What do you think scientists themselves do? They read all the reports published by the other scientists, then apply their knowledge critically to the body of work. People who aren't directly involved in that research itself (without 4000 hours and 40 grand to spare) must simply read all the scientific reports and make value judgements on what the most rational overall state of knowledge and scientific certainty is on the subject. That's what he's describing.
As opposed to some of these whacko's who go around spouting off "original thinking", conjuring up their own brilliant "hypotheses" and the necessary "evidence".
The only people I want to hear from are people who are accurately summarizing the overall thoughts, state of knowledge, and scientific certainty, by all real scientists. If you're summary differs from his, then you should both be able to directly compare your lists of articles, research groups, and published scientific endeavours, and describe why you believe what you do.
Certainly none of what I'm talking about involves reading anything in the mass-media, unless you trust the integrity and ability of a specific media report to be able to accurately summarize what I've described above, without invoking hype or ignoring a large body of work.
Ozone depletion research corresponds nicely with the expiration of the patent on Freon. Anyone with any knowledge of chemistry realizes that when a cosmic ray hits O2 it form 03 (ozone). In other words, depleting ozone just makes the atmosphere produce more ozone.
So you're claiming that the ozone/CFC issue was a big farce too?
You know, if you had left that out I might not have gotten the impression that you're an off-the-cuff whacko.
First off, I'm with you on your side wrt your analysis of what will happen as coal/gas/etc get scarce. However:
The reasons I don't buy the green house gas malarkey...
Nothing bad has happened in the past 100 years to a place you've been to, so nothing bad will happen in the next 200 years? That's the extent of your common sense logic?
Dozens of critical competitive disagreeable scientific teams have modeled what's happened in the past and what's going to happen in the future, and they all come to one conclusion. Increased CO2 leads to bad things. How many things have the governments of the world come together on lately? Not much: Human rights. Land mines. Ozone hole. Global warming. It's not some off the wall crackpot theory.
Not only that, but there's a chance that there will be a compound efect, where the warming causes less CO2 to be trapped in the ecosphere (aka forests) because it's a bit drier, and so even more CO2 goes in the atmosphere, etc etc, and it compounds the effects way in excess of what we ourselves put out.
There's another more ominous event that could happen. (And yes, this one is much more speculative, but it's a possibility). The runaway greenhouse. MASSIVE amounts of CO2 in the oceans, arctic oceans, and elsewhere get freed up, triggered by our small global warming, and the temperature of the earth rises 15 full degrees in 20 years.
"Common sense" just doesn't cut it when you get into the real world. The real world is aweful complicated. Only real science has a chance to predict what's going to happen. It's one thing to play the skeptic to new theories, that's ok, that's part of the scientific process. But it's another to stick your head in the sand.
I think it would be WELL worth it to "pretend" that we don't have all this fossil fuel to burn. If you're so confident that things will be all hunky dory when fossil fuels DO run out, why not bit the bullet RIGHT NOW? Or are you just being cheap, hoping that you don't have to be part of the generations that pay the real price for sustainable energy usage.
DUH!!!!! Because it's in the best interests of it's citizens, the people who control the government. Only a fool believes that the market can solve all our problems ahead of time.
Me too. Can you get your hands on ADSL? Really cheap, and with dynamic dns (dyndns.org) and a free webserver of your choice (Xitami is a quick and easy one Winblows), you can have gigabytes of webserver space plus nearly unlimited monthly bandwidth (although a capped instantaneous serving-speed of 15 kilobytes/s).
Then they have no recourse but to go directly to you.
One problem with those is that if you are identifying yourself to a server with your thumbprint(say), what keeps someone from just bypassing the fingerprint box and feeding in a recording?
The same technology that prevents you from re-playing back an SNMP V3 USM or SNMP v2usec message.
There are already biometric hardware systems available which result in unique encrypted messages which can not be replayed.
The last time I wanted to download Netscape 4.x gold, Netscape was forcing people to have some kind of free download account. You know, fill in a survey and get a username/password, then you can download junk.
I didn't want to go through all that hassle, nor give them any personal information or e-mail address to spam. So I did sort of the same thing you did, I just started typing in pairs of the most common first names. paul/paul, john/john, etc. Didn't work. But the system had one of those "forgot your password, use the question-reminder feature" things. So I asked for "paul"'s password question. It was "home state". I chose one of the most heavily populated US States I know of, California. Bingo.
> Microsoft has become those ashes. They're no longer a leader, they're a follower
I wish. I really do. But a pair of our top developers just came back from a 10,000 person MS Dev conference. One of them is one of our strongest Java coders and advocates. Both are just raving about MS.Net and the cool stuff it's capable of.
If MS can capture the soul of one of our best Java people by producing such exciting development environments, then the world is not yet safe.
> But if all software is free, then who pays the programmers?
[DEVILS-ADVOCATE-MODE]
If software can be made for free (because all you need is N out of six billion of us to do it for free for fun), and if software can be distributed for free (ala the internet), maybe the economics suggest that it should be free!
Maybe no-one should be paying them to do what they're doing?
Maybe we don't really need 90% of the programmers currently out there?
Face it, the sofware industry is horrifically inefficient. We currently create 5-10 duplicate pieces of software for every single task, and for every software project out there 2-3 completely fail, and there is very little real code re-use. If we actually got rid of all the inefficiencies, I don't think we'd need 90% of us!
Actually neutrinos are generated and escape the supernova well ahead of the photons (the internal process of a supernova is quite complex, and stars are *HUGE*), and the photons never do catch up. (ref-1) (ref-2)
So, neutrinos can actually provide early warning*about a supernova. Light from SN1987a was in fact preceeded by neutrionos that arrived 18 hours ahead of time (ref-1) (ref-2).
Here is a really good page (among a bunch) that explains supernovae.
Certain Counter-Strike servers already have this. It's some kind of semi-automated server administration program I think. (Not a core/real part of CS...) I presume that only admins can start a vote. (Or perhaps it scans for chat based accusations of cheating and then starts a vote..;)
But you are right, it is nearly impossible to get a vote for something or someone.
The key is to keep your expectations at the same level you had back when you had nothing but a (INSERT 5-10 YEAR OLD TECH HERE, ala modem).
For example, last month I downloaded every single Intellivision game ever made in 5 minutes. Remember, I had spent 2 YEARS of my life (15 years ago) dreaming of getting my hands on just 5-10 of them.
7 years ago I sat on my bed at University, closed my eyes, and dreamed about a 3d world in which I and 10-20 people played highly realistic real-time simulations. Last nite I played Counter Strike for 4 hours with 31 other people.
It's just like knocking on a door, trying a door handle, or checking if a window can be opened (former like port 80 or 21, latter like port 31337 ). If you do it at one house on one door then, you're probably just trying to visit a friend. If you check all the doors, the neighbours will eye you and try and figure out who you are. If you rattle the windows at 3am up and down the block while carrying a "break in kit", we'll have the police put you in jail on numerous charges.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget out caffeine free Mountain Dew.
Original thinking? Is that what you call it?
What do you think scientists themselves do? They read all the reports published by the other scientists, then apply their knowledge critically to the body of work. People who aren't directly involved in that research itself (without 4000 hours and 40 grand to spare) must simply read all the scientific reports and make value judgements on what the most rational overall state of knowledge and scientific certainty is on the subject. That's what he's describing.
As opposed to some of these whacko's who go around spouting off "original thinking", conjuring up their own brilliant "hypotheses" and the necessary "evidence".
The only people I want to hear from are people who are accurately summarizing the overall thoughts, state of knowledge, and scientific certainty, by all real scientists. If you're summary differs from his, then you should both be able to directly compare your lists of articles, research groups, and published scientific endeavours, and describe why you believe what you do.
Certainly none of what I'm talking about involves reading anything in the mass-media, unless you trust the integrity and ability of a specific media report to be able to accurately summarize what I've described above, without invoking hype or ignoring a large body of work.
Ozone depletion research corresponds nicely with the expiration of the patent on Freon. Anyone with any knowledge of chemistry realizes that when a cosmic ray hits O2 it form 03 (ozone). In other words, depleting ozone just makes the atmosphere produce more ozone.
So you're claiming that the ozone/CFC issue was a big farce too?
You know, if you had left that out I might not have gotten the impression that you're an off-the-cuff whacko.
First off, I'm with you on your side wrt your analysis of what will happen as coal/gas/etc get scarce. However:
The reasons I don't buy the green house gas malarkey...
Nothing bad has happened in the past 100 years to a place you've been to, so nothing bad will happen in the next 200 years? That's the extent of your common sense logic?
Dozens of critical competitive disagreeable scientific teams have modeled what's happened in the past and what's going to happen in the future, and they all come to one conclusion. Increased CO2 leads to bad things. How many things have the governments of the world come together on lately? Not much: Human rights. Land mines. Ozone hole. Global warming. It's not some off the wall crackpot theory.
Not only that, but there's a chance that there will be a compound efect, where the warming causes less CO2 to be trapped in the ecosphere (aka forests) because it's a bit drier, and so even more CO2 goes in the atmosphere, etc etc, and it compounds the effects way in excess of what we ourselves put out.
There's another more ominous event that could happen. (And yes, this one is much more speculative, but it's a possibility). The runaway greenhouse. MASSIVE amounts of CO2 in the oceans, arctic oceans, and elsewhere get freed up, triggered by our small global warming, and the temperature of the earth rises 15 full degrees in 20 years.
"Common sense" just doesn't cut it when you get into the real world. The real world is aweful complicated. Only real science has a chance to predict what's going to happen. It's one thing to play the skeptic to new theories, that's ok, that's part of the scientific process. But it's another to stick your head in the sand.
I think it would be WELL worth it to "pretend" that we don't have all this fossil fuel to burn. If you're so confident that things will be all hunky dory when fossil fuels DO run out, why not bit the bullet RIGHT NOW? Or are you just being cheap, hoping that you don't have to be part of the generations that pay the real price for sustainable energy usage.
Why does the government fund anything ?
DUH!!!!! Because it's in the best interests of it's citizens, the people who control the government. Only a fool believes that the market can solve all our problems ahead of time.
What rock did you crawl out from?
That's called a "big bright warm smile", and it looks spectacular. Perhaps you're not familiar with them
Neck down!?! I don't see any part of her I don't like!
You're going to set them on fire to get rid of them? Just how often are they far away from anything important, like your house?
In rural Saskatchewan the local Fire Departments have been taking care of crows nests, blasts of water from the pumper do the job just fine.
Canada eh?
Me too. Can you get your hands on ADSL? Really cheap, and with dynamic dns (dyndns.org) and a free webserver of your choice (Xitami is a quick and easy one Winblows), you can have gigabytes of webserver space plus nearly unlimited monthly bandwidth (although a capped instantaneous serving-speed of 15 kilobytes/s).
Then they have no recourse but to go directly to you.
NO!
It's not that Microsoft wants to compete for the same product or service.
It's that Microsoft is making it technically impossible or very very unfriendly for you as a consumer to choose to use anyone else's product!!!
The same technology that prevents you from re-playing back an SNMP V3 USM or SNMP v2usec message.
There are already biometric hardware systems available which result in unique encrypted messages which can not be replayed.
The last time I wanted to download Netscape 4.x gold, Netscape was forcing people to have some kind of free download account. You know, fill in a survey and get a username/password, then you can download junk.
I didn't want to go through all that hassle, nor give them any personal information or e-mail address to spam. So I did sort of the same thing you did, I just started typing in pairs of the most common first names. paul/paul, john/john, etc. Didn't work. But the system had one of those "forgot your password, use the question-reminder feature" things. So I asked for "paul"'s password question. It was "home state". I chose one of the most heavily populated US States I know of, California. Bingo.
Done.
See the big crater going to zero on Friday-Saturday, and the other one on Tues-Wed? Those were global outages.
> Microsoft has become those ashes. They're no longer a leader, they're a follower
I wish. I really do. But a pair of our top developers just came back from a 10,000 person MS Dev conference. One of them is one of our strongest Java coders and advocates. Both are just raving about MS .Net and the cool stuff it's capable of.
If MS can capture the soul of one of our best Java people by producing such exciting development environments, then the world is not yet safe.
Does anyone have any links or information about these tournaments?
Sound interesting, but being 1981 I'd imagine that they might be kind of primitive... I wonder if anyone has got it running in an emulator :)
I want Cyc to filter my Google answers based upon my query.
If it really was intelligent, it wouldn't have stated that "People Magazine" would not make sense. It would just answer.
> But if all software is free, then who pays the programmers?
[DEVILS-ADVOCATE-MODE]
If software can be made for free (because all you need is N out of six billion of us to do it for free for fun), and if software can be distributed for free (ala the internet), maybe the economics suggest that it should be free!
Maybe no-one should be paying them to do what they're doing?
Maybe we don't really need 90% of the programmers currently out there?
Face it, the sofware industry is horrifically inefficient. We currently create 5-10 duplicate pieces of software for every single task, and for every software project out there 2-3 completely fail, and there is very little real code re-use. If we actually got rid of all the inefficiencies, I don't think we'd need 90% of us!
> These figures contain sharp points and small parts and are recommended for ages 5 and up.
Cool, I think those are features, not bugs!!!
Ummm, and you think *we've* got a problem with admitting we're wrong and not knowing the truth?
Actually neutrinos are generated and escape the supernova well ahead of the photons (the internal process of a supernova is quite complex, and stars are *HUGE*), and the photons never do catch up. (ref-1) (ref-2)
So, neutrinos can actually provide early warning*about a supernova. Light from SN1987a was in fact preceeded by neutrionos that arrived 18 hours ahead of time (ref-1) (ref-2).
Here is a really good page (among a bunch) that explains supernovae.
Yeah, but SF is a *spectacular* place, if you can get the apartment with a view of the Bay Bridge and the sunrise...
Certain Counter-Strike servers already have this. It's some kind of semi-automated server administration program I think. (Not a core/real part of CS...) I presume that only admins can start a vote. (Or perhaps it scans for chat based accusations of cheating and then starts a vote..
But you are right, it is nearly impossible to get a vote for something or someone.
For example, last month I downloaded every single Intellivision game ever made in 5 minutes. Remember, I had spent 2 YEARS of my life (15 years ago) dreaming of getting my hands on just 5-10 of them.
7 years ago I sat on my bed at University, closed my eyes, and dreamed about a 3d world in which I and 10-20 people played highly realistic real-time simulations. Last nite I played Counter Strike for 4 hours with 31 other people.
It's just like knocking on a door, trying a door handle, or checking if a window can be opened (former like port 80 or 21, latter like port 31337 ). If you do it at one house on one door then, you're probably just trying to visit a friend. If you check all the doors, the neighbours will eye you and try and figure out who you are. If you rattle the windows at 3am up and down the block while carrying a "break in kit", we'll have the police put you in jail on numerous charges.
The important question is, how BIG can they make these things? And how thin? Can we create a laptop with an unfolding 26 inch widescreen display?
MMMMMmmmmm, DivX movies while travelling. Has anyone ever sat down on the commute to work with their laptop and watched a movie?