If you analyze the temperature of the earth past the start of the industrial era (where the sky is falling environmentalists like to stop) you will see that the temperature of the earth goes up AND down!
Yes, because there are also other effects superimposed on the CO2 effect - cyclic current changes, and solar maxima and minima. This is not about temperature going up all the time, it is about long-term trends.
Tree rings can only tell us so much, but you have to look at this in the gran scheme of things; you can't just measure the temperature year to year and be like "OMGZORS, teh earth is getting hotter, wesa alsa gonna die!"
This is not what is happening. Climate models based on long-term studies of temperature and other factors (such as CO2 concentration) are predicting substantial warming. This is not just a matter of measuring the temperature year to year - it is based on studies of thousands of years of data. And, we aren't all going to die; but the way most of us life is dependent on climate stability. Any change can cause phenomenal problems.
There are 2 ways to improve an economy (without outside assistance): Make more stuff per worker (productivity increases, such as using computers), or Make stuff last longer (decrease depreciation of assets). That's it - and your recomendation fits neither.
No, because you have missed another way: 3. Develop new technologies that give better value and employ people. This is what happened with the IT industry - an industry that barely existed decades ago.
For example, does environmental work trump building a more durable car?
No, but environmental research can build a car that can do better milage, so costs less to run. You get increased profit, less pollution and less requirement on foreign oil.
And, just to throw in a curve ball, instead of calling them votes we will call them dollars...
Give people technologies that will save them money (by using less fuel), and those dollars will 'vote' the right way.
Not quite. Scientific work often has controlled studies based on things you can observe over time. In fact, MOST of reliable science is done that way. The difficulty lies in the fact that there's no REAL way to test changes in the Earth's climate over time and what might influence it beyond computer simulations that have, time and time again, come up wrong.
A lot of science is like this - cosmology is a good example. What happens is that over time the simulations are refined and tested and then start to agree with retrospective data. Only then can you start to have some confidence in them.
Years ago, I recall a certain senator backing down on earlier greenhouse temperature predictions after his own, based on expert advice by scientists, was proven incorrect. We've heard this before.
Which is why you wait for a consensus. We have not had such a consensus before.
I agree.... These models are soooo accurate. What is the weather going to be like next week? Why don't we check the weather report and see? Just realize that the "models" can't predict the weather accurately for 48hrs not to mention one week. Yet, somehow we are projecting out the weather for decades? I understand that there are 2 different disciplines at work here
You obviously don't, or you would not have made this statement. Climate modelling is not about short term predictions of chaotic weather - it is about long term energy flows and balances. The total irrelevance of this argument is clearly illustrated by the fact that even though we are not able to predict the weather next week, we know when winter is coming....
but really how pompous are these people. I believe that the post industrial revolution climate can not be predicted no matter how much data they have collected.
Are you a climate expert? Have you run your models? Subject your theories to peer review?
If not, I don't think it is the climate modellers who are being pompous....
Uh, riiiight. And they can't even accurately predict the weather tomorrow.
I fail to see why this is so often brought up. The weather is chaotic, and long term predictions can often be made independently of short term ones. To show how this works, consider turbulent liquid flow - you can't preduct very short term behaviour - vortices can come and go, but you are in no doubt that if you put a certain amount of water into a stream, the same amount will come out! Long-term climate prediction is not about weather - it is about climate.
Sorry, you lose it.
I think not. All that has happened here is you have shown your ignorance of how climate modelling works.
I think you need to check your facts "Decaff". That data that goes back for millenia is incomplete, and often "guessed". You see, ancient man didn't have modern instruments for tracking weather, even temperature so we don't really know with 100% accuracy what the weather was like in 1006.
Not with 100% accuracy, but we have a very good idea. Ancient man didn't have modern instruments, but we do, and we can use such instruments to check things like gas compositions in ice cores, and isotopic ratios in such cores, in tree rings and so on. So, we have a pretty good idea of temperatures.
It's all guesswork.
No, it is called well-founded estimation.
And contrary to what NPR would have you believe, not all scientists are in agreement on "global warming".
Of course they don't. So what are you going to do? Wait until the very last scientist is finally convinced before you do anything? Sounds very risky to me.
...is still just a guess. "A government report based on computer modeling..." So- a projection from the government based on a computer model says that this is what might happen if the global temperature were to rise 3 degrees. Of course, given that computer models are just themselves guesses about how the various systems that affect climate and weather interact anyway, I remain unimpressed. I'll be taking this with more than a grain of salt. Can someone pick me up a salt lick?
I'm glad you are so confident. I am not. The models (the so-called 'guesses') have been developed and refined over decades, and based on data that goes back for millenia. Almost all scientific work is based on this sort of 'guess'.
Even if you still label it a 'guess', surely you should be concerned that so many guesses from so many who have studied this matter are pointing in the same direction.
It is even more meaningless. According to a scientist interviewed on NPR last week, who talked about localized glacier melting it, even if all humans on earth were to stop all emmisions the temperature would still increase by over 1 degree.
This isn't meaningless. It ie because of the CO2 we have already put into the atmosphere. This will not magically disappear as soon as we cut back - it will take some time.
Yes, the US refuses to cut levels (translation: "refuses to devolve our economy")
Cutting levels of CO2 need not involve devolving any economy. It will require technological advances in energy production and conservation. This sort of innovation can stimulate an economy.
A small nitpick- I would claim that the experiments only show a lack of a local hidden variable, which ruled out local realism for Einstein and many others.
Actually, the experiments show that you have to either give up locality or hidden variables.
It's absolutely relevant in what I put, which is that things may only seem random in the part of the picture we can see, but in the bigger picture (ie, when you include a particles position along dimensions we cannot [currently] observe, it is totally cause and effect.
But that is what the Bell Inequality tests for. It tests for hidden variables that we cannot currently observe.
I think you've misinterpreted the results of the experiments (on top of the fact that the results are in debate; experiments have shown both ways wrt the bell inequality) and what they can mean.
No, this simply not true. Almost all the experiments have gone the way of lack of local realism. The problem with earlier experiments is that they weren't done over sufficient separation of particles to rule out some other explanations. This is no longer the case. There are some refined debates as to the meaning, but almost everyone things that the correct interpretation is no hidden variables.
they're unable to tell what's going on across other dimensions.
which has no relevance at all.
There's no way you can prove randomness, and no real reason to believe in it, while there's evidence pointing towards other dimensions which things can interact and move over, that we are not [yet?] able to observe.
This is neither here not there.
Quantum theory is a patchy one at best. Other theories that tie in effects at a quantum level, with those on a relativistic level, such a the various string theories, all support the idea of more dimensions.
And again, this is irrelevant. String theory relies on random quantum effects in all those dimensions.
Until we can control interactions and observations over these (or show they don't exist), anything that says "randomness is real" is plain uninformed.
No, it isn't. What happens in other universes (assuming they exist) does not change things. Even if things are not random in an ensemble of universes as a whole (as in the Many Worlds interpretation of QM), they are still random here.
But look at how much time and effort we humans and other organisms spend on adding some kind of order to the seemingly pervasive randomness and entropy in life.
This is a belief, and while strongly backed, can't be proven (as even with real random, predictions still have a chance of being correct, which could fool experiments).
It has been shown to wrong, in a manner which most physicists accept as pretty definitive.
There have been very good experiments that have tested something called 'The Bell Inequality', which is a criterion for inidicating whether or not quantum mechanics truly is random, or if there is some hidden mechanism.
Whether you like it or not, there is an enormous difference between mircoevolution and macroevolution, namely, that one can be proved and the other cannot.
I don't understand. Both have occurred and both have been seen. Microevolution can be explain by changes of allele frequences in a population. We see that all the time. Macroevolution can happen with things like hybridization and polyploidy. We see that happen often as well.
There's no such thing as a small and fast Java application. Unless you happen to be talking about hello world, and ignore the size of the JVM/class libraries.
The JVM is tiny, and Java typically only loads the individual classes it needs as it needs them. This means you can ignore the size of the class libraries. Java is the language of choice for mobile devices because it can be so small.
As for Jedit... I'd say 5 seconds... and that's for a *fucking* text editor.
On the same machine the Kate KDE text editor takes longer to start up. In other words, Java app start-up time is indistinguishable from any other program.
Java is a dog. There's no shortage of empiracle evidence to show it.
I really wonder what protocol(s) this is supposed to be. Are they talking about Remote Desktop? Thinking about the IT at work, this would be the only service that comes to mind that really is Windows specific.
It is all kinds of things! Just to take one example - Samba provides file sharing based on Windows protocols, but it can't do this based on any documentation, as Microsoft has not released any - it has reverse-engineered protocols based on analysis of network traffic. This seems to work well, but it is not guaranteed to work, and not guaranteed to be efficient, as Microsoft could change it without notice. There are also protocols for Office applications to talk to server systems to allow collaboration software to work; and there are probably various protocols for authentication systems.
I realized why the the hell would I program anything in Java if the premier IDE for it, written in java, was such a dog. I stopped going after that.
Eclipse should not take that long to start up on any reasonably configured modern machine. If it takes more than 20-30 seconds, something is seriously wrong.
But there is another point - IDEs are among the most complex applications - they include plug-in tools, application servers, debuggers and so on. Such tools can be 'dogs' no matter what language they are written in, and to dismiss Java because of this is naive. Simple Java applications can be small and fast. On my laptop, the full-featured programmers editor JEdit - a pure Java app - starts up in a few seconds.
I'm not talking IDE use, I'm talking open source tools platform. While I personally prefer the Eclipse IDE to the NetBeans IDE, having actually coded for each as a platform, I can offer an opinion from experience: the Eclipse programming model makes just makes it easier to get things done. Most vendors seem to agree, which is why, with the exception of Sun, all the major Java vendors are Eclipse Foundation members (including my employer--naturally my opinions are my own).
Compare NetBeans on this footing and you'll see the difference.
You are right - and a large part of Eclipse's success has been as a tools platform. Fortunately, NetBeans is catching up in this area, with new tools and APIs for plug-in developers.
However, I still think that what matters in the end is the user experience, not so much that of the tool developer. This is why recent versions of NetBeans have been so successful, and why its share of the Java IDE market is growing.
The NetBeans tools may be great, but NetBeans' time has passed. Eclipse now has very strong momentum.
The statistics of IDE use disagree with you. Both Eclipse and NetBeans have very strong momentum. NetBeans use has been increasing dramatically recently. The reason? NetBeans has so much included in the base system, such as J2EE development and GUI designers. With NetBeans 4, powerful refactoring facilities were added (at last!), and with NetBeans 5 there is now one of the best GUI designers (Matisse) ever released.
It is important for the future health of Java development that there should be a choice of quality IDEs. If there is just one, then it can have excessive influence. A recent example of this was Eclipse's late support for Java 1.5. Many developers held back on the use of Java 1.5 because Eclipse did not support it.
Eclipse is the most widely used Java IDE, but NetBeans (and others, such as IntelliJ) are very widely used as well.
It'll be a cold day in hell before Sun releases the source code to any software that people actually use.
You have got to be joking. Apart from the fact that anyone can download the source code for Java, they have open sourced huge amounts. Solaris is very widely used, especially in commercial environments. NetBeans is a very widely used Java IDE, and there is, of course Open Office.
How do you know there isn't any examples of any extinction? There have been many mass extinction events and the parent didn't mention when this was to occur. The time period that this was supposed to occur was about 500 million years ago preceding a time when complex multicelled organisms appeared.
No it wasn't. It is supposed to have ended in the Ediacaran era, which is (interestingly) exactly the time at which really complex multicelled organisms first appeared. However, this means that there must have already been at least complex photosynthetic unicellular organisms. Also, as oxygen concentrations were reasonably stable during that time, there must have been areas of liquid water where photosynthetic organisms were exposed to light (oxygen is unstable, and would have declined otherwise).
So, the whole Earth could not have been covered with a miles-thick layer of ice.
Slashdot Mirror
If you analyze the temperature of the earth past the start of the industrial era (where the sky is falling environmentalists like to stop) you will see that the temperature of the earth goes up AND down!
Yes, because there are also other effects superimposed on the CO2 effect - cyclic current changes, and solar maxima and minima. This is not about temperature going up all the time, it is about long-term trends.
Tree rings can only tell us so much, but you have to look at this in the gran scheme of things; you can't just measure the temperature year to year and be like "OMGZORS, teh earth is getting hotter, wesa alsa gonna die!"
This is not what is happening. Climate models based on long-term studies of temperature and other factors (such as CO2 concentration) are predicting substantial warming. This is not just a matter of measuring the temperature year to year - it is based on studies of thousands of years of data. And, we aren't all going to die; but the way most of us life is dependent on climate stability. Any change can cause phenomenal problems.
There are 2 ways to improve an economy (without outside assistance): Make more stuff per worker (productivity increases, such as using computers), or Make stuff last longer (decrease depreciation of assets). That's it - and your recomendation fits neither.
No, because you have missed another way: 3. Develop new technologies that give better value and employ people. This is what happened with the IT industry - an industry that barely existed decades ago.
For example, does environmental work trump building a more durable car?
No, but environmental research can build a car that can do better milage, so costs less to run. You get increased profit, less pollution and less requirement on foreign oil.
And, just to throw in a curve ball, instead of calling them votes we will call them dollars...
Give people technologies that will save them money (by using less fuel), and those dollars will 'vote' the right way.
Not quite. Scientific work often has controlled studies based on things you can observe over time. In fact, MOST of reliable science is done that way. The difficulty lies in the fact that there's no REAL way to test changes in the Earth's climate over time and what might influence it beyond computer simulations that have, time and time again, come up wrong.
A lot of science is like this - cosmology is a good example. What happens is that over time the simulations are refined and tested and then start to agree with retrospective data. Only then can you start to have some confidence in them.
Years ago, I recall a certain senator backing down on earlier greenhouse temperature predictions after his own, based on expert advice by scientists, was proven incorrect. We've heard this before.
Which is why you wait for a consensus. We have not had such a consensus before.
I agree.... These models are soooo accurate. What is the weather going to be like next week? Why don't we check the weather report and see? Just realize that the "models" can't predict the weather accurately for 48hrs not to mention one week. Yet, somehow we are projecting out the weather for decades? I understand that there are 2 different disciplines at work here
You obviously don't, or you would not have made this statement. Climate modelling is not about short term predictions of chaotic weather - it is about long term energy flows and balances. The total irrelevance of this argument is clearly illustrated by the fact that even though we are not able to predict the weather next week, we know when winter is coming....
but really how pompous are these people. I believe that the post industrial revolution climate can not be predicted no matter how much data they have collected.
Are you a climate expert? Have you run your models? Subject your theories to peer review?
If not, I don't think it is the climate modellers who are being pompous....
Uh, riiiight. And they can't even accurately predict the weather tomorrow.
I fail to see why this is so often brought up. The weather is chaotic, and long term predictions can often be made independently of short term ones. To show how this works, consider turbulent liquid flow - you can't preduct very short term behaviour - vortices can come and go, but you are in no doubt that if you put a certain amount of water into a stream, the same amount will come out! Long-term climate prediction is not about weather - it is about climate.
Sorry, you lose it.
I think not. All that has happened here is you have shown your ignorance of how climate modelling works.
I think you need to check your facts "Decaff". That data that goes back for millenia is incomplete, and often "guessed". You see, ancient man didn't have modern instruments for tracking weather, even temperature so we don't really know with 100% accuracy what the weather was like in 1006.
Not with 100% accuracy, but we have a very good idea. Ancient man didn't have modern instruments, but we do, and we can use such instruments to check things like gas compositions in ice cores, and isotopic ratios in such cores, in tree rings and so on. So, we have a pretty good idea of temperatures.
It's all guesswork.
No, it is called well-founded estimation.
And contrary to what NPR would have you believe, not all scientists are in agreement on "global warming".
Of course they don't. So what are you going to do? Wait until the very last scientist is finally convinced before you do anything? Sounds very risky to me.
...is still just a guess. "A government report based on computer modeling..." So- a projection from the government based on a computer model says that this is what might happen if the global temperature were to rise 3 degrees. Of course, given that computer models are just themselves guesses about how the various systems that affect climate and weather interact anyway, I remain unimpressed. I'll be taking this with more than a grain of salt. Can someone pick me up a salt lick?
I'm glad you are so confident. I am not. The models (the so-called 'guesses') have been developed and refined over decades, and based on data that goes back for millenia. Almost all scientific work is based on this sort of 'guess'.
Even if you still label it a 'guess', surely you should be concerned that so many guesses from so many who have studied this matter are pointing in the same direction.
It is even more meaningless. According to a scientist interviewed on NPR last week, who talked about localized glacier melting it, even if all humans on earth were to stop all emmisions the temperature would still increase by over 1 degree.
This isn't meaningless. It ie because of the CO2 we have already put into the atmosphere. This will not magically disappear as soon as we cut back - it will take some time.
Yes, the US refuses to cut levels (translation: "refuses to devolve our economy")
Cutting levels of CO2 need not involve devolving any economy. It will require technological advances in energy production and conservation. This sort of innovation can stimulate an economy.
A small nitpick- I would claim that the experiments only show a lack of a local hidden variable, which ruled out local realism for Einstein and many others.
Actually, the experiments show that you have to either give up locality or hidden variables.
It's absolutely relevant in what I put, which is that things may only seem random in the part of the picture we can see, but in the bigger picture (ie, when you include a particles position along dimensions we cannot [currently] observe, it is totally cause and effect.
But that is what the Bell Inequality tests for. It tests for hidden variables that we cannot currently observe.
I think you've misinterpreted the results of the experiments (on top of the fact that the results are in debate; experiments have shown both ways wrt the bell inequality) and what they can mean.
No, this simply not true. Almost all the experiments have gone the way of lack of local realism. The problem with earlier experiments is that they weren't done over sufficient separation of particles to rule out some other explanations. This is no longer the case. There are some refined debates as to the meaning, but almost everyone things that the correct interpretation is no hidden variables.
they're unable to tell what's going on across other dimensions.
which has no relevance at all.
There's no way you can prove randomness, and no real reason to believe in it, while there's evidence pointing towards other dimensions which things can interact and move over, that we are not [yet?] able to observe.
This is neither here not there.
Quantum theory is a patchy one at best. Other theories that tie in effects at a quantum level, with those on a relativistic level, such a the various string theories, all support the idea of more dimensions.
And again, this is irrelevant. String theory relies on random quantum effects in all those dimensions.
Until we can control interactions and observations over these (or show they don't exist), anything that says "randomness is real" is plain uninformed.
No, it isn't. What happens in other universes (assuming they exist) does not change things. Even if things are not random in an ensemble of universes as a whole (as in the Many Worlds interpretation of QM), they are still random here.
But look at how much time and effort we humans and other organisms spend on adding some kind of order to the seemingly pervasive randomness and entropy in life.
I can't see how this is relevant, sorry.
Why can't people think that God put an devolved form of life on the planet and we evolved like the Scientists say?
Because we have several very good ideas about how life arose. No need for anyone to 'put' life anywhere.
This is a belief, and while strongly backed, can't be proven (as even with real random, predictions still have a chance of being correct, which could fool experiments).
It has been shown to wrong, in a manner which most physicists accept as pretty definitive.
There have been very good experiments that have tested something called 'The Bell Inequality', which is a criterion for inidicating whether or not quantum mechanics truly is random, or if there is some hidden mechanism.
It turns out that things really are random.
Whether you like it or not, there is an enormous difference between mircoevolution and macroevolution, namely, that one can be proved and the other cannot.
I don't understand. Both have occurred and both have been seen. Microevolution can be explain by changes of allele frequences in a population. We see that all the time. Macroevolution can happen with things like hybridization and polyploidy. We see that happen often as well.
There's no such thing as a small and fast Java application. Unless you happen to be talking about hello world, and ignore the size of the JVM/class libraries.
The JVM is tiny, and Java typically only loads the individual classes it needs as it needs them. This means you can ignore the size of the class libraries. Java is the language of choice for mobile devices because it can be so small.
As for Jedit... I'd say 5 seconds... and that's for a *fucking* text editor.
On the same machine the Kate KDE text editor takes longer to start up. In other words, Java app start-up time is indistinguishable from any other program.
Java is a dog. There's no shortage of empiracle evidence to show it.
Show us some then.
I really wonder what protocol(s) this is supposed to be. Are they talking about Remote Desktop? Thinking about the IT at work, this would be the only service that comes to mind that really is Windows specific.
It is all kinds of things! Just to take one example - Samba provides file sharing based on Windows protocols, but it can't do this based on any documentation, as Microsoft has not released any - it has reverse-engineered protocols based on analysis of network traffic. This seems to work well, but it is not guaranteed to work, and not guaranteed to be efficient, as Microsoft could change it without notice. There are also protocols for Office applications to talk to server systems to allow collaboration software to work; and there are probably various protocols for authentication systems.
Can you now see the problem?
I realized why the the hell would I program anything in Java if the premier IDE for it, written in java, was such a dog. I stopped going after that.
Eclipse should not take that long to start up on any reasonably configured modern machine. If it takes more than 20-30 seconds, something is seriously wrong.
But there is another point - IDEs are among the most complex applications - they include plug-in tools, application servers, debuggers and so on. Such tools can be 'dogs' no matter what language they are written in, and to dismiss Java because of this is naive. Simple Java applications can be small and fast. On my laptop, the full-featured programmers editor JEdit - a pure Java app - starts up in a few seconds.
Way better than NetBeans Editor
No, it really isn't. NetBeans Matisse GUI editor is recognised as being one of the best ever developed.
I'm not talking IDE use, I'm talking open source tools platform. While I personally prefer the Eclipse IDE to the NetBeans IDE, having actually coded for each as a platform, I can offer an opinion from experience: the Eclipse programming model makes just makes it easier to get things done. Most vendors seem to agree, which is why, with the exception of Sun, all the major Java vendors are Eclipse Foundation members (including my employer--naturally my opinions are my own).
Compare NetBeans on this footing and you'll see the difference.
You are right - and a large part of Eclipse's success has been as a tools platform. Fortunately, NetBeans is catching up in this area, with new tools and APIs for plug-in developers.
However, I still think that what matters in the end is the user experience, not so much that of the tool developer. This is why recent versions of NetBeans have been so successful, and why its share of the Java IDE market is growing.
NetBeans is also pure Java, written on Swing, while Eclipse uses its proprietary SWT, which uses native calls to get its GUI work done.
So does Swing - this is how the underlying AWT API works.
The NetBeans tools may be great, but NetBeans' time has passed. Eclipse now has very strong momentum.
The statistics of IDE use disagree with you. Both Eclipse and NetBeans have very strong momentum. NetBeans use has been increasing dramatically recently. The reason? NetBeans has so much included in the base system, such as J2EE development and GUI designers. With NetBeans 4, powerful refactoring facilities were added (at last!), and with NetBeans 5 there is now one of the best GUI designers (Matisse) ever released.
It is important for the future health of Java development that there should be a choice of quality IDEs. If there is just one, then it can have excessive influence. A recent example of this was Eclipse's late support for Java 1.5. Many developers held back on the use of Java 1.5 because Eclipse did not support it.
Eclipse is the most widely used Java IDE, but NetBeans (and others, such as IntelliJ) are very widely used as well.
It'll be a cold day in hell before Sun releases the source code to any software that people actually use.
You have got to be joking. Apart from the fact that anyone can download the source code for Java, they have open sourced huge amounts. Solaris is very widely used, especially in commercial environments. NetBeans is a very widely used Java IDE, and there is, of course Open Office.
How do you know there isn't any examples of any extinction? There have been many mass extinction events and the parent didn't mention when this was to occur. The time period that this was supposed to occur was about 500 million years ago preceding a time when complex multicelled organisms appeared.
No it wasn't. It is supposed to have ended in the Ediacaran era, which is (interestingly) exactly the time at which really complex multicelled organisms first appeared. However, this means that there must have already been at least complex photosynthetic unicellular organisms. Also, as oxygen concentrations were reasonably stable during that time, there must have been areas of liquid water where photosynthetic organisms were exposed to light (oxygen is unstable, and would have declined otherwise).
So, the whole Earth could not have been covered with a miles-thick layer of ice.