Naturally, Microsoft responded to Netscape not only bundling its browser into the operating system ("free" for anyone who bought a Windows PC), but making it architecturally part of the operating system so that Steve Ballmer could tell a judge that he didn't know how to remove IE without completely breaking Windows. It was the default browser for most PC's sold.
Most operating systems designed after about 1990 have some kind of built in HTML viewer component, and most of them would break if it were removed. In the Windows case, it's called MSHTML.DLL and is used all over the place from the shell to the html help control. So you're free to install Opera or Firefox, but you can't get rid of MSHTML.DLL since lots of other places rely on being able to host it.
Now most GUI operating systems have a default text editor component, which is similarly ubiquitous. In Windows that would be the EDIT window class. If you're replying to this using Internet Explorer, you're actually using both MSHTML.DLL and and EDIT window. Once a bundled component provides some functionality, other applications will tend to use it rather than reinventing it. So the built in Notepad and Internet Explorer are both just very thin wrappers around an EDIT control and MSHTML.DLL.
Now what's interesting here is that both the MSHTML.DLL and the EDIT are a bit old fashioned. This is inevitable with bundled components because in addition to running inside Internet Explorer or Notepad they are hosted inside lots of Windows components or even inside third party applications. Anyone who's used either for more than a few minutes will want to get something a bit more capable.
But for some reason, including Internet Explorer is a ploy designed to kill Netscape whereas including Notepad is fine. For example, I don't see the makers of CodeWright or UltraEdit or Emacs complain that including EDIT or Notepad is somehow designed to kill them.
I've never been tempted to do this, so I don't care. But if I want to laugh loudly at bad movies however people shouldn't be allowed to shush me. I wish the ushers would kick them out quite frankly - they're highly annoying.
Should we be able to advocate genocide on the internet?
Yes, absolutely! How am I supposed to spend my Saturday night if this is illegal?
This is the story of a land far away. A land of cold and GSM. In modern Scandinavia the Trolls were petty and cruel and they plagued to blogosphere with tyranny. Only one man dared to challenge their power. BEOWULF! Beowulf possesed a strength the world had never seen, and strength surpassed only by the power of his heart. He ourneyed the earth, battling the minions of his wicked enemy GRENDEL. But wherever there was evil, wherever an innocent would suffer there would be Beowulf.
Beowulf the Legendary Journeys (from the producers of "Hercules" and "Xena")
Caption: Starring Kevin Sorbo as Hercules Caption: Special Guest Stars: Kevin Smith as Grendel, Lucy Lawless as Grendel's mother
What? You don't think that anyone on the far right in [any country] would be willing to suggest genocide as a solution to the Israeli/Palestine problem?
I think he's suggesting that someone posted an inflammatory and extremist comment on a site on the internet to discredit the site not because they believed in it
Oh, and by the way LET'S KILL ALL THE REPUBLIKKKANS AND WINDOWS USERS! AL QAEDA FTW!
Telling the majority of your users (including, for example, poor people who don't own a computer and use whatever is installed on the computer in the public library) to fuck off is like a shoe store refusing to sell shoes to anyone with uncool socks. Much better to sell someone a nice pair of shoes, and say, "By the way, you could try these really nice socks to go with them. The don't have holes in them like the ones you're wearing."
It's better, but I'd still cockpunch someone who mentioned my socks have holes in them.
No, but I am in the business of predicting human behavior for a living and I have designed large-scale, moderately complex simulations (e.g. of an emergency room in a trauma hospital for use in deciding staffing levels).
Does your ER simulator sell well compared to Halo? Thought not.
Let's look at the features. Does have dual wielding? Rag doll physics? Damageable scenery? A chainsaw weapon? Realistic blood and gore? Do the patients have decent AI so they can outflank the player and attack in packs when he goes into dark places?
Right that that's the problem. Jeeze, no wonder you're not in marketing.
Mashup comes from the underground music scene. It's when people download two copyrighted pieces of music which required lots of musical ability to produce and mix them together ironically on their Mac (which requires a hell of a lot less ability) and then generously donate the result to the Creative Commons.
Actually, that reminds me of my least favourite word, digerati. It's the blogosphere equivalent of the popular group in an American high school. Annoyingly it's usually used by socially well connected Web 2.0 types who have little talent or idea about the underlying technology.
Oh, the realistic worst case scenario as given by the IPCC is a lot worse than that. Both in the number of degrees increased, and the negative effects on economy and environment.
Well if you pick your data well and extrapolate insanely, you can get some scary figures -
It's a graph which is flat with a lot of noise. They take an upward spike out of the noise and assuming it's a trend that will continue for the next hundred years. But there's nothing in the data that shows any sign that a 6 degree C rise is about to happen. If I'd done this sort of thing in a physics experiment at school people would have thought it was a joke.
And the idea that we should use this sort of science to make policy decisions about several percent of GDP is laughable.
It is possible to cut back without any economic disasters, if only for the sake of not wasting resources.
And that I think is what will reduce CO2 emissions eventually. As someone said, the stone age did not end because we run out of stone, and the oil age will not end because we run out of oil but because we have better alternatives.
The earth is robust in the sense that it doesn't matter much what strikes it - it's the inhabitants who aren't robust. Furthermore, even a small push can be of influence on a system in an equilibrium.
Personally, I think most people will be disappointed in your post because "in my life" tells them you don't care much for any future generations.
My argument is that it is not possible to predict that far ahead anyway. If you don't have the information it doesn't matter how much you care for future generations, since you have no way of knowing if what your doing is an improvement or not. And I'm not completely oblivious to future generations. My kids will have a lot of cash which should give them a legup over people that wasted their time in the Government/Education/Nonprofit sector caring about the environment and earning lousy salaries.
Do they even have self destructs I wonder? In Blackhawk Down (the book) they actually had guys go back and chuck in themite grenades into the helicopters. And in Iraq I heard the same thing about disabled M1A1s. I even heard of the USAF dropping napalm on downed equipment to destroy it. But all this is from journalists, so maybe it was bullshit.
Seems like if you had a self destruct, the guys that abandoned them would just have set a timer before they left. Maybe the safety issue makes it stupid idea in practice.
I dunno really. On one hand I think military stuff is full of explosives anyway, so a few small charges to destroy sensitive stuff is no problem, on the other I can see that it might be hard to do this if the inside is packed tight with soldiers and equipment, and maybe there are high tech ways to accomplish most of the effect of a self destruct if the computers reformat themselves and keys get revoked back at base. You certainly don't see the bad guys being able to use captured hardware, and it's not like al Qaeda will be able to reverse engineer it like the Russians could.
In that case, lobbing a thermite grenade is just to destroy any paperwork that might be left. I suspect there's an element of anthropomorphic thinking too, fragging equipment is sparing it the indignity of being captured.
sorry another physicsist this time at Harvard, guess that means you can ignore his arguments just like you ignored Nobel prize winning physicist Freeman Dyson
Hmm it seems that Dyson didn't win a Nobel Prize.
I'm sorry, since Appeals to authority seem so popular amongst the Church Of Gaia and the Blessed Consensus types I thought I'd try it. But it seems that unlike them I'm not actually very good at it.
I promise I will go and buy some indulgences and use a less fun means of transport for a week as a penance. And I'll watch that absurd Al Gore film several times more too.
Galileo never commented on the Bible. He stuck entirely to what he personally observed and knew about.
And because it contradicted the Bible he got in trouble.
This is the exact opposite of Dyson, who is so arrogant that he assumes that he can completely master something as large as climate modelling and then reject it, without in fact knowing much about it at all.
He's the guy that invented the Dyson sphere and has a good record of being right about physics. His comment is not based on him mastering anything. He knows the limitations of the models the climatologists are using. Just like Galileo he gets flack from pointing out the flaws in people's beliefs because those beliefs are based on faith, not on reason.
Even if you don't agree with the comparison, is shouldn't be that hard to figure out.
Do I detect the smell of burning martyr? Let me guess, another one who takes scientific scrutiny of his claims as attempts at censorship.
He's just got a sharp sense of humour. Mind you, looking at the immediate reaction of "he's not a true climatologist" I can see why.
There is something scarily religious about people that really believe in global warming - that the earth is doomed unless we make sacrifices, or buy indulgences in the form of emissions trading permits.
Personally, I don't know. And I reckon in my life time the worst case rise of a degree or so is no biggie. I'd rather choose a richer world than one which is a degree cooler but with a trashed economy. Mind you, I suspect doing nothing will not cause a catastophe, either economic or environmental.
Lie, some countries have kept records of climate ever since the invention of the meteorological instruments in the 17th century, today we have over 7000 stations that measure land temperatures, we also use satellites to measure sea levels, water and troposphere temperatures.
Hmm here's what Nasa say
http://www.ghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/ghcc_cvcc.html Mankind's impact on the global climate and whether pollution from modern energy use is indeed warming the Earth have become important issues for national and international policy makers. Political pressure and public sentiment are based on complex data sets that, alone, cannot tell the whole story. The ultimate question is whether our climate is becoming warmer because of the slow build-up in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. The answer is not clear, because much of what we know about global climate change in inferred from historical evidence of uncertain quality. Reliable ground-based measurements by scientific instruments have been made just in this century
As Lubos Motl put it (sorry another physicsist this time at Harvard, guess that means you can ignore his arguments just like you ignored Nobel prize winning physicist Freeman Dyson's) http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/01/global-mean-temp erature-1978-2004.html I guess that you won't be surprised that we may be heating the surface a bit. On the other hand, stratosphere seems to be cooling quite clearly, as NASA's satellite graphs show. I am certainly not claiming that the cooling of the stratosphere proves that the global warming theory is wrong; it does not prove that it is correct either. They usually say that the cooling comes from ozone depletion: The GHCC people from NASA are, of course, cautious, and they don't use simplified cliches such as that they have proved global cooling. Instead, they say that the answer about the existence of human-induced greenhouse global warming is not clear.
So basically the old measurements are unreliable and the new ones don't give unambiguous evidence of any simple warming trend.
In the absence of total catastophe right now and I mean like in The Day Tomorrow not some dubious trendline in cherry picked noisy data, I'm afraid I'm all for waiting and seeing. I still don't trust any model of climate enough that I spend Kyoto sized chunks of cash based on its predictions of the climate in a century or so. Hell, I wouldn't even bet a tenner on them being right next week.
Now at this point, I'd expect a load of one liners about the difference between climate and weather. But that's bunk. It's a big chaotic system - we can't predict it next week and we can't predict it next century, anymore than we can predict the stock market over short or long terms. Mind you, if your computer models have let you make a few billion on the stock market, I'm definitely interested. Hell I'll even believe in your loony religion if you pay me cold hard cash.
Freeman Dyson is a nuclear physicist, not a climatologist.
And Galileo was an astronomer not an expert on the bible. Still, Dyson he was smart enough to know that you'd say that -
"Of course they say I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied their climate models and know what they can do."
Freeman Dyson on Climate Models The first of my heresies says that all the fluff about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of twilight model experts and the crowd of diluted citizens that believe the numbers predicted by their models. Of course they say I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak.
But I have studied their climate models and know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics and do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields, farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in.
The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That's why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.
There's no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. The warming happens in places and times where it is cold, in the arctic more than the tropics, in the winter more than the summer, at night more than the daytime.
I'm not saying the warming doesn't cause problems, obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it. I'm saying that the problems are being grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are much more urgent and important. Poverty, infectious diseases, public education and public health. Not to mention the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans.
You know, at 4000mph I really don't think C4 or Thermite would be needed. I think friction would do the trick if there were to be any unplanned aerodynamic manipulations.
It's not strictly necessary, but the guy that wrote the OpSec/UAV/Self Destruct guidelines really liked C4. In fact if it wasn't for damn brass, he'd be out on the airfield testing an improved self destruct mechanism on unused B1 bombers.
Geek in bar: I'm thinking of getting an MP3 player. Girl in bar: Get an iPod. Cindi has one and it's great. They are a bit expensive though. Why don't you have a drink by the way? You've been sat here all night not talking to anyone and I've never seen you drink anything. Geek in bar: No way, the iPod is a tool of the RIAA, DRM is poisoning software freedom and the RIAA are a bunch of terrorists killing innocent GNU Monks. Did you hear that Dimitry Skylab was arrested for writing code in Russia when he visited America. And in GNU/Kenya blind people have been prevented from backing up their Audio books. Cory Doctorow wrote a great science fiction story about a version of Star Wars where DRM prevented the Bothans from copying the plans for the Death Star, it was called "Many Bothans were KILLED BY THE MAFIAA1!1!". Isn't Bush like Palpatine of even Hitler! I'm going to buy the Venezualan ChavezTunes MP3 player. It has DRM so it only boots Debian Linux, and it knows how to send malformed packets to M Dollar Zunes over Wifi so they crash. The hardware companies said that Free Software wasn't allowed to use Wifi because of security concerns but that's just like Big Alcohol tells people that safe and perfectly natural herbs make you paranoid. That's why I don't drink, I don't want to support those BASTARDS. Girl:....
Dell has been selling systems through the business end with FreeDos for a while now. Purchase one of those and install Ubuntu yourself. It really isn't that hard and you can actually customize the install to what components you actually need. Or you could purchase one and install any free distro you want.
Or keep FreeDos on it. It's had zero remote code execution exploits in its entire life. Plus it will run on low end hardware. And most Unix stuff is easy to port to it except for pointless eyecandy bloatware like KDE and Gnome. I took Ubuntu off my grandmother's machine and installed FreeDos and she's actually much happier. She finds arachne much faster and more stable than Firefox. She also likes the way that FreeDos software authors get straight to the point with concise lynx compatible websites too. No political badgering or Web 2.0 annoyances there.
Slashdot Mirror
Naturally, Microsoft responded to Netscape not only bundling its browser into the operating system ("free" for anyone who bought a Windows PC), but making it architecturally part of the operating system so that Steve Ballmer could tell a judge that he didn't know how to remove IE without completely breaking Windows. It was the default browser for most PC's sold.
Most operating systems designed after about 1990 have some kind of built in HTML viewer component, and most of them would break if it were removed. In the Windows case, it's called MSHTML.DLL and is used all over the place from the shell to the html help control. So you're free to install Opera or Firefox, but you can't get rid of MSHTML.DLL since lots of other places rely on being able to host it.
Now most GUI operating systems have a default text editor component, which is similarly ubiquitous. In Windows that would be the EDIT window class. If you're replying to this using Internet Explorer, you're actually using both MSHTML.DLL and and EDIT window. Once a bundled component provides some functionality, other applications will tend to use it rather than reinventing it. So the built in Notepad and Internet Explorer are both just very thin wrappers around an EDIT control and MSHTML.DLL.
Now what's interesting here is that both the MSHTML.DLL and the EDIT are a bit old fashioned. This is inevitable with bundled components because in addition to running inside Internet Explorer or Notepad they are hosted inside lots of Windows components or even inside third party applications. Anyone who's used either for more than a few minutes will want to get something a bit more capable.
But for some reason, including Internet Explorer is a ploy designed to kill Netscape whereas including Notepad is fine. For example, I don't see the makers of CodeWright or UltraEdit or Emacs complain that including EDIT or Notepad is somehow designed to kill them.
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/05/17/amd_launch es_dual-core_turions/
TL-50 1.6GHz 2*256KB caches $184
TL-52 1.6GHz 2*512KB caches $220
TL-56 1.8GHz 2*512KB caches $263
TL-60 2.0GHz 2*512KB caches $354
There are borked chips with half the cache disabled (or maybe faulty) and then a load of different speed grades.
We can't yell fire in a crowded theatre.
I've never been tempted to do this, so I don't care. But if I want to laugh loudly at bad movies however people shouldn't be allowed to shush me. I wish the ushers would kick them out quite frankly - they're highly annoying.
Should we be able to advocate genocide on the internet?
Yes, absolutely! How am I supposed to spend my Saturday night if this is illegal?
(and whatever your "what about" question is, the answer is, "yes, damn it")
What about if someone stands next to and and YELLS INANE THINGS in your ear 24 hours a day?
This is the story of a land far away. A land of cold and GSM. In modern Scandinavia the Trolls were petty and cruel and they plagued to blogosphere with tyranny. Only one man dared to challenge their power. BEOWULF! Beowulf possesed a strength the world had never seen, and strength surpassed only by the power of his heart. He ourneyed the earth, battling the minions of his wicked enemy GRENDEL. But wherever there was evil, wherever an innocent would suffer there would be Beowulf.
Beowulf the Legendary Journeys (from the producers of "Hercules" and "Xena")
Caption: Starring Kevin Sorbo as Hercules
Caption: Special Guest Stars: Kevin Smith as Grendel, Lucy Lawless as Grendel's mother
</voice over>
What?
You don't think that anyone on the far right in [any country] would be willing to suggest genocide as a solution to the Israeli/Palestine problem?
I think he's suggesting that someone posted an inflammatory and extremist comment on a site on the internet to discredit the site not because they believed in it
Oh, and by the way LET'S KILL ALL THE REPUBLIKKKANS AND WINDOWS USERS! AL QAEDA FTW!
Try doing a basic three column-layout (left bar, main, right bar) with header and footer in IE.
Use frames.
Telling the majority of your users (including, for example, poor people who don't own a computer and use whatever is installed on the computer in the public library) to fuck off is like a shoe store refusing to sell shoes to anyone with uncool socks. Much better to sell someone a nice pair of shoes, and say, "By the way, you could try these really nice socks to go with them. The don't have holes in them like the ones you're wearing."
It's better, but I'd still cockpunch someone who mentioned my socks have holes in them.
I've got a good friend who's Hungarian. He taught me the very useful words 'diszno' meaning 'swine' and 'paraszt' meaning 'peasant'.
Are you in marketing?
No, but I am in the business of predicting human behavior for a living and I have designed large-scale, moderately complex simulations (e.g. of an emergency room in a trauma hospital for use in deciding staffing levels).
Does your ER simulator sell well compared to Halo? Thought not.
Let's look at the features. Does have dual wielding? Rag doll physics? Damageable scenery? A chainsaw weapon? Realistic blood and gore? Do the patients have decent AI so they can outflank the player and attack in packs when he goes into dark places?
Right that that's the problem. Jeeze, no wonder you're not in marketing.
You're lucky you got just b& rather than b& and v&.
Mind you, if the Party Van comes calling, don't answer the door.
Actually, 'mashup' is a word used in Jamaica and some other former British colonies in Britain.
I meant to say 'British colonies in the Caribbean'. Need sleep....
What you originally wrote made perfect sense to me. I thought you meant South London.
Mashup comes from the underground music scene. It's when people download two copyrighted pieces of music which required lots of musical ability to produce and mix them together ironically on their Mac (which requires a hell of a lot less ability) and then generously donate the result to the Creative Commons.
Actually, that reminds me of my least favourite word, digerati. It's the blogosphere equivalent of the popular group in an American high school. Annoyingly it's usually used by socially well connected Web 2.0 types who have little talent or idea about the underlying technology.
Oh, the realistic worst case scenario as given by the IPCC is a lot worse than that. Both in the number of degrees increased, and the negative effects on economy and environment.
/ 05.24.jpg
Well if you pick your data well and extrapolate insanely, you can get some scary figures -
http://www.ipcc.ch/present/graphics/2001syr/large
It's a graph which is flat with a lot of noise. They take an upward spike out of the noise and assuming it's a trend that will continue for the next hundred years. But there's nothing in the data that shows any sign that a 6 degree C rise is about to happen. If I'd done this sort of thing in a physics experiment at school people would have thought it was a joke.
And the idea that we should use this sort of science to make policy decisions about several percent of GDP is laughable.
part of the crimes he was inprisioned for was lieing basicly going against the scientific consensus of the time.
Exactly, and that's what Dyson and the other skeptics are doing.
It is possible to cut back without any economic disasters, if only for the sake of not wasting resources.
And that I think is what will reduce CO2 emissions eventually. As someone said, the stone age did not end because we run out of stone, and the oil age will not end because we run out of oil but because we have better alternatives.
The earth is robust in the sense that it doesn't matter much what strikes it - it's the inhabitants who aren't robust. Furthermore, even a small push can be of influence on a system in an equilibrium.
Personally, I think most people will be disappointed in your post because "in my life" tells them you don't care much for any future generations.
My argument is that it is not possible to predict that far ahead anyway. If you don't have the information it doesn't matter how much you care for future generations, since you have no way of knowing if what your doing is an improvement or not. And I'm not completely oblivious to future generations. My kids will have a lot of cash which should give them a legup over people that wasted their time in the Government/Education/Nonprofit sector caring about the environment and earning lousy salaries.
Do they even have self destructs I wonder? In Blackhawk Down (the book) they actually had guys go back and chuck in themite grenades into the helicopters. And in Iraq I heard the same thing about disabled M1A1s. I even heard of the USAF dropping napalm on downed equipment to destroy it. But all this is from journalists, so maybe it was bullshit.
Seems like if you had a self destruct, the guys that abandoned them would just have set a timer before they left. Maybe the safety issue makes it stupid idea in practice.
I dunno really. On one hand I think military stuff is full of explosives anyway, so a few small charges to destroy sensitive stuff is no problem, on the other I can see that it might be hard to do this if the inside is packed tight with soldiers and equipment, and maybe there are high tech ways to accomplish most of the effect of a self destruct if the computers reformat themselves and keys get revoked back at base. You certainly don't see the bad guys being able to use captured hardware, and it's not like al Qaeda will be able to reverse engineer it like the Russians could.
In that case, lobbing a thermite grenade is just to destroy any paperwork that might be left. I suspect there's an element of anthropomorphic thinking too, fragging equipment is sparing it the indignity of being captured.
sorry another physicsist this time at Harvard, guess that means you can ignore his arguments just like you ignored Nobel prize winning physicist Freeman Dyson
Hmm it seems that Dyson didn't win a Nobel Prize.
I'm sorry, since Appeals to authority seem so popular amongst the Church Of Gaia and the Blessed Consensus types I thought I'd try it. But it seems that unlike them I'm not actually very good at it.
I promise I will go and buy some indulgences and use a less fun means of transport for a week as a penance. And I'll watch that absurd Al Gore film several times more too.
Galileo never commented on the Bible. He stuck entirely to what he personally observed and knew about.
And because it contradicted the Bible he got in trouble.
This is the exact opposite of Dyson, who is so arrogant that he assumes that he can completely master something as large as climate modelling and then reject it, without in fact knowing much about it at all.
He's the guy that invented the Dyson sphere and has a good record of being right about physics. His comment is not based on him mastering anything. He knows the limitations of the models the climatologists are using. Just like Galileo he gets flack from pointing out the flaws in people's beliefs because those beliefs are based on faith, not on reason.
Even if you don't agree with the comparison, is shouldn't be that hard to figure out.
Do I detect the smell of burning martyr? Let me guess, another one who takes scientific scrutiny of his claims as attempts at censorship.
p erature-1978-2004.html
He's just got a sharp sense of humour. Mind you, looking at the immediate reaction of "he's not a true climatologist" I can see why.
There is something scarily religious about people that really believe in global warming - that the earth is doomed unless we make sacrifices, or buy indulgences in the form of emissions trading permits.
Personally, I don't know. And I reckon in my life time the worst case rise of a degree or so is no biggie. I'd rather choose a richer world than one which is a degree cooler but with a trashed economy. Mind you, I suspect doing nothing will not cause a catastophe, either economic or environmental.
Lie, some countries have kept records of climate ever since the invention of the meteorological instruments in the 17th century, today we have over 7000 stations that measure land temperatures, we also use satellites to measure sea levels, water and troposphere temperatures.
Hmm here's what Nasa say
http://www.ghcc.msfc.nasa.gov/ghcc_cvcc.html
Mankind's impact on the global climate and whether pollution from modern energy use is indeed warming the Earth have become important issues for national and international policy makers. Political pressure and public sentiment are based on complex data sets that, alone, cannot tell the whole story. The ultimate question is whether our climate is becoming warmer because of the slow build-up in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. The answer is not clear, because much of what we know about global climate change in inferred from historical evidence of uncertain quality. Reliable ground-based measurements by scientific instruments have been made just in this century
As Lubos Motl put it (sorry another physicsist this time at Harvard, guess that means you can ignore his arguments just like you ignored Nobel prize winning physicist Freeman Dyson's)
http://motls.blogspot.com/2005/01/global-mean-tem
I guess that you won't be surprised that we may be heating the surface a bit. On the other hand, stratosphere seems to be cooling quite clearly, as NASA's satellite graphs show. I am certainly not claiming that the cooling of the stratosphere proves that the global warming theory is wrong; it does not prove that it is correct either. They usually say that the cooling comes from ozone depletion:
The GHCC people from NASA are, of course, cautious, and they don't use simplified cliches such as that they have proved global cooling. Instead, they say that the answer about the existence of human-induced greenhouse global warming is not clear.
So basically the old measurements are unreliable and the new ones don't give unambiguous evidence of any simple warming trend.
In the absence of total catastophe right now and I mean like in The Day Tomorrow not some dubious trendline in cherry picked noisy data, I'm afraid I'm all for waiting and seeing. I still don't trust any model of climate enough that I spend Kyoto sized chunks of cash based on its predictions of the climate in a century or so. Hell, I wouldn't even bet a tenner on them being right next week.
Now at this point, I'd expect a load of one liners about the difference between climate and weather. But that's bunk. It's a big chaotic system - we can't predict it next week and we can't predict it next century, anymore than we can predict the stock market over short or long terms. Mind you, if your computer models have let you make a few billion on the stock market, I'm definitely interested. Hell I'll even believe in your loony religion if you pay me cold hard cash.
Freeman Dyson is a nuclear physicist, not a climatologist.
And Galileo was an astronomer not an expert on the bible. Still, Dyson he was smart enough to know that you'd say that -
"Of course they say I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied their climate models and know what they can do."
Have you heard of the No True Scotsman fallacy BTW?
Freeman Dyson on Climate Models
The first of my heresies says that all the fluff about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of twilight model experts and the crowd of diluted citizens that believe the numbers predicted by their models. Of course they say I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak.
But I have studied their climate models and know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics and do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields, farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in.
The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That's why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.
There's no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. The warming happens in places and times where it is cold, in the arctic more than the tropics, in the winter more than the summer, at night more than the daytime.
I'm not saying the warming doesn't cause problems, obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it. I'm saying that the problems are being grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are much more urgent and important. Poverty, infectious diseases, public education and public health. Not to mention the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans.
He also worked out a way to reverse global warming quite cheaply.
You know, at 4000mph I really don't think C4 or Thermite would be needed. I think friction would do the trick if there were to be any unplanned aerodynamic manipulations.
It's not strictly necessary, but the guy that wrote the OpSec/UAV/Self Destruct guidelines really liked C4. In fact if it wasn't for damn brass, he'd be out on the airfield testing an improved self destruct mechanism on unused B1 bombers.
How does that work then? Like this maybe -
....
Geek in bar: I'm thinking of getting an MP3 player.
Girl in bar: Get an iPod. Cindi has one and it's great. They are a bit expensive though. Why don't you have a drink by the way? You've been sat here all night not talking to anyone and I've never seen you drink anything.
Geek in bar: No way, the iPod is a tool of the RIAA, DRM is poisoning software freedom and the RIAA are a bunch of terrorists killing innocent GNU Monks. Did you hear that Dimitry Skylab was arrested for writing code in Russia when he visited America. And in GNU/Kenya blind people have been prevented from backing up their Audio books. Cory Doctorow wrote a great science fiction story about a version of Star Wars where DRM prevented the Bothans from copying the plans for the Death Star, it was called "Many Bothans were KILLED BY THE MAFIAA1!1!". Isn't Bush like Palpatine of even Hitler! I'm going to buy the Venezualan ChavezTunes MP3 player. It has DRM so it only boots Debian Linux, and it knows how to send malformed packets to M Dollar Zunes over Wifi so they crash. The hardware companies said that Free Software wasn't allowed to use Wifi because of security concerns but that's just like Big Alcohol tells people that safe and perfectly natural herbs make you paranoid. That's why I don't drink, I don't want to support those BASTARDS.
Girl:
Dell has been selling systems through the business end with FreeDos for a while now. Purchase one of those and install Ubuntu yourself. It really isn't that hard and you can actually customize the install to what components you actually need. Or you could purchase one and install any free distro you want.
Or keep FreeDos on it. It's had zero remote code execution exploits in its entire life. Plus it will run on low end hardware. And most Unix stuff is easy to port to it except for pointless eyecandy bloatware like KDE and Gnome. I took Ubuntu off my grandmother's machine and installed FreeDos and she's actually much happier. She finds arachne much faster and more stable than Firefox. She also likes the way that FreeDos software authors get straight to the point with concise lynx compatible websites too. No political badgering or Web 2.0 annoyances there.