To put that number into perspective, prior to the Montreal Protocol, Dupont alone was cranking out 450 million lbs of CFCs a year. So 1 million lbs/year is still somewhat significant in comparison.
An actual scientist! Do you work under grants? Tell me honestly, if you applied for a grant to study a theory that C02 concentrations are not driving the earth-air temp, do you think you'd actually get funded? Or would all the other research groups that want to expand upon the theory get funded first? If you got a grant to prove C02 levels were the driver and you failed to establish the connection, how likely are you to get funded again? My wife wrote grant applications for quite a while, and we're both very familiar how the process works.
The strong bias I see in scientific research isn't at the working level - its primarily at the funding level which very politically driven. I'm going with the assumption that 99% of scientists are trying to be objective. Unfortunately the occasional example of scientific results being deliberately skewed to support the initial assumptions do make people question the whole lot of them.
Citing two papers doesn't show much. Particularly when you read the abstract for the first citation and it says "Additional climate forcing by changes in the Sun's output of ultraviolet light, and of magnetized plasmas, cannot be ruled out. The suggested mechanisms are, however, too complex to evaluate meaningfully at present."
The second paper you cited says that both CO2 and the natural causes must be accounted for in order to make the current models fit the actual data. In other words CO2 is not the dominate controller.
I can dig up just as many citations that show that solar output is sufficient. For example http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/235402/global-warming/274834/Variations-in-solar-output Those papers also question the validity of measuring a single portion of the spectrum at the earth surface and ignoring cosmis radiation and sunspot activity. Hence my assertion that there is still doubt that CO2 is the prime cause of the global temperature variations.
Okay so I called the local weld shop where we get our gases. You're right that "ballon gas" usually isn't pure, but its normally about 20% air. The reason for that is that it's simply cheaper to manufacture it. Welding quality helium tanks are much more pure and expensive (and no they don't add argon as its more expensive than the helium).
I can certainly believe that some O2 is added to the N20 for medical use for the reasons you cite, but I don't see why they'd go more than the normal 21% atmospheric concentration.
I doubt they add O2 to helium tanks. Adding in heavy O2 would defeat the purpose of using a light gas in ballons. A 50/50 mix would have 1/3 the lift of a straight helium. Welders certainly don't want O2 in their Helium tanks (used for some specialize welding).
He didn't directly say the CFC issue was bogus. He did highlighted a major problem with science in the US. The only way to get grant funding is scare tactics, or to blindly support a political agenda that's willing to pay to have their pet theories proven.
Besides, there is still some lingering doubt about the effect of CFCs. There's actually a stronger correlation between the ozone densities in the lower stratosphere and things such as solar outputs. Some contradictions that have not been explained are the ozone "hole" (not really a hole) getting smaller before the atmospheric CFC levels declined. The upper stratosphere is generally unaffected even though most current CFC theories say it should be. The initial baseline we keep comparing too was probably the high point of a cyclic process. We see the size of the hole cycling up and down through the year, its reasonable to assume it also has a long cycle.
The next scare tactic out there is carbon emissions. That's certainly a politically charged arena. Just ask Al Gore who's getting rich off it. The global temperature change tracks quite nicely with solar output levels, which happen to be cyclic. The politicians and scientists are making the tragic assuming that the earths temperature is supposed to be constant, and ignoring that it probably cycles up and down over a hundred year cycle. Are we affecting it? Possibly, but we are certainly not the dominant or controlling factor.
Happens more often that you'd realize. China is very, very good at hacking and spying. They also happen to manufacture a significant portion of the IT components that we all buy and consider trustworthy. I've convinced that if we ever piss of China, they can send out some magic icmp packet that will start bricking every Cisco switch in the US.
On average this is true that higher male or female hormone levels are correlated with differing finger lengths as you described. Ssomething like 75% of the time as I recall from the study which also happened to try to correlate it with intelligence (of course a sample size of 100 white people is hardly definitive). Of course, in general having a penis means you're male too, but if you've been paying attention you'll have noticed that isn't a 100% indicator either. In fact checking for sex organs is far more reliable than looking at the comparative length of someones fingers.
It seems like they ought to be suing the teacher for distributing and/or reproducing the paper, not the company. As I understand it, the company merely received the copies and stored them. Or does the company allow other teachers to download potentially similar papers if there is a match flagged? Its the same argument about downloading music not being the issue, but rather allowing others to download it from you.
That's the exact issue. It's currently NOT legal for the government to collect information on someone without a valid reason. Two good examples are the Watergate fiasco and recent illegal wiretapping. This is about trying to define cookies as a valid operational requirement, and set the appropriate boundaries for the collection of any information.
Yes it does: "Art 18. After each engagement, Parties to the conflict shall, without delay, take all possible measures to search for and collect the shipwrecked, wounded and sick, to protect them against pillage and ill-treatment, to ensure their adequate care, and to search for the dead and prevent their being despoiled."
The general conclusion on page 3 says it all. No difference between hands-free and non-hands-free from a "cognitive distraction" standpoint. It says nothing about visual distraction of having to look at the phone. It just points out the obvious conclusion that talking on a phone is a "cognitive distraction". Well duh! Read a little further "it is not possible to make a direct connection to crash risk". Okay, so we have the same old problem of correlation doesn't equal causation.
This paper only cites old, semi-questionable, existing research. No quality new data was collected or presented. This was supposed to be a fresh study. Instead this thing looks like a grade-C high-school student spent a few hours on the internet digging up some previous papers, and then summarizing the conflicting data.
Another very valid reason for trashing this crappy study (aside from shoddy research) is that the "independent research paper" was written as though it were intended to put forth suggested policies and laws. Really, go read the freaking thing. The bit about pissing off Congress, is because Congress knows full well that the Fed Govt (much less the lowly NHSTA) can not dictate how the States or Corporations write their laws. Of course nothing saying they can't bribe the states with highway funds like they did with the 55mph thing.
I never called it a "major energy draw". Keep in mind that 400-600 watts is only while its running, which is less than 20% of the time. My point is that dorking around with the fridge temp settings based on the time of day isn't going to save any money or energy. In the end it'll cost more in energy and pollution creating these new features.
I pick on lighting because installing more efficient lighting is easier, cheaper, and far more effective. Installing a higher SEER heat pump can often pay for itself within 5 years in the energy savings. Spending some moeny to improve the insulation in your home can pay off in the long run too. The goal is to use less energy.
I do agree that leveling out the daytime surge does help the utility, but nitpicking little things like the fridge when there are far larger daytime draws is a waste of effort.
I agree that it would be more productive to invest in more efficient systems (more efficient hvac, motion sensor lights, CFL & LED lighting) to reduce the overall average utility load, rather than to try shuffling their loads around time-wise.
In the larger picture, "taking turns" during the day at the individual appliance level doesn't do anything. It just complicates the equipment and makes it more expensive. The loads averages out anyway once you account for large cities of them. The peak loads seen at the utility are mainly due to commercial use and high use of a/c during the hot part of the day.
http://www.abaris.net/review/wattage_energy_consumption.htm. A fridge about equivalent to 5-6 100W bulbs. Turn off a few extra bulbs or replace with CFLs. Shift the fridge load to non-peak hours doesn't save any energy, nor will it make much of a difference in the peak loads seen at the utility.
The Aluminum plant in Spokane a few years back, when the electricity price was climbing, decided they could make more money by shutting down. They had a fix price contract for a certain quantity of power that was much lower than the current rates. They made a high profit by not using the electricity and selling it back to the grid. It was also a nice FU to the greedy union who was threatening to strike at the time.
That last thing you want is for your fridge to cycle temps up and down. That actually encourages spoilage in the fresh part of the fridge and increases frosting in the icebox. Besides, the fridge takes about the same anount of energy as a few incandescent bulbs. Why it does make sense to address the minor energy loads, you really need to start with the major energy draws in the home - A/C, heating, and lighting.
Have you expressed this very directly to your management? Perhaps now they will be more receptive to your wisdom. If they aren't, you need to either find another job or recognize that they really don't give a crap and work with what you've got. Otherwise, continuing to complain when they don't care will just get you labeled a whiner, or worse a scapegoat when another intrusion happens.
Maybe this article should have also said "Sorry state of video in linux". Just looking at the posts on video highlights how erratic good video support is in Linux. Linux seems to have difficulty playing DVDs with good quality, much less running an intense 3D game like Half-Life. Face it - Windows totally kicks Linux's ass with respect to video and sound support.
I've got no problem with the guy trying to get up to speed. I have respect for someone who admits a shortcoming and works at fixing it. Slashdot is hardly a great place to do it though. He should go to his boss and admit that he's in over his head and needs to either get some training/credentials or get a decent consult with an expert. The money or resources spent on the education or quality advice wil pay off down the road when they avoid a major security incident.
I get the strong impression you might be in way over your head with less than 3 years experience. You're asking about implement technologies which you don't fully understand yet. The risk here is that you might get a solution that works, but it will be horribly insecure.
VLANS are layer 2. Subnetting is at the layer three level and normally coincidence with the layer 2 vlans you create (but not always). While you can have vlans spread across large regions, you defeat most of the benefits of using a vlan such as limiting broadcast domains and introduce some latency and timing issues. Cisco will tell you to keep the number of hops as small as possible. Adding 250 ms rtt between peers is an issue. Cisco has also had issues where vlans were not hard boundaries and you could get traffic to jump vlan boundaries by faking the 802.11q tags.
I think I understand what your trying to accomplish - a public IP that can move around a larger region and between wireless towers at will. I think a far better solution is along the lines of a secure VPN. That avoids a whole slew of security and performance issues associated with vlans and wireless. What's stopping a malicious person from coming up with a wireless subscriber module (what exactly is that, btw?) that adds whatever vlan tag they want and getting access to any subnet at will?
I also recommend using dhcp-helper and a handful of linux dhcp servers. That puts all the configuration in a central linux box and you don't have to muck with all the switches and routers for every little change.
Done right on a network with proper QOS, VOIP using the G.711 codec works great. The big benefit for me is that it eliminated the need for installing an entire cabling plant just for analog voice.
VoIP has come a long ways since that has started and the bandwidth needed for good quality calls have dropped quite a bit.
If you definite a "good quality call" as the same quality as a POTS line, then VOIP G.711 (no compression) actually requires more bandwidth as it adds control signaling and you end up needing 80k instead of a single 64k channel per call. It also introduces more timing issues as ip doesn't guarantee timely or orderly deliverly of the packets. If you use a lower quality compression codec line G.729 you can reduce the bandwidth down as far as 8k data and 8k control, but at the expense of reduced voice quality - making it sound like a poor cell phone call.
Faking an email isn't a crime, and the pirating is a copyright infringement which isn't actionable by the cops unless the owner protests. However hacking in and changing grades is a crime called computer trespass.
Slashdot Mirror
To put that number into perspective, prior to the Montreal Protocol, Dupont alone was cranking out 450 million lbs of CFCs a year. So 1 million lbs/year is still somewhat significant in comparison.
An actual scientist! Do you work under grants? Tell me honestly, if you applied for a grant to study a theory that C02 concentrations are not driving the earth-air temp, do you think you'd actually get funded? Or would all the other research groups that want to expand upon the theory get funded first? If you got a grant to prove C02 levels were the driver and you failed to establish the connection, how likely are you to get funded again? My wife wrote grant applications for quite a while, and we're both very familiar how the process works.
The strong bias I see in scientific research isn't at the working level - its primarily at the funding level which very politically driven. I'm going with the assumption that 99% of scientists are trying to be objective. Unfortunately the occasional example of scientific results being deliberately skewed to support the initial assumptions do make people question the whole lot of them.
Citing two papers doesn't show much. Particularly when you read the abstract for the first citation and it says "Additional climate forcing by changes in the Sun's output of ultraviolet light, and of magnetized plasmas, cannot be ruled out. The suggested mechanisms are, however, too complex to evaluate meaningfully at present."
The second paper you cited says that both CO2 and the natural causes must be accounted for in order to make the current models fit the actual data. In other words CO2 is not the dominate controller.
I can dig up just as many citations that show that solar output is sufficient. For example http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/235402/global-warming/274834/Variations-in-solar-output Those papers also question the validity of measuring a single portion of the spectrum at the earth surface and ignoring cosmis radiation and sunspot activity. Hence my assertion that there is still doubt that CO2 is the prime cause of the global temperature variations.
Okay so I called the local weld shop where we get our gases. You're right that "ballon gas" usually isn't pure, but its normally about 20% air. The reason for that is that it's simply cheaper to manufacture it. Welding quality helium tanks are much more pure and expensive (and no they don't add argon as its more expensive than the helium).
I can certainly believe that some O2 is added to the N20 for medical use for the reasons you cite, but I don't see why they'd go more than the normal 21% atmospheric concentration.
I doubt they add O2 to helium tanks. Adding in heavy O2 would defeat the purpose of using a light gas in ballons. A 50/50 mix would have 1/3 the lift of a straight helium. Welders certainly don't want O2 in their Helium tanks (used for some specialize welding).
He didn't directly say the CFC issue was bogus. He did highlighted a major problem with science in the US. The only way to get grant funding is scare tactics, or to blindly support a political agenda that's willing to pay to have their pet theories proven.
Besides, there is still some lingering doubt about the effect of CFCs. There's actually a stronger correlation between the ozone densities in the lower stratosphere and things such as solar outputs. Some contradictions that have not been explained are the ozone "hole" (not really a hole) getting smaller before the atmospheric CFC levels declined. The upper stratosphere is generally unaffected even though most current CFC theories say it should be. The initial baseline we keep comparing too was probably the high point of a cyclic process. We see the size of the hole cycling up and down through the year, its reasonable to assume it also has a long cycle.
The next scare tactic out there is carbon emissions. That's certainly a politically charged arena. Just ask Al Gore who's getting rich off it. The global temperature change tracks quite nicely with solar output levels, which happen to be cyclic. The politicians and scientists are making the tragic assuming that the earths temperature is supposed to be constant, and ignoring that it probably cycles up and down over a hundred year cycle. Are we affecting it? Possibly, but we are certainly not the dominant or controlling factor.
Happens more often that you'd realize. China is very, very good at hacking and spying. They also happen to manufacture a significant portion of the IT components that we all buy and consider trustworthy. I've convinced that if we ever piss of China, they can send out some magic icmp packet that will start bricking every Cisco switch in the US.
On average this is true that higher male or female hormone levels are correlated with differing finger lengths as you described. Ssomething like 75% of the time as I recall from the study which also happened to try to correlate it with intelligence (of course a sample size of 100 white people is hardly definitive). Of course, in general having a penis means you're male too, but if you've been paying attention you'll have noticed that isn't a 100% indicator either. In fact checking for sex organs is far more reliable than looking at the comparative length of someones fingers.
It seems like they ought to be suing the teacher for distributing and/or reproducing the paper, not the company. As I understand it, the company merely received the copies and stored them. Or does the company allow other teachers to download potentially similar papers if there is a match flagged? Its the same argument about downloading music not being the issue, but rather allowing others to download it from you.
How do you know China isn't already doing this? I certainly don't doubt that NSA does this type of stuff.
"it is currently perfectly legal to use cookies"
That's the exact issue. It's currently NOT legal for the government to collect information on someone without a valid reason. Two good examples are the Watergate fiasco and recent illegal wiretapping. This is about trying to define cookies as a valid operational requirement, and set the appropriate boundaries for the collection of any information.
Yes it does:
"Art 18. After each engagement, Parties to the conflict shall, without delay, take all possible measures to search for and collect the shipwrecked, wounded and sick, to protect them against pillage and ill-treatment, to ensure their adequate care, and to search for the dead and prevent their being despoiled."
The general conclusion on page 3 says it all. No difference between hands-free and non-hands-free from a "cognitive distraction" standpoint. It says nothing about visual distraction of having to look at the phone. It just points out the obvious conclusion that talking on a phone is a "cognitive distraction". Well duh! Read a little further "it is not possible to make a direct connection to crash risk". Okay, so we have the same old problem of correlation doesn't equal causation.
This paper only cites old, semi-questionable, existing research. No quality new data was collected or presented. This was supposed to be a fresh study. Instead this thing looks like a grade-C high-school student spent a few hours on the internet digging up some previous papers, and then summarizing the conflicting data.
Another very valid reason for trashing this crappy study (aside from shoddy research) is that the "independent research paper" was written as though it were intended to put forth suggested policies and laws. Really, go read the freaking thing. The bit about pissing off Congress, is because Congress knows full well that the Fed Govt (much less the lowly NHSTA) can not dictate how the States or Corporations write their laws. Of course nothing saying they can't bribe the states with highway funds like they did with the 55mph thing.
I never called it a "major energy draw". Keep in mind that 400-600 watts is only while its running, which is less than 20% of the time. My point is that dorking around with the fridge temp settings based on the time of day isn't going to save any money or energy. In the end it'll cost more in energy and pollution creating these new features. I pick on lighting because installing more efficient lighting is easier, cheaper, and far more effective. Installing a higher SEER heat pump can often pay for itself within 5 years in the energy savings. Spending some moeny to improve the insulation in your home can pay off in the long run too. The goal is to use less energy. I do agree that leveling out the daytime surge does help the utility, but nitpicking little things like the fridge when there are far larger daytime draws is a waste of effort.
I agree that it would be more productive to invest in more efficient systems (more efficient hvac, motion sensor lights, CFL & LED lighting) to reduce the overall average utility load, rather than to try shuffling their loads around time-wise. In the larger picture, "taking turns" during the day at the individual appliance level doesn't do anything. It just complicates the equipment and makes it more expensive. The loads averages out anyway once you account for large cities of them. The peak loads seen at the utility are mainly due to commercial use and high use of a/c during the hot part of the day.
http://www.abaris.net/review/wattage_energy_consumption.htm. A fridge about equivalent to 5-6 100W bulbs. Turn off a few extra bulbs or replace with CFLs. Shift the fridge load to non-peak hours doesn't save any energy, nor will it make much of a difference in the peak loads seen at the utility.
The Aluminum plant in Spokane a few years back, when the electricity price was climbing, decided they could make more money by shutting down. They had a fix price contract for a certain quantity of power that was much lower than the current rates. They made a high profit by not using the electricity and selling it back to the grid. It was also a nice FU to the greedy union who was threatening to strike at the time.
That last thing you want is for your fridge to cycle temps up and down. That actually encourages spoilage in the fresh part of the fridge and increases frosting in the icebox. Besides, the fridge takes about the same anount of energy as a few incandescent bulbs. Why it does make sense to address the minor energy loads, you really need to start with the major energy draws in the home - A/C, heating, and lighting.
Have you expressed this very directly to your management? Perhaps now they will be more receptive to your wisdom. If they aren't, you need to either find another job or recognize that they really don't give a crap and work with what you've got. Otherwise, continuing to complain when they don't care will just get you labeled a whiner, or worse a scapegoat when another intrusion happens.
Maybe this article should have also said "Sorry state of video in linux". Just looking at the posts on video highlights how erratic good video support is in Linux. Linux seems to have difficulty playing DVDs with good quality, much less running an intense 3D game like Half-Life. Face it - Windows totally kicks Linux's ass with respect to video and sound support.
I've got no problem with the guy trying to get up to speed. I have respect for someone who admits a shortcoming and works at fixing it. Slashdot is hardly a great place to do it though. He should go to his boss and admit that he's in over his head and needs to either get some training/credentials or get a decent consult with an expert. The money or resources spent on the education or quality advice wil pay off down the road when they avoid a major security incident.
I get the strong impression you might be in way over your head with less than 3 years experience. You're asking about implement technologies which you don't fully understand yet. The risk here is that you might get a solution that works, but it will be horribly insecure.
VLANS are layer 2. Subnetting is at the layer three level and normally coincidence with the layer 2 vlans you create (but not always). While you can have vlans spread across large regions, you defeat most of the benefits of using a vlan such as limiting broadcast domains and introduce some latency and timing issues. Cisco will tell you to keep the number of hops as small as possible. Adding 250 ms rtt between peers is an issue. Cisco has also had issues where vlans were not hard boundaries and you could get traffic to jump vlan boundaries by faking the 802.11q tags.
I think I understand what your trying to accomplish - a public IP that can move around a larger region and between wireless towers at will. I think a far better solution is along the lines of a secure VPN. That avoids a whole slew of security and performance issues associated with vlans and wireless. What's stopping a malicious person from coming up with a wireless subscriber module (what exactly is that, btw?) that adds whatever vlan tag they want and getting access to any subnet at will?
I also recommend using dhcp-helper and a handful of linux dhcp servers. That puts all the configuration in a central linux box and you don't have to muck with all the switches and routers for every little change.
Here's a quick summary of the codecs and the MOS (essentially call quality) http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk1077/technologies_tech_note09186a00800b6710.shtml#mos. The big thing with the compressed codecs is the latency and increased sensitivity to line problems like jitter and dropped packets.
Done right on a network with proper QOS, VOIP using the G.711 codec works great. The big benefit for me is that it eliminated the need for installing an entire cabling plant just for analog voice.
Faking an email isn't a crime, and the pirating is a copyright infringement which isn't actionable by the cops unless the owner protests. However hacking in and changing grades is a crime called computer trespass.