We've had our 20,000 years of warm interglacial, and now it's time to dive right back down into another 80,000 years of glaciation in the highly regular 100,000 year cycle.
Here's a fairly useful time graph of temperature, dust and CO2 over the last 4 periods of this cycle (ie. 400,000 years). Note that time flows from right to left in this graphic, so "now" is at the origin.
The very close correlation between the curves is very interesting. Of course it doesn't tell us which is cause and which is effect at this resolution, but if CO2 is causal then it would indeed appear that the stage is set for the next glaciation, and Mankind's extra CO2 just reinforces the natural CO2 which rises towards the ends of interglacials leading up to the big plunge into coldness.
The single biggest problem for climatologists at the moment is that they can't model the transition from warm interglacial to fully glaciated state, largely because they don't know the full mechanism by which it happens, and hence no current GCM can model the transition. And when you don't know how that works, then all other talk about climate change is pretty pointless.
AutoDesk can certainly make a lot of noise about other people using their trademarks (if they are), and courts might listen with some interest.
But no way in hell can AutoDesk deny interoperability with their file formats. The precedents for interoperability as a protected activity are legion, spanning decades.
And if such claims were ever to be allowed even once, it would open Pandora's Box bigtime. The ramifications for all of human industry (not just computing) would be utterly immense, and catastrophic.
A huge amount of manufacturing rides piggyback on standards set by named brands, and really the relationship is symbiotic, although the big brands don't wish to acknowledge that. AutoDesk wishes to have a wholly tied customer base instead of being "merely" the leader in their manufacturing community. Such protectionism is very blinkered.
Hopefully their claims will be denied. If not, this could be very bad.
It's certainly like you describe here in the UK as well, and I hear it's the same in US.
What seems to have happened is that politicians worldwide have now lost any intention of representing the interest of "The People" honestly, and always work against them in any way they can. The political system is only as good as its practitioners, and hence nowadays it's rotten to the core.
I don't know if it was ever any better than this. Back in the days of the Founding Fathers in the US it must have been better, you can see the pro-The People intention clearly expressed in their Constitution. But of course that's being subverted now by the current administration.
Just treat politicians with utter contempt for the pure scum they are, universally. I don't know of any that are an exception to this, in the current day and age.
That continual discussion on the LKML doesn't help anyone, and misses an important technical opportunity.
Does anyone seriously believe that all card and peripheral device manufacturers will go fully FOSS any time soon, or indeed ever? No --- nobody is that unrealistic, no matter how much we'd love it to happen.
So, since it's not going to happen, how can we best live with binary modules without suffering the many, very bad consequences of closed code being in our kernel?
This is how:
Find a *technical* way of containing binary modules within MMU-protected kernel domains, at the same level as the "real" kernel but with controlled/restricted access to it. This would make binary modules almost as safe as user-code but still able to communicate rapidly with the kernel resources.
If you do that, the entire religious or political issue disappears, and instead we would have a significantly more robust/resilient kernel in practical terms.
No more bitching. Just find a way to keep the inevitable binary modules under tight MMU control.
These "gaming addiction" studies are getting annoying.
Addictions that involve the taking of a substance are one thing. Quite a different thing are pseudo-addictions that are merely "addictions to enjoyment" without any artificial chemical agent.
We are ALL "addicted" (in a sense) to enjoyment or pleasure or happiness or whatever turns us on --- we are always trying to maximize these things, at the expense of those that we do not enjoy. "Addiction" to our pleasures is the normal human condition.
The alleged "gaming addict" is just a gaming enthusiast who takes his or her gaming enjoyment to an extreme, but that doesn't make it a medical condition unless you are eager to find medical conditions in everything.
Woodstock was in 1969, and the idea that essentially all life is recycled through supernova explosions was already established strongly enough in popular culture for it to appear in Joni Mitchel's wonderful Woodstock lyrics:
We are stardust Billion year old carbon We are golden
Although we know quite a bit more now than then, TFA is recycling really old news.:-)
Both tech and non-tech scenarios of management just ape the traditional view, which is that management (as a distinct function to tech) is mandatory.
I'm afraid this is entirely wrong, and just a self-serving view created by the management "class".
Competent techs can organize themselves perfectly well without any imposed hierarchy --- in fact, this is probably a good definition of "competent". An unthinking directed tech slave is not really a competent tech in a true sense, because all tech work requires effective self-management if it is to be "good". (I guess it can also be "good" by sheer accident, but relying on repeat sheer accidents is not a good idea.)
This isn't a pie-in-the-sky view of the world either, although it's definitely unconventional. It stems from my experience in numerous companies (I'm freelance, so I see a lot of them) --- the best work comes from those tech teams that are self-managed from within, and not from those teams with managers who are not actually doing the tech work themselves.
I'm still trying to work out why this is so, but my working hypothesis at this time is the following: "if you're not doing the work, you're hindering it".
In any event, the conventional view is simply wrong.
Nothing. But then Blizzard/Vivendi wouldn't be so utterly stupid to try to sue him for cheating in a video game. The worst they could do is ban him from it, which I'm sure they've already done.
However, they might try to sue him for interfering in some way with their software. That would be incredibly hard to do though, since he does not modify anything nor copy anything over which Blizzard have copyright. (Copyright is a protection on works, and not on dynamically created in-core data, under any circumstances.) And he has not stolen any commercial secrets either, as long as he didn't go dumpster diving around the back of Blizzard labs. Reverse engineering for interoperability is certainly perfectly legal, and that's what Glider does, interoperate with WoW.
What's more, he has not circumvented any DMCA protection device either, since he is merely reading system memory which is not protected but in the clear. And it's his own machine's (or user's machine's) memory, so clearly he (or the user) has every right to read it.
Finally, he uses that information to drive the user's keyboard and mouse. Well, I'd like to see anyone challange his right to do that.;-)
Quite apart from the obvious dangers involved in dumping trash into orbit...
ISS trash isn't actually trash --- it's extremely valuable material (and mass) that has been boosted into LEO at very high cost.
They should attach an extensible trash module to the ISS, and place all their "trash" (which simply means stuff that they cannot currently use) into the containers through appropriate hatches.
(And I bet space contractors would love to bid for such a project too.)
Not only would you reduce the risk to future flights this way, but you would also provide useful materials for the future. *AND* you'd be seen to be environmentally sensitive, which is no bad thing.
Global Climate Models can't yet simulate what causes glaciation cycles to commence, and we're due for one right now (or overdue even), as we're right at the very end of the current inter-glacial period of 18,000 years or so.
So, for all we know, the melting of all that ice in the North Atlantic could trigger glaciation, and Alaska would go from baking to sub-Alaskan rather quickly. Glaciers covering 40% of the globe wouldn't really be much fun.
There would be one funny aspect to it though: we'd have to switch from cutting down CO2 emissions to pumping as much CO2 into the atmosphere as possible, to try to keep deep glaciation at bay. The U-turn by environmentalists would be priceless.:-)
>> global warming is very real, however we simply don't have good enough models yet
You are right on both counts. I am a scientist and an engineer, and I work enough with climate modelling to understand the problems and limitations in this area. And from this background, I judge that the esteemed economist is paying more attention to hype than fact.
Global warming is very real. Without natural global warming, this planet would be about 33 C colder than it currently is, so it's an extremely important effect that keeps this planet liveable. The most important greenhouse gas that creates 95% of the greenhouse effect is water vapour (not CO2), and we have no control over the water vapour whatsoever, but we're damn glad it's there.
What's more, there has been a gradual (though erratic) increase of temperature throughout the current interglacial period (18,000 years), which cannot be attributed to "advanced" civilization emissions, and this should be viewed against the backdrop of the longer current glaciation cycle (100,000 years) --- ie. we're at a perfectly normal peak in temperature, and it's not even a high one within the current interglacial.
That's the background. Now let's see where current observations put us.
Man's huge outpouring of CO2 has very significantly increased the CO2 ppm in the atmosphere, to levels unprecedented in recent glacial periods. While CO2 is not a primary controller of global temperature (the long-term paleoclimate record shows almost no correlation whatsoever, the record through the last several glaciations shows a strong correlation between the two.
Of course, graphing CO2 and temperature from the fossil record doesn't tell us which is cause and which is effect, and we are not currently able to model the very complex biosphere nor the chaotic cloud formation processes well enough to make any sound judgements about this. However, that doesn't mean that we can ignore it.
Two things we do know with total certainty:
Man-made CO2 *does* cause a tiny initial rise in the greenhouse effect (that's just simple physics), even if it turns out that its final effect is not the obvious one expected.
The climate is in the process of abrupt change, as noted from the extremely rapid melting of Greenland ice flows and polar ice cover, and the very dramatic observed slowdown in the Atlantic overturning that drives the Gulf Stream. And these processes are unstoppable, period, no matter what we do.
So, what do we make of this, in respect of economics and public planning?
Firstly, this is what we DON'T do: we don't conclude that the temperature is going to go through the roof. Not only is there no significant temperature excess in the record (the +0.6 C of recent times would be regarded as entirely within natural climate variation if it weren't for the hype), but more importantly, the trend cannot be stopped in the ways suggested because CO2 has a very long lifetime, and all the industrial age CO2 will continue having its effect for a good 800+ years.
Secondly, this is what we DO do: we accept that the North Atlantic and polar melting cannot be stopped and that therefore the sea level will rise enormously in coming decades and centuries. This will have a collosal effect on Man, and we should plan for it, basically through gradual retreat from the shorelines.
That would be economic planning based on scientific facts, rather than hype.
Of course, reducing CO2 while we're at it is a great idea --- we should not polute the planet, FULL STOP, as it's the only one we've got, currently. But to believe that this is going to solve climate change is a complete fiction.
>> Scientists speculate that the current ice age may have been triggered 40 million years ago by the uplift of the Himalayas
Speculate is the most important word in the whole writeup. To infer any more would be incorrect.
If you spend a few months examining the theory and implementation of the various types of Global Climate Model, you cannot fail to become aware of the incredible number of assumptions and inherent limits and intentionally narrowed scope and couplings in the models. This is on purpose, because it makes the simulations computable with current supercomputers. What's more, the sheer lack of scientific understanding in the more complex areas like cloud formation limits what we can do just as badly. Scientists know this, but outsiders often do not.
Climate modelling is in a state of infancy, despite the many decades of work, and like human infants it largely works though shortcuts and assumptions rather than insight and knowledge. To a very large extent, the results of our current simulations are both mathematically invalid and physically incorrect, but it's the best we have currently. This is not for want of trying nor dishonesty, but simply because it is *HARD*. Very very hard.
And it does no good when non-scientists think that something really concrete is being discovered through current modelling, as it just brings science into disrepute. This applies also to "scientists" who are wearing their Science hats only very loosely while riding the political bandwagon.
It you want to find and assess scientific climate modelling, look for results in which the premises, the computations, and the results are presented along with the ERROR BOUNDS for each of them, plus references to how those error bounds were obtained. You won't find much of that anywhere in climate modelling.
In general, if you see no stated error bounds (which express the meaningfulness of a claimed value), then it's not really science, to put it rather bluntly.
Admittedly, even just a handwaving precursor to actual scientific work is still useful, even *very* useful, but you have to understand the fundamental difference here --- it cannot be used to make any scientific claims whatsoever, because it cannot be refuted. Any value equals any other, in the absence of error bounds.
It's not too early to understand Second Life's implementation and to call it a disaster, because that is not changing. And it won't change. We've explained the problem to them repeatedly, to no avail.
I've been on Second Life a couple of years, and I still am, because the concept of Second Life is fantastic and I would love to see them succeed. But it won't, it can't possibly, because it's designed like a toy instead of for growth.
The problem is simple: SL's servers are mapped physically and logically into a static grid, where each server implements a fixed number of zones (called "sims"), usually just 1. This server does all the processing for everything in that zone (excluding database), and that includes all objects, all land-related storage, all scripting, and all handling of people in that zone.
Now early on in SL's life, some incompetent designer convinced the CEO that this is scalable, simply because you can extend the grid north-south and east-west as much as you like. Unfortunately, he or she failed to see that this is only scalable as long as all people and all objects stay in their home zones. Needless to say, that kills any prospects the world may have had stone dead. No crowds, no major sporting events, no well-populated pop concerts, no nothing beyond nightclub size, because 1 machine per zone (no matter how powerful) simply cannot scale that way.
Replacing each sim server by a cluster can't help, because SL zones can't be processed in a distributed manner. Huge multi-core SMP machines operating on a single server image might work, but then their entire business model of "one cheap machine per zone" would break down. And they can't put just a few big-iron machines in and restrict the large events to those zones, because anyone can hold an event on their own land, and that would discriminate between zones.
Another way of explaining the problem: processing people takes up most of a zone server's CPU in Second Life, but when people move from their home zone to another, the CPU power of their home zone does not follow them. So the server at an event is massively oversubscribed, while the one at home is now idle. It's inherently non-scalable for events and for objects that move between zones.
I've told their CEO and lots of other people there about this many times (and given them dynamically scalable solutions too), but it's bad news so the message is accepted politely and then ignored.
And yes, it *is* very bad news, because not only does it mean that Second Life has no future as it stands, it also means that there will be a revolution should they try to retrofix it. Because you see their business model is based on people paying for computing resources, and the economics of a dynamically allocated design are radically different. 400K+ landlords will suddenly find that their "investment" is now worthless, because land acreage is merely inactive storage in a dynamic architecture, and will cost almost nothing.
Which is almost certainly why Linden Labs haven't bitten the bullet and replaced their static design. It will be too painful. And now it may be too late.
Still, I wish them luck. The concept of Second Life has huge potential. It was just let down by a system architect who didn't understand scalability in a living virtual world, where people actually leave home and want to gather in events.
It's not as clearcut as you make out. Try reading some actual scientific papers on the topic, instead of just listening to the media and politicians with an agenda. Scientists make a distinction between their actual scientific correlations and their preferred personal interpretation --- the latter is not Science.
Climatology is full of uncertainties, and the general agreement among scientists goes only so far. The most important area of agreement is that CO2 operates as a greenhouse gas, but the extent of its contribution within the overall system is commonly misrepresented.
CO2 is not the most important greenhouse gas, by a long chalk. Water vapour is the primary greenhouse gas on Earth, directly responsible for 95% of the global warming that keeps the planet from freezing solid to a dreadful -19 C or so. Global warming is essential.
Climate modellers who want to highlight CO2 choose not to make that known to the man in the street, and the way they treat water vapour as a "feedback" in the GCM models instead of as a key mechanism of "forcing" tends to brush the importance of water vapour under the carpet. It's a somewhat questionable scientific approach because pure feedbacks should really be invariant linear amplifiers and not highly variant in their own right (as is water vapour), but what's worse is that this creates a hugely inaccurate public perception.
The simple fact is that we live on an ice, water, and water-vapour covered globe moving in a somewhat complex way around a somewhat variant Sun, and that is the PRIMARY driver of climate, with water as its main agent of heat distribution and with just enough natural global warming to make it liveable, in between ice ages. CO2? Yes, it's relevant and it does have an effect, but it's not even close to being a primary player, and reducing our CO2 emissions will not have a significant effect in anybody's realistic scenario.
And that's not under dispute by any scientist --- they know the maximum extent of possible direct warming per ppm of CO2, and they also know the maximim warming amplified through water vapour feedback in a cloudless atmosphere. But they're not even close to understanding well the magnitude of interactions in the upper atmosphere nor being able to model cloud formation well enough to determine what the real effect of 2X or 3X CO2 would be. To claim that anything in that area of climate forecasting is "established without doubt" is a total distortion of the truth.
What's more, the natural variation in temperature across glaciation cycles totally swamps the changes calculated by any existing climate model, which just shows how we know very little in the larger context. We're right at the "natural" end of the current 18,000-year inter-glacial period, so expect a massive drop in temperature any century now. Can the GCMs predict that? Of course not.
The uncertainties in this area are LARGE. They will be worked out. In the meantime, only non-scientists claim clearcut knowledge.
>> if you'd like to see how orbit effects climate... EdGCM
I've wanted to do this kind of thing for a while, plus add a couple of unconventional forcings and feedbacks, so I grabbed a copy and am now having a play.
I also joined your forum, although the administrator might be on holiday, as the day is over and still no approval. I'm in no hurry though.:-)
Many thanks for your post, this will be most interesting!
Others have pointed out the intentional messing up of definitions of "Nanotechnology" to suit the vested interests, so I won't address that. Suffice to say that any current or envisaged regulation concerns only nanoscale materials, and not molecular nanotechnology (MNT) which is the original "Nanotechnology" as defined by Drexler.
What I will address is regulation of MNT (once it exists). In a nutshell, you can't.
The basic reason is simple: MNT will be a kitchen sink manufacturing technology (ie. do it at home with no special ingredients other than dirt, water, and air for carbon from CO2), and a microdot seeding technology (eg. carry the precursor factories on an invisible dot on your watch, say). So, you won't be able to stop it by restricting ingredients, nor by external monitoring.
As a result, the only way in which MNT could be regulated is by flooding the world with even more nanomachines to monitor everything that is going on --- in other words, a fully invasive world police state.
Furthermore, it would have to be a WORLD police state, because any invasive regulation done purely at home would achieve nothing, other than ensure that the rest of the world takes the lead in MNT.
This is why regulation of MNT makes no sense at all. The only way to avoid the undoubted dangers of MNT in the hands of nasty people is by defense. No, not the kind of defense where you bomb others, but the real kind, wrapping yourself and your community in a shield.
That will be extremely difficult. Nevertheless, it is the only way, and we ought to start planning for it.
>> This business of calling surface chemistry of finely divided powders "nanotechnology" is a bit much.
That's very true. I'll stick with the definitions given by the founder of the field (ie. Drexler), as it's less subject to commercial and political manipulation. Much of the defining material is freely available online, for anyone who wants their information from the horse's mouth.
First of all there's the online version of Eric Drexler's extremely seminal Engines of Creation. It's a fantastic read, even after all these years.
(The online version of EoC used to be maintained at the Foresight Institute, but it's now kept by Drexler himself above. His whole site is a great resource of course, so clear out the tail of the URL and have a look around.)
Then there's the online version of the popular Unbounding the Future, an easily readable and slightly updated introduction to nanotechnology for everyone, although somehow I find it lacks the charm of Engines of Creation.
But nothing beats his textbook Nanosystems though. This book is a 150% must-have for anyone with a strong interest in nanotechnology, because even if you cannot follow the detailed science and mathematics, the diagrams and tables alone justify the cost.
Unfortunately the online version of Nanosystems is still at a very early stage, and is not really useful except as an online table of contents. Buy the textbook, you won't regret it.
"ensure freedom of action in space, and, if directed, deny such freedom of action to adversaries"
... means "ensure only we have freedom of action in space"
... which means "no freedom of action in space".
That's pretty much what we'd expect from that source, but it doesn't make it any better.
Surely there should be some sort of Logic Advisor sitting next to the President's speech writers. I don't imagine that he wants to look evil and dishonest in front of a world audience well versed in elementary logic.
Prof Eben Moglen is the Free Software Foundation's attorney, and of course is strongly involved in framing the GPL's legal content. And in the detailed article "The GPL Is a License, not a Contract", Prof Moglen says very clearly that:
" The GPL, however, is a true copyright license: a unilateral permission, in which no obligations are reciprocally required by the licensor."
It really doesn't get much clearer than that. Read the whole article though for Pamela Jones' typically detailed explanation. Even some lawyers on Slashdot seem to be getting that point wrong.
While many of your points are good, I wouldn't stress so much about predictions of gloom. It's both safer and more credible to stick to objective assessment of the hard science in this area, which is extensive but doesn't always make the headlines.
When faced with minimally-informed climate theorists, I like to direct them to Take the Global Warming Test". (Part of an excellent fossils resource.)
It gives a reasonably accurate scientific picture which non-scientists can comprehend, and most importantly it deflates any agitated arm-waving and predictions of imminent doom. While I'm not a geologist, geologists do tend to take the long view, and given the sheer inertia of the Earth's systems, that is a sound approach.
GPLv2 is indeed as you describe, but GPLv3/draft goes slightly further than this, and that's what all the fuss is about. Many people have commented on the details of keys etc, but there are other issues causing trouble too, for example the change in underlying philosophy.
GPLv2 was purely a copyright license (the FSF's "copyleft" is based in copyright, and only comes into effect when issues of copyright are engaged). Everyone knew that the license could never impact on your usage of any GPL'd software, only on your distribution of it, because distribution entails copying, and anything else you may do is irrelevant.
In contrast, GPLv3 now seeks to turn the pure copyright license into a sort of EULA (End User Licensing Agreement), because the terms of the license are affected by what you as an END USER do quite separate from distributing the software.
For example, litigating against an open source developer for alleged patent infringements is a nasty thing to do, but it has nothing at all to do with COPYING or COPYright or distribution of GPL'd code. In seeking to make such separate actions of the end user relevant to the freedoms they can have under GPLv3, the new license clearly goes beyond pure copyright and into EULA territory.
The keys issue, and this change away from pure copyright worries people, and these worries may be warranted.
GPLv3 is certainly not the GPL that we love today, and we haven't even begun to understand the full ramifications of the various changes. While nobody likes where the TiVO seemed to be leading us, GPLv3 seems to be heading down a very dangerous and slippery road to thwart that, and the cure may be worse than the disease.
>> Which UN stats? Which national stats? Which study in Sweden? Which newspapers, in Wales or elsewhere?
There are lots of very detailed stats available on this subject. I don't know which sources the parent had in mind, but NationMaster is pretty thorough and fairly neutral:
For "advanced 1st world" countries whose populations do not need crime to survive, that's an utter disgrace. And this figure does tell you that allowing or not allowing guns makes little difference to your overall per-capita crime rate.
The biggest danger about guns is that people talk incessantly about them and so lose focus of the real issues. Pro or anti firearm policy is a red herring, because disallowing guns doesn't eliminate or even reduce your crime problem.
If you have criminals, they will perform crimes, it's in their nature, and changing the tools of their "trade" isn't going to make them get a job and take up basket-weaving instead.
The real reason why governments don't want civilians to carry firearms is because policemen often get shot when chasing gun-equiped criminals. Other weapons don't have this property; thieves don't run back and fight it out with the police using knives and fists, but they will fire shots back when running. Whenever a police death happens in the UK, all politicians get on this easy bandwagon, and the outcome is predictable. And of course, police don't like being on a more even playing field with criminals, nor getting shot at, so you won't find any police chiefs being liberal about this.
It has nothing to do with reducing crime. Because it doesn't.
>> For instance, I have a colleague who is pretty much a failed academic. They have had nothing appear in print for over six years (however, they are tenured). Yet, they are currently offering apparently sagely advice on being a scholar.
I obviously do not know the particular circumstances of this case, but I think you may be generalizing too much from that one data point.
I was an academic myself in a previous life --- I had tenure, and I wrote papers at the department's recommended rates, but I left anyway because prospects of promotion were limited by dead man's shoes, and I was lured away by the comparatively huge money in industry. However, I was there enough years to know how research and publication and academic success are related.
Here's the rub: publication rate is an *artificial and invalid* metric of research effort. It is not even a valid metric of research success or of research relevance. Instead, it most strongly correlates with interest in self-promotion, rather than with scientific or engineering dedication and capability and insight and work rate.
And even worse, in many fields it's your social networking skills and your ability to write the papers that reviewers want to see that gets you published, rather than the intrinsic scientific value of your work and writing.
So, in the general case (but perhaps not in yours), I do not really agree with your premise that a low (or even zero) publication rate makes for a bad scholar. An unsuccessful scholar, perhaps, but to make an analogy which I think is appropriate, being high up in the pop music charts doesn't correlate with musicianship.
The British Library does take a fairly balanced view on this subject ("life+70" excepted), but there is one important area where their view is not balanced at all: they believe that libraries are somehow exceptional in their needs. Well they're not.
Libraries have many roles, but almost none of those roles are exclusive. The three most important ones are collecting, sharing, and archiving for posterity, but these roles are also performed within society as a whole (as a normal part of life and culture), and therefore libraries do not have exclusive need for protections here. We all do.
P2P is probably the most contentious sharing technology today, yet what P2P'ers do is not significantly different to what libraries do --- ie. provide access to their collections to the public. They're similar not only in function, but also in social neutrality and economic effect: sharing is available to everyone equally, no money is made or taken from the sharing, they both reduce somewhat the sales of the items in question, and they both provide free public promotion for the items as well.
The role of archiving for posterity is not exclusive to libraries either --- nobody wants to lose their collected works through media deterioration from old age, so being able to make copies and not being at the mercy of DRM is important for everyone, not just libraries. Indeed, passing down our digital collections to our descendents will undoubtedly be a common interest.
So, while I support what the British Library is saying for the most part, their preoccupation with the needs of libraries sends the wrong message --- we are all in that same boat.
Slashdot Mirror
We've had our 20,000 years of warm interglacial, and now it's time to dive right back down into another 80,000 years of glaciation in the highly regular 100,000 year cycle.
Here's a fairly useful time graph of temperature, dust and CO2 over the last 4 periods of this cycle (ie. 400,000 years). Note that time flows from right to left in this graphic, so "now" is at the origin.
The very close correlation between the curves is very interesting. Of course it doesn't tell us which is cause and which is effect at this resolution, but if CO2 is causal then it would indeed appear that the stage is set for the next glaciation, and Mankind's extra CO2 just reinforces the natural CO2 which rises towards the ends of interglacials leading up to the big plunge into coldness.
The single biggest problem for climatologists at the moment is that they can't model the transition from warm interglacial to fully glaciated state, largely because they don't know the full mechanism by which it happens, and hence no current GCM can model the transition. And when you don't know how that works, then all other talk about climate change is pretty pointless.
AutoDesk can certainly make a lot of noise about other people using their trademarks (if they are), and courts might listen with some interest.
But no way in hell can AutoDesk deny interoperability with their file formats. The precedents for interoperability as a protected activity are legion, spanning decades.
And if such claims were ever to be allowed even once, it would open Pandora's Box bigtime. The ramifications for all of human industry (not just computing) would be utterly immense, and catastrophic.
A huge amount of manufacturing rides piggyback on standards set by named brands, and really the relationship is symbiotic, although the big brands don't wish to acknowledge that. AutoDesk wishes to have a wholly tied customer base instead of being "merely" the leader in their manufacturing community. Such protectionism is very blinkered.
Hopefully their claims will be denied. If not, this could be very bad.
You're no exception in NZ at all.
It's certainly like you describe here in the UK as well, and I hear it's the same in US.
What seems to have happened is that politicians worldwide have now lost any intention of representing the interest of "The People" honestly, and always work against them in any way they can. The political system is only as good as its practitioners, and hence nowadays it's rotten to the core.
I don't know if it was ever any better than this. Back in the days of the Founding Fathers in the US it must have been better, you can see the pro-The People intention clearly expressed in their Constitution. But of course that's being subverted now by the current administration.
Just treat politicians with utter contempt for the pure scum they are, universally. I don't know of any that are an exception to this, in the current day and age.
That continual discussion on the LKML doesn't help anyone, and misses an important technical opportunity.
Does anyone seriously believe that all card and peripheral device manufacturers will go fully FOSS any time soon, or indeed ever? No --- nobody is that unrealistic, no matter how much we'd love it to happen.
So, since it's not going to happen, how can we best live with binary modules without suffering the many, very bad consequences of closed code being in our kernel?
This is how:
Find a *technical* way of containing binary modules within MMU-protected kernel domains, at the same level as the "real" kernel but with controlled/restricted access to it. This would make binary modules almost as safe as user-code but still able to communicate rapidly with the kernel resources.
If you do that, the entire religious or political issue disappears, and instead we would have a significantly more robust/resilient kernel in practical terms.
No more bitching. Just find a way to keep the inevitable binary modules under tight MMU control.
These "gaming addiction" studies are getting annoying.
Addictions that involve the taking of a substance are one thing. Quite a different thing are pseudo-addictions that are merely "addictions to enjoyment" without any artificial chemical agent.
We are ALL "addicted" (in a sense) to enjoyment or pleasure or happiness or whatever turns us on --- we are always trying to maximize these things, at the expense of those that we do not enjoy. "Addiction" to our pleasures is the normal human condition.
The alleged "gaming addict" is just a gaming enthusiast who takes his or her gaming enjoyment to an extreme, but that doesn't make it a medical condition unless you are eager to find medical conditions in everything.
Woodstock was in 1969, and the idea that essentially all life is recycled through supernova explosions was already established strongly enough in popular culture for it to appear in Joni Mitchel's wonderful Woodstock lyrics:
:-)
We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Although we know quite a bit more now than then, TFA is recycling really old news.
Both tech and non-tech scenarios of management just ape the traditional view, which is that management (as a distinct function to tech) is mandatory.
I'm afraid this is entirely wrong, and just a self-serving view created by the management "class".
Competent techs can organize themselves perfectly well without any imposed hierarchy --- in fact, this is probably a good definition of "competent". An unthinking directed tech slave is not really a competent tech in a true sense, because all tech work requires effective self-management if it is to be "good". (I guess it can also be "good" by sheer accident, but relying on repeat sheer accidents is not a good idea.)
This isn't a pie-in-the-sky view of the world either, although it's definitely unconventional. It stems from my experience in numerous companies (I'm freelance, so I see a lot of them) --- the best work comes from those tech teams that are self-managed from within, and not from those teams with managers who are not actually doing the tech work themselves.
I'm still trying to work out why this is so, but my working hypothesis at this time is the following: "if you're not doing the work, you're hindering it".
In any event, the conventional view is simply wrong.
What's illegal about cheating in a game?
;-)
Nothing. But then Blizzard/Vivendi wouldn't be so utterly stupid to try to sue him for cheating in a video game. The worst they could do is ban him from it, which I'm sure they've already done.
However, they might try to sue him for interfering in some way with their software. That would be incredibly hard to do though, since he does not modify anything nor copy anything over which Blizzard have copyright. (Copyright is a protection on works, and not on dynamically created in-core data, under any circumstances.) And he has not stolen any commercial secrets either, as long as he didn't go dumpster diving around the back of Blizzard labs. Reverse engineering for interoperability is certainly perfectly legal, and that's what Glider does, interoperate with WoW.
What's more, he has not circumvented any DMCA protection device either, since he is merely reading system memory which is not protected but in the clear. And it's his own machine's (or user's machine's) memory, so clearly he (or the user) has every right to read it.
Finally, he uses that information to drive the user's keyboard and mouse. Well, I'd like to see anyone challange his right to do that.
Quite apart from the obvious dangers involved in dumping trash into orbit ...
ISS trash isn't actually trash --- it's extremely valuable material (and mass) that has been boosted into LEO at very high cost.
They should attach an extensible trash module to the ISS, and place all their "trash" (which simply means stuff that they cannot currently use) into the containers through appropriate hatches.
(And I bet space contractors would love to bid for such a project too.)
Not only would you reduce the risk to future flights this way, but you would also provide useful materials for the future. *AND* you'd be seen to be environmentally sensitive, which is no bad thing.
You don't know how right you are! (Maybe)
:-)
Global Climate Models can't yet simulate what causes glaciation cycles to commence, and we're due for one right now (or overdue even), as we're right at the very end of the current inter-glacial period of 18,000 years or so.
So, for all we know, the melting of all that ice in the North Atlantic could trigger glaciation, and Alaska would go from baking to sub-Alaskan rather quickly. Glaciers covering 40% of the globe wouldn't really be much fun.
There would be one funny aspect to it though: we'd have to switch from cutting down CO2 emissions to pumping as much CO2 into the atmosphere as possible, to try to keep deep glaciation at bay. The U-turn by environmentalists would be priceless.
You are right on both counts. I am a scientist and an engineer, and I work enough with climate modelling to understand the problems and limitations in this area. And from this background, I judge that the esteemed economist is paying more attention to hype than fact.
Global warming is very real. Without natural global warming, this planet would be about 33 C colder than it currently is, so it's an extremely important effect that keeps this planet liveable. The most important greenhouse gas that creates 95% of the greenhouse effect is water vapour (not CO2), and we have no control over the water vapour whatsoever, but we're damn glad it's there.
What's more, there has been a gradual (though erratic) increase of temperature throughout the current interglacial period (18,000 years), which cannot be attributed to "advanced" civilization emissions, and this should be viewed against the backdrop of the longer current glaciation cycle (100,000 years) --- ie. we're at a perfectly normal peak in temperature, and it's not even a high one within the current interglacial.
That's the background. Now let's see where current observations put us.
Man's huge outpouring of CO2 has very significantly increased the CO2 ppm in the atmosphere, to levels unprecedented in recent glacial periods. While CO2 is not a primary controller of global temperature (the long-term paleoclimate record shows almost no correlation whatsoever, the record through the last several glaciations shows a strong correlation between the two.
Of course, graphing CO2 and temperature from the fossil record doesn't tell us which is cause and which is effect, and we are not currently able to model the very complex biosphere nor the chaotic cloud formation processes well enough to make any sound judgements about this. However, that doesn't mean that we can ignore it.
Two things we do know with total certainty:
- Man-made CO2 *does* cause a tiny initial rise in the greenhouse effect (that's just simple physics), even if it turns out that its final effect is not the obvious one expected.
- The climate is in the process of abrupt change, as noted from the extremely rapid melting of Greenland ice flows and polar ice cover, and the very dramatic observed slowdown in the Atlantic overturning that drives the Gulf Stream. And these processes are unstoppable, period, no matter what we do.
So, what do we make of this, in respect of economics and public planning?Firstly, this is what we DON'T do: we don't conclude that the temperature is going to go through the roof. Not only is there no significant temperature excess in the record (the +0.6 C of recent times would be regarded as entirely within natural climate variation if it weren't for the hype), but more importantly, the trend cannot be stopped in the ways suggested because CO2 has a very long lifetime, and all the industrial age CO2 will continue having its effect for a good 800+ years.
Secondly, this is what we DO do: we accept that the North Atlantic and polar melting cannot be stopped and that therefore the sea level will rise enormously in coming decades and centuries. This will have a collosal effect on Man, and we should plan for it, basically through gradual retreat from the shorelines.
That would be economic planning based on scientific facts, rather than hype.
Of course, reducing CO2 while we're at it is a great idea --- we should not polute the planet, FULL STOP, as it's the only one we've got, currently. But to believe that this is going to solve climate change is a complete fiction.
You are quite right.
>> Scientists speculate that the current ice age may have been triggered 40 million years ago by the uplift of the Himalayas
Speculate is the most important word in the whole writeup. To infer any more would be incorrect.
If you spend a few months examining the theory and implementation of the various types of Global Climate Model, you cannot fail to become aware of the incredible number of assumptions and inherent limits and intentionally narrowed scope and couplings in the models. This is on purpose, because it makes the simulations computable with current supercomputers. What's more, the sheer lack of scientific understanding in the more complex areas like cloud formation limits what we can do just as badly. Scientists know this, but outsiders often do not.
Climate modelling is in a state of infancy, despite the many decades of work, and like human infants it largely works though shortcuts and assumptions rather than insight and knowledge. To a very large extent, the results of our current simulations are both mathematically invalid and physically incorrect, but it's the best we have currently. This is not for want of trying nor dishonesty, but simply because it is *HARD*. Very very hard.
And it does no good when non-scientists think that something really concrete is being discovered through current modelling, as it just brings science into disrepute. This applies also to "scientists" who are wearing their Science hats only very loosely while riding the political bandwagon.
It you want to find and assess scientific climate modelling, look for results in which the premises, the computations, and the results are presented along with the ERROR BOUNDS for each of them, plus references to how those error bounds were obtained. You won't find much of that anywhere in climate modelling.
In general, if you see no stated error bounds (which express the meaningfulness of a claimed value), then it's not really science, to put it rather bluntly.
Admittedly, even just a handwaving precursor to actual scientific work is still useful, even *very* useful, but you have to understand the fundamental difference here --- it cannot be used to make any scientific claims whatsoever, because it cannot be refuted. Any value equals any other, in the absence of error bounds.
>> it's too early
It's not too early to understand Second Life's implementation and to call it a disaster, because that is not changing. And it won't change. We've explained the problem to them repeatedly, to no avail.
I've been on Second Life a couple of years, and I still am, because the concept of Second Life is fantastic and I would love to see them succeed. But it won't, it can't possibly, because it's designed like a toy instead of for growth.
The problem is simple: SL's servers are mapped physically and logically into a static grid, where each server implements a fixed number of zones (called "sims"), usually just 1. This server does all the processing for everything in that zone (excluding database), and that includes all objects, all land-related storage, all scripting, and all handling of people in that zone.
Now early on in SL's life, some incompetent designer convinced the CEO that this is scalable, simply because you can extend the grid north-south and east-west as much as you like. Unfortunately, he or she failed to see that this is only scalable as long as all people and all objects stay in their home zones. Needless to say, that kills any prospects the world may have had stone dead. No crowds, no major sporting events, no well-populated pop concerts, no nothing beyond nightclub size, because 1 machine per zone (no matter how powerful) simply cannot scale that way.
Replacing each sim server by a cluster can't help, because SL zones can't be processed in a distributed manner. Huge multi-core SMP machines operating on a single server image might work, but then their entire business model of "one cheap machine per zone" would break down. And they can't put just a few big-iron machines in and restrict the large events to those zones, because anyone can hold an event on their own land, and that would discriminate between zones.
Another way of explaining the problem: processing people takes up most of a zone server's CPU in Second Life, but when people move from their home zone to another, the CPU power of their home zone does not follow them. So the server at an event is massively oversubscribed, while the one at home is now idle. It's inherently non-scalable for events and for objects that move between zones.
I've told their CEO and lots of other people there about this many times (and given them dynamically scalable solutions too), but it's bad news so the message is accepted politely and then ignored.
And yes, it *is* very bad news, because not only does it mean that Second Life has no future as it stands, it also means that there will be a revolution should they try to retrofix it. Because you see their business model is based on people paying for computing resources, and the economics of a dynamically allocated design are radically different. 400K+ landlords will suddenly find that their "investment" is now worthless, because land acreage is merely inactive storage in a dynamic architecture, and will cost almost nothing.
Which is almost certainly why Linden Labs haven't bitten the bullet and replaced their static design. It will be too painful. And now it may be too late.
Still, I wish them luck. The concept of Second Life has huge potential. It was just let down by a system architect who didn't understand scalability in a living virtual world, where people actually leave home and want to gather in events.
It's not as clearcut as you make out. Try reading some actual scientific papers on the topic, instead of just listening to the media and politicians with an agenda. Scientists make a distinction between their actual scientific correlations and their preferred personal interpretation --- the latter is not Science.
Climatology is full of uncertainties, and the general agreement among scientists goes only so far. The most important area of agreement is that CO2 operates as a greenhouse gas, but the extent of its contribution within the overall system is commonly misrepresented.
CO2 is not the most important greenhouse gas, by a long chalk. Water vapour is the primary greenhouse gas on Earth, directly responsible for 95% of the global warming that keeps the planet from freezing solid to a dreadful -19 C or so. Global warming is essential.
Climate modellers who want to highlight CO2 choose not to make that known to the man in the street, and the way they treat water vapour as a "feedback" in the GCM models instead of as a key mechanism of "forcing" tends to brush the importance of water vapour under the carpet. It's a somewhat questionable scientific approach because pure feedbacks should really be invariant linear amplifiers and not highly variant in their own right (as is water vapour), but what's worse is that this creates a hugely inaccurate public perception.
The simple fact is that we live on an ice, water, and water-vapour covered globe moving in a somewhat complex way around a somewhat variant Sun, and that is the PRIMARY driver of climate, with water as its main agent of heat distribution and with just enough natural global warming to make it liveable, in between ice ages. CO2? Yes, it's relevant and it does have an effect, but it's not even close to being a primary player, and reducing our CO2 emissions will not have a significant effect in anybody's realistic scenario.
And that's not under dispute by any scientist --- they know the maximum extent of possible direct warming per ppm of CO2, and they also know the maximim warming amplified through water vapour feedback in a cloudless atmosphere. But they're not even close to understanding well the magnitude of interactions in the upper atmosphere nor being able to model cloud formation well enough to determine what the real effect of 2X or 3X CO2 would be. To claim that anything in that area of climate forecasting is "established without doubt" is a total distortion of the truth.
What's more, the natural variation in temperature across glaciation cycles totally swamps the changes calculated by any existing climate model, which just shows how we know very little in the larger context. We're right at the "natural" end of the current 18,000-year inter-glacial period, so expect a massive drop in temperature any century now. Can the GCMs predict that? Of course not.
The uncertainties in this area are LARGE. They will be worked out. In the meantime, only non-scientists claim clearcut knowledge.
>> if you'd like to see how orbit effects climate ... EdGCM
:-)
I've wanted to do this kind of thing for a while, plus add a couple of unconventional forcings and feedbacks, so I grabbed a copy and am now having a play.
I also joined your forum, although the administrator might be on holiday, as the day is over and still no approval. I'm in no hurry though.
Many thanks for your post, this will be most interesting!
Others have pointed out the intentional messing up of definitions of "Nanotechnology" to suit the vested interests, so I won't address that. Suffice to say that any current or envisaged regulation concerns only nanoscale materials, and not molecular nanotechnology (MNT) which is the original "Nanotechnology" as defined by Drexler.
What I will address is regulation of MNT (once it exists). In a nutshell, you can't.
The basic reason is simple: MNT will be a kitchen sink manufacturing technology (ie. do it at home with no special ingredients other than dirt, water, and air for carbon from CO2), and a microdot seeding technology (eg. carry the precursor factories on an invisible dot on your watch, say). So, you won't be able to stop it by restricting ingredients, nor by external monitoring.
As a result, the only way in which MNT could be regulated is by flooding the world with even more nanomachines to monitor everything that is going on --- in other words, a fully invasive world police state.
Furthermore, it would have to be a WORLD police state, because any invasive regulation done purely at home would achieve nothing, other than ensure that the rest of the world takes the lead in MNT.
This is why regulation of MNT makes no sense at all. The only way to avoid the undoubted dangers of MNT in the hands of nasty people is by defense. No, not the kind of defense where you bomb others, but the real kind, wrapping yourself and your community in a shield.
That will be extremely difficult. Nevertheless, it is the only way, and we ought to start planning for it.
>> This business of calling surface chemistry of finely divided powders "nanotechnology" is a bit much.
That's very true. I'll stick with the definitions given by the founder of the field (ie. Drexler), as it's less subject to commercial and political manipulation. Much of the defining material is freely available online, for anyone who wants their information from the horse's mouth.
First of all there's the online version of Eric Drexler's extremely seminal Engines of Creation. It's a fantastic read, even after all these years.
(The online version of EoC used to be maintained at the Foresight Institute, but it's now kept by Drexler himself above. His whole site is a great resource of course, so clear out the tail of the URL and have a look around.)
Then there's the online version of the popular Unbounding the Future, an easily readable and slightly updated introduction to nanotechnology for everyone, although somehow I find it lacks the charm of Engines of Creation.
But nothing beats his textbook Nanosystems though. This book is a 150% must-have for anyone with a strong interest in nanotechnology, because even if you cannot follow the detailed science and mathematics, the diagrams and tables alone justify the cost.
Unfortunately the online version of Nanosystems is still at a very early stage, and is not really useful except as an online table of contents. Buy the textbook, you won't regret it.
That's pretty much what we'd expect from that source, but it doesn't make it any better.
Surely there should be some sort of Logic Advisor sitting next to the President's speech writers. I don't imagine that he wants to look evil and dishonest in front of a world audience well versed in elementary logic.
>> it's not a EULA. It's simply a contract
The FSF begs to differ on the latter.
Prof Eben Moglen is the Free Software Foundation's attorney, and of course is strongly involved in framing the GPL's legal content. And in the detailed article "The GPL Is a License, not a Contract", Prof Moglen says very clearly that:
" The GPL, however, is a true copyright license: a unilateral permission, in which no obligations are reciprocally required by the licensor."
It really doesn't get much clearer than that. Read the whole article though for Pamela Jones' typically detailed explanation. Even some lawyers on Slashdot seem to be getting that point wrong.
While many of your points are good, I wouldn't stress so much about predictions of gloom. It's both safer and more credible to stick to objective assessment of the hard science in this area, which is extensive but doesn't always make the headlines.
When faced with minimally-informed climate theorists, I like to direct them to Take the Global Warming Test". (Part of an excellent fossils resource.)
It gives a reasonably accurate scientific picture which non-scientists can comprehend, and most importantly it deflates any agitated arm-waving and predictions of imminent doom. While I'm not a geologist, geologists do tend to take the long view, and given the sheer inertia of the Earth's systems, that is a sound approach.
GPLv2 is indeed as you describe, but GPLv3/draft goes slightly further than this, and that's what all the fuss is about. Many people have commented on the details of keys etc, but there are other issues causing trouble too, for example the change in underlying philosophy.
GPLv2 was purely a copyright license (the FSF's "copyleft" is based in copyright, and only comes into effect when issues of copyright are engaged). Everyone knew that the license could never impact on your usage of any GPL'd software, only on your distribution of it, because distribution entails copying, and anything else you may do is irrelevant.
In contrast, GPLv3 now seeks to turn the pure copyright license into a sort of EULA (End User Licensing Agreement), because the terms of the license are affected by what you as an END USER do quite separate from distributing the software.
For example, litigating against an open source developer for alleged patent infringements is a nasty thing to do, but it has nothing at all to do with COPYING or COPYright or distribution of GPL'd code. In seeking to make such separate actions of the end user relevant to the freedoms they can have under GPLv3, the new license clearly goes beyond pure copyright and into EULA territory.
The keys issue, and this change away from pure copyright worries people, and these worries may be warranted.
GPLv3 is certainly not the GPL that we love today, and we haven't even begun to understand the full ramifications of the various changes. While nobody likes where the TiVO seemed to be leading us, GPLv3 seems to be heading down a very dangerous and slippery road to thwart that, and the cure may be worse than the disease.
>> Which UN stats? Which national stats? Which study in Sweden? Which newspapers, in Wales or elsewhere?
There are lots of very detailed stats available on this subject. I don't know which sources the parent had in mind, but NationMaster is pretty thorough and fairly neutral:
The UK has a slightly higher per-capita crime rate than the US, although neither of them has anything to brag about, as they're respectively 6th and 8th in world rankings.
For "advanced 1st world" countries whose populations do not need crime to survive, that's an utter disgrace. And this figure does tell you that allowing or not allowing guns makes little difference to your overall per-capita crime rate.
The biggest danger about guns is that people talk incessantly about them and so lose focus of the real issues. Pro or anti firearm policy is a red herring, because disallowing guns doesn't eliminate or even reduce your crime problem.
If you have criminals, they will perform crimes, it's in their nature, and changing the tools of their "trade" isn't going to make them get a job and take up basket-weaving instead.
The real reason why governments don't want civilians to carry firearms is because policemen often get shot when chasing gun-equiped criminals. Other weapons don't have this property; thieves don't run back and fight it out with the police using knives and fists, but they will fire shots back when running. Whenever a police death happens in the UK, all politicians get on this easy bandwagon, and the outcome is predictable. And of course, police don't like being on a more even playing field with criminals, nor getting shot at, so you won't find any police chiefs being liberal about this.
It has nothing to do with reducing crime. Because it doesn't.
>> For instance, I have a colleague who is pretty much a failed academic. They have had nothing appear in print for over six years (however, they are tenured). Yet, they are currently offering apparently sagely advice on being a scholar.
I obviously do not know the particular circumstances of this case, but I think you may be generalizing too much from that one data point.
I was an academic myself in a previous life --- I had tenure, and I wrote papers at the department's recommended rates, but I left anyway because prospects of promotion were limited by dead man's shoes, and I was lured away by the comparatively huge money in industry. However, I was there enough years to know how research and publication and academic success are related.
Here's the rub: publication rate is an *artificial and invalid* metric of research effort. It is not even a valid metric of research success or of research relevance. Instead, it most strongly correlates with interest in self-promotion, rather than with scientific or engineering dedication and capability and insight and work rate.
And even worse, in many fields it's your social networking skills and your ability to write the papers that reviewers want to see that gets you published, rather than the intrinsic scientific value of your work and writing.
So, in the general case (but perhaps not in yours), I do not really agree with your premise that a low (or even zero) publication rate makes for a bad scholar. An unsuccessful scholar, perhaps, but to make an analogy which I think is appropriate, being high up in the pop music charts doesn't correlate with musicianship.
if (statement.source.profession == "politician")
{
probability_of_truth = 0.0;
}
The British Library does take a fairly balanced view on this subject ("life+70" excepted), but there is one important area where their view is not balanced at all: they believe that libraries are somehow exceptional in their needs. Well they're not.
Libraries have many roles, but almost none of those roles are exclusive. The three most important ones are collecting, sharing, and archiving for posterity, but these roles are also performed within society as a whole (as a normal part of life and culture), and therefore libraries do not have exclusive need for protections here. We all do.
P2P is probably the most contentious sharing technology today, yet what P2P'ers do is not significantly different to what libraries do --- ie. provide access to their collections to the public. They're similar not only in function, but also in social neutrality and economic effect: sharing is available to everyone equally, no money is made or taken from the sharing, they both reduce somewhat the sales of the items in question, and they both provide free public promotion for the items as well.
The role of archiving for posterity is not exclusive to libraries either --- nobody wants to lose their collected works through media deterioration from old age, so being able to make copies and not being at the mercy of DRM is important for everyone, not just libraries. Indeed, passing down our digital collections to our descendents will undoubtedly be a common interest.
So, while I support what the British Library is saying for the most part, their preoccupation with the needs of libraries sends the wrong message --- we are all in that same boat.