Tyen-shia suo-yo duh run doh gai si! Gamers! they made them!
If they catch us they'll bore us to death talking about framerates and SLI set ups, pwn our flesh and make our clothes into player skins... and if we're really lucky they'll do it in that order!
Because the iPhone isn't intended to be an all-purpose pocket computer - its a phone and music player.
Apple's fear is that people will install buggy apps that screw up the phone, and then blame Apple. No conspiracy needed. If they were purely interested in lock-out they'd never have approved Spotify.
If Apple allowed apps that ran arbitrary code they'd have to check not just the C64 emu but every app with a macro or scripting facility to ensure that they were adequately sandboxed. That would be a lot of work.
If you want a phone where, if you break it, you get to keep both pieces, go buy an Android phone or (if you want to lose the will to live) Windows Mobile.
Disclaimer, I have an Android phone, and an iPod Touch (iPhone without a phone) and am looking for a sufficiently deep hole in which to cast my old WM phone. So I'm not a complete fanboi.
Meanwhile, this guy agreed to remove BASIC but either deliberately or negligently left it in. I'd rather not install their software, in case they negligently or deliberately left anything els in, thanks.
That is a dangerous idea. Over-use of placebos could lead to the evolution of placebo-resistant bacteria! Its happened with antibiotics, it could happen with placebo, too!! Worse, the resistance to placebos could spread from pharmaceutical placebos to more common cures!!!
Be afraid!!!! The Pharma industry would love to destroy traditional placebo-based remedies as chicken soup, a nice cup of tea, a double Scotch or "kissing it better" so they could sell you expensive pills as well!!!! Its a conspiracy!!!!!!
(Is that enough !!!!s to ensure that nobody thinks this is a serious comment?)
I already have a streaming mobile device.. its called an FM radio.
You're confusing a streaming, music-on-demand service like Spotify with an Internet radio station.
With Spotify you search for the track, album or artist you want and hit play. Mostly, it contains complete albms. You don't rely on anybody's selection (unless you want to listen to somebody else's playlist).
One thing I've noticed about Spotify, though, is that people are using it who you would not expect in a million years to download music (e.g. my 80 year old dad, work colleagues who only listen to classical music etc.) That's only anecdotal, but I'd say that Spotify have done a bit of a Nintendo for online music. However, how many of those people will want it on their phones is another thing...
The main complaint about it was noise, even though aircraft like the Boeing VC-137 [wikipedia.org] were louder.
I was once sitting in my plebian economy class seat on my plebian subsonic flight a couple of places back from a Concorde in the take-off queue at Heathrow. That sucker was loud. We're not talking "a bit noisier than a 747" here. We're talking about a civilian plane with afterburners for frick's sake!
Plus, even with it going subsonic 70 miles off the coast, the boom could be heard across the South of England (I used to live on the South coast and there was a regular evening boom, probably from the Paris-bound flight - not a problem when there are only a few concordes around..).
So, before the widespread deployment of broadband,
The technology was established by then - it just had to be rolled out.
before programmable GPUs,
ISTR playing Quake quite happily in 1999.
when a mobile device with a 25MHz m68k (no MMU) was state of the art?
Uh? The Newton packed a 20MHz ARM (which could take a m28k to the cleaners) in 1993. Apple and Psion had pretty much worked out what goes into a good PDA long before 1999. Ye gods, if my 1993 Psion only had a USB port I'd still use it today... OK, so it didn't have a phone (but that would have spoiled the battery life).
Maybe. If your idea of entertainment is getting deep vein thrombosis from sitting for 7 hours with your knees in your mouth.
7 Hours? That's fscking short-haul!!! I've got UK to Australia followed a few weeks later by UK to California to look forward to. Ugh. Praise the iPod and pass the support socks. I was definitely being ironic when I cited that as a source of "progress".
Yes, it has. I wouldn't emphasize 50years though. Just look at computers the last 10years and computers 20years ago. In 1999 I was on slashdot from a computer not much different from this one. In 1989 I was trying to get a dial-up modem so I could connect to a BBS from my Amiga.
Yes - I think computers started to hit the buffers circa 1999. On the other hand, computer development from 1980-1999 was so frenetic that a break from the "if it works it is obsolete" principle would be a good thing.
It would be nice to start a 2-3 year development project in the knowledge that the skills and experience you gain will still be applicable to the next project:-)
I think that, if you look at the smartphone market, for example, you already see more focus on usability than horsepower (say what you like about Apple, the iPhone has raised the bar: Android and the Palm Pre wouldn't be as good without that target to aim for). That is a good thing - the old priorities gave us Windows Mobile (incredibly powerful and flexible but barely usable).
I have seen the end of supersonic passenger aircraft (for the time being, with no resumption in sight).
The last time man was on the moon was before I was born.
I think what both of those have in common is that, although they were astounding technical achievements, they were both unsustainable "gimmicks" driven by political pissing contests rather than by any actual demand.
The progress we do have is that we've sent robot probes to most of the solar system (good) and subsonic air travel now costs less than rail travel (maybe not so good). Don't undervalue these.
Oh, and we have vastly improved inflight entertainment systems to keep us sane on subsonic flights:-)
Keeping accurate track of such information should be trivial. Actually doing it should be a no-brainer.
That's good, because the government has no brains:-)
You're dead right in that we need a simple, reliable ID system, and that (if done well) it would be less intrusive than the current silly, ad hoc systems currently used when it is necessary to verify ID (one favorite method is to ask for a gas or electricity bill - but all the gas and electricity firms are moving to paperless billing...).
Problem is, the gubment has such a stellar record on delivering IT systems that nobody in their right mind trusts them to do it. It doesn't help that they're loading on lofty and unrealistic ambitions about preventing benefit fraud, catching illegal immigrants and eradicating child abuse. I'd settle for being able to get a mobile phone without them taking a photocopy of my drivers license...
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!
At least you have a choice... There are racks and racks of alternative MP3 players and phones in stores, and at least 4 serious, mainstream contenders for smartphone platforms. For most of the 1990s the choice for desktop PCs was DOS/Windows vs. some minority ghetto platform or other (some of which were brilliant: Amiga, RISC-OS etc. but which were becoming a labor of love to support).
If you want to, get an Android phone (I have one, they're cool) and install so many apps on it that it grinds to a halt, and you have to install a task killer that lets you kill com.google.magicsmoke if you feel inclined. I'd recommend these to anybody slightly technie who might want to install a FTP server on their phone. However, I also have an iPod touch and, sorry, the iPhone UI is still in a different league, sorry.
oh wait, Open Office runs on Windows without MS control, the horror!!!!
In other news, Open Office also runs on a Mac without Apple approval. The full SDK is included free. Install fink or macports and you can install a massive range of FLOSS projects. Apple even provide a point-and-drool tool to let you install Windows on your Mac if you want.
Point is (shennanigans with AT&T notwithstanding) Apple understand the difference between a general purpose computer (Mac) and an appliance (iPhone), and are trying to ensure that, for an appliance, even if you are sufficietly sad to want to install 20 different fart simuators that it does't fuck up the phone or the music player.
Sigh! Not only is water vapor a better greenhouse gas, there's so much more of it in the atmosphere than any other.
If you have some greenhouse gases and add more greenhouse gases then the level of greenhouse gasses goes up. The composition of the greenhouse gasses you started with is irrelevant. That much is really very simple.
although there's a correlation between rising temperature and rising CO2 levels, the CO2 level follows the temperature, not leads it. If so, the whole business about AGW goes out the window.
Even if that is true, and not spin or experimental error, you're back to treating the Earth as a lump of iron on a gas cooker again. It is perfectly possible for rising temperatures to cause more CO2 to be released from natural systems and for rising CO2 to cause rising temperatures - there's nothing mutually exclusive about those. Its also perfectly possible to have a cycle in which, if you only look at a snapshot of it, cause appears to follow effect (a cat and a dog are running in circles - who's chasing who?).
We've introduced a new source of greenhouse gasses into the equation - digging up and burning 100-million-year-old fossil fuels at such a rate that we'll have released a geological era's worth in a hundred years or so. That doesn't feature in the ice cores, and we've absolutely no idea (apart from wishful thinking) whether whatever mechanism regulated it in the past can cope with all the natural sources and this new, artificial source. What we do know is that CO2 absorbs IR radiation, and more CO2 will absorb more IR.
The water vapor that's currently in the atmosphere is responsible for (I'm guessing here, but I don't think I'm that far off.) over 95% of the greenhouse heating.
So what? The problem is not the greenhouse effect itself: we didn't cause that - its been going on forever and without it the Earth would probably be an ice cube. Our problem is that we're increasing the level of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and that increases the greenhouse heating.
It doesn't matter one jot how much of the normal level of greenhouse heating comes from which gas: increase any one of them and you increase the effect.
And, of course, anybody who embraces AGW needs to come up with a theory that explains why CO2 magically becomes a stronger and more significant greenhouse gas than H2O.
Why? Are you planning to dig up underground water that has been out of the loop for aeons and pump it into the atmosphere?
So in other words, you didn't want an answer to your question, even though there's one available based on easily understandable physics;
Unfortunately, it doesn't help when people give duff answers, either: The "greenhouse effect" may play a role in a real greenhouse (i.e. preventing cooling from radiation) but they also trap warm air (preventing cooling by convection) and block the wind (preventing cooling by evaporation) which have nothing to do with CO2 in the atmosphere. Don't take names too seriously: in other news, the World Wide Web wasn't made by a spider and "bluetooth" headsets are not made from the remains of Viking warlords.
Fortunately, we can be confident that the theory of global warming is not just something extrapolated from some stoner's wilting marijuana crop. Co2 doing its infrared absorption thang can be observed by pointing a spectroscope anywhere in the universe that has CO2.
Mr Sumdumass and Mr Dvorkin: please consider your heads cracked firmly together.
It would seem that Co2 in the upper atmosphere would absorb more heat and prevent it from hitting the earth in the first place before it bounces back and gets traped by the Co2 on the way out.
The energy doesn't "bounce off*" - it is absorbed by the Earth and re-radiated. All objects radiate energy, but the frequency spectrum of that radiation depends on the temperature.
Because the sun is very hot, it radiates a lot of energy in the form of visible light.
Because the Earth isn't as hot as the sun, most of the energy it re-radiates is as lower frequency infra-red.
CO2 is transparent to visible light, but absorbs infra-red. So it acts as a one-way valve: the visible light from the sun gets in, the re-radiated infra-red from the Earth can't get out.
(* It only bounces off the white shiny bits - which unfortunately tend to melt as the earth 'warms up'...)
I think the controversy basically boils down to the following:
Well, as long as that's the only thing that boils.
No, what it really boils down to is: we still can't reliably predict the behavior of complex systems. Unfortunately, this encourages people (especially politically-motivated people who didn't get where they are today by saying "I don't know") to pretend that they are simple.
If there is proof that humans are causing global warming, it should be easy to show
Why should it be easy? That's part of the problem. The Earth is not a pan on a cooker that just gets hotter when you turn up the gas and cools down when you turn it down. The Earth is a complex web of cycles and equilibria that we don't completely understand.
Heck, stick some ice, water and salt in the pan, clamp on a slightly leaky lid and even that becomes non-trivial - and that's peanuts alongside the Earth.
Global warming (or not) is always going to be a guessing game: if you want irrefutable proof, wait 100 years and see whether Bangladesh is still there. Until then, its a risk/benefit analysis, not a scientific study.
What is known is that basic physics says that increasing CO2 levels in an atmosphere will increase the proportion of solar heat retained by the planet: that much can be proven in the lab. Anybody who rejects AGW needs to come up with some theory that explains why that magically won't happen in the real world. Instead, they're exploiting the fact that its very, very difficult to predict how that extra heat will translate into temperature and climate changes. Sadly, I suspect that there are those on both sides of the argument who don't even know that heat is not the same thing as temperature...
Listen to the BBC radio adaptation of the final book for one solution to this. Normally tacking on a happy ending would be abhorrent, but they claim that Adams expressed regrets at killing everybody.
Yes, I know its complicated - the first two books were adapted from the radio, the last three books were adapted to the radio and a legion of Bobby Ewings emerged from the shower to paper over the cracks. Thank God (or at least the guy from Eels' dad) for parallel universes.
Short of "...and then the universe ceased to exist, and all of time with it," I'm not sure how you can avoid someone desperate enough to think of a sequel (or a prequel if necessary) to come up with one.
Huh? That happened in Book 2 of HHGTTG and Adams himeself did 3 more sequels:-)
Then in book 5 the Earth gets annihhilated from every possible parallel universe and still the BBC managed to come up with a new epilogue for the radio adaptation.
Depends which ones: The first couple of Discworld books were very much a series of set-piece jokes tied together by a loose plot - very much like the Hitch-Hikers Guide but with wizzards and dragons instead of robots and space ships... However, as the books went on the emphasis shifted from comedy towards plot and character.
The recent City Watch books are more hard-boiled detective and social commentary. Pratchett's most recent book, "Nation" was decidedly not a comedy.
Mind you, I get the distinct impression that Pratchett sets out to tell the story he wants to tell and doesn't really agonize over genres. You can only spot his children's books because they're 50 pages shorter and omit the full lyrics of "The Hedgehog Song".
"We do!" is the answer for those of us who believe that democracy (in some form) is the answer to problems of authority.
Please let me know when someone starts one of these "democracies" that solve all the problems of authority - they sound great, but I don't think I've ever encountered one.
Slashdot Mirror
Tyen-shia suo-yo duh run doh gai si! Gamers! they made them!
If they catch us they'll bore us to death talking about framerates and SLI set ups, pwn our flesh and make our clothes into player skins... and if we're really lucky they'll do it in that order!
Write arbitrary code.
Which is against Apple's T&Cs.
Because the iPhone isn't intended to be an all-purpose pocket computer - its a phone and music player.
Apple's fear is that people will install buggy apps that screw up the phone, and then blame Apple. No conspiracy needed. If they were purely interested in lock-out they'd never have approved Spotify.
If Apple allowed apps that ran arbitrary code they'd have to check not just the C64 emu but every app with a macro or scripting facility to ensure that they were adequately sandboxed. That would be a lot of work.
If you want a phone where, if you break it, you get to keep both pieces, go buy an Android phone or (if you want to lose the will to live) Windows Mobile.
Disclaimer, I have an Android phone, and an iPod Touch (iPhone without a phone) and am looking for a sufficiently deep hole in which to cast my old WM phone. So I'm not a complete fanboi.
Meanwhile, this guy agreed to remove BASIC but either deliberately or negligently left it in. I'd rather not install their software, in case they negligently or deliberately left anything els in, thanks.
That is a dangerous idea. Over-use of placebos could lead to the evolution of placebo-resistant bacteria! Its happened with antibiotics, it could happen with placebo, too!! Worse, the resistance to placebos could spread from pharmaceutical placebos to more common cures!!!
Be afraid!!!! The Pharma industry would love to destroy traditional placebo-based remedies as chicken soup, a nice cup of tea, a double Scotch or "kissing it better" so they could sell you expensive pills as well!!!! Its a conspiracy!!!!!!
(Is that enough !!!!s to ensure that nobody thinks this is a serious comment?)
I already have a streaming mobile device.. its called an FM radio.
You're confusing a streaming, music-on-demand service like Spotify with an Internet radio station.
With Spotify you search for the track, album or artist you want and hit play. Mostly, it contains complete albms. You don't rely on anybody's selection (unless you want to listen to somebody else's playlist).
One thing I've noticed about Spotify, though, is that people are using it who you would not expect in a million years to download music (e.g. my 80 year old dad, work colleagues who only listen to classical music etc.) That's only anecdotal, but I'd say that Spotify have done a bit of a Nintendo for online music. However, how many of those people will want it on their phones is another thing...
The main complaint about it was noise, even though aircraft like the Boeing VC-137 [wikipedia.org] were louder.
I was once sitting in my plebian economy class seat on my plebian subsonic flight a couple of places back from a Concorde in the take-off queue at Heathrow. That sucker was loud. We're not talking "a bit noisier than a 747" here. We're talking about a civilian plane with afterburners for frick's sake!
Plus, even with it going subsonic 70 miles off the coast, the boom could be heard across the South of England (I used to live on the South coast and there was a regular evening boom, probably from the Paris-bound flight - not a problem when there are only a few concordes around..).
Pity, because it was a damned pretty plane.
So, before the widespread deployment of broadband,
The technology was established by then - it just had to be rolled out.
before programmable GPUs,
ISTR playing Quake quite happily in 1999.
when a mobile device with a 25MHz m68k (no MMU) was state of the art?
Uh? The Newton packed a 20MHz ARM (which could take a m28k to the cleaners) in 1993. Apple and Psion had pretty much worked out what goes into a good PDA long before 1999. Ye gods, if my 1993 Psion only had a USB port I'd still use it today... OK, so it didn't have a phone (but that would have spoiled the battery life).
Maybe. If your idea of entertainment is getting deep vein thrombosis from sitting for 7 hours with your knees in your mouth.
7 Hours? That's fscking short-haul!!! I've got UK to Australia followed a few weeks later by UK to California to look forward to. Ugh. Praise the iPod and pass the support socks. I was definitely being ironic when I cited that as a source of "progress".
Yes, it has. I wouldn't emphasize 50years though. Just look at computers the last 10years and computers 20years ago. In 1999 I was on slashdot from a computer not much different from this one. In 1989 I was trying to get a dial-up modem so I could connect to a BBS from my Amiga.
Yes - I think computers started to hit the buffers circa 1999. On the other hand, computer development from 1980-1999 was so frenetic that a break from the "if it works it is obsolete" principle would be a good thing.
It would be nice to start a 2-3 year development project in the knowledge that the skills and experience you gain will still be applicable to the next project :-)
I think that, if you look at the smartphone market, for example, you already see more focus on usability than horsepower (say what you like about Apple, the iPhone has raised the bar: Android and the Palm Pre wouldn't be as good without that target to aim for). That is a good thing - the old priorities gave us Windows Mobile (incredibly powerful and flexible but barely usable).
I have seen the end of supersonic passenger aircraft (for the time being, with no resumption in sight).
The last time man was on the moon was before I was born.
I think what both of those have in common is that, although they were astounding technical achievements, they were both unsustainable "gimmicks" driven by political pissing contests rather than by any actual demand.
The progress we do have is that we've sent robot probes to most of the solar system (good) and subsonic air travel now costs less than rail travel (maybe not so good). Don't undervalue these.
Oh, and we have vastly improved inflight entertainment systems to keep us sane on subsonic flights :-)
Keeping accurate track of such information should be trivial. Actually doing it should be a no-brainer.
That's good, because the government has no brains :-)
You're dead right in that we need a simple, reliable ID system, and that (if done well) it would be less intrusive than the current silly, ad hoc systems currently used when it is necessary to verify ID (one favorite method is to ask for a gas or electricity bill - but all the gas and electricity firms are moving to paperless billing...).
Problem is, the gubment has such a stellar record on delivering IT systems that nobody in their right mind trusts them to do it. It doesn't help that they're loading on lofty and unrealistic ambitions about preventing benefit fraud, catching illegal immigrants and eradicating child abuse. I'd settle for being able to get a mobile phone without them taking a photocopy of my drivers license...
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!
At least you have a choice... There are racks and racks of alternative MP3 players and phones in stores, and at least 4 serious, mainstream contenders for smartphone platforms. For most of the 1990s the choice for desktop PCs was DOS/Windows vs. some minority ghetto platform or other (some of which were brilliant: Amiga, RISC-OS etc. but which were becoming a labor of love to support).
If you want to, get an Android phone (I have one, they're cool) and install so many apps on it that it grinds to a halt, and you have to install a task killer that lets you kill com.google.magicsmoke if you feel inclined. I'd recommend these to anybody slightly technie who might want to install a FTP server on their phone. However, I also have an iPod touch and, sorry, the iPhone UI is still in a different league, sorry.
oh wait, Open Office runs on Windows without MS control, the horror!!!!
In other news, Open Office also runs on a Mac without Apple approval. The full SDK is included free. Install fink or macports and you can install a massive range of FLOSS projects. Apple even provide a point-and-drool tool to let you install Windows on your Mac if you want.
Point is (shennanigans with AT&T notwithstanding) Apple understand the difference between a general purpose computer (Mac) and an appliance (iPhone), and are trying to ensure that, for an appliance, even if you are sufficietly sad to want to install 20 different fart simuators that it does't fuck up the phone or the music player.
Sigh! Not only is water vapor a better greenhouse gas, there's so much more of it in the atmosphere than any other.
If you have some greenhouse gases and add more greenhouse gases then the level of greenhouse gasses goes up. The composition of the greenhouse gasses you started with is irrelevant. That much is really very simple.
although there's a correlation between rising temperature and rising CO2 levels, the CO2 level follows the temperature, not leads it. If so, the whole business about AGW goes out the window.
Even if that is true, and not spin or experimental error, you're back to treating the Earth as a lump of iron on a gas cooker again. It is perfectly possible for rising temperatures to cause more CO2 to be released from natural systems and for rising CO2 to cause rising temperatures - there's nothing mutually exclusive about those. Its also perfectly possible to have a cycle in which, if you only look at a snapshot of it, cause appears to follow effect (a cat and a dog are running in circles - who's chasing who?).
We've introduced a new source of greenhouse gasses into the equation - digging up and burning 100-million-year-old fossil fuels at such a rate that we'll have released a geological era's worth in a hundred years or so. That doesn't feature in the ice cores, and we've absolutely no idea (apart from wishful thinking) whether whatever mechanism regulated it in the past can cope with all the natural sources and this new, artificial source. What we do know is that CO2 absorbs IR radiation, and more CO2 will absorb more IR.
The water vapor that's currently in the atmosphere is responsible for (I'm guessing here, but I don't think I'm that far off.) over 95% of the greenhouse heating.
So what? The problem is not the greenhouse effect itself: we didn't cause that - its been going on forever and without it the Earth would probably be an ice cube. Our problem is that we're increasing the level of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and that increases the greenhouse heating.
It doesn't matter one jot how much of the normal level of greenhouse heating comes from which gas: increase any one of them and you increase the effect.
And, of course, anybody who embraces AGW needs to come up with a theory that explains why CO2 magically becomes a stronger and more significant greenhouse gas than H2O.
Why? Are you planning to dig up underground water that has been out of the loop for aeons and pump it into the atmosphere?
So in other words, you didn't want an answer to your question, even though there's one available based on easily understandable physics;
Unfortunately, it doesn't help when people give duff answers, either: The "greenhouse effect" may play a role in a real greenhouse (i.e. preventing cooling from radiation) but they also trap warm air (preventing cooling by convection) and block the wind (preventing cooling by evaporation) which have nothing to do with CO2 in the atmosphere. Don't take names too seriously: in other news, the World Wide Web wasn't made by a spider and "bluetooth" headsets are not made from the remains of Viking warlords.
Fortunately, we can be confident that the theory of global warming is not just something extrapolated from some stoner's wilting marijuana crop. Co2 doing its infrared absorption thang can be observed by pointing a spectroscope anywhere in the universe that has CO2.
Mr Sumdumass and Mr Dvorkin: please consider your heads cracked firmly together.
It would seem that Co2 in the upper atmosphere would absorb more heat and prevent it from hitting the earth in the first place before it bounces back and gets traped by the Co2 on the way out.
The energy doesn't "bounce off*" - it is absorbed by the Earth and re-radiated. All objects radiate energy, but the frequency spectrum of that radiation depends on the temperature.
Because the sun is very hot, it radiates a lot of energy in the form of visible light.
Because the Earth isn't as hot as the sun, most of the energy it re-radiates is as lower frequency infra-red.
CO2 is transparent to visible light, but absorbs infra-red. So it acts as a one-way valve: the visible light from the sun gets in, the re-radiated infra-red from the Earth can't get out.
(* It only bounces off the white shiny bits - which unfortunately tend to melt as the earth 'warms up'...)
I think the controversy basically boils down to the following:
Well, as long as that's the only thing that boils.
No, what it really boils down to is: we still can't reliably predict the behavior of complex systems. Unfortunately, this encourages people (especially politically-motivated people who didn't get where they are today by saying "I don't know") to pretend that they are simple.
If there is proof that humans are causing global warming, it should be easy to show
Why should it be easy? That's part of the problem. The Earth is not a pan on a cooker that just gets hotter when you turn up the gas and cools down when you turn it down. The Earth is a complex web of cycles and equilibria that we don't completely understand.
Heck, stick some ice, water and salt in the pan, clamp on a slightly leaky lid and even that becomes non-trivial - and that's peanuts alongside the Earth.
Global warming (or not) is always going to be a guessing game: if you want irrefutable proof, wait 100 years and see whether Bangladesh is still there. Until then, its a risk/benefit analysis, not a scientific study.
What is known is that basic physics says that increasing CO2 levels in an atmosphere will increase the proportion of solar heat retained by the planet: that much can be proven in the lab. Anybody who rejects AGW needs to come up with some theory that explains why that magically won't happen in the real world. Instead, they're exploiting the fact that its very, very difficult to predict how that extra heat will translate into temperature and climate changes. Sadly, I suspect that there are those on both sides of the argument who don't even know that heat is not the same thing as temperature...
For those who don't like the downer ending,
Listen to the BBC radio adaptation of the final book for one solution to this. Normally tacking on a happy ending would be abhorrent, but they claim that Adams expressed regrets at killing everybody.
Yes, I know its complicated - the first two books were adapted from the radio, the last three books were adapted to the radio and a legion of Bobby Ewings emerged from the shower to paper over the cracks. Thank God (or at least the guy from Eels' dad) for parallel universes.
Short of "...and then the universe ceased to exist, and all of time with it," I'm not sure how you can avoid someone desperate enough to think of a sequel (or a prequel if necessary) to come up with one.
Huh? That happened in Book 2 of HHGTTG and Adams himeself did 3 more sequels :-)
Then in book 5 the Earth gets annihhilated from every possible parallel universe and still the BBC managed to come up with a new epilogue for the radio adaptation.
You didn't read Discworld, then?
Depends which ones: The first couple of Discworld books were very much a series of set-piece jokes tied together by a loose plot - very much like the Hitch-Hikers Guide but with wizzards and dragons instead of robots and space ships... However, as the books went on the emphasis shifted from comedy towards plot and character.
The recent City Watch books are more hard-boiled detective and social commentary. Pratchett's most recent book, "Nation" was decidedly not a comedy.
Mind you, I get the distinct impression that Pratchett sets out to tell the story he wants to tell and doesn't really agonize over genres. You can only spot his children's books because they're 50 pages shorter and omit the full lyrics of "The Hedgehog Song".
The mouse buttons are reversed from the way they are here in the States.
So, Mac users are OK then...
...and I thought the FFF system of units stood for "Furlongs, Firkins and Fortnights".
Plus, I was trying to be polite by not using the unexpurgated term "metric shitload".
Cracking security, Gromit!
"We do!" is the answer for those of us who believe that democracy (in some form) is the answer to problems of authority.
Please let me know when someone starts one of these "democracies" that solve all the problems of authority - they sound great, but I don't think I've ever encountered one.