The guy has a license - so that means he passed the same test as you did. He thinks it might be a reasonable safety option - and he's trying to verify that opinion. If he winds up using it for an emergency, then he well within the basis and purpose of the service. If he doesn't use to do anything else but talk to some buddies while he's hiking - he STILL is within reasonable and normal usage.
I'm answering this perhaps WEEKS after the thread has died - you're forgiven;-)
Indeed - if the repeater owner says no - that puts an end to ordering the pizza. If he/she is okay with it (and your ham buddies will consume same), then go for it.
What I don't understand is why Ham Radio Packet communications wouldn't be considered prior art for all of these patents. Hams were sending email through automated gateways to MOBILE stations back in the 80s. Why isn't this adequate prior art?
In looking at the patent:
"A system (100) for connecting a plurality of mail systems (1-N) each transmitting information from one of a plurality of originating processors (A-N) to at least one of a plurality of destination processors (A-N) which may be transported during operation in accordance with the invention includes at least one interface switch (304), an interface switch being coupled to each of the plurality of electronic mail systems of receiving information originating from an originating processor in one of the electronic mail systems for transmission to a destination processor in another electronic mail system; and a RF information transmission network (302), coupled to the at least one interface switch, for transmitting stored information received from one of the at least one interface switch originating from an originating processor in one electronic mail system by RF transmission to at least one RF receiver which relays the information to a destination processor within the another electronic mail system. "
The big difference is that there is an RF link....Ham Packet Radio fits the bill.
Couple of points - a "regular" signal is defined as digital! The other is that I would imagine that if you are only watching "basic" cable, then your digital tuners should cover the same frequencies. So there likely isn't any conversion for the digital TVs you already have.
As for the Dig to Ana converters - remember the ads the cable TV folks ran - "You won't have to change a thing if you have cable because we'll keep the analog signal around." Well - Comcast lied! I have to rent 6 (*^#(#^^ boxes for my house!
I was an official observer (read ARRL band cop with no teeth) back in the late 80's/early 90's. 97.113 absolutely prohibited ANY type of business use back then. The rules were changed in the early 90's to allow this type of exception (along with ham related swap-nets) as an example.
So there was a time when it wasn't legal. It is now.
You don't seem to understand - they aren't "YOUR" airwaves. You are a guest in the amateur's spectrum in this case, not the other way around.
RF spectrum is something that is actually coordinated on an international level typically. So those ham bands are likely ham bands in multiple countries within what is known as an ITU region. That being the case - who has priority is actually not always decided by the FCC.
In any case, the licensed service has precedence over part 15 devices. That's the law as written. It's been that way for a LONG time. Put that up your wi-fi router and sniff it?
I looked at the list of patents. I believe one of them can be invalidated due to obviousness of the idea. Apple patented lowering the voltage to the processor to reduce power. It is OBVIOUS to a practitioner of the art (I'm an EE in the business) that if you reduce voltage you reduce energy consumption (it's kinda basic -like ohms law!) It is a method that has been in use for a LONG time in the chip business. So that is one of the multitude of patents that can and should be thrown out. Prior art on this one has to be HUGE -
You can sit there and be critical of the judge all you choose - but the question still remains. Does his ruling make sense? If you look at the economic impact of the President's decision - it's just as much of a catastrophe for the region as the Oil! Further - these accidents don't happen every 15 minutes - those arguing against drilling because of possible second episode are just playing an emotional argument, not a logical one.
Gee - why not pick on the judge because he was a Reagan appointee?
Well - I can tell you that Dave Probert saw his first multi-processor about 28 years ago at Burroughs corporation. It was a dual-processor B1855. I had the pleasure with working with the guy way back then. From what I recall he then went on to work at FPS systems which was an array processor that you could add onto other machines (I think vaxen...but I could be wrong there..)
Well - I designed what would be portion 320 in the diagram, the image modulation system for a scanning LED TV. The first problem was that LEDs were too dim at the time. The lasers in this system against a phosphor take care of that issue. The second issue you have is what is called the pin-cushion effect. As you scan the laser over the surface of the rotating polygon, it will tend to modulate the length of the scanline making the picture look like a pin cushion. I had a way to fix this in the modulation controller - can't talk about HOW to fix it;-) Just know that is a pretty big problem to overcome.
Once you have a method to overcome the pin-cushion effect, then you need to have to have a way to align the TVs in production (another REAL headache I didn't come up with a solution for..but then we only got to the prototype stage so didn't have to face that issue.)
Finally - there is the issue of NOISE. Rotating mirrors can be REALLY loud. Our prototype sounded like a jet engine when we spooled up the motors. The precision optics are also expensive. The mechanical engineers believed they could build a much quieter mirror assembly - maybe with air bearings.
So there are a lot of real - practical - tough design problems with this approach.
Finally - I expect it to be a relatively BIG TV.
It's a neat technology - but I don't believe there is any market for it.
You're right about CD's always having contained this type of ECC mechanism. For that matter you will see this type of ECC in Radio based communications infrastructure and data that gets written to Hard disks too! In other words - all modern data storage devices (except maybe Flash..) contain ECC mechanisms that allow burst error detection and correction.
So now we're talking about being doubly redundant. Put ECC on the ECC? I'm not sure that helps.
Consider - if a bit twiddles on a magnetic domain. It will be found and corrected by the codes that are already protecting the bit when the bit is next accessed. This is hardware functionality. What good does expanding the size of your data do by being redundant with the ECC codes? It makes more sense to actually increase the size of your ECC fields within the hardware mechanism to handle larger burst errors. It certainly is more efficient with storage anyway.
There IS a point where the media can be so damaged that the data can't be retrieved. Your errors exceed the number of bits you are capable of correcting. Why does anyone believe the doubly redundant data is going to be any better? It has the same correction limits as the original algorithms...and likely got compromised along with the hardware ECC.
"Copyright
All content on the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) website (http://www.bart.gov) including the collection, arrangement, assembly and presentation of pages and all logos, maps, text, images, feeds and databases are the property of BART or its content suppliers and are protected by copyright laws.
You may not use the BART logo, the BART map or any other content from the BART website without express written permission in advance from BART."
Rule 1: She is always right, you are always wrong.
Just simply say "Yes dear" and move on. Rule 2: See Rule 1 Rule 3: How did you get here??? Go back to Rule 1 NOW!
Gee - last I heard - you couldn't copyright a database. Further, unless he specifically provided for it in his contract up front, work done for hire belongs to he who pays. If you under-price your services, that isn't the cities fault.
Finally, what about the guy who thought he was HELPING the city and county of SF by not giving the other admins the passwords. They locked his butt up. SF doesn't play nice when under pressure.
I've been in the industry as a chip designer since 1995 (board designer for 15 years before that..) I learned Verilog in about 2 days because I knew C thoroughly. My experience applies to someone who is already a designer - which isn't the case here.
I also know that there are some limitations of the original definition of VHDL that make it a pain to use. The strong typing gets in the way of getting the logic described. VHDL natively can't do things like signed arithmetic. That's why you have all those IEEE packages! In other words - the language is extensible - but you pay a price in lack of brevity to describe the hardware you're after.
There are features of 1995 Verilog that also are a curse and a god-send. The assumption that any undefined term is automatically a wire can save you lots of trouble in the creation of the design or bite you in the posterior (where a strongly typed language would save you from yourself.) So Verilog takes on the original K&R attitude of the programmer being smarter than the compiler and knowing what he/she is doing.
No come into the current century and we have System Verilog. System Verilog = Verilog + Vera + the best parts of VHDL (things like generate).
Where VHDL and Verilog were lacking for strong verification methodologies (that in truth were developed years after either language came into being...) System Verilog has been updated to handle this job adequately along with the task of describing the hardware.
The real answer is that you have asked one of those religious war questions - just like VI vs Emacs (Obviously VI is better;-) Let me give you a URL that you can read about a contest that was held at DAC some years ago - http://www.angelfire.com/in/rajesh52/contest.html
I worked for both Yatin and Larry (two of the conspirators in this story) You be the judge of the Verilog/VHDL war.
I also believe there is a very definite geocentric component to these arguments as has been claimed in earlier posts - In the US Verilog is dominant - while in Europe it's VHDL. I can't speak to other continents.;-)
In my time as a consultant in the field - I've had two projects out of roughly 20 that were VHDL. Now-a-days these tend to be multi-language affairs where we have both VHDL and Verilog mixed together. Modelsim, and the Cadence offerings handle this pretty transparently (can't speak to the Synopsys tools - haven't used them in better than a decade at this point.)
As another data point - the vast majority of reusable IP that I've seen was done in Verilog. (This may be due to the geographic component - mostly US companies.. ARM being the exception - but everything I see from them is primarily in Verilog...;-)
Okay - that's lots of data as to what you should do - I would think you should concentrate on teaching about the synthesis subset, proper digital design AND how to write verification environments before they ever even WORRY about FPGAs. What I've seen are a lot of non-designers getting into FPGA design - and they are clueless about things like clock domain crossing and testing the design in simulation BEFORE they go to the FPGA. The old 90/10 rule applies equally here. Do the homework on the design FIRST with simulation before you try to debug every little problem when it's been realized in hardware as an FPGA. I would imagine that students who are trying to become designers are going to suffer the same pitfalls if not shown the RIGHT way to do things.
Hope this gives you some data. In the long run - whether you use Verilog, VHDL or better yet - System Verilog doesn't matter so much as teaching the proper design and verification methodologies!
I have a little bit of real-life experience dealing with an FCC engineer while he was hunting a suspected illegal transmitter. I was helping him locate it.
Basic story - someone had set up a cross-band repeater with it's output on 2m running about 100W. The main purpose of this thing was to act as a remote phone. The output was right in the middle of the 2m Satellite downlink band. The system would turn on intermittently, and he would talk to his girlfriend about Olive oil parties and such.
We found his input frequency and figured out how he turned the thing on and off.
FCC came down to track it - they asked us to turn it on for 30 seconds at a time. They took three readings to find the guy! The last reading was "which antenna!" They are VERY good at what they do. Turns out the guy DID have a license, and he was sited for no ID (which was pretty minimal..) He was later confronted about his activities personally and embarrassed into ceasing same. The fact that he was screwing up satellite operations AND a near by repeater he didn't know existed helped in that cause.
Anyway - to make this relevant. The FCC never went into his house. However, they DID confront him at his place of work to site him. (not sure how this occurred..)
As a Ham - they DO have the right to demand to enter my premises to inspect the radio gear. If I deny them access - they can take away the license. So it's a balancing act. If I want to keep the license I let them in. They won't be bringing cops to the door.
This sounds like the most useless research I've ever heard of. Don't these guys know that Incandescent light bulbs are going to be illegal after 2012? I mean - what is the point? They're not going to be able to sell the darn thing.
Now - if they were figuring out a way to make a Compact Florescent lamp (CFL) without Mercury - now that would be a hot seller!
You folks were up in arms about the loss of Privacy when the Bush administration was trying to spy on Terrorists calling into the country? Here you have a Democrat congress and a Democrat President who are going to be snooping into EVERYONE's business - let's have a little more energy - or one might think all the previous belly-aching about privacy was really just partisan nonsense????
Well so is H2O and there is a substantially larger amount of H2O in the atmosphere! Further, the range of frequencies that H2O contributes to warming is far greater than CO2.
Explain then why Algore shows a plot of CO2 versus temperature derived from Ice cores and INCORRECTLY claims that CO2 Leads the temperature. If you LOOK at the REAL curve you'll find that for most of the data period (600 thousand years or so) CO2 LAGS temperature rise. (Which makes sense- it gets warmer, more life around the globe..)
That is another problem with your argument. You limit yourself to "recorded" history. That is only a 5000 year span. Even Algore goes for 600 thousand years or so - and in that period of time the amount of time we've had equivalent CO2 in the atmosphere before.
Gee - we're don't agree - that means there is no concensus. There are plenty of scientists in the field who disagree. There is nothing settled about it.
Saying it's settled is just stupid!
Lastly - starting out your argument complaining about my spelling just an attempt to belittle my points without any facts.
I have to agree with you (and Dyson). Al Gore looses his argument as soon as he says that a concensus has been reached. Science simply doesn't work that way! Then he follows up with "the discussions are over." No they are not. Real science is a process of ALWAYS questioning your theories and assumptions and going where the evidence leads.
There is some evidence that there is some heating. The evidence that it is caused by CO2 or is man-made is tenuous at best! Depending on computer models that are not historically consitant is also ludicrous. All you really need to do is look at the prediction results for a Hurricane track. They use 10-15 different models and get that many different results. Usually as they show tracks taking off from Cuba - the run anywhere from the Yucatan to curling around and hitting Florida - and this for 3-4 days out!
Further - a lot of the data that they use for their arguments of warming are things like the temperature readings in the US - where it has been proven that a goodly chunk of these numbers are biased by Urbanization, but the numbers haven't been corrected for this affect!
Remember the announcement that 1998 was the warmest year of the century -well it turns out that these biases through them off. !934 or there abouts where (remember the great dust bowl???) 1998 was one of the 10 hotest in the century, but not the worst. Further - we've been having a cooling trend for nearly 10 years now! How does that jive with global warming?
You probably believe that 9/11 was an inside job too!
What the President was referring to when said that is family was a 45 second commute away was that when Obama might feel overwhelmed then his support system, i.e. his family was an EASY 45 second commute away.
Note the "EASY" emphasis was mine. Bush said neither tough or easy from what I remember him saying. Whoops - I actually watched the discussion live. What I'm saying above was the context of the comment.
Bush was also saying that at some point - the size of the responsibilities of the office of the Presidency would hit Obama emotionally.
Take a deep breath -then crawl back under your tin hat.
Slashdot Mirror
You really need to get off your high horse.
The guy has a license - so that means he passed the same test as you did. He thinks it might be a reasonable safety option - and he's trying to verify that opinion. If he winds up using it for an emergency, then he well within the basis and purpose of the service. If he doesn't use to do anything else but talk to some buddies while he's hiking - he STILL is within reasonable and normal usage.
So PLEASE drop out of lecture mode.
I'm answering this perhaps WEEKS after the thread has died - you're forgiven ;-)
Indeed - if the repeater owner says no - that puts an end to ordering the pizza. If he/she is okay with it (and your ham buddies will consume same), then go for it.
What I don't understand is why Ham Radio Packet communications wouldn't be considered prior art for all of these patents. Hams were sending email through automated gateways to MOBILE stations back in the 80s. Why isn't this adequate prior art?
In looking at the patent:
"A system (100) for connecting a plurality of mail systems (1-N) each transmitting information from one of a plurality of originating processors (A-N) to at least one of a plurality of destination processors (A-N) which may be transported during operation in accordance with the invention includes at least one interface switch (304), an interface switch being coupled to each of the plurality of electronic mail systems of receiving information originating from an originating processor in one of the electronic mail systems for transmission to a destination processor in another electronic mail system; and a RF information transmission network (302), coupled to the at least one interface switch, for transmitting stored information received from one of the at least one interface switch originating from an originating processor in one electronic mail system by RF transmission to at least one RF receiver which relays the information to a destination processor within the another electronic mail system. "
The big difference is that there is an RF link....Ham Packet Radio fits the bill.
Couple of points - a "regular" signal is defined as digital! The other is that I would imagine that if you are only watching "basic" cable, then your digital tuners should cover the same frequencies. So there likely isn't any conversion for the digital TVs you already have.
As for the Dig to Ana converters - remember the ads the cable TV folks ran - "You won't have to change a thing if you have cable because we'll keep the analog signal around." Well - Comcast lied! I have to rent 6 (*^#(#^^ boxes for my house!
Ack - wrong! Would you like to try again?
I was an official observer (read ARRL band cop with no teeth) back in the late 80's/early 90's. 97.113 absolutely prohibited ANY type of business use back then. The rules were changed in the early 90's to allow this type of exception (along with ham related swap-nets) as an example.
So there was a time when it wasn't legal. It is now.
You don't seem to understand - they aren't "YOUR" airwaves. You are a guest in the amateur's spectrum in this case, not the other way around.
RF spectrum is something that is actually coordinated on an international level typically. So those ham bands are likely ham bands in multiple countries within what is known as an ITU region. That being the case - who has priority is actually not always decided by the FCC.
In any case, the licensed service has precedence over part 15 devices. That's the law as written. It's been that way for a LONG time. Put that up your wi-fi router and sniff it?
I looked at the list of patents. I believe one of them can be invalidated due to obviousness of the idea. Apple patented lowering the voltage to the processor to reduce power. It is OBVIOUS to a practitioner of the art (I'm an EE in the business) that if you reduce voltage you reduce energy consumption (it's kinda basic -like ohms law!) It is a method that has been in use for a LONG time in the chip business. So that is one of the multitude of patents that can and should be thrown out. Prior art on this one has to be HUGE -
You can sit there and be critical of the judge all you choose - but the question still remains. Does his ruling make sense? If you look at the economic impact of the President's decision - it's just as much of a catastrophe for the region as the Oil! Further - these accidents don't happen every 15 minutes - those arguing against drilling because of possible second episode are just playing an emotional argument, not a logical one.
Gee - why not pick on the judge because he was a Reagan appointee?
You weren't expecting anyone to argue with you here where you???
This reminds me of one of the best lines in all of movie making.... "They killed Congress" followed by a menacing laugh ;-) Gotta Love Mars Attacks!
You mean like - Climate prediction?
I'm just saying - maybe we should prosecute the weatherman for the tornado that killed some many people.
Well - I can tell you that Dave Probert saw his first multi-processor about 28 years ago at Burroughs corporation. It was a dual-processor B1855. I had the pleasure with working with the guy way back then. From what I recall he then went on to work at FPS systems which was an array processor that you could add onto other machines (I think vaxen...but I could be wrong there..)
Anyway - he has been around ALONG time.
Well - I designed what would be portion 320 in the diagram, the image modulation system for a scanning LED TV. The first problem was that LEDs were too dim at the time. The lasers in this system against a phosphor take care of that issue. The second issue you have is what is called the pin-cushion effect. As you scan the laser over the surface of the rotating polygon, it will tend to modulate the length of the scanline making the picture look like a pin cushion. I had a way to fix this in the modulation controller - can't talk about HOW to fix it ;-) Just know that is a pretty big problem to overcome.
Once you have a method to overcome the pin-cushion effect, then you need to have to have a way to align the TVs in production (another REAL headache I didn't come up with a solution for..but then we only got to the prototype stage so didn't have to face that issue.)
Finally - there is the issue of NOISE. Rotating mirrors can be REALLY loud. Our prototype sounded like a jet engine when we spooled up the motors. The precision optics are also expensive. The mechanical engineers believed they could build a much quieter mirror assembly - maybe with air bearings.
So there are a lot of real - practical - tough design problems with this approach.
Finally - I expect it to be a relatively BIG TV.
It's a neat technology - but I don't believe there is any market for it.
You're right about CD's always having contained this type of ECC mechanism. For that matter you will see this type of ECC in Radio based communications infrastructure and data that gets written to Hard disks too! In other words - all modern data storage devices (except maybe Flash..) contain ECC mechanisms that allow burst error detection and correction.
So now we're talking about being doubly redundant. Put ECC on the ECC? I'm not sure that helps.
Consider - if a bit twiddles on a magnetic domain. It will be found and corrected by the codes that are already protecting the bit when the bit is next accessed. This is hardware functionality. What good does expanding the size of your data do by being redundant with the ECC codes? It makes more sense to actually increase the size of your ECC fields within the hardware mechanism to handle larger burst errors. It certainly is more efficient with storage anyway.
There IS a point where the media can be so damaged that the data can't be retrieved. Your errors exceed the number of bits you are capable of correcting. Why does anyone believe the doubly redundant data is going to be any better? It has the same correction limits as the original algorithms...and likely got compromised along with the hardware ECC.
I don't see the point.
Great move - now you guys are going to have the Copyright Police after you!
The term "Netbook" is copyrighted by Psion Teklogix,... just ask them, they'll tell you! ;-)
Why would you choose a term that is already means a piece of hardware, and is copyrighted already to boot??
Thought I would take a look at the local transit system and see if they had similar restrictions.
http://www.bart.gov/siteinfo/copyright.aspx
Sure seems like it!
"Copyright
All content on the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) website (http://www.bart.gov) including the collection, arrangement, assembly and presentation of pages and all logos, maps, text, images, feeds and databases are the property of BART or its content suppliers and are protected by copyright laws.
You may not use the BART logo, the BART map or any other content from the BART website without express written permission in advance from BART."
Yep -
Rule 1: She is always right, you are always wrong.
Just simply say "Yes dear" and move on.
Rule 2: See Rule 1
Rule 3: How did you get here??? Go back to Rule 1 NOW!
Gee - last I heard - you couldn't copyright a database. Further, unless he specifically provided for it in his contract up front, work done for hire belongs to he who pays. If you under-price your services, that isn't the cities fault.
Finally, what about the guy who thought he was HELPING the city and county of SF by not giving the other admins the passwords. They locked his butt up. SF doesn't play nice when under pressure.
I've been in the industry as a chip designer since 1995 (board designer for 15 years before that..) I learned Verilog in about 2 days because I knew C thoroughly. My experience applies to someone who is already a designer - which isn't the case here.
I also know that there are some limitations of the original definition of VHDL that make it a pain to use. The strong typing gets in the way of getting the logic described. VHDL natively can't do things like signed arithmetic. That's why you have all those IEEE packages! In other words - the language is extensible - but you pay a price in lack of brevity to describe the hardware you're after.
There are features of 1995 Verilog that also are a curse and a god-send. The assumption that any undefined term is automatically a wire can save you lots of trouble in the creation of the design or bite you in the posterior (where a strongly typed language would save you from yourself.) So Verilog takes on the original K&R attitude of the programmer being smarter than the compiler and knowing what he/she is doing.
No come into the current century and we have System Verilog. System Verilog = Verilog + Vera + the best parts of VHDL (things like generate).
Where VHDL and Verilog were lacking for strong verification methodologies (that in truth were developed years after either language came into being...) System Verilog has been updated to handle this job adequately along with the task of describing the hardware.
The real answer is that you have asked one of those religious war questions - just like VI vs Emacs (Obviously VI is better ;-) Let me give you a URL that you can read about a contest that was held at DAC some years ago - http://www.angelfire.com/in/rajesh52/contest.html
I worked for both Yatin and Larry (two of the conspirators in this story) You be the judge of the Verilog/VHDL war.
I also believe there is a very definite geocentric component to these arguments as has been claimed in earlier posts - In the US Verilog is dominant - while in Europe it's VHDL. I can't speak to other continents. ;-)
In my time as a consultant in the field - I've had two projects out of roughly 20 that were VHDL. Now-a-days these tend to be multi-language affairs where we have both VHDL and Verilog mixed together. Modelsim, and the Cadence offerings handle this pretty transparently (can't speak to the Synopsys tools - haven't used them in better than a decade at this point.)
As another data point - the vast majority of reusable IP that I've seen was done in Verilog. (This may be due to the geographic component - mostly US companies.. ARM being the exception - but everything I see from them is primarily in Verilog... ;-)
Okay - that's lots of data as to what you should do - I would think you should concentrate on teaching about the synthesis subset, proper digital design AND how to write verification environments before they ever even WORRY about FPGAs. What I've seen are a lot of non-designers getting into FPGA design - and they are clueless about things like clock domain crossing and testing the design in simulation BEFORE they go to the FPGA. The old 90/10 rule applies equally here. Do the homework on the design FIRST with simulation before you try to debug every little problem when it's been realized in hardware as an FPGA. I would imagine that students who are trying to become designers are going to suffer the same pitfalls if not shown the RIGHT way to do things.
Hope this gives you some data. In the long run - whether you use Verilog, VHDL or better yet - System Verilog doesn't matter so much as teaching the proper design and verification methodologies!
I have a little bit of real-life experience dealing with an FCC engineer while he was hunting a suspected illegal transmitter. I was helping him locate it.
Basic story - someone had set up a cross-band repeater with it's output on 2m running about 100W. The main purpose of this thing was to act as a remote phone. The output was right in the middle of the 2m Satellite downlink band. The system would turn on intermittently, and he would talk to his girlfriend about Olive oil parties and such.
We found his input frequency and figured out how he turned the thing on and off.
FCC came down to track it - they asked us to turn it on for 30 seconds at a time. They took three readings to find the guy! The last reading was "which antenna!" They are VERY good at what they do. Turns out the guy DID have a license, and he was sited for no ID (which was pretty minimal..) He was later confronted about his activities personally and embarrassed into ceasing same. The fact that he was screwing up satellite operations AND a near by repeater he didn't know existed helped in that cause.
Anyway - to make this relevant. The FCC never went into his house. However, they DID confront him at his place of work to site him. (not sure how this occurred..)
As a Ham - they DO have the right to demand to enter my premises to inspect the radio gear. If I deny them access - they can take away the license. So it's a balancing act. If I want to keep the license I let them in. They won't be bringing cops to the door.
Someone has his funny-bone permanently out of joint.
This was something like the fourth post too when it was originally contributed... so the "redundant" mod probably wasn't really fair. - but it is /.
This sounds like the most useless research I've ever heard of. Don't these guys know that Incandescent light bulbs are going to be illegal after 2012? I mean - what is the point? They're not going to be able to sell the darn thing.
Now - if they were figuring out a way to make a Compact Florescent lamp (CFL) without Mercury - now that would be a hot seller!
You folks were up in arms about the loss of Privacy when the Bush administration was trying to spy on Terrorists calling into the country? Here you have a Democrat congress and a Democrat President who are going to be snooping into EVERYONE's business - let's have a little more energy - or one might think all the previous belly-aching about privacy was really just partisan nonsense????
"CO2 is a known greenhouse gas"
Well so is H2O and there is a substantially larger amount of H2O in the atmosphere! Further, the range of frequencies that H2O contributes to warming is far greater than CO2.
Explain then why Algore shows a plot of CO2 versus temperature derived from Ice cores and INCORRECTLY claims that CO2 Leads the temperature. If you LOOK at the REAL curve you'll find that for most of the data period (600 thousand years or so) CO2 LAGS temperature rise. (Which makes sense- it gets warmer, more life around the globe..)
That is another problem with your argument. You limit yourself to "recorded" history. That is only a 5000 year span. Even Algore goes for 600 thousand years or so - and in that period of time the amount of time we've had equivalent CO2 in the atmosphere before.
Gee - we're don't agree - that means there is no concensus. There are plenty of scientists in the field who disagree. There is nothing settled about it.
Saying it's settled is just stupid!
Lastly - starting out your argument complaining about my spelling just an attempt to belittle my points without any facts.
I have to agree with you (and Dyson). Al Gore looses his argument as soon as he says that a concensus has been reached. Science simply doesn't work that way! Then he follows up with "the discussions are over." No they are not. Real science is a process of ALWAYS questioning your theories and assumptions and going where the evidence leads.
There is some evidence that there is some heating. The evidence that it is caused by CO2 or is man-made is tenuous at best! Depending on computer models that are not historically consitant is also ludicrous. All you really need to do is look at the prediction results for a Hurricane track. They use 10-15 different models and get that many different results. Usually as they show tracks taking off from Cuba - the run anywhere from the Yucatan to curling around and hitting Florida - and this for 3-4 days out!
Further - a lot of the data that they use for their arguments of warming are things like the temperature readings in the US - where it has been proven that a goodly chunk of these numbers are biased by Urbanization, but the numbers haven't been corrected for this affect!
Remember the announcement that 1998 was the warmest year of the century -well it turns out that these biases through them off. !934 or there abouts where (remember the great dust bowl???) 1998 was one of the 10 hotest in the century, but not the worst. Further - we've been having a cooling trend for nearly 10 years now! How does that jive with global warming?
You probably believe that 9/11 was an inside job too!
What the President was referring to when said that is family was a 45 second commute away was that when Obama might feel overwhelmed then his support system, i.e. his family was an EASY 45 second commute away.
Note the "EASY" emphasis was mine. Bush said neither tough or easy from what I remember him saying. Whoops - I actually watched the discussion live. What I'm saying above was the context of the comment.
Bush was also saying that at some point - the size of the responsibilities of the office of the Presidency would hit Obama emotionally.
Take a deep breath -then crawl back under your tin hat.