Two degrees? On the surface? That's the best scare you can give us? Two degrees is nothing! Industrial revolution, mass globalization, nuclear weapon testing - and two degrees?!
OK, dude, time for calorimetry 101. Let's assume for a second that the temperature increase was just for the oceans (to avoid messing around with too many different specific heats). Let's further assume that it only applies to the top centimeter of the water (ie, the rest of the oceans are not affected). What would the impact be of a 2 degree fahrenheit increase in the surface temperature?
The oceans are 361,000,000 square km, which is 3.61e18 square cm, which by the assumption would yield 3.61e18 cc of water raised by 2 degrees F
2 degrees F difference is 1.11 Kelvin difference
The specific heat of water is 1 cal / g * k, and the density of water is 1 g / cc (yes, ocean water is slightly less dense and has a slightly higher specific heat; the ballpark will be correct though)
So, the amount of extra energy this represents is temperature * mass * specific heat (which then factors out since it's 1): 1.11 k * 3.61e18 g * 1 cal / gk = 4.01e18 calories
4,010,000,000,000,000,000 cal (that's 4 quintillion calories), or 1.68e19 joules, or approximately 4010 megatons of TNT, or about 1000 modern middle sized nuclear devices
That's a lot of energy to have floating around that we didn't used to have.
I want them to be sentenced to write (by hand) an apology to every person they've wronged...
I can see it now...
Hello. This is Mr. Spammer, a.k.a. Happy Dude. The court has ordered me to call everyone in town and say that I'm sorry for my telemarketing scams. (pause) I'm sorry. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, please send one dollar to "Sorry Dude," 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield. You have the power.
Spam is hugely profitable, because your overhead is nil.
*shrug* I'm not sure how true that is. I used to work for a pretty big, just-barely-legal, bulk email farm. The overhead can actually be pretty high, since you have to keep several networks ready in case too many spam complaints get your upstream to shut you down (and keep in mind, these were mailings that the people did actually request and confirm to receive and had our physical address and phone number in every footer -- I can't imagine how many more complaints the really illegal shit must get). Unless you can talk your provider into making you the abuse contact for your block (at which point the stakes get really high, because you can go to jail if you start screwing around then), you have to move about once every six months.
We basically had two kinds of clients: people who essentially wanted a cheaper Lyris for their mailing list (things like music groups sending out their tour announcements, churches sending out their activities announcements, demagogic political blowhards sending out their vitriolic screeds, etc.), and people who were hawking products (everything from frozen crabcakes to cool little mouse-cord-holder-stands -- I still have one of those -- to "Get Free Money From the Government" books). The first kind of customer was pretty steady and almost never gave us spam complaints (we ended up giving them their own network). The second kind of customer not only generated a lot of spam complaints (and contractually had to pay us $100 for each one), but usually went broke after a few months. They got good receive and open rates, and even OK click-through, but people just didn't buy the shit.
I left the "industry" a while ago in a fit of conscience, but what I learned might be a bit sobering for those who suggest we attack the companies advertising via spam. If my experience is normal, that won't matter because they all go out of business anyways. There's money in bulk email for the companies sending out the email, and for their carriers (who get to charge more for pink contracts), but rarely if ever for the people selling stuff. It's just there's always some new jackass ready to take his place once a seller fails.
Is this that good an idea? Is the risk of creating a virus with Cthulhu-knows-what properties that then is accidentally released worth having a cool kind of battery?
Yes, I know, there are "controls in place". But Monsanto had "controls in place" and swore its terminator plants couldn't cross-polinate anything... guess what? they did. (Monsanto then sued the guy whose fields were infected for patent infringement... wouldn't that be awesome, to get infected with a new ElectroVirus and get sued?)
Sometimes it seems like a lot of the genetic engineering research we do gets done without acknowledging the possible risks.
Apple is about "ease of use". Linux is about "Make it hard, Make it free too but goddamn it make sure its hard to use or I won't feel smart!"
Close, but not quite. Linux is about "Make it right", ie, make it do something useful in a reliable way. Being right is often hard for the user, but those of us who want software that's correct are willing to put up with it (well, those of us who *really* want software to be correct use Net and/or OpenBSD, but Linux is fairly close).
And anyways I find the incessant repetition of the claim that "Linux is hard for home users" stupid. It's slightly easier to install Linux than it is to install Windows XP (the main difference is that you rarely have to hunt around the Internet for the right drivers after you install Linux). Once it's installed (which home users shouldn't be doing themselves anyways), clicking on the icon for a web browser, an email client, a music player, a movie player, etc. isn't really any different from one platform to the next. What's so hard about it?
Eh... her actions may have been illegal, but prosecuters aren't exactly going out of their way to find music downloaders*. What is important here is that her actions were tortious, which means someone other than a prosecuter (say, RIAA) can bring her to court for them.
* and IMO if RIAA were serious about what they said, they would be pushing prosecuters to charge these people. Instead, they are going the civil route, I believe because the burden of proof is lower and they get more $$ that way. If they pushed for criminal charges, the most they could claim was restitution for the value of the "good", which would be nowhere near 3 grand.
Is this going directly to OpenSSH efforts, or to OpenBSD in general?
Since they're the same team, any donation is pretty much fungible (ie, $10,000 "for OpenSSH" still means Theo has $10,000 now freed up for OpenBSD, if that's how he sees the need to allocated it).
You might argue that companies should have some damn sense of what's right and what isn't, without needing to be regulated down to the tiniest level.
You could say the same thing about people, but I don't think it's out of place to say there should be laws against people killing, stealing, defrauding, etc.
Alternately you could argue that you don't trust any company, and would want them to undergo expensive and painful audits - and that you'd be happy as a consumer to pay for that...
Happy? No. Convinced it's clearly the better alternative? Yes.
How can this poll be valid? They only asked 1200 people. Probably 1200 people from the same region or area. That's like having a poll in San Diego and asking people if they like the weather. 1200 people is by no means an accurate representation of how the millions of people in the country feel.
Yeah, just like all those medical studies that only looked at a few hundred sick people. They never are accurate... That's how sampling works. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good.
Such Federal edicts have been the old 55mph speed limit (state wide), and the drinking age at 21 (state wide).
*shrug* States that don't want it are free to not take federal money. I get sick of whiney conservatives who want money from the government but don't want any regulation. The government is not an ATM.
The FDIC, which in the case of another depression, would fail due to lack of funds. This, of course, makes the existence of it pointless.
It's not pointless -- it *has* bailed out banks that have failed. It just wouldn't be able to bail them *all* out if they *all* failed at once.
The GI Bill, which has made college educations impossible to pay for without massive loans, for those that are even able to get them. Now many people join the military simply to afford to go to college.
You're getting the order things happened in backwards. College education was out of the reach of most families. The GI Bill let veterans from poor families afford college. You must be one of those guys who looks at the problem government stepped in to solve after private groups and states dropped the ball, ignore the fact that the problem was worse beforehand, and blame the problem on the Federal government.
Then you have the WIC, which used to be handled privately by charity. Another Federal program that does something that was already being done, just less efficiently, with more corruption, and a much larger price tag. It's easily the most benign and sucessfull without poor side-effects of your list, though.
You have any evidence it is more corrupt or less efficient than when it was run by private charities? Private charities are notorious for corruption and inefficiency.
Why the hell do people bristle so much at corporate regulation? A corporation is chartered by the state; it's not like you have some God-given right to run whatever business organization you want in whatever way you want without somebody watching what you do.
A) Al Gore was Vice President. The Veep's job is to break ties in the Senate and wait around for the President to keel over or resign.
B) I was contesting the argument that all government programs "turn to shit". My counterargument was not that "All government programs do not turn to shit", but rather that "Some government programs do not turn to shit; however all current ones do because of the corrupt and incompetent jackasses currently in charge who started out believing government couldn't accomplish anything good and seem hell-bent on convincing as many people as possible of their belief by living it out in the chambers of power of this country".
C) If there is any major political contender in the US who has done more to try to get people to use energy more efficiently and pollute less than Gore, I can't think of him. Hell, he probably lost the election because he sounded too "granola" for Mr. and Mrs. Lived-all-their-lives-in-central-Missouri.
I've noticed the Brits just talk about "climate change", not global warming. I think the fact that the phrase "global warming" is so popular in the US is unfortunate; there's a lot more at stake than just warming. "Climate change" includes deforestation, erosion, water table depletion, air and water pollution, etc... warming may (or then again may not) be a result of these, but these changes themselves are very dangerous.
I'm a little cautious about the specific idea of global warming only because I get cautious any time I see scientists act like cheerleaders, talk about "overwhelming consensus" (since that usually means there *is* a disagreement that they wish to marginalize -- biologists don't talk about "overwhelming consensus" when discussing evolution; they talk about "observed evidence"), etc. Still, the evidence is clear that climate change and habitat change caused by humans are very easily observed and sometimes quite dramatic in their negative consequences. Maybe that would be a better way to frame the debate.
Don't confuse the incompetence of the current party in power with the idea that government is neccessarily incompetent. That's exactly what they want you to do anyways.
Ah, yes, question the absolute omniscience of doctors and have dumb people call you dumb. You fail it:)
Never mind that there are thousands of people saved by modern medical procedures and medicines every day
And never mind that iatrogenic death outnumbers any other cause, including heart disease [Weinstein in EID, '98] [Lazarou in JAMA '98]?
we should clearly side with you because sometimes mistakes are made
I could care less if you side with me or not. I only care if you start forcing me to undergo therapies I don't believe will be effective, particularly therapies that are continued against mounting evidence of their efficacy or safety because it is profitable to a pharmaceutical company for them to continue.
Here's a list of things I hope you don't do, because even though they're safe for tens of thousands of people every day, sometimes things go wrong:
Drive a car, ride public transit, or fly (crashes).
Drink water (poisons, microbes)
Eat canned food (bacterial disease)
Are you really unable to distinguish between "some" and "all"? There have been plenty of medical successes and plenty of medical failures, just like with all those things. You act like it's a complete crapshoot, but it's not.
You gave three very good examples; let me show you what you don't seem to understad:
Yes, I drive and ride on public transit. But, if I saw growing evidence that a given model of car had dangerous defects, despite the manufacturer's claims and studies funded by the manufacturer to the contrary, I would not drive in that model of car. And I would not want you to force me to drive in it.
I drink water, but if I saw growing evidence that my city's water supply had dangerous levels of contaminants despite the city's claims to the contrary (this happened where I live in Washington DC; independent researchers were showing dangerous levels of lead for years before the city admitted it), I would seek other sources of water. And I would not want you to force me to drink the municipal supply.
I eat canned food, but if I saw growing evidence that one manufacturer's food was contaminated, despite the manufacturer's claims to the contrary, I wouldn't eat that brand. And I would not want you to force me to eat it.
Medical science tends to be right *over the long term*. That does not mean the prevailing opinion on any given subject is right at any given moment. The list I gave showed that it doesn't even mean the prevailing opinion reflects the actual data at any given moment (of the 11 systemic medical mistakes I've mentioned earlier, 7 were abandoned -- years or decades late -- not after some new experiment but after a comprehensive review of the literature was published). Why does it make you think I'm "stupid" to point this out? Why does it make you angry? And why are you so trusting of studies of therapies funded by companies with a financial interest in that therapy being proven safe and effective?
Well... I'm thinking of it. All I can seem to come up with is steady longetivity as medical knowledge advances, beginning with a huge increase starting around the time modern sanitation came into play. That, and how countries with more modern medical practices have significantly lower infant mortality rates, higher incidences of diseases associated with old age, and minimal death rates from things like, oh, say, Polio or dysentary.
Really... you can't think of any cases where medicine has spent years, or even decades, charging blinkardly down the wrong path despite mountains of evidence to the contrary? How about any of these (and no, it's not a coincidence that most of these are pharmacological):
Thalidomide
Amphetemines
Tamoxifen
Celibrex
The 1200+ milligram doses of AZT AIDS patients used to get
Clioquinol (this caused the SMON epidemic in Japan)
Labotomies
Overuse of antibiotics
Lithium being given to every kid who can't sit still for 10 minutes (rather than telling their parents to keep them off sugar)
Telling people to lose weight when the data show with absolute, undeniable clarity that weight fluctuation is more dangerous than obesity
Nevirapine
That's a quick sample off the top of my head. Medicine on the whole has been making strides, but any particular therapy popular at any particular moment is not neccessarily a good idea, and often maintains its popularity for months or even years despite evidence to the contrary, for various reasons including ego, weight given to seniority, and all too often questions of funding by the producers of the mistake itself.
Because of that, I tend to give people a rather wide berth in what course of treatment they do or don't choose to accept.
Now, as I predicted you want me to "think of the children". Well, it's a hard world and children die. Sometimes parents prevent their children from receiving treatment, and the children die. Sometimes parents go forward with a treatment against their better judgments (or are compelled to), and the children die in what turns out later to have been a misguided, ineffective, or outright dangerous form of therapy.
As my sig says, all's true that is mistrusted. Medical science is too awash in pharmacological money to be terribly trustworthy at any given time. It's tended to take a decade or more for the truth about the drugs I mentioned above and others to finally be admitted by the mainstream. So, question, doubt, check the data yourself (when you can get to it), and don't assume so blithely that you know better than John Q Whoever what the right course of therapy for him is.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, dude, time for calorimetry 101. Let's assume for a second that the temperature increase was just for the oceans (to avoid messing around with too many different specific heats). Let's further assume that it only applies to the top centimeter of the water (ie, the rest of the oceans are not affected). What would the impact be of a 2 degree fahrenheit increase in the surface temperature?
That's a lot of energy to have floating around that we didn't used to have.
I can see it now...
Hello. This is Mr. Spammer, a.k.a. Happy Dude. The court has ordered me to call everyone in town and say that I'm sorry for my telemarketing scams. (pause) I'm sorry. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me, please send one dollar to "Sorry Dude," 742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield. You have the power.
*shrug* I'm not sure how true that is. I used to work for a pretty big, just-barely-legal, bulk email farm. The overhead can actually be pretty high, since you have to keep several networks ready in case too many spam complaints get your upstream to shut you down (and keep in mind, these were mailings that the people did actually request and confirm to receive and had our physical address and phone number in every footer -- I can't imagine how many more complaints the really illegal shit must get). Unless you can talk your provider into making you the abuse contact for your block (at which point the stakes get really high, because you can go to jail if you start screwing around then), you have to move about once every six months.
We basically had two kinds of clients: people who essentially wanted a cheaper Lyris for their mailing list (things like music groups sending out their tour announcements, churches sending out their activities announcements, demagogic political blowhards sending out their vitriolic screeds, etc.), and people who were hawking products (everything from frozen crabcakes to cool little mouse-cord-holder-stands -- I still have one of those -- to "Get Free Money From the Government" books). The first kind of customer was pretty steady and almost never gave us spam complaints (we ended up giving them their own network). The second kind of customer not only generated a lot of spam complaints (and contractually had to pay us $100 for each one), but usually went broke after a few months. They got good receive and open rates, and even OK click-through, but people just didn't buy the shit.
I left the "industry" a while ago in a fit of conscience, but what I learned might be a bit sobering for those who suggest we attack the companies advertising via spam. If my experience is normal, that won't matter because they all go out of business anyways. There's money in bulk email for the companies sending out the email, and for their carriers (who get to charge more for pink contracts), but rarely if ever for the people selling stuff. It's just there's always some new jackass ready to take his place once a seller fails.
Sorry, how was that a troll? It's a serious question.
Is this that good an idea? Is the risk of creating a virus with Cthulhu-knows-what properties that then is accidentally released worth having a cool kind of battery?
Yes, I know, there are "controls in place". But Monsanto had "controls in place" and swore its terminator plants couldn't cross-polinate anything... guess what? they did. (Monsanto then sued the guy whose fields were infected for patent infringement... wouldn't that be awesome, to get infected with a new ElectroVirus and get sued?)
Sometimes it seems like a lot of the genetic engineering research we do gets done without acknowledging the possible risks.
You forgot their cell-phone spamming multilevel marketing scheme.
Close, but not quite. Linux is about "Make it right", ie, make it do something useful in a reliable way. Being right is often hard for the user, but those of us who want software that's correct are willing to put up with it (well, those of us who *really* want software to be correct use Net and/or OpenBSD, but Linux is fairly close).
And anyways I find the incessant repetition of the claim that "Linux is hard for home users" stupid. It's slightly easier to install Linux than it is to install Windows XP (the main difference is that you rarely have to hunt around the Internet for the right drivers after you install Linux). Once it's installed (which home users shouldn't be doing themselves anyways), clicking on the icon for a web browser, an email client, a music player, a movie player, etc. isn't really any different from one platform to the next. What's so hard about it?
That's Troll or Funny, not Insightful
... combining the wide acceptance and massive library of supported applications of OpenBSD with the security and theoretical correctness of FreeBSD...
Eh... her actions may have been illegal, but prosecuters aren't exactly going out of their way to find music downloaders*. What is important here is that her actions were tortious, which means someone other than a prosecuter (say, RIAA) can bring her to court for them.
* and IMO if RIAA were serious about what they said, they would be pushing prosecuters to charge these people. Instead, they are going the civil route, I believe because the burden of proof is lower and they get more $$ that way. If they pushed for criminal charges, the most they could claim was restitution for the value of the "good", which would be nowhere near 3 grand.
Eh? Anything with more than 2 components (aka, every electronic consumer product) needs an OS. Devices don't just cooperate on their own.
Yeah, that Iliad was a laugh riot...
Since they're the same team, any donation is pretty much fungible (ie, $10,000 "for OpenSSH" still means Theo has $10,000 now freed up for OpenBSD, if that's how he sees the need to allocated it).
You could say the same thing about people, but I don't think it's out of place to say there should be laws against people killing, stealing, defrauding, etc.
Happy? No. Convinced it's clearly the better alternative? Yes.
Yeah, just like all those medical studies that only looked at a few hundred sick people. They never are accurate... That's how sampling works. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good.
*shrug* States that don't want it are free to not take federal money. I get sick of whiney conservatives who want money from the government but don't want any regulation. The government is not an ATM.
It's not pointless -- it *has* bailed out banks that have failed. It just wouldn't be able to bail them *all* out if they *all* failed at once.
You're getting the order things happened in backwards. College education was out of the reach of most families. The GI Bill let veterans from poor families afford college. You must be one of those guys who looks at the problem government stepped in to solve after private groups and states dropped the ball, ignore the fact that the problem was worse beforehand, and blame the problem on the Federal government.
You have any evidence it is more corrupt or less efficient than when it was run by private charities? Private charities are notorious for corruption and inefficiency.
You work for ChoicePoint or something?
Why the hell do people bristle so much at corporate regulation? A corporation is chartered by the state; it's not like you have some God-given right to run whatever business organization you want in whatever way you want without somebody watching what you do.
A) Al Gore was Vice President. The Veep's job is to break ties in the Senate and wait around for the President to keel over or resign.
B) I was contesting the argument that all government programs "turn to shit". My counterargument was not that "All government programs do not turn to shit", but rather that "Some government programs do not turn to shit; however all current ones do because of the corrupt and incompetent jackasses currently in charge who started out believing government couldn't accomplish anything good and seem hell-bent on convincing as many people as possible of their belief by living it out in the chambers of power of this country".
C) If there is any major political contender in the US who has done more to try to get people to use energy more efficiently and pollute less than Gore, I can't think of him. Hell, he probably lost the election because he sounded too "granola" for Mr. and Mrs. Lived-all-their-lives-in-central-Missouri.
I've noticed the Brits just talk about "climate change", not global warming. I think the fact that the phrase "global warming" is so popular in the US is unfortunate; there's a lot more at stake than just warming. "Climate change" includes deforestation, erosion, water table depletion, air and water pollution, etc... warming may (or then again may not) be a result of these, but these changes themselves are very dangerous.
I'm a little cautious about the specific idea of global warming only because I get cautious any time I see scientists act like cheerleaders, talk about "overwhelming consensus" (since that usually means there *is* a disagreement that they wish to marginalize -- biologists don't talk about "overwhelming consensus" when discussing evolution; they talk about "observed evidence"), etc. Still, the evidence is clear that climate change and habitat change caused by humans are very easily observed and sometimes quite dramatic in their negative consequences. Maybe that would be a better way to frame the debate.
Well, some that come to mind are the Interstate Higheway System, the FDIC, the Marshall Plan, WIC, the GI Bill...
Deadly Africanized "Killer" Bees (tm)
Isn't 29% the same percentage that still approve of the President's performance? Interesting...
Don't confuse the incompetence of the current party in power with the idea that government is neccessarily incompetent. That's exactly what they want you to do anyways.
Ah, yes, question the absolute omniscience of doctors and have dumb people call you dumb. You fail it :)
And never mind that iatrogenic death outnumbers any other cause, including heart disease [Weinstein in EID, '98] [Lazarou in JAMA '98]?
I could care less if you side with me or not. I only care if you start forcing me to undergo therapies I don't believe will be effective, particularly therapies that are continued against mounting evidence of their efficacy or safety because it is profitable to a pharmaceutical company for them to continue.
Are you really unable to distinguish between "some" and "all"? There have been plenty of medical successes and plenty of medical failures, just like with all those things. You act like it's a complete crapshoot, but it's not.
You gave three very good examples; let me show you what you don't seem to understad:
Medical science tends to be right *over the long term*. That does not mean the prevailing opinion on any given subject is right at any given moment. The list I gave showed that it doesn't even mean the prevailing opinion reflects the actual data at any given moment (of the 11 systemic medical mistakes I've mentioned earlier, 7 were abandoned -- years or decades late -- not after some new experiment but after a comprehensive review of the literature was published). Why does it make you think I'm "stupid" to point this out? Why does it make you angry? And why are you so trusting of studies of therapies funded by companies with a financial interest in that therapy being proven safe and effective?
Really... you can't think of any cases where medicine has spent years, or even decades, charging blinkardly down the wrong path despite mountains of evidence to the contrary? How about any of these (and no, it's not a coincidence that most of these are pharmacological):
That's a quick sample off the top of my head. Medicine on the whole has been making strides, but any particular therapy popular at any particular moment is not neccessarily a good idea, and often maintains its popularity for months or even years despite evidence to the contrary, for various reasons including ego, weight given to seniority, and all too often questions of funding by the producers of the mistake itself.
Because of that, I tend to give people a rather wide berth in what course of treatment they do or don't choose to accept.
Now, as I predicted you want me to "think of the children". Well, it's a hard world and children die. Sometimes parents prevent their children from receiving treatment, and the children die. Sometimes parents go forward with a treatment against their better judgments (or are compelled to), and the children die in what turns out later to have been a misguided, ineffective, or outright dangerous form of therapy.
As my sig says, all's true that is mistrusted. Medical science is too awash in pharmacological money to be terribly trustworthy at any given time. It's tended to take a decade or more for the truth about the drugs I mentioned above and others to finally be admitted by the mainstream. So, question, doubt, check the data yourself (when you can get to it), and don't assume so blithely that you know better than John Q Whoever what the right course of therapy for him is.