Your garage is much cooler than mine. Mine only has a bunch of outdated security equipment and tools that I hardly use any more. I'd ask to borrow your invisible dragon, but there wouldn't be room with Rosa's car there too. Bummer.
Arthur Clarke did **NOT** patent the use of geosynchronous satellite orbits, although he did write an essay about it in later years called 'How I Lost A Billion Dollars'.
If you want to talk about making perfectly accurate predictions, then yes, there's a lot of work to be done. If you just want to ask whether human activity is causing more heat to be trapped by the atmosphere the answer is settled. There isn't any doubt about it. And it isn't an "extremely minor effect", you only need to look at Earth's two closest neighbors to see and measure the effect that increased CO2 concentrations have. Not surprisingly that effect is that the higher the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere the larger the percentage of heat that the atmosphere traps. Now perhaps you don't think that doubling or tripling the percentage of CO2 in an atmosphere has a noticeable effect on heat retention, but the realities very quickly became obvious to planetary scientists in the middle part of the 20th century. Maybe there is some magical element in Earth's atmosphere which will make CO2 act in a different manner than everywhere else in the known universe, but I wouldn't bet my paycheck on it.
need to show the causal link between the specific CO2 concentrations and the specific amount of global warming
No you don't. CO2 traps heat. An atmosphere with more CO2 in it will trap more heat than an atmosphere with less. High school honors physics classes do that experiment, the simple fact has been known for a century and a half. Humanity's activities generates and releases CO2 by the gigaton, many times more than the planet's natural output. Unless you have some way of reversing these two simple facts then if you were honest you would have to admit that AGW is happening. 1+2=3, and unless you have some proof to the contrary there is no wiggle room for your position at all.
You've never had a family member addicted to Farmville, have you? By all the gods above and below, whoever invented that game should be taken out and shot, and their estate charged for the gazillion hours wasted on that Pavlovian hamster wheel.
I had forgotten Jordan, you're right. Israel is mostly a theocracy, as is Iraq. Lebanon? Is there even a central government that can claim to rule the majority of the country? Not the last that I looked.
Syria is the last secular government in the area, even Egypt's new military government hasn't repealed the laws rammed through by the fundies so they're operating in large part under religious law. (Turkey doesn't really count as being in the Middle East.) I really don't see why US/Israel seems so intent on replacing secular governments in the Middle East with religious ones, but they've done it in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and now are working on imposing the fundies on Syria as well so that appears to be the agenda.
Madoff, Skilling and Fastow ripped off rich people, so they got prosecuted. Who got punished for the Countryside fiasco? Taxpayers. Milken was a long time ago in a galaxy far away, when financial criminals didn't own congresscritters.
I rather wonder if it isn't the (often valid) stereotype of IT jobs requiring 60 hour weeks doesn't turn off a lot of women from the profession. I know that in retail in the big box stores that's a big barrier to many women looking for management positions. They get to a certain level and refuse to advance (generally to store assistant manager) because of the ridiculous hours necessary.
quotas always seem to cause more trouble than they are worth
You weren't around during the 'separate but equal' decades of the US educational system, I take it. There were perfectly valid reasons why quotas really WERE necessary. Most places have done away with them now as it's no longer a shock to see a black child in a mostly-white school any more, but the only reason why that is the case today is because it was FORCED down the throats of unwilling school boards across the nation. Quotas have their place, it just depends on the situation.
You need to go back and research some history. The post-WWII period was really the first time in the last several centuries that women were expected to not have to bring income into the household. You probably don't realize that because most of the literature was written by the upper class, but women of the lower classes had to work for the family to get by. Weaving, knitting, needlepoint, painting ceramics, cheese making, butter making, washing clothes, and the like were all sources of income that could be done out of the home, as were raising chickens and rabbits, collecting eggs, and salting fish.
Women often worked outside the home, and not only in the stereotypical one-room schoolhouse of the movies. My grandmothers and great-grandmothers all worked in resorts and restaurants, a shoe factory, a comforter factory, canneries, basket factories and a fishing lure factory. They were not uncommon in that regard. The storied life of 'Little House on the Prairie' was just that, a story. In reality the mother would probably have spent a couple days a week at the local meat packing plant or the flour mill.
They may have traded as far away as the Gulf of Guinea, as Ming Dynasty ceramic has been excavated in the ruins of Timbuktu. An interesting book on the Chinese naval expeditions of the time is '1421, The Year China Discovered America' by Gavin Menzies. Although his conclusions are somewhat dubious the research he has done is quite interesting.
There wasn't a "race" of Native Americans, there were many different peoples of varied descent. There were at least three major and many minor influxes of people from northeast Asia, and possibly some from northern Europe, and maybe even Africa and southeast Asia. Scandinavians had more in common with Arabs than Algonquins did with Andean peoples.
There were a number of seafaring American peoples. There were many in the Pacific Northwest and the Caribbean, traders sailed from northern Chile to Central America and others from Central America to central California, and IIRC there was also trade between the mouths of the Amazon and the Rio Plata. Because the only written histories were destroyed by the Spanish (Bishop Landa boasted of having burned over a million books in his diocese alone) they're mostly forgotten.
He also had organizational and management skills that Ballmer doesn't. Under the latter the corporate bureaucracy has exploded with multiple new layers of utterly useless management. Programmers should make up the bulk of staff in a programming company, not managers. And where did Ballmer get enough coke to make him think that their employee review system was a good idea?
If they don't have anyone internal who is competent to replace Ballmer it's because they all quit in disgust with his management style. MS would be a much healthier company if the whole top two tiers of management followed Ballmer into the Stygian Pit and were replaced with people who weren't professional backstabbing politicians.
Re:Ballmer made $20 billion for investors today
on
Ballmer To Retire
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· Score: 1
It's all speculation, IOW, a combination of gambling and herd behavior. The days when one purchased a stock, had a voice in the company's operations, and received dividends that were expected to eventually pay for the stock's purchase are long gone. Most stock issued today is non-voting and non-dividend stock, essentially a piece of paper that says, "I was dumb enough to give Company A the amount of $X and have received nothing in return and do not expect to ever get anything back from them." The only value of that piece of paper (or more likely that collection of electrons) is that someone else might pay you more money than you did for it. Why? I have no clue, except for the standard human compulsion for gambling.
Now that stock has been issued and is in circulation every random breeze sets the automated programs on a low-level buy or sell, the speculators see movement and assume insider activity so start buying or selling, the automated programs see the activity and amplify the price swing, and eventually the stock ends up higher or lower than it was for no real reason at all. A good earnings report from the company will send up the price, even though those earnings don't make any dividends for the shareholder, because the 'common knowledge' that good earnings send share prices up is enshrined in the arbitrage programs and the herd instinct of the trading floor. Nothing to do with reality any more at all.
I grew up in a tourist town. Almost twice as many people got killed there crossing with the light as jaywalking, because jaywalkers look at the traffic and don't assume that they'll be fine because the light says that things are all hunky dory. To this day the only time that I actually wait for the light is when my wife is with me and insists.
The herd instinct is strong in people, though. Crossed the street against the light a couple of weeks ago and the whole group of 10 or so who had been waiting followed me. Suddenly I heard a rather plaintive voice saying, "What are we doing? The light's still red!" Rather amusingly a few days later the entire street was completely closed to traffic because of a crime scene investigation, and still all day the herds of people waited at the corner for the light to change.
It depends on the locality. Normally "shared" poles aren't really that. Whoever hangs wire off them leases that right. If the power company owns the poles they will lease the right to use them to the telephone company, cable company, or maybe a private company that wants its own telecom infrastructure between sites, for $X per pole. It can get really complicated in some areas when the owner of the property where the pole is situated can get a portion of the lease, and even sometimes the owner of the property that the cables pass over. In some places there are companies that only own poles, none of the wires that attach to them. Utilities have entire departments that do nothing but deal with this.
By all the gods, WHY isn't ignorance of this depth painful?
There is an enormous percentage of the population who do not use Twitter, and big chunks of that group are pretty easy to define. Anyone who doesn't have a cell phone with Internet access. Anyone who doesn't have continual Internet access on their tablet/laptop. Anyone who values their privacy. Almost everyone over the age of 50. Anyone who is too busy working/taking care of children/playing to waste the time to maintain a feed. Anyone who tried it and found they didn't like it. Anyone who isn't so narcissistic as to think that people really give a crap about their random brain droppings. Anyone who actually has a life.
Your actual regular Twitter users seem pretty un-representative of the general population to me. I only know one person who tweets more than once a month.
Probably not even then. They don't even hold Ronnie Raygun responsible for some of the truly horrible things that happened during his reign, and he's been out of office for a quarter of a century.
Bengazi was the pretty much inevitable result of contracting mercenaries to do the work that Marines did (guarding embassies and consulates) until ~2006. Marine guards come under attack and you end up with a fleet of helicopters full of pissed-off rednecks descending on the area. Mercenary guards come under attack and once their supervisor is woken up he has to decide whether he can call in other staff to do overtime.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless the venue is a swingers club . . .
Your garage is much cooler than mine. Mine only has a bunch of outdated security equipment and tools that I hardly use any more. I'd ask to borrow your invisible dragon, but there wouldn't be room with Rosa's car there too. Bummer.
Arthur Clarke did **NOT** patent the use of geosynchronous satellite orbits, although he did write an essay about it in later years called 'How I Lost A Billion Dollars'.
If you want to talk about making perfectly accurate predictions, then yes, there's a lot of work to be done. If you just want to ask whether human activity is causing more heat to be trapped by the atmosphere the answer is settled. There isn't any doubt about it. And it isn't an "extremely minor effect", you only need to look at Earth's two closest neighbors to see and measure the effect that increased CO2 concentrations have. Not surprisingly that effect is that the higher the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere the larger the percentage of heat that the atmosphere traps. Now perhaps you don't think that doubling or tripling the percentage of CO2 in an atmosphere has a noticeable effect on heat retention, but the realities very quickly became obvious to planetary scientists in the middle part of the 20th century. Maybe there is some magical element in Earth's atmosphere which will make CO2 act in a different manner than everywhere else in the known universe, but I wouldn't bet my paycheck on it.
Fortunately normal people aren't likely to get medical advice from guys who shoot up steroids on a regular basis.
need to show the causal link between the specific CO2 concentrations and the specific amount of global warming
No you don't. CO2 traps heat. An atmosphere with more CO2 in it will trap more heat than an atmosphere with less. High school honors physics classes do that experiment, the simple fact has been known for a century and a half. Humanity's activities generates and releases CO2 by the gigaton, many times more than the planet's natural output. Unless you have some way of reversing these two simple facts then if you were honest you would have to admit that AGW is happening. 1+2=3, and unless you have some proof to the contrary there is no wiggle room for your position at all.
You've never had a family member addicted to Farmville, have you? By all the gods above and below, whoever invented that game should be taken out and shot, and their estate charged for the gazillion hours wasted on that Pavlovian hamster wheel.
I had forgotten Jordan, you're right. Israel is mostly a theocracy, as is Iraq. Lebanon? Is there even a central government that can claim to rule the majority of the country? Not the last that I looked.
Syria is the last secular government in the area, even Egypt's new military government hasn't repealed the laws rammed through by the fundies so they're operating in large part under religious law. (Turkey doesn't really count as being in the Middle East.) I really don't see why US/Israel seems so intent on replacing secular governments in the Middle East with religious ones, but they've done it in Iraq, Libya, Egypt, and now are working on imposing the fundies on Syria as well so that appears to be the agenda.
Madoff, Skilling and Fastow ripped off rich people, so they got prosecuted. Who got punished for the Countryside fiasco? Taxpayers. Milken was a long time ago in a galaxy far away, when financial criminals didn't own congresscritters.
They tried to promote my wife several times, and her consistent response was "I don't **LIKE** what my boss does."
I rather wonder if it isn't the (often valid) stereotype of IT jobs requiring 60 hour weeks doesn't turn off a lot of women from the profession. I know that in retail in the big box stores that's a big barrier to many women looking for management positions. They get to a certain level and refuse to advance (generally to store assistant manager) because of the ridiculous hours necessary.
quotas always seem to cause more trouble than they are worth
You weren't around during the 'separate but equal' decades of the US educational system, I take it. There were perfectly valid reasons why quotas really WERE necessary. Most places have done away with them now as it's no longer a shock to see a black child in a mostly-white school any more, but the only reason why that is the case today is because it was FORCED down the throats of unwilling school boards across the nation. Quotas have their place, it just depends on the situation.
You need to go back and research some history. The post-WWII period was really the first time in the last several centuries that women were expected to not have to bring income into the household. You probably don't realize that because most of the literature was written by the upper class, but women of the lower classes had to work for the family to get by. Weaving, knitting, needlepoint, painting ceramics, cheese making, butter making, washing clothes, and the like were all sources of income that could be done out of the home, as were raising chickens and rabbits, collecting eggs, and salting fish.
Women often worked outside the home, and not only in the stereotypical one-room schoolhouse of the movies. My grandmothers and great-grandmothers all worked in resorts and restaurants, a shoe factory, a comforter factory, canneries, basket factories and a fishing lure factory. They were not uncommon in that regard. The storied life of 'Little House on the Prairie' was just that, a story. In reality the mother would probably have spent a couple days a week at the local meat packing plant or the flour mill.
The latest generation of SlashDot trolls are incredibly disappointing. Michael Kristopit could have created an entire flame war in a thread like this.
They may have traded as far away as the Gulf of Guinea, as Ming Dynasty ceramic has been excavated in the ruins of Timbuktu. An interesting book on the Chinese naval expeditions of the time is '1421, The Year China Discovered America' by Gavin Menzies. Although his conclusions are somewhat dubious the research he has done is quite interesting.
There wasn't a "race" of Native Americans, there were many different peoples of varied descent. There were at least three major and many minor influxes of people from northeast Asia, and possibly some from northern Europe, and maybe even Africa and southeast Asia. Scandinavians had more in common with Arabs than Algonquins did with Andean peoples.
There were a number of seafaring American peoples. There were many in the Pacific Northwest and the Caribbean, traders sailed from northern Chile to Central America and others from Central America to central California, and IIRC there was also trade between the mouths of the Amazon and the Rio Plata. Because the only written histories were destroyed by the Spanish (Bishop Landa boasted of having burned over a million books in his diocese alone) they're mostly forgotten.
He also had organizational and management skills that Ballmer doesn't. Under the latter the corporate bureaucracy has exploded with multiple new layers of utterly useless management. Programmers should make up the bulk of staff in a programming company, not managers. And where did Ballmer get enough coke to make him think that their employee review system was a good idea?
If they don't have anyone internal who is competent to replace Ballmer it's because they all quit in disgust with his management style. MS would be a much healthier company if the whole top two tiers of management followed Ballmer into the Stygian Pit and were replaced with people who weren't professional backstabbing politicians.
It's all speculation, IOW, a combination of gambling and herd behavior. The days when one purchased a stock, had a voice in the company's operations, and received dividends that were expected to eventually pay for the stock's purchase are long gone. Most stock issued today is non-voting and non-dividend stock, essentially a piece of paper that says, "I was dumb enough to give Company A the amount of $X and have received nothing in return and do not expect to ever get anything back from them." The only value of that piece of paper (or more likely that collection of electrons) is that someone else might pay you more money than you did for it. Why? I have no clue, except for the standard human compulsion for gambling.
Now that stock has been issued and is in circulation every random breeze sets the automated programs on a low-level buy or sell, the speculators see movement and assume insider activity so start buying or selling, the automated programs see the activity and amplify the price swing, and eventually the stock ends up higher or lower than it was for no real reason at all. A good earnings report from the company will send up the price, even though those earnings don't make any dividends for the shareholder, because the 'common knowledge' that good earnings send share prices up is enshrined in the arbitrage programs and the herd instinct of the trading floor. Nothing to do with reality any more at all.
It's like forgetting to wait for the cross signal
I grew up in a tourist town. Almost twice as many people got killed there crossing with the light as jaywalking, because jaywalkers look at the traffic and don't assume that they'll be fine because the light says that things are all hunky dory. To this day the only time that I actually wait for the light is when my wife is with me and insists.
The herd instinct is strong in people, though. Crossed the street against the light a couple of weeks ago and the whole group of 10 or so who had been waiting followed me. Suddenly I heard a rather plaintive voice saying, "What are we doing? The light's still red!" Rather amusingly a few days later the entire street was completely closed to traffic because of a crime scene investigation, and still all day the herds of people waited at the corner for the light to change.
It depends on the locality. Normally "shared" poles aren't really that. Whoever hangs wire off them leases that right. If the power company owns the poles they will lease the right to use them to the telephone company, cable company, or maybe a private company that wants its own telecom infrastructure between sites, for $X per pole. It can get really complicated in some areas when the owner of the property where the pole is situated can get a portion of the lease, and even sometimes the owner of the property that the cables pass over. In some places there are companies that only own poles, none of the wires that attach to them. Utilities have entire departments that do nothing but deal with this.
By all the gods, WHY isn't ignorance of this depth painful?
There is an enormous percentage of the population who do not use Twitter, and big chunks of that group are pretty easy to define. Anyone who doesn't have a cell phone with Internet access. Anyone who doesn't have continual Internet access on their tablet/laptop. Anyone who values their privacy. Almost everyone over the age of 50. Anyone who is too busy working/taking care of children/playing to waste the time to maintain a feed. Anyone who tried it and found they didn't like it. Anyone who isn't so narcissistic as to think that people really give a crap about their random brain droppings. Anyone who actually has a life.
Your actual regular Twitter users seem pretty un-representative of the general population to me. I only know one person who tweets more than once a month.
Probably not even then. They don't even hold Ronnie Raygun responsible for some of the truly horrible things that happened during his reign, and he's been out of office for a quarter of a century.
Bengazi was the pretty much inevitable result of contracting mercenaries to do the work that Marines did (guarding embassies and consulates) until ~2006. Marine guards come under attack and you end up with a fleet of helicopters full of pissed-off rednecks descending on the area. Mercenary guards come under attack and once their supervisor is woken up he has to decide whether he can call in other staff to do overtime.