No, thank Christ. Round our office, first thing we do with new Linux boxen is uninstall Beagle, 'cause if you don't the goddamn program will easily spend the first day or two of the box's life eating half of your CPU indexing where your 82 brazillion files are, even when a user has a priority process running. The *last* thing I wanna do is have to renice a bunch of processes because some idiotic GUI finder program wants to index files.
Beagle sucks. So does Spotlight, but at least Spotlight doesn't suck in a resource-wasting way.
Yeah - anecdotally, when I switched to OS X, every so often I'd have to reset the permissions to get DVD Player.app to play movies. Being a Unix geek, I dropped a 'diskutil repairPermissions/' as root into my crontab, to run once a week. Haven't had a single issue since then.
Oddly enough, this was ever only a problem on my G4 mini - neither the MacBookPro I use at work or my MacBook at home have ever had permissions problems (I don't run the permissions repair in my crontab). Not sure why the G4 borks my permissions while the Intel Macs don't, but since it represents the sum-total of problems I've had with my Macs, I'm prepared to let it slide.:)
I used BootCamp to dual-boot my MacBook Pro (Core Duo, not a C2D) into Windows XP, and it ran everything natively, right off the hardware. Half-Life 2 Episode 1 looked awesome, Battlefield 2 ran fast, everything was great, just like on my dedicated Wintel gaming rig.
The only difference between a dual-booted Mac and a bog-standard Intel PC is (AFAIK) the boot sequence, which is what BootCamp takes care of. After that, there's no difference between running Windows on a Mac/BootCamp and running windows on a PC.
Otherpeople tried it and got different results. Of course, some people found mixed results. I guess you could, I don't know, try it and see if it helps?
Haven't read a single report where replacing the thermal paste didn't lower the temperature - only some (including your link) where the temperature didn't drop by much.
You might be one of the lucky ones whose MBPs had too much thermal grease applied to the processor heat sink. Apple put the fan temperature sensors on the heat pipes leading from the processor - the excess in thermal grease actually insulates the heat pipes, keeping the fans off and the processor way too hot.
There's a couple of sites that demonstrate how to disassemble your MBP to get to the processor - reapply an appropriate amount of thermal paste, your heat pipes start working properly (and your fan starts blowing more, too) and your MBP gets much, much cooler. If you have an earlier MBP, this just might be your problem
Ahh, check that out. I learned something today. Occam's Razor is also spelled as Ockham's Razor. I've somehow managed to make it through thirty years without seeing it spelled that way, but hey, I learned something. Consider me informed.
Maybe the patronization was justified?
Must be nice to have never made a mistake in your whole fucking life, eh asshole?
Also, the author is unable to spell "Occam's Razor", although they are able to parenthetically explain that "Ockham's Razor" is also known as the 'principle of parsimony' with only a hint of patronization.
Ahh, having one's intelligence insulted by idiots - what a way to wrap up the week.:)
Yeah, you don't need to show me the basics - I do cloud radiative forcing research for a living. And anyways, that Goody graph makes my point for me: the 15um CO2 band is saturated (as in, 100% absorption) at the surface and at 11km, while the dominant (in the longwave, anyways) 6.3um H2O band is *not* saturated at 11km (nor are the rotation bands.) Adding CO2 will generate a weak longwave radiative forcing due to pressure broadening, while adding H2O could push the column absorption closer to 100%, generating a much larger longwave radiative forcing.
There is a caveat - as the Goody plot shows, vapor is indeed saturated at the surface. Therefore, how one adds H2O to the atmosphere will determine the result. If additional H2O can be added in such a way that only surface amounts of vapor increase, then there will be, as you say, little effect in the infrared. Adding H2O to the middle troposphere, where the vapor lines are not saturated, will net you a vastly different result. Complicating the issue is the interaction between clouds and water vapor - we simply cannot tell where additional amounts of H2O vapor will go, and therefore, we cannot assume that additional water vapor will not yield a longwave forcing, since the H2O bands are not everywhere saturated. Whereas the CO2 bands are.
This is why most models investigating CO2 impacts start off with a doubling of CO2 - since the band is saturated, it takes a lot of additional CO2 to get a significant forcing.
I can send references, if you like - my gmail is in my profile.
Now I will say this on the note of the fabric store types: Not Geeks! These are the types of people that never get out and experience the world.
Pot, kettle. Kettle, pot. Hey, you're black too!
Re:Costs as much as a new low end PC or 2!
on
GeForce 7800 GTX Review
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, maybe. I don't know how FFXI works, but in every game I play, I just turn off some of the shiny, fancy features, maybe turn down the resolution, and get wicked framerates as a result. It's always a blast owning some n00b whose many-thousands-of-dollars system, running at 1600x1200x8x4x, couldn't line up the shot as fast as my $800 FrankenPuter running at 800x600 and 72fps.
For me at least, a lot of the chrome they put in games nowadays is a distraction from what I'm trying to do in-game, and I'd rather play without it. Yeah, I don't get bump-mapped anti-aliased 32bit color on my closeups of Lara Croft's guns (not those, the other ones) but I don't have to drop six c-notes everytime ATi/nVidia come up with the latest and greatest. Different strokes, I guess...
Someone point me to an article that tells me what they actually did and how they did it.
No. If you can't be stuffed to read one *whole* page of the article (they get into details pretty quickly) then I sure as hell am not going to hand you the relevant bits on a silver platter. Christ.
Perhaps the reason that four motivated immigrants can beat MIT at a robotics contest is simply because they worked harder. With a country filled with lazy, "I'm too good for this" shirks like parent poster, it's almost inevitable that barely literate Mexicans will soon be doing our robotics work.
Once you have sufficient market share in distribution, why not sign a few up and coming artists ?
Because Apple Records would sue them off the face of the earth, again. IIRC, iTunes was on shaky ground for a while while the record companies thought long and hard about all possibilities about letting Apple re-sell their music online. Plenty of companies still don't license their music for resale by Apple (try getting Led Zeppelin on iTMS) because they don't trust Apple not to do exactly what you've hypothesized.
Don't get me wrong, if I could support artists more directly by paying my bucks to Apple, who could probably offer lower overhead and management waste, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But I doubt the bean-counting moneydroids at the big record companies would let 'em without a massive, massive lawsuit, which would kill iTunes and the iPod, which in turn, would screw Apple pretty well and good.
Actually, it says the new version of Netscape, which it also says is integrating the core code of Firefox. But I'm glad that someone is reading this.:)
It's *rare* that I talk to ACs, especially ones who present themselves as asshat blowhards as you've done repeatedly (here and to the two responses to your 'question'.) But I s'pose it's fun to stir the poo sometimes, and you definitely count.
Anecdotally, I don't have security issues with my Windows boxes when I use Firefox. When my wife uses IE, I find myself removing spyware. For me, in my experience, Firefox is more secure. You may write that off as a niche user in a niche market, but fuck you anyways, AC.
As far as other people, STFW - there's plenty of other people reviewing the ways and means which make Firefox less exploitable than IE. Type 'Firefox IE more secure' into Google and see which way the order comes out on your links. I know you won't, since you're just trolling, but maybe somebody reading this will and learn something.
Is the concept of the "butterfly effect" still considered valid by the scientific community?
The butterfly effect is more related to chaotic processes in numerical weather prediction models - climate modelling specifically avoids chaotic behavior whenever possible. Remember that climate research is a very different animal than weather research - climate modelling seeks to find long-term trends that average over seasonal trends and such.
I was in fact trying to say that papers addressing pre-human climate change don't include human impacts.
Thanks - you're not the only one having problems typing tonight. Apologies if I came off harshly - it's been a long day.:)
It is certainly a fact that there is a larger amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to human activity and that a greenhouse effect can occur. Given the significant variability of the earth's climate before human activity became significant, wouldn't it be fair to say that we can't make an informed judgment about the good or bad effects of human CO2 generation relative to Earth's climate in the future?
Well, the impact of CO2 warming is more complicated than just the radiative forcing issue - various feedbacks (which are poorly understood at present) complicate the issue. It would be entirely correct to state that given the significant variability in the climate record that we cannot at this time make an definitive judgement about anthropogenic climate forcing. This is, of course, not the same thing as saying that 'global warming does not exist.' It merely states that we are unsure as to the magnitude of human impact on the natural climate system, among other things.
In your opinion is the movement to limit CO2 generation a good thing or a bad thing?
Given that we are essentially running an uncontrolled experiment on a climate system whose mechanisms we do not understand, I tend to take a more conservative approach. As a friend stated, 'why pee in the pool?' In terms of sociopolitical arguments, reduction of CO2 emission would necessitate a transfer to alternative energy strategies which would reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources (read, the Middle East.) With a determined scientific effort backed by political will, I can't see why this would be a bad thing, although as stated in the IPCC report, it wouldn't do much with regard to global warming. But there exist viable solutions to the CO2 reduction problem that would be beneficial for our country to explore.
Apparently most of the world has signed Kyoto and they originally hoped that the U.S. would too
We did sign Kyoto, but didn't ratify it. And the rest of the world hasn't put it into action - it's a paper tiger, a theoretical political agreement. I stand by my assertion that scientists have no real sway, at least in the field of climate politics. There are far too many other obfuscations that must be dealt with before politicians are willing to look at the friggin' data. Your previous analysis of the cost-benefit of dealing with climate change is one such obfuscation - there has to be a magic dollar amount before it's worth dealing with, which gives politicians essentially unlimited wiggle room in dealing with what the magic number is.
At least we agree that scientists aren't immune to selfish motives.
Science is more of a trade rag than a scientific journal - think of it as a coffee-shop discussion for people who number their underwear sets. As such, it's the perfect place for controversial (and yes, entertaining, but maybe not like you think of entertainment) commentary that doesn't belong in the 'pure' literature.
Fine, we'll move on. But I'm not the only one that read what you wrote the exact way I did.
My original statement stands - nobody's said that climate change occurs (as in, present tense) independent of human activity. I did not say 'has now, or ever has occurred. If you and others have problem reading tenses in English, I'm not to blame.
But that is what the Science article says.
See my reply in the other thread - I think we're past this bit now.
So, no, they didn't come out and say "all scientists agree with human induced global warming." But the layman (and the mainstream media) could probably be forgiven for getting that impression from the article.
Herein lies the problem of public discourse about science in general - you obviously took it a different way, and it took a conversation with someone who reads Science as Part Of A Balanced Daily Dead-Tree Diet to change your position. They *could* be forgiven, but I grow tired of doing so - why can't people just read articles and not push their political views on the analysis therein?
Who's going to make that claim? Of course human activity must effect the climate....and this is all scientists are saying, which is why Science wrote an article detailing the fact that nobody's written the hypothetical paper I forwarded. We're starting to see eye-to-eye now - this is a rare event on Slashdot; maybe I should print this.:)
Heck, a fly farting is going to have some effect on the climate.
Careful, now: climate != weather. The question you ask is the same question we ask - what influence does human activity have on climate change? The question presupposes a scientific consensus on anthropogenic effects (i.e. that they exists) and now the question is: what is the magnitude? This is, again, what the Science article is talking about.
Before we invest so much money on analyzing the human impact on global climate change I think we should spend a heck of a lot more time and money understanding natural climate change.
It's a good idea, but the two are now part of the same system, obeying the same physical processes. The atmosphere does not distinguish between human and natural activity - it reacts to energy forcing without regard to the source of said energy.
I personally think that clouds and the sun contribute to global climate change by absolutely staggering proportions compared to human activity.
Maybe so, but what of effects of human activity which influences cloud amount and type? If you're serious about this, I can send you plenty of literature references addressing this very topic. Cloud-radiative feedback is a major field of research right now, and it's been demonstrated that human activity has a decidedly marked impact on clouds. It's not necessarily all about CO2, after all.
But like I said, this is the first time in quite a while that a global-warming thread I've jumped on on Slashdot didn't turn into a rampant flame-fest. You're obviously someone I've underestimated, and I apologize for earlier snarkiness. Perhaps cogent discussion on the Internet isn't quite dead yet.:)
All scientists that I've met have, thus far, been human.
Man, could I show you a thing or two, then...:)
"Think twice about publishing your anti-global warming research because everyone disagrees with you."
Again, you're not reading the literature. Plenty of people win their spurs from publishing theories that dispute anthropogenic climate changes, or by positing hypotheses that negate any warming that might occur. Google for the 'Iris Hypothesis' by Richard Lindzen - makes for great reading, and even better back-and-forth literature articles. FWIW, not even Lindzen out-and-out discounts global warming, but he obviously doesn't think much of it, and he's done just fine from publishing his research.
At no time in human history have scientists had so much influence on politics as global warming scientists do today.
Yeah, because everybody signed that Kyoto Accord and put it into action, right? C'mon - your statement is ludicrous and you know it. Scientists have little influence on politics unless they've found a way to blow people up.
So why the hell did Science publish this silly article that proves nothing?
To sell ads, maybe? To encourage further discussion from the scientists that suspect that global warming is hooey but haven't found proof yet? To keep the thing interesting? Scientists read dozens of new articles every month, and a little light entertainment is sometimes just what the doctor ordered.:)
We already know that climate change occurs independent of human activity. Or are we to believe that the climate was static until we humans started messing things up?
No, no, no, read that carefully now. What I said was no paper has been published which posits that climate change is (as in, is now) independent of human activity. Certainly before humans existed, climate change was independent of human activity. The global warming debate boils down to whether or not this is still the case. Stop playing semantics.
Althought right now we aren't really discussing global warming but whether every scientist agrees with it.
Again, that's not what the Science article says. I know plenty of scientists who are skeptical about anthropogenic climate change (I myself have reservations about the magnitude of any human impact) but, that doesn't mean that we don't agree that global warming is a possibility. Why? Because nobody's proven otherwise. Neither do we necessarily believe that global warming must exist (which is what you think the Science article claims) because again, nobody's demonstrated the link past a first-order radiative affect.
The average scientific reader of Slashdot? Hahaha.
You should have gleaned this by now, but I mean what I write when I write it, because I try to write carefully. I didn't say the average scientific reader of Slashdot, I said the average scientific Slashdot reader. The former puts the emphasis on 'reader of Slashdot' while the latter puts the emphasis on 'scientific'. There's plenty of scientists who read Slashdot, and more often than not, we wonder why we even bother when we read the comments. No doubt some other scientist is out there rolling their eyes at my charging at windmills, but hey, this is what I do after a few whiskey sours.:) But laugh if you will.
Anyways, this is a tempest in a teapot - the Science article merely states that there exists a scientific consensus that global warming hasn't been disproven. Perhaps their angle is suspect, but nothing else, and I wouldn't get all hot and bothered about it if I were you.:)
This is the part where I say "why yes, yes I am." But you probably knew that was coming...:) It's a lame thing to do, what I did, and I immediately regretted it after clicking 'submit' but there you go...
Your sentence "When reliable evidence that supports the theory that climate change occurs independent of human activity surfaces, it will be published" is rather unfortunate.
Read it again, then. It doesn't mean what you think it means. It means, when reliable evidence supporting the theory that climate change is unaffected by human activity, it will be published. No such paper has been published, to my knowledge. Neither has a paper definitively demonstrating a human impact on climate change been published, for that matter, but I've made my point.
99.999% of the data that climatologists are comparing the last humdred years of climate change against records pre-human history.
That sentence doesn't even parse. If you're referring to the fact that climatologists use paleoclimate data in their analyses, yes, I'm well aware of that fact. And I'm also well aware that climatologists study climate change during periods where no human activity existed. What is germaine to this discussion is that climatologists are studying potential human impacts on current climate change, which is what most people mean by 'global warming theory.' No paper stating that climate change is wholly unaffected by human activity exists, to my knowledge. Papers that address climate change prior to human activity obviously don't include potential human impacts - is this what you were trying to say?
Anyways, I probably should have just let this thread pass on by - I've had this discussion dozens of times on Slashdot, but people would rather be left to their own devices than discuss the issues with someone who might know a thing or two about the subject. Examine the current state of political discourse by way of example.:)
Are you an atmospheric scientist? You make some good points, but your general attitude leads me to believe that you don't have much experience in dealing with scientists. To wit:
Scientists think about funding, but pushing an agenda to acheive funding is ultimately a career-limiting move when the political pendulum shifts, as it has in recent years. And as with most things, the scientific ego supercedes the need to seek acceptance through funding - scientists will push theories they believe in, and try to swing funding their way, not vice versa.
Have you actually read any of the literature regarding climate change? It doesn't sound like it - you don't see much politicizing in peer-reviewed journals. Certainly the exacting of personal/institutional spats occurs, but the literature certainly doesn't read the way you imply it does.
I don't think stating that no scientific paper reviewed discounts anthropomorphic climate change will have a chilling effect on climate research: scientists are well aware that correlation is not the same as causation, after all. When reliable evidence that supports the theory that climate change occurs independent of human activity surfaces, it will be published. When reliable evidence that supports the theory that climate change occurs because of human activity, it will also be published. Until then, we'll continue to study the mechanisms behind climate change and look for links. It's just that simple.
The Science article merely states that the bulk of peer-reviewed literature allows for the possibility of anthropogenic climate change, nothing more. Anything you read into it sounds more like your agenda than anything else.
Anyways, take it as you will - I doubt seriously you're prepared to think critically about this topic. But making blanket statements accusing scientists of massive malfeasance to further a political agenda that counters your own smacks more of conspiracy theory than a reasoned argument, and it certainly doesn't impress the average scientific Slashdot reader.
Second off, early Walkmans (IIRC) cost on the order of a hundred bucks, back in the early 80's. And they played one (1) cassette tape, containing 8-10 songs. The iPod, while costing a bit more than that initial hundred bucks the early Walkmen cost, plays thousands of songs. I have a crappy older iPod that's got over three thousand songs on it, and it can slice and dice 'em any way I want. Saying it's just a fancy Walkman is like saying SpaceShip One is just a fancy EAA project.
I won't disagree with you that rich kids like to flaunt their iPods as a sort of 'look at me' item, but other, saner people use them as intended - as a portable CD library that fits in your pocket. Hardly just a fashion accessory.
Someone tell me what a "MAJOR" hardware upgrade is
Power spike at work fried my old P4 motherboard. Fortunately, the mobo 'took one for the team' and spared the rest of the components. $100 later, with a new mobo (and PSU), I put the old P4 processor, RAM, graphics card, gigabit ethernet, and hard drive(s) on the new board, powered up, and was on my merry way.
If it'd been a Mac, I'd be buying a new computer.
In my opinion a MAJOR hardware upgrade is called building a new computer.
More power to you. Some of us work for a living, though, and we'd rather not drop two grand replacing parts when we can get away with the same thing for a hundred bucks.
Slashdot Mirror
Never have mod points when I need 'em, though. Well played!
Does Beagle even run in OS X?
No, thank Christ. Round our office, first thing we do with new Linux boxen is uninstall Beagle, 'cause if you don't the goddamn program will easily spend the first day or two of the box's life eating half of your CPU indexing where your 82 brazillion files are, even when a user has a priority process running. The *last* thing I wanna do is have to renice a bunch of processes because some idiotic GUI finder program wants to index files.
Beagle sucks. So does Spotlight, but at least Spotlight doesn't suck in a resource-wasting way.
Yeah - anecdotally, when I switched to OS X, every so often I'd have to reset the permissions to get DVD Player.app to play movies. Being a Unix geek, I dropped a 'diskutil repairPermissions /' as root into my crontab, to run once a week. Haven't had a single issue since then.
:)
Oddly enough, this was ever only a problem on my G4 mini - neither the MacBookPro I use at work or my MacBook at home have ever had permissions problems (I don't run the permissions repair in my crontab). Not sure why the G4 borks my permissions while the Intel Macs don't, but since it represents the sum-total of problems I've had with my Macs, I'm prepared to let it slide.
I used BootCamp to dual-boot my MacBook Pro (Core Duo, not a C2D) into Windows XP, and it ran everything natively, right off the hardware. Half-Life 2 Episode 1 looked awesome, Battlefield 2 ran fast, everything was great, just like on my dedicated Wintel gaming rig.
The only difference between a dual-booted Mac and a bog-standard Intel PC is (AFAIK) the boot sequence, which is what BootCamp takes care of. After that, there's no difference between running Windows on a Mac/BootCamp and running windows on a PC.
Other people tried it and got different results. Of course, some people found mixed results. I guess you could, I don't know, try it and see if it helps?
Haven't read a single report where replacing the thermal paste didn't lower the temperature - only some (including your link) where the temperature didn't drop by much.
You might be one of the lucky ones whose MBPs had too much thermal grease applied to the processor heat sink. Apple put the fan temperature sensors on the heat pipes leading from the processor - the excess in thermal grease actually insulates the heat pipes, keeping the fans off and the processor way too hot.
There's a couple of sites that demonstrate how to disassemble your MBP to get to the processor - reapply an appropriate amount of thermal paste, your heat pipes start working properly (and your fan starts blowing more, too) and your MBP gets much, much cooler. If you have an earlier MBP, this just might be your problem
Ahh, check that out. I learned something today. Occam's Razor is also spelled as Ockham's Razor. I've somehow managed to make it through thirty years without seeing it spelled that way, but hey, I learned something. Consider me informed.
Maybe the patronization was justified?
Must be nice to have never made a mistake in your whole fucking life, eh asshole?
Also, the author is unable to spell "Occam's Razor", although they are able to parenthetically explain that "Ockham's Razor" is also known as the 'principle of parsimony' with only a hint of patronization.
:)
Ahh, having one's intelligence insulted by idiots - what a way to wrap up the week.
Yeah, you don't need to show me the basics - I do cloud radiative forcing research for a living. And anyways, that Goody graph makes my point for me: the 15um CO2 band is saturated (as in, 100% absorption) at the surface and at 11km, while the dominant (in the longwave, anyways) 6.3um H2O band is *not* saturated at 11km (nor are the rotation bands.) Adding CO2 will generate a weak longwave radiative forcing due to pressure broadening, while adding H2O could push the column absorption closer to 100%, generating a much larger longwave radiative forcing.
There is a caveat - as the Goody plot shows, vapor is indeed saturated at the surface. Therefore, how one adds H2O to the atmosphere will determine the result. If additional H2O can be added in such a way that only surface amounts of vapor increase, then there will be, as you say, little effect in the infrared. Adding H2O to the middle troposphere, where the vapor lines are not saturated, will net you a vastly different result. Complicating the issue is the interaction between clouds and water vapor - we simply cannot tell where additional amounts of H2O vapor will go, and therefore, we cannot assume that additional water vapor will not yield a longwave forcing, since the H2O bands are not everywhere saturated. Whereas the CO2 bands are.
This is why most models investigating CO2 impacts start off with a doubling of CO2 - since the band is saturated, it takes a lot of additional CO2 to get a significant forcing.
I can send references, if you like - my gmail is in my profile.
Umm, no - it's the CO2 lines that are mostly saturated. H2O lines are not saturated - you got that backwards.
Heh...here's another joke, from TFA:
Now I will say this on the note of the fabric store types: Not Geeks! These are the types of people that never get out and experience the world.
Pot, kettle. Kettle, pot. Hey, you're black too!
Yeah, maybe. I don't know how FFXI works, but in every game I play, I just turn off some of the shiny, fancy features, maybe turn down the resolution, and get wicked framerates as a result. It's always a blast owning some n00b whose many-thousands-of-dollars system, running at 1600x1200x8x4x, couldn't line up the shot as fast as my $800 FrankenPuter running at 800x600 and 72fps.
For me at least, a lot of the chrome they put in games nowadays is a distraction from what I'm trying to do in-game, and I'd rather play without it. Yeah, I don't get bump-mapped anti-aliased 32bit color on my closeups of Lara Croft's guns (not those, the other ones) but I don't have to drop six c-notes everytime ATi/nVidia come up with the latest and greatest. Different strokes, I guess...
Someone point me to an article that tells me what they actually did and how they did it.
No. If you can't be stuffed to read one *whole* page of the article (they get into details pretty quickly) then I sure as hell am not going to hand you the relevant bits on a silver platter. Christ.
Perhaps the reason that four motivated immigrants can beat MIT at a robotics contest is simply because they worked harder. With a country filled with lazy, "I'm too good for this" shirks like parent poster, it's almost inevitable that barely literate Mexicans will soon be doing our robotics work.
Once you have sufficient market share in distribution, why not sign a few up and coming artists ?
Because Apple Records would sue them off the face of the earth, again. IIRC, iTunes was on shaky ground for a while while the record companies thought long and hard about all possibilities about letting Apple re-sell their music online. Plenty of companies still don't license their music for resale by Apple (try getting Led Zeppelin on iTMS) because they don't trust Apple not to do exactly what you've hypothesized.
Don't get me wrong, if I could support artists more directly by paying my bucks to Apple, who could probably offer lower overhead and management waste, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But I doubt the bean-counting moneydroids at the big record companies would let 'em without a massive, massive lawsuit, which would kill iTunes and the iPod, which in turn, would screw Apple pretty well and good.
Actually, it says the new version of Netscape, which it also says is integrating the core code of Firefox. But I'm glad that someone is reading this. :)
It's *rare* that I talk to ACs, especially ones who present themselves as asshat blowhards as you've done repeatedly (here and to the two responses to your 'question'.) But I s'pose it's fun to stir the poo sometimes, and you definitely count.
Anecdotally, I don't have security issues with my Windows boxes when I use Firefox. When my wife uses IE, I find myself removing spyware. For me, in my experience, Firefox is more secure. You may write that off as a niche user in a niche market, but fuck you anyways, AC.
As far as other people, STFW - there's plenty of other people reviewing the ways and means which make Firefox less exploitable than IE. Type 'Firefox IE more secure' into Google and see which way the order comes out on your links. I know you won't, since you're just trolling, but maybe somebody reading this will and learn something.
Back under the bridge with you, then.
Is the concept of the "butterfly effect" still considered valid by the scientific community?
:)
The butterfly effect is more related to chaotic processes in numerical weather prediction models - climate modelling specifically avoids chaotic behavior whenever possible. Remember that climate research is a very different animal than weather research - climate modelling seeks to find long-term trends that average over seasonal trends and such.
I was in fact trying to say that papers addressing pre-human climate change don't include human impacts.
Thanks - you're not the only one having problems typing tonight. Apologies if I came off harshly - it's been a long day.
It is certainly a fact that there is a larger amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere due to human activity and that a greenhouse effect can occur. Given the significant variability of the earth's climate before human activity became significant, wouldn't it be fair to say that we can't make an informed judgment about the good or bad effects of human CO2 generation relative to Earth's climate in the future?
Well, the impact of CO2 warming is more complicated than just the radiative forcing issue - various feedbacks (which are poorly understood at present) complicate the issue. It would be entirely correct to state that given the significant variability in the climate record that we cannot at this time make an definitive judgement about anthropogenic climate forcing. This is, of course, not the same thing as saying that 'global warming does not exist.' It merely states that we are unsure as to the magnitude of human impact on the natural climate system, among other things.
In your opinion is the movement to limit CO2 generation a good thing or a bad thing?
Given that we are essentially running an uncontrolled experiment on a climate system whose mechanisms we do not understand, I tend to take a more conservative approach. As a friend stated, 'why pee in the pool?' In terms of sociopolitical arguments, reduction of CO2 emission would necessitate a transfer to alternative energy strategies which would reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources (read, the Middle East.) With a determined scientific effort backed by political will, I can't see why this would be a bad thing, although as stated in the IPCC report, it wouldn't do much with regard to global warming. But there exist viable solutions to the CO2 reduction problem that would be beneficial for our country to explore.
Apparently most of the world has signed Kyoto and they originally hoped that the U.S. would too
We did sign Kyoto, but didn't ratify it. And the rest of the world hasn't put it into action - it's a paper tiger, a theoretical political agreement. I stand by my assertion that scientists have no real sway, at least in the field of climate politics. There are far too many other obfuscations that must be dealt with before politicians are willing to look at the friggin' data. Your previous analysis of the cost-benefit of dealing with climate change is one such obfuscation - there has to be a magic dollar amount before it's worth dealing with, which gives politicians essentially unlimited wiggle room in dealing with what the magic number is.
At least we agree that scientists aren't immune to selfish motives.
Science is more of a trade rag than a scientific journal - think of it as a coffee-shop discussion for people who number their underwear sets. As such, it's the perfect place for controversial (and yes, entertaining, but maybe not like you think of entertainment) commentary that doesn't belong in the 'pure' literature.
Fine, we'll move on. But I'm not the only one that read what you wrote the exact way I did.
My original statement stands - nobody's said that climate change occurs (as in, present tense) independent of human activity. I did not say 'has now, or ever has occurred. If you and others have problem reading tenses in English, I'm not to blame.
But that is what the Science article says.
See my reply in the other thread - I think we're past this bit now.
So, no, they didn't come out and say "all scientists agree with human induced global warming." But the layman (and the mainstream media) could probably be forgiven for getting that impression from the article.
Herein lies the problem of public discourse about science in general - you obviously took it a different way, and it took a conversation with someone who reads Science as Part Of A Balanced Daily Dead-Tree Diet to change your position. They *could* be forgiven, but I grow tired of doing so - why can't people just read articles and not push their political views on the analysis therein?
(i.e. that they exists)
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Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?
Who's going to make that claim? Of course human activity must effect the climate. ...and this is all scientists are saying, which is why Science wrote an article detailing the fact that nobody's written the hypothetical paper I forwarded. We're starting to see eye-to-eye now - this is a rare event on Slashdot; maybe I should print this. :)
:)
Heck, a fly farting is going to have some effect on the climate.
Careful, now: climate != weather. The question you ask is the same question we ask - what influence does human activity have on climate change? The question presupposes a scientific consensus on anthropogenic effects (i.e. that they exists) and now the question is: what is the magnitude? This is, again, what the Science article is talking about.
Before we invest so much money on analyzing the human impact on global climate change I think we should spend a heck of a lot more time and money understanding natural climate change.
It's a good idea, but the two are now part of the same system, obeying the same physical processes. The atmosphere does not distinguish between human and natural activity - it reacts to energy forcing without regard to the source of said energy.
I personally think that clouds and the sun contribute to global climate change by absolutely staggering proportions compared to human activity.
Maybe so, but what of effects of human activity which influences cloud amount and type? If you're serious about this, I can send you plenty of literature references addressing this very topic. Cloud-radiative feedback is a major field of research right now, and it's been demonstrated that human activity has a decidedly marked impact on clouds. It's not necessarily all about CO2, after all.
But like I said, this is the first time in quite a while that a global-warming thread I've jumped on on Slashdot didn't turn into a rampant flame-fest. You're obviously someone I've underestimated, and I apologize for earlier snarkiness. Perhaps cogent discussion on the Internet isn't quite dead yet.
All scientists that I've met have, thus far, been human.
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:) But laugh if you will.
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Man, could I show you a thing or two, then...
"Think twice about publishing your anti-global warming research because everyone disagrees with you."
Again, you're not reading the literature. Plenty of people win their spurs from publishing theories that dispute anthropogenic climate changes, or by positing hypotheses that negate any warming that might occur. Google for the 'Iris Hypothesis' by Richard Lindzen - makes for great reading, and even better back-and-forth literature articles. FWIW, not even Lindzen out-and-out discounts global warming, but he obviously doesn't think much of it, and he's done just fine from publishing his research.
At no time in human history have scientists had so much influence on politics as global warming scientists do today.
Yeah, because everybody signed that Kyoto Accord and put it into action, right? C'mon - your statement is ludicrous and you know it. Scientists have little influence on politics unless they've found a way to blow people up.
So why the hell did Science publish this silly article that proves nothing?
To sell ads, maybe? To encourage further discussion from the scientists that suspect that global warming is hooey but haven't found proof yet? To keep the thing interesting? Scientists read dozens of new articles every month, and a little light entertainment is sometimes just what the doctor ordered.
We already know that climate change occurs independent of human activity. Or are we to believe that the climate was static until we humans started messing things up?
No, no, no, read that carefully now. What I said was no paper has been published which posits that climate change is (as in, is now) independent of human activity. Certainly before humans existed, climate change was independent of human activity. The global warming debate boils down to whether or not this is still the case. Stop playing semantics.
Althought right now we aren't really discussing global warming but whether every scientist agrees with it.
Again, that's not what the Science article says. I know plenty of scientists who are skeptical about anthropogenic climate change (I myself have reservations about the magnitude of any human impact) but, that doesn't mean that we don't agree that global warming is a possibility. Why? Because nobody's proven otherwise. Neither do we necessarily believe that global warming must exist (which is what you think the Science article claims) because again, nobody's demonstrated the link past a first-order radiative affect.
The average scientific reader of Slashdot? Hahaha.
You should have gleaned this by now, but I mean what I write when I write it, because I try to write carefully. I didn't say the average scientific reader of Slashdot, I said the average scientific Slashdot reader. The former puts the emphasis on 'reader of Slashdot' while the latter puts the emphasis on 'scientific'. There's plenty of scientists who read Slashdot, and more often than not, we wonder why we even bother when we read the comments. No doubt some other scientist is out there rolling their eyes at my charging at windmills, but hey, this is what I do after a few whiskey sours.
Anyways, this is a tempest in a teapot - the Science article merely states that there exists a scientific consensus that global warming hasn't been disproven. Perhaps their angle is suspect, but nothing else, and I wouldn't get all hot and bothered about it if I were you.
Are you an atmospheric scientist?
:) It's a lame thing to do, what I did, and I immediately regretted it after clicking 'submit' but there you go...
:)
This is the part where I say "why yes, yes I am." But you probably knew that was coming...
Your sentence "When reliable evidence that supports the theory that climate change occurs independent of human activity surfaces, it will be published" is rather unfortunate.
Read it again, then. It doesn't mean what you think it means. It means, when reliable evidence supporting the theory that climate change is unaffected by human activity, it will be published. No such paper has been published, to my knowledge. Neither has a paper definitively demonstrating a human impact on climate change been published, for that matter, but I've made my point.
99.999% of the data that climatologists are comparing the last humdred years of climate change against records pre-human history.
That sentence doesn't even parse. If you're referring to the fact that climatologists use paleoclimate data in their analyses, yes, I'm well aware of that fact. And I'm also well aware that climatologists study climate change during periods where no human activity existed. What is germaine to this discussion is that climatologists are studying potential human impacts on current climate change, which is what most people mean by 'global warming theory.' No paper stating that climate change is wholly unaffected by human activity exists, to my knowledge. Papers that address climate change prior to human activity obviously don't include potential human impacts - is this what you were trying to say?
Anyways, I probably should have just let this thread pass on by - I've had this discussion dozens of times on Slashdot, but people would rather be left to their own devices than discuss the issues with someone who might know a thing or two about the subject. Examine the current state of political discourse by way of example.
- Scientists think about funding, but pushing an agenda to acheive funding is ultimately a career-limiting move when the political pendulum shifts, as it has in recent years. And as with most things, the scientific ego supercedes the need to seek acceptance through funding - scientists will push theories they believe in, and try to swing funding their way, not vice versa.
- Have you actually read any of the literature regarding climate change? It doesn't sound like it - you don't see much politicizing in peer-reviewed journals. Certainly the exacting of personal/institutional spats occurs, but the literature certainly doesn't read the way you imply it does.
- I don't think stating that no scientific paper reviewed discounts anthropomorphic climate change will have a chilling effect on climate research: scientists are well aware that correlation is not the same as causation, after all. When reliable evidence that supports the theory that climate change occurs independent of human activity surfaces, it will be published. When reliable evidence that supports the theory that climate change occurs because of human activity, it will also be published. Until then, we'll continue to study the mechanisms behind climate change and look for links. It's just that simple.
- The Science article merely states that the bulk of peer-reviewed literature allows for the possibility of anthropogenic climate change, nothing more. Anything you read into it sounds more like your agenda than anything else.
Anyways, take it as you will - I doubt seriously you're prepared to think critically about this topic. But making blanket statements accusing scientists of massive malfeasance to further a political agenda that counters your own smacks more of conspiracy theory than a reasoned argument, and it certainly doesn't impress the average scientific Slashdot reader.First off, you missed the sarcasm in parent post.
Second off, early Walkmans (IIRC) cost on the order of a hundred bucks, back in the early 80's. And they played one (1) cassette tape, containing 8-10 songs. The iPod, while costing a bit more than that initial hundred bucks the early Walkmen cost, plays thousands of songs. I have a crappy older iPod that's got over three thousand songs on it, and it can slice and dice 'em any way I want. Saying it's just a fancy Walkman is like saying SpaceShip One is just a fancy EAA project.
I won't disagree with you that rich kids like to flaunt their iPods as a sort of 'look at me' item, but other, saner people use them as intended - as a portable CD library that fits in your pocket. Hardly just a fashion accessory.
Someone tell me what a "MAJOR" hardware upgrade is
Power spike at work fried my old P4 motherboard. Fortunately, the mobo 'took one for the team' and spared the rest of the components. $100 later, with a new mobo (and PSU), I put the old P4 processor, RAM, graphics card, gigabit ethernet, and hard drive(s) on the new board, powered up, and was on my merry way.
If it'd been a Mac, I'd be buying a new computer.
In my opinion a MAJOR hardware upgrade is called building a new computer.
More power to you. Some of us work for a living, though, and we'd rather not drop two grand replacing parts when we can get away with the same thing for a hundred bucks.