Oh, no... You misunderstood me. Milking the Windows and Office cows until they're dead is just what I want him to do. I don't want him to have a vision for the future. I don't want him to grasp the significance of the transition to mobile. He thinks XBox is a huge win, and that's just what I want him to think. He thinks Windows Phone and Online Services Division have got a chance in Hell, and I'm OK with that. He probably thinks he's going to make something useful out of Skype. He's going to anchor all "innovations" and acquisitions with "business drivers" until they won't fly. There's no danger he's going to "get it" so I hope they keep him until the end. When your opponent is making a mistake, don't interrupt.
To me this Microsoft debacle is a distraction from the potential progress we could have had these past three decades. Microsoft's goal isn't innovation, it's control of innovation. The prevention of innovation they don't control is Microsoft's goal, and they were great at it under Gates but less so under Ballmer. They've done so well with this that they're now introducing features we had 30 years ago in Unix, and being lauded for it. Their current patent trolling is just the chancres of a much deeper disease. Fortunately for us and unfortunately for them, the innate creativity of people is a force that can be slowed but not stopped. Eventually a way is found.
With people Microsoft's goal seems to be to destroy morale as fast as possible. Their forced ranking system informs one employee in five that he's on the way out - some say two in five. You can only watch that for so long before you know that one day they come for you no matter what you do. Microsoft only hires people good at math so let's do the math. If the odds of you surviving the next year at Microsoft are 0.8 and the distribution is totally random then your odds of surviving 20 years is 0.8 to the 20th power, or one in a hundred. But we all know the distribution isn't random. Most everybody has in their life a bad year and nobody knows they're not going to have one with divorce, the loss of a loved one that drives you to depression, physical illness, ordinary loss of focus, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that induce you to produce less than your peers - no matter how good you are. Even if you don't have a bad year the currently rumored "Young Up Microsoft" program tilts the scale from "insanely difficult" to "impossible". So after about your third year there you know that this isn't a career path that leads to retirement. That shifts the personal goal of employees from "do what's best" to "get what you can before you're canned". Since new-hires have a well-known "grace year" because otherwise the hirer would suffer, for some segment of the new hires this translates to "don't get caught scrapping the walls for copper." Obviously this internal strategy served the short-term bottom line at some point in the past and is now a cultural anomaly like cargo cults but the rest of us eventually benefit so I hope they don't change it.
Microsoft's core products are Windows and Office. An operating environment and a suite of basic applications. The operating environment isn't as secure and robust as many we had 30 years ago, and does the same thing it did then: provide an environment for applications to run in. The suite of applications isn't even organic - they bought them all - and hasn't really changed in productivity in fifteen years. There are only so many ways to put glyphs on a page and do a mail merge. The spreadsheet feature wars ended sometime in 1989 when every spreadsheet had more features than three sigmas of users would ever access. Databases and presentations took a little longer - and to be fair the features they didn't buy there they outright stole. Microsoft won the office software wars not by making better software, but by ensuring that competing software wouldn't run well on their OS - and when they won, they stopped giving more value. This is being worked around by various
But this isn't technically email, though the principle is the same. You only get a Link.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
Some here will be offended. While I wouldn't care to have to deal with the guy, I like his vision. "Windows yesterday, today and forever" is just the message I want him to have here. He should stay focused on a strong defense of his core business - an iron fort unassailable by all. To stay the course on his miserable failures online, in mobile, in acquisitions is more than I could hope for, but it does appear to be the plan.
So when we move the trade route so it passes nowhere near his precious fort he won't be able to react.
I hope they make him chairman after Mr. Gates finally finishes divesting and retires. He's taking the company just where I want it to go.
Microsoft has been buying up vast quantities of their own stock for a very long time. In a pinch, they can sell that - which would drive the price down on the market. That's not very safe.
If you control utterly a multibillion dollar international corporation through direct equity ownership there are a variety of quite legal ways to separate the control from the value such that you can still control it utterly while eliminating your exposure to risk if it should collapse. You can do it in such a way through blind investments that your control is not seen. You can even sell your ownership of it several times over through holding companies. A major holder began learning these lessons a quarter century ago.
One upon a time they would pretend to care to keep up appearances, but that need is gone now as we approach the end game. There is just no point in sitting around listening to the outcry of these trivial owners when all together they could not rally enough votes to be even remotely interesting. In years past they would linger and listen with satisfaction to the bleating to the lambs as they're led to slaughter - but no more. They're not emotionally attached enough any more even for that. They've checked out.
There are people on slashdot who see it as their mission to paint Google evil for any reason. If they can misinterpret a license that most people don't understand and thus incorrectly hold it out as Google being evil, that's what they're going to do. It doesn't play very well, if you look around this thread - in fact, they're probably doing their "evil Google" campaign more harm than good trying it here where so many active participants actually know better. They should take their work to PCWorld and CNet, where it would work better. Yet still, they try here but don't be misled: It's not about license compliance, it's about getting some tar on Google any way they can in the minds of folk who don't know better. They're not really GPL fans or they would understand what is required, and why, and that Google is - and has always been - in compliance with the terms and above that generous with contributions of all sorts.
Kickstarter looked like a good idea. But then there was this project that seemed grand, "Musopen": record classical music for the public domain. There was an article here on Slashdot about it. They raised $68,359 - way over the original $11,000 goal, over a year ago.
The stupid part is not the judge, but people who use Facebook for things that might be of interest in legal or civil proceedings. Are people really this dumb?
From the time stamps it took six whole minutes to hunt down this trouble ticket on a random blog comment and resolve the customer's desire for some obscure user interface customization. You guys are slipping. Back in the day this would have only taken four minutes. No wonder people are switching back to Windows.
I use Linux to troubleshoot dual Westmere blade servers, quad Opteron rack servers, 10Gbit FCoE and Ethernet cards, PCIe attached SSD, 8G FC SAN, QDR infiniband and so on. That's pretty much bleeding edge hardware, and drivers haven't been a problem for many years. Haven't tried it on the new ARM cluster-in-a-box stuff yet - I imagine that requires a custom distro.
But yeah, the same Linux also detects and runs stuff that goes back to the stone age - flawlessly. The same Linux that boots an old P4 desktop runs some of the world's largest supercomputers and everything in between.
Look into edubuntu. It takes a bit to set up a PXE boot server but then you can configure almost anything to netboot, set the PC to netboot and bang: zero install instant boot as many machines as you want as either thin clients with apps running on the server or whole-hog PC with network attached storage. Runs on almost anything, works with almost everything. Can be configured to do scripted OS installs, be a netboot cluster manager and so on... This has been no biggie for about eight years. I have had this running on my home network for years to provide desktops to guests (kids) without risk they'll compromise my PCs.
We were talking about profits, not build quality. Dell doesn't make a lot of money on a laptop. Not as much profit as the revenue UPS gets to deliver it to your house. About $20.
I still don't think you're getting it. On a smaller body like the moon an increase in insolation like that would boil all the water off into space, ending its temperature regulation - as it obviously did. The Earth is a much deeper gravity well and we'd be in no danger of losing our water content even if the sun's power doubled. We're actually on the outer edge of the goldilocks zone, I think, and it was the spark of life in some distant era when geothermal energy was more prominent that saved the Earth from being a snowball permanently. By regulating the global temperature through manipulating the atmosphere's retention of heat the various competing forms of life stabilize the temperature at a higher average level than it would be if there were no life given the early materials mix. With a temperature regulator like life, minor variations in the sun's power don't matter as much.
Due to plate tectonics much of the early carbon metabolized by life has been subducted back into the mantle - commingling with silicon in a way that's not going to ever come back. Going back three billion years almost all of the Earth's surface has been subducted and what we see is newer stuff - though really the big era of photosynthesis is more recent. That carbon is not fuel any more. Even more of that carbon was not chemically bonded to hydrogen, but rather to things like calcium in the forms of limestone and marble which have never been considered fuels - and the oxygen was trapped too in different ways as oxides of other things. The oxides are actually part of the metabolic photosynthetic processes that trap more carbon. There might be enough free carbon left to keep us out of the long cold / brief warm cycle. So no, there's not enough left to make a runaway greenhouse even with a sun this much warmer (if even that's true). Not even if we scraped the seas of clathrate ices and turned them into atmospheric methane, and the permafrost-trapped methane too. Not if we burned every gram of coal hidden in the Earth, the oil and natural gas too. We couldn't do it even on purpose. We could make it warmer. We could melt the polar icecaps mostly, turning the shores of Antarctica into habitable land that the sun actually sees, and turn Prince Edward Island into a vacation destination. We could plow the vast reaches of Siberia and the Canadian arctic. We can't make it too hot to support human life in great abundance - not even on purpose, dedicating all of Man's excess resources to the effort and applying our best science to the task. The upper limit regulating mechanism is beyond our ability to defeat at this time both deliberately and accidentally.
Too cold to sustain our population enough to retain our culture and history though? That can be done, as it has been done before and will be done in the future. Eventually the algae will defeat us, capture the CO2 faster than we can farm and burn it. And then the cold will come again. If we get fusion power it may come sooner rather than later as we lose the need to burn those carbon fuels and the algae don't give up. Glaciers have a way of setting back progress. There's a reason why despite the fact that mankind goes back about 200,000 years, written history is limited to about ten thousand. I'd rather we didn't go there again - at least not sooner than we must. There are the stars to explore, after all.
Don't think of it as being cheated. Consider it an accidental charitable gift to the B&M-G Foundation.
Third way, while we're at it: stock buybacks to buy stocks at the same rate the Chairman sells stocks and then stock grants to him to give them back. It's like magic money transfers, only legal. Like a dividend, but to only one stockholder and paid over and over in compensation for a decade of calling in four times a year to say "hey Steve! You're doing GRrrrrEAT!"
Well, it's possible the workers believed that. It doesn't seem likely management did, considering they knew the largest shareholder was going to spend 20 years divesting and being re-granted equity to maximize his real return. Not that it matters - they also do a forced ranking system that induces turnover at a rates that prevents deferred bonuses like options from vesting anyway. And that's a second way to avoid paying the old grey mare her promised and earned carrot.
In military terms few things are less successful than an old successful strategy. You have to have change-ups to win in the long term because otherwise the other guy knows what you're going to do.
This is not actually how the thermodynamic model of planets works. I'm not qualified to dig down into the formulae, but I'll give you the gist.
The earth is a ball of mass in a giant freezer (space) with three significant energy inputs: infall (the energy gained basically from friction when the planet was formed), radioactive decay (elements in the mass are decaying - never a big input and less over time), and sunlight. The first two are minor issues and at this point fairly constant on a time scale of hundreds of millions of years because the Earth's crust is a very poor thermal conductor. The ongoing input that could cause the temperature to run away is that solar input - and the solar input is huge: 174 petawatts, continuously, received as a broad spectrum of light from radio waves to X rays which is either reflected away immediately or stored as thermal energy and then radiated away as infrared light.
Hubris of human solar efforts notwithstanding, there are two significant outputs of this energy: Primarily it is radiated away. There is no outer blanket to reflect those rays back and for the most part they've begun an endless journey into the universe. A tiny fraction is employed by carbon-based photo synthesizer life forms to convert the energy to complex compounds, mostly involving carbon, oxygen, calcium and iron as a byproduct of their efforts to produce ever more similar life forms. If there were no life forms, it would all be radiated away - as frankly almost all of it is even today. The trick for this is that the thermal energy flow for a sphere in space is a function of its temperature. The Earth radiates heat in all directions as infrared light - even directly at the sun - all the time, and the warmer the surface gets the faster this energy flows because the greater the difference in temperature (deltaT) the faster the energy is transferred. This is what puts an effective upper bound on what the temperature can come to be on a planet orbiting this distance from a star that puts out this much energy. We reach an equilibrium of sorts that varies with our orbit, among other things.
A thicker blanket of CO2 or other greenhouse gasses can reflect a larger percentage of back to the ground where it's reabsorbed for a while, which causes the solar (and other) energies to stick around longer, which increases the deltaT and increasing the rate at which thermal energy is converted to infrared light, which then defeats the increased reflectivity of the atmosphere and escapes - restoring equilibrium.
Now we come to those pesky life forms. Originally the atmosphere of Earth was quite toxic, and would not sustain many modern forms of life. Over hundreds of millions of years primitive life forms are said to have converted poisonous concentrations of oxygen and other elements, arriving at an atmosphere similar to ours but far, far richer in CO2 that fell to Earth on comets. The Earth was warm and rich with life - quite the hospitable place - for hundreds of millions of years at a time, barring the occasional asteroid or comet strike or supervolcano. But those darned photo synthesizer life forms don't stop reproducing. Having exhausted the more active iron, they go after calcium and carbon and of course hydrogen and oxygen - converting solar energy to their use through energy transfers that wound up locking up ever more CO2 and other greenhouse gases, thus accelerating the departure of the infrared light and lowering the temperature. Each one doesn't do much individually, but considering the oceans are a soup so thick with them that they convert almost all the light that falls on the sea to their use should give some idea of the scale of this operation.
Every million years the temperature dipped more and more until finally it became too much and upset the equilibrium. You see, we get to that "reflected immediately" part. Snow is white. It reflects almost all of the solar energy that falls on it. And if you keep it cold it's quite durable. Since it doesn't absorb
Do you realize that it's possible for what you say to be true (and I agree with the general point) AND for it to also be true that humans are capable of altering the environment? Given that, it's also possible that the natural changes wouldn't be so bad, but the human caused changes might end up being very bad for us. So shouldn't we do something to stop the changes we can stop?
The answer to your questions lies not in the direct answer, but the indirect one. To give the answer I have to give a little background.
The Earth's climate has always been changing and it always will. The treehugger notion we could or should stop the climate from changing is great irony - because that would be a bigger imposition on the Earth's ecology than doing nothing. It would introduce a static climate never before seen on Earth - if it were possible - with inevitable and unforeseen consequences. But there are temperature zones the Earth appears not to like, and it transitions through them swiftly - and then stays on one side or another of this zone for a longer time. There are other zones that global average temperature can vary in for a considerable period of time - until it enters this unsavory zone and then rapidly crosses over it again. I'll leave the "why" of this to some philosopher or trained scientist, but it's a useful observed fact without understanding why.
Giving the average global temperature of the 21st century as 0, we reached the peak of the current temperate zone about 5,000 years ago at a level called the Holocene Climatic Optimum at about +1C. This is about 4-8C below the maximum temperature for the last 450K years or so, and there appear to be feedback effects which prevent the temperature from going any higher than that maximum because it hasn't deviated from this pattern for 2.5 million years - longer than humans have been around. There is a climate danger zone at -0.6C and if we enter it the temperature drops quickly to a new range of -5 to -8C for a very long time. Glaciers march and scrape our cities into the sea, owning the land for a hundred thousand years.
Unfortunately for our teeming billions, up until about 300 years ago the temperature had declined from the Holocene Optimum of +1C to -0.6C and was trending down. -0.6C appears to be the upper bound of one of those unsavory zones, and the next stop is -5C which is quite a drastic change. We were on the cusp of transition into the ice, and in fact that period is called the "little ice age". Each time in the last half-million years the average temperature passed below -0.7C it skipped directly over the intervening temperatures and went directly to the lower level - resulting in the die-off of terrestrial animals including humans, glaciation, and other unpleasant effects. The duration of this cold period averages 100,000 years which is likely longer than we could bear it. If it had not been for the warming currently attributed by some to the burning of fossil fuels and its concomitant CO2 discharge, we would likely already be suffering the cold dipping to -5C or more.
Perhaps 6 billion of us would be dead already, or never born - not from the cold, but from the inevitable famine and struggling for resources that it would bring. But that's not the end. 300 years from now there would be only a few million of our seven billions left, if the resulting wars didn't leave the planet uninhabitable entirely. Our entire industrial revolution, sciences and arts these last 200 years? Lost, perhaps forever.
No matter what we do the Earth will not stay habitable to this many humans forever. In the last half-million years we've had only four such periods lasting an average 12,000 years or so. This warm period we now enjoy is not the Earth's normal temperature. And when it's over, it really and truly does appear to be over for a very long time. It will be cold sooner or later. For me and mine, I
No, it's a dynamic, chaotic system that has been changing since "infall". It hasn't stopped changing ever. It was changing before there was life on the planet and it will be changing after we're gone - until the planet is swallowed by the sun. That's what makes the outcry over "climate change" so ironic.
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Oh, no... You misunderstood me. Milking the Windows and Office cows until they're dead is just what I want him to do. I don't want him to have a vision for the future. I don't want him to grasp the significance of the transition to mobile. He thinks XBox is a huge win, and that's just what I want him to think. He thinks Windows Phone and Online Services Division have got a chance in Hell, and I'm OK with that. He probably thinks he's going to make something useful out of Skype. He's going to anchor all "innovations" and acquisitions with "business drivers" until they won't fly. There's no danger he's going to "get it" so I hope they keep him until the end. When your opponent is making a mistake, don't interrupt.
To me this Microsoft debacle is a distraction from the potential progress we could have had these past three decades. Microsoft's goal isn't innovation, it's control of innovation. The prevention of innovation they don't control is Microsoft's goal, and they were great at it under Gates but less so under Ballmer. They've done so well with this that they're now introducing features we had 30 years ago in Unix, and being lauded for it. Their current patent trolling is just the chancres of a much deeper disease. Fortunately for us and unfortunately for them, the innate creativity of people is a force that can be slowed but not stopped. Eventually a way is found.
With people Microsoft's goal seems to be to destroy morale as fast as possible. Their forced ranking system informs one employee in five that he's on the way out - some say two in five. You can only watch that for so long before you know that one day they come for you no matter what you do. Microsoft only hires people good at math so let's do the math. If the odds of you surviving the next year at Microsoft are 0.8 and the distribution is totally random then your odds of surviving 20 years is 0.8 to the 20th power, or one in a hundred. But we all know the distribution isn't random. Most everybody has in their life a bad year and nobody knows they're not going to have one with divorce, the loss of a loved one that drives you to depression, physical illness, ordinary loss of focus, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune that induce you to produce less than your peers - no matter how good you are. Even if you don't have a bad year the currently rumored "Young Up Microsoft" program tilts the scale from "insanely difficult" to "impossible". So after about your third year there you know that this isn't a career path that leads to retirement. That shifts the personal goal of employees from "do what's best" to "get what you can before you're canned". Since new-hires have a well-known "grace year" because otherwise the hirer would suffer, for some segment of the new hires this translates to "don't get caught scrapping the walls for copper." Obviously this internal strategy served the short-term bottom line at some point in the past and is now a cultural anomaly like cargo cults but the rest of us eventually benefit so I hope they don't change it.
Microsoft's core products are Windows and Office. An operating environment and a suite of basic applications. The operating environment isn't as secure and robust as many we had 30 years ago, and does the same thing it did then: provide an environment for applications to run in. The suite of applications isn't even organic - they bought them all - and hasn't really changed in productivity in fifteen years. There are only so many ways to put glyphs on a page and do a mail merge. The spreadsheet feature wars ended sometime in 1989 when every spreadsheet had more features than three sigmas of users would ever access. Databases and presentations took a little longer - and to be fair the features they didn't buy there they outright stole. Microsoft won the office software wars not by making better software, but by ensuring that competing software wouldn't run well on their OS - and when they won, they stopped giving more value. This is being worked around by various
But this isn't technically email, though the principle is the same. You only get a Link.
Your post advocates a ( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
...
Some here will be offended. While I wouldn't care to have to deal with the guy, I like his vision. "Windows yesterday, today and forever" is just the message I want him to have here. He should stay focused on a strong defense of his core business - an iron fort unassailable by all. To stay the course on his miserable failures online, in mobile, in acquisitions is more than I could hope for, but it does appear to be the plan.
So when we move the trade route so it passes nowhere near his precious fort he won't be able to react.
I hope they make him chairman after Mr. Gates finally finishes divesting and retires. He's taking the company just where I want it to go.
Microsoft has been buying up vast quantities of their own stock for a very long time. In a pinch, they can sell that - which would drive the price down on the market. That's not very safe.
If you control utterly a multibillion dollar international corporation through direct equity ownership there are a variety of quite legal ways to separate the control from the value such that you can still control it utterly while eliminating your exposure to risk if it should collapse. You can do it in such a way through blind investments that your control is not seen. You can even sell your ownership of it several times over through holding companies. A major holder began learning these lessons a quarter century ago.
One upon a time they would pretend to care to keep up appearances, but that need is gone now as we approach the end game. There is just no point in sitting around listening to the outcry of these trivial owners when all together they could not rally enough votes to be even remotely interesting. In years past they would linger and listen with satisfaction to the bleating to the lambs as they're led to slaughter - but no more. They're not emotionally attached enough any more even for that. They've checked out.
There was that Bernie guy, but I hear he's retired now.
Except that it is farmland. So they'll just plow it in, diluting the concentration.
There are people on slashdot who see it as their mission to paint Google evil for any reason. If they can misinterpret a license that most people don't understand and thus incorrectly hold it out as Google being evil, that's what they're going to do. It doesn't play very well, if you look around this thread - in fact, they're probably doing their "evil Google" campaign more harm than good trying it here where so many active participants actually know better. They should take their work to PCWorld and CNet, where it would work better. Yet still, they try here but don't be misled: It's not about license compliance, it's about getting some tar on Google any way they can in the minds of folk who don't know better. They're not really GPL fans or they would understand what is required, and why, and that Google is - and has always been - in compliance with the terms and above that generous with contributions of all sorts.
Kickstarter looked like a good idea. But then there was this project that seemed grand, "Musopen": record classical music for the public domain. There was an article here on Slashdot about it. They raised $68,359 - way over the original $11,000 goal, over a year ago.
And nothing has been recorded yet.
Kickstarter projects lack accountability.
The stupid part is not the judge, but people who use Facebook for things that might be of interest in legal or civil proceedings. Are people really this dumb?
From the time stamps it took six whole minutes to hunt down this trouble ticket on a random blog comment and resolve the customer's desire for some obscure user interface customization. You guys are slipping. Back in the day this would have only taken four minutes. No wonder people are switching back to Windows.
Sooner or later Adobe is going to wake up to the idea that Microsoft is trying to kill them.
I use Linux to troubleshoot dual Westmere blade servers, quad Opteron rack servers, 10Gbit FCoE and Ethernet cards, PCIe attached SSD, 8G FC SAN, QDR infiniband and so on. That's pretty much bleeding edge hardware, and drivers haven't been a problem for many years. Haven't tried it on the new ARM cluster-in-a-box stuff yet - I imagine that requires a custom distro.
But yeah, the same Linux also detects and runs stuff that goes back to the stone age - flawlessly. The same Linux that boots an old P4 desktop runs some of the world's largest supercomputers and everything in between.
Look into edubuntu. It takes a bit to set up a PXE boot server but then you can configure almost anything to netboot, set the PC to netboot and bang: zero install instant boot as many machines as you want as either thin clients with apps running on the server or whole-hog PC with network attached storage. Runs on almost anything, works with almost everything. Can be configured to do scripted OS installs, be a netboot cluster manager and so on... This has been no biggie for about eight years. I have had this running on my home network for years to provide desktops to guests (kids) without risk they'll compromise my PCs.
We were talking about profits, not build quality. Dell doesn't make a lot of money on a laptop. Not as much profit as the revenue UPS gets to deliver it to your house. About $20.
I still don't think you're getting it. On a smaller body like the moon an increase in insolation like that would boil all the water off into space, ending its temperature regulation - as it obviously did. The Earth is a much deeper gravity well and we'd be in no danger of losing our water content even if the sun's power doubled. We're actually on the outer edge of the goldilocks zone, I think, and it was the spark of life in some distant era when geothermal energy was more prominent that saved the Earth from being a snowball permanently. By regulating the global temperature through manipulating the atmosphere's retention of heat the various competing forms of life stabilize the temperature at a higher average level than it would be if there were no life given the early materials mix. With a temperature regulator like life, minor variations in the sun's power don't matter as much.
Due to plate tectonics much of the early carbon metabolized by life has been subducted back into the mantle - commingling with silicon in a way that's not going to ever come back. Going back three billion years almost all of the Earth's surface has been subducted and what we see is newer stuff - though really the big era of photosynthesis is more recent. That carbon is not fuel any more. Even more of that carbon was not chemically bonded to hydrogen, but rather to things like calcium in the forms of limestone and marble which have never been considered fuels - and the oxygen was trapped too in different ways as oxides of other things. The oxides are actually part of the metabolic photosynthetic processes that trap more carbon. There might be enough free carbon left to keep us out of the long cold / brief warm cycle. So no, there's not enough left to make a runaway greenhouse even with a sun this much warmer (if even that's true). Not even if we scraped the seas of clathrate ices and turned them into atmospheric methane, and the permafrost-trapped methane too. Not if we burned every gram of coal hidden in the Earth, the oil and natural gas too. We couldn't do it even on purpose. We could make it warmer. We could melt the polar icecaps mostly, turning the shores of Antarctica into habitable land that the sun actually sees, and turn Prince Edward Island into a vacation destination. We could plow the vast reaches of Siberia and the Canadian arctic. We can't make it too hot to support human life in great abundance - not even on purpose, dedicating all of Man's excess resources to the effort and applying our best science to the task. The upper limit regulating mechanism is beyond our ability to defeat at this time both deliberately and accidentally.
Too cold to sustain our population enough to retain our culture and history though? That can be done, as it has been done before and will be done in the future. Eventually the algae will defeat us, capture the CO2 faster than we can farm and burn it. And then the cold will come again. If we get fusion power it may come sooner rather than later as we lose the need to burn those carbon fuels and the algae don't give up. Glaciers have a way of setting back progress. There's a reason why despite the fact that mankind goes back about 200,000 years, written history is limited to about ten thousand. I'd rather we didn't go there again - at least not sooner than we must. There are the stars to explore, after all.
Don't think of it as being cheated. Consider it an accidental charitable gift to the B&M-G Foundation.
Third way, while we're at it: stock buybacks to buy stocks at the same rate the Chairman sells stocks and then stock grants to him to give them back. It's like magic money transfers, only legal. Like a dividend, but to only one stockholder and paid over and over in compensation for a decade of calling in four times a year to say "hey Steve! You're doing GRrrrrEAT!"
Well, it's possible the workers believed that. It doesn't seem likely management did, considering they knew the largest shareholder was going to spend 20 years divesting and being re-granted equity to maximize his real return. Not that it matters - they also do a forced ranking system that induces turnover at a rates that prevents deferred bonuses like options from vesting anyway. And that's a second way to avoid paying the old grey mare her promised and earned carrot.
So pretty much like a Dell laptop then.
In military terms few things are less successful than an old successful strategy. You have to have change-ups to win in the long term because otherwise the other guy knows what you're going to do.
This is not actually how the thermodynamic model of planets works. I'm not qualified to dig down into the formulae, but I'll give you the gist.
The earth is a ball of mass in a giant freezer (space) with three significant energy inputs: infall (the energy gained basically from friction when the planet was formed), radioactive decay (elements in the mass are decaying - never a big input and less over time), and sunlight. The first two are minor issues and at this point fairly constant on a time scale of hundreds of millions of years because the Earth's crust is a very poor thermal conductor. The ongoing input that could cause the temperature to run away is that solar input - and the solar input is huge: 174 petawatts, continuously, received as a broad spectrum of light from radio waves to X rays which is either reflected away immediately or stored as thermal energy and then radiated away as infrared light.
Hubris of human solar efforts notwithstanding, there are two significant outputs of this energy: Primarily it is radiated away. There is no outer blanket to reflect those rays back and for the most part they've begun an endless journey into the universe. A tiny fraction is employed by carbon-based photo synthesizer life forms to convert the energy to complex compounds, mostly involving carbon, oxygen, calcium and iron as a byproduct of their efforts to produce ever more similar life forms. If there were no life forms, it would all be radiated away - as frankly almost all of it is even today. The trick for this is that the thermal energy flow for a sphere in space is a function of its temperature. The Earth radiates heat in all directions as infrared light - even directly at the sun - all the time, and the warmer the surface gets the faster this energy flows because the greater the difference in temperature (deltaT) the faster the energy is transferred. This is what puts an effective upper bound on what the temperature can come to be on a planet orbiting this distance from a star that puts out this much energy. We reach an equilibrium of sorts that varies with our orbit, among other things.
A thicker blanket of CO2 or other greenhouse gasses can reflect a larger percentage of back to the ground where it's reabsorbed for a while, which causes the solar (and other) energies to stick around longer, which increases the deltaT and increasing the rate at which thermal energy is converted to infrared light, which then defeats the increased reflectivity of the atmosphere and escapes - restoring equilibrium.
Now we come to those pesky life forms. Originally the atmosphere of Earth was quite toxic, and would not sustain many modern forms of life. Over hundreds of millions of years primitive life forms are said to have converted poisonous concentrations of oxygen and other elements, arriving at an atmosphere similar to ours but far, far richer in CO2 that fell to Earth on comets. The Earth was warm and rich with life - quite the hospitable place - for hundreds of millions of years at a time, barring the occasional asteroid or comet strike or supervolcano. But those darned photo synthesizer life forms don't stop reproducing. Having exhausted the more active iron, they go after calcium and carbon and of course hydrogen and oxygen - converting solar energy to their use through energy transfers that wound up locking up ever more CO2 and other greenhouse gases, thus accelerating the departure of the infrared light and lowering the temperature. Each one doesn't do much individually, but considering the oceans are a soup so thick with them that they convert almost all the light that falls on the sea to their use should give some idea of the scale of this operation.
Every million years the temperature dipped more and more until finally it became too much and upset the equilibrium. You see, we get to that "reflected immediately" part. Snow is white. It reflects almost all of the solar energy that falls on it. And if you keep it cold it's quite durable. Since it doesn't absorb
Microsoft, for example, just made the granted options worthless for many years.
Do you realize that it's possible for what you say to be true (and I agree with the general point) AND for it to also be true that humans are capable of altering the environment? Given that, it's also possible that the natural changes wouldn't be so bad, but the human caused changes might end up being very bad for us. So shouldn't we do something to stop the changes we can stop?
The answer to your questions lies not in the direct answer, but the indirect one. To give the answer I have to give a little background.
The Earth's climate has always been changing and it always will. The treehugger notion we could or should stop the climate from changing is great irony - because that would be a bigger imposition on the Earth's ecology than doing nothing. It would introduce a static climate never before seen on Earth - if it were possible - with inevitable and unforeseen consequences. But there are temperature zones the Earth appears not to like, and it transitions through them swiftly - and then stays on one side or another of this zone for a longer time. There are other zones that global average temperature can vary in for a considerable period of time - until it enters this unsavory zone and then rapidly crosses over it again. I'll leave the "why" of this to some philosopher or trained scientist, but it's a useful observed fact without understanding why.
Giving the average global temperature of the 21st century as 0, we reached the peak of the current temperate zone about 5,000 years ago at a level called the Holocene Climatic Optimum at about +1C. This is about 4-8C below the maximum temperature for the last 450K years or so, and there appear to be feedback effects which prevent the temperature from going any higher than that maximum because it hasn't deviated from this pattern for 2.5 million years - longer than humans have been around. There is a climate danger zone at -0.6C and if we enter it the temperature drops quickly to a new range of -5 to -8C for a very long time. Glaciers march and scrape our cities into the sea, owning the land for a hundred thousand years.
Unfortunately for our teeming billions, up until about 300 years ago the temperature had declined from the Holocene Optimum of +1C to -0.6C and was trending down. -0.6C appears to be the upper bound of one of those unsavory zones, and the next stop is -5C which is quite a drastic change. We were on the cusp of transition into the ice, and in fact that period is called the "little ice age". Each time in the last half-million years the average temperature passed below -0.7C it skipped directly over the intervening temperatures and went directly to the lower level - resulting in the die-off of terrestrial animals including humans, glaciation, and other unpleasant effects. The duration of this cold period averages 100,000 years which is likely longer than we could bear it. If it had not been for the warming currently attributed by some to the burning of fossil fuels and its concomitant CO2 discharge, we would likely already be suffering the cold dipping to -5C or more.
Perhaps 6 billion of us would be dead already, or never born - not from the cold, but from the inevitable famine and struggling for resources that it would bring. But that's not the end. 300 years from now there would be only a few million of our seven billions left, if the resulting wars didn't leave the planet uninhabitable entirely. Our entire industrial revolution, sciences and arts these last 200 years? Lost, perhaps forever.
No matter what we do the Earth will not stay habitable to this many humans forever. In the last half-million years we've had only four such periods lasting an average 12,000 years or so. This warm period we now enjoy is not the Earth's normal temperature. And when it's over, it really and truly does appear to be over for a very long time. It will be cold sooner or later. For me and mine, I
No, it's a dynamic, chaotic system that has been changing since "infall". It hasn't stopped changing ever. It was changing before there was life on the planet and it will be changing after we're gone - until the planet is swallowed by the sun. That's what makes the outcry over "climate change" so ironic.
The Earth's Climate will enter stasis, and stop changing for the first time ever?