While that is absolutely true, the population of CA is still far better off than they would be without the reservoirs - they would have had to move (or die) 2 years ago. The fact is that they will pump water where they need to and it will get expensive, and maybe make certain types of agriculture uneconomical. But we'll defeat mother nature's attempt to kill us.

"Follow the money" is indeed a good strategy. I recommend you apply that philosophy equally to those who have made careers out of denying AGW. It also shouldn't take too much time to realize that we are probably 20 years into something of a consensus on AGW within the scientific community, and "the government" has changed hands between the Democrats and Republicans a few times since then. If there was political influence, you would expect some wavering amongst the scientific community - and yet there has been none.

It wasn't me, it was ncc74656.

So you are asserting that all of the climate scientists are bad at their jobs, and if only some smart people would step up and build some proper models, we'd see just how wrong they are. Interesting. If only there were some smart people who wanted to look into climate science...

I completely agree, and my post was meant to be sarcastic. I'm completely against the fatalist attitude.

Seems like we need to adjust either terrestrial radio or let Pandora pay less.

The nice thing about us - versus an anthropomorphized "Mother Earth" - is that we don't need to throw a massive amount of volcanic ash into the air in some completely uncontrolled way. We can put some into the air and see what the effect is like. We can gradually increase or decrease the amount applied. We can stop the "eruption" at any time and let the effect quickly dissipate.

I'm not trying to be glib about this - the ideal is to stop throwing CO2 into the air in the first place. But the fatalist approach irks me - we have never been fatalist about what Mother Nature throws at us. She makes droughts, we make reservoirs and food storage. She makes floods, we build dams. Our whole existence is best summed up as one big fight with that wretched bitch.

Yes, let mother nature take care of us. All hail our Goddess Earth.

Bullshit (and I say this as a compiler writer). Very few compilers do anything with data layout at all (some JVMs do, to a limited degree, because they live in a closed world) and none outside of a few research projects will replace one data structure with another. What compiler are you using that will replace and XOR linked list or a skip list with something more efficient?

The belief in the compiler as a magic box that can turn a crappy algorithm into a good one is one of the things that a computer science education is meant to disabuse students of.

What are you talking about?

No, it really doesn't. If anything it's more relevant in other languages. For example, the cost of moving values from integer to floating point register files is a significant determining factor in JavaScript compiler design. To take JavaScriptCore as an example, the typical instruction cache size was one of the key inputs into the design of the interpreter and baseline JIT - it's written in a portable macro assembly language with precisely two design goals: the interpreter must have precise control over stack layout (so that deoptimisation can work easily) and the interpreter must fit entirely in the instruction cache of a modern CPU. The baseline JIT works by constructing a sequence of (predictable, because they have static destinations) jumps to the relevant entry points into the interpreter for a bytecode sequence. Trying to do this without understanding a reasonable amount of computer architecture would lead to all sorts of issues.

Understanding how a transistor works requires quantum mechanics, but 'transistors are tiny magical switches' is enough to be able to understand how to build them up into gates, how to assemble gates into arithmetic, logic, and memory circuits, how to assemble those into pipelines, and so on.

Eventually you need quantum mechanics (or relativity, or both) to understand how anything works, but understanding the electron transfer involved in combustion is not essential to understanding how a car works. Computer science is all about building abstractions.

There are different degrees of knowledge. I don't think anyone can be a competent programmer without understanding things like caches, TLBs, and pipelines (and, in particular, branch prediction). These things have significant impacts on the performance of code - often a factor of ten. Trying to write software for some hypothetical abstract machine, rather than a real modern processor leaves you with something that has the CPU gently warming the room while it waits for data from RAM. For example, I've seen people who skipped that part of their education think that XOR linked lists and skip lists are still good data structures to use.

You're paraphrasing Dijkstra, but missing his point. Astronomers, in general, know a heck of a lot about optics. His point wasn't to excuse ignorance of how computers work (he worked on the design of the STANTEC ZEBRA and wrote an incredibly scathing review of the IBM1620, for example, so clearly knew his way around the design process), it was to point out that this is a building block.

I'd consider any computer science curriculum that doesn't cover logic gates up to building adders, the basics of pipelining, the memory hierarchy and virtual memory translation at a minimum to have seriously skimped over computer architecture. The better ones will include design and simulation (on FPGA if budgets permit) of a simple pipelined processor.

If you want to work on compilers or operating systems, to give just two examples, then you need a solid grasp of computer architecture.

Even if the 97% number is a complete fabrication, you'd have a very hard time finding someone who has studied climate for a living who has an opinion that humans haven't significantly contributed to the warming of the planet. Sure, you'll find the odd physicist or meteorologist - but no one who has made it their living to model the climate. Picking at the 97% number is really just grasping at straws and trying to win the argument on semantics.

Normally you have to pay back loans in the currency that they were given. If you only have another currency, then you have to find someone willing to exchange them. The exchange rate isn't likely to be very good for a little while. That said, it would probably be great for the Greek economy, as a very weak currency will make exports very easy for them.

The other problem that you're not mentioning is that, if Greece leaves the Euro then Putin will be very happy to extend trade deals to them to get around sanctions and to piss off Germany and no one wants Greece to become a satellite state of the new USSR.