Actually, that's not true. When you factor in security theater and having to arrive at the airport early, and have fast trains, you can travel hundreds of kilometers on a train before a plane trip started at the same time can catch up. That's why high-speed rail is successful in Europe and the NE Corridor compared to most of the United States; the latter has longer distances and slower trains.

Hate to reply to my own posts, but oh well...

Also, just because the Earth has feedback cycles that will (probably) keep us from turning into Venus doesn't mean the new equilibrium is something we will like. In this case, it's like the a/c is being set by someone you can try to influence, but not yourself...if you do it wrong (pump loads of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere--note that people are worried about CH4, NO, etc., too--the really powerful stuff), then maybe the a/c will be set to 90 degrees (Fahrenheit) and you'll get to enjoy sweating it out inside the house...

If the first is false, then there is no global warming. If the second is false, there is no way to prove the third, because we would have examples of the warming going past this point and then correcting. If the third is false, then we need take no action. If the fourth is false, then we need take no action. If the fifth is false, then any action we could take would likely be meaningless.

Your statements of the meaning of the second through fourth points are off. In actuality, (2) is known to have happened; it is known that (3) is not true (ie., that there are feedback cycles that can kick in to keep the Earth from turning into Venus); however even with (2) and (3) being that way (that there have been high temperatures in the past and that there are extreme feedback mechanisms in place) that doesn't mean there won't be catastrophic impacts. A comparison might be an air-conditioning system and a space heater. Suppose the air-conditioning system is much more powerful than the space heater. However, it takes a while to kick in. In the meantime, it will get awfully hot around the space heater.

What is the optimum temperature (or range) of the Earth?

This of course will depend on who you talk to. A polar bear will want it a lot colder than a tarantula, for instance. But for our purposes, it's fine to just consider human impacts. In that case, temperatures in the range of those we had when most of our current cities and population centers grew up would be best, as that would mean that none of them ought to end up frozen, flooded, or burning. So that means the average temperature in the period 1900-1950 or so.

When has it been at that temperature in the past?

Well, obviously 1900-1950. It has surely been at about that temperature at many other times, as we know that it's been hotter and colder than that at various points

Has it ever been outside that temperature in the past?

Yep. Loads hotter in the Mesozoic or Carbonaceous. Colder in the Little Ice Age.

How, specifically, do we know this?

Well, direct measurements for the latter. Palaeontological evidence for the first two, such as the presence of huge tropical swamps and giant insects in the Carbonaceous. I'm not a geologist or palaeoclimatologist, though, so I can't really describe the methods by which they figure the temperatures of historical periods that well.

In particular, how does one define the temperature of the Earth, and how does then measure that?

Well, like I said that's not my area of expertise. I'm perfectly willing to say that the people who DO have that as their area of expertise have doubtlessly thought about it a lot and come up with some good indicators, though, based on my experience in physics.

However, there's no practical way for him to get data that would allow him to conclude causation. With only one test subject, and presumably being aware of the differences between regular and decaf coffee, he cannot perform a blinded study. In this case, the best he can do (without getting very silly) is to look at the data, see if it has a strong correlation (which apparently it did), and examine if there were any confounding variables that might have altered. For example, he might have changed jobs from one allowing little sleep, and much of that irregular, to one allowing much more regular sleep, which might cause similar effects. In the event that there aren't any confounding variables he can detect, then that correlation is the best evidence he can get that whatever he happens to be doing (in this case, not drinking coffee) is better than whatever else he could be doing.

(BTW, the fallacy is actually reverse ad populum. After all, he was arguing that everyone not doing it meant it was better.)

The problem is that he is very likely to be able to recognize regular versus decaf from their differing effects on his nervous systems, which would render the elaborate (maybe overelaborate--does remixing the labels serve a purpose, since the assistant isn't part of the experiment after that? I don't see how it could improve the blinding, since you're both the subject and the observer) blinding you have proposed useless. In this case, it shows a correlation, possibly quite a strong one, and that is enough for him to keep doing what he's doing.

What this actually shows is that:

1: There are (excluding Africa) around 4.3-4.5 billion people living in undeveloped/underdeveloped states (that is, that the large majority of world population is in underdeveloped states).

2: Said states tend (not surprisingly) to have weak IP laws compared to developed states.

3: Therefore, a large majority of world population lives in states that have weak IP laws.

The list is large because there are a lot of countries where IP laws are a low priority, in other words. And why is that? Because those countries are either poor, or benefit from having weak IP laws much more than they are hurt from them (and they are poor). There are only 4-5 fully developed countries in the list, and most of those aren't well-known for the vast amount of creative works that pour out of them. When the non-developed countries grow to become big parts of the world economy with a lot of creative industries, you'd better believe they'll crack down on this sort of thing, just like the US. On the other hand, if they never grow to become big creative centers, they probably won't bother.

Although that might be because non-CS majors have to take CSC 101. I'm a physics/math major at a major research university, and while the introductory courses were pretty big, most of those guys were engineers and such, not people going for the major. When we went to the more advanced classes (modern physics, classical mechanics, theoretical partial differential equations, and such) enrollment dropped to mostly just being the physics majors, physics post-bacs, and a few interested engineers. It's not necessarily that they decided that they didn't like physics or mathematics, it's just that they didn't have to take physics or mathematics past the first year, so they didn't.

1. Obama negotiated with Russia to deactivate nuclear weapons if deploying these and to allow Russian inspections to show they weren't nuclear armed. Bush wasn't willing to.

2. The planned technology changed from the Navy's Conventional Trident (which would look exactly like a nuclear Trident) to a hypersonic cruise missile or new ballistic missile which would have a different launch signature from existing ballistic missiles and be based in different locations (which the Russians could inspect). That would mean it couldn't be mistaken for a real nuclear missile launch.

How many commercial payloads has Shuttle launched since 1986? How many satellites has it launched since then? How many expendable vehicles have been retired due to its "routine workaday program"? Oh, that's right. (Almost) none that weren't manifested before Challenger, not that many, and none. Hardly a "routine workaday program" to me... (And as SECProto pointed out, Shuttle could only fly a couple times per year, didn't cost any less than expendable vehicles, and couldn't support any space development. Not at all a routine workaday program in any sense of the phrase.)

And all he's saying is that e-cig refills should meet the same kind of safety standards in packaging, that is having impermeable non-dissolvable (in nicotine, in this case) packaging that is designed to make it difficult to spill, and banning the sale of liquid refills in favor of simple cartridges (this is unnecessary for most of those products since people generally throw away their excess and get a new bottle, rather than getting liquid ammonia and filling their old).

Unfortunately, you never actually get around to saying what the purpose of those RPG elements actually is, or what the end to which character development should be put...

Well, clearly I needed it to be said :)

That being, um, said, even your fundamental element (that is, endless replayability via randomzation) would be disputed by a lot of people. Just focusing on your 4X-style games, I can immediately think of at least one developer whose games, while 4X-style, would be utterly unsuited to such a thing. In fact, if they DID implement randomization to "improve replayability" they'd lose almost their entire fan base! You're just not going to get agreement on fundamental things--eg., compare Oblivion and Mass Effect fans. You think their ideas on how to improve RPGs are going to be the same? Now throw in Final Fantasy fans--it's getting crazy! Sure, you can keep making it narrower and narrower, but you're not going to get a perfect setting (what about Dragon Age versus Mass Effect? Or GalCiv2 versus Civ?), a perfect story, perfect graphics, etc. etc. And so you'll end up with a fragmentation into lots of games, each of which hews to its own concept of what's "perfect" (even if it doesn't achieve that). Kind of like what we have today.

More pertinently, there's the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect game, since whether or not a game is "perfect" will obviously be extremely subjective. Compare chess and basketball for two wildly varying implementations of "game," or if you want to stick to video games, Halo and Sim City. Every one of those has their fans, but you'd have a hard time getting them to agree on what would make a game more perfect!

Yes, in fact there have been many such treaties !

It's almost like they might be signing something...changed from what went before, isn't it?

(For the spam filter and the sarcasm-impaired) This treaty goes beyond the many I linked above by imposing somewhat deeper cuts and a new "trust but verify" mechanism (which SORT did not have). It is a welcome step forwards for stability, peace, and cost-cutting.

To say that the organization has the authority to do so (which is what shutdown -p now said) implies that it inherently has the right to do so. I think that was shutdown -p now's point.

Well, that's kind of what I was saying. Anyone, single or collective, has the right to give money or rewards to anyone they want, for any reason they want. Now, obviously sometimes that might have other problems (eg., someone giving out rewards for killing Jews), but that is not in of itself because that person or group of persons is giving out rewards. Fundamentally, no authority of any sort is necessary to reward people for any reason whatsoever.

Perelman may well believe that no organization has the right to judge the works of others, which should stand on their worth alone, and arbitrarily decide which deserve renumeration.

Everyone has the "right" to judge the works of others, at least insofar as the quality and skill of those works is concerned. Otherwise, speaking of the "worth" of someone's works would be nonsense. And they have the right, as I said above, of rewarding anyone they damn well please--and people do, and often for the worth of someone's works. And since mathematicians are people, and vary in ability, it is natural that some people will just be better than others, and that some people will be more motivated by greenbacks than Green's functions, and that the sets of particularly clever and especially money-loving mathematicians will overlap. So when mathematicians recognize one of their own's works as being particularly worthy, or want to attract great mathematicians to difficult problems, money will be one major tool in their kit.

I don't have any problem with Perelman not accepting the money per se (though that could really do him and his family a lot of good, simply by allowing them a very comfortable safety net), I just have a problem with his stated reasons.