Doing something different from what you are used to is ALWAYS more difficult. Get over it.
I used to think that way too. Except add OS X to the discussion. Then things change.
There is always a "hump" associated with changing from one operating system to another, however people who cross the hump on Windows or OS X can live there and become productive. There is no getting over the hump on Linux. Why? Because both Windows and OS X have a set of rules regarding what applications should look like, how their menus should be laid out, what keys should be used for which short cuts, etc. So the more you use them and get used to them the less you have to think about how the infrastructure is going to work and the more productive you can be. That isn't true of Linux, each application might have a different windows toolkit, some wiener thought having "File" be the first menu was stoopid and it should be "Edit", someone else decides since preferences are really options and they are editing the config file they should be called "edit config" under the File menu not called Preferences under the Edit menu.
As silly and as banal as that sounds, it makes a world of difference for people who use computers to get things done, rather than simply enjoy the act of using a computer.
You may try to litigate the employment agreement but basically as it stands everything you write they own. Some states such as California have a "what you do on your own time with your own gear" exemption however that has been subverted by companies who offer to "pay for your internet access". The reasoning goes (and I know at least one person trapped by this) that they paid for your internet access, thus they "own" your network connection, thus any work you do that uses that network connection they also own under the terms of their employment contract. Ever since I had a friend burned by this I refused to have my employer pay for my internet connection.
You need to go to your boss and make a request for transfer of ownership and rights of the code you wrote that the company is now shoving in the proverbial bin. If they accept then you need to get that transfer in writing then you can safely open source the code. More likely they will refuse, citing some bogus reason like "but people will expect us to support it" or some such, but what they really mean is that if your code is successful and begins to dominate its little market segment they will look like buttheads for going outside for this other bit of code which cost the company money to acquire and time to integrate. No, it is so much simpler just to say no.
With luck someone will write him and say they have the software, they use the software, and they aren't going to take it down. So sue me. If he takes the bait (and a good lawyer would not recommend it) then you could have a court explain to him that this particular cow is not only out of the barn, he is out of gunshot range.
The question that hasn't been tested well in court is the "viral" nature of the GPL. The author could, as is his right, change a few lines of code and release under a new license, but which is the original work and which is the derivative? The GPL asserts that derivative works are also covered under the license so one might try to argue that unless he re-implements it *from scratch* then his new version is covered under the GPL as well.
There is precedent for this way of thinking. Back in the 80's when people needed a BIOS to boot their PC and IBM had oh so nicely published the source to theirs in the PC/AT Technical documents, they got called on the table because IBM had not given them access to the source in order to allow them to implement it. Unlike most software licenses the GPL is written with rights propagation, (most any other software license you read will explicitly disallow propagation) and so one wonders if you litigated that aspect of the GPL which interpretation would win. I know the one that rms would prefer won.
Between cscope and a tags following editor and a notebook (or another text editor window open) figuring out code like this is kind of fun. Basically start with what the code is supposed to do, and follow the trail of how it does that. I like to start at the function or module that flips the bit or presents the screen and looking at who called it (cscope, follow tag) then looking at what the function needed to know before it could call it, and then how did it get that information (following back up the tree). Eventually you will end up with a whole bunch of things that can cause the code to do what its designed to do, and along the way those paths will have modulators that sometimes enable, sometimes disable what they do. That is your "control plane" if you will. Follow the control plane and you will know how to make the software do what you want and then you should have enough to start making it do something different than what it does (assuming what it does is broken;-). Good luck.
--C
Except that roads can hold more "perfect" drivers per minute than they can "imperfect" drivers. Specifically, if everyone is traveling in their lane, the road can carry avg car length * # of lanes * speed (in feet/minute) Cars per minute. Cars go faster, more cars go through. But represents the highway equivalent of "laminar flow" where all the cars are following along. But of course they are aren't perfect drivers and since responses aren't instantaneous they introduce "turbulence" into the flow.
Many people get two times a day 5 days a week to test these theories;-). Once the flow on the freeway goes chaotic the avg speed almost exactly drops in half.
--Chuck
Why? Bigger screen (possible to read 8.5 x 11 pdfs without zooming), more memory (12G CF cards supported), built in graphic pad for annotating things you're reading. Runs Linux!! Easy to ssh to it. You can build custom applications for it for your favorite content. Its got Wifi so you can fetch things over the web (you could even write code to have it phone home to your home server and upload the current news if you so chose) Oh and did I mention OPEN SOURCE? As in not closed, as in you don't have to pay yourself $0.10 to read your own email on your e-reader?
-DrC
I find a number of people have the misimpression that the reason "everyone" uses Internet Explorer is because it adheres best to the web standards. The proof? "Well gee, everywhere you go it works and there are some sites that IE works great on and those other browsers can't render at all!" Sad really.
I do think the combination of CSS and XHTML make managing a nice web site with a basic text editor possible. Nice to have the layout stuff not mixed up with the content.
Probably used by weight/fitness centers to scam people, "See! This is what you could look like if you use our amazing $29.95/month plan!" or some such.
There is something creepy about having "you" in the game (not to mention the massive upload/download problems of having 8 million "skins" getting shared) but worse would be celebrity abuse. I mean really, who wouldn't dress up kobolds to look like Bill Gates? Scripted dialog? "You no take Vista!" But then where does that leave poor bill? And when you can video someone walking down the street and "back port" their scan into a game? Hmmmm ?
Next thing will be DVDs where you can replace the lead characters in a movie with "you" ? Boy the pr0n industry will be into that one in a big way. (no pun intended)
All in all a new world is just another day away.
--D
Anyone who believes that the "Total Information Awareness" project was scrapped is misguided. Until the US creates a Constituional Amendment which defines a citizen's right to privacy, the government and in particular the police/injustice arm of the government will pursue developing this capability vigorusly. It is the technology that make despotism possible in secular society, why wouldn't they want it?
-D
So no one understands climates?
on
Water From Wind
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Understand that moisture content in the air is established by temperature and pressure. There is water in Australia, its just not dropping out of the sky. If you extract moisture from the air, then when that air is in the presence of liquid water it will induce some evaporation.
That being said, this system could work either by using the reduced pressure from the airfoil surface or more likely by actually creating some compression and then having a decompression path for the air that goes through a condenser.
All that being said, I was in Australia a couple of months ago and speaking as someone from California I'd say that if they put flow restrictors on their faucets it would do them a world of good. Sure taking a shower in a 6gpm shower is luxurious but really, do you really care about conserving water if you let your water run free like that? Low flow toilets? Nope. Granted I was mostly in the cities (Sydney, Canberra, etc) but still it seemed there wasn't a lot of "internalizing" what it means to live in a drought.
--C
Challenges abound, and for what?
on
USB To Go Wireless
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
So whomever first observed that the benefit of USB was that you could power the damn things too was spot on. Take the NeXT cube, sure it was wired but it was ONLY ONE wire. So this has some of the same feel. I read this as a response to the completely messed up world that is Bluetooth (and Zigbee) because nobody can create a wireless standard that you and I can program without joining some $100,000 up front consortium and with $50,000 per annum bulk patent licensing rights. The first wireless proposal that is both "open" in the sense that its well docuemented and "free" in the sense that you can claim compliance without having your arse sued off because you implemented to the SPEC, will take all other wireless standards out.
--DrC
Gamecards come with an authorization key for creating an account. You can use anyone's install media to put the game on your computer. Game cards are $30 for 60 days of play time and can be extended by adding the code from a new game card.
--C
Perhaps they haven't been expressed well. I can imagine a digital picture frame that can tell you about the picture in the display, as if the photographer was there next to you explaining it.
The idea picture frame like device is probably one of ATMELs cheap ARM processors and bluetooth etched right on the glass with the drivers for the TFT. If you provided an LED backlight you could run the thing for very little power and send it updates from a local machine that has the network stuff.
You could also do short clips (sort of halfway to the Wizarding pictures in the Harry Potter books.) No doubt this will be a standard feature of some digital wall paper in the future but for now it lowers the barrier to sending the grandparents a new picture every month or so, and its economically more efficient than printing a new picture every month if done correctly.
--Chuck
I didn't see any specs for the touch panel, it would be a shame if you could write a decent driver for it under Linux or FreeBSD. Also the power supply is listed at 220W. Assuming you actually put a P4 Prescott in there, you've got about 90W of motherboard, plus another 35 for the video card, and surges of 30 for the disks (15 x 2) It starts to get into the range where the supply better actually deliver what it says or you might be replacing it.
I also wonder about the "cool & quiet" vs you can put an AX800/XT in there. Seems not so cool or quiet.
All that being said however, it is refreshing to see some variety in the PC market. After so many years of beige bricks a little color and panache from the factory (as opposed to home grown) can only help.
--Chuck
I don't make that assumption, the author of the piece linked to the story points out the scary similarities between shifts in greenhouse gases in prehistoric times and todays shifts. Now he does that to try to emphasize the rapidity of change, but it also means that our current rise may NOT be due to humans after all as there were no humans on the planet when those shifts were recorded.
And back to my analogy, I didn't say someone who stopped (or didn't) smoke wouldn't get lung cancer, I simply said cancer. Just like our changing the amount of green house gases may prevent a kind of global climate shift but by definition there are other mechanisms that don't involve humans that will still cause a global climate shift. The end result is the same, massive changes in where humanity can live comfortably but we're not preparing for that now are we? Of course not there isn't any grant money in it.
Here is the quote, from the article that is linked in the story, that you apparently didn't bother to read:
Lessons from the deep past
An alternative approach is to look for examples in more ancient earth history, of similar phenomena to the present: that is, of sudden, massive outbursts of greenhouse gases into a world that is already warm. At least two have been identified, in the Toarcian epoch of the Jurassic Period, some 180 million years ago, and in the early Eocene Epoch, around 55 million years ago.
In both of these, the influx of greenhouse gases has been demonstrated by changes in the ratios of carbon isotopes within fossils. The isotopes themselves do not say whether mainly CO2 or methane was involved, but plausible scenarios suggest the involvement of both (say, by deriving CO2 from extraordinary, geologically rare volcanic outbursts, providing initial warming which in turn destabilized methane which had been stored in permafrost or in ocean floor sediments). Whatever the precise mix of gases, the amount of warming is now well established, again from isotope ratios preserved in fossils. Rapid warmings of the order of between 5 and 10 degrees centigrade took place globally, the temperatures declining back to background values over many thousands of years, probably as the excess greenhouse gases were slowly drawn out of the atmosphere by reactions associated with rock weathering.
These geological examples strongly reinforce the modelled scenarios of global warming for later this century. Crucially, such temperature surges show the earth behaving in a non-linear fashion when reacting to environmental stress: that is, it tends to 'flip' from one quasi-stable state to another, and this kind of behaviour is inherently difficult to model or to predict. There will be, the oceanographer Wallace Broecker has said, unpleasant surprises in the greenhouse.
I added a bit of emphasis there. Those pre-historic levels seem to have "flipped" pretty quickly too.
But that was "volcanic" you say, well we're entering a period of "unprecendented" volcanic activity on the pacific rim. But hey, that's probably our fault too.
Unless I'm mistaken, and that's certainly possible, no one in the accredited scientific community disagrees with the assertion that global climate has changed, for reasons unknown, over geologically short periods of time, without the participation of humans, in the past 200 - 300 million years. That is neither a minority opinion, nor is particularly assailable as a fact (unless you're a creationist and want to go that "young earth" route).
So telling folks that by cutting down their green house gas emissions, they are going to prevent or even ameliorate global warming is like telling someone that by not smoking they will not get cancer. Not only is it not the whole truth, it detracts from actually saving lives. If you can't understand that, or if you wish to dally in meta debate, you're welcome to do that. It just means, like our non-smoker friend, you haven't really done anything to futher the chances of humanities survival.
On the contrary, a number of the papers that study things like ice cores in the antartic are worried because climate shifts were, in a geological sense, very rapid. Don't you even read this stuff?
My two points are that the "global warming alarmists" are wasting innocent people's hard earned money by trying to get them to buy into the fact that they will figure out a way to control the weather (and if they were up front about that agenda they would get sacked.) And two that there is indisputable proof that if we were to abandon this planet today its climate will shift, so why shouldn't we just accept that and deal with it? Three billion dollars to reduce emissions from vehicles this year and 133 people die of heatstroke in europe because the temperature swing was abnormal? Three billion dollars could get everyone in italy an airconditioner and a tank of propane to run it.
Next thing you know there will be the "global magnetic crisis". The north and south poles are wandering, and they may even switch to opposite ends of the planet! This change has been accelerating over the last 100 years, it MUST be due to something people are doing.
Can we stop sacrificing innocent people in the quest to appease the weather gods? It didn't work for the Mayans and it won't work today.
This is a tremendously silly debate. Strong words I know but consider the facts:
1) There is clear evidence of global climate
changes when humans were not present.
2) There is clear evidence of global climate
changes when humans are present.
3) All of our global climate is directly related
to the output of energy from the Sun.
4) There is clear evidence that the Sun's energy
output is variable.
What does that add up to? It adds up to a 100% chance that the global climate will change radically whether or not we do anything! So we really have only two choices:
Option A: Develop the science and technology to completely control the weather/climate everywhere on the planet.
Option B: Develop the science and technology that allows humans to survive when the planet is frozen as well as when it is hot.
The entire "Global Warming" debate is focussed on getting us to "Option A". The starting element being to have the global population regulate the proportion of certain gasses that are emitted by our day to day activities. I can only assume they will move on to giant fans or perhaps massive ocean moving water pumps to attempt to balance heatload around the planet.
Option B requires no new science (hence it isn't interesting to scientists looking for grants, its just an engineering problem.) and consequently it gets no coverage at all.
Face it folks, this planet is a documented deathtrap. It has killed off more flora and fauna over the last 4.5 billion years than you can imagine and we're next. Lets let the planet do its thing and get hotter and colder and focus on either digging in and surviving those changes or getting off this rock into an environment we built and we control.
My nightmare is that we invest literally trillions of euros/dollars what-have-you trying to control the weather, only to have some factor that changed the weather a million years ago do it again. And we all die. But collectively, the billions waiting outside the pearly gates can look to each other and say "At least it wasn't our fault."
Software Piracy is a Myth. Classical economics teaches us that given a supply of widgets, the price for the widget rises until the marginal cost to produce the widget and the demand for the widget balance out. Explicitly, economics teaches us the concept of price "elasticity" where reducing the price of a widget will increase demand. Software, and non-real property services screws with that model because its costs essentially nothing to reproduce. Thus in a classical model, supply is effectively infinite (especially with electronic download) so the price should move down toward zero (which it doesn't of course).
If software vendors had a perfectly impenetrable copy protection mechanism, the change in their revenues would be, nearly zero. This is because the people they accuse of being pirates have a price elasticity point that is below their artificially created market price.
For example, the price of Microsoft Office in China (prior to revision by M$FT) was the equivalent of approximately one half year's salary of the typical urban Chinese. How many people will pay half of what they earn for one copy of buggy bloated software? Exactly zero. So had Microsoft a perfect copy protection system in China, they would sell exactly zero copies of their program. They have only belatedly come to realize that thousands of people will pay $3.00 for their software, so if the choice is zero or thousands, and the price to produce it still quite low. What would you do? Can you say "Country Specific Versions" ?
The digital economy will wreak a number of changes, and this is only one of them. I leave you with this final bit of wisdom.
No form of copy protection has ever prevented a determined attacker from getting access to the protected product (and from their distributing to anyone who wants it) and yet there are countless documented cases of legitimate users who have been unable to use a product due to the interaction of its protection scheme and their legitimate equipment. If it doesn't stop crooks, and it hurts people who actually pay money, what is the logical endpoint? No one willing to pay any more money.
For any system, if it isn't maintained by complete idiots, it improves over time. I for one am glad that Gnome and KDE exist because the "rivalry" (such as it is) keeps them both improving at a good rate.
On any "modern" system they will both be reasonable fast, and depending on your tolerance for UI symmetry easy to use. I do dislike the "K" prefex on everything, but the X guys started it so I shouldn't complain.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to think that way too. Except add OS X to the discussion. Then things change.
There is always a "hump" associated with changing from one operating system to another, however people who cross the hump on Windows or OS X can live there and become productive. There is no getting over the hump on Linux. Why? Because both Windows and OS X have a set of rules regarding what applications should look like, how their menus should be laid out, what keys should be used for which short cuts, etc. So the more you use them and get used to them the less you have to think about how the infrastructure is going to work and the more productive you can be. That isn't true of Linux, each application might have a different windows toolkit, some wiener thought having "File" be the first menu was stoopid and it should be "Edit", someone else decides since preferences are really options and they are editing the config file they should be called "edit config" under the File menu not called Preferences under the Edit menu.
As silly and as banal as that sounds, it makes a world of difference for people who use computers to get things done, rather than simply enjoy the act of using a computer.
--Chuck[disclaimer IANAL]
You may try to litigate the employment agreement but basically as it stands everything you write they own. Some states such as California have a "what you do on your own time with your own gear" exemption however that has been subverted by companies who offer to "pay for your internet access". The reasoning goes (and I know at least one person trapped by this) that they paid for your internet access, thus they "own" your network connection, thus any work you do that uses that network connection they also own under the terms of their employment contract. Ever since I had a friend burned by this I refused to have my employer pay for my internet connection.
You need to go to your boss and make a request for transfer of ownership and rights of the code you wrote that the company is now shoving in the proverbial bin. If they accept then you need to get that transfer in writing then you can safely open source the code. More likely they will refuse, citing some bogus reason like "but people will expect us to support it" or some such, but what they really mean is that if your code is successful and begins to dominate its little market segment they will look like buttheads for going outside for this other bit of code which cost the company money to acquire and time to integrate. No, it is so much simpler just to say no.
--ChuckWith luck someone will write him and say they have the software, they use the software, and they aren't going to take it down. So sue me. If he takes the bait (and a good lawyer would not recommend it) then you could have a court explain to him that this particular cow is not only out of the barn, he is out of gunshot range.
The question that hasn't been tested well in court is the "viral" nature of the GPL. The author could, as is his right, change a few lines of code and release under a new license, but which is the original work and which is the derivative? The GPL asserts that derivative works are also covered under the license so one might try to argue that unless he re-implements it *from scratch* then his new version is covered under the GPL as well.
There is precedent for this way of thinking. Back in the 80's when people needed a BIOS to boot their PC and IBM had oh so nicely published the source to theirs in the PC/AT Technical documents, they got called on the table because IBM had not given them access to the source in order to allow them to implement it. Unlike most software licenses the GPL is written with rights propagation, (most any other software license you read will explicitly disallow propagation) and so one wonders if you litigated that aspect of the GPL which interpretation would win. I know the one that rms would prefer won.
--ChuckBetween cscope and a tags following editor and a notebook (or another text editor window open) figuring out code like this is kind of fun. Basically start with what the code is supposed to do, and follow the trail of how it does that. I like to start at the function or module that flips the bit or presents the screen and looking at who called it (cscope, follow tag) then looking at what the function needed to know before it could call it, and then how did it get that information (following back up the tree). Eventually you will end up with a whole bunch of things that can cause the code to do what its designed to do, and along the way those paths will have modulators that sometimes enable, sometimes disable what they do. That is your "control plane" if you will. Follow the control plane and you will know how to make the software do what you want and then you should have enough to start making it do something different than what it does (assuming what it does is broken ;-). Good luck.
--C
Except that roads can hold more "perfect" drivers per minute than they can "imperfect" drivers. Specifically, if everyone is traveling in their lane, the road can carry avg car length * # of lanes * speed (in feet/minute) Cars per minute. Cars go faster, more cars go through. But represents the highway equivalent of "laminar flow" where all the cars are following along. But of course they are aren't perfect drivers and since responses aren't instantaneous they introduce "turbulence" into the flow. Many people get two times a day 5 days a week to test these theories ;-). Once the flow on the freeway goes chaotic the avg speed almost exactly drops in half.
--Chuck
Why? Bigger screen (possible to read 8.5 x 11 pdfs without zooming), more memory (12G CF cards supported), built in graphic pad for annotating things you're reading. Runs Linux!! Easy to ssh to it. You can build custom applications for it for your favorite content. Its got Wifi so you can fetch things over the web (you could even write code to have it phone home to your home server and upload the current news if you so chose) Oh and did I mention OPEN SOURCE? As in not closed, as in you don't have to pay yourself $0.10 to read your own email on your e-reader? -DrC
I find a number of people have the misimpression that the reason "everyone" uses Internet Explorer is because it adheres best to the web standards. The proof? "Well gee, everywhere you go it works and there are some sites that IE works great on and those other browsers can't render at all!" Sad really.
I do think the combination of CSS and XHTML make managing a nice web site with a basic text editor possible. Nice to have the layout stuff not mixed up with the content.
--Chuck
Probably used by weight/fitness centers to scam people, "See! This is what you could look like if you use our amazing $29.95/month plan!" or some such. There is something creepy about having "you" in the game (not to mention the massive upload/download problems of having 8 million "skins" getting shared) but worse would be celebrity abuse. I mean really, who wouldn't dress up kobolds to look like Bill Gates? Scripted dialog? "You no take Vista!" But then where does that leave poor bill? And when you can video someone walking down the street and "back port" their scan into a game? Hmmmm ? Next thing will be DVDs where you can replace the lead characters in a movie with "you" ? Boy the pr0n industry will be into that one in a big way. (no pun intended) All in all a new world is just another day away. --D
Anyone who believes that the "Total Information Awareness" project was scrapped is misguided. Until the US creates a Constituional Amendment which defines a citizen's right to privacy, the government and in particular the police/injustice arm of the government will pursue developing this capability vigorusly. It is the technology that make despotism possible in secular society, why wouldn't they want it? -D
Understand that moisture content in the air is established by temperature and pressure. There is water in Australia, its just not dropping out of the sky. If you extract moisture from the air, then when that air is in the presence of liquid water it will induce some evaporation. That being said, this system could work either by using the reduced pressure from the airfoil surface or more likely by actually creating some compression and then having a decompression path for the air that goes through a condenser. All that being said, I was in Australia a couple of months ago and speaking as someone from California I'd say that if they put flow restrictors on their faucets it would do them a world of good. Sure taking a shower in a 6gpm shower is luxurious but really, do you really care about conserving water if you let your water run free like that? Low flow toilets? Nope. Granted I was mostly in the cities (Sydney, Canberra, etc) but still it seemed there wasn't a lot of "internalizing" what it means to live in a drought. --C
So whomever first observed that the benefit of USB was that you could power the damn things too was spot on. Take the NeXT cube, sure it was wired but it was ONLY ONE wire. So this has some of the same feel. I read this as a response to the completely messed up world that is Bluetooth (and Zigbee) because nobody can create a wireless standard that you and I can program without joining some $100,000 up front consortium and with $50,000 per annum bulk patent licensing rights. The first wireless proposal that is both "open" in the sense that its well docuemented and "free" in the sense that you can claim compliance without having your arse sued off because you implemented to the SPEC, will take all other wireless standards out. --DrC
Gamecards come with an authorization key for creating an account. You can use anyone's install media to put the game on your computer. Game cards are $30 for 60 days of play time and can be extended by adding the code from a new game card. --C
Along this same line, a passenger jet of this size is irresitable to terrorists. Kill nearly 600 innocent civilians with one IED? Music to their ears.
Perhaps they haven't been expressed well. I can imagine a digital picture frame that can tell you about the picture in the display, as if the photographer was there next to you explaining it. The idea picture frame like device is probably one of ATMELs cheap ARM processors and bluetooth etched right on the glass with the drivers for the TFT. If you provided an LED backlight you could run the thing for very little power and send it updates from a local machine that has the network stuff. You could also do short clips (sort of halfway to the Wizarding pictures in the Harry Potter books.) No doubt this will be a standard feature of some digital wall paper in the future but for now it lowers the barrier to sending the grandparents a new picture every month or so, and its economically more efficient than printing a new picture every month if done correctly. --Chuck
I didn't see any specs for the touch panel, it would be a shame if you could write a decent driver for it under Linux or FreeBSD. Also the power supply is listed at 220W. Assuming you actually put a P4 Prescott in there, you've got about 90W of motherboard, plus another 35 for the video card, and surges of 30 for the disks (15 x 2) It starts to get into the range where the supply better actually deliver what it says or you might be replacing it. I also wonder about the "cool & quiet" vs you can put an AX800/XT in there. Seems not so cool or quiet. All that being said however, it is refreshing to see some variety in the PC market. After so many years of beige bricks a little color and panache from the factory (as opposed to home grown) can only help. --Chuck
this is a test
And back to my analogy, I didn't say someone who stopped (or didn't) smoke wouldn't get lung cancer, I simply said cancer. Just like our changing the amount of green house gases may prevent a kind of global climate shift but by definition there are other mechanisms that don't involve humans that will still cause a global climate shift. The end result is the same, massive changes in where humanity can live comfortably but we're not preparing for that now are we? Of course not there isn't any grant money in it.
--Chuck
Here is the quote, from the article that is linked in the story, that you apparently didn't bother to read:
Lessons from the deep past
An alternative approach is to look for examples in more ancient earth history, of similar phenomena to the present: that is, of sudden, massive outbursts of greenhouse gases into a world that is already warm. At least two have been identified, in the Toarcian epoch of the Jurassic Period, some 180 million years ago, and in the early Eocene Epoch, around 55 million years ago.
In both of these, the influx of greenhouse gases has been demonstrated by changes in the ratios of carbon isotopes within fossils. The isotopes themselves do not say whether mainly CO2 or methane was involved, but plausible scenarios suggest the involvement of both (say, by deriving CO2 from extraordinary, geologically rare volcanic outbursts, providing initial warming which in turn destabilized methane which had been stored in permafrost or in ocean floor sediments). Whatever the precise mix of gases, the amount of warming is now well established, again from isotope ratios preserved in fossils. Rapid warmings of the order of between 5 and 10 degrees centigrade took place globally, the temperatures declining back to background values over many thousands of years, probably as the excess greenhouse gases were slowly drawn out of the atmosphere by reactions associated with rock weathering.
These geological examples strongly reinforce the modelled scenarios of global warming for later this century. Crucially, such temperature surges show the earth behaving in a non-linear fashion when reacting to environmental stress: that is, it tends to 'flip' from one quasi-stable state to another, and this kind of behaviour is inherently difficult to model or to predict. There will be, the oceanographer Wallace Broecker has said, unpleasant surprises in the greenhouse.
I added a bit of emphasis there. Those pre-historic levels seem to have "flipped" pretty quickly too.
But that was "volcanic" you say, well we're entering a period of "unprecendented" volcanic activity on the pacific rim. But hey, that's probably our fault too.
Unless I'm mistaken, and that's certainly possible, no one in the accredited scientific community disagrees with the assertion that global climate has changed, for reasons unknown, over geologically short periods of time, without the participation of humans, in the past 200 - 300 million years. That is neither a minority opinion, nor is particularly assailable as a fact (unless you're a creationist and want to go that "young earth" route).So telling folks that by cutting down their green house gas emissions, they are going to prevent or even ameliorate global warming is like telling someone that by not smoking they will not get cancer. Not only is it not the whole truth, it detracts from actually saving lives. If you can't understand that, or if you wish to dally in meta debate, you're welcome to do that. It just means, like our non-smoker friend, you haven't really done anything to futher the chances of humanities survival.
My two points are that the "global warming alarmists" are wasting innocent people's hard earned money by trying to get them to buy into the fact that they will figure out a way to control the weather (and if they were up front about that agenda they would get sacked.) And two that there is indisputable proof that if we were to abandon this planet today its climate will shift, so why shouldn't we just accept that and deal with it? Three billion dollars to reduce emissions from vehicles this year and 133 people die of heatstroke in europe because the temperature swing was abnormal? Three billion dollars could get everyone in italy an airconditioner and a tank of propane to run it.
Next thing you know there will be the "global magnetic crisis". The north and south poles are wandering, and they may even switch to opposite ends of the planet! This change has been accelerating over the last 100 years, it MUST be due to something people are doing.
Can we stop sacrificing innocent people in the quest to appease the weather gods? It didn't work for the Mayans and it won't work today.
--Chuck
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1) There is clear evidence of global climate
changes when humans were not present.
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2) There is clear evidence of global climate
changes when humans are present.
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3) All of our global climate is directly related
to the output of energy from the Sun.
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4) There is clear evidence that the Sun's energy
output is variable.
What does that add up to? It adds up to a 100% chance that the global climate will change radically whether or not we do anything! So we really have only two choices:Option A: Develop the science and technology to completely control the weather/climate everywhere on the planet.
Option B: Develop the science and technology that allows humans to survive when the planet is frozen as well as when it is hot.
The entire "Global Warming" debate is focussed on getting us to "Option A". The starting element being to have the global population regulate the proportion of certain gasses that are emitted by our day to day activities. I can only assume they will move on to giant fans or perhaps massive ocean moving water pumps to attempt to balance heatload around the planet.
Option B requires no new science (hence it isn't interesting to scientists looking for grants, its just an engineering problem.) and consequently it gets no coverage at all.
Face it folks, this planet is a documented deathtrap. It has killed off more flora and fauna over the last 4.5 billion years than you can imagine and we're next. Lets let the planet do its thing and get hotter and colder and focus on either digging in and surviving those changes or getting off this rock into an environment we built and we control.
My nightmare is that we invest literally trillions of euros/dollars what-have-you trying to control the weather, only to have some factor that changed the weather a million years ago do it again. And we all die. But collectively, the billions waiting outside the pearly gates can look to each other and say "At least it wasn't our fault."
--Chuck
If software vendors had a perfectly impenetrable copy protection mechanism, the change in their revenues would be, nearly zero. This is because the people they accuse of being pirates have a price elasticity point that is below their artificially created market price.
For example, the price of Microsoft Office in China (prior to revision by M$FT) was the equivalent of approximately one half year's salary of the typical urban Chinese. How many people will pay half of what they earn for one copy of buggy bloated software? Exactly zero. So had Microsoft a perfect copy protection system in China, they would sell exactly zero copies of their program. They have only belatedly come to realize that thousands of people will pay $3.00 for their software, so if the choice is zero or thousands, and the price to produce it still quite low. What would you do? Can you say "Country Specific Versions" ?
The digital economy will wreak a number of changes, and this is only one of them. I leave you with this final bit of wisdom.
No form of copy protection has ever prevented a determined attacker from getting access to the protected product (and from their distributing to anyone who wants it) and yet there are countless documented cases of legitimate users who have been unable to use a product due to the interaction of its protection scheme and their legitimate equipment. If it doesn't stop crooks, and it hurts people who actually pay money, what is the logical endpoint? No one willing to pay any more money.
For any system, if it isn't maintained by complete idiots, it improves over time. I for one am glad that Gnome and KDE exist because the "rivalry" (such as it is) keeps them both improving at a good rate.
On any "modern" system they will both be reasonable fast, and depending on your tolerance for UI symmetry easy to use. I do dislike the "K" prefex on everything, but the X guys started it so I shouldn't complain.