Comment Re:Won't this eventually defeat the purpose? (Score 2, Insightful) 138
The text is warped and obfuscated. Look at example captchas -- do you really think the geometric swirls were in the source documents?
The text is warped and obfuscated. Look at example captchas -- do you really think the geometric swirls were in the source documents?
Oh get off it. You're just being a contrary to the point of hyperbole. And you're completely wrong.
Go read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropical_cyclone
"This rate of energy release is equivalent to 70 times the world energy consumption of humans and 200 times the worldwide electrical generating capacity, or to exploding a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes."
Wikipedia also says that all nuclear testing amounted to 510 megatons of energy released.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield
I don't know how that related to all "all explosives ever detonated", but assuming that is the total, then it would take a hurricane ~1,000 minutes to match the energy. You were off by a factor of at minimum 1,000 with your hyperbole.
Now, disregarding that, you're simply wrong that we can't influence hurricanes. It's simple math. If the water 100m below the surface if 5 degrees cooler, and we clearly understand how every change in water surface temperature influences hurricane strength, you can easily calculate how much energy we need to expand to pump that water up and how long it will stay there before convecting back down, etc... You can come up with a straightforward figure for how many joules our fleet needs to expend, and judging by this patent, it's not an astronomical figure.
Stop spouting this whole "noble nature" myth. Humans got to be a successful, spacefaring civilization by engineering the hell out of our environment. Our water system, the land, etc. This is just the next step.
Indeed, the original article has been updated with an editor's note now to indicate that it does not apply to US citizens. The summary needs to be clarified.
This is an excellent suggestion. If you can pull the curtain aside and take the magic out of the world, it can help the person put things into perspective.
This is clearly a transitional measure, and not a concerted effort to hide communications from mandated records keeping procedures as Bush and Palin are accused of.
It shouldn't have just been denied an oral presentation, it should have been caught by the program committee and never reviewed. You can't read 3 sentences of that abstract without knowing that it's garbage.
Presumably someone DID review this and deny it an oral, but didn't follow up with the program committee to make sure it was pulled entirely.
I've never been to a conference which pity accepts papers. CVPR, a IEEE conference on computer vision, has a 25% acceptance rate for posters. I think this paper is quite an embarrassment to IEEE.
"More software projects have gone awry for lack of calendar time than for all other causes combined." -- Fred Brooks, Jr., _The Mythical Man Month_