No no, you got it wrong. Simply believing anything religious is "intellectual dishonesty" to me and I suppose many other atheists. If you can't say what exactly makes you believe, if you can't present your evidence to others, if you can't build a logical argument about why you believe.. You shouldn't believe. You shouldn't fool yourself, and "yourself" is the easiest person to fool.
The poster wasn't really intolerant either. Not tolerating somebody is very separate from simply disagreeing with him. It should be that ideas struggle together, not the people having ideas. Sadly, when people have ideas that they can't defend logically, they tend to take their ideas personally and see any threat to their idea as a threat towards their person.
By the way, the grandparent never called names or targeted a person in his post while you start your post by labeling him a bigot. I think the GP, while not really taking care about being nice, was truly insightful. And he does have a point. The group of people calling themselves christian are so diverse that there just isn't anything "christian" anymore. Some christians say peace, others say holy war. Being a christian doesn't say anything about one's beliefs, other than Jesus was a divine son of god (which seems to be the only common thing).
Many of the teachings of Jesus were nice, intelligent and good. I'd seriously appreciate someone who said they were studying and following the teachings of Jesus, without believing in any godly origins stuff. Quite frankly, there are better teachers out there though, ones who speak much more clearly, so maybe this is why people have other gurus. I like reading Dalai Lama myself - we're kind of speaking the same language. Trying to read the Bible, translated as it may be, I find myself usually completely stupefied about what Jesus is actually trying to say. You'd think the son of god could drive a point across.
I think there's a strong reason to assume learning languages is the cause for less dementia. It isn't surprising that if you do practice, your brains develop. For what I know, the most certain way to catch dementia is to go all passive and sit around the telly when you grow old, while active old people grow very old without losing their wits.
We here farther east take American to mean someone from America (rather logically!). If we want to be specific, we say "north american" or even "yankee". Which I think is a perfect term for someone from USA.
I am, if not a climate scientist yet, working with physical oceanography and studying the stuff (http://www.fimr.fi). There really seems to be a consensus about the "political side". There is an overwhelming agreement on the importance of reducing pollution. We're living with lots of uncertainties, but remember that how uncertain the scientific prediction might be, it's still the best prediction we have. And the stakes are quite high for a gamble.
I'm not a climate scientist but I follow the feild closely and I have noticed there are a lot of people withing the "Consensus" on global warming who are really starting to worry about how political this issue has become and how bad science is not being challenged. There are lots of scientists who see unrealistic models, that are fed with incomplete or incorrectly gathered data, and are built off of flawed assumptions make predictions which are not plausable get attention from the mainstream press and worry about what will happen to the field when these predictions don't even come close to being met; the fear is that these bad-models will destroy all respect that the general public has for the field.
You must understand that scientists are mostly interested in their own work, not discrediting others'. Furthermore, in a complex problem like global climate trends, it's not clear which assumptions are good and which aren't. We're dealing with lots and lots of simplifications and assumptions some of which are known to introduce certain errors, and we're ignoring some known phenomena thought to be insignificant.
All data scientists have or will ever have is incomplete. Do you have an idea how many weather stations exist? How often they produce a good measurement? We've got 510 million square kilometers on this planet, and a good many significant kilometers of atmosphere on top of it. Only to store the complete state of the Earth climate in a good resolution would take several harddisks. The problem itself is unsolvable and we'll always need an approximation. That said, AFAIK, there are no permanent weather stations in the whole of the Arctic. We get satellite pictures, we get measurements from ships and airplanes, scientific trips etc but satellites don't see things like air temperature, and measurements are scarce.
That said, our models that are fed incomplete data and use many inaccurate assumptions and simplifications do produce a useful weather forecast for up to a week ahead. And that's the most useful and best forecast we have.
All right, the last day of any weather forecast is not too reliable, so how will a global climate forecast for a hundred years will be? Real scientists have studied this problem too. Incomplete data? Well, let's run the model a hundred times, each time starting with different input data, and see what range of results we get. Bad assumptions? Do the same thing, varying your uncertain assumptions a bit. Other errors? Run a simulation, and then run exactly the same simulation with some more CO2.
Models based on sound physical principles seem to agree about the correlation of CO2 and temperature. One of the largest uncertainties in the climate models is actually how much CO2 the humanity manages to spew out during the next 100 years. Talk about uncertain predictions here!
All that said, the climate change probably isn't as catastrophic as the media wants to think. Maybe it gets hotter, sea levels rise and so on. The north pole will probably get ice-free summers in 50-100 years (albedo goes down, Earth sucks in even more heat). Living in the north it's probably getting better for me. Heck, we're living the warmest winter ever recorded right here in Helsinki, and one could say that it's somewhat pleasant too:). Then again, I like the natural equilibrium of things here on Earth and dislike changing it. Maybe that's the ideological question if you want to find one.
"But why is a permanent record bad, when I'm doing nothing wrong?". You aren't doing anything wrong today, but what about under the laws of tomorrow? What about if you later become a public figure, and they have tapes of you picking your nose? Is it suddenly a privacy intrusion then?
What I hope would happen is we'd finally get accustomed to the fact that people pick noses! And that other stuff like that happens. Sure, right now we're all damn busy trying to polish our public appearance, and that's the only thing the cameras will rob from us, faked appearances.
I actually welcome our new nose-picking public figure overlords! Maybe they'd appear and even act (gasp!) a bit more like human beings then =).
Be what may, Peak Oil is what will ultimately save our environment =). If we were to pump infinite amounts of CO2 to the air, we'd be doomed. I'm glad there's a finite amount of it!
Hell, for all we know, the rise in CO2 might be the symptom instead of the cause of global warming. Granted, it's unlikely, but how do we know for sure? Has anyone measured CO2 levels on mars and venus? So far the only proof we have that co2 is linked to global warming is that any time in the past when temperatures have gone up, so has CO2.
I'd like to remind you that we've actually discovered a method by which CO2 does warm up the planet.
You're claiming that we know very little and you're forgetting everything doesn't need to be empirical. Let's take an example: we know that the date of the Chicxulub impact crater coincides very nicely with the extinction of dinosaurs. Which caused which? Maybe the global extinction triggered the falling of meteoroids! Wrong. Why? Because we understand very well how a meteor impact could cause mass extinction, but we don't have a silly clue to how an extinction could cause meteor impacts.
By what I know about climatology, there's no doubt whatsoever that there is a process by which greenhouse gases are warming up the planet.
Sure, it's not the only process, and not even the most important one. It is actually completely dependent on another, solar radiation hitting the planet (imagine Earth without that!). Maybe the effect of the variability of solar input is even larger than the largest possible impact of the greenhouse effect - even that doesn't nullify the fact that the greenhouse effect is the part we can do something about.
Anyway, we know from theory that the potential of the greenhouse effect is far from insignificant. Yeah, it could be countered by some yet unknown other effect, but I wouldn't count on that.
What the hell happened with the tree structure in here? Replies used to be placed logically under relevant articles some time back and I liked it that way =(.
No. This has nothing to do with creationism. Not much of the real world has anything to do with creationism. And conversely, creationism doesn't have anything to do with the real world. Why? Because creationism doesn't tell us what the world should be like, and just not knowing how the world came to be what it is doesn't mean there's no natural way for it to happen. Probabilities? Now that's pure guesswork, not science.
Yet again, this doesn't have anything to do with the age of the Moon either =). The question is *not* how old the Moon is (how long ago it was formed) but instead, how long did it stay alive since then. We know Earth's core is pretty hot, and we're assuming the cores of the moons and the planets too were hot when they formed. It's logical to assume that this heat is conducted to the surface and radiated to space with time. The question is, did Moon (being much smaller) already cool down all the way to the core or not? We've been assuming that it did, but that's not a fact.
Either way, I don't see how moons cooling down slower than we expected / starting out hotter than we expected would really support or not support anything. What exactly do you mean by supporting creationism? Do you think that every time something we thought was good science is proved wrong, creationism gets supported?
I think the next humans to go to the moon should seriously take some geologic equipment with them. Blow up some stuff and record all the vibrations that get echoed from underground layers. Liquid should be visible.
A magnetic field would tell about movement in a molten core - that is, convection and rotation of the mass. The moon rotates much slower than Earth, and the gravity driving convection is much lower too. So maybe there's a molten core that just doesn't act like Earth's molten core?
You do have a point, but I believe I've got one too;-). Worldwide, and mostly even locally in poor countries, there is enough food for everyone. The problem is it isn't distributed fairly, and how could it, in a capitalist setting like this when the poor people are uneducated and don't necessarily have good farming grounds just waiting there to be worked on.
Point is, the third world cannot buy food from countries that have extra. Why not? Because nobody wants to hire mr. Cant-Read. For example in Nepal, an army is the only thing might hire them. The British one for 20 years service for example, and that's the best thing you can end up if you start as a farmer. Or then there's the Indian army or the Nepali one. Those are the options for boys..
Obviously, to succeed, even modestly, in the global trade system, one needs education. LOTS of it. And it takes equipment and it takes capital. The yak farmer that can browse for market information and trade online is better off than the yak farmer who needs to walk two days just to talk to someone. The other yak farmer who learned online to make cheese can probably sell it better. The remote villages that don't have educated teachers can probably do some kinds of remote learning. They can get contacts. Don't underestimate this - half of the mountain dwellers have never been to the nearest city because it's too far away. I could go on an on.. =).
AFAIK, most dying-of-hunger kind of thing happens when shit hits the fan: Crops fail, tsunami strikes, they get drought or something. Even when volunteer-working in Nepal I never saw hunger but I did see people who didn't exactly have any opportunities they could actually achieve.
I'm not saying that giving food, refrigeration, better toilets etc wouldn't be valuable, it is. What I'm saying is that for heaven's sake don't stop helping in other ways too, because one can't provide the necessities of life without actually helping poor people earn it themselves. Yes, they are a part of "our economy" and yes, they need to adjust to it.
Well, he was saying that 16-bit colors suck in Gimp because they "tend to posterize images easily if you do harsh curves adjustments." I dunno, maybe I read wrong or he wrote wrong or something.
Maybe the problems will go away with 16-bit color, but it tends to posterize images easily if you do harsh curves adjustments.
Gee.. That's what it *should* do. At least that is my understanding of things after a theoretical course in digital image manipulation. 16 bits simply isn't enough, and even 24 bits is woefully little if you want to do curve adjustments. Think about it. 16 bits mean that you have 5 bits per color - 32 possible levels of red, green and blue (well, not green, but red and blue). That's 0 for pitch black and 31 for the brightest blue your eyes can see. Now, your eyes can actually see and differentiate between more than 32 shades of blue - much more to be exact, but in most cases, 32 is enough. Enough meaning it won't irritate you.
Now imagine that you do a "harsh curves adjustment" with something that looks like the logarithmic curve for example. In practice, you've traded the 32 levels to 8 or so different levels of blue. This does indeed start to "catch the eye". It's really about the *resolution* of the picture. It's really much the same than taking a small part of a 640x480 picture and then complaining that the small part doesn't have good resolution!
Maybe PhotoShop does some better witchcraft with it than Gimp. I'd like to see it. But largely I think the whole problem is silly, and anyone caring about quality should use at least 24-bit colours and millions of pixels. Plus, I don't think 16-bit graphics are actually used anymore.
It might be just me, but I *like* the GIMP gui. Especially after 2.0, when it got a lot better. Sure, it might take some getting used to, but so will any learning.
I think comparing to PhotoShop is not really that useful at all. People who did actually pay for it will certainly continue to use it. People who stole it seem to be fond of it as well, maybe because of the price tag. People who use Windows will like something that fits their mindset. It's apples and oranges on all levels - price, UI, technology.
Meanwhile, Gimp does a really good job for linux freaks who actually like and trust free software with quirks. It's also great for folks who don't want to pay for PhotoShop but don't like to steal either.
There are some building blocks involved in broadcasting a 2-dimensional moving picture. I'd think sending pictures sequentially one after the other is common sense, so what's left is turning a 2d pic into a 1d signal. It's done one line at a time, from top to bottom, with a repeating marker signal between each line.
There will be two repeating marker signals, one between each scanline and one longer signal between two frames. These will be the first regularities anyone will notice.
When each line of data is the same lenght in the signal, it's reasonable to assume the picture is rectangular. Bingo! And it's intuitive that the amplitude represents brightness! It's easy to count the number of lines between "vertical refreshes", and the number of "pixels" on each line should be roughly equal - a square is an intuitive special case.
Now, there is some trouble involved in figuring out the modulation method, but AM is the simplest and rather intuitive. They can make good guesses about the modulation by the frequency spectrum of our signal. This is assuming they've discovered the importance of Fourier's transform too!:).
Sure, once they get the picture rolling, it's important to put things to scale. Maybe broadcast it in real time, so they have the time axis right from the start. Size is harder. They'll know which way is down if the video shows people walking around and dropping things, but they won't know if we are big or small. They can guess based on their own ecology though =).
Would be interesting to get such a sample to play around with!
What someone said about PAL / NTSC / foo, don't you think it's surprising how much you're actually seeing from a video signal even when your TV's setting is wrong?
Thing is, being "adult" used to be something very cool and people learned to fake it. Many adult adults will still be very childish if you annoy or challenge them.
Reading the article should give some clues about it.. I'd say that a satellite-radar-based method wouldn't really care about isostatic rebound one bit.
The ocean cannot be above the geode in one part of the world and below it in another _by definition_. At least not on average over a year.
Sure it can. I don't really see any problems with this. For example the air pressure has an important effect on the sea level, and if the surface air pressure is strengthening on average, that should well enough push the water down (or, rather, elsewhere). Air pressure could be rising following a rise in temperatures. Temperature could have a direct effect or an indirect one - maybe the increased melting results in more evaporation -> bigger air pressure. Of course air pressure can locally rise on average because of some obscure weather pattern too. The problem with the polar region is that we don't really have a good amount of pressure gauges around there.
In any case one shouldn't just assume that water follows gravity "by definition". There's another weather system going on below the surface. Maybe the Gulf stream is weakening and, in a sense, that causes less water to "pile up" in the Arctic? Or the cold fresh water currents down from the pole are doing something funny as they're growing stronger? Maybe the saline bottom currents are not, for whatever reason, properly matching the now-stronger fresh water currents?
Even these ideas are very simple while real weather systems are rather complex. I'd like to see many many different simulations about it:). Simulation really seems to be the only way to predict what will happen in these kinds of problems.
Just something.. You say controversial? Why? Isn't it a kind of common knowledge that military organizations focus on giving orders and avoiding blame? To do tasks you'd much rather not do, just enough to avoid blame, and then to go into hiding to avoid further tasks?
At least that's what they teach here to all men aged 18..
For all we know, the universe is rather big. So indeed there is a huge if not infinite number of hands dealt. And they've been dealing hands for billions of years, and it still goes on.
So, even if chemistry was random, if space (or time) is infinite, each finitely improbable hand would certainly be dealt to someone. Infinitely many times, to be exact.
Now, most scientists assume that chemistry is not random, and most planets are so big that forming some molecules by luck isn't that improbable if you count the available surface area. If you get a molecule or a set of molecules that copies itself, you have life.
No, no, it's genuine. Or at least it might be. I for one think it's extremely likely that Goliath's hometown was running a successful souvenir trade for tourists visiting those parts, producing thousands of "Goliath"-pots and other branded products.
This is not to say the "David vs. Goliath" story is true, but at least the story exists - thus the opportunity for 4) PROFIT!!!!!!
Imagine archaeologists digging up a peculiar mug with barely readable markings saying "Yoda"..
Explain to me exactly how anything except fighting and killing are going to get rid of a ready-made foe like that? (taking him and his minions collectively)
It seems that a long-standing deadlock followed by negotiation might work (IRA, ETA). I can agree that it's a difficult situation with decades or violence for both sides. Countries can be won by devastating show of force and negotiation in a shorter timeframe.
Would you in turn explain to me how exactly should one fight and kill a readily-made foe without making new foes in the process? Imagine the Britain fighting and killing every IRA activist. Your fight-and-win POV was appropriate back then when there were countries fighting each other, but even then it only worked in some cases. For example, a large group of people who desperately want to be independent cannot be "fought and killed".
Europe, while getting blissfully unaware and more and more shocked by wartime realities, seems to honor some ideas that I think are essential to lessening the total amount of aggression. First of all, in order to "finish" an affair with a country or a rebellion against a country, you need to still be worthy of trust. If your enemy knows you have compassion and can be trusted, there is hope for true peace. It doesn't even matter that much which one wins. But as long as the enemy is the Great Satan the best peace there is is still disturbed by a bomb going off every now and then.
USA is currently also not negotiating with anyone. Not even with its allies (while deciding about Iraq). This is an enormous show of selfish pride. It also effectively prevents peaceful solutions from arising. Think about it for a while. Nobody would really fight USA and hope for a military victory. Only the most angered would wish to go kamikaze at USA from sheer hate. They want something and they want it desperately. The world doesn't even know what they want because of the lack of negotiation.
The USA is treating islamist terrorists like Britain was treating freedom fighters in colonies in 1800s. Their some rebel scum not to be taken seriously and not negotiated with. Well, the rebel ideology prevailed, was eventually negotiated with, gained independence by negotiation. Peace, end of story.
I'm not saying USA shouldn't defend itself. It should, but it should be less preemptive and more negotiating.
there will always be external forces that will want to exert power over significant reaches of (or the entire) world.
Please explain why you think this way because I disagree with you strongly. It seems to me that after the colonial era, and very visibly after the second world war, at least Europe came to see that there's no greatness in conquering land area and bringing people under one's control. I think power is a primitive motivation and really, I don't know personally anyone who would be motivated by power. Even the USA is not trying to annex anybody. Actually, I can't tell of any recent examples except for Iraq possibly wishing to annex Kuwait.
Times are changing. You cannot tell future by studying the past. Some of us are desperately trying to make the global future into something very unlike our history. One reason USA is hated is that they seem to be counteracting what some believe is global moral development.
I do not believe that any culture can advance, for more than a few centuries at a time, on a technological front alone. Morals and ethics must not lag behind science, otherwise the social system will breed poisons which will cause its certain destruction. I believe therefore that with superhuman knowledge must go equally great compassion and tolerance. - Arthur C. Clarke
After all, we want to live peaceful lives. Democracy itself (real democracy, the kind in which people have power) prevents war because those deciding about the wars are the ones who suffer them. There are no longer material reasons for war in most countries. Religious fanaticism is declining (big picture, Bus
I think Dovecot is much nicer than Binc. I would be interested in why you think otherwise!
Why, of course. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words qmail-pop3d and www.qmail.org inscribed in large friendly letters on its homepage.
Seriously though, only the latter had a meaning when I made my choice. I had originally installed qmail because a friend recommended it and I installed an imapd later when I started to need it. I first tried courier-imapd but couldn't figure out how to make it work at the time, and binc happened to be the next one to try; maybe it was mentioned on qmail.org. It matched my needs perfectly - installation was a snap and it has worked flawlessly ever since. Thus, I never got to try Dovecot or any other imapd.
If you have experience from both, I would be interested in why you think Dovecot's better!
As someone who uses Qmail and likes it a lot I might recommend you do just that. There are some features that people expect from a modern mta package. IMAP would be one of them, and my humble opinion is that binc-imap would go well with qmail.
I just did a qmail install yesterday and even when it's a good program it has a long steep learning curve. Every time I install qmail I need to google around, read a lot of documents and understand new things to decide what I need. Netqmail is a good but insufficient starting point while qmailrocks.org's version is completely overblown (at least for me). While figuring out the patches and other tools I'd need I couldn't help plotting yet another qmail package of my own.
Improving netqmail and making it what qmail should be would be great.
As an aside, my personal feeling is that if DJB sticks to his licensing (and continues to ignore all the patching) we need to eventually rewrite qmail. It's getting worse by the day and the patches are already starting to conflict with each other.
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No no, you got it wrong. Simply believing anything religious is "intellectual dishonesty" to me and I suppose many other atheists. If you can't say what exactly makes you believe, if you can't present your evidence to others, if you can't build a logical argument about why you believe.. You shouldn't believe. You shouldn't fool yourself, and "yourself" is the easiest person to fool.
The poster wasn't really intolerant either. Not tolerating somebody is very separate from simply disagreeing with him. It should be that ideas struggle together, not the people having ideas. Sadly, when people have ideas that they can't defend logically, they tend to take their ideas personally and see any threat to their idea as a threat towards their person.
By the way, the grandparent never called names or targeted a person in his post while you start your post by labeling him a bigot. I think the GP, while not really taking care about being nice, was truly insightful. And he does have a point. The group of people calling themselves christian are so diverse that there just isn't anything "christian" anymore. Some christians say peace, others say holy war. Being a christian doesn't say anything about one's beliefs, other than Jesus was a divine son of god (which seems to be the only common thing).
Many of the teachings of Jesus were nice, intelligent and good. I'd seriously appreciate someone who said they were studying and following the teachings of Jesus, without believing in any godly origins stuff. Quite frankly, there are better teachers out there though, ones who speak much more clearly, so maybe this is why people have other gurus. I like reading Dalai Lama myself - we're kind of speaking the same language. Trying to read the Bible, translated as it may be, I find myself usually completely stupefied about what Jesus is actually trying to say. You'd think the son of god could drive a point across.
I think there's a strong reason to assume learning languages is the cause for less dementia. It isn't surprising that if you do practice, your brains develop. For what I know, the most certain way to catch dementia is to go all passive and sit around the telly when you grow old, while active old people grow very old without losing their wits.
We here farther east take American to mean someone from America (rather logically!). If we want to be specific, we say "north american" or even "yankee". Which I think is a perfect term for someone from USA.
How convenient! I've always had difficulties trying to buy the right size shoes, but now I can order shoes precisely 1 foot long!
I am, if not a climate scientist yet, working with physical oceanography and studying the stuff (http://www.fimr.fi). There really seems to be a consensus about the "political side". There is an overwhelming agreement on the importance of reducing pollution. We're living with lots of uncertainties, but remember that how uncertain the scientific prediction might be, it's still the best prediction we have. And the stakes are quite high for a gamble.
I'm not a climate scientist but I follow the feild closely and I have noticed there are a lot of people withing the "Consensus" on global warming who are really starting to worry about how political this issue has become and how bad science is not being challenged. There are lots of scientists who see unrealistic models, that are fed with incomplete or incorrectly gathered data, and are built off of flawed assumptions make predictions which are not plausable get attention from the mainstream press and worry about what will happen to the field when these predictions don't even come close to being met; the fear is that these bad-models will destroy all respect that the general public has for the field.
You must understand that scientists are mostly interested in their own work, not discrediting others'. Furthermore, in a complex problem like global climate trends, it's not clear which assumptions are good and which aren't. We're dealing with lots and lots of simplifications and assumptions some of which are known to introduce certain errors, and we're ignoring some known phenomena thought to be insignificant.
All data scientists have or will ever have is incomplete. Do you have an idea how many weather stations exist? How often they produce a good measurement? We've got 510 million square kilometers on this planet, and a good many significant kilometers of atmosphere on top of it. Only to store the complete state of the Earth climate in a good resolution would take several harddisks. The problem itself is unsolvable and we'll always need an approximation. That said, AFAIK, there are no permanent weather stations in the whole of the Arctic. We get satellite pictures, we get measurements from ships and airplanes, scientific trips etc but satellites don't see things like air temperature, and measurements are scarce.
That said, our models that are fed incomplete data and use many inaccurate assumptions and simplifications do produce a useful weather forecast for up to a week ahead. And that's the most useful and best forecast we have.
All right, the last day of any weather forecast is not too reliable, so how will a global climate forecast for a hundred years will be? Real scientists have studied this problem too. Incomplete data? Well, let's run the model a hundred times, each time starting with different input data, and see what range of results we get. Bad assumptions? Do the same thing, varying your uncertain assumptions a bit. Other errors? Run a simulation, and then run exactly the same simulation with some more CO2.
Models based on sound physical principles seem to agree about the correlation of CO2 and temperature. One of the largest uncertainties in the climate models is actually how much CO2 the humanity manages to spew out during the next 100 years. Talk about uncertain predictions here!
All that said, the climate change probably isn't as catastrophic as the media wants to think. Maybe it gets hotter, sea levels rise and so on. The north pole will probably get ice-free summers in 50-100 years (albedo goes down, Earth sucks in even more heat). Living in the north it's probably getting better for me. Heck, we're living the warmest winter ever recorded right here in Helsinki, and one could say that it's somewhat pleasant too :). Then again, I like the natural equilibrium of things here on Earth and dislike changing it. Maybe that's the ideological question if you want to find one.
"But why is a permanent record bad, when I'm doing nothing wrong?". You aren't doing anything wrong today, but what about under the laws of tomorrow? What about if you later become a public figure, and they have tapes of you picking your nose? Is it suddenly a privacy intrusion then?
What I hope would happen is we'd finally get accustomed to the fact that people pick noses! And that other stuff like that happens. Sure, right now we're all damn busy trying to polish our public appearance, and that's the only thing the cameras will rob from us, faked appearances.
I actually welcome our new nose-picking public figure overlords! Maybe they'd appear and even act (gasp!) a bit more like human beings then =).
Be what may, Peak Oil is what will ultimately save our environment =). If we were to pump infinite amounts of CO2 to the air, we'd be doomed. I'm glad there's a finite amount of it!
Hell, for all we know, the rise in CO2 might be the symptom instead of the cause of global warming. Granted, it's unlikely, but how do we know for sure? Has anyone measured CO2 levels on mars and venus? So far the only proof we have that co2 is linked to global warming is that any time in the past when temperatures have gone up, so has CO2.
I'd like to remind you that we've actually discovered a method by which CO2 does warm up the planet.
You're claiming that we know very little and you're forgetting everything doesn't need to be empirical. Let's take an example: we know that the date of the Chicxulub impact crater coincides very nicely with the extinction of dinosaurs. Which caused which? Maybe the global extinction triggered the falling of meteoroids! Wrong. Why? Because we understand very well how a meteor impact could cause mass extinction, but we don't have a silly clue to how an extinction could cause meteor impacts.
By what I know about climatology, there's no doubt whatsoever that there is a process by which greenhouse gases are warming up the planet.
Sure, it's not the only process, and not even the most important one. It is actually completely dependent on another, solar radiation hitting the planet (imagine Earth without that!). Maybe the effect of the variability of solar input is even larger than the largest possible impact of the greenhouse effect - even that doesn't nullify the fact that the greenhouse effect is the part we can do something about.
Anyway, we know from theory that the potential of the greenhouse effect is far from insignificant. Yeah, it could be countered by some yet unknown other effect, but I wouldn't count on that.
What the hell happened with the tree structure in here? Replies used to be placed logically under relevant articles some time back and I liked it that way =(.
No. This has nothing to do with creationism. Not much of the real world has anything to do with creationism. And conversely, creationism doesn't have anything to do with the real world. Why? Because creationism doesn't tell us what the world should be like, and just not knowing how the world came to be what it is doesn't mean there's no natural way for it to happen. Probabilities? Now that's pure guesswork, not science.
Yet again, this doesn't have anything to do with the age of the Moon either =). The question is *not* how old the Moon is (how long ago it was formed) but instead, how long did it stay alive since then. We know Earth's core is pretty hot, and we're assuming the cores of the moons and the planets too were hot when they formed. It's logical to assume that this heat is conducted to the surface and radiated to space with time. The question is, did Moon (being much smaller) already cool down all the way to the core or not? We've been assuming that it did, but that's not a fact.
Either way, I don't see how moons cooling down slower than we expected / starting out hotter than we expected would really support or not support anything. What exactly do you mean by supporting creationism? Do you think that every time something we thought was good science is proved wrong, creationism gets supported?
I think the next humans to go to the moon should seriously take some geologic equipment with them. Blow up some stuff and record all the vibrations that get echoed from underground layers. Liquid should be visible.
A magnetic field would tell about movement in a molten core - that is, convection and rotation of the mass. The moon rotates much slower than Earth, and the gravity driving convection is much lower too. So maybe there's a molten core that just doesn't act like Earth's molten core?
You do have a point, but I believe I've got one too ;-). Worldwide, and mostly even locally in poor countries, there is enough food for everyone. The problem is it isn't distributed fairly, and how could it, in a capitalist setting like this when the poor people are uneducated and don't necessarily have good farming grounds just waiting there to be worked on.
Point is, the third world cannot buy food from countries that have extra. Why not? Because nobody wants to hire mr. Cant-Read. For example in Nepal, an army is the only thing might hire them. The British one for 20 years service for example, and that's the best thing you can end up if you start as a farmer. Or then there's the Indian army or the Nepali one. Those are the options for boys..
Obviously, to succeed, even modestly, in the global trade system, one needs education. LOTS of it. And it takes equipment and it takes capital. The yak farmer that can browse for market information and trade online is better off than the yak farmer who needs to walk two days just to talk to someone. The other yak farmer who learned online to make cheese can probably sell it better. The remote villages that don't have educated teachers can probably do some kinds of remote learning. They can get contacts. Don't underestimate this - half of the mountain dwellers have never been to the nearest city because it's too far away. I could go on an on.. =).
AFAIK, most dying-of-hunger kind of thing happens when shit hits the fan: Crops fail, tsunami strikes, they get drought or something. Even when volunteer-working in Nepal I never saw hunger but I did see people who didn't exactly have any opportunities they could actually achieve.
I'm not saying that giving food, refrigeration, better toilets etc wouldn't be valuable, it is. What I'm saying is that for heaven's sake don't stop helping in other ways too, because one can't provide the necessities of life without actually helping poor people earn it themselves. Yes, they are a part of "our economy" and yes, they need to adjust to it.
Ah, do check http://www.nepalwireless.net and http://www.himanchal.org if you're interested :)
Well, he was saying that 16-bit colors suck in Gimp because they "tend to posterize images easily if you do harsh curves adjustments." I dunno, maybe I read wrong or he wrote wrong or something.
Maybe the problems will go away with 16-bit color, but it tends to posterize images easily if you do harsh curves adjustments.
Gee.. That's what it *should* do. At least that is my understanding of things after a theoretical course in digital image manipulation. 16 bits simply isn't enough, and even 24 bits is woefully little if you want to do curve adjustments. Think about it. 16 bits mean that you have 5 bits per color - 32 possible levels of red, green and blue (well, not green, but red and blue). That's 0 for pitch black and 31 for the brightest blue your eyes can see. Now, your eyes can actually see and differentiate between more than 32 shades of blue - much more to be exact, but in most cases, 32 is enough. Enough meaning it won't irritate you.
Now imagine that you do a "harsh curves adjustment" with something that looks like the logarithmic curve for example. In practice, you've traded the 32 levels to 8 or so different levels of blue. This does indeed start to "catch the eye". It's really about the *resolution* of the picture. It's really much the same than taking a small part of a 640x480 picture and then complaining that the small part doesn't have good resolution!
Maybe PhotoShop does some better witchcraft with it than Gimp. I'd like to see it. But largely I think the whole problem is silly, and anyone caring about quality should use at least 24-bit colours and millions of pixels. Plus, I don't think 16-bit graphics are actually used anymore.
It might be just me, but I *like* the GIMP gui. Especially after 2.0, when it got a lot better. Sure, it might take some getting used to, but so will any learning.
I think comparing to PhotoShop is not really that useful at all. People who did actually pay for it will certainly continue to use it. People who stole it seem to be fond of it as well, maybe because of the price tag. People who use Windows will like something that fits their mindset. It's apples and oranges on all levels - price, UI, technology.
Meanwhile, Gimp does a really good job for linux freaks who actually like and trust free software with quirks. It's also great for folks who don't want to pay for PhotoShop but don't like to steal either.
There are some building blocks involved in broadcasting a 2-dimensional moving picture. I'd think sending pictures sequentially one after the other is common sense, so what's left is turning a 2d pic into a 1d signal. It's done one line at a time, from top to bottom, with a repeating marker signal between each line. There will be two repeating marker signals, one between each scanline and one longer signal between two frames. These will be the first regularities anyone will notice. When each line of data is the same lenght in the signal, it's reasonable to assume the picture is rectangular. Bingo! And it's intuitive that the amplitude represents brightness! It's easy to count the number of lines between "vertical refreshes", and the number of "pixels" on each line should be roughly equal - a square is an intuitive special case. Now, there is some trouble involved in figuring out the modulation method, but AM is the simplest and rather intuitive. They can make good guesses about the modulation by the frequency spectrum of our signal. This is assuming they've discovered the importance of Fourier's transform too! :).
Sure, once they get the picture rolling, it's important to put things to scale. Maybe broadcast it in real time, so they have the time axis right from the start. Size is harder. They'll know which way is down if the video shows people walking around and dropping things, but they won't know if we are big or small. They can guess based on their own ecology though =).
Would be interesting to get such a sample to play around with!
What someone said about PAL / NTSC / foo, don't you think it's surprising how much you're actually seeing from a video signal even when your TV's setting is wrong?
Thing is, being "adult" used to be something very cool and people learned to fake it. Many adult adults will still be very childish if you annoy or challenge them.
Now it's cool to be dumb, ignorant and naive.
Oh the humanity!
Reading the article should give some clues about it.. I'd say that a satellite-radar-based method wouldn't really care about isostatic rebound one bit.
The ocean cannot be above the geode in one part of the world and below it in another _by definition_. At least not on average over a year.
Sure it can. I don't really see any problems with this. For example the air pressure has an important effect on the sea level, and if the surface air pressure is strengthening on average, that should well enough push the water down (or, rather, elsewhere). Air pressure could be rising following a rise in temperatures. Temperature could have a direct effect or an indirect one - maybe the increased melting results in more evaporation -> bigger air pressure. Of course air pressure can locally rise on average because of some obscure weather pattern too. The problem with the polar region is that we don't really have a good amount of pressure gauges around there.
In any case one shouldn't just assume that water follows gravity "by definition". There's another weather system going on below the surface. Maybe the Gulf stream is weakening and, in a sense, that causes less water to "pile up" in the Arctic? Or the cold fresh water currents down from the pole are doing something funny as they're growing stronger? Maybe the saline bottom currents are not, for whatever reason, properly matching the now-stronger fresh water currents?
Even these ideas are very simple while real weather systems are rather complex. I'd like to see many many different simulations about it :). Simulation really seems to be the only way to predict what will happen in these kinds of problems.
Just something.. You say controversial? Why? Isn't it a kind of common knowledge that military organizations focus on giving orders and avoiding blame? To do tasks you'd much rather not do, just enough to avoid blame, and then to go into hiding to avoid further tasks?
At least that's what they teach here to all men aged 18..
For all we know, the universe is rather big. So indeed there is a huge if not infinite number of hands dealt. And they've been dealing hands for billions of years, and it still goes on.
So, even if chemistry was random, if space (or time) is infinite, each finitely improbable hand would certainly be dealt to someone. Infinitely many times, to be exact.
Now, most scientists assume that chemistry is not random, and most planets are so big that forming some molecules by luck isn't that improbable if you count the available surface area. If you get a molecule or a set of molecules that copies itself, you have life.
No. We're completely horrified by people with the combination of alzheimers and nuclear weapons.
No, no, it's genuine. Or at least it might be. I for one think it's extremely likely that Goliath's hometown was running a successful souvenir trade for tourists visiting those parts, producing thousands of "Goliath"-pots and other branded products. This is not to say the "David vs. Goliath" story is true, but at least the story exists - thus the opportunity for 4) PROFIT!!!!!! Imagine archaeologists digging up a peculiar mug with barely readable markings saying "Yoda"..
Explain to me exactly how anything except fighting and killing are going to get rid of a ready-made foe like that? (taking him and his minions collectively)
It seems that a long-standing deadlock followed by negotiation might work (IRA, ETA). I can agree that it's a difficult situation with decades or violence for both sides. Countries can be won by devastating show of force and negotiation in a shorter timeframe.
Would you in turn explain to me how exactly should one fight and kill a readily-made foe without making new foes in the process? Imagine the Britain fighting and killing every IRA activist. Your fight-and-win POV was appropriate back then when there were countries fighting each other, but even then it only worked in some cases. For example, a large group of people who desperately want to be independent cannot be "fought and killed".
Europe, while getting blissfully unaware and more and more shocked by wartime realities, seems to honor some ideas that I think are essential to lessening the total amount of aggression. First of all, in order to "finish" an affair with a country or a rebellion against a country, you need to still be worthy of trust. If your enemy knows you have compassion and can be trusted, there is hope for true peace. It doesn't even matter that much which one wins. But as long as the enemy is the Great Satan the best peace there is is still disturbed by a bomb going off every now and then.
USA is currently also not negotiating with anyone. Not even with its allies (while deciding about Iraq). This is an enormous show of selfish pride. It also effectively prevents peaceful solutions from arising. Think about it for a while. Nobody would really fight USA and hope for a military victory. Only the most angered would wish to go kamikaze at USA from sheer hate. They want something and they want it desperately. The world doesn't even know what they want because of the lack of negotiation.
The USA is treating islamist terrorists like Britain was treating freedom fighters in colonies in 1800s. Their some rebel scum not to be taken seriously and not negotiated with. Well, the rebel ideology prevailed, was eventually negotiated with, gained independence by negotiation. Peace, end of story.
I'm not saying USA shouldn't defend itself. It should, but it should be less preemptive and more negotiating.
there will always be external forces that will want to exert power over significant reaches of (or the entire) world.
Please explain why you think this way because I disagree with you strongly. It seems to me that after the colonial era, and very visibly after the second world war, at least Europe came to see that there's no greatness in conquering land area and bringing people under one's control. I think power is a primitive motivation and really, I don't know personally anyone who would be motivated by power. Even the USA is not trying to annex anybody. Actually, I can't tell of any recent examples except for Iraq possibly wishing to annex Kuwait.
Times are changing. You cannot tell future by studying the past. Some of us are desperately trying to make the global future into something very unlike our history. One reason USA is hated is that they seem to be counteracting what some believe is global moral development.
I do not believe that any culture can advance, for more than a few centuries at a time, on a technological front alone. Morals and ethics must not lag behind science, otherwise the social system will breed poisons which will cause its certain destruction. I believe therefore that with superhuman knowledge must go equally great compassion and tolerance. - Arthur C. Clarke
After all, we want to live peaceful lives. Democracy itself (real democracy, the kind in which people have power) prevents war because those deciding about the wars are the ones who suffer them. There are no longer material reasons for war in most countries. Religious fanaticism is declining (big picture, Bus
I think Dovecot is much nicer than Binc. I would be interested in why you think otherwise!
Why, of course. First, it is slightly cheaper; and secondly it has the words qmail-pop3d and www.qmail.org inscribed in large friendly letters on its homepage.
Seriously though, only the latter had a meaning when I made my choice. I had originally installed qmail because a friend recommended it and I installed an imapd later when I started to need it. I first tried courier-imapd but couldn't figure out how to make it work at the time, and binc happened to be the next one to try; maybe it was mentioned on qmail.org. It matched my needs perfectly - installation was a snap and it has worked flawlessly ever since. Thus, I never got to try Dovecot or any other imapd.
If you have experience from both, I would be interested in why you think Dovecot's better!
I just did a qmail install yesterday and even when it's a good program it has a long steep learning curve. Every time I install qmail I need to google around, read a lot of documents and understand new things to decide what I need. Netqmail is a good but insufficient starting point while qmailrocks.org's version is completely overblown (at least for me). While figuring out the patches and other tools I'd need I couldn't help plotting yet another qmail package of my own.
Improving netqmail and making it what qmail should be would be great.
As an aside, my personal feeling is that if DJB sticks to his licensing (and continues to ignore all the patching) we need to eventually rewrite qmail. It's getting worse by the day and the patches are already starting to conflict with each other.