The research is being done at the AMES labs in Moffett field, California. Home of the climate model for Mars and Solar system modelling and numerical modelling in general. As well as some X-projects (as in X15 and X33).
It's entirely possible this article and the security program is directed at Windows users only. Neither Cisco or the Anti-virus vendors are malicious enough (IMHO) to block Unix/Mac boxes because they don't need the anti-virus software the companies sell. The wild internet frontier of email-address-confirming porn and Gatorware is probably here to stay.
It's also possible they might figure out a way to block certain version of programs, say WuFTPd, from having an unsecured link to the outside world. This could help prevent a university network being used as a DDOS tool because a student didn't upgrade his ftp server. Or a mail server which doesn't smart-relay through an authenticating server to stop student PC's spamming.
It's not always a virus that brings a network down. But when a university is forced to print 10,000 CDs with anti-virus and windows worm-removing tools to give to new students (who aren't allowed access to the university network if their box looks active on port 137) this might look like an alternative.
The evil that it does bring is in the form of anti-Free networking, where Linux boxes are used to form cheap routers and gateways, without a Cisco(R)-Symantec(R) licensed monitoring system, your access to the larger internet may be limited by your upstream provider, ala Verisign certs.
This system is probably for the intranet users to stop an OE/ IE virus bringing down their system before the poor tech guy patches the boxes.
> God Bless America, with barely 300 years of dire history and culture
Hint: we're still on our first Republic. France is on their fifth, with intervening Reigns of Terror, anarchy, kings, emperors, and Nazi collaborationist regimes.
You're actually on your third or forth, depending on whether you count the native Americans you removed. Then you have the pre-confederate days, a small war for independence (with some French aid) got rid of the English.
Then you got a decade or so of weakening the confederate government and a transition to a republic with the drafting of the Consititution. Then you had a civil war when the South decided they liked holding Africans as their property.
Your culture dominates the world...yes, yes it does, congratulations on that.
Posting this as newsworthy less than a week after it was published in a journal is silly. Research takes time, debunking research takes more time.
The authors of the original paper have posted their rebutal already (as linked to by Millionth Monkey. At the moment its still a virtual mud-fight, each side calling the others' data and method wrong.
The abstract from this paper reads like a shotgun attack on the original paper, if your going to critique another author's work it helps not call their data obselete and their method poor, at least not in the abstract. You have a better chance of cooperation and admission of error then.
Both authors of this paper also seem to be first time authors in the field (not that the data should be discounted on that fact alone), McIntyre has no apparent affiliation with a university and McKitrick is an Economist (who has published before, albeit in book form).
For further backup of their theory, more sources are needed (they don't appear to include any supportive references). For example, we have John Daly's account of the hockey stick. There's also Massan's critique, showing essentially the same thing (medieval warm period being ignored by Mann et al.) This data seems to have been sourced from The Greening Earth Society, which, conveniently, is a Oil lobbying organisation.
Citing a paper, published in the last week, submitted by an Anonymous Reader (to Slashdot), using the National Post and USA Today as supporting material isn't the proper way to do serious science. The USA Today article opens with
" An important new paper in the journal Energy & Environment". The paper is a week old!
Anyway, at least I have some fun reading tonight, ooh, and some data to play with.
we want individual tracks as opposed to complete albums,
I would be so happy if the facts in this case supported that argument. According to the LAMP website, 9 out of the top 10 songs played this week are from the same Coldplay album (however long that 'week' actually represents...).
From this I would suggest that music buyers want good music, be it in album or single form. However, in the absence of good music they will listen to any old trash with minimum clothing. The music labels know this and strippers are cheaper than singers.
There are unlawful wars, there are international laws. Invading a country without a formal decleration of war is against international treaties/laws. The US has not formally declared war since World War II.
The public reason for the war was that Iraq had WMD and could be ready to use them in 45 minutes , and they were trying to get Uranium from Africa. None of that was true as it turns out. How can you be so sure everybody in congress had more information than you did? Did they all have access to the intelligence? They didn't declare war, they chickened out and gave Bush their support for whatever action he deemed necessary.
I don't remember being told democracy is the best political system for conservative muslims. The US tried that in Iran, they had a revolution and installed a muslim fundamentalist.
In this case, the US did claim to represent the world, they were ridding the world of one of the 3 members of the axis of evil, they went to the UN to ask for support, they were told be almost every other country that it was not necessary to go to war. They pulled out weapon inspectors who had reported no WMD finds YET. They still haven't found the WMD.
The US government wasn't founded to protect the world, that much is true. But everytime they have decided isolationism is the best way (just before World War I, II, early fifties, late eighties), they find that another part of the world destabalizes and affects their interests. War is good for business but so is peace.
US policy has often not been in the best interests of the people, a capatalist democracy doesn't do that, the US policy is designed to be in the best interest of the those who make it, be they the seatraders of the 18th century (Boston Tea Party...), the farmers/ land owners (Native Americans) or the multi-national corporations (you don't need examples).
A strong national defense is a necessary policy, the US currently spends more on its National Defence than the rest of the world put together, why? They have Nuclear defenses to protect against the big five (2 if you discount the UK and France), they have an air force more powerful than anything the world has ever seen, that takes care of the small/medium fish, Milosovic et al.
As they are finding out, holding up the american flag and driving through town in an M1 Abrahms doesn't work on the groups opposed to your way of life, for that you need to find some guy who doesn't mind you and who the terrorists don't mind (Arafat isn't the poster boy for the middle east peace process for nothing). Then you take out the worst groups and talk with the rest. The process is slow, painful and involves admitting your own mistakes (something that hasn't happened either in Nothern Ireland or Israel yet).
You don't use mysterious germs to threaten nation states, you use them to threaten people. V2 flying bombs, mustard gas, Gatling gun...
Marketing uses aside, this could be of use to blind people , it could tell the shopper which aisle they are in and what brand and product they are near to. It could even read out the shopping list they have prepared.
Wheelchair disabled users could have a touchscreen map linked to their motorised wheelchair, allowing their wheelchair to position them closer to the shelf they want instead of trying to manouver their feet out of the way.
Deaf users could have speech-to-text converters to talk with the shop attendants, etc.
From the 400 or so years that are classed as the Old English (upto abotu 1150 AD), we have a total of 5 million words in texts. That would probably fit on less floppy disks than Windows 3.11 and its Dos. Or in my telephone.
It's true that not all bits are equal.
You can also measure the speed of light using ants, the ants are small enough that they can fit into the low energy points of the microwave.
If you put some ants in the microwave, and switch it on, they all start moving from the heat into the cold spots, measure the distance between the cold spots and you have the wavelength.
Obviously, you shouldn't *actually* try this, unless the ants happen to climb in there looking for food, then they're fair game:) And take the turntable out, that's cruel.
The calculation (chocolate or ants) does still rely on prior knowledge of the frequency of the microwave(s) being used. Trying to measure the speed of light without a prior fixed frequency or wavelength is much more taxing. A shortwave radio can help though, or a flashlight and a large telescope (bouncing signals off the moon)
The graph doesn't show what you think it does, no correlation is being made between the level of CO2 and the temperature change since pre-industrial times.
It is undeniable that CO2 levels have increased since pre-industrial times, this has been measure by direct sampling of the atmosphere as well as by proxy measurement of the Icelandic and Greenland ice sheets.
"To state that the increase in CO2 is undeniably causing the increase in temperature" is bad science, but only because you provided no context. There is strong evidence that CO2 absorbs strongly in the infra red and weakly in the visible. Incoming radiation from the Sun is allowed in, outgoing is absorbed and causes the CO2 and surrounding gases to heat up.
Further, if we take the two other terrestrial planets as "test Earths" for extreme climates, both Mars and Venus have 90 % CO2, as such their not in the same regime as the Earth, however, Mars should be approximately 20K cooler than has been measured, this is due to the heat absorbed the the atmosphere.
Venus, which also has global cloud coverage has a heat increase of over 400 K compared to what it "should" be (under reasonable black body assumptions). This was agreed on as early as the 60's (proposed by Sagan in 60/62), there are no other plausible reasons for such a huge increase in heat, the clouds on Venus block out 95% of the incoming light from the surface, yet it's hot enough to melt lead.
We have experiments to back up the scientific conclusions that have been made, numerical models (CPDN for example) have performed numerous experiments where concentrations of CO2 and other GhG are increased over a period, the mean temperature increase is positive even when no other conditions are explicitely changed. Theoretical chemistry can calculate pretty well how different gases will react under given conditions. When Chapman devised the Ozone balance, it turned out it wasn't quite right, until CFC and OH/NO radicals were included. Models of CO2 and other GhG are simple enough, they absorb IR, they don't absorb Visible, there aren't many conclusions that can be drawn from that.
I'm not entirely sure which four in you list you refer to,but...
The heat balance of the earth is measured in numbers much bigger than the heat output of fuel burning, one second of solar input is 0.7 kW per square metre average over the entire Earth,compared to an estimated 0.01 Kw/m^2 for the total power output, that's 1% of the total (that's current day values).
Is the Earth going through a warmer part of the what now? The galaxy/ Universe is slightly bigger than the Earth, and it has a mean value of 2.7 K
How would this Earth core heating manifest itself? more volcanos I guess? Also regular Earthquakes as the mantle reconfigures to a more stable state, neither of these have been seen to my knowledge.
We can measure the output form the Sun pretty accurtaly, either by, you know, looking at it, which we have been doing (wrt Ozone) since 1920. Proxy measurements from sedimentiary rocks and ice sheets extend this to at least a billion or two years. The paleoclimatalogical solar constant was about 7% lower than the present day value, the Earth was covered in ice, even to the equator.
The total area covered by satellites is so depressingly small that they probably won't even register on the millikelvin instruments used to measure absolute zero. The satellites which absorb significant amount of heat (most of them) rotate in order the face cold space to radiate the heat away from the Sun, this is the "barbecue roll" theat they talk about in Apollo 13 just before the explosion. The moon is huge, satellites small, no effect here, move on.
I have to ask what is possibly a stupid question...
Is it possible to get the Versign website to DDOS itself? If the server uses server side includes then it can include itself? Would it stop if the client stopped requesting the page or would it keep looping until it maxed out the server threads?
Or, if not server side include, a javascript 'wget' maybe, but that's client side.
I work on climate modelling (same building as the CPDN Oxford people) and I use IDL to view the output (like CPDN will be doing when they release the IDL based viewer).
IDL direct graphics are so easy to use just to view a quick plot of the winds or temperature and array manipulation is fast, especially with 100,000 element arrays. My biggest problem with it is that the memory use is much bigger that the data you read in. I've read numbers like a factor of 8 because of the data structures, which I can believe after writing some C code plugins (ahh, order O(1) optimisations are fun..)
It doesn't look too difficult to write some kind of clone of IDL, the specifications in the help files show the internals quite well (so that you can write plugins) but I get the feeling that all is not being revealed (keyword arguments for example). I'll have to look at Octave one day.
What do you use as a replacement for IDL? Some other researchers here (non-modelling mostly) use Mathematica or matlab, but I've never tried them because it's still a choice of expensive-tool-1 or expensive-tool-2.
IDL 6 of course, has changed. Direct graphics are gone and have been replaced by iTools, which reimplement direct graphics internally in object graphics (the stuff used to make gui programs), users in the IDL-pwave newsgroup seem confused. Luckily I think the site licence we have is limited to point upgrades of IDL 5 for now.
It's possible that he/she wanted you to find the
Sierra Times article on the greenhouse effect. Whose conclusion is...
Perhaps we would be better served by accepting that changes in the temperature of the Earth do occur and they are not under our control. Then we can get on with business.
Just before pointing out that General Relativity might be wrong.
Rumours on the forum are that it can be run under WineX or some such things, as well, of course, as VMWare.
There is no problem with running the model on Linux though, the model itself will run under any operating system with enough power, it was originally written for a Cray and is still used at the Met Office on Cray-like machines (specifically a a T3E, I think).
The model will (and does) currently run on Linux, quite happily, the problem with running CP.net on Linux is that the program used to control the model is currently windows only, as is the visualisation software.
As for running the model without the control program, there are two problems, the first is that the interface is....not good. It uses Fortran namelists for most of the non-compiled variables and input files with specifications that were dreamt up by Satan on LSD (It's always a good sign when the program itself doesn't follow the file specifications). The CP.net team have created a "virtual grad-student" (their words) which will look after your model and redo any calculations it needs, as well as deciding when to report back to CP.net and take a coffee break. Having sat waiting for the model to run/crash I wish I had a toy like that, even if I did have to make the coffee.
The second problem is that the model is balanced on a knife edge. There is a continuous battle between realistic physics (more complicated functions, shorter integration timesteps, slower model) and getting some work done (longer timesteps, simple physics, etc.). A part of this project will be to find out which parameters can be changed in such a way as to make the model fall over and become an ice planet or any of the other non physical but numerically feasible solutions.
It will take a long time to run each model, as the website says, but this is pretty much the simplest model which would produce a useful result, even on a 2.6Ghz Athlon you won't get more than about a day every six minutes (3 minutes for the atmosphere, 3 minutes for the ocean) for the full model, 50 years is 360*6*50 = 108000 minutes (75 days) on 24/7, luckily (?) a good portion of the models will fail before then, some will take longer as the results are checked if they look extreme. The real physical differences produced will only be a subset of the results from the experiment.
The model can go faster, e.g. a variation has been developed by the MetOffice where the Ocean model can runs upto 10 times faster than in the CP model, the main reason for this speed up? Iceland was deleted from the map:) (in terms of size, I think Ireland and the UK are next)
The data which will result in this project will hopefully be able to give a quantitative prediction of how bad things might get if we (say) double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it can tell us (=scientists) how likely it is that New York will be flooded or El Nino will shutdown. Whether or not the data will be 'open' is anybody's guess. Checking the sponsers, at least one of them is an insurance company that insures based on weather forecasts (good crop weather, flooding, etc.), I have little doubt about the commercial value of the data (c.f Cancer research programs).
As for the people who want access to the model source (and the source for the visualisation programs I guess). Are you completely out of your mind:) It's half a million lines of Fortran which has been written by many many people over about 10 years. Having access to the source in this case would benefit nobody. It only does 1 thing, model the climate. The atmosphere model has about 50 different options for the physics schemes, 10 different dynamical schemes and noise filtering options, all of which need to be set up properly to have any chance of working. The 'simple' ocean model has another load of options, then the 'complex' ocean model has another load of options, then there are multiple way to couple the atmosphere and ocean together. (Also, *shock horror*, it has bugs in it.)
videophones have been around for a while in the UK and in other countries(seems to be broken?). The quality still isn't brilliant but Orange(I think) have started to offer Soccer highlights over the latest phones.
moon colonies, ok, we chose to put a space station up there first, and then realised it costs a lot of money for little (commercial or military) value. Moon colonies are sadly not as sexy as say a Mars colony, or even a Mars mission, which ESA has planned in 25 years, NASA tried and continues to test methods of producing enough food,air and water, other countries,notably India and China have planned Moon landings so we are going back. Space is unfortunately used as a pissing contest between nuclear neighbours, when this stops then some more science can get done(e.g. Hubble, Galileo, Beagle 2)
food in pills. You can get food in pills, just not the calories, vitamins will give you nearly all of the trace elements you need to live. Calories are a lot harder, to get 500 Calories into a pill means eating something with 40 times the energy concentration of sugar or twenty times the concentration of fats, I doubt the human body would have much success digesting such complicated food. You can however get protein and creatine supplements which are in tablet/powder form, and sugar sweets( those silly energy sweets which taste of really sour orange) have more calories than their equivalent weight in sugar. (The protein supplements also tend to taste bad and are fed to animals instead. )
cars that drive themselves; power steering has been around for a while, as has ABS and cruise control, that is about as much as the current laws will allow on the public roads. intelligent carshave been developed, which, when combined with other intelligent cars, are actually safe. It's the human drivers who freak out at the sight of a driverless car that's the problem:-)
jet packs; Jet packs appeared in Thunderball (James Bond). You can buy them if you have enough money, or you can build themif you want. They're not used much because, much like the Segway, there are easier and cheaper way of getting around.
moving sidewalk's are in most airports now, as well as some metrostations.
There have also been "moving stairs" around for just as long.
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This post brought to you by Google.com, paid for by Google For America, Inc.
Why should the government use open source software instead of closed source software? It's my money their spending, so I should get the benefit from it in the end (free and Free software).
Why shouldn't this apply to state (and paid for by pseduo-taxes) owned television. Okay, so we can charge for the bandwidth, nobody said you have to get your redhat ISO's for free of redhat.com, the BBC could charge micropayments<buzzword/> for their episodes, a dollar (plus bandwidth?) an episode? This would not only allow use to get cheap episodes but might also serve to stick it to the MPAA/RIAA clans with online distribution.
And you could always give 200 free(-beer) downloads to license payers. I might buy a license then (no TV...)
The biggest problem I can see with either free or cost-covered distribution are the pirates (I can feel the MPAA dancing in their mansions now). If the BBC goes after them, it legitimizes the MPAA argument that even if they offer it cheaply, people will still steal. If the BBC doesn't go after them, any money they do get might rapidly decrease as mirror sites pop up and the MPAA will use this as in their "online-distribution is not profitable" argument.
Ok, replace 5 with 12 and your got pretty much the same conclusion as me. The top universities seem to get pretty much the same coverage from employers. The employers who only recruit from the top 4 or Cambridge are normally for the super-high flying jobs paying huge amounts just for training (at least the ones who interviewed me did:). Also, IMHO, they are being very silly doing that, it reduces supply thus increasing pay of the top Universities and the students will likely be taught by the same people with the same ideas.
At the moment, all universites do cost the same, not ! The tuition may be a token payment right now, but when top-up fees start then differentials will occur, starting with the top 8 (the 'Red brick' universities). Plus there are many ways your university can fleece you. Accomodation, extras like washing machines, network usage, examwear (Oxbridge has a silly number of gowns and rules for exam suits), etc.
I'm guessing from your post you studied a science at Cambridge? (hey, this is Slashdot, I doubt your an English student?) No, they don't accept only weathly independently educated students but they don't always accept on merit either. The male--female ratio is low in most colleges, the state-public school ratio is low in most colleges, the colored-white british national ratio is low in most colleges, many of the science subjects encourage you to do some kind of low-paid summer research. I don't honestly think they provide "cheap good lodgings". They try and compete on the open market by increasing their rents way above inflation (mine does at least).
...anyway..Yes they do give you an advantage, but you are (or will be when alumni reunion time comes) paying for that advantage.
There's no need to qualify it with 2/3rd of them are spam, they all cost AOL money, none of them should be deleted unless their customer has asked them to. AOL has common carrier status, they don't look into your data unless you (or the FBI) ask them.
When you pay for something, you do get a right, it's not consitutional, but it's derived from it. The right you get is the right to receive the goods/services you have paid for. AOL (and all other ISP I have seen) have clauses stating "shit happens" and that's fine. How long will it be until somebody at AOL realises that 1/3 of a billion emails are costing them money, why not create an AOL-stamp?
Isn't it an external company suing anyway? Their complaining that they blocked their C class (only 64000 ip numbers !) because there may have been a spam-network on there.
Having said all that, AOL are accusing them of spamming, CIHost (the other company) are saying they don't, and that they have spam-filters installed which cannot be turned off by customers. CIHost go on to accuse AOL (in a roundabout way) of soliciting their customers, and the courts have ordered AOL not to contact them anymore (no more AOL cds?). CIHost have also got a restraining order blocking AOL free speech on the court case, <irony>which is brilliant</irony>.
-- workingassets.com spammed me today, so I thought I'd put this here.
I did think it was made before ER, not that it's any better because of that:) Also, since when are the last-episode disasters "true to the original format"? From the few episodes/series I was forced to sit through as a child (pre-ER) I don't remember it being anything but a soap-opera with cuts and bruises?
It could possibly be the blurry vision of memory though, I seem to remember Saturday night being the blockbuster film night....
The big question is what acutally consitutes the "BBC archive"? Is it everything that's ever been shown on the BBC, or is it only the in-house produced BBC programs?
To take an obvious example, The Simpsons, their definately not BBC property, so I doubt they'll be in the archive, neither will any of the other American imports (24, Buffy, Star Trek, etc.). But then, what about Blackadder? Surely that was made by the BBC? The rights to Blackadder are owned by Tiger productions (Rowan Atkinson's company), this includes the DVD rights for example. Will this be in the archive?
What about Monty Python, 'Allo 'Allo, Red Dwarf, Dr Who or Hitchhikers? A (non-authoritative ) Amazon check suggests that they are all distributed by BBC worldwide, which is the commerical arm of the BBC (and produces all of the commercial UK-* stations on Sky), but how many of these have additional rights? Red Dwarf (the book) is owned by Grant Naylor, Hitchhikers by Douglas Adams. How many books will get sold if these episodes are available for free?
There's also the digitising problem, It might not seem like it, but only in the last 5 years have any TV programs been digitally stored. And the BBC tend to lose things, they lost episodes of Dr Who for example (one is still missing I think), so how many of these archives will be complete?
I am truly hoping that most BBC aired programs will be there (you might have to wait for
"The Office"?) but I have a horrible feeling it'll be an archive of Eastenders (bad bad soap opera), Casualty (no blood-n-guts E.R. clone) and Noel's house party (please god no).
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What a time to be sitting on a Gigabit university network...:)
a. Intruder Alarm company is now a "viable business".
b. Intruder Alarms are needed AT ALL?
The world is full of people who will do bad things to you in order to `improve' their life, (they're assuming it's a zero sum game I guess). Sometimes we have to take defensive action against them until it stops, or until it falls below our radars.
Spam numbers have been increasing exponentially for a year now (probably more), major ISP(s) are starting to provide spam filtering services in their packages just like 50 years ago some television programs were actually broadcast in colour(!). Eventually, spam will start to decrease and the spam-filter will be turned down with them (to allow some false positives and negatives through) until an acceptable threshold is reached.
Spam filter companies are viable now, just as vacuum tube manufacturers were 50 years ago, then somebody invented the transistor, it was sleek, small and stopped spam (hmm...). Some of your replies allude to Anti-Virus software. How many of the recent viruses were `proper' viruses, and not DOS attacks on windows services or VBA worms in Outlook. They aren't really viruses, their just malicious code exploit some bug in MS code.
Don't worry, the sun will rise tomorrow, and you'll get emails telling you how small your penis is, how much the Nigerian bankers make in 7 days and how to get expensive electronics for free, that can't be bad, can it?
Wow:). It's like the `mysterious future', only in the real world.
When the UK gov. introduced the 1000 UKP tuition fee, they increased the student loan by 1000 UKP, but 'means tested' it, the poorer you are, the more debt you can have (also the less tuition you pay, but money is money to students:)
The means testing of course, isn't based on your potential, or your course, or whether your going to be a nurse, a teacher or a business analyst. It's based on what your parents earn. Any family earning more than 30,000 UKP (2 parents, 2 kids), will pay full cost. You even get from the government telling you much you parents will give you:)
The U.K. government found that their 1000 UKP tuition fees didn't achieve it's goal of 50% of school leavers going to university. So now they think they should start allowing "top" universties (those that can get away with it) to start charging top-up fees up to 4000 UKP. The more money in the education system, the more people can get grants, apparently.
The privatised student loan companies charge the interest on the loan based on inflation ("tied to inflation" in the legal jargon), so, knowing how pay has increased, they have redifined how inflation is calculated, increasing interest rates by 100% (almost double the rate of inflation , and 1% less than a 100,000 UKP mortgate will cost)
especially since in America there's not much difference, in real world terms, between ivy league and Schmoe U.
I think this is true pretty much everywhere, in the UK we have league tables showing which is the best university. If you want an 'ivy-league' your told Oxford or Cambridge, otherwise, anything ranked between 5 and 70 that does your course (and from what I remember, has a favourable m/f ratio:) is good enough. Oxford or Cambridge is only a significant edge if your name is Clinton or crown prince....
The crazy thing is, it's not the graduates who will actually have to pay this 1k/ year.
Ever since tuition fees were introduced graduate pay (especially for top universities) has gone up by huge amounts. When I started (4 years ago) a finance job in the London stockmarkets would get you about 20K UKP, when I graduated I was doing 'milk-rounds' for 30K with consultancy firms.
For some reason, I chose grad student life, on 9K. Something went wrong there. I do get to surf slashdot for 5 hours a day though, then have a coffee break:)
...back to the point...These pay rises are not being payed for by inflation, prices will rise,services will cost more. Graduates will be able to afford the proportional increase, people who didn't go to university won't. Something that was meant to guarantee access for poor people ends up kicking them where it hurts.
Thank you Ed (or is it Bob?), but I stand by my reasoning, the last word in the image is 'below', but they have used a lower case omega as the w, and typically (in Microsft Word and in latex), omicron is in a different font to 'o'. Plus there are other ways to write that sentence.
Slashdot Mirror
The research is being done at the AMES labs in Moffett field, California. Home of the climate model for Mars and Solar system modelling and numerical modelling in general. As well as some X-projects (as in X15 and X33).
NASA doesn't just send things into space anymore.
It's entirely possible this article and the security program is directed at Windows users only. Neither Cisco or the Anti-virus vendors are malicious enough (IMHO) to block Unix/Mac boxes because they don't need the anti-virus software the companies sell. The wild internet frontier of email-address-confirming porn and Gatorware is probably here to stay.
It's also possible they might figure out a way to block certain version of programs, say WuFTPd, from having an unsecured link to the outside world. This could help prevent a university network being used as a DDOS tool because a student didn't upgrade his ftp server. Or a mail server which doesn't smart-relay through an authenticating server to stop student PC's spamming.
It's not always a virus that brings a network down. But when a university is forced to print 10,000 CDs with anti-virus and windows worm-removing tools to give to new students (who aren't allowed access to the university network if their box looks active on port 137) this might look like an alternative.
The evil that it does bring is in the form of anti-Free networking, where Linux boxes are used to form cheap routers and gateways, without a Cisco(R)-Symantec(R) licensed monitoring system, your access to the larger internet may be limited by your upstream provider, ala Verisign certs.
This system is probably for the intranet users to stop an OE/ IE virus bringing down their system before the poor tech guy patches the boxes.
> God Bless America, with barely 300 years of dire history and culture
Hint: we're still on our first Republic. France is on their fifth, with intervening Reigns of Terror, anarchy, kings, emperors, and Nazi collaborationist regimes.
You're actually on your third or forth, depending on whether you count the native Americans you removed. Then you have the pre-confederate days, a small war for independence (with some French aid) got rid of the English.
Then you got a decade or so of weakening the confederate government and a transition to a republic with the drafting of the Consititution. Then you had a civil war when the South decided they liked holding Africans as their property.
Your culture dominates the world...yes, yes it does, congratulations on that.
Posting this as newsworthy less than a week after it was published in a journal is silly. Research takes time, debunking research takes more time.
The authors of the original paper have posted their rebutal already (as linked to by Millionth Monkey. At the moment its still a virtual mud-fight, each side calling the others' data and method wrong.
The abstract from this paper reads like a shotgun attack on the original paper, if your going to critique another author's work it helps not call their data obselete and their method poor, at least not in the abstract. You have a better chance of cooperation and admission of error then.
Both authors of this paper also seem to be first time authors in the field (not that the data should be discounted on that fact alone), McIntyre has no apparent affiliation with a university and McKitrick is an Economist (who has published before, albeit in book form).
For further backup of their theory, more sources are needed (they don't appear to include any supportive references). For example, we have John Daly's account of the hockey stick. There's also Massan's critique, showing essentially the same thing (medieval warm period being ignored by Mann et al.) This data seems to have been sourced from The Greening Earth Society, which, conveniently, is a Oil lobbying organisation.
We can find even more Oil funded rebutals to the original Mann paper, 1,2 (a tenuous link to the Greening Earth Society and General Motors...)
Citing a paper, published in the last week, submitted by an Anonymous Reader (to Slashdot), using the National Post and USA Today as supporting material isn't the proper way to do serious science. The USA Today article opens with " An important new paper in the journal Energy & Environment". The paper is a week old!
Anyway, at least I have some fun reading tonight, ooh, and some data to play with.
we want individual tracks as opposed to complete albums,
I would be so happy if the facts in this case supported that argument. According to the LAMP website, 9 out of the top 10 songs played this week are from the same Coldplay album (however long that 'week' actually represents...).
From this I would suggest that music buyers want good music, be it in album or single form. However, in the absence of good music they will listen to any old trash with minimum clothing. The music labels know this and strippers are cheaper than singers.
I'm aware of the irony, but I didn't know what Teoma was (or that existed). So I searched on Google for it.
There are unlawful wars, there are international laws. Invading a country without a formal decleration of war is against international treaties/laws. The US has not formally declared war since World War II.
The public reason for the war was that Iraq had WMD and could be ready to use them in 45 minutes , and they were trying to get Uranium from Africa. None of that was true as it turns out. How can you be so sure everybody in congress had more information than you did? Did they all have access to the intelligence? They didn't declare war, they chickened out and gave Bush their support for whatever action he deemed necessary.
I don't remember being told democracy is the best political system for conservative muslims. The US tried that in Iran, they had a revolution and installed a muslim fundamentalist.
In this case, the US did claim to represent the world, they were ridding the world of one of the 3 members of the axis of evil, they went to the UN to ask for support, they were told be almost every other country that it was not necessary to go to war. They pulled out weapon inspectors who had reported no WMD finds YET. They still haven't found the WMD.
The US government wasn't founded to protect the world, that much is true. But everytime they have decided isolationism is the best way (just before World War I, II, early fifties, late eighties), they find that another part of the world destabalizes and affects their interests. War is good for business but so is peace.
US policy has often not been in the best interests of the people, a capatalist democracy doesn't do that, the US policy is designed to be in the best interest of the those who make it, be they the seatraders of the 18th century (Boston Tea Party...), the farmers/ land owners (Native Americans) or the multi-national corporations (you don't need examples).
A strong national defense is a necessary policy, the US currently spends more on its National Defence than the rest of the world put together, why? They have Nuclear defenses to protect against the big five (2 if you discount the UK and France), they have an air force more powerful than anything the world has ever seen, that takes care of the small/medium fish, Milosovic et al.
As they are finding out, holding up the american flag and driving through town in an M1 Abrahms doesn't work on the groups opposed to your way of life, for that you need to find some guy who doesn't mind you and who the terrorists don't mind (Arafat isn't the poster boy for the middle east peace process for nothing). Then you take out the worst groups and talk with the rest. The process is slow, painful and involves admitting your own mistakes (something that hasn't happened either in Nothern Ireland or Israel yet).
You don't use mysterious germs to threaten nation states, you use them to threaten people. V2 flying bombs, mustard gas, Gatling gun...
Marketing uses aside, this could be of use to blind people , it could tell the shopper which aisle they are in and what brand and product they are near to. It could even read out the shopping list they have prepared.
Wheelchair disabled users could have a touchscreen map linked to their motorised wheelchair, allowing their wheelchair to position them closer to the shelf they want instead of trying to manouver their feet out of the way.
Deaf users could have speech-to-text converters to talk with the shop attendants, etc.
just dreaming, move along...
BB
From the 400 or so years that are classed as the Old English (upto abotu 1150 AD), we have a total of 5 million words in texts. That would probably fit on less floppy disks than Windows 3.11 and its Dos. Or in my telephone. It's true that not all bits are equal.
You can also measure the speed of light using ants, the ants are small enough that they can fit into the low energy points of the microwave.
If you put some ants in the microwave, and switch it on, they all start moving from the heat into the cold spots, measure the distance between the cold spots and you have the wavelength.
Obviously, you shouldn't *actually* try this, unless the ants happen to climb in there looking for food, then they're fair game :) And take the turntable out, that's cruel.
The calculation (chocolate or ants) does still rely on prior knowledge of the frequency of the microwave(s) being used. Trying to measure the speed of light without a prior fixed frequency or wavelength is much more taxing. A shortwave radio can help though, or a flashlight and a large telescope (bouncing signals off the moon)
The graph doesn't show what you think it does, no correlation is being made between the level of CO2 and the temperature change since pre-industrial times.
It is undeniable that CO2 levels have increased since pre-industrial times, this has been measure by direct sampling of the atmosphere as well as by proxy measurement of the Icelandic and Greenland ice sheets.
"To state that the increase in CO2 is undeniably causing the increase in temperature" is bad science, but only because you provided no context. There is strong evidence that CO2 absorbs strongly in the infra red and weakly in the visible. Incoming radiation from the Sun is allowed in, outgoing is absorbed and causes the CO2 and surrounding gases to heat up.
Further, if we take the two other terrestrial planets as "test Earths" for extreme climates, both Mars and Venus have 90 % CO2, as such their not in the same regime as the Earth, however, Mars should be approximately 20K cooler than has been measured, this is due to the heat absorbed the the atmosphere.
Venus, which also has global cloud coverage has a heat increase of over 400 K compared to what it "should" be (under reasonable black body assumptions). This was agreed on as early as the 60's (proposed by Sagan in 60/62), there are no other plausible reasons for such a huge increase in heat, the clouds on Venus block out 95% of the incoming light from the surface, yet it's hot enough to melt lead.
We have experiments to back up the scientific conclusions that have been made, numerical models (CPDN for example) have performed numerous experiments where concentrations of CO2 and other GhG are increased over a period, the mean temperature increase is positive even when no other conditions are explicitely changed. Theoretical chemistry can calculate pretty well how different gases will react under given conditions. When Chapman devised the Ozone balance, it turned out it wasn't quite right, until CFC and OH/NO radicals were included. Models of CO2 and other GhG are simple enough, they absorb IR, they don't absorb Visible, there aren't many conclusions that can be drawn from that.
I'm not entirely sure which four in you list you refer to,but...
I have to ask what is possibly a stupid question...
Is it possible to get the Versign website to DDOS itself? If the server uses server side includes then it can include itself? Would it stop if the client stopped requesting the page or would it keep looping until it maxed out the server threads?
Or, if not server side include, a javascript 'wget' maybe, but that's client side.
I work on climate modelling (same building as the CPDN Oxford people) and I use IDL to view the output (like CPDN will be doing when they release the IDL based viewer).
IDL direct graphics are so easy to use just to view a quick plot of the winds or temperature and array manipulation is fast, especially with 100,000 element arrays. My biggest problem with it is that the memory use is much bigger that the data you read in. I've read numbers like a factor of 8 because of the data structures, which I can believe after writing some C code plugins (ahh, order O(1) optimisations are fun..)
It doesn't look too difficult to write some kind of clone of IDL, the specifications in the help files show the internals quite well (so that you can write plugins) but I get the feeling that all is not being revealed (keyword arguments for example). I'll have to look at Octave one day.
What do you use as a replacement for IDL? Some other researchers here (non-modelling mostly) use Mathematica or matlab, but I've never tried them because it's still a choice of expensive-tool-1 or expensive-tool-2.
IDL 6 of course, has changed. Direct graphics are gone and have been replaced by iTools, which reimplement direct graphics internally in object graphics (the stuff used to make gui programs), users in the IDL-pwave newsgroup seem confused. Luckily I think the site licence we have is limited to point upgrades of IDL 5 for now.
It's possible that he/she wanted you to find the Sierra Times article on the greenhouse effect. Whose conclusion is...
Perhaps we would be better served by accepting that changes in the temperature of the Earth do occur and they are not under our control. Then we can get on with business.
Just before pointing out that General Relativity might be wrong.
Rumours on the forum are that it can be run under WineX or some such things, as well, of course, as VMWare.
There is no problem with running the model on Linux though, the model itself will run under any operating system with enough power, it was originally written for a Cray and is still used at the Met Office on Cray-like machines (specifically a a T3E, I think).
The model will (and does) currently run on Linux, quite happily, the problem with running CP.net on Linux is that the program used to control the model is currently windows only, as is the visualisation software.
As for running the model without the control program, there are two problems, the first is that the interface is....not good. It uses Fortran namelists for most of the non-compiled variables and input files with specifications that were dreamt up by Satan on LSD (It's always a good sign when the program itself doesn't follow the file specifications). The CP.net team have created a "virtual grad-student" (their words) which will look after your model and redo any calculations it needs, as well as deciding when to report back to CP.net and take a coffee break. Having sat waiting for the model to run/crash I wish I had a toy like that, even if I did have to make the coffee.
The second problem is that the model is balanced on a knife edge. There is a continuous battle between realistic physics (more complicated functions, shorter integration timesteps, slower model) and getting some work done (longer timesteps, simple physics, etc.). A part of this project will be to find out which parameters can be changed in such a way as to make the model fall over and become an ice planet or any of the other non physical but numerically feasible solutions.
It will take a long time to run each model, as the website says, but this is pretty much the simplest model which would produce a useful result, even on a 2.6Ghz Athlon you won't get more than about a day every six minutes (3 minutes for the atmosphere, 3 minutes for the ocean) for the full model, 50 years is 360*6*50 = 108000 minutes (75 days) on 24/7, luckily (?) a good portion of the models will fail before then, some will take longer as the results are checked if they look extreme. The real physical differences produced will only be a subset of the results from the experiment.
The model can go faster, e.g. a variation has been developed by the MetOffice where the Ocean model can runs upto 10 times faster than in the CP model, the main reason for this speed up? Iceland was deleted from the map :) (in terms of size, I think Ireland and the UK are next)
The data which will result in this project will hopefully be able to give a quantitative prediction of how bad things might get if we (say) double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it can tell us (=scientists) how likely it is that New York will be flooded or El Nino will shutdown. Whether or not the data will be 'open' is anybody's guess. Checking the sponsers, at least one of them is an insurance company that insures based on weather forecasts (good crop weather, flooding, etc.), I have little doubt about the commercial value of the data (c.f Cancer research programs).
As for the people who want access to the model source (and the source for the visualisation programs I guess). Are you completely out of your mind :) It's half a million lines of Fortran which has been written by many many people over about 10 years. Having access to the source in this case would benefit nobody. It only does 1 thing, model the climate. The atmosphere model has about 50 different options for the physics schemes, 10 different dynamical schemes and noise filtering options, all of which need to be set up properly to have any chance of working. The 'simple' ocean model has another load of options, then the 'complex' ocean model has another load of options, then there are multiple way to couple the atmosphere and ocean together. (Also, *shock horror*, it has bugs in it.)
videophones have been around for a while in the UK and in other countries(seems to be broken?). The quality still isn't brilliant but Orange(I think) have started to offer Soccer highlights over the latest phones.
moon colonies, ok, we chose to put a space station up there first, and then realised it costs a lot of money for little (commercial or military) value. Moon colonies are sadly not as sexy as say a Mars colony, or even a Mars mission, which ESA has planned in 25 years, NASA tried and continues to test methods of producing enough food,air and water, other countries,notably India and China have planned Moon landings so we are going back. Space is unfortunately used as a pissing contest between nuclear neighbours, when this stops then some more science can get done(e.g. Hubble, Galileo, Beagle 2)
food in pills. You can get food in pills, just not the calories, vitamins will give you nearly all of the trace elements you need to live. Calories are a lot harder, to get 500 Calories into a pill means eating something with 40 times the energy concentration of sugar or twenty times the concentration of fats, I doubt the human body would have much success digesting such complicated food. You can however get protein and creatine supplements which are in tablet/powder form, and sugar sweets( those silly energy sweets which taste of really sour orange) have more calories than their equivalent weight in sugar. (The protein supplements also tend to taste bad and are fed to animals instead. )
cars that drive themselves; power steering has been around for a while, as has ABS and cruise control, that is about as much as the current laws will allow on the public roads. intelligent cars have been developed, which, when combined with other intelligent cars, are actually safe. It's the human drivers who freak out at the sight of a driverless car that's the problem :-)
jet packs; Jet packs appeared in Thunderball (James Bond). You can buy them if you have enough money, or you can build them if you want. They're not used much because, much like the Segway, there are easier and cheaper way of getting around.
moving sidewalk's are in most airports now, as well as some metro stations. There have also been "moving stairs" around for just as long.
--This post brought to you by Google.com, paid for by Google For America, Inc.
Why should the government use open source software instead of closed source software? It's my money their spending, so I should get the benefit from it in the end (free and Free software).
Why shouldn't this apply to state (and paid for by pseduo-taxes) owned television. Okay, so we can charge for the bandwidth, nobody said you have to get your redhat ISO's for free of redhat.com, the BBC could charge micropayments<buzzword/> for their episodes, a dollar (plus bandwidth?) an episode? This would not only allow use to get cheap episodes but might also serve to stick it to the MPAA/RIAA clans with online distribution.
And you could always give 200 free(-beer) downloads to license payers. I might buy a license then (no TV...)
The biggest problem I can see with either free or cost-covered distribution are the pirates (I can feel the MPAA dancing in their mansions now). If the BBC goes after them, it legitimizes the MPAA argument that even if they offer it cheaply, people will still steal. If the BBC doesn't go after them, any money they do get might rapidly decrease as mirror sites pop up and the MPAA will use this as in their "online-distribution is not profitable" argument.
(Thank you for the [sic], I deserved that one :( )
Ok, replace 5 with 12 and your got pretty much the same conclusion as me. The top universities seem to get pretty much the same coverage from employers. The employers who only recruit from the top 4 or Cambridge are normally for the super-high flying jobs paying huge amounts just for training (at least the ones who interviewed me did :). Also, IMHO, they are being very silly doing that, it reduces supply thus increasing pay of the top Universities and the students will likely be taught by the same people with the same ideas.
At the moment, all universites do cost the same, not ! The tuition may be a token payment right now, but when top-up fees start then differentials will occur, starting with the top 8 (the 'Red brick' universities). Plus there are many ways your university can fleece you. Accomodation, extras like washing machines, network usage, examwear (Oxbridge has a silly number of gowns and rules for exam suits), etc.
I'm guessing from your post you studied a science at Cambridge? (hey, this is Slashdot, I doubt your an English student?) No, they don't accept only weathly independently educated students but they don't always accept on merit either. The male--female ratio is low in most colleges, the state-public school ratio is low in most colleges, the colored-white british national ratio is low in most colleges, many of the science subjects encourage you to do some kind of low-paid summer research. I don't honestly think they provide "cheap good lodgings". They try and compete on the open market by increasing their rents way above inflation (mine does at least).
...anyway..Yes they do give you an advantage, but you are (or will be when alumni reunion time comes) paying for that advantage.
And I was about to mod you up...
AOL gets 1 billion emails a day.
There's no need to qualify it with 2/3rd of them are spam, they all cost AOL money, none of them should be deleted unless their customer has asked them to. AOL has common carrier status, they don't look into your data unless you (or the FBI) ask them.
When you pay for something, you do get a right, it's not consitutional, but it's derived from it. The right you get is the right to receive the goods/services you have paid for. AOL (and all other ISP I have seen) have clauses stating "shit happens" and that's fine. How long will it be until somebody at AOL realises that 1/3 of a billion emails are costing them money, why not create an AOL-stamp?
Isn't it an external company suing anyway? Their complaining that they blocked their C class (only 64000 ip numbers !) because there may have been a spam-network on there.
Having said all that, AOL are accusing them of spamming, CIHost (the other company) are saying they don't, and that they have spam-filters installed which cannot be turned off by customers. CIHost go on to accuse AOL (in a roundabout way) of soliciting their customers, and the courts have ordered AOL not to contact them anymore (no more AOL cds?). CIHost have also got a restraining order blocking AOL free speech on the court case, <irony>which is brilliant</irony>.
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workingassets.com spammed me today, so I thought I'd put this here.
I did think it was made before ER, not that it's any better because of that :) Also, since when are the last-episode disasters "true to the original format"? From the few episodes/series I was forced to sit through as a child (pre-ER) I don't remember it being anything but a soap-opera with cuts and bruises?
It could possibly be the blurry vision of memory though, I seem to remember Saturday night being the blockbuster film night....
BB
The big question is what acutally consitutes the "BBC archive"? Is it everything that's ever been shown on the BBC, or is it only the in-house produced BBC programs?
To take an obvious example, The Simpsons, their definately not BBC property, so I doubt they'll be in the archive, neither will any of the other American imports (24, Buffy, Star Trek, etc.). But then, what about Blackadder? Surely that was made by the BBC? The rights to Blackadder are owned by Tiger productions (Rowan Atkinson's company), this includes the DVD rights for example. Will this be in the archive?
What about Monty Python, 'Allo 'Allo, Red Dwarf, Dr Who or Hitchhikers? A (non-authoritative ) Amazon check suggests that they are all distributed by BBC worldwide, which is the commerical arm of the BBC (and produces all of the commercial UK-* stations on Sky), but how many of these have additional rights? Red Dwarf (the book) is owned by Grant Naylor, Hitchhikers by Douglas Adams. How many books will get sold if these episodes are available for free?
There's also the digitising problem, It might not seem like it, but only in the last 5 years have any TV programs been digitally stored. And the BBC tend to lose things, they lost episodes of Dr Who for example (one is still missing I think), so how many of these archives will be complete?
I am truly hoping that most BBC aired programs will be there (you might have to wait for "The Office"?) but I have a horrible feeling it'll be an archive of Eastenders (bad bad soap opera), Casualty (no blood-n-guts E.R. clone) and Noel's house party (please god no).
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What a time to be sitting on a Gigabit university network... :)
Does anyone find it disturbing that --
a. Intruder Alarm company is now a "viable business".
b. Intruder Alarms are needed AT ALL?
The world is full of people who will do bad things to you in order to `improve' their life, (they're assuming it's a zero sum game I guess). Sometimes we have to take defensive action against them until it stops, or until it falls below our radars.
Spam numbers have been increasing exponentially for a year now (probably more), major ISP(s) are starting to provide spam filtering services in their packages just like 50 years ago some television programs were actually broadcast in colour(!). Eventually, spam will start to decrease and the spam-filter will be turned down with them (to allow some false positives and negatives through) until an acceptable threshold is reached.
Spam filter companies are viable now, just as vacuum tube manufacturers were 50 years ago, then somebody invented the transistor, it was sleek, small and stopped spam (hmm...). Some of your replies allude to Anti-Virus software. How many of the recent viruses were `proper' viruses, and not DOS attacks on windows services or VBA worms in Outlook. They aren't really viruses, their just malicious code exploit some bug in MS code.
Don't worry, the sun will rise tomorrow, and you'll get emails telling you how small your penis is, how much the Nigerian bankers make in 7 days and how to get expensive electronics for free, that can't be bad, can it?
Wow :). It's like the `mysterious future', only in the real world.
When the UK gov. introduced the 1000 UKP tuition fee, they increased the student loan by 1000 UKP, but 'means tested' it, the poorer you are, the more debt you can have (also the less tuition you pay, but money is money to students :)
The means testing of course, isn't based on your potential, or your course, or whether your going to be a nurse, a teacher or a business analyst. It's based on what your parents earn. Any family earning more than 30,000 UKP (2 parents, 2 kids), will pay full cost. You even get from the government telling you much you parents will give you :)
The U.K. government found that their 1000 UKP tuition fees didn't achieve it's goal of 50% of school leavers going to university. So now they think they should start allowing "top" universties (those that can get away with it) to start charging top-up fees up to 4000 UKP. The more money in the education system, the more people can get grants, apparently.
The privatised student loan companies charge the interest on the loan based on inflation ("tied to inflation" in the legal jargon), so, knowing how pay has increased, they have redifined how inflation is calculated, increasing interest rates by 100% (almost double the rate of inflation , and 1% less than a 100,000 UKP mortgate will cost)
especially since in America there's not much difference, in real world terms, between ivy league and Schmoe U.
I think this is true pretty much everywhere, in the UK we have league tables showing which is the best university. If you want an 'ivy-league' your told Oxford or Cambridge, otherwise, anything ranked between 5 and 70 that does your course (and from what I remember, has a favourable m/f ratio :) is good enough. Oxford or Cambridge is only a significant edge if your name is Clinton or crown prince....
The crazy thing is, it's not the graduates who will actually have to pay this 1k/ year.
Ever since tuition fees were introduced graduate pay (especially for top universities) has gone up by huge amounts. When I started (4 years ago) a finance job in the London stockmarkets would get you about 20K UKP, when I graduated I was doing 'milk-rounds' for 30K with consultancy firms.
For some reason, I chose grad student life, on 9K. Something went wrong there. I do get to surf slashdot for 5 hours a day though, then have a coffee break :)
...back to the point...These pay rises are not being payed for by inflation, prices will rise,services will cost more. Graduates will be able to afford the proportional increase, people who didn't go to university won't. Something that was meant to guarantee access for poor people ends up kicking them where it hurts.
Thank you Ed (or is it Bob?), but I stand by my reasoning, the last word in the image is 'below', but they have used a lower case omega as the w, and typically (in Microsft Word and in latex), omicron is in a different font to 'o'. Plus there are other ways to write that sentence.
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