I said "denialists", not "deniers". If you've never heard the word before, I can tell you've been careful not to hear what the side you accuse of scientific misconduct, grand conspiracy and worse, have to say to their defense.
What would you call someone who persisted in claiming that asbestos or smoking didn't cause cancer, or that evolution wasn't proven, for political reasons, against all evidence? It's just calling a spade a spade in my opinion.
WAIT before you leap to conclusion. This article cites only blogs which are known to misrepresent science and actions pertaining to them. The accused - in the blog world, that would be realclimate, which unlike Watt's and climateaudit is run by climate scientists - have not had time to answer yet.
The denialists have played this game many, many times before. Example: recently, the blogs were up in a huff because a denialist polar bear researcher had been denied a seat on some board. The news even reached slashdot before anyone got time to ask people from the board in question. But when someone did, it turned out the researcher in question was not eligible, on account of not being active in polar bear research any longer.
When serious accusations like this come out (especially from the denialists, who have been known to paint themselves as victims if their mails were not responded to quickly enough) you got to wait and hear what the accused side has to say before jumping to conclusions.
Why not script 3D graphics? That's how I relearned programming (after toying with BASIC many years ago), with QuakeC. QuakeC is a mess, though, I don't recommend it.
The problem with higher level languages is that our abstractions leak. They leak bad. Many things that make perfect sense when we look at a computer language as a matemathical construct just don't work very well on real machines. We're trying to build something useful on top of a very simplistic machine, but occasionally it rears its ugly head.
This is really not the case across the electronics boundary. Transistors don't behave in surprising ways very often. We don't have to say, "oh, but that was doped with gallium arsenide, therefore you can't program so and so". But we may say, about programming in a high level language: "that causes cache misses", "that's not very efficiently implemented on this or this processor", "doing it that way is a bad fit for the memory allocation methods we use" etc.
As things are today, very many programmers have to go down to that level eventually. And even for those who don't, it's not clear that they won't benefit from a litte knowledge of how things work "under the hood".
At Princeton, I understand there is a course that teaches x86 assembly as a first language; it uses the book "Programming from the Ground Up" by Johnatan Bartlett. He's a slashdot user. He developed the book in an open manner (and I even made some very small contributions). I recommend that book, especially the bits about memory management will obviously be relevant to lots of people eventually.
Are you sure Haskell would be so much "brain-fuckery" for someone who wasn't used to imperative programming already?
Actually, we can answer that. Many people HAVE learned Haskell as their first language by now.
I came across the blog of a computer scientist (pretty accomplished too) who had. Yeah, that made me feel old, too. I can't seem to find that blog again, but there's sure to be some people on slashdot who are in the same situation.
(My first languages were C64 basic, then AMOS basic at the Amiga, then the strange C dialect used for scripting quake, then Java. I don't think Basic hurt me all that much, but QuakeC really confused me for some months about OO)
The problem with eating dog is that they are carnivorous mammals. It takes a lot of grain to feed a cow, it takes a lot of cow to feed a dog. Not very resource efficient.
I think the metavegetarian diet (only eating vegetables and vegetarians) is more sustainable in the long run.
"Do you do or are you interested in outdoor activities?"
This used to be such a standard line in personal ads ("I like hiking in the woods") that I wondered if it was a code word for some kind of disturbing activity.
Yeah right, I'm sure you macho-hacker trash can write hand-crafted assembly that is safer than GCC. And I'm sure the guy who found out about this doesn't have a comp sci background at all. Everyone knows it's the hackers that find the real stuff!
"Do you really think nanotech is going to win against the reigning champions who have been beating all comers for millennia?"
I wouldn't be surprised. If you've played around with genetic algorithms on your computer, you've probably realized that while they are fun and cool, and amazingly versatile, for pretty much any specific problem there is a better solution. Put differently, intelligently designed solutions beat the crap out of evolved ones, if you can be bothered to implement one. Amazing as evolved organisms are, what could we have had from actual intelligent design?
Mold? Ethanol at fuel-grade concentrations is... well, it's one of our more common disinfectants, right? It's also been used as a preservative for generations*. How do you manage to grow mold in it?
Biodiesel, on the other hand, does have a problem with bacterial contamination. One of the disadvantages of a fuel that isn't extremely toxic...
*you could say it still is, but since it's carcinogenic and causes birth defects I'd say its preservative properties are probably pretty far down on the list of reasons why it's used...
It lists how the guy is a shill, how he isn't qualified and says we need to ignore him, then lists not more then 2 places with errors but they don't actually point the errors out and even take something out of context to do it.
So... you blast him for not pointing out where the errors are. But you yourself don't point out where he fails to point out where the errors are, or where he allegedly takes things out of context. The irony is delicious.
[...]even because it disputes your long help beliefs and faiths is not practicing science.
I'm not practising science right now, buddy. Never said I did. But neither are you. I don't know what you think you are doing, but I'm practising how to cut my time-wastage losses. Good night.
"And the question is, is that information correct or incorrect."
Astroturfers aren't worth the time even answering, because they don't argue in good faith. They want to spread FUD. It's what they're paid to. As soon as they manage to grab hold of someone to "debate", they score a point with their funders, because by then lots of the audience will just zone out and just assume "well, both sides probably have some merit".
"In fact, when you look at how politics dominate this topic, you have to wonder if science is actually driving it at all."
Hah, the old politician's trick of making lots of noise, and then using that noise to say "listen to the noise! this is way too controversial!".
Get this: It's all about good faith. If I think you don't have it, I'm not going to bother much. As it is, I think you are merely a bit brainwashed. Some people are willing to waste more time on it (or maybe just a bit more willing to give the benefit of doubt when it comes to whether arguments are made in good faith or not).
Gavin A. Schmidt at realclimate.org has in fact had slightly more patience with Carlin's report. If you're so interested in the science as you claim, you might want to read it?
> Why don't we examine the content of his report before disregarding it based on his non-qualifications.
Because people hired to make noise must be disregarded eventually. But since the noise-making apparently succeded enough to get a slashdot post, I can at least link to an examination at deep climate.
Short version: He cut and pasted from various contrarian blogs and astroturf organisations - the ones that are now shouting censorhip - rewriting it slightly to remove too obvious editorialising. The actual content is standard issue denialist fare: misrepresenting papers (and ignoring the protests when the author complains), along with some long discredited talking points (global warming stopped in 1998, and anyway it was the sun and cosmic rays that did it)
There are no politics in computer science at the moment. I'd be far more careful trusting random opinions in computer science if there were people who denied basic findings on ideological grounds, and people employed by industry to muddy the waters.
When I think about it, I suppose the latter exist in computer science, although it's not very ideologically motivated. You know about FUD? It's there about global warming, too, except Microsoft looks like a bumbling newbie by comparisons. The guys at CEI are veterans of the tobacco wars, they can spread uncertainty and doubt like no others.
"The entire internet has been complaining" indeed. The internet is very good at isolating you from people you disagree with (if you want to) and making it look like there are a lot more people like you than there really are (whether you want to or not). The vast amount of people on the internet probably don't know what the DMCA is, or care much for copyright reform.
Drugs? Give me a break. A majority of the world's population doesn't even drink alcohol - granted, this is a lot because India and China have little tradition for it, but it might put this "everyone really thinks like me" delusion into perspective.
That's ridiculous, you can do all that today as well, except you don't want to because you have an iphone. And anyway, the iphone is probably powerful enough to run an...
Slashdot Mirror
I said "denialists", not "deniers". If you've never heard the word before, I can tell you've been careful not to hear what the side you accuse of scientific misconduct, grand conspiracy and worse, have to say to their defense.
What would you call someone who persisted in claiming that asbestos or smoking didn't cause cancer, or that evolution wasn't proven, for political reasons, against all evidence? It's just calling a spade a spade in my opinion.
Are you serious, or is this a parody?
WAIT before you leap to conclusion. This article cites only blogs which are known to misrepresent science and actions pertaining to them. The accused - in the blog world, that would be realclimate, which unlike Watt's and climateaudit is run by climate scientists - have not had time to answer yet.
The denialists have played this game many, many times before. Example: recently, the blogs were up in a huff because a denialist polar bear researcher had been denied a seat on some board. The news even reached slashdot before anyone got time to ask people from the board in question. But when someone did, it turned out the researcher in question was not eligible, on account of not being active in polar bear research any longer.
When serious accusations like this come out (especially from the denialists, who have been known to paint themselves as victims if their mails were not responded to quickly enough) you got to wait and hear what the accused side has to say before jumping to conclusions.
Windows 7 Tangerine edition.
Why not script 3D graphics? That's how I relearned programming (after toying with BASIC many years ago), with QuakeC. QuakeC is a mess, though, I don't recommend it.
Yes, there is something wrong with PHP! It doesn't even have proper scoping.
There are such things as bad habits. There are such things as languages that encourage them.
The problem with higher level languages is that our abstractions leak. They leak bad. Many things that make perfect sense when we look at a computer language as a matemathical construct just don't work very well on real machines. We're trying to build something useful on top of a very simplistic machine, but occasionally it rears its ugly head.
This is really not the case across the electronics boundary. Transistors don't behave in surprising ways very often. We don't have to say, "oh, but that was doped with gallium arsenide, therefore you can't program so and so". But we may say, about programming in a high level language: "that causes cache misses", "that's not very efficiently implemented on this or this processor", "doing it that way is a bad fit for the memory allocation methods we use" etc.
As things are today, very many programmers have to go down to that level eventually. And even for those who don't, it's not clear that they won't benefit from a litte knowledge of how things work "under the hood".
At Princeton, I understand there is a course that teaches x86 assembly as a first language; it uses the book "Programming from the Ground Up" by Johnatan Bartlett. He's a slashdot user. He developed the book in an open manner (and I even made some very small contributions). I recommend that book, especially the bits about memory management will obviously be relevant to lots of people eventually.
Are you sure Haskell would be so much "brain-fuckery" for someone who wasn't used to imperative programming already?
Actually, we can answer that. Many people HAVE learned Haskell as their first language by now.
I came across the blog of a computer scientist (pretty accomplished too) who had. Yeah, that made me feel old, too. I can't seem to find that blog again, but there's sure to be some people on slashdot who are in the same situation.
(My first languages were C64 basic, then AMOS basic at the Amiga, then the strange C dialect used for scripting quake, then Java. I don't think Basic hurt me all that much, but QuakeC really confused me for some months about OO)
The bits of WLM you would need can be used for Linux, can't they? Kopete and what's-it's-name-now Gaim lets you use that service just fine.
The problem with eating dog is that they are carnivorous mammals. It takes a lot of grain to feed a cow, it takes a lot of cow to feed a dog. Not very resource efficient.
I think the metavegetarian diet (only eating vegetables and vegetarians) is more sustainable in the long run.
"Do you do or are you interested in outdoor activities?"
This used to be such a standard line in personal ads ("I like hiking in the woods") that I wondered if it was a code word for some kind of disturbing activity.
Finally, they asked me how much I thought it was worth. I told them that I'd pay $500.
Yikes! You are either desperate, a liar, or maybe just really rich ;-)
Yeah right, I'm sure you macho-hacker trash can write hand-crafted assembly that is safer than GCC. And I'm sure the guy who found out about this doesn't have a comp sci background at all. Everyone knows it's the hackers that find the real stuff!
"Do you really think nanotech is going to win against the reigning champions who have been beating all comers for millennia?"
I wouldn't be surprised. If you've played around with genetic algorithms on your computer, you've probably realized that while they are fun and cool, and amazingly versatile, for pretty much any specific problem there is a better solution. Put differently, intelligently designed solutions beat the crap out of evolved ones, if you can be bothered to implement one. Amazing as evolved organisms are, what could we have had from actual intelligent design?
Mold? Ethanol at fuel-grade concentrations is ... well, it's one of our more common disinfectants, right? It's also been used as a preservative for generations*. How do you manage to grow mold in it?
Biodiesel, on the other hand, does have a problem with bacterial contamination. One of the disadvantages of a fuel that isn't extremely toxic...
*you could say it still is, but since it's carcinogenic and causes birth defects I'd say its preservative properties are probably pretty far down on the list of reasons why it's used...
It lists how the guy is a shill, how he isn't qualified and says we need to ignore him, then lists not more then 2 places with errors but they don't actually point the errors out and even take something out of context to do it.
So... you blast him for not pointing out where the errors are. But you yourself don't point out where he fails to point out where the errors are, or where he allegedly takes things out of context. The irony is delicious.
[...]even because it disputes your long help beliefs and faiths is not practicing science.
I'm not practising science right now, buddy. Never said I did. But neither are you. I don't know what you think you are doing, but I'm practising how to cut my time-wastage losses. Good night.
"And the question is, is that information correct or incorrect."
Astroturfers aren't worth the time even answering, because they don't argue in good faith. They want to spread FUD. It's what they're paid to. As soon as they manage to grab hold of someone to "debate", they score a point with their funders, because by then lots of the audience will just zone out and just assume "well, both sides probably have some merit".
"In fact, when you look at how politics dominate this topic, you have to wonder if science is actually driving it at all."
Hah, the old politician's trick of making lots of noise, and then using that noise to say "listen to the noise! this is way too controversial!".
Get this: It's all about good faith. If I think you don't have it, I'm not going to bother much. As it is, I think you are merely a bit brainwashed. Some people are willing to waste more time on it (or maybe just a bit more willing to give the benefit of doubt when it comes to whether arguments are made in good faith or not).
Gavin A. Schmidt at realclimate.org has in fact had slightly more patience with Carlin's report. If you're so interested in the science as you claim, you might want to read it?
Well that's not politics, that's religion!
> Why don't we examine the content of his report before disregarding it based on his non-qualifications.
Because people hired to make noise must be disregarded eventually. But since the noise-making apparently succeded enough to get a slashdot post, I can at least link to an examination at
deep climate.
Short version: He cut and pasted from various contrarian blogs and astroturf organisations - the ones that are now shouting censorhip - rewriting it slightly to remove too obvious editorialising. The actual content is standard issue denialist fare: misrepresenting papers (and ignoring the protests when the author complains), along with some long discredited talking points (global warming stopped in 1998, and anyway it was the sun and cosmic rays that did it)
There are no politics in computer science at the moment. I'd be far more careful trusting random opinions in computer science if there were people who denied basic findings on ideological grounds, and people employed by industry to muddy the waters.
When I think about it, I suppose the latter exist in computer science, although it's not very ideologically motivated. You know about FUD? It's there about global warming, too, except Microsoft looks like a bumbling newbie by comparisons. The guys at CEI are veterans of the tobacco wars, they can spread uncertainty and doubt like no others.
"The entire internet has been complaining" indeed. The internet is very good at isolating you from people you disagree with (if you want to) and making it look like there are a lot more people like you than there really are (whether you want to or not). The vast amount of people on the internet probably don't know what the DMCA is, or care much for copyright reform.
Drugs? Give me a break. A majority of the world's population doesn't even drink alcohol - granted, this is a lot because India and China have little tradition for it, but it might put this "everyone really thinks like me" delusion into perspective.
Sometimes they are on the wrong side of the door, too. I can't count the number of times I slapped my hand to the right of the doors in my old house.
Right is the standard here.
That's ridiculous, you can do all that today as well, except you don't want to because you have an iphone. And anyway, the iphone is probably powerful enough to run an ...
Oh. Never mind.
No, we do not have that world. Criminals' need for money laundering proves that.
I for one never needed one. In fact, I thought they were a really stupid idea, and wondered who would actually use them.
To the degree that they fill a need, it can probably easily be met in a way that doesn't imply untraceable purchases.
(I don't disagree that we have have some real influence over our governments, btw).