That phrase "as early as"--what does it mean, exactly? If you call this a "prediction"-- what did it predict, and how can you tell whether it is accurate?
New Science Suggests the Ocean Could Rise More -- and Faster -- Than We Thought
Maybe. Possibly.
But aren't we already suppose to be under ten feet of water?
Huh? Where did you get that? Nobody predicted ten feet-- over three meters!-- of sea level rise by 2017.
The very first IPCC report-- back in 1990--predicted "an average rate of global mean sea level rise of about 6 cm per decade over the next century (with an uncertainty range of 3 – 10 cm per decade), mainly due to thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of some land ice. The predicted rise is about 20 cm... by 2030, and 65 cm by the end of the next century."
The most recent (5th, 2014) report (here https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assess... ) says 25 cm to 70 cm by 2100. (That's the one that this news item is reacting to).
Nobody predicted 10 feet by 2017-- you should look back and find who told you that had been the prediction and never believe them again.
Answer this: Where is the science that says the current global average temperature is optimal?
It isn't "optimal". It is, however, what we have built our society's infrastructure around, and what the Earth's ecology has adapted to.
We could rebuild our infrastructure to a different temperature. It will have a cost. The Earth's ecology can adapt to a different set of climates. It will take time, and result in some amount of species loss, but inside of ten thousand years or so, they'd adapt.
It's only the short term-- the next few centuries-- that would be hard.
Doesn't matter how unlikely it is in infinite time it's gonna happen a lot.
Yep. But the chances are ten-to-the-googleplex to one that all that gets temporarily created in the fluctuation is your brain, and that fluctuation only lasts long enough to read this message, after which you (or, what you temporarily believed was you) dissipate.
And, if it's true, then everything we know about physics is fantasy, since physics (like the existence of other people) never actually ever existed.
The current iteration of the universe is not infinite, which you state. So it's completely plausible the universe has always existed but it goes through "rebirth" every few trillion "years". Maybe the big bang that started our universe was the infinity + 1 big bang that happened.
Yep. That's one reason I put in that particular wording: "the universe has not existed infinitely in its current form.
I'm far from an expert and I'll go so far to say that I'm not even very knowledgeable on the subject.. but my simple brain seems to think that at some point expansion halts and contraction begins. Could the universe contract into a singularity and cause another big bang?
That is plausible in terms of the physics: it's sometimes called the "big crunch", and the idea that the universe expands to a maximum extent, contracts, and then recycles into a new big bang is called the "cyclic" or "oscillating" universe: https://www.universetoday.com/...
The best data we have at the moment, however, says that there is not enough mass in the universe for the expansion to be reversed by gravity (in fact, it suggests the opposite: rather than expansion slowing down and eventually stopping, expansion is actually speeding up.)
There are people trying to prove that antimatter has negative mass. That would explain the 'missing' part as well as the accelerated expansion of the universe [antimatter has somehow become Dark Energy].
There may be people trying to prove this, but if antimatter has negative mass, you have even worse problems. But it doesn't: if it did, then it would take zero energy to create particle/antiparticle pairs (mc^2 + (-m)c^2 = 0). And positronium (which has been made) would have net zero mass, and thus would accelerate to arbitrary velocity under the pressure of photons of trivial energy, and we'd never see it.
What we know for sure is that the universe hasn't existed forever in its current form. If it has existed forever, it has been in a different form.
If you are arguing for the possibillity that the universe is a temporary fluctuation in a thermal equilibrium state, you do realize that large fluctuations are exponentially unlikely, and the probability of any fluctuation being long-lasting is even more exponentially unlikely. So, if what we see as the universe is a fluctuation, it is almost certainly very very small, and very very short lasting-- what you call the "universe" must consists of nothing more than your brain and some random signals propagating to it, and its duration is no more than a few fractions of a second.
Your previous post is not something you did (your memory of it is a random fluctuation), I don't exist, the internet doesn't exist, and this post doesn't exist (what exists are the random fluctuations in thermal equilibrium that, coincidentally, your brain happens to interpret as memories, and as an "internet" post.).
Also, everything we know about the universe doesn't exist-- your memories of what you think we know about physics are just random fluctuations, not real: nobody has ever actually done any physics experiments because nobody else actually exists.
And neither will you, in a second or two from now.
The human mind is particularly bad at handling some concepts... like 'infinity' for one. What if the universe always existed, and always will? Why can't it be infinitely long on the time axis as well as the spatial ones?
Because if it had always existed, there would be dead stars that are infinitely (or nearly infinitely) old. But there aren't.
What we do know absolutely for sure is that the universe has not existed infinitely in its current form. Stars don't last forever. Entropy tends toward maximum. If the universe was infinitely old, it would have slid down the curve of entropy to be a featureless mess.
The nature of that event at the beginning (of the universe as we know it), however, is still somewhat unclear. We do see the universe expanding, and that's a clue. We can track it backwards to very small and very dense. But we can't track it backwards to the "beginning," because it gets to realms of energy and density for which we don't know the laws of physics.
Standard quantum mechanics (well, relativistic quantum mechanics) states that particles and antiparticles must have exactly the same magnetic properties. Exactly.
If CERN tests didn't verify this, there would be a big, big problem with parts of physics that we thought we knew pretty well. That's a pretty exciting experiment to try, since if there was a big big problem with quantum mechanics, it would be groundbreaking to find this out. But it's not particularly headline news to say "quantum mechanics is confirmed, yet again."
Yes, that's a different question. I was addressing the post by AmiMoJo stating that what they should have done was copied the customer's files, analyzed them, and published them.
"if we accidentally get some of your files, we delete them immediately-- any files of any type, no matter what they are or what they do."
But if it got malware, how are they supposed to know if YOU wrote the malware (and thus the policy would be to delete it) or if you just downloaded it (and thus their policy should be to catalogue and hash)?
We are assuming here that Kaspersky is not actually clueless.
Among other things, the fact that you have source code and several previous versions of the file might serve as a clue.
What really worries me here is that Kaspersky apparently deleted the NSA malware and source code once they realized what it was. They should have analyzed it, generated signatures and published details. Failure to do so is far worse than simply sharing it with the Russian government, who I'd assume already had copies anyway given how leaky the NSA is.
They said that their software sent them for analysis some files that belonged to the customer, and they deleted the files as soon as they realized that these were customer files.
If Kaspersky did not delete customer files that their software sends them, then I would definitely say you have to dump them.
"We found some of the software you were working on when we scanned your machine. Mostly we delete customer files we access by accident, but we thought this one was useful to us, so we kept it so we can reverse engineer what it does" is not acceptable behavior from somebody you are going to allow to have access to your maching. You can't accept an antivirus company looking at your files and deciding whether or not to keep them-- their policy has to be rigorously "if we accidentally get some of your files, we delete them immediately-- any files of any type, no matter what they are or what they do."
I've bought books because of Google Books service that let me look inside a book and see that it's going to be useful for me. Shutting down GB means closing this channel for you as an author. A stupid move, I would say.
I agree. But it should be your choice to decide what and how much of your work to give away for free, not somebody else's.
Here's my proposal how to fix the major flaws of copyright while ensuring that authors get paid: Replace copyright with payright. Here's what it means: The author gets a right to a clearly defined slice of revenue (e.g. 20% by default) from every commercial use of their work. If you register your work in a central registry, you get to set the percentage yourself and commercial users will have contact you. If you don't register it, statutory default applies and commercial users will just need to hold your slice of revenue in escrow until you contact them.
So, you're saying that I can put up a site that makes the work of all the bestselling authors in America available for free, and the bestselling authors will get nothing. Because in your view they don't own their work, and aren't allowed to decide what their work is worth, or even if it is worth anything at all.
As an an author, Shirley you can do better than introducing a straw man into the argument? The poster did not make comment about living authors, so it ain't reasonable to criticise him for your unsupported inference.
The anonymous coward poster was making a comment on my post, which most explicitly was about living authors. Since my post was about living authors, you should be responding to anonymous coward's post, not mine: As an an anonymous coward, Shirley you can do better than introducing a straw man into the argument? The poster you are responding to made a comment about living authors, so it ain't reasonable to criticise him for your unsupported statements about dead authors.
For thousands of years, authors, artists and musicians didn't expect to get paid for their work, and they did it anyway.
And for thousands of years peasants starved to death in years when the local harvest was poor, and died of disease when a plague passed through. And, more to the point, had their stuff taken away by anybody who passed by who was equipped with swords, spears, arrows, and armor.
Your point is that ancient societies were somehow better than ours? That societies for thousands of years condoned slavery, so we should, too?
Copyright length is the main issue, not a differing business model. There's a lot of content out there that the author's are dead and income are the least of their worries.
So, Mr. Anonymous Coward, what you're basically saying is that since dead authors don't need to be paid, you think it's ok if living ones don't get paid either.
As an author, yes, I would like to be paid when my works are distributed.
The problem is that Google wanted to distribute the work from authors for free.
I do know that the idea that people should be paid for their work is controversial on/., where many commentators believe that information-- meaning other peoples' work-- should be free, and authors should be happy to starve, because, hey, it's exposure.
Well, actually, isn't the problem that they want to sell it / use it for commercial purposes? If Google simply wanted to put this on the web for absolutely free, with no links to anything else, couldn't they?
Google is the most valuable company in the world. They may want to distribute others peoples work for free, but they themselves plan to make a huge profit from doing so.
You only need 1.21 gigawatts to travel back in time, buy Bitcoins at USD$0.008, become the most powerful company on the planet and simply buy out any and all competitors before they become a threat.
Don't buy too MANY of the Bitcoins. You might get back to now and find out that the market that drove their price up never developed and theyr're worth nothing.
Actually, that's as good an explanation of why bitcoins have risen in price as any other: time travellers bought them up.
I will agree with the point that one storm, even an extraordinary storm, is neither confirmation nor refutation of global warming. Global warming is real (the science really is pretty solid, despite the doubters), but it is a global, long-term thing. One storm-- even one extraordinary storm season-- is not global warming.
Go ahead and panic if it makes you happy, but it should be a long-term panic about effects evincing over the next fifty to a hundred years, not a "this is it, right here, right now" panic.
You're actually making it more difficult for the center leaning right to have civil discourse.
I'd actually like to hear more from the center-leaning right. The far-right is completely drowning out the discourse (and for that matter, I'd be interested in hearing more from the center-leaning left.)
And you're not alone, nearly all the people are polarized and the TrueLeft and True Right just can't believe what the center leaning on either side are talking about, that the opposition may have certain points worth discussing or that their argument is more nuanced than it is made out to be.
Agree! Most of what passes for political discourse these days seems to be false dichotomy: if you're not far left, you must be fascist right / If you're not far right, you must be Stalinist left.
Slashdot Mirror
That phrase "as early as"--what does it mean, exactly? If you call this a "prediction"-- what did it predict, and how can you tell whether it is accurate?
Here's a good discussion: https://www.carbonbrief.org/gu...
And here's a nice one with a pretty graphic visualization: http://sciencenordic.com/when-...
New Science Suggests the Ocean Could Rise More -- and Faster -- Than We Thought
Maybe. Possibly.
But aren't we already suppose to be under ten feet of water?
Huh? Where did you get that? Nobody predicted ten feet-- over three meters!-- of sea level rise by 2017.
The very first IPCC report-- back in 1990--predicted "an average rate of global mean sea level rise of about 6 cm per decade over the next century (with an uncertainty range of 3 – 10 cm per decade), mainly due to thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of some land ice. The predicted rise is about 20 cm ... by 2030, and 65 cm by the end of the next century."
The most recent (5th, 2014) report (here https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assess... ) says 25 cm to 70 cm by 2100. (That's the one that this news item is reacting to).
Nobody predicted 10 feet by 2017-- you should look back and find who told you that had been the prediction and never believe them again.
Answer this:
Where is the science that says the current global average temperature is optimal?
It isn't "optimal". It is, however, what we have built our society's infrastructure around, and what the Earth's ecology has adapted to.
We could rebuild our infrastructure to a different temperature. It will have a cost. The Earth's ecology can adapt to a different set of climates. It will take time, and result in some amount of species loss, but inside of ten thousand years or so, they'd adapt.
It's only the short term-- the next few centuries-- that would be hard.
Doesn't matter how unlikely it is in infinite time it's gonna happen a lot.
Yep. But the chances are ten-to-the-googleplex to one that all that gets temporarily created in the fluctuation is your brain, and that fluctuation only lasts long enough to read this message, after which you (or, what you temporarily believed was you) dissipate.
And, if it's true, then everything we know about physics is fantasy, since physics (like the existence of other people) never actually ever existed.
The current iteration of the universe is not infinite, which you state. So it's completely plausible the universe has always existed but it goes through "rebirth" every few trillion "years". Maybe the big bang that started our universe was the infinity + 1 big bang that happened.
Yep. That's one reason I put in that particular wording: "the universe has not existed infinitely in its current form.
I'm far from an expert and I'll go so far to say that I'm not even very knowledgeable on the subject.. but my simple brain seems to think that at some point expansion halts and contraction begins. Could the universe contract into a singularity and cause another big bang?
That is plausible in terms of the physics: it's sometimes called the "big crunch", and the idea that the universe expands to a maximum extent, contracts, and then recycles into a new big bang is called the "cyclic" or "oscillating" universe: https://www.universetoday.com/...
The best data we have at the moment, however, says that there is not enough mass in the universe for the expansion to be reversed by gravity (in fact, it suggests the opposite: rather than expansion slowing down and eventually stopping, expansion is actually speeding up.)
There are people trying to prove that antimatter has negative mass. That would explain the 'missing' part as well as the accelerated expansion of the universe [antimatter has somehow become Dark Energy].
There may be people trying to prove this, but if antimatter has negative mass, you have even worse problems. But it doesn't: if it did, then it would take zero energy to create particle/antiparticle pairs (mc^2 + (-m)c^2 = 0). And positronium (which has been made) would have net zero mass, and thus would accelerate to arbitrary velocity under the pressure of photons of trivial energy, and we'd never see it.
...thus replacing the problem with yet another problem.
...and it's turtles all the way down.
What we know for sure is that the universe hasn't existed forever in its current form. If it has existed forever, it has been in a different form.
If you are arguing for the possibillity that the universe is a temporary fluctuation in a thermal equilibrium state, you do realize that large fluctuations are exponentially unlikely, and the probability of any fluctuation being long-lasting is even more exponentially unlikely. So, if what we see as the universe is a fluctuation, it is almost certainly very very small, and very very short lasting-- what you call the "universe" must consists of nothing more than your brain and some random signals propagating to it, and its duration is no more than a few fractions of a second.
Your previous post is not something you did (your memory of it is a random fluctuation), I don't exist, the internet doesn't exist, and this post doesn't exist (what exists are the random fluctuations in thermal equilibrium that, coincidentally, your brain happens to interpret as memories, and as an "internet" post.).
Also, everything we know about the universe doesn't exist-- your memories of what you think we know about physics are just random fluctuations, not real: nobody has ever actually done any physics experiments because nobody else actually exists.
And neither will you, in a second or two from now.
There has just always been a universe. Problem solved :)
Problem not solved, but replaced by a different problem: where are the infinite number of infinitely old burned-out stars?
The human mind is particularly bad at handling some concepts... like 'infinity' for one. What if the universe always existed, and always will? Why can't it be infinitely long on the time axis as well as the spatial ones?
Because if it had always existed, there would be dead stars that are infinitely (or nearly infinitely) old. But there aren't.
What we do know absolutely for sure is that the universe has not existed infinitely in its current form. Stars don't last forever. Entropy tends toward maximum. If the universe was infinitely old, it would have slid down the curve of entropy to be a featureless mess.
The nature of that event at the beginning (of the universe as we know it), however, is still somewhat unclear. We do see the universe expanding, and that's a clue. We can track it backwards to very small and very dense. But we can't track it backwards to the "beginning," because it gets to realms of energy and density for which we don't know the laws of physics.
The phrasing here is very much hyperbole.
Standard quantum mechanics (well, relativistic quantum mechanics) states that particles and antiparticles must have exactly the same magnetic properties. Exactly.
If CERN tests didn't verify this, there would be a big, big problem with parts of physics that we thought we knew pretty well. That's a pretty exciting experiment to try, since if there was a big big problem with quantum mechanics, it would be groundbreaking to find this out. But it's not particularly headline news to say "quantum mechanics is confirmed, yet again."
Yes, that's a different question. I was addressing the post by AmiMoJo stating that what they should have done was copied the customer's files, analyzed them, and published them.
"if we accidentally get some of your files, we delete them immediately-- any files of any type, no matter what they are or what they do."
But if it got malware, how are they supposed to know if YOU wrote the malware (and thus the policy would be to delete it) or if you just downloaded it (and thus their policy should be to catalogue and hash)?
We are assuming here that Kaspersky is not actually clueless.
Among other things, the fact that you have source code and several previous versions of the file might serve as a clue.
What really worries me here is that Kaspersky apparently deleted the NSA malware and source code once they realized what it was. They should have analyzed it, generated signatures and published details. Failure to do so is far worse than simply sharing it with the Russian government, who I'd assume already had copies anyway given how leaky the NSA is.
They said that their software sent them for analysis some files that belonged to the customer, and they deleted the files as soon as they realized that these were customer files.
If Kaspersky did not delete customer files that their software sends them, then I would definitely say you have to dump them.
"We found some of the software you were working on when we scanned your machine. Mostly we delete customer files we access by accident, but we thought this one was useful to us, so we kept it so we can reverse engineer what it does" is not acceptable behavior from somebody you are going to allow to have access to your maching. You can't accept an antivirus company looking at your files and deciding whether or not to keep them-- their policy has to be rigorously "if we accidentally get some of your files, we delete them immediately-- any files of any type, no matter what they are or what they do."
"...good password practices are far and away still the most important of security protocols." (Meaning complex and frequently-changed passwords.)"
Frequently changed?
That has been proposed for security repeatedly, but I don't see this as a big help.
(If I had to list one thing, it would be "not re-used for other platforms.")
I've bought books because of Google Books service that let me look inside a book and see that it's going to be useful for me. Shutting down GB means closing this channel for you as an author. A stupid move, I would say.
I agree. But it should be your choice to decide what and how much of your work to give away for free, not somebody else's.
Your work, your decision.
Here's my proposal how to fix the major flaws of copyright while ensuring that authors get paid: Replace copyright with payright. Here's what it means: The author gets a right to a clearly defined slice of revenue (e.g. 20% by default) from every commercial use of their work. If you register your work in a central registry, you get to set the percentage yourself and commercial users will have contact you. If you don't register it, statutory default applies and commercial users will just need to hold your slice of revenue in escrow until you contact them.
So, you're saying that I can put up a site that makes the work of all the bestselling authors in America available for free, and the bestselling authors will get nothing. Because in your view they don't own their work, and aren't allowed to decide what their work is worth, or even if it is worth anything at all.
Why do you think this is good?
As an an author, Shirley you can do better than introducing a straw man into the argument? The poster did not make comment about living authors, so it ain't reasonable to criticise him for your unsupported inference.
The anonymous coward poster was making a comment on my post, which most explicitly was about living authors. Since my post was about living authors, you should be responding to anonymous coward's post, not mine:
As an an anonymous coward, Shirley you can do better than introducing a straw man into the argument? The poster you are responding to made a comment about living authors, so it ain't reasonable to criticise him for your unsupported statements about dead authors.
For thousands of years, authors, artists and musicians didn't expect to get paid for their work, and they did it anyway.
And for thousands of years peasants starved to death in years when the local harvest was poor, and died of disease when a plague passed through. And, more to the point, had their stuff taken away by anybody who passed by who was equipped with swords, spears, arrows, and armor.
Your point is that ancient societies were somehow better than ours? That societies for thousands of years condoned slavery, so we should, too?
Amusing quote, and what's even more ironic, in the context of this discussion, is that you didn't bother to credit the author:
J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Chapter 25).
So, your worldview is apparently that not only should authors not be paid, they shouldn't even be credited.
Copyright length is the main issue, not a differing business model. There's a lot of content out there that the author's are dead and income are the least of their worries.
So, Mr. Anonymous Coward, what you're basically saying is that since dead authors don't need to be paid, you think it's ok if living ones don't get paid either.
Yeah, great.
As an author, yes, I would like to be paid when my works are distributed.
The problem is that Google wanted to distribute the work from authors for free.
I do know that the idea that people should be paid for their work is controversial on /., where many commentators believe that information-- meaning other peoples' work-- should be free, and authors should be happy to starve, because, hey, it's exposure.
Well, actually, isn't the problem that they want to sell it / use it for commercial purposes? If Google simply wanted to put this on the web for absolutely free, with no links to anything else, couldn't they?
Google is the most valuable company in the world. They may want to distribute others peoples work for free, but they themselves plan to make a huge profit from doing so.
It's merely the authors who don't get paid.
You only need 1.21 gigawatts to travel back in time, buy Bitcoins at USD$0.008, become the most powerful company on the planet and simply buy out any and all competitors before they become a threat.
Don't buy too MANY of the Bitcoins. You might get back to now and find out that the market that drove their price up never developed and theyr're worth nothing.
Actually, that's as good an explanation of why bitcoins have risen in price as any other: time travellers bought them up.
I will agree with the point that one storm, even an extraordinary storm, is neither confirmation nor refutation of global warming. Global warming is real (the science really is pretty solid, despite the doubters), but it is a global, long-term thing. One storm-- even one extraordinary storm season-- is not global warming.
Go ahead and panic if it makes you happy, but it should be a long-term panic about effects evincing over the next fifty to a hundred years, not a "this is it, right here, right now" panic.
You're actually making it more difficult for the center leaning right to have civil discourse.
I'd actually like to hear more from the center-leaning right. The far-right is completely drowning out the discourse (and for that matter, I'd be interested in hearing more from the center-leaning left.)
And you're not alone, nearly all the people are polarized and the TrueLeft and True Right just can't believe what the center leaning on either side are talking about, that the opposition may have certain points worth discussing or that their argument is more nuanced than it is made out to be.
Agree! Most of what passes for political discourse these days seems to be false dichotomy: if you're not far left, you must be fascist right / If you're not far right, you must be Stalinist left.