what is your evidence that poverty is the cause of crime? Or that government aid programs reduce crime? My experience indicates that the causes of crime are social, not economic.
I know personally that if my choices were either starve or steal, I'd pick steal. I think it's a rather common-sense choice. So a community is better off when nobody has to make that choice. Last famine here in the 1800s, some were even killing each other for food. If that's not happening now, it's because everybody has something to eat, either through work, aid or crime.
You seem to be making two contradictory points. The first is that the money doesn't really belong the individual but to the "community" (which for all intents and purposes means the government). Then, second, that the government (Prince John and the sheriff) didn't have a legitimate right to the money. So which is it? Does wealth belong to the person who produces it or to the government (Prince John and the sheriff)?
I was more thinking that Prince John and the sheriff are rich individuals. Certainly the peasants didn't vote for them, and they use their wealth for personal gain, not for the community. A feudal system isn't something we'd want a government to be today..
It's fair to assume wealth belongs to whom- or whatever produced it. But any work done by any person today wouldn't be possible without a great amount of work done by a great amount of other people. I've seen myself why poor countries stay poor - nobody can produce wealth very well when road transport, electricity, telephones et cetera fail every day at random times. Think of all the machines and artifacts you're using in your work, and to get to work, and the number of people who manufactured those.
I argue it isn't therefore a question of principle but rather of fairness and practicality. It's fair and practical to do some amount of RobinHooding taking care of everybody and still reward good work with a higher standard of living.
Freedom also means opportunities. Free university education means more freedom, and free health care also means more freedom. That's essential - a poor young talented guy isn't really free unless he's both healthy and capable of receiving education that meets his talent.
We're so dependent on other people around us that to me, it makes sense to view the whole community as a one big family.
Further, countries poorer than USA have no trouble at all providing universal healthcare and free university education. People are quite willing to pay taxes, and other people are quite willing to heal and teach for the money.
As for the person who uses his money to buy a bigger house or a new car, IT'S HIS/HER MONEY, what right do you have to tell them how to spend it? You want to be Robin Hood and steal from the rich and give to the poor.
Having that money, and having a chance to buy a car or a house, are highly dependent on those people living in a community. So it's not far-fetched at all to expect members to benefit the community that will, as an entity, take care of itself. Even the worse parts, because it makes sense to keep the aid recipients away from crime and in a condition that might allow them to still get a job later on.
Prince John or the sheriff wouldn't be rich unless there were many many peasants around too. That's where the riches come from. It's not self-evident it really should be *their money*. That's the point of Robin Hood, I think.
Just a couple of points. Our continuous upward trend, that scientific and news sources are giving out, do say that it's a recent trend. Recent meaning something like the last 30 years. I hope you seriously don't expect that to show in a 420000 year graph from ice core data? It takes time for the ice to form from falling snow for example.
There's still ice around, that's true. But I never heard that an interglacial would mean no ice anywhere. I think defining ice age to mean age when ice exists being a bad definition.
That wikipedia article is all nice and good, but if you want to read science about it, I recommend http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_FAQs.pdf as a starting point. Question 2.1 is particularly important because the radiative forcing graph is quite clear about humans being the deciding factor in changes in radiative forcing, that is the amount of heat arriving as radiation.
I'm certainly hoping that the existence of humans on this planet will come to be more than a blip!
The cosmic background radiation will warm the body, only very slightly. Any body will always dissipate heat by radiation, and the amount is in relation to the body's surface temperature in K to the power of four, check Stefan-Boltzmann law.
Ah, do forgive me for being rather sloppy with conductive/convective. I rather think that convection is conduction at it's very heart =). Conduction with movement, that is.
You miss one important point. There is no air in space that would dissipate the heat. Therefore heat loss in atmosphere and heat loss in space are not comparable.
I didn't really miss the point. Heat loss in space with no air is purely radiative. The skin radiates the same amount of energy regardless of where it is or whether there's air or some other matter touching it. The loss depends only on your skin's temperature and emissivity. You don't lose heat by radiation if you're surrounded by stuff of the same temperature only because then you'd be receiving as much radiative heat as you were losing. The atmosphere doesn't enter this picture at all.
In addition to that, in an atmosphere, you lose heat by conduction, that's your body warming up the air around you. Air is also a pretty good insulator, so in very still air conduction isn't terribly large. What counts is the air motion and new cold air coming to meet your skin all the time, that's called convective heat transfer and it's usually dominant over conduction.
That's why I compared radiative heat loss in 2 Kelvin to radiative + conductive + convective heat loss in 253 Kelvin. I still think this approach is valid - please elaborate if you think it isn't.
I've been taught thermodynamics in a university although the application is mine, so no citations =). And with all respect to mr. Landis, I seriously think he forgot about radiation or underestimated it grossly.
Because it's still a vacuum. Do you want your hands covered in extreme "hickeys" in a few seconds? Swelling? Getting sunburn and cold? While even the combination is probably not really dangerous, it's not really comfortable either. Unlucky me, I cannot experiment with low pressure in any other way than sucking my fingers very hard =), but that's of course nowhere near the suckiness of space.
That, and it might be too difficult to make your sleeves airtight at wrists. At least without a rather biting rubber loop..
There's a nice
article that states roughly 2/3 of heat loss from humans is radiative in cool, still air. Stefan-Boltzmann law gives about 95W radiative heat loss, assuming 2 square meters of 28 C skin in 20 C surroundings. That'd make total heat loss something like 150 W.
Now, go outside when it's cold like -20 C, and the radiative heat loss, with above approximations, hits around 467 W.
If your surroundings are spacewarm of maybe 2 K, the radiative heat loss is around 932 W. That's about twice as much radiative loss as in -20 C atmosphere, where you'd have to add some, maybe 230, Watts for conductive heat loss.
Based on this very crude calculation I'd say that vacuum in space *is* cold, and about as cold as outside on Earth in -20 C and few clothes. Now that's not very cold, but you'd definitely still freeze before dying of thirst:).
The whole point of the Fermi Paradox is that even if civilizations take a ridiculously long time to travel between stars, and between colonization and sending out their own child colonies, the entire universe (not just one galaxy) should still long since be clogged to the gills.
Why's that?
Considering only the milky way.. Let's suppose there are a million intelligent species in the galaxy and each of them is flying around a thousand spaceships, at average speed 0.1 c, assuming it's 4 LY from one star to another, we should be having visitors once every 80000 - 160000 years (for 200 - 400 billion stars).
Sure, the above is for a "status quo", and the possibility of one existing is certainly a matter of debate. Nevertheless, I see no reason to assume exponential growth either. So the question is really whether a population will continue to expand exponentially forever, or maybe level out at some population. Or continue doing something completely dynamic and unpredictable so that any naive calculation about their spreading is hopeless.
It's clear that we humans are not doing much at all to spread among the stars. It's the scifi writer's wet dream, nothing else.
I think our galaxy is not conductive to travel or communication. Everybody knows planets with life are probably at least 100 years apart by any conceivable technology, but few actually come to think about our radio communication. Sure, our TV broadcasts have traveled in space for many many lightyears, but they've become incredibly feeble doing so. That, and they're mingled with all the radiation from our sun. The humankind isn't even coming close to using the kinds of energies that are constantly reflected from Earth's surface.
I did some calculations earlier and I'm sorry to say I've misplaced them, but it is my understanding that no signal mankind has ever sent could be picked up with the largest of our telescopes, from a few lightyears' distance. Another humanity could be in this very neighborhood and we couldn't know.
This is my favorite answer to the Fermi paradox. Travel over thousands of lightyears is obviously difficult and even if a race would do that, they wouldn't visit a star very often (it depends on if replicating probes are viable, though). Communication on the other hand would either require modulating your home star's radiation output or switching to a whole other unknown method.. And communication would be aimed, not omnidirectional..
It actually does scare me sometimes the lack of 'modern' or NT Windows based knowledge on Slashdot. It is like all the users here abandoned Windows back in the Win9X days which is a completely different OS and they have no concept of the NT architecture or even acknowledge that the NT core is one of the few things MS ever did fairly well.
Calm down, I'm not interested in bashing Microsoft baselessly. I'm using XP SP2 fully updated, legally bought, on my home computer, and have been for a long time. I only use Linux for work where it really makes a difference. I love bash for automating stuff:).
I think I never claimed to be knowing much more than personal experience. And while I agree that NTFS is vastly superior to FAT, I wouldn't call it one of the best. Certainly, my comparison is biased because I don't know how to get fragmentation data out of ext3 / reiserfs. Would like to know those numbers too.
That said, my experience is that right now, on the XP SP2 installed one year ago, on a harddisk bought three months ago, formatted with one NTFS partition and always having had more than 100 GB free space for storing files contiguously, I have a 1 MB file that's split in 263 fragments.
I'm going to continue calling that kind of thing pointless and potentially harmful. I don't think this is technologically "fairly well". I DO trust my most valuable data on two synced NTFS disks though if you must know.
Would you care to explain how this could possibliy, logistically or physically even be possble? Fragmentation is the only thing that could slow a FS over time unless the FS used a really stupid indexing system for the File Table. And yet not only is NTFS is still one of the best FS for handing fragmentation, ever, it has a well managed and fast file table indexing system.
I don't know about the fragmentation really. Personal experience here - just checked my partitions and found many files that are stored in thousands of "fractions". The OS installation is not a year old either, and I think I did defrag everything at least once already. Add to that, even if I defragment the drive, usually the tool cannot repair my NTFS drives completely. Moving the problem files back and forth between the two partitions does help though.
Ext3, Reiserfs, other Linux FSes though, all I hear is that the filesystem avoids fragmentation by itself and doesn't need to be defragged. How is that not much better than NTFS? Come to think of it, maybe a big part of the slowdown I see accumulating on Windows is because of this NTFS goodness..
I always found it plenty sufficient to upgradepkg my kernel whenever Pat decided to put out a kernel update package. And that's very seldom. My reason for using Slackware is that it really doesn't get security updates often - depending on your setup, you might not see any security updates in several months..
(Nearly all public research funding is political. If someone disagrees, he is either an idiot or not in research.)
I'm researching the dynamics and development of sea ice. Funding comes from ESA, and so it's from European governments. I fail to notice any political requirements in my work.. =).
Besides, I fail to see any possible motivation behind pretending global warming is true.
You're wrong about having to say *why* it is stupid to take jelly beans for cancer. If you want me to take jelly beans for cancer, you have to have the data to back it up (though I'd probably take the jelly beans, anyway, as long as it's orally).
How about "there's no known link of any kind between jelly beans and cancer" for an answer? When somebody says that, there's an actual claim and there can be meaningful debate about the truth value of the claim. I don't think one can rely on "common sense" or "intuition" in science. These do vary between people anyway.
The case with the atmosphere is notably different. We've significantly increased the CO2 content, and there's a well understood mechanism by which CO2 absorbs long-wave radiation. So how exactly would increased CO2 *not* trap energy in our atmosphere? While the greenhouse effect is accepted science, it's futile to criticize it without saying what exactly makes you think it's false or unimportant.
CO2 almost certainly has a significant impact on global climate, but our research shouldn't need to lead to dramatic changes regarding only CO2. We're trying to turn only the knobs that we feel comfortable twiddling (CO2 emissions). We do this while largely ignoring the knobs that we find it difficult to twiddle (water consumption, regional urbanization, and agricultural development). Where's the funding for research showing that these are not significant causes of climate change? This is what Lindzen was talking about.
Maybe the public climate discussion is dumbed-down a bit too much, but I'm quite convinced that the scientists are sufficiently researching all the other causes for climate change too. Let me point you to IPCC's scientific summary (pdf), pages 3 and 4. The table on page 4 does give values and error bars for many different causes of warming. It even summarises the level of scientific understanding behind each cause!
I think the IPCC summary is much better than many people think.
It is not okay to say that we're going to put a large number of cities underwater (as if civil engineers would watch NYC sink) and that we are certain that is all on the back of CO2.
Let me point out that, to my knowledge, IPCC has not said any of those things (I've read the summary and attended a lecture about it, given by one of the scientists behind the report).
The scientists I work with and listen to on lectures all seem both convinced and rather relaxed about global warming. They're speaking about when the north pole will wholly melt during summer, not if, for example. That doesn't stop them from being optimistic and happy. If somebody's alarmist, it's not the scientists.
Maybe the alarmists are also funded by oil companies to be that, to discredit the real scientists?
And perhaps somebody actually was funded by oil companies? Or was dismissed for some other reason?
And, you should be capable of saying *why* it's stupid to take jelly beans for cancer. In science, I find I'm most of the time either supporting a conclusion or not understanding it. And, if somebody's loudly expressing doubt without an ability to say what exactly he's doubting, it's a good guess that he's not actually understanding the claim and the logic behind it.
By the way, Lindzen did have valid points in his article in cato.org. The article was written in 1992 though, and the same criticism is not valid against the 15 years of science done afterwards. Do remember that the IPCC reports around '92 did express a lot more uncertainty than they do today, and that's for a reason.
it is far better to give them questions that they can think about and explore themselves than answers which they may or may not understand.
I think that an answer you don't understand IS a question in itself.
There's something I don't understand but I want to test the idea. After growing older I'm getting lazy and only testing the ideas that I know are probably worth it (ideas from science, not from religion etc).
There's nothing like being told about general relativity at an early age, and spending the next 15 years trying to decide if you're convinced or not. Remarkable as it seemed at first, I think I finally grasped it now and it actually feels more logical than any other option =).
Things kids don't understand is something they'll remember and "work on", given sufficient self-confidence. It's great to have many wonders you don't understand! That said, don't expect understanding in significantly less than 15 years..
Um, let me clarify. I'm not happy about nazism, far from that. But, I'm happy that Finland was an ally (more or less) of Germany in World War 2. Any other option (allying with USSR, or trying to stay independent) would have seen Finland end up in russian hands. We were lucky to have a strong friend in the war, and we were lucky that the same friend went down in flames and could not oppress us afterwards.
Nazism stands for nationalism. More spesifically, usually the word means things like the german nationalist party did before and during WW2..
Predicting what would have happened is always hard, but I find it probable that Finland would be better off under nazi oppression than the same from soviets. No jewish here really, and they kinda liked us. So they wouldn't have deported people to siberia or concentration camps, and they probably wouldn't have moved in hundreds of thousands of german people and insist their language on us.
Like it or not, nazism would have been the lesser of two evils compared to russian-style communism. For us - maybe not for others.
I stand corrected. Vaivara "was apparently established in 1943 as a camp for Soviet prisoners of war".. "by the Nazi regime" (wikipedia), for the purpose of "Concentration/Transit" (your link).
Happy? Are you an Estonian by any chance? You can be happy all you want, but normal people of the world hate pro-Nazis scum like you.
No, I'm finnish, and I'm happy that I was born in a free, independent and successful country. I'm happy I didn't have to learn russian and I'm sorry that our estonian neighbors are so much worse off because of the russian occupation.
Call me names all you want but trust me - I will be against any racial prejudices, concentration camps and fascism. I'll raise my voice against them if I see them, be it in my home country, Estonia or Russia. Moving a statue and hurting somebodys feelings falls a lightyear short from being a condemnable "nazist" act.
It's the Russia I am worried about now. The government is strengthening its power, oppressing opposition, lessening press freedom. Then there's Putin-jugend.. Russia is the country that's taking the steps Germany took a hundred years ago.
Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger. -- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
WW2 is history, Estonia is a country today. Present day must be more important than history. The "victory" meant "defeat" for the Estonians from the very first day as they lost independence. If soviets would have "liberated" them, they'd have withdrawn after the nazis were beaten, no? I can appreciate your Victory Day, but I'm still celebrating our Independence Day when we wrested our invaluable freedom from russia.
somehow figuring that using riot police and tear gas on the thousands protesters was justified...
Rioters used Molotov cocktails.. 'nuff said.
Hence, it is more than likely that the DDOS attacks are in fact spontaneous activism, and not sponsored by Kremlin, which has different and less obvious means at its disposal.
As Kremlin is not doing anything to the DDOS attacks (illegal activity), as they were not doing anything to the Estonian embassy riots, they're guilty of taking sides and letting crimes happen.
Are you saying there were concentration camps in Estonia? Can you please provide proof for that claim? And how many civilians did the USSR execute, by the way? I hear it's in the millions.
That said, I'm happy that Finland "embraced" the Nazi Germany and thus managed to defend itself against the soviet oppressors who would have raped this land as they did Estonia. Germany wasn't all bad, and USSR wouldn't have been any better. Are you accusing Finland of nazi sympathies too?
Open your eyes, man. Liberation is a nice word for propaganda, but that's never what really happens in a war. What happens in war is death and the best thing you can do in war is kill. There's no glory whatsoever in sending unprepared troops to die as USSR did. Never in history have the soviets actually cared about their soldiers.
Stop yelling fascism and stop to think for a moment. Try for a short moment to think how Finnish or Estonian feel about USSR and why.
The only perspective you'll ever find in any of this is here: it is a statue, a trivial amount of stone and metal. Oppressing a piece of metal is not exactly great fascism.
I recall seeing it in news that the estonians would have tracked these attacks to russian govt IP's, but now it's nowhere. Meanwhile, we do know that the russian administration has been up to a lot:
A Russian State Duma delegation led by the former FSB Director Nikolay Kovalev has also arrived in Estonia, in what was described as a "fact finding mission".[78] While still in Russia, the chairman of the delegation had already made a declaration, asking Estonia's government (led by Andrus Ansip) to step down.
at the Estonian embassy in Moscow: On Monday, April 30, Estonia's foreign minister Urmas Paet reported that "the situation had become much worse in the previous night.[97] The building is by now completely blocked."[98] Paet says that Estonia's foreign ministry had sent a note[99] to Russia's foreign ministry, due to Russia's apparent unwillingness and impotency to defend the embassy building and its staff (which violates Diplomatic law, especially the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations).
In any case it was clear that if the russian government wasn't directly behind the riots or the ddos attacks (there's a rumor of somebody paying the rioters), they never condemned those.
OK, so what does make something a religon? What's the definition? I'm not disagreeing with you that Scientology is at best rather absurd, but I don't see any clear way of distinguishing it from other more conventional religions other than by number of belivers or age - neither of which seem fair ways to judge legitimacy to me.
All religions are rather absurd. No need to distinguish them from each other really. Many people inherit religion from their parents, some are drawn to one that pleases them. Religious ideas are not legitimate, the more conventional ones are simply more conventional. It's OK to ritually cannibalize Jesus because many people are accustomed to it - no other reason.
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I know personally that if my choices were either starve or steal, I'd pick steal. I think it's a rather common-sense choice. So a community is better off when nobody has to make that choice. Last famine here in the 1800s, some were even killing each other for food. If that's not happening now, it's because everybody has something to eat, either through work, aid or crime.
You seem to be making two contradictory points. The first is that the money doesn't really belong the individual but to the "community" (which for all intents and purposes means the government). Then, second, that the government (Prince John and the sheriff) didn't have a legitimate right to the money. So which is it? Does wealth belong to the person who produces it or to the government (Prince John and the sheriff)?I was more thinking that Prince John and the sheriff are rich individuals. Certainly the peasants didn't vote for them, and they use their wealth for personal gain, not for the community. A feudal system isn't something we'd want a government to be today..
It's fair to assume wealth belongs to whom- or whatever produced it. But any work done by any person today wouldn't be possible without a great amount of work done by a great amount of other people. I've seen myself why poor countries stay poor - nobody can produce wealth very well when road transport, electricity, telephones et cetera fail every day at random times. Think of all the machines and artifacts you're using in your work, and to get to work, and the number of people who manufactured those.
I argue it isn't therefore a question of principle but rather of fairness and practicality. It's fair and practical to do some amount of RobinHooding taking care of everybody and still reward good work with a higher standard of living.
Freedom also means opportunities. Free university education means more freedom, and free health care also means more freedom. That's essential - a poor young talented guy isn't really free unless he's both healthy and capable of receiving education that meets his talent.
We're so dependent on other people around us that to me, it makes sense to view the whole community as a one big family.
Further, countries poorer than USA have no trouble at all providing universal healthcare and free university education. People are quite willing to pay taxes, and other people are quite willing to heal and teach for the money.
Having that money, and having a chance to buy a car or a house, are highly dependent on those people living in a community. So it's not far-fetched at all to expect members to benefit the community that will, as an entity, take care of itself. Even the worse parts, because it makes sense to keep the aid recipients away from crime and in a condition that might allow them to still get a job later on.
Prince John or the sheriff wouldn't be rich unless there were many many peasants around too. That's where the riches come from. It's not self-evident it really should be *their money*. That's the point of Robin Hood, I think.
Just a couple of points. Our continuous upward trend, that scientific and news sources are giving out, do say that it's a recent trend. Recent meaning something like the last 30 years. I hope you seriously don't expect that to show in a 420000 year graph from ice core data? It takes time for the ice to form from falling snow for example.
There's still ice around, that's true. But I never heard that an interglacial would mean no ice anywhere. I think defining ice age to mean age when ice exists being a bad definition.
That wikipedia article is all nice and good, but if you want to read science about it, I recommend http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_FAQs.pdf as a starting point. Question 2.1 is particularly important because the radiative forcing graph is quite clear about humans being the deciding factor in changes in radiative forcing, that is the amount of heat arriving as radiation.
I'm certainly hoping that the existence of humans on this planet will come to be more than a blip!
The cosmic background radiation will warm the body, only very slightly. Any body will always dissipate heat by radiation, and the amount is in relation to the body's surface temperature in K to the power of four, check Stefan-Boltzmann law.
Check MLI for an interesting read.
Ah, do forgive me for being rather sloppy with conductive/convective. I rather think that convection is conduction at it's very heart =). Conduction with movement, that is.
I didn't really miss the point. Heat loss in space with no air is purely radiative. The skin radiates the same amount of energy regardless of where it is or whether there's air or some other matter touching it. The loss depends only on your skin's temperature and emissivity. You don't lose heat by radiation if you're surrounded by stuff of the same temperature only because then you'd be receiving as much radiative heat as you were losing. The atmosphere doesn't enter this picture at all.
In addition to that, in an atmosphere, you lose heat by conduction, that's your body warming up the air around you. Air is also a pretty good insulator, so in very still air conduction isn't terribly large. What counts is the air motion and new cold air coming to meet your skin all the time, that's called convective heat transfer and it's usually dominant over conduction.
That's why I compared radiative heat loss in 2 Kelvin to radiative + conductive + convective heat loss in 253 Kelvin. I still think this approach is valid - please elaborate if you think it isn't.
I've been taught thermodynamics in a university although the application is mine, so no citations =). And with all respect to mr. Landis, I seriously think he forgot about radiation or underestimated it grossly.
Because it's still a vacuum. Do you want your hands covered in extreme "hickeys" in a few seconds? Swelling? Getting sunburn and cold? While even the combination is probably not really dangerous, it's not really comfortable either. Unlucky me, I cannot experiment with low pressure in any other way than sucking my fingers very hard =), but that's of course nowhere near the suckiness of space.
That, and it might be too difficult to make your sleeves airtight at wrists. At least without a rather biting rubber loop..
There's a nice article that states roughly 2/3 of heat loss from humans is radiative in cool, still air. Stefan-Boltzmann law gives about 95W radiative heat loss, assuming 2 square meters of 28 C skin in 20 C surroundings. That'd make total heat loss something like 150 W.
Now, go outside when it's cold like -20 C, and the radiative heat loss, with above approximations, hits around 467 W.
If your surroundings are spacewarm of maybe 2 K, the radiative heat loss is around 932 W. That's about twice as much radiative loss as in -20 C atmosphere, where you'd have to add some, maybe 230, Watts for conductive heat loss.
Based on this very crude calculation I'd say that vacuum in space *is* cold, and about as cold as outside on Earth in -20 C and few clothes. Now that's not very cold, but you'd definitely still freeze before dying of thirst :).
Why's that?
Considering only the milky way.. Let's suppose there are a million intelligent species in the galaxy and each of them is flying around a thousand spaceships, at average speed 0.1 c, assuming it's 4 LY from one star to another, we should be having visitors once every 80000 - 160000 years (for 200 - 400 billion stars).
Sure, the above is for a "status quo", and the possibility of one existing is certainly a matter of debate. Nevertheless, I see no reason to assume exponential growth either. So the question is really whether a population will continue to expand exponentially forever, or maybe level out at some population. Or continue doing something completely dynamic and unpredictable so that any naive calculation about their spreading is hopeless.
It's clear that we humans are not doing much at all to spread among the stars. It's the scifi writer's wet dream, nothing else.
I think our galaxy is not conductive to travel or communication. Everybody knows planets with life are probably at least 100 years apart by any conceivable technology, but few actually come to think about our radio communication. Sure, our TV broadcasts have traveled in space for many many lightyears, but they've become incredibly feeble doing so. That, and they're mingled with all the radiation from our sun. The humankind isn't even coming close to using the kinds of energies that are constantly reflected from Earth's surface.
I did some calculations earlier and I'm sorry to say I've misplaced them, but it is my understanding that no signal mankind has ever sent could be picked up with the largest of our telescopes, from a few lightyears' distance. Another humanity could be in this very neighborhood and we couldn't know.
This is my favorite answer to the Fermi paradox. Travel over thousands of lightyears is obviously difficult and even if a race would do that, they wouldn't visit a star very often (it depends on if replicating probes are viable, though). Communication on the other hand would either require modulating your home star's radiation output or switching to a whole other unknown method.. And communication would be aimed, not omnidirectional..
Calm down, I'm not interested in bashing Microsoft baselessly. I'm using XP SP2 fully updated, legally bought, on my home computer, and have been for a long time. I only use Linux for work where it really makes a difference. I love bash for automating stuff :).
I think I never claimed to be knowing much more than personal experience. And while I agree that NTFS is vastly superior to FAT, I wouldn't call it one of the best. Certainly, my comparison is biased because I don't know how to get fragmentation data out of ext3 / reiserfs. Would like to know those numbers too.
That said, my experience is that right now, on the XP SP2 installed one year ago, on a harddisk bought three months ago, formatted with one NTFS partition and always having had more than 100 GB free space for storing files contiguously, I have a 1 MB file that's split in 263 fragments.
I'm going to continue calling that kind of thing pointless and potentially harmful. I don't think this is technologically "fairly well". I DO trust my most valuable data on two synced NTFS disks though if you must know.
I don't know about the fragmentation really. Personal experience here - just checked my partitions and found many files that are stored in thousands of "fractions". The OS installation is not a year old either, and I think I did defrag everything at least once already. Add to that, even if I defragment the drive, usually the tool cannot repair my NTFS drives completely. Moving the problem files back and forth between the two partitions does help though.
Ext3, Reiserfs, other Linux FSes though, all I hear is that the filesystem avoids fragmentation by itself and doesn't need to be defragged. How is that not much better than NTFS? Come to think of it, maybe a big part of the slowdown I see accumulating on Windows is because of this NTFS goodness..
I always found it plenty sufficient to upgradepkg my kernel whenever Pat decided to put out a kernel update package. And that's very seldom. My reason for using Slackware is that it really doesn't get security updates often - depending on your setup, you might not see any security updates in several months..
I'm researching the dynamics and development of sea ice. Funding comes from ESA, and so it's from European governments. I fail to notice any political requirements in my work.. =). Besides, I fail to see any possible motivation behind pretending global warming is true.
You're wrong about having to say *why* it is stupid to take jelly beans for cancer. If you want me to take jelly beans for cancer, you have to have the data to back it up (though I'd probably take the jelly beans, anyway, as long as it's orally).How about "there's no known link of any kind between jelly beans and cancer" for an answer? When somebody says that, there's an actual claim and there can be meaningful debate about the truth value of the claim. I don't think one can rely on "common sense" or "intuition" in science. These do vary between people anyway.
The case with the atmosphere is notably different. We've significantly increased the CO2 content, and there's a well understood mechanism by which CO2 absorbs long-wave radiation. So how exactly would increased CO2 *not* trap energy in our atmosphere? While the greenhouse effect is accepted science, it's futile to criticize it without saying what exactly makes you think it's false or unimportant.
CO2 almost certainly has a significant impact on global climate, but our research shouldn't need to lead to dramatic changes regarding only CO2. We're trying to turn only the knobs that we feel comfortable twiddling (CO2 emissions). We do this while largely ignoring the knobs that we find it difficult to twiddle (water consumption, regional urbanization, and agricultural development). Where's the funding for research showing that these are not significant causes of climate change? This is what Lindzen was talking about.Maybe the public climate discussion is dumbed-down a bit too much, but I'm quite convinced that the scientists are sufficiently researching all the other causes for climate change too. Let me point you to IPCC's scientific summary (pdf), pages 3 and 4. The table on page 4 does give values and error bars for many different causes of warming. It even summarises the level of scientific understanding behind each cause!
I think the IPCC summary is much better than many people think.
Weathermen can't accurately predict the weather a few hours out ... what makes anyone think they can predict the temperature years or decades out?
The weather a few hours out is about the distribution of mass and energy in our atmosphere.
The temperature decades out is about the total amount of mass and energy in our atmosphere.
You've got to admit that the latter is a much easier problem.
It is not okay to say that we're going to put a large number of cities underwater (as if civil engineers would watch NYC sink) and that we are certain that is all on the back of CO2.
Let me point out that, to my knowledge, IPCC has not said any of those things (I've read the summary and attended a lecture about it, given by one of the scientists behind the report).
The scientists I work with and listen to on lectures all seem both convinced and rather relaxed about global warming. They're speaking about when the north pole will wholly melt during summer, not if, for example. That doesn't stop them from being optimistic and happy. If somebody's alarmist, it's not the scientists.
Maybe the alarmists are also funded by oil companies to be that, to discredit the real scientists?
And perhaps somebody actually was funded by oil companies? Or was dismissed for some other reason?
And, you should be capable of saying *why* it's stupid to take jelly beans for cancer. In science, I find I'm most of the time either supporting a conclusion or not understanding it. And, if somebody's loudly expressing doubt without an ability to say what exactly he's doubting, it's a good guess that he's not actually understanding the claim and the logic behind it.
By the way, Lindzen did have valid points in his article in cato.org. The article was written in 1992 though, and the same criticism is not valid against the 15 years of science done afterwards. Do remember that the IPCC reports around '92 did express a lot more uncertainty than they do today, and that's for a reason.
it is far better to give them questions that they can think about and explore themselves than answers which they may or may not understand.
I think that an answer you don't understand IS a question in itself.
There's something I don't understand but I want to test the idea. After growing older I'm getting lazy and only testing the ideas that I know are probably worth it (ideas from science, not from religion etc).
There's nothing like being told about general relativity at an early age, and spending the next 15 years trying to decide if you're convinced or not. Remarkable as it seemed at first, I think I finally grasped it now and it actually feels more logical than any other option =).
Things kids don't understand is something they'll remember and "work on", given sufficient self-confidence. It's great to have many wonders you don't understand! That said, don't expect understanding in significantly less than 15 years..
Um, let me clarify. I'm not happy about nazism, far from that. But, I'm happy that Finland was an ally (more or less) of Germany in World War 2. Any other option (allying with USSR, or trying to stay independent) would have seen Finland end up in russian hands. We were lucky to have a strong friend in the war, and we were lucky that the same friend went down in flames and could not oppress us afterwards.
Nazism stands for nationalism. More spesifically, usually the word means things like the german nationalist party did before and during WW2..
Predicting what would have happened is always hard, but I find it probable that Finland would be better off under nazi oppression than the same from soviets. No jewish here really, and they kinda liked us. So they wouldn't have deported people to siberia or concentration camps, and they probably wouldn't have moved in hundreds of thousands of german people and insist their language on us.
Like it or not, nazism would have been the lesser of two evils compared to russian-style communism. For us - maybe not for others.
It's a public knowledge that Estonian happily served in Nazis SS (extermination unit). Here is your camp (search for Estonia): http://history1900s.about.com/library/holocaust/bl chart.htm
I stand corrected. Vaivara "was apparently established in 1943 as a camp for Soviet prisoners of war" .. "by the Nazi regime" (wikipedia), for the purpose of "Concentration/Transit" (your link).
Happy? Are you an Estonian by any chance? You can be happy all you want, but normal people of the world hate pro-Nazis scum like you.
No, I'm finnish, and I'm happy that I was born in a free, independent and successful country. I'm happy I didn't have to learn russian and I'm sorry that our estonian neighbors are so much worse off because of the russian occupation.
Call me names all you want but trust me - I will be against any racial prejudices, concentration camps and fascism. I'll raise my voice against them if I see them, be it in my home country, Estonia or Russia. Moving a statue and hurting somebodys feelings falls a lightyear short from being a condemnable "nazist" act.
It's the Russia I am worried about now. The government is strengthening its power, oppressing opposition, lessening press freedom. Then there's Putin-jugend.. Russia is the country that's taking the steps Germany took a hundred years ago.
Of course the people don't want war. But after all, it's the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it's always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it's a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger. -- Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials
WW2 is history, Estonia is a country today. Present day must be more important than history. The "victory" meant "defeat" for the Estonians from the very first day as they lost independence. If soviets would have "liberated" them, they'd have withdrawn after the nazis were beaten, no? I can appreciate your Victory Day, but I'm still celebrating our Independence Day when we wrested our invaluable freedom from russia.
somehow figuring that using riot police and tear gas on the thousands protesters was justified...
Rioters used Molotov cocktails.. 'nuff said.
Hence, it is more than likely that the DDOS attacks are in fact spontaneous activism, and not sponsored by Kremlin, which has different and less obvious means at its disposal.
As Kremlin is not doing anything to the DDOS attacks (illegal activity), as they were not doing anything to the Estonian embassy riots, they're guilty of taking sides and letting crimes happen.
Are you saying there were concentration camps in Estonia? Can you please provide proof for that claim? And how many civilians did the USSR execute, by the way? I hear it's in the millions.
That said, I'm happy that Finland "embraced" the Nazi Germany and thus managed to defend itself against the soviet oppressors who would have raped this land as they did Estonia. Germany wasn't all bad, and USSR wouldn't have been any better. Are you accusing Finland of nazi sympathies too?
Open your eyes, man. Liberation is a nice word for propaganda, but that's never what really happens in a war. What happens in war is death and the best thing you can do in war is kill. There's no glory whatsoever in sending unprepared troops to die as USSR did. Never in history have the soviets actually cared about their soldiers.
Stop yelling fascism and stop to think for a moment. Try for a short moment to think how Finnish or Estonian feel about USSR and why.
The only perspective you'll ever find in any of this is here: it is a statue, a trivial amount of stone and metal. Oppressing a piece of metal is not exactly great fascism.
More about the statue on wikipedia: Bronze Soldier of Tallinn
And there's the story of Kristjan Palusalu who was the model for the statue..
I recall seeing it in news that the estonians would have tracked these attacks to russian govt IP's, but now it's nowhere. Meanwhile, we do know that the russian administration has been up to a lot:
A Russian State Duma delegation led by the former FSB Director Nikolay Kovalev has also arrived in Estonia, in what was described as a "fact finding mission".[78] While still in Russia, the chairman of the delegation had already made a declaration, asking Estonia's government (led by Andrus Ansip) to step down.
at the Estonian embassy in Moscow: On Monday, April 30, Estonia's foreign minister Urmas Paet reported that "the situation had become much worse in the previous night.[97] The building is by now completely blocked."[98] Paet says that Estonia's foreign ministry had sent a note[99] to Russia's foreign ministry, due to Russia's apparent unwillingness and impotency to defend the embassy building and its staff (which violates Diplomatic law, especially the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations).
In any case it was clear that if the russian government wasn't directly behind the riots or the ddos attacks (there's a rumor of somebody paying the rioters), they never condemned those.
OK, so what does make something a religon? What's the definition? I'm not disagreeing with you that Scientology is at best rather absurd, but I don't see any clear way of distinguishing it from other more conventional religions other than by number of belivers or age - neither of which seem fair ways to judge legitimacy to me.
All religions are rather absurd. No need to distinguish them from each other really. Many people inherit religion from their parents, some are drawn to one that pleases them. Religious ideas are not legitimate, the more conventional ones are simply more conventional. It's OK to ritually cannibalize Jesus because many people are accustomed to it - no other reason.