Keep in mind that not having an alibi isn't necessarily sufficient to constitute proof beyond reasonable doubt, especially when any eye-witness or CCTV evidence could apply equally to both twins.
I can answer that, actually. I use a Macbook as my main computer, running Snow Leopard. I work in an office environment where OpenOffice doesn't really cut it. In fact, Word doesn't cut it either. Wordperfect is the optimum choice for the work I do (legal work). Alas, Corel no longer ports Wordperfect over to Mac, so I'm stuck. I can use Office 2008 for OS X, or I can run Windows in a VM and run Wordperfect in Windows. I'm locked in to Microsoft products, despite having a Mac.
Now my case isn't really that typical, but it is illustrative of the effect of MS using their OS monopoly to leverage their Office suite into a monopoly position as well. The fact that they did it so long ago, and that it's still having an effect on users now, should demonstrate how powerful that monopoly abuse really was. And MS has gone totally unpunished for that one, as far as I know.
I would probably gather, based on my own experience with VMWare is that your intuition is correct. My MacBook runs just fine, as long as I don't have VMWare running (with an OS running in it). Once I start up the second OS, things get slooooooow. I always just chalked it up to the fact that you had two competing OS's, with different ideas about how to do things, trying to access the same hardware. My knowledge of how VM's work isn't very sophisticated, so I don't know if the problem lies with VMWare itself or the virtual OS.
So I've matched up my straw-poll against your personal anecdote and we've proven between us...nothing. Though really, I hate to say it, but I'm more convinced by the two articles I read than by your personal anecdote, if only a little bit.
There was a couple of studies done (one in Scandinavia somewhere, and a less formal poll in Canada) that suggested that downloaders on average spend more on music than their non-downloading peers. If people have the same behaviour with movies, then the studios are possibly attacking their best customers when they sue file-sharers.
Hmm, you know, the RIAA uses that same logic, but there were a couple of studies that showed the opposite: people who downloaded music spent more money on music (either discs, concerts or other products) than people who didn't download music. I wonder if the same holds for movies? I kind of suspect it does. If indeed it does, not only would the studios be attacking their customers, but attacking their best customers. If I were them, I would have wanted to test that one before launching the lawsuits.
I could be wrong on this, but my impression was that in the US these matters are handled in the civil, not the criminal court system. In other words, they're not going to "book everyone in", some clerks are going to stamp documents (which they would be doing anyway), and the Plaintiffs are going to pay to have all the defendants served. Presumably, they're hoping to either get back the expense of all those services through winning their cases, or they're doing it to discourage the rest of us from downloading movies, and consider it worth the cost.
As for trial, the rule of thumb is that 95% of all cases settle, so that'll cut through a lot of the suits. The rest of them will just have to wait their turn if they want a trial. The first handful of verdicts will set the tone, and I'd bet there won't be more than a few before everyone else starts settling.
Strictly speaking, my assumption is that there is a non-zero probability that humanity is doomed if something isn't done. My point was that "humanity not going extinct" has infinite value, which skews the cost/benefit calculation. If
cost/(probability of extinction)*(value of !extinction)
is the proper general equation, and (value of !extinction) is infinite, it doesn't matter how high the cost is, or how low the probability is, if the probability is non-zero (no matter how small), the cost will always be outweighed by the benefits. The real problem with doing this kind of risk assessment is, what do we do about the pesky infinities? I don't have an answer for that. That was my point. There may not be an answer for that.
For the record, I think the weakest assumption above is the actual value of !humanExtinction. It's arguable that the planet as a whole would be better off without us, but I think in the final crunch we as a species would not accept that. My feeling (and it's only a feeling) is that we as a species will place an infinite value on our own survival (but only when the threat is clear and immediate).
Not their job? You don't seem to get it: if you don't present your evidence in a way that the layperson can grasp they will not support the policies you want to ameliorate/reverse climate change. Sitting in the Ivory Towers and saying "just trust us" is not going to help politicians and the people who vote for them to support your position and you need that support if you want to fix the problem (instead of just describe the problem in 11,000 papers). Why is this so hard to grasp? We have in the US (and increasingly so in Canada) a debate that is dominated on the one hand by climate-change deniers who rely on volume and "what would we do without oil?" rhetoric and on the other hand scientists whose main arguments are "just trust us, you can trust authority figures, and we're authority figures, right? Besides, the polar bears are dying!!!!1!!!!one!!" arguments, and nobody is talking about the actual science in a way that makes sense to voters or politicians!
This may seem like a uniquely American problem, but if the US (world's largest consumer of oil) won't move to control carbon emissions, then China (world's fastest-growing consumer of oil) sure as fuck won't, and then we're all fucked. The scientists need to start communicating (effectively!) with the people, instead of leaving it in the hands of environmental groups who have no choice but to fight their opponents with the same deceptive tools.
So what's the approximate value of "saving humanity from extinction?" That's what's at stake after all. You could say that saving us from extinction is worth any price, and thus the cost/benefit ratio is impossible to evaluate. So then you have to evaluate the likelihood of extinction vs the cost. A much harder value to calculate. And while you are doing these calculations, there's a very real probability that things are getting worse and you're wasting time calculating when you should be making changes. So again, what do? Given the other benefits of reducing carbon emissions, shouldn't we get started?
I'm not claiming that I can't look at the real evidence myself, I'm claiming that I don't have the time or training to do so effectively. I'm in law school, I don't have time to research 10s or 100s of papers in a subject that doesn't relate directly to the exams I'm going to be writing in 3 weeks. Furthermore, very few other people do have the time or ability to do this.
As a lawyer, I'll probably not explain things to all my clients, as you say. And that's okay, because the client will have the option of going to another lawyer if they don't like what I have to say, or they can ask me for clarification of points they don't understand. They will have options, and can make reasonably informed choices on their own. The same isn't true of the climate change issue because the material is far more abstruse, and nobody in the public sphere is willing to make an effort to explain it in a form lay-people can evaluate for themselves. On the one hand you have "they can't take my Hummer away!" and on the other hand we have "just trust us, we're experts." Neither of these arguments is terribly persuasive.
You've misunderstood the thrust of my argument, in part because I've been obfuscating my true position to avoid a flamewar. Clearly that didn't work.;-p
For the record, I'm on-side with the experts you're talking about, and believe we should do something about it. My concern is more with how the issue is playing out in the public sphere in America (very badly, with a lot of mis-information from both sides) and the fact that the experts are answering it all by saying "just trust us, we know what we're doing", which I don't think is an adequate answer.
We need better scientific education at the grade-school level, we need a discourse where magical thinking and entertainment value is not seen as a substitute for the truth, and we need the scientific community to reach out to the rest of us and do a better job of explaining things to us so that we can feel justified in trusting them. The stakes are far too high for the discourse to continue as it has.
What debate? Nearly all people with enough education to understand the science do not agree there is anything worth debating.
This is a very small number of people, relatively speaking. Climate science is hard, and most people are not qualified to understand it, even if only because we chose to specialize in other areas. For the rest of us, because of the nature of the discourse in North America, we're basically told by two opposing sides that we just have to trust them.
If there was a debate, it is this: Well Demonstrated/Evaluated Theory VS. Ignorant Doubt Discarding Evidence and Providing No Viable Alternative Hypothesis.
The problem is, both sides are claiming to have the well-demonstrated/evaluated theory, and without a lot of education (or a better media) we're not really qualified to evaluate these positions. I know which side I support (probably the same side you do, in fact), I'm just not as comfortable with my support as you are, because I'm perhaps more aware of how tenuous my understanding of the subject really is.
That's news to me. So who funds the scientists' PR departments?
Well, they don't call them PR departments, true. They call them Environmental lobby groups. Groups like the David Suzuki Foundation in Canada, who do actually do good science, but also release press releases that rely more on PR gibberish than actual data. As I said earlier, I don't blame them for doing so, because they need to get their message in a format that most people understand. But it makes things harder for people like me who want to evaluate the evidence.
(1) I'm a law student, not a climatologist
Well, then your opinions on climatology aren't worth much then, are they?
That's exactly my problem. I want to become reasonably informed about global warming, but I don't have time to go get the appropriate degree, and nobody out there is boiling stuff down to layman's terms so I can make a reasonably informed decision. Instead we get the climate deniers on one hand, who think that volume=debate, and people like you on the other hand, who stoop to insult and "just trust me, I'm a scientist" rhetoric on the other hand. You didn't even bother to ask me which side of the debate I support, before attacking my position and making an argument from the perceived authority of "tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers", none of which I have ever read or am capable of understanding.
For the record, I believe that we should be drastically reducing carbon emissions to mitigate any effect humans are having on the change in climate. I've been intentionally obfuscating this position because (1) climate debates on slashdot always devolve into Holy Wars, thanks to people like you and (2) my support for this position is based more on risk assessment and other incidental effects of reducing carbon dependence than it is on a true understanding of the core of the debate, and this makes me uncomfortable.
True, but the problem right now is that the idiots are running the asylum. Evaluating public debate in America basically amounts to trying to decide which camp of idiots is more likely to be right than the other camp. In the context of the climate change issue, failure to back the right camp of idiots will likely have disastrous consequences, as it's the idiots we back who are going to make policy.
Except that the scientists have PR departments too, and what we get from the scientists is PR, and not actual evidence. This isn't the fault of the scientists, it's in part the fault of the sad state of scientific education (in North America, at any rate), the sheer complexity of the science involved (climate science is hard and few of us have time or inclination to become climatologists), the recent skew of the major North American media toward infotainment and newstainment instead of plain old truthy news reporting, and other reasons.
I can go check out your links, and even agree with them, but they mean almost nothing to me because I don't have any way to check the accuracy of the migratory bird data, no easy way to know whether Bergmann's Rule is controversial or settled, or know whether the effect described in the rule is attributable to climate exclusively or to other factors.
I don't know these things because (1) I'm a law student, not a climatologist (2) nobody in the media is talking about this kind of data and (3) nobody in the PR departments of the sciency people or their opponents is using this kind of data in their public debates.
Well to be fair, both sides of the debate have been using that fallacy, depending on how the weather has been in your local geographical area. It's THE major problem I've had with the climate change debate. The only public person I've heard who's actually tried to call people on it was Krugman over at the New York Times, who pointed out that by selecting your sample years carefully from the last 10-20 years, you can "prove" anything you want about the climate. He was arguing at the time against the anti-AGW crowd (as you might expect).
As for me, I'm inclined to think we do have some cause for concern, based on what little actual evidence I've seen from both sides of the debate. I'm by no means convinced that we have enough evidence to support one side or another. I also think we have some other very good reasons to reduce carbon emissions, including a need to reduce particulate emissions of all kinds (air pollution), reduce dependence on petroleum products (whose supplies are probably running out), reduce the "need" to colonize the Middle East (eliminate the causes of terrorism), etc.
In my teen and college years I would get up around 14-15 (that's 2-3 PM for you americans) on weekends and it took a lot of effort to go from my teenage 9-10:30 wakeup to getting up at 7 for some lectures in college, the only reason I pulled that off was because unlike HS it was actually subjects I wanted to learn about instead of random classes that someone else had decided I needed to take and which were often watered down to the point where there was little to nothing interesting left, as an example our HS biology class seemed to spend more time learning what the leaves of different trees looked like than anything useful (come on, I don't need to spend several hours in early-morning classes to learn how to identify birch trees, they're all over the place).
I don't normally nit-pick spelling and grammar, but what I quoted above from your post is one sentence. Please be kind to your readers and add proper punctuation! I actually tried to read that all in one breath. It didn't end well.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Which is why we have the legal notion of corporate personhood.
Keep in mind that not having an alibi isn't necessarily sufficient to constitute proof beyond reasonable doubt, especially when any eye-witness or CCTV evidence could apply equally to both twins.
Locking two people away until one of then confesses is "third world". but really, it's totalitarian, not third world.
I hope you don't think that corporations should have the vote.
I can answer that, actually. I use a Macbook as my main computer, running Snow Leopard. I work in an office environment where OpenOffice doesn't really cut it. In fact, Word doesn't cut it either. Wordperfect is the optimum choice for the work I do (legal work). Alas, Corel no longer ports Wordperfect over to Mac, so I'm stuck. I can use Office 2008 for OS X, or I can run Windows in a VM and run Wordperfect in Windows. I'm locked in to Microsoft products, despite having a Mac.
Now my case isn't really that typical, but it is illustrative of the effect of MS using their OS monopoly to leverage their Office suite into a monopoly position as well. The fact that they did it so long ago, and that it's still having an effect on users now, should demonstrate how powerful that monopoly abuse really was. And MS has gone totally unpunished for that one, as far as I know.
I would probably gather, based on my own experience with VMWare is that your intuition is correct. My MacBook runs just fine, as long as I don't have VMWare running (with an OS running in it). Once I start up the second OS, things get slooooooow. I always just chalked it up to the fact that you had two competing OS's, with different ideas about how to do things, trying to access the same hardware. My knowledge of how VM's work isn't very sophisticated, so I don't know if the problem lies with VMWare itself or the virtual OS.
If you can't figure out how to disable it, you need to turn your geek card in at the door.
It's crashing the flash plugin for Chrome on OS X, but not Chrome itself.
So I've matched up my straw-poll against your personal anecdote and we've proven between us...nothing. Though really, I hate to say it, but I'm more convinced by the two articles I read than by your personal anecdote, if only a little bit.
There was a couple of studies done (one in Scandinavia somewhere, and a less formal poll in Canada) that suggested that downloaders on average spend more on music than their non-downloading peers. If people have the same behaviour with movies, then the studios are possibly attacking their best customers when they sue file-sharers.
Hmm, you know, the RIAA uses that same logic, but there were a couple of studies that showed the opposite: people who downloaded music spent more money on music (either discs, concerts or other products) than people who didn't download music. I wonder if the same holds for movies? I kind of suspect it does. If indeed it does, not only would the studios be attacking their customers, but attacking their best customers. If I were them, I would have wanted to test that one before launching the lawsuits.
I could be wrong on this, but my impression was that in the US these matters are handled in the civil, not the criminal court system. In other words, they're not going to "book everyone in", some clerks are going to stamp documents (which they would be doing anyway), and the Plaintiffs are going to pay to have all the defendants served. Presumably, they're hoping to either get back the expense of all those services through winning their cases, or they're doing it to discourage the rest of us from downloading movies, and consider it worth the cost.
As for trial, the rule of thumb is that 95% of all cases settle, so that'll cut through a lot of the suits. The rest of them will just have to wait their turn if they want a trial. The first handful of verdicts will set the tone, and I'd bet there won't be more than a few before everyone else starts settling.
Strictly speaking, my assumption is that there is a non-zero probability that humanity is doomed if something isn't done. My point was that "humanity not going extinct" has infinite value, which skews the cost/benefit calculation. If
cost/(probability of extinction)*(value of !extinction)
is the proper general equation, and (value of !extinction) is infinite, it doesn't matter how high the cost is, or how low the probability is, if the probability is non-zero (no matter how small), the cost will always be outweighed by the benefits. The real problem with doing this kind of risk assessment is, what do we do about the pesky infinities? I don't have an answer for that. That was my point. There may not be an answer for that.
For the record, I think the weakest assumption above is the actual value of !humanExtinction. It's arguable that the planet as a whole would be better off without us, but I think in the final crunch we as a species would not accept that. My feeling (and it's only a feeling) is that we as a species will place an infinite value on our own survival (but only when the threat is clear and immediate).
That's not their job.
Not their job? You don't seem to get it: if you don't present your evidence in a way that the layperson can grasp they will not support the policies you want to ameliorate/reverse climate change . Sitting in the Ivory Towers and saying "just trust us" is not going to help politicians and the people who vote for them to support your position and you need that support if you want to fix the problem (instead of just describe the problem in 11,000 papers). Why is this so hard to grasp? We have in the US (and increasingly so in Canada) a debate that is dominated on the one hand by climate-change deniers who rely on volume and "what would we do without oil?" rhetoric and on the other hand scientists whose main arguments are "just trust us, you can trust authority figures, and we're authority figures, right? Besides, the polar bears are dying!!!!1!!!!one!!" arguments, and nobody is talking about the actual science in a way that makes sense to voters or politicians!
This may seem like a uniquely American problem, but if the US (world's largest consumer of oil) won't move to control carbon emissions, then China (world's fastest-growing consumer of oil) sure as fuck won't, and then we're all fucked. The scientists need to start communicating (effectively!) with the people, instead of leaving it in the hands of environmental groups who have no choice but to fight their opponents with the same deceptive tools.
So what's the approximate value of "saving humanity from extinction?" That's what's at stake after all. You could say that saving us from extinction is worth any price, and thus the cost/benefit ratio is impossible to evaluate. So then you have to evaluate the likelihood of extinction vs the cost. A much harder value to calculate. And while you are doing these calculations, there's a very real probability that things are getting worse and you're wasting time calculating when you should be making changes. So again, what do? Given the other benefits of reducing carbon emissions, shouldn't we get started?
I'm not claiming that I can't look at the real evidence myself, I'm claiming that I don't have the time or training to do so effectively. I'm in law school, I don't have time to research 10s or 100s of papers in a subject that doesn't relate directly to the exams I'm going to be writing in 3 weeks. Furthermore, very few other people do have the time or ability to do this.
As a lawyer, I'll probably not explain things to all my clients, as you say. And that's okay, because the client will have the option of going to another lawyer if they don't like what I have to say, or they can ask me for clarification of points they don't understand. They will have options, and can make reasonably informed choices on their own. The same isn't true of the climate change issue because the material is far more abstruse, and nobody in the public sphere is willing to make an effort to explain it in a form lay-people can evaluate for themselves. On the one hand you have "they can't take my Hummer away!" and on the other hand we have "just trust us, we're experts." Neither of these arguments is terribly persuasive.
You've misunderstood the thrust of my argument, in part because I've been obfuscating my true position to avoid a flamewar. Clearly that didn't work. ;-p
For the record, I'm on-side with the experts you're talking about, and believe we should do something about it. My concern is more with how the issue is playing out in the public sphere in America (very badly, with a lot of mis-information from both sides) and the fact that the experts are answering it all by saying "just trust us, we know what we're doing", which I don't think is an adequate answer.
We need better scientific education at the grade-school level, we need a discourse where magical thinking and entertainment value is not seen as a substitute for the truth, and we need the scientific community to reach out to the rest of us and do a better job of explaining things to us so that we can feel justified in trusting them. The stakes are far too high for the discourse to continue as it has.
What debate? Nearly all people with enough education to understand the science do not agree there is anything worth debating.
This is a very small number of people, relatively speaking. Climate science is hard, and most people are not qualified to understand it, even if only because we chose to specialize in other areas. For the rest of us, because of the nature of the discourse in North America, we're basically told by two opposing sides that we just have to trust them.
If there was a debate, it is this: Well Demonstrated/Evaluated Theory VS. Ignorant Doubt Discarding Evidence and Providing No Viable Alternative Hypothesis.
The problem is, both sides are claiming to have the well-demonstrated/evaluated theory, and without a lot of education (or a better media) we're not really qualified to evaluate these positions. I know which side I support (probably the same side you do, in fact), I'm just not as comfortable with my support as you are, because I'm perhaps more aware of how tenuous my understanding of the subject really is.
That's news to me. So who funds the scientists' PR departments?
Well, they don't call them PR departments, true. They call them Environmental lobby groups. Groups like the David Suzuki Foundation in Canada, who do actually do good science, but also release press releases that rely more on PR gibberish than actual data. As I said earlier, I don't blame them for doing so, because they need to get their message in a format that most people understand. But it makes things harder for people like me who want to evaluate the evidence.
(1) I'm a law student, not a climatologist
Well, then your opinions on climatology aren't worth much then, are they?
That's exactly my problem. I want to become reasonably informed about global warming, but I don't have time to go get the appropriate degree, and nobody out there is boiling stuff down to layman's terms so I can make a reasonably informed decision. Instead we get the climate deniers on one hand, who think that volume=debate, and people like you on the other hand, who stoop to insult and "just trust me, I'm a scientist" rhetoric on the other hand. You didn't even bother to ask me which side of the debate I support, before attacking my position and making an argument from the perceived authority of "tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers", none of which I have ever read or am capable of understanding.
For the record, I believe that we should be drastically reducing carbon emissions to mitigate any effect humans are having on the change in climate. I've been intentionally obfuscating this position because (1) climate debates on slashdot always devolve into Holy Wars, thanks to people like you and (2) my support for this position is based more on risk assessment and other incidental effects of reducing carbon dependence than it is on a true understanding of the core of the debate, and this makes me uncomfortable.
True, but the problem right now is that the idiots are running the asylum. Evaluating public debate in America basically amounts to trying to decide which camp of idiots is more likely to be right than the other camp. In the context of the climate change issue, failure to back the right camp of idiots will likely have disastrous consequences, as it's the idiots we back who are going to make policy.
Indeed. Unfortunately, the stakes are high enough that we really need to figure it all out, and soon.
Except that the scientists have PR departments too, and what we get from the scientists is PR, and not actual evidence. This isn't the fault of the scientists, it's in part the fault of the sad state of scientific education (in North America, at any rate), the sheer complexity of the science involved (climate science is hard and few of us have time or inclination to become climatologists), the recent skew of the major North American media toward infotainment and newstainment instead of plain old truthy news reporting, and other reasons.
I can go check out your links, and even agree with them, but they mean almost nothing to me because I don't have any way to check the accuracy of the migratory bird data, no easy way to know whether Bergmann's Rule is controversial or settled, or know whether the effect described in the rule is attributable to climate exclusively or to other factors.
I don't know these things because (1) I'm a law student, not a climatologist (2) nobody in the media is talking about this kind of data and (3) nobody in the PR departments of the sciency people or their opponents is using this kind of data in their public debates.
What do?
Well to be fair, both sides of the debate have been using that fallacy, depending on how the weather has been in your local geographical area. It's THE major problem I've had with the climate change debate. The only public person I've heard who's actually tried to call people on it was Krugman over at the New York Times, who pointed out that by selecting your sample years carefully from the last 10-20 years, you can "prove" anything you want about the climate. He was arguing at the time against the anti-AGW crowd (as you might expect).
As for me, I'm inclined to think we do have some cause for concern, based on what little actual evidence I've seen from both sides of the debate. I'm by no means convinced that we have enough evidence to support one side or another. I also think we have some other very good reasons to reduce carbon emissions, including a need to reduce particulate emissions of all kinds (air pollution), reduce dependence on petroleum products (whose supplies are probably running out), reduce the "need" to colonize the Middle East (eliminate the causes of terrorism), etc.
Nuclear launch code?
12345
What?! I have the same code on my luggage!
In my teen and college years I would get up around 14-15 (that's 2-3 PM for you americans) on weekends and it took a lot of effort to go from my teenage 9-10:30 wakeup to getting up at 7 for some lectures in college, the only reason I pulled that off was because unlike HS it was actually subjects I wanted to learn about instead of random classes that someone else had decided I needed to take and which were often watered down to the point where there was little to nothing interesting left, as an example our HS biology class seemed to spend more time learning what the leaves of different trees looked like than anything useful (come on, I don't need to spend several hours in early-morning classes to learn how to identify birch trees, they're all over the place).
I don't normally nit-pick spelling and grammar, but what I quoted above from your post is one sentence. Please be kind to your readers and add proper punctuation! I actually tried to read that all in one breath. It didn't end well. ;-)