Also note that doing a climate-free order-of-magnitude estimate of whether or not the changes in solar output are sufficient to account for the changes in Earth's average temperature is, at best, a homework problem for an undergraduate student taking an introductory course in thermodynamics. (Even an engineer could do it.)
A brief primer on qualitative versus quantitative argument.
Qualitative: The Earth, Mars, and Venus are all getting warming. The only apparent link they share is that, ultimately, all of their heat comes from the Sun. Therefore, the output of the Sun must be increasing.
Quantitative: We should measure the changes in solar output, compare this to the temperature changes on all three planets, model the very different climates of all three planets, and see where this analysis leads us.
Simpler quantitative: Hey, we should just directly measure solar output using space robots.
It turns out that the changes in solar output are much too small to have a noticeable effect on any of the three planets' temperatures. So, as you might guess, the causes of the planets' temperature changes are unrelated. Note that if you are so coarse as to categorize a planet's temperature change as one of three things: warming, cooling, or staying the same, we have enough planets in the solar system with something resembling an atmosphere that finding two or three planets trending in the same direction is highly likely. Not surprisingly, two things trending in the same direction do not necessarily share a root cause.
The climate change thing is sold as a whole package, a "You believe all of this or you are a DENIER!" kind of thing.
Only if you get your information solely from television news and Slashdot comments.
However it is really a series of arguments, and at each level someone might have questions.
If by "series of arguments" you mean "body of experimental and theoretical research work", then yes. It's important to keep in mind that scientific results aren't based on qualitative arguments, but on quantitative evidence. You might only see the statement "because of X, then Y", in the news, but that's not the entirety of the work. The work that eventually leads to global warming is, at the very least, decades worth of research by numerous scientists.
I mean the most basic is "The Earth is getting warmer, outside of any currently known cycles and over a longer period of time." Ok, pretty strong evidence here, but still there is things to look in to. The temperature recording stations have not been controlled and monitored the way we might hope, the record is not as accurate as we would like. Probably nothing that affects any results but in good science you don't write shit off just because it might be inconvenient.
No, indeed you don't. There are lots of ways to study measurement devices that are known to be biased (or, for that matter, not already known to be biased), quantify the influence of the bias, and handle the resulting error. Not surprisingly, these methods have been applied to exactly the data you refer to. (If I recall correctly, if you discard the data from all known-biased stations, you get a statistically-identical result.)
Newton's gravity is much more accurate than that, and even Newton's mechanics and Maxwell's electrodynamics, while technically wrong, are much more accurate than 99% in nearly every circumstance they're used.
Not surprisingly, people have studied this considerably and don't entirely agree. But basing predictions off of a graph with all of five peaks and no resolution to speak of is unwise. The variability in spacing between the 100 kyr glacial cycles, about 10 kyr, is roughly as long as all of human history. The climate change labelled "global warming" is interesting on a time scale of about 100 years. A 100-year timespan wouldn't even show up on that graph. So, "we're due for another ice age any time now" is perhaps true if thousands or tens of thousands of years qualifies as "any time now". They're entirely different time scales.
The Wikipedia on Ice Ages, incidentally, has a brief and more or less accurate discussion on different predictions for how long our current interglacial period may last. It's anywhere from a thousand years to 58,000 or so.
Airport security checks are to prevent such things from getting on to a plane. If their purpose was to keep explosives out of the U.S., you wouldn't have the security checks on domestic flights.
The analytical methods are published. The code is often unpublished, but there's limited benefit to publishing the code for purposes of validating their findings -- you shouldn't reuse the same code, lest you include a systematic error. You should have new code that performs the same documented methods.
If your complaint is that it requires being a scientist in the field to have the knowledge necessary to reproduce a scientific result, then that's true.
Ever notice that anytime an interesting piece of science or technology is talked about, someone complains about how people say "we see this having applications in about five years", even when it's not really relevant?
They're "papers", but that's not what he said. He said, "business records are not your personal papers and effects". That is, business records maintained by a business B concerning that business's dealings with person P are the property of the business. They are not the personal papers of person P. Now, the person's business records of their dealings with the business B are P's property.
It's generally acceptable to call general-purpose computers Turing complete, even though they're technically not, as they lack infinite memory. Strictly, they're simply linear bounded automata complete.
They don't regulate the volume of your television.
What they do is regulate, through the FCC, the characteristics of the signals that transmitted over the publicly owned and managed "television" block of the electromagnetic spectrum. Precedent suggests that, at least among people who have studied law, this is within their powers (since the FCC's been regulating that for a while now).
The majority of U.S. debt isn't really in a form where we really directly pay interest on loans and maintain an outstanding principal. It's primarily in T-bills and T-notes, which mature in 10 years or less. T-bills don't even really pay interest per se -- you buy them at lower-than-face-value and then can redeem them later for face value. We just maintain an outstanding debt by constantly borrowing (in the form of issuing securities) to cover paying our debt.
Sure, it's theoretically possible for us to default, though it's unlikely short of a government overthrow. But default would have such a big impact on the world economy that almost all of your available alternative investments would also be affected. So the risk of Treasury securities relative to the risk of any other possible investment is low. (Some of our biggest investors are also our biggest trade partners, like China. If we're in a position where we can't pay our debts, our economy is so bad that China's export economy will seriously suffer. So the risk of the US defaulting already was affecting them.)
TFA specifically indicates that they don't do something as straightforward as is described (which would be sentiment analysis). Instead, they implemented some algorithm that lowers the ranking of some merchant websites that, according to them, provide a poor user experience. No further details on how their algorithm behaves are given. It doesn't even indicate that people giving poor reviews of the merchant or website factor in to the ranking change at all. (The only part where this comes in to play is their mention that many websites hosting reviews use rel=nofollow to avoid promoting any linked-to websites, which is preexisting behavior.)
Note that he didn't just jailbreak his own phone. He was purchasing discounted prepaid phones from a company, jailbreaking them, and then selling them.
I don't know if this falls under the text of the exemption: "(2) Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset."
Regardless, he apparently pled guilty, so there was no decision on the matter by a jury.
Slashdot Mirror
Contracts are legally binding.
Also note that doing a climate-free order-of-magnitude estimate of whether or not the changes in solar output are sufficient to account for the changes in Earth's average temperature is, at best, a homework problem for an undergraduate student taking an introductory course in thermodynamics. (Even an engineer could do it.)
A brief primer on qualitative versus quantitative argument.
Qualitative: The Earth, Mars, and Venus are all getting warming. The only apparent link they share is that, ultimately, all of their heat comes from the Sun. Therefore, the output of the Sun must be increasing.
Quantitative: We should measure the changes in solar output, compare this to the temperature changes on all three planets, model the very different climates of all three planets, and see where this analysis leads us.
Simpler quantitative: Hey, we should just directly measure solar output using space robots.
It turns out that the changes in solar output are much too small to have a noticeable effect on any of the three planets' temperatures. So, as you might guess, the causes of the planets' temperature changes are unrelated. Note that if you are so coarse as to categorize a planet's temperature change as one of three things: warming, cooling, or staying the same, we have enough planets in the solar system with something resembling an atmosphere that finding two or three planets trending in the same direction is highly likely. Not surprisingly, two things trending in the same direction do not necessarily share a root cause.
The climate change thing is sold as a whole package, a "You believe all of this or you are a DENIER!" kind of thing.
Only if you get your information solely from television news and Slashdot comments.
However it is really a series of arguments, and at each level someone might have questions.
If by "series of arguments" you mean "body of experimental and theoretical research work", then yes. It's important to keep in mind that scientific results aren't based on qualitative arguments, but on quantitative evidence. You might only see the statement "because of X, then Y", in the news, but that's not the entirety of the work. The work that eventually leads to global warming is, at the very least, decades worth of research by numerous scientists.
I mean the most basic is "The Earth is getting warmer, outside of any currently known cycles and over a longer period of time." Ok, pretty strong evidence here, but still there is things to look in to. The temperature recording stations have not been controlled and monitored the way we might hope, the record is not as accurate as we would like. Probably nothing that affects any results but in good science you don't write shit off just because it might be inconvenient.
No, indeed you don't. There are lots of ways to study measurement devices that are known to be biased (or, for that matter, not already known to be biased), quantify the influence of the bias, and handle the resulting error. Not surprisingly, these methods have been applied to exactly the data you refer to. (If I recall correctly, if you discard the data from all known-biased stations, you get a statistically-identical result.)
Never mind Bacon or Descartes.
Newton's gravity is much more accurate than that, and even Newton's mechanics and Maxwell's electrodynamics, while technically wrong, are much more accurate than 99% in nearly every circumstance they're used.
Not surprisingly, people have studied this considerably and don't entirely agree. But basing predictions off of a graph with all of five peaks and no resolution to speak of is unwise. The variability in spacing between the 100 kyr glacial cycles, about 10 kyr, is roughly as long as all of human history. The climate change labelled "global warming" is interesting on a time scale of about 100 years. A 100-year timespan wouldn't even show up on that graph. So, "we're due for another ice age any time now" is perhaps true if thousands or tens of thousands of years qualifies as "any time now". They're entirely different time scales.
The Wikipedia on Ice Ages, incidentally, has a brief and more or less accurate discussion on different predictions for how long our current interglacial period may last. It's anywhere from a thousand years to 58,000 or so.
At least, they don't plan to sell it to (many) programmers who also are unable to make their own Caps Lock key.
Actually, if you're #ifdef'ing macros that are reasonably visible, Xcode will do properly-capitalized autocomplete on them.
Airport security checks are to prevent such things from getting on to a plane. If their purpose was to keep explosives out of the U.S., you wouldn't have the security checks on domestic flights.
The analytical methods are published. The code is often unpublished, but there's limited benefit to publishing the code for purposes of validating their findings -- you shouldn't reuse the same code, lest you include a systematic error. You should have new code that performs the same documented methods.
If your complaint is that it requires being a scientist in the field to have the knowledge necessary to reproduce a scientific result, then that's true.
How do they work?
Ever notice that anytime an interesting piece of science or technology is talked about, someone complains about how people say "we see this having applications in about five years", even when it's not really relevant?
Nonprofits have greater latitude in discriminating when hiring.
They're "papers", but that's not what he said. He said, "business records are not your personal papers and effects". That is, business records maintained by a business B concerning that business's dealings with person P are the property of the business. They are not the personal papers of person P. Now, the person's business records of their dealings with the business B are P's property.
It's generally acceptable to call general-purpose computers Turing complete, even though they're technically not, as they lack infinite memory. Strictly, they're simply linear bounded automata complete.
They don't regulate the volume of your television.
What they do is regulate, through the FCC, the characteristics of the signals that transmitted over the publicly owned and managed "television" block of the electromagnetic spectrum. Precedent suggests that, at least among people who have studied law, this is within their powers (since the FCC's been regulating that for a while now).
The majority of U.S. debt isn't really in a form where we really directly pay interest on loans and maintain an outstanding principal. It's primarily in T-bills and T-notes, which mature in 10 years or less. T-bills don't even really pay interest per se -- you buy them at lower-than-face-value and then can redeem them later for face value. We just maintain an outstanding debt by constantly borrowing (in the form of issuing securities) to cover paying our debt.
Sure, it's theoretically possible for us to default, though it's unlikely short of a government overthrow. But default would have such a big impact on the world economy that almost all of your available alternative investments would also be affected. So the risk of Treasury securities relative to the risk of any other possible investment is low. (Some of our biggest investors are also our biggest trade partners, like China. If we're in a position where we can't pay our debts, our economy is so bad that China's export economy will seriously suffer. So the risk of the US defaulting already was affecting them.)
We pay the loans back constantly, and they routinely choose to reinvest. Plus, compared to other possible investments, it's extremely low risk.
To be fair, the foreign interests actually make money off of the loans they extend to the U.S. government.
Hopefully he means, "the economic divide between the rich and the poor in the U.S. is the largest in recent history", which is more or less true.
Certainly when the king ostensibly owns everything and is above the law, there is a bigger divide.
TFA specifically indicates that they don't do something as straightforward as is described (which would be sentiment analysis). Instead, they implemented some algorithm that lowers the ranking of some merchant websites that, according to them, provide a poor user experience. No further details on how their algorithm behaves are given. It doesn't even indicate that people giving poor reviews of the merchant or website factor in to the ranking change at all. (The only part where this comes in to play is their mention that many websites hosting reviews use rel=nofollow to avoid promoting any linked-to websites, which is preexisting behavior.)
That would be sentiment analysis, which TFA specifically mentions they don't use because of exactly the problem you describe.
Note that he didn't just jailbreak his own phone. He was purchasing discounted prepaid phones from a company, jailbreaking them, and then selling them.
I don't know if this falls under the text of the exemption:
"(2) Computer programs that enable wireless telephone handsets to execute software applications, where circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of enabling interoperability of such applications, when they have been lawfully obtained, with computer programs on the telephone handset."
Regardless, he apparently pled guilty, so there was no decision on the matter by a jury.
The physical objects people generally refer to as routers often care about DNS.