I have no doubt that human activity has caused climate change in the past (can you say "dust bowl?") and is continuing to cause changes now (desertification, various climate changes in what used to be the Soviet Union due to massive river diversions, etc.). Human activity *may* even be causing global warming but we will only be able to prove that when we climate models that back test over some of the more significant climate changes of the past.
Existing climate models that only correlate an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases to increasing temperature don't prove a thing. As far as I'm concerned, the only way to show that greenhouse gases are causing global warming is to back test the climate models that purport to show this over as much of the climate record as possible. This would show that whatever mechanisms drove past climate change isn't responsible for the current warming. There have been much larger changes in the climate in the past than the current "global warming" that had nothing to do with human activity. Only a back test that models such changes shows that whatever drove these prior climate changes isn't also responsible for the current warming.
In a word, yes. I find human causation of global warming to be unproven. What we have are a collection of climate models that only reflect the last 50 years or so and that show a correlation between increasing green house gases and increasing temperatures. Correlation is not causality.
What the parent poster and I both want to see is how well these models describe the past. That is, we want to see these climate models back tested over at least the several thousand years of history for which we have climate data. Using tree ring analysis and other methods, we have climate data going back tens of thousands of years including the last ice age. If the climate models are correct, they should also show, at a minimum, the gross climate swings that resulted in things like the "little ice age", the warm period the parent poster referred to, etc. If these models don't work when back tested then they are worthless.
I have yet to see a single result published in which a climate model being used to show humans are causing the current warming that also predicts any past climate changes. I'll *accept* that humans are causing global warming when such a result is published. Until then, we have a large segment of the scientific community who are doing a disservice to science and the rest of the population by jumping on the "humans cause global warming" bandwagon because it's a great way to get funding.
This isn't a question of belief. It's a question of when the folks who are blaming the current warming on human activities provide some reasonable proof that their models accurately predict previous, known, well-documented climate changes. Until they do, they and their followers are the ones who are following an unproven set of beliefs.
The great majority of court cases are settled out of court. Either the parties reach an agreement or the moving party decides not to pursue the action. The courts encourage such settlements. It hardly means that the model is "contemptuous" of the justice system. Since she is the plaintiff, she is under no obligation to continue the action and can discontinue it at any time. As it is, she had the legal expenses to file the suit, compel Google to disclose the blogger's name and probably quite a few other expenses. If the model is content to simply out the person who defamed her, she is perfectly entitled to stop at that point or at any other point of her choosing.
The blogger can sue Google (good luck with that under their terms of service) or she can sue the model if she was actually harmed in some way by the disclosure of her identity. My take is that she doesn't understand the difference between free speech and anonymous slander. The first amendment only bars the government from making laws that diminish free speech. That's quite a bit different from a court deciding that what someone says rises to the level of slander and compels that the person who slandered someone be identified. The blogger has the "right" to say what she did but she may then have to show that what she said wasn't slanderous. There is no "right" to anonymity.
Once the model found out who had made the posts, she may have decided the "you can't get blood out of a rock." That is, it wasn't worth the legal expenses to continue the action since the person responsible for the defamation didn't have sufficient resources to even pay those expenses; let alone pay any sort of punitive penalty.
Why should the model be "forced" to continue an action that won't bring her any compensation?
In the past, Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) looked at the threat, defined and acquired the means of dealing with the threat and then trained the people at the sharp end how to use what TRADOC or the other commands had acquired to dispatch the threat. Since everything but the threat was theoretical, the only way to do things was to have the FM written by TRADOC. No one had any real experience on which to base a FM. This made a lot of sense when the overall threat was assumed to be the Warsaw Pact armies rolling through the Fulda Gap with their latest collection of toys.
Fast forward to the 21st century and both the overall threat and the specific means of implementing the threat aren't as clearly defined. On the other hand, we have people in the field getting real experience dealing with the current threat. It just makes sense to get the people with the experience to data dump into a FM that represents how things really work. Conversely, no one but the analysts and people at TRADOC had any idea of how to deal with the cold war threats. Asking the people at the sharp end back then to write the FM wouldn't have made any sense either.
Er, no. The idea is that the inclination of the orbit keeps getting larger until the planet is orbiting "backwards." The planet doesn't stop and reverse its orbit.
I set up and scanned a number of virtual machines for a network security class Spring of this year. I noticed the following was the typical output of nmap when scanning the virtual host (in this case the VM was Fedora Core 10 hosted on CentOS 5.3 running a 2.6.29 custom kernel):
Network Distance: 1 hop TCP Sequence Prediction: Difficulty=0 (Trivial joke)
Running nmap against the same host but the physical OS (currently FC-11) gives:
I've been using the following quote as my e-mail sig for quite some time:
Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. -- Ambrose Bierce
In this case the politicians are trying to convince everyone that someone else will be paying for whatever it is that they've been promised. As I said in my original post, I'm just trying to get back some of the money they already taxed from me. I know it's my money but at least this way I get some of it back rather than letting the politicians "redistribute" it to those who contribute the most to their campaigns, er need it more than me (sorry for the politically incorrect slip there).
Is anybody going to buy a new car just because of this handout? Seems like it's juust giving a bonus to anybody who was going to buy one anyway.
I look at programs like this as my way of getting back at least some of my taxes that would otherwise be spent on things I don't like.
We traded in our 1987 Pathfinder for a new Nissan Altima and scored $4,500 under the program. The Pathfinder had just under 200K miles and needed new tires, a new exhaust, the tranny rebuilt, new rear main seals, new struts, some body work and several other "little things" fixed. Hated to see it go since we were the original owners (I wonder how many/.ers aren't as old as that car?) but there was no way we could justify putting in the money it would take to make it safely drivable vs. just taking the government money (or, as I like to look at it, getting back some of our taxes).
.. if someone develops a FPS where you shoot Hispanic 8-year-old females everyone will be happy? I kinda doubt it..
Actually, that should be an elderly Hispanic shooting eight year-old female Native Americans. Then you would cover all of the under-represented demographics. The only question is, does she yell "Get off my lawn!" in Spanish?
It's call a mili-helen and it's a face that will launch one ship. 1,000 mili-helens equal one Helen of Troy who was said to have had the face that launched a thousand ships.
You would have known this if you'd taken a classical mythology class.
...after the Mudd's wife in the original Star Trek series episode "I, Mudd."
I still prefer real, paper maps as well as our GPS for navigation away from cities. You really don't need the GPS away from big cities and the paper map tells you much more about what's nearby (and even not so nearby). Can't beat the GPS though for getting around or through big cities when you're on a road trip.
The "rule of thumb" for the old, straight tube florescent bulbs bulbs was to only turn them off if you weren't going to be needing the light again for at least fifteen minutes. This is due to the start up energy costs to establish the initial arc in the gas. First question: Do CFLs have the same or similar start up costs? If so, it would seem that old style incandescent bulbs should still be used where the light is frequently turned on and off and, typically, the light only remains on for short periods of time (e.g., a bathroom light, closet light, refrigerator light, etc.). Second question: Is this "leave it on" period different for CFLs?
Microsoft makes lots of money (as do their partners) from training people on how to use the new and improved versions of Windows, Office (figured out ribbons yet?), various server products, etc. Killing support (which also means new hardware isn't supported) seems to be their last resort when it comes to coercing people to buy a new product.
I wonder how many people will continue using XP after W7 comes out? They continued running XP after Vista was released and they'll continue running XP after W7 is released. Interesting that the local Microcenter makes a big deal of still having XP systems available (large font saying "XP Pro!" prominently displayed on each XP system).
Obviously, Microsoft will pull the support plug on XP at some point to force people off of it. They will claim it's due to cost and, since it generates no new revenue but costs money to support, they will be truthful to some extent. Sad commentary on their newer products that they have to resort to that to get people to "upgrade."
The current mess with certain banks and the car makers is a good argument for injecting a "too big to fail" criteria into the existing anti-trust criteria. Sure Chase and Citibank and BofA all compete but if they've gotten "too big to fail", is there really competition? The same applies to GM and Chrysler plus some other companies that aren't in trouble at the moment (e.g., what happens to commercial aviation if Boeing goes belly up? There used to be a competitor called McDonnell-Douglas until Boeing bought them).
Capitalism only works if today's dinosaurs can be recycled. When a company becomes "too big to fail" that recycling stops. Had any of the banks that are the focus of TARP been smaller, the FDIC would have seized them and sold off the assets to "healthy" banks. That this solution wasn't possible says that we've let these banks and certain other businesses (e.g., AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, etc.) become too big and deluded ourselves that there is any true competition.
I couldn't tell from the article whether the guy represented himself, just said, "Yes, I did it," or had a total boob for a lawyer in trial court. The bottom line is that the facts regarding lack of an acceptable use policy should have been presented at trial. Regardless of what he did, if the city hadn't established a policy that personal use of a city computer was forbidden and other people had gotten away with similar actions (e.g., uploading pictures to say FaceBook), his actions were not illegal or inappropriate. It is irrelevant that he uploaded nude photos of himself since there is no AUP that defines what sorts of personal uses are OK and what actions are forbidden.
It sounds like the lawyer handling his appeal has a better grip on this but this should have been disputed at trial. He may still be able to get out of the hacking conviction with the appeal (How can computer use be inappropriate when the city hasn't established what constitutes inappropriate use?) but he should have been fighting this a long time before it ever got to the appeal.
1) Nobody declares war anymore. There hasn't been a single conflict since WWII where the combatants have actually declared war. I don't make up history but that's the way the world works now.
2) Absolutely true regarding most of the typical computer crime attacks. When it comes to actually attacking a country, the procedures followed to ensure secrecy argue strongly against a geographically distributed attack in which the actual perpetrators are in a variety of locations. They may use botnets or proxy chains to hide where they actually are but distributing the perps makes it hard to keep the action a secret. The more people who are involved in such an action, the lower the probability that the action can be kept secret.
#2 May be the rational reason behind this threat. Letting the perps know that that the response may be a cruise missile *may* cause them to distribute their origin thus making such an attack easier to discover and then prevent.
Think about the whole game for a minute not just the tactics.
Very few commercial products or services are held to the standard of "perfection." Likewise, if such a product or service is substandard, not as advertised (i.e., false advertising), defective, dangerous, not fit to be used as advertised (ever notice the disclaimers on say car advertisements where they note that the drivers are professionals on a closed course?), etc. then there are legal remedies. With software the consumer has no such remedies given a typical commercial EULA.
To me, this just means that quite a bit of the snake oil that is passed off as a commercial quality software application will have to be brought to a higher level of quality, fitness for use, etc. It doesn't mean that any flaw found after a product ships will result in a law suit. It does mean that flaws known at product release or that should have been found by a reasonable testing program will come back to haunt the firm that released a substandard product.
By the way, I've worked in various software development jobs since 1980 including working as Quality Manager for a software company. I've seen the crap that was deemed "good enough" to ship. I left that position when I realized that shipping such crap was "OK" with management until a sale was lost due to a failure during evaluation (once the customer had paid, management didn't care).
Slashdot Mirror
Bingo!
I have no doubt that human activity has caused climate change in the past (can you say "dust bowl?") and is continuing to cause changes now (desertification, various climate changes in what used to be the Soviet Union due to massive river diversions, etc.). Human activity *may* even be causing global warming but we will only be able to prove that when we climate models that back test over some of the more significant climate changes of the past.
Existing climate models that only correlate an increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases to increasing temperature don't prove a thing. As far as I'm concerned, the only way to show that greenhouse gases are causing global warming is to back test the climate models that purport to show this over as much of the climate record as possible. This would show that whatever mechanisms drove past climate change isn't responsible for the current warming. There have been much larger changes in the climate in the past than the current "global warming" that had nothing to do with human activity. Only a back test that models such changes shows that whatever drove these prior climate changes isn't also responsible for the current warming.
Cheers,
Dave
In a word, yes. I find human causation of global warming to be unproven. What we have are a collection of climate models that only reflect the last 50 years or so and that show a correlation between increasing green house gases and increasing temperatures. Correlation is not causality.
What the parent poster and I both want to see is how well these models describe the past. That is, we want to see these climate models back tested over at least the several thousand years of history for which we have climate data. Using tree ring analysis and other methods, we have climate data going back tens of thousands of years including the last ice age. If the climate models are correct, they should also show, at a minimum, the gross climate swings that resulted in things like the "little ice age", the warm period the parent poster referred to, etc. If these models don't work when back tested then they are worthless.
I have yet to see a single result published in which a climate model being used to show humans are causing the current warming that also predicts any past climate changes. I'll *accept* that humans are causing global warming when such a result is published. Until then, we have a large segment of the scientific community who are doing a disservice to science and the rest of the population by jumping on the "humans cause global warming" bandwagon because it's a great way to get funding.
This isn't a question of belief. It's a question of when the folks who are blaming the current warming on human activities provide some reasonable proof that their models accurately predict previous, known, well-documented climate changes. Until they do, they and their followers are the ones who are following an unproven set of beliefs.
Cheers,
Dave
The great majority of court cases are settled out of court. Either the parties reach an agreement or the moving party decides not to pursue the action. The courts encourage such settlements. It hardly means that the model is "contemptuous" of the justice system. Since she is the plaintiff, she is under no obligation to continue the action and can discontinue it at any time. As it is, she had the legal expenses to file the suit, compel Google to disclose the blogger's name and probably quite a few other expenses. If the model is content to simply out the person who defamed her, she is perfectly entitled to stop at that point or at any other point of her choosing.
The blogger can sue Google (good luck with that under their terms of service) or she can sue the model if she was actually harmed in some way by the disclosure of her identity. My take is that she doesn't understand the difference between free speech and anonymous slander. The first amendment only bars the government from making laws that diminish free speech. That's quite a bit different from a court deciding that what someone says rises to the level of slander and compels that the person who slandered someone be identified. The blogger has the "right" to say what she did but she may then have to show that what she said wasn't slanderous. There is no "right" to anonymity.
Cheers,
Dave
Once the model found out who had made the posts, she may have decided the "you can't get blood out of a rock." That is, it wasn't worth the legal expenses to continue the action since the person responsible for the defamation didn't have sufficient resources to even pay those expenses; let alone pay any sort of punitive penalty.
Why should the model be "forced" to continue an action that won't bring her any compensation?
Cheers,
Dave
In the past, Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) looked at the threat, defined and acquired the means of dealing with the threat and then trained the people at the sharp end how to use what TRADOC or the other commands had acquired to dispatch the threat. Since everything but the threat was theoretical, the only way to do things was to have the FM written by TRADOC. No one had any real experience on which to base a FM. This made a lot of sense when the overall threat was assumed to be the Warsaw Pact armies rolling through the Fulda Gap with their latest collection of toys.
Fast forward to the 21st century and both the overall threat and the specific means of implementing the threat aren't as clearly defined. On the other hand, we have people in the field getting real experience dealing with the current threat. It just makes sense to get the people with the experience to data dump into a FM that represents how things really work. Conversely, no one but the analysts and people at TRADOC had any idea of how to deal with the cold war threats. Asking the people at the sharp end back then to write the FM wouldn't have made any sense either.
Cheers,
Dave
...there's always caffeine.
Cheers,
Dave
Er, no. The idea is that the inclination of the orbit keeps getting larger until the planet is orbiting "backwards." The planet doesn't stop and reverse its orbit.
Cheers,
Dave
Running nmap against the same host but the physical OS (currently FC-11) gives:
This would seem to indicate that "cloud" TCP/IP sessions may be vulnerable but session hijacking.
Cheers,
Dave
I've been using the following quote as my e-mail sig for quite some time:
Politics, n. Strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles.
-- Ambrose Bierce
In this case the politicians are trying to convince everyone that someone else will be paying for whatever it is that they've been promised. As I said in my original post, I'm just trying to get back some of the money they already taxed from me. I know it's my money but at least this way I get some of it back rather than letting the politicians "redistribute" it to those who contribute the most to their campaigns, er need it more than me (sorry for the politically incorrect slip there).
Cheers,
Dave
Been there. Tried that. Everyone gets one of these. No thanks.
Cheers,
Dave
True. But I'd rather they bribe me with my money than that they bribe someone else with it.
Cheers,
Dave
I look at programs like this as my way of getting back at least some of my taxes that would otherwise be spent on things I don't like.
/.ers aren't as old as that car?) but there was no way we could justify putting in the money it would take to make it safely drivable vs. just taking the government money (or, as I like to look at it, getting back some of our taxes).
We traded in our 1987 Pathfinder for a new Nissan Altima and scored $4,500 under the program. The Pathfinder had just under 200K miles and needed new tires, a new exhaust, the tranny rebuilt, new rear main seals, new struts, some body work and several other "little things" fixed. Hated to see it go since we were the original owners (I wonder how many
Cheers,
Dave
Actually, that should be an elderly Hispanic shooting eight year-old female Native Americans. Then you would cover all of the under-represented demographics. The only question is, does she yell "Get off my lawn!" in Spanish?
Cheers,
Dave
It's call a mili-helen and it's a face that will launch one ship. 1,000 mili-helens equal one Helen of Troy who was said to have had the face that launched a thousand ships.
You would have known this if you'd taken a classical mythology class.
Cheers,
Dave
*LOTS* of floppies. You might be surprised at how cheap they are now, too. :D
Cheers,
Dave
...after the Mudd's wife in the original Star Trek series episode "I, Mudd."
I still prefer real, paper maps as well as our GPS for navigation away from cities. You really don't need the GPS away from big cities and the paper map tells you much more about what's nearby (and even not so nearby). Can't beat the GPS though for getting around or through big cities when you're on a road trip.
Cheers,
Dave
The "rule of thumb" for the old, straight tube florescent bulbs bulbs was to only turn them off if you weren't going to be needing the light again for at least fifteen minutes. This is due to the start up energy costs to establish the initial arc in the gas. First question: Do CFLs have the same or similar start up costs? If so, it would seem that old style incandescent bulbs should still be used where the light is frequently turned on and off and, typically, the light only remains on for short periods of time (e.g., a bathroom light, closet light, refrigerator light, etc.). Second question: Is this "leave it on" period different for CFLs?
Cheers,
Dave
http://www.drones.com/RC-faq.html
Cheers,
Dave
"Change for change sake is good for ."
Microsoft makes lots of money (as do their partners) from training people on how to use the new and improved versions of Windows, Office (figured out ribbons yet?), various server products, etc. Killing support (which also means new hardware isn't supported) seems to be their last resort when it comes to coercing people to buy a new product.
Cheers,
Dave
I wonder how many people will continue using XP after W7 comes out? They continued running XP after Vista was released and they'll continue running XP after W7 is released. Interesting that the local Microcenter makes a big deal of still having XP systems available (large font saying "XP Pro!" prominently displayed on each XP system).
Obviously, Microsoft will pull the support plug on XP at some point to force people off of it. They will claim it's due to cost and, since it generates no new revenue but costs money to support, they will be truthful to some extent. Sad commentary on their newer products that they have to resort to that to get people to "upgrade."
Cheers,
Dave
Any bets that the cost of the appeal is several times what it would have cost to hire a decent lawyer for the original trial?
Cheers,
Dave
The current mess with certain banks and the car makers is a good argument for injecting a "too big to fail" criteria into the existing anti-trust criteria. Sure Chase and Citibank and BofA all compete but if they've gotten "too big to fail", is there really competition? The same applies to GM and Chrysler plus some other companies that aren't in trouble at the moment (e.g., what happens to commercial aviation if Boeing goes belly up? There used to be a competitor called McDonnell-Douglas until Boeing bought them).
Capitalism only works if today's dinosaurs can be recycled. When a company becomes "too big to fail" that recycling stops. Had any of the banks that are the focus of TARP been smaller, the FDIC would have seized them and sold off the assets to "healthy" banks. That this solution wasn't possible says that we've let these banks and certain other businesses (e.g., AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, etc.) become too big and deluded ourselves that there is any true competition.
Cheers,
Dave
I couldn't tell from the article whether the guy represented himself, just said, "Yes, I did it," or had a total boob for a lawyer in trial court. The bottom line is that the facts regarding lack of an acceptable use policy should have been presented at trial. Regardless of what he did, if the city hadn't established a policy that personal use of a city computer was forbidden and other people had gotten away with similar actions (e.g., uploading pictures to say FaceBook), his actions were not illegal or inappropriate. It is irrelevant that he uploaded nude photos of himself since there is no AUP that defines what sorts of personal uses are OK and what actions are forbidden.
It sounds like the lawyer handling his appeal has a better grip on this but this should have been disputed at trial. He may still be able to get out of the hacking conviction with the appeal (How can computer use be inappropriate when the city hasn't established what constitutes inappropriate use?) but he should have been fighting this a long time before it ever got to the appeal.
Cheers,
Dave
Responses:
1) Nobody declares war anymore. There hasn't been a single conflict since WWII where the combatants have actually declared war. I don't make up history but that's the way the world works now.
2) Absolutely true regarding most of the typical computer crime attacks. When it comes to actually attacking a country, the procedures followed to ensure secrecy argue strongly against a geographically distributed attack in which the actual perpetrators are in a variety of locations. They may use botnets or proxy chains to hide where they actually are but distributing the perps makes it hard to keep the action a secret. The more people who are involved in such an action, the lower the probability that the action can be kept secret.
#2 May be the rational reason behind this threat. Letting the perps know that that the response may be a cruise missile *may* cause them to distribute their origin thus making such an attack easier to discover and then prevent.
Think about the whole game for a minute not just the tactics.
Cheers,
Dave
Very few commercial products or services are held to the standard of "perfection." Likewise, if such a product or service is substandard, not as advertised (i.e., false advertising), defective, dangerous, not fit to be used as advertised (ever notice the disclaimers on say car advertisements where they note that the drivers are professionals on a closed course?), etc. then there are legal remedies. With software the consumer has no such remedies given a typical commercial EULA.
To me, this just means that quite a bit of the snake oil that is passed off as a commercial quality software application will have to be brought to a higher level of quality, fitness for use, etc. It doesn't mean that any flaw found after a product ships will result in a law suit. It does mean that flaws known at product release or that should have been found by a reasonable testing program will come back to haunt the firm that released a substandard product.
By the way, I've worked in various software development jobs since 1980 including working as Quality Manager for a software company. I've seen the crap that was deemed "good enough" to ship. I left that position when I realized that shipping such crap was "OK" with management until a sale was lost due to a failure during evaluation (once the customer had paid, management didn't care).
Cheers,
Dave