Mod parent up, he makes an excellent point. The claims of the paper are neatly put aside by their failure to demonstrate their claims with simple signal analysis. Autocorrelation? Fail. Spectral analysis instead of a useless time-domain graph? Not present. They only get this "amazing 27 million year signal" when they correlate the new data with the old, it's basically data manipulation and a fishing expedition.

Yes. You have to look into history to find the last time it was at these levels. 11 years is a very long time ago in the relative timescale of software.

How is this joke not old yet? It's not so old it's funny, it's just old, and wildly inaccurate.

Just because it's true doesn't mean the film directors realized that.

If you don't think academic scientists work for a living, you are WAY WAY off base. Becoming an assistant professor in a science discipline at a respected research university is currently one of the hardest and most time consuming undertakings you can take on.

Thank you. I don't get why Slashdot always boils down to black and white. Too much of an IT / tech user base?

Well said. I don't understand when society as a whole, including more personal-freedom oriented Slashdot, started thinking that if you wanted to compromise a little bit (say, using a social networking site), you would be forced to compromise completely (not allowed to select information that will be completely public).

What if you have an abusive ex? Does that mean you can no longer use Facebook at all? Previously, it would be pretty simple to restrict all info to friends only. Now, with the enforced publicity, you can either sacrifice personal safety or be exiled from the most popular method of coordinating with friends. Your comment is a poorly thought out knee jerk response.

Nobody is "hell bent" on fighting public transport ion.

That's what I was responding to when I said a lot of people really do fight against mass transit. I said nothing about WHY they were fighting it, just that this segment of the population not only exists, but can get its way.

Do you know how much nuclear fuel for current nuclear reactor technology is available? If it was the bulk of the world's power source you'd be shocked at how quickly we'd use that up too.

A lot of people hate mass transit in general. See Arlington, Texas, the largest city in the US without even a bus service. They have the Cowboys stadium, seating for 110,000, and absolutely no mass transit. It's a nightmare of parking, and yet the council was cheered as the most recent effort to create a bus line was defeated. They believed, as documented in local media, that busses would attract "the wrong sorts of people" to their town. Not all mass transit advocates want to force you to use it or artificially raise automobile prices. It's not always a war or a zero sum game, and don't pretend your side doesn't have a very large irrational population.

Some of us do not want the companies to do whatever they want with their own money, it is true! They cannot mine everywhere, because we prefer unmined land, and they cannot pollute as much as they want, because we prefer unpolluted land! So, how do we decide how much companies get to exploit the world for their own profit? We get together and vote. It turns out the current majority of our population does NOT WANT more CO2 producing fossil fuel extracted, while creating a non-trivial mess in the process. The free market is a means to an end, and that end is a good life with personal liberty etc. The free market itself is not the end.

Ha! Maybe you haven't seen the meme "You must be new here."

Are you trying to claim that Americans say "April 1st" because April is an adjective? April is a noun.

Actually, I think you're wrong. Months DO get used in adjective form quite a bit: "November rain", "May flowers", "June bugs", "April showers", etc! We tend to think of the month as modifying things. Today is the 21st, and is an October 21st.

You, not particularly. Why should I care, they are consenting adults. Not being married won't stop them from having kids if that's what they want to do.