They might have a more normal social experience, but they'd also likely sacrifice the uniqueness that their antisocial position has manifested that resulted in superior coding and design.
Those interested in the relationship between "normal" mentality and things like creativity or productivity will enjoy reading these books:
All present interesting portraits of people who are far from normal and wouldn't have it any other way. The second one is especially relvant to the Slashdot crowd as it covers people with Asperger's Syndrome and explicitly recommends computing as a career for the autistic.
All of these made me once again question the current medical viewpoint that treats a pretty narrow range of capability and behavior as normal, and everything else to be medicatable. Especially after reading Thinking in Pictures, it was easy for me to imagine a world where the geek/autism range was normal, and the excessively social minority was encouraged to take medication to help them stop obsessing over trival details of other people's lives.
Of course, I live in San Francisco, where between the artists, the geeks, and the outright freaks, we're not far away from that anyhow. Just last month the city council voted, more or less, to rename the Bay Bridge for our patron saint of weirdness, Emperor Norton the First.
I'm going to give you a clue (but I'll still have it after I give it to you, imagine that)
The reason xethair isn't taking the clue is that he's afraid it will be theft. Or, possibly, premeditated murder of his own treasured ignorance. Either way, it's best for him not to take any chances.
Have you written up your experience anywhere? I'd love to know all about how much time it took, how much money it cost, and so on.
Re:people are not mathematical equations
on
Mathematics and Sex
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· Score: 1
The big difference between human beings and animals is that we are economic creatures, and can choose. We have societies, moralities, laws, cultures, histories, etc.
Humans are not as unique in this regard as humans like to think. Animals display, albeit in a form much less developed than ours, society, morality, and culture. What they mainly lack is the language skills, so formal laws and recorded histories are beyond them. For more information, a couple of good popular introductions are Chimpanzee Politics and Good Natured, both by De Waal.
By the way, pre-empting an argument is not refuting it, but is rather agreeing with it.
In a formal debate, perhaps. But you haven't convinced me to have a formal debate about the fundamental nature of economics and the utility of game theory therein.
I know that game theory to me has been very helpful in understanding the evolution of social behavior. I also know smart people who've studied a lot of economics and find it useful there, too. So your vehement and total rejection of game theory already leads me to put you in the "probable loon" category; reasonable people can generally acnowledge the strengths of things they don't like, even if they feel the weaknesses predominate. And further items in your posts and the linked articles strengthen that impression.
As to whether the version of economics without game theory will eventually win out over the one with game theory, honestly, I don't really care enough to figure that out now. Given the utility of game theory, and in particular the iterated prisoner's dilemma, in understanding animal social behavior, I'd be surprised if economics had no need of that kind of modelling. Our social capacity, after all, started with animals and evolved the same way theirs did.
But really, it's a sunny day, and if I want to argue with idealogues, I can go do it at an outdoor cafe table with people I know and like, rather than random idealogues on Slashdot. So good luck on your quest, and drop us a note when the rest of the economists have conceded.
Re:people are not mathematical equations
on
Mathematics and Sex
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· Score: 1
The Nobel prize is awarded by a bunch of socialists, so who cares what they say?
You realize this makes you look like a loon, right? Because whatever non-socialist box you put yourself in (objectivist? ultra-capitalist?) is equally vulnerable to the sweeping dismissal. That's how the golden rule works.
You haven't in any way refuted the arguments presented.
I read the first article, and I didn't notice any arguments worthy of refutation, other than the one that game theory doesn't explain everything, which I did indeed refute by saying that it is an advance, and so it just needs to explain more things than previous theories, not all things ever.
I'm not interested in the behaviour of parrots,
Then fine, you can stop commenting on this article about the mathematics of evolutionary biology. But game theory is a big help in understanding the evolution of social behavior in non-humans, parrots included.
It would be strange indeed if it, after helping with the rest of the animal kingdom, provided no insights into human social behavior. But if you feel like you can construct an alternative economics without using it, more power to you. Let us know when you win the Nobel Prize, 'kay?
They say, "Our iPod works with the iTunes music store, and ONLY the iTunes music store. Like it or lump it."
Sorry, is that in an advertisement I haven't seen? Or did I miss that footnote on Apple's iPod site? Because that's about the most research your average consumer will be doing.
I'm not saying it isn't legal, of course; caveat emptor and all that. But given all of Apple's we're-the-alternative-to-1984 self-promotion, you could see how most consumers would expect otherwise.
person engaged in homosexuality has a "right" to join the Boy Scouts of America, an organization that requires belief in and respect for the God of the Bible
Because, of course, all of those gay Christians are just faking their belief in God. How sneaky of them!
Many of my favorites have already been mentioned: junit, jdom, xstream, log4j, and many things from Jakarta Commons.
The other things I use regularly are HttpUnit, a virtual web client and Prevayler, a simple Java persistence framework.
Re:people are not mathematical equations
on
Mathematics and Sex
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· Score: 1
people are not mathematical equations [...] operations of calculus are completely invalid
Say, did you read the same article that I read? The one that quoted Einstein as saying "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." It seems like you're overstating a point that the author already completely agrees with.
reality of game theory is that it is a bunch of humbug [...] article on John Nash and Game Theory
So this guy from Shenandoah University (3000 students, "the 'yes you can' university") is telling us that the Nobel Prize was given out for a bunch of humbug? Well heck, that's good enough for me.
Sure, Nash's work didn't mean that they just called it done and shut down the Economics department, but game theory was a big step forward not only in economics but also in evolutionary biology, especially in understanding the evolution of social behavior. Simple games don't completely model human behavior, but if you're trying to understand reciprocal altruism in parrots, it works a treat.
Secondly, human beings can choose.
This, unless you're a raging ghost-in-the-machine dualist, doesn't mean anything about the analyzability of human behavior. The fact that people can and do choose doesn't mean that we can't, through science and mathematical modelling, improve our understanding of how they choose.
Re:How to write poorly, brought to you by Slashdot
on
Mathematics and Sex
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· Score: 1
Hi! I'm sure it's really fun for you to trash a sincere effort. But perhaps you could just spare the rest of us and send the author a little private mail? Maybe the review's a little overwritten, but it wouldn't kill you to acknowledge that the guy, gratis, took some time to tell us about a book he liked.
a tantalizing hint of what the mathematics of evolution is all about.
A tantalizing hint? Seems like a pretty crappy chapter if all it has to offer is a hint, doesn't it?
Hardly. There's a huge amount of math relating to evolution, and it's a rich field of study. In a popular science book, a hint is about all you can get. If the author does it right, of course the hint will be tantalizing.
For example, who would have thought that parasites might be the reason sex arose?
An insectophiliac? What is this an example of anyway, other than how the author may have bored their professor into passing their thesis without reading past the first page?
I don't follow that field much anymore, but last I heard, this author is exactly right. The current best theory for why sexual reproduction exists is indeed because of parasites.
The problem is that parasites, with their short lifetimes, can evolve to pick the immune system's locks. Sexual (as opposed to asexual) reproduction scrambles the combinations in a way that makes it harder for parasites. There's even intriguing evidence for this in human mating patterns.
The author hasn't even told us what issues he's talking about!
That's because this is a book review, and not the actual book. The idea is not to tell you everything in the book, but merely to give you an indication of whether it's a book you might like. The review did that for me, and apparently it did that for you as well.
But say, since you're such an expert, I'm sure you can point us to your better book reviews, right?
It's not unethical, either. You should know the risks involved with updating your firmware, whether it removes functionality or not.
By this logic, it's ethical for somebody to be a crook as long as we all should know that he's a crook. So I guess you should call up Sanford Wallace and tell him that his latest scam was ethical.
Personally, I'd say that knowledge and consent are a big part of ethics. Apple presents themselves as the nice guys, as the underdogs. Intentionally and silently removing a capability from a product they sold to somebody, as they are alleged to have done, without saying, "Hey, if you get this update you can't listen to your music," doesn't strike me as in any way ethical.
http://www.wikipediasucks.com/ probably qualifies as libel. Anyone want to set up a donation fund to take him out? (If Mr. Wales is interested in filing suit, that is. Unlikely, but we can hope?)
I don't know that it's libel, but it's certainly a vile piece of work. It certainly seems like Sollog has too much time on his hands; perhaps a lawsuit would help to better occupy his time. I'm in for a few hundred bucks.
Well, aren't you clever not bothering to clarify so I could possibly understand what you mean.
If you're interested, I'm glad to explain. Traditionally, people indicate that by asking questions rather than assuming the worse, but I'll presume you're doing it differently.
Nobody said the code was hard to read
It would seem to me that if you're having enough trouble finding the uses of a variable that you need to search, the code is hard to read. Perhaps we work on different sorts of code.
You start discussing giving variables "meaningful names". In sections you can't refactor.
Occasionally I'll end up with a complex enough loop that's awkward to eliminate by one of the many ways to get rid of a long loop (extract method, helper object, iterator, closure, foreach, etc).
Pretty much every time that happens it's because it's clearer with the code in one place because there's some meaning to things. For example, I might loop through a set of customers, pulling out invoices and looking at individual line items. If it were just a single loop of customers, I'd use just 'i'; that's a common idiom in languages without something like a foreach loop. But using arbitrary letters for all three is confusing, so I'd name them more clearly.
I'm not searching for them because they are so far apart, or because they are hard to find. I'm searching for them, so I can ensure I double check each and every single one is correct.
I'm glad that works for you. I feel like if a block of code is hard to read, I should make it easier to read. If you'd prefer to search, that's fine by me.
Wait, so what your telling me, is that [...] you change to use a longer variable name to make the code longer [...] use less idiomatic code [...] you stop following coding conventions as old as the hills
Yes, you're right, I was trying to say that I'm an idiot. Because there couldn't be any other possible interpretation what I wrote, right?
So I don't feel bad about automatically trashing all mail that originates in Chinese netblocks.
I'm not willing to go that far, but I do assign a 1.5 point penalty (out of 5) to all Chinese and Korean IP space. It has made a substantial difference as spammers get smarter about skirting Bayesian filters.
one of the best tips from one the best programmers I've ever known, is use the form "iii" for all incremented variables [...] Why? Because if you use English Language descriptions, "iii" should never occur when searching except for in the case of your variable
This seems dubious to me. The only time I use a variable like i is in a nice, short loop, so I have no need to search. If a loop is too long to fit conveniently on the screen, I almost always do Extract Method (or I extract a function if it's not OO code). If I can't figure out a way to do that, I give the variable some meaningful name.
Using three-letter loop variables seems like a very clever solution to the wrong problem entirely.
Java is an object oriented language, but I could certainly write Java code that would be a major headache to maintain if I chose to do so. I think most maintenance problems come from poor coding habits, and not the language its self.
I think this is true, but language is a factor. I have a soft spot in my heart for Perl, but I would much rather get handed 100kloc of badly written Java than badly written Perl.
It isn't a computer, but when it comes to email, the web, phoning, and otherwise connecting those communicating tasks the Blackberry doesn't present many "dead-ends" for information. My palm m125 on the other hand is nothing but a dead end for information.
That seems like an unfair comparison. I do all of those things with the Palm Treo 650. The Treo is more a phone-with-organizer device than a email-with-a-phone device, of course. But that's better for me; I'm near a computer often enough that I do most of my email with a real keyboard and screen.
For me, the primary function of a handheld is making calls and acting as an organizer (contacts, calendar, to-dos). The other things that I do with my Treo (browse the web, check email, listen to music, ssh in to my servers, track passwords, take snapshots, read e-books, play games) are all nice, but very much secondary. I imagine that were I a manager in a large corporation, my priorities would be different, and the Blackberry would make a lot more sense.
This is a question that should be posted to the students of your university.
His questions were, "What technologies exist?" and "What are other schools doing?" Those are actually pretty good questions for people who are not students of his university.
I agree, of course, that they should only do things that solve local needs. But it's not like he said, "Hey, tell me what I should do here!" Rather than assuming, with no evidence, that he's clueless, it might be more productive to phrase your comment in a way that allows for the possibility that he's not making the mistake that you fear he's making.
You think that, eh? Well then. If Slashdot member 539129 makes an unsupported assertion, that's good enough for me. Thanks for setting us straight. No, don't worry about showing some actual data. That would only cloud my newfound clarity on the issue.
This idea that humans are responsible for global warming is completely baseless. [...] given that the scientific community is largely split
So scientists are split, but the ones who disagree with you are all wrong? Did you notice that you're responding to an article that says that "all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter", feel that "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise."
If you know enough to prove baseless the claims of most of the people who make this their life's work then you're wasting your time on Slashdot, bucko. You should go play in the big leagues.
We already have reductions in place.
No, we have increases. As we discussed just a couple of posts up this thread. But please give the coal lobby my warmest regards, eh?
I always apperciate the English speakers (generally Americans) who think Engrish is some way of life. I wonder what their Japanese skills are (let alone English).
I'm sure the Japanese are just as amused by all the westerners who get tatoos of Japanese characters without getting them checked by a native speaker.
Slashdot Mirror
Those interested in the relationship between "normal" mentality and things like creativity or productivity will enjoy reading these books:
- Tocuhed With Fire: Manic Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament , a look by a bipolar psychiatrist at the close relationship between creativity and mental illness,
- Thinking In Pictures and Other Reports from My Life with Autism , a memoir by an autistic woman describing her unusual mentality and the life that resulted from it, and
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time , a hugely enjoyable book written from the point of view of a boy with autism.
All present interesting portraits of people who are far from normal and wouldn't have it any other way. The second one is especially relvant to the Slashdot crowd as it covers people with Asperger's Syndrome and explicitly recommends computing as a career for the autistic.All of these made me once again question the current medical viewpoint that treats a pretty narrow range of capability and behavior as normal, and everything else to be medicatable. Especially after reading Thinking in Pictures, it was easy for me to imagine a world where the geek/autism range was normal, and the excessively social minority was encouraged to take medication to help them stop obsessing over trival details of other people's lives.
Of course, I live in San Francisco, where between the artists, the geeks, and the outright freaks, we're not far away from that anyhow. Just last month the city council voted, more or less, to rename the Bay Bridge for our patron saint of weirdness, Emperor Norton the First.
Why is it ok to measure hard drives in "gigs" but not processor speed? It's an abbreviation/slang for giga, meaning 1 billion.
Because we didn't say "megs" for older processors.
For something to be slang, lots of people have say it.
I'm going to give you a clue (but I'll still have it after I give it to you, imagine that)
The reason xethair isn't taking the clue is that he's afraid it will be theft. Or, possibly, premeditated murder of his own treasured ignorance. Either way, it's best for him not to take any chances.
So what did I do? I sued the bastards.
You are my hero.
Have you written up your experience anywhere? I'd love to know all about how much time it took, how much money it cost, and so on.
The big difference between human beings and animals is that we are economic creatures, and can choose. We have societies, moralities, laws, cultures, histories, etc.
Humans are not as unique in this regard as humans like to think. Animals display, albeit in a form much less developed than ours, society, morality, and culture. What they mainly lack is the language skills, so formal laws and recorded histories are beyond them. For more information, a couple of good popular introductions are Chimpanzee Politics and Good Natured, both by De Waal.
By the way, pre-empting an argument is not refuting it, but is rather agreeing with it.
In a formal debate, perhaps. But you haven't convinced me to have a formal debate about the fundamental nature of economics and the utility of game theory therein.
I know that game theory to me has been very helpful in understanding the evolution of social behavior. I also know smart people who've studied a lot of economics and find it useful there, too. So your vehement and total rejection of game theory already leads me to put you in the "probable loon" category; reasonable people can generally acnowledge the strengths of things they don't like, even if they feel the weaknesses predominate. And further items in your posts and the linked articles strengthen that impression.
As to whether the version of economics without game theory will eventually win out over the one with game theory, honestly, I don't really care enough to figure that out now. Given the utility of game theory, and in particular the iterated prisoner's dilemma, in understanding animal social behavior, I'd be surprised if economics had no need of that kind of modelling. Our social capacity, after all, started with animals and evolved the same way theirs did.
But really, it's a sunny day, and if I want to argue with idealogues, I can go do it at an outdoor cafe table with people I know and like, rather than random idealogues on Slashdot. So good luck on your quest, and drop us a note when the rest of the economists have conceded.
The Nobel prize is awarded by a bunch of socialists, so who cares what they say?
You realize this makes you look like a loon, right? Because whatever non-socialist box you put yourself in (objectivist? ultra-capitalist?) is equally vulnerable to the sweeping dismissal. That's how the golden rule works.
You haven't in any way refuted the arguments presented.
I read the first article, and I didn't notice any arguments worthy of refutation, other than the one that game theory doesn't explain everything, which I did indeed refute by saying that it is an advance, and so it just needs to explain more things than previous theories, not all things ever.
I'm not interested in the behaviour of parrots,
Then fine, you can stop commenting on this article about the mathematics of evolutionary biology. But game theory is a big help in understanding the evolution of social behavior in non-humans, parrots included.
It would be strange indeed if it, after helping with the rest of the animal kingdom, provided no insights into human social behavior. But if you feel like you can construct an alternative economics without using it, more power to you. Let us know when you win the Nobel Prize, 'kay?
They say, "Our iPod works with the iTunes music store, and ONLY the iTunes music store. Like it or lump it."
Sorry, is that in an advertisement I haven't seen? Or did I miss that footnote on Apple's iPod site? Because that's about the most research your average consumer will be doing.
I'm not saying it isn't legal, of course; caveat emptor and all that. But given all of Apple's we're-the-alternative-to-1984 self-promotion, you could see how most consumers would expect otherwise.
person engaged in homosexuality has a "right" to join the Boy Scouts of America, an organization that requires belief in and respect for the God of the Bible
Because, of course, all of those gay Christians are just faking their belief in God. How sneaky of them!
Many of my favorites have already been mentioned: junit, jdom, xstream, log4j, and many things from Jakarta Commons.
The other things I use regularly are HttpUnit, a virtual web client and Prevayler, a simple Java persistence framework.
people are not mathematical equations [...] operations of calculus are completely invalid
Say, did you read the same article that I read? The one that quoted Einstein as saying "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." It seems like you're overstating a point that the author already completely agrees with.
reality of game theory is that it is a bunch of humbug [...] article on John Nash and Game Theory
So this guy from Shenandoah University (3000 students, "the 'yes you can' university") is telling us that the Nobel Prize was given out for a bunch of humbug? Well heck, that's good enough for me.
Sure, Nash's work didn't mean that they just called it done and shut down the Economics department, but game theory was a big step forward not only in economics but also in evolutionary biology, especially in understanding the evolution of social behavior. Simple games don't completely model human behavior, but if you're trying to understand reciprocal altruism in parrots, it works a treat.
Secondly, human beings can choose.
This, unless you're a raging ghost-in-the-machine dualist, doesn't mean anything about the analyzability of human behavior. The fact that people can and do choose doesn't mean that we can't, through science and mathematical modelling, improve our understanding of how they choose.
And if you are a raging ghost-in-the-machine dualist, you're still pretty much screwed; read Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting for details.
A tantalizing hint? Seems like a pretty crappy chapter if all it has to offer is a hint, doesn't it?
Hardly. There's a huge amount of math relating to evolution, and it's a rich field of study. In a popular science book, a hint is about all you can get. If the author does it right, of course the hint will be tantalizing.
An insectophiliac? What is this an example of anyway, other than how the author may have bored their professor into passing their thesis without reading past the first page?
I don't follow that field much anymore, but last I heard, this author is exactly right. The current best theory for why sexual reproduction exists is indeed because of parasites.
The problem is that parasites, with their short lifetimes, can evolve to pick the immune system's locks. Sexual (as opposed to asexual) reproduction scrambles the combinations in a way that makes it harder for parasites. There's even intriguing evidence for this in human mating patterns.
The author hasn't even told us what issues he's talking about!
That's because this is a book review, and not the actual book. The idea is not to tell you everything in the book, but merely to give you an indication of whether it's a book you might like. The review did that for me, and apparently it did that for you as well.
But say, since you're such an expert, I'm sure you can point us to your better book reviews, right?
It's not unethical, either. You should know the risks involved with updating your firmware, whether it removes functionality or not.
By this logic, it's ethical for somebody to be a crook as long as we all should know that he's a crook. So I guess you should call up Sanford Wallace and tell him that his latest scam was ethical.
Personally, I'd say that knowledge and consent are a big part of ethics. Apple presents themselves as the nice guys, as the underdogs. Intentionally and silently removing a capability from a product they sold to somebody, as they are alleged to have done, without saying, "Hey, if you get this update you can't listen to your music," doesn't strike me as in any way ethical.
http://www.wikipediasucks.com/ probably qualifies as libel. Anyone want to set up a donation fund to take him out? (If Mr. Wales is interested in filing suit, that is. Unlikely, but we can hope?)
I don't know that it's libel, but it's certainly a vile piece of work. It certainly seems like Sollog has too much time on his hands; perhaps a lawsuit would help to better occupy his time. I'm in for a few hundred bucks.
Well, aren't you clever not bothering to clarify so I could possibly understand what you mean.
If you're interested, I'm glad to explain. Traditionally, people indicate that by asking questions rather than assuming the worse, but I'll presume you're doing it differently.
Nobody said the code was hard to read
It would seem to me that if you're having enough trouble finding the uses of a variable that you need to search, the code is hard to read. Perhaps we work on different sorts of code.
You start discussing giving variables "meaningful names". In sections you can't refactor.
Occasionally I'll end up with a complex enough loop that's awkward to eliminate by one of the many ways to get rid of a long loop (extract method, helper object, iterator, closure, foreach, etc).
Pretty much every time that happens it's because it's clearer with the code in one place because there's some meaning to things. For example, I might loop through a set of customers, pulling out invoices and looking at individual line items. If it were just a single loop of customers, I'd use just 'i'; that's a common idiom in languages without something like a foreach loop. But using arbitrary letters for all three is confusing, so I'd name them more clearly.
Does that help clarify what I meant?
I'm not searching for them because they are so far apart, or because they are hard to find. I'm searching for them, so I can ensure I double check each and every single one is correct.
I'm glad that works for you. I feel like if a block of code is hard to read, I should make it easier to read. If you'd prefer to search, that's fine by me.
Wait, so what your telling me, is that [...] you change to use a longer variable name to make the code longer [...] use less idiomatic code [...] you stop following coding conventions as old as the hills
Yes, you're right, I was trying to say that I'm an idiot. Because there couldn't be any other possible interpretation what I wrote, right?
So I don't feel bad about automatically trashing all mail that originates in Chinese netblocks.
I'm not willing to go that far, but I do assign a 1.5 point penalty (out of 5) to all Chinese and Korean IP space. It has made a substantial difference as spammers get smarter about skirting Bayesian filters.
one of the best tips from one the best programmers I've ever known, is use the form "iii" for all incremented variables [...] Why? Because if you use English Language descriptions, "iii" should never occur when searching except for in the case of your variable
This seems dubious to me. The only time I use a variable like i is in a nice, short loop, so I have no need to search. If a loop is too long to fit conveniently on the screen, I almost always do Extract Method (or I extract a function if it's not OO code). If I can't figure out a way to do that, I give the variable some meaningful name.
Using three-letter loop variables seems like a very clever solution to the wrong problem entirely.
Java is an object oriented language, but I could certainly write Java code that would be a major headache to maintain if I chose to do so. I think most maintenance problems come from poor coding habits, and not the language its self.
I think this is true, but language is a factor. I have a soft spot in my heart for Perl, but I would much rather get handed 100kloc of badly written Java than badly written Perl.
It isn't a computer, but when it comes to email, the web, phoning, and otherwise connecting those communicating tasks the Blackberry doesn't present many "dead-ends" for information. My palm m125 on the other hand is nothing but a dead end for information.
That seems like an unfair comparison. I do all of those things with the Palm Treo 650. The Treo is more a phone-with-organizer device than a email-with-a-phone device, of course. But that's better for me; I'm near a computer often enough that I do most of my email with a real keyboard and screen.
For me, the primary function of a handheld is making calls and acting as an organizer (contacts, calendar, to-dos). The other things that I do with my Treo (browse the web, check email, listen to music, ssh in to my servers, track passwords, take snapshots, read e-books, play games) are all nice, but very much secondary. I imagine that were I a manager in a large corporation, my priorities would be different, and the Blackberry would make a lot more sense.
This is a question that should be posted to the students of your university.
His questions were, "What technologies exist?" and "What are other schools doing?" Those are actually pretty good questions for people who are not students of his university.
I agree, of course, that they should only do things that solve local needs. But it's not like he said, "Hey, tell me what I should do here!" Rather than assuming, with no evidence, that he's clueless, it might be more productive to phrase your comment in a way that allows for the possibility that he's not making the mistake that you fear he's making.
I think the CO2 problem is largely a wash.
You think that, eh? Well then. If Slashdot member 539129 makes an unsupported assertion, that's good enough for me. Thanks for setting us straight. No, don't worry about showing some actual data. That would only cloud my newfound clarity on the issue.
This idea that humans are responsible for global warming is completely baseless. [...] given that the scientific community is largely split
So scientists are split, but the ones who disagree with you are all wrong? Did you notice that you're responding to an article that says that "all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter", feel that "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise."
If you know enough to prove baseless the claims of most of the people who make this their life's work then you're wasting your time on Slashdot, bucko. You should go play in the big leagues.
We already have reductions in place.
No, we have increases. As we discussed just a couple of posts up this thread. But please give the coal lobby my warmest regards, eh?
I think this is more like The Rosetta Project.
Actually, "bluyins" (as far as the pronounciation goes) is pretty correct.
Yeah, this is common enough to be mentioned in this fun article about languages borrowing words from English.
I always apperciate the English speakers (generally Americans) who think Engrish is some way of life. I wonder what their Japanese skills are (let alone English).
I'm sure the Japanese are just as amused by all the westerners who get tatoos of Japanese characters without getting them checked by a native speaker.
No, he just wrote the post last month, and so wasn't allowed to apply the patch to change "September" to "December".