>>Frankly, if they charge per hour it and she didn't have restoration disks, it probably was unsalvageable - at least, not without incurring more cost than the value of the computer.
Given that all the data was available on the computer before they destroyed it, I'm of the school of thought that they just blew it up to sell her a new computer.
>>You accuse Gavin Schmidt of being a bullshitting deceitful hack who isn't really a scientist. I disagree
I disagree too, because that's not what I think of him. Gavin is not a "bullshiting deceitful hack who isn't really a scientist". I wouldn't bother being subscribed to RC.org for years if he was that bad. I'd ignore him like the other nuts. He's a political hack. There's a big difference.
What it means is that instead of outright lying about this or that (which is much more common in the anti-AGW camp), it means that he goes easy on anyone on his "side" (Al Gore, IPCC predictions) and hard on anyone that even slightly disagrees with him.
The absurdity I was pointing out was that even if we have no warming at all over the next decade (if you missed the time period, there it is), people like RC.org will say that the AR4 predictions are confirmed, but by implication this means that if we get too much warming... global warming is false. (So to speak. If you've read all of my posts on here, which it sounds like you have, you know that I know that scientific theories are never proven true or false, it's a sloppy shorthand I use.) No, I'm NOT saying there is a prediction of no warming - even if we shut off all anthropogenic CO2 production today, the earth would still (probably) warm.
In this thread I'm talking about the rather silly world of hypothesis confirmation, especially as it relates to AGW, nothing more.
>>But you repeatedly imply that scientific results which eliminate "lots" of error sources are "dubious" and "low confidence" and "hackish". Nonsense.
Did you actually read their methods? I'm curious how you can think they're anything but a bunch of heuristics. (And for the record, they can be hackish AND valuable at the same time.)
My mother's computer was up to date with windows and flash patches, spybot S&D, and antivir, and still got rooted somehow. I had to go back home, so I couldn't finish cleaning it up. She took it to a shop, destroyed the machine claiming it was unsalvageable, and then sold her a new one.
Sure, but the bandwidth caps mobile providers are using are set absurdly low. In your example, you'd allow a user to use the network at full speed for half an hour per month. (Assuming full 10Gbps, and a 5gb/mo cap.) And then if they go over their limit, charge a single enough money to not only do the full wiring you calculate above, but also to coat all the wires in gold, paint racing stripes on them, and still have enough left over to buy Ferraris for everyone in net ops.
It's not like a reasonable person using 'unlimited bandwidth' is even close to these low caps providers are setting. Watch 10 Youtube videos a day, and you've hit your 5G cap.
Only if you needed reliable transmission. If you were doing something like a game where it's more important that a packet get to its destination quickly than reliably, UDP is often better than TCP.
UDP flooding can also be used to 'steal' bandwidth from the nice orderly TCP using folks.
>>While I will not raise any ideological arguments here, the sheer cost of this would be mindblowing.
That's why you have to look at levelized cost, which includes the cost of building a plant in the energy rate. Nuclear (10 year levelized) is affordable:
>>I enjoy how everyone thinks nuclear energy now, but I wonder what is everyone going to say after the first nuclear energy accident...
I love how people are willing to write off the thousands of people that die every year from coal power because they're not concentrated in one big accident. As well as the CO2 emissions, radiation emissions (from coal, not nuclear plants), and so forth.
That's why we need the Shaka Plan for Energy: 1) Replace all coal power plants with nuclear 2) Replace all gasoline imports with coal gassification
Cost-neutral on the price of electricity, price of gasoline at the pump will go down, the influential senators from coal states are happy, and no more funding terrorism in the middle east.
I just use folder shortcuts in XP. Works the same way, and takes the same amount of effort (just right-click drag and drop) but without taking up my valuable top-level directory view space in the file browser.
If they made a version of Win7 with the Win7 internals with the XP interface, I'd buy it in a second. Until then, I'll stick with XP. I hate breadcrumbs, the file browser, the taskbar (unless I have a lot of windows open, it's just costing me an extra click and hunt every time I switch windows), and the start menu (a hierarchical layout is better than a flat one - didn't we learn that in the 80s?). Oh, and the system bar, and the way they integrated quick-launch with task switching.
I do like the internals a lot more (esp. memory management), the fact you don't need a floppy to install RAID drivers, the better support for multimonitor setups (without needing UltraMon) and a lot of the new keyboard shortcuts.
>>If you really wanted to I'm sure you could play WoW at 1920x1080 on a 55" LED flatscreen.
People can and do. My buddy (think the fat gamer in the South Park episode) literally lays back in his Laz-E-Boy all day with a wireless keyboard and mouse in front of his TV, playing WoW. Every hour that he's not working.
He used to be on the Atkins diet, and was coaching football - actually brought his weight down substantially, but WoW undid all that.
While that sounds damning for gaming, I know a lot more people that fell into the same fat death spiral by TV.
According to the reference I provided, Mr average consumes 20 hours of TV and 10 of radio... and this presumably includes all the "losers" that have stopped watch TV altogether.
You need to throw a large "I ANAL" tag on that post of your's, buddy.
Laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. When I lived in SF, the court upheld the right for police to casually chat with people and take it further if they found the person suspicious and they failed to answer the questions satisfactorily. Might have been in regards to anti-vagrancy laws, but basically upheld the right of police to talk with people going about their business on the streets.
>>Only 48 hours? Why thats only 7ish hours a day. Thats barely enough to run heroic instances.
Nice.
What's really sad is that the average American consumes 30 hours of TV and radio per week, but is considered perfectly normal. (http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20051227/news_lz1n27list.html)
Oh, and the same people rotting their brains out watching American Idol are the people who claim gamers are wasting their time playing the games. I can't recall how many times I've been told by couch potatoes that "there's no way they'd be able to spend that much time in front of a computer every day". WTF do they think their flat screen is?? Sigh.
>>I'm almost certain all police vehicles have a frontal camera for precisely that reason, but most times don't release it to the press. In a civil or criminal action, you are certainly free to request it during the discovery phase of the trial, and you can use it during trial (if properly authenticated). (Yes, I am a lawyer.)
I tried that in California when I got pulled over for speeding when doing 55MPH in a 70. (No, not lying about it.) I thought the cop confused me with another car and wanted to pull video camera footage. The CHP ignored my request, and the cop said there wasn't a camera anyway, and even now I don't believe all cop cars have cameras - the Police Unions blocked it, IIRC, unless they could be *disabled at will by the cop*.
Given that I was acquaintances with Sam Knott, I think there's a very good reason why cops shouldn't be able to disable their cameras at will.
Interesting post. I tend to throw ethics, religion, and philosophy into the same category of answering ought-style questions, though they're obviously different beasts. I somewhat like the Non-overlapping Magisteria argument by Gould, but I don't like his formulation of his argument. On my livejournal a while back I posted what I consider to be five or six different kinds of "truth", and think that each of them have their own domain.
As you say, the IS/OUGHT distinction is not as clear as all that. Religions claim to know the fundamental nature of the universe, which may or may not be empirically verifiable by science. In other words, while religions do mainly focus on OUGHT questions, one can also examine their IS claims to see if science helps or hurts their case.
Buddhism, as you point out, *can* be closer to a philosophy than a religion, depending on which school of Buddhism you're looking at. Various atheists claim to also be Buddhists, presumably in the various schools of thought that don't have all the different Gods and God-analogues running around, like you see when you visit places in the East. But Buddhism does make some fundamental claims, such as the eternalness of the universe, that can be verified or disproven by science. If the Big Bang is true, a lot of Buddhistic philosophy falls apart, unless you presume a superset of universes or something like that. For example, they claim we should all love each other because if the universe is infinitely old, we've all been each other's mother once. But if humanity is less than a million years old, it's quite unlikely you've ever been my mother, even if reincarnation is true.
Interestingly enough, Hinduism is an experiential religion - if you want to determine for yourself if Hinduism is true, you do it, and find out for yourself if you think their claims are true (presumably by getting in touch with Brahmin or some such). I've heard it described as deep sea diving inside the consciousness. Since we'll assume Hindus are not lying about their religious experiences, you could consider it a sort of empirical confirmation for their claims. In your post, you ask for "grounding beliefs on observations", and so there you are: a religion that does just that.
Christianity makes a few claims that can be verified, for example, that the universe had an origin (God created it, natch). Jesus was born and lived a certain time and did certain things. Including Judaism in the mix, a variety of fun facts and genealogies about life during the bronze age. If the Big Bang holds up, then science prefers Christianity over Buddhism. The contrawise is true, as well. Historical fact is not scientific 'fact' (the two are very different beasts), but does confirm the existence of a historical Jesus, the various apostles and their works.
Islam claims various things as well, and the facts do support a historic Muhammad. As with all of the above, this doesn't mean I'm necessarily saying the various religious claims are true, but it IS something to consider, especially given religions like Mormonism, which is more or less disproven by, well, everything. Which is a shame, since I do like Mormons.
Science, by contrast, is a collection of best guess theories about the world as it is. As you say, science alone cannot make ethical judgments, and when people tried to mix science into ethics in the early 20th Century, you got Eugenics, Social Darwinism, and Mengele. (Godwin's Law, I know, but it's relevant.) You propose Utilitarianism as a solution, but it fails to deliver acceptable ethical results. Mostly because the needs of the many always outweigh the needs of the few, mathematically speaking, and you get tyranny as a result. This was the main objection to Bentham and JSM back in the day, IIRC.
Also, as I said in other threads, our current state of ethical elevation (and it really is elevated, compared with the history of mankind) is the result of the *religious theory* of a creator that loves his creation. If you discard the theory of natural rights, the
Eh, I thought the secret ingredient in Roman concrete was volcanic ash? When medieval people elsewhere tried making concrete to the ancient specifications, they ended up with some watery messes and gave up on the whole thing for centuries.
Well, fair enough. I have a lot of bones to pick with fundies, and not knowing theology, while professing to be "Bible Christians" is one of them.
The real problem is that because they're the loudest, atheists here often assume that "Christian" implies "mouth breathing fundie", and tar all theists with the same wide paintbrush.
>>If religion described things that are objectively true, then the majority of people who study it would come to the same conclusion. We do not find that in practice.
Go back and read what I wrote, you got it backwards.
Science is the empirical study of what IS. Religion/Ethics/Philosophy is the study of what OUGHT to be. Of course you'll not find agreement on what ought to be.
>>Is it really fair to say that an Indian family can't have a refrigerator to keep their food fresh, unless rich Westerners can have an equivalent percentage
I'm confused.
Are you supporting or opposing offshoring with this post?
'Fairness' is usually just a code word for something rather unfair.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Frankly, if they charge per hour it and she didn't have restoration disks, it probably was unsalvageable - at least, not without incurring more cost than the value of the computer.
Given that all the data was available on the computer before they destroyed it, I'm of the school of thought that they just blew it up to sell her a new computer.
>>You accuse Gavin Schmidt of being a bullshitting deceitful hack who isn't really a scientist. I disagree
I disagree too, because that's not what I think of him. Gavin is not a "bullshiting deceitful hack who isn't really a scientist". I wouldn't bother being subscribed to RC.org for years if he was that bad. I'd ignore him like the other nuts. He's a political hack. There's a big difference.
What it means is that instead of outright lying about this or that (which is much more common in the anti-AGW camp), it means that he goes easy on anyone on his "side" (Al Gore, IPCC predictions) and hard on anyone that even slightly disagrees with him.
The absurdity I was pointing out was that even if we have no warming at all over the next decade (if you missed the time period, there it is), people like RC.org will say that the AR4 predictions are confirmed, but by implication this means that if we get too much warming... global warming is false. (So to speak. If you've read all of my posts on here, which it sounds like you have, you know that I know that scientific theories are never proven true or false, it's a sloppy shorthand I use.) No, I'm NOT saying there is a prediction of no warming - even if we shut off all anthropogenic CO2 production today, the earth would still (probably) warm.
In this thread I'm talking about the rather silly world of hypothesis confirmation, especially as it relates to AGW, nothing more.
>>But you repeatedly imply that scientific results which eliminate "lots" of error sources are "dubious" and "low confidence" and "hackish". Nonsense.
Did you actually read their methods? I'm curious how you can think they're anything but a bunch of heuristics. (And for the record, they can be hackish AND valuable at the same time.)
My mother's computer was up to date with windows and flash patches, spybot S&D, and antivir, and still got rooted somehow. I had to go back home, so I couldn't finish cleaning it up. She took it to a shop, destroyed the machine claiming it was unsalvageable, and then sold her a new one.
>>We're going to report some crimes.
I hereby award you the "Defender of Humanity Barnstar" in recognition of your achievements in cracking down on crime in Wikipedia.
Sure, but the bandwidth caps mobile providers are using are set absurdly low. In your example, you'd allow a user to use the network at full speed for half an hour per month. (Assuming full 10Gbps, and a 5gb/mo cap.) And then if they go over their limit, charge a single enough money to not only do the full wiring you calculate above, but also to coat all the wires in gold, paint racing stripes on them, and still have enough left over to buy Ferraris for everyone in net ops.
It's not like a reasonable person using 'unlimited bandwidth' is even close to these low caps providers are setting. Watch 10 Youtube videos a day, and you've hit your 5G cap.
Only if you needed reliable transmission. If you were doing something like a game where it's more important that a packet get to its destination quickly than reliably, UDP is often better than TCP.
UDP flooding can also be used to 'steal' bandwidth from the nice orderly TCP using folks.
>>While I will not raise any ideological arguments here, the sheer cost of this would be mindblowing.
That's why you have to look at levelized cost, which includes the cost of building a plant in the energy rate. Nuclear (10 year levelized) is affordable:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelised_energy_cost
>>I enjoy how everyone thinks nuclear energy now, but I wonder what is everyone going to say after the first nuclear energy accident...
I love how people are willing to write off the thousands of people that die every year from coal power because they're not concentrated in one big accident. As well as the CO2 emissions, radiation emissions (from coal, not nuclear plants), and so forth.
Statistics are a bitch.
That's why we need the Shaka Plan for Energy:
1) Replace all coal power plants with nuclear
2) Replace all gasoline imports with coal gassification
Cost-neutral on the price of electricity, price of gasoline at the pump will go down, the influential senators from coal states are happy, and no more funding terrorism in the middle east.
I just use folder shortcuts in XP. Works the same way, and takes the same amount of effort (just right-click drag and drop) but without taking up my valuable top-level directory view space in the file browser.
If they made a version of Win7 with the Win7 internals with the XP interface, I'd buy it in a second. Until then, I'll stick with XP. I hate breadcrumbs, the file browser, the taskbar (unless I have a lot of windows open, it's just costing me an extra click and hunt every time I switch windows), and the start menu (a hierarchical layout is better than a flat one - didn't we learn that in the 80s?). Oh, and the system bar, and the way they integrated quick-launch with task switching.
I do like the internals a lot more (esp. memory management), the fact you don't need a floppy to install RAID drivers, the better support for multimonitor setups (without needing UltraMon) and a lot of the new keyboard shortcuts.
>>That's true provided your definition of "mixed reception" encompasses the pitchfork and torch carrying mob ready to storm AT&T headquarters.
You gotta love Slashdot.
Dammit, Jim - I'm a software engineer, not a journalist!
>>If you really wanted to I'm sure you could play WoW at 1920x1080 on a 55" LED flatscreen.
People can and do. My buddy (think the fat gamer in the South Park episode) literally lays back in his Laz-E-Boy all day with a wireless keyboard and mouse in front of his TV, playing WoW. Every hour that he's not working.
He used to be on the Atkins diet, and was coaching football - actually brought his weight down substantially, but WoW undid all that.
While that sounds damning for gaming, I know a lot more people that fell into the same fat death spiral by TV.
According to the reference I provided, Mr average consumes 20 hours of TV and 10 of radio... and this presumably includes all the "losers" that have stopped watch TV altogether.
Actually, I'm pretty sure 48 hours of gaming per day is impossible. :)
>>A waste of a perfectly good computer monitor?
Precisely!
You need to throw a large "I ANAL" tag on that post of your's, buddy.
Laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. When I lived in SF, the court upheld the right for police to casually chat with people and take it further if they found the person suspicious and they failed to answer the questions satisfactorily. Might have been in regards to anti-vagrancy laws, but basically upheld the right of police to talk with people going about their business on the streets.
>>Only 48 hours? Why thats only 7ish hours a day. Thats barely enough to run heroic instances.
Nice.
What's really sad is that the average American consumes 30 hours of TV and radio per week, but is considered perfectly normal. (http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20051227/news_lz1n27list.html)
Oh, and the same people rotting their brains out watching American Idol are the people who claim gamers are wasting their time playing the games. I can't recall how many times I've been told by couch potatoes that "there's no way they'd be able to spend that much time in front of a computer every day". WTF do they think their flat screen is?? Sigh.
>>I'm almost certain all police vehicles have a frontal camera for precisely that reason, but most times don't release it to the press. In a civil or criminal action, you are certainly free to request it during the discovery phase of the trial, and you can use it during trial (if properly authenticated). (Yes, I am a lawyer.)
I tried that in California when I got pulled over for speeding when doing 55MPH in a 70. (No, not lying about it.) I thought the cop confused me with another car and wanted to pull video camera footage. The CHP ignored my request, and the cop said there wasn't a camera anyway, and even now I don't believe all cop cars have cameras - the Police Unions blocked it, IIRC, unless they could be *disabled at will by the cop*.
Given that I was acquaintances with Sam Knott, I think there's a very good reason why cops shouldn't be able to disable their cameras at will.
Interesting post. I tend to throw ethics, religion, and philosophy into the same category of answering ought-style questions, though they're obviously different beasts. I somewhat like the Non-overlapping Magisteria argument by Gould, but I don't like his formulation of his argument. On my livejournal a while back I posted what I consider to be five or six different kinds of "truth", and think that each of them have their own domain.
As you say, the IS/OUGHT distinction is not as clear as all that. Religions claim to know the fundamental nature of the universe, which may or may not be empirically verifiable by science. In other words, while religions do mainly focus on OUGHT questions, one can also examine their IS claims to see if science helps or hurts their case.
Buddhism, as you point out, *can* be closer to a philosophy than a religion, depending on which school of Buddhism you're looking at. Various atheists claim to also be Buddhists, presumably in the various schools of thought that don't have all the different Gods and God-analogues running around, like you see when you visit places in the East. But Buddhism does make some fundamental claims, such as the eternalness of the universe, that can be verified or disproven by science. If the Big Bang is true, a lot of Buddhistic philosophy falls apart, unless you presume a superset of universes or something like that. For example, they claim we should all love each other because if the universe is infinitely old, we've all been each other's mother once. But if humanity is less than a million years old, it's quite unlikely you've ever been my mother, even if reincarnation is true.
Interestingly enough, Hinduism is an experiential religion - if you want to determine for yourself if Hinduism is true, you do it, and find out for yourself if you think their claims are true (presumably by getting in touch with Brahmin or some such). I've heard it described as deep sea diving inside the consciousness. Since we'll assume Hindus are not lying about their religious experiences, you could consider it a sort of empirical confirmation for their claims. In your post, you ask for "grounding beliefs on observations", and so there you are: a religion that does just that.
Christianity makes a few claims that can be verified, for example, that the universe had an origin (God created it, natch). Jesus was born and lived a certain time and did certain things. Including Judaism in the mix, a variety of fun facts and genealogies about life during the bronze age. If the Big Bang holds up, then science prefers Christianity over Buddhism. The contrawise is true, as well. Historical fact is not scientific 'fact' (the two are very different beasts), but does confirm the existence of a historical Jesus, the various apostles and their works.
Islam claims various things as well, and the facts do support a historic Muhammad. As with all of the above, this doesn't mean I'm necessarily saying the various religious claims are true, but it IS something to consider, especially given religions like Mormonism, which is more or less disproven by, well, everything. Which is a shame, since I do like Mormons.
Science, by contrast, is a collection of best guess theories about the world as it is. As you say, science alone cannot make ethical judgments, and when people tried to mix science into ethics in the early 20th Century, you got Eugenics, Social Darwinism, and Mengele. (Godwin's Law, I know, but it's relevant.) You propose Utilitarianism as a solution, but it fails to deliver acceptable ethical results. Mostly because the needs of the many always outweigh the needs of the few, mathematically speaking, and you get tyranny as a result. This was the main objection to Bentham and JSM back in the day, IIRC.
Also, as I said in other threads, our current state of ethical elevation (and it really is elevated, compared with the history of mankind) is the result of the *religious theory* of a creator that loves his creation. If you discard the theory of natural rights, the
Eh, I thought the secret ingredient in Roman concrete was volcanic ash? When medieval people elsewhere tried making concrete to the ancient specifications, they ended up with some watery messes and gave up on the whole thing for centuries.
>>It's considered well-debunked.
Well-debunked?? Are you missing the fact that there's a clue hidden inside the words "44 BC"?
Honestly, this is the most appallingly stupid statement I've seen since someone on here claimed the druids were wiped out by Christians.
Well, fair enough. I have a lot of bones to pick with fundies, and not knowing theology, while professing to be "Bible Christians" is one of them.
The real problem is that because they're the loudest, atheists here often assume that "Christian" implies "mouth breathing fundie", and tar all theists with the same wide paintbrush.
>>If religion described things that are objectively true, then the majority of people who study it would come to the same conclusion. We do not find that in practice.
Go back and read what I wrote, you got it backwards.
Science is the empirical study of what IS. Religion/Ethics/Philosophy is the study of what OUGHT to be. Of course you'll not find agreement on what ought to be.
To be fair, most Warsaw Pact countries met their targets because the morons that wrote Kyoto set CO2 levels at precollapse of the USSR
>>Is it really fair to say that an Indian family can't have a refrigerator to keep their food fresh, unless rich Westerners can have an equivalent percentage
I'm confused.
Are you supporting or opposing offshoring with this post?
'Fairness' is usually just a code word for something rather unfair.