Let's review... The hacked emails look bad, but they were obtained illegally and were never meant for public consumption - these emails were never "peer reviewed" so to speak. As far as I'm concerned, they are irrelevant, as tempting as it is to see some giant conspiracy in them.
The fact that this is modded 5-insightful shows where Slashdot has gone. Bye, it was nice knowing you, Slashdot.
What you are saying is true for cases where the data is so small that reproducing the experiment is not a major investment. But when you are a government-funded organization with millions of pounds invested in collecting and collating the data, some of which may not even be obtainable in the same form, to claim that your results are reproducible because someone else can invest millions of pounds is ridiculous. Yet that is what the HadCRU data set would require to be reproduced, *even if* the description were comprehensible.
What a load. Peer review is not accuracy checking in the slightest. It is a sanity check on submitted articles, to remove obvious poseurs.
They have tossed the raw data, not intermediate runs. Their numbers simply cannot be reproduced. Their data set is essentially meaningless. They are saying "trust us", and the code that is evident in the files posted shows that you can't even begin to trust them.
Their work is completely discredited. They are disgraced.
The Guardian has an editorial claiming that the economic establishment is too fearful to come clean on the reality of oil suppplies, and makes an analogy with the (marginalized, demonized) economists who warned of a coming economic collapse in 2007.
What about the (marginalized, demonized) economists who forecast an economic collapse every year from 1980 to 2000? Even Jeanne Dixon got a few right.
If you read through the entire article, you can find some interesting information on what it was he wanted us to do. Instead of regulating CO2 emissions, he states that it is more economical to reduce the amount of radiation from the sun that reaches the earth. I don't really understand his position. In effect, he's saying, "I don't believe in global warming. However, even if I did, there's no reason to regulate CO2 emissions." He's against limiting CO2 because he doesn't believe it can work. Neither do I. Even Waxman-Markey proponents agree that it will have an insignificant effect on world temperatures.
He seems bent against regulation of CO2 at any cost.
That's semantically a bit over the top.
Secondly, he also states that global temperatures have fallen for the last 11 years. I really would like to see his work. This article (http://earthtrends.wri.org/updates/node/83), reported in the September 26 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows global temperatures rising for the last 30 years.
As they have apparently risen and fallen for millenia, in 30 year cycles. Now they are falling again. The IPCC graphs that the EPA is basing their engangerment finding on? Not a single one of them shows a falling. As it has for the last 10 years since the El-Nino-influenced year of 1998. More importantly, they have also fallen since 2002.
This man strikes me as being very much against any type of environmental regulation, and I'm not surprised that the EPA is trying to silence him. The EPA is not supposed to silence anyone. I am a bit shocked that you think that silencing an opposing scientific viewpoint is OK. Of course that is the constant tactic of many environmentalists....I suppose you might be one.
You simply don't get it. Why would anyone bother taking the risk of entering into a domain moving transaction for peanuts? Why would they bother? To make $20.00? With the risk of problems that can happen. There are several steps you have to monitor. Why bother?
I would laugh at you too. $120.00 isn't enough for anything. It won't pay a consultant for one hour to perform the operations to move and transfer a domain.
As one who has been on the receiving end of many such offers, by virtue of being the reg contact on a *lot* of domains, many are just ridiculous. If your business isn't worth enough to spend $1,000 on a major asset like a domain name, then it isn't worth registering that one special domain for.
Perhaps you can find someone who just wants to be a nice guy. But probably not.
+1 on that. Especially when you run into mob-connected bureaucratic nightmares like New York State, who literally don't give a crap about the problems they cause for others. Pay up, baby. Our way. We don't care about how complex it is -- comply with thousands of state and local tax regulations even if you are a small business.
The software route is no good because nothing is universal enough.
I could get behind a tax initiative if the states adopted a flat online sales tax rate for all items in all localities. No different tax rates by county or municipality. Just the base state rate.
Anyone who can fully understand the greater part of the climatic system. That person might show up in a couple of centuries.
Oh, by the way -- why are the global warming people rebranding themselves as "climate change"? Is it, perhaps, because the globe isn't warming?
I couldn't find a simple answer for that but I'll give you my guess. The idea of warming is too simple. It sounds like every spot equally is going to get warmer by a few degrees. That's not the prediction.
Not a few years ago. The prediction was warming, and it was called global warming. It included sea level rise and the "smoking hot spot" 10km up in the atmosphere. Neither of those have occurred, nor has overall warming over the last decade. What predictions have come true? Just name a few.
Instead, some places will get drier (and get droughts) while other places will get wetter (and get floods). Some storms will probably become more violent (because storms are fueled by heat) and some of these storms may actually bring a lot of rain or snow making people feel colder. Lastly, there are some thoughts that climate change will switch off some important ocean currents which bring warm water to the likes of Britain and Northern Europe - which would make them a lot colder.
The term climate change is a nice catch-all to describe how the climate will change - and not simply become warmer.
If you could point to a large number of predictions that have come true without significant numbers that haven't come true, then it would mean something. Until then, you are blowing hot air.
(On a slightly more personal note, I'd suggest that your question indicates that you are not all that familiar with the predictions of climate change - which makes me think that you haven't researched the subject sufficiently to be able to rebut it well. This does not speak well for your position.)
Do mean on a slightly more ad-hominem note? 8-) Well, I will return the favor.
I am not a climate change expert. Neither is Al Gore. But I can read the words of the scientists that signed the Inhofe petition. And the proceedings of the American Institute for Economic Research conference on Global Warming.
Where's the beef? Whare is the hot spot in the atmosphere 10km above the tropics? Where is the overall global warming trend over the last decade? Where is the predicted sea level rise?
It is clear to me that anyone talking down from a mountaintop like you are, as if the science is settled, is not someone to listen to. There are plenty of reputable people of great stature, including William Gray and John Theon, who are not believers in AGW. Most of what I see from AGW proponents is appeals to authority and gobbledy-gook that tries to explain why the small percentage of CO2 that humans create is the most important percentage.
I would suggest that people look at the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [wikipedia.org]. This is a United Nations effort with a very large number of scientists involved. So many, from so many different countries, that I would suggest that the information represents consensus opinion and should be listened to very carefully.
And we all know how impartial and non-political the UN is, right?
To me the UN moniker on something is a guarantee that I will ignore it. Any body that can put Syria in the chairmanship of the Human Rights Commission is fundamentally flawed. As is their climate effort.
Oh, by the way -- why are the global warming people rebranding themselves as "climate change"? Is it, perhaps, because the globe isn't warming?
My big complaint about ads is their overmodulation and intrusiveness. I would much more willingly submit to ads if stations would commit to turning down the volume, perhaps half what the music is.
Instead, I just don't watch television or listen to radio. I simply cannot stand constant advertising.
Why does it make sense to have high speed rail between Paris and London, but not between similarly distant New York and Philadelphia?
Because Philadelphia isn't Paris.
Why can't we put a loop going from Chicago to Detroit to Cleveland to New York?
Because the cities are 1) not as populous and 2) farther apart than the capitals of Europe.
Or connecting Miami, Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville? What about winding from San Diego to San Francisco?
It may not be economical to make links between the coasts, or over much of the Midwest. But the areas I'm talking about are areas with European density, with urban cores at reasonable distances from each other. Believing that the United States as a whole faces "distances that dwarf that of Europe" is downright Texan.
And so you are claiming that distance and population density doesn't matter?
The US has a third the population density. And to boot, there are three major disconnected population centers with distances over 1500 miles separating them. No such situation is present in Europe to *any* degree.
There is simply no comparison between the US and Europe for rail travel. None. And yet certain types of people lay their ridiculous guilt trip on the US for not embracing rail, without even considering that.
128Kbs is sooo 1990s.. We've moved on. Storage, be it flash or Hard drives, has gotten order(s) of magnitude cheaper and bigger. So why aren't we moving our mindset about default MP3 quality UP to reflect the change? Make very High quality VBR the default and raise the average quality bar.
When network transfer speeds start increasing at the same rate storage capacity increases, I say yes. Until then, 128Kbps has a definite place and improving the quality is a worthy goal.
My code sucked too. The good part was that no matter how bad it did, it was one of the few pieces of code on the planet that did what it does.
So I had time to improve my skills, and the code is still in use 14 years later. There are still little bits of it you can tell were written by a novice, but most of it is pretty decent.
Unless you were designing in an asymmetric random IP address paradigm for sourcing outgoing requests, I would think it would be easy simply by scanning logs.
And even if you did that but then you can't find a connecting host, what good is direct addressability anyway? You might as well NAT.
It amazes me that the IPv6 people never talk about the *benefits* of NAT, which is that the individual's user and all it's vulnerable services are not readily accessible to the Internet at large.
And don't talk to me about firewalls, either. In actual practice, firewalls have turned out to be firesieves way too often. If you have a strong enough firewall to matter, you might as well NAT because you aren't getting to that machine anyway.
I have been a full-time telecommuter for years. I quit my telecommuting job created from someone buying my telecommuting business. I then formed another company which is all telecommuters.
We have never physically met most of our clients. We are located in three different cities (Idaho, Indiana, Texas).
I find that there are two things that are important.
-- Separation from your family. Either a physically separate building (which is what I do) or an ironclad don't-bother-me-before-5pm rule.
-- Frequent phone calls and physical meetings, and constant availability of what the others are doing. We have a policy that our messages our Bcc to a record of outgoing email by default. You can always tell what the other is doing if you look. My partner looks at mine all the time -- I don't tend to do that.
It can work, but it requires self-starters. Most full-time salaried people I wouldn't even consider allowing them to telecommute.
The problem is not that Perl is hard. In fact, at it's easy level, it is so easy that real tyros write code in it.
It empowers tyros to do things they couldn't begin to do in most languages.
I am author of a 12-year-old open source product written in Perl. It has contributions from hundreds of people, with substantial contributions from scores. I don't believe I would have received nearly that many had it been written in C. I might have gotten that many or more if it was in PHP, but they never could have been trusted for use because of security.
The person who said Perl lost the marketing war is correct, but one of the biggest problems with Perl at the corporate level is technical. It is not signal-safe. That is a big problem when writing code which interacts with system libraries.
Slashdot Mirror
Your comment is the usual ad-hominem, appeal to authority, and appeal to popularity. Nothing to see here -- in your response.
Let's review... The hacked emails look bad, but they were obtained illegally and were never meant for public consumption - these emails were never "peer reviewed" so to speak. As far as I'm concerned, they are irrelevant, as tempting as it is to see some giant conspiracy in them.
The fact that this is modded 5-insightful shows where Slashdot has gone. Bye, it was nice knowing you, Slashdot.
What you are saying is true for cases where the data is so small that reproducing the experiment is not a major investment. But when you are a government-funded organization with millions of pounds invested in collecting and collating the data, some of which may not even be obtainable in the same form, to claim that your results are reproducible because someone else can invest millions of pounds is ridiculous. Yet that is what the HadCRU data set would require to be reproduced, *even if* the description were comprehensible.
What a load. Peer review is not accuracy checking in the slightest. It is a sanity check on submitted articles, to remove obvious poseurs.
They have tossed the raw data, not intermediate runs. Their numbers simply cannot be reproduced. Their data set is essentially meaningless. They are saying "trust us", and the code that is evident in the files posted shows that you can't even begin to trust them.
Their work is completely discredited. They are disgraced.
What about the (marginalized, demonized) economists who forecast an economic collapse every year from 1980 to 2000? Even Jeanne Dixon got a few right.
If you read through the entire article, you can find some interesting information on what it was he wanted us to do. Instead of regulating CO2 emissions, he states that it is more economical to reduce the amount of radiation from the sun that reaches the earth. I don't really understand his position. In effect, he's saying, "I don't believe in global warming. However, even if I did, there's no reason to regulate CO2 emissions."
He's against limiting CO2 because he doesn't believe it can work. Neither do I. Even Waxman-Markey proponents agree that it will have an insignificant effect on world temperatures.
He seems bent against regulation of CO2 at any cost.
That's semantically a bit over the top.
Secondly, he also states that global temperatures have fallen for the last 11 years. I really would like to see his work. This article (http://earthtrends.wri.org/updates/node/83), reported in the September 26 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows global temperatures rising for the last 30 years.
As they have apparently risen and fallen for millenia, in 30 year cycles. Now they are falling again. The IPCC graphs that the EPA is basing their engangerment finding on? Not a single one of them shows a falling. As it has for the last 10 years since the El-Nino-influenced year of 1998. More importantly, they have also fallen since 2002.
This man strikes me as being very much against any type of environmental regulation, and I'm not surprised that the EPA is trying to silence him.
The EPA is not supposed to silence anyone. I am a bit shocked that you think
that silencing an opposing scientific viewpoint is OK. Of course that is the
constant tactic of many environmentalists....I suppose you might be one.
You keep tossing out this consensus thing. News flash -- the consensus is shattered. Try this on for size:
http://sciencespeak.com/NoEvidence.pdf
He also has a Caltech degree in Physics, and they don't give those out by mail order.
You should be responding to his science, not trashing the man.
You simply don't get it. Why would anyone bother taking the risk of entering into a domain moving transaction for peanuts? Why would they bother? To make $20.00? With the risk of problems that can happen. There are several steps you have to monitor. Why bother?
I would laugh at you too. $120.00 isn't enough for anything. It won't pay a consultant for one hour to perform the operations to move and transfer a domain.
As one who has been on the receiving end of many such offers, by virtue of being the reg contact on a *lot* of domains, many are just ridiculous. If your business isn't worth enough to spend $1,000 on a major asset like a domain name, then it isn't worth registering that one special domain for.
Perhaps you can find someone who just wants to be a nice guy. But probably not.
+1 on that. Especially when you run into mob-connected bureaucratic nightmares like New York State, who literally don't give a crap about the problems they cause for others. Pay up, baby. Our way. We don't care about how complex it is -- comply with thousands of state and local tax regulations even if you are a small business.
The software route is no good because nothing is universal enough.
I could get behind a tax initiative if the states adopted a flat online sales tax rate for all items in all localities. No different tax rates by county or municipality. Just the base state rate.
Terrorism could be in quotes if three thousand people had not died on 9/11.
-1 disagree with everything you said, including your sig. 8-)
So who would you listen to? What would it take?
Anyone who can fully understand the greater part of the climatic system. That person might show up in a couple of centuries.
Not a few years ago. The prediction was warming, and it was called global warming. It included sea level rise and the "smoking hot spot" 10km up in the atmosphere. Neither of those have occurred, nor has overall warming over the last decade. What predictions have come true? Just name a few.
If you could point to a large number of predictions that have come true without significant numbers that haven't come true, then it would mean something. Until then, you are blowing hot air.
Do mean on a slightly more ad-hominem note? 8-) Well, I will return the favor.
I am not a climate change expert. Neither is Al Gore. But I can read the words of the scientists that signed the Inhofe petition. And the proceedings of the American Institute for Economic Research conference on Global Warming.
Where's the beef? Whare is the hot spot in the atmosphere 10km above the tropics? Where is the overall global warming trend over the last decade? Where is the predicted sea level rise?
It is clear to me that anyone talking down from a mountaintop like you are, as if the science is settled, is not someone to listen to. There are plenty of reputable people of great stature, including William Gray and John Theon, who are not believers in AGW. Most of what I see from AGW proponents is appeals to authority and gobbledy-gook that tries to explain why the small percentage of CO2 that humans create is the most important percentage.
I would suggest that people look at the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [wikipedia.org]. This is a United Nations effort with a very large number of scientists involved. So many, from so many different countries, that I would suggest that the information represents consensus opinion and should be listened to very carefully.
And we all know how impartial and non-political the UN is, right?
To me the UN moniker on something is a guarantee that I will ignore it. Any body that can put Syria in the chairmanship of the Human Rights Commission is fundamentally flawed. As is their climate effort.
Oh, by the way -- why are the global warming people rebranding themselves as "climate change"? Is it, perhaps, because the globe isn't warming?
My trust just went right down the toilet.
It wasn't there already?
My big complaint about ads is their overmodulation and intrusiveness. I would much more willingly submit to ads if stations would commit to turning down the volume, perhaps half what the music is.
Instead, I just don't watch television or listen to radio. I simply cannot stand constant advertising.
Why does it make sense to have high speed rail between Paris and London, but not between similarly distant New York and Philadelphia?
Because Philadelphia isn't Paris.
Why can't we put a loop going from Chicago to Detroit to Cleveland to New York?
Because the cities are 1) not as populous and 2) farther apart than the capitals of Europe.
Or connecting Miami, Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville? What about winding from San Diego to San Francisco?
It may not be economical to make links between the coasts, or over much of the Midwest. But the areas I'm talking about are areas with European density, with urban cores at reasonable distances from each other. Believing that the United States as a whole faces "distances that dwarf that of Europe" is downright Texan.
And so you are claiming that distance and population density doesn't matter?
The US has a third the population density. And to boot, there are three major disconnected population centers with distances over 1500 miles separating them. No such situation is present in Europe to *any* degree.
There is simply no comparison between the US and Europe for rail travel. None. And yet certain types of people lay their ridiculous guilt trip on the US for not embracing rail, without even considering that.
How about
8. Distances which dwarf that of Europe.
I can't believe people talk about rail in the U.S. without ever mentioning that key fact.
Nobody wants it -- why do you think the project failed?
128Kbs is sooo 1990s.. We've moved on. Storage, be it flash or Hard drives, has gotten order(s) of magnitude cheaper and bigger. So why aren't we moving our mindset about default MP3 quality UP to reflect the change? Make very High quality VBR the default and raise the average quality bar.
When network transfer speeds start increasing at the same rate storage capacity increases, I say yes. Until then, 128Kbps has a definite place and improving the quality is a worthy goal.
My code sucked too. The good part was that no matter how bad it did, it was one of the few pieces of code on the planet that did what it does.
So I had time to improve my skills, and the code is still in use 14 years later. There are still little bits of it you can tell were written by a novice, but most of it is pretty decent.
Unless you were designing in an asymmetric random IP address paradigm for sourcing outgoing requests, I would think it would be easy simply by scanning logs.
And even if you did that but then you can't find a connecting host, what good is direct addressability anyway? You might as well NAT.
It amazes me that the IPv6 people never talk about the *benefits* of NAT, which is that the individual's user and all it's vulnerable services are not readily accessible to the Internet at large.
And don't talk to me about firewalls, either. In actual practice, firewalls have turned out to be firesieves way too often. If you have a strong enough firewall to matter, you might as well NAT because you aren't getting to that machine anyway.
I have been a full-time telecommuter for years. I quit my telecommuting job created from someone buying my telecommuting business. I then formed another company which is all telecommuters.
We have never physically met most of our clients. We are located in three different cities (Idaho, Indiana, Texas).
I find that there are two things that are important.
-- Separation from your family. Either a physically separate building (which is what I do) or an ironclad don't-bother-me-before-5pm rule.
-- Frequent phone calls and physical meetings, and constant availability of what the others are doing. We have a policy that our messages our Bcc to a record of outgoing email by default. You can always tell what the other is doing if you look. My partner looks at mine all the time -- I don't tend to do that.
It can work, but it requires self-starters. Most full-time salaried people I wouldn't even consider allowing them to telecommute.
The problem is not that Perl is hard. In fact, at it's easy level, it is so easy that real tyros write code in it.
It empowers tyros to do things they couldn't begin to do in most languages.
I am author of a 12-year-old open source product written in Perl. It has contributions from hundreds of people, with substantial contributions from scores. I don't believe I would have received nearly that many had it been written in C. I might have gotten that many or more if it was in PHP, but they never could have been trusted for use because of security.
The person who said Perl lost the marketing war is correct, but one of the biggest problems with Perl at the corporate level is technical. It is not signal-safe. That is a big problem when writing code which interacts with system libraries.