Unfortunately, the people in charge failed to notice a good thing when they saw it and kept a good deal of it secret, leaving others to take computing forward. Similar story with what would become known as RSA.
Dialup is pretty much unusable now. Plus given how widespread broadband is now, it would't surprise me if it was just as cheap to provide an extra customer with broadband as with dialup. The marginal cost is pretty low, it's all the fixed infrastructure that's expensive.
1.5 Mbps is 30 times as fast as dialup. There's a *world* of difference between the two. In fact, you can do almost anything at 1.5 Mbps - browse the web, use email, watch video streams (maybe not 1080, but adequate), Skype, games, you name it. By contrast, with dialup everything except perhaps email is an exercise in extreme patience.
I used a 1.5 Mbps connection for a while - big downloads could be a bit frustrating, but on the whole it was quite usable. A lot better than when I had a nominal 10 Mbps on a congested cable network.
Well, I am surprised. I knew the USA had more open space than my own country, but even so...
Personally, I'd find a big garden a liability. My parents had a big one by UK suburban standards (about two thirds of an acre) and it was a real pain in the arse to maintain. Enough to add a tinge of green and have a little space to sit outside is fine for me. For anything else, I can go to the park.
You don't have to live in a city to be surprised by a six acre "lawn". Where is there that it's even slightly typical to own that much land and have it as a lawn?
Or maybe I'm just not knowledgable enough about the world and there are places where everyone has a six acre lawn. But I've never seen one.
Really? I'd have said it's the other way round, where cars really excel is short to medium journeys where the competition would be buses or walking, where they win easily in time and convenience. For long journeys though, trains can be the quicker and easier option..
From what I remember from the statistics, the USA has something like 50% more cars per capita than Western Europe, so you indeed drive a lot more over there.
I wasn't saying that $100k wasn't more than $10k, that would be silly. Just that an extra dollar is worth a lot less to a rich man than to someone who's barely scraping by, so the risk-reward balance for the lottery is even worse than simple arithmetic suggests.
It's really the other way round though. A jump in income of 100,000 to 200,000 is worth much less in terms of quality of life than from 10,000 to 20,000.
If you want to see socialism in action look at Sweden
Sweden isn't socialist, most industry there is privately owned. It just has high taxes and a big welfare state, neither of which is incompatible with capitalism.
Yep, which comes back to the whole "falsification is simplistic" argument I was making earlier. I was assuming the other factors would be unchanged from what we already expect. But these could be measured, data assessed all over again, and the end result could be that "humans aren't contributing significantly to global warming". This is certainly a very unlikely outcome given what we already know, but it does satisfy the naive falsifiablity requirement as much as anything else in science does.
OK, the ending got mangled somewhere along the line. The probability of getting 10 heads in a row is 0.001 - highly statistically significant. So seeing a few cases of this means the coin is biased, right?
So, 30 year periods. Got it. In another 15 years, if there is no statistically significant warming, you'll finally stop believing in CAGW (or AGW, your choice).
No, it would also have to be statistically significantly different from the AGW prediction. A result can be statistically insignificant because it's a poor or inadequate measurement. A short term measurement will generally be compatible with both models, once errors are taken into account - this is because over a short time scale, natural fluctuations in temperature are large compared to the effect of global warming.
You could also look at the ice core records and find a few 30 year periods where CO2 fell,but temps rose
Of course you can, if you cherry pick. Toss a coin 10000 times you'll find a few streaks of 10 heads in a row. Probability of throwing ten heads http://xkcd.com/882/.
In terms of Newtonian gravity and deviations from the theoretical, I think we can agree that those are pretty small deviations.
I chose that example carefully. Those deviations *were* statistically significant. Being small doesn't change that, and it needs an explanation. There were are least two notable examples of this happening - one time, it did indeed falsify Newtonian gravity and led to general relativity. The other, it didn't - the deviations were due to an as yet undetected planet. So was Newtonian mechanics falsifiable? You can always postulate new planets. A similarly situation exists for dark matter which hasn't been resolved yet. The point is that "falsification" is a simplistic view of science which doesn't match up very well with the way it actually operates. And orbital motion is almost a trivial case. The climate is vastly more complex, so the scope for a simple falsification is correspondingly lower.
Nevertheless, a simple test is to keep emitting lots of CO2 and measure the effects on a much longer timescale (say 40 years from now, compare a 15 year average temperature with one from the 20th century). If no warmer, there's a problem with the theory. So it's definitely falsifiable by any reasonable definition. Of course, if AGW is right, by then it'll be too late to do anything.
In reality, most of the things that could easily falsify the idea sooner than that have already been thoroughly investigated and ruled out to high probability, which is why the scientists are so confident in asserting that climate change has a human contribution.
It really comes down to a balance of evidence combined with Ockham's razor, which is the way science tends to work in practice. Given the evidence we've gathered so far, the idea of no human contribution to warming is by far the less credible idea. And ultimately, you can't falsify a true hypothesis.
Not so much the oil companies these days. Even Exxon admit it. It mostly seems to be Libertarians and conservatives who don't believe it because they don't like the implications.
The Popperian falsification idea isn't so great. You can always add some new hypothesis to explain any discrepancy between the data and your theory. Sometimes you'd be right to. For example, if the orbits of the planets aren't quite what Newtonian gravity seems to predict, have you falsified Newtonian gravity?
In the case of climate change, there's no single piece of evidence that shows it conclusively, and similarly there's unlikely to be a single piece of evidence that disproves it. Collective evidence could, however.
In that much-quoted "no statistically significant warming" example, the data wasn't significantly different from "no warming", but it also wasn't significantly different from the AGW predictions. So by itself, it didn't show anything conclusively either way - but there's plenty of other evidence supporting warming.
Incidentally, with the latest temperature data, that warming is now statistically significant. 15 years is too short to tell, as would have been clear by looking at various 15 year periods in the historical data.
The mechanical step is where the bulk of our efficiency problems come from
Not really, in fact the mechanics are pretty efficient. The problem is mostly thermodynamics. Heat is a poor place to start if you want to get usable energy - you can't do better than the Carnot efficiency by any means, as that would imply the universe spontaneously lowering its entropy.
They don't seem to require the heat-differential of thermo-electric generators
In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics! (sorry).
Steam turbines are pretty good efficiency-wise (as a fraction of the theoretically optimum Carnot efficiency), given the constraints on operating temperature that they operate under due to corrosion considerations and so forth. If something could work with a higher temperature heat source, it could get higher efficiency.
Most audio comes at the same sample rate and bit-depth as CD or DAT, while there is no excuse whatsoever why this should not be increased to 192kHz/24bit or higher,
Other than there's no need, as the human ear isn't sensitive enough to tell any difference between that and 44 kHz/16 bit. That already gives better frequency reproduction and much better SNR than the vinyl that audiophiles seem to love. The problem is that most CDs aren't mastered well enough to take advantage of the medium's capabilities.
This pissed most of us off because we've been using Gb and GB for years as base 2, but they gave us the dumbass "i" version and gave our established terminology over to the jargon of the layman for use as base 10.
Well, if it's a matter of established terminology, the use of mega, giga etc. to mean various powers of ten long predates the use of the binary versions. You can't appeal to tradition when it was the computing industry that broke with it in the first place.
I thought the idea was to use the GB (base 10) version for end users, to be consistent with every other use of the SI prefixes, and GiB for when it's actually more convenient to use the binary version, e.g. hardware design, programming, that kind of thing. Doesn't seem to have worked out that way though - file sizes aren't naturally powers of two.
That can be the case, though it's got better in recent years - or perhaps I've just learned . But go back to analogue after watching digital for a while and the artefacts induced by the analogue colour encoding jump out at you - shimmering effects around sharp colour changes, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, the people in charge failed to notice a good thing when they saw it and kept a good deal of it secret, leaving others to take computing forward. Similar story with what would become known as RSA.
Dialup is pretty much unusable now. Plus given how widespread broadband is now, it would't surprise me if it was just as cheap to provide an extra customer with broadband as with dialup. The marginal cost is pretty low, it's all the fixed infrastructure that's expensive.
1.5 Mbps is 30 times as fast as dialup. There's a *world* of difference between the two. In fact, you can do almost anything at 1.5 Mbps - browse the web, use email, watch video streams (maybe not 1080, but adequate), Skype, games, you name it. By contrast, with dialup everything except perhaps email is an exercise in extreme patience.
I used a 1.5 Mbps connection for a while - big downloads could be a bit frustrating, but on the whole it was quite usable. A lot better than when I had a nominal 10 Mbps on a congested cable network.
Well, I am surprised. I knew the USA had more open space than my own country, but even so...
Personally, I'd find a big garden a liability. My parents had a big one by UK suburban standards (about two thirds of an acre) and it was a real pain in the arse to maintain. Enough to add a tinge of green and have a little space to sit outside is fine for me. For anything else, I can go to the park.
You don't have to live in a city to be surprised by a six acre "lawn". Where is there that it's even slightly typical to own that much land and have it as a lawn?
Or maybe I'm just not knowledgable enough about the world and there are places where everyone has a six acre lawn. But I've never seen one.
Six acres isn't a lawn, it's a field... anyone else get the impression this guy just wanted a reason to say "I have a six acre lawn"?
Really? I'd have said it's the other way round, where cars really excel is short to medium journeys where the competition would be buses or walking, where they win easily in time and convenience. For long journeys though, trains can be the quicker and easier option..
From what I remember from the statistics, the USA has something like 50% more cars per capita than Western Europe, so you indeed drive a lot more over there.
Renewables are even older, so what's your point?
There've been nearly 15,000 reactor-years of operation worldwide, not 50 years. So "one in ten thousand years" is a bit off, but not spectacularly.
I wasn't saying that $100k wasn't more than $10k, that would be silly. Just that an extra dollar is worth a lot less to a rich man than to someone who's barely scraping by, so the risk-reward balance for the lottery is even worse than simple arithmetic suggests.
It's really the other way round though. A jump in income of 100,000 to 200,000 is worth much less in terms of quality of life than from 10,000 to 20,000.
Rockets have something like a 1-2% failure rate, and you'd need quite a lot of them.
If you want to see socialism in action look at Sweden
Sweden isn't socialist, most industry there is privately owned. It just has high taxes and a big welfare state, neither of which is incompatible with capitalism.
Yep, which comes back to the whole "falsification is simplistic" argument I was making earlier. I was assuming the other factors would be unchanged from what we already expect. But these could be measured, data assessed all over again, and the end result could be that "humans aren't contributing significantly to global warming". This is certainly a very unlikely outcome given what we already know, but it does satisfy the naive falsifiablity requirement as much as anything else in science does.
OK, the ending got mangled somewhere along the line. The probability of getting 10 heads in a row is 0.001 - highly statistically significant. So seeing a few cases of this means the coin is biased, right?
That xkcd link explains it nicely.
So, 30 year periods. Got it. In another 15 years, if there is no statistically significant warming, you'll finally stop believing in CAGW (or AGW, your choice).
No, it would also have to be statistically significantly different from the AGW prediction. A result can be statistically insignificant because it's a poor or inadequate measurement. A short term measurement will generally be compatible with both models, once errors are taken into account - this is because over a short time scale, natural fluctuations in temperature are large compared to the effect of global warming.
You could also look at the ice core records and find a few 30 year periods where CO2 fell,but temps rose
Of course you can, if you cherry pick. Toss a coin 10000 times you'll find a few streaks of 10 heads in a row. Probability of throwing ten heads http://xkcd.com/882/.
In terms of Newtonian gravity and deviations from the theoretical, I think we can agree that those are pretty small deviations.
I chose that example carefully. Those deviations *were* statistically significant. Being small doesn't change that, and it needs an explanation. There were are least two notable examples of this happening - one time, it did indeed falsify Newtonian gravity and led to general relativity. The other, it didn't - the deviations were due to an as yet undetected planet. So was Newtonian mechanics falsifiable? You can always postulate new planets. A similarly situation exists for dark matter which hasn't been resolved yet. The point is that "falsification" is a simplistic view of science which doesn't match up very well with the way it actually operates. And orbital motion is almost a trivial case. The climate is vastly more complex, so the scope for a simple falsification is correspondingly lower.
Nevertheless, a simple test is to keep emitting lots of CO2 and measure the effects on a much longer timescale (say 40 years from now, compare a 15 year average temperature with one from the 20th century). If no warmer, there's a problem with the theory. So it's definitely falsifiable by any reasonable definition. Of course, if AGW is right, by then it'll be too late to do anything.
In reality, most of the things that could easily falsify the idea sooner than that have already been thoroughly investigated and ruled out to high probability, which is why the scientists are so confident in asserting that climate change has a human contribution.
It really comes down to a balance of evidence combined with Ockham's razor, which is the way science tends to work in practice. Given the evidence we've gathered so far, the idea of no human contribution to warming is by far the less credible idea. And ultimately, you can't falsify a true hypothesis.
Not so much the oil companies these days. Even Exxon admit it. It mostly seems to be Libertarians and conservatives who don't believe it because they don't like the implications.
The Popperian falsification idea isn't so great. You can always add some new hypothesis to explain any discrepancy between the data and your theory. Sometimes you'd be right to. For example, if the orbits of the planets aren't quite what Newtonian gravity seems to predict, have you falsified Newtonian gravity?
In the case of climate change, there's no single piece of evidence that shows it conclusively, and similarly there's unlikely to be a single piece of evidence that disproves it. Collective evidence could, however.
In that much-quoted "no statistically significant warming" example, the data wasn't significantly different from "no warming", but it also wasn't significantly different from the AGW predictions. So by itself, it didn't show anything conclusively either way - but there's plenty of other evidence supporting warming.
Incidentally, with the latest temperature data, that warming is now statistically significant. 15 years is too short to tell, as would have been clear by looking at various 15 year periods in the historical data.
The mechanical step is where the bulk of our efficiency problems come from
Not really, in fact the mechanics are pretty efficient. The problem is mostly thermodynamics. Heat is a poor place to start if you want to get usable energy - you can't do better than the Carnot efficiency by any means, as that would imply the universe spontaneously lowering its entropy.
They don't seem to require the heat-differential of thermo-electric generators
In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics! (sorry).
Steam turbines are pretty good efficiency-wise (as a fraction of the theoretically optimum Carnot efficiency), given the constraints on operating temperature that they operate under due to corrosion considerations and so forth. If something could work with a higher temperature heat source, it could get higher efficiency.
Most audio comes at the same sample rate and bit-depth as CD or DAT, while there is no excuse whatsoever why this should not be increased to 192kHz/24bit or higher,
Other than there's no need, as the human ear isn't sensitive enough to tell any difference between that and 44 kHz/16 bit. That already gives better frequency reproduction and much better SNR than the vinyl that audiophiles seem to love. The problem is that most CDs aren't mastered well enough to take advantage of the medium's capabilities.
This pissed most of us off because we've been using Gb and GB for years as base 2, but they gave us the dumbass "i" version and gave our established terminology over to the jargon of the layman for use as base 10.
Well, if it's a matter of established terminology, the use of mega, giga etc. to mean various powers of ten long predates the use of the binary versions. You can't appeal to tradition when it was the computing industry that broke with it in the first place.
I thought the idea was to use the GB (base 10) version for end users, to be consistent with every other use of the SI prefixes, and GiB for when it's actually more convenient to use the binary version, e.g. hardware design, programming, that kind of thing. Doesn't seem to have worked out that way though - file sizes aren't naturally powers of two.
That can be the case, though it's got better in recent years - or perhaps I've just learned . But go back to analogue after watching digital for a while and the artefacts induced by the analogue colour encoding jump out at you - shimmering effects around sharp colour changes, for example.