nobel motives

Hah!

It matters not one whit how many studies show result X.

I disagree. It might not matter as to result X, but if you're interested in assessing the quality of the research being done *in general*, then it's vital, especially if (like here, and in a whole bunch of pharma cases) you've got a correlation with a vested interest. Peer review does miss things (well-faked data, for instance), so while it's important, what is more important is not just repeatability, but studies *actually being repeated*.

radar disk repairers

There was an interesting study done (which typically I can't find right now) into microwave techs, which basically found that they only ever have daughters. Ok, so it's not exactly "suppurating pustules", but it's interesting nonetheless.

Even people whose heads are hit by 100 watts of much stronger photons (sunbathers, cowboys), they do just fine.

Skin cancer is really, really nasty. You should have picked a better example.

On 512MB machines, I set Java to use 256MB or even 128MB....

Gah. Way to miss the point.

Can you please explain the specific problem that you are experiencing with regards to running java on low memory machines ?

I'm not, nor am I picking a my-ecosystem-is-better-than-yours argument. I'm simply pointing out that resources are not unlimited, and that implying that they are, and that resource management therefore is unnecessary, is unhelpful. There's *always* a case where, if system X used *slightly* less resources, outcome Y would be possible.

Sure. I'm not having a go at Java here, I just think that saying "resources aren't a problem - but they're effectively limitless anyway" isn't a decent counterargument.

In your case, you control the host. I often might not, and have to be able to assume that if my guest says it has 512MB available, then I can commit ~512MB and not suffer, no matter who's running what else on the same host.

While I agree completely, the logic is not to stop the plot at the gate. The idea is to force anyone who wants to play pop-goes-the-jumbo to use a method that won't be detected; in theory that means that either they won't bother (in which case yay! it worked! but we don't and can't know about it) or they'll have to use a method that's cobbled together and unreliable (in which case some dolt sets their pants on fire and the world laughs).

I think you missed a sarcasm tag somewhere there...

Machines typically have 4 GB of ram nowadays.

Just a nitpick, but I really hate this argument. For starters, while physical machines might have more RAM than they need, virtual machines often don't. There's still a very powerful drive to get memory footprint down for VM usage.

I can say from the painful experience of my colleagues that Gems are just broken. It's hard to say precisely what the problem is, but I *think* it's human rather than technical. It's telling that several solutions to "fix" Gems have sprung up in the past few months.

The problem stems, I think, from a tendency for software developers to attach themselves to the cargo-cult of major-minor-teeny version numbers. Without solid release engineering, you've got no indication that (for instance) a minor version bump doesn't include functionality breakage, or that a certain release only includes bug and security fixes *and nothing else*. What it boils down to is that you might as well only have two versions: current and edge.

I also see no reason *whatsoever* to allow more than one gem version on a production server. This being supported has caused us some *hideous* problems in the past. It's not helped by gem authors completely ignoring that some libraries (rake is an example) that are available both as gems and as ordinary system libraries. What happens then is that you can have one version installed, a gem requiring a version that should match, and that require failing because rake exists outside gems.

One way to fix it would be to have a "distribution" layer on top of gems, where people would nominate a specific set of gem versions, and make sure that they work happily together *without* the Gem namespace existing. End users could then install gems from a specific distribution without caring about specific version numbers, knowing that version conflicts couldn't happen. Optionally, the distribution could take care of building binary gems, so that production hosts didn't need compilation tools installed. A not insignificant benefit of this would be that it could make gems compatible with the Debian packaging policy.

The only downside is that people would have to stop living on the edge. I don't see this as a bad thing.

Let's assume your numbers are correct, and that we have the highly simplified situation that you describe, with a simple absorption-reradiation day-night cycle.

Now, take a 100-year period. What difference between energy absorption and radiation do we need to induce in order to make the air temperature increase by 1 degree C, assuming no change in albedo? That's simple - it's the total energy required (1273 J/m3) divided by the time period (3e9 seconds), which is roughly 0.4e-6 W/m3 or, in other words, half a billionth of the incident energy. That's an order of magnitude which puts the effect in the "plausible, but needs verifying" range for me, and not something to be dismissed out of hand.

CO2 levels TRAIL [wikipedia.org] temperature increases (note the graph is read from right to left)

Actually they don't. At least, not in that graph. It's an optical illusion. Open the image in an image editor and draw vertical lines; you'll see that the peaks of CO2 and temperature match perfectly, which tells us nothing about causation whatsoever.

And any scientist worth his salt knows that the MAIN greenhouse gas is WATER VAPOR, not CO2. Well, if you heat the planet, of course you're going to evaporate more water into the atmosphere, which keeps the planet warmer. However the water vapor wasn't the CAUSE of the heating. It's merely acting as an insulator. If you remove the heat, the atmosphere cools, water condenses, and you're back to the beginning.

That's right. Assume we are heating the planet by adding carbon dioxide; it's made worse by the extra water vapour chucked into the atmosphere by the excess heat.

Considering the huge amounts of energy involved, the complete inability of mankind to produce even a small fraction of that energy even if we wanted to

That's irrelevant. We're not producing energy. The argument is that we've artificially increased the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 30%ish.

the minimal REAL impact that CO2 (the alleged "culprit") has on the greenhouse effect when compared to water vapor

It's 25%ish we (might be able to) influence as opposed to 70%ish we can't. I don't view that as "minimal".

or even methane

The human-driven change in methane levels has had one third the effect of human-driven changes in carbon dioxide levels. Yes, methane can *potentially* be really nasty, but comparatively it hasn't been - yet. Insert your standard "methane sink going critical" apocalyptic scare story here; there are more than enough to go around.

and the fact that the martian polar caps are also receding,

That avenue's a bust, unfortunately.

and atmospheric phenomena on Jupiter is recently increasing

That tells us very little. All we know there is that something changed. The equatorial temperature *appears to have* increased, with a corresponding drop at the poles. What we definitely do know is that a chaotic system underwent dramatic change, which is not exactly surprising in itself.

it's much more reasonable to conclude that our solar system is receiving more radiation, either from the sun or nearby stars, for whatever as yet unknown reason.

Not really, given a) the above, and b) a sound physical hypothesis for man-made warning.

What he's actually saying is that *this has already been done*, and they have already been vindicated.

Can some stats bod calculate how likely these events are given a normal ergodic process, please? I'm surprised I haven't seen it done yet; it'd be good to know how unlikely the counterclaims are.

I think when the GP says "namespaces" what he might mean is "namespaces used in the standard library." PHP's stdlib is, and always has been, dreadful in that regard.

I do know of a vehicle braking system that was coded in C, but the C was generated by a Haskell code generator. I wouldn't be at all surprised if that sort of thing was quite common.

I know for a fact that the insurance companies have non-medically qualified people denying claims on the basis of JPEGS of radiograms.

There's a lot to be said for the idea that they should be sued for practising medicine without a license.

Except they suffer from the slight drawback of neither actually existing, nor having particularly strong fields in the first place. Besides, that doesn't solve anything - you've just swapped a nasty field generation power problem for a nasty superconductor cooling problem.