"The problem is that ignores simple thermodynamics....Heat engines are driven by temperature differences not just heat"
Unless the sun can shine over the entire globe all at once and with the same intensity I'm pretty sure you will get temprature differences. I'm also pretty sure that while the earth spins you will also get vorticies forming in the moving air.
Weather systems are heat engines.
Again, weather != climate. It is climate that acts like a clasical heat engine, weather can be such that 4 seasons occur in a single day. Matter of fact the city I live in is famous for such weather.
Add James Lovelock ( the "father of modern earth sciences" ) to the list of scientists who have upset some green politicians by advocating Nuclear (at a minimum it would buy more time). Wether it's John Howard on GW, or Greenpeace on Nuclear, all political groups have no shortage of "leaders" willing to bury their head in the sand when confronted with new information. I know over the five decades I've been looking around the place, society, science and technology have all changed beyond recognition. Politicians are just a sub-species of human that are preoccupied with not rocking the boat so much that supporters start falling overboard and are not above whacking a smart-arse scientist with an oar. Strange thing is I think that overall the world is a much better place now than it was during my (happy) childhood, albeit with the problems that come with an extra 3.5 billion mouths to feed
"Who are preventing wind & solar plants?"
The last project death I heard of was here in Australia. Quite the achivement for a right-wing federal minister to overide a state premier and cancel a wind farm, but to then attempt to convince the nation that the enviro-nazi's and their bloody parrots were to blame makes it a cynical farce worthy of a whole "Yes Minister" episode.
I'm sorry if you think I am blaming the US, I was intending to blame our govt. and John Howard in particular. The US did not hold a gun to his head. As for nuclear John and George had dreams of stitching up the supply side of the nuclear fuel economy ~2005 but that has quickly fallen by the wayside (hint: we have shitloads of uranium in Australia).
The problem with the Hurricane thing is that weather != climate, have a look at what the realclimate link has to say about why that particular weather prediction failed.
One of the forecast climatic effects of increase global tempratures is an increase in extreme weather - simple thermodynamics says if you warm air up it will move around more. To date the peer-reviewed evidence supporting this view is weak to non-existant.
To say that one failed weather prediction for storm season X in location Y validates/nullifies that particular climatic forecast completely misses what the forecast actually says. I suggest you find some less amusing but more competent experts.
"There is nothing wrong with being a skeptic. I am skeptical as well that there is proof of man made global warming."
Skepticisim is at the core of the scientific method, it is a skill that is easily taught, often abused, and never fully mastered. I have been proud to label myself as such since "discovering" James Randi and Carl Sagan in the seventies. Sagan went on to write what I would consider a modern "bible" on the virtues of scepticisim - Demon Haunted World. However science provides evidence for concepts in the form of repeatable demonstrations, never proof.
"Australia uses coal because Australia has a lot of coal."
Yep and it's mostly the dirty brown stuff, it's all over the place - we even sent coals to Newcastle during the Thatcher years. Consequently there is a very powerfull coal lobby in Australia.
"I will simply state that I fail to understand is how standing stubbornly by the US has anything to do with your choice in energy?"
Our powerfull coal lobbyists are barely distinguishable from your powerfull coal lobbyists, so much so that at the most influential levels they are often the same people. They have very successfully moved the public argument to oil and rising oceans when the major threat is to food and it's coming first and foremost from coal. Blind support for the US stance on Kyoto and it's successor was a large part of John Howard's downfall in the last election, his blind support for TWOT was an even larger part of the battering his party took at the polls. From what I saw of UK politics I belive at least some of Tony Blair's unpopularity at home was also due to his emabrassingly obvious body language when he was kissing Bush's arse in public. These three leaders (two right-wingers and a lefty) dragged the world into Iraq and had no choice but to stick together on TWOT, simarly Howard got sticky with George on GW for other reasons.
During the last decade in particular, both the US and Australian government sponsered scientific institutions such as NOAA and CSIRO have contributed an enourmous wealth of knowledge on the subject despite political interference. At the same time Howard and Bush were calling for "more research" (in perfect mass media, trans-pacific synconisity) they were eliminating all refrences to "our home planet" in NASA's mission statement and gutting the budgets that had, for decades, been providing the research they were calling for.
"The problem is that unless China and India get on board and NO I am not willing to pay them off it really will make little difference."
True, however the UN climate summit at Bali demonstrated the only country that is still not on board is the US. The deal that US finally agreed to discuss after being deserted by Australia, shamed by PNG and boo'ed by the rest of the planet is known as the Brazilian proposal (the top link is to Melbourne Uni, a highly respected university in my home town).
As far as the fairness of obligations goes the general idea is a cap and trade system that attempts to allocate the same amount of GHG on a per-captia basis to each person on Earth between (IIRC) 1960-2060 this creates different emmision curves for different nations but the curves are planned to merge together ~2030. Having said that I am not a fan of everything in the proposal (in particular offsets based on land use), I also recognise that no treaty will please everyone or be immune from creative accounting.
"At the same time I am all for cutting CO2 just because I don't think that it can hurt and it may hel
"Actually, you might be interested in real studies on the matter. Here's one from UCLA (hardly a right-wing place), which determines that drudge, fox news, etc are actually pretty damn even and not as right-wing as you claim, while the "traditional" media lean FAR left."
Hmmm, a study that shows Fox is "fair and balanced" vs Rupert Murdoch who readily admits he uses his media outlets to push his own right-wing worldview.
As a few others have pointed out the middle ground in the US is currently so far to the right that Gengis Khan could be considered a moderate.
I agree there is a lot of useless crap written by mathematicians but to be fair there are plenty of software sharlatns who claim to have written AI, super-duper compression, etc into their apps (eg: the MS paperclip). AI needs input from programmers, engineers, neuro-scientists/surgeons, mathematicians, behaviorists and it probably won't be recognised for what it is until it starts experimenting on us.
We already have the technology to map the overall physical properties of a human brain onto a computer down to the level of individual nurons and synapses, IIRC IBM is working towards doing just that by 2012. IMHO it won't achieve much without a simiarly complex set of sensors to replicate the nervous system that connects a living brain to it's environment and it's life support system (body). Humans (and other animals) are genetically programmed to categorize the world into objects (trivially: self vs non-self), experience teaches us what is relevant to our existance and trains our body's reaction (eg: all baby humans are facinated with their own hands for 6-9 months after they are born).
Intelligence is a hard thing to define, for instance it could be argued that an ameoba[sic] is intelligent because it "knows" self vs non-self well enough to "hunt" other microbes. However I think what most people mean when they say AI, is intelligence as per the strong version of the Turing test. A "virtual brain" in a box that cannot cannot walk down the street and experience what normal humans experience will have little chance of passing the Turing test.
Quick? NYCL has been posting on this stuff for years and is by far the most informative voice on slashdot for this type of thing - I can only assume you are a new AC around here.
It appears that he's getting paid for it.
Define "it". Also regardless of wether he is paid for "it", he has done far more than just sit on slashdot and bitch about the MAFIAA like the rest of us do.
Ummm, I am not trying to blame the US, I was having a go at our last PM who had his head stuck up Bush's arse 24/7 and to this day is a "skeptic". His misdirected loyalty cost him the last election and was the main reason he and his government lost the last election.
"Scary, isn't it? Unless we carefully condense the steam even geothermal energy doesn't solve global warming. And at present, we don't."
Sorry but you have been misinformed (probably by those who are not geothermal fans). There is no need to condense the steam, yes it's true that H20 is a powerfull GHG but that is only part of the strory. The atmosphere is already more or less saturated with H20 (eg: dew drops form in desrerts every night and evaporate in the heat of the day), adding more H20 won't affect the temprature because it simply falls out somewhere else as rain/dew.
In other words the total amount H20 in the atmosphere stays relatively constant regardless of how much steam we pump into it.
"A bigger issue with a system like this would be false negatives. Economics being what it is, this means that the organizations deploying these cameras would likely end up hiring less people to watch the monitors per camera (whether that means an increase in cameras or a decrease in staff.)"
Stocktakes tell the store owner how much is being lost via theft. Economics being what it is, you can use this information to measure your security bang for buck and notice there is a point where diminishing returns makes eliminating the remaining false negatives a net loss. At this point your best option is to maintain the same level of risk aversion for less money. People who run large sets of cameras are the target market so IMHO the false negatives will be expected/ignored by the buyer, they (rational but non-technical bussiness buyers) will simply want to know what it all means for their bottom line.
The CSIRO in Australia has been investigating the practicality of producing electricity from granite deposits since the early nineties. Also since the nineties the same organisation has been saying that Australia could produce all it's power and then some from either solar or wind.
The problem for the last 11yrs in this country has been purely political as we stood stubbornly by the US. Because of this misdirected loyalty our power generation remains 90+% derived from coal and we have seen many innovations payed for by taxpayers sold off to private companies in the EU and elsewhere.
Now that our breadbasket (the Murry-Darling basin) is regularly producing half of what it did just a couple of decades ago people are starting to pay attention.
I think you did a good job explaining, one point thought. The sub-problems need not be independent.
Many problems such as weather prediction use finite element analysis with a "clock tick" to syncronise the results of the sub-problems. The sub-problems themselves are cubes representing X cubic kilometers of the atmosphere/surface, each sub-problem depends on the state of it's immediate neighbours. The accuracy of the results depends on the resolution of the clock tick, the volume represented by the sub-problems and the accuracy of the initial conditions. This is usefull in all sorts of simulations from designing molds to minmise air pockets that can plague the process of metal casting, to shooting Cassini through the rings of Saturn, twice!
The technique can be thought of as brute force integration with respect to time, space, matter, energy, etc, for a wide range of physical problems. The more power and raw data you throw at these types of problems the more realistic the "physics" in both video games and scientific simulations. IMHO we have only just scratched the surface of what computers can tell us about the real world through these types of simulations and much of this is due to scientists in many fields confusing "computer simulation" with "artists impression".
BTW climate and weather modelling use the same sort of algorithm but get very different results because weather != claimte.
Yes, the knee-jerk reaction seems to be "license == BadThing(TM)" or maybe "Govt. steals PRIVATE data" but without laws specifiying that certain clauses must be included in the license we would be left with the default copyright laws which I think most people here would agree are unacceptable for trashy romance novels let alone unique raw data sets concerning our home planet. Perhaps private companies in the mold of Disney would decline to take part becuse they have to share data about our planet, but IMHO that's a GoodThing(TM). It also reduces the burden on the taxpayer if private consortiums are forced to share scientific data, the only downside I can think of is the double edged sword of "national security" (control people vs share data).
As far as space exploration goes the worst thing that has happened recently is this obvious attempt to silence the most powerfull tool available for montoring the biosphere. Maybe it's non-obvious that in govt budgets, funding is tied directly to the agency's "mission statement", or maybe I have my tinfoil hat on too tight and NOAA/NASA budgets are not related? Anyway, since I'm not an american taxpayer I can hardly complain about the informative freebies NOAA/NASA already provides, and I admire Hansen as both a scientist and a public servant willing to "speak truth to power".
"Putting out forest fires has proven to be yet another form of short term thinking that gets us into a lot more trouble in the long term. Sometimes you really do have to destroy a forest in order to save it."
That's a bit simplistic, the idea is to burn the undergrowth not destroy the forrest.
"Govt. run "assistance" programs do more harm than good, DESPITE people's attempts to defend them by illustrating the good they do."
Perhaps that's the case in the US although looking at the trans continental railways I doubt it, it's just easy to stereotype people who are getting something your not when it's coming out of the public purse.
I posted somewhere else about how I received support to do a BSc as a mature age student in Australia. The assistance is merit based (ie:you still have have to pass educational criteria to gain entry, I had to do a HS maths course to get in since I dropped out of high school). I repayed 1/4 of that assistance through a tax levy that is part of the system and have also paid an estimated $750K in income tax since completing the degree in 1991. That's more than twice the tax I would have paid had I remained working shifts in a factory. While studying I had two kids at school, a non-drunk wife working part-time and a job driving cabs.
After the divorce I didn't get a cent from the wife or the government and neither did my kids, the degree had improved my standard of living past the point where I NEEDED any. And since you also survived the single dad thing I am assuming we are in similar income brackets, meaning both of us had the EXISTING financial ability to look after our kids alone. None of that means you or I work any harder than a single mum at collage or one working for minimum wage as a waitress. True there is no way to tell what individual people will or won't contribute to society in the future but if there never given a chance then it's a certainty they won't contribute much. I also belive that the vast majority of people on welfare want to get off it and the overwhelming evidence says the best way to do that is to get an eductaion and some skills.
"But I certainly never felt like my situation "entitled" me to free govt. benefits."
Free, entitled? For fuck's sake you could build a whole school with what I have paid in tax over the last 35yrs.
From an outside perspective it seems the best thing to do with the US health system would be to scrap it and start again, but given the views on UHC in the US it won't happen until a large chunk of the population stop associating UHC with Stalin. Apart from ideology I see no reason why your government currently spends more per head than Australia does on health and yet you still need to buy private cover. Why else (other than ideology) would the US spend all that EXTRA money to be rated down below 30th in the world for health outcomes? Why is it that Joe Sixpack may still have to choose between treatment and bankruptcy when there is more money in the US system than any other nation? As far as I can tell much of the money goes to an army of private and public buracrats working out who pays for the treatment.
Pragmatisim is far more sane than idealisim. The US health system will continue to be inefficient, expensive and occasionally inhumane until sufficent numbers of Americans remove their ideological blinkers and start seeing provision of low-cost, high-quality health care as a bi-partisan human rights issue.
"Great, so i should go mucking around in list of random poorly-labelled security settings in order to do things I should be able to do by default, and hope that I'm disabling the right things, and not doing something even dumber?"
Yes, as a geek it's your duty to fiddle but not with my machine ok. Windows is still king of the SOE workstations due mainly to it's distribution and control tools, the people who buy the corporate licenses don't see the problem as thousands of machines that need tweeking, they see a system called "SOE desktops" that needs maintaining. Millions of non-technical people use windows at work so will naturally look for it when they buy a 'family' PC.
"Why not just have reasonable security settings from the outset?"
They obviously use a different definition of reasonable, so counting mine we now have three.
I'm not saying it is right that young white males have to pay when nobody else seems to. I think that everyone should (and in the west can) have the opportunity to get a tertiary education and IMHO educating people while they are tied down with small kids is an effcient way of doing it. The question in my mind about the US is not "why should single mums get support" it is "why is it so hard for single white males".
Here in Australia we have had substantial govt. support for merit based tertiary education for ~20yrs now, you're required to pay about 1/4 of you govt funded degree back to the govt through an increased income tax that kicks in once you start earning money in the workforce. I went to uni as a mature age student under this scheme in the late 80's, my tax returns since then demonstrate it was a good investment for both myself and the govt. I understand that others may have pissed those opportunities away and may never return anything to society (financial or otherwise), but I don't know how you can weed these people out if it's true that they don't need to show progress (ie:pass), especially before the fact.
Coincidently I once lived and worked on a sawmill near Cann River (circa 80-81) and now live in Melbourne. The local school near the sawmill would simply close when there were less than 5 kids amoungst the workers/farmers families.:o
Judging from you're reply I have must have misunderstood you OP, ironic eh?
"Will there be an economic failure of massive proportion?"
Right now the financial pundits here in Australia are asking if the US economy implodes will it drag Australia with it. The US dollar has sunk like a stone over the last couple of years so much so that the Aussie dollar has gone from $0.70US to $0.98US, those who in 2006 said oil wouldn't hit $100 are watching it approach $150, the US is now bailing out very large financial institutions (more or less by simply printing more money). The full effect of all this bad news from the US will take a year or so to unfold so I think high petrol prices are just the begining.
BTW: I posted for years as AC before overcoming the spam paranoia and opening an account. Knowing what I do about censorship these days I am also inclined to take ownership of my comments and defend/appologise for them as I see fit.
Not that I would put it past Rupert to do such a thing but the economic problems the US is facing (including the minor bank run at Indymac) are not entirely his fault.
Slashdot Mirror
"The problem is that ignores simple thermodynamics....Heat engines are driven by temperature differences not just heat"
Unless the sun can shine over the entire globe all at once and with the same intensity I'm pretty sure you will get temprature differences. I'm also pretty sure that while the earth spins you will also get vorticies forming in the moving air.
Weather systems are heat engines.
Again, weather != climate. It is climate that acts like a clasical heat engine, weather can be such that 4 seasons occur in a single day. Matter of fact the city I live in is famous for such weather.
Add James Lovelock ( the "father of modern earth sciences" ) to the list of scientists who have upset some green politicians by advocating Nuclear (at a minimum it would buy more time). Wether it's John Howard on GW, or Greenpeace on Nuclear, all political groups have no shortage of "leaders" willing to bury their head in the sand when confronted with new information. I know over the five decades I've been looking around the place, society, science and technology have all changed beyond recognition. Politicians are just a sub-species of human that are preoccupied with not rocking the boat so much that supporters start falling overboard and are not above whacking a smart-arse scientist with an oar. Strange thing is I think that overall the world is a much better place now than it was during my (happy) childhood, albeit with the problems that come with an extra 3.5 billion mouths to feed
"Who are preventing wind & solar plants?"
The last project death I heard of was here in Australia. Quite the achivement for a right-wing federal minister to overide a state premier and cancel a wind farm, but to then attempt to convince the nation that the enviro-nazi's and their bloody parrots were to blame makes it a cynical farce worthy of a whole "Yes Minister" episode.
I'm sorry if you think I am blaming the US, I was intending to blame our govt. and John Howard in particular. The US did not hold a gun to his head. As for nuclear John and George had dreams of stitching up the supply side of the nuclear fuel economy ~2005 but that has quickly fallen by the wayside (hint: we have shitloads of uranium in Australia).
The problem with the Hurricane thing is that weather != climate, have a look at what the realclimate link has to say about why that particular weather prediction failed.
One of the forecast climatic effects of increase global tempratures is an increase in extreme weather - simple thermodynamics says if you warm air up it will move around more. To date the peer-reviewed evidence supporting this view is weak to non-existant.
To say that one failed weather prediction for storm season X in location Y validates/nullifies that particular climatic forecast completely misses what the forecast actually says. I suggest you find some less amusing but more competent experts.
Yes, Europa's ice covered ocean is another interesting but difficult target and IMHO is currently the most likely place to find ET.
"There is nothing wrong with being a skeptic. I am skeptical as well that there is proof of man made global warming."
Skepticisim is at the core of the scientific method, it is a skill that is easily taught, often abused, and never fully mastered. I have been proud to label myself as such since "discovering" James Randi and Carl Sagan in the seventies. Sagan went on to write what I would consider a modern "bible" on the virtues of scepticisim - Demon Haunted World. However science provides evidence for concepts in the form of repeatable demonstrations, never proof.
"Australia uses coal because Australia has a lot of coal."
Yep and it's mostly the dirty brown stuff, it's all over the place - we even sent coals to Newcastle during the Thatcher years. Consequently there is a very powerfull coal lobby in Australia.
"I will simply state that I fail to understand is how standing stubbornly by the US has anything to do with your choice in energy?"
Our powerfull coal lobbyists are barely distinguishable from your powerfull coal lobbyists, so much so that at the most influential levels they are often the same people. They have very successfully moved the public argument to oil and rising oceans when the major threat is to food and it's coming first and foremost from coal. Blind support for the US stance on Kyoto and it's successor was a large part of John Howard's downfall in the last election, his blind support for TWOT was an even larger part of the battering his party took at the polls. From what I saw of UK politics I belive at least some of Tony Blair's unpopularity at home was also due to his emabrassingly obvious body language when he was kissing Bush's arse in public. These three leaders (two right-wingers and a lefty) dragged the world into Iraq and had no choice but to stick together on TWOT, simarly Howard got sticky with George on GW for other reasons.
During the last decade in particular, both the US and Australian government sponsered scientific institutions such as NOAA and CSIRO have contributed an enourmous wealth of knowledge on the subject despite political interference. At the same time Howard and Bush were calling for "more research" (in perfect mass media, trans-pacific synconisity) they were eliminating all refrences to "our home planet" in NASA's mission statement and gutting the budgets that had, for decades, been providing the research they were calling for.
"The problem is that unless China and India get on board and NO I am not willing to pay them off it really will make little difference."
True, however the UN climate summit at Bali demonstrated the only country that is still not on board is the US. The deal that US finally agreed to discuss after being deserted by Australia, shamed by PNG and boo'ed by the rest of the planet is known as the Brazilian proposal (the top link is to Melbourne Uni, a highly respected university in my home town).
As far as the fairness of obligations goes the general idea is a cap and trade system that attempts to allocate the same amount of GHG on a per-captia basis to each person on Earth between (IIRC) 1960-2060 this creates different emmision curves for different nations but the curves are planned to merge together ~2030. Having said that I am not a fan of everything in the proposal (in particular offsets based on land use), I also recognise that no treaty will please everyone or be immune from creative accounting.
"At the same time I am all for cutting CO2 just because I don't think that it can hurt and it may hel
"Actually, you might be interested in real studies on the matter. Here's one from UCLA (hardly a right-wing place), which determines that drudge, fox news, etc are actually pretty damn even and not as right-wing as you claim, while the "traditional" media lean FAR left."
Hmmm, a study that shows Fox is "fair and balanced" vs Rupert Murdoch who readily admits he uses his media outlets to push his own right-wing worldview.
As a few others have pointed out the middle ground in the US is currently so far to the right that Gengis Khan could be considered a moderate.
I agree there is a lot of useless crap written by mathematicians but to be fair there are plenty of software sharlatns who claim to have written AI, super-duper compression, etc into their apps (eg: the MS paperclip). AI needs input from programmers, engineers, neuro-scientists/surgeons, mathematicians, behaviorists and it probably won't be recognised for what it is until it starts experimenting on us.
We already have the technology to map the overall physical properties of a human brain onto a computer down to the level of individual nurons and synapses, IIRC IBM is working towards doing just that by 2012. IMHO it won't achieve much without a simiarly complex set of sensors to replicate the nervous system that connects a living brain to it's environment and it's life support system (body). Humans (and other animals) are genetically programmed to categorize the world into objects (trivially: self vs non-self), experience teaches us what is relevant to our existance and trains our body's reaction (eg: all baby humans are facinated with their own hands for 6-9 months after they are born).
Intelligence is a hard thing to define, for instance it could be argued that an ameoba[sic] is intelligent because it "knows" self vs non-self well enough to "hunt" other microbes. However I think what most people mean when they say AI, is intelligence as per the strong version of the Turing test. A "virtual brain" in a box that cannot cannot walk down the street and experience what normal humans experience will have little chance of passing the Turing test.
An insightfull mod for asserting #5 was NOT alive. Bravo BadAnalogyGuy, bravo!
"Let us not be too quick to deify him."
Quick? NYCL has been posting on this stuff for years and is by far the most informative voice on slashdot for this type of thing - I can only assume you are a new AC around here.
It appears that he's getting paid for it.
Define "it". Also regardless of wether he is paid for "it", he has done far more than just sit on slashdot and bitch about the MAFIAA like the rest of us do.
"Wow and just how is the US to blame for this?"
Ummm, I am not trying to blame the US, I was having a go at our last PM who had his head stuck up Bush's arse 24/7 and to this day is a "skeptic". His misdirected loyalty cost him the last election and was the main reason he and his government lost the last election.
"Scary, isn't it? Unless we carefully condense the steam even geothermal energy doesn't solve global warming. And at present, we don't."
Sorry but you have been misinformed (probably by those who are not geothermal fans). There is no need to condense the steam, yes it's true that H20 is a powerfull GHG but that is only part of the strory. The atmosphere is already more or less saturated with H20 (eg: dew drops form in desrerts every night and evaporate in the heat of the day), adding more H20 won't affect the temprature because it simply falls out somewhere else as rain/dew.
In other words the total amount H20 in the atmosphere stays relatively constant regardless of how much steam we pump into it.
"A bigger issue with a system like this would be false negatives. Economics being what it is, this means that the organizations deploying these cameras would likely end up hiring less people to watch the monitors per camera (whether that means an increase in cameras or a decrease in staff.)"
Stocktakes tell the store owner how much is being lost via theft. Economics being what it is, you can use this information to measure your security bang for buck and notice there is a point where diminishing returns makes eliminating the remaining false negatives a net loss. At this point your best option is to maintain the same level of risk aversion for less money. People who run large sets of cameras are the target market so IMHO the false negatives will be expected/ignored by the buyer, they (rational but non-technical bussiness buyers) will simply want to know what it all means for their bottom line.
The CSIRO in Australia has been investigating the practicality of producing electricity from granite deposits since the early nineties. Also since the nineties the same organisation has been saying that Australia could produce all it's power and then some from either solar or wind.
The problem for the last 11yrs in this country has been purely political as we stood stubbornly by the US. Because of this misdirected loyalty our power generation remains 90+% derived from coal and we have seen many innovations payed for by taxpayers sold off to private companies in the EU and elsewhere.
Now that our breadbasket (the Murry-Darling basin) is regularly producing half of what it did just a couple of decades ago people are starting to pay attention.
I think you did a good job explaining, one point thought. The sub-problems need not be independent.
Many problems such as weather prediction use finite element analysis with a "clock tick" to syncronise the results of the sub-problems. The sub-problems themselves are cubes representing X cubic kilometers of the atmosphere/surface, each sub-problem depends on the state of it's immediate neighbours. The accuracy of the results depends on the resolution of the clock tick, the volume represented by the sub-problems and the accuracy of the initial conditions. This is usefull in all sorts of simulations from designing molds to minmise air pockets that can plague the process of metal casting, to shooting Cassini through the rings of Saturn, twice!
The technique can be thought of as brute force integration with respect to time, space, matter, energy, etc, for a wide range of physical problems. The more power and raw data you throw at these types of problems the more realistic the "physics" in both video games and scientific simulations. IMHO we have only just scratched the surface of what computers can tell us about the real world through these types of simulations and much of this is due to scientists in many fields confusing "computer simulation" with "artists impression".
BTW climate and weather modelling use the same sort of algorithm but get very different results because weather != claimte.
Yes, the knee-jerk reaction seems to be "license == BadThing(TM)" or maybe "Govt. steals PRIVATE data" but without laws specifiying that certain clauses must be included in the license we would be left with the default copyright laws which I think most people here would agree are unacceptable for trashy romance novels let alone unique raw data sets concerning our home planet. Perhaps private companies in the mold of Disney would decline to take part becuse they have to share data about our planet, but IMHO that's a GoodThing(TM). It also reduces the burden on the taxpayer if private consortiums are forced to share scientific data, the only downside I can think of is the double edged sword of "national security" (control people vs share data).
As far as space exploration goes the worst thing that has happened recently is this obvious attempt to silence the most powerfull tool available for montoring the biosphere. Maybe it's non-obvious that in govt budgets, funding is tied directly to the agency's "mission statement", or maybe I have my tinfoil hat on too tight and NOAA/NASA budgets are not related? Anyway, since I'm not an american taxpayer I can hardly complain about the informative freebies NOAA/NASA already provides, and I admire Hansen as both a scientist and a public servant willing to "speak truth to power".
Yep, there are lots of them here in Australia. Mainly Eucalypts, Acacias and Banksias.
"i always hate the people who mix up the austrian kangaroo with the australian schnitzel"
Speaking as an Aussie there are lots of locals who still manage to confuse "The sound of music" with Guy Sebastian.
"Putting out forest fires has proven to be yet another form of short term thinking that gets us into a lot more trouble in the long term. Sometimes you really do have to destroy a forest in order to save it."
That's a bit simplistic, the idea is to burn the undergrowth not destroy the forrest.
"Govt. run "assistance" programs do more harm than good, DESPITE people's attempts to defend them by illustrating the good they do."
Perhaps that's the case in the US although looking at the trans continental railways I doubt it, it's just easy to stereotype people who are getting something your not when it's coming out of the public purse.
I posted somewhere else about how I received support to do a BSc as a mature age student in Australia. The assistance is merit based (ie:you still have have to pass educational criteria to gain entry, I had to do a HS maths course to get in since I dropped out of high school). I repayed 1/4 of that assistance through a tax levy that is part of the system and have also paid an estimated $750K in income tax since completing the degree in 1991. That's more than twice the tax I would have paid had I remained working shifts in a factory. While studying I had two kids at school, a non-drunk wife working part-time and a job driving cabs.
After the divorce I didn't get a cent from the wife or the government and neither did my kids, the degree had improved my standard of living past the point where I NEEDED any. And since you also survived the single dad thing I am assuming we are in similar income brackets, meaning both of us had the EXISTING financial ability to look after our kids alone. None of that means you or I work any harder than a single mum at collage or one working for minimum wage as a waitress. True there is no way to tell what individual people will or won't contribute to society in the future but if there never given a chance then it's a certainty they won't contribute much. I also belive that the vast majority of people on welfare want to get off it and the overwhelming evidence says the best way to do that is to get an eductaion and some skills.
"But I certainly never felt like my situation "entitled" me to free govt. benefits."
Free, entitled? For fuck's sake you could build a whole school with what I have paid in tax over the last 35yrs.
From an outside perspective it seems the best thing to do with the US health system would be to scrap it and start again, but given the views on UHC in the US it won't happen until a large chunk of the population stop associating UHC with Stalin. Apart from ideology I see no reason why your government currently spends more per head than Australia does on health and yet you still need to buy private cover. Why else (other than ideology) would the US spend all that EXTRA money to be rated down below 30th in the world for health outcomes? Why is it that Joe Sixpack may still have to choose between treatment and bankruptcy when there is more money in the US system than any other nation? As far as I can tell much of the money goes to an army of private and public buracrats working out who pays for the treatment.
Pragmatisim is far more sane than idealisim. The US health system will continue to be inefficient, expensive and occasionally inhumane until sufficent numbers of Americans remove their ideological blinkers and start seeing provision of low-cost, high-quality health care as a bi-partisan human rights issue.
"Great, so i should go mucking around in list of random poorly-labelled security settings in order to do things I should be able to do by default, and hope that I'm disabling the right things, and not doing something even dumber?"
Yes, as a geek it's your duty to fiddle but not with my machine ok. Windows is still king of the SOE workstations due mainly to it's distribution and control tools, the people who buy the corporate licenses don't see the problem as thousands of machines that need tweeking, they see a system called "SOE desktops" that needs maintaining. Millions of non-technical people use windows at work so will naturally look for it when they buy a 'family' PC.
"Why not just have reasonable security settings from the outset?"
They obviously use a different definition of reasonable, so counting mine we now have three.
I'm not saying it is right that young white males have to pay when nobody else seems to. I think that everyone should (and in the west can) have the opportunity to get a tertiary education and IMHO educating people while they are tied down with small kids is an effcient way of doing it. The question in my mind about the US is not "why should single mums get support" it is "why is it so hard for single white males".
:o
Here in Australia we have had substantial govt. support for merit based tertiary education for ~20yrs now, you're required to pay about 1/4 of you govt funded degree back to the govt through an increased income tax that kicks in once you start earning money in the workforce. I went to uni as a mature age student under this scheme in the late 80's, my tax returns since then demonstrate it was a good investment for both myself and the govt. I understand that others may have pissed those opportunities away and may never return anything to society (financial or otherwise), but I don't know how you can weed these people out if it's true that they don't need to show progress (ie:pass), especially before the fact.
Coincidently I once lived and worked on a sawmill near Cann River (circa 80-81) and now live in Melbourne. The local school near the sawmill would simply close when there were less than 5 kids amoungst the workers/farmers families.
Judging from you're reply I have must have misunderstood you OP, ironic eh?
"Will there be an economic failure of massive proportion?"
Right now the financial pundits here in Australia are asking if the US economy implodes will it drag Australia with it. The US dollar has sunk like a stone over the last couple of years so much so that the Aussie dollar has gone from $0.70US to $0.98US, those who in 2006 said oil wouldn't hit $100 are watching it approach $150, the US is now bailing out very large financial institutions (more or less by simply printing more money). The full effect of all this bad news from the US will take a year or so to unfold so I think high petrol prices are just the begining.
BTW: I posted for years as AC before overcoming the spam paranoia and opening an account. Knowing what I do about censorship these days I am also inclined to take ownership of my comments and defend/appologise for them as I see fit.
Not that I would put it past Rupert to do such a thing but the economic problems the US is facing (including the minor bank run at Indymac) are not entirely his fault.
"I don't think the /. crowd will understand a lot of your rant but I write this to let you know that I understand and appreciate it."
Get back to us about who doesn't understand what when your own kids have been through collage.