Someone started out yelling and hand waving about 5 million billion tons of atmosphere, and someone else started yelling and hand waving about 29,000 billion tons of CO2.
Proof that you can't read. The tonnage of CO2 was waved at first, and that "someone" that brought up the mass of the atmosphere was me, to prove that the mass the global warming crowd was hand waving about was of a trivial value. Stop being dishonest fucks that use propaganda tactics. Its really that simple. Stick to things that matter.
Instances of individuals voting multiple times or assuming another voter’s identity are vanishingly negligible
The veracity of this claim is in question because the system is set up specifically to forbid the testing of the claim. See the fight against Voter ID laws as evidence that some people really really really dont want the veracity of this claim tested.
you're ignoring the part about how much of the atmosphere is carbon dioxide
Nor does the 29 billion tons figure tell us. See the problem yet? Its an irrelevant number used for dishonest purposes. Hand waving and then hoping that nobody notices that the information indicated doesnt mean anything, in an attempt to influence opinion with information that is both deceptive and irrelevant, well theres a name for that.
A tendency towards failure to recognize such trivial forms of propaganda is a dangerous state to be in.
Not really. Someone who is on a life support machine isn't necessarily really alive.
If a single microbe or spore of anything biological were ever to be found on mars, the headlines would in fact read "LIFE FOUND ON MARS!" complete with an exclamation point. Just saying...
Your point seems to be that beavers may be our intellectual equals, or even perhaps our superiors.
Really? The point couldn't possibly be that we don't know what our impact is, and we also don't know what beavers do or don't know? You don't have to read anything into it. The thing stated is precisely what is meant.
Saying exactly what you mean is how some people actually choose what to say.
Speaking of which, nobody has any idea what being "intellectual equals" actually means, but there you are trying to argue with it, as if you know that this particular property that we cant even begin to measure is some how a requirement of the hypothesis that frogs understand their ecological impact. Do you see the problem? You really don't know what you are talking about, even though you may like to think that you do.
The total weight of the atmosphere isn't relevant because the vast majority (> 95%) of the atmosphere are not greenhouse gases
I am not the one claiming that weight is relevant. The grandparent, the person I replied to, is clearly making the claim that weight is relevant and in fact relies on the premise when he brought up the weight of CO2, an attempt to play the number itself ("billions") to be relevant evidence in the discourse.
Its not. Its just a number, and it turns out to be a quite small one in context. If you want to talk about the effects of CO2, thats another thing entirely, and one that does not meaningfully depend on the absolute weight. The absolute weight number is garbage, and thats why I replied to him, but you didn't seem to get that. Perhaps you should step back.
No sir, 5 million billion tons. Your entire premise is based on 29 billion being "a lot" - but it isn't a lot at all. The two units are 6 orders of magnitude different. This is like adding 29 megabytes to a 5 terabyte hard drive. So now you've got 5.000029 terabytes. This 29 billion tons number is small in the context for which it is used. The number is not evidence of anything.
Now please explain why you told us about the mass of CO2 released by humans into the atmosphere each year, why you used a seemingly large number to I guess influence opinion, and why you neglected to be honest about how small the number you gave actually is in reality.
A beaver that builds a dam has no hope of knowing the ecological impacts of his actions.
First, what makes you think that beavers dont understand the ecological impacts of their actions?
Second, what makes you think that we understand the ecological impacts of our actions?
Your argument with regards to habitat modification seems to suggest that you believe humans are equal to other animals in terms of morality as well.
I merely believe that we evolved to make decisions that benefit ourselves, our families, and our tribe (nationalism is just another name for tribalism.) That sometimes the order of importance of these things is different than given is also a matter of evolution at its core. I also observe that many people conflate conservation with preservation, to the detriment of both philosophies.
if you heard that Syria was barring international election monitors within 100 feet of polling places, would you give them the same benefit of the doubt?
I would if they barred all reasonable forms of election monitoring. Texas doesnt do that. Texas allows any eligible voter to register to monitor the elections, and many shall.
Nice try ignoring reality though. What is so unreasonable about only letting the people who are voting monitor the vote? Nothing. The person being unreasonable is you.
Only $2.5B to flawlessly land a 1 ton nuclear powered rover on the surface of Mars.
I see your logic. Point out really bad spending in order to make something that costs less look justified. The problem is that it doesn't.
"Only $2.5B" is the entire income of 55,000 Americans at the median. The space shuttle, including first launch and re-entry, cost quite a bit less.
1 ton is 32000 ounces. So the MSL has so far cost $80,000 per ounce.
Dont even think about bringing up the fuel, because the space shuttle was 2000 times as massive and could be put into polar orbit for about 20% of the cost of the MSL.
No sir, while it's nice to do science stuff, the cost was not justified. This was NASA shoveling money at private corporations, enabled by runaway government deficits and a lack of any semblance of responsible oversight. Did you miss the article last week about the set of weather satellites that have cost $12.5B so far, and arent even launch-able for several more years?
NASA's primary mission is to shovel money at corporations. The science stuff is an excuse to do so, and you can't justify the gross inefficiency with logical fallacies about the Iraq war. It's nice to do science stuff, but don't shut your brain off just because science is being done.
This is because NASA's mission was changed from "win the space race" to "shovel money derived from runaway deficits into the coffers of favored corporations" sometime around 1990 (+/- 4 years)
If you take the humans-are-evil-because-they-wipe-out-species, then wouldn't re-introducing extinct species also be sort of irresponsible under the same philosophy?
If we could bring back pterodactyls today, would it really be wise? It isnt hard to imagine the devastation to many species that this would cause. Perhaps it is actually immoral to preserve the possibility of that sort of thing happening. Can we trust future humans to only bring back these species when its a good idea to do so? Maybe we shouldn't give them the chance to make horribly bad decisions.
The Apple/Microsoft cross licensing deals date back to the year indicated in my signature. In this year Apple was going down the tubes rapidly, their lawsuits with Microsoft were in a stalemate that would last longer than Apple would, and Apple literally needed to be saved with a very large cash injection.
The only reason Apple started playing ball with Microsoft is because they were forced to. The only reason Apple continues to play ball with Microsoft is because Microsoft still has them between a rock and a hard place in terms of patents.
..or, the "smart" nerds know that there are better alternatives.
iTunes is "good enough" until something better is witnessed, then usually the opinion is that iTunes is "completely unacceptable" because thats how wide the gap is. I've got a nice system.. many real cores, over 3ghz, plenty of memory, and the iTunes on Windows 7 experience can be summed up as "holy fuck thats a lot of senseless interface latency.. this piece of shit makes RealPlayer look good"
In this case its only evidence of a crime if the evidence collected turns out to be of a crime. This is known as a fishing expedition and I would dare say that the constitution has language to prevent exactly this sort of thing, but the government no longer follows the constitution so here we are.
Next up, the government collects all emails sent by anyone in the search for evidence of crimes.
..especially pertinent since TFA is, at its roots, about the DEA going after marijuana growers.
This is the administration that blew off the petition to legalize marijuana, after creating the system to petition them under the blatantly false promise that the people actually matter.
The difference between Bush and Obama is that when Bush did shit like this, the media crucified him, so Bush didnt pull shit like this very often.
In fact there's so much bad code like this in C# that they had introduce the strange "yield" keyword to help alleviate the issues caused by this feature.
uh, what?
Yield has nothing to do with that "feature" as you call it. Yield is extremely useful because efficiently iterating over a data set is not always as simple as repeatedly incrementing an index, and in fact trying to shoehorn index methodology into it is sometimes one of the least efficient ways to do it.
The canonical example is probably iterating over permutations or combinations of indexed items. How do you efficiently index combinations? For instance, index all combinations of 7 of 52 items?
int count = 133784560// (52 choose 7)
for(int j = 0; j < count; j++) { your turn, convert j into 7 values from 0 to 51 in such a way that all 133 million combinations are visited
}
Clearly, shoehorning this indexing methodology onto the problem is terribly inefficient.
Yield allows a single routine to be written to produce such an iteration efficiently, without any of the consumers of the iterator having to worry about its peculiar methodology. So instead of having the obvious *7* nested for loops in your code wherever you need to produce this iteration, you can just implement it once, and the consumer can just go visit each combination with absolutely no way to bug up the iteration.
Online searches are usually slower than local searches
Are you kidding me?
With an online search, there are servers waiting to perform my search and are optimized to do it. Google throws me 10 results in well under a second.
My local machine is not optimized to do searches of local content, nor do I want it to dedicate the kind of RAM it takes to do fast local searches. My local machine takes longer than a Google search just to get a a set of uncached icons onto the screen because its got to hit the platter.
Last time I checked graphics performance was more dependent on the discrete graphics card performance than on cpu power.
If you bothered to look at their hardware survey, you would have noticed that the most common GPU isnt in a discrete graphics card either. The most common GPU is the Intel HD 3000.
So much for Valve serving the performance enthusiasts.
This is a market that is willing to spend hundreds of dollars and hours of tweaking to gain a few percent more performance.
Umm, no. Check out Steam's hardware survey sometime. The most common CPU speed is ~2.5ghz and the most common number of cores is 2. There is definitely an enthusiast gaming market, but Valve isnt really serving it. Valve is serving what is essentially everyone (at the moment.)
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I'm confused about what you're arguing.
Then you can't read.
Someone started out yelling and hand waving about 5 million billion tons of atmosphere, and someone else started yelling and hand waving about 29,000 billion tons of CO2.
Proof that you can't read. The tonnage of CO2 was waved at first, and that "someone" that brought up the mass of the atmosphere was me, to prove that the mass the global warming crowd was hand waving about was of a trivial value. Stop being dishonest fucks that use propaganda tactics. Its really that simple. Stick to things that matter.
Instances of individuals voting multiple times or assuming another voter’s identity are vanishingly negligible
The veracity of this claim is in question because the system is set up specifically to forbid the testing of the claim. See the fight against Voter ID laws as evidence that some people really really really dont want the veracity of this claim tested.
you're ignoring the part about how much of the atmosphere is carbon dioxide
Nor does the 29 billion tons figure tell us. See the problem yet? Its an irrelevant number used for dishonest purposes. Hand waving and then hoping that nobody notices that the information indicated doesnt mean anything, in an attempt to influence opinion with information that is both deceptive and irrelevant, well theres a name for that.
A tendency towards failure to recognize such trivial forms of propaganda is a dangerous state to be in.
Not really. Someone who is on a life support machine isn't necessarily really alive.
If a single microbe or spore of anything biological were ever to be found on mars, the headlines would in fact read "LIFE FOUND ON MARS!" complete with an exclamation point. Just saying...
Your point seems to be that beavers may be our intellectual equals, or even perhaps our superiors.
Really? The point couldn't possibly be that we don't know what our impact is, and we also don't know what beavers do or don't know? You don't have to read anything into it. The thing stated is precisely what is meant.
Saying exactly what you mean is how some people actually choose what to say.
Speaking of which, nobody has any idea what being "intellectual equals" actually means, but there you are trying to argue with it, as if you know that this particular property that we cant even begin to measure is some how a requirement of the hypothesis that frogs understand their ecological impact. Do you see the problem? You really don't know what you are talking about, even though you may like to think that you do.
The total weight of the atmosphere isn't relevant because the vast majority (> 95%) of the atmosphere are not greenhouse gases
I am not the one claiming that weight is relevant. The grandparent, the person I replied to, is clearly making the claim that weight is relevant and in fact relies on the premise when he brought up the weight of CO2, an attempt to play the number itself ("billions") to be relevant evidence in the discourse.
Its not. Its just a number, and it turns out to be a quite small one in context. If you want to talk about the effects of CO2, thats another thing entirely, and one that does not meaningfully depend on the absolute weight. The absolute weight number is garbage, and thats why I replied to him, but you didn't seem to get that. Perhaps you should step back.
The atmosphere masses 5,000 billion tons
No sir, 5 million billion tons. Your entire premise is based on 29 billion being "a lot" - but it isn't a lot at all. The two units are 6 orders of magnitude different. This is like adding 29 megabytes to a 5 terabyte hard drive. So now you've got 5.000029 terabytes. This 29 billion tons number is small in the context for which it is used. The number is not evidence of anything.
The atmosphere weighs ~5 million billion tons.
Now please explain why you told us about the mass of CO2 released by humans into the atmosphere each year, why you used a seemingly large number to I guess influence opinion, and why you neglected to be honest about how small the number you gave actually is in reality.
A beaver that builds a dam has no hope of knowing the ecological impacts of his actions.
First, what makes you think that beavers dont understand the ecological impacts of their actions?
Second, what makes you think that we understand the ecological impacts of our actions?
Your argument with regards to habitat modification seems to suggest that you believe humans are equal to other animals in terms of morality as well.
I merely believe that we evolved to make decisions that benefit ourselves, our families, and our tribe (nationalism is just another name for tribalism.) That sometimes the order of importance of these things is different than given is also a matter of evolution at its core. I also observe that many people conflate conservation with preservation, to the detriment of both philosophies.
if you heard that Syria was barring international election monitors within 100 feet of polling places, would you give them the same benefit of the doubt?
I would if they barred all reasonable forms of election monitoring. Texas doesnt do that. Texas allows any eligible voter to register to monitor the elections, and many shall.
Nice try ignoring reality though. What is so unreasonable about only letting the people who are voting monitor the vote? Nothing. The person being unreasonable is you.
Only $2.5B to flawlessly land a 1 ton nuclear powered rover on the surface of Mars.
I see your logic. Point out really bad spending in order to make something that costs less look justified. The problem is that it doesn't.
"Only $2.5B" is the entire income of 55,000 Americans at the median. The space shuttle, including first launch and re-entry, cost quite a bit less.
1 ton is 32000 ounces. So the MSL has so far cost $80,000 per ounce.
Dont even think about bringing up the fuel, because the space shuttle was 2000 times as massive and could be put into polar orbit for about 20% of the cost of the MSL.
No sir, while it's nice to do science stuff, the cost was not justified. This was NASA shoveling money at private corporations, enabled by runaway government deficits and a lack of any semblance of responsible oversight. Did you miss the article last week about the set of weather satellites that have cost $12.5B so far, and arent even launch-able for several more years?
NASA's primary mission is to shovel money at corporations. The science stuff is an excuse to do so, and you can't justify the gross inefficiency with logical fallacies about the Iraq war. It's nice to do science stuff, but don't shut your brain off just because science is being done.
This is because NASA's mission was changed from "win the space race" to "shovel money derived from runaway deficits into the coffers of favored corporations" sometime around 1990 (+/- 4 years)
Thats like calling you dead because you are dead in the future. Sometimes the act of using qualifying terminology undoes the terminology itself.
If you take the humans-are-evil-because-they-wipe-out-species, then wouldn't re-introducing extinct species also be sort of irresponsible under the same philosophy?
If we could bring back pterodactyls today, would it really be wise? It isnt hard to imagine the devastation to many species that this would cause. Perhaps it is actually immoral to preserve the possibility of that sort of thing happening. Can we trust future humans to only bring back these species when its a good idea to do so? Maybe we shouldn't give them the chance to make horribly bad decisions.
If you are anti-religious, as you seem to elude to, then you must accept that we are natural beings and are not the only ones that advantageously alter their habitat without regard for the consequences to other natural beings.
You have not refuted his point. You have unwittingly supported it.
The lesson that we can take away from this is that good editors should have been kept in zoos too.
The Apple/Microsoft cross licensing deals date back to the year indicated in my signature. In this year Apple was going down the tubes rapidly, their lawsuits with Microsoft were in a stalemate that would last longer than Apple would, and Apple literally needed to be saved with a very large cash injection.
The only reason Apple started playing ball with Microsoft is because they were forced to. The only reason Apple continues to play ball with Microsoft is because Microsoft still has them between a rock and a hard place in terms of patents.
..or, the "smart" nerds know that there are better alternatives.
iTunes is "good enough" until something better is witnessed, then usually the opinion is that iTunes is "completely unacceptable" because thats how wide the gap is. I've got a nice system.. many real cores, over 3ghz, plenty of memory, and the iTunes on Windows 7 experience can be summed up as "holy fuck thats a lot of senseless interface latency.. this piece of shit makes RealPlayer look good"
Next up, the government collects all emails sent by anyone in the search for evidence of crimes.
Not really the same thing.
Fine.
Next up, the government collects all emails sent by anyone in the search for evidence of jury members discussing this case.
In this case its only evidence of a crime if the evidence collected turns out to be of a crime. This is known as a fishing expedition and I would dare say that the constitution has language to prevent exactly this sort of thing, but the government no longer follows the constitution so here we are.
Next up, the government collects all emails sent by anyone in the search for evidence of crimes.
..especially pertinent since TFA is, at its roots, about the DEA going after marijuana growers.
This is the administration that blew off the petition to legalize marijuana, after creating the system to petition them under the blatantly false promise that the people actually matter.
The difference between Bush and Obama is that when Bush did shit like this, the media crucified him, so Bush didnt pull shit like this very often.
In fact there's so much bad code like this in C# that they had introduce the strange "yield" keyword to help alleviate the issues caused by this feature.
uh, what?
// (52 choose 7)
Yield has nothing to do with that "feature" as you call it. Yield is extremely useful because efficiently iterating over a data set is not always as simple as repeatedly incrementing an index, and in fact trying to shoehorn index methodology into it is sometimes one of the least efficient ways to do it.
The canonical example is probably iterating over permutations or combinations of indexed items. How do you efficiently index combinations? For instance, index all combinations of 7 of 52 items?
int count = 133784560
for(int j = 0; j < count; j++) {
your turn, convert j into 7 values from 0 to 51 in such a way that all 133 million combinations are visited
}
Clearly, shoehorning this indexing methodology onto the problem is terribly inefficient.
Yield allows a single routine to be written to produce such an iteration efficiently, without any of the consumers of the iterator having to worry about its peculiar methodology. So instead of having the obvious *7* nested for loops in your code wherever you need to produce this iteration, you can just implement it once, and the consumer can just go visit each combination with absolutely no way to bug up the iteration.
Online searches are usually slower than local searches
Are you kidding me?
With an online search, there are servers waiting to perform my search and are optimized to do it. Google throws me 10 results in well under a second.
My local machine is not optimized to do searches of local content, nor do I want it to dedicate the kind of RAM it takes to do fast local searches. My local machine takes longer than a Google search just to get a a set of uncached icons onto the screen because its got to hit the platter.
Last time I checked graphics performance was more dependent on the discrete graphics card performance than on cpu power.
If you bothered to look at their hardware survey, you would have noticed that the most common GPU isnt in a discrete graphics card either. The most common GPU is the Intel HD 3000.
So much for Valve serving the performance enthusiasts.
This is a market that is willing to spend hundreds of dollars and hours of tweaking to gain a few percent more performance.
Umm, no. Check out Steam's hardware survey sometime. The most common CPU speed is ~2.5ghz and the most common number of cores is 2. There is definitely an enthusiast gaming market, but Valve isnt really serving it. Valve is serving what is essentially everyone (at the moment.)