Faulty logic. Just because X is true doesn't mean that the reverse of X is true. The gene is recessive, meaning for the woman to be tetrachromatic she must have both recessive genes for tetrachromaticity. This gene is carried on the X chromosome, which she has two of, but her prospective son only has one of.
Forgot it was recessive - wasn't the logic, just a brain cramp.;)
I suppose trying to describe it to us with only three colors would be much like trying to describe any kind of color to somebody completely color blind. It's a futile exercise. Try explaining vision to somebody who was born blind.
Not quite that bad - we do at least have vision. Particularly, what I was wondering is if Orange-Red,O-G,and O-B combos produce hideous glaring colors like cyan (B-G), magenta (B-R), and yellow (R-G). I'm sure the O-X combos look fine to us, but I was wondering if it behaved in a similar way as cyan etc do for a tetrachromatic. That would certainly be explainable, and I think interesting.
The unfortunate effect of this is because they only have that gene (since it's obviously recessive), all their male offspring are colorblind. Interesting none the less, though.
I suppose, then, that the inverse would have to hold as well - that any man with this sort of colorblindness had a tetrachromatic mother?
What's that like, anyway? Do oranges just appear more brilliant?
i have a similar question - why is throwing a game illegal? if i am a pro ballplayer and i screw up on purpose (because, of course, someone paid me to), well i can see my boss firing me and my finding employment on other teams to be probably impossible, but, assuming gambling is illegal, i haven't harmed anyone else beyond the fact that folks watching the game didn't see what they expected to (sort of like watching wrestling)
Well, presumably you've defrauded your employer - that's a biggie. They'll get you for conspiracy too, since you conspired to defraud. And given the potential losses incurred by your employer, that's pretty serious.
However, let's say Mr. White sits down at an online gambling table and 'loses' $100,000 to Mr. Pink. That transaction is stored in the private database of an off-shore casino and is out of the eye of the IRS and the US Government. Washing the money after you withdraw from the casino involves more processes, but the most important thing is that money does not go through the proper, established channels, and the government does not like this.
I would turn this argument by pointing out the "offshore" nature of internet gambling in the status quo. Make offshore gambling illegal while legalizing "onshore" gambling and this changes significantly. Now your books are open to examination, and if a drug dealer makes a one-time wager of $100,000...well, Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do!
Sports is also the most logical candidate for legalization, as the results are pre-regulated (obviously discounting point shaving or whatnot). That way, you can't say he, uh, lost $100,000 playing roulette - he has to have made a real wager, and the feds should be able to tell if you've altered that.
Now, let's say Mr. Pink makes a sports wager and accidentally wins, now he "forgets" to collect. Sus-pic-ious. Instead, maybe he decides to make a moneyline wager on the Bengals, figuring that's the easiest way to lose money. Same deal. Or let's say the feds look for guys who put a lot of cash in the casino and bet it until it's gone, or until he loses a nice round number. All stuff to check, and being on American soil would make it lots easier.
Let's see: a form of gambling that is not in the best interests of the government or established casinos (that lobby said government.) Hhmmm...I wonder why they want to make it illegal...
I guarantee that the tax revenue they make from legalized online gambling would more than offset the loss of profit from lotteries. Lottery administrative costs are rather phenomenal.
I think that puts the motive back to a moralistic angle.
Impossible, or at least impractical. It would require losing the ability to use most of the spectrum -- because after all, whatever frequency you're talking about, there's a frequency that's 1/2, 1/3rd, 1/4th etc. of it, that could interfere with it.
I wouldn't leave it unused, just try to shif things so that, say, two bands with extremely high power and use aren't directly "integered."
Also, I believe the relative power of the nth harmonic goes down directly with n, correct? As far as that goes, I suppose they've done OK - there are a few orders of magnitude between AM,FM,and wireless (800MHz). Maybe that's why nothing major happens at only a few hundred MHz?
According to This site you can actually listen to the harmonics of an FM radio station in the hundreds of MHz region.
Right. But people were talking about frequencies like 800.0000001 mhz... as if you could somehow make a perfect radio that would allow lots of data to be pushed into 0.0000001 mhz, which you definately cannot do. Shannon and Nyquist and all.
Ah, I assumed by that he meant "800"+(lots of zeros to make the last digit nearly insignificant)+"1". But if you actually look at the number of zeros (which I'll admit I didn't do!), you are correct, sir.
And then there's harmonics -- 2.4 ghz should not affect 800 mhz, but the harmonics of 800 mhz could certainly interfere with 2.4 ghz (WiFi) signals.
That's most certainly true, and I hadn't even considered it. Do they try anything to avoid that? If I were the FCC, I would try to keep major bands from being integer multiples of each other - and that 800/2400 looks like potential disaster there.
Online gambling isn't illegal if you live in a country which believes in personal freedom, such as the UK. And being legal doesn't make it any less profitable.
Stop trolling. I can name a NUMBER of rights that Americans have that Brits don't. And at least cameras aren't ubiquitous here. Can you guys still take a shit in privacy?
Slowly its turning to one big homogenous state, which is a bad thing. The way it is now, if you dont like Casinos and strip clubs and prostitution, you can decide to not live in Nevada, but still be an American. Soon, you'll have to renounce your citizenship and move to some filthy european country where they molest children for sport.
Right, but that whole state thing doesn't work at all for the internet - it barely works (some would say still doesn't) for whole countries. You could give the individual states the right to do this, but then where's the jurisdiction - the business or the user? Do *both* have to be in the same state? If so, is having a router in that state sufficient while still being incorporated in another?
You see where that goes pretty quickly.
Also, the internet bit is so unobtrusive, it's hard to argue any sort of harm against someone else. So I gamble online - that doesn't affect my neighbor in any way. I could see a state not wanting something obtrusive, but this is just silly.
Btw, I liked the "Europeans" bit. Sneaky troll there.;)
They're backed by organized crime in many, if not most cases.
Not trying to be a prick, but I'd love to see that. It wouldn't shock me, but it's the first I've heard of it. The story made the guy look clean, although that doesn't prove a general case.
Last thing I'd want is a $10,000 dept to some anonymous internet guy operating out of some country with little or no laws.
Well, I don't know that they'd go to Costa Rica if it was legal here (though they still might). Second, they could easily make *foreign* gambling illegal in the US.
Plus, real casinos are policed by gaming commissions to ensure fairness. Online ones arent.
I think making it legal would go hand-in-hand with some sort of certification. But as you say, sports books would be much easier to regulate - the NFL (etc) already takes care of it!
That was sort of a rhetorical question, but it still stands as their "solution" is completely counter-productive. By pushing these guys offshore, they've made *sure* they get no tax money. Let them back, regulate it, and watch the cash roll in. Think of all the jackasses watching football on sundays (like me, for instance). If you don't live near a casino, you've got no legal gambling. And the house's cut is better than trying to get your buddies to pay up, or dealing with a bookie. If this were legal, the tax revenue generated would be phenomenal
Yes, you're right. But it's not a function of a `crappy transmitter'... it's called `bandwidth' -- and while you may have heard the term before, *this* is where it originated.
I have - I'm a chemist, so I do some spectroscopy.;) I was more referring to the license situation the FCC has. It allots you, say, a 0.5 MHz bandwidth. Your transmitter is supposed to transmit in this band. However, say it sucks - the spectrum might not be as tight as it's supposed to be, and it might bleed over more.
For what it's worth, at a given frequency, it's the better transmitter or source/monochromator (that's what we'd call it) that provides the narrower bandwidth. For example, considering visible light, a good system would give you a bandwidth of a few nanometers - a bad one, ten times that.
In any event, that exact same problem has happened in the 800 mhz band -- 801.4 mhz may be allocated to a police band, but 801.5 mhz may be used by a cell phone tower...
Yep. And if that cell tower is too powerful, or bleeds a bit, you know what you get. I think that part of the problem is that the shoulders on any transmitter's bandwidth are nearly disregarded, but they can create significant problems if you're close enough.
I know I tend to a somewhat libertarian bent, but why is online gambling illegal? It can't be the exploitation of citizens - these sportsbooks pay better than state lotteries (which are nearly ubiquitous now). They can't make the "There goes the neighborhood" argument either, as the worst case is some guy looks at porn AND gambles online, instead of going to a casino and getting a hooker. If anything, online casinos could put "real" (and illicit) gambling out of business.
Even with a laser there's a spread in the frequencies of light it generates - it's this fact which limits the distance at which light from the laser is still coherent, a property of the device named (highly originally) the "coherence length".
I'm so sad I actually look forward to getting called on things like that these days. Yes, of course you're correct, particularly if said laser isn't operating through a vacuum. Compared to an analog transmitter, however...
...you missed the point. Use shit designed not to go to crap in its use environment. Since environments change, tools should too. This even includes mice.
right, point taken. I was too quick to say 'absolutely nothing.' Although, most of the problems described are probably still more to do with crappy receiving rather than transmitting.
Well, assuming they spend more on the transmitter than you do on your cell phone, huh?;) Although the way Sprint's been lately, I'm not so sure.
Has absoulutely nothing to do with anything on the broadcasting end.
I really don't know about that. Just as receivers have tolerances, transmitters do too. So if I have a crappy transmitter and I tell it to broadcast at a certain frequency, there will be a certain tolerance there, unless I'm using a laser. They're certainly not. Even with a good transmitter, there's a certain +/- to the frequency distribution, although presumably less.
So ultimately, his question was quite a fair one - for someone to tell the difference between two signals 800.0000001 and 800.0000002, the two transmitters will have to be good enough to send out precise, narrow signals, and his receiver will have to be good enough to tell the difference.
That'd have to be some serious interference for those to be affected by wifi, huh? Do people really not know all that much about allocated use of spectrum?
What is natural - supernovae are definitely a natural occurring incidents, albeit somewhat disasterous. Particles may also be formed during cosmic ray showers, god's lineac certainly packs some punch.
You forgot the "occurring" that always follows the "natural" there. Many of the transuranics (such as 114) do not, as I mentioned, persist longer than a microsecond. For this reason, I think using the term "occurring" is a bit unrealistic. Not only will they not occur on Earth, they will not occur in any planet because it will take the planet longer to form than they will exist.
The transuranics (and abnormal isotopes) we see on earth are usually the result of artificial action - reactors or accelerators, but others do naturally exist, perhaps not at this moment on earth though.
Like I said, they exist nowhere except briefly, in about a microsecond after a supernova. Hell, they can't even form stable atoms - by the time they cool down to temperatures where they can take electrons, they don't exist any longer. Considering that the periodic table is designed for chemistry, and chemistry doesn't occur without electron interactions, that's a reasonable requirement for "existence."
You have to have the most liberal definition of "exist" possible to call these "naturally occuring." But I don't think it's proper to correct those who are saying that they don't exist narually in a state of matter that one is accustomed to. I think granting the last half of that statement is reasonable.
This will become a common way for 'big' corps to spy on 'small' corps (and individual users?), to find new ways to both screw them over, and appear 'omniscient'. They'll never (or rarely) get called on it. Meanwhile, anyone who tries to reveal information discovered in this way which is incriminating towards said big corps will get sued for being "hackers" and/or "terrorists".
Aside from the paranoia overtones, I still disagree. The tools for doing this are on the web. Right now. So in other words, a weapon has been released that is free and easy to use. If anything, this will help small, poor companies with no resources for industrial espionage get a little information out of people who don't know any better, including their large-company rivals. All they have to do is hire one of the celibate wonders that read slashdot, and they're in business.
Oh bloody hell, do we have to go through this again? I have to question the quality of science at your institution. Tenth International Conference on Cold Fusion.
That is not the cold fusion you refer to when we're talking about what was debunked. This is different stuff, is reputable, and shouldn't be lumped with that crap that happened a decade ago. I keep assuming you actually have some knowledge of those events, sorry.
By the way, you can question whatever you want. I go to Caltech.
Well, I'm not exactly a Mac OS X zealot, although I have been pleased with my recently acquired Powerbook 17" (which I am currently installing Gentoo GNU/Linux on).
I can tell you're not because you use words like "I'm pleased with my Mac," not "If you don't like macs you can burn in hell!";) For what it's worth, I really like Mac OSX a lot, and linux too - but I can do without the religion, know what I mean?
OTOH their main competitor's image (MS) is so bad, Apple still looks pretty good in comparison.
The temperature rise is clearly real, and it is rising in a rapid manner that has no really plausible explanation other than the obvious one of human CO2 production, which it roughly correlates with. Occam's razor.
I would believe you if temperature didn't tend to fluctuate wildly at points before humans existed. That takes away your razor there, so you're forced to admit that there are things about climate we don't understand, and to base ANY conclusions on data we don't comprehend is foolish.
As for cold fusion, it wasn't so much debunked as no evidence found for it.
Actually, evidence was found for it, and it was published. Problem is, the guys were finding stray neutrons from the environment, not their test. There is now NO research ongoing for cold fusion, and no one at all believes it. These are not the same, not even remotely. Believe me on this, one of the profs at my school was heavily involved in debunking cold fusion, so I've learned more than I'd have liked about it. It's dead.
It seems fairly clear that if you release enough CO2 into the atmosphere the temperature is going to rise.
I realize you're not a climatologists, but if you talked to some you would find that this is an obscenely simplistic explanation. The problem is that so many other things come into play, namely the oceans and clouds. Also, at the same time we release CO2, we release other substances that aerosol in the upper atmosphere, which have a reflective/cooling influence. So the picture is nowhere near as simple as you seem to think. That's why you can't bank on this.
We don't know for sure, but the increases look different to rises that have occurred previously in the planet's history.
As climatological data go, 150 years is almost completely irrelevant. There is no way to base an educated opinion on data that short when comparing it to the history of the earth.
Some of the rise may be due to other factors, but equally the climate may have been undergoing a cooling phase (as seems to be the expected change looking at the long-term record) and the human factor is more pronounced than otherwise thought.
That's completely true, but if you concede that argument then you have to concede the former - namely, that human influences are insignificant compared to a spurious warming trend.
Ultimately, if you want to see how really screwed up this is, look into some atmospheric chemistry publications. There is a reason why none of the people predicting models come up with the same numbers. If it were that easy, everyone would agree, but it's not and they don't.
Microsoft's products, for example, contain a clause in their license essentially saying that the product they sold you may not work at all. While honest (their software is after all notorious for not working properly... add to that the security issues and that fact really begins to kick you in the face), the fact that their marketing people are constantly telling the world the opposite, and sticking the little factoid that their product really doesn't work in a seldom read document, and thereby stripping the consumer of all the rights to satisfaction and return they would otherwise have, is more than a little appalling.
That's a good point. I would love to see a plaintiff that bought windows because it said it was really stable, then found in the EULA that they had no protection thereof. Does M$ issue refunds? I know stores won't, typically, for opened shrink-wrap software. It would be fun to start a windows refund campaign.
I agree with the sentiment, though. Windoze users would just shrug and admit they would get no satisfaction from Microsoft, while Apple users are clearly accustomed to much better software, better service, and better support...
Wow, that's dogmatic. Appropriate for the thread though.
Apple's overall reputation, already good, probably gets better (if it changes at all).
I don't think so - I would have agreed had they been really interested in solving the problem before the plaintiffs got all lawyered up. This is more like the car company that got forced into issuing a recall after they got sued. I don't think that's a good image.
Seriously though, this tells you a lot about the both the Mac community and Apple. The machines are so good that people are able to file a lawsuit due to expecting X performance on a machine and not getting it, and expect to have a case. Wow.
It's because Apple said it would work on all G3's as mentioned in a higher thread. Had they not done so, plaintiffs would have had no case. So no precedent set, except that things won't be guaranteed to run on any older platform from now on.
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Forgot it was recessive - wasn't the logic, just a brain cramp. ;)
I suppose trying to describe it to us with only three colors would be much like trying to describe any kind of color to somebody completely color blind. It's a futile exercise. Try explaining vision to somebody who was born blind.
Not quite that bad - we do at least have vision. Particularly, what I was wondering is if Orange-Red,O-G,and O-B combos produce hideous glaring colors like cyan (B-G), magenta (B-R), and yellow (R-G). I'm sure the O-X combos look fine to us, but I was wondering if it behaved in a similar way as cyan etc do for a tetrachromatic. That would certainly be explainable, and I think interesting.
I suppose, then, that the inverse would have to hold as well - that any man with this sort of colorblindness had a tetrachromatic mother?
What's that like, anyway? Do oranges just appear more brilliant?
Well, presumably you've defrauded your employer - that's a biggie. They'll get you for conspiracy too, since you conspired to defraud. And given the potential losses incurred by your employer, that's pretty serious.
Interesting question though.
However, let's say Mr. White sits down at an online gambling table and 'loses' $100,000 to Mr. Pink. That transaction is stored in the private database of an off-shore casino and is out of the eye of the IRS and the US Government. Washing the money after you withdraw from the casino involves more processes, but the most important thing is that money does not go through the proper, established channels, and the government does not like this.
I would turn this argument by pointing out the "offshore" nature of internet gambling in the status quo. Make offshore gambling illegal while legalizing "onshore" gambling and this changes significantly. Now your books are open to examination, and if a drug dealer makes a one-time wager of $100,000...well, Lucy, you got some 'splainin' to do!
Sports is also the most logical candidate for legalization, as the results are pre-regulated (obviously discounting point shaving or whatnot). That way, you can't say he, uh, lost $100,000 playing roulette - he has to have made a real wager, and the feds should be able to tell if you've altered that.
Now, let's say Mr. Pink makes a sports wager and accidentally wins, now he "forgets" to collect. Sus-pic-ious. Instead, maybe he decides to make a moneyline wager on the Bengals, figuring that's the easiest way to lose money. Same deal. Or let's say the feds look for guys who put a lot of cash in the casino and bet it until it's gone, or until he loses a nice round number. All stuff to check, and being on American soil would make it lots easier.
Nice Resirvoir Dogs reference, btw.
I guarantee that the tax revenue they make from legalized online gambling would more than offset the loss of profit from lotteries. Lottery administrative costs are rather phenomenal.
I think that puts the motive back to a moralistic angle.
I wouldn't leave it unused, just try to shif things so that, say, two bands with extremely high power and use aren't directly "integered."
Also, I believe the relative power of the nth harmonic goes down directly with n, correct? As far as that goes, I suppose they've done OK - there are a few orders of magnitude between AM,FM,and wireless (800MHz). Maybe that's why nothing major happens at only a few hundred MHz?
According to This site you can actually listen to the harmonics of an FM radio station in the hundreds of MHz region.
Ah, I assumed by that he meant "800"+(lots of zeros to make the last digit nearly insignificant)+"1". But if you actually look at the number of zeros (which I'll admit I didn't do!), you are correct, sir.
And then there's harmonics -- 2.4 ghz should not affect 800 mhz, but the harmonics of 800 mhz could certainly interfere with 2.4 ghz (WiFi) signals.
That's most certainly true, and I hadn't even considered it. Do they try anything to avoid that? If I were the FCC, I would try to keep major bands from being integer multiples of each other - and that 800/2400 looks like potential disaster there.
Stop trolling. I can name a NUMBER of rights that Americans have that Brits don't. And at least cameras aren't ubiquitous here. Can you guys still take a shit in privacy?
Right, but that whole state thing doesn't work at all for the internet - it barely works (some would say still doesn't) for whole countries. You could give the individual states the right to do this, but then where's the jurisdiction - the business or the user? Do *both* have to be in the same state? If so, is having a router in that state sufficient while still being incorporated in another?
You see where that goes pretty quickly.
Also, the internet bit is so unobtrusive, it's hard to argue any sort of harm against someone else. So I gamble online - that doesn't affect my neighbor in any way. I could see a state not wanting something obtrusive, but this is just silly.
Btw, I liked the "Europeans" bit. Sneaky troll there. ;)
Not trying to be a prick, but I'd love to see that. It wouldn't shock me, but it's the first I've heard of it. The story made the guy look clean, although that doesn't prove a general case.
Last thing I'd want is a $10,000 dept to some anonymous internet guy operating out of some country with little or no laws.
Well, I don't know that they'd go to Costa Rica if it was legal here (though they still might). Second, they could easily make *foreign* gambling illegal in the US.
Plus, real casinos are policed by gaming commissions to ensure fairness. Online ones arent.
I think making it legal would go hand-in-hand with some sort of certification. But as you say, sports books would be much easier to regulate - the NFL (etc) already takes care of it!
That was sort of a rhetorical question, but it still stands as their "solution" is completely counter-productive. By pushing these guys offshore, they've made *sure* they get no tax money. Let them back, regulate it, and watch the cash roll in. Think of all the jackasses watching football on sundays (like me, for instance). If you don't live near a casino, you've got no legal gambling. And the house's cut is better than trying to get your buddies to pay up, or dealing with a bookie. If this were legal, the tax revenue generated would be phenomenal
I have - I'm a chemist, so I do some spectroscopy. ;) I was more referring to the license situation the FCC has. It allots you, say, a 0.5 MHz bandwidth. Your transmitter is supposed to transmit in this band. However, say it sucks - the spectrum might not be as tight as it's supposed to be, and it might bleed over more.
For what it's worth, at a given frequency, it's the better transmitter or source/monochromator (that's what we'd call it) that provides the narrower bandwidth. For example, considering visible light, a good system would give you a bandwidth of a few nanometers - a bad one, ten times that.
In any event, that exact same problem has happened in the 800 mhz band -- 801.4 mhz may be allocated to a police band, but 801.5 mhz may be used by a cell phone tower ...
Yep. And if that cell tower is too powerful, or bleeds a bit, you know what you get. I think that part of the problem is that the shoulders on any transmitter's bandwidth are nearly disregarded, but they can create significant problems if you're close enough.
So what's the drawback again?
I'm so sad I actually look forward to getting called on things like that these days. Yes, of course you're correct, particularly if said laser isn't operating through a vacuum. Compared to an analog transmitter, however...
...you missed the point. Use shit designed not to go to crap in its use environment. Since environments change, tools should too. This even includes mice.
Well, assuming they spend more on the transmitter than you do on your cell phone, huh? ;) Although the way Sprint's been lately, I'm not so sure.
I really don't know about that. Just as receivers have tolerances, transmitters do too. So if I have a crappy transmitter and I tell it to broadcast at a certain frequency, there will be a certain tolerance there, unless I'm using a laser. They're certainly not. Even with a good transmitter, there's a certain +/- to the frequency distribution, although presumably less.
So ultimately, his question was quite a fair one - for someone to tell the difference between two signals 800.0000001 and 800.0000002, the two transmitters will have to be good enough to send out precise, narrow signals, and his receiver will have to be good enough to tell the difference.
That'd have to be some serious interference for those to be affected by wifi, huh? Do people really not know all that much about allocated use of spectrum?
You forgot the "occurring" that always follows the "natural" there. Many of the transuranics (such as 114) do not, as I mentioned, persist longer than a microsecond. For this reason, I think using the term "occurring" is a bit unrealistic. Not only will they not occur on Earth, they will not occur in any planet because it will take the planet longer to form than they will exist.
The transuranics (and abnormal isotopes) we see on earth are usually the result of artificial action - reactors or accelerators, but others do naturally exist, perhaps not at this moment on earth though.
Like I said, they exist nowhere except briefly, in about a microsecond after a supernova. Hell, they can't even form stable atoms - by the time they cool down to temperatures where they can take electrons, they don't exist any longer. Considering that the periodic table is designed for chemistry, and chemistry doesn't occur without electron interactions, that's a reasonable requirement for "existence."
You have to have the most liberal definition of "exist" possible to call these "naturally occuring." But I don't think it's proper to correct those who are saying that they don't exist narually in a state of matter that one is accustomed to. I think granting the last half of that statement is reasonable.
Aside from the paranoia overtones, I still disagree. The tools for doing this are on the web. Right now. So in other words, a weapon has been released that is free and easy to use. If anything, this will help small, poor companies with no resources for industrial espionage get a little information out of people who don't know any better, including their large-company rivals. All they have to do is hire one of the celibate wonders that read slashdot, and they're in business.
That is not the cold fusion you refer to when we're talking about what was debunked. This is different stuff, is reputable, and shouldn't be lumped with that crap that happened a decade ago. I keep assuming you actually have some knowledge of those events, sorry.
By the way, you can question whatever you want. I go to Caltech.
I can tell you're not because you use words like "I'm pleased with my Mac," not "If you don't like macs you can burn in hell!" ;) For what it's worth, I really like Mac OSX a lot, and linux too - but I can do without the religion, know what I mean?
OTOH their main competitor's image (MS) is so bad, Apple still looks pretty good in comparison.
Even a skunk smells good in a sewer. ;)
I would believe you if temperature didn't tend to fluctuate wildly at points before humans existed. That takes away your razor there, so you're forced to admit that there are things about climate we don't understand, and to base ANY conclusions on data we don't comprehend is foolish.
As for cold fusion, it wasn't so much debunked as no evidence found for it.
Actually, evidence was found for it, and it was published. Problem is, the guys were finding stray neutrons from the environment, not their test. There is now NO research ongoing for cold fusion, and no one at all believes it. These are not the same, not even remotely. Believe me on this, one of the profs at my school was heavily involved in debunking cold fusion, so I've learned more than I'd have liked about it. It's dead.
It seems fairly clear that if you release enough CO2 into the atmosphere the temperature is going to rise.
I realize you're not a climatologists, but if you talked to some you would find that this is an obscenely simplistic explanation. The problem is that so many other things come into play, namely the oceans and clouds. Also, at the same time we release CO2, we release other substances that aerosol in the upper atmosphere, which have a reflective/cooling influence. So the picture is nowhere near as simple as you seem to think. That's why you can't bank on this.
We don't know for sure, but the increases look different to rises that have occurred previously in the planet's history.
As climatological data go, 150 years is almost completely irrelevant. There is no way to base an educated opinion on data that short when comparing it to the history of the earth.
Some of the rise may be due to other factors, but equally the climate may have been undergoing a cooling phase (as seems to be the expected change looking at the long-term record) and the human factor is more pronounced than otherwise thought.
That's completely true, but if you concede that argument then you have to concede the former - namely, that human influences are insignificant compared to a spurious warming trend.
Ultimately, if you want to see how really screwed up this is, look into some atmospheric chemistry publications. There is a reason why none of the people predicting models come up with the same numbers. If it were that easy, everyone would agree, but it's not and they don't.
That's a good point. I would love to see a plaintiff that bought windows because it said it was really stable, then found in the EULA that they had no protection thereof. Does M$ issue refunds? I know stores won't, typically, for opened shrink-wrap software. It would be fun to start a windows refund campaign.
I agree with the sentiment, though. Windoze users would just shrug and admit they would get no satisfaction from Microsoft, while Apple users are clearly accustomed to much better software, better service, and better support ...
Wow, that's dogmatic. Appropriate for the thread though.
Apple's overall reputation, already good, probably gets better (if it changes at all).
I don't think so - I would have agreed had they been really interested in solving the problem before the plaintiffs got all lawyered up. This is more like the car company that got forced into issuing a recall after they got sued. I don't think that's a good image.
It's because Apple said it would work on all G3's as mentioned in a higher thread. Had they not done so, plaintiffs would have had no case. So no precedent set, except that things won't be guaranteed to run on any older platform from now on.