If sea level increases by half a meter (a reasonable estimate for 2100), storm surges will be half a meter higher. Depending on the topography, that can mean quite a bit if additional flooded land, and the stuff near the coast tends to be the most valuable. Sandy wasn't a particularly strong hurricane, but it had a large storm surge that had very unpleasant effects in New York. Raise it by half a meter and the effects will be even less pleasant.
is only believed by the climate "scientists" whose jobs/grants depend on it and those without a degree in hard physical science or those who just believe whatever their told.
In other words, you believe that grants and funding are handled, worldwide, by people who insist on a particular specific outcome and won't fund anything else? Also, how do you explain all the other physical scientist associations who believe in it (having seen the evidence)? Members of societies of chemists and physicists do tend to have degrees in the hard physical sciences. You're referring to one unidentified study of the number of scientists who think AGW is going on, and there have been several.studies pointing that out.
Your list of scientists who don't agree is short, and many are not talking about their field of expertise. (Where does being former president of Greenpeace Canada count as scientific credentials?) The article also points out that there is an overwhelming consensus that these people don't agree with.
That atmosphere weighs about 5 quadrillion tons, so one part per million is 5 billion tons. Except that carbon dioxide is about half again as heavy as the nitrogen-oxygen mix, so figure about 7.5 billion tons. Multiply that by 400 and that's about three billion tons. When I was looking this up, I found that 7.5 billion tons of coal were mined in 2010, and that would, if burned, produce well over 20 tons of carbon dioxide, enough to raise the atmosphereic concentration by roughly 3 parts per million. Obviously, burning one year's coal production isn't going to do much, but the concentration over about the last 165 years has gone from 280ppm to 400ppm, one ppm at a time. You'll understand why I don't pay attention to your quantitative estimates, because they're seriously wrong where I've checked.
And, yes, this was all in the atmosphere and ocean tens of millions of years ago, when the climate was very significantly different. The Sun has gotten a bit brighter since then, so it would stabilize at a warmer temperature with the same amount of CO2. This is pretty much irrelevant, since our civilization and domesticated plants and animals have evolved in much different circumstances. The planet will adapt. The biosphere will eventually adapt. Bad things (from the human point of view) will happen in the meantime.
I haven't done this in a while, but with my wife pegging the speedometer at about 60mph I'd time the passing of milestones to the second, usually taking the observation over five miles when possible. The speedometer was pretty darn accurate.
What I find interesting about this is that Einstein had some of the characteristics of the Believer. He knew that bases of Special and General Relativity were true. He also knew that the Universe is deterministic, including at the quantum level. His convictions about relativity advanced science greatly. His convictions about determinism helped by forcing physicists to think hard about his arguments, which were wrong.
Got any evidence that we'll get hit by a large rock in the next century? I'm figuring about one in fifty million years (please correct me if you have better figures) which gives a chance of about one in five hundred thousand. If you figure it will do a trillion dollars of damage, that's still an expected $20K/year, so it's worth spending some effort on. Global warming is known to be happening, we can make good predictions of some of the effects, and we have very good reason to think it will continue.
But we're still branded as "deniers" becuase we take strong issue with is the proposed "solutions".
Nope. If you think AGW is happening and will have some bad consequences you aren't a denier. If you ignore the physical evidence because it's politically inconvenient, then you're a denier.
Feel free to argue about what we should do about AGW. There's options, and we're almost certainly going to have to go with more than one of them. Nobody's going to call you a denier for that. Of course, if you argue that carbon sequestration is socialist rather than scientific you're going to be called a crackpot and idiot, but that's your problem for acting stupid.
I remember when a sinister organization passed out large books containing my contact information to every one of their customers. Now, there are websites where someone can type my name in and find out where I live and what my phone number is. I'm used to this being publicly available information.
Which part of "it is wrong for government to collect this data on anybody" was unclear?
The justification. You clearly think this, but I think differently. Since you want to change the government that both you and I vote for and live under, you really do need to convince a lot of us, assuming you want action on this.
And race or sexual orientation are relevant to security clearances... how?
Anything that might be an opening to blackmail is highly relevant. If you're a closet homosexual, and will face consequences if you're found out, you're a security risk.
Yup. When the General screws up, he has to repeat himself. When the subordinate officer screws up, she gets executed. That's my take-away from the story.
The best use of lawyers in contract law is to make things sufficiently clear that nobody wants to go to court about it, because they know what the outcome will be.
I'm a US citizen, and if I trace my ancestry back far enough it'll get to East Africa, like everybody else. Technically, since "African-American" is applied to people who've never been in Africa but have ancestors there, I count in a thoroughly pedantic and useless sense..
Significant nuclear accidents are very, very rare. Chernobyl isn't happening again. Fukushima might. The Fukushima nuclear meltdowns didn't kill many people at all.
In the meantime, people keep falling off roofs when installing solar panels. It's typically one person at a time, and although it's relatively rare it mounts up to a lot more deaths per watt or joule (whichever) than nuclear power.
So, what you're saying is that people who want to pay the ransom should avoid letting any law enforcement agency know they've got the ransomware? Wouldn't you rather encourage the reporting of ransomware?
The law may be useful for extradition. If bad guy A is working in country B, and is identified, it may be easier to file an extradition request for a charge of extortion than computer misuse.
If I, in the US, hack into somebody else's computer using an untraceable route, should I still be considered in violation of the CFAA?
I think you may be ignoring the legal definition of permission. For example, using login credentials that the ex-employee knew should not be used to log into a company system certainly has technical permission from the system, but I believe it's been found illegal under the CFAA.
That definition says "who takes money or property", implying that the threat by itself is likely to not count as extortion unless it's successful. I'd rather have "give me $1000 or I break your arms" count as extortion whether I hand the money over or not. Specifically, I'd like the installation and activation of ramsomware to count as extortion.
I assume people do pay attention to default installs. However, I've loaded distros with multiple development environments and office suites, so not only is there more code to vet, it's misleading in bugs per unit functionality.
RIM also believed that what they were bringing to the market was vital to corporations, who would never accept iPhones. This, along with business inertia, helped them avoid seeing the inevitable until it was too late. I can see Apple going the same way.
Sure, I can use Twitter. However, I have friends, and I have relatives I like, and a large number of them are on Facebook. I use social media to connect with people I want to stay social with, and dropping Facebook would lose the social advantage of social media.
Right. Something of a niche market. I'm in that market, in fact, and what I really want from my work computer is faster compile and link times. Most people don't do the things you mentioned, so we're in a market niche.
Slashdot Mirror
If sea level increases by half a meter (a reasonable estimate for 2100), storm surges will be half a meter higher. Depending on the topography, that can mean quite a bit if additional flooded land, and the stuff near the coast tends to be the most valuable. Sandy wasn't a particularly strong hurricane, but it had a large storm surge that had very unpleasant effects in New York. Raise it by half a meter and the effects will be even less pleasant.
In other words, you believe that grants and funding are handled, worldwide, by people who insist on a particular specific outcome and won't fund anything else? Also, how do you explain all the other physical scientist associations who believe in it (having seen the evidence)? Members of societies of chemists and physicists do tend to have degrees in the hard physical sciences. You're referring to one unidentified study of the number of scientists who think AGW is going on, and there have been several.studies pointing that out.
Your list of scientists who don't agree is short, and many are not talking about their field of expertise. (Where does being former president of Greenpeace Canada count as scientific credentials?) The article also points out that there is an overwhelming consensus that these people don't agree with.
That atmosphere weighs about 5 quadrillion tons, so one part per million is 5 billion tons. Except that carbon dioxide is about half again as heavy as the nitrogen-oxygen mix, so figure about 7.5 billion tons. Multiply that by 400 and that's about three billion tons. When I was looking this up, I found that 7.5 billion tons of coal were mined in 2010, and that would, if burned, produce well over 20 tons of carbon dioxide, enough to raise the atmosphereic concentration by roughly 3 parts per million. Obviously, burning one year's coal production isn't going to do much, but the concentration over about the last 165 years has gone from 280ppm to 400ppm, one ppm at a time. You'll understand why I don't pay attention to your quantitative estimates, because they're seriously wrong where I've checked.
And, yes, this was all in the atmosphere and ocean tens of millions of years ago, when the climate was very significantly different. The Sun has gotten a bit brighter since then, so it would stabilize at a warmer temperature with the same amount of CO2. This is pretty much irrelevant, since our civilization and domesticated plants and animals have evolved in much different circumstances. The planet will adapt. The biosphere will eventually adapt. Bad things (from the human point of view) will happen in the meantime.
I haven't done this in a while, but with my wife pegging the speedometer at about 60mph I'd time the passing of milestones to the second, usually taking the observation over five miles when possible. The speedometer was pretty darn accurate.
What I find interesting about this is that Einstein had some of the characteristics of the Believer. He knew that bases of Special and General Relativity were true. He also knew that the Universe is deterministic, including at the quantum level. His convictions about relativity advanced science greatly. His convictions about determinism helped by forcing physicists to think hard about his arguments, which were wrong.
Got any evidence that we'll get hit by a large rock in the next century? I'm figuring about one in fifty million years (please correct me if you have better figures) which gives a chance of about one in five hundred thousand. If you figure it will do a trillion dollars of damage, that's still an expected $20K/year, so it's worth spending some effort on. Global warming is known to be happening, we can make good predictions of some of the effects, and we have very good reason to think it will continue.
Nope. If you think AGW is happening and will have some bad consequences you aren't a denier. If you ignore the physical evidence because it's politically inconvenient, then you're a denier.
Feel free to argue about what we should do about AGW. There's options, and we're almost certainly going to have to go with more than one of them. Nobody's going to call you a denier for that. Of course, if you argue that carbon sequestration is socialist rather than scientific you're going to be called a crackpot and idiot, but that's your problem for acting stupid.
Ah, yes, the stages of denialism:
1. It's not happening.
2. It's not our fault.
3. Our contribution isn't significant.
4. It's not going to be that bad..
5. It's too late to do anything useful, so there's no point in doing anything.
I remember when a sinister organization passed out large books containing my contact information to every one of their customers. Now, there are websites where someone can type my name in and find out where I live and what my phone number is. I'm used to this being publicly available information.
The justification. You clearly think this, but I think differently. Since you want to change the government that both you and I vote for and live under, you really do need to convince a lot of us, assuming you want action on this.
Anything that might be an opening to blackmail is highly relevant. If you're a closet homosexual, and will face consequences if you're found out, you're a security risk.
You got any data to support that claim? Seems to me that discrimination based on sex and race is way down from the 1960s.
Yup. When the General screws up, he has to repeat himself. When the subordinate officer screws up, she gets executed. That's my take-away from the story.
The best use of lawyers in contract law is to make things sufficiently clear that nobody wants to go to court about it, because they know what the outcome will be.
I'm a US citizen, and if I trace my ancestry back far enough it'll get to East Africa, like everybody else. Technically, since "African-American" is applied to people who've never been in Africa but have ancestors there, I count in a thoroughly pedantic and useless sense..
Significant nuclear accidents are very, very rare. Chernobyl isn't happening again. Fukushima might. The Fukushima nuclear meltdowns didn't kill many people at all.
In the meantime, people keep falling off roofs when installing solar panels. It's typically one person at a time, and although it's relatively rare it mounts up to a lot more deaths per watt or joule (whichever) than nuclear power.
Are you seriously arguing that laws that outlaws don't obey shouldn't be on the books?
So, what you're saying is that people who want to pay the ransom should avoid letting any law enforcement agency know they've got the ransomware? Wouldn't you rather encourage the reporting of ransomware?
The law may be useful for extradition. If bad guy A is working in country B, and is identified, it may be easier to file an extradition request for a charge of extortion than computer misuse.
If I, in the US, hack into somebody else's computer using an untraceable route, should I still be considered in violation of the CFAA?
I think you may be ignoring the legal definition of permission. For example, using login credentials that the ex-employee knew should not be used to log into a company system certainly has technical permission from the system, but I believe it's been found illegal under the CFAA.
I think they wanted installing and activating ransomware to count as extortion, which it didn't.
That definition says "who takes money or property", implying that the threat by itself is likely to not count as extortion unless it's successful. I'd rather have "give me $1000 or I break your arms" count as extortion whether I hand the money over or not. Specifically, I'd like the installation and activation of ramsomware to count as extortion.
I assume people do pay attention to default installs. However, I've loaded distros with multiple development environments and office suites, so not only is there more code to vet, it's misleading in bugs per unit functionality.
According to Adobe's standards site, the last published change was in 2009. You'd think they'd have Reader pretty solid by now.
So, you're saying all those problems and annoyances are just W10 working as designed?
RIM also believed that what they were bringing to the market was vital to corporations, who would never accept iPhones. This, along with business inertia, helped them avoid seeing the inevitable until it was too late. I can see Apple going the same way.
Sure, I can use Twitter. However, I have friends, and I have relatives I like, and a large number of them are on Facebook. I use social media to connect with people I want to stay social with, and dropping Facebook would lose the social advantage of social media.
Right. Something of a niche market. I'm in that market, in fact, and what I really want from my work computer is faster compile and link times. Most people don't do the things you mentioned, so we're in a market niche.