I suppose Mann is a denier now too? You can follow my link to his last follow up on his own hockey stick graph. He stands by his work, but even his own corrected reconstructions now show that the last century of warming is NOT an anomaly over the last 2k years, but has been matched on at least 3 or 4 occasions in that time. The most he is able to observe is that the warming of merely the last decade is abnormal, of course, that is based 100% on the instrumental record since none of the proxy sets his paper uses covers that time frame.
I'll observe on my own that the only anomalous warming is entirely limited to the short time for which we have no proxy data...
But yeah, go on pretending the science is settled and decry those still researching and studying the matter as deniers and heretics to your chosen ideology.
If nuclear power were safe, it would be possible for utilities to build nuclear power plants without government indemnification.
This statement is true if and only if government requirements are rationally based... As most people, I don't accept that basic premise, you probably shouldn't use it.
The reason that doesn't happen is that if you factor in the cost of indemnification, it is *not* cheaper than the alternatives.
Ah, but which comes first? The ridiculous costs employed against nuclear are BECAUSE of the irrational fear of it. You don't get turn around and use those high costs to justify the irrationality too, that is irrational in itself.
The reality is that coal power kills more people than nuclear power. It kills more people not by a small margin, but at a hands down terrifyingly higher rate. Coal plants even manage to dump MORE radioactive material into the environment than a nuclear plant.
Look no further than the Fukushima disaster for the proof of nuclear safety versus other power generation methods. How many people have died so far because of Fukushima? How many are projected to get sick in the future? How many have been killed by hydro dams failing and wiping out those downstream? How many coal miners die through accidents each year? How many to lung diseases from working the mines for years?
Oh, and that isn't even mentioning that the Fukushima plant had the added mark that it's disaster was precipitated by not only the most devastating earthquake in the nations recorded history, but the worst Tsunami as well.
You original point about government indemnification makes my point better than yours. Nuclear is safer, and has injured and killed vastly fewer people than any other form of cheaper power generation, and yet the indemnification conditions on nuclear is astronomically higher than that for any of the others...
I dunno about you, but I call that irrational fear.
It's true that it's difficult to model the risks of global warming, but we have pretty good models.
No, we don't. Can anyone's models even project sea level rise 30 years from now within 5cm with any degree of confidence? Nope. Good luck projecting climate averages out to 2100(let alone the impacts) where it is supposed to really start kicking in.
The main reason people fear nuclear power irrationally is that it's very difficult to model the risk of nuclear power,
And modeling the risks of global warming is easier how? Seems to me it's a much, much tougher nut to crack.
I see 2 main reasons people oppose nuclear power as a solution to carbon emissions. The biggest is that they just don't consider carbon emissions to be a serious problem. The next, and very close behind it, is how much easier it is to find problems than solutions. With electrics cars around the corner, nuclear power solves 90% of carbon emissions. It is much easier though to look at nuclear as a problem of it's own rather than as a solution to a bigger problem.
I forget who to credit it to, but people are like sheep. They fear the sheephound and wish he'd go away, right up until a wolf has them by throat.
When 100,000 people die of starvation, its said we can't feed them, or is it just that we don't want to feed them?
Or is it that the men with guns living much closer to them than us steal everything for themselves and use hunger as a weapon against those around them?
There is simply zero reason that North Koreans need to be starving so persistently that they average a full 6 inches less in height than their genetically identical, well fed Southern counterparts. Well, there is the fact their now dead God king needed to spend their resources developing nuclear weapons and long range missiles instead of feeding them...
Look at all the starving people in Africa. How many of them are locals that have been living safely in the same location for more than one generation? How many are displaced refuges who have been shot at or chased away by regional clashes and violence?
Lack of food isn't why people around the world are starving. Warfare from many levels is why the overwhelming majority are starving. They will continue to starve as well, since the people who care enough to help aren't willing or able to muster up the needed military force to ensure they are safely fed. Meanwhile the ones with the military force needed to see them fed, just can't be bothered to care. And why should they, anyone sending a military force in to 'help' would see themselves immediately blamed as a cause of any continuing suffering and starvation anyways.
Maybe not. Having more HP out of an electric car isn't the limiting factor in good lap times. It might be great for drag racing, but when it adds an enormous amount of weight, it destroys lap times. When Top Gear was running test laps with Tesla's electric Lotus it was terrible for lap times because it was just too heavy to corner well, even though it could beat a gas Lotus on a drag strip.
Fallout 3 is the first game I came across that was fully supported by the community with mods, skins, and improved game play with patches to fix bugs.
You must be young.
I remember mods for Wolf3D and Doom. I remember rarely playing vanilla Quake because there were so very many great mods for it. So many in fact that Quake's gamer/developer community spawned a host of new game companies, most notably Valve.
How about I speak your language. The problem is not religion, but blind religious devotion to an ideology. Which, by the way, leads to the fact that atheists are in no way immune to the problem.
Blind religious devotion to Stalin's ideologies was no more foreign to atheists than theists. Blind religious devotion to Pol Pot's ideologies was no more foreign to atheists than theists. Blind religious devotion to Mao's ideologies was no more foreign to atheists than theists.
Putting absolute confidence in atheists immunity to blind devotion to any ideology is self-contradictory. Most of the worst cults start off with the acceptance of a similarly paradoxical premise.
Saudi Arabia. I don't care what lists it is or isn't on, it's where Bin Laden's from, it's where most of the 9/11 hijackers are from, it's a theocratic monarchy that keeps it's citizens in line with a combination of the threat of violence and a welfare state built on everything that's left over of the oil money after they've taken their share. They have numerous ties to terrorism, numerous human rights abuses and are not someone we should be supporting.
More over, it's where most of the money to support extremists in the tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan is coming from too. I'm hopeful the Saudi royals will be going the way of Saddam and Mubarak soon enough. It's the dictators America does NOT support who look to have a longer run ahead of them in places like Syria and Iran.
As a dictator, the benefit of not taking American money is that you don't need to worry what the American public thinks of your repressive measures in the longer run of things. That fees up the kind of brutal measures necessary to maintain 'order'.
You act as if we somehow have more "freedom" just because we elect our dictator (sorry - Mubarak calls himself "president")
No, YOU are acting like the Egyptian people under Mubarak's dictatorship had as much "freedom" as Americans. That's a gross insult to the suffering and persecution that the Egyptian people were suffering, and it's shameful.
There are many Egyptian Telco workers who think, 'If the government tells me to shutdown the ISP connection, I will obey, because the government knows best.' - These are the same types you find in the EU or US who say it's okay for the SA officers to stick hands down passengers' pants (i.e. grope penises) and touch women's breasts.* They think it's okay if the government does it.
Your experience in a free country doesn't translate quite so well to a dictatorship. The Egyptian Telco workers also think "If the government tells me to shutdown the ISP connection, I will obey, because the government will jail or possibly kill me and my family if I don't".
Don't marginalize the position and plight of those under repressive dictatorships by pretending it's akin to your own struggles in a free country. By all means fight to keep your country free. By all means point out measures in your free country that can lead to suppression and tyranny. By all means stand up against those measures. Just don't do it on the backs of those like the Egyptians fighting a very different and much harder conflict.
The AI beat a decent player of the european Starcraft scene. But that same player would _not_ be able to hold his ground against the likes of Jaedong or Flash.
Even with that you are overselling the AI. It's victory against the human player was part of their test cases, specifically testing vs. Goliaths. Plainly that means the human had to allow the AI to survive long enough to face higher tier units. The match the human 'lost' was with both hands behind his back and similar to heralding a chess AI that can beat top humans who never move their queen.
You can actually watch the matches on youtube here. You can see the match is heavily one sided from very early on. And your right as well about the huge gap there still is from this player that won quite handily to where top Korean players are.
Having programmed an AI for that same competition, I can assure you that nobody should be surprised an AI can beat a human.
Turns out the AI didn't and can't. From a different article on the tournament: The showcase game of the competition was a bot versus human match. In the exhibition match, =DoGo=, a World Cyber Games 2001 competitor played against the top ranking bot of the competition. The result was an exciting man versus machine match highlighting the state of the art in real-time strategy game AI.
While the expert player was capable of defeating the top performing bots in the competition, the results are quite encouraging. Read on for complete results.
Even the original article noted that the AI 'victory' against their human pro was the result of the human player artificially altering their play to build only a single unit they wanted to test out(Goliaths).
By that logic, that means we should go around and liberate all oppressed nations.
No, by your logic we shouldn't liberate anyone unless we can liberate EVERYONE. A better analogy is watching 300 people drowning and walking away because you don't want to pick favorites by saving only 2 or 3.
Read up on the history of Saddam's reign and who his puppet master was. Yes, that was Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand.
A better tip is to research the subject for more than 5 minutes on Google. Saddam was nobody's puppet. Yes, America, Rumsfeld and especially the CIA worked with him and even tried hard to influence him. So did the Russians. So did the Saudi Arabians. So did pretty much every major power in the world. Leaders of oil producing countries get a lot of international attention. Saddam was, importantly, not walking to the tune of America's harp. He wanted war with Iran for his own reasons, and America jumped on board because it worked for them too.
Then we gave him weapons, including chemical weapons to fight Iran. That is in fact false. America did not sell Saddam chemical weapons. They did sell him some dual use equipment, most notably helicopters that he likely used to deliver the weapons. However, Saddam's suppliers of chemical weapons were primarily in Germany and Singapore. His largest financial backers, were Saudi Arabia. America did provide invaluable intelligence to Saddam though, specifically to most efficiently deploy his chemical weapons to maximum effect. So America's hands are plenty dirty, despite not actually selling the weapons themselves.
A lingering question is why should that detract from the positive nature of changing course and finally opposing instead of supporting such a monster. Seems to me that's the right direction to be headed.
regarding Saddam's atrocities it is said: You act as if that blood isn't on our hands as well.
No, you are acting as though Saddam's atrocities aren't on America's hands. If that blood is on America's hands, how can you argue against them being expected to step up and put an end to them?
We live in a society with two sets of rules. They basically boil down to this: if a big guy does it to a little guy, it's okay. If a little guy does it to a big guy, the little guy is gonna get stomped. That is the real American Dream
I pointed out that this wasn't unique to America, but it was the nature of the world/humanity. You seemed to disagree, and we went back and forth to the point of using ancient Egypt as an example. To which you respond: You brought up the example of the slaves and the pyramid. I pointed out that that was a bad example, as the pyramids were built by volunteers.
Egyptian slavery(or volunteer labor if you prefer) demonstrates might makes right as a mentality, and I do insist it demonstrates it more strongly than American society does today. Comparing favorably do a slave state isn't high praise. I merely wished to point out that your criticism of the 'American Dream' extended much, much further into human nature in general. Do you deny that?
Your misinformation about the pyramids does not speak well about your understanding of the rest of history. The Pharaoh was a living God. Would a living God have to force slaves to build his tomb? No. Every Egyptian wanted to work on the pyramids, to take part in that immense religious ritual, and they were well paid and well taken care of. Archeologists know a lot about the conditions of pyramid workers, because many were buried nearby. Bones show signs of being professionally set. The workers were well fed and lived in better housing than most.
Working on your God's tomb was an honer, a privilege bestowed on the best and the brightest, not a labor of slaves.
I could stomach that theory if I hadn't originally been replying to your saying this: That is the real American Dream: to become an Important Person, so you can play by the more advantageous set of rules and tell the little people what to do.
Waxing nostalgic for the good old days of Egyptian slaves worshiping their Man-God, while decrying the ways of the evil American empire.
Are you really sure that's where you want to go with this?
You should read a bit more about modern sociological, games theory, psychological, and economic experiments, which show that your worldview is incorrect. People are generally nice, because cooperation is evolutionarily advantageous.
I refer you, again, to history. Cooperation is advantageous. That is NOT the same as being nice to your fellow man. The pyramids are a lasting testament to what human cooperation can accomplish. Maintaining control over more than a million slaves requires a lot of cooperation, that doesn't make it nice.
History is war, conquest and the use of force against fellow man. Over and over and over again. Usually all that war and subjugation requires a great deal of cooperation, and yes, humans have proven good at it. I distinguish between that, and being nice.
Modern democracy's approach to balancing competing groups of co-operating humans with a mechanism other than brute force seems the best way to dodge the not nice aspect of cooperative competition. After all, the majority would likely win the violent contest anyways, so letting them 'win' can be expedient.
People are generally nice, unless they live in a society where there are two sets of rules. When being nice gets you taken advantage of, people become dicks out of self defense. That doesn't mean they want to be dicks, it means they have to, because they have no real access to justice.
I think that's backwards. People are only generally nice, when they have a society that encourages that as being in their self interest.
Modern economic experiments show that people would rather be fair and practice reciprocity than act in their own self interest.
History shows that in practice people act in their own self interest. It just sometimes takes the form of collective self interest. Selflessly risking your life in a war of aggression for betterment of your group at the expense of another is a recurring theme.
In any case, even if that IS the way things are, and people are just not generally very nice, it does not mean that is the way they should be.
I agree whole heartedly. Unfortunately I see the balance of the world, both now and historically, to be dominated by warlords oppressing those under them. Anytime a warlord is overthrown, more often than not the victor simply takes their place in power. There are exceptions of course, but I'd dare say stable democracies like America are the ones that stand out.
Which goes back to the prior post, I would say America on the whole is an example of one of the rare places where might makes right is more discouraged than re-enforced. With the caveat that this is a ridiculously low bar.
We live in a society with two sets of rules. They basically boil down to this: if a big guy does it to a little guy, it's okay. If a little guy does it to a big guy, the little guy is gonna get stomped. That is the real American Dream: to become an Important Person, so you can play by the more advantageous set of rules and tell the little people what to do.
I think your missing the forest for the tree. It's not just American society that double standard applies to. It applies sweepingly to the whole of human history, including every single historical and modern society.
People are just generally not very nice. As a result, odds are pretty good that if your reading this you are a bad person, shame on you!
the real point is that water vapor and clouds, which again are two distinct things, are only feedbacks because their levels in the atmosphere are dependent on atmospheric conditions.
That's what a feedback is, your just saying they are only feedbacks because they fit the definition of a feedback.
CO2 levels on the other hand are independent of atmospheric conditions.
Nope, CO2 is both a feedback and a forcing. CO2 absorption and release from things like plants and oceans is dependent on temperature, making CO2 levels a feedback. Human CO2 emissions add an external forcing source for CO2 as well. It's both a feedback and a forcing.
CO2 is the main driver.
Except that we've been coming in and out of ice ages for millenia without the benefit of human CO2 forcing.
Let me repeat my question. Water vapor and the related cloud formations account for far more of the greenhouse effect than CO2. We do not understand the effect of cloud formation well enough to even attribute it as a positive or negative feedback. With our understanding of that being so poor, how can we have such a greater confidence in our understanding of the net impact of human CO2 emissions? Remember, CO2 has a much smaller impact, and human emissions are much smaller than natural CO2 emissions to boot.
You are confusing water vapor with clouds which while they are related are two different things. Water vapor is always a positive forcing. Clouds can be either positive or negative depending on a number of factors.
My apologies, I should have said feedback not forcing. What is not well understood or agreed upon is what roll water vapor and the directly resulting cloud cover play as global temperature increases and decreases. Whether they are a positive or negative feedback pretty much dwarfs any other consideration regarding future projections. I still would love an explanation of how a much less significant feedback, CO2, can be so well known when the sign for H2O is unknown.
Also CO2 alone accounts for around 20% of GHG forcing
Which depends on how you measure it. The high end 20-25% numbers are all based on ignoring any overlapping absorption by other gases in the same spectra. No respectable scientist ever attributes that level of absorption to CO2 alone, it's dishonest. I can't be bothered to go back and dig up the journal entries, but even being generous and giving CO2 15% overall absorption, it is still crushed by the more than 60% from H2O(if we measure H2O as you did it is up around 75%) that is so poorly understood we don't even know the sign to attribute it as a feedback.
It's not alarmist, it's a logical progression. We can't keep pumping shit into the atmosphere and water supplies thinking it won't have some major cumulative effect down the road.
Which has exactly NOTHING to do with global warming. For all that you've said, we might as well be terrified of the terrible global cooling effect that we are facing from human smoke and smog emissions.
Your argument is pure fear mongering and has absolutely nothing to do with the actual science of what is happening around us.
It may be possible that rising levels of CO2 may have a negligible impact on temperature due to the negative feedback of cloud formation. Current evidence suggests otherwise, specifically that doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will raise the average temperature by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius.
I'd like to see a citation for the 'evidence' of those effects for doubling CO2. All the journal articles I've found base their doubling numbers on climate models, not measured 'evidence'. More over, those climate models aren't always even in agreement over the sign to attribute to water vapor. When CO2 makes up about 5% of the greenhouse effect and H2O contributes more than 60%, I'm baffled that anyone can claim that the understanding of CO2's overall contribution is better understood than that of H2O.
Let me repeat that, because I think it is a sorely overlooked point. Climate models aren't well agreed on what sign to attribute to water vapor forcing. Water vapor forcing is known to account for more than 60% of GHG forcing. Meanwhile, CO2 is known to account for a mere 5% of GHG forcing. Can anyone explain to me how a climate model can have high confidence of the effects from CO2's 5%, when the sign for more than 60% of GHG's is uncertain?
Do plants create landfills? How do landfills contribute to global warming exactly?
Do they bury radioactive material? How does buried radioactive material contribute to global warming exactly?
Do they crash tankers or blow up oil rigs, causing millions of gallons of oil to flow into the oceans over a very short period of time? How do oil spills contribute to global warming exactly?
All the theories around AGW are based around human CO2 emissions. An extraordinarily harmless gas that plants require to survive, and naturally convert into oxygen. The potential harm from our CO2 emissions is it's contribution to the greenhouse effect. All your raving about toxic waste and oil spills just proves your more interested in declaring the sky is falling than you are in the actual science.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose Mann is a denier now too? You can follow my link to his last follow up on his own hockey stick graph. He stands by his work, but even his own corrected reconstructions now show that the last century of warming is NOT an anomaly over the last 2k years, but has been matched on at least 3 or 4 occasions in that time. The most he is able to observe is that the warming of merely the last decade is abnormal, of course, that is based 100% on the instrumental record since none of the proxy sets his paper uses covers that time frame.
I'll observe on my own that the only anomalous warming is entirely limited to the short time for which we have no proxy data...
But yeah, go on pretending the science is settled and decry those still researching and studying the matter as deniers and heretics to your chosen ideology.
If nuclear power were safe, it would be possible for utilities to build nuclear power plants without government indemnification.
This statement is true if and only if government requirements are rationally based...
As most people, I don't accept that basic premise, you probably shouldn't use it.
The reason that doesn't happen is that if you factor in the cost of indemnification, it is *not* cheaper than the alternatives.
Ah, but which comes first? The ridiculous costs employed against nuclear are BECAUSE of the irrational fear of it. You don't get turn around and use those high costs to justify the irrationality too, that is irrational in itself.
The reality is that coal power kills more people than nuclear power. It kills more people not by a small margin, but at a hands down terrifyingly higher rate. Coal plants even manage to dump MORE radioactive material into the environment than a nuclear plant.
Look no further than the Fukushima disaster for the proof of nuclear safety versus other power generation methods. How many people have died so far because of Fukushima? How many are projected to get sick in the future? How many have been killed by hydro dams failing and wiping out those downstream? How many coal miners die through accidents each year? How many to lung diseases from working the mines for years?
Oh, and that isn't even mentioning that the Fukushima plant had the added mark that it's disaster was precipitated by not only the most devastating earthquake in the nations recorded history, but the worst Tsunami as well.
You original point about government indemnification makes my point better than yours. Nuclear is safer, and has injured and killed vastly fewer people than any other form of cheaper power generation, and yet the indemnification conditions on nuclear is astronomically higher than that for any of the others...
I dunno about you, but I call that irrational fear.
It's true that it's difficult to model the risks of global warming, but we have pretty good models.
No, we don't. Can anyone's models even project sea level rise 30 years from now within 5cm with any degree of confidence? Nope. Good luck projecting climate averages out to 2100(let alone the impacts) where it is supposed to really start kicking in.
The main reason people fear nuclear power irrationally is that it's very difficult to model the risk of nuclear power,
And modeling the risks of global warming is easier how? Seems to me it's a much, much tougher nut to crack.
I see 2 main reasons people oppose nuclear power as a solution to carbon emissions. The biggest is that they just don't consider carbon emissions to be a serious problem. The next, and very close behind it, is how much easier it is to find problems than solutions. With electrics cars around the corner, nuclear power solves 90% of carbon emissions. It is much easier though to look at nuclear as a problem of it's own rather than as a solution to a bigger problem.
I forget who to credit it to, but people are like sheep. They fear the sheephound and wish he'd go away, right up until a wolf has them by throat.
When 100,000 people die of starvation, its said we can't feed them, or is it just that we don't want to feed them?
Or is it that the men with guns living much closer to them than us steal everything for themselves and use hunger as a weapon against those around them?
There is simply zero reason that North Koreans need to be starving so persistently that they average a full 6 inches less in height than their genetically identical, well fed Southern counterparts. Well, there is the fact their now dead God king needed to spend their resources developing nuclear weapons and long range missiles instead of feeding them...
Look at all the starving people in Africa. How many of them are locals that have been living safely in the same location for more than one generation? How many are displaced refuges who have been shot at or chased away by regional clashes and violence?
Lack of food isn't why people around the world are starving. Warfare from many levels is why the overwhelming majority are starving. They will continue to starve as well, since the people who care enough to help aren't willing or able to muster up the needed military force to ensure they are safely fed. Meanwhile the ones with the military force needed to see them fed, just can't be bothered to care. And why should they, anyone sending a military force in to 'help' would see themselves immediately blamed as a cause of any continuing suffering and starvation anyways.
I was going to go with:
Never underestimate the bandwidth of an ass load of backup tapes.
But you've beat me to it, well played good sir.
Maybe not. Having more HP out of an electric car isn't the limiting factor in good lap times. It might be great for drag racing, but when it adds an enormous amount of weight, it destroys lap times. When Top Gear was running test laps with Tesla's electric Lotus it was terrible for lap times because it was just too heavy to corner well, even though it could beat a gas Lotus on a drag strip.
Fallout 3 is the first game I came across that was fully supported by the community with mods, skins, and improved game play with patches to fix bugs.
You must be young.
I remember mods for Wolf3D and Doom. I remember rarely playing vanilla Quake because there were so very many great mods for it. So many in fact that Quake's gamer/developer community spawned a host of new game companies, most notably Valve.
How about I speak your language. The problem is not religion, but blind religious devotion to an ideology. Which, by the way, leads to the fact that atheists are in no way immune to the problem.
Blind religious devotion to Stalin's ideologies was no more foreign to atheists than theists. Blind religious devotion to Pol Pot's ideologies was no more foreign to atheists than theists. Blind religious devotion to Mao's ideologies was no more foreign to atheists than theists.
Putting absolute confidence in atheists immunity to blind devotion to any ideology is self-contradictory. Most of the worst cults start off with the acceptance of a similarly paradoxical premise.
Saudi Arabia. I don't care what lists it is or isn't on, it's where Bin Laden's from, it's where most of the 9/11 hijackers are from, it's a theocratic monarchy that keeps it's citizens in line with a combination of the threat of violence and a welfare state built on everything that's left over of the oil money after they've taken their share. They have numerous ties to terrorism, numerous human rights abuses and are not someone we should be supporting.
More over, it's where most of the money to support extremists in the tribal regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan is coming from too. I'm hopeful the Saudi royals will be going the way of Saddam and Mubarak soon enough. It's the dictators America does NOT support who look to have a longer run ahead of them in places like Syria and Iran.
As a dictator, the benefit of not taking American money is that you don't need to worry what the American public thinks of your repressive measures in the longer run of things. That fees up the kind of brutal measures necessary to maintain 'order'.
You act as if we somehow have more "freedom" just because we elect our dictator (sorry - Mubarak calls himself "president")
No, YOU are acting like the Egyptian people under Mubarak's dictatorship had as much "freedom" as Americans. That's a gross insult to the suffering and persecution that the Egyptian people were suffering, and it's shameful.
There are many Egyptian Telco workers who think, 'If the government tells me to shutdown the ISP connection, I will obey, because the government knows best.' - These are the same types you find in the EU or US who say it's okay for the SA officers to stick hands down passengers' pants (i.e. grope penises) and touch women's breasts.* They think it's okay if the government does it.
Your experience in a free country doesn't translate quite so well to a dictatorship. The Egyptian Telco workers also think "If the government tells me to shutdown the ISP connection, I will obey, because the government will jail or possibly kill me and my family if I don't".
Don't marginalize the position and plight of those under repressive dictatorships by pretending it's akin to your own struggles in a free country. By all means fight to keep your country free. By all means point out measures in your free country that can lead to suppression and tyranny. By all means stand up against those measures. Just don't do it on the backs of those like the Egyptians fighting a very different and much harder conflict.
The AI beat a decent player of the european Starcraft scene.
But that same player would _not_ be able to hold his ground against the likes of Jaedong or Flash.
Even with that you are overselling the AI. It's victory against the human player was part of their test cases, specifically testing vs. Goliaths. Plainly that means the human had to allow the AI to survive long enough to face higher tier units. The match the human 'lost' was with both hands behind his back and similar to heralding a chess AI that can beat top humans who never move their queen.
You can actually watch the matches on youtube here. You can see the match is heavily one sided from very early on. And your right as well about the huge gap there still is from this player that won quite handily to where top Korean players are.
Having programmed an AI for that same competition, I can assure you that nobody should be surprised an AI can beat a human.
Turns out the AI didn't and can't. From a different article on the tournament:
The showcase game of the competition was a bot versus human match. In the exhibition match, =DoGo=, a World Cyber Games 2001 competitor played against the top ranking bot of the competition. The result was an exciting man versus machine match highlighting the state of the art in real-time strategy game AI.
While the expert player was capable of defeating the top performing bots in the competition, the results are quite encouraging. Read on for complete results.
Even the original article noted that the AI 'victory' against their human pro was the result of the human player artificially altering their play to build only a single unit they wanted to test out(Goliaths).
By that logic, that means we should go around and liberate all oppressed nations.
No, by your logic we shouldn't liberate anyone unless we can liberate EVERYONE. A better analogy is watching 300 people drowning and walking away because you don't want to pick favorites by saving only 2 or 3.
Read up on the history of Saddam's reign and who his puppet master was. Yes, that was Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand.
A better tip is to research the subject for more than 5 minutes on Google. Saddam was nobody's puppet. Yes, America, Rumsfeld and especially the CIA worked with him and even tried hard to influence him. So did the Russians. So did the Saudi Arabians. So did pretty much every major power in the world. Leaders of oil producing countries get a lot of international attention. Saddam was, importantly, not walking to the tune of America's harp. He wanted war with Iran for his own reasons, and America jumped on board because it worked for them too.
Then we gave him weapons, including chemical weapons to fight Iran.
That is in fact false. America did not sell Saddam chemical weapons. They did sell him some dual use equipment, most notably helicopters that he likely used to deliver the weapons. However, Saddam's suppliers of chemical weapons were primarily in Germany and Singapore. His largest financial backers, were Saudi Arabia. America did provide invaluable intelligence to Saddam though, specifically to most efficiently deploy his chemical weapons to maximum effect. So America's hands are plenty dirty, despite not actually selling the weapons themselves.
A lingering question is why should that detract from the positive nature of changing course and finally opposing instead of supporting such a monster. Seems to me that's the right direction to be headed.
regarding Saddam's atrocities it is said:
You act as if that blood isn't on our hands as well.
No, you are acting as though Saddam's atrocities aren't on America's hands. If that blood is on America's hands, how can you argue against them being expected to step up and put an end to them?
I can see the politically correct future already...
Wife: Did you sleep with him?
Husband: No of course I didn't! Not that there's anything wrong with homosexuality or infidelity...
now for the mods to decide if it's flamebait, funny or maybe even insightful.
We live in a society with two sets of rules. They basically boil down to this: if a big guy does it to a little guy, it's okay. If a little guy does it to a big guy, the little guy is gonna get stomped. That is the real American Dream
I pointed out that this wasn't unique to America, but it was the nature of the world/humanity. You seemed to disagree, and we went back and forth to the point of using ancient Egypt as an example. To which you respond:
You brought up the example of the slaves and the pyramid. I pointed out that that was a bad example, as the pyramids were built by volunteers.
Egyptian slavery(or volunteer labor if you prefer) demonstrates might makes right as a mentality, and I do insist it demonstrates it more strongly than American society does today. Comparing favorably do a slave state isn't high praise. I merely wished to point out that your criticism of the 'American Dream' extended much, much further into human nature in general. Do you deny that?
Your misinformation about the pyramids does not speak well about your understanding of the rest of history. The Pharaoh was a living God. Would a living God have to force slaves to build his tomb? No. Every Egyptian wanted to work on the pyramids, to take part in that immense religious ritual, and they were well paid and well taken care of. Archeologists know a lot about the conditions of pyramid workers, because many were buried nearby. Bones show signs of being professionally set. The workers were well fed and lived in better housing than most.
Working on your God's tomb was an honer, a privilege bestowed on the best and the brightest, not a labor of slaves.
I could stomach that theory if I hadn't originally been replying to your saying this:
That is the real American Dream: to become an Important Person, so you can play by the more advantageous set of rules and tell the little people what to do.
Waxing nostalgic for the good old days of Egyptian slaves worshiping their Man-God, while decrying the ways of the evil American empire.
Are you really sure that's where you want to go with this?
You should read a bit more about modern sociological, games theory, psychological, and economic experiments, which show that your worldview is incorrect. People are generally nice, because cooperation is evolutionarily advantageous.
I refer you, again, to history. Cooperation is advantageous. That is NOT the same as being nice to your fellow man. The pyramids are a lasting testament to what human cooperation can accomplish. Maintaining control over more than a million slaves requires a lot of cooperation, that doesn't make it nice.
History is war, conquest and the use of force against fellow man. Over and over and over again. Usually all that war and subjugation requires a great deal of cooperation, and yes, humans have proven good at it. I distinguish between that, and being nice.
Modern democracy's approach to balancing competing groups of co-operating humans with a mechanism other than brute force seems the best way to dodge the not nice aspect of cooperative competition. After all, the majority would likely win the violent contest anyways, so letting them 'win' can be expedient.
People are generally nice, unless they live in a society where there are two sets of rules. When being nice gets you taken advantage of, people become dicks out of self defense. That doesn't mean they want to be dicks, it means they have to, because they have no real access to justice.
I think that's backwards. People are only generally nice, when they have a society that encourages that as being in their self interest.
Modern economic experiments show that people would rather be fair and practice reciprocity than act in their own self interest.
History shows that in practice people act in their own self interest. It just sometimes takes the form of collective self interest. Selflessly risking your life in a war of aggression for betterment of your group at the expense of another is a recurring theme.
In any case, even if that IS the way things are, and people are just not generally very nice, it does not mean that is the way they should be.
I agree whole heartedly. Unfortunately I see the balance of the world, both now and historically, to be dominated by warlords oppressing those under them. Anytime a warlord is overthrown, more often than not the victor simply takes their place in power. There are exceptions of course, but I'd dare say stable democracies like America are the ones that stand out.
Which goes back to the prior post, I would say America on the whole is an example of one of the rare places where might makes right is more discouraged than re-enforced. With the caveat that this is a ridiculously low bar.
We live in a society with two sets of rules. They basically boil down to this: if a big guy does it to a little guy, it's okay. If a little guy does it to a big guy, the little guy is gonna get stomped. That is the real American Dream: to become an Important Person, so you can play by the more advantageous set of rules and tell the little people what to do.
I think your missing the forest for the tree. It's not just American society that double standard applies to. It applies sweepingly to the whole of human history, including every single historical and modern society.
People are just generally not very nice. As a result, odds are pretty good that if your reading this you are a bad person, shame on you!
the real point is that water vapor and clouds, which again are two distinct things, are only feedbacks because their levels in the atmosphere are dependent on atmospheric conditions.
That's what a feedback is, your just saying they are only feedbacks because they fit the definition of a feedback.
CO2 levels on the other hand are independent of atmospheric conditions.
Nope, CO2 is both a feedback and a forcing. CO2 absorption and release from things like plants and oceans is dependent on temperature, making CO2 levels a feedback. Human CO2 emissions add an external forcing source for CO2 as well. It's both a feedback and a forcing.
CO2 is the main driver.
Except that we've been coming in and out of ice ages for millenia without the benefit of human CO2 forcing.
Let me repeat my question. Water vapor and the related cloud formations account for far more of the greenhouse effect than CO2. We do not understand the effect of cloud formation well enough to even attribute it as a positive or negative feedback. With our understanding of that being so poor, how can we have such a greater confidence in our understanding of the net impact of human CO2 emissions? Remember, CO2 has a much smaller impact, and human emissions are much smaller than natural CO2 emissions to boot.
You are confusing water vapor with clouds which while they are related are two different things. Water vapor is always a positive forcing. Clouds can be either positive or negative depending on a number of factors.
My apologies, I should have said feedback not forcing. What is not well understood or agreed upon is what roll water vapor and the directly resulting cloud cover play as global temperature increases and decreases. Whether they are a positive or negative feedback pretty much dwarfs any other consideration regarding future projections. I still would love an explanation of how a much less significant feedback, CO2, can be so well known when the sign for H2O is unknown.
Also CO2 alone accounts for around 20% of GHG forcing
Which depends on how you measure it. The high end 20-25% numbers are all based on ignoring any overlapping absorption by other gases in the same spectra. No respectable scientist ever attributes that level of absorption to CO2 alone, it's dishonest. I can't be bothered to go back and dig up the journal entries, but even being generous and giving CO2 15% overall absorption, it is still crushed by the more than 60% from H2O(if we measure H2O as you did it is up around 75%) that is so poorly understood we don't even know the sign to attribute it as a feedback.
It's not alarmist, it's a logical progression. We can't keep pumping shit into the atmosphere and water supplies thinking it won't have some major cumulative effect down the road.
Which has exactly NOTHING to do with global warming. For all that you've said, we might as well be terrified of the terrible global cooling effect that we are facing from human smoke and smog emissions.
Your argument is pure fear mongering and has absolutely nothing to do with the actual science of what is happening around us.
It may be possible that rising levels of CO2 may have a negligible impact on temperature due to the negative feedback of cloud formation. Current evidence suggests otherwise, specifically that doubling the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will raise the average temperature by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius.
I'd like to see a citation for the 'evidence' of those effects for doubling CO2. All the journal articles I've found base their doubling numbers on climate models, not measured 'evidence'. More over, those climate models aren't always even in agreement over the sign to attribute to water vapor. When CO2 makes up about 5% of the greenhouse effect and H2O contributes more than 60%, I'm baffled that anyone can claim that the understanding of CO2's overall contribution is better understood than that of H2O.
Let me repeat that, because I think it is a sorely overlooked point. Climate models aren't well agreed on what sign to attribute to water vapor forcing. Water vapor forcing is known to account for more than 60% of GHG forcing. Meanwhile, CO2 is known to account for a mere 5% of GHG forcing. Can anyone explain to me how a climate model can have high confidence of the effects from CO2's 5%, when the sign for more than 60% of GHG's is uncertain?
Do plants create landfills?
How do landfills contribute to global warming exactly?
Do they bury radioactive material?
How does buried radioactive material contribute to global warming exactly?
Do they crash tankers or blow up oil rigs, causing millions of gallons of oil to flow into the oceans over a very short period of time?
How do oil spills contribute to global warming exactly?
All the theories around AGW are based around human CO2 emissions. An extraordinarily harmless gas that plants require to survive, and naturally convert into oxygen. The potential harm from our CO2 emissions is it's contribution to the greenhouse effect. All your raving about toxic waste and oil spills just proves your more interested in declaring the sky is falling than you are in the actual science.