For experimental confirmation that the earth is not warming a great amount, stick your thumb out the window. This past December the USA recorded a long listing or record low temperatures.
Really? Using that argument alone puts you out of the discussion.
Why is this insightful? I know TFA is light on content and tedious to read, but its last 2 paragraphs do appear to say "the thing is basically useless" (in a long-winded way). Not quite the kind of publicity I would be happy with if I were that company.
In light of previous conversations with GP, I'm almost certain it's a joke, and/or he or she is testing my sense of humor. As for the moderation, it hasn't been modded at all, as you can see by clicking on the score. If you create an account, your posts automatically start at +1. If you make a significant numbers of interesting/informative/insightful comments and very few troll/flamebait comments, you automatically accumulate "karma", and if your karma is high enough, you get an additional +1 on top of that. So that's why it's at +2. Given that it's a joke, but not a hilariously funny one, the mods are not likely to spend their limited mod points on it either way, so it stays at +2.
For completeness, low karma can also cause a -1 karma modifier. That's why career trolls rarely bother to make an account, and that in turn is why ACs are held in low respect.
Here's a serious answer, just in case you're not going along with the joking tone of the 2 posts I replied to...
I thought we were (implicitly) talking about the presence of air making terrestrial use of the weapon impossible. Particles coming loose tend to fly around at high speeds is somewhat random directions. Some of them will remain in the way of the antimatter projectile/beam, some of them will go out of the way but hit a molecule and return where they came from, some of them will create some backscatter effect (like a billiard ball being launched at high speed on a pool table full of other balls), causing molecules of air to get into the way. Even if one could fire a hypothetical ray that clearly annihilates all matter ahead of an antimatter projectile/beam, air would quickly rush into the vacuum being created (of course, having such a ray at one's disposal would mostly remove the point of using an antimatter projectile/beam). Whatever happens, there won't be the necessary hard vacuum for the antimatter projectile/beam to proceed. Even air at very low density would exert an incredibly strong braking/beam dispersal force because of the energy released when it collides with antimatter.
Also, in the present discussion, gravity is far too weak a force to be relevant at all. If you have to wait for gravity to remove stuff out of the way, air will have been given time to take that stuff's place a hundred times over. That's why there's no hard vacuum behind objects in (subsonic) free fall. Now in space, there is no air, but little gravity either...
Say, sir, did you hear that WHOOSHing sound overhead? Could it perchance be that GP was a semi-funny allusion to the fact that Google initially invested in IV, as mentioned in the first sentence of the summary?
Ooh, that terminology is soo 20th century. Google doesn't have offices, Google has labs. Ergo: "Google created a monster in their patent troll lab." Doesn't that sound much better?
Parent and GP's suggestions might work in SF, but in real physics, a powerful laser blast will just break the ordinary matter into smaller pieces, which will still be sitting in the way. As for the positrons, they won't quite annihilate the ordinary matter; some of them would annihilate with electrons, but most of them would convert neutrons into protons, if I remember the nuclear chemistry chapters of my bachelor's courses correctly. The resulting unstable cores would either decay or fission, but the products would still be ordinary matter, and no matter (pun not intended) how long you keep repeating this, there would still be a lot of ordinary matter left that cannot be converted to energy any further by bombarding with positrons.
What part of my first sentence did you not understand? You seem to be basing your whole argument on the mistaken belief that climate scientists don't publish enough details about their models to make them reproducible by other people. The part of climate science that is taken seriously by the scientific community is all published in scientific journals that are rigorously peer-reviewed, and these journals invariably stipulate in their guidelines for reviewers that enough information should be given in the paper to reproduce the results. Anyone with enough background can re-run the simulations.(*)
Now, if you were talking about climate change deniers, then you would have a point; they're almost always publishing in murky backwater journals with lax editorial and reviewing standards, and are not taken seriously by the community precisely because their results cannot be reproduced. That, and the fact that the papers often contain fundamental errors.
(*)It will also set you back a few $1000 if you don't have access to a university's library and have to download enough articles to understand how the models work on a pay-per-view basis.(+) This is a great wrong, but it is true for all branches of science, ranging from biomedical research to physics and astronomy. I don't hear you complaining about those.
(+)Also, you'll likely spend more than that on the necessary computers to run the simulations. Don't worry, some fossil fuel industry lobby group will gladly pick up the tab for you if you can show that the results are not reproducible. In fact, said industry happens to be in the possession of large computing resources; what makes you thing they didn't try this? The fact that they were unwilling to publish the conclusion that the simulations are, in fact, reproducible?
I probably shouldn't reply to this crackpottery, but since it's modded informative...
"Quantum" computing is hype & the research saying it exists is flawed.
Nuh-huh. The basic principles of quantum computing directly follow from quantum mechanics and have been demonstrated in impractical systems for numbers of Qubits that are too low to be of practical use. Quantum computing is real; saying that it isn't is equivalent to stating that modern physics is all wrong. Quantum computing is not what is being disputed here, it's D-wave's claim that the machine they sell for $$$$ actually relies on quantum effects to produce its results. A claim I've been pretty skeptical of myself even before the publication of the findings reported in TFA.
Read the works of Prof. Richard Lindzen of MIT. He has proved
-snipped bunch of poppycock-
Of all of the findings you attribute to Dr. Linzen, I couldn't find a single one in his recent work, making it painfully obvious you have no clue what you're talking about.
'Dr. Lindzen accepts the elementary tenets of climate science. He agrees that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, calling people who dispute that point “nutty.” He agrees that the level of it is rising because of human activity and that this should warm the climate.' Source.
So there you go, I have it from a source you seem to respect a lot that you are a nut.
Dr. Lindzen's differences with the mainstream view of climate science have been decreasing together with the uncertainties of the climate models. If I'm following the story correctly, he currently thinks the climate models overestimate the warming by about 25%. The basis for his argument is not totally outlandish, but is considered somewhat outdated and inaccurate. At any rate, even 25% less warming is predicted to cause us trouble. It is this prediction Dr. Lindzen disagrees with most. He basically states that it won't do a great bit of harm to adapt a "wait and see" attitude for a few more decades. To me, this goes against the precautionary principle. Not to mention that the measures that need to be taken will give us a head start adapting to the inevitable depletion of fossil fuels. Getting our homework done early won't hurt anything but the pockets of some prominent special-interest groups. Having to do it all at the last minute (or when it's too late), OTOH, may have an impact on society and the economy at large.
For experimental confirmation that the earth is not warming a great amount, stick your thumb out the window. This past December the USA recorded a long listing or record low temperatures.
Really? Using that argument alone puts you out of the discussion.
1) I have serious issues with the data collection, statistical analysis applied, lack of transparency of both models AND data, and unsupported conclusions
It's all in the literature. Just because it's intransparent to you doesn't mean it's intransparent to experts. If I were to shove a paper about improvements in simulating asteroid orbits into your hand, you likely won't understand much of it - would you complain about intransparency as well? The sad truth is that science has specialized so far that a even smart well-educated person cannot understand most of the literature in a field that is not their specialization. Society has reached a point where you cannot distrust everything you're not able personally verify, else you're paranoid. No Linux user is going to skim the source of the kernel they're running for NSA backdoors. Yet most of them are not going to claim Linux kernel development is "intransparent"; instead, they're going to trust that the community of kernel developers is paying attention. People are also willing to trust the community of scientific experts on diverse subjects ranging from biomedical research to physics and astronomy. Yet when it comes to that one subject where huge commercial interests happen to be at stake, suddenly the scientists aren't trained to get basic statistics right and the peer-reviewed literature is "intransparent". We've seen it all before in the smoking-doesn't-cause-cancer debate.
If you RTFA, you will find that the Microsoft guys first figured out that Sefnit installs Tor in a very specific, unusual way in very specific, unusual location, then contacted the Tor developers to ask if there is any chance a legitimate user would do the same thing. Only then, they proceeded to remove Tor versions that were installed in this very specific way and location. Without any doubt, one of their operating parameters was to avoid collateral damage at all cost; if they screwed up, they could have caused the Microsoft PR disaster of the decade (and boy, is there stiff competition for that title).
I came here to say just this. TFA is a neat story in a general sense, but in the sense of "Microsoft controlling your computer", there's exactly nothing there we didn't know already. It can only be a surprise to people who don't know or are in denial about what it means to update their operating system. Every second Tuesday, Microsoft adds stuff to your windows computers, which is way scarier than removing stuff, if one thinks about it for just a second.
Oh yes! It's hard to stay focused on one thing these days. I would be tempted to leave my e-mail client and my cell phone off during working hours, but people don't appreciate that, so I only do the e-mail client and only when I'm really busy.
I do not like your one-sided view, sir. You are doing truth a great disservice by not mentioning the "pro oil industry fascists", "pro weapon industry fascists", "pro telecom industry fascists" and the "pro health insurance industry fascists". If any sector makes enough money to buy politicians and adverts, you'll find them represented on capitol hill and in the media. The people, on the other hand...
Oh, so that would explain why the WMD lie, the Saddam-supports-Al-Qaeda lie and the general "rationale" for going to Iraq were repeated spinelessly by the patriotic media in the USA, while being lambasted in most of the media in the rest of the world. Because the American media hate the Republicans who came up with the idea and only "parrot govt propaganda so long as Democrats are in power". Got it.
You're conflating two different things. Multiculturalism is loosely defined as the tolerance and acceptance of cultural diversity in society, and getting the best of all worlds. Without multiculturalism, the United States would never have existed, survived, or become successful. If you are against it, then yes, you are a bigot by simple dictionary definition. Mass immigration, in contrast, is an issue of immigration laws and pressures. It is a much more difficult subject, which potential economic advantages and disadvantages depending on a lot of factors.
And we're not even talking about free trade, as dragged into the discussion by Hairyfeet above, which is completely unrelated (with a good dose of hyperbole, one could even state that ultimate free trade and mass immigration are mutually exclusive) and even more complex. My opinion is that too much free trade is about as harmful as (or possibly slightly more than) too little of it.
Anyhow, if you guys can't tell these issues apart, then you make it tempting to conclude you are xenophobes, in the narrow definition of being afraid of everything foreign.:-P
Going by that annoying typewriter font you're using, ditching some old-fashioned habits and mannerisms might help, else you're not going to make it past HR screening no matter how talented you are.:-P
Funny how a majority of people on this site wants to believe we're going to cure aging and live forever, but doesn't want to pay for the fundamental research that would help us move in that direction. (Although the goal is unattainable, NIH research directly contributes to increases in life expectancy.)
Not taking sides here, just making an observation. My opinion is that, while fighting for immortality is a futile endeavor, the NIH should be funded nevertheless because the fundamental research they perform also has application in fighting multiresistant bacteria and potentially pandemic viruses, which might start causing trouble sooner than a giant asteroid or gamma ray burst. To a lesser extent, the NIH should also be funded just to avoid the inconsistency of nobody wanting to get heart disease or cancer but nobody wanting to fund the quest for better cures, not to mention the inconsistency of everyone whining about America losing economic competitiveness while at the same time snubbing its one strong source of economic competitiveness: fundamental research. That said, NASA should also be funded for the reasons parent cited. And don't forget to give those fusion researchers something too; they're working on a potential solution to a lot of huge problems, on a shoe-string budget. Where to get the money? The military and the pointless-wars-fund can do with a few % less. And those oil industry subsidies should be consigned to history, where they belong.
My hypothesis is that Generation X-ers (such as me) and older - who didn't grow up with cell phones and internet (and the two combined into smartphones) - have an inherent disadvantage in coping with information overload because they weren't immersed in it as a kid. They see the younger part of Generation Y and Generation Z fluently switching between information sources and think they are unfocused, while in reality, their brain is just wired from childhood to be better at context switching / multitasking. If they really were all suffering from some tech-induced form of ADD, they wouldn't be nearly as successful in the workforce as they reportedly are.
Disclaimer: I'm well aware of the stereotypes and overgeneralizations in this post. I'm talking on average. You know what I mean. And no, no standard deviation given.
It's Nuclear Magnetic Resonance that was changed to Magnetic Resonance Imaging. And, as others have pointed out, only in the medical field. </pedantic nitpick>
Slashdot Mirror
For experimental confirmation that the earth is not warming a great amount, stick your thumb out the window. This past December the USA recorded a long listing or record low temperatures.
Really? Using that argument alone puts you out of the discussion.
Obligatory xkcd.
Why is this insightful? I know TFA is light on content and tedious to read, but its last 2 paragraphs do appear to say "the thing is basically useless" (in a long-winded way). Not quite the kind of publicity I would be happy with if I were that company.
Pfff, is that it? My password for everything is "correct horse battery stable". Apparently, some smart guy has proven it's veeery secure!
In light of previous conversations with GP, I'm almost certain it's a joke, and/or he or she is testing my sense of humor. As for the moderation, it hasn't been modded at all, as you can see by clicking on the score. If you create an account, your posts automatically start at +1. If you make a significant numbers of interesting/informative/insightful comments and very few troll/flamebait comments, you automatically accumulate "karma", and if your karma is high enough, you get an additional +1 on top of that. So that's why it's at +2. Given that it's a joke, but not a hilariously funny one, the mods are not likely to spend their limited mod points on it either way, so it stays at +2.
For completeness, low karma can also cause a -1 karma modifier. That's why career trolls rarely bother to make an account, and that in turn is why ACs are held in low respect.
Here's a serious answer, just in case you're not going along with the joking tone of the 2 posts I replied to...
I thought we were (implicitly) talking about the presence of air making terrestrial use of the weapon impossible. Particles coming loose tend to fly around at high speeds is somewhat random directions. Some of them will remain in the way of the antimatter projectile/beam, some of them will go out of the way but hit a molecule and return where they came from, some of them will create some backscatter effect (like a billiard ball being launched at high speed on a pool table full of other balls), causing molecules of air to get into the way. Even if one could fire a hypothetical ray that clearly annihilates all matter ahead of an antimatter projectile/beam, air would quickly rush into the vacuum being created (of course, having such a ray at one's disposal would mostly remove the point of using an antimatter projectile/beam). Whatever happens, there won't be the necessary hard vacuum for the antimatter projectile/beam to proceed. Even air at very low density would exert an incredibly strong braking/beam dispersal force because of the energy released when it collides with antimatter.
Also, in the present discussion, gravity is far too weak a force to be relevant at all. If you have to wait for gravity to remove stuff out of the way, air will have been given time to take that stuff's place a hundred times over. That's why there's no hard vacuum behind objects in (subsonic) free fall. Now in space, there is no air, but little gravity either...
Say, sir, did you hear that WHOOSHing sound overhead? Could it perchance be that GP was a semi-funny allusion to the fact that Google initially invested in IV, as mentioned in the first sentence of the summary?
Ooh, that terminology is soo 20th century. Google doesn't have offices, Google has labs. Ergo: "Google created a monster in their patent troll lab." Doesn't that sound much better?
Parent and GP's suggestions might work in SF, but in real physics, a powerful laser blast will just break the ordinary matter into smaller pieces, which will still be sitting in the way. As for the positrons, they won't quite annihilate the ordinary matter; some of them would annihilate with electrons, but most of them would convert neutrons into protons, if I remember the nuclear chemistry chapters of my bachelor's courses correctly. The resulting unstable cores would either decay or fission, but the products would still be ordinary matter, and no matter (pun not intended) how long you keep repeating this, there would still be a lot of ordinary matter left that cannot be converted to energy any further by bombarding with positrons.
What part of my first sentence did you not understand? You seem to be basing your whole argument on the mistaken belief that climate scientists don't publish enough details about their models to make them reproducible by other people. The part of climate science that is taken seriously by the scientific community is all published in scientific journals that are rigorously peer-reviewed, and these journals invariably stipulate in their guidelines for reviewers that enough information should be given in the paper to reproduce the results. Anyone with enough background can re-run the simulations.(*)
Now, if you were talking about climate change deniers, then you would have a point; they're almost always publishing in murky backwater journals with lax editorial and reviewing standards, and are not taken seriously by the community precisely because their results cannot be reproduced. That, and the fact that the papers often contain fundamental errors.
(*)It will also set you back a few $1000 if you don't have access to a university's library and have to download enough articles to understand how the models work on a pay-per-view basis.(+) This is a great wrong, but it is true for all branches of science, ranging from biomedical research to physics and astronomy. I don't hear you complaining about those.
(+)Also, you'll likely spend more than that on the necessary computers to run the simulations. Don't worry, some fossil fuel industry lobby group will gladly pick up the tab for you if you can show that the results are not reproducible. In fact, said industry happens to be in the possession of large computing resources; what makes you thing they didn't try this? The fact that they were unwilling to publish the conclusion that the simulations are, in fact, reproducible?
"Quantum" computing is hype & the research saying it exists is flawed.
Nuh-huh. The basic principles of quantum computing directly follow from quantum mechanics and have been demonstrated in impractical systems for numbers of Qubits that are too low to be of practical use. Quantum computing is real; saying that it isn't is equivalent to stating that modern physics is all wrong. Quantum computing is not what is being disputed here, it's D-wave's claim that the machine they sell for $$$$ actually relies on quantum effects to produce its results. A claim I've been pretty skeptical of myself even before the publication of the findings reported in TFA.
Read the works of Prof. Richard Lindzen of MIT. He has proved
-snipped bunch of poppycock-
Of all of the findings you attribute to Dr. Linzen, I couldn't find a single one in his recent work, making it painfully obvious you have no clue what you're talking about.
'Dr. Lindzen accepts the elementary tenets of climate science. He agrees that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, calling people who dispute that point “nutty.” He agrees that the level of it is rising because of human activity and that this should warm the climate.'
Source.
So there you go, I have it from a source you seem to respect a lot that you are a nut.
Dr. Lindzen's differences with the mainstream view of climate science have been decreasing together with the uncertainties of the climate models. If I'm following the story correctly, he currently thinks the climate models overestimate the warming by about 25%. The basis for his argument is not totally outlandish, but is considered somewhat outdated and inaccurate. At any rate, even 25% less warming is predicted to cause us trouble. It is this prediction Dr. Lindzen disagrees with most. He basically states that it won't do a great bit of harm to adapt a "wait and see" attitude for a few more decades. To me, this goes against the precautionary principle. Not to mention that the measures that need to be taken will give us a head start adapting to the inevitable depletion of fossil fuels. Getting our homework done early won't hurt anything but the pockets of some prominent special-interest groups. Having to do it all at the last minute (or when it's too late), OTOH, may have an impact on society and the economy at large.
For experimental confirmation that the earth is not warming a great amount, stick your thumb out the window. This past December the USA recorded a long listing or record low temperatures.
Really? Using that argument alone puts you out of the discussion.
1) I have serious issues with the data collection, statistical analysis applied, lack of transparency of both models AND data, and unsupported conclusions
It's all in the literature. Just because it's intransparent to you doesn't mean it's intransparent to experts. If I were to shove a paper about improvements in simulating asteroid orbits into your hand, you likely won't understand much of it - would you complain about intransparency as well? The sad truth is that science has specialized so far that a even smart well-educated person cannot understand most of the literature in a field that is not their specialization. Society has reached a point where you cannot distrust everything you're not able personally verify, else you're paranoid. No Linux user is going to skim the source of the kernel they're running for NSA backdoors. Yet most of them are not going to claim Linux kernel development is "intransparent"; instead, they're going to trust that the community of kernel developers is paying attention. People are also willing to trust the community of scientific experts on diverse subjects ranging from biomedical research to physics and astronomy. Yet when it comes to that one subject where huge commercial interests happen to be at stake, suddenly the scientists aren't trained to get basic statistics right and the peer-reviewed literature is "intransparent". We've seen it all before in the smoking-doesn't-cause-cancer debate.
Guess the mods didn't get the joke. Sad, really.
Yeah, but probably never as good as some of these kids who grew up with it.
If you RTFA, you will find that the Microsoft guys first figured out that Sefnit installs Tor in a very specific, unusual way in very specific, unusual location, then contacted the Tor developers to ask if there is any chance a legitimate user would do the same thing. Only then, they proceeded to remove Tor versions that were installed in this very specific way and location. Without any doubt, one of their operating parameters was to avoid collateral damage at all cost; if they screwed up, they could have caused the Microsoft PR disaster of the decade (and boy, is there stiff competition for that title).
I came here to say just this. TFA is a neat story in a general sense, but in the sense of "Microsoft controlling your computer", there's exactly nothing there we didn't know already. It can only be a surprise to people who don't know or are in denial about what it means to update their operating system. Every second Tuesday, Microsoft adds stuff to your windows computers, which is way scarier than removing stuff, if one thinks about it for just a second.
Oh yes! It's hard to stay focused on one thing these days. I would be tempted to leave my e-mail client and my cell phone off during working hours, but people don't appreciate that, so I only do the e-mail client and only when I'm really busy.
I do not like your one-sided view, sir. You are doing truth a great disservice by not mentioning the "pro oil industry fascists", "pro weapon industry fascists", "pro telecom industry fascists" and the "pro health insurance industry fascists". If any sector makes enough money to buy politicians and adverts, you'll find them represented on capitol hill and in the media. The people, on the other hand...
Oh, so that would explain why the WMD lie, the Saddam-supports-Al-Qaeda lie and the general "rationale" for going to Iraq were repeated spinelessly by the patriotic media in the USA, while being lambasted in most of the media in the rest of the world. Because the American media hate the Republicans who came up with the idea and only "parrot govt propaganda so long as Democrats are in power". Got it.
You're conflating two different things. Multiculturalism is loosely defined as the tolerance and acceptance of cultural diversity in society, and getting the best of all worlds. Without multiculturalism, the United States would never have existed, survived, or become successful. If you are against it, then yes, you are a bigot by simple dictionary definition. Mass immigration, in contrast, is an issue of immigration laws and pressures. It is a much more difficult subject, which potential economic advantages and disadvantages depending on a lot of factors.
And we're not even talking about free trade, as dragged into the discussion by Hairyfeet above, which is completely unrelated (with a good dose of hyperbole, one could even state that ultimate free trade and mass immigration are mutually exclusive) and even more complex. My opinion is that too much free trade is about as harmful as (or possibly slightly more than) too little of it.
Anyhow, if you guys can't tell these issues apart, then you make it tempting to conclude you are xenophobes, in the narrow definition of being afraid of everything foreign. :-P
Going by that annoying typewriter font you're using, ditching some old-fashioned habits and mannerisms might help, else you're not going to make it past HR screening no matter how talented you are. :-P
Funny how a majority of people on this site wants to believe we're going to cure aging and live forever, but doesn't want to pay for the fundamental research that would help us move in that direction. (Although the goal is unattainable, NIH research directly contributes to increases in life expectancy.)
Not taking sides here, just making an observation. My opinion is that, while fighting for immortality is a futile endeavor, the NIH should be funded nevertheless because the fundamental research they perform also has application in fighting multiresistant bacteria and potentially pandemic viruses, which might start causing trouble sooner than a giant asteroid or gamma ray burst. To a lesser extent, the NIH should also be funded just to avoid the inconsistency of nobody wanting to get heart disease or cancer but nobody wanting to fund the quest for better cures, not to mention the inconsistency of everyone whining about America losing economic competitiveness while at the same time snubbing its one strong source of economic competitiveness: fundamental research. That said, NASA should also be funded for the reasons parent cited. And don't forget to give those fusion researchers something too; they're working on a potential solution to a lot of huge problems, on a shoe-string budget. Where to get the money? The military and the pointless-wars-fund can do with a few % less. And those oil industry subsidies should be consigned to history, where they belong.
My hypothesis is that Generation X-ers (such as me) and older - who didn't grow up with cell phones and internet (and the two combined into smartphones) - have an inherent disadvantage in coping with information overload because they weren't immersed in it as a kid. They see the younger part of Generation Y and Generation Z fluently switching between information sources and think they are unfocused, while in reality, their brain is just wired from childhood to be better at context switching / multitasking. If they really were all suffering from some tech-induced form of ADD, they wouldn't be nearly as successful in the workforce as they reportedly are.
Disclaimer: I'm well aware of the stereotypes and overgeneralizations in this post. I'm talking on average. You know what I mean. And no, no standard deviation given.
It's Nuclear Magnetic Resonance that was changed to Magnetic Resonance Imaging. And, as others have pointed out, only in the medical field. </pedantic nitpick>
Apparently so.
(Even if I get banned from /., that pun was worth it.)