Oh, for Pete's sake. Twitter doesn't sell technology; no social media company does. They sell you. That doesn't mean they're not involved in developing new technology, you just don't see it unless you're a developer who uses the open source projects or standards they contribute to.
Depends. You can build plausible deniability into the system. Put one password into the system and you see one set of files, put another in and you see another set of files. No password and you see a bunch of encrypted blocks.
Sometimes I think we think too narrowly about these things.
What is the government? Anyone who thinks they can, and in practice are able, to impose their will on you. I think we have to worry just as much about the private sector becoming a shadow government, one that knows about and controls more aspects of our lives than any totalitarian state ever did.
So his opposition to some of the purely political "solutions" to climate change make him a climate change denier? His urge to see countries like China held to the same standard as, say, France or the US - that makes him a "denier?"
No, the article he wrote for National Review in which he trotted out the old denialist tropes about scientific uncertainty shows he's a denialist:
That debate is far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.
It must be wonderful to be able to set any arbitrary standard rather than "preponderance of evidence" for your preferred policy position -- in this case unanimity of all scientists in the world (apparently without regard to their particularly disciplinary qualifications going by past appeals of denialists to "scientific disagreement").
Except if you do it through a third party company that's all at arm's length, and nobody bothers enforcing that law anyway. We all know that's true. So the risk to Disney is minimal.
What they're doing with this lawsuit is hitting Disney where it lives -- reputation. What's going to happen is that if Disney doesn't settle, Disney will win on the basis that it's not illegal to discriminate against Americans. How do you think that will go over?
Slashdot is not has never been an IT news site. However this is definitely IT news. Systems need to be designed to prevent or detect collusion, and this kind of thing is a natural part of a system's risk assessment.
Oh, I'm not underestimating how broken China is, not by a long shot. I'm just going by what the data says, which is that coal is declining, albeit slightly, as a share of energy there even as energy demand climbs. Just because it's broken doesn't mean they aren't trying.
The issue is protecting the rights and freedoms of citizens, whether from interference from foreign powers or unaccountable elements in our own government. Or is government automatically our friend now? Who exactly is trying to have it both ways?
So there is really only one issue: the liberty of Americans. Granted you can't do a perfect job, and at some point you're taking away more liberty than, statistically speaking, you're saving. That's when you've gone too far. And I suspect this may have a great deal to do with the morale of the techies in the agency, who understand this better than the political mandarins they report to.
Of course this is against a backdrop of massive energy consumption increases, which makes moving away from coal extremely difficult.
China has epic pollution problems based on its dependency on low-grade coal. How bad is it? They're sending their kids to school in surgical masks, which unfortunately do almost nothing. Can you imagine that happening here?
Recent research, however, shows that while China's coal consumption has continued to increase, it has decreased as a fraction of total energy production. They aren't ready to solve their pollution problems, but they're at least trying to reduce the rate at which the problems get worse. They're trying to *shift* their coal use away from cities like Beijing.
Anyone who favors reviving coal jobs in the US should look at the air pollution problems in Beijing, or the Killer "Fog" that blanketed London in 1952. Not that that is likely to happen here; short of an attempt to actually promote coal use over natural gas coal won't be able to compete.
You clearly don't understand the electoral college. The people do not elect the president, period. It doesn't matter what it says on the ballot, you are voting for electors.
The pledged delegate system only came about as a side effect of the emergence of parties, and is completely extra-constitutional. Nobody designed the system we have today or "set out the rule", they just evolved piecewise.
Well, if you want to be pedantic (of course you do), heat isn't radiation. Black body radiation is a consequence of heat. And in point of fact the ionizing spectral components of the Sun's radiation generates over seventy-thousand cases of cancer in the US annually, and over ten thousand deaths. If there were an artificial radiation source that was that harmful we'd be right to be very concerned about it, that's substantially more than 3x the number of people who perished in 9/11 every single year.
The real issue here isn't people using linguistic short hand like "radiation" that Internet trolls can play "gotcha" with; it's people not understanding the difference between radiation per se, ionizing radiation, and radioactive fallout. Maybe you don't need to be a Nobel Prize-winning physicist to run the DoE, but you should at least be able to explain the difference between these things. And you'd certainly want anyone working in government to know the difference between preventable and non-preventable deaths.
I've been following this story, and I expect we're not looking at the future, but rather stagnation in the status quo for the last fifteen years or so plus statistical noise.
Where things gets interesting when you start disaggregating the trends. If you look at the life expectancy data by county, the disparity is shocking: almost all rural and poor counties saw little or no improvement in life expectancy since the late 80s, but life expectancy has improved dramatically (5 years or more) in urban and wealthy counties. And here's an interesting fact: the gap between white and black life expectancy has narrowed, but this is largely due to stagnation in life expectancy among working class whites.
This indicates to me that poor access to health care advances for working class and rural whites has driven the overall stagnation in life expectancy. This is in part what Obamacare was intended to address, however it can't possibly improve the situation in rural counties without Medicaid expansion.
I'm not talking advertising tie-ins, but why not do additional story lines available for streaming purchase? Especially in those big ensemble superhero movies that are always so narratively cluttered because they have to give you a thin slice of so many characters.
Well, I dunno. It seems like blaming Fitbit for Pebble's financial failure.
Let's take a consequentialist view of matters. If the rule is you have to buy the whole business and continue to operate it, even though it's losing money, Pebble goes out of business and it's customers and debt holders suffer. If you can sell of just the good bits without the obligation to continue running the failing as before, the customers suffer but the debt holders get some relief. Which approach is better?
Well, it's actually $3.75 billion. And it's not one, but two aircraft, so that's 1.875 billion apiece. That's to ensure the executive branch can function in a military crisis while one of the planes is being service.
Deduct 375 million apiece for the airframe, and we're talking 1.5 billion dollars in customization for each aircraft, including aerial refueling capabilities, which on a two-off job is a craft job; no economies of scale. Add defense and countermeasure capabilities that Air Force is extremely close-lipped about. Is there a actual escape pod on Air Force One like in the movie? Well probably not, but I'm sure the idea was at least contemplated. However it's pretty certain that if someone locks onto AF1 with a targeting radar the aircraft will have options that a stock 747-8 doesn't.
Next outfit each one so it can function as a replacement for the West Wing and the Situation Room for up to two months -- that's a deducible requirement based on the known fact that the aircraft stores 2000 meals for 100 people. That means three-of-a-kind electronics and communications systems (one for each airframe and one for the actual White House).
Is 3.75 billion too much for that? Probably. But it's hard to think of any weapon development program since WW2 that is less extravagant.
By that standard 127 million for an orbital repair robot is an almost inconceivable bargain, even if you factor in a 5x cost overrun.
The history of greenhouse effect theory is interesting and well worth reading up on. It was first raised as a possibility in the 1890s, but rejected quickly based on two erroneous beliefs: (1) that the oceans would rapidly absorb any increase in atmospheric CO2 and (2) that the absorption spectra of water vapor and CO2 mostly overlapped. Together these implied that CO2 could not increase in the atmosphere, and even if it did it could not capture any heat that water vapor wouldn't have anyway.
There are a lot of twists and turns in the story, which Wikipedia does a pretty good job of summarizing. I highly recommend reading that article.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, for Pete's sake. Twitter doesn't sell technology; no social media company does. They sell you. That doesn't mean they're not involved in developing new technology, you just don't see it unless you're a developer who uses the open source projects or standards they contribute to.
Depends. You can build plausible deniability into the system. Put one password into the system and you see one set of files, put another in and you see another set of files. No password and you see a bunch of encrypted blocks.
Sometimes I think we think too narrowly about these things.
What is the government? Anyone who thinks they can, and in practice are able, to impose their will on you. I think we have to worry just as much about the private sector becoming a shadow government, one that knows about and controls more aspects of our lives than any totalitarian state ever did.
So his opposition to some of the purely political "solutions" to climate change make him a climate change denier? His urge to see countries like China held to the same standard as, say, France or the US - that makes him a "denier?"
No, the article he wrote for National Review in which he trotted out the old denialist tropes about scientific uncertainty shows he's a denialist:
That debate is far from settled. Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.
It must be wonderful to be able to set any arbitrary standard rather than "preponderance of evidence" for your preferred policy position -- in this case unanimity of all scientists in the world (apparently without regard to their particularly disciplinary qualifications going by past appeals of denialists to "scientific disagreement").
Scott Pruitt
Well, it's a peculiar request to make for anything but a witch hunt.
Except if you do it through a third party company that's all at arm's length, and nobody bothers enforcing that law anyway. We all know that's true. So the risk to Disney is minimal.
What they're doing with this lawsuit is hitting Disney where it lives -- reputation. What's going to happen is that if Disney doesn't settle, Disney will win on the basis that it's not illegal to discriminate against Americans. How do you think that will go over?
Slashdot is not has never been an IT news site. However this is definitely IT news. Systems need to be designed to prevent or detect collusion, and this kind of thing is a natural part of a system's risk assessment.
I found the fourth episode really dull and contrived.
Oh, I'm not underestimating how broken China is, not by a long shot. I'm just going by what the data says, which is that coal is declining, albeit slightly, as a share of energy there even as energy demand climbs. Just because it's broken doesn't mean they aren't trying.
This is a false dichotomy.
The issue is protecting the rights and freedoms of citizens, whether from interference from foreign powers or unaccountable elements in our own government. Or is government automatically our friend now? Who exactly is trying to have it both ways?
So there is really only one issue: the liberty of Americans. Granted you can't do a perfect job, and at some point you're taking away more liberty than, statistically speaking, you're saving. That's when you've gone too far. And I suspect this may have a great deal to do with the morale of the techies in the agency, who understand this better than the political mandarins they report to.
Of course this is against a backdrop of massive energy consumption increases, which makes moving away from coal extremely difficult.
China has epic pollution problems based on its dependency on low-grade coal. How bad is it? They're sending their kids to school in surgical masks, which unfortunately do almost nothing. Can you imagine that happening here?
Recent research, however, shows that while China's coal consumption has continued to increase, it has decreased as a fraction of total energy production. They aren't ready to solve their pollution problems, but they're at least trying to reduce the rate at which the problems get worse. They're trying to *shift* their coal use away from cities like Beijing.
Anyone who favors reviving coal jobs in the US should look at the air pollution problems in Beijing, or the Killer "Fog" that blanketed London in 1952. Not that that is likely to happen here; short of an attempt to actually promote coal use over natural gas coal won't be able to compete.
You clearly don't understand the electoral college. The people do not elect the president, period. It doesn't matter what it says on the ballot, you are voting for electors.
The pledged delegate system only came about as a side effect of the emergence of parties, and is completely extra-constitutional. Nobody designed the system we have today or "set out the rule", they just evolved piecewise.
Well, if you want to be pedantic (of course you do), heat isn't radiation. Black body radiation is a consequence of heat. And in point of fact the ionizing spectral components of the Sun's radiation generates over seventy-thousand cases of cancer in the US annually, and over ten thousand deaths. If there were an artificial radiation source that was that harmful we'd be right to be very concerned about it, that's substantially more than 3x the number of people who perished in 9/11 every single year.
The real issue here isn't people using linguistic short hand like "radiation" that Internet trolls can play "gotcha" with; it's people not understanding the difference between radiation per se, ionizing radiation, and radioactive fallout. Maybe you don't need to be a Nobel Prize-winning physicist to run the DoE, but you should at least be able to explain the difference between these things. And you'd certainly want anyone working in government to know the difference between preventable and non-preventable deaths.
How exactly do you think Democrats were able to maintain hold on the house for so many years?
The white working class.
I've been following this story, and I expect we're not looking at the future, but rather stagnation in the status quo for the last fifteen years or so plus statistical noise.
Where things gets interesting when you start disaggregating the trends. If you look at the life expectancy data by county, the disparity is shocking: almost all rural and poor counties saw little or no improvement in life expectancy since the late 80s, but life expectancy has improved dramatically (5 years or more) in urban and wealthy counties. And here's an interesting fact: the gap between white and black life expectancy has narrowed, but this is largely due to stagnation in life expectancy among working class whites.
This indicates to me that poor access to health care advances for working class and rural whites has driven the overall stagnation in life expectancy. This is in part what Obamacare was intended to address, however it can't possibly improve the situation in rural counties without Medicaid expansion.
I'm not talking advertising tie-ins, but why not do additional story lines available for streaming purchase? Especially in those big ensemble superhero movies that are always so narratively cluttered because they have to give you a thin slice of so many characters.
Well, I dunno. It seems like blaming Fitbit for Pebble's financial failure.
Let's take a consequentialist view of matters. If the rule is you have to buy the whole business and continue to operate it, even though it's losing money, Pebble goes out of business and it's customers and debt holders suffer. If you can sell of just the good bits without the obligation to continue running the failing as before, the customers suffer but the debt holders get some relief. Which approach is better?
Everyone hates the RIAA, but the fact is without the marketing by these entities you would never have found your "favorite" bands.
We'd have to make do with "favorite" (why the scare quotes?) bands we find ourselves.
Well, it's actually $3.75 billion. And it's not one, but two aircraft, so that's 1.875 billion apiece. That's to ensure the executive branch can function in a military crisis while one of the planes is being service.
Deduct 375 million apiece for the airframe, and we're talking 1.5 billion dollars in customization for each aircraft, including aerial refueling capabilities, which on a two-off job is a craft job; no economies of scale. Add defense and countermeasure capabilities that Air Force is extremely close-lipped about. Is there a actual escape pod on Air Force One like in the movie? Well probably not, but I'm sure the idea was at least contemplated. However it's pretty certain that if someone locks onto AF1 with a targeting radar the aircraft will have options that a stock 747-8 doesn't.
Next outfit each one so it can function as a replacement for the West Wing and the Situation Room for up to two months -- that's a deducible requirement based on the known fact that the aircraft stores 2000 meals for 100 people. That means three-of-a-kind electronics and communications systems (one for each airframe and one for the actual White House).
Is 3.75 billion too much for that? Probably. But it's hard to think of any weapon development program since WW2 that is less extravagant.
By that standard 127 million for an orbital repair robot is an almost inconceivable bargain, even if you factor in a 5x cost overrun.
I'm not silencing any skeptics. I'm stripping credulous people of the conceit that they're skeptics.
"Qualification" means conditions you set on the belief, without which you are willing to withdraw your belief.
They refuse to release un-'adjusted' data sets, even going so far as to attempt to use copyright claims on publicly-funded research
Knock yourself out. However unadjusted data is pretty useless for drawing conclusions from.
???
I think you meant to spew at someone else.
The history of greenhouse effect theory is interesting and well worth reading up on. It was first raised as a possibility in the 1890s, but rejected quickly based on two erroneous beliefs: (1) that the oceans would rapidly absorb any increase in atmospheric CO2 and (2) that the absorption spectra of water vapor and CO2 mostly overlapped. Together these implied that CO2 could not increase in the atmosphere, and even if it did it could not capture any heat that water vapor wouldn't have anyway.
There are a lot of twists and turns in the story, which Wikipedia does a pretty good job of summarizing. I highly recommend reading that article.