"...we've been denied by all the major casual game portals for the following reasons: a. it auto-patches when new versions come out, b. it talks to a central server to list high scores, and c. it's a bubble pop game..." a) fixable in about 0.02 seconds b) fixable in about 0.02 seconds c) probably the real reason, and could be mainly just that your game's not fun. I'd love to have checked and told you before I posted this, but it asked for an email address to log my scores on the server, and yes, while I could give you user@user.com, nah, that ALONE said 'this isn't worth my time'.
"...Developers are often overworked and unfulfilled, gamers have no qualms about voicing their disapproval (sometimes quite warranted, sometimes not), and the media, in trying to please both groups, often fails to satisfy either..."
Games industry like just about every other industry on the planet; news at ll.
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=12519 - The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal filed on behalf of a New Jersey boy suspended from school almost four years ago after a playground game of cops and robbers.
...but even in the (according to the rest of the world) "Gun Happy" USA, most children today are brought up in a world where everyone from the media to politicians to schools all universally say "Guns are bad, m'kay?" (European designers are probably doubly crippled along this line...)
They grow up to be game designers that not only have never fired a real gun, but have never even SEEN one firsthand.
The media likes to, for example, portray Columbine as an example of guns run amok. Schools expel kids for drawing a PICTURE of a gun.
Is it surprising then that these individuals then are hard-put to try to simulate a gun in code?
Heaven forbid we go back to the days when I was in high school, we actually had shooting classes, and we could even bring in our own shotguns if we wanted. And you know, nobody in the history of our school was ever shot. AMAZING.
It's almost like guns were treated as serious, potentially-dangerous tools that nevertheless had a valid purpose and the best way to deal with kids and guns was to teach them how to use them properly and with respect, in order to prevent injuries from inappropriate use. Crazy stuff, I know.
FWIW though, I know friends that have come back from Iraq who claim they owe their lives to moronic young Iraqi men that thought they could fire a handgun sideways like in the movies, probably not a few cops would say the same.
I'd guess that the difference you see in the (lack of) effectiveness and (un)realism of guns in video games has a great deal to do with video quality and fairness.
Sounds strange, but true.
The most amazingly realistic simulation of small arms (and large, but that's not relevant here) in combat is WW2OL aka Battleground Europe. (http://www.battlegroundeurope.com/) The problem is (from a gaming perspective) is that it's nowhere near 'fair' according to most peoples' terms.
The problem is that modern combat engagement ranges are in the 300-500m range, often significantly more. Combat rifles are intended to be fully lethal at these ranges, obviously.
If my math is right, on a monitor 0.5m from your face, a 2m-high man standing @ 500m is 2mm. If he's lying prone - extremely common in combat - he's 30cm real life or 0.3mm on the monitor. That's nearly approaching the minimum dot pitch of most monitors. So for a 'typical' combat game, realistically representing lethal rifle fire at realistic ranges, you're shooting at a SINGLE pixel, which is extremely ungratifying, not to mention impossible to distinguish a 'man-pixel' from a 'bush pixel' at that range.
Monitors simply cannot support the resolution needed to allow people to fight at realistic engagement ranges.
Further as regards 'fairness' and Battleground Europe: this hypothesis was illustrated clearly to me when I was running the game on a marginal-spec machine. Running at 800x600, I was having trouble fighting effectively and dying a lot. Once I spent significant $$ to upgrade my system, and run it at 1600x1200, it became MUCH easier it identify targets and hit them at useful ranges. Part of the explanation about why BE remains a niche-game to this day is that difficulty, of course. But I can't see any mass-market designer building a game where the amount of money you put into the hardware so DIRECTLY affects the success of the player - not when the simple (simplistic?) solution is to cut the engagement ranges down by a factor of 3x or 4x, and correspondingly lower the lethality of weapons. For most purposes, that would seem an ideal compromise.
"And I'd suggest that the slight changes in the current spike are more a function of record accuracy than anything." Hm, reading failure, or simply not seeing what you don't want to.
If you look at that graph and see "SIGNIFICANT" deviation from the natural cycle, I'd suspect you're using a different definition of significant.
Nope, it's just a clipped list from wiki, with the (many) non-climate-scientists omitted. I think it's organized according to argument - what part of AGW they object to/criticize.
Your first link (about CO2 lag/lead temperature) shows this graph: http://www.grist.org/i/assets/volstok.gif Truly then, how does one look at that graph and say sincerely "It's clear that human activity has grossly changed the natural cycles."? I look at that and see an ABSOLUTELY clear cycle of sudden (in geological terms) warming about every 100,000 years. Yes, that may show current warming is sudden....but it's just like 125k, 240k, 325k years ago. And I'd suggest that the slight changes in the current spike are more a function of record accuracy than anything.
Your second link is about water vapor. My question about water vapor is precisely in this context of dismissal. Essentially, if I understand it, water vapor doesn't force climate in any significant way over climatological timescales. However, I'd be interested to see an extended discussion about water vapor because despite its short-term impact, cloud cover has a significant affect on planetary albedo; the amount of moisture being forced into the air in the very short term is increasing significantly (look up the % of arable land being sprinklered) and almost entirely in the Northern Hemisphere. We saw that the simple elimination of jet traffic after 9/11 had an apparently large impact on weather in the US. Weather =/= climate, of course, but it's hard to believe that there is NO impact.
Your third link (Greenland used to be green!) is patronizing and dismissive. It amounts to "well it may have been nicer but it was never really nice and the Vikings were stupid." Nevertheless, the Vikings lived in Greenland, subsisting (per your link) off FARMING, for (per your link) hundreds of years. Given iron-age technology, could we do that in Greenland of today?
Rather than comment on the inherent smugness that AGW devotees can't seem to understand makes themselves so fundamentally repellant, I'll simply ask: So will you open your mind now, or just ignore all this and move on to other pesky facts that the so called "ecomarxists" have allegedly failed to mention?
"...Cesmat, who has a sizable criminal history..."
NICE CHOICE OF BOYFRIEND! Really, really a great idea to let him stay at home and take care of your pubescent daughter.
Mom, you're awesome.
On another note, I understand that some people will find this distasteful, but I'd argue that this level of criminal sexual conduct - if proven in a court of law - would justify sterilization of both the boyfriend and mom.
But that's just too cruel for some people, I guess.
Personally, I think this is a foretaste of the future of MMO's. Certainly, they may or may not be able to successfully implement, but I've always wondered at how STATIC MMO's are.
Certainly, for those of us who used to buy a computer game, you were pretty much stuck with whatever the designer(s) envisioned was possible when the game went gold. Occasionally a content patch would be released that might add some little thing (now they sell these as "DLC").
Strangely, MMO's - despite their dynamic foundation and constant-connection to the source servers - have mimicked this pattern. AFAIK the only game that ever tried to really let content change over time was Ultima Online where players could impact (in fact, drove) the economy, and perhaps today EVE, where the player-sourced economy dwarfs whatever is hard-coded by the game.
I'm talking about something less economics and more "world". Certainly the complexities of balance, loot, xp gain mean that it would be a hellish effort to try to add significant BALANCED content on a weekly basis. But would it be so impossible to have NPCs change their clothes over time? Maybe quit jobs and be replaced? Have a merchant vessel arrive on infrequent occasions into a port city, offering rare or unique items for sale? I think WoW has discovered that, between meaningless achievement points and holiday celebrations that players really ENJOY things that add depth to a world without necessarily increasing their dps. The WoW world-events are fun (of course there's some bitching, because change is scary) and memorable.
Now if they just didn't seem quite so "bolted on", discrete, and above all, repetitive we'd be getting somewhere.
Well, part of the problem is that the whole postulation of Global Warming (oh wait, it's merely Climate Change now, isn't it?) is such a hash of assumptions and begged questions. If an argument has 100 failed component parts, where do you begin in listing who's "opposed" to it?
That said here's a partial list of climate-specific scientists who have publicly critiqued one or more aspects of the general premise "The globe is generally warming and humans are a significant cause."
Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the National Academy of Sciences
Garth Paltridge, Visiting Fellow ANU and retired Chief Research Scientist, CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research and retired Director of the Institute of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre.
Hendrik Tennekes, retired Director of Research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute:
Antonino Zichichi, emeritus professor of nuclear physics at the University of Bologna and president of the World Federation of Scientists
Chris de Freitas, Associate Professor, School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, University of Auckland
William M. Gray, Professor Emeritus and head of The Tropical Meteorology Project, Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University
William Kininmonth, meteorologist, former Australian delegate to World Meteorological Organization Commission for Climatology
David Legates, associate professor of geography and director of the Center for Climatic Research, University of Delaware
Tad Murty, oceanographer; adjunct professor, Departments of Civil Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa
Fred Singer, Professor emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia
Jan Veizer, environmental geochemist, Professor Emeritus from University of Ottawa
Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Canada
Syun-Ichi Akasofu, retired professor of geophysics and Founding Director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks
John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, contributor to several IPCC reports
Craig D. Idso, faculty researcher, Office of Climatology, Arizona State University and founder of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change
Patrick Michaels, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and retired research professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia
August H. "Augie" Auer Jr. New Zealand MetService Meteorologist, past professor of atmospheric science at the University of Wyoming
Reid Bryson, Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Marcel Leroux Professor of Climatology, Université Jean Moulin
Frederick Seitz, solid-state physicist, former president of the National Academy of Sciences
We're talking about the "upper water column"...in fact, you're talking about a depth of at least TEN meters (more likely 100m) so really, you're talking about a density of at most 0.26g of plastic components per cubic meter (1 ton) of water.
That would be like putting 0.00026g of plastic components in your 1 liter bottle of water. Anecdotally, that's 1/10th of an average ant.
That's funny, because it sure looked like long-haired hippy protesters lying in front of trains and bulldozers to stop every nuclear plant construction project in the 1970s and 1980s. I didn't realize they were all oil-industry executives.
So let me please rephrase:...if one's research findings tend to question human-caused climate change - means to live and work in an environment of constant accusations of fraud, calls for investigations (or for criminal prosecutions), demands for access to every draft, every intermediate calculation, and every email exchanged with colleagues, daily hate mail and threats, and attempts to pressure the institutions that employ us and fund our research. Through experience, we have learned that there is no critique of climate scientists' work that isn't deemed a "whitewash" by climate change advocates; there is no casual remark that can't be seized upon, blown out of proportion and distorted; and there is no person whose character can't be assassinated, no matter how careful and honest their research.
Now how would you feel about it? There are serious, sober, and intelligent climate scientists that have serious questions about the anthropogenic climate change conclusions.
Generally, extraordinary conclusions require extraordinary proof. When this 'proof' is found to be massaged, culled, 'smoothed', and ANY critique or question is pilloried and attacked as a 'shill' of the oil industry - you don't see any room for doubt?
...at least 70% of the crap you store in your house isn't really needed, either. Do you really ever LOOK at the pictures hanging on the walls? Are you sure you're going to read every book you own, again?
...you don't need Plutonium to make Muslims feel good about themselves, right?
I mean, since this is possibly NASA's FOREMOST mission: "When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- (Obama) charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science... and math and engineering,"
Funny, I was just thinking the other day (while de-malware-izing my sister's computer for the fifth or sixth time...2000+ trojans, backdoors, and security-disabling programs; a task that left the computer itself barely able to run) "I wish that for this sort of person, there was the computer-equivalent of an xbox: a decent PC with good video and O/S hard-coded in, untouchable without the addition of something physical or at least without the use of a dongle, perhaps with a hard drive for storage of documents, data, and savegames.
"A common parasite can increase a women's attractiveness to the opposite sex but also make men more stupid, an Australian researcher says.
About 40 per cent of the world's population is infected with Toxoplasma gondii, including about eight million Australians.
Human infection generally occurs when people eat raw or undercooked meat that has cysts containing the parasite, or accidentally ingest some of the parasite's eggs excreted by an infected cat.
The parasite is known to be dangerous to pregnant women as it can cause disability or abortion of the unborn child, and can also kill people whose immune systems are weakened.
Until recently it was thought to be an insignificant disease in healthy people, Sydney University of Technology infectious disease researcher Nicky Boulter said, but new research has revealed its mind-altering properties.
"Interestingly, the effect of infection is different between men and women," Dr Boulter writes in the latest issue of Australasian Science magazine.
"Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women.
"On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls.
"In short, it can make men behave like alley cats and women behave like sex kittens""
If you have the ability to stream Netflix or just find the videos, Kevin Smith's rant about working for/with Prince is both insightful and hilarious, as the flunky that handed Kevin the NDA didn't bother to get it signed. WHUPS!
I get it; you're saying that they can pursue their lifestyle choice, and be compensated where they end up short for it - but hetero's cannot. Sure, perfectly fair.
So when is Google going to 'gross up' the pay of hetero employees that have to pay a higher tax rate due to the 'marriage penalty'?
From wiki: "In the U.S., income averaging (i.e., the "married filing jointly" status) was advantageous to a married couple with disparate incomes. To compensate for this somewhat, the U.S. provided a higher tax bracket for the averaged income of a married couple. While income averaging might still benefit a married couple with a stay-at-home spouse, such averaging would cause a married couple with roughly equal personal incomes to pay more total tax than they would as two single persons."
So because my wife and I have comparable incomes, we have to pay MORE than would two gays living together. Is the oh-so-enlightened management at Google also going to mount a social crusade to fix my tax woes?
People (including the SCOTUS) seem to be forgetting that petitions DON'T MAKE LAWS.
A petition in this case is a proposal to put something up for a vote. That's it. The VOTE ITSELF is what determines whether the law is created/rejected/whatever.
While I grant that allowing petitions to be even semi-anonymous raises complicated questions of verifications, there are a couple of points: - law doesn't often seem to hinge on the practical application of the law; that is, we don't decide whether to charge someone with murder based on how much of a chore it will be to actually convict them, do we? - let's remember that petitions in general are pretty FALLIBLE documents. I could sit down right now and quickly knock out a 500-signature petition, with 500 different signatures. None verified, none validateable. Really, how much worse is anonymity.
Because let's all again remember - a petition is really nothing more than a flag indicating public interest in deciding an issue. The VOTE that follows is what really determines law.
So why does it really matter if our legislative system is more permeable to more proposals? Ultimately the VOTES decide it, not the proposal process itself. I'd think more ideas, more proposals, are BETTER than fewer.
Slashdot Mirror
"...we've been denied by all the major casual game portals for the following reasons: a. it auto-patches when new versions come out, b. it talks to a central server to list high scores, and c. it's a bubble pop game..."
a) fixable in about 0.02 seconds
b) fixable in about 0.02 seconds
c) probably the real reason, and could be mainly just that your game's not fun. I'd love to have checked and told you before I posted this, but it asked for an email address to log my scores on the server, and yes, while I could give you user@user.com, nah, that ALONE said 'this isn't worth my time'.
Sorry.
"...Developers are often overworked and unfulfilled, gamers have no qualms about voicing their disapproval (sometimes quite warranted, sometimes not), and the media, in trying to please both groups, often fails to satisfy either..."
Games industry like just about every other industry on the planet; news at ll.
"Please dont display US propaganda as being real." O Rly?
http://www.azcentral.com/community/chandler/articles/0822gunsketch22-on.html - Student suspended for sketching gun
http://www.crystalair.com/story.php?id=200912008 - Boy Suspended For Drawing Jesus Shooting Santa With Gun
http://guyism.com/2010/03/kindergarten-student-suspended-for-making-gun-with-fingers.html
http://guyism.com/2010/02/fourth-grader-punished-for-2-inch-lego-gun.html
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/news.aspx?id=12519 - The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal filed on behalf of a New Jersey boy suspended from school almost four years ago after a playground game of cops and robbers.
The problem is the cost.
Since nobody's farming lvl 60 areas, the price of thorium in the AH has skyrocketed.
...but even in the (according to the rest of the world) "Gun Happy" USA, most children today are brought up in a world where everyone from the media to politicians to schools all universally say "Guns are bad, m'kay?" (European designers are probably doubly crippled along this line...)
They grow up to be game designers that not only have never fired a real gun, but have never even SEEN one firsthand.
The media likes to, for example, portray Columbine as an example of guns run amok. Schools expel kids for drawing a PICTURE of a gun.
Is it surprising then that these individuals then are hard-put to try to simulate a gun in code?
Heaven forbid we go back to the days when I was in high school, we actually had shooting classes, and we could even bring in our own shotguns if we wanted. And you know, nobody in the history of our school was ever shot. AMAZING.
It's almost like guns were treated as serious, potentially-dangerous tools that nevertheless had a valid purpose and the best way to deal with kids and guns was to teach them how to use them properly and with respect, in order to prevent injuries from inappropriate use. Crazy stuff, I know.
FWIW though, I know friends that have come back from Iraq who claim they owe their lives to moronic young Iraqi men that thought they could fire a handgun sideways like in the movies, probably not a few cops would say the same.
I'd guess that the difference you see in the (lack of) effectiveness and (un)realism of guns in video games has a great deal to do with video quality and fairness.
Sounds strange, but true.
The most amazingly realistic simulation of small arms (and large, but that's not relevant here) in combat is WW2OL aka Battleground Europe. (http://www.battlegroundeurope.com/) The problem is (from a gaming perspective) is that it's nowhere near 'fair' according to most peoples' terms.
The problem is that modern combat engagement ranges are in the 300-500m range, often significantly more. Combat rifles are intended to be fully lethal at these ranges, obviously.
If my math is right, on a monitor 0.5m from your face, a 2m-high man standing @ 500m is 2mm. If he's lying prone - extremely common in combat - he's 30cm real life or 0.3mm on the monitor. That's nearly approaching the minimum dot pitch of most monitors. So for a 'typical' combat game, realistically representing lethal rifle fire at realistic ranges, you're shooting at a SINGLE pixel, which is extremely ungratifying, not to mention impossible to distinguish a 'man-pixel' from a 'bush pixel' at that range.
Monitors simply cannot support the resolution needed to allow people to fight at realistic engagement ranges.
Further as regards 'fairness' and Battleground Europe: this hypothesis was illustrated clearly to me when I was running the game on a marginal-spec machine. Running at 800x600, I was having trouble fighting effectively and dying a lot. Once I spent significant $$ to upgrade my system, and run it at 1600x1200, it became MUCH easier it identify targets and hit them at useful ranges. Part of the explanation about why BE remains a niche-game to this day is that difficulty, of course. But I can't see any mass-market designer building a game where the amount of money you put into the hardware so DIRECTLY affects the success of the player - not when the simple (simplistic?) solution is to cut the engagement ranges down by a factor of 3x or 4x, and correspondingly lower the lethality of weapons. For most purposes, that would seem an ideal compromise.
"And I'd suggest that the slight changes in the current spike are more a function of record accuracy than anything."
Hm, reading failure, or simply not seeing what you don't want to.
If you look at that graph and see "SIGNIFICANT" deviation from the natural cycle, I'd suspect you're using a different definition of significant.
Nope, it's just a clipped list from wiki, with the (many) non-climate-scientists omitted.
I think it's organized according to argument - what part of AGW they object to/criticize.
Your first link (about CO2 lag/lead temperature) shows this graph: http://www.grist.org/i/assets/volstok.gif
Truly then, how does one look at that graph and say sincerely "It's clear that human activity has grossly changed the natural cycles."? I look at that and see an ABSOLUTELY clear cycle of sudden (in geological terms) warming about every 100,000 years. Yes, that may show current warming is sudden....but it's just like 125k, 240k, 325k years ago. And I'd suggest that the slight changes in the current spike are more a function of record accuracy than anything.
Your second link is about water vapor. My question about water vapor is precisely in this context of dismissal. Essentially, if I understand it, water vapor doesn't force climate in any significant way over climatological timescales. However, I'd be interested to see an extended discussion about water vapor because despite its short-term impact, cloud cover has a significant affect on planetary albedo; the amount of moisture being forced into the air in the very short term is increasing significantly (look up the % of arable land being sprinklered) and almost entirely in the Northern Hemisphere. We saw that the simple elimination of jet traffic after 9/11 had an apparently large impact on weather in the US. Weather =/= climate, of course, but it's hard to believe that there is NO impact.
Your third link (Greenland used to be green!) is patronizing and dismissive. It amounts to "well it may have been nicer but it was never really nice and the Vikings were stupid." Nevertheless, the Vikings lived in Greenland, subsisting (per your link) off FARMING, for (per your link) hundreds of years. Given iron-age technology, could we do that in Greenland of today?
Rather than comment on the inherent smugness that AGW devotees can't seem to understand makes themselves so fundamentally repellant, I'll simply ask: So will you open your mind now, or just ignore all this and move on to other pesky facts that the so called "ecomarxists" have allegedly failed to mention?
"...Cesmat, who has a sizable criminal history..."
NICE CHOICE OF BOYFRIEND! Really, really a great idea to let him stay at home and take care of your pubescent daughter.
Mom, you're awesome.
On another note, I understand that some people will find this distasteful, but I'd argue that this level of criminal sexual conduct - if proven in a court of law - would justify sterilization of both the boyfriend and mom.
But that's just too cruel for some people, I guess.
Personally, I think this is a foretaste of the future of MMO's.
Certainly, they may or may not be able to successfully implement, but I've always wondered at how STATIC MMO's are.
Certainly, for those of us who used to buy a computer game, you were pretty much stuck with whatever the designer(s) envisioned was possible when the game went gold. Occasionally a content patch would be released that might add some little thing (now they sell these as "DLC").
Strangely, MMO's - despite their dynamic foundation and constant-connection to the source servers - have mimicked this pattern. AFAIK the only game that ever tried to really let content change over time was Ultima Online where players could impact (in fact, drove) the economy, and perhaps today EVE, where the player-sourced economy dwarfs whatever is hard-coded by the game.
I'm talking about something less economics and more "world". Certainly the complexities of balance, loot, xp gain mean that it would be a hellish effort to try to add significant BALANCED content on a weekly basis. But would it be so impossible to have NPCs change their clothes over time? Maybe quit jobs and be replaced? Have a merchant vessel arrive on infrequent occasions into a port city, offering rare or unique items for sale? I think WoW has discovered that, between meaningless achievement points and holiday celebrations that players really ENJOY things that add depth to a world without necessarily increasing their dps. The WoW world-events are fun (of course there's some bitching, because change is scary) and memorable.
Now if they just didn't seem quite so "bolted on", discrete, and above all, repetitive we'd be getting somewhere.
"My answer is for us as publishers to actually sell unfinished games...."
Funny, it seems that the industry has been doing this for at least 10 years already.
Well, part of the problem is that the whole postulation of Global Warming (oh wait, it's merely Climate Change now, isn't it?) is such a hash of assumptions and begged questions. If an argument has 100 failed component parts, where do you begin in listing who's "opposed" to it?
That said here's a partial list of climate-specific scientists who have publicly critiqued one or more aspects of the general premise "The globe is generally warming and humans are a significant cause."
Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the National Academy of Sciences
Garth Paltridge, Visiting Fellow ANU and retired Chief Research Scientist, CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research and retired Director of the Institute of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre.
Hendrik Tennekes, retired Director of Research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute:
Antonino Zichichi, emeritus professor of nuclear physics at the University of Bologna and president of the World Federation of Scientists
Chris de Freitas, Associate Professor, School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, University of Auckland
William M. Gray, Professor Emeritus and head of The Tropical Meteorology Project, Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University
William Kininmonth, meteorologist, former Australian delegate to World Meteorological Organization Commission for Climatology
David Legates, associate professor of geography and director of the Center for Climatic Research, University of Delaware
Tad Murty, oceanographer; adjunct professor, Departments of Civil Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa
Fred Singer, Professor emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia
Jan Veizer, environmental geochemist, Professor Emeritus from University of Ottawa
Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Canada
Syun-Ichi Akasofu, retired professor of geophysics and Founding Director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks
John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, contributor to several IPCC reports
Craig D. Idso, faculty researcher, Office of Climatology, Arizona State University and founder of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change
Patrick Michaels, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and retired research professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia
August H. "Augie" Auer Jr. New Zealand MetService Meteorologist, past professor of atmospheric science at the University of Wyoming
Reid Bryson, Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Marcel Leroux Professor of Climatology, Université Jean Moulin
Frederick Seitz, solid-state physicist, former president of the National Academy of Sciences
Does that list seem trivial to you?
We're talking about the "upper water column"...in fact, you're talking about a depth of at least TEN meters (more likely 100m) so really, you're talking about a density of at most 0.26g of plastic components per cubic meter (1 ton) of water.
That would be like putting 0.00026g of plastic components in your 1 liter bottle of water.
Anecdotally, that's 1/10th of an average ant.
Really, this is a crisis?
Funny, I was just going to say the same thing about the Holy Religion of Anthropogenic Global Warming, because His Eminence Pope Gore told me so.
That's funny, because it sure looked like long-haired hippy protesters lying in front of trains and bulldozers to stop every nuclear plant construction project in the 1970s and 1980s. I didn't realize they were all oil-industry executives.
So let me please rephrase: ...if one's research findings tend to question human-caused climate change - means to live and work in an environment of constant accusations of fraud, calls for investigations (or for criminal prosecutions), demands for access to every draft, every intermediate calculation, and every email exchanged with colleagues, daily hate mail and threats, and attempts to pressure the institutions that employ us and fund our research. Through experience, we have learned that there is no critique of climate scientists' work that isn't deemed a "whitewash" by climate change advocates; there is no casual remark that can't be seized upon, blown out of proportion and distorted; and there is no person whose character can't be assassinated, no matter how careful and honest their research.
Now how would you feel about it?
There are serious, sober, and intelligent climate scientists that have serious questions about the anthropogenic climate change conclusions.
Generally, extraordinary conclusions require extraordinary proof. When this 'proof' is found to be massaged, culled, 'smoothed', and ANY critique or question is pilloried and attacked as a 'shill' of the oil industry - you don't see any room for doubt?
...at least 70% of the crap you store in your house isn't really needed, either. Do you really ever LOOK at the pictures hanging on the walls? Are you sure you're going to read every book you own, again?
...you don't need Plutonium to make Muslims feel good about themselves, right?
I mean, since this is possibly NASA's FOREMOST mission: ... and math and engineering,"
"When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- (Obama) charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science
Funny, I was just thinking the other day (while de-malware-izing my sister's computer for the fifth or sixth time...2000+ trojans, backdoors, and security-disabling programs; a task that left the computer itself barely able to run) "I wish that for this sort of person, there was the computer-equivalent of an xbox: a decent PC with good video and O/S hard-coded in, untouchable without the addition of something physical or at least without the use of a dongle, perhaps with a hard drive for storage of documents, data, and savegames.
T.gondii has a better impact on humans:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/parasite-makes-men-dumb-women-sexy/2006/12/26/1166895290973.html
"A common parasite can increase a women's attractiveness to the opposite sex but also make men more stupid, an Australian researcher says.
About 40 per cent of the world's population is infected with Toxoplasma gondii, including about eight million Australians.
Human infection generally occurs when people eat raw or undercooked meat that has cysts containing the parasite, or accidentally ingest some of the parasite's eggs excreted by an infected cat.
The parasite is known to be dangerous to pregnant women as it can cause disability or abortion of the unborn child, and can also kill people whose immune systems are weakened.
Until recently it was thought to be an insignificant disease in healthy people, Sydney University of Technology infectious disease researcher Nicky Boulter said, but new research has revealed its mind-altering properties.
"Interestingly, the effect of infection is different between men and women," Dr Boulter writes in the latest issue of Australasian Science magazine.
"Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women.
"On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls.
"In short, it can make men behave like alley cats and women behave like sex kittens""
If you have the ability to stream Netflix or just find the videos, Kevin Smith's rant about working for/with Prince is both insightful and hilarious, as the flunky that handed Kevin the NDA didn't bother to get it signed. WHUPS!
I get it; you're saying that they can pursue their lifestyle choice, and be compensated where they end up short for it - but hetero's cannot. Sure, perfectly fair.
So when is Google going to 'gross up' the pay of hetero employees that have to pay a higher tax rate due to the 'marriage penalty'?
From wiki: "In the U.S., income averaging (i.e., the "married filing jointly" status) was advantageous to a married couple with disparate incomes. To compensate for this somewhat, the U.S. provided a higher tax bracket for the averaged income of a married couple. While income averaging might still benefit a married couple with a stay-at-home spouse, such averaging would cause a married couple with roughly equal personal incomes to pay more total tax than they would as two single persons."
So because my wife and I have comparable incomes, we have to pay MORE than would two gays living together. Is the oh-so-enlightened management at Google also going to mount a social crusade to fix my tax woes?
People (including the SCOTUS) seem to be forgetting that petitions DON'T MAKE LAWS.
A petition in this case is a proposal to put something up for a vote. That's it.
The VOTE ITSELF is what determines whether the law is created/rejected/whatever.
While I grant that allowing petitions to be even semi-anonymous raises complicated questions of verifications, there are a couple of points:
- law doesn't often seem to hinge on the practical application of the law; that is, we don't decide whether to charge someone with murder based on how much of a chore it will be to actually convict them, do we?
- let's remember that petitions in general are pretty FALLIBLE documents. I could sit down right now and quickly knock out a 500-signature petition, with 500 different signatures. None verified, none validateable. Really, how much worse is anonymity.
Because let's all again remember - a petition is really nothing more than a flag indicating public interest in deciding an issue.
The VOTE that follows is what really determines law.
So why does it really matter if our legislative system is more permeable to more proposals? Ultimately the VOTES decide it, not the proposal process itself. I'd think more ideas, more proposals, are BETTER than fewer.