Watt has never been correct about this stuff. Not a single time has any of his criticisms of climate science been proven correct. Even most climate scientists have stopped bothering to reply to his accusations.
It may be a logical fallacy to assume someone is incorrect because of their sources, but 99/100 being wrong tends to make it a good bet that the 100th time will also be wrong.
I agree with you, but it depends on what selection criteria they used.
EQ came out way before other mmorpgs. It peaked with 500,000 subscribers. It is blatantly obvious that WoW and other mmorpgs copied many of its features, dumbed them down for the masses, and came out during a time when most average PC's could play the game.
Remember when EQ came out in 1999, you needed some really good hardware to make it run smooth. WoW didn't have as much of that hardware obstacle. As a result of a wider possible install base, and dumbing down all the mmorpg features so they required little to no outside research, it made the game very appealing to a wider audience. 10 million subscribers eventually if I recall correctly.
Before WoW, a show like the Big Bang Theory would never have an episode about an mmorpg. That is kinda proof that the selection criteria included some sort of 'mass awareness' of the game.
EQ has been around since 1999 and imo should be considered the grandfather of all modern mmorpgs. It did have 500,000 subscribers at its peak.
WoW brought mmorpg to the masses though (10 million subscribers) at a time when everyone's PC was able to play a graphically intense game. So if subscriber numbers are more important than actual influence, I can see WoW winning. But at the time, most EQ players really made fun of WoW, since it literally copied, then dumbed down, ever single mmorpg feature than came before it.
I disagree with WoW being on the list. All others are legit entries.
No kidding. I'm not sure what their criteria was though. Everquest, for example, was a complete mmorpg first by many years, much more expansive (and still is), and was basically copied by lots of mmorpgs. There is likely an even older MUD out there that can claim to have influenced later GUI games like Everquest.
I can see WoW as being a contender if one of the criteria was 'mass popularity'. Everquest maybe had 500,0000 subscribers at its peak. WoW came along when there were a lot more PC's capable of playing a graphically intense game (EQ was released in 1999), dumbed the questing down so someone with zero mmorpg experience could start playing with little to no research, and as a result, the numbers exploded. 10 million I think?
Well, I see the disservice being placing education in a free market rather than considering part of the commons of a society.
Teachers generally are doing a good job promoting curiosity, following your dreams, etc.. Ideally, that is the type of student we want to produce: motivated, happy, pursuing what they love, doing well because of it, etc.. Pretty much every celebrity, motivational speaker, tech guru, etc.. spouts this 'follow your interests' mantra with every breath... .
That would work out perfectly fine if college was free like it is in most modern countries.
You are correct in that, if we want to continue to have an education be a product of a free market/capitalism, we need to start guiding students down vocational / internship paths or include the ROI of a degree in the products description (degree) so that the consumer can make a better educated choice. And that would then open up colleges to false advertising lawsuits, which depending on your viewpoint would either be a good force for price control or a bad one.
Or, make all state universities and community colleges free and high quality (like many modern western nations already do). That will put pressure on the ivy league and other pricey schools to remain price competitive.
Some things in life, especially the "must haves" (from strongly "must have" like life saving surgery, to basically "must have" to earn a living... a college education) don't respond well (or work at all with) to market forces.
There's no gamble, student loans are guaranteed by the government. That's why everyone can get them, and that's why the cost of education has exploded.
Another way of looking at the problem: education doesn't work well as a product of capitalism. The US attempted to educate more people by assisting students with the cost, since subsidizing the cost of a product in the market fits our ideological tendencies about free markets and competition. Instead, if we had recognized that an educated society is invaluable, and we had taken a lesson from other modern countries and made college free, we wouldn't find ourselves in a situation where tuition costs are skyrocketing.
Picking the college based on affordability didn't ruin his life.
That is something that needs to be taught/drilled into high school students heads: what you get from college is 90% personal effort and 10% school prestige for most people.
Get straight A's at any state/local school, and it will open doors to more prestiges universities later.
People shouldn't have to shop around. The tax dollars someone pays over the course of their lifetime with a college degree vs without, makes free tax payer provided higher education a no brainer. Like many other things (healthcare) the US seems to be stuck with a education system built on ideology rather than facts.
Why is higher education only useful for helping you making money? THat is not what it is for!
And yet it has been proven over and over again that pretty much any degree pays for itself in terms of future job earnings, even art history. If you come out of school with the ability to problem solve, write well, speak well, and can learn new things quickly, you can find a job.
That is why many grown up countries recognize that college should be free. It greatly benefits the tax payers to have an educated populace: the return from a lifetime of higher earning tax dollars alone is worth it. Then there are tons of less tangible things, like attracting businesses that require educated workers, etc..
Well, what should we do vs what can we do becomes the biggest question.
Before you can answer that question you have to answer this one first: "How much is it rational to spend on this project?"
People have run those studies. If X degrees of warming, Y will happen in Z years, displacing % of people from coast A, etc.. The general conclusion that it is much cheaper to mitigate the damage than dealing with it later. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=cost+benefit+analysis+of+dealing+with+climate+change&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ei=wT1yVY7IHM7roATMtYzIDA&ved=0CBwQgQMwAA
So we have a lot of studies to look over and start debating, right? Well, wrong. Apparently 50% of our elected congress is still denying it's even an issue. Despite companies that deal in the real world, like insurance agencies, fully embracing the scientific reports and data. When your bottom line depends on truly knowing if Florida is going to be underwater in 50-100 years, you tend to listen to the experts.
While I personally believe in man-made global warming, this sort of thing makes it hard to argue with someone who claims the researchers are just massaging the data until it shows what they think it should show.
Except that is not what they did. Re-read this discussion if you want the details.
I really want to believe that Ted Talk. I've watched it a couple times. But when I did a little background research, I found out that Savory's work was received very well in the mainstream academic circles. There was a lot of criticism that he was cherry picking his success stories from a set of many failures, and that he is basically claiming success based on a lot of correlations, not proving causations.
Maybe I just google'd poorly at the time. Not sure. Do you think he's more mainstream (has good evidence) than my first impressions?
Yawn. It's too late to do anything about it anyway. You might as well sit back and enjoy it. Unless we start a geoengineering project to remove CO2 from the atmosphere (and who's going to pay for that?) it'll be a thousand years before levels return to normal,
Is this the latest 'denier' phase? They have finally accepted it is happening, but "we can't do anything about it in time, so why bother?".
Another strawman. For f's sake, how does this point continue to get modded up?
You are, of course, 100% accurate in that the climate is always changing. 10,000 years from now it might be a lot hotter or a lot colder. All of North America might be under ice. Who knows? (Well, a climate scientist might have pretty good guesses considering they study all the long term climate cycles).
But that is completely irrelevant to the discussion about whether we should be concerned about the climate change we are observing right now. If you want a google hint, take a look into the rates of change of past climate shifts versus the rate of change we are seeing right now.
But by all means, continue to just throw your hands in the air and pretend that we shouldn't bother worrying about climate because "it is always changing".
And the Democrat party contains anti vaxxers. Trying to act like somehow the Democrats are better than the Republicans in science matters is pretty silly.
While all political parties have their wingnuts, only the GOP routinely nominates theirs as presidential candidates.
There's a difference between having idiots as members of your party and having idiots as leaders of your party.
Not just presidential candidates (most of whom just run for fame, leading to book deals/money/etc...), but vastly more damaging is putting fringe elements of the GOP in charge of congressional committees that control budgets for much needed programs. Like the Chair of the House Science Committee, Lamar Smith. Or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Inhofe , the chair of the senate environment and public works committee, who contents that global warming is a hoax, and basically believes that 'God' will take care of us and the planet.
The EPA may employee scientists, but the organization itself operates in a highly politicized environment, subject to the whims of a changing Congressional/Presidential membership every 2 to 4 years.
I haven't read the report you are talking about, but, and this is a guess, I bet the scientific data behind the report is accurate, but the report was probably laden with a nice fat layer of politicized wording meant to fit in with various agendas of the current politicians in power.
My point is you need to separate the scientists doing good work from the MBA's/politicians/bosses that might spin the results.
Native ssh is great. But what would make it even better is if windows would give up their c:\blah\blah file system structure and standardize with linux and osx by embracing/blah/blah. So annoying when working in a mixed OS environment. Lets see, did this app need the backslash escaped, c:/\ or will it handle c:\, does it even recognize c: or just / or just \, etc..
the real juggernauts of industry are so far removed from redmonds product
I haven't looked at the numbers in a while, but last time I checked (5 years ago maybe?) MS still dominated the small to medium business server market. Of course companies like Facebook, Google, etc.. are not using windows servers as their primary servers, but I'm pretty sure that the sum of small/medium businesses is a fairly huge number of sales.
While I'm certain that MS would be ecstatic if Google wanted to use windows servers, companies like Google are not what MS develops their servers for. Maybe this embrace of ssh means they are attempting to capture more of that 'juggernauts of industry' market?
And I can speak from experience that it feels like 50%+ of all schools are nearly 100% windows shops. We are a mix of linux/windows/solaris at my school, but I come across school after school that has bought into the MS platform hook line and sinker. A lot of that has to do with licensing. Once you get licenses for X, you often end up getting new products or existing ones for free. So every time a new project is in the product research phase, it is often faced with "well we could buy company X's linux based product which is really awesome, or we could just use MS product X which we already own as part of a site license".
Where is the news about this? Was it an official announcement of some sort? I'd love to be able to do something like 'sudo apt-get install vlc' on windows.
Let's say an age cure is released tomorrow. It will be priced specifically for a certain percentage to afford. It probably won't even be publicly available, and instead be invite-only like certain cars already are.
Unless the cure turns out to be some very common set of natural ingredients or is otherwise very easy to produce. Or the cure is discovered in a University that releases it 'open source style' to the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently we had Glenn Beck listeners before Glenn Beck was even on the air:
In the 1970s, some opponents suggested that metric road signs would facilitate a Russian invasion.
source: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/1999/10/why_hasnt_the_us_gone_metric.html
Watt has never been correct about this stuff. Not a single time has any of his criticisms of climate science been proven correct. Even most climate scientists have stopped bothering to reply to his accusations.
It may be a logical fallacy to assume someone is incorrect because of their sources, but 99/100 being wrong tends to make it a good bet that the 100th time will also be wrong.
Gun shows in most states legally bypass many of the regular laws. Has that changed?
I agree with you, but it depends on what selection criteria they used.
EQ came out way before other mmorpgs. It peaked with 500,000 subscribers. It is blatantly obvious that WoW and other mmorpgs copied many of its features, dumbed them down for the masses, and came out during a time when most average PC's could play the game.
Remember when EQ came out in 1999, you needed some really good hardware to make it run smooth. WoW didn't have as much of that hardware obstacle. As a result of a wider possible install base, and dumbing down all the mmorpg features so they required little to no outside research, it made the game very appealing to a wider audience. 10 million subscribers eventually if I recall correctly.
Before WoW, a show like the Big Bang Theory would never have an episode about an mmorpg. That is kinda proof that the selection criteria included some sort of 'mass awareness' of the game.
EQ has been around since 1999 and imo should be considered the grandfather of all modern mmorpgs. It did have 500,000 subscribers at its peak.
WoW brought mmorpg to the masses though (10 million subscribers) at a time when everyone's PC was able to play a graphically intense game. So if subscriber numbers are more important than actual influence, I can see WoW winning. But at the time, most EQ players really made fun of WoW, since it literally copied, then dumbed down, ever single mmorpg feature than came before it.
I disagree with WoW being on the list. All others are legit entries.
No kidding. I'm not sure what their criteria was though. Everquest, for example, was a complete mmorpg first by many years, much more expansive (and still is), and was basically copied by lots of mmorpgs. There is likely an even older MUD out there that can claim to have influenced later GUI games like Everquest.
I can see WoW as being a contender if one of the criteria was 'mass popularity'. Everquest maybe had 500,0000 subscribers at its peak. WoW came along when there were a lot more PC's capable of playing a graphically intense game (EQ was released in 1999), dumbed the questing down so someone with zero mmorpg experience could start playing with little to no research, and as a result, the numbers exploded. 10 million I think?
Well, I see the disservice being placing education in a free market rather than considering part of the commons of a society.
Teachers generally are doing a good job promoting curiosity, following your dreams, etc.. Ideally, that is the type of student we want to produce: motivated, happy, pursuing what they love, doing well because of it, etc.. Pretty much every celebrity, motivational speaker, tech guru, etc.. spouts this 'follow your interests' mantra with every breath... .
That would work out perfectly fine if college was free like it is in most modern countries.
You are correct in that, if we want to continue to have an education be a product of a free market/capitalism, we need to start guiding students down vocational / internship paths or include the ROI of a degree in the products description (degree) so that the consumer can make a better educated choice. And that would then open up colleges to false advertising lawsuits, which depending on your viewpoint would either be a good force for price control or a bad one.
Or, make all state universities and community colleges free and high quality (like many modern western nations already do). That will put pressure on the ivy league and other pricey schools to remain price competitive.
Some things in life, especially the "must haves" (from strongly "must have" like life saving surgery, to basically "must have" to earn a living... a college education) don't respond well (or work at all with) to market forces.
There's no gamble, student loans are guaranteed by the government. That's why everyone can get them, and that's why the cost of education has exploded.
Another way of looking at the problem: education doesn't work well as a product of capitalism. The US attempted to educate more people by assisting students with the cost, since subsidizing the cost of a product in the market fits our ideological tendencies about free markets and competition. Instead, if we had recognized that an educated society is invaluable, and we had taken a lesson from other modern countries and made college free, we wouldn't find ourselves in a situation where tuition costs are skyrocketing.
Picking the college based on affordability didn't ruin his life.
That is something that needs to be taught/drilled into high school students heads: what you get from college is 90% personal effort and 10% school prestige for most people.
Get straight A's at any state/local school, and it will open doors to more prestiges universities later.
People shouldn't have to shop around. The tax dollars someone pays over the course of their lifetime with a college degree vs without, makes free tax payer provided higher education a no brainer. Like many other things (healthcare) the US seems to be stuck with a education system built on ideology rather than facts.
Why is higher education only useful for helping you making money? THat is not what it is for!
And yet it has been proven over and over again that pretty much any degree pays for itself in terms of future job earnings, even art history. If you come out of school with the ability to problem solve, write well, speak well, and can learn new things quickly, you can find a job.
That is why many grown up countries recognize that college should be free. It greatly benefits the tax payers to have an educated populace: the return from a lifetime of higher earning tax dollars alone is worth it. Then there are tons of less tangible things, like attracting businesses that require educated workers, etc..
Well, what should we do vs what can we do becomes the biggest question.
Before you can answer that question you have to answer this one first: "How much is it rational to spend on this project?"
People have run those studies. If X degrees of warming, Y will happen in Z years, displacing % of people from coast A, etc.. The general conclusion that it is much cheaper to mitigate the damage than dealing with it later. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=cost+benefit+analysis+of+dealing+with+climate+change&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ei=wT1yVY7IHM7roATMtYzIDA&ved=0CBwQgQMwAA
So we have a lot of studies to look over and start debating, right? Well, wrong. Apparently 50% of our elected congress is still denying it's even an issue. Despite companies that deal in the real world, like insurance agencies, fully embracing the scientific reports and data. When your bottom line depends on truly knowing if Florida is going to be underwater in 50-100 years, you tend to listen to the experts.
While I personally believe in man-made global warming, this sort of thing makes it hard to argue with someone who claims the researchers are just massaging the data until it shows what they think it should show.
Except that is not what they did. Re-read this discussion if you want the details.
I really want to believe that Ted Talk. I've watched it a couple times. But when I did a little background research, I found out that Savory's work was received very well in the mainstream academic circles. There was a lot of criticism that he was cherry picking his success stories from a set of many failures, and that he is basically claiming success based on a lot of correlations, not proving causations.
Maybe I just google'd poorly at the time. Not sure. Do you think he's more mainstream (has good evidence) than my first impressions?
Yawn. It's too late to do anything about it anyway. You might as well sit back and enjoy it. Unless we start a geoengineering project to remove CO2 from the atmosphere (and who's going to pay for that?) it'll be a thousand years before levels return to normal,
Is this the latest 'denier' phase? They have finally accepted it is happening, but "we can't do anything about it in time, so why bother?".
Anyone that links to http://wattsupwiththat.com should just be auto-modded down.
Another strawman. For f's sake, how does this point continue to get modded up?
You are, of course, 100% accurate in that the climate is always changing. 10,000 years from now it might be a lot hotter or a lot colder. All of North America might be under ice. Who knows? (Well, a climate scientist might have pretty good guesses considering they study all the long term climate cycles).
But that is completely irrelevant to the discussion about whether we should be concerned about the climate change we are observing right now. If you want a google hint, take a look into the rates of change of past climate shifts versus the rate of change we are seeing right now.
But by all means, continue to just throw your hands in the air and pretend that we shouldn't bother worrying about climate because "it is always changing".
And the Democrat party contains anti vaxxers. Trying to act like somehow the Democrats are better than the Republicans in science matters is pretty silly.
While all political parties have their wingnuts, only the GOP routinely nominates theirs as presidential candidates.
There's a difference between having idiots as members of your party and having idiots as leaders of your party.
Not just presidential candidates (most of whom just run for fame, leading to book deals/money/etc...), but vastly more damaging is putting fringe elements of the GOP in charge of congressional committees that control budgets for much needed programs. Like the Chair of the House Science Committee, Lamar Smith. Or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Inhofe , the chair of the senate environment and public works committee, who contents that global warming is a hoax, and basically believes that 'God' will take care of us and the planet.
The EPA may employee scientists, but the organization itself operates in a highly politicized environment, subject to the whims of a changing Congressional/Presidential membership every 2 to 4 years.
I haven't read the report you are talking about, but, and this is a guess, I bet the scientific data behind the report is accurate, but the report was probably laden with a nice fat layer of politicized wording meant to fit in with various agendas of the current politicians in power.
My point is you need to separate the scientists doing good work from the MBA's/politicians/bosses that might spin the results.
Note to people who may want to google some of these terms:
Solotubes returns drastically different google image search results than Solatube....
Native ssh is great. But what would make it even better is if windows would give up their c:\blah\blah file system structure and standardize with linux and osx by embracing /blah/blah. So annoying when working in a mixed OS environment. Lets see, did this app need the backslash escaped, c:/\ or will it handle c:\, does it even recognize c: or just / or just \, etc..
the real juggernauts of industry are so far removed from redmonds product
I haven't looked at the numbers in a while, but last time I checked (5 years ago maybe?) MS still dominated the small to medium business server market. Of course companies like Facebook, Google, etc.. are not using windows servers as their primary servers, but I'm pretty sure that the sum of small/medium businesses is a fairly huge number of sales.
While I'm certain that MS would be ecstatic if Google wanted to use windows servers, companies like Google are not what MS develops their servers for. Maybe this embrace of ssh means they are attempting to capture more of that 'juggernauts of industry' market?
And I can speak from experience that it feels like 50%+ of all schools are nearly 100% windows shops. We are a mix of linux/windows/solaris at my school, but I come across school after school that has bought into the MS platform hook line and sinker. A lot of that has to do with licensing. Once you get licenses for X, you often end up getting new products or existing ones for free. So every time a new project is in the product research phase, it is often faced with "well we could buy company X's linux based product which is really awesome, or we could just use MS product X which we already own as part of a site license".
apt/yum/ports style software repositories
Where is the news about this? Was it an official announcement of some sort? I'd love to be able to do something like 'sudo apt-get install vlc' on windows.
Let's say an age cure is released tomorrow. It will be priced specifically for a certain percentage to afford. It probably won't even be publicly available, and instead be invite-only like certain cars already are.
Unless the cure turns out to be some very common set of natural ingredients or is otherwise very easy to produce. Or the cure is discovered in a University that releases it 'open source style' to the world.