H-Craft was done with a slightly modified Irrlicht engine (you can find my version on http://www.michaelzeilfelder.de/irrlicht.htm) but i always recommend using the original engine). It's certainly possible to do good graphics without shaders, the advantage of shaders is, besides some nice effects, that it will make the renderpipeline a lot more flexible and therefore some stuff would be easier to do.
In this game we restricted ourself also because this way it will still run on cards like Geforce2 without restrictions. Using shaders we would either need to have shader/nonshader versions (with additional testing overhead) or we would have to ignore old cards. This is something you care about in a small (2 man) company. So the technique used here was basicly lightmaps, dynamic lights and speculars.
It might be useful when choosing an engine to check out if projects, which are similar to the one you want to do, have been implemented with it. This is more telling than any featurelists:-)
From the museum job site:
All job applicants need to supply a written statement of their testimony, a statement of what they believe regarding creation and a statement that they have read and can support the AiG statement of faith. Read about that AiG statement of faith here: http://www.answersingenesis.org/home/area/about/fa ith.asp. This is going even far beyond just requiring to believe that the earth is just 6000 years old.
I'm just wondering if something like that is even legal? I don't know the US legal system, but so far i thought that even asking religious questions in a job interview shouldn't be done. They are asking that of every applicant for a job position - including for example applications for a programming job. Someone who really needs a job will even write a statement like that, but it's degrading.
I've been using Irrlicht for about 15 months now. I started with TGE but after 2 weeks failing to get it even running on linux or on windows 98 (yes i know MS does not support it anymore, i still do...) i tried out Irrlicht out of curiosity and it did just work. It's a 3d-renderengine only, so for stuff like sound and physic you will need other engines. It supports shaders, but the renderpipeline is not build upon shaders (which i suspect is what you want). A very big bonus is the zlib-license which basicly does not set any restrictions at all. Besides some minor exceptions the code is generally good and very readable. I have also about 10 years c++ experience and found it very easy to do some modifications to the existing code.
I suppose no engine is perfect, but so far i was very happy with Irrlicht and plan to use it again in my next project. You can check my website if you want to find out what i used it for.
It might be a good thing to do some OpenGL as it is great for learning. But once you really want to do applications it's generally a bad idea to reinvent the weel. First of all you can still use OpenGL in many engines, they wont stop you doing that. But you will lose on: A GUI System, loaders for 3d and image formats, any culling support, a scenegraph, texturemanagement, collisionstuff. Sure you can write that all yourself (and some more stuff), but it will keep you busy for 2-3 years in which you can't do anything else.
So even if you like to do stuff on your own, why not start with an engine like Irrlicht which already offers all the basics - with a nice license (zlib) which allows you to do with the sources whatever you like?
"small MMORPG" is already a contradiction in terms. You won't do a mmorpg without a few years programming fulltime. Start with something simpler and maybe after a few years work you have enough project experience and money that you can consider starting on a mmorpg.
Actually a lot of scientists attempt to answer the questions of consciousness. Unlike Religions which don't seem to care about any useful explanation (except it's there, or it's made by some powerful being). So far there is no agreement on the correct thesis, but is it that surprising to you to hear that there are still open questions in science? And while the final answer to that problem might not be there, a lot of progress is made every year on which other scientists working on that problem can build upon. Religions on the other hand did not seem to advance that much in the last few hundred years.
And like any good creationist you've obviously decided to move to another, completely unrelated topic in your next paragraph. And you also completely missed the point of science there. There is a big difference going from chaos/nothing/mathspace to slightly higher complexity compared to going from some big entity to anything less complex. Science tries to _explain_ the steps. Scientists did not just open a dictionary at random and happened by accident to find the words big bang and use those to explain a beginning which is completely unrelated to any other findings. The trick is not to find any explanation but to find a thesis which does fit in with all the other findings like p.E. cosmological radiation.
Same here. I did buy nvidia because drivers had less problems on linux. When ATI opens the source and nvidia does not my next card will be ATI. Simple as that.
Ah, yes - i remember having the same problem! Shortkeys are fine, but the tutorial was horrible. So far i started three times learning Blender and each time i had forgotten about the whole shortkeys. The only reason i even have an idea what those keys are about is that i learned to use Wings3D before it, which had some rather good tutorials:-).
Also i would prefer a hotkey reference which is not sorted by keyboard layout (numbers, F-keys, etc.), but by topic. I sort of know what i want to do, i need information how to do that.
Another thing i will never understand is why Blender does not start with -w by default on Linux. I don't know about Gnome, but it just won't work that way in a nice way with KDE (you will lose the taskbar). This is like slapping new users in the face for a greeting.
I suppose you also want to keep your job. Maybe even more important you don't want to be known as the guy who refuses to do something so trivial to help the company just because your such an law-abiding jerk. Maybe even most of the other people in the company know about that stuff and no one seems to care about it beside yourself?
Bad news: You can't just install OpenOffice - that won't do it.
Good news: It is not your problem to solve and this is exactly the point you can tell your superiors. They are trying to move a problem to you which is actually theirs. Tell them you can't do that and ask them to find another way to solve the budget constrains. You can bring up OpenOffice at a point when they try to nail you at the wall. Not as the perfect solution (it ain't in a MS-Office environment), but as something which might help them to get by for the moment, if they find absolutly no way to pay for original licenses. You might even get prepared for that talk and do before that some compatibility tests with typical documents of your company. Test if documents are screwed up, do macros no longer work etc. Do not avoid talking about the problems which can arise when switching to OO. Now they know their choices, that installing illegal copies is none of those choices and the decision what to do is back at them.
Call me a cheapskate if you like, but why should someone who just starts programming be forced to use a language which he has to buy before he can do anything? There are just too many free alternative available which beginners can install at home (without getting in legal troubles for using copied stuff). Actually i'd recommend using python or ruby for learning programming and a supplementary course which does teach the workings of a computer at a lower level (processor, registers, interrupts, memory access, etc.).
Java is currently missing a really good game engine. Also portability is currenlty a reason to use c++ because linux is still not that important for the game market while consoles are. And even if companies would like to port for linux, there is not much reason to use java instead of c++, because the usual java libs are not really designed for games but more for business applications.
You won't get around the DirectX problem with any language, if you want portability for 3D you have to use OpenGL (or a higher-level library which supports it) and for the other stuff (DirectInput, DirectDraw etc.) the best bet is also just to use other libs (like SDL).
Scripting is often dependant on the used gameengine, but beside that lua or own scriptlanguages are often used. Once more that does not really depend much on the language in which your game is written (and it's even possible to script c++, for example with cint).
Don't know about the performance for a complex game, because i really haven't seen a complex game written in java so far. I guess as usual for 90% of the stuff it would not make much of a difference. But i doubt you can speed up the bottlenecks with java that well - and nothing else counts anyway.
The network transmission itself ain't a big part of the networkcode in multiplayer games (at least not a big part of the development time). Maybe Java can save a few days there, but no big reason to change the language as there are enough net-libs for c++ available.
Can't tell much about the adavantages of java for multiprocessors yet. So far most games try to avoid using several processes, but this will change a lot in the next years.
Memory leaks are not much of a problem with good libraries. Bad references which form ring-like structure (each class depends on the other) are much harder to solve usually and that's once more a problem for c++ and java alike.
Maybe Java has a chance in the future, but so far i don't see much of a trend in that direction in the game industry. And i sort of doubt it really will be the c++ killer in this area. Even if it might offer some advantages, it just does not seem to give the productivity boost which would be needed for a switch. The companies would have to drop all the libs which they are currently using and also most game programmers just know c++ nowadays a lot better than java.
What we problably *will* see is that more code is programmed with scripts, but most modern games do that already to the extend which is allowed without getting a performance hit.
Currently nearly every game out there is written in C++, a few in c. One of the reasons is that those are at the moment the languages which are easy to port to consoles and a lot of companies want to do that right now. And i guess it will stay that way at least for another console generation (3-5 years). After that the dice might roll once more.
I'm always a little puzzled by that. I'm not even sure if we really should ban ID from schools, because it would probably take about 5 Minutes until the teachers would run out of material. Just think of it:
Teacher: Today we teach an alternative Theorie to Evolution. It's called Intelligent Design and it's about the theory that evolution did not happen but an intelligent Designer created life. The main argument of ID is that life is too complex to be created by random processes and therefore a Designer must exist.
Student: Ok, tell us more about this theory. Tell us about the experiments which were done to verify it. Tell us about research that's going on.
Teacher:...
Oh well, maybe some ID people here can fill in the points. Arguments *for* an ID theory - *not* arguments against evolution theory. Anything besides the "life is too complex and so we need an (even complexer) designer who created it".
The article does not mention all research which was done. I suppose religion was not completly ignored. For example a buddhist monk is mentioned and a group of nuns. Also the following sentence seems to hint that they did not ignore spirituality: "There are things that we really like and tire of less quickly - having good friends, the beauty of the natural world, spirituality". But you're right that it doesn't mention if organized spirituality (that's religion for me) increases our happyness.
If there are enough developers that feel that they don't want to work for a giant company, why not start your own?
Basicly because you need money to start a company or you need to find a way to get that money somehow. And there's nearly no one who will invest in computergames. The best way currently to start an own gamecompany is if you already have a name in this industry and you can convince a publisher to support your team. But guess what - publishers will only be convinced by ideas which are already proven to be successful. New team AND new Idea, that's just too much risk (and i don't even blame them for that, because this really will fail in too many cases).
Well the other way is to start small as an independant developer and trying to grow from there. Don't know yet if this is possible, but i'm quitting the gameindustry in a month and that's the way i'm going to try now.
Evolution and ID are two faulty theories with missing links and both have been proven false by many people. So i think it would just be fair to teach kids the only theorie which has not been refuted so far: The Universe was sneezed out of the nose of a being called the "Great Green Arkleseizure"!
I agree with Mr. Bush that all theories or even all strange opinions which remotly sound like a theory should be teached in school. Believing in the Great Green Arkleseizure Theory might sound foreign to you for now - but only by deliberatly analyzing it we will ever be prepared for "The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief"!.
What annoys me mostly is not stumbling over some problems in programmes (that happens on all systems), but when i need hours to find the solution even if it's something simple and the answer is already somewhere on the web.
I think linux could benefit more from the power of the web when it comes to documentation. So there is my idea (not nearly enough thought out, but i'm still at work right now *g*):
Allow to send all errors to a database on the web and open a wiki-side which is specifically for the error encountered. The database is for additional logging information which is of no interest to the user.
How could it be implemented? Basicly in GUI programms you could use an "Wikihelp"-Button in all error-dialogs. In consoleapps you could write on each error information in a... lets call it "wikihelpfile", which can be parsed by another application (for example by an mozilla-plugin).
The information in those wikihelpfiles would be the server which should be connected, the error which was encountered, the versionnumber of his application and any additional logging information which the programmer finds useful (like the logs on a mozilla-crash).
Whenever an user encounters a problem he would automatically be at a side where other people with same problem would land. Chances are high that he could find a fast solution there. Also the programmers would probably get more feedback about errors than in the current state, where you first have to find out who to contact.
Disadvantage could be a high-webtraffic on the projectsides. And it certainly would not work when you have networkproblems.
And yeah - i know the "just do it" mantra, but i won't find time for doing that anytime soon:(
I'm a little bit surprised that it seems to work only in 1 out of 10 cases. If there really is a backup and a way of transmitting genetic information without DNA i think it should be optimized by now to work in most cases and not that rarely. This sounds to me a little bit like finetuning the mutation rate at he positions after the decimal point.
No, i didn't say that:) I just said that this ain't the way science works. You're using occams razor and if you ever start speculation openly you usually do it in very small steps (like supposing in this case that RNA could be responsible for preserving the genetic information). Nothing stops a scientist from having a vision (like trying to prove god or something like that), but this does not make it a scientific theory.
Simply because it's not a scientific theory. Science is about finding out how thinks work and you don't find out anything if you just explain causes by a higher intelligence.
Well, i still like it:) Even if the USA is not part of it, i still think of the treaty, as it's been signed now, as a sign that gives a little hope that many countries start to take our impact on the environment more serious. And if (IF!) those countries will reduce theire CO2 emissions because of the kyoto treaty than we simply do gamble a little less with the future.
And now arguing that it's bad because it could have been better, well what's the point of it? Do better in the USA if you can do that better in your own way - i certainly wouldn't complain:). But so far the current US Administration has failed to convince me that they take this topic very serious.
Well, the basic theory seems to be that the radiation from the sun has longer waves after reflecting from earth and those long waves are blocked by CO2 therefore not releasing theire energy in space, but increasing the temparature on earth the same way like it's done in a greenhouse. The more CO2 is in the air the stronger the greenhouse effect.
Most simulations which are running to take care of more effects seem to hint in direction of an even stronger global warming, mainly because a small warming will cause glaciers to melt and thereby reducing the earth-reflection.
There are a lot of sideeffect which can further increase or decrease global temperature, but the basic theory never sounded that awfully complicated to me and doesn't seem to need even that much math to understand it. Probably i'm missing something serious, but that might be because i was so far not lucky in finding any good webpage which could explain to me why global warming will not happen.
As it does reduce the chances of global warming. While it could have been even better if the US would have taken part, fact is they did not and so complaining that a treaty is bad even if they didn't even sign it and therefore it won't cost them anything now seems pretty useless to me. Or do you have any problems just because the rest of the world does now regulate it's CO2 emissions?
Slashdot Mirror
H-Craft was done with a slightly modified Irrlicht engine (you can find my version on http://www.michaelzeilfelder.de/irrlicht.htm) but i always recommend using the original engine). It's certainly possible to do good graphics without shaders, the advantage of shaders is, besides some nice effects, that it will make the renderpipeline a lot more flexible and therefore some stuff would be easier to do.
:-)
In this game we restricted ourself also because this way it will still run on cards like Geforce2 without restrictions. Using shaders we would either need to have shader/nonshader versions (with additional testing overhead) or we would have to ignore old cards. This is something you care about in a small (2 man) company. So the technique used here was basicly lightmaps, dynamic lights and speculars.
It might be useful when choosing an engine to check out if projects, which are similar to the one you want to do, have been implemented with it. This is more telling than any featurelists
I'm just wondering if something like that is even legal? I don't know the US legal system, but so far i thought that even asking religious questions in a job interview shouldn't be done. They are asking that of every applicant for a job position - including for example applications for a programming job. Someone who really needs a job will even write a statement like that, but it's degrading.
I've been using Irrlicht for about 15 months now. I started with TGE but after 2 weeks failing to get it even running on linux or on windows 98 (yes i know MS does not support it anymore, i still do...) i tried out Irrlicht out of curiosity and it did just work. It's a 3d-renderengine only, so for stuff like sound and physic you will need other engines. It supports shaders, but the renderpipeline is not build upon shaders (which i suspect is what you want). A very big bonus is the zlib-license which basicly does not set any restrictions at all. Besides some minor exceptions the code is generally good and very readable. I have also about 10 years c++ experience and found it very easy to do some modifications to the existing code.
I suppose no engine is perfect, but so far i was very happy with Irrlicht and plan to use it again in my next project. You can check my website if you want to find out what i used it for.
It might be a good thing to do some OpenGL as it is great for learning. But once you really want to do applications it's generally a bad idea to reinvent the weel. First of all you can still use OpenGL in many engines, they wont stop you doing that. But you will lose on: A GUI System, loaders for 3d and image formats, any culling support, a scenegraph, texturemanagement, collisionstuff. Sure you can write that all yourself (and some more stuff), but it will keep you busy for 2-3 years in which you can't do anything else.
So even if you like to do stuff on your own, why not start with an engine like Irrlicht which already offers all the basics - with a nice license (zlib) which allows you to do with the sources whatever you like?
"small MMORPG" is already a contradiction in terms. You won't do a mmorpg without a few years programming fulltime.
Start with something simpler and maybe after a few years work you have enough project experience and money that you can consider starting on a mmorpg.
Actually a lot of scientists attempt to answer the questions of consciousness. Unlike Religions which don't seem to care about any useful explanation (except it's there, or it's made by some powerful being). So far there is no agreement on the correct thesis, but is it that surprising to you to hear that there are still open questions in science? And while the final answer to that problem might not be there, a lot of progress is made every year on which other scientists working on that problem can build upon. Religions on the other hand did not seem to advance that much in the last few hundred years.
And like any good creationist you've obviously decided to move to another, completely unrelated topic in your next paragraph. And you also completely missed the point of science there. There is a big difference going from chaos/nothing/mathspace to slightly higher complexity compared to going from some big entity to anything less complex. Science tries to _explain_ the steps. Scientists did not just open a dictionary at random and happened by accident to find the words big bang and use those to explain a beginning which is completely unrelated to any other findings. The trick is not to find any explanation but to find a thesis which does fit in with all the other findings like p.E. cosmological radiation.
Same here. I did buy nvidia because drivers had less problems on linux. When ATI opens the source and nvidia does not my next card will be ATI. Simple as that.
Ah, yes - i remember having the same problem! Shortkeys are fine, but the tutorial was horrible. So far i started three times learning Blender and each time i had forgotten about the whole shortkeys. The only reason i even have an idea what those keys are about is that i learned to use Wings3D before it, which had some rather good tutorials :-).
Also i would prefer a hotkey reference which is not sorted by keyboard layout (numbers, F-keys, etc.), but by topic. I sort of know what i want to do, i need information how to do that.
Another thing i will never understand is why Blender does not start with -w by default on Linux. I don't know about Gnome, but it just won't work that way in a nice way with KDE (you will lose the taskbar). This is like slapping new users in the face for a greeting.
I suppose you also want to keep your job. Maybe even more important you don't want to be known as the guy who refuses to do something so trivial to help the company just because your such an law-abiding jerk. Maybe even most of the other people in the company know about that stuff and no one seems to care about it beside yourself?
Bad news:
You can't just install OpenOffice - that won't do it.
Good news:
It is not your problem to solve and this is exactly the point you can tell your superiors. They are trying to move a problem to you which is actually theirs. Tell them you can't do that and ask them to find another way to solve the budget constrains. You can bring up OpenOffice at a point when they try to nail you at the wall. Not as the perfect solution (it ain't in a MS-Office environment), but as something which might help them to get by for the moment, if they find absolutly no way to pay for original licenses. You might even get prepared for that talk and do before that some compatibility tests with typical documents of your company. Test if documents are screwed up, do macros no longer work etc. Do not avoid talking about the problems which can arise when switching to OO. Now they know their choices, that installing illegal copies is none of those choices and the decision what to do is back at them.
> Distribution in binary form makes sense for games and art, but not for general purpose computing.
You just described the 90% of the Desktopmarket for Home-PC's which are currently out of reach for linux.
Call me a cheapskate if you like, but why should someone who just starts programming be forced to use a language which he has to buy before he can do anything? There are just too many free alternative available which beginners can install at home (without getting in legal troubles for using copied stuff). Actually i'd recommend using python or ruby for learning programming and a supplementary course which does teach the workings of a computer at a lower level (processor, registers, interrupts, memory access, etc.).
Java is currently missing a really good game engine. Also portability is currenlty a reason to use c++ because linux is still not that important for the game market while consoles are. And even if companies would like to port for linux, there is not much reason to use java instead of c++, because the usual java libs are not really designed for games but more for business applications.
You won't get around the DirectX problem with any language, if you want portability for 3D you have to use OpenGL (or a higher-level library which supports it) and for the other stuff (DirectInput, DirectDraw etc.) the best bet is also just to use other libs (like SDL).
Scripting is often dependant on the used gameengine, but beside that lua or own scriptlanguages are often used. Once more that does not really depend much on the language in which your game is written (and it's even possible to script c++, for example with cint).
Don't know about the performance for a complex game, because i really haven't seen a complex game written in java so far. I guess as usual for 90% of the stuff it would not make much of a difference. But i doubt you can speed up the bottlenecks with java that well - and nothing else counts anyway.
The network transmission itself ain't a big part of the networkcode in multiplayer games (at least not a big part of the development time). Maybe Java can save a few days there, but no big reason to change the language as there are enough net-libs for c++ available.
Can't tell much about the adavantages of java for multiprocessors yet. So far most games try to avoid using several processes, but this will change a lot in the next years.
Memory leaks are not much of a problem with good libraries. Bad references which form ring-like structure (each class depends on the other) are much harder to solve usually and that's once more a problem for c++ and java alike.
Maybe Java has a chance in the future, but so far i don't see much of a trend in that direction in the game industry. And i sort of doubt it really will be the c++ killer in this area. Even if it might offer some advantages, it just does not seem to give the productivity boost which would be needed for a switch. The companies would have to drop all the libs which they are currently using and also most game programmers just know c++ nowadays a lot better than java.
What we problably *will* see is that more code is programmed with scripts, but most modern games do that already to the extend which is allowed without getting a performance hit.
Currently nearly every game out there is written in C++, a few in c. One of the reasons is that those are at the moment the languages which are easy to port to consoles and a lot of companies want to do that right now. And i guess it will stay that way at least for another console generation (3-5 years). After that the dice might roll once more.
I'm always a little puzzled by that. I'm not even sure if we really should ban ID from schools, because it would probably take about 5 Minutes until the teachers would run out of material. Just think of it:
...
Teacher: Today we teach an alternative Theorie to Evolution. It's called Intelligent Design and it's about the theory that evolution did not happen but an intelligent Designer created life. The main argument of ID is that life is too complex to be created by random processes and therefore a Designer must exist.
Student: Ok, tell us more about this theory. Tell us about the experiments which were done to verify it. Tell us about research that's going on.
Teacher:
Oh well, maybe some ID people here can fill in the points. Arguments *for* an ID theory - *not* arguments against evolution theory. Anything besides the "life is too complex and so we need an (even complexer) designer who created it".
The article does not mention all research which was done. I suppose religion was not completly ignored. For example a buddhist monk is mentioned and a group of nuns. Also the following sentence seems to hint that they did not ignore spirituality:
"There are things that we really like and tire of less quickly - having good friends, the beauty of the natural world, spirituality". But you're right that it doesn't mention if organized spirituality (that's religion for me) increases our happyness.
Basicly because you need money to start a company or you need to find a way to get that money somehow. And there's nearly no one who will invest in computergames. The best way currently to start an own gamecompany is if you already have a name in this industry and you can convince a publisher to support your team. But guess what - publishers will only be convinced by ideas which are already proven to be successful. New team AND new Idea, that's just too much risk (and i don't even blame them for that, because this really will fail in too many cases).
Well the other way is to start small as an independant developer and trying to grow from there. Don't know yet if this is possible, but i'm quitting the gameindustry in a month and that's the way i'm going to try now.
Evolution and ID are two faulty theories with missing links and both have been proven false by many people. So i think it would just be fair to teach kids the only theorie which has not been refuted so far: The Universe was sneezed out of the nose of a being called the "Great Green Arkleseizure"!
I agree with Mr. Bush that all theories or even all strange opinions which remotly sound like a theory should be teached in school. Believing in the Great Green Arkleseizure Theory might sound foreign to you for now - but only by deliberatly analyzing it we will ever be prepared for "The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief"!.
What annoys me mostly is not stumbling over some problems in programmes (that happens on all systems), but when i need hours to find the solution even if it's something simple and the answer is already somewhere on the web.
:(
I think linux could benefit more from the power of the web when it comes to documentation. So there is my idea (not nearly enough thought out, but i'm still at work right now *g*):
Allow to send all errors to a database on the web and open a wiki-side which is specifically for the error encountered. The database is for additional logging information which is of no interest to the user.
How could it be implemented? Basicly in GUI programms you could use an "Wikihelp"-Button in all error-dialogs. In consoleapps you could write on each error information in a... lets call it "wikihelpfile", which can be parsed by another application (for example by an mozilla-plugin).
The information in those wikihelpfiles would be the server which should be connected, the error which was encountered, the versionnumber of his application and any additional logging information which the programmer finds useful (like the logs on a mozilla-crash).
Whenever an user encounters a problem he would automatically be at a side where other people with same problem would land. Chances are high that he could find a fast solution there. Also the programmers would probably get more feedback about errors than in the current state, where you first have to find out who to contact.
Disadvantage could be a high-webtraffic on the projectsides. And it certainly would not work when you have networkproblems.
And yeah - i know the "just do it" mantra, but i won't find time for doing that anytime soon
I'm a little bit surprised that it seems to work only in 1 out of 10 cases. If there really is a backup and a way of transmitting genetic information without DNA i think it should be optimized by now to work in most cases and not that rarely. This sounds to me a little bit like finetuning the mutation rate at he positions after the decimal point.
No, i didn't say that :) I just said that this ain't the way science works. You're using occams razor and if you ever start speculation openly you usually do it in very small steps (like supposing in this case that RNA could be responsible for preserving the genetic information). Nothing stops a scientist from having a vision (like trying to prove god or something like that), but this does not make it a scientific theory.
It happens to often for that. It seems to happen in one of ten cases and you don't even have that much mutation usually.
Simply because it's not a scientific theory. Science is about finding out how thinks work and you don't find out anything if you just explain causes by a higher intelligence.
Well, i still like it :) Even if the USA is not part of it, i still think of the treaty, as it's been signed now, as a sign that gives a little hope that many countries start to take our impact on the environment more serious. And if (IF!) those countries will reduce theire CO2 emissions because of the kyoto treaty than we simply do gamble a little less with the future.
:). But so far the current US Administration has failed to convince me that they take this topic very serious.
And now arguing that it's bad because it could have been better, well what's the point of it? Do better in the USA if you can do that better in your own way - i certainly wouldn't complain
Well, the basic theory seems to be that the radiation from the sun has longer waves after reflecting from earth and those long waves are blocked by CO2 therefore not releasing theire energy in space, but increasing the temparature on earth the same way like it's done in a greenhouse. The more CO2 is in the air the stronger the greenhouse effect.
Most simulations which are running to take care of more effects seem to hint in direction of an even stronger global warming, mainly because a small warming will cause glaciers to melt and thereby reducing the earth-reflection.
There are a lot of sideeffect which can further increase or decrease global temperature, but the basic theory never sounded that awfully complicated to me and doesn't seem to need even that much math to understand it. Probably i'm missing something serious, but that might be because i was so far not lucky in finding any good webpage which could explain to me why global warming will not happen.
As it does reduce the chances of global warming. While it could have been even better if the US would have taken part, fact is they did not and so complaining that a treaty is bad even if they didn't even sign it and therefore it won't cost them anything now seems pretty useless to me. Or do you have any problems just because the rest of the world does now regulate it's CO2 emissions?