Well, the FACT that CO2 and methane and other pollutants in the air are trapping heat, and something is melting the polar ice caps, warming the ocean, etc., sounds like at least a small clue to me.
What about the fact that CO2 levels have to be dramatically higher than they are now to cause any greenhouse effect?
Your argument appears to be that if two things happen simultaneously, they must be connected. The USA was established at the tail end of the little ice age, does that mean it's responsible for warming the oceans, and by returning to the queen's rule, we can cool the Earth? Incidentally...how did you come up with that cause-effect ordering of the CO2 level and temperatures? Geological evidence shows that CO2 changes follow temperature changes, not the other way around. And it makes sense, given that the oceans hold vast amounts of CO2, and water releases CO2 as it warms, and then absorbs CO2 as it cools. But let's not allow pesky reason to get in the way of a good religious fervor.
Humans are responsible for less than 3% of CO2 production (including indirect sources like cattle farming).
If you want to see some facts check out any mid-90s prediction of global temperatures over the next 15 years...and then compare them to what we saw. They predicted a massive uptick, we experienced a small decline. The best theories for global temperature changes (the ones where reality and theory match) are solar output, oceanic cycles, and clouds produced by cosmic rays (there was a/. story about CERN research on that topic recently).
The IPCC predicted 50million "climate refugees" for the last decade. It didn't happen. The real number was 0. So the IPCC hired Winston Smith to correct the earlier report.
In real science, if any one piece of evidence is bad, one should toss out everything derived from it, and start again. Climate scientists are intentionally building conclusions based on false data, and fixing the data to support their predetermined conclusions. That reminds me of another group of "scientists".
Sanitation: Like the government garbage strikes in NYC, where trash piled up for weeks? A private company would get the trash picked up (unless prevented from doing so by "labor laws").
Medicine: Government has run up the costs, and slowed the pace of innovation. When rich Canadians need surgery they leave their socialized system for the semi-socialized US system.
Education: Like in Atlanta, where the government schools cheat to get money? The more control government has gained over education, the worse it has become. Or the fact that almost half of all US high school graduates are functionally illiterate.
Wine: I have no idea what that has to do with government.
Public Order: Wars in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Panama, the Baltics. That's just a sample of the US's "public order" this century. If we look at the last century, we can add the Holocaust, the Soviet purges, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, Mao's cleansing, and countless other atrocities. Cops commit more murders in the US than they prevent, and as in the cases of Jose Guerena or John T. Williams, they get away with it. I refrain from murder, rape, and theft because it's wrong, not because it's illegal. And the vast majority of the population does as well.
Irrigation: All the irrigation systems I know of are private. But I don't claim any level of expertise in the field.
Roads: High quality roads, indeed! A private firm would see a bridge (or a road) as an asset to be maintained, in order to reduce the risk of lawsuits, and maintain revenue. To government it's an expense with nothing new and shiny to show the voters.
Fresh water: That would be fairly difficult to do in private industry...at least the way we do it now. But it's not done at the federal level. The farther control of something gets from the people, the worse it seems to get.
Public Health: Is having idiots scream that we're all going to die from the bird flu, or the swine flu, or the flying pigs flu a good thing?
Other than those things, government is responsible for hundreds of millions of murders, stealing wealth from its owners and diverting it to those with political connections (particularly banks and military contractors), and generally slowing the progress of our society.
Sadly in the US, where free markets have given way to corporate socialism, i.e. fascism, getting the job done, has more to do with making friends in D.C., than with providing a good product or service at a good price. But giving government agencies more power is not the way to fix a problem caused by government agencies having too much power.
Incompetence, yes. Greed, no. If they had been greedy and competent, they'd still be in business.
You're countering my point, by using the same point. Those companies that ran themselves into the ground, are no longer around to provide bad services. If those companies were government agencies, they'd be getting a bigger budget to "fix" their failures.
I am always suspicious when government is the solution. I prefer to keep it in the hands of private companies.
Private companies are motivated by profit.
Agencies are directed by political appointees, but good ones tend to have a culture which focuses on institutional competence. (e.g. the solicitor general's office.) It does not make sense for individual companies to take the same measures that a society does--there are collective action problems. Some of those goals can be assumed by an agency working for government.
Private companies that want to continue to make a profit will make sure they get the job done. Political appointees, on the other hand, will keep their jobs if they fail, and most likely turn the failure into an increased budget, so next time they can fail on a more spectacular level.
Look at how well they handle airport security, natural disasters, delivering packages, stopping drug smugglers, determining if Iraq has nuclear research, planning a budget, improving the economy, and virtually every other task they've ever attempted.
The only thing government does well is apply force, because that's all government is.
I'd much rather have a company, whose profits are on the line (assuming the feds don't decide to bail them out), staffed by people, whose salaries are on the line, dealing with an issue than a bureaucrat who will use failure as an excuse to ask for a bigger budget. In private industry, failure is punished. In government, it's rewarded.
You're not forced to go to the mall. Does that make it okay for the local cops at the mall to grope you as a requirement for entrance? Of course not!
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Reasonable? Nope!
Warrant issued? Nope!
Probable cause? Nope!
Supporting oath or affirmation? Nope!
0 / 4 might be a good score for government work, but not in the free world.
They tend to treat me like I'm crazy. But then, I don't look anything like a cop; I look like a slacker software engineer.
A few years ago at Sea-Tac, I had an Alaska rep tell me I couldn't check in a firearm. We had to call her boss over. Fortunately he was familiar with the form, and knew what to do. And the first rep was very apologetic and friendly after. And the best part is: nobody stole the external HDD out of my suitcase!
Buy a pistol, if you don't have one already. (A starter pistol, which has no legal restrictions on ownership or purchase in any state, works just as well).
Put your pistol in the suitcase, check-in at the counter, and tell the airline rep you have a firearm to declare.
Fill out the card that says your firearm is unloaded, put it in your suitcase, and lock it (with real locks, not TSA-approved ones), while the airline rep watches.
Walk down to the TSA screener with the airline rep, and hand your bag over.
The TSA screener will scan your bag while you wait. If there's a need to open it, the screener will have you open it, and will look through the bag while you watch.
It is illegal for them to open your bag without you being present, if you have a firearm declared. (I guess the government doesn't trust the TSA near guns...if only they'd expand that mistrust to all the federal alphabet soup criminals).
I discovered this accidentally, because I usually take at least one pistol whenever I fly anywhere, and have been using it ever since. If I'm going some place anti-gun, like Chicago or CA, I take a firearm component, like a barrel, which still has to be checked the same way, but can't get me into trouble on the trip.
You mean the local Community College? I doubt they have anything more powerful or bigger than a 10 year old Dell server running Win2k (and no less than three different rootkits).
I'd put DOS on a VM. Not because it's even a passable OS; purely for the absurdity of it. Then record a screencast of her randomly typing in words hoping that it will get the computer to do something useful, before finally giving up, sobbing. (Just make sure your birthday isn't coming up soon.)
Even if you ignore the Altair, and require a personal computer to be something with a keyboard and monitor, the Apple I and Apple II were out before the IBM PC (and far superior).
The database is not of the nearest tower or hotspot. It is of many nearby ones, (e.g. within dozens of miles). By having this cache of local known positions, the GPS can resolve in seconds, rather than in minutes.
Look at any analysis of the actual data and you'll see that the points do a very poor job of tracking locations. Some of the points are predictions on where you might go. The point of a cache is to have the data at hand before it's needed, so that when it is needed, it's right there.
It's possible he was somewhere near Las Vegas is not tracking.
People might be looking at the problem backwards. It's not what Android is doing poorly that's hurting it in the tablet market, as much as what Apple is doing poorly that's hurting it in the phone market. The answer is carrier exclusivity. iOS gained on Android in the US phone market for the first time in a long time recently, because they started selling Verizon phones. Perhaps as iPhones begin to support more carriers (assuming Apple can scale manufacturing enough), Apple will start to take bigger chunks.
That's really useful on a lot of modern notebooks where the Home key (if it even exists) is some meta key combination of O. Or like on this modern ThinkPad, where the Home key is a tiny target between Backspace and Off. Don't miss!
The Mac OS and hardware were designed together, so the software makes up for hardware limitations (like a reduced keyboard area), and takes full advantage of the hardware advantages (like the far superior touch pads and touch mice).
As a side note, the Home key on my full-sized Mac keyboard works just fine in all Apple software and most third party software. And remapping it to send CMD+Right takes about 20 seconds under Settings.
Finally, he says, Textmate sucks. 'Sooner or later, you have to face facts. Man up and learn Vim.'"
Looks like you missed a character.;-)
P.S. WTF is Textmate? I've been developing on MacOS X since Tiger in 2007, and I've never heard of it before. I've only used XCode, (console) Vim, or MacVim.
He might as well say he stopped developing on Windows, because Notepad is a horrible IDE.
MacBook Pros and ThinkPads are hardware. Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows 7 are software. Getting the ThinkPad wouldn't have helped in any way (unless you consider a cheap piece of plastic, with a low end display, that can't run on battery for 10+ hours an improvement). ThinkPads come with Windows 7 these days, which is vastly more removed from Linux than Mac OS X (which has always been UNIX-like and is now officially UNIX).
The ThinkPad might cost less, and that is the only advantage I can see, but if your employer is paying, get the good stuff!
The MacBook Pro can run any OS the ThinkPad can run. Additionally it can run Mac OS 10.4+, allowing you to test your content on a wider range of client platforms. VMWare and Parallels make running a Linux test VM easy. Running test code on a VM is better than running it natively anyway, since your deployment servers probably aren't running Amarok, proprietary NVidia or ATI drivers, etc. In fact, you might even be able to get a copy of the production machine build image, and create a VM using that, for 100% accuracy. And then you can have multiple dedicated VMs for different versions of client OSes for testing purposes.
If you want to run Emacs, there's probably a very nice Emacs implementationfor Mac OS X (I use MacVim to develop for iPhone/iPad). There's also a very nice Terminal app (not quite as nice as Eterm or Konsole, but close), built in support for mounting NFS shares from your VMs, etc. Everything you'd expect from a modern UNIX OS.
If you know anybody who works at MS (or knows somebody who knows somebody...), you can get Win7 Home Premium? (the version most PCs ship with) for $30 (Vista is $5 for any version). That's how I got my copy.
What about the OS on the dead notebook? Do you still have the license info for it? Can you just install it on the MacBook?
But before getting Windows (yech!), have you tried to figure out why she doesn't like Mac OS X? If it's because you're teaching her (generally a bad idea), try signing her up for a one-on-one session at your local Apple store. It seems odd that anyone would prefer the Windows interface, especially one that was sub-par when it was released 10 years ago.
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So...if the computer eventually gives in to entropy, it's not an infinite loop?
What about the fact that CO2 levels have to be dramatically higher than they are now to cause any greenhouse effect?
Your argument appears to be that if two things happen simultaneously, they must be connected. The USA was established at the tail end of the little ice age, does that mean it's responsible for warming the oceans, and by returning to the queen's rule, we can cool the Earth? Incidentally...how did you come up with that cause-effect ordering of the CO2 level and temperatures? Geological evidence shows that CO2 changes follow temperature changes, not the other way around. And it makes sense, given that the oceans hold vast amounts of CO2, and water releases CO2 as it warms, and then absorbs CO2 as it cools. But let's not allow pesky reason to get in the way of a good religious fervor.
Humans are responsible for less than 3% of CO2 production (including indirect sources like cattle farming).
If you want to see some facts check out any mid-90s prediction of global temperatures over the next 15 years...and then compare them to what we saw. They predicted a massive uptick, we experienced a small decline. The best theories for global temperature changes (the ones where reality and theory match) are solar output, oceanic cycles, and clouds produced by cosmic rays (there was a /. story about CERN research on that topic recently).
The IPCC predicted 50million "climate refugees" for the last decade. It didn't happen. The real number was 0. So the IPCC hired Winston Smith to correct the earlier report.
The CRU cherry-picked Russian climate data, to make it look like temperatures were going up.
In real science, if any one piece of evidence is bad, one should toss out everything derived from it, and start again. Climate scientists are intentionally building conclusions based on false data, and fixing the data to support their predetermined conclusions. That reminds me of another group of "scientists".
Sanitation: Like the government garbage strikes in NYC, where trash piled up for weeks? A private company would get the trash picked up (unless prevented from doing so by "labor laws").
Medicine: Government has run up the costs, and slowed the pace of innovation. When rich Canadians need surgery they leave their socialized system for the semi-socialized US system.
Education: Like in Atlanta, where the government schools cheat to get money? The more control government has gained over education, the worse it has become. Or the fact that almost half of all US high school graduates are functionally illiterate.
Wine: I have no idea what that has to do with government.
Public Order: Wars in Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, Panama, the Baltics. That's just a sample of the US's "public order" this century. If we look at the last century, we can add the Holocaust, the Soviet purges, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, Mao's cleansing, and countless other atrocities. Cops commit more murders in the US than they prevent, and as in the cases of Jose Guerena or John T. Williams, they get away with it. I refrain from murder, rape, and theft because it's wrong, not because it's illegal. And the vast majority of the population does as well.
Irrigation: All the irrigation systems I know of are private. But I don't claim any level of expertise in the field.
Roads: High quality roads, indeed! A private firm would see a bridge (or a road) as an asset to be maintained, in order to reduce the risk of lawsuits, and maintain revenue. To government it's an expense with nothing new and shiny to show the voters.
Fresh water: That would be fairly difficult to do in private industry...at least the way we do it now. But it's not done at the federal level. The farther control of something gets from the people, the worse it seems to get.
Public Health: Is having idiots scream that we're all going to die from the bird flu, or the swine flu, or the flying pigs flu a good thing?
Other than those things, government is responsible for hundreds of millions of murders, stealing wealth from its owners and diverting it to those with political connections (particularly banks and military contractors), and generally slowing the progress of our society.
Sadly in the US, where free markets have given way to corporate socialism, i.e. fascism, getting the job done, has more to do with making friends in D.C., than with providing a good product or service at a good price. But giving government agencies more power is not the way to fix a problem caused by government agencies having too much power.
Incompetence, yes. Greed, no. If they had been greedy and competent, they'd still be in business.
You're countering my point, by using the same point. Those companies that ran themselves into the ground, are no longer around to provide bad services. If those companies were government agencies, they'd be getting a bigger budget to "fix" their failures.
I am always suspicious when government is the solution. I prefer to keep it in the hands of private companies.
Private companies are motivated by profit.
Agencies are directed by political appointees, but good ones tend to have a culture which focuses on institutional competence. (e.g. the solicitor general's office.) It does not make sense for individual companies to take the same measures that a society does--there are collective action problems. Some of those goals can be assumed by an agency working for government.
Private companies that want to continue to make a profit will make sure they get the job done. Political appointees, on the other hand, will keep their jobs if they fail, and most likely turn the failure into an increased budget, so next time they can fail on a more spectacular level.
Look at how well they handle airport security, natural disasters, delivering packages, stopping drug smugglers, determining if Iraq has nuclear research, planning a budget, improving the economy, and virtually every other task they've ever attempted.
The only thing government does well is apply force, because that's all government is.
I'd much rather have a company, whose profits are on the line (assuming the feds don't decide to bail them out), staffed by people, whose salaries are on the line, dealing with an issue than a bureaucrat who will use failure as an excuse to ask for a bigger budget. In private industry, failure is punished. In government, it's rewarded.
If I really wanted to fly to Hawaii, I'd take a boat.
Please explain how this is possible.
There are these things that float on water, I forget what they're called. It'll come to me.
Witches?
Reasonable? Nope!
Warrant issued? Nope!
Probable cause? Nope!
Supporting oath or affirmation? Nope!
0 / 4 might be a good score for government work, but not in the free world.
Was your rapist wearing a blue polyester shirt with a sewn-own badge with blue rubber gloves, and hanging out at the airport? Mine was.
In my experience, the TSA guy has always slapped a sticker on my bag that says it has been searched (one of those shiny hologram TSA logo ones).
They tend to treat me like I'm crazy. But then, I don't look anything like a cop; I look like a slacker software engineer.
A few years ago at Sea-Tac, I had an Alaska rep tell me I couldn't check in a firearm. We had to call her boss over. Fortunately he was familiar with the form, and knew what to do. And the first rep was very apologetic and friendly after. And the best part is: nobody stole the external HDD out of my suitcase!
I also recommend printing out a copy of the TSA page on flying with firearms, in case you get somebody who doesn't have a clue.
It is illegal for them to open your bag without you being present, if you have a firearm declared. (I guess the government doesn't trust the TSA near guns...if only they'd expand that mistrust to all the federal alphabet soup criminals).
I discovered this accidentally, because I usually take at least one pistol whenever I fly anywhere, and have been using it ever since. If I'm going some place anti-gun, like Chicago or CA, I take a firearm component, like a barrel, which still has to be checked the same way, but can't get me into trouble on the trip.
You mean the local Community College? I doubt they have anything more powerful or bigger than a 10 year old Dell server running Win2k (and no less than three different rootkits).
I'd put DOS on a VM. Not because it's even a passable OS; purely for the absurdity of it. Then record a screencast of her randomly typing in words hoping that it will get the computer to do something useful, before finally giving up, sobbing. (Just make sure your birthday isn't coming up soon.)
Even if you ignore the Altair, and require a personal computer to be something with a keyboard and monitor, the Apple I and Apple II were out before the IBM PC (and far superior).
The database is not of the nearest tower or hotspot. It is of many nearby ones, (e.g. within dozens of miles). By having this cache of local known positions, the GPS can resolve in seconds, rather than in minutes.
Look at any analysis of the actual data and you'll see that the points do a very poor job of tracking locations. Some of the points are predictions on where you might go. The point of a cache is to have the data at hand before it's needed, so that when it is needed, it's right there. It's possible he was somewhere near Las Vegas is not tracking.
People might be looking at the problem backwards. It's not what Android is doing poorly that's hurting it in the tablet market, as much as what Apple is doing poorly that's hurting it in the phone market. The answer is carrier exclusivity. iOS gained on Android in the US phone market for the first time in a long time recently, because they started selling Verizon phones. Perhaps as iPhones begin to support more carriers (assuming Apple can scale manufacturing enough), Apple will start to take bigger chunks.
I have "a friend" who uses that all the time.
That's really useful on a lot of modern notebooks where the Home key (if it even exists) is some meta key combination of O. Or like on this modern ThinkPad, where the Home key is a tiny target between Backspace and Off. Don't miss!
The Mac OS and hardware were designed together, so the software makes up for hardware limitations (like a reduced keyboard area), and takes full advantage of the hardware advantages (like the far superior touch pads and touch mice).
As a side note, the Home key on my full-sized Mac keyboard works just fine in all Apple software and most third party software. And remapping it to send CMD+Right takes about 20 seconds under Settings.
Looks like you missed a character. ;-)
P.S. WTF is Textmate? I've been developing on MacOS X since Tiger in 2007, and I've never heard of it before. I've only used XCode, (console) Vim, or MacVim.
He might as well say he stopped developing on Windows, because Notepad is a horrible IDE.
MacBook Pros and ThinkPads are hardware. Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows 7 are software. Getting the ThinkPad wouldn't have helped in any way (unless you consider a cheap piece of plastic, with a low end display, that can't run on battery for 10+ hours an improvement). ThinkPads come with Windows 7 these days, which is vastly more removed from Linux than Mac OS X (which has always been UNIX-like and is now officially UNIX). The ThinkPad might cost less, and that is the only advantage I can see, but if your employer is paying, get the good stuff!
The MacBook Pro can run any OS the ThinkPad can run. Additionally it can run Mac OS 10.4+, allowing you to test your content on a wider range of client platforms. VMWare and Parallels make running a Linux test VM easy. Running test code on a VM is better than running it natively anyway, since your deployment servers probably aren't running Amarok, proprietary NVidia or ATI drivers, etc. In fact, you might even be able to get a copy of the production machine build image, and create a VM using that, for 100% accuracy. And then you can have multiple dedicated VMs for different versions of client OSes for testing purposes.
If you want to run Emacs, there's probably a very nice Emacs implementationfor Mac OS X (I use MacVim to develop for iPhone/iPad). There's also a very nice Terminal app (not quite as nice as Eterm or Konsole, but close), built in support for mounting NFS shares from your VMs, etc. Everything you'd expect from a modern UNIX OS.
If you know anybody who works at MS (or knows somebody who knows somebody...), you can get Win7 Home Premium? (the version most PCs ship with) for $30 (Vista is $5 for any version). That's how I got my copy.
What about the OS on the dead notebook? Do you still have the license info for it? Can you just install it on the MacBook?
But before getting Windows (yech!), have you tried to figure out why she doesn't like Mac OS X? If it's because you're teaching her (generally a bad idea), try signing her up for a one-on-one session at your local Apple store. It seems odd that anyone would prefer the Windows interface, especially one that was sub-par when it was released 10 years ago.