and that ice cores show that over the past 600,000 years or so the global CO2 concentration has varied, but remained relatively low.
The "problem" is that these ice cores show that atmospheric CO2 concentration follows changes in temperature, rather than vice versa.
Knowing that high CO2 concentrations do affect temperatures, even at lab scale
Rather this happens at "lab scale", what happens on a much more complex planetary scale is far less clear.
We have the ability to cut the levels of CO2 we emit, so it seems sensible to do so.
It is far from clear that trying to reduce the atmospheric CO2 concentration is either possible or even a good idea. That's before you even consider that the likes of "carbon trading" appear to be more about making financial middlemen rich(er) than actually reducing emissions. Such solutions also at best ignore lots of human made pollution, even in some cases could create a lot more pollution.
Maybe it will all be for nothing and we later find that the earth was naturally warming anyway,
What would it take for the alarmists to even entertain the notion that natural processes are in any way involved?
but we might just find that it was the right thing to do.
Or we might do exactly the wrong thing in our ignorance.
If we do nothing, it could be far too late.
"Too late" for who exactly? Consider that the models used by the alarmists have been incapable of any useful long term prediction.
I liken this to the widespread use of the "miracle" DDT; sure, it's a great pesticide... until we learned about accumulatioAn in higher predators and the extreme persistence of organochlorines in the environment.
The WHO recently lifted its ban on DDT. Turns out that the environmental damage may have been overstated. It's also quite possible for ill thought out "green" ideas to have their drawbacks. Such as "bio-fuels" competing with food crops or electric/hybrid vehicles producing far more pollution over their lifetime than internal combustion engine vehicles (even ones run exclusivly on petroleum).
Decent scientists on the whole don't have agendas in the same way that oil companies, coal-burning energy companies and governments do (unless they're paid specifically to have an agenda)
The IPCC is entirely government funded. The oil companies have also started running adverts showing how "green" they are...
Real scientists don;t mind you checking their data, and there is a lot of it about.
I believe the courts *have* limited Congress, in that they aren't allowed to pass a law that would put works that have fallen into the public domain back under copyright.
In many cases this would be impossible anyway. Since it's unlikely the that the original author would still be around. Increasing the copyright term of existing works makes just as little sense as randomly recreating a copyright. At least in the context of the US Constitution.
I think this graph in the wiki links sums the problem up nicely.
These copyright extensions are simply ridiculous.
The problem actually appears to have started in 1831. Why was nothing done then, since the US Congress dosn't (in theory) have the power to create ipso post facto laws?
If I act/dress like Steven Conroy goose-stepping through the streets, THAT is parody. If I create a passport with his name on it, then that is fraud.
If the passport was supposedly issued by a country which dosn't currently exist, e.g. the DDR, People's Republic of Australia, etc then it could still be parody or satire.
We do need copyrights of some kind, as everyone should be rewarded when his work is used in any way.
Plenty of past societies have managed without the concept of copyright. Even today the real danger for authors, poets, musicians, etc is that people who might enjoy their work will not even know it exists.
Compare speed limits (respected but usually broken)
Maybe what is respected here is the idea, but the implimentation can make little sense. Or even appear to be designed to raise revenue through fines rather than improve safety.
Overall, I'd say that copyright is more like Prohibition than Civil Rights. While Prohibition was widely considered to be a good idea at the time, it was immediately ignored by pretty much everyone. The lawlessness that this engendered quickly spread, and soon the fact that people ignored the laws about drinking meant that there was a huge upswing in official corruption, in violence, and in organized crime.
Yet dispite this we still have "prohibition". It's just been renamed "The War on Drugs".
And besides if you pulled out X Megawatts a day over a 100 year period thats got to be a little bit off the destruction:) at least you could hope lol
That's X*3600*24*365*100 MJ Which comes in at X*3.15E+9 MJ. A super volcano eruption is estimated to be in the 800 GT range which is 8E+8*4.18E+9 or 3.34E+18. A 1 Mw powerplant running flat out for a century would take out the energy equivalent of just under 1MT. Even if you are pulling out Gigawatts it isn't going to make much difference.
If you want to be taken seriously and convince even those who are not merely skeptical, but "won't" believe even in the face of evidence, then show us the raw fucking data without any tweaking - and accompany that data with a history of each temperature sensor (for example, if a parking lot went up next to it, and the temperature spiked the next few years and gradually increased, don't obfuscate that fact).
Also if you're only using data from some possible sources then explain how you came to choose them.
That way, if there really is an issue, one can come to a scientific conclusion rather than political.
It would also help if they were able to explain why they are so quick to dismiss anything which dosn't fit with their theories, including things which appear to be mutually exclusive.
Until then, count me among the skeptics who consider this a political rather than scientific issue, especially in light of the fact that it is believed that the Antarctic and arctic shelves are breaking from stress (from "overgrowth"), not due to heat,
Melting the the Arctic ocean may also be due to the recently discovered active volcanos and hydrothermal vents some 4km down.
since they are larger than they have been during recorded history
Recorded history of the Antarctic isn't exactly a very long time, accurate measurements of sea ice in the Arctic only go back around 30 years.
Ensuring that it's mainly useful for large corporations rather than any smaller artists.
Even the maximum fine is going to be quite trivial for a major corporation and can you really see a broadcaster, record or movie company being taken off the Internet for 6 hours, let alone 6 months, how ever much copyright infringement they get up to?
he second option is cloud storage which can't be easy to access when you are on the road in war-torn palestine even if you have a GSM connector. It's a quite expensive option to use if you do manage to get a connection and if your data goes over a few megabytes (let's say you're a photographer) it's a totally impractical.
If you are photographing/filming in the middle of a war then avoiding getting shot yourself probably matters more than anything else.
My understanding is that it's less likely to go boom than in previous explosions. This is because the hotspot now sits under a much thicker crust (the rocky mountains). But as I saw one geologist quoted, "I wouldn't bet on it either way".
Until last year people didn't think that volcanos could go "boom" under 4km of water. Until such examples were found under the Artic ocean.
No even if you built 100 power plants on the thing it would not drain it dry (there is a massive amount of energy there) but I think it might delay it a bit.
What's a "bit", decades, years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds? Probably makes more sense to build the power plants because you need power plants than the possibility that doing so might delay an erruption.
IF this thing will eventually blow (spewing movie credits all over the northern hemisphere, some might say), is there a way to stop it from happening? Can the volcano be "tapped" to allow the molten rock to ooze out and relieve some of the pressure?
No, even if it could be done you'd have effectivly created a sizable volcanic erruption. "Oozing" wouldn't work since the flow has to be fast enough that the magma won't cool too much and form a plug.
Can underground formations be "cracked" with explosives to, perhaps, add additional room underground for all this hot rock?
Explosives don't magically remove material. If you tried hard enough you could probably produce some more molten rock ("enriched" with some additional uranium and/or plutonium).
Personally I think it would be great to stick as many huge geothermal power plants as would fit on the thing and suck as much juice from it as possible.
Which would only tap a tiny fraction of the energy theer anyway. Whilst an erruption would take out the power plants if it did errupt there probably wouldn't be much further need for them.
Will the laptop battery last long enough to hack into and disable the lawnmower's systems before the lawnmower can run it over and make lithium confetti?
The original article has a link back to a previous one where a phone had a fight with a lawnmower. No damage apparently being caused to the mower in the in the process.
I would love to have a laptop powered by a small integrated gasoline/diesel (diesel would probably work better) engine,
You'd probably want a diesel since it dosn't have a spark ignition system to interfer with the laptop. The problem is can you make a purely mechanical diesel engine (plus generator) small enough for such an application. Also your typical small internal combustion engine tends to be very noisy.
Yeah, my best guess is that the lawnmower batteries are being sold at a discount in order to establish the market. As soon as the market is established, the prices for lawnmower batteries will probably slowly increase until they're about on par with laptop batteries.
Presumably, as with hand held tools, they'll want to make sure that even if the batteries are similar in rating and physical shape they won't actually fit in the "wrong" machine.
Slashdot Mirror
and that ice cores show that over the past 600,000 years or so the global CO2 concentration has varied, but remained relatively low.
The "problem" is that these ice cores show that atmospheric CO2 concentration follows changes in temperature, rather than vice versa.
Knowing that high CO2 concentrations do affect temperatures, even at lab scale
Rather this happens at "lab scale", what happens on a much more complex planetary scale is far less clear.
We have the ability to cut the levels of CO2 we emit, so it seems sensible to do so.
It is far from clear that trying to reduce the atmospheric CO2 concentration is either possible or even a good idea. That's before you even consider that the likes of "carbon trading" appear to be more about making financial middlemen rich(er) than actually reducing emissions. Such solutions also at best ignore lots of human made pollution, even in some cases could create a lot more pollution.
Maybe it will all be for nothing and we later find that the earth was naturally warming anyway,
What would it take for the alarmists to even entertain the notion that natural processes are in any way involved?
but we might just find that it was the right thing to do.
Or we might do exactly the wrong thing in our ignorance.
If we do nothing, it could be far too late.
"Too late" for who exactly? Consider that the models used by the alarmists have been incapable of any useful long term prediction.
I liken this to the widespread use of the "miracle" DDT; sure, it's a great pesticide... until we learned about accumulatioAn in higher predators and the extreme persistence of organochlorines in the environment.
The WHO recently lifted its ban on DDT. Turns out that the environmental damage may have been overstated.
It's also quite possible for ill thought out "green" ideas to have their drawbacks. Such as "bio-fuels" competing with food crops or electric/hybrid vehicles producing far more pollution over their lifetime than internal combustion engine vehicles (even ones run exclusivly on petroleum).
Decent scientists on the whole don't have agendas in the same way that oil companies, coal-burning energy companies and governments do (unless they're paid specifically to have an agenda)
The IPCC is entirely government funded. The oil companies have also started running adverts showing how "green" they are...
Real scientists don;t mind you checking their data, and there is a lot of it about.
Which is a big strike against the CRU...
What makes you think that regulations, no matter how well-written, can always be avoided?
Another obvious problem is when regulations end up being written and enforced by the "people" who they are intended ti regulate.
I believe the courts *have* limited Congress, in that they aren't allowed to pass a law that would put works that have fallen into the public domain back under copyright.
In many cases this would be impossible anyway. Since it's unlikely the that the original author would still be around.
Increasing the copyright term of existing works makes just as little sense as randomly recreating a copyright. At least in the context of the US Constitution.
I think this graph in the wiki links sums the problem up nicely.
These copyright extensions are simply ridiculous.
The problem actually appears to have started in 1831. Why was nothing done then, since the US Congress dosn't (in theory) have the power to create ipso post facto laws?
A simple way around this is to allow Disney to keep Mickey, you do this by creating a new class of limited rights for National Icons.
Or Disney (TM) could trademark everything to do with Mickey Mouse(TM) in the same way that Paramount (TM) treats everything to do with Star Trek (TM).
If I act/dress like Steven Conroy goose-stepping through the streets, THAT is parody. If I create a passport with his name on it, then that is fraud.
If the passport was supposedly issued by a country which dosn't currently exist, e.g. the DDR, People's Republic of Australia, etc then it could still be parody or satire.
We do need copyrights of some kind, as everyone should be rewarded when his work is used in any way.
Plenty of past societies have managed without the concept of copyright. Even today the real danger for authors, poets, musicians, etc is that people who might enjoy their work will not even know it exists.
Compare speed limits (respected but usually broken)
Maybe what is respected here is the idea, but the implimentation can make little sense. Or even appear to be designed to raise revenue through fines rather than improve safety.
Overall, I'd say that copyright is more like Prohibition than Civil Rights. While Prohibition was widely considered to be a good idea at the time, it was immediately ignored by pretty much everyone. The lawlessness that this engendered quickly spread, and soon the fact that people ignored the laws about drinking meant that there was a huge upswing in official corruption, in violence, and in organized crime.
Yet dispite this we still have "prohibition". It's just been renamed "The War on Drugs".
The problem in Italy is not that people are "brainwashed" by Silvio, it's just that he sucks slightly less than the only other choice.
:)
Having only two choices when the population of Italy is nearly 60 million sounds like the bigger problem
And besides if you pulled out X Megawatts a day over a 100 year period thats got to be a little bit off the destruction :) at least you could hope lol
That's X*3600*24*365*100 MJ Which comes in at X*3.15E+9 MJ. A super volcano eruption is estimated to be in the 800 GT range which is 8E+8*4.18E+9 or 3.34E+18.
A 1 Mw powerplant running flat out for a century would take out the energy equivalent of just under 1MT. Even if you are pulling out Gigawatts it isn't going to make much difference.
Somehow, I believe the studio will twist this story to sound more like "See! Piracy is causing us to lose money!"
As in "It may have been DRM which caused us to lose money in Germany, but it was only needed because of piracy" or something similar.
This despite them putting in the DRM, and despite them generating $10B revenue in 2009.
A small part of 2009, since the movie didn't come out on the 1st of January 2009.
If you want to be taken seriously and convince even those who are not merely skeptical, but "won't" believe even in the face of evidence, then show us the raw fucking data without any tweaking - and accompany that data with a history of each temperature sensor (for example, if a parking lot went up next to it, and the temperature spiked the next few years and gradually increased, don't obfuscate that fact).
Also if you're only using data from some possible sources then explain how you came to choose them.
That way, if there really is an issue, one can come to a scientific conclusion rather than political.
It would also help if they were able to explain why they are so quick to dismiss anything which dosn't fit with their theories, including things which appear to be mutually exclusive.
Until then, count me among the skeptics who consider this a political rather than scientific issue, especially in light of the fact that it is believed that the Antarctic and arctic shelves are breaking from stress (from "overgrowth"), not due to heat,
Melting the the Arctic ocean may also be due to the recently discovered active volcanos and hydrothermal vents some 4km down.
since they are larger than they have been during recorded history
Recorded history of the Antarctic isn't exactly a very long time, accurate measurements of sea ice in the Arctic only go back around 30 years.
Ensuring that it's mainly useful for large corporations rather than any smaller artists.
Even the maximum fine is going to be quite trivial for a major corporation and can you really see a broadcaster, record or movie company being taken off the Internet for 6 hours, let alone 6 months, how ever much copyright infringement they get up to?
he second option is cloud storage which can't be easy to access when you are on the road in war-torn palestine even if you have a GSM connector. It's a quite expensive option to use if you do manage to get a connection and if your data goes over a few megabytes (let's say you're a photographer) it's a totally impractical.
If you are photographing/filming in the middle of a war then avoiding getting shot yourself probably matters more than anything else.
I guess the EFF's and other consumer groups' invites must have gotten lost in the mail.
Or sent to Somalia by "mistake".
My understanding is that it's less likely to go boom than in previous explosions. This is because the hotspot now sits under a much thicker crust (the rocky mountains). But as I saw one geologist quoted, "I wouldn't bet on it either way".
Until last year people didn't think that volcanos could go "boom" under 4km of water. Until such examples were found under the Artic ocean.
No even if you built 100 power plants on the thing it would not drain it dry (there is a massive amount of energy there) but I think it might delay it a bit.
What's a "bit", decades, years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds? Probably makes more sense to build the power plants because you need power plants than the possibility that doing so might delay an erruption.
IF this thing will eventually blow (spewing movie credits all over the northern hemisphere, some might say), is there a way to stop it from happening? Can the volcano be "tapped" to allow the molten rock to ooze out and relieve some of the pressure?
No, even if it could be done you'd have effectivly created a sizable volcanic erruption. "Oozing" wouldn't work since the flow has to be fast enough that the magma won't cool too much and form a plug.
Can underground formations be "cracked" with explosives to, perhaps, add additional room underground for all this hot rock?
Explosives don't magically remove material. If you tried hard enough you could probably produce some more molten rock ("enriched" with some additional uranium and/or plutonium).
Several have suggested that we try to come up with a way to release pressure from the Super Volcano, but I can't see that helpful.
Any significent change is going to involve dealing with amounts of energy which make nuclear weapons look like toys.
Personally I think it would be great to stick as many huge geothermal power plants as would fit on the thing and suck as much juice from it as possible.
Which would only tap a tiny fraction of the energy theer anyway. Whilst an erruption would take out the power plants if it did errupt there probably wouldn't be much further need for them.
Will the laptop battery last long enough to hack into and disable the lawnmower's systems before the lawnmower can run it over and make lithium confetti?
The original article has a link back to a previous one where a phone had a fight with a lawnmower. No damage apparently being caused to the mower in the in the process.
I would love to have a laptop powered by a small integrated gasoline/diesel (diesel would probably work better) engine,
You'd probably want a diesel since it dosn't have a spark ignition system to interfer with the laptop. The problem is can you make a purely mechanical diesel engine (plus generator) small enough for such an application. Also your typical small internal combustion engine tends to be very noisy.
Yeah, my best guess is that the lawnmower batteries are being sold at a discount in order to establish the market. As soon as the market is established, the prices for lawnmower batteries will probably slowly increase until they're about on par with laptop batteries.
Presumably, as with hand held tools, they'll want to make sure that even if the batteries are similar in rating and physical shape they won't actually fit in the "wrong" machine.
Why not a headsup display?
You'd think that would be done for regular instrements, especially the speedometer.
The small tiny ones that comes with the player normaly need less effect to reach 85db then if you get some nice big headphones with better sound.
:)
Or are simply more comfortable to wear than having something stuffed right in your ear