...there's hooks and bubbles and whatnot that appear as the far end result of divination and summoning spells to other planes like the elemental planes...
That's what came to mind...
It is almost as though artificial life is mimicking art now. VR people falling for casts into their plane of existance...
"I'm afraid we can't get your son out Mrs. Thompson. He was pulled from his instance to someplace else and if we cut him off now, it would be neural overload. We're trying to find where he was abducted to and we will then dive in and rescue him, get him to an exit portal or try to do what they did and present him with a hook out of there."
There's enough junk Dutch in it to be read just barely by Americans who paid attention in high school English and History classes where the history of English is concerned. If it was proper Dutch, then it would be much harder.
And Java is far slower yet it gets all the ink why? Because Sun was seen as an upstart taking on Microsoft in the days before open source was the big thing, and now Sun is not so loved. In the aftermath of the hullaballoo, Java remains a slug of a language implementation.
Meanwhile, I can whip up apps in Python in no time and they run far faster and with less nonsense and hassle. Slower than C? Yes. Better for rapid prototyping and quick problem solving on the fly? Yes. Best language I know to bridge structured and object oriented paradigms? Yes.
If I haven't already bought this book, and I may have and just not remember given the stacks of them on my various desks, I will then do so and give a copy to my godson who is just learning about computers. The archaic school system might still be teaching LOGO and I want him to see something that he can actually use.
Pollution would cease being created. It would remain around for many years, CO2 taking as long as 20,000 years to be restored to it's natural level, but will decrease.
The planetary record says otherwise. CO2 levels rise and fall naturally from much much lower than now to much much higher than now. So too do water vapor averages and methane and so forth. Also, temperatures.
Yet another boob who imagines a static Earth where the planet has no volcanism, there are never natural forest fires, asteroids don't exist, comets never hit, and all the animals talk and live in little houses with cute outfits like a Richard Scary book. Why do people this that without mankind the world is something out of that Perfect place in the Walgreen's ads?
I recalll average life spans increasing during the industrial revolution as welll but telling people that isn't as grand and scary as simply going on about doubled cancer rates.
Humans want power, they want industry, the vote with their actions by buying things and demanding great industries, hospitals, and schools be built and concrete and steel don't simply happen by organic processes in your garden. They aren't helpless little children to be lectured to and it isn't the job of the technologist geeks to tell them what is best for them. If mankind fritters away itself, it did it by its own free will and choosing for yourself how to live your life is their business as much as it is yours. It may be one planet we have to share for now, but your share is not more important than others and you don't have more of a right to an environment of a quality you specify over everyone else.
We are turning into a planet of hypersensitive dipsticks who are on the run as fast as possible from free will as if it was the worst thing in the world. We want all these rights and privileges and want to give none to anyone else. We define what everyone else does as an attack on and damaging to us. We whine and moan and make no progress forward.
This was the great epitaph of mankind when it will have been written. "They chose their way with their eyes closed while walking backwards and proclaiming it forwards. Mercy be upon them for they knew not what they did or why but liked to think they did." Underneath in smaller type... "I mean, really. What would it have taken for these sorry fools to accept that they made their own choices instead of arguing that everything simply happened to them because of someone or something else? Apathetic idiots, the lot. Really. -ANONYMOUS ARCHAEOLOGIST"
Looks like sites will have an incentive to implement PrefPass; it's not antagonistic to their interests in the way Bugmenot is.
What is antagonistic is requiring people to give full legal names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, shoe and genital sizes, blood type, genetic write-up, and winning lottery numbers for the next five years. Okay, so not as much as all that but you do feel that way, don't you? In this age of spam and violations of promises stated on these websites that you will not receive unsolicited ads when you will and do five seconds after submitting the information, that all is what is antagonizing. I don't want any info about me whatsoever going to a website just to read a news article. If they need that, then why doesn't my local paper require a blood test at the damn paper box on the corner instead of $0.50? If it isn't money, then what is it? If it is money, go figure out micropayment systems that work or survive on ads but you're not getting my life's history just to RTF linked from Slashdot.
when the prices never came down. I watched them on sale at stores long since gone out of business, at prices only a buck more than now. One occasionally listenable song buried under a pile of crappy ones I don't want to be within ten miles of, on a media that children can burn copies of, by bands that your average child could write better lyrics than, still costs pretty much what they did twenty years ago. And the music has actually gotten worse.
I only buy when I really want what the band is putting out. Sadly, Stabbing Westward went out of business as did Creed and that introspective rock phase is over with me anyhow as I reach Crochety Old Bastardhood. I buy Weird Al. I don't really listen to anything other than whatever plays on Yahoo Launchcast and I can skip bad songs in record time. If they bothered making what I want to hear and sold it at a price I found not to be too big an insult, I'd go shopping for music more.
So it's download, listen for a bit, chuck it. I'm not putting money in the pockets of record execs with no musical talent so they can give 5% to the even less talented artists and claim that their huge cut is to pay one-handed women in Guatemala to press the discs and fantastically color blind alleged artists to design liner notes I'm not reading. Maybe some day I'll pick up one of those iPod things, but I'm not going to buy a disc unless it is really important. I've bought a lot in the past, but in the recent time, not so much and I don't miss it.
More to the point, the Vostok ice core graphs clearly show a repeated tendency of Earth to have slowly rising CO2 and temperature levels, both roughly in line with each other, BUT THEY ESTABLISH NO CAUSATIVE LINK BETWEEN TEMPERATURE AND CO2. IE, we do not see proof of the CO2 levels causing the temperature rise, only that they happen around the same time. Eventually the phenomenon reaches a precipice and drops relatively rapidly compared to the prior years of build-up.
On top of this, we do not have a proper historical superimposition of the sun's activity over these time frames showing its actual output.
Also, these often statically ignore the dynamic system of Earth's orbit and rotation, and the eccentricity of same.
Further, we do not have proper worldwid ocean salinity and chemistry history for the same time frame.
And moreover, we don't take into account over the millions of years where the continents were and what ocean currents dominated.
There are myriad things to take into account, but the poster is correct. Greenland was once green. Europe was so warm England's wine production was felt to be an economic threat in France. We know from written human history that it was so. We know there were warm and cold spikes over the last several thousand years and we know that logically for there to be an "ice age" there has to be a period of time that was conversely NOT an "ice age". We have mountains of evidence of warm periods long before written human history. These claims of warmest in a million years are hogwash as are claims that humans cause it all.
The environmentalists want to tell everyone that it is human hurbis and anthrocentrism that causes us to pollute and make the Earth get warm. Rather, it is they themselves who are full of anthrocentric hubris in that they cannot imagine anything happening on Earth that never happened before because they cannot conceive of anything that does not revolve around humans. Well, the Earth's climatology doesn't revolve around us. It runs over us like everything else and we simply survive where and when we can. When we can't, we get out of Momma Nature's way. But we don't tell her how things go.
I wasn't aware this involved aviation. Maintaining soil by plane does sound interesting though. It sorta happens when chutes don't open if only those pesky next of kin and their friends would stop removing the remains.
I want to see oversubscription come to an end, but I don't see it happening. The dropping price of bandwidth and network equipment is primarily driven by increasing customer demand for higher speeds rather than by an increased number of customers. Unless prices drop as customer demand for higher speed remains static (or at least grows slower than the prices drop), dedicated bandwidth at today's consumer-appropriate speeds and prices isn't going to happen.
Oversubscription is a fact of life. Buy a plane ticket and you have a chance of being bumped because the flight was oversold. Buy a movie ticket and you have a chance of being barred because they hit capacity. Many businesses oversell because they cannot guarantee every sale will actually be used. If they didn't oversell, planes might fly much less than full, movie theaters might play to almost emoty houses, and while that isn't the rule, it happens more often without overselling and that is seen as a loss.
DSL is oversold as well. Most providers have far less than a single OC3 backhaul (usually a single DS3) feeding their DSLAM farm and aggregate bandwidth usage potential far in excess of that. They gamble that not everyone will be on at all hours. I've seen extra DS3 circuits laid in when some customers insisted like schmucks that they should have the right to utilize their pipes to maximum around the clock but it is rare. More often, the company has to obey the laws of economics and cannot lay in another $10K a month connection just because one or two people are hogs. More over, the contract fine print doesn't allow for that kind of usage.
There is such a thing as being a good neighbor and not being a pr*ck. THROTTLE YOURSELF. Set the limits on your P2P clients well below your max, ESPECIALLY UPSTREAM. Don't be a fool and bring your downstream to 98% utilization and then complain to your ISP that mail is timing out. Don't be a childish tool and insist that you are supposed to get unlimited bandwidth. You aren't and the fine print says so. It IS supposed to be burstable. Furthermore, they CANNOT guarantee EVER reaching that maximum speed beyond the first IP hop after you and in the case of DSL there may be a dozen Frame Relay or ATM links underlying it.
Me, I throttle my P2P, I don't run it 24/7/365 but only when I need to get something, and by being good my ISP doesn't whack me for overutilization. I'm paying for a 15Mbpsx2Mbps line and with multipart downloads have many times kicked my aggregate downstream usage to 16.5Mbps and average 14.6Mbps. But I don't do it every waking second. Looking at my firewall graph, my usage is just the bursty sort the average target user's should be.
I read a load of messages, all of which were by people who do not and never have worked at an ISP, MSP, cable company, etc. I have and do.
I work for a telecom company right now which does T-1 and DSL services. We also have e-mail service. We have been one of many ISPs put on SORBS for no other purpose than to blackmail customers with offers to remove them for X$ and continue the ongoing fanatic obsession among some crusty old geeks on the Internet who earnestly believe despite all evidence to the contrary that arbitrary blacklists work. If they did, you'd not have any spam any more, but that's another story subject.
Other ISPs are also ending up on that and other blacklists. No matter how proactive your abuse technicians are at stopping abusive problem customers, there are blacklists which will add all of your IP ranges in their entirety at the drop of a hat. On top of this, many administrators are more and more given to using the nuclear blacklist option of blacklisting entire subnets over the most minor spam. Not content to research who the offender is and file the proper complaints and restrict to the lowest level needed, they will block all mails from that provider.
There is a war going on right now over this and Comcast is not in the habit of arbitrary blocking for nefarious reasons like they don't want competition. On the contrary, they are damn happy when you take your mail to someone else's server and are one less person clogging theirs. However, many brainless idiot end users exist on the Internet who will allow their third party mail service to fill with spam, and forward on to their comcast.net accounts and not think at all about it. Sometimes, the only way to wake people up is to take the nuclear option and block everything. This tends to get the other parties' attention and spur them to some sort of action.
If I were administering an e-mail system right now and I had users forwarding mails through another service and those mails were causing a lot of server strain, I'd seriously consider blocking that forwarding service to cut the stress on the servers in favor of customers actually using the mail service I was providing and not just using it as a catch-all for some other mail service. I'd want the forwarder to do something or at least prod their users into trying to cut down spam forwarded through it, choking the ultimate boxes at my server.
...just supposition. After reading all this, all I see is that dark matter, which cannot be observed by any means other than gravitational effects on other non-dark-matter matter and seems suspiciously absent from everyday experience and experiment here on Earth, must exist because we think we see mass and energy behaving in a way that goes with our theories, yet we've seen it behave that way before and it is only in recent times we've decided that something is wrong with physics and we need dark matter.
Can anyone say aether? I knew you'd try...
We have next to zero understanding of the quantum vacuum, and don't know for certain if everything should pop in and out there including not only electrons and photons, but antiprotons and neutral pi mesons and everything else too. We do know it exists from many many Earth-side experiments and reams of dead trees covered in equations. We don't know how the potential fields exist which give rise to the fields we know, we don't know how any of them link in all ways to the nuclear fields which we also don't understand too well but we have loads of equations and experiments for those.
So we invent something, call it "dark matter", and look for anything we can then say matches our thought experiments and we can forgo all the careful Earth-side experiments. We just sort of treat the absence of any dark matter here or anywhere near here as one of those Hitchhiker's Guide SEPs.
More science-by-supposition and proof-by-spectacle. Show me the proof. Show me why dark matter has to exist. Prove it out with careful calculation and application to everything across the board. We've set off fifty megaton nukes for crying out loud without a single sign of anything amiss that would suggest we have a giant hole in physics requiring dark matter. We've done experiments on electromagnetic fundamentals, nuclear forces, and so on and along the way, we didn't hear of a need to invent dark matter.
But some people look at the cosmos and decide that despite not truly understanding the whole picture of physics at every scale yet, we can claim that dark matter exists and here's proof. Where in the Nine Hells does this stuff fit with the physics theories they alread promulgate as accepted science to be taught in universities?
It looks like modern aether, and it looks as though anyone buying it will be upset when someone working right along on the regular investigations into quantum physics and spacetime and so on puts it together and says, "oh, here's why that galaxy moves that way. We didn't need dark matter after all..."
I'm just glad they did this ahead of any Ruby foray. Online, all I hear anymore is loud rowdy Ruby peope and anti-Python people, some of whom are the same. At the bookstore, I easily see two times more Python books than Ruby. This tells me that despite the online hype, there's still a lot of quiet interest in Python and it isn't that Ruby or anything else is pushing us aside, it's that we're not very vociferous.
Which is fine with me. As long as Yahoo and other outlets keep that in mind that is. Python is not dead no matter what some people want to believe from the SNR.
"Hey man, I'm in a... bad way today... Ya got any releases, any public interest, any sort of op-ed I can score? I'll even take obits or classifieds. Something. You have to help me man, I'm starting to think for myself and I'm considering voting Republican. You gotta get me something. I got money. I'll even pay you to make it up. No, I won't cross you man... Dan Rather who?"
Re:Comments from people who actually create Creati
on
Beginning GIMP
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Gimp lets me down every time. Since it is off the market now, I don't mind advocating a little skullduggery and using P2P to get Micrografx Picture Publisher 10 on Windows. It has infinite undos and did since well before Photoshop, it isn't scattered and counterintuitive like Gimp, and with a little time to get used to where everything is, you can be a real editing speed demon quickly. I wish they'd never been sold out, but since I can't stand Corel and Paint Shop Pro doesn't quite do everything I need as easy as I want... Yeah, I shelled out cash for it originally when it was still in production. Big shiny arse box and everything.
welcome our new (in)constant overlords or would if quantum mechanics allowed me to state what they were and when and where at the same time.
What I took away from the field of physics so far was that constant variables are bunk and largely a matter of fudging. The important constants are actually the formulaic and thus geometric relationships between the variables. Such as E=mc^2. If c is variable then with a factor n,
E=m((nc)^2) which amounts to E=(m/(n^2))((n^2)(c^2))
So for energy to remain the same without violations, as the local speed of light increases, mass must decrease.
I don't believe and never have that the individual value constants are constant but subject to the spacetime fabric and its conditions.
through force of numbers. Adopt strong encryption whenever and wherever you can, hide and obfuscate to maintain privacy at all times, jealously guard what you do. Insist on maintaining your right to privacy and communication, your right to speech at all times. And as a helper, stop being frigging schmucks (you KNOW who you are) and abusing your speech by being purposely nasty and provocative for the sake of attention. SAVE IT for the real issues that actually matter and do not squander your credibility before the public. If we the Internet connected are going to withstand government diddling, we better be able to lay out our positions, intents, beliefs, and methods clearly and make it clear as well that we will not back down and will not roll over.
Or we can go play RPGs all day and let them do whatever they feel like. Given that each side of the political spectrum are equally suspect and likely to screw us over (leftists in the name of political correctness and orthodoxy, rightists in the name of their view of morality and patriotism) and both will sell us out to whoever will pay money to their campaigns, merely voting people in or out won't cut it. Getting out and telling them what we believe and what we will stand for or not is what we have to do and we cannot back down.
It's no contest, virtualization has it all: multiple operating systems running on the same machine at nearly the full speed of the host's processor with each system seamlessly networking with the next.
As Henry Blake said, "everyone who believes that stand on your head."
Never seen any emulator/virutalizer work anywhere near the full speed. Ever. On Linux or Windows or Mac. Ain't no such animal. You want speed with running one OS inside another? Get a quad SMP system with dual-core CPUs and sixteen gigs of memory.
very much willfully overlooked. As is that longitudinal electromagnetic waves are demanded as well as the transverse variety we are familiar with. As is that the electromagnetic fields we know of descend from vector and scalar potential fields.
Scientists are like cops with cases. Grounded in preconceptions and given to following ideas they like while ignoring ones they don't.
While we might end up with the wrong person in jail, scientists engaging in this sort of tunnel vision may cost us our survival because these things obviously must be integrated into our overall framework of scientific knowledge for us to progress to things like warp drive, gravity manipulation, etc. if ever. Refusing to, and trying to come up with mathematical tricks to make them go away is like trying to go straight from horse and cart to V-1 rocket while still denying vehemently the idea of lifting surfaces and ignoring airplanes and maple tree seed pods.
I don't see anyone changing their views to include things they've already ruled out publicly any time soon. Too much ego is on the line really. How can they say that something can't be done only to have something else show them to be full of it? We're not talking Vannevar Bush being shown wrong by the moonshot or Soviet bomb here. We're talking all the people VB was opposed to being shown that THEY were wrong. Not one or two, but the establishment.
So we might be waiting a while until someone creates a homebrew warp drive and antigravity system and lands their own spacecraft on the White House lawn and hands it over to the government saying, "NOW will you believe you don't know everything?!"
We are not going to die or go extinct. Mankind has scant hope of doing to Earth what Earth can do to itself pretty much at random.
If people bothered to study, they'd know that. Between supervolcanos, asteroidal and cometary impacts, methane releases, continental drift, polar wander, and orbital wackiness, it is a wonder that we're still here. But mankind is not remotely powerful enough at this point in time to bring about the kind of horrible futures we in our arrogant anthrocentrism want to imagine.
Oh, it's pretty well established that the current continent arrangement lends towards maintaining the current ice age and towards glacials rather than interglacials such as the one we're in. Millions of years from now when Antarctica and Australia have careened into the North and South American contents as they head off for Asia and the Atlantic widens to a pan-Earth ocean, we'll see what we get. If we're still here and if polar wandering doesn't occur again and send everything off in some other direction.
But human caused climate changes are not going to be on the list of things that remove us. If you refuse to let go of that belief, you are really no different than those who believe that G-d flooded the world to get at sinful little mankind when really, the ice age was ending and the oceans were rising. Anthrocentric detachment from reality.
Yet more impetus for the common people to engage in turning their computers, connections, and so on into Fort Knoxes, spending time and money to hide nothing at all, just to make the point that it is STILL their nothing.
Bring it on forces of invasion, you harbingers of totalitarianism, you destroyers of privacy. You will lose. The siren call of your own species is to be free, and you ultimately cannot fight what you inherently are. Time and history are on the side of the people here.
So lose no heart geekdom. Keep in your minds the immortal words of Princess Leia to Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars and keep on slipping through the fingers of those who would control you and all you know for no better reason than they want to. If they cannot provide a good enough reason to win the day of discourse and debate in the democratic way among the people, the people bear neither blame nor ill conscience over resisting. Once upon a time, some wise people wrote wonderful parchment documents spelling out these thoughts, and if we do not lose hope or memory of why, then one day we will do that again.
Slashdot Mirror
...there's hooks and bubbles and whatnot that appear as the far end result of divination and summoning spells to other planes like the elemental planes...
That's what came to mind...
It is almost as though artificial life is mimicking art now. VR people falling for casts into their plane of existance...
"I'm afraid we can't get your son out Mrs. Thompson. He was pulled from his instance to someplace else and if we cut him off now, it would be neural overload. We're trying to find where he was abducted to and we will then dive in and rescue him, get him to an exit portal or try to do what they did and present him with a hook out of there."
Hmmm...
We have always been at war with the RIAA.
The MPAA have always been our allies. Remember our boys on the SCO Front. Just think about what they have to put up with.
There's enough junk Dutch in it to be read just barely by Americans who paid attention in high school English and History classes where the history of English is concerned. If it was proper Dutch, then it would be much harder.
And Java is far slower yet it gets all the ink why? Because Sun was seen as an upstart taking on Microsoft in the days before open source was the big thing, and now Sun is not so loved. In the aftermath of the hullaballoo, Java remains a slug of a language implementation.
Meanwhile, I can whip up apps in Python in no time and they run far faster and with less nonsense and hassle. Slower than C? Yes. Better for rapid prototyping and quick problem solving on the fly? Yes. Best language I know to bridge structured and object oriented paradigms? Yes.
If I haven't already bought this book, and I may have and just not remember given the stacks of them on my various desks, I will then do so and give a copy to my godson who is just learning about computers. The archaic school system might still be teaching LOGO and I want him to see something that he can actually use.
Pollution would cease being created. It would remain around for many years, CO2 taking as long as 20,000 years to be restored to it's natural level, but will decrease.
The planetary record says otherwise. CO2 levels rise and fall naturally from much much lower than now to much much higher than now. So too do water vapor averages and methane and so forth. Also, temperatures.
Yet another boob who imagines a static Earth where the planet has no volcanism, there are never natural forest fires, asteroids don't exist, comets never hit, and all the animals talk and live in little houses with cute outfits like a Richard Scary book. Why do people this that without mankind the world is something out of that Perfect place in the Walgreen's ads?
I recalll average life spans increasing during the industrial revolution as welll but telling people that isn't as grand and scary as simply going on about doubled cancer rates.
Humans want power, they want industry, the vote with their actions by buying things and demanding great industries, hospitals, and schools be built and concrete and steel don't simply happen by organic processes in your garden. They aren't helpless little children to be lectured to and it isn't the job of the technologist geeks to tell them what is best for them. If mankind fritters away itself, it did it by its own free will and choosing for yourself how to live your life is their business as much as it is yours. It may be one planet we have to share for now, but your share is not more important than others and you don't have more of a right to an environment of a quality you specify over everyone else.
We are turning into a planet of hypersensitive dipsticks who are on the run as fast as possible from free will as if it was the worst thing in the world. We want all these rights and privileges and want to give none to anyone else. We define what everyone else does as an attack on and damaging to us. We whine and moan and make no progress forward.
This was the great epitaph of mankind when it will have been written. "They chose their way with their eyes closed while walking backwards and proclaiming it forwards. Mercy be upon them for they knew not what they did or why but liked to think they did." Underneath in smaller type... "I mean, really. What would it have taken for these sorry fools to accept that they made their own choices instead of arguing that everything simply happened to them because of someone or something else? Apathetic idiots, the lot. Really. -ANONYMOUS ARCHAEOLOGIST"
Looks like sites will have an incentive to implement PrefPass; it's not antagonistic to their interests in the way Bugmenot is.
What is antagonistic is requiring people to give full legal names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, shoe and genital sizes, blood type, genetic write-up, and winning lottery numbers for the next five years. Okay, so not as much as all that but you do feel that way, don't you? In this age of spam and violations of promises stated on these websites that you will not receive unsolicited ads when you will and do five seconds after submitting the information, that all is what is antagonizing. I don't want any info about me whatsoever going to a website just to read a news article. If they need that, then why doesn't my local paper require a blood test at the damn paper box on the corner instead of $0.50? If it isn't money, then what is it? If it is money, go figure out micropayment systems that work or survive on ads but you're not getting my life's history just to RTF linked from Slashdot.
when the prices never came down. I watched them on sale at stores long since gone out of business, at prices only a buck more than now. One occasionally listenable song buried under a pile of crappy ones I don't want to be within ten miles of, on a media that children can burn copies of, by bands that your average child could write better lyrics than, still costs pretty much what they did twenty years ago. And the music has actually gotten worse.
I only buy when I really want what the band is putting out. Sadly, Stabbing Westward went out of business as did Creed and that introspective rock phase is over with me anyhow as I reach Crochety Old Bastardhood. I buy Weird Al. I don't really listen to anything other than whatever plays on Yahoo Launchcast and I can skip bad songs in record time. If they bothered making what I want to hear and sold it at a price I found not to be too big an insult, I'd go shopping for music more.
So it's download, listen for a bit, chuck it. I'm not putting money in the pockets of record execs with no musical talent so they can give 5% to the even less talented artists and claim that their huge cut is to pay one-handed women in Guatemala to press the discs and fantastically color blind alleged artists to design liner notes I'm not reading. Maybe some day I'll pick up one of those iPod things, but I'm not going to buy a disc unless it is really important. I've bought a lot in the past, but in the recent time, not so much and I don't miss it.
More to the point, the Vostok ice core graphs clearly show a repeated tendency of Earth to have slowly rising CO2 and temperature levels, both roughly in line with each other, BUT THEY ESTABLISH NO CAUSATIVE LINK BETWEEN TEMPERATURE AND CO2. IE, we do not see proof of the CO2 levels causing the temperature rise, only that they happen around the same time. Eventually the phenomenon reaches a precipice and drops relatively rapidly compared to the prior years of build-up.
On top of this, we do not have a proper historical superimposition of the sun's activity over these time frames showing its actual output.
Also, these often statically ignore the dynamic system of Earth's orbit and rotation, and the eccentricity of same.
Further, we do not have proper worldwid ocean salinity and chemistry history for the same time frame.
And moreover, we don't take into account over the millions of years where the continents were and what ocean currents dominated.
There are myriad things to take into account, but the poster is correct. Greenland was once green. Europe was so warm England's wine production was felt to be an economic threat in France. We know from written human history that it was so. We know there were warm and cold spikes over the last several thousand years and we know that logically for there to be an "ice age" there has to be a period of time that was conversely NOT an "ice age". We have mountains of evidence of warm periods long before written human history. These claims of warmest in a million years are hogwash as are claims that humans cause it all.
The environmentalists want to tell everyone that it is human hurbis and anthrocentrism that causes us to pollute and make the Earth get warm. Rather, it is they themselves who are full of anthrocentric hubris in that they cannot imagine anything happening on Earth that never happened before because they cannot conceive of anything that does not revolve around humans. Well, the Earth's climatology doesn't revolve around us. It runs over us like everything else and we simply survive where and when we can. When we can't, we get out of Momma Nature's way. But we don't tell her how things go.
What's their plane for maintaining the soil?
I wasn't aware this involved aviation. Maintaining soil by plane does sound interesting though. It sorta happens when chutes don't open if only those pesky next of kin and their friends would stop removing the remains.
I want to see oversubscription come to an end, but I don't see it happening. The dropping price of bandwidth and network equipment is primarily driven by increasing customer demand for higher speeds rather than by an increased number of customers. Unless prices drop as customer demand for higher speed remains static (or at least grows slower than the prices drop), dedicated bandwidth at today's consumer-appropriate speeds and prices isn't going to happen.
Oversubscription is a fact of life. Buy a plane ticket and you have a chance of being bumped because the flight was oversold. Buy a movie ticket and you have a chance of being barred because they hit capacity. Many businesses oversell because they cannot guarantee every sale will actually be used. If they didn't oversell, planes might fly much less than full, movie theaters might play to almost emoty houses, and while that isn't the rule, it happens more often without overselling and that is seen as a loss.
DSL is oversold as well. Most providers have far less than a single OC3 backhaul (usually a single DS3) feeding their DSLAM farm and aggregate bandwidth usage potential far in excess of that. They gamble that not everyone will be on at all hours. I've seen extra DS3 circuits laid in when some customers insisted like schmucks that they should have the right to utilize their pipes to maximum around the clock but it is rare. More often, the company has to obey the laws of economics and cannot lay in another $10K a month connection just because one or two people are hogs. More over, the contract fine print doesn't allow for that kind of usage.
There is such a thing as being a good neighbor and not being a pr*ck. THROTTLE YOURSELF. Set the limits on your P2P clients well below your max, ESPECIALLY UPSTREAM. Don't be a fool and bring your downstream to 98% utilization and then complain to your ISP that mail is timing out. Don't be a childish tool and insist that you are supposed to get unlimited bandwidth. You aren't and the fine print says so. It IS supposed to be burstable. Furthermore, they CANNOT guarantee EVER reaching that maximum speed beyond the first IP hop after you and in the case of DSL there may be a dozen Frame Relay or ATM links underlying it.
Me, I throttle my P2P, I don't run it 24/7/365 but only when I need to get something, and by being good my ISP doesn't whack me for overutilization. I'm paying for a 15Mbpsx2Mbps line and with multipart downloads have many times kicked my aggregate downstream usage to 16.5Mbps and average 14.6Mbps. But I don't do it every waking second. Looking at my firewall graph, my usage is just the bursty sort the average target user's should be.
I read a load of messages, all of which were by people who do not and never have worked at an ISP, MSP, cable company, etc. I have and do. I work for a telecom company right now which does T-1 and DSL services. We also have e-mail service. We have been one of many ISPs put on SORBS for no other purpose than to blackmail customers with offers to remove them for X$ and continue the ongoing fanatic obsession among some crusty old geeks on the Internet who earnestly believe despite all evidence to the contrary that arbitrary blacklists work. If they did, you'd not have any spam any more, but that's another story subject. Other ISPs are also ending up on that and other blacklists. No matter how proactive your abuse technicians are at stopping abusive problem customers, there are blacklists which will add all of your IP ranges in their entirety at the drop of a hat. On top of this, many administrators are more and more given to using the nuclear blacklist option of blacklisting entire subnets over the most minor spam. Not content to research who the offender is and file the proper complaints and restrict to the lowest level needed, they will block all mails from that provider. There is a war going on right now over this and Comcast is not in the habit of arbitrary blocking for nefarious reasons like they don't want competition. On the contrary, they are damn happy when you take your mail to someone else's server and are one less person clogging theirs. However, many brainless idiot end users exist on the Internet who will allow their third party mail service to fill with spam, and forward on to their comcast.net accounts and not think at all about it. Sometimes, the only way to wake people up is to take the nuclear option and block everything. This tends to get the other parties' attention and spur them to some sort of action. If I were administering an e-mail system right now and I had users forwarding mails through another service and those mails were causing a lot of server strain, I'd seriously consider blocking that forwarding service to cut the stress on the servers in favor of customers actually using the mail service I was providing and not just using it as a catch-all for some other mail service. I'd want the forwarder to do something or at least prod their users into trying to cut down spam forwarded through it, choking the ultimate boxes at my server.
...just supposition. After reading all this, all I see is that dark matter, which cannot be observed by any means other than gravitational effects on other non-dark-matter matter and seems suspiciously absent from everyday experience and experiment here on Earth, must exist because we think we see mass and energy behaving in a way that goes with our theories, yet we've seen it behave that way before and it is only in recent times we've decided that something is wrong with physics and we need dark matter.
Can anyone say aether? I knew you'd try...
We have next to zero understanding of the quantum vacuum, and don't know for certain if everything should pop in and out there including not only electrons and photons, but antiprotons and neutral pi mesons and everything else too. We do know it exists from many many Earth-side experiments and reams of dead trees covered in equations. We don't know how the potential fields exist which give rise to the fields we know, we don't know how any of them link in all ways to the nuclear fields which we also don't understand too well but we have loads of equations and experiments for those.
So we invent something, call it "dark matter", and look for anything we can then say matches our thought experiments and we can forgo all the careful Earth-side experiments. We just sort of treat the absence of any dark matter here or anywhere near here as one of those Hitchhiker's Guide SEPs.
More science-by-supposition and proof-by-spectacle. Show me the proof. Show me why dark matter has to exist. Prove it out with careful calculation and application to everything across the board. We've set off fifty megaton nukes for crying out loud without a single sign of anything amiss that would suggest we have a giant hole in physics requiring dark matter. We've done experiments on electromagnetic fundamentals, nuclear forces, and so on and along the way, we didn't hear of a need to invent dark matter.
But some people look at the cosmos and decide that despite not truly understanding the whole picture of physics at every scale yet, we can claim that dark matter exists and here's proof. Where in the Nine Hells does this stuff fit with the physics theories they alread promulgate as accepted science to be taught in universities?
It looks like modern aether, and it looks as though anyone buying it will be upset when someone working right along on the regular investigations into quantum physics and spacetime and so on puts it together and says, "oh, here's why that galaxy moves that way. We didn't need dark matter after all..."
when is the next Yggdrasil release? Oh, right, I was thrown back six or seven years by seeing the name Slackware and the list of specs. Never mind.
I'm just glad they did this ahead of any Ruby foray. Online, all I hear anymore is loud rowdy Ruby peope and anti-Python people, some of whom are the same. At the bookstore, I easily see two times more Python books than Ruby. This tells me that despite the online hype, there's still a lot of quiet interest in Python and it isn't that Ruby or anything else is pushing us aside, it's that we're not very vociferous.
Which is fine with me. As long as Yahoo and other outlets keep that in mind that is. Python is not dead no matter what some people want to believe from the SNR.
Isn't rooting Circuit City to take on the MPAA like summoning Orcus to fight off Demogorgon and hoping it turns out for the best?
"Hey man, I'm in a... bad way today... Ya got any releases, any public interest, any sort of op-ed I can score? I'll even take obits or classifieds. Something. You have to help me man, I'm starting to think for myself and I'm considering voting Republican. You gotta get me something. I got money. I'll even pay you to make it up. No, I won't cross you man... Dan Rather who?"
Gimp lets me down every time. Since it is off the market now, I don't mind advocating a little skullduggery and using P2P to get Micrografx Picture Publisher 10 on Windows. It has infinite undos and did since well before Photoshop, it isn't scattered and counterintuitive like Gimp, and with a little time to get used to where everything is, you can be a real editing speed demon quickly. I wish they'd never been sold out, but since I can't stand Corel and Paint Shop Pro doesn't quite do everything I need as easy as I want... Yeah, I shelled out cash for it originally when it was still in production. Big shiny arse box and everything.
welcome our new (in)constant overlords or would if quantum mechanics allowed me to state what they were and when and where at the same time.
What I took away from the field of physics so far was that constant variables are bunk and largely a matter of fudging. The important constants are actually the formulaic and thus geometric relationships between the variables. Such as E=mc^2. If c is variable then with a factor n,
E=m((nc)^2) which amounts to E=(m/(n^2))((n^2)(c^2))
So for energy to remain the same without violations, as the local speed of light increases, mass must decrease.
I don't believe and never have that the individual value constants are constant but subject to the spacetime fabric and its conditions.
through force of numbers. Adopt strong encryption whenever and wherever you can, hide and obfuscate to maintain privacy at all times, jealously guard what you do. Insist on maintaining your right to privacy and communication, your right to speech at all times. And as a helper, stop being frigging schmucks (you KNOW who you are) and abusing your speech by being purposely nasty and provocative for the sake of attention. SAVE IT for the real issues that actually matter and do not squander your credibility before the public. If we the Internet connected are going to withstand government diddling, we better be able to lay out our positions, intents, beliefs, and methods clearly and make it clear as well that we will not back down and will not roll over.
Or we can go play RPGs all day and let them do whatever they feel like. Given that each side of the political spectrum are equally suspect and likely to screw us over (leftists in the name of political correctness and orthodoxy, rightists in the name of their view of morality and patriotism) and both will sell us out to whoever will pay money to their campaigns, merely voting people in or out won't cut it. Getting out and telling them what we believe and what we will stand for or not is what we have to do and we cannot back down.
It's no contest, virtualization has it all: multiple operating systems running on the same machine at nearly the full speed of the host's processor with each system seamlessly networking with the next.
As Henry Blake said, "everyone who believes that stand on your head."
Never seen any emulator/virutalizer work anywhere near the full speed. Ever. On Linux or Windows or Mac. Ain't no such animal. You want speed with running one OS inside another? Get a quad SMP system with dual-core CPUs and sixteen gigs of memory.
very much willfully overlooked. As is that longitudinal electromagnetic waves are demanded as well as the transverse variety we are familiar with. As is that the electromagnetic fields we know of descend from vector and scalar potential fields.
Scientists are like cops with cases. Grounded in preconceptions and given to following ideas they like while ignoring ones they don't.
While we might end up with the wrong person in jail, scientists engaging in this sort of tunnel vision may cost us our survival because these things obviously must be integrated into our overall framework of scientific knowledge for us to progress to things like warp drive, gravity manipulation, etc. if ever. Refusing to, and trying to come up with mathematical tricks to make them go away is like trying to go straight from horse and cart to V-1 rocket while still denying vehemently the idea of lifting surfaces and ignoring airplanes and maple tree seed pods.
I don't see anyone changing their views to include things they've already ruled out publicly any time soon. Too much ego is on the line really. How can they say that something can't be done only to have something else show them to be full of it? We're not talking Vannevar Bush being shown wrong by the moonshot or Soviet bomb here. We're talking all the people VB was opposed to being shown that THEY were wrong. Not one or two, but the establishment.
So we might be waiting a while until someone creates a homebrew warp drive and antigravity system and lands their own spacecraft on the White House lawn and hands it over to the government saying, "NOW will you believe you don't know everything?!"
This does nothing to detract from the hellish torture of commuting on that stretch every day and night you know.
We are not going to die or go extinct. Mankind has scant hope of doing to Earth what Earth can do to itself pretty much at random.
If people bothered to study, they'd know that. Between supervolcanos, asteroidal and cometary impacts, methane releases, continental drift, polar wander, and orbital wackiness, it is a wonder that we're still here. But mankind is not remotely powerful enough at this point in time to bring about the kind of horrible futures we in our arrogant anthrocentrism want to imagine.
Oh, it's pretty well established that the current continent arrangement lends towards maintaining the current ice age and towards glacials rather than interglacials such as the one we're in. Millions of years from now when Antarctica and Australia have careened into the North and South American contents as they head off for Asia and the Atlantic widens to a pan-Earth ocean, we'll see what we get. If we're still here and if polar wandering doesn't occur again and send everything off in some other direction.
But human caused climate changes are not going to be on the list of things that remove us. If you refuse to let go of that belief, you are really no different than those who believe that G-d flooded the world to get at sinful little mankind when really, the ice age was ending and the oceans were rising. Anthrocentric detachment from reality.
Yet more impetus for the common people to engage in turning their computers, connections, and so on into Fort Knoxes, spending time and money to hide nothing at all, just to make the point that it is STILL their nothing.
Bring it on forces of invasion, you harbingers of totalitarianism, you destroyers of privacy. You will lose. The siren call of your own species is to be free, and you ultimately cannot fight what you inherently are. Time and history are on the side of the people here.
So lose no heart geekdom. Keep in your minds the immortal words of Princess Leia to Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars and keep on slipping through the fingers of those who would control you and all you know for no better reason than they want to. If they cannot provide a good enough reason to win the day of discourse and debate in the democratic way among the people, the people bear neither blame nor ill conscience over resisting. Once upon a time, some wise people wrote wonderful parchment documents spelling out these thoughts, and if we do not lose hope or memory of why, then one day we will do that again.
We the people...