No. Current solar absorption (accounting for albedo) is on the order of 50PW. By comparison, current peak world wide energy production is a paltry few TW. We're several orders of magnitude away from the point where our civilization's thermal output becomes a concern.

Not to mention that we woudl stop putting carbon dioxide from energy production into the atmosphere (and could, if it became an issue, use some of that fusion power to freeze some of it OUT of the atmosphere and do things like turn it back into coal and bury it.)

If human industry generated CO2's contribution to the greenhouse effect IS significant, we could pull that "gift that keeps on giving captured solar heat" back out of the air and put it into the bottle - at least until we reach pre-industrial levels. (Beyond that we probably don't want to go, because of the detrimental effect of low CO2 levels on plants.)

I've got an old Cisco small business router on the Ethernet side and an Ubiquiti for wireless. Can't complain. Wouldn't mind something a little newer than that Cisco up front just for a Gigabit switch built in instead of the 10/100, but it doesn't really matter on the broadband side and the Blue Ray player and Wii are all that's really plugged into that, so whatever.

In the atmosphere there's a situation: The weather all happens down near the surface, in a region called the troposphere. Here the density/temperature gradients can result in instabilities, where a parcel of air that is, say, lighter than its sourroundings can become MORE ligher-than-its surroundings as it moves up (and vice-versa). Above that is another (set of) layer(s) called the "stratosphere", where everything is most stable right where it is. Nothing very exciting happens there except when something coming up REALLY fast from below coasts up a bit before it stabilizes and moves back down.

The oceans do something similar, but upside down:

Water has an interesting property: Like most materials it gets more dense as it gtss colder - but only up to a point. As it approaches freezing the molecules start hanging out in larger groups, working their way toward being ice crystals. The hydrogens on one molecule attract the oxygens on another, and because of the angle between the hydrogens bondended to the oxygen in each molecule, the complexes are somewhat LESS dense than liquid. As a result, with progressively lower temperatures the density reaches a maximum, then the water begins to expand again. When it actually freezes it is so much less dense than near-freezing liquid that the ice floats. With fresh water the maximum density happens about 4 degrees C. Salt disrupts the crystalization somewhat so the maximum density is a tad cooler (and varies a bit with salt concentration - and thus depth), but the behavior is similar.

The result is that, when you have a mix of cooler and hotter blobs of fresh water, the water closer to 4 degrees sinks and that farther from it rises. The result is that, absent a heat or impurity source below, the bottom (and much of the volume) of a deep lake tends to be stable, stratified, water at about 4 degrees year around, while all the deviations from it and "weather" activity is in no more than about the top 300 feet: Wave action, ice, hot and cold currents, etc. are all above the reasonably abrupt "thermocline" boundary. Below that things are very slow, driven mostly by things like volcanic heat. (Diffusion is REALLY slow in calm water. It takes decades for, say, dissolved impurities to move a couple inches.)

The ocean is much like that, too, but a little cooler and with some temperature ramps spreading out the thermocline due to variations in salt concentration.

So global warming/cooling/weather, whatever would NOT be expected to affect deep water temperatures. This would all be happening in the top few hundred feet. If, say, the ocean were heating up without the surface water temperature changing, this would take the form of the thermocline gradually lowering near the equator and/or rising near the poles, rather than the deep water becoming warmer.

Shouldn't the oceans fall under the NOAA's domain?

NASA has a mandate to figure out what's with a variety of planets throughout the universe. They only have a few samples nearby, and this is the only one they can measure REALLY thoroughly, to test and refine their models and theories.

They also have the technology to do measurements from space. AND they work closely with NOAA (including launching and operating observation satellites for them).

I posted:
There are many jobs in TEM if you hold an H1B (and are willing to work for less than it would cost for someone with .

I meant to post:
There are many jobs in TEM if you hold an H1B (and are willing to work for less than it would cost for someone with the same qualifications who is native-born.)

(The keybord and trackpad on this recent LeNovo z710 are driving me nuts.)

Either shorten it to TEM or mention that there are many jobs under the STEM categories, but S-cience is experiencing total glut.

There are many jobs in TEM if you hold an H1B (and are willing to work for less than it would cost for someone with . But substantially more newe H1Bs are being issued than new TEM jobs created. This means that the number of citizens in such jobs is dropping.

Last I heard about 1/3 of the citizens qualified for TEM jobs are actually so employed, and recent grads mostly need not apply.

(And then the newsies wring their hands and wonder why students - especially women - are largely uninterested in completing a Computer Science or other TEM degree.)

I didn't know that. The other items on the menu at our favorite sushi place are noted as being cooked (e.g., unagi, ebi) or lightly flamed (seared tuna, scallops if you ask for them that way) but otherwise raw. I just assumed that since the octopus wasn't noted as cooked, it was raw. Unlike most of the other items on the menu that I might see in a fish market, I've never been to a fish market that had octopus (cooked or not).

I enjoy learning and, especially, learning about the things I eat. Thanks. Also, something tells me that the octopus being boiled isn't going to make it acceptable to my friends and family who stick to cooked items on the sushi menu....

Cheers,
Dave

The one that folds up into a briefcase that you can carry.

Cheers,
Dave

any type of device, they won't get my money for even a power strip.

They earned my boycott honestly years ago. I still haven't let them off the hook. Comments on that article exposed other reasons not to even give them the satisfaction of wiping your ass their products.

Lots of things are against the law and yet people still murder, rape, kidnap, steal, etc., etc. What makes you think some idiot will follow a law that says they can't fly their flying car if it has a bit of a bend? I followed some jerk whose brake lights didn't work last week. I'm sure that's illegal, too.

Cheers,
Dave

Most who remember the TV show 6 million dollar man, that was footage of a DynaSoar's unsuccessful landing

Nope...that footage was of two experimental lifting-body aircraft from Northrop, the HL-10 and M2-F2. The crash footage was of the M2-F2. Earlier in the credits, the HL-10 is shown being dropped from a B-52.

shouldn't require waiting for a new Linux kernel to ship

FTFY. Even the most ardent Stallmanites don't usually try to claim credit for the kernel.

I'm not saying that C is 2% faster than C++ in fact C++ might be faster but if C were faster... go C for a core functionality.

But what about new functionality? Suppose it takes an extra three months to get the next new thing working in C than it would in C++. That's two million users times three months productivity lost because the feature wasn't there if you stuck with C. And then there's the feature after that, and the next one... The future gets here sooner. Some of those "features" save lives.

Not that it matters: Some teams will use C. Some will use C++. Some will use [insert other language here]. Eventually some will use whiffy-spim-bam that hasn't been invented yet. Getting to release of a working product first is a big factor in displacing the competition and becoming a dominant paradigm.

What strikes me as ludicrous is that we're having this discussion centered around a variant of unix. In case you weren't aware, operating systems USED to be written entirely in assembler, long after vritually all applications were coded entirely, or all-but-critical-stuff, in compiled languages. What made UNIX different is that it was the first major OS that was coded primarily in a compiled language:

As of System 6, which was the big source code leak from the University of New South Wales, the kernel was 10,000 lines (including a lot of added blank lines to make modules come out on 50-line boundaries for easy listing in a textbook). Of that, 8,000 lines - mostly machine independent stuff - was in C and 2,000 - mainly memory management and interrupt vectoring - was still in assembler. As time went on virtually all of the rest migrated to C.

The kernel being tiny, the bulk of it being in C, the availability of good free and/or cheap C compilers for new architectures, and some interesting intellectual property licensing policies by Bell Labs, led to UNIX being rapidly ported to new chip architectures, enabling an explosion of "unix boxes" and wide adoption of UNIX.

All during that time we had EXACTLY this same argument - with assembler taking the role of C and C taking the role of C++. And then, as now, the argument didn't matter, because C won on the merits, despite being a few percent slower than good assembler code. B-)

(Note that this was BEFORE the RISC revolution, when it was discovered that, in actual production code, assembly code, on the average, actually ran slower than compiler output - because compilers knew only MOST of the tricks but they applied them ALL THE TIME, while coders only applied them when they were paying extra attention to something perceived as critical. Want to bet that C++ is REALLY slower than C, across the bulk of production code?)

I have World of Goo on nearly everything I own!

(Wii, Phone, Linux machine, and every my work Mac and work Windows machine)

Linus missed an opportunity to "adjust" the kernel version numbering scheme. This should have been released as Linux kernel 11.0.

(Sorry, couldn't resist)

Cheers,
Dave