Well,if everything just got 0.7C warmer everywhere, it wouldn't matter much, but it doesn't work that way. It represents huge amounts of additional energy when summed over the entire atmosphere, which means lots of anomalous weather, both hotter and cooler, wetter and dryer.
Even these changes by themselves don't result in a dramatically different Earth *on average*. Suppose seasonal rainfall moves from on region of the Earth to another; the world isn't any wetter or dryer *on average*; but the change is experienced as dramatic in both the drying region and the wetting region. Animals, plants and humans don't as individuals live over the entire globe; they live in specific places. So the 0.7 C increase drives changes that wouldn't be much of a big deal if they occurred over five hundred years, but the same change occurring over 30 years they strain the capability of people and the local ecosystems and economies to adapt.
Indeed we do have two poles, but they have entirely different climate dynamics, due to the fact that the Antarctic has a continent surrounded by water and the Arctic has an ocean surrounded by land.
Well, I think the issue with China is that it's a regime that's even more touchy than governments usually are about admitting mistakes. They don't like North Korea's nuclear program, or being associated with North Korean atrocities, but a public admission of a mistake they like even less. It's seen as weak, and weak governments leading to chaos is the number one lesson a student of Chinese history learns. Being Pyongyang's *only* ally puts China on the spot; the more embarrassing those ties are the harder they are to cut.
If you were talking about slow economic growth immediately after the war, I'd agree that the war would be a plausible contributing factor. But I don't see how a war that ends in 1865 causes a *crash* in 1873.
I certainly do not deny the existence of different breeds of dogs, but these are by no means analogous to the folk scientific concept of human "race".
There are three factors which account for the distinctiveness of dog breeds:
(1) Dogs are domesticated animals and thus less genetically diverse than humans, who are wild animals.
(2) The dog genome produces anomalously high variation in phenotype with slight differences in genotype, in comparison to other mammals.
(3) Dogs reach sexual maturity as early as six months old.
These factors make dogs ideal for developing distinct types that breed true. None of these things are true of humans. Humans do not breed true in the way dogs do; siblings resemble each other much less than dog litter mates.
I recommend the Wikipedia article on Denialism, which starts with a definition:
In human behavior, denialism is exhibited by individuals choosing to deny reality as a way to avoid dealing with an uncomfortable truth.
Racism has three definitions listed in the Wiktionary entry:
1. The belief that each race has distinct and intrinsic attributes. 2. The belief that one race is superior to all others. 3. Prejudice or discrimination based upon race.
Of course beliefs referenced are predicated on the folk concept of race, which doesn't hold up to biological scrutiny.
You should read up on fair use. The purpose and character of the use is the first of four factors in deciding whether fair use applies. A simple copy is merely *derivative*, not *transformative*.
Well, in a lot of places they have competition from fiber, and places where they *don't* are places where building out a competitive network is unprofitable. Relinquishing the monopoly on cable would be no big deal.
Krugman's point is that consolidating all those places where cable is the only game in town gives them a powerful middleman position. The monopoly has done its damage as far as the market is concerned; you can take the legal monopoly away and the de facto monopoly on access to the market will remain.
Well, let's start by stipulating that there's no inherent difference between "data" and "metadata"; it's all just data.
"Metadata" is simply data that's not germane to a particular task. For example, the IP address you are posting from is not germane to this discussion we're having, but it might be useful for figuring out whether you're a sock puppet astroturfing the site. The metadata on a MP3 track is not germane to the task of listening to that song, but it is germane to selecting other songs like it.
I can think of three reasons to purchase a company that curates a body of metadata. The first is to build and sell services based on that data. The second is to charge for access to that data. The third is to do commercially useful stuff with that data, or as a side effect of providing that data -- e.g. marketing to users of the database based on their request records. If you have a very high tolerance for false positives, you can find out a lot of things about people by the songs they listen to.
I suspect the value of Gracenote is that it has the most complete database of its kind, which also happens to be the most widely used database of its kind. That makes it an unique property. The Tribune isn't paying $170 million for Gracenote's current revenues, I'm guessing, but rather as part of a plan to exploit Gracenote's unique market position for some other purpose.
There's no question that it *can* be done. It's a question of opportunity costs. If we build a manned Moon outpost, what gets cut to make room in the space exploration budget?
My argument is that in the not-so-long term the cause of manned space exploration is better served by a phase of robotic deep space exploration and manned orbital missions.
It also means that every generalization you can draw about humanity is wrong much of the time. That said, Social Darwinism has enjoyed the popular pseudoscience stage unchallenged for too long.
The problem with terms like "altruism" and "self-interest" is that they're so vague. Their empirical significance is imprecise at best when applied to a species where an individual's sense of well-being is tied to his social connections.
Those who reduce a satisfying life exclusively to altruism or self-interest can point to supporting data, but they have only one piece of a much larger puzzle. Looked at dispassionately, Hitler and Gandhi are simply two extreme examples in the range of human character; most people would not be able to stand emulating either of them. As a species we did not evolve to fit in any simple, reductionistic philosophical box.
but this is just a rank based on a number calculated according to an arbitrary weighting of factors. It is possible that the rank drop of the US might have been less had the factors used in calculating the score been weighted differently, or the cases used to arrive at the score been characterized somewhat differently.
For example, the score weights "Pluralism" twice as much as "self-censorship" and four times as much as "transparency". Why? Can such things be weighted precisely at all?
The scores for these factors are likewise arbitrarily scaled numbers in the range 0-100. The ranking of each country is a linear combination of non-parametric factors; as such the rank on such a score is so arbitrary as to be practically meaningless, or at best very imprecise.
I think such a score might have some value in comparing a country's performance to its prior performance, or even to compare progress made in one country vs. another -- provided it is taken with a large grain of salt. But the nature of the score is such that very little can be inferred about country A vs. country B based on their relative ranks.
As a liberal geek I'm all up for harsh criticism of America as a nascent plutocracy, but this particular story is just manufactured controversy.
Well, the solution to *that* problem is a firmware update on the blue ray player, either to support IPv6 or not to require IPv4. There's only so much that can be done with more efficiently doling out IPv4 addresses in any case.
Well, I can think of two reasons. First, establishing a self-sustaining outpost on the Moon would cost a lot more money than an unmanned Uranus probe. Secondly, a self-sustaining Moon colony isn't basic research, it's *engineering* research and has to be judged by different standards than pure research. One of those standards is economic feasibility.
It's not at all clear that an *economically* self-sustaining manned outpost on the Moon is feasible with the level of technology immediately available to us. Given the added cost of man-rating a Moon outpost, it's likely that anything we could do with a manned outpost could be accomplished cheaper robotically. The research into human adaptability to space could likewise be more cheaply achieved in Earth orbit.
Without unlimited funding, the shortest practical path to landing humans on Mars and manned expeditions to the outer solar system may well start with robotic probes. Even the Moon landing was preceded by unmanned lunar probes like Luna, Ranger and Surveyor, and the case for unmanned vs. manned gets stronger the further a mission has to go. Manned exploration beyond where our species as yet gone is going to require moving a lot of extraneous mass to support the crew, and that is almost certainly going to involve basic advances in generating thrust efficiently. Those likely won't be man-ratable until there's been an un-manned exploration program much larger than any currently being contemplated.
You put those factors together and what you've got to do to advanced manned space exploration beyond the Moon is orbital manned missions with robotic exploration of the Solar System.
Speaking as a person who actually has children, I welcome deep space exploration. Just because basic research has no immediate applications doesn't mean that it is useless. When it comes to the pursuit of knowledge, a nation should look beyond immediate economic returns. The expansion of the sphere of economically useful scientific knowledge is dependent on the expansion of knowledge per se.
IPv4 and IPv6 are both network layer protocols. Younger folks here don't remember running IPX, IP, native Appletalk and NetBEUI over the same 10Base2 coax bus, but one of the features of the OSI network model is that multiple level 3 protocols can share the same physical link without any interference.
So this is not a "last mile" problem. If my neighbor has IPv6 service on his new cable modem there's no reason that my IPv4 only cable modem will suddenly stop working.
My guess is that this is a support issue. The people needed to support the transition and interoperation are more expensive than the people needed to implement stop-gaps to extend IPv4 only networking for the next year or two. Until the carriers have a financial reason in an upcoming year to roll out IPv6, I'd expect them to kick the IPv4 exhaustion can down the road.
Oh, it's not that hard to put in a sixty hour week at work, it's just not the same thing as working 60 hours per week, which is admittedly very, very difficult. People confuse the two, in part because it's so much easier to measure hours with butt in chair than hours working.
Viking is irrelevant to the point GP was making, which is that the US maintained its program capabilities with a series of modest, affordable missions rather than waiting another decade to launch a more expensive, complex mission.
Viking was conceived and developed at the tail end of the Apollo era, and cost $934 million in 1974 dollars -- roughly 4.6 billion in present day terms. That wasn't much by the standards of the day, but Pathfinder was developed in a totally different era, an era with much more advanced technology, but much more constrained budgets. Pathfinder cost less than 1/10 of what Viking's cost ($406 million in present day dollars) and met all of its mission objectives. It was a brilliant success, not only on its own terms, but in establishing that tent-pole projects aren't the only way to do planetary exploration.
Perhaps the first question to ask is whether his "PR war" is justified.
Actually, you're confusing the issue. It's fine to debate the environmental impact of atrazine, but that's not the question at hand. The issue is *the ground rules of a fair and civilized debate*.
I can't punch you in the mouth to shut you up, just because you're wrong. A civilized debate allows the wrong side to make its case without harassment, because freedom to have only "correct" opinions is no freedom at all.
So, the flipside of that question is: what should companies do against persistent but scientifically baseless attacks? Almost anything they can do can be twisted around to make them look even more manipulative and guilty.
Seriously, you don't know the answer to this question? You can't see a more appropriate response than a campaign of dirty tricks and character assassination? Well, lets start with what they shouldn't do if they want to avoid looking manipulative and guilty: they should't harass people and invade their privacy.
If you've already developed COPD, as Mr. Nimoy has, then you *will* experience the costs of continuing to smoke, even at the age of 82. So there are negatives.
Also, at the age of 82 you probably don't give a damn about looking cool any more, so the biggest plus for a teenager doesn't apply.
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Well,if everything just got 0.7C warmer everywhere, it wouldn't matter much, but it doesn't work that way. It represents huge amounts of additional energy when summed over the entire atmosphere, which means lots of anomalous weather, both hotter and cooler, wetter and dryer.
Even these changes by themselves don't result in a dramatically different Earth *on average*. Suppose seasonal rainfall moves from on region of the Earth to another; the world isn't any wetter or dryer *on average*; but the change is experienced as dramatic in both the drying region and the wetting region. Animals, plants and humans don't as individuals live over the entire globe; they live in specific places. So the 0.7 C increase drives changes that wouldn't be much of a big deal if they occurred over five hundred years, but the same change occurring over 30 years they strain the capability of people and the local ecosystems and economies to adapt.
Indeed we do have two poles, but they have entirely different climate dynamics, due to the fact that the Antarctic has a continent surrounded by water and the Arctic has an ocean surrounded by land.
Well, I think the issue with China is that it's a regime that's even more touchy than governments usually are about admitting mistakes. They don't like North Korea's nuclear program, or being associated with North Korean atrocities, but a public admission of a mistake they like even less. It's seen as weak, and weak governments leading to chaos is the number one lesson a student of Chinese history learns. Being Pyongyang's *only* ally puts China on the spot; the more embarrassing those ties are the harder they are to cut.
I'd take that bet.
If you were talking about slow economic growth immediately after the war, I'd agree that the war would be a plausible contributing factor. But I don't see how a war that ends in 1865 causes a *crash* in 1873.
You don't see any war movies which feature epidemics, either, even though infectious disease has killed more soldiers in war than battle wounds.
I certainly do not deny the existence of different breeds of dogs, but these are by no means analogous to the folk scientific concept of human "race".
There are three factors which account for the distinctiveness of dog breeds:
(1) Dogs are domesticated animals and thus less genetically diverse than humans, who are wild animals.
(2) The dog genome produces anomalously high variation in phenotype with slight differences in genotype, in comparison to other mammals.
(3) Dogs reach sexual maturity as early as six months old.
These factors make dogs ideal for developing distinct types that breed true. None of these things are true of humans. Humans do not breed true in the way dogs do; siblings resemble each other much less than dog litter mates.
I recommend the Wikipedia article on Denialism, which starts with a definition:
In human behavior, denialism is exhibited by individuals choosing to deny reality as a way to avoid dealing with an uncomfortable truth.
Racism has three definitions listed in the Wiktionary entry:
1. The belief that each race has distinct and intrinsic attributes.
2. The belief that one race is superior to all others.
3. Prejudice or discrimination based upon race.
Of course beliefs referenced are predicated on the folk concept of race, which doesn't hold up to biological scrutiny.
You should read up on fair use. The purpose and character of the use is the first of four factors in deciding whether fair use applies. A simple copy is merely *derivative*, not *transformative*.
Well, in a lot of places they have competition from fiber, and places where they *don't* are places where building out a competitive network is unprofitable. Relinquishing the monopoly on cable would be no big deal.
Krugman's point is that consolidating all those places where cable is the only game in town gives them a powerful middleman position. The monopoly has done its damage as far as the market is concerned; you can take the legal monopoly away and the de facto monopoly on access to the market will remain.
Well, let's start by stipulating that there's no inherent difference between "data" and "metadata"; it's all just data.
"Metadata" is simply data that's not germane to a particular task. For example, the IP address you are posting from is not germane to this discussion we're having, but it might be useful for figuring out whether you're a sock puppet astroturfing the site. The metadata on a MP3 track is not germane to the task of listening to that song, but it is germane to selecting other songs like it.
I can think of three reasons to purchase a company that curates a body of metadata. The first is to build and sell services based on that data. The second is to charge for access to that data. The third is to do commercially useful stuff with that data, or as a side effect of providing that data -- e.g. marketing to users of the database based on their request records. If you have a very high tolerance for false positives, you can find out a lot of things about people by the songs they listen to.
I suspect the value of Gracenote is that it has the most complete database of its kind, which also happens to be the most widely used database of its kind. That makes it an unique property. The Tribune isn't paying $170 million for Gracenote's current revenues, I'm guessing, but rather as part of a plan to exploit Gracenote's unique market position for some other purpose.
It *is* metric. The diameter of the object in question is 270m, or exactly 3x the minimum length of an association football pitch (a.k.a., a "soccer field").
There's no question that it *can* be done. It's a question of opportunity costs. If we build a manned Moon outpost, what gets cut to make room in the space exploration budget?
My argument is that in the not-so-long term the cause of manned space exploration is better served by a phase of robotic deep space exploration and manned orbital missions.
Ah, so I've victimized you, have I? Poor you.
It also means that every generalization you can draw about humanity is wrong much of the time. That said, Social Darwinism has enjoyed the popular pseudoscience stage unchallenged for too long.
The problem with terms like "altruism" and "self-interest" is that they're so vague. Their empirical significance is imprecise at best when applied to a species where an individual's sense of well-being is tied to his social connections.
Those who reduce a satisfying life exclusively to altruism or self-interest can point to supporting data, but they have only one piece of a much larger puzzle. Looked at dispassionately, Hitler and Gandhi are simply two extreme examples in the range of human character; most people would not be able to stand emulating either of them. As a species we did not evolve to fit in any simple, reductionistic philosophical box.
but this is just a rank based on a number calculated according to an arbitrary weighting of factors. It is possible that the rank drop of the US might have been less had the factors used in calculating the score been weighted differently, or the cases used to arrive at the score been characterized somewhat differently.
For example, the score weights "Pluralism" twice as much as "self-censorship" and four times as much as "transparency". Why? Can such things be weighted precisely at all?
The scores for these factors are likewise arbitrarily scaled numbers in the range 0-100. The ranking of each country is a linear combination of non-parametric factors; as such the rank on such a score is so arbitrary as to be practically meaningless, or at best very imprecise.
I think such a score might have some value in comparing a country's performance to its prior performance, or even to compare progress made in one country vs. another -- provided it is taken with a large grain of salt. But the nature of the score is such that very little can be inferred about country A vs. country B based on their relative ranks.
As a liberal geek I'm all up for harsh criticism of America as a nascent plutocracy, but this particular story is just manufactured controversy.
Well, the solution to *that* problem is a firmware update on the blue ray player, either to support IPv6 or not to require IPv4. There's only so much that can be done with more efficiently doling out IPv4 addresses in any case.
Well, I can think of two reasons. First, establishing a self-sustaining outpost on the Moon would cost a lot more money than an unmanned Uranus probe. Secondly, a self-sustaining Moon colony isn't basic research, it's *engineering* research and has to be judged by different standards than pure research. One of those standards is economic feasibility.
It's not at all clear that an *economically* self-sustaining manned outpost on the Moon is feasible with the level of technology immediately available to us. Given the added cost of man-rating a Moon outpost, it's likely that anything we could do with a manned outpost could be accomplished cheaper robotically. The research into human adaptability to space could likewise be more cheaply achieved in Earth orbit.
Without unlimited funding, the shortest practical path to landing humans on Mars and manned expeditions to the outer solar system may well start with robotic probes. Even the Moon landing was preceded by unmanned lunar probes like Luna, Ranger and Surveyor, and the case for unmanned vs. manned gets stronger the further a mission has to go. Manned exploration beyond where our species as yet gone is going to require moving a lot of extraneous mass to support the crew, and that is almost certainly going to involve basic advances in generating thrust efficiently. Those likely won't be man-ratable until there's been an un-manned exploration program much larger than any currently being contemplated.
You put those factors together and what you've got to do to advanced manned space exploration beyond the Moon is orbital manned missions with robotic exploration of the Solar System.
Speaking as a person who actually has children, I welcome deep space exploration. Just because basic research has no immediate applications doesn't mean that it is useless. When it comes to the pursuit of knowledge, a nation should look beyond immediate economic returns. The expansion of the sphere of economically useful scientific knowledge is dependent on the expansion of knowledge per se.
IPv4 and IPv6 are both network layer protocols. Younger folks here don't remember running IPX, IP, native Appletalk and NetBEUI over the same 10Base2 coax bus, but one of the features of the OSI network model is that multiple level 3 protocols can share the same physical link without any interference.
So this is not a "last mile" problem. If my neighbor has IPv6 service on his new cable modem there's no reason that my IPv4 only cable modem will suddenly stop working.
My guess is that this is a support issue. The people needed to support the transition and interoperation are more expensive than the people needed to implement stop-gaps to extend IPv4 only networking for the next year or two. Until the carriers have a financial reason in an upcoming year to roll out IPv6, I'd expect them to kick the IPv4 exhaustion can down the road.
Oh, it's not that hard to put in a sixty hour week at work, it's just not the same thing as working 60 hours per week, which is admittedly very, very difficult. People confuse the two, in part because it's so much easier to measure hours with butt in chair than hours working.
Viking is irrelevant to the point GP was making, which is that the US maintained its program capabilities with a series of modest, affordable missions rather than waiting another decade to launch a more expensive, complex mission.
Viking was conceived and developed at the tail end of the Apollo era, and cost $934 million in 1974 dollars -- roughly 4.6 billion in present day terms. That wasn't much by the standards of the day, but Pathfinder was developed in a totally different era, an era with much more advanced technology, but much more constrained budgets. Pathfinder cost less than 1/10 of what Viking's cost ($406 million in present day dollars) and met all of its mission objectives. It was a brilliant success, not only on its own terms, but in establishing that tent-pole projects aren't the only way to do planetary exploration.
Yes, a Briton invented http, but we've forgiven the UK, especially since we've found a way around most of its limitations.
It's called confirmation bias. Once Ibrahim was branded a "bad guy", mere lack of evidence was not enough to get her un-branded.
Perhaps the first question to ask is whether his "PR war" is justified.
Actually, you're confusing the issue. It's fine to debate the environmental impact of atrazine, but that's not the question at hand. The issue is *the ground rules of a fair and civilized debate*.
I can't punch you in the mouth to shut you up, just because you're wrong. A civilized debate allows the wrong side to make its case without harassment, because freedom to have only "correct" opinions is no freedom at all.
So, the flipside of that question is: what should companies do against persistent but scientifically baseless attacks? Almost anything they can do can be twisted around to make them look even more manipulative and guilty.
Seriously, you don't know the answer to this question? You can't see a more appropriate response than a campaign of dirty tricks and character assassination? Well, lets start with what they shouldn't do if they want to avoid looking manipulative and guilty: they should't harass people and invade their privacy.
If you've already developed COPD, as Mr. Nimoy has, then you *will* experience the costs of continuing to smoke, even at the age of 82. So there are negatives.
Also, at the age of 82 you probably don't give a damn about looking cool any more, so the biggest plus for a teenager doesn't apply.