What it tells you is the part that is certain: that if sea level rises by X, places that are less than X above mean high tide will be under water -- once for places with diurnal tides and twice for places with semi-diurnal tides. Flooding is much more complex than that.
Natural disasters are never actually "natural". It is human behavior that turns what would otherwise be just a natural phenomenon like an earthquake or flood into a "disaster". So changes in flood risk will occur where human engineering and settlement practices don't adapt to changes in local sea level and weather.
What we've done in planning development over the past century is look at historical records to figure out what a "ten year flood" or a "hundred year flood" would be, and site things near the coast according to our tolerance for it being flooded. A hundred year flood is probably not going to be a factor at all in siting something, but a ten year flood is going to be a big deal.
Here's the important part: the levels in a hundred year flood aren't going to be 10x as high as in a ten year flood; in many places it might only be just a little bit higher. But people build right up to the line because sharp demarcations are baked into building codes and insurance rates. So a slight increase in sea level could well have a disproportionate economic effect due to flooding.
Another issue not to discount in a climate change scenario is greater weather variability. Even with no local sea level rise, an increase in the frequency of unusually large coastal storms can create a dramatic shift in flooding frequency. Just like an unchanging sea level is built into our calculations of a "hundred year flood" an unchanging climate is as well.
So the climate change/flooding connection not as simple as dialing up sea level by a certain number of meters. Depending on local conditions like tidal dynamics and wind exposure, a modest (or non-existent) change in global sea levels along with a modest change in the frequency of large storms could mean a lot of stuff along the edges of the flood plain that never flooded in the past could flood quite frequently. That's what we should be worried about not a 500m or even 5m increase in sea level.
It's like my uncle Ivan, an old-time red used to say to me. "Kid, nobody believes in socialism. Nobody believes in capitalism either. It's 'Socialism for me, capitalism for you."
People understand that corporations are amoral. The rational position towards a large, powerful corporation is distrust. That's the baseline from which a corporation has to work up from.
On top of that most people don't get a *choice* of Microsoft or something else; Microsoft is chosen *for them* by the corporate IT department or by the IT departments of people they have to work with. That's raises the bar for user experience, somethign MS is not particularly good at. It's like the food you get on a college meal plan. The fact you're forced to eat it means that if you're assigning it a letter grade you automatically deduct two letter grades: an A becomes a C and a B becomes a D.
Now consider Apple. There's a lot to dislike in their trying to position themselves as content gate keepers especially. But there are offsetting virtues: innovation, design, and build quality. On top of that most people who use Apple products choose to do so, which means they get a better evaluation.
Unfair? Maybe; but that's reality.
Now this is not to say that Microsoft has no virtues as a corporation, it's just that those virtues aren't experienced by *users*. Microsoft has consistently provided a mediocre user experience in its core products, and undermined the main value of their products to the user -- familiarity -- by pointless fiddling with user interfaces.
Microsoft's big sin was abusing its market position to achieve a monopoly with a mediocre product. To be forgiven of that sin, they've got to start producing products people love and look forward to, and don't feel let down by.
Human being have never lived in a utopia. We've always had problems and we always will. And since we're incorrigibly ungrateful creatures, we never give ourselves credit for problems solved of ameliorated. So as far as we've been concerned the world's always been going to hell, and always will be.
We act as if having problems is an unnatural state of affairs, but we've always had problems and always will. And that's good, because you can't build a meaningful, satisfying life without problems to work on.
So don't throw up your hands at the problems you cite. *Do* something about them. Everybody can do *something*. Even if it's just a little bit, a little bit added up over everyone would be a lot.
You don't want to go to Mars? Please by all means, keep your bullshit on Earth and let us evolved human beings make a fresh new life on a fresh new planet without you!
True, but global warming doesn't mean we won't have good, hard winters. Sometimes we'll have them in places where such winters were seldom seen previously.
The reason that "climate change" is a better term than "global warming" is that "global warming" seems to conjure up a spurious picture where everywhere on the Earth is going to get noticeably hotter. In reality we're talking about *global averages* going up a degree or two at most over the next couple of decades. That's not much temperature-wise. A one degree change uniformly applied across the globe wouldn't close many ski resorts, for example, or make it nice to swim in the Gulf of Maine.
The real issue is that degree of average temperature increase across the globe represents a huge total addition of energy to the atmosphere. That in turn means that what previously would have been anomalous weather will become more common: hotter OR colder than normal; wetter or drier; longer or shorter seasons than previously experienced. These changes will put stress on plants, animals and human communities to adapt. A February cold snap might be a good thing for a New England apple orchard, but it's lousy for a Florida orange grove.
You make it sound like introducing new ideas to the public is somehow morally dubious.
The El Niño/Southern Oscillation was described some eighty years ago, but it was relatively obscure stuff until there was a big uptick in scientific interest in the mid-80s. Researchers began to realize that this phenomenon had huge, predictable consequences on weather across the globe. I remember because my wife was a grad student at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution at the time. It's not surprising that it takes twenty years or so for an idea that's caught on in the scientific community to enter the public consciousness. Not as many people subscribe to Science News as should.
That's a good point. According to the New York Times this particular leak has not as of yet reached the ocean yet. TEPCO says it won't make it to the ocean, but I'm reserving judgment on that claim given TEPCOs poor track record.
Still, even if ocean disposal is the best long term approach, that doesn't mean that it would be a good thing if this leak is washed into the ocean. It needs to be contained.
Strontium 90 has a half-life of 29 years. Obviously the process of decay will go on indefinitely, so it's pretty much meaningless to say that the leaking isotopes will decay "in decades".
What we need to know is how long will it take the concentrations of harmful isotopes to drop to acceptable levels. Thata of course depends on how many times greater the concentration is than acceptable levels.
If the initial concentration of S90 is acceptable, the answer is "instantaneously". If the concentration is 4x acceptable, the answer is "116 years". So it's not inconceivable that an S90 contamination problem could persist for centuries, although we have yet to determine whether we have such a problem.
Well, dilution *is* a reasonable approach to disposing of this waste, but what we have here appears to be an ongoing leak from a point source into tidal waters, which is not at all the way you'd design a project to dilute the waste.
There are several big differences between letting the stuff leak and a proper attempt to diffuse the waste over a large area of the ocean. First of all the leak is a point source discharging into an intertidal zone. My wife is a physical oceanographer who helped site a major sewage outfall, so I remember some of the concerns. Stuff that is discharged right near the shore doesn't diffuse nicely out to deep water, it gets transported along the shore with the same currents that deposit sand from rivers along the coast.
This means that the S90 may well get deposited in sediments. The concentration of S90 probably won't be enough to be a direct concern to humans, but because strontium is an analog to calcium, it can bioaccumulate. This means the somewhat incomplete process of dilution gets undone when critters like benthic worms on the bottom of the food chain consume the S90, and are in turn consumed by ground fish and so on up the food chain. At each trophic level the S90 is concentrated a little more.
I agree that the amount here reported is probably not a serious threat to human and environmental health, but the problem is that this process is ongoing. It is possible that what is going on doesn't present any threat to human or environmental health, but we can't be sure. By the time we figure it out it will be too late to do anything (or anything affordable) about it if it is a problem.
In a nutshell: dilution could work, but there's a significant chance that just letting the stuff leak into the sea won't do the job. This stuff needs to be contained or otherwise dealt with *now*.
Speaking of SW Virginia, I recently traveled on business from Boston to Blacksburg VA. There's no good way to get to Blacksburg; I'd have had to take a four hour flight (not counting check in time) to Roanoke then drive. Instead I took a 12 hour train trip to Lynchburg and drove. On the face of it, it sounds insane to take a 12 hour train ride instead of 4 hour plane ride, but the key is that I turned what would have been a travel day anyway into a highly productive work day. I put a solid eight hours of billable time in and relaxed for the rest of the trip. As a bonus I arrived at my hotel relaxed and refreshed.
On my return trip I wrote up my results, drafted an invoice and wrote a proposal for further work and popped them in the mail when I got home.
Look Ma, no downtime! No rush or hurrying, either.
Of course you can work on a plane, but its cramped, distracting and boring. A train is roomy, and comfortable enough that you can achieve a flow state and get some serious work done. If I'd taken the plane I could have arrived at the hotel at around 4PM and and worked until midnight, but it's satisfying arrive at your hotel on a business trip completely prepared for the next day. Plus a train is a nicer place to work than a hotel table. When you're doing brain work its more pleasant to look out the window at the scenery going by than to stare out at the hotel parking lot.
You've got to have the capacity to unplug, though. Some people don't seem to have the ability to go an hour without social media. But if you are comfortable working in isolation, without distraction or external simulation, then a day on the train is like a mini vacation. I suspect it would be hell for some people, but for me I'll always take the train if it's a choice between blowing a day on train travel and blowing a day on air travel.
Originally patents were for 13 years with one renewal by the original Person that applies and copyright was for 17 years with one renewal by the original Person that applies.
Sure, but none of that is actually in the Constitution. Article 1, Section 8 empowers Congress to secure exculsive rights to inventors "for limited Times[sic]", without stipulating any actual limit. For practical purposes this enables Congress to extend patents and copyrights indefinitely.
The framers were men of remarkable vision to understand that patents were needed all the way back in 1787, but they weren't supermen or fortune tellers. They did not foresee the rise of corporations to become the dominant force in American society, or the uses they would dream up for the patent system. I doubt they ever imagined anything like a business methods patent, or a design patent, or the notion of Federal trademark law.
I'm not clear what you are attacking. Are you suggesting that altering model parameters to match real world outcomes is somehow dishonest? Or are you suggesting that researchers altered their model after the fact then claimed the model predicted actual outcomes before the adjustments were made? If the latter, please provide the source for the claim.
Well,I wasn't specifically thinking about tasks that require safety goggles. I was thinking more along the lines of building inspection, urban rat control, exotic invasive species management, etc. In these kinds of applications the goggles wouldn't really be the focus; they're just part of an overall system that needs a little marketing pizzazz to break into.
Things like rat control aren't new activities the app developer is dreaming up out of thin air; these are important functions that serious people are already doing *now*. Your pitch is that you're going to help them do it *better*. The problem is that that is a tough pitch to make to the pragmatists on whom you'll make most of your money. They *know* they can do things the way they have and they can't be sure your system will work.
What you need to bootstrap a successful product in these kinds of markets are customers who fit the early adopter profile. These are people attracted to new and improved ways of doing things. To capture those early adopters, you need to put something in their hand that will fire their imagination, otherwise they'll talk your ear off and never buy anything.
I agree that you can probably prototype something workable with an LCD, or even an android smartphone, but when it comes to selling into these kinds of markets having a little polish really helps you break in. These markets are too small to support a manufacturing run of custom hardware, unless it is rather crude.
Actually, phones are very tough. They just get *mishandled*. Believe me, I have experience with this kind of thing; stuff that gets used in the field by fieldworkers take an almost unbelievable beating. The half-life of handheld computing device is, in my experience, between twelve and eighteen months.
But something you wear all the time *might be* different. I don't *know* this, because I have no experience with wearables, but I think it's possible they won't get left on top of the truck or fumbled into a water-filled ditch when you take it out of its holster. It may also be a bit more secure mounted near the user's eye, which people instinctively protect. This is conjecture, mind you, glass mounted HUD might be even worse, but I don't think so. And I'm certain that if a phone can be used while remaining snug in its case on the user's belt it will last longer.
Which doesn't impeach Spencer's critiques of climate change theory; it only means his beliefs about how the climate will behave in the future are unscientific. Any substantive critiques he raises on things like the effect of cloud formation on climate models should be dealt with substantively. His belief that climate will not change in the future because God wills it not to change is not a scientific proposition, and can't be addressed scientifically short of waiting and seeing.
It's important to note that Spencer continues to be published in climate journals. This shows that the denialist's belief that scientists who disagree with AGW are discriminated against is false. Skeptical scientists are free to critique, but not to publish their religious beliefs as science, which is exactly as it should be.
I see even less reason to impeach the credibility of John Christy just because he's a climate change skeptic -- and especially not because he lives in the same state as Spencer. You're allowed to disagree with the scientific consensus; it means you're outside the mainstream of science, it doesn't automatically make you a crackpot. Even if you *are* a crackpot, you're allowed to publish non-crackpottish criticisms of the basis for scientific consensus. Science is very open-minded this way, which is one of the reasons why the scientific *consensus* is generally so reliable.
This is how modeling works. You construct your model, but it inevitably has a number of parameters that aren't known with any degree of certainty. You choose values for your model parameters which match historical results.
For example we know that the amount of carbon plants absorb and the amount of water they emit as CO2 and ambient temperature change, but short of measuring the interaction of every blade of grass on Earth with the surrounding atmosphere we can't model it precisely. So we put together some equation and tweak the equation's parameters so the equation spits out the right numbers for our historical data.
It's not intellectually dishonest; it just represents a method for arriving at the most reasonable guess for how the Earth will behave for data within or near the historical range of values. That's certainly more reasonable than assuming the plants will behave exactly at 500 ppm CO2 as they did at 300 ppm, when we know for a fact that's a physical impossibility.
Well, there are apps and there are apps. In the era since the iPhone introduction, we think of apps as relatively cheap things where you make your money selling in high volumes at modest, impulse-friendly prices; or appendages to web-based social media systems. But there are applications for devices like this where they aren't necessarily the focus of the system.
I see potential for these devices in a lot of commercial, industrial and government fieldwork. Such applications aren't conceived around a gadget like this, they're conceived around tasks and data. That said, a gadget like this is often a powerful incentive for the customer to buy *the whole system*, even though it's only a narrow slice of the whole system's functionality.
I can imagine these devices being used in various kinds of inspection applications for example. They technically don't do anything a smartphone doesn't do, but if we're positing a future $400 device, that's the kind of money people will consider well spent if they see any advantage in immediacy, efficiency or durability. Pocket devices like smartphones and PDAs get rough treatment in the field, especially as they tend to get put in bad places, but if the smartphone stays in a hard case on the belt, a comfortable wearable terminal that costs under $500 could pay for itself in dropped smartphones over a comparatively short time.
Pretty soon there will be a $399 version that's 10x better than the first generation.
True, but if you're an app developer that's actually a sensible reason to drop the dough now and get familiar with the platform so you're ready when it becomes viable for pragmatist adopters. In my experience $500/seat is an important threshold when selling to pragmatist adopters.
The fact that the guy is even asking this question shows that he's got the money, but it's enough dough that he has to consider the purchase carefully. If there were an existing application that justified the purchase as a user he'd probably know about it, so I'd guess that the only practical reason to buy the thing would be to develop a new application. If you had an idea for a new app or even had confidence you could come up with such an idea, now would be a good time to get a jump on the competition.
If the guy isn't a serious developer, then what he ought to do is compare the novelty value of owning a Google Glass with other amusing ways he could spend $1500. That would pay for round trip airfare to Hawaii; a half dozen prime seat at Broadway shows; or a rather memorable night in a Nevada brothel.
I've worked with federal, state, and local agencies in public health and environmental monitoring. What I've seen in these agencies isn't that different from private sector, if anything the people there work a little harder than average for a little less pay than they could probably get elsewhere. This may not be representative of public service in general because these specific areas tend to draw young idealists.
Goof-offs are found in private sector too; there's no magic formula for identifying them and getting rid of every last one of them. Fortunately, most people prefer *not* to goof off at work, unless there's serious passive-aggression in the relationship between workers and managers. Nearly everyone prefers to feel they're doing productive work, so if there is a pervasive pattern of poor work habits there's a problem with management.
If your local government is particularly overstocked with gold-brickers, it probably says something about who you are electing to local office. They're either hiring the wrong people (patronage hires in particular), putting managers in place that set the wrong tone, or mismanaging the budget. Budget issues in particular are susceptible to abuse; too little funding, or too much can bring work to a halt.
Well, I think before throwing our hands up we should examine your assumptions. After all, CEO salaries aren't set by some nebulous, magical oracle called "the free market". They are set and approved by specific organizational entities within a corporation: the compensation committee and the board of directors respectively.
*If* these organizational entities operate as they are supposed to in advancing the interests of the proprietors, then *yes*, this is free enterprise and there's nothing we can do about it short of meddling with how the proprietors choose to foolishly spend their money.
But it *also* follows that if these committees were doing their job, the CEO wouldn't be paid "too much". He'd be paid the minimum amount necessary to secure management of comparable expertise.If the CEO is paid "too much", then it follows these corporate organs aren't doing their job -- in fact that it is commonplace for corporate management to fail in their duties toward the stockholders.
This points to something wrong in the laws and regulations protecting the interests of the proprietors from corporate officers abusing their positions. For example people serving on or advising the compensation committee could be in a position to receive financial favors from the CEO whose pay was being decided. This is actually sort-of legal. New regulations this year under Dodd-Frank require conflict of interest to be weighed in selecting the compensation committee, although people with such conflicts aren't actually banned. But it makes no difference what the duties of a corporate officer are supposed to be if nobody ever gets busted for breach of duty.
The rational response was not to hate Nazism per se, but the things that made it vicious. Xenophobia and scapegoating are high on that list. Once you are committed against xenophobia and ultra-nationalism in general, it automatically follows that you're committed against Nazism in particular.
Likewise it makes no sense for you to fear Islam per se, but rather the vicious things you associate with Islam.
If you knew more about Islam, you would see that those things are not universal in people who consider themselves Muslim. Islam is 1400 years old and has developed many very distinct flavors. The new age sufi imam renting space out in the local Unitarian church for Friday prayers doesn't have much in common with some Yemeni Wahabbist firebrand, in fact that firebrand hates the sufis even more than he hates you.
The thing about tyrannical regimes is that they like to scapegoat, and that requires inciting fear and hatred. To do that the regime will make use of any ideas that have convenient resonance in the subservient population, whether that is antsemitism, anti-colonialism, or islamaphobia.
Slashdot Mirror
How is this ad hominem? Could you be specific?
What it tells you is the part that is certain: that if sea level rises by X, places that are less than X above mean high tide will be under water -- once for places with diurnal tides and twice for places with semi-diurnal tides. Flooding is much more complex than that.
Natural disasters are never actually "natural". It is human behavior that turns what would otherwise be just a natural phenomenon like an earthquake or flood into a "disaster". So changes in flood risk will occur where human engineering and settlement practices don't adapt to changes in local sea level and weather.
What we've done in planning development over the past century is look at historical records to figure out what a "ten year flood" or a "hundred year flood" would be, and site things near the coast according to our tolerance for it being flooded. A hundred year flood is probably not going to be a factor at all in siting something, but a ten year flood is going to be a big deal.
Here's the important part: the levels in a hundred year flood aren't going to be 10x as high as in a ten year flood; in many places it might only be just a little bit higher. But people build right up to the line because sharp demarcations are baked into building codes and insurance rates. So a slight increase in sea level could well have a disproportionate economic effect due to flooding.
Another issue not to discount in a climate change scenario is greater weather variability. Even with no local sea level rise, an increase in the frequency of unusually large coastal storms can create a dramatic shift in flooding frequency. Just like an unchanging sea level is built into our calculations of a "hundred year flood" an unchanging climate is as well.
So the climate change/flooding connection not as simple as dialing up sea level by a certain number of meters. Depending on local conditions like tidal dynamics and wind exposure, a modest (or non-existent) change in global sea levels along with a modest change in the frequency of large storms could mean a lot of stuff along the edges of the flood plain that never flooded in the past could flood quite frequently. That's what we should be worried about not a 500m or even 5m increase in sea level.
It's like my uncle Ivan, an old-time red used to say to me. "Kid, nobody believes in socialism. Nobody believes in capitalism either. It's 'Socialism for me, capitalism for you."
People understand that corporations are amoral. The rational position towards a large, powerful corporation is distrust. That's the baseline from which a corporation has to work up from.
On top of that most people don't get a *choice* of Microsoft or something else; Microsoft is chosen *for them* by the corporate IT department or by the IT departments of people they have to work with. That's raises the bar for user experience, somethign MS is not particularly good at. It's like the food you get on a college meal plan. The fact you're forced to eat it means that if you're assigning it a letter grade you automatically deduct two letter grades: an A becomes a C and a B becomes a D.
Now consider Apple. There's a lot to dislike in their trying to position themselves as content gate keepers especially. But there are offsetting virtues: innovation, design, and build quality. On top of that most people who use Apple products choose to do so, which means they get a better evaluation.
Unfair? Maybe; but that's reality.
Now this is not to say that Microsoft has no virtues as a corporation, it's just that those virtues aren't experienced by *users*. Microsoft has consistently provided a mediocre user experience in its core products, and undermined the main value of their products to the user -- familiarity -- by pointless fiddling with user interfaces.
Microsoft's big sin was abusing its market position to achieve a monopoly with a mediocre product. To be forgiven of that sin, they've got to start producing products people love and look forward to, and don't feel let down by.
Human being have never lived in a utopia. We've always had problems and we always will. And since we're incorrigibly ungrateful creatures, we never give ourselves credit for problems solved of ameliorated. So as far as we've been concerned the world's always been going to hell, and always will be.
We act as if having problems is an unnatural state of affairs, but we've always had problems and always will. And that's good, because you can't build a meaningful, satisfying life without problems to work on.
So don't throw up your hands at the problems you cite. *Do* something about them. Everybody can do *something*. Even if it's just a little bit, a little bit added up over everyone would be a lot.
You don't want to go to Mars? Please by all means, keep your bullshit on Earth and let us evolved human beings make a fresh new life on a fresh new planet without you!
Says the person who believes in eugenics...
[That was a joke, by the way.]
True, but global warming doesn't mean we won't have good, hard winters. Sometimes we'll have them in places where such winters were seldom seen previously.
The reason that "climate change" is a better term than "global warming" is that "global warming" seems to conjure up a spurious picture where everywhere on the Earth is going to get noticeably hotter. In reality we're talking about *global averages* going up a degree or two at most over the next couple of decades. That's not much temperature-wise. A one degree change uniformly applied across the globe wouldn't close many ski resorts, for example, or make it nice to swim in the Gulf of Maine.
The real issue is that degree of average temperature increase across the globe represents a huge total addition of energy to the atmosphere. That in turn means that what previously would have been anomalous weather will become more common: hotter OR colder than normal; wetter or drier; longer or shorter seasons than previously experienced. These changes will put stress on plants, animals and human communities to adapt. A February cold snap might be a good thing for a New England apple orchard, but it's lousy for a Florida orange grove.
You make it sound like introducing new ideas to the public is somehow morally dubious.
The El Niño/Southern Oscillation was described some eighty years ago, but it was relatively obscure stuff until there was a big uptick in scientific interest in the mid-80s. Researchers began to realize that this phenomenon had huge, predictable consequences on weather across the globe. I remember because my wife was a grad student at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution at the time. It's not surprising that it takes twenty years or so for an idea that's caught on in the scientific community to enter the public consciousness. Not as many people subscribe to Science News as should.
That's a good point. According to the New York Times this particular leak has not as of yet reached the ocean yet. TEPCO says it won't make it to the ocean, but I'm reserving judgment on that claim given TEPCOs poor track record.
Still, even if ocean disposal is the best long term approach, that doesn't mean that it would be a good thing if this leak is washed into the ocean. It needs to be contained.
I didn't think you were trying to be an apologist. I agree this situation is not an issue for global, regional, or even local panic.
There's a lot of ground between "not a serious problem at all" and "everybody run for the hills", and this situation falls into that territory.
Strontium 90 has a half-life of 29 years. Obviously the process of decay will go on indefinitely, so it's pretty much meaningless to say that the leaking isotopes will decay "in decades".
What we need to know is how long will it take the concentrations of harmful isotopes to drop to acceptable levels. Thata of course depends on how many times greater the concentration is than acceptable levels.
If the initial concentration of S90 is acceptable, the answer is "instantaneously". If the concentration is 4x acceptable, the answer is "116 years". So it's not inconceivable that an S90 contamination problem could persist for centuries, although we have yet to determine whether we have such a problem.
Resulting in the Blue Ocean of Death...
Well, dilution *is* a reasonable approach to disposing of this waste, but what we have here appears to be an ongoing leak from a point source into tidal waters, which is not at all the way you'd design a project to dilute the waste.
There are several big differences between letting the stuff leak and a proper attempt to diffuse the waste over a large area of the ocean. First of all the leak is a point source discharging into an intertidal zone. My wife is a physical oceanographer who helped site a major sewage outfall, so I remember some of the concerns. Stuff that is discharged right near the shore doesn't diffuse nicely out to deep water, it gets transported along the shore with the same currents that deposit sand from rivers along the coast.
This means that the S90 may well get deposited in sediments. The concentration of S90 probably won't be enough to be a direct concern to humans, but because strontium is an analog to calcium, it can bioaccumulate. This means the somewhat incomplete process of dilution gets undone when critters like benthic worms on the bottom of the food chain consume the S90, and are in turn consumed by ground fish and so on up the food chain. At each trophic level the S90 is concentrated a little more.
I agree that the amount here reported is probably not a serious threat to human and environmental health, but the problem is that this process is ongoing. It is possible that what is going on doesn't present any threat to human or environmental health, but we can't be sure. By the time we figure it out it will be too late to do anything (or anything affordable) about it if it is a problem.
In a nutshell: dilution could work, but there's a significant chance that just letting the stuff leak into the sea won't do the job. This stuff needs to be contained or otherwise dealt with *now*.
Speaking of SW Virginia, I recently traveled on business from Boston to Blacksburg VA. There's no good way to get to Blacksburg; I'd have had to take a four hour flight (not counting check in time) to Roanoke then drive. Instead I took a 12 hour train trip to Lynchburg and drove. On the face of it, it sounds insane to take a 12 hour train ride instead of 4 hour plane ride, but the key is that I turned what would have been a travel day anyway into a highly productive work day. I put a solid eight hours of billable time in and relaxed for the rest of the trip. As a bonus I arrived at my hotel relaxed and refreshed.
On my return trip I wrote up my results, drafted an invoice and wrote a proposal for further work and popped them in the mail when I got home.
Look Ma, no downtime! No rush or hurrying, either.
Of course you can work on a plane, but its cramped, distracting and boring. A train is roomy, and comfortable enough that you can achieve a flow state and get some serious work done. If I'd taken the plane I could have arrived at the hotel at around 4PM and and worked until midnight, but it's satisfying arrive at your hotel on a business trip completely prepared for the next day. Plus a train is a nicer place to work than a hotel table. When you're doing brain work its more pleasant to look out the window at the scenery going by than to stare out at the hotel parking lot.
You've got to have the capacity to unplug, though. Some people don't seem to have the ability to go an hour without social media. But if you are comfortable working in isolation, without distraction or external simulation, then a day on the train is like a mini vacation. I suspect it would be hell for some people, but for me I'll always take the train if it's a choice between blowing a day on train travel and blowing a day on air travel.
Originally patents were for 13 years with one renewal by the original Person that applies and copyright was for 17 years with one renewal by the original Person that applies.
Sure, but none of that is actually in the Constitution. Article 1, Section 8 empowers Congress to secure exculsive rights to inventors "for limited Times[sic]", without stipulating any actual limit. For practical purposes this enables Congress to extend patents and copyrights indefinitely.
The framers were men of remarkable vision to understand that patents were needed all the way back in 1787, but they weren't supermen or fortune tellers. They did not foresee the rise of corporations to become the dominant force in American society, or the uses they would dream up for the patent system. I doubt they ever imagined anything like a business methods patent, or a design patent, or the notion of Federal trademark law.
I'm not clear what you are attacking. Are you suggesting that altering model parameters to match real world outcomes is somehow dishonest? Or are you suggesting that researchers altered their model after the fact then claimed the model predicted actual outcomes before the adjustments were made? If the latter, please provide the source for the claim.
Well,I wasn't specifically thinking about tasks that require safety goggles. I was thinking more along the lines of building inspection, urban rat control, exotic invasive species management, etc. In these kinds of applications the goggles wouldn't really be the focus; they're just part of an overall system that needs a little marketing pizzazz to break into.
Things like rat control aren't new activities the app developer is dreaming up out of thin air; these are important functions that serious people are already doing *now*. Your pitch is that you're going to help them do it *better*. The problem is that that is a tough pitch to make to the pragmatists on whom you'll make most of your money. They *know* they can do things the way they have and they can't be sure your system will work.
What you need to bootstrap a successful product in these kinds of markets are customers who fit the early adopter profile. These are people attracted to new and improved ways of doing things. To capture those early adopters, you need to put something in their hand that will fire their imagination, otherwise they'll talk your ear off and never buy anything.
I agree that you can probably prototype something workable with an LCD, or even an android smartphone, but when it comes to selling into these kinds of markets having a little polish really helps you break in. These markets are too small to support a manufacturing run of custom hardware, unless it is rather crude.
Actually, phones are very tough. They just get *mishandled*. Believe me, I have experience with this kind of thing; stuff that gets used in the field by fieldworkers take an almost unbelievable beating. The half-life of handheld computing device is, in my experience, between twelve and eighteen months.
But something you wear all the time *might be* different. I don't *know* this, because I have no experience with wearables, but I think it's possible they won't get left on top of the truck or fumbled into a water-filled ditch when you take it out of its holster. It may also be a bit more secure mounted near the user's eye, which people instinctively protect. This is conjecture, mind you, glass mounted HUD might be even worse, but I don't think so. And I'm certain that if a phone can be used while remaining snug in its case on the user's belt it will last longer.
Which doesn't impeach Spencer's critiques of climate change theory; it only means his beliefs about how the climate will behave in the future are unscientific. Any substantive critiques he raises on things like the effect of cloud formation on climate models should be dealt with substantively. His belief that climate will not change in the future because God wills it not to change is not a scientific proposition, and can't be addressed scientifically short of waiting and seeing.
It's important to note that Spencer continues to be published in climate journals. This shows that the denialist's belief that scientists who disagree with AGW are discriminated against is false. Skeptical scientists are free to critique, but not to publish their religious beliefs as science, which is exactly as it should be.
I see even less reason to impeach the credibility of John Christy just because he's a climate change skeptic -- and especially not because he lives in the same state as Spencer. You're allowed to disagree with the scientific consensus; it means you're outside the mainstream of science, it doesn't automatically make you a crackpot. Even if you *are* a crackpot, you're allowed to publish non-crackpottish criticisms of the basis for scientific consensus. Science is very open-minded this way, which is one of the reasons why the scientific *consensus* is generally so reliable.
This is how modeling works. You construct your model, but it inevitably has a number of parameters that aren't known with any degree of certainty. You choose values for your model parameters which match historical results.
For example we know that the amount of carbon plants absorb and the amount of water they emit as CO2 and ambient temperature change, but short of measuring the interaction of every blade of grass on Earth with the surrounding atmosphere we can't model it precisely. So we put together some equation and tweak the equation's parameters so the equation spits out the right numbers for our historical data.
It's not intellectually dishonest; it just represents a method for arriving at the most reasonable guess for how the Earth will behave for data within or near the historical range of values. That's certainly more reasonable than assuming the plants will behave exactly at 500 ppm CO2 as they did at 300 ppm, when we know for a fact that's a physical impossibility.
Well, there are apps and there are apps. In the era since the iPhone introduction, we think of apps as relatively cheap things where you make your money selling in high volumes at modest, impulse-friendly prices; or appendages to web-based social media systems. But there are applications for devices like this where they aren't necessarily the focus of the system.
I see potential for these devices in a lot of commercial, industrial and government fieldwork. Such applications aren't conceived around a gadget like this, they're conceived around tasks and data. That said, a gadget like this is often a powerful incentive for the customer to buy *the whole system*, even though it's only a narrow slice of the whole system's functionality.
I can imagine these devices being used in various kinds of inspection applications for example. They technically don't do anything a smartphone doesn't do, but if we're positing a future $400 device, that's the kind of money people will consider well spent if they see any advantage in immediacy, efficiency or durability. Pocket devices like smartphones and PDAs get rough treatment in the field, especially as they tend to get put in bad places, but if the smartphone stays in a hard case on the belt, a comfortable wearable terminal that costs under $500 could pay for itself in dropped smartphones over a comparatively short time.
Pretty soon there will be a $399 version that's 10x better than the first generation.
True, but if you're an app developer that's actually a sensible reason to drop the dough now and get familiar with the platform so you're ready when it becomes viable for pragmatist adopters. In my experience $500/seat is an important threshold when selling to pragmatist adopters.
The fact that the guy is even asking this question shows that he's got the money, but it's enough dough that he has to consider the purchase carefully. If there were an existing application that justified the purchase as a user he'd probably know about it, so I'd guess that the only practical reason to buy the thing would be to develop a new application. If you had an idea for a new app or even had confidence you could come up with such an idea, now would be a good time to get a jump on the competition.
If the guy isn't a serious developer, then what he ought to do is compare the novelty value of owning a Google Glass with other amusing ways he could spend $1500. That would pay for round trip airfare to Hawaii; a half dozen prime seat at Broadway shows; or a rather memorable night in a Nevada brothel.
I've worked with federal, state, and local agencies in public health and environmental monitoring. What I've seen in these agencies isn't that different from private sector, if anything the people there work a little harder than average for a little less pay than they could probably get elsewhere. This may not be representative of public service in general because these specific areas tend to draw young idealists.
Goof-offs are found in private sector too; there's no magic formula for identifying them and getting rid of every last one of them. Fortunately, most people prefer *not* to goof off at work, unless there's serious passive-aggression in the relationship between workers and managers. Nearly everyone prefers to feel they're doing productive work, so if there is a pervasive pattern of poor work habits there's a problem with management.
If your local government is particularly overstocked with gold-brickers, it probably says something about who you are electing to local office. They're either hiring the wrong people (patronage hires in particular), putting managers in place that set the wrong tone, or mismanaging the budget. Budget issues in particular are susceptible to abuse; too little funding, or too much can bring work to a halt.
Well, I think before throwing our hands up we should examine your assumptions. After all, CEO salaries aren't set by some nebulous, magical oracle called "the free market". They are set and approved by specific organizational entities within a corporation: the compensation committee and the board of directors respectively.
*If* these organizational entities operate as they are supposed to in advancing the interests of the proprietors, then *yes*, this is free enterprise and there's nothing we can do about it short of meddling with how the proprietors choose to foolishly spend their money.
But it *also* follows that if these committees were doing their job, the CEO wouldn't be paid "too much". He'd be paid the minimum amount necessary to secure management of comparable expertise.If the CEO is paid "too much", then it follows these corporate organs aren't doing their job -- in fact that it is commonplace for corporate management to fail in their duties toward the stockholders.
This points to something wrong in the laws and regulations protecting the interests of the proprietors from corporate officers abusing their positions. For example people serving on or advising the compensation committee could be in a position to receive financial favors from the CEO whose pay was being decided. This is actually sort-of legal. New regulations this year under Dodd-Frank require conflict of interest to be weighed in selecting the compensation committee, although people with such conflicts aren't actually banned. But it makes no difference what the duties of a corporate officer are supposed to be if nobody ever gets busted for breach of duty.
The rational response was not to hate Nazism per se, but the things that made it vicious. Xenophobia and scapegoating are high on that list. Once you are committed against xenophobia and ultra-nationalism in general, it automatically follows that you're committed against Nazism in particular.
Likewise it makes no sense for you to fear Islam per se, but rather the vicious things you associate with Islam.
If you knew more about Islam, you would see that those things are not universal in people who consider themselves Muslim. Islam is 1400 years old and has developed many very distinct flavors. The new age sufi imam renting space out in the local Unitarian church for Friday prayers doesn't have much in common with some Yemeni Wahabbist firebrand, in fact that firebrand hates the sufis even more than he hates you.
The thing about tyrannical regimes is that they like to scapegoat, and that requires inciting fear and hatred. To do that the regime will make use of any ideas that have convenient resonance in the subservient population, whether that is antsemitism, anti-colonialism, or islamaphobia.