God made humans rational beings.

Telling people who collect stamps they're idiots could be a hobby.

(Stupid touchpad...)

  - If this deviation is the result of burning fossil fuels, they are expected to run out in about 800 years - after which the temperature might crash toward the "Ice age already in progress" as the excess carbon is removed from the atomsphere by various processes, or simply be overwhelmed by the orbital mechanical function if it remains.

Does this scenario count as supporting or opposing anthropogenic global warming?

The percentages come from looking at all studies, papers, research, etc. and determining the number one one side or the /i?

When the administrators of research funding withhold future grants from scientists who publish papers questioning some aspect of the current global warming scenario, while giving additional funding to scientists who publish papers supporting it (or claiming some global-warming tie-in to whatever phenomenon they're examining), the count becomes skewed. This is political action, not science.

This happened in the '70s with research into medical effects of the popular "recreational" drugs - before such research was effectively banned. Among the resuts were a plethora of papers where the conclusions obviously didn't match the data presented and a two-decade delay in the discovery of medical effects and development of treatments. Only NOW are we finding evidence that PTSD might be aborted by adequate opate dosages in the weeks immediately following the injury, or that compounds in marijuana may be a specific treatment for it - as they are for some forms of epilepsy and may be for some cancers, late stage parkinsons, and so on.

The same happens when the editors of a journal and their selection of reviewers systematically approve and publish only research supporting the current paradigms, to the point that scientists with contrary resuts must find, or create, other journals or distribution channels (which can then be smeared as non-authoritaive, creations of the fossil fuel industry, right-wing politicans, or conspiracy nuts - and their articles LEFT OUT OF THE COUNT). Again, this is politics, not science.

Then there's the question of the methodology of the count itself. What is counted as "support for" versus "opposition to"? What does it count as a scientific paper? Were well-established research methods used? Was it reviewed? By whom? Was it done by scientists with no established position on the issue, by scientists supporting one side, by pollsters, by an advocacy group, by politicians? (Hell, was it done at all? Truth is the first casualty of politics, and fake polls are one of the commonest murder weapons.)

For an instance: How would you interpret the study behind the Scientific American article that seems to indicate:
  - Planetary temperatures have tightly tracked a function of three orbital-mechanics effects on the earth's orbit and axial orientation - up to the time of human domestication of fire.
  - That occurred as the function was just starting to inflect downward into the next ice age.
  - The deviation amounted to holding the temperature stable as the function slowly curved downward. (Perhaps a feedback effect - more fires needed for comfort in colder winters?)
  - This essentially flat temperature held up to the industrial revolution, when the temperature began to curve upward, overcoming the gradually steepening decline of the function.
  - If this deviation is the result of burning fossil fuels, they are expected to run out in about 800 years - after which the temperature might crash toward the "Ice age already in progress" as the excess carbon is removed from the atomsphere by various processes, or simply be overwhelmed by the orbita

In twenty-four hours this will go from "illegal" to "high demand professional camera service" for promotions, events, etc.

Sorry, that's already illegal (according to the FAA).

Just a few weeks ago the FAA issued an interpretation of existing rules that declared illegal any commercial use of video from a drone.

Go sit in a corner! Thou shalt never bring those two words in close proximity, for should they ever come in contact, the reaction could destroy reality as we know it!

I didn't see SystemC, either, but may have missed it. But the real question is what the stats would look like if you only included Wishbone-compliant usage?

There should have been modifiers for typical bugs per kloc and security holes per kloc.

Also, there are many more layers to the industry. Scientific computing? Avionics? Publishing?

The subdivisions between languages are also a bit... strange. Java/Oak isn't truly uniform, whatever anyone claims. C and C++ have standards that aren't always backwards-compatible - if you ignore such changes, why bother listing C# or D as distinct? Lump the lot, together with B and BCPL under a single header.

My guess is that accurate representation of languages isn't possible (when does a dialect become a distinct language?) but that if it was, none of the so-called "big three" languages would be in the top 10. Computer languages are as bad as natural languages when it comes to classifiers.

Last, but by no means least, people rarely directly code any more. They code within engines, usually using some weird fringe language nobody has ever heard of that turns out to be Lua or Visual Basic with the keywords words renamed for the theme. Real programmers (as opposed to integer or complex programmers) tend to be in the minority, have become rarer after Qualcomm outlawed them, and are mostly in mourning for Freshmeat. But as a lot are Goths anyway, it's hard to tell.

Already done. Check the Slashdot archives for the Vi vs Emacs paintball fight.

When I were a lad, we had to program in 96 bytes! In the snow! Uphill! Both ways!

I dont get it. The average depth of oil/gas wells here in Oklahoma is approx 5,000 ft. The typical depth of earthquakes here in Oklahoma is approx 16,000 ft. I'm not seeing a connection between the two.

First: You're looking at the wrong wells. What's the depth of the injection wells?

Second: The depth of the well doesn't particularly matter, as long as it connects the water to a fault system. The water spreads out through the fault, turning it into a hydraulic jack the size of a small eastern state or so. The faults aren't purely horizontal and the pressure (except for an added component at greater depth from the weight of the water above it) is the same everywhere.

So of course the earthquakes take place at the usual depths where the "last straw" rock finally gives way.

This was on Gizmag yesterday... like many of Slashdot's articles...

Give it a rest.

Slashdot is not an investigative journal or a follower-and-repeater of press releases. It's a bunch of nerds pointing out interesting stuff to each other, and talking it over, with a few nerds vetting the postings before they go up on the "front page".

That means, like Wikipedia, it's not generally a primary source. It also means that, for real news items, it is generally about a day behind.

If you want news in a timely fashion, go read Gizmag and a bunch of other acutal reportage sites. If you're willing to wait a little bit and then talk it over with a crowd of acquaintences (some of whom might actually know more about it than the newsies), this is the place for you.

Is the end result graphene, a lattice of carbon atoms, or not? What exactly is a "substitute carbon nanosheet" if not graphene itself?

It sounds to me like they're hedging because they haven't fully characterized what they get.

As I undetstand it, producing carbon fiber from plastic consists of stretching a plastic (such as rayon - a string of carbon hexagons joined by oxygen links, or polyacriolnitrile - a carbon backbone with a C2N group hanging off every other carbon) so the long-chains are alligned, then baking off the other elements (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen). This leaves just the carbon backbones (with additional carbon-carbon bonds from the loss of the hydrogen and whatever. Result: long, narrow, straight or crumpled ribbons of graphite-like hexagons, in a bundle, perhaps with occasional crosslinks, side-bumps, and other debris.

So I'd think that, if they did this on a surface, with something that didn't polmerize in two dimensions, they wouldn't end up with the nice, clean, carbon chicken-wire fence of graphine. Instead they'd end up with little graphine patches and strips, interconnected irregularly, and not restricted to an atom-thick plane.

But I'd expect the result to, like graphene, conduct well and be very strong. Just not as strong and conductive as a perfect graphene layer, perhaps with some odd electrical activity from the deviations from the regular structure acting as "impurities', and higher resistance due to shorter mean free paths for charge carriers as they bump into these irregularities.

[suggests] relocate[ing] GitHub (servers, company and all) outside the US to avoid those DMCA take downs? ... Next question: what country would be most friendly to Open Source yet resisting the insatiable hunger of the copyright trolls?

How about Antigua?

Antigua recently won a suit against the US over its ban on online gambling (a major source of foreign exchange income for the country). As a penalty, the WTO awarded Antigua the right to freely distribute "American [copyrighted] DVDs, CDs and games and software", up to $21 Million per year.

GitHub doesn't charge for the software it distributes (getting revenue mainly from things lik companies storing their OWN, PRIVATE repositories on their servers). So I'd think a company like GitHub, incorporated, owned, and hosted there, would consume $0 of the $21MM/year allocation, and could freely and legally distribute copyrighted material with US copyright holders - at least until the year after the US congress finally repeals the anti-online-gambing laws.