Water vapor in the atmosphere is strictly limited by temperature. It can never be greater than the ambient conditions allow for any length of time. Since increased CO2 has increased atmospheric temperatures water vapor in the atmosphere has also increased (about 4%).
Interesting how you cling to the idea of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere being a cause rather than an effect of warming. Something completly at odds with ice core data. Whilst dismissing out of hand the idea that water vapour could be causal.All this shows is faith, not even an attempt at any form of science...
customization of the login screen? It was made obsolete by the gnome devs not by canonical and the reason for that was faster boot time.
If the aim was to make things faster then the default would be "type in the username". With "generate a list of all possible usernames" being something which needed to be explicitally switched on. Or failing that only display a list if there were 20 or less usernames otherwise a box to put one in...
In spite of devoting so much attention to eye candy, Canonical forced on us the new GDM that doesn't bring anything useful over the old one, is incredibly ugly, and cannot be configured in substantial aspects.
Probably most importantly required an obscure fiddle to configure in a way sensible for use systems with anything other than a trivial number of users. Having to enumerate the entire user list before a login is even possible is hardly "enterprise friendly". Even more of an issue over wireless. Especially given the way Canonical appears to want "Network Manager" to "work". (Which apparently dosn't include integrating with ifplugd either.)
Has the situation changed with Maverick?
Lucid also broke NFS in/etc/fstab. (I did come up with a workaround for this. Though I suspect Canonical's intended audience would be completly at sea.)
I know, I know, this is only a login manager, and it works OK despite being fugly. But FFS, at least in Debian Squeeze the old GDM is one apt-get away.
IMHO ugly is a lot less of an issue than breaking things which have "just worked" since the last century.
Overseas voting is already notoriously insecure, as it's impossible to establish a legally-liable chain of custody of the ballot as it proceeds through the international postal system in a big fluorescent-yellow envelope marked "ELECTION MAIL"
It might be a better idea to use a plain brown envelope addressed to a random PO box. Also to send plenty of decoys...
A paper vote is physical with interested parties scrutinizing their every move. Short of hiring 10,000 tight-lipped magicians for an election it is nearly impossible to steal an election in a western democracy.
Whilst scrutineering of elections is common in Europe, Australasia and Canada this does not appear to be the case in the US.
Any electronics will hide what's happening and then we leave the future of democracy to the trust in experts.
Assuming these experts would be able to do anything anyway. e.g. Would they be allowed to randomly take a voting machine, drop it in liquid nitrogen, chop it up and examine the pieces with an electron microscope? Which is about the only way to find out what such a machine is actually doing.
the dead rise to vote, ballot boxes appear in the counting room stuffed with "legitimate" ballots, people vote early and often and ballots are simply miscounted or lost.
All of these appear to be due to a lack of transparency and scrutiny. How do dead people get recorded as able to vote without there being massive fraud in the first place? In which case things are broken before any "election" takes place. If you are concerned about people trying to vote more than once you mark them with fluorescent ink. It's also very hard to count ballots incorrectly if scrutineers are present at the count and the transport of ballot boxes.
Many of the companies famous for building voting machines also built their reputations building ATMs and such.
ATMs are, to the best of my knowledge, tremendously secure, even when you have physical access to the machine.
Thing is that they are not that secure, especially against bank employees. "Phantom withdrawls" being the most well known of these problems.
The fact that it is far easier for the average American to vote on the American Idol winner than our government shows that we have not applied our knowledge to the appropriate priorities.
Most likely it means that the "American Idol" voting system should be applied to electing politicians. If nothing else this method would appear less likely to create career politicians.
It should occur to you that within 6 blocks of your destination is not the same as at your destination.
An additional factor is that if lots of people use cars you need somewhere to store them. If you use a bus or train, even a taxi, you don't need anywhere to store the vehicle. Cities built recently (last 50 or so years) can sprawl considerably more than those which are older. Another factor is if cities have wide roads with multiple lanes in each direction right through the middle of the city.
Try the inside of a parked car sitting out in the summer sun. The same principle applies to a cargo plane sitting out on the tarmac at an airport in the desert sun.
The only part of a plane which has similar amount of glass to a car is the cockpit. There's no separate temperature control for the cockpit, turning the AC on is going to cool the whole plane. Dosn't look like Boeing fits that many windows if you order a freighter. Not like cargo tends to worry about the view:) Indeed the only one on the main deck I can see on photos of N571UP is in the door.
"Safe operating values" may not be the same in flight, also: the plane is in motion,
The motion of the contents of a plane relative to the plane itself is likely to be zero
and the cargo hold may be subject to air pressures you don't find naturally anywhere on earth's surface.
Or possibly on some alternate Earth which has no point of it's surface higher than 8,000 feet. What is measured is known as "cabin altitude". If the plane is flying below 8,000 feet then the the cabin altitude is the same as the actual altitude. Some spring loaded valves ensure that the pressure within the plane cannon be less than that outside. In the cabin altitude goes above 10,000 feet then alarm sounds in the cockpit to tell the crew to put their oxygen masks on and do something about the problem. On a passenger plane a cabin altitude above 14,000 automatically deploys the passenger oxygen masks. (Possibly on the upper deck of a 747 freighter if it's fitted out similarly to a passenger version.)
Yeah, this is why I was confused by this report. Lithium-ion cells have to get VERY hot in order to vent, and even then, they have multiple safety systems that attempt to prevent failures that could start a fire. If cargo compartments were getting hot enough to set cells off there would be complaints about many other things melting first. I would be surprised if the cargo compartments even reach 60 Celsius (140 F) which are within the operating bounds of lithium-ion cells (though at seriously reduced performance).
On a freight aircraft cargo is carried on the main deck. The lower holds may not be used at all due to ease of loading/unloading.
The only reason I could possibly see a higher incidence of cell explosion when on aircraft is if the cell was in a non-pressurized compartment such that the sealed cell expanded in such a way that an internal short was caused in the cell causing a fire. Even that would require the failure of at least one safety feature on the cell.
This would require this 744F (or indeed any 747 ever made) to have such a "non-pressurized compartment" in the first place. The entire fuselage is one pressure vessel. The only way that a battery could encounter a pressure lower than that at 8,000 feet is was on the outside of the plane. (So far as I know Boeing do not offer a "roof rack" as an option.) Though then the temperature is likely to be closer to minus 60 Celsius.
On the other hand, the issue does come up if Creative Commons content is viral in nature. In other words, if a particular broadcast program (radio or television, the issue is the same) includes CC content, is that program "forced" as a whole to adopt that license?
Isn't this just as, if not more, likely to happen with a proprietary licence given that there is an obvious financial motive to do so. Anyway what would happen if too such "viral" licences interacted:)
hat is something I am not completely familiar with myself, although there are some CC licenses that don't allow derivative works.
Typically grouping works together is not creating a "derived work". Any more than an anthology or compilation album is derivative of any of the works it contains.
Also, I would like to know by what mechanism carbon dioxide increases the heat retention of the atmosphere, from a physics and/or physical chemistry perspective. I ask this because when I made the calculations, I found that the heat capacity of carbon dioxide is actually BELOW the average of other atmospheric gasses, and significantly below the average when you take water vapor into account. Indeed, the variation in humidity on the surface of the Earth seems to have a much greater effect on heat retention, so much so that any possible effect of carbon dioxide would be nothing more than noise.
The effect of water is complex, since as clouds water will tend to cool...
That is not to say that increased water vapor isn't caused by human activity,
In which case would it be a global effect or lots of local effects. Possibly even different effects depending on whatever the humidity level would be without human activity.
but at least that is something that can be remedied without impoverishing the world,
Assuming there actually is a problem to need solving in the first place.
It's really hard to do validation without the source data...
Which interestingly climate "scientists" are reluctant to make available.
Also, it's really hard to do validation on extrapolations done by computer models.
Without knowing exactly what the program does (which can require more than just the source code) you can't really tell much.
In addition, it's really hard to do validation on climate (which changes on a scale of 10s of thousands of years) with a few hundred years of decent data and only about 100 of good data.
Even the more recent data need not be good data. There are incidents like people making up temperatures in the Arctic rather than risk a polar bear eating them... There are also problems with using data gathered for a different purpose. Notably that from airports intended to be of use for aviation purposes. This is likely to be compounded when good and bad data (with different levels of precision) gets "homogenized".
That's why science is based on experiments that are repeatable, not on computer models. I wouldn't believe in nuclear power either if we didn't have several examples of working reactors. If someone just said, "based on my computer model, U235 should undergo fission in a controlled process", I wouldn't be the first in line to bet on it. The computer model may be correct, but it also might be incomplete or have a high degree of unaccounted for variables.
In practice U235 can undergo either controlled fission, uncontrolled fission or no fission dependent on a great many factors. A car hitting a wall would probably be much easier to model than the climate system of a planet. (In practice you might need to also model solar fusion processes and planetary orbits.) Currently we still crash real cars containing the most human like mannequins we can come up with...
and there would be almost no dispute that climate change is happening.
Very few people would dispute that the Earth's climate has been changing for several billion years. Problem is that when the claims of AGWs don't square with history and archeology they go all majorly "deniest". (Whilst ironically calling anyone who is remotly skeptical of their claims of being a "denier". Thus sounding more like political and religious extremists than anything else.) Even the ice core data which initially supported the AGW hypothesis turned out to show that something else was happening. At this point any half decent scientist would say "that hypothesis is wrong something else is needed to explain the observations".
In 2007, Harris Interactive surveyed 489 randomly selected members of either the American Meteorological Society or the American Geophysical Union for the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) at George Mason University.
Dosn't sound very random if they are only picking people from two groups in the first place.
If I place something in your car, not accidentally leaving it behind or mistakenly leaving the wrong item, why wouldn't you be the owner? Sure, it might not be worth fighting about if I really badly want it back and you're not rich/motivated enough to fight, but assuming you went through with it to the point of getting a jury, then it's probably going to remain yours.
Interestingly the article mentions that newer devices are connected to the vehicle's electrical system. The court ruling appears to be about attaching a device to the outside. Does the same apply to putting a self contained device inside? What about making the bug part of the vehicle? In both of these two situations it may be necessary to subvert locks or intruder alarms. The last case involves property without their consent as well as effectivly stealing energy from them.
This may explain why there are so few law firms actually involved in the settlement business, which in a way reeks of easy money. All they have to do to get settlements, it seems, is sending out those letters.
What they are doing is a variation on the old scam of bogus invoicing.
The law is pretty much on their side, and most people don't have the resources let alone the guts to take it to court.
IIRC ACS:Law hasn't actually won any any contested court case. The only chance of their "winning" is if the defendant dosn't turn up to a hearing. Which in the case of a large corporation vs an individual (in the UK) is likely to be held at a court of the individual's choosing.
What would be the most amusingly effective is to infiltrate the computers of these organizations and start running filesharing software on them handing out copies of stuff that you just know the MPAA, RIAA or some other organization is going to be really hot about.
Would you need to? It's not like much evidence appears to be required to accuse a member of the public. Also the MPAA has already been caught "pirating" a movie and software (OSS which takes some serious effort to pirate).
Explaining to a judge how their filesharing was totally innocent even though their IP addresses were flagged would be really fun to watch.
How many such accusations go anywhere near a court.
Also, in 3-strikes jurisdictions, watching their ISPs kick them off the net would also be huge fun.
In such jurisdictions accusations which count as a "strike" have to be made by "annointed entities". Possibly they wouldn't do anything if both accused and accuser were both such entities.
This however isn't at all like it used to be in the US. At one point their were as many as 5 parties all with equal chances of getting a candidate elected as president! I want those days!
What was different about either the US as a country or the rules for nomination then compared with now.
Somehow we need to put a stop to this practice of appointing "Czars". Anyone who can't pass muster with the Senate shouldn't be calling shots in the Executive Branch.
Maybe a simpler solution would be that a rule that anyone who has ever been part of one branch of government can't ever serve in a different branch. Possibly also that nobody can move from state to federal or vice versa.
Slashdot Mirror
Water vapor in the atmosphere is strictly limited by temperature. It can never be greater than the ambient conditions allow for any length of time. Since increased CO2 has increased atmospheric temperatures water vapor in the atmosphere has also increased (about 4%).
Interesting how you cling to the idea of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere being a cause rather than an effect of warming. Something completly at odds with ice core data. Whilst dismissing out of hand the idea that water vapour could be causal.All this shows is faith, not even an attempt at any form of science...
customization of the login screen? It was made obsolete by the gnome devs not by canonical and the reason for that was faster boot time.
If the aim was to make things faster then the default would be "type in the username". With "generate a list of all possible usernames" being something which needed to be explicitally switched on. Or failing that only display a list if there were 20 or less usernames otherwise a box to put one in...
In spite of devoting so much attention to eye candy, Canonical forced on us the new GDM that doesn't bring anything useful over the old one, is incredibly ugly, and cannot be configured in substantial aspects.
/etc/fstab. (I did come up with a workaround for this. Though I suspect Canonical's intended audience would be completly at sea.)
Probably most importantly required an obscure fiddle to configure in a way sensible for use systems with anything other than a trivial number of users. Having to enumerate the entire user list before a login is even possible is hardly "enterprise friendly". Even more of an issue over wireless. Especially given the way Canonical appears to want "Network Manager" to "work". (Which apparently dosn't include integrating with ifplugd either.)
Has the situation changed with Maverick?
Lucid also broke NFS in
I know, I know, this is only a login manager, and it works OK despite being fugly. But FFS, at least in Debian Squeeze the old GDM is one apt-get away.
IMHO ugly is a lot less of an issue than breaking things which have "just worked" since the last century.
Overseas voting is already notoriously insecure, as it's impossible to establish a legally-liable chain of custody of the ballot as it proceeds through the international postal system in a big fluorescent-yellow envelope marked "ELECTION MAIL"
It might be a better idea to use a plain brown envelope addressed to a random PO box. Also to send plenty of decoys...
A paper vote is physical with interested parties scrutinizing their every move. Short of hiring 10,000 tight-lipped magicians for an election it is nearly impossible to steal an election in a western democracy.
Whilst scrutineering of elections is common in Europe, Australasia and Canada this does not appear to be the case in the US.
Any electronics will hide what's happening and then we leave the future of democracy to the trust in experts.
Assuming these experts would be able to do anything anyway. e.g. Would they be allowed to randomly take a voting machine, drop it in liquid nitrogen, chop it up and examine the pieces with an electron microscope? Which is about the only way to find out what such a machine is actually doing.
the dead rise to vote, ballot boxes appear in the counting room stuffed with "legitimate" ballots, people vote early and often and ballots are simply miscounted or lost.
All of these appear to be due to a lack of transparency and scrutiny. How do dead people get recorded as able to vote without there being massive fraud in the first place? In which case things are broken before any "election" takes place. If you are concerned about people trying to vote more than once you mark them with fluorescent ink. It's also very hard to count ballots incorrectly if scrutineers are present at the count and the transport of ballot boxes.
Many of the companies famous for building voting machines also built their reputations building ATMs and such.
ATMs are, to the best of my knowledge, tremendously secure, even when you have physical access to the machine.
Thing is that they are not that secure, especially against bank employees. "Phantom withdrawls" being the most well known of these problems.
The fact that it is far easier for the average American to vote on the American Idol winner than our government shows that we have not applied our knowledge to the appropriate priorities.
Most likely it means that the "American Idol" voting system should be applied to electing politicians. If nothing else this method would appear less likely to create career politicians.
Also the public transport cost far more in tickets than taking the car did in fuel.
Fuel is only one part to the TCO of using a car. With the likes of urban sprawl being paid even by people who don't have/use cars.
It should occur to you that within 6 blocks of your destination is not the same as at your destination.
An additional factor is that if lots of people use cars you need somewhere to store them. If you use a bus or train, even a taxi, you don't need anywhere to store the vehicle. Cities built recently (last 50 or so years) can sprawl considerably more than those which are older. Another factor is if cities have wide roads with multiple lanes in each direction right through the middle of the city.
Try the inside of a parked car sitting out in the summer sun. The same principle applies to a cargo plane sitting out on the tarmac at an airport in the desert sun.
:) Indeed the only one on the main deck I can see on photos of N571UP is in the door.
The only part of a plane which has similar amount of glass to a car is the cockpit. There's no separate temperature control for the cockpit, turning the AC on is going to cool the whole plane.
Dosn't look like Boeing fits that many windows if you order a freighter. Not like cargo tends to worry about the view
"Safe operating values" may not be the same in flight, also: the plane is in motion,
The motion of the contents of a plane relative to the plane itself is likely to be zero
and the cargo hold may be subject to air pressures you don't find naturally anywhere on earth's surface.
Or possibly on some alternate Earth which has no point of it's surface higher than 8,000 feet. What is measured is known as "cabin altitude". If the plane is flying below 8,000 feet then the the cabin altitude is the same as the actual altitude. Some spring loaded valves ensure that the pressure within the plane cannon be less than that outside. In the cabin altitude goes above 10,000 feet then alarm sounds in the cockpit to tell the crew to put their oxygen masks on and do something about the problem. On a passenger plane a cabin altitude above 14,000 automatically deploys the passenger oxygen masks. (Possibly on the upper deck of a 747 freighter if it's fitted out similarly to a passenger version.)
Yeah, this is why I was confused by this report. Lithium-ion cells have to get VERY hot in order to vent, and even then, they have multiple safety systems that attempt to prevent failures that could start a fire. If cargo compartments were getting hot enough to set cells off there would be complaints about many other things melting first. I would be surprised if the cargo compartments even reach 60 Celsius (140 F) which are within the operating bounds of lithium-ion cells (though at seriously reduced performance).
On a freight aircraft cargo is carried on the main deck. The lower holds may not be used at all due to ease of loading/unloading.
The only reason I could possibly see a higher incidence of cell explosion when on aircraft is if the cell was in a non-pressurized compartment such that the sealed cell expanded in such a way that an internal short was caused in the cell causing a fire. Even that would require the failure of at least one safety feature on the cell.
This would require this 744F (or indeed any 747 ever made) to have such a "non-pressurized compartment" in the first place. The entire fuselage is one pressure vessel. The only way that a battery could encounter a pressure lower than that at 8,000 feet is was on the outside of the plane. (So far as I know Boeing do not offer a "roof rack" as an option.) Though then the temperature is likely to be closer to minus 60 Celsius.
On the other hand, the issue does come up if Creative Commons content is viral in nature. In other words, if a particular broadcast program (radio or television, the issue is the same) includes CC content, is that program "forced" as a whole to adopt that license?
:)
Isn't this just as, if not more, likely to happen with a proprietary licence given that there is an obvious financial motive to do so. Anyway what would happen if too such "viral" licences interacted
hat is something I am not completely familiar with myself, although there are some CC licenses that don't allow derivative works.
Typically grouping works together is not creating a "derived work". Any more than an anthology or compilation album is derivative of any of the works it contains.
Also, I would like to know by what mechanism carbon dioxide increases the heat retention of the atmosphere, from a physics and/or physical chemistry perspective. I ask this because when I made the calculations, I found that the heat capacity of carbon dioxide is actually BELOW the average of other atmospheric gasses, and significantly below the average when you take water vapor into account. Indeed, the variation in humidity on the surface of the Earth seems to have a much greater effect on heat retention, so much so that any possible effect of carbon dioxide would be nothing more than noise.
The effect of water is complex, since as clouds water will tend to cool...
That is not to say that increased water vapor isn't caused by human activity,
In which case would it be a global effect or lots of local effects. Possibly even different effects depending on whatever the humidity level would be without human activity.
but at least that is something that can be remedied without impoverishing the world,
Assuming there actually is a problem to need solving in the first place.
It's really hard to do validation without the source data...
Which interestingly climate "scientists" are reluctant to make available.
Also, it's really hard to do validation on extrapolations done by computer models.
Without knowing exactly what the program does (which can require more than just the source code) you can't really tell much.
In addition, it's really hard to do validation on climate (which changes on a scale of 10s of thousands of years) with a few hundred years of decent data and only about 100 of good data.
Even the more recent data need not be good data. There are incidents like people making up temperatures in the Arctic rather than risk a polar bear eating them... There are also problems with using data gathered for a different purpose. Notably that from airports intended to be of use for aviation purposes. This is likely to be compounded when good and bad data (with different levels of precision) gets "homogenized".
That's why science is based on experiments that are repeatable, not on computer models. I wouldn't believe in nuclear power either if we didn't have several examples of working reactors. If someone just said, "based on my computer model, U235 should undergo fission in a controlled process", I wouldn't be the first in line to bet on it. The computer model may be correct, but it also might be incomplete or have a high degree of unaccounted for variables.
In practice U235 can undergo either controlled fission, uncontrolled fission or no fission dependent on a great many factors.
A car hitting a wall would probably be much easier to model than the climate system of a planet. (In practice you might need to also model solar fusion processes and planetary orbits.) Currently we still crash real cars containing the most human like mannequins we can come up with...
and there would be almost no dispute that climate change is happening.
Very few people would dispute that the Earth's climate has been changing for several billion years. Problem is that when the claims of AGWs don't square with history and archeology they go all majorly "deniest". (Whilst ironically calling anyone who is remotly skeptical of their claims of being a "denier". Thus sounding more like political and religious extremists than anything else.)
Even the ice core data which initially supported the AGW hypothesis turned out to show that something else was happening. At this point any half decent scientist would say "that hypothesis is wrong something else is needed to explain the observations".
In 2007, Harris Interactive surveyed 489 randomly selected members of either the American Meteorological Society or the American Geophysical Union for the Statistical Assessment Service (STATS) at George Mason University.
Dosn't sound very random if they are only picking people from two groups in the first place.
If I place something in your car, not accidentally leaving it behind or mistakenly leaving the wrong item, why wouldn't you be the owner? Sure, it might not be worth fighting about if I really badly want it back and you're not rich/motivated enough to fight, but assuming you went through with it to the point of getting a jury, then it's probably going to remain yours.
Interestingly the article mentions that newer devices are connected to the vehicle's electrical system. The court ruling appears to be about attaching a device to the outside. Does the same apply to putting a self contained device inside? What about making the bug part of the vehicle? In both of these two situations it may be necessary to subvert locks or intruder alarms. The last case involves property without their consent as well as effectivly stealing energy from them.
Or a powerful politician with something to hide.
Are there any of these who don't have something to hide?
This may explain why there are so few law firms actually involved in the settlement business, which in a way reeks of easy money. All they have to do to get settlements, it seems, is sending out those letters.
What they are doing is a variation on the old scam of bogus invoicing.
The law is pretty much on their side, and most people don't have the resources let alone the guts to take it to court.
IIRC ACS:Law hasn't actually won any any contested court case. The only chance of their "winning" is if the defendant dosn't turn up to a hearing. Which in the case of a large corporation vs an individual (in the UK) is likely to be held at a court of the individual's choosing.
What would be the most amusingly effective is to infiltrate the computers of these organizations and start running filesharing software on them handing out copies of stuff that you just know the MPAA, RIAA or some other organization is going to be really hot about.
Would you need to? It's not like much evidence appears to be required to accuse a member of the public. Also the MPAA has already been caught "pirating" a movie and software (OSS which takes some serious effort to pirate).
Explaining to a judge how their filesharing was totally innocent even though their IP addresses were flagged would be really fun to watch.
How many such accusations go anywhere near a court.
Also, in 3-strikes jurisdictions, watching their ISPs kick them off the net would also be huge fun.
In such jurisdictions accusations which count as a "strike" have to be made by "annointed entities". Possibly they wouldn't do anything if both accused and accuser were both such entities.
This however isn't at all like it used to be in the US. At one point their were as many as 5 parties all with equal chances of getting a candidate elected as president! I want those days!
What was different about either the US as a country or the rules for nomination then compared with now.
Somehow we need to put a stop to this practice of appointing "Czars". Anyone who can't pass muster with the Senate shouldn't be calling shots in the Executive Branch.
Maybe a simpler solution would be that a rule that anyone who has ever been part of one branch of government can't ever serve in a different branch. Possibly also that nobody can move from state to federal or vice versa.