To understand global warming, you must understand the carbon cycle. Carbon, in complex molecules such as glucose, is critical to all life.
The root of the carbon cycle is plant life, which pulls CO2 from the air and releases O2 in the presence of sunlight. The plant uses this carbon to grow, and to live.
Yeast needs the carbon from the plant to live. It converts an easily 'digested' molecule of sugar into a difficult to 'digest' molecule of alcohol.
Ignoring energy inputs for human growth of process feedstock, and heating and control systems, fermentation of alcohol is carbon neutral, because the waste will eventually rot, leaving no net additional carbon in the air.
Half the methods used to create industrial CO2 utilize fossil fuels, so if CO2 is used to pressurize bar taps, it is contributing slightly to global warming.
I know this is probably an April fool's joke, but honestly it's insane how many people, even technical people, don't think about the carbon cycle when proclaiming an end to global warming. In my journal, I show how we'd suffer mass starvation if we followed people's suggestions of completely stopping the use of fossil fuels.
How young must you be that the simple fact that lots of software stops working between OS revisions is a shock to you? Hell, my GameTap can't even handle the upgrade to Windows 7.
If you're playing a 10-15 year old game, DRM is about the most minor problem you'll possibly deal with.
Even if you were to install the OS that'd support the games, and somehow managed to hack drivers to work for it, you'll still be lucky not to get hit with some dippy Glide game that won't work without a 3dfx card. 10-15 years from now, we'll be onto yet another windows platform (as we moved from 9x to NT), and the chance of getting that unsupported game to work is almost nada.
All Christians should be scientists. If God created the world, then studying the earth is studying the work of God, and to deny the reality that science presents is to blaspheme, claiming false idols are more important than the works of God.
Actual jeeps get horrible mileage. My 23 year old Bronco II gets better mileage than a jeep TJ. With proper body design, they could get good fuel economy on the highway, but the majority of the SUV market is image-based, rather than practicality-based.
It's possible to do a lot of incredible things. One man used regular materials on a civic to make it extremely aerodynamic and ended up getting 80MPG.
The problem is, they don't do any of these things. There are a million big and little ideas that would add very little cost to a vehicle but would greatly increase the comfort and utility. For some reason, vehicle manufacturers locked into a certain vision of what makes a car, and refuse to consider anything else.
The beautiful thing about science is it doesn't have to explain anything until it's ready. The huge number of species so specialised didn't make sense until evolution came about. Until then, everyone could go "A wizard did it", but eventually it made sense. When physics reaches the point that we understand how this universe that we exist in came about, if it does end up explaining it in the span of human existence, then we'll know. Until then, the universe can be "A wizard did it" too. Electricity and magnetism were once literally "A wizard did it", and rare earth magnets and amber and such items were catalogued in "magical" tomes as items imbued with natural magic until science unravelled the mysteries.
I find Christians do themselves a disservice with their poor logic, especially when a lot of the questions they hope to solve have simple and consistent theological answers. The answers to "Why is there suffering in the world?" are all very flawed examples of poor logic, while the obvious answer is that if man is created in God's image, and God created the world out of an urge to create and see a better tomorrow, then God would be compelled to create a race that was also compelled with the urge to create and see a better tomorrow, in which a world that can't be improved because it's perfect would be hell. You can see this in far northern communities where everyone is on welfare, and the suicide rate is massive because everyone's needs are covered, but they've got no future any better than what they're already doing.
If you do any amount of game programming, you quickly learn that "tightly scripted but looks and works as it's meant to" is entirely the same as "a global, highly adaptable system which looks and works as it's meant to", except it takes a tenth of the time.
At the end of the day, the player doesn't care if you've created a neural network AI that has real thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams and will someday link up through the multiplayer feature to become skynet or if you've just hard-coded the behaviours.
The Half-life series has always been acclaimed for the AI.
I found Left 4 dead had excellent AI. The zombies rarely did things that didn't make sense, the only thing I can think of is when they climbed up on objects they didn't need to climb over.
It's not enemy AI, but Alyx from HL2 was pretty impressive. The zombies rarely did something stupid, but Alyx never did anything stupid. I'm sure I'm not the only one who formed a weird bond with the character by the end of Ep. 2
Haggling pisses me off. It forces vendors to build haggling into their price to maintain their margins, so haggling becomes the only way to get the price they actually wanted to get.
I'm in a town where haggling is rampant, and everything costs hundreds of dollars more than anywhere else, because it's expected you'll walk in saying "Hey, be a buddy, give me a deal".
You're missing the point. A customer was at their website, sitting with a credit card in their hand, and Blizzard didn't give a means to buy the product.
And no, it wasn't remotely pheasible to use his free-trial certificate. Even if he still had it, he lived 20 hours away, making it as much effort to use it as to go to the store.
It's almost always stupid companies. "No, we don't have that and we won't bother trying to get it." "No, we won't sell to you because you're Canadian.".
It's more common than you'd think. One of my favourite examples was World of Warcraft. My brother wanted me to try it, but they wouldn't let me play on-line until I left the house and found a store somewhere with the box. I had my credit card in my hand, and they refused to let me play until I'd gone out and checked all the software stores in town for their product. If they didn't have a copy, Blizzard would have lost a sale for no good reason.
Another time, I wanted to buy The Daily Show on iTunes, but they flat-out refused to sell it to me because I'm Canadian.
How the hell would you know? You've been so far removed from reality during this discussion that I had to point out basic things, like the number of years Bush had a fully Republican government for.
'Course, this is a purely intellectual discussion for me. After 12 years of surpluses under the Liberal Party of Canada, the Conservative Party of Canada has promised us at least 3 years of deficit, and I checked the budget, it's because of their irresponsible and very bush-like tax cuts and stimulus spending we can't afford. After losing it for a few elections, libs will be getting my vote next election. Conservatives are getting just a bit too much like the Progressive Conservative Party of the '80s under Brian Mulroney, who more than doubled the federal debt.
At least you guys are so far under water it makes sense to go into debt to dig your way out. You guys spend more of your GDP on government than we do, pay comparable taxes, yet we get socialised healthcare and balanced budgets -- your government is so broken some restructuring money might help.
For us, we didn't need to go into debt, and the idiots in power are acting irresponsibly by spending what actually is my money -- we've paid back over 10 billion dollars of debt year after year for over a decade before these bozos came around and wrecked the budget, so unlike you guys, who are really just spending your kids money anyway and obviously don't care, this is my money being spent.
Again, history. Politicians lie, but facts will never steer you wrong.
I know you're an idiot. The fact that you presented the stimulus package as 800 billion dollars worth of spending said to me that you're just a partisan hack.
Why would I take anything you say seriously after you make a factual error that huge as one of your major points? Then you brush aside actual data for a metric that is self-referential and flaky at best?
You're a partisan hack. There's a lot of you idiots who popped up to attack the new administration. Guess what? Some of us have been fiscal conservatives no matter who was in power, and we find your "fair weather fiscal conservatism" offensive.
The details aren't what caused the credit crisis, the fundamentals caused it, which is why I was able to predict it in 2005. The details didn't cause it, they just made it worse.
GDP/Debt is used as a metric to indicate the ability of a debtor nation to pay back their debts. The US can't even balance their budget, so this metric is useless.
You haven't been in charge of something before. Sure, the steering committee has the final say, but it's your baby, you make it how you want it, then deal with the parts they don't like, not the other way around.
Unrealistic views of debt, and ignoring the real value of things is the reason the credit bubble burst and why we're in a recession right now. You're not going to convince me that your hocus pocus statistic is worth more than the real inflation adjusted value of the debt.
The President creates the budget. The congress votes on it. Maybe you've never been in that sort of position before, but I have. It means the President has de facto power over the budget. Congress can say "No, we don't like it", but at the end of the day, it's the President actually putting numbers into the spreadsheet, and therefore he who has the power.
You're looking at exactly one metric, you're ignoring all data which proves your hypothesis wrong, and you're ignoring ancillary data which doesn't support your hypothesis. If this were real science, I'd make the discovery and get a SI unit named after me, and you'd die in obscurity.
The "Republican Congress" hypothesis is done. It's over. It has been conclusively disproven by the president who increased spending by 777 billion inflation adjusted dollars, George W. Bush. The budget was increased by an inflation adjusted 548.47 billion dollars under a Republican congress, senate, and judiciary. You dismissing the data only shows you're a terrible scientist.
My "Republican president" theory, however, still accounts for all present data. This may change under Obama, but the stimulus plan will only increase spending by 280 billion dollars for 2 years, so if he can control costs during his administration and doesn't try to extend the stimulus, he'll be able to come in below both Reagan and Bush -- possibly even Ford.
As an aside, the stagflation that Ford had to fight also gives him a prize: The inflation adjusted debt went down under his presidency. It also went down for several years under Clinton. You can't count inflation out of your calculations, because the value of debt decreases as the value of the dollar erodes.
Your bad math and bad science isn't going to suddenly become good because you keep on cycling through arguments designed for people who don't understand economics, math, or science.
You can't lie to me. I've got the numbers in front of me.
It's perfectly valid to compare the previous administration to the current one. Why wouldn't it be? Why has historical context suddenly become verboten?
Actually, don't answer that. I expect the same sort of stupid convoluted reasoning I heard in 2003 when I was telling Slashdotters that running up perpetual debt will cause massive problems with the economy.
The last administration was turning the United States into a terrifying totalitarian regime where foreign nationals are "disappeared" by the CIA and sent to rogue states like Syria to be tortured for months. After that, embezzling and tax evasion that weren't even ordered by the President seems almost quaint.
And you're a partisan hack, as shown by your partisan hack sig. You're putting everyone who disagrees with you into a big tent. Fiscal conservatives and constitutional conservatives? Liberals. How dare the bastards look at history to determine the context of current events.
Unlike you, oh partisan hack, I have the numbers in front of me, because I was interested. The FIRST, SECOND, and THIRD largest increases in debt occurred under a Republican Congress. The FIRST, SECOND, and THIRD largest increases in spending occurred under a Republican Congress.
I'm sick and tired of you loser armchair pundits who think you can make numbers up as you go along.
The actual spending increases in the stimulus package amounts to 575 billion, or a budget increase of 287 billion in one budget year. That's not really all that impressive, to be honest. In 2003 the Bush administration increased the federal budget by 237 billion, the year before that 153 billion, the year after by 190 billion(adjusting for inflation).
Clinton's budgets, by contrast, increased the federal budget by a measly 16 billion per year, adjusting for inflation. Even if Obama lied and he has another comparable stimulus package in 2 years time (so the net budget doesn't revert to 0), he'd still need another 2.7 stimulus plans(that similarly would need to be extended so the budget doesn't revert during his presidency) to be equal to the budget increases under Bush.
Just a refresher: 800 bilion dollars isn't spending.
Now, figure out how much Bush increased the federal budget by during his tenure. (Hint: The increases in 2004, 2005, and 2006 increased federal spending more than the stimulus package will)
Go do your homework. While you're at it, figure out who was running Congress while Bush was in power, racking up 200 billion dollar budget increases year after year.
I'm sick of you socialists pretending to be fiscal conservatives.
Slashdot Mirror
I just find it hilarious, it seems like the criticisms of the US personified.
"Here's a rare and incredibly symbolic gift, a pen case made with wood from anti-slave ships."-British
"lol heres 2 fast 2 furious" - US
To understand global warming, you must understand the carbon cycle. Carbon, in complex molecules such as glucose, is critical to all life.
The root of the carbon cycle is plant life, which pulls CO2 from the air and releases O2 in the presence of sunlight. The plant uses this carbon to grow, and to live.
Yeast needs the carbon from the plant to live. It converts an easily 'digested' molecule of sugar into a difficult to 'digest' molecule of alcohol.
Ignoring energy inputs for human growth of process feedstock, and heating and control systems, fermentation of alcohol is carbon neutral, because the waste will eventually rot, leaving no net additional carbon in the air.
Half the methods used to create industrial CO2 utilize fossil fuels, so if CO2 is used to pressurize bar taps, it is contributing slightly to global warming.
I know this is probably an April fool's joke, but honestly it's insane how many people, even technical people, don't think about the carbon cycle when proclaiming an end to global warming. In my journal, I show how we'd suffer mass starvation if we followed people's suggestions of completely stopping the use of fossil fuels.
So instead you ignore that Windows NT-based OSes are hit and miss with respect to game compatibility from 10-15 years ago?
How young must you be that the simple fact that lots of software stops working between OS revisions is a shock to you? Hell, my GameTap can't even handle the upgrade to Windows 7.
If you're playing a 10-15 year old game, DRM is about the most minor problem you'll possibly deal with.
Even if you were to install the OS that'd support the games, and somehow managed to hack drivers to work for it, you'll still be lucky not to get hit with some dippy Glide game that won't work without a 3dfx card. 10-15 years from now, we'll be onto yet another windows platform (as we moved from 9x to NT), and the chance of getting that unsupported game to work is almost nada.
All Christians should be scientists. If God created the world, then studying the earth is studying the work of God, and to deny the reality that science presents is to blaspheme, claiming false idols are more important than the works of God.
Actual jeeps get horrible mileage. My 23 year old Bronco II gets better mileage than a jeep TJ. With proper body design, they could get good fuel economy on the highway, but the majority of the SUV market is image-based, rather than practicality-based.
It's possible to do a lot of incredible things. One man used regular materials on a civic to make it extremely aerodynamic and ended up getting 80MPG.
The problem is, they don't do any of these things. There are a million big and little ideas that would add very little cost to a vehicle but would greatly increase the comfort and utility. For some reason, vehicle manufacturers locked into a certain vision of what makes a car, and refuse to consider anything else.
What do you know about the pirate LeChuck?
The beautiful thing about science is it doesn't have to explain anything until it's ready. The huge number of species so specialised didn't make sense until evolution came about. Until then, everyone could go "A wizard did it", but eventually it made sense. When physics reaches the point that we understand how this universe that we exist in came about, if it does end up explaining it in the span of human existence, then we'll know. Until then, the universe can be "A wizard did it" too. Electricity and magnetism were once literally "A wizard did it", and rare earth magnets and amber and such items were catalogued in "magical" tomes as items imbued with natural magic until science unravelled the mysteries.
I find Christians do themselves a disservice with their poor logic, especially when a lot of the questions they hope to solve have simple and consistent theological answers. The answers to "Why is there suffering in the world?" are all very flawed examples of poor logic, while the obvious answer is that if man is created in God's image, and God created the world out of an urge to create and see a better tomorrow, then God would be compelled to create a race that was also compelled with the urge to create and see a better tomorrow, in which a world that can't be improved because it's perfect would be hell. You can see this in far northern communities where everyone is on welfare, and the suicide rate is massive because everyone's needs are covered, but they've got no future any better than what they're already doing.
What do you know about LOOM?
If you do any amount of game programming, you quickly learn that "tightly scripted but looks and works as it's meant to" is entirely the same as "a global, highly adaptable system which looks and works as it's meant to", except it takes a tenth of the time.
At the end of the day, the player doesn't care if you've created a neural network AI that has real thoughts and feelings and hopes and dreams and will someday link up through the multiplayer feature to become skynet or if you've just hard-coded the behaviours.
The Half-life series has always been acclaimed for the AI.
I found Left 4 dead had excellent AI. The zombies rarely did things that didn't make sense, the only thing I can think of is when they climbed up on objects they didn't need to climb over.
It's not enemy AI, but Alyx from HL2 was pretty impressive. The zombies rarely did something stupid, but Alyx never did anything stupid. I'm sure I'm not the only one who formed a weird bond with the character by the end of Ep. 2
Haggling pisses me off. It forces vendors to build haggling into their price to maintain their margins, so haggling becomes the only way to get the price they actually wanted to get.
I'm in a town where haggling is rampant, and everything costs hundreds of dollars more than anywhere else, because it's expected you'll walk in saying "Hey, be a buddy, give me a deal".
You're missing the point. A customer was at their website, sitting with a credit card in their hand, and Blizzard didn't give a means to buy the product.
And no, it wasn't remotely pheasible to use his free-trial certificate. Even if he still had it, he lived 20 hours away, making it as much effort to use it as to go to the store.
It's almost always stupid companies. "No, we don't have that and we won't bother trying to get it." "No, we won't sell to you because you're Canadian.".
It's more common than you'd think. One of my favourite examples was World of Warcraft. My brother wanted me to try it, but they wouldn't let me play on-line until I left the house and found a store somewhere with the box. I had my credit card in my hand, and they refused to let me play until I'd gone out and checked all the software stores in town for their product. If they didn't have a copy, Blizzard would have lost a sale for no good reason.
Another time, I wanted to buy The Daily Show on iTunes, but they flat-out refused to sell it to me because I'm Canadian.
Yeah, it's a constant problem from my perspective: Even when I want to buy something, often companies don't want my money.
It must be nice running a business that doesn't have to make money.
How the hell would you know? You've been so far removed from reality during this discussion that I had to point out basic things, like the number of years Bush had a fully Republican government for.
'Course, this is a purely intellectual discussion for me. After 12 years of surpluses under the Liberal Party of Canada, the Conservative Party of Canada has promised us at least 3 years of deficit, and I checked the budget, it's because of their irresponsible and very bush-like tax cuts and stimulus spending we can't afford. After losing it for a few elections, libs will be getting my vote next election. Conservatives are getting just a bit too much like the Progressive Conservative Party of the '80s under Brian Mulroney, who more than doubled the federal debt.
At least you guys are so far under water it makes sense to go into debt to dig your way out. You guys spend more of your GDP on government than we do, pay comparable taxes, yet we get socialised healthcare and balanced budgets -- your government is so broken some restructuring money might help.
For us, we didn't need to go into debt, and the idiots in power are acting irresponsibly by spending what actually is my money -- we've paid back over 10 billion dollars of debt year after year for over a decade before these bozos came around and wrecked the budget, so unlike you guys, who are really just spending your kids money anyway and obviously don't care, this is my money being spent.
Again, history. Politicians lie, but facts will never steer you wrong.
I know you're an idiot. The fact that you presented the stimulus package as 800 billion dollars worth of spending said to me that you're just a partisan hack.
Why would I take anything you say seriously after you make a factual error that huge as one of your major points? Then you brush aside actual data for a metric that is self-referential and flaky at best?
You're a partisan hack. There's a lot of you idiots who popped up to attack the new administration. Guess what? Some of us have been fiscal conservatives no matter who was in power, and we find your "fair weather fiscal conservatism" offensive.
The details aren't what caused the credit crisis, the fundamentals caused it, which is why I was able to predict it in 2005. The details didn't cause it, they just made it worse.
GDP/Debt is used as a metric to indicate the ability of a debtor nation to pay back their debts. The US can't even balance their budget, so this metric is useless.
You haven't been in charge of something before. Sure, the steering committee has the final say, but it's your baby, you make it how you want it, then deal with the parts they don't like, not the other way around.
Unrealistic views of debt, and ignoring the real value of things is the reason the credit bubble burst and why we're in a recession right now. You're not going to convince me that your hocus pocus statistic is worth more than the real inflation adjusted value of the debt.
The President creates the budget. The congress votes on it. Maybe you've never been in that sort of position before, but I have. It means the President has de facto power over the budget. Congress can say "No, we don't like it", but at the end of the day, it's the President actually putting numbers into the spreadsheet, and therefore he who has the power.
You're looking at exactly one metric, you're ignoring all data which proves your hypothesis wrong, and you're ignoring ancillary data which doesn't support your hypothesis. If this were real science, I'd make the discovery and get a SI unit named after me, and you'd die in obscurity.
The "Republican Congress" hypothesis is done. It's over. It has been conclusively disproven by the president who increased spending by 777 billion inflation adjusted dollars, George W. Bush. The budget was increased by an inflation adjusted 548.47 billion dollars under a Republican congress, senate, and judiciary. You dismissing the data only shows you're a terrible scientist.
My "Republican president" theory, however, still accounts for all present data. This may change under Obama, but the stimulus plan will only increase spending by 280 billion dollars for 2 years, so if he can control costs during his administration and doesn't try to extend the stimulus, he'll be able to come in below both Reagan and Bush -- possibly even Ford.
As an aside, the stagflation that Ford had to fight also gives him a prize: The inflation adjusted debt went down under his presidency. It also went down for several years under Clinton. You can't count inflation out of your calculations, because the value of debt decreases as the value of the dollar erodes.
Your bad math and bad science isn't going to suddenly become good because you keep on cycling through arguments designed for people who don't understand economics, math, or science.
You can't lie to me. I've got the numbers in front of me.
It's perfectly valid to compare the previous administration to the current one. Why wouldn't it be? Why has historical context suddenly become verboten?
Actually, don't answer that. I expect the same sort of stupid convoluted reasoning I heard in 2003 when I was telling Slashdotters that running up perpetual debt will cause massive problems with the economy.
The last administration was turning the United States into a terrifying totalitarian regime where foreign nationals are "disappeared" by the CIA and sent to rogue states like Syria to be tortured for months. After that, embezzling and tax evasion that weren't even ordered by the President seems almost quaint.
And you're a partisan hack, as shown by your partisan hack sig. You're putting everyone who disagrees with you into a big tent. Fiscal conservatives and constitutional conservatives? Liberals. How dare the bastards look at history to determine the context of current events.
Wow. You're an idiot.
6 of 8 years is "the first few years"?
Unlike you, oh partisan hack, I have the numbers in front of me, because I was interested. The FIRST, SECOND, and THIRD largest increases in debt occurred under a Republican Congress. The FIRST, SECOND, and THIRD largest increases in spending occurred under a Republican Congress.
I'm sick and tired of you loser armchair pundits who think you can make numbers up as you go along.
My homework. Where's yours?
More math, because I like math.
The actual spending increases in the stimulus package amounts to 575 billion, or a budget increase of 287 billion in one budget year. That's not really all that impressive, to be honest. In 2003 the Bush administration increased the federal budget by 237 billion, the year before that 153 billion, the year after by 190 billion(adjusting for inflation).
Clinton's budgets, by contrast, increased the federal budget by a measly 16 billion per year, adjusting for inflation. Even if Obama lied and he has another comparable stimulus package in 2 years time (so the net budget doesn't revert to 0), he'd still need another 2.7 stimulus plans(that similarly would need to be extended so the budget doesn't revert during his presidency) to be equal to the budget increases under Bush.
Just a refresher: 800 bilion dollars isn't spending.
Now, figure out how much Bush increased the federal budget by during his tenure. (Hint: The increases in 2004, 2005, and 2006 increased federal spending more than the stimulus package will)
Go do your homework. While you're at it, figure out who was running Congress while Bush was in power, racking up 200 billion dollar budget increases year after year.
I'm sick of you socialists pretending to be fiscal conservatives.