Even if you are granted that this is a more urgent issue than to wait for the evidence pan out, there is more than just that to making a decision, and many of the supporters of the theory do tend to throw reason out of the window. Even once you're willing to take as an assumption that global warming is happening and that humans are a significant cause, you have only answered a very small percent of what needs to be asked before policy changes are put into effect.
The question is one of risk and contingent probabilities.
Given the probability that global warming is caused by humans, and given the percentage of such that is caused by humans (it certainly isn't 100% even if humans are a "significant factor") then let's look at the potential damage if we continue on this course (noting that technology tends to grow more efficient over time as per Simon's argument in The Ultimate Resource II, basically that pollution is inefficient). Balance this against the probability of us inventing some form of scrubbing technology or similar to miraculously clean things up.
Now, flip the equation and examine it from the alternate perspective. How much damage will we accept now in these schemes and "alarmist measures" vs. how much of a damage reduction will we get?
We do not need hard-and-fast answers to these, but we need to be talking about them. What if all of the carbon trading schemes and government mandates in the world will reduce our carbon emission in the US and throughout Europe, but it turns out that such is not enough to have any kind of significant impact in the amount in the atmosphere given the amount being put out by the rest of the world's population?
If this is the case, then all we have done is potentially crippled our economy in the short term to no appreciable long-term benefit. The crippling effect on our economy may then, in turn, lower the long-term odds of us producing cleaner energy sources and thus in the long run may hurt more than it helps. Of course, some of these are long-shots, but these are the questions we need to be asking.
Natural causes also must be factored into this. Say that the temperature of the earth is expected to increase by 4 degrees in some given amount of time, and that 50% of this is going to come from manmade causes. Assuming we can reduce the manmade impact to 0 (we can't) quickly enough that we will not contribute at all to that increase in temperature. How much damage can we anticipate with 2 degrees vs. 4 degrees?
How much damage must we accept now to prevent that two degree difference and is it worth it?
The question cannot be just "is it," but "how bad," "how much can we do," and "at what cost?"
In finance this problem comes up all of the time. Would you spend $1000 today to prevent a $1100 loss two years from now? If you were to invest that money with a 5% rate of return compounded monthly, it would be worth $1105--you could absorb the $1100 hit and have $5 left over versus merely preventing the hit.
There has been a ridiculously low amount of discussion in these terms, and most of the discussion I've seen in this area comes from "long odds" models: what is the worst/best case scenario. If you want to discuss policy, then we need to be talking contingent probabilities, the standard deviation of possible outcomes, and the most likely cases, not simply "is it" vs. "isn't it."
Therefore I have to form my opinions on global warming based on my assessment of the supporters of each argument, rather than the arguments themselves.
You don't "have" to form an opinion at all. Especially not one that you argue so vehemently. The correct response is either to educate yourself on the field sufficiently to understand the evidence in question, or to take the true skeptics position of 'I do not know.' If you educate yourself on the field and read the actual research, then you may still even come to the conclusion 'I do not know.'
There is no requirement that you have an opinion on things you do not understand. There is no shame in not understanding it without further research.
Basing your views on 'where the so-called scientists seem to be standing' is bad science and its bad logic.
The starting salary for a teacher is atrocious, at least in my area.
Someone with a degree in math and a few computer skills can get hired for 50% more as a starting salary. It doesn't matter how good of a teacher someone might make, if they can make 50% more starting (and, as you mention, significantly more down the road) it is going to be very hard to convince people who can do those higher paying jobs to take lower paying jobs.
This isn't even getting into the politics of teaching.
That link goes to military expenditures. I think you meant this link.
While it is true that the US ties for 37th, note that it is being beaten badly by most metrics by countries that spend a lot less in education (both in absolute and %GDP values).
Just because we don't spend more than anyone else, does not mean that we spend too much for how little we get.
Its not that they should care about Macs or Linux, but one would think they would care about older versions of Windows.
The reasons are the same that Mac antivirus programs strip out windows viruses, and viruses from as far back as OS 6. Just because it cannot infect this system, does not mean it is not a threat in general.
Besides, what evidence do you have that what they missed were older viruses? While I admit this is a valid hypothesis, I see no evidence for it one way or another.
What controls are in place, or what discussions have been had in the event that a single entity gains control over *all* of a certain blueprint original, or *all* of un-policed 0.0 space? </quote>
<p>As to the former: NPCs control T1 BPOs, so they cannot be completely controlled (or someone would have already tried to do it with a Tier 2 BC BPO). For T2, they've recently blogged about doing away with T2 BPOs entirely, which will remove the oligopoly elements of T2 production.</p>
<p>As to "all of 0.0"--that is a rather massive amount of space to lock down.</p>
"""For instance, no matter how skilled a player, a 6 month player will always perish to a 4 year player."""
This is more or less untrue in Eve.
- First, because of the group elements. A group of 8-10 month old players flying frigates can take down a player with several years experience in a Tech 2 fitted Battleship.
- Second, the amount of time it takes to improve is an exponential curve. For instance, take Cruise Missile Specialization (a random "high tier" skill"). Getting one rank takes an hour. Two takes 6 hours. Three takes over a day. 4 takes more than a week. 5 takes six weeks. Each level improves ones ability by the same amount. So, the player who spends two weeks on the skill is only 2% behind the guy who spends 2 months on the same skill. Every skill is like that: it takes 6 days to get the first 20% from Trajectory Analysis, it takes 27 days to get that last 5%. This adds up a lot over time.
- Third, specializations. Eve is a game that encourages specialization. A player who spends six months dedicated to Battleships may not be on the same tier as someone who spent four years on the same, but would be more than a match for *me* if I were in a BS since my BS skills suck. He would also be way ahead in a combat engagement against someone who specialized in, say, science and industry or mining.
Er. You seem to be making an assumption not in evidence: That they are advocating using these tools to necessarily communicate with others in the workplace using company sensitive, FOUO, or whatever you happen to be handling.
The impression I got from the summary was about restricting their use for personal use or things where a layer of abstraction is desirable. An example of the latter would be if I have a question regarding Jython but for whatever reason do not wish to directly associate my company's name with my question (there are a few reasons for this, depending on company policies) or if I am known "in the community" via another email address, something like gmail is an ideal tool.
Any information that is sufficiently sensitive that these restrictions are not enough (perhaps with a "no independently installed software" proviso) should probably be a closed system without access to the internet and with a standing policy that any media that interacts with system is now "part of the facility." Under such extremes, the facility should also probably be something akin to a SCIF.
At my last gig if they had told me "you're out" the day I gave notice, they would have crashed and burned on their next deadline and had no one around who understood anything about the underpinnings of the software.
Instead I was tasked with writing documentation. On my way out the door I turned in a 33 page document and had helped guide people who would be taking over my work.
Your approach to "managing liabilities" assumes that keeping the person around is a higher risk than not being able to get anything from them ever again and burning your bridges with them.
As a user who has to "get things done," I don't care.
There may be a fair antitrust complaint there, but as a user who has to get "x, y, and z" accomplished I don't care why the piece of software in question doesn't do that.
Its the same way that I don't care if the bug that is crashing the application is in Eclipse, JRuby, Hibernate, or the application code itself: the application is still crashing.
The problems described are almost all problems with Microsoft products, not Linux.
This is the customer not caring about fault, and only caring about getting things working. At my old job I once fussed at a few coworkers for claiming that something that was a showstopper of a bug was "an eclipse issue": It doesn't matter who's fault it is, it doesn't matter why it is happening, what matters is that it is either their (or missing) in our product.
The customer evaluates the products and decides what the best one is, for them, given certain constraints. They do not care about why it doesn't work or who's fault it is that those constraints are not met.
Do I care *why* the product doesn't do what I need, or do I care that it *doesn't* do what I need?
Sort of like GIMP and Photoshop. If I need features found in Photoshop that aren't in Gimp, I won't wonder about why GIMP doesn't have those features, I will simply buy Photoshop.
This is a capitalistic society--Linux variants need to adapt or die. Not the customers.
Either they have to provide the functionality needed to communicate with the software in question, or they have to provide a suitable replacement with a good migration capability. Good, consistent user interfaces is a plus.
Demanding that the *customer* adapt is just silly and a good way to make sure that linux remains marginal.
At my old company everything that the marketing director sent out ended up in my spam box for some reason, even when I started flagging them as "not spam."
>Give me one good reason why I should not cite an encyclopedia for commonly availible, >non-contraversial information?
I once caught a dictionary referring to imaginary numbers as numbers of the form "a+bi, where a and b are integers."
The correct information is commonly available, it is also non-controversial. The form in the dictionary is also wrong.
Sure, there are errors in other sources out there, but there is almost always a better source than an encyclopedia. If you have a primary source requirement, then the encyclopedia isn't the way to go. If the information is controversial, an encyclopedia isn't the way to go. If it requires fairly up-to-date knowledge, again an Encyclopedia has limited utility. If the topic requires even a little domain knowledge in a specialist's field, then there are undoubtedly better sources than a general-application encyclopedia.
Slashdot Mirror
Quick! Somebody tell CCP!
How, in what way shape or form, did the "scandal" affect your play?
Even if you are granted that this is a more urgent issue than to wait for the evidence pan out, there is more than just that to making a decision, and many of the supporters of the theory do tend to throw reason out of the window. Even once you're willing to take as an assumption that global warming is happening and that humans are a significant cause, you have only answered a very small percent of what needs to be asked before policy changes are put into effect.
The question is one of risk and contingent probabilities.
Given the probability that global warming is caused by humans, and given the percentage of such that is caused by humans (it certainly isn't 100% even if humans are a "significant factor") then let's look at the potential damage if we continue on this course (noting that technology tends to grow more efficient over time as per Simon's argument in The Ultimate Resource II, basically that pollution is inefficient). Balance this against the probability of us inventing some form of scrubbing technology or similar to miraculously clean things up.
Now, flip the equation and examine it from the alternate perspective. How much damage will we accept now in these schemes and "alarmist measures" vs. how much of a damage reduction will we get?
We do not need hard-and-fast answers to these, but we need to be talking about them. What if all of the carbon trading schemes and government mandates in the world will reduce our carbon emission in the US and throughout Europe, but it turns out that such is not enough to have any kind of significant impact in the amount in the atmosphere given the amount being put out by the rest of the world's population?
If this is the case, then all we have done is potentially crippled our economy in the short term to no appreciable long-term benefit. The crippling effect on our economy may then, in turn, lower the long-term odds of us producing cleaner energy sources and thus in the long run may hurt more than it helps. Of course, some of these are long-shots, but these are the questions we need to be asking.
Natural causes also must be factored into this. Say that the temperature of the earth is expected to increase by 4 degrees in some given amount of time, and that 50% of this is going to come from manmade causes. Assuming we can reduce the manmade impact to 0 (we can't) quickly enough that we will not contribute at all to that increase in temperature. How much damage can we anticipate with 2 degrees vs. 4 degrees?
How much damage must we accept now to prevent that two degree difference and is it worth it?
The question cannot be just "is it," but "how bad," "how much can we do," and "at what cost?"
In finance this problem comes up all of the time. Would you spend $1000 today to prevent a $1100 loss two years from now? If you were to invest that money with a 5% rate of return compounded monthly, it would be worth $1105--you could absorb the $1100 hit and have $5 left over versus merely preventing the hit.
There has been a ridiculously low amount of discussion in these terms, and most of the discussion I've seen in this area comes from "long odds" models: what is the worst/best case scenario. If you want to discuss policy, then we need to be talking contingent probabilities, the standard deviation of possible outcomes, and the most likely cases, not simply "is it" vs. "isn't it."
You don't "have" to form an opinion at all. Especially not one that you argue so vehemently. The correct response is either to educate yourself on the field sufficiently to understand the evidence in question, or to take the true skeptics position of 'I do not know.' If you educate yourself on the field and read the actual research, then you may still even come to the conclusion 'I do not know.'
There is no requirement that you have an opinion on things you do not understand. There is no shame in not understanding it without further research.
Basing your views on 'where the so-called scientists seem to be standing' is bad science and its bad logic.
Yes.
LabView is a 4GL. Not that such isn't very useful, but it is designed for a specific range of tasks.
I think that's the question to ask about the constitution...
The starting salary for a teacher is atrocious, at least in my area.
Someone with a degree in math and a few computer skills can get hired for 50% more as a starting salary. It doesn't matter how good of a teacher someone might make, if they can make 50% more starting (and, as you mention, significantly more down the road) it is going to be very hard to convince people who can do those higher paying jobs to take lower paying jobs.
This isn't even getting into the politics of teaching.
That link goes to military expenditures. I think you meant this link.
While it is true that the US ties for 37th, note that it is being beaten badly by most metrics by countries that spend a lot less in education (both in absolute and %GDP values).
Just because we don't spend more than anyone else, does not mean that we spend too much for how little we get.
Its not that they should care about Macs or Linux, but one would think they would care about older versions of Windows.
The reasons are the same that Mac antivirus programs strip out windows viruses, and viruses from as far back as OS 6. Just because it cannot infect this system, does not mean it is not a threat in general.
Besides, what evidence do you have that what they missed were older viruses? While I admit this is a valid hypothesis, I see no evidence for it one way or another.
What controls are in place, or what discussions have been had in the event that a single entity gains control over *all* of a certain blueprint original, or *all* of un-policed 0.0 space?
</quote>
<p>As to the former: NPCs control T1 BPOs, so they cannot be completely controlled (or someone would have already tried to do it with a Tier 2 BC BPO). For T2, they've recently blogged about doing away with T2 BPOs entirely, which will remove the oligopoly elements of T2 production.</p>
<p>As to "all of 0.0"--that is a rather massive amount of space to lock down.</p>
Um.
This has been, and is being, addressed in front of the subscribers.
The link for anyone who is interested in their classes ^_^
These days they work out of Pure Blind instead of Syndicate, but the class is the same.
"""For instance, no matter how skilled a player, a 6 month player will always perish to a 4 year player."""
This is more or less untrue in Eve.
- First, because of the group elements. A group of 8-10 month old players flying frigates can take down a player with several years experience in a Tech 2 fitted Battleship.
- Second, the amount of time it takes to improve is an exponential curve. For instance, take Cruise Missile Specialization (a random "high tier" skill"). Getting one rank takes an hour. Two takes 6 hours. Three takes over a day. 4 takes more than a week. 5 takes six weeks. Each level improves ones ability by the same amount. So, the player who spends two weeks on the skill is only 2% behind the guy who spends 2 months on the same skill. Every skill is like that: it takes 6 days to get the first 20% from Trajectory Analysis, it takes 27 days to get that last 5%. This adds up a lot over time.
- Third, specializations. Eve is a game that encourages specialization. A player who spends six months dedicated to Battleships may not be on the same tier as someone who spent four years on the same, but would be more than a match for *me* if I were in a BS since my BS skills suck. He would also be way ahead in a combat engagement against someone who specialized in, say, science and industry or mining.
"Diversity is the only solution to internet security"
If you truly believe that to be true, then why did you only recommend a set of linux distros?
Er. You seem to be making an assumption not in evidence: That they are advocating using these tools to necessarily communicate with others in the workplace using company sensitive, FOUO, or whatever you happen to be handling.
The impression I got from the summary was about restricting their use for personal use or things where a layer of abstraction is desirable. An example of the latter would be if I have a question regarding Jython but for whatever reason do not wish to directly associate my company's name with my question (there are a few reasons for this, depending on company policies) or if I am known "in the community" via another email address, something like gmail is an ideal tool.
Any information that is sufficiently sensitive that these restrictions are not enough (perhaps with a "no independently installed software" proviso) should probably be a closed system without access to the internet and with a standing policy that any media that interacts with system is now "part of the facility." Under such extremes, the facility should also probably be something akin to a SCIF.
At my last gig if they had told me "you're out" the day I gave notice, they would have crashed and burned on their next deadline and had no one around who understood anything about the underpinnings of the software.
Instead I was tasked with writing documentation. On my way out the door I turned in a 33 page document and had helped guide people who would be taking over my work.
Your approach to "managing liabilities" assumes that keeping the person around is a higher risk than not being able to get anything from them ever again and burning your bridges with them.
As a user who has to "get things done," I don't care.
There may be a fair antitrust complaint there, but as a user who has to get "x, y, and z" accomplished I don't care why the piece of software in question doesn't do that.
Its the same way that I don't care if the bug that is crashing the application is in Eclipse, JRuby, Hibernate, or the application code itself: the application is still crashing.
This is the customer not caring about fault, and only caring about getting things working. At my old job I once fussed at a few coworkers for claiming that something that was a showstopper of a bug was "an eclipse issue": It doesn't matter who's fault it is, it doesn't matter why it is happening, what matters is that it is either their (or missing) in our product.
The customer evaluates the products and decides what the best one is, for them, given certain constraints. They do not care about why it doesn't work or who's fault it is that those constraints are not met.
Pretend I am a customer evaluating a product.
Do I care *why* the product doesn't do what I need, or do I care that it *doesn't* do what I need?
Sort of like GIMP and Photoshop. If I need features found in Photoshop that aren't in Gimp, I won't wonder about why GIMP doesn't have those features, I will simply buy Photoshop.
No, he doesn't have to adapt.
This is a capitalistic society--Linux variants need to adapt or die. Not the customers.
Either they have to provide the functionality needed to communicate with the software in question, or they have to provide a suitable replacement with a good migration capability. Good, consistent user interfaces is a plus.
Demanding that the *customer* adapt is just silly and a good way to make sure that linux remains marginal.
At my old company everything that the marketing director sent out ended up in my spam box for some reason, even when I started flagging them as "not spam."
a and b are *real* numbers, not integers.
>Give me one good reason why I should not cite an encyclopedia for commonly availible,
>non-contraversial information?
I once caught a dictionary referring to imaginary numbers as numbers of the form "a+bi, where a and b are integers."
The correct information is commonly available, it is also non-controversial. The form in the dictionary is also wrong.
Sure, there are errors in other sources out there, but there is almost always a better source than an encyclopedia. If you have a primary source requirement, then the encyclopedia isn't the way to go. If the information is controversial, an encyclopedia isn't the way to go. If it requires fairly up-to-date knowledge, again an Encyclopedia has limited utility. If the topic requires even a little domain knowledge in a specialist's field, then there are undoubtedly better sources than a general-application encyclopedia.
Emphasis mine.
It clearly does not apply to CDs etc because those are not digitally delivered.
...just what I need, another pop-up to deal with when I start up the computer.