You forget that Google has not written their own OS. They have customized the kernel and written their own display manager, among (to be fair) a fairly respectable number of other changes. However, they started with Linux, and

uname -s

will still return 'Linux'.

You have more or less the Filesystem Heirarchy Standard, a limited but unixy shell, and anyone who has cut their teeth on the command line should feel at home. It doesn't by default let you install packages from the command line, but that's to be expected: the biggest security threat to a system is the user, and they need to be able to support a specific subset of features, as opposed to every combination of packages and configurations.

Point being though, they got 98% of the system for free, and the changes they made have been mostly in a fairly common vein. They're hardly the first to create a Linux-based appliance. And of course they get to draw on all of the Chrome-browser efforts.

With regard to your general point, it must be remembered that Microsoft originated the idea of an operating system as being something that was sold directly to consumers. At the risk of being predictive, that is beginning to seem like a bizarre anomaly, and it is difficult to see where any other future business could possibly duplicate their success, even the future Microsoft.

That was actually Mussolini's favorite definition of fascism: the union of the corporation with the state.

This I have to see as the union of two bad ideas: the first being the indefinitely chartered corporation, the second being the idea of indefinite copyright. I stop short of saying that copyright itself was a mistake, but it didn't always exist, and if patronage was good enough for Michelangelo...

No, I mean decades, because I have actually read the research papers coming out of the various climate study organizations in the State of Alaska. I can single out studies by the University of Alaska Fairbanks as being particularly informative on the subject of ice sheet loss. Overall temperatures in the Arctic have risen at about twice the global average since the 1950s. Ice sheet loss was about 52 cubic kilometers per year until the 1990s, when it essentially doubled. As might be expected, glacial retreat is greatest for low-altitude glaciers, which happen to be the most accessible and visible. Or would be if they weren't retreating so fast; we have glacier viewpoints where you cannot even see the glacier any more. Other fun facts: the number of frost-free days in Fairbanks, AK have increased by 50% over the last century. Villages that have been protected for millennia by sea ice are having to be moved.

If you're going to make an argument, make it with facts. Unfortunately the facts are against you, so you may want to revise your beliefs.

The Earth is 70% covered with water, which is in continual phase transition depending on local temperature. The most important transition for these purposes between liquid and gaseous states. Given that there is almost always some liquid water which will under no great provocation become gaseous should the atmosphere be capable of absorbing it, we can for most intents and purposes say that the atmosphere is saturated with H20. There is precisely zero we can do about that. Looking down the list of gases which are present in non-trivial amounts in the atmosphere, and which also contribute to the greenhouse effect by absorbing long-wave radiation, CO2 is clearly the biggest concern. Discounting the seasonal variations, the largest natural contributions to the carbon cycle are volcanic. In past eras volcanism has been responsible for some rather extreme extinction events. At our current rates of CO2 emission, humanity has been putting even the largest-scale volcanic events to shame. An eruption the size of Mt Pinatubo would, as I recall, represent about a day and a half of human CO2 emissions. An eruption on the scale of the Yellowstone supervolcano could be had twice annually without equalling our impact. We are still a couple orders of magnitude away from the largest CO2 outgassings the world has ever seen -- but we're working on it. And you must keep in mind that even spectacular events like the Deccan Traps happened over millenia and gigaannums. We are almost certainly changing the composition of the Earth's atmosphere at a rate unprecedented in its existence.

Discrepencies between theories and observed results are common in all fields, and in most cases do not affect the validity of those theories. Certainly not to the point where one would question, e.g. the greenhouse effects of carbon dioxide, which may be trivially demonstrated with any transparent container and a thermometer. In point of fact, since it is such an obvious property, it should come as no surprise that the idea of CO2-induced warming is about 200 years old. We may also point out, since you mention it, that the variation in solar irradiance is on the order of .1% over its 11-year cycle. This is still worth accounting for in a mathematical model, but being a fairly stable cycle it of course has a minimal effect on the error factors. I don't wish to belabor the point, but variance has nothing to do with predictability: consider any harmonic oscillation.

We may touch on the necessity for mathematical models and their use: a simple and fairly useless model would be to consider the Earth as a perfect blackbody, which can only tell us that this ideal Earth would have a temperature of ~6 degrees C. A less bad model might consider the atmosphere as a column of layered gases, from which one could derive some useful indications of what effect they have in various proportions. Again, a higher partial pressure of carbon dioxide will result in greater absorbtion of outgoing long-wave radiation, i.e. a "greenhouse" effect. Since warmer air can contain more water, and since the supply of water may be considered to be inexhaustible, a naive calculation would show that increasing the partial pressure of CO2 would lead to arbitrarily large temperatures, a la Venus. Since we know from experience and paleontology that this does not occur on Earth, we may be extremely thankful for various countering forces in the biosphere which ensure that this is not a runaway effect -- so far.

The problem is, of course, that our atmospheric changes are drastic and unprecedented. We rely on of life in order to balance out our carbon equation, but we're also doing a wonderful job of deforestation and various other forms of damage to our environment. At this point we are merely hoping that enough of these various other species are able to survive the Great Anthropogenic Extinction Event in order to ensure our own survival.

You may not be an idiot. You are deeply ignorant; this is grade-school level science. You are also close-minded, apparently unwilling to seek out the answers to your questions. You also are reactionary, and unwilling to listen to learned experts on the subject. Or, equivalently, you are unable to distinguish between expertise and its opposite. At which point, pray tell, should we start respecting your ignorance? Beyond this, you seem to be focused on pedantry concerning the term "global warming". I make no remark on this save to say that it is a shame that your mind has so well adapted itself to the meanest comprehension.

I have made no predictions; I leave that to my betters. I give merely the briefest overview of the physical systems, and hope for all our sakes that they may be useful. I am sure that while I can probably answer any other objections that you might have, you should probably take more active steps in acquiring new knowledge, such as consulting the FAQ on realclimate.org. An undergraduate course in Atmospheric Science might also be recommended; you may wish to examine MIT's OpenCourseWare offerings in that respect, and there are also a number of free texts available online: I will single out Jacob's Introduction to Atmospheric Chemistry. Thank you for reading, and I apologize for any strain on any one's attention.

The Earth, modeled as a perfect blackbody, has a trivially calulable temperature: 6 degrees C global average. Observed temperatures are obviously higher than that. The difference is, you guessed it, the "greenhouse" effect of the atmosphere. The science behind the greenhouse effect has been known for about 200 years now. There is no "so-called" adjective necessary to describe it and only the purest idiots would bother denying something that is trivially observable with any transparent container, a CO2 source, and a thermometer. That CO2 absorbs radiation in a certain band is incontrovertible.

For experimental confirmation that the Earth is warming a great amount, I may use my window: I live in Alaska, where glacial ice thousands of years old is vanishing with increasing rapidity and has been for decades. Guess which observation represents a trend?

Certainly theft was not involved, but it was not presented in the manner of a cautionary tale. I was cruising with a young good ol' boy whose highest ambition in life was defacing road signs, in a battered willys jeep of unknown provenance. Said acquaintance had just been released from the care of the local penal system, and was out visiting old friends to celebrate his newfound (and short-lived) freedom. I don't recall either of their names, but I'll always remember his friend as "Bubba", and he was quite the type. We pulled off a disused highway that wound amongst the foothills of the Appalachians, down a dusty red dirt track which pointed towards a hovel and nearly indistinguishable trash heaps surrounding it. A sweaty mountain wearing only denim overalls (with one strap fastened, of course) cornered the house and lumbered up the slope towards us. I was somewhat apprehensive and shall we say not in Kansas any more, being nineteen and straying out of Alaska on my own for the first time.

The topics of conversation were, as I mentioned, in the manner of a reunion after an enforced absence, and I am sure that of all possible answers to the question of, "So what have you been up to?" there could not have been any more shocking. Caution had no part in it; the man was embarrassed to show us his scar, and to describe his previous condition, and particularly wished us to understand that he was doing much better. One could only hope that to be the case -- there may be a downward path from that kind of state but it is surely very short and I cannot begin to imagine what horrors it would contain.

Shortly thereafter, as I was flying out of that benighted human waste-land, I read another local news story: a pair of rednecks had stolen their neighbor's pet pygmy goats, butchered them, and traded the meat to their dealer for crack. I had other experiences in the Carolinas, but nothing that one would call particularly pleasant, and these two for me have come to represent the place. I would let them be cautionary against spending time in Appalachia as much as against having a crack habit, but I've known other people and places to have crack problems without quite that level of crazy. Take from it what you will.

I met a man in South Carolina who claimed to have sold a kidney for crack. He displayed the most horrible scar, which I could very well have believed to be from the most amateur of surgeons. I remember that he said, "You know those stories that you hear about people waking up in a bathtub full of ice? Yeah, that happened to me."

But he said he'd kicked the habit.

Now, I make no claims as to this man's honesty, only to my own recollection, but surely while the implantation of an organ requires all that you mention, the removal of such is far simpler?

There are two divisions of "technique" when it comes to art. The first involves the physical manipulation of the medium, which has changed somewhat with the invention of new media, and some parts have become obsolete. The second involves understanding of perspective, anatomy, color, lines and shapes, various atmospheric effects, et cetera, and in many cases also how these rules may be broken to artistic effect, and these are timeless. Sure, anyone can paint without understanding, and anyone may criticize without comprehending, but you know how it is: everyone has an opinion and an asshole.

But, to be any good as an artist, you must certainly have rigor and knowledge of history. It is not enough to simply expel your first imaginings onto paper or canvas. The proper course would be to take photographs, do a color study, a black-and-white shape study, and a dozen figure studies (from life, including making a maquette if necessary), before even touching the main work. A lifetime of photographic study, plein air painting, and a deep understanding of the Old Masters helps too. If you do all this, you may enjoy the commercial success of e.g. James Gurney. I wouldn't want to give odds on his being long remembered to history though, unfortunately. It is of course not necessary for the critic to be an artist, if you think only of a critic as someone who draws public perception towards or away from a work, but if your friend comes to you and says, "Be honest with me. What's wrong with this painting?" then you had better know the trade at least as well as he does.

On the mathematical side, as long as we teach mathematics as nothing more than mechanical calculation, I despair of the species. Rigor may be necessary to STEM, but we have truly wonderful machines for calculation these days. Perhaps programming will be the necessary method with which we abstract computation into the proper sphere of symbol manipulation.

Let's build a model of the Earth's atmosphere.

First let's model the Earth as a point particle with perfect blackbody characteristics. Taking into account the received radiation from the sun, that should get us a global temperature of ~6 degrees C.

But wait, we know the Earth isn't a perfect blackbody, so we'll factor in an albedo of ~ .3 and get a global temperature of -18 degrees C.

This isn't a very good model so far, is it? Well, let's model the atmosphere as a layered column of gases, then. Oh hey, funny thing. It looks like if you increase the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, it heats up, and then the atmosphere can hold more CO2, leading to arbitrarily large temperatures. That can't be right. Let's revise the model...

That brings us to the beginnings of the 20th Century in terms of atmospheric modeling. You can read more about subsequent steps in this textbook, or perhaps this one. I can particularly recommend the former as it is brief and a good introduction to the problems associated with e.g. where in the atmosphere CO2 is concentrated, and its peculiar vibrational modes.

All of Science is to some degree wrong. Congratulations on your discovery of this fact. The question is, how wrong? And with these models we try to estimate that. We would all dearly like for there not to be such thing as the greenhouse effect right about now, believe you me. However, since it is trivial to show that an atmosphere with a greater proportion of CO2 will retain more solar radiation, and this has been known since the early 19th Century, we're not holding out much hope for that hypothesis. Wrong we may be, but that wrong we are surely not. I don't know where in your fathomless depths of ignorance and hubris you find the means to dispute apparent fact, but keep in mind that when many others' opinions differ from yours, it's unlikely to be a conspiracy.

This post brought to you by the Anthropogenic Global Warming Conspiracy. Get your membership card today!

So what? English is lingua franca for most of the western world. It's boring as hell, actually. You see people from all corners of Europe together in a room, all speaking English to each other. It's not a question of who is number one, it's about how English gets used in the real world. Being the most popular second language (which Ethnologue claims is true of English) is actually more important the number of native speakers, at least until such point as perfect audio-based machine translation becomes ubiquitous (likely never).

Half your posts are provocative by way of being wholly obtuse, and the other half are merely provocative.

Even if you do "own" the property, that does not constitute an unlimited right to do with it as you wish. It is not hereditary property, nor is it held by sovereign right. Your interest in the property is defined wholly by financial terms -- cash on the barrel-head. If someone else wants to spend more money to acquire that same property, so be it.

I don't wish to entirely repeat myself, but I found a metaphor that I feel particularly apt: this influx of wealth is like a rising tide. One may protest this (as demonstrated by Canute), but the flow of dollars, as with the tide, will not be swayed by argument, vandalism, nor rioting. To my mind, a far more productive use of time would be to recall that 'a rising tide lifts all boats', and apply oneself to learning programming. I did. Programming (albeit in its meanest form) is being taught to schoolchildren. Failing that, find a good excuse to separate these techies from their money -- real estate can't be their only interest. Failing that, "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche": this is how markets work. I would be receptive to the idea that markets are not an appropriate solution for allocating housing, but no one seems to be making that argument, and frankly it's going to be a hard sell to the rest of the world.

The idiots in question seem to be these protesters, who like Canute rail against the rising tide, and as effectively. We may recall the adage concerning the lifting abilities of the rising tide, and I might stretch the metaphor to suggest that these gentlemen take up boat-building. Programming to some mean degree is accessible even to schoolchildren; I myself have in these recent years taken up the profession.

I may guess at the purpose of your tautology about one's home, and surmise that you are implying that one has a right to continued occupation of one's primary residence. That this is not so is a well established principle of law, and also a natural consequence. As I have explained, no man has a greater natural right to a piece of this Earth than any other man. We come into this world without property, and any property gained before our deaths is merely the chance of fate. However, as far as the law governing that span is concerned, we mark a difference between property held in fee simple, and lands held by hereditary title or sovereign right. If you purchase property, then it should be abundantly obvious that any man may acquire it by the same means. It is wholly a matter of finance; no natural right enters into it.

I have sympathy towards those ousted from their homes, although I neither have a permanent residence nor should I choose to do so in the Bay Area. Yet my sympathies stop well short of supporting rioting in the streets, and in this case it's absurdly indefensible; it's not as if there are not already rent controls. If this absurd rabble cannot help itself I continue to ask what they imagine may be done to stem this tide.

My opinion used to be highly colored by a vocal medical doctor, who held that the title should only properly be applied to doctors medicinae. He reasoned that in dire accidents, the cry, "Is there a doctor in the house?" might only be answered by an M.D., and consequently those engaged in less vital studies were undeserving of the title.

My respect for the memory this physician is boundless; the world will not see his like again. However, in this matter he was entirely wrong: that all medical professionals have Ph. Ds is a relatively recent phenomenon. The word itself means, "I teach," and properly represents the highest degree of academic accomplishment. It does not confer such status, but recognizes it, and the idea that honorary recognition is somehow of less value is patent nonsense.

Dr. Richard Stallman has contributed greatly to the field of computer science. It is in the nature of computer code that, while itself unchanging, its utility declines with time. His code contributions often stand in exception to that rule, for which he deserves considerable respect. However, his greatest accomplishments have been (ironically) social: whatever you may think of the man, he occupies a fixed point in morality, and the entire world been shaped by it. He has done more to earn the title than most who claim it.

In point of fact, he has received this recognition of his contributions no less than fourteen times. Give the man his due.

Thank you for posting. I know that, while you are a GOOG employee, you're not any variation on Community Outreach, and posting here presumably represents your own personal time. I have been following the development of these technologies but not closely enough to have any appreciation of the issues the GP AC raised, and you have been wonderfully informative. Not that your normal standard is at all bad; you're often a source of fair commentary, and very good at both disclosing and setting aside your biases.

I spent my mod points elsewhere today: you'll have to settle for my paltry accolades. Nevertheless, your efforts are quite appreciated.

Why? What right do you have to keep living there? No human has any more natural interest in any parcel of land than any other. Perhaps you are confused as to what exactly your interest in your home is, because if that is not an arrangement subject primarily to the laws of commercial supply and demand, I would be surprised to hear of it.

No one cares that you are harmed by gentrification any more than any one cares about the loss of buggy whip manufacturers' incomes. Sometimes change is destructive, and becoming angry and destructive in turn is very easy. That does not mean that doing so will be effective, and in this case, it is highly unlikely that vandalism will have any effect whatsoever on the cause of the issue. Turn back the clock, if you can. Use whatever political demagoguery you may, to tax those you dislike and subsidize your friends, but let's not paint the breaking of a god-damned window as a productive activity. I think your cause is hopeless and deluded, even as supportive of social justice as I am, but if you are to realize any aims, you must first rise above "sound and fury".