Well, maybe the reproductively engaged kids like to use short words describing the last stage of human digestion because they are challenged by a lack of intellectual and linguistic capacity.

Pronounced:
The fucking kids say shit 'cause they're dumb.

Well, lets hope the anti-trust guys in the US read this as well. But I'm quite confident that Intel shelled out enough money to bribe them into looking the other way for the next few years, while they use their market power to prevent prices of overpowered CPUs from falling down to where they should be, as consumers become aware that you don't actually need a 40 ton truck to do your grocery shopping. But since Intel gets a lot more profit from the latter, they just cripple the more reasonable Atom to the (periphery-wise) least flexible mainboards around.

Gotta love 'em.

Why don't you just say you couldn't tell it was copyrighted, because the copyright legislation was inaccessible due to copyright?

Gotta love it.

Thanks a lot for the CC release of the text, I was wondering all along whether I'd have to kill yet another little tree to read Little Brother. (Not to mention shipping the resulting blocks over here.)

I wished there was a way to send some money to you (to help you make your living) and probably your publisher also (to sooth them enough to keep publishing your books), but it seems like publishers are too attached to selling dead trees to arrange for that - and I sure won't pay for an unsearchable text on dead tree (or unsearchable audio), if I can get it in a much more appropriate format for a price too cheap to meter. (Plus, there are better ways to sequester CO2.)

Quibbler:

That's the same as with the most important contemporary work of Charles Darwin:
"On the formation of vegetable mould through the actions of worms; with observations of their behaviour"

The book on worms I have read so far. (Also, the only one, but not bad at all.)

Kattw:

WLAN uses frequencies of about 2 GHz - microwaves. Those have wavelengths roughly on the order of an inch.

This is almost exactly the way it was in my dorm. :) I laughed about it all day when I had it set up there, since it resolved a lot of headache we had with it in the most ridiculously simple way imaginable.

Easy, windows is eating enough money that only an extra 8gb could be afforded instead of the extra 16gb - while keeping the price the same. As windows and applications will also take up more precious space on those lil' chips ... well, MS ain't gonna like it.

You can try to find out if a directional antenna might work by putting a sheet of metal (like the lid of a metal cookie box) a few centimeters behind the normal antenna. This reflects at least some of the signal and leads to marked improvements. If your problem has to do more with interference then you'll at least know you're out of luck with that line of thought.

Ross:

When I read it I had the impression that the emphasis was not so much on the failure of the system, but on the function it fulfils while it has not failed and the improvement that will be made once a failure has happened. (From the view of Daniel, old as he is and about to embark on a journey away from the - then - inevitable failure of the machine. And as you can see, the improvement made since that time has led to much less destructive failure modes.)

But your view is also right, it is just one from another perspective.

I can't help but put a quote in here:

"This journey began with a wizard walking into his door. Now it ends with a new kind of wizard standing on an Engine. Gazing down on this boiler from above, the wizard has the sense of being an angel or demon regarding Earth from Polaris. For, chastened by his failures, Mr. Newcomen has become most regular in his practices, and in this, his master-work, the seams and rivet-lines joining one curved plate to the next radiate from the top to the center just like meridians of Longitude spreading from the North Pole. Below is a raging fire, and within is steam at a pressure that would blow Daniel to Kingdom Come (just like Drake) if a rivet were to give way. But that does not come to pass. The steam is piped off to raise water, and the wasted heat of the fire affords a measure of comfort to the miners, and for the time being it all works as it is supposed to. At some point the whole System will fail, because of the flaws that have been wrought into it in spite of the best efforts of Caroline and Daniel. Perhaps new sorts of Wizards will be required then. But - and perhaps this is only because of his age, and that there's a long-boat waiting to take him away - he has to admit that having some kind of a System, even a flawed and doomed one, is better than to live forever in the poisonous storm-tide of quicksilver that gave birth to all of this.
He has done his job."

In case there is anyone who didn't guess it: it is the last paragraph of Neal Stephenson's "The System of the World", last part of the Baroque Cycle and Science Fiction at its best in the true meaning of the word.

> I don't think the world's climatologists would agree with this. Climatology is not a pseudoscience like astrology, nor is it ignorant of how the biosphere functions.

It doesn't have to be a pseudoscience to be unaccurate. We don't even know all the rules that govern the system.

What we do know for sure is, that it is a non-linear system. And just this fact makes a mockery out of most extrapolations. Unless you know the non-linearities (and we don't) you just can't predict the effects of a change of variables unless they are small enough to make the system act in a linear way - and they are not. (CO2 concentration rose from 280ppm to 380ppm - is projected to rise to 450 ppm at least and the IPCC has models that would let it rise to 600ppm and more.)

We can not even program a computer to predict the outcome of a game of go on a standard board. Even though the system is quite limited (boardsize is a mere 361 fields), the rules are extremely simple and algorithms for the solution are known. The game just turns out to be so complex - despite rules that fit on the back of an envelope - that no computer can even get the general drift of a game. (Because the algorithms don't finish in times significantly less than than the age of the universe.) Otherwise they wouldn't consistently be beaten by amateur players.

But even if the effect of CO2 on temperature could be calculated, the next layer is even more complicated. What are the effects of temperature on vegetation, cloudcover, rainfall, snowcover and all their interdependencies? Those effects too are non-linear and not small at all. And it doesn't stop here, because it still doesn't answer the most important questions: will the net effects of those changes on human living conditions be positive or negative?

Just one more point to think about: Given the assumption that warming is negative, would cooling be positive? Given that only the current climate is good for humankind and any deviation bad, what happened in past times when climate changed? Have those changes all been negative for humankind? What reason is there, that a climate that dooms northern Africa to be a desert is supposed to be the best of all possible climates?

I can only plead ignorance and no scientist can do more than guess the answer to the main question right now. (Positive or negative net impact of global warming.) All I can say is, we should reduce emissions of CO2 until we can deal with this kind of system or gather practical experience by observing the system.

Point in case: we only know about the extent of ice cover on the north pole since we have satellites that can take photos of it. Those have been around for maybe 30 years - a mere blip for such a massively complex system.

I forgot to add, that CO2 and other gases are not the only human contribution to changes is climate. Deforestation in particular has caused massive changes in climate since ancient times. (This is unrelated to questions of CO2 emissions, plant cover provides shade and reduces evaporation of water on ground level WHILE increasing it overall and thus causing more rainfall. It has been found in one study for example, that the sahara would probably be a savanna in the current climate, if only it had plants on it ... catch22)
Western Europe and mediterranian countries including the fertile crescent (mostly barren these days) used to be covered with forests, so were large parts of Northern America, China, probably India as well. I don't know about Africa since it has been inhabitated by humans for such a long time. But there were changes on a MASSIVE scale that nobody is talking about.

1. Is global climate change happening? yes/no

Yes

2 Should action be taken as a result of global climate change? yes/no

Yes.

3. Should we attempt to prevent global climate change? yes/no

No. Mind you, I don't say "don't care about global climate", but you can't fix the climate in its current state no matter what. (See 5)

4. Is global climate change occurring because of human activity? yes /no

Partly.

5. Should we increase or decrease the human generated levels of greenhouse gases? yes/no

We should decrease CO2 emissions because we have good reasons to believe they might do damage if they go unchecked, so, better to keep them in check until we can say what role they play in the "system of the world". (To borrow that term from Neal Stephenson.)

Knowledge of the global climate system right now is spotty at best - neither can we predict with accuracy the consequences of a certain amount of extra CO2 released into our atmossphere on its temperature, nor the consequences of the changed temperature on other climatic variables nor the consequences of these consequences on human living conditions. (And ultimately the question is centered on these, isn't it?) But since those COULD be negative, it seems to be wise to reduce the emission of certain gases and aerosols until our understanding of the climate system is mature enough to determine their effects with any accuracy.

@64

I just wanted to make sure you knew the correct value and put it in perspective. Nothing else was implied in my posting.

@49: Current CO2 levels are at a significantly increased 380 ppm. (Up from about 280 ppm at the end of the little ice age and largest extent of alpine glaciers in the middle of the 19th century.)

Your headline is wrong, it should be: Sunspots don't cause increased formation of clouds.

No more, no less has the study shown.

Thanks.

I'm very sorry, but this just over the top.

What Turner says here is the same as pointing out how vulnerable the place where I live would be to a magnitude 9 earthquake. Yes, sure it is, no doubt about it, but IT MISSES THE POINT. The point is: I live in central Germany and the strongest earthquake on record here had magnitude 2.4. A mag 9 one WILL NOT HAPPEN.

An increase of temperatures, as anyone sane enough to consider the bit of scientific evidence we have, of 8 degrees in 30-40 year, no matter if Fahrenheit, Kelvin or Reomur, is completely out of the question.

I want to make clear that people like Ted Turner are destroying the credibility of all those rightfully concerned about the climate, trying to find out with scientific methods what we are up to.

It is a mistake to say that it is save to err on the more extreme side of warming forecasts. If you want people to take action, you must first be sure that they have TRUST in what you say. Catastrophic scenarios beyond all scientific possibilities, constant fear-mongering and exclusive mentioning of negative impacts of global warming have distorted the picture of the whole issue in such a grand way that it has become unrecognizeable to anyone thinking about what a warming of climate would actually entail.

The way this topic is being debated has alienated those most capable of dealing with it. The only heating that I am sure to have seen in the last few years, is the heating of the debate to a point where cool-headed discussion has become impossible.

@10

Well, it sure is a minor step towards having a mission on the moon, but really it is not what you need right now. Any step towards the moon right now, is more likely to be made with a pencil and a spreadsheet of the US budget. This is what counts, because in the end, you can't have a sustainable moon program without steady funding. If the US should decide to pull through with a moon program in its current shape, it will just be a repetition of the Apollo program, maybe nice propaganda, but quickly falling out of favour, as the costs, like its goals, will be astronomical. The way I see it right now, is that funding (read: commitment) is much more important for any space program, than technological tinkering. And for all your (and also mine!) enthusiasm for the next moon program, I just can't see any sustainable commitment in the public at large right now.

Coop: Not worth it, because can't show that in the US. It would be weekly installments showing a guy running around, waving hands, moving his mouth, clearly shouting at people and all you'd hear is *beeeep* for 45 min straight, if you skip the commercials. ;)

Wow, a truck for the moon. Nevermind it is so heavy, that it takes a dedicated mission just to get it on the moon and that someone just spend $2 million on a prototype with rather shoddy technology, the actual point is, that it just won't be used.

A truck on the moon might be useful if there was a permanent moon base. But you are fooling yourselves if you expect that to be around there. This whole moon program right now is limited to "bringing a man to the moon and returning him safely to the earth" because, erm ... because ... well, because Americans do that sort of thing. It was announced ad hoc just after the Columbia desaster, which doesn't exactly sound like a well thought through plan. Also, roughly all the founding for the program has yet to come, as the plan conveniently put off all the founding until after the Bush administration couldn't be re-elected. And funding is something that won't be there in a nation reeking of sh*t that is currently hitting the fan.

Another point to consider is explained here:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2007/06/the_high_frontier_redux.html#comments

Sorry to wake you up from your dreams.

Thx Talia, better, but not yet good. Basically this is like not looking for needles in haystacks, but one specific needle in a stack of needles ... I was rather looking for some kind of search engine that would allow me to search for books available anywhere in the web with criteria like genre, author, title etc. not something like:

"University of Virginia Electronic Text Center has more than 10,000 publicly accessible texts in thirteen languages (& over 164,000 publicly available images). These texts are available to web browsers, but in addition there are 2,000 + e-books available (in English) for MS Reader & Palm Reader.
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu "

Which is basically leaving me perfectly clueless as to where to start searching for anything specific or not. Sure, when it comes to SF, bean books would be my first stop, and gutenberg for moderately popular classic literature. But this is the way the internet must have been like before there were any search engines around, not what you'd expect to be possible these days ... this is sooo web 0.5 ;)

Jeff:

Well, I'm a pre-singularity orthohuman living in Germany and had a lot of learning to do before I could *read* a novel in English, which means to me that I want to read it without having to refer to a dictionary all the time ... (Ok, back then the temptation was sure there, but I averaged significantly less than one unknown word per sentence, which is about the point when you can start to concentrate on reading. Now it's less than one per page, unless some grease monkey decides to recite the collection of tools he has in his garage or something ...)

But my question is still open: where can I find a directory of current free literature? (Current as in, "Yes, I know I can get Sherlock Holmes on www.gutenberg.org".)

There is one problem I'm happy to have (in a way): I have no clue which books are currently out there for free download. Is there somewhere on the web a collection of links to those? (No, I don't feel like googleing for them, as the noise to signal ratio would be too high.)

Some years back, when I read my first english novel - Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom - finding free books sure wasn't a problem, because the number was approximately one (with some margin of error) and everyone was shouting it all across the web, but these days ... =8-)

But as I said, it is a problem I'm rather pleased to have. :)

@ #10:

Well, that depends on what the project is supposed to do.

If its aim is to assign numerical values to theoretical social models in a real life world, I'd criticise some aspects of it (as in the economy, social behaviour is not a zero sum game) and note that, as in quantum mechanics, the measurement influences the behaviour of the subjects. So the score will reflect the model more than the underlying natural human behaviour of a given society.

The other possibility is, that the project is meant to use numerical values to influence social behaviour. In this case the project is apt, although the currently used model is prone to lead to a segregation of society. "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" would become a sad reality, although with fewer possibilities to raise your score. A different model could probably lead to much greater social cohesion.

Some rules might be:

* getting more points for being with more people, with diminishing returns
* increasing scores for being together with the same person for a longer time - up to a point
* score decay proportional to current score (like negative daily interest rates)
* score deductions for certain behaviours by social peers, again with diminishing returns

etc.

So the quest for intelligence in animals has found another victim, and once more people think that mathematics must be an act of intelligence. Most likely, it is not.

I'd bet my two cents here that this fish prefers the company of 4 rather than 3 fishes not because he counted them and found out that 4>3, but that meeting other fishes of the same species triggers some kind of neuroactivity that is associated with the fishes well-being and the choice between two groups of fishes comes down to "I feel better here" rather than "1, 2, 3, 4 ... there are more buddies here".

(It is plausible that human intelligence comes down to the same principle, although vastly more complex.)

I'll buy into that lower-dollar-courses-help-US-exports argument as soon as I can buy an EEE PC for 200 Euros, alas, I can't, it costs 300 Euros. (*)

Oh and btw, whoever said that the USA was the greatest exporter is wrong, as a German I can tell you that our government is obsessively watching export numbers to tell the public we are still number one exporter in world - for whatever good this is supposed to do us.

(*) This is a very common phenomenon. Somewhat larger telescopes made in USA usually have prices that make it reasonable to: get a flight ticket to the US, book a hotel, rent a car, go to a telescope dealer, purchase the telescope, fly back to Europe, paying for overweight baggage, pay customs duty and VAT and still paying LESS than just buying it in a shop in Germany, without shipping. Something seems to be going absurdly wrong along the way.

Wasn't the traditional one "drawn, halfhanged and quartered"?

You have a strange concept of nature.

Nature is, basically, everything. That includes trees, cows, grass, rivers and mountains and also humans and thus human artifacts. Wouldn't you agree that a molehill is part of nature? Or a dam built by a beaver? Or anthills? So why wouldn't a house, a dam or a power plant be part of it? Being "nature" doesn't mean it has to be pretty (also because beauty lies in the eye of the beholder).

So, yeah, a nuclear power plant or a motorway are as much part of nature as meadows (also human artifacts!) and forests (consisting of pines planted in regular spacing). Pretty or not.

This reminds me of my recent endeavour to listen to Antonin Dvorak's 9th symphony. (The one played in North Korea by the NYSO.) Just finding the CD took more time than to find a legal copy on the internet. Not to mention that the copy protection of the unCD successfully prevented my listening to the music I bought, since I don't own such an extravagant luxury as a stand alone CD player and use my laptop instead.

> I would think the police don't like having lasers pointed at them because they are afraid of it being mounted to a sniper rifle.

You mean those you see in the movies? Ok, I have no idea about weapons, but I'm pretty sure that lasers (that would be invisible in daylight and all too visible at night) and snipers don't mix.

> The airliners don't like it because lasers can be used to direct missiles to their targets.

Nope.

A) You need a much bigger laser to do that, because you don't want to spread your laser tag over the whole fuselage of the plane. And

B) An airliner is emitting enough IR radiation that shooting it down is no problem whatsoever.

You might as well search everyone for flasks and bottles containing liquids, because those could be explosives. Oh, wait, they're doing that already?

Ok, has anyone of you writing of blinding the crew of a jetliner/helicopter here, ever seen what your "ordinary" 30-50mW laserpointer looks like, when you shine it at something at a distance of about 400m/a quarter mile? (Most laserpointers are in the 0.5-5 mW range.)

Well, having tried it out, the laser beam becomes about 30-50 cm wide (roughly 200 times wider than at close range, resulting in a 40,000 fold loss of intensity - the equivalent of 0.001 mW) , only visible on white background, absolutely unlikely to be a threat to anyone. Those are pointers, not science grade lasers with high coherence. (You can easily tell the difference: if the laser active medium is roughly half a meter long or more, results would surely be different because of reduced diffraction. In said laserpointers the laser crystal is about 3mm long.)

At a distance of roughly a mile the beam is utterly invisible. That doesn't mean, that the laser would not be a very bright spot somewhere on the ground/in the distance, but only when it happens to hit the eye of whomever is standing there. And trust me, this is hard! Your hand is shaking by roughly 0.5 degrees, which translates to several meters or tens of meters at the kind of distance you would expect a flying airplane to be in.

(In case you wonder: I've pointed those lasers at stars in the sky (which they were intended to), the antenna of a skyscraper and a smokestack.)

Sorry for pointing that out, but it seems like you still have a bit of a way to go to get over your civil war.

These days, a secession would hardly be answered by military action - unless your federal government were willing to risk roits and mass demonstrations, not to mention the shattered remains of international credibilty. No more than a modest amount of bullets will be fired over that issue. People in the US would surely sympathise with the Lakotas (as indeed many do here), as would indiginous peoples around the world in Latin America, Australia, Papua New Guinea and other countries.

I think that whole thing is going to come out as most of you expect - some political hubhub, perhaps a bit of news coverage on TV if the Lakotas are lucky, but probably not in a serious or sustained way.

Now that's an easy one. "Per pedes" means to walk by foot. Pedes obviously means something like foot. And getting from pedia to pedes to foot to a chinese "chicken foot mushroom" should be obvious ... ;)

Since both "pedia" and "pedes" are of latin origin it could have been mixed up somehow. Try translating something to chinese and have it read back to you in english - you'll probably do worse. ;) If you really don't want to be understood: instead of writing, try reading it out aloud.

Just proves the saying, that it is easier to seek forgiveness than to ask for permission ...

Thanks for posting a price as well. Powering my laptop with a $6 device (about 4 Euro if we wait a bit) is a nice thought. Ok, in sunshine, without charging batteries ... but anyway, would be nice. Though I won't start to freak out until I hold it in my hand. (Trust me, if it happens, even for 50 (eur)ct. per watt, I will.)

I would have liked have a few more seconds of video (maybe close-up on the radio + music) and a fade out before the - rather sudden - end. But otherwise: great episode, keep 'em coming.

Wrst psd f bngbng tv yt. Srry t sy tht, t mght b tht y jst mssd my knd f hmr, bt tht ws (nsrprsngly) jst CRP. (Hvng bn md by crp-tv ...)

Well, thinking about what I wrote before, that was of course not quite correct. One could kickstart evolution and perhaps produce the mentioned result, but that would require non-ethical (though perfectly natural) measures. I will spare you the details, just wanted to appease the hairsplitters - such as myself. ;)

All right, soo ...

all of the sudden the rate of evolutionary change is to jump up like nothing in the next 1000 years, within as few as half as many generations as in the last 1000 years or the 1000 years before those or the 1000 years before those, in which no remarkable evolutionary change occured.

No matter what, this study/paper whatever is scientific junk.

I'm sorry to curb your enthusiasm, but price-fixing in no magic bullet against the decline of small bookshops. Here in germany too, the big chains (Thalia, Hubendubel + a few others) are taking over the market right now, smaller bookshops fell on hard times and seem to be bound to disappear - price-fixing or not.

On a personal note: when say I want to have a certain book, in fact I don't. What I want is its content, not a kilogramm of paper to go with it. Distribution costs in the web should be a matter of less than 10 cents per book ( paying for staff, equipment and bandwidth) - it's the author who should get the lion's share of the price (something in the order of 1-2 Euro), not people who do me a "service" (printing books) that I don't need, that I don't want, that pollutes the enviroment. However: When it comes to making a present, that one kilogram of paper to go with the books content sure comes in handy. ;)

I'm afraid the small bookshop will go the same way as the blacksmith or the taylor, they will disappear for the most part.