Yet there still seem to be a finite number of them, and they are thus countable. Not even enough to have to determine if they are a countable or uncountable infinity.
Yes, the number of stars must be finite and thus must be countable.
Assumption 1: there was a Big Bang. 2: The speed of light in a vacuum (c) is a hard limit on a mass's velocity. 3: a star has non-zero mass and non-zero positive volume.
The MAXIMUM radius of the universe can be calculated from c multiplied by the time since the Big Bang. The volume is simply 4/3 times pi times the radius cubed. Since all of these numbers are finite and real and positive, the result is finite and real and positive. The MAXIMUM number of stars can be calculated by dividing the volume of the universe by the average size of a star. Since both numbers are positive and real, the result is positive and real. And non-infinite.
The MINIMUM radius of the universe is, of course, about 60 miles, the distance a person can walk in one day. You would think that simply walking another 60 miles the next day would increase the possible radius, but no. While you were sleeping, the previous day's universe was replaced with a different universe with you at the center instead of 60 miles from the center. As least this is my theory, since I know that I am the center of the universe every morning when I wake up.
Dawkins freely admits you can't disprove the existance of a God or any other supnernatural being, no more than you can disprove the existance of pink unicorns, FSM or Santa Claus.
Delusion: de-lu-sion n.
3. Psychiatry: a false, persistent belief maintained in spite of evidence to the contrary --de-lu'sion-al adj.
He's a scientist using science to claim a "delusion" in God. It's reasonable to assume he's using the scientific term. If he's claiming you can't disprove God, then where is the evidence to the contrary he is implying by the very title of his book?
I did. Whether they are simply advocating the squashing of Dawkins' freedom of speech or are actually squashing, if the University tells Dawkins' to pack it in, the end result is the same.
They are neither squashing nor are they advocating the squashing. They are simply saying they "strongly oppose" his appearance. You're foolish if you think the University is scared they are going to lose funding for going ahead with this.
This resolution is nothing more than covering ass so the legislature can tell anyone who complains about Dawkins' appearance at a state funded school that they did what they could. This is the most they could. If they intended not to fund the uni because of this, they wouldn't be stupid enough to put it on the record, they'd have an informal meeting with the President of the uni and tell him personally.
Let's also not forget that First Amendment also includes the freedom to practice a religion of one's choosing. This also includes the right to practice no religion at all.
Of course it does. Dawkins is quite free to practice whatever religion he wants, even the religion of atheism. Who is stopping him? Certainly not this resolution.
IOW, Dawkins' has a Constitutional right to be an atheist and to speak about his own beliefs (or non-beliefs) as an atheist.
And he's going to do so. There is, however, no Constitutional right to speak using the foundation of a public university as your support. Universities don't have the requirement to let anyone who wants to speak at an event do so.
But the issue is not his religion, it is his conflation of science and religion. When he claims that God is a "delusion" and does in using the voice of science, he's wrong. THAT is the issue that people have with Dawkins. I, too, and perfectly fine with him practicing whatever religion he wants, as long as he's not trying to turn science into religion. As a scientist, I object very strongly to that.
However, what happens if the university rescinds its invitation to the speaker for fear of losing any state funding?
What happens if they hadn't scheduled him in the first place for fear of losing state funding? What happens if a vocal minority on campus objects and the University revokes the offer? (Oh, wait, it's OK for that to happen when the speaker is a conservative. I guess there's no problem with it happening to Dawkins.)
Do you really believe that a state legislature is going to refuse to fund the state university over this? Do you understand how many people, meaning voters, have students going to that university? Do you think they'll be happy to hear that the tuition for the university is going to triple because the state stopped funding it?
No, that ain't gonna happen. This measure says what it says -- strongly oppose. If they had wanted to say "prohibit", they could have. If they intended to tell the university that they were going to stop funding them over this, they'd be doing so informally so that nothing could be tied back to anyone.
The resolution is only an ass covering for the legislature to make those who oppose Dawkins (not oppose Evolution, but Dawkins' particular lack of perspective on the subject) happy. I mean, someone who writes a book "The God Delusion" has clearly stepped outside the bounds of science and is practicing religion. Science has no means to either prove or disprove God. By calling it a "delusion", he's making a claim under the pretense of science, and he's wrong for doing that. (I don't particularly care what his personal view is, when he pretends that he's being a scientist while making such claims he's overstepped his rights, and as a scientist I object to that.)
would be it okay for them to pass legislation to squash the free speech rights of someone...
You know, if you actually read the bill under discussion, you'd notice that it doesn't squash anything, much less anyone's "free speech rights". All it says is that the legislature opposes his appearance. They didn't ban him, and they don't order anything to be done about it. Oh, yes, they will "order" that their opposition message be sent to the University leaders.
The CDC system Michigan State University used in the late 70's used drum as swap and booted from a program stored in toggle switches. Not "toggled in", a large panel of toggle switches that contained the initial boot code bit by bit.
The article also forgot to mention that Jaquard (sp?) is the initial inventor of the punched card, since that's what controlled the looms.
And, of course, my favoritest kind of memory, the CRT. Yes, that was a very early memory device. And CORE. And the paper format that Byte (or Compute, I forget which) magazine tried to get adopted in the 80's, a form of which appears on shipping labels today.
- Hospital patients, who frequently use hospitals for healthcare at all hours of the day and, furthermore, often have to arrive there at a moment's notice due to a medical emergency, will have a slightly harder time finding their way around the outside of the hospital.
I doubt that most hospital patients, especially the ones having medical emergencies, use Google Earth images to find where the closest one is. Even if they did, I doubt they'd ignore the very large "EMERGENCY ROOM" sign when they get there just because it was blurred in the image they downloaded and printed out while they were having their stroke.
(In fact, if they are having a stroke, it is likely ALL the images are blurred anyway.)
Now, if your argument was that the ambulance crews would likely have a hard time finding their way around the outside of the hospital if Google Earth blurred the images, well, I'd agree with that. Those guys are notorious for showing up at schools and Walmarts instead of the hospital anyway.
The book's use of Bill Gates as an example of the 10,000 hour rule is rather poor. Bill Gates did not build Microsoft by being a good programmer. He built it by taking other people's good programs. He didn't even need any skill to identify "good", because he took those that lots of people were using. He let the public determine what was good and leveraged that.
In addition, the dreaded "rationing" of healthcare is already here, brought to you by the private sector.
Au contraire, mon fraire. Rationing is a property of EVERY healthcare system where people don't see the costs and thus overuse the system. Oregon's much-touted health care plan is one example. It has nothing to do with the private sector. It has everything to do with too many people putting too many demands on what is available, and instead of telling people who come to the ER with a headcold to "get the fuck out of here", they limit what everyone can get.
Calibre is nice, but it isn't the answer to the Sony problems.
Problem number 1 is that the Sony uses the embedded TITLE attribute for a pdf. This wouldn't be a problem except that very few producers of pdf format ebooks or documents have a damn clue about how to set it correctly. (The US Air Force is REALLY clueless at this. I have AF Regs that have TITLES like "u_2502883823.pdf".) This wouldn't be a problem except some of them then lock the pdf with a password so the user can't fix it, either.
I have one pdf user manual for a radio that has the extremely useful title "[].pdf". I have a series of pdfs with titles that all begin with the same 50 or so characters, and the Sony only displays --- 50 or so characters in the title. All locked with a password.
Sony has an XML database on the device listing the books, which can be edited by the user. Calibre appears to do that. BUT -- when the Sony cold-boots, it rescans EVERY BOOK and rebuilds the xml database, using the TITLE in the pdf.
Having to learn all the new tools to deal with fixing pdfs (pdftk is great!) is a big drawback to the system as a whole.
The other Sony issue, which Calibre DOES solve, is finding books that haven't been assigned to a collection. At 700+ books, if I have any books that aren't in a collection they are as good as lost forever. Searching by TITLE, with the TITLE problem, is a big pain.
Calibre also has "streaming feeds" of many publications, including (I think) the NY Times, Christian Science Monitor, and others. When I tried several, about half created documents that crashed the 505.
To say that it would be hard for an ISP to support typical users at 5Mbs seems naive.
The difference between an ISP and a University is that much of the traffic of a University stays on campus. That might not be true for the student personal traffic when they p2p their music, but the "official" traffic does. People on campus access servers on campus to move data on campus. Joe Engineering student connects to an on-campus server to run his programs and submit his term papers.
For example, all my data sits down the hall at the other end of a 100Mbit link. Switched. Other than transient web traffic, all the accesses come from other people with 100Mbit switched links in the same building. That data comes on-campus in megabyte chunks over the day, but originates at sites with 10Mbit or slower connections to start with.
At an ISP, there are very FEW people running servers to share data with other ISP users, so almost ALL of the traffic goes "off campus". Once your packets leave your house, it is almost a given they will go out the ISP's upstream connection. (Local proxies and caches are an exception, of course.)
So, basically, the assumptions behind sharing at a uni and at an ISP are two radically different things.
Consider, too, that "telecommunications" companies have ALWAYS made assumptions about sharing resources, even back in the glory days of Ma Bell and the local telco who owned your telephone. They never had one trunk per subscriber. They never even had one dialtone generator per sub. Nor did they have one step-by-step (relay) per sub. On a busy day, you could wait a minute to get dialtone. Even moving to the "computer" age and crossbar switches, there never was one DTMF decoder per sub, so you could still wait to get dialtone. And guess what? Computer modem users started reshaping the assumptions about line sharing that the telco's had to make. That's why they used to charge more for a "data" line -- it was going to be in use more and using the switching more than the "normal" user.
Now, most people never realized that they were sharing dialtone generators and DTMF decoders with other people, because they almost never had to wait for it when they picked up the phone. They didn't know there were only 10 or 20 trunks connecting their little central office with the rest of the world because when they wanted to call long-distance there was one available right away. (I remember visiting a CO when a friend was working there and being surprised that all the connections to the rest of the world came up to one small patch panel! And how simple it was to jack in to listen.)
That's no different than today. Most people don't realize they are sharing their cable modem network with anyone else because the system responds as fast as they ask it to. WE know because we are techies. Sometimes it IS better not to know what hotdogs are made of.
The design is to connect to the tower with the best reception.
The FA is rather skimpy on details, but it says he was on board the ship, and it is logical to assume he wasn't sitting on deck running his laptop. It is very likely that he had no shore-based reception, so the on-board cell was all there was.
About his "never leaving the US" claims. Well, he was on-board the ship. That means he had passed through immigration going out, and was on a ship that was almost certainly of a foreign registry. While he was still in US territorial waters, he was, for all practical purposes, out of the US. He would have had to clear immigration and customs to get back in.
But yeah, as someone who got hit with a stupidly large bill for "international roaming"*, I agree with the concept of an account "cap", but it appears from the FA that AT&T was trying to warn him and his equipment wasn't passing the message on.
* hundreds of calls being forwarded to Australia while I was there, not being answered because the phone was turned off, and then being forwarded back to the US for voicemail -- that didn't record a single one. With a one-minute charge going both ways.
When things are going right, a monkey could take off, fly, and land a plane.
Well, pretty close.
The majority of pilot training time is how to deal with emergencies. Making landings is a considerable part of the early training only because it is a skill that most people don't walk into a flight school already having. Once that's covered, the emphasis changes to -- emergencies.
What do you do if your engine fails? What do you do if one of your engines fail? What do you do if your electrical system fails? What do you do if your radio fails? For commercial ATP pilots, the recurring training assumes that they know how to fly, and it focuses almost entirely on dealing with failures. The kinds of things that a terrorist aiming to land the plane on the 43rd floor of an office building won't care about.
As for "navigation", I think most people could find New York City with one eye closed, even starting in LA, and once you get close enough to make out buildings, the Trade Center was a pretty obvious landmark. While ded reckoning does take some training to accomplish successfully, that's only because success means staying on a planned course. If your flight planning consists of "fly east, find New York, hit a building", then ded reckoning becomes trivial.
No, it's more likely that one person takes on all the good qualities of the pair and the other takes on all the bad qualities of the pair, and they'll have to knock the bad one out to force them to go back through the entanglement experiment so they come out ok.
Both could be damaging to the egos of an unprepared GC denier.
You know, expecting that global warming claims meet the standards of scientific process and not those of a religious cult is NOT being a "GC denier". It is being a good scientist. Those who say "there is no debate" are not good scientists. They meet the definition of a religion better than most religions I know, since most religions I know have some debates over some principles. Post-millenialism, pre-millenialism, amillenialism, etc.
CO2 levels remain stable for tens of thousands of years, with those stable levels going both up and down as you go back in time, with plenty of peaks and troughs.
Now you've given me a good chuckle. "The numbers are stable, except they go up and down and have peaks and troughs." Up and down and peaks and troughs aren't the sign of stability.
Do you understand the term "equilibrium"? Here's an example. Create a set of solutions of various concentrations of CO2. Let them sit for a long time. CO2 will either diffuse OUT of the solution (if the concentration is greater than the ambient) or be absorbed (if the concentration started below the ambient). Eventually, all the solutions will have THE SAME concentration. This is EXACTLY what you describe for the samples. "Except, once you go past the last hundred and fifty years, they aren't at all." This implies that 150 years is about the amount of time required for equilibrium to be reached.
As for ice being impermeable, I have a bottle of "Classic Coke" I bought back when there was no Classic Coke, only old Coke and "new" Coke. Yes, it's twenty years old or so. The plastic in which it was bottled is impermeable to CO2 -- on short timescales. It ain't really impermeable. In fact, it is demonstrating the equilibrium process I just described, in that the CO2 gas in the bottle has diffused out and there is now a partial vacuum. The bottle isn't pressurized anymore, in fact, it is below atmospheric pressure inside. So, I can imagine that an imperfect solid like glacial ice, cut into three inch diameter cores, might allow some CO2 to diffuse out over the years that these things have been stored, and even more over the millenia before it was cored.
But yeah, leave it to the "skeptics" to question scientific work by inventing a principle they can't be arsed to even examine themselves, to discredit data that they also haven't been arsed to see if their invented principle would even explain.
Yeah, leave it to the zealot to toss insults when any of their data is questioned, instead of thinking about the process and understanding that it does, indeed, describe the data they are seeing. And leave it to the zealots to try to smear the people who ask questions about the data as being "deniers" and worse.
I am unaware of the experiment and controversy surrounding it, have a link to a peer reviewed journal article?
It wasn't an experiment, it was a production system recording data full-time. No, I don't have a link and I'm not going to spend the time looking it up for you.
...corrections to the old data can be made and the corrected data would be accurate.
That assumes that the second version of the data is more reliable than the first.
Even if the data from an experiment has uncorrectable errors and the data is faulty, GW deniers have one experiment discredited,
Sigh. People who assume that every bit of data is perfect unless someone with unimpeachable credentials proves beyond all shadow of dount that it isn't are part of the problem, not part of the solution. This kind of error is a sign that science is NOT absolute and that statements made in such terms are not real science. Real science means looking at all the data all the time to make sure there isn't something wrong with it.
GW deniers still have still shown no credible alternate to explain the trends in the world's climate.
"My data PROVES that the globe is warming, there is no more room for debate."
"Your data is wrong, and here's why..."
"Ok, but now you need to disprove my PROVEN FACT that the globe is warming."
Water, in its solid crystalline form, ice, has no capability to hold CO2 in solution, only liquid water can hold CO2 in solution.
Ice does not exist alone. There is always an equilibrium. That means there is always some "liquid" around. Not much, but some. We're talking about MILLENIA. Thousands of years. Some reactions are so slow that they take years to make any appreciable progress. We don't know that CO2 diffusion in ice is not one of those.
No ethical scientist would call into question the motives of that researcher.
I agree. And you notice that almost 100% of the ethical questioning comes from pro-global warming scientists, especially anthropogenically caused supporters. "Oh, that report was done by someone paid by Exxon" is a common response to any data disproving any global warming claim. I can't recall seeing "oh, that report was done by a professional global-warming zealot" as refutation, and were anyone to say that, I know the over-the-top response the global warming zealots I know would have.
However, the GW denial community seems to think that minor doubts, ethics "questions",...
Patently incorrect data is not "minor doubts", it's patently incorrect data. And you have it backwards about who is questioning the ethics of whom. I'm simply pointing out the hypocracy in doing that.
I already did. CO2 is soluble in water. Ice is water. But then, nobody said only ONE gas is diffusing out. CO2 is the gas they are measuring, not argon or helium or nitrogen or oxygen.
You're looking for faith. Science doesn't deal with absolutes.
That's right, science doesn't, but the religions of Evolution and Global Warming do.
Evolution is a fact, there is no debate, this is how life began.
Global Warming is caused by man and we must act to stop it (and we CAN act to stop it) is a fact and there can be no debate.
I think the biggest problem with the discussion about Climate Change is that the vast majority of the American population has absolutely no idea how science works or what a scientific statement is.
I think the biggest problem is those who have adopted it as a religion instead of a science and want no discussion in public at all, other than "how much money will you give us to solve it?" But then, I'm just a scientist who accepts that assumptions are assumptions and raw data gets a lot of processing before it becomes knowledge. I'm also tired of the browbeating that accompanies almost all of the climate change "discussion" that comes from "irrefutable" scientists.
There is no question that data analysis and prediction is subject to errors, sometimes quite large ones. The real question is whether these errors are due to researcher bias.
At the heart of the issue is usually the measurements themselves. Bias should never be part of a measurement, but failure to completely understand the system being measured often is. Since many measurement systems today are not direct measurements but indirect, and many are "remote sensing", it is often a failure to understand both the system being measured AND the proxy for the desired measurement that causes failure.
For example, several years ago it was determined that the satellite-based sensing of ocean surface temperature was off by several degrees, because the atmospheric effects on the IR radiation being used to measure the temperature weren't being correctly corrected. It is no surprise to hear that any proxy measurement has been found to be off with a biased error.
What? Bias? Well, "biased error" is the technical term for an error in measurement that is wrong in a consistent manner. For example, a thermometer that has been miscalibrated so that it always reads high.
But please do not mention this possibility of measurement error to anyone involved in global warming research. They are right, everyone else is wrong.
Don't EVER ask why they assume that CO2, a gas that is soluble in water to a great extent, cannot diffuse out of air bubbles in ice that have been trapped for millenia. It is the measurement of CO2 in those bubbles that global warming scientists use to tell us what the level of CO2 was ten thousand years ago -- even though there is no recorded measurement from then, and only the proxy of "trapped bubbles" to rely on.
Many people have strong feelings that disaster is about to occur. Perhaps this comes from childhood recollections of maternal warnings about running with scissors or touching hot stoves.
Today's strong feelings of disaster are prompted by catastrophe-based science and the scientists who are paid to find solutions to catastrophes. Scientists who warn us that a stray comet could obliterate life on this planet don't get paid to deal with comets that don't come anywhere near us. Scientists who predict gloom and doom from global warming don't get paid if they report that there really isn't a problem. I am repeatedly fascinated by global warming scientists who dismiss studies that contradict their cries of alarm as the product of people who are being paid to say there is no problem. Why would the only scientists who lack ethics be the ones on one side of an issue? (The state of Oregon just created a group to deal with global warming issues. Do you think that the head of this group is someone who doesn't toe the line regarding the causes and results of global warming? He's getting paid, so why aren't his ethics questioned?)
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Yes, the number of stars must be finite and thus must be countable.
Assumption 1: there was a Big Bang. 2: The speed of light in a vacuum (c) is a hard limit on a mass's velocity. 3: a star has non-zero mass and non-zero positive volume.
The MAXIMUM radius of the universe can be calculated from c multiplied by the time since the Big Bang. The volume is simply 4/3 times pi times the radius cubed. Since all of these numbers are finite and real and positive, the result is finite and real and positive. The MAXIMUM number of stars can be calculated by dividing the volume of the universe by the average size of a star. Since both numbers are positive and real, the result is positive and real. And non-infinite.
The MINIMUM radius of the universe is, of course, about 60 miles, the distance a person can walk in one day. You would think that simply walking another 60 miles the next day would increase the possible radius, but no. While you were sleeping, the previous day's universe was replaced with a different universe with you at the center instead of 60 miles from the center. As least this is my theory, since I know that I am the center of the universe every morning when I wake up.
I use teco and mosaic.
And stop playing that damn music so loud!
He's a scientist using science to claim a "delusion" in God. It's reasonable to assume he's using the scientific term. If he's claiming you can't disprove God, then where is the evidence to the contrary he is implying by the very title of his book?
They are neither squashing nor are they advocating the squashing. They are simply saying they "strongly oppose" his appearance. You're foolish if you think the University is scared they are going to lose funding for going ahead with this.
This resolution is nothing more than covering ass so the legislature can tell anyone who complains about Dawkins' appearance at a state funded school that they did what they could. This is the most they could. If they intended not to fund the uni because of this, they wouldn't be stupid enough to put it on the record, they'd have an informal meeting with the President of the uni and tell him personally.
Let's also not forget that First Amendment also includes the freedom to practice a religion of one's choosing. This also includes the right to practice no religion at all.
Of course it does. Dawkins is quite free to practice whatever religion he wants, even the religion of atheism. Who is stopping him? Certainly not this resolution.
IOW, Dawkins' has a Constitutional right to be an atheist and to speak about his own beliefs (or non-beliefs) as an atheist.
And he's going to do so. There is, however, no Constitutional right to speak using the foundation of a public university as your support. Universities don't have the requirement to let anyone who wants to speak at an event do so.
But the issue is not his religion, it is his conflation of science and religion. When he claims that God is a "delusion" and does in using the voice of science, he's wrong. THAT is the issue that people have with Dawkins. I, too, and perfectly fine with him practicing whatever religion he wants, as long as he's not trying to turn science into religion. As a scientist, I object very strongly to that.
What happens if they hadn't scheduled him in the first place for fear of losing state funding? What happens if a vocal minority on campus objects and the University revokes the offer? (Oh, wait, it's OK for that to happen when the speaker is a conservative. I guess there's no problem with it happening to Dawkins.)
Do you really believe that a state legislature is going to refuse to fund the state university over this? Do you understand how many people, meaning voters, have students going to that university? Do you think they'll be happy to hear that the tuition for the university is going to triple because the state stopped funding it?
No, that ain't gonna happen. This measure says what it says -- strongly oppose. If they had wanted to say "prohibit", they could have. If they intended to tell the university that they were going to stop funding them over this, they'd be doing so informally so that nothing could be tied back to anyone.
The resolution is only an ass covering for the legislature to make those who oppose Dawkins (not oppose Evolution, but Dawkins' particular lack of perspective on the subject) happy. I mean, someone who writes a book "The God Delusion" has clearly stepped outside the bounds of science and is practicing religion. Science has no means to either prove or disprove God. By calling it a "delusion", he's making a claim under the pretense of science, and he's wrong for doing that. (I don't particularly care what his personal view is, when he pretends that he's being a scientist while making such claims he's overstepped his rights, and as a scientist I object to that.)
You know, if you actually read the bill under discussion, you'd notice that it doesn't squash anything, much less anyone's "free speech rights". All it says is that the legislature opposes his appearance. They didn't ban him, and they don't order anything to be done about it. Oh, yes, they will "order" that their opposition message be sent to the University leaders.
That would be '2in143'.
The article also forgot to mention that Jaquard (sp?) is the initial inventor of the punched card, since that's what controlled the looms.
And, of course, my favoritest kind of memory, the CRT. Yes, that was a very early memory device. And CORE. And the paper format that Byte (or Compute, I forget which) magazine tried to get adopted in the 80's, a form of which appears on shipping labels today.
I doubt that most hospital patients, especially the ones having medical emergencies, use Google Earth images to find where the closest one is. Even if they did, I doubt they'd ignore the very large "EMERGENCY ROOM" sign when they get there just because it was blurred in the image they downloaded and printed out while they were having their stroke.
(In fact, if they are having a stroke, it is likely ALL the images are blurred anyway.)
Now, if your argument was that the ambulance crews would likely have a hard time finding their way around the outside of the hospital if Google Earth blurred the images, well, I'd agree with that. Those guys are notorious for showing up at schools and Walmarts instead of the hospital anyway.
Awww, you started out good, and then failed to realize the actual solution.
We get GoogleEarth to blur out all sat photos of politicians. THAT'S the solution.
The book's use of Bill Gates as an example of the 10,000 hour rule is rather poor. Bill Gates did not build Microsoft by being a good programmer. He built it by taking other people's good programs. He didn't even need any skill to identify "good", because he took those that lots of people were using. He let the public determine what was good and leveraged that.
Au contraire, mon fraire. Rationing is a property of EVERY healthcare system where people don't see the costs and thus overuse the system. Oregon's much-touted health care plan is one example. It has nothing to do with the private sector. It has everything to do with too many people putting too many demands on what is available, and instead of telling people who come to the ER with a headcold to "get the fuck out of here", they limit what everyone can get.
Problem number 1 is that the Sony uses the embedded TITLE attribute for a pdf. This wouldn't be a problem except that very few producers of pdf format ebooks or documents have a damn clue about how to set it correctly. (The US Air Force is REALLY clueless at this. I have AF Regs that have TITLES like "u_2502883823.pdf".) This wouldn't be a problem except some of them then lock the pdf with a password so the user can't fix it, either.
I have one pdf user manual for a radio that has the extremely useful title "[].pdf". I have a series of pdfs with titles that all begin with the same 50 or so characters, and the Sony only displays --- 50 or so characters in the title. All locked with a password.
Sony has an XML database on the device listing the books, which can be edited by the user. Calibre appears to do that. BUT -- when the Sony cold-boots, it rescans EVERY BOOK and rebuilds the xml database, using the TITLE in the pdf.
Having to learn all the new tools to deal with fixing pdfs (pdftk is great!) is a big drawback to the system as a whole.
The other Sony issue, which Calibre DOES solve, is finding books that haven't been assigned to a collection. At 700+ books, if I have any books that aren't in a collection they are as good as lost forever. Searching by TITLE, with the TITLE problem, is a big pain.
Calibre also has "streaming feeds" of many publications, including (I think) the NY Times, Christian Science Monitor, and others. When I tried several, about half created documents that crashed the 505.
The difference between an ISP and a University is that much of the traffic of a University stays on campus. That might not be true for the student personal traffic when they p2p their music, but the "official" traffic does. People on campus access servers on campus to move data on campus. Joe Engineering student connects to an on-campus server to run his programs and submit his term papers.
For example, all my data sits down the hall at the other end of a 100Mbit link. Switched. Other than transient web traffic, all the accesses come from other people with 100Mbit switched links in the same building. That data comes on-campus in megabyte chunks over the day, but originates at sites with 10Mbit or slower connections to start with.
At an ISP, there are very FEW people running servers to share data with other ISP users, so almost ALL of the traffic goes "off campus". Once your packets leave your house, it is almost a given they will go out the ISP's upstream connection. (Local proxies and caches are an exception, of course.)
So, basically, the assumptions behind sharing at a uni and at an ISP are two radically different things.
Consider, too, that "telecommunications" companies have ALWAYS made assumptions about sharing resources, even back in the glory days of Ma Bell and the local telco who owned your telephone. They never had one trunk per subscriber. They never even had one dialtone generator per sub. Nor did they have one step-by-step (relay) per sub. On a busy day, you could wait a minute to get dialtone. Even moving to the "computer" age and crossbar switches, there never was one DTMF decoder per sub, so you could still wait to get dialtone. And guess what? Computer modem users started reshaping the assumptions about line sharing that the telco's had to make. That's why they used to charge more for a "data" line -- it was going to be in use more and using the switching more than the "normal" user.
Now, most people never realized that they were sharing dialtone generators and DTMF decoders with other people, because they almost never had to wait for it when they picked up the phone. They didn't know there were only 10 or 20 trunks connecting their little central office with the rest of the world because when they wanted to call long-distance there was one available right away. (I remember visiting a CO when a friend was working there and being surprised that all the connections to the rest of the world came up to one small patch panel! And how simple it was to jack in to listen.)
That's no different than today. Most people don't realize they are sharing their cable modem network with anyone else because the system responds as fast as they ask it to. WE know because we are techies. Sometimes it IS better not to know what hotdogs are made of.
If you took a job where working around the laws of thermodynamics was part of the job description, you deserve to be fired.
So, LinuxNew will be a large negative number and WindowsNew will be a large positive number?
The FA is rather skimpy on details, but it says he was on board the ship, and it is logical to assume he wasn't sitting on deck running his laptop. It is very likely that he had no shore-based reception, so the on-board cell was all there was.
About his "never leaving the US" claims. Well, he was on-board the ship. That means he had passed through immigration going out, and was on a ship that was almost certainly of a foreign registry. While he was still in US territorial waters, he was, for all practical purposes, out of the US. He would have had to clear immigration and customs to get back in.
But yeah, as someone who got hit with a stupidly large bill for "international roaming"*, I agree with the concept of an account "cap", but it appears from the FA that AT&T was trying to warn him and his equipment wasn't passing the message on.
* hundreds of calls being forwarded to Australia while I was there, not being answered because the phone was turned off, and then being forwarded back to the US for voicemail -- that didn't record a single one. With a one-minute charge going both ways.
Don't be silly. Why would the internet interpret Benjamin Franklin as damage?
Well, pretty close.
The majority of pilot training time is how to deal with emergencies. Making landings is a considerable part of the early training only because it is a skill that most people don't walk into a flight school already having. Once that's covered, the emphasis changes to -- emergencies.
What do you do if your engine fails? What do you do if one of your engines fail? What do you do if your electrical system fails? What do you do if your radio fails? For commercial ATP pilots, the recurring training assumes that they know how to fly, and it focuses almost entirely on dealing with failures. The kinds of things that a terrorist aiming to land the plane on the 43rd floor of an office building won't care about.
As for "navigation", I think most people could find New York City with one eye closed, even starting in LA, and once you get close enough to make out buildings, the Trade Center was a pretty obvious landmark. While ded reckoning does take some training to accomplish successfully, that's only because success means staying on a planned course. If your flight planning consists of "fly east, find New York, hit a building", then ded reckoning becomes trivial.
No, it's more likely that one person takes on all the good qualities of the pair and the other takes on all the bad qualities of the pair, and they'll have to knock the bad one out to force them to go back through the entanglement experiment so they come out ok.
You know, expecting that global warming claims meet the standards of scientific process and not those of a religious cult is NOT being a "GC denier". It is being a good scientist. Those who say "there is no debate" are not good scientists. They meet the definition of a religion better than most religions I know, since most religions I know have some debates over some principles. Post-millenialism, pre-millenialism, amillenialism, etc.
CO2 levels remain stable for tens of thousands of years, with those stable levels going both up and down as you go back in time, with plenty of peaks and troughs.
Now you've given me a good chuckle. "The numbers are stable, except they go up and down and have peaks and troughs." Up and down and peaks and troughs aren't the sign of stability.
Do you understand the term "equilibrium"? Here's an example. Create a set of solutions of various concentrations of CO2. Let them sit for a long time. CO2 will either diffuse OUT of the solution (if the concentration is greater than the ambient) or be absorbed (if the concentration started below the ambient). Eventually, all the solutions will have THE SAME concentration. This is EXACTLY what you describe for the samples. "Except, once you go past the last hundred and fifty years, they aren't at all." This implies that 150 years is about the amount of time required for equilibrium to be reached.
As for ice being impermeable, I have a bottle of "Classic Coke" I bought back when there was no Classic Coke, only old Coke and "new" Coke. Yes, it's twenty years old or so. The plastic in which it was bottled is impermeable to CO2 -- on short timescales. It ain't really impermeable. In fact, it is demonstrating the equilibrium process I just described, in that the CO2 gas in the bottle has diffused out and there is now a partial vacuum. The bottle isn't pressurized anymore, in fact, it is below atmospheric pressure inside. So, I can imagine that an imperfect solid like glacial ice, cut into three inch diameter cores, might allow some CO2 to diffuse out over the years that these things have been stored, and even more over the millenia before it was cored.
But yeah, leave it to the "skeptics" to question scientific work by inventing a principle they can't be arsed to even examine themselves, to discredit data that they also haven't been arsed to see if their invented principle would even explain.
Yeah, leave it to the zealot to toss insults when any of their data is questioned, instead of thinking about the process and understanding that it does, indeed, describe the data they are seeing. And leave it to the zealots to try to smear the people who ask questions about the data as being "deniers" and worse.
It wasn't an experiment, it was a production system recording data full-time. No, I don't have a link and I'm not going to spend the time looking it up for you.
That assumes that the second version of the data is more reliable than the first.
Even if the data from an experiment has uncorrectable errors and the data is faulty, GW deniers have one experiment discredited,
Sigh. People who assume that every bit of data is perfect unless someone with unimpeachable credentials proves beyond all shadow of dount that it isn't are part of the problem, not part of the solution. This kind of error is a sign that science is NOT absolute and that statements made in such terms are not real science. Real science means looking at all the data all the time to make sure there isn't something wrong with it.
GW deniers still have still shown no credible alternate to explain the trends in the world's climate.
"My data PROVES that the globe is warming, there is no more room for debate." ..."
"Your data is wrong, and here's why
"Ok, but now you need to disprove my PROVEN FACT that the globe is warming."
Water, in its solid crystalline form, ice, has no capability to hold CO2 in solution, only liquid water can hold CO2 in solution.
Ice does not exist alone. There is always an equilibrium. That means there is always some "liquid" around. Not much, but some. We're talking about MILLENIA. Thousands of years. Some reactions are so slow that they take years to make any appreciable progress. We don't know that CO2 diffusion in ice is not one of those.
No ethical scientist would call into question the motives of that researcher.
I agree. And you notice that almost 100% of the ethical questioning comes from pro-global warming scientists, especially anthropogenically caused supporters. "Oh, that report was done by someone paid by Exxon" is a common response to any data disproving any global warming claim. I can't recall seeing "oh, that report was done by a professional global-warming zealot" as refutation, and were anyone to say that, I know the over-the-top response the global warming zealots I know would have.
However, the GW denial community seems to think that minor doubts, ethics "questions",...
Patently incorrect data is not "minor doubts", it's patently incorrect data. And you have it backwards about who is questioning the ethics of whom. I'm simply pointing out the hypocracy in doing that.
I already did. CO2 is soluble in water. Ice is water. But then, nobody said only ONE gas is diffusing out. CO2 is the gas they are measuring, not argon or helium or nitrogen or oxygen.
That's right, science doesn't, but the religions of Evolution and Global Warming do.
Evolution is a fact, there is no debate, this is how life began.
Global Warming is caused by man and we must act to stop it (and we CAN act to stop it) is a fact and there can be no debate.
I think the biggest problem with the discussion about Climate Change is that the vast majority of the American population has absolutely no idea how science works or what a scientific statement is.
I think the biggest problem is those who have adopted it as a religion instead of a science and want no discussion in public at all, other than "how much money will you give us to solve it?" But then, I'm just a scientist who accepts that assumptions are assumptions and raw data gets a lot of processing before it becomes knowledge. I'm also tired of the browbeating that accompanies almost all of the climate change "discussion" that comes from "irrefutable" scientists.
At the heart of the issue is usually the measurements themselves. Bias should never be part of a measurement, but failure to completely understand the system being measured often is. Since many measurement systems today are not direct measurements but indirect, and many are "remote sensing", it is often a failure to understand both the system being measured AND the proxy for the desired measurement that causes failure.
For example, several years ago it was determined that the satellite-based sensing of ocean surface temperature was off by several degrees, because the atmospheric effects on the IR radiation being used to measure the temperature weren't being correctly corrected. It is no surprise to hear that any proxy measurement has been found to be off with a biased error.
What? Bias? Well, "biased error" is the technical term for an error in measurement that is wrong in a consistent manner. For example, a thermometer that has been miscalibrated so that it always reads high. But please do not mention this possibility of measurement error to anyone involved in global warming research. They are right, everyone else is wrong.
Don't EVER ask why they assume that CO2, a gas that is soluble in water to a great extent, cannot diffuse out of air bubbles in ice that have been trapped for millenia. It is the measurement of CO2 in those bubbles that global warming scientists use to tell us what the level of CO2 was ten thousand years ago -- even though there is no recorded measurement from then, and only the proxy of "trapped bubbles" to rely on.
Many people have strong feelings that disaster is about to occur. Perhaps this comes from childhood recollections of maternal warnings about running with scissors or touching hot stoves.
Today's strong feelings of disaster are prompted by catastrophe-based science and the scientists who are paid to find solutions to catastrophes. Scientists who warn us that a stray comet could obliterate life on this planet don't get paid to deal with comets that don't come anywhere near us. Scientists who predict gloom and doom from global warming don't get paid if they report that there really isn't a problem. I am repeatedly fascinated by global warming scientists who dismiss studies that contradict their cries of alarm as the product of people who are being paid to say there is no problem. Why would the only scientists who lack ethics be the ones on one side of an issue? (The state of Oregon just created a group to deal with global warming issues. Do you think that the head of this group is someone who doesn't toe the line regarding the causes and results of global warming? He's getting paid, so why aren't his ethics questioned?)