Its like being stopped by the security guard who claims you stole something. When you ask what, he says "You already know and I'm not going to tell you!". When they check your stuff and can't find anything they still persist: "The reason we can't find what you stole is because you musta ate it!".
Teacher: "Where's your homework!" Student: "My dawg ate it".
You don't have to reboot. You have two options. One is to use Linux as the host OS and another is to use the VMWARE product that contains its own OS which is a stripped down Linux kernel.
While you can choose to run VMWARE on a WINDOWS host OS - you certainly don't have to and I can't think of too many reasons why I would even want to.
adobe illustrator replacement
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 1
I'm interested in a replacement for Illustrator. Any suggestions? Can the new GIMP handle.ai files?
I have been issued a speeding ticket - on the way back to work after running a guy home when his car wouldn't start. It was 1:30 in the morning and 40 below. I worked at a bank. I was stopped at a red light behind another car. When the car didn't move I tooted my horn - because I needed to be back at work.
The cop behind me flipped on the red lights - asked me where I was going and when I told him back to work at the bank he didn't beleive me so he gave me a speeding ticket and told me to tell the judge. Like an idjot I paid it.
I have been arrested when I was the witness for assult and battery on a young woman. This guy in the bar punched her in the eye and the punch would have knocked down a heavyweight boxer. I called the cops. They didn't talk to the victim. I could have identifed the asshole who hit her. Instead they told me to F-off and when I asked if they were going to talk to the victim they arrested me.
Since I am a single parent (widowed) and my kids were quite young then - they were just besides themselves with worry when I didn't come home. The cops would not let me make a phone call.
There have been other occasions as well.
I certainly do not ever go out of my way to make trouble. It just comes looking sometimes and the thing is the cops expect you to not question their decisions no matter how ill thought out they are.
This is what the story is really about. The cops like to have all the power and sometimes they abuse it.
A young woman who is a friend of mine and who is rather attractive had a cop investigate her all the way to pulling her files from Revenue Canada. Of course she cannot prove he did this. But he knew things about her that only Revenue Canada would know - according to her. So her question is who do I call if someome is stalking me? Certainly not the cops because they are doing it!
Likely the type of issue in the story is going to become more and more prevalent because people often are harrassed and sometimes blatently charged when they did nothing worng. The cops have been a more or less closed knit group for a number of reasons including that sometimes they do face some pretty dangerous criminals. So when a member transgresses it is their natural instinct to support the chap.
What we have is a power struggle developing - its that simple. People have to record and fight for their rights. While there are many good apples in the police force there are also unfortunately too many bad apples. However the fear of facing a judge is something no cop relishes. Mind you I sometimes think they enjoy forcing members of the general public into this situation even if we are just minding their own business and not doing anything wrong.
There are other issues. Probably for financial reasons many of our cities are turning the police force into a revenue center. Thus we get red light cameras and photo radar and in this city cameras set for summer stopping distances in the middle of the winter when there is glare ice. Apparently its ok for the city to break the laws of physics. But what of the happless driver who gets trapped by a 2.6 second yellow?
Meanwhile there is a misdirection of the police forces because white collar crime such as fraud and fraudulent consealment are allowed to go on and even IF complaints are made the police claim these matters are civil when in fact its under the climinal code.
There is a LOT of cleaning up that needs to be done and its going to take the work of a lot of honest conserned citizens to do it. It going to take some fighting as well. One of the first steps is probably to increase the accountability of our police forces.
Oh lovely. So now a defense for the criminals in court is that they didn't give consent to the property owner to tape them while they were commiting the felony! WOW!
This is about as good as the robber sueing the property owner when he falls through the sky lite while prowling on the roof!
Clearly we need to tape to the "net". Then when they break into the house to abscond with the "evidence" there will be other copies they can't lay their hands on. It probably won't be admissible in court but then no doubt the real evidence will disappear anyways.
This is probably worse than when the arrest the witness to the crime and don't bother to talk to the victim.
This section, however, is not about the normal variation in quality and reliability between typical motherboards. It is about plain old-fashioned greed, and the cheap, shonky boards that sometimes result from it. Here then, is a short gallery of the cheap, the nasty, and the outright fraudulent.
To quote for the Red Hill web page:
PC Chips fake cache 486
Let's begin with the most famous of them all: the fake cache 486 boards that PC Chips produced in the mid-Nineties.
PCCHIPS has been a leading supplier of motherboards and PC peripherals since 1994. We are committed to provide products of superior value and exemplary customer service to our customers worldwide.
Well - I guess we'll have to encrypt the packets so nobody knows WTF they are. This was probably an oversight when the net was designed anyways.
If we cypher everything but the IP address... this includes the port information - IE - a wrapper to a cyphered port - then once the communication is established (via ssl probably) then we solve all sorts of problems including varying packet delivery based on the packet type (because the carrier wants to gain an unfair competative advantage for say their own video service) as well as other benefits.
So we have to re-think some protocols and reprogram some servers. Ok - I'm a programmer and I'm game!!!
A movement of continental plates, like the Indian subcontinent, may have initiated a release that led to the LPTM, Schmidt said. We know today that when the Indian subcontinent moved into the Eurasian continent, the Himalayas began forming. This uplift of tectonic plates would have decreased pressure in the sea floor, and may have caused the large methane release. Once the atmosphere and oceans began to warm, Schmidt added, it is possible that more methane thawed and bubbled out.
I think my sources are more reasonable than your sources!
If you read closely you will see they speak of the "polar" temperatures rising as much as 13C. This is possible and the paleo record confirms this. This is to be expected - however the amount of temperature rise is a bit of a question.
Please note that the eocene was already warm. We have cooled more since then that it warmed during the PETM.
Antarctica was not frozen over back then.
Also - the PETM is not likely to have warmed the tropical regions significantly. What made a huge difference was the alteration of a major ocean current.
While volcanic eruptions may have played a role - that period of time corresponds to a period of orogenic activity that eventually lead to a lot of mountains chains. This uplifted large amounts of seafloor which would have contained sediments with a substantial amount of methane. The upwelling would have take place slowly resulting in a protracted methane release.
Adding a little CO2 to the green house gas inventory of the earth (50,000+/-???? H2O + 365+/-?? CO2) is a drop in the bucket. Its like feeding your hourse a meal of oats and thinking its going to turn him into an elephant.
Consider. A horse might weigh say 1000 lbs and the oats say 1 lbs. This is a 1000:1 ratio.
CO2 change is arguably about 80 ppm and water vapour levels are arguably in the range of 50,000 PPM. This is also a 1000:1 ratio give or take.
The thing is we can't measure _average_ water vapour levels over the planet very accurately. This is much the same as weighing your horse. While at any point in time you can weigh him very accurately if you wish - the problem is he might take a shit. So did he shit before you weighed him or after? Did you measure the water vapour while the rain cloud was comming in or after it left?
If you add the weight of the meal of oats to a weighing of your horse - the weight of the bag of oats isn't significant regardless how accuratly you can weigh the oats and the horse.
The analogy holds with the change in CO2 levels as it applies to total greenhouse gas concentrations on the planet. We simply do not know if overall the water vapour levels are increasing/decreasing or going sideways and we also don't really know what the variance is. We do know there is a tremendous amount of energy stored in the oceans and this has enough of a moderating effect that a HUGE drop in temperature as was caused by Mount Tambora in 1815 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tambora) did not cause the earth's temperature to spiral out of control.
The cooling of the atmosphere due to this eruption will have caused a decline in the absolute water vapour in the atmosphere and this is combined with the reduced solar radiation due to tha volcanic ash from Tambora. The climatic effects lasted several years. Yet the earth promptly bounced back as soon as the ash settled out of the atmosphere.
If the earth's temperature were as sensitive as Mann et al think it is to green house gasses then the question is why is it sensitive to only the CO2 component which is orders of magnitude smaller than the water vapour? Hmm.
I think the answer is obvious. The horse analogy works in more ways than one.
These naturally powered predators already exist. They are called "crows".
Aussie crows are starting to learn how to flip the toads over. This is only 70 years. The ecosystem will correct this problem. It may take a bit of time but the ecosystem is very resiliant. Its been able to handle everything thrown at it for at least the last 3.8 billion years and a lot of things have happened worse than a cane toad.
However - I will admit they are ugly. Also, they make a mess when you drive over them. The thing is the army isn't likely going to be able to make much of a difference. While practical controls should be employed where feasible - wiping out a critter like a cane toad is a lot harder than wiping out the passenger pigeons and Dodo birds.
During the ordovician (taconic orogeny) CO2 levels were 13x to 17x higher than now. As the Orovidian began, the average temperature on the earth was about 10C warmer than now. By the end of the Ordovian we had a considerable amount of mountain building and the temperature plumeted and this is in spite of the CO2 levels.
30 million years ago the planet started to cool. Your 400,000 years are a drop in the geological bucket. Even 2 million years are a drop. However there have been about 20 ice ages during the last 2 million years. They tend to come on a cycle of about 110,000 years and the CO2 levels fluxuate with these ice ages. The last one ended about 18,000 years ago which is very recent.
At the end of the cretaceous the planet was about 10C warmer than now. We did not have anywhere near the mountains then that we have now. For instance, the rockies were starting to form in the late jusrassic. However most were built after the cretaceous ended.
Since the miocene we have the Rockies, Andies, Alps, two (2) Hellenic mountain ranges, the Pyrenees, the development of the Himalias and the Tibetian Plateau as well as the Colorado plateau. Read this http://www.scotese.com/moreinfo15.htm
You can find these in the wikipedia artical on paleoclimatology:
I'll quote: "Or more specifically that changing continental configurations and mountain building probably have a larger impact on climate than carbon dioxide."
Of course this is disputed - just as the notion of global warming caused by CO2 is disputed.
The thing is the most powerful green house gas is H2O. It is present in the atmosphere at levels up to 80,000 ppm (and higher) and is almost totally absent at the top of mountains because as the temperature drops to freezing it falls as snow. Clearly a lot of land at high elevation will increase the amount of energy reflected into space.
In addition, CO2 levels are about 365 ppm. The change is CO2 is about 80 ppm from the 280 ppm level estimated for the pre-industrial era. From the paleoclimatology artical: "it is clear that the preindustrial atmosphere with only 280 ppm CO2 is not far from the lowest ever occurring since the rise of macroscopic life."
Changes in water vapour swamp the changes in CO2 by many orders of magnitude. In fact, if you compare 365 ppm to say 80,000 ppm its like comparing the thickness of a sheet of paper to a tree stump. We cannot even _estimate_ the actual average water vapour levels to an accuracy of say 500 ppm much less 80 ppm. So we certainly do not know if water vapour levels have risen worldwide by more than 80 ppm or even if they have fallen. If they have risen which is to be expected actually, then this may be far more significant than CO2.
Since we cannot measure water vapour that accurately we certainly cannot model it. In a model you cannot add numbers you cannot measure and it is totally bad science to add in numbers smaller than the uncertainly of the large numbers.
When we get a handle on water vapour we'll be in a better position. There are new satellite techniques now that are promising.
I personally think irrigation may be a factor because it forces entire rivers into the atmosphere and does so where arid conditions prevail. However, I don't think this can be proven at this point and we might be left with mountain building being the deciding factor.
The short answer is that you need to _win_ in court. That will be a $30,000 touch. Next you need to collect.
One of the principals of law is you need to demonstrate damage. I doubt a visit to a website would be considered damage by the courts.
OTOH, the entertainment industry is effectively convincing the courts that they are losing millions and billions through illegal activity.
I am sure the court felt that whatever the attempted agreements and so forth - the website and its webmaster were up to no good and were attempting to assist people in pirating activites. Other than the fact that even the word "pirate" is not really approriate - the perception of considerable damage is still there.
Probably the unauthorized access to the website is illegal. It certainly would appear to contravine the wording of the law. However - in law words are sometimes redefined and this may well be an example.
Thus unauthorized access to a website may henseforth be interpreted in the light of if "you" type in a URL they can throw the book at you however if "they" go waltzing around collecting information which they intend to use to sue people then this is perfectly fine! Double standard - you bet!
The thing is double standards and unequal treatment have been around for a long time. Just look back at the anti-war movement of the 60's and 70's. Kids were actually shot. Those who were shooting at these unarmed kids were never brought to justice. There are far worse crimes that end up swept under the rug by those who's aim it is to support the power structure of society. In many respects, law is just a tool used for control.
Back then computer programmers were paid better as well. Seems people want the cost of the programmer to favorably compare to the cost of the hardware!
There would be no reason whatsoever to enrich uranium (Other than to make bombs to kill people) if we were to use the CANDU and IFR technology.
Fuel reprocessing however is necessary.
There is just no way we can supply our energy needs in the long haul other than with nuclear... that is unless we accept a massive change in our life styles!
Oil is peaking now. The actual month may well be in 2007 or even beyond that - but we are effectively already at peak because we cannot signficantly grow our supplies. We can increase our coal consumption and we can liquify it as well. We can also make bio-fuels. But they will not fill the gap created as conventional oil depleats. The short of biomass->ethanol for instance is that a tonne of any biomass (not the refined cooking oils!) is equivalent to about 2 barrels of oil. This is easy to illustrate by looking at the chemisty (CH2O)n -> C(n)H(2n+2).
We are starting to face a major energy crisis and this is only the beginning - barely the tip of the iceberg.
The issue is the current generation of reactors generate a pile of plutonium. While it isn't weapons grade Pu (too much Pu240 relative to the Pu239) it is still dangerous. The best course of action is to burn it up for power.
The CANDU is a near breader design and is quite efficient in its use of neutrons. It is a decent reactor to use until IFR can be put into production. Note that a CANDU can easily burn the spent uranium fuel which is incorrectly called "waste". An IFR can even burn depleated uranium.
Of course we need to allow fuel reprocessing for this to happen. The only reason we don't do it now is political. (for the short term... IFR combines the reprocessing on site and hense is far more secure).
As for the cost of nuclear energy?
The short answer is that enough governmental beauracracy can make _ANY_ industry unprofitable.
Since I don't know anyone in the EU I never phone there or send emails anyways. Even if I do the number will be low.
However Capone was tossed in Jail for Tax Evasion so passing a law that taxes those who send emails will hit exactly that part of the spammer world that needs to be hit - and hard!
If it happens to hit some innocent folks who set up open mail gateways, or otherwise connect (willing) unsecured hosts to high speed lines, then I guess this is reasonable collateral damage especially considering the number of evangellical people who are trumpeting solutions and willing to offer free assistance right up to the point of developing (for free) the applications which are far more secure; all the way through to installing same for free and training people in how to use them.
What is the advantage of wrapping Thorium or Uranium around a fusion reactor?
The advantage is that it turns a reactor which is a energy loser into a safe breeder. That is the only advantage. But we can do this with an IFR anyways.
When a fusion reactor becomes practical there may be no reason to use fission. However - this is an open question and it is anyone's guess when we will develope fusion power.
In the mean time we have to use what works and that includes fission.
A well designed IFR for instance is safe and disposes of the very long lived wastes. There are still short lived daughter isotopes mind you and a number of people have pointed this out. By burning all the actinides, an IFR gets about 475x more milage from the uranium that is mined and most of our disposal problems are solved. Most - but not all.
The point is that a fusion reactor (when it can be built) will still generate radioactive waste.
If its such a bad idea then why is there over $10 billion bux per year being invested in the Tar Sands?
What you do not realise is that without a source of hydrogen, chemical processes such as Fischer Tropsche must be used and this gives off carbon dioxide. In fact if we use F-T then by the time we get to 5 million barrels of oil per day production (which is less than 1/4 of North America's current consumption) we will be producing about 3 million barrels of liquid CO2 per day. Furthermore about 1/3 of the carbon that is mined ends up wasted as CO2.
Using nuclear to free up the hydrogen reduces the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by the same percentage of energy that the nuclear source provides. IE - if we produce the equivalent of 75GWe from nuclear then this reduces fossil fuel consumption by the same amount.
We do not have a way to transport hydrogen other than by pipeline. Hydrogen for automobiles is still a pipe dream. What is practical however is the production of Syncrude and this is why we are doing it. We already have the infrastructure in place to distribute and use liquid fuels.
Furthermore we can use any carbon source if we have sufficent nuclear energy. This can be a bio-source as well - but the issue with Biomnass is that one tonne of biomass is equivalent to about 2 barrels of oil. OTHO one tonne of coal will produce about 6 barrels of oil if we have a source of hydrogen.
The economics still point to the use of coal and bitumin as our oil supplies dwindle. And in this regard they are starting to dwindle and we are going to be facing a major crisis in very short order.
There is simply no way that Tar Sands production for instance can be ramped up to meet the demand and this is _with_ $10 billion per year in investments.
We need to undertake a massive construction effort NOW... not 25 years from now. Fusion did not make it. I think some day it will - but we need a solution now and fission can help provide this solution.
The other option will be freezing in the dark and when that starts to happen people will likely decide to go to war. IMHO this is already happening and the UK and USA in Iraq is an example.
--------------
Of course I would be quite happy if private cars were banned in the urban setting and if people would supre-insulate their houses. But these ideas are _also_ not politically correct.
(If you think that super-insulating housing is politically correct then why arn't more people doing it?) An electric powered mass transit system is viable in the urban setting. But people like their cars. This is why the USA currently consumes about 21 million barrels of oil per day.
Slashdot Mirror
I was saving all my mod points just for this joker. Damn. They expired.
Ha! This is even better than Judge Wells analogy.
Its like being stopped by the security guard who claims you stole something. When you ask what, he says "You already know and I'm not going to tell you!". When they check your stuff and can't find anything they still persist: "The reason we can't find what you stole is because you musta ate it!".
Teacher: "Where's your homework!" Student: "My dawg ate it".
Squid use a delta fin and they have been around for something like 450 million years.
Ha!
You don't have to reboot. You have two options. One is to use Linux as the host OS and another is to use the VMWARE product that contains its own OS which is a stripped down Linux kernel.
While you can choose to run VMWARE on a WINDOWS host OS - you certainly don't have to and I can't think of too many reasons why I would even want to.
I'm interested in a replacement for Illustrator. Any suggestions? Can the new GIMP handle .ai files?
We designed the CLI for people like this.
This was on the Discovery Channel last year.
What is it with the editors? Are they watching re-runs now?
So I wonder who looked after him? Being the caregiver can be almost a jail sentance.
I have been issued a speeding ticket - on the way back to work after running a guy home when his car wouldn't start. It was 1:30 in the morning and 40 below. I worked at a bank. I was stopped at a red light behind another car. When the car didn't move I tooted my horn - because I needed to be back at work.
The cop behind me flipped on the red lights - asked me where I was going and when I told him back to work at the bank he didn't beleive me so he gave me a speeding ticket and told me to tell the judge. Like an idjot I paid it.
I have been arrested when I was the witness for assult and battery on a young woman. This guy in the bar punched her in the eye and the punch would have knocked down a heavyweight boxer. I called the cops. They didn't talk to the victim. I could have identifed the asshole who hit her. Instead they told me to F-off and when I asked if they were going to talk to the victim they arrested me.
Since I am a single parent (widowed) and my kids were quite young then - they were just besides themselves with worry when I didn't come home. The cops would not let me make a phone call.
There have been other occasions as well.
I certainly do not ever go out of my way to make trouble. It just comes looking sometimes and the thing is the cops expect you to not question their decisions no matter how ill thought out they are.
This is what the story is really about. The cops like to have all the power and sometimes they abuse it.
A young woman who is a friend of mine and who is rather attractive had a cop investigate her all the way to pulling her files from Revenue Canada. Of course she cannot prove he did this. But he knew things about her that only Revenue Canada would know - according to her. So her question is who do I call if someome is stalking me? Certainly not the cops because they are doing it!
Likely the type of issue in the story is going to become more and more prevalent because people often are harrassed and sometimes blatently charged when they did nothing worng. The cops have been a more or less closed knit group for a number of reasons including that sometimes they do face some pretty dangerous criminals. So when a member transgresses it is their natural instinct to support the chap.
What we have is a power struggle developing - its that simple. People have to record and fight for their rights. While there are many good apples in the police force there are also unfortunately too many bad apples. However the fear of facing a judge is something no cop relishes. Mind you I sometimes think they enjoy forcing members of the general public into this situation even if we are just minding their own business and not doing anything wrong.
There are other issues. Probably for financial reasons many of our cities are turning the police force into a revenue center. Thus we get red light cameras and photo radar and in this city cameras set for summer stopping distances in the middle of the winter when there is glare ice. Apparently its ok for the city to break the laws of physics. But what of the happless driver who gets trapped by a 2.6 second yellow?
Meanwhile there is a misdirection of the police forces because white collar crime such as fraud and fraudulent consealment are allowed to go on and even IF complaints are made the police claim these matters are civil when in fact its under the climinal code.
There is a LOT of cleaning up that needs to be done and its going to take the work of a lot of honest conserned citizens to do it. It going to take some fighting as well. One of the first steps is probably to increase the accountability of our police forces.
Two (2) party consent?
Oh lovely. So now a defense for the criminals in court is that they didn't give consent to the property owner to tape them while they were commiting the felony! WOW!
This is about as good as the robber sueing the property owner when he falls through the sky lite while prowling on the roof!
Clearly we need to tape to the "net". Then when they break into the house to abscond with the "evidence" there will be other copies they can't lay their hands on. It probably won't be admissible in court but then no doubt the real evidence will disappear anyways.
This is probably worse than when the arrest the witness to the crime and don't bother to talk to the victim.
bad boards - how to recognise and avoid them
u tCOMPANY.aspx?MenuID=8&LanID=2
D =8&LanID=2
...
http://www.redhill.net.au/b/b-bad.html
This section, however, is not about the normal variation in quality and reliability between typical motherboards. It is about plain old-fashioned greed, and the cheap, shonky boards that sometimes result from it. Here then, is a short gallery of the cheap, the nasty, and the outright fraudulent.
To quote for the Red Hill web page:
PC Chips fake cache 486
Let's begin with the most famous of them all: the fake cache 486 boards that PC Chips produced in the mid-Nineties.
---------------
From the PCCHIPS website we find: http://www.pcchips.com.tw/PCCWeb/AboutCOMPANY/Abo
PCCHIPS has been a leading supplier of motherboards and PC peripherals since 1994. We are committed to provide products of superior value and exemplary customer service to our customers worldwide.
http://www.pcchips.com.tw/PCCWeb/Legal.aspx?MenuI
The materials ("Materials") contained in this web site are provided by Elitegroup Computer Systems Co., Ltd. ("ECS")
I think these quotes speak for themselves.
Well - I guess we'll have to encrypt the packets so nobody knows WTF they are. This was probably an oversight when the net was designed anyways.
If we cypher everything but the IP address... this includes the port information - IE - a wrapper to a cyphered port - then once the communication is established (via ssl probably) then we solve all sorts of problems including varying packet delivery based on the packet type (because the carrier wants to gain an unfair competative advantage for say their own video service) as well as other benefits.
So we have to re-think some protocols and reprogram some servers. Ok - I'm a programmer and I'm game!!!
A movement of continental plates, like the Indian subcontinent, may have initiated a release that led to the LPTM, Schmidt said. We know today that when the Indian subcontinent moved into the Eurasian continent, the Himalayas began forming. This uplift of tectonic plates would have decreased pressure in the sea floor, and may have caused the large methane release. Once the atmosphere and oceans began to warm, Schmidt added, it is possible that more methane thawed and bubbled out.
s /2001/200112106303.html
r mal_Maximum
From: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NasaNew
I think my sources are more reasonable than your sources!
If you read closely you will see they speak of the "polar" temperatures rising as much as 13C. This is possible and the paleo record confirms this. This is to be expected - however the amount of temperature rise is a bit of a question.
Read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene-Eocene_The
Please note that the eocene was already warm. We have cooled more since then that it warmed during the PETM.
Antarctica was not frozen over back then.
Also - the PETM is not likely to have warmed the tropical regions significantly. What made a huge difference was the alteration of a major ocean current.
While volcanic eruptions may have played a role - that period of time corresponds to a period of orogenic activity that eventually lead to a lot of mountains chains. This uplifted large amounts of seafloor which would have contained sediments with a substantial amount of methane. The upwelling would have take place slowly resulting in a protracted methane release.
We're all going to die
I have news for you.
Yes, we're all going to die!
Give the moderator one too!
The earth was hotter during the Permian temperature excursion than during the eocene.
i mate_Change.png
r
http://www.scotese.com/climate.htm
In fact - it was warmer during the cretaceous as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Phanerozoic_Cl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleoclimatology
Adding a little CO2 to the green house gas inventory of the earth (50,000+/-???? H2O + 365+/-?? CO2) is a drop in the bucket. Its like feeding your hourse a meal of oats and thinking its going to turn him into an elephant.
Consider. A horse might weigh say 1000 lbs and the oats say 1 lbs. This is a 1000:1 ratio.
CO2 change is arguably about 80 ppm and water vapour levels are arguably in the range of 50,000 PPM. This is also a 1000:1 ratio give or take.
The thing is we can't measure _average_ water vapour levels over the planet very accurately. This is much the same as weighing your horse. While at any point in time you can weigh him very accurately if you wish - the problem is he might take a shit. So did he shit before you weighed him or after? Did you measure the water vapour while the rain cloud was comming in or after it left?
If you add the weight of the meal of oats to a weighing of your horse - the weight of the bag of oats isn't significant regardless how accuratly you can weigh the oats and the horse.
The analogy holds with the change in CO2 levels as it applies to total greenhouse gas concentrations on the planet. We simply do not know if overall the water vapour levels are increasing/decreasing or going sideways and we also don't really know what the variance is. We do know there is a tremendous amount of energy stored in the oceans and this has enough of a moderating effect that a HUGE drop in temperature as was caused by Mount Tambora in 1815 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tambora) did not cause the earth's temperature to spiral out of control.
This is in spite of the fact that it caused the year without a summer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summe
The cooling of the atmosphere due to this eruption will have caused a decline in the absolute water vapour in the atmosphere and this is combined with the reduced solar radiation due to tha volcanic ash from Tambora. The climatic effects lasted several years. Yet the earth promptly bounced back as soon as the ash settled out of the atmosphere.
If the earth's temperature were as sensitive as Mann et al think it is to green house gasses then the question is why is it sensitive to only the CO2 component which is orders of magnitude smaller than the water vapour? Hmm.
I think the answer is obvious. The horse analogy works in more ways than one.
These naturally powered predators already exist. They are called "crows".
Aussie crows are starting to learn how to flip the toads over. This is only 70 years. The ecosystem will correct this problem. It may take a bit of time but the ecosystem is very resiliant. Its been able to handle everything thrown at it for at least the last 3.8 billion years and a lot of things have happened worse than a cane toad.
However - I will admit they are ugly. Also, they make a mess when you drive over them. The thing is the army isn't likely going to be able to make much of a difference. While practical controls should be employed where feasible - wiping out a critter like a cane toad is a lot harder than wiping out the passenger pigeons and Dodo birds.
During the ordovician (taconic orogeny) CO2 levels were 13x to 17x higher than now. As the Orovidian began, the average temperature on the earth was about 10C warmer than now. By the end of the Ordovian we had a considerable amount of mountain building and the temperature plumeted and this is in spite of the CO2 levels.
i mate_Change.pngr bon_Dioxide.png
30 million years ago the planet started to cool. Your 400,000 years are a drop in the geological bucket. Even 2 million years are a drop. However there have been about 20 ice ages during the last 2 million years. They tend to come on a cycle of about 110,000 years and the CO2 levels fluxuate with these ice ages. The last one ended about 18,000 years ago which is very recent.
At the end of the cretaceous the planet was about 10C warmer than now. We did not have anywhere near the mountains then that we have now. For instance, the rockies were starting to form in the late jusrassic. However most were built after the cretaceous ended.
Since the miocene we have the Rockies, Andies, Alps, two (2) Hellenic mountain ranges, the Pyrenees, the development of the Himalias and the Tibetian Plateau as well as the Colorado plateau. Read this http://www.scotese.com/moreinfo15.htm
You should look at these two graphs as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Phanerozoic_Cl
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Phanerozoic_Ca
You can find these in the wikipedia artical on paleoclimatology:
I'll quote: "Or more specifically that changing continental configurations and mountain building probably have a larger impact on climate than carbon dioxide."
Of course this is disputed - just as the notion of global warming caused by CO2 is disputed.
The thing is the most powerful green house gas is H2O. It is present in the atmosphere at levels up to 80,000 ppm (and higher) and is almost totally absent at the top of mountains because as the temperature drops to freezing it falls as snow. Clearly a lot of land at high elevation will increase the amount of energy reflected into space.
In addition, CO2 levels are about 365 ppm. The change is CO2 is about 80 ppm from the 280 ppm level estimated for the pre-industrial era. From the paleoclimatology artical: "it is clear that the preindustrial atmosphere with only 280 ppm CO2 is not far from the lowest ever occurring since the rise of macroscopic life."
Changes in water vapour swamp the changes in CO2 by many orders of magnitude. In fact, if you compare 365 ppm to say 80,000 ppm its like comparing the thickness of a sheet of paper to a tree stump. We cannot even _estimate_ the actual average water vapour levels to an accuracy of say 500 ppm much less 80 ppm. So we certainly do not know if water vapour levels have risen worldwide by more than 80 ppm or even if they have fallen. If they have risen which is to be expected actually, then this may be far more significant than CO2.
Since we cannot measure water vapour that accurately we certainly cannot model it. In a model you cannot add numbers you cannot measure and it is totally bad science to add in numbers smaller than the uncertainly of the large numbers.
When we get a handle on water vapour we'll be in a better position. There are new satellite techniques now that are promising.
I personally think irrigation may be a factor because it forces entire rivers into the atmosphere and does so where arid conditions prevail. However, I don't think this can be proven at this point and we might be left with mountain building being the deciding factor.
What a boob. To post a chart that goes back 400,000 years and suggest this is "geological" time.
Hide your head in shame and take some geology bud.
Why don't you compare CO2 levels during the Taconic orogeny? I'll leave it to you to figure out when it happened.
Why not do this?
The short answer is that you need to _win_ in court. That will be a $30,000 touch. Next you need to collect.
One of the principals of law is you need to demonstrate damage. I doubt a visit to a website would be considered damage by the courts.
OTOH, the entertainment industry is effectively convincing the courts that they are losing millions and billions through illegal activity.
I am sure the court felt that whatever the attempted agreements and so forth - the website and its webmaster were up to no good and were attempting to assist people in pirating activites. Other than the fact that even the word "pirate" is not really approriate - the perception of considerable damage is still there.
Probably the unauthorized access to the website is illegal. It certainly would appear to contravine the wording of the law. However - in law words are sometimes redefined and this may well be an example.
Thus unauthorized access to a website may henseforth be interpreted in the light of if "you" type in a URL they can throw the book at you however if "they" go waltzing around collecting information which they intend to use to sue people then this is perfectly fine! Double standard - you bet!
The thing is double standards and unequal treatment have been around for a long time. Just look back at the anti-war movement of the 60's and 70's. Kids were actually shot. Those who were shooting at these unarmed kids were never brought to justice. There are far worse crimes that end up swept under the rug by those who's aim it is to support the power structure of society. In many respects, law is just a tool used for control.
Back then computer programmers were paid better as well. Seems people want the cost of the programmer to favorably compare to the cost of the hardware!
There would be no reason whatsoever to enrich uranium (Other than to make bombs to kill people) if we were to use the CANDU and IFR technology.
Fuel reprocessing however is necessary.
There is just no way we can supply our energy needs in the long haul other than with nuclear... that is unless we accept a massive change in our life styles!
Oil is peaking now. The actual month may well be in 2007 or even beyond that - but we are effectively already at peak because we cannot signficantly grow our supplies. We can increase our coal consumption and we can liquify it as well. We can also make bio-fuels. But they will not fill the gap created as conventional oil depleats. The short of biomass->ethanol for instance is that a tonne of any biomass (not the refined cooking oils!) is equivalent to about 2 barrels of oil. This is easy to illustrate by looking at the chemisty (CH2O)n -> C(n)H(2n+2).
We are starting to face a major energy crisis and this is only the beginning - barely the tip of the iceberg.
The issue is the current generation of reactors generate a pile of plutonium. While it isn't weapons grade Pu (too much Pu240 relative to the Pu239) it is still dangerous. The best course of action is to burn it up for power.
The CANDU is a near breader design and is quite efficient in its use of neutrons. It is a decent reactor to use until IFR can be put into production. Note that a CANDU can easily burn the spent uranium fuel which is incorrectly called "waste". An IFR can even burn depleated uranium.
Of course we need to allow fuel reprocessing for this to happen. The only reason we don't do it now is political. (for the short term... IFR combines the reprocessing on site and hense is far more secure).
As for the cost of nuclear energy?
The short answer is that enough governmental beauracracy can make _ANY_ industry unprofitable.
I think I'm all in favour of this tax!
Since I don't know anyone in the EU I never phone there or send emails anyways. Even if I do the number will be low.
However Capone was tossed in Jail for Tax Evasion so passing a law that taxes those who send emails will hit exactly that part of the spammer world that needs to be hit - and hard!
If it happens to hit some innocent folks who set up open mail gateways, or otherwise connect (willing) unsecured hosts to high speed lines, then I guess this is reasonable collateral damage especially considering the number of evangellical people who are trumpeting solutions and willing to offer free assistance right up to the point of developing (for free) the applications which are far more secure; all the way through to installing same for free and training people in how to use them.
Maybe this is a silver lining!
What is the advantage of wrapping Thorium or Uranium around a fusion reactor?
The advantage is that it turns a reactor which is a energy loser into a safe breeder. That is the only advantage. But we can do this with an IFR anyways.
When a fusion reactor becomes practical there may be no reason to use fission. However - this is an open question and it is anyone's guess when we will develope fusion power.
In the mean time we have to use what works and that includes fission.
A well designed IFR for instance is safe and disposes of the very long lived wastes. There are still short lived daughter isotopes mind you and a number of people have pointed this out. By burning all the actinides, an IFR gets about 475x more milage from the uranium that is mined and most of our disposal problems are solved. Most - but not all.
The point is that a fusion reactor (when it can be built) will still generate radioactive waste.
If its such a bad idea then why is there over $10 billion bux per year being invested in the Tar Sands?
What you do not realise is that without a source of hydrogen, chemical processes such as Fischer Tropsche must be used and this gives off carbon dioxide. In fact if we use F-T then by the time we get to 5 million barrels of oil per day production (which is less than 1/4 of North America's current consumption) we will be producing about 3 million barrels of liquid CO2 per day. Furthermore about 1/3 of the carbon that is mined ends up wasted as CO2.
Using nuclear to free up the hydrogen reduces the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by the same percentage of energy that the nuclear source provides. IE - if we produce the equivalent of 75GWe from nuclear then this reduces fossil fuel consumption by the same amount.
We do not have a way to transport hydrogen other than by pipeline. Hydrogen for automobiles is still a pipe dream. What is practical however is the production of Syncrude and this is why we are doing it. We already have the infrastructure in place to distribute and use liquid fuels.
Furthermore we can use any carbon source if we have sufficent nuclear energy. This can be a bio-source as well - but the issue with Biomnass is that one tonne of biomass is equivalent to about 2 barrels of oil. OTHO one tonne of coal will produce about 6 barrels of oil if we have a source of hydrogen.
The economics still point to the use of coal and bitumin as our oil supplies dwindle. And in this regard they are starting to dwindle and we are going to be facing a major crisis in very short order.
There is simply no way that Tar Sands production for instance can be ramped up to meet the demand and this is _with_ $10 billion per year in investments.
We need to undertake a massive construction effort NOW... not 25 years from now. Fusion did not make it. I think some day it will - but we need a solution now and fission can help provide this solution.
The other option will be freezing in the dark and when that starts to happen people will likely decide to go to war. IMHO this is already happening and the UK and USA in Iraq is an example.
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Of course I would be quite happy if private cars were banned in the urban setting and if people would supre-insulate their houses. But these ideas are _also_ not politically correct.
(If you think that super-insulating housing is politically correct then why arn't more people doing it?)
An electric powered mass transit system is viable in the urban setting. But people like their cars. This is why the USA currently consumes about 21 million barrels of oil per day.