I'll repeat this here even though I posted it above, this thread is absurdly long:
Phil Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
That's the comment that started this thread..12C is not a statistically significant figure over 15 years. Let's look at The Register article:
The divergence between NASA and UAH has increased at a rate of 0.13 degrees per decade (red lines below.) In contrast, RSS has converged with UAH over the period and is now within 0.02 degrees (blue lines below.)
The divergence is now quite striking. Looking closer at March 2008, NASA's data shows the month as the third warmest on record. In sharp contrast, UAH and RSS satellite data showed March as the second coldest on record in the southern hemisphere, and just barely above average for the whole planet. How could such a large discrepancy occur?
They're claiming that a.13 degree difference over a single decade is a "large discrepancy" when it's within the margin of error, and furthermore, they're making the misleading claim that they're talking about.13 C per decade when they're only analyzing one decade. It's unmitigated bullshit. Yes, the UAH and RSS are closer. However, the presence of a third data point just outside the margin of error, if we were looking at it from a scientific perspective, would suggest that the actual figure is between the three data points.
But The Register is out to discredit global warming, so if three data points are slightly different, we should go with the two which are almost identical (even though they are all three almost identical from a statistical perspective.)
I've said nothing about causes. All I'm talking about is the effect. You can argue over the causes all you want, it won't change the fact that the planet is warming.
Actually, most bona fide conspiracy theories are more reasonable than the claims that the Earth is cooling. Like the moon landing deniers - all we have is the word of two secretive divisions of the US and Soviet militaries.
Or the allegations that the US government staged the 9/11 attacks. Again, very small group of people could have staged the whole thing (and fabricated the evidence implicating Muslim extremists - after all they are trying to do that sort of thing.)
Falsifying data at thousands of temperature stations worldwide? That's beyond ridiculous.
In this one, I suppose you don't have any outright lies, but this claim shows an intentional desire to avoid scientific rigor in favor of something that appears correct at first glance:
NASA temperatures for March 2008 indicate that it was the third warmest March in history, but satellite data sources RSS and UAH disagree. They show March as the second coldest ever in the southern hemisphere, and barely above average worldwide.
But you want lies?
They consistently refer to the discrepancy between the NASA data and the other two data sets as "large," which is an outright lie. As noted by Phil Jones (setting off this little thread):
Phil Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
From The Register:
The divergence between NASA and UAH has increased at a rate of 0.13 degrees per decade (red lines below.) In contrast, RSS has converged with UAH over the period and is now within 0.02 degrees (blue lines below.)
The divergence is now quite striking. Looking closer at March 2008, NASA's data shows the month as the third warmest on record. In sharp contrast, UAH and RSS satellite data showed March as the second coldest on record in the southern hemisphere, and just barely above average for the whole planet. How could such a large discrepancy occur?
They claim that the discrepancy is large, when in fact it is within the margin of error. So there you have it, the link you gave has an outright lie.
If you care about science, you should give a few years to analyze the data before throwing out those numbers. Statistical significance will increase over time. We can say a lot more about 1980-2000 than we can about 1990-2010, because we have the benefit of 10 years of data analysis.
Climate science is about the long haul. 15 years is a drop in the bucket. The Earth has been continuously warming, there is no doubt about that.
The models are wrong. Big deal. That doesn't make the planet cooler. It just means we're unclear about the causes. (Which is all you global warming deniers want, isn't it? Can't you just attack the science based on the actual fact that root causes of warming are difficult to pin down and not outright lie and claim that the planet is not significantly warming?)
1. If you only look at the construction of the plant. It makes perfect economic sense if you look out over 50 years, and can even be cheaper than coal. 2. Most of the waste we have could be used as fuel, but we're refusing to do so, partially because of the ban on new plants, partially because several of the methods create a lot of weapons-grade Plutonium. But we are making far more nuclear waste than necessary. 3. Repeal it. Anyway, coal plants have caused more health damage than nuclear, at least in the US. 4. That's not a fact. That's not even an opinion. You just said "fuel dependency."
First generation limited production machines are usually higher cost and lower quality than the ones available after a couple years of production use ( you can't properly test until the thing is used by a variety of people in a variety of situations. )
If after a reasonable amount of time the cost-benefit analysis still doesn't pan out, then yes, we go back to propane.
But arguing that these early models are too expensive up front doesn't mean that it's a bad thing to do - just that no one should do it with the intent of saving money in the next few years. They should do it in the hopes that a few years out production costs will come down and it will make sense for everyone to do.
Green thinking isn't about being stupid. It's about ending this disastrous (Enron, AIG, etc.) mentality where "short term" is this year, and "long term" is five years. That's fine for a person, but for an institution, "short term" needs to be 5-10 years, and "long term" needs to be 30-40. Looking at it in that sense, spending 80,000 on a machine that will last 5-10 years and maybe recoup its investment is well worth it if the cost drops by half or more before it needs to be replaced. The capitalist will say it's better to let someone else make that initial investment, but the capitalist is a dick.
Well, that's why I don't friend people I don't actually know. I don't think I'm unusual in this, at least among those who picked up Facebook back when it was restricted to higher ed.
The thing that makes Facebook superior to Gmail is that if you get a message from Joe Smith on Facebook, and his picture and friends correspond to a Joe Smith you know, Facebook is very good about making sure that it is in fact Joe Smith talking to you. Obviously a random person you've never met is not guaranteed to be a real person - but that's impossible to guarantee.
I meant security about authentication. Email is probably more secure than Facebook in terms of knowing that your communication is private (even on Gmail, though only marginally so.) What Facebook means is that when you get a message from someone, you can be fairly sure it came from that person. At least as sure as you can possibly be without that person personally comparing the message you're looking at to the one they sent. Even if you're using public key authentication, there's still the potential for an attacker to get your private key, etc.
Facebook - you know who you're talking to.
Gmail - you do if you've talked to the person through some other medium. Trying to shoehorn it into the Facebook paradigm was a stupid idea.
What it comes down to is this: A decent touchscreen costs something like $10 per square inch. A decent keyboard costs something like $10. And that price is a flat rate, whether you're talking about a 2x2 mobile keyboard or a full-sized desktop keyboard.
Now, given that typing causes a lot of mechanical wear, why would you want to put all of that wear on the most expensive part of the device when you can add a secondary keyboard that is easily replaced and can be designed with durability in mind at a much lower cost? Because you don't like connectors? Because it gives you a slightly lighter form factor (the keyboard also is a pretty negligible part of the weight such a device takes up.)
To top it all off, you can't do any sort of typing without sacrificing half of your expensive, pretty screen to a keyboard. A keyboard which isn't really any better than a hardware one.
the iPhone really created a functioning 3rd-party app marketplace
That gets repeated often, but so far no one has created a functioning 3rd-party app marketplace. Yeah, they got lots of adoption because they were the first to do it, and have been making a pretty penny as a result. But the developers are not.
Even the ones who have made good software have yet to recoup their initial investment. Apple's market ( and Android's, and the rest) are great for the established players in the market; the Skypes, the Amazons, the people who have the resources and brand recognition to put together a mobile version of what they're working on anyway. But as far as rewarding innovators, it's completely fallen flat. And that's going to cause problems in the long run, especially in Apple's environment which is so hostile to FOSS (so long as it's outside of Apple's offerings.)
What makes Facebook so good is that it's all tied to people - even the fake accounts need to seem to be people.
When you enable social networking for everyone who thought they were signing up for a mailbox, you're naturally going to cause a mess. Social networking is about the walled garden, and the security it gives you in terms of who you're talking to.
The underlying problem is one of anonymity and the Internet, and finding a way to verify identity without a walled garden. If Google is looking at innovating, they need to find a compelling way to bridge the anonymity gap.
It's become pretty clear that Intel's place in the market is assured. They can't stop people from using ARM in low-power devices, x86 just has too much overhead.
What they can do is make sure that people don't have to worry about their architecture when they're using software. And that benefits everyone, because it keeps the chips we're using at top capacity.
I don't see what TV has to do with this. The future I'm seeing is one in which I have two, maybe three computers, and two, maybe three screens, any one of which can be plugged into another. If I want to watch a 1080p program that's on my phone, I'll dock my phone at a big screen. If I want to have a portable machine, I'll take my laptop, which might just be a phone dock with a keyboard and a screen.
Alternately, I'll just plug my keyboard into my phone if all I'm doing is notetaking. With that kind of setup, I could see me doing entirely without something in the netbook form factor.
A British opponent of the idea (and supporter of the UK's draconian libel laws) is quoted: "The provisions allowing defendants to counter-sue 'libel tourists' in their home courts could transform the humble Icelander into a legal superman, virtually untouchable abroad for comment written — and uploaded — at home."
It's been done, re: The Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn. They could film it, but there's not much point.
What I want to see is a Ron Moore re-imagining of the original trilogy. Truth be told, what we have here might not be too bad. It sounds like it's going to follow Boba Fett's journey to becoming badass assassin/bounty hunter extraordinaire. Actually, if it's basically a film noir type private detective thing with Boba Fett as the antihero, it could be very very good.
Well, it hinges on how many copies of the songs in question were distributed. Assuming two albums for (generously) $40, and a share ratio of 100 (which is high even for a perpetual seeder) the actual damages come out to $4,000. And given that distributed does not equate to a lost sale, I'd say the damages are probably at best $1,000.
But really, we're looking at songs whose value was about $20, and the share ratio probably looked closer to 15, so we get $300.
Disingenous? A bit. But the damages are still grossly out of proportion with the offense.
Should we work on formal neural networks, probability theory, uncertain logic, evolutionary learning, a large hand-coded knowledge-base, mathematical theory, nonlinear dynamical systems, or an integrative design combining multiple paradigms?
People really don't understand research and it's place in the world. If we knew what fields could yield AI, it would simply be engineering. Research is required. That means all of the above and the craziest ideas that pop in to our heads too, just for good measure.
I just put "Your browser is unsupported. Upgrade to one of these fine alternatives: " in an element with css opacity:0; Older versions of FF, as well as all IE browsers and older webkits/Operas don't support opacity, so it filters out just about everyone I don't care about.
Of course, it filters out IE8, so it's not really good for production use.
The thing is, this is a high-profile app that Apple can approve and point to, saying "Look, we're letting our competitors in!" even though it doesn't open the platform in any meaningful way. So I actually think there's a very good chance they will approve it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll repeat this here even though I posted it above, this thread is absurdly long:
That's the comment that started this thread. .12C is not a statistically significant figure over 15 years. Let's look at The Register article:
They're claiming that a .13 degree difference over a single decade is a "large discrepancy" when it's within the margin of error, and furthermore, they're making the misleading claim that they're talking about .13 C per decade when they're only analyzing one decade. It's unmitigated bullshit. Yes, the UAH and RSS are closer. However, the presence of a third data point just outside the margin of error, if we were looking at it from a scientific perspective, would suggest that the actual figure is between the three data points.
But The Register is out to discredit global warming, so if three data points are slightly different, we should go with the two which are almost identical (even though they are all three almost identical from a statistical perspective.)
I've said nothing about causes. All I'm talking about is the effect. You can argue over the causes all you want, it won't change the fact that the planet is warming.
Actually, most bona fide conspiracy theories are more reasonable than the claims that the Earth is cooling. Like the moon landing deniers - all we have is the word of two secretive divisions of the US and Soviet militaries.
Or the allegations that the US government staged the 9/11 attacks. Again, very small group of people could have staged the whole thing (and fabricated the evidence implicating Muslim extremists - after all they are trying to do that sort of thing.)
Falsifying data at thousands of temperature stations worldwide? That's beyond ridiculous.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/02/a_tale_of_two_thermometers/
In this one, I suppose you don't have any outright lies, but this claim shows an intentional desire to avoid scientific rigor in favor of something that appears correct at first glance:
But you want lies?
They consistently refer to the discrepancy between the NASA data and the other two data sets as "large," which is an outright lie. As noted by Phil Jones (setting off this little thread):
From The Register:
They claim that the discrepancy is large, when in fact it is within the margin of error. So there you have it, the link you gave has an outright lie.
Sheep do what seems like a good idea at the time. Nothing we suggest sounds like a good idea right now. Ergo, we are sheep.
If you care about science, you should give a few years to analyze the data before throwing out those numbers. Statistical significance will increase over time. We can say a lot more about 1980-2000 than we can about 1990-2010, because we have the benefit of 10 years of data analysis.
Climate science is about the long haul. 15 years is a drop in the bucket. The Earth has been continuously warming, there is no doubt about that.
The models are wrong. Big deal. That doesn't make the planet cooler. It just means we're unclear about the causes. (Which is all you global warming deniers want, isn't it? Can't you just attack the science based on the actual fact that root causes of warming are difficult to pin down and not outright lie and claim that the planet is not significantly warming?)
If by facts you mean falsehoods.
The facts:
1. If you only look at the construction of the plant. It makes perfect economic sense if you look out over 50 years, and can even be cheaper than coal.
2. Most of the waste we have could be used as fuel, but we're refusing to do so, partially because of the ban on new plants, partially because several of the methods create a lot of weapons-grade Plutonium. But we are making far more nuclear waste than necessary.
3. Repeal it. Anyway, coal plants have caused more health damage than nuclear, at least in the US.
4. That's not a fact. That's not even an opinion. You just said "fuel dependency."
That's because you need more than 15 years to get statistically significant figures.
People have trouble comprehending anything that takes longer than 20 years to prove, that's the problem. Innate flaw in our psychological makeup.
First generation limited production machines are usually higher cost and lower quality than the ones available after a couple years of production use ( you can't properly test until the thing is used by a variety of people in a variety of situations. )
If after a reasonable amount of time the cost-benefit analysis still doesn't pan out, then yes, we go back to propane.
But arguing that these early models are too expensive up front doesn't mean that it's a bad thing to do - just that no one should do it with the intent of saving money in the next few years. They should do it in the hopes that a few years out production costs will come down and it will make sense for everyone to do.
Green thinking isn't about being stupid. It's about ending this disastrous (Enron, AIG, etc.) mentality where "short term" is this year, and "long term" is five years. That's fine for a person, but for an institution, "short term" needs to be 5-10 years, and "long term" needs to be 30-40. Looking at it in that sense, spending 80,000 on a machine that will last 5-10 years and maybe recoup its investment is well worth it if the cost drops by half or more before it needs to be replaced. The capitalist will say it's better to let someone else make that initial investment, but the capitalist is a dick.
Well, that's why I don't friend people I don't actually know. I don't think I'm unusual in this, at least among those who picked up Facebook back when it was restricted to higher ed.
The thing that makes Facebook superior to Gmail is that if you get a message from Joe Smith on Facebook, and his picture and friends correspond to a Joe Smith you know, Facebook is very good about making sure that it is in fact Joe Smith talking to you. Obviously a random person you've never met is not guaranteed to be a real person - but that's impossible to guarantee.
I meant security about authentication. Email is probably more secure than Facebook in terms of knowing that your communication is private (even on Gmail, though only marginally so.) What Facebook means is that when you get a message from someone, you can be fairly sure it came from that person. At least as sure as you can possibly be without that person personally comparing the message you're looking at to the one they sent. Even if you're using public key authentication, there's still the potential for an attacker to get your private key, etc.
Facebook - you know who you're talking to.
Gmail - you do if you've talked to the person through some other medium. Trying to shoehorn it into the Facebook paradigm was a stupid idea.
What it comes down to is this: A decent touchscreen costs something like $10 per square inch. A decent keyboard costs something like $10. And that price is a flat rate, whether you're talking about a 2x2 mobile keyboard or a full-sized desktop keyboard.
Now, given that typing causes a lot of mechanical wear, why would you want to put all of that wear on the most expensive part of the device when you can add a secondary keyboard that is easily replaced and can be designed with durability in mind at a much lower cost? Because you don't like connectors? Because it gives you a slightly lighter form factor (the keyboard also is a pretty negligible part of the weight such a device takes up.)
To top it all off, you can't do any sort of typing without sacrificing half of your expensive, pretty screen to a keyboard. A keyboard which isn't really any better than a hardware one.
That gets repeated often, but so far no one has created a functioning 3rd-party app marketplace. Yeah, they got lots of adoption because they were the first to do it, and have been making a pretty penny as a result. But the developers are not.
Even the ones who have made good software have yet to recoup their initial investment. Apple's market ( and Android's, and the rest) are great for the established players in the market; the Skypes, the Amazons, the people who have the resources and brand recognition to put together a mobile version of what they're working on anyway. But as far as rewarding innovators, it's completely fallen flat. And that's going to cause problems in the long run, especially in Apple's environment which is so hostile to FOSS (so long as it's outside of Apple's offerings.)
What makes Facebook so good is that it's all tied to people - even the fake accounts need to seem to be people.
When you enable social networking for everyone who thought they were signing up for a mailbox, you're naturally going to cause a mess. Social networking is about the walled garden, and the security it gives you in terms of who you're talking to.
The underlying problem is one of anonymity and the Internet, and finding a way to verify identity without a walled garden. If Google is looking at innovating, they need to find a compelling way to bridge the anonymity gap.
It's become pretty clear that Intel's place in the market is assured. They can't stop people from using ARM in low-power devices, x86 just has too much overhead.
What they can do is make sure that people don't have to worry about their architecture when they're using software. And that benefits everyone, because it keeps the chips we're using at top capacity.
I don't see what TV has to do with this. The future I'm seeing is one in which I have two, maybe three computers, and two, maybe three screens, any one of which can be plugged into another. If I want to watch a 1080p program that's on my phone, I'll dock my phone at a big screen. If I want to have a portable machine, I'll take my laptop, which might just be a phone dock with a keyboard and a screen.
Alternately, I'll just plug my keyboard into my phone if all I'm doing is notetaking. With that kind of setup, I could see me doing entirely without something in the netbook form factor.
Solar cells also have a limited lifespan. I'm skeptical that the battery is necessarily the limiting factor.
90% of it is at least partially compatible with modern hardware. I was expecting something legitimately odd.
As a US citizen, I'm looking forward to it.
It's been done, re: The Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn. They could film it, but there's not much point.
What I want to see is a Ron Moore re-imagining of the original trilogy. Truth be told, what we have here might not be too bad. It sounds like it's going to follow Boba Fett's journey to becoming badass assassin/bounty hunter extraordinaire. Actually, if it's basically a film noir type private detective thing with Boba Fett as the antihero, it could be very very good.
Well, it hinges on how many copies of the songs in question were distributed. Assuming two albums for (generously) $40, and a share ratio of 100 (which is high even for a perpetual seeder) the actual damages come out to $4,000. And given that distributed does not equate to a lost sale, I'd say the damages are probably at best $1,000.
But really, we're looking at songs whose value was about $20, and the share ratio probably looked closer to 15, so we get $300.
Disingenous? A bit. But the damages are still grossly out of proportion with the offense.
People really don't understand research and it's place in the world. If we knew what fields could yield AI, it would simply be engineering. Research is required. That means all of the above and the craziest ideas that pop in to our heads too, just for good measure.
Which will pan out about as well as Palm's attempt to get Apple in trouble for breaching the USB standard.
I just put "Your browser is unsupported. Upgrade to one of these fine alternatives: " in an element with css opacity:0; Older versions of FF, as well as all IE browsers and older webkits/Operas don't support opacity, so it filters out just about everyone I don't care about.
Of course, it filters out IE8, so it's not really good for production use.
The thing is, this is a high-profile app that Apple can approve and point to, saying "Look, we're letting our competitors in!" even though it doesn't open the platform in any meaningful way. So I actually think there's a very good chance they will approve it.