I was at a conference a few months ago and saw a woman using an iPad to edit a document using the on-screen keyboard, and I'd wager she was doing about 35wpm. Not spectacular, as she obviously knew how to type, but still, not too bad. I suspect, like anything, it just takes getting used to. It certainly meant she had a smaller, more self-contained device to take notes with than someone with a notebook, or shudder, a netbook/subnotebook.
Oh good, a AGW denier version of the "every day, more scientists are rejecting evolution" claim Creationists have been making for, oh I dunno, eight years.
Give me your rough estimate of the percentage of scientists working in climatology or related fields that reject AGW, and the rough estimate of how many are being added to that every, oh I dunno, month.
The point is superfluous. If there's no AGW, we still hit peak oil at some point this century, and because we haven't adequately prepared for it, our economy goes down the tank, and non-industrialized or semi-industrialized economies even further. You get all your suffering and starvation then.
If AGW is true, then it adds a whole new dimension, shifting rain patterns, meaning some places get wet (or wetter), and some places, in particular key agricultural zones that we have now, turn into dust bowls, and thus the combination of peak oil and AGW makes things even worse than that.
At least right now, maybe, we can try to work towards the necessary technological innovations so that we can rejig our energy production away from long-chain hydrocarbons (oil). This will also have the effect of reducing CO2 output.
As to China, well we can't make them or any other moderately well-endowed nation do what we want. If they don't co-operate that fucks things up considerably, but that hardly seems an argument for not trying to push beyond the oil economy. Sooner or later China is going to hit the same wall, and it will be every bit as damaging for them. They can either co-operate and we can dodge at least one of the bullets, or they don't, in which case I guess they end up buying the technology off of us.
The fact remains the solution to hitting peak oil and seeing deleterious economic effects and the solution to AGW are the same. We're killing two birds with one stone. Short to medium term pain for long term economic viability as opposed to just consuming every drop of oil we can get our hands on, and then suddenly realizing "Oh fuck, you mean that stuff was actually useful for something else besides airplanes, freighters and my car?"
Newtonian mechanics is good enough to insert a craft into Mars orbit. It's has subsumed into General Relativity.
Or, to put it another way, you're overstating your case so badly and understating the usefulness of Newtonian mechanics (which still work very well for non-relativistic speeds).
And then, like the good little psuedo you are, you invoke Kuhn. Go ahead, ask your average researcher what they think of that fatheaded twat. I can guarantee you, every time some fucktard like you wants to attack science, whether its evolution or AGW, the first think they do is start quoting Kuhn, a man pretty much universally rejected by every philosopher of science since.
They're worshiping at the altar, my friend, worshiping at the altar. Apple isn't a company, it's a religion. I swear to god, they could put out the iTurd, a steaming pile of shit on a plate, and the fanboys would be in there bragging how they bought two of them or how they'd heard rumors about the iTurd 2! Of course, what's really sad is that a few weeks later, Samsung would be releasing TurdX, and would have it banned in the EU because it stinks like shit, and thus violates an Apple design patent.
I can't imagine what your roofing material is. Maybe you live on some nice dry climate, but I live up in the Pacific Northwest, and up here, whatever your roofing choice, it's going to have been damned good and be built on top of something solid. Twenty years ago you couldn't get a roof put on up here for $1800.
Let's put it this way. I helped put a new metal roof on 64x12 mobile home about 3 years ago, and excluding the cost of proper rafters and the 1x4 strapping (every 16 inches for about 14x66 feet worth of roofing), it came to about $2800. If we'd gone with fiberglass or asphalt shingles, it would have saved quite a bit on the roofing itself, but then you'd have to have proper sheathing (which, as I said, up here means plywood, only insane or stupid people use OSB), so it would probably have come out to somewhere in the neighborhood of $2700 or $2800, do it yourself. For a contractor to do it (again, excluding framing up a proper rafter system), would most certainly have cost double that, so somewhere in the neighborhood of $6,000. Eight years ago, I dunno, metal would have been a a bit cheaper, but lumber prices weren't all that much, so I'd hazard a guess, doing-it-yourself, it would still have easily topped $2000 for that mobile home and would still have been in $2000 to $3000 for installation if you hired a contractor.
In other words, either you live in an area that allows much cheaper roofing (ie. rolled roofing, some forms of membrane roofing) on residential structures, or you have a very shitty roof.
I'm curious. Have you ever read anything on AGW beyond headlines and denier sites? Could you provide a brief bibliography of the articles and books you've read on the topic?
So you think there's some other source of complex long-chain hydrocarbons? Energy is the easy part... lots of coal and methane to burn... but the next time your little iShit consumer product or turn on your 50inch plasma flat screen and pop in your favorite pr0n DVD, try to fathom how much of those products got pumped out of the ground as oil.
I openly challenge you to phone your nearest roofing contractor and ask him if he'll replace the roof on your average 2,000 square foot home for $3,000. Don't worry, I'll wait until he finishes laughing his ass off.
Fuck pal, I put an el-cheapo asphalt shingle roof on a 20x20 shed (that's 400 square feet), and cheaped out and used OSB instead of plywood (definitely not recommended if you live in any kind of rainy climate), and between the bundles of shingles, roofing felt, the sheets of OSB (they alone came to about $80 or $90), flashing, roofing nails, roofing goop and odds an ends it cost me about $500. If I'd hired a contractor, you could at least double that. And being a shed, it didn't have closed walls, so no risk of dry rot, mold or any other nastiness from a leaking roof, just some rot around the sill plate that I pretty much ignored.
No fucking kidding. The poster is a frickin' moron. A decent roof on an average house is going to cost at least $10,000 to $15,000. The damage from a leaky roof left to long also ups that price because of potential structural damage, at the very least meaning the roofing sheathing (generally plywood) has to be replaced, which adds considerable cost. Then there's damage to carpets, flooring, water inundation into basement or crawl space potentially causing serious foundation damage... and at that point you're talking huge dollars, tens of thousands, sometimes even making it more justifiable to knock it down.
Of course, that's the problem with that analogy. You can, as a last resort light a match and let a house burn. Unfortunately, you're kind of stuck with whatever you've done to the planet. I haven't seen much evidence of any other nearby real estate that we can move to if we sucker punch this orb we're sitting on too hard.
I'm not the one you should be lecturing too. Perhaps all those scientists who disagree with you, oh mighty declarer of what is science and what is not, should receive your wisdom. I'm sure they'll find it enlightening to find out what some denier blowhard on Slashdot has to say about whether what they're doing is science or not.
Have you got the guts to try? There are a number of researchers who actually publish their email or mailing addresses. Rather than debate someone like me, how about you try one of them on for size.
As for me, being a layman, I'll trust that the overwhelming majority of researchers in a particular discipline actually know how to do science. That way, I'm not placing myself in the same position as the morons who deny evolution or the dangers of tobacco smoke.
I'm telling you, if we don't make the moves away from oil-based economics, there isn't going to be even this delightful 1st world jaunt to renewables, there is going to be a substantial and sustained crash. Instead of seizing upon the vast profits that are being made on oil and redirecting them forward, we've basically bought into this idea that we can consume until the cows come home and somehow at the last possible moment, we can just switch gears.
There is no easy fucking solution, for chrissakes. That's the problem. You and I both know that if we don't make the investments today, don't force a way forward, in fifty years, the industrialized and non-industrialized worlds both are going to incredibly damaged.
There is no compromise here, because, irrespective of AGW, we're going to run out of oil, and not only is that going to impact energy prices, it is going to have a far more insidious and long-lasting effect on the hidden hydrocarbon economy, based upon cheap and easy access to long-chain hydrocarbons for a multitude of industries and processes. In fact, I think there is no greater sign of our sheer stupidity than to even tolerate long-chain hydrocarbons being used to produce energy. It is surely the most moronic, short-sighted error our species has ever made, and here you are, trying to justify continuing to do just that, because, somehow, today's pain is going to just magically go away.
How strange it is that the researchers working on it don't use the term "hypothesis" but rather the term theory, and they seem to think they can make at least large-scale predictions.
Ah, but that's right, it's those evil climatologists. How fortunate we have the oil companies and their shills to show us the true path to endless consumption of an infinite resource that has no harmful effects whatsoever.
Slashdot Mirror
I was at a conference a few months ago and saw a woman using an iPad to edit a document using the on-screen keyboard, and I'd wager she was doing about 35wpm. Not spectacular, as she obviously knew how to type, but still, not too bad. I suspect, like anything, it just takes getting used to. It certainly meant she had a smaller, more self-contained device to take notes with than someone with a notebook, or shudder, a netbook/subnotebook.
I didn't know "prays" was spelled "d-e-c-l-a-r-e-s"
Ah and to top of epistemological nihilism, we get treated the No True Scotsman fallacy.
Here's a question for you. What percentage of the active researchers into climatology do you suppose reject AGW?
No kidding. Wow! I can't predict when a particular atomic nucleus of radium decays, so therefore radioactive decay half-lifes must be bullshit!!
Do you ever get the feeling that some of the deniers around here are genuinely stupid people?
Oh good, a AGW denier version of the "every day, more scientists are rejecting evolution" claim Creationists have been making for, oh I dunno, eight years.
Give me your rough estimate of the percentage of scientists working in climatology or related fields that reject AGW, and the rough estimate of how many are being added to that every, oh I dunno, month.
And it most certainly added lots of SO2, which would at least to some degree counteract the warming effects of CO2 coming from the volcano.
The volcano claim was debunked many years ago, and yet here it is, along with every other bullshit denier claim finding its way back.
No matter what the topic, if someone is quoting Dvorak, they're a moron.
The point is superfluous. If there's no AGW, we still hit peak oil at some point this century, and because we haven't adequately prepared for it, our economy goes down the tank, and non-industrialized or semi-industrialized economies even further. You get all your suffering and starvation then.
If AGW is true, then it adds a whole new dimension, shifting rain patterns, meaning some places get wet (or wetter), and some places, in particular key agricultural zones that we have now, turn into dust bowls, and thus the combination of peak oil and AGW makes things even worse than that.
At least right now, maybe, we can try to work towards the necessary technological innovations so that we can rejig our energy production away from long-chain hydrocarbons (oil). This will also have the effect of reducing CO2 output.
As to China, well we can't make them or any other moderately well-endowed nation do what we want. If they don't co-operate that fucks things up considerably, but that hardly seems an argument for not trying to push beyond the oil economy. Sooner or later China is going to hit the same wall, and it will be every bit as damaging for them. They can either co-operate and we can dodge at least one of the bullets, or they don't, in which case I guess they end up buying the technology off of us.
The fact remains the solution to hitting peak oil and seeing deleterious economic effects and the solution to AGW are the same. We're killing two birds with one stone. Short to medium term pain for long term economic viability as opposed to just consuming every drop of oil we can get our hands on, and then suddenly realizing "Oh fuck, you mean that stuff was actually useful for something else besides airplanes, freighters and my car?"
Okay then, you're "observations" were infantile. If they were genuine, then I can only think that you're a fucking retard.
"Honey, I just found out that ring you gave me had diamonds in it! You told me they were cut glass! You liar, you cheat!"
Hydrogen, helium, lithium and trace amounts of everything else.
Your objections were infantile, and you expect a reasonable response? Bizarre.
Newtonian mechanics is good enough to insert a craft into Mars orbit. It's has subsumed into General Relativity.
Or, to put it another way, you're overstating your case so badly and understating the usefulness of Newtonian mechanics (which still work very well for non-relativistic speeds).
And then, like the good little psuedo you are, you invoke Kuhn. Go ahead, ask your average researcher what they think of that fatheaded twat. I can guarantee you, every time some fucktard like you wants to attack science, whether its evolution or AGW, the first think they do is start quoting Kuhn, a man pretty much universally rejected by every philosopher of science since.
They're worshiping at the altar, my friend, worshiping at the altar. Apple isn't a company, it's a religion. I swear to god, they could put out the iTurd, a steaming pile of shit on a plate, and the fanboys would be in there bragging how they bought two of them or how they'd heard rumors about the iTurd 2! Of course, what's really sad is that a few weeks later, Samsung would be releasing TurdX, and would have it banned in the EU because it stinks like shit, and thus violates an Apple design patent.
It's pretty sad too. Not even 'you're fucking over your grandchildren!" seems to work.
We need a replacement... maybe CmdrBurger or CmdrPizza.
The real lesson here is that non-manufacturer extended warranties or a horrible, expensive scam.
I can't imagine what your roofing material is. Maybe you live on some nice dry climate, but I live up in the Pacific Northwest, and up here, whatever your roofing choice, it's going to have been damned good and be built on top of something solid. Twenty years ago you couldn't get a roof put on up here for $1800.
Let's put it this way. I helped put a new metal roof on 64x12 mobile home about 3 years ago, and excluding the cost of proper rafters and the 1x4 strapping (every 16 inches for about 14x66 feet worth of roofing), it came to about $2800. If we'd gone with fiberglass or asphalt shingles, it would have saved quite a bit on the roofing itself, but then you'd have to have proper sheathing (which, as I said, up here means plywood, only insane or stupid people use OSB), so it would probably have come out to somewhere in the neighborhood of $2700 or $2800, do it yourself. For a contractor to do it (again, excluding framing up a proper rafter system), would most certainly have cost double that, so somewhere in the neighborhood of $6,000. Eight years ago, I dunno, metal would have been a a bit cheaper, but lumber prices weren't all that much, so I'd hazard a guess, doing-it-yourself, it would still have easily topped $2000 for that mobile home and would still have been in $2000 to $3000 for installation if you hired a contractor.
In other words, either you live in an area that allows much cheaper roofing (ie. rolled roofing, some forms of membrane roofing) on residential structures, or you have a very shitty roof.
I'm curious. Have you ever read anything on AGW beyond headlines and denier sites? Could you provide a brief bibliography of the articles and books you've read on the topic?
So you think there's some other source of complex long-chain hydrocarbons? Energy is the easy part... lots of coal and methane to burn... but the next time your little iShit consumer product or turn on your 50inch plasma flat screen and pop in your favorite pr0n DVD, try to fathom how much of those products got pumped out of the ground as oil.
I openly challenge you to phone your nearest roofing contractor and ask him if he'll replace the roof on your average 2,000 square foot home for $3,000. Don't worry, I'll wait until he finishes laughing his ass off.
Fuck pal, I put an el-cheapo asphalt shingle roof on a 20x20 shed (that's 400 square feet), and cheaped out and used OSB instead of plywood (definitely not recommended if you live in any kind of rainy climate), and between the bundles of shingles, roofing felt, the sheets of OSB (they alone came to about $80 or $90), flashing, roofing nails, roofing goop and odds an ends it cost me about $500. If I'd hired a contractor, you could at least double that. And being a shed, it didn't have closed walls, so no risk of dry rot, mold or any other nastiness from a leaking roof, just some rot around the sill plate that I pretty much ignored.
No fucking kidding. The poster is a frickin' moron. A decent roof on an average house is going to cost at least $10,000 to $15,000. The damage from a leaky roof left to long also ups that price because of potential structural damage, at the very least meaning the roofing sheathing (generally plywood) has to be replaced, which adds considerable cost. Then there's damage to carpets, flooring, water inundation into basement or crawl space potentially causing serious foundation damage... and at that point you're talking huge dollars, tens of thousands, sometimes even making it more justifiable to knock it down.
Of course, that's the problem with that analogy. You can, as a last resort light a match and let a house burn. Unfortunately, you're kind of stuck with whatever you've done to the planet. I haven't seen much evidence of any other nearby real estate that we can move to if we sucker punch this orb we're sitting on too hard.
I'm not the one you should be lecturing too. Perhaps all those scientists who disagree with you, oh mighty declarer of what is science and what is not, should receive your wisdom. I'm sure they'll find it enlightening to find out what some denier blowhard on Slashdot has to say about whether what they're doing is science or not.
Have you got the guts to try? There are a number of researchers who actually publish their email or mailing addresses. Rather than debate someone like me, how about you try one of them on for size.
As for me, being a layman, I'll trust that the overwhelming majority of researchers in a particular discipline actually know how to do science. That way, I'm not placing myself in the same position as the morons who deny evolution or the dangers of tobacco smoke.
I'm telling you, if we don't make the moves away from oil-based economics, there isn't going to be even this delightful 1st world jaunt to renewables, there is going to be a substantial and sustained crash. Instead of seizing upon the vast profits that are being made on oil and redirecting them forward, we've basically bought into this idea that we can consume until the cows come home and somehow at the last possible moment, we can just switch gears.
There is no easy fucking solution, for chrissakes. That's the problem. You and I both know that if we don't make the investments today, don't force a way forward, in fifty years, the industrialized and non-industrialized worlds both are going to incredibly damaged.
There is no compromise here, because, irrespective of AGW, we're going to run out of oil, and not only is that going to impact energy prices, it is going to have a far more insidious and long-lasting effect on the hidden hydrocarbon economy, based upon cheap and easy access to long-chain hydrocarbons for a multitude of industries and processes. In fact, I think there is no greater sign of our sheer stupidity than to even tolerate long-chain hydrocarbons being used to produce energy. It is surely the most moronic, short-sighted error our species has ever made, and here you are, trying to justify continuing to do just that, because, somehow, today's pain is going to just magically go away.
How strange it is that the researchers working on it don't use the term "hypothesis" but rather the term theory, and they seem to think they can make at least large-scale predictions.
Ah, but that's right, it's those evil climatologists. How fortunate we have the oil companies and their shills to show us the true path to endless consumption of an infinite resource that has no harmful effects whatsoever.