Karmashock said:

"1. The world is warming."
Correct. However, on the same basis that 'the science is never decided' he should be saying 'current evidence and best interpretation is that the world is warming'. This is 'semantics' after all.
"2. The seas are rising."
Correct. And same comment as above.
"3. The climate is changing."
Correct. As above.
"4. The rate of sea level rise over the last 200 years has remained pretty consistent which argues against human activity having any impact on sea level increases."
Incorrect. See http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/f.... On the best science (see above) there is no evidence that sea levels rose from 0AD to 1900. Since 1990 best science shows sea levels rising 0.04 to 0.1 inches per year, more accurate satellite data shows sea levels rising .12 inches per year since 1992.
"5. Linking global temperature to human activity is very difficult. We have evidence of the temps going up and down over millions of years. And the current temps are not inconsistent with what they might have been with no humans at all."
Incorrect. This is the same argument used to say that we don't know that smoking causes lung cancer. It plays on the 'correlation is not causation' argument to say we don't know things we do know. Richard Muller, being unconvinced of the climate change arguments, set up his own non-profit institute (BEST) and did his own statistical study of the temperature record. He showed that the world is indeed warming and that on best science it can only be accounted for by increased CO2 in the atmosphere. He eliminated volcanoes and solar activity.
"6. I don't think there is anything magical about CO2 that makes it more inclined to cause problems in our atmosphere than anything else. I have looked at the light spectrum absorption patterns and compared them to other common gases in our atmosphere and nearly everything in that spectrum is overlapped by other spectrums of more common gases such as water vapor. As such, I question the relevance of CO2 in this discussion at the current concentrations of the gas."
Incorrect. This is worse than incorrect, it is irrelevant as stated. It does not matter what someone thinks, science is based on evidence, prediction and explanation. The absorption argument is a long standing piece of pseudo-science that has been debunked many times. It is indeed true that water vapour is a very significant greenhouse gas. But radiative transfer theory, exceptionally well verified by experiment, is excellent at explaining all the known facts about the greenhouse effect. Water vapour exists in the lower atmosphere and almost not at all in the upper atmosphere. CO2 however, rises through the lower atmosphere to have an increasing presence in the upper atmosphere as human activity increases its emission. The height at which atmospheric radiation dominates convection determines the amount of radiation emitted by the planet. We now know that increasing CO2 concentration raises this point reducing radiation and causing the greenhouse effect. Best scince now agrees that doubling CO2 concentration in the atmosphere causes about 3.7 watts per square metre of extra radiation across the surface of the earth. There is no concensus on the amount of feedback present that reacts to this extra radiative driving but all the science is pointing to the sensitivity being higher than conjectured. This sensitivity, not the greenhouse effect, is the final last refuge of skeptics who maintain scientific credibility and it is fast dissapearing.
"7. The lab experiments that showed that CO2 was a green house gas are misleading in several particulars. First, any gas is a green house gas. Hydrogen can be a greenhouse gas. Helium can be a greenhouse gas... and so on. The experiments also did not account for water vapor in the chamber. The air was desiccated. I'd love to see the difference in energy absorption of two gas samples... one that contains what we think our atmosphere would be without humans... including a reasonable moisture content. And then compare that to the energy absorption of an analogue of the current atmosphere. I rather doubt the difference is going to be anything assuming the air pressure isn't changed."
Irrelevant. This is just conjecture and doubt. There is a vast body of knowledge on the topic and complete scientific concensus. As explained above, the theory, completely confirmed by experiment, shows that it is the CO2 in the upper atmosphere that creates the radiative driving.

It is not true that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states "that a particle *does not simultaneously possess* a well-defined position and momentum". The only way to derive the HUP is by averaging measurements, so it only applies to ensembles, either in time (measure once many times) or in space (measure many at once). So the HUP has nothing to say about an individual particle. The wave function for a single electron, say, describes the possible results of a set of measurements of such a wave function.

Nor is it true that "Where the wave exists is where the particle actually is". The wave function exists in phase space and is an imaginary function. So there is no 'there' for the particle to be. To derive a possible measurement involves squaring the wave function and setting up a measurement environment that determines what possible results could be obtained.

In fact any wave theory can be shown to have an equivalent of the HUP - it is a simple mathematical consequence of that kind of theory.

Well,I'm 55, a regular film goer and I think the best movies I've ever seen were made after 2000. Namely, the three Lord of the Rings films which remain the three most engrossing films I've ever seen. For me these, with their superb attention to detail, extremely close attention to the book (though without adhering to it fanatically as in the Harry Potter books) and wonderful music, demonstrate the art of film like no other.

I think it is pretty clear what Bell's inequality shows. First of all, Bell showed that von Neumann's proof that you couldn't have hidden variables was wrong and he showed where it was wrong (von Neumann had assumed 'no distrubance'). Secondly, he showed that only non-local hidden variable theories, like Bohm's, could reproduce quantum mechanics (QM). Finally, he showed that QM predicts correlations that cannot be explained by a classical picture of objects and attributes. These correlations have since been measured and confirmed, leading to Alain Aspect's Nobel prize. These results are not conclusive because such as small number of correlations are found. It is possible that just the results that would give a classical result are missing, though no-one has an explanation for why this might be.

Bohm's hidden variable theory is not relativistic and so needs more work to be a credible contender for a realist interpretation of the wave function. In the meantime, the Born interpretation says that the wave function is just a probability distribution, the Many Worlds interpretation says that the wave function is real but split across many parallel universes while the Copenhagen Interpretation explicitly says that the wave function is not real. This is why finding a reason to think the wave function real is so important.

The problem with CDSs is that the are effectively insurance contracts, but without the limitation that you have to have an interest. This rule was added to insurance back in the 18th century. Without the rule, you can take insurance out on your neighbour's house and then arrange for it to be burned down.

That is exactly what some of the more ruthless financial services companies were doing. It is why Goldman Sachs paid out $550m in a fine and probably breathed a sigh of relief at how small it was.

If the CTFC had been allowed to regulate CDSs as insurance contracts, we would most likely not have had the credit crunch.

CICS went generally available in 1969, not 1973. It did move from Palo Alto to Hursley, UK around 1973 though.

In any case, retail banks mainly used IMS rather than CICS, which was more dominant in utilities (it was first developed at Chicago Power and Light) and insurance.

The retail banking IMS systems were mainly written in assembler not COBOL. In IMS PL/1 was as likely to be used as COBOL.

You have to allow for propagation delay and transmission delay. The propagation delay depends on the components. The rule of thumb for light travelling in a wire is that it travels at 2/3 of the speed of light in a vacuum. So at 5.2 GHz, travelling at 2/3 of 300m metres/second = 200m metres a second, light travel 200 x 10**6/5.2 x10**9 metres or 20 x 10**9/5.2 x 10**9 centimetres which is about 4cm. If we factor in propagation delay on the chip, it is much smaller than this.

Except that most bank transfers don't actually use a transaction. In the exceptional case that you are transferring between two accounts on the very same system, you might use a transaction (but I know one very large UK bank where even that isn't true). More likely the transfer (or payment) is between accounts on two different systems. In that case, one approach (used for instance by SAP payments) is to run a short workflow where you first try and reserve funds at the 'from' account, if that succeeds you then deposit into the 'to' account, finally you confirm at the 'from' account. The ability to reserve funds was put into most branch accounting systems to accommodate ATM withdrawals.

The truth is that the standard example of a transaction (transferring between two bank accounts) was an academic invention with very little relationship to what really happens in real banking systems.

It is also worth noting that the majority of branch accounting systems in the UK (and the US) run on IMS on IBM mainframes and a lot of them are coded in assembler not COBOL. COBOL is more used in insurance.

Actually the image is 380mb not 1gb so it fits on a CD. The reason for 1gb is to allow you to make changes and store them between boots. The recommendation is to use 500mb of the 1gb for a minimal install.