I believe the point would be that you'd have to be a total moron to believe anything the FBI says. Anything. In this case these fascist fucks may have just realized that they have shut down a major information channel by showing the whole world that the iPhone encryption is ineffective. Who is going to use it now for any sort of private communication? Someone may have finally realized how dumb it was to advertise their ability to do this to the whole world. So they're backpedaling a bit now.
How do you know who he voted for? Even if he did vote for the current government his choosing not to vote or to vote say Libertarian or Green or whatever would not have changed the outcome. It would have made no difference at all.
Time for programmers to once again enthusiastically embrace assembly language. The age of depending on ever faster hardware as an excuse for fast/lazy/elegant programming is about to end.
As CPUs slow to a crawl and soon come screeching to a...pause I'm thinking that water cooling and phase change cooling is going to get a boost. People can finally justify spending money--real money on sophisticated cooling systems. I already have a high end water cooling setup that I haven't used for years, but I've never seriously considered making the jump to phase change..until now.
As far as AGW goes, there is a vast amount of raw evidence and published papers to look through
As far as the 'raw evidence' perhaps you could link to just a single example. Since the data is so overwhelming. As for reading papers excuse me if I don't find a lot of interest in climate scientists preaching to the choir of other true believers. They tend to treat AGW as if it is fully settled.
You don't tend to find a lot of religious people arguing with each other over whether their beloved god really exists. Their arguments are more about disagreements about the details about what their god actually wants. For climate scientists what they generally want represents a political agenda of some kind.
Through burning fossil fuels and making cement and cutting down trees and other land clearing we are increasing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere by generally around 2ppm per year resulting in an increase from 280ppm (pre-industrial 19th century) to around 403ppm now.
This increased level of CO2 has probably caused a temperature increase of around 0.8 celsuis since the 19th century and will very likely continue to raise temperatures by similar amounts each century. Although trying to figure out how much it will raise temperature is very difficult to determine. Maybe even impossible. If the same rate of increase is assumed then our planet would be around 8 degrees celsuis warmer than it is now in 1000 years. We have no evidence that a planet 8c warmer than it is now would be incompatible with human life. In fact there have been warmer times in the past where mammals not so different from us survived. In the past there have been times (Jurassic for instance) when CO2 has been much higher than it is now (7000ppm) and temperatures were indeed higher at that time and the world was full of life, including mammalian life. Studying those times with higher levels of CO2 can provide actual evidence of its effects and can represent actual science instead of computer program simulation pseudo-science and true believer AGW-alarmist-as-religion.
AFAIK there simply is no other scientific way to predict how much our gradual increasing of CO2 in the atmosphere will raise global temperature over the next millennium. Since we are just guessing I'd argue for simply extending the observed pattern we have seen in the past century of around 2ppm more CO2 per year or 3300 more years before we reach Jurassic levels of CO2 which were 100% compatible with mammalian life. Not the end of the world. Still if the observed temperature rise of 0.8 celsuis in just over a century continues it would result in a 24 degree c increase in 3000 years. That would be a very warm planet by human standards. It would probably be a good idea to phase out fossil fuels in no more than 1000 years. So we probably have some time, but eventually we will need to transition to mostly nuclear (fission and/or fusion) power and/or some other form of electric power generation we are unaware of now.
You mean those highly speculative and completely unproven effects generated by simplistic (as compared to the immense complexity of an actual planet) computer programs? GIGO. I think we as a species should make decisions based on real science and not pseudo-science disguised as real science because the fake science happens on a computer.
More like electric trains and even electric big rig trucks powered by an overhead network of high voltage wires on the highways and by fuel cells or more overhead wires on secondary roads. The electricity could be generated by nuclear power plants.
2) Barring the invention of commercially viable electrical generation from fusion (or some similar massive source of energy), hydrocarbons are pretty much it for providing the majority of humanity's energy, so unless someone at Rockefeller has information that the rest of us do not have...
Actually fission would work too. It would just be a lot more expensive than coal. As in 2-3 times more expensive most likely. IOW it would be fine for rich people but would seriously suck for poor people and poor countries. If you make less than say $400 USD per month you may find you cannot afford to even use electricity if all or nearly all electricity is from a nuclear source. I have noticed that a lot of the AGW alarmists are not poor, at least not by my standard of 'poor'. Their electric bill is not a major portion of their budget.
Very few countries have the expertise and technology to actually build or maintain nuclear reactors. Some are lucky if they can manage to burn coal or oil and manage a reliable electrical grid infrastructure without frequent blackouts. Nevertheless I could picture a country like France with most or all of its power from nuclear fission plants and highways and even secondary roads wired up with either elevated wires or embedded road rails providing nuclear generated electricity to ground vehicles. No need to go back to horse and carriage transportation. As a planet we'd just have to fully embrace nuclear power as the only means we have for long term electricity generation. Fission fuels will eventually get used up as well, but it would take quite a few centuries and hopefully by then we'd have something better to replace it with. Fusion at least would use a different sort of fuel, generally hydrogen isotopes, and would likely extend our ability to generate electricity for eons.
Dealing with aircraft is a bit of a problem though. Maybe some air transportation could be replaced with transoceanic vacuum tunnels (hyperloops) with with maglev trains powered by nuclear generated electricity. I don't think even fuel cells have enough energy density to realistically power commercial aircraft and to the extent it may be possible such craft may be unbearably slow compared to what we are used to now.
Despite the problems and even without the emotionally driven hysterical alarmism so common these days there are very good arguments toward moving away from burning fossil fuels for electricity generation and toward fission combined with electric ground transportation. However these arguments will seem a lot less appealing to those who can barely afford coal generated electricity now.
One other piece of evidence for the rise in CO2 being caused by humans is the ratio of carbon13 to carbon12 in the atmosphere.
Yeah I saw that too. Thanks. The evidence for the CO2 increase being caused by us seems pretty solid. It's the rest that is shaky. As in how much warming will an additional x ppm of CO2 cause. That's what we really need to know and I don't see any way for us to determine that accurately except by waiting to see what happens next. I guess the next best thing would be looking into the past when CO2 levels were as high as 7000ppm and try to see how much that warmed the atmosphere. I don't know if we have methods for plotting temperature vs CO2 with enough accuracy going back so far.
Ok Alarmists. As a denialist I propose a wager. I will bet you that in 100 years the global temperature will have increased by less than 1 degree celsuis and that in 1000 years temperature will have increased by no more than 10 degrees celsuis.
Here is what there is actually evidence for: 1) The rise in CO2 since industrialization is due to human activities: basically burning stuff, making cement, and cutting down (killing) vegetation. Lots of evidence for that. No problem. 2) The earth has warmed by less than 1 degree celsuis since industrialization. The evidence for this isn't as strong and some sources are inconsistent, but there is a significant amount of evidence to support this view.
Maybe there is a causal relationship between the CO2 and the warming. There probably is. To say any more than that you will have to find evidence. Empirical, experimental data which I have not seen presented. Computer simulations are not science. You cannot prove anything with them. You need actual experiments for that and that's fine, because what we are doing is an experiment. Let's all sit back and see what happens.
Well I did a bit more research on the CO2 issue, and I find the evidence convincing enough that the rise in CO2 is caused by humans through combustion, but not due the logic you've just presented. I read that the human contribution to the carbon cycle is less than 4% of the total amount however it seems that the total amount of CO2 in the cycle is generally quite steady except on geologic time scales. So the rise in CO2 levels coinciding with the industrial revolution and rising continuously until now is pretty convincing evidence that we are the cause. It is 'circumstantial' evidence, but it does seem to be by far the most likely cause.
Having said that the question still remains as to how much CO2 is too much. At an increase of say 4ppm per year how long will it take before we start to see a significant warming effect? There have been large variations in CO2 in the past. Do we know how temperatures fluctuated in response to those much larger variations? That would be at least some evidence.
Because, aside from that sort of analysis it seems that the only way to be certain is to wait and see what happens. So far the warming, if it has indeed all been caused by the increase in CO2 levels, does not seem particularly worrisome. Certainly not catastrophic. If it continues at less than 1 degree celsius per century I think we can probably handle that for another millennium by which time we probably wouldn't be still burning coal or oil or natural gas for electricity.
We might not even have any fossil fuels left to burn in as little as a century according to some estimates. We'll have to mostly be using nuclear (ideally fusion) generated electricity and electric ground transportation. In terms of politics I would support a gradual phasing out of oil and natural gas in favor of nuclear or hydro or wind generation in the few places they are appropriate. I think coal, where economically feasible is just too cost effective to abandon without some very clear evidence of immediate harm. Perhaps it could be justified based on other forms of pollution which are easier to show as being harmful. Heavy metals perhaps. Hopefully, given a century or two, one of those miracle improvements to photovoltaic cells will actually make it to market at a reasonable cost.
There are small handful of scientists who question AGW
Most of those scientists also believe in a god. So if we are basing truth on the percentage of scientists who believe in it then I guess God is also real and anyone who doubts it is an irrational, unscientific, nutjob who does not need to be taken seriously, right?
I will never understand people who base their beliefs on popularity contests. I base my beliefs on evidence. Direct empirical evidence. Not computer simulations (gigo) or opinion polls. I will accept that climate warming is linked to human action as soon as evidence shows that. All I have seen so far in terms of evidence is that CO2 is rising and that the temperature of the earth seems to be slowly rising as well. I have not seen any direct evidence connecting the two. We know that higher CO2 levels leads to higher atmospheric temperatures of course, but what we don't know is exactly how much CO2 is required for how much of a rise in temperature on planetary scales. We also don't know if human beings are really the cause of the higher CO2 levels. Maybe we are, but it hasn't been proven beyond any doubt.
Also even if it is proven, and it may be at some point, it does not mean that everyone is going to agree about what if anything should be done about it. There are good arguments for nuclear power generation and highway electrification based on clean nuclear power from one of the newer, safer types of nuclear reactor designs even if it turns out that the amount of CO2 we are currently producing is not warming the climate to a dangerous degree as so many seem to believe at the moment. We are going to run out of fossil fuels eventually anyway and switching to fission (fusion is always 10 years away) power generation may be our only choice. Use of nuclear, hydro, wind, and photovoltaics is inevitable as soon as we run out of things to burn. The only problem with switching to those methods now if it isn't necessary yet is that nuclear, solar, and to a lesser extent wind power all are generally more expensive than coal. So poor people are often left not being able to afford to use much of it. Particularly in countries where almost everyone is poor this can be a big problem.
Standing up for one's morals is commendable, but what are the effects on the employees and on Apple?
Well the most obvious effect on the employees is that the ones with principles will either quit or stay and try to actively sabotage the FBI version of iOS. The rest are unprincipled bootlickers and sociopaths. Does it really have to be more complicated than that?
The FBI just unzipped their fly and whipped out their bright red demon cock. You can either open wide and suck it or you can refuse. I don't know how much you like FBI cock, but no salary is high enough for me to come in every day and suck on that. Most of those employees have enough value in the labor market that they simply don't *need* to suck FBI cock to make a living. Getting the fuck out of there seems like an easy decision to me.
Great posturing, but realistically, no Apple employee is going to quit their job because they had to rsync a source code tree to somewhere off-premises.
I think it's the part about having to work as a slave for the FBI that would get them to quit their job. I simply would refuse to do it. Full stop. If Apple wanted to fire me for that that would be up to them. Not only that but I would actively work to subvert the aims of the FBI in any way I could. If there were a group of employees trying to document all the changes that were made for the backdoor and then release a clean version without those changes online I'd be on *that* team. What's the point of making a lot of money if you have to be a slave actively working against what you believe in? There isn't enough money in the world to compensate me for that. OTOH if Apple wanted to start a cyberwar with the FBI and NSA I'd be so up for that! Was there ever a time when those fascist fucks were even somewhat on our side?
The Constitution does not prevent the Executive from searching citizens.
Where in the constitution does it say the government is allowed to search citizens? Also how is this equivalent to a search? What this is is a violation of the rights of every Apple employee and every Apple shareholder. It's a human rights violation and you don't seriously believe those Libertarian revolutionaries who idealized the ideas of John Locke would be in favor of this sort of 1984-ish Big Brother gets to read everyone's mail bullshit. The government has absolutely no right to do this Let-North-Korea-Show-Us-The-Way every-citizen-is-our-bitch nonsense.
This is going to rock, people! This is why global warming has my full support. Mother Earth has been begging for this for eons and it's time for us to deliver and prove that we are truly badass on a planetary scale. Terraformers who can truly shape the atmospheres of entire planets. Planets the size of the earth are mere toys to us. Little blue marbles in our giant hands. My greatest fear is that it will take too long. I want to see this in my lifetime. This needs to happen NOW. Not in a hundred years. Not in a thousand years. Not even next year. RIGHT NOW. Let's make this happen people! And Mars you motherfucker. You're next. I'm already putting aside as much money as I can for the inevitable canal front property that will be selling at bargain prices in just a few months.
Just because I am 'taught' something does not make it true. I do not believe anything without evidence. Comparing the temperature at which water boils to something as complex as the rate at which fundamental scientific advances are made brings nothing to the discussion at all. Totally irrelevant.
It doesn't take a whole lot of observation to see that just as most humans have a tendency to overestimate their abilities as individuals they also have a tendency to overestimate the ability of our species to make fundamental advances. We really are not nearly as smart as we think we are and our advances have mostly been slight improvements rather than fundamental paradigm shifting breakthroughs. Predictions of the dawn of the technological singularity within our lifetimes are particularly amusing.
>Technological advances have occurred in the most important areas for them to occur.
Important to whom? Maybe all of the advances have occurred in the least important areas. How would you know?
As for the exponential improvements in computer processing power that's pretty funny. There haven't been any significant improvements in the speed of serial information processing in nearly a decade. Yes embarrassingly parallel problems continue to be solved at higher and higher speeds mostly with GPGPUs, but in terms of most algorithms there hasn't been a real need to upgrade a CPU for a long time.
Well I don't find Fermi's paradox to be a particularly compelling idea. There is no Great Silence. It's just an expression of frustration really. Yes it would be nice if our galaxy was teeming with life. It probably isn't. Probably planets with intelligent life capable of building radio telescopes and lasers and pulsed neutrino transmitters are distributed at 1000+ or even 10000+ light year distances making communication, travel, and even discovery quite difficult even for advanced societies.
Maybe there are only something like 40 technological societies in our galaxy with another 100 or even 1000 planets teeming with life but with no intelligent life or with intelligent octopus-like creatures whose lives are mostly lived deep in an ocean and who are just not interested in building radio telescopes.
All the Great Silence and Great Absence indicates is that life in our galaxy is probably not very common and yeah that sucks, but it doesn't mean there is some mysterious force ending every advanced technological society. It doesn't mean that every such society is doomed. It just means they are rare and that few if any are capable of or interested in the sorts of grand scale science fiction projects that would make them obvious to every observer in the galaxy.
Although to be fair we haven't even done a proper search yet. We don't even have much in the way of the sort of advanced communication tech that real aliens might use. Neutrino pulses would make for a very compelling interstellar transmitter. We can still barely detect them. Do we have orbiting or lunar based kilometer scale radio telescopes listening at the right frequencies? No. We are at the bottom of a thick sea of mixed gases that attenuate the hell out of the more optimal higher frequences at or above 100 Ghz and we haven't launched any SETI listening stations outside of our thick atmospheric soup. Have we tried listening at many different frequencies? No. Just some stupid 'water hole' frequencies that are almost certainly not actually used by anyone. Have we looked for the much more likely pulsed transmissions? Not really and that is despite the tantalizing Wow! signal. Laser or neutrino pulses? Again, not really. Have we begun an Active SETI program to try to ping likely systems for a while before listening for transmissions from them? Nope. We are too scared and even if we weren't there's no money for such projects.
Your link doesn't really back up your claim but even if it's true that economists don't believe it that's an Argument from Authority. A logical fallacy. Explain *why* diminishing returns don't apply or at least supply a link that explains it. I'm highly skeptical and would like to see evidence supporting that view.
I haven't been impressed by the speed of technological advancements in my lifetime as compared with predictions from slashdotters and other geeks/techies. Every 10 years we're supposed to get nuclear fusion and truly efficient solar cells and 400 mpg engines and practical electric cars with decent range.
Where are the household robots? Where is Hal from 2001? Where are the advances in space travel? We're still using rocket tech that was invented in WWII. We're still driving around in cars driven by engines not fundamentally different from the ones used a century ago. Where are the photorealistic graphics and virtual reality we were all hoping was just around the corner? Oh right. It's still just around the corner. I'm not holding my breath.
I see a lot of gradual refinements. What I don't see is many genuine, fundamental advances. Our computer tech has slowed nearly to a halt. And in most other areas I just don't see a lot that makes me feel like I'm living in a futuristic science fiction novel.
There is the occasional exception like the advances in voice recognition and synthesis and robot vision and that Boston Dynamics Atlas robot video recently posted. Those are quite rare. They are the exception rather than the rule. Usually it seems that science and tech is moving forward very slowly and seems to slow down more than it speeds up.
If you could go back in time and ask people in the early 20th century what the early 21st century would be like I think they'd be surprised not by all of the technology that looks like magic to them, but with how little has really changed. The main thing is computers and now that has basically hit a wall for anything that is not an embarrassingly parallel task.
Fortunately, we are advancing very quickly . . . : )
Not in terms of computing power. I'm still waiting for the 10 Ghz CPUs that Intel thought they would have as early as 2006. I personally suspect that the law of diminishing returns applies to scientific and technological advancement just as it does in many other aspects of life. Einstein published On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies in 1905. When are we going to have our next paradigm shift in the fundamental laws of physics? If I had to guess I'd say the points on the relevant graph will follow an exponential downward curve. The further our understanding of the fundamental nature of reality advances the harder it will be to make further discoveries that are significant. I think many of us like to be wildly optimistic about the speed of technological and scientific advances because our own lifespans are so short.
You have to also consider the economics of running some kind of galactic lighthouse. It would take a lot of energy and so probably alot of money/resources. The science fiction author Gregory Benford along with his brother James Benford who just happens to be in the business of building jthe sort of transmitters that would be required for any sort of beacon wrote a couple of interesting papers on the subject. One is called Searching for Cost Optimized Interstellar Beacons and the other is called Messaging with Cost Optimized Interstellar Beacons. Both well worth reading.
According to the Benfords we should be looking for pulsed rather than continuous signals and up around 10 Ghz rather than around the so called water hole in the 1.42 to 1.666 Ghz range which would be a massive waste of energy for a galactic beacon. A real signal is a lot more likely to resemble the WoW! signal than the sort of continuous directional beam signal SETI has searched for. A short blip that never repeats.
Megastructures are a natural thing to want to build if one wants to harvest a lot of energy available. And if we're correct about basic thermodynamics then pretty much everyone wants lots of energy. Many versions have been suggested for ways of actually doing it, such as Dyson spheres (unlikely), Dyson swarms and Dyson bubbles (much more plausible). Stellar engines are also an option https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... But here's the really important part: regardless of how one does so, an attempt to use a large fraction of star's energy leads to noticeable changes in its light.
Can you demonstrate that such things are actually possible to build? Any of them? To harvest any significant percentage of a star's energy may simply be impossible or impractical.The scales involved are truly immense even if a society of intelligent entities could use all of the mass of the rocky planets and moons in a system I don't think it would be enough to create such immense gigastructures. Even if it is possible it may take so long to build that the lifetime of the star may become significant and all that effort would be wasted when the star dies. For that reason perhaps black holes are considered far more practical sources of energy which presumably are more stable and predictable and long lived.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe the point would be that you'd have to be a total moron to believe anything the FBI says. Anything. In this case these fascist fucks may have just realized that they have shut down a major information channel by showing the whole world that the iPhone encryption is ineffective. Who is going to use it now for any sort of private communication? Someone may have finally realized how dumb it was to advertise their ability to do this to the whole world. So they're backpedaling a bit now.
How do you know who he voted for? Even if he did vote for the current government his choosing not to vote or to vote say Libertarian or Green or whatever would not have changed the outcome. It would have made no difference at all.
Time for programmers to once again enthusiastically embrace assembly language. The age of depending on ever faster hardware as an excuse for fast/lazy/elegant programming is about to end.
As CPUs slow to a crawl and soon come screeching to a...pause I'm thinking that water cooling and phase change cooling is going to get a boost. People can finally justify spending money--real money on sophisticated cooling systems. I already have a high end water cooling setup that I haven't used for years, but I've never seriously considered making the jump to phase change..until now.
As far as AGW goes, there is a vast amount of raw evidence and published papers to look through
As far as the 'raw evidence' perhaps you could link to just a single example. Since the data is so overwhelming. As for reading papers excuse me if I don't find a lot of interest in climate scientists preaching to the choir of other true believers. They tend to treat AGW as if it is fully settled.
You don't tend to find a lot of religious people arguing with each other over whether their beloved god really exists. Their arguments are more about disagreements about the details about what their god actually wants. For climate scientists what they generally want represents a political agenda of some kind.
Here is what we know from actual evidence.
Through burning fossil fuels and making cement and cutting down trees and other land clearing we are increasing the level of CO2 in the atmosphere by generally around 2ppm per year resulting in an increase from 280ppm (pre-industrial 19th century) to around 403ppm now.
This increased level of CO2 has probably caused a temperature increase of around 0.8 celsuis since the 19th century and will very likely continue to raise temperatures by similar amounts each century. Although trying to figure out how much it will raise temperature is very difficult to determine. Maybe even impossible. If the same rate of increase is assumed then our planet would be around 8 degrees celsuis warmer than it is now in 1000 years. We have no evidence that a planet 8c warmer than it is now would be incompatible with human life. In fact there have been warmer times in the past where mammals not so different from us survived. In the past there have been times (Jurassic for instance) when CO2 has been much higher than it is now (7000ppm) and temperatures were indeed higher at that time and the world was full of life, including mammalian life. Studying those times with higher levels of CO2 can provide actual evidence of its effects and can represent actual science instead of computer program simulation pseudo-science and true believer AGW-alarmist-as-religion.
AFAIK there simply is no other scientific way to predict how much our gradual increasing of CO2 in the atmosphere will raise global temperature over the next millennium. Since we are just guessing I'd argue for simply extending the observed pattern we have seen in the past century of around 2ppm more CO2 per year or 3300 more years before we reach Jurassic levels of CO2 which were 100% compatible with mammalian life. Not the end of the world. Still if the observed temperature rise of 0.8 celsuis in just over a century continues it would result in a 24 degree c increase in 3000 years. That would be a very warm planet by human standards. It would probably be a good idea to phase out fossil fuels in no more than 1000 years. So we probably have some time, but eventually we will need to transition to mostly nuclear (fission and/or fusion) power and/or some other form of electric power generation we are unaware of now.
You mean those highly speculative and completely unproven effects generated by simplistic (as compared to the immense complexity of an actual planet) computer programs? GIGO. I think we as a species should make decisions based on real science and not pseudo-science disguised as real science because the fake science happens on a computer.
More like electric trains and even electric big rig trucks powered by an overhead network of high voltage wires on the highways and by fuel cells or more overhead wires on secondary roads. The electricity could be generated by nuclear power plants.
2) Barring the invention of commercially viable electrical generation from fusion (or some similar massive source of energy), hydrocarbons are pretty much it for providing the majority of humanity's energy, so unless someone at Rockefeller has information that the rest of us do not have...
Actually fission would work too. It would just be a lot more expensive than coal. As in 2-3 times more expensive most likely. IOW it would be fine for rich people but would seriously suck for poor people and poor countries. If you make less than say $400 USD per month you may find you cannot afford to even use electricity if all or nearly all electricity is from a nuclear source. I have noticed that a lot of the AGW alarmists are not poor, at least not by my standard of 'poor'. Their electric bill is not a major portion of their budget.
Very few countries have the expertise and technology to actually build or maintain nuclear reactors. Some are lucky if they can manage to burn coal or oil and manage a reliable electrical grid infrastructure without frequent blackouts. Nevertheless I could picture a country like France with most or all of its power from nuclear fission plants and highways and even secondary roads wired up with either elevated wires or embedded road rails providing nuclear generated electricity to ground vehicles. No need to go back to horse and carriage transportation. As a planet we'd just have to fully embrace nuclear power as the only means we have for long term electricity generation. Fission fuels will eventually get used up as well, but it would take quite a few centuries and hopefully by then we'd have something better to replace it with. Fusion at least would use a different sort of fuel, generally hydrogen isotopes, and would likely extend our ability to generate electricity for eons.
Dealing with aircraft is a bit of a problem though. Maybe some air transportation could be replaced with transoceanic vacuum tunnels (hyperloops) with with maglev trains powered by nuclear generated electricity. I don't think even fuel cells have enough energy density to realistically power commercial aircraft and to the extent it may be possible such craft may be unbearably slow compared to what we are used to now.
Despite the problems and even without the emotionally driven hysterical alarmism so common these days there are very good arguments toward moving away from burning fossil fuels for electricity generation and toward fission combined with electric ground transportation. However these arguments will seem a lot less appealing to those who can barely afford coal generated electricity now.
One other piece of evidence for the rise in CO2 being caused by humans is the ratio of carbon13 to carbon12 in the atmosphere.
Yeah I saw that too. Thanks. The evidence for the CO2 increase being caused by us seems pretty solid. It's the rest that is shaky. As in how much warming will an additional x ppm of CO2 cause. That's what we really need to know and I don't see any way for us to determine that accurately except by waiting to see what happens next. I guess the next best thing would be looking into the past when CO2 levels were as high as 7000ppm and try to see how much that warmed the atmosphere. I don't know if we have methods for plotting temperature vs CO2 with enough accuracy going back so far.
Ok Alarmists. As a denialist I propose a wager. I will bet you that in 100 years the global temperature will have increased by less than 1 degree celsuis and that in 1000 years temperature will have increased by no more than 10 degrees celsuis.
Here is what there is actually evidence for:
1) The rise in CO2 since industrialization is due to human activities: basically burning stuff, making cement, and cutting down (killing) vegetation. Lots of evidence for that. No problem.
2) The earth has warmed by less than 1 degree celsuis since industrialization. The evidence for this isn't as strong and some sources are inconsistent, but there is a significant amount of evidence to support this view.
Maybe there is a causal relationship between the CO2 and the warming. There probably is. To say any more than that you will have to find evidence. Empirical, experimental data which I have not seen presented. Computer simulations are not science. You cannot prove anything with them. You need actual experiments for that and that's fine, because what we are doing is an experiment. Let's all sit back and see what happens.
Well I did a bit more research on the CO2 issue, and I find the evidence convincing enough that the rise in CO2 is caused by humans through combustion, but not due the logic you've just presented. I read that the human contribution to the carbon cycle is less than 4% of the total amount however it seems that the total amount of CO2 in the cycle is generally quite steady except on geologic time scales. So the rise in CO2 levels coinciding with the industrial revolution and rising continuously until now is pretty convincing evidence that we are the cause. It is 'circumstantial' evidence, but it does seem to be by far the most likely cause.
Having said that the question still remains as to how much CO2 is too much. At an increase of say 4ppm per year how long will it take before we start to see a significant warming effect? There have been large variations in CO2 in the past. Do we know how temperatures fluctuated in response to those much larger variations? That would be at least some evidence.
Because, aside from that sort of analysis it seems that the only way to be certain is to wait and see what happens. So far the warming, if it has indeed all been caused by the increase in CO2 levels, does not seem particularly worrisome. Certainly not catastrophic. If it continues at less than 1 degree celsius per century I think we can probably handle that for another millennium by which time we probably wouldn't be still burning coal or oil or natural gas for electricity.
We might not even have any fossil fuels left to burn in as little as a century according to some estimates. We'll have to mostly be using nuclear (ideally fusion) generated electricity and electric ground transportation. In terms of politics I would support a gradual phasing out of oil and natural gas in favor of nuclear or hydro or wind generation in the few places they are appropriate. I think coal, where economically feasible is just too cost effective to abandon without some very clear evidence of immediate harm. Perhaps it could be justified based on other forms of pollution which are easier to show as being harmful. Heavy metals perhaps. Hopefully, given a century or two, one of those miracle improvements to photovoltaic cells will actually make it to market at a reasonable cost.
There are small handful of scientists who question AGW
Most of those scientists also believe in a god. So if we are basing truth on the percentage of scientists who believe in it then I guess God is also real and anyone who doubts it is an irrational, unscientific, nutjob who does not need to be taken seriously, right?
I will never understand people who base their beliefs on popularity contests. I base my beliefs on evidence. Direct empirical evidence. Not computer simulations (gigo) or opinion polls. I will accept that climate warming is linked to human action as soon as evidence shows that. All I have seen so far in terms of evidence is that CO2 is rising and that the temperature of the earth seems to be slowly rising as well. I have not seen any direct evidence connecting the two. We know that higher CO2 levels leads to higher atmospheric temperatures of course, but what we don't know is exactly how much CO2 is required for how much of a rise in temperature on planetary scales. We also don't know if human beings are really the cause of the higher CO2 levels. Maybe we are, but it hasn't been proven beyond any doubt.
Also even if it is proven, and it may be at some point, it does not mean that everyone is going to agree about what if anything should be done about it. There are good arguments for nuclear power generation and highway electrification based on clean nuclear power from one of the newer, safer types of nuclear reactor designs even if it turns out that the amount of CO2 we are currently producing is not warming the climate to a dangerous degree as so many seem to believe at the moment. We are going to run out of fossil fuels eventually anyway and switching to fission (fusion is always 10 years away) power generation may be our only choice. Use of nuclear, hydro, wind, and photovoltaics is inevitable as soon as we run out of things to burn. The only problem with switching to those methods now if it isn't necessary yet is that nuclear, solar, and to a lesser extent wind power all are generally more expensive than coal. So poor people are often left not being able to afford to use much of it. Particularly in countries where almost everyone is poor this can be a big problem.
Standing up for one's morals is commendable, but what are the effects on the employees and on Apple?
Well the most obvious effect on the employees is that the ones with principles will either quit or stay and try to actively sabotage the FBI version of iOS. The rest are unprincipled bootlickers and sociopaths. Does it really have to be more complicated than that?
The FBI just unzipped their fly and whipped out their bright red demon cock. You can either open wide and suck it or you can refuse. I don't know how much you like FBI cock, but no salary is high enough for me to come in every day and suck on that. Most of those employees have enough value in the labor market that they simply don't *need* to suck FBI cock to make a living. Getting the fuck out of there seems like an easy decision to me.
Great posturing, but realistically, no Apple employee is going to quit their job because they had to rsync a source code tree to somewhere off-premises.
I think it's the part about having to work as a slave for the FBI that would get them to quit their job. I simply would refuse to do it. Full stop. If Apple wanted to fire me for that that would be up to them. Not only that but I would actively work to subvert the aims of the FBI in any way I could. If there were a group of employees trying to document all the changes that were made for the backdoor and then release a clean version without those changes online I'd be on *that* team. What's the point of making a lot of money if you have to be a slave actively working against what you believe in? There isn't enough money in the world to compensate me for that. OTOH if Apple wanted to start a cyberwar with the FBI and NSA I'd be so up for that! Was there ever a time when those fascist fucks were even somewhat on our side?
The Constitution does not prevent the Executive from searching citizens.
Where in the constitution does it say the government is allowed to search citizens? Also how is this equivalent to a search? What this is is a violation of the rights of every Apple employee and every Apple shareholder. It's a human rights violation and you don't seriously believe those Libertarian revolutionaries who idealized the ideas of John Locke would be in favor of this sort of 1984-ish Big Brother gets to read everyone's mail bullshit. The government has absolutely no right to do this Let-North-Korea-Show-Us-The-Way every-citizen-is-our-bitch nonsense.
This is going to rock, people! This is why global warming has my full support. Mother Earth has been begging for this for eons and it's time for us to deliver and prove that we are truly badass on a planetary scale. Terraformers who can truly shape the atmospheres of entire planets. Planets the size of the earth are mere toys to us. Little blue marbles in our giant hands. My greatest fear is that it will take too long. I want to see this in my lifetime. This needs to happen NOW. Not in a hundred years. Not in a thousand years. Not even next year. RIGHT NOW. Let's make this happen people! And Mars you motherfucker. You're next. I'm already putting aside as much money as I can for the inevitable canal front property that will be selling at bargain prices in just a few months.
Surely more than a few science fiction novels have started like this.
Just because I am 'taught' something does not make it true. I do not believe anything without evidence. Comparing the temperature at which water boils to something as complex as the rate at which fundamental scientific advances are made brings nothing to the discussion at all. Totally irrelevant.
It doesn't take a whole lot of observation to see that just as most humans have a tendency to overestimate their abilities as individuals they also have a tendency to overestimate the ability of our species to make fundamental advances. We really are not nearly as smart as we think we are and our advances have mostly been slight improvements rather than fundamental paradigm shifting breakthroughs. Predictions of the dawn of the technological singularity within our lifetimes are particularly amusing.
>Technological advances have occurred in the most important areas for them to occur.
Important to whom? Maybe all of the advances have occurred in the least important areas. How would you know?
As for the exponential improvements in computer processing power that's pretty funny. There haven't been any significant improvements in the speed of serial information processing in nearly a decade. Yes embarrassingly parallel problems continue to be solved at higher and higher speeds mostly with GPGPUs, but in terms of most algorithms there hasn't been a real need to upgrade a CPU for a long time.
Well I don't find Fermi's paradox to be a particularly compelling idea. There is no Great Silence. It's just an expression of frustration really. Yes it would be nice if our galaxy was teeming with life. It probably isn't. Probably planets with intelligent life capable of building radio telescopes and lasers and pulsed neutrino transmitters are distributed at 1000+ or even 10000+ light year distances making communication, travel, and even discovery quite difficult even for advanced societies.
Maybe there are only something like 40 technological societies in our galaxy with another 100 or even 1000 planets teeming with life but with no intelligent life or with intelligent octopus-like creatures whose lives are mostly lived deep in an ocean and who are just not interested in building radio telescopes.
All the Great Silence and Great Absence indicates is that life in our galaxy is probably not very common and yeah that sucks, but it doesn't mean there is some mysterious force ending every advanced technological society. It doesn't mean that every such society is doomed. It just means they are rare and that few if any are capable of or interested in the sorts of grand scale science fiction projects that would make them obvious to every observer in the galaxy.
Although to be fair we haven't even done a proper search yet. We don't even have much in the way of the sort of advanced communication tech that real aliens might use. Neutrino pulses would make for a very compelling interstellar transmitter. We can still barely detect them. Do we have orbiting or lunar based kilometer scale radio telescopes listening at the right frequencies? No. We are at the bottom of a thick sea of mixed gases that attenuate the hell out of the more optimal higher frequences at or above 100 Ghz and we haven't launched any SETI listening stations outside of our thick atmospheric soup. Have we tried listening at many different frequencies? No. Just some stupid 'water hole' frequencies that are almost certainly not actually used by anyone. Have we looked for the much more likely pulsed transmissions? Not really and that is despite the tantalizing Wow! signal. Laser or neutrino pulses? Again, not really. Have we begun an Active SETI program to try to ping likely systems for a while before listening for transmissions from them? Nope. We are too scared and even if we weren't there's no money for such projects.
Your link doesn't really back up your claim but even if it's true that economists don't believe it that's an Argument from Authority. A logical fallacy. Explain *why* diminishing returns don't apply or at least supply a link that explains it. I'm highly skeptical and would like to see evidence supporting that view.
I haven't been impressed by the speed of technological advancements in my lifetime as compared with predictions from slashdotters and other geeks/techies. Every 10 years we're supposed to get nuclear fusion and truly efficient solar cells and 400 mpg engines and practical electric cars with decent range.
Where are the household robots? Where is Hal from 2001? Where are the advances in space travel? We're still using rocket tech that was invented in WWII. We're still driving around in cars driven by engines not fundamentally different from the ones used a century ago. Where are the photorealistic graphics and virtual reality we were all hoping was just around the corner? Oh right. It's still just around the corner. I'm not holding my breath.
I see a lot of gradual refinements. What I don't see is many genuine, fundamental advances. Our computer tech has slowed nearly to a halt. And in most other areas I just don't see a lot that makes me feel like I'm living in a futuristic science fiction novel.
There is the occasional exception like the advances in voice recognition and synthesis and robot vision and that Boston Dynamics Atlas robot video recently posted. Those are quite rare. They are the exception rather than the rule. Usually it seems that science and tech is moving forward very slowly and seems to slow down more than it speeds up.
If you could go back in time and ask people in the early 20th century what the early 21st century would be like I think they'd be surprised not by all of the technology that looks like magic to them, but with how little has really changed. The main thing is computers and now that has basically hit a wall for anything that is not an embarrassingly parallel task.
Fortunately, we are advancing very quickly . . . : )
Not in terms of computing power. I'm still waiting for the 10 Ghz CPUs that Intel thought they would have as early as 2006. I personally suspect that the law of diminishing returns applies to scientific and technological advancement just as it does in many other aspects of life. Einstein published On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies in 1905. When are we going to have our next paradigm shift in the fundamental laws of physics? If I had to guess I'd say the points on the relevant graph will follow an exponential downward curve. The further our understanding of the fundamental nature of reality advances the harder it will be to make further discoveries that are significant. I think many of us like to be wildly optimistic about the speed of technological and scientific advances because our own lifespans are so short.
You have to also consider the economics of running some kind of galactic lighthouse. It would take a lot of energy and so probably alot of money/resources. The science fiction author Gregory Benford along with his brother James Benford who just happens to be in the business of building jthe sort of transmitters that would be required for any sort of beacon wrote a couple of interesting papers on the subject. One is called Searching for Cost Optimized Interstellar Beacons and the other is called Messaging with Cost Optimized Interstellar Beacons. Both well worth reading.
According to the Benfords we should be looking for pulsed rather than continuous signals and up around 10 Ghz rather than around the so called water hole in the 1.42 to 1.666 Ghz range which would be a massive waste of energy for a galactic beacon. A real signal is a lot more likely to resemble the WoW! signal than the sort of continuous directional beam signal SETI has searched for. A short blip that never repeats.
Megastructures are a natural thing to want to build if one wants to harvest a lot of energy available. And if we're correct about basic thermodynamics then pretty much everyone wants lots of energy. Many versions have been suggested for ways of actually doing it, such as Dyson spheres (unlikely), Dyson swarms and Dyson bubbles (much more plausible). Stellar engines are also an option https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... But here's the really important part: regardless of how one does so, an attempt to use a large fraction of star's energy leads to noticeable changes in its light.
Can you demonstrate that such things are actually possible to build? Any of them? To harvest any significant percentage of a star's energy may simply be impossible or impractical.The scales involved are truly immense even if a society of intelligent entities could use all of the mass of the rocky planets and moons in a system I don't think it would be enough to create such immense gigastructures. Even if it is possible it may take so long to build that the lifetime of the star may become significant and all that effort would be wasted when the star dies. For that reason perhaps black holes are considered far more practical sources of energy which presumably are more stable and predictable and long lived.
Not just any rain. Acid rain.