Nope, I merely claim that you don't know that they *do*, and have no real evidence to support that theory.
So, you are saying that as long as it is not *proven* that some unknown mechanism to remove extra CO2 created by humanity does not exist, it's better to believe that such a mystery mechanism exists? That we'd need to prove non-existence of something? You know, usually it goes the other way, if you claim something exists, you'd need to prove *that*...
Because it's been pretty much proven that when you burn oil products or coal, you create CO2... (You know, basic chemistry). It must also go somewhere.
Most likely the same place it came from. it's not as if carbon were being created from thin air.
Are you trying to be funny on purpose or is that accidental?:-)
Because yes, oil and coal *were* created out of thin air... At least according to accepted theories. Plants and plancton take CO2 out of thin air and convert it into complex organic chemicals as they grow (such as wood material, different sugars etc). Then when some of this organic material gets buried underground (instead of decomposing the normal way), and stays under high pressure and temperature and no oxygen for millions of years, it slowly gets converted into coal, oil and/or natural gas.
Too bad it's kind of slow process, much much slower than the rate we're burning oil and coal.
So, most likely the CO2 we produce *stays* in the atmosphere, adding to any "natural" CO2 in there. If anybody claims that this is not the case, then they'd better have some kind of mechanism, preferably with observable evidence, how all the *extra* CO2 released by humanity gets taken out of the atmosphere *in addition* to the normal removal of CO2 in different ways.
We're putting *more* CO2 into the atmosphere that is "natural". Therefore, for the balance to remain, there'd have to some way to get more CO2 out of the atmosphere than is "natural". Nobody has come up with a believable explanation into how that would happen.
So, the simplest explanation remains. The CO2 we dump into the atmosphere adds CO2 in the atmosphere. And CO2 in the atmosphere undeniably affects heat balance of Earth. Therefore we're having an impact on that.
Our grand grand grand children might get the benefit. In the meanwhile, we and our children would be stuck in the middle of changing climate... Hurricanes of this summer would be childs play...
After the climate settles to a new balance, I wouldn't really be worried about overpopulation, not for a while at least...
Oh well, it'll be fun to wait and see... Do we get even worse hurricane summer next year, and even worse after that and so on, or was this just a fluke, and we'll have to wait decades for a next summer like this...
Hmm. Maybe a pre-emptive strike would be in order... Better hurry before China has believable and total MAD capability against US... Maybe neutron and/or EMP bombs would be good thing, exploed high enough in the atmosphere so we don't get nuclear winter out of it, but that's just technical detail.
Oh, and don't forget India! Swat two flies at the same time, minimize negative global impact!
The global warming pundits insist that they must ordinarily be constant. That's fairly unlikely; there appear (in the small amount of data we have collected over the past few decades) to be complicated cycles at work. We do not understand those cycles. Therefore we cannot claim to have altered them.
Uhum. We're digging and pumping carbon (oil and coal) out of the ground all the time and dumping most of it into the atmosphere. Do you disagree with this "claim" (more like an observation)?
If you claim that this does not affect CO2 levels of our atmosphere, I'd like to hear some reasoning and explanation... Where does the carbon we burn go then, if it doesn't increase CO2 levels in the atmosphere?
Well, consider how much more complicated embedded apps are getting - think about the onboard computer in the Audi, and the increasing numbes of mp3 players, movie players and whatnot. While "upgrade or else" is stupid, damn if this thing won't be useful.
There's still a lot of stuff that doesn't have and never will have any use for more than 8 bits in it's microcontroller, and having more will not be any improvement, only thing that matters is the component cost and availability of development tools. Compiler hides all the nasty stuff about handling memory and numbers anyway. I'm talking about stuff that is made millions, like household appliances.
So I'd say it's still a bit premature to declare the imminent death of 8-bit microcontrollers...
It's nice to read a bit about the coming elections over the pond and all, but come on. I mean, seriously, why is this kind of crap on/. front page? This is tabloid stuff, not "News for Nerds."
Electronic voting machines, fine. NASA budget news, fine. IP related politics, fine. Duplicates of the above, fine. But this article is ridiculous...
Quantum computers with enough qubits to do useful RSA public-key factoring will probably be built within about 10-20 years, based on the progress to date. Possibly earlier, but I'm going to be conservative and hedge a bit.
So, how many bits (or digits or whatever) long numbers can we currently factor with quantum computers? My impression is that the answer is 'zero', ie we have no working quantum computer that can actually perform any kind of factoring. And this means there can be any number of practical problems we don't even know about yet. So trying to guess when we actually have quantum computers that do something is like trying to guess when Duke Nukem Forever comes out...
But please correct me if I'm wrong, 'cos I'd be delighted to be wrong here... And preferably provide a link to a page reporting that an actual quantum computer was used to factor a number of any size, or solve some other practical problem with real data.
With recursion you get 20 function calls with all their associated overhead. A for loop is a much better solution.
Except a properly written recursive function, and a loop end up being exactly the same thing once compiled... Even with a C compiler
Of course anybody putting purposefully obfuscated code into any real software should be shot... All the unpurposefully obfuscated bad code is bad enough, when maintaining it falls on you.
You know the shit I'm talking about, jamming all kinds of operations into a for() declaration, badly chosen one-letter variable names, etc..
That's not the point IMHO, though admittedly a lot of the stuff is just that without any real content. But the real pearls would still be devious to decipher even if all identifier names were clear, and any unnecessary structural obfuscations were written in more clear way.
Those suckers never even got their foot in the door. I don't care how smart they think they are, we have to get products out fast, and realistically be able to maintain/upgrade them 10+ years or so.
You need to lighten up. Some get their kicks from polisihing their car over and over, some get theirs from standing in a river in long ridiculous boots and waving a rod around, and some get it from twisting their brains around a piece of C mumbo jumbo... Nothing wrong with any of that.
I'm a proponent of fission power. I know it's pollution-free, the reactors are vastly safer than any other method out there, and the anti-nuke crowd is very much to blame for a continued reliance on coal. However, fission is not an end-all solution. Uranium is not a limitless resource and reactor-safety, while not as critical as some have made it out to be, is an issue that needs to be regulated, which adds to inefficiency.
Check out breeder reactors. They can solve a lot of problems, including availability of fuel, and waste-disposal. Only real show-stopper is that it's hard to develop a breeder cycle that doesn't produce easy bomb material..
First of all, make sure you read "heat pump" as "electic resistance heating". That's what's meant by "heat pump" around here.
Interesting. Then what do you call a heating system that is essentially a freezer operating in reverse, taking heat energy from earth or a lake, or even from the warm "used" air being pumped out by ventilation, and using that to heat the house?
Because that's basically the most efficient way of heating a house, since it doesn't have to produce any heat, just pump it from outside to inside (just like a fridge pumps heat from inside the fridge to the outside of the fridge).
Mind you, it still uses about 30% as much energy as just heating with electricity directly, so it's not as "free" as some might think, but still hell of a lot more energy efficient than anything else.
I'm not advocating stealing here but believe in natural selection. If WalMart, et al, is so stupid as to pay [b|m]illions to have a system developed that has such a gaping hole let them pay the price.
Well, the thing is, it's the consumers who will pay for it, be it through higher prices, or bankrupts reducing competition, or problems caused by more unemployed people...
Stealing and natural selection have about as much to do with each others as homicide and natural selection (interpret that however you will).
i dont think prices should be embedded in the tags. thats asking for trouble.....
Yes, but if you want to forge the price, just change the item identification to a similar but cheaper one. Would work especially well with clothes, hard to spot by the cashier, but also on other stuff.
You assume that you want to have a stable orbit. If you don't have the velocity to maintain your higher orbit, you will naturally fall to lower orbits.
No you don't. Quite simply you are always are in a stable orbit, and you will return to about the same spot in space after one complete orbit around the center of gravity (assuming no orbit-changing close encounters or collisions with another object, and not using a rocket motor, etc).
I recommend basic Newtonian physics.
Your mistake is understandable though. Human intuition says that things must fall down, but that's only because human intuition is used to having air resistance that takes away energy, and having surface of earth to collide with. In empty space there's neither (well, usuallly, the meteorites found in Antarctica clearly did collide with Earth just after experiencing some serious air resistance...;-).
It is far more likely for you to lose the kinetic energy and fall out of orbit than it is for you to gain it and climb to a higher orbit
You can't "fall out of orbit". Orbit is stable unless you constantly decrease/increase kinetic energy *without* increasing potential energy at the same time (for example by using air resistance to slow down or propulsion to either slow down or accelerate). As soon as you stop doing that (turn of the rocket motor, exit an atmosphere), you are again in a stable orbit, new and different one but stable none the less.
Well, I guess we're pretty sure they're not from Earth... And they are (I imagine) easy to re-examine, so measurement error sounds very unlikely.
So, assuming that Mars probe results match the rocks, either
a) both meteor and probe measurements are faulty, but by co-incidence or systematic error they match each others
b1) rocks are not from mars, probe results are faulty but by incredible co-incidence look just like the Antarctica meteors from somewhere else
b2) like b1, except probe results are not faulty, but by even more incredible co-incidence they also measured meteors from same source, not "native" martian material.
c) both results are correct, the meteors are from mars
Now if the results would *not* match, then we'd have a puzzle in our hands...
Remember folks, launching stuff into a much higher orbit requires lots of energy.
The reason Mars rocks get here is because they are intercepted on their way to the sun.
Bzz. Wrong. Launching stuff to a much lower orbit also requires lots of energy. Basically the energy requirement is the same between two orbits, no matter wether you go from a lower to a higher orbit or the other way around. Quite obivious when you think about it, otherwise you could make perpetual motion machine, tapping the energy difference...
(Even on a pro-Mozilla site like slashdot, IE dominates the Windows UA stats.)
And I have to wonder if/. users really are that clueless... Unless they they read just/. and nothing else, but then that's the same thing really.
I mean, just considering all the exploits there are for IE... Ugh... Call me paranoid, but I would never do general browsing around the net with IE. You never know when you'll run into a malicious (possibly hacked) page that does something bad.
Does it make you feel *that* good to nit pick a one-letter mispelling of a word that isn't commonly used? I mean, you seemed to have understood him, knowing that he meant perigee. So what is the big fucking deal?
Relax. Slashdot is an international forum with lots of non-English speakers. He (and I) may have guessed what was meant, but you can never be sure if you guessed right or really know how to spell it yourself, if the writer made a typo or didn't actually know how to write it, or if writer actually meant something the reader didn't know. It was in no way insulting reply, so I wouldn't be so fast to call it "little kid shit"...
I don't agree that MS can afford to sit this out. If non-IE browsers gain too much market share, more and more web sites will make pages that are standards-compliant (as opposed to IE-compliant). And that' quite a "battle" to lose, even for MS.
don't u think it's not fair for all the non-US citizens?
Generally non-US citizens tend to have the courtesy of telling which part of the world they live in, if they talk about their living environment. And if somebody is arrogant enough to not tell anything about it, it's automatically assumed that he must be an American...;-)
Do I think this will happen? Not a snowball's chance in hell. But they'll try -- and fail because they do not understand how deeply the motivations for OSS go, at least I don't think so.
Or, there's the remote possiblity that they have come to the conclusion that for some things, OSS (and I mean real OSS) is the way to go. Perhaps this is a backup plan in case DRM doesn't manage to wipe out open source OSs. Also, OS market is diversifying with handheld devices getting more powerful too, not just by Linux gaining market share. Perhaps they are realizing that the significance of underlying OS is getting less and less, any desktop software that wants to dominate it's area will have to be largely OS-independent.
I mean, if they released a genuine Linux distribution, and then released Microsoft Office for that, then I bet in no time it would get a lot of the Linux market share, since many people want to use MS Office. Because, say what you will, it is the best Office suite out there (LaTex etc are of course a different thing, far superior but only for a limited audience), not to mention the "industry (non)standard".
And then they'd have a lot of power to steer Linux distribution development, since every distribution would have to enable MS Office to run to have any success in a lot of workplaces, and therefore would have to offer the libraries etc that MS Linux offers and MS Office for Linux needs.
Something like this might really hurt Windows for business use, but then again they could concentrate on making Windows for home use, since it's the only viable PC gaming OS at the moment, and for the foreseeable future too. All they'd have to make sure to keep it that way would be to make sure that "MS Linux" would be crappy at running games out of the box.
Scary? Crazy? Well, if you were MS, and had some common sense, how would you plan to not let OSS take over...?
Slashdot Mirror
So, you are saying that as long as it is not *proven* that some unknown mechanism to remove extra CO2 created by humanity does not exist, it's better to believe that such a mystery mechanism exists? That we'd need to prove non-existence of something? You know, usually it goes the other way, if you claim something exists, you'd need to prove *that*...
Because it's been pretty much proven that when you burn oil products or coal, you create CO2... (You know, basic chemistry). It must also go somewhere.
Are you trying to be funny on purpose or is that accidental?
Because yes, oil and coal *were* created out of thin air... At least according to accepted theories. Plants and plancton take CO2 out of thin air and convert it into complex organic chemicals as they grow (such as wood material, different sugars etc). Then when some of this organic material gets buried underground (instead of decomposing the normal way), and stays under high pressure and temperature and no oxygen for millions of years, it slowly gets converted into coal, oil and/or natural gas.
Too bad it's kind of slow process, much much slower than the rate we're burning oil and coal.
So, most likely the CO2 we produce *stays* in the atmosphere, adding to any "natural" CO2 in there. If anybody claims that this is not the case, then they'd better have some kind of mechanism, preferably with observable evidence, how all the *extra* CO2 released by humanity gets taken out of the atmosphere *in addition* to the normal removal of CO2 in different ways.
We're putting *more* CO2 into the atmosphere that is "natural". Therefore, for the balance to remain, there'd have to some way to get more CO2 out of the atmosphere than is "natural". Nobody has come up with a believable explanation into how that would happen.
So, the simplest explanation remains. The CO2 we dump into the atmosphere adds CO2 in the atmosphere. And CO2 in the atmosphere undeniably affects heat balance of Earth. Therefore we're having an impact on that.
Our grand grand grand children might get the benefit. In the meanwhile, we and our children would be stuck in the middle of changing climate... Hurricanes of this summer would be childs play...
After the climate settles to a new balance, I wouldn't really be worried about overpopulation, not for a while at least...
Oh well, it'll be fun to wait and see... Do we get even worse hurricane summer next year, and even worse after that and so on, or was this just a fluke, and we'll have to wait decades for a next summer like this...
Hmm. Maybe a pre-emptive strike would be in order... Better hurry before China has believable and total MAD capability against US... Maybe neutron and/or EMP bombs would be good thing, exploed high enough in the atmosphere so we don't get nuclear winter out of it, but that's just technical detail.
Oh, and don't forget India! Swat two flies at the same time, minimize negative global impact!
Uhum. We're digging and pumping carbon (oil and coal) out of the ground all the time and dumping most of it into the atmosphere. Do you disagree with this "claim" (more like an observation)?
If you claim that this does not affect CO2 levels of our atmosphere, I'd like to hear some reasoning and explanation... Where does the carbon we burn go then, if it doesn't increase CO2 levels in the atmosphere?
There's still a lot of stuff that doesn't have and never will have any use for more than 8 bits in it's microcontroller, and having more will not be any improvement, only thing that matters is the component cost and availability of development tools. Compiler hides all the nasty stuff about handling memory and numbers anyway. I'm talking about stuff that is made millions, like household appliances.
So I'd say it's still a bit premature to declare the imminent death of 8-bit microcontrollers...
It's nice to read a bit about the coming elections over the pond and all, but come on. I mean, seriously, why is this kind of crap on /. front page? This is tabloid stuff, not "News for Nerds."
Electronic voting machines, fine. NASA budget news, fine. IP related politics, fine. Duplicates of the above, fine. But this article is ridiculous...
So, how many bits (or digits or whatever) long numbers can we currently factor with quantum computers? My impression is that the answer is 'zero', ie we have no working quantum computer that can actually perform any kind of factoring. And this means there can be any number of practical problems we don't even know about yet. So trying to guess when we actually have quantum computers that do something is like trying to guess when Duke Nukem Forever comes out...
But please correct me if I'm wrong, 'cos I'd be delighted to be wrong here... And preferably provide a link to a page reporting that an actual quantum computer was used to factor a number of any size, or solve some other practical problem with real data.
Except a properly written recursive function, and a loop end up being exactly the same thing once compiled... Even with a C compiler
Of course anybody putting purposefully obfuscated code into any real software should be shot... All the unpurposefully obfuscated bad code is bad enough, when maintaining it falls on you.
That's not the point IMHO, though admittedly a lot of the stuff is just that without any real content. But the real pearls would still be devious to decipher even if all identifier names were clear, and any unnecessary structural obfuscations were written in more clear way.
You need to lighten up. Some get their kicks from polisihing their car over and over, some get theirs from standing in a river in long ridiculous boots and waving a rod around, and some get it from twisting their brains around a piece of C mumbo jumbo... Nothing wrong with any of that.
Check out breeder reactors. They can solve a lot of problems, including availability of fuel, and waste-disposal. Only real show-stopper is that it's hard to develop a breeder cycle that doesn't produce easy bomb material..
Interesting. Then what do you call a heating system that is essentially a freezer operating in reverse, taking heat energy from earth or a lake, or even from the warm "used" air being pumped out by ventilation, and using that to heat the house?
Because that's basically the most efficient way of heating a house, since it doesn't have to produce any heat, just pump it from outside to inside (just like a fridge pumps heat from inside the fridge to the outside of the fridge).
Mind you, it still uses about 30% as much energy as just heating with electricity directly, so it's not as "free" as some might think, but still hell of a lot more energy efficient than anything else.
Well, the thing is, it's the consumers who will pay for it, be it through higher prices, or bankrupts reducing competition, or problems caused by more unemployed people...
Stealing and natural selection have about as much to do with each others as homicide and natural selection (interpret that however you will).
Yes, but if you want to forge the price, just change the item identification to a similar but cheaper one. Would work especially well with clothes, hard to spot by the cashier, but also on other stuff.
No you don't. Quite simply you are always are in a stable orbit, and you will return to about the same spot in space after one complete orbit around the center of gravity (assuming no orbit-changing close encounters or collisions with another object, and not using a rocket motor, etc).
I recommend basic Newtonian physics.
Your mistake is understandable though. Human intuition says that things must fall down, but that's only because human intuition is used to having air resistance that takes away energy, and having surface of earth to collide with. In empty space there's neither (well, usuallly, the meteorites found in Antarctica clearly did collide with Earth just after experiencing some serious air resistance...
You can't "fall out of orbit". Orbit is stable unless you constantly decrease/increase kinetic energy *without* increasing potential energy at the same time (for example by using air resistance to slow down or propulsion to either slow down or accelerate). As soon as you stop doing that (turn of the rocket motor, exit an atmosphere), you are again in a stable orbit, new and different one but stable none the less.
Yes, but that's why it's also so very satisfying ;-)
Well, I guess we're pretty sure they're not from Earth... And they are (I imagine) easy to re-examine, so measurement error sounds very unlikely.
So, assuming that Mars probe results match the rocks, either
a) both meteor and probe measurements are faulty, but by co-incidence or systematic error they match each others
b1) rocks are not from mars, probe results are faulty but by incredible co-incidence look just like the Antarctica meteors from somewhere else
b2) like b1, except probe results are not faulty, but by even more incredible co-incidence they also measured meteors from same source, not "native" martian material.
c) both results are correct, the meteors are from mars
Now if the results would *not* match, then we'd have a puzzle in our hands...
The reason Mars rocks get here is because they are intercepted on their way to the sun.
Bzz. Wrong. Launching stuff to a much lower orbit also requires lots of energy. Basically the energy requirement is the same between two orbits, no matter wether you go from a lower to a higher orbit or the other way around. Quite obivious when you think about it, otherwise you could make perpetual motion machine, tapping the energy difference...
And I have to wonder if
I mean, just considering all the exploits there are for IE... Ugh... Call me paranoid, but I would never do general browsing around the net with IE. You never know when you'll run into a malicious (possibly hacked) page that does something bad.
Relax. Slashdot is an international forum with lots of non-English speakers. He (and I) may have guessed what was meant, but you can never be sure if you guessed right or really know how to spell it yourself, if the writer made a typo or didn't actually know how to write it, or if writer actually meant something the reader didn't know. It was in no way insulting reply, so I wouldn't be so fast to call it "little kid shit"...
I don't agree that MS can afford to sit this out. If non-IE browsers gain too much market share, more and more web sites will make pages that are standards-compliant (as opposed to IE-compliant). And that' quite a "battle" to lose, even for MS.
Isn't it homosexual? AFAIK bacteria are all the same sex (at least more or less, I'm sure there are some sort of multisexual exceptions or something).
Generally non-US citizens tend to have the courtesy of telling which part of the world they live in, if they talk about their living environment. And if somebody is arrogant enough to not tell anything about it, it's automatically assumed that he must be an American...
Nah, just check the earth population graph, and you'll se we don't even need barry white...
Or, there's the remote possiblity that they have come to the conclusion that for some things, OSS (and I mean real OSS) is the way to go. Perhaps this is a backup plan in case DRM doesn't manage to wipe out open source OSs. Also, OS market is diversifying with handheld devices getting more powerful too, not just by Linux gaining market share. Perhaps they are realizing that the significance of underlying OS is getting less and less, any desktop software that wants to dominate it's area will have to be largely OS-independent.
I mean, if they released a genuine Linux distribution, and then released Microsoft Office for that, then I bet in no time it would get a lot of the Linux market share, since many people want to use MS Office. Because, say what you will, it is the best Office suite out there (LaTex etc are of course a different thing, far superior but only for a limited audience), not to mention the "industry (non)standard".
And then they'd have a lot of power to steer Linux distribution development, since every distribution would have to enable MS Office to run to have any success in a lot of workplaces, and therefore would have to offer the libraries etc that MS Linux offers and MS Office for Linux needs.
Something like this might really hurt Windows for business use, but then again they could concentrate on making Windows for home use, since it's the only viable PC gaming OS at the moment, and for the foreseeable future too. All they'd have to make sure to keep it that way would be to make sure that "MS Linux" would be crappy at running games out of the box.
Scary? Crazy? Well, if you were MS, and had some common sense, how would you plan to not let OSS take over...?
Yeah, the last one is what counts
So hurry up and get the remaining shuttles flying again, they're needed for now at least!