Glaciers have been going away for the last 14,000 years in North America. Glacier National Park 14,000 would have been all the way down to Missoula Montana and into Wyoming. Glaciers shrink and the grow all over the World, the BBC piece with the photos "illustrating the change" are simply "best of show" pictures.
OK, here's a nice example you may have heard of--The Arctic Ice cap. Decreased in thickness by over a third since we started monitoring it (quite carefully, since it was important to our Cold War efforts) with our nuclear missile subs over the last forty years.
Decreased in thickness (mass) by a third in forty years. A mass of ice larger than some continents.
Now, since most of that ice is floating, we aren't seeing immediate changes in sea level. And like the ice cubes in a glass of liquid, the thermal inertia of the ice will regulate temperatures as long as it remain substantially in place.
But we are rapidly approaching the point where that ice is no longer substantially in place. When that happens, equilibrium disappears in a geological microsecond. When the Artic ice gets thin enough to start breaking apart, the albido of the Artic Ocean goes way down. All that summer sun that was reflecting back into space by the white snow and ice is suddenly being absorbed by the dark water. And the Ice melts faster and the water get warmer and the Ice melts faster. Once things get seriously hinky up there, the Greenland Ice Cap (which is NOT floating) becomes threatened.
At the present rate, Florida will be gone before the Baby Boom generation is completely retired. What's Florida worth? How many folks would give up their Hummer and switch to bio-diesel to save the Everglades and the Keys?
More evidence, Ross Ice Streams in West Antarctica is increasing at 26.8 gigatons per year, according to Science 295: 476-80
Ummm, from a global warming perspective, this increasing ice stream is a very bad thing. It is a sign that the Antarctic Ice cap is also becoming unstable. These ice streams are already causing an increase in sea levels that is threatening Bangladesh and the Maldives. It is not a sign that the Antarctic ice cap is growing.
I am working on doing exactly that, with either Linux or one of the free BSD OSs. I'm trying to setup a system for grandma or the kids that will browse email, surf the web, view Flash, run Open Office, and possibly (this is part of what I am researching) get images from digital cameras or a media reader.
At the same time, it won't be vulnerable to every virus and internet malware bug out there, and will come preconfigured to use the customers' ISP.
I'm the backyard mechanic form of IS support, and I'm seeing a real opportunity for a non-MS based computing solution that doesn't cost as much as a Macintosh (though the Mini will put a some heat on my business model).
If the Pentagon attack was terrorism because they hijacked a civilian plane to do it, then our entire Iraqi Conquest is terrorism, because we bombed water and power facilities during the attack.
Oh, and WWII was just one terrorist action after another, with the possible exception of a few sea battles.
If a fighter or a bomber is shot down and lands on somebody's house, which side committed the terrorist act?
There is nothing in the design of this thing that says it has to be small. Scaling up the size is a matter of making things bigger and getting more balloons and helium to lift it.
The innovation is in the electronics and control software that lets this thing fly itself back. Actual glider design (large enough to carry half a platoon of soldiers) is a well understood science that goes back before WWII.
What would make attacking a target like the *White* House tough is the batteries of anti-aircraft missiles installed on the *White* House roof, although an engineless (no heat-seekers) glider made of organic (no radar-guided) materials might be a nasty package to try and stop.
Of course, they may have laser guided missiles up there protecting Dubya as well, but if the soldiers illuminate aircraft with a laser pointer, they might get busted by Homeland Security!
While this technique would probably be hard to pull off against protected targets like the White House and such, it would be a considerable threat against assemblies and ceremonies. Being able to stand off and get away would be very useful for terrorists. Even a 10 mile separation and a 30 minute interval between initiating the attack and its execution would be a huge advantage.
Imagine what Timothy McVeigh would have been able to do with a couple of these with a 100 pound payload. I'm surprised the Pro-Lifers aren't using these against Abortion Clinics already.
Obviously, all you carpers who are claiming the knowledge of supersonic bullets means the concept of the sound barrier was impossible are lacking in subtlety.
A "Sound Barrier" or a region of infinitely (or prohibitively) high drag at the transition point between supersonic and subsonic flight makes perfect sense, and, in fact, exists.
The sound barrier is the shock wave created AT THE TRANSITION POINT between subsonic and supersonic flight. During the period of research that resulted in supersonic flight, it was a terrific barrier to overcome. Planes were being torn apart as they carefully approached supersonic speed.
Chuch Yeager was the guy who figured out it was necessary to smash through the barrier (accelerate rapidly) and get the shock wave behind the aircraft in order to survive it. Machine gun bullets, being blasted almost instantaneously to supersonic speeds, had no problem with an instant of atmospheric shock wave (especially since they are designed to ride an explosion).
But aircraft (and pilots) cannot be accelerated like bullets. They have to accelerate through the Sound Barrier relatively slowly, and this was and is still a challenge.
It's still a barrier today. We may have figured out how to overcome it, but we've figured out how to overcome many barriers to progress. It remains a barrier that has to be dealt with.
The Earth's rotation causes a 20-kilometre bulge at the equator, making Chimborazo volcano in Ecuador the highest mountain above sea level.
Unfortunately, sea level also bulges 20 kilometers at the equator. So while the top of Chimborazo is likely the most distance bit of terra firma from the center of the earth, Everest is still the highest point using sea level as a reference.
I wonder if that means we'll decide all the mountains are twenty feet shorter after the Greenland Ice Sheet melts in the next couple of decades?
The guy says the thing can easily do 60MPH, and he's riding it up and down a track without visible hearing protection or a crash helmet. I'm not personally optimistic about the stability of a wheelchair going 60MPH.
I think the guy is one quick turn away from becoming an asphalt patch.
The virus freaks are starting to use fake virus bounce-back messages as a means to get people to click on the attachments.
I've gotten them on my Macinotosh, which is suppossed to be sending out "Blaster" (yeah, right). The return addresses for the messages are frequently very obscure and often come from the same server.
The message body claims the virus has been stripped from the original message, which is included as an attachment. Of course, for some strange reason, the text message attachment has a.pif or.scr suffix! Isn't that odd? 8^P
I've also been seeing lots of bounced message fakes claiming a email address was incorrect. The message is supposed to be in the attachment, but of course, it's a message I never sent, the originating server is usually foreign (or very crudely spoofed) and there is another lovely.pif,.zip or.scr suffic on the attachment.
Some of these messages don't have an attachment, but instead have a URL link to click "for more information." I'm assuming this may be the recently revealed HTML virii exploit being attempted.
I'm quite impressed by the human engineering that goes into these infection attempts, and also quite glad I do my business work on the Mac.
Pretty soon, I want to start offering Linux boxen set up with Moxilla, Firebird and Open Office to the public to give them a similar sense of security. Anyone know a good free (or donation-ware) distro of Linux that I could learn to administer without too much overhead investment?
Well, many of these viruses *do* appear to come from people they know, so your advise may be contributing to the problem. Anymore they shouldn't trust any attachment they weren't specifically expecting.
This is a really good point. I tell the people I work with (I have a small computer repair shop) not to open email attachments, even from people they know, unless they have good reason to believe the person would actually send them something like this.
Also, I tell them that when they send somebody an attachment, that they need to put something in the body of the message so the recipient knows it's from them. Something like:
Hey Carol, remember that church picnic this summer? Well, I just figured out how to connect my digital camera to the computer and download the pictures I took. I thought you'd enjoy them, especially the shot of Margy vomiting on the pastor after eating too many Rum Balls on a empty stomach. The color rendering is just uncanny!
Re:AV companies? _What about Polymorphic viruses?
on
The Virus Squad
·
· Score: 1
I think a lot of the 800 "new" virii may simply be automatic variations created by polymorphic viruses that are slightly rewriting themselves automatically to complicate eradication efforts.
I agree 800 a day is a lot of work for human virus writers.
On the other hand, look at all the graffiti that is out there. An awful lot of work was put into spraypainting with even less chances of gain than could be hoped for from writing viruses. A lot of graffiti "artists" have also put a lot of time into learning their craft.
Aren't there barns that need painting? What are these people thinking?
I just wish I believed any of this new initiative to space was actually planned.
I don't think Bush is doing anything except trying to make a bunch of/. types excited enough to forget about a wasted environment, stinking economy, angry world, Free Osama/Omar, and Dick Cheney until after the first Tuesday of next November.
There isn't going to be any grand program. There isn't even going to be adequate funding for what we already have, robotic exploration of Mars and the ISS. That extra billion will get spent this year, and that will be it. After that, it's back to bombs, prisons, and oil 24/7.
If you don't think so, remember the $15 billion for Africa to combat AIDS, the Billions that was going to rebuild New York after 9/11, and all the Children Left Behind when the money for No Child Left Behind wasn't budgeted as promised.
Lies are cheap. This is cheap sucker bait from the biggest liars on the planet.
They brought us "Halo" (for X-Box, but now available for PC and even Mac OS X),
Uh, no, "they" didn't bring us Halo. Bungie software brought us Halo. Micro$oft bought Bungie and kept Halo away from anybody who didn't buy their stinking X-box for two mortal years.
Getting a drug approved isn't cheap, that is true. Since any sensible society wants to have drugs tested rigorously before giving them to millions of people, it's going to cost quite a bit of money. Or we can resign ourselves to periodic Thalidomide disasters.
But the expense of developing drugs pales next to the expense of advertising prescription drugs. Then there's the expense of schmoozing the physicians and providing free perks so they'll use the brand name version instead of a cheaper generic. And, of course, campaign contributions to politicians...
The pharmaceutical industry is swimming in money right now. If they need to reduce expenses, they have a fat target in their Marketing departments. I'm not sympathetic to their cries of poverty.
One more factor.
If the cow feed figure is coming from dairy cows, it is also probably suspect.
Dairy cows eat a LOT. They are producing huge quantities of high-calorie milk on a daily basis. A good milk cow can produce 10,000 lbs of milk a year. Even after subracting the water, that's still something like 2500 lbs of high quality protein, fat and sugars yearly.
You have to add that to the output of a dairy cow, and subtract the feed the dairy cow is eating and converting directly into milk from the normal feed of a beef cow. A lot of beef is raised on pretty marginal land, eating a pretty marginal diet. Dairy cows get special diets to help them produce abundant milk.
Ummmm,
Look, I really like Solar, and I'm not into bashing it at all, but this statement struck me as pretty, well, bizarre.
When compared to diesel fuel which requires more energy to create than it ever gives back.
Diesel fuel is just thicker gasoline really (more carbon atoms). It's refined from the same crude oil. I think it's actually easier to refine than gasoline and since it's more dense, it's more efficient to transport.
So unless the whole petroleum industry is running itself on hydropower or wind or something, if diesel fuel takes more energy to create than it delivers, we'd be in a net energy deficit regarding petroleum based power. I find it difficult to believe that is true. I also find it hard to believe that diesel fuel (and by inference, fuel oil, which is the same thing) would be so cheap to buy and widely used if they were sucking up all that energy.
Just a dumb question, but why did they use the big aluminum enclosures? Apple sells a rackmount 2U server that would seem to be tailor made for this application.
Does the server hardware or software configuration somehow prevent doing this? I'm dumb enough that it's possible Apple isn't shipping the G5 for their rackmounts yet and I just don't realize it, so please be kind when you explain.
French trade with Iraq was less than 2% of their foreign commerce. They could have easily picked up lots more cash by just voting with us on the Security Council, plus some nice plums in the "Reconstruction" rape that's going on now.
French principles beat the snot out of the criminals that are currently in charge of this country.
Slashdot Mirror
Decreased in thickness (mass) by a third in forty years. A mass of ice larger than some continents.
Now, since most of that ice is floating, we aren't seeing immediate changes in sea level. And like the ice cubes in a glass of liquid, the thermal inertia of the ice will regulate temperatures as long as it remain substantially in place.
But we are rapidly approaching the point where that ice is no longer substantially in place. When that happens, equilibrium disappears in a geological microsecond. When the Artic ice gets thin enough to start breaking apart, the albido of the Artic Ocean goes way down. All that summer sun that was reflecting back into space by the white snow and ice is suddenly being absorbed by the dark water. And the Ice melts faster and the water get warmer and the Ice melts faster. Once things get seriously hinky up there, the Greenland Ice Cap (which is NOT floating) becomes threatened.
At the present rate, Florida will be gone before the Baby Boom generation is completely retired. What's Florida worth? How many folks would give up their Hummer and switch to bio-diesel to save the Everglades and the Keys?
Ummm, from a global warming perspective, this increasing ice stream is a very bad thing. It is a sign that the Antarctic Ice cap is also becoming unstable. These ice streams are already causing an increase in sea levels that is threatening Bangladesh and the Maldives. It is not a sign that the Antarctic ice cap is growing.
The iMac G5 is so much better than the iMac G4 that I don't think the demand has anything to do with starving the channel.
I am working on doing exactly that, with either Linux or one of the free BSD OSs. I'm trying to setup a system for grandma or the kids that will browse email, surf the web, view Flash, run Open Office, and possibly (this is part of what I am researching) get images from digital cameras or a media reader.
At the same time, it won't be vulnerable to every virus and internet malware bug out there, and will come preconfigured to use the customers' ISP.
I'm the backyard mechanic form of IS support, and I'm seeing a real opportunity for a non-MS based computing solution that doesn't cost as much as a Macintosh (though the Mini will put a some heat on my business model).
If the Pentagon attack was terrorism because they hijacked a civilian plane to do it, then our entire Iraqi Conquest is terrorism, because we bombed water and power facilities during the attack.
Oh, and WWII was just one terrorist action after another, with the possible exception of a few sea battles.
If a fighter or a bomber is shot down and lands on somebody's house, which side committed the terrorist act?
There is nothing in the design of this thing that says it has to be small. Scaling up the size is a matter of making things bigger and getting more balloons and helium to lift it.
The innovation is in the electronics and control software that lets this thing fly itself back. Actual glider design (large enough to carry half a platoon of soldiers) is a well understood science that goes back before WWII.
What would make attacking a target like the *White* House tough is the batteries of anti-aircraft missiles installed on the *White* House roof, although an engineless (no heat-seekers) glider made of organic (no radar-guided) materials might be a nasty package to try and stop.
Of course, they may have laser guided missiles up there protecting Dubya as well, but if the soldiers illuminate aircraft with a laser pointer, they might get busted by Homeland Security!
While this technique would probably be hard to pull off against protected targets like the White House and such, it would be a considerable threat against assemblies and ceremonies. Being able to stand off and get away would be very useful for terrorists. Even a 10 mile separation and a 30 minute interval between initiating the attack and its execution would be a huge advantage.
Imagine what Timothy McVeigh would have been able to do with a couple of these with a 100 pound payload. I'm surprised the Pro-Lifers aren't using these against Abortion Clinics already.
I hate living in Interesting Times.
Not unpossible, but certainly dislikely...
Obviously, all you carpers who are claiming the knowledge of supersonic bullets means the concept of the sound barrier was impossible are lacking in subtlety.
A "Sound Barrier" or a region of infinitely (or prohibitively) high drag at the transition point between supersonic and subsonic flight makes perfect sense, and, in fact, exists.
The sound barrier is the shock wave created AT THE TRANSITION POINT between subsonic and supersonic flight. During the period of research that resulted in supersonic flight, it was a terrific barrier to overcome. Planes were being torn apart as they carefully approached supersonic speed.
Chuch Yeager was the guy who figured out it was necessary to smash through the barrier (accelerate rapidly) and get the shock wave behind the aircraft in order to survive it. Machine gun bullets, being blasted almost instantaneously to supersonic speeds, had no problem with an instant of atmospheric shock wave (especially since they are designed to ride an explosion).
But aircraft (and pilots) cannot be accelerated like bullets. They have to accelerate through the Sound Barrier relatively slowly, and this was and is still a challenge.
It's still a barrier today. We may have figured out how to overcome it, but we've figured out how to overcome many barriers to progress. It remains a barrier that has to be dealt with.
I wonder if that means we'll decide all the mountains are twenty feet shorter after the Greenland Ice Sheet melts in the next couple of decades?
I think he's trying to get rid of himself.
The guy says the thing can easily do 60MPH, and he's riding it up and down a track without visible hearing protection or a crash helmet. I'm not personally optimistic about the stability of a wheelchair going 60MPH.
I think the guy is one quick turn away from becoming an asphalt patch.
I went through the whole thread, and found nothing modded above "1" that made wisecracks about inflatable Love Dolls in space.
I find this excessive maturity and seriousness on
The virus freaks are starting to use fake virus bounce-back messages as a means to get people to click on the attachments.
.pif or .scr suffix! Isn't that odd? 8^P
.pif, .zip or .scr suffic on the attachment.
I've gotten them on my Macinotosh, which is suppossed to be sending out "Blaster" (yeah, right). The return addresses for the messages are frequently very obscure and often come from the same server.
The message body claims the virus has been stripped from the original message, which is included as an attachment. Of course, for some strange reason, the text message attachment has a
I've also been seeing lots of bounced message fakes claiming a email address was incorrect. The message is supposed to be in the attachment, but of course, it's a message I never sent, the originating server is usually foreign (or very crudely spoofed) and there is another lovely
Some of these messages don't have an attachment, but instead have a URL link to click "for more information." I'm assuming this may be the recently revealed HTML virii exploit being attempted.
I'm quite impressed by the human engineering that goes into these infection attempts, and also quite glad I do my business work on the Mac.
Pretty soon, I want to start offering Linux boxen set up with Moxilla, Firebird and Open Office to the public to give them a similar sense of security. Anyone know a good free (or donation-ware) distro of Linux that I could learn to administer without too much overhead investment?
I've soured on them. Good prices, but zero quality control. They ship a lot of DOA stuff and the returns policy is a pain in the ass.
This is a really good point. I tell the people I work with (I have a small computer repair shop) not to open email attachments, even from people they know, unless they have good reason to believe the person would actually send them something like this.
Also, I tell them that when they send somebody an attachment, that they need to put something in the body of the message so the recipient knows it's from them. Something like:
I think a lot of the 800 "new" virii may simply be automatic variations created by polymorphic viruses that are slightly rewriting themselves automatically to complicate eradication efforts. I agree 800 a day is a lot of work for human virus writers. On the other hand, look at all the graffiti that is out there. An awful lot of work was put into spraypainting with even less chances of gain than could be hoped for from writing viruses. A lot of graffiti "artists" have also put a lot of time into learning their craft. Aren't there barns that need painting? What are these people thinking?
I just wish I believed any of this new initiative to space was actually planned.
I don't think Bush is doing anything except trying to make a bunch of
There isn't going to be any grand program. There isn't even going to be adequate funding for what we already have, robotic exploration of Mars and the ISS. That extra billion will get spent this year, and that will be it. After that, it's back to bombs, prisons, and oil 24/7.
If you don't think so, remember the $15 billion for Africa to combat AIDS, the Billions that was going to rebuild New York after 9/11, and all the Children Left Behind when the money for No Child Left Behind wasn't budgeted as promised.
Lies are cheap. This is cheap sucker bait from the biggest liars on the planet.
Only if you're one of those people who hates robots because they're smarter than you are...
Uh, no, "they" didn't bring us Halo. Bungie software brought us Halo. Micro$oft bought Bungie and kept Halo away from anybody who didn't buy their stinking X-box for two mortal years.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish...
They won't get AIDS either?
No, they already died from food poisoning.
Getting a drug approved isn't cheap, that is true. Since any sensible society wants to have drugs tested rigorously before giving them to millions of people, it's going to cost quite a bit of money. Or we can resign ourselves to periodic Thalidomide disasters.
But the expense of developing drugs pales next to the expense of advertising prescription drugs. Then there's the expense of schmoozing the physicians and providing free perks so they'll use the brand name version instead of a cheaper generic. And, of course, campaign contributions to politicians...
The pharmaceutical industry is swimming in money right now. If they need to reduce expenses, they have a fat target in their Marketing departments. I'm not sympathetic to their cries of poverty.
One more factor. If the cow feed figure is coming from dairy cows, it is also probably suspect.
Dairy cows eat a LOT. They are producing huge quantities of high-calorie milk on a daily basis. A good milk cow can produce 10,000 lbs of milk a year. Even after subracting the water, that's still something like 2500 lbs of high quality protein, fat and sugars yearly.
You have to add that to the output of a dairy cow, and subtract the feed the dairy cow is eating and converting directly into milk from the normal feed of a beef cow. A lot of beef is raised on pretty marginal land, eating a pretty marginal diet. Dairy cows get special diets to help them produce abundant milk.
Diesel fuel is just thicker gasoline really (more carbon atoms). It's refined from the same crude oil. I think it's actually easier to refine than gasoline and since it's more dense, it's more efficient to transport.
So unless the whole petroleum industry is running itself on hydropower or wind or something, if diesel fuel takes more energy to create than it delivers, we'd be in a net energy deficit regarding petroleum based power. I find it difficult to believe that is true. I also find it hard to believe that diesel fuel (and by inference, fuel oil, which is the same thing) would be so cheap to buy and widely used if they were sucking up all that energy.
You sure you didn't make a typo?
Just a dumb question, but why did they use the big aluminum enclosures? Apple sells a rackmount 2U server that would seem to be tailor made for this application.
Does the server hardware or software configuration somehow prevent doing this? I'm dumb enough that it's possible Apple isn't shipping the G5 for their rackmounts yet and I just don't realize it, so please be kind when you explain.
Salon.com's discussion area, TableTalk, has a long running thread with a lot of the same comments I'm seeing here.
3
http://tabletalk.salon.com/webx?50@@.596c5668/188
They're trying to figure out the best way to get the word out about this very scary issue.
The technical expertise running around here is a nice complement to their political savvy...
To avoid the freezes, switch to a different mirror to actually download the update.
The European mirror seems to have problems. I've never had a crash using the U.S. based FX mirror.
French trade with Iraq was less than 2% of their foreign commerce. They could have easily picked up lots more cash by just voting with us on the Security Council, plus some nice plums in the "Reconstruction" rape that's going on now.
French principles beat the snot out of the criminals that are currently in charge of this country.