If most people don't compile the kernel then I doubt they have the problems you claim. I can't speak for rpm based distros (and perhaps this is why I doubt you, who knows) but I've never had this issue with a debian based distro or gentoo. In debian (i'm a bit out of date here) there was a package you could install (and apt-get update kept it updated) that you would just have to rebuild when you built/installed a new kernel. With gentoo I have a package installed that manages my external modules so I just need to do a 'module-rebuild' and it updates everything to the kernel linked in /usr/src/linux. Perhaps there are more issues for people using distro-built packages, but I can't speak for them either (the only distro-built kernels I've ever used are the ones bundled in installers to get enough of a system installed to build my own kernel). I do recall having some issues 10 or so years ago, but since then, and especially recently, I have had no problems.

The biggest inconvenience I can see is when your binary driver gets upgraded/rebuilt while using X, as then apps trying to use GLX fail with a kernel driver version mismatch, but a quick logout / stop xdm, rmmod nvidia, modprobe nvidia, start xdm, login, fixes that (or just reboot if that is too hard).

Didn't know that. The newest car I've owned is a '97 and barely speaks OBD II.

Go to an O'reilleys auto part store, they'll pull your engine codes for free for you. Some small oil change places will do it also in my experience. Fuses? Just look at them, or buy a cheap tester to probe them.

If you are compiling the kernel and whatever modules you compiled, how hard is it to compile one more module external to the kernel sources?

Chances are if you are using a distro that provides per-built generic kernels for you to use, they also provide a package for the nvidia driver package that takes care of things for you. If you are building the kernel yourself, it really is no pain to use tools like 'cd' and 'make' to build the nvidia driver.

The spin does cause the Earth to be shaped like an oblate spheroid as you mention but it does alter the gravity you experience as well. The local balance of forces if you are at rest relative to the Earth involves gravitational force and an apparent force (centrifugal) caused by centripetal acceleration. This alters your effective gravity that you experience ever so slightly (ie g_eff = g_newtonian + f_cent, where f is a specific force [units ms-2 or N/kg]) .

The degree to which we've had a warm dry winter and a hot spring is only represented by 2 years in the last 140 or so. While this pattern may be more common, it usually isn't this amplified. If this year plays out like the two analogs we should have a milder may. In any case I'd look for the trough in the Midwest to end up as a cutoff low over the east and bring a little relief.

I take it then that you haven't been in many airplanes. Good luck.

Tenerife was caused by an infallible Captain and his FO that was afraid to speak up and tell him he was wrong. CRM has come a long way since then.

Interference on 121.5 wont affect much. 95% of the traffic on that freq is people telling other people they are accidentally transmitting on guard.

The real issue is 108-112 MHz is the frequency band localizers broadcast on (the lateral part of instrument landing systems, the vertical is up somewhere in the 300's MHz), and 112-118 MHz is VOR navigation. Most people these day are flying GPS and not VOR, but they will be on the localizer when landing in low visibility. Not too many airlines can use RNAV afaik. If an oscillator is adding 10.7 Mhz, then anyone listening to an FM station around 97-102 MHz would put them in the right range for interfering with the localizer signal.

The old NorthWest DC-9's still flew VOR to VOR on steam guages last time I rode up front in one, which was before the Delta merger.

If you are unlucky enough to be on a flight that ends up in an accident during takeoff or landing (if it happens, its probably going to be one of those two), do you really want be trying to get to an exit with everyone between you and that door trying to put a laptop away? People have a hard enough time just leaving their bags on the plane in these situations, it'll only be worse if they have stuff they are trying to stuff back into a bag before leaving a burning aircraft.

True, its quite the exception to be involved in an accident like that, but remember that possibility is the only reason you have flight attendants; their primary role isnt to get you a coke and some peanuts.

And to add a personal anecdote, I was both a First Officer and a Captain for an airline flying EMB-145 regional jets, and if I had a passenger (or my crew) that left a TDMA or GSM phone turned on, I could always hear the distinctive noise they make in my headset, even with a TSO-approved headset. Nothing more than a distraction, though. The real reason I tuned my phone off is so the battery didnt drain looking for a cell tower en route.

Solid angles! Your understanding is correct, but the OP has it right also (for a ballpark estimate). He is using an averaged irradiance at the Earth's surface [ W m-2 ] that takes into account the effect of projecting the cross sectional area onto a rotating sphere (and is also averaged daily and seasonally to correct for night and the tilt of the earth).

You are correct that i am simplifying the matter. In truth, the east/west boundaries would be considered periodic, so that essentially the grid points on opposite edges of the domain are actually the same point. The north/south boundary gets interesting :). For spectral models, which require periodicity in the wave solution, the 'wraparound' zonally provides this, guaranteeing periodicity around a latitude circle. My personal modeling experience is cloud scale and regional modeling (CM1 and WRF, primarily), so I dont deal with global grids in physical or spectral space, or climate models for that matter.

Also there is still a need for upper and lower BC's, which in a very simple model might employ a no slip condition on the bottom and a radiative boundary at the top with a sponge layer to minimize energy reflecting off the top. Tthe lower boundaries will also have forcings from ocean and vegetation models/parameterizations (for moisture fluxes, sensible heat fluxes, roughness lengths, albedo, etc).

> The models don't indicate that there is supposed to be lag, the models were /programmed/ to /assume/ that there will be lag

What the models are programmed with are basic PDE's describing what we know about fluid motion, thermodynamics, mass continuity, etc. In this case there will also be code modeling the known interactions of the CO2 molecule with solar and terrestrial radiation. What the programmers are assuming (not programmers really, but the guys running the model) is how much CO2 there is in the atmosphere. The model equations will handle how a number concentration of CO2 ends up being a warming (radiative transfer would be a good class to have had for this), and the rest of your equation set will move that warming around the system.

You should download some model code (lots of it is open source!) and look at it sometime. Convince yourself its just an iterative march to grind on some PDE's and not a collection of "if CO2, wait 2 years, then T+=4K" type things.

They were all talking about differential equations, just some of you don't know it. Global circulation models are a collection of coupled atmosphere, ocean, etc models. Each of these models contain a core set of differential equations, which are either discretized to be integrated forward in time in physical space, or decomposed into spectral space, which has certain benefits for non-linear terms in the Navier-Stokes equation. There are a number of parameterizations to handle sub grid-scale processes so their effects taken into account at the resolved grid scale*. In essence you have a bunch of differential equations and a closure to give yourself a closed system for each component of the GCM, which you then use to force other components, and you integrate it all forward in time.

And the gp was right about observations. If you recall your ODE/PDE class, you'll be interested to know this is a boundary-value problem and you need to specify initial and boundary conditions. Initial conditions are your observations, or whatever your assumptions about the current state are. Often the GCM models are initialized in the year 1800 or 1900, giving them 100+ years of simulation time to equilibrate and match known observations before they are really forecasting the future. As for boundary conditions, the model is global, so the boundaries wrap around and you dont need to worry about them.

* An example of this is convection. When moist air rises and condensation occurs (to form cloud drops, rain, ice, etc), energy is released into the surrounding system (enthalpy of vaporization, deposition, fusion, etc). This translates into warming of the surrounding air, and helps drive convection and represents a transport of warming from the surface to the middle and upper atmosphere. The condensation process happens on a much smaller scale than a GCM can resolve, so the equations being integrated cannot represent this process. The process does however have an effect on temperature at the resolved scale. To handle this, parameterizations are employed that make certain assumptions about these processes and then make adjustments to the resolved scale. It would be better to just resolve these effects directly, but when you try to work at the molecular scale globally, realtime moves faster than the model does.