Tuvaluans (the entire country is at most 4.5 meters above sea levels),
Ha! They have it easy. The Maldives are at most 1.6 meters above sea level. That country is really at risk of disappearing completely over the next century.
However, after you acknowledge that fact, you then suggest we hobble our economy by introducing measures used in Europe. Tell me, if those measures are so wonderful, why is their GDP not higher than it is? Going by PPP, the GDP of the EU is a mere $270 billion more than the US, or roughly 1.89%, even though the EU has 62% more population than the US. If excessive taxation and rationing of gasoline were such a wonderful idea I would expect to see a greater disparity between the GDP of the US and the EU.
Keep in mind that the EU includes a lot of recovering formerly-Soviet economies. It might be more fair to compare the US economy to western Europe or to the older EU nations only. I have no idea how that comparison would look, though.
If the US creates a cap and trade system that rewards innovators and penalizes fossil fuel users, there is no doubt an explosion of innovation will arrive in the field. Companies like nanosolar would be only the tip of the iceberg.
The best way to do this is not through cap-and-trade, but by taxing CO2 emissions and using that money directly to get that same amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere (through planting forests, stimulating algae growth in sea, capturing CO2 and storing it underground, whatever you like). The tax should definitely not disappear into government budgets, and preferably be directly related to the cost of capturing that CO2.
This will stimulate companies to reduce their CO2 emissions, but it will also stimulate and entirely new industry that finds new and effective ways to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. And best of all, this system will almost immediately significantly reduce the net CO2 emissions. (Though it might be best to introduce it gradually, giving industries time to adjust.)
Build up a seawall an inch a year eh? And end up with a large part of the coastal area below sea level but protected by the seawall?
Kind of brings to mind a certain US city that was below water level protected by a retaining wall.
That "inch a year" of protection is all very well until you get a storm, surge or worse.
Those walls had been neglected, despite warnings that a major hurricane could flood New Orleans.
Much of Netherland also lies below sea level, but over the past decades, we invested in flood defenses that ought to reduce the risk to one major flood every 10,000 years.
Of course that doesn't take rising sea levels into account. From what I understand, increased defenses should be able to deal with a meter of sea level rise, but with more than that, I'm afraid large parts of the country may have to be evacuated.
China and India aren't nearly as vulnerable, though. They don't seem to have much reason to worry about flooding that may happen 2 or 3 centuries from now. Especially considering the damage that flooding rivers already do.
The global warming deniers act exactly like creationists do.
Really? I would have thought the opposite.
Care to explain how they act the same?
They both focus on minor gaps in the evidence supporting the theory, and claim it disproves the theory as a whole.
In other words: the fact that a (nonscientific) report contains a big error doesn't disprove the theory (that doesn't even rely on that report) any more than the lack of a fossil of a particular missing link proves that the theory of evolution is wrong. If you want to disprove it, you need to attack the basics, not the details.
Also, both groups have a tendency to pull data from the distant past out of context and reshape it to support their own ideas. Like humans and dinosaurs living at the same time, or high temperatures in the past proving that all temperature increase must be natural (ignoring issues like solar activity and the like).
This is, of course, not evidence that Anthropogenic Climate Change is real, but that public critics of ACC feel they can profitably resort to dishonesty to prove their point
You know Lomborg was dishonest? Based on what?
How about TFA?
Maybe Lomborg was wrong, but you didn't read or research Friel's work, you're just assuming it's correct, which is precisely what the AGW folks are complaining about in regard to Lomborg's work.
Why even read Friel's work? Sounds like Sharon Begley already did that for us. Whether you believe Lomborg, Friel, Begley, or even Albert Einstein, you're always relying on someone's authority, rather than doing your own research. And you have to, because you can't possibly recheck every bit of research that everybody ever did. I never checked for myself that F=m*a, nor that E=mc^2. But enough people did that I'm inclined to believe them.
As I understand this issue, nobody ever checked on Lomborg's claimed facts. His book seemed very well researched, so everybody blindly assumed that it was. Friel discovered that some of Lomborg's facts aren't supported at all by his cited sources, and sometimes even completely contradicted. Begley checked whether (a sample of) Friel's claims is correct, and apparently it is. Of course it's possible that both Friel and Begley are lying, but for the time being, I'm inclined to believe them. I hope that more people will check the real facts here more thoroughly, because this kind of academic dishonesty does need to be exposed.
You do realize, too, that we actual have HARD PROOF that global warming "scientists" were dishonest in their research, research that the IPCC relied on for its conclusions... right?
Do you realise that the IPCC report that contained those recently exposed mistakes was from a non-scientific "news" workgroup from the IPCC? Yes, it's very sloppy, but it's sloppy journalism rather than dishonest science.
Even if Lomborg was dishonest -- and you have no evidence of that
How do you "hover" with a touch interface? Do touch screens have some kind of sensor that tracks where the finger is went it's a few milli/centimetres above the screen?
I guess you could implement something like that by making a screen that's both capacitive and resistive. Touch counts as hover, press counts as click.
No idea if we'll ever see something like that, though. Most likely we'll figure out how to live without hover.
Straight up. Sites that use flash or javascript for navigation are an abomination.
Javascript has grown up a lot in the past couple of years. jQuery actually makes it fun to use, and makes it much easier to make a very responsive, smooth, web application.
Of course you shouldn't do something like >a onclick="window.location=...<. That'd be retarded. But there's lots of very useful stuff you can do with it nowadays. I used to hate javascript too, because it was abused for so much for stupid crap in the '90s, but nowadays people do use it for serious stuff.
I agree with you on flash, though. It's closed, requires a plugin, and is really only necessary for playing movies and web games. And even there, html5 + javascript is on its way to make it obsolete.
Unless you mean the time when typical bottles were glass - which was quite a long time ago - I don't see how an empty plastic bottle thrown around could hurt anyone, so that excuse wouldn't fly today.
They were modern plastic bottles. Nobody in his right mind would throw a glass bottle. Yet that was the stated reason why bringing your own water to many Dutch pop festivals was banned.
3. Lawyers hate America, so they can claim anything, and also be WRONG. For example, the activist US Supreme Court claims that Corporations are People and have the same rights as Citizens, which no sane citizen agrees with.
I'd expect lawyers to love America for exactly that reason.
At the entrance, volunteers searched my bag and poured out my bottle of water. This was for the benefit of Coca-Cola Corp.
While I mostly agree with what you say (speaking from Richmond here), so far as I can tell, the restriction on liquids isn't really for the benefit of Coke, but rather part of the recent security craze. They seem to forbid all sorts of liquids on entrance to any organized large gathering of people, whether or not Coke sells anything there.
Plenty of events banned bringing your own bottles long before 9/11. Back then the reason was that people might throw empty bottles around and that would be dangerous. But always at those events there's somebody selling drinks at highly inflated prices.
Every large event has problems no matter how much planning goes into them. The 2010 Olympics are no different.
All their zambonis broke down. They had to postpone a big event when they were right in the middle of it. That's certainly unheard of in the speed skating world.
So the IOC can claim that Lindsey Vonn is made out of ice cream, milkweed pods, and sandpaper, if they want. Won't make it true. If UVEX wasn't getting such a good laugh out of this stupidity, I hope they'd have the integrity to restore Lindsey's name to their web site.
I'd never heard of UVEX before, but this is almost good enough to make me start skiing, just so I can buy their gear.
But really, how can a name be anyone's property other than the person who's name it is? (And probably the thousands of others in the world who have the same name.) And how can you not be allowed to mention the name of a now-famous person? I don't understand how in the world anyone, even the IOC lawyers themselves, can possibly believe their claim makes sense.
Shouldn't civilised nations just stop hosting the Olympics completely, and people stop watching it? If we really need a high profile sporting event like that, maybe we should set up a new one, but this time with a sensible organisation behind it.
If there aren't any cracked versions available for the first months, most players who want it (including those who would had pirated it) are going to buy it as everyone else is playing. That's what counts mosts to the companies, since most sales are made during that period.
You mean they don't care about sales to me anyway? I never by a game right away. I always wait until it's patched, there are some mods, prizes go down, and hopefully there's a no-cd patch out.
For a regular beer, that's quite expensive, but not nearly as expensive as beers tend to be in Scandinavia. I've heard $10 - $20 is quite normal there.
But there are many other kinds of drinks. If you go to a good whisky bar, you can easily spend $100 without getting all that drunk.
It's not just the government and the media. People are just too eager to give up their privacy in exchange for some slight convenience.
I mean, you can protest all you want about a government that represents you violating your privacy, but people seem terribly eager to give up their privacy to profit-driven companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and big supermarket chains.
maybe i'm being whoooshed, but doesn't "communication for everyone, everywhere" sound rather socialist ? Not that i'm against it... right wing would be "communication for whomever can pay for it, wherever it's profitable", wouldn't it ?
Not sure if it's especially socialist (it's a horribly loaded, confused and misused word that can mean "freedom" in one country and "tyranny" in another), but fundamental human rights do indeed tend to be progressive/liberal issues (though "liberal" is just as loaded and confused).
The real problem is that politics tends not to be so one-dimensional as left-right terminology makes it out to be. There's dictators and libertarians on both ends of the spectrum.
Slashdot Mirror
Tuvaluans (the entire country is at most 4.5 meters above sea levels),
Ha! They have it easy. The Maldives are at most 1.6 meters above sea level. That country is really at risk of disappearing completely over the next century.
However, after you acknowledge that fact, you then suggest we hobble our economy by introducing measures used in Europe. Tell me, if those measures are so wonderful, why is their GDP not higher than it is? Going by PPP, the GDP of the EU is a mere $270 billion more than the US, or roughly 1.89%, even though the EU has 62% more population than the US. If excessive taxation and rationing of gasoline were such a wonderful idea I would expect to see a greater disparity between the GDP of the US and the EU.
Keep in mind that the EU includes a lot of recovering formerly-Soviet economies. It might be more fair to compare the US economy to western Europe or to the older EU nations only. I have no idea how that comparison would look, though.
If the US creates a cap and trade system that rewards innovators and penalizes fossil fuel users, there is no doubt an explosion of innovation will arrive in the field. Companies like nanosolar would be only the tip of the iceberg.
The best way to do this is not through cap-and-trade, but by taxing CO2 emissions and using that money directly to get that same amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere (through planting forests, stimulating algae growth in sea, capturing CO2 and storing it underground, whatever you like). The tax should definitely not disappear into government budgets, and preferably be directly related to the cost of capturing that CO2.
This will stimulate companies to reduce their CO2 emissions, but it will also stimulate and entirely new industry that finds new and effective ways to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. And best of all, this system will almost immediately significantly reduce the net CO2 emissions. (Though it might be best to introduce it gradually, giving industries time to adjust.)
Build up a seawall an inch a year eh? And end up with a large part of the coastal area below sea level but protected by the seawall?
Kind of brings to mind a certain US city that was below water level protected by a retaining wall.
That "inch a year" of protection is all very well until you get a storm, surge or worse.
Those walls had been neglected, despite warnings that a major hurricane could flood New Orleans.
Much of Netherland also lies below sea level, but over the past decades, we invested in flood defenses that ought to reduce the risk to one major flood every 10,000 years.
Of course that doesn't take rising sea levels into account. From what I understand, increased defenses should be able to deal with a meter of sea level rise, but with more than that, I'm afraid large parts of the country may have to be evacuated.
China and India aren't nearly as vulnerable, though. They don't seem to have much reason to worry about flooding that may happen 2 or 3 centuries from now. Especially considering the damage that flooding rivers already do.
The global warming deniers act exactly like creationists do.
Really? I would have thought the opposite.
Care to explain how they act the same?
They both focus on minor gaps in the evidence supporting the theory, and claim it disproves the theory as a whole.
In other words: the fact that a (nonscientific) report contains a big error doesn't disprove the theory (that doesn't even rely on that report) any more than the lack of a fossil of a particular missing link proves that the theory of evolution is wrong. If you want to disprove it, you need to attack the basics, not the details.
Also, both groups have a tendency to pull data from the distant past out of context and reshape it to support their own ideas. Like humans and dinosaurs living at the same time, or high temperatures in the past proving that all temperature increase must be natural (ignoring issues like solar activity and the like).
AGW is not a proven fact, and the shenanigans of both skeptics and supporters of the theory are doing science an injustice.
I agree with that last part, but the greenhouse effect and global warming were already quite well-supported before the IPCC ever got into it.
This is, of course, not evidence that Anthropogenic Climate Change is real, but that public critics of ACC feel they can profitably resort to dishonesty to prove their point
You know Lomborg was dishonest? Based on what?
How about TFA?
Maybe Lomborg was wrong, but you didn't read or research Friel's work, you're just assuming it's correct, which is precisely what the AGW folks are complaining about in regard to Lomborg's work.
Why even read Friel's work? Sounds like Sharon Begley already did that for us. Whether you believe Lomborg, Friel, Begley, or even Albert Einstein, you're always relying on someone's authority, rather than doing your own research. And you have to, because you can't possibly recheck every bit of research that everybody ever did. I never checked for myself that F=m*a, nor that E=mc^2. But enough people did that I'm inclined to believe them.
As I understand this issue, nobody ever checked on Lomborg's claimed facts. His book seemed very well researched, so everybody blindly assumed that it was. Friel discovered that some of Lomborg's facts aren't supported at all by his cited sources, and sometimes even completely contradicted. Begley checked whether (a sample of) Friel's claims is correct, and apparently it is. Of course it's possible that both Friel and Begley are lying, but for the time being, I'm inclined to believe them. I hope that more people will check the real facts here more thoroughly, because this kind of academic dishonesty does need to be exposed.
You do realize, too, that we actual have HARD PROOF that global warming "scientists" were dishonest in their research, research that the IPCC relied on for its conclusions ... right?
Do you realise that the IPCC report that contained those recently exposed mistakes was from a non-scientific "news" workgroup from the IPCC? Yes, it's very sloppy, but it's sloppy journalism rather than dishonest science.
Even if Lomborg was dishonest -- and you have no evidence of that
How do we not have evidence of that?
How do you "hover" with a touch interface? Do touch screens have some kind of sensor that tracks where the finger is went it's a few milli/centimetres above the screen?
I guess you could implement something like that by making a screen that's both capacitive and resistive. Touch counts as hover, press counts as click.
No idea if we'll ever see something like that, though. Most likely we'll figure out how to live without hover.
Straight up. Sites that use flash or javascript for navigation are an abomination.
Javascript has grown up a lot in the past couple of years. jQuery actually makes it fun to use, and makes it much easier to make a very responsive, smooth, web application.
Of course you shouldn't do something like >a onclick="window.location=...<. That'd be retarded. But there's lots of very useful stuff you can do with it nowadays. I used to hate javascript too, because it was abused for so much for stupid crap in the '90s, but nowadays people do use it for serious stuff.
I agree with you on flash, though. It's closed, requires a plugin, and is really only necessary for playing movies and web games. And even there, html5 + javascript is on its way to make it obsolete.
And they have the nerve to talk about the Olympic principles, and Olympic spirit.
The Olympic spirit is greed, right?
You clearly have no idea how much money is involved.
I'm sure I don't. But it's been done once. It could be done again. Hopefully with less money involved.
Unless you mean the time when typical bottles were glass - which was quite a long time ago - I don't see how an empty plastic bottle thrown around could hurt anyone, so that excuse wouldn't fly today.
They were modern plastic bottles. Nobody in his right mind would throw a glass bottle. Yet that was the stated reason why bringing your own water to many Dutch pop festivals was banned.
3. Lawyers hate America, so they can claim anything, and also be WRONG. For example, the activist US Supreme Court claims that Corporations are People and have the same rights as Citizens, which no sane citizen agrees with.
I'd expect lawyers to love America for exactly that reason.
At the entrance, volunteers searched my bag and poured out my bottle of water. This was for the benefit of Coca-Cola Corp.
While I mostly agree with what you say (speaking from Richmond here), so far as I can tell, the restriction on liquids isn't really for the benefit of Coke, but rather part of the recent security craze. They seem to forbid all sorts of liquids on entrance to any organized large gathering of people, whether or not Coke sells anything there.
Plenty of events banned bringing your own bottles long before 9/11. Back then the reason was that people might throw empty bottles around and that would be dangerous. But always at those events there's somebody selling drinks at highly inflated prices.
-a zamboni broke down
Every large event has problems no matter how much planning goes into them. The 2010 Olympics are no different.
All their zambonis broke down. They had to postpone a big event when they were right in the middle of it. That's certainly unheard of in the speed skating world.
So the IOC can claim that Lindsey Vonn is made out of ice cream, milkweed pods, and sandpaper, if they want. Won't make it true. If UVEX wasn't getting such a good laugh out of this stupidity, I hope they'd have the integrity to restore Lindsey's name to their web site.
I'd never heard of UVEX before, but this is almost good enough to make me start skiing, just so I can buy their gear.
But really, how can a name be anyone's property other than the person who's name it is? (And probably the thousands of others in the world who have the same name.) And how can you not be allowed to mention the name of a now-famous person? I don't understand how in the world anyone, even the IOC lawyers themselves, can possibly believe their claim makes sense.
Shouldn't civilised nations just stop hosting the Olympics completely, and people stop watching it? If we really need a high profile sporting event like that, maybe we should set up a new one, but this time with a sensible organisation behind it.
If there aren't any cracked versions available for the first months, most players who want it (including those who would had pirated it) are going to buy it as everyone else is playing. That's what counts mosts to the companies, since most sales are made during that period.
You mean they don't care about sales to me anyway? I never by a game right away. I always wait until it's patched, there are some mods, prizes go down, and hopefully there's a no-cd patch out.
For a regular beer, that's quite expensive, but not nearly as expensive as beers tend to be in Scandinavia. I've heard $10 - $20 is quite normal there.
But there are many other kinds of drinks. If you go to a good whisky bar, you can easily spend $100 without getting all that drunk.
I usually don't let my guests pay for their drinks.
He also says that computers and laser printers waste a lot of energy when doing nothing at all. Useful to keep in mind.
And if you just buy their product, there won't be any public evidence of your little problem.
It's not just the government and the media. People are just too eager to give up their privacy in exchange for some slight convenience.
I mean, you can protest all you want about a government that represents you violating your privacy, but people seem terribly eager to give up their privacy to profit-driven companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon and big supermarket chains.
maybe i'm being whoooshed, but doesn't "communication for everyone, everywhere" sound rather socialist ? Not that i'm against it... right wing would be "communication for whomever can pay for it, wherever it's profitable", wouldn't it ?
Not sure if it's especially socialist (it's a horribly loaded, confused and misused word that can mean "freedom" in one country and "tyranny" in another), but fundamental human rights do indeed tend to be progressive/liberal issues (though "liberal" is just as loaded and confused).
The real problem is that politics tends not to be so one-dimensional as left-right terminology makes it out to be. There's dictators and libertarians on both ends of the spectrum.
H.264 is a open standard, patent encumbered, but open, with several available decoders/encoders.
How is it open when it's patent encumbered? And open standard means anyone is free to implement it. Patents usually mean you need a license.