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The dominant paradigm being advanced comes from the IPCC's assessment report, which is the foremost scientific paper on the issue. According to the IPCC: 1) The global mean surface temperature is rising 2) The primary radiative forcing has been CO2 for the past 50 years 3) Anthropogenic CO2 sources substantially outnumber natural ones (by an order of magnitude) In which case I simply ask that those who criticise the present theory as advanced by the IPCC cite either: 1) IPCC peer reviewers or 2) A peer-reviewed scientific paper which contradicts the IPCC's assessment reports If you're going to contradict the leading scientific authority on the matter, you can do better than some think tank's web site

Thanks for taking part in an actual CS-related conversation in the computer science forum, heh

I don't know how else to describe it other than "cultural differences" I could certainly see places like New York and Detroit wanting to ban guns.

In the case of science their arguments take place within the context of peer reviewed scientific papers and journals. A think tank's web page provides no mechanism for feedback. It's a completely one-sided view, and as they control it, they're free to put up whatever they want with absolutely no checks on its correctness. Uhh, no. But that's a whopper of a red herring.

Hmmm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartland_Institute Can we please leave right-wing think tanks out of a science discussion? Global warming is already a politically charged issue.

We have armed police. I have armed friends. Is that scary? Not to me. Perhaps because I own guns too... Perhaps it just hasn't happened to me, and I've always been around people who treat guns responsibly, but living in what's reputed to be a country of gun nuts and being a gun owner myself, I have never in my life feared gun violence. The situation would be different if I lived in, say, Detroit. In the city I live in, the total number of homicides per year averages around two. The only one to garner national attention was JonBenet Ramsey

We don't know exactly how waveform collapse works. Does that mean we should reject the standard model, or at the very least be "distrustful" of it?

Nothing like unsubstantiated rhetoric. Can you cite the source from which you have cut-and-pasted this argument? And can you list which GCMs he's talking about specifically? Are there papers published on these issues, or is this just someone pulling shit out of their ass? Where are the papers to corroborate these claims, and what does the peer review say? I use GCM to refer to General or Global Circulation Models. That's nice

Some examples would be the year-to-year behavior of: The North Atlantic Oscillation El Nino/Southern Oscillation Mid-latitude cyclones Tropical Instability Waves

Actually it's the second volume of the fourth assessment report. We discussed the first volume, which provides the physical science basis (and argues human factors are the primary cause), earlier this year. This volume addresses impacts and vulnerabilities, like how an additional 500 million people will be without safe drinking water in another 15 years.

I'm not sure why you're bringing matrices into the picture here. How is what you're describing not fulfilled by a concurrent RDBMS? With concurrency, synchronization, and data storage handled by a single facilitator, the remaining "threads" remain horizontally scalable. The RDBMS can in turn be clustered (for example MySQL's NDB) resulting in fulll horizontal scalability.

You might look at TRON or QNX, the two most successful realtime operating systems. What is your intended goal regarding realtime programming? For simple tasks a microcontroller should suffice.

We're all basically computers. I'm sure John Searle and other monist philosophers would insist otherwise.

And with all that said, does anyone else here have ideas for their own language?

Erlang is most certainly obtuse. However, it now comprises many infrastructural parts of America's telecommunications system (a move largely motivated by the January 15, 1990 meltdown of AT&T's long distance system following a single logic error in C code previously used to regulate the network which slipped below the testing they performed) In terms of commodity software written in Erlang, ejabberd is the only program which really comes to mind. Concurrent programming remains a difficult task and a move to an Actor-based language is often a difficult one. In that respect there are a number of targets concurrent languages are aimed at. In the case of Erlang, it's aimed at high-reliability distributed systems. Asynchronous message passing allows for "modules" to be dynamically swapped out (in which case incoming messages are buffered until the new module is in place) and updated with newer versions while a program is running. This ensures that a running program need not be stopped for a software upgrade, rather upgrades can be done piecemeal and while the system is running. I would say Actor-based languages like Erlang are especially well-suited to any task that involves message processing (e.g. network servers). Beyond that, the implicit parallelism serves well for general purpose programming on distributed systems. At present CPUs are not highly distributed systems and can still be utilized effectively through multithreading, however multithreaded programming, much like manual memory management, has an enormous list of gotchas, specifically regarding synchronization which can result in terminal errors. Actor abstracts these problems away and dramatically simplifies the process of synchronization. While it may not seem well-suited as the basis of a general purpose programming language now, I think that will change dramatically when we move to processors with dozens, or even hundreds of cores. There are alternative approaches to parallelism which don't require a shared-memory system (as Erlang does). Perhaps the most notable is Google's MapReduce, which takes a "map" instruction (i.e. transform an input set into an output set member-by-member), applied to an index which is distributed among many computers (thus there is no performance hit occured in distributing the transformation as the input is already distributed) with a "reduce" instruction, which combines the output values into a single result. I've been somewhat wary of Actor for awhile, perhaps I've been influenced by Erlang and the restrictions it places on defining modules. I cling to object orientation because that's what I'm familiar with. It's possible that with increasingly parallel architectures object orientation is doomed to death, and implicit parallelism will necessarily take over as the new language paradigm. While I'm not entirely convinced that implicit parallelism in object oriented systems is an unobtainable goal, Actor seems like a much cleaner solution to the problem. For now I'll stick with object oriented Reactor frameworks. But Erlang remains my primary hope for the future of programming. I would still love to see what I set out initially in this post: a hybrid object/actor language where objects can be used in the implementation of higher level Actor-based modules (which can only talk to other Actors). However this can probably best be accomplished through implementing Actor primitives within an existing object oriented language.

Can I just say this? Never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever trust climate science reporting, ever. (CAVEAT to ever ever ever ever: Unless they're publishing the actual paper sans editorial)

And what do you have to say about all the other areas where GCMs are successfully predictive? Is it just random chance?

Yes. You can think of Actors as being a combination of an object and a thread. They communicate with asynchronous message passing, as opposed to the synchronous message passing of object-oriented languages. All program behavior is structured around receiving messages (similar to the Reactor pattern in OOP).

Did you read the criticism? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadows_of_the_Mind I think consciousness is information evolving with time, but the information is self-referential and exists within a first-person ontology.

I'd say the Howard Dean HOOWAAH! moment was more of a dealbreaker, and was also circulated around the Internet All that's changed is the viral spread of stupid clips has grown more idiot-friendly (not directed at this particular video, just viral video as a whole)

361 edits here... yay!

Someone decided to add a song from the West Side Story soundtrack as well. I believe the ostensible interpretation is an Ann Coulter-esque slight against his sexuality. But perhaps I'm just reading too much into it.

We get 0.625 pints

I'm having enough trouble getting anything more than 355ml, which is what Americans call a pint *shrug*

Objective C is not concurrent. The problem being addressed with concurrency is that of many CPU cores and how to allow programs to leverage them effectively.