Yeah, good idea, but you won't always be allowed to bring a gun. I say we add some gym time as well, and steroids, to get better return on that investement.
Amen. But is it impossible that this went all the way to the top, and that Rumsfeld, Cheney and co. did some ass-covering of their own? You won't have much trouble convincing me that those people could be negligent, or even that they thought a little terrorism could be useful for their plan of invading Iraq.
You would build it in the most populace cities. The largest cities that can support that kind of building and still make money off of it are all out of land. So, what is someone to do... Knock down some of the existing buildings and build a bigger one. Do you know what the cost would be to bring down an existing building in New York? One can only imagine. Do you know what it would take to get it approved through the city council?
"The city council? Aaargh, city councils are impossible to deal with!! Hey, I know, let's just arrange for some terrorists to come over and blow the whole thing up. It will be easier that way!."
> the only way to tell for sure is to read the ingredients.
Depends on where you live. Here, there are strict rules to what you can call food. There is no such thing as "soy milk" in Norway, it's "soy drink". And those bags of something that look like ground cheese to put on your pizza is revealingly labeled just "ground". Unless there's actual lemons in it, lemon soda is "soda with lemon taste". You get the picture.
I hear some other european nations are even more severe.
> Yes, I would, because if the science is solid, it will stand up to analysis.
The science isn't the issue here. What the "skeptics" want is more opportunity for cherry-picking, more quotes that can be mined, more areas to force the battle over to the PR area, where they have a huge advantage.
If they don't get what they ask for, they paint themselves as victims. If they do, the best phrase the scientists can expect from them is "well, this just raises far more questions than it answers."
It's totally irrelevant that almost every skeptic on this list is associated with a right wing think tank. And scientific credentials, pah, who needs them, I can refute global warming with simple high school physics!!1!
Well, that's capitalism for you. Rich people are allowed to pay for getting bigger houses and cars than the rest of us, it stands to reason they should be allowed to pollute more (as long as they buy up other people's pollution allowances). I for one am not into tilting at that particular windmill at this time.
But somehow, a lot of people who are not communists are nonetheless bashing Al Gore for using jet planes and making money. Go figure.
I'm so glad you came in here with your fair and balanced comment! With all this CONTROVERSY we can't know for sure one way or another, so the truth is somewhere in the middle for sure.
> The problem is that in this field there aren't thousands of other researchers.
Yes, there are in fact.
"People from over 130 countries contributed to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report over the previous 6 years. These people included more than 2500 scientific expert reviewers, more than 800 contributing authors, and more than 450 lead authors."
No matter how you argue the numbers, there are way too many for a conspiracy.
> You can quite clearly see the "fudge factor" (actual code comment) where it was calculated to produce the desired result.
When you write code with a big comment "Warning: This is very artificial!!" - why do you do that? I sometimes do similar stuff: fudge A temporarily to give the expected results, so I can go test B first, etc. When I do I make these comments to remember and go back and correct it later.
Which is in fact what happened. The fudge factor array is used to create another array, and that one is not used (it is commented out where it was).
If you were deliberately trying to falsify data, would you put a comment warning readers about it?
> Incidentally "climate change" is the trendy new word because "global warming" has the pesky tendency to be falsified whenever temperatures are cooler than expected. With a generic word like "climate change" you're only wrong if the temperature stays perfectly and exactly the same!
Conspiracy theory bullshit. Global warming is what the world will experience. Climate change is what YOU will experience, because it's not going to have a uniform effect. It's not any less serious either: changing rainfall patterns can hurt you a lot more, a lot quicker, than yet another warm season.
Why should the president be allowed to veto a law, really? Does this make bad laws harder to pass? Maybe, but then it makes necessary laws harder to pass as well. And bad laws harder to repel or fix (the two layers of veto in the US, first senate, then executive, means farm subsidies and gerrymandering, to name a few, won't be going anywhere for you...)
It seems to me (take same caveat as in your first paragraph) that over-vetoing is a big problem for the US. Important issues are decided by duelling lawyers, because the legislative branch is not responsive enough to prove explicit guidance (telling the courts how they really want to be interpreted).
1. Some guy uses the word in the original sense 2. Some other person is offended by misunderstanding 3. Racists are amused by the misunderstanding by person in 2, say it proves people like 2. are idiots, and start using the word because of it.
So please don't assume anyone who uses that word is racist. They may have just missed 3 and possibly 2.
"Another reason is that the fastest functional languages are still slower than C in general."
No, this isn't a reason. Open source software on Unix-clones is about the only place C is still a general purpose language. Ocaml and Haskell are eminently competitive with Java and C# (and with C too, in these domains).
"And not all have a one to one mapping between the meanings of words in different languages. The same words in different languages can have very different connotations. Some words and phrases in different languages, you have no clear counterpart in other languages. These are often cultural specific conditions. A good translation must actively understand the meaning and purpose of the language. "
That's Google translate, through English->Swedish->Chinese->Dutch->English.
No human level AI, no understanding of the actual content of what it translates, only "dumb" statistical translation. I wouldn't be so quick to say what's possible and not.
Are you trying to be sarcastic? Gigabytes are not enough for any translation worth a penny. And Google translate is alive and well, it's definitively the best general machine translation system available anywhere (see my above post for a comparison to Babelfish).
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, good idea, but you won't always be allowed to bring a gun. I say we add some gym time as well, and steroids, to get better return on that investement.
Amen. But is it impossible that this went all the way to the top, and that Rumsfeld, Cheney and co. did some ass-covering of their own? You won't have much trouble convincing me that those people could be negligent, or even that they thought a little terrorism could be useful for their plan of invading Iraq.
You would build it in the most populace cities. The largest cities that can support that kind of building and still make money off of it are all out of land. So, what is someone to do... Knock down some of the existing buildings and build a bigger one. Do you know what the cost would be to bring down an existing building in New York? One can only imagine. Do you know what it would take to get it approved through the city council?
"The city council? Aaargh, city councils are impossible to deal with!! Hey, I know, let's just arrange for some terrorists to come over and blow the whole thing up. It will be easier that way!."
> I want some baby seal nuggets
You might be disappointed. Sea mammal has a tendency to taste like beef - beef that has been marinated in fish oil for some time.
> the only way to tell for sure is to read the ingredients.
Depends on where you live. Here, there are strict rules to what you can call food. There is no such thing as "soy milk" in Norway, it's "soy drink". And those bags of something that look like ground cheese to put on your pizza is revealingly labeled just "ground". Unless there's actual lemons in it, lemon soda is "soda with lemon taste". You get the picture.
I hear some other european nations are even more severe.
You may not be on the top of the food chain.
Did you lock your windows?
No further comment.
No no, you see, it was vat-grown humans combined with a form of fusion!
I was going to use Australia as an example, but cut it because I realized I didn't know enough about your recent troubles. Thanks, very interesting.
> Yes, I would, because if the science is solid, it will stand up to analysis.
The science isn't the issue here. What the "skeptics" want is more opportunity for cherry-picking, more quotes that can be mined, more areas to force the battle over to the PR area, where they have a huge advantage.
If they don't get what they ask for, they paint themselves as victims. If they do, the best phrase the scientists can expect from them is "well, this just raises far more questions than it answers."
Why, why, that's an AD HOMINEM, that is!
It's totally irrelevant that almost every skeptic on this list is associated with a right wing think tank. And scientific credentials, pah, who needs them, I can refute global warming with simple high school physics!!1!
Not "the" temperature data. Some temperature data. If your institution has never lost data since the eighties, hats off to you.
Then we rewrite the physics books. God knows with what.
Well, that's capitalism for you. Rich people are allowed to pay for getting bigger houses and cars than the rest of us, it stands to reason they should be allowed to pollute more (as long as they buy up other people's pollution allowances). I for one am not into tilting at that particular windmill at this time.
But somehow, a lot of people who are not communists are nonetheless bashing Al Gore for using jet planes and making money. Go figure.
I'm so glad you came in here with your fair and balanced comment! With all this CONTROVERSY we can't know for sure one way or another, so the truth is somewhere in the middle for sure.
> The problem is that in this field there aren't thousands of other researchers.
Yes, there are in fact.
"People from over 130 countries contributed to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report over the previous 6 years. These people included more than 2500 scientific expert reviewers, more than 800 contributing authors, and more than 450 lead authors."
No matter how you argue the numbers, there are way too many for a conspiracy.
> You can quite clearly see the "fudge factor" (actual code comment) where it was calculated to produce the desired result.
When you write code with a big comment "Warning: This is very artificial!!" - why do you do that? I sometimes do similar stuff: fudge A temporarily to give the expected results, so I can go test B first, etc. When I do I make these comments to remember and go back and correct it later.
Which is in fact what happened. The fudge factor array is used to create another array, and that one is not used (it is commented out where it was).
If you were deliberately trying to falsify data, would you put a comment warning readers about it?
>>It's called climate change because "global warming" has been so soiled by deliberate misunderstanding that it's problematic to use.
>In other words, it's bad PR.
No, it's good PR. A good PR job by the other side.
It's not just a wedge either, it's a wedge. No points for guessing where the Discovery Institute stands on anthropogenic global warming.
> Incidentally "climate change" is the trendy new word because "global warming" has the pesky tendency to be falsified whenever temperatures are cooler than expected. With a generic word like "climate change" you're only wrong if the temperature stays perfectly and exactly the same!
Conspiracy theory bullshit. Global warming is what the world will experience. Climate change is what YOU will experience, because it's not going to have a uniform effect. It's not any less serious either: changing rainfall patterns can hurt you a lot more, a lot quicker, than yet another warm season.
Why should the president be allowed to veto a law, really? Does this make bad laws harder to pass? Maybe, but then it makes necessary laws harder to pass as well. And bad laws harder to repel or fix (the two layers of veto in the US, first senate, then executive, means farm subsidies and gerrymandering, to name a few, won't be going anywhere for you...)
It seems to me (take same caveat as in your first paragraph) that over-vetoing is a big problem for the US. Important issues are decided by duelling lawyers, because the legislative branch is not responsive enough to prove explicit guidance (telling the courts how they really want to be interpreted).
Tar baby is in the same category as "niggardly"
1. Some guy uses the word in the original sense
2. Some other person is offended by misunderstanding
3. Racists are amused by the misunderstanding by person in 2, say it proves people like 2. are idiots, and start using the word because of it.
So please don't assume anyone who uses that word is racist. They may have just missed 3 and possibly 2.
"Another reason is that the fastest functional languages are still slower than C in general."
No, this isn't a reason. Open source software on Unix-clones is about the only place C is still a general purpose language. Ocaml and Haskell are eminently competitive with Java and C# (and with C too, in these domains).
"And not all have a one to one mapping between the meanings of words in different languages. The same words in different languages can have very different connotations. Some words and phrases in different languages, you have no clear counterpart in other languages. These are often cultural specific conditions. A good translation must actively understand the meaning and purpose of the language. "
That's Google translate, through English->Swedish->Chinese->Dutch->English.
No human level AI, no understanding of the actual content of what it translates, only "dumb" statistical translation. I wouldn't be so quick to say what's possible and not.
Are you trying to be sarcastic? Gigabytes are not enough for any translation worth a penny. And Google translate is alive and well, it's definitively the best general machine translation system available anywhere (see my above post for a comparison to Babelfish).
"Trees don't grow into heaven". Let them figure it out, it shouldn't be that hard.