Steve Forbes for president? Or Ross Perot? Look how far those two smart, rich, successful businessmen went.
A surprisingly long way for any third party candidate - just compare their performance to say Nader for the Greens, or any Libertarian candidate in history. Which really just goes to show that what you really need to get elected is a shitload of money and a willingness to spend it to get yourself elected. The two main parties, of course, represent the biggest slush funds of "cash to be wasted on election bullshit".
The neo-cons - the architects of the ideology if not the actual war - are cutting loose like no one's business. They seem to think the war is going badly, and they're blaming the chimp.
Well they have to. Ideology is nothing something you can just change in the face of facts. Obviously then, for them, the was, and always will be, a goo idea. The fact that the war is inreasingly becoming a political albatross means the neo-cons need to distance themselves from the results. If the idea wasn't wrong (and it can't have been, it was their idea) then it must be the execution right? The fact is that Bush never was a neo-con, he just fell in with them. Tat means he is now the neo-cons scapegoat, the reason why their infallible ideology wasn't at fault for Iraq. Expect to hear this line from the hard-core neo-cons again and again as time goes on.
I agree that there is hype around agile methods, and programs of "how to be agile" that suggest a wide range of practices of dubious extra merit, but package the whole thing up as an "agile methodology" etc. Then again, there is some merit to the approach, and developing early testable specifications of what you intend to develop, and against which you can verify any further code you actually develop, is probably a good thing. Whether having two people sit next to each other to code, or having trendy names for your meetings, etc. has much merit is a little less clear. Agile will undoubtedly remain around, it will just become tempered with common sense and a lot of the hype and trendy named aspects of it will get trimmed away.
Short story: I was working at a company years ago, a VP of development wanted to be able to dial out and use a terminal programs on his PC from our office phone system. I asked him, point blank, tell me exactly what you need. He responded, "I just need to be able to connect to a modem and dial out." (exact words burned into my brain)
So, we bought $20,000 worth of phone equipment that did just that, alowed a PC's modem to be plugged into a wall, and dial out.
He came to my office and said, I can't use this system. I asked why? He said the modem banks weren't "hayes compatible." I looked at him, told him his exact words after being asked "exactly" what he needed, and he said (rather annoyed) "well, you should have known I needed "hayes compatible."
So your inability to elicit detailed specifications from a client means you should simply ignore the client? I'm not sure I follow. Did you really expect the guy to spell out in glittering detail all his very particular needs, many of which he may not think of on the spot, from a single direct question? You didn't think that a single sentence specification was begging to be fleshed out, went and spent $20,000 on the basis of that first pass spec, and then blame the customer?
Yes, customers are very poor at being able to immediately tell you, in glorious detail, there precise needs leaving out absolutely nothing. That doesn't mean you ignore them, that means you actually spend time talking to them trying to develop the specification. In principle the goal of agile development is to do exactly that, and to help the customers imagination along by providing him with intermediary working models to help elicit the deeper implicit needs as early as possible. The aim is to work with the customer to help the customer actually understand what their own implicit specification is, and that means a certain amount of back and forth is required. It means asking questions like "why do you want this?" so you can determine what other requirements are driving things, or hidden in the basic request. If you had, instead of taking his first pass as the complete spec, sat down with the guy and tried to work out what he needed, perhaps providing examples and explaining what the current spec would mean for him along the way, you could have avoided spending $20,000 on a system he won't use.
I'm beginning to think that working with customers to develop a specification is actually a suffciently hard job that it should be a specialised position - lord knows enough developers seem to have little in the way of an idea about it. Perhaps the task of interacting with the customer, and having the patience to carefully tease out of them exactly what their requirements are, then converting those requirements into a specification easily and clearly interpretable by a development team; p[erhaps that's a full time job in and of itself.
Honestly... no structure, no planning, no discipline, nothing but planning not to have a plan.
I'm honestly not sure what you mean. I guess you could do Agile that way if you wanted to, but it is in no way a requirement. You want discipline? Try Specification Driven Design and integrate formnal methods into your agile approach. You want structure? Try something like ESpec to provide a single workbench to structure design, development, testing, and formal verification. And as for planning, well its a matter of planning with what you have no, and being open to change - that's not "no plan". If you're curious as to why I'm picking on Eiffel as a language for agile development - I figure the percieved incongruity (that, as is apparent by the examples given, doesn't actually exist) of agile development with a fairly strict, planning oriented language like Eiffel might actually get you to pay attention and see what's going on.
I'm sorry, but I think all the hype about this game is ridiculous. Everyone I know who's actually played the game did so for maximum half an hour never to play it again after.
I sat down and played the game. It was fun, and had an extremely simple and intuitive interface. For a flash game it had quite a high degree of polish. I'm not sure of its replay value as it stands however. As you suggest, I played for about half an hour but don't find myself feeling any particular desire to continue or go back to it. The weakness, ultimately, is the relative sameness of the gameplay as you advance - there simply isn't anything particularly new or different; nothing to aspire to achieve. Of course in a full blown version there will likely be rather more effort put into developing and extending the levels so that new material can be introduced as you proceed - perhaps the "evolution" steps could introduce significant new skills so as to overcome new challenges etc.
So I guess I both agree and disagree with you. Yes the game, as it stands, is intriguing but lacks replay value. On the other hand the base is reasonably strong, and if someone creative can expand upon that to creater a longer fuller game experience... so much the better.
I can certainly agree with your last paragraph. My only real point is that there are, as far as I can tell, no panaceas - what we do have, however, is a wide variety of options that, while not perfect, can fit together and potentially produce a viable solution. Certainly it is worth investigating most of them, and biofuels are certainly on that list.
I think maybe you don't get it. Small arms are effective for a civil war. It's not like the government can nuke cities within its own borders without creating even more rebels elsewhere. Also, in most civil conflicts a significant portion of the military sides with each faction. So the guns they have are also the guns we have, in some proportion.
I believe the point is this: if you have a small scale uprising then small arms won't help, you'll get branded as terrorists, get little sympathy from the general populace, and at best provide a nuisance; if you have a large scale uprising then you can be just as effective without small arms in the hands of ordinary citizens - just having mass protests with people standing up nd saying "No" will do the job as well as anything else.
Let's analyse this more closely to see what I'm getting at. If you don't have general widespread support then at best you can run a rolling guerilla campaign like, say, the insurgents in Iraq or Afghanistan (though much of the violence in Iraq is sectarian violence attacking civilians). You might like to point out that the insurgents in Iraq are doing well - except they are not threatening to overthrow Iraq, not while the US military remains there. The threat is that the attrition will affect the attitudes of the US populace and result in a withdrawal of forces. You're not going to get that when you're fighting a war in the US with US civilians as the collateral damage of the conflict. Either you have the support of the general populace, or you don't. If you don't then you'll quickly acquire the ire of the general populace, and their support for the government to use stronger and harsher methods to eliminate you. The more violent you get, the less likely you are to gain support from the general populace.
Now let's presume you have much more widespread consensus that the government needs to be overthrown - say a significant percentage of the total population. If all those people, instead of arming themselves, simply take to the streets in coordinated mass protest calling for a change in government and or refusing to follow government directives then what is the government to do? If we presume an authoritarian government which wishes to suppress such protest or dissent, or that needs to enforce its directives then they can send in troops - but what are the troops to do? The more harshly you try to suppress the protestors the less likely the military are to follow the orders given. The military is unlikely to fire on unarmed peaceful protestors. In the few cases where that does happen then that will do far more to win the general populace to your cause than having armed violent protestors shot. As you point out, the government using violence is only going to create more rebels. In the end you will have the military refusing to follow the orders of the government, and that is victory for the revolution - the government no longer has any power.
All of this, of course, presumes freedom of speech. If there is no freedom of speech and free press then the government can violently suppress protest with little concern for any repurcussion: think Tiananmen square. Thus certainly the right to free speech is worth defending. The right to bear arms, however, is no longer terribly significant in doing that - not while there is a well equipped permanently standing army in the US.
What about bio fuels? Grow crops, burn them, or process them into fuel and burn that. Carbon neutral (you release only carbon that you first extracted), cleaner than fossil fuels, and probably cost effective if you choose the right crops - especially compared to nuclear fission.
Exactly how carbon neutral biofuels are depends on the crop used to produce it. Some crops are better than others. For instance Brazil uses sugar cane, which has pretty good yield rates without excess help and converts well to fuel. The leading candidate in the US is corn, but corn yields are as high as they are due to massive use of petrochemical fertilizers etc. The end result is that corn really isn't such a good crop. Sure corn biofuel represents a net carbon reduction on other fuel sources, but it is actually a lot smallere than you might think, and corn biofuels are a long way from carbon neutral. It doesn't scale that well either, at least not yet anyway, which is the other big catch. The massive farming of high density crops required to large scale biofuel production currently brings its own problems which again reduces the net gain. These problems are not insurmountale, but biofuels are not a cure-all, just another ingredient in what's looking to be a very diverse pudding.
Heh. Dawkins is a weak atheist. Most atheists ae weak atheists. I've almost never encountered a strong atheist. You might mistake an atheist for a strong atheist because he doesn't go around putting provisos of "but e can neve be absolutely certain" on everything he says, but if pressed or asked I think you'll find they are weak atheists and have no certainty as to non-existence, they just lean heavily in that direction (just as you, technically, are only a weak atheist with regard to Zeus, but generally lean toward the fact that Zeus doesn't exist). Dawkins is in exactly that category.
Even if Microsoft manages to pull off a spectacular legal coup d'état, I predict that their success in European and Asian courts will be... less than spectacular. Linux isn't going away anytime soon, and when it does go away it will be for technical reasons (i.e. 100+ years from now they finally rewrite the OS from scratch), not legal reasons.
Sure, Microsoft is unlikely to be able to kill Linux via this, or any similar route. If they can knock over the businesses backing a couple of major distributions, however, they can set Linux back a bit. Red Hat, for instance, contributes an awful lot of code. Yes the developers will still work on their projects, but they won't be paid to work on the full time anymore. New systems will spring up and Linux will keep rolling along. Potentially it can buy Microsoft more time in a comfortable monopoly position though, and I think right now that's all Microsoft cares about. The can try to leverage the monopoly into some other markets, or just buy themselves some breathing space. I think they'll be happy enough with that at this stage.
So what was the point of the deal then? Either you'll be contributing code that you couldn't have before, meaning no one else who doesn't have a similar MS deal can use, or you'll be contributing code that you could have easily added previously anyways. I don't get it.
I believe the "point", as they see it, is that they are being paid a lot of money to write this code. Sure, it might have been things they could have implemented anyway, but being paid enough to have lots of full time paid developers devoted to the task is more likely to (a) ensure the work actually gets done and (b) gets done more quickly than if you didn't have developers working on it full time.
This, of course, doesn't exonerate Novell - MS managed to slip the patent arrangement into the deal, and that part is certainly very fishy. My point is simply that they are actually getting something out of this.
Well let's see if we can reasonably compress the options down a little by getting somewhat creative. Note that I'm not claiming to propose a perfect solution here, I'm trying to demonstrate that, with a little thought you can compress the list reasonably - and hopefully with enough thought you can find ideal ways to do this.
Switch User, Log Off and Lock, ultimately could be compressed into a single option. What are the differences here? Log Off kills all your applications, while switch user and lock don't, and switch user allows you (presumably) to drop back to being you without entering a password. Why not have a single option which leaves applications running and takes you to a "log in" screen - log in as you and you get back to your session (so it is equivalent to a locked screen), log in as someone else and it starts a new session for them (so it is equivalent to switch user), and if you want to kill all your applications... then just kill all your applications: realistically if there was a robust lock screen/switch user option I think the need to "kill all your applications" and end your session will be lessened - most people will just leave stuff running. If you really need to kill stuff then shutdown completely.
Likewise sleep and hibernate, while technically different, really don't need to be differentiated - just pick one (and realistically hibernate, as the better energy saver, is the better option). If you want sleep, well let the power management handle that and don't bother with options for the user.
That leaves us with just a few options: Lock/Switch User, Hibernate, Restart and Shutdown. You can probably pare that down some more if you're cunning.
If I'd known you don't believe in absolute truth or universal, abstract, invariant laws of logic--I wouldn't have wasted my time trying to reason with you. What is the point? I mean, why don't I just adopt the logical convention that says "Theism is true" and then just declare myself the winner of this little slashdot debate?
If you were being honest with yourself you would probably realise that that is essentially what you started out by doing: you have essentially made it axiomatic that God exists from the outset. You should also realise that, as much as you may wish to adopt that particular logical convention, there is no compulsion for anyone else to accept it. If no-one else accepts it then the only person you are convincing that you've "won the debate" is yourself - and I think you were convinced of that before we began, and will be long after we cease arguing.
Yes, logicians differ and prove things using different methods, but that doesn't mean that logic is merely convention. You don't treat it as if it were a convention when you disagree with a colleague, calling a statement irrational.
On the contrary, I do. The reason I can object is because we share a particular convention. It is entirely reasonable to point out when a person contravenes a logic that both they and I accept. If they don't agree with that particular logic, well nothing I can say is going to change their mind, not unless I can convince them of the effectiveness of the logic in question first. The point of logic, particularly, say, classical logic, is that it has near universal agreement: almost everyone accepts it (People who have more experience dealing with logic, of course, tend to be more inclined to quibble - but then they can make the case for the greater efficacy of their preferred logic for the particular case). With that near universal agreement it is entirely possible to discuss things, and object to contravention of the convention. Logic doesn't have to be absolute for this to work, merely very widely accepted. And I've already given good reasons for wide acceptance - that logic is constructed from experiences of a shared common external world - that don't require any absolutes or eternal Platonic forms.
You have admitted that within your worldview (your presuppositions that you take as self-attesting) knowledge isn't truly possible.
On the contrary, I have admitted that absolute knowledge is not possible in my worldview. That still allows knowledge, it's just that it becomes contingent knowledge. Of course contingent knowledge is hardly something new - us mathematicians (who I suspect you would argue are playing in the world of eternal platonic absolutes) have been dealing with it ever since the questions about foundations got seriously explored. Take the Continuum Hypothesis - that there is no cardinal number between the number of natural numbers, and the number of real numbers - it is neither true, not false, in any absolute sense; it is independent of ZFC, and is, if you like, a contingent truth: it is either true, or false, depending on what assumptions you wish to accept and either case is as valid (and as consistent) as the other. This is, of course, hard for people use to thinking in terms of absolutes to accept - surely there either is, or is not, such a cardinal number? Not in the mathematical universe, no - it is a choice that can be made and there simply isn't an absolute truth either way. Once you get used to dealing with such contingent truth (the axiom of choice and any results that follow from it, for instance, are such a truths) in your everyday work it doesn't seem so bad. We've been trained to think in absolutes so it takes some practice, but it is easy enough to get the hang of it.
You have a pragmatic approach to logic: it works, but if it stops working, the laws could change in the future. That assumption about laws of thought and reason make this debate
May I suggest to look at Ada and Eiffel - both offer elegant and consistent syntax that results in easy to maintain code, with the benefit that they compile to run as fast as C and C++.
Yes, some of the logics are subfields of others. They add or subtract rules. The question is which rules are necessary? Do we need LEM and hence should we use classical logic? Will any paraconsistent logic do, or must we use a particular one? To say that paraconsistent logic is itself a subfield is to say that you can sub it under free logic, or generally "rules for systematizing thought", neither of which are especially useful in any practical sense - so are all out additions of rules to free logic wrong? If there is one true logic why to we keep finding/creating so many diferent ones? If logic is an absolute God created thing, why should there be any disagreement as to what it is and how it should work?
My question to you is this--do you disagree with the classical, philosophical logic that I am referring to?
Well it would help if you could define it. Do you mean free logic or classical logic? I tend to use intuitionistic logic and modal logic rather classical a lot of the time. I don't use free logic because it simply isn't practical - it's incapable of adequately yielding practical results in almost any situation. So yes, I guess I do disagree - not to say that those logics are "wrong" merely that they aren't always the most useful, nor the most definitive.
Are laws of logic merely conventions, agreed upon by men?
It would seem that way, given that there isn't even agreement over what to call logic, and exactly which rules should count, and which should be ignored. Is it so hard to believe that logic, which is ultimately just the modelling and systematizing of thoughts, should be able to be created by minds, such as those of humans, that are capable of reflecting upon themselves, and thinking about thoughts?
You might ask why there is as much agreement as there is - but that's a matter of practicality and the experience of a (presumed) common external world shaping things. If I were to create a basic rule for what happens when I drop and object from a height, would you be surprised if I arrived at "it falls" just like you did? Probably not. Our shared experience of the world results in a limited set of rules that produce practical and useful results. The rule "It completes a small circle before hovering", for instance, doesn't get us far. There are, of course, many different answers of varying practicality. My "it falls" isn't as useful and Newton's laws which provide both more detail of how it falls, and situations of when it might not. You can use general relativity to cover even more situations in even more detail. None of those rules for what happens when you drop something, however, are "true" as the inconsistency between general relativity and quantum mechanics shows. There is some other rule that we haven't found yet that is more practical because it cover quantum mechanical scales.
By the same token you can expect considerations of rules of logic to generally converge upon systems and rules that give practical results - that is rules that provide chains of thought that are extremely convincing. Originally logic was a matter of syllogisms, and was it competition with rhetoricians. Logic, however, found a different niche - it needed to be able to convince you, as well as convincing other people, and picking apart problems in your own and others arguments, and diverged from rhetoric. But given the shared external world, and the relative similarity of human minds, it should not be a huge surprise that we converge toward similar rules when determining how to systematize our thoughts so as to be most convincing to ourselves and others. Exactly which rules one converges upon really depends on exactly what phenomena, or what thoughts, one wishes to render more rigorous. Depending upon your interest you can arrive at different logics - or, if you're a pluralist like me, you can use whatever logic seems best suited to dealing with the problem at hand.
The "little" part of the the little ice age is really very little compared to the temperature differences between ice ages and interglacials. Have look at the reconstructions of past temperature - yes there are wobbles and natural variation, and there's even a medieval warm period - that doesn't stop the current rise from looking quite significant.
Try Russell's teapot then. Entirely physically possible (though rather unlikely) and certainly can't be disproven - do you believe there's a teapot orbiting the sub between earth and mars? Are you agnostic about it? Or do you simply not believe in it? Most atheists are "weak atheists", which is to say that they happily admit the question of the existence of God remains unresolved. They do believe, however, that the burden of proof is on the one making the claim of existence, and, pending further evidence, have to lean toward non-existence.
I'm curious as to how MS can actually profit by this translation. Sales of Mapuzugun-language software seem unlikely to be such that they'll recoup their investment.
Given that even the article summary states that the work was done in conjunction with the Chilean Ministry of Education, I think you'll find that "support for all local languages" was simply a checkbox requirement the Chilean government placed on software. It doesn't matter if no one ever uses the Mapuzugun-language version: being able to check off support for the language will be what will ensure Microsoft contracts with the Chilean government - and those contracts will undoubtedly more than pay for the cost of the translation.
So essentially, he still considers moderates to be illegitimate. He is just as much a fundamentalist as his enemies - in his view, you MUST be an atheist or you're "irrational". Just like how the Christian fundies think everyone MUST be a Christian.
Of course atheists haven't resorted to some tactics used by people to proselytize their religion...
[Knock][Knock] Homeowner: Yes, hello? Atheist: Hello. Have you considered not believing in God? Homeowner: Um, I hadn't really - Atheist: Perhaps you would care to read some of these pamphlets! Homeowner: That's okay I - Atheist: They clearly explain the benefits of not believing in God. Not believing in God changed my life, and it can change yours too. Homeowner: Uhuh, whatever - Atheist: Don't you see what not believing in God can do for you? If you don't not believe in - [SLAM!]
The thing you're probably looking for is Milankovitch cycles which account for the basic cycle of climate change every 100,000 years. You might also note that in the naturally occuring climate changes the temperature leads carbon dioxide - the orbital cycle causes an initial temperature change which results in a feedback cycle of more CO2 (warmer oceans can retain less CO2). Of course the orbital effects are insufficient to explain the degree of warming - to explain that we need to note that once a CO2 increase has been initiated by the orbital cycle it then feeds back on itself with CO2 causing significantly more warming. Note, however, that the current warming, and the current spike in CO2, do note fall into line with these natural cycles, so they aren't the caue of recent warming: in fact we're currently in the middle of an interglacial and should be expecting (relatively) steady climate for the next 40,000 years or so.
Two points, ten years is not a geological time frame. His graph shows very large swings in the observed tack, sometimes falling outside all three of his predictions. I cannot see how this is meant to show how good his models are, rather it gives a very good indication of his models failings.
And geological time-frames aren't really relevant to the discussion. The current change is, relatively speaking, rapid, and most predictions are only looking at the 10 to 100 year time scale. They don't need to be able to predict over geological time scales - they need to be able to deal with the time scale of observed change. As to his graph: indeed, it isn't a point for point match, but it is suprisingly close. The real question is "what is the source of the error"? The largest area, where the observed dips below all 3 scenarios is the year Pinatubo erupted. Hansen's scenario B and C had volcano factored in a few years later - and from that point on we are back to a close match. So the problem that prevented close pointwise matching was Hansen's inability to predict when a volcano would erupt - he could, however, make statistical assessements of the likelihood and factor it in to the long term predictions. He didn't get the year right, but averaging out past that he actually did remarkably well. The reality is that the greatest source of error in current climate models in our predictions of what future emissions will be - that's the big unknown.
The links to a AntiSkeptic FAQ can hardly be considered impartial. The FAQ also seems to fly in the face of good science, claiming that using historical data to prove a models validity is good enough to trust it's forward predictions.
I was rather more worried about the content than the source - the details of GCM predictions that have been observed in practice are referenced so you can follow those up if you care to. The point was simply that GCMs have made a number of predictions that have since been observed; an anti-skeptic FAQ simply proved the fastest easiest way to find that information presented conveniently in one source. As to whether success at predicting the past counts toward ability to predict the future: if the models are no being trained on the data in question, but instead programmed on principles - and let's be clear: these are not neural nets, nor pattern matching machines that are trained on past data - then their ability to predict the past is still a good indicator. Much of science actually works this way. The theory of evolution makes predictions on past data, and yet still claims to be able to make predictions with regard to the future. Much of cosmology uses data of events that have already happened on which to test their predictions. The trouble arises when you make use of the past data to make your prediction; assuming the conclusion if you like; that is indeed rather dodgy. It is also not what is being done with climate models.
The graphs you provide show have the general trend but that's about it. A moving average would also follow the trend. If the models are no better than a moving average why should people use them?
Because a moving average requires the data you are trying to predict to be fed into it to be able to make the prediction. Climate models are neural nets, they are not regressions, they are not predictive analytics. Climate models mathematical and physical models. You don't feed them all your historical data to train them to make predictions. You give them some base points, and you may well use some historical data to verify parameters, but it is a quite different than a moving average which cannot "predict" data it has never seen.
I'm also very interested to see if using sun activity alone is enough to model historical temperature swings, my guess is that it would be. Guess I'll have to bust out GNU Plot again
To let you know how accurate the large model for climatologists is look at the weather prediction in your news paper.
There is, of course, a vast difference between predicting weather - which is a local phenomena, with significant specificity - and predicting the climate trends - which is averaging general trends globally. Consider, for instance, that it is very hard to stand on a beach and predict the exact height and shape of the next wave and precisely where and when it will break. On the other hand predicting the approximate height and time of the next high tide is rather easier. GCMs are, indeed, currently rather poor at making predictions down to the level of day to day local weather. They have, however, been very accurate at predicting year on year global climate.
They are not sure as to just what influences our weather let alone to what extent. Ask them how much influence the sun or the earths core temp or the annual freezing of the southern oceans contribute to our weather and all they can do is shrug their shoulders and talk in non specifics.
As noted above, contrary to your claim, the models have proved to be remarkably robust and accurate. They are also, contrary to popular perception in some circles, not just a big pattern matching machine that are "trained" on past data. They are models that are fed in physics. Yes, there are some tweakable parameters, as there should be in any model where there is some uncertainty. The greatest area of uncertainty in models currently is clouds, since they can be both a positive or negative feedback depending on the exact nature of their formation. Of course this problem is taken very seriously and there is a lot of study. The last IPCC report had considerable detail summarising that work. The simple reality, however, is that the models have worked pretty well, and have, in fact, made significant predictions that have since been observed.
But when they draw conclusions they are just blowing smoke the more assumptions the more smoke e.g. higher CO2 means higher temperature, therefore the level of CO2 measured in ice cores proves the temperatures years ago were less therefore we have global warming therefore etc etc
Historical temperatures from ice-cores are determined by ratios of hydrogen or oxygen isotopes in the ice. The guts of the issue is that when combined in water the different isotopes, being different masses, fractionate out at slightly different temperatures, thus the exact isotope ratio is a function of many things, but a very signficant factor is the prevailing temperature at the time the water became vapout before precipitting out. Thus the ratio, while not an exact indication of specific temperatures (unless the many other factors are also accounted for), is a good indicator of general temperature trends over long time scales. For more detail see here. The result is that, using ice cores, we can plot temperature and carbon dioxide independently.
Furthermore, more recent temperature reconstructions (as in reconstructions of only the past 1000 years or so) rely not on ice cores but on a wide variety of sources including coral, tree rings, glaciers, and more. Usually many of these different methods are cross referenced with each other to create any single reconstruction. The results can be seen in this plot of 10 different reconstructions by different independent teams. The results, as you can see, while different, all show the same trend. If you're still uncertain, feel free to use the
The CH is a classic example of a question whose truth is "well, it depends". It depends on what logic you use, what you consider to be your base for the "absolute truths" of mathematics, etc. The reality is that mathematics is far from absolute, and shows all the signs of human construction, including dependency on what exactly it is that you mean.
I agree that religion may have value, particularly for some people. My argument was more that, as far as the task of adequately answering "Why" questions goes religion really is no better placed than philosophy. We don't expect religion to answer the "How" questions anymore because science has very successfully ursurped that role - it's just better at it. Religion used to be as much about "How" as "Why" of course - but seeing as "How" didn't work out they're settling for the "Why". I'm just trying to point out that religion is no better equipped to deal with those questions than it was to deal with the "How" questions way back when. Sure, science doesn't tackle "Why" but there are branches of philosophy that don't come weighed down with unnecessary dogma that can tackle "Why" questions to some extent: and they do so better than religion because, being unburdened, they are more flexible and capable of carefully exploring the possibilities.
This is, as I say, not to sya religion is useless in general, merely that the claims that religion somehow has dibs on "Why" questions really is about as well founded as the claim that religious explanations for "How" are good. Religion doesn't answer "Why" any better than anything else, and in practice it often does it far worse.
Slashdot Mirror
A surprisingly long way for any third party candidate - just compare their performance to say Nader for the Greens, or any Libertarian candidate in history. Which really just goes to show that what you really need to get elected is a shitload of money and a willingness to spend it to get yourself elected. The two main parties, of course, represent the biggest slush funds of "cash to be wasted on election bullshit".
Well they have to. Ideology is nothing something you can just change in the face of facts. Obviously then, for them, the was, and always will be, a goo idea. The fact that the war is inreasingly becoming a political albatross means the neo-cons need to distance themselves from the results. If the idea wasn't wrong (and it can't have been, it was their idea) then it must be the execution right? The fact is that Bush never was a neo-con, he just fell in with them. Tat means he is now the neo-cons scapegoat, the reason why their infallible ideology wasn't at fault for Iraq. Expect to hear this line from the hard-core neo-cons again and again as time goes on.
I agree that there is hype around agile methods, and programs of "how to be agile" that suggest a wide range of practices of dubious extra merit, but package the whole thing up as an "agile methodology" etc. Then again, there is some merit to the approach, and developing early testable specifications of what you intend to develop, and against which you can verify any further code you actually develop, is probably a good thing. Whether having two people sit next to each other to code, or having trendy names for your meetings, etc. has much merit is a little less clear. Agile will undoubtedly remain around, it will just become tempered with common sense and a lot of the hype and trendy named aspects of it will get trimmed away.
So your inability to elicit detailed specifications from a client means you should simply ignore the client? I'm not sure I follow. Did you really expect the guy to spell out in glittering detail all his very particular needs, many of which he may not think of on the spot, from a single direct question? You didn't think that a single sentence specification was begging to be fleshed out, went and spent $20,000 on the basis of that first pass spec, and then blame the customer?
Yes, customers are very poor at being able to immediately tell you, in glorious detail, there precise needs leaving out absolutely nothing. That doesn't mean you ignore them, that means you actually spend time talking to them trying to develop the specification. In principle the goal of agile development is to do exactly that, and to help the customers imagination along by providing him with intermediary working models to help elicit the deeper implicit needs as early as possible. The aim is to work with the customer to help the customer actually understand what their own implicit specification is, and that means a certain amount of back and forth is required. It means asking questions like "why do you want this?" so you can determine what other requirements are driving things, or hidden in the basic request. If you had, instead of taking his first pass as the complete spec, sat down with the guy and tried to work out what he needed, perhaps providing examples and explaining what the current spec would mean for him along the way, you could have avoided spending $20,000 on a system he won't use.
I'm beginning to think that working with customers to develop a specification is actually a suffciently hard job that it should be a specialised position - lord knows enough developers seem to have little in the way of an idea about it. Perhaps the task of interacting with the customer, and having the patience to carefully tease out of them exactly what their requirements are, then converting those requirements into a specification easily and clearly interpretable by a development team; p[erhaps that's a full time job in and of itself.
I'm honestly not sure what you mean. I guess you could do Agile that way if you wanted to, but it is in no way a requirement. You want discipline? Try Specification Driven Design and integrate formnal methods into your agile approach. You want structure? Try something like ESpec to provide a single workbench to structure design, development, testing, and formal verification. And as for planning, well its a matter of planning with what you have no, and being open to change - that's not "no plan". If you're curious as to why I'm picking on Eiffel as a language for agile development - I figure the percieved incongruity (that, as is apparent by the examples given, doesn't actually exist) of agile development with a fairly strict, planning oriented language like Eiffel might actually get you to pay attention and see what's going on.
I sat down and played the game. It was fun, and had an extremely simple and intuitive interface. For a flash game it had quite a high degree of polish. I'm not sure of its replay value as it stands however. As you suggest, I played for about half an hour but don't find myself feeling any particular desire to continue or go back to it. The weakness, ultimately, is the relative sameness of the gameplay as you advance - there simply isn't anything particularly new or different; nothing to aspire to achieve. Of course in a full blown version there will likely be rather more effort put into developing and extending the levels so that new material can be introduced as you proceed - perhaps the "evolution" steps could introduce significant new skills so as to overcome new challenges etc.
So I guess I both agree and disagree with you. Yes the game, as it stands, is intriguing but lacks replay value. On the other hand the base is reasonably strong, and if someone creative can expand upon that to creater a longer fuller game experience... so much the better.
I can certainly agree with your last paragraph. My only real point is that there are, as far as I can tell, no panaceas - what we do have, however, is a wide variety of options that, while not perfect, can fit together and potentially produce a viable solution. Certainly it is worth investigating most of them, and biofuels are certainly on that list.
I believe the point is this: if you have a small scale uprising then small arms won't help, you'll get branded as terrorists, get little sympathy from the general populace, and at best provide a nuisance; if you have a large scale uprising then you can be just as effective without small arms in the hands of ordinary citizens - just having mass protests with people standing up nd saying "No" will do the job as well as anything else.
Let's analyse this more closely to see what I'm getting at. If you don't have general widespread support then at best you can run a rolling guerilla campaign like, say, the insurgents in Iraq or Afghanistan (though much of the violence in Iraq is sectarian violence attacking civilians). You might like to point out that the insurgents in Iraq are doing well - except they are not threatening to overthrow Iraq, not while the US military remains there. The threat is that the attrition will affect the attitudes of the US populace and result in a withdrawal of forces. You're not going to get that when you're fighting a war in the US with US civilians as the collateral damage of the conflict. Either you have the support of the general populace, or you don't. If you don't then you'll quickly acquire the ire of the general populace, and their support for the government to use stronger and harsher methods to eliminate you. The more violent you get, the less likely you are to gain support from the general populace.
Now let's presume you have much more widespread consensus that the government needs to be overthrown - say a significant percentage of the total population. If all those people, instead of arming themselves, simply take to the streets in coordinated mass protest calling for a change in government and or refusing to follow government directives then what is the government to do? If we presume an authoritarian government which wishes to suppress such protest or dissent, or that needs to enforce its directives then they can send in troops - but what are the troops to do? The more harshly you try to suppress the protestors the less likely the military are to follow the orders given. The military is unlikely to fire on unarmed peaceful protestors. In the few cases where that does happen then that will do far more to win the general populace to your cause than having armed violent protestors shot. As you point out, the government using violence is only going to create more rebels. In the end you will have the military refusing to follow the orders of the government, and that is victory for the revolution - the government no longer has any power.
All of this, of course, presumes freedom of speech. If there is no freedom of speech and free press then the government can violently suppress protest with little concern for any repurcussion: think Tiananmen square. Thus certainly the right to free speech is worth defending. The right to bear arms, however, is no longer terribly significant in doing that - not while there is a well equipped permanently standing army in the US.
Exactly how carbon neutral biofuels are depends on the crop used to produce it. Some crops are better than others. For instance Brazil uses sugar cane, which has pretty good yield rates without excess help and converts well to fuel. The leading candidate in the US is corn, but corn yields are as high as they are due to massive use of petrochemical fertilizers etc. The end result is that corn really isn't such a good crop. Sure corn biofuel represents a net carbon reduction on other fuel sources, but it is actually a lot smallere than you might think, and corn biofuels are a long way from carbon neutral. It doesn't scale that well either, at least not yet anyway, which is the other big catch. The massive farming of high density crops required to large scale biofuel production currently brings its own problems which again reduces the net gain. These problems are not insurmountale, but biofuels are not a cure-all, just another ingredient in what's looking to be a very diverse pudding.
Heh. Dawkins is a weak atheist. Most atheists ae weak atheists. I've almost never encountered a strong atheist. You might mistake an atheist for a strong atheist because he doesn't go around putting provisos of "but e can neve be absolutely certain" on everything he says, but if pressed or asked I think you'll find they are weak atheists and have no certainty as to non-existence, they just lean heavily in that direction (just as you, technically, are only a weak atheist with regard to Zeus, but generally lean toward the fact that Zeus doesn't exist). Dawkins is in exactly that category.
Sure, Microsoft is unlikely to be able to kill Linux via this, or any similar route. If they can knock over the businesses backing a couple of major distributions, however, they can set Linux back a bit. Red Hat, for instance, contributes an awful lot of code. Yes the developers will still work on their projects, but they won't be paid to work on the full time anymore. New systems will spring up and Linux will keep rolling along. Potentially it can buy Microsoft more time in a comfortable monopoly position though, and I think right now that's all Microsoft cares about. The can try to leverage the monopoly into some other markets, or just buy themselves some breathing space. I think they'll be happy enough with that at this stage.
I believe the "point", as they see it, is that they are being paid a lot of money to write this code. Sure, it might have been things they could have implemented anyway, but being paid enough to have lots of full time paid developers devoted to the task is more likely to (a) ensure the work actually gets done and (b) gets done more quickly than if you didn't have developers working on it full time.
This, of course, doesn't exonerate Novell - MS managed to slip the patent arrangement into the deal, and that part is certainly very fishy. My point is simply that they are actually getting something out of this.
Well let's see if we can reasonably compress the options down a little by getting somewhat creative. Note that I'm not claiming to propose a perfect solution here, I'm trying to demonstrate that, with a little thought you can compress the list reasonably - and hopefully with enough thought you can find ideal ways to do this.
... then just kill all your applications: realistically if there was a robust lock screen/switch user option I think the need to "kill all your applications" and end your session will be lessened - most people will just leave stuff running. If you really need to kill stuff then shutdown completely.
Switch User, Log Off and Lock, ultimately could be compressed into a single option. What are the differences here? Log Off kills all your applications, while switch user and lock don't, and switch user allows you (presumably) to drop back to being you without entering a password. Why not have a single option which leaves applications running and takes you to a "log in" screen - log in as you and you get back to your session (so it is equivalent to a locked screen), log in as someone else and it starts a new session for them (so it is equivalent to switch user), and if you want to kill all your applications
Likewise sleep and hibernate, while technically different, really don't need to be differentiated - just pick one (and realistically hibernate, as the better energy saver, is the better option). If you want sleep, well let the power management handle that and don't bother with options for the user.
That leaves us with just a few options: Lock/Switch User, Hibernate, Restart and Shutdown. You can probably pare that down some more if you're cunning.
If you were being honest with yourself you would probably realise that that is essentially what you started out by doing: you have essentially made it axiomatic that God exists from the outset. You should also realise that, as much as you may wish to adopt that particular logical convention, there is no compulsion for anyone else to accept it. If no-one else accepts it then the only person you are convincing that you've "won the debate" is yourself - and I think you were convinced of that before we began, and will be long after we cease arguing.
On the contrary, I do. The reason I can object is because we share a particular convention. It is entirely reasonable to point out when a person contravenes a logic that both they and I accept. If they don't agree with that particular logic, well nothing I can say is going to change their mind, not unless I can convince them of the effectiveness of the logic in question first. The point of logic, particularly, say, classical logic, is that it has near universal agreement: almost everyone accepts it (People who have more experience dealing with logic, of course, tend to be more inclined to quibble - but then they can make the case for the greater efficacy of their preferred logic for the particular case). With that near universal agreement it is entirely possible to discuss things, and object to contravention of the convention. Logic doesn't have to be absolute for this to work, merely very widely accepted. And I've already given good reasons for wide acceptance - that logic is constructed from experiences of a shared common external world - that don't require any absolutes or eternal Platonic forms.
On the contrary, I have admitted that absolute knowledge is not possible in my worldview. That still allows knowledge, it's just that it becomes contingent knowledge. Of course contingent knowledge is hardly something new - us mathematicians (who I suspect you would argue are playing in the world of eternal platonic absolutes) have been dealing with it ever since the questions about foundations got seriously explored. Take the Continuum Hypothesis - that there is no cardinal number between the number of natural numbers, and the number of real numbers - it is neither true, not false, in any absolute sense; it is independent of ZFC, and is, if you like, a contingent truth: it is either true, or false, depending on what assumptions you wish to accept and either case is as valid (and as consistent) as the other. This is, of course, hard for people use to thinking in terms of absolutes to accept - surely there either is, or is not, such a cardinal number? Not in the mathematical universe, no - it is a choice that can be made and there simply isn't an absolute truth either way. Once you get used to dealing with such contingent truth (the axiom of choice and any results that follow from it, for instance, are such a truths) in your everyday work it doesn't seem so bad. We've been trained to think in absolutes so it takes some practice, but it is easy enough to get the hang of it.
May I suggest to look at Ada and Eiffel - both offer elegant and consistent syntax that results in easy to maintain code, with the benefit that they compile to run as fast as C and C++.
Well it would help if you could define it. Do you mean free logic or classical logic? I tend to use intuitionistic logic and modal logic rather classical a lot of the time. I don't use free logic because it simply isn't practical - it's incapable of adequately yielding practical results in almost any situation. So yes, I guess I do disagree - not to say that those logics are "wrong" merely that they aren't always the most useful, nor the most definitive.
It would seem that way, given that there isn't even agreement over what to call logic, and exactly which rules should count, and which should be ignored. Is it so hard to believe that logic, which is ultimately just the modelling and systematizing of thoughts, should be able to be created by minds, such as those of humans, that are capable of reflecting upon themselves, and thinking about thoughts?
You might ask why there is as much agreement as there is - but that's a matter of practicality and the experience of a (presumed) common external world shaping things. If I were to create a basic rule for what happens when I drop and object from a height, would you be surprised if I arrived at "it falls" just like you did? Probably not. Our shared experience of the world results in a limited set of rules that produce practical and useful results. The rule "It completes a small circle before hovering", for instance, doesn't get us far. There are, of course, many different answers of varying practicality. My "it falls" isn't as useful and Newton's laws which provide both more detail of how it falls, and situations of when it might not. You can use general relativity to cover even more situations in even more detail. None of those rules for what happens when you drop something, however, are "true" as the inconsistency between general relativity and quantum mechanics shows. There is some other rule that we haven't found yet that is more practical because it cover quantum mechanical scales.
By the same token you can expect considerations of rules of logic to generally converge upon systems and rules that give practical results - that is rules that provide chains of thought that are extremely convincing. Originally logic was a matter of syllogisms, and was it competition with rhetoricians. Logic, however, found a different niche - it needed to be able to convince you, as well as convincing other people, and picking apart problems in your own and others arguments, and diverged from rhetoric. But given the shared external world, and the relative similarity of human minds, it should not be a huge surprise that we converge toward similar rules when determining how to systematize our thoughts so as to be most convincing to ourselves and others. Exactly which rules one converges upon really depends on exactly what phenomena, or what thoughts, one wishes to render more rigorous. Depending upon your interest you can arrive at different logics - or, if you're a pluralist like me, you can use whatever logic seems best suited to dealing with the problem at hand.
The "little" part of the the little ice age is really very little compared to the temperature differences between ice ages and interglacials. Have look at the reconstructions of past temperature - yes there are wobbles and natural variation, and there's even a medieval warm period - that doesn't stop the current rise from looking quite significant.
Try Russell's teapot then. Entirely physically possible (though rather unlikely) and certainly can't be disproven - do you believe there's a teapot orbiting the sub between earth and mars? Are you agnostic about it? Or do you simply not believe in it? Most atheists are "weak atheists", which is to say that they happily admit the question of the existence of God remains unresolved. They do believe, however, that the burden of proof is on the one making the claim of existence, and, pending further evidence, have to lean toward non-existence.
Given that even the article summary states that the work was done in conjunction with the Chilean Ministry of Education, I think you'll find that "support for all local languages" was simply a checkbox requirement the Chilean government placed on software. It doesn't matter if no one ever uses the Mapuzugun-language version: being able to check off support for the language will be what will ensure Microsoft contracts with the Chilean government - and those contracts will undoubtedly more than pay for the cost of the translation.
Of course atheists haven't resorted to some tactics used by people to proselytize their religion...
[Knock][Knock]
Homeowner: Yes, hello?
Atheist: Hello. Have you considered not believing in God?
Homeowner: Um, I hadn't really -
Atheist: Perhaps you would care to read some of these pamphlets!
Homeowner: That's okay I -
Atheist: They clearly explain the benefits of not believing in God. Not believing in God changed my life, and it can change yours too.
Homeowner: Uhuh, whatever -
Atheist: Don't you see what not believing in God can do for you? If you don't not believe in -
[SLAM!]
The thing you're probably looking for is Milankovitch cycles which account for the basic cycle of climate change every 100,000 years. You might also note that in the naturally occuring climate changes the temperature leads carbon dioxide - the orbital cycle causes an initial temperature change which results in a feedback cycle of more CO2 (warmer oceans can retain less CO2). Of course the orbital effects are insufficient to explain the degree of warming - to explain that we need to note that once a CO2 increase has been initiated by the orbital cycle it then feeds back on itself with CO2 causing significantly more warming. Note, however, that the current warming, and the current spike in CO2, do note fall into line with these natural cycles, so they aren't the caue of recent warming: in fact we're currently in the middle of an interglacial and should be expecting (relatively) steady climate for the next 40,000 years or so.
And geological time-frames aren't really relevant to the discussion. The current change is, relatively speaking, rapid, and most predictions are only looking at the 10 to 100 year time scale. They don't need to be able to predict over geological time scales - they need to be able to deal with the time scale of observed change. As to his graph: indeed, it isn't a point for point match, but it is suprisingly close. The real question is "what is the source of the error"? The largest area, where the observed dips below all 3 scenarios is the year Pinatubo erupted. Hansen's scenario B and C had volcano factored in a few years later - and from that point on we are back to a close match. So the problem that prevented close pointwise matching was Hansen's inability to predict when a volcano would erupt - he could, however, make statistical assessements of the likelihood and factor it in to the long term predictions. He didn't get the year right, but averaging out past that he actually did remarkably well. The reality is that the greatest source of error in current climate models in our predictions of what future emissions will be - that's the big unknown.
I was rather more worried about the content than the source - the details of GCM predictions that have been observed in practice are referenced so you can follow those up if you care to. The point was simply that GCMs have made a number of predictions that have since been observed; an anti-skeptic FAQ simply proved the fastest easiest way to find that information presented conveniently in one source. As to whether success at predicting the past counts toward ability to predict the future: if the models are no being trained on the data in question, but instead programmed on principles - and let's be clear: these are not neural nets, nor pattern matching machines that are trained on past data - then their ability to predict the past is still a good indicator. Much of science actually works this way. The theory of evolution makes predictions on past data, and yet still claims to be able to make predictions with regard to the future. Much of cosmology uses data of events that have already happened on which to test their predictions. The trouble arises when you make use of the past data to make your prediction; assuming the conclusion if you like; that is indeed rather dodgy. It is also not what is being done with climate models.
Because a moving average requires the data you are trying to predict to be fed into it to be able to make the prediction. Climate models are neural nets, they are not regressions, they are not predictive analytics. Climate models mathematical and physical models. You don't feed them all your historical data to train them to make predictions. You give them some base points, and you may well use some historical data to verify parameters, but it is a quite different than a moving average which cannot "predict" data it has never seen.
There is, of course, a vast difference between predicting weather - which is a local phenomena, with significant specificity - and predicting the climate trends - which is averaging general trends globally. Consider, for instance, that it is very hard to stand on a beach and predict the exact height and shape of the next wave and precisely where and when it will break. On the other hand predicting the approximate height and time of the next high tide is rather easier. GCMs are, indeed, currently rather poor at making predictions down to the level of day to day local weather. They have, however, been very accurate at predicting year on year global climate.
As noted above, contrary to your claim, the models have proved to be remarkably robust and accurate. They are also, contrary to popular perception in some circles, not just a big pattern matching machine that are "trained" on past data. They are models that are fed in physics. Yes, there are some tweakable parameters, as there should be in any model where there is some uncertainty. The greatest area of uncertainty in models currently is clouds, since they can be both a positive or negative feedback depending on the exact nature of their formation. Of course this problem is taken very seriously and there is a lot of study. The last IPCC report had considerable detail summarising that work. The simple reality, however, is that the models have worked pretty well, and have, in fact, made significant predictions that have since been observed.
Historical temperatures from ice-cores are determined by ratios of hydrogen or oxygen isotopes in the ice. The guts of the issue is that when combined in water the different isotopes, being different masses, fractionate out at slightly different temperatures, thus the exact isotope ratio is a function of many things, but a very signficant factor is the prevailing temperature at the time the water became vapout before precipitting out. Thus the ratio, while not an exact indication of specific temperatures (unless the many other factors are also accounted for), is a good indicator of general temperature trends over long time scales. For more detail see here. The result is that, using ice cores, we can plot temperature and carbon dioxide independently.
Furthermore, more recent temperature reconstructions (as in reconstructions of only the past 1000 years or so) rely not on ice cores but on a wide variety of sources including coral, tree rings, glaciers, and more. Usually many of these different methods are cross referenced with each other to create any single reconstruction. The results can be seen in this plot of 10 different reconstructions by different independent teams. The results, as you can see, while different, all show the same trend. If you're still uncertain, feel free to use the
The CH is a classic example of a question whose truth is "well, it depends". It depends on what logic you use, what you consider to be your base for the "absolute truths" of mathematics, etc. The reality is that mathematics is far from absolute, and shows all the signs of human construction, including dependency on what exactly it is that you mean.
I agree that religion may have value, particularly for some people. My argument was more that, as far as the task of adequately answering "Why" questions goes religion really is no better placed than philosophy. We don't expect religion to answer the "How" questions anymore because science has very successfully ursurped that role - it's just better at it. Religion used to be as much about "How" as "Why" of course - but seeing as "How" didn't work out they're settling for the "Why". I'm just trying to point out that religion is no better equipped to deal with those questions than it was to deal with the "How" questions way back when. Sure, science doesn't tackle "Why" but there are branches of philosophy that don't come weighed down with unnecessary dogma that can tackle "Why" questions to some extent: and they do so better than religion because, being unburdened, they are more flexible and capable of carefully exploring the possibilities.
This is, as I say, not to sya religion is useless in general, merely that the claims that religion somehow has dibs on "Why" questions really is about as well founded as the claim that religious explanations for "How" are good. Religion doesn't answer "Why" any better than anything else, and in practice it often does it far worse.