Unless you propose a method of installing me on an iron throne it does come down to the basic decision of "believer or denier" because the same consensus on AGW is already quite settled upon the only thing they are willing to accept as a solution. And equally true is the reality that if as a polity we decide to ignore the warmer warning we aren't likely to do any half measures. So my only decision to make is do I believe the warmers or not and then, assuming my decision ends up being in the majority and implemented, to find out which of the four possible futures we get as a result of that decision combined with the result of waiting long enough to find the answer to he question of whether AGW was/is happening. Because by the time we know for sure it will almost be far too late to do anything to stop it. According to most of the greens it is already too late.
Just to show I have been thinking on this a bit, here are some other possibilities:
1. We could go all in on fission with modern safe(er) reactor designs, perhaps thorium. We know it would work so there is no risk and lots of side benefits like getting to tell the Saudis and the rest of that gang of miscreants to go pound sand. The GWOT would be over. Bonus! And we would probably have to execute most of the greens and lawyers to have any chance of building enough in a short enough time frame to make a difference. Bonus!
2. We could embark on a massive quest for a real viable alternative energy source. Fusion perhaps? It would be betting everything on a moonshot type R&D effort that with the current fragile economy could bankrupt the world if it failed but usher in a whole new world of plenty if it succeeded. Big risk, big reward. Don't like it right now, world is pretty fragile now.
3. We could launch a massive geoengineering project to mitigate the effects. If the projections are real and not just to scare us into doing something stupid we probably should start now since we have no real hope of getting the developing world to stop emitting in time even if we euthanized ourselves next week. Big engineering, massive new push along one of the major tech ladders. Bonus!
> Most people do not have goldfish brains and can keep track of this context for six whole words.
Ahem. Two words: Jersey Shore. How about two more: Daily Show. As in how many people think it is a news program instead of half unfunny satire/comedy half DNC propaganda.
Yes, most people now have the brains of a goldfish, thank TV and the government schools. That was what so diabolicaly clever about the way it was written. Those people (otherwise known as the base of the Democratic Party) get the intended "weesa gonna die! Everybody panic now!" message while the author can disclaim all responsibility because he clearly did not say anything that wasn't totally correct by any literate reading of the text.
> So can you enlighten me as to how exactly you've come to the conclusion that you should > come out against AGW rather than for, since there is plenty of bad reasoning by on both sides.
Ohh! Can I answer that one! Please?!?
Simple. There is so much FUD and obvious self serving interest on BOTH sides that trust would be stupid. So I apply logic to the situation thus:
What are the probable results of the four possibilities? Because that is what it comes down to, we can say with some confidence that there are four, what we can't say with high confidence is the probability of each because the science has become far too politicized.
1. AGW is real and we accept the IPCC/Progressive solution. According to their own predictions we are probably boned anyway. Implementing the One World Government/Police State that is proposed as the answer to totally regulate carbon, wrecking the first world, transferring most of the remaining wealth to the developing world, etc. leaves us an impoverished socialist hellhole unable to cope with the warming that will happen anyway, just a little less because we won't be emitting much anymore. Better for the Earth than #2 but almost certainly worse for us.
2. AGW is real and we ignore the greens (mostly because of fear of the reds within their ranks). Things will get warm. Yea it might suck. But it probably won't be the worst to happen to the Earth in the last million years, certainly not the worst thing since the dinosaurs had a very bad day. Good side is we will have plenty of wealth to throw at the problems and Free peoples have a way of overcoming.
3. AGW is bunk and we fall for a scam anyway. Hosed almost as bad as #1 except without the getting hot part.
4. AGW is bunk and we are smart enough to avoid falling for the scam. Good times. And soon enough we will move to something better for energy anyway, dead dinosaur isn't going to last forever. Even with fracking.
So my problem is to pick between 1/3 or 2/4. Can't know which one of the pair I'd actually get though. But from where I sit 2 is better than either 1 or 3 and 4 is of course full of win. So I will take 2/4. Logical choice, logically arrived at.
Technically it would have to be read as only the hottest in the hundred or so years we have records for. But it was written such that most people will read it with the meaning of 'hottest evar', especially since hottest in a century wouldn't scare many people and the whole thing was written as one big frightfest.
Reality says it has been both much warmer and much cooler than present. And probably will be again.
As for the rest.. Meh. Show me a 'green' energy source that can exist without government subsidies and I'll show you an energy source that the greens have either already turned on or soon will, Because the last thing they want is clean energy, what they want is for industrial civilization to go, depriving it of energy is just one of the ways to bring that about.
And in the end they are even sorta right, there ain't no such thing as energy without side effects. TANSTAAFL. Any energy source widely deployed will reveal that it ain't free, limitless and clean.
Re:Here we see the difference between Free and Sla
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OS X Mountain Lion Review
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· Score: 5, Insightful
> The problem is that I can't run Visio or ModelSim or other worktools...
Dunno about you but I'd run Visio in a VM the few times a typical person needs it and download the Linux tarball for ModelSim. It ain't the 1990s anymore, dude! Professional tools tend to be available on professional workstations and Sun and SGI are long since out of that space, replaced with high end hardware running Linux, usually RHEL. That means any serious software runs there now. Sure they have a Windows exectuable and since Mac is POSIX they will often do one of those too, but real work happens on real workstations and more importantly, real compute heavy stuff happens on clusters. In case you have been in a cave the last few years, Linux pretty much owns clusters.
> What if Linux and Windows ARE that "multitude of options" to OS X?
Eh? You can bring your Apple apps over to Window or Linux? Since when?
You see, that is my point: GNOME went nuts, a large fractionof their userbase said "screw you" and slid in a few new packages and kept right on working. We didn't have to toss our hardware (as in a Linux or Win to Mac migration) or all of our software (any complete OS migration) to escape the changes in GNOME we didn't like. We kept all of our files exactly as they were, all of our hardware exactly as it was, we even kept all of the exact same applications. It wasn't a problem.
If Redhat keeps it up I might abandon Fedora entirely, but guess what? Even moving to Debian won't be all that painful. The versions of a lot of apps will probably change, Debian does tend to lag. But most things will continue to be recognizable and I won't have to relearn everything. Like I would if I tried to go back to Windows since finally abandoning it at Win95. I check in on Windows from time to time, a lot has changed. And a lot more is different compared to Fedora, even with Cygwin to soften the shock.
> What if you had actually liked GNOME3?
That would have been nice. But I didn't. My problem goes beyond me though. I have a lab full of GNOME 2 machines and random members of the public using them. It acts close enough to how they expect a 'computer' (read as Windows) to work that we don't have to hand hold them. No way in Hell I'm upgrading to GNOME3 unless and until Metro succeeds and totally redefines what the public expects.
NIke also makes pretty decent shoes. But worth the price? Perhaps to an NBA player they are, the best will buy the best tools available no questions asked. But for 90% of their customers? But they all convince themselves they are absolutely worth it, sometimes worth killing for even. I'm somewhat skeptical of that claim.
Never underestimate the power of marketing on the minds of the weak willed.
In Apple's case though I don't even concede that they are 'the best.' I have looked at ther wares and this Thinkpad I'm on now cost more than a lot of Macbooks and it was bought with OPM anyway. I could have had a Mac instead but have no desire to use or to own one. Don't really like em and will tend to pick Free/Open software if it is an option. Would pick open hardware if it were a practical option, it isn't. If I had to pick a closed OS today I'd take the preload Win7, add Cygwin and hunker down to ride out Metro.
> I'm a little tired of the analogies between software and physical freedom.
That is because there are differences between physical products and software, especially entire platforms/operating systems. If I bought a GM car years ago it really doesn't matter if they are now a zombie entity jokingly called Government Motors or even if that had been allowed to simply fail, especially if the car is out of warranty. Parts and service are available from a wide variety of third parties and if I don't like the new model year version it doesn't matter because I'm not going to eventually get forced into upgrading to it. And when the car wears out and needs replacing I haven't developed any long term dependencies that will tend to make it hard to switch to Ford or Toyota.
Same for most things. Some products have some tendencies to lock in, but with less computerized stuff it isn't usually unbearable. Buy a Sony amp and sure, it works better with the Sony CD,DVD/BD and TV but you can, and most people do, mix and match. Not so with computers and increasingly with phones, tablets, ebooks, etc. That initial purchase will often dictate a lifetime of followup purchases as you have bought into a whole ecosystem.
Re:Here we see the difference between Free and Sla
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OS X Mountain Lion Review
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· Score: 3, Informative
> Nobody has enough time to maintain forks of everything they use, never mind the people who don't even have the knowhow.
The point is that we usually don't have to. Unless you really are a unique snowflake, you aren't the only one being abandoned. In the case of GNOME going nuts there were lots of options and more directly on point a lot of pissed off former users creating offshoot replacement projects. Most of those will fail but it doesn't matter because it will be because a couple will succeed and attract in attracting the majority of the outcast former GNOME users. You don't HAVE to create everything yourself, from scratch. You can even take the last 'good' version of a software line that goes off the deep end and use that as a starting point.
If you don't like MIcrosoft or Apple's new direction you have fewer options. You can suck it up, switch operating systems or start a cleanroom cloning effort of the entire stack from scratch. And look at ReactOS or Wine to see how impractical that last option has proven to be.
Not exactly. They are a marketing engine that sells consumer electronics at margins anyone else in that business would sacrifice their first born to get for just a single quarter. They used to be in the personal computer business and this article is about a product refresh over in that legacy business unit, one that would already have been phased out if they could figure out the paradox of how app developers could create iOS apps on iOS while maintaining the iron rule that "Thou Shalt Not Program an iDevice."
Here we see the difference between Free and Slave
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OS X Mountain Lion Review
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This is why I left the commercial software behind so many years ago. Let us contrast OS X, Windows and Linux+GNOME. All have recently succumbed, or will soon, to tablet madness. By this I mean that they are all undergoing an almost total rewrite to target an audience almost exactly unlike the one that currently uses the product. Whether this will be 'successful' is still debatable but for my purpose, as a current or past user, almost beside the point.
If you are a Mac user, as a drinker of the Kool-Aid you have no choice. Whatever is coming out is insanely great, you simply must believe that because any other thought would lead to madness. Windows folk will simply bitterly cling to Windows 7 until it end of lifes and hope policy changes, as it often does. They are more like Star Trek fans, they admit there is a pattern to which releases suck and don't suck. But again, their choice is limited to picking one of the available supported versions. When you hitch yourself to a commercial entity you always subject yourself to their business needs, which are rarely in alignment with your own and you get little input into the decisions they make and few options when they change directions and abandon you.
Now lets see how I came out. Few would dispute the GNOMEs also became infected with tablet madness and were suffering from 'lets remove features until an idiot can't screw anything up" disorder long before that. Difference is that when it finally became too much, after installing Fedora 15 and looking at the steaming turd that was GNOME 3, I didn't have to develop a cognitive disonance and convince myself the turd was actually shiny, new and that I loved it after all. I didn't have to bitterly cling to Fedora 14 (along with my gun, bible, etc.) and pray either. There were a multitude of options at that time and because I was in the company of a multitude who had also been similarly abandoned even more new options quickly appeared. And none involved the pain of even distro switching, let alone switching OS and most applications just because one group decided to change focus. In the end, WE decide. I decide. Worst case I could fork the closest thing to what I like and work on it.
Free means never being at the mercy of someone else's business plan.
> It's not there because of some ideological virtue of "openness".
However that was the primary reason everyone could rally behind it. Had it been closed suspicion and fear would have combined with not invented here. Because it was open Google was announcing up front that it was limiting itself in the games it could play later so everyone was willing to trust them. It took somebody with the clout of Google to get everyone else's attention, because they were big enough everyone could trust them to follow through on finishing what was, at the time of first products, a fairly rough platform. But because Google was so huge it would have inspired too much fear had Android been closed for every hardware maker under the sun to get on board. Everybody still remembers Microsoft. They dictate terms and rake off the lion's share of the profits with an iron hand. Who wants to exchange one evil overlord for another?
Nope. Because any other entitty would have developed their OS for thier own hardware and almost certainly have blindly chased Apple taillights and locked the platform. No single competitor would have been a wart on Apple's ass and thus no apps. Only a couple of products from one vendor would have meant no apps, thus no sales, dead. Google understood the only way to win the game was to kick over the table. Stopping Apple from acquiring a monopoly the likes of which Microsoft only dreamed of was more important than any profits from selling Android licenses so they gave it away and licensed darned near anyone to make official hardware. Nobody could beat Apple at that point with the RDF combined with their lead. But everybody together could and is in the process of doing exactly that. But it took someone like Google to raise up a standard that everyone could rally behind, and that allowed everyone to rally to it.
Good for iOS. But news flash, anything that is actually successful will get ported for the mass market on Android.
It doesn't suprise me that the kool-aid drinking zombies with more money than sense who can plunk for for an iDevice are less likely to care about being nickle and dimed to death for their iFart app.
But no sane developer will avoid porting a hit to Android because the effort is minimal (for a hit) and the reward is large enough to justify it. So let the pod people be the testing grounds where that middle ground of devs between Free and Corporate live for a spell. If some good stuff comes from the spare cash of the Apple owners it is good for everyone.
No it wasn't. It has never been legal. It hadn't been clearly understood and explained back in the before time when Bill Gates took out that infamous full page ad asking people to stop stealing his BASIC interpreter but since then it has not been in dispute that software is a copyrightable work and thus can't be passed around.
Not saying it wasn't widely done. I'm old enough to remember when everyone had shoeboxes of floppies. We bought floppies in hundred lots. The really hard core pooled their money and bought the thousand lots to get the super bulk pricing.
But guess what. Almost all of us also bought a fair amount of software. Vast fortunes were made selling software even in that environment. Although near the end of the golden age of 8bit the pirate vs publisher war was getting out of balance to the point it helped end that era. So there is a point where the pirates do kill off the commerce they prey on.
But sorry, I just don't see the average slubs buying Android phones and tablets bothering to pirate $1.99 apps. Maybe I'm wrong on that but it just isn't passing my smell test. The most rudementary copy protection should be more than enough deterrent as there isn't a major warez scene there.
To be brutally honest I haven't found an Android app I'd pirate. I have some simple free apps on it, but no paid ones, and no pirated ones either. I will probably buy a GPS app at some point to avoid a standalone GPS but I wouldn't be buying the app so much as subscribing to maps. After all, Google's free app is pretty good if you have a data plan, but I don't.
Perhaps that is the real problem. Whining about piracy is just cover for the suckiness of the available apps?
> Piracy is a lot more apparent to a software developer that can't sell anything.
Exactly. People with a product people want find ways to extract money from the transaction and laugh all the way to the bank. Losers whine about the unfairness of life.
Sorry, people made heaps of money selling games on the PC and piracy was and is rampant. Every pirated copy is NOT a lost sale. Every pirated copy isn't even a total loss if worked right.
Option one is a world of locked platforms with no piracy. It comes in two flavors, a Hell on Earth police state to enforce it or a land of skittles shitting unicorns that deosn't exist. Option two is what we have now and pretty much always have had, where piracy exists and is a problem but not an insurmountable one. Hollywierd is awash in cash despite the easy duplication of their wares. Multibillion dollar software houses were built on platforms where half or more of the players were running bootleg copies.
Google is your friend. I am feeling generous though so I'll give you a couple to start ya out.
"Speaking at the American leg of Live Earth: The Concerts for a Climate in Crisis, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the late Robert F. Kennedy, said, "Get rid of all these rotten politicians that we have in Washington, who are nothing more than corporate toadies." Referring to skeptics of manmade global warming, he said, "This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors." Traitors are either shot or imprisoned. I wonder which Robert Kennedy has in mind for the skeptics."
"Earlier this year, the Weather Channel's Dr. Heidi Cullen called for the decertification of weathermen who were skeptical of manmade global warming. Grist Magazine's staff writer David Roberts said that his solution for the "bastards" who were members of what he termed the global warming "denial industry" is, "When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg."
What part of that looks like science to you? When I see fascists I tend to assume they are in it for the power, not the Truth or to save anything except their power.
No, your post was about helplessly waiting and depending upon the government to solve every problem. Since the direct rebuttal had already been well made I choose to take it up a notch and go after the underlying assumption. Americans are quite capable (even after a century of attack on the values responsible) of taking care of ourselves and our community without waiting for Great White Father in Washington to wipe our noses. We can bury our dead, heal our wounded and if we can seize our govenmment back and make it get the hell out of our way, we can put down our mad dogs when the time comes.
> Guns don't make people safer, if you're taken by surprise then you're fucked, armed or not.
Yea, they aren't magic wands, only useful tools. If you aren't in favor of them if there is any scenario where they won't help then I don't think you are bebating in good faith.
> I notice you're sexist as well, I suppose it's inconceivable that a woman could be the brave one.
Only in a suicidal society. Men are expendable, that is our function. Women are brave when they must. If they find themselves the last line between defending their children they can usually be depended upon to give a good account of themselves. There is an order in the world, whether politically correct fools see it anymore makes no difference to the universe other than to the relentless forces of evolution which will correct the problem.
> The data was not manipulated and was cleared of all wrongdoing.
That would be a neat trick since the key raw data at CRU was destroyed.
So we have nothing left but "trust me" to decide to redirect a very sizable portion of world production into a project that just happens, total coincidence btw, to be exactly what socialists have been demanding we do for most of the 20th Century.
Way I see it is if we give in we get world socialism which would result in the Hell on Earth that has occurred every single place it has been tried as Option one. Option two is to tell the eco nuts to FOAD and we guessed right that it was a scam. Good times. Option three is they were both wicked and right, which means a future that is going to suck. But it would take a pretty vivid imagination of think of a eco doom worse than socialism, especially since we would have a robust economy to pay for mitigation or geoengineering.
So try to reason me out of that decision. Namecalling won't do it, in case you haven't noticed your team is losing the PR war and the shrill "you fools are going to DIE" stuff just sounds desperate at this point in the debate. Show me a higher probablility of things being worse on a warmed earth than the probability of death camps, mass graves, poverty, war, etc. that have always marked the terminal stages of socialism. The Earth has neen much warmer than today and much cooler. Life would be different but it would be life and we would be Free.
Bluestrat already tore you a new one about the need for dependence on government healthcare, let me attack more directly.
We have already heard the inspiring story that of the twelve dead, three were MEN who did the only honorable thing their government left for them to do, die in the service of their womenfolk; taking the bullets in their body that others might live. But imagine, if you can, what might have been had one or two of the people in those seats been legally allowed to bear arms. Yes a sudden attack by a determined evil man would have resulted in deaths, no doubt of that. But would the madness have continued until his damned gun jammed? Riddle me that.
Ok, somebody might have got trigger happy. Somebody might have been an incompetent who shouldn't have been carrying and shot somebody by accident in the confusion. As compared to to the body count we are watching on the news that sounds like a price every survivor would have been willing to pay.
Show me a mass killing and I will show you the sign on the wall declaring the 'gun free zone.' CO has a concealed carry law but Aurora forbids guns to anyone but a LEO. The State had finally passed an override over that local law so perhaps someone caught carrying could have contested it and got off with just a no-contest conviction for the remaining law against any discharge. But it was all moot because the multiplex was private property and the politically correct corporation had declared it a 'gun free zone.' Notice who that sign failed to convince, but all the law abiding DID obey and the rest is history.
Think about it, these guys are evil, some are even deranged, but the ones who get a body count worthy of national media aren't totally stupid. They know where they can find unarmed targets.
I call bullsh*it. If you really believed that you would boycot the evil energy companies. Which would of course mean you wouldn't be posting on the Internet.
You want energy. I want energy. They want to sell us energy. Where is the evil in any of that?
God Damn, man! They are selling gasoline cheaper than milk right now (US). All you have to do to get milk is feed cows and wait, gas needs a LOT of work to obtain, complex chemistry to refine and a complex worldwide distribution network for both crude and the end products. If you weren't a fool you would give thanks for the hard work being done daily by millions to supply the energy you take for granted. And those 'evil' profits flow into pensions, dividends and lots of other productive uses. And never forget that those evil profits are the thin sliver left over after expenses and a shocking amount of taxes flowing into the welfare state that I'd bet good yellow gold YOU depend on.
When some of us question the shaky science of AGW we are called anti-science, 'deniers' and worse. Hell, semi reputable idiots on the AGW team actually say we should be outlawed or otherwised silenced. I await with breathless anticipation the sudden 180, where dissent is again patiotic... and we have always been at war with Eastasia.
Why not lets meet in the middle and admit what my team has been saying for a long time, that science, being a human endeavor, has been politicized. Then we can all agree that every idiot in a lab coat (or worse, a politican who wears one on TV) shouldn't be blindly trusted. That science, and more importantly the ways of science, are important tools to knowledge but that scientists should only be allowed to inform policy decision, never to use argument from authority to impose policy.
One side effect of picking what channels you want instead of a bundle is the cable companies would know for sure what channels customers actually liked at what price point. Right now they get data from the digital boxes on what you are watching and that helps in their bargaining with the content providers, but real sales data would bring real market forces to bear.
You just know they would experiment with varying prices to see what the revnue maximizing price is for each channel. And I wouldn't have a problem with that.
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Unless you propose a method of installing me on an iron throne it does come down to the basic decision of "believer or denier" because the same consensus on AGW is already quite settled upon the only thing they are willing to accept as a solution. And equally true is the reality that if as a polity we decide to ignore the warmer warning we aren't likely to do any half measures. So my only decision to make is do I believe the warmers or not and then, assuming my decision ends up being in the majority and implemented, to find out which of the four possible futures we get as a result of that decision combined with the result of waiting long enough to find the answer to he question of whether AGW was/is happening. Because by the time we know for sure it will almost be far too late to do anything to stop it. According to most of the greens it is already too late.
Just to show I have been thinking on this a bit, here are some other possibilities:
1. We could go all in on fission with modern safe(er) reactor designs, perhaps thorium. We know it would work so there is no risk and lots of side benefits like getting to tell the Saudis and the rest of that gang of miscreants to go pound sand. The GWOT would be over. Bonus! And we would probably have to execute most of the greens and lawyers to have any chance of building enough in a short enough time frame to make a difference. Bonus!
2. We could embark on a massive quest for a real viable alternative energy source. Fusion perhaps? It would be betting everything on a moonshot type R&D effort that with the current fragile economy could bankrupt the world if it failed but usher in a whole new world of plenty if it succeeded. Big risk, big reward. Don't like it right now, world is pretty fragile now.
3. We could launch a massive geoengineering project to mitigate the effects. If the projections are real and not just to scare us into doing something stupid we probably should start now since we have no real hope of getting the developing world to stop emitting in time even if we euthanized ourselves next week. Big engineering, massive new push along one of the major tech ladders. Bonus!
> Most people do not have goldfish brains and can keep track of this context for six whole words.
Ahem. Two words: Jersey Shore. How about two more: Daily Show. As in how many people think it is a news program instead of half unfunny satire/comedy half DNC propaganda.
Yes, most people now have the brains of a goldfish, thank TV and the government schools. That was what so diabolicaly clever about the way it was written. Those people (otherwise known as the base of the Democratic Party) get the intended "weesa gonna die! Everybody panic now!" message while the author can disclaim all responsibility because he clearly did not say anything that wasn't totally correct by any literate reading of the text.
> So can you enlighten me as to how exactly you've come to the conclusion that you should
> come out against AGW rather than for, since there is plenty of bad reasoning by on both sides.
Ohh! Can I answer that one! Please?!?
Simple. There is so much FUD and obvious self serving interest on BOTH sides that trust would be stupid. So I apply logic to the situation thus:
What are the probable results of the four possibilities? Because that is what it comes down to, we can say with some confidence that there are four, what we can't say with high confidence is the probability of each because the science has become far too politicized.
1. AGW is real and we accept the IPCC/Progressive solution. According to their own predictions we are probably boned anyway. Implementing the One World Government/Police State that is proposed as the answer to totally regulate carbon, wrecking the first world, transferring most of the remaining wealth to the developing world, etc. leaves us an impoverished socialist hellhole unable to cope with the warming that will happen anyway, just a little less because we won't be emitting much anymore. Better for the Earth than #2 but almost certainly worse for us.
2. AGW is real and we ignore the greens (mostly because of fear of the reds within their ranks). Things will get warm. Yea it might suck. But it probably won't be the worst to happen to the Earth in the last million years, certainly not the worst thing since the dinosaurs had a very bad day. Good side is we will have plenty of wealth to throw at the problems and Free peoples have a way of overcoming.
3. AGW is bunk and we fall for a scam anyway. Hosed almost as bad as #1 except without the getting hot part.
4. AGW is bunk and we are smart enough to avoid falling for the scam. Good times. And soon enough we will move to something better for energy anyway, dead dinosaur isn't going to last forever. Even with fracking.
So my problem is to pick between 1/3 or 2/4. Can't know which one of the pair I'd actually get though. But from where I sit 2 is better than either 1 or 3 and 4 is of course full of win. So I will take 2/4. Logical choice, logically arrived at.
Technically it would have to be read as only the hottest in the hundred or so years we have records for. But it was written such that most people will read it with the meaning of 'hottest evar', especially since hottest in a century wouldn't scare many people and the whole thing was written as one big frightfest.
Reality says it has been both much warmer and much cooler than present. And probably will be again.
As for the rest.. Meh. Show me a 'green' energy source that can exist without government subsidies and I'll show you an energy source that the greens have either already turned on or soon will, Because the last thing they want is clean energy, what they want is for industrial civilization to go, depriving it of energy is just one of the ways to bring that about.
And in the end they are even sorta right, there ain't no such thing as energy without side effects. TANSTAAFL. Any energy source widely deployed will reveal that it ain't free, limitless and clean.
> The problem is that I can't run Visio or ModelSim or other worktools...
Dunno about you but I'd run Visio in a VM the few times a typical person needs it and download the Linux tarball for ModelSim. It ain't the 1990s anymore, dude! Professional tools tend to be available on professional workstations and Sun and SGI are long since out of that space, replaced with high end hardware running Linux, usually RHEL. That means any serious software runs there now. Sure they have a Windows exectuable and since Mac is POSIX they will often do one of those too, but real work happens on real workstations and more importantly, real compute heavy stuff happens on clusters. In case you have been in a cave the last few years, Linux pretty much owns clusters.
> What if Linux and Windows ARE that "multitude of options" to OS X?
Eh? You can bring your Apple apps over to Window or Linux? Since when?
You see, that is my point: GNOME went nuts, a large fractionof their userbase said "screw you" and slid in a few new packages and kept right on working. We didn't have to toss our hardware (as in a Linux or Win to Mac migration) or all of our software (any complete OS migration) to escape the changes in GNOME we didn't like. We kept all of our files exactly as they were, all of our hardware exactly as it was, we even kept all of the exact same applications. It wasn't a problem.
If Redhat keeps it up I might abandon Fedora entirely, but guess what? Even moving to Debian won't be all that painful. The versions of a lot of apps will probably change, Debian does tend to lag. But most things will continue to be recognizable and I won't have to relearn everything. Like I would if I tried to go back to Windows since finally abandoning it at Win95. I check in on Windows from time to time, a lot has changed. And a lot more is different compared to Fedora, even with Cygwin to soften the shock.
> What if you had actually liked GNOME3?
That would have been nice. But I didn't. My problem goes beyond me though. I have a lab full of GNOME 2 machines and random members of the public using them. It acts close enough to how they expect a 'computer' (read as Windows) to work that we don't have to hand hold them. No way in Hell I'm upgrading to GNOME3 unless and until Metro succeeds and totally redefines what the public expects.
NIke also makes pretty decent shoes. But worth the price? Perhaps to an NBA player they are, the best will buy the best tools available no questions asked. But for 90% of their customers? But they all convince themselves they are absolutely worth it, sometimes worth killing for even. I'm somewhat skeptical of that claim.
Never underestimate the power of marketing on the minds of the weak willed.
In Apple's case though I don't even concede that they are 'the best.' I have looked at ther wares and this Thinkpad I'm on now cost more than a lot of Macbooks and it was bought with OPM anyway. I could have had a Mac instead but have no desire to use or to own one. Don't really like em and will tend to pick Free/Open software if it is an option. Would pick open hardware if it were a practical option, it isn't. If I had to pick a closed OS today I'd take the preload Win7, add Cygwin and hunker down to ride out Metro.
> I'm a little tired of the analogies between software and physical freedom.
That is because there are differences between physical products and software, especially entire platforms/operating systems. If I bought a GM car years ago it really doesn't matter if they are now a zombie entity jokingly called Government Motors or even if that had been allowed to simply fail, especially if the car is out of warranty. Parts and service are available from a wide variety of third parties and if I don't like the new model year version it doesn't matter because I'm not going to eventually get forced into upgrading to it. And when the car wears out and needs replacing I haven't developed any long term dependencies that will tend to make it hard to switch to Ford or Toyota.
Same for most things. Some products have some tendencies to lock in, but with less computerized stuff it isn't usually unbearable. Buy a Sony amp and sure, it works better with the Sony CD,DVD/BD and TV but you can, and most people do, mix and match. Not so with computers and increasingly with phones, tablets, ebooks, etc. That initial purchase will often dictate a lifetime of followup purchases as you have bought into a whole ecosystem.
> Nobody has enough time to maintain forks of everything they use, never mind the people who don't even have the knowhow.
The point is that we usually don't have to. Unless you really are a unique snowflake, you aren't the only one being abandoned. In the case of GNOME going nuts there were lots of options and more directly on point a lot of pissed off former users creating offshoot replacement projects. Most of those will fail but it doesn't matter because it will be because a couple will succeed and attract in attracting the majority of the outcast former GNOME users. You don't HAVE to create everything yourself, from scratch. You can even take the last 'good' version of a software line that goes off the deep end and use that as a starting point.
If you don't like MIcrosoft or Apple's new direction you have fewer options. You can suck it up, switch operating systems or start a cleanroom cloning effort of the entire stack from scratch. And look at ReactOS or Wine to see how impractical that last option has proven to be.
> I thought Apple was a toy company now.
Not exactly. They are a marketing engine that sells consumer electronics at margins anyone else in that business would sacrifice their first born to get for just a single quarter. They used to be in the personal computer business and this article is about a product refresh over in that legacy business unit, one that would already have been phased out if they could figure out the paradox of how app developers could create iOS apps on iOS while maintaining the iron rule that "Thou Shalt Not Program an iDevice."
This is why I left the commercial software behind so many years ago. Let us contrast OS X, Windows and Linux+GNOME. All have recently succumbed, or will soon, to tablet madness. By this I mean that they are all undergoing an almost total rewrite to target an audience almost exactly unlike the one that currently uses the product. Whether this will be 'successful' is still debatable but for my purpose, as a current or past user, almost beside the point.
If you are a Mac user, as a drinker of the Kool-Aid you have no choice. Whatever is coming out is insanely great, you simply must believe that because any other thought would lead to madness. Windows folk will simply bitterly cling to Windows 7 until it end of lifes and hope policy changes, as it often does. They are more like Star Trek fans, they admit there is a pattern to which releases suck and don't suck. But again, their choice is limited to picking one of the available supported versions. When you hitch yourself to a commercial entity you always subject yourself to their business needs, which are rarely in alignment with your own and you get little input into the decisions they make and few options when they change directions and abandon you.
Now lets see how I came out. Few would dispute the GNOMEs also became infected with tablet madness and were suffering from 'lets remove features until an idiot can't screw anything up" disorder long before that. Difference is that when it finally became too much, after installing Fedora 15 and looking at the steaming turd that was GNOME 3, I didn't have to develop a cognitive disonance and convince myself the turd was actually shiny, new and that I loved it after all. I didn't have to bitterly cling to Fedora 14 (along with my gun, bible, etc.) and pray either. There were a multitude of options at that time and because I was in the company of a multitude who had also been similarly abandoned even more new options quickly appeared. And none involved the pain of even distro switching, let alone switching OS and most applications just because one group decided to change focus. In the end, WE decide. I decide. Worst case I could fork the closest thing to what I like and work on it.
Free means never being at the mercy of someone else's business plan.
> It's not there because of some ideological virtue of "openness".
However that was the primary reason everyone could rally behind it. Had it been closed suspicion and fear would have combined with not invented here. Because it was open Google was announcing up front that it was limiting itself in the games it could play later so everyone was willing to trust them. It took somebody with the clout of Google to get everyone else's attention, because they were big enough everyone could trust them to follow through on finishing what was, at the time of first products, a fairly rough platform. But because Google was so huge it would have inspired too much fear had Android been closed for every hardware maker under the sun to get on board. Everybody still remembers Microsoft. They dictate terms and rake off the lion's share of the profits with an iron hand. Who wants to exchange one evil overlord for another?
Nope. Because any other entitty would have developed their OS for thier own hardware and almost certainly have blindly chased Apple taillights and locked the platform. No single competitor would have been a wart on Apple's ass and thus no apps. Only a couple of products from one vendor would have meant no apps, thus no sales, dead. Google understood the only way to win the game was to kick over the table. Stopping Apple from acquiring a monopoly the likes of which Microsoft only dreamed of was more important than any profits from selling Android licenses so they gave it away and licensed darned near anyone to make official hardware. Nobody could beat Apple at that point with the RDF combined with their lead. But everybody together could and is in the process of doing exactly that. But it took someone like Google to raise up a standard that everyone could rally behind, and that allowed everyone to rally to it.
Good for iOS. But news flash, anything that is actually successful will get ported for the mass market on Android.
It doesn't suprise me that the kool-aid drinking zombies with more money than sense who can plunk for for an iDevice are less likely to care about being nickle and dimed to death for their iFart app.
But no sane developer will avoid porting a hit to Android because the effort is minimal (for a hit) and the reward is large enough to justify it. So let the pod people be the testing grounds where that middle ground of devs between Free and Corporate live for a spell. If some good stuff comes from the spare cash of the Apple owners it is good for everyone.
> this was legal back then, btw
No it wasn't. It has never been legal. It hadn't been clearly understood and explained back in the before time when Bill Gates took out that infamous full page ad asking people to stop stealing his BASIC interpreter but since then it has not been in dispute that software is a copyrightable work and thus can't be passed around.
Not saying it wasn't widely done. I'm old enough to remember when everyone had shoeboxes of floppies. We bought floppies in hundred lots. The really hard core pooled their money and bought the thousand lots to get the super bulk pricing.
But guess what. Almost all of us also bought a fair amount of software. Vast fortunes were made selling software even in that environment. Although near the end of the golden age of 8bit the pirate vs publisher war was getting out of balance to the point it helped end that era. So there is a point where the pirates do kill off the commerce they prey on.
But sorry, I just don't see the average slubs buying Android phones and tablets bothering to pirate $1.99 apps. Maybe I'm wrong on that but it just isn't passing my smell test. The most rudementary copy protection should be more than enough deterrent as there isn't a major warez scene there.
To be brutally honest I haven't found an Android app I'd pirate. I have some simple free apps on it, but no paid ones, and no pirated ones either. I will probably buy a GPS app at some point to avoid a standalone GPS but I wouldn't be buying the app so much as subscribing to maps. After all, Google's free app is pretty good if you have a data plan, but I don't.
Perhaps that is the real problem. Whining about piracy is just cover for the suckiness of the available apps?
> Piracy is a lot more apparent to a software developer that can't sell anything.
Exactly. People with a product people want find ways to extract money from the transaction and laugh all the way to the bank. Losers whine about the unfairness of life.
Sorry, people made heaps of money selling games on the PC and piracy was and is rampant. Every pirated copy is NOT a lost sale. Every pirated copy isn't even a total loss if worked right.
Option one is a world of locked platforms with no piracy. It comes in two flavors, a Hell on Earth police state to enforce it or a land of skittles shitting unicorns that deosn't exist. Option two is what we have now and pretty much always have had, where piracy exists and is a problem but not an insurmountable one. Hollywierd is awash in cash despite the easy duplication of their wares. Multibillion dollar software houses were built on platforms where half or more of the players were running bootleg copies.
> Uh, can I have a cite please?
Google is your friend. I am feeling generous though so I'll give you a couple to start ya out.
"Speaking at the American leg of Live Earth: The Concerts for a Climate in Crisis, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of the late Robert F. Kennedy, said, "Get rid of all these rotten politicians that we have in Washington, who are nothing more than corporate toadies." Referring to skeptics of manmade global warming, he said, "This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors." Traitors are either shot or imprisoned. I wonder which Robert Kennedy has in mind for the skeptics."
"Earlier this year, the Weather Channel's Dr. Heidi Cullen called for the decertification of weathermen who were skeptical of manmade global warming. Grist Magazine's staff writer David Roberts said that his solution for the "bastards" who were members of what he termed the global warming "denial industry" is, "When we've finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us and we're in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards — some sort of climate Nuremberg."
What part of that looks like science to you? When I see fascists I tend to assume they are in it for the power, not the Truth or to save anything except their power.
No, your post was about helplessly waiting and depending upon the government to solve every problem. Since the direct rebuttal had already been well made I choose to take it up a notch and go after the underlying assumption. Americans are quite capable (even after a century of attack on the values responsible) of taking care of ourselves and our community without waiting for Great White Father in Washington to wipe our noses. We can bury our dead, heal our wounded and if we can seize our govenmment back and make it get the hell out of our way, we can put down our mad dogs when the time comes.
> Guns don't make people safer, if you're taken by surprise then you're fucked, armed or not.
Yea, they aren't magic wands, only useful tools. If you aren't in favor of them if there is any scenario where they won't help then I don't think you are bebating in good faith.
> I notice you're sexist as well, I suppose it's inconceivable that a woman could be the brave one.
Only in a suicidal society. Men are expendable, that is our function. Women are brave when they must. If they find themselves the last line between defending their children they can usually be depended upon to give a good account of themselves. There is an order in the world, whether politically correct fools see it anymore makes no difference to the universe other than to the relentless forces of evolution which will correct the problem.
> The data was not manipulated and was cleared of all wrongdoing.
That would be a neat trick since the key raw data at CRU was destroyed.
So we have nothing left but "trust me" to decide to redirect a very sizable portion of world production into a project that just happens, total coincidence btw, to be exactly what socialists have been demanding we do for most of the 20th Century.
Way I see it is if we give in we get world socialism which would result in the Hell on Earth that has occurred every single place it has been tried as Option one. Option two is to tell the eco nuts to FOAD and we guessed right that it was a scam. Good times. Option three is they were both wicked and right, which means a future that is going to suck. But it would take a pretty vivid imagination of think of a eco doom worse than socialism, especially since we would have a robust economy to pay for mitigation or geoengineering.
So try to reason me out of that decision. Namecalling won't do it, in case you haven't noticed your team is losing the PR war and the shrill "you fools are going to DIE" stuff just sounds desperate at this point in the debate. Show me a higher probablility of things being worse on a warmed earth than the probability of death camps, mass graves, poverty, war, etc. that have always marked the terminal stages of socialism. The Earth has neen much warmer than today and much cooler. Life would be different but it would be life and we would be Free.
Bluestrat already tore you a new one about the need for dependence on government healthcare, let me attack more directly.
We have already heard the inspiring story that of the twelve dead, three were MEN who did the only honorable thing their government left for them to do, die in the service of their womenfolk; taking the bullets in their body that others might live. But imagine, if you can, what might have been had one or two of the people in those seats been legally allowed to bear arms. Yes a sudden attack by a determined evil man would have resulted in deaths, no doubt of that. But would the madness have continued until his damned gun jammed? Riddle me that.
Ok, somebody might have got trigger happy. Somebody might have been an incompetent who shouldn't have been carrying and shot somebody by accident in the confusion. As compared to to the body count we are watching on the news that sounds like a price every survivor would have been willing to pay.
Show me a mass killing and I will show you the sign on the wall declaring the 'gun free zone.' CO has a concealed carry law but Aurora forbids guns to anyone but a LEO. The State had finally passed an override over that local law so perhaps someone caught carrying could have contested it and got off with just a no-contest conviction for the remaining law against any discharge. But it was all moot because the multiplex was private property and the politically correct corporation had declared it a 'gun free zone.' Notice who that sign failed to convince, but all the law abiding DID obey and the rest is history.
Think about it, these guys are evil, some are even deranged, but the ones who get a body count worthy of national media aren't totally stupid. They know where they can find unarmed targets.
I call bullsh*it. If you really believed that you would boycot the evil energy companies. Which would of course mean you wouldn't be posting on the Internet.
You want energy. I want energy. They want to sell us energy. Where is the evil in any of that?
God Damn, man! They are selling gasoline cheaper than milk right now (US). All you have to do to get milk is feed cows and wait, gas needs a LOT of work to obtain, complex chemistry to refine and a complex worldwide distribution network for both crude and the end products. If you weren't a fool you would give thanks for the hard work being done daily by millions to supply the energy you take for granted. And those 'evil' profits flow into pensions, dividends and lots of other productive uses. And never forget that those evil profits are the thin sliver left over after expenses and a shocking amount of taxes flowing into the welfare state that I'd bet good yellow gold YOU depend on.
When some of us question the shaky science of AGW we are called anti-science, 'deniers' and worse. Hell, semi reputable idiots on the AGW team actually say we should be outlawed or otherwised silenced. I await with breathless anticipation the sudden 180, where dissent is again patiotic... and we have always been at war with Eastasia.
Why not lets meet in the middle and admit what my team has been saying for a long time, that science, being a human endeavor, has been politicized. Then we can all agree that every idiot in a lab coat (or worse, a politican who wears one on TV) shouldn't be blindly trusted. That science, and more importantly the ways of science, are important tools to knowledge but that scientists should only be allowed to inform policy decision, never to use argument from authority to impose policy.
One side effect of picking what channels you want instead of a bundle is the cable companies would know for sure what channels customers actually liked at what price point. Right now they get data from the digital boxes on what you are watching and that helps in their bargaining with the content providers, but real sales data would bring real market forces to bear.
You just know they would experiment with varying prices to see what the revnue maximizing price is for each channel. And I wouldn't have a problem with that.