The kinds of attacks I'm imagining would also be high profile, they'd just be much less likely to be preventable, much less likely to consume the attackers
Actually the leaders want the attackers to be consumed. Dead men tell no tales and leave less of a trail to be backtracked to the organizers. See also, "Two people can keep a secret, if one of them is dead". As long as you've got gullible recruits to spare, suicide attackers are better from a security standpoint. When people are given a possible escape plan and told to kill themselves if they're about to be captured, a significant number will not follow through on the latter point (and it also probably can't be supported as 72-virgin-worthy through Islamic scripture).
Unless it's a moderate snowfall to driving blizzard in which case, if they're not a local, they might not notice the blocked light fixture until it's too late to stop (white fixture against white sky), whereas they might have if it wasn't snow-covered.
I'd use the debugging Perl code life sentence FTEW. There's always a small chance the GP is a closet fan of musicals and would enjoy repeats of The Sound of Music.
More likely, they could tell which way the wind was going to blow and decided to try to stay ahead of the curve and in control of the decision making process. They held off as long as possible to keep the cash from applications coming in. However, now that the writing is on the wall, they're trying to avoid the court setting a major precedent restricting their processes - never mind that it was a (bad) court decision that allowed business and software patents in the first place. It's almost like they were a public for-profit corporation.
Best is the enemy of good. If you wait for the best, then you can wind up waiting forever. Often people will be better off having something good now that they can use rather than spend more months or years waiting for perfection. On the other hand, just because you have something good enough now doesn't mean you should get complacent and stop striving for perfection.
The test for cancer is to... swallow a bunch of radioactive isotopes and then get zapped by large doses of radiation that cause the swallowed isotopes to show up in a way that an image can be constructed?
Well, I'm assuming you're talking about CT/CAT scanning and that's one way to find cancer early when it's still small. Not all imaging techniques involve ingesting radioactives, though. MRIs use very powerful magnets to interact with hydrogen to detect fine structures in the body. Some cancers are more easily detectable with one imaging approach vs. the other. Another way involves waiting until the cancer has progressed and grown so much that it's easy to notice but very likely to kill you.
Anyways, it's all about risk trade-offs. Dentists also regularly bombard you with low doses of ionizing X-rays to take a picture of your teeth to detect cavities. Not treating those cavities could lead to needing root canals, pulling the tooth, or even bad gum disease that can affect your immune system and heart health.
The problem with MRI is that it needs very strong magnetic fields and the rapid drop off of magnetic field strength currently make it impractical for use on a torso, as opposed to a head or a limb. Maybe that will change eventually. However even some radiation from a CATScan is a good trade-off if they suspect some types of cancer and it allows them to detect and treat it early.
Well, it's been 3-4 years. That's plenty of time to go through all the GBs of backups, find the incriminating stuff, edit it out, and re-package the rest so that your hands look clean. Not that I think that's what happened, but if I were carrying things out for an evil conspiracy, that's about how I would do it: "Lose things" to buy time while I sweep away the guilty fingerprints.
Exactly. It used to be there was a wide variety of arcade video games in the 80s. Then player vs. player fighting games came out and they were so much more profitable (because players would keep on putting in quarters to fight each other) that the arcade owners wound up buying mostly those and the occasional outliers like racing games and dance dance revolution (still player vs. player). As a result the arcade machine manufacturers stopped making anything else and, with no variety to choose from, arcades became boring and withered and died. Now you may find a few old arcade machines in the lobby of movie theaters and that's about it. There have been some attempts to revive the arcade, most notably Playdium but, while the one in Missisauga is still operating, the one in Burnaby shut down a few years ago.
To a certain extent, I think the same thing has been happening again in the hardcore gaming market. I see the rise of casual gaming as a realization that the gaming market has similarly lost its way by focusing on specialty niche games with highly addictive game play to extract high MSRPs.
Aren't they shooting themselves in the long term ?
Pretty well. Up here, SOCAN are trying to renegotiate higher performance fees to get a cut of expected higher revenues for Vancouver transit buskers during the Olympics. It may result in getting the busker program (and SOCAN's revenues from it) cancelled instead. Does it make sense to charge buskers making $50 a weekend a rate much closer to DJs making hundreds of dollars a night?
Well, global average temperature is increasing significantly (melting glacial caps nearly everywhere is direct visual evidence that's pretty well undeniable except by the loonies and liars). Carbon dioxide percentage in the atmosphere has increased significantly in a similar period. That increase is due to human combustion of hydrocarbons. Carbon dioxide is a factor in the the greenhouse effect which keeps the Earth warmer than it would be in the same orbit without an atmosphere. The other major identified factors involved in the temperature of the Earth don't appear to have changed significantly.
All of those statements above are provably true. So to invalidate the conclusion of AGW, you would have to identify a new major factor involved in the average temperature of the Earth and show that it has also changed significantly in the last century. A Nobel prize awaits the scientists who discover this new factor, but so far despite all the money the hydrocarbon energy industry has spent, no one has proposed a credible alternative
Once you understand the above, the only question is: just how quickly are we making things worse? As for geoengineering, while there are significant concerns, AGW indicates that we're effectively doing it already. We're just doing it by accident and in ignorance. If we investigate the possibility, then in the worst case, we'll be reducing our ignorance and figuring out which accidents are best avoided
We're not all clueless about the world just because we are also not experts in your field.
If the most complicated math you've ever dealt with has been filling out your taxes, it's going to take me a long time to describe PDEs or non-laminar fluid flow.
For reasons I don't claim to understand, "climatology" has become rampantly politicized.
Well, when something becomes politicized it's usually about one of two things: money and power. There's incredible amounts of money in the current hydrocarbon-based industry and acceptance of AGW and the necessary remedies would threaten that investment.
There is a strong aura - as the whole "climategate" scandal drags into the light - that those doing climate research are no longer doing real science. Instead, the books are being cooked to support a particular result and along with it, a particular political agenda.
The books are being cooked by the people who have money to lose. However they were smart and have learned from the last industry that was demolished by the scientific analysis of their product, tobacco. So the hydrocarbon energy industry decided to not just pervert the process by "prolonging the controversy" (as the tobacco industry did) but by directly attacking the scientific process and the credibility of those who were participating in it honestly.
Although to be fair this has only accelerated something I was expecting anyways. The Internet has made cheating at every level of schooling below the graduate university level more pervasive. It was only a matter of time before more cheaters continued those habits into the post-graduate world, thus damaging the credibility of science. The warning signs have been the more frequent recent major scandals of data falsification, like the claims of human cloning in South Korea. While there have been famous hoaxes in science before (Piltdown man), the peer review process is not set up to detect them and instead generally assumes incompetence, not dishonesty, is the biggest danger. To maintain its integrity and its reputation, the scientific community is going to have to change how it goes about the peer review process, insisting that all raw data and the tools to process it be available - an Open Source science process if you will. Reviewers also will have to assume that data falsification is a possibility and take appropriate measures to minimize the possibility.
There is the difference, just as people have been distrusting some sciences recently there has also been an increase in intellectual elites showing distain for the, lets call 'em Plebes. I think it stems from being walled up in Universities and not having to work for a living.
I think you underestimate the scientists. Any disdain that the intellectual elites show towards the masses with at most a high school education has more to do with the short attention span/memory of those masses and how easily those masses are manipulated, by politicians, religious leaders, media, etc., often into directions that are directly in those masses' own best interests. When it comes to the followers of Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and all those inflammatory and mendacious demagogues, the only alternative to disdain is pity. And, when those masses elect leaders that actively try to sabotage the scientific process if it undermines a political ideology, anger.
We're going into TMI territory. I've worked in Intel labs. The people there are first rate.
Oh I totally agree that Intel has some top drawer engineers. I've heard their compiler division is first rate (which company was it that they bought for their patent portfolio again?). Intel's production process group is also tops and has been instrumental in keeping them ahead of the curve. Core is a testament to their CPU and chipset design teams. I've just never seen any indication that their graphics teams are of the same relative caliber in that domain. Just what historical market would good Intel graphics chips cannibalize, anyways? SSE(n+1)? On the other hand, Microsoft Research has hired some amazing people and yet you don't hear a lot about groundbreaking stuff coming out of there, so I'll grant you you may be right and that Intel's could just keeping an ace up their sleeve rather than play it to avoid drawing more AntiTrust heat. But they haven't been above some major strategic blunders out of greed (*cough* RDRAM *cough*) either. However, if you tried to make Intel executives accept shedding some light in their heart of darkness, more power to you.
Yeah, I've been wondering about that. For the last year I've heard people parrot how great Larabee was going to be and it reminded me a lot of the hype about how the Pentium IV (or even Itanium for that matter) was going to kick ass. I couldn't see Intel all of a sudden going from dead last in graphics performance to top of the heap. They would have needed some top graphics system designers on both the h/w and s/w sides and those people just haven't been at Intel. I can't help but wonder if Larabee FUD and the chipset disputes with NVidia might have been a one-two punch plan to knock down NVidia's market capitalization down a peg or two to make it cheaper buy out. Then Intel's in the driver's seat to get NVidia's expertise and patents for a song instead of paying top dollar for them. Intel could have been planning this from the moment AMD bought out ATI two years ago, or even earlier when the latter two were still in preliminary talks, I doubt there would be any email smoking guns over it though; Intel's where the paranoid survive after all. But if I'm right then I would expect Intel to make a play for NVidia in inside of two years. To wait much longer would give AMD/ATI too much of a headstart in a market increasingly dominated by laptops. Somehow, 18 months after Intel buys NVidia, Larabee II will show up with graphics performance slightly better than NVidia's last GPU (and those suckers doing Larabee development are going to find the pipeline/rendering model significantly changed to look a lot like NVidia's).
Hmmm. I agree that there are some poor design decisions but people that are in the physical sciences tend to only know Fortran because most of what they do is number crunching and, until recently, the Fortran compilers where the ones that got the best performance on any kind of numerical computation, and there's also 40+ years of libraries that they can draw upon. At least it's Fortran90.
However all the references in the linked article appear to be data preparation and not the actual modeling. Now certainly GIGO can be a problem. It does sound like CRU should hire somebody with a Data Warehouse background to do some decent conformal mapping and set up a data quality management framework. Actually it sounds like something the whole climate research community should get together and do. But while I haven't seen the code and only have the followed the link you point to, it's not clear to me that it applies to the actual computations doing the climate modelling simulations, which is where they would presumably primarily focus their attention. Again data quality could be a problem but, since it's for a large stretch of consecutive years, I would expect its main function is to compare with retrospective predictions. In that case the researchers may have considered this a necessary distraction from what was really important: the actual modelling. This may be prototype-quality code that they felt didn't need to be polished because it wasn't time-critical and provided sufficiently accurate results given some statistical analysis of the results. The real question is what does the production simulation code, the stuff that needs to be fast and right because it's iterated millions of times, look like?
Further, why should we expect a mere 20 years to be enough data unless the warming trend is very obvious
Let's see, retreating claciers all over the world, melting in the Greenland central glaciers, melting arctic ice pack leading to opening of the Northwest Passage, collapse of antarctic ice shelves. So change is happening in macroscopic telltales that have been around for at least tens of thousands of years. If those don't don't qualify, just what exactly would you require for an "obvious" warming trend?
Actually there's been plenty of evidence collected over the last 20 years. The models may not be perfectly accurate in predicting specific regional changes, but they've been good enough to get the broad brush strokes correct (globally increasing temperatures, particularly in the arctic). The broad brush strokes for the future say we're in going to be in big trouble. So yeah, what you and my other respondent wrote are exactly the Ostrich stance I'm talking about.
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Actually the leaders want the attackers to be consumed. Dead men tell no tales and leave less of a trail to be backtracked to the organizers. See also, "Two people can keep a secret, if one of them is dead". As long as you've got gullible recruits to spare, suicide attackers are better from a security standpoint. When people are given a possible escape plan and told to kill themselves if they're about to be captured, a significant number will not follow through on the latter point (and it also probably can't be supported as 72-virgin-worthy through Islamic scripture).
A snow covered traffic light might just not be very visible at night or against the sky in light to heavy snow conditions.
Unless it's a moderate snowfall to driving blizzard in which case, if they're not a local, they might not notice the blocked light fixture until it's too late to stop (white fixture against white sky), whereas they might have if it wasn't snow-covered.
I'd use the debugging Perl code life sentence FTEW. There's always a small chance the GP is a closet fan of musicals and would enjoy repeats of The Sound of Music.
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More likely, they could tell which way the wind was going to blow and decided to try to stay ahead of the curve and in control of the decision making process. They held off as long as possible to keep the cash from applications coming in. However, now that the writing is on the wall, they're trying to avoid the court setting a major precedent restricting their processes - never mind that it was a (bad) court decision that allowed business and software patents in the first place. It's almost like they were a public for-profit corporation.
"Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien" - Voltaire
Best is the enemy of good. If you wait for the best, then you can wind up waiting forever. Often people will be better off having something good now that they can use rather than spend more months or years waiting for perfection. On the other hand, just because you have something good enough now doesn't mean you should get complacent and stop striving for perfection.
Now fitting obese people into your standard MRI machine -- THAT'S impractical.
Shrink wrap? :-)
Well, I'm assuming you're talking about CT/CAT scanning and that's one way to find cancer early when it's still small. Not all imaging techniques involve ingesting radioactives, though. MRIs use very powerful magnets to interact with hydrogen to detect fine structures in the body. Some cancers are more easily detectable with one imaging approach vs. the other. Another way involves waiting until the cancer has progressed and grown so much that it's easy to notice but very likely to kill you.
Anyways, it's all about risk trade-offs. Dentists also regularly bombard you with low doses of ionizing X-rays to take a picture of your teeth to detect cavities. Not treating those cavities could lead to needing root canals, pulling the tooth, or even bad gum disease that can affect your immune system and heart health.
The problem with MRI is that it needs very strong magnetic fields and the rapid drop off of magnetic field strength currently make it impractical for use on a torso, as opposed to a head or a limb. Maybe that will change eventually. However even some radiation from a CATScan is a good trade-off if they suspect some types of cancer and it allows them to detect and treat it early.
Well, it's been 3-4 years. That's plenty of time to go through all the GBs of backups, find the incriminating stuff, edit it out, and re-package the rest so that your hands look clean. Not that I think that's what happened, but if I were carrying things out for an evil conspiracy, that's about how I would do it: "Lose things" to buy time while I sweep away the guilty fingerprints.
Exactly. It used to be there was a wide variety of arcade video games in the 80s. Then player vs. player fighting games came out and they were so much more profitable (because players would keep on putting in quarters to fight each other) that the arcade owners wound up buying mostly those and the occasional outliers like racing games and dance dance revolution (still player vs. player). As a result the arcade machine manufacturers stopped making anything else and, with no variety to choose from, arcades became boring and withered and died. Now you may find a few old arcade machines in the lobby of movie theaters and that's about it. There have been some attempts to revive the arcade, most notably Playdium but, while the one in Missisauga is still operating, the one in Burnaby shut down a few years ago.
To a certain extent, I think the same thing has been happening again in the hardcore gaming market. I see the rise of casual gaming as a realization that the gaming market has similarly lost its way by focusing on specialty niche games with highly addictive game play to extract high MSRPs.
Pretty well. Up here, SOCAN are trying to renegotiate higher performance fees to get a cut of expected higher revenues for Vancouver transit buskers during the Olympics. It may result in getting the busker program (and SOCAN's revenues from it) cancelled instead. Does it make sense to charge buskers making $50 a weekend a rate much closer to DJs making hundreds of dollars a night?
Yes, it is.
Well, global average temperature is increasing significantly (melting glacial caps nearly everywhere is direct visual evidence that's pretty well undeniable except by the loonies and liars). Carbon dioxide percentage in the atmosphere has increased significantly in a similar period. That increase is due to human combustion of hydrocarbons. Carbon dioxide is a factor in the the greenhouse effect which keeps the Earth warmer than it would be in the same orbit without an atmosphere. The other major identified factors involved in the temperature of the Earth don't appear to have changed significantly.
All of those statements above are provably true. So to invalidate the conclusion of AGW, you would have to identify a new major factor involved in the average temperature of the Earth and show that it has also changed significantly in the last century. A Nobel prize awaits the scientists who discover this new factor, but so far despite all the money the hydrocarbon energy industry has spent, no one has proposed a credible alternative
Once you understand the above, the only question is: just how quickly are we making things worse? As for geoengineering, while there are significant concerns, AGW indicates that we're effectively doing it already. We're just doing it by accident and in ignorance. If we investigate the possibility, then in the worst case, we'll be reducing our ignorance and figuring out which accidents are best avoided
If the most complicated math you've ever dealt with has been filling out your taxes, it's going to take me a long time to describe PDEs or non-laminar fluid flow.
Well, when something becomes politicized it's usually about one of two things: money and power. There's incredible amounts of money in the current hydrocarbon-based industry and acceptance of AGW and the necessary remedies would threaten that investment.
The books are being cooked by the people who have money to lose. However they were smart and have learned from the last industry that was demolished by the scientific analysis of their product, tobacco. So the hydrocarbon energy industry decided to not just pervert the process by "prolonging the controversy" (as the tobacco industry did) but by directly attacking the scientific process and the credibility of those who were participating in it honestly.
Although to be fair this has only accelerated something I was expecting anyways. The Internet has made cheating at every level of schooling below the graduate university level more pervasive. It was only a matter of time before more cheaters continued those habits into the post-graduate world, thus damaging the credibility of science. The warning signs have been the more frequent recent major scandals of data falsification, like the claims of human cloning in South Korea. While there have been famous hoaxes in science before (Piltdown man), the peer review process is not set up to detect them and instead generally assumes incompetence, not dishonesty, is the biggest danger. To maintain its integrity and its reputation, the scientific community is going to have to change how it goes about the peer review process, insisting that all raw data and the tools to process it be available - an Open Source science process if you will. Reviewers also will have to assume that data falsification is a possibility and take appropriate measures to minimize the possibility.
Achk. I of course meant "often into directions that are directly againts those masses' own best interests."
I think you underestimate the scientists. Any disdain that the intellectual elites show towards the masses with at most a high school education has more to do with the short attention span/memory of those masses and how easily those masses are manipulated, by politicians, religious leaders, media, etc., often into directions that are directly in those masses' own best interests. When it comes to the followers of Glen Beck, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and all those inflammatory and mendacious demagogues, the only alternative to disdain is pity. And, when those masses elect leaders that actively try to sabotage the scientific process if it undermines a political ideology, anger.
Yeah, the problem is that now you would need to bring home two tonnes of groceries.
Oh I totally agree that Intel has some top drawer engineers. I've heard their compiler division is first rate (which company was it that they bought for their patent portfolio again?). Intel's production process group is also tops and has been instrumental in keeping them ahead of the curve. Core is a testament to their CPU and chipset design teams. I've just never seen any indication that their graphics teams are of the same relative caliber in that domain. Just what historical market would good Intel graphics chips cannibalize, anyways? SSE(n+1)? On the other hand, Microsoft Research has hired some amazing people and yet you don't hear a lot about groundbreaking stuff coming out of there, so I'll grant you you may be right and that Intel's could just keeping an ace up their sleeve rather than play it to avoid drawing more AntiTrust heat. But they haven't been above some major strategic blunders out of greed (*cough* RDRAM *cough*) either. However, if you tried to make Intel executives accept shedding some light in their heart of darkness, more power to you.
Yeah, I've been wondering about that. For the last year I've heard people parrot how great Larabee was going to be and it reminded me a lot of the hype about how the Pentium IV (or even Itanium for that matter) was going to kick ass. I couldn't see Intel all of a sudden going from dead last in graphics performance to top of the heap. They would have needed some top graphics system designers on both the h/w and s/w sides and those people just haven't been at Intel. I can't help but wonder if Larabee FUD and the chipset disputes with NVidia might have been a one-two punch plan to knock down NVidia's market capitalization down a peg or two to make it cheaper buy out. Then Intel's in the driver's seat to get NVidia's expertise and patents for a song instead of paying top dollar for them. Intel could have been planning this from the moment AMD bought out ATI two years ago, or even earlier when the latter two were still in preliminary talks, I doubt there would be any email smoking guns over it though; Intel's where the paranoid survive after all. But if I'm right then I would expect Intel to make a play for NVidia in inside of two years. To wait much longer would give AMD/ATI too much of a headstart in a market increasingly dominated by laptops. Somehow, 18 months after Intel buys NVidia, Larabee II will show up with graphics performance slightly better than NVidia's last GPU (and those suckers doing Larabee development are going to find the pipeline/rendering model significantly changed to look a lot like NVidia's).
The University of East Anglia probably doesn't have a lot to do with the United Arab Emirates.
Hmmm. I agree that there are some poor design decisions but people that are in the physical sciences tend to only know Fortran because most of what they do is number crunching and, until recently, the Fortran compilers where the ones that got the best performance on any kind of numerical computation, and there's also 40+ years of libraries that they can draw upon. At least it's Fortran90.
However all the references in the linked article appear to be data preparation and not the actual modeling. Now certainly GIGO can be a problem. It does sound like CRU should hire somebody with a Data Warehouse background to do some decent conformal mapping and set up a data quality management framework. Actually it sounds like something the whole climate research community should get together and do. But while I haven't seen the code and only have the followed the link you point to, it's not clear to me that it applies to the actual computations doing the climate modelling simulations, which is where they would presumably primarily focus their attention. Again data quality could be a problem but, since it's for a large stretch of consecutive years, I would expect its main function is to compare with retrospective predictions. In that case the researchers may have considered this a necessary distraction from what was really important: the actual modelling. This may be prototype-quality code that they felt didn't need to be polished because it wasn't time-critical and provided sufficiently accurate results given some statistical analysis of the results. The real question is what does the production simulation code, the stuff that needs to be fast and right because it's iterated millions of times, look like?
Let's see, retreating claciers all over the world, melting in the Greenland central glaciers, melting arctic ice pack leading to opening of the Northwest Passage, collapse of antarctic ice shelves. So change is happening in macroscopic telltales that have been around for at least tens of thousands of years. If those don't don't qualify, just what exactly would you require for an "obvious" warming trend?
Actually there's been plenty of evidence collected over the last 20 years. The models may not be perfectly accurate in predicting specific regional changes, but they've been good enough to get the broad brush strokes correct (globally increasing temperatures, particularly in the arctic). The broad brush strokes for the future say we're in going to be in big trouble. So yeah, what you and my other respondent wrote are exactly the Ostrich stance I'm talking about.