An online survey isn't science, (If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane). The summary itself exposes the falacy right out ("...may not come as a shock to geeks"). The geeks are the ones more likely to be filling out an online survey in the first place. Not to mention the obvious class differences between those who have ready access to lots of technology vs those who don't and what that implies about their neighborhoods and schools. There's all kinds of variables that arent being controlled for.
For me, it isn't so much what Google might or might not do, but rather a question of what Google might be ordered to do. I can hope that given a court order of questionable legality the people at Google will do the right thing and fight it but I have no gaurantee that they will win. They have a lot of data on a lot of people, how long before some government office gets the idea in their heads of demanding a list of every IP/Username that ever searched for the words 'child porn', 'how to make a bomb', or 'how biological weapons work'.
That's like saying you shouldn't care if software is open sourced unless you intend to go through every line of it yourself to check for errors. If the data were released thousands of people would be going through it, people from both ends of the climate debate and, more importantly, people who don't have a vested interest in which way the result ends up.
I know there are lots of whackjobs who are conviced that GW is a worthless topic, or that the scientists are all on someone's payroll, or that GW science is some kind of master plan to give a certain political party power (and that power will just evaporate if they lose the next election? I've never understood those kinds of consiracy theories). That being said, the issue that I have is more along the lines of scientists trying to "do what's right" to protect the planet (meaning it's not about science anymore for some of them, it's about protecting the planet).
At best, that attitude leads to behaviors like celebrating the death of someone who disagrees with you; at worst it leads to falsifying data to ensure that world sees things the same way you do. We know, for a fact, that the former has happened; the question to me is, how far towards the latter end of the spectrum is their behaviour? Release the raw data and let everyone take a look at it, until then I'll always have my doubts as to what is really going on.
You're comparing a single document written basically ink on paper to thousands of square feet of glyphs carved into stone over a centuries long time span. It isn't really a fair comparison at all. One guy as a prank or as the result of a mental imbalance could easily have produced the manuscript, not true for hieroglyphs.
They did prove his thoerem but it took decades of work by some of the brightest mathematical minds using tools and techniques that hadn't been invented in Fermats time. In short, if Fermat really had a simple proof for his theorem, he was the best mathematician in history by orders of magnitude. It's more likely that either A) He realized what a hard problem it was and was making a joke (but the hardness of the problem isn't obvious to most people so they took it seriously. Or B) He thought he had discovered a simple proof but was incorrect and therefore never bothered to publish it (or go back and remove the note from his jounal).
Because the subject is only spot on if you don't ready the article and are totally ignorant of the facts in the case. He purposefully drew a huge crowd with no crowd control in place and then refused to tell the crowd to disperse (using twitter or by yelling or by anything) when the police showed up to deal with the dangerous, uncontrolled crowd. In fact, he kept sending tweets out about the event even as the police were trying to deal with the crowd. The only thing that courts might have to decide is if the police can compel you to say something for the public safety (the 1st amendment doesn't protect your right to say things that endanger the public, so I don't see why they shouldn't be able to force you to tell a dangerous crowd to disperse).
There's a difference between stereotypes and demographics you know; it isn't as if Amazon goes around saying "Yes it's cheap, but will it get them off their tractors?". It is a fact that Walmart has focused their efforts on rural areas, only very recently moving into major cities agressively. It's also a fact that Amazon's business model works slightly better for urbanites who recieve shipments faster (in Milwaukee shipments would arrive in 2-3 days with free shipping, rural Iowa it's more like 8-10 days), are more likely to have high speed internet, and are less likely to be served by a walmart/target type discount store.
Chromium isn't about a target user, it's about a target use. I'm also the developer, gamer, video editor type; that doesn't mean a netbook wouldn't come in handy for other things. My wife and I fight over the laptop all the time but I refuse to spend the money on a second one, a free netbook (even if all it could do was browse the web) would be very welcome.
That being said, it'll never happen. As someone up above pointed out, a single user isn't worth hundreds of dollars to Google, and it would only be a matter of time before someone figures out how to load custom software and hardware onto the thing. The article should be tagged with 'baseless speculation', that's all it is.
Doesn't work, they'll just look to get the money some other way, probably through shell companies whose 'services' are used by the company accepting the subsidies. Those kinds of limits can't be codified with our system of laws. If the law could simply say what it meant in clear english and leave the interpretation up to the courts it might be possible, but expensive lawyers will always find a way out of vuagely written laws.
90% of everything is crap. It's easy to look back and see the 10% of sci-fi that inspired real-world technology, it's a lot harder to look at the writing today and see how it is affecting things.
I didn't mean to call you a troll, I was only saying that that was the only part of your post that was even possibly trollish. The 'hey we might be headed for an ice' can't really be compared to the level of fearmongering going on today (even if you believe every word of AGW, you have to admit there is fearmongering going on). After all, by your own account Sagan admitted upfront that he may have been wrong. It is also possible that even now he may have been right and the ice age is here, just counteracted by warming; odds are we'll never know the true story.
Not sure this is deserving of a Troll mod (Ok, the stuff about the ice age in the 80's a little bit). It's a fact that many of the ground temperature stations are in places that have been developed since the stations were installed and that some number of them were installed in inapropriate places to begin with. You really can't argue with the pictures on the blog (assuming this is the same blog I stumbled on a while back); stations 5 feet from an asphalt parking lot, directly between two tennis courts, and on the top of asphalt roofed buildings. You might be able to argue that they somehow control for this, or that ground stations are taking a backseat to satellite data, but satellite data only goes back so far and temp adjustment are, at best, an educated guess.
Email isn't science but that doesn't mean it isn't interesting. If the email says "Hey Bob, your algorithm didn't produce the level of warming we were expecting, we need you to rework it so it is in line with our expectations" that would say a lot about how the 'science' is being done. Furthermore, random chunks of data isn't science, but it does have the possibility of revealing any number of things, anything from numbers not matching what is published to problems with software to inconsistent data.
I'm not saying that is what the leaked information says, nor am I saying that the leak is real; there isn't enough information to know that yet. But your instant dismissal of this because it isn't every piece of data ever collected is a little disconcerting in my opinion.
But, if the 'many eyes' were being honest with themselves, they should have cried foul at the insecure way extentions are handled before exploits were even known. It really isn't acceptible to give any random extention that much control over your software IMO.
GP never said it was impossible, just that it is much, much easier for people with a wealthy upbringing; and you sure as hell can't deny that. You said it yourself, you worked your ass off for your success. Meanwhile, I know several people from my college who were in their 6th year because 'Grandma' is paying their tuition and they don't give a damn. Eventually, they graduated and found good jobs but if you had their level of motivation you would have failed out and been working at a dead end job before the end of the second semester. Alternatively, my brother (mine is a lower-middle income family) was in a major car accident 8 years ago. Right about now, he is just barely getting his life and his finances under his own control again; college was on hold while he worked 60-70 hours a week to pay off his medical bills
The point is, people from wealthy families can make many decisions, hit some bad luck, sit on their ass for a few years and still win the game of life. People from poor families are one car accident, one lazy semester, or one layoff away from spending the next decade of their life clawing and scraping back up to where they were.
I could imagine having a socket installed such that hardware could be upgraded without re-opening the skull. USB has been around for almost 14 years now and is still used for many things today. Every 2-3 years seems like too much but I could definately see some people being willing to go under the knife every 10 years to upgrade the interface, especially if 'under the knife' means a 30 minute outpatient surgery (which, if millions of people are doing it, it would have to be). That would allow easy upgrades between socket upgrades, removal for sleeping/showering/swimming, re easy charging, even different hardware for different uses (a game machine, a work machine, etc), just swap out the plug.
Actually, I think Alastair Reynolds's vision is even more accurate: Such mind/computer interfaces exist, but the vast majority of people don't use them because they fear catching a nanotech virus and those that use them to the fullest are so distanced from the rest of humanity that wars are fought over the sanctity of the mind. The idea of a computer connecting directly up to my brain... well, I hope security technology improves by a couple orders of magnitude before that comes about.
In my neighbor's microwave, the turning on of which is what will kill my internet connection. Internet isn't 100% reliable, in my experience, my wireless internet is significantly less reliable than even buggy, bloaty, hated Windows Vista.
Hence the '42 is in base 13' part of my comment. 42(base 13) == 54(base 10) == 36(base 16). Of course, Adams himself denied this was the case... "No one writes jokes in base 13" but after this theory emerged he did work it into some of his later jokes, probably just to keep people wondering.
Unless of course, the ultimate question really is 'What is 6 times 9?' as some people believe (meaning 42 is base 13 for some unknown reason). Which would of course make the ultimate instruction 0x36.
I'll say it again, the MAD doctrine makes launching any small scale attack against the US the equivilent of National Suicide, especially using long rang missiles that can be tracked back to their origin. Do you think the US is just going to shrug an say 'oh well' after New York or LA has been nuked? As for the math, no missile sheild is going to be 100% perfect, ask the engineers working on it and I'll bet the target success rate is closer to 80% than 100%. That means that if you want to hit a major US city with a nuke, all you have to do is saturate. Russia, used btw because they are the only country that could concievably launch a successful, debilitating first strike (one that could eliminate a large percentage of our nuclear arsenal), has more than enough missiles to launch 100 at every critical target. If the failure rate is even 1% the majority of the targets will be destroyed. The math doesn't work out when it comes to an all out attack.
Star Wars was (and is) a massive destabalizer of international relations because despite being labeled 'purely defensive' it has no logical purpose other than to support offense (this is possibly revisable now if and only if you believe that a terrorist will somehow get access to an ICBM).
It goes like this: No concievable missile shield could shoot down any significant number of incoming missiles. The Russians would always be able to overwhelm the defenses with shear numbers, making the system worthless. The only situation where a missile shield works is if there is a very limited number of incoming targets. The only time Russia (or any other country for that matter) would be stupid enough to launch such a small nuclear attack is if they had already suffered a first strike and were launching a counter attack with whatever had survived.
So the senarios are 1) Russia launches an all out attack, missile shield is worthless, 2) Russia launches a small attack, US launches an all out attack and Russia is obliterated (MAD doctrine already prevents this level of attack in other words). 3) The US launches an all out attack, Russia launches it's counter which is relatively small (since it has already taken hits), missile shield works. The only logical purpose of a missile shield #3, to defend against a counter attack.
Slashdot Mirror
An online survey isn't science, (If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane). The summary itself exposes the falacy right out ("...may not come as a shock to geeks"). The geeks are the ones more likely to be filling out an online survey in the first place. Not to mention the obvious class differences between those who have ready access to lots of technology vs those who don't and what that implies about their neighborhoods and schools. There's all kinds of variables that arent being controlled for.
For me, it isn't so much what Google might or might not do, but rather a question of what Google might be ordered to do. I can hope that given a court order of questionable legality the people at Google will do the right thing and fight it but I have no gaurantee that they will win. They have a lot of data on a lot of people, how long before some government office gets the idea in their heads of demanding a list of every IP/Username that ever searched for the words 'child porn', 'how to make a bomb', or 'how biological weapons work'.
That's like saying you shouldn't care if software is open sourced unless you intend to go through every line of it yourself to check for errors. If the data were released thousands of people would be going through it, people from both ends of the climate debate and, more importantly, people who don't have a vested interest in which way the result ends up.
I know there are lots of whackjobs who are conviced that GW is a worthless topic, or that the scientists are all on someone's payroll, or that GW science is some kind of master plan to give a certain political party power (and that power will just evaporate if they lose the next election? I've never understood those kinds of consiracy theories). That being said, the issue that I have is more along the lines of scientists trying to "do what's right" to protect the planet (meaning it's not about science anymore for some of them, it's about protecting the planet).
At best, that attitude leads to behaviors like celebrating the death of someone who disagrees with you; at worst it leads to falsifying data to ensure that world sees things the same way you do. We know, for a fact, that the former has happened; the question to me is, how far towards the latter end of the spectrum is their behaviour? Release the raw data and let everyone take a look at it, until then I'll always have my doubts as to what is really going on.
The fact that this story is posted under Politics says a lot about what's wrong with the global warming 'debate' IMO.
You're comparing a single document written basically ink on paper to thousands of square feet of glyphs carved into stone over a centuries long time span. It isn't really a fair comparison at all. One guy as a prank or as the result of a mental imbalance could easily have produced the manuscript, not true for hieroglyphs.
They did prove his thoerem but it took decades of work by some of the brightest mathematical minds using tools and techniques that hadn't been invented in Fermats time. In short, if Fermat really had a simple proof for his theorem, he was the best mathematician in history by orders of magnitude. It's more likely that either A) He realized what a hard problem it was and was making a joke (but the hardness of the problem isn't obvious to most people so they took it seriously. Or B) He thought he had discovered a simple proof but was incorrect and therefore never bothered to publish it (or go back and remove the note from his jounal).
Because the subject is only spot on if you don't ready the article and are totally ignorant of the facts in the case. He purposefully drew a huge crowd with no crowd control in place and then refused to tell the crowd to disperse (using twitter or by yelling or by anything) when the police showed up to deal with the dangerous, uncontrolled crowd. In fact, he kept sending tweets out about the event even as the police were trying to deal with the crowd. The only thing that courts might have to decide is if the police can compel you to say something for the public safety (the 1st amendment doesn't protect your right to say things that endanger the public, so I don't see why they shouldn't be able to force you to tell a dangerous crowd to disperse).
There's a difference between stereotypes and demographics you know; it isn't as if Amazon goes around saying "Yes it's cheap, but will it get them off their tractors?". It is a fact that Walmart has focused their efforts on rural areas, only very recently moving into major cities agressively. It's also a fact that Amazon's business model works slightly better for urbanites who recieve shipments faster (in Milwaukee shipments would arrive in 2-3 days with free shipping, rural Iowa it's more like 8-10 days), are more likely to have high speed internet, and are less likely to be served by a walmart/target type discount store.
Chromium isn't about a target user, it's about a target use. I'm also the developer, gamer, video editor type; that doesn't mean a netbook wouldn't come in handy for other things. My wife and I fight over the laptop all the time but I refuse to spend the money on a second one, a free netbook (even if all it could do was browse the web) would be very welcome.
That being said, it'll never happen. As someone up above pointed out, a single user isn't worth hundreds of dollars to Google, and it would only be a matter of time before someone figures out how to load custom software and hardware onto the thing. The article should be tagged with 'baseless speculation', that's all it is.
Doesn't work, they'll just look to get the money some other way, probably through shell companies whose 'services' are used by the company accepting the subsidies. Those kinds of limits can't be codified with our system of laws. If the law could simply say what it meant in clear english and leave the interpretation up to the courts it might be possible, but expensive lawyers will always find a way out of vuagely written laws.
90% of everything is crap. It's easy to look back and see the 10% of sci-fi that inspired real-world technology, it's a lot harder to look at the writing today and see how it is affecting things.
I didn't mean to call you a troll, I was only saying that that was the only part of your post that was even possibly trollish. The 'hey we might be headed for an ice' can't really be compared to the level of fearmongering going on today (even if you believe every word of AGW, you have to admit there is fearmongering going on). After all, by your own account Sagan admitted upfront that he may have been wrong. It is also possible that even now he may have been right and the ice age is here, just counteracted by warming; odds are we'll never know the true story.
Not sure this is deserving of a Troll mod (Ok, the stuff about the ice age in the 80's a little bit). It's a fact that many of the ground temperature stations are in places that have been developed since the stations were installed and that some number of them were installed in inapropriate places to begin with. You really can't argue with the pictures on the blog (assuming this is the same blog I stumbled on a while back); stations 5 feet from an asphalt parking lot, directly between two tennis courts, and on the top of asphalt roofed buildings. You might be able to argue that they somehow control for this, or that ground stations are taking a backseat to satellite data, but satellite data only goes back so far and temp adjustment are, at best, an educated guess.
Email isn't science but that doesn't mean it isn't interesting. If the email says "Hey Bob, your algorithm didn't produce the level of warming we were expecting, we need you to rework it so it is in line with our expectations" that would say a lot about how the 'science' is being done. Furthermore, random chunks of data isn't science, but it does have the possibility of revealing any number of things, anything from numbers not matching what is published to problems with software to inconsistent data.
I'm not saying that is what the leaked information says, nor am I saying that the leak is real; there isn't enough information to know that yet. But your instant dismissal of this because it isn't every piece of data ever collected is a little disconcerting in my opinion.
But, if the 'many eyes' were being honest with themselves, they should have cried foul at the insecure way extentions are handled before exploits were even known. It really isn't acceptible to give any random extention that much control over your software IMO.
GP never said it was impossible, just that it is much, much easier for people with a wealthy upbringing; and you sure as hell can't deny that. You said it yourself, you worked your ass off for your success. Meanwhile, I know several people from my college who were in their 6th year because 'Grandma' is paying their tuition and they don't give a damn. Eventually, they graduated and found good jobs but if you had their level of motivation you would have failed out and been working at a dead end job before the end of the second semester. Alternatively, my brother (mine is a lower-middle income family) was in a major car accident 8 years ago. Right about now, he is just barely getting his life and his finances under his own control again; college was on hold while he worked 60-70 hours a week to pay off his medical bills
The point is, people from wealthy families can make many decisions, hit some bad luck, sit on their ass for a few years and still win the game of life. People from poor families are one car accident, one lazy semester, or one layoff away from spending the next decade of their life clawing and scraping back up to where they were.
I could imagine having a socket installed such that hardware could be upgraded without re-opening the skull. USB has been around for almost 14 years now and is still used for many things today. Every 2-3 years seems like too much but I could definately see some people being willing to go under the knife every 10 years to upgrade the interface, especially if 'under the knife' means a 30 minute outpatient surgery (which, if millions of people are doing it, it would have to be). That would allow easy upgrades between socket upgrades, removal for sleeping/showering/swimming, re easy charging, even different hardware for different uses (a game machine, a work machine, etc), just swap out the plug.
Actually, I think Alastair Reynolds's vision is even more accurate: Such mind/computer interfaces exist, but the vast majority of people don't use them because they fear catching a nanotech virus and those that use them to the fullest are so distanced from the rest of humanity that wars are fought over the sanctity of the mind. The idea of a computer connecting directly up to my brain... well, I hope security technology improves by a couple orders of magnitude before that comes about.
I know what you mean, ever since I woke up in the future I've been having these recuring dreams about Lightspeed Briefs (tm).
Where's the beef?
In my neighbor's microwave, the turning on of which is what will kill my internet connection. Internet isn't 100% reliable, in my experience, my wireless internet is significantly less reliable than even buggy, bloaty, hated Windows Vista.
Hence the '42 is in base 13' part of my comment. 42(base 13) == 54(base 10) == 36(base 16). Of course, Adams himself denied this was the case... "No one writes jokes in base 13" but after this theory emerged he did work it into some of his later jokes, probably just to keep people wondering.
Unless of course, the ultimate question really is 'What is 6 times 9?' as some people believe (meaning 42 is base 13 for some unknown reason). Which would of course make the ultimate instruction 0x36.
I'll say it again, the MAD doctrine makes launching any small scale attack against the US the equivilent of National Suicide, especially using long rang missiles that can be tracked back to their origin. Do you think the US is just going to shrug an say 'oh well' after New York or LA has been nuked? As for the math, no missile sheild is going to be 100% perfect, ask the engineers working on it and I'll bet the target success rate is closer to 80% than 100%. That means that if you want to hit a major US city with a nuke, all you have to do is saturate. Russia, used btw because they are the only country that could concievably launch a successful, debilitating first strike (one that could eliminate a large percentage of our nuclear arsenal), has more than enough missiles to launch 100 at every critical target. If the failure rate is even 1% the majority of the targets will be destroyed. The math doesn't work out when it comes to an all out attack.
Star Wars was (and is) a massive destabalizer of international relations because despite being labeled 'purely defensive' it has no logical purpose other than to support offense (this is possibly revisable now if and only if you believe that a terrorist will somehow get access to an ICBM).
It goes like this: No concievable missile shield could shoot down any significant number of incoming missiles. The Russians would always be able to overwhelm the defenses with shear numbers, making the system worthless. The only situation where a missile shield works is if there is a very limited number of incoming targets. The only time Russia (or any other country for that matter) would be stupid enough to launch such a small nuclear attack is if they had already suffered a first strike and were launching a counter attack with whatever had survived.
So the senarios are 1) Russia launches an all out attack, missile shield is worthless, 2) Russia launches a small attack, US launches an all out attack and Russia is obliterated (MAD doctrine already prevents this level of attack in other words). 3) The US launches an all out attack, Russia launches it's counter which is relatively small (since it has already taken hits), missile shield works. The only logical purpose of a missile shield #3, to defend against a counter attack.