Actually if you are coding something which processes bitstrings for example, you will have the problem whichever language you're using.
All the Java BitString libraries I have used have been platform independent; which makes sense, as a Java program has no indication of the word size of the underlying platform.
So what you said isn't really correct in all situations. Look at your code.
And? What does Java or C# have to do w/ it? If your C code made or makes invalid assumptions, then it's a bug in the code.
You are missing the point here. I don't want to have to recompile all my stuff to suit these different machines. With Java, if a machine is running a J2SE 1.5 VM, it will run my single binary, no matter what the bit size of the target machine.
Maintaining a source repository and having to rebuild it for a range of different target architectures (and support it on those architectures) is something I gladly gave up years ago. I target J2SE 1.5. WORA is a reality which I use on a daily basis.
A language's power comes in how well it suits a particular task.
Not necessarily. We are talking about the VM implementation, not just the language.
The fact that an int on Java is guaranteed to be 31-bits + a sign bit is the least attrative benefit of the language, and arguably not a benefit at all (it doesn't offer me anything whatsoever, since I fortunately never internalized such assumptions as a programmer).
It has huge benefits. It means that, for example, you can serialise information in Java and guarantee that you can restore that information on any platform. It allows for, for example, fast binary messaging between different JVMs on different platforms, so that you can cluster your application on a network of machines that not only differ in operating systems, but also on word size, and you can hot-deploy new code as binary over such a network.
The only difference is that the C "virtual machine" has a far looser specification than a JVM since it doesn't take for granted a 32-bit x86 or SPARC environment, nor even a process model.
Neither does the JVM - it makes no assumptions of the bit length of the host machine, or the environment. It has some assumptions - that a 32-bit integer can be handled atomically, for example, but that is it.
The JVM spec doesn't fit as neatly into a 16-bit or 64-bit environment, whereas C is just at home on an 8-bit microcontroller or a 128-bit vector machine.
I think you should take a look at where JVMs are installed. They have been fitting neatly and very efficiently into machines with a wide range of bit lengths for years - especially 64-bit. One of the great advantages of Java is that you can distribute your binary code to such machines, as described above.
What percentage ? Is it variable ? What affects its value ?
How can I find out what this percentage is *before* my company reaches it ?
You get in lawyers and market experts to advise you. This is what any sensible large company does - they have major legal departments.
"Of course it is. The EU is indicating how this can be avoided - by not bundling certain products and by allowing fair competition in the server market."
In other words, by not improving their product in line with competitor's products.
Of course not! Bundling is not a matter of improving their product in anyway - it is a marketing strategy; a matter of getting the foot in the door first by being pre-installed. To be on an equal footing in line with competitors products the extra features the media player etc. could be supplied extra on additional CDs with competitor's versions, or obtained through downloading (just like a competitors).
So it appears you can have a monopoly and not abuse it. Of course, by doing that you'll be well on the way to going out of business by the time you *don't* have a monopoly, since you won't have been able to keep your products at feature-parity with your competitors.
Don't be silly. Of course you can keep your products at feature-parity. The point is not to pre-install features which competitors are attempting to provide. This means things like media players, virus checkers, etc.
Pre-installation gives a built-in advantage, even for products of lesser quality.
Trying to squirm around these restrictions by labelling such features as 'part of the operating system' is one of the reasons why some don't consider Microsoft to be behaving correctly.
Really...just use Java or C#/Mono and the only thing you have to do is change the SDK/JDK and re-test.
Indeed. Having been through the horrors of 16-bit to 32-bit transition on Windows in the early 90s, it is great to be developing in Java, knowing that I don't have to care about such matters again. I let the JVM translate my bytecodes to high-performance machine code on whatever platform I am on, no matter what the word length.
What's a clear, objective, unambiguous metric by which a corporation can judge whether or not it is a monopoly ? Some value that's possible to know about *before* exceeding it.
Well, being above a certain percentage of the market helps. Being 85 and 90% of all desktop computers is a pretty obvious metric.
For all practical purposes, it is impossible to hold a monopoly position and not "abuse" it.
Of course it is. The EU is indicating how this can be avoided - by not bundling certain products and by allowing fair competition in the server market.
OSX have 100% market share on the market of Apple computers, don't they.
True, but irrelevant. Most people don't use Apple computers for specialised apple-only things. They use Apple computers for browsing, office use... etc. For this reason they are part of the general desktop computer market.
Apparently law undertstanding is pretty flexible if you're willing to put it to a critical analysis.
No, actually; the law is pretty clear.
You can claim Windows has a dominant position on PC's, PC's is just a special case of a programmable electronic device, just like Apple Macintosh is a special case of a personal computer machine.
Windows isn't dominant on electronic devices that accept an OS as a whole, so from that point of view they are suddenly not a monopoly, just like you claim Apple isn't a monopoly since you look at the whole PC market and not just the Macintosh computers market.
No. You don't use general electronic devices for things like office software. There is a recognised desktop computer market that does not include mobile phones or calculators or televisions.
Also you become a monopoly if you have a dominant position you say, what % is that share that makes it a dominant position? If Apple turns out successful in time, could you be really nice, please, and let them know at which % they should turn the policy up side down and immediately dismantle their OS in pieces.
The % at which they would need to be controlled (or at least monitored) is the % at which they can use their market share to gain unfair leverage in other markets. That is what the law says.
Do you know what this reminds me of. The Analog Hole proposal. The same those Slashdot users that flame MS on being monopolistic and how this is so different from the position Linux and Apple is, were pointing out how ridiculous it is to have DRM on "consumer" devices" but no DRM on "professional" devices (so they can do their work).
I am not flaming MS for being a monopoly. I am also not personally troubled by DRM.
What concerns me is abuse of monopoly, or gaining that monopoly by unfair means.
There is nothing at all wrong with a monopoly fairly gained and maintained through open competition.
* The OS comes preinstalled on the computer by the hardware vendor
* The OS itself bundles features such as a browser, media player and other essential applications which, due to lack of experience from the customers are strong "default" and remain in use just because they are available
* The applications for the OS in question can't run on another OS, so we have a vendor lock-in, meaning if there are no ports of the apps to another OS, the customers are out of luck
These things are not bad in principle. They are only bad if the OS in question is in a dominant position. In that case it would be potentially blocking competition in many areas.
Hey, you're right. Now I know why we have to sue Apple!
Apple is not subject to monopoly constraints because they don't have sufficient market presence. These things only matter legally if a company has a total or de-facto monopoly.
If Apple had 85% of the desktop computer market then yes, it probably would be time to review how they operated.
This is such an obvious point, I find it hard to understand why so many fail to see it.
Are you allowed to remove Windows and install another OS or dual-boot Windows and another OS? Yes.
Being pre-installed leads to inertia on the part of a customer, especially one who is not familiar with PCs. The PC vendor puts the work in to install Windows and ensure it works well on their hardware.
This obviously gives Windows an advantage over competing systems.
* Dynamic compilation to Java bytecodes - leads to highest possible performance without sacrificing interactivity.
* Optional static compilation - allows creation of applets, servlets, beans,...
I didn't realise that - this looks powerful, although translating via the production of Java source may not be the best way to get high performance. Some of the other languages on the VM do something similar, and it does not work well in this respect.
Given than Jython and JRuby exist, and Groovy doesn't offer much that they don't, what is the point other than to be deliberately obscure?
Groovy does offer things they don't, primarily the ability to compile to class files so that Groovy classes can be used from Java classes and vice versa. This also allows Groovy to run at high speed (as the byte code in the class files is optimised at run time).
However, JRuby plans to allows this in the near future as well.
And yet they still can't accurately tell me if it will rain within the next few hours.
Detailed models my ass.
Why do people keep bringing up this irrelevant point?
Long term prediction of trends is about exactly that - trends. Whether or not weather can be predicted to within hours is irrelevant. It is like, say, applying heat to a pan of water. You can't predict all the turbulence that will result, but you know that it is definitely going to heat up and boil. Would you take someone seriously if they said 'how can you know it will boil - you can't preduct when the next bubble appears?'
Now I'm curious how long it will be before the same people start realizing that they have been duped about global warming -- by the same people who duped us about the "coming Ice Age"
You weren't duped. There is a coming Ice Age (in fact, we are already in one - this is just an interglacial period). What global warming is likely to do is to make things very uncomfortable for millions of people before the next glacial period.
and hundreds of millions of people supposedly dying of hunger from overpopulation in the '70s.
Thanks to China limiting its population, and advances in crop breeding, that did not happen, but it was certainly a possibility.
Scientists do what they think is right. Politicians do what they think will work.
The difference here is that scientists are saying what has to be done, and instead of trying to figure how to do this, politicians are refusing to accept the science.
The difference is essential, and I have never heard of a scientist that was a successful politician (I'm sure they exist, but they are rare - and would you really call your example a scientist?).
surely you should be concerned that so many guesses from so many who have studied this matter are pointing in the same direction.
Groupthink, perhaps?
No, it is called science. It is an awesome process - the exact opposite of groupthink - where developers compete to produce new and different ideas of sufficient quality. Anyone who can call science groupthink hasn't the slightest idea of how it works.
In the case of the UN climate models, if you run them for the years 2000-2100 they predict temperatures increases of 3 degrees over the present. Problem is, that if you run the same model for the years 1900-2000 they predict the climate should be 3 degrees warmer than it actually is.
There are a range of climate models. The problem is that all of them seem to predict an increase in temperature.
By the way, do you have a citation for the above result?
I used to work on some of the largest computer models in the world, and they are only as good as your understanding of the underlying science.
I know. I used to work on large numerical models in the 80s and early 90s.
Until a few years ago climate models didn't account for the sun, oceans, or volcanoes (spewing C02).
And now they do. And they predict substantial warming.
Since Kyoto has been rejected by both Democratic and Capitalistic processes, it probably is overkill. And an environmentalist trying to bypass our democracy and force Kyoto is just as bad as a hardnosed judge (or executive branch member) bypassing the judicial system, for example. It happens, but it shouldn't.
The problem is that only the US thinks that Kyoto is overkill, and a political process is not a good way to judge the merit of scientific argument.
You've obviously mistaken me for the OP. Sorry, that was someone else. You contradicted the OP, stating that there was a THIRD way to grow an economy. I pointed out that your third way wasn't different than his first way.
Your right, and most of them are voting that way. But the government doesn't really need to be involved - and something Kyoto-ish is a really dumb idea if the market is really working.
Actually I do- there are three distinct definitions.
Then I apologise.
I'm just pointing out the widest one, which deals with "kinds" rather than mere species- hard lines between bacteria, plants, mammals, birds, reptiles and the like. The only SOLID evidence I've seen so far with this is the birds/reptiles connection, which is almost obvious in hindsight. We don't have much *yet* towards proving that form of macroevolution exists. That doesn't mean we will never have such evidence- just that it's a current big gaping hole in the theory that you can drive a mack truck through.
There is plenty of other evidence, as the lines really aren't hard. The recent find of an intermediate between fish and amphibians shows this. We have definite fossils of mammal-like reptiles (or are they reptile-like mammals?).
So, we have clear and obvious lines, with intermediates - fish to amphibians, amphibians to early reptiles, early reptiles to mammals and (in some order) birds, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, mosasaurs and later reptiles.
As for broader differences, we know how plants and animals arose from from earlier organisms - by encapsulation of multiple lines of organisms. Mitochondria and chloroplasts, and probably flagella, are derived from bactera. Each of our cells is a compound organism. We see new compound organisms forming all the time - lichens, and corals with embedded algae. There is little mystery about this.
I looked at your site, one question: The graph at the bottom, most of the records say we were at all time low from around the 1600s to 1850s, is that the data they used to say the earth was going to freeze?
No. You get fluctuations. The data used to say that a freeze is coming is based on orbital and spin axis inclination changes.
My point is, you can usually make the data say what you want, and it's just as true in this case. Probably even more so considering we know far far less than what we do know.
No - that is why we have things like recogised standards of statistical analysis and peer reviewed journals. You can't make the data say what you like and get away with it.
Now, hypothetically, if you weren't so sure about something, would you strongly suggest such an extreme?
You would if the uncertainty included possible disastrous scenarios.
What I'm getting at is that these "environmentalist" want to help the environment (duh). They are going to try and do that any way they can: this just happens to be what they can use to try and scare people this time...
No, they aren't environmentalists. They are simply highly respected research scientists reporting their findings.
a few decades ago the earth was entering a new ice age.
And without global warming it might well have been. It certainly will sometime soon, which is why some controlled global warming might not be a bad idea. The problem is that we aren't controlling it.
No. That comes under his "Make more stuff per worker". If we were not making "more stuff per worker" averagig across all industries, then there would have been no people available to employ in the IT industry, or any other new industry.
Ok, then my solution does come within your categories. You can't have it both ways.
Ok, within one degree, what was the temperature of Miami, Florida on April 7th, 223 B.C. at 12:00 Noon? That is well with 3 millenia (or are you using plural for a singular quantity?).
I don't know. But does that stop me or you from knowing that winter followed many months later?
If you can't give me that, then don't claim that you have data good enough to do accurate modeling over millenia.
I do still claim that.
If you can't get data accurate to less than one annual approximation point, then I don't have faith in your computer model for that time.
If you understood statistics, you would realise that you can certainly get decent general predictions without anything as accurate as annual data - because we aren't predicting to an annual accuracy - we are talking about trends. If you have enough volume of data, and you can determine the underlying statistical distribution of that data, you can get very reliable trend predictions from even erratic and noisy data.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually if you are coding something which processes bitstrings for example, you will have the problem whichever language you're using.
All the Java BitString libraries I have used have been platform independent; which makes sense, as a Java program has no indication of the word size of the underlying platform.
So what you said isn't really correct in all situations. Look at your code.
Eh? I look at my code all the time!
And? What does Java or C# have to do w/ it? If your C code made or makes invalid assumptions, then it's a bug in the code.
You are missing the point here. I don't want to have to recompile all my stuff to suit these different machines. With Java, if a machine is running a J2SE 1.5 VM, it will run my single binary, no matter what the bit size of the target machine.
Maintaining a source repository and having to rebuild it for a range of different target architectures (and support it on those architectures) is something I gladly gave up years ago. I target J2SE 1.5. WORA is a reality which I use on a daily basis.
A language's power comes in how well it suits a particular task.
Not necessarily. We are talking about the VM implementation, not just the language.
The fact that an int on Java
is guaranteed to be 31-bits + a sign bit is the least attrative benefit of the language, and arguably not a benefit at all (it doesn't offer me anything whatsoever, since I fortunately never internalized such assumptions as a programmer).
It has huge benefits. It means that, for example, you can serialise information in Java and guarantee that you can restore that information on any platform. It allows for, for example, fast binary messaging between different JVMs on different platforms, so that you can cluster your application on a network of machines that not only differ in operating systems, but also on word size, and you can hot-deploy new code as binary over such a network.
The only difference is that the C "virtual machine" has a far looser specification than a JVM since it doesn't take for granted a 32-bit x86 or SPARC environment, nor even a process model.
Neither does the JVM - it makes no assumptions of the bit length of the host machine, or the environment. It has some assumptions - that a 32-bit integer can be handled atomically, for example, but that is it.
The JVM spec doesn't fit as neatly into a 16-bit or 64-bit environment, whereas C is just at home on an 8-bit microcontroller or a 128-bit vector machine.
I think you should take a look at where JVMs are installed. They have been fitting neatly and very efficiently into machines with a wide range of bit lengths for years - especially 64-bit. One of the great advantages of Java is that you can distribute your binary code to such machines, as described above.
What percentage ? Is it variable ? What affects its value ?
How can I find out what this percentage is *before* my company reaches it ?
You get in lawyers and market experts to advise you. This is what any sensible large company does - they have major legal departments.
"Of course it is. The EU is indicating how this can be avoided - by not bundling certain products and by allowing fair competition in the server market."
In other words, by not improving their product in line with competitor's products.
Of course not! Bundling is not a matter of improving their product in anyway - it is a marketing strategy; a matter of getting the foot in the door first by being pre-installed. To be on an equal footing in line with competitors products the extra features the media player etc. could be supplied extra on additional CDs with competitor's versions, or obtained through downloading (just like a competitors).
So it appears you can have a monopoly and not abuse it. Of course, by doing that you'll be well on the way to going out of business by the time you *don't* have a monopoly, since you won't have been able to keep your products at feature-parity with your competitors.
Don't be silly. Of course you can keep your products at feature-parity. The point is not to pre-install features which competitors are attempting to provide. This means things like media players, virus checkers, etc.
Pre-installation gives a built-in advantage, even for products of lesser quality.
Trying to squirm around these restrictions by labelling such features as 'part of the operating system' is one of the reasons why some don't consider Microsoft to be behaving correctly.
>> although translating via the production of Java source may not be the best way to get high performance.
Why? Do you have a better approach in mind?
Java source generation is seen only in static compilation. No source is generated while the interpreter is run.
Yes, there is a far better approach - statically compile directly to optimised bytecode. I believe this is what the JRuby people are planning to do.
Really...just use Java or C#/Mono and the only thing you have to do is change the SDK/JDK and re-test.
Indeed. Having been through the horrors of 16-bit to 32-bit transition on Windows in the early 90s, it is great to be developing in Java, knowing that I don't have to care about such matters again. I let the JVM translate my bytecodes to high-performance machine code on whatever platform I am on, no matter what the word length.
What's a clear, objective, unambiguous metric by which a corporation can judge whether or not it is a monopoly ? Some value that's possible to know about *before* exceeding it.
Well, being above a certain percentage of the market helps. Being 85 and 90% of all desktop computers is a pretty obvious metric.
For all practical purposes, it is impossible to hold a monopoly position and not "abuse" it.
Of course it is. The EU is indicating how this can be avoided - by not bundling certain products and by allowing fair competition in the server market.
OSX have 100% market share on the market of Apple computers, don't they.
True, but irrelevant. Most people don't use Apple computers for specialised apple-only things. They use Apple computers for browsing, office use... etc. For this reason they are part of the general desktop computer market.
Apparently law undertstanding is pretty flexible if you're willing to put it to a critical analysis.
No, actually; the law is pretty clear.
You can claim Windows has a dominant position on PC's, PC's is just a special case of a programmable electronic device, just like Apple Macintosh is a special case of a personal computer machine.
Windows isn't dominant on electronic devices that accept an OS as a whole, so from that point of view they are suddenly not a monopoly, just like you claim Apple isn't a monopoly since you look at the whole PC market and not just the Macintosh computers market.
No. You don't use general electronic devices for things like office software. There is a recognised desktop computer market that does not include mobile phones or calculators or televisions.
Also you become a monopoly if you have a dominant position you say, what % is that share that makes it a dominant position? If Apple turns out successful in time, could you be really nice, please, and let them know at which % they should turn the policy up side down and immediately dismantle their OS in pieces.
The % at which they would need to be controlled (or at least monitored) is the % at which they can use their market share to gain unfair leverage in other markets. That is what the law says.
Do you know what this reminds me of. The Analog Hole proposal. The same those Slashdot users that flame MS on being monopolistic and how this is so different from the position Linux and Apple is, were pointing out how ridiculous it is to have DRM on "consumer" devices" but no DRM on "professional" devices (so they can do their work).
I am not flaming MS for being a monopoly. I am also not personally troubled by DRM.
What concerns me is abuse of monopoly, or gaining that monopoly by unfair means.
There is nothing at all wrong with a monopoly fairly gained and maintained through open competition.
Ok so let's sum up what's bad:
* The OS comes preinstalled on the computer by the hardware vendor
* The OS itself bundles features such as a browser, media player and other essential applications which, due to lack of experience from the customers are strong "default" and remain in use just because they are available
* The applications for the OS in question can't run on another OS, so we have a vendor lock-in, meaning if there are no ports of the apps to another OS, the customers are out of luck
These things are not bad in principle. They are only bad if the OS in question is in a dominant position. In that case it would be potentially blocking competition in many areas.
Hey, you're right. Now I know why we have to sue Apple!
Apple is not subject to monopoly constraints because they don't have sufficient market presence. These things only matter legally if a company has a total or de-facto monopoly.
If Apple had 85% of the desktop computer market then yes, it probably would be time to review how they operated.
This is such an obvious point, I find it hard to understand why so many fail to see it.
Are you allowed to remove Windows and install another OS or dual-boot Windows and another OS? Yes.
Being pre-installed leads to inertia on the part of a customer, especially one who is not familiar with PCs. The PC vendor puts the work in to install Windows and ensure it works well on their hardware.
This obviously gives Windows an advantage over competing systems.
Jython has this feature.
...
Below are two bullet points from the linked page:
* Dynamic compilation to Java bytecodes - leads to highest possible performance without sacrificing interactivity.
* Optional static compilation - allows creation of applets, servlets, beans,
I didn't realise that - this looks powerful, although translating via the production of Java source may not be the best way to get high performance. Some of the other languages on the VM do something similar, and it does not work well in this respect.
Given than Jython and JRuby exist, and Groovy doesn't offer much that they don't, what is the point other than to be deliberately obscure?
Groovy does offer things they don't, primarily the ability to compile to class files so that Groovy classes can be used from Java classes and vice versa. This also allows Groovy to run at high speed (as the byte code in the class files is optimised at run time).
However, JRuby plans to allows this in the near future as well.
And yet they still can't accurately tell me if it will rain within the next few hours.
Detailed models my ass.
Why do people keep bringing up this irrelevant point?
Long term prediction of trends is about exactly that - trends. Whether or not weather can be predicted to within hours is irrelevant. It is like, say, applying heat to a pan of water. You can't predict all the turbulence that will result, but you know that it is definitely going to heat up and boil. Would you take someone seriously if they said 'how can you know it will boil - you can't preduct when the next bubble appears?'
Now I'm curious how long it will be before the same people start realizing that they have been duped about global warming -- by the same people who duped us about the "coming Ice Age"
You weren't duped. There is a coming Ice Age (in fact, we are already in one - this is just an interglacial period). What global warming is likely to do is to make things very uncomfortable for millions of people before the next glacial period.
and hundreds of millions of people supposedly dying of hunger from overpopulation in the '70s.
Thanks to China limiting its population, and advances in crop breeding, that did not happen, but it was certainly a possibility.
Scientists do what they think is right. Politicians do what they think will work.
The difference here is that scientists are saying what has to be done, and instead of trying to figure how to do this, politicians are refusing to accept the science.
The difference is essential, and I have never heard of a scientist that was a successful politician (I'm sure they exist, but they are rare - and would you really call your example a scientist?).
Yes.
surely you should be concerned that so many guesses from so many who have studied this matter are pointing in the same direction.
Groupthink, perhaps?
No, it is called science. It is an awesome process - the exact opposite of groupthink - where developers compete to produce new and different ideas of sufficient quality. Anyone who can call science groupthink hasn't the slightest idea of how it works.
In the case of the UN climate models, if you run them for the years 2000-2100 they predict temperatures increases of 3 degrees over the present. Problem is, that if you run the same model for the years 1900-2000 they predict the climate should be 3 degrees warmer than it actually is.
There are a range of climate models. The problem is that all of them seem to predict an increase in temperature.
By the way, do you have a citation for the above result?
I used to work on some of the largest computer models in the world, and they are only as good as your understanding of the underlying science.
I know. I used to work on large numerical models in the 80s and early 90s.
Until a few years ago climate models didn't account for the sun, oceans, or volcanoes (spewing C02).
And now they do. And they predict substantial warming.
Since Kyoto has been rejected by both Democratic and Capitalistic processes, it probably is overkill. And an environmentalist trying to bypass our democracy and force Kyoto is just as bad as a hardnosed judge (or executive branch member) bypassing the judicial system, for example. It happens, but it shouldn't.
The problem is that only the US thinks that Kyoto is overkill, and a political process is not a good way to judge the merit of scientific argument.
You've obviously mistaken me for the OP. Sorry, that was someone else. You contradicted the OP, stating that there was a THIRD way to grow an economy. I pointed out that your third way wasn't different than his first way.
Yes, you are right. Sorry.
Your right, and most of them are voting that way. But the government doesn't really need to be involved - and something Kyoto-ish is a really dumb idea if the market is really working.
And is it?
Actually I do- there are three distinct definitions.
Then I apologise.
I'm just pointing out the widest one, which deals with "kinds" rather than mere species- hard lines between bacteria, plants, mammals, birds, reptiles and the like. The only SOLID evidence I've seen so far with this is the birds/reptiles connection, which is almost obvious in hindsight. We don't have much *yet* towards proving that form of macroevolution exists. That doesn't mean we will never have such evidence- just that it's a current big gaping hole in the theory that you can drive a mack truck through.
There is plenty of other evidence, as the lines really aren't hard. The recent find of an intermediate between fish and amphibians shows this. We have definite fossils of mammal-like reptiles (or are they reptile-like mammals?).
So, we have clear and obvious lines, with intermediates - fish to amphibians, amphibians to early reptiles, early reptiles to mammals and (in some order) birds, dinosaurs, pterosaurs, mosasaurs and later reptiles.
As for broader differences, we know how plants and animals arose from from earlier organisms - by encapsulation of multiple lines of organisms. Mitochondria and chloroplasts, and probably flagella, are derived from bactera. Each of our cells is a compound organism. We see new compound organisms forming all the time - lichens, and corals with embedded algae. There is little mystery about this.
I looked at your site, one question: The graph at the bottom, most of the records say we were at all time low from around the 1600s to 1850s, is that the data they used to say the earth was going to freeze?
No. You get fluctuations. The data used to say that a freeze is coming is based on orbital and spin axis inclination changes.
My point is, you can usually make the data say what you want, and it's just as true in this case. Probably even more so considering we know far far less than what we do know.
No - that is why we have things like recogised standards of statistical analysis and peer reviewed journals. You can't make the data say what you like and get away with it.
Now, hypothetically, if you weren't so sure about something, would you strongly suggest such an extreme?
You would if the uncertainty included possible disastrous scenarios.
What I'm getting at is that these "environmentalist" want to help the environment (duh). They are going to try and do that any way they can: this just happens to be what they can use to try and scare people this time...
No, they aren't environmentalists. They are simply highly respected research scientists reporting their findings.
a few decades ago the earth was entering a new ice age.
And without global warming it might well have been. It certainly will sometime soon, which is why some controlled global warming might not be a bad idea. The problem is that we aren't controlling it.
Back to the begining- when you can plant vegetable seeds and raise cows on stalks, we'll talk bout proof of macroevolution.
You really don't know what macroevolution is, do you?
No. That comes under his "Make more stuff per worker". If we were not making "more stuff per worker" averagig across all industries, then there would have been no people available to employ in the IT industry, or any other new industry.
Ok, then my solution does come within your categories. You can't have it both ways.
Ok, within one degree, what was the temperature of Miami, Florida on April 7th, 223 B.C. at 12:00 Noon? That is well with 3 millenia (or are you using plural for a singular quantity?).
I don't know. But does that stop me or you from knowing that winter followed many months later?
If you can't give me that, then don't claim that you have data good enough to do accurate modeling over millenia.
I do still claim that.
If you can't get data accurate to less than one annual approximation point, then I don't have faith in your computer model for that time.
If you understood statistics, you would realise that you can certainly get decent general predictions without anything as accurate as annual data - because we aren't predicting to an annual accuracy - we are talking about trends. If you have enough volume of data, and you can determine the underlying statistical distribution of that data, you can get very reliable trend predictions from even erratic and noisy data.
I don't think you can effectively analyse trends without having a much larger set of data. A few thousand over hundreds of millions is nothing.
n 2003b.html
Ok, so what is your required sampling rate? What analysis would you use?
Oh ya, and where's this data that you've been looking at? I'm dying to see how you're so convinced.
Here is an example
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/mann2003b/man