>>There are several things which Mozilla's new more rapid release process has made a bit rocky
I'd be more concerned with the rapid release schedule breaking addons and making life miserable for enterprise users.
It's a stupid idea, and breaks the notion of what a major version release is supposed to mean. Which wouldn't be an issue if you'd started that way (like the Chrome browser that you're obviously trying to mimic now), but once implementing a convention, you need to stick with it.
>>Why would you think the engine cuts fuel completely?
A friend of mine optimizes for this when he hypermiles. He has a widget hooked up to his car's computer, so he can see when it cuts off fuel to the engine (especially - under which circumstances). He's learned to trigger those circumstances on the interstate, and can usually get 60MPG out of his stock 2002 corolla without being (too) annoying to other cars on the freeway.
...the best conclusion I could come to is that I would be willing to augment, not replace. JC Denton had nanoaugs that enhanced his biological limbs,organs and tissues without replacing them, unlike Jensen who has permanently lost part of himself to machinery. I think enhancement is a far better approach than irreversible replacement.
That, and I couldn't come to grips with taking out my eyes. My mother gave them to me.
It's not like Jenson had any say in the matter. He'd been critically injured, and needed a torso and arm replacement. Then his dickhead boss ordered his remaining limbs chopped off and replaced without getting his permission. (Hey, people in comas can't say no, right?)
>>I like how, when faced with decades of research on the CO2 - global warming connection, the anti-AWG crowd are completely skeptical. But, a hint that cosmic rays might affect cloud formation and climate change, and they're already convinced.
That's how human brains work. If a fact meshes with the collection of facts we have established in our brains, it is readily accepted. Often times, too easily. If it does not mesh, then it can only be accepted after a lot of reading, and a lot of people won't accept it even then, if it disagrees with their established world view too strongly.
This applies equally well to right-wing people and left-wing people. The notion, for example, that Bush was behind 9/11 is just as laughable as the notion that Obama wants to introduce communism to our country.
>>So what you needed all along was a laptop anyway, so just get a laptop.
Well, as I said, I was basically required to get one for work. But in the interests of science, I did a head to head comparison with the sort of everyday tasks one uses a mobile computer for. No heavy gaming (I don't have a false expectation that a tablet will be able to run Deus Ex III or anything), but just things like web, reading PDFs, and email.
In a nutshell - If Honeycomb can't deliver a halfway-decent web or PDF reading experience, then it's not ready for prime time. I don't think this is an unfair benchmark to hold it to.
Plus, when I was running the comparison, I got weird bugs like all the desktop icons vanishing (requiring a hard reset) or things from the market getting somehow stuck in the download queue (requiring an app cache clearing to get working again).
But there's no laptop with a 16 hour battery life on it. (My desktop replacement gets about 90 minutes off a full charge.) There's no point bringing it onto a plane, or to a table for roleplaying games, or trying to use a laptop to read long documents in bed. The heat alone cooks my sensitive parts before it runs out of charge.
>>The fact that gun ownership is relatively common in the US and yet they still have one of the highest murder rates per capita in the world (for a 1st world country at least) pretty much stabs the "everyone having guns makes everyone safer" hypothesis in the heart and burns the corpse.
And that's why DC, which has the strictest gun control laws in the country, has such a low murder rate, right?
>>Actually, the easiest way to detect a manufactured diamond is precisely that it is so unnaturally perfect. Any natural diamond, no matter how "perfect" it is, has microscopic imperfections. Of course, you'd need to be a trained jeweler with special equipment to tell, but it's not at all undetectable.
I've never understood why a "natural" diamond should be worth more money, anyway. (Though the good artificial ones are actually quite expensive, too.) Given the rather nasty record of the DeBeers cartel, I'd rather not ever give them any money.
My wife, bless her soul, refused a diamond entirely. We ended up going to Japan instead.
>>Is he talking about iPad fever or lame tablet/netbook fever?
Well, the lame tablets really are much less polished than the iPad. I've spent quite a bit of time on Honeycomb, and, well, it's really lacking the spit and polish that made the iPad so successful. Even minor things like not being able to clear out your MRU apps list (a small little X in the corner of the preview windows would be all it takes) or the fact that they'll inexplicably drain their batteries fairly quickly unless fully powered off (even with ATK killing all running processes), or the lack of any decent free PDF readers for it, or the horrible input lag on typing text in the browsers, and so forth, all means that after using one for a while, I'd had enough of it.
I ended up sticking with the EEE Transformer instead of returning it for an iPad solely because of the external keyboard on it. It means I can type at 75% of my normal typing speed, which is just barely fast enough to not make me want to hurl the thing through a window. The iPad works out to about 50% of my normal WPM, and the horrid on-screen keyboard of Honeycomb even less than that. I was basically required to get a tablet for my work, and it seemed the least odious choice.
But running a battery of tests with it in my hotel side by side with my Win7 laptop (I know, not a fair comparison, but still - we use tablets and laptops in much the same way), the only real advantage the transformer had was weight, heat, and battery life. I could read documents on it lying in bed without needing to keep it plugged in or with a thermal isolation pad, as my desktop replacement laptop needs.
But for even minimal web browsing, the experience was utterly inferior. Text types in quite slowly on screen with a very noticeable lag, javascript runs very slowly (even with the Tegra core), and the PDF readers for Android all *suck* for one reason or another.
>>The greens don't fight for the status quo - that would be the major parties. The greens are vocal critics of coal fired power stations, especially the brown coal ones. They argue for renewable energy.
There's a difference between the words and what actually happens. That's the problem Greens always face.
"Wouldn't it be nice if we could ban those low-efficiency station wagons?" they ask - and thus the modern SUV was born.
>>Because they "dare" question financial axioms like "greed is good" and infinite growth?
More because they've caused as many environmental problems as they've solved. Australia has around a quarter of all the uranium deposits in the world, but has no nuclear power plants. Opposition is greatest from Greens (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Australia#Opinion_polls), and this in a country where only 7% of energy production comes from green sources.
Fighting for the status quo is a horrible idea when the status quo sucks.
I think it's wrong to say that climate change contrarians are dishonest idiot dogmatists. They're just examples of the modified salem hypothesis. In other words, they're honest people who aren't necessarily idiots or steeped in dogmatism. They're just trying to lecture about a highly advanced scientific subject, while not noticing that their background (programming, engineering, etc) isn't sufficient to understand the nuances of that subject. Ironically, I said this in an attempt to try as hard as possible to avoid writing down the kind of insults you are, but you seem to determined to see this as an insult, while innocently wondering why calling someone a dishonest idiot dogmatist is offensive.
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." -Feynman
Accusing your opponents of a "modified Salem Hypothesis" is just another way of saying they're religious engineers that don't know what they're talking about but think they do. I use the phrase;idiot dogmatist', and, you know, so do you. You applied the label to me, so I got pissed off about it, and rightly so. I don't think the phrase entirely applies to you, because you're not an idiot.
This comment is depressingly similar to the bizarre version of our conversation that you just posted. Remember when you said you could copy and paste links to make me look stupid? Remember that I just encouraged you to try do that? The key words here are copy and paste. When you try to actually copy and paste phrases from that conversation, you'll find that you were accusing scientists of bullshitting about temperature records, and that I was consistently saying that Watts's "survey" wasn't original and didn't support your repetitive accusations of bullshitting. That's still my position, and it's bizarre that you keep crowing about "dragging me kicking and screaming" to admit that Watts's work had any value. I still think his "survey" was pointless and didn't add anything new to the scientific literature.
The records are all there if people care to read them. If you want to state your official position is "I don't care about empiricism", then so be it. There's lots of room in climatology for people that don't work empirically. But I'm an empiricist at heart, and will always prefer real data to statistical models. I should probably post a relevant Feynman quote... oh hell, here you go:
"The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific 'truth'." -Feynman
The Chinese government has a weird obsession with Falun Gong, which I don't quite understand. I was in Flushing, Queens the other week and there was actually this whole (unmanned) table with signs, flyers, etc., blasting the Falun Gong as this insanely dangerous cult. I can't imagine who set it up other than the Chinese government.
Well, to be fair, the Falun Gong does the same thing. In SF Chinatown this weekend, the Falun Gong had a series of posters up about how to quit the CCP.
The biggest problem is that Alaska has no real rail infrastructure. There's a line between Anchorage and Fairbanks, and one between Skagway and the Yukon (which connects to the road network in Canada but otherwise goes nowhere), at http://www.wpyr.com/
Mainly, Alaskans use ferries and planes to get around. There's a limited network of roads, but nothing capable of shipping large amounts of raw materials in from Siberia. The Army tried building up a lot of the infrastructure in WWII, and while a fair amount got built, a lot also got abandoned or was never completed. They found it simply to be too difficult and expensive to be worth the while.
>>it's funny how the words dishonest idiot dogmatists have slipped your mind.
Which I applied to both sides, in case you can't read the quotes you're quoting.
I think I finally understand your confusion with me. I try very hard not to be a dogmatist. I like to look at everything from different angles, and am not comfortable accepting answers that everyone else takes on faith. When my 5th grade teacher told me that 5/0 = 0, I had issues with it, simply due to symmetry (I didn't know about NaN yet), but got yelled down by the rest of the class for being "wrong". When people tell me that Galileo was wrongly persecuted by the Catholic Church for believing in heliocentrism, I pulled up primary and secondary sources, and started reading - I found the reality was actually quite different from what the standard narrative tells us. (Answer me the question: who is right, someone that believes in a stationary earth, or someone who believes in a stationary sun?)
Your mind is overly reductive, though. You equate someone looking at an issue from an oblique angle, and reduce that to one side or another. If I come up with a way to test ID as a scientific theory, you reduce that to mean that I'm an IDer (I'm not, I simply think it'd be fun to test). You see me say that Watts contributed something with his surface station survey? You reduce that to mean that I agree with Watts on every issue. You see me take issue with predictions of the Greenland ice melt, you reduce that to me thinking all predictions are nonsense.
>>I've already pointed out that you've accused climatologists of being fascinated with plans that will kill people
I *do* think climatologists are generally pretty bad at understanding people (you're a good case in point) and so should NOT be the people writing policy. I've seen enough policy suggestions from people like Hansen to not ever want to see them elected to congress. (You'll probably reduce this statement to mean that I think Inhofe is a walking God in our mortal realms...) Can Climatologists kill people with their policy recommendations? Absolutely, and unequivocally. Disrupting global power and food supplies will absolutely lead to people dying, with the deaths proportionate to the size of the disruption.
>>This whole time I've been saying that there are several specific problems with Dr. Wu's methodology that, when fixed, would bring his estimates closer to the mainstream. That just happened. Now you're trying to claim that this means I'm saying you're right? Wow. Just... wow.
The fact that the Greenland melt is actually hard to model? Well... yeah. It's a bit of vindication for my quotes above.
>>Dear Rush Limbaugh, ShakaUVM, and many other climate change contrarians,
You really need to learn about proper debating techniques. I've said this before, but it still holds true. I don't agree with Rush Limbaugh on this issue - I certainly don't think that climate scientists should be "drawn and quartered". I think Phil Jones engaged in shady behavior (avoiding FOIA requests) and should be disciplined for it (losing his chairmanship is enough, IMO). I certainly don't think climatology should be defunded and the practitioners thrown in jail, like some Republicans do, apparently.
If I'm Rush Limbaugh, then you're... hmm. Don Imus? Yeah. Let's go with that.
Because accusing me of wanting to murder climatologists is about on Imus' level.
>>Since you never responded to my points, I can only assume you didn't read my original comment.
I try to not read anything on your blog. It's got one of the worse layouts I've ever seen - a tiny font, with you cherrypicking quotes from people from *other* blogs and responding to them... and then you expect for me to respond to them, there?
As I've said repeatedly, if you have any criticisms of me here, make them against my posts here. Your blog sucks monkey balls.
>>The language that both of you are using is absolutely uncalled for. >>This is the fourth time you've claimed that I agree with your libelous smears.
I believe in reasoned debate. If I said that I think it's harder to estimate Greenland ice losses than people think, that doesn't mean that I want to kill you, and your little dog, too. And when it turns out that maybe (maybe!) there were some systemic issues with how the losses were being calculated well outside the established estimates, it means you're saying I'm right.
>>The language that both of you are using is absolutely uncalled for.
That's an awfully large paintbrush you're using to hit me and Rush in the same sentence. I disagree with him on the issue much much much more than I disagree with you. Though on the topic of using uncalled-for language, look at all the blatantly inaccurate and libelous tripe you said about me in just this one post above. I think you might not realize how hypocritical you are being.
Since this is obviously causing you mental anguish - getting you to admit Watts' work might have some value nearly caused you to have an aneurysm - I'm not sure why you keep trying to argue with me. I think you think that I think something that I don't.
But I think the perception of it comes from those cases where innocent European tourists entered various Texans' properties and were summarily shot and killed. And the Texans got off under the Castle Doctrine principle, which caused a bit of an outrage in Europe.
>>I think the judges need to realize that a) they have some fanboy bias, and b) they need to correct for it.
The fact that they gave the Best Novel award to Blackout/All Clear, which is a terrible *novel* (though a very interesting *history book*) says everything that needs to be said about the Hugos for me.
It's a brain-numbingly repetitive book, with the heroes about 30 times in a row wondering if they messed up the timeline for the future, and then realizing they didn't.
>>It is the RARE woman that does NOT have a shoe fetish.
You may be hanging out with the wrong crowd of women.
My ideal woman doesn't worry about her looks - but looks good anyway - is smart as hell, will join in with my friends when gaming, and pull out a hammer to help me when I'm trying to knock a tsuba off a new sword. Well, that's why I ended up marrying my wife, anyway.
>>Try to live with only 50k Baltimore or San Diego.
I lived on 18k a year in San Diego as a grad student.
Rent: 2 bedroom apt in Mira Mesa - $1000/month, split 3 ways (later 2 ways) - $6000 Food: $20/day - $7000 Gas: $20/week - $1000 Insurance: $1000 $3000 left over to fix my car, go on trips, buy books/textbooks, etc.
I wasn't living the high life by any means, but I was certainly comfortable and happy.
On a four or five line interstate, every single lane will be going 75MPH in Southern California. The DoT uses the guideline that 10% of drivers are crazy idiots, and set the speed limits on surface streets to the 90th percentile.
Except on Freeways, where they arbitrarily set much lower speed limits.
Have you ever looked at the dropout rates of really good colleges? It's really low.
Even if you account for the higher calibre of applicants, there's always dumb shits in every class.
What happens is that the good colleges also have a really good support network that will try to help you pass your classes and then be successful later in life.
It's like in high school, when my friends told me they didn't want to take "advanced" classes, because they'd be too hard. Guess who had more (boring) homework assigned to them? The students in the regular classes.
Slashdot Mirror
>>There are several things which Mozilla's new more rapid release process has made a bit rocky
I'd be more concerned with the rapid release schedule breaking addons and making life miserable for enterprise users.
It's a stupid idea, and breaks the notion of what a major version release is supposed to mean. Which wouldn't be an issue if you'd started that way (like the Chrome browser that you're obviously trying to mimic now), but once implementing a convention, you need to stick with it.
I'm somewhat amazed that asset forfeiture hasn't been struck down yet for the unconstitutional bullshit that it is.
Asset forfeiture is exactly "Being deprived of property without due process of law".
I'm just curious how that US vs. Ebony Wood case got labelled "Forfeiture / Penalty - Drug Related Seizure of Property".
>>Why would you think the engine cuts fuel completely?
A friend of mine optimizes for this when he hypermiles. He has a widget hooked up to his car's computer, so he can see when it cuts off fuel to the engine (especially - under which circumstances). He's learned to trigger those circumstances on the interstate, and can usually get 60MPG out of his stock 2002 corolla without being (too) annoying to other cars on the freeway.
It's not like Jenson had any say in the matter. He'd been critically injured, and needed a torso and arm replacement. Then his dickhead boss ordered his remaining limbs chopped off and replaced without getting his permission. (Hey, people in comas can't say no, right?)
Also: Spoiler alert.
>>I like how, when faced with decades of research on the CO2 - global warming connection, the anti-AWG crowd are completely skeptical. But, a hint that cosmic rays might affect cloud formation and climate change, and they're already convinced.
That's how human brains work. If a fact meshes with the collection of facts we have established in our brains, it is readily accepted. Often times, too easily. If it does not mesh, then it can only be accepted after a lot of reading, and a lot of people won't accept it even then, if it disagrees with their established world view too strongly.
This applies equally well to right-wing people and left-wing people. The notion, for example, that Bush was behind 9/11 is just as laughable as the notion that Obama wants to introduce communism to our country.
>>So what you needed all along was a laptop anyway, so just get a laptop.
Well, as I said, I was basically required to get one for work. But in the interests of science, I did a head to head comparison with the sort of everyday tasks one uses a mobile computer for. No heavy gaming (I don't have a false expectation that a tablet will be able to run Deus Ex III or anything), but just things like web, reading PDFs, and email.
In a nutshell - If Honeycomb can't deliver a halfway-decent web or PDF reading experience, then it's not ready for prime time. I don't think this is an unfair benchmark to hold it to.
Plus, when I was running the comparison, I got weird bugs like all the desktop icons vanishing (requiring a hard reset) or things from the market getting somehow stuck in the download queue (requiring an app cache clearing to get working again).
But there's no laptop with a 16 hour battery life on it. (My desktop replacement gets about 90 minutes off a full charge.) There's no point bringing it onto a plane, or to a table for roleplaying games, or trying to use a laptop to read long documents in bed. The heat alone cooks my sensitive parts before it runs out of charge.
>>The fact that gun ownership is relatively common in the US and yet they still have one of the highest murder rates per capita in the world (for a 1st world country at least) pretty much stabs the "everyone having guns makes everyone safer" hypothesis in the heart and burns the corpse.
And that's why DC, which has the strictest gun control laws in the country, has such a low murder rate, right?
This is an interesting page to read about gun control facts:
http://www.justfacts.com/guncontrol.asp
>>Actually, the easiest way to detect a manufactured diamond is precisely that it is so unnaturally perfect. Any natural diamond, no matter how "perfect" it is, has microscopic imperfections. Of course, you'd need to be a trained jeweler with special equipment to tell, but it's not at all undetectable.
I've never understood why a "natural" diamond should be worth more money, anyway. (Though the good artificial ones are actually quite expensive, too.) Given the rather nasty record of the DeBeers cartel, I'd rather not ever give them any money.
My wife, bless her soul, refused a diamond entirely. We ended up going to Japan instead.
>>Is he talking about iPad fever or lame tablet/netbook fever?
Well, the lame tablets really are much less polished than the iPad. I've spent quite a bit of time on Honeycomb, and, well, it's really lacking the spit and polish that made the iPad so successful. Even minor things like not being able to clear out your MRU apps list (a small little X in the corner of the preview windows would be all it takes) or the fact that they'll inexplicably drain their batteries fairly quickly unless fully powered off (even with ATK killing all running processes), or the lack of any decent free PDF readers for it, or the horrible input lag on typing text in the browsers, and so forth, all means that after using one for a while, I'd had enough of it.
I ended up sticking with the EEE Transformer instead of returning it for an iPad solely because of the external keyboard on it. It means I can type at 75% of my normal typing speed, which is just barely fast enough to not make me want to hurl the thing through a window. The iPad works out to about 50% of my normal WPM, and the horrid on-screen keyboard of Honeycomb even less than that. I was basically required to get a tablet for my work, and it seemed the least odious choice.
But running a battery of tests with it in my hotel side by side with my Win7 laptop (I know, not a fair comparison, but still - we use tablets and laptops in much the same way), the only real advantage the transformer had was weight, heat, and battery life. I could read documents on it lying in bed without needing to keep it plugged in or with a thermal isolation pad, as my desktop replacement laptop needs.
But for even minimal web browsing, the experience was utterly inferior. Text types in quite slowly on screen with a very noticeable lag, javascript runs very slowly (even with the Tegra core), and the PDF readers for Android all *suck* for one reason or another.
>>The greens don't fight for the status quo - that would be the major parties. The greens are vocal critics of coal fired power stations, especially the brown coal ones. They argue for renewable energy.
There's a difference between the words and what actually happens. That's the problem Greens always face.
"Wouldn't it be nice if we could ban those low-efficiency station wagons?" they ask - and thus the modern SUV was born.
>>Because they "dare" question financial axioms like "greed is good" and infinite growth?
More because they've caused as many environmental problems as they've solved. Australia has around a quarter of all the uranium deposits in the world, but has no nuclear power plants. Opposition is greatest from Greens (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_Australia#Opinion_polls), and this in a country where only 7% of energy production comes from green sources.
Fighting for the status quo is a horrible idea when the status quo sucks.
>>I'd chip in $50 easy. Congrats to the people involved!
Ditto. When my wife and I watched it yesterday, she was convinced it had to be a clip from a professional film made by Valve. =)
I think it's wrong to say that climate change contrarians are dishonest idiot dogmatists. They're just examples of the modified salem hypothesis. In other words, they're honest people who aren't necessarily idiots or steeped in dogmatism. They're just trying to lecture about a highly advanced scientific subject, while not noticing that their background (programming, engineering, etc) isn't sufficient to understand the nuances of that subject. Ironically, I said this in an attempt to try as hard as possible to avoid writing down the kind of insults you are, but you seem to determined to see this as an insult, while innocently wondering why calling someone a dishonest idiot dogmatist is offensive.
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool." -Feynman
Accusing your opponents of a "modified Salem Hypothesis" is just another way of saying they're religious engineers that don't know what they're talking about but think they do. I use the phrase ;idiot dogmatist', and, you know, so do you. You applied the label to me, so I got pissed off about it, and rightly so. I don't think the phrase entirely applies to you, because you're not an idiot.
This comment is depressingly similar to the bizarre version of our conversation that you just posted. Remember when you said you could copy and paste links to make me look stupid? Remember that I just encouraged you to try do that? The key words here are copy and paste. When you try to actually copy and paste phrases from that conversation, you'll find that you were accusing scientists of bullshitting about temperature records, and that I was consistently saying that Watts's "survey" wasn't original and didn't support your repetitive accusations of bullshitting. That's still my position, and it's bizarre that you keep crowing about "dragging me kicking and screaming" to admit that Watts's work had any value. I still think his "survey" was pointless and didn't add anything new to the scientific literature.
The records are all there if people care to read them. If you want to state your official position is "I don't care about empiricism", then so be it. There's lots of room in climatology for people that don't work empirically. But I'm an empiricist at heart, and will always prefer real data to statistical models. I should probably post a relevant Feynman quote... oh hell, here you go:
"The test of all knowledge is experiment. Experiment is the sole judge of scientific 'truth'." -Feynman
Well, to be fair, the Falun Gong does the same thing. In SF Chinatown this weekend, the Falun Gong had a series of posters up about how to quit the CCP.
The biggest problem is that Alaska has no real rail infrastructure. There's a line between Anchorage and Fairbanks, and one between Skagway and the Yukon (which connects to the road network in Canada but otherwise goes nowhere), at http://www.wpyr.com/
Mainly, Alaskans use ferries and planes to get around. There's a limited network of roads, but nothing capable of shipping large amounts of raw materials in from Siberia. The Army tried building up a lot of the infrastructure in WWII, and while a fair amount got built, a lot also got abandoned or was never completed. They found it simply to be too difficult and expensive to be worth the while.
>>it's funny how the words dishonest idiot dogmatists have slipped your mind.
Which I applied to both sides, in case you can't read the quotes you're quoting.
I think I finally understand your confusion with me. I try very hard not to be a dogmatist. I like to look at everything from different angles, and am not comfortable accepting answers that everyone else takes on faith. When my 5th grade teacher told me that 5/0 = 0, I had issues with it, simply due to symmetry (I didn't know about NaN yet), but got yelled down by the rest of the class for being "wrong". When people tell me that Galileo was wrongly persecuted by the Catholic Church for believing in heliocentrism, I pulled up primary and secondary sources, and started reading - I found the reality was actually quite different from what the standard narrative tells us. (Answer me the question: who is right, someone that believes in a stationary earth, or someone who believes in a stationary sun?)
Your mind is overly reductive, though. You equate someone looking at an issue from an oblique angle, and reduce that to one side or another. If I come up with a way to test ID as a scientific theory, you reduce that to mean that I'm an IDer (I'm not, I simply think it'd be fun to test). You see me say that Watts contributed something with his surface station survey? You reduce that to mean that I agree with Watts on every issue. You see me take issue with predictions of the Greenland ice melt, you reduce that to me thinking all predictions are nonsense.
>>I've already pointed out that you've accused climatologists of being fascinated with plans that will kill people
I *do* think climatologists are generally pretty bad at understanding people (you're a good case in point) and so should NOT be the people writing policy. I've seen enough policy suggestions from people like Hansen to not ever want to see them elected to congress. (You'll probably reduce this statement to mean that I think Inhofe is a walking God in our mortal realms...) Can Climatologists kill people with their policy recommendations? Absolutely, and unequivocally. Disrupting global power and food supplies will absolutely lead to people dying, with the deaths proportionate to the size of the disruption.
>>This whole time I've been saying that there are several specific problems with Dr. Wu's methodology that, when fixed, would bring his estimates closer to the mainstream. That just happened. Now you're trying to claim that this means I'm saying you're right? Wow. Just... wow.
The fact that the Greenland melt is actually hard to model? Well... yeah. It's a bit of vindication for my quotes above.
>>Dear Rush Limbaugh, ShakaUVM, and many other climate change contrarians,
You really need to learn about proper debating techniques. I've said this before, but it still holds true. I don't agree with Rush Limbaugh on this issue - I certainly don't think that climate scientists should be "drawn and quartered". I think Phil Jones engaged in shady behavior (avoiding FOIA requests) and should be disciplined for it (losing his chairmanship is enough, IMO). I certainly don't think climatology should be defunded and the practitioners thrown in jail, like some Republicans do, apparently.
If I'm Rush Limbaugh, then you're... hmm. Don Imus? Yeah. Let's go with that.
Because accusing me of wanting to murder climatologists is about on Imus' level.
>>Since you never responded to my points, I can only assume you didn't read my original comment.
I try to not read anything on your blog. It's got one of the worse layouts I've ever seen - a tiny font, with you cherrypicking quotes from people from *other* blogs and responding to them... and then you expect for me to respond to them, there?
As I've said repeatedly, if you have any criticisms of me here, make them against my posts here. Your blog sucks monkey balls.
>>The language that both of you are using is absolutely uncalled for.
>>This is the fourth time you've claimed that I agree with your libelous smears.
I believe in reasoned debate. If I said that I think it's harder to estimate Greenland ice losses than people think, that doesn't mean that I want to kill you, and your little dog, too. And when it turns out that maybe (maybe!) there were some systemic issues with how the losses were being calculated well outside the established estimates, it means you're saying I'm right.
>>The language that both of you are using is absolutely uncalled for.
That's an awfully large paintbrush you're using to hit me and Rush in the same sentence. I disagree with him on the issue much much much more than I disagree with you. Though on the topic of using uncalled-for language, look at all the blatantly inaccurate and libelous tripe you said about me in just this one post above. I think you might not realize how hypocritical you are being.
Since this is obviously causing you mental anguish - getting you to admit Watts' work might have some value nearly caused you to have an aneurysm - I'm not sure why you keep trying to argue with me. I think you think that I think something that I don't.
>>It is NOT a gun friendly state
It's not a sword-friendly state, either.
But I think the perception of it comes from those cases where innocent European tourists entered various Texans' properties and were summarily shot and killed. And the Texans got off under the Castle Doctrine principle, which caused a bit of an outrage in Europe.
So you're saying I'm right, then.
"-144 +- 27 Gt/yr" is nowhere close to "-219 +- 33 Gt/yr"
>>I think the judges need to realize that a) they have some fanboy bias, and b) they need to correct for it.
The fact that they gave the Best Novel award to Blackout/All Clear, which is a terrible *novel* (though a very interesting *history book*) says everything that needs to be said about the Hugos for me.
It's a brain-numbingly repetitive book, with the heroes about 30 times in a row wondering if they messed up the timeline for the future, and then realizing they didn't.
>>It is the RARE woman that does NOT have a shoe fetish.
You may be hanging out with the wrong crowd of women.
My ideal woman doesn't worry about her looks - but looks good anyway - is smart as hell, will join in with my friends when gaming, and pull out a hammer to help me when I'm trying to knock a tsuba off a new sword. Well, that's why I ended up marrying my wife, anyway.
>>Try to live with only 50k Baltimore or San Diego.
I lived on 18k a year in San Diego as a grad student.
Rent: 2 bedroom apt in Mira Mesa - $1000/month, split 3 ways (later 2 ways) - $6000
Food: $20/day - $7000
Gas: $20/week - $1000
Insurance: $1000
$3000 left over to fix my car, go on trips, buy books/textbooks, etc.
I wasn't living the high life by any means, but I was certainly comfortable and happy.
On a four or five line interstate, every single lane will be going 75MPH in Southern California. The DoT uses the guideline that 10% of drivers are crazy idiots, and set the speed limits on surface streets to the 90th percentile.
Except on Freeways, where they arbitrarily set much lower speed limits.
I'd love it if we could get our speed limits up to 80MPH on the freeways here in California, and a minimum speed limit law for the fast lane.
I spent 3 hours on the road today, about half of it stuck behind a truck and an old guy, both doing 60MPH.
Honestly, experienced drivers know what the safe speed for a road is, and generally drive it - speed limits be damned.
Have you ever looked at the dropout rates of really good colleges? It's really low.
Even if you account for the higher calibre of applicants, there's always dumb shits in every class.
What happens is that the good colleges also have a really good support network that will try to help you pass your classes and then be successful later in life.
It's like in high school, when my friends told me they didn't want to take "advanced" classes, because they'd be too hard. Guess who had more (boring) homework assigned to them? The students in the regular classes.