that carbon per se is a pollutant we need to worry about today. Which is both stupid and wrong.
If you don't accept the science on AGW (and we all know you don't) then of course carbon is not a harmful pollutant in your eyes, but it's still a pollutant using the literal meaning of the word as in "I don't pollute my scotch with water". The reason the anti-science mob that feed you this information keep repeating the (stupid and wrong) mantra "CO2 is not a pollution" is that "pollution" has a very specific definition in US law, one that they do not want applied to their own activities.
You are of course entitled to your opinion but don't expect people to accept to remain quiet when it violently disagrees with rigorous scientific enquiry. Same thing when you redefine the word "pollution" without actually stating what the new definition is. That particular debating method is known as the "Humpty Dumpty defence" and is considered disingenuous and childish by intellectually honest adults.
You were probably modded troll because you are repeating denialist talking points (again). I'm not sure what definition you are using but to most people pollution is simply a resource in the wrong place. The substance does not have to be toxic to be considered pollution. The reason we don't call it "oxygen pollution" is that the oxygen is already in the atmosphere, it's the carbon that humans dig up from the ground and attach to it that is the "pollutant".
To use a less controversial example, many native English speakers consider water to be a pollutant when added to a good scotch, how does that make any sense under your (unstated) definition of "pollution"?
Security at my home tonight is lax, it's 11pm, both doors are wide open and there's a nice breeze coming through after a hot Aussie day, most of the day tourists have left the nearby beach. Security is just another word for distrust, and I generally trust my countrymen not to sneak in while I'm napping on the couch. Re sig below: more security may save your life, but more trust may make it worth something.
Knowledge is the most powerful weapon in any contest. Read up on Alan Turing and the enigma machine and how it sank the U-boat fleet and was later used to set up the naval ambush at Midway island. But most of this spook stuff that's been going on since the end of WW2 is about the "five eyes" gathering and sharing industrial espionage from supposedly friendly democratic nations such as Germany and Indonesia.
Russians hook up dash cams to qualify for the discount on their insurance premium, it's main benefit to the insurance company is that it avoids the need for a court battle between insurance companies when both parties are insured. The two companies simply review the tapes and settle it out of court.
Trucks, (say) the Melbourne to Sydney run, which is already a modern freeway and a busy overnight trade route for shipping containers of "stuff", freeways are much simpler for an autonomous car to navigate than a suburban street and they already exclude animals, pedestrians, push bikes, basically everything except cars, trucks, and motor bikes. I don't see it as "far fetched" that automated forklifts and trucks could move the bulk of goods between those two cities in the foreseeable future anyway. Slipstreaming the trucks in a tight convoy would result in significant fuel savings and only the lead truck would need the fancy compass, the rest just follow the leader. I suspect that at first they will either be piloted or restricted to 10km/h through the few towns still on the freeway route.
Having said that, I think it will be quite a while before autonomous trucks are running Sydney to Melbourne via the coast road.
In Australia third party medical insurance is compulsory, run by the state, and billed as part of the yearly registration fee. The government runs the scheme at a profit, that money is (to a large degree) put back into road safety in an evidence based effort to reduce road accidents. Sure it's a "socialist policy", but results are what count, and our state's annual road toll has halved since the "TAC" was tasked with managing it in the early 90's. Most of the legal drama has gone with the old (US style system) but you still need to seek legal counsel when making a substantial claim. If your unlucky enough to be hurt by an unregistered car the driver is liable for the medical costs, but the government pays you regardless. Wether or not the driver pays the government depends on how much the Sherriff's office can extract from the driver's assets at auction.
Third party property is optional and provided by the private sector, personally I would like to see it become mandatory, an 18yo burger flipper can easily rack up tens of thousands of dollars in damages with nothing more than the arrogance of youth and a $500 rust bucket. Debt collectors for the victims insurance company will hound said teenager for decades, dragging him into court every couple of years to review the garnishing of his wages. The only people who benefit under that scenario are the debt collection agencies.
I trust the value of the USD for instance more than the value of Diamonds.
Money markets trust US bonds more than gold, but it is certainly not blind trust, the US have an overwhelming military advantage and a long history of faithfully honouring the bonds.
The word "fiat" is redundant. That's the whole point of a "currency", it's a token of value, it's intrinsic value is irrelevant unless it is more than it's token value (as can happen with metal coins). The tokens free individual traders from constantly dealing with questions like - how many tea bags for a postage stamp? Currency is simply not possible without implicit trust that the tokens can be exchanged back into goods and services, you cannot eat silver and gold.
I worked with well paid engineer in the 90's who used to go busking on the street with his flute. He travelled extensively for work and made a point of busking in as many different cities as was practicable The coins thrown in the hat were a prop for his act, not the point of it.
surely there is someplace like the old/. out there?
That place never existed and never will, you're experiencing what is known as 'nostalgia', the tendency to recall the pleasurable and forget the noise.
hell even if you didn't agree you LEARNED and left knowing more than you knew before you got here
When you first meet your wife all her stories were new and interesting, same deal with Slashdot (and the internet in general).
I personally blame the allowing of AC posts
AC frees the reader from any pre-existing bias for/against the author.
I just don't see people walking across Alaska and Canada and finally settling in South America in the course of a few thousand years.
Why not? - A Frenchman in the 1800's walked from Paris to Moscow on stilts in under a year, however his 1000 mile journey was deliberate and had other humans along the way. Humans (like any other species) simply expand their range in the direction of least resistance, which when your at the top of the food chain means, "away from other humans".
Is this to say that the Earth's climate has gone through natural changes over the centuries? Warming and cooling? All by itself?! I thought global warming - I mean - climate change - was caused by man burning fossil fuels.
That can only be because you haven't been paying attention for the last 20yrs, perhaps you should spend an hour or so reading the relevant WP entries for further enlightenment.
The same thing happened to Australia's magafauna at roughly the same time, this also coincided with a wave of people coming from Asia but Australia was already populated long before that.. The new arrivals brought dogs (dingos). However regional movements of people cannot be the whole story since the megafauna die off was global. It was probably a bit of both, humans were just better equipped to survive the changes by moving, mass migration of humans simply added to the stress on megafauna populations.
Interestingly the aborigines recorded the environmental changes in their oral history and rock art, they tell the story of ancestors coming from the north and how a supernatural being cut the land bridge after they arrived. They also show the changes to local fauna as the oceans rose and receded at various times, for example fish carvings were overwritten by kangaroo carvings as the ocean receded and the local environment changed.
And take a look at Ghandi -- in many cases, the idea was to protest in a non-violent manner by continuing to do something that you should be able to do, but let the British soldiers beat you -- accept your punishment, so that the British citizens themselves might become outraged at what their "law enforcement" was doing, and thus the laws might be changed.
Yes this was also MLK's aim, many of MLK's followers (of all colours) were beaten by police themselves or the police stood idly by while they were beaten by members of the public. It became a nightly event on the news, decent American's were outraged at the senseless violence from the authorities and millions of middle class citizens stood up in their defence. A search for "civil rights violence" on youtube will give abundant examples of those news reports and it's very clear the protesters did not fight back. Similar revulsion and outrage was apparent when US soldiers were shown massacring a captured Vietnam village on the six o'clock news.
The money from Al Gore's AGW stuff is pumped straight back into a trust fund that uses it to produce more AGW stuff, he does not personally profit from the trust and has testified to those accounting facts in numerous senate hearings. The coal state senators who organise and run those senate inquisitions have a lot to gain if they could prove he was lying to the senate (and by inference the tax department). With all the coercive powers of such senate hearings they are unable to find any evidence he is lying. Undetered by any morality they then use their own "charitable" think-tanks to character assassinate Gore and their other perceived enemies - organisations such as the "Competitive Enterprise Institute" that Steyn "coincidentally" has strong links to. Note the CEI is also being sued by Mann in the same court case, this is more significant since it the main AGW lobby organisation that has spun off another 50 or so clones such as the "Heritage Institute".
The lobbyists are in it for the money alone, and it's surprisingly little ~$50 million spent on disinformation over 20yrs by my own recogning. A few million from CEI's wallet could (hopefully) signal the rapid demise of the "denier for hire" industry, it certainly shut the same people up when their sponsors were fined $500M for pretending to be "tobacco scientists" in the 90's. Will Peabody coal and their other sponsors stand by them with that sort of precedent hanging over their heads, or will they quietly back away and let the "over-zealous lobbyist" burn?
whether this particular debate should be squelched:
On the one hand: That particular debate was the subject of a US senate inquisition lead by hostile senators from coal rich states. The national academies stepped in as arbitrator and reviewed the work, they agreed with Mann's methods but criticized some of his certainty levels, these minor criticisms were addressees in a subsequent "hockey stick" paper from Mann (circa 2005) that was published by the national academies in their own journal (Science).
On the other hand: Anthony Watts is a well known denier with strong links to the same anti-science lobby groups as Steyn, he has never published a single peer-reviewed article or paper. He simply ignores any and all contra-evidence to his claims because he knows that some people will believe him if he repeats the same bald assertions ad-nauseam.
more or less linear increases in CO2 concentrations since like 1850
I think you are using an unconventional definition of "liner", probably one invented by Watts. The facts are it took ~250yrs to pump 500 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, on current consumption trends it will take less than 50yrs to double it.
But the climate deniers do seem to have gotten as thick as thieves in the past couple years.
Much thinner than they were a decade ago, IMO most of those that are left are trolls and astro-turfers who like to get in quick on AGW stories.
Mann has been character assassinated by "for hire" lobbyists, he has had numerous death threats and has appeared before several political inquisitions. The coal industries effort to discredit Mann and ruin his life is lead in congress by US senator Inhofe. It's about time Mann, Hansen, Schmidt, and others, fought back against political persecution and those who created the army of useful idiots intent on doing them physical harm. They should not have ignored the threat this long, I wish them the best of luck.
Hydrogen, Venus used to have tons of it bonded to oxygen in an ocean, the ocean boiled under a runaway greenhouse, radiation then split the water vapour blasting the hydrogen off the planet. The oxygen then found some carbon to bind with which is why it's called a "runaway" greenhouse. The fate awaits the Earth in roughly half a billion years.
As TFA said "life is a special case", ie: Life needs certain ingredients in a specific environment to be the most efficient way to dissipate energy, but life is not the only example of spontaneous self-organising matter (crystals are an obvious example). This guy's idea attempts to explain ALL spontaneous self-organization of matter as a natural consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. When you get down to the molecular scale the line between alive and not-alive is poorly defined, my personal opinion is that "life" is an arbitrary distinction between different types of chemistry, a word invented by humans to more easily comprehend and talk about the world around us. Interestingly the distinction between alive and not-alive is a modern way of seeing the world, the oldest tribal religions (polytheism) believed everything had a spirit (was alive), including rocks, clouds, and celestial bodies.
You assume that I don't use OO languages, matter of fact I started with Smaltalk in 1989 and can get my hands dirty with most flavours of C/C++, one early version of Watcom C++ I used (circa 1992) implemented inheritance as a set of macros on top of their standard C compiler.
My original point was that OO is a design technique, not a language. You use it during the analysis stage, it can be implemented in any Turing complete language. In fact there is no such thing as an OO language, since it's just as easy to implement a good/bad design in C or Assembler, as it is in Smalltalk or C++.
Slashdot Mirror
that carbon per se is a pollutant we need to worry about today. Which is both stupid and wrong.
If you don't accept the science on AGW (and we all know you don't) then of course carbon is not a harmful pollutant in your eyes, but it's still a pollutant using the literal meaning of the word as in "I don't pollute my scotch with water". The reason the anti-science mob that feed you this information keep repeating the (stupid and wrong) mantra "CO2 is not a pollution" is that "pollution" has a very specific definition in US law, one that they do not want applied to their own activities.
You are of course entitled to your opinion but don't expect people to accept to remain quiet when it violently disagrees with rigorous scientific enquiry. Same thing when you redefine the word "pollution" without actually stating what the new definition is. That particular debating method is known as the "Humpty Dumpty defence" and is considered disingenuous and childish by intellectually honest adults.
You were probably modded troll because you are repeating denialist talking points (again). I'm not sure what definition you are using but to most people pollution is simply a resource in the wrong place. The substance does not have to be toxic to be considered pollution. The reason we don't call it "oxygen pollution" is that the oxygen is already in the atmosphere, it's the carbon that humans dig up from the ground and attach to it that is the "pollutant".
To use a less controversial example, many native English speakers consider water to be a pollutant when added to a good scotch, how does that make any sense under your (unstated) definition of "pollution"?
Security at my home tonight is lax, it's 11pm, both doors are wide open and there's a nice breeze coming through after a hot Aussie day, most of the day tourists have left the nearby beach. Security is just another word for distrust, and I generally trust my countrymen not to sneak in while I'm napping on the couch. Re sig below: more security may save your life, but more trust may make it worth something.
Knowledge is the most powerful weapon in any contest. Read up on Alan Turing and the enigma machine and how it sank the U-boat fleet and was later used to set up the naval ambush at Midway island. But most of this spook stuff that's been going on since the end of WW2 is about the "five eyes" gathering and sharing industrial espionage from supposedly friendly democratic nations such as Germany and Indonesia.
There's no space at Bondi, it's tourist season!
Aussies will sometimes give a short beep to warn daydreaming pedestrians, and sometimes a loud blast from musical air-horn to say goodnight at 3am.
Russians hook up dash cams to qualify for the discount on their insurance premium, it's main benefit to the insurance company is that it avoids the need for a court battle between insurance companies when both parties are insured. The two companies simply review the tapes and settle it out of court.
Trucks, (say) the Melbourne to Sydney run, which is already a modern freeway and a busy overnight trade route for shipping containers of "stuff", freeways are much simpler for an autonomous car to navigate than a suburban street and they already exclude animals, pedestrians, push bikes, basically everything except cars, trucks, and motor bikes. I don't see it as "far fetched" that automated forklifts and trucks could move the bulk of goods between those two cities in the foreseeable future anyway. Slipstreaming the trucks in a tight convoy would result in significant fuel savings and only the lead truck would need the fancy compass, the rest just follow the leader. I suspect that at first they will either be piloted or restricted to 10km/h through the few towns still on the freeway route.
Having said that, I think it will be quite a while before autonomous trucks are running Sydney to Melbourne via the coast road.
In Australia third party medical insurance is compulsory, run by the state, and billed as part of the yearly registration fee. The government runs the scheme at a profit, that money is (to a large degree) put back into road safety in an evidence based effort to reduce road accidents. Sure it's a "socialist policy", but results are what count, and our state's annual road toll has halved since the "TAC" was tasked with managing it in the early 90's. Most of the legal drama has gone with the old (US style system) but you still need to seek legal counsel when making a substantial claim. If your unlucky enough to be hurt by an unregistered car the driver is liable for the medical costs, but the government pays you regardless. Wether or not the driver pays the government depends on how much the Sherriff's office can extract from the driver's assets at auction.
Third party property is optional and provided by the private sector, personally I would like to see it become mandatory, an 18yo burger flipper can easily rack up tens of thousands of dollars in damages with nothing more than the arrogance of youth and a $500 rust bucket. Debt collectors for the victims insurance company will hound said teenager for decades, dragging him into court every couple of years to review the garnishing of his wages. The only people who benefit under that scenario are the debt collection agencies.
To explain the rotational speed of galaxies.
[T]he most important emotional stance to have with respect to code is to care about the people who will depend upon that code
Sometimes a low uid does signify wisdom, this is one of those times.
I trust the value of the USD for instance more than the value of Diamonds.
Money markets trust US bonds more than gold, but it is certainly not blind trust, the US have an overwhelming military advantage and a long history of faithfully honouring the bonds.
No fiat currency has any intrinsic value either
The word "fiat" is redundant. That's the whole point of a "currency", it's a token of value, it's intrinsic value is irrelevant unless it is more than it's token value (as can happen with metal coins). The tokens free individual traders from constantly dealing with questions like - how many tea bags for a postage stamp? Currency is simply not possible without implicit trust that the tokens can be exchanged back into goods and services, you cannot eat silver and gold.
I worked with well paid engineer in the 90's who used to go busking on the street with his flute. He travelled extensively for work and made a point of busking in as many different cities as was practicable The coins thrown in the hat were a prop for his act, not the point of it.
surely there is someplace like the old /. out there?
That place never existed and never will, you're experiencing what is known as 'nostalgia', the tendency to recall the pleasurable and forget the noise.
hell even if you didn't agree you LEARNED and left knowing more than you knew before you got here
When you first meet your wife all her stories were new and interesting, same deal with Slashdot (and the internet in general).
I personally blame the allowing of AC posts
AC frees the reader from any pre-existing bias for/against the author.
No matter what you do or think. Someone, somewhere, will have a problem with it.
I just don't see people walking across Alaska and Canada and finally settling in South America in the course of a few thousand years.
Why not? - A Frenchman in the 1800's walked from Paris to Moscow on stilts in under a year, however his 1000 mile journey was deliberate and had other humans along the way. Humans (like any other species) simply expand their range in the direction of least resistance, which when your at the top of the food chain means, "away from other humans".
Is this to say that the Earth's climate has gone through natural changes over the centuries? Warming and cooling? All by itself?! I thought global warming - I mean - climate change - was caused by man burning fossil fuels.
That can only be because you haven't been paying attention for the last 20yrs, perhaps you should spend an hour or so reading the relevant WP entries for further enlightenment.
The same thing happened to Australia's magafauna at roughly the same time, this also coincided with a wave of people coming from Asia but Australia was already populated long before that.. The new arrivals brought dogs (dingos). However regional movements of people cannot be the whole story since the megafauna die off was global. It was probably a bit of both, humans were just better equipped to survive the changes by moving, mass migration of humans simply added to the stress on megafauna populations.
Interestingly the aborigines recorded the environmental changes in their oral history and rock art, they tell the story of ancestors coming from the north and how a supernatural being cut the land bridge after they arrived. They also show the changes to local fauna as the oceans rose and receded at various times, for example fish carvings were overwritten by kangaroo carvings as the ocean receded and the local environment changed.
And take a look at Ghandi -- in many cases, the idea was to protest in a non-violent manner by continuing to do something that you should be able to do, but let the British soldiers beat you -- accept your punishment, so that the British citizens themselves might become outraged at what their "law enforcement" was doing, and thus the laws might be changed.
Yes this was also MLK's aim, many of MLK's followers (of all colours) were beaten by police themselves or the police stood idly by while they were beaten by members of the public. It became a nightly event on the news, decent American's were outraged at the senseless violence from the authorities and millions of middle class citizens stood up in their defence. A search for "civil rights violence" on youtube will give abundant examples of those news reports and it's very clear the protesters did not fight back. Similar revulsion and outrage was apparent when US soldiers were shown massacring a captured Vietnam village on the six o'clock news.
The money from Al Gore's AGW stuff is pumped straight back into a trust fund that uses it to produce more AGW stuff, he does not personally profit from the trust and has testified to those accounting facts in numerous senate hearings. The coal state senators who organise and run those senate inquisitions have a lot to gain if they could prove he was lying to the senate (and by inference the tax department). With all the coercive powers of such senate hearings they are unable to find any evidence he is lying. Undetered by any morality they then use their own "charitable" think-tanks to character assassinate Gore and their other perceived enemies - organisations such as the "Competitive Enterprise Institute" that Steyn "coincidentally" has strong links to. Note the CEI is also being sued by Mann in the same court case, this is more significant since it the main AGW lobby organisation that has spun off another 50 or so clones such as the "Heritage Institute".
The lobbyists are in it for the money alone, and it's surprisingly little ~$50 million spent on disinformation over 20yrs by my own recogning. A few million from CEI's wallet could (hopefully) signal the rapid demise of the "denier for hire" industry, it certainly shut the same people up when their sponsors were fined $500M for pretending to be "tobacco scientists" in the 90's. Will Peabody coal and their other sponsors stand by them with that sort of precedent hanging over their heads, or will they quietly back away and let the "over-zealous lobbyist" burn?
whether this particular debate should be squelched:
On the one hand: That particular debate was the subject of a US senate inquisition lead by hostile senators from coal rich states. The national academies stepped in as arbitrator and reviewed the work, they agreed with Mann's methods but criticized some of his certainty levels, these minor criticisms were addressees in a subsequent "hockey stick" paper from Mann (circa 2005) that was published by the national academies in their own journal (Science).
On the other hand: Anthony Watts is a well known denier with strong links to the same anti-science lobby groups as Steyn, he has never published a single peer-reviewed article or paper. He simply ignores any and all contra-evidence to his claims because he knows that some people will believe him if he repeats the same bald assertions ad-nauseam.
more or less linear increases in CO2 concentrations since like 1850
I think you are using an unconventional definition of "liner", probably one invented by Watts. The facts are it took ~250yrs to pump 500 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, on current consumption trends it will take less than 50yrs to double it.
But the climate deniers do seem to have gotten as thick as thieves in the past couple years.
Much thinner than they were a decade ago, IMO most of those that are left are trolls and astro-turfers who like to get in quick on AGW stories.
Mann has been character assassinated by "for hire" lobbyists, he has had numerous death threats and has appeared before several political inquisitions. The coal industries effort to discredit Mann and ruin his life is lead in congress by US senator Inhofe. It's about time Mann, Hansen, Schmidt, and others, fought back against political persecution and those who created the army of useful idiots intent on doing them physical harm. They should not have ignored the threat this long, I wish them the best of luck.
Hydrogen, Venus used to have tons of it bonded to oxygen in an ocean, the ocean boiled under a runaway greenhouse, radiation then split the water vapour blasting the hydrogen off the planet. The oxygen then found some carbon to bind with which is why it's called a "runaway" greenhouse. The fate awaits the Earth in roughly half a billion years.
As TFA said "life is a special case", ie: Life needs certain ingredients in a specific environment to be the most efficient way to dissipate energy, but life is not the only example of spontaneous self-organising matter (crystals are an obvious example). This guy's idea attempts to explain ALL spontaneous self-organization of matter as a natural consequence of the second law of thermodynamics. When you get down to the molecular scale the line between alive and not-alive is poorly defined, my personal opinion is that "life" is an arbitrary distinction between different types of chemistry, a word invented by humans to more easily comprehend and talk about the world around us. Interestingly the distinction between alive and not-alive is a modern way of seeing the world, the oldest tribal religions (polytheism) believed everything had a spirit (was alive), including rocks, clouds, and celestial bodies.
You assume that I don't use OO languages, matter of fact I started with Smaltalk in 1989 and can get my hands dirty with most flavours of C/C++, one early version of Watcom C++ I used (circa 1992) implemented inheritance as a set of macros on top of their standard C compiler.
My original point was that OO is a design technique, not a language. You use it during the analysis stage, it can be implemented in any Turing complete language. In fact there is no such thing as an OO language, since it's just as easy to implement a good/bad design in C or Assembler, as it is in Smalltalk or C++.