Comment Delusions of Competency (Score 1) 319
See reply here — Slashdot doesn't like that "DNS" is repeated so many times.
See reply here — Slashdot doesn't like that "DNS" is repeated so many times.
You're a jerk in addition to a complete psycho for posting the same damn thing so many times. If you can refrain from spamming and trolling my every post, I might think about replying. You have a long history of harassing people who disagree with you; it's a bad habit that will get you in trouble some day.
This simplistic zero-feedback model proves nothing. Other things besides the amount of CO2 affect net radiation flux, and many of those other things are affected by CO2.
No, it proves that per basic laws of physics (Stefan-Boltzmann), all other things being equal, increased CO2 produces warming. There are indeed many things that affect net radiation flux, most notably H2O. Basic calculations and laboratory testing, indicate that water has a positive feedback effect on temperature changes due to an increased partial pressure of CO2. Please show evidence or a mechanism that would cancel out the CO2+H2O forcing.
The fact that CO2 absorbs IR under controlled conditions in your basement means essentially nothing.
Why? Propose a mechanism. If what you're saying is true, there has to be an effect to counter the CO2+H2O forcing. It has to be a large effect since the positive feedback is strong. That should make it easy to find. Go ahead, find the evidence, show us what we're missing.
... look at the increase over the last decade where warming has flatlined while CO2 substantially increased.
I am not aware that the warming has done any such thing, and most of the warmest years on record fall in the last decade. The multi-decadal trend is upwards, in close agreement with theoretical predictions.
Come back to us after you look up what percentage of the earths atmosphere is CO2...
Now here's a fact in search of an argument. Either you're disputing easily-observed facts about CO2, solar irradiance, and radiative physics, or you have to admit that CO2 causes warming. Specifically, all other things being equal, a doubling of CO2 results in about 4 W/m^2 of warming. Since I know you're not going to dispute basic laws of physics, we're back to the top of this post, where you find the term that makes a bunch of positive feedbacks go negative, but only on this planet, and only when it's convenient, and contrary to observations.
Unfortunately, the real world rarely displays such predictability.
Nonsense. If the world was not predictable, neither science nor engineering would be possible. You're not being empirical, and waffling about unpredictability isn't equivalent to refuting evidence.
Let's flip this around. In order to disprove global warming, you need to invalidate one of the aforementioned observations. First, that CO2 absorbs infrared radiation. Second, that solar output is relatively constant. Thirdly, that the Earth can only lose heat by radiation. Fourth, that the atmospheric CO2 levels are rising. Given all of those, global warming must be occurring.
The final factor in radiative forcing is water vapor. In laboratory environments it is trivial to prove that there is a significant positive feedback cycle combined with CO2-induced forcing. In order for an increase of CO2 to have a net-zero or net-negative effect, there needs to be an equally strong negative feedback cycle. So far there is no evidence of such a thing.
Your degree in physics seems not to have taught you to be empirical. This is not a chain of reasoning which can be discarded by refusing to accept its axioms, this is a chain of observation, repeatable and testable, which requires countering evidence to refute. Every aspect of AGW has been subject to repeated empirical testing, no different from any other field of science. It may surprise you to know that the same principles of heat transfer are used to predict and explain the atmospheric conditions of other planets and even stars. Do you also dispute those results? What aspect of this planet defies empiricism? And more directly to the point, what part of our heat transfer equations is so small to have been heretofore unobserved and yet so large as to cancel out the enormous increase in atmospheric carbon?
I'm afraid that I can't accept sophistry about predictability as an explanation; please provide evidence or an observable mechanism.
You have no idea what you're talking about. You can prove AGW in your basement — that is, depending on what parts of empirical reality you take issue with. Proving that CO2 absorbs IR is trivial. Proving that CO2 levels are rising is less trivial, but possible, and hopefully not in dispute. Proving that Earth is surrounded by vacuum is would be difficult but again hopefully not in dispute. Determining the variation (negligible) of solar irradiance is best done from space, but you might be able to get a good enough measurement from Earth.
The above would be sufficient to prove the fundamentals of global warming. There's only one major heat input, and only one way for heat to escape Earth. Adding CO2 to the atmosphere must correspond to a rise in temperature; it's very simple physics. Attributing the rise in CO2 to humans is pretty simple and two-pronged: one, we know pretty much how much fossil fuels are being consumed, and two, there's a huge difference in oxygen isotope ratios.
That's not all though. Unless everything that is known about radiation is wrong, as previously mentioned, a rise in CO2 means a rise in temperature. This can actually be calculated fairly exactly: 3.7 W/m^2 per doubling, corresponding to about 1 degree C change in global temperature. No one cares about this. However, we have lots of this "water" stuff lying around, and it's a way better greenhouse gas than CO2, and the amount of water that can be in the air increases exponentially with temperature. At first glance, this leads to a runaway positive feedback cycle. At second glance, there are reasons why it does not do that, but despite years of research, there does not seem to be any factors that can lead to a negative feedback cycle. The exact degree of forcing is a matter of research.
Realize that science started investigating this problem at least a hundred years before computer modeling existed. If computers were the only evidence people would be more skeptical. In point of fact, they were more skeptical; it has taken more than a century to muster convincing evidence that humans could affect the climate at all. At this point arguing against AGW is equivalent to arguing against evolution or heliocentrism; literally everything we know about atmospheric and radiative physics would have to be wrong in order for it to be untrue. It's actually a lot easier to prove the fundamentals of the theory than it would be to try to prove evolution.
Talking about computer modeling in the context of proving AGW is like talking about epidemiological models in the context of proving the germ theory of disease. You have the relationship backwards, and you're missing the actual evidence entirely.
You are an idiot.
You should learn about house keeping!
Not necessarily. Sometimes it is cheaper to let shit happen and fix the aftermath. For example, it is easier to remove dust with a broom than to track down and eliminate every source of dust in your house.
Actually if you intend to stay in that house for a longer term it is a better idea to eliminate at least some sources of dust.
Hosts is of dubious efficacy compared to an actual DNS server.
Advantages:
APK is delusional and fundamentally doesn't understand DNS. Don't be APK.
Hosts by default is cached in memory by Windows, which if you have a huge hosts file is going to eat up a ton of memory. Unless it's paged to disk, or if you've disabled the DNS client service, and in that case you will be hitting the disk with every request. This is unlikely to be faster than a local network request. Also if you've disabled the client service (this is almost a requirement for an APK-style hosts file), you have disabled indexing, so you have to read the file line-by-line to figure out if a domain is a match, for each request. Any sites not in your list require reading the entire file.
If you care about security, you should run your own local DNS server. You should also use an ad blocker, which will prevent many requests to ad networks from even being made. The hosts file is for temporary and machine-specific DNS changes, like if you're developing a website and need http://test.local/ to point to your local web server. It's better to have an actual domain registered and and a subdomain, but it's not a big deal. Hosts is a bad solution for almost anything else. Having a program to manage your hosts file is just writing a really shitty, stupid DNS server.
I know I'm going to be trolled for weeks — again — for saying this, but someone has to.
Actually, for most definitions of HR, it doesn't matter what they think about polygraph tests. In most cases, they aren't allowed to ask you to take one, and you can pretty much always refuse if they do.
This app would come with a feature that completely erases itself and any record that you even considered using it.
Why? I don't think this is possible, at least without root.
This kicks in if you don't positively identify that you are still alive and coherent every 6 hours. The lawyers would make sure this feature is present.
Because who needs sleep, right? What situations do you see this being useful for, other than paranoiacs with too little to do? What real-life situation is going to be that time-critical?
Since you might be using this app in the wilderness...
Where there are typically no data services, and emergency situations are frequently lethal within much less than six hours.
...while you are foraging, there are some sister apps you might like; one that estimates if you can jump that ravine, and another that tells you if there are enough handholds on that cliff face for climbing...
I've seen some slot canyons that were jumpable, but nothing I'd call a ravine. Having a loaded pack pretty much screws those sorts of ideas anyway. Your best bet for these apps would be something that just says, "No, you can't do that." to any given situation.
However, there is room for an app that would tell you about climbing routes in the local area. The hard part would be getting a database that had that information, and the other hard part would be making it useful to people beyond the reach of data services.
Better idea: Use an online IDE. I've been using Cloud9, and it keeps its state between sessions, up to and including running terminal programs. It's even open-source (to some degree) so you can install it on your private server. Syncing IDE files from place to place is not a very good solution, it's better to either have a central server to remote into. The cloud services can be good ways to take the server management off your hands. It has many of the same drawbacks as a remote desktop, but RD has heavier bandwidth requirements, and possibly other software-related issues.
I'm sorry, one or both of us (depending on how that error is scored) has fallen victim to Poe's Law. If high-paying jobs are a result of egotism I may have to try it some day. For the present I suppose I'll have to send off for another batch of <sarcasm> tags.
No, you should feel contrite that you are daring to report a bug in software that is obviously perfect. There are two classes of software error: hardware error, and user error. In the first case, you shouldn't have bought that in the first place, so it reduces to the second case. Our QA process will take advantage of this breakthrough, but the documentation will not be updated.
Poe's Law.
These are all actually equally crazy ideas, but there's a lot of nutcases going around clamoring for the first one. "Copyright should be limited to the original creator's natural life." Simple question: why?
Second question: why do we have to wait for the government to fix this? I suppose there's a pretty good reason to have a maximum copyright duration so Disney doesn't immediately realize their dreams of indefinite copyright, but there shouldn't be anything wrong with licensing a work so that it reverts to the public domain in a more reasonable time frame. Creative Commons and other permissive licenses have been making slow progress towards an open culture, shouldn't this be the next step?
"Protozoa are small, and bacteria are small, but viruses are smaller than the both put together."
