So, yes, volcanos spew plenty of greenhouse gasses. I don't have the exact information on hand and I don't have time to search for it right now, but if you jump to google.com and do some honest research I'm sure you can find it for yourself with little trouble.
This seems pretty emblematic of the average Slashdot debunking of the work of a large number of scientists around the world who work on climate issues.
Peer-reviewed science is wrong, we just know it in our hearts, we don't know quite why, don't have hte exact information on hand, but I'm sure we can find it on the trustworthy internet if we just use google. Because, after all, if we can find a debunking on the internet, it must be true!
And the theory of gravitation is... well, just a theory, too. Yet... whenever I stumble I seem to fall. Gravity, in other words, is real, and separate from our attempt to scientifically describe the cause of the phenomena through the theory of gravitation.
Common English usage of the word "theory" is much closer to the meaning of the word "hypothesis" in science. A "theory", in science, is a much stronger statement.
We are most likely seeing the same sort of effect now
Are we, or aren't we? We know how to measure such things. Presumably your brilliant friend is the first scientist in the world to think about this possibility, since clearly every other scientist is in bed with the environmental lobby.
So... your brilliant friend should nail down the data, empirically prove his point, and bask in the resulting glory and fame.
Of course... there's always the possibility that his wild-assed guess is wrong.
Banks loan money and that's where they primarily make their money. PayPal's business model isn't at all like a banks and it is reasonable that they're not treated like a bank.
We've got one thing aD never had - a truly community-based and community-supported development effort.
aD shut their "luser" community out (pronounce it out loud and you'll understand their attitude, starting with Philip Greenspun and never modified thereafter, no matter what disputes he and the VCs might've had), refusing bug fix patches, design input, etc from the large set of folks interested in the fruit's of Philip's efforts to start a company devoted to providing an open source toolkit for web development (but based on Oracle because that's how you Get Rich Quick!)
Well... the OpenACS community is certainly weaker in numbers and in hours (we all work for a living doing something else, typically custom client development).
But... we stumble along and have a few coups of our own, such as an OpenACS application winning a prestigous mobile computing award in the UK recently.
I think it is great that RedHat intends to continue forth with ACSJ, if true.
But... our little project won't care. We have a half-dozen or so companies making a living off our cooperative efforts (a socialist-capitalist mind-meld, if you will, as we have our separate businesses, compete, yet cooperate on the shared toolkit). So we're motivated to suceed.
Eek! I just built that OpenACS 4.5 beta1 tarball and it has a stupid error in it, and it's already mentioned on slashdot???. Oh no... it's bad enough having the flu without having one of the symptoms (temporary incompetence) exposed to the world!
In Europe, IIRC there is a bird, traditionally considered a single species, but which DNA testing shows to be five non-interbreeding species.
The same is true of at least one species here in North America, too... I'm not 100% certain but the name that comes to mind is "red crossbill". Take that with the same order of uncertainty we give to total species count estimates, though!
That simplistic definition falls flat on its face in the real world.
A good example:
Hermit and Townsend's warblers live at different altitudes in the PNW's Cascade range, with correspondingly different forest characteristics.
There's a very small zone of overlap and within that zone they hybridize freely, giving rise to fertile offspring.
Yet the zone of hyrbridization is, as best we can tell, fixed and there's no significant intermingling of genetic information between the vast majority of either species. Genetic drift alone is sufficient to guarantee that they'll continue to grow apart.
Clearly these are two species. Almost as clearly, the speciation event was fairly recent.
Spotted and Barred owls are similar. Barred owls gradually arrived in PNW coniferous forests, trailing industrial logging. The resulting clearcuts regenerated into the kind of thick cover preferred by these owls.
Given the patchwork nature of clearcutting in these forests, it was inevitable that Spotted and Barred Owls would compete for territories in at least some areas containing mixed habitat, as the nesting territories for each species is large.
And as it turns out, they do interbreed and produce fertile young occassionally (the kids that are produced are called "sparred" owls).
But not frequently and despite the profound hopes of the timber industry, certainly not to any degree that would cause taxonomists to "lump" the two into a single species. Reproductive isolation has been maintained, to a large extent.
Taxonomy isn't nearly as simple as most folks think.
Various people have made analytical estimates of the number of undescribed species based on what we know about the numbers and distribution of described species.
Estimates have varied widely. The one thing we do know is that there are a lot more undescribed than described species.
Why do non-scientists always greet an honest statement of uncertainty in the actual number - an order-of-magnitude estimate - with derision of this sort?
After all, a hell of a lot of software schedule estimates are no more precise. Mozilla comes to mind...
Actually, most of the obvious errors of the sort you mention with your hypothetical rat species have been weeded out of modern taxonomies for mammals and birds, at least.
Also... the Endangered Species Act gives protection to identifiable populations, subspecies and species, not just species. Because of this your three hypothetical mammal populations are elgible for protection under the Act regardless of their taxonomic status.
I bet you didn't know that, did you?:)
This aspect of the Act is marvelously well-designed considering the mangling process bills go through as they wend their way through House and Senate.
The reason why it is marvelously well-designed is because it is a result of specific recognition that taxonomy is an imprecise science.
If only species were protected by the Act we'd be seeing taxonomists being sued over "lumping" and "splitting" decisions.
As it stands now, minor shuffling by taxonomists doesn't cause a previously protected population to suddenly lose protection due to "lumping", or a previously unprotected population to suddenly get vaulted to protected status due to "splitting" at the species level.
So taxonomists can go about their work quietly and privately largely without interference. They only have to worry about angering birders who gain or lose entries on their "life lists" when they shuffle things around!
You're thinking of various large gulls in the genus Larus - Herring, Western, Glaucous-winged etc.
One way taxonomists (in zoology at least) deal with this is by lumping the species into a container known as a "superspecies". Another way that taxonomists deal with the problem is to downgrade the species into subspecies lumped into a single species.
There's no hard and fast rule to follow here, if there were taxonomists would have nothing to argue about.
The gull situation you refer to is particularly complex.
Why is the situation so messy? Evolution. These closely-related species are largely isolated reproductively and have evolved recognizable differences, though there's free hybridization where they meet. In some cases (Western X Glaucous-winged in the Seattle, Washington area, for instance) hybridization is so widespread that at some point I'd expect them to be "lumped" into a single species.
Humans have a role here as gulls show up in large numbers in places where they may not have in the past (think about all those gulls you see around inland landfills). We may play a role in reducing the degree of reproductive isolation of some of these closely-related gulls and may impact their evolution, in other words.
Let's see... there are about 12,000 species of bird and somewhat less than 10,000 species of mammal. 40 days and 40 nights... they require room to live for that length of time, and a fair amount of food, too.
And I'm sure that Europeans love your naive attitude in which you express an amazing ignorance about recent history.
WWI: 80,000 US dead. 5,000,000 Russian dead. A million or two dead in each of Britain and France.
WWII: 385,000 US dead in both theaters. Millions of Russians died on Germany's Eastern front and they, not the US, were largely responsible for Germany's defeat.
Belittling the contributions of those countries who lost millions of dead in those two conflicts does no honor to those of our own country who died in those two conflicts.
Give me a break. Requiring third-world countries to submit to the same degree of emissions reductions as first-world countries is inherently unfair for at least two reasons:
1. The first world generates most of the emissions
2. Making the requirement in essence dooms them to remaining third-world countries forever. Which is likely one unspoken goal of those politicians who insist on this requirement.
MS has been notorious for late delivery (the NT replacement of the DOS Windows derivatives was originally scheduled for what, 1999? 2001, that's for sure).
Therefore WinXP must be 1) open source and 2) non-commercial.
Slashdot Mirror
can you imagine spending hours of your time every day trying to convince people that the sky is blue?
Given that it's really cyan, not blue, no, I can't.
I swear, it's as bad as automobile owners in Portland, Oregon bashing the Carr Auto Group.
This seems pretty emblematic of the average Slashdot debunking of the work of a large number of scientists around the world who work on climate issues.
Peer-reviewed science is wrong, we just know it in our hearts, we don't know quite why, don't have hte exact information on hand, but I'm sure we can find it on the trustworthy internet if we just use google. Because, after all, if we can find a debunking on the internet, it must be true!
So your premise is that we can't trust peer-reviewed science but can trust published politically-motivated polemics that aren't reviewed at all?
And the theory of gravitation is ... well, just a theory, too. Yet ... whenever I stumble I seem to fall. Gravity, in other words, is real, and separate from our attempt to scientifically describe the cause of the phenomena through the theory of gravitation.
Common English usage of the word "theory" is much closer to the meaning of the word "hypothesis" in science. A "theory", in science, is a much stronger statement.
Are we, or aren't we? We know how to measure such things. Presumably your brilliant friend is the first scientist in the world to think about this possibility, since clearly every other scientist is in bed with the environmental lobby.
So ... your brilliant friend should nail down the data, empirically prove his point, and bask in the resulting glory and fame.
Of course ... there's always the possibility that his wild-assed guess is wrong.
Banks loan money and that's where they primarily make their money. PayPal's business model isn't at all like a banks and it is reasonable that they're not treated like a bank.
This is bullshit, as the C# bytecode virtual machine is not by any stretch of the imagination language agnostic.
Any measurement of performance will need to analyze the performance of the compiler and the "fit" with the C# VM if anything meaningful is to emerge.
I hate it when non-compiler writers pontificate on slashdot about compiler technology.
Not that it's different than with any other topic, it just happens that I'm a Compiler Expert (TM).
We've got one thing aD never had - a truly community-based and community-supported development effort.
aD shut their "luser" community out (pronounce it out loud and you'll understand their attitude, starting with Philip Greenspun and never modified thereafter, no matter what disputes he and the VCs might've had), refusing bug fix patches, design input, etc from the large set of folks interested in the fruit's of Philip's efforts to start a company devoted to providing an open source toolkit for web development (but based on Oracle because that's how you Get Rich Quick!)
Well ... the OpenACS community is certainly weaker in numbers and in hours (we all work for a living doing something else, typically custom client development).
But ... we stumble along and have a few coups of our own, such as an OpenACS application winning a prestigous mobile computing award in the UK recently.
I think it is great that RedHat intends to continue forth with ACSJ, if true.
But ... our little project won't care. We have a half-dozen or so companies making a living off our cooperative efforts (a socialist-capitalist mind-meld, if you will, as we have our separate businesses, compete, yet cooperate on the shared toolkit). So we're motivated to suceed.
Eek! I just built that OpenACS 4.5 beta1 tarball and it has a stupid error in it, and it's already mentioned on slashdot???. Oh no ... it's bad enough having the flu without having one of the symptoms (temporary incompetence) exposed to the world!
That applies to crimes, not civil actions. In fact it says "crime" right there in your post.
This is why, for instance, OJ was the subject of a civil suit (which he lost) after being acquitted in criminal court.
not to mention sometimes polluted with DNA from other sources.
Man, a molecular biologist standing up for taxonomy! Good for you!
The same is true of at least one species here in North America, too
That simplistic definition falls flat on its face in the real world.
A good example:
Hermit and Townsend's warblers live at different altitudes in the PNW's Cascade range, with correspondingly different forest characteristics.
There's a very small zone of overlap and within that zone they hybridize freely, giving rise to fertile offspring.
Yet the zone of hyrbridization is, as best we can tell, fixed and there's no significant intermingling of genetic information between the vast majority of either species. Genetic drift alone is sufficient to guarantee that they'll continue to grow apart.
Clearly these are two species. Almost as clearly, the speciation event was fairly recent.
Spotted and Barred owls are similar. Barred owls gradually arrived in PNW coniferous forests, trailing industrial logging. The resulting clearcuts regenerated into the kind of thick cover preferred by these owls.
Given the patchwork nature of clearcutting in these forests, it was inevitable that Spotted and Barred Owls would compete for territories in at least some areas containing mixed habitat, as the nesting territories for each species is large.
And as it turns out, they do interbreed and produce fertile young occassionally (the kids that are produced are called "sparred" owls).
But not frequently and despite the profound hopes of the timber industry, certainly not to any degree that would cause taxonomists to "lump" the two into a single species. Reproductive isolation has been maintained, to a large extent.
Taxonomy isn't nearly as simple as most folks think.
Various people have made analytical estimates of the number of undescribed species based on what we know about the numbers and distribution of described species.
Estimates have varied widely. The one thing we do know is that there are a lot more undescribed than described species.
Why do non-scientists always greet an honest statement of uncertainty in the actual number - an order-of-magnitude estimate - with derision of this sort?
After all, a hell of a lot of software schedule estimates are no more precise. Mozilla comes to mind...
Of course there are errors. And even more importantly there are disagreements because species boundaries are fuzzy, not knife-edged things.
Actually, most of the obvious errors of the sort you mention with your hypothetical rat species have been weeded out of modern taxonomies for mammals and birds, at least.
... the Endangered Species Act gives protection to identifiable populations, subspecies and species, not just species. Because of this your three hypothetical mammal populations are elgible for protection under the Act regardless of their taxonomic status.
:)
Also
I bet you didn't know that, did you?
This aspect of the Act is marvelously well-designed considering the mangling process bills go through as they wend their way through House and Senate.
The reason why it is marvelously well-designed is because it is a result of specific recognition that taxonomy is an imprecise science.
If only species were protected by the Act we'd be seeing taxonomists being sued over "lumping" and "splitting" decisions.
As it stands now, minor shuffling by taxonomists doesn't cause a previously protected population to suddenly lose protection due to "lumping", or a previously unprotected population to suddenly get vaulted to protected status due to "splitting" at the species level.
So taxonomists can go about their work quietly and privately largely without interference. They only have to worry about angering birders who gain or lose entries on their "life lists" when they shuffle things around!
You're thinking of various large gulls in the genus Larus - Herring, Western, Glaucous-winged etc.
One way taxonomists (in zoology at least) deal with this is by lumping the species into a container known as a "superspecies". Another way that taxonomists deal with the problem is to downgrade the species into subspecies lumped into a single species.
There's no hard and fast rule to follow here, if there were taxonomists would have nothing to argue about.
The gull situation you refer to is particularly complex.
Why is the situation so messy? Evolution. These closely-related species are largely isolated reproductively and have evolved recognizable differences, though there's free hybridization where they meet. In some cases (Western X Glaucous-winged in the Seattle, Washington area, for instance) hybridization is so widespread that at some point I'd expect them to be "lumped" into a single species.
Humans have a role here as gulls show up in large numbers in places where they may not have in the past (think about all those gulls you see around inland landfills). We may play a role in reducing the degree of reproductive isolation of some of these closely-related gulls and may impact their evolution, in other words.
As a software engineer who does volunteer field biology work every fall ... I say hats off to you and all other taxonomists!
Taxonomy is incredibly important. It is the foundation upon which biology rests.
Let's see ... there are about 12,000 species of bird and somewhat less than 10,000 species of mammal. 40 days and 40 nights ... they require room to live for that length of time, and a fair amount of food, too.
...
That's a big ark, dude
And I'm sure that Europeans love your naive attitude in which you express an amazing ignorance about recent history.
WWI: 80,000 US dead. 5,000,000 Russian dead. A million or two dead in each of Britain and France.
WWII: 385,000 US dead in both theaters. Millions of Russians died on Germany's Eastern front and they, not the US, were largely responsible for Germany's defeat.
Belittling the contributions of those countries who lost millions of dead in those two conflicts does no honor to those of our own country who died in those two conflicts.
Give me a break. Requiring third-world countries to submit to the same degree of emissions reductions as first-world countries is inherently unfair for at least two reasons:
1. The first world generates most of the emissions
2. Making the requirement in essence dooms them to remaining third-world countries forever. Which is likely one unspoken goal of those politicians who insist on this requirement.
As soon as Sun becomes a monopoly, then the same laws will apply.
Buy a Subaru wagon. You don't need a friggin' SUV to get 4WD. Hell of a lot easier to push, too, if you hit ice and slide into a ditch.
MS has been notorious for late delivery (the NT replacement of the DOS Windows derivatives was originally scheduled for what, 1999? 2001, that's for sure).
...
Therefore WinXP must be 1) open source and 2) non-commercial.
Very cool