What would help African farmers more than anything else would be for the EU to dismantle it's Common Agricultural Policy. Although the word "common" is something of a misnomer here as it's a policy to bribe the 4% of the population in France who are farmers. Lack of investment in African agricultural development is the price of it.
Before you add to your Trotskyist rant, the fact of the matter is that we (the West) have moved away from implicit support of fascist dictators in regions like the Middle East and towards explicit support of the Libertarian, democratic opposition within them. The Libyan war is a good example to use. When I read a Libyan's associate's Facebook page, littered with references to the English Liberal Tradition (including Locke), the ideas of which are made explicit in the US Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, I nearly fell off of my chair.
But what Kohath writes is true of the Green movement. It is a left-wing political philosophy that has had no intellectual contact with the law of unintended consequences. The thirty or so million people, many of them children, who died from malaria after DDT was banned are probably a very good example to use here.
I work in software development. And I use windows, as do 99% of all of our customers. I'm replying to your counter-point about Windows being great for Unix development. Well, Windows is pretty crap for any non-Windows development. I really don't understand what your point is. But for the OP, it's obviously the case that dual boot options aren't available because 99.999% of people don't want it, need it, or even know what it is.
What percentage of Windows users want to do Unix development? Tell you want, I'll ring around family and friends. I'm guessing the answer will be precisely ZERO, with a margin or error of precisely ZERO.
Your translation is totally wrong. I don't want or need to use Linux or Mac OS or any other OS apart from Windows, because Windows does everything I need it to do, has the largest availability of software, hardware, hardware support (drivers) and games. I would only suffer with Linux if I was skint, or if in my naivete I was trying to make a futile and stupid anti-capitalist point.
Yes, my experience too. I was pretty amazed when I looked around for a tablet. It would have to be bloody good to overcome the fact that as an iPhone/iPod user, I've got a lot of stuff "locked in" to Apple via. their store and iTunes. Anyway, I still don't think there's anything out there that's actually more desirable for me than an actual iPad, and that's still too expensive for what I want it for (not to anon cowards - I want it for browsing, YouTube and generally mooching around the web when I'm sitting in the lounge watching TV - a phone is not really a very pleasant usability experience for that kind-of thing, although that's what I'm using at the moment).
But from a software/hardware point of view I've seen this all before (at the company I work for): the competition comes out with something way ahead of the game, and you rush to play catch-up just to get a toe into the market and develop the skills and expertise you need in order to produce the much better, second generation product. The money invested in developing these things is investing in future products, rather than the existing range.
That "probably" is debatable. Cloud feedback, for example, is assumed to be positive, but in fact 3 papers in the last year have show it to be negative.
Oh no, that kind of paranoia is only on the AGW side. My point is quite simple (surprised you missed it as you're obviously smart enough to switch on a computer): the financial incentives for action are so great that almost nobody is going to be against it, except the proles who end up paying the taxes. The false dichotomy, that you've also missed is that there are two sides to this argument: poor, humble, sincere, honest scientists and big, greedy, evil corporations. The fact of the matter is that the poor, humble scientists depend on AGW just as much as the big, greedy corporations depend upon fossil fuels. Without it Climate Science would still be the obscure back-water of nerdish enquiry it was before Hansen sat his flabby arse before Congress (I note with interest the current temperature is below his 0% increase scenario prediction). I make no mention of the political interests of the NGOs and UN here, but they are also obvious.
Are you serious? The current temperature is below Hansen's ZERO EMISSIONS SCENARIO. In other words, if when Hansen made his prediction we started emitting ZERO CO2 into the atmosphere, what would be the result? As you can see, according to his prediction, CO2 is not driving temperature!
By the way, I like that you're quoting my previous slashdot sig here. You probably aren't aware that Exxon setup a carbon trading desk with Goldman, are you? They are really into it, because they stand to make billions of dollars from any such scheme.
Phil Jones on Horizon:
"The basic science is in the peer-reviewed literature, and I wish more people would read that than read the emails."
Phil Jones in CRU email:
"Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is ! Cheers, Phil"
Actually even the IPCC says the doubling of CO2 would cause a 1.4K warming, not 4-5C. Moreover, other people calculate it as between 0.5 and 1K. You only get the 4-5 figure when you start coding the fact into your climate models, "tuning" their parametrisation to fit your pre-conceived ideas that it should warm by at least that much. There's no evidence whatsoever that they are actually correct. They just curve fit against past data, rather than curve fit against future data (their predictive power is zero). I mean current temperature is BELOW James Hansen's zero emissions scenario of 20 years ago. You can't get much more WRONG than that, can you?
Of course the science is not in dispute. Here's how it works: sideline the mild sceptics (by attacking their integrity, making it difficult for them to publish and removing their funding) and all you have left disagreeing with the "consensus" are the oddballs and extremists. This is no different to various other arguments the Left have put forward about things like immigration and the Euro (here in the UK). But in reality there are many people who aren't oddballs or extremists who dispute the science. There are many reasons why the science can be disputed too. There are many people who aren't oddballs or extremists who dispute the solution to the non-problem (more tax, more costs on business, making us even more uncompetitive globally, and eventually a great deal poorer and less able to deal with any real environmental issues that arise).
These two quotes sum up the AGW position quite nicely:
Phil Jones on Horizon programme:
"The basic science is in the peer-reviewed literature, and I wish more people would read that than read the emails."
Phil Jones in CRU email:
"Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is ! Cheers, Phil"
But the temperature rose in the 20th century pre-1940 by just as much as it did post 1970, despite the population doubling, CO2 output increasing, bigger cars etc. Why do you assume the former is "natural variability" but the latter is man-made, which is what your statement implies?
Hmmmm interesting. Does this allow use of NVIDIA's parallel Nsight? You need two cards for that and not all motherboards have two slots. This might be a good, cheaper solution.
It is simple, yes. Simple minded. Your value system is something like: "warm fuzzy feeling contributing to the greater good" [your Marxist philosophy shining through] versus "nothing". As soon as you frame the latter as "nothing" of course, as you do by imposing your Marxist value system upon it, your argument already entails its own conclusion. That is a formal fallacy. The "nothing" of which you speak is a language translation enabling millions of people who wouldn't ordinarily be able to access the software to be able to do so. Now, please sit back down into your Duma seat.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, well said! This is another of the unintended consequences of policy. Even Al Gore said ethanol was a mistake.
What would help African farmers more than anything else would be for the EU to dismantle it's Common Agricultural Policy. Although the word "common" is something of a misnomer here as it's a policy to bribe the 4% of the population in France who are farmers. Lack of investment in African agricultural development is the price of it.
Before you add to your Trotskyist rant, the fact of the matter is that we (the West) have moved away from implicit support of fascist dictators in regions like the Middle East and towards explicit support of the Libertarian, democratic opposition within them. The Libyan war is a good example to use. When I read a Libyan's associate's Facebook page, littered with references to the English Liberal Tradition (including Locke), the ideas of which are made explicit in the US Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, I nearly fell off of my chair.
But what Kohath writes is true of the Green movement. It is a left-wing political philosophy that has had no intellectual contact with the law of unintended consequences. The thirty or so million people, many of them children, who died from malaria after DDT was banned are probably a very good example to use here.
Not just potential persecution. Spinoza was actually persecuted by the Jewish community he was a member of.
I work in software development. And I use windows, as do 99% of all of our customers. I'm replying to your counter-point about Windows being great for Unix development. Well, Windows is pretty crap for any non-Windows development. I really don't understand what your point is. But for the OP, it's obviously the case that dual boot options aren't available because 99.999% of people don't want it, need it, or even know what it is.
What percentage of Windows users want to do Unix development? Tell you want, I'll ring around family and friends. I'm guessing the answer will be precisely ZERO, with a margin or error of precisely ZERO.
Your translation is totally wrong. I don't want or need to use Linux or Mac OS or any other OS apart from Windows, because Windows does everything I need it to do, has the largest availability of software, hardware, hardware support (drivers) and games. I would only suffer with Linux if I was skint, or if in my naivete I was trying to make a futile and stupid anti-capitalist point.
He's right. It is stupid. Only systems administrators and nerds want to do that kind of thing.
Yes, my experience too. I was pretty amazed when I looked around for a tablet. It would have to be bloody good to overcome the fact that as an iPhone/iPod user, I've got a lot of stuff "locked in" to Apple via. their store and iTunes. Anyway, I still don't think there's anything out there that's actually more desirable for me than an actual iPad, and that's still too expensive for what I want it for (not to anon cowards - I want it for browsing, YouTube and generally mooching around the web when I'm sitting in the lounge watching TV - a phone is not really a very pleasant usability experience for that kind-of thing, although that's what I'm using at the moment).
But from a software/hardware point of view I've seen this all before (at the company I work for): the competition comes out with something way ahead of the game, and you rush to play catch-up just to get a toe into the market and develop the skills and expertise you need in order to produce the much better, second generation product. The money invested in developing these things is investing in future products, rather than the existing range.
That "probably" is debatable. Cloud feedback, for example, is assumed to be positive, but in fact 3 papers in the last year have show it to be negative.
I was just going to make that very point, but making use of an analogy involving Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach. Will save it for another time :p.
Oh no, that kind of paranoia is only on the AGW side. My point is quite simple (surprised you missed it as you're obviously smart enough to switch on a computer): the financial incentives for action are so great that almost nobody is going to be against it, except the proles who end up paying the taxes. The false dichotomy, that you've also missed is that there are two sides to this argument: poor, humble, sincere, honest scientists and big, greedy, evil corporations. The fact of the matter is that the poor, humble scientists depend on AGW just as much as the big, greedy corporations depend upon fossil fuels. Without it Climate Science would still be the obscure back-water of nerdish enquiry it was before Hansen sat his flabby arse before Congress (I note with interest the current temperature is below his 0% increase scenario prediction). I make no mention of the political interests of the NGOs and UN here, but they are also obvious.
Are you serious? The current temperature is below Hansen's ZERO EMISSIONS SCENARIO. In other words, if when Hansen made his prediction we started emitting ZERO CO2 into the atmosphere, what would be the result? As you can see, according to his prediction, CO2 is not driving temperature!
Actually even the IPCC says the doubling of CO2 would cause a 1.4K warming, not 4-5C. Moreover, other people calculate it as between 0.5 and 1K. You only get the 4-5 figure when you start coding the fact into your climate models, "tuning" their parametrisation to fit your pre-conceived ideas that it should warm by at least that much. There's no evidence whatsoever that they are actually correct. They just curve fit against past data, rather than curve fit against future data (their predictive power is zero). I mean current temperature is BELOW James Hansen's zero emissions scenario of 20 years ago. You can't get much more WRONG than that, can you?
These two quotes sum up the AGW position quite nicely:
But the temperature rose in the 20th century pre-1940 by just as much as it did post 1970, despite the population doubling, CO2 output increasing, bigger cars etc. Why do you assume the former is "natural variability" but the latter is man-made, which is what your statement implies?
Hmmmm interesting. Does this allow use of NVIDIA's parallel Nsight? You need two cards for that and not all motherboards have two slots. This might be a good, cheaper solution.
Almost certainly alarmist bollocks.
What? Degrade the quality of your vegetables? Are you fucking stupid or something?
I love the way you get a -1 for stating the fucking obvious.
Concerned about adding too much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere?
No.
Oh hear we go. The same arguments used by British trade unions to enforce the "closed shop" in the 1970's!
It is simple, yes. Simple minded. Your value system is something like: "warm fuzzy feeling contributing to the greater good" [your Marxist philosophy shining through] versus "nothing". As soon as you frame the latter as "nothing" of course, as you do by imposing your Marxist value system upon it, your argument already entails its own conclusion. That is a formal fallacy. The "nothing" of which you speak is a language translation enabling millions of people who wouldn't ordinarily be able to access the software to be able to do so. Now, please sit back down into your Duma seat.
Given the above, what I want to know is why you don't use reductio ad absurdum as your main form of argumentation more often.