I really do think that this summary was pretty unfair to it. This really doesn't seem to be a rebranding, but actually a pretty solid rewrite of the features. I read a WIRED article on it earlier today and it sounded interesting - a little like the offspring of Wolfram|Alpha and Google. See http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/05/microsofts-bing-hides-its-best-features/
I'm no MS Fanboy, but that post actually highlights Microsofts strength of implementation. It sounds like Oo.org is the one that has some problems in their implementation that only show up when importing a strictly made document. Hopefully this will be pressure to fix the workarounds they have in place so that true interoperability is possible.
The first thing I really remember on my first installation is that, while trying to get a server working, I chmodded something poorly, I think 777, which, besides the obvious security problems, sent my computer into a kernel panic next time it booted. If we're talking distros, I think it was a Red Hat version.
amen to that. I once spent an hour talking with a Library of Congress librarian about their catalog, and she showed me how to do some powerful things in it, but I still think it's awful. That power could have been achieved in much better ways.
You bring up a good point. In my policy analysis classes, we considered the validity of assumptions behind laws - causal, jurisdictional, etc. It seems that this is a portion of theory that scientists are held to relatively strictly, but which our lawmakers often fail to address.
Luckily for the American political system, you also just programmed an electronic Democrat.
Ahh, but if that's the case, can they be blamed? I hear they main()ly inherited their class behavior from the republicans. The only difference is that for democrats, bank_account is only 16 bits.
You go on a rant like that and then purport to somehow be different from those you hate? Every interest group has its extremes, but judging the whole group based upon those individuals is a disservice to everyone and a mistake. One who claims to be such a righteous observer of the flaws of mankind should know that.
We certainly have technology to capture CO2, but not on the scale of a powerplant. We also do not know the proper technology for sequestering it safely for 1000s of years. And the energy required - my goodness. It requires an extra coal plant for every two coal power plants you want to sequester just to power the sequestration process.
I never said sequestration didn't exist. I said safe (I'm adding this part), cheap, carbon capture for power plants does not exist yet and is not worth our while compared to the alternatives we have already developed or which are only a few years out with research funding
I may not have made it clear there, but that's not quite the logic. The logic is that we have an environmental crisis and limited time and resources to put into fixing it. We have technologies that can help us get off of it now for far cheaper than CCS, while CCS is going to be a good decade before anything is viable. The argument is that we should spend as much of our limited capital on the proven technologies while letting the technologies that aren't as likely to help immediately get less funding. If you look at our federal budgets, it has been the reverse with CCS getting the vast majority of the research budgets (until recently) due to its hipness in faux-environmentalism.
FYI - CCS plants are far more expensive than solar
Clean coal doesn't exist. Saying it is a clean energy form is like saying fusion is a clean energy form: regardless of whatever merits you can come up with for the system, carbon capture and sequestration (clean coal), like fusion, has no working plants (and probably won't for at least a decade) and is more a gimmick for public support and research funding than anything else. Money would be better spent on the efficiency efforts mentioned and commercially viable forms of clean energy that can be bought in the market today.
Actually, number one is far more likely and will include people starving to death.
In reality, most economic models predict that we actually stand to gain far more in terms of prosperity by making the switch to clean energy. Even the worst models predict at most 5% GDP loss as compared with a 25% GDP loss if we do *nothing* and let climate change force us to adapt on its terms, not ours. There little, if anything that is dangerous about stopping climate change, there is much to gain and almost nothing to lose. It's not that anything could potentially spell our doom. As I said in my first post, this is well-understood and well-researched and is not just a few people suggesting willy-nilly that we have a problem.
You entirely miss the point because you ask the wrong questions. It is not about testing climate change. During the Cuban Missile Crisis they hypothesized that if one country launched an nuke, we'd all launch them and it would be the end for us all. That was untestable, but we avoided it anyway on far less testable science than we have today to suggest that climate change is occurring and will alter life on this planet. If the sum of humanity's knowledge suggests that under a certain situation (launching a nuke, or business as usual carbon emissions) something bad has a probability very close to 1 of occurring, it is probably best to avoid it.
Science is frequently about using proxies and models to test whether something will occur without actually having to perform an experiment (which may be impossible). This type of science has been regularly used for climate change. So let's lay out the basics really quickly:
Carbon traps heat that would otherwise escape the atmosphere. Falsifiable: yes. True: yes.
Humanity is emitting carbon back into the atmosphere that was previously sequestered. Falsifiable: yes. True: yes.
The sum of the earth's other climate mechanisms is unable to adequately balance out our carbon emissions and prevent climate change from occurring. Falsifiable: yes (in more granular pieces). True: probably. This is where science is currently working. ALL of the data we have suggest that the earth will shift if we continue to emit carbon because the earth's systems will react. However, science hasn't given up on this yet and numerous studies are released every year on this subject attempting to falsify pieces of this (suggesting that this part or that part might take up the slack, etc).
So, science hasn't given up on climate change yet. It's not as if they are saying "there, we've proved it, now we only need to respond." No, scientists are providing as much evidence as possible to help us understand just how much this will or will not affect us.
If they haven't given up on climate change yet, why have you? While you sit there convinced that it's not occurring, we continue to blindly provide an input (carbon) into an extremely dangerous system (climate). All of the knowledge we have says that there is an extremely high probability that doing so will result in extreme shifts and war, famine, drought, etc - and you want to wait for a directly testable hypothesis? Goodness.
But that choice of having it be the smallest unit IS "arbitrary" in some sense even if there is reason behind it. We could add some other unit after it and have a whole new fraction of currency. He's saying he doesn't care about the cents portion. Not enough of his transactions make use of it where if everything was rounded up to a higher number, it's not a problem
Kinda makes you wonder if government intervention is really necessary.
It really was necessary here. There's an amazing graph that illustrates this that I can't find right now that basically shows that without the government's subsidy shift from oil to renewable energy, wind installation crashes. The government didn't renew the credits in 06, so installation was really high in 05, nosedives in 06 and rockets back up in 07.
My thoughts exactly. This summary is about as flamebait as they come. I think it could have conveyed the awfulness of the video in a much cleaner manner.
He never said they couldn't sue. Only that they wouldn't. It's too much of a waste of their resources to sue her, because they are only looking for easy money.
exactly. Having studied Everest for a class, it sounds to me like this study simply confirms what every climber knew (which is still useful). It happens on the descent because the weather is good enough in the morning that climbers say "I can make it" and then they reach the top, a storm whips up quickly (which happens there) and on the descent, the edema sets in and the weather is worse. Many of them simply die wandering around in whiteout conditions, literally freezing to death.
Slashdot Mirror
I really do think that this summary was pretty unfair to it. This really doesn't seem to be a rebranding, but actually a pretty solid rewrite of the features. I read a WIRED article on it earlier today and it sounded interesting - a little like the offspring of Wolfram|Alpha and Google. See http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/05/microsofts-bing-hides-its-best-features/
I'm no MS Fanboy, but that post actually highlights Microsofts strength of implementation. It sounds like Oo.org is the one that has some problems in their implementation that only show up when importing a strictly made document. Hopefully this will be pressure to fix the workarounds they have in place so that true interoperability is possible.
The first thing I really remember on my first installation is that, while trying to get a server working, I chmodded something poorly, I think 777, which, besides the obvious security problems, sent my computer into a kernel panic next time it booted. If we're talking distros, I think it was a Red Hat version.
Yup, n00b
amen to that. I once spent an hour talking with a Library of Congress librarian about their catalog, and she showed me how to do some powerful things in it, but I still think it's awful. That power could have been achieved in much better ways.
You bring up a good point. In my policy analysis classes, we considered the validity of assumptions behind laws - causal, jurisdictional, etc. It seems that this is a portion of theory that scientists are held to relatively strictly, but which our lawmakers often fail to address.
Ahh, but if that's the case, can they be blamed? I hear they main()ly inherited their class behavior from the republicans. The only difference is that for democrats, bank_account is only 16 bits.
You go on a rant like that and then purport to somehow be different from those you hate? Every interest group has its extremes, but judging the whole group based upon those individuals is a disservice to everyone and a mistake. One who claims to be such a righteous observer of the flaws of mankind should know that.
We certainly have technology to capture CO2, but not on the scale of a powerplant. We also do not know the proper technology for sequestering it safely for 1000s of years. And the energy required - my goodness. It requires an extra coal plant for every two coal power plants you want to sequester just to power the sequestration process.
I never said sequestration didn't exist. I said safe (I'm adding this part), cheap, carbon capture for power plants does not exist yet and is not worth our while compared to the alternatives we have already developed or which are only a few years out with research funding
I may not have made it clear there, but that's not quite the logic. The logic is that we have an environmental crisis and limited time and resources to put into fixing it. We have technologies that can help us get off of it now for far cheaper than CCS, while CCS is going to be a good decade before anything is viable. The argument is that we should spend as much of our limited capital on the proven technologies while letting the technologies that aren't as likely to help immediately get less funding. If you look at our federal budgets, it has been the reverse with CCS getting the vast majority of the research budgets (until recently) due to its hipness in faux-environmentalism.
FYI - CCS plants are far more expensive than solar
Clean coal doesn't exist. Saying it is a clean energy form is like saying fusion is a clean energy form: regardless of whatever merits you can come up with for the system, carbon capture and sequestration (clean coal), like fusion, has no working plants (and probably won't for at least a decade) and is more a gimmick for public support and research funding than anything else. Money would be better spent on the efficiency efforts mentioned and commercially viable forms of clean energy that can be bought in the market today.
25000 Watts = 20 vacuums = 1 solar beam? I mean, that's a lot of watts for a solar beam, but it's pretty powerful - it takes two whole moves!
Actually, number one is far more likely and will include people starving to death.
In reality, most economic models predict that we actually stand to gain far more in terms of prosperity by making the switch to clean energy. Even the worst models predict at most 5% GDP loss as compared with a 25% GDP loss if we do *nothing* and let climate change force us to adapt on its terms, not ours. There little, if anything that is dangerous about stopping climate change, there is much to gain and almost nothing to lose. It's not that anything could potentially spell our doom. As I said in my first post, this is well-understood and well-researched and is not just a few people suggesting willy-nilly that we have a problem.
You entirely miss the point because you ask the wrong questions. It is not about testing climate change. During the Cuban Missile Crisis they hypothesized that if one country launched an nuke, we'd all launch them and it would be the end for us all. That was untestable, but we avoided it anyway on far less testable science than we have today to suggest that climate change is occurring and will alter life on this planet. If the sum of humanity's knowledge suggests that under a certain situation (launching a nuke, or business as usual carbon emissions) something bad has a probability very close to 1 of occurring, it is probably best to avoid it.
Science is frequently about using proxies and models to test whether something will occur without actually having to perform an experiment (which may be impossible). This type of science has been regularly used for climate change. So let's lay out the basics really quickly:
So, science hasn't given up on climate change yet. It's not as if they are saying "there, we've proved it, now we only need to respond." No, scientists are providing as much evidence as possible to help us understand just how much this will or will not affect us.
If they haven't given up on climate change yet, why have you? While you sit there convinced that it's not occurring, we continue to blindly provide an input (carbon) into an extremely dangerous system (climate). All of the knowledge we have says that there is an extremely high probability that doing so will result in extreme shifts and war, famine, drought, etc - and you want to wait for a directly testable hypothesis? Goodness.
But that choice of having it be the smallest unit IS "arbitrary" in some sense even if there is reason behind it. We could add some other unit after it and have a whole new fraction of currency. He's saying he doesn't care about the cents portion. Not enough of his transactions make use of it where if everything was rounded up to a higher number, it's not a problem
It really was necessary here. There's an amazing graph that illustrates this that I can't find right now that basically shows that without the government's subsidy shift from oil to renewable energy, wind installation crashes. The government didn't renew the credits in 06, so installation was really high in 05, nosedives in 06 and rockets back up in 07.
Since when has that ever prevented anyone from reading slashdot?
My thoughts exactly. This summary is about as flamebait as they come. I think it could have conveyed the awfulness of the video in a much cleaner manner.
Just to add to the places with easy request forms online - DOE also has one which I have personally used (though all told, it took about a month).
http://management.energy.gov/FOIA/foia_request_form.htm
Well, if I remember the reports correctly, they didn't lay anyone off, they just closed the offices. But still, they are cutting costs.
He never said they couldn't sue. Only that they wouldn't. It's too much of a waste of their resources to sue her, because they are only looking for easy money.
While I agree with what TapeCutter said about you finding a reputable source that disagrees, I'll still help.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change
Yes, it's wikipedia, but it is extremely well cited, so believe it.
It was a perfectly cromulent spelling of shoes for dramatic effect
but he's dreaming of a wiped Christmas!
These two games are both super addictive - one is a risk-like strategy game while the other is a...well, it's it's own sort of puzzle game:
Fracas: http://www.smozzie.com/fracas.html
Pathological: http://pathological.sourceforge.net/
I've spent a lot of time playing each of these, and they are a blast for kids too.
exactly. Having studied Everest for a class, it sounds to me like this study simply confirms what every climber knew (which is still useful). It happens on the descent because the weather is good enough in the morning that climbers say "I can make it" and then they reach the top, a storm whips up quickly (which happens there) and on the descent, the edema sets in and the weather is worse. Many of them simply die wandering around in whiteout conditions, literally freezing to death.