"The best match for current changes was the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum of 55 million years ago, when vast amounts of methane were released into the atmosphere causing rapid global warming, ocean acidification, and mass extinction. But even then, it took at least 3000 years for ocean pH to drop by 0.5. "That is an order of magnitude slower than today," Hönisch says.
A key point (indirectly pointed to in the article) is that the *rate of change* of acidity is what's critical. We've got the accelerator floored and we're close to the cliff.
It's worse than that. Now that the bacteriophages have achieved Iron Age upgrades, they can develop Archery and Siege Workshop. If they research Ballistics and deploy enough Helepolis units, they will become unstoppable...
I would imagine so - even if somehow you were able to "smell" a complete vacuum, your own body (including the nasal passages themselves) will be giving off odors. If they are so subtle as to normally be overwhelmed by the usual natural background, that may be your first chance to detect them.
Based on all the sweaty hero-in-space-attacking-monolithic-fortress-of-evil-guy footage, however, I predict that most of the time space is rather sweaty and disgusting.
Unless she's Number Six, in which case space is sweaty and sexy...
"quantum entanglement would be pretty cool if an applicable use was found for it.
Applications already exist, at least if you count the demonstration of instantaneous transfer of information regardless of distance. And this experiment is years old.
So yes, quantum entanglement is indeed pretty cool.
Any number of innovative solutions that will flourish freely in a far more open market. MS will not simply disappear overnight, as you seem to imply. It's in the midst of a long slide into being just another player, and one with a crappy reputation (well earned) at that. As that curve descends, the solution curve from other vendors continues to rise.
An additional sign of MS's slide beneath the waters is the current crop of college new-grads. All the ones I speak with (recent hires, during interviews, socially etc.) view Microsoft as a plague. Couple that with the observation higher up of "falling empires scream their loudest", plus general consumer sentiment of "MS sucks" (among even my non-techie friends and relatives), and there's not much that can be done. MS has lost mindshare, and they are technically not capable of turning their ship around.
"Experiments have shown the DNA strands have undergone considerable mutation but such mutations have not impacted crucial functions like reproduction. It is remarkable that such a phenomenon has occurred contrary to common assumptions about nuclear waste."
Ummm... the animals are radioactive and their DNA has undergone considerable mutation. What exactly is contrary here to the common assumptions of radiological contamination? Sure matches my own assumptions.
Sure they can reproduce but I wouldn't exactly be jumping with glee over this "recovery". The damage merely has yet to express itself.
Though if any of the local turtles grow to human size and start dressing like ninjas, I'll take back everything I said.
"Let's hope it isn't anything like those voting machines."
I was going to joke that at least they were testing WMD detectors and not WMDs, but your post sparked the realization that a hacked voting system is far more dangerous to a nation than any WMD ever could be.
"You know, the girl with the sledgehammer breaking that giant screen with Big Brother in it.
Only this time around the girl is the stoner chick from the Switch campaign.
She wanders into the room looking dazed, sees the giant talking face on the screen, then cocks her head like a confused cocker spaniel while trying to use her iPod as a remote to change the channel.
"Sex and romantic entanglements among astronauts could derail missions to Mars and should therefore be studied by NASA, warns a top-level panel of US researchers."
So in reality we've got a top-level panel of US researches who are tantalizingly close to achieving the ultimate Holy Grail - pursuing workplace sex, romantic entanglements and porn in the name of "research".
"When dealing with management, be insincere. Tell them what they want to hear."
All other of your points I generally agree with (good stuff), but on this one I have to differ.
I've always dealt straight up with management for two reasons:
1) It covers your ass. Don't think for a moment you'll avoid being the fall guy unless you have a paper trail detailing the actual facts *and* your efforts with the upper tier to address them.
2) In the longterm (and you should *always* think longterm) it leads to a level of trust and competency in your judgements. Management may not be hearing what they want, but they are probably hearing what they *need* to in order to fend of disaster. And while it may lead to shortterm pain, in the longterm it pays off extremely well.
The caveat is that you have to start this from the very beginning. You can't lie about status and then 'fess up at the end after it's gone all furball on you.
That has paid off very well for me in my career. Of course you can't be a whining ass hat about telling the truth. Be tactful, stick to the facts, and focus on freakin' solutions to the actual problem(s), not pointing fingers.
Nearly everywhere I've worked I've acquired a reputation as a straight shooter who simply solves problems. Early on you may take a few hits from the weasels, but it's like investing - small consistent gains leading to longterm wealth, as opposed to trying to strike it big with shortcuts and shenanigans.
Playing the weasel's game just adds to the noise. In time I found I could just bring up a topic and share my thoughts, and the things I'd addressed would be handled.
Not only that, but the weasels no longer bothered when in my turf. They learned it was wasted effort since they couldn't get away with it, plus that I wasn't going to stab them in the back. I'd be happy to stab them in the chest, mind you! But never in the back.;-)
Which brings up the issue of effectively sticking up for yourself and your people. Like you say, "being nice" is like having a big target on your back. "Being nice" and being professional and constructively forceful ("rabid yet friendly") is the only effective route. When people see that heads roll when they screw with your crew, they tend to leave your crew alone.
All of that hinges on your reputation as an honest, upfront straightshooter with solutions. Anything else just makes you another whining child on the playground in their eyes.
And if you have so many weasels in your management chain that this isn't possible, your resume better already be on the streets.
"What would it be, International Move Like a Ninja Day?"
Yes! I'd give up my 401k to see everyone around my office move like a ninja for a day! Well OK, they'd all end up looking like the Star Wars kid but somehow that would make it even better.
Watching the tense action around the box of meeting donuts alone would be worth it.
"Now I am jumping into the job search full force and it looks like I will actually increase my salary significantly (10k+)"
Congrats! Sounds like you make some useful upgrades to the "product". Very nice to hear you grabbed the situation by the proverbial horns and ran with it. And I'm glad my endless blathering ended up as something other than tiresome.:-)
I'm serious about us IT nerds sticking together - the better we all become personally and professionally, the better chances we have of ending up working with quality people on our next projects. Imagine a project where everyone had a clue and actually covered each other's backs. Friggin' paradise!
I have a dream. And it involves Natalie Portman. But I also have another dream....:-)
"In other news: Effects of Katrina on children with learning disabilities in Australia still unknown!"
Well put. Yeesh, from TFA it doesn't seem Hubble's future is really any cloudier than before. It doesn't say the two key facilities were wiped out, only damaged. Several months delay in the overall Shuttle schedule seems likely - people want to be back to work pursuing normal lives ASAP, and the gov't will be pushing hard to make it happen (14 days after finally waking the fsck up).
Unless FEMA gets involved, in which case I predict our space program will be limited to airing repeats of the Thunderbirds for decades to come.
"maybe you should have added the "Or maybe you shouldn't bring me every piece of trash that you find in the copy machine".
Man, no doubt! I should've thrown in a Tyler reference like CaffeineAddict2001 did. Which also reminds me it's been way too long since I last watched FC.
"Clean food, please."
"In that case, sir, may I advise against the lady eating the clam chowder?"
"That's exactly why you use personal email for personal things..."
Though sometimes the upfront and personal approach is best. For example:
"Well, I gotta tell you - I'd be very, very careful who you talk to about that, because the person who stole that sandwich... is dangerous. And this button-down, Oxford-cloth psycho might just snap and then stalk from office to office with an Armilite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semiautomatic weapon: pumping round after round into colleagues and coworkers. This might be someone you've known for years . . . someone very, very close to you."
Slashdot Mirror
"The best match for current changes was the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum of 55 million years ago, when vast amounts of methane were released into the atmosphere causing rapid global warming, ocean acidification, and mass extinction. But even then, it took at least 3000 years for ocean pH to drop by 0.5. "That is an order of magnitude slower than today," Hönisch says.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21534-oceans-acidifying-at-unprecedented-speed.html
A key point (indirectly pointed to in the article) is that the *rate of change* of acidity is what's critical. We've got the accelerator floored and we're close to the cliff.
It's worse than that. Now that the bacteriophages have achieved Iron Age upgrades, they can develop Archery and Siege Workshop. If they research Ballistics and deploy enough Helepolis units, they will become unstoppable...
"The yellow cake is a lie."
In my mind you just got a +5 Triple Entendre Insightful Funny.
(Unless my hippocampus troll succeeds in modding it down.)
"When did we, US citizens, become automatically suspect by our government? :/ "
When we elected Gore as President in 2000.
"perhaps this is more than just psychosomatic?"
I would imagine so - even if somehow you were able to "smell" a complete vacuum, your own body (including the nasal passages themselves) will be giving off odors. If they are so subtle as to normally be overwhelmed by the usual natural background, that may be your first chance to detect them.
Based on all the sweaty hero-in-space-attacking-monolithic-fortress-of-evil-guy footage, however, I predict that most of the time space is rather sweaty and disgusting.
Unless she's Number Six, in which case space is sweaty and sexy...
"quantum entanglement would be pretty cool if an applicable use was found for it.
Applications already exist, at least if you count the demonstration of instantaneous transfer of information regardless of distance. And this experiment is years old.
So yes, quantum entanglement is indeed pretty cool.
I swear when I first read that, I parsed it as "one of the world's leading experts on how to protect installations from Windows."
And it still made perfect sense (codebase problems and all).
Any number of innovative solutions that will flourish freely in a far more open market. MS will not simply disappear overnight, as you seem to imply. It's in the midst of a long slide into being just another player, and one with a crappy reputation (well earned) at that. As that curve descends, the solution curve from other vendors continues to rise.
An additional sign of MS's slide beneath the waters is the current crop of college new-grads. All the ones I speak with (recent hires, during interviews, socially etc.) view Microsoft as a plague. Couple that with the observation higher up of "falling empires scream their loudest", plus general consumer sentiment of "MS sucks" (among even my non-techie friends and relatives), and there's not much that can be done. MS has lost mindshare, and they are technically not capable of turning their ship around.
I'm sorry, my ex-wife already has that position filled.
And with innovation like this out of Redmond, who could possibly argue otherwise? ;-)
"Experiments have shown the DNA strands have undergone considerable mutation but such mutations have not impacted crucial functions like reproduction. It is remarkable that such a phenomenon has occurred contrary to common assumptions about nuclear waste."
Ummm... the animals are radioactive and their DNA has undergone considerable mutation. What exactly is contrary here to the common assumptions of radiological contamination? Sure matches my own assumptions.
Sure they can reproduce but I wouldn't exactly be jumping with glee over this "recovery". The damage merely has yet to express itself.
Though if any of the local turtles grow to human size and start dressing like ninjas, I'll take back everything I said.
"This has to be considered decidedly anti-Homeland Defense by the current administration."
Unless they designed the backdoor to be inserted....
"Great, now they are combining two of the most horrible addictions in my life."
Now imagine how the productivity numbers would skyrocket if they managed to mix programming and pr0n.
(Granted, I've already written plenty of obscene code in the past...)
"(you can see the TM symbol next to "Me" in the SCO press release)."
Yeah, well I've got a trademark on "Bite.Me" that I'll be happy to send their way....
"Let's hope it isn't anything like those voting machines."
I was going to joke that at least they were testing WMD detectors and not WMDs, but your post sparked the realization that a hacked voting system is far more dangerous to a nation than any WMD ever could be.
"You know, the girl with the sledgehammer breaking that giant screen with Big Brother in it.
Only this time around the girl is the stoner chick from the Switch campaign.
She wanders into the room looking dazed, sees the giant talking face on the screen, then cocks her head like a confused cocker spaniel while trying to use her iPod as a remote to change the channel.
Eventually she wanders out a side exit.
"Sex and romantic entanglements among astronauts could derail missions to Mars and should therefore be studied by NASA, warns a top-level panel of US researchers."
So in reality we've got a top-level panel of US researches who are tantalizingly close to achieving the ultimate Holy Grail - pursuing workplace sex, romantic entanglements and porn in the name of "research".
Godspeed lads, godspeed.
"No, I don't want it Super-Sized!"
Yeah, that's what Darl is going to be saying on his "prison bride" honeymoon....
"Our observations do not prove the coalescence model, but we surely have found a lady with a smoking gun next to a dead body," said Shri Kulkarni
Looks like the Sin City DVD has been getting a lot of play time down in the lab....
"When dealing with management, be insincere. Tell them what they want to hear."
All other of your points I generally agree with (good stuff), but on this one I have to differ.
I've always dealt straight up with management for two reasons:
The caveat is that you have to start this from the very beginning. You can't lie about status and then 'fess up at the end after it's gone all furball on you.
That has paid off very well for me in my career. Of course you can't be a whining ass hat about telling the truth. Be tactful, stick to the facts, and focus on freakin' solutions to the actual problem(s) , not pointing fingers.
Nearly everywhere I've worked I've acquired a reputation as a straight shooter who simply solves problems. Early on you may take a few hits from the weasels, but it's like investing - small consistent gains leading to longterm wealth, as opposed to trying to strike it big with shortcuts and shenanigans.
Playing the weasel's game just adds to the noise. In time I found I could just bring up a topic and share my thoughts, and the things I'd addressed would be handled.
Not only that, but the weasels no longer bothered when in my turf. They learned it was wasted effort since they couldn't get away with it, plus that I wasn't going to stab them in the back. I'd be happy to stab them in the chest, mind you! But never in the back. ;-)
Which brings up the issue of effectively sticking up for yourself and your people. Like you say, "being nice" is like having a big target on your back. "Being nice" and being professional and constructively forceful ("rabid yet friendly") is the only effective route. When people see that heads roll when they screw with your crew, they tend to leave your crew alone.
All of that hinges on your reputation as an honest, upfront straightshooter with solutions. Anything else just makes you another whining child on the playground in their eyes.
And if you have so many weasels in your management chain that this isn't possible, your resume better already be on the streets.
"What would it be, International Move Like a Ninja Day?"
Yes! I'd give up my 401k to see everyone around my office move like a ninja for a day! Well OK, they'd all end up looking like the Star Wars kid but somehow that would make it even better.
Watching the tense action around the box of meeting donuts alone would be worth it.
"Now I am jumping into the job search full force and it looks like I will actually increase my salary significantly (10k+)"
Congrats! Sounds like you make some useful upgrades to the "product". Very nice to hear you grabbed the situation by the proverbial horns and ran with it. And I'm glad my endless blathering ended up as something other than tiresome. :-)
I'm serious about us IT nerds sticking together - the better we all become personally and professionally, the better chances we have of ending up working with quality people on our next projects. Imagine a project where everyone had a clue and actually covered each other's backs. Friggin' paradise!
I have a dream. And it involves Natalie Portman. But I also have another dream.... :-)
"In other news: Effects of Katrina on children with learning disabilities in Australia still unknown!"
Well put. Yeesh, from TFA it doesn't seem Hubble's future is really any cloudier than before. It doesn't say the two key facilities were wiped out, only damaged. Several months delay in the overall Shuttle schedule seems likely - people want to be back to work pursuing normal lives ASAP, and the gov't will be pushing hard to make it happen (14 days after finally waking the fsck up).
Unless FEMA gets involved, in which case I predict our space program will be limited to airing repeats of the Thunderbirds for decades to come.
"maybe you should have added the "Or maybe you shouldn't bring me every piece of trash that you find in the copy machine".
Man, no doubt! I should've thrown in a Tyler reference like CaffeineAddict2001 did. Which also reminds me it's been way too long since I last watched FC.
"Clean food, please."
"In that case, sir, may I advise against the lady eating the clam chowder?"
"That's exactly why you use personal email for personal things..."
Though sometimes the upfront and personal approach is best. For example:
"Well, I gotta tell you - I'd be very, very careful who you talk to about that, because the person who stole that sandwich... is dangerous. And this button-down, Oxford-cloth psycho might just snap and then stalk from office to office with an Armilite AR-10 carbine gas-powered semiautomatic weapon: pumping round after round into colleagues and coworkers. This might be someone you've known for years . . . someone very, very close to you."