That first paragraph was confusing so lemme post my summary:
Bjorn Lomborg says evironmentalists are stupid. Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty says Bjorn Lomborg is stupid. Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation says Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty is stupid. Cato Institute says Bjorn Lomborg is not stupid. Scientific American says Bjorn Lomborg is stupid.
No kidding, I just setup some computers for my brothers who just started college. I got a windows messenger (not the IM one) popup before I even had a chance to click on the windows update icon. That was 30 seconds after I logged in, at most 3 minutes since I turned the thing on.
Once I got the patches, virus protector, and ad-aware installed, everything was fine, but still, there was a reason I wanted to do a clean install.
Without a system?
on
Systemantics
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It is hardly necessary to state that the very first principle of Systems design is a negative one: Do it without a system if you can.
And how do you do that? Even anarchism is a system in which the majority is commited to opposing any conglomeration of power by a minority.
Since when did this site become News for Consumers, Stuff that's Easy? There is an imposter among us - someone call the geek police!
Seriously if you don't concider building things (electronics, software, whatever) fun, then you are not a nerd.
Re:none besides the PC?
on
Linux Toys
·
· Score: 1
I think what he was saying was that some of the projects don't require additional hardware. Why would he say that they require "a variety of hardware" if all you needed was a PC?
What's really sad is that this recorded scream is more famous and popular than any of us will ever be. I mean it's bad enough for to be overshadowed by idiot politicians and cardboard actors, but by a scream? That has to be some kind of all-time low:)
Of course they're probably not. His point, however, was that *not* having a high-end card to show off and impress people with will decrease their visiblity, among other factors, and make it harder for them to sell midrange cards, even if they are comparable to or better than similarly-midrange cards from NVidia or ATI.
And your parent's point was that this is irrelevent because they wont be selling to sparkle-vision consumers, but to bottom-line focused manufacturers.
Come on guys. I know reading the article is too much to ask for but could you at least look at the pretty picture. Apple Mail, Mozilla, mutt, pine all have a feature that let you sort the message listing in a usenet-style nested format. This is very different from displaying the contents of the messages themselves in a nested slashdot-style format. AFAIK, these other programs do not have this feature.
For example, Clinton fed the bubble despite a long cautionary history about preventing an economy from expanding too quickly.
I don't know about that. In his first campain he talked alot about the government investing in the national infrastructure. Then he got elected had some talks with Alan Greenspan, and decided that would be a bad idea for the economy and went back on his campain promises. He also decreased the deficit every year he was in office, exactly what you want to do during a good economy. Perhaps he could have done more to temper the bubble, but he certainly cannot be blamed for feeding it.
From what I understand it was one of the most tempered and drawn out bubble we have had in a long time. I blame the bubble on the tech industry, and the longevity on a wise FED chairman, a president willing to listen to him, and a congress willing to cooperate with the president on lowering the deficit. I likewise blame todays recession on natural business cycles, but will blame tomorrows problems on a president who goes against the advice of a wise FED chairman, and cuts and spends wrecklessly.
Then again, in the macro-economics class I took, one of the co-authors of the text was one of clinton's original (first term) economic advisors, so my understanding might be slightly biast, although I have read other sources.
I'd divided on the issue of medical patents as well, but lemme play devils advocate on this issue.
First I would very much like to point out that medicine does not save your life, it prolongs it. It used to be that we had a concept of dieing of natural causes. Now a'days we understand more, and have named more and more of the types of deaths that almost no one dies of "natural causes" anymore - they die of cancer, or a virus or what not. The truth of the matter is that everyone is going to die at some point and there is going to be a cause.
So if everyone is going to die someday, why not force the rich to pay mobs of money to pay for these life extending treatments, from which all of the money goes to further science and medical technology. Meanwhile, the rest of us will have to live normal lives, and are no worse off than we were before the drugs were developed, but are actually better off because of the drugs that were developed years ago which are now affordable.
The other option is to have all research be funded by institutions who don't need to recoup their financial investments - ie charities or the government. Having the rich fund scientific research seems more progressive than having taxes fund it.
If you would have RTFA you would have noticed that is appears that it has started to come down, but it is too difficult to tell since there is not enough data - we'll have to wait five years to tell if the trend has changed.
Re:Driving a Truck Through This One
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 3, Funny
3. I haven't done the calculations (has anybody?) but it also occurs to me that if Earth's atmosphere were soaking up all of that energy, there'd be some SERIOUS global warming occuring.
IANAAP*, IAAIC**. But why would energy being soaked up by the atmosphere lead to a warmer planet than being soaked up by the ground which then heats the atmosphere? If anything it would just change the temperature gradient, not the mean temperature, making the surface temperature colder, no?
* I am not an atmospheric physicist **I am an ignorant clod
Re:Rock On!!!
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Good: We'll all have great skin for starts.
Actually, the article mentioned that it was visable and infrared light that was being blocked by an excess of clouds, not ultraviolet. Add to this the fact that our magnetic feild is becoming less polarized, in the process of flipping. As it does so there will be a bunch of little poles (places where the magnetic feild points into the earth not parrallel to it), guiding in additional radiation (and aroras, yay!). So if anything we will have more problems with bad skin not less.
Also, as the earth has warmed we have seen an the wet places getting more precipitation and the dry places getting less. And the article said the dimming was not constant, just that we have had more clouds and the clouds obviously block light, but the deserts, with no precipitation will have fewer clouds and thus less dimming.
My prediction: the world will be divided into radsuit wearing deserts desert dwellers, and mutant frog men, who live in swamps.
First, solar energy is not reliable enough to be used as a primary energy source. Second, large scale solar plants are too inefficent. It think it mostly has to do with the fact that the output of cells is low voltage, and thus has to be upcast to get it to travel long distances (but i may be completely wrong on this one). Third transporting energy long distances is both wastefull (you loose some on the way) and very hard on the electrical grid. Arizona producing energy for a huge portion of the US would be a bad thing.
In addition to the fact that it is more efficient for the power from solar cells to be used locally, it also provides some independence from the national grid in the case that something goes wrong with it. In fact, a system where power generation was completely distrubted would be ideal, the only reason we don't use it is because our primary power sources either need large centralized plant or the economies of scale of a large centralized plant outweighs the distribution losses. Neither of these apply to solar. So why would you want to use it in an inferior centralized system, when it is so well suited for a distributed system?:)
Re:Now theres a fuckup waiting to happen?
on
Living on Mars Time
·
· Score: 1
Think thats bad? The egyptians and babylonians had a time system that had 12 "hours" of daylight and 12 "hours" of darkness regardless of how long the day was.
There was another motivation in creating patents. In lue of patents companies which did research would treat their findings as trade secrets and would never share the results. So patents are a trade-off - you provide the scientific comunity with the results of your work and in return you get a legal monopoly to its comercial applications. The implication being that while the market may be held back by patents science should be able to progress. This isn't exactly the case in our current system, because by and large scientists are also employees.
Just out of curiosity, how could an occurrence be neither lawfully governed nor random?
It could be willfull. But for that matter, how can an occurance be lawfully governed or random? This idea that we have all this energy/particles that just all follow some set of rules for no apperent reason is kindof odd, but seemingly true.
Think of it this way. Einstein believed that everything was governed by laws, and thought that quantum mechanics was not correct, just a usefull model, and that lower level rules which we were not aware of really governed those actions. To him the concept of true randomness was noncencical - completely forign to his world view. How could a perfect orderly world have occurances that are governed by true randomness.
Likewise, many scientists who have accepted the philisophical world view that everything is governed by rules and randomness have a very difficult time concidering that free will could be real. Anything that we see as an "act of will" must be controlled by underling rules or randomness that we don't understand yet. How could an elegent scientific world possibly have occurences that are governed by true willpower (or anything else it is just an example).
hmm, I don't know how good of a job I did explaining that, but it will have to be good enough for a Friday night:)
Oh, one thing I forgot to mention in my previous post is that the confusion might be linked to the fact that we are calling them receipts, and people usually do keep receipts as a personal record of a transaction. Perhaps we should pick another term like "ballot hardcopy" or "ballot printout".
If I remember right Ettore Perazzoli was also largly responcible for the GNOME Virtual File System code (transparently opening tarballs as folders, FTP etc) which in my opinion was the only good thing to come out of the Nautilus project.
Slashdot Mirror
This could mean 256 MB compact flash cards for under around $20, as compared to $70 tday, or mp3 players that cost almost half as much as they do now.
That first paragraph was confusing so lemme post my summary:
Bjorn Lomborg says evironmentalists are stupid.
Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty says Bjorn Lomborg is stupid.
Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation says Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty is stupid.
Cato Institute says Bjorn Lomborg is not stupid.
Scientific American says Bjorn Lomborg is stupid.
okay makes sense now.
hmm, seems like I do need text, so I lied about that [n/t] bit.
No kidding, I just setup some computers for my brothers who just started college. I got a windows messenger (not the IM one) popup before I even had a chance to click on the windows update icon. That was 30 seconds after I logged in, at most 3 minutes since I turned the thing on.
Once I got the patches, virus protector, and ad-aware installed, everything was fine, but still, there was a reason I wanted to do a clean install.
It is hardly necessary to state that the very first principle of Systems design is a negative one: Do it without a system if you can.
And how do you do that? Even anarchism is a system in which the majority is commited to opposing any conglomeration of power by a minority.
Situation is also part of it. I have no problem whatsoever giving talks and presentations, but can't keep up a conversation to save me.
Since when did this site become News for Consumers, Stuff that's Easy? There is an imposter among us - someone call the geek police!
Seriously if you don't concider building things (electronics, software, whatever) fun, then you are not a nerd.
I think what he was saying was that some of the projects don't require additional hardware. Why would he say that they require "a variety of hardware" if all you needed was a PC?
What's really sad is that this recorded scream is more famous and popular than any of us will ever be. I mean it's bad enough for to be overshadowed by idiot politicians and cardboard actors, but by a scream? That has to be some kind of all-time low :)
Damn, I though Y2K was a problem, now my 64 bit unix time isn't even good enough.
Of course they're probably not. His point, however, was that *not* having a high-end card to show off and impress people with will decrease their visiblity, among other factors, and make it harder for them to sell midrange cards, even if they are comparable to or better than similarly-midrange cards from NVidia or ATI.
And your parent's point was that this is irrelevent because they wont be selling to sparkle-vision consumers, but to bottom-line focused manufacturers.
Come on guys. I know reading the article is too much to ask for but could you at least look at the pretty picture. Apple Mail, Mozilla, mutt, pine all have a feature that let you sort the message listing in a usenet-style nested format. This is very different from displaying the contents of the messages themselves in a nested slashdot-style format. AFAIK, these other programs do not have this feature.
For example, Clinton fed the bubble despite a long cautionary history about preventing an economy from expanding too quickly.
I don't know about that. In his first campain he talked alot about the government investing in the national infrastructure. Then he got elected had some talks with Alan Greenspan, and decided that would be a bad idea for the economy and went back on his campain promises. He also decreased the deficit every year he was in office, exactly what you want to do during a good economy. Perhaps he could have done more to temper the bubble, but he certainly cannot be blamed for feeding it.
From what I understand it was one of the most tempered and drawn out bubble we have had in a long time. I blame the bubble on the tech industry, and the longevity on a wise FED chairman, a president willing to listen to him, and a congress willing to cooperate with the president on lowering the deficit. I likewise blame todays recession on natural business cycles, but will blame tomorrows problems on a president who goes against the advice of a wise FED chairman, and cuts and spends wrecklessly.
Then again, in the macro-economics class I took, one of the co-authors of the text was one of clinton's original (first term) economic advisors, so my understanding might be slightly biast, although I have read other sources.
FYI - several of the thumbnails down towards the bottom of the page don't match the screen screenshot they link to.
Quicktime changes
I'd divided on the issue of medical patents as well, but lemme play devils advocate on this issue.
First I would very much like to point out that medicine does not save your life, it prolongs it. It used to be that we had a concept of dieing of natural causes. Now a'days we understand more, and have named more and more of the types of deaths that almost no one dies of "natural causes" anymore - they die of cancer, or a virus or what not. The truth of the matter is that everyone is going to die at some point and there is going to be a cause.
So if everyone is going to die someday, why not force the rich to pay mobs of money to pay for these life extending treatments, from which all of the money goes to further science and medical technology. Meanwhile, the rest of us will have to live normal lives, and are no worse off than we were before the drugs were developed, but are actually better off because of the drugs that were developed years ago which are now affordable.
The other option is to have all research be funded by institutions who don't need to recoup their financial investments - ie charities or the government. Having the rich fund scientific research seems more progressive than having taxes fund it.
If you would have RTFA you would have noticed that is appears that it has started to come down, but it is too difficult to tell since there is not enough data - we'll have to wait five years to tell if the trend has changed.
3. I haven't done the calculations (has anybody?) but it also occurs to me that if Earth's atmosphere were soaking up all of that energy, there'd be some SERIOUS global warming occuring.
IANAAP*, IAAIC**. But why would energy being soaked up by the atmosphere lead to a warmer planet than being soaked up by the ground which then heats the atmosphere? If anything it would just change the temperature gradient, not the mean temperature, making the surface temperature colder, no?
* I am not an atmospheric physicist
**I am an ignorant clod
Good: We'll all have great skin for starts.
Actually, the article mentioned that it was visable and infrared light that was being blocked by an excess of clouds, not ultraviolet. Add to this the fact that our magnetic feild is becoming less polarized, in the process of flipping. As it does so there will be a bunch of little poles (places where the magnetic feild points into the earth not parrallel to it), guiding in additional radiation (and aroras, yay!). So if anything we will have more problems with bad skin not less.
Also, as the earth has warmed we have seen an the wet places getting more precipitation and the dry places getting less. And the article said the dimming was not constant, just that we have had more clouds and the clouds obviously block light, but the deserts, with no precipitation will have fewer clouds and thus less dimming.
My prediction: the world will be divided into radsuit wearing deserts desert dwellers, and mutant frog men, who live in swamps.
First, solar energy is not reliable enough to be used as a primary energy source. Second, large scale solar plants are too inefficent. It think it mostly has to do with the fact that the output of cells is low voltage, and thus has to be upcast to get it to travel long distances (but i may be completely wrong on this one). Third transporting energy long distances is both wastefull (you loose some on the way) and very hard on the electrical grid. Arizona producing energy for a huge portion of the US would be a bad thing.
:)
In addition to the fact that it is more efficient for the power from solar cells to be used locally, it also provides some independence from the national grid in the case that something goes wrong with it. In fact, a system where power generation was completely distrubted would be ideal, the only reason we don't use it is because our primary power sources either need large centralized plant or the economies of scale of a large centralized plant outweighs the distribution losses. Neither of these apply to solar. So why would you want to use it in an inferior centralized system, when it is so well suited for a distributed system?
Think thats bad? The egyptians and babylonians had a time system that had 12 "hours" of daylight and 12 "hours" of darkness regardless of how long the day was.
There was another motivation in creating patents. In lue of patents companies which did research would treat their findings as trade secrets and would never share the results. So patents are a trade-off - you provide the scientific comunity with the results of your work and in return you get a legal monopoly to its comercial applications. The implication being that while the market may be held back by patents science should be able to progress. This isn't exactly the case in our current system, because by and large scientists are also employees.
Just out of curiosity, how could an occurrence be neither lawfully governed nor random?
:)
It could be willfull. But for that matter, how can an occurance be lawfully governed or random? This idea that we have all this energy/particles that just all follow some set of rules for no apperent reason is kindof odd, but seemingly true.
Think of it this way. Einstein believed that everything was governed by laws, and thought that quantum mechanics was not correct, just a usefull model, and that lower level rules which we were not aware of really governed those actions. To him the concept of true randomness was noncencical - completely forign to his world view. How could a perfect orderly world have occurances that are governed by true randomness.
Likewise, many scientists who have accepted the philisophical world view that everything is governed by rules and randomness have a very difficult time concidering that free will could be real. Anything that we see as an "act of will" must be controlled by underling rules or randomness that we don't understand yet. How could an elegent scientific world possibly have occurences that are governed by true willpower (or anything else it is just an example).
hmm, I don't know how good of a job I did explaining that, but it will have to be good enough for a Friday night
Oh, one thing I forgot to mention in my previous post is that the confusion might be linked to the fact that we are calling them receipts, and people usually do keep receipts as a personal record of a transaction. Perhaps we should pick another term like "ballot hardcopy" or "ballot printout".
If I remember right Ettore Perazzoli was also largly responcible for the GNOME Virtual File System code (transparently opening tarballs as folders, FTP etc) which in my opinion was the only good thing to come out of the Nautilus project.