The point is that Verhoeven knows how to direct bloody, violent sci-fi action.
No, Verhoeven knows has to direct retarded, suspension of disbelief destroying, B-movie action. Look at Starship Troopers, for example.
We'll ignore how cool the movie could've been with nuke-dropping, mile leaping, power armor running rampant through alien worlds leaving trails of devastation or intimidation. Instead, let's focus on the idea of trained infantry using weapons with a good half-mile range deciding to run up to melee range with a giant clawed monster and firing at it while standing in a FREAKING circle!! Let's focus on the total lack of anything resembling squad tactics or a command and control structure. Let's take a chillingly technologically competent alien race and turn them in to stupid animals with mysterious plasma vomiting and FTL travelling organs. Let's rape a coming of age story about soldiers and turn it into a sleazy high school drama / romance.
Verhoeven action is all unabashedly cheesy, and his character interaction leaves you feeling like you just touched something greasy. While I probably wouldn't have passionately hated Starship Troopers if I hadn't read the book first, I still wouldn't have liked it. While I'm not sure that Verhoeven could've maked Doom suck worse, I can be sure that he wouldn't have made it good.
- Greedo shot first. - Han Solo steps on Jabba's tail without getting killed.* - BS explosion rings from the Death Stars. - Ewoks Cartoon. - Droids Cartoon. - Star Wars Christmas Special. - Ewoks instead of Wookies on Endor in RotJ.
My personal pick is when Greedo shot first.
(* Yes I know that it was because when they originally filmed the deleted scene Jabba was a man instead of a slug-like alien and Harrison Ford moved around him in ways that didn't work later, but this did sort of help break suspension of disbelief.)
1) Developers cannot know what the capabilities of your laptop are. They have to generalize for many, many hardware configurations, and any attempts to push the envelope of systems currently available risks making your system requirements too high for the game to sell. My PC does not equal your PC. My PS2 does equal your PS2.
2) Developers can assume that a laptop sold the year after yours will be more powerful than yours. What is a limit today is not a limit one year from now.
These two things combine to mean that PC developers cannot really push the limit of a PC because defined limits don't exist.
Pushing the limit of a console is truly a feat of wizardry because you're constantly striving to get more and more out of the same hardware instead of just coding for machines that don't yet exist or aren't yet common. On the other hand, there's an incentive to go all out since you are rewarded for hitting the limits of a system by increased sales instead of punished by decreased sales. It's an entirely different way of programming for an entirely different market.
A system with an add-on like a hard drive for an Xbox, a network card and hard drive for a PS2, or a memory pack for an N64 is not the same as an upgrade for a PC. In essence, what you have is an entirely new system. Console games are coded under the expectation that either:
A) You cannot assume that the hardware is there and the game cannot rely on it. B) The game requires the hardware and will not run without it.
In other words, two systems with or without an added capability are essentially two completely different consoles, and pushing the limits of those systems works completely differently. You'll note that because of lower market penetrations of Console++ over Vanilla Console, most games written for add-on hardware are commercial flops.
PC games are all programmed under the assumption that people can upgrade their hardware. There is no limit to push on a PC because of this. This is all about pushing the limit of a known system and not just coding wastefully under the assumption that the "next generation" will be able to handle it. Console programmers know that the current hardware is all that they are going to get.
The only thing that the PC world has that comes close to this is the demoscene.
There's just a small minority opposed to Darwin in the US, so people who are basically in the same camp feel the urge to show some sympathy for someone who had a good idea.
They're actually a majority in America and Britain. It is an extremely important problem because it feeds the culture of anti-intellectualism and distrust of science in other issues where fact-based policy-making and ideological politics are in conflict in both countries. People with a skeptical attitude towards science about evolution are more likely to have a skeptical attitude about global warming and to disregard studies about the effectiveness of abstinence-only sex education because they disagree with what they want to believe.
We desperately need to do something to rekindle the American love of science before our economy goes to rot thanks to the lack of people entering science and engineering majors and before the lives of millions are ruined by bad economic and social policies.
I really do suspect that if there was some sort of means that they could use to prevent piracy and cheating, and yet allow end users to do homebrew development, then they'd do it.
I don't. Microsoft does not like non-commercial software development at all. It represents a model in fundamental conflict with the existence of their business.
The big reason they wouldn't like it though is that all the money Microsoft makes off of the 360 comes from big developers who have to pay license fees to have access to the tools needed to make their titles run on the hardware. Everything that gives a reason to buy an Xbox 360 without buying a number of licensed games for it gives customers a reason to never let MS recover the money lost on a product sold for under cost. Any method usable by a "homebrew" developer could be used by a big company too in theory.
Homebrew development means a loss of control for Microsoft, and Microsoft likes control. All monopolies and cartels eventually get addicted to it.
I could see the possibility of turning the 360 into a PVR, but doesn't it seem like purchasing or building a dedicated PVR for less $$$ would make more sense? Do you really want to spend $400 just to hack it into a machine that you could have had for $150-$200?
You're looking at this problem from the wrong angle. Would you rather spend $550-600 for an Xbox 360 and a PVR, or just $400 for an Xbox 360? What if it could also serve as an emulator, a wireless A/B/G router with firewall, and a three-processor, Linux, websurfing / media PC that runs on 160 Watts? Heck, the thing already plays DVDs and streams music without hacks.
The moment that Linux becomes available for the XBox 360, I'm buying one even if it means that I can never boot a game on it without Microsoft patching and eliminating my Linux system. I don't care about Xbox 360 games and plan to never buy one; I just want a cheap, powerful, energy efficient Linux PC. Making MS subsidize my Linux box is only a cherry on top.
Microsoft's Xbox team (if they ever had the attitude) learned the hard way about #4, and #2 & #3 are in fact reinforcing reasons for attitude #1 to be the most likely.
If you haven't noticed, Microsoft is marching firmly in lock step with the recording and movie industries over the idea that customers should not be allowed to use what they purchase in ways that do not make Microsoft more money. Letting developers learn how to put stuff on the machine without going through MS's SDK could lead to homebrew games. Allowing people to write home-brew games means letting there be games that are sold (or worse given away) without paying Microsoft the license fee that makes up for selling Xbox 360s at a loss. Allowing utility access to the hardware might lead to putting Linux on a 360, thus making MS subsidize non-Windows computers that will play licensed games (and make up the loss), or allow the playing of pirated games.
If this is based on a security problem that can be patched in software, MS will treat it as a critical fix and release a patch for it ASAP.
Actually, there is another hypothesized threat from Toxoplasma gondii that is a deadly risk even for people with just a dormant infection. (Toxoplamsa doesn't get eliminated by the immune system; it just goes dormant in cysts in the muscle tissue and brain and continues to effect its host for life.)
It is true that we do not know what caused the MWP, nor do we know what caused the Carboniferous Ice Age. Clearly, in the latter case the Earth had an Ice Age in spite of CO2 levels (whereas CO2 levels dropped in all other very long ice age periods). Clearly, an ice age happened in spite of carbon dioxide levels. However, the greenhouse effect is reproduceable in a lab and is based on solid physics. We know that atmospheric carbon dioxide contributes to the warming of a planet. Just look at Venus if you doubt that.
The theoretical warming of Mars is disturbing, but it's supposition. The problem that leads some scientists to believe that Mars might be coming out of an ice age is that there is too much water ice in the lower latitudes. One theory is that this is ice that hasn't melted yet, but we don't know. We don't have temperature trends for Mars, and we don't know if it's warming as fast, faster, or slower than the Earth or if it's even warming at all. More research is needed.
We may have uncovered evidence of a seperate contributing factor to the warming of the Earth (and perhaps a more significant one on a geological time scale based on previous patterns of warming and cooling), but it does not invalidate the effect of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses on the atmosphere nor their ability to rapidly affect climate.
I'd also like to point out that I never said that a climate model proves anything except whether or not a mathematical model can predict what happens to the Earth. All mathematical models of the world are subject to Einstein's "closed watch" dilemma.
Lastly, I think your accusation of McCarthyism is grossly unfair. The comment that I replied to hardly counted as "reasoned discourse." All he was saying was in effect, "Ha! Something you said (when completely misconstrued) could contradict your point (if we ignore that the point is about rate of change and not maximum temperature). Thus, you're all crackpots."
Sorry about that. I do hear the "volcanoes put out more carbon dioxide than human activity" lie from hardcore GW deniers every now and then, so I incorrectly assumed what you were getting at.
Global warming would probably eventually have happened without us within 10,000 to 1,000,000 years time; we're in an ice age right now compared to earlier points in Earth's history. The problem of global warming is what it does to the human race within a century or two. If the world changed over tens of thousands of years, humanity wouldn't even really notice or care much. Seas would rise an inch per century or three, the spread of the desert would be slow, rivers would dry up and new ones would form, etc. Relocation of people would happen slowly, and wars over resources would be rare.
The problem of global warming is what we do to each other when the change is too fast to adapt to. The problem is wars for constrained resources like fresh water, mass starvation because farmland becomes useless within a generation, areas flooded while people still live there in great numbers, the mass extinction of useful other species that do not have time to evolve to adapt to the weather, etc.
Either way, humanity as a species will survive no matter what (unless we wipe ourselves out due to war and hate). We are supremely adaptive. The problem is the short-term and all the suffering that rapid climate change will bring about because of our necessary attachment to a way of life that depends on the current climate including where and what we farm and where we build our cities.
You might have more luck converting them to your belief system if the "solution" to the problem isn't always a call for more authoritarian government instrusions into our lives.
I had a post basically about why government intervention is needed in certain markets a few days ago. To sum up, the environment is a "common good" which means that it is rivalrous and non-exclusive. People cannot be stopped from taking the good without force, and use of the good degrades it for future users. Since you cannot prevent people from taking the good without government force, you cannot monetize it, and you have the free rider problem. Free market competition forces businesses to ignore the external costs of how they use a common good or a public good, and thus the free market rewards bad behavior.
There are multiple ways in which the government can fix environmental problems. There are bans on certain behavior which have substitutes like the use of ozone-destroying CFCs or health-ruining PCBs. This is the most "authoritarian" and should only be used when there is a compelling public need for a good to no longer be used such as due to the extreme harm it causes to the health of people and wildlife.
Mandating technology is another "authoritarian" solution that is rarely a desireable one to do because a technology that is efficient today may not be the most efficient forever. A good function that government can provide however is to set minimum standards such as for fuel and energy efficiency that the market would otherwise discourage due to upfront unit costs and R&D costs. (This is an example of a free market making inefficient use of resources because free markets only strive for the local maxima of efficiency instead of long-term maximum efficiency.)
For controlling emissions in the environment the government can set up trading schemes which turn the common good of air quality into a private good which free markets are extremely adept at maximizing the use of. The Kyoto agreement is implemented in terms of carbon trading schemes, though some are more heavy handed than others. Making a common good monetizeable is hardly an "authoritarian government intrusion" when the free market cannot solve the situation itself.
Government has to step in because there is no alternative. I'd love to hear a good explanation of how free markets can solve the problem of external costs when it is in fact price-oriented competition that creates the problem in the first place. In my opinion, the function of government is to prevent people from hurting each other when it would be profitable, from violent crimes to fraud to abuse of power to dumping things on everybody else to clean up. What you see as "authoritarian" I see as merely telling people to stop hurting other people for their own short-term benefit. It's no different from anti-mugging laws.
They're saying that it was every bit as warm in 800 A.D. then? That kinda discounts their theory that modern man is causing global warming then doesn't it?.
No they didn't and no it doesn't. 1) Nothing was said about the temperature in 800 AD. 2) Nothing was said about the rate of change in temperature in 800 AD.
We didn't have the modern industrial society that is thought to be the primary cause of global warming today. They're just using the tree ring study by Esper, Cook, and Schweingruber as the end point for as far back as we can go. Check out this graph and its explanation on the Wikipedia for more data points.
Basically, the Medieval Warm Period was still an average of 0.4 C cooler than modern times. It took about 800 years for temperatures to drop 0.4 C to the minimum before the Industrial Revolution and only 200 years since then to rise 0.8 C, an 8X difference in rate of change. Global climate does change on its own naturally, but the change since the dawn of the Industrial Age is still the fastest we've ever seen, and we have solid science that shows how it happens in the form of the greenhouse effect. What more will it take for you people to quit filtering the world for the few tenuous scraps of information that back up your preconceived notions?
Quick fact that average volcano spews more polution in an eruption than LA does in a year.
I'd love to know where you got the statistics for the amount of CO2 that LA (a single city) produces in a year. It sounds like a conjured statistic. Even if you're right, that's tiny compared to the total output of the US or the World.
Volcanoes do have an effect on global temperatures. However, volcanoes cause global cooling instead due to aerosols that may have been responsible for the difference in surface and atmosphere temperatures for the past 20 years. Actually, it turns out that the effect could've lasted even longer from the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 which caused "the year with no summer." Furthermore, the amount of CO2 released each year by volcanoes is miniscule according to this article by the USGS:
Scientists have calculated that volcanoes emit between about 130-230 million tonnes (145-255 million tons) of CO2 into the atmosphere every year (Gerlach, 1999, 1992). This estimate includes both subaerial and submarine volcanoes, about in equal amounts. Emissions of CO2 by human activities, including fossil fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring, amount to about 22 billion tonnes per year (24 billion tons) [ ( Marland, et al., 1998) - The reference gives the amount of released carbon (C), rather than CO2.]. Human activities release more than 150 times the amount of CO2 emitted by volcanoes--the equivalent of nearly 17,000 additional volcanoes like Kilauea (Kilauea emits about 13.2 million tonnes/year)!
The lion tamer that runs into the cage armed with nothing but an innocent air and a blindfold doesn't stay a lion tamer for long;-)
On the other hand, you could choose not to work with a feral beast that will bite your limbs off for the macho thrill of it and get a nice loyal dog that does what you tell it instead. YMMV.
Yeah... no, that's the TV series. Great. Another beloved childhood memory destroyed. Were there ANY cartoons made in the 80s that don't cause agony to watch when you're older?
It works better than a room full of stuffy old coots deciding how the economy should work by making decisions on what to do with the fruits of my productivity. Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but better than the alternatives.
Ideally, this is done in a democratic fashion, and the people making these decisions have just as much of a mandate to mitigate the pitfalls of a lawless/free economy as much as they do a lawless/free society with laws against harming others. In my opinion, the government should encourage free markets wherever private goods or club goods are involved unless there a life-need (e.g. healthcare), predatory practices (e.g. credit & investment), or both (e.g. utilities) are frequently present. However, whenever common goods or public goods are involved, government must step in to regulate because the free market can only make things worse.
For those who wonder what I'm talking about, there are four classical types of goods that economists define based on whether or not you can exclude others from use and whether or not use diminishes the good. They are:
Private goods: excludable, users degrade good (e.g. a loaf of bread, a VHS tape)
Club goods: excludable, users do not degrade good (e.g. scrambled cable TV, a concert)
Common goods: not excludable, users degrade good (e.g. the atmosphere, radio frequencies)
Public goods: not excludable, users do not degrade good (e.g. national defense, ideas)
The definition of degrading a good can vary, but the general idea is that adding or subtracting a single user does not signficantly affect the enjoyment of other users. A concert hall might fill up, but me listening to the music doesn't take away your ability to listen to it. Excludability is more about making sure that people who don't pay for a good can't use it without requiring government coercion. DRM can only exclude goods with government measures to prevent making tools to crack it.
The problem with common and public goods is in the fact that you can't effectively charge people for them. You can't make people stop polluting without coercive force. If you stop paying your taxes and hole up in a compound in Montana, the US military still protects you. The free market cannot effectively solve problems related to these types of goods. Only government can because the effective management and creation of these goods requires that people be forced to play along even if they don't want to.
Government can do this in ways that encourages more or less free market-like behavior. For example, emission trading schemes are more free market like than mandated technologies. However, without government force, there would be no market for emission trading because companies would continue to treat things that they get for free as externalities that free market cost pressures prevent them from worrying about. In fact, the free market makes things worse because competition forces actors in the market to cut costs wherever possible. People wouldn't pollute if it wasn't profitable, and a free market only makes things worse by giving incentives to bad behavior.
This is just an example of how free markets create wealth.
No. This is an example of a free market redistributing wealth earned in another external economy under completely different rules. All it is doing is rewarding someone for the fruits of their labors with the money others have earned elsewhere under different rules. All this is is someone earning a living under our existing non-free market system just like a flea market or yard sale.
It's a fine example of how well a free market economy works when no one has essential needs and every purchase is a luxury purchase. SL characters don't die of starvation if they can't earn money. They don't die of exposure without the ability to afford housing. They don't need medical care. They don't grow old and infirm and require retirement. Not only would you never have to kill to survive, you couldn't kill for money even if you wanted to. Violent crime is impossible. You can't cause serious harm to people deliberately or even indifferently by way of pollution, foreclosure, or anything else.
In other words, SL is nothing like reality. It is a world without disease, aging, or any other infirmity, non-consensual violence, and starvation or deprivation of any other sort. Well sure it works as a free market economy! All the hazards of the free market and human nature don't exist there.
If you think that anything but free markets work, you haven't had much experience in the real world.
If you think that free markets work, you haven't had much experience with reality. People who think free markets solve everything honestly don't understand the ramifications of the non-exclusive nature of public and common goods nor do they understand the net negative effects of the extreme poverty of others on oneself.
Actually, depending on just how bad the video was, what you may have actually seen was a clip from one of the two really badly animated Zelda CDi games. There was a third game too (for only God knows why reasons), but I've heard that it was differently animated. I dug up this thread on one of the games through Google Images.
I remember liking the Zelda cartoons when I was a kid. On the other hand, I remember liking Thundercats and Silverhawks, so I obviously had no freaking taste.
I have only used Monster.com. Humorously enough, though, I've never actually taken a job through them. All of my jobs have either been friend referrals or referrals through college.
Weird. I get sent job offerings once per week or two from a resume I last updated in August, and I don't have nearly the qualifications and experience that you do in terms of numbers of years.
On the other hand, I don't have very generic qualifications that everybody and their brother has like "C, C++, C#,.NET, VB, SQL Development." Instead I emphasize my UNIX programming experience, the projects I've worked on, and my interest in continuing to work on such projects. My languages and environments are pratically a footnote on my resume.
On the other other hand, I get a lot of job offers for jobs I have no interest in in cities I have no interest in moving to. I guess your mileage may vary.
Actually the word "Caucasian" comes directly from studies of eugenics at the turn of the century and I consider using it just as offensive as someone using the "n"-word, because it implies endorsing the values and attitudes of the time.
Yeah. Funny how no body puts checkboxes for "Negroid" or "Mongoloid" anymore, but "Caucasian" still gets the thumbs up.
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The point is that Verhoeven knows how to direct bloody, violent sci-fi action.
No, Verhoeven knows has to direct retarded, suspension of disbelief destroying, B-movie action. Look at Starship Troopers, for example.
We'll ignore how cool the movie could've been with nuke-dropping, mile leaping, power armor running rampant through alien worlds leaving trails of devastation or intimidation. Instead, let's focus on the idea of trained infantry using weapons with a good half-mile range deciding to run up to melee range with a giant clawed monster and firing at it while standing in a FREAKING circle!! Let's focus on the total lack of anything resembling squad tactics or a command and control structure. Let's take a chillingly technologically competent alien race and turn them in to stupid animals with mysterious plasma vomiting and FTL travelling organs. Let's rape a coming of age story about soldiers and turn it into a sleazy high school drama / romance.
Verhoeven action is all unabashedly cheesy, and his character interaction leaves you feeling like you just touched something greasy. While I probably wouldn't have passionately hated Starship Troopers if I hadn't read the book first, I still wouldn't have liked it. While I'm not sure that Verhoeven could've maked Doom suck worse, I can be sure that he wouldn't have made it good.
- Greedo shot first.
- Han Solo steps on Jabba's tail without getting killed.*
- BS explosion rings from the Death Stars.
- Ewoks Cartoon.
- Droids Cartoon.
- Star Wars Christmas Special.
- Ewoks instead of Wookies on Endor in RotJ.
My personal pick is when Greedo shot first.
(* Yes I know that it was because when they originally filmed the deleted scene Jabba was a man instead of a slug-like alien and Harrison Ford moved around him in ways that didn't work later, but this did sort of help break suspension of disbelief.)
1) Developers cannot know what the capabilities of your laptop are. They have to generalize for many, many hardware configurations, and any attempts to push the envelope of systems currently available risks making your system requirements too high for the game to sell. My PC does not equal your PC. My PS2 does equal your PS2.
2) Developers can assume that a laptop sold the year after yours will be more powerful than yours. What is a limit today is not a limit one year from now.
These two things combine to mean that PC developers cannot really push the limit of a PC because defined limits don't exist.
Pushing the limit of a console is truly a feat of wizardry because you're constantly striving to get more and more out of the same hardware instead of just coding for machines that don't yet exist or aren't yet common. On the other hand, there's an incentive to go all out since you are rewarded for hitting the limits of a system by increased sales instead of punished by decreased sales. It's an entirely different way of programming for an entirely different market.
A system with an add-on like a hard drive for an Xbox, a network card and hard drive for a PS2, or a memory pack for an N64 is not the same as an upgrade for a PC. In essence, what you have is an entirely new system. Console games are coded under the expectation that either:
A) You cannot assume that the hardware is there and the game cannot rely on it.
B) The game requires the hardware and will not run without it.
In other words, two systems with or without an added capability are essentially two completely different consoles, and pushing the limits of those systems works completely differently. You'll note that because of lower market penetrations of Console++ over Vanilla Console, most games written for add-on hardware are commercial flops.
PC games are all programmed under the assumption that people can upgrade their hardware. There is no limit to push on a PC because of this. This is all about pushing the limit of a known system and not just coding wastefully under the assumption that the "next generation" will be able to handle it. Console programmers know that the current hardware is all that they are going to get.
The only thing that the PC world has that comes close to this is the demoscene.
There's just a small minority opposed to Darwin in the US, so people who are basically in the same camp feel the urge to show some sympathy for someone who had a good idea.
They're actually a majority in America and Britain. It is an extremely important problem because it feeds the culture of anti-intellectualism and distrust of science in other issues where fact-based policy-making and ideological politics are in conflict in both countries. People with a skeptical attitude towards science about evolution are more likely to have a skeptical attitude about global warming and to disregard studies about the effectiveness of abstinence-only sex education because they disagree with what they want to believe.
We desperately need to do something to rekindle the American love of science before our economy goes to rot thanks to the lack of people entering science and engineering majors and before the lives of millions are ruined by bad economic and social policies.
I really do suspect that if there was some sort of means that they could use to prevent piracy and cheating, and yet allow end users to do homebrew development, then they'd do it.
I don't. Microsoft does not like non-commercial software development at all. It represents a model in fundamental conflict with the existence of their business.
The big reason they wouldn't like it though is that all the money Microsoft makes off of the 360 comes from big developers who have to pay license fees to have access to the tools needed to make their titles run on the hardware. Everything that gives a reason to buy an Xbox 360 without buying a number of licensed games for it gives customers a reason to never let MS recover the money lost on a product sold for under cost. Any method usable by a "homebrew" developer could be used by a big company too in theory.
Homebrew development means a loss of control for Microsoft, and Microsoft likes control. All monopolies and cartels eventually get addicted to it.
I could see the possibility of turning the 360 into a PVR, but doesn't it seem like purchasing or building a dedicated PVR for less $$$ would make more sense? Do you really want to spend $400 just to hack it into a machine that you could have had for $150-$200?
You're looking at this problem from the wrong angle. Would you rather spend $550-600 for an Xbox 360 and a PVR, or just $400 for an Xbox 360? What if it could also serve as an emulator, a wireless A/B/G router with firewall, and a three-processor, Linux, websurfing / media PC that runs on 160 Watts? Heck, the thing already plays DVDs and streams music without hacks.
The moment that Linux becomes available for the XBox 360, I'm buying one even if it means that I can never boot a game on it without Microsoft patching and eliminating my Linux system. I don't care about Xbox 360 games and plan to never buy one; I just want a cheap, powerful, energy efficient Linux PC. Making MS subsidize my Linux box is only a cherry on top.
Microsoft's Xbox team (if they ever had the attitude) learned the hard way about #4, and #2 & #3 are in fact reinforcing reasons for attitude #1 to be the most likely.
If you haven't noticed, Microsoft is marching firmly in lock step with the recording and movie industries over the idea that customers should not be allowed to use what they purchase in ways that do not make Microsoft more money. Letting developers learn how to put stuff on the machine without going through MS's SDK could lead to homebrew games. Allowing people to write home-brew games means letting there be games that are sold (or worse given away) without paying Microsoft the license fee that makes up for selling Xbox 360s at a loss. Allowing utility access to the hardware might lead to putting Linux on a 360, thus making MS subsidize non-Windows computers that will play licensed games (and make up the loss), or allow the playing of pirated games.
If this is based on a security problem that can be patched in software, MS will treat it as a critical fix and release a patch for it ASAP.
Actually, there is another hypothesized threat from Toxoplasma gondii that is a deadly risk even for people with just a dormant infection. (Toxoplamsa doesn't get eliminated by the immune system; it just goes dormant in cysts in the muscle tissue and brain and continues to effect its host for life.)
Latent toxoplasmosis seems to give people a significantly higher risk of getting in a car accident than people who do not have it. People with latent toxoplasmosis have slower reaction times and a tendency towards more risk-seeking behavior than people without, just like rats with the disease.
It is true that we do not know what caused the MWP, nor do we know what caused the Carboniferous Ice Age. Clearly, in the latter case the Earth had an Ice Age in spite of CO2 levels (whereas CO2 levels dropped in all other very long ice age periods). Clearly, an ice age happened in spite of carbon dioxide levels. However, the greenhouse effect is reproduceable in a lab and is based on solid physics. We know that atmospheric carbon dioxide contributes to the warming of a planet. Just look at Venus if you doubt that.
The theoretical warming of Mars is disturbing, but it's supposition. The problem that leads some scientists to believe that Mars might be coming out of an ice age is that there is too much water ice in the lower latitudes. One theory is that this is ice that hasn't melted yet, but we don't know. We don't have temperature trends for Mars, and we don't know if it's warming as fast, faster, or slower than the Earth or if it's even warming at all. More research is needed.
We may have uncovered evidence of a seperate contributing factor to the warming of the Earth (and perhaps a more significant one on a geological time scale based on previous patterns of warming and cooling), but it does not invalidate the effect of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses on the atmosphere nor their ability to rapidly affect climate.
I'd also like to point out that I never said that a climate model proves anything except whether or not a mathematical model can predict what happens to the Earth. All mathematical models of the world are subject to Einstein's "closed watch" dilemma.
Lastly, I think your accusation of McCarthyism is grossly unfair. The comment that I replied to hardly counted as "reasoned discourse." All he was saying was in effect, "Ha! Something you said (when completely misconstrued) could contradict your point (if we ignore that the point is about rate of change and not maximum temperature). Thus, you're all crackpots."
Sorry about that. I do hear the "volcanoes put out more carbon dioxide than human activity" lie from hardcore GW deniers every now and then, so I incorrectly assumed what you were getting at.
Global warming would probably eventually have happened without us within 10,000 to 1,000,000 years time; we're in an ice age right now compared to earlier points in Earth's history. The problem of global warming is what it does to the human race within a century or two. If the world changed over tens of thousands of years, humanity wouldn't even really notice or care much. Seas would rise an inch per century or three, the spread of the desert would be slow, rivers would dry up and new ones would form, etc. Relocation of people would happen slowly, and wars over resources would be rare.
The problem of global warming is what we do to each other when the change is too fast to adapt to. The problem is wars for constrained resources like fresh water, mass starvation because farmland becomes useless within a generation, areas flooded while people still live there in great numbers, the mass extinction of useful other species that do not have time to evolve to adapt to the weather, etc.
Either way, humanity as a species will survive no matter what (unless we wipe ourselves out due to war and hate). We are supremely adaptive. The problem is the short-term and all the suffering that rapid climate change will bring about because of our necessary attachment to a way of life that depends on the current climate including where and what we farm and where we build our cities.
You might have more luck converting them to your belief system if the "solution" to the problem isn't always a call for more authoritarian government instrusions into our lives.
I had a post basically about why government intervention is needed in certain markets a few days ago. To sum up, the environment is a "common good" which means that it is rivalrous and non-exclusive. People cannot be stopped from taking the good without force, and use of the good degrades it for future users. Since you cannot prevent people from taking the good without government force, you cannot monetize it, and you have the free rider problem. Free market competition forces businesses to ignore the external costs of how they use a common good or a public good, and thus the free market rewards bad behavior.
There are multiple ways in which the government can fix environmental problems. There are bans on certain behavior which have substitutes like the use of ozone-destroying CFCs or health-ruining PCBs. This is the most "authoritarian" and should only be used when there is a compelling public need for a good to no longer be used such as due to the extreme harm it causes to the health of people and wildlife.
Mandating technology is another "authoritarian" solution that is rarely a desireable one to do because a technology that is efficient today may not be the most efficient forever. A good function that government can provide however is to set minimum standards such as for fuel and energy efficiency that the market would otherwise discourage due to upfront unit costs and R&D costs. (This is an example of a free market making inefficient use of resources because free markets only strive for the local maxima of efficiency instead of long-term maximum efficiency.)
For controlling emissions in the environment the government can set up trading schemes which turn the common good of air quality into a private good which free markets are extremely adept at maximizing the use of. The Kyoto agreement is implemented in terms of carbon trading schemes, though some are more heavy handed than others. Making a common good monetizeable is hardly an "authoritarian government intrusion" when the free market cannot solve the situation itself.
Government has to step in because there is no alternative. I'd love to hear a good explanation of how free markets can solve the problem of external costs when it is in fact price-oriented competition that creates the problem in the first place. In my opinion, the function of government is to prevent people from hurting each other when it would be profitable, from violent crimes to fraud to abuse of power to dumping things on everybody else to clean up. What you see as "authoritarian" I see as merely telling people to stop hurting other people for their own short-term benefit. It's no different from anti-mugging laws.
They're saying that it was every bit as warm in 800 A.D. then? That kinda discounts their theory that modern man is causing global warming then doesn't it?.
No they didn't and no it doesn't.
1) Nothing was said about the temperature in 800 AD.
2) Nothing was said about the rate of change in temperature in 800 AD.
We didn't have the modern industrial society that is thought to be the primary cause of global warming today. They're just using the tree ring study by Esper, Cook, and Schweingruber as the end point for as far back as we can go. Check out this graph and its explanation on the Wikipedia for more data points.
Basically, the Medieval Warm Period was still an average of 0.4 C cooler than modern times. It took about 800 years for temperatures to drop 0.4 C to the minimum before the Industrial Revolution and only 200 years since then to rise 0.8 C, an 8X difference in rate of change. Global climate does change on its own naturally, but the change since the dawn of the Industrial Age is still the fastest we've ever seen, and we have solid science that shows how it happens in the form of the greenhouse effect. What more will it take for you people to quit filtering the world for the few tenuous scraps of information that back up your preconceived notions?
Quick fact that average volcano spews more polution in an eruption than LA does in a year.
I'd love to know where you got the statistics for the amount of CO2 that LA (a single city) produces in a year. It sounds like a conjured statistic. Even if you're right, that's tiny compared to the total output of the US or the World.
Volcanoes do have an effect on global temperatures. However, volcanoes cause global cooling instead due to aerosols that may have been responsible for the difference in surface and atmosphere temperatures for the past 20 years. Actually, it turns out that the effect could've lasted even longer from the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 which caused "the year with no summer." Furthermore, the amount of CO2 released each year by volcanoes is miniscule according to this article by the USGS:
What the fuck is right... I stand corrected, I don't like it, it's BS.
There's a study that you missed your chance to get in on.
Oh well, global warming's all about truthiness anyway, right?
So C++ just went from the king of the jungle to a nasty little shrew?
The lion tamer that runs into the cage armed with nothing but an innocent air and a blindfold doesn't stay a lion tamer for long;-)
On the other hand, you could choose not to work with a feral beast that will bite your limbs off for the macho thrill of it and get a nice loyal dog that does what you tell it instead. YMMV.
Yeah... no, that's the TV series. Great. Another beloved childhood memory destroyed.
Were there ANY cartoons made in the 80s that don't cause agony to watch when you're older?
Ideally, this is done in a democratic fashion, and the people making these decisions have just as much of a mandate to mitigate the pitfalls of a lawless/free economy as much as they do a lawless/free society with laws against harming others. In my opinion, the government should encourage free markets wherever private goods or club goods are involved unless there a life-need (e.g. healthcare), predatory practices (e.g. credit & investment), or both (e.g. utilities) are frequently present. However, whenever common goods or public goods are involved, government must step in to regulate because the free market can only make things worse.
For those who wonder what I'm talking about, there are four classical types of goods that economists define based on whether or not you can exclude others from use and whether or not use diminishes the good. They are:
The definition of degrading a good can vary, but the general idea is that adding or subtracting a single user does not signficantly affect the enjoyment of other users. A concert hall might fill up, but me listening to the music doesn't take away your ability to listen to it. Excludability is more about making sure that people who don't pay for a good can't use it without requiring government coercion. DRM can only exclude goods with government measures to prevent making tools to crack it.
The problem with common and public goods is in the fact that you can't effectively charge people for them. You can't make people stop polluting without coercive force. If you stop paying your taxes and hole up in a compound in Montana, the US military still protects you. The free market cannot effectively solve problems related to these types of goods. Only government can because the effective management and creation of these goods requires that people be forced to play along even if they don't want to.
Government can do this in ways that encourages more or less free market-like behavior. For example, emission trading schemes are more free market like than mandated technologies. However, without government force, there would be no market for emission trading because companies would continue to treat things that they get for free as externalities that free market cost pressures prevent them from worrying about. In fact, the free market makes things worse because competition forces actors in the market to cut costs wherever possible. People wouldn't pollute if it wasn't profitable, and a free market only makes things worse by giving incentives to bad behavior.
This is just an example of how free markets create wealth.
No. This is an example of a free market redistributing wealth earned in another external economy under completely different rules. All it is doing is rewarding someone for the fruits of their labors with the money others have earned elsewhere under different rules. All this is is someone earning a living under our existing non-free market system just like a flea market or yard sale.
It's a fine example of how well a free market economy works when no one has essential needs and every purchase is a luxury purchase. SL characters don't die of starvation if they can't earn money. They don't die of exposure without the ability to afford housing. They don't need medical care. They don't grow old and infirm and require retirement. Not only would you never have to kill to survive, you couldn't kill for money even if you wanted to. Violent crime is impossible. You can't cause serious harm to people deliberately or even indifferently by way of pollution, foreclosure, or anything else.
In other words, SL is nothing like reality. It is a world without disease, aging, or any other infirmity, non-consensual violence, and starvation or deprivation of any other sort. Well sure it works as a free market economy! All the hazards of the free market and human nature don't exist there.
If you think that anything but free markets work, you haven't had much experience in the real world.
If you think that free markets work, you haven't had much experience with reality. People who think free markets solve everything honestly don't understand the ramifications of the non-exclusive nature of public and common goods nor do they understand the net negative effects of the extreme poverty of others on oneself.
Actually, depending on just how bad the video was, what you may have actually seen was a clip from one of the two really badly animated Zelda CDi games. There was a third game too (for only God knows why reasons), but I've heard that it was differently animated. I dug up this thread on one of the games through Google Images.
I remember liking the Zelda cartoons when I was a kid. On the other hand, I remember liking Thundercats and Silverhawks, so I obviously had no freaking taste.
I have only used Monster.com. Humorously enough, though, I've never actually taken a job through them. All of my jobs have either been friend referrals or referrals through college.
Does some jackass have to bring up an Intelligent Design straw man troll in every damn discussion now?
Weird. I get sent job offerings once per week or two from a resume I last updated in August, and I don't have nearly the qualifications and experience that you do in terms of numbers of years.
.NET, VB, SQL Development." Instead I emphasize my UNIX programming experience, the projects I've worked on, and my interest in continuing to work on such projects. My languages and environments are pratically a footnote on my resume.
On the other hand, I don't have very generic qualifications that everybody and their brother has like "C, C++, C#,
On the other other hand, I get a lot of job offers for jobs I have no interest in in cities I have no interest in moving to. I guess your mileage may vary.
Actually the word "Caucasian" comes directly from studies of eugenics at the turn of the century and I consider using it just as offensive as someone using the "n"-word, because it implies endorsing the values and attitudes of the time.
Yeah. Funny how no body puts checkboxes for "Negroid" or "Mongoloid" anymore, but "Caucasian" still gets the thumbs up.