Neat quotes about "The Cooling". Meaningful quotes? Nope
First, Bryson's forward. Here's the most important line in it,
There are very few pages that, as a scientist, I could accept without questions of accuracy, of precision, or of balance.
Huh? You mean a guy that thought the majority of scientists believed the temperature trend for the climate was towards global cooling thought this book was, well, to put not too fine of a point on it, bad science? Perhaps you shouldn't put much weight on this book after all.
Continuing, Schneider's quote. Basically, he's saying "This is something we should be talking about". Sure, but the quote isn't supporting or denying global cooling or global warming, so you can't really draw any conclusions from what he wrote.
Now on to "The Genesis Strategy". Here's a quote from page 9
Human activities have already raised the CO2 content in the atmosphere by 10 percent and are estimated to raise it some 25 percent by the year 2000. In later chapters, I will show how this increase could lead to a 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degree Fahrenheit) average warming of the earth's surface...
Does this sound like a scientist predicting of global cooling? Not to me it doesn't. Does it sound like someone that "jumped ship" - definitely not. That entire book was in the same vein as the quote for "The Cooling" - this is an important topic, let's talk about it.
Here's the most important point you miss, from Wikipedia - "In 1977 [the year after "The Genesis Strategy" was published] Schneider criticized a popular science book (The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age) that predicted an imminent Ice Age, writing in Nature:
...it insists on maintaining the shock effect of the dramatic...rather than the reality of the discipline: we just don't know enough to chose definitely at this stage whether we are in for warming or cooling-- or when.
[end of quote from Wikipedia]
That's not the case anymore. There's plenty of data to show that we are experiencing a rapid global climate change, unlike one that has been found in the historical record, and some part of it is due to humans. That part is probably what is making the increase in temperature is so rapid.
No, you are wrong when you state, "there may or may not be evidence of shady behavior". There may have been shady behavior, but there isn't any evidence of shady behavior.
Um, no, there is no evidence of shady behavior. There's evidence that the computer in question displayed adult images during the time in question, but there are many reasons, such as the pop-up ads blamed by the defense, that such images could have been displayed.
That's becoming less and less true. All you have to do is look at salesforce.com's recent press releases to see that larger and larger companies are willing to put their data in the hands of others. Companies like Merril Lynch are very concerned about their data, and they recently chose salesforce.com over on-site software.
Let's also not forget the science that showed exposure to sunlight caused skin cancer, and that we should all stop going out in the sun.
Then they discovered that 'Whoops.... going out in the sun creates Vitamin D which PREVENTS other types of cancer. It's OK to go out, just don't get burned'.
What you claim is not true. Vitamin D deficiency may contribute to the formation of certain types of cancer, and, it's possible, but less likely, that increased levels of Vitamin D may have an impact on cancer, but neither of those have been proven. What has been proven is that UV exposure can cause skin cancer, so you should limit your exposure to it. See Sun exposure: Can it help fight cancer? from the Mayo clinic.
I don't blame you for getting it wrong, though, you certainly read this somewhere in the popular press. The kind of misinformation is why journalists shouldn't be allowed to write about science. It's also part of why so many people are confused about global climate change.
BTW, one point I want to make. You need to separate out your points a bit better. Many people that believe humans are contributing to global climate change agree that many people are overreacting with their doomsday predictions and they suggestions for change.
I haven't seen any posting that backs up the implication that Oracle did something to halt the "Week of Oracle Database Bugs". I think it's more likely, as others have said, that the researcher just couldn't meet the goals of that project.
Clearly he had issues, otherwise why ask for help, and why do a week instead of 30 days, as the other projects have been?
Does anyone have anything approaching proof to show that Oracle intimidated or otherwise caused the previous project to halt?
There is a distinctive signature, but it's different for each location. What that means is we can't predict what the signature would look like at a location that hasn't had a nuclear event before. What we can do is record a waveform that we know was a nuclear event. Then, if we see something like it again, from the same location, we can say, "Yup, that was another one". Even then, though, it's better to back it up with radiation sampling.
It is entirely possible that this was a non-nuclear explosion. It's also possible that it was a nuclear explosion and we aren't seeing any radiation because not much was released, or we sampled the wrong places, or for a million other reasons. It's harder to prove it wasn't a nuclear explosion than to prove it was. So far, though, we can't prove it was.
I think it isn't as much as they didn't prioritize it, as it could be they didn't publicize it.
No, the Bush administration's priority was domestic policy. For example, from TFA
Rice seemed focused on other administration priorities, especially the ballistic missile defense system that Bush had campaigned on.
and
Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn't want to swat at flies.
There are a lot of other examples of this, too.
You say you're not anti-Democrat, you're just trying to respond to a "democrat lie campaign". That right there shows that you are anti-Democrat. Yes, everything can be politicized, and you are doing that by blaming a certain political party, rather than responding to what is being said. Your comment on Kerry is a confirmation of that to anyone that may have thought otherwise.
If you really think what is being said is a lie, show how, don't rail against people for being of a particular party. I agree with you, people saying that this report shows Bush knew the attacks were going to happen and didn't do anything about it are wrong. This doesn't show that at all. What it does show is that the Bush administration, even when faced with some very compelling evidence pointing to a serious threat, choose to focus on other matters.
What could they have done differently? If the Bush administration had taken anti-terrorism seriously, and built on the intelligence from the Clinton administration, rather than focusing their efforts on other things, maybe that would have led to more usable intelligence earlier. There's no way to know, but we do know that the Bush administration did not prioritize anti-terrorism. That certainly led to some intelligence issues after the attacks on the WTC, and most likely was also a factor in the poor intelligence before the attacks.
Could the Clinton administration be blamed, too? Sure. There's plenty of blame to go around. Your post makes it pretty plain that you are anti-Democrat. I'm not, nor am I anti-Republican, that's why I can accept that both administrations made mistakes. In the end, though, Bush was President when the attacks happened.
BTW, assuming I'm reciting one liners from TV is a bad assumption. I don't even have a TV. Oh, and next time, try to be a bit more concise. It was hard finding the meat of your point in all the hyperbole.
At that late date they probably couldn't have done anything. However, if the Bush administration had spent any effort developing foreign policy, including anti-terrorism policy, they wouldn't just be finding out about the possiblity so late in the year. This is just another point showing that it wasn't lack of intelligence, but lack of focus, that made it easier for terrorists to attack the US.
Every administration, before they lose control of the executive branch, meets with the incoming administration. They also give the newcomers detailed information on their current policies and plans. The incoming administration usually tosses these in the trash and create their own policies. They can't create them all overnight, so they create them in priority. The Bush administration was not interested at all in "foreign entanglements" and, thus, everything to do with foreign policy took a back seat to domestic policies.
So, you see, both of those statements can, and are likely to be, correct.
This is real news, but not surprising news. The Bush administration had not interest in anything besides tax cuts and other domestic policies when they took office. They ignored foreign affairs, to the entire world's detriment.
His usage is actually the common usage of state - a sovereign country. In other words, he meant the United States of America, not a state in the union.
The initial name United States of America was chosen specifically to make it clear that each state of the confederation (that's what we were in the beginning, a conferation, not a union), remained an independent country unto itself.
Even if photocopies or digitized scans of books are legal for personal use, it wasn't until recently that such a thing was technologically possible. The very nature of the book prevented you from making a copy of it, without laborious hand copying, which is akin to, but much harder than, the type of copying possible of DVDs and video tapes. Granted, it happened. Just look at the history of Shakespeare's plays. Even now, scanning a 300 page book, running it through OCR, and fixing the inevitable problems is much harder than copying a DVD. Granted, it happened. Just look at the history of Shakespeare's plays.
To me the biggest change has been for the creators of content - in the past one was happy when one's works were heard, read, watched, because that made one popular, and thus, successful. Writers didn't actively encourage copying, but they didn't fight it too hard, as long as they were credited for the work, and as long as the work wasn't too corrupted. Shakespeare never made a penny off his plays being published, but he gained in popularity due to their publication.
Since we don't have sponsors anymore, writers need to make money off selling our work. That puts artists in the place of wanting their work to be wide spread, but also controlled. It's an odd situation to be in. I'd love everyone to read my work, but I'd also like to make some money off of it. Some are successful at allowing free usage (look at Thinking in Java for an example) and some aren't.
I still think the difference between DVDs and books aren't that different when it comes to ownership. Both can be copied, if one is willing to work hard enough. In both cases it's not the physical media that one buys, but one particular instance of the content.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but it's not really that different from a book, the one exception being fair use of excerpts.
You pay for the book, but you don't own it:
You can't make a backup copy, and you are supposed to try (as the signs at Kinko's have often reminded me).
You can, due to fair use, post excerpts for critical review.
I don't believe it's legal in the US to make backgrounds of images in books.
No soundtrack except what's in your head.
When a new version comes out (like the English version of "A Clockwork Orange", a paperback, or an ebook) you have to buy it if you want it in the new format or with the extra material. If your book wears out, or you spill coffee on it and it become illegible, you have to buy a new copy.
The biggest difference is a book never becomes unusable due to technological obsolescence.
Without defining what a CMS is, this is like saying, "We'd like to give some Open Source project that does something with websites $5k".
Defining what a CMS is is not an easy job. Wikipedia doesn't even have a good definition. The best you can hope for to define one as a set of features, and any system that can do those features, is, for your definition of a CMS.
There is no such thing as a neutral representation of a document.
Every document representation depends on what you are focused on when you create the markup, whether it's for on screen display (like HTML) or for rapid search and retrieval (like TEI). Open XML and ODF are no different. The problem comes when you need to convert from one format to the other. If you design the two document structures differently, you'll have a very hard time converting between them. A great example is converting between a purely layout specific format (TeX) and a nearly pure sematic format, like DocBook. You can do it, but the results will always be questionable.
You're wrong about the term translation, although it'd probably be more clear if everyone used conversion instead.
The program, Word for example, has an internal representation of the document that maps (perhaps 1 to 1, but one certainly hopes perfectly) to the native format Microsoft calls Open XML. When you use the plugin to create an ODF document, you will be converting from that native format to ODF. Since the internal representation of the document in Word will not map perfectly to ODF, the document needs to be converted. Since conversions are rarely perfect, everyone, including Microsoft, sees potential problems using the plugin to work with ODF and Microsoft products.
Conversion will probably create documents that do not work the way the author intended them to work. Thus, users will either have to know what the limitations are, or they will not be able to work effectively in Microsoft products if they want to use ODF. It really won't be any different than importing current Word documents (.doc) into OpenOffice. One can hope that since Open XML is XML rather than an undocumented binary format, the conversion errors will be easier to predict, but that's just a hope.
You seem to be implying that all Al Gore did was go to Congress sometime in the 90's and say, "Hey guys, this Internet thing is really cool!". As other posters have pointed out, some of the core innovators in what we now call the Internet credit Gore for his work at making the Internet what it is. I trust them more than I trust you.
The inventor of the Mosaic Browser, Marc Andreesen, credits Gore with making his work possible. He received a federal grant through Gore's High Performance Computing Act.
That bill passed in 1988, several years before you started using the net (not that your personal experience matters at all on this issue).
Some nice things that that bill did, besides sponsor Andreesen? It set up a national computing plan, it linked research centers and universities across the country, and it funded a lot of other important research.
Did Al Gore invent the internet? No. He did sponsor the bills that provided funding and vision for some key components of it, though.
BTW, to say you were there to see the Internet created, and then say you've been on the Internet since 1990 is idiotic. The net's been around a lot longer than that. The ARPANET, which is what evolved into the Internet, has been around since 1969. Email came along in 1972. TCP/IP a year later, and things just grew from there. Let me quote from A Brief History of the Internet
Thus, by 1985, Internet was already well established as a technology supporting a broad community of researchers and developers, and was beginning to be used by other communities for daily computer communications.
What is probably true is that your first exposure to the Internet came because of a project that was made possible by the bills that Al Gore sponsored. So, think of it from your own point of view - you got to use the Internet in 1990 because of Al Gore.
Although the parent post could be thought of as a troll, I think it's just a typical response by someone that hasn't kept up with Oracle. If you think it's 7+ years since Oracle's done anything in the Java market, then you haven't been paying attention.
OAS was discontinued several (3?) years ago. It was crap. Oracle acknowledged it, bought the code for the Orion app server, updated it, added functionality, and released it as their app server. It's a very powerful product, and has very good performance.
TopLink is an Oracle product. TopLink is one of the best ORM projects available.
ADF is a very powerful enterprise level development framework.
Oracle is one of the major players in creating and releasing JSF components.
Oracle JDeveloper is a very powerful and free Java IDE.
The reality is that Oracle's Java offerings are quite good now, much better than when you last looked.
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Neat quotes about "The Cooling". Meaningful quotes? Nope
First, Bryson's forward. Here's the most important line in it,
Huh? You mean a guy that thought the majority of scientists believed the temperature trend for the climate was towards global cooling thought this book was, well, to put not too fine of a point on it, bad science? Perhaps you shouldn't put much weight on this book after all.Continuing, Schneider's quote. Basically, he's saying "This is something we should be talking about". Sure, but the quote isn't supporting or denying global cooling or global warming, so you can't really draw any conclusions from what he wrote.
Now on to "The Genesis Strategy". Here's a quote from page 9
Does this sound like a scientist predicting of global cooling? Not to me it doesn't. Does it sound like someone that "jumped ship" - definitely not. That entire book was in the same vein as the quote for "The Cooling" - this is an important topic, let's talk about it.Here's the most important point you miss, from Wikipedia - "In 1977 [the year after "The Genesis Strategy" was published] Schneider criticized a popular science book (The Weather Conspiracy: The Coming of the New Ice Age) that predicted an imminent Ice Age, writing in Nature:
[end of quote from Wikipedia]That's not the case anymore. There's plenty of data to show that we are experiencing a rapid global climate change, unlike one that has been found in the historical record, and some part of it is due to humans. That part is probably what is making the increase in temperature is so rapid.
No, you are wrong when you state, "there may or may not be evidence of shady behavior". There may have been shady behavior, but there isn't any evidence of shady behavior.
Um, no, there is no evidence of shady behavior. There's evidence that the computer in question displayed adult images during the time in question, but there are many reasons, such as the pop-up ads blamed by the defense, that such images could have been displayed.
That's becoming less and less true. All you have to do is look at salesforce.com's recent press releases to see that larger and larger companies are willing to put their data in the hands of others. Companies like Merril Lynch are very concerned about their data, and they recently chose salesforce.com over on-site software.
Go ahead and do that Lexus-Nexus search and report back to us any articles in scientific journals. Wait, I'll save you the effort. Read Was an imminent Ice Age predicted in the '70's? No.
What you claim is not true. Vitamin D deficiency may contribute to the formation of certain types of cancer, and, it's possible, but less likely, that increased levels of Vitamin D may have an impact on cancer, but neither of those have been proven. What has been proven is that UV exposure can cause skin cancer, so you should limit your exposure to it. See Sun exposure: Can it help fight cancer? from the Mayo clinic.
I don't blame you for getting it wrong, though, you certainly read this somewhere in the popular press. The kind of misinformation is why journalists shouldn't be allowed to write about science. It's also part of why so many people are confused about global climate change.
BTW, one point I want to make. You need to separate out your points a bit better. Many people that believe humans are contributing to global climate change agree that many people are overreacting with their doomsday predictions and they suggestions for change.
I haven't seen any posting that backs up the implication that Oracle did something to halt the "Week of Oracle Database Bugs". I think it's more likely, as others have said, that the researcher just couldn't meet the goals of that project.
Clearly he had issues, otherwise why ask for help, and why do a week instead of 30 days, as the other projects have been?
Does anyone have anything approaching proof to show that Oracle intimidated or otherwise caused the previous project to halt?
Just like TV show ratings. Just because a show is rated, doesn't mean a kid can't watch it.
There is a distinctive signature, but it's different for each location. What that means is we can't predict what the signature would look like at a location that hasn't had a nuclear event before. What we can do is record a waveform that we know was a nuclear event. Then, if we see something like it again, from the same location, we can say, "Yup, that was another one". Even then, though, it's better to back it up with radiation sampling.
It is entirely possible that this was a non-nuclear explosion. It's also possible that it was a nuclear explosion and we aren't seeing any radiation because not much was released, or we sampled the wrong places, or for a million other reasons. It's harder to prove it wasn't a nuclear explosion than to prove it was. So far, though, we can't prove it was.
You say you're not anti-Democrat, you're just trying to respond to a "democrat lie campaign". That right there shows that you are anti-Democrat. Yes, everything can be politicized, and you are doing that by blaming a certain political party, rather than responding to what is being said. Your comment on Kerry is a confirmation of that to anyone that may have thought otherwise.
If you really think what is being said is a lie, show how, don't rail against people for being of a particular party. I agree with you, people saying that this report shows Bush knew the attacks were going to happen and didn't do anything about it are wrong. This doesn't show that at all. What it does show is that the Bush administration, even when faced with some very compelling evidence pointing to a serious threat, choose to focus on other matters.
What could they have done differently? If the Bush administration had taken anti-terrorism seriously, and built on the intelligence from the Clinton administration, rather than focusing their efforts on other things, maybe that would have led to more usable intelligence earlier. There's no way to know, but we do know that the Bush administration did not prioritize anti-terrorism. That certainly led to some intelligence issues after the attacks on the WTC, and most likely was also a factor in the poor intelligence before the attacks.
Could the Clinton administration be blamed, too? Sure. There's plenty of blame to go around. Your post makes it pretty plain that you are anti-Democrat. I'm not, nor am I anti-Republican, that's why I can accept that both administrations made mistakes. In the end, though, Bush was President when the attacks happened.
BTW, assuming I'm reciting one liners from TV is a bad assumption. I don't even have a TV. Oh, and next time, try to be a bit more concise. It was hard finding the meat of your point in all the hyperbole.
At that late date they probably couldn't have done anything. However, if the Bush administration had spent any effort developing foreign policy, including anti-terrorism policy, they wouldn't just be finding out about the possiblity so late in the year. This is just another point showing that it wasn't lack of intelligence, but lack of focus, that made it easier for terrorists to attack the US.
Every administration, before they lose control of the executive branch, meets with the incoming administration. They also give the newcomers detailed information on their current policies and plans. The incoming administration usually tosses these in the trash and create their own policies. They can't create them all overnight, so they create them in priority. The Bush administration was not interested at all in "foreign entanglements" and, thus, everything to do with foreign policy took a back seat to domestic policies.
So, you see, both of those statements can, and are likely to be, correct.
This is real news, but not surprising news. The Bush administration had not interest in anything besides tax cuts and other domestic policies when they took office. They ignored foreign affairs, to the entire world's detriment.
His usage is actually the common usage of state - a sovereign country. In other words, he meant the United States of America, not a state in the union.
The initial name United States of America was chosen specifically to make it clear that each state of the confederation (that's what we were in the beginning, a conferation, not a union), remained an independent country unto itself.
Are you sure that anti-abortion liberals outnumber anti-abortion conservatives? Any numbers to back that up?
From the last link,
Not a flat refusal, butEven if photocopies or digitized scans of books are legal for personal use, it wasn't until recently that such a thing was technologically possible. The very nature of the book prevented you from making a copy of it, without laborious hand copying, which is akin to, but much harder than, the type of copying possible of DVDs and video tapes. Granted, it happened. Just look at the history of Shakespeare's plays. Even now, scanning a 300 page book, running it through OCR, and fixing the inevitable problems is much harder than copying a DVD. Granted, it happened. Just look at the history of Shakespeare's plays.
To me the biggest change has been for the creators of content - in the past one was happy when one's works were heard, read, watched, because that made one popular, and thus, successful. Writers didn't actively encourage copying, but they didn't fight it too hard, as long as they were credited for the work, and as long as the work wasn't too corrupted. Shakespeare never made a penny off his plays being published, but he gained in popularity due to their publication.
Since we don't have sponsors anymore, writers need to make money off selling our work. That puts artists in the place of wanting their work to be wide spread, but also controlled. It's an odd situation to be in. I'd love everyone to read my work, but I'd also like to make some money off of it. Some are successful at allowing free usage (look at Thinking in Java for an example) and some aren't.
I still think the difference between DVDs and books aren't that different when it comes to ownership. Both can be copied, if one is willing to work hard enough. In both cases it's not the physical media that one buys, but one particular instance of the content.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but it's not really that different from a book, the one exception being fair use of excerpts.
You pay for the book, but you don't own it:
When a new version comes out (like the English version of "A Clockwork Orange", a paperback, or an ebook) you have to buy it if you want it in the new format or with the extra material. If your book wears out, or you spill coffee on it and it become illegible, you have to buy a new copy.
The biggest difference is a book never becomes unusable due to technological obsolescence.
Without defining what a CMS is, this is like saying, "We'd like to give some Open Source project that does something with websites $5k".
Defining what a CMS is is not an easy job. Wikipedia doesn't even have a good definition. The best you can hope for to define one as a set of features, and any system that can do those features, is, for your definition of a CMS.
There is no such thing as a neutral representation of a document.
Every document representation depends on what you are focused on when you create the markup, whether it's for on screen display (like HTML) or for rapid search and retrieval (like TEI). Open XML and ODF are no different. The problem comes when you need to convert from one format to the other. If you design the two document structures differently, you'll have a very hard time converting between them. A great example is converting between a purely layout specific format (TeX) and a nearly pure sematic format, like DocBook. You can do it, but the results will always be questionable.
You're wrong about the term translation, although it'd probably be more clear if everyone used conversion instead.
The program, Word for example, has an internal representation of the document that maps (perhaps 1 to 1, but one certainly hopes perfectly) to the native format Microsoft calls Open XML. When you use the plugin to create an ODF document, you will be converting from that native format to ODF. Since the internal representation of the document in Word will not map perfectly to ODF, the document needs to be converted. Since conversions are rarely perfect, everyone, including Microsoft, sees potential problems using the plugin to work with ODF and Microsoft products.
Conversion will probably create documents that do not work the way the author intended them to work. Thus, users will either have to know what the limitations are, or they will not be able to work effectively in Microsoft products if they want to use ODF. It really won't be any different than importing current Word documents (.doc) into OpenOffice. One can hope that since Open XML is XML rather than an undocumented binary format, the conversion errors will be easier to predict, but that's just a hope.
Do you have any?
You seem to be implying that all Al Gore did was go to Congress sometime in the 90's and say, "Hey guys, this Internet thing is really cool!". As other posters have pointed out, some of the core innovators in what we now call the Internet credit Gore for his work at making the Internet what it is. I trust them more than I trust you.
Let's get specific, though. According to Did Al Gore Invent the Internet?
That bill passed in 1988, several years before you started using the net (not that your personal experience matters at all on this issue).Some nice things that that bill did, besides sponsor Andreesen? It set up a national computing plan, it linked research centers and universities across the country, and it funded a lot of other important research.
Did Al Gore invent the internet? No. He did sponsor the bills that provided funding and vision for some key components of it, though.
BTW, to say you were there to see the Internet created, and then say you've been on the Internet since 1990 is idiotic. The net's been around a lot longer than that. The ARPANET, which is what evolved into the Internet, has been around since 1969. Email came along in 1972. TCP/IP a year later, and things just grew from there. Let me quote from A Brief History of the Internet
What is probably true is that your first exposure to the Internet came because of a project that was made possible by the bills that Al Gore sponsored. So, think of it from your own point of view - you got to use the Internet in 1990 because of Al Gore.Since LaTeX is, beneath the hood, TeX, you can't predict how free from formatting specific markup the document will be.
Can you write LaTeX files without formatting information in them? Yes. I've rarely seen one, though.
OAS was discontinued several (3?) years ago. It was crap. Oracle acknowledged it, bought the code for the Orion app server, updated it, added functionality, and released it as their app server. It's a very powerful product, and has very good performance.
TopLink is an Oracle product. TopLink is one of the best ORM projects available.
ADF is a very powerful enterprise level development framework.
Oracle is one of the major players in creating and releasing JSF components.
Oracle JDeveloper is a very powerful and free Java IDE.
The reality is that Oracle's Java offerings are quite good now, much better than when you last looked.