It amazes me, that with all the technical, RTFM-type people on this site, that not one person has mentioned the following paragraph:
Our analysis differs from others by including estimated temperatures up to 1200 km from the nearest measurement station (7). The resulting spatial extrapolations and interpolations are accurate for temperature anomalies at seasonal and longer time scales at middle and high latitudes, where the spatial scale of anomalies is set by Rossby waves (7). Thus we believe that the remarkable Arctic warmth of 2005 is real, and the inclusion of estimated arctic temperatures is the primary reason for our rank of 2005 as the warmest year. Other characteristics of our analysis method are summarized in footnote (8). [Emphasis mine]
Read it carefully. Think about what it's saying. "We are guessing temperatures for the artic based on readings taken up to 1200 km away." That's like me basing the temperature in Manitoba, Canada on the temperature in Denver, Colorado. Then they go on to say that it's this "guessed at" temperature that makes this the hottest year in history.
What amazing arrogance. And stupidity. We have dozens of satellites that measure the temperature of every point on the Earth, every day. Why are they estimating the data? Is it because the real data doesn't agree with their precious theory?
Sorry, I'll wait until I see a measurement that doesn't require 20% of the Earth's surface to be "guessed" as 3.5 degrees higher in temperature than average. I'll wait for the one with real measurements. The phrase "we believe" moves this story into the realm of religion, not science.
Trees only grow in summer, thus the tree ring reflects only summertime temperatures.
Tree growth depends on many factors, precipitation, soil condition, storm severity, etc.
Tree growth is also spurred on by the "fertilizer effect" of CO2, and is thus a poor measure of any single variable.
The really good proxy data, shows that there is *no* exceptional global warming. Am I against polluting? Absolutely! Let's start with the worst offenders, China and India. Oh wait, they're exempt from all those nasty global warming treaties.
BUt a 250 GB drive only formats to about 232GB, so the actual amount on the drive is something like 230GB, so about 50 DVDs (235GB) would cover it pretty well.
Of course, that would include the latest season, the "Confidential" episodes, and the Christmas special.
And, I'm assuming you'd use WinZip or a backup program to create a backup set across 50 discs.
But again, not that I actually *have* anything like that. I wouldn't want Interpol knocking on the door or anything.
There's a lot of missing episodes from the Hartnell and Troughton era, although there are "reconstructions" with stills from most the lost episodes and the original soundtrack. There's actually about 3-4 full seasons that are mostly lost, so the actual total is about 22+ seasons of the old version.
Plus one movie (Doctor Who 1996 with McCoy and Paul McGann)
Plus one special (2-parts -- "Dimensions in Time")
Plus one hillarious spoof (Curse of the Fatal Death)
Plus one spin-off (K9 and Company)
And if you bit-torrent it all (in divx), it fits (just barely) on one 250GB drive.
Not that I'd know or anything.
And if you send me 50 DVD's, I *won't* make a copy for you.
From the rather obtuse articles I've found on this thing, the size of the torroid, the amperage density of the torroid, the size of the magnetic field, and the rate of spin all have subtle effects on the torroid. The paper postulates that a 1GW generator could achieve the speed necessary to cause a dimensional transition. Because the math changes once you enter R' space depending on the corresponding the S and I domains (Subspace and Informational), the amount of energy needed to accelerate so that your velocity V in R' is far greater than C in R is actually the same.
If I remember correctly, the mass of their sample ship was something like 50 metric tons. It's also where the numbers above came from with the "Earth to the moon in 4 hours" and "Mars in 4 hours with FTL travel". It all works mathematically, and it seems to have awesome potential, but like I said, it's still untested.
The real trick here is that it's not *creating* gravity, it's simply causing a bias to form in space-time, with a net creation energy of zero. Think of it as creating a graviton/anti-graviton pair, net total energy is zero. The trick is getting the graviton to fall in one direction and the anti-graviton to fall in the other, thus creating gravity in one direction and anti-gravity in the other. This entire experiment is based on the idea that it's easier to sort the eggs then to lay them. The energy used is just to push the gravitophotons away from the quintessence particles.
By the way, my favorite example of how weak gravity is, is the jump from the Empire State Building. It takes the entire gravity of the Earth 1000 feet and ten seconds to accelerate you down to the ground, and just a few thousandths of an inch and a few microseconds for the electromagnetic force binding the concrete together to stop you.
If I were the prosecuting lawyer (and I think you have the defense and the prosecution mixed up in your comment) by the time the defense lawyer got to those questions I'd be trying to please an insanity defense -- for the prosecution. If a judge doesn't throw this case out before it even sees a jury, there's a huge problem with our legal system.
Excuse me for pointing this out, but where exactly are the damages that relate to this felony. If this kid finds a lawyer with even an ounce of brains, the court case should last thirty seconds.
Lawyer: Why do you have a web site?
School: So the public can access it.
Lawyer: So, is the same machine running it today?
School: Yes.
Lawyer: Does it run on the same connection?
School: Yes.
Lawyer: And it runs the same software, with the same data?
School: Yes.
Lawyer: So, in fact, nothing was erased or altered on the machine in any way? Correct?
School: Yes.
Lawyer: Did your service provider charge you with any extra fees?
School: No.
Lawyer: So, apart from a handful of extra traffic, which you admit slowed down but did not stop, damage, or destroy hardware, software, or data, and which did not cost you any extra money, you had not other damages?
School: Uhm, well, I guess that's correct.
Lawyer: Tell me, do you sue the driver in front of you if he slows down, or charge the slow walking grandmother holding up the line with a felony?
School: Uhm, no.
Lawyer: Tell me, if all the phone lines are in use at the school because people are calling them, is that a felony? Are prank calls a felony?
School: Er, no.
Lawyer: So, your basis for the "damage" in this case is that a student basically asked his friends to "call-up" the computer until you had a busy signal.
School: Yes.
Lawyer: In fact, your entire web site listed less than 900 hits before it was Slashdotted into oblivion. Tell me, have you started legal proceedings against the news agency that took the story national, or Zonk for posting it on Slashdot?
School: Erm, no.
Lawyer: So, you're only willing to harrass young children? To send a child to prison for what amounts to no more than a phone call where they hang up? Is that what you feel is acceptable? Is that, in fact, what you view as teaching our children?
School: Er, do I have to answer that?
Lawyer: Well, you are making me wait, keeping me busy, I might have to file a felony suit against you for that...
The simple answer to this is that there is a lab in the United States (somewhere in Florida if memory serves) that has a working, continuous 37 Tesla magnet. Since that's the hardest part of the system to build, the major expense is already taken care of. The only remaining expense is a 6 meter torroid spinning at 700 m/s, which, while big, is probably only in the million dollar range.
Expensive, yes, but given that the U.S. military is interested in the potential applications, it only amounts to something like 1/50th of an airplane, or something like 40 toilet seats. (Sorry, bit of sarcasm there.)
As to what other things you can test with such a rig, I'm not sure, but I think this is really something that's worth spending this amount of money on just to make sure it does or doesn't work.
If you read the obliquely mentioned document, and then you pursue the original work by Heim (admittedly you'd have to read German to do that) then you find that what Heim did was simply to complete the work that Einstein started in the 1950's, that is, to derive the universe geometrically, starting with General Relativity and then working quantum mechanics into it, rather than vice versa (which is bloody hard to do.)
Admittedly Heim's work is not proven, but so far it's not disproven either. That's an important point. Heim (who was blind, mostly deaf, and was born without hands) has advanced a sort of Grand Unification Theory. It covers all the particles we know about, predicts the masses of those particles plus a few more that we haven't *proven* to exist yet, and doesn't suffer from the necessity of the Higgs Boson, which QM and ST predict, but which has yet to be seen (even though we really should have by now.)
It includes predictions of source of Dark Energy ("quintessence particles") and Dark Matter.
In all these respects, it is similar to any number of current Unification Theories. However, it has one set of properties that predict it should be possible to cause a gradient to form in the fabric of space-time, namely that by passing a set of particles through a massive magnetic field in a rotating torus, that it should be possible to cause the creation of a virtual particle pair known as the "gravitophoton" to form. This particle would then cause a compression of space time to form, giving a bias to space so that the generator would be moved in a particular direction.
The theory goes on to predict that if enough of a gradient was formed, then c' > c within the gradient (along with a bunch of other effects) that can't happen in real space. The only option that preserves GR is that the object must move out of "real" space into a parallel dimension/alternate reality where c'>c is allowed. Thus, faster than light travel.
The whole article is about the U.S. being interested in *testing* the theory. To do this, you build a big-ass torroid (6M) and get it spinning fast (> 700m/s) and then energize a big-ass magnetic field (>37 T) and measure to see if the effect occurs. The effect in this case measuring something like 3 newtons.
If it's there, then HURRAY AND HUZZAH, Heim was a genius who goes down in the history books with Einstein and we have warp drive within 100 years.
If it doesn't work, then the theory is proven wrong, and Heim wasted 19 years of his life doing some really obnoxiously hard math.
The thing is, this is just a physics experiment, no different than when Michelson and Morley set up their twin mirror experiment. And although it's a deceptively simple experiment, it could have just as big of repercussions as M&M's.
Calling it warp drive is premature. Saying it could have massive repercussions if sucessful is a huge understatement.
I'm not the only one. I've seen this same discussion at least a dozen times on SlashDot, and I have yet to see one person screaming:
"WHY NOT EDUCATE THEM TO NOT DROP TROU EIGHT TIMES A DAY!"
You're the first person I've seen ask "Why not do both?" which would mean we could provide medicine and education for 10 countries for the same price as one country with just medicine. Congrats.
Stem Cell research is thriving in the United States. In fact, most of the applications have come from U.S. labs.
Even Embryonic stem cell research is going on right now in the United States, including labs funded with Federal Research Grants.
The *only* thing not allowed in the U.S. is the creation of new embryonic stem cell lines (through the destruction of a fertilized embryo) using Federal funds.
And given the fact that currently adult stem cell research is approaching 40 different applications and embryonic stem cell research has currently found, uhm, zero, I'm okay with that.
In Uganda (I believe it was Uganda, I read the article some time ago) where the government started a policy of AIDS prevention education the rate of AIDS infection dropped by over 90%. Uganda now has one of the lowest infection rates in Africa. The cost of this education was less than 5% of what they would have spent on the drugs to treat the new infections had the previous infection rate continued.
You, on the other hand, advocate allowing the infection rate to continue, and demand that drug makers must pay for creation and shipment of drugs to people who are unwilling to simply not engage in dangerous practices. This is the equivalent of telling the people of London in the 1600's suffering from the Black Plague, that the problem is there's not enough penecillian (not to mention that it hadn't been invented yet), not that we need to clean the rats and human feces out of the streets. In your world, you'd make Alexander Fleming pay to distribute it through the rat infested warrens of the city and damn the sanitation department as prejudiced jerks if they want to do anything about the slovenly conditions.
In typical emotion-led fashion, you take the point of advocating that they continue to live in filthy ignorance and that you'll preserve that lifestyle no matter how much it costs to those who've gotten themselves out of that same self-destructive lifestyle.
And I bet you consider yourself compassionate too.
I cannot possibly agree with you more. While I loved the old Doctor Who, I knew they were always going to be somewhat cheesey with a plot-line that a four-year-old wouldn't be phased by. The new shows have been absolutely stunning. Not just the fact that they seem to have discovered that you can build a set with more than cardboard and bubble-wrap, but the fact that the peril in some of these episodes is real, and the characters are more than cardboard cut-outs. At the same time, the kids still love and understand the stories. My 5 and 11 year-old are now both official Doctor Who addicts. Bravo.
As for House, it's probably the only show on (American) T.V. that I think has a writer with more than a fifth grade education. Here's a protagonist who's not only flawed, he's down-right nasty. And yet, you still want to cheer for him because you know he's basically a good guy. Not many writers would even go there, and not many actors could pull it off. Cheers to Hugh Laurie (another Brit) for taking on the role. (Although sometimes I have trouble looking at him as a "super-serious" doctor and forgetting his run as the idiot Prince George in Black Adder the Third. "Lucky for us, it's a Rotten Borough." "Oh yes, lucky us. Lucky, lucky, lucky, luck, luck - LUCK - LUCK!" "From that rather unexpected chicken impression, I may assume you have no idea what a Rotten Borough is?")
Galactica would probably come in third or fourth behind StarGate SG-1 (better in it's early seasons, but the whole new storyline has promise, and I hope they bring back Varla, as she had some great lines), maybe even fifth behind the original CSI (another show with an exceptionally gruff lead character.)
Thank God for TIVO so I don't have to waste my time with 90% of the crap on television.
Oh, and bring back Futurama...definitely a top five program.
"...light seems to appear before the sun is created..."
According to the current Big Bang theories, the first moment of the universe is a massive expansion of nearly pure energy. For 300,000 years, there is so much energy, that the universe is actually opaque. In other words, the universe is so filled with light that light can't penetrate it. Solid light.
Then, at 300,000 years, the universe expands and cools to the point where suddenly, the universe becomes transparent. This moment, where the light is "separated from the darkness" is the source of the microwave background radiation that permeates the universe. All this happened 8-9 billion years before the sun ignited.
"...And God saw the light was good, and he separated the light from the darknesss..."
I encourage this type of arrogance on the part of Microsoft, I would suspect that they would find themselves tied up in another legal battle. In addition, this may be exactly the type of thing that Linux needs.
This kind of epicaricacy (look it up) is exactly the problem. Linux acceptance doesn't need to be dependent on the competition sucking. Linux needs to be made better, not their competition worse. All that does is assure we're just about the worst possible option. Admittedly Linux has gotten much better in the last few years, but they still have a ways to go before my sixty+ mother is going to drop Windows, no matter what Microsoft charges.
If I predict a 3.5 degree rise in temperature, and the actual change is one degree, then my prediction is off by a factor of 350%. The prediction Hansen made and the IPCC repeated was for an increase of.33 degrees warming by 2000. Actual warming was 0.11 degrees. That's an error of 300%. The fact that you can't do simple math is not my problem. Oh, and he included "Global Dimming" in his value with a suspected volcanic erruption that would decrease the effect. So, no dice there either. In fact, the only time his model *correctly* predicted the.11 degree rise in temperature was if CO2 was made a non-factor (by not adding CO2 to the equation). In that case, his model was within a few percent of predicting the correct value.
Ubelievable, I spent two hours answering this crap, and then firefox closed the wrong tab and it all went poof.
That's a very valid criticism of the climate models of around 1985. Slab oceans are not used in state-of-the-art climate models.
Climateprediction.net uses a slab model of the ocean and will until at least revision three (they are on revision one now). NEC's Earth Simulator got it's first "non-shallow" ocean model in the 2003-2004 timeframe, but it is still at over twice the spatial resolution as the atmosphere is calculated. These are only the two most cited and "modern" models. NASA has a model that does the ocean, or the atmosphere, but not both at once. Your statement is *wholly* false. I had citations for both of these, but 10 seconds on Google will find the NEC Earth Simulator Annual Report for 2003, and Climate Prediction makes no secret of their model's shortcomings on their science page.
Well, nature set things up that way too. It's been known since the 1890s.
But Arrhenius was wrong. This paper is cited prominently by IPCC, and is off by a factor of some 1800%.
um, ever hear of an equation of state?
That would be fine if they included all states, but they don't. Why? It's too complicated to solve. The main items are Pressure, Density, Volume, and Temperature. NEC's Earth Simulator solves for Pressure and Temperature, and ignores the density and volume. Their own paper says the problem is just "too hard" so they treat air as an "incompressible medium". Yikes. The paper I have on this is by the authors of the algorithm. It is, however, located on a laptop at work, and thus inaccessable. It came from the Internet and "Google" is your friend.
Unfortunately, you show no signs of knowing what computer models are in use, why, or how they relate to the science.
Hmm, 20 years in the Computer Science industry, check. Several years working on massively parallel environment simulation models, check. Access to Physicists, Meterologists, Aerodynamic Engineers (the fluid dynamics gurus), and Oceanologists, check. Just because I typed the original message as I was trying to run out the door, doesn't make me what you think I am. Tell me, what is your knowledge of thermal transfer between discrete interhaline countercurrents? How about "meddies"? Do you know their cause, and the effect they have on deep ocean salinity transit? Heck, I'll throw you an easy one, why is ClimatePrediction's "Gravitic Wave" model of precipitation and cloud formation 180 degrees out of sync with actual oragraphic precipitation and formation?
And as for your precious computer models, here's a score card so far. My favorite is the model that says the Medieval Optimum never happened. Damn the History Books, full speed ahead.
Where? The Mars matter is addressed here.
Ahhh, I knew "RealClimate" would make it in here sooner or later. This is one of their better rants: Glacial Melting on Mars = Regional Variation -- Glacial Melting on Earth = Global Warming.
It's right up there with their near hysterical explanation of the historical lag between CO2 levels and warming trends where they claim that it's because the first warming isn't CO2, but then the CO2 causes the rest of the warming. The fact that histrically CO2 increase is a symptom of rising temperatures and not a cause. My favorite line in the comments is "Wow! Are you really saying that we have no idea what starts to warm up our world from an ice age but know with near certainty what has caused the warming of the last three decades? But go ahead, I get a good laugh out of it. If you want, post a note asking what the "Hockey Stick" looks like without the near-treeline Bristlecone Pines included. See if your comment get's censored... something they're notoriou
Those models do not "predict" global warming. They show a trend towards warming with an increase in atmospheric CO2. However to call these models "the most accurate" is quite a stretch. I ask you to look into the quality of these models and ask simple questions, such as, "do you accurately model the largest heat sink on the planet, or are your oceans just a thin slab of water that is basically a rigidly driven model that doesn't adjust to changes realistically." Ask if they solve their fluid model for all variables, or do they just solve for two of the three (pressure and temperature, but not volume). I can go on for hours about how completely inaccurate these models are.
But I don't have to. The models show that CO2 causes an increase because the modelers set up the model so that CO2 holds more heat in the model. Good golly, what a shock.
On the other hand, we have data that all of the inner planets are now heating up. The Twin MER rover teams were shocked at how warm the Martian winter was this year on Mars. They never expected their rovers to make it through the winter, yet both survived without a problem. In just the 30 years since the Viking missions, the temperature of Mars has increased substantially. In fact, it's done so by very nearly the exact same percentage as the temperatures seen on Earth. Similar remote measurements of Venus have shown the same increase.
Now, unless you want to claim that Dick Cheney is secretly driving his SUV's on Mars, that means the cause of the rise in temperature must be mainly external. And, oh look, here's a study that's found just that.
Science is hard, Climatology is very hard. We have no hard evidence to support anthropogenic global warming theories. We have computer models. The same people on this list who would scoff at the idea of a computer predicting the weather one week in advance, will accept, without the slightest hesitation, the prediction of a computer 100 years into the future. And, no, don't give me the "it's climate, the little changes disappear into climate" because that's bullshit. It's been disproven time and time again. The "best model" in 1995 mispredicted the temperature in 2000 by 300%. That's not a minor mistake, that's not within one standard deviation, that's a wild-ass guess that was totally wrong.
Trillions of dollars and Millions of lives will be lost if the "we should take action just in case" crowd wins. Some of the best estimates say that cutting CO2 by 50% will cost 1.5 BILLION LIVES by 2100. Are you so eager to pull the trigger?
As the only comparable occupation where one is held liable for every action, this would put me in the same category as a medical doctor. That means:
My salaray immediately jumps to the $500 to $1000 per hour range
The number of people willing to code drops close to zero
I carry "Security-Flaw Insurance" to cover my code
I can demand only the most up-to-date equipment and refuse to work without it
I only have to see one manager every two hours, and that for five minutes. The rest of the time I only have to have my nurse/assistant deal with them.
My nurses/assistants do 90% of the work, but get paid 5% of the money
You can come to me with requirements, but I'll tell you what we're going to do about them. If you don't like it, go get a second opinion from my other coding friend.
I only write about 15 lines of code every day
I come to work at 10:00, take a two hour lunch, and leave at 3:30
Computer companies give me free stuff to recommend their products
One word: Golf
So, heck yeah, cripple the IT economy, and make me stinking rich!
Thou darest take the name of the FSM in vain. Surely now he shall smite thee with his Marinara of wrath. Benevolent and Vengeful is he (or at least Semolina and Vengeful...)
Does not the Book of Boy'ar'Dee say: Cower and consume ye pasta before his righteous vengence. Ramen.
Slashdot Mirror
It amazes me, that with all the technical, RTFM-type people on this site, that not one person has mentioned the following paragraph:
Our analysis differs from others by including estimated temperatures up to 1200 km from the nearest measurement station (7). The resulting spatial extrapolations and interpolations are accurate for temperature anomalies at seasonal and longer time scales at middle and high latitudes, where the spatial scale of anomalies is set by Rossby waves (7). Thus we believe that the remarkable Arctic warmth of 2005 is real, and the inclusion of estimated arctic temperatures is the primary reason for our rank of 2005 as the warmest year. Other characteristics of our analysis method are summarized in footnote (8). [Emphasis mine]
Read it carefully. Think about what it's saying. "We are guessing temperatures for the artic based on readings taken up to 1200 km away." That's like me basing the temperature in Manitoba, Canada on the temperature in Denver, Colorado. Then they go on to say that it's this "guessed at" temperature that makes this the hottest year in history.
What amazing arrogance. And stupidity. We have dozens of satellites that measure the temperature of every point on the Earth, every day. Why are they estimating the data? Is it because the real data doesn't agree with their precious theory?
Sorry, I'll wait until I see a measurement that doesn't require 20% of the Earth's surface to be "guessed" as 3.5 degrees higher in temperature than average. I'll wait for the one with real measurements. The phrase "we believe" moves this story into the realm of religion, not science.
It's not like India has Nuclear Weapons or a space program. I mean they all still live in stone huts. Why should they be seen as a modern nation?
The really good proxy data, shows that there is *no* exceptional global warming. Am I against polluting? Absolutely! Let's start with the worst offenders, China and India. Oh wait, they're exempt from all those nasty global warming treaties.
Reference data for proxies.
You mispelled "whine".
Oh, am I going to get nailed for this one...
BUt a 250 GB drive only formats to about 232GB, so the actual amount on the drive is something like 230GB, so about 50 DVDs (235GB) would cover it pretty well.
Of course, that would include the latest season, the "Confidential" episodes, and the Christmas special.
And, I'm assuming you'd use WinZip or a backup program to create a backup set across 50 discs.
But again, not that I actually *have* anything like that. I wouldn't want Interpol knocking on the door or anything.
There's a lot of missing episodes from the Hartnell and Troughton era, although there are "reconstructions" with stills from most the lost episodes and the original soundtrack. There's actually about 3-4 full seasons that are mostly lost, so the actual total is about 22+ seasons of the old version.
Plus one movie (Doctor Who 1996 with McCoy and Paul McGann)
Plus one special (2-parts -- "Dimensions in Time")
Plus one hillarious spoof (Curse of the Fatal Death)
Plus one spin-off (K9 and Company)
And if you bit-torrent it all (in divx), it fits (just barely) on one 250GB drive.
Not that I'd know or anything.
And if you send me 50 DVD's, I *won't* make a copy for you.
From the rather obtuse articles I've found on this thing, the size of the torroid, the amperage density of the torroid, the size of the magnetic field, and the rate of spin all have subtle effects on the torroid. The paper postulates that a 1GW generator could achieve the speed necessary to cause a dimensional transition. Because the math changes once you enter R' space depending on the corresponding the S and I domains (Subspace and Informational), the amount of energy needed to accelerate so that your velocity V in R' is far greater than C in R is actually the same.
If I remember correctly, the mass of their sample ship was something like 50 metric tons. It's also where the numbers above came from with the "Earth to the moon in 4 hours" and "Mars in 4 hours with FTL travel". It all works mathematically, and it seems to have awesome potential, but like I said, it's still untested.
The real trick here is that it's not *creating* gravity, it's simply causing a bias to form in space-time, with a net creation energy of zero. Think of it as creating a graviton/anti-graviton pair, net total energy is zero. The trick is getting the graviton to fall in one direction and the anti-graviton to fall in the other, thus creating gravity in one direction and anti-gravity in the other. This entire experiment is based on the idea that it's easier to sort the eggs then to lay them. The energy used is just to push the gravitophotons away from the quintessence particles.
By the way, my favorite example of how weak gravity is, is the jump from the Empire State Building. It takes the entire gravity of the Earth 1000 feet and ten seconds to accelerate you down to the ground, and just a few thousandths of an inch and a few microseconds for the electromagnetic force binding the concrete together to stop you.
If I were the prosecuting lawyer (and I think you have the defense and the prosecution mixed up in your comment) by the time the defense lawyer got to those questions I'd be trying to please an insanity defense -- for the prosecution. If a judge doesn't throw this case out before it even sees a jury, there's a huge problem with our legal system.
Excuse me for pointing this out, but where exactly are the damages that relate to this felony. If this kid finds a lawyer with even an ounce of brains, the court case should last thirty seconds.
Lawyer: Why do you have a web site?
School: So the public can access it.
Lawyer: So, is the same machine running it today?
School: Yes.
Lawyer: Does it run on the same connection?
School: Yes.
Lawyer: And it runs the same software, with the same data?
School: Yes.
Lawyer: So, in fact, nothing was erased or altered on the machine in any way? Correct?
School: Yes.
Lawyer: Did your service provider charge you with any extra fees?
School: No.
Lawyer: So, apart from a handful of extra traffic, which you admit slowed down but did not stop, damage, or destroy hardware, software, or data, and which did not cost you any extra money, you had not other damages?
School: Uhm, well, I guess that's correct.
Lawyer: Tell me, do you sue the driver in front of you if he slows down, or charge the slow walking grandmother holding up the line with a felony?
School: Uhm, no.
Lawyer: Tell me, if all the phone lines are in use at the school because people are calling them, is that a felony? Are prank calls a felony?
School: Er, no.
Lawyer: So, your basis for the "damage" in this case is that a student basically asked his friends to "call-up" the computer until you had a busy signal.
School: Yes.
Lawyer: In fact, your entire web site listed less than 900 hits before it was Slashdotted into oblivion. Tell me, have you started legal proceedings against the news agency that took the story national, or Zonk for posting it on Slashdot?
School: Erm, no.
Lawyer: So, you're only willing to harrass young children? To send a child to prison for what amounts to no more than a phone call where they hang up? Is that what you feel is acceptable? Is that, in fact, what you view as teaching our children?
School: Er, do I have to answer that?
Lawyer: Well, you are making me wait, keeping me busy, I might have to file a felony suit against you for that...
The simple answer to this is that there is a lab in the United States (somewhere in Florida if memory serves) that has a working, continuous 37 Tesla magnet. Since that's the hardest part of the system to build, the major expense is already taken care of. The only remaining expense is a 6 meter torroid spinning at 700 m/s, which, while big, is probably only in the million dollar range.
Expensive, yes, but given that the U.S. military is interested in the potential applications, it only amounts to something like 1/50th of an airplane, or something like 40 toilet seats. (Sorry, bit of sarcasm there.)
As to what other things you can test with such a rig, I'm not sure, but I think this is really something that's worth spending this amount of money on just to make sure it does or doesn't work.
If you read the obliquely mentioned document, and then you pursue the original work by Heim (admittedly you'd have to read German to do that) then you find that what Heim did was simply to complete the work that Einstein started in the 1950's, that is, to derive the universe geometrically, starting with General Relativity and then working quantum mechanics into it, rather than vice versa (which is bloody hard to do.)
Admittedly Heim's work is not proven, but so far it's not disproven either. That's an important point. Heim (who was blind, mostly deaf, and was born without hands) has advanced a sort of Grand Unification Theory. It covers all the particles we know about, predicts the masses of those particles plus a few more that we haven't *proven* to exist yet, and doesn't suffer from the necessity of the Higgs Boson, which QM and ST predict, but which has yet to be seen (even though we really should have by now.)
It includes predictions of source of Dark Energy ("quintessence particles") and Dark Matter.
In all these respects, it is similar to any number of current Unification Theories. However, it has one set of properties that predict it should be possible to cause a gradient to form in the fabric of space-time, namely that by passing a set of particles through a massive magnetic field in a rotating torus, that it should be possible to cause the creation of a virtual particle pair known as the "gravitophoton" to form. This particle would then cause a compression of space time to form, giving a bias to space so that the generator would be moved in a particular direction.
The theory goes on to predict that if enough of a gradient was formed, then c' > c within the gradient (along with a bunch of other effects) that can't happen in real space. The only option that preserves GR is that the object must move out of "real" space into a parallel dimension/alternate reality where c'>c is allowed. Thus, faster than light travel.
The whole article is about the U.S. being interested in *testing* the theory. To do this, you build a big-ass torroid (6M) and get it spinning fast (> 700m/s) and then energize a big-ass magnetic field (>37 T) and measure to see if the effect occurs. The effect in this case measuring something like 3 newtons.
If it's there, then HURRAY AND HUZZAH, Heim was a genius who goes down in the history books with Einstein and we have warp drive within 100 years.
If it doesn't work, then the theory is proven wrong, and Heim wasted 19 years of his life doing some really obnoxiously hard math.
The thing is, this is just a physics experiment, no different than when Michelson and Morley set up their twin mirror experiment. And although it's a deceptively simple experiment, it could have just as big of repercussions as M&M's.
Calling it warp drive is premature. Saying it could have massive repercussions if sucessful is a huge understatement.
I'm not the only one. I've seen this same discussion at least a dozen times on SlashDot, and I have yet to see one person screaming:
"WHY NOT EDUCATE THEM TO NOT DROP TROU EIGHT TIMES A DAY!"
You're the first person I've seen ask "Why not do both?" which would mean we could provide medicine and education for 10 countries for the same price as one country with just medicine. Congrats.
Come again?
Stem Cell research is thriving in the United States. In fact, most of the applications have come from U.S. labs.
Even Embryonic stem cell research is going on right now in the United States, including labs funded with Federal Research Grants.
The *only* thing not allowed in the U.S. is the creation of new embryonic stem cell lines (through the destruction of a fertilized embryo) using Federal funds.
And given the fact that currently adult stem cell research is approaching 40 different applications and embryonic stem cell research has currently found, uhm, zero , I'm okay with that.
In Uganda (I believe it was Uganda, I read the article some time ago) where the government started a policy of AIDS prevention education the rate of AIDS infection dropped by over 90%. Uganda now has one of the lowest infection rates in Africa. The cost of this education was less than 5% of what they would have spent on the drugs to treat the new infections had the previous infection rate continued.
You, on the other hand, advocate allowing the infection rate to continue, and demand that drug makers must pay for creation and shipment of drugs to people who are unwilling to simply not engage in dangerous practices. This is the equivalent of telling the people of London in the 1600's suffering from the Black Plague, that the problem is there's not enough penecillian (not to mention that it hadn't been invented yet), not that we need to clean the rats and human feces out of the streets. In your world, you'd make Alexander Fleming pay to distribute it through the rat infested warrens of the city and damn the sanitation department as prejudiced jerks if they want to do anything about the slovenly conditions.
In typical emotion-led fashion, you take the point of advocating that they continue to live in filthy ignorance and that you'll preserve that lifestyle no matter how much it costs to those who've gotten themselves out of that same self-destructive lifestyle.
And I bet you consider yourself compassionate too.
I cannot possibly agree with you more. While I loved the old Doctor Who, I knew they were always going to be somewhat cheesey with a plot-line that a four-year-old wouldn't be phased by. The new shows have been absolutely stunning. Not just the fact that they seem to have discovered that you can build a set with more than cardboard and bubble-wrap, but the fact that the peril in some of these episodes is real, and the characters are more than cardboard cut-outs. At the same time, the kids still love and understand the stories. My 5 and 11 year-old are now both official Doctor Who addicts. Bravo.
As for House, it's probably the only show on (American) T.V. that I think has a writer with more than a fifth grade education. Here's a protagonist who's not only flawed, he's down-right nasty. And yet, you still want to cheer for him because you know he's basically a good guy. Not many writers would even go there, and not many actors could pull it off. Cheers to Hugh Laurie (another Brit) for taking on the role. (Although sometimes I have trouble looking at him as a "super-serious" doctor and forgetting his run as the idiot Prince George in Black Adder the Third. "Lucky for us, it's a Rotten Borough." "Oh yes, lucky us. Lucky, lucky, lucky, luck, luck - LUCK - LUCK!" "From that rather unexpected chicken impression, I may assume you have no idea what a Rotten Borough is?")
Galactica would probably come in third or fourth behind StarGate SG-1 (better in it's early seasons, but the whole new storyline has promise, and I hope they bring back Varla, as she had some great lines), maybe even fifth behind the original CSI (another show with an exceptionally gruff lead character.)
Thank God for TIVO so I don't have to waste my time with 90% of the crap on television.
Oh, and bring back Futurama...definitely a top five program.
Amateur, my archives go back to 1986. Of course, it's hard to find a 5 1/4" floppy drive these days.
"...light seems to appear before the sun is created..."
According to the current Big Bang theories, the first moment of the universe is a massive expansion of nearly pure energy. For 300,000 years, there is so much energy, that the universe is actually opaque. In other words, the universe is so filled with light that light can't penetrate it. Solid light.
Then, at 300,000 years, the universe expands and cools to the point where suddenly, the universe becomes transparent. This moment, where the light is "separated from the darkness" is the source of the microwave background radiation that permeates the universe. All this happened 8-9 billion years before the sun ignited.
"...And God saw the light was good, and he separated the light from the darknesss..."
Funny, I don't see a contradiction.
I encourage this type of arrogance on the part of Microsoft, I would suspect that they would find themselves tied up in another legal battle. In addition, this may be exactly the type of thing that Linux needs.
This kind of epicaricacy (look it up) is exactly the problem. Linux acceptance doesn't need to be dependent on the competition sucking. Linux needs to be made better, not their competition worse. All that does is assure we're just about the worst possible option. Admittedly Linux has gotten much better in the last few years, but they still have a ways to go before my sixty+ mother is going to drop Windows, no matter what Microsoft charges.
If I predict a 3.5 degree rise in temperature, and the actual change is one degree, then my prediction is off by a factor of 350%. The prediction Hansen made and the IPCC repeated was for an increase of .33 degrees warming by 2000. Actual warming was 0.11 degrees. That's an error of 300%. The fact that you can't do simple math is not my problem. Oh, and he included "Global Dimming" in his value with a suspected volcanic erruption that would decrease the effect. So, no dice there either. In fact, the only time his model *correctly* predicted the .11 degree rise in temperature was if CO2 was made a non-factor (by not adding CO2 to the equation). In that case, his model was within a few percent of predicting the correct value.
Ubelievable, I spent two hours answering this crap, and then firefox closed the wrong tab and it all went poof.
That's a very valid criticism of the climate models of around 1985. Slab oceans are not used in state-of-the-art climate models.
Climateprediction.net uses a slab model of the ocean and will until at least revision three (they are on revision one now). NEC's Earth Simulator got it's first "non-shallow" ocean model in the 2003-2004 timeframe, but it is still at over twice the spatial resolution as the atmosphere is calculated. These are only the two most cited and "modern" models. NASA has a model that does the ocean, or the atmosphere, but not both at once. Your statement is *wholly* false. I had citations for both of these, but 10 seconds on Google will find the NEC Earth Simulator Annual Report for 2003, and Climate Prediction makes no secret of their model's shortcomings on their science page.
Well, nature set things up that way too. It's been known since the 1890s.
But Arrhenius was wrong. This paper is cited prominently by IPCC, and is off by a factor of some 1800%.
um, ever hear of an equation of state?
That would be fine if they included all states, but they don't. Why? It's too complicated to solve. The main items are Pressure, Density, Volume, and Temperature. NEC's Earth Simulator solves for Pressure and Temperature, and ignores the density and volume. Their own paper says the problem is just "too hard" so they treat air as an "incompressible medium". Yikes. The paper I have on this is by the authors of the algorithm. It is, however, located on a laptop at work, and thus inaccessable. It came from the Internet and "Google" is your friend.
Unfortunately, you show no signs of knowing what computer models are in use, why, or how they relate to the science.
Hmm, 20 years in the Computer Science industry, check. Several years working on massively parallel environment simulation models, check. Access to Physicists, Meterologists, Aerodynamic Engineers (the fluid dynamics gurus), and Oceanologists, check. Just because I typed the original message as I was trying to run out the door, doesn't make me what you think I am. Tell me, what is your knowledge of thermal transfer between discrete interhaline countercurrents? How about "meddies"? Do you know their cause, and the effect they have on deep ocean salinity transit? Heck, I'll throw you an easy one, why is ClimatePrediction's "Gravitic Wave" model of precipitation and cloud formation 180 degrees out of sync with actual oragraphic precipitation and formation?
And as for your precious computer models, here's a score card so far. My favorite is the model that says the Medieval Optimum never happened. Damn the History Books, full speed ahead.
Where? The Mars matter is addressed here.
Ahhh, I knew "RealClimate" would make it in here sooner or later. This is one of their better rants: Glacial Melting on Mars = Regional Variation -- Glacial Melting on Earth = Global Warming.
It's right up there with their near hysterical explanation of the historical lag between CO2 levels and warming trends where they claim that it's because the first warming isn't CO2, but then the CO2 causes the rest of the warming. The fact that histrically CO2 increase is a symptom of rising temperatures and not a cause. My favorite line in the comments is "Wow! Are you really saying that we have no idea what starts to warm up our world from an ice age but know with near certainty what has caused the warming of the last three decades? But go ahead, I get a good laugh out of it. If you want, post a note asking what the "Hockey Stick" looks like without the near-treeline Bristlecone Pines included. See if your comment get's censored... something they're notoriou
Those models do not "predict" global warming. They show a trend towards warming with an increase in atmospheric CO2. However to call these models "the most accurate" is quite a stretch. I ask you to look into the quality of these models and ask simple questions, such as, "do you accurately model the largest heat sink on the planet, or are your oceans just a thin slab of water that is basically a rigidly driven model that doesn't adjust to changes realistically." Ask if they solve their fluid model for all variables, or do they just solve for two of the three (pressure and temperature, but not volume). I can go on for hours about how completely inaccurate these models are.
But I don't have to. The models show that CO2 causes an increase because the modelers set up the model so that CO2 holds more heat in the model. Good golly, what a shock.
On the other hand, we have data that all of the inner planets are now heating up. The Twin MER rover teams were shocked at how warm the Martian winter was this year on Mars. They never expected their rovers to make it through the winter, yet both survived without a problem. In just the 30 years since the Viking missions, the temperature of Mars has increased substantially. In fact, it's done so by very nearly the exact same percentage as the temperatures seen on Earth. Similar remote measurements of Venus have shown the same increase.
Now, unless you want to claim that Dick Cheney is secretly driving his SUV's on Mars, that means the cause of the rise in temperature must be mainly external. And, oh look, here's a study that's found just that.
Science is hard, Climatology is very hard. We have no hard evidence to support anthropogenic global warming theories. We have computer models. The same people on this list who would scoff at the idea of a computer predicting the weather one week in advance, will accept, without the slightest hesitation, the prediction of a computer 100 years into the future. And, no, don't give me the "it's climate, the little changes disappear into climate" because that's bullshit. It's been disproven time and time again. The "best model" in 1995 mispredicted the temperature in 2000 by 300%. That's not a minor mistake, that's not within one standard deviation, that's a wild-ass guess that was totally wrong.
Trillions of dollars and Millions of lives will be lost if the "we should take action just in case" crowd wins. Some of the best estimates say that cutting CO2 by 50% will cost 1.5 BILLION LIVES by 2100. Are you so eager to pull the trigger?
Just a thought...I was being sarcastic?
Admittedly it seems like every time I want to see my doctor he's out playing golf, but that's just me.
So, heck yeah, cripple the IT economy, and make me stinking rich!
Thou darest take the name of the FSM in vain. Surely now he shall smite thee with his Marinara of wrath. Benevolent and Vengeful is he (or at least Semolina and Vengeful...)
Does not the Book of Boy'ar'Dee say: Cower and consume ye pasta before his righteous vengence. Ramen.
Please, take it. Really. Please. 40 cents to mail a letter across the street...