The monthly swing isn't really relevant: it's just caused by seasonal changes. The concern is about the change in the annual average, or the change from year to year in any particular month.
If you plot the data you posted, it's clear that there's a general increasing trend in CO2, and an increasing trend in the year-by-year rate of change (neither of which is good news), but the last two years are not particularly out of line with what's been happening for the last 30 years. They're well within two sigmas of the trend line.
Okay, found a believable document. The Congressional Research Service said that in 2002, the number of US troops on peacekeeping missions was around 65000, if we include the large force in South Korea who might not be classified as peacekeepers. Here's the breakdown:
UN Peacekeeping 32
NATO Bosnia (SFOR) 1897
NATO Kosovo (KFOR) 4477
Macedonia Variable
South Korea 37000
Sinai Multilateral (MFO) 865
Near Iraq before invasion 20000
Total 64271
So if you include the large "forward presence mission" in Korea, US forces do contribute more peacekeepers than the official UN peacekeeper total (which was around 45000 in 2002), but if you don't include them, they don't.
i honestly submit to you that when confronted with the madness of 9/11, fixing the problem that made such a thing possible: ie, the basket case that is the middle east, is of greater importance than absolutely every single issue you bring up above
I think the US had more support worldwide in September and October 2001 than it had for years before that, and I think it continued through the invasion of Afghanistan.
Then GWB threw it away with his "axis of evil" speech in January 2002 and his baseless invasion of Iraq a couple of months later.
He had a chance to take advantage of that goodwill, and he blew it.
The fact is that the number of US military on "peace keeping missions" usually out numbers the total troops under UN command.
By "usually", I assume you mean pre-9/11, because that's certainly false now. There are about 60000 UN peacekeepers currently active, and nowhere near that many US troops on peacekeeping missions (unless you twist the words to claim Iraq is peacekeeping).
Before 9/11 I'm not so sure it was true either. Do you have a source for your claim?
You said the US makes up "the bulk of the UN peacekeepers".
I asked for some information to back that up, pointing out that according to public documents, the US actually contributes around 1% of the peacekeepers.
You pointed me to a couple of irrelevant websites and a seven year old DoD publication in which US military operations are apparently classified as UN peacekeepers, even though they aren't under the control of the UN.
So in other words: you just made up that "bulk of the UN peacekeepers" claim. Thanks for the clarification.
So you believe all you hear, right? Have you ever considered which national military makes up the bulk of the UN "peacekeepers"?
According to the UN, no country made up the bulk of the contributions in August 2004. The largest contributor was Pakistan, who contributed 8600 out of 60000 peacekeepers. The USA ranked 26th on the list, contributing 430.
But maybe Iraq is a distraction, so let's go back to August 2001: in that month Bangladesh was the biggest contributor, with 6100 peacekeepers, and the USA was 17th on the list, at 750.
I'd be interested in seeing the source of your numbers. I can believe that the US contributes the bulk of something to the UN, but "peacekeepers" it's not.
If todays civilization collapses (as it has several times throughout history), and some future people discover our caves full of vitrified radwaste, it won't be any more dangerous to them than a uranium cave.
In a few tens of thousands of years maybe, but freshly spent fuel rods are a lot more dangerous than unused ones. Uranium is much safer than the isotopes that are in spent fuel for the first few thousand years.
We are not creating more radioactive material than was already on this planet. All we are doing is moving it around.
This is true, in a very narrow sense: the mass coming out of the reactor is no bigger than the mass going in (in fact, an infinitesimal amount smaller).
But that's sort of irrelevant. The stuff coming out is *far more radioactive* than what was put in. According to the Office of Technology Assessment, it takes about a million years for it to cool down to the point of being no more harmful than uranium ore (see p. 29 of the linked document).
So we're moving future radioactivity from long-lived isotopes like U-238 into the present by converting them into shorter half-life fission products.
I think their calculation was about how long it would take until the waste would present the same risk as ore if diluted in the same way. But I did post the link, so you could always RTFA to check for yourself.
Okay, I found a link. The Office of Technology Assessment produced this report that says (near the top of p. 29) it takes about a million years for the spent fuel to decay to the point of being as toxic as the uranium ore used to produce it.
Which would seem to imply that you need to mix the spent fuel with an amount of concrete or glass or other bulk matter equivalent to the ore it came from to get back down to the same order of dangerousness.
It would only imply that if you ignore the fact that the fuel becomes about a million times more radioactive in the process of being used.
Nuclear reactors increase the total radioactivity of their fuel for at least the first few tens of thousands of years. Yes, they take energy out, but energy != radioactivity.
The other risk is the risk of chemical contamination of groundwater.
If you are sticking ot in the hole it came out of, you can at least say that the risk is no greater than it would be had you never done anything at all.
No, you can't say that at all. Fission changes the chemical nature of the fuel. I don't know how toxic uranium is, but I have no trouble believing that some of the products are more toxic (and some are probably less). I don't know whether the overall toxicity goes up or down, but it's a lot easier to deal with toxicity from a single fairly inert element than from a mix of lots of different ones, some of which are highly corrosive.
You only need to run it for long enough to get to the point where the waste mixed with the carrier is slightly less radioactive than the ore you originally mined.
And how long is that? Reactor waste is on the order of a million times more radioactive than the fuel that goes in (because it contains a lot of isotopes with shorter half lives than uranium). But shorter means tens of thousands of years instead of billions.
As well, the fuel that goes in is much more radioactive than the ore (because it has been concentrated). The ore itself is barely more radioactive than any other rock.
I can't find hard numbers saying how radioactive the products will be after 200000 years, but I expect they will be substantially above background levels at that point.
The other risk is the risk of chemical contamination of groundwater. Radioactive waste is a weird chemical mix, some of which is corrosive, soluble and/or poisonous.
Someone is sending spam using my email address as the return, and I'm getting hundreds of bounced emails.
Install spamassassin with Bayesian filtering or some other adaptive filter, and declare all of these bounces to be spam. I used to get dozens a day, now just a few slip through each week.
If you administer any systems for other people, install filters for them, too.
and what, pray tell, is your personality? i would guess it's something that is shaped predominantely by two factors: genetics and how you were raised.
So you don't think there's any individuality? We're all products of our childhood and our genes, and will be totally predictable once someone just figures out the formula? I think there's a pretty big random component to anyone's development; calling the result of it their "personality" seems pretty reasonable to me.
You clearly stated "there is no such thing as "The Essay Format".
That would have been someone else. What I posted was a challenge to your statement that you had found it. What you found was clearly labelled as the "5 Paragraph Essay Format", not "The Essay Format", and it said that there were other possible formats.
There is, it exists, teachers teach it, teachers are taught to teach it (trust me, my brother's an english teacher), kids learn it, and then have to "unlearn it" later.
That may all be true, but the link you posted gives no support at all to that claim.
Writing complete sentences will improve your essay.
It's likely to give him a better grade in high school, but what makes you think it will make the essay better? Sometimes sentence fragments are good. Like here.
Slashdot Mirror
The monthly swing isn't really relevant: it's just caused by seasonal changes. The concern is about the change in the annual average, or the change from year to year in any particular month.
If you plot the data you posted, it's clear that there's a general increasing trend in CO2, and an increasing trend in the year-by-year rate of change (neither of which is good news), but the last two years are not particularly out of line with what's been happening for the last 30 years. They're well within two sigmas of the trend line.
So you're right, it's just more of the same.
Testing only finds existing errors.
No, testing finds new errors. That's what test suites are for: to let you know when your change to X caused Y to break.
Okay, found a believable document. The Congressional Research Service said that in 2002, the number of US troops on peacekeeping missions was around 65000, if we include the large force in South Korea who might not be classified as peacekeepers. Here's the breakdown:
UN Peacekeeping 32
NATO Bosnia (SFOR) 1897
NATO Kosovo (KFOR) 4477
Macedonia Variable
South Korea 37000
Sinai Multilateral (MFO) 865
Near Iraq before invasion 20000
Total 64271
So if you include the large "forward presence mission" in Korea, US forces do contribute more peacekeepers than the official UN peacekeeper total (which was around 45000 in 2002), but if you don't include them, they don't.
...baseless invasion of Iraq a couple of months later.
Oops, wrong year. Make that 14 months later.
i honestly submit to you that when confronted with the madness of 9/11, fixing the problem that made such a thing possible: ie, the basket case that is the middle east, is of greater importance than absolutely every single issue you bring up above
I think the US had more support worldwide in September and October 2001 than it had for years before that, and I think it continued through the invasion of Afghanistan.
Then GWB threw it away with his "axis of evil" speech in January 2002 and his baseless invasion of Iraq a couple of months later.
He had a chance to take advantage of that goodwill, and he blew it.
The fact is that the number of US military on "peace keeping missions" usually out numbers the total troops under UN command.
By "usually", I assume you mean pre-9/11, because that's certainly false now. There are about 60000 UN peacekeepers currently active, and nowhere near that many US troops on peacekeeping missions (unless you twist the words to claim Iraq is peacekeeping).
Before 9/11 I'm not so sure it was true either. Do you have a source for your claim?
Okay, to summarize:
You said the US makes up "the bulk of the UN peacekeepers".
I asked for some information to back that up, pointing out that according to public documents, the US actually contributes around 1% of the peacekeepers.
You pointed me to a couple of irrelevant websites and a seven year old DoD publication in which US military operations are apparently classified as UN peacekeepers, even though they aren't under the control of the UN.
So in other words: you just made up that "bulk of the UN peacekeepers" claim. Thanks for the clarification.
So you believe all you hear, right? Have you ever considered which national military makes up the bulk of the UN "peacekeepers"?
According to the UN, no country made up the bulk of the contributions in August 2004. The largest contributor was Pakistan, who contributed 8600 out of 60000 peacekeepers. The USA ranked 26th on the list, contributing 430.
But maybe Iraq is a distraction, so let's go back to August 2001: in that month Bangladesh was the biggest contributor, with 6100 peacekeepers, and the USA was 17th on the list, at 750.
I'd be interested in seeing the source of your numbers. I can believe that the US contributes the bulk of something to the UN, but "peacekeepers" it's not.
To quote the patent,
The preferred and optimumly preferred embodiments of the present invention have been described herein...
Does the use of "optimumly" invalidate the patent? Or is the invention of this word covered under the same patent?
If todays civilization collapses (as it has several times throughout history), and some future people discover our caves full of vitrified radwaste, it won't be any more dangerous to them than a uranium cave.
In a few tens of thousands of years maybe, but freshly spent fuel rods are a lot more dangerous than unused ones. Uranium is much safer than the isotopes that are in spent fuel for the first few thousand years.
We are not creating more radioactive material than was already on this planet. All we are doing is moving it around.
This is true, in a very narrow sense: the mass coming out of the reactor is no bigger than the mass going in (in fact, an infinitesimal amount smaller).
But that's sort of irrelevant. The stuff coming out is *far more radioactive* than what was put in. According to the Office of Technology Assessment, it takes about a million years for it to cool down to the point of being no more harmful than uranium ore (see p. 29 of the linked document).
So we're moving future radioactivity from long-lived isotopes like U-238 into the present by converting them into shorter half-life fission products.
I think their calculation was about how long it would take until the waste would present the same risk as ore if diluted in the same way. But I did post the link, so you could always RTFA to check for yourself.
Okay, I found a link. The Office of Technology Assessment produced this report that says (near the top of p. 29) it takes about a million years for the spent fuel to decay to the point of being as toxic as the uranium ore used to produce it.
Which would seem to imply that you need to mix the spent fuel with an amount of concrete or glass or other bulk matter equivalent to the ore it came from to get back down to the same order of dangerousness.
It would only imply that if you ignore the fact that the fuel becomes about a million times more radioactive in the process of being used.
Nuclear reactors increase the total radioactivity of their fuel for at least the first few tens of thousands of years. Yes, they take energy out, but energy != radioactivity.
The other risk is the risk of chemical contamination of groundwater.
If you are sticking ot in the hole it came out of, you can at least say that the risk is no greater than it would be had you never done anything at all.
No, you can't say that at all. Fission changes the chemical nature of the fuel. I don't know how toxic uranium is, but I have no trouble believing that some of the products are more toxic (and some are probably less). I don't know whether the overall toxicity goes up or down, but it's a lot easier to deal with toxicity from a single fairly inert element than from a mix of lots of different ones, some of which are highly corrosive.
You only need to run it for long enough to get to the point where the waste mixed with the carrier is slightly less radioactive than the ore you originally mined.
And how long is that? Reactor waste is on the order of a million times more radioactive than the fuel that goes in (because it contains a lot of isotopes with shorter half lives than uranium). But shorter means tens of thousands of years instead of billions.
As well, the fuel that goes in is much more radioactive than the ore (because it has been concentrated). The ore itself is barely more radioactive than any other rock.
I can't find hard numbers saying how radioactive the products will be after 200000 years, but I expect they will be substantially above background levels at that point.
The other risk is the risk of chemical contamination of groundwater. Radioactive waste is a weird chemical mix, some of which is corrosive, soluble and/or poisonous.
So tell spamassassin that the good bounces are non-spam. It looks at the words in the message, not just at the fact that it was a bounce.
Most spam bounces I get are from viruses, with reports that the message "I" wrote had
Subject: Re: Hello
As long as I don't really use that subject or a spammy one like
Subject: let it!
Spamassassin isn't going to delete the good bounces.
Someone is sending spam using my email address as the return, and I'm getting hundreds of bounced emails.
Install spamassassin with Bayesian filtering or some other adaptive filter, and declare all of these bounces to be spam. I used to get dozens a day, now just a few slip through each week.
If you administer any systems for other people, install filters for them, too.
"... It's nearly as good as being in space."
Yes, it would be better to have a 16m telescope in space, but Hubble is only 2.4m.
The article from a few days ago about seeing at Dome C explains this: they get very, very little snowfall there. However, they do get blown ice crystals, but not very many at the proposed location. The linked article makes great reading.
I'd suggest breaking that big mother up and using a makefile.
The real numbers from general sites have Firefox climbing, sure,
That's a trend you know. In fact, it's the same one the article was claiming: Firefox usage is rising.
Now what was your point again?
and what, pray tell, is your personality? i would guess it's something that is shaped predominantely by two factors: genetics and how you were raised.
So you don't think there's any individuality? We're all products of our childhood and our genes, and will be totally predictable once someone just figures out the formula? I think there's a pretty big random component to anyone's development; calling the result of it their "personality" seems pretty reasonable to me.
You've changed your argument.
Nope, not me. I'm a model of consistency.
You clearly stated "there is no such thing as "The Essay Format".
That would have been someone else. What I posted was a challenge to your statement that you had found it. What you found was clearly labelled as the "5 Paragraph Essay Format", not "The Essay Format", and it said that there were other possible formats.
There is, it exists, teachers teach it, teachers are taught to teach it (trust me, my brother's an english teacher), kids learn it, and then have to "unlearn it" later.
That may all be true, but the link you posted gives no support at all to that claim.
Writing complete sentences will improve your essay.
It's likely to give him a better grade in high school, but what makes you think it will make the essay better? Sometimes sentence fragments are good. Like here.