I bought a laptop from system76 in October and have been quite satisfied with it. They give quite good value for the money, and, in answer to the question posed in the OP, the site is simple and the models are well-differentiated and easy to buy. They just sold out all their ivy-bridge laptops and are now phasing in the sandy-bridge ones, so the selection is not quite as big as it was in October.
When I get around to buying my next laptop, they will be at the top of my list. Definitely preferable to buying a Lenovo or Dell, if you want to run Linux
Be nice if you knew anything about what you're talking about.
(1) Mann and Wegman have nothing do to with anything in the article, or, for that matter future predictions of Global Warming.
(2) The Wegman Report was commissioned by Joe Barton and Ed Whitfield., from the Energy and Commerce Committee of the House of Representatives, not the Senate.
(3) Neither Barton (who recently gained further notoriety by apologizing to the CEO of BP), nor Whitfield were the chairman of the relevant committee at the time. The Republican chairman of the committee and the rest of the Republican and Democratic members commissioned a real report from the National Academy of Sciences. That report was by a team of real researchers, chosen by the normal, careful practices of the National Academy of Sciences. It was then sent out for a formal peer review. It found that while the statistical methods used by Mann et al had a minor problem, correcting the problem made no substantial difference. Moreover, Mann's results had been validated by being repeated by several different researchers that found the same results, using completely different proxies for past temperatures and mathematical analyses.
(4) In contrast, Wegman was chosen by Barton, whose opinions on climate change were already well known at the time, and Wegman was given material by Barton's staff to include in his report. He has said in interviews that he was under pressure to complete the report faster than he wanted.
(5) Wegman's report was *not* peer reviewed. Wegman claims to have sent it to 6 people to look at, but of course even if this is true, they were chosen by *him*, not by any normal process of peer review.
(6) Wegman's report is now known to have been plagiarized and Wegman is now under formal investigation for it by George Mason University.
(7) Wegman has refused to release supporting code or data for his report. Prof. David Ritson of Stanford University made such a request in 2006, shortly after the Wegman report was released. Wegman's report called for disclosure of supporting materials and openness generally, but he has himself refused to comply, citing the technicality that his report was not federally funded.
Because their denialist agenda is so strong that they always get this stuff wrong.
1) Doubling CO2 doesn't mean doubling from the current value of 390. It means doubling from the original pre-industrial value of 275. Hence they are talking about what happens when there are 550 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere, not 780. This is a huge difference from the point of view of how much time we have to stop the warming.
2) The model used in the paper predicts only a 1.94 C warming in the absence of the plant feedback. This is just barely inside the range of what is expected from a CO2 doubling. Most estimates are closer to 3.5C. Of course, changing the model to a more sensitive one (and therefore more likely), might change the plant effect, but if we assume that the plant effect is properly modeled, then it's -0.3C out of 3.5.
3) At any rate, we can't go on for centuries in any case. The authors are talking about what happens *after* the CO2 is stabilized.
So do you know how the continents were arranged then, and what effect on climate that had? Any idea how different the solar irradiance was at that time? What the sea levels were? If not, why are you asking this question?
Do you really think that the members of the National Academy of Sciences haven't thought of these obvious questions?
If you really want to know the answers, you could start by reading articles on Wikipedia:
The link you post to The Telegraph is merely repost of a blog posting from NZ. The graph he posts is clearly wrong: he is objecting to a set of corrections being made to the data, but then turns around and makes *no* corrections.
Here is an explanation: http://www.niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/news/all/niwa-confirms-temperature-rise/combining-temperature-data-from-multiple-sites-in-wellington Weather stations move or are replaced, and patching one timeseries onto another requires figuring out how to handle data collected in different ways at different times.
The NZ warming hasn't gone away, and this shrill report is nonsense.
Why is this article tagged with "democrats"? If you RTFA, you'll note that the tax credit was passed in 2005 and signed by G.W. Bush. In 2005 it was the Republicans that controlled congress.
The leg up Amazon has is that because it has "affiliates" run the local presence, it claims it doesn't have to collect sales tax. That makes its products look cheaper than those of the brick and mortar store. (Though, as others have said, in principle, the buyer is supposed to pay a use tax.)
What does that have to do with the price of tea in china? NY, and all other states, has been charging sales tax on out-of-state purchases for a very long time. Since Sears has nexus in NY, it has to collect sales tax and remit it to NY State - catalog purchase or no. In fact, given the vast number of Sears stores in every state (check out www.sears.com) I daresay they collect sales tax for every state.
Amazon, by contrast, gets "affiliates" to run their local presence, and makes the customer pay the use tax.
People here are missing the point. The sales tax does not tax an interstate transaction; it taxes a sale from a seller in a state to a buyer in the same state. Whether the warehouse from which the item is shipped is in another state doesn't matter, what matters is whether the seller does business in ("has nexus") in the state in which the buyer took delivery.
The states have different ways of determining whether a seller has nexus. Generally, these involve operating a facility or having employees in that state.
What New York did was to extend the definition to include the affiliates of the seller in the definition. This is not on its face silly, since the affiliates operate in much the same way as a store would.
Therefore, what will be before the court will not be the constitutionality of the sales tax, but the more limited issue of this extension of the definition of nexus.
This is a way to close a loophole the online retailers are using to give themselves a leg up over brick and mortar stores.
If you take a look at what this is doing, there's much less to it than meets the eye.
The way the page works is that it is able to load the file all.js in the greprefs directory inside your firefox installation. However, it is not *reading* this file and making it available to the javascript interpreter, it is *executing* the file. The file is a big list of browser preferences, each set with a call to a function with the signature pref(name, value). There is no code in there other than calls to pref. What the page does is define its own pref(name, value) which gets called, and the names and values are therefore available to the javascript interpreter.
So:
It has to know exactly what is in the file, and it has to be able to overwrite a function or functions so that some sort of privileged data becomes available to it. It has to be able to do this without the page throwing errors or halting execution. (That was easy with all.js, because the only thing in there was calls to pref. In other files I doubt it would be so easy.)
As demonstrated, it can only read data that's inside the directory of the default install, not your home directory or anywhere else. As others have pointed out, it's not clear that there's ever anything really privileged in there for it to get. (The settings gotten in the exploit demonstrated are not very interesting.)
I would additionally point out that the view-source: part of the URI appears to be unnecessary, since at least for me (Ubuntu FF 2.0.0.12) the "exploit" worked just fine without it.
Yes, it is true that hex was the preferred method for inputting the program (there was actually no storage medium on the Kim-1). But to be fair - the listing I posted a link to actually has the source listing right below - assembler of course.
Vi? BeOS? Hah - you young whippersnappers know squat about bloat-free software. Back in the day, when real men toggled their programs into a front panel, then then there was bloat free code.
My personal favorite was Peter Jennings Microchess, written in 1976 for a computer called the Kim-1.
Top this: this is a program that plays chess. It does not play it well, but it does accept input and makes a legal move in response. How long is the program?
Why is it that the moderators on/. always post these silly contrarian articles and ignore the relevant scientific discussion? In mid April, the largest and most highly-regarded group of climate scientists, working for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) published a report about precisely this subject. It was the second in a series of reports. The third was about what can be done to combat climate change./. never ran a piece linking to the actual report - and never mentioned the third report at all. It is here(pdf), and is easily readable by non-experts. You can get all of the reports (including the past IPCC reports from their website. (In fairness to/., there was this discussion about some BBC coverage on the report about it a week before it came out.)
The IPCC scientists did not ignore the "improvements" to the earth that the this article covers. Here is their exact words on that subject:
Studies in temperate areas have shown that climate change is projected to bring some benefits, such
as fewer deaths from cold exposure. Overall it is expected that these benefits will be outweighed by
the negative health effects of rising temperatures world-wide, especially in developing countries.
Also, BTW, why would anyone focus on the year 2050 when climate change is projected to continue - and possibly accelerate - after that?
My goodness the parent is a strange and silly post.
The first chart being linked to shows clearly that while there are certainly climate fluctuations on the order of centuries, they are only of 1 degree or less - less than the warming already observed in the 20th century. Not surprisingly, it also shows that 2004 was far hotter than any time in the last 12000 years. The other thing it shows is that far from it taking a long time to warm up, the spike in temperatures leading to the dot at 2004 is essentially unprecedented.
As for the second chart - first of all, it shows O2 concentrations, not temperature. Even if we assume (as the text below the chart disclaims) that this is a proxy for temperature, so what? The label on the chart immediately preceding big dip in temperature is "antarctic reglaciation". As ice forms on land, the sea level falls, the earth becomes more reflective, and all of these things lead to lower global temperatures. (In fact, the continents are also moving, making super long temperature comparisons pointless.) Does the parent think that it's "normal" for Antarctica to be free of ice, as the chart shows it was 20 million years ago? Keep doing what we're doing, and we'll be well on the way.
What I don't get is why so many people think that they know more than the climate scientists. Talking points of the sort in the parent do nothing to disprove the major point: that CO2 and methane are greenhouse gases, that they warm the earth in entirely predictable ways, and that the predictions (in many cases 20 or more years old at this point) are being shown to be correct.
The English vineyards bit is a standard contrarian talking point. The problem is that (a) it's not clear that vineyards tell you anything about climate (rather than economics) and (b) at any rate there's far more wine growing in England now than there was in the past.
Where do you guys come up with this crap? The surface of Venus is approximately 850 degrees F. That's not mostly because it is closer to the sun - it's because the atmosphere is mostly CO2, and so there's a runaway greenhouse effect. If somehow we could convert the earth's atmosphere to CO2, the earth would be nearly as hot, not just 10 degrees more.
Yes, there's no doubt that humans will survive if the planet is (say) 10 degrees F hotter. There will be lots of species that won't however, and it will very costly even for us.
There is no "global warming" on Mars. There *have* been some isolated incidences of regions on Mars that are warming up, over the course of 3 Martian years or so, but to infer from that that anything like a global warming trend of the type seen (and predicted) on earth is invalid.
The case for anthropogenic global warming is extraordinarily solid, and is based on lots and lots of observations of different effects, combined with modeling based on principles of physics. These talking points are just hot air.
"Scenario A was described as "on the high side of reality", because it assumed rapid exponential growth of greenhouse gases and it assumed that there would be no large volcanoes (which inject small particles into the stratosphere and cool the Earth) during the next half century. Scenario C was described as "a more drastic curtailment of emissions than has generally been imagined", specifically greenhouse gases were assumed to stop increasing after 2000. The intermediate Scenario B was described as "the most plausible". Scenario B had continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions at a moderate rate and it sprinkled three large volcanoes in the 50-year period after 1988, one of them in the 1990s."
"Not surprisingly, the real world has followed a course closest to that of Scenario B. The real world even had one large volcano in the 1990s, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which occurred in 1991, while Scenario B placed a volcano in 1995."
As you can see from looking at the graphs, Hansen's predictions are BANG ON.
You miss the point. Hansen's argument was that there were various possibilities. For example, one climate forcing is the eruption of volcanos. Since the timing and number of eruptions can't be predicted, you just put in an average number and guess. Hansen explicitly said that he constructed scenario B to be the best guess, so when the article goes around saying that Hansen "predicted" scenario A, they're just lying.
Slashdot Mirror
I bought a laptop from system76 in October and have been quite satisfied with it. They give quite good value for the money, and, in answer to the question posed in the OP, the site is simple and the models are well-differentiated and easy to buy. They just sold out all their ivy-bridge laptops and are now phasing in the sandy-bridge ones, so the selection is not quite as big as it was in October. When I get around to buying my next laptop, they will be at the top of my list. Definitely preferable to buying a Lenovo or Dell, if you want to run Linux
(1) Mann and Wegman have nothing do to with anything in the article, or, for that matter future predictions of Global Warming.
(2) The Wegman Report was commissioned by Joe Barton and Ed Whitfield., from the Energy and Commerce Committee of the House of Representatives, not the Senate.
(3) Neither Barton (who recently gained further notoriety by apologizing to the CEO of BP), nor Whitfield were the chairman of the relevant committee at the time. The Republican chairman of the committee and the rest of the Republican and Democratic members commissioned a real report from the National Academy of Sciences. That report was by a team of real researchers, chosen by the normal, careful practices of the National Academy of Sciences. It was then sent out for a formal peer review. It found that while the statistical methods used by Mann et al had a minor problem, correcting the problem made no substantial difference. Moreover, Mann's results had been validated by being repeated by several different researchers that found the same results, using completely different proxies for past temperatures and mathematical analyses.
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?isbn=0309102251
(4) In contrast, Wegman was chosen by Barton, whose opinions on climate change were already well known at the time, and Wegman was given material by Barton's staff to include in his report. He has said in interviews that he was under pressure to complete the report faster than he wanted.
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2010-11-22-plagiarism_N.htm
(5) Wegman's report was *not* peer reviewed. Wegman claims to have sent it to 6 people to look at, but of course even if this is true, they were chosen by *him*, not by any normal process of peer review.
(6) Wegman's report is now known to have been plagiarized and Wegman is now under formal investigation for it by George Mason University.
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/climate/globalwarming/2010-11-21-climate-report-questioned_N.htm
(7) Wegman has refused to release supporting code or data for his report. Prof. David Ritson of Stanford University made such a request in 2006, shortly after the Wegman report was released. Wegman's report called for disclosure of supporting materials and openness generally, but he has himself refused to comply, citing the technicality that his report was not federally funded.
http://deepclimate.org/2010/10/24/david-ritson-speaks-out/
The Wegman report is a piece of crap and it's pretty amusing that people who want to deny the reality of Global Warming keep citing it.
Because their denialist agenda is so strong that they always get this stuff wrong. 1) Doubling CO2 doesn't mean doubling from the current value of 390. It means doubling from the original pre-industrial value of 275. Hence they are talking about what happens when there are 550 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere, not 780. This is a huge difference from the point of view of how much time we have to stop the warming. 2) The model used in the paper predicts only a 1.94 C warming in the absence of the plant feedback. This is just barely inside the range of what is expected from a CO2 doubling. Most estimates are closer to 3.5C. Of course, changing the model to a more sensitive one (and therefore more likely), might change the plant effect, but if we assume that the plant effect is properly modeled, then it's -0.3C out of 3.5. 3) At any rate, we can't go on for centuries in any case. The authors are talking about what happens *after* the CO2 is stabilized.
Do you really think that the members of the National Academy of Sciences haven't thought of these obvious questions?
If you really want to know the answers, you could start by reading articles on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faint_young_sun_paradox
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permo%E2%80%93Carboniferous_Glaciation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleozoic#Climate
The link you post to The Telegraph is merely repost of a blog posting from NZ. The graph he posts is clearly wrong: he is objecting to a set of corrections being made to the data, but then turns around and makes *no* corrections. Here is an explanation: http://www.niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/news/all/niwa-confirms-temperature-rise/combining-temperature-data-from-multiple-sites-in-wellington Weather stations move or are replaced, and patching one timeseries onto another requires figuring out how to handle data collected in different ways at different times. The NZ warming hasn't gone away, and this shrill report is nonsense.
Why is this article tagged with "democrats"? If you RTFA, you'll note that the tax credit was passed in 2005 and signed by G.W. Bush. In 2005 it was the Republicans that controlled congress.
The leg up Amazon has is that because it has "affiliates" run the local presence, it claims it doesn't have to collect sales tax. That makes its products look cheaper than those of the brick and mortar store. (Though, as others have said, in principle, the buyer is supposed to pay a use tax.)
What does that have to do with the price of tea in china? NY, and all other states, has been charging sales tax on out-of-state purchases for a very long time. Since Sears has nexus in NY, it has to collect sales tax and remit it to NY State - catalog purchase or no. In fact, given the vast number of Sears stores in every state (check out www.sears.com) I daresay they collect sales tax for every state. Amazon, by contrast, gets "affiliates" to run their local presence, and makes the customer pay the use tax.
The states have different ways of determining whether a seller has nexus. Generally, these involve operating a facility or having employees in that state.
What New York did was to extend the definition to include the affiliates of the seller in the definition. This is not on its face silly, since the affiliates operate in much the same way as a store would.
Therefore, what will be before the court will not be the constitutionality of the sales tax, but the more limited issue of this extension of the definition of nexus.
This is a way to close a loophole the online retailers are using to give themselves a leg up over brick and mortar stores.
If you take a look at what this is doing, there's much less to it than meets the eye.
The way the page works is that it is able to load the file all.js in the greprefs directory inside your firefox installation. However, it is not *reading* this file and making it available to the javascript interpreter, it is *executing* the file. The file is a big list of browser preferences, each set with a call to a function with the signature pref(name, value). There is no code in there other than calls to pref. What the page does is define its own pref(name, value) which gets called, and the names and values are therefore available to the javascript interpreter.
So:
I would additionally point out that the view-source: part of the URI appears to be unnecessary, since at least for me (Ubuntu FF 2.0.0.12) the "exploit" worked just fine without it.
Yes, it is true that hex was the preferred method for inputting the program (there was actually no storage medium on the Kim-1). But to be fair - the listing I posted a link to actually has the source listing right below - assembler of course.
My personal favorite was Peter Jennings Microchess, written in 1976 for a computer called the Kim-1.
http://www.computerhistory.org/chess/main.php?sec= thm-42f15c9b2be73&sel=thm-42f15cab2be73
Top this: this is a program that plays chess. It does not play it well, but it does accept input and makes a legal move in response. How long is the program?
838 bytes.
Yes, bytes, no k or M prefix.
You can see the entire hex listing here:
http://archive.computerhistory.org/projects/chess/ related_materials/text/4-1.MicroChess_%20Manual_fo r_6502.Micro-Ware/MicroChessManual.PETER_JENNINGS. 062303071.sm.pdf
Check page 24/41.
My goodness the parent is a strange and silly post. The first chart being linked to shows clearly that while there are certainly climate fluctuations on the order of centuries, they are only of 1 degree or less - less than the warming already observed in the 20th century. Not surprisingly, it also shows that 2004 was far hotter than any time in the last 12000 years. The other thing it shows is that far from it taking a long time to warm up, the spike in temperatures leading to the dot at 2004 is essentially unprecedented. As for the second chart - first of all, it shows O2 concentrations, not temperature. Even if we assume (as the text below the chart disclaims) that this is a proxy for temperature, so what? The label on the chart immediately preceding big dip in temperature is "antarctic reglaciation". As ice forms on land, the sea level falls, the earth becomes more reflective, and all of these things lead to lower global temperatures. (In fact, the continents are also moving, making super long temperature comparisons pointless.) Does the parent think that it's "normal" for Antarctica to be free of ice, as the chart shows it was 20 million years ago? Keep doing what we're doing, and we'll be well on the way. What I don't get is why so many people think that they know more than the climate scientists. Talking points of the sort in the parent do nothing to disprove the major point: that CO2 and methane are greenhouse gases, that they warm the earth in entirely predictable ways, and that the predictions (in many cases 20 or more years old at this point) are being shown to be correct.
The English vineyards bit is a standard contrarian talking point. The problem is that (a) it's not clear that vineyards tell you anything about climate (rather than economics) and (b) at any rate there's far more wine growing in England now than there was in the past.
6 /07/medieval-warmth-and-english-wine/
See the discussion here
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/200
I have never seen a reference that claimed that English wine was "better" than French wine, so that seems to be new and made up.
See e.g. here: http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/GeorgeRyabov.s html
Yes, there's no doubt that humans will survive if the planet is (say) 10 degrees F hotter. There will be lots of species that won't however, and it will very costly even for us.
There is no "global warming" on Mars. There *have* been some isolated incidences of regions on Mars that are warming up, over the course of 3 Martian years or so, but to infer from that that anything like a global warming trend of the type seen (and predicted) on earth is invalid.
As a reference, see the discussion here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=192
The case for anthropogenic global warming is extraordinarily solid, and is based on lots and lots of observations of different effects, combined with modeling based on principles of physics. These talking points are just hot air.
Funny, but "it's" = "it is", not "it has".
"Scenario A was described as "on the high side of reality", because it assumed rapid exponential growth of greenhouse gases and it assumed that there would be no large volcanoes (which inject small particles into the stratosphere and cool the Earth) during the next half century. Scenario C was described as "a more drastic curtailment of emissions than has generally been imagined", specifically greenhouse gases were assumed to stop increasing after 2000. The intermediate Scenario B was described as "the most plausible". Scenario B had continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions at a moderate rate and it sprinkled three large volcanoes in the 50-year period after 1988, one of them in the 1990s."
"Not surprisingly, the real world has followed a course closest to that of Scenario B. The real world even had one large volcano in the 1990s, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, which occurred in 1991, while Scenario B placed a volcano in 1995."
As you can see from looking at the graphs, Hansen's predictions are BANG ON.
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/hansen_re-crichton.p df
You miss the point. Hansen's argument was that there were various possibilities. For example, one climate forcing is the eruption of volcanos. Since the timing and number of eruptions can't be predicted, you just put in an average number and guess. Hansen explicitly said that he constructed scenario B to be the best guess, so when the article goes around saying that Hansen "predicted" scenario A, they're just lying.
p df As you can see Hansen was pretty much BANG ON.
You can actually read Hansen's explanation of all this here: http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/hansen_re-crichton.
I definitely prefer KDE. Amarok is one of the best apps on any OS, period. It kicks iTunes's ass across the street.