and like in the Night of the Living dead the Java community neighborhood is looking as though no one but zombies is taking care of it. Its already starting to wither and loose mindshare to other communities of users.
The reality is that the vendor lock-in model mindset of Oracle corporation and others is becoming the order of the day and the concept of reuseable software is dead. Soon, if you want to cut and paste, you will have to have your credit card ready.
Notice the scale on the graph. Its in 50,000 year increments. Notice that the peaks of glacial advance and retreat correspond roughly with perhaps some time lag to those on the CO2 graph. Notice that carbon dioxide has gone up from about 280 to about 380 in a period of only 150 years, nearly as much as it took under pre-human activity about 95,000 years to accomplish. Notice that carbon dioxide is going up, not down as would be required to bring on that big rapid ice age you jump to the unjustified conclusion is just right around the corner. The issue has never been whether or not the climate would change, rather the rate and the direction of that change.
One should also notice that the graph only goes back about 400,000 years. Although there was glaciation in the past, indeed nearly the entire earth may have been frozen in the Cryogenian (about 680 MYA) the kind of "regular" glacial advances and retreats only mark Pleistocene times. One has to go back a long time in geological history to find extensive glaciation before the Pleistocene.
As far as peer-reviewed science has been able to establish, the concentration of a carbon dioxide, well and long known to have a warming effect in the atmosphere, has never, ever gone up as quickly as it has in the past 150 years, at a time there has been no appreciable deviations of solar output beyond its typical cyclic patterns, save an episode between 1645 and 1720 (Maunder Minimum), nor has volcanism been any more or less active than we might expect. Indeed during your typical modern year (2003) volcanoes produced about 200 million cubic tons of carbon dioxide, whereas burning of fossil fuels accounted for about 26.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Although equatorial volcanoes can have a tremendous effect on short term weather they have seldom produced extended climatic anomaly over the course of hundreds of years (extensive outflows on the mid-Atlantic ridge about 280 MYA, the extrusion of the Deccan traps 68 MYA, and certain Siberian outflows may have been exceptional). Consequently, its not hard to understand why climatologists have coined the term "hockey stick" to account for the result.
There is no evidence that Florida was ever glaciated in any of the Pleistocene glacial periods or that it took only 10 years or so for it to be under an ice sheet. Florida wasn't emergent in the Cryogenian so its state at that time, would be largely irrelevant.
If you are going to make stuff up and get the ignorant to believe you, you might at least take the trouble to get a few of the most evident facts right. But beyond trying to pull the wool over the eyes of fools, what you are actually advocating that it is perfectly alright by you if life on planet earth for their children and grandchildren gets pretty bleak.
There is no coming ice age. As the arctic warms one can expect the jet stream to become more unstable and with warming there is a lot more moisture in the air. While Scotts are suffering because of their proximity to the North Sea from too much snow, Russians are having a relatively mild time of it. If one looks at the global average, last year was tied for the hottest ever recorded during human history.
Well if you think a little about life in the oceans, you will quickly recognize that most of them produce skeletons of some kind, most based on calcium salts. Skeletal formation and for many reproduction will not occur if the pH drops even a fraction of one pH unit (pH is a logarithmic scale). If you have ever enjoyed shirmp, crabs, shellfish, or fish, most of which feed on such organisms, not to mention need to produce their own calcium-phosphate salt, you can begin to understand why this needs to be a very serious concern. According to some estimates it would require about 22 times the land mass off all human agriculture should we loose the oceans as protein source, not to mention the many calcareous algae that we tend to take for granted when we breath. When one recognizes that we won't have 22 times the land mass for that purpose, but are actually losing arable land because of drought or unpredictable weather and flooding, it becomes more of a concern.
Organisms won't adpat to conditions that fall outside their tolerance limits. Either they find a place to go or they go extinct.
If you think about it just a little bit, you can begin to get an idea of just how bad even a slight lowering of pH is going to be. The crash of sea-life in the Permian, during which about 95% of all organisms went extinct might give the prudent time to pause and reflect on exactly how large a calamity this will be. The only real good news, is that humans, likely the source of the problem, will be among the first to go because we are so incredibly dependent upon other simpler life forms to keep the world a habitable place for all 6.5 billion of us.
During the Permian concentrations of methane, another potent greenhouse gas went way up and the earth warmed dramatically. The result was that about 95% of all organisms on the planet went extinct. At least the good news is that humans, who are at the top of the food web, and hence dependent upon those organisms below them will be among the first to go.
by this one can only mean "inconvenient truths". This what the deniers hate the most and why they are so eager to jump all over Al Gore.
I suspect with republicans coming in to help fund more denial research, we will have a great "debate", but the easy to predict sophism won't do much to alter the reality that the planet is getting hotter as a result of forcing by carbon dioxide and as the temperatures in the arctic continue to increase, methane as well.
There is nothing absolutely nothing in the paper that suggests that the authors have studied any plants at all. They merely extrapolate an effect based on some very large assumptions that plants everywhere can be represented by a few simple parameters in their model. A look at most of the arid regions of the world, demonstrate that these assumptions are wildly optimistic. Ground cover in these regions is shrinking dramatically due to lack of soil moisture.
As consumers of information we can not have a system in which certain players can create choke points on the internet to deny access and distort democracy. At the same time it is obvious that nothing in life is free and that one must accept that some kind of payment is required to build and maintain the physical infrastructure that makes such connectivity possible.
The government needs to establish simple rules regarding the exact nature of what these fees can be based on a universal formula for all in terms of proportion of available bandwidth consumed/provided. These rules can not be based on the nature of the content or all hope for democracy and a rational market is lost as each player conjures up new ways to game the system. As long as corporations and individuals understand the fee structure and that they are not allowed to unilaterally change it, the market can get about the business of letting different players work within the fee structure to most efficiently and competitively provide services/bandwidth. This would bring a level of stability to the market, essential to developing systems architectures and services. Otherwise, other countries with far more progressive governmental policies concerning the internet like Korea, Japan and increasingly Europe and China are going to move so quickly ahead of us in terms of dominating the internet that petty conflicts like that between Comcast and Level 3 will be largely irrelevant.
While we dither over who is going to pay what to whom for Netflix services, Korea for example is moving to systems that will provide its end users the ability to download the entire Netflix movie library in minutes for about $20/month for end users, making anything these two companies are doing essentially irrelevant to the forefront of technological change, competivness, or benefit and therefore meaningless.
If America wants to be competitive in internet mediated business, then it needs policies that increase the number of software and hardware engineers and developers and decreases the number of lawyers, greedy corporate executives and their lobbyists, and paid-for politicians. Otherwise, we are lost.
would be that this thing might just be another piece of equipment that has to be lugged around the battlefield by foot soldiers, further weighing them down, making them slowoer, easier targets for a light, fast moving enemy. Will we have to put people into harms way just to fly or airdrop one of these things near to where they might be needed.
Sometimes I get the feeling that we are slowly loosing this war, because of the need to make so many different contractors so much money in the process. I think a requirement for these kinds of things on the battlefield is that the guy with the bright idea needs to be on the frontlines as these things are tested.
"Suppose you spill a cup of coffee over the blanket: its now tainted".
Since you are talking about the universe, the above statement would imply that something outside of it is having an effect, which is by definition not possible. Likewise the "stain" would seem to imply that some matter would or could be differentiated at some fundamental level from other matter as part of the process. This seems to make any mathematical model of the universe an intractable potentially infinite number of "unique" terms with special properties, and hence probably outside of experimental science to establish.
But don't listen to me. I tried to read Penrose's book the Road to Reality, but I had to give up after a couple of hundred pages. The math curve got too steep for me and I couldn't tell if I understood what I was reading. I've had to lock myself in a math library ever since. Kind of like being trapped in a black hole of increasing density and no chance to escape.
Thats just part of Ruppert Murdoch's scheme to push this stuff on an unsuspecting public who buys into this as "normal". His idea is to have everyone tagged so that whenever they walk within 20 ft of a TV, they will be immediately be exposed to Fox News. How else could you explain his massive investment portfolio into bar coding and radio tag technology?
There is a way to end this nonsense. Since terms like "face" and "book" have now become off limits and the sole property of companies like Facebook and Apple, etc. All others should stop using them and as a matter of strict public policy substitute the word "____" or "_____" when discussing them. That way these corporations will have to pay each time they want to advertise rather than having the general public and the news media do it for them. Perhaps, then the desire to own words won't seem like such an attractive proposition. Otherwise at the current rate freedom of speech won't mean anything as the entire dictionary will be owned by someone and you won't be able to open your mouth to say "Yahoo", or oops I mean "______". Bad habits are hard to break, but I'm working on it.
Who cares what the average Facebook user thinks? They would never offer that much of interest to the development of a social network anyway, besides participation that takes up bandwidth.
The critical elements, whether it be Diaspora or Appleseed or some other open source model is: 1) it is open source and not controlled from behind the scenes in an inscrutable way and 2) that the individual user gets to establish just how good their own security restrictions are and not some central corporation that determines what "freedom" users will permitted, but also what deals marketers will be able to make to mine personal information.
Not really. The concept of giving away your personal information so that it can be used by corporations to make money from marketers is a relatively new fad. Once the fad wears off, some other fad will come in and replace it. Myspace was once the fad. These kind of things can change quickly.
I think the important distinction here is that Diaspora is based on a model of 1) open source and 2) that individuals are themselves in a better position to control their own "node" in the network, rather than being simply a cog in someone else's business plan. Whether its successful is another issue entirely. Fox News has managed to convince millions that global warming is not a problem. It hardly means that it is not a fact of life and the human consequences won't be severe.
Its open source so others who "know better" can step in and fix it. With closed source such as Facebook, who really knows what you get, except obviously big profits by those buying and selling personal information.
"The big problem is that they're reinventing the wheel several times along the way".
Whats wrong with that? In an opens source world, having multiple views provides choice and possibly more efficient, "better" implementations. The availability of the code, open to all, permits lots of experimentation and nuance.
Why in a capitalistic society is there always such a desire to avoid competition? Why should only a few get to set all the rules going forward for everyone else to follow?
Nor do you have to be a psychoanalyst to figure out what motivates Senator Hatch.
This will make the heads of tea-party voters watching Fox News explode (implode?), a conservative senator who wants to create more government debt and bigger government.
1) The War in Afghanistan and against "terror" is being lost and there really are more "imminent threats" out there. Al Qieda is now publishing a magazine that attempts to target third parties to join in on ways to destroy our economy. One article instructs folks how to make bobby trapped parcels and suicide bombs for travelers.
2) For those corporations and their owners who make huge money off security, defense contracting, militarism, and the overall trappings of a police state, the highly visible and intrusive procedures are designed to instill a sense of fear and submission by the public to the concept of more and more need for these services. Soon TSA will be privatized, republicans are already pushing for this, and there will be two lines at airports, bus and train stations, the sign on the one leading to the x-ray scanners will read "cancer", the other leading to the pat-down room will say "humiliation". Of course, the top 1% and politicians will not be inconvenienced as they get pre-cleared to walk around both.
The only way to stop this, and perhaps the war as well, is for the public to demand legislation that requires that ALL federal employees, specifically including senators, representatives, and senior executive branch staff be required to go through the same lines and be videoed in a highly public way to demonstrate that they too are getting the same treatment. Likewise, no private airplane, carrying lobbyists, CEO, etc. can leave the runway until ALL passengers have likewise gone through the lines and have their pictures taken in the process to prove it.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe if they stick a camera up my arse, they could help me with my hemorrhoids!
"man may well have found is way to recreational drugs by observing the behavior of other animals".
No, man found his way to recreational drugs by behaving just like other animals.
and like in the Night of the Living dead the Java community neighborhood is looking as though no one but zombies is taking care of it. Its already starting to wither and loose mindshare to other communities of users.
The reality is that the vendor lock-in model mindset of Oracle corporation and others is becoming the order of the day and the concept of reuseable software is dead. Soon, if you want to cut and paste, you will have to have your credit card ready.
Notice the scale on the graph. Its in 50,000 year increments. Notice that the peaks of glacial advance and retreat correspond roughly with perhaps some time lag to those on the CO2 graph. Notice that carbon dioxide has gone up from about 280 to about 380 in a period of only 150 years, nearly as much as it took under pre-human activity about 95,000 years to accomplish. Notice that carbon dioxide is going up, not down as would be required to bring on that big rapid ice age you jump to the unjustified conclusion is just right around the corner. The issue has never been whether or not the climate would change, rather the rate and the direction of that change.
One should also notice that the graph only goes back about 400,000 years. Although there was glaciation in the past, indeed nearly the entire earth may have been frozen in the Cryogenian (about 680 MYA) the kind of "regular" glacial advances and retreats only mark Pleistocene times. One has to go back a long time in geological history to find extensive glaciation before the Pleistocene.
As far as peer-reviewed science has been able to establish, the concentration of a carbon dioxide, well and long known to have a warming effect in the atmosphere, has never, ever gone up as quickly as it has in the past 150 years, at a time there has been no appreciable deviations of solar output beyond its typical cyclic patterns, save an episode between 1645 and 1720 (Maunder Minimum), nor has volcanism been any more or less active than we might expect. Indeed during your typical modern year (2003) volcanoes produced about 200 million cubic tons of carbon dioxide, whereas burning of fossil fuels accounted for about 26.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Although equatorial volcanoes can have a tremendous effect on short term weather they have seldom produced extended climatic anomaly over the course of hundreds of years (extensive outflows on the mid-Atlantic ridge about 280 MYA, the extrusion of the Deccan traps 68 MYA, and certain Siberian outflows may have been exceptional). Consequently, its not hard to understand why climatologists have coined the term "hockey stick" to account for the result.
There is no evidence that Florida was ever glaciated in any of the Pleistocene glacial periods or that it took only 10 years or so for it to be under an ice sheet. Florida wasn't emergent in the Cryogenian so its state at that time, would be largely irrelevant.
If you are going to make stuff up and get the ignorant to believe you, you might at least take the trouble to get a few of the most evident facts right. But beyond trying to pull the wool over the eyes of fools, what you are actually advocating that it is perfectly alright by you if life on planet earth for their children and grandchildren gets pretty bleak.
There is no coming ice age. As the arctic warms one can expect the jet stream to become more unstable and with warming there is a lot more moisture in the air. While Scotts are suffering because of their proximity to the North Sea from too much snow, Russians are having a relatively mild time of it. If one looks at the global average, last year was tied for the hottest ever recorded during human history.
Well if you think a little about life in the oceans, you will quickly recognize that most of them produce skeletons of some kind, most based on calcium salts. Skeletal formation and for many reproduction will not occur if the pH drops even a fraction of one pH unit (pH is a logarithmic scale). If you have ever enjoyed shirmp, crabs, shellfish, or fish, most of which feed on such organisms, not to mention need to produce their own calcium-phosphate salt, you can begin to understand why this needs to be a very serious concern. According to some estimates it would require about 22 times the land mass off all human agriculture should we loose the oceans as protein source, not to mention the many calcareous algae that we tend to take for granted when we breath. When one recognizes that we won't have 22 times the land mass for that purpose, but are actually losing arable land because of drought or unpredictable weather and flooding, it becomes more of a concern.
Organisms won't adpat to conditions that fall outside their tolerance limits. Either they find a place to go or they go extinct.
If you think about it just a little bit, you can begin to get an idea of just how bad even a slight lowering of pH is going to be. The crash of sea-life in the Permian, during which about 95% of all organisms went extinct might give the prudent time to pause and reflect on exactly how large a calamity this will be. The only real good news, is that humans, likely the source of the problem, will be among the first to go because we are so incredibly dependent upon other simpler life forms to keep the world a habitable place for all 6.5 billion of us.
During the Permian concentrations of methane, another potent greenhouse gas went way up and the earth warmed dramatically. The result was that about 95% of all organisms on the planet went extinct. At least the good news is that humans, who are at the top of the food web, and hence dependent upon those organisms below them will be among the first to go.
by this one can only mean "inconvenient truths". This what the deniers hate the most and why they are so eager to jump all over Al Gore.
I suspect with republicans coming in to help fund more denial research, we will have a great "debate", but the easy to predict sophism won't do much to alter the reality that the planet is getting hotter as a result of forcing by carbon dioxide and as the temperatures in the arctic continue to increase, methane as well.
There is nothing absolutely nothing in the paper that suggests that the authors have studied any plants at all. They merely extrapolate an effect based on some very large assumptions that plants everywhere can be represented by a few simple parameters in their model. A look at most of the arid regions of the world, demonstrate that these assumptions are wildly optimistic. Ground cover in these regions is shrinking dramatically due to lack of soil moisture.
for everyone spammed to donate one penny to bribe the head of his electrical company to pull the plug on his apartment?
As consumers of information we can not have a system in which certain players can create choke points on the internet to deny access and distort democracy. At the same time it is obvious that nothing in life is free and that one must accept that some kind of payment is required to build and maintain the physical infrastructure that makes such connectivity possible.
The government needs to establish simple rules regarding the exact nature of what these fees can be based on a universal formula for all in terms of proportion of available bandwidth consumed/provided. These rules can not be based on the nature of the content or all hope for democracy and a rational market is lost as each player conjures up new ways to game the system. As long as corporations and individuals understand the fee structure and that they are not allowed to unilaterally change it, the market can get about the business of letting different players work within the fee structure to most efficiently and competitively provide services/bandwidth. This would bring a level of stability to the market, essential to developing systems architectures and services. Otherwise, other countries with far more progressive governmental policies concerning the internet like Korea, Japan and increasingly Europe and China are going to move so quickly ahead of us in terms of dominating the internet that petty conflicts like that between Comcast and Level 3 will be largely irrelevant.
While we dither over who is going to pay what to whom for Netflix services, Korea for example is moving to systems that will provide its end users the ability to download the entire Netflix movie library in minutes for about $20/month for end users, making anything these two companies are doing essentially irrelevant to the forefront of technological change, competivness, or benefit and therefore meaningless.
If America wants to be competitive in internet mediated business, then it needs policies that increase the number of software and hardware engineers and developers and decreases the number of lawyers, greedy corporate executives and their lobbyists, and paid-for politicians. Otherwise, we are lost.
Put down that pipe and save the tubes.
would be that this thing might just be another piece of equipment that has to be lugged around the battlefield by foot soldiers, further weighing them down, making them slowoer, easier targets for a light, fast moving enemy. Will we have to put people into harms way just to fly or airdrop one of these things near to where they might be needed.
Sometimes I get the feeling that we are slowly loosing this war, because of the need to make so many different contractors so much money in the process. I think a requirement for these kinds of things on the battlefield is that the guy with the bright idea needs to be on the frontlines as these things are tested.
cut him in on the take and you, my friend, may be the new owner of IBM.
"Suppose you spill a cup of coffee over the blanket: its now tainted".
Since you are talking about the universe, the above statement would imply that something outside of it is having an effect, which is by definition not possible. Likewise the "stain" would seem to imply that some matter would or could be differentiated at some fundamental level from other matter as part of the process. This seems to make any mathematical model of the universe an intractable potentially infinite number of "unique" terms with special properties, and hence probably outside of experimental science to establish.
But don't listen to me. I tried to read Penrose's book the Road to Reality, but I had to give up after a couple of hundred pages. The math curve got too steep for me and I couldn't tell if I understood what I was reading. I've had to lock myself in a math library ever since. Kind of like being trapped in a black hole of increasing density and no chance to escape.
Thats just part of Ruppert Murdoch's scheme to push this stuff on an unsuspecting public who buys into this as "normal". His idea is to have everyone tagged so that whenever they walk within 20 ft of a TV, they will be immediately be exposed to Fox News. How else could you explain his massive investment portfolio into bar coding and radio tag technology?
There is a way to end this nonsense. Since terms like "face" and "book" have now become off limits and the sole property of companies like Facebook and Apple, etc. All others should stop using them and as a matter of strict public policy substitute the word "____" or "_____" when discussing them. That way these corporations will have to pay each time they want to advertise rather than having the general public and the news media do it for them. Perhaps, then the desire to own words won't seem like such an attractive proposition. Otherwise at the current rate freedom of speech won't mean anything as the entire dictionary will be owned by someone and you won't be able to open your mouth to say "Yahoo", or oops I mean "______". Bad habits are hard to break, but I'm working on it.
Who cares what the average Facebook user thinks? They would never offer that much of interest to the development of a social network anyway, besides participation that takes up bandwidth.
The critical elements, whether it be Diaspora or Appleseed or some other open source model is: 1) it is open source and not controlled from behind the scenes in an inscrutable way and 2) that the individual user gets to establish just how good their own security restrictions are and not some central corporation that determines what "freedom" users will permitted, but also what deals marketers will be able to make to mine personal information.
Not really. The concept of giving away your personal information so that it can be used by corporations to make money from marketers is a relatively new fad. Once the fad wears off, some other fad will come in and replace it. Myspace was once the fad. These kind of things can change quickly.
I think the important distinction here is that Diaspora is based on a model of 1) open source and 2) that individuals are themselves in a better position to control their own "node" in the network, rather than being simply a cog in someone else's business plan. Whether its successful is another issue entirely. Fox News has managed to convince millions that global warming is not a problem. It hardly means that it is not a fact of life and the human consequences won't be severe.
So what?
Its open source so others who "know better" can step in and fix it. With closed source such as Facebook, who really knows what you get, except obviously big profits by those buying and selling personal information.
"The big problem is that they're reinventing the wheel several times along the way".
Whats wrong with that? In an opens source world, having multiple views provides choice and possibly more efficient, "better" implementations. The availability of the code, open to all, permits lots of experimentation and nuance.
Why in a capitalistic society is there always such a desire to avoid competition? Why should only a few get to set all the rules going forward for everyone else to follow?
that with Mitt Romney running in 2012, they are kicking into high gear for sales as part of an effort to increase his campaign contributions.
Is it true that all Utah state employees will be required to wear these starting in January 2012?
Nor do you have to be a psychoanalyst to figure out what motivates Senator Hatch.
This will make the heads of tea-party voters watching Fox News explode (implode?), a conservative senator who wants to create more government debt and bigger government.
Now that would impress the ladies.
Its really the result of two fundamental trends:
1) The War in Afghanistan and against "terror" is being lost and there really are more "imminent threats" out there. Al Qieda is now publishing a magazine that attempts to target third parties to join in on ways to destroy our economy. One article instructs folks how to make bobby trapped parcels and suicide bombs for travelers.
2) For those corporations and their owners who make huge money off security, defense contracting, militarism, and the overall trappings of a police state, the highly visible and intrusive procedures are designed to instill a sense of fear and submission by the public to the concept of more and more need for these services. Soon TSA will be privatized, republicans are already pushing for this, and there will be two lines at airports, bus and train stations, the sign on the one leading to the x-ray scanners will read "cancer", the other leading to the pat-down room will say "humiliation". Of course, the top 1% and politicians will not be inconvenienced as they get pre-cleared to walk around both.
The only way to stop this, and perhaps the war as well, is for the public to demand legislation that requires that ALL federal employees, specifically including senators, representatives, and senior executive branch staff be required to go through the same lines and be videoed in a highly public way to demonstrate that they too are getting the same treatment. Likewise, no private airplane, carrying lobbyists, CEO, etc. can leave the runway until ALL passengers have likewise gone through the lines and have their pictures taken in the process to prove it.