Hey, you're preaching to the choir here. If I had my choice everyone would use.ODF or some other open format and we could pick our office suite based on personal preference.
Sadly, I'm not in charge. I'm one guy in a small firm that uses MSOffice, because they can't afford any format friction with the companies they do business with. And I can say from personal experience (because I refuse to use that tripe) that at least 20-30% of the documents that cross my desktop can't be read properly by OO, LO, or Google Docs. Fortunately I'm strictly on the receiving end of those files so I can just deal with the bad formatting and broken scripting, but trying to pretend it doesn't exist is disingenuous.
On the other hand, I'm the guy that can usually open the files from older versions of MSO that give everyone else fits. It's the old MS treadmill, break compatibility just enough with every version to pressure everyone into upgrading regularly, and prevent the competition from being able to maintain compatibility with the current version.
Menus hide features almost as thoroughly and are much more tedious to use. Until you click on the menu, you have very little idea what's on it (except what you've memorized), and if there's no icons, and you haven't memorized positions, then you have to read through every option to find the one you're looking for. They're made worse by the fact that functions are very often not located on the menu you would expect, or menus are named such that *none* of them would lead you to believe they hold the function you're looking for.
Really, when you get right down to it the Ribbon is essentially a hybrid of a toolbar and a sticky-menu - click the menu header, and the associated toolbar is displayed.
The loss of text is quite annoying though - even though you rarely use the text for frequently-used functions, it's invaluable for trying to figure out which F'ing icon is associated with the rarely-used function you're looking for.
Hmmm, actually..., what if you made a ribbon that simultaneously displayed the tool-tips for everything on the bar whenever the mouse was over its tab? Essentially you'd get a 2D menu, where the bulky text was only displayed on demand.
free market Dictionary result for free market/fr märkt/ noun: free market; plural noun: free markets; modifier noun: free-market
an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses.
Unrestricted competition requires competition - which requires the government to do something to prevent the formation of monopolies and oligopolies.
Now, I'd be willing to settle for the government just coming in and breaking up any company that took more than a tiny slice of any given market, but there's obviously no interest in doing that on either side of the aisle. So the question becomes, should we allow monopolies to leverage their power into additional markets?
I've heard The Ribbon has improved a lot since it's introduction, so perhaps it's getting good enough to be worth cloning.
It would also be quite hilarious if LibreOffice manages to make a ribbon that is actually an improvement over traditional toolbars, exposing the fact that the problem is not ribbon interfaces themselves, but Microsoft's general incompetence at making UIs.
I know the times I've used MSOffice I've felt like the ribbon had a lot of potential, if only it weren't so infuriating to use.
>I don't really understand why small firms would do so. One word: compatibility. I'm not a fan of M.S. Office, but small firms often do business with big firms, and any digital paperwork that gets passed around will almost certainly be in MS Office format - which last I checked is neither fully documented, nor even fully compatible with their partially documented "open" format.
LibreOffice, Google Docs, etc. mostly do a pretty good job of working with MS files - but mostly isn't perfect, and leaves open the possibility of costly mistakes, as well as introducing a steady stream of headaches and frustration from dealing with inevitable incompatibilities, with costly effects on morale.
Plus, most new employees will already know their way around MS Office, and would require extensive training to use the alternatives. Not because they're any more difficult, but because most people seem to learn how to use their tools by rote memorization, so that any change requires them to relearn everything from scratch.
When an Office365 subscription costs less than a day's wages per year, it's not really that hard a decision to make.
I can't say I disapprove of these icon changes, and it's certainly worth noting that new icons are likely made by artists rather than programmers - it's possible some programmers are wearing two hats, but in general the man-hours spent on icons, documentation, etc. in a big project are hours spent by contributors that you wouldn't want working on code anyway.
I am generally annoyed with gratuitous icon changes - but in this case it seems like they (mostly) maintained recognizability, while improving legibility, which should be especially nice for those who choose to use smaller icon sizes. Can't tell you how annoyed I get about projects that go for the monochrome icon b.s. - icons are important functional components that must be easy to recognize, and they remove one of the most dramatic differentiating features for an arguable improvement in aesthetics?
Well, at least it's not the default. And it may turn out that the problem isn't the "Ribbon" strategy per-se, but that Microsoft's implementation of it is miserably bad. It would hardly be the first time they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
I thought you guys were in favor of the free market? That's the entire point of NN - to allow a free market on the internet, rather than allowing the ISP oligopoly to decide winners and losers.
Note that your formula does not actually involve voltage - only the ratio of voltage differential to temperature differential. Now, it's probably safe to assume the voltage given is actually the differential between the ends of the thermocouple, but without being given the corresponding temperature differential, the information is still useless. (You probably also want to know the absolute temperature, since S for a given thermocouple may vary with absolute temperature even if the temperature differential remains the same - e.g. the effect might be much larger or smaller if you're near absolute zero)
Also, it's not a measure of efficiency any more than the gravitational constant is - rather it's a measure of the magnitude of the effect. Efficiency only comes in when you compare the magnitude of the electrical power generated (for which you also need to know the current) to the amount of thermal power transferred.
You are correct, I just didn't want to get into the details with someone who quite likely doesn't care. Especially since the behavior of water in the atmosphere is quite complex, and not completely well understood (e.g. do clouds reflect more sunlight and cool the planet, or more infrared and warm it? Recent studies suggest the latter, though a narrow enough margin that there may actually be no net effect either way".) It's still very much an area of active research, and I'm far from an expert. I can give a basic 1000ft overview though.
Basically yes, water is a potent greenhouse gas, and as temperature rises (globally) the amount of water vapor in the air will also rise, and accelerate the process. But water alone can only push things so far - adding an extra unit of water to the atmosphere will raise the temperature of the air, but not by enough to raise the maximum amount of water the air can hold by a full unit. Keep adding more water, and eventually the air is saturated (100% humidity) and you get precipitation and/or condensation dumping water out of the air at least as fast as evaporation is adding more. That's the self-regulation: you can't get runaway global warming with water alone, because the higher you drive the %humidity, the faster the water leaves the air.
Add a unit of CO2 though and you get a similar warming effect, so that the air can hold more water, without changing the amount of water in the air, so the % humidity actually drops and precipitation becomes less likely. Evaporation will obviously continue adding more water until a stable %humidity is reached, but the important detail is that at the exact same %humidity, the absolute amount of water in the air is now higher, and thus so is the greenhouse effect of that water.
As for your various debates: We've shown pretty conclusively that Humanity is responsible for the increase in atmospheric CO2 - it's easy to calculate roughly how much fossil CO2 we produce based on how much fossil fuel we consume, and we're producing it faster than the atmospheric concentration is increasing. If you were filling a pool with a garden hose, and the amount of water in the pool is increasing more slowly than you're adding it, then it doesn't matter how complex any other plumbing is, you can be fairly confident in stating that the amount of water would be decreasing without your contribution.
The fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas can be tested in any middle-school science lab, and to argue that increasing amounts are somehow not raising the temperature of the planet is the extraordinary claim that requires evidence. Exactly how much it will do so directly is also relatively easy to calculate. The knock-on effects though, such as the effects of the correspondingly greater amount of water in the air on weather patterns, are indeed up for debate. As is exactly how much heating the planet can take before we tip its bistable climate out of the last 2.6 million years of icehouse conditions into the hot-house state it was in when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Which might be a good thing in the long term - but the transition has always been accompanied by mass-extinctions in the past, so even if we win in the long term, those intervening centuries of transition are likely to be brutal. There's also the rising sea levels to contend with, and it appears that the global climate patterns may actually have been even less stable than the glacial/interglacial cycle that characterizes an icehouse Earth.
We've also got some big data points already: as the polar icecaps melt the temperature difference between equator and poles decreases - and that difference is the driving force behind most of the world's wind and sea currents, which are slowing down in response. As those slow they start to wander, sometimes even looping back on themselves - the reason we're having to contend with the polar vortex here in the US, when it used to be a fast stream confined much closer to the poles. Slower more meandering air currents mean weather systems are
Keep in mind that, as an end user, you don't actually care about the voltage, it's the wattage that matters. If you can generate 1 million amps at 1 milliVolt, then you've got 1kW of power - the rest is just a matter of stepping the voltage to the desired levels.
Granted, that's pretty unlikely, but I hate hearing people cite information that's so incomplete as to be basically useless.
> If there aren't any bugs in the code, Ha! Good one!
> If there are bugs in the code, why wouldn't they be able to exploit them to communicate with the other processes and cause just as many issues? You might be able to, but you might not - it depends entirely on the nature of the bugs.
Basically security programming amounts to putting multiple layers of armor around something, knowing full well that none of the layers are perfect. However, each layer makes it more difficult (read: expensive) to get to the chewy center, at least early on before the vulnerabilities are well known.
And when someone inevitably does find a way through, and the developers learn of it? Then that "one" vulnerability is actually a list of the vulnerabilities that were exploited in each layer or armor - fix any one of those holes and you're safe again, at least until they find a new way through that layer of armor. Fix most or all of them, and you send them back to the drawing board.
Yes, rounding errors exist. But look at your own source a little more carefully, my error was in the 0.1%, NOT the 93%: All trace gasses combined are actually 0.04338% rather than 0.1%. Which means that CO2 is 0.0407%/0.04338% = 93.82% of all trace gasses. And it's worth noting that most of the remaining gasses are ALSO not greenhouse gasses, so CO2 is approaching 100% of greenhouse gasses.
You also seem to be willfully ignoring the fact that the percentage of CO2 is only miniscule compared to the gasses that have no effect on global warming. It's like trying to shine a light through a stack of 996 sheets of crystal-clear glass, and 4 layers of mylar. The glass won't really make much difference compared to the mylar. We could have 10x more oxygen and nitrogen in the air, and the planet wouldn't get noticeably warmer. Or we could get rid of the CO2 and the surface of the planet would freeze solid.
The moon is a good reference point for the "normal" temperature of something our distance from the sun. It gets the same amount of sunlight we do, and actually absorbs a lot more than us since it's surface is basically coal black, but it's temperature swings from -183C at night to 106C during the day - averaging out to about -39C (-102F). Without the "miniscule amount" of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere Earth would be even colder.
Yes, the sun heats the Earth, but CO2 slows the rate at which that heat escapes.
"As for the 420ppm is nothing" B.S. - The atmosphere is composed primarily of nitrogen(~78%), oxygen(~21%), and argon(~0.9%), all of which are transparent to infrared radiation, and thus irrelevant to the greenhouse effect that keeps our planet from being a frozen ball of ice. That leaves the last 0.1% of trace gasses for greenhouse warming - and over 93% of that is CO2. (There's also water, but that varies wildly and self-regulates through evaporation and precipitaion)
Sure - but for the average American that's the difference between "Someone I'm doing business with is a crook", versus "My employees are stealing from me"
The annoying thing is that I actually did look up a global population history graph to find a date for approximately 1% of current population. Apparently I either misread, or chanced upon a very inaccurate graph.
Or you know, enrich the poor nations so that they build their own richer societies. It's actually fairly easy to do - having lots of kids makes you poor, and if you were poor to begin with that means you start having trouble keeping your kids alive and healthy. Nobody *wants* that, there's just a whole lot of people who don't have any other option (abstinence is not a realistic option) So all you have to do is get the ball rolling, and it's self-accelerating.
There's been great success pretty much everywhere it's been tried with a multiprong attack: - Give poor people access to free birth control and family planning education (because they're mostly not familiar with the concept of being able to choose how large a family to have - not surprising when even a single condom can easily cost a full day's income) - provide basic health care for children so that they have a high chance of surviving to adulthood. - undermine the influence of anti-family-planning culture (Catholicism being one of the worst offenders)
Typically within 1-2 generations of offering that, you see growth rates fall to just slightly over 2 children per women, and slowly fall from there.
I'm not sure they're pretending. I've met many in person, including a few fairly intelligent and well educated I really thought would know better. I think a lot of them really are that gullible and/or stupid. Or at least angry and desperate enough to believe anyone who says they'll make things better. Tell them the government is corrupt (which I think we all know), and that you're going to do something about it, you get a lot of people's attention. Then start feeding them increasingly unhinged conspiracy theories, and giving them permission to be ever-larger assholes to... basically anyone whoisn't 100% on board with your agenda... some get turned off, but the ones that stick around, they get more committed to the cause than ever, and increasing lose connection with reality. I've met some who, when confronted with video of Trump's more obviously heinous or stupid statements or actions, simply dismiss them as fakes. And once someone is convinced that the propaganda office is the only source of real news, I really don't know how you can possibly shake their faith.
>and an Intel fab makes one thing, processors. You can't repurpose it to do anything else. It's way too specialized for that
Are your sure? Seems to me it would be relatively straightforward to make the same fab produce processors, RAM, Flash, and a wide range of other auxiliary chips - they're all transistors etched into silicon (well, Flash is mostly capacitors, but I think the technology to etch them is the same). Maybe you couldn't make them on the existing fab, but if there's not enough market to support a dedicated CPU fab line, then it would be relatively simple to make a more flexible one.
If we were talking about just the progress of technology, then I would agree, a larger population is better. But a larger population comes with a lot of other costs - increased pollution pouring into a planet with limited and insufficient pollution-eliminating pathways. Overtaxing limited ecological production capacity. Forcing democracy to scale far beyond anything we've ever made actually work. Increasing stress and depression in a species that never evolved to handle the population densities that are now normal. Etc,etc,etc.
I suspect that our population could fall well below a billion before the costs outweighed the benefits.
That wouldn't be a link, it'd be a database. Seems to me many/most phones are available in completely unlocked form direct from the manufacturer at the full outrageous price, as well as in various degrees of network-locked models. If you want a phone that can install a custom ROM, do your research beforehand, and make sure you're getting the *exact* model that supports it, rather than the indistinguishably different model that does not. As a quick test, if the phone is in any way branded by any network, it's a good bet it's firmly locked. Not that the lack of such branding is any guarantee it *will* work, but you can at least avoid the flashing warning lights.
I figured there's nothing to be gained by *them* by collecting it. They already get to watch everything you do on the website in question, how are they going to profit from storing your log-in credentials as well? I mean sure, "all surveillance data is good data", but in this case exposing it, or even collecting it without your permission, might put them in some legal hot water. What's the payoff to justify the risk?
It's even worse than that - even if advertisers were incredibly polite and non-invasive (Ha!) ads are still inherently evil. Their entire purpose is to make you want something you previously had no interest in. And in doing so they generate an artificial poverty, diminishing your wealth regardless or whether you actually buy whatever's being sold.
Sure. There is however some difficulty in prosecuting a foreign company for doing something that's perfectly legal where they did it. After all, you visited *them*, not the other way around.
We're only just beginning to sort out how to handle jurisdictional issues on the internet, and it's far from settled how such things should be handled. For now, if you want a company you're dealing with to be bound by your country's laws, you should only deal with companies fully located within your own country. Everything else gets... debatable.
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Hey, you're preaching to the choir here. If I had my choice everyone would use .ODF or some other open format and we could pick our office suite based on personal preference.
Sadly, I'm not in charge. I'm one guy in a small firm that uses MSOffice, because they can't afford any format friction with the companies they do business with. And I can say from personal experience (because I refuse to use that tripe) that at least 20-30% of the documents that cross my desktop can't be read properly by OO, LO, or Google Docs. Fortunately I'm strictly on the receiving end of those files so I can just deal with the bad formatting and broken scripting, but trying to pretend it doesn't exist is disingenuous.
On the other hand, I'm the guy that can usually open the files from older versions of MSO that give everyone else fits. It's the old MS treadmill, break compatibility just enough with every version to pressure everyone into upgrading regularly, and prevent the competition from being able to maintain compatibility with the current version.
Where's this "fair market" term coming from? I can't even find any reference to it on Google.
Menus hide features almost as thoroughly and are much more tedious to use. Until you click on the menu, you have very little idea what's on it (except what you've memorized), and if there's no icons, and you haven't memorized positions, then you have to read through every option to find the one you're looking for. They're made worse by the fact that functions are very often not located on the menu you would expect, or menus are named such that *none* of them would lead you to believe they hold the function you're looking for.
Really, when you get right down to it the Ribbon is essentially a hybrid of a toolbar and a sticky-menu - click the menu header, and the associated toolbar is displayed.
The loss of text is quite annoying though - even though you rarely use the text for frequently-used functions, it's invaluable for trying to figure out which F'ing icon is associated with the rarely-used function you're looking for.
Hmmm, actually..., what if you made a ribbon that simultaneously displayed the tool-tips for everything on the bar whenever the mouse was over its tab? Essentially you'd get a 2D menu, where the bulky text was only displayed on demand.
Lets look at the dictionary definition, shall we?
free market /fr märkt/
Dictionary result for free market
noun: free market; plural noun: free markets; modifier noun: free-market
an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses.
Unrestricted competition requires competition - which requires the government to do something to prevent the formation of monopolies and oligopolies.
Now, I'd be willing to settle for the government just coming in and breaking up any company that took more than a tiny slice of any given market, but there's obviously no interest in doing that on either side of the aisle. So the question becomes, should we allow monopolies to leverage their power into additional markets?
I've heard The Ribbon has improved a lot since it's introduction, so perhaps it's getting good enough to be worth cloning.
It would also be quite hilarious if LibreOffice manages to make a ribbon that is actually an improvement over traditional toolbars, exposing the fact that the problem is not ribbon interfaces themselves, but Microsoft's general incompetence at making UIs.
I know the times I've used MSOffice I've felt like the ribbon had a lot of potential, if only it weren't so infuriating to use.
>I don't really understand why small firms would do so.
One word: compatibility.
I'm not a fan of M.S. Office, but small firms often do business with big firms, and any digital paperwork that gets passed around will almost certainly be in MS Office format - which last I checked is neither fully documented, nor even fully compatible with their partially documented "open" format.
LibreOffice, Google Docs, etc. mostly do a pretty good job of working with MS files - but mostly isn't perfect, and leaves open the possibility of costly mistakes, as well as introducing a steady stream of headaches and frustration from dealing with inevitable incompatibilities, with costly effects on morale.
Plus, most new employees will already know their way around MS Office, and would require extensive training to use the alternatives. Not because they're any more difficult, but because most people seem to learn how to use their tools by rote memorization, so that any change requires them to relearn everything from scratch.
When an Office365 subscription costs less than a day's wages per year, it's not really that hard a decision to make.
I can't say I disapprove of these icon changes, and it's certainly worth noting that new icons are likely made by artists rather than programmers - it's possible some programmers are wearing two hats, but in general the man-hours spent on icons, documentation, etc. in a big project are hours spent by contributors that you wouldn't want working on code anyway.
I am generally annoyed with gratuitous icon changes - but in this case it seems like they (mostly) maintained recognizability, while improving legibility, which should be especially nice for those who choose to use smaller icon sizes. Can't tell you how annoyed I get about projects that go for the monochrome icon b.s. - icons are important functional components that must be easy to recognize, and they remove one of the most dramatic differentiating features for an arguable improvement in aesthetics?
Well, at least it's not the default. And it may turn out that the problem isn't the "Ribbon" strategy per-se, but that Microsoft's implementation of it is miserably bad. It would hardly be the first time they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
I thought you guys were in favor of the free market? That's the entire point of NN - to allow a free market on the internet, rather than allowing the ISP oligopoly to decide winners and losers.
Note that your formula does not actually involve voltage - only the ratio of voltage differential to temperature differential. Now, it's probably safe to assume the voltage given is actually the differential between the ends of the thermocouple, but without being given the corresponding temperature differential, the information is still useless. (You probably also want to know the absolute temperature, since S for a given thermocouple may vary with absolute temperature even if the temperature differential remains the same - e.g. the effect might be much larger or smaller if you're near absolute zero)
Also, it's not a measure of efficiency any more than the gravitational constant is - rather it's a measure of the magnitude of the effect. Efficiency only comes in when you compare the magnitude of the electrical power generated (for which you also need to know the current) to the amount of thermal power transferred.
You are correct, I just didn't want to get into the details with someone who quite likely doesn't care. Especially since the behavior of water in the atmosphere is quite complex, and not completely well understood (e.g. do clouds reflect more sunlight and cool the planet, or more infrared and warm it? Recent studies suggest the latter, though a narrow enough margin that there may actually be no net effect either way".) It's still very much an area of active research, and I'm far from an expert. I can give a basic 1000ft overview though.
Basically yes, water is a potent greenhouse gas, and as temperature rises (globally) the amount of water vapor in the air will also rise, and accelerate the process. But water alone can only push things so far - adding an extra unit of water to the atmosphere will raise the temperature of the air, but not by enough to raise the maximum amount of water the air can hold by a full unit. Keep adding more water, and eventually the air is saturated (100% humidity) and you get precipitation and/or condensation dumping water out of the air at least as fast as evaporation is adding more. That's the self-regulation: you can't get runaway global warming with water alone, because the higher you drive the %humidity, the faster the water leaves the air.
Add a unit of CO2 though and you get a similar warming effect, so that the air can hold more water, without changing the amount of water in the air, so the % humidity actually drops and precipitation becomes less likely. Evaporation will obviously continue adding more water until a stable %humidity is reached, but the important detail is that at the exact same %humidity, the absolute amount of water in the air is now higher, and thus so is the greenhouse effect of that water.
As for your various debates: We've shown pretty conclusively that Humanity is responsible for the increase in atmospheric CO2 - it's easy to calculate roughly how much fossil CO2 we produce based on how much fossil fuel we consume, and we're producing it faster than the atmospheric concentration is increasing. If you were filling a pool with a garden hose, and the amount of water in the pool is increasing more slowly than you're adding it, then it doesn't matter how complex any other plumbing is, you can be fairly confident in stating that the amount of water would be decreasing without your contribution.
The fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas can be tested in any middle-school science lab, and to argue that increasing amounts are somehow not raising the temperature of the planet is the extraordinary claim that requires evidence. Exactly how much it will do so directly is also relatively easy to calculate. The knock-on effects though, such as the effects of the correspondingly greater amount of water in the air on weather patterns, are indeed up for debate. As is exactly how much heating the planet can take before we tip its bistable climate out of the last 2.6 million years of icehouse conditions into the hot-house state it was in when dinosaurs roamed the Earth. Which might be a good thing in the long term - but the transition has always been accompanied by mass-extinctions in the past, so even if we win in the long term, those intervening centuries of transition are likely to be brutal. There's also the rising sea levels to contend with, and it appears that the global climate patterns may actually have been even less stable than the glacial/interglacial cycle that characterizes an icehouse Earth.
We've also got some big data points already: as the polar icecaps melt the temperature difference between equator and poles decreases - and that difference is the driving force behind most of the world's wind and sea currents, which are slowing down in response. As those slow they start to wander, sometimes even looping back on themselves - the reason we're having to contend with the polar vortex here in the US, when it used to be a fast stream confined much closer to the poles. Slower more meandering air currents mean weather systems are
Isn't that the thing women use to remove callouses from their feet?
Keep in mind that, as an end user, you don't actually care about the voltage, it's the wattage that matters. If you can generate 1 million amps at 1 milliVolt, then you've got 1kW of power - the rest is just a matter of stepping the voltage to the desired levels.
Granted, that's pretty unlikely, but I hate hearing people cite information that's so incomplete as to be basically useless.
> If there aren't any bugs in the code,
Ha! Good one!
> If there are bugs in the code, why wouldn't they be able to exploit them to communicate with the other processes and cause just as many issues?
You might be able to, but you might not - it depends entirely on the nature of the bugs.
Basically security programming amounts to putting multiple layers of armor around something, knowing full well that none of the layers are perfect. However, each layer makes it more difficult (read: expensive) to get to the chewy center, at least early on before the vulnerabilities are well known.
And when someone inevitably does find a way through, and the developers learn of it? Then that "one" vulnerability is actually a list of the vulnerabilities that were exploited in each layer or armor - fix any one of those holes and you're safe again, at least until they find a new way through that layer of armor. Fix most or all of them, and you send them back to the drawing board.
Yes, rounding errors exist. But look at your own source a little more carefully, my error was in the 0.1%, NOT the 93%: All trace gasses combined are actually 0.04338% rather than 0.1%. Which means that CO2 is 0.0407%/0.04338% = 93.82% of all trace gasses. And it's worth noting that most of the remaining gasses are ALSO not greenhouse gasses, so CO2 is approaching 100% of greenhouse gasses.
You also seem to be willfully ignoring the fact that the percentage of CO2 is only miniscule compared to the gasses that have no effect on global warming. It's like trying to shine a light through a stack of 996 sheets of crystal-clear glass, and 4 layers of mylar. The glass won't really make much difference compared to the mylar. We could have 10x more oxygen and nitrogen in the air, and the planet wouldn't get noticeably warmer. Or we could get rid of the CO2 and the surface of the planet would freeze solid.
The moon is a good reference point for the "normal" temperature of something our distance from the sun. It gets the same amount of sunlight we do, and actually absorbs a lot more than us since it's surface is basically coal black, but it's temperature swings from -183C at night to 106C during the day - averaging out to about -39C (-102F). Without the "miniscule amount" of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere Earth would be even colder.
Yes, the sun heats the Earth, but CO2 slows the rate at which that heat escapes.
"As for the 420ppm is nothing" B.S. - The atmosphere is composed primarily of nitrogen(~78%), oxygen(~21%), and argon(~0.9%), all of which are transparent to infrared radiation, and thus irrelevant to the greenhouse effect that keeps our planet from being a frozen ball of ice. That leaves the last 0.1% of trace gasses for greenhouse warming - and over 93% of that is CO2. (There's also water, but that varies wildly and self-regulates through evaporation and precipitaion)
Sure - but for the average American that's the difference between "Someone I'm doing business with is a crook", versus "My employees are stealing from me"
The annoying thing is that I actually did look up a global population history graph to find a date for approximately 1% of current population. Apparently I either misread, or chanced upon a very inaccurate graph.
Or you know, enrich the poor nations so that they build their own richer societies. It's actually fairly easy to do - having lots of kids makes you poor, and if you were poor to begin with that means you start having trouble keeping your kids alive and healthy. Nobody *wants* that, there's just a whole lot of people who don't have any other option (abstinence is not a realistic option) So all you have to do is get the ball rolling, and it's self-accelerating.
There's been great success pretty much everywhere it's been tried with a multiprong attack:
- Give poor people access to free birth control and family planning education (because they're mostly not familiar with the concept of being able to choose how large a family to have - not surprising when even a single condom can easily cost a full day's income)
- provide basic health care for children so that they have a high chance of surviving to adulthood.
- undermine the influence of anti-family-planning culture (Catholicism being one of the worst offenders)
Typically within 1-2 generations of offering that, you see growth rates fall to just slightly over 2 children per women, and slowly fall from there.
I'm not sure they're pretending. I've met many in person, including a few fairly intelligent and well educated I really thought would know better. I think a lot of them really are that gullible and/or stupid. Or at least angry and desperate enough to believe anyone who says they'll make things better. Tell them the government is corrupt (which I think we all know), and that you're going to do something about it, you get a lot of people's attention. Then start feeding them increasingly unhinged conspiracy theories, and giving them permission to be ever-larger assholes to... basically anyone whoisn't 100% on board with your agenda... some get turned off, but the ones that stick around, they get more committed to the cause than ever, and increasing lose connection with reality. I've met some who, when confronted with video of Trump's more obviously heinous or stupid statements or actions, simply dismiss them as fakes. And once someone is convinced that the propaganda office is the only source of real news, I really don't know how you can possibly shake their faith.
>and an Intel fab makes one thing, processors. You can't repurpose it to do anything else. It's way too specialized for that
Are your sure? Seems to me it would be relatively straightforward to make the same fab produce processors, RAM, Flash, and a wide range of other auxiliary chips - they're all transistors etched into silicon (well, Flash is mostly capacitors, but I think the technology to etch them is the same). Maybe you couldn't make them on the existing fab, but if there's not enough market to support a dedicated CPU fab line, then it would be relatively simple to make a more flexible one.
If we were talking about just the progress of technology, then I would agree, a larger population is better. But a larger population comes with a lot of other costs - increased pollution pouring into a planet with limited and insufficient pollution-eliminating pathways. Overtaxing limited ecological production capacity. Forcing democracy to scale far beyond anything we've ever made actually work. Increasing stress and depression in a species that never evolved to handle the population densities that are now normal. Etc,etc,etc.
I suspect that our population could fall well below a billion before the costs outweighed the benefits.
That wouldn't be a link, it'd be a database. Seems to me many/most phones are available in completely unlocked form direct from the manufacturer at the full outrageous price, as well as in various degrees of network-locked models. If you want a phone that can install a custom ROM, do your research beforehand, and make sure you're getting the *exact* model that supports it, rather than the indistinguishably different model that does not. As a quick test, if the phone is in any way branded by any network, it's a good bet it's firmly locked. Not that the lack of such branding is any guarantee it *will* work, but you can at least avoid the flashing warning lights.
I figured there's nothing to be gained by *them* by collecting it. They already get to watch everything you do on the website in question, how are they going to profit from storing your log-in credentials as well? I mean sure, "all surveillance data is good data", but in this case exposing it, or even collecting it without your permission, might put them in some legal hot water. What's the payoff to justify the risk?
It's even worse than that - even if advertisers were incredibly polite and non-invasive (Ha!) ads are still inherently evil. Their entire purpose is to make you want something you previously had no interest in. And in doing so they generate an artificial poverty, diminishing your wealth regardless or whether you actually buy whatever's being sold.
Sure. There is however some difficulty in prosecuting a foreign company for doing something that's perfectly legal where they did it. After all, you visited *them*, not the other way around.
We're only just beginning to sort out how to handle jurisdictional issues on the internet, and it's far from settled how such things should be handled. For now, if you want a company you're dealing with to be bound by your country's laws, you should only deal with companies fully located within your own country. Everything else gets... debatable.