China's mission into space had little to do with science and everything to do with becoming a world power. North Korea's bid into space also has nothing to do with science and everything with delivering nuclear weapons in your backyard.
We have a choice: We can sign a bunch of peace treaties, declare and end to war in space, and go smoke the peace pipe. That way, we'll have at least twenty years of peace until we realize that maybe allowing China and North Korea to launch all those satellites and establish a moon base wasn't such a great idea after all.
Or, we can face reality, stack the deck in our favor, and hope that our democratic republic will handle the weapons better than a tin-horn dictator or a country run by sex-crazed communists.
If any of you remember recent history, remember that the reason why the Soviet Union fell apart was because Reagan made it a point to beat them in every race. We built so many nuclear weapons of such devastating capacity that the Soviets couldn't even compete anymore. Our military was so strong and effective, not even the Soviet troops in Grenada could hold them off for a day. Our economic power grew so rapidly so quickly that even Germany's and Japan's growth rate at the time looked weak. We had the upper hand, we were getting stronger every day, and the Soviet Union had a choice: Go to war and commit suicide, or decide that maybe getting along with the western democracies wasn't such a bad idea after all.
If we have a moon base, if we have a Mars base, and if we have warships in orbit, missiles on the moon, and such, ready to launch death against any threat in space, the skies, or below, China and North Korea and Iran are going to be that much more likely to meet us at the discussion table and reexamine their core beliefs like the Soviet Union did.
Peace only comes after victory. War isn't like baseball - we don't choose who we are going to play against or even whether we want to play. And when we lose war, we don't go home sad because we lost. We go home in bodybags, if there is a home to go to anymore.
When someone gets the idea that beating up Americans, launching missiles into our backyard, and detonating nuclear warheads over our schools is a good idea, we have to kick the crap out of them until either they figure out that maybe that was a bad idea or they are dead.
Sure, you think we can probably talk this out with them. Maybe if we just gave peace a chance. Let's get the scenario straight here - are you going to negotiate with a guy who is constantly threatening to kill you, who is buying grenades and guns and stuff, who is standing at your fence pointing guns at you? Are you going to walk up to him and say, "Hey, let's talk about this. Maybe we can work something out?" Or are you going to defend yourself, call the police, get a restraining order, and then keep a 12-gauge in the closet "just in case"? Let's get serious about this issue.
Here's a simplified version for some other chemical that might exist:
1. Heat comes in as visible light, but is reflected back into space.
2. Infrared light from the surface of the earth passes through the chemical and is emitted to space.
Thus, if we increase this chemical, we will experience global cooling.
In layman's terms, CO2 is like an emergency blanket (the shiny kinds) turned shiny side in. This chemical would be like an emergency blanket with shiny side out.
I'm sure anyone who knows what the absorption lines are of various chemicals will be able to find said chemical in an afternoon. All we have to do is fill the upper atmosphere with this to cool the earth off. Problem solved.
Heat is the transfer of energy. The energy needed to boil extra atmosphere away would come from the extra heat that global warming is claimed to produce.
Sulfuric acid aerosols are not needed. Ice has a plenty high enough albedo.
Energy to power an effort to cool the atmosphere with heat pumps would likely come from the sun or the earth itself. Any energy we absorb to power the machines will be energy not used to heat the earth.
I was trying to overthrow the original posters argument that increasing the concentration of various chemicals in the atmosphere will lead to global warming. The point is that the earth is an extremely complicated system that no one has yet completely understood. I brought up four extra ways that heat could be transferred out of the atmosphere to counter the effects of an increase in certain chemicals.
I am of the belief that anything we humans do has hardly any effect on the earth at large. The earth is so huge and so complicated that we can't pretend to control it or have much of an effect on it. How do we know that increasing the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere won't cause more algae in the oceans, taller treese, and denser growth that brings that level of CO2 back to equillibrium? We can't predict such a thing, we can barely even guess.
Any in particular, or are you just making more stuff up?
I don't "make stuff up". I attended the University of Washington and studied Physics. I achieved very high marks in the Thermodynamics and Astrophysics courses. I graduated June 2000 with a BS in Physics and a minor in math.
And your credentials are?
Let me cite to you some very basic things: 1) Certain chemical reactions render gasses such as oxygen and carbon dioxide from solids that are found naturally in the earth crust. In fact, the whole reason volcanoes explode is because of the gasses that build up.
2) You are thinking of a very simple model and ignoring the flow of magma and currents and such. Warm air from the tropics is carried to the artic, and vice-versa with cold air. Why can this not happen below the surface? Phase changes absorb a lot of heat. For instance, we can take a lot of the extra heat that is attributed to global warming and use it to melt ice, rock, or any number of other chemicals. We can even turn liquids in gasses. This is done naturally.
3) Have you ever played with the instant cool-packs? You mix two chemicals together and the mixture gets very cold very quickly. There are chemical reactions that absorb heat at room temperature. We can use that to cool the earth. The earth may even do it naturally.
4) There are naturally occuring substances that will reflect the sun's light away from the earth. Ice, for instance, has a very high albedo. In fact, Europa has an extremely high albedo and reflects something like 90% of the incoming sunlight away from itself. If we could increase the earth's albedo, we would decrease the amount of incoming heat, thus cooling the earth.
5) Concerning my claim that people are trying to predict the weather one hundred years from now -- isn't that the whole premise of "global warming" -- the idea that the earth is gradually getting warmer?
That KDE people are creating technologies to be able to make Gnome apps compatible with them is a sign of Gnome's success.
"Success" in the Open Source world is measured by user base and available resources. People tend to use the better software, and they tend to contribute to projects they use. Compare this with success in the commercial software world, where success is measured in stock price, profits, and company size.
Because it is KDE contributing the code, this is a bad sign for Gnome. Gnome can't seem to muster the resources to get it done on their end, while KDE can and does.
This means that either there are more developers contributing to KDE than Gnome, or the developers are just that much more productive.
If there are more developers in KDE than in Gnome, this hints that the actual user base of KDE is larger than Gnome. More people are using KDE because they like it more than Gnome (or hate it less). This is not a good sign for Gnome.
If the developers are just more productive in KDE than in Gnome, this is another bad sign for Gnome. Either the codebase in KDE is so much easier to work with than in Gnome, or the political structure of the project tends to encourage contribution better than Gnome.
Either way, KDE is developing faster than Gnome. Eventually, Gnome will become the BSD of the desktop environments as KDE progresses, gaining more users, more developers, and gaining momentum.
I can't predict for sure of course, and Gnome's usability gamble may pay off in a big way down the road. But claiming that because KDE was able to get their end of the deal done first is a win for Gnome is illogical.
I am of course biased. I have investigated both the codebase and user interfaces of Gnome and KDE extensively. I found KDE much easier to work with in both ways. Gnome has come a long way in the past few years, but in my eyes, KDE has come a lot farther.
The right to free speech is a natural right - it cannot be taken away by any constitution. It can only be silenced with bloodshed. Even then, your speech isn't killed - it is sealed with your blood. It is not an American right - it is a human right that everyone is given by God.
But the right to defend oneself, one's family, property, friends, and country is a natural right as well. Government cannot take it away. Even if they legislate against it, it will still be our right.
I agree: President Bush is not God.
We all agreed to the constitution. The constitution declares him to be the Commander in Chief. In times of war, with a few words, he can revoke the constitution, all the laws, the courts, and anything else he sees as contrary to our nation's needs. It's called "Martial Law". It's the law that we live by on the battle field. Without it, our republic would be crippled in times of national emergency.
This isn't a war like Vietnam or Desert Storm. The battlefield is every home, every building, and every street in the entire world. The terrorists have declared their method of fighting. Now we have to prepare a defense against it. We have to come up with a strategy to defeat it. This is the execution of that strategy: Sieze everyone who has donated even a few dollars to any organization connected in any way to the terrorists. Question them. Hold them in Guantanamo. Interrogate their friends and family.
The guy is now an enemy combatant. Since the terrorists have no uniform and act in secret, we cannot tell who is a terrorist or who is not except by uncovering the web the use one link at a time. He is one of those links.
He doesn't fall under the jurisdiction of the local courts or any American court. He is a prisoner of war.
If I blab national secrets to our foreign or domestic enemies, am I covered by the first amendment? I think not. If I was a citizen, I would be charged with treason, and hopefully, I would receive the death penalty. If I were a foreign national, I would expect the same, except the trial may be shorter or even omitted.
Even if he didn't give material support to terrorist organizations, being a consenting facilitator in a mailing list for such a purpose is an act of war or terror or whatever you want to call it. The United States of America is at war with terrorists and anyone who helps them. He obviously helped them, if he is not one himself.
I hope this guy ends up in Guantanamo and all his rights are stripped away. I hope the only document he'll be able to appeal to will be the Geneva Convention. I hope he is held accountable for the thousands of Jewish settlers that have been murdered, the hundreds of Arabs that have been murdered, and the thousands of Americans that have been murdered by the terrorists.
1. Carbon dioxide, methane, sulfur hexaflouride and such are transparent to most solar radiation, but absorbent across various bands of thermal wavelengths.
True.
2. Due to this absorbency, increasing the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere will tend to trap heat which currently radiates to space.
True.
3. To restore the balance between solar flux and radiative cooling, the temperature of the Earth will have to increase on the average.
This requires a leap of faith -- namely some laws of thermodynamics. But the end result is also true. If the heat absorbed is different from the heat emitted, then the body will either cool off or heat up.
4. If we desire to ameliorate these changes, we have to reduce the rate at which greenhouse gases are put into the atmosphere.
I agree. That is one way that we can help the earth cool off. But there are other ways.
We can boil some of the atmosphere away. This happens constantly and changes in temperature and pressure will change the rate at which out atmosphere boils away. Fortunately, the warmer the planet gets, the more atmosphere that boils away. Don't worry, we have a fresh atmosphere ready to supply us in the rocks below us. Otherwise we would've lost it a long time ago.
We can trap some of the heat beneath the surface. The earth naturally draws heat out of the atmosphere and absorbs it below the surface. There may be a simple way to accelerate this process, should the temperature become extreme. By the way, the earth's crust is an excellent insulator.
We can convert some of the heat into energy stored in molecular bonds. There are chemical reactions that result in a lowering of the temperature of the medium the reaction occured in. Bonus points if the chemical reaction involves remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere and deposits it safely on the earth's surface.
We can increase the amount of gasses that reflect solar radiation, increasing the albedo of the planet and reducing the amount of radiation absorbed. There are certain gasses that naturally reflect sunlight away from out planet. Increasing the amount of these gasses will make the atmosphere more like a mirror and reflect away all of the incoming heat.
You are looking at the problem as if there was only one solution. The bottom line is that there isn't only one solution. We are not even sure if the earth is warming up or cooling. And we know that any variation in the sun's emissions will result in changes that we can't control here on earth.
I understand that there are systems so extraordinarily complicated and chaotic that even with advanced supercomputers and the world's brightest minds we cannot understand them. The weather happens to be one of them. We cannot predict the weather reliably. We can barely predict the weather today or tomorrow. How can we possibly predict the weather one hundred years from now?
So I have decided long ago, that I will sit back and enjoy a cool refreshing drink from my refrigerator that uses CFCs as a refrigerant, delivered to me by trucks using gasoline as a propellant, and exhaling that sacred CO2 from my lungs with every breath I take. Worrying about something so grossly out of my control is counterproductive to my happiness.
It doesn't take 2 years to become proficient with Unix. It takes a few months. Even non-programmers have become very skilled in the Unix environment.
Let's put it this way. You have two options: Riding a bicycle, or driving a car. While it only takes a few days to get the hang of riding a bike, you are limited by the features of riding a bike: fatigue, the environment, and a low maximum speed. Some people have trained themselves to the point where they can ride for days or at very high speeds.
But driving a car is a different matter altogether. It takes almost a year of practice and learning before someone can become proficient at driving a car. But the end result is so much better. You can drive in all kinds of weather and remain comfortable inside. You can drive for days without the kind of fatigue that bike-riding would cause. In fact, people who become proficient at driving cars can drive very quickly around racetracks, or drive huge trucks from city to city at a profit.
Needless to say, riding a bike is like relying on your GUI environment. Using the Unix system to its full potential is like driving a car.
And as far as people who want to create applications quickly -- it takes a lot more than a few years to even understand programming to a point where programming that app is even an option! The investment in learning the Unix tools is quite small compared to that. Of course, judging by some of the apps that Microsoft has turned out, I'd say a lot of their programmers need to spend some more time learning how to program...
Just because you can make crap quickly doesn't mean it still isn't crap!
I'll agree that there is no free IDE that can throw up a GUI as quickly and as well as MS [VisualBasic.NET Whatever]. The underlying programming language (VB) sucks big ones, but the GUI maker is supurb, no doubt. I'd be damn happy if there were a GPLed GUI maker that good.
Try Qt Designer with PyQt. I programmed an app yesterday to show flashcards to my toddler in less than 3 minutes and with only two lines of Python code.
I've done a lot more extensive work than this with it. I coded a complete app to handle an Optometrist's medical record and claim filings in a few months by myself full time. It's still running (1 year later) and there are hardly any bugs.
The Visual Studio IDE still blows away anything and everything Linux offers and developing world class web apps can be done with.NET faster than in Linux.
I beg to differ. I have worked extensively (2+ years) with VS and a variety of other development platforms. I have proven numerous times that using BASH, UNIX tools, CVS, plus the ViM editor makes me far more efficient in coding anything than in any other kind of development environment I have seen.
I program "world class" webapps for a living.
I code HTML faster and cleaner than people who use DreamWeaver. I code up hundreds of lines of perl code an hour that are tested and working. I am 2 to 3 times faster when working with Python.
I call your bluff, and raise you a find, grep, and diff, all of which can not exist in VS.
2 Facts: 1) Microsoft admits that the OS is a commodity and you can't make killer profits from writing OS anymore. It doesn't have the resources or expertise to provide patches in a timely manner, restructure the underlying software efficiently, or provide stable, basic services like DNS and DHCP reliably.
2) Microsoft believes that one of its core competencies is getting bleeding-edge technology out to the masses quickly in a user-friendly format. This is its advantage over OSS.
(1) and (2) together suggests that Microsoft may shift gears, abandon its OS, and embrace a free, stable platform (BSD or Linux). Microsoft will provide the bleeding edge, user-friendly stuff, and will leave the old, tried-and-true, commodity software alone.
I believe the OSS community may one day think of Microsoft as partners and friendly neighbors. If it is possible for IBM to change, and if IBMs change translates to continued profits, then Microsoft will follow.
I wouldn't be surprised if they have a full-steam-ahead development team working on it as I type.
I have some friends who work at Microsoft in Redmond. They say that Microsoft is already doing some serious development and testing on Linux. I doubt you'll get anyone to officially admit this, but it is happening right now.
At least my cousin who works at Microsoft no longer gets so upset when I mention that I hack on Linux at work. He freely admits that Linux is a popular sub-culture on campus now.
The nanotubes are sticky and bond well with themselves. Read the article.
The process they describe here is a way of storing the nanotubes for transport, so that they can be assembled later.
Creating nanotubes is dead-on easy. I've actually seen a nanotube creation lab in the Physics department in the University of Washington. I think it is on the third or fourth floor. Go visit there if you get a chance.
After the nanotubes are created, they have to be seperated. They come in a hairball and need to be seperated individually. Next they are stored in a liquid type suspension. When they want to form their nanotube rope, they need a way to squeeze them back together again and extract all of the liquid. The liquid described in the article is beneficial because it helps organize the nanotubes so that they can be easily extracted. You will end up with 100% pure nanotube rope or cable at the end of the process.
Now you are probably speculating that it can't be that simple. It is. Sheep hair (wool), cotton fiber, polyester, and such all work in the same way.
I agree. It's high time the Republicans lived up to their campaign promises and started cutting back federal programs. Welfare, medicare, and social security are all due for a checkup and rewrite.
However, space exploration falls under the constitutionally duty of the federal government to fund science. Bush is perfectly within his party's vision and the bounds of the constitution in proposing this. I want my tax dollars to fund this.
Trolltech is saying that there is no free lunch. It gives the source out freely to Free Software users because they receive so much from Free Software and the Open Source model. They could build a viable business model with their free software alone.
The reason why they refuse to give away their source code and add value to the Windows codebase is because they get nothing in return from them. In fact, they have to pay Microsoft for the "privilege".
It's also much more difficult to code for the Windows platform than for the standard free software *NIX platforms.
One of the reasons is the lack of reliable documentation. Sure, there are tons of documents out there on Windows, but there are too many contradictions in them. Which one is correct? Which calls may cause seg faults? Which ones will cause the entire system to fail? No one seems to know. Microsoft has a mysterious habit of presenting second-rank "experts" to the community, while hiding the first-rank and true experts from public view. This means when you go read an article written by an "expert" in the field, it is really a nice PR ploy with little or no true substance. I guess you have to pay a lot more or live on the Microsoft campus if you want access to the actual experts.
The other is the short, abrupt upgrades that totally invalidate their previous work. Imagine rewriting the entire KDE codebase every year or so because Linux and XFree86 decide to move around all their APIs and invalidate previous ones. That is what Microsoft is forcing people to do. I've experienced it first-hand from about 1997-2000, as I was writing a game based on Direct3D. How many times did the API to Direct3D experience a complete rewrite? I don't recall, but I think it was something like 4. I also had to code up from '95, to '98, and then to 2000 and NT. That was a very painful experience for me. I feel the pain of the people who are chained to their desks and forced to code for windows. You really are slaves to the whims of Redmond.
The other reason is that when they have a problem, they cannot "dig down" into the source code or the community to discover if the problem is on their end or the OS's end. When developing for Linux or *BSD, when you run into some serious problems, you can either look into the source code itself or even ask the kernel community if there is a bug there or what you are doing wrong. Such is not possible with Microsoft unless you shell out some cash and spend a lot of time speaking with phone monkeys.
If you really, really need a Windows version of Qt, and if it really is going to save you a lot of time in your project, then you should gratefully shell out the money to get a developer's version of Qt for Windows. And you can't complain that it is not open source -- neither is Windows, and yet you use that. Your money is going to hire people who really don't want to code for Windows. You will be paying to have them trained on the latest versions of windows. Not just the APIs, but the new applications as well. Your money is going to be used to purchase the latest and "greatest" windows platform for them to code, test, and build on. Your money is going to go to the phone monkey department as they call in to see if there is a bug in the Windows OS or if they are just reading the wrong version of an "expert's" analysis. Your money is going to be spent lining Bill Gate's pockets, and hire a few people who would rather be coding for Linux, in other words.
I was having a problem with configuring my webserver with HTML::Mason. Problem was resolved in a few hours by one of the authors of HTML::Mason. Now a neat summary of my problems and its resolutions is available to the world in the archives.
I am trying to extend PostgreSQL so that it includes efficient Materialized Views. I posted a couple of messages, and the team basically says, "We've all got our personal projects we're working on, but we all want to see M.V. a reality. Here's some pointers and good luck." When I come back with my findings, they point out some more stuff, and the discussion starts to build. I can see having M.V. in PostgreSQL a reality if I keep advocating it.
These are just two examples of things that just are not possible with closed-source software. The HTML::Mason and PostgreSQL teams are really good examples of open source work at its finest (along with other projects too numerous to mention). But imagine getting this kind of support from Microsoft or SUN. (Well, maybe SUN is fanatical about support and encourages its users to contribute to the codebase, I wouldn't know.)
This is why Open Source Software (or Free Software, whatever you want to call it) is going to take over the world. Petty irritations exist, but they exist everywhere and are not insurmountable. Eventually, everyone will see what I see in the open source community. I can't imagine "paying" someone for software that I can't look into or modify. No matter how useful it is now, it won't be useful in a few years. Heck, it won't even be supported by anyone. But open source software is timeless and invaluable. When it becomes obselete, it is updated (case in point: sendmail)
we must make sure that the slag dump is a protected environment. Any work in cleaning up the dump could result in the extinction of entire species of bacteria.
Perhaps we could set up other toxic slag dump wildlife preserves in other places throughout the world.
Why are they spending $60.8 billion on internet connections when they can fully fund their own military and allow the US soldiers to return home? This just boggles the mind. Here we have an economy 20 times the size of their northern aggressors, and they decide to spend the extra cash on an internet connection?
If you lived within artillery range of a hostile nation that is openly aggressive, would you rather have your money spent on a faster internet connection or a military force to keep the enemy at bay? Heck, with that kind of money they can overthrow Kim Jong Il and perhaps set up a peaceful government in its place, or even unify!
So you and your friends never wrote a report on the nuclear weapons program in the 1940s? They were heavily funded and had all the cutting edge technology of the time.
And there's a major thing your forgetting - we've already worked out the budget. The department is just allocating their funds the way they think best fulfills their mission.
As far as why they are not spending big bucks on microturbines, biodiesel, wave power and such is because these are all being researched quite thoroughly without mega funding. We don't need to build a huge plant with gigantic lasers and an enormous battery of capacitors to do some research on biodiesel, for example. Such a facility is a necessity for fusion research, however.
Truth be told, these "small" projects are better left handled by the private sector. That way they can develop a working prototype and get it on the market without having to file endless paperwork and worry about being cut off the next cycle. Government is best at funding and supporting huge projects with enormous requirements. I still know some professors who are waiting for the funding for the SSC to be restored. Imagine biodiesel in a similar predicament!
The schools in America have received record-breaking funding this cycle, so the money is all there.
Supercomputers are going to be a critical component of many scientific advances in the next hundred years.
If you haven't noticed, professors and researchers are moving away from scribbling equations on notepads and hoping they remembered to carry the '1' to trying out their theories in a numerical environment and seeing how close it matches reality.
They are also using supercomputers to solve with the brute-force method. What used to take hundreds of grad students slaving away for decades now takes a couple of clicks on a keyboard because of brute force.
One of the limiting factors to particle accelerators is the rate at which they can model the results that they read and determine if it is interesting or not and therefore worthy to store in the database. Having really big iron is a critical component of all particle acceleration and collision detection equipment.
Not only that, but perhaps we can use big iron to help solve complicated problems where we understand the theory very well already. Something like sustainable fusion reactions comes to mind.
Just goes to show that we already have the resources to stand up to spam.
These people are committing fraud, plain and simple. Fraud is a serious crime, and the bigger the distances, the more serious it becomes.
While we may be getting a lot of spam nowadays, expect that to fall off sharply as law enforcement, public awareness, and vigilance makes entering this business too costly for the average Joe to survive for long.
The only surviving spammers will be those who are semi-legitimate, or on such a small scale that they go unnoticed.
As long as we make sure that crime doesn't pay, the criminals will have to get up pretty early in the morning to figure out how to make it pay temporarily.
That's an ad hominem attack. Rather than attack the messenger, attack the message he is trying to deliver. You look like a prejudiced inconsiderate fool otherwise.
I agree with you women, that women are indeed better than men.... here's the punchline... So if you're better than us, why are you trying to lower yourself to our level?
Another way of looking at the world is that for every great achievement of every great person, there were at least one and perhaps two women who can claim a large portion of the credit:
1) Their mother. (Who else nurtured them and prepard them for greatness?)
2) Their wife. (Who else encouraged them and supported them?)
So next time you hear, "Albert Einstein is a great man", think, "There are two women who are at least as great". This simple fact puts the number of great women at nearly doubly the number of great men.
Slashdot Mirror
China's mission into space had little to do with science and everything to do with becoming a world power. North Korea's bid into space also has nothing to do with science and everything with delivering nuclear weapons in your backyard.
We have a choice: We can sign a bunch of peace treaties, declare and end to war in space, and go smoke the peace pipe. That way, we'll have at least twenty years of peace until we realize that maybe allowing China and North Korea to launch all those satellites and establish a moon base wasn't such a great idea after all.
Or, we can face reality, stack the deck in our favor, and hope that our democratic republic will handle the weapons better than a tin-horn dictator or a country run by sex-crazed communists.
If any of you remember recent history, remember that the reason why the Soviet Union fell apart was because Reagan made it a point to beat them in every race. We built so many nuclear weapons of such devastating capacity that the Soviets couldn't even compete anymore. Our military was so strong and effective, not even the Soviet troops in Grenada could hold them off for a day. Our economic power grew so rapidly so quickly that even Germany's and Japan's growth rate at the time looked weak. We had the upper hand, we were getting stronger every day, and the Soviet Union had a choice: Go to war and commit suicide, or decide that maybe getting along with the western democracies wasn't such a bad idea after all.
If we have a moon base, if we have a Mars base, and if we have warships in orbit, missiles on the moon, and such, ready to launch death against any threat in space, the skies, or below, China and North Korea and Iran are going to be that much more likely to meet us at the discussion table and reexamine their core beliefs like the Soviet Union did.
Peace only comes after victory. War isn't like baseball - we don't choose who we are going to play against or even whether we want to play. And when we lose war, we don't go home sad because we lost. We go home in bodybags, if there is a home to go to anymore.
When someone gets the idea that beating up Americans, launching missiles into our backyard, and detonating nuclear warheads over our schools is a good idea, we have to kick the crap out of them until either they figure out that maybe that was a bad idea or they are dead.
Sure, you think we can probably talk this out with them. Maybe if we just gave peace a chance. Let's get the scenario straight here - are you going to negotiate with a guy who is constantly threatening to kill you, who is buying grenades and guns and stuff, who is standing at your fence pointing guns at you? Are you going to walk up to him and say, "Hey, let's talk about this. Maybe we can work something out?" Or are you going to defend yourself, call the police, get a restraining order, and then keep a 12-gauge in the closet "just in case"? Let's get serious about this issue.
Here's a simplified version for some other chemical that might exist:
1. Heat comes in as visible light, but is reflected back into space.
2. Infrared light from the surface of the earth passes through the chemical and is emitted to space.
Thus, if we increase this chemical, we will experience global cooling.
In layman's terms, CO2 is like an emergency blanket (the shiny kinds) turned shiny side in. This chemical would be like an emergency blanket with shiny side out.
I'm sure anyone who knows what the absorption lines are of various chemicals will be able to find said chemical in an afternoon. All we have to do is fill the upper atmosphere with this to cool the earth off. Problem solved.
Heat is the transfer of energy. The energy needed to boil extra atmosphere away would come from the extra heat that global warming is claimed to produce.
Sulfuric acid aerosols are not needed. Ice has a plenty high enough albedo.
Energy to power an effort to cool the atmosphere with heat pumps would likely come from the sun or the earth itself. Any energy we absorb to power the machines will be energy not used to heat the earth.
I was trying to overthrow the original posters argument that increasing the concentration of various chemicals in the atmosphere will lead to global warming. The point is that the earth is an extremely complicated system that no one has yet completely understood. I brought up four extra ways that heat could be transferred out of the atmosphere to counter the effects of an increase in certain chemicals.
I am of the belief that anything we humans do has hardly any effect on the earth at large. The earth is so huge and so complicated that we can't pretend to control it or have much of an effect on it. How do we know that increasing the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere won't cause more algae in the oceans, taller treese, and denser growth that brings that level of CO2 back to equillibrium? We can't predict such a thing, we can barely even guess.
Any in particular, or are you just making more stuff up?
I don't "make stuff up". I attended the University of Washington and studied Physics. I achieved very high marks in the Thermodynamics and Astrophysics courses. I graduated June 2000 with a BS in Physics and a minor in math.
And your credentials are?
Let me cite to you some very basic things:
1) Certain chemical reactions render gasses such as oxygen and carbon dioxide from solids that are found naturally in the earth crust. In fact, the whole reason volcanoes explode is because of the gasses that build up.
2) You are thinking of a very simple model and ignoring the flow of magma and currents and such. Warm air from the tropics is carried to the artic, and vice-versa with cold air. Why can this not happen below the surface? Phase changes absorb a lot of heat. For instance, we can take a lot of the extra heat that is attributed to global warming and use it to melt ice, rock, or any number of other chemicals. We can even turn liquids in gasses. This is done naturally.
3) Have you ever played with the instant cool-packs? You mix two chemicals together and the mixture gets very cold very quickly. There are chemical reactions that absorb heat at room temperature. We can use that to cool the earth. The earth may even do it naturally.
4) There are naturally occuring substances that will reflect the sun's light away from the earth. Ice, for instance, has a very high albedo. In fact, Europa has an extremely high albedo and reflects something like 90% of the incoming sunlight away from itself. If we could increase the earth's albedo, we would decrease the amount of incoming heat, thus cooling the earth.
5) Concerning my claim that people are trying to predict the weather one hundred years from now -- isn't that the whole premise of "global warming" -- the idea that the earth is gradually getting warmer?
That KDE people are creating technologies to be able to make Gnome apps compatible with them is a sign of Gnome's success.
"Success" in the Open Source world is measured by user base and available resources. People tend to use the better software, and they tend to contribute to projects they use. Compare this with success in the commercial software world, where success is measured in stock price, profits, and company size.
Because it is KDE contributing the code, this is a bad sign for Gnome. Gnome can't seem to muster the resources to get it done on their end, while KDE can and does.
This means that either there are more developers contributing to KDE than Gnome, or the developers are just that much more productive.
If there are more developers in KDE than in Gnome, this hints that the actual user base of KDE is larger than Gnome. More people are using KDE because they like it more than Gnome (or hate it less). This is not a good sign for Gnome.
If the developers are just more productive in KDE than in Gnome, this is another bad sign for Gnome. Either the codebase in KDE is so much easier to work with than in Gnome, or the political structure of the project tends to encourage contribution better than Gnome.
Either way, KDE is developing faster than Gnome. Eventually, Gnome will become the BSD of the desktop environments as KDE progresses, gaining more users, more developers, and gaining momentum.
I can't predict for sure of course, and Gnome's usability gamble may pay off in a big way down the road. But claiming that because KDE was able to get their end of the deal done first is a win for Gnome is illogical.
I am of course biased. I have investigated both the codebase and user interfaces of Gnome and KDE extensively. I found KDE much easier to work with in both ways. Gnome has come a long way in the past few years, but in my eyes, KDE has come a lot farther.
The right to free speech is a natural right - it cannot be taken away by any constitution. It can only be silenced with bloodshed. Even then, your speech isn't killed - it is sealed with your blood. It is not an American right - it is a human right that everyone is given by God.
But the right to defend oneself, one's family, property, friends, and country is a natural right as well. Government cannot take it away. Even if they legislate against it, it will still be our right.
I agree: President Bush is not God.
We all agreed to the constitution. The constitution declares him to be the Commander in Chief. In times of war, with a few words, he can revoke the constitution, all the laws, the courts, and anything else he sees as contrary to our nation's needs. It's called "Martial Law". It's the law that we live by on the battle field. Without it, our republic would be crippled in times of national emergency.
This isn't a war like Vietnam or Desert Storm. The battlefield is every home, every building, and every street in the entire world. The terrorists have declared their method of fighting. Now we have to prepare a defense against it. We have to come up with a strategy to defeat it. This is the execution of that strategy: Sieze everyone who has donated even a few dollars to any organization connected in any way to the terrorists. Question them. Hold them in Guantanamo. Interrogate their friends and family.
The guy is now an enemy combatant. Since the terrorists have no uniform and act in secret, we cannot tell who is a terrorist or who is not except by uncovering the web the use one link at a time. He is one of those links.
He doesn't fall under the jurisdiction of the local courts or any American court. He is a prisoner of war.
If I blab national secrets to our foreign or domestic enemies, am I covered by the first amendment? I think not. If I was a citizen, I would be charged with treason, and hopefully, I would receive the death penalty. If I were a foreign national, I would expect the same, except the trial may be shorter or even omitted.
Even if he didn't give material support to terrorist organizations, being a consenting facilitator in a mailing list for such a purpose is an act of war or terror or whatever you want to call it. The United States of America is at war with terrorists and anyone who helps them. He obviously helped them, if he is not one himself.
I hope this guy ends up in Guantanamo and all his rights are stripped away. I hope the only document he'll be able to appeal to will be the Geneva Convention. I hope he is held accountable for the thousands of Jewish settlers that have been murdered, the hundreds of Arabs that have been murdered, and the thousands of Americans that have been murdered by the terrorists.
Let me refute your fourth claim.
1. Carbon dioxide, methane, sulfur hexaflouride and such are transparent to most solar radiation, but absorbent across various bands of thermal wavelengths.
True.
2. Due to this absorbency, increasing the concentration of these gases in the atmosphere will tend to trap heat which currently radiates to space.
True.
3. To restore the balance between solar flux and radiative cooling, the temperature of the Earth will have to increase on the average.
This requires a leap of faith -- namely some laws of thermodynamics. But the end result is also true. If the heat absorbed is different from the heat emitted, then the body will either cool off or heat up.
4. If we desire to ameliorate these changes, we have to reduce the rate at which greenhouse gases are put into the atmosphere.
I agree. That is one way that we can help the earth cool off. But there are other ways.
We can boil some of the atmosphere away. This happens constantly and changes in temperature and pressure will change the rate at which out atmosphere boils away. Fortunately, the warmer the planet gets, the more atmosphere that boils away. Don't worry, we have a fresh atmosphere ready to supply us in the rocks below us. Otherwise we would've lost it a long time ago.
We can trap some of the heat beneath the surface. The earth naturally draws heat out of the atmosphere and absorbs it below the surface. There may be a simple way to accelerate this process, should the temperature become extreme. By the way, the earth's crust is an excellent insulator.
We can convert some of the heat into energy stored in molecular bonds. There are chemical reactions that result in a lowering of the temperature of the medium the reaction occured in. Bonus points if the chemical reaction involves remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere and deposits it safely on the earth's surface.
We can increase the amount of gasses that reflect solar radiation, increasing the albedo of the planet and reducing the amount of radiation absorbed. There are certain gasses that naturally reflect sunlight away from out planet. Increasing the amount of these gasses will make the atmosphere more like a mirror and reflect away all of the incoming heat.
You are looking at the problem as if there was only one solution. The bottom line is that there isn't only one solution. We are not even sure if the earth is warming up or cooling. And we know that any variation in the sun's emissions will result in changes that we can't control here on earth.
I understand that there are systems so extraordinarily complicated and chaotic that even with advanced supercomputers and the world's brightest minds we cannot understand them. The weather happens to be one of them. We cannot predict the weather reliably. We can barely predict the weather today or tomorrow. How can we possibly predict the weather one hundred years from now?
So I have decided long ago, that I will sit back and enjoy a cool refreshing drink from my refrigerator that uses CFCs as a refrigerant, delivered to me by trucks using gasoline as a propellant, and exhaling that sacred CO2 from my lungs with every breath I take. Worrying about something so grossly out of my control is counterproductive to my happiness.
It doesn't take 2 years to become proficient with Unix. It takes a few months. Even non-programmers have become very skilled in the Unix environment.
Let's put it this way. You have two options: Riding a bicycle, or driving a car. While it only takes a few days to get the hang of riding a bike, you are limited by the features of riding a bike: fatigue, the environment, and a low maximum speed. Some people have trained themselves to the point where they can ride for days or at very high speeds.
But driving a car is a different matter altogether. It takes almost a year of practice and learning before someone can become proficient at driving a car. But the end result is so much better. You can drive in all kinds of weather and remain comfortable inside. You can drive for days without the kind of fatigue that bike-riding would cause. In fact, people who become proficient at driving cars can drive very quickly around racetracks, or drive huge trucks from city to city at a profit.
Needless to say, riding a bike is like relying on your GUI environment. Using the Unix system to its full potential is like driving a car.
And as far as people who want to create applications quickly -- it takes a lot more than a few years to even understand programming to a point where programming that app is even an option! The investment in learning the Unix tools is quite small compared to that. Of course, judging by some of the apps that Microsoft has turned out, I'd say a lot of their programmers need to spend some more time learning how to program...
Just because you can make crap quickly doesn't mean it still isn't crap!
I'll agree that there is no free IDE that can throw up a GUI as quickly and as well as MS [VisualBasic .NET Whatever]. The underlying programming language (VB) sucks big ones, but the GUI maker is supurb, no doubt. I'd be damn happy if there were a GPLed GUI maker that good.
Try Qt Designer with PyQt. I programmed an app yesterday to show flashcards to my toddler in less than 3 minutes and with only two lines of Python code.
I've done a lot more extensive work than this with it. I coded a complete app to handle an Optometrist's medical record and claim filings in a few months by myself full time. It's still running (1 year later) and there are hardly any bugs.
The Visual Studio IDE still blows away anything and everything Linux offers and developing world class web apps can be done with .NET faster than in Linux.
I beg to differ. I have worked extensively (2+ years) with VS and a variety of other development platforms. I have proven numerous times that using BASH, UNIX tools, CVS, plus the ViM editor makes me far more efficient in coding anything than in any other kind of development environment I have seen.
I program "world class" webapps for a living.
I code HTML faster and cleaner than people who use DreamWeaver. I code up hundreds of lines of perl code an hour that are tested and working. I am 2 to 3 times faster when working with Python.
I call your bluff, and raise you a find, grep, and diff, all of which can not exist in VS.
2 Facts:
1) Microsoft admits that the OS is a commodity and you can't make killer profits from writing OS anymore. It doesn't have the resources or expertise to provide patches in a timely manner, restructure the underlying software efficiently, or provide stable, basic services like DNS and DHCP reliably.
2) Microsoft believes that one of its core competencies is getting bleeding-edge technology out to the masses quickly in a user-friendly format. This is its advantage over OSS.
(1) and (2) together suggests that Microsoft may shift gears, abandon its OS, and embrace a free, stable platform (BSD or Linux). Microsoft will provide the bleeding edge, user-friendly stuff, and will leave the old, tried-and-true, commodity software alone.
I believe the OSS community may one day think of Microsoft as partners and friendly neighbors. If it is possible for IBM to change, and if IBMs change translates to continued profits, then Microsoft will follow.
I wouldn't be surprised if they have a full-steam-ahead development team working on it as I type.
I have some friends who work at Microsoft in Redmond. They say that Microsoft is already doing some serious development and testing on Linux. I doubt you'll get anyone to officially admit this, but it is happening right now.
At least my cousin who works at Microsoft no longer gets so upset when I mention that I hack on Linux at work. He freely admits that Linux is a popular sub-culture on campus now.
The nanotubes are sticky and bond well with themselves. Read the article.
The process they describe here is a way of storing the nanotubes for transport, so that they can be assembled later.
Creating nanotubes is dead-on easy. I've actually seen a nanotube creation lab in the Physics department in the University of Washington. I think it is on the third or fourth floor. Go visit there if you get a chance.
After the nanotubes are created, they have to be seperated. They come in a hairball and need to be seperated individually. Next they are stored in a liquid type suspension. When they want to form their nanotube rope, they need a way to squeeze them back together again and extract all of the liquid. The liquid described in the article is beneficial because it helps organize the nanotubes so that they can be easily extracted. You will end up with 100% pure nanotube rope or cable at the end of the process.
Now you are probably speculating that it can't be that simple. It is. Sheep hair (wool), cotton fiber, polyester, and such all work in the same way.
I agree. It's high time the Republicans lived up to their campaign promises and started cutting back federal programs. Welfare, medicare, and social security are all due for a checkup and rewrite.
However, space exploration falls under the constitutionally duty of the federal government to fund science. Bush is perfectly within his party's vision and the bounds of the constitution in proposing this. I want my tax dollars to fund this.
I think this poster has summed up Bush's opposition.
If Bush decided to save some cash and announce a cutback in NASA and the space program, he would be flamed.
If he announced bold new steps in the space program, he would be flamed.
Bush's opponents don't oppose Bush ideologically -- they hate him for being Bush.
Blind hatred is no way to treat a fellow citizen. At least the KKK hated blacks because they were black. You hate Bush for no reason at all!
Trolltech is saying that there is no free lunch. It gives the source out freely to Free Software users because they receive so much from Free Software and the Open Source model. They could build a viable business model with their free software alone.
The reason why they refuse to give away their source code and add value to the Windows codebase is because they get nothing in return from them. In fact, they have to pay Microsoft for the "privilege".
It's also much more difficult to code for the Windows platform than for the standard free software *NIX platforms.
One of the reasons is the lack of reliable documentation. Sure, there are tons of documents out there on Windows, but there are too many contradictions in them. Which one is correct? Which calls may cause seg faults? Which ones will cause the entire system to fail? No one seems to know. Microsoft has a mysterious habit of presenting second-rank "experts" to the community, while hiding the first-rank and true experts from public view. This means when you go read an article written by an "expert" in the field, it is really a nice PR ploy with little or no true substance. I guess you have to pay a lot more or live on the Microsoft campus if you want access to the actual experts.
The other is the short, abrupt upgrades that totally invalidate their previous work. Imagine rewriting the entire KDE codebase every year or so because Linux and XFree86 decide to move around all their APIs and invalidate previous ones. That is what Microsoft is forcing people to do. I've experienced it first-hand from about 1997-2000, as I was writing a game based on Direct3D. How many times did the API to Direct3D experience a complete rewrite? I don't recall, but I think it was something like 4. I also had to code up from '95, to '98, and then to 2000 and NT. That was a very painful experience for me. I feel the pain of the people who are chained to their desks and forced to code for windows. You really are slaves to the whims of Redmond.
The other reason is that when they have a problem, they cannot "dig down" into the source code or the community to discover if the problem is on their end or the OS's end. When developing for Linux or *BSD, when you run into some serious problems, you can either look into the source code itself or even ask the kernel community if there is a bug there or what you are doing wrong. Such is not possible with Microsoft unless you shell out some cash and spend a lot of time speaking with phone monkeys.
If you really, really need a Windows version of Qt, and if it really is going to save you a lot of time in your project, then you should gratefully shell out the money to get a developer's version of Qt for Windows. And you can't complain that it is not open source -- neither is Windows, and yet you use that. Your money is going to hire people who really don't want to code for Windows. You will be paying to have them trained on the latest versions of windows. Not just the APIs, but the new applications as well. Your money is going to be used to purchase the latest and "greatest" windows platform for them to code, test, and build on. Your money is going to go to the phone monkey department as they call in to see if there is a bug in the Windows OS or if they are just reading the wrong version of an "expert's" analysis. Your money is going to be spent lining Bill Gate's pockets, and hire a few people who would rather be coding for Linux, in other words.
I was having a problem with configuring my webserver with HTML::Mason. Problem was resolved in a few hours by one of the authors of HTML::Mason. Now a neat summary of my problems and its resolutions is available to the world in the archives.
I am trying to extend PostgreSQL so that it includes efficient Materialized Views. I posted a couple of messages, and the team basically says, "We've all got our personal projects we're working on, but we all want to see M.V. a reality. Here's some pointers and good luck." When I come back with my findings, they point out some more stuff, and the discussion starts to build. I can see having M.V. in PostgreSQL a reality if I keep advocating it.
These are just two examples of things that just are not possible with closed-source software. The HTML::Mason and PostgreSQL teams are really good examples of open source work at its finest (along with other projects too numerous to mention). But imagine getting this kind of support from Microsoft or SUN. (Well, maybe SUN is fanatical about support and encourages its users to contribute to the codebase, I wouldn't know.)
This is why Open Source Software (or Free Software, whatever you want to call it) is going to take over the world. Petty irritations exist, but they exist everywhere and are not insurmountable. Eventually, everyone will see what I see in the open source community. I can't imagine "paying" someone for software that I can't look into or modify. No matter how useful it is now, it won't be useful in a few years. Heck, it won't even be supported by anyone. But open source software is timeless and invaluable. When it becomes obselete, it is updated (case in point: sendmail)
we must make sure that the slag dump is a protected environment. Any work in cleaning up the dump could result in the extinction of entire species of bacteria.
Perhaps we could set up other toxic slag dump wildlife preserves in other places throughout the world.
Why are they spending $60.8 billion on internet connections when they can fully fund their own military and allow the US soldiers to return home? This just boggles the mind. Here we have an economy 20 times the size of their northern aggressors, and they decide to spend the extra cash on an internet connection?
If you lived within artillery range of a hostile nation that is openly aggressive, would you rather have your money spent on a faster internet connection or a military force to keep the enemy at bay? Heck, with that kind of money they can overthrow Kim Jong Il and perhaps set up a peaceful government in its place, or even unify!
So you and your friends never wrote a report on the nuclear weapons program in the 1940s? They were heavily funded and had all the cutting edge technology of the time.
And there's a major thing your forgetting - we've already worked out the budget. The department is just allocating their funds the way they think best fulfills their mission.
As far as why they are not spending big bucks on microturbines, biodiesel, wave power and such is because these are all being researched quite thoroughly without mega funding. We don't need to build a huge plant with gigantic lasers and an enormous battery of capacitors to do some research on biodiesel, for example. Such a facility is a necessity for fusion research, however.
Truth be told, these "small" projects are better left handled by the private sector. That way they can develop a working prototype and get it on the market without having to file endless paperwork and worry about being cut off the next cycle. Government is best at funding and supporting huge projects with enormous requirements. I still know some professors who are waiting for the funding for the SSC to be restored. Imagine biodiesel in a similar predicament!
The schools in America have received record-breaking funding this cycle, so the money is all there.
Supercomputers are going to be a critical component of many scientific advances in the next hundred years.
If you haven't noticed, professors and researchers are moving away from scribbling equations on notepads and hoping they remembered to carry the '1' to trying out their theories in a numerical environment and seeing how close it matches reality.
They are also using supercomputers to solve with the brute-force method. What used to take hundreds of grad students slaving away for decades now takes a couple of clicks on a keyboard because of brute force.
One of the limiting factors to particle accelerators is the rate at which they can model the results that they read and determine if it is interesting or not and therefore worthy to store in the database. Having really big iron is a critical component of all particle acceleration and collision detection equipment.
Not only that, but perhaps we can use big iron to help solve complicated problems where we understand the theory very well already. Something like sustainable fusion reactions comes to mind.
Just goes to show that we already have the resources to stand up to spam.
These people are committing fraud, plain and simple. Fraud is a serious crime, and the bigger the distances, the more serious it becomes.
While we may be getting a lot of spam nowadays, expect that to fall off sharply as law enforcement, public awareness, and vigilance makes entering this business too costly for the average Joe to survive for long.
The only surviving spammers will be those who are semi-legitimate, or on such a small scale that they go unnoticed.
As long as we make sure that crime doesn't pay, the criminals will have to get up pretty early in the morning to figure out how to make it pay temporarily.
That's an ad hominem attack. Rather than attack the messenger, attack the message he is trying to deliver. You look like a prejudiced inconsiderate fool otherwise.
I agree with you women, that women are indeed better than men. ... here's the punchline ... So if you're better than us, why are you trying to lower yourself to our level?
Another way of looking at the world is that for every great achievement of every great person, there were at least one and perhaps two women who can claim a large portion of the credit:
1) Their mother. (Who else nurtured them and prepard them for greatness?)
2) Their wife. (Who else encouraged them and supported them?)
So next time you hear, "Albert Einstein is a great man", think, "There are two women who are at least as great". This simple fact puts the number of great women at nearly doubly the number of great men.