Bacopa, Brahmii, and others....herbs of the Ayruvedic tradition, all used now and for thousands of years by many students and engineers all over India to give them an edge... and steal your job;) . Bacopa at least has a fair amount of clinical studies to back it up too and these herbs have a long history of safety.
Equivocation is the use in a syllogism (a logical chain of reasoning) of a term several times, but giving the term a different meaning each time. For example:
A feather is light.
What is light cannot be dark.
Therefore, a feather cannot be dark.
Nature has Laws. All Laws are made for the purpose of governing. Nature has laws that are made for the purpose of governing.
Notice that the first and second time the term "Law" is used it has a different meaning.
So I'm sure a lot of American Slashdotters are thinking: "What? A Russian Company buying an American Company? Where did they get the dough?"
From : http://www.econstats.com/weo/V012.htm Share of World Economy % country 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 United States 21.68 21.34 21.13 20.97 20.85 20.71 20.57 Russia 2.36 2.42 2.46 2.55 2.60 2.66 2.69 Italy 3.22 3.20 3.12 3.01 2.91 2.84 2.79 France 3.34 3.33 3.27 3.17 3.10 3.04 2.98 Spain 1.81 1.82 1.81 1.78 1.75 1.72 1.70 China 10.92 11.47 12.07 12.68 13.18 13.59 13.99 India 5.45 5.54 5.65 5.83 5.91 6.05 6.17
I wish this chart went back further to really accentuate how much has changed over the past 15 years. The point being... Slowly but surely the world economy is getting more evenly distributed around the globe.
JRuby is actually faster on a lot of benchmarks now then straight C Ruby (see the link in the above article to the blog post). This is because Jruby turns ruby into Java bytecode. Java's JIT can do lots of special runtime optimizations to the compiled bytecode that C Ruby can't. With each version, the JVM has been getting better and better at doing these optimizations. It's nice because if I wrote a program in C it would always be the same speed unless I upgraded the hardware. With Java the software just gets faster and faster with each version because the JVM gets smarter.
Certainly some bird is going to get hit by that kite! It will look ugly flying offshore hundreds of miles from where we can see it! The kite is made from polymers derived from fossil fuels! It somehow violates the second law of thermodynamics! It will sap energy from global winds leading to something bad! Won't somebody please think of the children [ of oil company executives]!
Seriously though... I can't think of any alternatives to fossil fuels that haven't run into enormous amount of flack.
I was listening to a radio program a while ago when the Atkins diet was hip. It was a debate between nutritionists pro and con about Atkins. Both of them had a lot of awards, titles,etc. The anti-Atkins guy eventually rant out of arguments and started talking about how we have to stop eating so much meat and destroying the earth. Which led me to believe that the whole obesity/health/eating situation is suffering from severe politicization.
China is not fascist IMHO because they don't have an institutionalized ideology of racism and military expansionism. I just think western political science doesn't have a word yet for what they are yet.
China runs like a communist state in that "The Party" makes all the decisions. As Lenin said, "the party is the vanguard of the proletariat [the people]" -- so the proletariat should just shut up. People join the party and then are slowly promoted up the ranks, appointed to various positions, committees, etc. based on internally made decisions by fellow party members ("Inner Party Democracy"). At the very top is the central committee and the chairman of the central committee is nominally the head of the government.
The economic system is different from the west in that banks run with heavy state influence but never contract credit. In the U.S a bank makes a lot of bad loans -- it goes out of business. They all tend to do that at the same time when credit stops expanding -- which causes a contraction in lending, which causes a slowdown in the economy.
In China bank make tons of bad loans to people the government wants them to and the loans never get paid back. The banks get continually bailed out by the government and so the credit cycle doesn't really happen. The problem with this system is that if the banks lend money to inefficient industries, or cronies, inflation will get rolling along. China counteracts this by regularly executing corrupt bank officials. They also stomp on asset bubbles by doing things like raising taxes and instituting mandatory down payments on real estate loans.
In the west we have the law and only the law and lots of lawyers to go with it. In China they have the law and a lot of arbitrary rules made by party officials that they change from time to time. The whole thing hangs together IMHO because of a strong sense of solidarity and patriotism within the party and brutal action against dissent from outside the party and corruption inside the party.
Usually new ideas get introduced into the party dialog by internal party think tanks who make speeches and float trial balloons which are collectively accepted or rejected by the higher levels of the party.
It's a different system but it works. The problem is is that these kinds of systems have to be particularly careful to keep power evenly distributed -- and keep out Stalin like sociopaths -- in order to prevent the party from becoming too rigid or power from becoming too concentrated and thus making irrational policy decisions and stifling "legitimate" criticism as happened during Mao's reign.
Two high level defectors in the 1980s Anatoliy Golitsyn (Author of "The Perestroika Deception) and Jan Sejna (Author of "We Will Bury You") have written books and tried to tell the west that Perestroika was not genuine reform, but just a strategic retreat planned by the KGB (now GRU) that would help the Soviets catch up to the west technologically and economically after which they would return back to dictatorship and imperialism.
Check out the video of Sergei! He's the CEO of the company, worth billions of dollars, making an official product promotional video and he's wearing a shirt that looks like he slept in it! If you can be a billionaire wearing shirts that you slept in I don't even know why I even bother wearing a collar at all:).
Psychologists have suggested we hone our skills of rationalization in order to impress others, reaffirm our "moral integrity" and protect our "self-concept" and feeling of "global self-worth."
Since most people spend their lives trying to impress other people I guess rationalization is a critical skill that should be the focus of our educational system./sarcasm
I think Microsoft royally screwed up with outlook web access. They added XMLHttpRequest to the browser so outlook web access would work more like a desktop app. They built an application on a technology that did not require full access to the latest version of the win32 api and x86 assembly language and it was off to the races. Most of Google, Yahoo and indeed the entirety of Web 2.0 was built on this mistake. They are desperately trying to put the web back in the original box they intended it to be in which is people without access to the latest version of the full Win32 API, and an X86 processor will be denied access to all online content.
Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed:
libsvncpp0c2a libwxbase2.6-0 libwxgtk2.6-0 Suggested packages:
libgnomeprintui2.2-0 The following NEW packages will be installed:
libsvncpp0c2a libwxbase2.6-0 libwxgtk2.6-0 rapidsvn 0 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. Need to get 3817kB of archives. After unpacking 10.8MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y Get:1 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ feisty/universe libsvncpp0c2a 0.9.4-1ubuntu3 [73.1kB] Get:2 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ feisty/universe libwxbase2.6-0 2.6.3.2.1.5ubuntu6 [567kB] Get:3 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ feisty/universe libwxgtk2.6-0 2.6.3.2.1.5ubuntu6 [2875kB] Get:4 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ feisty/universe rapidsvn 0.9.4-1ubuntu3 [303kB] Fetched 3817kB in 16s (237kB/s) Selecting previously deselected package libsvncpp0c2a. (Reading database... 157987 files and directories currently installed.) Unpacking libsvncpp0c2a (from.../libsvncpp0c2a_0.9.4-1ubuntu3_i386.deb)... Selecting previously deselected package libwxbase2.6-0. Unpacking libwxbase2.6-0 (from.../libwxbase2.6-0_2.6.3.2.1.5ubuntu6_i386.deb)... Selecting previously deselected package libwxgtk2.6-0. Unpacking libwxgtk2.6-0 (from.../libwxgtk2.6-0_2.6.3.2.1.5ubuntu6_i386.deb)... Selecting previously deselected package rapidsvn. Unpacking rapidsvn (from.../rapidsvn_0.9.4-1ubuntu3_i386.deb)... Setting up libsvncpp0c2a (0.9.4-1ubuntu3)... Setting up libwxbase2.6-0 (2.6.3.2.1.5ubuntu6)... Setting up libwxgtk2.6-0 (2.6.3.2.1.5ubuntu6)... Setting up rapidsvn (0.9.4-1ubuntu3)...
Wow! That was so easy! Took me 30 seconds to install including downloading. Would have taken longer to install on windows just to find the rapidsvn website, download the files, click the install button and hit the next button on the wizard. Geez people start using Ubuntu or at least a Debian based distro. It's not 1997 anymore.
Speaking of Brittany Spears concerts, It throughly amazes me how desperate people are for "culture". Any public gathering that involves alcohol, some pretension of sophistication or spirituality, and good parking is absolutely overflowing with people these days. Maybe I'm just getting old:/
Many historical accounts detailed the cruelties of the Mongol conquerors.
* The Grand Library of Baghdad, containing countless precious historical documents and books on subjects ranging from medicine to astronomy, was destroyed. Survivors said that the waters of the Tigris ran black with ink from the enormous quantities of books flung into the river.
* The Mongols looted and then destroyed mosques, palaces, libraries, and hospitals--grand buildings that had been the work of generations--were burned to the ground.
Baghdad was a depopulated, ruined city for several centuries and only gradually recovered some of its former glory.
"Iraq in 1258 was very different from present day Iraq. Its agriculture was supported by a canal network thousands of years old. Baghdad was one of the most brilliant intellectual centers in the world. The Mongol destruction of Baghdad was a psychological blow from which Islam never recovered. Already Islam was turning inward, becoming more suspicious of conflicts between faith and reason and more conservative. With the sack of Baghdad, the intellectual flowering of Islam was snuffed out. Imagining the Athens of Pericles and Aristotle obliterated by a nuclear weapon begins to suggest the enormity of the blow. The Mongols filled in the irrigation canals and left Iraq too depopulated to restore them." (Steven Dutch)
I always thought with that big of an address space they could force everybody to have their own unique biometric hash and gps coordinates encoded in the ip address.
Traditional Macroeconomics is designed around the strange institution called the federal reserve. Therefore, for any synthetic economy it is kind of useless. Let me give you some examples:
MMO: Game Owners Create money and distribute to players at a fixed rate. Real Life: Federal Reserve creates money and distributes it by buying government debt which pays interest.
MMO: Game Owners tax citizens in Non-MMO money Real Life: Government taxes citizens in order to repay federal reserve and decrease inflation for goods and services that they need in their government function (otherwise they'd just borrow even more money from the fed).
MMO: No Lending/Credit Real Life: Almost all economic activity is tied indirectly to lending and/or credit in one form or another.
MMO: No banks with fractional reserve lending ability Real Life: Fractional reserve lending multiplies the money supply 10x and creates debtor/lender relationships that structure economic activity
I have a friend who lives up in California and has a bunch of people working out of his house because his home internet connection is somehow 50mbps per second because the place was setup as some ultra high speed trial a few years back. He'd like to get all his employees out of his living room but he can't because he can't find a single commercial building with comparable broadband speeds without going to an absurdly priced OC3. Just goes to show that as William Gibson has said, "The future is here, it's just not widely distributed yet".
There are millions of illegal immigrants working with fake SSNs. They Give fake SSNs to hospitals, cell phone providers, banks, tax collectors, schools, etc. How would illegal immigrants operate if you had tough penalties for using someone else's SSN? This is one of the biggest politically sensitive roadblocks to better identity theft protection in this country.
"We're failing because we're not spending enough".
I cannot count the amount of times I've seen this argument over and over again in political debates in America. It's the real downfall of America. In education, health care, scientific research, energy people just wave money around like some sort of cure-all when it isn't. What is really required is leadership and creativity and a lot of examining details in an even handed manner that the vast majority of people could care less about or would go over their heads. I think it's pretty reflective of the current trend of people not getting excited about any political issue unless it involves them getting some money from the government trough or money being taken away from them.
I have a sidekick phone and can do AOL, MSN or Yahoo IM all day and I pay a flat rate per month. You can even get a cheap used Sidekick I or II and still do AOL and/or Yahoo. Pay per message text messaging seems like something from the 1980s.
"Page 19 - There is a wide band of uncertainty as to the amount of uncertainty in the warming that would result from any stabilized greenhouse gase concentration"
The footnote says 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius. That to me means wild ass guess. Models and data please!!
The warming of CO2 is actually relatively well established; what is uncertain is how much it is amplified by feedbacks.
What do you expect me to take this on faith? I wish someone would give me mathematical models backed up by historical data instead of "fairly well established".
The full Working Group I report (not just the Summary for Policymakers) has references to the literature.
Well let's see looked through it and it basically says that the temperature and the CO2 are rising over the last 300 years. Might as well be the decline in Pirates.
They're based on both instrumental and ice core data, among other sources. The ice core data is not the long-term Vostok data for ice ages you're referring to, but just over the last few centuries.
Well why not use the Vostok data? Oh I forgot it shows sharp and dramatic falls and increases in both CO2 and temperature (with CO2 slightly trailing temperature) which happen for no apparent reason. What if the temperature rising is causing increases in CO2? CO2 becoming less soluble in the oceans, less vegetation as deserts grow, etc.
Ok, what do you want to know?
Alright: 1. What explains the fall of CO2 and temperature simultaneously in the ice core data (with temperature leading slightly)? 2. If you notice at the end of the ice core data there is a very sharp rise in CO2 (Humans show up) but the temperature levels off.
For me the ice core data is pretty convincing evidence that CO2 increases are not responsible for global warming. Again CO2 is increasing, temperature is increasing. CO2, at the amount present in the atmosphere is not contributing significantly to warming. If it was, temperature would follow CO2 in the ice cores not the other way around. The drops in temperature and CO2 following are also strange in the ice cores. That's real data.. 1000s of years not just the last 300.
What is sorely lacking from the global warming debate is actual complete numeric data specifically how much an increase in CO2 will affect the global temperature. I looked at the ICCC report and there are basically a whole bunch of wild assed guesses as to how much it will affect temperature based on simulated models of the climate. The values range all over the place. We're talking increasing the CO2 concentrations by a few hundredths of a percentage point as a percentage of the mass of the atmosphere over the next century.
I saw references to the simulations but could not find the methodology as to how they were conducted. If they were based on the Vostok ice cores they are suspect because it's fairly obvious that the CO2 concentrations began rising after the temperature started increasing and then suddenly dropped steeply a few centuries later directly in line with temperature so it's not clear a. what was causing the change in CO2 concentrations in earlier eras and what what the correlation/causation relationship was in the temperature in earlier eras.
I would love to talk with someone about actual data and methodologies used to come to conclusions and not the ad hominem attacks that have dominated the debate for so long. When I start to bring this kind of stuff up I am met with silence or 1-liner put-downs.
Slashdot Mirror
Bacopa, Brahmii, and others....herbs of the Ayruvedic tradition, all used now and for thousands of years by many students and engineers all over India to give them an edge... and steal your job ;) . Bacopa at least has a fair amount of clinical studies to back it up too and these herbs have a long history of safety.
Nature has Laws.
All Laws are made for the purpose of governing.
Nature has laws that are made for the purpose of governing.
Notice that the first and second time the term "Law" is used it has a different meaning.
Flash! New barking to English translator heralds new era in call center outsourcing!
So I'm sure a lot of American Slashdotters are thinking: "What? A Russian Company buying an American Company? Where did they get the dough?"
From : http://www.econstats.com/weo/V012.htm
Share of World Economy %
country 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
United States 21.68 21.34 21.13 20.97 20.85 20.71 20.57
Russia 2.36 2.42 2.46 2.55 2.60 2.66 2.69
Italy 3.22 3.20 3.12 3.01 2.91 2.84 2.79
France 3.34 3.33 3.27 3.17 3.10 3.04 2.98
Spain 1.81 1.82 1.81 1.78 1.75 1.72 1.70
China 10.92 11.47 12.07 12.68 13.18 13.59 13.99
India 5.45 5.54 5.65 5.83 5.91 6.05 6.17
I wish this chart went back further to really accentuate how much has changed over the past 15 years. The point being... Slowly but surely the world economy is getting more evenly distributed around the globe.
JRuby is actually faster on a lot of benchmarks now then straight C Ruby (see the link in the above article to the blog post). This is because Jruby turns ruby into Java bytecode. Java's JIT can do lots of special runtime optimizations to the compiled bytecode that C Ruby can't. With each version, the JVM has been getting better and better at doing these optimizations. It's nice because if I wrote a program in C it would always be the same speed unless I upgraded the hardware. With Java the software just gets faster and faster with each version because the JVM gets smarter.
Certainly some bird is going to get hit by that kite! It will look ugly flying offshore hundreds of miles from where we can see it! The kite is made from polymers derived from fossil fuels! It somehow violates the second law of thermodynamics! It will sap energy from global winds leading to something bad! Won't somebody please think of the children [ of oil company executives]!
Seriously though... I can't think of any alternatives to fossil fuels that haven't run into enormous amount of flack.
I was listening to a radio program a while ago when the Atkins diet was hip. It was a debate between nutritionists pro and con about Atkins. Both of them had a lot of awards, titles ,etc. The anti-Atkins guy eventually rant out of arguments and started talking about how we have to stop eating so much meat and destroying the earth. Which led me to believe that the whole obesity/health/eating situation is suffering from severe politicization.
China is not fascist IMHO because they don't have an institutionalized ideology of racism and military expansionism. I just think western political science doesn't have a word yet for what they are yet.
China runs like a communist state in that "The Party" makes all the decisions. As Lenin said, "the party is the vanguard of the proletariat [the people]" -- so the proletariat should just shut up. People join the party and then are slowly promoted up the ranks, appointed to various positions, committees, etc. based on internally made decisions by fellow party members ("Inner Party Democracy"). At the very top is the central committee and the chairman of the central committee is nominally the head of the government.
Here's a good article on political reform within the party and the strengthening of "inner-party democracy":
http://www.chinapost.com.tw/commentary/2007/09/19/123161/All-eyes.htm
The economic system is different from the west in that banks run with heavy state influence but never contract credit. In the U.S a bank makes a lot of bad loans -- it goes out of business. They all tend to do that at the same time when credit stops expanding -- which causes a contraction in lending, which causes a slowdown in the economy.
In China bank make tons of bad loans to people the government wants them to and the loans never get paid back. The banks get continually bailed out by the government and so the credit cycle doesn't really happen. The problem with this system is that if the banks lend money to inefficient industries, or cronies, inflation will get rolling along. China counteracts this by regularly executing corrupt bank officials. They also stomp on asset bubbles by doing things like raising taxes and instituting mandatory down payments on real estate loans.
In the west we have the law and only the law and lots of lawyers to go with it. In China they have the law and a lot of arbitrary rules made by party officials that they change from time to time. The whole thing hangs together IMHO because of a strong sense of solidarity and patriotism within the party and brutal action against dissent from outside the party and corruption inside the party.
Usually new ideas get introduced into the party dialog by internal party think tanks who make speeches and float trial balloons which are collectively accepted or rejected by the higher levels of the party.
It's a different system but it works. The problem is is that these kinds of systems have to be particularly careful to keep power evenly distributed -- and keep out Stalin like sociopaths -- in order to prevent the party from becoming too rigid or power from becoming too concentrated and thus making irrational policy decisions and stifling "legitimate" criticism as happened during Mao's reign.
Two high level defectors in the 1980s Anatoliy Golitsyn (Author of "The Perestroika Deception) and Jan Sejna (Author of "We Will Bury You") have written books and tried to tell the west that Perestroika was not genuine reform, but just a strategic retreat planned by the KGB (now GRU) that would help the Soviets catch up to the west technologically and economically after which they would return back to dictatorship and imperialism.
http://code.google.com/android/
:).
Check out the video of Sergei! He's the CEO of the company, worth billions of dollars, making an official product promotional video and he's wearing a shirt that looks like he slept in it! If you can be a billionaire wearing shirts that you slept in I don't even know why I even bother wearing a collar at all
Since most people spend their lives trying to impress other people I guess rationalization is a critical skill that should be the focus of our educational system.
I think Microsoft royally screwed up with outlook web access. They added XMLHttpRequest to the browser so outlook web access would work more like a desktop app. They built an application on a technology that did not require full access to the latest version of the win32 api and x86 assembly language and it was off to the races. Most of Google, Yahoo and indeed the entirety of Web 2.0 was built on this mistake. They are desperately trying to put the web back in the original box they intended it to be in which is people without access to the latest version of the full Win32 API, and an X86 processor will be denied access to all online content.
If you can run Windows XP on the OLPC, adults will be able to use them. Especially if windows can debrick stolen OLPCs.
This means that they can be stolen and resold, thereby destroying the program.
On ubuntu you run
... 157987 files and directories currently installed.) .../libsvncpp0c2a_0.9.4-1ubuntu3_i386.deb) ... .../libwxbase2.6-0_2.6.3.2.1.5ubuntu6_i386.deb) ... .../libwxgtk2.6-0_2.6.3.2.1.5ubuntu6_i386.deb) ... .../rapidsvn_0.9.4-1ubuntu3_i386.deb) ... ... ... ... ...
sudo apt-get install rapidsvn
Output of this command:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libsvncpp0c2a libwxbase2.6-0 libwxgtk2.6-0
Suggested packages:
libgnomeprintui2.2-0
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libsvncpp0c2a libwxbase2.6-0 libwxgtk2.6-0 rapidsvn
0 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 3817kB of archives.
After unpacking 10.8MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
Get:1 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ feisty/universe libsvncpp0c2a 0.9.4-1ubuntu3 [73.1kB]
Get:2 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ feisty/universe libwxbase2.6-0 2.6.3.2.1.5ubuntu6 [567kB]
Get:3 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ feisty/universe libwxgtk2.6-0 2.6.3.2.1.5ubuntu6 [2875kB]
Get:4 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ feisty/universe rapidsvn 0.9.4-1ubuntu3 [303kB]
Fetched 3817kB in 16s (237kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package libsvncpp0c2a.
(Reading database
Unpacking libsvncpp0c2a (from
Selecting previously deselected package libwxbase2.6-0.
Unpacking libwxbase2.6-0 (from
Selecting previously deselected package libwxgtk2.6-0.
Unpacking libwxgtk2.6-0 (from
Selecting previously deselected package rapidsvn.
Unpacking rapidsvn (from
Setting up libsvncpp0c2a (0.9.4-1ubuntu3)
Setting up libwxbase2.6-0 (2.6.3.2.1.5ubuntu6)
Setting up libwxgtk2.6-0 (2.6.3.2.1.5ubuntu6)
Setting up rapidsvn (0.9.4-1ubuntu3)
Wow! That was so easy! Took me 30 seconds to install including downloading. Would have taken longer to install on windows just to find the rapidsvn website, download the files, click the install button and hit the next button on the wizard. Geez people start using Ubuntu or at least a Debian based distro. It's not 1997 anymore.
Speaking of Brittany Spears concerts, It throughly amazes me how desperate people are for "culture". Any public gathering that involves alcohol, some pretension of sophistication or spirituality, and good parking is absolutely overflowing with people these days. Maybe I'm just getting old :/
If they can forgive us for dropping two nukes on them, I think we can forgive them for what they did to us in WW II.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Baghdad_(1258)
I always thought with that big of an address space they could force everybody to have their own unique biometric hash and gps coordinates encoded in the ip address.
Traditional Macroeconomics is designed around the strange institution called the federal reserve. Therefore, for any synthetic economy it is kind of useless. Let me give you some examples:
MMO: Game Owners Create money and distribute to players at a fixed rate.
Real Life: Federal Reserve creates money and distributes it by buying government debt which pays interest.
MMO: Game Owners tax citizens in Non-MMO money
Real Life: Government taxes citizens in order to repay federal reserve and decrease inflation for goods and services that they need in their government function (otherwise they'd just borrow even more money from the fed).
MMO: No Lending/Credit
Real Life: Almost all economic activity is tied indirectly to lending and/or credit in one form or another.
MMO: No banks with fractional reserve lending ability
Real Life: Fractional reserve lending multiplies the money supply 10x and creates debtor/lender relationships that structure economic activity
I have a friend who lives up in California and has a bunch of people working out of his house because his home internet connection is somehow 50mbps per second because the place was setup as some ultra high speed trial a few years back. He'd like to get all his employees out of his living room but he can't because he can't find a single commercial building with comparable broadband speeds without going to an absurdly priced OC3. Just goes to show that as William Gibson has said, "The future is here, it's just not widely distributed yet".
There are millions of illegal immigrants working with fake SSNs. They Give fake SSNs to hospitals, cell phone providers, banks, tax collectors, schools, etc. How would illegal immigrants operate if you had tough penalties for using someone else's SSN? This is one of the biggest politically sensitive roadblocks to better identity theft protection in this country.
"We're failing because we're not spending enough".
I cannot count the amount of times I've seen this argument over and over again in political debates in America. It's the real downfall of America. In education, health care, scientific research, energy people just wave money around like some sort of cure-all when it isn't. What is really required is leadership and creativity and a lot of examining details in an even handed manner that the vast majority of people could care less about or would go over their heads. I think it's pretty reflective of the current trend of people not getting excited about any political issue unless it involves them getting some money from the government trough or money being taken away from them.
I have a sidekick phone and can do AOL, MSN or Yahoo IM all day and I pay a flat rate per month. You can even get a cheap used Sidekick I or II and still do AOL and/or Yahoo. Pay per message text messaging seems like something from the 1980s.
Just because the values are not certain, or are based on climate models, does not mean they are "wild assed guesses".
a nning/New_Data/IceCores1.gif
http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/un/syreng/spm.pdf
"Page 19 - There is a wide band of uncertainty as to the amount of uncertainty in the warming that would result from any stabilized greenhouse gase concentration"
The footnote says 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius. That to me means wild ass guess. Models and data please!!
The warming of CO2 is actually relatively well established; what is uncertain is how much it is amplified by feedbacks.
What do you expect me to take this on faith? I wish someone would give me mathematical models backed up by historical data instead of "fairly well established".
The full Working Group I report (not just the Summary for Policymakers) has references to the literature.
I found it right over here:
http://www.ipcc.ch/pub/IPCCTP.II(E).pdf
Well let's see looked through it and it basically says that the temperature and the CO2 are rising over the last 300 years. Might as well be the decline in Pirates.
They're based on both instrumental and ice core data, among other sources. The ice core data is not the long-term Vostok data for ice ages you're referring to, but just over the last few centuries.
Well why not use the Vostok data? Oh I forgot it shows sharp and dramatic falls and increases in both CO2 and temperature (with CO2 slightly trailing temperature) which happen for no apparent reason. What if the temperature rising is causing increases in CO2? CO2 becoming less soluble in the oceans, less vegetation as deserts grow, etc.
Ok, what do you want to know?
Alright:
1. What explains the fall of CO2 and temperature simultaneously in the ice core data (with temperature leading slightly)?
2. If you notice at the end of the ice core data there is a very sharp rise in CO2 (Humans show up) but the temperature levels off.
http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_Pl
For me the ice core data is pretty convincing evidence that CO2 increases are not responsible for global warming. Again CO2 is increasing, temperature is increasing. CO2, at the amount present in the atmosphere is not contributing significantly to warming. If it was, temperature would follow CO2 in the ice cores not the other way around. The drops in temperature and CO2 following are also strange in the ice cores. That's real data.. 1000s of years not just the last 300.
What is sorely lacking from the global warming debate is actual complete numeric data specifically how much an increase in CO2 will affect the global temperature. I looked at the ICCC report and there are basically a whole bunch of wild assed guesses as to how much it will affect temperature based on simulated models of the climate. The values range all over the place. We're talking increasing the CO2 concentrations by a few hundredths of a percentage point as a percentage of the mass of the atmosphere over the next century.
I saw references to the simulations but could not find the methodology as to how they were conducted. If they were based on the Vostok ice cores they are suspect because it's fairly obvious that the CO2 concentrations began rising after the temperature started increasing and then suddenly dropped steeply a few centuries later directly in line with temperature so it's not clear a. what was causing the change in CO2 concentrations in earlier eras and what what the correlation/causation relationship was in the temperature in earlier eras.
I would love to talk with someone about actual data and methodologies used to come to conclusions and not the ad hominem attacks that have dominated the debate for so long. When I start to bring this kind of stuff up I am met with silence or 1-liner put-downs.