Climate change is real.
What is fiction is the extent of man's impact on climate change.
Calling it "fiction" is being rather hopeful and is quite an assumption unto itself. If we can punch a hole in the ozone layer with a couple decades' output of CFCs, what makes you so certain that we cannot also affect greenhouse gas levels enough to bring out an average temperature change of a few degrees? Especially in light of the actual science, which currently supports the anthropogenic hypothesis?
That said, things like this story -- falsely attributing the result of market forces (namely, ethanol production and the higher price of corn) to global warming -- are fiction. It detracts from the scientific debate, and it only serves to give the dogmatic global warming deniers fodder ("See, this one scientist was being alarmist; ergo, the entire scientific community is incorrect about anthropogenic climate change.").
Atheism is not "repulsive to scientific thinking".
Agnosticism, in effect, says I have no evidence for the truth of [insert religion here], therefore I do not know whether [said religion] is true or untrue. Atheism simply takes that one step further: And, since I have no basis for believing [religion] is true, I shall therefore presume, pending further evidence, that it is probably false. It is not a dogmatic position; it merely acknowledges that what is proffered without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, unless we someday find evidence to support it.
For example, suppose I tell you that there's a pink unicorn wandering the streets of your city. Except he's invisible, quite quiet, and deftly hops out of the way whenever someone approaches him, such that nobody ever sees, hears, or feels him. "Nonsense," you reply, "that's an absurd proposition about the nature of reality with no supporting evidence in favor, therefore I dismiss it." Should I, in return, deride your position as dogmatic unicorn-atheism?
On the other hand, if we started seeing molted unicorn horns inexplicably littering the streets, and if clumsy baby unicorns began bumping into pedestrians left and right, then the hypothetical unicorn-atheist would reconsider his position based on this evidence. But until such a time, he would feel justified in dismissing the unicorn worldview as probably untrue.
I agree with you for the most part, and I think it is important for religious and non-religious folks to demonstrate more respect and understanding for one another than they often do. But don't confuse that with the notion of respecting your beliefs.
I respect you as a person, but I don't respect your beliefs. I don't disrespect them, either: in open and rational discourse, beliefs are neither disrespected nor respected, but are dispassionately debated solely on their merits. What would be your response if someone admonished you to "respect" his beliefs about the laws of gravity, or of recent historical fact?
When we conflate respect of fellow human beings with "respect" for their beliefs, it usually becomes shorthand for "please do not hold this particular idea up to scrutiny." That is something to be avoided.
I agree that we're well behind many parts of the world when it comes to fast Internet access. However, you can't take the single, well-publicized case of the Swedish lady with a 40 Gb/s connection on top of specialized networking gear, and extrapolate that to make any meaningful statements about the overall state of broadband availability in Sweden versus in the United States.
Sadly, there's still the whole WordPress thing -- the darn program was never intended to work with anything other than MySQL at the back end. At one point there was an effort to "port" WordPress to PostgreSQL, but that fork has long since stagnated. And adding support for other databases is not on the WordPress team's short list.
I wouldn't know the actual numbers any better than the next guy, but it's clear that WordPress is one of the top reasons MySQL retains such a dominant market share in the Web segment. Until WordPress adds support for multiple back-ends, MySQL will always be, at minimum, just as entrenched a product as WordPress is.
I hope that Movable Type's recent open-sourcing will eventually help effect more widespread adoption of PostgreSQL. Unlike WordPress, MT was designed from the ground up with forward-thinking features like database abstraction; it currently supports the Berkeley Database format, SQLite, PostgreSQL, and MySQL, and adding support for additional back-ends is relatively easy. Perhaps if Movable Type can chip away at WordPress's market share a bit, it will in turn help relax MySQL's stranglehold on the Web market.
A further problem of using a domain not your own as a sender address is that the recipient's email server may block it due to SPF records or other checks on sender domains.
SPF policies apply only to the envelope sender address, not the message's From: header.
People don't go for OSX because it's BSD, they go for it because it's pretty, and because shit just works.
Yes, pretty is a part of it, but "because shit just works" is a far greater part of the equation for most people, in my experience.
And to whom do people turn, when they're considering getting a new computer and they want to know which particular brand of shit just works the best? The same kind people who switched to Macs in droves a few years back, solely because of OS X. Such solicited recommendations have been the driving force behind Mac sales among most of my friends.
They do not care about the BSD underpinnings. [...] The growth of the MacOS is from Windows users [...], not from Linux users.
What? Read my comment again... I never even remotely suggested that the bulk of Mac sales are from people who think "ooh, BSD!".
My point wasn't that the average Joe wants a computer that runs Unix, it was that the people the average Joe turns to for advice on computer purchases often wants a computer that runs Unix, and is therefore now (thanks to OS X) far more likely to be a Mac user; and, having experience with Apple computers, would now consider recommending them to his friends.
This is borne out by the fact that most of the people I know who use Macs bought them after the Mac was recommended to them by either myself or another "technologically elite" (for lack of a better term) friend.
That's very unrealistic. Apple's product design was pretty good in the late nineties too, but nobody wanted to buy their computers back then. Frankly, this was because the computers were slow and the operating system was crap.
Their recent success has had far more to do with the underlying technology than with design or the success of the iPod (although the iPod certainly didn't hurt). The influence of OS X's FreeBSD / NeXTSTEP underpinnings cannot be overstated. Just about every clique and every social group has that technophile whom the others turn to for advice on electronics, and with OS X Apple won many of these people over from the Linux and other Unix camps.
For example, over the last six months I've had three people turn to me for laptop purchasing advice, and I strongly recommended the MacBook to two of them; these two eventually decided to purchase MacBooks. Six or seven years ago I wouldn't have even considered recommending Apple to anybody outside the graphics design and publishing niche. And I know there are many others like me.
Furthermore, with the switch to Intel processors it is now trivial to virtualize Windows applications in OS X, or even to run Windows itself on a Mac, removing most users' single greatest barrier to switching. Really, it's technology, not industrial design, at the heart of Apple's leap in market share.
And this is supposed to count against Apple... how, exactly?
If the authors of the BSD-licensed software used in Apple products were that concerned about getting every single bit of code contributed back by everyone who touches their software, then -- guess what? -- they would have licensed that code under the GPL instead. They are not only meeting, but actually surpassing, their pseudo-contractual obligations for use of the code.
I'd say the fact that Apple continues to contribute anything back to these projects speaks well of them. Not that the company doesn't have its own faults, of course, but let's give credit where credit is due...
But the analogy fails (as computer-car analogies often do), because while a seatbelt actually tends to work, anti-virus software is horribly inept at detecting modern mutating computer viruses and other malware, even with the best-of-breed "heuristic" scanning software. And anti-virus software generally does not protect against attacks on existing software, either (e.g., a buffer overflow attack against QuickTime).
I haven't yet heard anything definitive about Gecko's performance in FF3 with respect to FF2 or the rendering engines in other major web browsers, but from my own experience with the betas I can subjectively say "it's fast"; if I'm missing out on speed using FF3b4 instead of the latest WebKit, I can't tell the difference myself.
And Beta 4 is quite stable, to boot. Mozilla really pulled out all the stops on this one... unless you have incompatible extensions holding you back, do yourself a favor and upgrade now.
BTW, one weird idea would be to send a bunch of women and have them serve as incubators. In particular, if we send several missions of women AND zygotes, then we can grow a colony there.
Nonono, don't send zygotes, just the women; and tell all the male engineers of the world that there's an entire colony of women on Mars, eagerly waiting to mate with the first guy through the airlock. THEN we'll see just how fast we can clear up these 'engineering difficulties.'
I take it you're not a fan of anti-lock brake systems either? You know, if you can't handle traditional braking techniques, don't use a car?
But like the automobile, the Web has become a necessary part of everyday life in the U.S.; many people simply cannot "opt out" of the Internet and still function in business and in society. So I really have no problem with adding basic safety features, like the Google blacklist, to web browsers, to help out the more accident-prone among us. And I have no problem telling people that they should use a browser with these safety features over one that lacks them.
I'm very happy for you, that you've never made a single careless mistake in your life. However, please do try to have a little mercy on those of us who are merely human, especially when we're honest enough to admit it.
Look, if you're not checking what's in the URL of your browser, or are in the habit of clicking on links in email blindly, you get the phishing you deserve.
I'm all for exercising personal responsibility, but I'd never argue that anybody 'deserves' to fall victim to a phishing scam.
The fact of the matter is that there are some people (my grandparents, for example) who like to use the Web, but who are perhaps just a little bit senile and might one day fall for this sort of thing. If even an Ars Technica writer can fall for it, how can we expect an 80+ year-old to constantly exercise due vigilance?
I'm actually quite OK with this PayPal advisory: the kind of people who will act upon it -- computing amateurs, basically -- probably should be using a browser that raises a big fat red flag when it hits a known scam site, and I'd recommend that such people use Firefox, Opera, or even IE 7 rather than Safari. The rest of us, those who are clueful enough to know how to protect themselves, aren't really the ones that PayPal is addressing here.
I have a simple BIND server that performs recursive DNS for my home network... if you really want the (meaningless, but nonetheless heartwarming) satisfaction of metaphorically flipping BJB the bird, add
zone "wikileaks.org" { type master; file "master/db.org.wikileaks"; }
to your named.conf, then enter the following master/db.org.wikileaks:
$ORIGIN wikileaks.org. $TTL 3h
@ IN SOA yourserver.domain.example. root ( 105 ; Serial 3h ; Refresh 1h ; Retry 1w ; Expire 1h ; Negative caching TTL )
NS yourserver.domain.example.
A 88.80.13.160 MX 0 mail.wikileaks.org. mail A 88.80.13.160
Reload named and you should be able to resolve wikileaks.org across your network.
(Sorry for the monotype; is there a way to use the <ecode> tag such that it doesn't eat up leading whitespace?)
If so, is there anything as good as TeXShop is for OS X?
Sadly, no. One of the best features of TeXShop is pdfsync (which is also supported in other PDF viewers on OS X like Skim and PDFView), but pdfsync is not yet supported by any Linux (or Windows) LaTeX environments.
Here's the problem: You were lambasting memetics as fundamentally unscientific because it can't be used to make "quantitiative" predictions about reality, but here we have what is essentially a study in memetics doing just that... which you yourself admit is the case. Your objection seems to fall along the lines of (1) memetics has little empirical research behind it so far, but (2) this research is scientific, therefore (3) this research must not be memetics. It's an absolute non sequitur.
The point is that memetics is not amenable to quantitative analysis. [...] But it's not impossible. The research we are told about in TFA in fact does that
Well, which is it? The second of the two contradictory positions you take here corroborates my original point that memetics is, in fact, a useful type of scientific model.
The research we are told about in TFA in fact does that, it (finally) does a serious quantitative study of cultural evolution, a field that until now has been almost entirely about qualitative claims, e.g., "religion is a virus". That might be true, but it isn't testable, hence it isn't scientific in the way that genetic evolution is. (If you believe I am wrong, please supply a reference to a rigorous scientific investigation of memetics, i.e., a quantitative one; thanks in advance.)
There hasn't been much research in this area, and it's a shame. But from the dearth of research it does not follow that this field cannot be researched. I recommend you read Daniel Dennett's "Breaking The Spell", in which he both outlines the case for why this field can (and should) be researched scientifically, and encourages scientists to start doing such work.
Memetics is a fun term. As a qualitative notion, it makes some intuitive sense. But what the article mentions is work that was quantitative (it compared functional vs. decorative features and their rate of change), and hence actually scientific.
With all respect, what in the hell are you talking about? To paraphrase the Wikipedia entry, Memetics is an approach to creating models for cultural information transfer. You know, just like natural selection is an approach to creating models for evolution. Of course it's not "quantitative"; it's a model for understanding the quantitative data.
Slashdot Mirror
More like as long as the latter doesn't waltz into the former's territory.
Calling it "fiction" is being rather hopeful and is quite an assumption unto itself. If we can punch a hole in the ozone layer with a couple decades' output of CFCs, what makes you so certain that we cannot also affect greenhouse gas levels enough to bring out an average temperature change of a few degrees? Especially in light of the actual science, which currently supports the anthropogenic hypothesis?
That said, things like this story -- falsely attributing the result of market forces (namely, ethanol production and the higher price of corn) to global warming -- are fiction. It detracts from the scientific debate, and it only serves to give the dogmatic global warming deniers fodder ("See, this one scientist was being alarmist; ergo, the entire scientific community is incorrect about anthropogenic climate change.").
Wait, are you saying that your previous post wasn't intelligently designed?
Atheism is not "repulsive to scientific thinking".
Agnosticism, in effect, says I have no evidence for the truth of [insert religion here], therefore I do not know whether [said religion] is true or untrue. Atheism simply takes that one step further: And, since I have no basis for believing [religion] is true, I shall therefore presume, pending further evidence, that it is probably false. It is not a dogmatic position; it merely acknowledges that what is proffered without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, unless we someday find evidence to support it.
For example, suppose I tell you that there's a pink unicorn wandering the streets of your city. Except he's invisible, quite quiet, and deftly hops out of the way whenever someone approaches him, such that nobody ever sees, hears, or feels him. "Nonsense," you reply, "that's an absurd proposition about the nature of reality with no supporting evidence in favor, therefore I dismiss it." Should I, in return, deride your position as dogmatic unicorn-atheism?
On the other hand, if we started seeing molted unicorn horns inexplicably littering the streets, and if clumsy baby unicorns began bumping into pedestrians left and right, then the hypothetical unicorn-atheist would reconsider his position based on this evidence. But until such a time, he would feel justified in dismissing the unicorn worldview as probably untrue.
I agree with you for the most part, and I think it is important for religious and non-religious folks to demonstrate more respect and understanding for one another than they often do. But don't confuse that with the notion of respecting your beliefs.
I respect you as a person, but I don't respect your beliefs. I don't disrespect them, either: in open and rational discourse, beliefs are neither disrespected nor respected, but are dispassionately debated solely on their merits. What would be your response if someone admonished you to "respect" his beliefs about the laws of gravity, or of recent historical fact?
When we conflate respect of fellow human beings with "respect" for their beliefs, it usually becomes shorthand for "please do not hold this particular idea up to scrutiny." That is something to be avoided.
I agree that we're well behind many parts of the world when it comes to fast Internet access. However, you can't take the single, well-publicized case of the Swedish lady with a 40 Gb/s connection on top of specialized networking gear, and extrapolate that to make any meaningful statements about the overall state of broadband availability in Sweden versus in the United States.
I think you're missing the subtle distinction between "evolve and grow feathers" and "get tarred and feathered".
Thanks to the school voucher system, private schools are paid for by everyone as well, draining funds from our poorly-supported public school system.
Sadly, there's still the whole WordPress thing -- the darn program was never intended to work with anything other than MySQL at the back end. At one point there was an effort to "port" WordPress to PostgreSQL, but that fork has long since stagnated. And adding support for other databases is not on the WordPress team's short list.
I wouldn't know the actual numbers any better than the next guy, but it's clear that WordPress is one of the top reasons MySQL retains such a dominant market share in the Web segment. Until WordPress adds support for multiple back-ends, MySQL will always be, at minimum, just as entrenched a product as WordPress is.
I hope that Movable Type's recent open-sourcing will eventually help effect more widespread adoption of PostgreSQL. Unlike WordPress, MT was designed from the ground up with forward-thinking features like database abstraction; it currently supports the Berkeley Database format, SQLite, PostgreSQL, and MySQL, and adding support for additional back-ends is relatively easy. Perhaps if Movable Type can chip away at WordPress's market share a bit, it will in turn help relax MySQL's stranglehold on the Web market.
Good point, but just to nitpick:
A further problem of using a domain not your own as a sender address is that the recipient's email server may block it due to SPF records or other checks on sender domains.SPF policies apply only to the envelope sender address, not the message's From: header.
Yes, pretty is a part of it, but "because shit just works" is a far greater part of the equation for most people, in my experience.
And to whom do people turn, when they're considering getting a new computer and they want to know which particular brand of shit just works the best? The same kind people who switched to Macs in droves a few years back, solely because of OS X. Such solicited recommendations have been the driving force behind Mac sales among most of my friends.
What? Read my comment again... I never even remotely suggested that the bulk of Mac sales are from people who think "ooh, BSD!".
My point wasn't that the average Joe wants a computer that runs Unix, it was that the people the average Joe turns to for advice on computer purchases often wants a computer that runs Unix, and is therefore now (thanks to OS X) far more likely to be a Mac user; and, having experience with Apple computers, would now consider recommending them to his friends.
This is borne out by the fact that most of the people I know who use Macs bought them after the Mac was recommended to them by either myself or another "technologically elite" (for lack of a better term) friend.
That's very unrealistic. Apple's product design was pretty good in the late nineties too, but nobody wanted to buy their computers back then. Frankly, this was because the computers were slow and the operating system was crap.
Their recent success has had far more to do with the underlying technology than with design or the success of the iPod (although the iPod certainly didn't hurt). The influence of OS X's FreeBSD / NeXTSTEP underpinnings cannot be overstated. Just about every clique and every social group has that technophile whom the others turn to for advice on electronics, and with OS X Apple won many of these people over from the Linux and other Unix camps.
For example, over the last six months I've had three people turn to me for laptop purchasing advice, and I strongly recommended the MacBook to two of them; these two eventually decided to purchase MacBooks. Six or seven years ago I wouldn't have even considered recommending Apple to anybody outside the graphics design and publishing niche. And I know there are many others like me.
Furthermore, with the switch to Intel processors it is now trivial to virtualize Windows applications in OS X, or even to run Windows itself on a Mac, removing most users' single greatest barrier to switching. Really, it's technology, not industrial design, at the heart of Apple's leap in market share.
And this is supposed to count against Apple... how, exactly?
If the authors of the BSD-licensed software used in Apple products were that concerned about getting every single bit of code contributed back by everyone who touches their software, then -- guess what? -- they would have licensed that code under the GPL instead. They are not only meeting, but actually surpassing, their pseudo-contractual obligations for use of the code.
I'd say the fact that Apple continues to contribute anything back to these projects speaks well of them. Not that the company doesn't have its own faults, of course, but let's give credit where credit is due...
But the analogy fails (as computer-car analogies often do), because while a seatbelt actually tends to work, anti-virus software is horribly inept at detecting modern mutating computer viruses and other malware, even with the best-of-breed "heuristic" scanning software. And anti-virus software generally does not protect against attacks on existing software, either (e.g., a buffer overflow attack against QuickTime).
Reduced memory usage is great, but if you're more interested in speed you should take a look at Firefox 3b4's results on the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark, where testers commonly found that it performed twice as well as the latest Opera beta, and nearly three times as fast as Firefox 2.
I haven't yet heard anything definitive about Gecko's performance in FF3 with respect to FF2 or the rendering engines in other major web browsers, but from my own experience with the betas I can subjectively say "it's fast"; if I'm missing out on speed using FF3b4 instead of the latest WebKit, I can't tell the difference myself.
And Beta 4 is quite stable, to boot. Mozilla really pulled out all the stops on this one... unless you have incompatible extensions holding you back, do yourself a favor and upgrade now.
Good thing I was born in 1980, in that case.
Nonono, don't send zygotes, just the women; and tell all the male engineers of the world that there's an entire colony of women on Mars, eagerly waiting to mate with the first guy through the airlock. THEN we'll see just how fast we can clear up these 'engineering difficulties.'
I take it you're not a fan of anti-lock brake systems either? You know, if you can't handle traditional braking techniques, don't use a car?
But like the automobile, the Web has become a necessary part of everyday life in the U.S.; many people simply cannot "opt out" of the Internet and still function in business and in society. So I really have no problem with adding basic safety features, like the Google blacklist, to web browsers, to help out the more accident-prone among us. And I have no problem telling people that they should use a browser with these safety features over one that lacks them.
I'm very happy for you, that you've never made a single careless mistake in your life. However, please do try to have a little mercy on those of us who are merely human, especially when we're honest enough to admit it.
I'm all for exercising personal responsibility, but I'd never argue that anybody 'deserves' to fall victim to a phishing scam.
The fact of the matter is that there are some people (my grandparents, for example) who like to use the Web, but who are perhaps just a little bit senile and might one day fall for this sort of thing. If even an Ars Technica writer can fall for it, how can we expect an 80+ year-old to constantly exercise due vigilance?
I'm actually quite OK with this PayPal advisory: the kind of people who will act upon it -- computing amateurs, basically -- probably should be using a browser that raises a big fat red flag when it hits a known scam site, and I'd recommend that such people use Firefox, Opera, or even IE 7 rather than Safari. The rest of us, those who are clueful enough to know how to protect themselves, aren't really the ones that PayPal is addressing here.
I have a simple BIND server that performs recursive DNS for my home network... if you really want the (meaningless, but nonetheless heartwarming) satisfaction of metaphorically flipping BJB the bird, add
zone "wikileaks.org" {
type master;
file "master/db.org.wikileaks";
}
to your named.conf, then enter the following master/db.org.wikileaks:
$ORIGIN wikileaks.org.
$TTL 3h
@ IN SOA yourserver.domain.example. root (
105 ; Serial
3h ; Refresh
1h ; Retry
1w ; Expire
1h ; Negative caching TTL
)
NS yourserver.domain.example.
A 88.80.13.160
MX 0 mail.wikileaks.org.
mail A 88.80.13.160
Reload named and you should be able to resolve wikileaks.org across your network.
(Sorry for the monotype; is there a way to use the <ecode> tag such that it doesn't eat up leading whitespace?)
Sadly, no. One of the best features of TeXShop is pdfsync (which is also supported in other PDF viewers on OS X like Skim and PDFView), but pdfsync is not yet supported by any Linux (or Windows) LaTeX environments.
Here's the problem: You were lambasting memetics as fundamentally unscientific because it can't be used to make "quantitiative" predictions about reality, but here we have what is essentially a study in memetics doing just that... which you yourself admit is the case. Your objection seems to fall along the lines of (1) memetics has little empirical research behind it so far, but (2) this research is scientific, therefore (3) this research must not be memetics. It's an absolute non sequitur.
The point is that memetics is not amenable to quantitative analysis. [...] But it's not impossible. The research we are told about in TFA in fact does thatWell, which is it? The second of the two contradictory positions you take here corroborates my original point that memetics is, in fact, a useful type of scientific model.
The research we are told about in TFA in fact does that, it (finally) does a serious quantitative study of cultural evolution, a field that until now has been almost entirely about qualitative claims, e.g., "religion is a virus". That might be true, but it isn't testable, hence it isn't scientific in the way that genetic evolution is. (If you believe I am wrong, please supply a reference to a rigorous scientific investigation of memetics, i.e., a quantitative one; thanks in advance.)There hasn't been much research in this area, and it's a shame. But from the dearth of research it does not follow that this field cannot be researched. I recommend you read Daniel Dennett's "Breaking The Spell", in which he both outlines the case for why this field can (and should) be researched scientifically, and encourages scientists to start doing such work.
With all respect, what in the hell are you talking about? To paraphrase the Wikipedia entry, Memetics is an approach to creating models for cultural information transfer. You know, just like natural selection is an approach to creating models for evolution. Of course it's not "quantitative"; it's a model for understanding the quantitative data.