Actually, there's nothing stopping people from creating a fractional-reserve banking system based on Bitcoin. Most inflationary pressure is done by using fractional-reserve banking to increase the money supply beyond the actual amount of currency in circulation. Works just as well with Bitcoin.
A number of states have this: traffic tickets have the normal base price, but then there are surcharges for specific programs on top of that. The problem is that the surcharges are per-ticket, not percentage-based, so a $40 speeding ticket might cost you $140.
Now, in my part of upstate New York, they make the process more annoying by not telling you the charge up front. The officer takes down your address, gives you a copy of the ticket, and the city mails you information about your fine and court date (along with instructions) later. I remember in Georgia a number of years back, the fine, court date, and such were all on the written ticket you received at the time. (Georgia had these fees, too, I think, but they were less obvious.)
Our city/county/region actually makes it more annoying: if you show up for your first "court date", all that happens is that you register a plea and are assigned a second court date that is your actual court date. Fortunately, you can do this by mail (although you may have less say in your court date).
Baggage fees that encourage people to take carry-ons whenever possible, slowing down boarding, coupled with almost no enforcement of carry-on size rules.
Nonlinear isn't the same as unsolveable. The Navier-Stokes equation, and the methods for solving it, are a lot more interesting than you let on, and its applications are more interesting than you let on. I mean, aircraft? We built aircraft that worked without knowing anything really useful about fluid dynamics.
Navier-Stokes is a differential equation. Non-linear, too.
Never mind the inconvenient problem that, for any realistic situation, there exists no known exact solution. You just have to model it using computers and mostly-accurate models. Disturbingly similar to how climatic models work! And yet we're able to do all sorts of interesting fluid dynamics engineering (like the many kinds of jet engines).
The patent presumably includes the standard boilerplate for describing software: a long series of claims that modify the base claim by describing all of the ways that computer software could be implemented.
Only if it was designed to be a bomb that triggered when you tried to detect it. Otherwise, the uncontrolled chain reaction would go something more like "zort" as it irradiated all the people nearby.
People have accidentally made supercritical masses before. You can't just lump a sufficient amount of plutonium into one spot and magically it's a bomb.
That assumes they scale black to zero and the rest of the scale is linear, which often isn't the case for such images. (They contrast-enhance the interesting region.)
The effect of high-energy photons is necessarily limited to odd secondary effects: no direct heating effects are possible (there's just not enough of them).
The pictures say nothing about intensity, only that it's not homogeneous. What's the intensity scale for the picture?
You can get enormous changes for low-intensity wavelengths with small temperature shifts in the sun: tha's how blackbody radiation goes. That's because it's changing from "almost no photons" to "slightly more".
Take your graph as an example. The peak is about 3 x 10^10 photons / cm^2 / sec for ~30 nm photons. That's what, about 300 microwatts/m^2 out of the 1300 W/m^2 solar irradiance? The photon flux in that region could increase a hundredfold with no measurable effect on solar irradiance.
One should be careful using the word "should" in these situations. Not only does it imply that there is a "correct" temperature for the Earth, but it suggests we have a solid enough understanding of the entire system that we can make definitive predictions about the future. That's usually not the case in any situation where one would say "but the graphs suggests that it should be 3 C cooler right now".
I don't really see what you're saying about the graph. Hopefully you're not looking at the peak height of previous peaks (~2 C) and comparing it to the height of the current peak (~0 C) and figuring this means that it "should" be 2 C hotter? This equally suggests that something else in the climate has changed or that there's long-term drift. The periodic pattern is hard to reliably predict the future from -- it's not all that consistent (a lot of things: cycle period, peak width, vary between the cycles shown). The graph does suggest that in the future, we should a temperature decline of a total of roughly 10 C. Again, though, apply quantitative analysis. That 10 C drop is over the course of about 120,000 years. That's about 0.08 C / thousand years. The global-warming trend is about 0.8 C over a hundred years, which is 8 C over a thousand years. So that's a factor of 100 different. So if somehow the effect of global warming caps at a degree or two C, then in 5-10 thousand years (roughly the length of time humans have had writing and civilization), it could get cold. Models don't suggest that to be the case. (To put 8 C / thousand years in perspective on that graph, the rising edge of the prominent peak seems to be about 10 C over 5-10 thousand years. If we say 5 thousand, that's 2 C / thousand years -- a factor of four slower than our current trend.)
Oh, you can't accurately estimate the Earth's temperature dependence on CO2. Not if you want particularly high accuracy. But that's what Arrhenius did, which was more or less the start of figuring out the greenhouse effect. Later work (with a large gap in there) has been figuring out the many details. It's a great starting point, though. The feedback is a perturbation of the dead-simple model. It's useful, before looking at the feedback and getting into a rat's maze of details, if the temperature dependence of the Earth on CO2 is on the order of 1 C per doubling in CO2, 0.01 C per doubling, or 100 C per doubling.
I think the art of using rough quantitative analysis to estimate the reasonableness of claims is an art that is lost on most people, particularly when they are talking about any issue they have an opinion on, and particularly on Slashdot. It's far too convenient and unproductive to throw up a wall of "but there are lots of details" and "but there are things we don't understand" and fall back on qualitative arguments like "but volcanoes output CO2, and other planets are getting hotter without SUVs" without giving it the barest amount of critical thought.
For example, while total irradiance is fairly flat, the makeup of that radiation varies greatly
Sort of. The Sun's output, prior to meeting the atmosphere, is very close to black-body radiation. So you can place decent limits on how much the irradiance for a particular wavelength will change as a function of the change in the total irradiance.
Something you should look up: there isn't one "solar cycle." There are several.
Of course, but there's limited to no direct measurement of the irradiance variation over these cycles, and proxy data suggests that the total irradiance variation as a result of all of these cycles is about 0.2%.
which is that we've been on the UPSWING of that same solar cycle for the same time period that global warming has occurred.
It's a long-term trend starting in the early 1900s or so, so it's not on the upswing of any cycle shorter than 200 years, give or take. It's roughly 0.8 C over that time, so in the extreme case, half of that is due to irradiance.
Which allows a LOT more cosmic rays to hit the Earth (15% or so).
There is a theory that the cosmic rays affect albedo via cloud cover, but the numbers I've seen for cosmic ray variation are about 2%.
True. The earth will still be around. Life will almost certainly still be around, although the environment will be very different. Worse has happened before. Humans will probably still be around, as we're pretty good technologists. We sure as hell may not like the transition period, though. Sure, we're being greedily protective of the status quo, but that's because large-scale climate change will be very, very expensive.
This is because people are bad at quantitative analysis. Look, solar irradiance averages about 1366 W/m^2 and a has a variation of about 1 W/m^2 (using a one-year moving average). That's 0.073%. If the Earth's temperature was entirely determined by solar irradiance, then the temperature variation would be about 0.2 C. That is, you'd see an 11-year temperature cycle corresponding to the solar output cycle with temperatures varying +/- 0.1 C from the average over the course of this cycle.
There. A tiny bit of research on the Internet and some math and you too can put bounds on how much influence sunspot cycles have on Earth's temperature.
And yes, climate scientists are familiar with this. The sun has been kind of important to climate science since Arrhenius figured out the greenhouse effect in 1896 and used the Stefan-Boltzmann law to estimate the Earth's temperature dependence on CO2.
Hardened PBKDF with a remotely decent password isn't cheap to crack at all. If you want to be insulated against forgetting the password: (a) encrypt wallet with key A (b) store a copy of key A alongside wallet, encrypted with password-based key B (c) store an unencrypted copy of A on a USB disk
For (c) you can alternately store a copy of the unencrypted wallet; store a copy of the private key A; make a public-private keypair, put the public-key-encrypted key A alongside the wallet, and store the private key; or make a new private key C, encrypt key A with that, and store C on the USB disk.
It's not simple for a home user to cobble together, but the above is a common way of encrypting files while providing lost-password recovery (and allowing the user to change their password without having to change the lost-password-recovery data). Bitcoin clients should support it.
but if parent's dna were copied exactly the same, then you wouldn't be much different from your brothers and sisters.
This is actually because of chromosomal crossover. You receive half your DNA from each parent. Without crossover, there'd be only 4 possible children per parent pair. However, during meiosis, sections of chromosomes swap positions, dramatically increasing the number of different possible offspring.
Still, mutation is the source of brand-new genotypes. It's critical to evolution (which is natural selection pressure applied to a population that reproduces with mutations), but it's still mutation.
Some per-file encryption schemes encrypt the files whole (with something like CBC) instead of by block, which for large files will have a negative impact on Dropbox. Perhaps these don't.
Additionally, even if you have per-file encryption, the filenames and other metadata for the files, including a complete timestamp history of changes, is visible without decryption. For some people, this is more information than they want others to have about their files.
IT ruins gas mileage and the gas stations are NOT selling it for 5%-10% cheaper because that is what your gas mileage loss is from running E10.
You should know that running E10 can't cost you 10% gas mileage, since the energy content of ethanol isn't zero and E10 has 10% ethanol. It's more like 2-3%.
Of course, it's still stupid to sell E10 at the same price as E0. If it provides 3% less energy, it ought to cost me 3% less or they should stop selling it.
That's an interesting question. I don't know when the sync is triggered. The smart thing for Dropbox to do is wait until the file is closed (that is, the Truecrypt volume is unmounted) before attempting to push updates. Hopefully it would not try to download updates and apply them unless the volume is unmounted -- to do so would be disastrous.
A TrueCrypt container isn't going to handle simultaneous access well at all, which is a distinct shortcoming of this method.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there's nothing stopping people from creating a fractional-reserve banking system based on Bitcoin. Most inflationary pressure is done by using fractional-reserve banking to increase the money supply beyond the actual amount of currency in circulation. Works just as well with Bitcoin.
A number of states have this: traffic tickets have the normal base price, but then there are surcharges for specific programs on top of that. The problem is that the surcharges are per-ticket, not percentage-based, so a $40 speeding ticket might cost you $140.
Now, in my part of upstate New York, they make the process more annoying by not telling you the charge up front. The officer takes down your address, gives you a copy of the ticket, and the city mails you information about your fine and court date (along with instructions) later. I remember in Georgia a number of years back, the fine, court date, and such were all on the written ticket you received at the time. (Georgia had these fees, too, I think, but they were less obvious.)
Our city/county/region actually makes it more annoying: if you show up for your first "court date", all that happens is that you register a plea and are assigned a second court date that is your actual court date. Fortunately, you can do this by mail (although you may have less say in your court date).
Baggage fees that encourage people to take carry-ons whenever possible, slowing down boarding, coupled with almost no enforcement of carry-on size rules.
Energy company does. Cable company does. Traffic tickets do.
Nonlinear isn't the same as unsolveable. The Navier-Stokes equation, and the methods for solving it, are a lot more interesting than you let on, and its applications are more interesting than you let on. I mean, aircraft? We built aircraft that worked without knowing anything really useful about fluid dynamics.
Nope. You're just apparently prone to misinterpretation. Oh well.
Navier-Stokes is a differential equation. Non-linear, too.
Never mind the inconvenient problem that, for any realistic situation, there exists no known exact solution. You just have to model it using computers and mostly-accurate models. Disturbingly similar to how climatic models work! And yet we're able to do all sorts of interesting fluid dynamics engineering (like the many kinds of jet engines).
The patent presumably includes the standard boilerplate for describing software: a long series of claims that modify the base claim by describing all of the ways that computer software could be implemented.
Oh yeah. Anyone nearby will be seriously upset. For a short while. Pretty different from a bomb, though.
Only if it was designed to be a bomb that triggered when you tried to detect it. Otherwise, the uncontrolled chain reaction would go something more like "zort" as it irradiated all the people nearby.
People have accidentally made supercritical masses before. You can't just lump a sufficient amount of plutonium into one spot and magically it's a bomb.
That assumes they scale black to zero and the rest of the scale is linear, which often isn't the case for such images. (They contrast-enhance the interesting region.)
The effect of high-energy photons is necessarily limited to odd secondary effects: no direct heating effects are possible (there's just not enough of them).
The pictures say nothing about intensity, only that it's not homogeneous. What's the intensity scale for the picture?
You can get enormous changes for low-intensity wavelengths with small temperature shifts in the sun: tha's how blackbody radiation goes. That's because it's changing from "almost no photons" to "slightly more".
Take your graph as an example. The peak is about 3 x 10^10 photons / cm^2 / sec for ~30 nm photons. That's what, about 300 microwatts/m^2 out of the 1300 W/m^2 solar irradiance? The photon flux in that region could increase a hundredfold with no measurable effect on solar irradiance.
Quick: start a company called Localdomain and trademark the name.
Once you get your new TLD, your website, of course, will be hosted on the machine "localhost".
One should be careful using the word "should" in these situations. Not only does it imply that there is a "correct" temperature for the Earth, but it suggests we have a solid enough understanding of the entire system that we can make definitive predictions about the future. That's usually not the case in any situation where one would say "but the graphs suggests that it should be 3 C cooler right now".
I don't really see what you're saying about the graph. Hopefully you're not looking at the peak height of previous peaks (~2 C) and comparing it to the height of the current peak (~0 C) and figuring this means that it "should" be 2 C hotter? This equally suggests that something else in the climate has changed or that there's long-term drift. The periodic pattern is hard to reliably predict the future from -- it's not all that consistent (a lot of things: cycle period, peak width, vary between the cycles shown). The graph does suggest that in the future, we should a temperature decline of a total of roughly 10 C. Again, though, apply quantitative analysis. That 10 C drop is over the course of about 120,000 years. That's about 0.08 C / thousand years. The global-warming trend is about 0.8 C over a hundred years, which is 8 C over a thousand years. So that's a factor of 100 different. So if somehow the effect of global warming caps at a degree or two C, then in 5-10 thousand years (roughly the length of time humans have had writing and civilization), it could get cold. Models don't suggest that to be the case. (To put 8 C / thousand years in perspective on that graph, the rising edge of the prominent peak seems to be about 10 C over 5-10 thousand years. If we say 5 thousand, that's 2 C / thousand years -- a factor of four slower than our current trend.)
Oh, you can't accurately estimate the Earth's temperature dependence on CO2. Not if you want particularly high accuracy. But that's what Arrhenius did, which was more or less the start of figuring out the greenhouse effect. Later work (with a large gap in there) has been figuring out the many details. It's a great starting point, though. The feedback is a perturbation of the dead-simple model. It's useful, before looking at the feedback and getting into a rat's maze of details, if the temperature dependence of the Earth on CO2 is on the order of 1 C per doubling in CO2, 0.01 C per doubling, or 100 C per doubling.
I think the art of using rough quantitative analysis to estimate the reasonableness of claims is an art that is lost on most people, particularly when they are talking about any issue they have an opinion on, and particularly on Slashdot. It's far too convenient and unproductive to throw up a wall of "but there are lots of details" and "but there are things we don't understand" and fall back on qualitative arguments like "but volcanoes output CO2, and other planets are getting hotter without SUVs" without giving it the barest amount of critical thought.
For example, while total irradiance is fairly flat, the makeup of that radiation varies greatly
Sort of. The Sun's output, prior to meeting the atmosphere, is very close to black-body radiation. So you can place decent limits on how much the irradiance for a particular wavelength will change as a function of the change in the total irradiance.
Something you should look up: there isn't one "solar cycle." There are several.
Of course, but there's limited to no direct measurement of the irradiance variation over these cycles, and proxy data suggests that the total irradiance variation as a result of all of these cycles is about 0.2%.
which is that we've been on the UPSWING of that same solar cycle for the same time period that global warming has occurred.
It's a long-term trend starting in the early 1900s or so, so it's not on the upswing of any cycle shorter than 200 years, give or take. It's roughly 0.8 C over that time, so in the extreme case, half of that is due to irradiance.
Which allows a LOT more cosmic rays to hit the Earth (15% or so).
There is a theory that the cosmic rays affect albedo via cloud cover, but the numbers I've seen for cosmic ray variation are about 2%.
True. The earth will still be around. Life will almost certainly still be around, although the environment will be very different. Worse has happened before. Humans will probably still be around, as we're pretty good technologists. We sure as hell may not like the transition period, though. Sure, we're being greedily protective of the status quo, but that's because large-scale climate change will be very, very expensive.
Close. Discover is pro-science. It's kind of their schtick.
This is because people are bad at quantitative analysis. Look, solar irradiance averages about 1366 W/m^2 and a has a variation of about 1 W/m^2 (using a one-year moving average). That's 0.073%. If the Earth's temperature was entirely determined by solar irradiance, then the temperature variation would be about 0.2 C. That is, you'd see an 11-year temperature cycle corresponding to the solar output cycle with temperatures varying +/- 0.1 C from the average over the course of this cycle.
There. A tiny bit of research on the Internet and some math and you too can put bounds on how much influence sunspot cycles have on Earth's temperature.
And yes, climate scientists are familiar with this. The sun has been kind of important to climate science since Arrhenius figured out the greenhouse effect in 1896 and used the Stefan-Boltzmann law to estimate the Earth's temperature dependence on CO2.
Hardened PBKDF with a remotely decent password isn't cheap to crack at all. If you want to be insulated against forgetting the password:
(a) encrypt wallet with key A
(b) store a copy of key A alongside wallet, encrypted with password-based key B
(c) store an unencrypted copy of A on a USB disk
For (c) you can alternately store a copy of the unencrypted wallet; store a copy of the private key A; make a public-private keypair, put the public-key-encrypted key A alongside the wallet, and store the private key; or make a new private key C, encrypt key A with that, and store C on the USB disk.
It's not simple for a home user to cobble together, but the above is a common way of encrypting files while providing lost-password recovery (and allowing the user to change their password without having to change the lost-password-recovery data). Bitcoin clients should support it.
but if parent's dna were copied exactly the same, then you wouldn't be much different from your brothers and sisters.
This is actually because of chromosomal crossover. You receive half your DNA from each parent. Without crossover, there'd be only 4 possible children per parent pair. However, during meiosis, sections of chromosomes swap positions, dramatically increasing the number of different possible offspring.
Still, mutation is the source of brand-new genotypes. It's critical to evolution (which is natural selection pressure applied to a population that reproduces with mutations), but it's still mutation.
Some per-file encryption schemes encrypt the files whole (with something like CBC) instead of by block, which for large files will have a negative impact on Dropbox. Perhaps these don't.
Additionally, even if you have per-file encryption, the filenames and other metadata for the files, including a complete timestamp history of changes, is visible without decryption. For some people, this is more information than they want others to have about their files.
IT ruins gas mileage and the gas stations are NOT selling it for 5%-10% cheaper because that is what your gas mileage loss is from running E10.
You should know that running E10 can't cost you 10% gas mileage, since the energy content of ethanol isn't zero and E10 has 10% ethanol. It's more like 2-3%.
Of course, it's still stupid to sell E10 at the same price as E0. If it provides 3% less energy, it ought to cost me 3% less or they should stop selling it.
You didn't seem to suggest any of that initially. Why demand it now?
Or does "quick firing squad" silently include the slow process of a trial?
That's an interesting question. I don't know when the sync is triggered. The smart thing for Dropbox to do is wait until the file is closed (that is, the Truecrypt volume is unmounted) before attempting to push updates. Hopefully it would not try to download updates and apply them unless the volume is unmounted -- to do so would be disastrous.
A TrueCrypt container isn't going to handle simultaneous access well at all, which is a distinct shortcoming of this method.