Customers... Oh, too bad there are no customers because everyone stole the game.
You are assuming that no one would buy a game unless forced to by DRM... which must mean that you yourself wouldn't buy a game unless forced to by DRM.
This rules out any testable/falsifiable hypothesis and hence scientific-ness of the theory. In a few decades, another "expert" will come along who will spout forth his own untestable hypothesis.
I'm sure the geologists will love to hear that what they're doing isn't science. After all, they deal with stuff that happens over millions or even billions of years.
But just not enough randomness not to spend trillions of dollars in preventing global warming?
It really depends on how much you care what the planet is going to be like in 50 or 100 years or longer.
Imagine I have a coin that I know from past experience is double-headed; it comes up heads 100% of the time. If I only consider my most recent flip, that's not enough data to prove that it was weighted for that flip. That doesn't mean it wasn't weighted for that flip. Of course it was weighted for that flip, it's weighted for every flip. But I didn't consider enough flips to prove it.
In an analogous way, considering the data since 1995 is not enough to prove that the earth has been warming. That doesn't mean the earth hasn't been warming since 1995, it means that you're not considering enough of the data.
No, it sounds like he has said there is no warming trend in the past 14 or 15 years. "Almost significant" means "not significant." Nor is p = 0.05 exactly a stellar level of certainty. Physicists like things at the three sigma level, for the most part.
We're talking about predicted warming rates of a fraction of a degree per decade. The atmosphere is not a uniform temperature bath, and there's a lot of reasons why temperature can go up and down independent of global warming - the data is very noisy compared to the predicted warming in a decade and a half. I don't know why the interviewer picked 1995 as the start year but all the answer really means is that 14 or 15 years is not a large enough sample period.
The actual climatologists have generally been pretty careful about not making predictions they can't support. It's the politicians and activists who have been running around making predictions that then don't come true. Anyone who says that global warming will do anything specific on a time scale of less than decades is probably not a climatologist.
It's true that there's no single observation that would falsify global warming in general. There's too much randomness in the weather to get anything useful from single observations; we're talking about predicted changes of a few hundredths of a degree a year, against much larger background fluctuations. Fortunately we have a hundred years or so of data which appears to trend upwards. If there were a few decades of new data which didn't have a clear warming trend, that might put a dent in the theory - although that would likely mean that there was some other effect buffering it, not that carbon dioxide isn't a greenhouse gas. (If you don't believe in greenhouse gasses, I have some wonderful oceanfront real estate on Venus to sell you.)
I'd hardly qualify myself as a True Believer here, but what it would take for me to reconsider would be a whole bunch of climatologists saying that global warming isn't happening. I can't say exactly what would make the climatologists change their minds, but it would probably involve computer models.
A 5'3", 170 lb (BMI=30) person like this is not going to spill into your seat. For airline seat purposes straight weight is probably a better indicator than BMI.
Microsoft's strategy for interacting with Open Source seems to be settling into the pattern of treating it like any other software. Instead of being pro-"Open Source" or anti-"Open Source" their reaction depends on the specific project.
Software that interoperates with, extends, runs on, or otherwise boosts Microsoft products: Good. Software that replaces or competes with Microsoft products: Bad.
So, it would make perfect sense to Microsoft for them to try to lure open source projects built on top of OpenOffice.org, like plugins or whatever, to switch to building on Microsoft Office instead.
Yes you are obligated to do such a thing, and if you don't comply you can be dragged to court where you could be sentenced to pay for copyright infringement.
Exactly: not complying, getting dragged to court, and paying is an option. You're not obligated to open the source, you can just suffer the consequences of copyright violation instead.
I agree that that's not nice. But - this is the key point - he is winning the zone for his team. His actions contribute to fulfilling his objective within the game, and they are legal by the rules of the game.
It sounds to me that the entire purpose of the PVP zones is to have PVP fights, and people who aren't there to fight or interact with enemy players are abusing them for something contrary to the designer's intent. If someone comes along and does something mean to them, that's their fault for being in the PVP zone. If the designers wanted to provide a place where you can get the increased experience without the risk of having someone kill you they would just add it!
You have read incorrectly. The bug occurs when applications compiled with the brand new GCC 4.3 are run on old kernels, regardless of what compiler was used to compile the kernel.
There are other projects that sequence the DNA of people known to have rare diseases such as cystic fibrosis, and there are projects that sequence the DNA of people with common diseases like heart disease, but we don't know much about the variants in the middle that are neither very common nor very rare. This is an attempt to fill in that gap in our knowledge.
Some individual cells' DNA may change (usually for the worse - that's how you get cancer), but those mutations are probably much less common than the errors generated by the DNA sequencing machines. Both sorts of errors are filtered out because each piece of the genome is sequenced several times for each individual, and a computer combines the results.
The scientific goals of the 1000 Genomes Project are to produce a catalog of variants that are present at 1 percent or greater frequency in the human population across most of the genome, and down to 0.5 percent or lower within genes. A frequency of 0.5% is 1 in 200, not 1 in 2000. That's much easier to find with a thousand genomes, especially since they're not trying to figure out what the variations do, just that they exist.
Chinese military analyst: "Oh look, the Americans have built a submarine barn big enough to hold a small aircraft carrier. It's probably not important."
Perhaps Dr. Pournelle doesn't understand how the DMCA takedown process works. Yes, the process requires identifying the specific works, and providing excess information. That's the way the law is set up by the US Congress. Once the notice is sent, Scribd does have an obligation to take down everything - even the stuff they have permission for. Again, that's the law.
It sounds like Dr. Pournelle is unhappy that Scribd is taking advantage of the DMCA's safe harbor provision to make money. While I understand why he's upset that people are copying his works, it sounds like Scribd is following the law, which makes it the responsibility of the author to send takedown notices for infringing works (and only infringing works). The fact that the SFWA notice included works that weren't infringing was an abuse of the DMCA process, and that's why people are upset.
If I understood the article correctly, the advantage of the device is it doesn't actually use much energy unless it actually moves something vertically. It wouldn't need a huge continous energy expenditure to hover any more than a helium blimp needs one. Effectively, it's an antigravity device - it can cancel the effect of gravity for relatively little energy, and then a jet or propeller can provide actual propulsion.
I can't say the physics of it makes any sense to me, but I don't see any theoretical reason why it's impossible. Since there's no reaction mass, it only has to provide enough energy to account for the actual acceleration and gravitational potential energy it adds to the vehicle.
Time to execute the array version 100,000 times on a 10,000 character string: 0m4.515s Time to execute the pointer version 100,000 times on a 10,000 character string: 0m3.936s
So the pointer version actually generates somewhat faster code with the compiler I used on this example, which surprises me. But there's no substitute for actually testing.
The mentally ill and brain damaged are certainly alive. So are trees and fluffy bunny rabbits and the bacteria in your gut. So why you bring "alive" into it I don't know.
As for whether they have intelligence and free will... I'd say in most cases short of actual brain-death, yes. Debatable? Certainly. Do I want to debate it? No, not really.
Correction: A Homo sapiens embryo is obviously a Homo sapiens. Whether or not it is yet a human being is quite debatable, since "human" has additional connotations involving intelligence and free will. I find it hard to believe that an embryo at the stage under discussion in stem cell research - technically, a blastula - with no nerve cells at all, let alone brain function, has either intelligence or free will. So in that sense, it's not yet human, although in appropriate circumstances it might become human.
Unfortunately, the ""We deliberately use different operating systems, different name server implementations..." quote is from Paul Vixie, president of the Internet Systems Consortium, and it's about the root name servers, not about Akamai.
Slashdot Mirror
That didn't stop Gerald Ford.
Customers... Oh, too bad there are no customers because everyone stole the game.
You are assuming that no one would buy a game unless forced to by DRM... which must mean that you yourself wouldn't buy a game unless forced to by DRM.
Speak for yourself, pirate.
This rules out any testable/falsifiable hypothesis and hence scientific-ness of the theory. In a few decades, another "expert" will come along who will spout forth his own untestable hypothesis.
I'm sure the geologists will love to hear that what they're doing isn't science. After all, they deal with stuff that happens over millions or even billions of years.
But just not enough randomness not to spend trillions of dollars in preventing global warming?
It really depends on how much you care what the planet is going to be like in 50 or 100 years or longer.
Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995
Imagine I have a coin that I know from past experience is double-headed; it comes up heads 100% of the time. If I only consider my most recent flip, that's not enough data to prove that it was weighted for that flip. That doesn't mean it wasn't weighted for that flip. Of course it was weighted for that flip, it's weighted for every flip. But I didn't consider enough flips to prove it.
In an analogous way, considering the data since 1995 is not enough to prove that the earth has been warming. That doesn't mean the earth hasn't been warming since 1995, it means that you're not considering enough of the data.
No, it sounds like he has said there is no warming trend in the past 14 or 15 years. "Almost significant" means "not significant." Nor is p = 0.05 exactly a stellar level of certainty. Physicists like things at the three sigma level, for the most part.
We're talking about predicted warming rates of a fraction of a degree per decade. The atmosphere is not a uniform temperature bath, and there's a lot of reasons why temperature can go up and down independent of global warming - the data is very noisy compared to the predicted warming in a decade and a half. I don't know why the interviewer picked 1995 as the start year but all the answer really means is that 14 or 15 years is not a large enough sample period.
The actual climatologists have generally been pretty careful about not making predictions they can't support. It's the politicians and activists who have been running around making predictions that then don't come true. Anyone who says that global warming will do anything specific on a time scale of less than decades is probably not a climatologist.
It's true that there's no single observation that would falsify global warming in general. There's too much randomness in the weather to get anything useful from single observations; we're talking about predicted changes of a few hundredths of a degree a year, against much larger background fluctuations. Fortunately we have a hundred years or so of data which appears to trend upwards. If there were a few decades of new data which didn't have a clear warming trend, that might put a dent in the theory - although that would likely mean that there was some other effect buffering it, not that carbon dioxide isn't a greenhouse gas. (If you don't believe in greenhouse gasses, I have some wonderful oceanfront real estate on Venus to sell you.)
I'd hardly qualify myself as a True Believer here, but what it would take for me to reconsider would be a whole bunch of climatologists saying that global warming isn't happening. I can't say exactly what would make the climatologists change their minds, but it would probably involve computer models.
A 5'3", 170 lb (BMI=30) person like this is not going to spill into your seat. For airline seat purposes straight weight is probably a better indicator than BMI.
Microsoft's strategy for interacting with Open Source seems to be settling into the pattern of treating it like any other software. Instead of being pro-"Open Source" or anti-"Open Source" their reaction depends on the specific project.
Software that interoperates with, extends, runs on, or otherwise boosts Microsoft products: Good.
Software that replaces or competes with Microsoft products: Bad.
So, it would make perfect sense to Microsoft for them to try to lure open source projects built on top of OpenOffice.org, like plugins or whatever, to switch to building on Microsoft Office instead.
Yes you are obligated to do such a thing, and if you don't comply you can be dragged to court where you could be sentenced to pay for copyright infringement.
Exactly: not complying, getting dragged to court, and paying is an option. You're not obligated to open the source, you can just suffer the consequences of copyright violation instead.
I agree that that's not nice. But - this is the key point - he is winning the zone for his team. His actions contribute to fulfilling his objective within the game, and they are legal by the rules of the game.
It sounds to me that the entire purpose of the PVP zones is to have PVP fights, and people who aren't there to fight or interact with enemy players are abusing them for something contrary to the designer's intent. If someone comes along and does something mean to them, that's their fault for being in the PVP zone. If the designers wanted to provide a place where you can get the increased experience without the risk of having someone kill you they would just add it!
You have read incorrectly. The bug occurs when applications compiled with the brand new GCC 4.3 are run on old kernels, regardless of what compiler was used to compile the kernel.
There's a very interesting book that lays out an argument about treating tools about part of the body in detail. It's called Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence. Check it out, it's an interesting read.
There are other projects that sequence the DNA of people known to have rare diseases such as cystic fibrosis, and there are projects that sequence the DNA of people with common diseases like heart disease, but we don't know much about the variants in the middle that are neither very common nor very rare. This is an attempt to fill in that gap in our knowledge.
Some individual cells' DNA may change (usually for the worse - that's how you get cancer), but those mutations are probably much less common than the errors generated by the DNA sequencing machines. Both sorts of errors are filtered out because each piece of the genome is sequenced several times for each individual, and a computer combines the results.
Chinese military analyst: "Oh look, the Americans have built a submarine barn big enough to hold a small aircraft carrier. It's probably not important."
Perhaps Dr. Pournelle doesn't understand how the DMCA takedown process works. Yes, the process requires identifying the specific works, and providing excess information. That's the way the law is set up by the US Congress. Once the notice is sent, Scribd does have an obligation to take down everything - even the stuff they have permission for. Again, that's the law.
It sounds like Dr. Pournelle is unhappy that Scribd is taking advantage of the DMCA's safe harbor provision to make money. While I understand why he's upset that people are copying his works, it sounds like Scribd is following the law, which makes it the responsibility of the author to send takedown notices for infringing works (and only infringing works). The fact that the SFWA notice included works that weren't infringing was an abuse of the DMCA process, and that's why people are upset.
If I understood the article correctly, the advantage of the device is it doesn't actually use much energy unless it actually moves something vertically. It wouldn't need a huge continous energy expenditure to hover any more than a helium blimp needs one. Effectively, it's an antigravity device - it can cancel the effect of gravity for relatively little energy, and then a jet or propeller can provide actual propulsion.
I can't say the physics of it makes any sense to me, but I don't see any theoretical reason why it's impossible. Since there's no reaction mass, it only has to provide enough energy to account for the actual acceleration and gravitational potential energy it adds to the vehicle.
... a gravitational wave generator patented by the NSA. I guess reverse engineering all those UFOs paid off.
[ObDisclaimerForTheClueless: No, I don't really believe they reverse engineered UFOs. The patent's real though. Who knows, it might even work.]
Sadly, compiling gcc on cygwin has been broken for months, otherwise I'd test it with a more recent snapshot.
Just for fun, I tried the sample code on gcc (GCC) 4.1.0 20050723 (experimental), with -O3 -march=pentium-m. The loop from the array version:
L13:
movzbl -1(%ebx), %edx
movl %esi, %ecx
decl %edi
movl 8(%ebp), %eax
movb %dl, -13(%ebp)
movzbl -1(%esi,%eax), %edx
movb %dl, -1(%ebx)
decl %ebx
movzbl -13(%ebp), %edx
movb %dl, -1(%esi,%eax)
incl %esi
cmpl %ecx, %edi
jg L13
The loop from the pointer version:
L5:
movzbl 1(%esi), %edx
movl %esi, %ecx
movzbl (%ebx), %eax
movb %al, 1(%esi)
decl %esi
movb %dl, (%ebx)
incl %ebx
cmpl %ecx, %ebx
jb L5
Time to execute the array version 100,000 times on a 10,000 character string: 0m4.515s
Time to execute the pointer version 100,000 times on a 10,000 character string: 0m3.936s
So the pointer version actually generates somewhat faster code with the compiler I used on this example, which surprises me. But there's no substitute for actually testing.
The mentally ill and brain damaged are certainly alive. So are trees and fluffy bunny rabbits and the bacteria in your gut. So why you bring "alive" into it I don't know.
As for whether they have intelligence and free will... I'd say in most cases short of actual brain-death, yes. Debatable? Certainly. Do I want to debate it? No, not really.
Correction: A Homo sapiens embryo is obviously a Homo sapiens. Whether or not it is yet a human being is quite debatable, since "human" has additional connotations involving intelligence and free will. I find it hard to believe that an embryo at the stage under discussion in stem cell research - technically, a blastula - with no nerve cells at all, let alone brain function, has either intelligence or free will. So in that sense, it's not yet human, although in appropriate circumstances it might become human.
Unfortunately, the ""We deliberately use different operating systems, different name server implementations..." quote is from Paul Vixie, president of the Internet Systems Consortium, and it's about the root name servers, not about Akamai.