> The relexive denial that anything is wrong shocks me. I don't understand it.
I suspect it's because a large plurality of Slashdot readers are what The Register once called "West Coast Libertarians", who basically think the role of government is to set the policies that will let them get the richest the fastest, all other considerations be damned.
> While environmentalism is not a bad thing by itself, most hard core environmentalists are much more interested in political-economic changes than they are in actually 'saving the earth'.
Did you discover this by reading their minds, or by reading their diaries?
Also, even if we suppose what you say is true, what do the political views of a "hard core" have to do with the reality (or lack thereof) of global warming?
> Once socialism and communism were widely regarded as failures, the leftists needed some other method of advocating their anti capitalist beliefs. What better way to bring down capitalism than through extreme environmentalism. Make it too expensive and too difficult to produce anything or even to go about our daily lives, and industrialized society will crumble.
FYI, neither socialism nor communism have historically been against industrialized society. In fact, communist countries tend to attempt brutal plans for catching up in industrialization. Surely you've heard of the "five year plan"?
> Once again, I'm not saying all environmentalists have this goal in mind, and I for one don't want corporations to be able to legally dump mercury in a river or anything like that, but many hard core enviro-freaks are also die hard socialists.
And many hard-core fuck-the-environment types are Republicans. Did you have a point?
> Is Global Warming a scientific concern or a political objective?
Is the denial of global warming a scientific concern or a political objective?
> I often ask that question because whenever the global warming scenario is painted, I only hear the bad effects, never the good. That makes me wonder about those doing the painting. A scientific discourse would show good and bad, and be objective.
So, would a scientific discourse about the effects of having a large asteroid crash into Kansas also show both good and bad?
(OK, I suppose global warming will be great for tropical fish... Happy now?)
> Back in the 1970's the same global warming scaremongers were telling us that a new global ice age was coming.
The very same people? Really?
> There is some evidence for the earth's warming, but the evidence is far from clean and many observations (such as (corrected) satellite data and weather balloons) show no warming. Most of the climate change predictions are based on computer models. Given our inability to forecast weather accurately at any interval, I doubt very much the computers can handle the much greater complexities of climate change. Certainly more research is warranted and we may yet find some links to human activity that need to be addressed.
So, do you dispute the physics of greenhouse gasses, or the fact that we've been dumping them into the atmosphere at an astonishing rate since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution?
> But "Global warming" as such as is a political program not science. WHen the New York Times famously said "Blame global warming for the blizzard" (notwithstanding the huge number of major weather events throughtout human history) it has to make you wonder.
The primary effect of global warming is more thermal energy in the atmosphere. That doesn't equate to a uniform temperature increase in all places at all times. Climate is a wonderfully complex phenomenon. For example, if global warming melts the Greenland ice sheets, the flux of cold water into the North Atlantic might shut down the Gulf Stream and send northwestern Europe into a local ice age. (It's warmer than it has any right to expect, due to the Gulf Stream.) The inconvenient freeze would still be global warming, and still catastrophic to the well-being of millions of humans and animals.
> But the use of hysteria and scaremongering to sell a political agenda is wrong IMO.
Who says it's a political agenda? What if it's a sober warning rather than scaremongering?
> I just can't help but picture Darl, locked in his office, giggling his ass off while watching the stock ticker on SCO go up everytime he released some FUD.
And lecturing his assistants on the importance of maintaining the purity of their precious bodily fluids.
> SCO has gone to far now to simply back off, or admit they were wrong. They have invested their whole business in this, and have no option but to go forward and proceed with litigation. If they back of now they loose face and the business will probably crash.
Like they care. We're not really dealing with SCO, we're dealing with The Canopy Group, which chased the ambulance, bought the wounded body, and threw it into passing traffic in hopes of suing on the body's behalf.
SCO is nothing more than Canopy Group's dirty bomb, deployed to extort money under the threat of wanton destruction. CG isn't going to shed any tears over the fate of the bomb.
> You know, painful as it is to those who pay the price, one can make the argument that this trend will, in the long run, help to minimize the economic disparities between the "developed" countries and the "third world." And that can't be bad for international security.
Until the former "haves" start using military force to maintain the former disequilibrium.
> Very interesting - If corroborated, then this data presents a huge stumbling block for the standard evolutionary "Big Bang" theory. As any good evolutionist knows
Thank you for trolling.
The article does not call the Big Bang into question.
BTW, evolution and the big bang are separate theories; neither relies on the existence of the other.
> This observation of thousands of galaxies SO FAR OUT from the assumed center of the "Big Bang" doesn't make sense, since the matter comprising those galaxies (being the furthest out from center and thus having the greatest initial velocity and energy), should be the MOST CHAOTIC, not the most ORGANIZED, as they apparently are (being in string formation). Obviously this is not the appropriate forum for an ultra-detailed discussion of the physics in the theorized Big Bang
Obviously not, given your lack of understanding of cosmology.
> suffice it to say that this observation stands to flip Big Bang Science upside down and inside out.
Actually, here's what the discoverer actuall said -
"To explain our results the dark matter clouds that lie in strings must have formed galaxies, while the dark matter clouds elsewhere have not done so. We've no idea why this happened - it's not what the models predict," Dr Francis said.
Doesn't sound like he's discarding the Big Bang to me.
> This brings to my mind ponderings of the Intelligent Design, or "ID", argument, which you can read more about here at LeaderU. I agree with the ID proponents - the more we learn about the universe, the more obvious it becomes that it takes more "faith" to believe that that universe was created by chance than it does to believe that SOME outside, intelligent force "caused" it to be (the details of which are certainly open to debate).
What, precisely, about an old string of galaxies suggests intelligent intervention?
Are intelligent designers created by chance? If not, who designs them?
What makes you interpret this as a nail into the Big Bang's heart? There's nothing in the article that suggests that the Big Bang didn't happen. In fact it gives the known date of the Big Bang.
The scientist comments -
To explain our results the dark matter clouds that lie in strings must have formed galaxies, while the dark matter clouds elsewhere have not done so. We've no idea why this happened - it's not what the models predict
> > The team were refused time on a US telescope because many American astronomers believed the observations were technically impossible
> Refusing time to a group of astronomers who think they may have found something new is not so different from burning heretics who claimed the world was a sphere.
It's not like there are enough telescopes for everyone to get all the time they want. Sometimes a judgement call is required, and sometimes judgement calls are going to be wrong.
It's not like these people have been labeled heretics and refused time on any telescope. Otherwise we wouldn't be hearing these results.
> Could it also be a factor in Evolution? Increased exposure to radiation causing a period of increased mutations in the surviving species?
The opportunities for species to radiate into vacated niches would probably have a much bigger evolutionary impact than the effects of a short-term boost in mutation rates.
> Perhaps the real plan is to give them glowing red eyes and smoke coming out of their mouths, to scare the opposition. Now that would we worth doing...
And on lonely night watches, guards can pass the time debating whether they really have wings, or only metaphorically have wings.
>...has just awarded a $2.5 million contract to build a prototype of a large robot dog that would follow soldiers into battle and carry food, ammunition, and medical supplies.
When the early prototype mysteriously faild to deliver the food, an investigation revealed that they had foolishly based the design on Scooby Doo.
> And even though it might be interesting to find out what happended to Beagle 2 there isn't much scientific value in trying to investigate what happened to an object sent from earth compared to surveying the planet itself. And the only investigation the rover could do is to take pictures since it's equipped to drill holes in rocks and analyse them. Not pick up pieces of a probe.
Maybe Beagle 2 already 'drilled' a nice big hole for it?
> I believe many photocopiers have somewhat similar detection and preventitive measures for people trying to copy U.S. currency (printers too I have heard). Really this is one of those things that I know people will gripe about, but I cannot see a single real scenario where this truly makes a problem for anyone.
Sounds like they're just equipping counterfeiters with a nice set of tools for testing the quality of their fakes. If you can scan/Photoshop/print it, you need to work on it some more...
> Science is a type of belief system. [...] No different than Christanity, Muslim, Sheeaboo, Me day beliefs.
Actually, science differs from all those because it relies on a built-in system of sanity checks. That's the essence of the so-called "scientific method". It's also why science is self-correcting, unlike belief systems, which are self-propagating. In science you change the conclusions to fit the facts; in belief systems you change the facts to fit the belief.
> Why the hell should a paper need to be reviewed by other scientists to be considered valid?
In principle, you can revolutionize the scientific world by a Slashdot post that gets modded down to -1. But don't expect that to happen.
The peer review process doesn't certify that a paper is 'valid', nor does the lack of peer review certify that it isn't. Peer review is just a screening to make sure you've done your homework. Did you neglect to consider an important paper on the topic? Did you misinterpret the conclusions of other publications? Are your own arguments sound? Does your data actually support your conclusions?
Passing peer review doesn't mean your work is correct; it merely means that it has been screened for the most glaring sort of errors. The real debate over your work is the additional literature it spawns, whether in agreement or in dispute. (Ultimately, the "value" of a paper is the number of other papers that cite it.)
Papers that get published in peer reviewed journals are going to get cited in future papers, and it's useful to screen out the most defective ones before publishing them. Also, the most common result of a rejection is that you get feedback specifying the problems the reviewers had with it, so you re-work the paper and submit it again. If you're not a kook or an incompetent, and unless the work is intrinsically uninteresting, you will probably get it published sooner or later.
> Especially considering how this is a THEORY... and for now, one that can't be proven.
Theories are the end product of science. There's nothing more upscale than a theory, and none of them are proven.
> einstein suffered terribly in school, guess that makes him a moron too, eh?
While popular culture holds that Einstein was a drop-out, a lowly patent-office clerk, and an outsider who stood the scientific world on his head, he was in fact the equivalent of a modern PhD candidate in the last year of a PhD program. In 1900 he graduated with the equivalent of a bachelor's degree or higher, qualified to teach both math and physics at the university level. When he published his famous papers in 1905 he was what we now call an ABD ("all but dissertation"), and in fact he submitted his dissertation On a new determination of molecular dimensions that same year, earning a PhD in physics at U. Zurich.
> After a very reachable number of bits, you end up needing more power then exists in the universe, or a computer bigger then the universe, to crack the encryption
Right, but that number's bigger than 48 bits, right?. (Refer back to the grandparent post.)
> "Progress will continue exponentially forever" is a fallacy.
Yep. That's why I qualified my statement with "So long as we ride the Moore Curve".
But how many bits do you think we need to use, to be secure in perpetuity?
> OK, I'm not saying that Microsoft's totally without guilt here but just how far do people think they need to go with regards to securing passworded files? 48-bit encryption? 128-bit? 160-bit with triple DES? At what stage does the encryption become overkill?
So long as we ride the Moore Curve, overkill degrades to underkill at a rate of about one bit per 18 months. So if you want your document to be secure in perpetuity, you'd better use a lot of bits.
> Do you seriously doubt the existence of an infinite God when confronted with the silliness these "great minds" babble about?
Theism would gain much more respect if it didn't rely so heavily on non sequiturs for its supporting arguments.
Personally, I have more respect for someone who says "I believe it because that's what I was taught as a kid" than for someone who says "I believe it because of $BADARGUMENT".
Slashdot Mirror
> The relexive denial that anything is wrong shocks me. I don't understand it.
I suspect it's because a large plurality of Slashdot readers are what The Register once called "West Coast Libertarians", who basically think the role of government is to set the policies that will let them get the richest the fastest, all other considerations be damned.
> While environmentalism is not a bad thing by itself, most hard core environmentalists are much more interested in political-economic changes than they are in actually 'saving the earth'.
Did you discover this by reading their minds, or by reading their diaries?
Also, even if we suppose what you say is true, what do the political views of a "hard core" have to do with the reality (or lack thereof) of global warming?
> Once socialism and communism were widely regarded as failures, the leftists needed some other method of advocating their anti capitalist beliefs. What better way to bring down capitalism than through extreme environmentalism. Make it too expensive and too difficult to produce anything or even to go about our daily lives, and industrialized society will crumble.
FYI, neither socialism nor communism have historically been against industrialized society. In fact, communist countries tend to attempt brutal plans for catching up in industrialization. Surely you've heard of the "five year plan"?
> Once again, I'm not saying all environmentalists have this goal in mind, and I for one don't want corporations to be able to legally dump mercury in a river or anything like that, but many hard core enviro-freaks are also die hard socialists.
And many hard-core fuck-the-environment types are Republicans. Did you have a point?
> Is Global Warming a scientific concern or a political objective?
Is the denial of global warming a scientific concern or a political objective?
> I often ask that question because whenever the global warming scenario is painted, I only hear the bad effects, never the good. That makes me wonder about those doing the painting. A scientific discourse would show good and bad, and be objective.
So, would a scientific discourse about the effects of having a large asteroid crash into Kansas also show both good and bad?
(OK, I suppose global warming will be great for tropical fish... Happy now?)
> Back in the 1970's the same global warming scaremongers were telling us that a new global ice age was coming.
The very same people? Really?
> There is some evidence for the earth's warming, but the evidence is far from clean and many observations (such as (corrected) satellite data and weather balloons) show no warming. Most of the climate change predictions are based on computer models. Given our inability to forecast weather accurately at any interval, I doubt very much the computers can handle the much greater complexities of climate change. Certainly more research is warranted and we may yet find some links to human activity that need to be addressed.
So, do you dispute the physics of greenhouse gasses, or the fact that we've been dumping them into the atmosphere at an astonishing rate since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution?
> But "Global warming" as such as is a political program not science. WHen the New York Times famously said "Blame global warming for the blizzard" (notwithstanding the huge number of major weather events throughtout human history) it has to make you wonder.
The primary effect of global warming is more thermal energy in the atmosphere. That doesn't equate to a uniform temperature increase in all places at all times. Climate is a wonderfully complex phenomenon. For example, if global warming melts the Greenland ice sheets, the flux of cold water into the North Atlantic might shut down the Gulf Stream and send northwestern Europe into a local ice age. (It's warmer than it has any right to expect, due to the Gulf Stream.) The inconvenient freeze would still be global warming, and still catastrophic to the well-being of millions of humans and animals.
> But the use of hysteria and scaremongering to sell a political agenda is wrong IMO.
Who says it's a political agenda? What if it's a sober warning rather than scaremongering?
> I just can't help but picture Darl, locked in his office, giggling his ass off while watching the stock ticker on SCO go up everytime he released some FUD.
And lecturing his assistants on the importance of maintaining the purity of their precious bodily fluids.
> SCO has gone to far now to simply back off, or admit they were wrong. They have invested their whole business in this, and have no option but to go forward and proceed with litigation. If they back of now they loose face and the business will probably crash.
Like they care. We're not really dealing with SCO, we're dealing with The Canopy Group, which chased the ambulance, bought the wounded body, and threw it into passing traffic in hopes of suing on the body's behalf.
SCO is nothing more than Canopy Group's dirty bomb, deployed to extort money under the threat of wanton destruction. CG isn't going to shed any tears over the fate of the bomb.
> You know, painful as it is to those who pay the price, one can make the argument that this trend will, in the long run, help to minimize the economic disparities between the "developed" countries and the "third world." And that can't be bad for international security.
Until the former "haves" start using military force to maintain the former disequilibrium.
Doesn't sound like he's discarding the Big Bang to me.> Very interesting - If corroborated, then this data presents a huge stumbling block for the standard evolutionary "Big Bang" theory. As any good evolutionist knows
Thank you for trolling.
The article does not call the Big Bang into question.
BTW, evolution and the big bang are separate theories; neither relies on the existence of the other.
> This observation of thousands of galaxies SO FAR OUT from the assumed center of the "Big Bang" doesn't make sense, since the matter comprising those galaxies (being the furthest out from center and thus having the greatest initial velocity and energy), should be the MOST CHAOTIC, not the most ORGANIZED, as they apparently are (being in string formation). Obviously this is not the appropriate forum for an ultra-detailed discussion of the physics in the theorized Big Bang
Obviously not, given your lack of understanding of cosmology.
> suffice it to say that this observation stands to flip Big Bang Science upside down and inside out.
Actually, here's what the discoverer actuall said -
> This brings to my mind ponderings of the Intelligent Design, or "ID", argument, which you can read more about here at LeaderU. I agree with the ID proponents - the more we learn about the universe, the more obvious it becomes that it takes more "faith" to believe that that universe was created by chance than it does to believe that SOME outside, intelligent force "caused" it to be (the details of which are certainly open to debate).
What, precisely, about an old string of galaxies suggests intelligent intervention?
Are intelligent designers created by chance? If not, who designs them?
Want to troll again?
Does that sound like a denial of the Big Bang?What makes you interpret this as a nail into the Big Bang's heart? There's nothing in the article that suggests that the Big Bang didn't happen. In fact it gives the known date of the Big Bang.
The scientist comments -
> if you have other apps with problems, please post about them below.
How 'bout if I just give you a link to Bugzilla?
> > The team were refused time on a US telescope because many American astronomers believed the observations were technically impossible
> Refusing time to a group of astronomers who think they may have found something new is not so different from burning heretics who claimed the world was a sphere.
It's not like there are enough telescopes for everyone to get all the time they want. Sometimes a judgement call is required, and sometimes judgement calls are going to be wrong.
It's not like these people have been labeled heretics and refused time on any telescope. Otherwise we wouldn't be hearing these results.
> Could it also be a factor in Evolution? Increased exposure to radiation causing a period of increased mutations in the surviving species?
The opportunities for species to radiate into vacated niches would probably have a much bigger evolutionary impact than the effects of a short-term boost in mutation rates.
> Perhaps the real plan is to give them glowing red eyes and smoke coming out of their mouths, to scare the opposition. Now that would we worth doing...
And on lonely night watches, guards can pass the time debating whether they really have wings, or only metaphorically have wings.
>
When the early prototype mysteriously faild to deliver the food, an investigation revealed that they had foolishly based the design on Scooby Doo.
> Work on robot soldiers, and save yourself all of the hassle of killing people at all. That would be a lot more fun to watch on CNN anyway.
I used to watch it on PBS.
> And even though it might be interesting to find out what happended to Beagle 2 there isn't much scientific value in trying to investigate what happened to an object sent from earth compared to surveying the planet itself. And the only investigation the rover could do is to take pictures since it's equipped to drill holes in rocks and analyse them. Not pick up pieces of a probe.
Maybe Beagle 2 already 'drilled' a nice big hole for it?
> I believe many photocopiers have somewhat similar detection and preventitive measures for people trying to copy U.S. currency (printers too I have heard). Really this is one of those things that I know people will gripe about, but I cannot see a single real scenario where this truly makes a problem for anyone.
Sounds like they're just equipping counterfeiters with a nice set of tools for testing the quality of their fakes. If you can scan/Photoshop/print it, you need to work on it some more...
> Science is a type of belief system. [...] No different than Christanity, Muslim, Sheeaboo, Me day beliefs.
Actually, science differs from all those because it relies on a built-in system of sanity checks. That's the essence of the so-called "scientific method". It's also why science is self-correcting, unlike belief systems, which are self-propagating. In science you change the conclusions to fit the facts; in belief systems you change the facts to fit the belief.
> Why the hell should a paper need to be reviewed by other scientists to be considered valid?
In principle, you can revolutionize the scientific world by a Slashdot post that gets modded down to -1. But don't expect that to happen.
The peer review process doesn't certify that a paper is 'valid', nor does the lack of peer review certify that it isn't. Peer review is just a screening to make sure you've done your homework. Did you neglect to consider an important paper on the topic? Did you misinterpret the conclusions of other publications? Are your own arguments sound? Does your data actually support your conclusions?
Passing peer review doesn't mean your work is correct; it merely means that it has been screened for the most glaring sort of errors. The real debate over your work is the additional literature it spawns, whether in agreement or in dispute. (Ultimately, the "value" of a paper is the number of other papers that cite it.)
Papers that get published in peer reviewed journals are going to get cited in future papers, and it's useful to screen out the most defective ones before publishing them. Also, the most common result of a rejection is that you get feedback specifying the problems the reviewers had with it, so you re-work the paper and submit it again. If you're not a kook or an incompetent, and unless the work is intrinsically uninteresting, you will probably get it published sooner or later.
> Especially considering how this is a THEORY... and for now, one that can't be proven.
Theories are the end product of science. There's nothing more upscale than a theory, and none of them are proven.
> einstein suffered terribly in school, guess that makes him a moron too, eh?
While popular culture holds that Einstein was a drop-out, a lowly patent-office clerk, and an outsider who stood the scientific world on his head, he was in fact the equivalent of a modern PhD candidate in the last year of a PhD program. In 1900 he graduated with the equivalent of a bachelor's degree or higher, qualified to teach both math and physics at the university level. When he published his famous papers in 1905 he was what we now call an ABD ("all but dissertation"), and in fact he submitted his dissertation On a new determination of molecular dimensions that same year, earning a PhD in physics at U. Zurich.
More detail here.
> I guess Steven Hawking has to cancel that Playboy subscription.
> (if you don't get it, move along. There is something to "get" and your mod points are needed elsewhere. Thank you.)
Hmmm, +2... I see we have a couple of moderators willing to pretend they get it!
> Two words : quantum computing.
Isn't that just one word in two different states?
> After a very reachable number of bits, you end up needing more power then exists in the universe, or a computer bigger then the universe, to crack the encryption
Right, but that number's bigger than 48 bits, right?. (Refer back to the grandparent post.)
> "Progress will continue exponentially forever" is a fallacy.
Yep. That's why I qualified my statement with "So long as we ride the Moore Curve".
But how many bits do you think we need to use, to be secure in perpetuity?
> OK, I'm not saying that Microsoft's totally without guilt here but just how far do people think they need to go with regards to securing passworded files? 48-bit encryption? 128-bit? 160-bit with triple DES? At what stage does the encryption become overkill?
So long as we ride the Moore Curve, overkill degrades to underkill at a rate of about one bit per 18 months. So if you want your document to be secure in perpetuity, you'd better use a lot of bits.
> Do you seriously doubt the existence of an infinite God when confronted with the silliness these "great minds" babble about?
Theism would gain much more respect if it didn't rely so heavily on non sequiturs for its supporting arguments.
Personally, I have more respect for someone who says "I believe it because that's what I was taught as a kid" than for someone who says "I believe it because of $BADARGUMENT".