I'd venture to say that the astroturfing is about as blatant as that of the infamous Sony PSP Christmas site. Comparisons straight from a marketing handbook (break out one functionality into several bullet points, etc), professional quality product photos (complete with high quality photoshopping of screen quality), completely improbably insider stories (not a single product or marketing manager will divulge info on future products unless that's the plan).... the list goes on.
Really, really lame. If I want official info, I'd like it without the horrid writing.
Bingo! It isn't. DRM has always been about distribution control, never about piracy. Witness that the stuff that actually is proven to hit the industry in the pocket book (large-scale for-profit piracy) isn't impressed by any of the DRM, and never will be. The only people it annoys are the ones who can't be arsed to figure out where to get DVD copiers from.
Control of the distribution channel is far more important to the industry than any measly piracy. Why? Because they're middle men, and technology that removes the middle man means that they don't have a job anymore. DRM is about job protection, not piracy prevention.
Interestingly enough, this seems to be the same guy who just hangs out at the Auction House in Ironforge or Stormwind.... in a tux. Dunno about you, but I think a crash course in priorities is required.
Read the article, it deals with your question quite nicely: "'It now appears that the deep-sea hydrothermal vent environments are akin to those under which life on earth first arose,' Adams said." In other words, this seems to be the place where life started, not the other way around.
To turn your question around: what makes the 70-100F range so special that life has to originate there? Liquid water? Exists in plenty of different fashions at different temperatures. Stable chemistry? Same. All in all, the vents are proof that life can *originate* in situations that are dramatically different from what we consider "requirements."
I take it you play on a regular server? Because on a PVP server, being level 70 and well-geared is basically a requirement for enjoying content. Anything less (certainly anything less than being 5 levels above the highest-level mob in an area) opens you up to some ugly ganking. As such - getting to high levels quickly is certainly a requirement on a PVP server.
It's all a dinky fruit stand. And it all is Cheop's Pyramid. On a purely material level, the battlefield of Gettysburg is no different than the field in the suburban park nearby. On a mental/spiritual (ick - I hate the fact that "spiritual" has been largely coopted by quacks and cooks) though, they are miles away. One is the location of a defining moment in American history. The other... is a field. One connects you to a significant event, the other... connects you with kids playing in the grass.
It's the difference between being home and just living in a place.
If you study a little bit of chaos theory and theory of complex systems, you'll know that there are points when the behavior of a system changes dramatically. Increase a value a lot, but not past a certain point, and a system has one stability point. Increase the value just a tiny bit past a breaking point, and suddenly, your system has completely different stability points.
When dealing with a complex system like the atmosphere, do not assume that linear relationships on one scale hold on a different scale, or with different values. When we spiked the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, we may very well have moved the system from one stable point to another.
BTW, the earth is a (largely) closed system. Just more complex than your average shoebox diorama. We can't test hypotheses, but we can make predictions and see if they hold. And unfortunately, models that incorporate man-made CO2 forcing as a major factor in temperature variations are the most accurate.
The graph shows that too. The last 20000 years show the lag, just like the previous 500000 years. Note how there's generally a sharp spike in both temperature and CO2, followed by a slow decrease in both. Notice how the CO2 concentration is fairly regular in its cycle, right until the very last point on the graph. Then, it suddenly spikes from being right at the max of its regular range to being 20% higher. This, while the temperature is staying high for a longer than normal time period. This behavior is completely outside the behavior I expect to see if temperature is the only driver of CO2 concentration, and if CO2 has no impact on temperature (even disregarding the fact that we KNOW that CO2 impacts temperatures).
The graph tells me two things about todays CO2 concentrations: we are at abnormally high levels, those levels have nothing to do with known cyclical temperature changes, and the cyclical temperature changes seem to have been disrupted as well. That's why that graph tells me that not only is the current spike in CO2 concentrations different, but so is the spike in temperatures.
For your information: every single climatologist/physicist/scientist worth the paper on which his diploma was stamped said that no one should attribute a single hurricane (or even season) to global warming. They went out of their way to say that while increases in temperatures can provide more power to hurricanes, the two are not nearly well enough tied together to allow for immediate predictions.
So to answer your question: no, these are not the models that predict history's worst hurricane season. These would be media stories thrown out by clueless talking heads. Please do not confuse talking heads on TV with scientists. An angel dies everytime you do.
1. You're correct - that's one way in which CO2 and temperatures are connected. There's another - it's called the greenhouse gas effect. We know the mechanism by which an increase in temperature results in an increase in CO2, and we know the mechanism by which an increase in CO2 results in an increase in temperature. It's called a feedback loop, which can be started by a variety of things. Right now, that cycle is being kick started by our propensity to burn fossil fuels for energy.
2. I would not call a 60 ppm increase over the previous known maximum a blip when the previous known maximum was at around 300 ppm. I would actually call that a 20% increase in a time period that is essentially zero on the current time line.
That graph is great indeed. It provides so much information about what's currently going on.
Close, but no cigar. The temperature curves in antarctic ice cores hundreds of thousands of years old show that there is a lag. That does not mean that every future temperature increase is going to be started by something other than an increase in CO2. Here's the deal: CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It's impact on temperatures is very well known. Increase CO2, and you increase the global temperature.
The real question thrown up by that lag from the ice cores is "What caused the initial heating?" It does not mean that the current increase in temperatures (which has been shown over and over) is not related to an increase in CO2. It simply means that there are other mechanisms that can cause an increase in temperature as well... and unfortunately for us, all of them combined do not account for more than about 60% of the increase in measured temperatures.
I believe that has to do with the suggestion to mod up rather than mod down. One group of people might disagree with the the other's opinion, but will generally refrain from modding down. The end result is that both arguments bubble up with net positive mods.
Or it could be that the people who say "adapt or die" and those who say "outsourcing is wrong!" could be different people. And that the Slashdot community is not a hive-mind. Just a thought, you know.
1: Check, though a bit oversimplified. The Chinese can't just dump their reserves out, because the impact on the world will be too drastic. They're in a better position than the US, but can't really take advantage of it. 2: If by greatest, you mean largest by volume, then check. 3: No. And please define "all major powers". If you say it's the US and a smattering of European countries, I'd be tempted to agree. Though that's like bragging that the US got more gold medals at the Olympics than Luxembourg - misleading, not to mention irrelevant. 4: Wrong. They shot down a satellite to demonstrate they were able and willing to do so. Any country with ICBMs can achieve this, it's just that most are a bit more concerned than China about creating a huge mass of space junk. 5: China keeps low? That's news to Taiwan, the US, Japan, Tibet, and pretty much the whole world. I'd also assume that China would take offense to being compared in any way to Russia. Russia is a two-bit thug on the world stage, while China plans on being the super-power. And since when is a wide-body passenger plane anything to brag about? Airbus would love to forget its latest venture in that area. 6: Wrong. Military expenditures by China: 4.6%. Military expenditures by the US: 4.06%. And this is from heavily understated official figures.
China will be the world power by the time the second half of this century rolls around, but only one of your reasons will have even remotely something to do with it.
Something else I wish: that "liberal" stops being usurped by paleolithic talking heads as a swear word. Liberal is not a 4-letter word, and the ideas behind liberalism are not anathema to the American spirit.
You know, I thought that this was indeed a very well written post, and was nodding my head until... well, until this line:
"Let me know when you people get your stories straight."
Yeah, because we, the collective Slashdot posters, have an oligation to you to speak with one voice. We ought to ensure that everyone in our midst presents the same argument. If they disagree, we ought to silence them so they will not disturb the unified presentation. We are Borg of Slashdot.
Seriously, either talk to specific people ("nickfoo, get your story straight"), say "some people" or don't bring this up. I'm not slashdot, you are not slashdot, and I'm pretty sure no one here likes to be lumped under the general heading "Slashdot poster". Say what you have to say, but leave the "you people" out of it. It brings down the rest of your post.
friendsofscience.org is a site expressly designed to counter anything that realclimate.org and ucsusa.org puts out. I.e, they are a complete shill. For a bit more on their background story, here are Sourcewatch and Wikipedia entries regarding them. Finally, pretty much everything on that site directly contradicts results of peer-reviewed articles. Why believe them over what people doing actual research in the field are saying? Or are you just grasping for straws?
That's the beauty of the idea, and the reason why Jeff Minter is still regarded as a gaming genius: his completely off-the-wall ideas have a tendency to become common-place after a few years. Procedural worlds? Check. Music that controls the game? Check. Yes, the devil is in the detail, but that's the other reason he is a gaming genius: he gets stuff to work that other people simply theorize about.
I don't know what software you install, but until recently, part of my on-site job included installing large software packages with a footprint of 1-2 Gigs. At 2-3 customers a month, I can easily breach that. Include the fact that a lot of customers won't just let me plug in my laptop into their network, and that we release a new version pretty much every couple of weeks, and I'm basically forced to download at least 2-3G a month. Funny thing is, we used to have Verizon, but I never had any problems. Beats me if there's a special sekrit business plan with true unlimited downloads.... or if that's the reason why we're now using Sprint cards.
All in all, I can tell you that a 5G monthly download cap for me is difficult to work with.
But forget job situations... I would love to just have a laptop with a broadband card. No computer, no home dsl, just wireless broadband everywhere, all the time. Can't do it - at least not with any of the plans I've seen. And if my ISP ever throttles my bandwidth, I'm going back to being a luddite. I've gotten way too used to downloading movies and songs to accept artificial caps.
Ok, I know that environmentalists are nutty as well, but how the hell does a completely unsupported accusation like the first and second story get modded informative? It's like saying the jews are behind 9/11 is an informative statement. The only people it informs is those who want to believe it.
Good point. I was talking more generically about corporations in general. I've heard about the hell that is floor jobs in retail, and never want to get into it. That said, I still think that even in retail, people underestimate the cost of training new hires.... what do you think?
Slash costs by firing the highest-paid (and generally best) people. Rehire low-paid scrubs to do the same job. Then be shocked - shocked! - when morale goes down, department performance goes down, and you can't hit your uptime/sales/response time/no screw-up quotas for the month.
Here's a newsflash, people: saving money by firing the expensive people is a prime example of penny-wise, pound-foolish. Most departments are too dysfunctional to allow them to just pluck someone off the street and plug them into the system - they need the old hands because they make things go.
This seems to be a disease most common among MBAs who have seen a lot of theory and not much practice, or who have never seen the inside of the department they are supposed to administrate.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd venture to say that the astroturfing is about as blatant as that of the infamous Sony PSP Christmas site. Comparisons straight from a marketing handbook (break out one functionality into several bullet points, etc), professional quality product photos (complete with high quality photoshopping of screen quality), completely improbably insider stories (not a single product or marketing manager will divulge info on future products unless that's the plan).... the list goes on.
Really, really lame. If I want official info, I'd like it without the horrid writing.
Bingo! It isn't. DRM has always been about distribution control, never about piracy. Witness that the stuff that actually is proven to hit the industry in the pocket book (large-scale for-profit piracy) isn't impressed by any of the DRM, and never will be. The only people it annoys are the ones who can't be arsed to figure out where to get DVD copiers from.
Control of the distribution channel is far more important to the industry than any measly piracy. Why? Because they're middle men, and technology that removes the middle man means that they don't have a job anymore. DRM is about job protection, not piracy prevention.
Interestingly enough, this seems to be the same guy who just hangs out at the Auction House in Ironforge or Stormwind.... in a tux. Dunno about you, but I think a crash course in priorities is required.
Read the article, it deals with your question quite nicely: "'It now appears that the deep-sea hydrothermal vent environments are akin to those under which life on earth first arose,' Adams said." In other words, this seems to be the place where life started, not the other way around.
To turn your question around: what makes the 70-100F range so special that life has to originate there? Liquid water? Exists in plenty of different fashions at different temperatures. Stable chemistry? Same. All in all, the vents are proof that life can *originate* in situations that are dramatically different from what we consider "requirements."
I take it you play on a regular server? Because on a PVP server, being level 70 and well-geared is basically a requirement for enjoying content. Anything less (certainly anything less than being 5 levels above the highest-level mob in an area) opens you up to some ugly ganking. As such - getting to high levels quickly is certainly a requirement on a PVP server.
Wrong. Still.
It's all a dinky fruit stand. And it all is Cheop's Pyramid. On a purely material level, the battlefield of Gettysburg is no different than the field in the suburban park nearby. On a mental/spiritual (ick - I hate the fact that "spiritual" has been largely coopted by quacks and cooks) though, they are miles away. One is the location of a defining moment in American history. The other... is a field. One connects you to a significant event, the other... connects you with kids playing in the grass.
It's the difference between being home and just living in a place.
If you study a little bit of chaos theory and theory of complex systems, you'll know that there are points when the behavior of a system changes dramatically. Increase a value a lot, but not past a certain point, and a system has one stability point. Increase the value just a tiny bit past a breaking point, and suddenly, your system has completely different stability points.
When dealing with a complex system like the atmosphere, do not assume that linear relationships on one scale hold on a different scale, or with different values. When we spiked the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, we may very well have moved the system from one stable point to another.
BTW, the earth is a (largely) closed system. Just more complex than your average shoebox diorama. We can't test hypotheses, but we can make predictions and see if they hold. And unfortunately, models that incorporate man-made CO2 forcing as a major factor in temperature variations are the most accurate.
The graph shows that too. The last 20000 years show the lag, just like the previous 500000 years. Note how there's generally a sharp spike in both temperature and CO2, followed by a slow decrease in both. Notice how the CO2 concentration is fairly regular in its cycle, right until the very last point on the graph. Then, it suddenly spikes from being right at the max of its regular range to being 20% higher. This, while the temperature is staying high for a longer than normal time period. This behavior is completely outside the behavior I expect to see if temperature is the only driver of CO2 concentration, and if CO2 has no impact on temperature (even disregarding the fact that we KNOW that CO2 impacts temperatures).
The graph tells me two things about todays CO2 concentrations: we are at abnormally high levels, those levels have nothing to do with known cyclical temperature changes, and the cyclical temperature changes seem to have been disrupted as well. That's why that graph tells me that not only is the current spike in CO2 concentrations different, but so is the spike in temperatures.
All that text, so much ignorance.
For your information: every single climatologist/physicist/scientist worth the paper on which his diploma was stamped said that no one should attribute a single hurricane (or even season) to global warming. They went out of their way to say that while increases in temperatures can provide more power to hurricanes, the two are not nearly well enough tied together to allow for immediate predictions.
So to answer your question: no, these are not the models that predict history's worst hurricane season. These would be media stories thrown out by clueless talking heads. Please do not confuse talking heads on TV with scientists. An angel dies everytime you do.
1. You're correct - that's one way in which CO2 and temperatures are connected. There's another - it's called the greenhouse gas effect. We know the mechanism by which an increase in temperature results in an increase in CO2, and we know the mechanism by which an increase in CO2 results in an increase in temperature. It's called a feedback loop, which can be started by a variety of things. Right now, that cycle is being kick started by our propensity to burn fossil fuels for energy.
2. I would not call a 60 ppm increase over the previous known maximum a blip when the previous known maximum was at around 300 ppm. I would actually call that a 20% increase in a time period that is essentially zero on the current time line.
That graph is great indeed. It provides so much information about what's currently going on.
Close, but no cigar. The temperature curves in antarctic ice cores hundreds of thousands of years old show that there is a lag. That does not mean that every future temperature increase is going to be started by something other than an increase in CO2. Here's the deal: CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It's impact on temperatures is very well known. Increase CO2, and you increase the global temperature.
The real question thrown up by that lag from the ice cores is "What caused the initial heating?" It does not mean that the current increase in temperatures (which has been shown over and over) is not related to an increase in CO2. It simply means that there are other mechanisms that can cause an increase in temperature as well... and unfortunately for us, all of them combined do not account for more than about 60% of the increase in measured temperatures.
Errr... you should read up on Chaos Theory before you say that. You're simply betraying your ignorance there.
I believe that has to do with the suggestion to mod up rather than mod down. One group of people might disagree with the the other's opinion, but will generally refrain from modding down. The end result is that both arguments bubble up with net positive mods.
Or it could be that the people who say "adapt or die" and those who say "outsourcing is wrong!" could be different people. And that the Slashdot community is not a hive-mind. Just a thought, you know.
1: Check, though a bit oversimplified. The Chinese can't just dump their reserves out, because the impact on the world will be too drastic. They're in a better position than the US, but can't really take advantage of it.
2: If by greatest, you mean largest by volume, then check.
3: No. And please define "all major powers". If you say it's the US and a smattering of European countries, I'd be tempted to agree. Though that's like bragging that the US got more gold medals at the Olympics than Luxembourg - misleading, not to mention irrelevant.
4: Wrong. They shot down a satellite to demonstrate they were able and willing to do so. Any country with ICBMs can achieve this, it's just that most are a bit more concerned than China about creating a huge mass of space junk.
5: China keeps low? That's news to Taiwan, the US, Japan, Tibet, and pretty much the whole world. I'd also assume that China would take offense to being compared in any way to Russia. Russia is a two-bit thug on the world stage, while China plans on being the super-power. And since when is a wide-body passenger plane anything to brag about? Airbus would love to forget its latest venture in that area.
6: Wrong. Military expenditures by China: 4.6%. Military expenditures by the US: 4.06%. And this is from heavily understated official figures.
China will be the world power by the time the second half of this century rolls around, but only one of your reasons will have even remotely something to do with it.
At least read the Wikipedia entry before repeating Rush's and Bill's hallucinations.
Something else I wish: that "liberal" stops being usurped by paleolithic talking heads as a swear word. Liberal is not a 4-letter word, and the ideas behind liberalism are not anathema to the American spirit.
You know, I thought that this was indeed a very well written post, and was nodding my head until... well, until this line:
"Let me know when you people get your stories straight."
Yeah, because we, the collective Slashdot posters, have an oligation to you to speak with one voice. We ought to ensure that everyone in our midst presents the same argument. If they disagree, we ought to silence them so they will not disturb the unified presentation. We are Borg of Slashdot.
Seriously, either talk to specific people ("nickfoo, get your story straight"), say "some people" or don't bring this up. I'm not slashdot, you are not slashdot, and I'm pretty sure no one here likes to be lumped under the general heading "Slashdot poster". Say what you have to say, but leave the "you people" out of it. It brings down the rest of your post.
friendsofscience.org is a site expressly designed to counter anything that realclimate.org and ucsusa.org puts out. I.e, they are a complete shill. For a bit more on their background story, here are Sourcewatch and Wikipedia entries regarding them. Finally, pretty much everything on that site directly contradicts results of peer-reviewed articles. Why believe them over what people doing actual research in the field are saying? Or are you just grasping for straws?
That's the beauty of the idea, and the reason why Jeff Minter is still regarded as a gaming genius: his completely off-the-wall ideas have a tendency to become common-place after a few years. Procedural worlds? Check. Music that controls the game? Check. Yes, the devil is in the detail, but that's the other reason he is a gaming genius: he gets stuff to work that other people simply theorize about.
I don't know what software you install, but until recently, part of my on-site job included installing large software packages with a footprint of 1-2 Gigs. At 2-3 customers a month, I can easily breach that. Include the fact that a lot of customers won't just let me plug in my laptop into their network, and that we release a new version pretty much every couple of weeks, and I'm basically forced to download at least 2-3G a month. Funny thing is, we used to have Verizon, but I never had any problems. Beats me if there's a special sekrit business plan with true unlimited downloads.... or if that's the reason why we're now using Sprint cards.
All in all, I can tell you that a 5G monthly download cap for me is difficult to work with.
But forget job situations... I would love to just have a laptop with a broadband card. No computer, no home dsl, just wireless broadband everywhere, all the time. Can't do it - at least not with any of the plans I've seen. And if my ISP ever throttles my bandwidth, I'm going back to being a luddite. I've gotten way too used to downloading movies and songs to accept artificial caps.
Ok, I know that environmentalists are nutty as well, but how the hell does a completely unsupported accusation like the first and second story get modded informative? It's like saying the jews are behind 9/11 is an informative statement. The only people it informs is those who want to believe it.
Good point. I was talking more generically about corporations in general. I've heard about the hell that is floor jobs in retail, and never want to get into it. That said, I still think that even in retail, people underestimate the cost of training new hires.... what do you think?
Slash costs by firing the highest-paid (and generally best) people. Rehire low-paid scrubs to do the same job. Then be shocked - shocked! - when morale goes down, department performance goes down, and you can't hit your uptime/sales/response time/no screw-up quotas for the month.
Here's a newsflash, people: saving money by firing the expensive people is a prime example of penny-wise, pound-foolish. Most departments are too dysfunctional to allow them to just pluck someone off the street and plug them into the system - they need the old hands because they make things go.
This seems to be a disease most common among MBAs who have seen a lot of theory and not much practice, or who have never seen the inside of the department they are supposed to administrate.