I pointed this out elsewhere, but got modded down by the commie mods as 'flamebait'. Irregardless, WiFi and wireless aren't necessarily competing products, so WiFi is actually creating a new market that wireless carriers haven't exploited. Most WiFi is used for electronic messaging, which if you've seen the cost of doing this on cell phones, you'd understand why most people still don't text each other.
This looks like a new low for slashdot, and it comes from CowBoyNeal no less. Not only is the article listed almost wholly from the ad copy on the products website, but the claims are almost immediately recognizable as snake-oil. Here are three of the primary claims:
Absorb the electromagnetic waves generated from the battery.
Electromagnetic waves? From a battery? Aside from a very very very small magnetic field generated inside the battery, and being techincal, the infrared emissions of a warm battery, there is no significant electromagnetic radiation from chemical batteries. And if there was, absorbing them would represent a loss of energy.
Generate a flow of negative ions.
If this device is generating a flow of negative ions passively, then it's draining the battery. Internal ion flows discharge batteries, and battery disigners spend countless hours trying to figure out how to prevent spurious chemical interactions in batteries that aren't part of a circuit.
Interact with the battery's internal electrolyte and ions.
This one should be immedately obvious to anyone whose handled a battery, because in most case they are hermetically sealed, wrapped in plastic a few times, and sealed in a plastic case.
First off, the wireless carriers are making a killing, and that much is evident by the growth, and they are still charging long distance rates that aren't justified by infrastructure costs. So they can certainly compete by lowering fees, simplifying their draconian and overly complex pricing structures, and try to get more market share.
Secondly, the tone of this article is just...dumb. It's predicated on the notion of a zero sum game. Having an alternative to costly cell phone actually creates market share, which means some or most of that money comes from people who wouldn't use similar services on the cell carriers.
...in jail. That is because China takes the matter of foreigners flaunting Chinese law very seriously, even to the point that you will face harsher punishement than citizens. If arrested and tried, you will be charged for the cost of the trial, your stay in jail, et al, which could amount to hundreds if not thousands. And don't expect the US State Department to come galloping to your aid: You knew better.
...and how did we know the stratospheric concentration of CO2 in the 1800's? Its things like this that make me call 'bullshit' everytime a new chicken-little prediction about global warming comes out.
Fine - except the OP didn't talk about the southern hemisphere either
It's called "global warming", jackass. And you should read what was written yourself. The parent of this thread complained that it's North America and Europe who produce all the pollution, and the truth is that while we consume 90% of the worlds resources, we're responsble for just over half the pollution. My statement was an affront to his assinine sectionalist nationalist bigotry. Then you had to jump in with your defensive stupidity.
...that the models aren't very accurate. While some produce expected results of one to two degrees, others produce wild swings. It may also be that the large shifts are outside the standard deviation of the model, and represent a minority of the cases. Of course, there's not mention of the models that predicted cooling, or nothing happenning at all.
Celsius has parity with Kelvin. 1 C is equal to 1 Kelvin (no degrees in the Kelvin scale). To convert from Celsius to Kelvin, just add 273.15. Now from fahrenheit it's a bit more complex: (9/5)*XC + 32.
It's about the only thing the "global warming is our fault and it's going to kill us all" morons can agree with the "if the earth is warming why do we have record snowfall for the second straight year" idiots on.
I'd feel better about the rest of your argument if you hadn't botched the percentages so badly.
Point taken. It naturally follow that because I did the math on the percent increase of CO2 over 170 years wrong, that global warming is absolutely real and correct. Thank you.
Probably mere happenstance, since it wasn't michael posting, but this is the first time the 'media' has mention that the "ban" on stem cell research is really just a ban on government funding of stem cell research. Damn, any schmuck can pick up his wifes afterbirth and create cures for cancer in his basement lab.
What's worse: the brunt of the pollution stems from North American and European industrialization.
In 1998, Australia was the worlds worst polluter, and they're not even in the Northern hemisphere. According to the UN, the third world produces almost three times as much greenhouse gases than the US, Europe, and developed asian countries (Japan, S Korea, Taiwan, et al) combined. While the 'westernized' world consumes more resources, they also do it more efficiently and emit fewer harmful emissions than countries like China (who is responsible singly for 29% of all CO2 from coal, while the US is only responsible for 19%).
As to your rhetorical question about reversing the trend? Aggressive investment in nuclear fusion for energy production, hydrogen as a storage medium for energy, and efficient transmission methods for electrical power. The problem is the 50 years of draconian environment legislation lead by scientifically ignorant environmental groups like Greenpeace.
I know you're being sarcastic, but just to demonstrate the point: I saw a documentary on the eruption of Krakatoa, which said that the amount (12 cubic miles) of crap spilt out into the atmosphere caused a net increase in global warming of half a Celsius degree. That's back in what, 1870-odd?
How much have we gained in C20? the last 50 years? How much do we have to before everything melts and goes pfui?
C02 (C20 would be a solid at atmospheric temperature and pressures concerned here) has increased 79% since the start of the industrial revolution ca 1840 (or 1760 by some estimates). That sounds like a lot, but we're talking about parts per million. Prior to about the industrail revolution, atmospheric C02 as measured on the ground was about 280 ppm. Lately, measurements have peaked at 353 ppm. (280 ppm/353 ppm)x100%=79.3%. But we're still talkinga bout a concentration of 353 parts per million, which works out to.0353% by volume of C02. In other words, C02 is a minor trace gas compared to Oxygen(20%) and Nitrogen (79%).
On the issue of volcanoes, it is a fact that they emit more pollutants in a single large eruption than all of human activity over a similar time span. Volcanos also inject their particulate and gaseous emissions more or less directly into the stratosphere, where it lingers for months or years. Human emission, however, is largely limited to the troposphere (excepting high altitude commercial traffic and space launches, which are a huge culprit of some pollutants), and only a small fraction actually percolates up into the upper atmosphere.
However, blaming global warming on volcanic activity presumes that the explanation for global warming - that is atmospheric gasses and aerosols cause it - is correct. A NASA study concluded that the sun plays a far greater role in global climate than atmospheric composition changes resulting from volcanism, and if volcano's trump human emission, then logically human emission is not the cause or global warming.
Yes, over here the Met Office can't get the predictions right for my town - forever changing it with a day or 12hrs to go. However, your argument is bogus. Nobody can claim to understand what makes a quark tick, but we happily make calculations based on the known properties of protons and neutrons and atoms and the properties of many atoms through emergent statistical behaviour
You're comparing apples to oranges. If we have a single particle, we can precisely model most of its properties and behaviors. We can do the same for two, or four, or four hundred million, but everytime you incrase the number of particles, you increase the number of calculations and conditions and interactions. Now consider the atmosphere, with it's hundreds of billions of tons of gasses and particles. Now consider the hundreds of thousands of areas of temperature variance. Now add the varying velocities of gasses in any given area. Now take into consideration the multilayered behavior of our atmosphere. In order to predict the weather days in advance, the National Weather Service in the US has a network of hundreds of thousands of weather monitoring stations which take over twenty measurements of atmospheric condition, and a dozen satellites which generate data.
With modern mathematics, in order to predict the weather you have to know the precise state of the atmosphere at any given instant. Today, working with computer models and data in double digit precision, the rate of error increases exponentially so that by 7 days out the models are only 50% accurate.
Now, these models have been refined over decades of data collection. When the model fails to accurately predict the data, they're able to correct the model in a repetitive process of refinement. However, we are going into global warming for the first time in our technological and scientific m
The great bogey man nailed by many environmentalists (much to the degree of many collectivists) is the industrail revolution which occurred in the early-to-mid 1800's (some even go back to the mid to late 1700's). Since Orwell is writing during America's postwar industrial boon about events that that occurred well before industrialization, this passage seems to more or less support the notion of anthropogenic change.
Still, you're quite right. Climatologists who aren't funded by the governments of the world, and are thus removed from the Iron Rice Bowl/Iron Triangle (PDF) effect, often point to ice cores taken in antartica as proof that we are in a natural cyclic period of climate change. Scientists using computer models often have to use mathematical tricks to get the models to fit the data, indicating that issues like CO2 and particulate emission have been greatly exaggerated. The more I read about global warming, the more I'm convinced that its quite the ballyhoo, and is distracting from more serious ecological issues like the penetration of toxic metals into groundwater and nitrogen-laden runoff in coastal estuaries affecting fish stocks.
It's because you take it personally. Here's the problem: Canada, due in part to their liberal asylum policies, has become a haven and stopover point for terrorists wishing entry into the US. Since passports from countries like Morrocco or Jordan are already highly suspect, terrorists have been using forged and legit passports from countries like Canada (often obtained through family contacts), to gain entry with much less scrutiny. My advice? Next time choose a connecting flight in Canada.
Yes. AKA retirees, though fewere and fewer are actually retiring when they start taking SSI benefits.
the idle class that makes this world go around
No, the idle class that made this world go round, and is now soundly ignored by the youth, their progeny, and pretty much everyone except the nursing home and politicians needing an issue to generate exposure for themselves.
There is no surplus. There never was. And rightly, there never should be. A surplus means an inefficent underallocation of resources when it comes to programs like SSI. The alleged surplus was a projection based on increased payments during the dot com boom, which didn't last. As for 'spending', that never happenned either. What happenned was individual allocations were restructured.
You clearly have little understanding of the matter. I see it from both ends - my girlfriends uncle works as an actuary for the social security administration, and he spends his entire day shuffling numbers and moving money around trying to keep the SSA legal and makeing its payments. On the other end, my step-brother receives payments, and has seen a sharp decline over the last four years as beauracrats trying to keep up with the flood of new recipients keep cutting back benefits. You, on the other hand, appear to only be equipped with information you get from articles in the NY Times, and we now how accurate and objective they are.
One of my favorite authors, Wil McCarthy, writes a series of books which concentrate mainly on a few technologies, one of which is the 'fax gate', or just 'fax'. Similiar to today's fax machines, the point is to accept an item as input, and transmit data about it to another point for reproduction. Unlike today's faxes, the faxes of Wil McCarthy's world consist of a print plate filled with nano scale assemblers which 'dissolve' you on one end and store your substance in a buffer, then transmit a highly detailed pattern of you to another fax gate elsewhere where the assemblers use mass from the previous entrants to reconstruct you to every last detail, even preserving quantum states so you're still alive an conscience.
An unintended consequence is that people who've stepped into a fax plate exist only as data, and data can be manipulated. Software can (and does, in his fiction), fix damage, remove disease, and undoes genetically programmed death. The upshot of all this is that everyone has the perfectly toned bodies of 20 year old athletes, and the worst that happens in death is that you lose a few hours of memories for ever. As long as a fax gate is nearby (and they're as common as telephones in McCarthy's future), the damage would have to be pretty extensive to cause actual death, otherwise your body can simpley be tossed into the nearest fax, and a repaired you will be spit out almost immediately. You're immorbid, incapable of natural death, and with backups made everytime you step through a gate, you're theoretically immortal.
Of course, with the notion to tamper comes the required self improvement. Soldiers would elect to have carbon nanofibres woven into their skeleton, and protective diamond plates inserted around major organs. Slashdot weenies, tired of receiving wedgies, could order up a buff exterior and pump up their enemies. Women could go blonde for a day, or enlarge their boobs for that special date, then shrink them down when they become a nuisance. You can even, with enough mass in the buffers, make copies of yourself.
Is this possible? Depends on who you ask. Some nanologists poo poo the notion of nanoassemblers citing electronic forces on the atomic level as inhibiting the movement of little claws. Others poo poo the poo pooers by pointing out that individual atoms have already been manipulated in the lab.
The overall issue of immorbidity raises new questions. If we are incapable of death ourselves, do we lose our concept of it, and therefore our fear of it? Or how about, what if someone chooses to die. Their immorbid and highly improved bodies won't allow it. And what happens when you reach the physiologicallimit of your own memory capacity? Do you download it into a flash disk, or just dump them forever. And with people living for centuries, what do you do with all the bored, unemployable, and resource draining people who will overpopulate the planet in a society where production of basic goods is so efficient that there are absolutely no environmental pressures or population controls? Well...besides colonize space (which didn't work so well in McCarthy's books).
If all you ever get your information from are NY Times articles, its no wonder you're such a mind numbed moron. The Federal Government subsidizes SSI with hundreds of millions of dollars each year, and on the back end SSI recipients receives severely discounted services and cutbacks. It is not solvent by any rational definition.
Slashdot Mirror
I pointed this out elsewhere, but got modded down by the commie mods as 'flamebait'. Irregardless, WiFi and wireless aren't necessarily competing products, so WiFi is actually creating a new market that wireless carriers haven't exploited. Most WiFi is used for electronic messaging, which if you've seen the cost of doing this on cell phones, you'd understand why most people still don't text each other.
Electromagnetic waves? From a battery? Aside from a very very very small magnetic field generated inside the battery, and being techincal, the infrared emissions of a warm battery, there is no significant electromagnetic radiation from chemical batteries. And if there was, absorbing them would represent a loss of energy.
If this device is generating a flow of negative ions passively, then it's draining the battery. Internal ion flows discharge batteries, and battery disigners spend countless hours trying to figure out how to prevent spurious chemical interactions in batteries that aren't part of a circuit.
This one should be immedately obvious to anyone whose handled a battery, because in most case they are hermetically sealed, wrapped in plastic a few times, and sealed in a plastic case.
For crying out loud, BUY AN AD!
First off, the wireless carriers are making a killing, and that much is evident by the growth, and they are still charging long distance rates that aren't justified by infrastructure costs. So they can certainly compete by lowering fees, simplifying their draconian and overly complex pricing structures, and try to get more market share.
Secondly, the tone of this article is just...dumb. It's predicated on the notion of a zero sum game. Having an alternative to costly cell phone actually creates market share, which means some or most of that money comes from people who wouldn't use similar services on the cell carriers.
...in jail. That is because China takes the matter of foreigners flaunting Chinese law very seriously, even to the point that you will face harsher punishement than citizens. If arrested and tried, you will be charged for the cost of the trial, your stay in jail, et al, which could amount to hundreds if not thousands. And don't expect the US State Department to come galloping to your aid: You knew better.
...and how did we know the stratospheric concentration of CO2 in the 1800's? Its things like this that make me call 'bullshit' everytime a new chicken-little prediction about global warming comes out.
It's called "global warming", jackass. And you should read what was written yourself. The parent of this thread complained that it's North America and Europe who produce all the pollution, and the truth is that while we consume 90% of the worlds resources, we're responsble for just over half the pollution. My statement was an affront to his assinine sectionalist nationalist bigotry. Then you had to jump in with your defensive stupidity.
...that the models aren't very accurate. While some produce expected results of one to two degrees, others produce wild swings. It may also be that the large shifts are outside the standard deviation of the model, and represent a minority of the cases. Of course, there's not mention of the models that predicted cooling, or nothing happenning at all.
Leave it to an aussie to waste so much space when any idiot can figure out that I mean to write "Southern Hemisphere".
Well...not any idiot. But don't let that take you away from your mission to bash first world countries.
Celsius has parity with Kelvin. 1 C is equal to 1 Kelvin (no degrees in the Kelvin scale). To convert from Celsius to Kelvin, just add 273.15. Now from fahrenheit it's a bit more complex: (9/5)*XC + 32.
It's about the only thing the "global warming is our fault and it's going to kill us all" morons can agree with the "if the earth is warming why do we have record snowfall for the second straight year" idiots on.
What's to stop WTO protestors from covering their face while committing acts of vandalism and assault against bystanders and officers?
Read the post - the guy was blaming it on North America and Europe, neither of which is in the Northern Hemisphere.
Point taken. It naturally follow that because I did the math on the percent increase of CO2 over 170 years wrong, that global warming is absolutely real and correct. Thank you.
Probably mere happenstance, since it wasn't michael posting, but this is the first time the 'media' has mention that the "ban" on stem cell research is really just a ban on government funding of stem cell research. Damn, any schmuck can pick up his wifes afterbirth and create cures for cancer in his basement lab.
Muslim extremists are blaming the tsunami on US and French nuclear testing.
In 1998, Australia was the worlds worst polluter, and they're not even in the Northern hemisphere. According to the UN, the third world produces almost three times as much greenhouse gases than the US, Europe, and developed asian countries (Japan, S Korea, Taiwan, et al) combined. While the 'westernized' world consumes more resources, they also do it more efficiently and emit fewer harmful emissions than countries like China (who is responsible singly for 29% of all CO2 from coal, while the US is only responsible for 19%).
As to your rhetorical question about reversing the trend? Aggressive investment in nuclear fusion for energy production, hydrogen as a storage medium for energy, and efficient transmission methods for electrical power. The problem is the 50 years of draconian environment legislation lead by scientifically ignorant environmental groups like Greenpeace.
C02 (C20 would be a solid at atmospheric temperature and pressures concerned here) has increased 79% since the start of the industrial revolution ca 1840 (or 1760 by some estimates). That sounds like a lot, but we're talking about parts per million. Prior to about the industrail revolution, atmospheric C02 as measured on the ground was about 280 ppm. Lately, measurements have peaked at 353 ppm. (280 ppm/353 ppm)x100%=79.3%. But we're still talkinga bout a concentration of 353 parts per million, which works out to .0353% by volume of C02. In other words, C02 is a minor trace gas compared to Oxygen(20%) and Nitrogen (79%).
On the issue of volcanoes, it is a fact that they emit more pollutants in a single large eruption than all of human activity over a similar time span. Volcanos also inject their particulate and gaseous emissions more or less directly into the stratosphere, where it lingers for months or years. Human emission, however, is largely limited to the troposphere (excepting high altitude commercial traffic and space launches, which are a huge culprit of some pollutants), and only a small fraction actually percolates up into the upper atmosphere.
However, blaming global warming on volcanic activity presumes that the explanation for global warming - that is atmospheric gasses and aerosols cause it - is correct. A NASA study concluded that the sun plays a far greater role in global climate than atmospheric composition changes resulting from volcanism, and if volcano's trump human emission, then logically human emission is not the cause or global warming.
You're comparing apples to oranges. If we have a single particle, we can precisely model most of its properties and behaviors. We can do the same for two, or four, or four hundred million, but everytime you incrase the number of particles, you increase the number of calculations and conditions and interactions. Now consider the atmosphere, with it's hundreds of billions of tons of gasses and particles. Now consider the hundreds of thousands of areas of temperature variance. Now add the varying velocities of gasses in any given area. Now take into consideration the multilayered behavior of our atmosphere. In order to predict the weather days in advance, the National Weather Service in the US has a network of hundreds of thousands of weather monitoring stations which take over twenty measurements of atmospheric condition, and a dozen satellites which generate data.
With modern mathematics, in order to predict the weather you have to know the precise state of the atmosphere at any given instant. Today, working with computer models and data in double digit precision, the rate of error increases exponentially so that by 7 days out the models are only 50% accurate.
Now, these models have been refined over decades of data collection. When the model fails to accurately predict the data, they're able to correct the model in a repetitive process of refinement. However, we are going into global warming for the first time in our technological and scientific m
The great bogey man nailed by many environmentalists (much to the degree of many collectivists) is the industrail revolution which occurred in the early-to-mid 1800's (some even go back to the mid to late 1700's). Since Orwell is writing during America's postwar industrial boon about events that that occurred well before industrialization, this passage seems to more or less support the notion of anthropogenic change.
Still, you're quite right. Climatologists who aren't funded by the governments of the world, and are thus removed from the Iron Rice Bowl/Iron Triangle (PDF) effect, often point to ice cores taken in antartica as proof that we are in a natural cyclic period of climate change. Scientists using computer models often have to use mathematical tricks to get the models to fit the data, indicating that issues like CO2 and particulate emission have been greatly exaggerated. The more I read about global warming, the more I'm convinced that its quite the ballyhoo, and is distracting from more serious ecological issues like the penetration of toxic metals into groundwater and nitrogen-laden runoff in coastal estuaries affecting fish stocks.
As if voting has anything to do with "global warming".
If you'll excuse me now, I need to go look at heavy coats, due to the second year of unusually LOW temperatures.
...are competing against a bunch of nerds in the Mojave desert led by an eccentric aerospace engineer.
And they are LOSING.
It's because you take it personally. Here's the problem: Canada, due in part to their liberal asylum policies, has become a haven and stopover point for terrorists wishing entry into the US. Since passports from countries like Morrocco or Jordan are already highly suspect, terrorists have been using forged and legit passports from countries like Canada (often obtained through family contacts), to gain entry with much less scrutiny. My advice? Next time choose a connecting flight in Canada.
Yes. AKA retirees, though fewere and fewer are actually retiring when they start taking SSI benefits.
No, the idle class that made this world go round, and is now soundly ignored by the youth, their progeny, and pretty much everyone except the nursing home and politicians needing an issue to generate exposure for themselves.
Not very likely.
There is no surplus. There never was. And rightly, there never should be. A surplus means an inefficent underallocation of resources when it comes to programs like SSI. The alleged surplus was a projection based on increased payments during the dot com boom, which didn't last. As for 'spending', that never happenned either. What happenned was individual allocations were restructured.
You clearly have little understanding of the matter. I see it from both ends - my girlfriends uncle works as an actuary for the social security administration, and he spends his entire day shuffling numbers and moving money around trying to keep the SSA legal and makeing its payments. On the other end, my step-brother receives payments, and has seen a sharp decline over the last four years as beauracrats trying to keep up with the flood of new recipients keep cutting back benefits. You, on the other hand, appear to only be equipped with information you get from articles in the NY Times, and we now how accurate and objective they are.
One of my favorite authors, Wil McCarthy, writes a series of books which concentrate mainly on a few technologies, one of which is the 'fax gate', or just 'fax'. Similiar to today's fax machines, the point is to accept an item as input, and transmit data about it to another point for reproduction. Unlike today's faxes, the faxes of Wil McCarthy's world consist of a print plate filled with nano scale assemblers which 'dissolve' you on one end and store your substance in a buffer, then transmit a highly detailed pattern of you to another fax gate elsewhere where the assemblers use mass from the previous entrants to reconstruct you to every last detail, even preserving quantum states so you're still alive an conscience.
An unintended consequence is that people who've stepped into a fax plate exist only as data, and data can be manipulated. Software can (and does, in his fiction), fix damage, remove disease, and undoes genetically programmed death. The upshot of all this is that everyone has the perfectly toned bodies of 20 year old athletes, and the worst that happens in death is that you lose a few hours of memories for ever. As long as a fax gate is nearby (and they're as common as telephones in McCarthy's future), the damage would have to be pretty extensive to cause actual death, otherwise your body can simpley be tossed into the nearest fax, and a repaired you will be spit out almost immediately. You're immorbid, incapable of natural death, and with backups made everytime you step through a gate, you're theoretically immortal.
Of course, with the notion to tamper comes the required self improvement. Soldiers would elect to have carbon nanofibres woven into their skeleton, and protective diamond plates inserted around major organs. Slashdot weenies, tired of receiving wedgies, could order up a buff exterior and pump up their enemies. Women could go blonde for a day, or enlarge their boobs for that special date, then shrink them down when they become a nuisance. You can even, with enough mass in the buffers, make copies of yourself.
Is this possible? Depends on who you ask. Some nanologists poo poo the notion of nanoassemblers citing electronic forces on the atomic level as inhibiting the movement of little claws. Others poo poo the poo pooers by pointing out that individual atoms have already been manipulated in the lab.
The overall issue of immorbidity raises new questions. If we are incapable of death ourselves, do we lose our concept of it, and therefore our fear of it? Or how about, what if someone chooses to die. Their immorbid and highly improved bodies won't allow it. And what happens when you reach the physiologicallimit of your own memory capacity? Do you download it into a flash disk, or just dump them forever. And with people living for centuries, what do you do with all the bored, unemployable, and resource draining people who will overpopulate the planet in a society where production of basic goods is so efficient that there are absolutely no environmental pressures or population controls? Well...besides colonize space (which didn't work so well in McCarthy's books).
If all you ever get your information from are NY Times articles, its no wonder you're such a mind numbed moron. The Federal Government subsidizes SSI with hundreds of millions of dollars each year, and on the back end SSI recipients receives severely discounted services and cutbacks. It is not solvent by any rational definition.