Indeed; I use this approach for handling errors in a lot of routines. However, to please the anti-goto crowd, I usually define two macros:
#define Done goto done #define Fail goto fail
You'd be surprised how many people accept the resulting code as properly structured, when they vociferously reject any code that contains the "goto" token. By moving the goto out to a.h file, you magically create goto-less code.
People can be really dumb sometimes.
And I hope they never learn anything about machine code. Their whole world would shatter into little unstructured chunks.
You'd think this would be an insignificant problem, though, because at the machine-code level, pretty much all branching and looping is done with goto-type instructions. Subroutines and interrupt routines are about the only exceptions, and they are arguably not really "branching" instructions.
Of course, this generally hidden in an assembly language, by not includng the 4 chars "goto" in the opcodes. But it's easy to see through that ruse.
What this really means is that with gotos, some optimizations can only be done at the machine-code level, because the flow of control is obscured at higher (source and intermediate-data-structure) levels. But this in turn is used as an argument for generally moving optimizations to the lowest possible level, so that they will work even when the source code obscures the flow of control.
Yeah, but I think there are two very different things going on here. There's the scientific story, in which things like the recent rash of North Atlantic hurricanes is just a detail, buried in a mass of statistics. Then there's the socio-political story, in which most of the people in power have a strong (personal profit) incentve to downplay global warmng, while the great majority of people don't understand and won't notice or care until it bites them.
Saying that such isolated stories like New Orleans aren't relevant to the global warming issue is of course true in a scientific setting. But to understand the scientific issues, you need a good understanding of statistics, and most people (including most/. readers) have hardly any statistical understanding at all. So if you're going to get their attention (which you must if you are to effect changes in a democratc society), you have to somehow get their attention and get across this "global warmng" thing.
So far, the only technique that seems to work is to keep looking for news stories that are vaguely climate related, and keep saying "global warming". It's true that no individual event is scientific evidence. But it is political evidence, the only kind that usually works. The other side will, of course, say "it's not proof". You happily agree with that, and mention that there is an overwhelming body of published evidence, of which this event is just one tiny statistic. You mention the century or so of published articles on the topic. You give links for people who want to learn more about the topic. You keep suggesting that it's a complex topic, and that people will have to learn a lot (including - ack - statistics) to follow the science.
Alternatively, people who don't want to learn all that techie stuff can just listen to the climate experts and trust them. Of course, that's tricky, since there are people with economic agendas trying hard to muddy the waters. Better if people try to learn something.
Anyway, we can expect lots more anecdotal "evidence" of global warming. In a society of sound-bite and bumper-sticker voters, that's necessary to get the story across to people who can't or won't understand the technical writings on the topic.
And we can expect lots more flame wars here on the topic, until the changes reach the point that they can't be ignored. So far, only a few tropical islands have been abandoned due to rising waters. In a few decades, this will be a major news story. Until then, about all we can do in the political arena is to just keep beating on the anecdotes and keep chanting "global warming".
(Oh, yeah; we should also keep agreeing that "further research is needed". This is important with an administration that's cutting back on funding for research.;-)
Indeed. One of the first major studies that dealt with the topic was done in the UK back in the 1970's. It was what's now often called a "data dredging" study, digging up lots and lots of medical records, running correlations of everything against everything else, to discover what might be correlated with long life.
They expressed a bit of surprise that their main results turned out to be about alcoholic beverages. They reported that, while drunkards didn't do too well, teetotallers didn't do a lot better. Those who lived longest were what they called "moderate" drinkers. Many readers here in the US were a bit surprised to discover that this meant 3 or 4 "drinks" (about 1 ounce or 25-30 ml alcohol each) per day for the average-size person. Effectiveness fell off on either side of this peak level.
They also said that people who drank mostly beer or wine showed the most benefit. Distilled beverages were only about half as effective. But drinking distilled booze mixed with fruit juices was about as good for you as beer or wine. They conjectured that the benefit was from both the alcohol and the vitamins produced by yeast or fruit.
There was a strong "further research is needed" in the summary. After all, it was just a correlation study, and said little about causation. Since then there have been a lot of more-detailed studies. This study is just the latest in a series, and a lot more research is still needed.
Finding volunteer subjects is perhaps easier with these studies than with most.
And it has been fun watching the media try to spin the results of study after study that show the benefits of (moderate) alcohol consumption.
The overall significance of this might be indicated by comparing a few other sets of plants that are in the same family:
tomatoes, nightshade, potatoes and tobacco (Solanaceae) strawberries, apples and almonds (Rosaceae) cashews and poison ivy (Anacardiaceae) cabbage, nasturtium and wasabi (Brassicaceae) okra and cotton (Malvaceae)
Plants within a single family can be rather variable. Even within a single genus, you get contrasts like the various kinds of peppers.
-- "It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Great quote. I always thought, back when I was still being sent to church, that this was what was meant by God creating us "in His image". How boring it must be, if you're a god, to watch people abjectly worshiping you. Much better to raise up a species that spins off individuals who are worth having a conversation with.
I'm sympathetic to your position but making shit up doesn't help anybody.
Try visiting the NOAA National Hurricane Center. The advisory this morning was that Delta would lose strength during the day. It has actually increased (slightly) both wind and ground speeds. It isn't predicted to reach hurricane strength.
Yesterday it was headed roughly for the Azores. It is now predicted to curve around and head for Morocco. The storm has been wobbling around a lot, though, so it could hit anywhere. Or fizzle.
Anyway, if you're involved in North Atlantic shipping, you are following this storm. You don't really want your ships to tangle with it.
Should we hold a memorial for those who lost property and life in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79?
Done. Try visiting the Naples area some time. The digs at Pompeii and Herculaneum include museums that amount to national memorials. They attract their share of tourists. Interesting stuff.
Of course, there's no problem finding reading material on the topic. Both google and amazon.com can help you a lot there.
We could drop the world sea level by a dozen feet or so if we flooded the Sahara through Libya, though.
Some decades back, there were a number of "mega-engineering" studies that, among other things, considered this.
The idea was: The Congo River flows through a range of high hills. What we do is bury a pair of small A-bombs under the hills on either side of the river, and set them off. This knocks them into the valley, forming a dam, which can then be fixed up with some heavy earth-moving equipment. If the A-bombs are politically unacceptable, we can use the earth-moving equipment for the entire job, though it will be much slower and more expensive.
This will cause the Congo to form a lake to the east of the dam. It will spread for some years, and finally overflow through the lowest pass, which is to the north. The water flows to Lake Chad, fills it, and overflows through the next-lowest pass, again to the north.
One by one, the low spots in the eastern Sahara are filled with Congo River water. After a century or so, the Qattara Depression in northern Egypt is filled. The next outlet is again to the north, to the Mediterranean.
Meanwhile, the climate of northeastern Africa has been heavily modified by the string of lakes, and is now mostly semi-arid land rather than desert. Whether the Congo will ever actually reach the Mediterranean isn't actually known; it's likely that irrigation projects will soak it up along the way. Or it might end like the Okavango, spreading out in a seasonal marsh somewhere along the way.
Of course, the oceans might still drop slightly. After all, a major river system is no longer supplying water to the Atlantic.
It was an interesting read. I wonder if more study has been done on the idea. But even if it's a good idea, it's probably impossible for political reasons.
(An even better one was the suggestion to dam the Strait of Gibraltar. This was suggested back in 1929, and has been feasible for 50 years or so. Calculations of the results are interesting. Recent writings on the topic have emphasized the possibility of doing this for climate control.)
Would building in a marshy river delta below sea level in an area known for hurricanes and without sufficient levee support be a good idea without global warming?
Well, if you were a Captain of Industry, it would probably sound like a great idea. Just as long as you don't have to live there yourself. Maybe you'd build a house a bit upstream, in Baton Rouge of St Louis, with a condo in New Orleans when you need to visit there (preferably in February or March when the climate is a bit more comfy).
As for the people who live in NO and work for you, why would you care about their comfort or safety. Though you might be worried about possible damage to your warehouses and dock facilities. But good insurance (especially if you can get the government to back it) will go a long way toward alleviating your worries there.
New Orleans is where it is for very good business reasons. It's at the mouth of the river system that drains roughly 1/3 of the US. It could have been built a few miles upstream or down, but there has to be a major port in the general vicinity.
The "sufficient levee support" is, of course, mostly the government's responsibility, since you can't do levee/dike systems on a retail basis. And the story here is that the Army Corps of Engineers had written reports that clearly described the dangers. There were extensive engineering studies of the likely outcome of major storms. The Corps' reports and suggested maintenance programs were known by the Bush administration, and intentionally defunded in 2004.
The damage to NO could have been avoided, if the Corps' recommendations had been followed. But Bush's folks had other uses for the money. The Captains of Industry are rather upset by it all, of course. They aren't particularly concerned with the poor folk of the city who worked on the docks for minimum wage; those people are on their own. But they are concerned with destruction of economic facilities, and are making sure that those facilities are rebuilt, mostly at government expense. Because there will be a major port there. The only questions are who pays for it and who profits from the rebuilding.
I would be more concerned if they said "The highest levels EVER" rather than "The highest levels in...."
Ah, the old debating ruse of requiring that the opponent give perfect data in order to be credible.
There's very little chance that anyone will be able to accurately determine the atmosphere's composition for the entire history of the Earth. Perhaps it can be pushed back a bit more, maybe even a couple million years. But there may never be a way to determine atmosphere or temperature for most of the planet's history.
The study in question only reaches back 650,000 years because they used air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice cores, and that's the age of the oldest ice they could get. There may be small amounts of Antarctic ice that's older, but probably not much, and certainly not covering the entire history of the planet.
The study doesn't say that temperatures or CO2 levels were higher before that. It says nothing at all about earlier conditions, because their data ends at 650,000 years BP.
Taking "highest levels in 650,000 years" to mean "levels were higher before 650,000 years ago" is a supremely fallacious conclusion to draw from the study. This is such an extreme jump of illogic that a typical 10-year-old would see through it. I'd conclude that the real meaning of such an inference is "I have no intention to believe the implications of this study, and I'm going to distort the findings in any way I can to support my beliefs."
Actually, there are studies of much older fossils that imply significantly higher CO2 levels. But the error bars on those studies are also much larger. Not surprising considering the methods that must be used. On the other side, there's the "snowball Earth" conjecture, likely to be true but also needing the support of independent evidence. It's quite possible that this study may be as accurate as we will ever get for such dates.
Or maybe someone will suddenly come up with a way to accurately measure atmospheric composition and temperatures all the way back. If so, it'll be different from any techniques we know of now. But it's unlikely, considering how spotty the fossil record is. So the extreme skeptics will probably always have an excuse to dismiss the data as incomplete.
Still, inferring from this study that conditions must have been such-and-such before 650,000 BP is a stunning bit of illogic.
A second guess would be corals and other reef-building organisms.
But this would also take a lot longer than the couple of centuries since our industrial revolution started pumping CO2 and hydrocarbons into the air. And the tropical reef-building corals aren't in very good shape these days, either.
There are also the deep-water clathrate deposits. We're gonna have a fun few years when we cross the threshold for those. But if we could find a cheap way to add to them on a large scale, it could solve the problem. As far as I've read, nobody is working on that one.
I mean with 10 MPG or there abouts, you have no right to complain;P
Well, here in the US, we do have a right to complain. We call it "The First Ammendment".;-)
What we don't have is the right to do anything meaningful about it.
I mean, yeah; in our household we have a fairly gas-efficient car. Big deal. We're just two of millions of drivers, most of whom listen to lots of marketing but will never hear anything the least bit scientific about global warming.
Our purchase power gives us about as much power as our two votes do. In both cases, the real power tends to fall into the hands of the guys with lots of dollars.
This is one of many issues that can only be solved on a global level. And there's more than a bit of Prisoners' Dilemma game about it. It's in a lot of people's short-term interest to keep doing things the way we're doing them now.
This says far more about the U.N. than it says about Microsoft.
I was wondering when someone would point that out.
And a second question I have is: Why did the UN guys go along with it? When MS told them to make changes, why didn't they just say "Who are you to order us around?"
What sort of hold does MS have over the UN guys? Why didn't the UN just publish the report as written?
Hello, Microsoft! Welcome to the post-GPL economy, where software income is based on services!
Hmmm... I think you got your computer history a bit wrong here. Microsoft is a spin-off of IBM, and for decades IBM has made most of their profit from "services".
Yes, they sell hardware and software. But their own sales figures since the 1960s have said that their primary business was "support" of that hardware and software.
After all, a piece of hardware or software is typically sold once, and then "just runs" (unless it's from Microsoft, in which case it requires constant updates;-). But a support contract gives you income every month. Also, sales are a (somewhat) competitive market, while support is (nearly) a monopoly with much higher profit margins.
And, historically, businesses have been happy to do it this way. With the support contract, when something goes wrong or you can't get it to work at all, you grab the phone and a CS person talks you through it. Or maybe they even come over and help you get it working. Then they go away and you go about your business. Or at least that's how the marketing people tell you it works.
Microsoft's problem is that companies like Red Hat and Novell have figured this out, and are using IBM's model with this so-called "free" software. But for some reason, MS can't understand how IBM or Red Had make their money.
Actually, I suspect that a lot of them do understand this. But they are working from a monopolist position, and see it all as a challenge to their monopoly. They're really just fighting to prevent competitors from arising and taking income that they consider rightfully theirs.
But pretending that "free" software and a service economy are something new is blatant ignorance of how much of the computer business has operated for most of its history.
It's worth noting again that IBM's meta-OS, VM, came out of academia. When customers started installing and using it, IBM first ignored it, then shrugged and started offering it as part of their catalog. It was "open source" and "free" long before linux came along. And, of course, when IBM started supporting VM, it became another source of service income for them.
. I suppose these astronomical hypotheses don't challege people's fundamental world views, but they do when discussing evolution.
But just a few centuries ago, the church's treatment of Galileo (and others) show that at that time, astronomy did produce the same sort of reaction.
What has happened is that the astronomers have won, and even the religious extremists have to accept that the Earth isn't the center of the universe (or flat;-).
They've only been fighting Darwinism for 150 years or so, and they haven't quite had the time it takes for religious people to give up a losing battle. Actually, of course, most of them have given up. Even the Catholic Church now admits that Darwin was right. It's only a few remaining fundies, mostly American, that are still fighting their rear-guard action.
Stick around a couple more centuries, and they'll have given up the fight. But we don't have to worry; they'll find other things to fight scientists over.
I know proposing a medium is highly illegal after the old ether theories. But it would be so helpful, also in making models for gravity.
Actually, a common interpretation of the scientific issues would disagree. Einstein didn't really disprove the existence of the "luminiferous aether"; he merely ignored it because his theories didn't need it.
There is a lot of scientific precedent for this. One that's in a number of science-history texts: At one time, physicists had two competing concepts called "impetus" and "momentum". I've forgotten the exact definition of "impetus"; the two were almost but not quite the same. Then Newton came along and published his theories that used only momentum. He didn't disprove the existence of impetus; he merely ignored it as not useful in his equations.
Similarly, someone may eventually come up with a good theory that extends general relativity in a way that requires that space be treated as a physical medium with matter-like properties. If it's good science that passes the appropriate tests, we'll see that physicists don't decry the reintroduction of the "ether" to physics.
As with the recent suggestions that Einstein's cosmological constant may not have been an error, physicists will mostly just shrug, say "That's interesting", and go on with their work. Their work will, of course, include attempting at all opportunities to shoot holes in the new theory. But including new things in the universe won't be a very strong mark against a new theory.
The ether isn't nearly as radical as cosmic strings, after all. And that "sea of virtual particles" is damned close to a variant of the ether.
What I find most disturbing about that statement is that it implies that something a bit less than 70% of DMCA takedown notices are not improper and not illegal.
Actually, that's a standard logical fallacy; it doesn't imply any such thing. Even if the 30% figure were accurate, it can only be a minimum estimate until the cases are settled in court. But most are settled out of court, mostly for financial reasons (the cost of an individual fighting a corporation), so their legal status can never be known. If you want to make an inference like this, you should read it as "at least 30% of takedown notices are invalid".
But note that that 30% only applies to the specific sample studied, and it wasn't at all a scientifically-chosen random sample. The sample was what statisticians call "self selected", so as a statistic, the number is rather bogus.
This isn't a criticism of the people who did the study. If you read TFA, you'll find that they didn't claim that 30% of DMCA notices are improper; they stated clearly that about 30% of the cases they studied were improper.
So that 30% isn't a statistic; it's merely an example of the DMCA's effect on a small sample of people who are willing to go public with their story. TFA doesn't actually teach us much about the overall impact of the DMCA.
But I suppose that's a bit too precise for a/. discussion. Radical over-generalization (along with reasoning from the inverse) does seem to be the order of the day hereabouts.
[H]ow the hell is a pensioner objecting to a war a terrorist?
That's an easy one: He struck terror into the hearts of Labour Party leaders.
I mean, imagine the results (on their jobs and leadership positions) if this sort of thing became widespread.
Here in the US, we have a similar story: We've reached the stage where decorated military veterans are calling for withdrawal from Iraq. We even have a Congressman, John Murtha, who's an ex-marine with medals and has called for pulling the troops out of Iraq. Bush's gang first tried to label Murtha a traitor, but the public outcry forced Bush to publicly state that being against war isn't treason (at least if you're a decorated veteran). Now commentators are describing Bush and Cheney as "running scared".
So Bush et al are clearly being "terrorized" by people who object to their foreign policies. And Bush is the one who some time back told us "If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists."
Labelling all your opponents as terrorists is conventional politics. And it's an old story. We can expect to hear a lot more of this before it's all over. (And it'll probably never be over.)
Indeed, and that's probably why google didn't turn up the "American Ships Head to Gulf" headline. If I recall correctly, I saw it in a Usenet article that was a collection of funny headlines. Later, I also saw a book that included it in a much larger list of headlines. But the Australian and Russian headlines were more recent, so they showed up in google.
Ambiguous headlines are an ongoing (and cheap;-) source of humor.
We did cross over some sort of cultural threshold about 10 years ago, as news organizations and search engines started to appear online.
Ah, but part of the fun of English-language headlines is that so many words can be misread as verbs. As others have already pointed out, both "spoof" and "top" can be verbs in this headline (though an 's' should probably be added if you're American). Also, "Finnish" can be read as a mistyping of "finish" and treated as a verb, which is a standard pun in some circles.
One of my favorites, from around 15 years ago, was the newspaper headline "American Ships Head to Gulf". I just did a check, by googling for "Ships Head to Gulf", and found that at least one Australian and one Russian have also shipped their heads to the Gulf.
Or maybe I'm misreading them, and these three people shipped someone else's head to the Gulf...
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed; I use this approach for handling errors in a lot of routines. However, to please the anti-goto crowd, I usually define two macros:
.h file, you magically create goto-less code.
#define Done goto done
#define Fail goto fail
You'd be surprised how many people accept the resulting code as properly structured, when they vociferously reject any code that contains the "goto" token. By moving the goto out to a
People can be really dumb sometimes.
And I hope they never learn anything about machine code. Their whole world would shatter into little unstructured chunks.
Obviously,
what
you should have done
is insert
lots of
line feeds
and tabs
into
that one line.
Then it would have been a shining example of highly-structured code, and obviously much more readable.
Your argument against Goto is even less logical. Goto is a conditional jump, ...
No; Goto is a Japanese programmer.
Actually, it's the name of several Japanese programmers. Puns on their names go way back, to the weeks after Dijkstra's famous paper.
You'd think this would be an insignificant problem, though, because at the machine-code level, pretty much all branching and looping is done with goto-type instructions. Subroutines and interrupt routines are about the only exceptions, and they are arguably not really "branching" instructions.
Of course, this generally hidden in an assembly language, by not includng the 4 chars "goto" in the opcodes. But it's easy to see through that ruse.
What this really means is that with gotos, some optimizations can only be done at the machine-code level, because the flow of control is obscured at higher (source and intermediate-data-structure) levels. But this in turn is used as an argument for generally moving optimizations to the lowest possible level, so that they will work even when the source code obscures the flow of control.
people are always trying to eliminate him.
Yeah, but I think there are two very different things going on here. There's the scientific story, in which things like the recent rash of North Atlantic hurricanes is just a detail, buried in a mass of statistics. Then there's the socio-political story, in which most of the people in power have a strong (personal profit) incentve to downplay global warmng, while the great majority of people don't understand and won't notice or care until it bites them.
/. readers) have hardly any statistical understanding at all. So if you're going to get their attention (which you must if you are to effect changes in a democratc society), you have to somehow get their attention and get across this "global warmng" thing.
;-)
Saying that such isolated stories like New Orleans aren't relevant to the global warming issue is of course true in a scientific setting. But to understand the scientific issues, you need a good understanding of statistics, and most people (including most
So far, the only technique that seems to work is to keep looking for news stories that are vaguely climate related, and keep saying "global warming". It's true that no individual event is scientific evidence. But it is political evidence, the only kind that usually works. The other side will, of course, say "it's not proof". You happily agree with that, and mention that there is an overwhelming body of published evidence, of which this event is just one tiny statistic. You mention the century or so of published articles on the topic. You give links for people who want to learn more about the topic. You keep suggesting that it's a complex topic, and that people will have to learn a lot (including - ack - statistics) to follow the science.
Alternatively, people who don't want to learn all that techie stuff can just listen to the climate experts and trust them. Of course, that's tricky, since there are people with economic agendas trying hard to muddy the waters. Better if people try to learn something.
Anyway, we can expect lots more anecdotal "evidence" of global warming. In a society of sound-bite and bumper-sticker voters, that's necessary to get the story across to people who can't or won't understand the technical writings on the topic.
And we can expect lots more flame wars here on the topic, until the changes reach the point that they can't be ignored. So far, only a few tropical islands have been abandoned due to rising waters. In a few decades, this will be a major news story. Until then, about all we can do in the political arena is to just keep beating on the anecdotes and keep chanting "global warming".
(Oh, yeah; we should also keep agreeing that "further research is needed". This is important with an administration that's cutting back on funding for research.
Indeed. One of the first major studies that dealt with the topic was done in the UK back in the 1970's. It was what's now often called a "data dredging" study, digging up lots and lots of medical records, running correlations of everything against everything else, to discover what might be correlated with long life.
They expressed a bit of surprise that their main results turned out to be about alcoholic beverages. They reported that, while drunkards didn't do too well, teetotallers didn't do a lot better. Those who lived longest were what they called "moderate" drinkers. Many readers here in the US were a bit surprised to discover that this meant 3 or 4 "drinks" (about 1 ounce or 25-30 ml alcohol each) per day for the average-size person. Effectiveness fell off on either side of this peak level.
They also said that people who drank mostly beer or wine showed the most benefit. Distilled beverages were only about half as effective. But drinking distilled booze mixed with fruit juices was about as good for you as beer or wine. They conjectured that the benefit was from both the alcohol and the vitamins produced by yeast or fruit.
There was a strong "further research is needed" in the summary. After all, it was just a correlation study, and said little about causation. Since then there have been a lot of more-detailed studies. This study is just the latest in a series, and a lot more research is still needed.
Finding volunteer subjects is perhaps easier with these studies than with most.
And it has been fun watching the media try to spin the results of study after study that show the benefits of (moderate) alcohol consumption.
[T]he closest relative of hops is cannabis.
The overall significance of this might be indicated by comparing a few other sets of plants that are in the same family:
tomatoes, nightshade, potatoes and tobacco (Solanaceae)
strawberries, apples and almonds (Rosaceae)
cashews and poison ivy (Anacardiaceae)
cabbage, nasturtium and wasabi (Brassicaceae)
okra and cotton (Malvaceae)
Plants within a single family can be rather variable. Even within a single genus, you get contrasts like the various kinds of peppers.
--
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Great quote. I always thought, back when I was still being sent to church, that this was what was meant by God creating us "in His image". How boring it must be, if you're a god, to watch people abjectly worshiping you. Much better to raise up a species that spins off individuals who are worth having a conversation with.
... tropical storm DELTA is brewing.
I'm sympathetic to your position but making shit up doesn't help anybody.
Try visiting the NOAA National Hurricane Center. The advisory this morning was that Delta would lose strength during the day. It has actually increased (slightly) both wind and ground speeds. It isn't predicted to reach hurricane strength.
Yesterday it was headed roughly for the Azores. It is now predicted to curve around and head for Morocco. The storm has been wobbling around a lot, though, so it could hit anywhere. Or fizzle.
Anyway, if you're involved in North Atlantic shipping, you are following this storm. You don't really want your ships to tangle with it.
Should we hold a memorial for those who lost property and life in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in AD 79?
Done. Try visiting the Naples area some time. The digs at Pompeii and Herculaneum include museums that amount to national memorials. They attract their share of tourists. Interesting stuff.
Of course, there's no problem finding reading material on the topic. Both google and amazon.com can help you a lot there.
We could drop the world sea level by a dozen feet or so if we flooded the Sahara through Libya, though.
Some decades back, there were a number of "mega-engineering" studies that, among other things, considered this.
The idea was: The Congo River flows through a range of high hills. What we do is bury a pair of small A-bombs under the hills on either side of the river, and set them off. This knocks them into the valley, forming a dam, which can then be fixed up with some heavy earth-moving equipment. If the A-bombs are politically unacceptable, we can use the earth-moving equipment for the entire job, though it will be much slower and more expensive.
This will cause the Congo to form a lake to the east of the dam. It will spread for some years, and finally overflow through the lowest pass, which is to the north. The water flows to Lake Chad, fills it, and overflows through the next-lowest pass, again to the north.
One by one, the low spots in the eastern Sahara are filled with Congo River water. After a century or so, the Qattara Depression in northern Egypt is filled. The next outlet is again to the north, to the Mediterranean.
Meanwhile, the climate of northeastern Africa has been heavily modified by the string of lakes, and is now mostly semi-arid land rather than desert. Whether the Congo will ever actually reach the Mediterranean isn't actually known; it's likely that irrigation projects will soak it up along the way. Or it might end like the Okavango, spreading out in a seasonal marsh somewhere along the way.
Of course, the oceans might still drop slightly. After all, a major river system is no longer supplying water to the Atlantic.
It was an interesting read. I wonder if more study has been done on the idea. But even if it's a good idea, it's probably impossible for political reasons.
(An even better one was the suggestion to dam the Strait of Gibraltar. This was suggested back in 1929, and has been feasible for 50 years or so. Calculations of the results are interesting. Recent writings on the topic have emphasized the possibility of doing this for climate control.)
Hey, here in the US, that's not called "lying", it's "marketing".
Try to get it right in the [warm] future.
Would building in a marshy river delta below sea level in an area known for hurricanes and without sufficient levee support be a good idea without global warming?
Well, if you were a Captain of Industry, it would probably sound like a great idea. Just as long as you don't have to live there yourself. Maybe you'd build a house a bit upstream, in Baton Rouge of St Louis, with a condo in New Orleans when you need to visit there (preferably in February or March when the climate is a bit more comfy).
As for the people who live in NO and work for you, why would you care about their comfort or safety. Though you might be worried about possible damage to your warehouses and dock facilities. But good insurance (especially if you can get the government to back it) will go a long way toward alleviating your worries there.
New Orleans is where it is for very good business reasons. It's at the mouth of the river system that drains roughly 1/3 of the US. It could have been built a few miles upstream or down, but there has to be a major port in the general vicinity.
The "sufficient levee support" is, of course, mostly the government's responsibility, since you can't do levee/dike systems on a retail basis. And the story here is that the Army Corps of Engineers had written reports that clearly described the dangers. There were extensive engineering studies of the likely outcome of major storms. The Corps' reports and suggested maintenance programs were known by the Bush administration, and intentionally defunded in 2004.
The damage to NO could have been avoided, if the Corps' recommendations had been followed. But Bush's folks had other uses for the money. The Captains of Industry are rather upset by it all, of course. They aren't particularly concerned with the poor folk of the city who worked on the docks for minimum wage; those people are on their own. But they are concerned with destruction of economic facilities, and are making sure that those facilities are rebuilt, mostly at government expense. Because there will be a major port there. The only questions are who pays for it and who profits from the rebuilding.
I would be more concerned if they said "The highest levels EVER" rather than "The highest levels in ...."
Ah, the old debating ruse of requiring that the opponent give perfect data in order to be credible.
There's very little chance that anyone will be able to accurately determine the atmosphere's composition for the entire history of the Earth. Perhaps it can be pushed back a bit more, maybe even a couple million years. But there may never be a way to determine atmosphere or temperature for most of the planet's history.
The study in question only reaches back 650,000 years because they used air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice cores, and that's the age of the oldest ice they could get. There may be small amounts of Antarctic ice that's older, but probably not much, and certainly not covering the entire history of the planet.
The study doesn't say that temperatures or CO2 levels were higher before that. It says nothing at all about earlier conditions, because their data ends at 650,000 years BP.
Taking "highest levels in 650,000 years" to mean "levels were higher before 650,000 years ago" is a supremely fallacious conclusion to draw from the study. This is such an extreme jump of illogic that a typical 10-year-old would see through it. I'd conclude that the real meaning of such an inference is "I have no intention to believe the implications of this study, and I'm going to distort the findings in any way I can to support my beliefs."
Actually, there are studies of much older fossils that imply significantly higher CO2 levels. But the error bars on those studies are also much larger. Not surprising considering the methods that must be used. On the other side, there's the "snowball Earth" conjecture, likely to be true but also needing the support of independent evidence. It's quite possible that this study may be as accurate as we will ever get for such dates.
Or maybe someone will suddenly come up with a way to accurately measure atmospheric composition and temperatures all the way back. If so, it'll be different from any techniques we know of now. But it's unlikely, considering how spotty the fossil record is. So the extreme skeptics will probably always have an excuse to dismiss the data as incomplete.
Still, inferring from this study that conditions must have been such-and-such before 650,000 BP is a stunning bit of illogic.
My first guess would be plankton.
A second guess would be corals and other reef-building organisms.
But this would also take a lot longer than the couple of centuries since our industrial revolution started pumping CO2 and hydrocarbons into the air. And the tropical reef-building corals aren't in very good shape these days, either.
There are also the deep-water clathrate deposits. We're gonna have a fun few years when we cross the threshold for those. But if we could find a cheap way to add to them on a large scale, it could solve the problem. As far as I've read, nobody is working on that one.
I mean with 10 MPG or there abouts, you have no right to complain ;P
;-)
Well, here in the US, we do have a right to complain. We call it "The First Ammendment".
What we don't have is the right to do anything meaningful about it.
I mean, yeah; in our household we have a fairly gas-efficient car. Big deal. We're just two of millions of drivers, most of whom listen to lots of marketing but will never hear anything the least bit scientific about global warming.
Our purchase power gives us about as much power as our two votes do. In both cases, the real power tends to fall into the hands of the guys with lots of dollars.
This is one of many issues that can only be solved on a global level. And there's more than a bit of Prisoners' Dilemma game about it. It's in a lot of people's short-term interest to keep doing things the way we're doing them now.
This says far more about the U.N. than it says about Microsoft.
I was wondering when someone would point that out.
And a second question I have is: Why did the UN guys go along with it? When MS told them to make changes, why didn't they just say "Who are you to order us around?"
What sort of hold does MS have over the UN guys? Why didn't the UN just publish the report as written?
Anyone know?
Hello, Microsoft! Welcome to the post-GPL economy, where software income is based on services!
... I think you got your computer history a bit wrong here. Microsoft is a spin-off of IBM, and for decades IBM has made most of their profit from "services".
;-). But a support contract gives you income every month. Also, sales are a (somewhat) competitive market, while support is (nearly) a monopoly with much higher profit margins.
Hmmm
Yes, they sell hardware and software. But their own sales figures since the 1960s have said that their primary business was "support" of that hardware and software.
After all, a piece of hardware or software is typically sold once, and then "just runs" (unless it's from Microsoft, in which case it requires constant updates
And, historically, businesses have been happy to do it this way. With the support contract, when something goes wrong or you can't get it to work at all, you grab the phone and a CS person talks you through it. Or maybe they even come over and help you get it working. Then they go away and you go about your business. Or at least that's how the marketing people tell you it works.
Microsoft's problem is that companies like Red Hat and Novell have figured this out, and are using IBM's model with this so-called "free" software. But for some reason, MS can't understand how IBM or Red Had make their money.
Actually, I suspect that a lot of them do understand this. But they are working from a monopolist position, and see it all as a challenge to their monopoly. They're really just fighting to prevent competitors from arising and taking income that they consider rightfully theirs.
But pretending that "free" software and a service economy are something new is blatant ignorance of how much of the computer business has operated for most of its history.
It's worth noting again that IBM's meta-OS, VM, came out of academia. When customers started installing and using it, IBM first ignored it, then shrugged and started offering it as part of their catalog. It was "open source" and "free" long before linux came along. And, of course, when IBM started supporting VM, it became another source of service income for them.
. I suppose these astronomical hypotheses don't challege people's fundamental world views, but they do when discussing evolution.
;-).
But just a few centuries ago, the church's treatment of Galileo (and others) show that at that time, astronomy did produce the same sort of reaction.
What has happened is that the astronomers have won, and even the religious extremists have to accept that the Earth isn't the center of the universe (or flat
They've only been fighting Darwinism for 150 years or so, and they haven't quite had the time it takes for religious people to give up a losing battle. Actually, of course, most of them have given up. Even the Catholic Church now admits that Darwin was right. It's only a few remaining fundies, mostly American, that are still fighting their rear-guard action.
Stick around a couple more centuries, and they'll have given up the fight. But we don't have to worry; they'll find other things to fight scientists over.
I know proposing a medium is highly illegal after the old ether theories. But it would be so helpful, also in making models for gravity.
Actually, a common interpretation of the scientific issues would disagree. Einstein didn't really disprove the existence of the "luminiferous aether"; he merely ignored it because his theories didn't need it.
There is a lot of scientific precedent for this. One that's in a number of science-history texts: At one time, physicists had two competing concepts called "impetus" and "momentum". I've forgotten the exact definition of "impetus"; the two were almost but not quite the same. Then Newton came along and published his theories that used only momentum. He didn't disprove the existence of impetus; he merely ignored it as not useful in his equations.
Similarly, someone may eventually come up with a good theory that extends general relativity in a way that requires that space be treated as a physical medium with matter-like properties. If it's good science that passes the appropriate tests, we'll see that physicists don't decry the reintroduction of the "ether" to physics.
As with the recent suggestions that Einstein's cosmological constant may not have been an error, physicists will mostly just shrug, say "That's interesting", and go on with their work. Their work will, of course, include attempting at all opportunities to shoot holes in the new theory. But including new things in the universe won't be a very strong mark against a new theory.
The ether isn't nearly as radical as cosmic strings, after all. And that "sea of virtual particles" is damned close to a variant of the ether.
What I find most disturbing about that statement is that it implies that something a bit less than 70% of DMCA takedown notices are not improper and not illegal.
/. discussion. Radical over-generalization (along with reasoning from the inverse) does seem to be the order of the day hereabouts.
Actually, that's a standard logical fallacy; it doesn't imply any such thing. Even if the 30% figure were accurate, it can only be a minimum estimate until the cases are settled in court. But most are settled out of court, mostly for financial reasons (the cost of an individual fighting a corporation), so their legal status can never be known. If you want to make an inference like this, you should read it as "at least 30% of takedown notices are invalid".
But note that that 30% only applies to the specific sample studied, and it wasn't at all a scientifically-chosen random sample. The sample was what statisticians call "self selected", so as a statistic, the number is rather bogus.
This isn't a criticism of the people who did the study. If you read TFA, you'll find that they didn't claim that 30% of DMCA notices are improper; they stated clearly that about 30% of the cases they studied were improper.
So that 30% isn't a statistic; it's merely an example of the DMCA's effect on a small sample of people who are willing to go public with their story. TFA doesn't actually teach us much about the overall impact of the DMCA.
But I suppose that's a bit too precise for a
[H]ow the hell is a pensioner objecting to a war a terrorist?
That's an easy one: He struck terror into the hearts of Labour Party leaders.
I mean, imagine the results (on their jobs and leadership positions) if this sort of thing became widespread.
Here in the US, we have a similar story: We've reached the stage where decorated military veterans are calling for withdrawal from Iraq. We even have a Congressman, John Murtha, who's an ex-marine with medals and has called for pulling the troops out of Iraq. Bush's gang first tried to label Murtha a traitor, but the public outcry forced Bush to publicly state that being against war isn't treason (at least if you're a decorated veteran). Now commentators are describing Bush and Cheney as "running scared".
So Bush et al are clearly being "terrorized" by people who object to their foreign policies. And Bush is the one who some time back told us "If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists."
Labelling all your opponents as terrorists is conventional politics. And it's an old story. We can expect to hear a lot more of this before it's all over. (And it'll probably never be over.)
Indeed, and that's probably why google didn't turn up the "American Ships Head to Gulf" headline. If I recall correctly, I saw it in a Usenet article that was a collection of funny headlines. Later, I also saw a book that included it in a much larger list of headlines. But the Australian and Russian headlines were more recent, so they showed up in google.
;-) source of humor.
Ambiguous headlines are an ongoing (and cheap
We did cross over some sort of cultural threshold about 10 years ago, as news organizations and search engines started to appear online.
USE VERBS IN YOUR HEADLINES!
...
Ah, but part of the fun of English-language headlines is that so many words can be misread as verbs. As others have already pointed out, both "spoof" and "top" can be verbs in this headline (though an 's' should probably be added if you're American). Also, "Finnish" can be read as a mistyping of "finish" and treated as a verb, which is a standard pun in some circles.
One of my favorites, from around 15 years ago, was the newspaper headline "American Ships Head to Gulf". I just did a check, by googling for "Ships Head to Gulf", and found that at least one Australian and one Russian have also shipped their heads to the Gulf.
Or maybe I'm misreading them, and these three people shipped someone else's head to the Gulf