This year cannot be taken as a 'look how severe global warming is!' year either. Saying this year is all "due to global warming" is as silly as the neocons saying "It's cold at home in Minnesota, so global warming isn't happening!". Localized changes, and something happening one year only is not a reliable indicator; the whole world has to be looked at over a period of several years.
Especially cold or mild winters are just part of the normal variations. The important thing is to find where the new 'norm' might be, rather than kicking off about one particular year or one particular location.
But it's true - lower Alps skiing will be history before the end of the century judging by the best climate models.
Yes. Check out the Met.Office's Hadley Climate Centre. They have validated their models by setting the conditions to a known state (say, 50 years ago), then running the models and seeing how accurately they predict the climate over those 50 years by doing a comparison to the actual data collected over that time period. They actually do very well. The better models have been validated. Their website has good coverage of what they do.
There is of course some variables which will make them less accurate in the extreme long term, but they seem a pretty good bet at least 50-100 years out. They've also done things like remove the human emissions to see what that does to the resulting model. The results of many of these validations is that you can be pretty damned confident that humans are having an effect on the climate.
Sigh. He released a frikin' worm, he didn't just pick up the phone and say "Your service is vulnerable to X". He actually exploited the vulnerability. It's like instead of telling someone that the lock doesn't work on their door, you instead go in, sleep in their beds, drink their beer and rearrange their furniture. Telling them the lock doesn't work? A nice neighbourly thing. Going in and rearranging their house without their consent? Criminal trespass.
I don't think you really understand what the hardware does.
The software is there to provide the abstractions (if you did it all in the hardware, you'd lose a tremendous amount of flexability to obtain the right tool for the right job). I don't know why you're complaining about hardware MMU - this is precisely the type of abstraction you then go on to say you want! (Compare the stability of a platform with a hardware MMU versus a software MMU - like a MC68000 based Mac with a VAXstation built in the same time period, and you'll see why the hardware MMU is a good thing).
Types like ints, floats etc. are language features. You can quite happily design a language that doesn't bother with them (such as Perl) since you're using the language to provide the abstraction. It's only if you need to get close to the metal that you care, and when writing business apps, generally you'll want to avoid this. There is no reason to use a language which you have to decide between int/float if you don't want to.
I'm building stuff with the Z80 as a learning exercise right now. Sure, you have to have external ROM and RAM, but it's very simple to add, and I think for teaching the learning exercise of how to build the chip select logic would be very beneficial (as well as how to watch for your I/O address etc.) You also get a lot of flexibility you don't with a microcontroller with it all on board. Want to use dual ported SRAM? Sure, no problem.
Sigh. You are yet another person who can't tell the difference between a meteorologist and a climatologist. A simple analogy that will help you:
Imagine you have a pan of water on a gas stove. The meteorologist will try to predict where individual convections will appear in the pan. This of course gets quite difficult when you get more than a few seconds in the future. A climatologist on the other hand figures at what rate the water as a whole is heating, and the effects of putting a lid on the pan, or turning up the heat. The effects can be accurately predicted quite a long way into the future when you're looking at the entire contents of the pan, not trying to predict where each convection current will be.
Let me preface this by saying I'm not a global warming skeptic, so don't flame me for being a 'denier', I'm not.
However, I'd just like to point out that the UK climate is a terrible indicator of global climate effects - the local effects (position of the jetstream, gulf stream etc.) mean there are tremendous variations in the UK climate which are not at all related to global temperatures. The hotter years for the UK since the winter of 1975 can be largely put down to a change in the path of the jetstream (and the weather that it brings). Simplistically, before the winter of '75, the position of the jetstream was such that Atlantic low pressure systems tended to show up over and over again in the summer (leading to cool, damp summers) and blocking high pressure systems tended to arrive in the winter (leading to frigid winter nights and days as they brought continental polar air masses). In the winter of '75, the jetstream moved such that generally the Atlantic lows arrived in the winter (leading to mild cloudy winters with mild Atlantic air) and blocking highs in the summer (with the resulting hot summer weather).
Even if the global temperature was 2 degrees higher today than it was in 1975, all it would take would be another jetstream movement to return the UK back to frigid winters and cold wet summers. Local weather observations in isolationi are very bad for figuring the global climate. (Equally, you hear neocons going on about how it's colder where they happen to live).
That (in my case 21 inch Trinitron glass bottle) power hungry thing also displays a much more pleasing picture than the most expensive LCD monitor. Also, 4:3 is preferable for most things - generally, widescreen is a scam to be able to advertise a screen to be 'larger' (21 inches diagonal on a 16:9 display is much less display real estate than 21 inches diagonal at 4:3. Human vision generally is 'closer' to 4:3 than it is to 16:9. The whole 16:9 thing was a marketing driven Hollywood exercise in the first place).
I'll be keeping the Trinitron (now 7 years old) until the picture starts degrading. It still looks excellent now.
The Beeb was made by Acorn. It was based on the 6502 processor, and didn't really have an OS as such - really, just a ROM monitor much in the way that other 8 bit computers of the era had. Acorn went on to design the ARM CPU (now ubiquitous in handheld devices). When the ARM was new, it did appear in the last model of BBC Microcomputer (the Archimedes with the BBC branding). Again, it was Acorn's OS (Arthur, renamed to RiscOS).
No. The US system is better. Do you think the German government could remotely get away with a 19% sales tax if people picked up an item for its untaxed price, then saw the ridiculous amount of VAT they have to pay?
This is why sales tax in the US is almost never more than 6 or 7%. The state government simply wouldn't be able to get away with it, unlike in Europe where it becomes a "stealth tax".
All the arguments you list are red herrings in the context of DRM. DRM'd media still gets pirated, and in the case of your DVD, pirate copies still show up on file sharing networks before the DVD is out despite the DRM.
As for the business model, yes - that is ABSOLUTELY my decision to make as the customer. Companies (I think it was one of the European RIAA equivalents) seem to think they are granting us a privilege to be able to play music we bought, say, on a Linux computer. This is not true. The companies are privileged to receive our money. It's a privilege we can withdraw at any time. It is a privilege I have withdrawn from iTMS since they want to force me to upgrade to a version of iTunes which jHymn won't work with. (I want to play my iTunes downloads on my Linux workstation, and avoid Apple lock-in. Burning to a CD and re-ripping is inconvenient). I privilege eMusic with my patronage because they don't use DRM at all. I don't feel the need to pirate music that I get via eMusic, either.
All DRM does is makes your music inconvenient to use. It doesn't stop piracy, and the expectation that it can is extremely naive. The only reason that Apple and Microsoft etc. are so eager to push their DRM systems is that whichever DRM system wins (currently Apple) gets to control the distribution channel and take a 'tax' of any music track sold online.
eMusic seems to be doing pretty well without DRM at all - it's the #2 seller of legal music online, only behind iTunes. It outsells all the other DRM-laden music sales sites - and it doesn't even carry chart or big label music.
The problem with DRM is that it doesn't work. Music will still get pirated without DRM, and pirated casually (all the extant DRM schemes currently let you burn a CD, which you can then rip. 99% of people don't care about the almost inaudible quality loss, they don't have equipment good enough to tell). So with DRM you have a system that causes inconvenience, but doesn't actually do what it says on the tin. The solution therefore is to just get rid of it because it's basically pointless.
Plenty of nations get by without software patents at all. Software is already covered by copyright; it doesn't need to also be covered by patents. Software was developed just fine in the United States prior to software patents being admissable.
Actually, the USPTO is well aware that most patents are junk: they themselves have a word for good patents - they call them "pioneer patents". They have said in the past that only 5% of approved patents fall into this category.
In reality, the only patents that should be approved are "pioneer patents". It SHOULD be hard to get a patent - the invention should be truly non-obvious. Everyone gets hung up on 'prior art', but most of these junk patents are obvious to those ordinarily skilled in the art if given the same problem to solve.
Verbal bullying is very real, especially to a teenager who isn't the most rational person to start with (and will likely react in some way). Verbal bullying can be extremely destructive, as much so as physical bullying. It should be taken every bit as seriously as physical bullying. (And often the two are combined).
You're hardly comparing like with like. Liquid fuel is easy to transfer to a car (in what amounts to megawatts).
But you canna break the laws of physics. Saying my car is easy to fuel up therefore a battery is easy to charge at a rate which would require hundreds of kilowatts to megawatts to each house is so wrong it isn't even wrong.
Solar panels are typically guaranteed for 25 years, not a decade. They have no moving parts, and generally require no maintenance apart from cleaning the pigeon shit off the glass covering once in a while.
There's no reason a properly constructed solar panel won't last 50 years. The most likely problem with a panel is the connector going bad (corroded), and that's just a screw down terminal block that takes all of two minutes to replace.
Solar panels stay expensive because solar panels are expensive to make. The current way of making solar panels will always be expensive; you canna break the laws of physics, cap'n. Solar panels are unlikely to get cheaper in the near future (any technology being worked on right now that would make them cheap won't show up in the market for at least 5 to 10 years).
All most people want to do with the QuickTime player is use full screen mode. Apple's OS X is a beautiful OS, but from a company so oriented towards making using and creating video easy - to not have full screen mode available in the version of QT Player that ships with the machine makes the whole thing look...shoddy. Even Windows users get full screen playback out of the box. Linux users get it out of the box. But not Mac OS X.
I use OS X, but I don't want any extra functionality out of the QuickTime player. So instead I have to use VLC instead of the native player because I do want full screen playback. Finding out that OS X doesn't have full screen video playback out of the box is a bit like having one of those really nice, expensive ice cream cones - and then finding a dead mouse at the bottom. It kind of makes the nice experience of everything else rather soured.
Linux had it in 1999? Try 1992. We were resizing partitions so we could install Linux 0.14 (there were no distros, you basically did a 'cp -a' of the root disk to the hard disk, and using a hex editor, changed the boot device in the kernel to the hard disk).
It sounds like Apple are hiding behind this legislation, in much the way government departments in the UK when criticised hide behind the Data Protection Act, giving the DPA ungodly powers it doesn't actually have - but no one knows better. This smells awfully similar.
You're missing the one thing most of the detractors miss: climate prediction != weather prediction. Climatologists make no such claim that "Year X will be a busy/quiet/indifferent year for $FOO weather".
An analogy: Take a pan of water on a gas stove. Weather prediction is predicting exactly where the eddy currents will appear in the heating water, and how many there may be in a particular time period. Climate prediction on the other hand is giving a forecast such as - If we put a lid on the pan, it will reach boiling point 10% quicker, or, if we turn the heat up by X% it will boil Y minutes sooner.
The climate models are actually doing quite well. The British Met Office's Hadley Climate Centre model has been validated by using it to predict general climate conditions (things like average global temperature, NOT the number of hurricanes in a given year) by rolling it back fifty or sixty years, and given the data about atmospheric composition and the rate of change of the atmosphere, how closely this resembles today's conditions when the model is run. If you look at the Met.Office's website, you'll find the model closely matches reality. Therefore, you can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that if the rate of CO2 emissions (i.e. putting the lid on the pan) continues at a certain rate, it is likely to have a certain result on global average temperatures.
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This year cannot be taken as a 'look how severe global warming is!' year either. Saying this year is all "due to global warming" is as silly as the neocons saying "It's cold at home in Minnesota, so global warming isn't happening!". Localized changes, and something happening one year only is not a reliable indicator; the whole world has to be looked at over a period of several years.
Especially cold or mild winters are just part of the normal variations. The important thing is to find where the new 'norm' might be, rather than kicking off about one particular year or one particular location.
But it's true - lower Alps skiing will be history before the end of the century judging by the best climate models.
Yes. Check out the Met.Office's Hadley Climate Centre. They have validated their models by setting the conditions to a known state (say, 50 years ago), then running the models and seeing how accurately they predict the climate over those 50 years by doing a comparison to the actual data collected over that time period. They actually do very well. The better models have been validated. Their website has good coverage of what they do.
There is of course some variables which will make them less accurate in the extreme long term, but they seem a pretty good bet at least 50-100 years out. They've also done things like remove the human emissions to see what that does to the resulting model. The results of many of these validations is that you can be pretty damned confident that humans are having an effect on the climate.
Sigh. He released a frikin' worm, he didn't just pick up the phone and say "Your service is vulnerable to X". He actually exploited the vulnerability. It's like instead of telling someone that the lock doesn't work on their door, you instead go in, sleep in their beds, drink their beer and rearrange their furniture. Telling them the lock doesn't work? A nice neighbourly thing. Going in and rearranging their house without their consent? Criminal trespass.
I don't think you really understand what the hardware does.
The software is there to provide the abstractions (if you did it all in the hardware, you'd lose a tremendous amount of flexability to obtain the right tool for the right job). I don't know why you're complaining about hardware MMU - this is precisely the type of abstraction you then go on to say you want! (Compare the stability of a platform with a hardware MMU versus a software MMU - like a MC68000 based Mac with a VAXstation built in the same time period, and you'll see why the hardware MMU is a good thing).
Types like ints, floats etc. are language features. You can quite happily design a language that doesn't bother with them (such as Perl) since you're using the language to provide the abstraction. It's only if you need to get close to the metal that you care, and when writing business apps, generally you'll want to avoid this. There is no reason to use a language which you have to decide between int/float if you don't want to.
My Dad is as computer illiterate as they get. He could use GNOME just fine (I had him using RedHat 9 a while back). It's not rocket science.
I'm building stuff with the Z80 as a learning exercise right now. Sure, you have to have external ROM and RAM, but it's very simple to add, and I think for teaching the learning exercise of how to build the chip select logic would be very beneficial (as well as how to watch for your I/O address etc.) You also get a lot of flexibility you don't with a microcontroller with it all on board. Want to use dual ported SRAM? Sure, no problem.
Sigh. You are yet another person who can't tell the difference between a meteorologist and a climatologist. A simple analogy that will help you:
Imagine you have a pan of water on a gas stove. The meteorologist will try to predict where individual convections will appear in the pan. This of course gets quite difficult when you get more than a few seconds in the future.
A climatologist on the other hand figures at what rate the water as a whole is heating, and the effects of putting a lid on the pan, or turning up the heat. The effects can be accurately predicted quite a long way into the future when you're looking at the entire contents of the pan, not trying to predict where each convection current will be.
Let me preface this by saying I'm not a global warming skeptic, so don't flame me for being a 'denier', I'm not.
However, I'd just like to point out that the UK climate is a terrible indicator of global climate effects - the local effects (position of the jetstream, gulf stream etc.) mean there are tremendous variations in the UK climate which are not at all related to global temperatures. The hotter years for the UK since the winter of 1975 can be largely put down to a change in the path of the jetstream (and the weather that it brings). Simplistically, before the winter of '75, the position of the jetstream was such that Atlantic low pressure systems tended to show up over and over again in the summer (leading to cool, damp summers) and blocking high pressure systems tended to arrive in the winter (leading to frigid winter nights and days as they brought continental polar air masses). In the winter of '75, the jetstream moved such that generally the Atlantic lows arrived in the winter (leading to mild cloudy winters with mild Atlantic air) and blocking highs in the summer (with the resulting hot summer weather).
Even if the global temperature was 2 degrees higher today than it was in 1975, all it would take would be another jetstream movement to return the UK back to frigid winters and cold wet summers. Local weather observations in isolationi are very bad for figuring the global climate. (Equally, you hear neocons going on about how it's colder where they happen to live).
That (in my case 21 inch Trinitron glass bottle) power hungry thing also displays a much more pleasing picture than the most expensive LCD monitor. Also, 4:3 is preferable for most things - generally, widescreen is a scam to be able to advertise a screen to be 'larger' (21 inches diagonal on a 16:9 display is much less display real estate than 21 inches diagonal at 4:3. Human vision generally is 'closer' to 4:3 than it is to 16:9. The whole 16:9 thing was a marketing driven Hollywood exercise in the first place).
I'll be keeping the Trinitron (now 7 years old) until the picture starts degrading. It still looks excellent now.
The Beeb was made by Acorn. It was based on the 6502 processor, and didn't really have an OS as such - really, just a ROM monitor much in the way that other 8 bit computers of the era had. Acorn went on to design the ARM CPU (now ubiquitous in handheld devices). When the ARM was new, it did appear in the last model of BBC Microcomputer (the Archimedes with the BBC branding). Again, it was Acorn's OS (Arthur, renamed to RiscOS).
By the letter of the law - yes, if you buy someone a plane ticket, they have to pay tax on it. However, in reality that never happens.
No. The US system is better. Do you think the German government could remotely get away with a 19% sales tax if people picked up an item for its untaxed price, then saw the ridiculous amount of VAT they have to pay?
This is why sales tax in the US is almost never more than 6 or 7%. The state government simply wouldn't be able to get away with it, unlike in Europe where it becomes a "stealth tax".
All the arguments you list are red herrings in the context of DRM. DRM'd media still gets pirated, and in the case of your DVD, pirate copies still show up on file sharing networks before the DVD is out despite the DRM.
As for the business model, yes - that is ABSOLUTELY my decision to make as the customer. Companies (I think it was one of the European RIAA equivalents) seem to think they are granting us a privilege to be able to play music we bought, say, on a Linux computer. This is not true. The companies are privileged to receive our money. It's a privilege we can withdraw at any time. It is a privilege I have withdrawn from iTMS since they want to force me to upgrade to a version of iTunes which jHymn won't work with. (I want to play my iTunes downloads on my Linux workstation, and avoid Apple lock-in. Burning to a CD and re-ripping is inconvenient). I privilege eMusic with my patronage because they don't use DRM at all. I don't feel the need to pirate music that I get via eMusic, either.
All DRM does is makes your music inconvenient to use. It doesn't stop piracy, and the expectation that it can is extremely naive. The only reason that Apple and Microsoft etc. are so eager to push their DRM systems is that whichever DRM system wins (currently Apple) gets to control the distribution channel and take a 'tax' of any music track sold online.
eMusic seems to be doing pretty well without DRM at all - it's the #2 seller of legal music online, only behind iTunes. It outsells all the other DRM-laden music sales sites - and it doesn't even carry chart or big label music.
The problem with DRM is that it doesn't work. Music will still get pirated without DRM, and pirated casually (all the extant DRM schemes currently let you burn a CD, which you can then rip. 99% of people don't care about the almost inaudible quality loss, they don't have equipment good enough to tell). So with DRM you have a system that causes inconvenience, but doesn't actually do what it says on the tin. The solution therefore is to just get rid of it because it's basically pointless.
Plenty of nations get by without software patents at all. Software is already covered by copyright; it doesn't need to also be covered by patents. Software was developed just fine in the United States prior to software patents being admissable.
Actually, the USPTO is well aware that most patents are junk: they themselves have a word for good patents - they call them "pioneer patents". They have said in the past that only 5% of approved patents fall into this category.
In reality, the only patents that should be approved are "pioneer patents". It SHOULD be hard to get a patent - the invention should be truly non-obvious. Everyone gets hung up on 'prior art', but most of these junk patents are obvious to those ordinarily skilled in the art if given the same problem to solve.
Verbal bullying is very real, especially to a teenager who isn't the most rational person to start with (and will likely react in some way). Verbal bullying can be extremely destructive, as much so as physical bullying. It should be taken every bit as seriously as physical bullying. (And often the two are combined).
You're hardly comparing like with like. Liquid fuel is easy to transfer to a car (in what amounts to megawatts).
But you canna break the laws of physics. Saying my car is easy to fuel up therefore a battery is easy to charge at a rate which would require hundreds of kilowatts to megawatts to each house is so wrong it isn't even wrong.
Silicone is what you use to make breast enlargements. Silicon on the other hand is what you use for making solar cells and transistors.
Solar panels are typically guaranteed for 25 years, not a decade. They have no moving parts, and generally require no maintenance apart from cleaning the pigeon shit off the glass covering once in a while.
There's no reason a properly constructed solar panel won't last 50 years. The most likely problem with a panel is the connector going bad (corroded), and that's just a screw down terminal block that takes all of two minutes to replace.
Solar panels stay expensive because solar panels are expensive to make. The current way of making solar panels will always be expensive; you canna break the laws of physics, cap'n. Solar panels are unlikely to get cheaper in the near future (any technology being worked on right now that would make them cheap won't show up in the market for at least 5 to 10 years).
All most people want to do with the QuickTime player is use full screen mode. Apple's OS X is a beautiful OS, but from a company so oriented towards making using and creating video easy - to not have full screen mode available in the version of QT Player that ships with the machine makes the whole thing look...shoddy. Even Windows users get full screen playback out of the box. Linux users get it out of the box. But not Mac OS X.
I use OS X, but I don't want any extra functionality out of the QuickTime player. So instead I have to use VLC instead of the native player because I do want full screen playback. Finding out that OS X doesn't have full screen video playback out of the box is a bit like having one of those really nice, expensive ice cream cones - and then finding a dead mouse at the bottom. It kind of makes the nice experience of everything else rather soured.
Linux had it in 1999? Try 1992. We were resizing partitions so we could install Linux 0.14 (there were no distros, you basically did a 'cp -a' of the root disk to the hard disk, and using a hex editor, changed the boot device in the kernel to the hard disk).
It sounds like Apple are hiding behind this legislation, in much the way government departments in the UK when criticised hide behind the Data Protection Act, giving the DPA ungodly powers it doesn't actually have - but no one knows better. This smells awfully similar.
You're missing the one thing most of the detractors miss: climate prediction != weather prediction. Climatologists make no such claim that "Year X will be a busy/quiet/indifferent year for $FOO weather".
An analogy: Take a pan of water on a gas stove. Weather prediction is predicting exactly where the eddy currents will appear in the heating water, and how many there may be in a particular time period. Climate prediction on the other hand is giving a forecast such as - If we put a lid on the pan, it will reach boiling point 10% quicker, or, if we turn the heat up by X% it will boil Y minutes sooner.
The climate models are actually doing quite well. The British Met Office's Hadley Climate Centre model has been validated by using it to predict general climate conditions (things like average global temperature, NOT the number of hurricanes in a given year) by rolling it back fifty or sixty years, and given the data about atmospheric composition and the rate of change of the atmosphere, how closely this resembles today's conditions when the model is run. If you look at the Met.Office's website, you'll find the model closely matches reality. Therefore, you can say with a reasonable degree of confidence that if the rate of CO2 emissions (i.e. putting the lid on the pan) continues at a certain rate, it is likely to have a certain result on global average temperatures.