Seriously. For those who don't remember, the DMCA put in place this ridiculous takedown process, which requires sites to take down works based merely on somebody's say-so, without any due process. That has inevitably led to situations in which some people do not have access to certain media at all. And of course, as usual in recent years, the whole process is slanted toward big corporations.
There should never be a law in the United States that forces compliance without first having to go through due process. The system wasn't broken, and the DMCA didn't fix it. The DMCA made things worse.
I was against these provisions of the DMCA and protested them before the law was even passed. We are merely seeing the results that many of us knew had to happen if such a bad law was passed.
As far as I am concerned, the ONLY good parts of the DMCA are the "safe harbor" provisions. Given a choice, I would shitcan the entire rest of the Act.
Military manuals, like most other government publications, are by law public property here in the U.S.
And you probably won't find better instructions on making homemade or impromptu explosives, than U.S. military manuals. I mean some really nasty, horrific sh*t. They are freely available on the market, and must be kept public, by law.
Please explain to me how you could justify arresting, much less convicting, someone for possessing information distributed by our own government that is, by law, public information. I don't think you could.
I firmly believe that the best way to protect yourself from ANY kind of weapon is to know about said weapon. How it is built and how it works. Therefore, trying to censor such information is a crime against society.
Actually, both England and the United states have, for centuries, had a common legal principle that information, of itself, is not harmful as is protected. It is only acts based on that information that are actionable.
This censorship of information is actually pretty recent, even in England. Don't mistake policies made in and around your lifetime for "long-standing" policies; it just ain't so.
Pardon me. You got me there. I was confusing Watts and a friend of his with McIntyre and McKitrick. They were the ones who originally brought up the famous "critiques" of CRU's statistics. However, Watts did feature that on his site, which was the original point: Watt does not need to be a scientist himself to reference scientific material. McIntyre and McKitrick are not "climate scientists" either, but their criticisms of the statistics have been repeatedly confirmed to be valid. Up to and including, as I stated earlier, by every one of the official direct investigations that have been made to date.
"The fact that parts of it are cut'n'pasted from Wikipedia is mere icing on the cake."
What relevance does that have? See, this is the problem with your "scientific" arguments: you aren't making any.
Instead you pick on him for a weird reference, reputed plagiarism, etc. which are completely irrelevant to the arguments and conclusions about the statistics, which are the heart and purpose of the paper.
It's nothing but indirect ad hominem argument. That is to say, it's ridiculous. You aren't addressing any of the actual ISSUES raised in the paper. If you have something to say about the statistics, then say so. Otherwise, you're just blowing hot air.
To put it a different way: since you obviously can't refute the actual technical points made in the paper, you choose to pick on it in other ways, including an obscure reference. Which, by the way, was a paper dealing with magnetic effects of solar radiation on the upper atmosphere, which is a real phenomenon. If somebody is going to pick on the reference, maybe they should obtain a copy first, and tell us all about how ridiculous the actual paper is, rather than scoffing at the title alone?
"When no-one else can find the same flaws, the flaws themselves tend to be fallacious."
Hahahaha! Now it's my turn to laugh.
Everyone has found the same flaws. You haven't been paying attention. EVERY team that has investigated CRU and friends in regard to their research, including University of East Anglia itself, Wegman, Penn State, and the British House of Commons, ALL called them on their shoddy statistical methods. They worded it mildly, but it was included in each of those reports, make no mistake.
And Watts was the first one to point it out. In fact Wegman was assigned to investigate by the U.S. Senate, who had gotten wind of Watts' findings. So it was a direct result of good old Anthony Watts. And the Wegman report concluded that Watts' criticisms were valid. It says so in the report, in so many words.
"Anthony Watts is no scientist, he was a TV weatherman."
And Einstein was a patent clerk. So f*king what? That means absolutely nothing. You are committing the logical fallacy of "appeal to authority". It is possible for a non-scientist to call a scientist on shoddy methods. It happens all the time. He -- and I, and a great many people who are not University researchers -- know enough about statistics to know when somebody is playing fast and loose with them, regardless of whether they are "scientists" or not. And in fact, that's part of the point: they made mistakes (if we assume they were really mistakes), BECAUSE they are climate researchers, and not statisticians. But that doesn't excuse them for not verifying their methods with some actual professionals before publishing.
"The best evidence he found out of the IPCC report is a few typo's."
Again, you haven't been paying attention. Most of the stuff on the WUWT website does not come from Watts himself. It may be that he didn't find flaws with the IPCC reports himself, but he certainly did report about other people who did. Respectable and reputable scientists, no less. As I already told you.
Let me put this a different way: let's say police are searching some place where they suspect there are drugs, and they have a warrant based on probable cause. (The customs agents didn't need a warrant to conduct their search; I'm simply establishing here that it's a legal search.) And while they are searching, they SEE you put what is obviously cocaine in a reinforced room and lock it.
The police do not need a court order to bust into that room and retrieve the contraband. They can blow it the hell up to get inside if they want. You may disagree with that, but that is the law. I'm only describing it, not defending it.
And there is very little difference here. The agents were conducting a legal search, and they SAW what they knew to be contraband. They would have been within their rights to "bust in" to the encrypted space and retrieve that contraband... if they could. The court actually did nothing but assert the same standard.
"No, still sophistry. The images can't be "known" to be on the drive until the guy has been convicted."
Look, guy. I'm not defending the court's actions here, I'm simply explaining what the judge's ruling was, okay?
But having said that, you are still wrong. The issue here is that they have concurring testimony from 2 separate customs agents to what they saw, AND they have no sane reason for lying about it: if they go in and find the files are not there, those agents are in deep shit. Further, there is close to zero possibility that the files have since been erased (the computer was seized at the time).
What the judge ruled was that based on testimony by two professionals who have everything to lose should their testimony be false, AND that it would be ridiculously easy to verify that the particular files the agents described are indeed there without rummaging through others, AND that the court is not asking anybody to search other files, but simply retrieve those in question, then any danger to the defendant's right against self-incrimination is negligible.
You are confusing a "search", with or without a warrant, with a subpoena to produce material that is known to exist. They are not the same things. The court did NOT order a search of the hard drive. Just the retrieval of those files. That's not the same law.
It wasn't that the search "could not be completed", at all. The search DID find contraband (which we now know, beyond any doubt). The judge didn't order a continuation of the search. He simply subpoenaed the particular files described to be there. If they didn't actually exist, then defendant's rights were violated by Customs and he would go free.
"What if they then find evidence of a different crime? Would that be the fruit of the poisonous tree?"
Presumably, it would indeed.
"Sorry, it's not obvious to me which method you suggest."
By simply going in and looking for the specific files that the Customs agents testified are there (and not others). If the files are there, fine and dandy. If they are not, then the agents perjured themselves and anything found would be your "fruit of the poisonous tree" all over again.
I do not claim that I agree 100% with the judge's reasoning here; but I do think he drew the line in a place that might be considered reasonable. And you have to admit that this particular case is kind of a rare circumstance... which is why it probably should not have been mentioned in the article anyway. The odds that it applies to the main subject of the article are probably very near zero.
If it is already known that there is illegal material there, and where it is, then the government (courts) have legal access to it. It is any theory that they don't that is questionable.
If police are searching your home specifically for cocaine that they know to be there based on evidence and testimony, and have a warrant or subpoena... and they also find marijuana in the process of the search, they might not be able to use it as evidence. It depends on a few things.
But they still have the pretty much unquestionable legal right to go in and get that cocaine.
The court did not insist on all the contents of his encrypted files. Just the ones they knew to already be there. And they are justified in wanting it: telling a jury that you know, even beyond doubt, that something exists, is not the same as showing it to them.
And so? What do you think is funny? Please be specific.
Do you think the Wegman report has been "discredited" simply because it appears to have some "borrowed" descriptions of evidence? Not so. It is the validity of the math and the conclusions that matter.
Do you think the statistics used by the CRU crew are "okay"? If so, why did EVERY actual investigation find problems with it?
Seriously, I'd like to know what you find funny. You asked for support of real science, you got it.
"Funny" is trying to pawn bad research with bad math off on the public. For that you can thank Mann, Bradley, Hughes, et al.
"Indeed, there is something wrong with everyone ditching mature products..."
I second that. For more than just the reasons you gave.
Ubuntu's "Head Up Display" is an astoundingly bad idea from a human interface perspective. It cannot be a general improvement to the drop-down menu, because of the way people and their brains work.
For just one example: you want to search your browser bookmarks or history for something? Great. Except... you are searching for the word "parametrics" when the bookmark you want actually says "variability". HUD won't help you there. At all. In fact it will help you stay lost.
Apple pulled a similar thing recently with OS X Lion, although not quite so egregious. They decided to make OS X and iOS look more alike. In the process, they reduced the human-interface effectiveness of the scrollbar on the desktop in several ways: they made it gray instead of colored, so now it's harder to see. They made it narrower, so now it's harder to grab with the mouse. They actually made it disappear if you don't use it for a few seconds, making it even harder and slower to use; you have to hover the mouse there for a second to bring it back. The disappearing thing is doubly bad, from an interface perspective: people are used to glancing at the scrollbar to see there position in a long document.
Of course, the disappearing act can be turned off, but it's on by default. The whole thing demonstrates an apparent complete ignorance of all the human-interface research that has gone into these things over the years.
But as for Ubuntu's HUD: people NEED those lists in dropdown menus. They aren't going to remember the names of all the commands. In a new piece of software, they may not even know that many of them exist, unless they SEE them in the menu! The HUD is just such a dumb idea, I don't know how to articulate it properly.
Change for the sake of change is not good. It is bad. Change for the sake of actual improvement might be okay, but you need to make sure first that it's an actual improvement! Not just that, but enough of an improvement to justify the cost, because change always comes at a cost, and sometimes that cost can be huge.
I really want to drive home the fact that the people making these willy-nilly changes appear to simply be ignorant of even the most basic principles of human interface design, which has been an active area of research for well over half a century. If they truly are ignorant of that history, they should not be designing interfaces at all, because they will just be doomed to repeat that history, and we should be moving forward, not back. If they are NOT ignorant of that history, then all I can say is that they are people who make astonishingly bad decisions.
This isn't f**cking Wikipedia. But if you insist that somebody do your homework for you, look up "Wegman Report" and read the intro and conclusion, if you don't want to wade through all the rest.
Note that the Wegman Report was reputed to contain some supporting material that was "plagiarized" from other sources... but that has no bearing on the rigor or conclusions of the report itself. That was peer reviewed by 6 professional statisticians before it was presented, and nobody since has been able to refute the analysis or conclusions of the report. All they've been able to do is yell "plagiarism" over some relatively insignificant sections of supporting data.
But the Wegman Report wasn't the end of it. EVERY independent study of the Hadley Centre, CRU and their methods has made at least passing mention of questionable statistical methods. And guess who found those flaws in tse statistical methods in the first place (as credited by Wegman and others since)? Why, it was none other than Anthony Watts.
"And I really wish people would stop digging up the rotting corpses of long dead talking points."
And what about that Wikipedia article prompts you to claim it is a "dead talking point"?
Do you mean this statement?
"The heterogeneous nature of climate during the Medieval Warm Period is illustrated by the wide spread of values exhibited by the individual records.[12] Warmth in some regions appears to have matched or exceeded recent levels of warmth in these regions, but globally the Medieval Warm Period was cooler than recent global temperatures.[13]"
Critics please take note: the ONLY references Wikipedia lists for saying that the MWP was not warmer than today are papers by -- who else? -- Jones, Mann, Bradley, and Hughes, of course.
Wow, imagine that. And all of them relying on... guess what? The very same questionable data set. So they can't be called "independent" verifications of one another.
Nope. Sorry, TapeCutter, but as long as MBH -- oops, and Jones -- papers are the only listed references, and all of them except one solely by Mann are discredited papers from before 2004, it very much remains a talking point.
"The 5th amendment does not protect you from being required to provide subpoenaed materials. It just means you dont have to testify or speak..."
Very definitely incorrect. I looked into this when I first read about the second court case mentioned in TFA. The one about the guy at the border who had child pornography on his computer. TFA gives a woefully incomplete account of that case; there is almost no chance that it is anything like this one at all.
The court ruled that he had to provide the password to an encrypted area on his hard drive, because Customs had already seen some child pornography on his computer, in the encrypted portion of the drive. The decryption software was running at the time, so these files were open and 2 Customs agents were able to see them. But somehow the man then managed to turn off the computer so the files could no longer be accessed.
The key thing here is that the court did not want the password in order to perform a SEARCH. It was already known that there was illegal material there. That is a FAR different situation.
In its ruling, the court made this point very clearly: the government normally cannot force someone to provide an encryption password, in order to SEARCH for items or material that are only SUSPECTED to be there. That would constitute a clear violation of the 5th Amendment.
However, in that particular (and really very unusual) case, the government already knew that there was illegal material, and even where it was. And the court wanted that material for the trial. There could be no violation of the 5th Amendment in that particular situation the court ruled, because it amounted to seizing illegal materials that were already known to be there. Therefore it was not a "search" in any reasonable sense of the term, and the defendant was not supplying anything incriminating that was not already known. He was not "testifying against himself" in other words.
Other courts have made this VERY clear: except under very unusual circumstances, rendering your password up to authorities is most definitely "testifying against yourself", and falls under the 5th Amendment. They cannot demand that information in order to search for evidence that might incriminate you.
When I mentioned all this earlier, when this post still hadn't appeared yet, somebody (sjames) replied that this was "sophistry", to use his word, and that if the court really "knew" it was there, they would not have required that it be supplied to the court.
However, that in itself is sophistry. Apparently he was forgetting several things: (1) As long as the court is not violating the 5th amendment (and in THAT rare case it was not), it can order the material to be presented for pretty much any damned reason it pleases. I did not say it was "needed" by the court to obtain a conviction; I simply stated that it was ordered to be given up. (2) Considering that the court already had consistent and concurring testimony from 2 Customs agents, if they had committed perjury it would have been ridiculously easy to very that without much compromising the defendant's privacy, and any further intrusion could be immediately ended. So there was little danger to the defendant's rights. And most importantly, (3) I wasn't asking sjames to take my word for it; he can look up the damned court decision himself on Google, just like I did, and read about it for himself.
Slashdot needs to change the default character set for its pages. They really should know better. But until they do, names like Wibjorn Karlen (English-ifiied spelling) simply won't show up properly.
"Dude, publicly funded institutions have been locking us into Microsoft for the last 20 years. Apple comes out with an innovation people actually want and you complain it's proprietary? Yeah, why don't you get MS Office out of schools first then get back to me on the ibooks."
Yes, I've given schools and local government a hard time about the very same thing. Sometimes they listen, sometimes not.
But I still have a complaint about iBooks. Just because someone else is doing something wrong, or even more wrong, doesn't make this right.
Yeah, Microsoft did that for years, and actually made some progress in that regard.
I don't know how many times I told various departments in my City government that it was NOT appropriate to publish "public" information online in Microsoft Word format. On and off for years. Some of them didn't listen, and actually thought I was some kind of nut. I told them if they didn't knock it off, eventually someone was going to sue them, and they'd be out a lot of money and time, because then somebody would have to be learning some new software.
Apparently somebody listened, because they're doing a lot less of it these days. They may not be cured yet, but they're doing much better.
I know there have, but to me this just reflects what appears very strongly to me to be an increasingly corrupt and decreasingly educated Supreme Court. It's hard to really argue the "less educated" part, but they sure do act that way sometimes.
Indirect evidence: if you notice, nearly all of these controversial (or even un-controversially bad) decisions seem to involve either Government or Corporate power, and nearly all of them land on the wrong side of that scale.
Our recent Supreme Court has been terrible about upholding Constitutional rights, in general. It was very refreshing to hear the decision about G.P.S tracking, but even then I don't think they made their points strongly enough.
I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just saying that there are many people -- in know some people -- who would. And yes, they consider it to be "their morality".
My point was that it is society's morals that determine what it considers just. Laws are nothing more (should be nothing more, at any rate) than enforcement of those societal decisions.
But law can go astray. And when people (I'm not pointing fingers here, just speaking in the abstract) start thinking that something is moral or immoral because it is the law, then they are thinking exactly backwards.
"More water in the system will destroy some of the well established ocean currents that drives the weather on the planet and have caused some stability for the last 15000 years or so."
Um... no. It has been warmer than this before (during the Medieval Warming Period for example, which did exist despite rhetoric from certain fanatics), and no doubt at some time it will again. Humanity did not die off; in fact there is every reason to believe they thrived during those times.
I really wish people would stop panicking over what amounts to very little.
If they're anything like me, they downloaded the Author application, played with and saved a test "publication", then tossed the application into the shitcan with all the other applications that save only to proprietary venues/formats.
Author will save only to ".ibook" (a modified version of ".epub"), a crippled.pdf, or.txt (the latter without any graphics, of course). And it will not "publish" to anything but Apple's store for use on iPhones and iPads.
I have no use for such lock-in, proprietary bullshit. I'll publish my work in a.PDF instead. Sure, it will get "illegally shared" some, but as far as I am concerned that is still better than this. And there are ways to help prevent that, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. For those who don't remember, the DMCA put in place this ridiculous takedown process, which requires sites to take down works based merely on somebody's say-so, without any due process. That has inevitably led to situations in which some people do not have access to certain media at all. And of course, as usual in recent years, the whole process is slanted toward big corporations.
There should never be a law in the United States that forces compliance without first having to go through due process. The system wasn't broken, and the DMCA didn't fix it. The DMCA made things worse.
I was against these provisions of the DMCA and protested them before the law was even passed. We are merely seeing the results that many of us knew had to happen if such a bad law was passed.
As far as I am concerned, the ONLY good parts of the DMCA are the "safe harbor" provisions. Given a choice, I would shitcan the entire rest of the Act.
Where, exactly?
Why, the U.S. government, of course.
Military manuals, like most other government publications, are by law public property here in the U.S.
And you probably won't find better instructions on making homemade or impromptu explosives, than U.S. military manuals. I mean some really nasty, horrific sh*t. They are freely available on the market, and must be kept public, by law.
Please explain to me how you could justify arresting, much less convicting, someone for possessing information distributed by our own government that is, by law, public information. I don't think you could.
I firmly believe that the best way to protect yourself from ANY kind of weapon is to know about said weapon. How it is built and how it works. Therefore, trying to censor such information is a crime against society.
Actually, both England and the United states have, for centuries, had a common legal principle that information, of itself, is not harmful as is protected. It is only acts based on that information that are actionable.
This censorship of information is actually pretty recent, even in England. Don't mistake policies made in and around your lifetime for "long-standing" policies; it just ain't so.
"The fact that parts of it are cut'n'pasted from Wikipedia is mere icing on the cake."
What relevance does that have? See, this is the problem with your "scientific" arguments: you aren't making any.
Instead you pick on him for a weird reference, reputed plagiarism, etc. which are completely irrelevant to the arguments and conclusions about the statistics, which are the heart and purpose of the paper.
It's nothing but indirect ad hominem argument. That is to say, it's ridiculous. You aren't addressing any of the actual ISSUES raised in the paper. If you have something to say about the statistics, then say so. Otherwise, you're just blowing hot air.
To put it a different way: since you obviously can't refute the actual technical points made in the paper, you choose to pick on it in other ways, including an obscure reference. Which, by the way, was a paper dealing with magnetic effects of solar radiation on the upper atmosphere, which is a real phenomenon. If somebody is going to pick on the reference, maybe they should obtain a copy first, and tell us all about how ridiculous the actual paper is, rather than scoffing at the title alone?
"When no-one else can find the same flaws, the flaws themselves tend to be fallacious."
Hahahaha! Now it's my turn to laugh.
Everyone has found the same flaws. You haven't been paying attention. EVERY team that has investigated CRU and friends in regard to their research, including University of East Anglia itself, Wegman, Penn State, and the British House of Commons, ALL called them on their shoddy statistical methods. They worded it mildly, but it was included in each of those reports, make no mistake.
And Watts was the first one to point it out. In fact Wegman was assigned to investigate by the U.S. Senate, who had gotten wind of Watts' findings. So it was a direct result of good old Anthony Watts. And the Wegman report concluded that Watts' criticisms were valid. It says so in the report, in so many words.
"Anthony Watts is no scientist, he was a TV weatherman."
And Einstein was a patent clerk. So f*king what? That means absolutely nothing. You are committing the logical fallacy of "appeal to authority". It is possible for a non-scientist to call a scientist on shoddy methods. It happens all the time. He -- and I, and a great many people who are not University researchers -- know enough about statistics to know when somebody is playing fast and loose with them, regardless of whether they are "scientists" or not. And in fact, that's part of the point: they made mistakes (if we assume they were really mistakes), BECAUSE they are climate researchers, and not statisticians. But that doesn't excuse them for not verifying their methods with some actual professionals before publishing.
"The best evidence he found out of the IPCC report is a few typo's."
Again, you haven't been paying attention. Most of the stuff on the WUWT website does not come from Watts himself. It may be that he didn't find flaws with the IPCC reports himself, but he certainly did report about other people who did. Respectable and reputable scientists, no less. As I already told you.
Let me put this a different way: let's say police are searching some place where they suspect there are drugs, and they have a warrant based on probable cause. (The customs agents didn't need a warrant to conduct their search; I'm simply establishing here that it's a legal search.) And while they are searching, they SEE you put what is obviously cocaine in a reinforced room and lock it.
The police do not need a court order to bust into that room and retrieve the contraband. They can blow it the hell up to get inside if they want. You may disagree with that, but that is the law. I'm only describing it, not defending it.
And there is very little difference here. The agents were conducting a legal search, and they SAW what they knew to be contraband. They would have been within their rights to "bust in" to the encrypted space and retrieve that contraband... if they could. The court actually did nothing but assert the same standard.
"No, still sophistry. The images can't be "known" to be on the drive until the guy has been convicted."
Look, guy. I'm not defending the court's actions here, I'm simply explaining what the judge's ruling was, okay?
But having said that, you are still wrong. The issue here is that they have concurring testimony from 2 separate customs agents to what they saw, AND they have no sane reason for lying about it: if they go in and find the files are not there, those agents are in deep shit. Further, there is close to zero possibility that the files have since been erased (the computer was seized at the time).
What the judge ruled was that based on testimony by two professionals who have everything to lose should their testimony be false, AND that it would be ridiculously easy to verify that the particular files the agents described are indeed there without rummaging through others, AND that the court is not asking anybody to search other files, but simply retrieve those in question, then any danger to the defendant's right against self-incrimination is negligible.
You are confusing a "search", with or without a warrant, with a subpoena to produce material that is known to exist. They are not the same things. The court did NOT order a search of the hard drive. Just the retrieval of those files. That's not the same law.
It wasn't that the search "could not be completed", at all. The search DID find contraband (which we now know, beyond any doubt). The judge didn't order a continuation of the search. He simply subpoenaed the particular files described to be there. If they didn't actually exist, then defendant's rights were violated by Customs and he would go free.
"What if they then find evidence of a different crime? Would that be the fruit of the poisonous tree?"
Presumably, it would indeed.
"Sorry, it's not obvious to me which method you suggest."
By simply going in and looking for the specific files that the Customs agents testified are there (and not others). If the files are there, fine and dandy. If they are not, then the agents perjured themselves and anything found would be your "fruit of the poisonous tree" all over again.
I do not claim that I agree 100% with the judge's reasoning here; but I do think he drew the line in a place that might be considered reasonable. And you have to admit that this particular case is kind of a rare circumstance... which is why it probably should not have been mentioned in the article anyway. The odds that it applies to the main subject of the article are probably very near zero.
No, you have only thought that half-through.
If it is already known that there is illegal material there, and where it is, then the government (courts) have legal access to it. It is any theory that they don't that is questionable.
If police are searching your home specifically for cocaine that they know to be there based on evidence and testimony, and have a warrant or subpoena... and they also find marijuana in the process of the search, they might not be able to use it as evidence. It depends on a few things.
But they still have the pretty much unquestionable legal right to go in and get that cocaine.
The court did not insist on all the contents of his encrypted files. Just the ones they knew to already be there. And they are justified in wanting it: telling a jury that you know, even beyond doubt, that something exists, is not the same as showing it to them.
And so? What do you think is funny? Please be specific.
Do you think the Wegman report has been "discredited" simply because it appears to have some "borrowed" descriptions of evidence? Not so. It is the validity of the math and the conclusions that matter.
Do you think the statistics used by the CRU crew are "okay"? If so, why did EVERY actual investigation find problems with it?
Seriously, I'd like to know what you find funny. You asked for support of real science, you got it.
"Funny" is trying to pawn bad research with bad math off on the public. For that you can thank Mann, Bradley, Hughes, et al.
"Indeed, there is something wrong with everyone ditching mature products..."
I second that. For more than just the reasons you gave.
Ubuntu's "Head Up Display" is an astoundingly bad idea from a human interface perspective. It cannot be a general improvement to the drop-down menu, because of the way people and their brains work.
For just one example: you want to search your browser bookmarks or history for something? Great. Except... you are searching for the word "parametrics" when the bookmark you want actually says "variability". HUD won't help you there. At all. In fact it will help you stay lost.
Apple pulled a similar thing recently with OS X Lion, although not quite so egregious. They decided to make OS X and iOS look more alike. In the process, they reduced the human-interface effectiveness of the scrollbar on the desktop in several ways: they made it gray instead of colored, so now it's harder to see. They made it narrower, so now it's harder to grab with the mouse. They actually made it disappear if you don't use it for a few seconds, making it even harder and slower to use; you have to hover the mouse there for a second to bring it back. The disappearing thing is doubly bad, from an interface perspective: people are used to glancing at the scrollbar to see there position in a long document.
Of course, the disappearing act can be turned off, but it's on by default. The whole thing demonstrates an apparent complete ignorance of all the human-interface research that has gone into these things over the years.
But as for Ubuntu's HUD: people NEED those lists in dropdown menus. They aren't going to remember the names of all the commands. In a new piece of software, they may not even know that many of them exist, unless they SEE them in the menu! The HUD is just such a dumb idea, I don't know how to articulate it properly.
Change for the sake of change is not good. It is bad. Change for the sake of actual improvement might be okay, but you need to make sure first that it's an actual improvement! Not just that, but enough of an improvement to justify the cost, because change always comes at a cost, and sometimes that cost can be huge.
I really want to drive home the fact that the people making these willy-nilly changes appear to simply be ignorant of even the most basic principles of human interface design, which has been an active area of research for well over half a century. If they truly are ignorant of that history, they should not be designing interfaces at all, because they will just be doomed to repeat that history, and we should be moving forward, not back. If they are NOT ignorant of that history, then all I can say is that they are people who make astonishingly bad decisions.
This isn't f**cking Wikipedia. But if you insist that somebody do your homework for you, look up "Wegman Report" and read the intro and conclusion, if you don't want to wade through all the rest.
Note that the Wegman Report was reputed to contain some supporting material that was "plagiarized" from other sources... but that has no bearing on the rigor or conclusions of the report itself. That was peer reviewed by 6 professional statisticians before it was presented, and nobody since has been able to refute the analysis or conclusions of the report. All they've been able to do is yell "plagiarism" over some relatively insignificant sections of supporting data.
But the Wegman Report wasn't the end of it. EVERY independent study of the Hadley Centre, CRU and their methods has made at least passing mention of questionable statistical methods. And guess who found those flaws in tse statistical methods in the first place (as credited by Wegman and others since)? Why, it was none other than Anthony Watts.
"And I really wish people would stop digging up the rotting corpses of long dead talking points."
And what about that Wikipedia article prompts you to claim it is a "dead talking point"?
Do you mean this statement?
"The heterogeneous nature of climate during the Medieval Warm Period is illustrated by the wide spread of values exhibited by the individual records.[12] Warmth in some regions appears to have matched or exceeded recent levels of warmth in these regions, but globally the Medieval Warm Period was cooler than recent global temperatures.[13]"
Critics please take note: the ONLY references Wikipedia lists for saying that the MWP was not warmer than today are papers by -- who else? -- Jones, Mann, Bradley, and Hughes, of course.
Wow, imagine that. And all of them relying on... guess what? The very same questionable data set. So they can't be called "independent" verifications of one another.
Nope. Sorry, TapeCutter, but as long as MBH -- oops, and Jones -- papers are the only listed references, and all of them except one solely by Mann are discredited papers from before 2004, it very much remains a talking point.
Don'tcha just love it when moderators use "Troll" to mean "I disagree"?
"The 5th amendment does not protect you from being required to provide subpoenaed materials. It just means you dont have to testify or speak..."
Very definitely incorrect. I looked into this when I first read about the second court case mentioned in TFA. The one about the guy at the border who had child pornography on his computer. TFA gives a woefully incomplete account of that case; there is almost no chance that it is anything like this one at all.
The court ruled that he had to provide the password to an encrypted area on his hard drive, because Customs had already seen some child pornography on his computer, in the encrypted portion of the drive. The decryption software was running at the time, so these files were open and 2 Customs agents were able to see them. But somehow the man then managed to turn off the computer so the files could no longer be accessed.
The key thing here is that the court did not want the password in order to perform a SEARCH. It was already known that there was illegal material there. That is a FAR different situation.
In its ruling, the court made this point very clearly: the government normally cannot force someone to provide an encryption password, in order to SEARCH for items or material that are only SUSPECTED to be there. That would constitute a clear violation of the 5th Amendment.
However, in that particular (and really very unusual) case, the government already knew that there was illegal material, and even where it was. And the court wanted that material for the trial. There could be no violation of the 5th Amendment in that particular situation the court ruled, because it amounted to seizing illegal materials that were already known to be there. Therefore it was not a "search" in any reasonable sense of the term, and the defendant was not supplying anything incriminating that was not already known. He was not "testifying against himself" in other words.
Other courts have made this VERY clear: except under very unusual circumstances, rendering your password up to authorities is most definitely "testifying against yourself", and falls under the 5th Amendment. They cannot demand that information in order to search for evidence that might incriminate you.
When I mentioned all this earlier, when this post still hadn't appeared yet, somebody (sjames) replied that this was "sophistry", to use his word, and that if the court really "knew" it was there, they would not have required that it be supplied to the court.
However, that in itself is sophistry. Apparently he was forgetting several things: (1) As long as the court is not violating the 5th amendment (and in THAT rare case it was not), it can order the material to be presented for pretty much any damned reason it pleases. I did not say it was "needed" by the court to obtain a conviction; I simply stated that it was ordered to be given up. (2) Considering that the court already had consistent and concurring testimony from 2 Customs agents, if they had committed perjury it would have been ridiculously easy to very that without much compromising the defendant's privacy, and any further intrusion could be immediately ended. So there was little danger to the defendant's rights. And most importantly, (3) I wasn't asking sjames to take my word for it; he can look up the damned court decision himself on Google, just like I did, and read about it for himself.
Slashdot needs to change the default character set for its pages. They really should know better. But until they do, names like Wibjorn Karlen (English-ifiied spelling) simply won't show up properly.
Yes, scientific evidence. You seem to forget that not everything that is posted or linked to on WattsUpWithThat originated with Anthony Watts. They post some very good information by reputable scientists, among them Prof. WibjÃrn Karlén, who collaborated with the folks at CRU on at least 4 papers that I know of, and probably more. (One paper was on tree-ring proxies, for example.) He knows his stuff.
Karlén, and very definitely others, have a fine reputation in the science world, thank you very much. If you don't think so, then you must believe the people at CRU are themselves idiots, to collaborate on a climate paper with some kind of fool, eh?
And yet Karlén, among other people, have found some very severe faults with the data that was cherry-picked for IPCC reports, for example. Watts himself, with a collaborator, was responsible for finding flaws in the statistical methods used by the Hadley Centre, CRU, and Mann in their research. Flaws that have been continued to be questioned by every body that has investigated their operations to date.
Yeah, there's science there, all right. Real science.
See the reply below.
"Dude, publicly funded institutions have been locking us into Microsoft for the last 20 years. Apple comes out with an innovation people actually want and you complain it's proprietary? Yeah, why don't you get MS Office out of schools first then get back to me on the ibooks."
Yes, I've given schools and local government a hard time about the very same thing. Sometimes they listen, sometimes not.
But I still have a complaint about iBooks. Just because someone else is doing something wrong, or even more wrong, doesn't make this right.
Yeah, Microsoft did that for years, and actually made some progress in that regard.
I don't know how many times I told various departments in my City government that it was NOT appropriate to publish "public" information online in Microsoft Word format. On and off for years. Some of them didn't listen, and actually thought I was some kind of nut. I told them if they didn't knock it off, eventually someone was going to sue them, and they'd be out a lot of money and time, because then somebody would have to be learning some new software.
Apparently somebody listened, because they're doing a lot less of it these days. They may not be cured yet, but they're doing much better.
I know there have, but to me this just reflects what appears very strongly to me to be an increasingly corrupt and decreasingly educated Supreme Court. It's hard to really argue the "less educated" part, but they sure do act that way sometimes.
Indirect evidence: if you notice, nearly all of these controversial (or even un-controversially bad) decisions seem to involve either Government or Corporate power, and nearly all of them land on the wrong side of that scale.
Our recent Supreme Court has been terrible about upholding Constitutional rights, in general. It was very refreshing to hear the decision about G.P.S tracking, but even then I don't think they made their points strongly enough.
That should read "I know..." Damn typos.
I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just saying that there are many people -- in know some people -- who would. And yes, they consider it to be "their morality".
My point was that it is society's morals that determine what it considers just. Laws are nothing more (should be nothing more, at any rate) than enforcement of those societal decisions.
But law can go astray. And when people (I'm not pointing fingers here, just speaking in the abstract) start thinking that something is moral or immoral because it is the law, then they are thinking exactly backwards.
"More water in the system will destroy some of the well established ocean currents that drives the weather on the planet and have caused some stability for the last 15000 years or so."
Um... no. It has been warmer than this before (during the Medieval Warming Period for example, which did exist despite rhetoric from certain fanatics), and no doubt at some time it will again. Humanity did not die off; in fact there is every reason to believe they thrived during those times.
I really wish people would stop panicking over what amounts to very little.
If they're anything like me, they downloaded the Author application, played with and saved a test "publication", then tossed the application into the shitcan with all the other applications that save only to proprietary venues/formats.
.pdf, or .txt (the latter without any graphics, of course). And it will not "publish" to anything but Apple's store for use on iPhones and iPads.
.PDF instead. Sure, it will get "illegally shared" some, but as far as I am concerned that is still better than this. And there are ways to help prevent that, too.
Author will save only to ".ibook" (a modified version of ".epub"), a crippled
I have no use for such lock-in, proprietary bullshit. I'll publish my work in a