the data itself was at best flawed, or at worst a fraud (depending on PoV). Your cite does not disagree at all with what I just typed, and in fact agrees with me perfectly - the specific methodology was/is flat-out wrong.
"the original hockey stick... was not far off the mark. Most later temperature reconstructions fall within the error bars of the original hockey stick."
That statement is an endorsement of the methodology of the "hockey stick". The stick was not far off the mark, most later reconstructions are within its error bars. This statement is about as far from your "flawed, or at worst a fraud" as you can get. I see no similarity between your position and that of the cited article on this point.
I should add that, regardless of the initial impact events of 47,000 years ago when humans arrived, once established they did become part of a stable eco-system, with a stable population size, for over 40,000 years. It really was a sustainable lifestyle. I doubt that the current Western lifestyle will be sustainable for the next 100 years, never mind the next 40,000. All sources of energy we currently have - oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear fuels - will run out within the next few hundred years. Without some dramatic breakthroughs in energy technology, Western civilisation as we know it will come to an end in a relatively short space of time.
The papers I've read suggest that it was forest that was burnt to produce grassland which animals would graze on, in turn making it easier to hunt them. The aim was not to get rid of megafauna, since there is some evidence that humans ate the megafauna. Changing climate was primarily responsible for changes and erosion of soil, not humans, although they did have some localised effect (ref).
Except for the part where they hunted many of their food species to extinction, right?
If you're referring to Australian megafauna, then the primary cause of death was the first humans in Australia burning the landscape, not hunting for food. And that was 47,000 years ago. After that they lived as part of a stable eco-system, and as far as I know, have never hunted any of their food species to extinction.
Yes, it has been shown that the English are genetically closer to Dutch and Germans than Welsh and Scots. BBC article link That's a poke in the eye for the BNP (speaking of which, I'd love to see Nick Griffin on Who do you think you are?
Every one of them left an environmental mark on the world around them.
Yes, but the environmental mark was, on average, a lot smaller than modern living. The Australian Aborigines had a way of life that was essentially unchanged for tens of thousands of years. The lifestyle consisted of finding water sources, hunting for food, and collecting wild growing berries and fruits from the land (not farming). Everything that they constructed was made from wood and other natural, biodegradable materials, from completely renewable and sustainable sources. Without intervention, they would probably have continued their lifestyle for tens of thousands of more years. Modern living is not sustainable - we are facing Peak Oil in the next few decades, we have an estimated 20 years or so of coltan supplies left, and we are using up many other limited resources relatively quickly. Our current lifestyle is based on consumption of resources that we can't replace. The Aborigine way of life would still be viable in 200 years, our Western way of life may well not be (people will do their best to adapt, but that adaptation may involve going back to a lifestyle of 200 years ago, with a strong focus on manual agriculture and labour).
Native cultures were famous for "slash and burn" agriculture
Of course I meant 250 commits per second, not per minute. That's still assuming the best case of one transaction being written every rotation of the disk. Actual world results will probably be lower.
/tmp is actually partially backed by RAM, which is extremely convenient and useful from time to time, when you want a little piece of lightning-fast filesystem space
Depends on your application. Benchmarks can often show that the regular (cached) file system outperforms tmpfs.
or want to eliminate disk as a variable in some sort of timing test.
If the mount is backed by hard drive (as tmpfs is) then the space might get swapped to disk, so to eliminate that you need a ram disk. It isn't difficult, but the ram drive size is fixed.
Maybe you didn't include Roman Catholicism because "There are some things you just don't question. Period." happens to be true when those things are said by the Pope?
Then those of us that learn and go on to be successful get attacked for making too much money.
People don't get attacked for making too much money, they get attacked for doing something that other people feel is impossible for them to achieve. It is seen as exploiting some kind of unfairness of the world. People don't criticise sports stars for making millions a year, because there is a feeling that they have "earned" it through physical activity, and the general idea that if only the average person trained every day and worked hard enough, they'd be able to do that too. Science and maths, on the other hand, is different - the ordinary person doesn't understand it, thinks that it involves sitting on your ass all day expending no effort, and thinks that, no matter how hard they tried, they would never be able to do it. The reality is that, no matter how hard they tried, they would probably never be a pro-sportsman either, but the perception is that it is possible, because kicking or hitting a ball looks easy, whereas those math symbols look hard.
The hero worship of American sports idols is about as close to elitism as you get in modern society. Is there any rational reason why a sporting figure's opinion on any topic other than their own sport should be given any more weight than the opinion of a random member of the population? And yet sporting figures are frequently displayed in the media in a capacity outside of their respective sport, even to the extent of advertising cosmetic products, and for some reason, the public assumes that the (paid) opinion of a sporting celebrity on a cosmetic product is more valid than that of a dermatologist.
The conclusion that we are making the world warmer certainly does not depend on reconstructions of temperature prior to direct records.
Most researchers would agree that while the original hockey stick can - and has - been improved in a number of ways, it was not far off the mark. Most later temperature reconstructions fall within the error bars of the original hockey stick. Some show far more variability leading up to the 20th century than the hockey stick, but none suggest that it has been warmer at any time in the past 1000 years than in the last part of the 20th century.
The "Hockey Stick" was investigated by the 2006 report of the US National Academy of Science, which found:
the key conclusion is the same: it's hotter now than it has been for at least 1000 years.
The thing about these drives is that they are more expensive ($/GB) even than registered ECC DDR2/3 RAM, which obviously is going to be even faster.
That only means it would probably be better to use RAM for read-only applications. An application that needs to commit a write to a database, ensuring that the bits are actually written to a physical medium, will be be able to utilise flash rather than a hard disk. A lot of database servers would gain increased performance from such an arrangement.
Yahoo has been explicit in stating that the satellite image license they have allows tracing. Maybe Google's license doesn't say the same. 'Bulk use' is a different thing to tracing - it's probably defined as downloading many tiles covering an area and caching them locally, like Maemo Mapper and some other local applications can do. This bypasses the Google interface entirely, which is probably not the greatest thing for Google's advertising based service...
The act of streaming a DVD would involve decrypting the DVD in the first place, which is what would be considered copyright infringement. The argument of streaming is legally different; most legal systems incorporate an exemption to copyright for caching, and in the case of a movie, streaming does involve sending a copy of the movie, rather than the output of the movie. If playing a video game over the network is a violation of copyright, then using X or VLC to log in to a remote server and play a commercial videogame would be illegal. I can understand that playing a movie over X might be considered a copyright violation, since a copy of the stream is transferred between two computers, but with a videogame there is only one copy of the copyrighted work residing in the remote server - no local copy is made.
Why would you assume a license fee is being paid? If I owned a video game arcade, and rented out time playing Mario Kart on a N64 by the hour, I would be under no obligation to obtain a license from Nintendo or pay Nintendo any money (in my legal jurisdiction, others may vary). Now if I installed an N64 in a server room, and had a TV and joypad in a different player room, I still would have no license obligation towards Nintendo. This is exactly the same, except the "other room" happens to be hundreds of kilometres away.
Have Nintendo ever licensed a Mario game for a non-Nintendo console? Why do you assume they would have done so now?
One of the most interesting aspects of this is running Mario Kart 64... I doubt Nintendo has licensed a Mario game out, so is this running from a real cart? Via an emulator or real N64? Either way I can't see Nintendo being pleased.
Chrome is better optimised for small screens and maximising window real estate. I actually like the "throwing the title bar away and integrating tabs with window decorations" of Chrome - it gives a couple of cm more vertical space for the html render window. As does hiding the bookmarks bar, and status/download bars by default. Going back to a default Firefox layout now reminds me of those old 3D wireframe Elite style shootemups, and how they used to have huge blocks of static graphics at the top and bottom of the screen to speed up the frame rate.. ok, I'm exaggerating a little, but on my 17 inch monitor the difference in default vertical space is 28mm, that's a slightly >10% increase in vspace with Chrome.
I'm surprised the guy rips into the bug calling the Google API and even says "Here's the government's chart done right" without mentioning that piecharts are a bad way to represent comparative data like this in the first place 3D pie charts may look fancy, but they make it more difficult to compare the actual data (which is supposed to be the whole point of plotting it). They are even worse than 2D barcharts, at least with 2D you are only looking at data being relative to slice area, and not being rendered at an angle - look at the edge in the plot he uses, there's as much if not more purple on display as the supposedly larger green slice. What's wrong with a bar chart for visualising comparative data like this? Surely it would give the reader a much more informed quick overview of spending?
Sony did have 25% of the laptop market 8 years ago and I used to see Vaios everywhere so it's a bit surprising that Sony have fallen so far. The 2008 sales figures:
Rank Vendor Market share 1 HP 20.8% 2 Dell 15.1% 3 Acer 14.6% 4 Toshiba 9.3% 5 Lenovo 7.5% 6 Fujitsu 5.2% 7 Apple 4.6% 8 Asus 4.3% 9 Sony 4.2%
Almost every one of those other manufacturers will be shipping IE. So technically you're right, Apple at 4.6% is a slightly bigger dent than Sony's 4.2%, but it's not a huge difference.
Indeed. An ipod touch battery replacement from Apple is £66.13 in the UK (equiv. US$107). That's probably higher than the profit margin on a brand new device. And the great thing about it, is that the cost is totally hidden from the initial purchase - the majority of people have no idea that batteries degrade over time, and won't even think about Total Cost of Ownership.
What one can deduce from your references is that none has any bearing whatsoever on the core texts of Christianity.
The core text of Christianity - the Bible - says that homosexuals are to be put to death. This is very clear, and has been used by Saints, Bishops, Emperors, and other leaders of the Church to justify putting homosexuals to death throughout the ages.
You do *not* reference canon law, but focus on decisions of (at the time) political bodies who had a relation to the church.
These were not just "political bodies" in a modern sense. Bishops, Saints, Emperors, and other Church leaders in Christian theocracies decreed that, based upon the Bible, homosexuality was punishable by death under Christian law. Canon 34 not only endorsed Leviticus but also interpreted Paul's Epistle to the Romans as advocating capital punishment Who do you think made up the Canons? You can't just dismiss laws that you don't like as being made by "political bodies" or "not the word of Jesus" - Jesus did not write the religious laws, God did not write the religious laws, so if you're going to dismiss one as being the failed work of a human, then logically you must dismiss them all.
where exactly did Justinian find 70.000 homosexuals in antiquity ? I mean that would be the population of several countries at the time, and those would all have to be homosexual
You are wrong about the population figures. The estimated world population in the year 1.A.D is 200 million people. In 1000 A.D. it is 310 million people. Rome alone fought a single war in 90A.D. or so in which 300,000 people were killed. At its peak the plague of the Justinian era was recorded to have killed 10,000 people a day in Constantinople alone. Besides, the conversion of the 70,000 is well documented:
The quote actually states that the law was used against his political enemies as well as homosexuals, so it isn't necessarily the case that all of the dead were homosexual. And obviously the example given of 70,000 people forcibly converted in a single campaign does not mean that they were all homosexuals either.
You're right, of course, that some Christians did persecute homosexuals
An understatement. In the majority of the Christian nations of the world homosexuality has been illegal for most of the past two thousand years.
Yes, I should have included Rosa Parks. And I should have included Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison for the "crime" of protesting against apartheid.
Slashdot Mirror
the data itself was at best flawed, or at worst a fraud (depending on PoV). Your cite does not disagree at all with what I just typed, and in fact agrees with me perfectly - the specific methodology was/is flat-out wrong.
"the original hockey stick... was not far off the mark. Most later temperature reconstructions fall within the error bars of the original hockey stick."
That statement is an endorsement of the methodology of the "hockey stick". The stick was not far off the mark, most later reconstructions are within its error bars. This statement is about as far from your "flawed, or at worst a fraud" as you can get. I see no similarity between your position and that of the cited article on this point.
I should add that, regardless of the initial impact events of 47,000 years ago when humans arrived, once established they did become part of a stable eco-system, with a stable population size, for over 40,000 years. It really was a sustainable lifestyle. I doubt that the current Western lifestyle will be sustainable for the next 100 years, never mind the next 40,000. All sources of energy we currently have - oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear fuels - will run out within the next few hundred years. Without some dramatic breakthroughs in energy technology, Western civilisation as we know it will come to an end in a relatively short space of time.
The papers I've read suggest that it was forest that was burnt to produce grassland which animals would graze on, in turn making it easier to hunt them. The aim was not to get rid of megafauna, since there is some evidence that humans ate the megafauna. Changing climate was primarily responsible for changes and erosion of soil, not humans, although they did have some localised effect (ref).
Except for the part where they hunted many of their food species to extinction, right?
If you're referring to Australian megafauna, then the primary cause of death was the first humans in Australia burning the landscape, not hunting for food. And that was 47,000 years ago. After that they lived as part of a stable eco-system, and as far as I know, have never hunted any of their food species to extinction.
Yes, it has been shown that the English are genetically closer to Dutch and Germans than Welsh and Scots. BBC article link That's a poke in the eye for the BNP (speaking of which, I'd love to see Nick Griffin on Who do you think you are?
Every one of them left an environmental mark on the world around them.
Yes, but the environmental mark was, on average, a lot smaller than modern living. The Australian Aborigines had a way of life that was essentially unchanged for tens of thousands of years. The lifestyle consisted of finding water sources, hunting for food, and collecting wild growing berries and fruits from the land (not farming). Everything that they constructed was made from wood and other natural, biodegradable materials, from completely renewable and sustainable sources. Without intervention, they would probably have continued their lifestyle for tens of thousands of more years. Modern living is not sustainable - we are facing Peak Oil in the next few decades, we have an estimated 20 years or so of coltan supplies left, and we are using up many other limited resources relatively quickly. Our current lifestyle is based on consumption of resources that we can't replace. The Aborigine way of life would still be viable in 200 years, our Western way of life may well not be (people will do their best to adapt, but that adaptation may involve going back to a lifestyle of 200 years ago, with a strong focus on manual agriculture and labour).
Native cultures were famous for "slash and burn" agriculture
Many (most?) native cultures did not practice farming, instead living off wildly growing foods and hunting. Some Aborigines practiced "fire farming" in the last 5,000 years (after 40,000 of not farming in any sense of the word). Researchers suggest that this was sustainable "Aboriginal people's use of fire involved developing a self-sustaining mosaic of burnt and unburnt areas that reduced the damaging effects of fire". The fact that it was a stable way of life for 5,000 years suggests that it was more sustainable than the current fossil fuel based lifestyle.
Of course I meant 250 commits per second, not per minute. That's still assuming the best case of one transaction being written every rotation of the disk. Actual world results will probably be lower.
In an application where you need to ensure data is written to somewhere physical on commit the database will call fsync(). This can only be done 250 times per minute on a 15k rpm disk drive. That limits the database to 250 commits a minute. Battery backed or flash cache increases performance here - "The really enormous performance increases that have been found for update-heavy database loads come from another hardware enhancement, namely the RAID controller with battery-backed cache.... On a test involving a workload heavy on updates, with transactions involving relatively few updates, the introduction of this cache increased performance by a factor of 20."
Depends on your application. Benchmarks can often show that the regular (cached) file system outperforms tmpfs.
or want to eliminate disk as a variable in some sort of timing test.
If the mount is backed by hard drive (as tmpfs is) then the space might get swapped to disk, so to eliminate that you need a ram disk. It isn't difficult, but the ram drive size is fixed.
And I'm not even including the non-fundie Roman Catholicism
Papal infallibility
Maybe you didn't include Roman Catholicism because "There are some things you just don't question. Period." happens to be true when those things are said by the Pope?
Then those of us that learn and go on to be successful get attacked for making too much money.
People don't get attacked for making too much money, they get attacked for doing something that other people feel is impossible for them to achieve. It is seen as exploiting some kind of unfairness of the world. People don't criticise sports stars for making millions a year, because there is a feeling that they have "earned" it through physical activity, and the general idea that if only the average person trained every day and worked hard enough, they'd be able to do that too. Science and maths, on the other hand, is different - the ordinary person doesn't understand it, thinks that it involves sitting on your ass all day expending no effort, and thinks that, no matter how hard they tried, they would never be able to do it. The reality is that, no matter how hard they tried, they would probably never be a pro-sportsman either, but the perception is that it is possible, because kicking or hitting a ball looks easy, whereas those math symbols look hard.
The hero worship of American sports idols is about as close to elitism as you get in modern society. Is there any rational reason why a sporting figure's opinion on any topic other than their own sport should be given any more weight than the opinion of a random member of the population? And yet sporting figures are frequently displayed in the media in a capacity outside of their respective sport, even to the extent of advertising cosmetic products, and for some reason, the public assumes that the (paid) opinion of a sporting celebrity on a cosmetic product is more valid than that of a dermatologist.
Wrong. Climate myths: The 'hockey stick' graph has been proven wrong, quote:
The conclusion that we are making the world warmer certainly does not depend on reconstructions of temperature prior to direct records.
Most researchers would agree that while the original hockey stick can - and has - been improved in a number of ways, it was not far off the mark. Most later temperature reconstructions fall within the error bars of the original hockey stick. Some show far more variability leading up to the 20th century than the hockey stick, but none suggest that it has been warmer at any time in the past 1000 years than in the last part of the 20th century.
The "Hockey Stick" was investigated by the 2006 report of the US National Academy of Science, which found:
the key conclusion is the same: it's hotter now than it has been for at least 1000 years.
The thing about these drives is that they are more expensive ($/GB) even than registered ECC DDR2/3 RAM, which obviously is going to be even faster.
That only means it would probably be better to use RAM for read-only applications. An application that needs to commit a write to a database, ensuring that the bits are actually written to a physical medium, will be be able to utilise flash rather than a hard disk. A lot of database servers would gain increased performance from such an arrangement.
Yahoo has been explicit in stating that the satellite image license they have allows tracing. Maybe Google's license doesn't say the same. 'Bulk use' is a different thing to tracing - it's probably defined as downloading many tiles covering an area and caching them locally, like Maemo Mapper and some other local applications can do. This bypasses the Google interface entirely, which is probably not the greatest thing for Google's advertising based service...
The act of streaming a DVD would involve decrypting the DVD in the first place, which is what would be considered copyright infringement. The argument of streaming is legally different; most legal systems incorporate an exemption to copyright for caching, and in the case of a movie, streaming does involve sending a copy of the movie, rather than the output of the movie. If playing a video game over the network is a violation of copyright, then using X or VLC to log in to a remote server and play a commercial videogame would be illegal. I can understand that playing a movie over X might be considered a copyright violation, since a copy of the stream is transferred between two computers, but with a videogame there is only one copy of the copyrighted work residing in the remote server - no local copy is made.
Why would you assume a license fee is being paid? If I owned a video game arcade, and rented out time playing Mario Kart on a N64 by the hour, I would be under no obligation to obtain a license from Nintendo or pay Nintendo any money (in my legal jurisdiction, others may vary). Now if I installed an N64 in a server room, and had a TV and joypad in a different player room, I still would have no license obligation towards Nintendo. This is exactly the same, except the "other room" happens to be hundreds of kilometres away.
Have Nintendo ever licensed a Mario game for a non-Nintendo console? Why do you assume they would have done so now?
One of the most interesting aspects of this is running Mario Kart 64... I doubt Nintendo has licensed a Mario game out, so is this running from a real cart? Via an emulator or real N64? Either way I can't see Nintendo being pleased.
Chrome is better optimised for small screens and maximising window real estate. I actually like the "throwing the title bar away and integrating tabs with window decorations" of Chrome - it gives a couple of cm more vertical space for the html render window. As does hiding the bookmarks bar, and status/download bars by default. Going back to a default Firefox layout now reminds me of those old 3D wireframe Elite style shootemups, and how they used to have huge blocks of static graphics at the top and bottom of the screen to speed up the frame rate.. ok, I'm exaggerating a little, but on my 17 inch monitor the difference in default vertical space is 28mm, that's a slightly >10% increase in vspace with Chrome.
I'm surprised the guy rips into the bug calling the Google API and even says "Here's the government's chart done right" without mentioning that piecharts are a bad way to represent comparative data like this in the first place 3D pie charts may look fancy, but they make it more difficult to compare the actual data (which is supposed to be the whole point of plotting it). They are even worse than 2D barcharts, at least with 2D you are only looking at data being relative to slice area, and not being rendered at an angle - look at the edge in the plot he uses, there's as much if not more purple on display as the supposedly larger green slice. What's wrong with a bar chart for visualising comparative data like this? Surely it would give the reader a much more informed quick overview of spending?
Sony did have 25% of the laptop market 8 years ago and I used to see Vaios everywhere so it's a bit surprising that Sony have fallen so far. The 2008 sales figures:
Rank Vendor Market share
1 HP 20.8%
2 Dell 15.1%
3 Acer 14.6%
4 Toshiba 9.3%
5 Lenovo 7.5%
6 Fujitsu 5.2%
7 Apple 4.6%
8 Asus 4.3%
9 Sony 4.2%
Almost every one of those other manufacturers will be shipping IE. So technically you're right, Apple at 4.6% is a slightly bigger dent than Sony's 4.2%, but it's not a huge difference.
Indeed. An ipod touch battery replacement from Apple is £66.13 in the UK (equiv. US$107). That's probably higher than the profit margin on a brand new device. And the great thing about it, is that the cost is totally hidden from the initial purchase - the majority of people have no idea that batteries degrade over time, and won't even think about Total Cost of Ownership.
"King of the Jews." That's not a crime.
The Jews considered it blasphemous that Jesus claimed to be both God and the Jewish Messiah. asked directly by the Sanhedrin if he was the Christ, Son of God. Jesus responded, as in Mark 14:60-62: "And Jesus said, "I am;" Blasphemy was a crime punishable by death under Jewish law. The other stuff about it being political may well be true, but it doesn't negate the fact that claiming to be Son of God was considered blasphemous and hence illegal by the authorities of the day.
What one can deduce from your references is that none has any bearing whatsoever on the core texts of Christianity.
The core text of Christianity - the Bible - says that homosexuals are to be put to death. This is very clear, and has been used by Saints, Bishops, Emperors, and other leaders of the Church to justify putting homosexuals to death throughout the ages.
You do *not* reference canon law, but focus on decisions of (at the time) political bodies who had a relation to the church.
These were not just "political bodies" in a modern sense. Bishops, Saints, Emperors, and other Church leaders in Christian theocracies decreed that, based upon the Bible, homosexuality was punishable by death under Christian law. Canon 34 not only endorsed Leviticus but also interpreted Paul's Epistle to the Romans as advocating capital punishment Who do you think made up the Canons? You can't just dismiss laws that you don't like as being made by "political bodies" or "not the word of Jesus" - Jesus did not write the religious laws, God did not write the religious laws, so if you're going to dismiss one as being the failed work of a human, then logically you must dismiss them all.
where exactly did Justinian find 70.000 homosexuals in antiquity ? I mean that would be the population of several countries at the time, and those would all have to be homosexual
You are wrong about the population figures. The estimated world population in the year 1.A.D is 200 million people. In 1000 A.D. it is 310 million people. Rome alone fought a single war in 90A.D. or so in which 300,000 people were killed. At its peak the plague of the Justinian era was recorded to have killed 10,000 people a day in Constantinople alone. Besides, the conversion of the 70,000 is well documented:
efforts directed against them resulted in the forcible baptism of 70,000 persons in Asia Minor alone.
John of Ephesus, Inquisitor, began a campaign of forced conversion in 542... 70,000 people were forced to convert.
The quote actually states that the law was used against his political enemies as well as homosexuals, so it isn't necessarily the case that all of the dead were homosexual. And obviously the example given of 70,000 people forcibly converted in a single campaign does not mean that they were all homosexuals either.
You're right, of course, that some Christians did persecute homosexuals
An understatement. In the majority of the Christian nations of the world homosexuality has been illegal for most of the past two thousand years.
Yes, I should have included Rosa Parks. And I should have included Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison for the "crime" of protesting against apartheid.