The only thing left to argue about is how much do we contribute... 80%? 50%?
Personally, I think humans contribute nearly 100% to the current warming trend. I also think that doesn't matter.
However, I've not once seen a denialist argue "The mainstream claims that we contribute 80% but I think it's only 50% because of this evidence..."
Well, and I have not once seen a sound argument for (1) why we should prevent global warming, and (2) how we are going to achieve that.
The fact that, all things being equal, continued CO2 emissions will cause global warming and sea level rise is not a sufficient argument to do anything. The climate is so variable that anthropogenic warming is as likely to be beneficial as it may be harmful.
This isn't a two-sided issue where you can divide people into "mainstream scientists" and "climate skeptics".
The original statistical analysis of warming temperatures was deeply flawed. Saying that doesn't mean people necessarily denied that warming was happening, simply that the data didn't show it. Muller reevaluated the data and found that the warming trend was real. Given that the data had been looked at many times, that doesn't surprise anybody.
That means very little, however. Most people labeled as "climate skeptics" don't really care about that data to begin with. There are still fundamental questions about whether the warming it shows is relevant to global warming and whether it is related to CO2 emissions. More importantly, many people think the warming trend it shows doesn't matter, or that it is not preventable anyway, or that it is even beneficial. Those objections are not addressed at all by this data or reevaluation.
Personally, I agree with almost all the scientific findings in the IPCC report, and I still say we should take no action on global warming because there is no effective action we can take to prevent it. Temperatures are going to rise due to continued CO2 emissions, sea levels are going to rise, and we should just deal with the consequences.
Ubuntu's traditional market niche is the technical and professional market, people who used to use UNIX workstations. Unfortunately, with 11.10 and the upcoming move away from X11, Ubuntu is hell-bent on leaving that market: Unity is already nearly useless for power users (it doesn't work well at all on large or multi-screen setups), tools like Synaptic are becoming non-standard, etc.
Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn't have a chance in the tablet and smartphone market either. That market is already well service by Android and iOS. Ubuntu has virtually no mobile developers. And if it manages against all odds to even get a small market share, Ubuntu will face the kind of patent feeding frenzy that Android is being subjected to.
Too bad Shuttleworth couldn't leave good enough alone. He's going to kill Ubuntu and seriously hurt Linux as a whole.
It's not "exactly the same". It lacks the cube transitions, fading windows, and all the other crap that takes up so much CPU/GPU but doesn't contribute to getting the job done. Thanks, Apple!
The day should be a memorial to the millions of man years and thousands of lives lost to pointer errors and uncaught arithmetic errors due to the fact that the C language provides no facilities for helping in their prevention.
Really? You think the Texas governor, legislature, or residents "don't mind" executing innocent people? Well, if only everybody were as perfect as you and wherever you're from!
Seems to me those people are happy that guilty, dangerous criminals are being executed. It's your belief that these people are innocent.
I think we should abolish the death penalty. But, frankly, what passes for death penalty opponents is such an ideologically driven and irrational bunch that I doubt it's going to get much traction.
Unlike you, I have done a side-by-side comparison. The Galaxy SII screen is gorgeous. It's probably the best screen currently available, except for the new generation of 720p screens on the next generation Android devices. Apple's "Retina Display" is behind in every respect.
You have a state that doesn't seem to mind executing people that might be innocent and where there's little concern for courts convicting innocent people in general.
And which state would that be? I don't know of any such state in the US.
Is there any evidence the "decode path" is simpler?
Why didn't Apple open source it back then?
Why aren't they supporting FLAC and OGG now?
This seems like yet another cynical Apple move, first screwing people with proprietary formats, and then when their monopoly has eroded, trying to sabotage open standards by releasing redundant and useless alternatives.
Why did Apple come up with yet another incompatible codec? FLAC is available under BSD, and ther eis obviously no difference in quality between ALAC and FLAC.
A fiber optical cable is fundamentally limited by physics just as much as as radio bandwidth is limited by physics. Once the cable is laid in the ground, there is a fixed amount of bandwidth that will flow across it.
Just the original O-band on fiber is 1260-1360nm, giving you 18000000 MHz bandwidth on fiber, vs 20 MHz for Verizon's 4G over the air.
These investments you keep speaking about are no different than the investments that wired networks need to make too.
They are very different, because the limit on wired infrastructure is available processing speed, while the limit on wireless is available bandwidth and spectral efficiency.
What you don't seem to understand is that getting the bandwidth to the tower has never been the problem.
We agree on that, which is why I left it out of my calculations.
It is getting the bandwidth to the wireless client. Same thing with wireless access points for consumers right now. A consumer wired network has capacity at any one point that exceeds the wireless capability with the latest technologies right now, by a considerable margin.
What you don't understand is that it is not "wireless capability with the latest technologies" that matters, it is mostly bandwidth. Theoretically, 4G gives you a peak spectral efficiency of 8 Mbps/MHz and 3G gives you 2 Mbps/MHz. But under real-world conditions, both currently give you 0.5-1 Mbps, and 4G can raise that to maybe 2 Mbps/MHz over the next decade with a lot of extra hardware being deployed. (And the only reason 4G can even do that is MIMO; that's a one trick pony.)
How can 4G be the same as 3G? Nothing much would change or get faster?
Think of 4G as a Porsche and 3G as a Honda Civic. The Porsche "is faster" than the Civic on an uncongested highway or the racetrack, but in city traffic, the two are the same. If you actually want faster performance out of the Porsche, it isn't sufficient to buy the faster car, you also need to build more highways and raise the speed limit. Likewise, if they actually want faster performance out of 4G, companies need to build a lot more towers (plus invest a lot more money in the existing ones).
Well then you don't understand it either. All of the numbers you pulled were either out of your ass, or for 3G.
As I was saying, I was using _your_ numbers, just to illustrate a point; the actual cost structure is much more complicated.
The point is that cell service is fundamentally limited by radio bandwidth, tower density, and peak usage. If your infrastructure is maxed out, then if people start using twice as much data, you need twice as many towers. That's fundamentally different from wired.
I think you don't know what you are talking about because the literature puts your numbers off by an order at least. Even 1st gen WiMAX exceeds the numbers you put out.
You're confusing limits with actual performance. WiMAX and 4G increase the limits of the technology, but they don't use bandwidth a lot more efficiently. If you replaced all 3G towers and phones with 4G, nothing much would change or get faster. 4G just allows companies to put in more towers, support faster rates, and and support more users, but they still need to make the investments to actually do so.
Americans, on average, spend less than 10% of their disposable income on food, and half on that on dining outside the home (in 1985, the percentage was considerably higher). More than half of income is spent on transportation, housing, clothing, and entertainment, and people are getting a lot more for their money in all those areas. So what the price of bread (or other home food items) is is irrelevant. Minimum wage has also gone down in constant dollars, so it is a bad basis for comparison. When economists look at overall wealth, they find that people are a lot better off these days than they were 25 years ago.
That's an absolutely ridiculous claim. If you look at the economic data, almost everything has gotten a lot cheaper. The reason it seems constant is because you're choosing to buy bigger and better versions and measure your wealth relative to others. Technology cannot conquer your greed and envy, it can only make goods cheaper.
No, we are talking about the physics and economics of wireless cellular communications. They principles stay the same regardless of what standard you are using, only the numbers change (much of US "4G" is 3G anyway).
Your idea that wireless is just like wired except companies have to pay for building a few towers with a range of many miles is ridiculous. You just don't understand how cellular technology works.
There is not enough competition. The players are price fixing. Period.
All true in the US, albeit for completely different reasons than you imagine.
That's what we are building those machines in the first place: either they drive down the cost of production so much that people don't need to work anymore... or they don't and people still do have jobs.
A cell tower costs a few million dollars, but covers a much greater distance.
Distance is irrelevant, the limit on cells is the size of the radio band available (hence "bandwidth") and how much of that users are using. Verizon has 10 MHz 3G bandwidth, probably corresponding to about 10 Mbps that's shared between all users of that cell site at all times.
The fact is that 15GB represents only ~400Kb/s average transfer rate for the month.... A cell tower costs a few million dollars
Let's use your numbers, shall we? If you actually use 400kbps steady stream, that's about 1/20th of Verizon's bandwidth per tower. Let's say the tower costs $1 million (low end of your estimate). If you and 20 other people like you use 400kbps, the tower is full and can't do anything else. So, just to pay for the tower, Verizon needs to recover $50000 from each user like you. In addition, they actually still need to run a network infrastructure, pay for Internet access, etc. $1000/month seems quite reasonable for that. But it's worse than that: if you use 400kbps on average, but only use the device during working hours, that's about 1.6Mbps or 1/6th of the tower, so now they need to make $160000 from you just to recover your portion of the cost of the tower.
I consult and develop solutions for companies. In real estate I mainly deal with communications between those companies and sometimes mobile. However, that actually stopped after the collapse.
Sounds to me like it stopped because you didn't have any idea of what you were doing.
Well, let me be more blunt: I'm not going to subsidize a bunch of doctors, real estate agents, and lawyers who are running a business off a $30/month smartphone plan. I hope your provider sues you for theft of service and breach of contract. If you want 15G/month, you should f*cking pay for it yourself. Of course, what mobile phone companies should do is simply have metered service a, say, $10/Gbyte for consumers and $20/Gbyte for business users (with the latter offering better service, support, and reliability).
Wow, a real estate agent complaining about the phone company screwing them and overcharging them. Look in the mirror, man. Your industry caused the real estate bubble, and getting paid a percentage of transaction costs is the biggest fraud imaginable. If anybody should be forced to go to a "flat rate", it's you people.
You bought the phone when you signed the 2 year contract, you are just paying it off. (At least that's the way it used to work.) The phone is yours even if you aren't using the service anymore. Of course, because all the carriers are incompatible, the phone is also useless to you.
Sounds like a consumer smartphone plan isn't the right choice for you then. On business plans, I think you can easily get 10-15G for maybe $150/month. And if you're in "real estate, insurance, or medical" with "2 or 3 agents", I think you can afford it.
So? I was simply pointing out that global static analysis is useless for these kinds of applications, and moving more of the OS into "managed code" with JITs (like Microsoft is trying) also isn't working. Both language and compiler technologies that Android is built on (C++, Java) optimize badly.
Apple's choices (Objective-C, now LLVM) seem better to me in comparison when it comes to efficient, unbloated code (unfortunately, Objective-C has other problems, like a lack of type-safety).
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Personally, I think humans contribute nearly 100% to the current warming trend. I also think that doesn't matter.
Well, and I have not once seen a sound argument for (1) why we should prevent global warming, and (2) how we are going to achieve that.
The fact that, all things being equal, continued CO2 emissions will cause global warming and sea level rise is not a sufficient argument to do anything. The climate is so variable that anthropogenic warming is as likely to be beneficial as it may be harmful.
This isn't a two-sided issue where you can divide people into "mainstream scientists" and "climate skeptics".
The original statistical analysis of warming temperatures was deeply flawed. Saying that doesn't mean people necessarily denied that warming was happening, simply that the data didn't show it. Muller reevaluated the data and found that the warming trend was real. Given that the data had been looked at many times, that doesn't surprise anybody.
That means very little, however. Most people labeled as "climate skeptics" don't really care about that data to begin with. There are still fundamental questions about whether the warming it shows is relevant to global warming and whether it is related to CO2 emissions. More importantly, many people think the warming trend it shows doesn't matter, or that it is not preventable anyway, or that it is even beneficial. Those objections are not addressed at all by this data or reevaluation.
Personally, I agree with almost all the scientific findings in the IPCC report, and I still say we should take no action on global warming because there is no effective action we can take to prevent it. Temperatures are going to rise due to continued CO2 emissions, sea levels are going to rise, and we should just deal with the consequences.
Ubuntu's traditional market niche is the technical and professional market, people who used to use UNIX workstations. Unfortunately, with 11.10 and the upcoming move away from X11, Ubuntu is hell-bent on leaving that market: Unity is already nearly useless for power users (it doesn't work well at all on large or multi-screen setups), tools like Synaptic are becoming non-standard, etc.
Unfortunately, Ubuntu doesn't have a chance in the tablet and smartphone market either. That market is already well service by Android and iOS. Ubuntu has virtually no mobile developers. And if it manages against all odds to even get a small market share, Ubuntu will face the kind of patent feeding frenzy that Android is being subjected to.
Too bad Shuttleworth couldn't leave good enough alone. He's going to kill Ubuntu and seriously hurt Linux as a whole.
It's not "exactly the same". It lacks the cube transitions, fading windows, and all the other crap that takes up so much CPU/GPU but doesn't contribute to getting the job done. Thanks, Apple!
The day should be a memorial to the millions of man years and thousands of lives lost to pointer errors and uncaught arithmetic errors due to the fact that the C language provides no facilities for helping in their prevention.
Really? You think the Texas governor, legislature, or residents "don't mind" executing innocent people? Well, if only everybody were as perfect as you and wherever you're from!
Seems to me those people are happy that guilty, dangerous criminals are being executed. It's your belief that these people are innocent.
I think we should abolish the death penalty. But, frankly, what passes for death penalty opponents is such an ideologically driven and irrational bunch that I doubt it's going to get much traction.
Unlike you, I have done a side-by-side comparison. The Galaxy SII screen is gorgeous. It's probably the best screen currently available, except for the new generation of 720p screens on the next generation Android devices. Apple's "Retina Display" is behind in every respect.
And which state would that be? I don't know of any such state in the US.
Is there any evidence the "decode path" is simpler?
Why didn't Apple open source it back then?
Why aren't they supporting FLAC and OGG now?
This seems like yet another cynical Apple move, first screwing people with proprietary formats, and then when their monopoly has eroded, trying to sabotage open standards by releasing redundant and useless alternatives.
Why did Apple come up with yet another incompatible codec? FLAC is available under BSD, and ther eis obviously no difference in quality between ALAC and FLAC.
Just the original O-band on fiber is 1260-1360nm, giving you 18000000 MHz bandwidth on fiber, vs 20 MHz for Verizon's 4G over the air.
They are very different, because the limit on wired infrastructure is available processing speed, while the limit on wireless is available bandwidth and spectral efficiency.
We agree on that, which is why I left it out of my calculations.
What you don't understand is that it is not "wireless capability with the latest technologies" that matters, it is mostly bandwidth. Theoretically, 4G gives you a peak spectral efficiency of 8 Mbps/MHz and 3G gives you 2 Mbps/MHz. But under real-world conditions, both currently give you 0.5-1 Mbps, and 4G can raise that to maybe 2 Mbps/MHz over the next decade with a lot of extra hardware being deployed. (And the only reason 4G can even do that is MIMO; that's a one trick pony.)
Think of 4G as a Porsche and 3G as a Honda Civic. The Porsche "is faster" than the Civic on an uncongested highway or the racetrack, but in city traffic, the two are the same. If you actually want faster performance out of the Porsche, it isn't sufficient to buy the faster car, you also need to build more highways and raise the speed limit. Likewise, if they actually want faster performance out of 4G, companies need to build a lot more towers (plus invest a lot more money in the existing ones).
As I was saying, I was using _your_ numbers, just to illustrate a point; the actual cost structure is much more complicated.
The point is that cell service is fundamentally limited by radio bandwidth, tower density, and peak usage. If your infrastructure is maxed out, then if people start using twice as much data, you need twice as many towers. That's fundamentally different from wired.
You're confusing limits with actual performance. WiMAX and 4G increase the limits of the technology, but they don't use bandwidth a lot more efficiently. If you replaced all 3G towers and phones with 4G, nothing much would change or get faster. 4G just allows companies to put in more towers, support faster rates, and and support more users, but they still need to make the investments to actually do so.
Americans, on average, spend less than 10% of their disposable income on food, and half on that on dining outside the home (in 1985, the percentage was considerably higher). More than half of income is spent on transportation, housing, clothing, and entertainment, and people are getting a lot more for their money in all those areas. So what the price of bread (or other home food items) is is irrelevant. Minimum wage has also gone down in constant dollars, so it is a bad basis for comparison. When economists look at overall wealth, they find that people are a lot better off these days than they were 25 years ago.
That's an absolutely ridiculous claim. If you look at the economic data, almost everything has gotten a lot cheaper. The reason it seems constant is because you're choosing to buy bigger and better versions and measure your wealth relative to others. Technology cannot conquer your greed and envy, it can only make goods cheaper.
No, we are talking about the physics and economics of wireless cellular communications. They principles stay the same regardless of what standard you are using, only the numbers change (much of US "4G" is 3G anyway).
Your idea that wireless is just like wired except companies have to pay for building a few towers with a range of many miles is ridiculous. You just don't understand how cellular technology works.
All true in the US, albeit for completely different reasons than you imagine.
No, but you still bought the phone and still have a load to pay it off.
That's what we are building those machines in the first place: either they drive down the cost of production so much that people don't need to work anymore... or they don't and people still do have jobs.
Distance is irrelevant, the limit on cells is the size of the radio band available (hence "bandwidth") and how much of that users are using. Verizon has 10 MHz 3G bandwidth, probably corresponding to about 10 Mbps that's shared between all users of that cell site at all times.
Let's use your numbers, shall we? If you actually use 400kbps steady stream, that's about 1/20th of Verizon's bandwidth per tower. Let's say the tower costs $1 million (low end of your estimate). If you and 20 other people like you use 400kbps, the tower is full and can't do anything else. So, just to pay for the tower, Verizon needs to recover $50000 from each user like you. In addition, they actually still need to run a network infrastructure, pay for Internet access, etc. $1000/month seems quite reasonable for that. But it's worse than that: if you use 400kbps on average, but only use the device during working hours, that's about 1.6Mbps or 1/6th of the tower, so now they need to make $160000 from you just to recover your portion of the cost of the tower.
Sounds to me like it stopped because you didn't have any idea of what you were doing.
Well, let me be more blunt: I'm not going to subsidize a bunch of doctors, real estate agents, and lawyers who are running a business off a $30/month smartphone plan. I hope your provider sues you for theft of service and breach of contract. If you want 15G/month, you should f*cking pay for it yourself. Of course, what mobile phone companies should do is simply have metered service a, say, $10/Gbyte for consumers and $20/Gbyte for business users (with the latter offering better service, support, and reliability).
Wow, a real estate agent complaining about the phone company screwing them and overcharging them. Look in the mirror, man. Your industry caused the real estate bubble, and getting paid a percentage of transaction costs is the biggest fraud imaginable. If anybody should be forced to go to a "flat rate", it's you people.
You bought the phone when you signed the 2 year contract, you are just paying it off. (At least that's the way it used to work.) The phone is yours even if you aren't using the service anymore. Of course, because all the carriers are incompatible, the phone is also useless to you.
Sounds like a consumer smartphone plan isn't the right choice for you then. On business plans, I think you can easily get 10-15G for maybe $150/month. And if you're in "real estate, insurance, or medical" with "2 or 3 agents", I think you can afford it.
You mean when a self-selected subset of readers answers subjectively about how reliable their devices are?
http://www.pcworld.com/article/211074/the_tech_brands_you_can_trust.html
That's kind of like saying that the problem with water is that it's wet.
So? I was simply pointing out that global static analysis is useless for these kinds of applications, and moving more of the OS into "managed code" with JITs (like Microsoft is trying) also isn't working. Both language and compiler technologies that Android is built on (C++, Java) optimize badly.
Apple's choices (Objective-C, now LLVM) seem better to me in comparison when it comes to efficient, unbloated code (unfortunately, Objective-C has other problems, like a lack of type-safety).