About what Chenney is saying... this reminds me of the Simpsons.
Homer: Well, there's not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol is sure doing its job. Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad. Homer: Thank you, sweetie. Lisa: Dad, what if I were to tell you that this rock keeps away tigers. Homer: Uh-huh, and how does it work? Lisa: It doesn't work. It's just a stupid rock. Homer: I see. Lisa: But you don't see any tigers around, do you? Homer: (Looks around) Lisa, I'd like to buy your rock.
That's not even the point. That article is mostly talking about COUNTERFEITS products being sold. Clothes, furnitures, etc. What does this have to do with the DMCA and ISP and so forth? Absolutely nothing. These proposed laws doesn't even tackled the issues raised in that article. If youTHEN take the article apart like you did, you see that most of it is conjecture, however, it is actually belivable. However, downloading movies and mp3s on the net funds terrorism? Yeah right.
But what happens here is the same as with cars. Ok, bad analogy follows, but oh well. If you put too much HP in your car, you might not even be able to attain the highest speed as other components comes into play: tires, trasmission, aerodynamics, etc. Putting a dual-V12-whatever won't magically make a Mini as fast a a ferrari. HP = MHz and Twin Engine = Core/Dual procs, etc.
Furthermore, why aren't EVERYONE buying ferraris/lambo/porsche/etc? I mean, they want the fastest car possible right? Or why aren't every car makers putting V12 in their cars? Oh yeah, price, gas, normal usage, etc. all come into play. If you only drive to work, a ferrari isn't very useful. Sure, a speed freak/track racer might want to have the ferrari more than a ford, but then again, they are the hardcore gamers of the automotive world.
Intel is kind of selling engines by only advertising the HP in them. That's not all there is, and your mom probably don't need a damn 3.0 ghz for her dell with 256 ram and a slowass hard drive and shitty onboard graphic card. Yeah they have the Celeron, but they still sell them by the speed, for normal people a 3.0 ghz pentium and celeron isn't different, so obviously they'll take the cheapest of the 2.
A lot of people will say that WoW actually starts at level 60, nothing comes to a halt except for xp/level. There's still the whole items, raid, pvp, etc. part of the game.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-ji Yang
One of my favorite quote from Alpha Centauri.
Re:Civilization IV - Released Way Too Eearly!!
on
30 Greatest Games of 2005
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Just remember that this is not everyone. In fact, most problems lies with older computers, laptops and some(most?) ATI cards. Me and my friends had absolutely no problems with the game. In fact, I haven't patched the game yet with either patches.
After following tons of game releases in the last 2-3 years, there is AWALYS a backlash about compatibilities and other problems outside of the game itself. There are tons of people posting that games doesn't work, but you have to take that with a grain of salt, since people that are playing fine don't post about it. Vocal minority. Hardware + games = a lot of problems.
This is not to say that there isn't any problems for some people, and some systems, because that's the case. It's just that the problems doesn't affect everyone and that most people are playing the game without any problems.
The game is incredible too. Best of the serie. Try the demo, if you don't have any problem running it, go buy it. At least the demo serves a purpose!
Re:Write your own damn adventures!
on
Dungeons and Shadows
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I concede that for D&D, they release all kinds of books on any possible subject. Tons of adventures and all, which ends up being used once, if never.
For Shadowrun tho, IMHO, it's an entirely different matter. The canon(official) storyline of shadowrun is incredibly rich and interesting. Most players swear by it. It advances in a somewhat realtime fashion, always going forward. They used to release a lot of 'adventures', which were mostly cool, but now they tend to expose the storyline and give you tons of hooks, but no exact adventures details. Heck, even old adventures were pretty loose, compared to D&D. Even campaigns are structured in acts following the storyline, but what actually happens is up to the GM... and players.
Now, most of the books now are background materials which makes incredible sources for adventures. Also, what is fun in SR is that, most of the info given in the books are... gossips. Very few things are the real deal, most of it is rumours, which may be true or not. The way it works, it gives so much power to the GM and gives so much fuel for ideas.
I'd say it's a win win. As a GM, I do tons of stuff outside of the official storyline, but I usually always end up putting my players right in the middle of the official storyline, without them knowing, which usually ends up with a big WTF later on.
This is what makes Shadowrun fun. Just the rules without any background would make shadowrun a really ordinary, run of the mill but 'cool' RPG. The rich background and characters are a big part of the game. For this, the books are an excellent source of background.
So yeah, you don't have to buy books, but for SR, the last few books I bought, I was so close to GM orgasm that it was worth it so much. Arcology Shutdown was especially evil, and so, so awesome. All the credits goes to the incredible gang of freelance writers for Shadowrun.
Heck, I would buy Shadowrun sourcebook just to read em even if I had no plan to actually play SR, heh.
This is the sales chart of the Firefly DVD on Amazon. For a show that was cancelled, that's pretty good. It's been in the top 40 for more than 3 months, and on the top 10 for a total of about 5 weeks. Considering it was cancelled prematurely, that's pretty good.
I don't think it means the majority of people like it, but it isn't just a minor vocal groups of hardcore fans, lots of people bought it, so I expect that a good part of it liked it. Even if just 50% of them liked it, it's still not just a small group of people.
Well, this is the usual naive way of seeing it. It also seems logical at first, since the hash is small, it obviously will get collision.
However, when you start looking at it in more details, some things stands out. If you use a 256bit hash, you get about 10^77 possible combinaisons as a good algorithm should be able to fill all the hash space.
Now, we are currently estimating at ~10^79 the number of atoms in the whole universe. 10^77 vs 10^79. Even without going into maths and analysis of hash algorithm, space distribution and all, it already gives you a pretty good idea. Now, since data isn't always physical(thoughts?), it's interesting to imagine if we can store more information than the total number of atoms in the universe. That's an interesting (but hardly on topic) question.
So, a 256bit hash is pretty big. Increase it to 512bit and you get 10^154 combinaisons. Unless the algorithm is flawed or the distribution isn't uniform, I'd say that collisions are going to be pretty hard to get. Then again, that's without any distribution and statistical analysis, I'll leave that up to others.
The conclusion is that our first thought about collision might not be as evident after thinking about the above.
I completely agree with you. I prefer open source software for all the reason you mentionned. I do know that the having access to the source isn't an end in itself, just as being open-source isn't an end in itself. I won't make and ideological stance for many reasons, but I strongly believe in open source.
Having said that, some proprietary software are just more suited for my needs than open source. Many open source projects are young and not ready, I still use some of them, and for the rest I use proprietary software. I will even contribute to open source project that I don't actively use because I find it cool and want them to become better, but I'll often use another program in the mean time.
The fact it's open source doesn't mean it's going to be better in the end, just as the opposite is true. There is a lot of factor here: trust, dev team, management, etc.
As for the example right now, Firefox is open source and Opera is closed source. I do have MUCH more trust in Opera than Firefox. Why? Firefox might be open source, but the dev team is pretty elitist and closed, they rarely accept patches unless you have a name and rep with them. That's not in the spirit of Open Source. I don't like the management aspect ofit and their roadmap. For opera, I submitted lots of bugs, had feedback asking me how to reproduce them in more details and, behold, it was usually fix in the next few patches. Soemtimes it was a JS bug, sometimes a website not rendering properly while the HTML was valid, some were crashes, etc. Never had a problem, and I was using the free (ad-supported version) at first when I reported those bugs then I started paying because I was pretty happy with it. My experience(and many others) with Firefox is the opposite.
So, open-source is not an end in itself. I agree with the spirit of open-source, but it doesn't mean an open source project is really following the spirit of it.
In the end, the fact is, software development is a process. A well-managed closed source software with good coders and good Q&A will give the same result as a well-managed open-source software with a large sample of coders and testers. Now, how often does that happen? Rarely, unfortunatel, for both sides. But I do want to encourage good software/ideas whether it's open or closed source. I find that Opera is good software, inovative and well managed.
Open-source and Closed-source are processes. In theory, both can be good and both can be real bad. In fact, it doesn't really work that way tho, but you shouldn't dismiss closed-source because it's, well, closed source.
Why would that cost them in the licensing department? If things goes well, they'll gain more exposure and will probably sell a lot more mobile licenses. The mobile version isn't free, just the desktop one.
Why would they go out of business? They are making a profit with their mobile browser which they license. The ad revenue was just to support their mobile dev at first and now since they are making a nice profit they switch to PR and spread their browser as much as they can. That's quite a good idea actually. More people use Opera and since it gets more exposure, this means more company will license their browser for mobile applications.
Unless you are taking an ideological stance in which you do not use any closed/proprietary software(including windows, office, etc.), in which case it's justified, or if you are a Firefox developper and need the source, I don't see that as a strong argument. The fact that it's open source doesn't mean much beside for development and ideological reasons. In the end it's a product.
Now, you may not like Opera for other reasons, or you are happy with firefox and don't see why you'd switch, that's fine. But not trying it because it's not open source is pretty stupid IMHO.
Now, since they are mostly similar, I don't see a lot of people switching from one to another, but that's something else and has nothing to do in the fact that it's open source or not. Those using FF don't see why they should switch, and Oepra users don't see why they should switch. Some will switch because of a couple of features or other reasons, but they both do a pretty good job.
Maybe I'm an open source traitor, but I do like open source and see the advantage of it, but if a closed source software does a better job, or is really cool and innovate, and the price is right, I'll gladly pay to encourage the company. 20-40 bucks for a software I use everyday? That's fair. Now it's free, which is even better. I use tons of open source software whenever I can, but I still use some closed software too. I donate or contribute to open source projects whenever I can, just as I pay for a closed software if I like it.
Oh, and, btw, lots of people thought that Saddam was involved. Maybe much less today, but polls showed that a large majority believed that at the time.
A near-unanimous majority believes that the Iraqi government trains and supports terrorists. In an August 2002 Gallup survey, 86% said they think "Saddam Hussein is involved in supporting terrorist groups that have plans to attack the United States."
That's one poll. There are tons of others.
Now, are we to believe polls? That's something else. Anecdotal evidence might also be biased due to location and demographics of the sample. You can conclude whatever you want, do you hold more faith in your anecdotal evidences or polls? I can't answer that question for you.
That was exactly my point. The administration never directly said that Saddam was responsible, but people spun that for their own propaganda. Maybe only a small % of people were affected by the propaganda, but activists from both side spun the issues. Same with Ozone and GW.
But how about using less oil globally? I means, if we start using less and less, 3 things could happen:
1) If the oil is non-renewable, instead of exhausting all the oil in X years, we do it over CX years. In the end we'll have poluted as much. However, this can lead to 2 things:
1.1) Maybe the Earth can cope with Y% less polutionper years much more efficiently. For example, if you can filter 10 gallons of water per hours, and dump 11 every hours, it's going to clog. However, if you dump 9-10 gallons each hours, all of it will be filtered and there will be no leftovers.
1.2) It won't be significant to make a change.
2) If oil is renewable and we can't run out of it, reducing the consumption can have very high repercussions in the long run.
3) We stop using oil eventually and replace it all with alternatives. Overall, this is very good pollution-wise.
I agree with you with the intention of your post, but you wrong about Global Warning. It's not because people are using GW as propaganda(on both sides of the political spectrum) that it is not happening. The fact is, Global Warming is happening. We have countless REAL scientific evidence of that and there is very little doubt in the climatology community that GW is happening. For a non-political source, check out http://www.realclimate.org/.
Now, all the political activists that tries to spin it to their advantage, that's what you should worry about. The alarmists are not the scientists, the alarmists or naysayers are the political activists.
The scientists are there to make the observations and care about the science. They tell us that yeah, GW is happening. That's pretty much it. Anything that follows is mostly political or policy based.
There is no correlation between the ozone layer and global warming and there never was any. Some people might have led you to believe that, but it's simply not the case, when you look at the science itself and what the scientists are saying.
The parent is right. Furthermore, the scientist community never linked the ozone layer to global warming, just as much as Saddam was never linked to 9/11 but everyone thinks he was linked.
Not to say that it isn't another problem, but it doesn't have any direct consequences on Global Warming.
So, deforestation, land use and land coverage aren't our fault? I wonder whose fault it is.
Local to regional land surface processes related to land cover/land use change represent an important first-order forcing of climate variability. Changes in land cover due to urbanization, agriculture, and engineering projects have important consequences for vegetation, soil moisture, sensible and latent heat fluxes, air temperature, precipitation, atmospheric circulation, the distribution of frozen ground (in high latitude/altitude regions), etc. In areas where rapid and extensive alterations to the land surface have occurred, such as China, parts of North America and Europe, high-latitude areas, as well as many other regions, the analogous land surface processes can have widespread climatic and environmental consequences.
Hell, he's posting articles that are attributing the problems much more directly to humans than on http://www.realclimate.org/ , which, contrary to your comment, I find to be pretty good as it tries to stay away from politics and economics, focusing on the science itself. Hardly alarmist IMHO. All in all, I find both sources complementary.
However, YMMV.
The fact remains: Global Warming is happening. There are very strong indications that we are responsible, but in what capacity and what are the political/economical consequences of such a thing? That's something else. The core problem still remains: there is global warming. That has direct consequences on the fauna and flora of Earth. Whether we are responsible or not, there is still a problem and it's not by still dumping tons of CO2 that it's going to go away.
Well, if you ask the experts, you know, climatology scientists, there is little doubt about global warming. Now, what it means, or the political/economical repercussions, is something else, but we do have the technology and enough evidence and proof that global warming is happening. Not much doubt there when you look only at the science, not the propaganda(from both sides of the political/economical spectrum might I add.)
Will GW means the "fall of civilization" as we know it or such things? Who knows for sure. One thing is sure, science tells us that GW is happening, it's up to us to find out what it means for us, our children and the planet.
You might be interested in reading http://www.realclimate.org/ , a pretty good site dealing with the SCIENCE and not with politics and economics run by prominent climatology scientists tired of being labeled as charlantans, scapegoats or scaremongers.
Slashdot Mirror
About what Chenney is saying... this reminds me of the Simpsons.
Homer: Well, there's not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol is sure doing its job.
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, sweetie.
Lisa: Dad, what if I were to tell you that this rock keeps away tigers.
Homer: Uh-huh, and how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work. It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: I see.
Lisa: But you don't see any tigers around, do you?
Homer: (Looks around) Lisa, I'd like to buy your rock.
That's not even the point. That article is mostly talking about COUNTERFEITS products being sold. Clothes, furnitures, etc. What does this have to do with the DMCA and ISP and so forth? Absolutely nothing. These proposed laws doesn't even tackled the issues raised in that article. If youTHEN take the article apart like you did, you see that most of it is conjecture, however, it is actually belivable. However, downloading movies and mp3s on the net funds terrorism? Yeah right.
Well, you've got 2 things wrong there. Here would be the corrected statements.
1) According to current theories and methods, it was proven that neutrinos do exist.
2) It is impossible for science to determine whether God exists or not and thus the answer is irrevelant to science.
But what happens here is the same as with cars. Ok, bad analogy follows, but oh well. If you put too much HP in your car, you might not even be able to attain the highest speed as other components comes into play: tires, trasmission, aerodynamics, etc. Putting a dual-V12-whatever won't magically make a Mini as fast a a ferrari. HP = MHz and Twin Engine = Core/Dual procs, etc.
Furthermore, why aren't EVERYONE buying ferraris/lambo/porsche/etc? I mean, they want the fastest car possible right? Or why aren't every car makers putting V12 in their cars? Oh yeah, price, gas, normal usage, etc. all come into play. If you only drive to work, a ferrari isn't very useful. Sure, a speed freak/track racer might want to have the ferrari more than a ford, but then again, they are the hardcore gamers of the automotive world.
Intel is kind of selling engines by only advertising the HP in them. That's not all there is, and your mom probably don't need a damn 3.0 ghz for her dell with 256 ram and a slowass hard drive and shitty onboard graphic card. Yeah they have the Celeron, but they still sell them by the speed, for normal people a 3.0 ghz pentium and celeron isn't different, so obviously they'll take the cheapest of the 2.
A lot of people will say that WoW actually starts at level 60, nothing comes to a halt except for xp/level. There's still the whole items, raid, pvp, etc. part of the game.
It really depends on how you look at it.
This reminds me...
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-ji Yang
One of my favorite quote from Alpha Centauri.
Just remember that this is not everyone. In fact, most problems lies with older computers, laptops and some(most?) ATI cards. Me and my friends had absolutely no problems with the game. In fact, I haven't patched the game yet with either patches.
After following tons of game releases in the last 2-3 years, there is AWALYS a backlash about compatibilities and other problems outside of the game itself. There are tons of people posting that games doesn't work, but you have to take that with a grain of salt, since people that are playing fine don't post about it. Vocal minority. Hardware + games = a lot of problems.
This is not to say that there isn't any problems for some people, and some systems, because that's the case. It's just that the problems doesn't affect everyone and that most people are playing the game without any problems.
The game is incredible too. Best of the serie. Try the demo, if you don't have any problem running it, go buy it. At least the demo serves a purpose!
I concede that for D&D, they release all kinds of books on any possible subject. Tons of adventures and all, which ends up being used once, if never.
For Shadowrun tho, IMHO, it's an entirely different matter. The canon(official) storyline of shadowrun is incredibly rich and interesting. Most players swear by it. It advances in a somewhat realtime fashion, always going forward. They used to release a lot of 'adventures', which were mostly cool, but now they tend to expose the storyline and give you tons of hooks, but no exact adventures details. Heck, even old adventures were pretty loose, compared to D&D. Even campaigns are structured in acts following the storyline, but what actually happens is up to the GM... and players.
Now, most of the books now are background materials which makes incredible sources for adventures. Also, what is fun in SR is that, most of the info given in the books are... gossips. Very few things are the real deal, most of it is rumours, which may be true or not. The way it works, it gives so much power to the GM and gives so much fuel for ideas.
I'd say it's a win win. As a GM, I do tons of stuff outside of the official storyline, but I usually always end up putting my players right in the middle of the official storyline, without them knowing, which usually ends up with a big WTF later on.
This is what makes Shadowrun fun. Just the rules without any background would make shadowrun a really ordinary, run of the mill but 'cool' RPG. The rich background and characters are a big part of the game. For this, the books are an excellent source of background.
So yeah, you don't have to buy books, but for SR, the last few books I bought, I was so close to GM orgasm that it was worth it so much. Arcology Shutdown was especially evil, and so, so awesome. All the credits goes to the incredible gang of freelance writers for Shadowrun.
Heck, I would buy Shadowrun sourcebook just to read em even if I had no plan to actually play SR, heh.
A better link, for the raw numbers used in the above chart:
http://www.fireflyfans.net/amazon.asp
I don't have much to add to your opinions, but I have one fact to present you, make whatever you want out of it:
i f
http://www.users.qwest.net/~jorguson/dvdsales05.g
This is the sales chart of the Firefly DVD on Amazon. For a show that was cancelled, that's pretty good. It's been in the top 40 for more than 3 months, and on the top 10 for a total of about 5 weeks. Considering it was cancelled prematurely, that's pretty good.
I don't think it means the majority of people like it, but it isn't just a minor vocal groups of hardcore fans, lots of people bought it, so I expect that a good part of it liked it. Even if just 50% of them liked it, it's still not just a small group of people.
Well, this is the usual naive way of seeing it. It also seems logical at first, since the hash is small, it obviously will get collision.
However, when you start looking at it in more details, some things stands out. If you use a 256bit hash, you get about 10^77 possible combinaisons as a good algorithm should be able to fill all the hash space.
Now, we are currently estimating at ~10^79 the number of atoms in the whole universe. 10^77 vs 10^79. Even without going into maths and analysis of hash algorithm, space distribution and all, it already gives you a pretty good idea. Now, since data isn't always physical(thoughts?), it's interesting to imagine if we can store more information than the total number of atoms in the universe. That's an interesting (but hardly on topic) question.
So, a 256bit hash is pretty big. Increase it to 512bit and you get 10^154 combinaisons. Unless the algorithm is flawed or the distribution isn't uniform, I'd say that collisions are going to be pretty hard to get. Then again, that's without any distribution and statistical analysis, I'll leave that up to others.
The conclusion is that our first thought about collision might not be as evident after thinking about the above.
I completely agree with you. I prefer open source software for all the reason you mentionned. I do know that the having access to the source isn't an end in itself, just as being open-source isn't an end in itself. I won't make and ideological stance for many reasons, but I strongly believe in open source.
Having said that, some proprietary software are just more suited for my needs than open source. Many open source projects are young and not ready, I still use some of them, and for the rest I use proprietary software. I will even contribute to open source project that I don't actively use because I find it cool and want them to become better, but I'll often use another program in the mean time.
The fact it's open source doesn't mean it's going to be better in the end, just as the opposite is true. There is a lot of factor here: trust, dev team, management, etc.
As for the example right now, Firefox is open source and Opera is closed source. I do have MUCH more trust in Opera than Firefox. Why? Firefox might be open source, but the dev team is pretty elitist and closed, they rarely accept patches unless you have a name and rep with them. That's not in the spirit of Open Source. I don't like the management aspect ofit and their roadmap. For opera, I submitted lots of bugs, had feedback asking me how to reproduce them in more details and, behold, it was usually fix in the next few patches. Soemtimes it was a JS bug, sometimes a website not rendering properly while the HTML was valid, some were crashes, etc. Never had a problem, and I was using the free (ad-supported version) at first when I reported those bugs then I started paying because I was pretty happy with it. My experience(and many others) with Firefox is the opposite.
So, open-source is not an end in itself. I agree with the spirit of open-source, but it doesn't mean an open source project is really following the spirit of it.
In the end, the fact is, software development is a process. A well-managed closed source software with good coders and good Q&A will give the same result as a well-managed open-source software with a large sample of coders and testers. Now, how often does that happen? Rarely, unfortunatel, for both sides. But I do want to encourage good software/ideas whether it's open or closed source. I find that Opera is good software, inovative and well managed.
Open-source and Closed-source are processes. In theory, both can be good and both can be real bad. In fact, it doesn't really work that way tho, but you shouldn't dismiss closed-source because it's, well, closed source.
Why would that cost them in the licensing department? If things goes well, they'll gain more exposure and will probably sell a lot more mobile licenses. The mobile version isn't free, just the desktop one.
You can still pay for premium support if you are so inclined. I don't see a problem with this model.
And knowing them, I'd say they take any bug report seriously, which is more than I can say about Firefox.
Why would they go out of business? They are making a profit with their mobile browser which they license. The ad revenue was just to support their mobile dev at first and now since they are making a nice profit they switch to PR and spread their browser as much as they can. That's quite a good idea actually. More people use Opera and since it gets more exposure, this means more company will license their browser for mobile applications.
Unless you are taking an ideological stance in which you do not use any closed/proprietary software(including windows, office, etc.), in which case it's justified, or if you are a Firefox developper and need the source, I don't see that as a strong argument. The fact that it's open source doesn't mean much beside for development and ideological reasons. In the end it's a product.
Now, you may not like Opera for other reasons, or you are happy with firefox and don't see why you'd switch, that's fine. But not trying it because it's not open source is pretty stupid IMHO.
Now, since they are mostly similar, I don't see a lot of people switching from one to another, but that's something else and has nothing to do in the fact that it's open source or not. Those using FF don't see why they should switch, and Oepra users don't see why they should switch. Some will switch because of a couple of features or other reasons, but they both do a pretty good job.
Maybe I'm an open source traitor, but I do like open source and see the advantage of it, but if a closed source software does a better job, or is really cool and innovate, and the price is right, I'll gladly pay to encourage the company. 20-40 bucks for a software I use everyday? That's fair. Now it's free, which is even better. I use tons of open source software whenever I can, but I still use some closed software too. I donate or contribute to open source projects whenever I can, just as I pay for a closed software if I like it.
Oh, and, btw, lots of people thought that Saddam was involved. Maybe much less today, but polls showed that a large majority believed that at the time.
A near-unanimous majority believes that the Iraqi government trains and supports terrorists. In an August 2002 Gallup survey, 86% said they think "Saddam Hussein is involved in supporting terrorist groups that have plans to attack the United States."
That's one poll. There are tons of others.
Now, are we to believe polls? That's something else. Anecdotal evidence might also be biased due to location and demographics of the sample. You can conclude whatever you want, do you hold more faith in your anecdotal evidences or polls? I can't answer that question for you.
That was exactly my point. The administration never directly said that Saddam was responsible, but people spun that for their own propaganda. Maybe only a small % of people were affected by the propaganda, but activists from both side spun the issues. Same with Ozone and GW.
Wake up =)
How much of the recent CO2 increase is due to human activities?
But how about using less oil globally? I means, if we start using less and less, 3 things could happen:
1) If the oil is non-renewable, instead of exhausting all the oil in X years, we do it over CX years. In the end we'll have poluted as much. However, this can lead to 2 things:
1.1) Maybe the Earth can cope with Y% less polutionper years much more efficiently. For example, if you can filter 10 gallons of water per hours, and dump 11 every hours, it's going to clog. However, if you dump 9-10 gallons each hours, all of it will be filtered and there will be no leftovers.
1.2) It won't be significant to make a change.
2) If oil is renewable and we can't run out of it, reducing the consumption can have very high repercussions in the long run.
3) We stop using oil eventually and replace it all with alternatives. Overall, this is very good pollution-wise.
I agree with you with the intention of your post, but you wrong about Global Warning. It's not because people are using GW as propaganda(on both sides of the political spectrum) that it is not happening. The fact is, Global Warming is happening. We have countless REAL scientific evidence of that and there is very little doubt in the climatology community that GW is happening. For a non-political source, check out http://www.realclimate.org/.
Now, all the political activists that tries to spin it to their advantage, that's what you should worry about. The alarmists are not the scientists, the alarmists or naysayers are the political activists.
The scientists are there to make the observations and care about the science. They tell us that yeah, GW is happening. That's pretty much it. Anything that follows is mostly political or policy based.
There is no correlation between the ozone layer and global warming and there never was any. Some people might have led you to believe that, but it's simply not the case, when you look at the science itself and what the scientists are saying.
The parent is right. Furthermore, the scientist community never linked the ozone layer to global warming, just as much as Saddam was never linked to 9/11 but everyone thinks he was linked.
Not to say that it isn't another problem, but it doesn't have any direct consequences on Global Warming.
So, deforestation, land use and land coverage aren't our fault? I wonder whose fault it is.
Local to regional land surface processes related to land cover/land use change represent an important first-order forcing of climate variability. Changes in land cover due to urbanization, agriculture, and engineering projects have important consequences for vegetation, soil moisture, sensible and latent heat fluxes, air temperature, precipitation, atmospheric circulation, the distribution of frozen ground (in high latitude/altitude regions), etc. In areas where rapid and extensive alterations to the land surface have occurred, such as China, parts of North America and Europe, high-latitude areas, as well as many other regions, the analogous land surface processes can have
widespread climatic and environmental consequences.
Hell, he's posting articles that are attributing the problems much more directly to humans than on http://www.realclimate.org/ , which, contrary to your comment, I find to be pretty good as it tries to stay away from politics and economics, focusing on the science itself. Hardly alarmist IMHO. All in all, I find both sources complementary.
However, YMMV.
The fact remains: Global Warming is happening. There are very strong indications that we are responsible, but in what capacity and what are the political/economical consequences of such a thing? That's something else. The core problem still remains: there is global warming. That has direct consequences on the fauna and flora of Earth. Whether we are responsible or not, there is still a problem and it's not by still dumping tons of CO2 that it's going to go away.
Well, if you ask the experts, you know, climatology scientists, there is little doubt about global warming. Now, what it means, or the political/economical repercussions, is something else, but we do have the technology and enough evidence and proof that global warming is happening. Not much doubt there when you look only at the science, not the propaganda(from both sides of the political/economical spectrum might I add.)
Will GW means the "fall of civilization" as we know it or such things? Who knows for sure. One thing is sure, science tells us that GW is happening, it's up to us to find out what it means for us, our children and the planet.
You might be interested in reading http://www.realclimate.org/ , a pretty good site dealing with the SCIENCE and not with politics and economics run by prominent climatology scientists tired of being labeled as charlantans, scapegoats or scaremongers.