"Now CEI is trying to go after the UK temperature record because the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, used by the Hadley/Met Office, has abandoned some bad data. Climate Science Watch (CSW) has the background, “CEI global warming denialists try another gambit seeking to derail EPA endangerment finding.“ Ironically, as Prof. Phil Jones, CRU’s Director explains below:
Almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same as in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) archive used by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center [see here and here]. The original raw data are not “lost.”
A small amount of data, which could be easily reconstructed if one wanted to waste a lot of time, was abandoned for reasons such as the following:
Station series for sites that in the 1980s we deemed then to be affected by either urban biases or by numerous site moves, that were either not correctable or not worth doing as there were other series in the region."
WOW, that's critical, the whole concept of doing climate science is undermined!
Honestly, fact checking and using less than completely idiotic biased sources is a good idea.
I think my observation would basically be that 'denialism' of any ilk will tend towards the same sort of rhetorical forms. After all, if you are going to ignore the fact that science has revealed a vast array of objectively verifiable predictive descriptions of the natural world, then you need to attack its epistemic foundations. There are only so many ways you can do that. They can be clad in a wide variety of terminology for consumption by different audiences, but they all in the long run come down to "Nyaaaaahhhhh! You can't really do what I can see you consistently doing!" followed by some variation of sticking ones fingers in one's ears.
Not that science is unassailable at an epistemological level of course. It is just hard to take people seriously who try to extend that to the practical implications of systematized knowledge. Perhaps we cannot know anything in some sense. Nor can we ascertain certainty in anything fundamentally, but CO2 absorbs and reradiates long wave radiation at specific frequencies, and increasing its concentration in the atmosphere can be objectively proven (and was so proven 100 years ago) to raise the surface temperature of the Earth. Anyone betting against that process happening, and anyone betting that what we see today is 'happenstance' is simply taking a sucker bet. The least they could do would be to go move to some other Earth and not try to force the rest of us to play their losing odds.
It was actually a pretty good job, though I should have gained a clue from the combination of "Ivory Tower" and "Real American" in the same post, lol;) I tried hard. Blame my stupid insane client of the week that is trying to cheat me out of $15k. The world is a rotten egg this week, for sure, lol.
This has to be one of, if not the, biggest piece of tripe ever posted on/. and that's quite an accomplishment. If reality is nothing but a 'consensus' then we can simply wish for mana to fall from heaven, eh? What sort of bullshit mumbo jumbo is this?
Let me point out a few inconvenient FACTS for you. That "Ivory tower education-fascist complex" (talk about over educated buzz-word laden ivory tower technocratic BS speech right there) brought your ass all the modern conveniences of life you count on and without which your ass would be sitting naked in a cave. Let me also point out that you have SOME BALLS telling anyone who is and isn't a "Real American". You might want to get out a bit more, your little narrow minded world view is pathetic.
What right do you have to dump tons of extra CO2 into the atmosphere so you can have the kind of lighting you fancy? Who gave anyone the 'right' to do or have anything at all? Who gave the inhabitants of the arbitrarily designated area of the surface of the Earth those people designate as the 'United States' the right to install vicious dictators in various other arbitrary parts of the Earth who will supply them with their fossil fuels cheaply? Who gave the assholes who buy the politicians who enact the policies which insure that buying more of their crappy polluting product is government policy and that MY tax money will be spent on keeping them in business when it would be vastly more beneficial to all of us to simply implement basic common sense energy efficiency policies? You want to watch out when you start talking about 'rights' because frankly I don't look around and see a whole lot of respect being given to the rights of a whole lot of people in this world. So maybe count your blessing, suck it up, be socially responsible, and enjoy your CFLs for a couple more years until you can replace them with LED lighting.
Seriously, in a perfect world everyone would get to do whatever the heck they want, but it ain't a perfect world. You have to drive on the proper side of the road, and at a safe posted speed, correct? Are you all up in arms about that? Why are you all up in arms about a light bulb? Are you sure this is YOUR issue, or is it really mostly the result of certain self-centered individuals clever manipulation of public perception?
Really, just because climate science has immediate implications in the real world doesn't make it politics nor the scientists doing that research political. People need to get their heads out of their butts and realize that science is science and if they don't like the implications of that then it is their own tough crap. Not that this will ever happen or that any climate scientists can ever expect to actually be treated in a fair, rational, or even civil manner by the barbarian hordes.
They have good updates, excellent repositories, and a system that is both fairly cutting edge and quite stable. In other words it works and works well. Rarely do you ever need to go hunting beyond the official repos except to get unfree stuff that is ALL well supported in the PLF repos (which have a nice simple web interface that will set them up in URPMI with a couple of clicks). I've used Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, CentOS, etc, and all of them have relatively poor repos compared to Mandriva and I had to hunt around, install stuff from various 3rd party repos, deal with dependency hell, etc. Haven't had to deal with any of that with Mandriva in quite a while now.
OTOH there are some downsides. URPMI isn't quite as slick as some of the APT based package managers, and French people + documentation apparently = disastrous mess. Still, there's plenty of expertise on the net to solve any issues, the documentation exists, it is just badly organized.
Mandriva the company seems to have lost some of its steam in the last few years, but they are still pumping out an excellent distro. After using it as my primary desktop OS, internal server OS, and on numerous laptops for 10 years I really have no major complaints and see no compelling reason to switch. SUSE is the only other distro that supports KDE even half as well, and I'm just not that interested in switching to Gnome. Mandriva does what a distro should do, does it well, and will serve most people's needs quite well. I wouldn't run it on production servers only because it is a pain in the arse to leave off the desktop packages entirely for some reason, though it will WORK fine.
Not to mention the totally daft lack of understanding of how natural selection even works, timescale aside. But ah well, we already know there's no logic here to start with...
Eh, whatever. There's no defeating that level of illogic. All we can do is live in the knowledge that nature cares not for man's ignorance. What is, is.
Oh, I think it is clear enough, to anyone who is actually willing to engage their brain at all. There are what, 2-3 million species known to inhabit the Earth right now, with vast diversity. Even a few minutes of thought clearly shows it would be impossible for a boat to hold all possible animals, and if the entire Earth flooded to the top of every mountain then equally clearly nothing else survived. The story couldn't have made literal sense even to the people who wrote it. Even if you accept the basic story of Genesis whole cloth you can't match the story to the most basic plain facts you can see around you if you spend 5 minutes looking.
Thus we have to conclude that Biblical literalists LITERALLY cannot reason, even with basic facts accessible to every person.
Perhaps, but the whole flood story becomes vastly suspect in any case since it is clearly impossible that there was a worldwide flood within recent prehistory, nor can anything even close to a literal interpretation of the Noah story make any sense. Clearly it is at best an allegorical tale and/or cultural myth. Once we accept that any given Bible story is clearly not literally an accurate attestation of fact then there's no particular reason to expect any other part to be particularly either.
I'd say that tales like Genesis are actually pretty good summaries of the common sense reasoning of the day. People are seen to be related and families and people's increase in number over time, so logically you would expect to be able to go backwards to a time when there were "only 2 people", and likewise to some sort of time when the world began in some fashion or other.
In other words I just don't think there's much point in debating the actual scientific relevance of Bible stories. They're pre-scientific legends, informed by some common sense reasoning but no actual facts. They may happen to match with scientific findings in some random cases, but at best that shows that some science is also common sense, and at worst indicates that no matter what fantastical tall tale you tell sometimes you get lucky and the truth bears some (albeit faint) resemblance to your story.
In any case, most Christians throughout history have not held that there was any great specific literal accuracy to the Bible. Even ancient late classical Christian theologians pretty much took it all metaphorically, and so have Jews and Moslems going all the way back to ancient times. Other posters are right about the super literalism prevalent in some places in the US today being a recent phenomenon. I dunno what it is about the US, but we sure do breed a unique form of fanatics.
6-10 thousand years is a pretty trivial amount of time in evolutionary terms. There is simply no way that 2 people could produce in 10k years the diversity we actually see in actual living humans unless they mutated so fast that practically every single person would be born with fatal mutations.
Actually the evidence is much like you suggest in terms of there being one unique woman, Mitochondrial Eve, that falls in the female line of every living human being. There is probably likewise some point at which you can find a single male line in every living human lineage, but they didn't happen at the same time, weren't a couple, and nobody ever living at any one given instant was ever descended from those two people. Beyond that the timelines are MUCH longer. The last bottleneck was at least 50k years ago and there was probably another at 200ky.
The upshot is certainly that human lineages are vastly older than most bible scholars seem to think, at least those who are at all literalistic.
I don't think they would have. Clearly the government has the responsibility to regulate the use of public property and thus the authority to do so. Note too that there are undoubtedly limits to that authority. Anyone can get a driver's license by meeting certain basic qualifications. A state could not refuse to license a category of people without being able to show compelling interest. Remember, it is the government of the people, the 'privilege' is permission to use the property of the people at large and in principle should the regulation of that privilege become onerous it is the people who have only themselves to blame for choosing representatives who passed such laws. There is no 'them' in government, it is us.
This is true, but what is the justification for it? And why is it being done without any real discussion? I mean it isn't a SECRET, but it isn't as if there was any effort made to have a public debate about it either. Just sort of "oh, by the way, we're now tracking where everyone goes. Have a nice day."
I'm not even saying I necessarily have a huge problem with it. In fact it can work in your favor if there's ever a question about where you were at any given time. There should simply be a more thorough discussion in public about what can be collected, how it can be used, what the ACTUAL safeguards are, when or how you might be notified of who may be interested in this information, etc. Lots of questions that should be answered, and given the documented fact that the Federal Govt has essentially no qualms about illegally obtaining similar kinds of data I for one have serious questions about the wisdom of creating this monstrosity in the first place. OTOH this sort of thing is virtually inevitable, so it is best done in the light of day and openly. And it would be a VERY good idea to have independent outside control and verification that is answerable to the people through channels that are not controlled by the police.
Yes, they retain this data. I've confirmed that. I don't know how long it is retained, but it IS uploaded. I've pointed out to some people over there that this seems quite dubious, but that's what they do and they're not interested in whether people like it or not.
I don't know how many states are doing this now, but they also under at least SOME circumstances share with the feds as well. Vermont I KNOW for certain has had this for some time, though far from all PDs have the equipment yet. They're way ahead of the civil rights people on this one, and their official line is you're in public, you don't have a right to privacy in public, and "oh we keep it all secure and only accessible under controlled conditions" which of course means every intel agency in the govt has it of course...
Truthfully though, this stuff is inevitable, the issue is the sneaky way they're kind of sliding into it. There was NO debate on this at all in our state.
Oh, it may well go to the dogs too. At least the core functionality is better than Facebook's. Only time will tell. Google may add more cruft to their stuff, but they don't seem to go as crazy with that as many places do. Fundamentally some kind of distributed social networking might be ideal, but I think technologically we're not really anywhere near being there yet.
That's the real significant fact about it. Facebook's UI is a gargantuan POS. G+ has a vastly better UI and functionality that is clearly more useful for what it is intended to do. I don't understand what it is about sites like Facebook, but these services just seem to be incapable of not turning themselves into crap. Hopefully G+ will just stick to doing what it does now and doing it better. I don't understand why I should need to be able to run 'applications' in a social networking site, I can go to Popcap and do that if I want, etc.
So yeah, G+ isn't Facebook, and that's a good thing.
But that is EXACTLY why 'agile' development methods place a high degree of emphasis on working code. Iteration 1 should WORK, every iteration from 1 to N should work. The early iterations of larger projects may not do anything exceptionally useful, but they have to run and pass acceptance tests. Thus you're always squarely centered on extending a working application and 'cleaning it up' (continuous integration). You never spend time working on anything that isn't part of some actual working functional part of the application being developed. Now and then that actually means you may code something in a way that is clearly not the final end result, but that's OK because you will always be in a position where you have an actual working application. If the customer decides later they don't want X, then you just never do X and if X would have required refactoring Y then good, you already have a Y that does everything else sans X.
It really does work, and the emphasis really is NOT on process, but on practical problem solving. Process is "what actually did work best in practice".
You can get all the temperature data AND you can get a full run down of all the processing done, AND there are now FIVE totally independent analyses which have been done on the temperature data using their own subsampling and analysis procedures, AND they all show the same thing give or take a bit.
All this really 'proves' is that 95% of the people who are smart enough to download a free AV program didn't have an infection. Lets see, who uses those? Oh, I know! People who take precautions... When do they do it? BEFORE they get infected, lol.
While it is an interesting datapoint to hobknob about, this actually says ZILCH about Windows infection rate, except it probably can't possibly be LESS than 5%.
Well, there is a WIDE diversity of legitimate scientific opinion on the death toll from Chernobyl. The lower numbers are actually more on the order of around 6,000 excess thyroid cancers, but of course not all of those were fatal (OTOH the effects of having your thyroid removed surgically are rather nasty, especially as in this case where you're talking about almost entirely children). Upper bounds go on up into huge numbers, but there are certainly reasonable lines of evidence that put the figure 2 orders of magnitude above what you've cited.
OTOH, while it is easy to criticize the Japanese, they actually have acted with vastly greater promptness and regard for public well-being than the Soviets did in 1986. The Soviets denied almost everything, issued evacuation orders only long after they were critically needed, refused to test or order the discontinued distribution of contaminated food (mostly milk), etc. None of these kinds of behavior can be laid at the doorstep of the Japanese authorities. Many of the inaccurate or not-so-timely releases of data have been either a result of great difficulty in producing good data, unclear lines of responsibility, etc.
I can understand the Japanese Government's desire to see only accurate information disseminated and there are some dangers in putting out bad information. Still, this whole feeble attempt to retcon the Internet etc is just that, feeble. Even if everyone involved had perfectly good motives it can only serve to reduce public confidence in the authorities at this point and give a seeming of credibility to some pretty ridiculous nonsense. But that's government for you. As other posters have noted, governmental authorities aren't usually terribly good at thinking out of the box (and in this case they may simply not have any good options either).
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module
Not a new idea at all. Heck, many existing mother boards support it.
You mean THIS data?
"Now CEI is trying to go after the UK temperature record because the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, used by the Hadley/Met Office, has abandoned some bad data. Climate Science Watch (CSW) has the background, “CEI global warming denialists try another gambit seeking to derail EPA endangerment finding.“ Ironically, as Prof. Phil Jones, CRU’s Director explains below:
Almost all the data we have in the CRU archive is exactly the same as in the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) archive used by the NOAA National Climatic Data Center [see here and here]. The original raw data are not “lost.”
A small amount of data, which could be easily reconstructed if one wanted to waste a lot of time, was abandoned for reasons such as the following:
Station series for sites that in the 1980s we deemed then to be affected by either urban biases or by numerous site moves, that were either not correctable or not worth doing as there were other series in the region."
WOW, that's critical, the whole concept of doing climate science is undermined!
Honestly, fact checking and using less than completely idiotic biased sources is a good idea.
I think my observation would basically be that 'denialism' of any ilk will tend towards the same sort of rhetorical forms. After all, if you are going to ignore the fact that science has revealed a vast array of objectively verifiable predictive descriptions of the natural world, then you need to attack its epistemic foundations. There are only so many ways you can do that. They can be clad in a wide variety of terminology for consumption by different audiences, but they all in the long run come down to "Nyaaaaahhhhh! You can't really do what I can see you consistently doing!" followed by some variation of sticking ones fingers in one's ears.
Not that science is unassailable at an epistemological level of course. It is just hard to take people seriously who try to extend that to the practical implications of systematized knowledge. Perhaps we cannot know anything in some sense. Nor can we ascertain certainty in anything fundamentally, but CO2 absorbs and reradiates long wave radiation at specific frequencies, and increasing its concentration in the atmosphere can be objectively proven (and was so proven 100 years ago) to raise the surface temperature of the Earth. Anyone betting against that process happening, and anyone betting that what we see today is 'happenstance' is simply taking a sucker bet. The least they could do would be to go move to some other Earth and not try to force the rest of us to play their losing odds.
It was actually a pretty good job, though I should have gained a clue from the combination of "Ivory Tower" and "Real American" in the same post, lol ;) I tried hard. Blame my stupid insane client of the week that is trying to cheat me out of $15k. The world is a rotten egg this week, for sure, lol.
This has to be one of, if not the, biggest piece of tripe ever posted on /. and that's quite an accomplishment. If reality is nothing but a 'consensus' then we can simply wish for mana to fall from heaven, eh? What sort of bullshit mumbo jumbo is this?
Let me point out a few inconvenient FACTS for you. That "Ivory tower education-fascist complex" (talk about over educated buzz-word laden ivory tower technocratic BS speech right there) brought your ass all the modern conveniences of life you count on and without which your ass would be sitting naked in a cave. Let me also point out that you have SOME BALLS telling anyone who is and isn't a "Real American". You might want to get out a bit more, your little narrow minded world view is pathetic.
What right do you have to dump tons of extra CO2 into the atmosphere so you can have the kind of lighting you fancy? Who gave anyone the 'right' to do or have anything at all? Who gave the inhabitants of the arbitrarily designated area of the surface of the Earth those people designate as the 'United States' the right to install vicious dictators in various other arbitrary parts of the Earth who will supply them with their fossil fuels cheaply? Who gave the assholes who buy the politicians who enact the policies which insure that buying more of their crappy polluting product is government policy and that MY tax money will be spent on keeping them in business when it would be vastly more beneficial to all of us to simply implement basic common sense energy efficiency policies? You want to watch out when you start talking about 'rights' because frankly I don't look around and see a whole lot of respect being given to the rights of a whole lot of people in this world. So maybe count your blessing, suck it up, be socially responsible, and enjoy your CFLs for a couple more years until you can replace them with LED lighting.
Seriously, in a perfect world everyone would get to do whatever the heck they want, but it ain't a perfect world. You have to drive on the proper side of the road, and at a safe posted speed, correct? Are you all up in arms about that? Why are you all up in arms about a light bulb? Are you sure this is YOUR issue, or is it really mostly the result of certain self-centered individuals clever manipulation of public perception?
Really, just because climate science has immediate implications in the real world doesn't make it politics nor the scientists doing that research political. People need to get their heads out of their butts and realize that science is science and if they don't like the implications of that then it is their own tough crap. Not that this will ever happen or that any climate scientists can ever expect to actually be treated in a fair, rational, or even civil manner by the barbarian hordes.
They have good updates, excellent repositories, and a system that is both fairly cutting edge and quite stable. In other words it works and works well. Rarely do you ever need to go hunting beyond the official repos except to get unfree stuff that is ALL well supported in the PLF repos (which have a nice simple web interface that will set them up in URPMI with a couple of clicks). I've used Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, CentOS, etc, and all of them have relatively poor repos compared to Mandriva and I had to hunt around, install stuff from various 3rd party repos, deal with dependency hell, etc. Haven't had to deal with any of that with Mandriva in quite a while now.
OTOH there are some downsides. URPMI isn't quite as slick as some of the APT based package managers, and French people + documentation apparently = disastrous mess. Still, there's plenty of expertise on the net to solve any issues, the documentation exists, it is just badly organized.
Mandriva the company seems to have lost some of its steam in the last few years, but they are still pumping out an excellent distro. After using it as my primary desktop OS, internal server OS, and on numerous laptops for 10 years I really have no major complaints and see no compelling reason to switch. SUSE is the only other distro that supports KDE even half as well, and I'm just not that interested in switching to Gnome. Mandriva does what a distro should do, does it well, and will serve most people's needs quite well. I wouldn't run it on production servers only because it is a pain in the arse to leave off the desktop packages entirely for some reason, though it will WORK fine.
Not to mention the totally daft lack of understanding of how natural selection even works, timescale aside. But ah well, we already know there's no logic here to start with...
Eh, whatever. There's no defeating that level of illogic. All we can do is live in the knowledge that nature cares not for man's ignorance. What is, is.
Where are mod points when we need them?
Oh, I think it is clear enough, to anyone who is actually willing to engage their brain at all. There are what, 2-3 million species known to inhabit the Earth right now, with vast diversity. Even a few minutes of thought clearly shows it would be impossible for a boat to hold all possible animals, and if the entire Earth flooded to the top of every mountain then equally clearly nothing else survived. The story couldn't have made literal sense even to the people who wrote it. Even if you accept the basic story of Genesis whole cloth you can't match the story to the most basic plain facts you can see around you if you spend 5 minutes looking.
Thus we have to conclude that Biblical literalists LITERALLY cannot reason, even with basic facts accessible to every person.
Perhaps, but the whole flood story becomes vastly suspect in any case since it is clearly impossible that there was a worldwide flood within recent prehistory, nor can anything even close to a literal interpretation of the Noah story make any sense. Clearly it is at best an allegorical tale and/or cultural myth. Once we accept that any given Bible story is clearly not literally an accurate attestation of fact then there's no particular reason to expect any other part to be particularly either.
I'd say that tales like Genesis are actually pretty good summaries of the common sense reasoning of the day. People are seen to be related and families and people's increase in number over time, so logically you would expect to be able to go backwards to a time when there were "only 2 people", and likewise to some sort of time when the world began in some fashion or other.
In other words I just don't think there's much point in debating the actual scientific relevance of Bible stories. They're pre-scientific legends, informed by some common sense reasoning but no actual facts. They may happen to match with scientific findings in some random cases, but at best that shows that some science is also common sense, and at worst indicates that no matter what fantastical tall tale you tell sometimes you get lucky and the truth bears some (albeit faint) resemblance to your story.
In any case, most Christians throughout history have not held that there was any great specific literal accuracy to the Bible. Even ancient late classical Christian theologians pretty much took it all metaphorically, and so have Jews and Moslems going all the way back to ancient times. Other posters are right about the super literalism prevalent in some places in the US today being a recent phenomenon. I dunno what it is about the US, but we sure do breed a unique form of fanatics.
6-10 thousand years is a pretty trivial amount of time in evolutionary terms. There is simply no way that 2 people could produce in 10k years the diversity we actually see in actual living humans unless they mutated so fast that practically every single person would be born with fatal mutations.
Actually the evidence is much like you suggest in terms of there being one unique woman, Mitochondrial Eve, that falls in the female line of every living human being. There is probably likewise some point at which you can find a single male line in every living human lineage, but they didn't happen at the same time, weren't a couple, and nobody ever living at any one given instant was ever descended from those two people. Beyond that the timelines are MUCH longer. The last bottleneck was at least 50k years ago and there was probably another at 200ky.
The upshot is certainly that human lineages are vastly older than most bible scholars seem to think, at least those who are at all literalistic.
I don't think they would have. Clearly the government has the responsibility to regulate the use of public property and thus the authority to do so. Note too that there are undoubtedly limits to that authority. Anyone can get a driver's license by meeting certain basic qualifications. A state could not refuse to license a category of people without being able to show compelling interest. Remember, it is the government of the people, the 'privilege' is permission to use the property of the people at large and in principle should the regulation of that privilege become onerous it is the people who have only themselves to blame for choosing representatives who passed such laws. There is no 'them' in government, it is us.
This is true, but what is the justification for it? And why is it being done without any real discussion? I mean it isn't a SECRET, but it isn't as if there was any effort made to have a public debate about it either. Just sort of "oh, by the way, we're now tracking where everyone goes. Have a nice day."
I'm not even saying I necessarily have a huge problem with it. In fact it can work in your favor if there's ever a question about where you were at any given time. There should simply be a more thorough discussion in public about what can be collected, how it can be used, what the ACTUAL safeguards are, when or how you might be notified of who may be interested in this information, etc. Lots of questions that should be answered, and given the documented fact that the Federal Govt has essentially no qualms about illegally obtaining similar kinds of data I for one have serious questions about the wisdom of creating this monstrosity in the first place. OTOH this sort of thing is virtually inevitable, so it is best done in the light of day and openly. And it would be a VERY good idea to have independent outside control and verification that is answerable to the people through channels that are not controlled by the police.
Yes, they retain this data. I've confirmed that. I don't know how long it is retained, but it IS uploaded. I've pointed out to some people over there that this seems quite dubious, but that's what they do and they're not interested in whether people like it or not.
I don't know how many states are doing this now, but they also under at least SOME circumstances share with the feds as well. Vermont I KNOW for certain has had this for some time, though far from all PDs have the equipment yet. They're way ahead of the civil rights people on this one, and their official line is you're in public, you don't have a right to privacy in public, and "oh we keep it all secure and only accessible under controlled conditions" which of course means every intel agency in the govt has it of course...
Truthfully though, this stuff is inevitable, the issue is the sneaky way they're kind of sliding into it. There was NO debate on this at all in our state.
Oh, it may well go to the dogs too. At least the core functionality is better than Facebook's. Only time will tell. Google may add more cruft to their stuff, but they don't seem to go as crazy with that as many places do. Fundamentally some kind of distributed social networking might be ideal, but I think technologically we're not really anywhere near being there yet.
That's the real significant fact about it. Facebook's UI is a gargantuan POS. G+ has a vastly better UI and functionality that is clearly more useful for what it is intended to do. I don't understand what it is about sites like Facebook, but these services just seem to be incapable of not turning themselves into crap. Hopefully G+ will just stick to doing what it does now and doing it better. I don't understand why I should need to be able to run 'applications' in a social networking site, I can go to Popcap and do that if I want, etc.
So yeah, G+ isn't Facebook, and that's a good thing.
But that is EXACTLY why 'agile' development methods place a high degree of emphasis on working code. Iteration 1 should WORK, every iteration from 1 to N should work. The early iterations of larger projects may not do anything exceptionally useful, but they have to run and pass acceptance tests. Thus you're always squarely centered on extending a working application and 'cleaning it up' (continuous integration). You never spend time working on anything that isn't part of some actual working functional part of the application being developed. Now and then that actually means you may code something in a way that is clearly not the final end result, but that's OK because you will always be in a position where you have an actual working application. If the customer decides later they don't want X, then you just never do X and if X would have required refactoring Y then good, you already have a Y that does everything else sans X.
It really does work, and the emphasis really is NOT on process, but on practical problem solving. Process is "what actually did work best in practice".
You can get all the temperature data AND you can get a full run down of all the processing done, AND there are now FIVE totally independent analyses which have been done on the temperature data using their own subsampling and analysis procedures, AND they all show the same thing give or take a bit.
So maybe some wishful thinking there? lol.
All this really 'proves' is that 95% of the people who are smart enough to download a free AV program didn't have an infection. Lets see, who uses those? Oh, I know! People who take precautions... When do they do it? BEFORE they get infected, lol.
While it is an interesting datapoint to hobknob about, this actually says ZILCH about Windows infection rate, except it probably can't possibly be LESS than 5%.
Well, there is a WIDE diversity of legitimate scientific opinion on the death toll from Chernobyl. The lower numbers are actually more on the order of around 6,000 excess thyroid cancers, but of course not all of those were fatal (OTOH the effects of having your thyroid removed surgically are rather nasty, especially as in this case where you're talking about almost entirely children). Upper bounds go on up into huge numbers, but there are certainly reasonable lines of evidence that put the figure 2 orders of magnitude above what you've cited.
OTOH, while it is easy to criticize the Japanese, they actually have acted with vastly greater promptness and regard for public well-being than the Soviets did in 1986. The Soviets denied almost everything, issued evacuation orders only long after they were critically needed, refused to test or order the discontinued distribution of contaminated food (mostly milk), etc. None of these kinds of behavior can be laid at the doorstep of the Japanese authorities. Many of the inaccurate or not-so-timely releases of data have been either a result of great difficulty in producing good data, unclear lines of responsibility, etc.
I can understand the Japanese Government's desire to see only accurate information disseminated and there are some dangers in putting out bad information. Still, this whole feeble attempt to retcon the Internet etc is just that, feeble. Even if everyone involved had perfectly good motives it can only serve to reduce public confidence in the authorities at this point and give a seeming of credibility to some pretty ridiculous nonsense. But that's government for you. As other posters have noted, governmental authorities aren't usually terribly good at thinking out of the box (and in this case they may simply not have any good options either).
Depends on what they block I suppose... There are a lot of different ways to accomplish blocking, but blacklisting IP addresses is the simplest.
Yeah, I'm going to pay for a domain that will be blocked in 90% of the world...