Exactly. Not only that, existing coal-to-oil technology can do it for around $40 per barrel, and we have around a 200 year supply in Montana alone if Montana coal were only used for that purpose.
All claims of energy "shortages" are based on rampant, over the top environuts - as opposed to reality.
Worse than that, the Dems are spending something like fives times as much as the previous administration, with falling tax revenues. That makes them at least five times less responsible.:-P
The previous administration was far from perfect, but its worst feature was spending more than it brought in. Too much compromise with the Dems and liberals.
If only Republicans had controlled Congress and the White House in 2005.
They didn't have a supermajority, and were unwilling to invoke the "nuclear option". We'll see if the current group of geniuses in Congress show the same restraint.
Of course, the Democrat majority Congress from 2006 on could have done something as well...
And you're exactly right cheddarlump... the press cannot be beholden to the government. It's a travesty. Just like "shield laws," where the press are beholden to the government to offer them special privileges, which, being legislative and particular to the people who have them, can be revoked.
The total irony here is many media outlets are being increasingly ignored over their fawning, lapdog approach to 0bama - without even a financial benefit.
They're really just asking to be paid for their efforts.
"With D3D they talk to all the manufacturers and say "this is how the feature will work, design your card to use it". If they want their card to be DX18 or whatever, they've got to implement it that way. It can mean you have to wait between revisions for new features but it prevents the kind of divergence than a graphics API is supposed to prevent in the first place."
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It's all the same. With MS/DX you have to wait for MS to get around to supporting what you want. With OpenGL, the functionality is available earlier as vendor extensions (as you alluded), but later is added to the main spec once issues are worked out and the competing implementations have been compared.
At any rate, you should note that the Tech 5 engine is still OpenGL 2, and a Mac port is forthcoming.
"Sure, that makes sense from a technical perspective. The problem is the legal perspective... because "fewer errors" does not equal "no errors". Bugs will still happen. And who takes responsibility when a bug results in a robot suddenly whipping around and killing someone?"
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You should read up on safety critical software, like flight control software. Any software controlling something that potentially physically harms humans needs some level of the _testing_ that this type of software receives. While a solid, already tested foundation should help, there's no way to avoid testing the final assembly unless you can mathematically prove there's no possibility of new failure modes.
Note that commercial operating systems (vxWorks, Integrity) are often used in such systems.
There's no way to avoid thorough, multi-level testing if you want to avoid problems.
Don't forget the US has an equatorial launch facility:
"2500 miles southwest of Hawaii on Omelek Island, part of the Reagan Test Site (RTS) at United States Army Kwajalein Atoll (USAKA) in the Central Pacific."
That's where SpaceX has tried some launches...
"Changes in temperature on this scale are exactly what you would expect to find, actually, in the context of an overall, long-term warming trend [cabq.gov]."
Just as one would expect to find them in the context of an overall, long term cooling trend.
Proving exactly nothing, except the IPCC projections for this decade are way off. What gives you confidence they have the slightest idea what'll be happening 90 years from now?!?
You might also want to look at other proprietary systems like Integrity and QNX. With high-end embedded "free" versus "not free" is a very muddy area (meaning that fixing a problem might be prohibitively expensive with the "free" solution). As far as I know, none of the free solutions have true deterministic resource management.
Certifications might also be an issue, as in DO-178B.
Exactly. I'd say this exercise DID show the "wisdom of the crowds" to a large extent. Marijuana use may not be beneficial, but it's certainly no worse a drag on society than alcohol. Regardless, marijuana enforcement has been a much worse drag on society, resulting in a general loss of civil liberties, an increase in government confiscation, and millions of citizens unnecessarily incarcerated, many with felonies. Oh, and the illegal marijuana trade is largely responsible for destabilizing Mexico almost to the point of civil war.
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It's clearly time to rethink marijuana policy. This country has too many serious problems that require attention.
I've wondered about roads and roofs being a contributing factor to global warming. There's a lot of square miles of roofs and roads that have increased relation to the population. It's always been notable that cities are hotter than the countryside surrounding them.
This is a well known issue, google "urban heat island". In fact, this is one of the factors that isn't being properly handled by GISS, in that the surface measurements aren't being corrected properly, skewing them to the warm side. Fortunately, satellites now provide better data regardless.
I've wondered about the heat put off by internal combustion engines.
I believe if you analyze the total amount of energy from vehicles on the road on average, versus the energy in the sunlight that falls on roads, you'll find the sunlight is more by a couple of orders of magnitude at least. In other words, IC engines don't dump a significant amount of energy into the environment.
Read any of Sun's SEC filings, press releases, blogs, news stories about Sun, etc. It's pretty much common knowledge.
Ah, the infamous "common knowledge". I will tell you that any of Sun's recent SEC filings are pretty pathetic, and SPARC has done so well that the company is for sale. That should tell you something.
Ellison said today that Solaris/SPARC was the most popular choice for Oracle deployments. He's been pushing Oracle/Linux for years now and it's still only #2. Why would he continue to go against his customers?
That's an argument by precedent: "The sun has risen every morning, therefore it will always rise."
CEOs should be forward looking, not backwards looking. Does SPARC really stand a chance against the x86 world at this point, especially as the x86 world is beginning to embrace PLD and GPU computing as well?
It's no surprise that most Oracle deployments have been on Solaris/SPARC, as Linux users often use MySQL/Postgres or other alternatives like DB2. IBM hardware users are more likely to use DB2. I wonder what the primary DB is for HP servers.
At any rate, I find this conversation rather ironic considering your tagline.;-)
I think the interesting question is, does Oracle care about SPARC?
The majority of Sun's $13billion in revenues comes from hardware.
The majority of their hardware comes from Sparc.
Why would you buy a company for billions of dollars and ditch it's most popular product?
Source please?
I looked and was unable to find figures on SPARC versus x86 Sun sales for a recent quarter, either volume or revenue.
My point is that Oracle is a software company, and Sun has several software assets that Oracle would like to control. It'll be interesting to see if IBM will tolerate Oracle stewardship of Java, since Java is so strategic to IBM and Oracle is a major competitor against DB2.
Even if SPARC servers generate a lot of revenue compared to x86, SPARC development costs a lot of money. It'd be interesting to know the real net profit figures. Oracle figured out the cost benefits of x86 Linux servers a long time ago, I'll be surprised if they push a proprietary architecture at this point.
I think the interesting question is, does Oracle care about SPARC?
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Oracle obviously wants Sun's software stack, but my guess is that Oracle thinks Intel and AMD are doing a fine job on the CPU front. I think that SPARC is most likely toast (or will be sold off as "intellectual capital"). There's not much effort in migrating from SPARC to x86-64.
That's all great until that paper comes out explaining the failings of the *P*RNG you've been using, invalidating years of research.
It might be a good idea to validate the results of the PRNG runs with some verifiably random data. Alternatively, you could inject entropy periodically in a computationally efficient fashion using the truly random data and improve things some.
As you mentioned, the lowest value is 0.1 C -- which indicates warming.
It indicates warming versus an arbitrarily chosen "average" temperature. Another one of the games NASA is playing is basing that "anamoly" on a period with a large temperature dip (the '70s). Remember the Time cover article from that era predicting a new ice age?
Any positive value indicates warming, any negative value indicates cooling. There are only positive values on that entire graph.
See above.
The downward trend from 2002 in that graph only means that things are warming less rapidly than before. "Warming less rapidly" is still warming, not cooling (you might notice that I even mentioned that in my post).
Uh, no, the downward trend means cooling from the starting point forward. 2002-2008 means SIX YEARS of cooling. You don't find that significant?!?
Plus any measurement within 1 C is well within a reasonable random variation...
At any rate, I'll go out on a limb and predict that this winter and the next few years will seal the deal on a medium-term cooling trend. The long solar cycle also predicts an even longer solar cycle next time, based on the leading solar dynamics model.
I predict we'll see something like at least thirty years cooler than 1998 by the time that temperature is approached again.
These articles are quite alarmist regarding "2 trillion tons of ice melting" (which by the way is ~0.0074% of the world's landlocked ice), but completely fail to mention that ice is accreting elsewhere such as the eastern part of the antarctic ice cap. In fact, one of the articles even failed to mention that the Alaskan glaciers are now growing, even though there's been a net ice loss since 2003.
Hope that helped...
(BTW you should also note the lack of alarmist arctic ice cap stories, since the ice there has increased from last year's levels.)
By the way, I should add that the sunspot cycles are looking to produce at least 15 more years of cooling. That gives us quite a bit more breathing room to determine if man-made CO2 is actually a problem or not.
The jury's still out at this point, with many responsible scientists siding with "not".
If you take a trend line from 2002 or later to present, you'll notice a downward trend. That is "cooling".
Even with NASA's cooked figures (including improperly adjusted measurements), last January there was only a 0.1 C temperature anomaly. That is FAR below the prediction made by Hansen et. al. in 1998. Where did the warming go? It is supposed to be cumulative you know.
If they couldn't get the prediction right less than ten years down the road (and they are WAY off), what gives you the slightest confidence their prediction for 2100 is worth a thing?
CAGW is a hoax. One that has a price tag as high as $45 trillion. One that's being used to drive major government policy. It must be exposed, and stopped, as soon as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
... and yet, miraculously, research on coal-to-liquid fuels continues all over the country! Damn that Reagan and his ineffective efforts.
Google: Coal to liquid
- Alaska Jack
Exactly. Not only that, existing coal-to-oil technology can do it for around $40 per barrel, and we have around a 200 year supply in Montana alone if Montana coal were only used for that purpose.
All claims of energy "shortages" are based on rampant, over the top environuts - as opposed to reality.
The previous administration was far from perfect, but its worst feature was spending more than it brought in. Too much compromise with the Dems and liberals.
Hard times ahead as the economy continues to tank, inflation hits hard, and unemployment continues to rise.
Tax and spend is an economy killer. So is "redistribution of wealth". Heinlein fans might remember the acronym "tanstaafl".
The voter's reaction in 2010 and 2012 will be quite a shock to the clueless Washington establishment. Time to "drain the swamp" for real.
If only Republicans had controlled Congress and the White House in 2005.
They didn't have a supermajority, and were unwilling to invoke the "nuclear option". We'll see if the current group of geniuses in Congress show the same restraint.
Of course, the Democrat majority Congress from 2006 on could have done something as well...
Any other ideas come floating to mind?
Frivolous waste of government money at the worst possible time?
Our current administration is an idiocracy.
And you're exactly right cheddarlump ... the press cannot be beholden to the government. It's a travesty. Just like "shield laws," where the press are beholden to the government to offer them special privileges, which, being legislative and particular to the people who have them, can be revoked.
The total irony here is many media outlets are being increasingly ignored over their fawning, lapdog approach to 0bama - without even a financial benefit.
They're really just asking to be paid for their efforts.
.
It's all the same. With MS/DX you have to wait for MS to get around to supporting what you want. With OpenGL, the functionality is available earlier as vendor extensions (as you alluded), but later is added to the main spec once issues are worked out and the competing implementations have been compared.
At any rate, you should note that the Tech 5 engine is still OpenGL 2, and a Mac port is forthcoming.
.
You should read up on safety critical software, like flight control software. Any software controlling something that potentially physically harms humans needs some level of the _testing_ that this type of software receives. While a solid, already tested foundation should help, there's no way to avoid testing the final assembly unless you can mathematically prove there's no possibility of new failure modes.
Note that commercial operating systems (vxWorks, Integrity) are often used in such systems.
There's no way to avoid thorough, multi-level testing if you want to avoid problems.
Don't forget the US has an equatorial launch facility: "2500 miles southwest of Hawaii on Omelek Island, part of the Reagan Test Site (RTS) at United States Army Kwajalein Atoll (USAKA) in the Central Pacific." That's where SpaceX has tried some launches...
Just as one would expect to find them in the context of an overall, long term cooling trend.
Proving exactly nothing, except the IPCC projections for this decade are way off. What gives you confidence they have the slightest idea what'll be happening 90 years from now?!?
The lunatics are running the asylum.
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Between outspending McCain over two to one, and having a completely complicit fifth column, er I mean mainstream media, he was a shoe-in.
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Looks like we'll be paying for the consequences for decades. America may never recover.
Certifications might also be an issue, as in DO-178B.
-
It's clearly time to rethink marijuana policy. This country has too many serious problems that require attention.
This is a well known issue, google "urban heat island". In fact, this is one of the factors that isn't being properly handled by GISS, in that the surface measurements aren't being corrected properly, skewing them to the warm side. Fortunately, satellites now provide better data regardless.
I've wondered about the heat put off by internal combustion engines.
I believe if you analyze the total amount of energy from vehicles on the road on average, versus the energy in the sunlight that falls on roads, you'll find the sunlight is more by a couple of orders of magnitude at least. In other words, IC engines don't dump a significant amount of energy into the environment.
Read any of Sun's SEC filings, press releases, blogs, news stories about Sun, etc. It's pretty much common knowledge.
Ah, the infamous "common knowledge". I will tell you that any of Sun's recent SEC filings are pretty pathetic, and SPARC has done so well that the company is for sale. That should tell you something.
Ellison said today that Solaris/SPARC was the most popular choice for Oracle deployments. He's been pushing Oracle/Linux for years now and it's still only #2. Why would he continue to go against his customers?
That's an argument by precedent: "The sun has risen every morning, therefore it will always rise."
CEOs should be forward looking, not backwards looking. Does SPARC really stand a chance against the x86 world at this point, especially as the x86 world is beginning to embrace PLD and GPU computing as well?
It's no surprise that most Oracle deployments have been on Solaris/SPARC, as Linux users often use MySQL/Postgres or other alternatives like DB2. IBM hardware users are more likely to use DB2. I wonder what the primary DB is for HP servers.
At any rate, I find this conversation rather ironic considering your tagline. ;-)
I think the interesting question is, does Oracle care about SPARC?
The majority of Sun's $13billion in revenues comes from hardware.
The majority of their hardware comes from Sparc.
Why would you buy a company for billions of dollars and ditch it's most popular product?
Source please?
I looked and was unable to find figures on SPARC versus x86 Sun sales for a recent quarter, either volume or revenue.
My point is that Oracle is a software company, and Sun has several software assets that Oracle would like to control. It'll be interesting to see if IBM will tolerate Oracle stewardship of Java, since Java is so strategic to IBM and Oracle is a major competitor against DB2.
Even if SPARC servers generate a lot of revenue compared to x86, SPARC development costs a lot of money. It'd be interesting to know the real net profit figures. Oracle figured out the cost benefits of x86 Linux servers a long time ago, I'll be surprised if they push a proprietary architecture at this point.
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Oracle obviously wants Sun's software stack, but my guess is that Oracle thinks Intel and AMD are doing a fine job on the CPU front. I think that SPARC is most likely toast (or will be sold off as "intellectual capital"). There's not much effort in migrating from SPARC to x86-64.
That's all great until that paper comes out explaining the failings of the *P*RNG you've been using, invalidating years of research.
It might be a good idea to validate the results of the PRNG runs with some verifiably random data. Alternatively, you could inject entropy periodically in a computationally efficient fashion using the truly random data and improve things some.
Still waiting... **crickets**
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I do just fine, thanks. ;-)
As you mentioned, the lowest value is 0.1 C -- which indicates warming.
It indicates warming versus an arbitrarily chosen "average" temperature. Another one of the games NASA is playing is basing that "anamoly" on a period with a large temperature dip (the '70s). Remember the Time cover article from that era predicting a new ice age?
Any positive value indicates warming, any negative value indicates cooling. There are only positive values on that entire graph.
See above.
The downward trend from 2002 in that graph only means that things are warming less rapidly than before. "Warming less rapidly" is still warming, not cooling (you might notice that I even mentioned that in my post).
Uh, no, the downward trend means cooling from the starting point forward. 2002-2008 means SIX YEARS of cooling. You don't find that significant?!?
Plus any measurement within 1 C is well within a reasonable random variation...
At any rate, I'll go out on a limb and predict that this winter and the next few years will seal the deal on a medium-term cooling trend. The long solar cycle also predicts an even longer solar cycle next time, based on the leading solar dynamics model.
I predict we'll see something like at least thirty years cooler than 1998 by the time that temperature is approached again.
Citation, please.
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There were excellent examples of this recently, both front page articles:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/12/16/melting.ice/index.html
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081216/ap_on_sc/sci_arctic_ice;_ylt=Ak1io9hb791KvrjNodwbWfoDW7oF
These articles are quite alarmist regarding "2 trillion tons of ice melting" (which by the way is ~0.0074% of the world's landlocked ice), but completely fail to mention that ice is accreting elsewhere such as the eastern part of the antarctic ice cap. In fact, one of the articles even failed to mention that the Alaskan glaciers are now growing, even though there's been a net ice loss since 2003.
Hope that helped...
(BTW you should also note the lack of alarmist arctic ice cap stories, since the ice there has increased from last year's levels.)
The jury's still out at this point, with many responsible scientists siding with "not".
At any rate, I claim there's a cooling trend based on data such as that presented at:
http://www.factsandarts.com/articles/no-significant-global-warming-since-1995/
If you take a trend line from 2002 or later to present, you'll notice a downward trend. That is "cooling".
Even with NASA's cooked figures (including improperly adjusted measurements), last January there was only a 0.1 C temperature anomaly. That is FAR below the prediction made by Hansen et. al. in 1998. Where did the warming go? It is supposed to be cumulative you know.
If they couldn't get the prediction right less than ten years down the road (and they are WAY off), what gives you the slightest confidence their prediction for 2100 is worth a thing?
CAGW is a hoax. One that has a price tag as high as $45 trillion. One that's being used to drive major government policy. It must be exposed, and stopped, as soon as possible.
. Everyone, apparently, but the authors of the various global climate models, none of which currently include it.