It probably accounts for more than 80% of the development resources, yet I have never seen any formal method/strategy/tool for handling maintenance/change requests/bugfixes. Is this because maintenance is unsexy?
That's where XP comes in, or at least claims to.
I think you can get most of the benefits of XP just by implementing the Unit Testing aspects of the philosophy; I'm not sure I buy the whole package but Unit Testing really holds up.
Also Radio Userland, and an open-source clone PyDS. The usual Open Source/Commercial software applies; technically PyDS may do more but requires more maintenance and is harder to use:-)
I'm not sure either product can split the feeds by category, but I usually just read them all at once; I'm one of the people who swears by the "feed" approach to newsreading. Both products can split out your website by category, though, creating an "everything" main page, and seperate pages for categories which are basically weblogs-in-weblogs, with independent pinging, templates, upload points, etc.... or not, if you just want them to use the same template and go to subdirectories by default. I often use this for focused feeds, for people who just want to know about one of my software projects and not my "real" weblog.
Rationalizing magic in most fantasy worlds is impossible and the DM should slap you for trying.
For one thing, with a multitude of readily-accessible planes, your "universe" is hardly a closed system.
But if you insist, there is a place to draw the energy from in your scenario: The space inside the bag. Space itself is energy of a sort; I don't know how to compute it from General Relativity, but my impression is that it is a rather large amount; one bag would probably keep that going effectively indefinately with neglibile space loss.
(Of course, that implies you must have access to an equally large amount of energy to create the bag in the first place; how convenient that there are so many highly energetic planes to draw from.)
Perhaps, as this experiment shows, the Asian mentality may actually be the superior strategy?
Oh, this is a bad time to get all multicultural.
Sure, it works out great for the Masters, who get to the winners circles on the backs of their Slaves.
Meanwhile, if you want to call Tit-for-Tat the Western strategy, everybody mostly wins after a while, even though few do really well.
I don't believe either categorization. I'm just pointing out that if you're going to base your argument on this article, you are saying that it is good that a few individuals come out better, at the expense of a lot of other individuals, in the putative Asian system of thought. Which I find barbaric, though YMMV.
He has nothing to lose by admitting the simple facts that everybody knows and much to lose (like any credibility he had left).
You obviously live in a much different America than I do. In fact, from the tone of your post, you would be one of the first people to jump all over the President if he actually did admit an error, and rapidly interpret the admission and extend the admission into ways the President would not have meant.
Now you can't do that, only make vague claims that he should, and even borderline lie by claiming he'd increase his "credibility" (presumably with you, since that's the only person you can talk about) by doing so. Like hell he would. You wouldn't consider him any more credible if he did come clean. That's exactly what I'm talking about.
(For a lot of people, most likely including you though I can't be 100% on this, he could come out with proof positive of everything he has said, and produce unassailable proof that he could not release this info earlier or troops would have died, and you still would not consider him credible. Your mind is made up.)
He made an error in saying the exact copy that he had of the memo was the actual one.
In years past, that would be enough. None of the rest of what you say would erase that. Especially after he stuck to his guns and insulted nearly the entire rest of the country in the process for questioning him.
See, Dan Rather is right 95% of the time and it's "disgusting" that people attack him. Bush is right 95% of the time, and by golly, get him the hell out of here. (Don't bother quibbling with the exact numbers, they don't matter. Let me save you time: They are both wrong numbers.) Partisan, partisan, partisan. You're exactly the kind of person I'm writing about, you're just too close to see it.
AC said: Considering how much the incumbent wins I don't think US politicians get punished for jack shit...
Which actually brings up another side effect of this issue: Because we make a HUGE FUCKING DEAL about a mispronounced word, the HUGE FUCKING DEAL about, say, the President brutually murdering Congress and selling the Country to Nigeria gets drowned out, or at least put on almost equal HFD footing.
There is no way to have a sense of proportion when everything is a HUGE FUCKING DEAL, and we just tune it all out. So of course people just turn the volume up...
Are Americans "sheeple", or, as we are on the cutting edge of the advertising culture, are we just tired of hearing about your HUGE FUCKING DEAL in the same tones of voice as the HFD's from the opposition, and also the same tones used to exhort us to "Buy today, before the sale ends in the next millisecond!"? (From what I hear from other people, not even Europe can match our country's sheer quantity of loud messages of every variety.)
his leadership style is like that of a religious organization... no matter what, never admit you are wrong (until at least a few hundred years after the incident, if ever).
I've been thinking about this lately, and I don't think that's it. I think the problem is that we as Americans are holding all of our leaders to unreasonably high standards, in many cases exceeding even "perfection". (Which is to say, we demand the impossible, like full disclosure of military operations while demanding that our troops be kept safe.)
So, at the slightest sign of failure, we brutally punish the leader, out of any proportion to the fault (which is sometimes only perceived!).
In this environment, why should we expect anyone to ever admit mistakes, ever? That's just one more thing to pile on about. Better to deny it and hope for the best.
This is a non-partisan observation, and indeed it extends past politics; in previous eras Dan Rather would be out of a job, now he stands on his "facts" for a few weeks, mumbles a vague and unsatisfying apology, and hopes for the best, which AFAIK he is getting. Same for CEOs. We punish people for apologizing or admitting fault and reward them for bulling through until the problem just goes away.
What do you expect? Unless we have a culture shift where we acknowlegde that nobody is perfect and start holding people to more realistic standards as a whole, everybody is going to act that way. And I can imagine no way for this to occur, since people currently benefit greatly for mocking politicians dress, speaking ability, or face shape. (I mean, come on, what is a guy supposed to do about that?)
Again, this is non-partisan; anything in this message you think is directly about Bush is meant to apply broadly.
I'm serious. Actually, first baseman is a bad example. Who is going to play right field? Or blocker in football?
Everybody wants to be the star. Since we're talking about computer games, everybody should be the star. MMORPGs have enough trouble with this. Sports would be even worse.
Remember, the only logical standard for judging is "If the other side did the exact same thing, how would you feel?"
If your are pro-Kerry, but it wouldn't bother you to see a hatchet job on Bush at the same time by the same basic people, then you really have no grounds to complain.
Flip-side, if you are Pro-Bush, but would not want to see a hatchet job on Kerry at the same time, then you should not support this.
Personally, since I sort of fall into the latter category (I'm not 100% for Bush, but Kerry has completely failed to convince me he is better in the ways I personally care about; this is disclosure, not a request to be "corrected", OK?), my personal opinion is that this is an inappropriate action to take, and I don't care what side does it. If it was run earlier, I don't think I'd care, and there have certainly been hatchet jobs on both sides meeting this criteria, but the closer you get to the election, the more important it is for large entities to shut the hell up and leave the final voting as a matter between the candidates and the voters.
What part of "If there are no answers, it is probably not worth worrying about." implies "Nobody should ever look for answers?" Sounds to me like you're reading in your own pre-conceived notions of what I "must" think in order to say what I say, and skipping the important step where you actually read what I say.
The burden of proof for people predicting runaway processes is firmly on the predictor. I refuse to panic. Deal with it.
This is not an acceptable answer, because "humanity" is not a cause.
Everything we've done has been done by nature before. Gigantic eruptions changing the global climate with all manner of gasses, asteroid impacts, etc.
Why is this runaway process only going to strike this time? Why didn't it happen last time a mega-volcano spouted off? If it did happen, what reversed it?
Using "humanity" and what we've done as an explanation for more normal events is at least defensible, but runaway processes are a different story. By their nature, once they are "set off", there is supposed to be no stopping them. So why, in the half-a-billion years or so of life has nothing ever set off this process, or what stopped it, is still a very valid question. We may be straining the current biosphere, but we haven't yet hit any of the various limits Planet Earth has experienced over the eons. My point is very specific to "runaway processes".
Also, your simple additive arguments based on bank accounts show me you have no place discussing the climate, along with most people I see here on Slashdot. (Before you ask, I'm OK because I'm not discussing, I'm asking, something more people around here should be doing.) This is the land of differential equations and chaos and stuff; your bank account is as far away from the climate as is conceivably and is actively harmful as a metaphor.
His conclusion that the warming of the planet will greatly accelerate the release of carbon from the soil, which in turn, will warm the planet, which in turn will release more carbon from the soil. As you can see, he predicts a nasty spiral.
You have to watch out for people like this. People who predict unrestrained runaway processes have a very important and critical question to answer: "If the process is so easy to set off and runs in such an unrestrained fashion, answer one of two questions: a. Why hasn't it happened before, or b. What stopped it last time?"
Remember, the planet has been warmer and cooler, a lot in both directions. One of them should have set off this runaway effect that we're supposed to be so scared of. Why is it a problem this time and not last time?
I'm not saying there are no answers. I'm saying for any given threat, if there are no answers, then it probably isn't worth worrying about.
(a). the planet operated fine before without us pumping out such ammounts of CO2 and
This is trivially false, for modern definition of "working fine". The planet has been both much warmer and much cooler than it is now. Evidently, to listen to the global warming fear mongers, this would not constitute "working fine", since exactly the same circumstances they are warning us against have happened, over and over again, in the past.
(Which brings up one of my really "kooky-because-I-dare-use-logic-that-bastard" positions: Why do we all assume global warming is so bad? The ice caps melt... drop your force-fed assumptions and think about that for a moment... so what? We have proof that the life continues to function in the past. So we lose a few feet of coastline... so what? Yeah, sucks for the people living there but they can move inland. Yeah, we lose large swathes of Florida, but ultimately, in all seriousness, so what? "Florida" is not necessary to life. So the weather may or may not get a little worse... so what? Frankly, the weather is already pretty dangerous and it's not like we're going to have tornados plating North America, with not a single square foot untouched, we're just going to maybe have more and bigger ones. It isn't the end of the world.
Now, I'm sure many posters will see fit to jump in below and re-iterate the various proposed disaster scenarios, but I ask you to ask yourself so what? We already live in a world just oozing with earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, and all kinds of other natural disasters. Are you really afraid of a "doubling" of tornados, or are you just afraid of change? It's worth thinking about. Frankly, of our choices between warming and cooling (since stasis is not an option), I prefer warming at the moment. The Ice Ages, now those are something to live in terror of.
I am far, far more worried about global cooling than global warming.)
This is not a big deal and will ultimately not succeed much, although I won't say it will totally fail.
Blogs are "pull". You have to choose to read them, and thanks to the wonders of RSS and newsreaders, the majority of most blog's readerships are recurring, from the smallest ones to the largest ones. That is to say, blog readers rapidly get to know the blog, where it is coming from, etc., and make decisions based on that.
If you try to start an astroturfing blog, you'd better have something more substantial than "rah rah rah, product X is great", or people won't subscribe or visit for long. Blogs as pure astroturfing degenerate into astroturfing web pages, and they just don't work.
If you have something more substantial, then you may acquire an audience, but it'll be mostly for the substantial stuff, not the rah rah rah. In fact I know of many blogs that are largely product advocacy blogs, or can be interpreted as such, but are still fascinating because of the beef they have. An example I've been working through lately: The Old New Thing, written by Raymond Chen, an important Windows developer and guru. On the one hand, you could read it as Windows advocacy (though I truly believe it is not intended as such directly), but there is so, so, so much meat there that it is irrelevant. My blog hasn't got a huge readership, but I know the ones I have are there for the substance, because I don't offer much else.
Like I said, astroturfing may not "fail", but it'll be just preaching to the choir, which isn't terribly effective. (The majority of political blogs already boil down to this, although they aren't necessarily intended to be astroturfing.) Nothing to worry about here, just corporate hipsters who aren't.
Putting it all online would let people get copies of it for *gasp* FREE.
Who said anything about "free"?
Although this would potentially take dialog about the public domain out of obscurity and into the LoC mainstream, and the LoC does have some influence in the copyright debate. Certainly once the data exists, anywhere, it is going to be harder to make the argument that we should just throw it away, no matter what the reason.
Unfortunately, this has the side effect that there is a lot of incorrect and misleading information out there. Everything is also self-reinforcing, because one person often copies their "facts" from another website without first checking the veracity.
I am interested in where you have found a source of information that does not match this description.
I was not aware extra-terrestrials were running libraries I could get at. Certainly no known human data source has ever risen to this standard.
(Criticizing the internet for not being perfect and implying it is a waste of time to improve it is stupid on a number of levels. How is it supposed to improve if nobody tries? Are you seriously suggesting we should give up on all forms of collected knowledge because none of them are perfect? If not, why are you only holding the Internet to your absurd standard and giving everything else a pass? I assure you, whatever source you are comparing the 'net too is also full of errors and inaccuracies. Simple example: Look at books on how to train animals. You'll find a book espousing every conceivable technique. They can't all be right... Also, look up "urban legend" sometime and watch unchecked knowledge spread far and wide, even into academic scholarship sometimes.)
Re:So disappointed!
on
A Hack A Day
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· Score: 3, Funny
"If I failed, I was successful."
You're no geek, you're a politician. I invoke the sacred names of Babbage, Turing, and Cantor and order you back from whence you came.
If there is an implied arrangement to watch an ad in return for a service, then I guess, from one point of view, this is justifiable (if not currently legal), however offensive we may find it.
Contracts can not override Constitutional rights, and for that matter, neither can Congressional bills.
No sane intepretation of the right to free speech, despite the common phrase we use to identify that right, can fail to include the right to listen to whomever we choose, or not listen to whomever we choose. (My own logic for that statement is here, but like I said, it is really hard to rationalize one but not the other.)
I'll be fair and say that this is probably not a certain win, legally, because your argument has force, too. But there does come a point where you can't sign away your rights, and free speech is one of the few we still really have left.
Do not forget you must take my argument out of just the context of watching a movie, and apply it generally. Once it is allowed to require listening in the context of movie viewing, it will swiftly become required elsewhere; even if it starts out acceptable to the Supreme Court someone will push it too hard.
I can not think of a context where we are today forced to view commercials. Even in a theatre, you are not denied access to the movie if you come in after the previews/commercials.
So you agree with the GGP that all rightists are animals, right?
Or maybe you, too, should work a little less hard to pigeonhole people.
I freely pigeonhole ideologies because they are, by nature, a group, massive, average sort of thing. But I know of no one who agrees with me 100%, no one who quite thinks like me.
I don't care if Kerry is "left" or "right", and for the most part I don't give a flying fuck what the rest of the world thinks, which coincidentally is the same regard they hold me in. (The latter part is a universal truth, and one of my problems with Kerry is that he does not understand that the world does not care about Kerry qua Kerry, as evidenced by his continued belief/claim that the allies will just magically flock to him because he is "better". But I digress...) Pigeonholing people based on a handful of paragraphs is wrong. I quite deliberately used the quasi-word "ideologist" because it fit.
Ultimately, for any meaningful definition of "radical" (and I insist on taking a cue from the left and defining it in terms of a given culture, not a putative absolute morality as apparently defined by "the world"), anybody who gets 50% of the vote is mainstream, and the people who feel that is radical, are the real radicals. Both Bush and Kerry are firmly mainstream in the US, or they would not be split 50/50, QED.
I got my Masters degree in computer science because I read the course descriptions and said "I gotta have some of that."
If you aren't drooling over those courses like I was, I can't recommend post-grad work at all.
If you also don't know you want that PhD, but you are drooling over the course descriptions, consider a Masters. My institution offered a course-only Masters program, and I took that, because I looked around and I thought the Masters projects were a joke, and I figured I was better off working on my own. Can't say if I was right yet but it has at least been fun.
You Righties see America as something to which you owe loyalty, and you see and the President, Senators, et al as demigods.
That is complete, utter, biased, trolling, ideologist bullshit, and so is your +5, Insightful.
Instead of generalizing, why don't you get to know some real, non-radical right-leaning people? (Of course, I can judge the left based on the radicals but that wouldn't be fair either, no?) You'll find they are people, just like you. Most of the time, they even have the same concerns. They just differ on priority levels and solutions.
Oh, how convenient it is for you to dismiss "the right" as, apparently literally, animals. You are much, much more part of the problem than the solution.
Slashdot Mirror
It probably accounts for more than 80% of the development resources, yet I have never seen any formal method/strategy/tool for handling maintenance/change requests/bugfixes. Is this because maintenance is unsexy?
That's where XP comes in, or at least claims to.
I think you can get most of the benefits of XP just by implementing the Unit Testing aspects of the philosophy; I'm not sure I buy the whole package but Unit Testing really holds up.
Also Radio Userland, and an open-source clone PyDS. The usual Open Source/Commercial software applies; technically PyDS may do more but requires more maintenance and is harder to use :-)
I'm not sure either product can split the feeds by category, but I usually just read them all at once; I'm one of the people who swears by the "feed" approach to newsreading. Both products can split out your website by category, though, creating an "everything" main page, and seperate pages for categories which are basically weblogs-in-weblogs, with independent pinging, templates, upload points, etc.... or not, if you just want them to use the same template and go to subdirectories by default. I often use this for focused feeds, for people who just want to know about one of my software projects and not my "real" weblog.
The Light of Other Days.
Rationalizing magic in most fantasy worlds is impossible and the DM should slap you for trying.
For one thing, with a multitude of readily-accessible planes, your "universe" is hardly a closed system.
But if you insist, there is a place to draw the energy from in your scenario: The space inside the bag. Space itself is energy of a sort; I don't know how to compute it from General Relativity, but my impression is that it is a rather large amount; one bag would probably keep that going effectively indefinately with neglibile space loss.
(Of course, that implies you must have access to an equally large amount of energy to create the bag in the first place; how convenient that there are so many highly energetic planes to draw from.)
Perhaps, as this experiment shows, the Asian mentality may actually be the superior strategy?
Oh, this is a bad time to get all multicultural.
Sure, it works out great for the Masters, who get to the winners circles on the backs of their Slaves.
Meanwhile, if you want to call Tit-for-Tat the Western strategy, everybody mostly wins after a while, even though few do really well.
I don't believe either categorization. I'm just pointing out that if you're going to base your argument on this article, you are saying that it is good that a few individuals come out better, at the expense of a lot of other individuals, in the putative Asian system of thought. Which I find barbaric, though YMMV.
I once defined a political axis as "people who know they would be kings, vs. people who think they would be serfs". Sounds like I can guess where you come out on that.
He has nothing to lose by admitting the simple facts that everybody knows and much to lose (like any credibility he had left).
You obviously live in a much different America than I do. In fact, from the tone of your post, you would be one of the first people to jump all over the President if he actually did admit an error, and rapidly interpret the admission and extend the admission into ways the President would not have meant.
Now you can't do that, only make vague claims that he should, and even borderline lie by claiming he'd increase his "credibility" (presumably with you, since that's the only person you can talk about) by doing so. Like hell he would. You wouldn't consider him any more credible if he did come clean. That's exactly what I'm talking about.
(For a lot of people, most likely including you though I can't be 100% on this, he could come out with proof positive of everything he has said, and produce unassailable proof that he could not release this info earlier or troops would have died, and you still would not consider him credible. Your mind is made up.)
He made an error in saying the exact copy that he had of the memo was the actual one.
In years past, that would be enough. None of the rest of what you say would erase that. Especially after he stuck to his guns and insulted nearly the entire rest of the country in the process for questioning him.
See, Dan Rather is right 95% of the time and it's "disgusting" that people attack him. Bush is right 95% of the time, and by golly, get him the hell out of here. (Don't bother quibbling with the exact numbers, they don't matter. Let me save you time: They are both wrong numbers.) Partisan, partisan, partisan. You're exactly the kind of person I'm writing about, you're just too close to see it.
AC said: Considering how much the incumbent wins I don't think US politicians get punished for jack shit...
Which actually brings up another side effect of this issue: Because we make a HUGE FUCKING DEAL about a mispronounced word, the HUGE FUCKING DEAL about, say, the President brutually murdering Congress and selling the Country to Nigeria gets drowned out, or at least put on almost equal HFD footing.
There is no way to have a sense of proportion when everything is a HUGE FUCKING DEAL, and we just tune it all out. So of course people just turn the volume up...
Are Americans "sheeple", or, as we are on the cutting edge of the advertising culture, are we just tired of hearing about your HUGE FUCKING DEAL in the same tones of voice as the HFD's from the opposition, and also the same tones used to exhort us to "Buy today, before the sale ends in the next millisecond!"? (From what I hear from other people, not even Europe can match our country's sheer quantity of loud messages of every variety.)
Kerry could have marched through Vietnam naked and won the war all by himself
:-)
Now that's an image! ("Run for your life! It's Lt. Col. John Kerry, and he's naked! We surrender! Unconditionally!")
Anyone up for a "slash" campaign ad parody? (In the right hands this could actually be pretty funny...) Or got pointers to one?
his leadership style is like that of a religious organization... no matter what, never admit you are wrong (until at least a few hundred years after the incident, if ever).
I've been thinking about this lately, and I don't think that's it. I think the problem is that we as Americans are holding all of our leaders to unreasonably high standards, in many cases exceeding even "perfection". (Which is to say, we demand the impossible, like full disclosure of military operations while demanding that our troops be kept safe.)
So, at the slightest sign of failure, we brutally punish the leader, out of any proportion to the fault (which is sometimes only perceived!).
In this environment, why should we expect anyone to ever admit mistakes, ever? That's just one more thing to pile on about. Better to deny it and hope for the best.
This is a non-partisan observation, and indeed it extends past politics; in previous eras Dan Rather would be out of a job, now he stands on his "facts" for a few weeks, mumbles a vague and unsatisfying apology, and hopes for the best, which AFAIK he is getting. Same for CEOs. We punish people for apologizing or admitting fault and reward them for bulling through until the problem just goes away.
What do you expect? Unless we have a culture shift where we acknowlegde that nobody is perfect and start holding people to more realistic standards as a whole, everybody is going to act that way. And I can imagine no way for this to occur, since people currently benefit greatly for mocking politicians dress, speaking ability, or face shape. (I mean, come on, what is a guy supposed to do about that?)
Again, this is non-partisan; anything in this message you think is directly about Bush is meant to apply broadly.
Once a real third party got that much media attention, it would be the beginning of the end for the big 2 (Atleast on a local level).
Two words: "Reform Party."
I call first baseman!
BOOOOOOOOOORING!!!
I'm serious. Actually, first baseman is a bad example. Who is going to play right field? Or blocker in football?
Everybody wants to be the star. Since we're talking about computer games, everybody should be the star. MMORPGs have enough trouble with this. Sports would be even worse.
Flip-side, if you are Pro-Bush, but would not want to see a hatchet job on Kerry
Crud, that should read "hatchet job on Bush" both times. Went too far with the logical negations.
Remember, the only logical standard for judging is "If the other side did the exact same thing, how would you feel?"
If your are pro-Kerry, but it wouldn't bother you to see a hatchet job on Bush at the same time by the same basic people, then you really have no grounds to complain.
Flip-side, if you are Pro-Bush, but would not want to see a hatchet job on Kerry at the same time, then you should not support this.
Personally, since I sort of fall into the latter category (I'm not 100% for Bush, but Kerry has completely failed to convince me he is better in the ways I personally care about; this is disclosure, not a request to be "corrected", OK?), my personal opinion is that this is an inappropriate action to take, and I don't care what side does it. If it was run earlier, I don't think I'd care, and there have certainly been hatchet jobs on both sides meeting this criteria, but the closer you get to the election, the more important it is for large entities to shut the hell up and leave the final voting as a matter between the candidates and the voters.
What part of "If there are no answers, it is probably not worth worrying about." implies "Nobody should ever look for answers?" Sounds to me like you're reading in your own pre-conceived notions of what I "must" think in order to say what I say, and skipping the important step where you actually read what I say.
The burden of proof for people predicting runaway processes is firmly on the predictor. I refuse to panic. Deal with it.
Because humanity is the problem this time.
This is not an acceptable answer, because "humanity" is not a cause.
Everything we've done has been done by nature before. Gigantic eruptions changing the global climate with all manner of gasses, asteroid impacts, etc.
Why is this runaway process only going to strike this time? Why didn't it happen last time a mega-volcano spouted off? If it did happen, what reversed it?
Using "humanity" and what we've done as an explanation for more normal events is at least defensible, but runaway processes are a different story. By their nature, once they are "set off", there is supposed to be no stopping them. So why, in the half-a-billion years or so of life has nothing ever set off this process, or what stopped it, is still a very valid question. We may be straining the current biosphere, but we haven't yet hit any of the various limits Planet Earth has experienced over the eons. My point is very specific to "runaway processes".
Also, your simple additive arguments based on bank accounts show me you have no place discussing the climate, along with most people I see here on Slashdot. (Before you ask, I'm OK because I'm not discussing, I'm asking, something more people around here should be doing.) This is the land of differential equations and chaos and stuff; your bank account is as far away from the climate as is conceivably and is actively harmful as a metaphor.
His conclusion that the warming of the planet will greatly accelerate the release of carbon from the soil, which in turn, will warm the planet, which in turn will release more carbon from the soil. As you can see, he predicts a nasty spiral.
You have to watch out for people like this. People who predict unrestrained runaway processes have a very important and critical question to answer: "If the process is so easy to set off and runs in such an unrestrained fashion, answer one of two questions: a. Why hasn't it happened before, or b. What stopped it last time?"
Remember, the planet has been warmer and cooler, a lot in both directions. One of them should have set off this runaway effect that we're supposed to be so scared of. Why is it a problem this time and not last time?
I'm not saying there are no answers. I'm saying for any given threat, if there are no answers, then it probably isn't worth worrying about.
(a). the planet operated fine before without us pumping out such ammounts of CO2 and
This is trivially false, for modern definition of "working fine". The planet has been both much warmer and much cooler than it is now. Evidently, to listen to the global warming fear mongers, this would not constitute "working fine", since exactly the same circumstances they are warning us against have happened, over and over again, in the past.
(Which brings up one of my really "kooky-because-I-dare-use-logic-that-bastard" positions: Why do we all assume global warming is so bad? The ice caps melt... drop your force-fed assumptions and think about that for a moment... so what? We have proof that the life continues to function in the past. So we lose a few feet of coastline... so what? Yeah, sucks for the people living there but they can move inland. Yeah, we lose large swathes of Florida, but ultimately, in all seriousness, so what? "Florida" is not necessary to life. So the weather may or may not get a little worse... so what? Frankly, the weather is already pretty dangerous and it's not like we're going to have tornados plating North America, with not a single square foot untouched, we're just going to maybe have more and bigger ones. It isn't the end of the world.
Now, I'm sure many posters will see fit to jump in below and re-iterate the various proposed disaster scenarios, but I ask you to ask yourself so what? We already live in a world just oozing with earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, and all kinds of other natural disasters. Are you really afraid of a "doubling" of tornados, or are you just afraid of change? It's worth thinking about. Frankly, of our choices between warming and cooling (since stasis is not an option), I prefer warming at the moment. The Ice Ages, now those are something to live in terror of.
I am far, far more worried about global cooling than global warming.)
This is not a big deal and will ultimately not succeed much, although I won't say it will totally fail.
Blogs are "pull". You have to choose to read them, and thanks to the wonders of RSS and newsreaders, the majority of most blog's readerships are recurring, from the smallest ones to the largest ones. That is to say, blog readers rapidly get to know the blog, where it is coming from, etc., and make decisions based on that.
If you try to start an astroturfing blog, you'd better have something more substantial than "rah rah rah, product X is great", or people won't subscribe or visit for long. Blogs as pure astroturfing degenerate into astroturfing web pages, and they just don't work.
If you have something more substantial, then you may acquire an audience, but it'll be mostly for the substantial stuff, not the rah rah rah. In fact I know of many blogs that are largely product advocacy blogs, or can be interpreted as such, but are still fascinating because of the beef they have. An example I've been working through lately: The Old New Thing, written by Raymond Chen, an important Windows developer and guru. On the one hand, you could read it as Windows advocacy (though I truly believe it is not intended as such directly), but there is so, so, so much meat there that it is irrelevant. My blog hasn't got a huge readership, but I know the ones I have are there for the substance, because I don't offer much else.
Like I said, astroturfing may not "fail", but it'll be just preaching to the choir, which isn't terribly effective. (The majority of political blogs already boil down to this, although they aren't necessarily intended to be astroturfing.) Nothing to worry about here, just corporate hipsters who aren't.
Putting it all online would let people get copies of it for *gasp* FREE.
Who said anything about "free"?
Although this would potentially take dialog about the public domain out of obscurity and into the LoC mainstream, and the LoC does have some influence in the copyright debate. Certainly once the data exists, anywhere, it is going to be harder to make the argument that we should just throw it away, no matter what the reason.
Unfortunately, this has the side effect that there is a lot of incorrect and misleading information out there. Everything is also self-reinforcing, because one person often copies their "facts" from another website without first checking the veracity.
I am interested in where you have found a source of information that does not match this description.
I was not aware extra-terrestrials were running libraries I could get at. Certainly no known human data source has ever risen to this standard.
(Criticizing the internet for not being perfect and implying it is a waste of time to improve it is stupid on a number of levels. How is it supposed to improve if nobody tries? Are you seriously suggesting we should give up on all forms of collected knowledge because none of them are perfect? If not, why are you only holding the Internet to your absurd standard and giving everything else a pass? I assure you, whatever source you are comparing the 'net too is also full of errors and inaccuracies. Simple example: Look at books on how to train animals. You'll find a book espousing every conceivable technique. They can't all be right... Also, look up "urban legend" sometime and watch unchecked knowledge spread far and wide, even into academic scholarship sometimes.)
"If I failed, I was successful."
You're no geek, you're a politician . I invoke the sacred names of Babbage, Turing, and Cantor and order you back from whence you came.
THE POWER OF CANTOR COMPELS YOU.
THE POWER OF CANTOR COMPELS YOU.
THE POWER OF CANTOR COMPELS YOU.
If there is an implied arrangement to watch an ad in return for a service, then I guess, from one point of view, this is justifiable (if not currently legal), however offensive we may find it.
Contracts can not override Constitutional rights, and for that matter, neither can Congressional bills.
No sane intepretation of the right to free speech, despite the common phrase we use to identify that right, can fail to include the right to listen to whomever we choose, or not listen to whomever we choose. (My own logic for that statement is here, but like I said, it is really hard to rationalize one but not the other.)
I'll be fair and say that this is probably not a certain win, legally, because your argument has force, too. But there does come a point where you can't sign away your rights, and free speech is one of the few we still really have left.
Do not forget you must take my argument out of just the context of watching a movie, and apply it generally. Once it is allowed to require listening in the context of movie viewing, it will swiftly become required elsewhere; even if it starts out acceptable to the Supreme Court someone will push it too hard.
I can not think of a context where we are today forced to view commercials. Even in a theatre, you are not denied access to the movie if you come in after the previews/commercials.
So you agree with the GGP that all rightists are animals, right?
Or maybe you, too, should work a little less hard to pigeonhole people.
I freely pigeonhole ideologies because they are, by nature, a group, massive, average sort of thing. But I know of no one who agrees with me 100%, no one who quite thinks like me.
I don't care if Kerry is "left" or "right", and for the most part I don't give a flying fuck what the rest of the world thinks, which coincidentally is the same regard they hold me in. (The latter part is a universal truth, and one of my problems with Kerry is that he does not understand that the world does not care about Kerry qua Kerry, as evidenced by his continued belief/claim that the allies will just magically flock to him because he is "better". But I digress...) Pigeonholing people based on a handful of paragraphs is wrong. I quite deliberately used the quasi-word "ideologist" because it fit.
Ultimately, for any meaningful definition of "radical" (and I insist on taking a cue from the left and defining it in terms of a given culture, not a putative absolute morality as apparently defined by "the world"), anybody who gets 50% of the vote is mainstream, and the people who feel that is radical, are the real radicals. Both Bush and Kerry are firmly mainstream in the US, or they would not be split 50/50, QED.
I got my Masters degree in computer science because I read the course descriptions and said "I gotta have some of that."
If you aren't drooling over those courses like I was, I can't recommend post-grad work at all.
If you also don't know you want that PhD, but you are drooling over the course descriptions, consider a Masters. My institution offered a course-only Masters program, and I took that, because I looked around and I thought the Masters projects were a joke, and I figured I was better off working on my own. Can't say if I was right yet but it has at least been fun.
You Righties see America as something to which you owe loyalty, and you see and the President, Senators, et al as demigods.
That is complete, utter, biased, trolling, ideologist bullshit, and so is your +5, Insightful.
Instead of generalizing, why don't you get to know some real, non-radical right-leaning people? (Of course, I can judge the left based on the radicals but that wouldn't be fair either, no?) You'll find they are people, just like you. Most of the time, they even have the same concerns. They just differ on priority levels and solutions.
Oh, how convenient it is for you to dismiss "the right" as, apparently literally, animals. You are much, much more part of the problem than the solution.