So we have a very abstracted estimate of future economics that is derived from already abstracted estimated models of temperature. Sounds compelling...
According the IPCC's 5th assessment report in Chapter 9 models have problems with the TOA energy balance. Specifically if you look in Box 9.1 they say: maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system They follow up with a half dozen citations verifying this.
Read that closely because it is telling. Read the cited articles, and it's even more so. Climate models still can NOT predict TOA energy imbalance. To even get hindcasts correct, requires manual corrections to unknown or poorly understood processes like clouds. Let me observe that long term climate change driven by the greenhouse effect works ENTIRELY through the TOA energy imbalance and trapping more or less energy as gas concentrations change.
Forgive me if I believe we lack sufficient evidence and understanding to justify carbon taxations and other economic controls to try and rectify something we still can't even quantify,
The only things this demonstrates is your lack of understanding. You then take that ignorance and formulate it into something that fits your rather obvious bias and hand-wave away any troubling things like "context".
In addition, you an others like you treat the model runs as the end all be all of climate science. They're not. Models are just one tool that is used, just like any other branch of science that you care to name. All models have errors since all models are imperfect representations of reality, and they never ever have perfect data. That's why any non-trivial scientific model has numerous parameters and settings that can be set and tweaked, and why a EXPERT is required to run them and analyze the results. Otherwise you'd have Joe Sixpack claiming he developed an infiniglider since he changed a parameter in an aerodynamic model and the airfoil generates lift even at rest.
This may be the beginning of the end for career politicians and national parties.
Hardly. This is just another step along the downward spiral. Predictable even.
It seems to be progressing faster than I thought it would though. I didn't expect someone like Trump could actually be a viable presidential candidate until the 2030's.
The storm was packing 200 mph winds. That is an EF5 tornado. An EF5 tornado is capable of tearing asphalt off the ground, leaving nothing but slabs where sturdy homes used to be, tossing big rigs around like toothpicks, tearing tree out of the ground and shredding them, so on and so forth. Take a look at some before an after pics of an EF5 tornado.
An EF5 tornado will rarely approach a diameter of 1 mile, and is usually over in a couple of minutes.
This storm was an EF5 that would have wiped something like New York City off the map. Not just a little path through downtown, but the whole damn city. Those winds would have lasted for an hour or more. You can't even begin to imagine what that would be like.
That "only" would have been catastrophic if it hit a population center. Fortunately, it didn't (and several conditions occurred that manged to weaken the storm a bit before landfall).
Dodged a bullet this time, but we keep reloading the gun.
None of the references point to co-gravition, or Heaviside's force, which seems to produce much of the desired results called for.
Yes, all those references on over unity are really convincing. Love the youtube anti-grav videos as well. I'd tell you more but the gubmit will probably be breaking down my door to steal my plans for the Death Star.:P
Dark matter is still handwavium. The best proof we have for it so far is that if it isn't there the model we use doesn't work.
No, it isn't.
If you're hunting for a bear and you find bear tracks, bear shit, bear claw marks on trees, and everything except for directly observing the bear itself, you don't say the bear is "handwavium" and all of the evidence was really caused by a mutant chicken just because you didn't "see" the bear itself.
Dark matter is exactly the same. We've measured. We've observed. The evidence points to some sort of weakly interacting/non-interacting form of matter. We can't "see" it, but we see the effects it has on everything else. It's the best and simplest explanation we have at the moment.
Now you may not like it. You may think there's a better explanation. But until you put forth your theory with evidence to the contrary that not only explains the current observations but also doesn't break current physics it's simply your unsubstantiated opinion.
My gut says that for 95-99% of ex-employees this never matters and for the majority of the remainder it's either a couple emails a few months later asking about where they stored some project no one else remembers.
That being said "reasonable" is a bit of a fuzzy term, yeah a couple emails asking if I remembered where I put that old script is reasonable, but what about a 5 minute email every week for six months? Or coming in for 4 hours to answer questions for an internal audit? I suspect different people will have very different expectations of what reasonable is.
Reasonable. Let me think for a moment about reasonable.
You're laying me off. But before you lay me off you want me train my overseas replacement. In addition to that, you want me to provide free services to you for up to 2 years after you let me go.
There are two words and exactly two words that are reasonable in this case for any person in this situation: FUCK YOU
You want me to answer questions after you forced me to change jobs, uproot my family, and drain my savings? And for free?
FUCK YOU
You nuked that bridge from orbit. After pulling that shit you're going to pay, and pay dearly for any services I render. I don't care if it's a texted yes or no question. I don't care if you're being audited. I don't care if your whole company is going up in flames and the one thing that can save it is my help. I will give one single response to any request for help, and that will be a quote containing the price for my consultation services, which will be a minimum of $500K, up front, after taxes plus any additional fees I damn well see fit to add. The price will be non-negotiable. If the response is anything other than "we agree", then requests for help will be ignored.
Aliens that find us will probably be so much more advanced than we are, they'll put us in their zoo, or they'll eat us. There should be a law against contacting intelligent alien life forms.
No. No they wouldn't.
If aliens had the technology to make the interstellar trek to us in any reasonable time frame, then they have moved well beyond the want or need for imprisoning and/or consuming random life they encounter. It's also unlikely that they would want or need Earth for resources, as they would have the technology to easily gather what they need from any number of uninhabited worlds throughout the galaxy. Not only that, but it's also likely that they have moved beyond inconveniences like mortality.
At best, an advanced alien species capable of interstellar travel would find us to be a curiosity. With their technology, wiping out humans, and indeed all life on Earth, would be trivial. They wouldn't need an army or death star like weapon. All they'd need to do is find a nice asteroid an aim it at Earth. Or if they wanted subtle they could engineer a super virus/nano-death-machines and surreptitiously drop it over a major population center.
Or maybe they would just sit back and wait for us to destroy ourselves, since we seem pretty hellbent on doing that. If your practically immortal, then waiting a hundred or a thousand years for a barely conscious species to self-destruct really isn't that big of a deal, and may even provide some level of entertainment.
In short, there really isn't any reason for an advanced alien race to be hostile towards us, intentionally or otherwise.
Equating speech to physical violence is a very dangerous trend that will not end well.
You're right, because persistent verbal abuse is PSYCHOLOGICAL VIOLENCE which has much more devastating and longer term impacts than physical violence.
...C isn't a bad language to do *anything* in. It's just a language that requires you to be competent, or better, and to address it through the lens of that competence in order to get enough out of it to make the result and the effort expended worth the candle.
This statement says nothing. You can replace C with anything. Programmer competency far outweighs language choice, and a competent programmer will choose the appropriate tools to get the job done well.
C's key inherent characteristics are portability,
Hardly. Yeah, hypothetically if you stick 100% to ANSI standards then the code should hypothetically be portable, but pretty much every C/C++ code I've ever worked with/built/etc. is not 100% ANSI compliant. Macros galore permeate cross-platform C/C++ code. It is an exceptionally rare occurrence when I can take a pure C code written on Linux, bring it over to Windows, and compile and run it successfully without modifications. Meanwhile, I can take a python script I wrote on OS X and run it on Windows, Linux, etc. without issue.
There's a big difference between something that can be MADE portable and something that IS portable.
leanness and close-to-the-metal speed.
Good qualities to be sure. But most applications don't require "close to the metal" speeds for anything but key components. Use the appropriate tools for the job. Yes, hypothetically you can write entire web applications in C/C++, but it certainly isn't the smartest way to go about it.
It doesn't hold your hand.
No language "holds your hand". Some languages attempt to reduce some common types of programming errors (built-in garbage collection, exceptions, etc.). But no language is going to make an incompetent programmer competent. You can just as easily shoot yourself in the foot with Python or Java, but in some cases it might be a little harder to pull the trigger.
It's a language for experienced, skilled programmers when we're talking about creating actual products that are expected to perform in the wild.
Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean it's practical. If I'm staffing up a major web development effort, I'm not going to hire someone who claims they're going to do the whole thing in C. Similarly, if I need to develop a fluid dynamic model to run on super computers I'm not going to hire someone who says they're going to do it all in Python.
When you have to file lawsuits to silence your opposition, that's the clearest possible sign that you are not a scientist, and what you're doing is nothing CLOSE to being a "science".
They're not "silencing the opposition". Learn to read. They're going after companies with a long history of funding bullshit at the behest of whatever companies stand to lose money because science shows that they're pissing in the pool.
This kind of crap has been happening for DECADES. It happens anytime researchers demonstrates that some company or group of companies are doing damage. Said companies then go out and higher various firms to start pumping out the bullshit so they can keep polluting/slave/labor/whatever is stuffing their pockets. They did this with leaded gasoline, asbestos, acid rain, etc. This is neither the first nor the last time something like this will happen. AGW is just the flavor of the month.
So, you opposed the RICO investigation (1999-2006) of the so-called "science" which said that cigarettes are safe?
Yes. The way to counter speech that you disagree with, is not censorship, but MORE SPEECH. It is especially effective if you can back up your speech with data.
Well if you are just talking about speech, then sure. But this isn't about speech. This is about organized attempts at burying scientific fact under piles of FUD so that certain companies can continue to profit while causing harm.
This isn't anything new. There is a very long history of companies doing this. Leaded gasoline, CFCs, smoking, acid rain. I've seen this movie many times. AGW just happens to be the latest target, and you can be certain that it won't be the last.
Computers follow rules. Humans (a.k.a every other asshole on the road) do not.
This is a no win situation. If you program a car to drive safely and follow rules, then it won't be safe on roads because of all the assholes who don't. If you program the car to behave more like an asshole ( a human driver), then it won't be safe since there's a good chance it will make the wrong call. If you program the car to just account for assholes but still drive safely, then it will basically choke in situations like a four way stop in southern California where every other asshole will just muscle or roll their way through the stop.
The long pole in the tent isn't developing an AI capable of driving. It's developing an AI that can deal with assholes.
I'm starting to get tired of this mentality from service providers that, just because someone is using their services in ways they didn't expect, they're somehow 'abusing' the service. If you advertise the service as unlimited, it should be unlimited. You shouldn't care that I'm using it to torrent or do whatever.
If you can't provide a truly unlimited service, don't advertise it
I believe that these "unlimited plans" were making the assumption that people aren't assholes. That's a terrible assumption to make.
Most user's aren't going to run torrents on their phones. In fact, I'm almost certain that type of use case wasn't even considered when they decided on the "unlimited plan" idea. They were probably only looking at the "average" use case with some deviation boundaries. But then along comes the spider that is Joe/Jane Torrent, who blows all usage estimation out of the water and screws over everyone else in an area by using his/her phone as an internet hub.
Companies should know better by now. Offer an "unlimited" anything and there will always be some part of the population who will use it in ways that will demonstrate just how stupid that idea was.
The problem with RTGs is that the contain the word "nuclear" in their description. This induces hysterics in the idiotic population that a mishap will result in an Earth Shattering Kaboom(tm).
You don't understand the concept and made ASSumptions based on a generalized analogy that isn't even wholly correct, then proclaim that he's an idiot.
Are you running for office?
Regardless, how about a different analogy that might might make this more clear.
You have an egg. You drop it. The egg hits the floor. It vanishes. Do you still have an egg? Nope.
You have an egg. You drop it. The egg splatters on the floor. Do you still have an egg? Yep.
The former is how black holes were thought to work. The problem is that if black holes really worked that way it would cause some rather odd things to occur. We haven't observed these really odd things, which implies that black holes don't operate that way.
The latter is how they operate according to the new work. The egg may not be in the same form, but it didn't "vanish". You didn't "lose" anything. It's just in a different form. Sure, it may not be anything more than a mess on your floor. It may not be useful for anything other than a Fido snack. But it doesn't change the fact that the egg is still there.
Plants... they consume CO2, which seems to be the big issue in climate change.
How about projects to plant more plants in cities globally? Like forcing coal-powered power plants to surround their plant with plants? Plan to plant more plants in your plants.
*facepalm*
That will jack shit because you and others like you have absolutely no concept of scale. If you completely covered every square meter of earth the densest fast growing trees, you wouldn't even come close to counteracting a single year's worth of carbon emissions. And I don't mean just the land. I mean even square meter of surface area. We're burning through the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of years worth of ancient global forests, grasslands, etc. every year. No amount of greenery is going to counteract that.
Worse, it doesn't even fix the problem even IF it were possible to plant enough. It just kicks the can down the road. Any plants or trees you plant eventually die. When they die, the decompose releasing methane, CO2, and a host of other carbon based compounds. The carbon doesn't just magically vanish. It goes right back into the global carbon cycle.
And that's the problem with these so-called geoengineering "solutions". They're not solutions. They're hacks. Even if they could work on a global scale they treat the symptoms, and not the problems. Worse, it's likely any such hacks will cause other issues.
Sorry, but we're long passed the point of possibly fixing the problem. And geohacking so we can keep taking hits of the fossil fuel crack pipe is dangerous as well as stupid. We need to come up with plans for adaptation, reduction in fossil fuel usage, and sustainability.
"there is no climate change" - I wonder how many deniers or skeptics argue that?- only a tiny %age at a guess. I'd say the evidence for climate change since the last Ice Age indicates that non-anthropogenic GW one of the stronger puzzles that needs to be worked on, even if Mann and Smith are trying to downplay the variability seen.
If you ignore the past 120+ years or so of climate research, then yes it is a puzzle. However, since Arrhenius first proposed his global climate model in the late 1800's science has come quite a long way in this matter. There are many research papers on this very topic, and even whole textbooks.
But if you don't want to bother with dedicated research on the topic (or if you doubt it), brush up on some physics, chemistry, and math and rediscover what all these scientist have researched over the past century.
This is why no-one trusts the media. I doubt even the most fervent anti-CC campaigner believes this to be true. And while I don't think climate change itself is a hoax, I'm far less convinced that it's a death sentence (e.g. as far as I know we've had higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere in the past without all life dying).
Apparently you've never seen the bags of crazy at WUWT and CA, or even read the comments on a climate science story here on Slashdot. Chemistry? Thermodynamics? Pssh. Much more plausible to believe a global conspiracy on the order of the Illuminati.:P
At any rate, no respectable climate scientist has said that climate change will end all life. Again, that's something the crazies (such as those at WUWT) fabricated out of nothing. There will be negative consequences to be sure. But I've never seen a single sane scientist claim that climate change will kill all humans, let alone all life.
Slashdot Mirror
So we have a very abstracted estimate of future economics that is derived from already abstracted estimated models of temperature. Sounds compelling...
According the IPCC's 5th assessment report in Chapter 9 models have problems with the TOA energy balance. Specifically if you look in Box 9.1 they say:
maintaining the global mean top of the atmosphere (TOA) energy balance in a simulation of pre-industrial climate is essential to prevent
the climate system from drifting to an unrealistic state. The models used in this report almost universally contain adjustments to parameters
in their treatment of clouds to fulfil this important constraint of the climate system
They follow up with a half dozen citations verifying this.
Read that closely because it is telling. Read the cited articles, and it's even more so. Climate models still can NOT predict TOA energy imbalance. To even get hindcasts correct, requires manual corrections to unknown or poorly understood processes like clouds. Let me observe that long term climate change driven by the greenhouse effect works ENTIRELY through the TOA energy imbalance and trapping more or less energy as gas concentrations change.
Forgive me if I believe we lack sufficient evidence and understanding to justify carbon taxations and other economic controls to try and rectify something we still can't even quantify,
The only things this demonstrates is your lack of understanding. You then take that ignorance and formulate it into something that fits your rather obvious bias and hand-wave away any troubling things like "context".
In addition, you an others like you treat the model runs as the end all be all of climate science. They're not. Models are just one tool that is used, just like any other branch of science that you care to name. All models have errors since all models are imperfect representations of reality, and they never ever have perfect data. That's why any non-trivial scientific model has numerous parameters and settings that can be set and tweaked, and why a EXPERT is required to run them and analyze the results. Otherwise you'd have Joe Sixpack claiming he developed an infiniglider since he changed a parameter in an aerodynamic model and the airfoil generates lift even at rest.
This may be the beginning of the end for career politicians and national parties.
Hardly. This is just another step along the downward spiral. Predictable even.
It seems to be progressing faster than I thought it would though. I didn't expect someone like Trump could actually be a viable presidential candidate until the 2030's.
How about some perspective then?
The storm was packing 200 mph winds. That is an EF5 tornado. An EF5 tornado is capable of tearing asphalt off the ground, leaving nothing but slabs where sturdy homes used to be, tossing big rigs around like toothpicks, tearing tree out of the ground and shredding them, so on and so forth. Take a look at some before an after pics of an EF5 tornado.
An EF5 tornado will rarely approach a diameter of 1 mile, and is usually over in a couple of minutes.
This storm was an EF5 that would have wiped something like New York City off the map. Not just a little path through downtown, but the whole damn city. Those winds would have lasted for an hour or more. You can't even begin to imagine what that would be like.
That "only" would have been catastrophic if it hit a population center. Fortunately, it didn't (and several conditions occurred that manged to weaken the storm a bit before landfall).
Dodged a bullet this time, but we keep reloading the gun.
None of the references point to co-gravition, or Heaviside's force, which seems to produce much of the desired results called for.
Yes, all those references on over unity are really convincing. Love the youtube anti-grav videos as well. I'd tell you more but the gubmit will probably be breaking down my door to steal my plans for the Death Star. :P
Sorry, I don't believe in conspiracies or magic.
Dark matter is still handwavium. The best proof we have for it so far is that if it isn't there the model we use doesn't work.
No, it isn't.
If you're hunting for a bear and you find bear tracks, bear shit, bear claw marks on trees, and everything except for directly observing the bear itself, you don't say the bear is "handwavium" and all of the evidence was really caused by a mutant chicken just because you didn't "see" the bear itself.
Dark matter is exactly the same. We've measured. We've observed. The evidence points to some sort of weakly interacting/non-interacting form of matter. We can't "see" it, but we see the effects it has on everything else. It's the best and simplest explanation we have at the moment.
Now you may not like it. You may think there's a better explanation. But until you put forth your theory with evidence to the contrary that not only explains the current observations but also doesn't break current physics it's simply your unsubstantiated opinion.
My gut says that for 95-99% of ex-employees this never matters and for the majority of the remainder it's either a couple emails a few months later asking about where they stored some project no one else remembers.
That being said "reasonable" is a bit of a fuzzy term, yeah a couple emails asking if I remembered where I put that old script is reasonable, but what about a 5 minute email every week for six months? Or coming in for 4 hours to answer questions for an internal audit? I suspect different people will have very different expectations of what reasonable is.
Reasonable. Let me think for a moment about reasonable.
You're laying me off. But before you lay me off you want me train my overseas replacement. In addition to that, you want me to provide free services to you for up to 2 years after you let me go.
There are two words and exactly two words that are reasonable in this case for any person in this situation: FUCK YOU
You want me to answer questions after you forced me to change jobs, uproot my family, and drain my savings? And for free?
FUCK YOU
You nuked that bridge from orbit. After pulling that shit you're going to pay, and pay dearly for any services I render. I don't care if it's a texted yes or no question. I don't care if you're being audited. I don't care if your whole company is going up in flames and the one thing that can save it is my help. I will give one single response to any request for help, and that will be a quote containing the price for my consultation services, which will be a minimum of $500K, up front, after taxes plus any additional fees I damn well see fit to add. The price will be non-negotiable. If the response is anything other than "we agree", then requests for help will be ignored.
Aliens that find us will probably be so much more advanced than we are, they'll put us in their zoo, or they'll eat us. There should be a law against contacting intelligent alien life forms.
No. No they wouldn't.
If aliens had the technology to make the interstellar trek to us in any reasonable time frame, then they have moved well beyond the want or need for imprisoning and/or consuming random life they encounter. It's also unlikely that they would want or need Earth for resources, as they would have the technology to easily gather what they need from any number of uninhabited worlds throughout the galaxy. Not only that, but it's also likely that they have moved beyond inconveniences like mortality.
At best, an advanced alien species capable of interstellar travel would find us to be a curiosity. With their technology, wiping out humans, and indeed all life on Earth, would be trivial. They wouldn't need an army or death star like weapon. All they'd need to do is find a nice asteroid an aim it at Earth. Or if they wanted subtle they could engineer a super virus/nano-death-machines and surreptitiously drop it over a major population center.
Or maybe they would just sit back and wait for us to destroy ourselves, since we seem pretty hellbent on doing that. If your practically immortal, then waiting a hundred or a thousand years for a barely conscious species to self-destruct really isn't that big of a deal, and may even provide some level of entertainment.
In short, there really isn't any reason for an advanced alien race to be hostile towards us, intentionally or otherwise.
Equating speech to physical violence is a very dangerous trend that will not end well.
You're right, because persistent verbal abuse is PSYCHOLOGICAL VIOLENCE which has much more devastating and longer term impacts than physical violence.
Well, it's Hitlers all the way down anyway.
And how long do you think it takes and how many people are involved before the first shovel hits the ground on a major new construction project?
...C isn't a bad language to do *anything* in. It's just a language that requires you to be competent, or better, and to address it through the lens of that competence in order to get enough out of it to make the result and the effort expended worth the candle.
This statement says nothing. You can replace C with anything. Programmer competency far outweighs language choice, and a competent programmer will choose the appropriate tools to get the job done well.
C's key inherent characteristics are portability,
Hardly. Yeah, hypothetically if you stick 100% to ANSI standards then the code should hypothetically be portable, but pretty much every C/C++ code I've ever worked with/built/etc. is not 100% ANSI compliant. Macros galore permeate cross-platform C/C++ code. It is an exceptionally rare occurrence when I can take a pure C code written on Linux, bring it over to Windows, and compile and run it successfully without modifications. Meanwhile, I can take a python script I wrote on OS X and run it on Windows, Linux, etc. without issue.
There's a big difference between something that can be MADE portable and something that IS portable.
leanness and close-to-the-metal speed.
Good qualities to be sure. But most applications don't require "close to the metal" speeds for anything but key components. Use the appropriate tools for the job. Yes, hypothetically you can write entire web applications in C/C++, but it certainly isn't the smartest way to go about it.
It doesn't hold your hand.
No language "holds your hand". Some languages attempt to reduce some common types of programming errors (built-in garbage collection, exceptions, etc.). But no language is going to make an incompetent programmer competent. You can just as easily shoot yourself in the foot with Python or Java, but in some cases it might be a little harder to pull the trigger.
It's a language for experienced, skilled programmers when we're talking about creating actual products that are expected to perform in the wild.
Just because you CAN do something doesn't mean it's practical. If I'm staffing up a major web development effort, I'm not going to hire someone who claims they're going to do the whole thing in C. Similarly, if I need to develop a fluid dynamic model to run on super computers I'm not going to hire someone who says they're going to do it all in Python.
When you have to file lawsuits to silence your opposition, that's the clearest possible sign that you are not a scientist, and what you're doing is nothing CLOSE to being a "science".
They're not "silencing the opposition". Learn to read. They're going after companies with a long history of funding bullshit at the behest of whatever companies stand to lose money because science shows that they're pissing in the pool.
This kind of crap has been happening for DECADES. It happens anytime researchers demonstrates that some company or group of companies are doing damage. Said companies then go out and higher various firms to start pumping out the bullshit so they can keep polluting/slave/labor/whatever is stuffing their pockets. They did this with leaded gasoline, asbestos, acid rain, etc. This is neither the first nor the last time something like this will happen. AGW is just the flavor of the month.
So, you opposed the RICO investigation (1999-2006) of the so-called "science" which said that cigarettes are safe?
Yes. The way to counter speech that you disagree with, is not censorship, but MORE SPEECH. It is especially effective if you can back up your speech with data.
Well if you are just talking about speech, then sure. But this isn't about speech. This is about organized attempts at burying scientific fact under piles of FUD so that certain companies can continue to profit while causing harm.
This isn't anything new. There is a very long history of companies doing this. Leaded gasoline, CFCs, smoking, acid rain. I've seen this movie many times. AGW just happens to be the latest target, and you can be certain that it won't be the last.
Harassed. Not perp marched out of school in handcuffs by armed men.
But, this is Texas. If you aren't white and you don't play football, then you're a terrorist.
If only we had some way to warm the planet, so that there would be more wind. Perhaps by putting more CO2 in the air and letting the sun warm us up.
Well, since wind is driven by temperature differentials, reducing those differentials will actually weaken winds. :P
Computers follow rules. Humans (a.k.a every other asshole on the road) do not.
This is a no win situation. If you program a car to drive safely and follow rules, then it won't be safe on roads because of all the assholes who don't. If you program the car to behave more like an asshole ( a human driver), then it won't be safe since there's a good chance it will make the wrong call. If you program the car to just account for assholes but still drive safely, then it will basically choke in situations like a four way stop in southern California where every other asshole will just muscle or roll their way through the stop.
The long pole in the tent isn't developing an AI capable of driving. It's developing an AI that can deal with assholes.
I'm starting to get tired of this mentality from service providers that, just because someone is using their services in ways they didn't expect, they're somehow 'abusing' the service. If you advertise the service as unlimited, it should be unlimited. You shouldn't care that I'm using it to torrent or do whatever.
If you can't provide a truly unlimited service, don't advertise it
I believe that these "unlimited plans" were making the assumption that people aren't assholes. That's a terrible assumption to make.
Most user's aren't going to run torrents on their phones. In fact, I'm almost certain that type of use case wasn't even considered when they decided on the "unlimited plan" idea. They were probably only looking at the "average" use case with some deviation boundaries. But then along comes the spider that is Joe/Jane Torrent, who blows all usage estimation out of the water and screws over everyone else in an area by using his/her phone as an internet hub.
Companies should know better by now. Offer an "unlimited" anything and there will always be some part of the population who will use it in ways that will demonstrate just how stupid that idea was.
We're transforming our language into hieroglyphics. Soon, only Cortana will be able to read the old books, and that' only with a Rosetta Stone plugin.
Very Kerbal. Much wow.
The problem with RTGs is that the contain the word "nuclear" in their description. This induces hysterics in the idiotic population that a mishap will result in an Earth Shattering Kaboom(tm).
I blame Marvin the Martion for this.
You don't understand the concept and made ASSumptions based on a generalized analogy that isn't even wholly correct, then proclaim that he's an idiot.
Are you running for office?
Regardless, how about a different analogy that might might make this more clear.
You have an egg. You drop it. The egg hits the floor. It vanishes. Do you still have an egg? Nope.
You have an egg. You drop it. The egg splatters on the floor. Do you still have an egg? Yep.
The former is how black holes were thought to work. The problem is that if black holes really worked that way it would cause some rather odd things to occur. We haven't observed these really odd things, which implies that black holes don't operate that way.
The latter is how they operate according to the new work. The egg may not be in the same form, but it didn't "vanish". You didn't "lose" anything. It's just in a different form. Sure, it may not be anything more than a mess on your floor. It may not be useful for anything other than a Fido snack. But it doesn't change the fact that the egg is still there.
Plants... they consume CO2, which seems to be the big issue in climate change.
How about projects to plant more plants in cities globally? Like forcing coal-powered power plants to surround their plant with plants? Plan to plant more plants in your plants.
*facepalm*
That will jack shit because you and others like you have absolutely no concept of scale. If you completely covered every square meter of earth the densest fast growing trees, you wouldn't even come close to counteracting a single year's worth of carbon emissions. And I don't mean just the land. I mean even square meter of surface area. We're burning through the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of years worth of ancient global forests, grasslands, etc. every year. No amount of greenery is going to counteract that.
Worse, it doesn't even fix the problem even IF it were possible to plant enough. It just kicks the can down the road. Any plants or trees you plant eventually die. When they die, the decompose releasing methane, CO2, and a host of other carbon based compounds. The carbon doesn't just magically vanish. It goes right back into the global carbon cycle.
And that's the problem with these so-called geoengineering "solutions". They're not solutions. They're hacks. Even if they could work on a global scale they treat the symptoms, and not the problems. Worse, it's likely any such hacks will cause other issues.
Sorry, but we're long passed the point of possibly fixing the problem. And geohacking so we can keep taking hits of the fossil fuel crack pipe is dangerous as well as stupid. We need to come up with plans for adaptation, reduction in fossil fuel usage, and sustainability.
"there is no climate change" - I wonder how many deniers or skeptics argue that?- only a tiny %age at a guess. I'd say the evidence for climate change since the last Ice Age indicates that non-anthropogenic GW one of the stronger puzzles that needs to be worked on, even if Mann and Smith are trying to downplay the variability seen.
If you ignore the past 120+ years or so of climate research, then yes it is a puzzle. However, since Arrhenius first proposed his global climate model in the late 1800's science has come quite a long way in this matter. There are many research papers on this very topic, and even whole textbooks.
But if you don't want to bother with dedicated research on the topic (or if you doubt it), brush up on some physics, chemistry, and math and rediscover what all these scientist have researched over the past century.
This is why no-one trusts the media. I doubt even the most fervent anti-CC campaigner believes this to be true. And while I don't think climate change itself is a hoax, I'm far less convinced that it's a death sentence (e.g. as far as I know we've had higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere in the past without all life dying).
Apparently you've never seen the bags of crazy at WUWT and CA, or even read the comments on a climate science story here on Slashdot. Chemistry? Thermodynamics? Pssh. Much more plausible to believe a global conspiracy on the order of the Illuminati. :P
At any rate, no respectable climate scientist has said that climate change will end all life. Again, that's something the crazies (such as those at WUWT) fabricated out of nothing. There will be negative consequences to be sure. But I've never seen a single sane scientist claim that climate change will kill all humans, let alone all life.
Sounds like college.
1997 called. They want their overused Java meme back.