Climate is the average of the weather in an area over a long period of time. Climate, therefore, does not equal weather, but is directly defined by it.
Long range climate predictions are easier because they're less specific than weather predictions. Your weatherman predicts that it'll rain in your city tomorrow. A climatologist predicts that it'll be chilly on your continent in January every year for the next 50 years.
So, actually, it would be more akin to you predicting that there will be a presidential election than it is to you predicting who the candidates are.
And, please note that these products aren't even officially being supported anymore
Allow me to dance upon the grave of this particular party line here and now -- bullshit, MS is still actively selling this operating system if you happen to be the right customer.
My gripe isn't that they want to charge for an update to a (now) 2-gen-old version of a product. My gripe is what they want to charge, even the new bargain-basement price. I could see a "nominal charge" up to the original sticker price, but I just can't swallow that a relatively simple change to the OS incurs a 40x higher cost than the original development of the entire OS, especially considering its a change they have to come up with anyway, because they are still actively selling it.
Not in this context. "Nazi", when used to refer to the political party, is a proper noun and should be capitalized. When used to refer to behavior, as in "language nazi", there is no such requirement.
Two independent sentences should be separated by a [...]
Technically this is correct, but it is needlessly nitpicky. The primary purpose of language is to effectively communicate ideas, and is malleable to that end. As long as I know which rules I am breaking, I am free to break them. To paraphrase from a certain well-known pirate film, "They're not rules so much as what you might call guidelines."
This being true, of course, means that the question of "NASA" vs. "The NASA" is largely irrelevant assuming I know the applicable rule. In this case, though, I do not, which is why I am asking.
Witty digs that strike a nerve but make a valid point are not "trolls".
If your points are demonstrated not to be valid, then what?
Oh, to have a purpose again. Life...is...good!
So it is. Serve your purpose. Answer my question. Please:-)
I suspect that I make a lot of mistake using "the" in inappropriate places.
Not at all, you're fine. I ask my question because I'm not sure that you are the one making the mistake. It might be us native speakers. Unfortunately, the only language nazi I managed to attract decided to answer everything except the question I was asking.
"the NASA"? I know it would be "the National Aeronautics and Space Administration", but I've always seen the acronym "NASA" used as its own proper noun. i.e., "NASA said..." rather than "The NASA said..."
I'm seriously not trying to play language nazi here, I'm really curious. It seems like if it would be "the National Aeronautics [...]", then it should also be "the NASA" (especially considering how much noise is thrown up about "ATM Machine" being redundant), unless NASA is some sort of an exception?
Oh, for Christ's sake, you're not turning around and staring over your shoulder, you're doing a quick eye flick to determine whether the space is occupied by A) air, or B) something large, metal, and opaque that may do significant body damage if you run into it. If this takes you longer than a fraction of a second, you're doing it wrong.
First impressions are important. If I bought a product and it didn't meet my minimum expectations of quality, I wouldn't purchase another product from the company in question either. Are you in the habit of buying shoddy merchantise repeatedly from the same company?
I'm not, but circumstance has a funny way of stepping in and using my perceptions against one another.
I had bought a Compaq years ago. It was the worst machine I've ever had. I'm talking about a semi-functional, proprietary, non-upgradable nightmare of Packard-Bell proportions.
After taking more pain from this machine than I cared for, I shopped around and settled on an HP as its replacement. One of the best machines I've ever owned. And I swore I would never again send one of my dollars to Compaq.
Then HP bought Compaq, and I all but wept. Damn you, Murphy.
Absolutely! Similarly, the iPods will be programmed to loop "We Built This City" endlessly, virtually guaranteeing that somebody will show up to scream "Turn that crap off!"
I'll assume they're adding a day; and if the onboard system is using, say, 64-bit ints for femtoseconds since takeoff,
What on God's green Earth would make you think that the planes are adjusting for time zones literally on the fly? Why introduce the havoc in the system logs should you find yourself bouncing back and forth across a time zone in a dogfight? This just simply will never be the case. All system clocks are going to be synced maybe to the local time of their home base, but more likely GMT or UCT.
My guess is somebody forgot their basic map stitching rules and the sudden jump from -180 to 180 Lat had the nav systems believing that the plane had suddenly zoomed the long way across the dateline in a fraction of a second, and they're probably programmed to shut down in the event of an error condition rather than muck things up further.
Well, the article does say that the difference is the "crafting" aspect
Right, but what I'm saying is that if an aquatic rodent can figure out "whack it with a rock", then a species capable of, with assistance, learning sign language and piloting a space capsule might just be able to pull of a pointy stick without assistance.
Remember, humans don't have all of the tools and technology because we're all brilliant. All it takes is one smarter-than-average chimp with one flash of insight to change the world.
I'd think this would get boring after a while. Crafting tools and killing defenseless little creatures -- are they trying to level up, or what??:)
Damned kobolds. [poke, stab] If they were serious about levelling, they'd warp straight to the boss level
Forget weather. We're going to selectively engineer the numerical distribution rolling dice. Now, we can't accurately predict or control any particular throw or series of throws, but we're going to magically make even numbers over-represent themselves.
No problems:-)
And you freaked me. I'm sorry you feel that way. Though, at the same time, I'm surprised I haven't been modded into the basement...
After doing a little light reading inspired by your.sig, I'm just going to smile passively, politley agree to everything you say, and back slowly away.
Slowly, slowly away...
But seriously:
why don't you actually read what it says in the article you linked to? Then you can explain how you can possibly construe that as "equal certainty".
Ah, yes. Rules of engagement. Wikipedia is not an authoritative source, unless it is. I was insulating against the "Hurk, there's nevar bin inny such thing!!1!" reponses. Wikipedia is a convenient reference for such puposes. To be fair, I don't recall hearing the phrase "global cooling" until after the advent of "global warming". I believe it was actually reported at the time as "Are We Entering a New Ice Age?"
I am not an authority on the climate. Most of my exposure is from popular media. I read articles, papers, op/ed pieces, so on and so forth. The energy crisis, global cooling, commie reds and nuclear winter, global warming, terrorism - whatever the topic of the day is that is going to end us all generates the same hysterics. Yet, we still have gas, I have never been run over by a glacier, I have never been recruited by the communist party, I have never been nuked, I have never been baked out of my habitat, I have never been car-bombed. Yes, I recognize that all of these things are real to a greater or lesser extent, and that people have been affected by them to a greater or lesser extent, some quite catestrophically. I feel for those people, at least inasmuch as I wish no ill upon anybody, but my personal exposure has always been at the receiving end of a televised talking head.
So please forgive me if I don't have the will to dance about the current superstitious campfire. Forgive me if I seem a bit cynical about "consensus" - I am. Forgive me if my recollection seems tainted by popular media - it is.
But here's the thing: in spite of the wikipedians saying that there was never a consensus, there were expert talking heads saying we were entering an ice age, just as there are expert talking heads now. I didn't believe them, either, I bring them up only as a counterpoint.
The fact is, there still isn't consensus. I am not alone questioning the impact of humans. People far smarter than I, who are experts, ask the same questions. See what Dr. Tim Ball has to say. Or Professor C.R. de Freitas (apologies, PDF... but very informative and with sources listed. A very brief unsourced summary is here). Wikipedia (dare I?) has a list of scientists that doubt one aspect or another of the "global warming consensus". I'll even acknowledge that the first line says "A small minority of scientists", but that does not change the fact that some of their concerns with the current fervor sound very reasonable to me.
OTOH, people far smarter than I, who are also experts, say we are the cause. The experts do not agree. I choose to side with the skeptics. And that, basically, is all I have to say.
The climatic conditions tens of millions of years ago are irrelevant to the attribution of the recent phenomenon of global warming. We can say that the current warming is "primarily due to" mankind's CO2 emissions irrespective of what drove the climate in past ages, purely on the basis of what we know about the recent climate.
We don't know what drove these climate changes in the past. We have theories, not all of which agree with each other, on topics from volcanic erruptions to fluctuations in solar output to permutations in the Earth's orbit to shifts in the magnetic poles to... whatever.
We know only that the temperature has trended up recently. It might be mankind's "carbon footprint". It might be something else that we don't know to look for. The fact that these changes take place without us and we don't know why is completely relevant to the discussion.
What's your point? Are you attempting to deny that global warming is primarily due to mankind's CO2 emissions, or are you merely pointing out the irrelevant?
I'm questioning "primarily due to". How is pointing out that the Earth does this with or without us irrelevant to that question?
...and it must do all of this without telling me what it's doing, because I don't care what it does as long as the software then works.
Why is this funny? There's nothing evil about a silent mode. It's called "ease of use". In fact, I was kinda under the impression that ease of use was the point of this article. If you like screens of text, set a verbose flag. If you like pulling wires, you can still build from code.
Or is the goal to continue to scare people away from widespread adoption?
However, they are smart people who know what they're talking about. They could be wrong, but I don't really see how any of the recommended measures, if taken incrementally to make the money-grubbing politicians and blood-sucking lawyers happy, will be bad for us on the whole. We get more efficient technology out of the deal, significant technological advances, and serious improvements in living conditions in exchange for what? Recognizing we might be capable of trashing our planet? Sounds good to me!
Certainly I'll agree with this. Absolutely we should move towards cleaner and more efficient technology. By and large we tend to do so anyway, even without this surrounding debate, and I've already said we should be kinder to our environment. That's not at all what I'm arguing against, it's the insinuations that it just has to be mankind this time when there have been "radically" different climates throughout the ages that irks me.
That, and being painted as a Neanderthal, half-wit, right-wingnut creationist, flat-earther, or other such title for daring to say so out loud. Mind you, none of the above apply. Like I said, I'm all for humanity cleaning up its act (I think that's a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself), I'm just asking what seems to me to be a perfectly valid question in the face of a reactionary argument.
We've already engineered our global climate with our greenhouse gas, aerosol, and particulate emissions.
Hmmm...
The world spent millions of years with a tropical climate in the Cretaceous age.
And without a bit of help from mankind and his evil CO2 emissions, it might be pointed out.
What does "climate is self-correcting" mean? [...] the point is that the climate doesn't necessarily stabilize at conditions that we would find preferable.
Habitable, perhaps not preferable. That is what self-correcting means. Or at least what I mean when I say it. Climate gets warmer, the world becomes largely tropical, life continues. Climate gets cooler, glaciers cover large amounts of land, life continues. "Climate is self-correcting" means that, even at its extremes, our world is still perfectly suitable for life.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonono, you're telling the joke all wrong! It goes like this:
Climate is the average of the weather in an area over a long period of time. Climate, therefore, does not equal weather, but is directly defined by it.
Long range climate predictions are easier because they're less specific than weather predictions. Your weatherman predicts that it'll rain in your city tomorrow. A climatologist predicts that it'll be chilly on your continent in January every year for the next 50 years.
So, actually, it would be more akin to you predicting that there will be a presidential election than it is to you predicting who the candidates are.
Allow me to dance upon the grave of this particular party line here and now -- bullshit, MS is still actively selling this operating system if you happen to be the right customer.
My gripe isn't that they want to charge for an update to a (now) 2-gen-old version of a product. My gripe is what they want to charge, even the new bargain-basement price. I could see a "nominal charge" up to the original sticker price, but I just can't swallow that a relatively simple change to the OS incurs a 40x higher cost than the original development of the entire OS, especially considering its a change they have to come up with anyway, because they are still actively selling it.
Not in this context. "Nazi", when used to refer to the political party, is a proper noun and should be capitalized. When used to refer to behavior, as in "language nazi", there is no such requirement.
Two independent sentences should be separated by a [...]Technically this is correct, but it is needlessly nitpicky. The primary purpose of language is to effectively communicate ideas, and is malleable to that end. As long as I know which rules I am breaking, I am free to break them. To paraphrase from a certain well-known pirate film, "They're not rules so much as what you might call guidelines."
This being true, of course, means that the question of "NASA" vs. "The NASA" is largely irrelevant assuming I know the applicable rule. In this case, though, I do not, which is why I am asking.
Witty digs that strike a nerve but make a valid point are not "trolls".If your points are demonstrated not to be valid, then what?
Oh, to have a purpose again. Life...is...good!So it is. Serve your purpose. Answer my question. Please :-)
Not at all, you're fine. I ask my question because I'm not sure that you are the one making the mistake. It might be us native speakers. Unfortunately, the only language nazi I managed to attract decided to answer everything except the question I was asking.
The following events take place between the hours of 8:00pm and 9:00pm EST:
"the NASA"? I know it would be "the National Aeronautics and Space Administration", but I've always seen the acronym "NASA" used as its own proper noun. i.e., "NASA said..." rather than "The NASA said..."
I'm seriously not trying to play language nazi here, I'm really curious. It seems like if it would be "the National Aeronautics [...]", then it should also be "the NASA" (especially considering how much noise is thrown up about "ATM Machine" being redundant), unless NASA is some sort of an exception?
Oh, for Christ's sake, you're not turning around and staring over your shoulder, you're doing a quick eye flick to determine whether the space is occupied by A) air, or B) something large, metal, and opaque that may do significant body damage if you run into it. If this takes you longer than a fraction of a second, you're doing it wrong.
<user, screaming> "AARRGGHH, it burnssss! It burnsss ussss, pressciouse!"
<Symantec Support 1> "That's how you know it's working."
<Symantec Support 2> "Damn - actually, it was only supposed to tingle. Back to the drawing board, guys."
I'm not, but circumstance has a funny way of stepping in and using my perceptions against one another.
I had bought a Compaq years ago. It was the worst machine I've ever had. I'm talking about a semi-functional, proprietary, non-upgradable nightmare of Packard-Bell proportions.
After taking more pain from this machine than I cared for, I shopped around and settled on an HP as its replacement. One of the best machines I've ever owned. And I swore I would never again send one of my dollars to Compaq.
Then HP bought Compaq, and I all but wept. Damn you, Murphy.
Absolutely! Similarly, the iPods will be programmed to loop "We Built This City" endlessly, virtually guaranteeing that somebody will show up to scream "Turn that crap off!"
Irfanview. It slices, it dices, it opens every image format I've ever had to throw at it.
What on God's green Earth would make you think that the planes are adjusting for time zones literally on the fly? Why introduce the havoc in the system logs should you find yourself bouncing back and forth across a time zone in a dogfight? This just simply will never be the case. All system clocks are going to be synced maybe to the local time of their home base, but more likely GMT or UCT.
My guess is somebody forgot their basic map stitching rules and the sudden jump from -180 to 180 Lat had the nav systems believing that the plane had suddenly zoomed the long way across the dateline in a fraction of a second, and they're probably programmed to shut down in the event of an error condition rather than muck things up further.
Right, but what I'm saying is that if an aquatic rodent can figure out "whack it with a rock", then a species capable of, with assistance, learning sign language and piloting a space capsule might just be able to pull of a pointy stick without assistance.
Remember, humans don't have all of the tools and technology because we're all brilliant. All it takes is one smarter-than-average chimp with one flash of insight to change the world.
I'd think this would get boring after a while. Crafting tools and killing defenseless little creatures -- are they trying to level up, or what??Damned kobolds. [poke, stab] If they were serious about levelling, they'd warp straight to the boss level
Even if it is some form of imitation, doesn't that indicate some grasp of the encompassed cause and effect? Some glimmer of said foresight?
Otters use flat stones to crack open shellfish. Some apes use sticks to fish for termites. Is this really such a stretch?
I just called him up. He says he'll divert the funds, but only if Cheney gets to shoot that Jar-Jar guy.
[applause]
Forget weather. We're going to selectively engineer the numerical distribution rolling dice. Now, we can't accurately predict or control any particular throw or series of throws, but we're going to magically make even numbers over-represent themselves.
No problems :-)
And you freaked me. I'm sorry you feel that way. Though, at the same time, I'm surprised I haven't been modded into the basement...
After doing a little light reading inspired by your .sig, I'm just going to smile passively, politley agree to everything you say, and back slowly away.
Slowly, slowly away...
But seriously:
why don't you actually read what it says in the article you linked to? Then you can explain how you can possibly construe that as "equal certainty".Ah, yes. Rules of engagement. Wikipedia is not an authoritative source, unless it is. I was insulating against the "Hurk, there's nevar bin inny such thing!!1!" reponses. Wikipedia is a convenient reference for such puposes. To be fair, I don't recall hearing the phrase "global cooling" until after the advent of "global warming". I believe it was actually reported at the time as "Are We Entering a New Ice Age?"
I am not an authority on the climate. Most of my exposure is from popular media. I read articles, papers, op/ed pieces, so on and so forth. The energy crisis, global cooling, commie reds and nuclear winter, global warming, terrorism - whatever the topic of the day is that is going to end us all generates the same hysterics. Yet, we still have gas, I have never been run over by a glacier, I have never been recruited by the communist party, I have never been nuked, I have never been baked out of my habitat, I have never been car-bombed. Yes, I recognize that all of these things are real to a greater or lesser extent, and that people have been affected by them to a greater or lesser extent, some quite catestrophically. I feel for those people, at least inasmuch as I wish no ill upon anybody, but my personal exposure has always been at the receiving end of a televised talking head.
So please forgive me if I don't have the will to dance about the current superstitious campfire. Forgive me if I seem a bit cynical about "consensus" - I am. Forgive me if my recollection seems tainted by popular media - it is.
But here's the thing: in spite of the wikipedians saying that there was never a consensus, there were expert talking heads saying we were entering an ice age, just as there are expert talking heads now. I didn't believe them, either, I bring them up only as a counterpoint.
The fact is, there still isn't consensus. I am not alone questioning the impact of humans. People far smarter than I, who are experts, ask the same questions. See what Dr. Tim Ball has to say. Or Professor C.R. de Freitas (apologies, PDF... but very informative and with sources listed. A very brief unsourced summary is here). Wikipedia (dare I?) has a list of scientists that doubt one aspect or another of the "global warming consensus". I'll even acknowledge that the first line says "A small minority of scientists", but that does not change the fact that some of their concerns with the current fervor sound very reasonable to me.
OTOH, people far smarter than I, who are also experts, say we are the cause. The experts do not agree. I choose to side with the skeptics. And that, basically, is all I have to say.
We don't know what drove these climate changes in the past. We have theories, not all of which agree with each other, on topics from volcanic erruptions to fluctuations in solar output to permutations in the Earth's orbit to shifts in the magnetic poles to... whatever.
We know only that the temperature has trended up recently. It might be mankind's "carbon footprint". It might be something else that we don't know to look for. The fact that these changes take place without us and we don't know why is completely relevant to the discussion.
I'm questioning "primarily due to". How is pointing out that the Earth does this with or without us irrelevant to that question?
...and it must do all of this without telling me what it's doing, because I don't care what it does as long as the software then works.Why is this funny? There's nothing evil about a silent mode. It's called "ease of use". In fact, I was kinda under the impression that ease of use was the point of this article. If you like screens of text, set a verbose flag. If you like pulling wires, you can still build from code.
Or is the goal to continue to scare people away from widespread adoption?
Certainly I'll agree with this. Absolutely we should move towards cleaner and more efficient technology. By and large we tend to do so anyway, even without this surrounding debate, and I've already said we should be kinder to our environment. That's not at all what I'm arguing against, it's the insinuations that it just has to be mankind this time when there have been "radically" different climates throughout the ages that irks me.
That, and being painted as a Neanderthal, half-wit, right-wingnut creationist, flat-earther, or other such title for daring to say so out loud. Mind you, none of the above apply. Like I said, I'm all for humanity cleaning up its act (I think that's a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself), I'm just asking what seems to me to be a perfectly valid question in the face of a reactionary argument.
Hmmm...
The world spent millions of years with a tropical climate in the Cretaceous age.And without a bit of help from mankind and his evil CO2 emissions, it might be pointed out.
What does "climate is self-correcting" mean? [...] the point is that the climate doesn't necessarily stabilize at conditions that we would find preferable.Habitable, perhaps not preferable. That is what self-correcting means. Or at least what I mean when I say it. Climate gets warmer, the world becomes largely tropical, life continues. Climate gets cooler, glaciers cover large amounts of land, life continues. "Climate is self-correcting" means that, even at its extremes, our world is still perfectly suitable for life.