A very insightful reply, if only I had modpoints...
You said you did not want to "stop the owner of the system from doing anything they could previously do" but actually that is what you are proposing, you want to stop them from being able to cheat at network games, which is something they could previously do.
I actually see this as "if you want to play my game, you have to turn on your secure hardware context, as this is a hardware feature that my game requires." You can, and should be able to, turn off your TC hardware, and play Everquest or World of Warcraft or whatever.
The great thing about the design of trusted computing, once you understand it, is that it doesn't have to be mandatory in order for those benefits to arrive (unlike the legal system). The reason is because you can prove that you have a trusted computer and you're participating in the system, using some crypto protocols. People who don't have TC's can't pretend they do. This allows the TC users to form a sort of closed world, an exclusive club, and only to interact with one another for certain protocols or games or activities. Nobody else can join in unless they have a TC, and once they do, they'll automatically follow the rules.
In this way people can get the social benefits that accrue from people accepting certain limitations, without having to force everyone to participate. It's like receiving the benefits of government, but without the coercion. It's a dream come true for those who respect diversity and want to see maximum freedom of choice. I hope that we will be allowed to make this dream a reality, and that skeptics of this technology do not scuttle the opportunities for everyone.
This is one of the better analyses of Trusted Computing that I've seen. It's not an insidious freedom-destroying technology, it's just an optional feature, rather like a network adapter, which, incidentally, my game, like many others, might also require -- a hardware requirement for certain software functionality. Right now, I can choose to remove the network adapter from my PC if, for example, I am concerned that my use of the computer on the net erodes my privacy in ways I'm not comfortable with. My computer will still work perfectly for many tasks, but Firefox won't work as intended without the network hardware. Of course, I've already made the decision that the ability to post in this forum is more important to me than the privacy I gain by not using the net. Freedom of choice...
Thank you for the link. I had actually thought about a couple of these issues, and I never assumed a couple of others would hold true (like the one about a single administrator -- this is the problem my original post talks about).
I have never written a distributed application before, which to me is half the fun of doing it. I expect that I may write something unworkable along the way and have to rip it out and start again, but that's okay -- I'm doing this to have fun and maybe learn something along the way.
You need more than that, don't you? You need to be sure that anything that looks like such a context, remotely, actually is such a context (that is, it conforms to certain spec's).
This is a really interesting point. I would hope that any security hardware would have the ability to ensure that it is talking to its counterpart rather than an emulator (not a trivial task, I would guess), or else the whole thing is less than useful.
(1) and (2) can be accomplished by sending identical tasks to multiple machines, randomly selected.
I've thought about approaching the problem this way, as I don't have access to secure hardware.
(3) is harder. You need user's machines to process data without the user being able to interpret the data. Tricky....
I don't mind the user being able to interpret the data, I would just like a reasonably secure way of ensuring that the user can't manipulate the datastream -- not a small problem when the user most likely has root access to their own machine, which is why I think some kind of security hardware might be an interesting way of securing network communications. Doing redundant calculations and ignoring bad data (much like mainframe processing, actually) could accomplish this too.
...but I would like to see some sort of hardware-enforced secure context available on commodity computer systems. I would like the hardware to remain completely backward-compatible with all existing operating systems and software, and certainly not stop the owner of the system from doing anything they could previously do. I would like this as I'm working up a p2p MMOG protocol as a hobby project, with the goal of being able to host a world with tens or hundreds of thousands of users on minimal hardware by offloading most of the processing onto the network. Anyone who's played an MMOG for any length of time probably knows that this would be unworkable because of the potential for hacks that would give unscrupulous players an advantage. However, it could work if the networking code could be run in a sufficiently secure context, which I believe can only be provided at the hardware level. I would like to see something like this, as it could allow for MMOGs to be hosted with much smaller hardware and network resources, significantly reducing the cost to the player.
Of course, such a system would have undesirable uses as well, DRM and the like...
Learned everything I needed to know in an hour from the man pages the first time I needed to set them for users.
How the kernel knows where the root partition is.
Learned this the first time I had a disk array fail and had to restore from backup. I don't remember where I found it, probably in the LILO documentation somewhere.
What the difference between the exire time in an SOA record and the TTL in the zone file is.
Haven't set up a fresh DNS server since I switched to djbdns a few years ago, so I didn't remember this one. Ten seconds of googling refreshed my memory.
I guess my point in all of this is that it doesn't matter if you have holes in your knowledge. Instead, it is important to know that you do have them, and to know where to find the information you need. And, for what it's worth, I'm mostly self-taught, but I've taken some classes. Both are valuable.
Do you really want soccer moms in Expeditions (which will probably be upwards of sixty feet long in ten years) talking on their 'wristbands', putting on makeup, and screaming at their children while driving in THREE dimensions?
My problem is finding "Compose ONLY in plain text" in Thunderbird. If it's there, I can't find it.
It's not too obvious or intuitive. Go to Tools->Account Settings->[Your Account]->Composition and Addressing and de-select "Compose Messages in HTML Format" (This is for Thunderbird 0.7). I don't know why they put it here and not with the rest of the Compose options under Tools->Options. Oh, well.
This was what/opt was originally designed for. Files associated with a particular package go in/opt/$PKG/bin,/opt/$PKG/lib, etc. Then, in/etc/profile, you have something like:
for dir in/opt/* do if [ -d $dir/lib ]; then LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$dir/lib fi if [ -d $dir/bin ]; then PATH=$PATH:$dir/bin fi done unset dir
(Sorry about the indentation, I don't feel like fighting with the tabs inside the <ecode> tags)
I actually install my boxen like this now, with the base system where it usually is, then I put all my add-on software in/opt like this.
A nitpick with your comment, IMO this is one thing Windows does right.: I actually think DOS followed this convention a lot better than Windows does. I completely agree with your arguement though, having apps confined to their own directory is the best way to do it.
As far as renaming the directories to something less arcane, I think that's a matter of personal preference. I've been using Unix systems since the late 80's, which have all used the same general conventions with some variation (ex. Digital Unix used to (and may still, I haven't used it since '97 or so) symlink/bin to/usr/bin.), so I don't think I would like it. OTOH, someone new to Unix would probably find/programs preferable to/bin.
I'm testing it right now with my Courier IMAP server with FAM. I have almost 10,000 users, so good IDLE behavior becomes important. My connection is using just under 2 megs of RAM and negligible CPU. Seems to work well so far. Overall, TB seems to have a decent IMAP implementation.
You know, posting a link to your IP here isn't going to help you with your bandwidth costs very much. Hell, I clicked it, I was curious about the ad:).
Heh. Our helpdesk has a whiteboard doing exactly the same thing. The last time I was down there, the record was 2,548. Multiple DS3 lines shared between only 3000 students tends to breed this stuff...
I think you just redesigned bash completion. This does the "cd a" thing exactly how you want it to. I don't think it handles the argument expansion thing yet though. That would be doable though. Most programs use getopt() to parse arguments, it is probably possible to put hooks into that function that bash could use to do the expansion. It wouldn't be trivial, since you would have to run the program in the background to see what arguments it accepts (probably something similar to how ldd runs a program to determine what libraries it uses), but it could be done.
Amen to that! The first computer I ever bought was an IBM PS/2. 286, 1MB RAM, 20MB HD. I still use the keyboard, although I gave away the rest of the system years ago. The spacebar is a little loose, but it still works fine. I actually have trouble getting into "deep hack" mode without the key-clicking:).
Interesting. One of the last classes I took in college (finished my CS requirements and had a semester of electives) was called simply "Science Fiction". We read almost exactly those books (we read Butler's "Lilith's Brood" instead of Wild Seed), and I seem to remember reading Elgin's "Native Tongue" as well (it was a while ago).
Sorry to reply again, I forgot to touch on this one:
Only about 4% of the exhaled air is CO2, or 100 ml per breath.
Where did you get this figure from? I got my 20% CO2 figure from an old college biology text hanging around. Your breakdown seems plausible, too, though. It doesn't make sense that all oxygen would be metabolized in an average breath, if there's enough there for you to hold your breath for a few minutes before it's gone, it shouldn't be all metabolized when you breathe every three seconds or so (if that's actually the average rate, I got that one from the same book:) ).
Wow, I've never gotten this many replies from a/. thread.
Just a few comments:
You only demonstrate the dangers of bad science education, coupled with an unreasonable belief in numbers.
I'll be the first to admit that most of my scientific education sucks. I'm not sure what you mean by an unreasonable belief in numbers. I know my output numbers are only as good as my input numbers, but that's why I asked for people to confirm my input numbers, which several people did.
30 million tons for what? That sounds like a reasonable number for daily worldwide production and a particular definition of industrial processes.
My original source was inaccurate, but RayBender corrected me here and provided some better sources. Essentially, we produce 6-7 billion tons of CO2 a year by doing other things than breathing.
Using again the corrected numbers, we arrive at 6 billion tons (6x10^9) for CO2 produced by human breathing. So you underestimated CO2 production from fossil sources by a factor of 1000 and overestimated breathing CO2 production by a factor of 10.
Someone else (probably RayBender again, he's pretty smart) pointed out that I messed up the weight of the CO2 by a factor of 10, so humans do produce about 7 x 10^9 tons of CO2 in a year, about the same as is produced by industrial processes. You seem to be overestimating the amount of CO2 produced by fossil sources, although I would be interested to see your sources.
Yes, I see it, but you don't. Those numbers don't matter at all because the CO2 produced by breathing is part of a CO2 cycle. That is, all Carbon in our breath comes from food (in the end, from plants), who extracted it from the air while growing. As long as we don't start eating synthetic food, our net CO2 production from breathing is exactly zero.
Now this is one of the more interesting points in this part of the thread so far. As world population grows with advances in industry, there are advances in agriculture and more plants grown to feed everyone, which offsets the increased CO2 from more humans exhaling. Of course, there are some practical problems with this:
Most people don't confine their diet to plants. Domesticated food animals are going to be bred in greater numbers as well, which also produce CO2 in breathing. Of course, these animals have to eat too, and so more plants have to be grown to feed them.
Plants use oxygen and produce CO2 as well. They do this less than they metabolize CO2 and produce oxygen though.
All those hydrocarbons we burn to dump CO2 into the atmosphere were plants once too, so your industrial CO2 emissions were extracted from the air once too.
There are probably more things to take into consideration, but your point may still stand.
Just remember, this only works when there is a healthy balance between CO2 producers and CO2 metabolizers. Before the Industrial Revolution the world population was a lot smaller (see here).
Population in the year 1800 was about 1,000,000,000 people. Even accounting for agriculture, I don't think there are six times as many plants in the world as there were 200 years ago (remember, we usually kill inedible plants to make room to grow edible ones), so the balance may be disrupted (and industrial emissions probably aren't helping). I don't think reducing industrial emissions will make the difference some people think it will, though. I think the human population is a factor in all of this too.
Very informative. You can see clearly a correlation between CO2 concentration and:
Increased industrialization.
Population growth (due to advances in medicine and overall raised standard of living largely because of 1.)
There is certainly a preponderance of evidence correlating CO2 concentration and global warming trends, and (to try and stay on topic myself) I think the Bush administration does the public a disservice by trying to pretend that global warming doesn't exist (I don't know conclusively that it does, but I think more study is warranted). I was just trying to point out that industry emissions aren't necessarily the only significant source of CO2.
Judging by some other comments in the thread, there seems to be some disagreement on how much each source of CO2 actually contributes, though. I'm inclined to be most interested in RayBender's figures on industrial emissions, because he (she? Well, one has to be right;)) had sources which didn't immediately seem disreputable.
I had 20 grams of CO2 per minute (I messed up the mass of CO2, see below). 20*60*24 = 28,800 grams of CO2 per human per day, or 63.4931315 pounds (I love the Google unit converter) per human per day. I did get the mass of CO2 too high, as someone already pointed out (IANAC - I Am Not A Chemist), so that probably accounts for the difference. Where did you find the figure of 2.5lbs per day? I'd like to see that.
The global production of CO2 per day supporting humans (think gas, power, industry...) is 75lbs per day.
Someone came up with 6-7 billion tons per year total emission, with sources, higher than my initial figure. Did you mean 75lbs per human per day? 75*365*6,000,000,000/2000 = 82,125,000,000 tons per year, higher yet again. Do you have a source for this figure?
The rest is just simple math, which I can't find more than one side of:).
Thanks, these are very informative. I just used the first reputable-looking figure I found, which was from 1995 or so, and did a rough extrapolation to what emissions would be like now based on the growth rate documented. My original point still stands, though.
Fair enough. My statement "nothing can ever be proven" was only intended as a counter to "this is proven, if you disagree with me you're wrong". The point was really meant to show that just because someone with an important-sounding title says "I've proven $statement is true," it doesn't mean you should blindly believe him/her without looking at the facts for yourself.
To take your example: "It's a fact that the earth goes around the sun. I can even prove it." Sure you can, but I would be a fool to run out in the street and yell it aloud without first checking your facts and observing nature myself for a while.
Human carbon dioxide emissions raise the overall temperature.
Someone else said this better than I can a few months ago, but I can't find it, so I'll do my best to replicate it. (Remember, this is an estimation at best, but it should illustrate the point I am trying to make).
The best I could find on Google is that CO2 emissions from industrial processes account for about 30 million tons. This sounds reasonable to me, anyone have a better figure?
Humans exhale CO2 as part of the normal breathing process. Let's assume for the sake of this simplified example that an average human breathes 20 times a minute. If I remember correctly, average exhalation volume of air is 2.5 liters or so, of which 20% or so is CO2 (If any of my figures are inaccurate, please correct them). Therefore, there is about half a liter of CO2 in one exhalation, which would be about a gram (this is a roundoff to make my next calculations easier). This results in 20 grams of CO2 produced by one adult human in a minute. There are 60*24*365.25, or 525960 minutes in a year, which means one human exhales 10,519,200 grams, or 10,519.2 kilograms, of CO2 in a year. Assuming a world population of six billion humans (don't point out that I'm discounting other species, I know and I'm doing it to keep this from getting too long), humans exhale 63,115,200,000,000 kilograms of CO2 in a year, or 6.95725989 x 10^10 tons of CO2 in a year. Now you see why exact figures don't matter all that much for the purposes of the example (if anyone has better ones than mine, though, please correct me).
It's proven, and it doesn't need more study.
Not very scientific there, everything can use more study. If there is a problem with carbon dioxide, my admittedly rough figures don't show it coming from industrial emissions.
If you disagree, you are wrong, just as wrong as you are if you disagree with the fact of evolution (as opposed to the *theory* of how it happened.) There is no middle ground here, there is science, and there is expensive wishful thinking in the form of industry/government supported pseudo-science.
Faulty logic if I ever heard it. The only fundamental fact in science is that everything should be questioned, that nothing is ever proven. For the record, I think the theory of evolution is the best one on the general subject that we currently have, but that's an aside. Another aside, I know someone else who says things like "If you disagree with me, you are wrong." Hint: he holds a job very high up in the current administration.
And just to be sure I don't leave anyone out while I'm pissing people off, I'll throw in a jab at the other side. Yes, it is true that global warming and catastrophic human destruction of the planet is not a foregone conclusion. No, that doesn't mean that you should go buy a Ford Expedition and dump its used oil on your lawn. It still makes sense to minimize your own pollution of the environment. As my father says, "Don't shit where you eat."
Don't just spew your particular party line without even considering what you're saying. Look at all sides of the issue, and come up with your own informed opinion. It makes you look smarter that way.
I'm glad this was modded insightful. I actually find that I enjoy LAN parties so much more than online gaming that I usually don't bother with online play anymore. There are a few reasons for this:
All those latency problems disappear (unless you have a really crappy hub, or something).
It's easier to choose who you play with, important as FPSs are much more fun when players are evenly matched.
It's a social event. Get some pizza and beer, and enjoy yourself! (The beer may even help improve the skills:).
I stumbled onto this a few weeks ago, and I couldn't even get any of what I thought were obvious searches to return any results. I don't look at much pr0n, so maybe my searches were faulty, but one would think I would have gotten something. At the time, I thought they were having temporary problems. I guess it was more permanent, or it was never supposed to work, just sell toys and DVDs. Oh well.
Slashdot Mirror
You said you did not want to "stop the owner of the system from doing anything they could previously do" but actually that is what you are proposing, you want to stop them from being able to cheat at network games, which is something they could previously do.
I actually see this as "if you want to play my game, you have to turn on your secure hardware context, as this is a hardware feature that my game requires." You can, and should be able to, turn off your TC hardware, and play Everquest or World of Warcraft or whatever.
The great thing about the design of trusted computing, once you understand it, is that it doesn't have to be mandatory in order for those benefits to arrive (unlike the legal system). The reason is because you can prove that you have a trusted computer and you're participating in the system, using some crypto protocols. People who don't have TC's can't pretend they do. This allows the TC users to form a sort of closed world, an exclusive club, and only to interact with one another for certain protocols or games or activities. Nobody else can join in unless they have a TC, and once they do, they'll automatically follow the rules.
In this way people can get the social benefits that accrue from people accepting certain limitations, without having to force everyone to participate. It's like receiving the benefits of government, but without the coercion. It's a dream come true for those who respect diversity and want to see maximum freedom of choice. I hope that we will be allowed to make this dream a reality, and that skeptics of this technology do not scuttle the opportunities for everyone.
This is one of the better analyses of Trusted Computing that I've seen. It's not an insidious freedom-destroying technology, it's just an optional feature, rather like a network adapter, which, incidentally, my game, like many others, might also require -- a hardware requirement for certain software functionality. Right now, I can choose to remove the network adapter from my PC if, for example, I am concerned that my use of the computer on the net erodes my privacy in ways I'm not comfortable with. My computer will still work perfectly for many tasks, but Firefox won't work as intended without the network hardware. Of course, I've already made the decision that the ability to post in this forum is more important to me than the privacy I gain by not using the net. Freedom of choice...
I have never written a distributed application before, which to me is half the fun of doing it. I expect that I may write something unworkable along the way and have to rip it out and start again, but that's okay -- I'm doing this to have fun and maybe learn something along the way.
This is a really interesting point. I would hope that any security hardware would have the ability to ensure that it is talking to its counterpart rather than an emulator (not a trivial task, I would guess), or else the whole thing is less than useful.
(1) and (2) can be accomplished by sending identical tasks to multiple machines, randomly selected.
I've thought about approaching the problem this way, as I don't have access to secure hardware.
(3) is harder. You need user's machines to process data without the user being able to interpret the data. Tricky ....
I don't mind the user being able to interpret the data, I would just like a reasonably secure way of ensuring that the user can't manipulate the datastream -- not a small problem when the user most likely has root access to their own machine, which is why I think some kind of security hardware might be an interesting way of securing network communications. Doing redundant calculations and ignoring bad data (much like mainframe processing, actually) could accomplish this too.
Of course, such a system would have undesirable uses as well, DRM and the like...
Learned everything I needed to know in an hour from the man pages the first time I needed to set them for users.
How the kernel knows where the root partition is.
Learned this the first time I had a disk array fail and had to restore from backup. I don't remember where I found it, probably in the LILO documentation somewhere.
What the difference between the exire time in an SOA record and the TTL in the zone file is.
Haven't set up a fresh DNS server since I switched to djbdns a few years ago, so I didn't remember this one. Ten seconds of googling refreshed my memory.
I guess my point in all of this is that it doesn't matter if you have holes in your knowledge. Instead, it is important to know that you do have them, and to know where to find the information you need. And, for what it's worth, I'm mostly self-taught, but I've taken some classes. Both are valuable.
Do you really want soccer moms in Expeditions (which will probably be upwards of sixty feet long in ten years) talking on their 'wristbands', putting on makeup, and screaming at their children while driving in THREE dimensions?
It's not too obvious or intuitive. Go to Tools->Account Settings->[Your Account]->Composition and Addressing and de-select "Compose Messages in HTML Format" (This is for Thunderbird 0.7). I don't know why they put it here and not with the rest of the Compose options under Tools->Options. Oh, well.
(Sorry about the indentation, I don't feel like fighting with the tabs inside the <ecode> tags)
I actually install my boxen like this now, with the base system where it usually is, then I put all my add-on software in /opt like this.
A nitpick with your comment, IMO this is one thing Windows does right.: I actually think DOS followed this convention a lot better than Windows does. I completely agree with your arguement though, having apps confined to their own directory is the best way to do it.
As far as renaming the directories to something less arcane, I think that's a matter of personal preference. I've been using Unix systems since the late 80's, which have all used the same general conventions with some variation (ex. Digital Unix used to (and may still, I haven't used it since '97 or so) symlink /bin to /usr/bin.), so I don't think I would like it. OTOH, someone new to Unix would probably find /programs preferable to /bin.
A civil engineer. :-)
I'm testing it right now with my Courier IMAP server with FAM. I have almost 10,000 users, so good IDLE behavior becomes important. My connection is using just under 2 megs of RAM and negligible CPU. Seems to work well so far. Overall, TB seems to have a decent IMAP implementation.
(Sorry)
Heh. Our helpdesk has a whiteboard doing exactly the same thing. The last time I was down there, the record was 2,548. Multiple DS3 lines shared between only 3000 students tends to breed this stuff...
I think you just redesigned bash completion. This does the "cd a" thing exactly how you want it to. I don't think it handles the argument expansion thing yet though. That would be doable though. Most programs use getopt() to parse arguments, it is probably possible to put hooks into that function that bash could use to do the expansion. It wouldn't be trivial, since you would have to run the program in the background to see what arguments it accepts (probably something similar to how ldd runs a program to determine what libraries it uses), but it could be done.
Amen to that! The first computer I ever bought was an IBM PS/2. 286, 1MB RAM, 20MB HD. I still use the keyboard, although I gave away the rest of the system years ago. The spacebar is a little loose, but it still works fine. I actually have trouble getting into "deep hack" mode without the key-clicking :).
Interesting. One of the last classes I took in college (finished my CS requirements and had a semester of electives) was called simply "Science Fiction". We read almost exactly those books (we read Butler's "Lilith's Brood" instead of Wild Seed), and I seem to remember reading Elgin's "Native Tongue" as well (it was a while ago).
Only about 4% of the exhaled air is CO2, or 100 ml per breath.
Where did you get this figure from? I got my 20% CO2 figure from an old college biology text hanging around. Your breakdown seems plausible, too, though. It doesn't make sense that all oxygen would be metabolized in an average breath, if there's enough there for you to hold your breath for a few minutes before it's gone, it shouldn't be all metabolized when you breathe every three seconds or so (if that's actually the average rate, I got that one from the same book :) ).
Just a few comments:
You only demonstrate the dangers of bad science education, coupled with an unreasonable belief in numbers.
I'll be the first to admit that most of my scientific education sucks. I'm not sure what you mean by an unreasonable belief in numbers. I know my output numbers are only as good as my input numbers, but that's why I asked for people to confirm my input numbers, which several people did.
30 million tons for what? That sounds like a reasonable number for daily worldwide production and a particular definition of industrial processes.
My original source was inaccurate, but RayBender corrected me here and provided some better sources. Essentially, we produce 6-7 billion tons of CO2 a year by doing other things than breathing.
Using again the corrected numbers, we arrive at 6 billion tons (6x10^9) for CO2 produced by human breathing. So you underestimated CO2 production from fossil sources by a factor of 1000 and overestimated breathing CO2 production by a factor of 10.
Someone else (probably RayBender again, he's pretty smart) pointed out that I messed up the weight of the CO2 by a factor of 10, so humans do produce about 7 x 10^9 tons of CO2 in a year, about the same as is produced by industrial processes. You seem to be overestimating the amount of CO2 produced by fossil sources, although I would be interested to see your sources.
Yes, I see it, but you don't. Those numbers don't matter at all because the CO2 produced by breathing is part of a CO2 cycle. That is, all Carbon in our breath comes from food (in the end, from plants), who extracted it from the air while growing. As long as we don't start eating synthetic food, our net CO2 production from breathing is exactly zero.
Now this is one of the more interesting points in this part of the thread so far. As world population grows with advances in industry, there are advances in agriculture and more plants grown to feed everyone, which offsets the increased CO2 from more humans exhaling. Of course, there are some practical problems with this:
- Most people don't confine their diet to plants. Domesticated food animals are going to be bred in greater numbers as well, which also produce CO2 in breathing. Of course, these animals have to eat too, and so more plants have to be grown to feed them.
- Plants use oxygen and produce CO2 as well. They do this less than they metabolize CO2 and produce oxygen though.
- All those hydrocarbons we burn to dump CO2 into the atmosphere were plants once too, so your industrial CO2 emissions were extracted from the air once too.
There are probably more things to take into consideration, but your point may still stand.Just remember, this only works when there is a healthy balance between CO2 producers and CO2 metabolizers. Before the Industrial Revolution the world population was a lot smaller (see here). Population in the year 1800 was about 1,000,000,000 people. Even accounting for agriculture, I don't think there are six times as many plants in the world as there were 200 years ago (remember, we usually kill inedible plants to make room to grow edible ones), so the balance may be disrupted (and industrial emissions probably aren't helping). I don't think reducing industrial emissions will make the difference some people think it will, though. I think the human population is a factor in all of this too.
- Increased industrialization.
- Population growth (due to advances in medicine and overall raised standard of living largely because of 1.)
There is certainly a preponderance of evidence correlating CO2 concentration and global warming trends, and (to try and stay on topic myself) I think the Bush administration does the public a disservice by trying to pretend that global warming doesn't exist (I don't know conclusively that it does, but I think more study is warranted). I was just trying to point out that industry emissions aren't necessarily the only significant source of CO2.Judging by some other comments in the thread, there seems to be some disagreement on how much each source of CO2 actually contributes, though. I'm inclined to be most interested in RayBender's figures on industrial emissions, because he (she? Well, one has to be right ;)) had sources which didn't immediately seem disreputable.
I had 20 grams of CO2 per minute (I messed up the mass of CO2, see below). 20*60*24 = 28,800 grams of CO2 per human per day, or 63.4931315 pounds (I love the Google unit converter) per human per day. I did get the mass of CO2 too high, as someone already pointed out (IANAC - I Am Not A Chemist), so that probably accounts for the difference. Where did you find the figure of 2.5lbs per day? I'd like to see that.
The global production of CO2 per day supporting humans (think gas, power, industry...) is 75lbs per day.
Someone came up with 6-7 billion tons per year total emission, with sources, higher than my initial figure. Did you mean 75lbs per human per day? 75*365*6,000,000,000/2000 = 82,125,000,000 tons per year, higher yet again. Do you have a source for this figure?
The rest is just simple math, which I can't find more than one side of :).
Thanks, these are very informative. I just used the first reputable-looking figure I found, which was from 1995 or so, and did a rough extrapolation to what emissions would be like now based on the growth rate documented. My original point still stands, though.
To take your example: "It's a fact that the earth goes around the sun. I can even prove it." Sure you can, but I would be a fool to run out in the street and yell it aloud without first checking your facts and observing nature myself for a while.
I guess I should have been more clear.
Someone else said this better than I can a few months ago, but I can't find it, so I'll do my best to replicate it. (Remember, this is an estimation at best, but it should illustrate the point I am trying to make).
The best I could find on Google is that CO2 emissions from industrial processes account for about 30 million tons. This sounds reasonable to me, anyone have a better figure?
Humans exhale CO2 as part of the normal breathing process. Let's assume for the sake of this simplified example that an average human breathes 20 times a minute. If I remember correctly, average exhalation volume of air is 2.5 liters or so, of which 20% or so is CO2 (If any of my figures are inaccurate, please correct them). Therefore, there is about half a liter of CO2 in one exhalation, which would be about a gram (this is a roundoff to make my next calculations easier). This results in 20 grams of CO2 produced by one adult human in a minute. There are 60*24*365.25, or 525960 minutes in a year, which means one human exhales 10,519,200 grams, or 10,519.2 kilograms, of CO2 in a year. Assuming a world population of six billion humans (don't point out that I'm discounting other species, I know and I'm doing it to keep this from getting too long), humans exhale 63,115,200,000,000 kilograms of CO2 in a year, or 6.95725989 x 10^10 tons of CO2 in a year. Now you see why exact figures don't matter all that much for the purposes of the example (if anyone has better ones than mine, though, please correct me).
It's proven, and it doesn't need more study.
Not very scientific there, everything can use more study. If there is a problem with carbon dioxide, my admittedly rough figures don't show it coming from industrial emissions.
If you disagree, you are wrong, just as wrong as you are if you disagree with the fact of evolution (as opposed to the *theory* of how it happened.) There is no middle ground here, there is science, and there is expensive wishful thinking in the form of industry/government supported pseudo-science.
Faulty logic if I ever heard it. The only fundamental fact in science is that everything should be questioned, that nothing is ever proven. For the record, I think the theory of evolution is the best one on the general subject that we currently have, but that's an aside. Another aside, I know someone else who says things like "If you disagree with me, you are wrong." Hint: he holds a job very high up in the current administration.
And just to be sure I don't leave anyone out while I'm pissing people off, I'll throw in a jab at the other side. Yes, it is true that global warming and catastrophic human destruction of the planet is not a foregone conclusion. No, that doesn't mean that you should go buy a Ford Expedition and dump its used oil on your lawn. It still makes sense to minimize your own pollution of the environment. As my father says, "Don't shit where you eat."
Don't just spew your particular party line without even considering what you're saying. Look at all sides of the issue, and come up with your own informed opinion. It makes you look smarter that way.
Afterthought: Am I feeding a troll? Oh, well.
Straight down the crapper requires a ROAD MAP?
Well, you know the old joke about how Darl can't find his ass with both... Oh, never mind, that's too easy :).
I stumbled onto this a few weeks ago, and I couldn't even get any of what I thought were obvious searches to return any results. I don't look at much pr0n, so maybe my searches were faulty, but one would think I would have gotten something. At the time, I thought they were having temporary problems. I guess it was more permanent, or it was never supposed to work, just sell toys and DVDs. Oh well.