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User: E++99

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  1. Re:Tell me again... on U.S. Students/Grads Carrying Over $1 Trillion In Debt · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It costs so much because people have been conditioned to be willing to pay anything for it, believing it is essential for future success. And if they can't afford it the government ensures that they can borrow for it. There's no way tuition can possibly go but up until this scenario changes.

  2. Re:i trust nothing on Ask Slashdot: Do You Still Trust Bitcoin? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There is far more stability in USD now than when it was tied to gold. How soon people forget.

  3. Re:Is MtGox Bitcoin? on Mt. Gox Shuts Down: Collapse Should Come As No Surprise · · Score: 1

    A NYSE stock can only be traded on the NYSE. Bitcoins can be traded and exchanged for dollars on many exchanges, coinbase now being the most popular. The problem isn't even that an exchange shut down, which wouldn't have been a big deal. The problem is that a lot of people trusted that exchange to hold their coins, and those coins have probably disappeared with the exchange.

  4. Re:Risk? on Mt. Gox Shuts Down: Collapse Should Come As No Surprise · · Score: 1

    Despite conventional wisdom that says otherwise, volatility is not the same as risk.

  5. Re:When I hear "I work 60 hours a week"... on Your 60-Hour Work Week Is Not a Badge of Honor · · Score: 2

    Humans just aren't built for that.

    You know... I love the fact that we as a society are so wealthy that we can have soft easy lives. But the idea that we "just aren't built for" doing 6 10 hour days and then taking a whole day off is ridiculous. Someone doing something they're interested in will probably do something like those hours at a minimum.

    For most of human history 60 hours would probably not even be sufficient simply for the human need to occupy one's mind, since there weren't always the entertainment options that we have now.

  6. Or... on Getting Young Women Interested In Open Source · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ...we could just let people do whatever the fuck they want to do.

  7. Re:Why is he unkempt? on How Farming Reshaped Our Genomes · · Score: 5, Informative

    Flynt is sharper than any copper knife.
    Obsidian is sharper than any copper knife.
    Tribal people shave with flint to this day.
    There is archaeological evidence of shaving going back 20,000 years.

  8. Re:The Unanswered Question on Global-Warming Skepticism Hits 6-Year High · · Score: 1

    Increasing relative to what? During the last interglacial all the ice on the planet except for Greenland and Antarctica melted completely.

  9. Remember Anthropogenic Climate Change? on Studies Say Earth Won't Die As Soon As Thought · · Score: 1

    All this assumes that humans with hundreds of millions of years worth of technological development will not be able to figure out a way to reflect away excess sunlight.

  10. Re:Show me a climate model for the past 16 years on Global-Warming Skepticism Hits 6-Year High · · Score: 1

    Newton's model made excellent and reliable predictions.

  11. Re:Here we go again... on Global-Warming Skepticism Hits 6-Year High · · Score: 1

    I never put forth the idea that CO2 drives the climate. I'm not referring to only one climate change event. I'm talking about these papers. They do not appear to me to be consistent with the doctrine that CO2 drives the climate.

    Petit et all 1999 -- analysed 420,000 years of Vostok, and found that as the world cools into an ice age, the delay before carbon falls is several thousand years.
    Fischer et al 1999 -- described a lag of 600 plus or minus 400 years as the world warms up from an ice age.
    Monnin et al 2001 -- looked at Dome Concordia (also in Antarctica) – and found a delay on the recent rise out of the last major ice age to be 800 ± 600
    Mudelsee (2001) -- Over the full 420,000 year Vostok history Co2 variations lag temperature by 1,300 years ± 1000.
    Caillon et al 2003 -- analysed the Vostok data and found a lag (where CO2 rises after temperature) of 800 ± 200 years.

  12. Re:Here we go again... on Global-Warming Skepticism Hits 6-Year High · · Score: 1

    I don't see how that graph is an example. It shows a warming trend that starts around 1620 and a CO2 increase trend that starts around 1840. Moreover, this time period is useless for analyzing the natural interaction between temperature and CO2, since it is well known that most the CO2 increases since 1840 are because of the increased burning of fossil fuels and not primarily as a result of rising temperatures as has been the case over the long term as indicated by the ice cores.

  13. Re:Show me a climate model for the past 16 years on Global-Warming Skepticism Hits 6-Year High · · Score: 0

    If only they did. But they don't. Even if they're in principle modelling physics, they end up tweaking all the parameters to turn it into essentially a curve-fitting exercise. That's why after the sudden ice arctic drop in 2008, there was suddenly a "scientific" model that predicted the arctic would be ice free by 2014, which then Al Gore got to tout enthusiastically as if it were science.

  14. Re:Show me a climate model for the past 16 years on Global-Warming Skepticism Hits 6-Year High · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If the best models are worthless and have not made any good predictions, should we really "go with them" just because they are the best?

  15. Re:Here we go again... on Global-Warming Skepticism Hits 6-Year High · · Score: 2

    #1: over 1000 years of temperature records: in the film it is explained that they drill a hole in the artic ice to extract a cilinder of ice. This ice has grown over many centuries and throught the way it has melted the temperature can be derived. At the same time the level of CO2 can be measured too. And here comes the clue: in all those thousands and thousands of years, the CO2 curve and the temperature curve have been closely matched. If you know that the CO2 now is higher than it has ever been since many thousands of years it seems logical to conclude that the temperature will also rise above the 'normal' levels.

    You're not going to understand anything if you use that movie for a source. What the movie doesn't tell you that the changes in CO2 follow the changes in temperature by an average of 800 years, indicating that the causal relationship has flowed (during the 800,000 years of data from those ice cores) mostly (if not entirely) from temperature to CO2. You can read dozens of papers studying this lag in the peer reviewed climate journals. There are theories that there is still causal relationships the other way in how the climate has evolved over that time, but they are much more tenuous than suggested by Al Gore's naive observation that, hey, the lines go up and down together.

    And the ice cores are not the source of the temperature data presented on the 1000-2000 year range. Most ice core analysis doesn't have the resolution for that. For that they use tree ring data, which is a lot more questionable than ice core data, as it has to make a lot of assumptions about the things other than temperature that influence tree growth rates.

  16. Re:Here we go again... on Global-Warming Skepticism Hits 6-Year High · · Score: 1

    More CO2 captures more heat. It's that simple.

    It's not that simple at all. Given the current composition of the atmosphere, for instance, to the best of our observations, more CO2 in the troposphere traps more heat in the troposphere, raising its temperature, BUT more CO2 in the stratosphere radiates more heat out of the stratosphere, lowering the temperature of the stratosphere. There may be a point in the system, after which the absorption bands in the troposphere are saturated enough that the cooling effect on the stratosphere of additional CO2 is greater than the warming effect on the troposphere.

    Life on earth will continue but it could be that lots of hurricanes, higher temperatures, combined with periods of draught could make life very unconfortable and may result that a total population of 11 billion people cannot be supported anymore...

    Or it could be that global warming will lead to fewer hurricanes and less drought. The idea that we can use a computer model to predict the behavior of this system outside the region that we have data for is naive.

    And it could also be that we can ONLY support 11 billion people with global warming, as the one thing that global warming certainly leads to is higher evaporation rates, which means more fresh water produced by nature. And fresh water supply is the biggest limiter to human population.

  17. Re:How hard can it be? on Controversial Execution In Ohio Uses New Lethal Drug Combination · · Score: 1

    This. Or just slowly crank up the morphine until he stops breathing. I don't understand why this is a problem.

  18. Re:Weather is Not Climate? on How Weather Influences Global Warming Opinions · · Score: 1

    Well you see, it's no longer "global warming". It's "climate change". And "climate change," of course, means more extreme weather events, which are caused by manmade pollution. And therefore every extreme weather event is compelling evidence that Al Gore was right all along.

  19. 2001: A Space Odyssey on How One Photographer Is Hacking the Concept of Time · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is the same photographic technique used to create the stargate special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but putting the camera on a trolley and zooming it in. Here's a really good video on the evolution of the technology. http://youtu.be/KhRo2WbWnKU

    For artistic slit scan photography, check out Jay Mark Johnson's work. It's much more interesting than this stuff, imo.

  20. Re:WTF on Is Earth Weighed Down By Dark Matter? · · Score: 1

    I'm saying if the plane of the orbit is perpendicular to the plane of the ring. Of course it doesn't have to be fully perpendicular -- as long as the two planes aren't identical, any satellite orbit will move back and forth across the plane of the ring. The magnitude of the effect would depend on how perpendicular the plane of the orbit is to the plane of the ring, and therefore how far away it moves from the plane of the ring at the extremities of its orbit.

  21. Re:WTF on Is Earth Weighed Down By Dark Matter? · · Score: 2

    If the ring was perpendicular to the orbit of the satellite, it would have an additive effect to the earth's gravity in proportion to how far out of the plane of the ring the satellite is. If the satellite is in the plane of the ring, it would have no effect, as it would pull equally in all directions.

  22. Nope on Sun Not a Significant Driver of Climate Change · · Score: 1

    They found that their model of weak changes in the sun gave the best correlation with temperature records, indicating that solar activity has had a minimal impact on temperature in the past millennium.

    This methodology does not justify that headline.

  23. Re:good riddance on After FDA Objections, 23andMe Won't Offer Health Information · · Score: 4, Informative

    What 23andMe does is market a product that you use to extract unique information about your own body, which is then presented to you in the form of suggestions about what health measures you should take -- in other words, medical advice. Very different.

    Whoa, what? They have never been in the business of medical advice! What they did is to say, "you have genetic marker X which according to studies A and B are indicative of a 20% increased susceptibility to disease Y or and 50% increased likelihood to have an adverse reaction to drug Z." That is not medical advice! That is mere information, filtered by your genetic markers.

  24. Re:Blasphemy on King James Programming · · Score: 2

    Uhm, what exactly is this "unaltered bible". Even the King James verison, which is the closest there is to a "standard" bible for the English language...

    Um, I'm pretty sure that the Bible was not written in English and that the King James version is a translation.

  25. Re:good riddance on After FDA Objections, 23andMe Won't Offer Health Information · · Score: 2

    The FDA was very clear about why they stopped it. It wasn't necessarily that the information was misleading, but that it would lead patients to make decisions about their own care without necessarily consulting a doctor, which the FDA thinks is not a good idea -- and I totally see their point, frankly.

    For example, one of the things that 23andMe can tell you is how well you might respond to one drug versus another, because of your specific genetic makeup. If you take that advice and change the dosage of your medication or switch to a different medication without discussing the issue with your doctor, you could cause yourself serious harm.

    How could that possibly be within any legitimate government's domain? Using the same rational they could shut down wikipedia or rxlist. Clearly, people DO make medical decisions for themselves based on wikipedia and rxlist without talking to a doctor. The idea that some people believe it is the responsibility of the government to stop that sort of thing is terrifying to me. I should have autonomy over my own body, and the government should not stand in the way of me obtaining information for making my own rational decisions about how to exercise that autonomy.