>>It's possible to disagree with AGW without being a denier, but such a person would be open to the possibility of it being accurate.
Precisely. Aside from a few minor quibbles (though these quibbles often turn into long, pointless debates on/.), I have no real issues with AGW, though people try to paint me as one, because of various issues I have.
My main problem is that the 'solutions' to AGW are almost universally bad. Either ridiculously overpriced, overintrusive, undereffective, unfair... and most often some mixture of all of these.
Solutions tend to come from scientists who have never heard of Amdahl's Law, and focus ridiculously expensive solutions on rather thin slices of the CO2 pie, instead of cheaper solutions on larger slices of the pie. For example, we spend 10-20 cents more per gallon at the pump here in California for a special blend of gas that might shave a fraction of a percent of the total CO2 produced in America.
By contrast, if we were to switch to all CO2-free power plants in our country (mainly nuclear) if we amortized cost over 10 years, we could break even on the costs without paying much more for electricity - and reduce our total CO2 emitted in our country by ~40%.
This would meet every CO2 target for our country, and allow people to keep driving whatever CO2-emitting SUVs they want without impacting their daily life in the slightest. (This might sound unfair to the Nazi-greens that WANT to control what other people do, but tough shit.)
>>Wow, that list is bad. I mean, painfully, horribly bad.
Yeah, how dare anyone talk about the Pioneer anomaly\? Or possible compatibility issues with quantum mechanics?
I mean... seriously, right? We all know that relativity is the result of hippie science (truth is relative, man!) which obviously can't be allowed to stand.
>>Std. English "lose" : New Slashdotese: "loose" >>Std. English "loose" : New Slashdotese: "looose" >>This is obviously a recursive transformation that can be applied as many times as necessary to effectively lose the reader in the dust
Obviously we need to write a Turing machine to calculate the sheer levels of eliteness in you looosers.
>>And further more you said it yourself , it's the best metric available , sure you can't quantify it really well but radiation _does_ add up.
It's the best metric, but it's a bad metric. That's the point I'm trying to make. If you look at cancer rates from Hiroshima or Chernobyl, you'll see spikes in cancer, as you'd expect from high doses of radiation, but you don't see a linear effect down to the lower levels of exposure.
The main question is how to quantify it numerically, and there's a lot of debate on this topic.
>>The problem with filtering your developers through Github, or limiting them to those who have contributed to other open-source projects, is that you will be bypassing by some very good prospects for employees.
Yes. But that's not their goal - the problem is that there are too many Bad Applicants out there. So even if they cut the potential pool in half, if they eliminate all but the most productive open source coders, they will have a decent pool of Good Applicants.
The point is that HR, Headhunters, and Middle Management often have not the slightest clue what makes someone a good programmer instead of a bad programmer, and so they waste the time of the interviewing team, whose job it is to make that determination, sorting through all the Bads.
>>Not to mention that according to most people in the Agile industry, the idea of the "rockstar developer" has been dead for about 2 years.
Well, that's nice that "most people" think that. It doesn't make it any more true.
No, not really. The human body is used to dealing with low levels of radiation, with repair mechanisms to cope with DNA repair and the free radicals generated. It's when you exceed a certain threshold that real damage occurs.
>>According to the author of the post I was responding to, science is not supposed to do this. "Real" scientists are supposed to follow the data, and be willing to abandon cherished hypotheses when the data indicates you should.
Indeed. In my response to someone else above, I mention that both scientifically-minded and unscientifically-minded people fall prey to dogma, which is persisting in believing something even when facts are contrary to this. This is mainly due to the fact that what we consider "facts" to begin with is biased by what we already believe in. If it sounds circular, it is - but that's how humans are.
Ideally enough experimental evidence is gathered that they can't just brush it under the carpet any more, and then a Kuhnian paradigm shift occurs, and we have a new operating consensus. Looking back at history, though, this can sometimes take a while.
There's actually a lot of causation-related science behind this as well. A lot of papers have come out in the last year talking about how sitting affects our health much more than we're-not-burning-calories.
>>When a religious person believes something, it's a dogma - i.e. an unquestionable tenant of their faith. >>I don't think you should use the word "believe" to mean the same in both cases.
No, not really. The meaning is identical. A belief is something you're currently using as your sort of operating set of ideas: this is how the world is. In any case, they can be overturned by facts. The point I was trying to make is that a scientifically-minded person will allow facts to sway his beliefs, but an unscientifically-minded person will not. This is kind of the definition of dogma (*ignoring* fact for belief) and both religious and non-religious people are vulnerable to it.
Of course, the distinction is not so simple, as many people allow facts to sway them on some issues and not others, and the entire issue of how one accepts facts to begin with is influenced by our beliefs (circularly).
There's three scenarios: 1) Scientific consensus agreeing with your belief 2) Scientific consensus holding no opinion on your belief 3) Scientific consensus disagreeing with your belief.
Scientifically-minded people are just as prone to choosing to believe things without evidence, which is perfectly acceptable. (People misunderstanding philosophy of science aside.) If you look at Hawking vs. the black hole information paradox, or Hoyle vs. the Big Bang, or any number of other examples, you'll see people stake claims all the time before the facts are in. It's okay.
The key difference is between a scientifically-minded person and a non-scientifically minded person is when the scientific facts disagree with one's belief. A scientifically-minded person will set that belief aside (perhaps with a caveat that the scientific consensus might later be overturned). A non-scientifically minded person will not.
Note that I am using the term scientifically-minded, not scientists, as if a physicist who is currently working in macroeconomics will somehow lose his scientific mindset.
>>But to simply watch where someone goes and what they do? No warrant necessary.
Presumably they will break into your car to install the GPS tracker. That sounds like warrant-needed territory to me.
They can't go around breaking open people's trunks on the side of the street, can they? IIRC, they can visual inspect the stuff inside of your car, but breaking in requires a warrant. I don't see why this should be any different, especially given the fact the police will now know your every movement.
Yep. Pretty much explains it exactly, and in a non-biased way. Rather silly moderators modded it down because in the Slashdot Groupthink, it is unacceptable to speak of Foxnews with anything but the strongest derision possible, ideally by spelling it "Faux" News, which is incredibly clever and original.
>>Something similar will happen with graphics. It is only a matter of time. And I personally suspect that 8 years will be more than enough time to see it happen.
Doubtful. Look at the transistors on a CPU vs. a GPU, how they're allocated, and projections for transistor budgets in 8 years.
>>Windows 95 was my first version of windows, and was a remarkably bland and inoffensive experience. >>For me personally, 98 with active desktop was the start of the blue screens and instability which became a meme till the present day.
Indeed. In 1997, I ran my Windows 95 box with a year of Uptime without needing to reboot it, and it worked a lot better than I expected for an "OS" that wants to reboot itself every time you change the most minor system setting.
If you go back and count the number of clicks/keypresses it takes you to do something in Windows 95, you'll be surprised how much faster it is than Windows7, which is apparently optimized for people who have hundreds of open applications at once.
>>Jesus spoke about the literalness of the historical record of the Old Testament, and repeatedly throughout the Bible itself is the historicity of the creation account referred-to.
In the sense that God was the creator of the universe, sure. But the ancient Israelites had a very different conception of "history" than we do. Heroditus hadn't even been born when the early books of the Bible were written. Just as modern people have trouble dealing with the laws in the Old Testament sometimes, because they are structured differently from the more precise laws of today. So the debate is over if the account is a spiritual narrative or a historical narrative. Nachmanides and Maimonides both consider it spiritual narrative, and they often were at different ends of the spectrum from each other.
Various quotes -
Colossians 1:15: "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together."
Matthew 19:4: ""Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,'"
Or: "...At the briefest instant following creation all the matter of the universe was concentrated in a very small place, no larger than a grain of mustard. The matter at this time was very thin, so intangible, that it did not have real substance. It did have, however, a potential to gain substance and form and to become tangible matter. From the initial concentration of this intangible substance in its minute location, the substance expanded, expanding the universe as it did so. As the expansion progressed, a change in the substance occurred. This initially thin noncorporeal substance took on the tangible aspects of matter as we know it. From this initial act of creation, from this etherieally thin pseudosubstance, everything that has existed, or will ever exist, was, is, and will be formed." -Nachmanides, ~1250AD
Considering that Saint Augustine (circa 400AD) argued against a literal Genesis, it's not really that surprising that a lot of Catholics don't believe in a literal Genesis. He's one of the foundations of the church. (Doctor of the Church? Whatever the term is.)
While it's always been a debate in Christianity, Biblical Literalism coming to the forefront is really quite a modern development.
>> And I'd like to add that if we subsidize rail like we subsidize highways, it's be MUCH cheaper than currently, with much higher usage rates, and so we'd likely be able to afford a much better rail system.
You do know that China has a very extensive rail system, and they still got this mess?
At any one time, there's a million people in transit in Beijing train stations alone.
>>I know that California's budget concerns go far beyond just the building of this school, but this is still the kind of irresponsible spending that got them into the mess they're currently in. If I were in charge of this project, I wouldn't want anyone to know about it right now.
Don't worry about it! As TFA says, it was paid for by bonds, so it didn't cost us anything.
>>if you feel like Valve has screwed you over, call the card company and cancel the payment. It's called a "charge back" and people who know about it do it constantly to software companies.
Check your Steam TOS. If you ever chargeback them, they delete all of your games you've ever bought from them.
This is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read from Harvard. And I've read a lot of ridiculous things.
For example: "Excuse: Recycling costs too much.
* Recycling generates revenue to help pay for itself, while incineration and landfilling do not."
Notice the complete lack of connection between 'excuse' and explanation? If recycling cost 10x as much as landfilling, but only paid back a fraction of a percent, they would make the same excuse, and be just as right. It doesn't address the core issue at all.
Or even better: "Excuse: There is no landfill crisis. landfill
* Recycling's true value comes from preventing pollution and saving natural resources and energy, not landfill space."
So in other words, we know that there's no crisis, but look at the monkey. Look at the silly monkey!
" * Recycling is largely responsible for averting the landfill crisis."
Not in the slightest.
" * Most states have less than twenty years of landfill capacity: who wants to live next to a new landfill?"
Deceptive; this makes it sound like we'll be out of landfill space in 20 years. Just like we were in 1980.
So on and so forth. I can't believe you're helping spread such bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
>>It's possible to disagree with AGW without being a denier, but such a person would be open to the possibility of it being accurate.
Precisely. Aside from a few minor quibbles (though these quibbles often turn into long, pointless debates on /.), I have no real issues with AGW, though people try to paint me as one, because of various issues I have.
My main problem is that the 'solutions' to AGW are almost universally bad. Either ridiculously overpriced, overintrusive, undereffective, unfair... and most often some mixture of all of these.
Solutions tend to come from scientists who have never heard of Amdahl's Law, and focus ridiculously expensive solutions on rather thin slices of the CO2 pie, instead of cheaper solutions on larger slices of the pie. For example, we spend 10-20 cents more per gallon at the pump here in California for a special blend of gas that might shave a fraction of a percent of the total CO2 produced in America.
By contrast, if we were to switch to all CO2-free power plants in our country (mainly nuclear) if we amortized cost over 10 years, we could break even on the costs without paying much more for electricity - and reduce our total CO2 emitted in our country by ~40%.
This would meet every CO2 target for our country, and allow people to keep driving whatever CO2-emitting SUVs they want without impacting their daily life in the slightest. (This might sound unfair to the Nazi-greens that WANT to control what other people do, but tough shit.)
>>Wow, that list is bad. I mean, painfully, horribly bad.
Yeah, how dare anyone talk about the Pioneer anomaly\? Or possible compatibility issues with quantum mechanics?
I mean... seriously, right? We all know that relativity is the result of hippie science (truth is relative, man!) which obviously can't be allowed to stand.
>>Std. English "lose" : New Slashdotese: "loose"
>>Std. English "loose" : New Slashdotese: "looose"
>>This is obviously a recursive transformation that can be applied as many times as necessary to effectively lose the reader in the dust
Obviously we need to write a Turing machine to calculate the sheer levels of eliteness in you looosers.
I've read papers on it on the past, but you could probably dig them up as fast as I could find them.
>>sometimes the fact that it is true can cause many people to think it.
Considering the sentence was referencing "People in the Agile Industry" I'm not especially impressed by his appeal to authority.
Especially since there are programmers who can be an order or two more productive than someone with a handful of meaningless certifications.
>>And further more you said it yourself , it's the best metric available , sure you can't quantify it really well but radiation _does_ add up.
It's the best metric, but it's a bad metric. That's the point I'm trying to make. If you look at cancer rates from Hiroshima or Chernobyl, you'll see spikes in cancer, as you'd expect from high doses of radiation, but you don't see a linear effect down to the lower levels of exposure.
The main question is how to quantify it numerically, and there's a lot of debate on this topic.
>>I suggest you do a search for "cumulative radiation."
The FDA uses cumulative radiation exposure because they don't have any better metric. They already know it's a flawed measure, but nobody is sure where the threshold lies, so they don't use one. For example: http://www.ndt-ed.org/EducationResources/CommunityCollege/RadiationSafety/biological/stochastic/leukemia.htm
While you might like to pretend that 1 rad a day is equivalent to 365 rads one day a year, it's not, as common sense should tell you.
>>The problem with filtering your developers through Github, or limiting them to those who have contributed to other open-source projects, is that you will be bypassing by some very good prospects for employees.
Yes. But that's not their goal - the problem is that there are too many Bad Applicants out there. So even if they cut the potential pool in half, if they eliminate all but the most productive open source coders, they will have a decent pool of Good Applicants.
The point is that HR, Headhunters, and Middle Management often have not the slightest clue what makes someone a good programmer instead of a bad programmer, and so they waste the time of the interviewing team, whose job it is to make that determination, sorting through all the Bads.
>>Not to mention that according to most people in the Agile industry, the idea of the "rockstar developer" has been dead for about 2 years.
Well, that's nice that "most people" think that. It doesn't make it any more true.
>>Radiation is cumulative
No, not really. The human body is used to dealing with low levels of radiation, with repair mechanisms to cope with DNA repair and the free radicals generated. It's when you exceed a certain threshold that real damage occurs.
>>And on top of that, if you click on the actual Lincoln Memorial, it shows a picture of the Washington Monument.
I noticed this, too.
Since when did Google Maps become Wikipedia?
>>According to the author of the post I was responding to, science is not supposed to do this. "Real" scientists are supposed to follow the data, and be willing to abandon cherished hypotheses when the data indicates you should.
Indeed. In my response to someone else above, I mention that both scientifically-minded and unscientifically-minded people fall prey to dogma, which is persisting in believing something even when facts are contrary to this. This is mainly due to the fact that what we consider "facts" to begin with is biased by what we already believe in. If it sounds circular, it is - but that's how humans are.
Ideally enough experimental evidence is gathered that they can't just brush it under the carpet any more, and then a Kuhnian paradigm shift occurs, and we have a new operating consensus. Looking back at history, though, this can sometimes take a while.
There's actually a lot of causation-related science behind this as well. A lot of papers have come out in the last year talking about how sitting affects our health much more than we're-not-burning-calories.
>>When a religious person believes something, it's a dogma - i.e. an unquestionable tenant of their faith.
>>I don't think you should use the word "believe" to mean the same in both cases.
No, not really. The meaning is identical. A belief is something you're currently using as your sort of operating set of ideas: this is how the world is. In any case, they can be overturned by facts. The point I was trying to make is that a scientifically-minded person will allow facts to sway his beliefs, but an unscientifically-minded person will not. This is kind of the definition of dogma (*ignoring* fact for belief) and both religious and non-religious people are vulnerable to it.
Of course, the distinction is not so simple, as many people allow facts to sway them on some issues and not others, and the entire issue of how one accepts facts to begin with is influenced by our beliefs (circularly).
>>That's not how science works.
There's three scenarios:
1) Scientific consensus agreeing with your belief
2) Scientific consensus holding no opinion on your belief
3) Scientific consensus disagreeing with your belief.
Scientifically-minded people are just as prone to choosing to believe things without evidence, which is perfectly acceptable. (People misunderstanding philosophy of science aside.) If you look at Hawking vs. the black hole information paradox, or Hoyle vs. the Big Bang, or any number of other examples, you'll see people stake claims all the time before the facts are in. It's okay.
The key difference is between a scientifically-minded person and a non-scientifically minded person is when the scientific facts disagree with one's belief. A scientifically-minded person will set that belief aside (perhaps with a caveat that the scientific consensus might later be overturned). A non-scientifically minded person will not.
Note that I am using the term scientifically-minded, not scientists, as if a physicist who is currently working in macroeconomics will somehow lose his scientific mindset.
>>But to simply watch where someone goes and what they do? No warrant necessary.
Presumably they will break into your car to install the GPS tracker. That sounds like warrant-needed territory to me.
They can't go around breaking open people's trunks on the side of the street, can they? IIRC, they can visual inspect the stuff inside of your car, but breaking in requires a warrant. I don't see why this should be any different, especially given the fact the police will now know your every movement.
Yep. Pretty much explains it exactly, and in a non-biased way. Rather silly moderators modded it down because in the Slashdot Groupthink, it is unacceptable to speak of Foxnews with anything but the strongest derision possible, ideally by spelling it "Faux" News, which is incredibly clever and original.
>>Something similar will happen with graphics. It is only a matter of time. And I personally suspect that 8 years will be more than enough time to see it happen.
Doubtful. Look at the transistors on a CPU vs. a GPU, how they're allocated, and projections for transistor budgets in 8 years.
>>My guess is the machine(s) in question were somehow or other rebooting themselves in the middle of the night long before 49.7 days was up.
I had Cygwin installed, so I actually could run uptime and see.
I took a screenshot of it, I'll see if I can dig it up.
>>Windows 95 was my first version of windows, and was a remarkably bland and inoffensive experience.
>>For me personally, 98 with active desktop was the start of the blue screens and instability which became a meme till the present day.
Indeed. In 1997, I ran my Windows 95 box with a year of Uptime without needing to reboot it, and it worked a lot better than I expected for an "OS" that wants to reboot itself every time you change the most minor system setting.
If you go back and count the number of clicks/keypresses it takes you to do something in Windows 95, you'll be surprised how much faster it is than Windows7, which is apparently optimized for people who have hundreds of open applications at once.
>>Jesus spoke about the literalness of the historical record of the Old Testament, and repeatedly throughout the Bible itself is the historicity of the creation account referred-to.
In the sense that God was the creator of the universe, sure. But the ancient Israelites had a very different conception of "history" than we do. Heroditus hadn't even been born when the early books of the Bible were written. Just as modern people have trouble dealing with the laws in the Old Testament sometimes, because they are structured differently from the more precise laws of today. So the debate is over if the account is a spiritual narrative or a historical narrative. Nachmanides and Maimonides both consider it spiritual narrative, and they often were at different ends of the spectrum from each other.
Various quotes -
Colossians 1:15: "He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together."
Matthew 19:4: ""Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,'"
Or: "...At the briefest instant following creation all the matter of the universe was concentrated in a very small place, no larger than a grain of mustard. The matter at this time was very thin, so intangible, that it did not have real substance. It did have, however, a potential to gain substance and form and to become tangible matter. From the initial concentration of this intangible substance in its minute location, the substance expanded, expanding the universe as it did so. As the expansion progressed, a change in the substance occurred. This initially thin noncorporeal substance took on the tangible aspects of matter as we know it. From this initial act of creation, from this etherieally thin pseudosubstance, everything that has existed, or will ever exist, was, is, and will be formed." -Nachmanides, ~1250AD
Considering that Saint Augustine (circa 400AD) argued against a literal Genesis, it's not really that surprising that a lot of Catholics don't believe in a literal Genesis. He's one of the foundations of the church. (Doctor of the Church? Whatever the term is.)
While it's always been a debate in Christianity, Biblical Literalism coming to the forefront is really quite a modern development.
>>
And I'd like to add that if we subsidize rail like we subsidize highways, it's be MUCH cheaper than currently, with much higher usage rates, and so we'd likely be able to afford a much better rail system.
You do know that China has a very extensive rail system, and they still got this mess?
At any one time, there's a million people in transit in Beijing train stations alone.
>>I know that California's budget concerns go far beyond just the building of this school, but this is still the kind of irresponsible spending that got them into the mess they're currently in. If I were in charge of this project, I wouldn't want anyone to know about it right now.
Don't worry about it! As TFA says, it was paid for by bonds, so it didn't cost us anything.
(Right? Isn't that how bonds work? Lol.)
>>if you feel like Valve has screwed you over, call the card company and cancel the payment. It's called a "charge back" and people who know about it do it constantly to software companies.
Check your Steam TOS. If you ever chargeback them, they delete all of your games you've ever bought from them.
>>a good summary page is here: http://www.uos.harvard.edu/fmo/recycling/myths.shtml
This is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever read from Harvard. And I've read a lot of ridiculous things.
For example:
"Excuse: Recycling costs too much.
* Recycling generates revenue to help pay for itself, while incineration and landfilling do not."
Notice the complete lack of connection between 'excuse' and explanation? If recycling cost 10x as much as landfilling, but only paid back a fraction of a percent, they would make the same excuse, and be just as right. It doesn't address the core issue at all.
Or even better:
"Excuse: There is no landfill crisis.
landfill
* Recycling's true value comes from preventing pollution and saving natural resources and energy, not landfill space."
So in other words, we know that there's no crisis, but look at the monkey. Look at the silly monkey!
" * Recycling is largely responsible for averting the landfill crisis."
Not in the slightest.
" * Most states have less than twenty years of landfill capacity: who wants to live next to a new landfill?"
Deceptive; this makes it sound like we'll be out of landfill space in 20 years. Just like we were in 1980.
So on and so forth. I can't believe you're helping spread such bullshit.