Came to post that. I suspect this is a case of giving the "genius" credit for everything. At the very least, he was not the one who realized the idea (the hardest part of all ideas).
George Carlin quote or no, this is seriously misleading:
"They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, [...] If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. "
The electoral system is not very good at producing representative politicians. At the very best, they are representative on a single axis - whatever political axis which the voters judge most important. On such issues as selfishness and ignorance, there's no reason to assume they are typical Americans - the selection effect implied by being able to stand for election and win, ensures that they probably have less of many forms of ignorance, and are more selfish, have less doubt, have less ability to admit mistakes, are more likely to believe they have all the answers they need already, etc. etc. Don't bash representative government, because we haven't really tried it at any serious level.
C# is too windows-oriented to really be useful, but maybe this will be a revival for Ada?
Oooh, wouldn't that be fun! But no. What Java always had going for it was the virtual machine approach and the tightly enforced standards (until Android came along, that is... still, I don't think they did anything illegal). Ada has tightly enforced standards, but no virtual machine targets that I know of! Also, it's 10 to 20 years behind on standard library features for anything except embedded.
I don't like software patents either, but development does take its time and money
Development of software patents does not take time and money. At least not time and money spent on software development. You do like software patents more than you should if you think so.
This is legalized extortion, nothing more. Microsoft is not providing anything of value to the companies they threaten.
On Android, there's a neat little app that lets you use the WiiMote as a "keyboard" input device. So it works with all apps that work nicely with the Android input system - ideally, with key remapping as well. The NES, SNES and GBA emulators work excellently with it.
Sadly, the Amiga and DOS emulators can't handle it yet. The DOS emulator doesn't even have a built-in software keyboard, so it's useless on Desire:-/
Seeing DosBox on Symbian was one of the rare "Oh, maybe I should have had that phone instead"-moments.
I have a question though - why do you have any expectation that your children will do fine if we *don't* keep this up?
I don't plan on doing anything extreme. I just want to put a price on carbon emissions, like any other pollution. People who say it will bring communism and an end to life as we know it are the scaremongers, not me.
Since this is a modest change, I expect to see modest economic and social fallout from it.
Of course, it could be that maize suddenly collectively mutates into a ravenous flesh-eating plant. In that case I would have made the wrong priorities, in retrospect. Still, I'll go by the best information we have, and that leaves me with two major concerns: global warming and peak oil.
For my kids, I'm more worried about whether or not they get a decent education, find true love, and become self-sufficient, than whether or not a 2C change in temperature over the next 100 years will somehow cause them to spontaneously combust.
The fallout from a 2 degrees C change (which is a best-case scenario, including immediate action) is highly likely to harm your kids. Also, it will kill other people's kids.
As you would expect when no humans were are around.
A warmer world means a warmer ocean. Warm water dissolves gases less efficiently, so large amounts of CO2 are released. This drives further warming. And so on and so on (don't panic. Each step is smaller than the last. It's a convergent series, so temperatures on earth won't rise to infinity). Then you have an interglacial - that's what it is.
What's the nudge that sets the ball rolling, turning ice ages into interglacials and vice versa? (another thing you shouldn't panic for: the feedbacks work the other way too!) Orbital anomalies.
When climate prediction started in earnest, the earth had even been cooling slightly for four decades. Nonetheless, the scientific community predicted warming. Why bet against the trend? Study the science and you may find out.
What happened? The eighies were warmer. Then the nineties were warmer still. Now the previous decade is the warmest on record. Pretty good for a wild guess, huh? Want to bet whether the next is going back to 70's levels?
Nuclear waste is tomorrow's fuel. (I'm not of those who will bet on breeder reactors to magic us out of the current mess, but one day they will be economical. One day. Meanwhile, there's little enough of it that we can afford to store it.)
Landfills may look ugly, but they're not going anywhere.
Deforestation and CO2 emissions are two sides of the same coin. See, the trees don't exactly "filter" our air. They make oxygen as a byproduct of binding carbon into plant matter. The problem isn't lack of oxygen - there will be enough of that for the foreseeable future - it's too much CO2.
They are more accurate than your handwaving. And yes, historical CO2 levels support the position that high CO2 levels will lead to a warmer climate - they would even if we didn't have the physics to assume it, which we do.
Saudi Arabia is digging their own grave, no doubt about that. Not only is it hot already down there, but they are depleting their fossil aquifer at an alarming rate.
Same with pretty much the rest of the middle east, including Israel. Within our lifetimes, it's going to get really hard (or expensive, if you're optimistic) to live there at all - not even taking global warming into account.
Thanks for the effort, but though you have reduced your emission footprint by a certain number of tons, you have not reduced total emissions by the same amount. Not remotely.
The problem is that each gallon of gas you save, drives gas prices slightly down. The slightly cheaper gas is then available to someone who couldn't afford it before.
All the oil we pump up, and the coal we dig up, is getting used. Theoretically, the reduced demand from people like us may lower prices enough that some fields are left unexploited.
But we can't count on it. Fossil energy is just too damn useful. Without legislation and taxation to price in the external costs, pretty much all of it will end up in the atmosphere eventually. Humanity can't afford that.
What Dick Cheney sneeringly referred to as "personal virtue" will not save the world, unless it's followed up with political action.
Predicting weather and predicting climate uses similar models, but the former solves an initial value problem, the latter solves a boundary value problem.
What it means is this: I can't tell you what the weather will be tomorrow where you live. However, if you live in the northern hemisphere, I can pretty confidently say that the average temperature for the next six months will be lower than for the previous six.
The earth has had much higher concentrations of CO2 in the past, it's true. The earth has also been tropical to the poles, and frozen to the equator, if you go far enough back. The earth can handle it. We, however, probably won't, especially if the change happens quickly - and compared to other changes in geological history, this change is happening in the blink of an eye.
It's too simple to just say there are crazies on that side, there are crazies on the other side, I take the golden middle road.
The problem with global warming - the core problem - is that it happens on timescales humans aren't good at dealing with.
The carbon we release today will take five years before we could possibly hope to see any effect, and the slow feedbacks, such as the albedo feedback from melting ice sheets, may take hundreds of years to fully kick in.
That this train took a long time to put into motion, also means that it will take a long time to stop. It's precisely because it isn't going to happen tomorrow that we need to act now.
Slashdot Mirror
I bet they put a few more down in Belfast and Glasgow.
Came to post that. I suspect this is a case of giving the "genius" credit for everything. At the very least, he was not the one who realized the idea (the hardest part of all ideas).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_alcohol_consumption
USA: 8.6 litres per person per year
UK: 11.8 litres per person per year
I don't trust WHO numbers for all countries, but I trust them for UK/USA.
George Carlin quote or no, this is seriously misleading:
The electoral system is not very good at producing representative politicians. At the very best, they are representative on a single axis - whatever political axis which the voters judge most important. On such issues as selfishness and ignorance, there's no reason to assume they are typical Americans - the selection effect implied by being able to stand for election and win, ensures that they probably have less of many forms of ignorance, and are more selfish, have less doubt, have less ability to admit mistakes, are more likely to believe they have all the answers they need already, etc. etc. Don't bash representative government, because we haven't really tried it at any serious level.
Why did I get the funny mod and not you?
A sense of moral responsibility would be pretty far down on the list of why the Chinese government does anything.
So Kim Il Sung is a bit like ... Joseph Smith?
Some drinks are illegal. I think it's weird to talk of beer and wine etc. as "different alcohols".
How long until you will have to?
On that day, I for one will welcome our reproducing, self-fueling heli overlords.
Oooh, wouldn't that be fun! But no. What Java always had going for it was the virtual machine approach and the tightly enforced standards (until Android came along, that is... still, I don't think they did anything illegal). Ada has tightly enforced standards, but no virtual machine targets that I know of! Also, it's 10 to 20 years behind on standard library features for anything except embedded.
Development of software patents does not take time and money. At least not time and money spent on software development. You do like software patents more than you should if you think so.
This is legalized extortion, nothing more. Microsoft is not providing anything of value to the companies they threaten.
On Android, there's a neat little app that lets you use the WiiMote as a "keyboard" input device. So it works with all apps that work nicely with the Android input system - ideally, with key remapping as well. The NES, SNES and GBA emulators work excellently with it.
Sadly, the Amiga and DOS emulators can't handle it yet. The DOS emulator doesn't even have a built-in software keyboard, so it's useless on Desire :-/
Seeing DosBox on Symbian was one of the rare "Oh, maybe I should have had that phone instead"-moments.
I don't plan on doing anything extreme. I just want to put a price on carbon emissions, like any other pollution. People who say it will bring communism and an end to life as we know it are the scaremongers, not me.
Since this is a modest change, I expect to see modest economic and social fallout from it.
Of course, it could be that maize suddenly collectively mutates into a ravenous flesh-eating plant. In that case I would have made the wrong priorities, in retrospect. Still, I'll go by the best information we have, and that leaves me with two major concerns: global warming and peak oil.
The fallout from a 2 degrees C change (which is a best-case scenario, including immediate action) is highly likely to harm your kids. Also, it will kill other people's kids.
As you would expect when no humans were are around.
A warmer world means a warmer ocean. Warm water dissolves gases less efficiently, so large amounts of CO2 are released. This drives further warming. And so on and so on (don't panic. Each step is smaller than the last. It's a convergent series, so temperatures on earth won't rise to infinity). Then you have an interglacial - that's what it is.
What's the nudge that sets the ball rolling, turning ice ages into interglacials and vice versa? (another thing you shouldn't panic for: the feedbacks work the other way too!) Orbital anomalies.
Yes, they have.
When climate prediction started in earnest, the earth had even been cooling slightly for four decades. Nonetheless, the scientific community predicted warming. Why bet against the trend? Study the science and you may find out.
What happened? The eighies were warmer. Then the nineties were warmer still. Now the previous decade is the warmest on record. Pretty good for a wild guess, huh? Want to bet whether the next is going back to 70's levels?
Nuclear waste is tomorrow's fuel. (I'm not of those who will bet on breeder reactors to magic us out of the current mess, but one day they will be economical. One day. Meanwhile, there's little enough of it that we can afford to store it.)
Landfills may look ugly, but they're not going anywhere.
Deforestation and CO2 emissions are two sides of the same coin. See, the trees don't exactly "filter" our air. They make oxygen as a byproduct of binding carbon into plant matter. The problem isn't lack of oxygen - there will be enough of that for the foreseeable future - it's too much CO2.
They are more accurate than your handwaving. And yes, historical CO2 levels support the position that high CO2 levels will lead to a warmer climate - they would even if we didn't have the physics to assume it, which we do.
Saudi Arabia is digging their own grave, no doubt about that. Not only is it hot already down there, but they are depleting their fossil aquifer at an alarming rate.
Same with pretty much the rest of the middle east, including Israel. Within our lifetimes, it's going to get really hard (or expensive, if you're optimistic) to live there at all - not even taking global warming into account.
Thanks for the effort, but though you have reduced your emission footprint by a certain number of tons, you have not reduced total emissions by the same amount. Not remotely.
The problem is that each gallon of gas you save, drives gas prices slightly down. The slightly cheaper gas is then available to someone who couldn't afford it before.
All the oil we pump up, and the coal we dig up, is getting used. Theoretically, the reduced demand from people like us may lower prices enough that some fields are left unexploited.
But we can't count on it. Fossil energy is just too damn useful. Without legislation and taxation to price in the external costs, pretty much all of it will end up in the atmosphere eventually. Humanity can't afford that.
What Dick Cheney sneeringly referred to as "personal virtue" will not save the world, unless it's followed up with political action.
I'd side with the mammals, and the oxygen-producing cyanobacteria (not "plants", back to school with you). You see, I am an oxygen-breathing mammal.
The earth will do fine! It's my children that won't, if we keep this up.
Aha, so the fireball theory is discredited.
Now, where were those environmentalists who proposed the fireball theory, did you say?
Casting fireballs at strawmen sounds like fun, but please leave it for another time.
Predicting weather and predicting climate uses similar models, but the former solves an initial value problem, the latter solves a boundary value problem.
What it means is this: I can't tell you what the weather will be tomorrow where you live. However, if you live in the northern hemisphere, I can pretty confidently say that the average temperature for the next six months will be lower than for the previous six.
The earth has had much higher concentrations of CO2 in the past, it's true. The earth has also been tropical to the poles, and frozen to the equator, if you go far enough back. The earth can handle it. We, however, probably won't, especially if the change happens quickly - and compared to other changes in geological history, this change is happening in the blink of an eye.
It's too simple to just say there are crazies on that side, there are crazies on the other side, I take the golden middle road.
The problem with global warming - the core problem - is that it happens on timescales humans aren't good at dealing with.
The carbon we release today will take five years before we could possibly hope to see any effect, and the slow feedbacks, such as the albedo feedback from melting ice sheets, may take hundreds of years to fully kick in.
That this train took a long time to put into motion, also means that it will take a long time to stop. It's precisely because it isn't going to happen tomorrow that we need to act now.