No, that one was about spreading fear so that people give up their freedom. Fear is not enough to recreate the events of 1930s in Germany. You need violent hatred for that.
Remember how Nazi Germany solved their economic problems in 1930s? Social situation in the US is not yet bad enough to hijack the so-far-peaceful protests and spin enough hatred against some fictional threat with propaganda to start a war. But people are slowly getting desperate and they'll listen to anyone with a quick & easy solution pretty soon.
2013 (35 years since 1978) will be especially interesting because that's when first artists can take their copyright assignments back and walk away from their record label with their music back in their own hands. Not only the recording industry is running out of money, it'll also run out of music classics pretty soon.
When the talk starts with kids asking about programming games, it's not so hard steering it towards actual computer science. Because game engines are nothing but linear algebra, general algebra, graph theory, artificial intelligence and advanced image manipulation. That's pretty much computer science in a nutshell. Except that actual computer science is about inventing new stuff in those areas while games are mostly about applying what we already know.
BTW, I'm sure there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with real hacking. Compiling kernel is not very interesting to teenagers (except for ubergeeks who need no more convincing). But when they see some tedious task which would take them hours to solve and they sometimes run into it themselves solved in seconds, now THAT is cool. Show them for example how to download a webcomic using simple script or some other mass data manipulation they ask about themselves.
People who understand drawbacks of something they promote also know very well which examples they should avoid at all costs because that particular something won't work in that case. When they try to peddle their thing, they use examples where their thing makes everybody involved happy, seemingly look very similar but under the surface are actually fundamentally different (in other words: bait and switch). But when somebody says this kind of blatantly obvious nonsense, he has to be absolutely clueless. Probably from living in corporate ivory tower for too long.
Statutory licensing of patents doesn't really solve any of the major problems. Sure, it prevents patent hoarding and licensee discrimination but it doesn't stop patent trolls (just gives their victims one more chance to pay the troll a smaller fee), it doesn't prevent patent writers from being ridiulously vague about the actual implementation (see patent trolls) and it doesn't solve the problem of independent discovery (the single biggest patent problem out there; if this one was solved, patent trolls would go away forever).
It'd be more than enough to sue anybody who tries to build a bomb which uses hydrogen fusion at any point in the reaction. Hydrogen fusion doesn't have to be the only step and not even the last step in the explosion but if it's somewhere in the chain, it still falls under that ridiculously vague patent. That's what ridiculously vague patents are written for.
Well, his note makes it clear that he's completely ignorant about all the drawbacks of intellectual property systems. The example of violin and saxophone does make sense but what he says about patenting WWW is completely idiotic. In a nutshell, he says that if WWW had been patented with flexible enough licensing that doesn't cripple its use (probably as flexible as if it wasn't patented at all), we'd see huge investments into WWW innovations (basically what we've seen in the past 20 years even without patents).
The single most important thing to remember about intellectual property systems is that while they create incentives to make innovations, they also as a side-effect create environment hostile to actually getting those innovations into general use. When you're dealing with intellectual property, you can never have the former without the latter.
I was talking about immediate state of the economy, not about potential future development. Who knows what the Chinese decide to do with crashed US economy after they buy it from natives for a few beads.
Thus, they are rewarding accidents that would happen anyhow.
The problem is they're NOT rewarding those valuable accidents. They're TRYING to reward them by creating environment hostile to actually using the result. And it obviously doesn't work. You can't build economy on innovation in an environment hostile to using results of innovation.
It doesn't matter. You forget that China's growth is export-driven; they don't have the local demand base to support those industries (since the bulk of the population still can't afford to buy it). And if they're not honoring the copyrights/patents/trademarks of other countries, they can't sell to *any* of those countries, since the laws are now interlocking.
Today is not like the old Cold War, where the West and the Soviets could say "fuck you" to each others patents because neither economic bloc traded with the other. China's only competitive advantage right now is cheap manual labor; if they lose this, the entire foundation of their growth so far turns to mud and the whole thing collapses.
By the time their export destinations stop buying stuff, they will have big enough local demand to compensate. China will probably come into position of post-WW2 USA within the next decade or two, except that this time around, it'll be US economy that'll be wrecked like Europe after the war.
Sorry but I don't believe that for a second. Because I've actually been down that road with XP. I can lock NT-based Windows down almost as much as any UNIX system is locked down by default. But the problem is that when you really do that, you throw a HUGE pile of software out of the window. Software that wants to write to its Program Files directory, software that wants to write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE branch of registry or even worse, software that wants to write to Windows directory itself. Sure, all of that software was written by idiots but home users will rather give up security than that software. And Microsoft knows that. That's why UAC and other fancy "security" features of Vista/7 don't go anywhere near where they actually have to in order to improve security.
Or maybe he needs to realize that he's talking to ignorant morons who won't look at the science even at gunpoint, much less understand it. Newsflash: Professor Steven Sherwood DIDN'T pull that claim out of monkey's ass. Go ahead and see for yourself what's the difference in ice cover between natural and human-caused warming.
Where are we supposed to get Windows-less machines to sell when most computers get Windows pre-installed even before they get shipped from the manufacturing plant?
You know, there's often very little difference between being completely wrong about the real world and being completely right about world inside ivory tower. Mainstream economic theories may be perfectly sound from purely mathematical point of view but that doesn't say anything about whether their base premises hold in the real world or not. When they don't hold, the theory is useless.
BTW, does anybody know about a textbook which builds economic theory as formal theory from base premises up? Most of economic textbooks I've seen contain too much handwaving for my taste.
You do realize that there was no such thing as a climate scientists until the IPCC came about and global warming activists wanted to restrict who was commenting on it right? Go ahead and show me some degree information on becoming a climate scientists from before 2000 or so. i would be really surprised if you could come close to it.
I see you didn't do your homework then. Here you go, a brife history of Climatology as a Profession. Climatology formed as a separate field of science in 1960s from several related fields where research on the topic was going on since early 20th century. A lot of important breakthroughs for climate science took place during 1930s and 1940 but it took a few more decades before those results from separate fields of science were pieced together into a comprehensive theory of the climate.
The climate scientists we have today are invented specifically for climate change and i would suggest that the first thing they are going to do is not publish something contradicting it and lose the rest of their career being blackballed.
Bullshit.
lol.. This is the entire problem with global warming, it's all "trust me", I know what 'I'm talking about". You don't see a problem there? How about if a used care salesman had that attitude?
No. You wouldn't like the answer because it involves a lot of research-related work on your part. There's no "trust me" in it, quite the contrary.
are you dense or something? The CRU emails were full of it. They blatantly dismissed research because it didn't fit into what they wanted.
Ok, but I'm still waiting for a specific example. Mind you, I've already seen a lot of alleged examples from the CRU emails but all of them were either deliberately misquoted or innocent scientific jargon misunderstood by laymen bloggers and journalists.
the models are broken and do not work for predictions. That's a plain and simple fact. They can only validate historical information if tweaked enough and have not even come close to accurately predicting future climate.
Really? I'd say that IPCC AR4 did pretty well forecasting the past decade and hindcasting 20 more years before that. And what do you mean by "tweaking"?
If all they reported was where the connection is, then who is going to stand up and bitch?
Those who did good science but were left out for no good reason, apparently. That is, if there was a significant number of such climate scientist, which there apparently isn't.
You tell me.
I'd tell you, but you wouldn't like that answer.
I mean seriously, when scientific work and criticisms of peer reviewed works are dismissed because of some 20 year old connection to an oil company or because someone isn't a climate scientists even thought analytic and statistical study is what they are qualified with and nit picking over.
Show me one example where climate scientists dismiss scientific paper on any other basis than flaws in its methodology. Analytic and statistical study are necessary but not sufficient qualifications to do climate science. There's a ton of stuff that one has to learn on top of that to actually do any meaningful work in climate science. You wouldn't trust engineer who designed car engines for most of his career to build a jet engine. You wouldn't trust a dentist to do surgery anywhere else but in your mouth. So why do you expect that scientists from fields unrelated to climate science would get climate science right at their first attempt? Those scientists from other fields who were asked to review climate science and spent a better part of a year learning it came to the conclusion that the evidence for man-made global warming is solid. Even those who were initially praised by deniers as the only impartial scientists "who will uncover the conspiracy for sure".
How about when an entire research team purposely leaves out data that throws their preconceived theory into question and causes numbers and crap not to line up.
There are valid reasons to leave out some data sets. For example when there's too much noise in it (garbage in, garbage out). Or when the data set is irrelevant because the paper focuses on specific geographic area and the data in question were taken too far away. Show me one example where a research team left out data they had without a valid reason.
How do you weed out the bad science and keep only the good science when modelling to date has not been able to accurately predict the state of climate change without going back and modifying the models to make historical data relevant- yet still isn't capable of an accurate forward looking prediction?
Just a second here. There's a difference between modifying algorithms in the model and running the same model with more accurate external inputs (solar power output, volcanic activity, CO2 levels). Even a perfect model will make wrong predictions when you feed it inaccurate inputs (again, garbage in, garbage out). And as far as I know, current climate models, although far from perfect, are actually pretty good when you feed them correct inputs. But predicting those inputs is a whole another story for other fields of science.
The IPCC was pretty much a political organization with the intent of showing a connection between global warming and humans.
Which would be downright impossible if the connection wasn't there in the first place. The IPCC doesn't do research. It was created to dig through heaps of third party research results and compile a summary for politicians. If they were feeding us bullshit, the climate scientists would be the first to stand up and complain. Hundreds of thousands of climate scientists across the world. Did they? No. The only people who stand up and claim that IPCC feeds us bullshit have degrees only in fields completely unrelated to climate science, if they have any at all.
Only the true believers refuse to see that most of climate science has been politicized when it comes to global warming
I have a question for you: How do you distinguish good science from bullshit in a topic which has been intentionally politicised by people who want the good science buried because there's an awful lot of money in burying it? Or do you think that we should completely give up all research on the whole topic just because somebody launched PR campaign against good science?
He thinks musicians are getting burned by the evil downloaders. I tell him they are like someone who builds a piece of furniture and puts it out on the curb, then complains it gets stolen.
Not stolen, it just gets sat on by random passer-bys. And sometimes gets used by a passer-by to build something completely new. Not to mention that the maker who's throwing temper tantrum about random passer-bys using his furniture himself used somebody else's furniture to make his own in the first place. That's the reality of creativity.
How is that supposed to be a "proof"? Scientists are less wrong today than they were yesterday. Creationists on the other hand are still exactly as wrong as the bronze age goat herders who came up with the creation fairy tale several thousand years ago.
My definition of "daily computing" is pretty far from Microsoft's target audience. I spend a lot of time working in command line because that's the best way to do what I need. So unless Microsoft builds some future version of Windows on UNIX base like Apple did its OS X, there's very little hope of me going back.
I might not be a gamer by my own standards from when I was a teenager and I don't keep up with the latest and greatest gaming hits but I still play a lot. Most of the games I play either have a native Linux version or run fine in Dosbox/Wine.
I for one don't care. I've decided to skip all future versions of Windows and switch to Linux back in 2006. So far, I haven't found a single good reason to change my mind.
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No, that one was about spreading fear so that people give up their freedom. Fear is not enough to recreate the events of 1930s in Germany. You need violent hatred for that.
Technically, yes. But I was talking more along the lines of preparing for war.
Remember how Nazi Germany solved their economic problems in 1930s? Social situation in the US is not yet bad enough to hijack the so-far-peaceful protests and spin enough hatred against some fictional threat with propaganda to start a war. But people are slowly getting desperate and they'll listen to anyone with a quick & easy solution pretty soon.
2013 (35 years since 1978) will be especially interesting because that's when first artists can take their copyright assignments back and walk away from their record label with their music back in their own hands. Not only the recording industry is running out of money, it'll also run out of music classics pretty soon.
When the talk starts with kids asking about programming games, it's not so hard steering it towards actual computer science. Because game engines are nothing but linear algebra, general algebra, graph theory, artificial intelligence and advanced image manipulation. That's pretty much computer science in a nutshell. Except that actual computer science is about inventing new stuff in those areas while games are mostly about applying what we already know.
BTW, I'm sure there's a lot of cool stuff you can do with real hacking. Compiling kernel is not very interesting to teenagers (except for ubergeeks who need no more convincing). But when they see some tedious task which would take them hours to solve and they sometimes run into it themselves solved in seconds, now THAT is cool. Show them for example how to download a webcomic using simple script or some other mass data manipulation they ask about themselves.
People who understand drawbacks of something they promote also know very well which examples they should avoid at all costs because that particular something won't work in that case. When they try to peddle their thing, they use examples where their thing makes everybody involved happy, seemingly look very similar but under the surface are actually fundamentally different (in other words: bait and switch). But when somebody says this kind of blatantly obvious nonsense, he has to be absolutely clueless. Probably from living in corporate ivory tower for too long.
Statutory licensing of patents doesn't really solve any of the major problems. Sure, it prevents patent hoarding and licensee discrimination but it doesn't stop patent trolls (just gives their victims one more chance to pay the troll a smaller fee), it doesn't prevent patent writers from being ridiulously vague about the actual implementation (see patent trolls) and it doesn't solve the problem of independent discovery (the single biggest patent problem out there; if this one was solved, patent trolls would go away forever).
It'd be more than enough to sue anybody who tries to build a bomb which uses hydrogen fusion at any point in the reaction. Hydrogen fusion doesn't have to be the only step and not even the last step in the explosion but if it's somewhere in the chain, it still falls under that ridiculously vague patent. That's what ridiculously vague patents are written for.
Well, his note makes it clear that he's completely ignorant about all the drawbacks of intellectual property systems. The example of violin and saxophone does make sense but what he says about patenting WWW is completely idiotic. In a nutshell, he says that if WWW had been patented with flexible enough licensing that doesn't cripple its use (probably as flexible as if it wasn't patented at all), we'd see huge investments into WWW innovations (basically what we've seen in the past 20 years even without patents).
The single most important thing to remember about intellectual property systems is that while they create incentives to make innovations, they also as a side-effect create environment hostile to actually getting those innovations into general use. When you're dealing with intellectual property, you can never have the former without the latter.
I was talking about immediate state of the economy, not about potential future development. Who knows what the Chinese decide to do with crashed US economy after they buy it from natives for a few beads.
Thus, they are rewarding accidents that would happen anyhow.
The problem is they're NOT rewarding those valuable accidents. They're TRYING to reward them by creating environment hostile to actually using the result. And it obviously doesn't work. You can't build economy on innovation in an environment hostile to using results of innovation.
It doesn't matter. You forget that China's growth is export-driven; they don't have the local demand base to support those industries (since the bulk of the population still can't afford to buy it). And if they're not honoring the copyrights/patents/trademarks of other countries, they can't sell to *any* of those countries, since the laws are now interlocking.
Today is not like the old Cold War, where the West and the Soviets could say "fuck you" to each others patents because neither economic bloc traded with the other. China's only competitive advantage right now is cheap manual labor; if they lose this, the entire foundation of their growth so far turns to mud and the whole thing collapses.
By the time their export destinations stop buying stuff, they will have big enough local demand to compensate. China will probably come into position of post-WW2 USA within the next decade or two, except that this time around, it'll be US economy that'll be wrecked like Europe after the war.
Since Vista, everyone runs as least-privileged,
Sorry but I don't believe that for a second. Because I've actually been down that road with XP. I can lock NT-based Windows down almost as much as any UNIX system is locked down by default. But the problem is that when you really do that, you throw a HUGE pile of software out of the window. Software that wants to write to its Program Files directory, software that wants to write to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE branch of registry or even worse, software that wants to write to Windows directory itself. Sure, all of that software was written by idiots but home users will rather give up security than that software. And Microsoft knows that. That's why UAC and other fancy "security" features of Vista/7 don't go anywhere near where they actually have to in order to improve security.
Yes, the almighty selective blindness. Guaranteed to protect you from 99.9% of all inconvenient scientific facts.
Or maybe he needs to realize that he's talking to ignorant morons who won't look at the science even at gunpoint, much less understand it. Newsflash: Professor Steven Sherwood DIDN'T pull that claim out of monkey's ass. Go ahead and see for yourself what's the difference in ice cover between natural and human-caused warming.
Where are we supposed to get Windows-less machines to sell when most computers get Windows pre-installed even before they get shipped from the manufacturing plant?
You know, there's often very little difference between being completely wrong about the real world and being completely right about world inside ivory tower. Mainstream economic theories may be perfectly sound from purely mathematical point of view but that doesn't say anything about whether their base premises hold in the real world or not. When they don't hold, the theory is useless.
BTW, does anybody know about a textbook which builds economic theory as formal theory from base premises up? Most of economic textbooks I've seen contain too much handwaving for my taste.
You do realize that there was no such thing as a climate scientists until the IPCC came about and global warming activists wanted to restrict who was commenting on it right? Go ahead and show me some degree information on becoming a climate scientists from before 2000 or so. i would be really surprised if you could come close to it.
I see you didn't do your homework then. Here you go, a brife history of Climatology as a Profession. Climatology formed as a separate field of science in 1960s from several related fields where research on the topic was going on since early 20th century. A lot of important breakthroughs for climate science took place during 1930s and 1940 but it took a few more decades before those results from separate fields of science were pieced together into a comprehensive theory of the climate.
The climate scientists we have today are invented specifically for climate change and i would suggest that the first thing they are going to do is not publish something contradicting it and lose the rest of their career being blackballed.
Bullshit.
lol.. This is the entire problem with global warming, it's all "trust me", I know what 'I'm talking about". You don't see a problem there? How about if a used care salesman had that attitude?
No. You wouldn't like the answer because it involves a lot of research-related work on your part. There's no "trust me" in it, quite the contrary.
are you dense or something? The CRU emails were full of it. They blatantly dismissed research because it didn't fit into what they wanted.
Ok, but I'm still waiting for a specific example. Mind you, I've already seen a lot of alleged examples from the CRU emails but all of them were either deliberately misquoted or innocent scientific jargon misunderstood by laymen bloggers and journalists.
the models are broken and do not work for predictions. That's a plain and simple fact. They can only validate historical information if tweaked enough and have not even come close to accurately predicting future climate.
Really? I'd say that IPCC AR4 did pretty well forecasting the past decade and hindcasting 20 more years before that. And what do you mean by "tweaking"?
If all they reported was where the connection is, then who is going to stand up and bitch?
Those who did good science but were left out for no good reason, apparently. That is, if there was a significant number of such climate scientist, which there apparently isn't.
You tell me.
I'd tell you, but you wouldn't like that answer.
I mean seriously, when scientific work and criticisms of peer reviewed works are dismissed because of some 20 year old connection to an oil company or because someone isn't a climate scientists even thought analytic and statistical study is what they are qualified with and nit picking over.
Show me one example where climate scientists dismiss scientific paper on any other basis than flaws in its methodology. Analytic and statistical study are necessary but not sufficient qualifications to do climate science. There's a ton of stuff that one has to learn on top of that to actually do any meaningful work in climate science. You wouldn't trust engineer who designed car engines for most of his career to build a jet engine. You wouldn't trust a dentist to do surgery anywhere else but in your mouth. So why do you expect that scientists from fields unrelated to climate science would get climate science right at their first attempt? Those scientists from other fields who were asked to review climate science and spent a better part of a year learning it came to the conclusion that the evidence for man-made global warming is solid. Even those who were initially praised by deniers as the only impartial scientists "who will uncover the conspiracy for sure".
How about when an entire research team purposely leaves out data that throws their preconceived theory into question and causes numbers and crap not to line up.
There are valid reasons to leave out some data sets. For example when there's too much noise in it (garbage in, garbage out). Or when the data set is irrelevant because the paper focuses on specific geographic area and the data in question were taken too far away. Show me one example where a research team left out data they had without a valid reason.
How do you weed out the bad science and keep only the good science when modelling to date has not been able to accurately predict the state of climate change without going back and modifying the models to make historical data relevant- yet still isn't capable of an accurate forward looking prediction?
Just a second here. There's a difference between modifying algorithms in the model and running the same model with more accurate external inputs (solar power output, volcanic activity, CO2 levels). Even a perfect model will make wrong predictions when you feed it inaccurate inputs (again, garbage in, garbage out). And as far as I know, current climate models, although far from perfect, are actually pretty good when you feed them correct inputs. But predicting those inputs is a whole another story for other fields of science.
The IPCC was pretty much a political organization with the intent of showing a connection between global warming and humans.
Which would be downright impossible if the connection wasn't there in the first place. The IPCC doesn't do research. It was created to dig through heaps of third party research results and compile a summary for politicians. If they were feeding us bullshit, the climate scientists would be the first to stand up and complain. Hundreds of thousands of climate scientists across the world. Did they? No. The only people who stand up and claim that IPCC feeds us bullshit have degrees only in fields completely unrelated to climate science, if they have any at all.
Only the true believers refuse to see that most of climate science has been politicized when it comes to global warming
I have a question for you: How do you distinguish good science from bullshit in a topic which has been intentionally politicised by people who want the good science buried because there's an awful lot of money in burying it? Or do you think that we should completely give up all research on the whole topic just because somebody launched PR campaign against good science?
He thinks musicians are getting burned by the evil downloaders. I tell him they are like someone who builds a piece of furniture and puts it out on the curb, then complains it gets stolen.
Not stolen, it just gets sat on by random passer-bys. And sometimes gets used by a passer-by to build something completely new. Not to mention that the maker who's throwing temper tantrum about random passer-bys using his furniture himself used somebody else's furniture to make his own in the first place. That's the reality of creativity.
How is that supposed to be a "proof"? Scientists are less wrong today than they were yesterday. Creationists on the other hand are still exactly as wrong as the bronze age goat herders who came up with the creation fairy tale several thousand years ago.
My definition of "daily computing" is pretty far from Microsoft's target audience. I spend a lot of time working in command line because that's the best way to do what I need. So unless Microsoft builds some future version of Windows on UNIX base like Apple did its OS X, there's very little hope of me going back.
I might not be a gamer by my own standards from when I was a teenager and I don't keep up with the latest and greatest gaming hits but I still play a lot. Most of the games I play either have a native Linux version or run fine in Dosbox/Wine.
I for one don't care. I've decided to skip all future versions of Windows and switch to Linux back in 2006. So far, I haven't found a single good reason to change my mind.