If a tenant can complain about a landlord in a matter of seconds and have an audience of hundreds of thousands, the landlord will be more upset than if the tenant just mentions it to her friends at the golf course or knitting circle or watering hole.
Plus, the landlord will be more likely to be able to prove that the tenant did it, in a court of law. Because of the ease and immediacy, people often treat IM's and other "informal" online communications as if they were in-person speech, but they tend to leave a durable record which can be produced in court, like writing, but often much more easily discovered by someone other than the intended recipient who might want to take action based on them than hardcopy would be.
Sure there is -- in smart businesses. Of course, that often requires keeping the business narrowly and privately held in the hands of people interested in running a business for the long term, or going public in a carefully controlled manner that leaves the real power in the hands of a fairly narrow group of the same kind of people (Google at least attempted to do this.)
ATT's only concern is wringing as much money out of today's subscribers as it can today. Apple's only concern is soaking up customer's disposable income with disposable gadgets.
Perhaps, but insofar as that's true, those interests collide where, e.g., AT&T's efforts to protect its ability to wring SMS charges out of customers makes an AT&T-exclusive iPhone a less attractive gadget than it would otherwise be, and, again, AT&T needs the iPhone exclusivity deal more than Apple does.
Anyone know how on earth Google expects to make money off of this thing?
Its technology that (when released as open source) has the potential to revolutionize and commoditize collaboration, opening up a huge market for a well positioned service provider with a reputation for providing online services and a global network of data centers to provide services to small-to-medium sized businesses that don't have their own datacenters, and to enterprises that would prefer to outsource collaboration, while providing commercial support to businesses that prefer to keep collaboration in house. Currently, that market is locked up by a few proprietary (Exchange, Notes) systems because no one has provided a system that goes beyond that those provide while being backed by a big enough name to be credible with business.
So I can save a copy of a conversation locally on my computer and read it without access to the server?
Yes. When you first open a wavelet from the server, the server provides you the complete serialized state of the wavelet (future updates are sent as deltas, not full states, but applying a delta to an existing state fully specifies the new state); so at any time the client will have a complete state of the wavelet (including all documents that are part of the wavelet) at some point in the past to reference, which means that a properly configured client application (including an browser-based app making use of Google Gears or HTML5 local storage) could work with any document that is part of a wavelet without any remote connection. A remote connection is only needed to send or receive updates to or from the server.
just like "clouds", "waves" do not reside on your computer, but rather *out there* somewhere [...] if your internet goes down, suddenly you've lost access to even internal communication at your office, as well as all archives and logs of past communication.
Since both the spec and the reference server implementation are open source, its quite possible for "waves" to reside on a local network under your control (and the same is true, though less relevant to the present thread, for "clouds", for instance Ubuntu Server now includes tools for serving "cloud" apps.)
Yes, if you don't have your own datacenter and IT staff to manage it, you could rely on someone else to host your waves in their cloud. But for many small businesses, the choice isn't between that and locally-hosted online collaboration, its between that and and no online collaboration tool.
there are serious privacy issues as well, no doubt google will be surfin the "waves" looking for terms to market to you, but perhaps it is more shady than that even. google has agreed to censorship in foreign markets over the years, does it really make sense to let them hold onto your data in this way?
This thread is about them open sourcing the implementation. This is, then, all about the fact that they aren't forcing you to let them hold onto any of your data for you to get the full benefit of the technology. So what are you complaining about?
then again.. it's cool technology, and now that it's being open sourced, it means feasibly you can run your own "waveserver" and mitigate the issues above somewhat.
Wave is surely an interesting concept and application, but if there's any web app that just makes you want to scream for a native implementation, it's Wave. [...] Why is Google spoiling good concepts by tying them to the browser exclusively?
Its a published protocol built on top of XMPP, with a defined data model; nothing is stopping people from building native apps that produce and/or consume wave updates. Certainly, Google is doing nothing to prevent this.
They just need to develop for the three major platforms, Windows, Linux and OS X. And open source it so that the enthusiasts of other OSes can port them.
Or, you know, they could just publish the specs and leave implementation of native applications, which are far less relevant to Google's business than web applications using the protocol, to people who have an interest in and use for native applications.
I just created my Google phone number a few days ago and I was wondering when I could use it on my iPhone.
You can use it on your iPhone now. Having an app would make the UI for some things better, and otherwise be a convenience, but if you have a phone and a web browser, you can do pretty much everything Google Voice does (some of the management features require either a non-mobile browser or an app, though.)
So if AT&T can get an app banned (as Gruber [daringfireball.net] says is the case), what happens later on when the iPhone is not tied to any one phone company in the U.S.? Carrier specific stores?
No, when there isn't a special relationship with a particular carrier, most likely no carrier will be able to get any app banned, and there will continue to be one iPhone store.
And what would you have Apple do? Tell AT&T, their one sales partner, to bugger off?
Sure, tell AT&T that they have no interest in renewing their exclusivity agreement regardless of financial incentives if AT&T insists on prohibiting access to basic features of the phone. AT&T needs Apple more than Apple needs AT&T. People aren't buying iPhones because they are on AT&T's network, as much as they are paying for AT&T data plans because its the only way they can use an iPhone.
Apple is, with the iPhone, in a position of strength. But that only lasts as long as other premium smartphones, like those running Android, don't offer a better all-around experience, and if AT&T tries to defend its existing business model by hamstringing the iPhone, it may work in the short-term, but in the long-term its going to make it easier for other phones to displace the iPhone as the mobile device of choice, which will hurt Apple and AT&T both.
What they don't get is their 'money for free' SMS charges.
Plenty of free SMS apps for the iPhone exist already and are in the App Store (and there are plenty of places on the web you can use any browser, including iPhone Safari, to do web-based SMS without an app, including Google Voice's mobile page.)
The big thing loss for AT&T and Apple from Google Voice is that your handy visually-organized voice mail and SMS history is no longer tied to your AT&T exclusive iPhone and backed up only through Apple iTunes and transferrable only to a new AT&T exclusive iPhone. That's true even without an app, if you use the Google Voice web page and call-in number to do everything, although you can't use some of the basic management features through the mobile page, and Google doesn't let you easily get to the standard Google Voice page from iPhone Safari.
Yes but using Google voice to make international calls would be way cheaper than making a phone call on your cell phone with AT&T.
Of course, you can make a Google voice call with any phone (wireless or landline) without a special app. (Well, it has to be touch tone; I do know at least one person who still uses a rotary phone that she originally leased from AT&T, but she's not likely to ever use Google Voice, or even a computer.)
Google voice offers services that compete with AT&T and the iPhone infrastructure in ways big enough to hurt the bottom line of AT&T, which as you can see from other comments at the least, made this app go pouf disappear.
I think, though, in the end this is a bad thing for the iPhone: not having a special app doesn't stop you from using Google Voice with an iPhone, but it does make the experience less pleasant than using Google Voice with any of the smartphones that do have Google Voice apps, so it just makes those phones more attractive, without stopping people from using Google Voice.
There's all sorts of talk about Google Voice competing with the iPhone (at least on some other news sites that have published this) Not sure I understand the comparison. Google Voice for phone calls uses at&t minutes, which don't cost Apple. Its simply call forwarding. This is not VOIP folks. Google Voice SMS doesnt cost Apple either.
Google Voice SMS, because it replaces actual SMS with a web-based SMS service which doesn't incur wireless-plan SMS usage, can cost AT&T, because it reduces the usage of in-plan SMS.
Of course, you wouldn't need a Google Voice app on the iPhone as much (given that iPhone Safari is a fairly full-featured browser), except as a slight convenience, if Google didn't force mobile users (including iPhone Safari users) to the mobile Google Voice page without even an option to use the regular page.
No, because there is nothing that can replace it. Look at the range it covers.
Why do we need one language that can do all the things C++ is used for moderately well (but with all the headaches of C++), rather than languages that are the right tool for each specific task, bound together, where necessary, by an appropriate architectural infrastructure (whether a common VM and calling conventions, or a message-based integration layer, or something else) for the higher level task at hand?
If you are going to complain about slashdot summaries, you should strive to improve upon them. Its transparent to extreme UV for an estimated 40 femtoseconds. That is, if it was actually transparent for a year, milliseconds would have been a more appropriate unit than they are for the actual time for which it is transparent. (1 year ~= 3E10 ms, 40 fs = 4E-11 ms)
From what I can recall, scientists discussed a correlation between pollution and global warming back in the early 1970's. So, since then, we cleaned up emissions from cars, emissions from factories, heck, people are using CF bulbs to reduce the use of electricity.
While the first discussion of anthropogenic global warming was in or earlier than the 1970s, the "cleaning up" of emissions from the 1970s didn't target green house gases, it targetted pollutants with more immediate and visible consequences, like particulates, toxins, and acid rain producing compounds. Global production of greenhouse gases continued to increase (and, IIRC, to increase at an increasing rate) from the 1970s into the 2000s.
Shouldn't we be able to see some evidence of all these changes, of all the struggling to slow global warming, shouldn't there be some sign that it's working?
No, because there has been virtually no serious discussion of concerted effort to control global warming until the 1990s, and even since then virtually nothing has actually been done; some developed countries have adopted policies, but neither the biggest contributors nor the sources of the biggest increases in GHG output have done anything concerted.
Year after year we keep hearing that "We have to stop using this, or stop doing that" and we do, and yet, there has never been anyone who has ever said "IT'S WORKING!!!!!"
That's because, year after year, we don't actually do anything, despite people saying that we need to. Until something is done, it can't work.
If the scientists have proof that humans are causing global warming, then they should also have proof that all of the things we have done have helped, no matter how little.
Not really; global warming is evident in long-term trends, but year to year variations around the long-term trendlines is so significant that it several years to see a change in the trend; additionally, there is enough uncertainty in the current models that a small change in the actual trend resulting from a partial policy solution would be very easy to miss even when we had enough years data that it wouldn't be drowned out by year-to-year variability. Unless we do enough to significantly alter the trend, which no one believes anything that has been done thus far would even be on the right order of magnitude to acheive, and sustain it for a decade or so, the evidence of any effect is likely to be very hard to spot.
don't deny that the climate is changing, it's just that year after year with no word that anything humans have done to lessen their impact on the environment has helped, it makes me wonder if it's even worth the effort.
Since human's have basically done pretty close to nothing to actually address climate change, its not surprising that there is no evidence that anything that has been done has helped.
No, it doesn't, which is why there is a term specifically for global warming with man-made causes, "anthropogenic global warming".
whereas anyone who actually went to secondary school and did geography and/or geology knows that for millions of years the Earth's ice has been expanding & contracting, resulting in at least four Ice Ages and all of which happened before man was ever here.
Well, no; the entire ~200,000 years during which H. sapiens has walked the earth has been within the most recent 10% of the (present) Quaternary ice age, including several glacial periods; the last glacial period during the present ice age ended about 10,000 years ago. There were at least four other ice ages in Earth's history, though.
But the current rapid-and-accelerating global warming is not something consistent with the evidence we have of what has occurred in the past, and we have a pretty good understanding that man is causing it and how.
Well, no; the strong and sustained warming after the last glacial period seems to have peaked something like 8,000 years ago, leading to a period in which temperatures appear to have been fairly stable; over the last 2000 years there has been a slight warming period (the "Medieval Warm Period") and a slight cooling period ("the Little Ice Age"), but no period of change in evidence as significant as the change since the Industrial Revolution (not even any period where the total warming or cooling, regardless of the length of the period, appears to have been close to the magnitude of that change, even over a longer period of time.)
Artic ice cap, as antartic ice cap, melt and reform each year : something I didn't knew before doing my own research. Artic ice cap size reduce something like 5% per year in the last 20-30 years and the antartic ice cap size is GROWING, slower but growing each year.
Actually, the ice cap isn't growing (covering more area), its getting thicker, because more moisture is transported to Antarctica as a consequence of warming.
Its, at the same time, also shrinking (covering less area), and recently its also been containing less total ice despite thickening. (Because less of the area is cold enough to have an ice cap, but there is still more moisture transported to the areas that do support an ice cap.)
The growth in temperature for more than a century is less than a celcius degree (0.76 if I remember well). Half of this increase happen if I well remember before WWII.
So?
In recent years there have been no increase in temperature, even if co2 incresed
Short-term variation and long-term trends are two different things. The year to year variation isn't what is important, its the long-term trend that matters. The year-to-year changes are much greater in magnitude. (There have, in fact, been sharp year-to-year increases -- and drops -- in the last few years, but no evidence of a reversal or halt in the long-term trend.)
Temperature measure are often done in inner city, where temperature is effectively slighthly greater
Temperature measures are also often done lots of places that are not inner cities, including Antarctica. So what?
- Finally the point that wake me up to the possibility global warming is maybe political / taxation propaganda : ALL other planets got temperature increase.
What?
So yes maybe a majority of climatologist could agree that global warming got a human original, but I'm not buying that. I could agree maybe for a point around 20% of global warming is human origin, but absolutly no more than that.
Okay, so where is your evidence for absolutely no more than 20% of global warming being anthropogenic? And, even if we granted that, wouldn't the effects of global warming still warrant human action to address it even if none of it was anthropogenic?
Dyson doesn't disagree with any of the really fundamental elements of the scientific consensus on global warming: he agrees that it is happening, he agrees that it is largely anthropogenic, and he agrees that there are disruptions likely because of it.
The main way we disagrees with the general consensus is that he espouses a set of near-magical beliefs about a field far from his own (he's a physicist, the beliefs are about biology) about how the problems will, both naturally and through technology, fix the problems of global warming, and that he is skeptical of the detailed models and precise predictions of existing climate science, without disagreeing with the broad conclusions (which is an interesting criticism coming from someone who famous, at least as much as for his own scientific contribution, as a futurist with a rather mixed record of predictions who has defended his own precise-more-than-accurate futurism with the line "it is better to be wrong than vague".)
There are many reasons to migrate from fossil fuels, the most compelling being that they're going to run out very soon.
No, its not, because they aren't going to run out very soon; indeed, they are unlikely to run out at all. What is more likely to happen (is, arguably, already happening) is that the effort to extract the remaining fossil fuels is going to, from some point, go up faster than improvements in the value that can be derived from consuming a given quantity of fuel, so that the long-term trend is for an increase in real prices that makes more and more uses of fossil fuels net value losses even discounting (as normal, short-sighted decision-making tends to) long-term and/or diffuse effects like global warming and other environmental and health impacts. There'll still be fossil fuels in the ground when we run out of things to do with them that are, even in the short term, worth the price of extracting them.
If so, then you haven't stumbled upon C++'s many problems.
Really? I would think it was certainly possible for someone who has stumbed upon C++'s many problems to come to the conclusion that C++ was unnecessary, and, consequently, that C++0x was also unnecessary.
It may be they lied about keeping user supplied data in house, and they may have implied that they used advanced technological means to do the transcription, but if their service does what it says I can't blame them for using human labour to do the transcription.
Controlling who has access to the private messages in a particular way is part of what they said they would do for the people using the service, so, no, if they said they were doing automated transcription and keeping all personal data inside Europe when in fact they were sending it outside of Europe and having humans transcribe it, the service was not doing what they claimed.
And, again assuming the claims are true, the way in which it was not doing what it claimed was quite probably a way that was both important to its users.
"visible light" is a composite technical term with a meaning which is not the same as the the adjective "visible" applied to the noun "light", though it is related.
"invisible light" is not such a technical term, so its meaning would simply be what one would expect with the adjective "invisible" applied to the term "light".
And they always look like yellow or gold circles behind the persons head, not rings above the head.
For particularly loose definitions of "always"; consider the Benois Madonna, and the derivative Madonna of the Pinks, both of which use semi-transparent disks above the head.
there are a lot of IT people who understand enough of the business end to work out solutions to business problems, but few business people who understand enough technology to even know what their options are.
That may be because, below the executive level, particularly in middle management, anyone on the business side that has more than a casual understanding of technology can usually make more money (and feel less like they are banging their head against a wall anytime they try to use that understanding) moving over to the technical organizations (either within the same firm or elsewhere), because despite the job relevance of technical knowledge in business-side decision-making, its not rewarded very well there.
At least, that's what seems to go on most places I've seen.
Slashdot Mirror
Plus, the landlord will be more likely to be able to prove that the tenant did it, in a court of law. Because of the ease and immediacy, people often treat IM's and other "informal" online communications as if they were in-person speech, but they tend to leave a durable record which can be produced in court, like writing, but often much more easily discovered by someone other than the intended recipient who might want to take action based on them than hardcopy would be.
Sure there is -- in smart businesses. Of course, that often requires keeping the business narrowly and privately held in the hands of people interested in running a business for the long term, or going public in a carefully controlled manner that leaves the real power in the hands of a fairly narrow group of the same kind of people (Google at least attempted to do this.)
Perhaps, but insofar as that's true, those interests collide where, e.g., AT&T's efforts to protect its ability to wring SMS charges out of customers makes an AT&T-exclusive iPhone a less attractive gadget than it would otherwise be, and, again, AT&T needs the iPhone exclusivity deal more than Apple does.
Its technology that (when released as open source) has the potential to revolutionize and commoditize collaboration, opening up a huge market for a well positioned service provider with a reputation for providing online services and a global network of data centers to provide services to small-to-medium sized businesses that don't have their own datacenters, and to enterprises that would prefer to outsource collaboration, while providing commercial support to businesses that prefer to keep collaboration in house. Currently, that market is locked up by a few proprietary (Exchange, Notes) systems because no one has provided a system that goes beyond that those provide while being backed by a big enough name to be credible with business.
Yes. When you first open a wavelet from the server, the server provides you the complete serialized state of the wavelet (future updates are sent as deltas, not full states, but applying a delta to an existing state fully specifies the new state); so at any time the client will have a complete state of the wavelet (including all documents that are part of the wavelet) at some point in the past to reference, which means that a properly configured client application (including an browser-based app making use of Google Gears or HTML5 local storage) could work with any document that is part of a wavelet without any remote connection. A remote connection is only needed to send or receive updates to or from the server.
Since both the spec and the reference server implementation are open source, its quite possible for "waves" to reside on a local network under your control (and the same is true, though less relevant to the present thread, for "clouds", for instance Ubuntu Server now includes tools for serving "cloud" apps.)
Yes, if you don't have your own datacenter and IT staff to manage it, you could rely on someone else to host your waves in their cloud. But for many small businesses, the choice isn't between that and locally-hosted online collaboration, its between that and and no online collaboration tool.
This thread is about them open sourcing the implementation. This is, then, all about the fact that they aren't forcing you to let them hold onto any of your data for you to get the full benefit of the technology. So what are you complaining about?
Somewhat? I think you understate that...somewhat.
Its a published protocol built on top of XMPP, with a defined data model; nothing is stopping people from building native apps that produce and/or consume wave updates. Certainly, Google is doing nothing to prevent this.
Or, you know, they could just publish the specs and leave implementation of native applications, which are far less relevant to Google's business than web applications using the protocol, to people who have an interest in and use for native applications.
You can use it on your iPhone now. Having an app would make the UI for some things better, and otherwise be a convenience, but if you have a phone and a web browser, you can do pretty much everything Google Voice does (some of the management features require either a non-mobile browser or an app, though.)
No, when there isn't a special relationship with a particular carrier, most likely no carrier will be able to get any app banned, and there will continue to be one iPhone store.
Sure, tell AT&T that they have no interest in renewing their exclusivity agreement regardless of financial incentives if AT&T insists on prohibiting access to basic features of the phone. AT&T needs Apple more than Apple needs AT&T. People aren't buying iPhones because they are on AT&T's network, as much as they are paying for AT&T data plans because its the only way they can use an iPhone.
Apple is, with the iPhone, in a position of strength. But that only lasts as long as other premium smartphones, like those running Android, don't offer a better all-around experience, and if AT&T tries to defend its existing business model by hamstringing the iPhone, it may work in the short-term, but in the long-term its going to make it easier for other phones to displace the iPhone as the mobile device of choice, which will hurt Apple and AT&T both.
Plenty of free SMS apps for the iPhone exist already and are in the App Store (and there are plenty of places on the web you can use any browser, including iPhone Safari, to do web-based SMS without an app, including Google Voice's mobile page.)
The big thing loss for AT&T and Apple from Google Voice is that your handy visually-organized voice mail and SMS history is no longer tied to your AT&T exclusive iPhone and backed up only through Apple iTunes and transferrable only to a new AT&T exclusive iPhone. That's true even without an app, if you use the Google Voice web page and call-in number to do everything, although you can't use some of the basic management features through the mobile page, and Google doesn't let you easily get to the standard Google Voice page from iPhone Safari.
Of course, you can make a Google voice call with any phone (wireless or landline) without a special app. (Well, it has to be touch tone; I do know at least one person who still uses a rotary phone that she originally leased from AT&T, but she's not likely to ever use Google Voice, or even a computer.)
I think, though, in the end this is a bad thing for the iPhone: not having a special app doesn't stop you from using Google Voice with an iPhone, but it does make the experience less pleasant than using Google Voice with any of the smartphones that do have Google Voice apps, so it just makes those phones more attractive, without stopping people from using Google Voice.
Google Voice SMS, because it replaces actual SMS with a web-based SMS service which doesn't incur wireless-plan SMS usage, can cost AT&T, because it reduces the usage of in-plan SMS.
Of course, you wouldn't need a Google Voice app on the iPhone as much (given that iPhone Safari is a fairly full-featured browser), except as a slight convenience, if Google didn't force mobile users (including iPhone Safari users) to the mobile Google Voice page without even an option to use the regular page.
Why do we need one language that can do all the things C++ is used for moderately well (but with all the headaches of C++), rather than languages that are the right tool for each specific task, bound together, where necessary, by an appropriate architectural infrastructure (whether a common VM and calling conventions, or a message-based integration layer, or something else) for the higher level task at hand?
If you are going to complain about slashdot summaries, you should strive to improve upon them. Its transparent to extreme UV for an estimated 40 femtoseconds. That is, if it was actually transparent for a year, milliseconds would have been a more appropriate unit than they are for the actual time for which it is transparent. (1 year ~= 3E10 ms, 40 fs = 4E-11 ms)
While the first discussion of anthropogenic global warming was in or earlier than the 1970s, the "cleaning up" of emissions from the 1970s didn't target green house gases, it targetted pollutants with more immediate and visible consequences, like particulates, toxins, and acid rain producing compounds. Global production of greenhouse gases continued to increase (and, IIRC, to increase at an increasing rate) from the 1970s into the 2000s.
No, because there has been virtually no serious discussion of concerted effort to control global warming until the 1990s, and even since then virtually nothing has actually been done; some developed countries have adopted policies, but neither the biggest contributors nor the sources of the biggest increases in GHG output have done anything concerted.
That's because, year after year, we don't actually do anything, despite people saying that we need to. Until something is done, it can't work.
Not really; global warming is evident in long-term trends, but year to year variations around the long-term trendlines is so significant that it several years to see a change in the trend; additionally, there is enough uncertainty in the current models that a small change in the actual trend resulting from a partial policy solution would be very easy to miss even when we had enough years data that it wouldn't be drowned out by year-to-year variability. Unless we do enough to significantly alter the trend, which no one believes anything that has been done thus far would even be on the right order of magnitude to acheive, and sustain it for a decade or so, the evidence of any effect is likely to be very hard to spot.
Since human's have basically done pretty close to nothing to actually address climate change, its not surprising that there is no evidence that anything that has been done has helped.
No, it doesn't, which is why there is a term specifically for global warming with man-made causes, "anthropogenic global warming".
Well, no; the entire ~200,000 years during which H. sapiens has walked the earth has been within the most recent 10% of the (present) Quaternary ice age, including several glacial periods; the last glacial period during the present ice age ended about 10,000 years ago. There were at least four other ice ages in Earth's history, though.
But the current rapid-and-accelerating global warming is not something consistent with the evidence we have of what has occurred in the past, and we have a pretty good understanding that man is causing it and how.
Well, no; the strong and sustained warming after the last glacial period seems to have peaked something like 8,000 years ago, leading to a period in which temperatures appear to have been fairly stable; over the last 2000 years there has been a slight warming period (the "Medieval Warm Period") and a slight cooling period ("the Little Ice Age"), but no period of change in evidence as significant as the change since the Industrial Revolution (not even any period where the total warming or cooling, regardless of the length of the period, appears to have been close to the magnitude of that change, even over a longer period of time.)
Actually, the ice cap isn't growing (covering more area), its getting thicker, because more moisture is transported to Antarctica as a consequence of warming.
Its, at the same time, also shrinking (covering less area), and recently its also been containing less total ice despite thickening. (Because less of the area is cold enough to have an ice cap, but there is still more moisture transported to the areas that do support an ice cap.)
So?
Short-term variation and long-term trends are two different things. The year to year variation isn't what is important, its the long-term trend that matters. The year-to-year changes are much greater in magnitude. (There have, in fact, been sharp year-to-year increases -- and drops -- in the last few years, but no evidence of a reversal or halt in the long-term trend.)
Temperature measures are also often done lots of places that are not inner cities, including Antarctica. So what?
What?
Okay, so where is your evidence for absolutely no more than 20% of global warming being anthropogenic? And, even if we granted that, wouldn't the effects of global warming still warrant human action to address it even if none of it was anthropogenic?
Dyson doesn't disagree with any of the really fundamental elements of the scientific consensus on global warming: he agrees that it is happening, he agrees that it is largely anthropogenic, and he agrees that there are disruptions likely because of it.
The main way we disagrees with the general consensus is that he espouses a set of near-magical beliefs about a field far from his own (he's a physicist, the beliefs are about biology) about how the problems will, both naturally and through technology, fix the problems of global warming, and that he is skeptical of the detailed models and precise predictions of existing climate science, without disagreeing with the broad conclusions (which is an interesting criticism coming from someone who famous, at least as much as for his own scientific contribution, as a futurist with a rather mixed record of predictions who has defended his own precise-more-than-accurate futurism with the line "it is better to be wrong than vague".)
No, its not, because they aren't going to run out very soon; indeed, they are unlikely to run out at all. What is more likely to happen (is, arguably, already happening) is that the effort to extract the remaining fossil fuels is going to, from some point, go up faster than improvements in the value that can be derived from consuming a given quantity of fuel, so that the long-term trend is for an increase in real prices that makes more and more uses of fossil fuels net value losses even discounting (as normal, short-sighted decision-making tends to) long-term and/or diffuse effects like global warming and other environmental and health impacts. There'll still be fossil fuels in the ground when we run out of things to do with them that are, even in the short term, worth the price of extracting them.
Really? I would think it was certainly possible for someone who has stumbed upon C++'s many problems to come to the conclusion that C++ was unnecessary, and, consequently, that C++0x was also unnecessary.
Controlling who has access to the private messages in a particular way is part of what they said they would do for the people using the service, so, no, if they said they were doing automated transcription and keeping all personal data inside Europe when in fact they were sending it outside of Europe and having humans transcribe it, the service was not doing what they claimed.
And, again assuming the claims are true, the way in which it was not doing what it claimed was quite probably a way that was both important to its users.
It is both "invisible light" and "visible light".
"visible light" is a composite technical term with a meaning which is not the same as the the adjective "visible" applied to the noun "light", though it is related.
"invisible light" is not such a technical term, so its meaning would simply be what one would expect with the adjective "invisible" applied to the term "light".
For particularly loose definitions of "always"; consider the Benois Madonna, and the derivative Madonna of the Pinks, both of which use semi-transparent disks above the head.
That may be because, below the executive level, particularly in middle management, anyone on the business side that has more than a casual understanding of technology can usually make more money (and feel less like they are banging their head against a wall anytime they try to use that understanding) moving over to the technical organizations (either within the same firm or elsewhere), because despite the job relevance of technical knowledge in business-side decision-making, its not rewarded very well there.
At least, that's what seems to go on most places I've seen.