That was never the purpose of the Interstate Commerce clause. That clause has been abused six ways to Sunday. It was intended to ensure that states did not develop trade wars between one another such that cohesion was broken.

Of course, it's since been interpreted such that intrastate commercial activity and activity that isn't commercial at all falls under it, meaning that anything and everything that anyone does anywhere for any reason at any time falls under the Federal government's power. Bullshit like that is exactly why there's a massive 10th Amendment push happening all around the country. Bullshit like that is undermining the very intent of the Commerce Clause by creating a rift between states and the rest of the Union. States receive authority only as ceded to them by the people. The Federal government receives authority only as ceded to it by the states.

When the Feds pull crap like this, they're willfully ignoring the fact that they're twice removed from the source of power and authority and they need to back the fuck up.

My point is that it goes both ways. An apparent 'pause' in warming doesn't predict warmer or cooler (or stable) temperatures tomorrow, next year, or over the next decade. A few decades of observed warming do not - themselves - predict future warming either.

That wasn't really my point; my point was merely that we've only just very, very recently had satellite data added to the mix. And that data, though more complete than anything before it, is still subject to measurement issues. It marks an improvement in our toolbox, but that improvement has only provided an incredibly small amount of new data and we need a whole lot more.

Until around the 1930s (in some places, the 1920s, but in vanishingly few places prior thereto), most places where temperature measurements were taken were not scientific labs. They were simple weather stations where the person doing the measuring simply looked at an old mercury thermometer located randomly (sometimes near a heat source). There was little to no training for that person for taking the measurements in a standard way, the equipment used was crude and uncalibrated (not that it would help considering the level of precision available with common thermometers at the time), there was no standard time of day for measurement taking, no verification of measurements, etc. Statistical smoothing (like the kind applied to the surface temperature reconstructions done for data collected prior to about the 1930s) can help weed out a few bad measurements here in there in a largely accurate and precise data set. What it cannot do is take hugely incomplete, inaccurate, imprecise data measured in non-standard ways with crude instruments and numerous unknown outside variables and turn that into something useful enough to demonstrate a fraction of a degree difference in temperature.

All that taken together, the margin of error for surface measurements taken between the early 1800s and the 1930s should be around 1-2C. It just isn't scientifically significant data in a discussion about temperature changes of

Suicidal? How can it be suicidal to reduce our carbon footprint to a level that we had in the past, when obviously we didn't all die out back then - either literally or economically. And they say the AGW proponents are alarmists!!

You should re-read what I wrote. I said that setting public policy based on our current level of understanding is foolish, not suicidal. What I said was suicidal was purposely attempting to alter the climate with mass engineering efforts (think stratospheric sulfate aerosols). It's completely insane to even consider such an effort today given that we have such a poor understanding of how our climate works. To continue my analogy, it'd be like that child in the nuclear power plant seeing a blinking light, deciding it must be bad, and trying to make it stop blinking by pushing buttons.

You should re-read what I wrote. I specifically stated... well you know what, I'll just past it here again and maybe this time it'll get read:

It doesn't mean we shouldn't take reasonable steps to reduce obvious negative impacts we have on our environment.

Now we'll see the difference in the replies to me between a reasonable, rational individual who will agree that the goals of reducing our obvious, measurable, visible environmental impact are good and should be pursued and the AGW zealots who will demand that all believe as they believe, worship as they worship at the alter of the IPCC, and who will cast me out as a heretic and an infidel regardless of common goals.

The point is this: we don't have to agree that AGW is happening (and from my post, it should be obvious that I'm agnostic on the issue as I don't believe we have sufficient information, understanding, or context to really know either way at this juncture) to agree on common goals for reducing our environmental impact. We can agree that - with a suitable replacement available - we should phase out the use of dirty technologies like coal and oil. We can agree that dumping plastic into the ocean to the point that it creates whole islands of garbage is bad. We can agree that blowing up the tops of mountains is bad. We can agree that dumping heavy metals into rivers is bad. We don't have to agree on AGW to agree on the common goal of providing sufficient funding and tools to better understand our climate and how our actions impact it. Probably 70%+ of what environmentalists claim to want is easily arguable without requiring a belief in AGW.

But an AGW zealot doesn't want to stop using coal or oil half as much as they want everyone to drink their kool-aid and worship at the altar of the IPCC. The heretics must be burned at the stake, regardless of how much carbon that'll release.

Do we know they injected this ray into our sun? The problem is, unless we have context surrounding the event (be it increased global temperatures, decreased solar output, etc), we're left with an incomplete understanding of what's driving it. We do know that there are cycles of solar activity, climate on Earth, etc. Some of those cycles we understand pretty well, like the changing of the seasons. We can observe it taking place, it happens at short, regular intervals, and it fits within our understanding of astrophysics. Other cycles are far less understood because there are so many complex interconnected variables at play and cycles sometimes interact with one another in very confusing ways. For instance, there may be a ten year cycle for solar activity in which activity decreases by X amount. There may be a thousand year cycle wherein said activity decreases, suddenly, by 10X amount due to a convergence of internal conditions. Even if we understand the ten year cycle, what are we to make of it when that thousand year cycle suddenly lands? Was it the aliens and their ray beams? A stray strand of negative energy?

You don't need the full 4.5 Billion year history of the Earth to gain a sufficient understanding of the inner workings of the climate and all its myriad cycles to work out what's normal and what's new, but to think you can do it with ~45 years of just-okay data is ludicrous.

As any investor will tell you, past performance is no guarantee of future results. I would further direct your attention to the fact that your link to the satellite data only goes back to about 1970. Prior to that, we had even less data sources with less data points. The further back you go (prior to around 1930, there wasn't even standardization or widespread training for temperature measurements at weather stations), the less accurate, precise, and available the data becomes. All in all, for a planet that's 4,500,000,000 years old, we have about ~45 years of decent climate data. That's akin to trying to measure the speed of a car by taking a very grainy, low resolution 30 second video, editing it down to just the last 0.3 microseconds, and using a collection of indirect methods to carry out the measurement, then trying to determine the cause of its movement.

We're still at the point of having a child's understanding of the incredibly complex climate on this planet. Multiple times a year, new inputs into that climate are discovered that have a measurable impact (even if we can't yet measure that impact). Do humans have some level of impact on the climate? Absolutely; any chaos theorist can tell you that. How much is that impact? We don't have enough understanding of the system to know that yet. Our methods of measurement are crude, imprecise, and disagree with one another (tree ring data disagrees with satellite data disagrees with oceanic data, disagrees with ground station data). We attempt to reconcile that with crude statistical analysis that seeks to essentially cut the difference down the middle and call it a day. When we don't even have those crude measurements available, we turn to even cruder measurements like ice cores and subjective weather descriptions.

We are a child trying to understand the inner workings of a nuclear power plant even as we struggle to master basic arithmetic. That doesn't mean we shouldn't continue learning more. That doesn't mean we'll never get there in our understanding. It doesn't mean we shouldn't fund the basic research that takes us forward. It doesn't mean we shouldn't take reasonable steps to reduce obvious negative impacts we have on our environment. It does mean that setting public policy based on the level of understanding we have today is foolish and that any attempt to purposely alter the climate through mass engineering efforts is downright suicidal.

Now we'll see the difference in the replies to me between a reasonable, rational individual who will agree that the goals of reducing our obvious, measurable, visible environmental impact are good and should be pursued and the AGW zealots who will demand that all believe as they believe, worship as they worship at the alter of the IPCC, and who will cast me out as a heretic and an infidel regardless of common goals.

I suspect that we could persuade those caches to flush to RAM, simply by exhausting the number of possible lines for that address - if the cache is set-associative. Of course modern processors have multiple levels of cache, so that makes it harder.

Hi AC,

This is sort of self-contradictory, so I don't really need to respond to it directly. I just want to point one thing out. I can't afford to work for any company as less than a C-level employee. It would be a salary cut from my current business.

Not to mention that I'd not like it.

An AC talking about balls. Pathetic.

Right. I didn't even bother responding to the taunts.

Coward really means coward. I am sorry for the folks who are afraid that their employer will take a dislike of what they post, but for them we have handles.

I can't say I'm happy about what's happened to Debian. Having Ubuntu as a commercial derivative really has been the kiss of death for it, not that there were not other problems. It strikes me that the kernel team has done better for its lack of a constitution and elections, and Linus' ability to tell someone to screw off. I even got to tell him to screw off when he was dumping on 'Tridge over Bitkeeper. Somehow, that stuff works.

IMO, don't create a happy inclusive project team full of respect for each other. Hand-pick the geniuses and let them fight. You get better code in the end.

This actually has something to do with why so many people hate Systemd. It turns out that Systemd is professional-quality work done by competent salaried engineers. Our problem with it is that we're used to beautiful code made by geniuses. Going all of the way back to DMR.

It really does look like Jomo did post this article, and it refers to another article of his.

What isn't to like about Ubuntu is that it's a commercial project with a significant unpaid staff. Once in a while I make a point of telling the unpaid staff that there really are better ways that they could be helping Free Software.

It's just that I object folks who would be good community contributors being lured into being unpaid employees instead.

Say how do feel about idiots working for corporations contractually enmeshed with the US military-industrial-surveillance complex. Why no spittle-laced hate for them?

The GNU Radio project was funded in part by a United States intelligence agency. They paid good money and the result is under GPL. What's not to like?

Keep all of the idiots that want to work for a millionare for nothing. Fire the others.

Anyone with sense has by now joined a non-profit project.

Compare-and-exchange and mfence would be doing cache flush all of the way to RAM and global cache line invalidation, wouldn't they? So, they can potentially be used to hammer too.

Multi-threaded programs really do need those cache flushes to implement their interprocessor communications, don't they? It seems to me that they would be the ones most likely to hit this problem.

It has yet to be established whether hammer techniques can result in a correct data+ECC pattern. If so, it should be possible to permute the memory in a way that defeats this, either on the memory module or the memory controller.

That would make a good research paper for someone.

Yes, you beat me to it. A correctly-configured ECC motherboard with real ECC memory would defeat this. Watch out for fake ECC memory that just simulates the correction bits.

Once memory starts being vulnerable to row interference, having a machine without ECC becomes much more dangerous, regardless of this exploit.