But it misses the more fundamental problem with the glacial quote - the 2035 claim was treated in the past by prominent figures of AGW as studied science, as an incontrovertible fact.
Um, no. Anyone who wanted to get info on glacier forecasts would have turned to WG1, which is the working group that covered the science of global warming. Which *did* get it right. WG1 is held to a higher standard than WG2 and WG3. WG1 is written by climate scientists, is heavily reviewed, and uses almost no gray literature. WG2 is written by ecologists and uses a small but relevant amount of gray literature. WG3 is written by economists and people in industry, and contains a small but relevant amount of gray literature.
So the reality that in fact the quote came from one off the cuff comment
It was the conclusion of a not-yet-published paper. Calling it an "off the cuff comment" is a deliberate attempt to downplay that. Yes, the WG2 team screwed up there. On about two sentences of one page of a thousand page report -- one of three reports. Tell you what. You write a flawless 3,000 page report, then we'll talk.
I simply credit it to the "I can do it!" attitude that leads people to become engineers or CS people in the first place. The sense that you're smart enough to understand everything and capable enough to figure everything out. Even when you're not. It's a great attitude to have in an engineer, but it has the side effect of them assuming that they know more than people who actually do know what they're talking about.
Create, definition 1: "to cause to come into being, as something unique that would not naturally evolve or that is not made by ordinary processes."
Invent, definition 1: "to originate or create as a product of one's own ingenuity, experimentation, or contrivance: to invent the telegraph."
Clear?
Next we'll be having to debate the definition of "is".:P The "Gore Bill" turned ARPANET into the internet. Feel free to hate the guy, but he deserves credit for this.
What, you expect lack of knowledge on an issue to stop people from commenting on it? You *don't* expect to hear straw men?
Random straw man example: the "glaciers aren't melting" comment. First off, most glaciers are in decline, so they're wrong. But more importantly, AGW does not mean that all glaciers will decline. Glacier melt rates certainly affect rate of flow. But so does snowfall rate, and there are a good number of lesser factors (for example, how strongly pack ice holds back the front of the glacier). Some glaciers almost never experience temperatures above freezing, so melt rate isn't a significant issue for them; it's all about the balance between snowfall and discharge rate (which partly depends on pack ice if it reaches the sea). Snowfall rate and how well pack ice is retained depends on how weather patterns and ocean currents and temperatures change in the area. In most areas, the average precipitation increases in AGW scenarios. Oceans generally warm (although not evenly, thanks in large part to thermohaline cycling). And ocean currents vary. So you can't make any general comment about how all glaciers will react.
A good example of something that's been misused by *Gore*, to be even-handed here, is Kilimanjaro. Gore cited it as an example of climate change. It was probably one of the worst cases he could have picked. The summit of Kilimanjaro almost never goes above freezing. The rate of glacier change is a balance between snowfall and sublimation. Most (although not all) papers on the subject indicate that the balance of these two has indeed shifted due to human activity -- but primarily the raising of food in the region, not warming.
It's really a shame that Gore picked that case, because most glacier declines that have been studied have been determined to be primarily due to warming (esp. inland/temperate/mountain glaciers). But not Kilimanjaro.
Me: "So, God gave us dominion over the Earth, correct? He put us in charge of His creation?" Them: "Yes." Me: "So, if a parent told their children, 'We're going to be out for an hour. We're leaving you in charge of the house while we're goine,' and they came home and the house was burned down... how happy do you think they'd be with their children?"
And yet they'll at the same time start complaining about how they're being oppressed by moderation, even though they'll easily be dominating in the mod count. Mark my words.
It's really ridiculous. What ever happened to modding based on how reasonably a person is debating rather than whether the person matches your political ideology?
Correction: The quote as that he "took the initiative in creating the internet". And that is correct, at least as far as the internet as we know it today.
There are other arguments against stored procedures... for example, that they're not readily portable between DBs. And anyway, 99% of the time, a statement can just be written with bindings -- case closed.
What I find is that a surprising number of developers don't know that bindings exist. I've many times just happened to run into code that injection was a risk for, informed the developer, and was told, "Oh! I'll just put in a replace statement for "'" in the input.", and I had to take a lot of time to explain to them why A) that would not do the trick, and B) why adding more replace statements is not the right solution. Come on, people -- learn bindings and use them!
And it's not just SQL that's vulnerable to injection. I once coded for a free MMORPG (which shall not be named) and was appalled to see their lack of security checks when I audited their code. And they were upset with me for auditing it, as though leaving potential or known security holes in was fine (security through obscurity -- even though the client was open-source). The only one I got them to fix (with my patch, at that) took forever, and it was a *huge* security hole. On the MMORPG, if you said a weblink, it'd automatically transform into a clickable URL. They would run your web browser through a pipe, invoking the shell with whatever arguments were needed to run the browser and passing it the URL. Anyone seeing the hole yet? If your URL contained a shell substatement, that substatement would be run as well. So you could inject, say, "rm -rf ~/*". And due to the way they displayed the links, the user might never even see the malicious code in the URL. Massive, massive security hole, and it took several days for me to convince them that it needed to be fixed. They were afraid that if they changed that "working" piece of code, something might break and it might delay their next release. Delay nothing... that's a MASSIVE GAPING SECURITY HOLE, people!
I never was able to convince them to sanitize incoming packets to the client... they were insistent that TCP/IP would always protect them. I also found some scanf-style overflow holes that I couldn't get them to fix. Talk about putting expediency over safety.:P
I'll never forget the just plain awful translations in Final Fantasy Tactics -- an otherwise excellent game. When the same spell name gets translated in different ways depending on which screen you're on ("Summon Lich" vs. "Summon Rich" -- yeah, awesome Engrish there;) ), you've got QA problems.
And the evolution of their communication network. If you're a giant tree with roots that extend out for hundreds of meters, you're certainly going to have a relevant amount of current flowing through you. Any voltage drops or induced frequency modulation your tissue causes will affect the current being received at the next tree over. Seems a vastly more efficient method of communicating than how species on Earth do (for most immobile species, airborne chemical signals -- for example, acacias warn each other of predation by releasing chemicals that signal other acacias to produce more toxins). The bandwidth and latency from chemical communication is *extremely* poor, but you could obviously support tremendously high bandwidth communication by modulating an electrical signal. And since it's already flowing through them...
Also, trees closer to the energy sources would have stronger currents flowing through them, while distant ones would have less. So evolution could happen closer to the source of energy, and then an evolved increased sensitivity to it could allow the signal to be perceived further and further away over time.
Just like animals on our planet have evolved to interpret or co-opt the chemical and auditory communication of other species, animal species on Pandora would naturally be expected to do the same with electrical communications.
Eh, I still enjoy a good rickroll now and then. For my little sister's birthday, I'm giving her a card that looks perfectly normal and serious from the outside, but when you open it, it plays the first minute of "Never Gonna Give You Up" and has an Astley photo inside.
It'll also include a gift card, of course; I'm not that mean;)
I've seen one article which said that it can all be explained simply by the asymmetry of the heating -- that is, there's not enough heating for the entire interior of Enceladus to be liquid, but there is for a portion of it to be liquid, so long as there was a mechanism to concentrate it to one side -- which is what we see (and they postulated one method, although I forget what it was).
I'd bet dollars to donuts that that particular plot element was thrown in at the last minute to explain why they had to bring along this incompetent, untrained grunt to take part in a scientific mission. If the didn't have the DNA requirement, they could have used anyone.
I'm sure someone out there was reading over the script and said, "Hey, wait a minute -- why are they bringing HIM of all people?" To which Cameron probably debated the point for a while before ultimately conceding that they had to patch that issue.
The plot to Avatar was nothing special -- pick trope, write script. What made the movie impressive, however, was not just top-notch graphics, but also excellent worldbuilding behind it.
Historically, Lucifer is Venus, the Morning Star/Evening Star/Daystar (although in modern times, "daystar" has come to mean the sun). We get the word Lucifer from the vulgate where it's a literal translation of Light-Bringer -- Lux + Ferre. Isaiah uses Venus as an analogy for the fall of the king of Babylon. However, because the imagery he used was similar to that of the apocryphal story of the fall of Satan, early Christians confused the two.
Interestingly enough, uranium isn't the heaviest naturally occurring element. It occurs in two ways. One is extremely small amounts of natural Pu-244 The other is muromontite, which is a beryllium and sometimes uranium-containing form of allanite, making it a natural breeder reactor.
On the other hand, they had a pretty interesting scientific backstory for the movie. When I was watching the movie, when the guy set down the "unobtanium" on a platform and it floated, I immediately thought, "Huh... I bet that's supposed to be a room-temperature superconductor. Which would explain the demand." And indeed, that's exactly the intent. According to the backstory, part of the reason for the intense initial interest in the moon was the very high magnetic field strength it displayed. And since superconductors expel magnetic fields, leading to stable levitation, the floating mountains and continents are actually scientifically plausible in such a scenario. The very high magnetic field and the presence of the moon orbiting in the radiation belt of a gas giant leads to very high levels of ionizing radiation at the poles and at the intense local distortions in the magnetic field from the "unobtanium" -- to the degree that they're not just deadly, but also lead to a large current flowing through the planet.
The explanation for the mineral name is that scientists frustrated on Earth used began using the name "unobtanium" in reference to high temperature superconductors (before stable versions were found on Pandora) that it stuck.
That's a bogus argument. Normals have almost no effect on the performance of a 2004-era video card. They've been standard since the late '90s. A 2004-era video card should be able to handle cast shadows and possibly bump-mapping. And if you want to improve performance on an old video card, you need to reduce your poly count. SL generally has high poly count models. So they're doing things that hurt the performance of old cards but not doing things that have little effect on the performance of old cards.
It's just a crappy engine. Let's quit making excuses for it. Heck, they don't even have to do the work themselves! There are all sorts of rendering engines available today that do all the hard work for you. Including *good* implementations of auto-LOD on meshes to reduce poly counts at a distance.
I knew that would be coming! As I stated, SL textures and poly counts are just fine. So that's a bogus excuse. Normals have *bloody nothing* to do with streaming, and it took them until *2010* to do so. I mean, give me a freaking break. Vertex shaders have nothing to do with streaming, and they're sure as heck not using them. I could go on and on. It's just a sucky-written engine, period.
And the argument that they can't optimize scenes is likewise dumb. They have all these servers sitting idle and all of this content that basically remains static. Use them! But that's a totally secondary issue, because that's all about enabling higher poly counts (via culling), and as mentioned, SL seems to have no problem with poly counts.
Here's a random scene from the old client. Look -- *tons* of polys; the curves are all smooth. Lots of detail on the textures. But the engine just plain sucks. It's like something from the late 90s. You know how pathetically easy freaking *normals* are to compute? I had 3d engines that I wrote in BASIC in the mid '90s as a teenager that did them. It's a *one-time* cross-product per poly, and with OpenGL, you don't even have to do the dotproduct yourself. They're only just now adding them? That's just amazingly bad. There's what, five-ish standard ways to efficiently do cast shadows now, and they're still not doing them? Let alone shadows with umbra/penumbra shading... they're not doing cast shadows *at all*. What time warp did they did their graphics code out of?
Slashdot Mirror
But it misses the more fundamental problem with the glacial quote - the 2035 claim was treated in the past by prominent figures of AGW as studied science, as an incontrovertible fact.
Um, no. Anyone who wanted to get info on glacier forecasts would have turned to WG1, which is the working group that covered the science of global warming. Which *did* get it right. WG1 is held to a higher standard than WG2 and WG3. WG1 is written by climate scientists, is heavily reviewed, and uses almost no gray literature. WG2 is written by ecologists and uses a small but relevant amount of gray literature. WG3 is written by economists and people in industry, and contains a small but relevant amount of gray literature.
So the reality that in fact the quote came from one off the cuff comment
It was the conclusion of a not-yet-published paper. Calling it an "off the cuff comment" is a deliberate attempt to downplay that. Yes, the WG2 team screwed up there. On about two sentences of one page of a thousand page report -- one of three reports. Tell you what. You write a flawless 3,000 page report, then we'll talk.
If you want to get along with people better, next time, try being correct.
I simply credit it to the "I can do it!" attitude that leads people to become engineers or CS people in the first place. The sense that you're smart enough to understand everything and capable enough to figure everything out. Even when you're not. It's a great attitude to have in an engineer, but it has the side effect of them assuming that they know more than people who actually do know what they're talking about.
Create, definition 1: "to cause to come into being, as something unique that would not naturally evolve or that is not made by ordinary processes."
Invent, definition 1: "to originate or create as a product of one's own ingenuity, experimentation, or contrivance: to invent the telegraph."
Clear?
Next we'll be having to debate the definition of "is". :P The "Gore Bill" turned ARPANET into the internet. Feel free to hate the guy, but he deserves credit for this.
A good headline would be, "Half of Apple's Shareholders Are Dead Wrong But Vehemently Certain They Are Correct". ;)
Doesn't have to specify which side is which ;)
What, you expect lack of knowledge on an issue to stop people from commenting on it? You *don't* expect to hear straw men?
Random straw man example: the "glaciers aren't melting" comment. First off, most glaciers are in decline, so they're wrong. But more importantly, AGW does not mean that all glaciers will decline. Glacier melt rates certainly affect rate of flow. But so does snowfall rate, and there are a good number of lesser factors (for example, how strongly pack ice holds back the front of the glacier). Some glaciers almost never experience temperatures above freezing, so melt rate isn't a significant issue for them; it's all about the balance between snowfall and discharge rate (which partly depends on pack ice if it reaches the sea). Snowfall rate and how well pack ice is retained depends on how weather patterns and ocean currents and temperatures change in the area. In most areas, the average precipitation increases in AGW scenarios. Oceans generally warm (although not evenly, thanks in large part to thermohaline cycling). And ocean currents vary. So you can't make any general comment about how all glaciers will react.
A good example of something that's been misused by *Gore*, to be even-handed here, is Kilimanjaro. Gore cited it as an example of climate change. It was probably one of the worst cases he could have picked. The summit of Kilimanjaro almost never goes above freezing. The rate of glacier change is a balance between snowfall and sublimation. Most (although not all) papers on the subject indicate that the balance of these two has indeed shifted due to human activity -- but primarily the raising of food in the region, not warming.
It's really a shame that Gore picked that case, because most glacier declines that have been studied have been determined to be primarily due to warming (esp. inland/temperate/mountain glaciers). But not Kilimanjaro.
My typical argument with these people is,
Me: "So, God gave us dominion over the Earth, correct? He put us in charge of His creation?"
Them: "Yes."
Me: "So, if a parent told their children, 'We're going to be out for an hour. We're leaving you in charge of the house while we're goine,' and they came home and the house was burned down... how happy do you think they'd be with their children?"
And yet they'll at the same time start complaining about how they're being oppressed by moderation, even though they'll easily be dominating in the mod count. Mark my words.
It's really ridiculous. What ever happened to modding based on how reasonably a person is debating rather than whether the person matches your political ideology?
So could I paraphrase you as, "F*** Al Gore: Because We're Not *All* Going To Die" ?
Correction: The quote as that he "took the initiative in creating the internet". And that is correct, at least as far as the internet as we know it today.
Creating != Inventing.
Carry on.
There are other arguments against stored procedures... for example, that they're not readily portable between DBs. And anyway, 99% of the time, a statement can just be written with bindings -- case closed.
What I find is that a surprising number of developers don't know that bindings exist. I've many times just happened to run into code that injection was a risk for, informed the developer, and was told, "Oh! I'll just put in a replace statement for "'" in the input.", and I had to take a lot of time to explain to them why A) that would not do the trick, and B) why adding more replace statements is not the right solution. Come on, people -- learn bindings and use them!
And it's not just SQL that's vulnerable to injection. I once coded for a free MMORPG (which shall not be named) and was appalled to see their lack of security checks when I audited their code. And they were upset with me for auditing it, as though leaving potential or known security holes in was fine (security through obscurity -- even though the client was open-source). The only one I got them to fix (with my patch, at that) took forever, and it was a *huge* security hole. On the MMORPG, if you said a weblink, it'd automatically transform into a clickable URL. They would run your web browser through a pipe, invoking the shell with whatever arguments were needed to run the browser and passing it the URL. Anyone seeing the hole yet? If your URL contained a shell substatement, that substatement would be run as well. So you could inject, say, "rm -rf ~/*". And due to the way they displayed the links, the user might never even see the malicious code in the URL. Massive, massive security hole, and it took several days for me to convince them that it needed to be fixed. They were afraid that if they changed that "working" piece of code, something might break and it might delay their next release. Delay nothing... that's a MASSIVE GAPING SECURITY HOLE, people!
I never was able to convince them to sanitize incoming packets to the client... they were insistent that TCP/IP would always protect them. I also found some scanf-style overflow holes that I couldn't get them to fix. Talk about putting expediency over safety. :P
I'll never forget the just plain awful translations in Final Fantasy Tactics -- an otherwise excellent game. When the same spell name gets translated in different ways depending on which screen you're on ("Summon Lich" vs. "Summon Rich" -- yeah, awesome Engrish there ;) ), you've got QA problems.
Oh my god, you're right! Think about it: when was the last time you saw Kylie Minogue and Rick Astley in the same place at the same time???
And the evolution of their communication network. If you're a giant tree with roots that extend out for hundreds of meters, you're certainly going to have a relevant amount of current flowing through you. Any voltage drops or induced frequency modulation your tissue causes will affect the current being received at the next tree over. Seems a vastly more efficient method of communicating than how species on Earth do (for most immobile species, airborne chemical signals -- for example, acacias warn each other of predation by releasing chemicals that signal other acacias to produce more toxins). The bandwidth and latency from chemical communication is *extremely* poor, but you could obviously support tremendously high bandwidth communication by modulating an electrical signal. And since it's already flowing through them...
Also, trees closer to the energy sources would have stronger currents flowing through them, while distant ones would have less. So evolution could happen closer to the source of energy, and then an evolved increased sensitivity to it could allow the signal to be perceived further and further away over time.
Just like animals on our planet have evolved to interpret or co-opt the chemical and auditory communication of other species, animal species on Pandora would naturally be expected to do the same with electrical communications.
Eh, I still enjoy a good rickroll now and then. For my little sister's birthday, I'm giving her a card that looks perfectly normal and serious from the outside, but when you open it, it plays the first minute of "Never Gonna Give You Up" and has an Astley photo inside.
It'll also include a gift card, of course; I'm not that mean ;)
I've seen one article which said that it can all be explained simply by the asymmetry of the heating -- that is, there's not enough heating for the entire interior of Enceladus to be liquid, but there is for a portion of it to be liquid, so long as there was a mechanism to concentrate it to one side -- which is what we see (and they postulated one method, although I forget what it was).
I'd bet dollars to donuts that that particular plot element was thrown in at the last minute to explain why they had to bring along this incompetent, untrained grunt to take part in a scientific mission. If the didn't have the DNA requirement, they could have used anyone.
I'm sure someone out there was reading over the script and said, "Hey, wait a minute -- why are they bringing HIM of all people?" To which Cameron probably debated the point for a while before ultimately conceding that they had to patch that issue.
The plot to Avatar was nothing special -- pick trope, write script. What made the movie impressive, however, was not just top-notch graphics, but also excellent worldbuilding behind it.
Historically, Lucifer is Venus, the Morning Star/Evening Star/Daystar (although in modern times, "daystar" has come to mean the sun). We get the word Lucifer from the vulgate where it's a literal translation of Light-Bringer -- Lux + Ferre. Isaiah uses Venus as an analogy for the fall of the king of Babylon. However, because the imagery he used was similar to that of the apocryphal story of the fall of Satan, early Christians confused the two.
The conditions on Enceladus are believed to be short lived.
Where are you getting that from? Why would its tidal force heating have been less in the past?
Interestingly enough, uranium isn't the heaviest naturally occurring element. It occurs in two ways. One is extremely small amounts of natural Pu-244 The other is muromontite, which is a beryllium and sometimes uranium-containing form of allanite, making it a natural breeder reactor.
On the other hand, they had a pretty interesting scientific backstory for the movie. When I was watching the movie, when the guy set down the "unobtanium" on a platform and it floated, I immediately thought, "Huh... I bet that's supposed to be a room-temperature superconductor. Which would explain the demand." And indeed, that's exactly the intent. According to the backstory, part of the reason for the intense initial interest in the moon was the very high magnetic field strength it displayed. And since superconductors expel magnetic fields, leading to stable levitation, the floating mountains and continents are actually scientifically plausible in such a scenario. The very high magnetic field and the presence of the moon orbiting in the radiation belt of a gas giant leads to very high levels of ionizing radiation at the poles and at the intense local distortions in the magnetic field from the "unobtanium" -- to the degree that they're not just deadly, but also lead to a large current flowing through the planet.
The explanation for the mineral name is that scientists frustrated on Earth used began using the name "unobtanium" in reference to high temperature superconductors (before stable versions were found on Pandora) that it stuck.
Sounds like someone's just grumpy because Lastday is coming up.
That's a bogus argument. Normals have almost no effect on the performance of a 2004-era video card. They've been standard since the late '90s. A 2004-era video card should be able to handle cast shadows and possibly bump-mapping. And if you want to improve performance on an old video card, you need to reduce your poly count. SL generally has high poly count models. So they're doing things that hurt the performance of old cards but not doing things that have little effect on the performance of old cards.
It's just a crappy engine. Let's quit making excuses for it. Heck, they don't even have to do the work themselves! There are all sorts of rendering engines available today that do all the hard work for you. Including *good* implementations of auto-LOD on meshes to reduce poly counts at a distance.
I've played the game plenty. The in-game graphics are that good.
I knew that would be coming! As I stated, SL textures and poly counts are just fine. So that's a bogus excuse. Normals have *bloody nothing* to do with streaming, and it took them until *2010* to do so. I mean, give me a freaking break. Vertex shaders have nothing to do with streaming, and they're sure as heck not using them. I could go on and on. It's just a sucky-written engine, period.
And the argument that they can't optimize scenes is likewise dumb. They have all these servers sitting idle and all of this content that basically remains static. Use them! But that's a totally secondary issue, because that's all about enabling higher poly counts (via culling), and as mentioned, SL seems to have no problem with poly counts.
Here's a random scene from the old client. Look -- *tons* of polys; the curves are all smooth. Lots of detail on the textures. But the engine just plain sucks. It's like something from the late 90s. You know how pathetically easy freaking *normals* are to compute? I had 3d engines that I wrote in BASIC in the mid '90s as a teenager that did them. It's a *one-time* cross-product per poly, and with OpenGL, you don't even have to do the dotproduct yourself. They're only just now adding them? That's just amazingly bad. There's what, five-ish standard ways to efficiently do cast shadows now, and they're still not doing them? Let alone shadows with umbra/penumbra shading... they're not doing cast shadows *at all*. What time warp did they did their graphics code out of?