If their data is valuable enough to have RAID, why were they such cheap bastards that they didn't get hot-swap drives?
I've been hearing this story since at least the early 90's. Hot swap capability wasn't as common then as it appears to be today. I don't recall numbers, but I recall that the cabinet that I would have liked cost more than the rest of our little network.
I've heard this before, and I've always found it just a tad far-fetched. Even with drives made the same day with the same batches of components I would expect a little more variation in their lifespans. I suppose it could be true, but I've never experienced it firsthand or met someone who did.
What used to be a problem though was the power demand when all the drives spin up - you could replace a drive and then kill the power supply when you turned it back on. Dying power supplies can take components with them, so I'd find it credible that maybe you'd lose a second drive this way with a cheap power supply. I would hope that any modest cabinet today would have a better power supply than that, though.
I haven't bought a SCSI drive in years, but it was common at the time to be able to configure a spin-up delay on SCSI drives for exactly this reason. You could stagger their startups to avoid having them all hammering the power supply at once. Obviously, if you could dodge that bullet, there's no risk of it taking a drive or two with it even if it is a cheapie.
I also don't see how this solution is effectively any better than RAID... If anything, a backup server is more expensive than a second hard drive for a RAID system (though it may pay off eventually). I'd think the backup server would need to be maintained as well... and if your backup ever fails, it seems like it would require a lot to set up another.
I only skimmed TFA and it's not clear to me how like or unlike Windows' Distributed File System it is, but I'll give you a quick picture of what DFS does for us here to give you a better idea how NetBSD's backup could be handy. We've got a primary and secondary server, each with its own RAID array, and DFS isn't a replacement for it - it's a supplement to it. I'd consider this to be the same.
For starters, when your server fails your RAID array goes with it. The data's fine of course (knock on wood), it's just not available until you either fix the server or shuffle the array into another system. Compound that with the fact that I only drop by here a couple times a week, and I'm the only person who could do this work (we're a small office). When that failure happens, the data would probably be offline for hours at minimum, and that would be a hardship in this environment. Having our data perpetually backed up on another working system that's just waiting to take over is easily worth the trouble and expense of a second system.
In addition, DFS doesn't actually record a duplicate copy of the whole disk's file system (one-way to the backup server), nor does it work in the transactional manner that I picture this working, but it replicates files within a special share both ways. You create this share, and it isn't actually on either server - it's on BOTH servers. DFS decides which one to use and keeps the copies synchronized. If the primary server catches on fire, gets stolen, explodes etc., users would hardly notice. There's a little lag in replication sometimes, so something very recently saved in the primary copy of the share might not actually be in the secondary yet. Aside from that, almost everything else just keeps working.
The bandwidth could be an issue in another environment, but this particular server only gets a mild-to-moderate workout, and DFS is able to keep up. There are a couple database applications that I only allow to replicate one-way because initially DFS started to choke trying to keep it synchronized both ways. For those, someone would have to switch the clients manually from using one server to using the other. Aside from those two, I can reboot either server at will without ever disturbing a user. I think that in the worst case, this is what you'd need to do with NetBSD's backup.
The Anglo-Saxons use the entire Latin alphabet. If you wanted a bunch of aftermarket vowels on the keyboard, you should have invented the personal computer.;)
Given the intransigence the U.S. has displayed in the past regarding control of TLDs, this move isn't all that surprising.
In principle, there isn't anything wrong with countries controlling their own TLD's. Why not? Shouldn't they have control over them? Why should they be in the hands of a private organization under the thumb of the U.S. Congress? But when I consider the likely outcomes of doing this in practice, it starts to look a little different.
Right now anyone in the world can lay out $10 and own a domain name. Anyone anywhere in the world. What happens when, say, Yemen comes into control of.ye? This is a country that routinely shuts down newspapers and jails editors that print things the ruling regime doesn't like. I don't think for an instant that they wouldn't use TLD control to do the same on the internet, and probably with even greater regularity. After all, it's easier to tap a few keys than to send police to take over a building.
There are a number of countries where I don't think you'd ever notice a difference if control over their TLD's were passed to them. There are quite a few more where you would. How many places do you imagine the process of domain aquisition would be only open to people and businesses friendly to the ruling regime? Is that a desirable scenario? I ask because in a lot of places, it's a likely one; is that a worthwhile trade for getting your TLD's under the authority of someone besides ICANN?
Wouldn't it be great if you needed to be government licenced to own a domain name? How about if the pathway to domain ownership was strewn with requisite bribes, as government functions are in many countries? Honestly, it doesn't sound so hot to me, but it will be a new reality in a number of countries. I don't think there's even a question of it. Wouldn't people in Zimbabwe be happy to wind up paying $500 or more for what costs $10 today for the satisfaction of knowing that their name wasn't provided through the auspices of ICANN? Probably not. But at least the intransigent U.S. will have finally capitulated. Victory at last!
Providing yet another outlet for institutionalized corruption is the least problem, though. The bigger problem is that, while many countries have liberal societies where the free exchange of ideas is practically an unquestioned fact of life, there are even more where the free exchange of ideas is considered a menace by the government - China's just the biggest, nowhere near the only. Iran, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and France have also all taken an active interest in establishing a controlling stake in internet governance. These are all regimes known to kill information that they don't want public - you don't believe that they wouldn't welcome gleefully the opportunity to have direct control over their own TLD's, do you? You don't wonder for the span of a heartbeat why they would, right?
I maintain that uncontrolled information flow is your only hope of knowing the world beyond the reach of your own five senses. Trying to know reality by anything less than an uncontrolled flow makes you an extension of the biases of whoever controls your information. Internalize that; regimes like North Korea know it very well. TLD control provides a means of information control to people who'd very much like to control it, and I don't want them to. Uncontrollable information is the best thing to happen to the world in the last 50 years.
Oh, but it's ICANN! The horror.
And what, exactly, are the disadvantages of keeping the current arrangement? What might any given country improve by having control over their TLD? What has been detrimental about ICANN's oversignt? I've heard lots of peevish griping about TLD control, but I'm still waiting for a reasonable answer to one of these questions. Congress hasn't once used their authority to interfere with ICANN, and TLD's continue to be freely and cheaply available to everyone in
Clearly, "Don't be evil" has to go. It no longer applies. But wait! That doesn't mean that the concept and the branding that have gone into it need to be scrapped! Google just needs a slightly retooled slogan that incorporates the old idea into the new reality of Google. My recommendations:
"Be a little bit evil occasionally."
"Don't be evil everywhere, all at once. Pace yourself."
"New & improved Google! Now with 25% more evil!"
"Evil is inversely proportional to profit."
And it's also only accounting for the fine, none of which I imagine is going to your lawyer. It's not clear to me whether your lawyer's costs will come out of the fund being established for victims, but I'm thinking that fund is potentially much larger than the fine.
If we're cold outside, walk inside and it's warm, do we automatically assume that our body is suddenly ramping up it's heat production?
No, of course not, that's silly. But we DO know what it means when we see people carrying umbrellas every time it rains - it means we must destroy the umbrella makers before the effects of umbrellas drown us all!
That's pretty amazing. Here all this time I thought that only half of a planet could be doing something like leaving winter, while the other half would have to be leaving summer. I bow in awe before your superior wisdom. It was the ellipses that convinced me - someone who isn't right couldn't use so many.
I had mistakenly believed that this trend had been supported by continued observation since first reported in the December 7, 2001 issue of the journal Science. However, Mars is leaving winter, so that doesn't matter. I'm glad that your punctuation set me straight.
And... Solar... Irradiance... Is... In... DECLINE
Or increasing, but nevermind that. Still, Pluto continues warming despite moving away from the sun for over 10 years now, and is anticipated to continue warming for at least the next decade as it moves yet farther away. It's almost as if, even on a planet with such thin atmosphere, the climatic effects of irradiance don't - and aren't expected to - turn on a dime. Crazy. Happily for you, I guess the Earth's can. I feel so foolish now.
The name Greenland was an exercise in marketing. Erik the Red had been banished from Iceland (for murder) and wanted to attract settlers to an otherwise inhospitable land.
Certainly, all the Norse trading vessels that visited Greenland wouldn't bring back any news to contradict such a claim if it were false. It's not as if news travelled by sail in those days, right?
The norse settlements subsisted mainly on sheep in the early years. We know they hunted cold-weather animals by goods they traded (like walrus tusks), and even that they had to hunt different areas by season, so Greenland clearly wasn't another African veldt. It must have been temperate enough then for a settlement to graze a sizable herd though, and yet today archaeologists have to chip their artifacts out of permafrost.
They lived mainly on fish later, before they disappeared - this suggests to me that, for whatever reason, the sheep thing wasn't working out very well by then. If memory serves, they weren't doing so hot with the farming then either. It's speculation, but not exactly wild, that climate shift had made herding and farming unsustainable.
Read just an article or two on archeology in Greenland. Hit up Google, and pick something from a source that looks reputable to you. There's plenty of support for climate change during the span of Norse settlement.
The scientists who study this stuff, who know this stuff, and who are highly educated about this stuff,
Uh-oh... an appeal to "the experts", and such an effort to establish their authority too. That never smacks of an independant conclusion.
have pretty much unanimously concluded that the current spate of climate change is primarily due to human activity.
Wow, such a consensus? Well, unanimous except for these 17,000 quacks and hacks, I suppose you mean. But gee, if all of the experts say that I'm wrong... hey, wait a minute! Didn't the experts also all agree that the earth was flat, the universe orbited the earth, and the sun was a fiery chariot? And that the 1970's marked the dawn of a new ice age, the barbary lion was extinct and giant squid didn't really exist. Medical science 'pretty much unanimously concluded' that there was no such thing as female orgasm until the last half of the 20th century - and a female is a lot easier to collect data on than a planet. How could it all have been wrong? I don't understand - they all agreed! Isn't reality imposed by a democratic body of scientists?
Incidentally, being that you seem fond of mythology, this huckleberry might hol
Wake up to reality. Stop listening to Rush Limbaugh.
I don't even know if Limbaugh airs in my city. Since it doesn't bear on the discussion, only on your pejorative assumptions about my intellectual capacity, character, or whatever other snotty inference you meant to imply, I'll thank you to leave your dogma at home.
Mars, Pluto, and Triton are warming without any greenhouse effect (they haven't enough atmosphere to try it), and who knows what's happening with Jupiter (which is nothing but atmosphere) since all we know for sure is that warming is happening on top of its cloud cover. Even Venus, whose temperature (IIRC) the greenhouse theory was formulated to explain, seems to be warmer than absorbed solar radiation and a greenhouse effect would predict. None of this is myth - it is observed change and measured fact.
When I look for a common thread between them, it is not the greenhouse effect, nor SUV's, nor even the Kyoto protocol that I find - it's the tremendous, fiery orb pumping out inconceivable amounts of energy that they all orbit. The observation is miles from conclusive, but I'll always find a single, common explanation more plausable than numerous and varied ones when looking for the cause of several similar events. That doesn't mean I'll always be right, just that even with no further interference from reason I'd still be right more often than not.
There is though, a great deal of uncertainty in estimates of solar irradiance beyond what can be measured by satellites, and still the contribution of direct solar irradiance forcing is small compared to the greenhouse gas component.
And we don't even know what the greenhouse gas component is. We have no idea what impact is realized by introduction of x tons of CO2, and just an inkling of how much energy is re-radiated into space or by what mechanisms. When there's so much relevant data -- and funcitonality -- missing from even our best climate models, and so much that the flavor-of-the-month hysteria that is global warming fails to explain, "the simplest explanation is the most likely" has added heft in my mind. When the climate models predicting that we're causing our doom can't even predict the past, I'm not willing to lend them the heft to compete.
Anthropogenic climate change is not conclusive fact, and natural variability is. Greenland was green within the last few hundred years. Glaciers in the French Alps grew so fast as to swallow villages whole. Palm trees used to grow in northern Europe. Wake up to reality.
We have to put labels on butane lighters to warn people that the contents are flammable. I'm just saying that if people who can't piece that together without written notice got out of the gene pool, we might all be better off.
Speeding up the natural glacial cycle by several orders of magnitude causes more death than a single stabbing yet for some reason it's not considered criminal.
I think a hundred thousand years of creeping, incremental change could easily cause several times more death, just not so much all at once.
As for criminality, this nettlesome thing called a burden of proof needs to be met. Explanations for our planet's warming seem more credible when they can account for the concurrent warming on other planets in our solar system, where there are drastically fewer SUV's, and I have yet to see such an explanation that admits of criminality.
The Windows 3.1 upgrade caused one of my COM ports to disappear completely. BIOS no longer reported it, DOS utilities could no longer address it. A warm boot didn't fix it, but a cold boot did. Formatting and repeating the upgrade procedure zapped it again. Since then, I take it as read that Microsoft can screw up anything, and I skip every other version.
With the present state of the art (in IT), I guess it would be possible to achieve a 100% democratic govt. But, as our elected representatives are probably not quite willing to have their jobs replaced by a couple of computers, I guess we will never get to that stage
For a while, as this came closer and closer to being feasable, it did seem like an intriguing possibility to me. I took some time to think about whether or not it's really a good thing, though. I only had to look around my workplace to realize that my world is filled with people who I never want having direct control over it.
That's why I pointed out that it was my mistake. If I expected you to know by ESP that I'd misread and inappropriately replied, I would have called it your mistake. Back down, Punchy.
Half right, anyway. I was thinking "Federal republic", which describes structure, when I read "republic", which describes sovereign autonomy not run by a monarch, which was indeed my mistake. Even strictly (which is to say, more correctly) speaking though, "republic" still doesn't preclude "democracy" - it may or may not be empowered by the people. Or doesn't Ireland vote for leadership? Or is Iran empowered by the people?
Slashdot Mirror
If their data is valuable enough to have RAID, why were they such cheap bastards that they didn't get hot-swap drives?
I've been hearing this story since at least the early 90's. Hot swap capability wasn't as common then as it appears to be today. I don't recall numbers, but I recall that the cabinet that I would have liked cost more than the rest of our little network.
I've heard this before, and I've always found it just a tad far-fetched. Even with drives made the same day with the same batches of components I would expect a little more variation in their lifespans. I suppose it could be true, but I've never experienced it firsthand or met someone who did.
What used to be a problem though was the power demand when all the drives spin up - you could replace a drive and then kill the power supply when you turned it back on. Dying power supplies can take components with them, so I'd find it credible that maybe you'd lose a second drive this way with a cheap power supply. I would hope that any modest cabinet today would have a better power supply than that, though.
I haven't bought a SCSI drive in years, but it was common at the time to be able to configure a spin-up delay on SCSI drives for exactly this reason. You could stagger their startups to avoid having them all hammering the power supply at once. Obviously, if you could dodge that bullet, there's no risk of it taking a drive or two with it even if it is a cheapie.
I also don't see how this solution is effectively any better than RAID... If anything, a backup server is more expensive than a second hard drive for a RAID system (though it may pay off eventually). I'd think the backup server would need to be maintained as well... and if your backup ever fails, it seems like it would require a lot to set up another.
I only skimmed TFA and it's not clear to me how like or unlike Windows' Distributed File System it is, but I'll give you a quick picture of what DFS does for us here to give you a better idea how NetBSD's backup could be handy. We've got a primary and secondary server, each with its own RAID array, and DFS isn't a replacement for it - it's a supplement to it. I'd consider this to be the same.
For starters, when your server fails your RAID array goes with it. The data's fine of course (knock on wood), it's just not available until you either fix the server or shuffle the array into another system. Compound that with the fact that I only drop by here a couple times a week, and I'm the only person who could do this work (we're a small office). When that failure happens, the data would probably be offline for hours at minimum, and that would be a hardship in this environment. Having our data perpetually backed up on another working system that's just waiting to take over is easily worth the trouble and expense of a second system.
In addition, DFS doesn't actually record a duplicate copy of the whole disk's file system (one-way to the backup server), nor does it work in the transactional manner that I picture this working, but it replicates files within a special share both ways. You create this share, and it isn't actually on either server - it's on BOTH servers. DFS decides which one to use and keeps the copies synchronized. If the primary server catches on fire, gets stolen, explodes etc., users would hardly notice. There's a little lag in replication sometimes, so something very recently saved in the primary copy of the share might not actually be in the secondary yet. Aside from that, almost everything else just keeps working.
The bandwidth could be an issue in another environment, but this particular server only gets a mild-to-moderate workout, and DFS is able to keep up. There are a couple database applications that I only allow to replicate one-way because initially DFS started to choke trying to keep it synchronized both ways. For those, someone would have to switch the clients manually from using one server to using the other. Aside from those two, I can reboot either server at will without ever disturbing a user. I think that in the worst case, this is what you'd need to do with NetBSD's backup.
Under a rock, I imagine - I thought IANA's authority trumped anything local.
The Anglo-Saxons use the entire Latin alphabet. If you wanted a bunch of aftermarket vowels on the keyboard, you should have invented the personal computer. ;)
All my foes are spelling or grammar Nazis.
;)
All of my foes are spelling or grammar Nazis.
Given the intransigence the U.S. has displayed in the past regarding control of TLDs, this move isn't all that surprising.
.ye? This is a country that routinely shuts down newspapers and jails editors that print things the ruling regime doesn't like. I don't think for an instant that they wouldn't use TLD control to do the same on the internet, and probably with even greater regularity. After all, it's easier to tap a few keys than to send police to take over a building.
In principle, there isn't anything wrong with countries controlling their own TLD's. Why not? Shouldn't they have control over them? Why should they be in the hands of a private organization under the thumb of the U.S. Congress? But when I consider the likely outcomes of doing this in practice, it starts to look a little different.
Right now anyone in the world can lay out $10 and own a domain name. Anyone anywhere in the world. What happens when, say, Yemen comes into control of
There are a number of countries where I don't think you'd ever notice a difference if control over their TLD's were passed to them. There are quite a few more where you would. How many places do you imagine the process of domain aquisition would be only open to people and businesses friendly to the ruling regime? Is that a desirable scenario? I ask because in a lot of places, it's a likely one; is that a worthwhile trade for getting your TLD's under the authority of someone besides ICANN?
Wouldn't it be great if you needed to be government licenced to own a domain name? How about if the pathway to domain ownership was strewn with requisite bribes, as government functions are in many countries? Honestly, it doesn't sound so hot to me, but it will be a new reality in a number of countries. I don't think there's even a question of it. Wouldn't people in Zimbabwe be happy to wind up paying $500 or more for what costs $10 today for the satisfaction of knowing that their name wasn't provided through the auspices of ICANN? Probably not. But at least the intransigent U.S. will have finally capitulated. Victory at last!
Providing yet another outlet for institutionalized corruption is the least problem, though. The bigger problem is that, while many countries have liberal societies where the free exchange of ideas is practically an unquestioned fact of life, there are even more where the free exchange of ideas is considered a menace by the government - China's just the biggest, nowhere near the only. Iran, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and France have also all taken an active interest in establishing a controlling stake in internet governance. These are all regimes known to kill information that they don't want public - you don't believe that they wouldn't welcome gleefully the opportunity to have direct control over their own TLD's, do you? You don't wonder for the span of a heartbeat why they would, right?
I maintain that uncontrolled information flow is your only hope of knowing the world beyond the reach of your own five senses. Trying to know reality by anything less than an uncontrolled flow makes you an extension of the biases of whoever controls your information. Internalize that; regimes like North Korea know it very well. TLD control provides a means of information control to people who'd very much like to control it, and I don't want them to. Uncontrollable information is the best thing to happen to the world in the last 50 years.
Oh, but it's ICANN! The horror.
And what, exactly, are the disadvantages of keeping the current arrangement? What might any given country improve by having control over their TLD? What has been detrimental about ICANN's oversignt? I've heard lots of peevish griping about TLD control, but I'm still waiting for a reasonable answer to one of these questions. Congress hasn't once used their authority to interfere with ICANN, and TLD's continue to be freely and cheaply available to everyone in
E.R., CSI, Numb3rs, I'm sure there are more. They have women, they have science. What more do you want?
Spankings and latex, for starters.
Come ye to knowledge, and know that it is good. ;)
Clearly, "Don't be evil" has to go. It no longer applies. But wait! That doesn't mean that the concept and the branding that have gone into it need to be scrapped! Google just needs a slightly retooled slogan that incorporates the old idea into the new reality of Google. My recommendations: "Be a little bit evil occasionally." "Don't be evil everywhere, all at once. Pace yourself." "New & improved Google! Now with 25% more evil!" "Evil is inversely proportional to profit."
And it's also only accounting for the fine, none of which I imagine is going to your lawyer. It's not clear to me whether your lawyer's costs will come out of the fund being established for victims, but I'm thinking that fund is potentially much larger than the fine.
New Google.ch! Now with 25% more evil</neon>!
If we're cold outside, walk inside and it's warm, do we automatically assume that our body is suddenly ramping up it's heat production?
No, of course not, that's silly. But we DO know what it means when we see people carrying umbrellas every time it rains - it means we must destroy the umbrella makers before the effects of umbrellas drown us all!
Mars.. Is... Leaving... Winter...
That's pretty amazing. Here all this time I thought that only half of a planet could be doing something like leaving winter, while the other half would have to be leaving summer. I bow in awe before your superior wisdom. It was the ellipses that convinced me - someone who isn't right couldn't use so many.
I had mistakenly believed that this trend had been supported by continued observation since first reported in the December 7, 2001 issue of the journal Science. However, Mars is leaving winter, so that doesn't matter. I'm glad that your punctuation set me straight.
And... Solar... Irradiance... Is... In... DECLINE
Or increasing, but nevermind that. Still, Pluto continues warming despite moving away from the sun for over 10 years now, and is anticipated to continue warming for at least the next decade as it moves yet farther away. It's almost as if, even on a planet with such thin atmosphere, the climatic effects of irradiance don't - and aren't expected to - turn on a dime. Crazy. Happily for you, I guess the Earth's can. I feel so foolish now.
The name Greenland was an exercise in marketing. Erik the Red had been banished from Iceland (for murder) and wanted to attract settlers to an otherwise inhospitable land.
Certainly, all the Norse trading vessels that visited Greenland wouldn't bring back any news to contradict such a claim if it were false. It's not as if news travelled by sail in those days, right?
The norse settlements subsisted mainly on sheep in the early years. We know they hunted cold-weather animals by goods they traded (like walrus tusks), and even that they had to hunt different areas by season, so Greenland clearly wasn't another African veldt. It must have been temperate enough then for a settlement to graze a sizable herd though, and yet today archaeologists have to chip their artifacts out of permafrost.
They lived mainly on fish later, before they disappeared - this suggests to me that, for whatever reason, the sheep thing wasn't working out very well by then. If memory serves, they weren't doing so hot with the farming then either. It's speculation, but not exactly wild, that climate shift had made herding and farming unsustainable.
Read just an article or two on archeology in Greenland. Hit up Google, and pick something from a source that looks reputable to you. There's plenty of support for climate change during the span of Norse settlement.
The scientists who study this stuff, who know this stuff, and who are highly educated about this stuff,
Uh-oh... an appeal to "the experts", and such an effort to establish their authority too. That never smacks of an independant conclusion.
have pretty much unanimously concluded that the current spate of climate change is primarily due to human activity.
Wow, such a consensus? Well, unanimous except for these 17,000 quacks and hacks, I suppose you mean. But gee, if all of the experts say that I'm wrong... hey, wait a minute! Didn't the experts also all agree that the earth was flat, the universe orbited the earth, and the sun was a fiery chariot? And that the 1970's marked the dawn of a new ice age, the barbary lion was extinct and giant squid didn't really exist. Medical science 'pretty much unanimously concluded' that there was no such thing as female orgasm until the last half of the 20th century - and a female is a lot easier to collect data on than a planet. How could it all have been wrong? I don't understand - they all agreed! Isn't reality imposed by a democratic body of scientists?
Incidentally, being that you seem fond of mythology, this huckleberry might hol
Wake up to reality. Stop listening to Rush Limbaugh.
I don't even know if Limbaugh airs in my city. Since it doesn't bear on the discussion, only on your pejorative assumptions about my intellectual capacity, character, or whatever other snotty inference you meant to imply, I'll thank you to leave your dogma at home.
Mars, Pluto, and Triton are warming without any greenhouse effect (they haven't enough atmosphere to try it), and who knows what's happening with Jupiter (which is nothing but atmosphere) since all we know for sure is that warming is happening on top of its cloud cover. Even Venus, whose temperature (IIRC) the greenhouse theory was formulated to explain, seems to be warmer than absorbed solar radiation and a greenhouse effect would predict. None of this is myth - it is observed change and measured fact.
When I look for a common thread between them, it is not the greenhouse effect, nor SUV's, nor even the Kyoto protocol that I find - it's the tremendous, fiery orb pumping out inconceivable amounts of energy that they all orbit. The observation is miles from conclusive, but I'll always find a single, common explanation more plausable than numerous and varied ones when looking for the cause of several similar events. That doesn't mean I'll always be right, just that even with no further interference from reason I'd still be right more often than not.
There is though, a great deal of uncertainty in estimates of solar irradiance beyond what can be measured by satellites, and still the contribution of direct solar irradiance forcing is small compared to the greenhouse gas component.
And we don't even know what the greenhouse gas component is. We have no idea what impact is realized by introduction of x tons of CO2, and just an inkling of how much energy is re-radiated into space or by what mechanisms. When there's so much relevant data -- and funcitonality -- missing from even our best climate models, and so much that the flavor-of-the-month hysteria that is global warming fails to explain, "the simplest explanation is the most likely" has added heft in my mind. When the climate models predicting that we're causing our doom can't even predict the past, I'm not willing to lend them the heft to compete.
Anthropogenic climate change is not conclusive fact, and natural variability is. Greenland was green within the last few hundred years. Glaciers in the French Alps grew so fast as to swallow villages whole. Palm trees used to grow in northern Europe. Wake up to reality.
We have to put labels on butane lighters to warn people that the contents are flammable. I'm just saying that if people who can't piece that together without written notice got out of the gene pool, we might all be better off.
predictable tides
Just curious, how does warming affect the predictability of tides?
by this reckoning, maybe we should shoot 10,000 random people in your home town. The ones who survive will be best at dodging bullets right?
Or we could just stop thwarting evolution and quit protecting idiots from themselves. That sounds a lot easier, and I'm all about the easy.
Speeding up the natural glacial cycle by several orders of magnitude causes more death than a single stabbing yet for some reason it's not considered criminal.
I think a hundred thousand years of creeping, incremental change could easily cause several times more death, just not so much all at once. As for criminality, this nettlesome thing called a burden of proof needs to be met. Explanations for our planet's warming seem more credible when they can account for the concurrent warming on other planets in our solar system, where there are drastically fewer SUV's, and I have yet to see such an explanation that admits of criminality.
The Windows 3.1 upgrade caused one of my COM ports to disappear completely. BIOS no longer reported it, DOS utilities could no longer address it. A warm boot didn't fix it, but a cold boot did. Formatting and repeating the upgrade procedure zapped it again. Since then, I take it as read that Microsoft can screw up anything, and I skip every other version.
If I am correct sp2 alone was 300 MB, meaning around 215 floppies to install.
And if history is any guide, disk #176 will have gone bad in transit.
With the present state of the art (in IT), I guess it would be possible to achieve a 100% democratic govt. But, as our elected representatives are probably not quite willing to have their jobs replaced by a couple of computers, I guess we will never get to that stage For a while, as this came closer and closer to being feasable, it did seem like an intriguing possibility to me. I took some time to think about whether or not it's really a good thing, though. I only had to look around my workplace to realize that my world is filled with people who I never want having direct control over it.
Was that directed at Morton Grove?
That's why I pointed out that it was my mistake. If I expected you to know by ESP that I'd misread and inappropriately replied, I would have called it your mistake. Back down, Punchy.
Half right, anyway. I was thinking "Federal republic", which describes structure, when I read "republic", which describes sovereign autonomy not run by a monarch, which was indeed my mistake. Even strictly (which is to say, more correctly) speaking though, "republic" still doesn't preclude "democracy" - it may or may not be empowered by the people. Or doesn't Ireland vote for leadership? Or is Iran empowered by the people?