You might find it useful to stick the portable version of ConTEXT on a USB drive:

http://www.contexteditor.org/i...

It hasn't been developed for 6 years, but I still have it installed just for its ability to open text files of several hundred megabytes in seconds. It's great as a lightweight editor for Windows.

Is the "noob" the guy with the ID 718245, or 726776? I can't tell. They're both, like, twice as old as me. Or something.

So, your argument is that because a bad thing is probably going to happen eventually, we may as well just do it now?

We started doing that here in Canada, and then companies started turning off the pipes to drive up the price. So yeah, lot of places are now looking at building coal power plants again. Hell there was a 40% increase in the price of NG in many parts of the country this year, because it was unusually cold and in turn burning through all the stocked gas.

You can drive from Baltimore to DC and back without noticing that you have a flat tire?

You never notice the tires when you're getting into or out of a car? What the hell?

I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.

How do you know that? I'm going to take a wild guess and assume that you did not inspect the tire to see what kind of condition it was in before it blew, and probably not at any point for months before that.

Pretty much that. Even Norway tossed it after trials, we looked at it here in Ontario gave it a go at 33 municipalities, garbage. Same with phone voting, garbage.

Active Lane Assist is where the car corrects the steering to keep it in the lane. In the video in the article he looks like he's just going straight, but if you watch the wheel closely it will turn occasionally to keep the car in the lane. The driver never has his hands on the wheel. The Mercedes will use radar to sense and maintain the distance to the vehicle in front (not the best around motorcycles, or when going around turns), and lane assist will keep the car in the lane as well.

You probably should be sorry. The fastest Geodes are antiques (I have two of them right here, whee.)

How do you know how long it was "flat" before you noticed it?

So true.

We live in the days of global warming and wanting to find new ways to be more efficient with our power use.

But of course people burn megawatts to do useless calculations to "discover" hidden codes that are given "value" through mystical means - backed by fiat currency too just to make more of a mockery.

Almost as bad as the stock exchange and all the high freq. traders....almost.....

A good rule of thumb is that you must understand your program at least one layer of abstraction past the user layer to be truly competent with it.

That's frameworks, libraries, languages, whatever.

This knowledge is often the difference between the experts and the experienced novices, and I think we all innately know this once we've experienced it. Java provides a nice example, because they build that requirement into their certification program and learn about obscured concepts like memory utilization and object creation, but examples exist elsewhere. That 'Aha!' moment when you read Effective C++, or when you grok EF, or understand why Backbone.js does the things it does in the way it does them. I've even seen it on graphic designers who were forced to write raw HTML and CSS, rather than Dreamweaver or Muse.

This isn't even a program-from-bare-metal argument, it's just simply a matter of understanding the underpinnings in order to write decent code, instead of just adequate code.

Um, JUST NO. I really don't know where you might have gotten that idea, but it's false.

I told you already: you're trying to argue with the wrong person. I'm going to answer this, and them I'm done. You've been hammering at this unsuccessfully for over 2 years now. To say that it has been an outrageous waste of my time even answering you is an understatement.

No, he didn't. I swear, you are the King of mis-stating other peoples' arguments, so you cay try to shoot down straw-men instead.

What he actually argues is that Spencer's argument, not "mainstream physics", would result in creation of energy. His actual argument is that "mainstream physics" (which he has used almost daily in his career as an expert in heat transfer) shows that it can't be so, therefore Spencer's argument is false.

That's not the same, and your claim that it is just shows you either misunderstand, or you're lying. After 2 years of this shit, I strongly suspect it is the latter.

Now I KNOW you're just spouting bullshit. Because you well know that even "arbitrarily small" is not zero. And any deviation from zero is enough to make the difference between T and T0 (or however you want to designate them) non-zero. A non-zero difference is all we need, no matter how "arbitrarily small" you try to make it. Remember that this is physical substance, not merely a mathematical abstraction.

He doesn't wrongly claim that absorbing any "cold back radiation" would violate the first law. Again, you are merely mis-stating his actual argument. Now YOU are confusing absolute transfer with net transfer. That's your problem, not his. His argument has always been about NET transfer, and he does NOT claim that "any" re-absorption would violate the first law. You are again trying to claim that his argument is not about net transfer, when it fact it always has been. You are tilting at windmills again. Or still, take your pick. Why do you persist in this? Who are you trying to convince? You sure as hell aren't convincing me of anything. I mean, hell, YOU just tried to imply that an enclosing mass can be made of negligible mass, to the point that we don't even have to take it into account. Hahaha.

I mean that's so wrong on so many levels. For one thing (I already mentioned another), if the mass were negligible (as it would have to be, to make the difference in dimension negligible), then it would also absorb and re-emit negligble radiation, which makes the whole argument moot. And I have to wonder again why you don't see these glaringly obvious problems with your arguments. If you reduced the mass (and thereby dimensions) to almost zero, you reduce the absorption and re-radiation to almost zero. You can't have it both ways. Unless you want to hypothesize about some mystery substance that is not known to exist in reality.

He doesn't claim that. Repeat: you are mis-stating his argument. He actually claims the reverse: he USES "mainstream" physics to show that in reality it does not warm infinitely, and therefore Spencer's argument was wrong. I mean you're just absolutely trying to reverse the real argument here. But I really don't expect you to see that, because if we assume you're being honest (which I do not in fact assume), you don't even see the enormous gaping holes in your own argument which you made above. IN REALITY, the enclosing plate will be somewhat cooler. That's not even advanced physics, it's simple math. Repeat: why can a layman so easily poke holes in your "physics" arguments? I'm not a physicist, and haven't claimed to be one.

You're wrong about that too. Thermal insulation does not work by blocking radiative cooling. It inhibits convection and conduction. There is no convection or conduction between Earth's system and "the cosmic background". Only radiation. You have conflated two wholly unrelated concepts, and called it an argument.

I am DONE with your nonsense. If you think you really can refute Latour, then go do it, and stop bothering me. I have nothing to do with it. But I don't mind saying I wouldn't mind a bit if the whole world saw your foolishness as clearly as I do. So go do it, if you think you can, and leave me be. I am done here. I will respond no more to this stream of BS.

But before I leave, I'm going to do you a favor here. You don't deserve it, but I'm going to anyway. Here's a hint, if you really want to examine the difference that convection and conduction make, then take a strong look at how LONG it takes the Moon's surface, with no atmosphere, to cool off once it rotates into shadow.

Argue about that all you like, but with yourself. I won't be waiting to hear it.

I wonder if he's in any condition to ask if he wants to be transported to the US. If I volunteered to go try to cure people with Ebola, I think the last thing I'd want to do is bring a body-weight ebola culture back to a major US city.

And yes it is an excellent idea, because it gives the CDC a living "test tube" of the actual active Ebola virus, not a sample of infected blood collected, and shipped on ice.

Right, because it's absolutely impossible to ship a plane full of CDC scientists and equipment. Far, far, better to ship a live human body full of ebola over and to a densely populated area. What could possibly go wrong?