30 years is too short a period to be drawing conclusions. Looking at all of the current interglacial--back 10,000 years--makes more sense: http://smpro.ca/crunch/GISP2Civil.png
Let me state quite clearly: it is not a question of taste or opinion what constitutes a too short period for drawing conclusions, it is a question of statistical significance and the level of acceptable certainty. The shortest time interval for statistically significant warming at p < 0.05 is about 15 years. The precise shortest time period depends on the given years of course. We're seeing statistically significant warming since 1996 for example.
The graph you linked is a local temperature measurement, it isn't the global average. For a much better overview please click here. Consider the fact though, that even though we had higher temperatures a couple of million years ago, we haven't had a civilization back then.
Having walked my dogs in -20C weather this morning, it can't get warmer fast enough.
It might get even colder locally for you, if for example an oceanic current starts moving away from it's current path by a couple of hundred miles. By the way, the recent cold spell was the consequence of artic cold air being pushed down to Northern America and Europe while the Arctic warmed to unusually high temperatures. This might in fact happen a lot more often in the future.
Everything depends on the timescale. For the past 2,000 years that we started settling places as a civilization, we're reaching record warmth. It doesn't matter what happened 1-500M years ago, as those conditions existed when the human race didn't. There is a reason why sea to land transition fossil hunters are going to Northern Canada for fossils: about 365M years ago that area was tropical.
The speed of change that's happening is staggering, it's at least a hundred times faster than the speed of natural, geological changes. The difference between our current changes to the composition of the atmosphere and thus the planet's surface temperature and the geological changes is like the difference between bumping into someone and running that person over at over 100MPH.
What I disagree with - and in this I'm in agreement with one of the founders of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore - is that CO2 is in any way harmful to the environment. And that as a consequence of this obsessing over a few tenths of a degree increase in temperature, we're spending huge sums of money on things that are likely to make absolutely no difference whatsoever, ignoring all of the other problems that we really need to be dealing with.
CO2 is harmful in the sense that we started having more of it in the past dozen decades than what civilization adopted to. The important part is the global increase in temperature: it is a change in the global yearly average temperature, but the consequences of that change are huge. Currently without no decisive action the change won't be kept under an increase of 3C, which is enough to cause widespread disruption and mass human migration. It isn't pretty when hundreds of millions of people either relocate or die, due to being underwater or lacking drinking water.
No. I support it because it's superior. And it's not being an apologist if the thing you are supporting is superior in the manner in which you are supporting it.
But of course, h.264 is not superior to WebM. They are generally on par, with one or the other coming out on top with very slight difference depending on the type of measurement that is done. However, WebM does this while still having lots of room for improvement, plus the perfect storm of open source software: large corporate backers and many, many talented open source coders motivated by technical and philosophical reasons. I would bet WebM will beat h.264 handsomely in a couple of years in most technical tests you can throw at it.
Of course, that ignores the legal/philosophical aspect of the virtues of having an unencumbered codec. While MPEG-LA has the only interest of making as much money as possible, that kind of control is not possible with WebM and therefor it is a lot more attractive platform for using it in environments that do not want to be dragged into the swamp of licensing, for those who want to redistribute libraries and software including those libraries and ultimately for the pockets of end users.
The argument that you're trying to apply is the same as Microsoft touted with SCO and patents against Linux: a stupid scare tactic that eventually became an embarrasment for the very source perpetrating it.
...I'd say the new media law is deeply disturbing and it's certainly a step away from democracy, however comparing Hungary to Russia, Belarus or Venezuela does a disservice to describe the state of opression in those countries.
There is one thing that the election in 2010 taught me: if someone campaigns on vague promises and commits to nothing, then assume the worst of intentions and do not, under any circumstances give the party seeking a large majority a carte blanche.
It's a weird feeling to see a/. article about Hungary, I don't think that happened many times before. It is warranted as Hungary now holds the rotating EU presidency for the next 6 months and also this has been the worst degradation of democratic freedoms in the country since the fall of the communist run dictatorship that ended in 1990.
Overall, I think this media law and the government itself will fall, on the medium term (~4 years). This new law and the governing party is already a subject of widespread mockery and nothing corrodes support for a party more than being subject of ridicule. Hungary regained press freedom not long enough ago to have forgotten how precious it is. The governemnt doesn't understand the internet or the state of media.
Movies may have scientists, but no real science (as in the scientific method). Show kids THAT in a classroom. Show them how powerful it is. Make them experience personal achievements by applying science.
The last time something really influenced kids was getting men on the moon. A movie is just generally background noise and cheap entertainment these days. I certainly wasn't motivated to do something based on a movie I've seen in my childhood, but I was motivated by programming in LOGO and discovering how powerful a C64 really was.
Sure, if you go by strict "what's your mother tongue" criterion, then mandarin might outweight english when simply summing up the internet penetration of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, NZ and a couple of smaller nations. But this leaves out India and pretty much most of Europe where you simply don't exist as a conversation partner without knowing english.
Point in case, I'm a hungarian guy who leaves english comments/posts on slashdot, facebook, twitter, tumblr, stackoverflow and the list goes on. Chinese written language is nowhere near dominating the internet, it misses the mark by at least 2 billion people.
Instead of asking 3,000 people, what they should have done is ask the 3,000 people to pick the 10 smartest and THEY should have made some educated guesses.
Hurray, we can turn safely contained pollution on/in the ground into air pollution! Someone managed to rebrand this exercise as environmentally conscious, while all we're doing is burning trash. Hat's off, really.
It's not being spent on what I want to spend them on though. I'm a big supporter of filling out a form on deciding how I want a certain percentage (10-30%) of my taxes to be spent, excluding the class of welfare related items.
Lets say a page takes a ridiculous 10s to run on the old browsers, Chrome comes out and takes 5s off that number so now it's 5s. Their next update manages to shave another 2s off, that's a 40% reduction right there, even though it's less than half the improvement the previous version gave. Then they shave another 1.5s off, the new engine is twice as fast. We look at things in ratios, which is the way it should be when looking at incremental improvements, but it means that when you're talking about fractions of a second, it doesn't take much improvement to make for accurate 'twice as fast' type claims.
A more realistic scenario would be saying that if ideal page load time is sub 500ms or so, then it is possible to do a lot more in that time with this upgrade. Google doesn't want to reduce the load times, it wants to do more in a given amount of time, when considering applications like GMail, spreadsheets, etc, while still providing fast page load times.
Since 2007 we have been deliberately placing some of our servers in jurisdictions that we suspected suffered a free speech deficit inorder to separate rhetoric from reality. Amazon was one of these cases.
This shows how deeply Assange has thought about the issues surrounding Wikileaks and the state of democracy and openness worldwide. He drives the point home perfectly. Based on the reaction to Wikileaks in the USA, many people in the world realise that the United States has room for improvement until it reaches Swedish/Finnish/Icelandic levels of transparency.
I purchased a book called "How to lie with statistics" by Darrell Huff. It was written in 1954. The first chapter is called "The sample with the built-in bias". It contains amongst other things the story of polling phone subscribers for the 1936 presidential election.
Long story short, phone subscribers were economically and socially biased to be more likely to be republican at that time and so the poll picked Landon as a probable president and not Roosevelt. It's sad and funny at the same time to see how little the pollsters learned.
Not true. Those apps were already broken in the last couple of years then, because the time when DST gets applied changed for example in Europe. The list of time related legislative changes around the world is extensive.
Besides, anything that relies on anything else than a well maintained library for time manipulation was already broken on a design level. Just quoting a small part of the changes from wikipedia:
Start and end dates vary with location and year. Since 1996 European Summer Time has been observed from the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October; previously the rules were not uniform across the European Union.[28] Starting in 2007, most of the United States and Canada observe DST from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November, almost two-thirds of the year.[31] The 2007 U.S. change was part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005; previously, from 1987 through 2006, the start and end dates were the first Sunday in April and the last Sunday in October, and Congress retains the right to go back to the previous dates now that an energy-consumption study has been done.[32]
Absolutely. It's a net loss economically and all those people who like the "longer" hours, would still have them at summer without DST. Just the simplification of software would be worth the benefit.
It seems like this is also a good reason to learn a human language with different roots than your native one, but I have not done that yet, so I couldn't say.
Absolutely! I alternate between english and hungarian for my thoughts and it is very clear to me that I come to ways of thinking often that I couldn't elegantly express in the other language.
Slashdot Mirror
Let me state quite clearly: it is not a question of taste or opinion what constitutes a too short period for drawing conclusions, it is a question of statistical significance and the level of acceptable certainty. The shortest time interval for statistically significant warming at p < 0.05 is about 15 years. The precise shortest time period depends on the given years of course. We're seeing statistically significant warming since 1996 for example.
The graph you linked is a local temperature measurement, it isn't the global average. For a much better overview please click here. Consider the fact though, that even though we had higher temperatures a couple of million years ago, we haven't had a civilization back then.
It might get even colder locally for you, if for example an oceanic current starts moving away from it's current path by a couple of hundred miles. By the way, the recent cold spell was the consequence of artic cold air being pushed down to Northern America and Europe while the Arctic warmed to unusually high temperatures. This might in fact happen a lot more often in the future.
Everything depends on the timescale. For the past 2,000 years that we started settling places as a civilization, we're reaching record warmth. It doesn't matter what happened 1-500M years ago, as those conditions existed when the human race didn't. There is a reason why sea to land transition fossil hunters are going to Northern Canada for fossils: about 365M years ago that area was tropical.
The speed of change that's happening is staggering, it's at least a hundred times faster than the speed of natural, geological changes. The difference between our current changes to the composition of the atmosphere and thus the planet's surface temperature and the geological changes is like the difference between bumping into someone and running that person over at over 100MPH.
CO2 is harmful in the sense that we started having more of it in the past dozen decades than what civilization adopted to. The important part is the global increase in temperature: it is a change in the global yearly average temperature, but the consequences of that change are huge. Currently without no decisive action the change won't be kept under an increase of 3C, which is enough to cause widespread disruption and mass human migration. It isn't pretty when hundreds of millions of people either relocate or die, due to being underwater or lacking drinking water.
Cut him some slack, he just arrived from 1986.
But of course, h.264 is not superior to WebM. They are generally on par, with one or the other coming out on top with very slight difference depending on the type of measurement that is done. However, WebM does this while still having lots of room for improvement, plus the perfect storm of open source software: large corporate backers and many, many talented open source coders motivated by technical and philosophical reasons. I would bet WebM will beat h.264 handsomely in a couple of years in most technical tests you can throw at it.
Of course, that ignores the legal/philosophical aspect of the virtues of having an unencumbered codec. While MPEG-LA has the only interest of making as much money as possible, that kind of control is not possible with WebM and therefor it is a lot more attractive platform for using it in environments that do not want to be dragged into the swamp of licensing, for those who want to redistribute libraries and software including those libraries and ultimately for the pockets of end users.
The argument that you're trying to apply is the same as Microsoft touted with SCO and patents against Linux: a stupid scare tactic that eventually became an embarrasment for the very source perpetrating it.
Flexibility to different needs and desires is not bloat.
...I'd say the new media law is deeply disturbing and it's certainly a step away from democracy, however comparing Hungary to Russia, Belarus or Venezuela does a disservice to describe the state of opression in those countries.
/. article about Hungary, I don't think that happened many times before. It is warranted as Hungary now holds the rotating EU presidency for the next 6 months and also this has been the worst degradation of democratic freedoms in the country since the fall of the communist run dictatorship that ended in 1990.
There is one thing that the election in 2010 taught me: if someone campaigns on vague promises and commits to nothing, then assume the worst of intentions and do not, under any circumstances give the party seeking a large majority a carte blanche.
It's a weird feeling to see a
Overall, I think this media law and the government itself will fall, on the medium term (~4 years). This new law and the governing party is already a subject of widespread mockery and nothing corrodes support for a party more than being subject of ridicule. Hungary regained press freedom not long enough ago to have forgotten how precious it is. The governemnt doesn't understand the internet or the state of media.
That would have been stupid though, unless you want to throw away the caching layer of the dns infrastructure.
Movies may have scientists, but no real science (as in the scientific method). Show kids THAT in a classroom. Show them how powerful it is. Make them experience personal achievements by applying science.
The last time something really influenced kids was getting men on the moon. A movie is just generally background noise and cheap entertainment these days. I certainly wasn't motivated to do something based on a movie I've seen in my childhood, but I was motivated by programming in LOGO and discovering how powerful a C64 really was.
Sure, if you go by strict "what's your mother tongue" criterion, then mandarin might outweight english when simply summing up the internet penetration of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, NZ and a couple of smaller nations. But this leaves out India and pretty much most of Europe where you simply don't exist as a conversation partner without knowing english.
Point in case, I'm a hungarian guy who leaves english comments/posts on slashdot, facebook, twitter, tumblr, stackoverflow and the list goes on. Chinese written language is nowhere near dominating the internet, it misses the mark by at least 2 billion people.
Instead of asking 3,000 people, what they should have done is ask the 3,000 people to pick the 10 smartest and THEY should have made some educated guesses.
Hurray, we can turn safely contained pollution on/in the ground into air pollution! Someone managed to rebrand this exercise as environmentally conscious, while all we're doing is burning trash. Hat's off, really.
...caused a lot of the ugly chapters of history. Being part of an organisation makes you responsible for it's actions.
It's not being spent on what I want to spend them on though. I'm a big supporter of filling out a form on deciding how I want a certain percentage (10-30%) of my taxes to be spent, excluding the class of welfare related items.
A more realistic scenario would be saying that if ideal page load time is sub 500ms or so, then it is possible to do a lot more in that time with this upgrade. Google doesn't want to reduce the load times, it wants to do more in a given amount of time, when considering applications like GMail, spreadsheets, etc, while still providing fast page load times.
Ah no worries, it was just a bit of harmless fun and it hurt noone.
Wait, what's that file on his computer? He planned on setting up a wikileaks mirror? TERRORIST!!!
This shows how deeply Assange has thought about the issues surrounding Wikileaks and the state of democracy and openness worldwide. He drives the point home perfectly. Based on the reaction to Wikileaks in the USA, many people in the world realise that the United States has room for improvement until it reaches Swedish/Finnish/Icelandic levels of transparency.
Replace the system with nothing. General description of threat is meaningless and does nothing but frightens the public.
I purchased a book called "How to lie with statistics" by Darrell Huff. It was written in 1954. The first chapter is called "The sample with the built-in bias". It contains amongst other things the story of polling phone subscribers for the 1936 presidential election.
Long story short, phone subscribers were economically and socially biased to be more likely to be republican at that time and so the poll picked Landon as a probable president and not Roosevelt. It's sad and funny at the same time to see how little the pollsters learned.
[citation needed]
Besides, anything that relies on anything else than a well maintained library for time manipulation was already broken on a design level. Just quoting a small part of the changes from wikipedia:
Absolutely. It's a net loss economically and all those people who like the "longer" hours, would still have them at summer without DST. Just the simplification of software would be worth the benefit.
I would have gotten a first post if it wouldn't be for those meddling kids at Apple!
Absolutely! I alternate between english and hungarian for my thoughts and it is very clear to me that I come to ways of thinking often that I couldn't elegantly express in the other language.
Oh absolutely! It costs the US tens of billions of dollars every year in lost tourism/business revenues to maintain the security theater.