"I don't think you understand the difference between writing a program with no bugs, and writing a program capable of performing any task however ill-defined. "
I understand the difference just fine. I was replying in the context of GP's comment. My point was just that if you define "bug free" as "100% reliable", it simply isn't possible, as a practical matter, in many cases. It's NOT easy to do, and there probably isn't enough time for 100 people to make it 100% reliable.
So my code HAS TO accept that a certain amount of malformed input will not produce usable output. Some people might call that "bad code". (Not me, however; I'm a practical person.)
"I have read both of those before and Latour is full of it. While it's true that the net energy flow is always toward the cooler object his hypothesis that a warmer object reflects the IR radiation of a cooler object doesn't hold water."
Then either you haven't actually read it, or didn't understand it.
He is referring to NET effects. Regardless of whether a warmer object might absorb radiation at a cooler radiative temperature, if that happens then it emits it right back out... the NET effect being as if it hadn't absorbed any at all.
And you can say this "doesn't hold water" all you want. But you're wrong, because it's fundamental to the Stefan-Boltzmann law, which states that NET energy transfer is ALWAYS from warmer to cooler.
Simply saying he's wrong won't wash. Where is the error in his math?
You're doing the same thing Spencer did. Arguing about what you think would happen based on your mental model of the circumstances.
But that isn't science, and that doesn't refute Latour and his math. Jesus, man. This guy designed heat transfer control systems for NASA. Do you really think he's going to make that kind of mistake?
"Programming without bugs is easy. It's just slow and expensive. so nobody wants it. It's cheaper and easier to write bad code and ship it, absorbing backlash, than to build it right in the first place."
Tell me. I am currently involved in a project that involves parsing text from thousands of pages written by different people. And it's a horrendous task. Even though the pages are somewhat standardized, there are variants of wording, variants of spelling, typographical errors (those are particularly bad to deal with), etc.
Trying to create bug-free methods for parsing those into their constituent parts is a difficult job indeed. I did not realize when I took the job just how NON-conforming all these different pages are. After all, they're in a "standardized" format. Haha.
I'm sticking with the job, though, because if I can pull it off, it might also pay off. But bug-free is just impossible in this case (unless you're IBM, maybe... but even Watson made mistakes). The best I have managed is to get most of them right, and flag the rest as needing human intervention. As long as I can keep the latter to a minimum, it will be okay. But none? Not a chance.
"No, that isn't the point. The point is to have good peer-reviewed science that is available to anyone for a nominal fee. You seem to be confusing "open access" with "free as in beer.""
Just no. I'm not the one missing the point here. Apparently what I was saying went right over your head.
If the taxpayers funded the research -- i.e., PAID for it -- then they should not have to pay another fee to see the results. Nominal or otherwise. They paid for it. It BELONGS to them, by every ethical standard that exists.
There is nothing "free" about it. They already paid for it. So they should get it. Period.
"There is no strangle hold. That is a slashdot-ism. It costs journals money to review articles and publish them. Paying $15 for a scientific journal article isn't a strangle hold."
"Slash-dotism" my ass. If you think publishers of science journals haven't had a "stranglehold" on the publishing of peer-reviewed papers, then you just don't know very much about it. Further, I am aware that journals spend money on their publishing business. But that has NOTHING to do with the subject at hand.
That's changing now -- as it should -- but change has been slow. And yes: for a taxpayer to have to pay $15 to get access to research that taxpayer funded in the first place is an abomination. That is an unethical situation and there is no reason it has to continue to exist.
"should have mentioned I mean they are easy to ID and eating unidentified fungi has always been stupid thing to do"
"Easy to ID" is a relative term. Even experts get some fungi wrong. For example, there are poisonous species of Galerina that sometimes grow right alongside the prized hallucinogenic "Liberty Cap" mushrooms, and even experts have to take a spore print and use a microscope to tell them apart.
As a PSA, here are two warning signs displayed by A Phalloides as in that picture on Wikipedia:
First is the "veil" surrounding the stem just below the cap, which you can see on the larger mushroom that is setting on its side. The other is the "cup" at the bottom.
It is important to note that neither of these are reliable indicators. Some edible species of mushrooms have one or both. Many poisonous species of mushrooms do not.
The point is: unless you know EXACTLY what you are doing, treat those features as strong warning signs. Best not to eat any mushrooms that have them.
"Part of the problem is that the programming profession hasn't had its professional renaissance like the medical profession had in the twentieth century."
No, it isn't.
The current state-of-the-art is such that programming is still as much an art as it is a science. If/when it ever gets to the point you can test and certify programmers reliably the same way you do mechanical engineers, WITHOUT stifling innovation in the process, THEN you'll have reached that goal.
Today, it is nowhere near in sight. Every effort to responsibly certify programmers (and lots of irresponsible efforts) have all failed, or at best have done very poorly, for the simple reason that there is currently no science that allows you to validly do it.
I would go so far as to say that most programming "certifications" offered today are not worth the paper they're printed on.
Yes, but where did those funds come from in the first place?
They used the Commerce Clause to justify the construction of the Interstate and Defense Highway system. Then they used the use of that highway system to justify even more taxes and regulations.
So the highway funds that the Feds threatened to withhold from States if they didn't change their laws, are ultimately traceable back to the Feds' misuse of that same Commerce Clause.
"Congress can, under its deliberately broad Constitutional power to regulate commerce, regulate the fsck out of airlines."
The power to regulate commerce was not "deliberately broad" at all. On the contrary, it was deliberately narrow. Your source doesn't know his history worth a damn.
Framers didn't intend their intent to be a guide, huh? (Your source's argument.) Not only is that a blatant logical contradiction all by itself, it is contrary to actual historical fact. Let me give you a quote from one of those very framers:
"The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it." -- James Wilson"
Further, the 1798 Act your "unreasonable man" mentions did in fact happen. But among other errors, he says it was government-funded, but it was NOT. It was an insurance policy paid for by those sailors' own wages. You can find this out in 30 seconds by reading about it in Wikipedia. So much for his scholarship.
To put it bluntly, the "unreasonable man" doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.
The Federal government only has authority over "Aircraft safety" on the basis already given above. They actually (legally, Constitutionally) have authority only over interstate commerce. Theoretically, they should have no authority over in-state flights AT ALL.
They have used the commerce clause as an excuse to regulate just about everything imaginable under the sun, but I will repeat: that doesn't mean they really have genuine, lawful authority over it. Constitutional scholars are generally in agreement that the commerce clause was never intended to give the Feds the kind of authority SCOTUS claimed in Wickard v. Filburn.
"There's no arbitrage involved at all. Arbitrage involves different prices for the same thing. In the summary's own example, a cross-city trip is the same price whether from east to west or west to east. This story is about cheating the system into thinking you are only travelling a few stops instead how far you really went."
It isn't even really that. That is to say, it is, but it depends on how you look at "how far you went". TFA has made an error in summarizing the situation.
TFA implies that a round-trip commute to city center and back costs less than a full trip across town. But then it says that presumably the Metro wants to charge approximately the same per mile. Those are contradictory.
If you take two people who swap tickets at city center, you don't even have to assume equal mileage for each round-trip. But let's do so anyway for the sake of simplicity.
If a round trip half the width of town costs less than a one-way trip all the way across town, then the Metro is NOT charging the same for every mile. And since the Metro itself is charging different rates for the same number of miles in one situation versus the other, how are you "cheating" by taking advantage of this? The only difference is that YOU are deciding, rather than the Metro, who gets the discount. I see no moral or ethical problem with that.
"It caused scientists to examine their methods for dealing with it more closely but in the end it just increased the confidence that they were dealing with it well."
Really? Well, I'll give you one good example that says otherwise. From Steve Goddard, just yesterday. The funny thing is people suspected the following kind of B.S. when Hadley Centre said it didn't have its intermediate results anymore... it had just been tossed out with other "obsolete data". While the following is just one example, it is hardly isolated. Isn't it a bit funny that in California, the mountain weather instruments are in general no longer being used for the "raw data", but almost all of it now comes from the warmer lowlands? Etc. The point being what every scientist knows: if you cherry-pick your data, you can show almost anything you want.
Then, there is the strange phenomenon of the GISS "historical data" mysteriously changing over time. And many, many other anomalies that people are just now beginning to look into. Expect some results announced in March. But back to the example I wanted to show you: Fort Collins, CO.
Note that in 2002, they built a parking lot around the weather station, which had previously been in farmland. And not just a little single-lane road or anything of that nature. It is now surrounded by asphalt. Look at the number of 90-degree days since then! Gee, what a coincidence. But this is one source of official climate data.
And lest you say "a little asphalt doesn't make a difference", here, take a look at it, straight from Google Maps. Well... so the University (on that info page linked to above), said that rather than move their station again, they'd take care to "buffer" it from the hot surroundings. Well done, CSU! Right?
So here is their "buffer". (Again, straight rom Google Maps, and these pictures by the way are very recent copyright.) A rock garden, of all things, with a few flowers and a couple of tiny shrugs.
No sane person would call this an effective "buffer". But CSU pretends it is.
As I say: just one example. But it is one of very, very many. And by the way, speaking of "dealing with it": when Mann and CRU were the subject of 5 "independent" investigations, while they might have been absolved of scientific malpractice, all 5 reports criticized their methods in one form or another.
So don't try to give me this guff about "responsible methods". I have seen too many examples of exactly the opposite. If cases like this (of which, I repeat, a great many have been found) constitute responsible methods, then no wonder the world is shown to be warming. And no wonder an increasing percentage of the people are ignoring this "data".
"You expand beyond the quotes. So yes, you are wrong."
Okay, if you want to nitpick over semantics, technically you are correct.
However, as a practical matter, wget is a SHITTY basis for a web crawler. IT WASN'T DESIGNED FOR THAT SPECIFIC PURPOSE AND DOESN'T HAVE ANY INTELLIGENCE. About all you can do with it by itself is set it to snarf up everything in its path within narrowly defined parameters. That is all. And that just isn't enough for a generally useful web crawler.
If you want to do anything other than massive blind data grabbing, you have to control it via some scripting language(s), augment it with curl or OpenURI, or use something else (the vastly preferred solution).
Which brings us RIGHT BACK to my original reply to you:
Actually there are options in wget for that.
Well, yes. But while wget could be part of a full-featured crawler, it just doesn't have the functionality to do it all, by itself. [emphasis added]
My comment stands and I owe you no apologies. If all you want to do is semantic nitpicking, you are just wasting everybody's time.
"The only problem with fiat currency is third parties making counterfeits and the money producers printing excessive amounts."
Wow. No, there are LOTS of problems with fiat currency.
"We the people if we are in control have an impact on that last part."
Sure, but we haven't been "in control" since 1913. Loot at that chart again. Monetary policy is under the control of the Fed. And the Fed -- although the chair is appointed by the President -- is a collection of private banks. And much of their assets are owned by foreign interests. They don't give the slightest shit what you have to say. They don't even really care much what the President has to say.
"Regardless of the form of currency, if a government is corrupt of falls into expediency -- then it doesn't matter what type of currency they have."
Not true, because when we had a gold standard (and no Fed), We The People were in fact in control of the money supply... just as it should always have been. THEN, the government+Fed could not inflate the money. Look at that chart again... the only times of inflation were when the government borrowed money for wars, and it went right back again afterward. Until the Fed was created.
The whole reason we HAVE fiat money, in the first place, was that the government spent more money than it actually had in gold. It could not meet its debts so it created the floating dollar. (First partially in 1934, the completely in 1971. See that chart one more time. It's full of valuable information.) They created the fiat dollar so they could inflate it at will.
But government inflates money, THEY and the BANKS get to spend it at full value. But by the time the inflation actually hits the economy (it's not instant, it usually takes 2-3 years), your savings have lost their value.
That's why government likes inflation. But it actually hurts the economy. Just one way it does that, is that your savings evaporate at a rate equal to the inflation rate. So if you get 5% from your bank account (haha... does anybody today?), but inlation is 6%, you're losing 1% of your money annually.
Right now, today, most "savings" accounts, after adjusting for inflation, are losing money.
"I think there's an error, in that you're not using a consistent definition of "value"."
I'm using the classic macroeconomics 101 definition of "value": production cost + distribution cost. This can also be defined as "what it is worth in terms of other common commodities". They are very similar.
So Bitcoin has a relatively fixed "intrinsic value" in economic terms. (Ignore "stock market value", which is an unrelated concept. In economic terms that is really a price, not a value.)
Yes, Bitcoin value changes, but only by a little over time. As such, it works like an anchor, much like gold dollars used to.
You can't set an exchange rate between your currency and something of fixed value, then inflate your currency. It just doesn't work. You'd be creating "value" (production) out of thin air. It isn't possible.
But yes, in the sense you mean, you CAN do it... for a short time, until everyone buys out all the goods and production capacity in your country and leaves you with nothing but worthless paper money.
"Maybe, just maybe, he was using curl , html2text and grep in a BASH script, like in "Ethical Hacking" 101, which is a course he lists on his resume."
And if he was, then he wasn't "just" using wget.
"And you're wrong about wget "needing to know if the directory exists". RTFM (sigh)."
I did RTFM, and no, I'm not wrong. Wget can follow links and do recursive gets, but it does so unintelligently. As I stated: by itself, it just isn't an effective web crawler.
I do this stuff for a living, man. I didn't just pull uninformed opinions out of my ass.
"Public access" doesn't always mean "must provide everyone a free copy."
No, but it should. That's the point.
If the public paid for it, the public should have open access to it. There is no valid societal or ethical reason private publishers should have a stranglehold on publicly-funded research.
"Publically funded research has never been public-access in the sense you mean."
I am aware of this. But the problem is more widely recognized than before.
The fact that it wasn't that way in the past is not an argument against change. As a taxpayer, it makes me angry. If I've paid for it, it should not be held hostage in corporate (publisher) vaults, so to speak. Other than things classified for genuine national security reasons, publicly funded research should be public.
"A cultural change needs to occur in how academics are assessed by their university administration in order to break the stranglehold."
I agree, and I agree that the situation is looking up. We still have a way to go, though.
I didn't say that copyrights, per se, have been the culprit. But paywalls demonstrably are.
Further, I wasn't necessarily referring to the "20th Century". The problem that most people have remarked on seems to be more of a phenomenon of the last decade or so.
"For example there's a mountain of easily accesible and very credible information about AGW from just about every scientific institution you can care to name, but some people still quote Anthony Watts as a credible source on the subject."
What matters is not the source, but the validity of the science the source is reporting on. This obsession with who the source is undermines real science. Shooting the messenger is not a valid scientific argument.
Having said that, I am NOT claiming Watts is a wonderfully reliable source. His experiments attempting to refute Pierre Latour, for example, were miserable failures, and Watts didn't seem to understand why. However, most of what he reports on isn't his own work. And in that respect, he is no more or less reliable than just about any other news source you might pick. For example, I'd definitely rate him as less biased than realclimate.org, and vastly less biased than MSNBC.
Slashdot Mirror
"I don't think you understand the difference between writing a program with no bugs, and writing a program capable of performing any task however ill-defined. "
I understand the difference just fine. I was replying in the context of GP's comment. My point was just that if you define "bug free" as "100% reliable", it simply isn't possible, as a practical matter, in many cases. It's NOT easy to do, and there probably isn't enough time for 100 people to make it 100% reliable.
So my code HAS TO accept that a certain amount of malformed input will not produce usable output. Some people might call that "bad code". (Not me, however; I'm a practical person.)
"I have read both of those before and Latour is full of it. While it's true that the net energy flow is always toward the cooler object his hypothesis that a warmer object reflects the IR radiation of a cooler object doesn't hold water."
Then either you haven't actually read it, or didn't understand it.
He is referring to NET effects. Regardless of whether a warmer object might absorb radiation at a cooler radiative temperature, if that happens then it emits it right back out... the NET effect being as if it hadn't absorbed any at all.
And you can say this "doesn't hold water" all you want. But you're wrong, because it's fundamental to the Stefan-Boltzmann law, which states that NET energy transfer is ALWAYS from warmer to cooler.
Simply saying he's wrong won't wash. Where is the error in his math?
You're doing the same thing Spencer did. Arguing about what you think would happen based on your mental model of the circumstances.
But that isn't science, and that doesn't refute Latour and his math. Jesus, man. This guy designed heat transfer control systems for NASA. Do you really think he's going to make that kind of mistake?
"Programming without bugs is easy. It's just slow and expensive. so nobody wants it. It's cheaper and easier to write bad code and ship it, absorbing backlash, than to build it right in the first place."
Tell me. I am currently involved in a project that involves parsing text from thousands of pages written by different people. And it's a horrendous task. Even though the pages are somewhat standardized, there are variants of wording, variants of spelling, typographical errors (those are particularly bad to deal with), etc.
Trying to create bug-free methods for parsing those into their constituent parts is a difficult job indeed. I did not realize when I took the job just how NON-conforming all these different pages are. After all, they're in a "standardized" format. Haha.
I'm sticking with the job, though, because if I can pull it off, it might also pay off. But bug-free is just impossible in this case (unless you're IBM, maybe... but even Watson made mistakes). The best I have managed is to get most of them right, and flag the rest as needing human intervention. As long as I can keep the latter to a minimum, it will be okay. But none? Not a chance.
"No, that isn't the point. The point is to have good peer-reviewed science that is available to anyone for a nominal fee. You seem to be confusing "open access" with "free as in beer.""
Just no. I'm not the one missing the point here. Apparently what I was saying went right over your head.
If the taxpayers funded the research -- i.e., PAID for it -- then they should not have to pay another fee to see the results. Nominal or otherwise. They paid for it. It BELONGS to them, by every ethical standard that exists.
There is nothing "free" about it. They already paid for it. So they should get it. Period.
"There is no strangle hold. That is a slashdot-ism. It costs journals money to review articles and publish them. Paying $15 for a scientific journal article isn't a strangle hold."
"Slash-dotism" my ass. If you think publishers of science journals haven't had a "stranglehold" on the publishing of peer-reviewed papers, then you just don't know very much about it. Further, I am aware that journals spend money on their publishing business. But that has NOTHING to do with the subject at hand.
That's changing now -- as it should -- but change has been slow. And yes: for a taxpayer to have to pay $15 to get access to research that taxpayer funded in the first place is an abomination. That is an unethical situation and there is no reason it has to continue to exist.
"should have mentioned I mean they are easy to ID and eating unidentified fungi has always been stupid thing to do"
"Easy to ID" is a relative term. Even experts get some fungi wrong. For example, there are poisonous species of Galerina that sometimes grow right alongside the prized hallucinogenic "Liberty Cap" mushrooms, and even experts have to take a spore print and use a microscope to tell them apart.
As a PSA, here are two warning signs displayed by A Phalloides as in that picture on Wikipedia:
First is the "veil" surrounding the stem just below the cap, which you can see on the larger mushroom that is setting on its side. The other is the "cup" at the bottom.
It is important to note that neither of these are reliable indicators. Some edible species of mushrooms have one or both. Many poisonous species of mushrooms do not.
The point is: unless you know EXACTLY what you are doing, treat those features as strong warning signs. Best not to eat any mushrooms that have them.
"Part of the problem is that the programming profession hasn't had its professional renaissance like the medical profession had in the twentieth century."
No, it isn't.
The current state-of-the-art is such that programming is still as much an art as it is a science. If/when it ever gets to the point you can test and certify programmers reliably the same way you do mechanical engineers, WITHOUT stifling innovation in the process, THEN you'll have reached that goal.
Today, it is nowhere near in sight. Every effort to responsibly certify programmers (and lots of irresponsible efforts) have all failed, or at best have done very poorly, for the simple reason that there is currently no science that allows you to validly do it.
I would go so far as to say that most programming "certifications" offered today are not worth the paper they're printed on.
Yes, but where did those funds come from in the first place?
They used the Commerce Clause to justify the construction of the Interstate and Defense Highway system. Then they used the use of that highway system to justify even more taxes and regulations.
So the highway funds that the Feds threatened to withhold from States if they didn't change their laws, are ultimately traceable back to the Feds' misuse of that same Commerce Clause.
"Congress can, under its deliberately broad Constitutional power to regulate commerce, regulate the fsck out of airlines."
The power to regulate commerce was not "deliberately broad" at all. On the contrary, it was deliberately narrow. Your source doesn't know his history worth a damn.
Framers didn't intend their intent to be a guide, huh? (Your source's argument.) Not only is that a blatant logical contradiction all by itself, it is contrary to actual historical fact. Let me give you a quote from one of those very framers:
"The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it." -- James Wilson"
Further, the 1798 Act your "unreasonable man" mentions did in fact happen. But among other errors, he says it was government-funded, but it was NOT. It was an insurance policy paid for by those sailors' own wages. You can find this out in 30 seconds by reading about it in Wikipedia. So much for his scholarship.
To put it bluntly, the "unreasonable man" doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.
The Federal government only has authority over "Aircraft safety" on the basis already given above. They actually (legally, Constitutionally) have authority only over interstate commerce. Theoretically, they should have no authority over in-state flights AT ALL.
They have used the commerce clause as an excuse to regulate just about everything imaginable under the sun, but I will repeat: that doesn't mean they really have genuine, lawful authority over it. Constitutional scholars are generally in agreement that the commerce clause was never intended to give the Feds the kind of authority SCOTUS claimed in Wickard v. Filburn.
"Congress has the authority to regulate the airspace and, as such, regulates the rules of commercial air travel."
NO, it doesn't. Congress has the authority to regulate certain aspects of interstate travel that relate to commerce. THAT IS ALL.
Granted, they have assumed the authority to regulate airspace. But that doesn't mean that the authority really, lawfully exists.
"There's no arbitrage involved at all. Arbitrage involves different prices for the same thing. In the summary's own example, a cross-city trip is the same price whether from east to west or west to east. This story is about cheating the system into thinking you are only travelling a few stops instead how far you really went."
It isn't even really that. That is to say, it is, but it depends on how you look at "how far you went". TFA has made an error in summarizing the situation.
TFA implies that a round-trip commute to city center and back costs less than a full trip across town. But then it says that presumably the Metro wants to charge approximately the same per mile. Those are contradictory.
If you take two people who swap tickets at city center, you don't even have to assume equal mileage for each round-trip. But let's do so anyway for the sake of simplicity.
If a round trip half the width of town costs less than a one-way trip all the way across town, then the Metro is NOT charging the same for every mile. And since the Metro itself is charging different rates for the same number of miles in one situation versus the other, how are you "cheating" by taking advantage of this? The only difference is that YOU are deciding, rather than the Metro, who gets the discount. I see no moral or ethical problem with that.
"I do pay attention to the climate debate but I've seen very little good science coming from the climate contrarian side."
Then you haven't REALLY been paying attention.
Try these on for size, just as an example. Hardly new.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/20...
http://www.principia-scientifi...
If you can successfully rebut Latour, I'd be happy to buy you a drink.
s/shrugs/shrubs
"It caused scientists to examine their methods for dealing with it more closely but in the end it just increased the confidence that they were dealing with it well."
Really? Well, I'll give you one good example that says otherwise. From Steve Goddard, just yesterday. The funny thing is people suspected the following kind of B.S. when Hadley Centre said it didn't have its intermediate results anymore... it had just been tossed out with other "obsolete data". While the following is just one example, it is hardly isolated. Isn't it a bit funny that in California, the mountain weather instruments are in general no longer being used for the "raw data", but almost all of it now comes from the warmer lowlands? Etc. The point being what every scientist knows: if you cherry-pick your data, you can show almost anything you want.
Then, there is the strange phenomenon of the GISS "historical data" mysteriously changing over time. And many, many other anomalies that people are just now beginning to look into. Expect some results announced in March. But back to the example I wanted to show you: Fort Collins, CO.
In 1961 they moved their weather instruments to a new location. It is important to note that this is all from the official records. Here is a chart of 90-plus degree days for each recent year. Official data. No fudging. You can look it up yourself.
Note that in 2002, they built a parking lot around the weather station, which had previously been in farmland. And not just a little single-lane road or anything of that nature. It is now surrounded by asphalt. Look at the number of 90-degree days since then! Gee, what a coincidence. But this is one source of official climate data.
And lest you say "a little asphalt doesn't make a difference", here, take a look at it, straight from Google Maps. Well... so the University (on that info page linked to above), said that rather than move their station again, they'd take care to "buffer" it from the hot surroundings. Well done, CSU! Right?
So here is their "buffer". (Again, straight rom Google Maps, and these pictures by the way are very recent copyright.) A rock garden, of all things, with a few flowers and a couple of tiny shrugs.
No sane person would call this an effective "buffer". But CSU pretends it is.
As I say: just one example. But it is one of very, very many. And by the way, speaking of "dealing with it": when Mann and CRU were the subject of 5 "independent" investigations, while they might have been absolved of scientific malpractice, all 5 reports criticized their methods in one form or another.
So don't try to give me this guff about "responsible methods". I have seen too many examples of exactly the opposite. If cases like this (of which, I repeat, a great many have been found) constitute responsible methods, then no wonder the world is shown to be warming. And no wonder an increasing percentage of the people are ignoring this "data".
"You expand beyond the quotes. So yes, you are wrong."
Okay, if you want to nitpick over semantics, technically you are correct.
However, as a practical matter, wget is a SHITTY basis for a web crawler. IT WASN'T DESIGNED FOR THAT SPECIFIC PURPOSE AND DOESN'T HAVE ANY INTELLIGENCE. About all you can do with it by itself is set it to snarf up everything in its path within narrowly defined parameters. That is all. And that just isn't enough for a generally useful web crawler.
If you want to do anything other than massive blind data grabbing, you have to control it via some scripting language(s), augment it with curl or OpenURI, or use something else (the vastly preferred solution).
Which brings us RIGHT BACK to my original reply to you:
Actually there are options in wget for that.
Well, yes. But while wget could be part of a full-featured crawler, it just doesn't have the functionality to do it all, by itself. [emphasis added]
My comment stands and I owe you no apologies. If all you want to do is semantic nitpicking, you are just wasting everybody's time.
"The only bias I've seen at Real Climate is for good science and they've got the data to back it up."
What data is that? You mean like HadCRUT and GISS? Don't make me laugh.
If you don't start paying attention to both "sides" of the debate, you're going to end up looking pretty foolish.
"Agreed. How?"
Get on the mailing list at EFF.org. Sign their petitions and email your congressfolk.
"Fiat Money may not be perfect - but it's better than Gold and Silver coins."
Wanna bet? Oh, I suppose you might say it's "better" if you have an inflation fetish. But why would you?
This is what it has done to prices -- and as a consequence undermined savings -- over the last 100 years.
"The only problem with fiat currency is third parties making counterfeits and the money producers printing excessive amounts."
Wow. No, there are LOTS of problems with fiat currency.
"We the people if we are in control have an impact on that last part."
Sure, but we haven't been "in control" since 1913. Loot at that chart again. Monetary policy is under the control of the Fed. And the Fed -- although the chair is appointed by the President -- is a collection of private banks. And much of their assets are owned by foreign interests. They don't give the slightest shit what you have to say. They don't even really care much what the President has to say.
"Regardless of the form of currency, if a government is corrupt of falls into expediency -- then it doesn't matter what type of currency they have."
Not true, because when we had a gold standard (and no Fed), We The People were in fact in control of the money supply... just as it should always have been. THEN, the government+Fed could not inflate the money. Look at that chart again... the only times of inflation were when the government borrowed money for wars, and it went right back again afterward. Until the Fed was created.
The whole reason we HAVE fiat money, in the first place, was that the government spent more money than it actually had in gold. It could not meet its debts so it created the floating dollar. (First partially in 1934, the completely in 1971. See that chart one more time. It's full of valuable information.) They created the fiat dollar so they could inflate it at will.
But government inflates money, THEY and the BANKS get to spend it at full value. But by the time the inflation actually hits the economy (it's not instant, it usually takes 2-3 years), your savings have lost their value.
That's why government likes inflation. But it actually hurts the economy. Just one way it does that, is that your savings evaporate at a rate equal to the inflation rate. So if you get 5% from your bank account (haha... does anybody today?), but inlation is 6%, you're losing 1% of your money annually.
Right now, today, most "savings" accounts, after adjusting for inflation, are losing money.
"I think there's an error, in that you're not using a consistent definition of "value"."
I'm using the classic macroeconomics 101 definition of "value": production cost + distribution cost. This can also be defined as "what it is worth in terms of other common commodities". They are very similar.
So Bitcoin has a relatively fixed "intrinsic value" in economic terms. (Ignore "stock market value", which is an unrelated concept. In economic terms that is really a price, not a value.)
Yes, Bitcoin value changes, but only by a little over time. As such, it works like an anchor, much like gold dollars used to.
You can't set an exchange rate between your currency and something of fixed value, then inflate your currency. It just doesn't work. You'd be creating "value" (production) out of thin air. It isn't possible.
But yes, in the sense you mean, you CAN do it... for a short time, until everyone buys out all the goods and production capacity in your country and leaves you with nothing but worthless paper money.
"Maybe, just maybe, he was using curl , html2text and grep in a BASH script, like in "Ethical Hacking" 101, which is a course he lists on his resume."
And if he was, then he wasn't "just" using wget.
"And you're wrong about wget "needing to know if the directory exists". RTFM (sigh)."
I did RTFM, and no, I'm not wrong. Wget can follow links and do recursive gets, but it does so unintelligently. As I stated: by itself, it just isn't an effective web crawler.
I do this stuff for a living, man. I didn't just pull uninformed opinions out of my ass.
You're just repeating the same semantic argument. I disagree.
"Public access" doesn't always mean "must provide everyone a free copy."
No, but it should. That's the point.
If the public paid for it, the public should have open access to it. There is no valid societal or ethical reason private publishers should have a stranglehold on publicly-funded research.
"Publically funded research has never been public-access in the sense you mean."
I am aware of this. But the problem is more widely recognized than before.
The fact that it wasn't that way in the past is not an argument against change. As a taxpayer, it makes me angry. If I've paid for it, it should not be held hostage in corporate (publisher) vaults, so to speak. Other than things classified for genuine national security reasons, publicly funded research should be public.
"A cultural change needs to occur in how academics are assessed by their university administration in order to break the stranglehold."
I agree, and I agree that the situation is looking up. We still have a way to go, though.
Further, I wasn't necessarily referring to the "20th Century". The problem that most people have remarked on seems to be more of a phenomenon of the last decade or so.
"For example there's a mountain of easily accesible and very credible information about AGW from just about every scientific institution you can care to name, but some people still quote Anthony Watts as a credible source on the subject."
What matters is not the source, but the validity of the science the source is reporting on. This obsession with who the source is undermines real science. Shooting the messenger is not a valid scientific argument.
Having said that, I am NOT claiming Watts is a wonderfully reliable source. His experiments attempting to refute Pierre Latour, for example, were miserable failures, and Watts didn't seem to understand why. However, most of what he reports on isn't his own work. And in that respect, he is no more or less reliable than just about any other news source you might pick. For example, I'd definitely rate him as less biased than realclimate.org, and vastly less biased than MSNBC.
Pick one, because both are true:
(1) in proportion to the increase in profits
(2) in proportion to the amount invested by other developed nations, per user