Why? Without an estimation of deaths caused by patents vs lives saved by Gates' work on vaccines, how would it be possible to say whether his contribution is positive or negative? What if without Bill Gates Warren Buffet would have decided to spend money on generic drug research, for example?
Quite apart from where Bill Gates comes from, saying that Bill Gates is wrong to support patents because they kill is a valid statement. I for one, won't give anyone a break on that.
The evidence says that passive smoking is responsible for about 1% of total premature deaths worldwide.
Worldwide, 40% of children, 33% of male non-smokers, and 35% of female non-smokers were exposed to second-hand smoke in 2004. This exposure was estimated to have caused 379 000 deaths from ischaemic heart disease, 165 000 from lower respiratory infections, 36 900 from asthma, and 21 400 from lung cancer.
So yeah, it's not that big issue for lung cancer, but a stunningly large for heart disease.
To refute my point, please provide links to peer reviewed studies contradicting the study I linked, no older than 5 years, otherwise I have to say that your statement "tremendously trumped up and in some cases just as falsified as the wakefield BS" seems like astroturfing propaganda from some of those PR companies working for the tobacco industry.
It's not an open standard in spirit because it's encumbered by patents. To be more verbose on it, it's not an open standard if interested parties cannot use it without licensing it from someone for money. Here, interested parties consist of the whole fucking internet.
Now, the legal definition as defined by the EU says it's not an open standard because it doesn't grant an irrevocable patent license. So there you have it.
Besides, to blow a whole in your argument: this is like a mathematical theorem: I only need to find a case where what you claim to be an open standard isn't accepted as such, while you need to show that it's a generally well accepted open standard. Now of course in law things aren't as absolute, but I'd say if something is not accepted as an open standard on a whole populated continent, then it isn't.
It is certainly misleading to call H.264 an open standard and it isn't wordplay to point that out.
Perhaps you don't understand what's written there. The key word is "irrevocably". MPEG-LA hasn't even made a temporary license available publicly, they only made press statements. Even the press statements include phrases like "extended until 2015". Does that seem like irrevocable to you?
Actually, it is an open standard as defined by the EU. It passes all those tests. It isn't a royalty based fee, and less than $.10 per unit is a "nominal fee".
No. It fails this one blatantly and therefor it isn't an open standard: The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.
Patent risk from submarine patents: neither h.264 nor WebM offers any protection from it.
Patent risk from MPEG-LA for h.264: significant, as it can decide to raise prices / start charging for content at any time. Bait and switch is their strategy.
Google hereby grants to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable ⦠patent license to [infringe VP8 patents owned by Google].
Google dropped support for that crap because it's a patent trap, while a technologically equivalent format exists - WebM. I hope Youtube will remove h.264 encoding from their videos as soon as most Firefox and Chrome users migrated to a version that supports WebM.
I was on classic too, because "threaded, -1" for smaller threads and "threaded, 3" for large ones was the only way a thread could be comfortably viewed.
JS is just sluggish.
I wish there was a way to strip all this JS functionality, because I appreciate browsing speed a lot more. This will probably drastically reduce the time I spend on slashdot. Shame.
...cold fusion or any similar energy generating scheme: one day you'll notice that they'll offer to sell large companies electricity at half the market price.
As to your item 3: AGW hasn't been falsified because it's not falsifiable, nor has any climate model demonstrated predictive power. It's astonishing how few climate scientists betray any understanding of chaos.
What's not falsifiable about it? A lot of people tried, they just haven't succeeded, that's the essence of a good theory. Also, a lot of climate models predicted previously unknown things that we've found evidence for later.
You linked to Anthony Watts. While I don't believe in ad hominem, he's been wrong so many times that I might just as well read horoscopes and get bullshit more honestly.
Most of the observed warming occurred during two periods: 1910 to 1945 and 1976 to 2000; the cooling/plateau from 1945 to 1976 has been mostly attributed to sulphate aerosol.
As far as I know the share structure of Google gives enough voting rights to the founders to retain absolute control even with a minority of the shares.
Did you look at the graphs? Do you see any acceleration in the rate of change? Is there a greater rate of change between 1900 and 1940 as that between 1950 and 1990? No, there isn't.
The most common measure of global warming is the trend in globally averaged temperature near the Earth's surface. Expressed as a linear trend, this temperature rose by 0.74 ± 0.18 C over the period 1906-2005. The rate of warming over the last half of that period was almost double that for the period as a whole (0.13 ± 0.03 C per decade, versus 0.07 C ± 0.02 C per decade).
Here another one about temperature and CO2. The main point is that it is a strawman argument that CO2 is the single controlling factor of temperature. No serious climate scientist is saying that. On your graphs there isn't a single case where an increase in CO2 didn't also correlate with an increase in temperature though.
I don't understand how people gets this conclusion. How can the scientists do the measurements of the rate of climate change for some century of -for example- 50M years ago?
I'm not entirely sure about paleoclimatology that far back, however ice core samples would have shown any sudden, extremely fast change if it occured anytime in the past 800k years.
.05 is one chance in twenty that it's a fluke. That's what we call statistical insignificance.
95% significance is pretty standard in science, but if that doesn't satisfy you, feel free to calculate statistical significance from 1960 or so, then you'll reach much higher confidence levels.
A statistical correlation isn't evidence; it's a pointer that says "here there may be some interesting science."
There is no correlation here, as you're only looking at one variable - temperature - not comparing two or more. You're mixing terms. The process goes something like this:
Notice statistically significant warming - check
Notice strong correlation between temperature and CO2 levels - check
Formulate theory and model that explains the correlation, noone has managed to falsify it and has predictive power - check
Current temperatures are not changing in any way outside of the bounds of natural variation. If you stretch out any segment of a random plot, as that image shows, it will look significant. However, if you plot the graph with more reasonable axis, you will see it's almost imperceptible noise.
You've got it all wrong. The temperature change in the past 150 years, compared to the past 2000 years as a baseline is extremely significant, but no model can explain it without the human caused CO2 increase.
You can't argue that the temperature isn't changing or isn't changing enough, because that's been demonstrated over and over and over and over again.
There is no empirical data showing that Co2 caused an increase in 20th century temperature. There is a weak correlation between Co2 and temperature in the 20th century. There is a stronger correlation between the PDO and solar activity. But you will ignore the latter, because the former suits your political opinions better.
We measured the CO2 increase over the past century and we can calculate based on simple physics that adding a given amount of CO2 into the atmosphere increases global temperatures by a given amount. There is no conceivable way that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere wouldn't have a warming effect on global temperature, that's a physical impossibility.
Solar activity varied something like 0.1% in the past 50 years. Here is a graph where CO2, solar activity and temperature are all on a same graph. The CO2 correlation is a lot stronger.
Research based on satellite observations, published in October, 2010, shows an increase in the flow of freshwater into the world's oceans, partly from melting ice and partly from increased precipitation driven by an increase in global ocean evaporation. The increase in global freshwater flow, based on data from 1994 to 2006, was about 18%. Much of the increase is in areas which already experience high rainfall.
IPCC (2007a:5) found that, on average, mountain glaciers and snow cover had decreased in both the northern and southern hemispheres.[3] This widespread decrease in glaciers and ice caps has contributed to observed sea level rise.
Since the industrial revolution began, it is estimated that surface ocean pH has dropped by slightly more than 0.1 units (on the logarithmic scale of pH; approximately a 30% increase in H+),
IPCC (2007a:5) reported that since 1961, global average sea level had risen at an average rate of 1.8 [1.3 to 2.3] mm/yr.[3] Between 1993 and 2003, the rate increased above the previous period to 3.1 [2.4 to 3.8] mm/yr. IPCC (2007a) were uncertain whether the increase in rate from 1993 to 2003 was due to natural variations in sea level over the time period, or whether it reflected an increase in the underlying long-term trend.
You say that:
The consequences are huge if the more outlandish models are correct (10F-15F), but of course given current temperatures are within the bounds of natural variability and over the medium and long term indistinguishable from noise, it's hardly cause for concern.
...but this is incorrect. Current temperatures are changing in a statistically significant way and that change cannot be explained by natural processes, only when you factor in the human CO2 increase. Does this look like noise to you?
How do you know that there is something we can do to stop it?
Because we can stop putting shit in the atmosphere. It is easier to change our infrastructure depending on fossil fuels than to change the infrastructure of having population centers where they are.
We're roughly at 40-60% human-natural in the total CO2 content of the atmosphere. That 60% natural part kept the planet from being a frozen iceball for the past couple of thousand years.
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Why? Without an estimation of deaths caused by patents vs lives saved by Gates' work on vaccines, how would it be possible to say whether his contribution is positive or negative? What if without Bill Gates Warren Buffet would have decided to spend money on generic drug research, for example?
Quite apart from where Bill Gates comes from, saying that Bill Gates is wrong to support patents because they kill is a valid statement. I for one, won't give anyone a break on that.
So yeah, it's not that big issue for lung cancer, but a stunningly large for heart disease.
To refute my point, please provide links to peer reviewed studies contradicting the study I linked, no older than 5 years, otherwise I have to say that your statement "tremendously trumped up and in some cases just as falsified as the wakefield BS" seems like astroturfing propaganda from some of those PR companies working for the tobacco industry.
It's not an open standard in spirit because it's encumbered by patents. To be more verbose on it, it's not an open standard if interested parties cannot use it without licensing it from someone for money. Here, interested parties consist of the whole fucking internet.
Now, the legal definition as defined by the EU says it's not an open standard because it doesn't grant an irrevocable patent license. So there you have it.
Besides, to blow a whole in your argument: this is like a mathematical theorem: I only need to find a case where what you claim to be an open standard isn't accepted as such, while you need to show that it's a generally well accepted open standard. Now of course in law things aren't as absolute, but I'd say if something is not accepted as an open standard on a whole populated continent, then it isn't.
It is certainly misleading to call H.264 an open standard and it isn't wordplay to point that out.
Perhaps you don't understand what's written there. The key word is "irrevocably". MPEG-LA hasn't even made a temporary license available publicly, they only made press statements. Even the press statements include phrases like "extended until 2015". Does that seem like irrevocable to you?
No. It fails this one blatantly and therefor it isn't an open standard: The intellectual property - i.e. patents possibly present - of (parts of) the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis.
Actually, it's not an open standard either, at least as defined by the European Union, the world's biggest IT market by GDP.
Patent risk from submarine patents: neither h.264 nor WebM offers any protection from it.
Patent risk from MPEG-LA for h.264: significant, as it can decide to raise prices / start charging for content at any time. Bait and switch is their strategy.
Patent risk from Google for WebM: none, they offered irrevocable indemnification:
Google dropped support for that crap because it's a patent trap, while a technologically equivalent format exists - WebM. I hope Youtube will remove h.264 encoding from their videos as soon as most Firefox and Chrome users migrated to a version that supports WebM.
I was on classic too, because "threaded, -1" for smaller threads and "threaded, 3" for large ones was the only way a thread could be comfortably viewed. JS is just sluggish.
I wish there was a way to strip all this JS functionality, because I appreciate browsing speed a lot more. This will probably drastically reduce the time I spend on slashdot. Shame.
...cold fusion or any similar energy generating scheme: one day you'll notice that they'll offer to sell large companies electricity at half the market price.
What's not falsifiable about it? A lot of people tried, they just haven't succeeded, that's the essence of a good theory. Also, a lot of climate models predicted previously unknown things that we've found evidence for later.
There was no stasis/cooling between 1930 and 1950. Quoting wikipedia:
As far as I know the share structure of Google gives enough voting rights to the founders to retain absolute control even with a minority of the shares.
Have you heard of the industrial revolution?
You're just plain wrong. From wikipedia (citing the IPCC's 4th assessment):
Solar activity is pretty stable and isn't responsible for warming.
Here another one about temperature and CO2. The main point is that it is a strawman argument that CO2 is the single controlling factor of temperature. No serious climate scientist is saying that. On your graphs there isn't a single case where an increase in CO2 didn't also correlate with an increase in temperature though.
What you're missing is the scale and speed of the change that's occuring now.
Because they've been there for many thousands of years and it's kind of weird how they're shrinking at an accelerated rate since 1850 eh?
I'm not entirely sure about paleoclimatology that far back, however ice core samples would have shown any sudden, extremely fast change if it occured anytime in the past 800k years.
95% significance is pretty standard in science, but if that doesn't satisfy you, feel free to calculate statistical significance from 1960 or so, then you'll reach much higher confidence levels.
There is no correlation here, as you're only looking at one variable - temperature - not comparing two or more. You're mixing terms. The process goes something like this:
You've got it all wrong. The temperature change in the past 150 years, compared to the past 2000 years as a baseline is extremely significant, but no model can explain it without the human caused CO2 increase.
You can't argue that the temperature isn't changing or isn't changing enough, because that's been demonstrated over and over and over and over again.
We measured the CO2 increase over the past century and we can calculate based on simple physics that adding a given amount of CO2 into the atmosphere increases global temperatures by a given amount. There is no conceivable way that pumping CO2 into the atmosphere wouldn't have a warming effect on global temperature, that's a physical impossibility.
Solar activity varied something like 0.1% in the past 50 years. Here is a graph where CO2, solar activity and temperature are all on a same graph. The CO2 correlation is a lot stronger.
Sure:
You say that:
Because we can stop putting shit in the atmosphere. It is easier to change our infrastructure depending on fossil fuels than to change the infrastructure of having population centers where they are.
We're roughly at 40-60% human-natural in the total CO2 content of the atmosphere. That 60% natural part kept the planet from being a frozen iceball for the past couple of thousand years.