Once a certain wealth level is achieved, the number of kids per family is reduced.
This is only a temporary phenomenon at best. Any gene that promotes large families despite high wealth levels will grow exponentially, until it takes over the entire population.
A more likely scenario is that the population will oscillate rather than smoothly approach an asymptote.
When there are plenty of resources, people get plenty of children. As these children survive into adulthood when the resources run out, they start to kill each other to survive. Also, some of the renewable resource (e.g. trees, fish, and topsoil) take a while to recover, causing the population to drop much lower before it can start to grow again.
Like you have a normal user account and decide you want to try this cool new network file system but the admin won't install the kernel module.
Maybe the admin doesn't want to you to test this cool new network filesystem on their infrastructure, even if you could run it in userspace.
If you have a legitimate reason to be testing filesystems on somebody else's hardware, there are ways to accomplish this, even in Linux. However, the simplest solution is simply to get your own (virtual) hardware, and do whatever you want.
They should be a little bit slower due to context switching (waaaah! my computer acts like it's 3 months older! waaaaahh!)
If context switching overhead was the only problem you'd be right. A much bigger problem is the effort it requires to maintain a coherent state between loosely coupled tasks in a microkernel. The oft-repeated mantra that a microkernel is easier to develop for is just a joke. For example, making a single-threaded filesystem task is pretty simple, but the performance will be horrible if you have 1000 other tasks, all blasting this single task with filesystem request messages. The obvious sounding fix, developing a scalable, multi-threaded filesystem, is not a simple job at all. In fact, it is extremely hard, and the reason is that a filesystem needs to have a coherent state. If one task renames a directory, other tasks need to be notified atomically, or you need to redesign the entire filesystem to be robust even when working with out-of-date information.
In comparison, developing a scalable monolithic kernel filesystem is much easier. If you have 1000 processes banging on the filesystem in Linux, multi threading is done automatically.
The photo of the government officials was a pretty accurate record. The picture of the three men was taken when they were admiring the new road, and the background was an actual picture of that same road.
The photoshopped picture was merely a small cosmetic change to remove the glare on the road that was originally in the background.
Even chess programs running on smart phones have reached grandmaster levels. In 2009, Pocket Fritz 4 running an on HDC touch won the Copa Mercosur tournament in Buenos Aires with 9 wins and a draw, and a 2898 performance rating.
Cheating, in this case, means violating the rules of the championship:
18th WORLD COMPUTER CHESS CHAMPIONSHIP TOURNAMENT RULES
2. Each program must be the original work of the entering developers. Programming teams whose code is derived from or including game-playing code written by others must name all other authors, or the source of such code, in the details of their submission form
The rules of the International Computer Games Association that hosts the championship state that the program must be an original work of the developers. If the program is derived from other sources, they must be named together with the original authors.
Rybka/Houdini played a 40-game match recently, and Houdini won by a wide margin of 23.5-16.5. You can see the match here: http://livechess.chessdom.com/site/ (Check for TCEC S1 Elite Match)
In general, people will want clocks that pretty much point to noon at the sun's zenith where they live
But it doesn't have to be at the nearest second. Where I live, the sun reached zenith at 1:43pm today. Even if we stop counting the leap seconds, it will take long before that number reaches 2pm. At that time, we can start considering adding a leap hour, or something similar.
Companies like Goldman Sachs have little to benefit from bringing down Exxon or Shell. Besides, even with the most stringent CO2 reductions, there is no suitable alternative for oil until the wells run dry. The future of those companies is secure until then.
Oh, yeah, governments are never interested in increasing regulation (and thus their own power).
Sure, but there are better methods than setting up a worldwide conspiracy that could be easily uncovered by any decent researcher. Also, your method would assume that all major governments have their goals aligned. This is simply not true. Russia's economy is for a large portion based on oil and gas exports, and they would hate to lose that in return for some extra regulation. Other countries like China are rapidly building coal plants to provide electricity to their citizens, and have little interest in slowing that down. And, obviously, some countries like China do not have a problem with increasing regulation if they wanted to do that on a whim.
Yeah I noted how every poor country in the world was massively in favor of enacting climate change legislation
Of course, most of the developed world doesn't give a fuck about them.
You can use taxes and subsidies as a way to incorporate hidden costs into a product. For instance, using a coal power plant to generate electricity may be cheap, but only by using current coal price, and ignoring some of the environmental/health damage it does. If you know prices are going to rise in the next 25 years, and you know that the solar panels have a similar lifespan, it's only fair to make some adjustments.
Of course, hidden costs must also be incorporated for solar technology whenever they apply.
1. Can you not imagine any economic interests in promoting anthropogenic global warming?
Not enough to justify setting up a giant, global conspiracy of scientists.
2. Why didn't you mention the governmental interest in promoting anthropogenic global warming?
Because governments have little interest in doing that anyway. Note how little progress is made on climate summits to make any kind of change. I'd be more worried about the influence of oil companies on governments.
I didn't say we'd get perfect results. But even with imperfect results, you can make an assessment about the cost of mitigation. You just have to put in the error bars as well. Same thing applies to the cost of reduction, which is probably harder to calculate.
Suppose you want to build a levee system with a requirement that a breach won't happen with more than 0.01% chance per year. Now, you can put in the model of the sea level over the next century, with the appropriate error bars, and update your estimate on how high the levees need to be. As knowledge progresses, you redo this calculation ever year. Even with limited precision, this is a better strategy than ignoring the model output altogether.
I have to disagree about your assessment of the climate models. They are mostly physical models, with only a limited number of parameters that can be tweaked:
Secondly, there are tuning parameters that control aspects of the emergent system. Gravity wave drag parameters are not very constrained by data, and so are often tuned to improve the climatology of stratospheric zonal winds. The threshold relative humidity for making clouds is tuned often to get the most realistic cloud cover and global albedo. Surprisingly, there are very few of these (maybe a half dozen) that are used in adjusting the models to match the data. It is important to note that these exercises are done with the mean climate (including the seasonal cycle and some internal variability) â" and once set they are kept fixed for any perturbation experiment.
And once upon a time there was no debate about the fact that it was possible to turn lead into gold
Do you have anything more recent ? Science and science publishing has improved a bit since the 17th century. Besides, it's not even true.
Also, periodicals would love to publish counter arguments, as long as they are scientifically sound. Such publications are good for publicity. The only problem is that this combination doesn't happen very often.
No, what's more likely is that the whales left in the 1800's because they were hunted, and they are returning because they aren't (as much) anymore.
The article's claim that they returned as a result of higher temperatures isn't very well supported (it certainly doesn't provide any citations). It may be different for the algae, though.
BTW, nobody ever claimed that recent years were "the hottest ever". The claim was that those years were the hottest in the modern temperature record, which goes back to 1880. Based on proxy data, it is likely that last decade was the hottest since at least a couple thousand years.
It's only hotly debated by some politicians, laypeople on blogs and in the popular press. The debate in the scientific literature is almost non-existent.
NO. The fact that the change is caused by humans is interesting but not relevant to our course of action
Of course it is relevant to understand what's causing a certain phenomenon. If we understand how current warming is caused by increasing greenhouse gases, then we also know how much we can influence warming by reducing the amount of those gases we produce.
And even if we choose not to limit CO2 production, we can use the knowledge to estimate how big the warming is going to be, and what kind of problems it could cause within a certain time frame. That knowledge could be used to allocate the necessary funds to deal with the problems.
Since 1 pixel on the graph equals about 100,000 years, it's impossible to say whether our current rate of change is unprecedented on a century-timescale, or not.
And, even assuming the current variability is not unprecedented on a 100-million year scale, that does little to comfort somebody living in a low lying coastal city, or on a flood plane, getting threatened by higher sea levels and increased precipitation.
A whale is either there or it's not. It isn't half there.
But two whales can be half there.
Current "global warming" is well within the bounds of natural variation
Irrelevant. What's relevant is the current global warming is caused by human activity, how it will impact our lives, and what options we have to change it. The fact that millions of years ago it was even hotter due to some natural phenomenon doesn't change anything. It's like saying: "it's not a problem that your house is flooded, because 165 million years ago, there used to be a sea in that place"
Slashdot Mirror
This is only a temporary phenomenon at best. Any gene that promotes large families despite high wealth levels will grow exponentially, until it takes over the entire population.
A more likely scenario is that the population will oscillate rather than smoothly approach an asymptote.
When there are plenty of resources, people get plenty of children. As these children survive into adulthood when the resources run out, they start to kill each other to survive. Also, some of the renewable resource (e.g. trees, fish, and topsoil) take a while to recover, causing the population to drop much lower before it can start to grow again.
A very simple model between two species is described by the Lotka-Volterra equations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotka%E2%80%93Volterra_equation
Maybe the admin doesn't want to you to test this cool new network filesystem on their infrastructure, even if you could run it in userspace.
If you have a legitimate reason to be testing filesystems on somebody else's hardware, there are ways to accomplish this, even in Linux. However, the simplest solution is simply to get your own (virtual) hardware, and do whatever you want.
If context switching overhead was the only problem you'd be right. A much bigger problem is the effort it requires to maintain a coherent state between loosely coupled tasks in a microkernel. The oft-repeated mantra that a microkernel is easier to develop for is just a joke. For example, making a single-threaded filesystem task is pretty simple, but the performance will be horrible if you have 1000 other tasks, all blasting this single task with filesystem request messages. The obvious sounding fix, developing a scalable, multi-threaded filesystem, is not a simple job at all. In fact, it is extremely hard, and the reason is that a filesystem needs to have a coherent state. If one task renames a directory, other tasks need to be notified atomically, or you need to redesign the entire filesystem to be robust even when working with out-of-date information.
In comparison, developing a scalable monolithic kernel filesystem is much easier. If you have 1000 processes banging on the filesystem in Linux, multi threading is done automatically.
The photo of the government officials was a pretty accurate record. The picture of the three men was taken when they were admiring the new road, and the background was an actual picture of that same road.
The photoshopped picture was merely a small cosmetic change to remove the glare on the road that was originally in the background.
So ? This is no different than any fashion photo on the cover of a magazine.
He's using a funny way of not redistributing binaries, then:
http://www.rybkachess.com/index.php?auswahl=Purchase+Rybka
Even chess programs running on smart phones have reached grandmaster levels. In 2009, Pocket Fritz 4 running an on HDC touch won the Copa Mercosur tournament in Buenos Aires with 9 wins and a draw, and a 2898 performance rating.
Of course, if you wanted to prove that two algorithms are identical, you would not compare the positions where the computers both made optimal moves.
Instead, you find positions where one program makes a weird mistake, and you compare the other program to see if it makes the same mistake.
Cheating, in this case, means violating the rules of the championship:
The rules of the International Computer Games Association that hosts the championship state that the program must be an original work of the developers. If the program is derived from other sources, they must be named together with the original authors.
No Rybka, but Houdini:
http://www.cruxis.com/chess/houdini.htm
Rybka/Houdini played a 40-game match recently, and Houdini won by a wide margin of 23.5-16.5. You can see the match here:
http://livechess.chessdom.com/site/ (Check for TCEC S1 Elite Match)
But it doesn't have to be at the nearest second. Where I live, the sun reached zenith at 1:43pm today. Even if we stop counting the leap seconds, it will take long before that number reaches 2pm. At that time, we can start considering adding a leap hour, or something similar.
Companies like Goldman Sachs have little to benefit from bringing down Exxon or Shell. Besides, even with the most stringent CO2 reductions, there is no suitable alternative for oil until the wells run dry. The future of those companies is secure until then.
Sure, but there are better methods than setting up a worldwide conspiracy that could be easily uncovered by any decent researcher. Also, your method would assume that all major governments have their goals aligned. This is simply not true. Russia's economy is for a large portion based on oil and gas exports, and they would hate to lose that in return for some extra regulation. Other countries like China are rapidly building coal plants to provide electricity to their citizens, and have little interest in slowing that down. And, obviously, some countries like China do not have a problem with increasing regulation if they wanted to do that on a whim.
Of course, most of the developed world doesn't give a fuck about them.
You can use taxes and subsidies as a way to incorporate hidden costs into a product. For instance, using a coal power plant to generate electricity may be cheap, but only by using current coal price, and ignoring some of the environmental/health damage it does. If you know prices are going to rise in the next 25 years, and you know that the solar panels have a similar lifespan, it's only fair to make some adjustments.
Of course, hidden costs must also be incorporated for solar technology whenever they apply.
1226 kWh/year at an average US rate of 11.2 cents/kWh(*) is more than $13, not $1.50.
(*) see: http://www.eia.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table5_6_a.html
Not enough to justify setting up a giant, global conspiracy of scientists.
Because governments have little interest in doing that anyway. Note how little progress is made on climate summits to make any kind of change. I'd be more worried about the influence of oil companies on governments.
I didn't say we'd get perfect results. But even with imperfect results, you can make an assessment about the cost of mitigation. You just have to put in the error bars as well. Same thing applies to the cost of reduction, which is probably harder to calculate.
Suppose you want to build a levee system with a requirement that a breach won't happen with more than 0.01% chance per year. Now, you can put in the model of the sea level over the next century, with the appropriate error bars, and update your estimate on how high the levees need to be. As knowledge progresses, you redo this calculation ever year. Even with limited precision, this is a better strategy than ignoring the model output altogether.
I have to disagree about your assessment of the climate models. They are mostly physical models, with only a limited number of parameters that can be tweaked:
(http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/11/faq-on-climate-models/)
Do you have anything more recent ? Science and science publishing has improved a bit since the 17th century. Besides, it's not even true.
Also, periodicals would love to publish counter arguments, as long as they are scientifically sound. Such publications are good for publicity. The only problem is that this combination doesn't happen very often.
No, what's more likely is that the whales left in the 1800's because they were hunted, and they are returning because they aren't (as much) anymore.
The article's claim that they returned as a result of higher temperatures isn't very well supported (it certainly doesn't provide any citations). It may be different for the algae, though.
BTW, nobody ever claimed that recent years were "the hottest ever". The claim was that those years were the hottest in the modern temperature record, which goes back to 1880. Based on proxy data, it is likely that last decade was the hottest since at least a couple thousand years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png
It's only hotly debated by some politicians, laypeople on blogs and in the popular press. The debate in the scientific literature is almost non-existent.
Of course it is relevant to understand what's causing a certain phenomenon. If we understand how current warming is caused by increasing greenhouse gases, then we also know how much we can influence warming by reducing the amount of those gases we produce.
And even if we choose not to limit CO2 production, we can use the knowledge to estimate how big the warming is going to be, and what kind of problems it could cause within a certain time frame. That knowledge could be used to allocate the necessary funds to deal with the problems.
Since 1 pixel on the graph equals about 100,000 years, it's impossible to say whether our current rate of change is unprecedented on a century-timescale, or not.
And, even assuming the current variability is not unprecedented on a 100-million year scale, that does little to comfort somebody living in a low lying coastal city, or on a flood plane, getting threatened by higher sea levels and increased precipitation.
But two whales can be half there.
Irrelevant. What's relevant is the current global warming is caused by human activity, how it will impact our lives, and what options we have to change it. The fact that millions of years ago it was even hotter due to some natural phenomenon doesn't change anything. It's like saying: "it's not a problem that your house is flooded, because 165 million years ago, there used to be a sea in that place"
Yes, if all the change happened in the last few decades of those 800,000 years.