Carl Wunsch, one of the scientists featured in the programme, has said that he was "completely misrepresented" in the film and had been "totally misled" when he agreed to be interviewed. He called the film "grossly distorted" and "as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two." Wunsch was reported to have threatened legal action and to have lodged a complaint with Ofcom, the UK broadcast regulator.
People who deny the science on climate change are in the same boat as creationists and Flat-Earthers.
I'd send him another email acknowledging the conversation, saying that as per his verbal instruction I was now assuming that the licences were available and was now going ahead and installing the software.
If the boss summoned me for another meeting I would have a concealed dictaphone ready.
Not in our society. Certain rights are only granted if certain responsibilities are upheld, but even our most despised criminals are granted the right to food, shelter, freedom from torture and so on.
I would grant at least these minimum rights to any animal that can pass the mirror test.
Sure, it's not difficult to remember to append "/uk" to the URL, but the problem is that there is no standard. It could be example.com/uk, example.com/world/uk, uk.example.com, and countless other combinations.
Yep, but since those are already all used, the.co.uk domain just adds to the confusion. It would be reasonably nice to have a standard though.
True. OK then, org, com, and net get registered as domain names. Anyone owning a.com,.org, or.net get an automatic right to a subdomain of those domains. The owner of keirstead.org gets the right to org.keirstead, and so on. keirstead as a top-level domain is available to the first person to register it.
Country-level TLDs are significant. For example, I KNOW that http://www.toyota.ca/ takes me to Toyota Canada's page, while http://www.toyota.com/ takes me to the US page. Using country-level TLDs for this purpose is correct and should be encouraged - it is a lot better than the alternatives like having a stupid URL like http://www.hyundaicanada.com/, or forcefully re-directing people based on their geographic location (what if I am using a proxy? Or what if I want information on the American prices for comparison?).
Lots of companies redirect country TLDs to one website, such as www.example.co.uk -> www.example.com/uk/. It's just as convenient a standard and I don't see what advantage a TLD gets you.
But how would you implement it - how do you reconcile those domains if different people own them, who gets the new TLD when they are amalgamated?
There's no obvious solution. You could do it by lottery between the holders of the current.org/.com/.net domain, or start a new registry as a free-for-all or one of several other ways.
I think it would be worth it, but it's never going to happen.
Chavez won with 68% of the vote. This is 68% of the popular vote and it is extremely difficult to get. This does imply a lack of opposition through intimidation, rampant populism, or some other ways and means.
Well if you have any evidence that the electorate has been intimidated, please post it. As for saying that he won 68% of the vote through "rampant populism" -- well that's tautalogical isn't it? If he wins such a high proportion of the vote, he is indeed rapantly popular. I don't see anything wrong with "rampant populism" -- we could do with a bit more of that in other democracies.
He used to take home $930 a month from his butcher shop at the Guacaipuro Market. But that ended when the Venezuelan government cracked down on butchers and grocers who were selling products above price controls.
It's a policy of a controlled economy, or socialism. You may not like it, but that does not mean he is a dictator.
On Jan. 8, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez sent tremors through the international capitalist market when he announced a new wave of nationalizations. These nationalizations would eliminate foreign control over the country's largest telecommunications and electricity companies.
Surely you can't seriously be equating nationalisation with dictatorship? Again, you might not like it, but it is not dictatorship. If the people of Venezuela don't like it they are free to elect someone else.
- Venezuela is intensifying a campaign against the media criticizing President Hugo Chávez' attempts at seizing freedom of expression for his self-proclaimed socialist revolution, the Inter-American Press Association said on Monday. - Press freedom watchdogs have accused Chavez of using the judiciary and new legislation restricting broadcast content to silence critics. Chavez denies threatening press freedoms and accuses Venezuela's privately owned media of conspiring to topple his government.
So the privately owned media are anti-Chavez? Well hardly surprising -- the media in the West is pretty right wing too. Although the very fact that there is privately owned media that can criticise Chavez is evidence that he isn't a dictator. Also the fact that he manages to get such high approval ratings even with the opposition of the media just shows how popular he really is.
BTW one tell tale sign that he is a dictator is his every increasing majority! After all Saddam had something like 98% of the vote, but I doubt anybody would say he was democratically elected!
So increasing majority == dictator? Which kind of bizarro world do you inhabit?
As far as I know, Saddam never held public elections, but he certainly didn't hold them under the approval of international observers. Chavez did.
In short, the flaw in trying to call this (or anything, IMHO) a DWL is that you have to ignore the person who was paid as a result of the futile competition.
As you define it, I agree. I can't think of anything that would count as a DWL (except maybe literally throwing money away -- but then I suppose you've increased the value of everyone else's cash haven't you?)
Anyway, Wales's point makes sense, even if his definition of a DWL doesn't agree with the literature (I've no idea if it does or not) and there is certainly a difference between his two examples (which was the point I thought you were disagreeing with).
Assuming a closed system (let's call it society):
Scenario 1 is that company A pays company B $5,000 dollars for web hosting. The net cash value change in society stays the same. Society gains the hosting of a website but loses the work done by the workers of company B to set up and maintain the hosting system.
Scenario 2 is that company A pays company B $5,000 dollars for SEO. The net cash value change in society stays the same. Society loses the work done by the workers of company B to research and game the search engine, but gains nothing. This is a DWL as I understand Wales's interpretation.
Whoever got the $5000 benefited; hence it cannot be a DWL. The loss of the search-engine-gamers was the gain of whoever they paid. It doesn't matter if wealth/useful-work has been produced or hasn't.
I think the dead loss is the time and effort expended by the workers of the SEO company and the administration of the paying company. All that work for a *net* benefit of no wealth.
Who got the $5000 worth of effort from each of them that they spent? That was the corresponding benefit to another party.
Yes, but it's just a transfer of money from one party to another; it's a zero-sum game. No wealth has been produced in the sense of some useful work being done. With respect to the hosting company example, the hosting company received the market price for a useful service, a positive benefit to both parties. (As far as I can see, the company did not overpay for hosting in the example).
The craziest complaint I heard about GMail though, was that it threaded related messages into "conversations". To me, that is probably the most useful feature about it.
Conversations are often more of a tree than a list and it would be nice to have the option of viewing it as such.
Shill bidding only affects morons who get caught up in the bidding frenzy and pay more than they wanted to for the item anyway.
No, it affects everyone. In an auction, the bidder pays the lowest price that no one else is prepared to match. With shill bidding, you pay the maximum you are prepared to pay. If you can't understand the difference, you are the moron.
I buy a lot of stuff on eBay. But I don't do any sniping, or bid hunting, or anything else. I just add things to my eBay watch list, and wait until 5 minutes before auction close, when Unwired Buyer calls my cell phone. I then either bid a bit higher than the current price on the item if it's at the right price, otherwise, I just hang up.
If everyone used this strategy (and ebay is so broken I can see it going that way) then this wouldn't work. And, as another poster pointed out, this *is* sniping.
Then, why in the world would you (a) bid $100 for it, and then (b) complain when you didn't get outbid?!?!?!
(a) Because it is worth $100? (b) Because you are no longer participating in an auction. Instead of paying the lowest price that no one else is willing to pay, you are paying the highest price you are willing to pay. This is fraud.
Why did the treaty simply allow China to be exempted from the said treaty
It didn't. You have been misinformed.
Every party could have worked to make the treaty fair and more sound for the world, but they stopped at fairness and simply said that the US should do the MOST work to improve the environment
Well the US is the world's largest polluter by far, so surely they should cut their emissions the most? Kyoto's requirements were pretty minimal and would have been easy for the US to meet however.
without looking at the facts that China will greatly outstrip the US in pollution
I can only assume this is a troll. Surely no one could possibly be this ignorant by accident. Still, debunking your comment might provide minor entertainment:
The earth and sun have very long cycles that span eons and looking at a mere 100 years of semi-accurate data is very myopic.
Try hundreds of thousands of years.
I can go along with the current theories that we are having an influence on the climate but we certainly are not as significant as the political rallying groups would like you to believe.
How about the scientists?
IF they were correct after all, the ozone hole would not be getting smaller.
The situation with the hole in the ozone layer is improving because we took note of what the scientists were saying and reduced our release of CFCs. And this does of course have absolutely nothing to do with climate change.
Anyone who thinks the Kyoto accords were only about reducing greenhouse emissions needs to really look into the politics behind it. Most of the nations that signed it didn't have significant emissions to begin with.
Every nation of note except the USA and Australia signed and ratified it.
Look closely at Gore's CO2 chart and you'll notice that the CO2 levels can lag the temperature rises. If CO2 was *causing* temperature to rise, CO2 level rises would precede temperature rises.
But increased CO2 does precede temperature rises.
The climate modelers want you to think they understand earth's climate. But their models have huge lag times between modeling and verification. Contrast the climatologist's problem with the meteorologist's. Both run models as to how the atmosphere is going to behave but the meteorologist's models are constantly being revised in the face of Nature doing something other than what the models predicted. Hell, Katrina hit New Orleans a few days after 6 out of 7 models said she'd harmlessly veer into the Atlantic. It's impressive that even one model made the right call about Katrina but the fact that 6 out 7 "scientific models" were wrong on that particular hurricane should make you cautious about believing forecasts. Climatology models run on much longer cycles and so get much less feedback as to their accuracy. Moreover, climatologists are building their models on very sparse, inaccurate data.
That's an imbecilic argument. Long term trends are usually much easier to predict than short term ones. If you were to make 1,000 dice rolls I could predict to a fair degree of accuracy what the mean score would be, but I would not like to predict what the mean score of 2 rolls would be.
Just to address a couple of points in your ill-informed confused rant:
We're putting a LOT of heat out, as well as large amounts of CO2. So anecdotally it seems credible to me.
The amount of heat we produce is negligible. The major concern is the CO2 we are producing which is trapping the sun's heat.
But the earth is a BIG system. Almost inconceivably big. Larger shifts in CO2 and temp have occurred historically, and just as quickly, long before humans showed up.
This is completely wrong. This is, to the best of our ability to measure it, the fastest increase in CO2 levels (and, not conicidentally, temperature) in the history of the Earth.
There seems to be a common theme in arguments against taking action against climate change: Just Making Shit Up.
but why do we consider it to be humans fault for this one year warming?
Because it's not one year, it's part of a trend.
But in all of this data, has the factors of the Earth's core heating up, Sun heating up, orbital pattern change have a play in it as well?
Bit of a coincidence that the sun would suddenly produce more heat just as we massively increase the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere? The sums have been done, and the change is due to us (or at least mostly due to us).
The first thing I thought when I saw those charts was 'correlation doesn't equal causation'.
You're joking right? Correlation does not *necessarily* imply causation but it gives you the right to be damned suspicious that it does. And this is a very good correlation, with a known scientific model that points to causation.
Slashdot Mirror
I love the way people are able to discard mountains of scientific evidence on the basis of a crappy documentary.
The documentary (which wasn't made by the BBC) has been strongly debunked, and it was seriously dishonest:
From Wikipedia:
Carl Wunsch, one of the scientists featured in the programme, has said that he was "completely misrepresented" in the film and had been "totally misled" when he agreed to be interviewed. He called the film "grossly distorted" and "as close to pure propaganda as anything since World War Two." Wunsch was reported to have threatened legal action and to have lodged a complaint with Ofcom, the UK broadcast regulator.
People who deny the science on climate change are in the same boat as creationists and Flat-Earthers.
Hired killers? Is that your view of those who serve in the military?
Soldiers are paid, so they are "hired" in a sense, and the ultimate aim of the military is to kill. "Hired killers" is an accurate term.
On behalf of my former Army and Marine Corps comrades, FUCK YOU.
Good to see hired killers have no problems with mental stability.
I'd send him another email acknowledging the conversation, saying that as per his verbal instruction I was now assuming that the licences were available and was now going ahead and installing the software.
If the boss summoned me for another meeting I would have a concealed dictaphone ready.
Rights come with responsibilities as well.
Not in our society. Certain rights are only granted if certain responsibilities are upheld, but even our most despised criminals are granted the right to food, shelter, freedom from torture and so on.
I would grant at least these minimum rights to any animal that can pass the mirror test.
Sure, it's not difficult to remember to append "/uk" to the URL, but the problem is that there is no standard. It could be example.com/uk, example.com/world/uk, uk.example.com, and countless other combinations.
.co.uk domain just adds to the confusion. It would be reasonably nice to have a standard though.
Yep, but since those are already all used, the
True. OK then, org, com, and net get registered as domain names. Anyone owning a .com, .org, or .net get an automatic right to a subdomain of those domains. The owner of keirstead.org gets the right to org.keirstead, and so on. keirstead as a top-level domain is available to the first person to register it.
Not that I can see it ever happening.
Country-level TLDs are significant. For example, I KNOW that http://www.toyota.ca/ takes me to Toyota Canada's page, while http://www.toyota.com/ takes me to the US page. Using country-level TLDs for this purpose is correct and should be encouraged - it is a lot better than the alternatives like having a stupid URL like http://www.hyundaicanada.com/, or forcefully re-directing people based on their geographic location (what if I am using a proxy? Or what if I want information on the American prices for comparison?).
.org/.com/.net domain, or start a new registry as a free-for-all or one of several other ways.
Lots of companies redirect country TLDs to one website, such as www.example.co.uk -> www.example.com/uk/. It's just as convenient a standard and I don't see what advantage a TLD gets you.
But how would you implement it - how do you reconcile those domains if different people own them, who gets the new TLD when they are amalgamated?
There's no obvious solution. You could do it by lottery between the holders of the current
I think it would be worth it, but it's never going to happen.
Chavez won with 68% of the vote. This is 68% of the popular vote and it is extremely difficult to get. This does imply a lack of opposition through intimidation, rampant populism, or some other ways and means.
Well if you have any evidence that the electorate has been intimidated, please post it. As for saying that he won 68% of the vote through "rampant populism" -- well that's tautalogical isn't it? If he wins such a high proportion of the vote, he is indeed rapantly popular. I don't see anything wrong with "rampant populism" -- we could do with a bit more of that in other democracies.
He used to take home $930 a month from his butcher shop at the Guacaipuro Market. But that ended when the Venezuelan government cracked down on butchers and grocers who were selling products above price controls.
It's a policy of a controlled economy, or socialism. You may not like it, but that does not mean he is a dictator.
On Jan. 8, Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez sent tremors through the international capitalist market when he announced a new wave of nationalizations. These nationalizations would eliminate foreign control over the country's largest telecommunications and electricity companies.
Surely you can't seriously be equating nationalisation with dictatorship? Again, you might not like it, but it is not dictatorship. If the people of Venezuela don't like it they are free to elect someone else.
- Venezuela is intensifying a campaign against the media criticizing President Hugo Chávez' attempts at seizing freedom of expression for his self-proclaimed socialist revolution, the Inter-American Press Association said on Monday.
- Press freedom watchdogs have accused Chavez of using the judiciary and new legislation restricting broadcast content to silence critics. Chavez denies threatening press freedoms and accuses Venezuela's privately owned media of conspiring to topple his government.
So the privately owned media are anti-Chavez? Well hardly surprising -- the media in the West is pretty right wing too. Although the very fact that there is privately owned media that can criticise Chavez is evidence that he isn't a dictator. Also the fact that he manages to get such high approval ratings even with the opposition of the media just shows how popular he really is.
BTW one tell tale sign that he is a dictator is his every increasing majority! After all Saddam had something like 98% of the vote, but I doubt anybody would say he was democratically elected!
So increasing majority == dictator? Which kind of bizarro world do you inhabit?
As far as I know, Saddam never held public elections, but he certainly didn't hold them under the approval of international observers. Chavez did.
Genesis 1 was meant to be poetic rather than a scientific account of how God created the universe.
It would have saved us all a lot of trouble if the writers of Genesis had bothered to put a disclaimer to that effect at the beginning.
In short, the flaw in trying to call this (or anything, IMHO) a DWL is that you have to ignore the person who was paid as a result of the futile competition.
As you define it, I agree. I can't think of anything that would count as a DWL (except maybe literally throwing money away -- but then I suppose you've increased the value of everyone else's cash haven't you?)
Anyway, Wales's point makes sense, even if his definition of a DWL doesn't agree with the literature (I've no idea if it does or not) and there is certainly a difference between his two examples (which was the point I thought you were disagreeing with).
Assuming a closed system (let's call it society):
Scenario 1 is that company A pays company B $5,000 dollars for web hosting. The net cash value change in society stays the same. Society gains the hosting of a website but loses the work done by the workers of company B to set up and maintain the hosting system.
Scenario 2 is that company A pays company B $5,000 dollars for SEO. The net cash value change in society stays the same. Society loses the work done by the workers of company B to research and game the search engine, but gains nothing. This is a DWL as I understand Wales's interpretation.
Whoever got the $5000 benefited; hence it cannot be a DWL. The loss of the search-engine-gamers was the gain of whoever they paid. It doesn't matter if wealth/useful-work has been produced or hasn't.
I think the dead loss is the time and effort expended by the workers of the SEO company and the administration of the paying company. All that work for a *net* benefit of no wealth.
Who got the $5000 worth of effort from each of them that they spent? That was the corresponding benefit to another party.
Yes, but it's just a transfer of money from one party to another; it's a zero-sum game. No wealth has been produced in the sense of some useful work being done. With respect to the hosting company example, the hosting company received the market price for a useful service, a positive benefit to both parties. (As far as I can see, the company did not overpay for hosting in the example).
That seems to be the theory, anyway.
You CAN change the email address of your windows live ID to one completely of your own.
Not if you already have a hotmail one.
The craziest complaint I heard about GMail though, was that it threaded related messages into "conversations". To me, that is probably the most useful feature about it.
Conversations are often more of a tree than a list and it would be nice to have the option of viewing it as such.
Originally the battery-powered torch was an "electric torch", so if you wanted to distinguish between them I suppose you'd have to use the qualifier.
However, to avoid any trans-Atlantic confusion, I propose we reinstate the archaic term of "faggot" for the wooden kind.
Sniping is an automated, not a manual process.
Just because you assert it is true doesn't mean it is!
Google definition
Wikipedia
Not that there's anything morally wrong with it. You're playing within the agreed rules, unlike fake bidders.
Shill bidding only affects morons who get caught up in the bidding frenzy and pay more than they wanted to for the item anyway.
No, it affects everyone. In an auction, the bidder pays the lowest price that no one else is prepared to match. With shill bidding, you pay the maximum you are prepared to pay. If you can't understand the difference, you are the moron.
I buy a lot of stuff on eBay. But I don't do any sniping, or bid hunting, or anything else. I just add things to my eBay watch list, and wait until 5 minutes before auction close, when Unwired Buyer calls my cell phone. I then either bid a bit higher than the current price on the item if it's at the right price, otherwise, I just hang up.
If everyone used this strategy (and ebay is so broken I can see it going that way) then this wouldn't work. And, as another poster pointed out, this *is* sniping.
Then, why in the world would you (a) bid $100 for it, and then (b) complain when you didn't get outbid?!?!?!
(a) Because it is worth $100?
(b) Because you are no longer participating in an auction. Instead of paying the lowest price that no one else is willing to pay, you are paying the highest price you are willing to pay. This is fraud.
Why did the treaty simply allow China to be exempted from the said treaty
It didn't. You have been misinformed.
Every party could have worked to make the treaty fair and more sound for the world, but they stopped at fairness and simply said that the US should do the MOST work to improve the environment
Well the US is the world's largest polluter by far, so surely they should cut their emissions the most? Kyoto's requirements were pretty minimal and would have been easy for the US to meet however.
without looking at the facts that China will greatly outstrip the US in pollution
Hopefully Kyoto will ensure they don't.
I can only assume this is a troll. Surely no one could possibly be this ignorant by accident. Still, debunking your comment might provide minor entertainment:
The earth and sun have very long cycles that span eons and looking at a mere 100 years of semi-accurate data is very myopic.
Try hundreds of thousands of years.
I can go along with the current theories that we are having an influence on the climate but we certainly are not as significant as the political rallying groups would like you to believe.
How about the scientists?
IF they were correct after all, the ozone hole would not be getting smaller.
The situation with the hole in the ozone layer is improving because we took note of what the scientists were saying and reduced our release of CFCs. And this does of course have absolutely nothing to do with climate change.
Anyone who thinks the Kyoto accords were only about reducing greenhouse emissions needs to really look into the politics behind it. Most of the nations that signed it didn't have significant emissions to begin with.
Every nation of note except the USA and Australia signed and ratified it.
Look closely at Gore's CO2 chart and you'll notice that the CO2 levels can lag the temperature rises. If CO2 was *causing* temperature to rise, CO2 level rises would precede temperature rises.
But increased CO2 does precede temperature rises.
The climate modelers want you to think they understand earth's climate. But their models have huge lag times between modeling and verification. Contrast the climatologist's problem with the meteorologist's. Both run models as to how the atmosphere is going to behave but the meteorologist's models are constantly being revised in the face of Nature doing something other than what the models predicted. Hell, Katrina hit New Orleans a few days after 6 out of 7 models said she'd harmlessly veer into the Atlantic. It's impressive that even one model made the right call about Katrina but the fact that 6 out 7 "scientific models" were wrong on that particular hurricane should make you cautious about believing forecasts. Climatology models run on much longer cycles and so get much less feedback as to their accuracy. Moreover, climatologists are building their models on very sparse, inaccurate data.
That's an imbecilic argument. Long term trends are usually much easier to predict than short term ones. If you were to make 1,000 dice rolls I could predict to a fair degree of accuracy what the mean score would be, but I would not like to predict what the mean score of 2 rolls would be.
Just to address a couple of points in your ill-informed confused rant:
We're putting a LOT of heat out, as well as large amounts of CO2. So anecdotally it seems credible to me.
The amount of heat we produce is negligible. The major concern is the CO2 we are producing which is trapping the sun's heat.
But the earth is a BIG system. Almost inconceivably big. Larger shifts in CO2 and temp have occurred historically, and just as quickly, long before humans showed up.
This is completely wrong. This is, to the best of our ability to measure it, the fastest increase in CO2 levels (and, not conicidentally, temperature) in the history of the Earth.
There seems to be a common theme in arguments against taking action against climate change: Just Making Shit Up.
but why do we consider it to be humans fault for this one year warming?
Because it's not one year, it's part of a trend.
But in all of this data, has the factors of the Earth's core heating up, Sun heating up, orbital pattern change have a play in it as well?
Bit of a coincidence that the sun would suddenly produce more heat just as we massively increase the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere? The sums have been done, and the change is due to us (or at least mostly due to us).
The first thing I thought when I saw those charts was 'correlation doesn't equal causation'.
You're joking right? Correlation does not *necessarily* imply causation but it gives you the right to be damned suspicious that it does. And this is a very good correlation, with a known scientific model that points to causation.