousand other maybes. Having no spare Earth for experimentation, it's all fantasy.
But there's no reason to believe that everything will continue as normal. As you've observed, weather variation is already pretty extreme and historically always has been. It's reasonable, given the observable data available, to act on the theory that this variability will increase as more solar energy is input into the system as a whole.
Myself, I agree with Nikola Tesla, who pointed out in 1905 that burning oil or any other non-renewable resource is stupidly wasteful. That stuff is so incredibly useful! Oil, for example, is a honkin' good lubricant.
Good point about the funding. Personally, I would rather the government spent counter-terrorism money on alleviating the conditions that breed terrorism instead of ineffectual military bungling and pervasive surveillance. But unfortunately George didn't ask for my opinion.:(
Still, I stand by my observation that terrorists are underachieving losers. Terrorism is not even close to being a significant threat to US society. Al-Quaeda has killed what, 5000 people more or less? That's not worth any military expenditure or abrogation of civil liberties; more people have died playing High School football than that!
#1 - I ADOPT. Do you? No? Then shut up about who has the "right" to have kids. And yes, I am fertile, as is my spouse, although it's none of your business. I have a biological kid too. And no, I don't adopt Chinese or Russian babies, I can't afford to fly to exotic places and rescue children. I go to the closest major city, which happens to be Wilmington.
#2 - I do not ask for or receive any charity from you, the government, or anyone else. Period. I am self-sufficient through 20 years of hard work; I own productive land with game and clean water and I would be fine if every other human on the planet disappeared tomorrow. So shut up about paying for me, you simply don't. I pay for you, though, since you require the business environment that my tax dollars make possible - an environment my family does not require. I have read your blog and posts; you require social support structures far more than I do.
#3 - I don't watch TV, we cook at home, we don't have an X-box, we drive to the beach for vacation, and all your other typical classist and racist arguments don't apply to my family either.
So, I do have a right to have kids. I have demonstrated it by providing a home and education for homeless, parentless kids you clearly don't want to pay for.
You, on the other claw, have not earned the right to even talk about parenting, much less the right to be one. Your snide contempt for poor people's financial mismanagement invalidates whatever good your "churches" do with your donations, as far as I'm concerned; in fact I'd rather you kept your money and grew some compassion.
And finally: Listen, I've seen "kill all nigger-lovers" spray-painted on my goddamn sidewalk, when we were the only mixed-race family in the plastic yuppie neighborhood I used to live in. I'm marked for death by the fucking phineas priests because I'm actually doing something meaningful while you grub for money and post clueless tripe about parenting on the Internet. Go adopt some parentless inner-city children, raise 'em up to be productive, self-actualized human beings and then you'll have the right to lecture me.
No one thinks phone calls made to Al-Qaeda shouldn't be taped.
I do. I think it's a waste of time and money. There are more important things to do.
Terrorists are pikers. Alcohol abuse kills more people than terrorism. Enron wrecked more lives than 9/11. The US government has committed farmoreatrocities than Al-Qaeda ever will. Terrorists are a just bunch of incompetent, underachieving losers with good press; hell, diseases you never heard of kill more innocent people than terrorism every single day.
The USA government's highly successful campaign to convert the "home of the brave" to the "land of gutless wimps" disgusts me. People are lining up to give away their civil rights (and their tax dollars) chasing some imaginary feeling of security that can't really be achieved since they have become terrorized, puling cowards.
I understand kids have a tendency to get away. I also understand that the market has provisions for tracking when kids do get away.
While I'm no fan of the FBI, your remarks about parenting are inutterably clueless. I suggest you stop digging the hole deeper. It's actually painful to watch.
dada21:I don't see how someone could kidnap my child if I was a good parent and actually parented the child at all times, as a parent should.
doughrama:You just lost all credibility.
You got that right! Denial of reality and good parenting are hardware incompatible.
Some of us have to work. And sleep (one of my kids sleepwalks, incidentally, as does my spouse). And some of us have chosen to parent more than one bright, inquisitive child. Human beings can't do these things and simultaneously do 24 hour bodyguard duty.
It should also be obvious that not every parent can afford nannies and high-tech surveillance, so don't bother bringing it up.
I keep a lot more than 50 days worth on line. And I get effectively more than 90% compression. And individual users can do their own restores from their own desktops.
Look at how dirvish works. Or rsnap, or rsync-incr, or rsnapshot, or ribs-backup, or indeed any tool based on Mike Rubel's basic idea.
I use a homebrew variation that is suited to my employer's unique needs and infrastructure. You may find it expedient to do the same. I don't save any metadata other than the snapshot date for each tree, and I use data mining techniques (well, actually I use find and gawk from command line) if I want to determine what's going on or how the system is doing.
It has run for years with no maintenance other than periodic OS patches. It is not our primary backup system because it does not support off-site archival, but it's well worth the investment for rapid restore of user-deleted files. I'll consider this array (I'm currently using linux soft raid 1+0 on two physically separate busses) when I need more disk eventually.
The point I was trying to make was that the cheapness of oil is artificial, as is the high cost of agricultural products. You're choosing to focus on one side of the equation only. Government interference (driven by a hereditary plutocratic aristocracy, in my opinion) has shaped the market from both sides.
You said "Oil is used world-wide, because it's cheaper than other forms of energy" but I have enormous hydropower potential in my back yard and absolutely no oil resources closer than 100 miles away. At one time the house I live in had a huge waterwheel in the basement, but it was ripped out decades ago because tax-sponsored oil-based infrastructure made it uneconomic to use. Today, due to the commercial availablility of extremely powerful magnets, it would be commercially viable again, but use of the water now requires permits from nine county and state agencies plus three federal ones. It would be far cheaper, in a fair and free marketplace, to fabricate and install a 1-ton francis turbine with an environmentally safe coanda wedgewire intake on my stream than to continuously truck propane in over the lifetime of such a turbine.
Obviously, this is ancedotal and not scientific evidence, but you get my point I bet.
BTW, the high energy density of oil makes it good for prosecuting offensive war, while the high sustainability of agriculturally based, locally generated fuels makes them better for maintaining defenses. It seems like society should not sponsor one to the detriment of the other (perhaps using a minimum of trade interference to keep both available) but the US fedguv has been distorting the marketplace for over half a century with heavy-handed, half-assed attempts at sponsoring both - with ever-increasing use of tax dollars.
Aren't you forgetting even more massive subsidies and tax manipulation enjoyed by other energy sources?
And remember US Farm Parity laws, too - if the fedguv didn't pay people to not grow crops, ethanol and food would cost a tiny fraction of what they now cost.
A true market economy would probably work better. But as you say, we'll never know....
While I agree that obligatory DRM is bad, and I certainly won't buy anything that implements it (get yer region-free DVD players here!) I think you are overstating the case a bit.
The "worst tyranny" would more likely be one that has uniformed soldiers rape children to death in front of your wife so she will tell them where you are hiding.
Riiiiiiight, we'll use secure keys to secure the keys. And then we'll make chickens without eggs!
Either you are determined to misinterpret whatever I say to make yourself appear clever, or you are a troll, or we are not speaking the same language. Further conversation seems pointless.
The key is to have the government do as little as possible.
And if you can figure out exactly what as little as possible translates to in the real world, you will be hailed as the greatest statesman-philosopher that ever lived.
When I read your (very cogent) post there was a Ken Thompson quote at the bottom of the page that said "When in doubt, use brute force".
So, thinking along the lines of elegance and brute force, why not make the DAC always run at the highest useable clock speed (unless the user goes to absurd lengths to make it not do so - you need to allow a hack so uber-gurus can solve obscure aliasing problems) and adjust the rate down as required by individual applications in the driver?
I'm not a sound/media guru, though I have written industrial A->D and D->A applications for use by the military and NASA.
Slashdot Mirror
Not far from where I type, the Great Centralia Coal Fire has been burning out of control since 1962 - despite all attempts to put it out. If the USA can't do it, why should you think China can?
Mythbusters is not bad as entertainment - certainly better than that 70s show - but science?
It is to laugh!
My favorite was when they proved that hitting a wooden dowel with an arrow always resulted in a split down the grain, regardless of speed, point of impact, or any other factor they managed to notice. From that, they concluded that Robin Hood could not possibly split one arrow with another. Amount of time spent doing historical/archeological research to determine whether 14 century archers preferred end-to-end straight-grained wood for their arrows? Zero. Zip. Nada.
The one where they "prove" Archimedes' mirror couldn't work is almost as funny, though. They actually used a previously sunken ship for a target without considering the effect that total saturation might have on the flammability of wood!
I love watching those guys with actual scientists in the room. It's just like MST3K!
I use undirected quoting everywhere except m4 programming. Are you accusing me of using proper english punctuation? If so, thanks! Nobody's ever accused me of that before, I'm honored.
If your statement was meant literally, I think you will find that your car does go faster if you "encourage" the driver with your buggy whip.
In written english, all paired punctuation marks are directed, which means they point inwards at what they enclose. Usually the left-side marks and right-side marks are mirror images of each other (like these parentheses).
Due to the limitations of the (horrendously badly engineered) standard PC keyboard, there are no left-hand double quote marks available, and the single quote marks do not properly mirror each other. So it is often impossible to type correct english on a PC.
Most of us shrug, and soldier on - ignoring the rules and using only right-hand marks, or using the left-hand single quote twice to fabricate a left-double-quote. Fabricated quotes don't look right and undirected quoting is faster (it also mimics the syntax of most programming languages, although m4 and some typesetting languages use directed quoting) so the former strategy has come to dominate the on-line world lately.
Younger people like yourself, who may have seen far more computer-typed text than hand-written or professionally printed text, don't automatically see undirected quoting as "wrong" and vaguely disturbing. Perhaps you've also never noticed the correct use of directed quoting in magazines and books. To me, it looks wrong no matter how you do it - possibly because when I was a child teachers still insisted on correct handwriting technique. Which is why I hate this keyboard I'm using!
Pumping previously sequestered carbon into the atmosphere cannot help but to change the energy absorbtion characteristics of the planet as a whole. To say otherwise is to ignore basic physics, I think, and I don't think it would be hard to devise an experiment to demonstrate this. Note I am not that kind of scientist, though!
Calculating average temperatures across the planet is mostly just an indirect, half-assed way of monitoring the change in atmospheric carbon. I met the guy who coined the term "global warming" about a decade ago, and he told me the worst thing he ever did in his scientific career was popularize that term. Pretty strong coming from a guy who once purposely contaminated a forest with plutonium!
It's clear that at some point, if you have enough carbon available, you can modify the environment - in the most obvious extreme by making the air unbreathable to mammals. We probably don't have the abillity to do that through human industry, unless we get really serious about it and start kicking off volcanoes with nukes on purpose. Maybe not even then; and I'm not in favor of doing the experiment, personally.
We don't really know where the tipping point is that will make human life impossible. It may have already passed - weather patterns may have already begun an inexorable change to a higher energy state that will wreak some yet-unforseen havoc on our species. Or, perhaps there is some counterbalancing factor that will restore equilibrium without human intervention, that we have not yet triggered. Or a thousand other maybes. Having no spare Earth for experimentation, it's all fantasy.
But there's no reason to believe that everything will continue as normal. As you've observed, weather variation is already pretty extreme and historically always has been. It's reasonable, given the observable data available, to act on the theory that this variability will increase as more solar energy is input into the system as a whole.
Myself, I agree with Nikola Tesla, who pointed out in 1905 that burning oil or any other non-renewable resource is stupidly wasteful. That stuff is so incredibly useful! Oil, for example, is a honkin' good lubricant.
Good point about the funding. Personally, I would rather the government spent counter-terrorism money on alleviating the conditions that breed terrorism instead of ineffectual military bungling and pervasive surveillance. But unfortunately George didn't ask for my opinion.
Still, I stand by my observation that terrorists are underachieving losers. Terrorism is not even close to being a significant threat to US society. Al-Quaeda has killed what, 5000 people more or less? That's not worth any military expenditure or abrogation of civil liberties; more people have died playing High School football than that!
#1 - I ADOPT. Do you? No? Then shut up about who has the "right" to have kids. And yes, I am fertile, as is my spouse, although it's none of your business. I have a biological kid too. And no, I don't adopt Chinese or Russian babies, I can't afford to fly to exotic places and rescue children. I go to the closest major city, which happens to be Wilmington.
#2 - I do not ask for or receive any charity from you, the government, or anyone else. Period. I am self-sufficient through 20 years of hard work; I own productive land with game and clean water and I would be fine if every other human on the planet disappeared tomorrow. So shut up about paying for me, you simply don't. I pay for you, though, since you require the business environment that my tax dollars make possible - an environment my family does not require. I have read your blog and posts; you require social support structures far more than I do.
#3 - I don't watch TV, we cook at home, we don't have an X-box, we drive to the beach for vacation, and all your other typical classist and racist arguments don't apply to my family either.
So, I do have a right to have kids. I have demonstrated it by providing a home and education for homeless, parentless kids you clearly don't want to pay for.
You, on the other claw, have not earned the right to even talk about parenting, much less the right to be one. Your snide contempt for poor people's financial mismanagement invalidates whatever good your "churches" do with your donations, as far as I'm concerned; in fact I'd rather you kept your money and grew some compassion.
And finally: Listen, I've seen "kill all nigger-lovers" spray-painted on my goddamn sidewalk, when we were the only mixed-race family in the plastic yuppie neighborhood I used to live in. I'm marked for death by the fucking phineas priests because I'm actually doing something meaningful while you grub for money and post clueless tripe about parenting on the Internet. Go adopt some parentless inner-city children, raise 'em up to be productive, self-actualized human beings and then you'll have the right to lecture me.
No one thinks phone calls made to Al-Qaeda shouldn't be taped.
I do. I think it's a waste of time and money. There are more important things to do.
Terrorists are pikers. Alcohol abuse kills more people than terrorism. Enron wrecked more lives than 9/11. The US government has committed far more atrocities than Al-Qaeda ever will. Terrorists are a just bunch of incompetent, underachieving losers with good press; hell, diseases you never heard of kill more innocent people than terrorism every single day.
The USA government's highly successful campaign to convert the "home of the brave" to the "land of gutless wimps" disgusts me. People are lining up to give away their civil rights (and their tax dollars) chasing some imaginary feeling of security that can't really be achieved since they have become terrorized, puling cowards.
I understand kids have a tendency to get away. I also understand that the market has provisions for tracking when kids do get away.
While I'm no fan of the FBI, your remarks about parenting are inutterably clueless. I suggest you stop digging the hole deeper. It's actually painful to watch.
dada21: I don't see how someone could kidnap my child if I was a good parent and actually parented the child at all times, as a parent should.
doughrama: You just lost all credibility.
You got that right! Denial of reality and good parenting are hardware incompatible.
Some of us have to work. And sleep (one of my kids sleepwalks, incidentally, as does my spouse). And some of us have chosen to parent more than one bright, inquisitive child. Human beings can't do these things and simultaneously do 24 hour bodyguard duty.
It should also be obvious that not every parent can afford nannies and high-tech surveillance, so don't bother bringing it up.
Since their show is entertainment pretending to be science, how appropriate that they should examine science fiction.
I keep a lot more than 50 days worth on line. And I get effectively more than 90% compression. And individual users can do their own restores from their own desktops.
Look at how dirvish works. Or rsnap, or rsync-incr, or rsnapshot, or ribs-backup, or indeed any tool based on Mike Rubel's basic idea.
I use a homebrew variation that is suited to my employer's unique needs and infrastructure. You may find it expedient to do the same. I don't save any metadata other than the snapshot date for each tree, and I use data mining techniques (well, actually I use find and gawk from command line) if I want to determine what's going on or how the system is doing.
It has run for years with no maintenance other than periodic OS patches. It is not our primary backup system because it does not support off-site archival, but it's well worth the investment for rapid restore of user-deleted files. I'll consider this array (I'm currently using linux soft raid 1+0 on two physically separate busses) when I need more disk eventually.
The point I was trying to make was that the cheapness of oil is artificial, as is the high cost of agricultural products. You're choosing to focus on one side of the equation only. Government interference (driven by a hereditary plutocratic aristocracy, in my opinion) has shaped the market from both sides.
You said "Oil is used world-wide, because it's cheaper than other forms of energy" but I have enormous hydropower potential in my back yard and absolutely no oil resources closer than 100 miles away. At one time the house I live in had a huge waterwheel in the basement, but it was ripped out decades ago because tax-sponsored oil-based infrastructure made it uneconomic to use. Today, due to the commercial availablility of extremely powerful magnets, it would be commercially viable again, but use of the water now requires permits from nine county and state agencies plus three federal ones. It would be far cheaper, in a fair and free marketplace, to fabricate and install a 1-ton francis turbine with an environmentally safe coanda wedgewire intake on my stream than to continuously truck propane in over the lifetime of such a turbine.
Obviously, this is ancedotal and not scientific evidence, but you get my point I bet.
BTW, the high energy density of oil makes it good for prosecuting offensive war, while the high sustainability of agriculturally based, locally generated fuels makes them better for maintaining defenses. It seems like society should not sponsor one to the detriment of the other (perhaps using a minimum of trade interference to keep both available) but the US fedguv has been distorting the marketplace for over half a century with heavy-handed, half-assed attempts at sponsoring both - with ever-increasing use of tax dollars.
Aren't you forgetting even more massive subsidies and tax manipulation enjoyed by other energy sources?
And remember US Farm Parity laws, too - if the fedguv didn't pay people to not grow crops, ethanol and food would cost a tiny fraction of what they now cost.
A true market economy would probably work better. But as you say, we'll never know....
While I agree that obligatory DRM is bad, and I certainly won't buy anything that implements it (get yer region-free DVD players here!) I think you are overstating the case a bit.
The "worst tyranny" would more likely be one that has uniformed soldiers rape children to death in front of your wife so she will tell them where you are hiding.
Why, it does absolutely everything that the Hurd does, and therefore is entirely Hurd compliant!
It isn't really a debate when you aren't hearing what the other person is saying.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
Your comment relates to use of modems as out-of-band transfer mechanisms exactly how?
Are you on Ritalin by any chance? You don't seem to be able to track an entire conversation at once.
Like the gaseous sun for example?
Remember, this is the guy who brought Hayao Miyazaki back to the US market.
Riiiiiiight, we'll use secure keys to secure the keys. And then we'll make chickens without eggs!
Either you are determined to misinterpret whatever I say to make yourself appear clever, or you are a troll, or we are not speaking the same language. Further conversation seems pointless.
When I read your (very cogent) post there was a Ken Thompson quote at the bottom of the page that said "When in doubt, use brute force".
So, thinking along the lines of elegance and brute force, why not make the DAC always run at the highest useable clock speed (unless the user goes to absurd lengths to make it not do so - you need to allow a hack so uber-gurus can solve obscure aliasing problems) and adjust the rate down as required by individual applications in the driver?
I'm not a sound/media guru, though I have written industrial A->D and D->A applications for use by the military and NASA.