For example, I could attack carbon dating as being an unproven technique. If we haven't watched the radioactive decay of one from of carbon into another for thousands of years, how can we be sure that carbon dating works? We can accept it because it is confirmed by a hundred other ways that we estimate age of a fossil.
*And* because we have a solid, well-verified model of how radioactive decay works, which supports it. It's not just bits of evidence - it's been connected together into an verified explanation of exactly what is happening and why (at least, on scales larger than quantum physics).
The distinction between this and climatology is that we don't have a solid, well-verified model of how a planetary ecology functions and its effects on the climate. Planets are much more complicated than atoms; we know how atoms work, but planets are still something of a puzzle.
For example, they talk plenty about global warming and green house gasses during the entire history of life on Earth.
The evidence gets weaker as you go back in time; I was just picking up on the points you raised (to cover every possible data point would take weeks).
There is compelling evidence that tropical mountain glaciers are now smaller than they have been in thousands of years.
That is distinct from evidence that this is directly related to global climate changes - over the past several thousands of years, the temperature has varied quite a lot. It's a different point to the one you raised - it's a relevant data point for research into the possible effects of global climate changes, but not a conclusive one (because a lot of stuff has happened over that time period and you're back to the three possibilities implied by a correlation again).
You also talk about five mass extinctions. Rapid climate change is a leading theory as a cause of End Ordovician, End Permian, and Late Devonian extinctions
Yes, but it's just a theory. The evidence for it isn't particularly compelling, and there's no appreciable scientific consensus about it being likely (as opposed to the meteor impact, which most scientists in the field think is probably what happened that time). We're terribly short on data about what happened that long ago.
I'm amazed you can quote mass extinctions as strong evidence that global warming wont cause mass extinctions this time around.
No, you missed my point there. The point is that mass extinctions don't cause the biosphere to stop functioning. It's survived several of them so far, and each time it has recovered fine. That means we're not looking at a doomsday scenario here. Even if global warming is true, it probably will not be as bad as some people have been speculating - climate change is not permanent. Furthermore, the fact that the biosphere has recovered each time indicates that there are stabilising effects at work here. We do not understand these effects very well yet. The interesting question is: when and how will they stabilise the short-term changes that we have been observing?
I'm left guessing how you came to believe things like mass extinctions show global warming wont cause another
You're *still* talking about belief in a scientific context. I've said several times that this attitude is the problem. There is no belief here. I am not compelled to pick one option and assume it is true. I consider the range of plausible options, and what the evidence says about the probability of them - and in this case, I find the evidence to be inconclusive. That means it's an interesting question which deserves research to find the answer. It doesn't mean I have to guess.
or why you thought glaciers were only smaller than they have been during the last hundred years
The theory is that the child is harmed above and beyond the original incident because they have to deal with the shame of knowing the whole world gets to see it.
That's an argument in favour of a law to prohibit publishing certain images. It is not an argument in favour of a law to prohibit posessing certain images (which is the case in question).
It is reasonable to ban the publication of images of a person, without their consent, when such images would constitute an invasion of privacy. So far as I am aware, this is already the case for all people, not just children. Since these actions are already illegal, what is accomplished by banning the posession of images of children?
Another case: if you draw a picture of a stylised, fictional child with no clothing, you can be jailed for years and forced to register as a sex offender.
Are you sure? I'd never heard of such a thing.
Japanese lolicon manga (extremely popular over there for some reason I still don't understand). There've been a number of cases in connection with it in various parts of the world; I'm too tired to hunt for details right now. The essential point is that people have gone to jail for "pornography" that did not and could not possibly contain any real children or even anything that looked convincingly like a real child. I find this to be rather absurd - who is this supposed to be protecting? People who don't exist? Ink?
These next points aren't based on actual cases, but rather they are hypothetical questions designed to illustrate the difficult points. Attempting to answer them should lead to understanding of the problems in attempting to legislate in this field.
What is the legal and ethical status of a fictional female who, at the age of 60, has transplanted their personality into the body of a 12-year-old girl and proceeds to have sex? Is it legal to draw pictures of this character performing such actions? Should it be? Can anybody form a coherent explanation that covers both this case and the one above? (I can't form any that would allow such images to be banned)
How about if we make our hypothetical female non-fictional (and presume that the technology for body transplants exists)? What is the legal and ethical status of creating pornographic videos of this person with their consent?
Let us further suppose that the 12-year-old body has an identical twin, containing a girl that is genuinely 12 years old. What images should now be banned? Presume that it is impossible to tell from the images which girl they contain.
Would this scenario require that the current anti-child-porn laws in the US be struck down as unconstitutional abridgement of the right of a citizen to give their consent for sexual encounters? If not, why not? If it would, why are those laws not unconstitutional now?
(I would be interesting in hearing from anybody who can answer that lot in a meaningful fashion without either demonstrating that the current laws are stupid, or degenerating into incoherent ranting.
Of course, if you're a typical American fundamentalist Christian, like 38% of us, you can't believe any of the data going back more than a few thousand years because it contradicts literal interpretation of the Bible.
As a typical approximately-objective scentific type, I'm disdainful of data that only spans 750k years when we believe that the biosphere is around 4 billion years old (counting from the point at which bacterial life is estimated to have first appeared). Our current crop of large mammalian life is about 65 million years old (counting from the last mass extinction). 750k years is very short by comparison. It's interesting data - but it's important to remember that we're looking at a tiny fraction of the history of life on this planet. There is so much more that we don't know about. Our data may not be representative; as a statistical sample, it would be considered a very poorly chosen one that would be expected to introduce bias. Unfortunately it's the only data we've got.
Wikipedia.org has lots more stuff, and you just implied that none of it was compelling.
Because it's not, in the sense that you mean. That is, it is not compelling evidence for global warming - a lot of the evidence is compelling in some sense but it doesn't directly indicate that the global warming hypothesis (increasing carbon dioxide levels will cause the temperature to rise over the entire planet) is true. Here's why, to pick on your two examples:
Over 750,000 years, mean temperature and CO2 levels correlated extremely closely
This is compelling evidence that one or more of the following are true:
CO2 levels control temperature
Temperature controls CO2 levels
Both temperature and CO2 levels are tightly controlled by some unspecified third process
(There are the three standard options for any strong correlation between two factors; the platitude that goes along with them is "evidence of correlation is not proof of causation")
It is not compelling evidence that the first of these three things is true (which is the one postulated by the global warming hypothesis). As such, it is not directly relevant as evidence here. It's just another thing which says global warming is *possible*, and that we should attempt to figure out what is actually happening. Climatology modelling is primarily concerned with pinning down which of these three things are true, and so far the results are "probably", "maybe", and "maybe" respectively.
Mountain glaciers have melted away an average of 13 meters of thickness since 1960
That's compelling evidence that increasing temperatures melts glaciers in the short term (which here means anything less than a century), but no more than that. It doesn't say anything about the causes of the temperature increase, so it's not directly relevant there. I didn't bother to consider short-term effects of global warming because frankly, they aren't very interesting. Losing a few million tons of ice or increasing the sea level by a few centimeters per year isn't a big deal unless it happens for an extended period, so the important question is: how will the global ecology react to this change, and what will happen next? Will it tend to exacerbate the problem or to correct it? There are plenty of theories for both options, but little evidence so far. We cannot use this data point to infer that glaciers will continue to melt for the next hundred years - that might happen, but then again it might not, if the melting ice causes other conditions to change. So that's another "maybe".
It's important to keep in mind that we're aware of five major catastrophies occurring in the history of this planet, which wiped out most of the surface life (one was probably an asteroid impact; we don't know the causes of the other four yet). Any of them would make global warming look insignifican
Then again, many (probably most) of us are American, and we are the guys who:
- Believe that evolution is "junk science" - Don't believe in global warming
People who use the word "belief" about scientific studies don't help matters.
Obligatory summary of "global warming" research status: there is compelling evidence that the planet is warmer than our geological records indicate it should be, and compelling evidence that the carbon dioxide level is higher than it has ever been in our records (but in both cases, the evidence is merely compelling, not proof - our records aren't that good). From our current understanding of science, we know that a bare, lifeless rock with an oxygen/nitrogen/carbon dioxide atmosphere will become hotter if you change the ratio to increase the carbon dioxide content. That's what we know.
There is a theory that the same behaviour will happen on a planet with an active biosphere, but that's a much harder theory to prove. There have been many studies on the subject. The best answer they have come up with is "it should be possible". We can't pack a planet with an active biosphere into a lab to study it, and we can't simulate the entire thing on a computer yet (most of the studies have been based around approximate simulations). It's quite a difficult theory to prove or disprove. Research continues.
There's a rough consensus between scientists in the field that the theory is convincing - they think it's likely to be approximately true, if they could just find a way to prove it. It's probably also not perfect yet; planets are large, complicated, and they have many parameters. There may be important details which have not been discovered yet.
Nobody knows whether or not it's actually happening like this. We've got increased temperature and carbon dioxide, but that doesn't prove that one caused the other - it's equally possible that increased temperature is causing the carbon dioxide increase (there's a theory that says this is possible, little evidence for it so far), or that some unknown third cause is responsible for them both (no good theories here that I'm aware of, but this sort of thing happens all the time in science). Just because it *could* happen doesn't mean that it *is* happening. We've got several theories that say how it might be happening. I am not aware of anybody coming up with a way to tell whether or not it *is* happening, so far (it's very hard to construct experiments to prove anything about a planetary ecology when you've only got one of them to look at).
There are numerous theories about what will happen over the next hundred years and little evidence to support any of them. Few scientists agree on anything when it comes to the question of possible long-term consequences of global warming. It's probably too early to be asking that question.
Talking about whether or not people or scientists "believe" in global warming is confusing, unhelpful, and wrong. No belief is involved in science, and the question is too simplified anyway. The details I've sketched out here are important - to science, global warming remains an open question (much like the question of how gravity works) - a lot of people are working towards an answer, they've made considerable progress, but they haven't got one yet. So far the progress indicates a firm "maybe". Trying to turn that into a "yes" or "no" question of faith is not only grossly unscientific, it may serve to retard the progress of science; bad political interference at this point in the research would be extremely unhelpful.
The very best thing that politicians could do about global warming is push more funding into research on climatology, ecology, computer modelling, data collection, and other related disciplines. That should help get some better answers sooner.
The worst thing they could do is try to cut out the scientists and let politicians and laymen decide whether or not it's happening.
Peer to peer is flooded with the the stuff... and often as not it is impossible to distinguish from the legal porn or other content (until, of course, you have already downloaded it). The same content with different names and hashes comes up over and over again.
This is actually quite puzzling. Why would anybody want to spread this stuff on the file sharing networks under confusing names? What exactly is this supposed to accomplish?
The only thing I can think of is that somebody is trying to incite people to fear that it is spreading. That motive would place the blame on agents of the government. Even for the bozos currently in charge of the US, that seems a bit unlikely... but why else would anybody do it?
In other words, if they want to stop child porn they ought to:
* Target the producers
* Target the ones making pictures of actual sexual acts
Still wrong. They should be targetting the ones who are coercing children into sexual acts (ie, statutory rape). There is no evidence that merely holding a camera is intrinsically harmful. (And if it's coincidentally harmful, that's a conspiracy rape charge). Anti-pornography laws just don't make any kind of sense here - if the action *was* harmful, then it's *already* illegal. If it was not already illegal then it's not harmful, so what is the point in outlawing it?
Currently, if you see somebody molesting a child, it is a crime for you to take a photograph to be used as evidence.
Another case: if you draw a picture of a stylised, fictional child with no clothing, you can be jailed for years and forced to register as a sex offender. Unless it's a parody, when it becomes protected free speech in the US.
You didn't get your EE degree for hammering some nails to string RS-232C, any more than a doctor gets their degree to treat a common cold in a healthy 8-year old. In the same fashion, I didn't get my CS degree to write Swing UIs. Did our educations tangentially cover these things? Yep, they did, but they're a) not our core competencies and b) can be done by someone who is literate and capable of following a simple single sheet of instructions.
Surprisingly few people are capable of reading a simple sheet of instructions. Fewer still are capable of following them correctly.
Well, at least it's surprising until you've done tech support for a couple of years.
That there is such a level of vitriol against people who still run Win98.
Because the average win98 user accumulates one new trojan/worm every couple of weeks. There are millions of win98 boxes in the world and most of them are relaying spam. People who relay spam through sheer idiocy are hated. This should not be a surprise. Death's too good for them.
Universally appalling? Check the facts. In almost everything that Microsoft pursues, they eventually become a large, dominant player.
I have checked the facts. Microsoft become a large dominant player who LOSES BILLIONS OF DOLLARS EVERY YEAR. By any reasonable measure, that is a disaster. Where did you get this idea that the objective was to make the biggest loss?
Any idiot can become a large player if they can spend money like water and don't have to show a profit. Microsoft do not appear to have figured out how to do it any other way (with the exception of Windows and Office - I can only presume that they don't understand how to duplicate that feat).
As for this console wars thing, look at Sony et al. They are going to have to subsidize their consoles heavily too.
I have looked at Sony. They broke even. They did not lose billions of dollars. Breaking even is unimpressive, but it's adequete - shareholders can be satisfied with that.
Microsoft is just playing the game; they've done it in the past, and they'll do it again. Look at everything microsoft "sucks" at first. Look at it 2-3 years later.
We are looking at it 2-3 years later. The Xbox has reached end-of-life and been replaced. It did not become profitable. It lost FOUR BILLION DOLLARS. The product was a miserable failure. It did not result in recovering the costs through game sales (although a number of non-Microsoft companies did manage to make a profit from it, such as nvidia). In the past, Microsoft has done the exact same thing. They have had only two products which made significant profits: Windows and Office. Ever. That's a fact taken right from their SEC filings, which you can look up yourself if you want.
But I do agree with you on one point: they'll do it again. And in 2-3 years, when the Xbox 360 has lost 4+x billion dollars, people like you will still be saying "look at it 2-3 years later".
But that it's scope is way too limit to warrent a political party.
The Pirate Party is really more of a pressure group. They'll never control the government, but they can and probably will make it very hard for any government to act against their interests (which should prove to be an effective counterbalance to bribes from the media cartels). They run for elections because Sweden's electoral system encourages this behaviour; it gets them into places where they can get their message across and forces the other parties to come up with answers.
I hope noone ever gets voted into parliament anywhere based on such a narrow issue
Sweden disagrees with you. Their electoral system has been specifically designed to get single-issue parties into parliament. They get a couple of seats, and trade votes with the major parties (so, the minor party will follow the major party's line in exchange for the major party taking on their cause; this can often result in a coalition of parties that would not otherwise have held a majority in parliament). This is primarily of significance with the environmentalism minority, but there's no reason why it should not apply to others.
It's about as sane as any other representational democracy, and helps keep minorities satisfied.
The XBox is a good example - they sucked it initially, then basically poured money and effort into it till they became a dominant player in the market.
I wouldn't call tied for distant second in a three player market a "dominant player".
And I wouldn't call a four billion dollar loss a "dominant player". Other phrases come to mind, like "act of gross stupidity" and "shareholder lawsuit". Someday, Microsoft's universally appalling performance in everything but Windows and Office is going to come back and bite them - they sink billions of dollars of other people's money every year into these schemes, and haven't had anything to show for it yet. If they refocussed on their two profitable products and axed everything else, their shareholders would become vastly richer. The cultist attitude at Microsoft (that has so far prevented this from happening) cannot last forever.
We don't; culling affected cows has always been and will always be a viable solution for BSE, so there is no demand for a cure.
Whenever the media sees research into CJD, they translate it into "Mad Cow disease". This is nonsense; there is still no proof that they are even related - just a strong suspicion that there is some connection to one particular kind of CJD because they look awfully similar and nobody has come up with a better theory that fits the facts. The "classical" CJD has been confirmed as unrelated to BSE.
This is research into cracking the puzzle of CJD and a batch of other related human disorders. If it comes up with a cure for BSE as well, it will be unintentional (although not impossible if they do turn out to be related).
I'm glad to see that Google is going beyond their "Don't be evil" motto to "Be good". I applaud their apparent sense of social responsibility.
I'm sorry, but this is a fundamental failure to comprehend the notion of "social responsibility". In fact, it's quite the opposite.
Social responsibility means thinking about the impacts of your actions and choosing your actions so that they are "good". What you're talking about is paying off karmic and/or publicity debts with "good" actions. It's the distinction between "he founded a charity to save starving children" and "he was a mass murderer, but he paid for a charity which saved more children than he killed, so he was a good person". You are attempting to classify Google using the second concept: that "good" actions in themselves are all that is required (so long as they outweigh bad ones). The concept of "social responsibility" would mean that you didn't do any of the "bad" actions in the first place, so there is no need to pay them off with "good" ones.
I know you didn't intend to extend the principle that far, but it's implicit: your assumption is that Google *needs* to do "good", non-business-related things in order to be a "good" company, which implies that their business-related actions are not "good". A "socially responsible" company would run their business in that manner and not need to found a charity for it. Google are therefore *not* a "socially responsible" company, they're a "regular company doing non-good things" that is trying to balance out their other actions. Financially there is no difference (stealing $10 from one person and then giving him a different $10 results in no net change), but ethically there is a difference (saving somebody's life and then stabbing him results in no net change, but that's not an excuse).
Companies have sophicticated electronic detection equipment that can detect the hash from your shoe computer.
Some casinos might go in for this sort of thing, but most wouldn't bother. You have to remember: gambling is not a right, it's a product that you pay for. They can refuse service to anybody they want, there is no requirement for them to prove that you're "cheating".
Most casinos have a simple policy: anybody who keeps winning is out. They don't care whether it's by fair means or foul. If you keep winning, somebody taps you on the shoulder and says "Sir, I think you've gambled enough". They don't mind the occasional big wins - in fact, they need them, to keep the other marks enthusiastic. They won't tolerate a string of wins spread over a couple of hours. And they will keep your name and photograph and refuse you entry in the future. All their "sophisticated monitoring" is just about tracking where each person is going, what they're doing, and what their win-percentage is (which is actually quite tricky in a crowded casino, since the marks don't register their identity when they walk up to a table, so they spend a fair bit of money on the technology to support this).
As far as the UK public is concerned, the system is transparent and gives real benefits, and no more intrusive than having a real police officer on patrol there in the first place.
This is very true. We have no expectation of privacy in a public place. Why would we?
Nobody would even think about suggesting putting cameras in private spaces without the permission and control of the occupants. It would be political suicide even to talk about it. Public spaces are public, and private spaces are private and will not be infringed upon. "An Englishman's home is his castle" is not just a trite phrase, it's an attitude. Putting up a camera to monitor a public street is legal. Pointing that camera so that it looks into my window is not.
We're not particularly worried about the police abusing videos of public places because (a) the police are widely known to be too incompetant to be able to manage it, and (b) it's not apparent how one can 'abuse' something which is considered public knowledge anyway.
To Americans who worry about their privacy when in public spaces: stop making out in public. Nobody but the stalkers appreciates it. Go indoors and close the door. Defend your privacy on that line. It's not like there's a shortage of real privacy abuses for you to tackle (like warrantless wiretaps and laws to permit them). The cure to slippery slopes is to pick where you're going to stand and stay there; privacy in a public space is not very solid ground to be standing on.
Contrary to most geek's ideas, marketing is bloody difficult.
I was not aware that (m)any people think marketing is easy.
What is widely thought (amoung the minority of people in the world who are literate) is that marketing is evil, at least in the forms it is commonly practiced.
Sony is a big company. Their content and entertainment divions may be on my sh*t list right now, but they have always (and still do) make darn good electronics hardware, when it isn't crippled by the other divisions.
When the electronics division isn't being crippled by the other divisions, it is often being sued by them. Yes, this company is schizoid enough to take itself to court (and lose? win?) and has done so numerous times in the past; it's possible because it's really a congolmerate of several dozen mutually-owned companies, located in various countries (probably for tax and political reasons). The management of these companies rarely agree on anything; the only person a Sony manager would prefer to fight instead of their customers is another Sony manager in a different division.
Others have mentioned Samsung, but add iiyama to that list as well. Most of the LCD panels in the world are made by various asian companies, several of which will sell direct. I don't think Dell actually makes any, they just pay to have their badge sprayed on a casing (which is true of the vast majority of their 'products'; they're either designed and produced on contract, or Dell just owns the company that really makes them). Sony is a real hardware company who deserves your scorn. Not sure about HP, but LCD displays seem a bit outside their normal production to me.
The name "Ubunutu" is unfortunate. Managers naturally ask me what it means when I recommend it, and the feel-good granola-crunchy meaning reinforces their feeling that I'm a granola-crunchy sort of guy promoting software written by acid-inspired junkies.
Ubuntu is noise here. They talk a lot, but they sound like hippies because they mostly are hippies. RedHat and Novell are the ones to bring in. Especially Novell, with a well-known brand that managers are probably already familiar with, from Netware. Those guys can sell to management.
The obvious evidence for this: RedHat and Novell are making profits. Ubuntu aren't even making revenue (but are always talking about how they're going to get a big contract in 'real soon now'). Linux adoption is business is happening, and it's happening largely because of those two.
If you're trying to get corporate types to buy into it, call the corporates. Not the hippies.
There, it's said. Sure, they make huge amounts of money (for publishers; developers rarely break even) and they're important to a lot of people. But they're mostly one-shot, throw-away pieces of software that aren't maintained over a period of time and have a very short marketable lifespan. As such they don't benefit much from free software development (which excels at maintainance, not short time-to-market) and it doesn't really matter what platform they run on.
So what if they keep running on Windows? That just means Windows becomes the fourth console system. I wouldn't be very surprised if someday, Windows merged with the xbox, after all the 'serious' applications migrate over to Linux-based platforms.
You could argue that they slow down adoption of Linux in the home, but realistically, Linux on the desktop is happening first in businesses, and then the home users will follow. And businesses don't care about games.
If you're building from the start, that is. If you've already got a huge, existing website, then it can be quite the PITA
Not that this matters. The UK rules say that if your building is not accessible then you've got to make it accessible (with clear and detailed rules about what standards of accessibility you must meet; half of this stuff is in the building codes anyway). If that means rebuilding half the damn thing then your choices are to rebuild it or to find a new place of business. There's no apparent reason why the same thing should not apply to websites. The point of these laws is to ensure that accessibility is the financial problem of the only people who can do anything about it, because that's the only way it will ever get done.
Anybody here old enough to remember Japan's rise to a respectable engineering powerhouse? Any of you guys remeber when "Made in Japan" meant it would break in 10 minutes of use?
It's still kinda-sorta true, after a fashion. Technology products made for sale in Japan are typically of lower quality than ones made for sale in the west. They're also typically released months earlier. The Japanese release is like a 'beta' of the product. This happens because the Japanese are more willing to splurge on dubious tech toys. What's changed is that they've stopped trying to sell those same products in the western countries; instead, they redesign them first based on lessons learned in the Japanese market.
(Exceptions abound, of course, but the broad trend in the market runs in that direction)
I'm not going to argue that HTML is a particularly complex invention, but the impact of this simple idea is probably larger then the research of 95% of the Nobel prizes awarded in the last few decades.
You're missing the point, by a long way. While it is true that HTML has been a critical part of something that has had a vast impact, HTML itself is nothing special. If it had not been invented then something else would have been used. Several vaguely similar things already existed at the time, any of which could have been minimally extended and taken the place of HTML. The important point here is: it could have been anything. There is nothing about HTML which fundamentally made all this stuff possible; any of the other choices would have done the same job in a vaguely similar fashion. Any good software engineer at the time, working on the same problem, would have come up with approximately the same solution - perhaps better, perhaps worse, but HTML as it stands is not special. It's just the thing that we happened to end up using.
Obligatory analogy: the guy who decided to build the first cars with throttle and brake controls as foot pedals is responsible for something that has had a massive effect on the world, influencing the lives of most people in developed nations. But while the decision has had a large impact, it wouldn't have been very different if he had decided to use a hand throttle. Just because the decision affected a lot of people doesn't mean that it really mattered all that much.
In all these cases, you have to consider what the world would have been like if the person in question had not done what they did. If HTML hadn't been invented, something vaguely similar would have done the same job. Lots of other people were working on similar things at the time.
The point of a Nobel prize (and similar prizes) is that they are awards for something that is intrinsically unique, important, and irreplaceable. They are things which could not have been done by anybody reasonably competent in the field who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. They represent more than felicity and good marketing. If the prize winner had not done what they did, then the world would almost certainly be much worse off.
If CSS had been just a little bit stronger it would have lasted far, far longer.
No, people would just have been using copies of keys that had been extracted from 'official' DVD players. That's been done, and I think it actually predates DeCSS. We use libdvdcss instead because it's probably legal in most of the world (except the US and its vassals, like AU).
(The media hoarders claim that the decryption keys are copyrighted, and prosecuted some people who used copies of keys in commercial products - the sanity of a key being copyrightable is somewhat dubious, but then so are most of the laws they've bought).
However, the real problem with schools is the insistence upon including everyone and teaching to the lowest common denominator.
That's one problem... but most of the time, the difference between a 'high achiever' and a regular bozo is whether or not they've done any work in their N years of education so far. Kids who work will get ahead; kids who don't will absorb the minimum possible via osmosis. The real, major, huge problem with schools is that they fail to get most of the kids to try to learn anything, which is caused by a combination of (a) teachers who don't know what to do about it, (b) teachers who don't care about it, (c) large class sizes that keep teachers from being able to do anything about it, and (d) parents who view schools as a day-care centre and pass this view on to the kids.
This situation has come about because when governments are faced with a shortage of (good) teachers, their solution is to hire more bad teachers and pack more kids into each class. Also, when was the last time you heard of a teacher getting sacked for being ineffectual?
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*And* because we have a solid, well-verified model of how radioactive decay works, which supports it. It's not just bits of evidence - it's been connected together into an verified explanation of exactly what is happening and why (at least, on scales larger than quantum physics).
The distinction between this and climatology is that we don't have a solid, well-verified model of how a planetary ecology functions and its effects on the climate. Planets are much more complicated than atoms; we know how atoms work, but planets are still something of a puzzle.
The evidence gets weaker as you go back in time; I was just picking up on the points you raised (to cover every possible data point would take weeks).
That is distinct from evidence that this is directly related to global climate changes - over the past several thousands of years, the temperature has varied quite a lot. It's a different point to the one you raised - it's a relevant data point for research into the possible effects of global climate changes, but not a conclusive one (because a lot of stuff has happened over that time period and you're back to the three possibilities implied by a correlation again).
Yes, but it's just a theory. The evidence for it isn't particularly compelling, and there's no appreciable scientific consensus about it being likely (as opposed to the meteor impact, which most scientists in the field think is probably what happened that time). We're terribly short on data about what happened that long ago.
No, you missed my point there. The point is that mass extinctions don't cause the biosphere to stop functioning. It's survived several of them so far, and each time it has recovered fine. That means we're not looking at a doomsday scenario here. Even if global warming is true, it probably will not be as bad as some people have been speculating - climate change is not permanent. Furthermore, the fact that the biosphere has recovered each time indicates that there are stabilising effects at work here. We do not understand these effects very well yet. The interesting question is: when and how will they stabilise the short-term changes that we have been observing?
You're *still* talking about belief in a scientific context. I've said several times that this attitude is the problem. There is no belief here. I am not compelled to pick one option and assume it is true. I consider the range of plausible options, and what the evidence says about the probability of them - and in this case, I find the evidence to be inconclusive. That means it's an interesting question which deserves research to find the answer. It doesn't mean I have to guess.
That was your data point, not mine.
That's an argument in favour of a law to prohibit publishing certain images. It is not an argument in favour of a law to prohibit posessing certain images (which is the case in question).
It is reasonable to ban the publication of images of a person, without their consent, when such images would constitute an invasion of privacy. So far as I am aware, this is already the case for all people, not just children. Since these actions are already illegal, what is accomplished by banning the posession of images of children?
Japanese lolicon manga (extremely popular over there for some reason I still don't understand). There've been a number of cases in connection with it in various parts of the world; I'm too tired to hunt for details right now. The essential point is that people have gone to jail for "pornography" that did not and could not possibly contain any real children or even anything that looked convincingly like a real child. I find this to be rather absurd - who is this supposed to be protecting? People who don't exist? Ink?
These next points aren't based on actual cases, but rather they are hypothetical questions designed to illustrate the difficult points. Attempting to answer them should lead to understanding of the problems in attempting to legislate in this field.
What is the legal and ethical status of a fictional female who, at the age of 60, has transplanted their personality into the body of a 12-year-old girl and proceeds to have sex? Is it legal to draw pictures of this character performing such actions? Should it be? Can anybody form a coherent explanation that covers both this case and the one above? (I can't form any that would allow such images to be banned)
How about if we make our hypothetical female non-fictional (and presume that the technology for body transplants exists)? What is the legal and ethical status of creating pornographic videos of this person with their consent?
Let us further suppose that the 12-year-old body has an identical twin, containing a girl that is genuinely 12 years old. What images should now be banned? Presume that it is impossible to tell from the images which girl they contain.
Would this scenario require that the current anti-child-porn laws in the US be struck down as unconstitutional abridgement of the right of a citizen to give their consent for sexual encounters? If not, why not? If it would, why are those laws not unconstitutional now?
(I would be interesting in hearing from anybody who can answer that lot in a meaningful fashion without either demonstrating that the current laws are stupid, or degenerating into incoherent ranting.
As a typical approximately-objective scentific type, I'm disdainful of data that only spans 750k years when we believe that the biosphere is around 4 billion years old (counting from the point at which bacterial life is estimated to have first appeared). Our current crop of large mammalian life is about 65 million years old (counting from the last mass extinction). 750k years is very short by comparison. It's interesting data - but it's important to remember that we're looking at a tiny fraction of the history of life on this planet. There is so much more that we don't know about. Our data may not be representative; as a statistical sample, it would be considered a very poorly chosen one that would be expected to introduce bias. Unfortunately it's the only data we've got.
Because it's not, in the sense that you mean. That is, it is not compelling evidence for global warming - a lot of the evidence is compelling in some sense but it doesn't directly indicate that the global warming hypothesis (increasing carbon dioxide levels will cause the temperature to rise over the entire planet) is true. Here's why, to pick on your two examples:
This is compelling evidence that one or more of the following are true:
(There are the three standard options for any strong correlation between two factors; the platitude that goes along with them is "evidence of correlation is not proof of causation")
It is not compelling evidence that the first of these three things is true (which is the one postulated by the global warming hypothesis). As such, it is not directly relevant as evidence here. It's just another thing which says global warming is *possible*, and that we should attempt to figure out what is actually happening. Climatology modelling is primarily concerned with pinning down which of these three things are true, and so far the results are "probably", "maybe", and "maybe" respectively.
That's compelling evidence that increasing temperatures melts glaciers in the short term (which here means anything less than a century), but no more than that. It doesn't say anything about the causes of the temperature increase, so it's not directly relevant there. I didn't bother to consider short-term effects of global warming because frankly, they aren't very interesting. Losing a few million tons of ice or increasing the sea level by a few centimeters per year isn't a big deal unless it happens for an extended period, so the important question is: how will the global ecology react to this change, and what will happen next? Will it tend to exacerbate the problem or to correct it? There are plenty of theories for both options, but little evidence so far. We cannot use this data point to infer that glaciers will continue to melt for the next hundred years - that might happen, but then again it might not, if the melting ice causes other conditions to change. So that's another "maybe".
It's important to keep in mind that we're aware of five major catastrophies occurring in the history of this planet, which wiped out most of the surface life (one was probably an asteroid impact; we don't know the causes of the other four yet). Any of them would make global warming look insignifican
People who use the word "belief" about scientific studies don't help matters.
Obligatory summary of "global warming" research status: there is compelling evidence that the planet is warmer than our geological records indicate it should be, and compelling evidence that the carbon dioxide level is higher than it has ever been in our records (but in both cases, the evidence is merely compelling, not proof - our records aren't that good). From our current understanding of science, we know that a bare, lifeless rock with an oxygen/nitrogen/carbon dioxide atmosphere will become hotter if you change the ratio to increase the carbon dioxide content. That's what we know.
There is a theory that the same behaviour will happen on a planet with an active biosphere, but that's a much harder theory to prove. There have been many studies on the subject. The best answer they have come up with is "it should be possible". We can't pack a planet with an active biosphere into a lab to study it, and we can't simulate the entire thing on a computer yet (most of the studies have been based around approximate simulations). It's quite a difficult theory to prove or disprove. Research continues.
There's a rough consensus between scientists in the field that the theory is convincing - they think it's likely to be approximately true, if they could just find a way to prove it. It's probably also not perfect yet; planets are large, complicated, and they have many parameters. There may be important details which have not been discovered yet.
Nobody knows whether or not it's actually happening like this. We've got increased temperature and carbon dioxide, but that doesn't prove that one caused the other - it's equally possible that increased temperature is causing the carbon dioxide increase (there's a theory that says this is possible, little evidence for it so far), or that some unknown third cause is responsible for them both (no good theories here that I'm aware of, but this sort of thing happens all the time in science). Just because it *could* happen doesn't mean that it *is* happening. We've got several theories that say how it might be happening. I am not aware of anybody coming up with a way to tell whether or not it *is* happening, so far (it's very hard to construct experiments to prove anything about a planetary ecology when you've only got one of them to look at).
There are numerous theories about what will happen over the next hundred years and little evidence to support any of them. Few scientists agree on anything when it comes to the question of possible long-term consequences of global warming. It's probably too early to be asking that question.
Talking about whether or not people or scientists "believe" in global warming is confusing, unhelpful, and wrong. No belief is involved in science, and the question is too simplified anyway. The details I've sketched out here are important - to science, global warming remains an open question (much like the question of how gravity works) - a lot of people are working towards an answer, they've made considerable progress, but they haven't got one yet. So far the progress indicates a firm "maybe". Trying to turn that into a "yes" or "no" question of faith is not only grossly unscientific, it may serve to retard the progress of science; bad political interference at this point in the research would be extremely unhelpful.
The very best thing that politicians could do about global warming is push more funding into research on climatology, ecology, computer modelling, data collection, and other related disciplines. That should help get some better answers sooner.
The worst thing they could do is try to cut out the scientists and let politicians and laymen decide whether or not it's happening.
(As yet there is no sci
This is actually quite puzzling. Why would anybody want to spread this stuff on the file sharing networks under confusing names? What exactly is this supposed to accomplish?
The only thing I can think of is that somebody is trying to incite people to fear that it is spreading. That motive would place the blame on agents of the government. Even for the bozos currently in charge of the US, that seems a bit unlikely... but why else would anybody do it?
Still wrong. They should be targetting the ones who are coercing children into sexual acts (ie, statutory rape). There is no evidence that merely holding a camera is intrinsically harmful. (And if it's coincidentally harmful, that's a conspiracy rape charge). Anti-pornography laws just don't make any kind of sense here - if the action *was* harmful, then it's *already* illegal. If it was not already illegal then it's not harmful, so what is the point in outlawing it?
Currently, if you see somebody molesting a child, it is a crime for you to take a photograph to be used as evidence.
Another case: if you draw a picture of a stylised, fictional child with no clothing, you can be jailed for years and forced to register as a sex offender. Unless it's a parody, when it becomes protected free speech in the US.
These laws are stupid. They make no sense at all.
Surprisingly few people are capable of reading a simple sheet of instructions. Fewer still are capable of following them correctly.
Well, at least it's surprising until you've done tech support for a couple of years.
Because the average win98 user accumulates one new trojan/worm every couple of weeks. There are millions of win98 boxes in the world and most of them are relaying spam. People who relay spam through sheer idiocy are hated. This should not be a surprise. Death's too good for them.
I have checked the facts. Microsoft become a large dominant player who LOSES BILLIONS OF DOLLARS EVERY YEAR. By any reasonable measure, that is a disaster. Where did you get this idea that the objective was to make the biggest loss?
Any idiot can become a large player if they can spend money like water and don't have to show a profit. Microsoft do not appear to have figured out how to do it any other way (with the exception of Windows and Office - I can only presume that they don't understand how to duplicate that feat).
I have looked at Sony. They broke even. They did not lose billions of dollars. Breaking even is unimpressive, but it's adequete - shareholders can be satisfied with that.
We are looking at it 2-3 years later. The Xbox has reached end-of-life and been replaced. It did not become profitable. It lost FOUR BILLION DOLLARS. The product was a miserable failure. It did not result in recovering the costs through game sales (although a number of non-Microsoft companies did manage to make a profit from it, such as nvidia). In the past, Microsoft has done the exact same thing. They have had only two products which made significant profits: Windows and Office. Ever. That's a fact taken right from their SEC filings, which you can look up yourself if you want.
But I do agree with you on one point: they'll do it again. And in 2-3 years, when the Xbox 360 has lost 4+x billion dollars, people like you will still be saying "look at it 2-3 years later".
The Pirate Party is really more of a pressure group. They'll never control the government, but they can and probably will make it very hard for any government to act against their interests (which should prove to be an effective counterbalance to bribes from the media cartels). They run for elections because Sweden's electoral system encourages this behaviour; it gets them into places where they can get their message across and forces the other parties to come up with answers.
Sweden disagrees with you. Their electoral system has been specifically designed to get single-issue parties into parliament. They get a couple of seats, and trade votes with the major parties (so, the minor party will follow the major party's line in exchange for the major party taking on their cause; this can often result in a coalition of parties that would not otherwise have held a majority in parliament). This is primarily of significance with the environmentalism minority, but there's no reason why it should not apply to others.
It's about as sane as any other representational democracy, and helps keep minorities satisfied.
And I wouldn't call a four billion dollar loss a "dominant player". Other phrases come to mind, like "act of gross stupidity" and "shareholder lawsuit". Someday, Microsoft's universally appalling performance in everything but Windows and Office is going to come back and bite them - they sink billions of dollars of other people's money every year into these schemes, and haven't had anything to show for it yet. If they refocussed on their two profitable products and axed everything else, their shareholders would become vastly richer. The cultist attitude at Microsoft (that has so far prevented this from happening) cannot last forever.
We don't; culling affected cows has always been and will always be a viable solution for BSE, so there is no demand for a cure.
Whenever the media sees research into CJD, they translate it into "Mad Cow disease". This is nonsense; there is still no proof that they are even related - just a strong suspicion that there is some connection to one particular kind of CJD because they look awfully similar and nobody has come up with a better theory that fits the facts. The "classical" CJD has been confirmed as unrelated to BSE.
This is research into cracking the puzzle of CJD and a batch of other related human disorders. If it comes up with a cure for BSE as well, it will be unintentional (although not impossible if they do turn out to be related).
I'm sorry, but this is a fundamental failure to comprehend the notion of "social responsibility". In fact, it's quite the opposite.
Social responsibility means thinking about the impacts of your actions and choosing your actions so that they are "good". What you're talking about is paying off karmic and/or publicity debts with "good" actions. It's the distinction between "he founded a charity to save starving children" and "he was a mass murderer, but he paid for a charity which saved more children than he killed, so he was a good person". You are attempting to classify Google using the second concept: that "good" actions in themselves are all that is required (so long as they outweigh bad ones). The concept of "social responsibility" would mean that you didn't do any of the "bad" actions in the first place, so there is no need to pay them off with "good" ones.
I know you didn't intend to extend the principle that far, but it's implicit: your assumption is that Google *needs* to do "good", non-business-related things in order to be a "good" company, which implies that their business-related actions are not "good". A "socially responsible" company would run their business in that manner and not need to found a charity for it. Google are therefore *not* a "socially responsible" company, they're a "regular company doing non-good things" that is trying to balance out their other actions. Financially there is no difference (stealing $10 from one person and then giving him a different $10 results in no net change), but ethically there is a difference (saving somebody's life and then stabbing him results in no net change, but that's not an excuse).
Some casinos might go in for this sort of thing, but most wouldn't bother. You have to remember: gambling is not a right, it's a product that you pay for. They can refuse service to anybody they want, there is no requirement for them to prove that you're "cheating".
Most casinos have a simple policy: anybody who keeps winning is out. They don't care whether it's by fair means or foul. If you keep winning, somebody taps you on the shoulder and says "Sir, I think you've gambled enough". They don't mind the occasional big wins - in fact, they need them, to keep the other marks enthusiastic. They won't tolerate a string of wins spread over a couple of hours. And they will keep your name and photograph and refuse you entry in the future. All their "sophisticated monitoring" is just about tracking where each person is going, what they're doing, and what their win-percentage is (which is actually quite tricky in a crowded casino, since the marks don't register their identity when they walk up to a table, so they spend a fair bit of money on the technology to support this).
This is very true. We have no expectation of privacy in a public place. Why would we?
Nobody would even think about suggesting putting cameras in private spaces without the permission and control of the occupants. It would be political suicide even to talk about it. Public spaces are public, and private spaces are private and will not be infringed upon. "An Englishman's home is his castle" is not just a trite phrase, it's an attitude. Putting up a camera to monitor a public street is legal. Pointing that camera so that it looks into my window is not.
We're not particularly worried about the police abusing videos of public places because (a) the police are widely known to be too incompetant to be able to manage it, and (b) it's not apparent how one can 'abuse' something which is considered public knowledge anyway.
To Americans who worry about their privacy when in public spaces: stop making out in public. Nobody but the stalkers appreciates it. Go indoors and close the door. Defend your privacy on that line. It's not like there's a shortage of real privacy abuses for you to tackle (like warrantless wiretaps and laws to permit them). The cure to slippery slopes is to pick where you're going to stand and stay there; privacy in a public space is not very solid ground to be standing on.
I was not aware that (m)any people think marketing is easy.
What is widely thought (amoung the minority of people in the world who are literate) is that marketing is evil, at least in the forms it is commonly practiced.
When the electronics division isn't being crippled by the other divisions, it is often being sued by them. Yes, this company is schizoid enough to take itself to court (and lose? win?) and has done so numerous times in the past; it's possible because it's really a congolmerate of several dozen mutually-owned companies, located in various countries (probably for tax and political reasons). The management of these companies rarely agree on anything; the only person a Sony manager would prefer to fight instead of their customers is another Sony manager in a different division.
Others have mentioned Samsung, but add iiyama to that list as well. Most of the LCD panels in the world are made by various asian companies, several of which will sell direct. I don't think Dell actually makes any, they just pay to have their badge sprayed on a casing (which is true of the vast majority of their 'products'; they're either designed and produced on contract, or Dell just owns the company that really makes them). Sony is a real hardware company who deserves your scorn. Not sure about HP, but LCD displays seem a bit outside their normal production to me.
Ubuntu is noise here. They talk a lot, but they sound like hippies because they mostly are hippies. RedHat and Novell are the ones to bring in. Especially Novell, with a well-known brand that managers are probably already familiar with, from Netware. Those guys can sell to management.
The obvious evidence for this: RedHat and Novell are making profits. Ubuntu aren't even making revenue (but are always talking about how they're going to get a big contract in 'real soon now'). Linux adoption is business is happening, and it's happening largely because of those two.
If you're trying to get corporate types to buy into it, call the corporates. Not the hippies.
Games basically don't matter.
There, it's said. Sure, they make huge amounts of money (for publishers; developers rarely break even) and they're important to a lot of people. But they're mostly one-shot, throw-away pieces of software that aren't maintained over a period of time and have a very short marketable lifespan. As such they don't benefit much from free software development (which excels at maintainance, not short time-to-market) and it doesn't really matter what platform they run on.
So what if they keep running on Windows? That just means Windows becomes the fourth console system. I wouldn't be very surprised if someday, Windows merged with the xbox, after all the 'serious' applications migrate over to Linux-based platforms.
You could argue that they slow down adoption of Linux in the home, but realistically, Linux on the desktop is happening first in businesses, and then the home users will follow. And businesses don't care about games.
Not that this matters. The UK rules say that if your building is not accessible then you've got to make it accessible (with clear and detailed rules about what standards of accessibility you must meet; half of this stuff is in the building codes anyway). If that means rebuilding half the damn thing then your choices are to rebuild it or to find a new place of business. There's no apparent reason why the same thing should not apply to websites. The point of these laws is to ensure that accessibility is the financial problem of the only people who can do anything about it, because that's the only way it will ever get done.
It's still kinda-sorta true, after a fashion. Technology products made for sale in Japan are typically of lower quality than ones made for sale in the west. They're also typically released months earlier. The Japanese release is like a 'beta' of the product. This happens because the Japanese are more willing to splurge on dubious tech toys. What's changed is that they've stopped trying to sell those same products in the western countries; instead, they redesign them first based on lessons learned in the Japanese market.
(Exceptions abound, of course, but the broad trend in the market runs in that direction)
You're missing the point, by a long way. While it is true that HTML has been a critical part of something that has had a vast impact, HTML itself is nothing special. If it had not been invented then something else would have been used. Several vaguely similar things already existed at the time, any of which could have been minimally extended and taken the place of HTML. The important point here is: it could have been anything. There is nothing about HTML which fundamentally made all this stuff possible; any of the other choices would have done the same job in a vaguely similar fashion. Any good software engineer at the time, working on the same problem, would have come up with approximately the same solution - perhaps better, perhaps worse, but HTML as it stands is not special. It's just the thing that we happened to end up using.
Obligatory analogy: the guy who decided to build the first cars with throttle and brake controls as foot pedals is responsible for something that has had a massive effect on the world, influencing the lives of most people in developed nations. But while the decision has had a large impact, it wouldn't have been very different if he had decided to use a hand throttle. Just because the decision affected a lot of people doesn't mean that it really mattered all that much.
In all these cases, you have to consider what the world would have been like if the person in question had not done what they did. If HTML hadn't been invented, something vaguely similar would have done the same job. Lots of other people were working on similar things at the time.
The point of a Nobel prize (and similar prizes) is that they are awards for something that is intrinsically unique, important, and irreplaceable. They are things which could not have been done by anybody reasonably competent in the field who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. They represent more than felicity and good marketing. If the prize winner had not done what they did, then the world would almost certainly be much worse off.
No, people would just have been using copies of keys that had been extracted from 'official' DVD players. That's been done, and I think it actually predates DeCSS. We use libdvdcss instead because it's probably legal in most of the world (except the US and its vassals, like AU).
(The media hoarders claim that the decryption keys are copyrighted, and prosecuted some people who used copies of keys in commercial products - the sanity of a key being copyrightable is somewhat dubious, but then so are most of the laws they've bought).
That's one problem... but most of the time, the difference between a 'high achiever' and a regular bozo is whether or not they've done any work in their N years of education so far. Kids who work will get ahead; kids who don't will absorb the minimum possible via osmosis. The real, major, huge problem with schools is that they fail to get most of the kids to try to learn anything, which is caused by a combination of (a) teachers who don't know what to do about it, (b) teachers who don't care about it, (c) large class sizes that keep teachers from being able to do anything about it, and (d) parents who view schools as a day-care centre and pass this view on to the kids.
This situation has come about because when governments are faced with a shortage of (good) teachers, their solution is to hire more bad teachers and pack more kids into each class. Also, when was the last time you heard of a teacher getting sacked for being ineffectual?