The Vikings planted vineyards in Greenland. Kinda scotches the idea that it was never very hospitable, doesn't it?
Well it might if it were true. The ruins and remains of the Greenland Norse colony have been found, however, and there has been quite detailed archaelogical studies. Nothing shows vineyards. Perhaps you are confusing Greenland with Vinland, which is a land the Greenland Norse found, but abandoned due to poor relations with the natives, and which was believed to be in the New Foundland/Labrador region, and further south. Of course they never planted vineyards there either, just merely found wild vines. And finally it should be noted that vineyards are not necessarily an indication of "warm" climate.
If you think about it, this seems to imply that the Greenland had just been warmer than it currently is, and that it was starting to freeze up again when Eric discovered it. The ice has stopped migrating to the sea, but hadn't yet expanded to cover the shore again. (I could be wrong, perhaps there is currently a strip around the edge of Greenland that's suitable for raising rye or some such. It wouldn't need to be anything a modern farmer would find attractive.)
In fact there is currently an area of Greenland that is not under ice and is (relatively) hospitable. The site of the Viking colonies is, even today, still green with pasture. It's definitely marginal land, but habitable. If you're uncertain, here are some photos of Greenland today, and you can see photos of the ruins of the Norse settlement which all look pretty green to me.
Since this is science, that information *should* be publicly available somewhere.
There are vast amounts of data available from the NOAA, from tree rings, to coral, to pollen, to ice cores, complete with search engines and mapping systems to help you locate the dataset you want. All of it is freely available for download and analysis. As for modelling - a quick search pulled up this page which provides R code for the MBH graph. Feel free to grab that, check their assumptions, and redo whatever you wish.
Debugging multithreaded code can be relatively easy, you just have to start off on the right foot. The best way to do that is to leave behind older concurrency models like monitors with mutexes, which the inventor of that model rejected back in the 80s and go with more recent concurrency models like CSP (the newer way to do concurrency from the man who brought you monitors). From a more modern perspective like CSP reasoning about concurrency is a lot easier, and hence debugging becomes much simpler. In fact tere are model checking tools that can verify lack of deadlocks etc. The downside is that its much easier if you have a language that supports the model, or get an addon library to do it for you. You can get a CSP add-ons for Java: JCSP, and for C++: C++CSP. Alternatively languages like Eiffel, Erlang, Occam, and Oz, offer more of hat you need out of the box - concurrent programming with those languages is easy to get right. Changing languages is, of course, not an option for most people.
It's a matter of comparing apples to apples: the current increase in temperature and relatively high temperatures are measured in terms of globally averaged temperatures, so comparing that to northern hemisphere only temperatures and saying "it's not that high" is disingenuous. If we were to take only northern hemisphere temperatures to determine the current temperature anomoly it would be signifiantly greater - and thus that much warmer than the northern hemisphere medieval warm period.
There are various things that can be said here, but let's start with temperature change leading CO2 change historically. That's entirely true, but not necessarily indicative of anything - previous climate changes are a result of Milankovitch cycles. These cycles initiate climate change events, but are insufficient to explain to total degree of change. How do we explain it? After the temperature begins to rise oceans, being warmer, can retain less CO2, and hence atmospheric carbon dioxide rises. This creates a tidy feedback cycle which boosts the temperature change higher than the earth's orbital dynamics can alone. Currently we're well outside the natural range of variation for atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last 650,000 years.
With regard to the medieval warm period - yes, it exists, and most historical temperature reconstructions using proxy data do show it. A notable aspect, however, is that the medieval warm period seems to have been far more of a northern hemisphere event, showing up much more strongly in northern hemisphere proxies than southern hemisphere ones. Once you average out the global climate across the global set of proxy data the medieval warm period does look somewhat less extreme than it does from northern hemisphere proxies alone. Of course people who want to minimise data for purely ideological reasons should, indeed, be pilloried. Having the apparent impact minimised by more comprehensive data, however, is quite different - and clinging to the results of the smaller data set for ideological reasons is just as silly as trying to squash results for ideological reasons.
It was indeed a reuse error. It wasn't, however, an unavoidable reuse error. Had the code included proper specification, rather than the specification being buried in a vast paper document, then reuse would have worked out fine.
As with any of these things, the answer is "it depends on what you're looking for". If you're a professional who uses photoshop a lot, and fully exploits the featureset then Krita may not be ideal, but if you're anythign less than that then, depending on what exatly it is you want to do, then Krita may well meet your needs pretty well.
Apologies for the grida.no links, they seem to be down at the moment which is odd. You can find the attribution chapter here on archive.org, and the mitigation report here. If you actually bother to read through both of those (and I'll be honest, that's a lot of reading), you'll find it adds a lot more than "one new datum". The attribution chapter alone is a summary of 13 different studies, using diverse techniques such as pattern correlation, time series methods, optimal fingerpring methods, and others to attribute observed warming to a very diverse range of potential causes both natural and anthropogenic.
As to the realclimate links, you can ad-hominem the site all you like, but the links are to a plot with no related text, so try arguing the issue presented. The end result is that current climate models do a remarkably good job of modelling climate, contrary to what to OP had to say. If you want lots of data then try reading through the model evaluation chapter of the IPCC TAR which should give you a great deal of detailed data on the accuracy of climate models circa 2001 (and of course models have continued to improve, now providing some accuracy on regional scales).
Then there's the fact that the more recent Holocene temperature reconstruction demonstrates that the graphs cited by the OP are not actually particularly accurate - we are in a largely stable period during an interglacial, except that current global average temperatures are anomolously spiking.
Finally it's worth noting that the OP didn't actually provide much in the way of "facts", but rather some bold assertions, several of which are demonstrably false, such as claims of 95% of greenhouse warming being from water vapour, and claims of climate model innaccuracy, as well as the claim that "nothing can be done". His thesis rests on the claim that "we don't know everything" and therefore shouldn't do anything, but that's just not the case - we understand a great deal about how the climate works, we have models that can reproduce global climates surprisingly accurately, and we have a great deal of detailed evidence to stringly support the hypothesis that the observed warming is anthropogenic (Equally importantly, there is no current theory that can adequately explain the current observed warming any other way). The best information we have, and there is a fair amount of it, suggests that global warming is real, has a signifiant anthropogenic component to its cause, and that human actions toward mitigation can, indeed, have a significant impact on future warming. No, we don't know everything, but we're a long way from just guessing.
The issues you raise have various levels of "solution" already existing, some harder than others.
Does GIMP support 16-bit color/CMYK separation?
Still in the "coming" category unfortunately. It sounds like GEGL at last has some legs again, but... On the other hand if you want 16-bit color and CMYK you can use Krita right now.
Does Thunderbird interoperate well with our exchange server?
I can't speak for Thunderbird interoperability, but Evolution works with Exchange, and the quality of that integration and interoperability continues to improve.
Now for the harder cases.
Does Firefox work on most webpages?
Well yes, for the most part it does, and where it doesn't it is a tricky issue that Firefox is going to have a hard time getting around (people coding specifically to proprietary MS standards). Then again as Frefox usage continues to grow the ability to ignore it and not code websites to deal with it drops, and as a result more and more websites work better and better in Firefox.
Does OpenOffice interoperate well with MS Office files?
This is even harder again, and is deeper into the proprietary issues. For this the only real cure is more widespread adoption of OASIS formats - and that is slowly starting to happen. In the meantime there's little that can really be done to improve over how things currently stand.
So the end result is that most of the sorts of issues you feel need to be tackled prior to polish are, in fact, solved in some cases, being worked on hard in others, and somewhat intractable, but still potentially soluble via other means in the last couple of cases. It's not like these issues are being ignored in favour of polish, quite the opposite really.
There are, definitely, some facts in there, but you've put them together in a weird pastiche with some old data, and some outright false statements.
The most important greenhouse gas that creates 95% of the greenhouse effect is water vapour (not CO2)
This just isn't true. I've heard this claim a lot, and I am yet to be provided with one reputable source that actually uses this figure. Water vapour accounts for around 80% of greenhouse gases by mass, or 90% by volume. But even that's somewhat deceptive because what really counts is how effectively it acts as a greenhouse gas to trap heat. In terms of percentage input to the warming effect of greenhouse gases, water vapour is somewhere between 36% and 70%, though most studies tend to find it to be around 65%.
Still, 65% is a very significant portion, the difference is that water vapour, unlike carbon dioxide or methane, has a very short residence time in the atmosphere (around 10 days). This means that water vapour will very quickly find an equilibrium point and can only act as a feedback rather than a forcing with regard to climate change. None the less water vapour represents an important feedback and you'll find no shortage of scientific papers detailing its effects on climate change. You'll also find that tropospheric water vapour is a vital component in IPCC climate models, while stratospheric water vapour is treated specifically in IPCC reports.
What's more, there has been a gradual (though erratic) increase of temperature throughout the current interglacial period (18,000 years)
You link to a very rough chart (looking at the plot style it is a qualitative rather than hard quantitative) that shows - well not a gradual and erratic rise, but a certain amount of erraticness and variation with current temperatures being plotted as a momentary low. The chart is old, over 16 years old, however, and we have many more recent studies that compile together many sources of proxy data. Here is a chart showing several such proxy data reconstructions, which sompiels together the different methods. Note that the general trend is far more down than up, and that the recent rise is completely obscured due to the scale of the chart (as with the chart you provided). The author of this chart, however, conveniently denotes the 2004 temperature level, and provides a subchart of recent proxy data. All of a sudden the recent rise is more clear, and far from natural looking.
To stem off the the claims that the individual lines in that plot (as opposed to the averaging over all of them) show much greater natural variation - most of those represent data from a single location such as an ice core from Greenland, and ice core from Kilamanjaro etc. There is plenty of variation in local climate, and no one denies this, however it is global warming that is the issue and the average global temperature, which is far better expressed by the averaging over the various local data sources spread around the globe, is far less given to such dramatic fluctuation (and we know this - compare instrumental temperature data for local sources versus averaged globally: in the global average there is much less dramatic variation).
and this should be viewed against the backdrop of the longer current glaciation cycle (100,000 years) --- ie. we're at a perfectly normal peak in temperature, and it's not even a high one within the current interglacial.
We are, indeed, currently in an interglacial. We have, however, been in one for the past 11,000 years or so, and via most modern temperature reconstruction we reached the temeperature peak for that interglacial near the beginning, and shouldn't be expecting further rises within this interglacial. The current sudden upsurge of temperature really isn't a normal peak - it is anomolous within this interglacial. Moreover, it actua
The review will not officially be released until tomorrow, so you can't get it yet. There is this webpage which will potentially host the report when it is released, and has intermediary papers and presentations by Stern in the meantime.
Going back further requires use of proxy data such as tree rings, ice cores, coral data, glaciers, etc. There have been numerous different studies by different scientists collecting, and cross referencing such data to create historical temperature reconstructions. Here is a plot showing 10 different reconstructions by various authors. There is some variability, but the recent upward trend is again clear. Again, you can get the datasets yourself, and read more reports detailing how they are analysed. At about this point skeptics point to Greenland being green, or Wine growing in Europe in 1000AD, but I've discussed those before, so I won't go into detail again.
The result is that, to claim that the earth is not presently getting warmer requires either a belief that limate scientists are almost universally incompetent, or that they are colluding en masse in a grand conspiracy to falsify data and delude the public. Either of those options would seem, to me, to be a much greater leap of faith than simply assuming that the world is, indeed, getting warmer. As I said, it requires a rather perverse skepticism more on par with 9/11 conspiracy theorists like the maker of Loose Change.
b) If "global warming" is really happening, is it due to anything mankind is doing?
An interesting question. Certainly mankind is doing something: since 1850 atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen from around 280ppm to 385ppm. That's a significant change - in fact given atmospheric carbon dioxide levels over the last 650,000 years (via ice core data) the current levels are 5.5 standard deviations from the mean; that's significant! Are humans responsible for this change? Certainly it correlates with the industrial revolution, but still... As it happens we can do isotope analysis of atmospheric carbon dioxide, since isotope ratios for fossil fuels are different from thoses of the rest of the carbon cycle. It turns out that indeed, the sudden increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is from humans burning fossil fuels. Now a little basic physics and the absorption spectra of carbon dioxide is enough to tell us that we should expect greater atmospheric carbon dioxide to result in a warmer planet. It turns out that is indeed what we are seeing, and that it correlates well. There's more than just that however. Have a read through the chapter on attribution of the IPCC Third Assessment report. A wide variety of techniques are used to attempt to attribute the observed warming to various potential causes. The end result is that the IPCC found that while warming prior to 1950 could possibly be accounted for by other factors, including solar variation, warming since 1950 can only be reasonably accounted for via anthropogenic atmospheric carbon dioxide. Feel f
For reference the report's outlook is to 2050. That is to say the report concludes that it would cost 1% of the expected global GDP in 2050 to mitigate problems, while doing nothing is expected to result in global GDP being 5% to 20% lower in 2050. Anyone expecting to be alive for the next 44 years is going to be paying the costs according to this report - and we'll be paying costs sooner than that, just not at the 5% to 20% level. In essence doing nothing will mean the world will potentially be 1/5th less productive and wealthy in 2050 as it could otherwise have been.
Our money is far, far better spent learning to cope with a warmer planet, assuming again that things are getting warmer and staying warmer.
That's an interesting assertion. The point of the report is that this precise question was studied in great depth by a well respected economist (Stern was a former chief economist for the World Bank), and that the results of all that detailed anaylsis is that, in fact, it is far more expensive to learn to cope with a warmer planet. I fail to see how you dismiss that result quite so easily - especially given that you have not read the report (it is not officially released till tomorrow).
We should be investing in these new technologies and in general scientific and economic progress, and I am concerned that these short-term "band-aid" measures of reducing output could actually increase the amount of time it takes (and thus how bad it gets) before we have the appropriate technology and scientific understanding to regulate the climate of our entire planet.
Emissions reductions plans are not about reducing production, but about being more efficient, in terms of emissions, in the production we do. In this article about the report you'll note that reductions are discussed in terms of reducing emissions per unit of GDP. Certainly such a thing is theoretically feasible, this table demonstrates that each dollar of GDP per ton of emissions can vary dramatically from country to country, and that, significantly, there is plenty of room for improvement from major polluting nations such as the US and China (The US looks positively emissions efficient compared to China).
Moreover, the ideal plan with green taxes would be that money collected from such taxes would then be funnelled back into research into technology to mitigate the problem. Whether that happens in practice, well - I think we all know governments and tax dollars; but that just means it is up to the voters to hold politicians suitably accountable. I think the key point, however, is that it looks likely that doing nothing could be very expensive in the long term, so we really ought to be making the investment of taking action now to try and mitigate that cost as much as possible. A good start would be to try to stop making the problem worse.
Again, you're just making my point - in the face of peaceful but firm protest the only option would be to order to military to kill or suppress the protestors. However, the more severe/harsh the suppression ordered, the less likely the military is to follow those orders. It is a lot harder justifying the violent suppression of peaceful protest than it is to rationalise suppression of violent insurrection - and it is that dilemma that is going to be faced by every level of the military that is ordered to suppress whatever opposition there is. Which is to say, orders to violently suppress peaceful protest are far less likely to ever get followed, and as soon as the military stops following orders from on high, any "dictatorship" is over. In short, you get to the result faster and with less loss of life by not using guns.
I don't think it would be that easy. Who are you going to get to do the massacaring? I'm sure some rather more thoughtless platoon or otherwise will just kill people in cold blood, but really, in the face of mass civilian protest most of the military, if told to just kill them all, are going to do an about-face and try and defend them from whatever small groups are foolish enough to follow orders. Basically, even if a slaughter or two does occur, for the most part the military is simply going to revile that, and turn against those who do the killing. Moreover, as much as it might frighten some people, I expect that news of the slaughter of unarmed civilians in cold-blood is going to do far more to strengthen the resolve of the public to oppose whatever regime did that. Of course being told that a group of armed terrorists were gunned down while resisting arrest, and several soldiers were killed by the terrorists - that's a lot less likely to draw any public sympathy for those who were opposing the government.
You're really just making my point for me. Yes, the vast majority of "grunts" are far from mindless. More importantly they're also far less likely to fire on peaceful unarmed protestors than on insurgents who are armed and potentially firign at them. If we take your postulated scenario, that Bush uses this, or a similar law to become a dictator and suspend elections, then I think it is entirely reasonable to expect a significant portion of the US population to stand up in peaceful nationwide protest and say "no". And what is to happen then? Bush is going to have a hard time telling the military to fire on innocent civilians - they simply won't follow that order, and will, instead be forced to align with the protestors. And there ends Bush's attempted takeover. No guns required. If we take your alternate approach - that a significant portion of the public turns up armed and ready to fight - well, you'll still end up with the same result, but I suspect you'll have a lot more fighting from military who are prepared to fire on armed and potentially aggressive civilians. So really all the guns buy you is a few more casualties before the inevitable. I see no benefit.
My optimistic side urges me to believe that our military would try even harder to limit civilian casualties if they were fighting their own people.
Well yes, but at that point why do you need to guns anymore? All the civilians can just stand up and say no, and the military can have the moral quandry of whether they want to cold-bloodedly slaughter a significant percentage of the US population who are standing in unarmed opposition. If you don't have widespread enough support to do that, then you are sufficiently small to be labelled a "radical terrorist group" ala McVeigh and friends or Koresh and co. at Waco, at which point you'll find n public support, and plenty of willingness to allow harsh measures.
Suddenly the 1 reason for the 2nd amendment becomes crystal clear.
I'm curious as to what you expect to be achieved on that front - ever since the US started having a permanent well equipped standing military the question of bearing arms to defend yourself against the government has become increasingly moot. Any small to medium homegrown insurgency is going to be efficiently denounced as terrorists (how much sympathy did McVeigh and friends recieve?) throughout the media and largely crushed by US military. I expect some sort of running insurgency as in Iraq could be maintained, but it would be, lets be honest, a thorn in the governments side (the Iraqi government is not about to be overthrown as long as US support remains). Should it go on long enough you'll find the rest of the US public (who will be suitably indoctrinated by the media to view the insurgency as radical terrorists killing innocents - let's face it, a certain amount of collateral damage in the long term campaign is inevitable, and you'll always get some extremists who won't mind killing civilians anyway) will happily support the sort of extreme measures (seeing as they're being the ones threatened now) to put down the insurgency that aren't being seen in Iraq: currently the US public is averse to serious troop commitment and potential serious loss of life in Iraq - were this happening in the US I doubt you would find such aversion.
So what does that leave? Well a large scale insurrection could work. The question I put to you, however, is whether, once you get to the scale required, being armed makes a difference anymore. If the anti-government sentiment is sufficiently strong and sufficiently widespread that it gives the US military a serious run for their money and can't easily be labelled as terrorists and face harsh measures then you'll probably find that (1) A reasonable portion of the US military will defect to the insurgency anyway, and (2) Civil disobedience and protest will quite probably get the job done. If the military is already divided then calling them in to provide martial law is going to be tricky. Moreover even if you do, with the scale of unrest we're talking about then all the people simply standing up and saying no is going to be as effective as anything - what are the military going to do, open fire on what amounts to maybe a third of the entire civilian population of the US? I think you'd have most military on the ground cave long before they did that. And really, who is a military grunt more likely to fire on, a mob of unarmed protesting civilians, or a mob of armed protetsing civilians? I think you'll stand a much better chance with the former than the latter.
Sure, you'll find military grunts who will senselessly follow orders and open fire on crowds of innocent civilians and a number of people will likely die. I doubt, however, in the face of mass peaceful opposition, that such incidents will be anything but a minority. And are you really going to claim that the loss of life in that approach will be greater than a mass armed insurrection with violent pitched battles all over the country?
Let's be honest, in this day and age, with modern military hardware (which is restricted - know many people with fully armed tanks, helicopter gunships, or cruise missles), a vast and incredibly well equipped permanent standing army, and the current sheer scale of the Federal government, the point where "the right to bear arms" had a signficant impact on the success of failure of an insurrection has been long passed. I fully believe there was a time when it made sense, but the Federal government grew bigger and bigger, and the army became permanent and well equipped - far better than any civilian could ever hope to be. If you wanted to make your stand, you should have done it a long time ago. Or, if you want it put another way - it's too late, you've already lost.
I think, to be honest, the bigger threat than mobs (who, while polarising, tend to have to fight it out within their own group a little, and will contain some moderates who will listen to the other side) is the situation of single extremists with way too much time on their hands, particularly in slightly more obscure articles. There you get left with a person with the patience and determination to shout down all but the sternest of opposition. If it's a less trafficked page it can be rare that you find enough people willing to spend the vast amounts of time required to keep things on an even keel. I'm sure there are examples all over the dusty corners of Wikipedia, but a couple examples I can cite are Indo-Aryan migration related pages where a user by the name of WIN, who views the suggestion of any such thing as an affront to perceived Indian superiority, and is willing to use torturous logic and ignore pretty much all the supporting evidence to shout down anyone who disagrees. There seems to be one editor heroically trying to hold things together - how long that will last is likely a war of attrition and patience. There's also the Time Cube page which has previously been in some appalling states, and for quite some time had someone with far too muchtime on his hands providing a brick wall for a variety of different editors to beat their head against. At least in that case the changing roll of editors did eventually outlast the Time Cube Guy. Still...
Wikipedia is already performing a vital function in aggregating information and external links on important (and sometimes not-so-important) stuff.
I think this point is often underrated. Often I'll want to look up some term, or a person, or whatever, not because I need a detailed and accurate reference, but just because I happened to be reading something and saw mention of X and suddenly thought "Hmm, what/who is that exactly?". I just want 5 or 10 seconds worth of reading summarising whatever it is. Previously this was the sort of thing search engines were good for, but these days I just go straight to Wikipedia - more often than not it has an entry for whatever it is, and regardless fo whether it is of stellar quality or not it always has the basic details I need to sate my curiosity. What Wikipedia has really meant is that I can indulge my curiosity better - where previously I would have had to dig through a variety of web search results (which probably wouldn't have been worth it for the 10 second rough description of whatever it is I'm after) I can just skim read the intro to the relevant Wikipedia entry, which I can easily go straight to. If it is actually something really interesting and I want detail then there are usually references and external links I can use to track down the details properly.
Forth is relatively quick (slower than C but probably faster than Java), but insanely compact. I would bet most forth code compiles to less than 10% the size of similar projects in C.
I'm not exactly sure where you get that impression from - certainly Forth can be pleasantly efficient when it comes to memory use, but I would suggest "roughly on par with C" is about the best you can claim. Now, while the Debian Computer Language Shootout benchmarks are hardly ideal, particularly since they are all very small programs, they can give at least an idea of roughly comparable memory use in a variety of different languages. In this case, glancing through a fewdifferentbenchmarks, we see that Forth certainly holds its own (doing quite well in the k-nucleotide benchmark) but is at best on par with the other memory efficient languages, and is down the list in several benhmarks. The winner is often C (unsurprisingly), though Pascal, D, Eiffel and Fortran all do remarkably well as well. Given those options, and presuming you were going to move away from C for some reason, I'd have to say D and Eiffel are the most attractive options.
It's nice to see the suggestions to actually use available tools to see what your code is actually doing and where it might be going wrong. There are many available, and some are remarkably good. Splint, for instance, has a talent for turning up unlooked for errors, and if you're willing to add a few annotations here and there it can do even better. I'm constantly surprised such tools don't see much wider use.
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Well it might if it were true. The ruins and remains of the Greenland Norse colony have been found, however, and there has been quite detailed archaelogical studies. Nothing shows vineyards. Perhaps you are confusing Greenland with Vinland, which is a land the Greenland Norse found, but abandoned due to poor relations with the natives, and which was believed to be in the New Foundland/Labrador region, and further south. Of course they never planted vineyards there either, just merely found wild vines. And finally it should be noted that vineyards are not necessarily an indication of "warm" climate.
In fact there is currently an area of Greenland that is not under ice and is (relatively) hospitable. The site of the Viking colonies is, even today, still green with pasture. It's definitely marginal land, but habitable. If you're uncertain, here are some photos of Greenland today, and you can see photos of the ruins of the Norse settlement which all look pretty green to me.
There are vast amounts of data available from the NOAA, from tree rings, to coral, to pollen, to ice cores, complete with search engines and mapping systems to help you locate the dataset you want. All of it is freely available for download and analysis. As for modelling - a quick search pulled up this page which provides R code for the MBH graph. Feel free to grab that, check their assumptions, and redo whatever you wish.
Debugging multithreaded code can be relatively easy, you just have to start off on the right foot. The best way to do that is to leave behind older concurrency models like monitors with mutexes, which the inventor of that model rejected back in the 80s and go with more recent concurrency models like CSP (the newer way to do concurrency from the man who brought you monitors). From a more modern perspective like CSP reasoning about concurrency is a lot easier, and hence debugging becomes much simpler. In fact tere are model checking tools that can verify lack of deadlocks etc. The downside is that its much easier if you have a language that supports the model, or get an addon library to do it for you. You can get a CSP add-ons for Java: JCSP, and for C++: C++CSP. Alternatively languages like Eiffel, Erlang, Occam, and Oz, offer more of hat you need out of the box - concurrent programming with those languages is easy to get right. Changing languages is, of course, not an option for most people.
It's a matter of comparing apples to apples: the current increase in temperature and relatively high temperatures are measured in terms of globally averaged temperatures, so comparing that to northern hemisphere only temperatures and saying "it's not that high" is disingenuous. If we were to take only northern hemisphere temperatures to determine the current temperature anomoly it would be signifiantly greater - and thus that much warmer than the northern hemisphere medieval warm period.
There are various things that can be said here, but let's start with temperature change leading CO2 change historically. That's entirely true, but not necessarily indicative of anything - previous climate changes are a result of Milankovitch cycles. These cycles initiate climate change events, but are insufficient to explain to total degree of change. How do we explain it? After the temperature begins to rise oceans, being warmer, can retain less CO2, and hence atmospheric carbon dioxide rises. This creates a tidy feedback cycle which boosts the temperature change higher than the earth's orbital dynamics can alone. Currently we're well outside the natural range of variation for atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last 650,000 years.
With regard to the medieval warm period - yes, it exists, and most historical temperature reconstructions using proxy data do show it. A notable aspect, however, is that the medieval warm period seems to have been far more of a northern hemisphere event, showing up much more strongly in northern hemisphere proxies than southern hemisphere ones. Once you average out the global climate across the global set of proxy data the medieval warm period does look somewhat less extreme than it does from northern hemisphere proxies alone. Of course people who want to minimise data for purely ideological reasons should, indeed, be pilloried. Having the apparent impact minimised by more comprehensive data, however, is quite different - and clinging to the results of the smaller data set for ideological reasons is just as silly as trying to squash results for ideological reasons.
It was indeed a reuse error. It wasn't, however, an unavoidable reuse error. Had the code included proper specification, rather than the specification being buried in a vast paper document, then reuse would have worked out fine.
As with any of these things, the answer is "it depends on what you're looking for". If you're a professional who uses photoshop a lot, and fully exploits the featureset then Krita may not be ideal, but if you're anythign less than that then, depending on what exatly it is you want to do, then Krita may well meet your needs pretty well.
Apologies for the grida.no links, they seem to be down at the moment which is odd. You can find the attribution chapter here on archive.org, and the mitigation report here. If you actually bother to read through both of those (and I'll be honest, that's a lot of reading), you'll find it adds a lot more than "one new datum". The attribution chapter alone is a summary of 13 different studies, using diverse techniques such as pattern correlation, time series methods, optimal fingerpring methods, and others to attribute observed warming to a very diverse range of potential causes both natural and anthropogenic.
As to the realclimate links, you can ad-hominem the site all you like, but the links are to a plot with no related text, so try arguing the issue presented. The end result is that current climate models do a remarkably good job of modelling climate, contrary to what to OP had to say. If you want lots of data then try reading through the model evaluation chapter of the IPCC TAR which should give you a great deal of detailed data on the accuracy of climate models circa 2001 (and of course models have continued to improve, now providing some accuracy on regional scales).
Then there's the fact that the more recent Holocene temperature reconstruction demonstrates that the graphs cited by the OP are not actually particularly accurate - we are in a largely stable period during an interglacial, except that current global average temperatures are anomolously spiking.
Finally it's worth noting that the OP didn't actually provide much in the way of "facts", but rather some bold assertions, several of which are demonstrably false, such as claims of 95% of greenhouse warming being from water vapour, and claims of climate model innaccuracy, as well as the claim that "nothing can be done". His thesis rests on the claim that "we don't know everything" and therefore shouldn't do anything, but that's just not the case - we understand a great deal about how the climate works, we have models that can reproduce global climates surprisingly accurately, and we have a great deal of detailed evidence to stringly support the hypothesis that the observed warming is anthropogenic (Equally importantly, there is no current theory that can adequately explain the current observed warming any other way). The best information we have, and there is a fair amount of it, suggests that global warming is real, has a signifiant anthropogenic component to its cause, and that human actions toward mitigation can, indeed, have a significant impact on future warming. No, we don't know everything, but we're a long way from just guessing.
Still in the "coming" category unfortunately. It sounds like GEGL at last has some legs again, but... On the other hand if you want 16-bit color and CMYK you can use Krita right now.
I can't speak for Thunderbird interoperability, but Evolution works with Exchange, and the quality of that integration and interoperability continues to improve.
Now for the harder cases.
Well yes, for the most part it does, and where it doesn't it is a tricky issue that Firefox is going to have a hard time getting around (people coding specifically to proprietary MS standards). Then again as Frefox usage continues to grow the ability to ignore it and not code websites to deal with it drops, and as a result more and more websites work better and better in Firefox.
This is even harder again, and is deeper into the proprietary issues. For this the only real cure is more widespread adoption of OASIS formats - and that is slowly starting to happen. In the meantime there's little that can really be done to improve over how things currently stand.
So the end result is that most of the sorts of issues you feel need to be tackled prior to polish are, in fact, solved in some cases, being worked on hard in others, and somewhat intractable, but still potentially soluble via other means in the last couple of cases. It's not like these issues are being ignored in favour of polish, quite the opposite really.
This just isn't true. I've heard this claim a lot, and I am yet to be provided with one reputable source that actually uses this figure. Water vapour accounts for around 80% of greenhouse gases by mass, or 90% by volume. But even that's somewhat deceptive because what really counts is how effectively it acts as a greenhouse gas to trap heat. In terms of percentage input to the warming effect of greenhouse gases, water vapour is somewhere between 36% and 70%, though most studies tend to find it to be around 65%.
Still, 65% is a very significant portion, the difference is that water vapour, unlike carbon dioxide or methane, has a very short residence time in the atmosphere (around 10 days). This means that water vapour will very quickly find an equilibrium point and can only act as a feedback rather than a forcing with regard to climate change. None the less water vapour represents an important feedback and you'll find no shortage of scientific papers detailing its effects on climate change. You'll also find that tropospheric water vapour is a vital component in IPCC climate models, while stratospheric water vapour is treated specifically in IPCC reports.
You link to a very rough chart (looking at the plot style it is a qualitative rather than hard quantitative) that shows - well not a gradual and erratic rise, but a certain amount of erraticness and variation with current temperatures being plotted as a momentary low. The chart is old, over 16 years old, however, and we have many more recent studies that compile together many sources of proxy data. Here is a chart showing several such proxy data reconstructions, which sompiels together the different methods. Note that the general trend is far more down than up, and that the recent rise is completely obscured due to the scale of the chart (as with the chart you provided). The author of this chart, however, conveniently denotes the 2004 temperature level, and provides a subchart of recent proxy data. All of a sudden the recent rise is more clear, and far from natural looking.
To stem off the the claims that the individual lines in that plot (as opposed to the averaging over all of them) show much greater natural variation - most of those represent data from a single location such as an ice core from Greenland, and ice core from Kilamanjaro etc. There is plenty of variation in local climate, and no one denies this, however it is global warming that is the issue and the average global temperature, which is far better expressed by the averaging over the various local data sources spread around the globe, is far less given to such dramatic fluctuation (and we know this - compare instrumental temperature data for local sources versus averaged globally: in the global average there is much less dramatic variation).
We are, indeed, currently in an interglacial. We have, however, been in one for the past 11,000 years or so, and via most modern temperature reconstruction we reached the temeperature peak for that interglacial near the beginning, and shouldn't be expecting further rises within this interglacial. The current sudden upsurge of temperature really isn't a normal peak - it is anomolous within this interglacial. Moreover, it actua
The review will not officially be released until tomorrow, so you can't get it yet. There is this webpage which will potentially host the report when it is released, and has intermediary papers and presentations by Stern in the meantime.
Unless you are being perversely skeptical, the answer to that is "yes". We have historical temperature records going back to 1850. You can read the FAQ for such datasets and download the data for yourself if you like, or read the articles detailing data collection, analysis, and uncertainties. There is an obvious upward trend.
Going back further requires use of proxy data such as tree rings, ice cores, coral data, glaciers, etc. There have been numerous different studies by different scientists collecting, and cross referencing such data to create historical temperature reconstructions. Here is a plot showing 10 different reconstructions by various authors. There is some variability, but the recent upward trend is again clear. Again, you can get the datasets yourself, and read more reports detailing how they are analysed. At about this point skeptics point to Greenland being green, or Wine growing in Europe in 1000AD, but I've discussed those before, so I won't go into detail again.
The result is that, to claim that the earth is not presently getting warmer requires either a belief that limate scientists are almost universally incompetent, or that they are colluding en masse in a grand conspiracy to falsify data and delude the public. Either of those options would seem, to me, to be a much greater leap of faith than simply assuming that the world is, indeed, getting warmer. As I said, it requires a rather perverse skepticism more on par with 9/11 conspiracy theorists like the maker of Loose Change.
An interesting question. Certainly mankind is doing something: since 1850 atmospheric carbon dioxide levels have risen from around 280ppm to 385ppm. That's a significant change - in fact given atmospheric carbon dioxide levels over the last 650,000 years (via ice core data) the current levels are 5.5 standard deviations from the mean; that's significant! Are humans responsible for this change? Certainly it correlates with the industrial revolution, but still... As it happens we can do isotope analysis of atmospheric carbon dioxide, since isotope ratios for fossil fuels are different from thoses of the rest of the carbon cycle. It turns out that indeed, the sudden increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is from humans burning fossil fuels. Now a little basic physics and the absorption spectra of carbon dioxide is enough to tell us that we should expect greater atmospheric carbon dioxide to result in a warmer planet. It turns out that is indeed what we are seeing, and that it correlates well. There's more than just that however. Have a read through the chapter on attribution of the IPCC Third Assessment report. A wide variety of techniques are used to attempt to attribute the observed warming to various potential causes. The end result is that the IPCC found that while warming prior to 1950 could possibly be accounted for by other factors, including solar variation, warming since 1950 can only be reasonably accounted for via anthropogenic atmospheric carbon dioxide. Feel f
For reference the report's outlook is to 2050. That is to say the report concludes that it would cost 1% of the expected global GDP in 2050 to mitigate problems, while doing nothing is expected to result in global GDP being 5% to 20% lower in 2050. Anyone expecting to be alive for the next 44 years is going to be paying the costs according to this report - and we'll be paying costs sooner than that, just not at the 5% to 20% level. In essence doing nothing will mean the world will potentially be 1/5th less productive and wealthy in 2050 as it could otherwise have been.
That's an interesting assertion. The point of the report is that this precise question was studied in great depth by a well respected economist (Stern was a former chief economist for the World Bank), and that the results of all that detailed anaylsis is that, in fact, it is far more expensive to learn to cope with a warmer planet. I fail to see how you dismiss that result quite so easily - especially given that you have not read the report (it is not officially released till tomorrow).
Emissions reductions plans are not about reducing production, but about being more efficient, in terms of emissions, in the production we do. In this article about the report you'll note that reductions are discussed in terms of reducing emissions per unit of GDP. Certainly such a thing is theoretically feasible, this table demonstrates that each dollar of GDP per ton of emissions can vary dramatically from country to country, and that, significantly, there is plenty of room for improvement from major polluting nations such as the US and China (The US looks positively emissions efficient compared to China).
Moreover, the ideal plan with green taxes would be that money collected from such taxes would then be funnelled back into research into technology to mitigate the problem. Whether that happens in practice, well - I think we all know governments and tax dollars; but that just means it is up to the voters to hold politicians suitably accountable. I think the key point, however, is that it looks likely that doing nothing could be very expensive in the long term, so we really ought to be making the investment of taking action now to try and mitigate that cost as much as possible. A good start would be to try to stop making the problem worse.
Again, you're just making my point - in the face of peaceful but firm protest the only option would be to order to military to kill or suppress the protestors. However, the more severe/harsh the suppression ordered, the less likely the military is to follow those orders. It is a lot harder justifying the violent suppression of peaceful protest than it is to rationalise suppression of violent insurrection - and it is that dilemma that is going to be faced by every level of the military that is ordered to suppress whatever opposition there is. Which is to say, orders to violently suppress peaceful protest are far less likely to ever get followed, and as soon as the military stops following orders from on high, any "dictatorship" is over. In short, you get to the result faster and with less loss of life by not using guns.
I don't think it would be that easy. Who are you going to get to do the massacaring? I'm sure some rather more thoughtless platoon or otherwise will just kill people in cold blood, but really, in the face of mass civilian protest most of the military, if told to just kill them all, are going to do an about-face and try and defend them from whatever small groups are foolish enough to follow orders. Basically, even if a slaughter or two does occur, for the most part the military is simply going to revile that, and turn against those who do the killing. Moreover, as much as it might frighten some people, I expect that news of the slaughter of unarmed civilians in cold-blood is going to do far more to strengthen the resolve of the public to oppose whatever regime did that. Of course being told that a group of armed terrorists were gunned down while resisting arrest, and several soldiers were killed by the terrorists - that's a lot less likely to draw any public sympathy for those who were opposing the government.
You're really just making my point for me. Yes, the vast majority of "grunts" are far from mindless. More importantly they're also far less likely to fire on peaceful unarmed protestors than on insurgents who are armed and potentially firign at them. If we take your postulated scenario, that Bush uses this, or a similar law to become a dictator and suspend elections, then I think it is entirely reasonable to expect a significant portion of the US population to stand up in peaceful nationwide protest and say "no". And what is to happen then? Bush is going to have a hard time telling the military to fire on innocent civilians - they simply won't follow that order, and will, instead be forced to align with the protestors. And there ends Bush's attempted takeover. No guns required. If we take your alternate approach - that a significant portion of the public turns up armed and ready to fight - well, you'll still end up with the same result, but I suspect you'll have a lot more fighting from military who are prepared to fire on armed and potentially aggressive civilians. So really all the guns buy you is a few more casualties before the inevitable. I see no benefit.
Well yes, but at that point why do you need to guns anymore? All the civilians can just stand up and say no, and the military can have the moral quandry of whether they want to cold-bloodedly slaughter a significant percentage of the US population who are standing in unarmed opposition. If you don't have widespread enough support to do that, then you are sufficiently small to be labelled a "radical terrorist group" ala McVeigh and friends or Koresh and co. at Waco, at which point you'll find n public support, and plenty of willingness to allow harsh measures.
I'm curious as to what you expect to be achieved on that front - ever since the US started having a permanent well equipped standing military the question of bearing arms to defend yourself against the government has become increasingly moot. Any small to medium homegrown insurgency is going to be efficiently denounced as terrorists (how much sympathy did McVeigh and friends recieve?) throughout the media and largely crushed by US military. I expect some sort of running insurgency as in Iraq could be maintained, but it would be, lets be honest, a thorn in the governments side (the Iraqi government is not about to be overthrown as long as US support remains). Should it go on long enough you'll find the rest of the US public (who will be suitably indoctrinated by the media to view the insurgency as radical terrorists killing innocents - let's face it, a certain amount of collateral damage in the long term campaign is inevitable, and you'll always get some extremists who won't mind killing civilians anyway) will happily support the sort of extreme measures (seeing as they're being the ones threatened now) to put down the insurgency that aren't being seen in Iraq: currently the US public is averse to serious troop commitment and potential serious loss of life in Iraq - were this happening in the US I doubt you would find such aversion.
So what does that leave? Well a large scale insurrection could work. The question I put to you, however, is whether, once you get to the scale required, being armed makes a difference anymore. If the anti-government sentiment is sufficiently strong and sufficiently widespread that it gives the US military a serious run for their money and can't easily be labelled as terrorists and face harsh measures then you'll probably find that (1) A reasonable portion of the US military will defect to the insurgency anyway, and (2) Civil disobedience and protest will quite probably get the job done. If the military is already divided then calling them in to provide martial law is going to be tricky. Moreover even if you do, with the scale of unrest we're talking about then all the people simply standing up and saying no is going to be as effective as anything - what are the military going to do, open fire on what amounts to maybe a third of the entire civilian population of the US? I think you'd have most military on the ground cave long before they did that. And really, who is a military grunt more likely to fire on, a mob of unarmed protesting civilians, or a mob of armed protetsing civilians? I think you'll stand a much better chance with the former than the latter.
Sure, you'll find military grunts who will senselessly follow orders and open fire on crowds of innocent civilians and a number of people will likely die. I doubt, however, in the face of mass peaceful opposition, that such incidents will be anything but a minority. And are you really going to claim that the loss of life in that approach will be greater than a mass armed insurrection with violent pitched battles all over the country?
Let's be honest, in this day and age, with modern military hardware (which is restricted - know many people with fully armed tanks, helicopter gunships, or cruise missles), a vast and incredibly well equipped permanent standing army, and the current sheer scale of the Federal government, the point where "the right to bear arms" had a signficant impact on the success of failure of an insurrection has been long passed. I fully believe there was a time when it made sense, but the Federal government grew bigger and bigger, and the army became permanent and well equipped - far better than any civilian could ever hope to be. If you wanted to make your stand, you should have done it a long time ago. Or, if you want it put another way - it's too late, you've already lost.
I think, to be honest, the bigger threat than mobs (who, while polarising, tend to have to fight it out within their own group a little, and will contain some moderates who will listen to the other side) is the situation of single extremists with way too much time on their hands, particularly in slightly more obscure articles. There you get left with a person with the patience and determination to shout down all but the sternest of opposition. If it's a less trafficked page it can be rare that you find enough people willing to spend the vast amounts of time required to keep things on an even keel. I'm sure there are examples all over the dusty corners of Wikipedia, but a couple examples I can cite are Indo-Aryan migration related pages where a user by the name of WIN, who views the suggestion of any such thing as an affront to perceived Indian superiority, and is willing to use torturous logic and ignore pretty much all the supporting evidence to shout down anyone who disagrees. There seems to be one editor heroically trying to hold things together - how long that will last is likely a war of attrition and patience. There's also the Time Cube page which has previously been in some appalling states, and for quite some time had someone with far too much time on his hands providing a brick wall for a variety of different editors to beat their head against. At least in that case the changing roll of editors did eventually outlast the Time Cube Guy. Still...
I think this point is often underrated. Often I'll want to look up some term, or a person, or whatever, not because I need a detailed and accurate reference, but just because I happened to be reading something and saw mention of X and suddenly thought "Hmm, what/who is that exactly?". I just want 5 or 10 seconds worth of reading summarising whatever it is. Previously this was the sort of thing search engines were good for, but these days I just go straight to Wikipedia - more often than not it has an entry for whatever it is, and regardless fo whether it is of stellar quality or not it always has the basic details I need to sate my curiosity. What Wikipedia has really meant is that I can indulge my curiosity better - where previously I would have had to dig through a variety of web search results (which probably wouldn't have been worth it for the 10 second rough description of whatever it is I'm after) I can just skim read the intro to the relevant Wikipedia entry, which I can easily go straight to. If it is actually something really interesting and I want detail then there are usually references and external links I can use to track down the details properly.
I'm not exactly sure where you get that impression from - certainly Forth can be pleasantly efficient when it comes to memory use, but I would suggest "roughly on par with C" is about the best you can claim. Now, while the Debian Computer Language Shootout benchmarks are hardly ideal, particularly since they are all very small programs, they can give at least an idea of roughly comparable memory use in a variety of different languages. In this case, glancing through a few different benchmarks, we see that Forth certainly holds its own (doing quite well in the k-nucleotide benchmark) but is at best on par with the other memory efficient languages, and is down the list in several benhmarks. The winner is often C (unsurprisingly), though Pascal, D, Eiffel and Fortran all do remarkably well as well. Given those options, and presuming you were going to move away from C for some reason, I'd have to say D and Eiffel are the most attractive options.
It's nice to see the suggestions to actually use available tools to see what your code is actually doing and where it might be going wrong. There are many available, and some are remarkably good. Splint, for instance, has a talent for turning up unlooked for errors, and if you're willing to add a few annotations here and there it can do even better. I'm constantly surprised such tools don't see much wider use.