You knew that global warming was the only thing staving off the next ice age right? (see Fallen Angels by Larry Niven)
When making claims about climatology, a reference to a scientific work - even a something of popular science rather than peer-reviewed journals - would be far more appropriate than science fiction.
Groundhog Day is fantastic. A little bit of everything: humor, romance, man's eternal search for meaning. A fellow on a karate mailing list I'm on refered to it as a "warrior's movie". I don't know why, but I agree with him...something about the quest for perfection of human potential that lies behind budo, perhaps.
Many thousands of FL residents were "scrubbed" from the voter rolls, because they had the similar names to convicted felons. This disproportionately hurt Gore, because most of the people scrubbed were minorities which leaned towards Gore in the election. The scrubbing was overseen by the FL secretary of state, who happened to be in charge of Bush's campaign in FL.
ChoicePoint's board and executive roster are packed with Republican stars, including billionaire Ken Langone, a company director who was chairman of the fund-raising committee for New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani's aborted run against Hillary Rodham Clinton. Langone is joined at ChoicePoint by another Giuliani associate, former New York Police Commissioner Howard Safir. And Republican power lobbyist and former congressman Vin Weber lobbies for ChoicePoint in Washington. Just before his death in 1998, Rick Rozar, president of a Choicepoint company, CDB Infotek, donated $100,000 to the Republican Party
Choicepoint says the information they used to deny basic human rights to thousands came from the state of Texas.
If you can really "ensure" that, then you wouldn't need the firearms to begin with, would you? There'd be nothing to use them in self-defense against, right?
Uh, no. There's still plenty of violent crime that happens without firearms. "Personal weapons" (hands and feet) are the most commonly used in violent crime, plus there are knives, clubs, rocks, all sorts of tools for beating the shit out of people.
it's impossible to prove anything on an infinite set of data that isn't defined in the parameters of the data set.
Of course it's possible. Between high school, college, and grad school I'm sure I proved hundreds of propositions about infinite sets.
A Theorem is a tested hypothesis, and these guys aren't even offering this.
No.
A theorem is a proven mathematical statement. E.g., the Pythagorean theorem, or the fundamental theorem of integral calculus.
A theory is (in a scientific context) a tested and widely accepted hypothesis. E.g., the theory of relativity. In a mathematical context, a theory is a related body of study (set theory, probability theory, etcetera).
A law is, in a scientific context, a mathematical statement of a theory - "Newton's First Law". In a mathematical context, a law is a fundamental theorem of some branch of mathematics (for example, the Law of Large Numbers).
There was a huge consensus just a few centuries ago that we were in for global cooling - why do you think the current consensus is somehow more accurate?
Just a few centuries ago? Just a few centuries ago people believed the earth was the center of the universe. I hope our scientific consensuses today are more accurate.
If perhaps your misspelled "decades", just a few decades ago doctors recommended cigarette smoking to their patients. The Big Bang theory is only a few decades old. I can remember reading science books in the 1970s (probably published in the 60s) that held that planetary systems were almost certainly very rare, the result of stellar near-collisions.
Science progresses a fair amount over decades. Especially earth science in the past few decades - the space program has provided a wealth of climate data. Comparing climate predictions from the 1960s with those of today is like comparing medical techniques from before x-ray imaging with those of today.
Then why does a strong scientific consensus hold that climate change induced by human activity is a very real danger? While all the opposition comes from people who either stand to directly profit from the release of greeenhouse gases, or have wacky political ideologies that believe that air should be private property?
The National Academy of Sciences, the World Meteorological Organization, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change all agreeing that the evidence is strong (of course, not 100% - the only way to get 100% would be to wait and see if the climate changes enough to screw up human civilization, not a practical experiment), versus a few researchers backed by the fossil fuel industry and a handful of vocal Ayn Rand cultists.
Climate change "skeptics" belong in the same basket with evolution "skeptics", or with the tobacco-funded researchers who are "skeptical" about the health consequences of smoking.
As far as waiting for certainty before acting - you know, if someone took a revolver, loaded only one chamber in the cylinder, spun it, closed it, and pointed the gun at me, and said "I'm now going to pull the trigger once," I'd dive to the ground. Even though the probability of a shot being fired was only.167, and even if it meant getting a few bruises or messing up a nice expensive suit of clothes in the mud.
And if there was only a 10% chance that a large asteroid was going to hit the planet in the next few decades, I bet there'd be almost no dispute on the cost of building planetary defenses.
The threat from global climate change is much more substantial. But because dealing with it means stepping on American's rights to live in a fantasy world of unlimited resources and consequence-free mass consumption, many otherwise intelligent people decide to stick their fingers in their ears.
Re:WTF pop culture do you live in?
on
Lucky Wander Boy
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· Score: 1
No kidding! Everyone and their dog wears an Atari t-shirt too.
I was amazed to see an Atari sweatshirt on a 13-year-old girl a few weeks ago. She only had any idea what "Atari" was because her mom told her. Where the heck did that come from?
I suppose, then, that you don't use Makefiles. An action line in a Makefile must start with a tab.
Ahem. I said (sarcastically) "it's certainly a joy when dealing with makefiles."
And whoever came up with that idea deserves a severe beating..."What the heck's wrong with this makefile? It looks just fine. Whaddya mean I've got spaces instead of tabs? How the fsck am I supposed to see the difference???? ARRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!! KILL!! KILL!! KILL!!!"
For the rest of us who live in the larger set consisting of the intersection of people who want to get work done and the set of people who want to write code that other people have a prayer of maintaining, Python fits the bill.
...minus the set of us who realize that any language that makes whitespace syntactically significant should be taken out and shot. Yeah, I really enjoyed that idea when I was forced to work in Fortran for a college class, and it's certainly a joy when dealing with makefiles.
Really. The only explanation I can come up with for a decision like that is drugs. Really bad drugs....
What about people who go and spend hundreds at strip clubs on the weekend?
I'd say they're making a stupid choice, but not orders of magnitude more stupid than someine who sends hundreds of dollars at ski slopes on the weekend, or any other expensive hobby.
If you want to stop doing something and have great difficulty doing so, then it's an addiction.
No, it's not. Addiction is a well-defined condition consisting of tolerance, withdrawl, continued use in the face of strong negative consequences, and repeated failed attempted to quit. We'd been well-served to use the term properly and stop mis-applying it to things like gambling and porn.
1) Security issues. We have to keep fissionables away from terrorists. And if any nation we don't like wants to start a fission power plant, we apparently reserve the right to call "weapons of mass destruction!" and bomb them.
A solution that only some nations are allowed to implement is no good.
2) Fuel production costs. Digging uranium out of the ground is not a gentle endeavour.
3) Disposal and decomissioning costs. We still don't have a solution for nuclear waste.
Given all that, money spent on fission power plants would be better spent on improving efficiency of use (develop cheap LED lightbulbs and put them everywhere, offer interest-free loans for home insulation, etcetera) and on fusion research.
This makes no sense to me at all. Filters are supposed to keep other people (your kids, your patrons, your employees) away from using your machine to see porn, but this scheme is about your own habits. If you don't want to see porn, don't go to porn sites. How is sending someone a list of what sites you view going to help you do that?
Unless you buy into the silly idea put forth by some on the wacko fringe of the religious right that porn is somehow "addictive", and this is suposed to be like an alcoholic having a friend keep an eye out to make sure he doesn't drink...even then, why would you pay this middleman?
It still works just fine (after about 25 years of use from a family of 7) so there hasn't been a need to replace it...
Works fine until you encounter a DTMF-based voicemail system that doesn't have a default. I was once at the home of a friend who's only phone was rotary, went to call my parents who have voicemail set up on their PC, and was unable to leave a message.
But yeah, general point stands - they don't make 'em like they used to.
It's ridiculous to think that poor people pay more for things.
Uh, no. It's true. It's part of the vicious cycle - poverty is expensive.
How did you get you groceries this week? Probably drove to your nearby supermarket. How does a poor urban family, in a neighborhood far away from a market, and without a car, get theirs? They either pay very high prices at a convenience store, or pay for a taxi to go to the market (in which case we should include the cost of the cab ride in the price of the groceries).
Poor people pay more for credit. For "things" they simply either don't buy them, or tend to buy the cheapest ones available.
Which is also expensive, when the cheap one breaks and has to be replaced constantly.
There are, of course, valid economic reasons why things are this way; but we have to acknowledge and understand it if we want lessen the problem.
I picked up a used Akai DPS12 awhile back...haven't had the time to play with it as much as I'd like, but it's pretty nice. May be ore than you're looking for, though.
Either treason or perjury has occured. Long-hair Linux hipies would go to jail for such action, but bribe^H^H^H^H^Hcampain fund producers like MS will not suffer at all. Welcome to America...
I heard there was a new thing where they call and leave an advertisement on your answering machine. I don't know if that's true...
I get these all the fscking time. Seems to be a pretty brain-dead system; it calls, waits several seconds (probably the length of the average answering machine accouncement), then plays its canned spam: "Hi, this is Alice from SmegCorp, sorry I missed you but I wanted to let you know about...."
None of us can put up with the ugliness of text in current Linux GUIs, which looks like the Mac of almost 20 years ago.
Odd...I find that text on my Linux box is much more readable than on a Windows machine or Mac. (Ugliest text I've ever seen was defintely on a Power PCMac I had on my dekat at one job.)
Of course, part of it is using the right font for the job. I use Lucidia Typewriter, a lovely fixed-width sans-serif font, in my emacs and terminal windows, and it's a joy. In my browser (galeon), I get to use fonts that aren't fscked up by "anti-aliasing" (worst idea ever - making characters blurry does not increase readability!)
If you're trying to use some WYSIWYG word processor or something, there may be more of a problem - but that's a fundamental issue that fonts that work on paper don't work on screen, and vice-versa.
It seems to me that if you believe in a purely physical cause for our existence (and evolution is in that direction), you should also hold the position that your experience of a consciousness is the result (by-product) of a physical process that is completely out of your control.
This apparent problem is based on a false view of who/what "you" are...that somehow a "self" apart from the rest of the universe exists...that somehow there's a "you" that's being mercilessly manipulated by a cold cruel universe. The way out of this apparent dilemma is to realize that you are not separate from the rest of the universe, that the self we usually think of is an illusion. The brain is a story-telling machine, and from sensory information it constructs plots and characters - including our "selves". Which is all fine an entertaining, so long as you realize it for what it is. Attaching to this fiction that mind creates is the cause of tremendous suffering.
Mortal:
Well, are my acts determined by the laws of nature or aren't they?
God:
The word determined here is subtly but powerfully misleading and has contributed so much to the confusions of the free will versus determinism controversies. Your acts are certainly in accordance with the laws of nature, but to say they are determined by the laws of nature creates a totally misleading psychological image which is that your will could somehow be in conflict with the laws of nature and that the latter is somehow more powerful than you, and could "determine" your acts whether you liked it or not. But it is simply impossible for your will to ever conflict with natural law. You and natural law are really one and the same.
Mortal:
What do you mean that I cannot conflict with nature? Suppose I were to become very stubborn, and I determined not to obey the laws of nature. What could stop me? If I became sufficiently stubborn even you could not stop me!
God:
You are absolutely right! I certainly could not stop you. Nothing could stop you. But there is no need to stop you, because you could not even start! As Goethe very beautifully expressed it, "In trying to oppose Nature, we are, in the very process of doing so, acting according to the laws of nature!" Don't you see that the so-called "laws of nature" are nothing more than a description of how in fact you and other beings do act? They are merely a description of how you act, not a prescription of of how you should act, not a power or force which compels or determines your acts. To be valid a law of nature must take into account how in fact you do act, or, if you like, how you choose to act.
Mortal:
So you really claim that I am incapable of determining to act against natural law?
God:
It is interesting that you have twice now used the phrase "determined to act" instead of "chosen to act." This identification is quite common. Often one uses the statement "I am determined to do this" synonymously with "I have chosen to do this." This very psychological identification should reveal that determinism and choice are much closer than they might appear. Of course, you might well say that the doctrine of free will says that it is you who are doing the determining, whereas the doctrine of determinism appears to say that your acts are determined by something apparently outside you. But the confusion is largely caused by your bifurcation of reality into the "you" and the "not you." Really now, just where do you leave off and the rest of the universe begin? Or where does the rest of the universe leave off and you begin? Once you can see the so-called "you" and the so-called "nature" as a continuous whole, then you can never again be bothered by such questions as whether it is you who are controlling nature or nature who is controlling you. Thus the muddle of free will versus determinism will vanish. If I may use a crude analogy, imagine two bodies moving toward each other by virtue of gravitational attraction. Each body, if sentient, might wonder whether it is he or the other fellow who is exerting the "force." In a way it is both, in a way it is neither. It is best to say that it is the configuration of the two which is crucial.
Or consult any Zen master for further enlightenment.
Slashdot Mirror
When making claims about climatology, a reference to a scientific work - even a something of popular science rather than peer-reviewed journals - would be far more appropriate than science fiction.
Groundhog Day is fantastic. A little bit of everything: humor, romance, man's eternal search for meaning. A fellow on a karate mailing list I'm on refered to it as a "warrior's movie". I don't know why, but I agree with him...something about the quest for perfection of human potential that lies behind budo, perhaps.
Ah, Robocop. "I'd buy *that* for a dollar!"
A good flick with some subtle moments of greatness.
And the information they used came from...Texas.
Florida contracted out their Jim Crow disenfranchisement to a company called Choicepoint, a company whose board has strong Republician ties:
Choicepoint says the information they used to deny basic human rights to thousands came from the state of Texas.
Uh, no. There's still plenty of violent crime that happens without firearms. "Personal weapons" (hands and feet) are the most commonly used in violent crime, plus there are knives, clubs, rocks, all sorts of tools for beating the shit out of people.
Of course it's possible. Between high school, college, and grad school I'm sure I proved hundreds of propositions about infinite sets.
No.
A theorem is a proven mathematical statement. E.g., the Pythagorean theorem, or the fundamental theorem of integral calculus.
A theory is (in a scientific context) a tested and widely accepted hypothesis. E.g., the theory of relativity. In a mathematical context, a theory is a related body of study (set theory, probability theory, etcetera).
A law is, in a scientific context, a mathematical statement of a theory - "Newton's First Law". In a mathematical context, a law is a fundamental theorem of some branch of mathematics (for example, the Law of Large Numbers).
Just a few centuries ago? Just a few centuries ago people believed the earth was the center of the universe. I hope our scientific consensuses today are more accurate.
If perhaps your misspelled "decades", just a few decades ago doctors recommended cigarette smoking to their patients. The Big Bang theory is only a few decades old. I can remember reading science books in the 1970s (probably published in the 60s) that held that planetary systems were almost certainly very rare, the result of stellar near-collisions.
Science progresses a fair amount over decades. Especially earth science in the past few decades - the space program has provided a wealth of climate data. Comparing climate predictions from the 1960s with those of today is like comparing medical techniques from before x-ray imaging with those of today.
Then why does a strong scientific consensus hold that climate change induced by human activity is a very real danger? While all the opposition comes from people who either stand to directly profit from the release of greeenhouse gases, or have wacky political ideologies that believe that air should be private property?
The National Academy of Sciences, the World Meteorological Organization, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change all agreeing that the evidence is strong (of course, not 100% - the only way to get 100% would be to wait and see if the climate changes enough to screw up human civilization, not a practical experiment), versus a few researchers backed by the fossil fuel industry and a handful of vocal Ayn Rand cultists.
Climate change "skeptics" belong in the same basket with evolution "skeptics", or with the tobacco-funded researchers who are "skeptical" about the health consequences of smoking.
As far as waiting for certainty before acting - you know, if someone took a revolver, loaded only one chamber in the cylinder, spun it, closed it, and pointed the gun at me, and said "I'm now going to pull the trigger once," I'd dive to the ground. Even though the probability of a shot being fired was only .167, and even if it meant getting a few bruises or messing up a nice expensive suit of clothes in the mud.
And if there was only a 10% chance that a large asteroid was going to hit the planet in the next few decades, I bet there'd be almost no dispute on the cost of building planetary defenses.
The threat from global climate change is much more substantial. But because dealing with it means stepping on American's rights to live in a fantasy world of unlimited resources and consequence-free mass consumption, many otherwise intelligent people decide to stick their fingers in their ears.
I was amazed to see an Atari sweatshirt on a 13-year-old girl a few weeks ago. She only had any idea what "Atari" was because her mom told her. Where the heck did that come from?
Ahem. I said (sarcastically) "it's certainly a joy when dealing with makefiles."
And whoever came up with that idea deserves a severe beating..."What the heck's wrong with this makefile? It looks just fine. Whaddya mean I've got spaces instead of tabs? How the fsck am I supposed to see the difference???? ARRRGGGGGHHHHHH!!!! KILL!! KILL!! KILL!!!"
...minus the set of us who realize that any language that makes whitespace syntactically significant should be taken out and shot. Yeah, I really enjoyed that idea when I was forced to work in Fortran for a college class, and it's certainly a joy when dealing with makefiles.
Really. The only explanation I can come up with for a decision like that is drugs. Really bad drugs....
Please cite peer-reviewed psychological literature on this. You'll pardon me if I don't find a URL with "church" in it to be a reputable source...
No, it's not. Addiction is a well-defined condition consisting of tolerance, withdrawl, continued use in the face of strong negative consequences, and repeated failed attempted to quit. We'd been well-served to use the term properly and stop mis-applying it to things like gambling and porn.
1) Security issues. We have to keep fissionables away from terrorists. And if any nation we don't like wants to start a fission power plant, we apparently reserve the right to call "weapons of mass destruction!" and bomb them.
A solution that only some nations are allowed to implement is no good.
2) Fuel production costs. Digging uranium out of the ground is not a gentle endeavour.
3) Disposal and decomissioning costs. We still don't have a solution for nuclear waste.
Given all that, money spent on fission power plants would be better spent on improving efficiency of use (develop cheap LED lightbulbs and put them everywhere, offer interest-free loans for home insulation, etcetera) and on fusion research.
This makes no sense to me at all. Filters are supposed to keep other people (your kids, your patrons, your employees) away from using your machine to see porn, but this scheme is about your own habits. If you don't want to see porn, don't go to porn sites. How is sending someone a list of what sites you view going to help you do that?
Unless you buy into the silly idea put forth by some on the wacko fringe of the religious right that porn is somehow "addictive", and this is suposed to be like an alcoholic having a friend keep an eye out to make sure he doesn't drink...even then, why would you pay this middleman?
Works fine until you encounter a DTMF-based voicemail system that doesn't have a default. I was once at the home of a friend who's only phone was rotary, went to call my parents who have voicemail set up on their PC, and was unable to leave a message.
But yeah, general point stands - they don't make 'em like they used to.
Uh, no. It's true. It's part of the vicious cycle - poverty is expensive.
How did you get you groceries this week? Probably drove to your nearby supermarket. How does a poor urban family, in a neighborhood far away from a market, and without a car, get theirs? They either pay very high prices at a convenience store, or pay for a taxi to go to the market (in which case we should include the cost of the cab ride in the price of the groceries).
Which is also expensive, when the cheap one breaks and has to be replaced constantly.
There are, of course, valid economic reasons why things are this way; but we have to acknowledge and understand it if we want lessen the problem.
I picked up a used Akai DPS12 awhile back...haven't had the time to play with it as much as I'd like, but it's pretty nice. May be ore than you're looking for, though.
Either treason or perjury has occured. Long-hair Linux hipies would go to jail for such action, but bribe^H^H^H^H^Hcampain fund producers like MS will not suffer at all. Welcome to America...
And murder-for-hire pays even more. So what? Good pay is no excuse for participating in unethical behavior...
Source? They don't sound like it to me.
And if they are, they chose to take an evil job. They're lucky if a tounge-lashing is all they get...
I get these all the fscking time. Seems to be a pretty brain-dead system; it calls, waits several seconds (probably the length of the average answering machine accouncement), then plays its canned spam: "Hi, this is Alice from SmegCorp, sorry I missed you but I wanted to let you know about...."
Odd...I find that text on my Linux box is much more readable than on a Windows machine or Mac. (Ugliest text I've ever seen was defintely on a Power PCMac I had on my dekat at one job.)
Of course, part of it is using the right font for the job. I use Lucidia Typewriter, a lovely fixed-width sans-serif font, in my emacs and terminal windows, and it's a joy. In my browser (galeon), I get to use fonts that aren't fscked up by "anti-aliasing" (worst idea ever - making characters blurry does not increase readability!)
If you're trying to use some WYSIWYG word processor or something, there may be more of a problem - but that's a fundamental issue that fonts that work on paper don't work on screen, and vice-versa.
From which, one might conclude that he never did. And one might further conclude that there's no such character...
Why?
I mean, do you believe it just 'cause it sounds cool, or do you have some chain of reasoning that leads you towards this conclusion?
This apparent problem is based on a false view of who/what "you" are...that somehow a "self" apart from the rest of the universe exists...that somehow there's a "you" that's being mercilessly manipulated by a cold cruel universe. The way out of this apparent dilemma is to realize that you are not separate from the rest of the universe, that the self we usually think of is an illusion. The brain is a story-telling machine, and from sensory information it constructs plots and characters - including our "selves". Which is all fine an entertaining, so long as you realize it for what it is. Attaching to this fiction that mind creates is the cause of tremendous suffering.
I don't have time or space to explore this fully (duh!), but let me recommend Alan Watts' The Book (On the taboo against knowing who you are) , and Raymond Smullyan's The Tao is Silent, especially the chapter "Is God a Taoist?":
Or consult any Zen master for further enlightenment.