I personally haven't pledged, because I can't quite stomach putting down $650 blind for a hypothetical product. But I would bite their arm off for it if it were on general sale.
Then you may be one of the people for whom treshold pledge funding hasn't quite sunk in.
Remember, you're not putting down $650 blind. If it doesn't reach the goal, you're out nothing. I don't know how IndieGoGo does it, but Kickstarter doesn't even withdraw or lock the funds until the campaign ends (so yes, it can happen that some people can't afford their pledge when the campaign is over! Kickstarter project starters are warned to take that into account.)
So if you're that excited about it, do go over there and show your support! Most likely it won't reach the goal, but you'd have sincerely signalled your interest, and that is a good thing to do in any market.
This is more interesting, I think, because quite likely this is going to be the first record-breaker that fails. A lot of people will for the first time have supported a failing project with considerable money.
That may be sad for Ubuntu, but it's good news for treshold pledge funding (crowdfunding is a poor word). I'm pretty sure that for most people, it hasn't quite sunk in that you aren't out any money if your project fails. It's one thing to hear it, another thing to see it. The people who pledged this time around will be (even) braver threshold pledge funders in the future.
and they will get information out him, whether Snowden wants to or not.
Snowden has been in the employ of secret services for some 6 years. He's said he's taken steps to make sure he could not be coerced to reveal information even under torture, and there's no reason to doubt him. I know many, many ways to protect information, and I'm sure an ex-CIA/NSA employee knows many more.
Far from it. Pravda was tightly controlled, and mostly about Russia.
RT as it is today looks increasingly like Al Jazeera. What Putin has learned from AJ is that having a free press can be a great thing - as long as they're busy telling the truth and uncovering corruption and injustice somewhere else. You couldn't possibly stop all the annoying (to a tyrant) idealistic journalists of the world, but there's enough injustice in the world to distract them. Instead of suppressing democratic sentiment, why not export it and let it become someone else's headache?
Both "climate change" and "global warming" was used in the very first modern scientific paper that discussed the possibility. So your theory that this is some PR gimmick is interesting speculation, but alas, wrong.
(although as I recall, there was a memo from a Bush-era advisor who recommended using "climate change" over "global warming" as the latter sounded too dramatic- in other words, the exact opposite PR reason that you thought it were. But it would be too generous to think this changed the terminology, though.)
Some have a hard time stopping others enjoy it so much they really don't want to stop. you can break the habit but because of the chemical dependency it is much much harder.
But to some degree, the one IS the other. And to the degree it isn't: Hospital patients regularly get physically addicted to opiates. They get much purer stuff than on the streets, and they actually get more addicted - they need larger doses to have an effect, and so on. Yet after going through painful withdrawal, these people never want to try it again - they're no more likely to become opiate addicts than anyone else.
There was a big study on Vietnam veterans, probably they expected to find the opposite. But people who had been treated with opiates during the war did no better or worse than other veterans.
Another thing is that if you meet a really long-time addict, odds are he would have gone through withdrawals many, many times the last years. Odds are also that he would have spent many weeks or months sober in periods, without help. Many, perhaps most addicts can decide to stay sober for a while if the situation demands it (for instance for special events like visits or trips). Yet they go back on the drugs.
People use drugs because they want to. Why they want to, currently psychiatrists are doing a much better job actually explaining than neurobiologists. It's just more practical to look at in human terms. Maybe it will change one day, but that's how it is now.
You did not answer my question, and your idea of freedom is too simplistic to be useful. Even in simple games, it's sometimes better to not have an option than to have it, and as soon as you include any notion of information and information asymmetry this:
For every thing I'm "protected" from, I have my freedom reduced.
goes down the drain fast.
Taxi drivers aren't powerful. They certainly aren't more powerful than the kind of people they commonly drive. If lack of regulation served taxi customers, why is it regulated everywhere (and often on the municipal level, so it would not be hard at all to experiment with deregulation).
As Tom Slee pointed out: There isn't one big taxi cartel controlling regulation from Aberdeen to San Fransisco. Taxi companies, like B&B (which Airbnb plays Uber's role for) are typically small scale operations.
Yet everywhere, from Aberdeen to San Fransisco, Taxi services and hosting services are regulated. Why is that? If it was just regulatory capture, don't you suppose there would be ONE municipality somewhere where it wasn't regulated, where it worked great, to serve as a beacon for would-be deregulators everywhere? Or maybe there are reasons for all this cumbersome regulation.
Good point. Since part of the purpose of the campaign is to gauge the market potential of the thing, there is probably a sum below which he won't do that, though... but that sum is also probably quite a bit below the stated goal.
Now that more people think that the project is going to fail, even fewer people will bother to invest in it.
The point of Kickstarter (and IndieGoGo projects that don't use the greedy and buyer-hostile "flexible funding" option) is that there's no reason to do that. If you think the project will fail, it's still rational to pledge - if you were wrong, you're happy, and if you were right, you've lost nothing.
That is the KEY point of treshold pledge funding, and by extension Kickstarter, to counteract this self-fulfilling pessimism. (IndieGoGo, as mentioned, haven't quite got it, and are willing to sacrifice buyers to attract a few more dumb and greedy project starters).
Yes, it is possible to estimate how well a climate model models reality. The parameters that vary in climate models are not unconstrained, but constrained by physics (experimental evidence). If your climate model accurately hindcasts the climate developments of the 20th century (say), but the parameters are at the extreme range of what's plausible from experimental physics, then it probably isn't a very good model.
Not all climate scientists focus on general circulation models either. If your particular GCM isn't accepted by climate scientists, it's probably because it has trouble accounting for things we know from other sub-disciplines of climate science.
Propagation of rounding errors is not a big problem in climate modeling. These models are run thousands of times in order to establish averages, very different from meteorological models (although they are basically the same!) which are run many times to find the most likely specific events.
Climate predictions are not vulnerable to rounding errors the way meteorological predictions are. Meteorologists are solving an initial value problem, climate scientist are solving a boundary value problem.
You can make simple climate models that do not rely on computer simulations (energy budget calculations of various sorts), and those are certainly enough to predict big problems from anthopogenic global warming. Heavy-duty numerical climate models aren't used to "prove" global warming, they're used to get better estimates for various things.
Averaging the result makes sense for climate modeling. But for meteorological forecasts, it makes more sense to report the most commonly occuring prediction in the ensemble, plus something about risks if you're talking about dangerous weather.
Some of us want to make money. Some of us want to get people universal health care. Some want to spread the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the nations. Some want our nations to have glory, and be important actors on the stage of the world. Some want international justice, some trade agreements. Some want nuns to drive old cars to set a good example.
We don't agree on all of this. But one thing we the powerful can agree on is that we can't have the public come in and mess up everything!
Slashdot Mirror
Then you may be one of the people for whom treshold pledge funding hasn't quite sunk in.
Remember, you're not putting down $650 blind. If it doesn't reach the goal, you're out nothing. I don't know how IndieGoGo does it, but Kickstarter doesn't even withdraw or lock the funds until the campaign ends (so yes, it can happen that some people can't afford their pledge when the campaign is over! Kickstarter project starters are warned to take that into account.)
So if you're that excited about it, do go over there and show your support! Most likely it won't reach the goal, but you'd have sincerely signalled your interest, and that is a good thing to do in any market.
This is more interesting, I think, because quite likely this is going to be the first record-breaker that fails. A lot of people will for the first time have supported a failing project with considerable money.
That may be sad for Ubuntu, but it's good news for treshold pledge funding (crowdfunding is a poor word). I'm pretty sure that for most people, it hasn't quite sunk in that you aren't out any money if your project fails. It's one thing to hear it, another thing to see it. The people who pledged this time around will be (even) braver threshold pledge funders in the future.
If Merkel & Co can look at what's been revealed and say "we see no spying here", it shouldn't be so hard for the US to keep abstaining from spying.
Snowden has been in the employ of secret services for some 6 years. He's said he's taken steps to make sure he could not be coerced to reveal information even under torture, and there's no reason to doubt him. I know many, many ways to protect information, and I'm sure an ex-CIA/NSA employee knows many more.
Under Bush, the US tortured precisely to get confessions and incrimination of others.
Under Obama, the US tortures not so much for fun as to punish defiance.
Between them they cover all the reasons reasons states (or other large institutions) ever ran a torture program.
Far from it. Pravda was tightly controlled, and mostly about Russia.
RT as it is today looks increasingly like Al Jazeera. What Putin has learned from AJ is that having a free press can be a great thing - as long as they're busy telling the truth and uncovering corruption and injustice somewhere else. You couldn't possibly stop all the annoying (to a tyrant) idealistic journalists of the world, but there's enough injustice in the world to distract them. Instead of suppressing democratic sentiment, why not export it and let it become someone else's headache?
Both "climate change" and "global warming" was used in the very first modern scientific paper that discussed the possibility. So your theory that this is some PR gimmick is interesting speculation, but alas, wrong.
(although as I recall, there was a memo from a Bush-era advisor who recommended using "climate change" over "global warming" as the latter sounded too dramatic- in other words, the exact opposite PR reason that you thought it were. But it would be too generous to think this changed the terminology, though.)
But to some degree, the one IS the other. And to the degree it isn't: Hospital patients regularly get physically addicted to opiates. They get much purer stuff than on the streets, and they actually get more addicted - they need larger doses to have an effect, and so on. Yet after going through painful withdrawal, these people never want to try it again - they're no more likely to become opiate addicts than anyone else.
There was a big study on Vietnam veterans, probably they expected to find the opposite. But people who had been treated with opiates during the war did no better or worse than other veterans.
Another thing is that if you meet a really long-time addict, odds are he would have gone through withdrawals many, many times the last years. Odds are also that he would have spent many weeks or months sober in periods, without help. Many, perhaps most addicts can decide to stay sober for a while if the situation demands it (for instance for special events like visits or trips). Yet they go back on the drugs.
People use drugs because they want to. Why they want to, currently psychiatrists are doing a much better job actually explaining than neurobiologists. It's just more practical to look at in human terms. Maybe it will change one day, but that's how it is now.
That's how software procurement works in the private sector too.
When it comes to crypto tools, I go by a simple rule: WWJD?
The J in this case is Jacob, more specifically Jacob Appelbaum. Until he endorses it, I'm on the fence. For IM, I already have OTR.
You did not answer my question, and your idea of freedom is too simplistic to be useful. Even in simple games, it's sometimes better to not have an option than to have it, and as soon as you include any notion of information and information asymmetry this:
For every thing I'm "protected" from, I have my freedom reduced.
goes down the drain fast.
Taxi drivers aren't powerful. They certainly aren't more powerful than the kind of people they commonly drive. If lack of regulation served taxi customers, why is it regulated everywhere (and often on the municipal level, so it would not be hard at all to experiment with deregulation).
As Tom Slee pointed out: There isn't one big taxi cartel controlling regulation from Aberdeen to San Fransisco. Taxi companies, like B&B (which Airbnb plays Uber's role for) are typically small scale operations.
Yet everywhere, from Aberdeen to San Fransisco, Taxi services and hosting services are regulated. Why is that? If it was just regulatory capture, don't you suppose there would be ONE municipality somewhere where it wasn't regulated, where it worked great, to serve as a beacon for would-be deregulators everywhere? Or maybe there are reasons for all this cumbersome regulation.
And unicode, that's a problem Slashdot won't solve...
What on earth convinced you that it was a contract with penalities and not just a "best effort" assurance?
Good point. Since part of the purpose of the campaign is to gauge the market potential of the thing, there is probably a sum below which he won't do that, though... but that sum is also probably quite a bit below the stated goal.
The point of Kickstarter (and IndieGoGo projects that don't use the greedy and buyer-hostile "flexible funding" option) is that there's no reason to do that. If you think the project will fail, it's still rational to pledge - if you were wrong, you're happy, and if you were right, you've lost nothing.
That is the KEY point of treshold pledge funding, and by extension Kickstarter, to counteract this self-fulfilling pessimism. (IndieGoGo, as mentioned, haven't quite got it, and are willing to sacrifice buyers to attract a few more dumb and greedy project starters).
Yes, it is possible to estimate how well a climate model models reality. The parameters that vary in climate models are not unconstrained, but constrained by physics (experimental evidence). If your climate model accurately hindcasts the climate developments of the 20th century (say), but the parameters are at the extreme range of what's plausible from experimental physics, then it probably isn't a very good model.
Not all climate scientists focus on general circulation models either. If your particular GCM isn't accepted by climate scientists, it's probably because it has trouble accounting for things we know from other sub-disciplines of climate science.
These are pretty old, discredited talking points.
Propagation of rounding errors is not a big problem in climate modeling. These models are run thousands of times in order to establish averages, very different from meteorological models (although they are basically the same!) which are run many times to find the most likely specific events.
Climate predictions are not vulnerable to rounding errors the way meteorological predictions are. Meteorologists are solving an initial value problem, climate scientist are solving a boundary value problem.
You can make simple climate models that do not rely on computer simulations (energy budget calculations of various sorts), and those are certainly enough to predict big problems from anthopogenic global warming. Heavy-duty numerical climate models aren't used to "prove" global warming, they're used to get better estimates for various things.
Averaging the result makes sense for climate modeling. But for meteorological forecasts, it makes more sense to report the most commonly occuring prediction in the ensemble, plus something about risks if you're talking about dangerous weather.
Some of us want to make money. Some of us want to get people universal health care. Some want to spread the Good News of the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the nations. Some want our nations to have glory, and be important actors on the stage of the world. Some want international justice, some trade agreements. Some want nuns to drive old cars to set a good example.
We don't agree on all of this. But one thing we the powerful can agree on is that we can't have the public come in and mess up everything!
That's a nice description of the problem. One of the ever growing tumors of any opaque bureaucracy.
Or maybe they just quoted the lot? Seriously, you don't have to be some sort of marine grunt to know what abbreviations like NAVINT means.
Interesting. Dishfire is probably older than that, then, since it doesn't sound like a dictionary word.
Database on satellite phones, maybe?
sudo make me a sandwich
mysidia is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
Reported, you hear?!