Back in the BBS days (*sigh*... pause for warm fuzzy memory) here in Australia there was an echo-mail area called "Life the Universe and Everything". The whole point of this area was the development of a semi-continuous complex-as-buggery story. The story was created by the participants over time. It was a very weird experience to jump in the first time. The main point seemed to be to impress everyone else with your creativity, wit and dramatic flair. The story was so convoluted that newbies had practically no chance.
Still it was an interesting area. People got severely addicted to it. But it wasn't a novel, it was however a kind of fiction. It reminds me of a blind double date I once went on. I knew the other girl, she was really really smart. We ended up having a coded, semi-fictional fantasy exchance across the table that just kept escalating in complexity... the others couldn't follow it. That's what Life etc was like.
Good luck. But don't expect a novel. A novel is a very particular kind of fiction. A lot of enjoyable fiction that is called a "novel" today is not a Novel.
At work here I suggested as a product that was in beta, on the basis that it looked interesting and "why not give it a shot" and the other recommendations were so expensive. And the guys in testing got a trial copy and have been very happy with it, though I haven't used it myself. It is qftest from Quality Software First. We build our java stuff for Win2K , Linux and Solaris. And this seems to do the job well. And its dirt cheap compared to anything from Rational or Mercury where you've gotta shell out big time.
"a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition"
Nothing about means of production. "Means of production" is an obsession of the Communists. But somehow I don't think you are a Marxist.:) And in Nazi Germany big business did very well indeed thank you.
I remember first watching this when I was out of town on a contract. I thought I'd watch some mindless SF carnage that was just fun and that I didn't have to think about. After all everyone I knew who had seen it said it was just mindless fun.
Right. So what did I get. A VERY disturbing movie based on segments from WW2 propaganda movies, in particular Nazi. Remember the guy who went into Military Intelligence, who always knew what was right for you ? Well he turns up in a Gestapo uniform and in one scene executes a prisoner of war on live television as an educational exercise.
All the uniforms and the flags and insignia are so Nazi-like it made my skin crawl.
The creepiest part though was that so many who saw the movie cheered it and believed the bit at the end that goes "and you just know they will win"... so rousing all we'd need is a round of "Uber alles".
Sure it's not Heinlein's version. But so what... it could have been worse, it could have been totally Hollywoodised into pablum.
The sun may be related to global warming, there is no reason why the sun cannot be a very slow variable star over many years.
If you heat up your environment it is radiated away to space very quickly. After all just think how fast deserts lose their heat at night... you can be cooked in the day and literally freeze at night.
"CO2 is perfectly transparent" Um errr. Well yeah at optical frequencies it is , but not at infra red frequencies , which is what radiant heat is... infra red. At infra red frequencies the atmosphere is partially transparent. Adding CO2 will reduce the transparency thus allowing less heat to escape.
Good troll though. Liked the 30 gigajoules bit. Lessee , that's enough energy to lift 1 metric ton a distance of 3,000 kilometres. Wooo. Well if you're going to tell a lie better to make it a big one. Or else we could use coal as rocket fuel.
This is talking about a 100,000 year cycle. So it has NOTHING to do with the Greenhouse debate. Right ? Absolutely.
Also the Milankovic Cycle of heating due to orbital factors has a very good fit to the onset and end of the various ice ages over the last 2 million years. So I wouldn't agree that this is the trigger of Earth bound climate yet. Again this has nothing to do with current global warming.
He he he. Yeah I've been guilty of that too after I first came across patterns. But not for long having once had to wade through layers of inheritance. I still love patterns but Pattern Paralysis is a real danger for new projects these days. It can be a real liability if a System Architect decides to go down the path of aggressive application of patterns. Trouble is , so much of the abstraction is totally unnecessary , programmers being so smart that they practically obfuscate the code with "good" design.
I'm not an expert on these things but recently I read an article on just this stuff that no-one seems to have touched on. In American Scientist for January-February there is a book review for a book called "Hubbert's Peak". The author is Kenneth S. Deffeyes and describes the work of M. King Hubbert.
Hubbert was an oil industry scientist, and in 1956 predicted that US production would peak about 1970 and decline thereafter. His analysis was rejected by Shell, where he worked at the time. However, his prediction came true. US production started its decline about 1970 and continues its decline to this day.
In 1982, Hubbert attempted to predict when global oil production would start to decline. With modern data the current estimates of the world's yield of oil will be about 1.8 trillion barrels. A Hubbert style analysis of the rate at which the oil can be produced leads to a predicted peak of production between 2002 and 2004 and a long, slow decline thereafter.
The review then touches on the issue of new or promising fields... unfortunately this is an illusion. Geologists have now pretty well much looked everywhere on Earth, there are no more Middle Easts. Western Siberia was promising and although fuel rich it is not oil but almost entirely natural gas. The South China Sea was promising , but so far where surveys have been done they have been disappointing.
So there we are. There are plenty of energy reserves. But not in the ideal form of oil. This might seem like a small thing but as prices start to rise people will not want to switch to a form of fuel that is likely to be more expensive because it is a) more costly to extract, b) require conversion of industry, c) require new processing plants d) all of the above. At the moment gasoline / petrol is probably the second cheapest liquid on the face of the Earth (after water). That is the real threat , not the greenie "no oil" doomsday scenario but the rise in prices with consequences for all developed economies.
Um. Not an American but still pretty much agree with you. Too much wimpy snivelling over this I think.
As for a reason to go to Mars ? Well for me its just a matter of the attitude a civilisation or nation adopts. If the West (or civilisation in general) adopts the attitude that its best not to try anything ambitious then we'll never have the fscking motivation to tackle the more urgent issues. Sure there are lots of things we could spend the money on, but who on Earth is so naive as to believe that the money would actually be spent on those things. How many trillions will be spent on armaments in the next 20 years compared to the piddly amount for the Mars mission. Fact is the 100 billion US dollar cost of this isn't that big considering the time-span and that there could be some international co-operation etc on it, I'm sure lots of nations would like a chance to be associated with it.
The cracks once formed last for many many years. I don't offhand remember how many millenia they last for. But they are easily visible and well mapped. The crack forms, the water freezes over, but (the article argues) water should be forced into the crack due to tidal forces. Eventually, the crack will seal up but as I said it would take a long time.
The recent American Scientist article on this described how the constant flexing of the moon in its orbit around Jupiter may produce tides that rise through the myriad cracks on the surface, bringing water close to the surface.. The cracks are plentiful and it shouldn't be too hard to find the more recent ones. Actually, the article describes in some detail crack formation and propogation. The overall impression is that this is a constant process and that it may be an easy way of getting to the sub-europan ocean.
does. The wildest thing he's stated so far (without any real evidence, just lots of "It is my strong belief") is that space and time are discrete on a very small scale, and are stuctured as a network of nodes. He
The discrete nature of space and time is neither new nor particularly controversial. Maybe the network of nodes is (new that is), but it doesn't even seem that controversial to me.
Sorry can't remember the name of it. But Anderson wrote a story of an alternate history where the plage instead of killing say 1/3 of Europe had killed 3/4 of Europe. Thus letting Islam take over Europe. The story is about an Englishman voyaging to the Americas, by the grace of Allah, to visit the Aztecs and the norther Indian civilisations. Where the Aztecs have overcome their sacrificial past and are now into an enlightenment phase and producing an Industrial revolution with the invention of steam engines and steam cars. An interesting different view.
Someone mentioned "Pavane" also. Hmmm. I'd guess it would be a spoiler to point out that it really isn't an alternate history... but history being re-run to avoid a nuclear war. Therefore, the religious oppression of invention is seen as a delaying tactic to prepare the world. Maybe I shouldna said that... nah... I'm a bastard, so there:)
We are not importing the Uranium from Mars; it all comes from the Earth.
But the nuclear waste is our product and as another poster has said will release its energy in a short period of time.
There was a naturally occurring nuclear reactor in Africa
Yep. But there was no local biology. It started, finished, was 'decommissioned' before life walked on the land. And nature had plenty of time to seal the nuclear waste in the rocks. We can't wait for millions of years.
The total quantity of pollutants produced by fission for a given power production is much less than that produced by combustion
This is a crazy proposition. I am sure that you would rather a smogy day in LA than to have been downwind of Chernobyl. A whiff of nitrous oxides and hydrocarbons is far better than a dose of radionuceides that might kill by themselves or damage my dna, causing cancers etc.
Take a look through Campbell's "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" and you realise that Luke Skywalker fits the mould to a 't'. The classic hero story has an amazing number of similarities between all cultures... if you ignore it then people will mostly ignore your story... rip it off and people will say it is profound and universal. And they'd be right. Even if you didn't know why.
As an exercise compare Luke Skywalker and Frodo Baggins. Both have lost their parents, must leave their home in a crisis, journey far, make great discoveries, return, but pay a price. If this makes you think that Lucas ripped off Tolkein then think of another hero. Say Neo from The Matrix. Also a man with no family, leaves his home in a crisis and makes great discoveries, then overocmes great evil to return but pays a price for doing this (dying and coming back from the dead), but must return to his people with the knowledge.
Read Campbell however, he is better at describing this than I am.
Olaf Stapledon's "Star Maker" ? Probably the best SF book I have ever read. Most of the ones high on the list that I have read I think were good, some very good and even excellent. But Star Maker is well.. in a league of its own. I can only presume its not on the list because no one knows it exists.
There have been theories about cyclic expansions and contractions lasting say a 100 billion years. But these theories were killed by the realisation that there was not enough mass in the universe to reverse the contraction.
Also there is a class of theories, which I guess this theory belongs to where the universe reproduces itself. Scientific American had an article on this about 10 years ago. About how after a very long period of time the universe could spontaneously generate a new big bang withough contraction.
In fact, an update on the original article can be found here.
As you can see this looks a lot like the current theory at first sight, but they are quite different since the latest one involves 'branes'.
Not a linear correlation on ozone hole and "ozone-layer eating gasses ban" Ozone layer has been shown to shrink and grow.
But the trend is upwards. It grows EACH southern winter, and shows a 2 yearly cycle. But you should know that shouldn't you unless you are pig ignorant.
Why should my family run business through out a $10,000-$20,000 refridgeration system because the freon to run the damn thing went from $15 a can to $800+ ? Yeah, the ban rocketed the price of real freon into the ozone layer.
Yeah, that sucks. But the damage to the ozone layer is one of the best documented effects. Pretty open and shut.
Since when did Carbon Dioxide, food for plants and trees, become a toxin?
Oh pulease! This is a greenie argument. Oh man its like natural therefore there can't be anything wrong with it. Bullshit. Its not a toxin. It causes the world to get warmer not massive death. The warmer world however is not necessarily pleasant.
After working hard all week, it puts a smile on my face knowing that my 8 mile per gallon 6000 pound luxury SUV will decimate any subcompact you drive if we get into an accident
Just like a typical redneck. Probably think you can get away with neg driving too. BTW enjoy your guzzler while you can. World oil stocks are dropping dramatically. It is expected that extraction rates will drop from about 2010. There isn't that much oil left. Why do think all that work is being done on fuel cells ?
Oh god no you said something intelligent. That'll only confuse the Slashdotters. But it will be funny waiting for the replies. Lets see. There'll be the obligatory: "Well then why don't you go and live in Russia^H^H^H^H^H^HChina". Or even better "We saved your ass in WW2", yeah like they had a choice. Fact is most of the anger comes from ignorance, these guys don't really know what Leftism is anyway. Totally knee jerk reaction. As I said it just so amusing watching the reactions... its almost pitiful.
No one's going to listen to you here. Slashdot these days is full of scientifically ignorant right wing bums.
I mean they fuckin even got the basis of this article wrong. It is heat conducting down from the surface. Similar measurements, on permafrost, have been done for the last decade. The earth is getting warmer, there is absolutely no doubt on that. Is it due to CO2. Well fuck me.. it IS a greenhouse gas you know.. how many ways are there to pretend it isn't. Let the slashdotters count the ways. Maybe the Earth is just plain getting warmer... many measurements indicate the fastest rate of warming since the start of the holocene, which is kind of an amazing coincidence that it should happen when we are pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere.
Am I a greenie ? Nope. Do I think global warming is going to stuff things up big time ? Yep. Do I think humans will actually do anything to stop it ? No. Just look at history. Humans aren't really good at planning long term. Better still look at all the fishing grounds and the reaction when scientists point out the consequences of continued levels of fishing... they object , find ways around it blah blah.. then the fishing stocks crash bye bye industry. Wonderful planning guys. Total idiots.
Normally I don't get this pissed off. But the level of ignorance is totally frightening. Oh well that's what natural selection is for.
Re:Theoretically interesting/Practically irrelevan
on
Deep Algorithms?
·
· Score: 2
True. I agree 99%.
The other 1% is for weird situations where you want some weird variation on a sort etc or its an algorithm that's in a library not ported to your platform/language so you have to actually code the algorithm. I did this once for some code that determined optimum paths through a network that was changing in real time while the object was moving. I found that the library versions of quicksort made the code too complicated, sorry I forget all the details, so I rewrote it... took no time to do and worked as advertised. Also used graph algorithms in that too but had to modify them pretty severely.
Wonderful little putes, especially liked the version of Basic. Easy & powerful, learn it in an afternoon. Ahhhh those were the days... when sorting meant bubble sorts... now there's an algorithm.. the kind of algorithm you pull out of your head because you didn't know enough to look up alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the BBS days (*sigh* ... pause for warm fuzzy memory) here in Australia there was an echo-mail area called "Life the Universe and Everything". The whole point of this area was the development of a semi-continuous complex-as-buggery story. The story was created by the participants over time. It was a very weird experience to jump in the first time. The main point seemed to be to impress everyone else with your creativity, wit and dramatic flair. The story was so convoluted that newbies had practically no chance.
Still it was an interesting area. People got severely addicted to it. But it wasn't a novel, it was however a kind of fiction. It reminds me of a blind double date I once went on. I knew the other girl, she was really really smart. We ended up having a coded, semi-fictional fantasy exchance across the table that just kept escalating in complexity ... the others couldn't follow it. That's what Life etc was like.
Good luck. But don't expect a novel. A novel is a very particular kind of fiction. A lot of enjoyable fiction that is called a "novel" today is not a Novel.
At work here I suggested as a product that was in beta, on the basis that it looked interesting and "why not give it a shot" and the other recommendations were so expensive. And the guys in testing got a trial copy and have been very happy with it, though I haven't used it myself. It is qftest from Quality Software First. We build our java stuff for Win2K , Linux and Solaris. And this seems to do the job well. And its dirt cheap compared to anything from Rational or Mercury where you've gotta shell out big time.
From Merriam-Webster:
"a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition"
Nothing about means of production. "Means of production" is an obsession of the Communists. But somehow I don't think you are a Marxist. :) And in Nazi Germany big business did very well indeed thank you.
The movie that is of course.
I remember first watching this when I was out of town on a contract. I thought I'd watch some mindless SF carnage that was just fun and that I didn't have to think about. After all everyone I knew who had seen it said it was just mindless fun.
Right. So what did I get. A VERY disturbing movie based on segments from WW2 propaganda movies, in particular Nazi. Remember the guy who went into Military Intelligence, who always knew what was right for you ? Well he turns up in a Gestapo uniform and in one scene executes a prisoner of war on live television as an educational exercise.
All the uniforms and the flags and insignia are so Nazi-like it made my skin crawl.
The creepiest part though was that so many who saw the movie cheered it and believed the bit at the end that goes "and you just know they will win" ... so rousing all we'd need is a round of "Uber alles".
Sure it's not Heinlein's version. But so what ... it could have been worse, it could have been totally Hollywoodised into pablum.
Pete
A lovely troll :-)
For those who may think otherwise:
Good troll though. Liked the 30 gigajoules bit. Lessee , that's enough energy to lift 1 metric ton a distance of 3,000 kilometres. Wooo. Well if you're going to tell a lie better to make it a big one. Or else we could use coal as rocket fuel.
This is talking about a 100,000 year cycle. So it has NOTHING to do with the Greenhouse debate. Right ? Absolutely.
Also the Milankovic Cycle of heating due to orbital factors has a very good fit to the onset and end of the various ice ages over the last 2 million years. So I wouldn't agree that this is the trigger of Earth bound climate yet. Again this has nothing to do with current global warming.
He he he. Yeah I've been guilty of that too after I first came across patterns. But not for long having once had to wade through layers of inheritance. I still love patterns but Pattern Paralysis is a real danger for new projects these days. It can be a real liability if a System Architect decides to go down the path of aggressive application of patterns. Trouble is , so much of the abstraction is totally unnecessary , programmers being so smart that they practically obfuscate the code with "good" design.
I'm not an expert on these things but recently I read an article on just this stuff that no-one seems to have touched on. In American Scientist for January-February there is a book review for a book called "Hubbert's Peak". The author is Kenneth S. Deffeyes and describes the work of M. King Hubbert.
Hubbert was an oil industry scientist, and in 1956 predicted that US production would peak about 1970 and decline thereafter. His analysis was rejected by Shell, where he worked at the time. However, his prediction came true. US production started its decline about 1970 and continues its decline to this day.
In 1982, Hubbert attempted to predict when global oil production would start to decline. With modern data the current estimates of the world's yield of oil will be about 1.8 trillion barrels. A Hubbert style analysis of the rate at which the oil can be produced leads to a predicted peak of production between 2002 and 2004 and a long, slow decline thereafter.
The review then touches on the issue of new or promising fields ... unfortunately this is an illusion. Geologists have now pretty well much looked everywhere on Earth, there are no more Middle Easts. Western Siberia was promising and although fuel rich it is not oil but almost entirely natural gas. The South China Sea was promising , but so far where surveys have been done they have been disappointing.
So there we are. There are plenty of energy reserves. But not in the ideal form of oil. This might seem like a small thing but as prices start to rise people will not want to switch to a form of fuel that is likely to be more expensive because it is a) more costly to extract, b) require conversion of industry, c) require new processing plants d) all of the above. At the moment gasoline / petrol is probably the second cheapest liquid on the face of the Earth (after water). That is the real threat , not the greenie "no oil" doomsday scenario but the rise in prices with consequences for all developed economies.
Um. Not an American but still pretty much agree with you. Too much wimpy snivelling over this I think.
As for a reason to go to Mars ? Well for me its just a matter of the attitude a civilisation or nation adopts. If the West (or civilisation in general) adopts the attitude that its best not to try anything ambitious then we'll never have the fscking motivation to tackle the more urgent issues. Sure there are lots of things we could spend the money on, but who on Earth is so naive as to believe that the money would actually be spent on those things. How many trillions will be spent on armaments in the next 20 years compared to the piddly amount for the Mars mission. Fact is the 100 billion US dollar cost of this isn't that big considering the time-span and that there could be some international co-operation etc on it, I'm sure lots of nations would like a chance to be associated with it.
Anyway just my 2 cents.
The cracks once formed last for many many years. I don't offhand remember how many millenia they last for. But they are easily visible and well mapped. The crack forms, the water freezes over, but (the article argues) water should be forced into the crack due to tidal forces. Eventually, the crack will seal up but as I said it would take a long time.
Anyway, sounds like it's worth a shot.
The recent American Scientist article on this described how the constant flexing of the moon in its orbit around Jupiter may produce tides that rise through the myriad cracks on the surface, bringing water close to the surface.. The cracks are plentiful and it shouldn't be too hard to find the more recent ones. Actually, the article describes in some detail crack formation and propogation. The overall impression is that this is a constant process and that it may be an easy way of getting to the sub-europan ocean.
does. The wildest thing he's stated so far (without any real evidence, just lots of "It is my strong belief") is that space and time are discrete on a very small scale, and are stuctured as a network of nodes. He
The discrete nature of space and time is neither new nor particularly controversial. Maybe the network of nodes is (new that is), but it doesn't even seem that controversial to me.
Just my 2 cents ... or 3.9 cents here.
Sorry can't remember the name of it. But Anderson wrote a story of an alternate history where the plage instead of killing say 1/3 of Europe had killed 3/4 of Europe. Thus letting Islam take over Europe. The story is about an Englishman voyaging to the Americas, by the grace of Allah, to visit the Aztecs and the norther Indian civilisations. Where the Aztecs have overcome their sacrificial past and are now into an enlightenment phase and producing an Industrial revolution with the invention of steam engines and steam cars. An interesting different view.
Someone mentioned "Pavane" also. Hmmm. I'd guess it would be a spoiler to point out that it really isn't an alternate history ... but history being re-run to avoid a nuclear war. Therefore, the religious oppression of invention is seen as a delaying tactic to prepare the world. Maybe I shouldna said that ... nah ... I'm a bastard, so there :)
We are not importing the Uranium from Mars; it all comes from the Earth.
But the nuclear waste is our product and as another poster has said will release its energy in a short period of time.
There was a naturally occurring nuclear reactor in Africa
Yep. But there was no local biology. It started, finished, was 'decommissioned' before life walked on the land. And nature had plenty of time to seal the nuclear waste in the rocks. We can't wait for millions of years.
The total quantity of pollutants produced by fission for a given power production is much less than that produced by combustion
This is a crazy proposition. I am sure that you would rather a smogy day in LA than to have been downwind of Chernobyl. A whiff of nitrous oxides and hydrocarbons is far better than a dose of radionuceides that might kill by themselves or damage my dna, causing cancers etc.
.... of the myth in it! What is so mysterious ?
Take a look through Campbell's "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" and you realise that Luke Skywalker fits the mould to a 't'. The classic hero story has an amazing number of similarities between all cultures ... if you ignore it then people will mostly ignore your story ... rip it off and people will say it is profound and universal. And they'd be right. Even if you didn't know why.
As an exercise compare Luke Skywalker and Frodo Baggins. Both have lost their parents, must leave their home in a crisis, journey far, make great discoveries, return, but pay a price. If this makes you think that Lucas ripped off Tolkein then think of another hero. Say Neo from The Matrix. Also a man with no family, leaves his home in a crisis and makes great discoveries, then overocmes great evil to return but pays a price for doing this (dying and coming back from the dead), but must return to his people with the knowledge.
Read Campbell however, he is better at describing this than I am.
Olaf Stapledon's "Star Maker" ? Probably the best SF book I have ever read. Most of the ones high on the list that I have read I think were good, some very good and even excellent. But Star Maker is well .. in a league of its own. I can only presume its not on the list because no one knows it exists.
Just take a look at the reviews on Amazon.
No not at all new.
There have been theories about cyclic expansions and contractions lasting say a 100 billion years. But these theories were killed by the realisation that there was not enough mass in the universe to reverse the contraction.
Also there is a class of theories, which I guess this theory belongs to where the universe reproduces itself. Scientific American had an article on this about 10 years ago. About how after a very long period of time the universe could spontaneously generate a new big bang withough contraction.
In fact, an update on the original article can be found here .
As you can see this looks a lot like the current theory at first sight, but they are quite different since the latest one involves 'branes'.
you do realise he's talking about a CD he *BOUGHT* legally ?
In 30 years he will have the CD still. The issue is making copies of tracks for personal use: in his car, in his PDA and on his PC.
But the trend is upwards. It grows EACH southern winter, and shows a 2 yearly cycle. But you should know that shouldn't you unless you are pig ignorant.
Why should my family run business through out a $10,000-$20,000 refridgeration system because the freon to run the damn thing went from $15 a can to $800+ ? Yeah, the ban rocketed the price of real freon into the ozone layer.
Yeah, that sucks. But the damage to the ozone layer is one of the best documented effects. Pretty open and shut.
Since when did Carbon Dioxide, food for plants and trees, become a toxin?
Oh pulease! This is a greenie argument. Oh man its like natural therefore there can't be anything wrong with it. Bullshit. Its not a toxin. It causes the world to get warmer not massive death. The warmer world however is not necessarily pleasant.
After working hard all week, it puts a smile on my face knowing that my 8 mile per gallon 6000 pound luxury SUV will decimate any subcompact you drive if we get into an accident
Just like a typical redneck. Probably think you can get away with neg driving too. BTW enjoy your guzzler while you can. World oil stocks are dropping dramatically. It is expected that extraction rates will drop from about 2010. There isn't that much oil left. Why do think all that work is being done on fuel cells ?
Thank heavens someone answered ... I was starting to think I'd have revise the intelligence level of slashdot upwards.
20 million dead. hmph. That was Communism dork. Not leftism. There is a difference. Oh you didn't know ? Figures. BTW I'm not even a leftist.
Oh god no you said something intelligent. That'll only confuse the Slashdotters. But it will be funny waiting for the replies. Lets see. There'll be the obligatory: "Well then why don't you go and live in Russia^H^H^H^H^H^HChina". Or even better "We saved your ass in WW2", yeah like they had a choice. Fact is most of the anger comes from ignorance, these guys don't really know what Leftism is anyway. Totally knee jerk reaction. As I said it just so amusing watching the reactions ... its almost pitiful.
Since you're too lazy to get the full story I also used google, check this. Or don't you trust Nature. And this followup.
This myth has persisted for so long its amazing. The satellite data did not take into account the orbital decay of the sensor platforms.
No one's going to listen to you here. Slashdot these days is full of scientifically ignorant right wing bums.
.. it IS a greenhouse gas you know .. how many ways are there to pretend it isn't. Let the slashdotters count the ways. Maybe the Earth is just plain getting warmer ... many measurements indicate the fastest rate of warming since the start of the holocene, which is kind of an amazing coincidence that it should happen when we are pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere.
... they object , find ways around it blah blah .. then the fishing stocks crash bye bye industry. Wonderful planning guys. Total idiots.
I mean they fuckin even got the basis of this article wrong. It is heat conducting down from the surface. Similar measurements, on permafrost, have been done for the last decade. The earth is getting warmer, there is absolutely no doubt on that. Is it due to CO2. Well fuck me
Am I a greenie ? Nope. Do I think global warming is going to stuff things up big time ? Yep. Do I think humans will actually do anything to stop it ? No. Just look at history. Humans aren't really good at planning long term. Better still look at all the fishing grounds and the reaction when scientists point out the consequences of continued levels of fishing
Normally I don't get this pissed off. But the level of ignorance is totally frightening. Oh well that's what natural selection is for.
True. I agree 99%.
... took no time to do and worked as advertised. Also used graph algorithms in that too but had to modify them pretty severely.
The other 1% is for weird situations where you want some weird variation on a sort etc or its an algorithm that's in a library not ported to your platform/language so you have to actually code the algorithm. I did this once for some code that determined optimum paths through a network that was changing in real time while the object was moving. I found that the library versions of quicksort made the code too complicated, sorry I forget all the details, so I rewrote it
Hmmmm ... speccies ...
... when sorting meant bubble sorts ... now there's an algorithm .. the kind of algorithm you pull out of your head because you didn't know enough to look up alternatives.
Wonderful little putes, especially liked the version of Basic. Easy & powerful, learn it in an afternoon. Ahhhh those were the days