Funny how those so sceptical to believe global warming even exists tend to be the same people who are so quick to jump on the "global warming's not man-made, it's due to phenomenon X" bandwagon.
How about applying the same level of scepticism as you have towards man-made global warming towards any alternate theories also?
Using selective evidence to deduce a theory off the top of your head is really, really, bad science.
Whilst I see the comparison there are some major differences. We have climate records going back thousands of years and more (ice samples, tree rings, fossilized plant growth, crystal growth, geological formations etc.) and the ability to perform direct observation on the climate.
Other solar systems however are an almost complete unknown. We have no past data to validate anything against and we have only recently started indirectly detecting the existance of extra-solar planets through very complex means.
I don't think the two can really be directly compared.
It does seem to have become a Slashdot theme of late.
Something I've noticed though is that the vast majority of the "horrific loss of privacy in Britain" stories refer to proposed ideas, often by people low down in their government whose job it is to think up new ideas (whether good or - as is most often the case - bad) but few of which have yet shown any real signs of actually being implemented.
Here, Bush prefers doing these sort of things in secret and using every dirty trick in the book to keep it secret. I'd prefer to have my government announcing plans which will infringe on my privacy before they are implemented rather than them being uncovered by reporters several years in.
I agree they catch virtually all spam, but the reason I stopped using gmail was I found their spam-filter was catching a fair few genuine emails also (and not just the ones from my dad talking about his Viagra usage).
Personally, I think spam filtering is an area where not junking genuine emails is far more crucial than catching a perfect 100% of spam emails.
If it was pre-meditated murder, why do it in a police car on a public street?
We all know from Pulp Fiction that this creates a huge mess to be cleaned up! Besides, Russia has more wilderness than anywhere else in the world, they could have easily taken him somewhere quiet and knocked him off.
Also, why didn't they just put him in a dark jail cell for the next few decades whilst 'awaiting trial'? (or claim that's where he is now). If it was pre-meditated, surely they would have sort up some sort of excuse/alibi - e.g. given him a bomb and then claimed he was trying to detonate it. Why did they make all the public announcements to the media?
Surely it's far more likely some sort of 'incident' took place (maybe even just an arguement, I don't know) and one of the policemen got more than a little trigger-happy.
I think it depends on the time and place. The lans I would smoke at would be mainly ones organized by mates where most people are also drinking and socializing.
A serious lan like a WCG tournament, I agree, is definitely not the place to be getting mashed (whether it's smoking weed, drinking or whatever).
"They built a "model" of the battery. They still haven't nailed down how to make the inside part work or how to build a real one. I could take out my legos and build a car battery sized box and say it's a "model" of what a magic battery would look like and say I haven't quite figured out how to make it generate electricity."
This shows why analogies can be so bad. The two situations - despite sounding convincingly similar - are extremely different, as other people have pointed out.
Mind you, it's not quite as bad as an anology I heard on the TV news the other day, that almost had me throwing something at it, the analogy was so misleading.
I've been to lots of big lan parties and most the time I'll be one of those people getting stoned beforehand or going out for the occasional joint during the day/evening.
Nothign to do with trying to "enhance performance", I just like playing games even better when mashed.
I suspect this explains a lot of the usage and why Cannabis (a drug not normally associated with performance enhancement) is the apparent drug of choice for gamers.
"That comment about whether the government should really decide is very trollish."
Not only that, but it's also completely irrelevant to the story. The Advertising Standards Authority (who deemed the advert misleading) was setup by the advertising industry's trade body and has absolutely nothing to do with the British government.
The ASA ruling is non-legally binding although all major broadcasters and publishers generally adhere to it. The appropriate governmental agencies are Ofcom (office of communication) and OFT (office of fair trading) which have the relevant legal powers. Neither of which were involved here.
"Should government authorities be the ones making that decision?""
The Advertising Standards Authority is not a government authority. It was established by the Advertising Association, a trade body representing (from the wiki) "advertisers, agencies, media and support services in the United Kingdom" The ASA's introduction on wikipedia reads:
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) is the independent self-regulatory organisation (SRO) of the advertising industry in the United Kingdom. The ASA is a non-statutory organisation and so cannot interpret or enforce legislation. However, its code of advertising practice broadly reflects legislation in many instances. The ASA is not funded by the British Government, but by a levy on the advertising industry
This is how most media watchdogs in the UK are run. Important facts like this should really be checked before making very flawed summaries. For if Apple wanted, they could simply ignore the ASA's ruling. Most carriers would probably refuse to run the adverts, but it's most certainly not a "government decision".
"Scale matters but as I said making it more fragile should compensate."
You're right, scale does matter. It's not a case of making the model more or less fragile compared to the original to compensate, rather that the model would just simply behave completely differently. Nothing would be proved either way.
Computer models can help, but using scale models for an event as complex as a skyscraper being consumed by fire is pointless.
I hate when companies use the USA's low overall population density as an excuse for low internet speeds. The same goes for our pitiful public transport infastructure etc.
The USA might have a lower overall population density than Europe or Japan due to our deserts and national parks, but if you only count metropolitan areas, the densities are all pretty similar. Plus here we don't have to worry about problems like delays and expense due to uncovering archeological ruins.
Yet still they use this petty excuse again and again. "Oh I'm sorry the infastructure isn't as good as other countries despite being 2x the cost, it's got nothing todo with the lack of regulation we lobbied for allowing us to use our monopoly to rip everyone off, it's due to low population density, honest!"
Blame someone, fire someone, whatever; I couldn't care less. What I'm saying is it won't magically fix anything!
My point is that just saying the usual "it's because [name of whoever happens to be in charge] is incompentent, he should resign immediately!" mantra may help sell newspapers and help attack [name of whichever party is in office at the time] but it won't do much towards fixing the actual problem at hand.
Well sure, the blame does likely lie with the CIO. You said however ""At least fire everybody in charge at once.""
I fail to see what the CFO or the director of human resource etc. have to do with the incident. For all you could know, they may be the best ones to have ever graced their positions. So an automatic, immediate firing of "everybody in charge" is stupid in my opinion.
"very big storm or unusual meteorological event these days is automatically assumed to be yet another affect of global climate change."
Yes doing such is stupid, but in recent years almost every metological record has been broken.
Not a decade in recorded history (with exception of a couple of decades witnessing massive volcanic eruptions) has experienced such climatic instability right accross the globe as this one.
It is only natural for people to blame climate change for events which are pretty clearly being influenced by a change in the earth's atmospheric composition.
Sorry, but how can someone misplacing a USB stick be attributed to any of the things you listed?
If I.T. data security needs tightening (which it obviously does) then how about actually changing something in some way related to I.T. data security?
Rather than actually fix the problem at hand though, it seems - as always - everyone would rather copy the mainstream media's cries of wolf and descend into the typical "the world's going to the dogs and it's all someone-but-me's fault" farce.
That's a great attitude to take if you want viewers and readers (everyone wants to hear about problems with someone-else to blame) but it's not very good if you actually want to fix the problem at hand.
Oh well, that's just a humble engineer's opinion, it may be a little rational for the arena of politics & popular opinion.
That's the sort of stupid, over-the-top thinking which will likely cause much, much bigger problems.
So even if a director is doing an excellent job he should be fired because some guy lost a USB stick which is most probably behind the back of some filing cabinet?
I realize it's popular these days is to always blame everything on those "incompetent" people in charge of governments. But a little rationality is required.
Despite all these "data breaches" there is yet to be any evidence of misuse of this data. That doesn't mean it's OK, but to claim it's some sort of "disaster" is a little over the top.
I work for a multi-national corp which uses several large-scale PHP applications for its operations which have been extremely successful. They are built upon the Symfony framework http://www.symfony-project.org/ which has proven to be a good, secure & reliable MVC application framework.
The grandparent post was spot-on, the maturing of PHP over the past 5 years has been remarkable and is a real testement to the power of the open source ideology.
"but I'd really need to see the original paper to understand their work."
Pffft.
I don't want to hear some reasoned conclusion made after careful examination of source material!
I want to hear some over-generalised, steroeotype-based statement made off the top of your head about how the researchers have actually got it all completely wrong and that infact the reverse is true.
I know what you mean, I used to live in Australia and remember the magpies as being particularly evil at times. Especailly when riding my bike they would often swoop down and crack me on the head.
I even remember seeing an item on the news about a local kid being blinded by a magpie attacking him.
Most studies would say otherwise. Large animals do require more brain power to control their bodies, but that doesn't mean that additional brain power doesn't also help with intelligence. Also, A mouse with a brain the size of an average dog's, for example, will not be more intelligent than an average dog (an extreme example, but reguarly observed to a much smaller degree).
Of course there is always ultimately the potential for conflicting observations due to the lack of a concrete definition of what intelligence actually is.
Well the only limit here was that they shouldn't have started driving it down public highways.
The offenses for which they are being investigated are: "defying insurance regulations, driving without a license and violating registration requirements."...all of which refer to their driving of the unlicensed 'vehicle' on public streets.
I believe the exact same would have happened back during the "happy-days".
"People in positions of global scale aren't going to give up that power just because you have a lot of signatures on a petition."
Um, this "petition" happens every few years, it's called an election.
"To make any significant change to the deeper power structures of any large government you need a revolution."
"deeper power structures"? What on earth is a "deeper power structure"? Actual real-life, quantitative, examples please; not wishy-washy existential rubbish like such phrases usually represent.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you might be right, heaven knows we see this sort of thing in politics all the time.
Funny how those so sceptical to believe global warming even exists tend to be the same people who are so quick to jump on the "global warming's not man-made, it's due to phenomenon X" bandwagon.
How about applying the same level of scepticism as you have towards man-made global warming towards any alternate theories also?
Using selective evidence to deduce a theory off the top of your head is really, really, bad science.
Whilst I see the comparison there are some major differences. We have climate records going back thousands of years and more (ice samples, tree rings, fossilized plant growth, crystal growth, geological formations etc.) and the ability to perform direct observation on the climate.
Other solar systems however are an almost complete unknown. We have no past data to validate anything against and we have only recently started indirectly detecting the existance of extra-solar planets through very complex means.
I don't think the two can really be directly compared.
It does seem to have become a Slashdot theme of late.
Something I've noticed though is that the vast majority of the "horrific loss of privacy in Britain" stories refer to proposed ideas, often by people low down in their government whose job it is to think up new ideas (whether good or - as is most often the case - bad) but few of which have yet shown any real signs of actually being implemented.
Here, Bush prefers doing these sort of things in secret and using every dirty trick in the book to keep it secret. I'd prefer to have my government announcing plans which will infringe on my privacy before they are implemented rather than them being uncovered by reporters several years in.
BT aren't the only wholesale broadband provider though. Most do either base their sales on data or else include some data restrictions.
I agree they catch virtually all spam, but the reason I stopped using gmail was I found their spam-filter was catching a fair few genuine emails also (and not just the ones from my dad talking about his Viagra usage).
Personally, I think spam filtering is an area where not junking genuine emails is far more crucial than catching a perfect 100% of spam emails.
If it was pre-meditated murder, why do it in a police car on a public street?
We all know from Pulp Fiction that this creates a huge mess to be cleaned up! Besides, Russia has more wilderness than anywhere else in the world, they could have easily taken him somewhere quiet and knocked him off.
Also, why didn't they just put him in a dark jail cell for the next few decades whilst 'awaiting trial'? (or claim that's where he is now). If it was pre-meditated, surely they would have sort up some sort of excuse/alibi - e.g. given him a bomb and then claimed he was trying to detonate it. Why did they make all the public announcements to the media?
Surely it's far more likely some sort of 'incident' took place (maybe even just an arguement, I don't know) and one of the policemen got more than a little trigger-happy.
I think it depends on the time and place. The lans I would smoke at would be mainly ones organized by mates where most people are also drinking and socializing.
A serious lan like a WCG tournament, I agree, is definitely not the place to be getting mashed (whether it's smoking weed, drinking or whatever).
"They built a "model" of the battery. They still haven't nailed down how to make the inside part work or how to build a real one. I could take out my legos and build a car battery sized box and say it's a "model" of what a magic battery would look like and say I haven't quite figured out how to make it generate electricity."
This shows why analogies can be so bad. The two situations - despite sounding convincingly similar - are extremely different, as other people have pointed out.
Mind you, it's not quite as bad as an anology I heard on the TV news the other day, that almost had me throwing something at it, the analogy was so misleading.
I've been to lots of big lan parties and most the time I'll be one of those people getting stoned beforehand or going out for the occasional joint during the day/evening.
Nothign to do with trying to "enhance performance", I just like playing games even better when mashed.
I suspect this explains a lot of the usage and why Cannabis (a drug not normally associated with performance enhancement) is the apparent drug of choice for gamers.
"That comment about whether the government should really decide is very trollish."
Not only that, but it's also completely irrelevant to the story. The Advertising Standards Authority (who deemed the advert misleading) was setup by the advertising industry's trade body and has absolutely nothing to do with the British government.
The ASA ruling is non-legally binding although all major broadcasters and publishers generally adhere to it. The appropriate governmental agencies are Ofcom (office of communication) and OFT (office of fair trading) which have the relevant legal powers. Neither of which were involved here.
"Should government authorities be the ones making that decision?""
The Advertising Standards Authority is not a government authority. It was established by the Advertising Association, a trade body representing (from the wiki) "advertisers, agencies, media and support services in the United Kingdom" The ASA's introduction on wikipedia reads:
This is how most media watchdogs in the UK are run. Important facts like this should really be checked before making very flawed summaries. For if Apple wanted, they could simply ignore the ASA's ruling. Most carriers would probably refuse to run the adverts, but it's most certainly not a "government decision".
"Scale matters but as I said making it more fragile should compensate."
You're right, scale does matter. It's not a case of making the model more or less fragile compared to the original to compensate, rather that the model would just simply behave completely differently. Nothing would be proved either way.
Computer models can help, but using scale models for an event as complex as a skyscraper being consumed by fire is pointless.
I hate when companies use the USA's low overall population density as an excuse for low internet speeds. The same goes for our pitiful public transport infastructure etc.
The USA might have a lower overall population density than Europe or Japan due to our deserts and national parks, but if you only count metropolitan areas, the densities are all pretty similar. Plus here we don't have to worry about problems like delays and expense due to uncovering archeological ruins.
Yet still they use this petty excuse again and again. "Oh I'm sorry the infastructure isn't as good as other countries despite being 2x the cost, it's got nothing todo with the lack of regulation we lobbied for allowing us to use our monopoly to rip everyone off, it's due to low population density, honest!"
Blame someone, fire someone, whatever; I couldn't care less. What I'm saying is it won't magically fix anything!
My point is that just saying the usual "it's because [name of whoever happens to be in charge] is incompentent, he should resign immediately!" mantra may help sell newspapers and help attack [name of whichever party is in office at the time] but it won't do much towards fixing the actual problem at hand.
Well sure, the blame does likely lie with the CIO. You said however ""At least fire everybody in charge at once.""
I fail to see what the CFO or the director of human resource etc. have to do with the incident. For all you could know, they may be the best ones to have ever graced their positions. So an automatic, immediate firing of "everybody in charge" is stupid in my opinion.
"very big storm or unusual meteorological event these days is automatically assumed to be yet another affect of global climate change."
Yes doing such is stupid, but in recent years almost every metological record has been broken.
Not a decade in recorded history (with exception of a couple of decades witnessing massive volcanic eruptions) has experienced such climatic instability right accross the globe as this one.
It is only natural for people to blame climate change for events which are pretty clearly being influenced by a change in the earth's atmospheric composition.
Sorry, but how can someone misplacing a USB stick be attributed to any of the things you listed?
If I.T. data security needs tightening (which it obviously does) then how about actually changing something in some way related to I.T. data security?
Rather than actually fix the problem at hand though, it seems - as always - everyone would rather copy the mainstream media's cries of wolf and descend into the typical "the world's going to the dogs and it's all someone-but-me's fault" farce.
That's a great attitude to take if you want viewers and readers (everyone wants to hear about problems with someone-else to blame) but it's not very good if you actually want to fix the problem at hand.
Oh well, that's just a humble engineer's opinion, it may be a little rational for the arena of politics & popular opinion.
"At least fire everybody in charge at once."
That's the sort of stupid, over-the-top thinking which will likely cause much, much bigger problems.
So even if a director is doing an excellent job he should be fired because some guy lost a USB stick which is most probably behind the back of some filing cabinet?
I realize it's popular these days is to always blame everything on those "incompetent" people in charge of governments. But a little rationality is required.
Despite all these "data breaches" there is yet to be any evidence of misuse of this data. That doesn't mean it's OK, but to claim it's some sort of "disaster" is a little over the top.
That's not all it's used for though, is it.
I work for a multi-national corp which uses several large-scale PHP applications for its operations which have been extremely successful. They are built upon the Symfony framework http://www.symfony-project.org/ which has proven to be a good, secure & reliable MVC application framework.
The grandparent post was spot-on, the maturing of PHP over the past 5 years has been remarkable and is a real testement to the power of the open source ideology.
"but I'd really need to see the original paper to understand their work."
Pffft.
I don't want to hear some reasoned conclusion made after careful examination of source material!
I want to hear some over-generalised, steroeotype-based statement made off the top of your head about how the researchers have actually got it all completely wrong and that infact the reverse is true.
I know what you mean, I used to live in Australia and remember the magpies as being particularly evil at times. Especailly when riding my bike they would often swoop down and crack me on the head.
I even remember seeing an item on the news about a local kid being blinded by a magpie attacking him.
Most studies would say otherwise. Large animals do require more brain power to control their bodies, but that doesn't mean that additional brain power doesn't also help with intelligence. Also, A mouse with a brain the size of an average dog's, for example, will not be more intelligent than an average dog (an extreme example, but reguarly observed to a much smaller degree).
Of course there is always ultimately the potential for conflicting observations due to the lack of a concrete definition of what intelligence actually is.
"Where imagination was your only limit"
Well the only limit here was that they shouldn't have started driving it down public highways.
The offenses for which they are being investigated are: "defying insurance regulations, driving without a license and violating registration requirements." ...all of which refer to their driving of the unlicensed 'vehicle' on public streets.
I believe the exact same would have happened back during the "happy-days".
"People in positions of global scale aren't going to give up that power just because you have a lot of signatures on a petition."
Um, this "petition" happens every few years, it's called an election.
"To make any significant change to the deeper power structures of any large government you need a revolution."
"deeper power structures"? What on earth is a "deeper power structure"? Actual real-life, quantitative, examples please; not wishy-washy existential rubbish like such phrases usually represent.