heaving = heavy

Please provide an edit function /.!

As the first response points out, most modern Linux installs will run Steam games fine. There's a Steam client for Linux in addition to the full SteamOS. SteamOS has been terrific in that it's driving heaving improvement to Linux video drivers, particularly AMD's.

I'm hopeful that SteamOS will get Apple to wake up and make gaming a priority as well, giving us three high-quality PC game environments. For developers, MacOS and Linux game ports are well over 90% identical.

I predict Windows will whither at the same rate other desktop platforms improve their gaming experience. :-)

There is no way to improve latency enough as far as air-to-air combat goes. Either the human controller needs to be close (within a few hundred miles max) or the drone needs to be fully autonomous. I seriously doubt autonomous air-to-air drones will be allowed to engage without human approval, so I believe there will be a human presence involved (in the general area at least) for the foreseeable future. Line of sight links will also be needed to eliminate jamming or other communication disruption.

It is true that drones will have an increasing presence, but some human piloted planes are still needed. I really like the idea of the B1-R. That would make a great "drone controller" aircraft.

Just above freezing. You know, rather unlike the actual oceans - which are far from uniform.

Well, that would be a more meaningful question if the total amount of sea ice were decreasing... Actually 2013 was rather a banner year for antarctic sea ice.

Aside from that, the Earth's climate is a highly chaotic and complex entity. It has numerous long-term cycles and feedback mechanisms. As the latest IPCC report points out, the actual climate sensitivity to CO2 isn't known with good accuracy. We'll have a much better idea over the coming decades, but my hunch is that it will be a good bit lower than the current centerline IPCC estimate.

No, the one that everyone admits is ongoing, including climate scientists and the latest IPCC report.

For instance:

Leading climate scientist Kevin Trenberth has told reportingclimatescience.com that he believes the pause in global warming may be caused by long term changes in the Pacific Ocean.

So, the very real pause is a subject of hot debate even among climate scientists. I suggest you re-read the quote from Richard Kerr above, as it also references the pause way back in 2009. It will be interesting seeing how things go over the next few years. We're currently right at solar maximum, and the tail end of this solar cycle will be long and low. Then, Cycle 25 will begin (starting probably in roughly 2020-2022) and it is predicted to be much lower than the current cycle, with the first estimate being a maximum sunspot number of 7 (versus about 67 for the current very low cycle - this one is already the lowest in over a century). So, the next 20+ years will give us an excellent idea of the true influence of extremely low solar activity on climate - and I believe the results will not be positive for climate alarmism.

As to the big picture on CO2, the US is no longer the biggest producer, nor will it be going forward. If growing CO2 concentration is in fact a crisis, the task of the alarmist community will be to convince China, India, Russia and the host of growing third-world economies to forgo growth and save the planet. Good luck with that.

The one possibility that might be a win-win is the proliferation of thorium or LENR nuclear technology in a major way. That route would provide plenty of energy at low cost, without producing a gram of CO2. Regardless of CO2 production, there are a lot of good reasons to displace coal electricity production with cleaner technologies. Solar will also play a role, but it is not a good source of baseline power, and is unlikely to ramp up to the levels needed anytime soon.

I'm not going to spend a lot of time on the rest of your post (for the three people that might actually read this lol) but I'll hit a couple of high points...

The ocean temperature measurements aren't nearly as straightforward as you make out. The purported "extra heat hiding in the oceans" amounts to changes of hundredths of a degree in the water column. Reliable measurements of that accuracy simply don't exist.

On the other hand, we do have accurate satellite measurements of sea surface temperatures going back for some time. Here's the most current data I could find. (If you track it down, you'll find temperatures have been similar back to 1998, the year of a major El Niño event.) You'll note that sea surface temperatures have not noticeably risen. As I said before, it doesn't pass the "sniff test" to believe that the deep oceans are heating while the ocean surface is not - thus my comments about entropy.

At any rate, these discussions are fairly pointless - there is almost no chance of increasing CO2 concentrations halting before 500 PPM is reached. I suggest you join with the prominent climate scientists calling for a rapid nuclear power buildout as that is the only realistic way to tackle the "problem". If, of course, it is actually a problem.

The great thing is we'll see the experiment play out, and find out the actual truth - regardless of what people would like to see happen.

Personally, I'm not too worried except for the possibility that climate alarmism and fanatical environmentalism will stifle progress and keep humanity from spreading throughout the solar system.

You may have see the phrase "past performance is no guarantee of future results" in the financial industry. That is equally true of the (even more complex) climate.

There are some interesting factors to consider.

First of all, volcanic activity has been low for a couple of decades now. The last VEI 6 or larger eruption was Mt. Pinatubo in 1991. Each VEI number represents 10x as much material being blasted into the atmosphere. Also as the VEI number goes up the height of the cloud increases - at around VEI 5 SO2 starts makng it into the stratosphere. VEI 5 and lower eruptions cause much less global cooling than VEI 6 and up. So, the lack of volcanic activity represents a net warming influence.

Second, the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has increased about 25% since 1955.

So, it is in fact quite surprising if you're a devotee of climate alarmism to see temperatures stabilize like this. I understand there are theories regarding this heat hiding in the deep ocean somehow (rather in violation of entropy it seems) and others than try to explain the satellite temperature measurements away by various hand waving. So far I don't feel those theories pass the sniff test, and regardless we'll learn more as additional data is collected over time.

Finally, I'll leave you with the words of a noted global warming proponent and researcher:

“Pauses as long as 15 years are rare in the simulations, and ‘we expect that [real-world] warming will resume in the next few years,’ the Hadley Centre group writes. Researchers agree that no sort of natural variability can hold off greenhouse warming much longer.” - Richard Kerr, Science (2009)

So, we'll see...2009 is already five long years in the past, and the pause shows no sign of stopping at this point...

Yeah, except that entire effort is a straw man of colossal proportions. "Climate deniers", really? What, do they deny the climate exists?

Many climate change skeptics accept the idea of greenhouse gasses and potential warming. What is contested is the severity of future warming, if any, and the certainty expressed by the IPCC when instead much is uncertain.

As to the "pause" being a statistical artifact, warming has in fact flattened for about fifteen years so far - despite CO2 being at record levels. We'll see how long it continues, we're right at solar maximum currently and looking at a long stretch of low solar activity ahead. So, the next 20-40 years should give us a true concrete idea of how a solar Grand Minimum effects the climate.

If you read the first review for this on Amazon, you'll find it runs at 120 Hz at 1920x1080 res. That's pretty nice, as most decent video cards do a good job at that res, but not even the highest end ones can hit 60 Hz at 4K, at least with good settings levels.

I'd be all over this if it were 30", and for $500 I may still give it a try... The review and comments afterwards are quite favorable, although one guy did install higher quality caps on the power supply.

Oh yeah, the decisions could be a LOT worse. The US actually has very humane rules of engagement. They are a far cry from "kill them all and let God sort them out".

I don't necessarily disagree with fielding autonomous lethal robots, but they need to have very specific instructions. It should be pointed out that we've had autonomous killing machines for quite a while. They're called "Tomahawk Cruise Missiles".

Bah, somehow my Julia link got fubared. Anyhow, here's a good one:

julialang.org

Those who're interested in Matlab alternatives would be well served to check out Julia.

It's a very clean language and has very good (LLVM based) performance!

I guess you mean something different from FreeBSD? heh

It could have been done seriously, very easily.

It was written against the milieu of World War II. Not many folks today realize at a gut level what that entailed. Read it again, with that in mind.