Hmm... Call me a sick fuck then because rather than killing myself, my wife and my children driving into that upcoming 2 ton truck, I would choose to hit the pedestrian every day of the week! And to add a bit of fuel to the discussion, I (and I suspect there are many that agree with me) would only ever buy a car that makes decisions that takes ME into account first and THEN starts looking at minimizing collateral damage. But, like you said, I'm a sick fuck by thinking this apparently...
Yeah good idea. Let's start messing with this incredibly complex system on which all our lives depend and for which we have no validated model to predict what will be the outcome because we are seeing some measurements results lately that surprise us a bit because we don't have a clue of how it all works in the first place! Grand idea!
'wind is clearly one of the cheapest source of energy.'
For power compagnies, maybe, not for end consumers. If you have the money, solar panels on your roof are a very good investment giving you a ROI of around 15% per year. After 8 or so years, you have payed off your investment but keep getting that 15% year after year. Try getting that from a bank or stocks. Wind turbines however are rarely a possibility for normal people and they end up buying that green energy from the same old power companies. Those companies love that of course! Wind energy keeps people dependent on the old structures and keeps them paying. THIS is the reason wind energy is pushed so much by lobbyists in many countries, not it's technical or economical merits....
But then if you read the description, it turns out not to work by splitting water into it's atoms. Does it? It works by extracting solved air from the water, exactly like fish do. Or are you saying that fish are a hoax too?
Yep... showing respect towards the 'proper' authorities and recanting is the way to go if you end up on the wrong side of a society that is starting to show many parallels with George Orwell's 1984 (or the Spanish Inquisition or similar). I know I would. Sad but true...
Do you really think that the vast majority of climate scientists from around the world are falsifying science for the sake of money
Nope. No one does. That is just a far too simple representation of what is going on. What is going on is subtle and actually quite understandable, and it has hit many scientists over the ages, in virtually any field of science. And not even science: any research is potentially victim of this. Let me explain:
Science is based on so called 'hypotheses'. Generally these hypotheses are proved or disproved based on observations/measurements/math or whatever method is appropriate. This is how science has worked for the past hundreds of years. Under normal circumstances, an unbiased scientist should arrive at the correct concluson for his researched hypothesis. The problem arises when a scientist is no longer unbiased. Once a scientist 'believes' his hypothesis too much, he is willing to look at his data in 'new and innovative' ways to prove he is right. This is good. That's how science works. However, there is a pitfall, best expressed in a saying: "If you torture your data long enough, it will, in the end, confess". This means that there will often be a way to present data in such a way that it LOOKS like the hypothesis is correct, but it really isn't. Of course there are many ways of looking at the same dataset that say otherwise, but when a scientist is biased this is likely to be ignored. The result is a scientific paper that looks solid, but really isn't. It is VERY difficult to verify such a paper, without actually repeating it and especially without access to the raw data (this raw data is suspiciously difficult to come by for climate-science, so it seems. The general tendency seems to be that 'to avoid confusion' the data is not supplied by the scientist, making verficiation of a paper virtually impossible).
It also is the case that in the media and politically there is some kind of 'concensus' that man-made warming is a indisputable fact. On schools and science institutes young people are indoctriated very early with this 'fact'. Also, it is in many countries professionally very unhealthy to be openly critical on the assumption of man-made warming. Even in the Netherlands, where I live, there have been ample recorded cases where people's careers were hindered by political views of others, ending their job or throttling funds. What all this results into is a very specific type scientist being successfully active in the climate research field: The true 'believers'. It is these very 'believers' that are likely to fall into trap I described above that are currently overly represented in the field. This provides a feedback-loop that will become worse with the years, as we have seen in the past two decades. It will likely take very convincing evidence to make these believers question their faith and restore balance in the field. It will probably happen if temperature starts falling significantly again. Even then they will probably find explanations to prolong their beliefs, as is they way of all true believers;-)
Now all this isn't new. It can be seen over the ages and even today in many situations, where evidence is hard to come by or difficult to obtain. To name a few: - Try to prove/disprove the existence of God. Or the creation - evolution debate in which it has resulted. - Many people have been convicted of crimes they didn't commit because the detective in question was biased and presented skewed evidence. There are many recorded cases of this. Sometimes these people are later aquitted using the SAME evidence as was already available in the first trial, but now presented in an unbiased way.
With all this going on, it is not difficult to imagine some people are sceptical of climate science. I, for myself am one of them. Why? I read some of the papers and find that the evicence presented is either non-conclusive or cannot be easily verified. This is how I went to work (admittedly around 5 years ago): I sk
I hear that a lot, but it is actually not true. 95% or more of what you can do with Excel can actually be done with Calc, just in a different way. Truth is, it tells me that you have not yet seriously looked into the program. I hear this argument almost exclusively from management/sales/hrm people and almost never from people that really have to work with numbers like engineers or programmers.... Draw your own conclusions.
I heard an interview with this guy on the dutch radio and he is obviously a moron. He managed to contradict himself three times in as many sentences and obviously has no idea about how SH works. His servers are on our blacklists too and with good reason...
What part of "as well as other sciences" does not translate to "science" in general? If they didn't research science in general, they should not say they did. If they did research it, they have proven themselves that "climate" apparently doesn't have anything to do with it. However which way you look at it, it smells fishy. The fact that they did actually research the reactions to such a polarized and hyped field where unproven theories are floating around only makes matters worse. It is flamebait research and should be treated as such...
The paper was put forward in a slanted way. The report apparently concluded that: "those who subscribed to one or more conspiracy theories or who strongly supported a free market economy were more likely to reject the findings from climate science as well as other sciences."
What it the report SHOULD have concluded is: "those who subscribed to one or more conspiracy theories or who strongly supported a free market economy were more likely to reject the findings from science" which is exactly as valid, is a far more neutral observation, and does not single out a specific group.
By including the "climate science" as a specific category the researchers make themselves suspect and people may (perhaps not entirely without cause) assume that this report was not unbiased and perhaps targeting "climate sceptists" rather than being an honest report on the behaviour of conspiracists in general. And of course this fuels a discussion. The authors could have known this and probably did. Therefore the article's title should be renamed to: "Those who play at bowls, must look out for rubs".
Now every terrorist knows that they need to apply a simple high-pass filter to their recording before releasing it... I would have kept this from the public if I were the police, but hey... that's just me...
As a fallout from this news, the Bitcoin rate has dropped roughly 30% (even around 50% for a short while). Why? No one seems to know. Whatever the scam, this _should_ have had near-zero impact on the exchange rate of the Bitcoin and the drop can only be explained by people panicking and selling off their coins. No matter, I made a nice extra when the rates bounced back from -50% to -30%, but it goes a long way to show how many people do not have a real inkling of how financial markets really work.
Really... where is this any different from 'conventional' financial markets?
Under normal circumstances you can build a test-suite that will present the software with a large number of scenario's and see if it still gives the 'correct' answer after a code update. However, here the 'correct' answer is not really clear. You are trying to test the results in a highly chaotic system of which you do even understand the mechanics, cannot simulate correctly and cannot measure. On top of that, your software is going to actively influence the dynamics of the very system you are working in, making things even more difficult. Impossible to test anything but some basic stuff really...
You could create software monitoring the actions of the trading software to some extend however. This is probably the only way to go...
Once in my life I was honest in an exit interview and it came back to haunt me later...
I had an exit interview after I had worked for a automotive-related company in the Netherlands. At the time, it was promised to me that whatever I said in this interview would remain a private matter between me and the HRM department and would be used in an anonymous context to improve things. Even so, I refrained from making any remarks towards the functioning of individual colleagues or my boss, and only commented on the serious flaws in research and development strategy the company (and my department) deployed, which were actually the reasons I decided to leave. It was constructive feedback. No ranting, nothing of the kind. I outlined a strategy that would, in my opinion, work out. My arguments seemed to be taken seriously and I went away with the feeling that at least I did what I could to steer things in the right direction...
About three years later I was invited back for an interview by a different department of the same company who had specific needs for my expertise and I felt that in this department I could do some useful work. However, before I was hired, I was invited by my former department head for an interview. In this interview the gloves came off: He had an exact copy of everything I had said in the previous exit interview before him and he was NOT amused. He said the interview was "to see if I had learned something in the meantime" but it was blatantly obvious that he was going to block me from being hired back. Didn't need to because I declined immediately after I learned how HRM had handled this.
In the end, it turned out for the better, because it was one of the events that prompted me to start my own company and I am now making more money that I could ever have made over there and I am sure having a lot more fun doing it. Still it sucked at the time...
He can come work for me in the Netherlands any time. We don't care much about this kind of stuff... Even better... If you say "I didn't inhale" here everyone looks at you like you are really really stupid;-)
Which is exactly what is missing in this research. Because given a choice, the mice might have started using a different drug to compensate for the loss of the effects of heroine. And this, I think, is exactly what addicted people will do. Possibly worse drugs. Instead of solving the problem you will have made it worse. Heroine is not such a bad drug, if you can pay for it. So make it dirt-cheap and your problems will at least be manageable. But then again, I am a Dutch boy and we are all addicts anyway. Or so most of you believe;-)
It is actually quite simple provided you have at least some basic math skills. Don't try to wrap your head around the math involved just yet. Just do this:
1) Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform and only look at Definition and Introduction. 2) Get some tool like Matlab or Octave (the last one is OSS) 3) Generate a pure sine wave signal and put that through the formula's you found in 1). You should get a single spike in your results 4) Now add a second sine wave with a different frequency to the first signal. and put that signal through the same formulas. You should find two spikes. 5) Try experimenting with this, adding signals and experiencing how the amplitude and frequency impacts the spike height and position.
When you have a feeling for this, THAT is the time to read the entire article. You will find it easier to understand.
You now have a reasonable understanding of the Fourier Transform. The Fast Fourier Transform or classic FFT is no more than some mathematical trick to make these calculations faster and actually it has it's drawbacks, like your nr of sample must be a power of 2 and some other stuff I won't go into here, although these are acceptable in most practical cases. This new FFT transform seems to be a lossy variant of FFT which will impact the resulting signal, negating the contribution of frequency area's with low energy content. It could be especially useful in situation where that loss of information is acceptable as it is in sound and video to some degree. However, I did not really read up on this new method so I could be off the mark...
I would say, if you are able to support CentOS using the skills available in your organization, by all means, go for it! You will not need the RH support. On top of that, you are not buying a whole lot with RedHat support. Look at their conditions and you see a lot of things like:
- No support if you run a customized kernel. - No support if you run non RH packaged software. - No support if you run it on "certified" hardware.
So basically, if you run it according to the conditions, you will not need the support. As soon as you do something that makes you need the support, it will fall outside the contract and you end up paying for it.
To be frank... your pointy haired boss seems to have gotten it right this time. Cherish it. Most of us never get to see that day!
"but if so, repeat cycles of poverty could be putting poor children at a serious disadvantage for heart disease, diabetes and lung disorders."
What is this based on? Perhaps extra robustness is built in for exactly the reason that you may run more risk? So having poor parents may actually give you an advantage...
1) Were these researchers able to personally inspect the instruments used over the involved period? Checking calibration and such? 2) Were these research able to get their hands on the RAW data coming from these instruments?
Let me tell you without reading the research: the answer to both questions is "no". Why? Simply because for the information of 1) you need to have been there. And for 2), this data has mostly eh... well eh... destroyed?!. "Luckily" though, there are of course the datasets that were CORRECTED for all kind of stuff that the original researchers found distracting or anomalous. If (and I say if) you cook the books, you cook them where it cannot be checked later and I just shown you where that is. So this research actually says nothing at all.
The kicker is, that the Koch brothers must have known this in advance. So what is the use? Well, it is a necessary first step in a process that will take many years to complete. So yes. They will get more funding. Exactly _because_ withdrawing the funding now would be the stupid thing to do. Even if it turns out the Koch brothers were wrong, they will still want to KNOW. THAT is science. And exactly _because_ most climate sceptic scientists have been marginalized by _removing_ funding by politicians that have a very one-sided agenda. Which is NOT science. Science is all about _knowing_ even IF you find out that you were wrong after all. People tend to forget that, and in the end it is gonna cost us all...
The real kicker is that the global warming thing isn't what it is all about, it is the "manmade" part that is under fire. But thoroughly kill that misconception, you first have to establish the basis, which is what is being done her in my opinion...
Strange... I run a anti-spam business and we only see spam rising on our end. Perhaps you are missing something? Like you are blocking IP ranges (which you shouldn't) and therefore not counting those attempts as spam if at all? This mistake is made by many spam 'experts' in the field at the moment. Our servers accept every message, from every source, because we can learn from large volumes and I can say for sure: The volume only dropped for a few weeks after the takedowns. After that we were back up where we were before....
I see a lot of very skeptic responses and I must admit I am a bit too. But then I thought back to the first time I saw "Doom" on a 486 and almost had my eyes fall out. It was just such a big step... I could have imagined it. All it took was someone with a very bright idea. Perhaps we might be in for a similar surprise...
The landing procedure look entirely too complex to me. It is one thing to let something crash in a controlled way, but quite another to land it in the way they desscribe. There is a host of things that could go wrong, like failing thrusters, frozen fuel lines, malfunctioning controllers, etc etc... And all that after months in space, having survived a launch and re-entry and then completely automated, with only seconds to react if something fails... I will be really,really impressed if they pull this off...
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... Call me a sick fuck then because rather than killing myself, my wife and my children driving into that upcoming 2 ton truck, I would choose to hit the pedestrian every day of the week! And to add a bit of fuel to the discussion, I (and I suspect there are many that agree with me) would only ever buy a car that makes decisions that takes ME into account first and THEN starts looking at minimizing collateral damage. But, like you said, I'm a sick fuck by thinking this apparently...
Yeah good idea. Let's start messing with this incredibly complex system on which all our lives depend and for which we have no validated model to predict what will be the outcome because we are seeing some measurements results lately that surprise us a bit because we don't have a clue of how it all works in the first place! Grand idea!
'wind is clearly one of the cheapest source of energy.'
For power compagnies, maybe, not for end consumers. If you have the money, solar panels on your roof are a very good investment giving you a ROI of around 15% per year. After 8 or so years, you have payed off your investment but keep getting that 15% year after year. Try getting that from a bank or stocks. Wind turbines however are rarely a possibility for normal people and they end up buying that green energy from the same old power companies. Those companies love that of course! Wind energy keeps people dependent on the old structures and keeps them paying. THIS is the reason wind energy is pushed so much by lobbyists in many countries, not it's technical or economical merits....
But then if you read the description, it turns out not to work by splitting water into it's atoms. Does it? It works by extracting solved air from the water, exactly like fish do. Or are you saying that fish are a hoax too?
Yep... showing respect towards the 'proper' authorities and recanting is the way to go if you end up on the wrong side of a society that is starting to show many parallels with George Orwell's 1984 (or the Spanish Inquisition or similar). I know I would. Sad but true...
Do you really think that the vast majority of climate scientists from around the world are falsifying science for the sake of money
Nope. No one does. That is just a far too simple representation of what is going on. What is going on is subtle and actually quite understandable, and it has hit many scientists over the ages, in virtually any field of science. And not even science: any research is potentially victim of this. Let me explain:
Science is based on so called 'hypotheses'. Generally these hypotheses are proved or disproved based on observations/measurements/math or whatever method is appropriate. This is how science has worked for the past hundreds of years. Under normal circumstances, an unbiased scientist should arrive at the correct concluson for his researched hypothesis. The problem arises when a scientist is no longer unbiased. Once a scientist 'believes' his hypothesis too much, he is willing to look at his data in 'new and innovative' ways to prove he is right. This is good. That's how science works. However, there is a pitfall, best expressed in a saying: "If you torture your data long enough, it will, in the end, confess". This means that there will often be a way to present data in such a way that it LOOKS like the hypothesis is correct, but it really isn't. Of course there are many ways of looking at the same dataset that say otherwise, but when a scientist is biased this is likely to be ignored. The result is a scientific paper that looks solid, but really isn't. It is VERY difficult to verify such a paper, without actually repeating it and especially without access to the raw data (this raw data is suspiciously difficult to come by for climate-science, so it seems. The general tendency seems to be that 'to avoid confusion' the data is not supplied by the scientist, making verficiation of a paper virtually impossible) .
It also is the case that in the media and politically there is some kind of 'concensus' that man-made warming is a indisputable fact. On schools and science institutes young people are indoctriated very early with this 'fact'. Also, it is in many countries professionally very unhealthy to be openly critical on the assumption of man-made warming. Even in the Netherlands, where I live, there have been ample recorded cases where people's careers were hindered by political views of others, ending their job or throttling funds. What all this results into is a very specific type scientist being successfully active in the climate research field: The true 'believers'. It is these very 'believers' that are likely to fall into trap I described above that are currently overly represented in the field. This provides a feedback-loop that will become worse with the years, as we have seen in the past two decades. It will likely take very convincing evidence to make these believers question their faith and restore balance in the field. It will probably happen if temperature starts falling significantly again. Even then they will probably find explanations to prolong their beliefs, as is they way of all true believers ;-)
Now all this isn't new. It can be seen over the ages and even today in many situations, where evidence is hard to come by or difficult to obtain. To name a few:
- Try to prove/disprove the existence of God. Or the creation - evolution debate in which it has resulted.
- Many people have been convicted of crimes they didn't commit because the detective in question was biased and presented skewed evidence. There are many recorded cases of this. Sometimes these people are later aquitted using the SAME evidence as was already available in the first trial, but now presented in an unbiased way.
With all this going on, it is not difficult to imagine some people are sceptical of climate science. I, for myself am one of them. Why? I read some of the papers and find that the evicence presented is either non-conclusive or cannot be easily verified. This is how I went to work (admittedly around 5 years ago): I sk
I hear that a lot, but it is actually not true. 95% or more of what you can do with Excel can actually be done with Calc, just in a different way. Truth is, it tells me that you have not yet seriously looked into the program. I hear this argument almost exclusively from management/sales/hrm people and almost never from people that really have to work with numbers like engineers or programmers.... Draw your own conclusions.
I heard an interview with this guy on the dutch radio and he is obviously a moron. He managed to contradict himself three times in as many sentences and obviously has no idea about how SH works. His servers are on our blacklists too and with good reason...
It looks ok, but on my ipad 1 it load really slow. I know, i know the ipad 1 needs to be replaced by now, but still....
What part of "as well as other sciences" does not translate to "science" in general? If they didn't research science in general, they should not say they did. If they did research it, they have proven themselves that "climate" apparently doesn't have anything to do with it. However which way you look at it, it smells fishy. The fact that they did actually research the reactions to such a polarized and hyped field where unproven theories are floating around only makes matters worse. It is flamebait research and should be treated as such...
The paper was put forward in a slanted way. The report apparently concluded that: "those who subscribed to one or more conspiracy theories or who strongly supported a free market economy were more likely to reject the findings from climate science as well as other sciences."
What it the report SHOULD have concluded is: "those who subscribed to one or more conspiracy theories or who strongly supported a free market economy were more likely to reject the findings from science" which is exactly as valid, is a far more neutral observation, and does not single out a specific group.
By including the "climate science" as a specific category the researchers make themselves suspect and people may (perhaps not entirely without cause) assume that this report was not unbiased and perhaps targeting "climate sceptists" rather than being an honest report on the behaviour of conspiracists in general. And of course this fuels a discussion. The authors could have known this and probably did. Therefore the article's title should be renamed to: "Those who play at bowls, must look out for rubs".
Now every terrorist knows that they need to apply a simple high-pass filter to their recording before releasing it... I would have kept this from the public if I were the police, but hey... that's just me...
As a fallout from this news, the Bitcoin rate has dropped roughly 30% (even around 50% for a short while). Why? No one seems to know. Whatever the scam, this _should_ have had near-zero impact on the exchange rate of the Bitcoin and the drop can only be explained by people panicking and selling off their coins. No matter, I made a nice extra when the rates bounced back from -50% to -30%, but it goes a long way to show how many people do not have a real inkling of how financial markets really work.
Really... where is this any different from 'conventional' financial markets?
Under normal circumstances you can build a test-suite that will present the software with a large number of scenario's and see if it still gives the 'correct' answer after a code update. However, here the 'correct' answer is not really clear. You are trying to test the results in a highly chaotic system of which you do even understand the mechanics, cannot simulate correctly and cannot measure. On top of that, your software is going to actively influence the dynamics of the very system you are working in, making things even more difficult. Impossible to test anything but some basic stuff really...
You could create software monitoring the actions of the trading software to some extend however. This is probably the only way to go...
Once in my life I was honest in an exit interview and it came back to haunt me later...
I had an exit interview after I had worked for a automotive-related company in the Netherlands. At the time, it was promised to me that whatever I said in this interview would remain a private matter between me and the HRM department and would be used in an anonymous context to improve things. Even so, I refrained from making any remarks towards the functioning of individual colleagues or my boss, and only commented on the serious flaws in research and development strategy the company (and my department) deployed, which were actually the reasons I decided to leave. It was constructive feedback. No ranting, nothing of the kind. I outlined a strategy that would, in my opinion, work out. My arguments seemed to be taken seriously and I went away with the feeling that at least I did what I could to steer things in the right direction...
About three years later I was invited back for an interview by a different department of the same company who had specific needs for my expertise and I felt that in this department I could do some useful work. However, before I was hired, I was invited by my former department head for an interview. In this interview the gloves came off: He had an exact copy of everything I had said in the previous exit interview before him and he was NOT amused. He said the interview was "to see if I had learned something in the meantime" but it was blatantly obvious that he was going to block me from being hired back. Didn't need to because I declined immediately after I learned how HRM had handled this.
In the end, it turned out for the better, because it was one of the events that prompted me to start my own company and I am now making more money that I could ever have made over there and I am sure having a lot more fun doing it. Still it sucked at the time...
He can come work for me in the Netherlands any time. We don't care much about this kind of stuff... Even better... If you say "I didn't inhale" here everyone looks at you like you are really really stupid ;-)
Which is exactly what is missing in this research. Because given a choice, the mice might have started using a different drug to compensate for the loss of the effects of heroine. And this, I think, is exactly what addicted people will do. Possibly worse drugs. Instead of solving the problem you will have made it worse. Heroine is not such a bad drug, if you can pay for it. So make it dirt-cheap and your problems will at least be manageable. But then again, I am a Dutch boy and we are all addicts anyway. Or so most of you believe ;-)
It is actually quite simple provided you have at least some basic math skills. Don't try to wrap your head around the math involved just yet. Just do this:
1) Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourier_transform and only look at Definition and Introduction.
2) Get some tool like Matlab or Octave (the last one is OSS)
3) Generate a pure sine wave signal and put that through the formula's you found in 1). You should get a single spike in your results
4) Now add a second sine wave with a different frequency to the first signal. and put that signal through the same formulas. You should find two spikes.
5) Try experimenting with this, adding signals and experiencing how the amplitude and frequency impacts the spike height and position.
When you have a feeling for this, THAT is the time to read the entire article. You will find it easier to understand.
You now have a reasonable understanding of the Fourier Transform. The Fast Fourier Transform or classic FFT is no more than some mathematical trick to make these calculations faster and actually it has it's drawbacks, like your nr of sample must be a power of 2 and some other stuff I won't go into here, although these are acceptable in most practical cases. This new FFT transform seems to be a lossy variant of FFT which will impact the resulting signal, negating the contribution of frequency area's with low energy content. It could be especially useful in situation where that loss of information is acceptable as it is in sound and video to some degree. However, I did not really read up on this new method so I could be off the mark...
I would say, if you are able to support CentOS using the skills available in your organization, by all means, go for it! You will not need the RH support. On top of that, you are not buying a whole lot with RedHat support. Look at their conditions and you see a lot of things like:
- No support if you run a customized kernel.
- No support if you run non RH packaged software.
- No support if you run it on "certified" hardware.
So basically, if you run it according to the conditions, you will not need the support. As soon as you do something that makes you need the support, it will fall outside the contract and you end up paying for it.
To be frank... your pointy haired boss seems to have gotten it right this time. Cherish it. Most of us never get to see that day!
"but if so, repeat cycles of poverty could be putting poor children at a serious disadvantage for heart disease, diabetes and lung disorders."
What is this based on? Perhaps extra robustness is built in for exactly the reason that you may run more risk? So having poor parents may actually give you an advantage...
Some questions then:
1) Were these researchers able to personally inspect the instruments used over the involved period? Checking calibration and such?
2) Were these research able to get their hands on the RAW data coming from these instruments?
Let me tell you without reading the research: the answer to both questions is "no". Why? Simply because for the information of 1) you need to have been there. And for 2), this data has mostly eh... well eh... destroyed?!. "Luckily" though, there are of course the datasets that were CORRECTED for all kind of stuff that the original researchers found distracting or anomalous. If (and I say if) you cook the books, you cook them where it cannot be checked later and I just shown you where that is. So this research actually says nothing at all.
The kicker is, that the Koch brothers must have known this in advance. So what is the use? Well, it is a necessary first step in a process that will take many years to complete. So yes. They will get more funding. Exactly _because_ withdrawing the funding now would be the stupid thing to do. Even if it turns out the Koch brothers were wrong, they will still want to KNOW. THAT is science. And exactly _because_ most climate sceptic scientists have been marginalized by _removing_ funding by politicians that have a very one-sided agenda. Which is NOT science. Science is all about _knowing_ even IF you find out that you were wrong after all. People tend to forget that, and in the end it is gonna cost us all...
The real kicker is that the global warming thing isn't what it is all about, it is the "manmade" part that is under fire. But thoroughly kill that misconception, you first have to establish the basis, which is what is being done her in my opinion...
For some reason, we always succeed to plant clueless people in positions like this. If it wasn't so very dangerous it would be funny...
Strange... I run a anti-spam business and we only see spam rising on our end. Perhaps you are missing something? Like you are blocking IP ranges (which you shouldn't) and therefore not counting those attempts as spam if at all? This mistake is made by many spam 'experts' in the field at the moment. Our servers accept every message, from every source, because we can learn from large volumes and I can say for sure: The volume only dropped for a few weeks after the takedowns. After that we were back up where we were before....
I see a lot of very skeptic responses and I must admit I am a bit too. But then I thought back to the first time I saw "Doom" on a 486 and almost had my eyes fall out. It was just such a big step... I could have imagined it. All it took was someone with a very bright idea. Perhaps we might be in for a similar surprise...
The landing procedure look entirely too complex to me. It is one thing to let something crash in a controlled way, but quite another to land it in the way they desscribe. There is a host of things that could go wrong, like failing thrusters, frozen fuel lines, malfunctioning controllers, etc etc... And all that after months in space, having survived a launch and re-entry and then completely automated, with only seconds to react if something fails... I will be really,really impressed if they pull this off...