The Sun shines more energy in an hour on us than we generate as a species in a year so human heat production is not yet much of a factor in climate (but this could change if we keep doubling it). If greenhouse gases cause heating which gets reinforced by lower albedo due to the ice caps melting that would be news. Fortunately, heat radiation goes up as the fourth power of temperature according to the Stephan-Boltzmann Law. So runaway greenhouse is not in the cards.
Let’s tax some coal; that would be cool. Cutting back $50 worth of gasoline use cuts back one fill up. Cutting back $50 worth of coal cuts back two tons. The Party that does it probably won’t win West Virginia in the next election.
3. Kill a lot of people, then stop. In 1973, the Nobel Peace Prize was shared by Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. Kissinger’s CV included the “secret” bombing of Cambodia and the “Christmas” bombing of North Vietnam; just a month before his prize was announced, he was complicit in the coup that installed a brutal dictatorship in Chile. So why did he win? Because he and Tho had reached a truce to end the Vietnam War. Tho wasn’t a particularly peaceful man either, but at least he had the common courtesy to refuse the award.
More recently, the prize went to Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasser Arafat, a man whose career to that point had been spent arranging terrorist assaults on civilians. He shared the award with Israel’s Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin; the three of them, like Kissinger and Tho, had negotiated an end to a war. In this case the peace agreement didn’t hold, and both the state of Israel and various Palestinian groups went on to produce many more corpses. So don’t worry if you develop a taste for blood during the initial stage of your Peace Prize campaign: You’re free to resume killing once Mr. Nobel’s money is safely in your hands.
What would cause computer A to be able to ping Computers B and C, but B and C be unable to ping A (though they can ping each other)? FWIW, A is on a wireless connection. B and C are ethernet.
[Update a few minutes later]
In answer to the question in comments, I’m pinging by IP. The router is running in DHCP mode.
[going off to try something]
That was it. Zone Alarm was blocking the pings. I shut it down, and it works now. Guess I need to add the local network to its trusted zone.
The trouble is that Gore’s preferred policies will lead to a poorer, energy starved world. Far better, one might think, to tackle malaria, sea level rise, drought, hunger, and so on directly rather than by tinkering with the chemical composition of the atmosphere. As Indur Goklany has shown, we can do this for a fraction of the cost.
In the future, people will marry robots. Well, we knew we were headed down a slippery slope with all the gay marriage stuff. I’ll bet Massachusetts will be the first state to allow it. The state supreme court will no doubt insist.
Anyway, I, for one, welcome our new robot overladies.
In the future, people will marry robots. Well, we knew we were headed down a slippery slope with all the gay marriage stuff. I’ll bet Massachusetts will be the first state to allow it. The state supreme court will no doubt insist.
Anyway, I, for one, welcome our new robot overladies.
In the future, people will marry robots. Well, we knew we were headed down a slippery slope with all the gay marriage stuff. I’ll bet Massachusetts will be the first state to allow it. The state supreme court will no doubt insist.
Anyway, I, for one, welcome our new robot overladies.
If you read the full article above you’ll learn that the first experimental subjects for a Novato California company were in Argentina – not exactly close by. I suspect this says something about medical regulation in America today. The Argentines were on hemodialysis for kidney failure and had what the report below characterized as “typical risk factors for end-stage renal disease”. You might expect regulatory agencies to grant greater freedom of action to try out new treatments on people who are looking death in face. But this company used subjects from another country. I fear excessive regulatory obstacles in the way of new treatment development are costing lots of lives.
I suspect that the FDA probably kills more people by delaying the introduction of new drugs and procedures than it saves. But it’s like protectionist policies and other interferences with the market–the jobs and businesses that aren’t created are an invisible consequence compared to existing jobs that are lost, and a bureaucrat is much more concerned about being blamed for a death that results from a new drug than one that results from its delay, because the latter is just a maintenance of the status quo.
Randall also has bad news about avian flu. It may be easier for it to mutate to affect humans than we thought.
Jon Goff has an interesting flight safety analysis that might indicate that NASA is spending too much money on launch vehicle reliability for a lunar program.