The idea that a shutting-down of the Altantic Conveyor would lead to drastic cooling in Europe has been tossed around for the last twenty years or so (ever since computer simulations suggested that the patterns of ocean currents are not particularly stable, but are really merely metastable states in a rather easily perturbed dynamic system), and the idea that global warming might cause this (by dumping more fresh water onto the top of the ocean) has been around for the last 10-15 or so, but what's really interesting are the maps of ocean sanility over the past 40 years in the article.
Note that from 1965-1990 (a period of a general mild warming trend globally, depending on whose graphs you look at), the North Atlantic went through a period of exceptional salinity, especially on the eastern seaboard. The article makes no attempt to comment on this.
What it raises alarms based on are the last 10 years of data, in which the North Atlantic appears to be abnormally fresh. Unfortnately, we have no centuries-long data series for seawater salinity at depth, so what the article really means is "fresher than we've seen in the last 40 years," not "fresh is a manner that is historically significant."
But we've been dumping carbon in the atmosphere all century long. If human activity is to blame for the recent freshness, how can we explain the previous salinity when the human activity in question has more or less continued unchecked throughout the whole time period?
Personally, I think the truth is scarier than any environmental alarmism can paint. Articles like this would have you believe that
The climate is a delicate balance that can change suddenly.
Human activity can cause such changes.
Such a change appears imminent.
Therefore we should stop certain human activities to avoid the disaster.
All fine and good, but the truth is more like
The climate is a delicate balance that can change suddenly.
Human activity can cause such changes.
So can a whole lot of other stuff.
Supercomputers and all, we still have minimal understanding of how the climate actually works.
It's possible that major climatic change could happen within the decade as a result of human activity.
But ceasing that activity might not make a difference.
In fact, for all we know, ceasing that activity might at this point cause a climatic change that otherwise would have been avoided.
Chaotic dynamics can make you want to go run to mommy sometimes.
However, the money being directed is being directed to a specific account, not distributed across the net like the servers, so there is a central target which can quite easily be sued.
Under what nation's laws? The Virgin Islands'? The whole thing was set up as an offshore deliberately to make it more expensive to pursue legal action against.
And really, as for tracking the beneficiary of all this through the account number, my bet is the account (which only Amazon knows until someone bothers to file a John Doe lawsuit to force it out in discovery) is a front company somewhere with no easy-to-prove relationship to any of the filesharing networks. Sue it, it can vanish overnight and be resurrected under another name by the end of the week.
Trying to pursue it that way is even more of a game of legal whack-a-mole than trying to get rid of the networks themselves.
This is one of the realities when dealing in quasi-legal business models. Morpheus et al have set themselves up in such a way that they are fundamentally difficult to sue. You, the user, like this because it makes it difficult for Sen. Hollings and pals to shut them down.
The flipside of this is they can screw you over in any illegal way they like and there's just about jack you can do about it. It's like owing your bookie money. Because the debt CAN'T be legally enforced, you have to pay it.
Well, there is a simple experiment that could be packed onto the next Venus atmospheric entry probe, that would probably be as cheap and as unambiguous a test for life as you can do without a sample retrieval. I don't know why they didn't put it aboard the Vikings.
Collect a sample. Run it through a chromatography column. Put a polarimeter on the end. If there's anything chiral, you have life. If everything is completely racemic, you almost certainly don't.
I'm not saying I'm convinced that this happened. But it is an intriguing scenario and might go far to explain ice ages and such. One of the more intriguing things about it is that it appears to be testable in several different ways.
What you describe is plausible for large amounts of ejecta (ala the "Big Whack" that is the current favorite moon formation theory). But the mutual gravitation of the amount of ejecta to be expected by even dinosaur-killer class impacts seems like too small a force to regularize an orbit in a single oribital period.
Lunar sheparding is an intriguing possibility, but orbits that get too near the region of earth-moon equigravitation tend to be chaotically unstable on periods of years -- most of the pieces of the Apollo project on such orbits have since lost them.
Until I see some n-body simulations, this seems like a neat idea, but one too implausible to account for what seems like a fairly common climatological anomaly. It's easy to think of orbital mechanics situations that seem neat and capture the mind, but just don't work (The Ringword is unstable, the Ringworld is unstable. Did the best that he was able, and it's good enough for me...)
I'm not a planetary scientist, but I'm still skeptical. So a rock gets blasted off the surface of the earth with some ballistic trajectory. Unless something acts on it near apogee to circularize its orbit, that orbit will return to the point it began (which lies inside the atmosphere).
So most of the rocks from such a collision will either be on an escape trajectory to become interplanteary debris, or secondary meterites that will fall over the next few days.
Where's the circularizing force in these models to put debris into long-term stable orbits?
Maybe it was cheaper to develop a game back in the hayday of "adventure games that actually had a plot", maybe all these "give me a good plot not
fancy graphics" whiners aren't putting their money where their mouth is, maybe there's just a much better return on FPS/eyecandy games. Whatever the reason, every once in awhile you still see a game comes out that tries to revitalize the adventure game genre and it experiences lackluster sales.
Another factor is that the video game market is one of the most tightly bottled there is. Far worse than music, almost as bad as Hollywood. Go into a computer game store and count how many titles are actually for sale. Try the same trick in bookstore or music store of similar size -- there's at least an order of magnitude's difference. Or see how long a given game is actually on the shelf for. (Again compare to music or books.)
The way the market is structured, there's only room for a few dozen hits at a time, and the major game publishers are going to dump millions into promotion of just a few games to make sure their chosen horses are those hits. And if you're going to spend that money, you're going to spend it on what's easiest to promote -- eye candy is ready made advertisement.
Who actually buys a game they know nothing about, just to see if it's any good? At $50/box, not many. Whereas I'll regularly grab a book by an author I've never read. The price and transient stock of computer games makes it a market where creativity is not in general profitable.
If you're just sending text, then there's really no risk of running out of pad. Fill a zip disk with noise. Give it to the other party. Now, how long will it be before you've exchanged 100M of correspondence?
1 personal meeting yields a lifetime of secure communication.
Would be better as an eye-tracking mouse
on
Type With Your Eyes
·
· Score: 2
As others have no doubt pointed out by now, this has some serious handicaps compared to traditional typing because you have 10 fingers and only two eyes (and the eyes have been trained from birth to act in concert).
But what could really speed me up in an eye-tracking mouse. Keyboard action applies to whatever you're looking at. Also turns the keyboard into an n-button mouse.
Suppose I want multiple phones that connect to the same service. For many of the same reasons people have more than one handset on the same land-line, even well into the age of the cordless receiver.
You can scratch the VIN off your car, but if you do, you can't operate it on the public roadways. You own the car, you don't own the road.
You can leave your gas running, but if something catches fire, you're liable for arson. You own your house, but you don't own the neighborhood, and you don't own the fire department.
And in many jurisdictions, you can scan police frequencies. But you can't transmit on them. You don't own the airwaves.
Obviously, search engine operators don't release their ranking algorithms for the very reason of avoiding this sort of manipulation, but Google at least appears to value several types of meta-information above domain name.
The search I ran this afternoon on "unix" gave unix.com in 26th place. The top 3 were the GNU project, FreeBSD, and geek-girl.com's unix reference pages (which kind of gives credence to the respondent's claim that the UNIX trademark should be revoked as having become generic).
DNS is obsolete. Someone looking for unix info might type in www.unix.com, but experience has taught anyone who has surfed the net more than 30 minutes that randomly typing in URLs is a chancy way of finding what you want.
Far more useful is to type what you're looking for into Google. Lately, the I'm Feeling Lucky button has just been uncanny.
Why fight over namespace when the real value is in Googlespace?
What's wrong with just selling a tag or sticker that permits the operation of a motor vehicle in London, and ticket cars without it? Seems to work well enough in most parking lots.
While it does require human beings to actually go out and do the enforcement, this can be compensated by adjusting the fine. Make the fine stiff enough, and the ability to maybe get away with it doesn't overcome the times you might get caught.
Re:File formats are the core problem
on
Digital Dark Ages?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
And even if the media is stable for centuries, how will they know how to read it? This is a problem over even just 20 years.
I have an old 7-inch floppy with some TI software old it. I'm sure it's bit-rotted to oblivion by now, but even if it hadn't, I don't have the media reader to read it. And even if I did, I still don't know how the disk was formatted. Was it for CP/M, an early MS-DOS, what?
On encountering digital data, future archaeologists will have to (1) research past media recording technologies enough to build a reader (2) research (poorly documented) data formatting protocols so they can (3) write themselves a device driver and (4) read the media.
I pity the archaeologist who first has to rediscover EBCDIC.
The reply was (paraphrased) "We can store about 20 years of waste here, on-site, but it's the government's job to find a perminent solution."
This isn't, as you frame it, blatant irresponsibility. According to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, it is the federal government's job to construct a permanent storage site, and to have it operational by the end of 1997.
When the government passes a law binding itself to do something, it may be a little bit naive to assume it will come through on its end of the deal, but I don't think it's too much to ask of Congress to actually build infrastructure their own laws say they will build.
The case might be made that the Apollo Project was largely responsible for funding production capacity, industrial research, personnel development, etc. for the American electronics industry for a good chunk of the 1960's. And seriously, can any technological trend of the last 30 years of the 20th century claim to be as prominent as the increasing ubiquity of the digital computer?
Similarly, the technologies that would make a manned presence on Mars feasible (photovoltaics, semi-autonomous factories, improved materials) are not exactly useless on Earth.
A spokesman for the Christopher Little Literary Agency, which represents her, was quoted as saying: 'This is a case which we are aware of and, as with all piracy matters throughout the world, take this issue extremely seriously.'
Although parody doesn't survive translation well, from the quotes given in the article, it sure feels like this is nothing more than a parody, like Barry Trotter and I'm sure some other less famous ones.
And, as all good slashdotters should know, parody is fair use under almost all nations' copyright ordinances. So why is this a piracy issue?
I mean, isn't this one of the first real examples of privatized justice? Enforcing copyright on the Internet has proven infeasible / pointless / not-cost-effective for the federal government to do, so they are out-sourcing this governmental function to private industry, who may be able to perform it more efficiently. (The fact that perceived gains in efficiency may be due to private industrial enforcement efforts being exempt from certain trivialities like "due process", "unreasonable search and seizure", and "security in persons, houses, papers, and effects" that hinder governmental law inforcement agencies will be temporarily overlooked.)
Moreover, this move makes for a more equitable social contract by placing the financial costs of copyright enforcement directly on the shoulders of those who benefit the most from said enforcement.
Isn't the free market grand? We ought to increase the number of representatives in Congress. With greater supply, the price should go down.
...that having this kind of database doesn't even help.
At the time of its demise, the East German government held dossiers on about one-third of its citizenry. Yet in spite of this database, they failed to forsee the mass protest that culminated in the destruction of the Berlin Wall.
Another option is small claims court, provided your claim is small enough. While you can't use a lawyer, neither can the party you're suing, which in the case of a corporation means they must send an employee of the company other than a lawyer to represent themselves. Unless the corporation has a physical presence in your locality, it is almost always less expensive for them to capitulate than to show up.
Secondly, a class action suit is a much smaller deterrent than ten thousand small claims. In the case of a class action, the corp has a single suit that they can focus on and may actually win. In the case of ten thousand small claims, if the claims have any merit at all, they cannot possibly defend against even a majority of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Note that from 1965-1990 (a period of a general mild warming trend globally, depending on whose graphs you look at), the North Atlantic went through a period of exceptional salinity, especially on the eastern seaboard. The article makes no attempt to comment on this.
What it raises alarms based on are the last 10 years of data, in which the North Atlantic appears to be abnormally fresh. Unfortnately, we have no centuries-long data series for seawater salinity at depth, so what the article really means is "fresher than we've seen in the last 40 years," not "fresh is a manner that is historically significant."
But we've been dumping carbon in the atmosphere all century long. If human activity is to blame for the recent freshness, how can we explain the previous salinity when the human activity in question has more or less continued unchecked throughout the whole time period?
Personally, I think the truth is scarier than any environmental alarmism can paint. Articles like this would have you believe that
The climate is a delicate balance that can change suddenly.
Human activity can cause such changes.
Such a change appears imminent.
Therefore we should stop certain human activities to avoid the disaster.
All fine and good, but the truth is more like
The climate is a delicate balance that can change suddenly.
Human activity can cause such changes.
So can a whole lot of other stuff.
Supercomputers and all, we still have minimal understanding of how the climate actually works.
It's possible that major climatic change could happen within the decade as a result of human activity.
But ceasing that activity might not make a difference.
In fact, for all we know, ceasing that activity might at this point cause a climatic change that otherwise would have been avoided.
Chaotic dynamics can make you want to go run to mommy sometimes.
Now may be such a time.
Under what nation's laws? The Virgin Islands'? The whole thing was set up as an offshore deliberately to make it more expensive to pursue legal action against.
And really, as for tracking the beneficiary of all this through the account number, my bet is the account (which only Amazon knows until someone bothers to file a John Doe lawsuit to force it out in discovery) is a front company somewhere with no easy-to-prove relationship to any of the filesharing networks. Sue it, it can vanish overnight and be resurrected under another name by the end of the week.
Trying to pursue it that way is even more of a game of legal whack-a-mole than trying to get rid of the networks themselves.
The flipside of this is they can screw you over in any illegal way they like and there's just about jack you can do about it. It's like owing your bookie money. Because the debt CAN'T be legally enforced, you have to pay it.
Collect a sample. Run it through a chromatography column. Put a polarimeter on the end. If there's anything chiral, you have life. If everything is completely racemic, you almost certainly don't.
What you describe is plausible for large amounts of ejecta (ala the "Big Whack" that is the current favorite moon formation theory). But the mutual gravitation of the amount of ejecta to be expected by even dinosaur-killer class impacts seems like too small a force to regularize an orbit in a single oribital period.
Lunar sheparding is an intriguing possibility, but orbits that get too near the region of earth-moon equigravitation tend to be chaotically unstable on periods of years -- most of the pieces of the Apollo project on such orbits have since lost them.
Until I see some n-body simulations, this seems like a neat idea, but one too implausible to account for what seems like a fairly common climatological anomaly. It's easy to think of orbital mechanics situations that seem neat and capture the mind, but just don't work (The Ringword is unstable, the Ringworld is unstable. Did the best that he was able, and it's good enough for me...)
So most of the rocks from such a collision will either be on an escape trajectory to become interplanteary debris, or secondary meterites that will fall over the next few days.
Where's the circularizing force in these models to put debris into long-term stable orbits?
Another factor is that the video game market is one of the most tightly bottled there is. Far worse than music, almost as bad as Hollywood. Go into a computer game store and count how many titles are actually for sale. Try the same trick in bookstore or music store of similar size -- there's at least an order of magnitude's difference. Or see how long a given game is actually on the shelf for. (Again compare to music or books.)
The way the market is structured, there's only room for a few dozen hits at a time, and the major game publishers are going to dump millions into promotion of just a few games to make sure their chosen horses are those hits. And if you're going to spend that money, you're going to spend it on what's easiest to promote -- eye candy is ready made advertisement.
Who actually buys a game they know nothing about, just to see if it's any good? At $50/box, not many. Whereas I'll regularly grab a book by an author I've never read. The price and transient stock of computer games makes it a market where creativity is not in general profitable.
If you're just sending text, then there's really no risk of running out of pad. Fill a zip disk with noise. Give it to the other party. Now, how long will it be before you've exchanged 100M of correspondence?
1 personal meeting yields a lifetime of secure communication.
But what could really speed me up in an eye-tracking mouse. Keyboard action applies to whatever you're looking at. Also turns the keyboard into an n-button mouse.
So if this is for real, RSA will soon be dead. Does there exist a quantum algorithm for solving the discrete logrithm problem in manageable time?
How long before someone converts this into the world's largest Quake arena?
Suppose I want multiple phones that connect to the same service. For many of the same reasons people have more than one handset on the same land-line, even well into the age of the cordless receiver.
You can leave your gas running, but if something catches fire, you're liable for arson. You own your house, but you don't own the neighborhood, and you don't own the fire department.
And in many jurisdictions, you can scan police frequencies. But you can't transmit on them. You don't own the airwaves.
The search I ran this afternoon on "unix" gave unix.com in 26th place. The top 3 were the GNU project, FreeBSD, and geek-girl.com's unix reference pages (which kind of gives credence to the respondent's claim that the UNIX trademark should be revoked as having become generic).
Far more useful is to type what you're looking for into Google. Lately, the I'm Feeling Lucky button has just been uncanny.
Why fight over namespace when the real value is in Googlespace?
Oh, you may operate a car without a license in perfect legality. The license is what's required to operate it on the roadways.
While it does require human beings to actually go out and do the enforcement, this can be compensated by adjusting the fine. Make the fine stiff enough, and the ability to maybe get away with it doesn't overcome the times you might get caught.
I have an old 7-inch floppy with some TI software old it. I'm sure it's bit-rotted to oblivion by now, but even if it hadn't, I don't have the media reader to read it. And even if I did, I still don't know how the disk was formatted. Was it for CP/M, an early MS-DOS, what?
On encountering digital data, future archaeologists will have to (1) research past media recording technologies enough to build a reader (2) research (poorly documented) data formatting protocols so they can (3) write themselves a device driver and (4) read the media.
I pity the archaeologist who first has to rediscover EBCDIC.
This isn't, as you frame it, blatant irresponsibility. According to the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, it is the federal government's job to construct a permanent storage site, and to have it operational by the end of 1997.
When the government passes a law binding itself to do something, it may be a little bit naive to assume it will come through on its end of the deal, but I don't think it's too much to ask of Congress to actually build infrastructure their own laws say they will build.
Similarly, the technologies that would make a manned presence on Mars feasible (photovoltaics, semi-autonomous factories, improved materials) are not exactly useless on Earth.
Although parody doesn't survive translation well, from the quotes given in the article, it sure feels like this is nothing more than a parody, like Barry Trotter and I'm sure some other less famous ones.
And, as all good slashdotters should know, parody is fair use under almost all nations' copyright ordinances. So why is this a piracy issue?
Moreover, this move makes for a more equitable social contract by placing the financial costs of copyright enforcement directly on the shoulders of those who benefit the most from said enforcement.
Isn't the free market grand? We ought to increase the number of representatives in Congress. With greater supply, the price should go down.
Arguing otherwise is like saying retaining old copies of magazines after the new ones have come out is an infringing use of those magazines.
At the time of its demise, the East German government held dossiers on about one-third of its citizenry. Yet in spite of this database, they failed to forsee the mass protest that culminated in the destruction of the Berlin Wall.
Secondly, a class action suit is a much smaller deterrent than ten thousand small claims. In the case of a class action, the corp has a single suit that they can focus on and may actually win. In the case of ten thousand small claims, if the claims have any merit at all, they cannot possibly defend against even a majority of them.