The fact that you feel the 'free flow of oil' or 'stable economies' are reasons to FUKCING KILL PEOPLE is exactly why you are disqualified from this conversation.
I forget who said it, but I think the quote is relevent here: "Without economic freedom, all other freedoms are just an intellectual excercise."
We didn't just "kill people", we killed military soldiers invading another sovereign country, which happened to correspond to one of our vital national interests. You'll also notice that Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (who was next) asked for our help.
And before you get on a "so, you only defend countries where you have an economic interest" kick, you are damn straight right. The US is not the world's policeman, but we are going to step in when it's in our best interests to do so.
The problem is that ONLY Americans would kill people so they can drive big cars that needlessly burn gas.
There is absolutely no reason to go back to living in caves, which is the ultimate conclusion to that line of thinking. Big cars / small cars? Hell! Let's do away with cars; that's much more efficient. And then, let's restrict travel because you know that are rarely reasons for such "inefficiency". Ad infinitum. Don't believe it can happen? Please look at the Soviet Union who tried this type of thinking.
Restricting freedom is never the answer. In fact, got news for you: today's large cars pollute far less than yesterday's eurocrap cars. The answer to technology's problems is more technology, not conservation.
What a steaming, stinking, unsightly pile of inaccurate information.
America has the largest tax receipts of any country in the world.
That receipts are irrelevent. America has only moderate tax rates (although still too high). They're not even close to the highest in the world.
America spends more on its miltary than any other country in the world. What exactly does this contribute to free trade ?
You're joking, right? How about, for one, the free-flow of oil at market prices? Or do you forget that Saddam dude who tried to take over a large majority of the world's oil supply? If the US hadn't stepped up, you would have a king of the "United Kingdom of the Middle East" by now. Stable economies require a stable world. A strong military is critical to stable economies.
When forced to compete on a level playing field, US corporations fail dismally. E.g. the auto industry.
The car companies don't care about exporting their cars. I was reading an article a few years ago about how the American car companies only recently produced a car that could be changed to have the steering wheel on the right side. The problem is that Americans like big cars, and the rest of the world doesn't. So it's not all that profitable for American car companies to produce tiny euroboxes that all have to be exported, since there is no market here.
In any case, I believe the Ford Fiesta (?) is one of the best, if not the best, selling cars in Europe, so they can do it if they care.
But going beyond cars, the US dominates in almost every industry that matters, particularly the leading edge ones like software.
America leads the world in the destruction of the natural environment.
Cite some proof. American is one of the cleanest countries in the world. In fact, I remember a british engineer who I met about 10 year ago who came over for some temporary work. I asked him what struck him the most about the US, and remarked he couldn't believe how clean everything was. Just an anecdote, but telling.
If you want to see pollution, take a look around Europe some time.
The SF channel started running repeats of the Six Million Dollar Man, and I actually found that it was still pretty cool. Yes, the "special effects" were cheesy and unrealistic, but the cold war plots were often very cool.
Unfortunately, on the flip side, the last season episodes really sucked as much as I remembered. One word: Bigfoot.:)
And say what you want about SMDM, but it had by far the coolest opening of any TV show ever: that pounding rhythm, gnarley crash landing, mechanical limbs being handed off, all the while the incredibly cool voiceover:
"Steve Austin. Astronaut. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology to create the world's first bionic man. Better than he was before. Better. Stronger. Faster!" da da DA daaaaa! DA da da da da DA DA DA DA...
The artistic styles often matched far too well, the style of the humor and stories so close.
I actually find this a little offensive. While an argument can be made that the humor styles are similar (although Breathed had a much broader array of subjects), the artistic abilities of the two are night and day. You don't have to be an artist to be a cartoonist, so I don't say this as a knock on Illiad. But Breathed really had truly significant artistic talent and his sight gags were often hiliarious.
They stated that the votes should be counted, that the FSP should establish guidelines for doing so, but that it was TOO LATE to count the votes now.
No, they stated that it was too late to establish clear guidelines followed by implementing the guidelines to count votes. They gave no opinion on what the guidelines should be.
It is simply my opinion that any guideline that requires a subjective opinion on the part of a counter is a bogus guideline. Any guideline should require unequivocal evidence that a vote goes one way or another. And every vote that had unequivocal evidence was counted.
Frankly, I find it astounding that anyone would argue that ambiguous votes should count. There is only one explanation -- because you're biased in favor of Gore. Since Gore could only win if you count bogus votes, therefore you're in favor of bogus votes.
Just for the record, I would have exactly the same opinion whether Bush or Gore had won.
Is this voter's intent clear? I think so. Would this vote have been counted, they way things played out?
As a matter of fact, yes. And they should. In fact, there is legal precedent for counting ballots when a voter uses a pencil/pen.
requires that the counting procedure 'determine the intent of the voter'. [...] So now tell me again how you know for sure that every legal vote was counted.
If someone circled a particular hole, then the voter's intent is clearly defined, and no subjectivity [I'll use this word just for you] is required. But that's not what happened. What happened was that Gore wanted to go beyond that, and to count votes with scratches on the card. That requires subjectiveness on the part of the counter. Put it this way, if two counters can reasonably reach different conclusions, then it's not a vote.
Bottom line, all votes with clear intent were counted.
First, the travelling salesman problem is solvable even by a Turing-machine analogue
I'm speaking practically here. I'm going to visit 10,000 cities. Please give me the absolute guaranteed best route (in my lifetime, if you please).
Pattern recognition seems to be built into the human brain as much as (and perhaps more than) binary addition is built into modern processors.
Well, obviously, and so is creativity, emotion, and self-awareness. That doesn't mean that we know how they work.
So, you questions answered...
Actually, you haven't answered anything.
a self-organizing network becomes a problem when you want it to do something, like minimize network traffic (or at least collisions) or be trustable.
Nice hand-wave. The reason I bring up the TSP and pattern recognition is that they are problems that seem like they should be simple, but aren't. I believe self-organizing networks fall into the same category.
But hey, someone prove me wrong. I'd love to see it happen.
Then there weren't any votes at all. If you think that machines are infallible, you're an idiot.
There's a difference between an unbiased machine doing an imperfect, but mostly accurate job, and a biased human trying to divine a voter's state of mind from a scratch on a card.
For instance, lets say you have a napster style peer group, 10,000 peers. What if, to query these peers, you sent a small UDP packet to each of them directly?
There are a number of problems with this scheme, foremost among them:
1. How do you identify all the peers?
2. Let's say 10% of those 10K people are doing searches. That saturates a 56K modem, assuming you can really get your packets down to 56 bytes
3. What happens when you try to have 100K people? One million? How about the 10 million+ of Napster? Your scheme would not scale.
You're right that the problem is routing, but it's the routing through low-bandwidth connections that is the problem, not routing per se. You need routing and a heirarchy to scale, but it needs to self-organize so that higher bandwidth clients take more of the burden away from the low-bandwidth clients.
What about a network that uses a structure like DNS for searching?
DNS is not really the same thing: 1) it has a fixed set of root servers, and 2) it is not self-organizing (i.e., it's all manual set-up). The heirarchical nature is what is needed, though.
Freenet is also very well architected, unlike bogus Gnutella.
The problem with Gnutella is not the transferring of files, it's the searching. You'll note that Freenet conspicuously avoids the subject of searching, except for "yeah, we're thinking about it... real soon now!"
But if Napster gets squeezed, you can bet your last dollar that it will be made to. Or something like freenet or audiogalaxy will take over.
But if the price of gasoline goes up, you can bet your last dollar that teleportation will be made practical. Or that cars that use fusion will be developed.
Not everything is practical just because there is a need for it.
Anyone who understands how Gnutella works (unfortunately, too few people) knows that Gnutella is horribly broken, will never work, and is basically unfixable.
The more relevent question is whether you can have a peer-to-peer network without central servers that *can* scale. And the answer is "no".
However, the REAL question is whether you can have a peer-to-peer network with decentralized servers, i.e., with clients that automatically establish a heirarchy among all the clients, and certain clients become more "server like". They only way to make a Gnutella work is by making it heirarchical, but the heirarchy needs to be automatic for it have the same general "virtual network" aspect of Gnutella.
Is it possible? I don't know. You would probably have to have automatic bandwidth measurements, depth probes, all kinds of things to make it work. I simply don't know if it would be possible to automate something like that.
I remember in a recent Information Theory course I did at Uni, we learnt that the information content of an ensemble with 26 different equally possible outcomes is 4.7 bits per symbol.
That would be a very crude way to compress. LZW compression (and similar algorithms such as the one in gzip) find multiple-byte patterns, which are reduced to smaller and smaller bit representations as they occur more frequently. For example, if I had "ABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABC", it would figure out that "ABC" is being repeated and use a smaller number of bits to represent it.
That's why English text can typically be reduced by 8-10:1 compression, because there is so much redundancy in words. Try doing a gzip on a log-style file with lots of redundancy and you'll often see 100:1 compressions.
The UN? Are we supposed to care what the UN thinks?
Oh oh! They better watch out! The UN might get mad! They might pass another resolution condemning them! Please, not that! Anything but the dreaded UN resolution!
Hi, reality master 101, how is your trolling session today ?
So if someone disagrees with you, then they must be a troll?
The law will not say "you are required to use window", but "it is illegal to use software non-approved by the industry", and, funnily, the industry will only approve windows software.
Guess what? It's a product. You can choose to buy that product or not. We're not talking about food or housing, we're talking about a movie in a particular format. Note that it isn't even the only format you can buy. Read carefully: It's their product. They can do whatever they want with it. It's called "freedom". But since you appear to advocate socialism, freedom is a word you may not be familiar with.
There is no such thing as an honest (or dishonest) company. Don't anthropomorphize.
Try this word: "metaphor". You know what I mean, but instead you choose to deliberately pretend that you don't rather than make a substantive argument. And you accuse me of trolling?
So a corporatist government combined with thousands of groups whose sole stated interest is to screw the consumer out of as much money as possible is better? How does that make any sense?
Because governments have the force of law, and corporations do not. There is no law requiring me to use Microsoft software, Xerox copiers or Blue Shield medical insurance. Better that I have the freedom to choose the honest companies over the dishonest ones, rather than being screwed 100% of the time, by law, by the government.
And you know, just because you paid more for something, doesn't mean it's any better. [...] Only under a deranged, half-baked system like capitalism would this be true.
Versus socialism? The difference is that under socialism, the government attempts to cheat the citizens as a matter of course. The difference is that there is only one government, and under capitalism, you can choose whichever company you percieve to cheat you the least.
And if you think socialistic government are paragons of virtue and efficiency with only the best interests of the citizens at heart, then I feel sorry for you and your naivete.
To be fair, the earth has experienced natual swings in climate due to mechanisms we are not completely sure of.
Here's the thing, and maybe you can give me a reasonable answer to this. Everyone seems to agree that a 5 degree swing is pretty significant as far as climate and livability is concerned. And 10-20 degrees probably even more so. On a percentage basis, however, that is really not much, which means that there is a relatively narrow band of average temperatures where life thrives relatively well.
Now, given this, one would imagine in 500 million years of high vertebrate life, we have seen pretty major upheavils from various natural disasters, huge volcanoes exploding, ice ages, continental drift, maybe even comets hitting the earth. The earth has clearly not been a peaceful place throughout its history.
But, we have never had a disaster that has wiped out all higher life, although the Dinosaurs certainly took a hit, but it still didn't wipe out all the higher vertebrates. Doesn't this indicate that the earth has incredibly powerful equilibrium mechanisms that we probably don't fully understand, primarily because of our lack of historical perspective? If the earth's ecological balance was all that fragile, it seems likely that higher life forms would be getting killed off over and over as the climate swung around every million years or so. Yet, life has been stable enough for the incredibly unlikely occurance of intelligent life to spring up (at least IMO it's unlikely, but that's another topic).
I don't doubt that we humans have an effect on climate, but I think it's likely that the earth's rejuvenative powers are radically underestimated and poorly understood in the current models.
First it was 3.5, now it's 5.8. That's a difference of 2.3 degrees! So what happened with the original computer model? Are now to believe that "Oh, that original one was flawed, but this one is the real deal! AND GOOD GOD IT'S WORSE THAN EVER BEFORE!!"
The fact is, climate simulations are not even close to being able to predict patterns 1 year in the future, much less 100 bloody years. Not only is our understanding of climates at the stone knives and bearskin level (to quote Star Trek), but our computers are multiple orders of magnitude away from being able to do anything accurate. Proof? Give me a link to a study that was done, say, 3-4 years ago that correctly predicted the climate for this year. You can't, because it's all garbage.
This is not science, this is 1) pure politics, and 2) pure money raising. It's well known that the more dire the prediction, the more money you can ask for grants.
Global warming may or may not be happening, but climate simulations tell us absolutely nothing. In fact, it's worse than nothing because it is intentionally misleading.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that you feel the 'free flow of oil' or 'stable economies' are reasons to FUKCING KILL PEOPLE is exactly why you are disqualified from this conversation.
I forget who said it, but I think the quote is relevent here: "Without economic freedom, all other freedoms are just an intellectual excercise."
We didn't just "kill people", we killed military soldiers invading another sovereign country, which happened to correspond to one of our vital national interests. You'll also notice that Kuwait and Saudi Arabia (who was next) asked for our help.
And before you get on a "so, you only defend countries where you have an economic interest" kick, you are damn straight right. The US is not the world's policeman, but we are going to step in when it's in our best interests to do so.
The problem is that ONLY Americans would kill people so they can drive big cars that needlessly burn gas.
There is absolutely no reason to go back to living in caves, which is the ultimate conclusion to that line of thinking. Big cars / small cars? Hell! Let's do away with cars; that's much more efficient. And then, let's restrict travel because you know that are rarely reasons for such "inefficiency". Ad infinitum. Don't believe it can happen? Please look at the Soviet Union who tried this type of thinking.
Restricting freedom is never the answer. In fact, got news for you: today's large cars pollute far less than yesterday's eurocrap cars. The answer to technology's problems is more technology, not conservation.
--
What a steaming, stinking, unsightly pile of inaccurate information.
America has the largest tax receipts of any country in the world.
That receipts are irrelevent. America has only moderate tax rates (although still too high). They're not even close to the highest in the world.
America spends more on its miltary than any other country in the world. What exactly does this contribute to free trade ?
You're joking, right? How about, for one, the free-flow of oil at market prices? Or do you forget that Saddam dude who tried to take over a large majority of the world's oil supply? If the US hadn't stepped up, you would have a king of the "United Kingdom of the Middle East" by now. Stable economies require a stable world. A strong military is critical to stable economies.
When forced to compete on a level playing field, US corporations fail dismally. E.g. the auto industry.
The car companies don't care about exporting their cars. I was reading an article a few years ago about how the American car companies only recently produced a car that could be changed to have the steering wheel on the right side. The problem is that Americans like big cars, and the rest of the world doesn't. So it's not all that profitable for American car companies to produce tiny euroboxes that all have to be exported, since there is no market here.
In any case, I believe the Ford Fiesta (?) is one of the best, if not the best, selling cars in Europe, so they can do it if they care.
But going beyond cars, the US dominates in almost every industry that matters, particularly the leading edge ones like software.
America leads the world in the destruction of the natural environment.
Cite some proof. American is one of the cleanest countries in the world. In fact, I remember a british engineer who I met about 10 year ago who came over for some temporary work. I asked him what struck him the most about the US, and remarked he couldn't believe how clean everything was. Just an anecdote, but telling.
If you want to see pollution, take a look around Europe some time.
--
The SF channel started running repeats of the Six Million Dollar Man, and I actually found that it was still pretty cool. Yes, the "special effects" were cheesy and unrealistic, but the cold war plots were often very cool.
Unfortunately, on the flip side, the last season episodes really sucked as much as I remembered. One word: Bigfoot. :)
And say what you want about SMDM, but it had by far the coolest opening of any TV show ever: that pounding rhythm, gnarley crash landing, mechanical limbs being handed off, all the while the incredibly cool voiceover:
"Steve Austin. Astronaut. A man barely alive. Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology to create the world's first bionic man. Better than he was before. Better. Stronger. Faster!" da da DA daaaaa! DA da da da da DA DA DA DA...
--
The artistic styles often matched far too well, the style of the humor and stories so close.
I actually find this a little offensive. While an argument can be made that the humor styles are similar (although Breathed had a much broader array of subjects), the artistic abilities of the two are night and day. You don't have to be an artist to be a cartoonist, so I don't say this as a knock on Illiad. But Breathed really had truly significant artistic talent and his sight gags were often hiliarious.
--
Every single element of your message -- your nick, the body of the post itself, and your sig -- reeks of pretentiousness.
I don't think pretentiousness is the word you want. Arrogance, maybe. Self-righteousness? Conceitedness? Definitely.
Of course, I would prefer brilliant, honest and humble (humble, but just too much brilliance leaks out to be possible). :)
--
First of all, I don't doubt that Katz is doing his usual exaggeration here.
But if there really was a little kid that went to see this movie, his parents should be put in jail for child abuse.
--
They stated that the votes should be counted, that the FSP should establish guidelines for doing so, but that it was TOO LATE to count the votes now.
No, they stated that it was too late to establish clear guidelines followed by implementing the guidelines to count votes. They gave no opinion on what the guidelines should be.
It is simply my opinion that any guideline that requires a subjective opinion on the part of a counter is a bogus guideline. Any guideline should require unequivocal evidence that a vote goes one way or another. And every vote that had unequivocal evidence was counted.
Frankly, I find it astounding that anyone would argue that ambiguous votes should count. There is only one explanation -- because you're biased in favor of Gore. Since Gore could only win if you count bogus votes, therefore you're in favor of bogus votes.
Just for the record, I would have exactly the same opinion whether Bush or Gore had won.
--
First of all, the word you're looking for is 'subjectivity'.
Which is synonymous with subjectiveness.
Is this voter's intent clear? I think so. Would this vote have been counted, they way things played out?
As a matter of fact, yes. And they should. In fact, there is legal precedent for counting ballots when a voter uses a pencil/pen.
requires that the counting procedure 'determine the intent of the voter'. [...] So now tell me again how you know for sure that every legal vote was counted.
If someone circled a particular hole, then the voter's intent is clearly defined, and no subjectivity [I'll use this word just for you] is required. But that's not what happened. What happened was that Gore wanted to go beyond that, and to count votes with scratches on the card. That requires subjectiveness on the part of the counter. Put it this way, if two counters can reasonably reach different conclusions, then it's not a vote.
Bottom line, all votes with clear intent were counted.
--
First, the travelling salesman problem is solvable even by a Turing-machine analogue
I'm speaking practically here. I'm going to visit 10,000 cities. Please give me the absolute guaranteed best route (in my lifetime, if you please).
Pattern recognition seems to be built into the human brain as much as (and perhaps more than) binary addition is built into modern processors.
Well, obviously, and so is creativity, emotion, and self-awareness. That doesn't mean that we know how they work.
So, you questions answered...
Actually, you haven't answered anything.
a self-organizing network becomes a problem when you want it to do something, like minimize network traffic (or at least collisions) or be trustable.
Nice hand-wave. The reason I bring up the TSP and pattern recognition is that they are problems that seem like they should be simple, but aren't. I believe self-organizing networks fall into the same category.
But hey, someone prove me wrong. I'd love to see it happen.
--
Then there weren't any votes at all. If you think that machines are infallible, you're an idiot.
There's a difference between an unbiased machine doing an imperfect, but mostly accurate job, and a biased human trying to divine a voter's state of mind from a scratch on a card.
--
For instance, lets say you have a napster style peer group, 10,000 peers. What if, to query these peers, you sent a small UDP packet to each of them directly?
There are a number of problems with this scheme, foremost among them:
1. How do you identify all the peers?
2. Let's say 10% of those 10K people are doing searches. That saturates a 56K modem, assuming you can really get your packets down to 56 bytes
3. What happens when you try to have 100K people? One million? How about the 10 million+ of Napster? Your scheme would not scale.
You're right that the problem is routing, but it's the routing through low-bandwidth connections that is the problem, not routing per se. You need routing and a heirarchy to scale, but it needs to self-organize so that higher bandwidth clients take more of the burden away from the low-bandwidth clients.
--
What about a network that uses a structure like DNS for searching?
DNS is not really the same thing: 1) it has a fixed set of root servers, and 2) it is not self-organizing (i.e., it's all manual set-up). The heirarchical nature is what is needed, though.
--
Why wouldn't it be ?
Why isn't the travelling salesman problem solvable? Why is pattern recognition such a difficult problem when humans do it so easily?
Don't underestimate the difficulty of the problem of a self-organizing network. It is definitely a non-trivial problem.
--
Freenet is also very well architected, unlike bogus Gnutella.
The problem with Gnutella is not the transferring of files, it's the searching. You'll note that Freenet conspicuously avoids the subject of searching, except for "yeah, we're thinking about it... real soon now!"
--
But if Napster gets squeezed, you can bet your last dollar that it will be made to. Or something like freenet or audiogalaxy will take over.
But if the price of gasoline goes up, you can bet your last dollar that teleportation will be made practical. Or that cars that use fusion will be developed.
Not everything is practical just because there is a need for it.
--
Anyone who understands how Gnutella works (unfortunately, too few people) knows that Gnutella is horribly broken, will never work, and is basically unfixable.
The more relevent question is whether you can have a peer-to-peer network without central servers that *can* scale. And the answer is "no".
However, the REAL question is whether you can have a peer-to-peer network with decentralized servers, i.e., with clients that automatically establish a heirarchy among all the clients, and certain clients become more "server like". They only way to make a Gnutella work is by making it heirarchical, but the heirarchy needs to be automatic for it have the same general "virtual network" aspect of Gnutella.
Is it possible? I don't know. You would probably have to have automatic bandwidth measurements, depth probes, all kinds of things to make it work. I simply don't know if it would be possible to automate something like that.
--
I remember in a recent Information Theory course I did at Uni, we learnt that the information content of an ensemble with 26 different equally possible outcomes is 4.7 bits per symbol.
That would be a very crude way to compress. LZW compression (and similar algorithms such as the one in gzip) find multiple-byte patterns, which are reduced to smaller and smaller bit representations as they occur more frequently. For example, if I had "ABCABCABCABCABCABCABCABC", it would figure out that "ABC" is being repeated and use a smaller number of bits to represent it.
That's why English text can typically be reduced by 8-10:1 compression, because there is so much redundancy in words. Try doing a gzip on a log-style file with lots of redundancy and you'll often see 100:1 compressions.
--
And exactly what is new and interesting about those stories? It's the same information that's been known before and debated to death on Slashdot.
--
To get below 1 watt, they have to drop the speed of a PIII to just 300 MHz.
Well, keep in mind that this is very possibly about the same performance as the Crusoe will end up being in real applications.
--
The UN? Are we supposed to care what the UN thinks?
Oh oh! They better watch out! The UN might get mad! They might pass another resolution condemning them! Please, not that! Anything but the dreaded UN resolution!
--
Hi, reality master 101, how is your trolling session today ?
So if someone disagrees with you, then they must be a troll?
The law will not say "you are required to use window", but "it is illegal to use software non-approved by the industry", and, funnily, the industry will only approve windows software.
Guess what? It's a product. You can choose to buy that product or not. We're not talking about food or housing, we're talking about a movie in a particular format. Note that it isn't even the only format you can buy. Read carefully: It's their product. They can do whatever they want with it. It's called "freedom". But since you appear to advocate socialism, freedom is a word you may not be familiar with.
There is no such thing as an honest (or dishonest) company. Don't anthropomorphize.
Try this word: "metaphor". You know what I mean, but instead you choose to deliberately pretend that you don't rather than make a substantive argument. And you accuse me of trolling?
--
So a corporatist government combined with thousands of groups whose sole stated interest is to screw the consumer out of as much money as possible is better? How does that make any sense?
Because governments have the force of law, and corporations do not. There is no law requiring me to use Microsoft software, Xerox copiers or Blue Shield medical insurance. Better that I have the freedom to choose the honest companies over the dishonest ones, rather than being screwed 100% of the time, by law, by the government.
--
And you know, just because you paid more for something, doesn't mean it's any better. [...] Only under a deranged, half-baked system like capitalism would this be true.
Versus socialism? The difference is that under socialism, the government attempts to cheat the citizens as a matter of course. The difference is that there is only one government, and under capitalism, you can choose whichever company you percieve to cheat you the least.
And if you think socialistic government are paragons of virtue and efficiency with only the best interests of the citizens at heart, then I feel sorry for you and your naivete.
--
To be fair, the earth has experienced natual swings in climate due to mechanisms we are not completely sure of.
Here's the thing, and maybe you can give me a reasonable answer to this. Everyone seems to agree that a 5 degree swing is pretty significant as far as climate and livability is concerned. And 10-20 degrees probably even more so. On a percentage basis, however, that is really not much, which means that there is a relatively narrow band of average temperatures where life thrives relatively well.
Now, given this, one would imagine in 500 million years of high vertebrate life, we have seen pretty major upheavils from various natural disasters, huge volcanoes exploding, ice ages, continental drift, maybe even comets hitting the earth. The earth has clearly not been a peaceful place throughout its history.
But, we have never had a disaster that has wiped out all higher life, although the Dinosaurs certainly took a hit, but it still didn't wipe out all the higher vertebrates. Doesn't this indicate that the earth has incredibly powerful equilibrium mechanisms that we probably don't fully understand, primarily because of our lack of historical perspective? If the earth's ecological balance was all that fragile, it seems likely that higher life forms would be getting killed off over and over as the climate swung around every million years or so. Yet, life has been stable enough for the incredibly unlikely occurance of intelligent life to spring up (at least IMO it's unlikely, but that's another topic).
I don't doubt that we humans have an effect on climate, but I think it's likely that the earth's rejuvenative powers are radically underestimated and poorly understood in the current models.
--
First it was 3.5, now it's 5.8. That's a difference of 2.3 degrees! So what happened with the original computer model? Are now to believe that "Oh, that original one was flawed, but this one is the real deal! AND GOOD GOD IT'S WORSE THAN EVER BEFORE!!"
The fact is, climate simulations are not even close to being able to predict patterns 1 year in the future, much less 100 bloody years. Not only is our understanding of climates at the stone knives and bearskin level (to quote Star Trek), but our computers are multiple orders of magnitude away from being able to do anything accurate. Proof? Give me a link to a study that was done, say, 3-4 years ago that correctly predicted the climate for this year. You can't, because it's all garbage.
This is not science, this is 1) pure politics, and 2) pure money raising. It's well known that the more dire the prediction, the more money you can ask for grants.
Global warming may or may not be happening, but climate simulations tell us absolutely nothing. In fact, it's worse than nothing because it is intentionally misleading.
--