Posts by TheVogon

Re: only poor people drink tap water

Just in case anyone didn't realise that was a joke:

Is it true that tap water contains hormones?

No. Analysis of water abstracted from rivers, in storage reservoirs and in tap water has shown no detectable levels of hormones. Laboratory studies have shown that current water treatment processes would be very effective at removing hormones - if they were present.

http://www.tapwater.org/faqs

No need to invent a new word. 'The Colonies' is the colloquial term that you were looking for!

Re: Some one else needs to be charged ...(@ Evil Auditor)

"by transforming it into salts, chlorides and stuff"

You mean like the exact sort of things that people think they have to pay for mineral water to get?

Re: Urine is sterile

From Peckham Spring, surely?

Re: No way near Homeopathic standards..

All this talk of diluted piss rather reminds me of the consistency of American beer...

Re: Hard to cope with?

"a massive 4 feet over 2 centuries is considered hard to cope with"

Yes, very - lots of inhabited costal areas will be below sea level. And this is from just one glacier.

Or we could of course try and stop emitting so much CO2 and making the problem worse....

Re: Sad but true

Powershell already has a fully capable Regex implementation. What you presumably mean is that it is different from what you are used to in say Perl.

Re: jpsoft

Reasons to use Powershell over BASH, etc.

1) Object oriented pipes so that I don't have to format and reparse and be concerned about language settings.

2) Command metadata. PowerShell commands, functions and even *script files* expose metadata about the names, positions, types and validation rules for parameters, allowing the *shell* to perform type coercion, allowing the *shell* to explain the parameters/syntax, allowing the *shell* to support both tab completion and auto-suggestions with no need for external and cumbersome completion definitions.

3) Robust risk management. Look up common parameters -WhatIf, -Confirm, -Force and consider how they are supported by ambient values in scripts you author yourself.

4) Multiple location types and -providers. Even a SQL Server appears as a navigable file system. Want to work with a certain database? Just switch to the sqlserver: drive and navigate to the server/database and start selecting, creating tables etc.

5) Fan-out remoting. Execute the same script transparently and *robustly* on multiple servers and consolidate the results back on the controlling console. Try icm host1,host2,host3 {ps} and watch how you get consolidated, object-oriented process descriptions from multiple servers.

6) Workflow scripting. PowerShell scripts can (since v3) be defined as workflows which are suspendable, resumable and which can pick up and continue even across system restarts.

7) Parallel scripting. No, not just starting multiple processes, but having the actual *script* branch out and run massively parallel.

8) True remote sessions where you don't step into and out of remote sessions but actually controls any number of remote sessions from the outside.

9) PowerShell web access. You can now set up a IIS with PWA as a gateway. This gives you a firewall-friendly remote command line in any standards compliant browser.

10) Superior security features, e.g. script signing, memory encryption, proper multi-mode credentials allowing script to be agnostic about authentication schemes which may go way beyond stupid username+password and use smart cards, tokens, OTPs etc.

11) Transaction support right in the shell. Script actions can join any resource manager such as SQL server, registry, message queues in a single atomic transaction. Do that in bash?

12) Strongly typed stripting, extensive data types, e.g first class xml support and regex support right in the shell. Optional static/explicit typing. Real lambdas (script blocks) instead of stupidly relying on dangerous and error prone "eval" functions.

13) Real *structured* exception handling as an alternative to outdated traps (which PowerShell also has). try-catch-finally blocks.

14) Instrumentation, extensive tracing, transcript and *source level* debugging of scripts.

15) Consistent naming conventions covering verb-noun command names, common verbs, common parameter names.

Re: Mormons?

So you believe in a religeon partly based on the Christianity myths, but also the 'Book of Mormon' - that was written by sticking 'seer stones' in a hat?!

And I thought Scientologists were guillible....quality stuff this - you couldn't make it up. Oh - wait.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seer_stone_(Latter_Day_Saints)

Perhaps you would be interested in buying some Power Balance bracelets?

Maybe they could claim that it wasn't her vagina involved, but was one of her wrinkles?

Re: Starting point of graph is deceptive to unscientific brains

"the lack of warming in the last 20 years."

Average global surface temperature has still been increasing in the last 20 years. A tiny bit slower than before, but that's because the heat is currently going into the oceans instead. And guess what - the oceans' capacity to store heat is finite...

Re: "Truthy" math

See http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/~gang/eprints/eprintLovejoy/neweprint

/Anthro.climate.dynamics.13.3.14.pdf

Re: Aren't clouds where rain and snow come from?

"I learnt to be wary of computer models..."

I can sympathise at least with that view.

"None of this is incorporated in the grossly over simplified climate models used by the AGW hypothesis."

Right - but temperature and sea levels have been demonstrably rising for a long time - and the conclusions of what will happen based not on a computer model, but on say historical measurements of CO2 versus average temperature over the last few hundred thousands years are also pretty clear...

Re: "Truthy" math

"...the science now shows with 95 percent certainty that human activity is the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-20th century," is actually just based on the report writers' personal opinions, and not on any mathematical or statistical calculation"

No - as it it says 'science shows' so via measurements and probability statistics. You are confusing this with 'I think'.

"it's also worrisome that the opinion has gone up from 90 percent in the previous IPCC report, even though the current IPCC document reports *more*, not less, uncertainty about our understanding of the climate system"

No that's not worrisome. We might have greater uncertainly about the climate system as a whole under extreme conditions caused by AGW, but we are now statistically sure that AGW itself is at least partly caused by human burning of fossil fuels and near certain that it is the primary cause. There is no conflict in those conclusions.

Re: Tragedy of the commons (1)

"Anthropogenic or otherwise doesn't matter"

It does - it means we could choose to try and do something about it.

"The evidence to hand shows that no appreciable warming has happened, nor increase in ocean levels"

Only if all you have to hand is Faux News. The overwhelming scientific evidence shows quite the opposite. We know both temperature and sea levels have risen - and continue to rise.

"statistically no significant warming has happened this century."

Statistically, 100% of scientists would disagree with you.

"CO2 wasn't enough on the physics to account for 20th century warming"

See above. And see for instance the long term records of CO2 levels versus average surface temperatures.

"Assuming there is any economically available fossil fuel by then."

Even if we stopped burning fossil fuels and emitting CO2 tomorrow - the planet will likely take 10,000+ years to return by itself to a lower level of CO2. This is not something that we can easily go and fix later. We need to reduce CO2 output now.

"Until there is a real explanation available for the last 22 years of stagnation on the warming front"

You mean the apparent slow down in the rate of warming when looking at the figures from a very specific average surface temperature measurement method? That has already been largely explained.

Firstly that the data for that method wasnt complete:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/11/global-warming-since-1997-underestimated-by-half/

And secondly that the remaining small slow down in the rate of surface temperature increase has an explanation - the oceans have been warming instead:

See http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2014/feb/12/global-warming-fake-pause-hiatus-climate-change

and

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/09/global-warming-pause-trade-winds-pacific-ocean-study

and

http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-case-of-the-missing-heat-1.14525

Re: Marvin would love this news

"no one can agree on anything."

All scientists agree that anthropomorphic climate change is happening. The scientific doubt is effectively zero. And has been for well over a decade.

The only uncertainty is about how bad it's going to get and in what timescale...

Assuming no period without acceleration:

We know it does 220m in 21.5 seconds

Given d = Vi * t + 1/2 at^2

220 = 0 + 1/2a * 21.5^2

220 = 231.125a

a = 0.952 ms/s

0.952/9.80665 = ~ 0.097 G

(And a maximum speed of ~ 20.468 m/s)

Re: The man from Munich

(After carefully hiding the ~ €30 million it actually cost to migrate ~ 80% of their users fully and to have to run 2 sets of infrastructure for the foreseeable future...)

Re: 2008 R2?

It is Windows Server 2003 that has only slightly over a year of support left. And the latest version is 2012 R2.