Lucia Liljegren has shown that the IPCC's 2'C/century prediction (sorry, "projection") is statistically rejected as too high. This number was published in 2000, IIRC. It has not changed in the more recent IPCC report. It gets worse if you consider the global mean surface temperature calculations may be biased upwards.
6'C/century is right out according to the measurements. But it makes for a good (i.e., scary) headline.
"everyone should know basic math by the time they graduate from High School"
I went to a decent state Primary School in England in the 70s. At age seven or eight we all made up times-table cards, going up to 12x12, which we carried around with us everywhere. We were constantly tested on those cards. By the time we were nine or ten, *everybody* knew their times tables off by heart. Long multiplication and division were drummed into us by age ten. The primary school maths syllabus finished giving us a fair grasp of fractions: we could simplify, add, subtract, and multiply fractions by the end of it. Not just the smart kids; virtually the whole class. I honestly don't understand why this level of achievement can't be universal.
I don't believe in a god in the same way I don't believe in unicorns.
All knowledge is contingent: at some level you have to believe things such as the past is a predictor of the future, that you can trust your senses, and so forth, in order to make any progress. Without such starting points it's hard to see how you could develop any kind of worthwhile philosophy.
There are an infinite number of things that might be or about which I might be mistaken, but I'm not going to act as though they do exist without good reason. I don't see atheist logicians and philosophers as being closed minded on the subject, they are just unconvinced by the arguments in favour of faith. Moreover, they explain precisely the problems with the arguments for theism as presented.
You need something interactive. I took up aikido: it's so complicated you haven't time to notice you're doing exercise. But I'm pretty sure anything that captures your attention and is fun will do. I can't stand the gym: teeedious.
I wasn't trying to make a statistical argument. I was offering evidence to counter the suggestion that Windows is especially sensitive to the hardware you have (moreso than Ubuntu). Moreover, I was pointing out that Windows does not typically require you to hunt the internet for drivers - in my experience I haven't even needed to use the driver CDs that came with the hardware I have installed. I would put good money on Grandma having an easier time of installing Windows simply because Windows is used on a much larger range of home machines than Ubuntu (or any other flavour of Linux).
Regarding software that comes with an OS, I'd say the number one program for domestic users is the web browser. IE works out of the box and lets you view everything on the web pretty much without having to install anything else. Not so under Ubuntu, in my experience. For example, only some of the Ubuntu machines in the office where I work can do such exotic things as reliably view web pages with JavaScript or Flash, the experience of surfing the web is different on each, and don't even get me started on sound support.
I've been using Linux since the first Slackware release and it has been a fantastic workhorse. However, it's been increasingly obvious to me that Windows has for some time provided a dependably superior, simpler experience for just about everything that I don't run from bash. For example: printing, sound, web surfing, networking, hardware support. I could go on.
Hmm. At home I have machines running Vista and they do, simply, just work. They are home built machines and in each case I just put the Vista DVD in the drive and twenty minutes later had a fully working system. Vista even automatically downloaded the drivers for all the odd bits of hardware I have. So, yes, I can imagine my grandmother successfully installing Vista.
My office machines run recent versions of Debian/Ubuntu. They do not just work. They require stupid amounts of voodoo to create even a distinctly second rate user experience. Based on my experience, I cannot imagine Ubuntu passing the grandmother test.
By the way, MS doesn't have a stranglehold on hardware manufacturers. Rather, hardware manufacturers obviously want to target the largest sales base first: Windows. Linux simply doesn't cut it in that regard.
[Having said good things about Windows and bad things about Ubuntu, let the modding-down begin.]
The modern CLR seems fairly sensible to me; definitely several steps ahead of the JVM (e.g., compare how parametric polymorphism is handled).
The article you link to on GC is an in-depth discussion on the cost of implementing finalisation in the GC. These problems are well known and, more to the point, are only some of the reasons why implicit (nondeterministic) finalisation is a Bad Thing. Reference counting memory allocators are much slower than mark-and-sweep memory management for most programs, mainly because all of the bookkeeping the mutator (i.e., your application) has to do.
With regards to exception handling being slow, this is something that has always made me curious: why would anyone use exceptions in a situation where they expect exceptions to be thrown frequently (i.e., not exceptionally!)?
For both these points, yes I can come up with examples where reference counting would be sensible and where fast exception handling would be useful, but these would be very special cases that are not representative of most programs.
The.NET CLR is surely not perfect, but I can't think of any competing schemes that do better (C-- is a possibility, but that project has unfortunately been stuck in first gear for a while).
From Extoxnet: "DDT is slightly to practically non-toxic to test animals via the dermal route".
I guess you wouldn't want to swim in the stuff, but then you wouldn't want to eat a cup of table salt in one go, either.Malaria, on the other hand, is most definitely a major killer.
(1) You obviously aren't looking very hard if you think there are only 10 skeptical journal publications out there. The professors Peilke alone put out more than that each year.
(2) I don't care about who wrote an article, I care about the content of the article.
(3) Your ignorance combined with your claim to familiarity with the literature suggests that you've pretty much insulated yourself against any critical argument. Why?
You would like to think so. However, in climate science this isn't always the case. Google for "Mann hockey stick" for one high profile example of withholding data and code; the current Hadley Centre CRU debacle over temperature records is another (HadCRUT and GISS are the main global temperature analyses used in climate science). These cases are by no means isolated.
Your emotive language aside, the UK emissions reduction target for 2050 puts CO2 output at the same level it was in 1849! For the US, a similar 80% reduction means a return to 1905 levels. How do you take this stuff seriously?
I urge people to read what McKitrick actually said (e.g., comment 7) rather than just taking the word of fanboy here.
Unlike several cases involving high profile climate scientists, McKitrick immediately issued a correction to his work when the degrees/radians error was pointed out - an unfortunate, but entirely understandable mistake (any suggestion that McKitrick does not know the difference is pure ad hominem). Of course, NASA itself, Hansen's employer, has lost at least one mission because of confusion between feet and metres. Apparently even rocket scientists can forget simple details.
I don't thinks that's fair: the spec. just says *what* properties the system should have; the implementation says *how* those properties are provided. Where you can do it, denotational semantics (the spec.) let you say a lot more than you can with operational semantics (the code).
Of course, your argument also suffers from circularity: to debug code you have to have a spec. in the first place to tell you when the implementation is doing the wrong thing.
* why should I care about anyone's connections to the Heartland Institute? I guess I could dismiss Hansen et al. as tree-hugging alarmist luddites with an agenda, but they could still be right. If someone's affiliations matter so much to you, you're probably better suited to activism than critical thinking.
* Of course there is no chance I can show you the "substance of the disagreement" when the disagreement in context is hypothetical. You and I have crossed swords in the past and I have brought up the fact that there are problems with the fidelity of the temperature record, corrections for UHI, absolute and relative performance of climate models, lack of an engineering quality explanation of the claimed climate sensitivity to CO2 (to borrow McIntyre's term), variability of the ice caps (the "scariness" of some of those graphs for the Arctic is due to 70% of the data coming from the pre-satellite era - the Antarctic, on the other hand, seems to be doing just fine), not to mention key disputes over costs of adaptation vs. correction (if that is possible). Any one of these topics would require more space to discuss in depth than would be reasonable or sensible in a Slashdot forum. You know this. If you are interested, the most measured starting points I can think of giving you are Roger Pielke Sr's work at climatesci.org and Lucia Liljegren's statistical analyses at rankexploits.com/musings.
* Have you read some of the responses to the reviewers' comments for the IPCC reports? If you had, you would hear alarm bells ringing. More to the point, the IPCC chapters contain significant amounts of the lead authors own work: the reports are *not* independent reviews.
I can't work out whether you genuinely believe the science of AGW is rock solid and admits of no debate or whether you're so hung up on the precautionary principle that you think open debate is too dangerous to allow.
First, many (many) people with scientific training have *specifically* followed the climate debate and found the argument for AGW wanting. Should they still abandon reason because there is a concensus (but not clear evidence)?
Second, there are many publishing climate scientists who take issue with AGW and the findings and methods of the IPCC. Are they then cherry-picking conspiracy nuts?
Third, how can this matter possibly be discussed if any disagreement is dismissed this way without regard to the substance of the disagreement?
You can pick any other number of contentious topics (alternative medicine, creationism, moon landing hoaxers, etc.) and produce real *evidence* to back up the science. With AGW the standard starting point in the debate is for the warmers to resort to tiresome rhetorical attacks in an effort to discredit the questioner.
I used to call myself an agnostic until I realised it's not a very useful term. I'm agnostic about gods in the same sense I'm agnostic about invisible, undectectable dogs: the lack of evidence or reason for either means it makes sense to *assume* they simply don't exist, rather than act on the basis that they *might* exist.
For my money, an atheist is someone who says, "On the basis of the available evidence, it makes sense to assume there is no god (or undetectable dogs)." I think you'd be hard pushed to find an atheist who would not change their mind should the Almighty decide to manifest Himself in their living room offering proof of His credentials.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's really less convincing when you have the lead authors promoting their own work - e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_E._Mann
Lucia Liljegren has shown that the IPCC's 2'C/century prediction (sorry, "projection") is statistically rejected as too high. This number was published in 2000, IIRC. It has not changed in the more recent IPCC report. It gets worse if you consider the global mean surface temperature calculations may be biased upwards.
6'C/century is right out according to the measurements. But it makes for a good (i.e., scary) headline.
"everyone should know basic math by the time they graduate from High School"
I went to a decent state Primary School in England in the 70s. At age seven or eight we all made up times-table cards, going up to 12x12, which we carried around with us everywhere. We were constantly tested on those cards. By the time we were nine or ten, *everybody* knew their times tables off by heart. Long multiplication and division were drummed into us by age ten. The primary school maths syllabus finished giving us a fair grasp of fractions: we could simplify, add, subtract, and multiply fractions by the end of it. Not just the smart kids; virtually the whole class. I honestly don't understand why this level of achievement can't be universal.
I don't believe in a god in the same way I don't believe in unicorns.
All knowledge is contingent: at some level you have to believe things such as the past is a predictor of the future, that you can trust your senses, and so forth, in order to make any progress. Without such starting points it's hard to see how you could develop any kind of worthwhile philosophy.
There are an infinite number of things that might be or about which I might be mistaken, but I'm not going to act as though they do exist without good reason. I don't see atheist logicians and philosophers as being closed minded on the subject, they are just unconvinced by the arguments in favour of faith. Moreover, they explain precisely the problems with the arguments for theism as presented.
You need something interactive. I took up aikido: it's so complicated you haven't time to notice you're doing exercise. But I'm pretty sure anything that captures your attention and is fun will do. I can't stand the gym: teeedious.
I wasn't trying to make a statistical argument. I was offering evidence to counter the suggestion that Windows is especially sensitive to the hardware you have (moreso than Ubuntu). Moreover, I was pointing out that Windows does not typically require you to hunt the internet for drivers - in my experience I haven't even needed to use the driver CDs that came with the hardware I have installed. I would put good money on Grandma having an easier time of installing Windows simply because Windows is used on a much larger range of home machines than Ubuntu (or any other flavour of Linux).
Regarding software that comes with an OS, I'd say the number one program for domestic users is the web browser. IE works out of the box and lets you view everything on the web pretty much without having to install anything else. Not so under Ubuntu, in my experience. For example, only some of the Ubuntu machines in the office where I work can do such exotic things as reliably view web pages with JavaScript or Flash, the experience of surfing the web is different on each, and don't even get me started on sound support.
I've been using Linux since the first Slackware release and it has been a fantastic workhorse. However, it's been increasingly obvious to me that Windows has for some time provided a dependably superior, simpler experience for just about everything that I don't run from bash. For example: printing, sound, web surfing, networking, hardware support. I could go on.
Hmm. At home I have machines running Vista and they do, simply, just work. They are home built machines and in each case I just put the Vista DVD in the drive and twenty minutes later had a fully working system. Vista even automatically downloaded the drivers for all the odd bits of hardware I have. So, yes, I can imagine my grandmother successfully installing Vista.
My office machines run recent versions of Debian/Ubuntu. They do not just work. They require stupid amounts of voodoo to create even a distinctly second rate user experience. Based on my experience, I cannot imagine Ubuntu passing the grandmother test.
By the way, MS doesn't have a stranglehold on hardware manufacturers. Rather, hardware manufacturers obviously want to target the largest sales base first: Windows. Linux simply doesn't cut it in that regard.
[Having said good things about Windows and bad things about Ubuntu, let the modding-down begin.]
The modern CLR seems fairly sensible to me; definitely several steps ahead of the JVM (e.g., compare how parametric polymorphism is handled).
The article you link to on GC is an in-depth discussion on the cost of implementing finalisation in the GC. These problems are well known and, more to the point, are only some of the reasons why implicit (nondeterministic) finalisation is a Bad Thing. Reference counting memory allocators are much slower than mark-and-sweep memory management for most programs, mainly because all of the bookkeeping the mutator (i.e., your application) has to do.
With regards to exception handling being slow, this is something that has always made me curious: why would anyone use exceptions in a situation where they expect exceptions to be thrown frequently (i.e., not exceptionally!)?
For both these points, yes I can come up with examples where reference counting would be sensible and where fast exception handling would be useful, but these would be very special cases that are not representative of most programs.
The .NET CLR is surely not perfect, but I can't think of any competing schemes that do better (C-- is a possibility, but that project has unfortunately been stuck in first gear for a while).
From Extoxnet: "DDT is slightly to practically non-toxic to test animals via the dermal route".
I guess you wouldn't want to swim in the stuff, but then you wouldn't want to eat a cup of table salt in one go, either.Malaria, on the other hand, is most definitely a major killer.
Are you opposed to vaccination on the same basis?
Parents don't have to make many sacrifices at all to rear children here.
You're obviously not a parent.
(1) You obviously aren't looking very hard if you think there are only 10 skeptical journal publications out there. The professors Peilke alone put out more than that each year.
(2) I don't care about who wrote an article, I care about the content of the article.
(3) Your ignorance combined with your claim to familiarity with the literature suggests that you've pretty much insulated yourself against any critical argument. Why?
You should actually read some of the informed criticism; you might learn something.
You do know that Real Climate, Open Mind, etc. heavily censor their comment pages? You won't get an honest view of the debate at those sites.
You would like to think so. However, in climate science this isn't always the case. Google for "Mann hockey stick" for one high profile example of withholding data and code; the current Hadley Centre CRU debacle over temperature records is another (HadCRUT and GISS are the main global temperature analyses used in climate science). These cases are by no means isolated.
Your emotive language aside, the UK emissions reduction target for 2050 puts CO2 output at the same level it was in 1849! For the US, a similar 80% reduction means a return to 1905 levels. How do you take this stuff seriously?
And now, let the modding down of my post begin...
I urge people to read what McKitrick actually said (e.g., comment 7) rather than just taking the word of fanboy here.
Unlike several cases involving high profile climate scientists, McKitrick immediately issued a correction to his work when the degrees/radians error was pointed out - an unfortunate, but entirely understandable mistake (any suggestion that McKitrick does not know the difference is pure ad hominem). Of course, NASA itself, Hansen's employer, has lost at least one mission because of confusion between feet and metres. Apparently even rocket scientists can forget simple details.
It isn't. Petulance is an endemic feature of the slashdot scoring system.
I don't thinks that's fair: the spec. just says *what* properties the system should have; the implementation says *how* those properties are provided. Where you can do it, denotational semantics (the spec.) let you say a lot more than you can with operational semantics (the code).
Of course, your argument also suffers from circularity: to debug code you have to have a spec. in the first place to tell you when the implementation is doing the wrong thing.
Shhhhhh! You'll offend people's religious beliefs.
Umm, three exclamation marks, a smiley... the only thing that didn't go in there was a ... tag.
Tell me you didn't mod your own comment up?
...it's never, never, NEVER compromise!!! :-)
Your notion that the NAS panel endorsed Mann's work clearly indicates that you haven't read it.
Ah well. There is none so blind as he who will not see: you're unreachable.
In reverse order:
* why should I care about anyone's connections to the Heartland Institute? I guess I could dismiss Hansen et al. as tree-hugging alarmist luddites with an agenda, but they could still be right. If someone's affiliations matter so much to you, you're probably better suited to activism than critical thinking.
* Of course there is no chance I can show you the "substance of the disagreement" when the disagreement in context is hypothetical. You and I have crossed swords in the past and I have brought up the fact that there are problems with the fidelity of the temperature record, corrections for UHI, absolute and relative performance of climate models, lack of an engineering quality explanation of the claimed climate sensitivity to CO2 (to borrow McIntyre's term), variability of the ice caps (the "scariness" of some of those graphs for the Arctic is due to 70% of the data coming from the pre-satellite era - the Antarctic, on the other hand, seems to be doing just fine), not to mention key disputes over costs of adaptation vs. correction (if that is possible). Any one of these topics would require more space to discuss in depth than would be reasonable or sensible in a Slashdot forum. You know this. If you are interested, the most measured starting points I can think of giving you are Roger Pielke Sr's work at climatesci.org and Lucia Liljegren's statistical analyses at rankexploits.com/musings.
* Have you read some of the responses to the reviewers' comments for the IPCC reports? If you had, you would hear alarm bells ringing. More to the point, the IPCC chapters contain significant amounts of the lead authors own work: the reports are *not* independent reviews.
I can't work out whether you genuinely believe the science of AGW is rock solid and admits of no debate or whether you're so hung up on the precautionary principle that you think open debate is too dangerous to allow.
First, many (many) people with scientific training have *specifically* followed the climate debate and found the argument for AGW wanting. Should they still abandon reason because there is a concensus (but not clear evidence)?
Second, there are many publishing climate scientists who take issue with AGW and the findings and methods of the IPCC. Are they then cherry-picking conspiracy nuts?
Third, how can this matter possibly be discussed if any disagreement is dismissed this way without regard to the substance of the disagreement?
You can pick any other number of contentious topics (alternative medicine, creationism, moon landing hoaxers, etc.) and produce real *evidence* to back up the science. With AGW the standard starting point in the debate is for the warmers to resort to tiresome rhetorical attacks in an effort to discredit the questioner.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_Monster_Maze
Released in 1982 for the 16Kbyte ZX-81. Awesome game!
I used to call myself an agnostic until I realised it's not a very useful term. I'm agnostic about gods in the same sense I'm agnostic about invisible, undectectable dogs: the lack of evidence or reason for either means it makes sense to *assume* they simply don't exist, rather than act on the basis that they *might* exist.
For my money, an atheist is someone who says, "On the basis of the available evidence, it makes sense to assume there is no god (or undetectable dogs)." I think you'd be hard pushed to find an atheist who would not change their mind should the Almighty decide to manifest Himself in their living room offering proof of His credentials.