Yep. Well, except for the nude part. And the jaibait part.
An ordinary photo of a fully clothed married 17 year old involved in a routine public soccer game is criminal "child porn" if the court interprets the image as sexually suggestive and deems it to lack "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value".
Actually I'm not even quite sure if there is any upper age limit on "child porn". There was a big fuss over the difficulty of getting convictions when the people in the photos were unidentified and they ages could not be absolutely established. They drafted some legislation to saying something like "or appearing to be under 18". The law explicitly would allow prosecuting people for "child porn" involving ADULT actors. I'm not sure if that law is currently on the books or if it was struck down or whatever happened with it, but I definitely do recall a big fuss over it.
blue-violet pulse semiconductor lasers,' is believed to be capable of holding more than 20 times the information of current Blu-ray technology
As you go from infra-red to red to blue to violet and beyond, the wavelength of the light gets shorter (smaller). The smaller wavelength allows you to read and write smaller bits on the disk. It's like printing a book with smaller letters. If the letters are half the size then you have twice as many letters on each row of text, and half the hight letters means twice as many rows on a page. If the letters are half the size you actually get FOUR times as much text on each page.
The data you can store doesn't just increase with the color of the laser, the amount you can store increases with the square of the color of the laser. You can store far more data as you move from red lasers to green lasers to blue lasers and now to this blue-violet laser. This blue-violet laser can store 20 times as much data as a blu-ray disk, meaning many hours of video on a disk.
It's easy to look forwards where the technology is going. And after violet light comes ultraviolet light with an even smaller wavelength. Ultraviolet lasers would mean disks that could hold probably a month of non-stop video. You could store (and sell) pretty much an entire video rental store's inventory on a single DVD-style disk. A plastic disk witch cost pennies to manufacture. Just think about that. Every movie ever made in one box, on just a couple of cheap plastic disks.
And of course after ultraviolet comes X-rays. By my calculations using X-ray lasers would result in the disks holding more video than could be watched during a viewer's entire lifetime. Rimshot: Ba-Dum Dum!
As others have noted buckyballs are a significant component of common soot. They form naturally in almost any high temperature carbon vapor. The surprising thing is that they had been overlooked by scientists for so long.
Apparently there are no lab conditions on earth that are not duplicated somewhere else in the universe.
Actually there is a pretty easy example of conditions that are not duplicated anywhere in the universe (except perhaps within some alien scientist's lab). Science experiments can't even begin to compete with the natural universe on the high end, the bigger hotter faster high energy stuff. However in the laboratory we have nature beat cold in.... cold. Space is filled with thermal radiation from the big bang. This radiation has a temperature of about 2.7 degrees above absolute zero and it constantly shines from all directions. An object floating in the deepest emptiest intergalactic space will not cool below 2.7 degrees. In fact any object colder than that would be soon be warmed to at least 2.7 degrees because of the thermal radiation from every direction in space.
A expanding gas cloud in space can cool below that temperature because a gas cools as it expands, but that cooling won't go very far. Background thermal radiation will shine into the expanding gas and quickly warm things back up.
In the laboratory we can actively cool stuff. We have gotten temperatures down to a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. We are pretty dang certain that these conditions have never existed in the history of the universe, unless some alien science lab beat us to it. At these temperatures you can achieve an entirely new state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate.
A superfluid (sort of a liquid equivalent of a superconductor) is another example state of matter that has probably never existed outside a lab. Helium becomes a superfluid at about 2.1 degrees above zero. Expanding gaseous nebulae are known to cool below this temperature, however they would never have the pressure to maintain a fluid in the near vacuum of space.
I agree with the major points of your post, but one sentence in particular caught my attention for being factually false.
There is no such thing as illegal information in the US.
I briefly considered the DMCA, it comes close, but technically it only makes it illegal to communicate (a.k.a. "traffic") certain information.
However there is at least one category where information itself is illegal. An image which is interpreted as sexually suggestive, of a person under the age of 18, and which "lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value". The image itself is illegal. The series of numbers making up the image file are illegal.
I still don't understand the prevention of reuse part.
To make things simple we will imagine the system only has a single coin.
The first step is that I generate an RSA key. For those who don't know how public key crypto works, imagine I make up a public "name" for myself, and I have a secret crypto key linked to that public name. This is anonymous because I can just make up new RSA public names for myself at will. The important part is that only I know the secret RSA key for any public RSA name that I make up.
When a BitCoin is born it has a number. Lets say it's coin number 1. The coin's number is put into the database along with my RSA public name. This makes me the owner of the coin.
Lets say you try to spend my coin. You send a public message saying you are giving coin number 1 to Bob. Bob, or anyone else, can look up coin 1 in the database and see the owner's RSA name. In order to give away a coin you need to prove you know the secret RSA key for that name. You don't know the key, so everyone can see that your message trying spending the coin is bogus. Everyone will simply ignore your message spending that coin.
Lets say I want to give you the coin. You make up an RSA public name and save your secret key. I write a massage naming coin 1 and naming your RSA name as the new owner. I also use my secret key to sign that message. Anyone with a copy of the database then looks up coin 1, checks the RSA public name listed for that coin, and checks that the secret key I used in that message matches. They then log that valid message in the database, and they store your RSA name as the current owner of the coin.
So the first important thing is that anyone can examine the public records and check the validity of each logged transaction. The only valid transaction is one from the owner of a coin sending a message to give away that coin. No one can attack a coin that he doesn't own because he doesn't know the secret key for the RSA name listed for that coin. The only attack we have to worry about is a valid coin owner sending two different messages giving that coin to two different people.
If you are a member of the P2P network and you hear two messages from a logged coin owner trying to give that coin away twice, it's pretty simple. Adam owns coin 1. Adam sends a message saying to give the coin to Bob, and Adam sends a message saying give the coin to Charlie. You see that the first message is valid and you log the transfer and you log Bob new owner. Now you receive the second message from Adam trying to give that coin to Charlie. This time when you look up coin 1 you'll find Bob's name listed. You simply reject the second invalid double-spend message from Adam.
Anyone can jump into the system at any time and they verify for themselves the validity of all information they are being given. However there are two additional requirements for this to work. First you need to be able to verify that you are being given a *complete* record of messages. If one of the transfer messages is left out of the log you get then you would have no way to invalidate a second transfer message for that same money. Secondly you need a way to verify the order of transfer messages.
A hash can be used to take a snapshot of the current database of coin owners and of the transfers that led up to that picture. New transfer messages can be added after that snapshot, but the snapshot itself proves an order of history. If you know a hash then you can prove you are being given a full snapshot, and you know that all messages in that snapshot did exists at that point in history, and than any additional transfer messages listed were added after the snapshot was taken.
A snapshot also includes the hash of the prior snapshot within it. So if you have a snapshot hash then you can verify for yourself the entire history of snapshots leading up to it. Older messages are buried under more layers of snapshots.
If I want to cheat I need to erase one of my old spend messages. I need take a fake snaps
First, the only gain an attacker can get by doing that is the ability to re-spend coins that they themselves had, and which they spent, during that particular timestamp period (timestamps are approximately once every ten minutes I believe). Next, in order to respend that BitCoin you would have to use that technique to "erase" the transaction from the first time you spend that money, and the person you spent it to would rapidly find out. Depending upon the nature of that first transaction they would obviously (if possible) terminate the service or delivery of whatever you bought, and of course do their best to expose you. The duplicate chains floating around would document what was going on. Conflicting chains would send up instant red flags across the network, and the actual real-world timestamps when those chains were seen across the network would expose the fraudulent ones.
However there is a fascinating reason why someone with that much computing power wouldn't want to commit that attack. The more computing power you feed into the P2P network the more VALID BitCoins you generate for yourself. If you had so much computing power that you made up more than half of the power of the P2P network it means you would in fact be generating more than 50% of the money in the economy. The valid money you would generate as an honest participant will likely outweigh the value of attacking it. In any case the profit of such a powerful honest participant is certainly easier and safer than any questionable marginal gains you might hope for as an attacker.
Why bother with schemes to commit fraud when you have the power to print legitimate money?
It sounds like this might be another step forward for self replicating 3D printers. The best 3D printers print all of the plastic components to produce more 3D printers, but they are not yet able to print some of the necessary electrical components.
Of course my "easy!" comment was directed to how trivially easy it is to predict the general temperature change between August and December, and that it is also trivially easy to predict that increasing CO2 will produce a general temperature increase. I was just showing that Anthropogenic Global Warming is fundamentally an easily established fact. And we fully agree of course that it's much more complicated to make more detailed predictions. Unfortunately the Denialists first need to be dragged kicking and screaming to the point that science even CAN show it exists at all.
My understanding is that the tree ring data did not successfully predict the temperatures of the recent times [nature.com], but that once the tree ring data got into recent years, they simply stopped using the tree ring data.
I just don't understand how this is acceptable in any way.
It's simple. Lets say you're a police forensic scientist following a trail of blood drops. And then you spill your lunch on some of the blood drops near the end of the trail. Well, then obviously it is still valid to preform any and all tests on the older drops, and of course you ignore any results from the contaminated drops at the end of the trail.
It's simple, the more modern data is contaminated. We know it's contaminated. And we know how and why it is contaminated. *WE* contaminated it. If you do a chemical analysis of modern tree rings you will find, for example, faint traces of lead contamination. The primary source of lead contamination was from out use of leaded gasoline. Known, indisputable, human caused pollution contamination. However I don't think it's the lead in particular that's causing the problem. The primary pollution issue appears to be aerosols and particulates which scatter sunlight. Other pollutants such as nitrogen/sulfur compounds may also be involved by acidifying rain. The pollution effect on the trees is fairly small, but it slightly slows growth. Both cooler temperatures and pollution have the same effect of slowing growth. The tree rings would recored a combined signal of temperature PLUS pollution. Prior to about 1960 pollution levels were too low to make a meaningful impact on the temperature record. Post-1960ish you would obviously see a false cooling signal as pollution increased.
the weatherman can't predict the weather tomorrow and that we're talking about prediction not 5 years out but 20 years and further.
Well duh, short term specific whether is insanely hard to predict. However long term climate trends are EASY to predict!
I predict that the average climate in the US will undergo a large and relatively steady cooling trend from August to December.
See how easy it is? You completely ignore noisy random weather fluctuations and look at physical principles driving the underlying average temperatures. If you look at the physical principal of the seasonal tilt of earth's orbit you can make an indisputable prediction of future average temperature changes. You can predict those average changes over time with absolute certainty and with reasonably high precision.
If you look at the simple physics of infrared emission and adsorption you have the absolutely indisputable fact that increasing CO2 levels will increase the "greenhouse" trapping of thermal radiation. The current natural atmospheric greenhouse effect is about 50 degrees F. Increasing CO2 levels have the effect of trapping more heat. That is simple indisputable physics.
The fact that human increases in CO2 will have a direct increased heat trapping effect is indisputable. I.E. Anthropogenic Global Warming is a fact. There are fairly simply scientific calculations for the amount of heat trapping for any given CO2 level. There are a number of complexities in trying to predict the vast range of secondary effects, and those secondary effects will in turn influence the climate. There absolutely is a significant uncertainty range in future average temperature increases due to those complexities. However that does not alter the fact that the CO2 heat trapping effect is indisputable basic physics. Expert scientists have come to a fairly confident range on the temperature increase. It is indeed possible that they missed some of the complexities and the actual increase will be smaller than they predicted, and it is equally possible that they missed some of the complexities and the actual increase will be larger than they predicted. However trying to deny the basic effect itself is denialism-of-basic-physics. The effect is real and indisputable. Only the size of the effect and the complex secondary interactions are increasingly uncertain as you go further forward in time. If the CO2 heat trapping melts the ice caps faster than predicted then the temperature increase will be faster than predicted due the loss of sunlight-reflecting ice. If the melt slower than predicted than the temperature increase will be slower. If the CO2 heat trapping affects ocean circulation patterns then there can be fairly radical (and potentially opposite) secondary increases or decreases to US and European temperatures and rainfall patterns. In fact there is strong geological evidence that past high points in global temperatures produced severe declines in rainfall for the western US.
The effect is indisputably real. Predicting the long term average trend is easy. Predicting details of secondary interactions is extremely hard.
Especially since Co2 is immaterial to global warming since the primary mediator of heat in the atmosphere... wait for it... is WATER!
Closing open windows is immaterial to temperature inside a house because the primary mediator for heat in a house... wait for it... is WALLS!
There is indeed a huge quantity of water vapor in the atmosphere, and it is indeed the gas with the single largest impact on trapping thermal radiation. However there are two key points. The first point is that the existing warming effect is 50 degrees F. So yes water is the "primary mediator" towards the existing 50 degree greenhouse effect. Without water and other natural natural level greenhouse gases the earth would be 50 degrees colder than current temperatures. Without the natural existing 50 degree greenhouse effect most of the planet would be covered in ice. The second key point is that there are different frequencies of thermal radiation, like different colors of light. At certain "colors" of heat radiation water is completely "black". The vast quantity of water vapor traps that portion of heat energy almost completely. Increasing or decreasing the amount of water vapor has little effect because the quantity of water vapor already traps that heat energy almost completely. At those frequencies the water vapor acts like the walls of a house. However at other frequencies, other "colors" of thermal radiation, water vapor is completely transparent to heat energy. Those frequencies are like holes in the walls, they are like open windows in the walls. Heat energy does freely escape and allow the earth to cool back down at those frequencies, through those open windows. This issue is that CO2 is "black" at those frequencies. Dumping CO2 into the atmosphere covers up those "open windows" that exist in H20. Dumping CO2 into the atmosphere is like closing the windows in a house and nailing an extra plywood wall over them.
So yes H20 is the gas with the single largest greenhouse effect, and that effect is already 50 degrees. H20 has "open windows" and H2O has zero ability to trap heat at certain frequencies. Dumping CO2 into the atmosphere and closing those open windows WILL have a very real effect increasing the greenhouse warming several degrees about the existing 50 degree greenhouse warming.
This is basic physics. There is absolutely no scientific dispute over the physics. There is absolutely no scientific dispute that increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere does have the effect of trapping heat in this manner. None. This Anthropogenic Global Warming effect is absolutely indisputable basic physics. This effect absolutely is significant because CO2 is trapping frequencies of thermal radiation that water doesn't affect at all.
Global Warming is a social controversy and a political controversy. The fundamental facts of Global Warming are not a scientific controversy.
I am open to negotiating a deal with Russia or any other government interested in offering me reasonable terms and a nominal fee in exchange for a copy of Linux source code.
Slashdot Mirror
CP probably includes nude jailbait.
Yep. Well, except for the nude part. And the jaibait part.
An ordinary photo of a fully clothed married 17 year old involved in a routine public soccer game is criminal "child porn" if the court interprets the image as sexually suggestive and deems it to lack "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value".
Actually I'm not even quite sure if there is any upper age limit on "child porn". There was a big fuss over the difficulty of getting convictions when the people in the photos were unidentified and they ages could not be absolutely established. They drafted some legislation to saying something like "or appearing to be under 18". The law explicitly would allow prosecuting people for "child porn" involving ADULT actors. I'm not sure if that law is currently on the books or if it was struck down or whatever happened with it, but I definitely do recall a big fuss over it.
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The police did pull over a suspicious pimped out Escalade, but according to the paperwork the driver wasn't the bank robber they were looking for.
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blue-violet pulse semiconductor lasers,' is believed to be capable of holding more than 20 times the information of current Blu-ray technology
As you go from infra-red to red to blue to violet and beyond, the wavelength of the light gets shorter (smaller). The smaller wavelength allows you to read and write smaller bits on the disk. It's like printing a book with smaller letters. If the letters are half the size then you have twice as many letters on each row of text, and half the hight letters means twice as many rows on a page. If the letters are half the size you actually get FOUR times as much text on each page.
The data you can store doesn't just increase with the color of the laser, the amount you can store increases with the square of the color of the laser. You can store far more data as you move from red lasers to green lasers to blue lasers and now to this blue-violet laser. This blue-violet laser can store 20 times as much data as a blu-ray disk, meaning many hours of video on a disk.
It's easy to look forwards where the technology is going. And after violet light comes ultraviolet light with an even smaller wavelength. Ultraviolet lasers would mean disks that could hold probably a month of non-stop video. You could store (and sell) pretty much an entire video rental store's inventory on a single DVD-style disk. A plastic disk witch cost pennies to manufacture. Just think about that. Every movie ever made in one box, on just a couple of cheap plastic disks.
And of course after ultraviolet comes X-rays. By my calculations using X-ray lasers would result in the disks holding more video than could be watched during a viewer's entire lifetime. Rimshot: Ba-Dum Dum!
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Photons are a great invention.
Shhhhhhh!
You don't want the software-patent-nazis hearing that sort of talk.
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I suggest anyone blowing a vuvuzela be placed in the vacuum of space so we don't have to hear it.
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As others have noted buckyballs are a significant component of common soot. They form naturally in almost any high temperature carbon vapor. The surprising thing is that they had been overlooked by scientists for so long.
Apparently there are no lab conditions on earth that are not duplicated somewhere else in the universe.
Actually there is a pretty easy example of conditions that are not duplicated anywhere in the universe (except perhaps within some alien scientist's lab). Science experiments can't even begin to compete with the natural universe on the high end, the bigger hotter faster high energy stuff. However in the laboratory we have nature beat cold in.... cold. Space is filled with thermal radiation from the big bang. This radiation has a temperature of about 2.7 degrees above absolute zero and it constantly shines from all directions. An object floating in the deepest emptiest intergalactic space will not cool below 2.7 degrees. In fact any object colder than that would be soon be warmed to at least 2.7 degrees because of the thermal radiation from every direction in space.
A expanding gas cloud in space can cool below that temperature because a gas cools as it expands, but that cooling won't go very far. Background thermal radiation will shine into the expanding gas and quickly warm things back up.
In the laboratory we can actively cool stuff. We have gotten temperatures down to a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. We are pretty dang certain that these conditions have never existed in the history of the universe, unless some alien science lab beat us to it. At these temperatures you can achieve an entirely new state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate.
A superfluid (sort of a liquid equivalent of a superconductor) is another example state of matter that has probably never existed outside a lab. Helium becomes a superfluid at about 2.1 degrees above zero. Expanding gaseous nebulae are known to cool below this temperature, however they would never have the pressure to maintain a fluid in the near vacuum of space.
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Have you released your decompression algorithm under the GPL?
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daemonc (145175)
I just realized there is no way to moderate you as "-1 wrong"
Greetings! Welcome to Slashdot!
A bit of belated advice, if you're going to buy a user ID on eBay you really shouldn't waste your money on anything with more than 4 digits.
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I agree with the major points of your post, but one sentence in particular caught my attention for being factually false.
There is no such thing as illegal information in the US.
I briefly considered the DMCA, it comes close, but technically it only makes it illegal to communicate (a.k.a. "traffic") certain information.
However there is at least one category where information itself is illegal. An image which is interpreted as sexually suggestive, of a person under the age of 18, and which "lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value". The image itself is illegal. The series of numbers making up the image file are illegal.
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Minor correction: BitCoin is based on EC-DSA, not RSA as I described. That detail does not make any real difference in how things work.
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I still don't understand the prevention of reuse part.
To make things simple we will imagine the system only has a single coin.
The first step is that I generate an RSA key. For those who don't know how public key crypto works, imagine I make up a public "name" for myself, and I have a secret crypto key linked to that public name. This is anonymous because I can just make up new RSA public names for myself at will. The important part is that only I know the secret RSA key for any public RSA name that I make up.
When a BitCoin is born it has a number. Lets say it's coin number 1. The coin's number is put into the database along with my RSA public name. This makes me the owner of the coin.
Lets say you try to spend my coin. You send a public message saying you are giving coin number 1 to Bob. Bob, or anyone else, can look up coin 1 in the database and see the owner's RSA name. In order to give away a coin you need to prove you know the secret RSA key for that name. You don't know the key, so everyone can see that your message trying spending the coin is bogus. Everyone will simply ignore your message spending that coin.
Lets say I want to give you the coin. You make up an RSA public name and save your secret key. I write a massage naming coin 1 and naming your RSA name as the new owner. I also use my secret key to sign that message. Anyone with a copy of the database then looks up coin 1, checks the RSA public name listed for that coin, and checks that the secret key I used in that message matches. They then log that valid message in the database, and they store your RSA name as the current owner of the coin.
So the first important thing is that anyone can examine the public records and check the validity of each logged transaction. The only valid transaction is one from the owner of a coin sending a message to give away that coin. No one can attack a coin that he doesn't own because he doesn't know the secret key for the RSA name listed for that coin. The only attack we have to worry about is a valid coin owner sending two different messages giving that coin to two different people.
If you are a member of the P2P network and you hear two messages from a logged coin owner trying to give that coin away twice, it's pretty simple. Adam owns coin 1. Adam sends a message saying to give the coin to Bob, and Adam sends a message saying give the coin to Charlie. You see that the first message is valid and you log the transfer and you log Bob new owner. Now you receive the second message from Adam trying to give that coin to Charlie. This time when you look up coin 1 you'll find Bob's name listed. You simply reject the second invalid double-spend message from Adam.
Anyone can jump into the system at any time and they verify for themselves the validity of all information they are being given. However there are two additional requirements for this to work. First you need to be able to verify that you are being given a *complete* record of messages. If one of the transfer messages is left out of the log you get then you would have no way to invalidate a second transfer message for that same money. Secondly you need a way to verify the order of transfer messages.
A hash can be used to take a snapshot of the current database of coin owners and of the transfers that led up to that picture. New transfer messages can be added after that snapshot, but the snapshot itself proves an order of history. If you know a hash then you can prove you are being given a full snapshot, and you know that all messages in that snapshot did exists at that point in history, and than any additional transfer messages listed were added after the snapshot was taken.
A snapshot also includes the hash of the prior snapshot within it. So if you have a snapshot hash then you can verify for yourself the entire history of snapshots leading up to it. Older messages are buried under more layers of snapshots.
If I want to cheat I need to erase one of my old spend messages. I need take a fake snaps
You overlook some details.
First, the only gain an attacker can get by doing that is the ability to re-spend coins that they themselves had, and which they spent, during that particular timestamp period (timestamps are approximately once every ten minutes I believe). Next, in order to respend that BitCoin you would have to use that technique to "erase" the transaction from the first time you spend that money, and the person you spent it to would rapidly find out. Depending upon the nature of that first transaction they would obviously (if possible) terminate the service or delivery of whatever you bought, and of course do their best to expose you. The duplicate chains floating around would document what was going on. Conflicting chains would send up instant red flags across the network, and the actual real-world timestamps when those chains were seen across the network would expose the fraudulent ones.
However there is a fascinating reason why someone with that much computing power wouldn't want to commit that attack. The more computing power you feed into the P2P network the more VALID BitCoins you generate for yourself. If you had so much computing power that you made up more than half of the power of the P2P network it means you would in fact be generating more than 50% of the money in the economy. The valid money you would generate as an honest participant will likely outweigh the value of attacking it. In any case the profit of such a powerful honest participant is certainly easier and safer than any questionable marginal gains you might hope for as an attacker.
Why bother with schemes to commit fraud when you have the power to print legitimate money?
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ePenny? LOLZ
It's called a BitCoin.
And yes, I'll get off your lawn now grampa.
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It sounds like this might be another step forward for self replicating 3D printers. The best 3D printers print all of the plastic components to produce more 3D printers, but they are not yet able to print some of the necessary electrical components.
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They forgot "weapons of mass destruction" and "baby-cooking recipes".
Wow, the site was infested with Muslims and Atheists? Damn! No wonder they took it down.
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Moral of the story:
When you get the moron asshat out of power things better without the world turning into a magical candyland.
Thanks for your rightwing input, it was oh so insightful and oh so helpful.
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Of course my "easy!" comment was directed to how trivially easy it is to predict the general temperature change between August and December, and that it is also trivially easy to predict that increasing CO2 will produce a general temperature increase. I was just showing that Anthropogenic Global Warming is fundamentally an easily established fact. And we fully agree of course that it's much more complicated to make more detailed predictions. Unfortunately the Denialists first need to be dragged kicking and screaming to the point that science even CAN show it exists at all.
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1. Set up facebook-like site with really good privacy rules.
2. Let site grow with lots of safe personal details
3. ???Don't go bankrupt???
4. PROFIT!
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That's like the car Hitler's analogy would have driven.
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My understanding is that the tree ring data did not successfully predict the temperatures of the recent times [nature.com], but that once the tree ring data got into recent years, they simply stopped using the tree ring data.
I just don't understand how this is acceptable in any way.
It's simple. Lets say you're a police forensic scientist following a trail of blood drops. And then you spill your lunch on some of the blood drops near the end of the trail. Well, then obviously it is still valid to preform any and all tests on the older drops, and of course you ignore any results from the contaminated drops at the end of the trail.
It's simple, the more modern data is contaminated. We know it's contaminated. And we know how and why it is contaminated. *WE* contaminated it. If you do a chemical analysis of modern tree rings you will find, for example, faint traces of lead contamination. The primary source of lead contamination was from out use of leaded gasoline. Known, indisputable, human caused pollution contamination. However I don't think it's the lead in particular that's causing the problem. The primary pollution issue appears to be aerosols and particulates which scatter sunlight. Other pollutants such as nitrogen/sulfur compounds may also be involved by acidifying rain. The pollution effect on the trees is fairly small, but it slightly slows growth. Both cooler temperatures and pollution have the same effect of slowing growth. The tree rings would recored a combined signal of temperature PLUS pollution. Prior to about 1960 pollution levels were too low to make a meaningful impact on the temperature record. Post-1960ish you would obviously see a false cooling signal as pollution increased.
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the weatherman can't predict the weather tomorrow and that we're talking about prediction not 5 years out but 20 years and further.
Well duh, short term specific whether is insanely hard to predict.
However long term climate trends are EASY to predict!
I predict that the average climate in the US will undergo a large and relatively steady cooling trend from August to December.
See how easy it is? You completely ignore noisy random weather fluctuations and look at physical principles driving the underlying average temperatures. If you look at the physical principal of the seasonal tilt of earth's orbit you can make an indisputable prediction of future average temperature changes. You can predict those average changes over time with absolute certainty and with reasonably high precision.
If you look at the simple physics of infrared emission and adsorption you have the absolutely indisputable fact that increasing CO2 levels will increase the "greenhouse" trapping of thermal radiation. The current natural atmospheric greenhouse effect is about 50 degrees F. Increasing CO2 levels have the effect of trapping more heat. That is simple indisputable physics.
The fact that human increases in CO2 will have a direct increased heat trapping effect is indisputable. I.E. Anthropogenic Global Warming is a fact. There are fairly simply scientific calculations for the amount of heat trapping for any given CO2 level. There are a number of complexities in trying to predict the vast range of secondary effects, and those secondary effects will in turn influence the climate. There absolutely is a significant uncertainty range in future average temperature increases due to those complexities. However that does not alter the fact that the CO2 heat trapping effect is indisputable basic physics. Expert scientists have come to a fairly confident range on the temperature increase. It is indeed possible that they missed some of the complexities and the actual increase will be smaller than they predicted, and it is equally possible that they missed some of the complexities and the actual increase will be larger than they predicted. However trying to deny the basic effect itself is denialism-of-basic-physics. The effect is real and indisputable. Only the size of the effect and the complex secondary interactions are increasingly uncertain as you go further forward in time. If the CO2 heat trapping melts the ice caps faster than predicted then the temperature increase will be faster than predicted due the loss of sunlight-reflecting ice. If the melt slower than predicted than the temperature increase will be slower. If the CO2 heat trapping affects ocean circulation patterns then there can be fairly radical (and potentially opposite) secondary increases or decreases to US and European temperatures and rainfall patterns. In fact there is strong geological evidence that past high points in global temperatures produced severe declines in rainfall for the western US.
The effect is indisputably real. Predicting the long term average trend is easy. Predicting details of secondary interactions is extremely hard.
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Especially since Co2 is immaterial to global warming since the primary mediator of heat in the atmosphere... wait for it... is WATER!
Closing open windows is immaterial to temperature inside a house because the primary mediator for heat in a house... wait for it... is WALLS!
There is indeed a huge quantity of water vapor in the atmosphere, and it is indeed the gas with the single largest impact on trapping thermal radiation. However there are two key points. The first point is that the existing warming effect is 50 degrees F. So yes water is the "primary mediator" towards the existing 50 degree greenhouse effect. Without water and other natural natural level greenhouse gases the earth would be 50 degrees colder than current temperatures. Without the natural existing 50 degree greenhouse effect most of the planet would be covered in ice. The second key point is that there are different frequencies of thermal radiation, like different colors of light. At certain "colors" of heat radiation water is completely "black". The vast quantity of water vapor traps that portion of heat energy almost completely. Increasing or decreasing the amount of water vapor has little effect because the quantity of water vapor already traps that heat energy almost completely. At those frequencies the water vapor acts like the walls of a house. However at other frequencies, other "colors" of thermal radiation, water vapor is completely transparent to heat energy. Those frequencies are like holes in the walls, they are like open windows in the walls. Heat energy does freely escape and allow the earth to cool back down at those frequencies, through those open windows. This issue is that CO2 is "black" at those frequencies. Dumping CO2 into the atmosphere covers up those "open windows" that exist in H20. Dumping CO2 into the atmosphere is like closing the windows in a house and nailing an extra plywood wall over them.
So yes H20 is the gas with the single largest greenhouse effect, and that effect is already 50 degrees. H20 has "open windows" and H2O has zero ability to trap heat at certain frequencies. Dumping CO2 into the atmosphere and closing those open windows WILL have a very real effect increasing the greenhouse warming several degrees about the existing 50 degree greenhouse warming.
This is basic physics. There is absolutely no scientific dispute over the physics. There is absolutely no scientific dispute that increasing CO2 levels in the atmosphere does have the effect of trapping heat in this manner. None. This Anthropogenic Global Warming effect is absolutely indisputable basic physics. This effect absolutely is significant because CO2 is trapping frequencies of thermal radiation that water doesn't affect at all.
Global Warming is a social controversy and a political controversy. The fundamental facts of Global Warming are not a scientific controversy.
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Tax avoidance through expense maximization and income minimization
Yeah, you would not believe the amount of taxes I avoid paying through income minimization.
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I am open to negotiating a deal with Russia or any other government interested in offering me reasonable terms and a nominal fee in exchange for a copy of Linux source code.
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It's the coordinates of Barack Hussein Obama's place of birth.
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