It is actually quite simple provided you have at least some basic math skills. Don't try to wrap your head around the math involved just yet. Just do this:

1) Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform and only look at Definition and Introduction.
2) Get some tool like Matlab or Octave (the last one is OSS)
3) Generate a pure sine wave signal and put that through the formula's you found in 1). You should get a single spike in your results
4) Now add a second sine wave with a different frequency to the first signal. and put that signal through the same formulas. You should find two spikes.
5) Try experimenting with this, adding signals and experiencing how the amplitude and frequency impacts the spike height and position.

When you have a feeling for this, THAT is the time to read the entire article. You will find it easier to understand.

You now have a reasonable understanding of the Fourier Transform. The Fast Fourier Transform or classic FFT is no more than some mathematical trick to make these calculations faster and actually it has it's drawbacks, like your nr of sample must be a power of 2 and some other stuff I won't go into here, although these are acceptable in most practical cases. This new FFT transform seems to be a lossy variant of FFT which will impact the resulting signal, negating the contribution of frequency area's with low energy content. It could be especially useful in situation where that loss of information is acceptable as it is in sound and video to some degree. However, I did not really read up on this new method so I could be off the mark...

Nice argument, but it has absolutely nothing to do with global warming. Lets have a look at the facts:

1) The snow in the alps melts every year. All of it. All of it that matters for us anyway, since most of the glaciers are positioned SOUTH of the watershed line, and the water from these glaciers will never reach the Netherlands. This means there is no "extra" melting done every year, because of shrinking glaciers or everlasting snow melting off.
2) This means that the amount of water melting in spring does not increase (and should actually DECREASE if you believe global warming, since more warming means less snow during winter, right?)
3) More and more of our rivers are being channeled up the line, decreasing the number of natural overflow basins up the line and therefore the Netherlands will get more water in less time during spring.

The influx of melting water in the Netherlands therefore has nothing to do with global warming, but has everything to do with water management projects in the countries up the line and the Netherlands itself.

Can't speak for rising sea levels, but when it comes to melting water, the Netherlands has nothing to fear from global warming. Manmade or not. What we DO have to fear for is misinformed people trying to push every change in their surroundings into the shoes of as yet unexplained phenomena, leading to lots of wrong decisions in politics.

I am one of those people that sees the temperature rise as being well within expected statistical variance, when looking to the last 2000 years or so. I guess that makes me an "unbeliever" and will probably be modded down for it severely. So be it.... ;-)

I would say, if you are able to support CentOS using the skills available in your organization, by all means, go for it! You will not need the RH support. On top of that, you are not buying a whole lot with RedHat support. Look at their conditions and you see a lot of things like:

- No support if you run a customized kernel.
- No support if you run non RH packaged software.
- No support if you run it on "certified" hardware.

So basically, if you run it according to the conditions, you will not need the support. As soon as you do something that makes you need the support, it will fall outside the contract and you end up paying for it.

To be frank... your pointy haired boss seems to have gotten it right this time. Cherish it. Most of us never get to see that day!

"but if so, repeat cycles of poverty could be putting poor children at a serious disadvantage for heart disease, diabetes and lung disorders."

What is this based on? Perhaps extra robustness is built in for exactly the reason that you may run more risk? So having poor parents may actually give you an advantage...

Some questions then:

1) Were these researchers able to personally inspect the instruments used over the involved period? Checking calibration and such?
2) Were these research able to get their hands on the RAW data coming from these instruments?

Let me tell you without reading the research: the answer to both questions is "no". Why? Simply because for the information of 1) you need to have been there. And for 2), this data has mostly eh... well eh... destroyed?!. "Luckily" though, there are of course the datasets that were CORRECTED for all kind of stuff that the original researchers found distracting or anomalous. If (and I say if) you cook the books, you cook them where it cannot be checked later and I just shown you where that is. So this research actually says nothing at all.

The kicker is, that the Koch brothers must have known this in advance. So what is the use? Well, it is a necessary first step in a process that will take many years to complete. So yes. They will get more funding. Exactly _because_ withdrawing the funding now would be the stupid thing to do. Even if it turns out the Koch brothers were wrong, they will still want to KNOW. THAT is science. And exactly _because_ most climate sceptic scientists have been marginalized by _removing_ funding by politicians that have a very one-sided agenda. Which is NOT science. Science is all about _knowing_ even IF you find out that you were wrong after all. People tend to forget that, and in the end it is gonna cost us all...

The real kicker is that the global warming thing isn't what it is all about, it is the "manmade" part that is under fire. But thoroughly kill that misconception, you first have to establish the basis, which is what is being done her in my opinion...

For some reason, we always succeed to plant clueless people in positions like this. If it wasn't so very dangerous it would be funny...

Strange... I run a anti-spam business and we only see spam rising on our end. Perhaps you are missing something? Like you are blocking IP ranges (which you shouldn't) and therefore not counting those attempts as spam if at all? This mistake is made by many spam 'experts' in the field at the moment. Our servers accept every message, from every source, because we can learn from large volumes and I can say for sure: The volume only dropped for a few weeks after the takedowns. After that we were back up where we were before....

I see a lot of very skeptic responses and I must admit I am a bit too. But then I thought back to the first time I saw "Doom" on a 486 and almost had my eyes fall out. It was just such a big step... I could have imagined it. All it took was someone with a very bright idea. Perhaps we might be in for a similar surprise...

The landing procedure look entirely too complex to me. It is one thing to let something crash in a controlled way, but quite another to land it in the way they desscribe. There is a host of things that could go wrong, like failing thrusters, frozen fuel lines, malfunctioning controllers, etc etc... And all that after months in space, having survived a launch and re-entry and then completely automated, with only seconds to react if something fails... I will be really,really impressed if they pull this off...

We escaped the Software Patent madness by a hair in the EU, but we escaped. Do it before August 2nd tho, or at least change your dollars to euros before that, or you will have to live under a bridge ;-)

This is true, however not so in Belgium as far as I know. But even so, you have to balance the costs of your enforcement against the costs of loosing exposure at all. Clearly they underestimated that cost and now they are paying the rather steep price. I won't shed a single tear for them, and it will make other think before they act!

Couldn't agree more. The problem with people owning copyright is that they seem to have this craving for controlling that copyright in every aspect, even the aspects where it doesn't really matter. Believe me, it matters NOT where your content is archived if you already publish it to the world as long the proper source citing is done, which is always the case with Google. You only get more visitors in the end, which is entirely what you want. If you are too stupid to grasp this, you should get a lesson, and that is what happened here.

I think it is entirely logical from Google's side to pull this into the extreme. Before you know it they will be in court every day fighting off clueless managers of newspapers, publishers and what else. This is clearly a message: If you want to sue to defend your 'rights', you can do so, but if you win, you lose in the worst way you can imagine. If they Google wins the ensuing case (which will come) and is able to keep the Belgian publishers out of their databases, they nipped this one neatly in the bud I should say....

Way to go Google!