How would you know if it was? For example, do you know how many temperature recording stations there are across the globe of Mars, vs. the Earth?
There are certain observations of changes to the Mars southern polar cap that could be caused by Martian global warming--but they could also be caused by a host of other climate processes.
It's dangerous to extrapolate a few local changes into evidence for global trends. If you only looked at Earth's south pole, you would conclude that this planet was experiencing global cooling. But you'd be wrong.
I believe the libertarian ideal that is popular in engineering and IT fields contributes to this sort of situation.
A libertarian believes that all success is personally earned. In addition, people who self-identify as libertarians tend to believe that they are personally more capable that most people, and are being "held back" by systems that compel cooperation and compromise.
This creates an incentive to compete against coworkers, and the most obvious way to do so is to work beyond normal business hours and expectations. It also creates a strong opposition to unions, collective bargaining, and class action lawsuits, which makes it easy for companies in the IT sector to limit their labor battles to individual workers.
Now--that said, there are huge problems with many unions in the U.S. as they currently exist. With few meaningful labor fights left, many large unions are turning to activities that look more and more like corporate extortion.
It's easy to sit around and post on Slashdot and be cynical. It's harder to dedicate your life to becoming the absolute best athlete at a given sport or skill, and that is the heart of the Olympics.
Do all those things happen around the Olympics? Sure. Are they the purpose? Not at all.
I know 3 out of the 5 U.S. whitewater slalom athletes in Beijing (plus many who barely missed the chance to go) and I can assure you there is nothing glamorous or rich or corrupt about their pursuit of excellence. The U.S. men's K1 athlete makes a modest living constructing prosthetics for injured soldiers when he's not in training sessions 12 times a week.
There is a "warning," and then there is a "WARNING: YOU MUST CLICK FIVE TIMES TO SEE THIS PAGE."
You might understand the difference between the encryption and authentication uses of SSL, but most people do not. Worse, their ignorance could provide a very effective vector for social engineering attacks.
User interface warnings are for people who do not understand what they are doing. They don't know where the trouble could come from, so the software must help them. Anything that presents a likely avenue of trouble should have a strong warning in front of it.
Those who do not understand potential avenues of trouble should be encouraged to simply stay out them. Those who do understand what they are doing will also understand the warning, and know that is ok for them to proceed.
A simple bar across the top of the page with a warning that the sites identity couldn't be verified, but that the connection was still encrypted would work just fine.
Work just fine for who? It seems to me this "issue" is basically a small number of power users annoyed about having to click an "ok" button a couple times.
Any biological intelligence does exactly the same as described: gather data (try to assess external universe model), find correlations (build internal universe model), act according to internal needs (act upon internal universe model) and repeat.
What are the internal needs of Google? I contend that as a tool, it has none, actually. Tools serve external needs only.
You're right about the data collection and correlation, but the essence of intelligence is the internal needs...that's the arrow of will, the great result of evolution. The data stuff is just a scaling issue.
Shedding party affiliation is a bit like shaking a religious upbringing; the hardest part is breaking the initial unshakable faith.
Party affiliation has nothing to do with believing that one political party is the same as the other. I'm not a fan of any flavor of Linux; it's on none of my computers. But I know there is a difference between them.
For example, how could a Republican filibuster have passed the FISA amendment to grant retroactive immunity? How could a filibuster "authorize the use of force" (and a metric shitload of money) in Iraq without a declaration of war?
The answer is called horse trading. You want to pass a minimum wage hike; I want immunity in my FISA. You want federal funds to repair the bridge in your city; I want immunity in my FISA. You want to pass the annual appropriations for HUD; I want immunity in my FISA. I have the power to deny anything you want; what are you willing to trade? Filibusters are like guns--I don't need to point one at you to get what I want, I just need to point one at something you care about.
Both parties use this tactic very effectively, by the way.
As the parent pointed out, it's not surprising that this sort of thing is happening. Many people could see it coming, which is one reason U.S. leadership is not boycotting or otherwise using the Games as political leverage.
Why would they need to? It seemed likely that China would shoot themselves in the foot with this sort of activity. What they hoped would be triumphant display of their world influence is becoming an exercise in sunlight being the best disinfectant. With this foreknowledge it is easy for the U.S. leadership to take a "high road" in their official capacity. Our free press is more than capable of providing the criticism.
Many Western journalists in China went there looking for this sort of story to cover. From their perspective the gift of the Olympics to Beijing was a trojan horse.
I think it's a fundamental mistake to judge the health or future prospects of a company by its stock price. Google is a company with a positive cash flow, little debt, and sizable cash reserves. If they were a private company it would be howlingly funny to speculate that they are going to crash anytime soon.
Stock prices fluctuate all over the place, having as much to do with the relative bets of institutional investors as with the business fundamentals of the company itself. If you want to predict the future of a tech company have a look at its balance sheet and R&D resources. By both measures Google seems to have a long and healthy future in front of it.
Please don't try to coopt the global warming issue to promote the animal rights issue. Like a bunch of people recently tried to hijack the Sierra Club by claiming that illegal immigration is an environmental issue.
Animal exhalations of methane and CO2 are not directly related to global warming because animals consume living matter. The carbon they emit was in the atmosphere just a few months ago. Cows, in and of themselves, are 100% carbon neutral.
The only carbon we really need to be worried about is that which comes out of deep stores. The CO2 that is produced by burning fossil fuels was last in the atmosphere millions of years ago. By adding it back into the atmosphere now, we are disturbing the current balance. A balance which, by the way, all living emitters of CO2 are part of. Even if we kill them and eat them.
Now it is true that the agriculture industry (not just the meat industry--the entire ag industry) burns a lot of fossil fuels to produce and ship their product, and that contributes to global warming. But the solution to that would be the same as for trucking--replace the internal combustion engine and gasoline.
Most lay people--and many doctors, seemingly--seem to think health science is only conducted epidemiologically. They do not understand that well-understood mechanical theory can be sufficient to disprove a causative link between correlated data...especially if it is poorly correlated.
As I've said in another post, we're simply not yet in a position to know whether cell phones cause cancer, because the difference between the rate of cancer in a cell-phone-using population and a non-cell-phone-using population will be vary small (the inter-group variance) and the variance in each population (the intra-group variance) will be vary large (think of it as 2 normal curves with 99.5% overlap). We're not going to have a reliable answer for many years.
We're not going to have a precisely reliable answer for many years, and maybe never. That does not mean we do not have an answer now. We do--it is that there is no correlation between cell phone use and cancer greater than the limit of precision (aka margin of error) in the studies done so far. This is a fancy way of saying that IF cell phones increase your risk of cancer, they do so by such a small amount that it is hidden by the many other factors that affect your health.
While that's not the same as saying cell phones have absolutely no risk factor for cancer, it is a big hint that we can direct our health concerns toward other priorities.
Just saw the movie "In the Shadow of the Moon," and his comments about this experience struck me as very poetic and beautiful. It brought home the power of the experience in a way that the engineering speak did not. And I'm not a religious or even really spiritual guy. But I do experience a sense of wonder sometimes, and he invoked it.
There's a moving scene where they show the TLI burn from the perspective of the stage left behind in orbit (it had a camera mounted in it). It's just a single long shot with music and the radio traffic overlayed. Great movie.
The entire concept of the Millenium Clock is an exercise in intellectual masturbation. It's impossible to generate an object that we can be sure will last 10,000 years, and trying to think about it results mostly in flights of fancy or self-satisfied hypothetical questioning.
The proper approach to long-term planning is the same as any approach to massive scalability...design systems that provably work in a manageable scale, then iterate them. The only reliable "Millenium Clock" is not an object, it is a repeatable short-term process for learning to tell time. So long as each generation teaches the next to tell time, they will be able to tell when 10,000 years has passed. And before you get hysterical about how long that is, understand that the Jewish calendar is more than halfway to that milestone already. Instead of creating a single indestructible object, they've instead focused on constructing a culture that simply passes down their concepts of time and calendar.
There is absolutely no reason to think that the next 10,000 years will be anything like the last, so can we please stop hyperventilating about the past. Yeah, not many papyrus scrolls have survived...well today we work in materials that are provably more durable than papyrus. Not that materials technology is the pinnacle of human achievement; we also have things today like representative government, free enterprise, wide-scale literacy, and widescale multilingualism. Not to mention many, many times more people than 10,000 years ago.
Agreed on the inapt name, but it's one of those terms that is now so common that it's probably impossible put the genie back in the bottle.
CO2 absorbs infrared (IR) light of certain wavelengths and then re-emits IR light. It passes visible light. This acts to warm the surface of the Earth in the following way. Let's say 100 units of sunlight pass through the atmospheric CO2 and hit the Earth's surface. 30 are immediately reflected, while the other 70 are absorbed, and then re-emitted as IR light.
Of those 70, let's say 10 are absorbed by the atmospheric CO2, and re-emitted in all directions evenly...for simplicity's sake let's ignore the sideways and say that 5 are emitted up into space, and 5 are emitted down toward the ground. The lower 5 are absorbed by the ground and then re-emitted upward, where they are once again absorbed and re-emitted by the atmospheric CO2. So now you have 2.5 going out into space, and 2.5 going down to the ground again. Iterate by halves until there's no more light left.
But the key is that these are all cumulative. So between the ground and the atmospheric CO2 you have an energy influx of 70 of visible, plus 5 of IR, plus 2.5 of IR, plus 1.75 of IR, etc. The end result is that between the CO2 and the ground, the number is over 70--the climate experiences an energy level greater than expected. In other words it is warmer than the sun would seem to provide in influx.
If the percentage of molecules of CO2 in the atmosphere goes up, it's obviously going to have a better chance of catching those IR photons and re-emitting them. The ultimate CO2 greenhouse effect is on Venus, which has an atmosphere of over 90% CO2. It is farther from the sun than Mercury but its surface is hotter than Mercury's because of all that CO2 trapping IR (heat).
This is grossly simplified of course, but the basic concept is there...IR is intercepted on its way back into space and partially re-emitted downward. This IR back-and-forth effectively "traps" some energy and produces a climate on the surface that is warmer than would be otherwise expected, say if calculated using only a black-body radiation model. In fact this discrepancy is what led to the initial concepts of "greenhouse gases" in the 19th century.
The big difference today is that quantum mechanics provides a detailed model for why CO2 absorbs or emits certain wavelengths of light. I'm not going to pretend to understand that...I was a geology major not a physics major.
If you take a non-biased, fresh look at all the data, there's actually more evidence that says that global warming increases carbon dioxide levels rather than increasing carbon dioxide levels increases global warming.
This is true and not true at the same time. Ice core and other historical climate proxies show that CO2 levels have lagged temperature trends. Some people have taken this to mean that warming causes high CO2 levels. Not exactly true because rising CO2 levels themselves cause warming (no historical data needed, this part is pure chemistry). So in the past what you've had is an initial "kick" of warming from something (most likely orbital variations), followed by a self-reinforcing process where warming releases more CO2 from oceans, which adds to the warming, which releases more CO2, etc.
The big thing to wrap our heads around is that warming is possible without that initial "kick." Humans are producing CO2 from fossil fuels, which is raising CO2 levels without the kick. But just like before, the CO2 will lead to more warming (remember: chemistry), and potentially another self-reinforcing cycle.
The great part about this plan is that if it turns out we don't need it, we just stop dumping lime. I'm not a biochemist but I believe a strength of this proposal is that the process is lime-limited. Stop dumping the lime and the process stops. It cannot go "runaway."
It isn't GW denying, it's that CO2 probably accounts for less than 25% of the greenhouse effect.
Less than 25% over what period of time? What is the incremental effect of ongoing CO2 emissions, vs. other gases? What are the chemical sources for all the gases?
In a short snapshot of time, CO2 does not contribute much to the greenhouse effect. Water vapor and methane produce a greater percentage of warming. HOWEVER, the global balance of water vapor is not significantly changing, and imbalances cycle out of the atmosphere within a week or two (as rain). So while water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas, it does not contribute to long-term climate trends very much. Methane lasts a lot longer than water vapor, but still quite a bit less time than CO2. That is because methane is not stable in the atmosphere; it breaks down into water, ozone, and...CO2. CO2 lasts a long time in the atmosphere. It is chemically stable and the carbon cycle moves slowly.
We have a situation where mankind produces a lot of water vapor, methane, and CO2. The water vapor washes out of the atmosphere so quickly that no matter how much extra we produce, the balance is back a week later. Plus the amount we produce is tiny compared to say, ocean evaporation.
Methane and CO2 are produced from living plant matter and from fossil fuels. Plant matter is made of CO2 that used to be in the atmosphere, so every plant we convert to CO2 will eventually be plant again, etc--keeping the system in balance. But methane and CO2 coming from fossil fuels are not part of our ongoing balance. And since CO2 lasts a long time, the aggregate effect of increases over decades will actually be the greatest due to CO2.
A metaphor for this is a comparison of growing your money at 20% compounded for 2 years or 7% compounded for 10 years. Yes the former has a "larger effect," i.e. a bigger instantaneous interest rate. But even though the percentage is smaller, the latter produces the larger final effect. This is a metaphor for why scientists are most concerned about CO2 among the greenhouse gases. Whatever we do now with CO2, we're going to be stuck with the results for a long time.
The article provides insight into Microsoft's way of thinking. But, it does not provide an independent evaluation of whether that way of thinking is correct or effective. Basically I believe that it is not. I think Microsoft fundamentally misunderstands the relationships between search companies and their users.
[Microsoft has] an anemic 8.5% of searches, according to comScore. Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500), meanwhile, still commands 21%, to Google's 62%...The only way Microsoft can compete with what the business of Google really is - a large marketplace for advertising and searches - is to somehow achieve much greater scale. No method of creating dramatically greater scale seems available other than combining with Yahoo's search.
I think it's a fundamental mistake to think that a merger is automatically additive--that by buying Yahoo's search business, Microsoft will realize 29.5% market share in searches. This is not paid-for software like Great Plains or PeopleSoft or Salesforce.com. There is nothing of substance tying the people who search on yahoo.com to Yahoo! the company. The only things creating repeat searches are the brand and the search technology.
To achieve a larger ad ecosystem, Microsoft would have to fold Live Search into Yahoo or vice versa. But because there are no financial ties, customers can react to changes however they want. If there are changes to Live.com, it's just as likely that half the customers will choose to move to Google, as they would choose to move to the new Yahoo. When you shake the bird feeder there is no guarantee all the birds will just go next door.
Furthermore, if search technology is not as important, what is keeping people coming back to Google? It's not the ads, which are ignored by most people. It's the search product itself.
I think it's fundamentally backward to think that product elements like brand, technology, UI, etc are somehow not important, but "scale" is. How is scale achieved? The first step to growth is bringing in lots of repeat customers. What brings that? Great consumer-facing products. This is the key to the growth of most of Microsoft's competitors these days. But Microsoft is often not able to solve that. XBox is one example of where they have...they compete directly against Sony on the basis of the product itself.
Buying Yahoo will not achieve product greatness. It's entirely possible they will succeed in making the investment, only to see the combined market share of Live and Yahoo search drop over the next several years. The ONLY thing that can ensure that will not happen, is to create a search brand and product that is more attractive to customers than Google. But if they could do that, they would not need buy Yahoo in the first place.
I don't mean to be condescending, just helpful. It's pretty easy to do since all the e-mails are coming from one source.
You go to settings and create a new filter, with myspace as the from address. After clicking "next", you have actions to choose from. One of them is to apply a label, which will help keep them all "together" for easier review later. But another one is to "skip the inbox" which sends them straight into the Archive (i.e. hides them from view).
If you want to review them first, just have the filter set the label. Then later after you're read them, you can click that label name in the lower-left green box to find them all. Then click the "select all" link at the top, then choose archive from download. It sounds like a lot of steps but it is very fast since you don't have to manually select each one. The label is applied automatically by the filter upon receipt, and it lets you select and move them all around at once.
You can always archive things manually as well. Just check the box for the ones you want to hide, and choose "Archive" from the drop-down box.
You can also use a search...for instance search your entire inbox for messages with "myspace" in the from field, and "friend request" (or whatever) in the subject line. Once you get the results list, you can again click the Select All link, then use the drop down to Archive.
Once you get the hang of it I think you'll find it is faster and easier to manage. Once you learn it, you can use it effectively--that's what people usually mean by "intuitive." But it is not obvious...it does a little effort to learn. Hope this was helpful.
The only thing that can affect the amount of Gallium available on Earth is nucleosynthesis or a fairly sturdy asteroid impact.
Exactly. The issue is not that gallium is getting "used up," the issue is that it's getting redistributed from ground ore into landfills. The process of that distribution is a human endeavor, thus it is subject to study by economics.
Gallium is currently more expensive to get out of landfills than it is to get out of the ground. That's fine, at one point it was too expensive to get out of the ground too. When it became economically advantageous to do so, people did it. Same with recovering from electronics.
The REAL physical limitation is not gallium, it is energy. As long as we have energy to spend, we can reuse and recycle gallium forever. If we run out of energy, it doesn't matter where the gallium is, we won't be able to use it.
You might have dozens of folders for your bookmarks too. Well, del.icio.us uses tags and searching to organize bookmarks, and you may have noticed that has not held it back. Perhaps you have all your photos carefully organized into folders. Well Flickr shows us that tags and searching works very well to organize photos. Wikipedia pages are tagged. Everyone knows how to use Google to search for information. The metaphors in the Gmail interface are very well established in the populace.
In addition, I find your comment to be pretty pointless because it does not describe an actual need. "Moving an e-mail to a folder" is not an information- or user-oriented need, it is a tool. It is a means not an end. An actual user need would be something like "find this e-mail easily later" or "keep all e-mails from my bank together." Needs like these are easily met with labels and searching, used together.
If you've never had a Coke in your life, but you've seen the logo everywhere you go for a decade, when faced with 10 unknown colas and no opportunity to do research, you're most likely to pick the Coke because it feels like a known element even though it isn't.
If this is the context in which advertising will control me, let's just say I'm not worried. And it occurs to me that there remains the option to buy none of the 10 sodas, familiar or not.
AdBlock is a great tool for people who don't want to see ads. But if people think they are better or more independent humans for using it, they're fooling themselves.
Look at it another way: If the AI takes 5 years to learn what a child learns in 5 years - what happens when you double its execution speed (technically, by speeding up its processors/system)? It will take 2.5 years, of course. Only if you speed up the input by 2x as well. If the machine is learning by observing or interacting with discrete events, those events may only be able to happen so fast. It's not at all clear that processing speed is the bottleneck in learning systems.
If you mean that it will take about as much learning material and exposure to stimuli/etc, then that sounds intuitively right (assuming it will be as efficient as we are at using its source material). Exactly. So the question is: how fast can we feed it that stimuli? If the stimuli is direct human interaction (as it is when raising kids), then the "parents" are probably the slowest part of the system. The AI could be 100x as efficient as a human child, but that would just mean 100x more dead time between learning events.
Slashdot Mirror
How would you know if it was? For example, do you know how many temperature recording stations there are across the globe of Mars, vs. the Earth?
There are certain observations of changes to the Mars southern polar cap that could be caused by Martian global warming--but they could also be caused by a host of other climate processes.
It's dangerous to extrapolate a few local changes into evidence for global trends. If you only looked at Earth's south pole, you would conclude that this planet was experiencing global cooling. But you'd be wrong.
I believe the libertarian ideal that is popular in engineering and IT fields contributes to this sort of situation.
A libertarian believes that all success is personally earned. In addition, people who self-identify as libertarians tend to believe that they are personally more capable that most people, and are being "held back" by systems that compel cooperation and compromise.
This creates an incentive to compete against coworkers, and the most obvious way to do so is to work beyond normal business hours and expectations. It also creates a strong opposition to unions, collective bargaining, and class action lawsuits, which makes it easy for companies in the IT sector to limit their labor battles to individual workers.
Now--that said, there are huge problems with many unions in the U.S. as they currently exist. With few meaningful labor fights left, many large unions are turning to activities that look more and more like corporate extortion.
It's easy to sit around and post on Slashdot and be cynical. It's harder to dedicate your life to becoming the absolute best athlete at a given sport or skill, and that is the heart of the Olympics.
Do all those things happen around the Olympics? Sure. Are they the purpose? Not at all.
I know 3 out of the 5 U.S. whitewater slalom athletes in Beijing (plus many who barely missed the chance to go) and I can assure you there is nothing glamorous or rich or corrupt about their pursuit of excellence. The U.S. men's K1 athlete makes a modest living constructing prosthetics for injured soldiers when he's not in training sessions 12 times a week.
There is a "warning," and then there is a "WARNING: YOU MUST CLICK FIVE TIMES TO SEE THIS PAGE."
You might understand the difference between the encryption and authentication uses of SSL, but most people do not. Worse, their ignorance could provide a very effective vector for social engineering attacks.
User interface warnings are for people who do not understand what they are doing. They don't know where the trouble could come from, so the software must help them. Anything that presents a likely avenue of trouble should have a strong warning in front of it.
Those who do not understand potential avenues of trouble should be encouraged to simply stay out them. Those who do understand what they are doing will also understand the warning, and know that is ok for them to proceed.
A simple bar across the top of the page with a warning that the sites identity couldn't be verified, but that the connection was still encrypted would work just fine.
Work just fine for who? It seems to me this "issue" is basically a small number of power users annoyed about having to click an "ok" button a couple times.
Any biological intelligence does exactly the same as described: gather data (try to assess external universe model), find correlations (build internal universe model), act according to internal needs (act upon internal universe model) and repeat.
What are the internal needs of Google? I contend that as a tool, it has none, actually. Tools serve external needs only.
You're right about the data collection and correlation, but the essence of intelligence is the internal needs...that's the arrow of will, the great result of evolution. The data stuff is just a scaling issue.
Shedding party affiliation is a bit like shaking a religious upbringing; the hardest part is breaking the initial unshakable faith.
Party affiliation has nothing to do with believing that one political party is the same as the other. I'm not a fan of any flavor of Linux; it's on none of my computers. But I know there is a difference between them.
For example, how could a Republican filibuster have passed the FISA amendment to grant retroactive immunity? How could a filibuster "authorize the use of force" (and a metric shitload of money) in Iraq without a declaration of war?
The answer is called horse trading. You want to pass a minimum wage hike; I want immunity in my FISA. You want federal funds to repair the bridge in your city; I want immunity in my FISA. You want to pass the annual appropriations for HUD; I want immunity in my FISA. I have the power to deny anything you want; what are you willing to trade? Filibusters are like guns--I don't need to point one at you to get what I want, I just need to point one at something you care about.
Both parties use this tactic very effectively, by the way.
As the parent pointed out, it's not surprising that this sort of thing is happening. Many people could see it coming, which is one reason U.S. leadership is not boycotting or otherwise using the Games as political leverage.
Why would they need to? It seemed likely that China would shoot themselves in the foot with this sort of activity. What they hoped would be triumphant display of their world influence is becoming an exercise in sunlight being the best disinfectant. With this foreknowledge it is easy for the U.S. leadership to take a "high road" in their official capacity. Our free press is more than capable of providing the criticism.
Many Western journalists in China went there looking for this sort of story to cover. From their perspective the gift of the Olympics to Beijing was a trojan horse.
I think it's a fundamental mistake to judge the health or future prospects of a company by its stock price. Google is a company with a positive cash flow, little debt, and sizable cash reserves. If they were a private company it would be howlingly funny to speculate that they are going to crash anytime soon.
Stock prices fluctuate all over the place, having as much to do with the relative bets of institutional investors as with the business fundamentals of the company itself. If you want to predict the future of a tech company have a look at its balance sheet and R&D resources. By both measures Google seems to have a long and healthy future in front of it.
Please don't try to coopt the global warming issue to promote the animal rights issue. Like a bunch of people recently tried to hijack the Sierra Club by claiming that illegal immigration is an environmental issue.
Animal exhalations of methane and CO2 are not directly related to global warming because animals consume living matter. The carbon they emit was in the atmosphere just a few months ago. Cows, in and of themselves, are 100% carbon neutral.
The only carbon we really need to be worried about is that which comes out of deep stores. The CO2 that is produced by burning fossil fuels was last in the atmosphere millions of years ago. By adding it back into the atmosphere now, we are disturbing the current balance. A balance which, by the way, all living emitters of CO2 are part of. Even if we kill them and eat them.
Now it is true that the agriculture industry (not just the meat industry--the entire ag industry) burns a lot of fossil fuels to produce and ship their product, and that contributes to global warming. But the solution to that would be the same as for trucking--replace the internal combustion engine and gasoline.
Most lay people--and many doctors, seemingly--seem to think health science is only conducted epidemiologically. They do not understand that well-understood mechanical theory can be sufficient to disprove a causative link between correlated data...especially if it is poorly correlated.
As I've said in another post, we're simply not yet in a position to know whether cell phones cause cancer, because the difference between the rate of cancer in a cell-phone-using population and a non-cell-phone-using population will be vary small (the inter-group variance) and the variance in each population (the intra-group variance) will be vary large (think of it as 2 normal curves with 99.5% overlap). We're not going to have a reliable answer for many years.
We're not going to have a precisely reliable answer for many years, and maybe never. That does not mean we do not have an answer now. We do--it is that there is no correlation between cell phone use and cancer greater than the limit of precision (aka margin of error) in the studies done so far. This is a fancy way of saying that IF cell phones increase your risk of cancer, they do so by such a small amount that it is hidden by the many other factors that affect your health.
While that's not the same as saying cell phones have absolutely no risk factor for cancer, it is a big hint that we can direct our health concerns toward other priorities.
Just saw the movie "In the Shadow of the Moon," and his comments about this experience struck me as very poetic and beautiful. It brought home the power of the experience in a way that the engineering speak did not. And I'm not a religious or even really spiritual guy. But I do experience a sense of wonder sometimes, and he invoked it.
There's a moving scene where they show the TLI burn from the perspective of the stage left behind in orbit (it had a camera mounted in it). It's just a single long shot with music and the radio traffic overlayed. Great movie.
That's why I prefix my salary with 5 zeroes on my resume.
The entire concept of the Millenium Clock is an exercise in intellectual masturbation. It's impossible to generate an object that we can be sure will last 10,000 years, and trying to think about it results mostly in flights of fancy or self-satisfied hypothetical questioning.
The proper approach to long-term planning is the same as any approach to massive scalability...design systems that provably work in a manageable scale, then iterate them. The only reliable "Millenium Clock" is not an object, it is a repeatable short-term process for learning to tell time. So long as each generation teaches the next to tell time, they will be able to tell when 10,000 years has passed. And before you get hysterical about how long that is, understand that the Jewish calendar is more than halfway to that milestone already. Instead of creating a single indestructible object, they've instead focused on constructing a culture that simply passes down their concepts of time and calendar.
There is absolutely no reason to think that the next 10,000 years will be anything like the last, so can we please stop hyperventilating about the past. Yeah, not many papyrus scrolls have survived...well today we work in materials that are provably more durable than papyrus. Not that materials technology is the pinnacle of human achievement; we also have things today like representative government, free enterprise, wide-scale literacy, and widescale multilingualism. Not to mention many, many times more people than 10,000 years ago.
Agreed on the inapt name, but it's one of those terms that is now so common that it's probably impossible put the genie back in the bottle.
CO2 absorbs infrared (IR) light of certain wavelengths and then re-emits IR light. It passes visible light. This acts to warm the surface of the Earth in the following way. Let's say 100 units of sunlight pass through the atmospheric CO2 and hit the Earth's surface. 30 are immediately reflected, while the other 70 are absorbed, and then re-emitted as IR light.
Of those 70, let's say 10 are absorbed by the atmospheric CO2, and re-emitted in all directions evenly...for simplicity's sake let's ignore the sideways and say that 5 are emitted up into space, and 5 are emitted down toward the ground. The lower 5 are absorbed by the ground and then re-emitted upward, where they are once again absorbed and re-emitted by the atmospheric CO2. So now you have 2.5 going out into space, and 2.5 going down to the ground again. Iterate by halves until there's no more light left.
But the key is that these are all cumulative. So between the ground and the atmospheric CO2 you have an energy influx of 70 of visible, plus 5 of IR, plus 2.5 of IR, plus 1.75 of IR, etc. The end result is that between the CO2 and the ground, the number is over 70--the climate experiences an energy level greater than expected. In other words it is warmer than the sun would seem to provide in influx.
If the percentage of molecules of CO2 in the atmosphere goes up, it's obviously going to have a better chance of catching those IR photons and re-emitting them. The ultimate CO2 greenhouse effect is on Venus, which has an atmosphere of over 90% CO2. It is farther from the sun than Mercury but its surface is hotter than Mercury's because of all that CO2 trapping IR (heat).
This is grossly simplified of course, but the basic concept is there...IR is intercepted on its way back into space and partially re-emitted downward. This IR back-and-forth effectively "traps" some energy and produces a climate on the surface that is warmer than would be otherwise expected, say if calculated using only a black-body radiation model. In fact this discrepancy is what led to the initial concepts of "greenhouse gases" in the 19th century.
The big difference today is that quantum mechanics provides a detailed model for why CO2 absorbs or emits certain wavelengths of light. I'm not going to pretend to understand that...I was a geology major not a physics major.
More on the "greenhouse" effect:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_effect
If you take a non-biased, fresh look at all the data, there's actually more evidence that says that global warming increases carbon dioxide levels rather than increasing carbon dioxide levels increases global warming.
This is true and not true at the same time. Ice core and other historical climate proxies show that CO2 levels have lagged temperature trends. Some people have taken this to mean that warming causes high CO2 levels. Not exactly true because rising CO2 levels themselves cause warming (no historical data needed, this part is pure chemistry). So in the past what you've had is an initial "kick" of warming from something (most likely orbital variations), followed by a self-reinforcing process where warming releases more CO2 from oceans, which adds to the warming, which releases more CO2, etc.
The big thing to wrap our heads around is that warming is possible without that initial "kick." Humans are producing CO2 from fossil fuels, which is raising CO2 levels without the kick. But just like before, the CO2 will lead to more warming (remember: chemistry), and potentially another self-reinforcing cycle.
The great part about this plan is that if it turns out we don't need it, we just stop dumping lime. I'm not a biochemist but I believe a strength of this proposal is that the process is lime-limited. Stop dumping the lime and the process stops. It cannot go "runaway."
It isn't GW denying, it's that CO2 probably accounts for less than 25% of the greenhouse effect.
Less than 25% over what period of time? What is the incremental effect of ongoing CO2 emissions, vs. other gases? What are the chemical sources for all the gases?
In a short snapshot of time, CO2 does not contribute much to the greenhouse effect. Water vapor and methane produce a greater percentage of warming. HOWEVER, the global balance of water vapor is not significantly changing, and imbalances cycle out of the atmosphere within a week or two (as rain). So while water vapor is a powerful greenhouse gas, it does not contribute to long-term climate trends very much. Methane lasts a lot longer than water vapor, but still quite a bit less time than CO2. That is because methane is not stable in the atmosphere; it breaks down into water, ozone, and...CO2. CO2 lasts a long time in the atmosphere. It is chemically stable and the carbon cycle moves slowly.
We have a situation where mankind produces a lot of water vapor, methane, and CO2. The water vapor washes out of the atmosphere so quickly that no matter how much extra we produce, the balance is back a week later. Plus the amount we produce is tiny compared to say, ocean evaporation.
Methane and CO2 are produced from living plant matter and from fossil fuels. Plant matter is made of CO2 that used to be in the atmosphere, so every plant we convert to CO2 will eventually be plant again, etc--keeping the system in balance. But methane and CO2 coming from fossil fuels are not part of our ongoing balance. And since CO2 lasts a long time, the aggregate effect of increases over decades will actually be the greatest due to CO2.
A metaphor for this is a comparison of growing your money at 20% compounded for 2 years or 7% compounded for 10 years. Yes the former has a "larger effect," i.e. a bigger instantaneous interest rate. But even though the percentage is smaller, the latter produces the larger final effect. This is a metaphor for why scientists are most concerned about CO2 among the greenhouse gases. Whatever we do now with CO2, we're going to be stuck with the results for a long time.
The article provides insight into Microsoft's way of thinking. But, it does not provide an independent evaluation of whether that way of thinking is correct or effective. Basically I believe that it is not. I think Microsoft fundamentally misunderstands the relationships between search companies and their users.
[Microsoft has] an anemic 8.5% of searches, according to comScore. Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500), meanwhile, still commands 21%, to Google's 62%...The only way Microsoft can compete with what the business of Google really is - a large marketplace for advertising and searches - is to somehow achieve much greater scale. No method of creating dramatically greater scale seems available other than combining with Yahoo's search.
I think it's a fundamental mistake to think that a merger is automatically additive--that by buying Yahoo's search business, Microsoft will realize 29.5% market share in searches. This is not paid-for software like Great Plains or PeopleSoft or Salesforce.com. There is nothing of substance tying the people who search on yahoo.com to Yahoo! the company. The only things creating repeat searches are the brand and the search technology.
To achieve a larger ad ecosystem, Microsoft would have to fold Live Search into Yahoo or vice versa. But because there are no financial ties, customers can react to changes however they want. If there are changes to Live.com, it's just as likely that half the customers will choose to move to Google, as they would choose to move to the new Yahoo. When you shake the bird feeder there is no guarantee all the birds will just go next door.
Furthermore, if search technology is not as important, what is keeping people coming back to Google? It's not the ads, which are ignored by most people. It's the search product itself.
I think it's fundamentally backward to think that product elements like brand, technology, UI, etc are somehow not important, but "scale" is. How is scale achieved? The first step to growth is bringing in lots of repeat customers. What brings that? Great consumer-facing products. This is the key to the growth of most of Microsoft's competitors these days. But Microsoft is often not able to solve that. XBox is one example of where they have...they compete directly against Sony on the basis of the product itself.
Buying Yahoo will not achieve product greatness. It's entirely possible they will succeed in making the investment, only to see the combined market share of Live and Yahoo search drop over the next several years. The ONLY thing that can ensure that will not happen, is to create a search brand and product that is more attractive to customers than Google. But if they could do that, they would not need buy Yahoo in the first place.
I don't mean to be condescending, just helpful. It's pretty easy to do since all the e-mails are coming from one source.
You go to settings and create a new filter, with myspace as the from address. After clicking "next", you have actions to choose from. One of them is to apply a label, which will help keep them all "together" for easier review later. But another one is to "skip the inbox" which sends them straight into the Archive (i.e. hides them from view).
If you want to review them first, just have the filter set the label. Then later after you're read them, you can click that label name in the lower-left green box to find them all. Then click the "select all" link at the top, then choose archive from download. It sounds like a lot of steps but it is very fast since you don't have to manually select each one. The label is applied automatically by the filter upon receipt, and it lets you select and move them all around at once.
You can always archive things manually as well. Just check the box for the ones you want to hide, and choose "Archive" from the drop-down box.
You can also use a search...for instance search your entire inbox for messages with "myspace" in the from field, and "friend request" (or whatever) in the subject line. Once you get the results list, you can again click the Select All link, then use the drop down to Archive.
Once you get the hang of it I think you'll find it is faster and easier to manage. Once you learn it, you can use it effectively--that's what people usually mean by "intuitive." But it is not obvious...it does a little effort to learn. Hope this was helpful.
The only thing that can affect the amount of Gallium available on Earth is nucleosynthesis or a fairly sturdy asteroid impact.
Exactly. The issue is not that gallium is getting "used up," the issue is that it's getting redistributed from ground ore into landfills. The process of that distribution is a human endeavor, thus it is subject to study by economics.
Gallium is currently more expensive to get out of landfills than it is to get out of the ground. That's fine, at one point it was too expensive to get out of the ground too. When it became economically advantageous to do so, people did it. Same with recovering from electronics.
The REAL physical limitation is not gallium, it is energy. As long as we have energy to spend, we can reuse and recycle gallium forever. If we run out of energy, it doesn't matter where the gallium is, we won't be able to use it.
You might have dozens of folders for your bookmarks too. Well, del.icio.us uses tags and searching to organize bookmarks, and you may have noticed that has not held it back. Perhaps you have all your photos carefully organized into folders. Well Flickr shows us that tags and searching works very well to organize photos. Wikipedia pages are tagged. Everyone knows how to use Google to search for information. The metaphors in the Gmail interface are very well established in the populace.
In addition, I find your comment to be pretty pointless because it does not describe an actual need. "Moving an e-mail to a folder" is not an information- or user-oriented need, it is a tool. It is a means not an end. An actual user need would be something like "find this e-mail easily later" or "keep all e-mails from my bank together." Needs like these are easily met with labels and searching, used together.
If you've never had a Coke in your life, but you've seen the logo everywhere you go for a decade, when faced with 10 unknown colas and no opportunity to do research, you're most likely to pick the Coke because it feels like a known element even though it isn't.
If this is the context in which advertising will control me, let's just say I'm not worried. And it occurs to me that there remains the option to buy none of the 10 sodas, familiar or not.
AdBlock is a great tool for people who don't want to see ads. But if people think they are better or more independent humans for using it, they're fooling themselves.