I worked with climate scientists as a computer scientist. My job was helping to implement, tune and parallelize computer simulations. Otherwise I was not involved in climate science at all.
There's a lot of people in climate science. Our group consisted of geologists, archaeologists, biologists. We even had one sociologist:)
"However, a climate scientists doesn't need to be a stupid idiot in order to be wrong. Much of what we were taught in school concerning fundamentals of physics were "wrong" (e.g. 4 phases of matter; 3 spatial dimensions + 1 temporal dimension; proton is the smallest fundamental particle, etc)."
And guess what, they taught you RIGHT. Because all these facts are quite true, they just do not hold at some extreme conditions. In other words, all our theories are incomplete.
But good theories have predictive power within their domain. This is quite true about 3 stages of matter in 'common' life, for example.
"I personally don't care if it's true or not. If you really believe it, then there are solutions to solving it that don't require control of others. Let's go nuclear. Let's seed the oceans with iron (which also has the added side effect of increasing fish populations). Let's put up the solar shades. Let's move the earth to a wider orbit. Let's sequester the CO2 on Mars."
Of course, it's not the "end of the world" in the sense of "the Earth is destroyed", but in practical terms it'll be VERY bad.
There's a good article on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming - some effects are ALREADY very visible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming#Acidification is my favorite).
200 millions of light-years is too small for significant Hubble effects.
Spectral patterns are not really affected by the star being close to collapse, since we only see its outer envelope which consists of fairly normal plasma.
"Disabling everything but HTTP/HTTPS to the outside world seems a reasonable model for most ISP's. I've certainly encouraged that approach at work, simply to ease the security headaches."
I hope you never work at ISP...
First, a lot of good legitimate applications need incoming connections on a separate channel. The main example: VoIP.
Second, you'll also need a lot of non-HTTP protocols like the network protocol of WoW.
Slashdot Mirror
Anthropogenic global warming is also a direct effect of rising CO2...
The paper uses the term 'fast-paced game'. Just saying...
The worst design issue is GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) - it prevents Python from using threads.
The second design issue is the usage of refcounters instead of real GC.
And finally, Python's bytecode and internal representation is far from optimal. Any Forth programmer can tell you that :)
Uhm...
This study has good controls, so it's more than just 'correlation'.
JVM is going to get invokedynamic instruction soon - http://blog.headius.com/2008/09/first-taste-of-invokedynamic.html
Even without 'invkoedynamic', JRuby is one of the best-performing Ruby interpreters.
You can write in Scala, it's very nice. Although, I'd like to see better support for its type system in the JVM.
It's the unofficial 'next Java' for JVM.
PS: Do you want me to punch you in face? You see, C++ is one of my favorite languages :)
Python has some brain-dead design issues in its interpreter, so it's not that great a feat.
"Unladen Swallow" will probably fix a lot of these issues (and maybe, just maybe, we'll get rid of GIL in Python).
CMU and SBCL are nice, but if you want the current state-of-the-art in virtual machine development, you should check Sun JVM.
LISP compilers are not magical. They just try to:
1) Infere types and then compile typed code.
2) Do inlined threaded interpreter for everything else.
I.e. if you want fast LISP code - you have to write it like you would write it in C/Java/C++/another_static_language.
Not necessary.
I worked with climate scientists as a computer scientist. My job was helping to implement, tune and parallelize computer simulations. Otherwise I was not involved in climate science at all.
There's a lot of people in climate science. Our group consisted of geologists, archaeologists, biologists. We even had one sociologist :)
Of course, it's impossible to assert that the current climate change is not natural only from looking at the ice core data.
Fortunately, we have A LOT of other data from different sources with much better time and resolution.
You actually don't even _need_ to use tools to detect global warming, its effects can be seen with naked eyes. Look at corals, for example.
"However, a climate scientists doesn't need to be a stupid idiot in order to be wrong. Much of what we were taught in school concerning fundamentals of physics were "wrong" (e.g. 4 phases of matter; 3 spatial dimensions + 1 temporal dimension; proton is the smallest fundamental particle, etc)."
And guess what, they taught you RIGHT. Because all these facts are quite true, they just do not hold at some extreme conditions. In other words, all our theories are incomplete.
But good theories have predictive power within their domain. This is quite true about 3 stages of matter in 'common' life, for example.
"I personally don't care if it's true or not. If you really believe it, then there are solutions to solving it that don't require control of others. Let's go nuclear. Let's seed the oceans with iron (which also has the added side effect of increasing fish populations). Let's put up the solar shades. Let's move the earth to a wider orbit. Let's sequester the CO2 on Mars."
Let's ask a wood fairy to fix all that's wrong...
Virtually 100% of real climate scientists agree on global warming.
You have to scrape the bottom of the barrel even to find several dozens of real dissenting climate scientists: http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/12/more_on_inhofes_alleged_list_o.php
The last figure is from ice-core samples in Antarctica. And it's very misleading.
Look at the scale. One pixel on this diagram is about one _thousand_ years, and it takes tens of thousands of years for significant changes.
Yet we see MUCH more rapid changes. As in 100x more rapid than the changes on your graph.
The cycles on this graph are very well known, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles - they were first derived by purely mathematical methods.
PS: Do you REALLY think that all climate scientists are stupid idiots and/or parts of global conspiracy?
Can you provide quotes of relevant articles?
Of course, it's not the "end of the world" in the sense of "the Earth is destroyed", but in practical terms it'll be VERY bad.
There's a good article on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming - some effects are ALREADY very visible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_global_warming#Acidification is my favorite).
"A few feet of water and a few degrees and perhaps some rain pattern changes *worst case*"
How about "dustbowls in USA every single year" bad?
I have some first-hand experience in the field of climate science.
I got tired of fighting with trolls on forums, because people somehow think that their gut feeling is better than real science.
The current warming trend is NOT a natural cycle, its parameters are all wrong.
But it only needs to happen one time.
200 millions of light-years is too small for significant Hubble effects.
Spectral patterns are not really affected by the star being close to collapse, since we only see its outer envelope which consists of fairly normal plasma.
Tsar Bomb is tiny.
I mean _really_ tiny. It has yield of 2*10^17 joules and power of about 5.4*10^24 watts. That's about 1% of the normal Sun's energy output.
Supernovae produce about 1*10^44 Joules of energy during several minutes. So Tsar Bomba has the power of about 0.000000000000000000000001% Supernova.
There are OpenSource tools which handle re-flashing of most BIOSes.
Also, there are just a few BIOS manufacturers. So it might be not that hard to write semi-unversal code.
Now I wish my computer had a TPM module....
"The random Sourceforge VoIP project won't cut it, and isn't worth my time or an ISP's time to evaluate."
So, you want (as ISP) to decide what your users should use? You fail, then.
"Disabling everything but HTTP/HTTPS to the outside world seems a reasonable model for most ISP's. I've certainly encouraged that approach at work, simply to ease the security headaches."
I hope you never work at ISP...
First, a lot of good legitimate applications need incoming connections on a separate channel. The main example: VoIP.
Second, you'll also need a lot of non-HTTP protocols like the network protocol of WoW.
Third, NATing on ISP scale is not very easy.
Portable apps _designed_ to behave this way. That's not a bug.
They can be copied on (and started from) a USB stick.
There are lot of problems with portable applications which try to write into the directory where .exe file is installed.
Vista 'helpfully' virtualizes file access and this breaks a lot of such apps.