3. Finding unread messages in Evolution is difficult. Sorting in general is more flexible in Thunderbird IMHO.
Huh? This one I just don't understand. Finding unread messages is trivial in Evolution - just look in the "Unread Messages" virtual folder which contains all unread messages, and only unread messages. If for some reason your copy of evolution didn't come configured with such a thing, it's trivial to set up (Tools->Virtual Folder Editor create a new one and set "Status is not read" as the criteria) and it can group all unread mail across all your accounts. You can even have nice categorised vfolders (All unread mail newer than 2 weeks, all unread mail from a sender, or group of senders etc.)
Sorting may well be easier in Thunderbird (I haven't tried it in a very very long time), but I really don't see how "finding unread mail in Evolution is difficult" when all you have to do is click on the folder labelled "Unread Mail" to find it all.
Although it might count as blasphemy to say as much on Slashdot, Microsoft, of all companies, understands that, and except in really extreme situations will usually work with a company to get them in compliance, for NO fine (even offering a discount to "help them out" in some cases). The BSA, on the other hand... Absolute pure evil. It amazes me that anyone would allow them on-site without a warrant and a police escort.
That would be the "good cop, bad cop" approach. You need a decent stick to beat people with (the BSA) but you also need to be able to present yourself as the "good guy" trying help the person out...
1. It is a well-known fact that pirates are cool. This is evidenced by the existence of Errol Flynn and Jack Sparrow (aka Johnny Depp)
2. There is a strong and well-documented correlation between the reduction in the number of pirates worldwide and increases in global temperatures
It's pretty clear that a reduced level of global coolness caused by a lack of pirates would result in increasing global temperatures
I think the flaw in your reasoning is possibly in your use of the word cool. Oddly enough this word apparently has many definitions, the ones presumably being referenced above being "1 : moderately cold : lacking in warmth" and "7 slang a : very good : EXCELLENT; also : ALL RIGHT b : FASHIONABLE" which, it would seem are very different. Pirates are indeed "very good" and "fashionable" as a result of Errol Flynn's and Johnny Depp's performances in film. What they are not is "moderately cold" or in any way particularly related to thermal deficits, which is what your second point (relating to global temperatures) correlates pirates with.
Perhaps if you could actually show that pirates do in fact cause a notable reduction in temperature as opposed being fashionable you might have point. As it stands you don't even have a very good joke.
It also remains to be seen whether the costs of climate change outweigh the costs of reducing CO2 emmissions globally. There are a lot of poor people on the planet who die of diseases that could be easilly treated or even cured if they were economically developed (which will probably include enhanced CO2 emmissions).
Oddly enough carbon dioxide emissions are not directly proportional to how economically developed you are. If you look at the ratio of GDP and carbon dioxide emissions you'll see that emissions don't scale closely to GDP - there's really quite a range in there, with a lot of what we would consider more developed countries (like Japan and northern Europe) having a good ratio of emissions to GDP, while countries like China, Russia and the former Soviet states perform very poorly by comparison.
The climate has been changing since before humans evolved. How do you know what's causing it now? Sure, there may be a correlation between industrialization and mean global temperature, but how do you prove causation?
Generally the argument goes something like this:
It's a perfectly observable, testable fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide can trap heat - in precis: it lets ultraviolet and visible light from the sun through, but reflects the radiated heat that the earth converts the ultraviolet and visible light into back. For detail you can read the fine points here. It comes down to basic well known physics.
Since the industrial revolution we have produced a very large amount of carbon dioxide in comparison the natural fluctuations in carbon dioxide levels. In practice this means we have produced sufficient carbon dioxide that we currently have the highest levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide in 650,000 years, fully 30% higher than at any time in the past, and easily (by an order of magnitude or so) the largest short term fluctuation in the last 650,000 years. Given that according to that same ice core record (and others covering slightly shorter historical time frames) there is a remarkable correlation between carbon dioxide levels and global temperature one would expect we may see some repurcussions
Historical temperature reconstructions, created by cross referencing between different proxy data series from around the world (including glaciers, ice cores, tree ring data etc.) show a distinct upturn in temperature over the last 200 years that is unprecendented in the last 2000 years or more. We are coming out of a "little ice age" 400 years ago, and there are natural fluctuations, but the very dramatic acceleration in increase in global temperature appears well beyond what might be expected from natural processes alone. Here is a nice chart showing 10 different, largely independent, historical temperature reconstructions showing how closely they agree on general trends, and how dramatic the current change really is.
Is that conclusive proof? No, but then we don't have conclusive proof of general relativity or evolution either, we've just got a lot of good evidence. There's a lot more evidence that the 3 points laid out above as well, but they provide the solid backbone: atmospheric carbon dioxide traps heat; human activity has produced an unprecedented spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels; the beginnings of the acceleration in warming predicted by such a dramatic increase in carbon dioxide has been observed.
Personally, I am curious why we don't look for more grand scale technological solutions to environmental problems. We have certainly proven that we can very effectively destroy the ozone with just a little CFCs. We know how to increase global warming. Why in the hell hasn't anyone found a chemical that promotes ozone expansion or reduces global warming?
Well there is plenty of work being done, you just have to know what to look for. Here's some Wikipedia information on various schemes at artificial carbon sequestration - basically just getting the carbon out of the atmosphere and locking it up somewhere.
As to mitigation with regard to a stalling north Atlantic conveyor - the cause, according to the models that predict such a thing, is lowered salinity of water in the north Atlantic, which means lowered density which means it doesn't sink when it should, and hence the system stalls. The obvious ways to "correct" that are to increase the salinity by removing fresh water, or by adding salt, or some combination thereof. Doing such a thing would be a huge and expensive exercise, but depending on how badly tthings stall and how bad the weather gets, it may well be worthwhile. I expect that there are people working the numbers for various schemes along those lines.
And if not, why we should draw any major conclusions from 5 data points over 50 years, when we don't know the variance of the system over hundreds or thousands of years, which 'seems' to be a 'normal' timescale for change?
I'm not saying this isn't a big deal, but the information in the article is woefully incomplete.
This BBC article on the same subject explains a little more on this front. The scientists freely admit that 5 datapoints is not a lot, that the findings are still provisional, and that the work now is all about studying the variability. The points in favour of some concern is that this finding does fit with what was expected from the models, and apparently the pattern found by these measurements is out of phase with the known periodic variability (which supposedly has a 70 year cycle, and should have been warming since 1970).
It's still not a lot, and I don't think it counts as reason to panic yet, but it does count as reason to to throw some real effort into further study of the natural variability to get a gauge of what this really means.
It's something that real climatologists are considering... but they're certainly not of the opinion that it will suddenly and dramatically flip the global warming to global cooling... unless you consider a decade or two fast.
They're not even suggesting a "flip" to "global cooling". What is being suggested is that despite gloablly getting warmer, locally eastern North America and Northern Europe are going to get colder. That just means all the extra heat is going to get pushed elsewhere (the suggestion seems to be warmer weather for Central and South America and Africa).
If the current is pulling all that energy from the warm waters up north and dissipating it in the process, what will happen to all the excess warmth if the current stops? Will it find another way to go? Maybe create a new current or even restart the same current again? That heat has to go somewhere, it is water after all.
Well the current that pushes northward occurs due to the conveyor effect that occurs when the water reaches up north, cools, sinks, and flows back as cold water much deeper. In general the current just circles around the equatorial Atlantic, and only a portion branches north due to said conveyor. If the conveyor effect stalls the most likely outcome is simply more and warmer water circulating in the equatorial Atlantic. That, of course, is going to have significant impacts on climate in Africa and central and South America. Potentially a lot of the energy may end up providing more power for hurricanes out in the Atlantic. What exactly will happen is unclear, but I think its safe to say that assuming everything will magically right itself is betting on the long shot - there's really no evidence for such a thing. The most likely outcome is simply a lot warmer and more energetic weather for Africa and South and Central America.
The temperature differential that drives that current has shrunk slightly and therefore as lost some momentum. Then Europe gets cold for a while, things even out, and everyone is happy.
Not really. Europe, and North America get colder yes (and to be honest I'm not all that happy about that, living in Canada at the moment), but the rest of the trapped heat from global warming doesn't magically vanish, it simply gets pushed elsewhere - so think more more heat (and droughts) for Africa, more energy in the Carribean to help power hurricanes etc.
This is why the term "global climate change" is preferred these days. While there is "global warming" in that there is more energy trapped and retained in the system, that doesn't mean it's going to be evenly distributed as warming, it just means more energy in the system which can result in more dramatic swings and changes in climate.
Perl has a similar thing in the Class::Contract module, which makes it easy to design by contract in Perl. It's actually pretty slick...
I didn't know about that one (mostly because I haven't really done any Perl programming in quite a while) but you're right, it is pretty slick. I like it. definitely a must next time I end up doing any OO Perl.
Assertions have long been a part of C and C++ programming, of course, but that's not really designing by contract, so much as performing error checking. These are different things, though certainly the latter is a superset of the former.
My real gripe with assertions as opposed to proper DbC is that it doesn't behave nicely with respect to subtyping/inheritance, or automatic inclusion in documentation, but that's more a matter of ease of use and niceness than actual functionality. As you say, it still does job.
If it's an unusual situation, check for it in an assert as part of the pre-conditions at the beginning of the function (programming by contract). I'm assuming this is Java code in your example - does it not support assert now?
Why not go one step better, get JML and actually have proper preconditions which will go into the JavaDoc documentation and can be used to generate JUnit unit tests automatically as well?
You then get the advantage that any subclasses will automatically inherit the pre- and post-conditions, and sensibly handles subtyping so that pre-conditions can only be strengthened and post-conditions weakened etc.
It's also worth noting that perhaps the right way to go about this would have been to have
public class Account { ... //@ public invariant Tariff != null ... }
Presuming that an account should presumably always have a tariff (who knows exactly what the business logic is though), and thus when you have runtime checking of contracts enabled you'll get an error whenever the Tariff is null for an Account object (checked after every method executes), and you'll have the fact that Accounts should never have null Tariffs formally documented while you're at it.
...and comments, by themselves, cannot do near so much good as clearly, concisely, and well-styled code.
I think this is a strong argument (in large projects that will require significant maintenance prorgamming) for langauges that enforce coding style, that constrain you to pretty much one way to do most things - very few ways to have cute hacks, or cunning implementations, or subtle ways to hint to the compiler for optimization; just one obvious way and let the compiler do the work. It doesn't need to be slow, Ada and Eiffel are designed with that sort of philosophy and they benchmark right up there with C (which has a million and one different ways to be cute or cunning with code). It does take a little of the fun out of things - it's always fun to find a some obscure but more compact or more efficient way of coding something... but then large projects that will require large amounts of maintenance aren't supposed to be "fun" to program.
Of course that's not to say something like Perl with TMTOWTDI don't have their place. Having lots of ways to do something can make for a very expressive easy to write language, and there are definitely many times when that's the right choice, especially when you just need to get somethign working ASAP, or provide a little glue between things. And of course you can always program C or Perl with very very strict style guidelines and end up with perfectly maintainable code... it's just that when it matters, particularly on big projects with lots of people who all have slightly different idiomatic ways of thinking, actually having hard enforcement of style via the language to help produce clear, simple, readable code has real value.
What parts do what should be clear from the names of function calls and variables, but whenever a function becomes longer than something really short, yes, it needs comments describing what happens where. If a function does something complicated, it's worth starting with a comment describing pre- and post conditions.
Now there is an excellent idea! It doesn't take a lot of effort - you should be able to come up with some basic constraints on inputs and outputs if you have any decent idea of what the function does - but it is very helpful documentation to anyone else, particularly for people who have to call the function (as it clerly delimits exactly what they need to provide, and exactly what they can expect to get back). Better yet, as long as you use a system that supports it you can get a whole lot of benefits in terms of automated checking and debugging of your code, saving you a lot of effort later.
Eiffel and D support pre and post conditions directly in the code (instead of in comments). Java has JML which is a syntax for writing pre and post conditions in comments, as well as some tools to do extra checking, add runtime checks to your code (or not) based on the conditions, write the conditions into JavaDoc properly, and automatically generate JUnit tests based on the conditions. If you program in Ada there's SPARK which supports pre and post conditions as comments as well as a range of other annotations, and provides extremely powerful tools to do extensive static checking and analysis and even generate automatically simplied proof obligations based on your annotations. If you program in Python there's PyContract which allows you to write pre and post conditions into docstrings and switch on or off runtime checking of those contracts. I expect there are plenty more, so hopefully other people can mention those.
And that's where having source code (and ideally open published proofs for the theorems) is going to help. Nothing is perfect because ultimately there is going to be possibility for human error - the aim is not to somehow eliminate the possibility of any error, but rather to try to minimise the possibility for error and provide assurances as tow which parts of the system are error free, and which parts need to be scrutinised. Managing to provide some solid assurances is always going to be better than supplying none.
Prove that each voter's vote was recorded as they intended.
Show that only voters eligible to vote voted, and that each only voted once.
And this is where proper formal specification, verification and theorem proving code would start to show its worth. I might not be suitable for every project, but electronic voting is cryng out for it. You cannot, of course, prove that a miscount cannot occur, but you can say "providing X and Y then a miscount cannot occur in software" where X and Y are things like "the filesystem drivers are error free" and "no hardware fault has occurred in RAM or hard drive". Not perfect no, but it makes solid assurances and clearly delineates where your problems could possibly occur. Likewise proving that only eligible voters voted is going to be hard, but you can likely prove something along the lines of "all recorded votes were cast only by people presenting unique token identifier X" and then your problems are with the people who check people coming in and provide unique identifier tokens - there's still plenty of room for human error, but at least your assured there won't be a software error. You can do similar things for ensuring the vote was recorded as intended - display and print a reciept (to be deposited in a voting box before you leave) and prove that the software cannot record a vote as going to anything other than what is displayed and printed. Sure you can have miscast votes because the person didn't check their reciept and ask to have their vote change if it was wrong, but we're back to human error - we have assurances the software, at least, is ding the right thing.
I think the real point here is that what really matters is the breadth and depth of your public support base. Given widespread support you'll be getting support from military personnel with access to military hardware (that they can always disperse to the rest of your base if for some reason that's needed) and any fighting will occur within that framework. It doesn't matter if your civilian populace is armed with automatic rifles or just single hunting rfiles, or not armed at all - what matters is managing to have or to get public support for your cause, and guns don't matter much for that.
In short, whether the civilian populace is armed or not is, these days, of utterly marginal significance with respect to the success or failure of an attempted insurrection in the US.
From the GP: Women weren't allowed a vote. Natives weren't allowed a vote. Blacks weren't even considered human, and certainly weren't allowed a vote.
Take a look at the historical treatment of "natives" in... New Zealand...
New Zealand probably isn't the best example to be throwing in there. While the treatment of the Maori historically has not exactly been exemplary, it's been better than most other imperial outposts. The founding document of the country is a treaty with the native Maori. There is, of course, some dispute about what exactly it means and how it should be interpreted, and certainly there have been some historical transgressions by the crown for which more recent governments have made coniserable efforts at redress. More importantly, politically in terms of representation New Zealand fared pretty well. It had seats in parliament reserved for Maori, to be voted on by those who choose to identify themselves as Maori, as early as 1867 (and considering parliament was only instituted in 1852 that's a relatively quick move to giving natives explicit representation in government. Moreover New Zealand was the first country to grant universal suffrage in 1893 (while the US took another 27 years to recognise women's right to vote).
Do you seriously think that the US Military will have less of a morale problem suppressing American dissidents than they had in Vietnam?
I think they'd have a much larger morale problem violently suppressing unarmed peaceful protetstors than putting down an attempted armed insurrection from people trying to kill them. I'm not saying the military would succeed in any particular case (really it mostly depends on how widespread the protests/insurrection is), I'm trying to say that whether the average civilian has rifles and handguns is of incredibly marginal significance.
Good. Then you won't mind if I keep and bear mine.
I'm not objecting to the second amendment, I'm simply objecting to the oft trotted out line that it's significant in overthrowing the government in the modern world. On that front it just really doesn't matter much.
1/3 of the population wanted revolution in 1776, 1/3 favored British rule and 1/3 were neutral.
And there was no unbelievably powerfully equipped local standing army which had control of the vast majority of martial power available in the world. What would matter in a modern insurrection is how the US military sides - even if that's a matter of the military splitting with divided loyalties to differing sides of the conflict.
OK, did you forget all about Vietnam and Iraq 2.0?
Did you notice that that was a case of a country attemtpting to fight off a foreign aggressor? The US is doing poorly in Iraq, and fared as poorly as it did in Vietnam largely due to the inability to sustain sufficient military to fight a war in a distant foreign country and not lose morale at home. In the case of an internal insurrection the US military can stick with it for as long as they like, most likely with the support of the populace who is horrified by people ambushing and attacking their own people. You'll win an insurrection in the US the moment you gain enough general support for your cause that chunks of the military (be it national guard or otherwise) support you. Basic firearms are not a prerequisite for managing that in this day and age, control of information flow and good rhetoric are going to be far more important. And once you've got some of the military supporting you you don't need basic firearms in the hands of civilians, the military can equip you properly.
While I have no intention to start or participate in an insurrection, the concept here isn't a new one. You don't have to have a weapon good enough to outshoot the military; you just have to have one good enough for you and a few friends to ambush a solitary patrol, and take THEIR weapons.
I think the real question is: how long do you expect to be able to maintain that sort of activity, and how do you expect to extend that sort of activity into a means to actually overthrow the government? What you need is popular widespread support for your cause, and unless you've managed to get some control of media to tell your side of the story I think you'll find knocking off a hummer full of guys from your local military base is going to alienate a lot of the very people you want to support you.
Any move to authoritarian government in the US isn't going to occur with the federal government suddenly suspending elections overnight and sending the military out to patrol the streets and enforce curfews or something. It will occur along the lines that things are already going - slowly with a succession of minor tweaks with, as much as possible, the media behind them all the way. That is, the government is going to, as much as possible, have the general public fully supporting them. You'll do as well with mass protests and similar campaigns to win over the general populace and as much of the military as you can to your cause as you will running around shooting Americans in ambushes. If you can get some of the military to side with your cause then they'll give you military weapons to fight with, instead of you having to take them.
It would seem to me that things have moved well past the point where the weapons that can still be legally obtained by private citizens are going to be of real practical significance in any insurrection.
The same way the current Iraqi insurrection is preventing the occupying US military from establishing a real presence.
I think there's a very significant difference there - the US military is a foreign occupying force in Iraq. They have to send troops and material to Iraq, and they have to maintain sufficient morale for the war at home. Are you honstly suggesting that an attempted internal insurrection in the US of the same scale and using the same techniques as the Iraqi insurrection wouldn't be immediately labelled "terrorists", alienated from the rest of the population, and quickly put down just using FBI, and national guard?
To be truly effective an insurrection would need to be widespread and have sufficient general support from the citizenry that the US military itself would be torn on the issue. At that point it would most likely have the support of local national guard, and potentially chunks of the active military - at which point the need for the private populace to be armed would be largely obviated: they could, if necessary arm themselves with military hardware provided by supporting military units.
The real question then is as to how one gains sufficient widespread support. I put it to you that beginning the movement by running around with rifles and homemade bombs and attacking your local military is not going to do it - it's going to alienate the public, not win them to your cause.
Arm yourself under the protections of the 2nd amendments. We're allowed guns not just to hunt prey, protect our country from foreign invaders, and ensure our private security, but also to protect ourselves from domestic threats (meaning from within our borders.) If and when our government has become so corrupt that reform through the ballot boxes is impossible, then it is time to turn to the ammo boxes. (I don't believe we are near that point at all. When we are, a whole lot more people will be reaching for their ammo boxes.)
I've always been rather interested in how well this concept works in modern America. It would seem to me that things have moved well past the point where the weapons that can still be legally obtained by private citizens are going to be of real practical significance in any insurrection.
I would be interested to hear a detailed explanation of how you would plan to proceed with an insurrection in such a way that currently permissable firearms in the hands of private citizens are a vital component.
Earth has been in an Ice Age for the past 5-10 million years. Apply Global Warming and. . . . . . . . we get "normal" conditions for the vast majority of this planet's history.
I don't think any sane sensible people are claiming that the planet won't cope. It will handle all of this just fine. People who actually have a clue aren't claiming that life won't cope either - it will adapt if necessary and is already pretty flexible to begin with in a lot of ways. I'm sure life on planet in earth in general will keep trucking along much as normal. In fact, there are plenty of people who are concerned who aren't even claiming that humanity won't cope. Personally I would expect that we'll manage to adapt and survive just fine. A lot of the people who are concerned are simply worried about that short blink of an eye (in planetary timescales) during which humanity adapts to the changing climate. You see, in human timescales that could be a reasonably long time, and while we will probably cope in the long run, it might be anywhere from severe adversity and the deaths of a significant percentage of the global population through to merely exceptionally expensive and extremely detrimental to global living standards, in the short to medium term.
Think of it this way: in terms of the timescale of your entire life a cold or flu really doesn't have any signficant impact. It's not going to kill you, you'll recover and be just fine and probably forget about it. That doesn't mean, however, that you should ignore any early symptoms and not try to save yourself being laid up in bed suffering for a few days.
Slashdot Mirror
3. Finding unread messages in Evolution is difficult. Sorting in general is more flexible in Thunderbird IMHO.
Huh? This one I just don't understand. Finding unread messages is trivial in Evolution - just look in the "Unread Messages" virtual folder which contains all unread messages, and only unread messages. If for some reason your copy of evolution didn't come configured with such a thing, it's trivial to set up (Tools->Virtual Folder Editor create a new one and set "Status is not read" as the criteria) and it can group all unread mail across all your accounts. You can even have nice categorised vfolders (All unread mail newer than 2 weeks, all unread mail from a sender, or group of senders etc.)
Sorting may well be easier in Thunderbird (I haven't tried it in a very very long time), but I really don't see how "finding unread mail in Evolution is difficult" when all you have to do is click on the folder labelled "Unread Mail" to find it all.
Jedidiah.
Although it might count as blasphemy to say as much on Slashdot, Microsoft, of all companies, understands that, and except in really extreme situations will usually work with a company to get them in compliance, for NO fine (even offering a discount to "help them out" in some cases). The BSA, on the other hand... Absolute pure evil. It amazes me that anyone would allow them on-site without a warrant and a police escort.
That would be the "good cop, bad cop" approach. You need a decent stick to beat people with (the BSA) but you also need to be able to present yourself as the "good guy" trying help the person out...
Jedidiah.
Also
1. It is a well-known fact that pirates are cool. This is evidenced by the existence of Errol Flynn and Jack Sparrow (aka Johnny Depp)
2. There is a strong and well-documented correlation between the reduction in the number of pirates worldwide and increases in global temperatures
It's pretty clear that a reduced level of global coolness caused by a lack of pirates would result in increasing global temperatures
I think the flaw in your reasoning is possibly in your use of the word cool. Oddly enough this word apparently has many definitions, the ones presumably being referenced above being "1 : moderately cold : lacking in warmth" and "7 slang a : very good : EXCELLENT; also : ALL RIGHT b : FASHIONABLE" which, it would seem are very different. Pirates are indeed "very good" and "fashionable" as a result of Errol Flynn's and Johnny Depp's performances in film. What they are not is "moderately cold" or in any way particularly related to thermal deficits, which is what your second point (relating to global temperatures) correlates pirates with.
Perhaps if you could actually show that pirates do in fact cause a notable reduction in temperature as opposed being fashionable you might have point. As it stands you don't even have a very good joke.
Jedidiah.
It also remains to be seen whether the costs of climate change outweigh the costs of reducing CO2 emmissions globally. There are a lot of poor people on the planet who die of diseases that could be easilly treated or even cured if they were economically developed (which will probably include enhanced CO2 emmissions).
Oddly enough carbon dioxide emissions are not directly proportional to how economically developed you are. If you look at the ratio of GDP and carbon dioxide emissions you'll see that emissions don't scale closely to GDP - there's really quite a range in there, with a lot of what we would consider more developed countries (like Japan and northern Europe) having a good ratio of emissions to GDP, while countries like China, Russia and the former Soviet states perform very poorly by comparison.
Jedidiah.
Generally the argument goes something like this:
Is that conclusive proof? No, but then we don't have conclusive proof of general relativity or evolution either, we've just got a lot of good evidence. There's a lot more evidence that the 3 points laid out above as well, but they provide the solid backbone: atmospheric carbon dioxide traps heat; human activity has produced an unprecedented spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels; the beginnings of the acceleration in warming predicted by such a dramatic increase in carbon dioxide has been observed.
Jedidiah.
Personally, I am curious why we don't look for more grand scale technological solutions to environmental problems. We have certainly proven that we can very effectively destroy the ozone with just a little CFCs. We know how to increase global warming. Why in the hell hasn't anyone found a chemical that promotes ozone expansion or reduces global warming?
Well there is plenty of work being done, you just have to know what to look for. Here's some Wikipedia information on various schemes at artificial carbon sequestration - basically just getting the carbon out of the atmosphere and locking it up somewhere.
As to mitigation with regard to a stalling north Atlantic conveyor - the cause, according to the models that predict such a thing, is lowered salinity of water in the north Atlantic, which means lowered density which means it doesn't sink when it should, and hence the system stalls. The obvious ways to "correct" that are to increase the salinity by removing fresh water, or by adding salt, or some combination thereof. Doing such a thing would be a huge and expensive exercise, but depending on how badly tthings stall and how bad the weather gets, it may well be worthwhile. I expect that there are people working the numbers for various schemes along those lines.
Jedidiah.
And if not, why we should draw any major conclusions from 5 data points over 50 years, when we don't know the variance of the system over hundreds or thousands of years, which 'seems' to be a 'normal' timescale for change?
I'm not saying this isn't a big deal, but the information in the article is woefully incomplete.
This BBC article on the same subject explains a little more on this front. The scientists freely admit that 5 datapoints is not a lot, that the findings are still provisional, and that the work now is all about studying the variability. The points in favour of some concern is that this finding does fit with what was expected from the models, and apparently the pattern found by these measurements is out of phase with the known periodic variability (which supposedly has a 70 year cycle, and should have been warming since 1970).
It's still not a lot, and I don't think it counts as reason to panic yet, but it does count as reason to to throw some real effort into further study of the natural variability to get a gauge of what this really means.
Jedidiah.
It's something that real climatologists are considering... but they're certainly not of the opinion that it will suddenly and dramatically flip the global warming to global cooling... unless you consider a decade or two fast.
They're not even suggesting a "flip" to "global cooling". What is being suggested is that despite gloablly getting warmer, locally eastern North America and Northern Europe are going to get colder. That just means all the extra heat is going to get pushed elsewhere (the suggestion seems to be warmer weather for Central and South America and Africa).
Jedidiah.
If the current is pulling all that energy from the warm waters up north and dissipating it in the process, what will happen to all the excess warmth if the current stops? Will it find another way to go? Maybe create a new current or even restart the same current again? That heat has to go somewhere, it is water after all.
Well the current that pushes northward occurs due to the conveyor effect that occurs when the water reaches up north, cools, sinks, and flows back as cold water much deeper. In general the current just circles around the equatorial Atlantic, and only a portion branches north due to said conveyor. If the conveyor effect stalls the most likely outcome is simply more and warmer water circulating in the equatorial Atlantic. That, of course, is going to have significant impacts on climate in Africa and central and South America. Potentially a lot of the energy may end up providing more power for hurricanes out in the Atlantic. What exactly will happen is unclear, but I think its safe to say that assuming everything will magically right itself is betting on the long shot - there's really no evidence for such a thing. The most likely outcome is simply a lot warmer and more energetic weather for Africa and South and Central America.
Jedidiah.
The temperature differential that drives that current has shrunk slightly and therefore as lost some momentum. Then Europe gets cold for a while, things even out, and everyone is happy.
Not really. Europe, and North America get colder yes (and to be honest I'm not all that happy about that, living in Canada at the moment), but the rest of the trapped heat from global warming doesn't magically vanish, it simply gets pushed elsewhere - so think more more heat (and droughts) for Africa, more energy in the Carribean to help power hurricanes etc.
This is why the term "global climate change" is preferred these days. While there is "global warming" in that there is more energy trapped and retained in the system, that doesn't mean it's going to be evenly distributed as warming, it just means more energy in the system which can result in more dramatic swings and changes in climate.
Jedidiah.
Perl has a similar thing in the Class::Contract module, which makes it easy to design by contract in Perl. It's actually pretty slick...
I didn't know about that one (mostly because I haven't really done any Perl programming in quite a while) but you're right, it is pretty slick. I like it. definitely a must next time I end up doing any OO Perl.
Assertions have long been a part of C and C++ programming, of course, but that's not really designing by contract, so much as performing error checking. These are different things, though certainly the latter is a superset of the former.
My real gripe with assertions as opposed to proper DbC is that it doesn't behave nicely with respect to subtyping/inheritance, or automatic inclusion in documentation, but that's more a matter of ease of use and niceness than actual functionality. As you say, it still does job.
Jedidiah.
Why not go one step better, get JML and actually have proper preconditions which will go into the JavaDoc documentation and can be used to generate JUnit unit tests automatically as well?You then get the advantage that any subclasses will automatically inherit the pre- and post-conditions, and sensibly handles subtyping so that pre-conditions can only be strengthened and post-conditions weakened etc.
It's also worth noting that perhaps the right way to go about this would have been to havePresuming that an account should presumably always have a tariff (who knows exactly what the business logic is though), and thus when you have runtime checking of contracts enabled you'll get an error whenever the Tariff is null for an Account object (checked after every method executes), and you'll have the fact that Accounts should never have null Tariffs formally documented while you're at it.
Jedidiah.
...and comments, by themselves, cannot do near so much good as clearly, concisely, and well-styled code.
I think this is a strong argument (in large projects that will require significant maintenance prorgamming) for langauges that enforce coding style, that constrain you to pretty much one way to do most things - very few ways to have cute hacks, or cunning implementations, or subtle ways to hint to the compiler for optimization; just one obvious way and let the compiler do the work. It doesn't need to be slow, Ada and Eiffel are designed with that sort of philosophy and they benchmark right up there with C (which has a million and one different ways to be cute or cunning with code). It does take a little of the fun out of things - it's always fun to find a some obscure but more compact or more efficient way of coding something... but then large projects that will require large amounts of maintenance aren't supposed to be "fun" to program.
Of course that's not to say something like Perl with TMTOWTDI don't have their place. Having lots of ways to do something can make for a very expressive easy to write language, and there are definitely many times when that's the right choice, especially when you just need to get somethign working ASAP, or provide a little glue between things. And of course you can always program C or Perl with very very strict style guidelines and end up with perfectly maintainable code... it's just that when it matters, particularly on big projects with lots of people who all have slightly different idiomatic ways of thinking, actually having hard enforcement of style via the language to help produce clear, simple, readable code has real value.
Jedidiah.
What parts do what should be clear from the names of function calls and variables, but whenever a function becomes longer than something really short, yes, it needs comments describing what happens where. If a function does something complicated, it's worth starting with a comment describing pre- and post conditions.
Now there is an excellent idea! It doesn't take a lot of effort - you should be able to come up with some basic constraints on inputs and outputs if you have any decent idea of what the function does - but it is very helpful documentation to anyone else, particularly for people who have to call the function (as it clerly delimits exactly what they need to provide, and exactly what they can expect to get back). Better yet, as long as you use a system that supports it you can get a whole lot of benefits in terms of automated checking and debugging of your code, saving you a lot of effort later.
Eiffel and D support pre and post conditions directly in the code (instead of in comments). Java has JML which is a syntax for writing pre and post conditions in comments, as well as some tools to do extra checking, add runtime checks to your code (or not) based on the conditions, write the conditions into JavaDoc properly, and automatically generate JUnit tests based on the conditions. If you program in Ada there's SPARK which supports pre and post conditions as comments as well as a range of other annotations, and provides extremely powerful tools to do extensive static checking and analysis and even generate automatically simplied proof obligations based on your annotations. If you program in Python there's PyContract which allows you to write pre and post conditions into docstrings and switch on or off runtime checking of those contracts. I expect there are plenty more, so hopefully other people can mention those.
Jedidiah.
And that's where having source code (and ideally open published proofs for the theorems) is going to help. Nothing is perfect because ultimately there is going to be possibility for human error - the aim is not to somehow eliminate the possibility of any error, but rather to try to minimise the possibility for error and provide assurances as tow which parts of the system are error free, and which parts need to be scrutinised. Managing to provide some solid assurances is always going to be better than supplying none.
Jedidiah.
Verify that a miscount did not take place.
Prove that each voter's vote was recorded as they intended.
Show that only voters eligible to vote voted, and
that each only voted once.
And this is where proper formal specification, verification and theorem proving code would start to show its worth. I might not be suitable for every project, but electronic voting is cryng out for it. You cannot, of course, prove that a miscount cannot occur, but you can say "providing X and Y then a miscount cannot occur in software" where X and Y are things like "the filesystem drivers are error free" and "no hardware fault has occurred in RAM or hard drive". Not perfect no, but it makes solid assurances and clearly delineates where your problems could possibly occur. Likewise proving that only eligible voters voted is going to be hard, but you can likely prove something along the lines of "all recorded votes were cast only by people presenting unique token identifier X" and then your problems are with the people who check people coming in and provide unique identifier tokens - there's still plenty of room for human error, but at least your assured there won't be a software error. You can do similar things for ensuring the vote was recorded as intended - display and print a reciept (to be deposited in a voting box before you leave) and prove that the software cannot record a vote as going to anything other than what is displayed and printed. Sure you can have miscast votes because the person didn't check their reciept and ask to have their vote change if it was wrong, but we're back to human error - we have assurances the software, at least, is ding the right thing.
Jedidiah.
I think the real point here is that what really matters is the breadth and depth of your public support base. Given widespread support you'll be getting support from military personnel with access to military hardware (that they can always disperse to the rest of your base if for some reason that's needed) and any fighting will occur within that framework. It doesn't matter if your civilian populace is armed with automatic rifles or just single hunting rfiles, or not armed at all - what matters is managing to have or to get public support for your cause, and guns don't matter much for that.
In short, whether the civilian populace is armed or not is, these days, of utterly marginal significance with respect to the success or failure of an attempted insurrection in the US.
Jedidiah.
From the GP: Women weren't allowed a vote. Natives weren't allowed a vote. Blacks weren't even considered human, and certainly weren't allowed a vote.
... New Zealand ...
Take a look at the historical treatment of "natives" in
New Zealand probably isn't the best example to be throwing in there. While the treatment of the Maori historically has not exactly been exemplary, it's been better than most other imperial outposts. The founding document of the country is a treaty with the native Maori. There is, of course, some dispute about what exactly it means and how it should be interpreted, and certainly there have been some historical transgressions by the crown for which more recent governments have made coniserable efforts at redress. More importantly, politically in terms of representation New Zealand fared pretty well. It had seats in parliament reserved for Maori, to be voted on by those who choose to identify themselves as Maori, as early as 1867 (and considering parliament was only instituted in 1852 that's a relatively quick move to giving natives explicit representation in government. Moreover New Zealand was the first country to grant universal suffrage in 1893 (while the US took another 27 years to recognise women's right to vote).
Jedidiah.
Do you seriously think that the US Military will have less of a morale problem suppressing American dissidents than they had in Vietnam?
I think they'd have a much larger morale problem violently suppressing unarmed peaceful protetstors than putting down an attempted armed insurrection from people trying to kill them. I'm not saying the military would succeed in any particular case (really it mostly depends on how widespread the protests/insurrection is), I'm trying to say that whether the average civilian has rifles and handguns is of incredibly marginal significance.
Good. Then you won't mind if I keep and bear mine.
I'm not objecting to the second amendment, I'm simply objecting to the oft trotted out line that it's significant in overthrowing the government in the modern world. On that front it just really doesn't matter much.
Jedidiah
1/3 of the population wanted revolution in 1776, 1/3 favored British rule and 1/3 were neutral.
And there was no unbelievably powerfully equipped local standing army which had control of the vast majority of martial power available in the world. What would matter in a modern insurrection is how the US military sides - even if that's a matter of the military splitting with divided loyalties to differing sides of the conflict.
Jedidiah.
OK, did you forget all about Vietnam and Iraq 2.0?
Did you notice that that was a case of a country attemtpting to fight off a foreign aggressor? The US is doing poorly in Iraq, and fared as poorly as it did in Vietnam largely due to the inability to sustain sufficient military to fight a war in a distant foreign country and not lose morale at home. In the case of an internal insurrection the US military can stick with it for as long as they like, most likely with the support of the populace who is horrified by people ambushing and attacking their own people. You'll win an insurrection in the US the moment you gain enough general support for your cause that chunks of the military (be it national guard or otherwise) support you. Basic firearms are not a prerequisite for managing that in this day and age, control of information flow and good rhetoric are going to be far more important. And once you've got some of the military supporting you you don't need basic firearms in the hands of civilians, the military can equip you properly.
Jedidiah.
While I have no intention to start or participate in an insurrection, the concept here isn't a new one. You don't have to have a weapon good enough to outshoot the military; you just have to have one good enough for you and a few friends to ambush a solitary patrol, and take THEIR weapons.
I think the real question is: how long do you expect to be able to maintain that sort of activity, and how do you expect to extend that sort of activity into a means to actually overthrow the government? What you need is popular widespread support for your cause, and unless you've managed to get some control of media to tell your side of the story I think you'll find knocking off a hummer full of guys from your local military base is going to alienate a lot of the very people you want to support you.
Any move to authoritarian government in the US isn't going to occur with the federal government suddenly suspending elections overnight and sending the military out to patrol the streets and enforce curfews or something. It will occur along the lines that things are already going - slowly with a succession of minor tweaks with, as much as possible, the media behind them all the way. That is, the government is going to, as much as possible, have the general public fully supporting them. You'll do as well with mass protests and similar campaigns to win over the general populace and as much of the military as you can to your cause as you will running around shooting Americans in ambushes. If you can get some of the military to side with your cause then they'll give you military weapons to fight with, instead of you having to take them.
Jedidiah.
I think there's a very significant difference there - the US military is a foreign occupying force in Iraq. They have to send troops and material to Iraq, and they have to maintain sufficient morale for the war at home. Are you honstly suggesting that an attempted internal insurrection in the US of the same scale and using the same techniques as the Iraqi insurrection wouldn't be immediately labelled "terrorists", alienated from the rest of the population, and quickly put down just using FBI, and national guard?
To be truly effective an insurrection would need to be widespread and have sufficient general support from the citizenry that the US military itself would be torn on the issue. At that point it would most likely have the support of local national guard, and potentially chunks of the active military - at which point the need for the private populace to be armed would be largely obviated: they could, if necessary arm themselves with military hardware provided by supporting military units.
The real question then is as to how one gains sufficient widespread support. I put it to you that beginning the movement by running around with rifles and homemade bombs and attacking your local military is not going to do it - it's going to alienate the public, not win them to your cause.
Jedidiah.
Arm yourself under the protections of the 2nd amendments. We're allowed guns not just to hunt prey, protect our country from foreign invaders, and ensure our private security, but also to protect ourselves from domestic threats (meaning from within our borders.) If and when our government has become so corrupt that reform through the ballot boxes is impossible, then it is time to turn to the ammo boxes. (I don't believe we are near that point at all. When we are, a whole lot more people will be reaching for their ammo boxes.)
I've always been rather interested in how well this concept works in modern America. It would seem to me that things have moved well past the point where the weapons that can still be legally obtained by private citizens are going to be of real practical significance in any insurrection.
I would be interested to hear a detailed explanation of how you would plan to proceed with an insurrection in such a way that currently permissable firearms in the hands of private citizens are a vital component.
Jedidiah.
Earth has been in an Ice Age for the past 5-10 million years. Apply Global Warming and. . . . . . . . we get "normal" conditions for the vast majority of this planet's history.
I don't think any sane sensible people are claiming that the planet won't cope. It will handle all of this just fine. People who actually have a clue aren't claiming that life won't cope either - it will adapt if necessary and is already pretty flexible to begin with in a lot of ways. I'm sure life on planet in earth in general will keep trucking along much as normal. In fact, there are plenty of people who are concerned who aren't even claiming that humanity won't cope. Personally I would expect that we'll manage to adapt and survive just fine. A lot of the people who are concerned are simply worried about that short blink of an eye (in planetary timescales) during which humanity adapts to the changing climate. You see, in human timescales that could be a reasonably long time, and while we will probably cope in the long run, it might be anywhere from severe adversity and the deaths of a significant percentage of the global population through to merely exceptionally expensive and extremely detrimental to global living standards, in the short to medium term.
Think of it this way: in terms of the timescale of your entire life a cold or flu really doesn't have any signficant impact. It's not going to kill you, you'll recover and be just fine and probably forget about it. That doesn't mean, however, that you should ignore any early symptoms and not try to save yourself being laid up in bed suffering for a few days.
Jedidiah.