Well, let's say we're talking about 14 year copyrights (the old U.S. way). How many clones of 14 year old games are you playing? How many people would have bought a copy of "The Legend of Melda" on the Nintendo Entertainment System in the year 2001? Note: They couldn't use the name "Zelda" in the title because Nintendo presumably owns a Trademark on the name "Legend of Zelda".
Besides, for the most part we're not talking about clones, but about making the original available without licensing costs. So what you might find is that some company is selling again, in the year 2001, a package of the best games from 1986, or this year, the best games from 1999. The problem with derivative works, is that you still have to be very careful not to include anything that's newer than the age of the copyright. For example, while you could make a game that's derived from Ocarina of Time now if copyright were 14 years (instead of life + 75), you would not be able to use anything from Majora's Mask, Twilight Princess, Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks, or Skyward Sword, and you still wouldn't be able to use any of Nintendo's trademarks which probably means they could still sucessfully sue you for using Link as the protaganist.
So, the short answer is: Yes, Nintendo would have still made those games, and it's highly unlike Zelda clones (if any at all were made) would ever have any impact on that decision. It's even reasonable to supposed they might have made more Zelda games to keep a steady supply of fresh copyright material available to fend off all of the potential poachers that you envision.
The fact that GOG.com is a viable business kills his point that old games have no economic value.
Actually, it does not. GOG.com does value-added work on old games. There is no evidence that the games themselves maintain any significant economic benefit without that work. As I understand it, GOG.com fixes the game and those fixes should be entitled to copyright protection for a suitable length of time, however, the underlying games should no longer have any protection. Do you really think it's reasonable that the source code for Pacman, for example, will be protected by copyright until 2055 at the earliest?
That's an article about Richard Lindzen, who's practically made a career of out of always being wrong. For instance, he also doesn't think there's a strong link between cigarettes and lung cancer.
Arctic sea ice extent for December was 12.38 million square kilometers (4.78 million square miles). This is 700,000 square kilometers or 270,300 square miles below the 1981 to 2010 average, making it the 4th lowest December extent in the 36-year satellite data record.
Flat taxes are very popular among the exceptionally wealthy because they know it's a win-win for them. They pay less taxes no matter how it breaks down because a greater proportion of the taxes will be collected from people who earn less than them, and with a higher burden of taxes on other people it gives an additional incentive to lower the tax rate which will overwhelmingly benefit the richest citizens of the nation. Lower the flat tax by 1% and the average tax payer would save around $400, while the billionaires save $10,000 on every million they make.
I have read this paragraph 5 times, and it's still gobbledygook. It sounds like (correct me if I misunderstand) you are saying that climate change, whatever it may be, may or may not influence the weather.
It's pretty complicated. When someone says climate change is responsible for a storm, it's like saying that the "1" in 4+1=5 is responsible for the 5. You would only have a 4 without the 1, but you'd still have a 4. So, for example, without any human-induced climate change we'd still have heat waves but they would generally not be as hot and wouldn't last as long, and fewer people would die. However, if 30 people die, it's unlikely anyone can tell you exactly how many would have died if we hadn't increased the average global temperature.
However, we can gauge the trends to determine how things are changing over time. Generally speaking if we are breaking more hot records than cold records, that's evidence that the climate is warming.
As to your last phrase there, "stable climate", I would not suggest that climate is stable. Climate does indeed change -- I just oppose the alarmism, and question the tenets of what has already become a religion for many people.
It's without human activity, the climate wouldn't be stable, but the natural trend in climate is something on the order of -0.3 degrees per 1000 years. Which is much more stable than the warming caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases. They're increasing the temperature at around 17 degrees per 1000 years. Of course we'll run out of fossil fuels long before we could reach a 17 degree increase or 1000 years, but I'm putting them in the same units so you can see the difference between what's natural and what's going on now. We're moving things at around 50 times the speed in the opposite direction.
Why are the AGW people here so insistent that everyone must *believe*, or be branded a heretic?
I don't care whether you believe or not, I just correct people when they say things which are contradicted by the best available science. Personally, I don't like it when people spread misinformation. That goes for people who hype global warming too much, as well. We're not actually likely to turn the planet into a cinderball, but I rarely have to correct people making claims like that because there are so few of them and usually someone else has already corrected them.
Previously reported discrepancies between the amount of warming near the surface and higher in the atmosphere have been used to challenge the reliability of climate models and the reality of human-induced global warming... This significant discrepancy no longer exists because errors in the satellite and radiosonde data have been identified and corrected. New data sets have also been developed that do not show such discrepancies.
If he's using known bad data, then it should be no surprise that he's getting the wrong results.
When I was a wee lad, the "settled" climate science was that Earth was cooling, and we were careening head-on into a new Ice Age that was going to destroy us all.
No, it wasn't. What this statement shows is that you don't know the difference between a new reporter and a scientist. There was a little media hysteria over the possibility of a ice age, but the science supported warming over cooling at nearly 6 to 1 already by that point. The debate at that time was over whether the natural cooling effects that causes ice ages could overcome anthropogenic emissions (which were quite a bit lower at that point).
Then, as science, data collection, and computer modeling advanced yet further... "Global Warming" has been called into question. So much so, in fact, that many of the climate scientists of today will not use the phrase "Global Warming", but have chosen the trademark of "Climate Change". It's back to "we're not sure what's going on but we're all gonna die!" "Climate Change" is a delightfully vague yet alarming turn of phrase, and a stroke of genius.
This is also false, the IPCC has never been the IPGW. Many people don't understand this, but global warming is a specific effect of climate change. Just like warming is just one type of temperature change. The IPCC's mandate is to study climate change, whatever it is. Global warming is what we're currently getting from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The only people I'm aware of who tried to change the name for the phenomenon from global warming to climate change are George W. Bush's political advisors who suggested that climate change was less likely to disturb voters.
So now, every time something odd, unusual, rare, extreme, or even normal happens with weather, it can be attributed to "Climate Change" -- because something changed, see? Climate Change equals different weather, so something in weather that didn't happen last year or the year before is now because of Climate Change.
That is not at all what climate change means. Climate change is about changes in the long-term baseline for weather, so yes if new events are possible because the average amount of rain fall or temperature (for example) has changed over the long term, then climate change may be partially responsible for a new extreme weather event. For instance if you increase the average temperature by 1 degree over the long term, you also increase the maximum reachable temperature by one degree and the minimum reachable temperature by 1 degree (simplistically, it's actually a lot more complicated that). Regardless of that change, individual events aren't general regarded as scientific proof of climate change but changes in the distribution of events can be. For instance, in a stable climate you would expect a roughly 50-50 split over time between record highs and record lows and that the number of new records overall would decrease over time. For the last 20 years or so we've been looking at around 66-33 for the high/low split, and the difference between the number of record highs and record lows is increasing, plus the number of record highs is not falling off at the rate we would expect for a stable climate.
Go ahead, Climate Change bigots. Mod me down. I've got karma to burn. I could post AC, but I'm thumbing my nose at you.
You know, it'd be more effective if anything you wrote was actually correct.
Well he's certainly trying to start an argument, but other than accusations of double-standards with no evidence to support them, there doesn't seem to be anything there.
Actually, the point of the expedition was to see what changes had taken place in the last 100 years. You and some others are the ones claiming that they went there with a forgone conclusion with no evidence to support it other than your prejudice.
As I previously posted, it's also possible that the comparison was done incorrectly. For instance, NASA's GISS temperature series shows an increase of around 0.5 degrees between 1979 and 2013, while Dr. Spencer's "satellite" and "balloon" temperature series show an increase of barely 0.2 degrees. And it's unclear how Dr. Spencer retrofitted models to all have a start date of 1979 and whether he did so correctly, the trends given in his other post seem to grossly overstate the actual predicted warming by the models.
Looking at his graph and notes, I don't understand why he chose 1979 as the starting period for his graph, and what he's done to model runs that start after 1979 to extend their trend lines backwards. I would expect a single line with many points of divergence along it to show where each model begins to overestimate warming, the fact that they all seem to start overestimating by 1982 is a clue that someone is playing games with the data. Furthermore, just from looking at the graph it appears to be indicating that the average of the models is between 0.3 and 0.4 degrees per decade. That is significantly higher than the average from the IPCC1 report (which was between 0.15 and 0.3 degrees per decade) so where are these numbers coming from? Did Spencer cherry-pick the worst performing models for his graph or did he alter the results produce by the models in some way? The attached commentary doesn't provide the data or explain the methodology used to generate the graph.
Additionally, the only two reference points are an average of two sets of satellite data and 4 balloons? Where are the ground temperature series in this graph?
Jane, I think you've been snookered. The author is playing a game of bait and switch and you fell for it hook, line and sinker. The whole article rests of the supposedly logical assumption that two different effects with the same name can't both exist because they operate differently.
Look, I'll put this in layman's terms. The guy claims the temperature inside a greenhouse is not higher than the temperature inside the greenhouse and therefore climate science is a hoax. Obviously, that's a ridiculous argument. More specifically, there's a false dichotomy (either one or the other must exist but not both) followed by a non-sequitor. Specifically, I don't see why climate science is wrong because an astrologist can't measure the "global greenhouse effect" inside his greenhouse. The conclusions are simply not supported by the evidence or the argument presented.
GGP has a point, though - a sample of only 1,000 orbits (out of what, 4.5 billion?) isn't even acceptable by statistical standards when you're trying to determine what effect the Sun has on our climate.
Actually, he doesn't and it's clear that neither of you know as much about statistics as you think you do. A sample size of 1000 is good, and it doesn't matter how many orbits the planet has made. If you understood statistics you would have been talking about bias in the selection (the last 1000 years) rather than the size. Of course, since they're looking at the current factors driving climate change rather than the factors over the entire lifetime of the planet, the bias is irrelevant because the sample includes all the years we actually care about (minus those that haven't occurred yet, for obvious reasons).
There so very many things for which there is no evidence, that it becomes incredibly questionable for you to select just a few of them to believe in. If you believe in a god for which there is no proof, why not the Grey Men? the Invisible Pink Space Unicorn? Why not the flying spaghetti monster? Why not Russell's Teapot? Why not the dragon in my garage? Why not Harry Potter? Why not the Sasquatch? Why not Atlantis? I could go on for a very long time before I run out things that I could name that don't exist.
So how and why do you choose, with no supporting evidence, to believe in some things and not to believe in others?
As I understand it, on a normal day (stormy days are different) the sun will heat the air closest to the ground causing it to rise and mix with the colder air above it which will create wind, thus the strongest winds should coincide with the daily temperature peak which should be sometime in the afternoon. Because the ground tends to cool off quickly after the sun goes down, the air also cools and less of it rises, and thus there is less mixing and the wind will normally be weaker at night.
In coastal areas, there will also normally be a temperature differential between the air over land and over water which will drive some wind on warm days (and potentially cold days too, I guess), amplifying the effect you would get in landlocked areas.
I'm not sure if this daily variance is sufficient to drive a noticeable trend in wind-power generation, but it could be.
If the value of someone's work declines relative to the work of someone else, you have to reduce the pay.
It's actually a bit wose than that, during times of high deflation, you'd have to reduce everybody's pay. The problem is that people really don't like it when you tell them you're cutting their wages (even if you're cutting by less than the amount of deflation). Of course, it wouldn't help that many employers would probably try to cut by more than the amount of deflation for that extra little bit of profit.
You might need to look at this as a systemic issue.
If losing the data on a hard drive (and related backups) can render bitcoins unusable, then over time bitcoins will be lost. I think that means the theory that underpins bitcoin is wrong because it can't be a stable monetary supply if it has a finite number of coins each of which can be destroyed or lost.
It's true much of the current definition of species is somewhat arbitrary.
There is some magic component that we just have not seen yet which triggers these events.
Apparently Will Ratcliff and Michael Travisano from the University of Minnesota have already demonstrated the evolution from single-cell to multi-cell in the laboratory. The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
You haven't provided your definition of speciation, as far as I can tell the Primrose example of speciation is correct and relevent. A primary trait of different species is the inability to produce viable offspring when crossbred.
Slashdot Mirror
If that's the case, then it looks like GOG isn't actually doing any work that's worthy of protection.
Well, let's say we're talking about 14 year copyrights (the old U.S. way). How many clones of 14 year old games are you playing? How many people would have bought a copy of "The Legend of Melda" on the Nintendo Entertainment System in the year 2001? Note: They couldn't use the name "Zelda" in the title because Nintendo presumably owns a Trademark on the name "Legend of Zelda".
Besides, for the most part we're not talking about clones, but about making the original available without licensing costs. So what you might find is that some company is selling again, in the year 2001, a package of the best games from 1986, or this year, the best games from 1999. The problem with derivative works, is that you still have to be very careful not to include anything that's newer than the age of the copyright. For example, while you could make a game that's derived from Ocarina of Time now if copyright were 14 years (instead of life + 75), you would not be able to use anything from Majora's Mask, Twilight Princess, Phantom Hourglass, Spirit Tracks, or Skyward Sword, and you still wouldn't be able to use any of Nintendo's trademarks which probably means they could still sucessfully sue you for using Link as the protaganist.
So, the short answer is: Yes, Nintendo would have still made those games, and it's highly unlike Zelda clones (if any at all were made) would ever have any impact on that decision. It's even reasonable to supposed they might have made more Zelda games to keep a steady supply of fresh copyright material available to fend off all of the potential poachers that you envision.
The fact that GOG.com is a viable business kills his point that old games have no economic value.
Actually, it does not. GOG.com does value-added work on old games. There is no evidence that the games themselves maintain any significant economic benefit without that work. As I understand it, GOG.com fixes the game and those fixes should be entitled to copyright protection for a suitable length of time, however, the underlying games should no longer have any protection. Do you really think it's reasonable that the source code for Pacman, for example, will be protected by copyright until 2055 at the earliest?
Indeed, that's why all of the top 10 hottest years on record have happened since 1997. Because it's getting colder.
That's an article about Richard Lindzen, who's practically made a career of out of always being wrong. For instance, he also doesn't think there's a strong link between cigarettes and lung cancer.
That's because that's exactly what it is. You see, scientists are on Harper's enemy list. They won't say what he tells them to say.
About 97% or roughly 410 out 435. What? Was that supposed to be rhetorical?
Flat taxes are very popular among the exceptionally wealthy because they know it's a win-win for them. They pay less taxes no matter how it breaks down because a greater proportion of the taxes will be collected from people who earn less than them, and with a higher burden of taxes on other people it gives an additional incentive to lower the tax rate which will overwhelmingly benefit the richest citizens of the nation. Lower the flat tax by 1% and the average tax payer would save around $400, while the billionaires save $10,000 on every million they make.
I have read this paragraph 5 times, and it's still gobbledygook. It sounds like (correct me if I misunderstand) you are saying that climate change, whatever it may be, may or may not influence the weather.
It's pretty complicated. When someone says climate change is responsible for a storm, it's like saying that the "1" in 4+1=5 is responsible for the 5. You would only have a 4 without the 1, but you'd still have a 4. So, for example, without any human-induced climate change we'd still have heat waves but they would generally not be as hot and wouldn't last as long, and fewer people would die. However, if 30 people die, it's unlikely anyone can tell you exactly how many would have died if we hadn't increased the average global temperature. However, we can gauge the trends to determine how things are changing over time. Generally speaking if we are breaking more hot records than cold records, that's evidence that the climate is warming.
As to your last phrase there, "stable climate", I would not suggest that climate is stable. Climate does indeed change -- I just oppose the alarmism, and question the tenets of what has already become a religion for many people.
It's without human activity, the climate wouldn't be stable, but the natural trend in climate is something on the order of -0.3 degrees per 1000 years. Which is much more stable than the warming caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gases. They're increasing the temperature at around 17 degrees per 1000 years. Of course we'll run out of fossil fuels long before we could reach a 17 degree increase or 1000 years, but I'm putting them in the same units so you can see the difference between what's natural and what's going on now. We're moving things at around 50 times the speed in the opposite direction.
Why are the AGW people here so insistent that everyone must *believe*, or be branded a heretic?
I don't care whether you believe or not, I just correct people when they say things which are contradicted by the best available science. Personally, I don't like it when people spread misinformation. That goes for people who hype global warming too much, as well. We're not actually likely to turn the planet into a cinderball, but I rarely have to correct people making claims like that because there are so few of them and usually someone else has already corrected them.
What does the raw data show? The satellite and balloon data is raw - and covers the entire world.
If it's the raw satellite data then Dr. Spencer is being wilfully obtuse or deliberately misleading, he should know by now that the raw data has errors due to satellite drift. From a paper from one of his fellow climate change "skeptics", John Christy:
If he's using known bad data, then it should be no surprise that he's getting the wrong results.
When I was a wee lad, the "settled" climate science was that Earth was cooling, and we were careening head-on into a new Ice Age that was going to destroy us all.
No, it wasn't. What this statement shows is that you don't know the difference between a new reporter and a scientist. There was a little media hysteria over the possibility of a ice age, but the science supported warming over cooling at nearly 6 to 1 already by that point. The debate at that time was over whether the natural cooling effects that causes ice ages could overcome anthropogenic emissions (which were quite a bit lower at that point).
Then, as science, data collection, and computer modeling advanced yet further... "Global Warming" has been called into question. So much so, in fact, that many of the climate scientists of today will not use the phrase "Global Warming", but have chosen the trademark of "Climate Change". It's back to "we're not sure what's going on but we're all gonna die!" "Climate Change" is a delightfully vague yet alarming turn of phrase, and a stroke of genius.
This is also false, the IPCC has never been the IPGW. Many people don't understand this, but global warming is a specific effect of climate change. Just like warming is just one type of temperature change. The IPCC's mandate is to study climate change, whatever it is. Global warming is what we're currently getting from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The only people I'm aware of who tried to change the name for the phenomenon from global warming to climate change are George W. Bush's political advisors who suggested that climate change was less likely to disturb voters.
So now, every time something odd, unusual, rare, extreme, or even normal happens with weather, it can be attributed to "Climate Change" -- because something changed, see? Climate Change equals different weather, so something in weather that didn't happen last year or the year before is now because of Climate Change.
That is not at all what climate change means. Climate change is about changes in the long-term baseline for weather, so yes if new events are possible because the average amount of rain fall or temperature (for example) has changed over the long term, then climate change may be partially responsible for a new extreme weather event. For instance if you increase the average temperature by 1 degree over the long term, you also increase the maximum reachable temperature by one degree and the minimum reachable temperature by 1 degree (simplistically, it's actually a lot more complicated that). Regardless of that change, individual events aren't general regarded as scientific proof of climate change but changes in the distribution of events can be. For instance, in a stable climate you would expect a roughly 50-50 split over time between record highs and record lows and that the number of new records overall would decrease over time. For the last 20 years or so we've been looking at around 66-33 for the high/low split, and the difference between the number of record highs and record lows is increasing, plus the number of record highs is not falling off at the rate we would expect for a stable climate.
Go ahead, Climate Change bigots. Mod me down. I've got karma to burn. I could post AC, but I'm thumbing my nose at you.
You know, it'd be more effective if anything you wrote was actually correct.
Well he's certainly trying to start an argument, but other than accusations of double-standards with no evidence to support them, there doesn't seem to be anything there.
Actually, the point of the expedition was to see what changes had taken place in the last 100 years. You and some others are the ones claiming that they went there with a forgone conclusion with no evidence to support it other than your prejudice.
As I previously posted, it's also possible that the comparison was done incorrectly. For instance, NASA's GISS temperature series shows an increase of around 0.5 degrees between 1979 and 2013, while Dr. Spencer's "satellite" and "balloon" temperature series show an increase of barely 0.2 degrees. And it's unclear how Dr. Spencer retrofitted models to all have a start date of 1979 and whether he did so correctly, the trends given in his other post seem to grossly overstate the actual predicted warming by the models.
First, it is important to note that Dr. Roy Spencer has a track record of providing misinformation on climate issues.
Looking at his graph and notes, I don't understand why he chose 1979 as the starting period for his graph, and what he's done to model runs that start after 1979 to extend their trend lines backwards. I would expect a single line with many points of divergence along it to show where each model begins to overestimate warming, the fact that they all seem to start overestimating by 1982 is a clue that someone is playing games with the data. Furthermore, just from looking at the graph it appears to be indicating that the average of the models is between 0.3 and 0.4 degrees per decade. That is significantly higher than the average from the IPCC1 report (which was between 0.15 and 0.3 degrees per decade) so where are these numbers coming from? Did Spencer cherry-pick the worst performing models for his graph or did he alter the results produce by the models in some way? The attached commentary doesn't provide the data or explain the methodology used to generate the graph.
Additionally, the only two reference points are an average of two sets of satellite data and 4 balloons? Where are the ground temperature series in this graph?
Skeptical Science has posted several blog posts that show a much closer match between models and observation, so I'm inclined to believe that Spencer screwed it up unintentionally or otherwise.
Jane, I think you've been snookered. The author is playing a game of bait and switch and you fell for it hook, line and sinker. The whole article rests of the supposedly logical assumption that two different effects with the same name can't both exist because they operate differently.
Look, I'll put this in layman's terms. The guy claims the temperature inside a greenhouse is not higher than the temperature inside the greenhouse and therefore climate science is a hoax. Obviously, that's a ridiculous argument. More specifically, there's a false dichotomy (either one or the other must exist but not both) followed by a non-sequitor. Specifically, I don't see why climate science is wrong because an astrologist can't measure the "global greenhouse effect" inside his greenhouse. The conclusions are simply not supported by the evidence or the argument presented.
GGP has a point, though - a sample of only 1,000 orbits (out of what, 4.5 billion?) isn't even acceptable by statistical standards when you're trying to determine what effect the Sun has on our climate.
Actually, he doesn't and it's clear that neither of you know as much about statistics as you think you do. A sample size of 1000 is good, and it doesn't matter how many orbits the planet has made. If you understood statistics you would have been talking about bias in the selection (the last 1000 years) rather than the size. Of course, since they're looking at the current factors driving climate change rather than the factors over the entire lifetime of the planet, the bias is irrelevant because the sample includes all the years we actually care about (minus those that haven't occurred yet, for obvious reasons).
You don't seem to be following the argument.
There so very many things for which there is no evidence, that it becomes incredibly questionable for you to select just a few of them to believe in. If you believe in a god for which there is no proof, why not the Grey Men? the Invisible Pink Space Unicorn? Why not the flying spaghetti monster? Why not Russell's Teapot? Why not the dragon in my garage? Why not Harry Potter? Why not the Sasquatch? Why not Atlantis? I could go on for a very long time before I run out things that I could name that don't exist.
So how and why do you choose, with no supporting evidence, to believe in some things and not to believe in others?
As I understand it, on a normal day (stormy days are different) the sun will heat the air closest to the ground causing it to rise and mix with the colder air above it which will create wind, thus the strongest winds should coincide with the daily temperature peak which should be sometime in the afternoon. Because the ground tends to cool off quickly after the sun goes down, the air also cools and less of it rises, and thus there is less mixing and the wind will normally be weaker at night.
In coastal areas, there will also normally be a temperature differential between the air over land and over water which will drive some wind on warm days (and potentially cold days too, I guess), amplifying the effect you would get in landlocked areas.
I'm not sure if this daily variance is sufficient to drive a noticeable trend in wind-power generation, but it could be.
THAT case was just a stupid case of ignoring scientific criticism for profit.
Of course, that would never happen anywhere else.
If the value of someone's work declines relative to the work of someone else, you have to reduce the pay.
It's actually a bit wose than that, during times of high deflation, you'd have to reduce everybody's pay. The problem is that people really don't like it when you tell them you're cutting their wages (even if you're cutting by less than the amount of deflation). Of course, it wouldn't help that many employers would probably try to cut by more than the amount of deflation for that extra little bit of profit.
You might need to look at this as a systemic issue. If losing the data on a hard drive (and related backups) can render bitcoins unusable, then over time bitcoins will be lost. I think that means the theory that underpins bitcoin is wrong because it can't be a stable monetary supply if it has a finite number of coins each of which can be destroyed or lost.
There is some magic component that we just have not seen yet which triggers these events.
Apparently Will Ratcliff and Michael Travisano from the University of Minnesota have already demonstrated the evolution from single-cell to multi-cell in the laboratory. The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
You haven't provided your definition of speciation, as far as I can tell the Primrose example of speciation is correct and relevent. A primary trait of different species is the inability to produce viable offspring when crossbred.