1) The whole story/argument/whatever is based on an organization that literally invented a little something called an imprimatur [reference.com] (The funny part is, the deal with Galileo was largely based on the fact that he printed his famous book and using a papal imprimatur without permission, but that's a whole other argument that I'm sure I'd be modded into oblivion for elaborating on).
Italian guy here. Studied what an imprimatur was and its implications in literature in high school. In Galileo's times, imprimaturs ("be it printed", Latin) were necessary to print books in several areas of Italy, including, of course, the Papal States and all states that cared about good relationships with Rome. Therefore, obviously had Galileo to falsify one to publish a book, he would not have been able otherwise.
On the other hand, imprimaturs were widely recognised as marks of bad quality publications. They caused the same reaction that a label reading "this videogame has been approved by the Christian union of concerned mothers" would today.
No book worth reading has ever received the imprimatur, to my knowledge.
Thousands of experts would have assured you that pholgiston and the ether existed. The consensus view in medicine has been wrong lots of times: routine tonsilectomy, eggs and other foods as contributing to high cholesterol, the effects of tobacco and alcohol [...]
And how do you know all those things were wrong? Guess what, the consensus told you. So your best strategy is to always follow the consensus, unless you want to invest a decade or so becoming an expert yourself. If you want someone with an immutable and infallible truth, ask a priest or an astrologist.
"You require a visa for Syria. Whether or not you have a visa you should be aware that if your passport contains an Israeli stamp or stamps from other countries' border crossing points with Israel, you will be refused entry to Syria."
I would guess that stems from the fact that Syria is still technically at war with Israel, and that Israel bombs Syria once in a while.
Have you heard about the Cuban Five? They infiltrated a Miami-based terror network, and instead of going the Mossad way of killing them, or the CIA way of abducting them, they actually handed over the information to American authorities.
Instead of arresting international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, the FBI arrested the agents who had done the work for them. The five were then convicted to ludicrous prison terms in a trial in Miami, while Posada Carriles is still a free man.
Ok, in this case it was not "handing out free stuff to political groups", it was more like "handing out critical security information to the host government".
Re:Enter the closed loop you cannot enter.
on
The Limits To Skepticism
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The article is penned by authors of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, an "institute" with just 6 faculty members, among which two sons of institute head Arthur Robinson, Noah and Zachary. A 50% incidence of nepotism? How can this be considered a serious research institution?
To further discredit the paper's first author, who is also the head of the OISM, I will mention he has signed the Discovery Institute's Dissent from Darwin petition.
Now, in addition to the shaky credibility of the authors, you say this paper has not passed peer review. I'll stick with the judgement of serious scientists, thank you very much.
we need to invent news ways to do review of papers and grants that is not totally dependent on self-policing of scientists.
That's impossible. Only scientists with proven track record are competent enough to review a scientific paper. There might be an amateur or two with the right stuff, but for a referee (who generally does not have specific competence) it would be impossible to know whether they were actually knowledgeable or just posing.
Also, that "subversion" of the peer-review process you talk about was nothing evil. Some researchers felt that a journal was publishing bullshit, and advised people to shun it. That's like the old adage "Don't feed the trolls" on the Intertubes. If the deniers really were right, people would gradually flock to their journal anyway, and the other journals would die out.
I am a scientist. I know that there are bad papers around. I found one last month with four sign errors in thermodynamics, one for each term, which made the final equation right—no idea how that got past peer review. Peer review is certainly not perfect, but it is the best possible system.
People like to ignore the fact that coal burning plants send up far more radioactive elements in the atmosphere than even a "disaster" like 3 mile island.
For the umpteenth time: this is irrelevant. What is dangerous about radiation poisoning is its concentration, not its absolute value. Our bodies, and pretty much every life form on the planet, has evolved with the ability to withstand a certain amount of background radiation. If you dilute the radiation enough, the problem will go away. So stop saying that the total amount of radiation released from a coal power plant makes it more dangerous than waste from a nuclear plant.
You may claim that, at nominal conditions, nuclear plants are cleaner than coal plants. You may even claim that nuclear waste does not give the same problems as coal combustion products. But claiming that coal power causes are more dangerous than nuclear power from the point of view of radiation poisoning is nuts.
Yet, those very corrupt politicians are pushing the "fast trial" reform, which will cancel this trial, since the facts date back to 2006.
Under the proposed (and likely going to be approved, unless they figure out something worse) fast-trial law, any trial lasting more than 2 years (counting from end of investigations) in any of the three degrees of appeal of the Italian justice system will be considered a mistrial. The average duration of a trial is currently 7 and a half years, you do the math.
The reason is to avoid Berlusconi from being found guilty in an open-and-shut witness-corruption case he has been dragging for months.
.That is completely false. Torino comes from the celtic word Tau, which means mountain (meaning the Alps, definitely not small). It was later adapted by the Latins into Augusta Taurinorum. Your story is completely false, especially since Turin never had a particular civilisation to boast of in ancient times.
On the other hand, the comma is graphically stronger and more visible. The period is so graphically weak that we have the rule to use an upper-case letter after it to make sure people do not miss it.
I was not replying to a Dutchman AFAIK. I assume you have no problem with light drugs, so that makes you coherent.
Personally I am for legalising light drugs up to alcohol, and banning tobacco and heavy drugs. Growing up with smoking parents may have influenced me.
Anyway, since you are Dutch, your society has a social safety net. Smokers are hurting your society by weighing on the public health care system. Someone has to take care of all those wasted lungs, and lung cancer takes a hell of a long time to kill a person.
Stop telling others what they can't do when they aren't really hurting society.
Y'know, I'm from Italy. That's exactly the same thing mafiosi say all the time. They're just "catering people's needs" and when they shoot people is a business between them, without hurting anyone else in society. That's called omertà and that's a very dangerous attitude that has nothing to do with freedom.
While the law should IMO not legislate on your sexual practices, laws are still valid in your house.
Now, either you are for legalisation of hash and light drugs, OR you are for a smoking ban (at least to the level of light drugs), OR you have a serious case of doublethink.
And, just to remind you: no, you are not allowed to do as you please just because it's your home. You cannot beat your wife, raise your army, print money or shoot people, and you cannot do bunches of other things. Actually the only thing that I can think of that would be OK inside your home and illegal outside is walking around naked.
Long time, but I do not remember it that way. WC4 was my favourite since it had a solid plot with a few twists, compared to WC3 where Chris Roberts was still experimenting and used the classic evil-aliens-we-must-exterminate plot. For some part of WC4 you could actually choose sides (though the plot had to converge at some point).
What really killed the series was WC5. Bad acting, bad plot, no details ever given about the enemies, gameplay not significantly improved.
How was the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact different from the Munich agreement? In MA, France and England try to get Hitler to expand East, fight Stalin and let them fight it out. In MR, Stalin pulls off the exact same thing, turning Adi West, and serving the ball back to England and France.
Considering Stalin's previous and later crimes, this was simply a clever diplomacy move aimed at forcing England and France into the war they wanted to dodge.
All things considered, it is probably for the better: had Hitler attacked the Soviet Union first, he may actually have been successful since he would have had no distractions on the western front, and even as things went he got his troops into Stalingrad and a few kilometres away from Leningrad and Moscow centres. After that, he would have had no obstacles east and could have taken the rest of Europe with ease.
You really think that a large group of people is capable of holding a secret so large for so long?
If they all have a vested interest in keeping it, yes.
As I already wrote in this thread production quotas in OPEC are set according to reserve estimates, which are a very fuzzy business. Everybody cheats, everybody knows the others are cheating, and everybody knows it is impossible to prove others are cheating because reserve estimation is only a wild guess.
Also, this is not really that big of a secret. Read about it years ago in a nice book, "The end of oil". This may be the first time you hear about it, but don't think this is the first time the issue surfaces.
You must be new here to OPEC. Let me be your guide.
OPEC exists to maximise the profits of its member countries. To avoid countries from competing against each other and thus lowering the price, there are production quotas.
Quotas are determined for each country based on its reserves.
Reserves are, however, only a rough estimation, because no one can go kilometres underground and survey the oil fields. They only have a few holes, pressure vs. flow data, composition and little more.
As a result, a geologist from Whatsamatterstan is asked from his minister: how much oil reserves do we have? If you say X, we make Y. If you say 2*X, we make 2*Y, and I will be happier. If you say X/2, I will hire another geologist.
So, as a result, reserve estimates within OPEC have a strong incentive to be exaggerated. In order to maximise profits, a country has to put a straight face until oil is really not flowing any more: if they let out the news that they cheated about reserves, they cannot sell oil at the same rate any more, and (not sure about OPEC by-laws) may face fines. So they will always deny any exaggeration in estimates until the bitter end.
Saudi Arabia, in particular, has an enormous incentive to lie about their cheap oil: they have a leadership position in OPEC because they have the largest reservoirs and the cheapest oil (used to be $2/barrel at production), which means they can keep everybody else who may disobey them in line by flooding the market, thereby sinking price, thereby hitting their profits. If they were to hit peak oil, that country would suddenly be powerless, useless to the US as a strategic ally, and will lose its position of prominence (most likely) to Iran, which you may guess will start a long domino effect.
You are thinking only in economic terms. At some point there is an absolute economic limit when you are using as much energy to extract and process the oil as the energy you actually get out of it.
So, there are reserves that are "unattainable" because it is not energetically sane to extract, and they will never be economically feasible no matter the price.
Keep in mind that already now extracting only 50% of the oil of a reservoir is not considered that bad (and that's secondary recovery already, when you flush with water to get more oil out).
I don't think paying CEOs according to performance will work. That's actually already been done and there are unintended consequences.
A CEO who knows he is going to be paid a certain fraction of net profit will run the company into the ground by seeking short-term profit (in the long-term he will be elsewhere), for example cutting on research and maintenance.
I think the core of the problem is rather that there is a too large concentration of power in the hands of CEOs, which is too easy for them to abuse. No idea exactly how to organise everything so that the problem will go away, but maybe democratising companies and mandating maximum/minimum salary ratios (say, CEO.salary() / Janitor.salary() < 20) could be a way to try.
Even if they weren't light years ahead in other areas of usability, Microsoft *are* ahead of Ubuntu in at least one, basic, critical area. Stable hardware support that actually works. You know, as in sound support that doesn't die every few hours, or graphics drivers that don't intermittently cause kernel panics.
Prove me wrong, Linux users.
Running on Kubuntu now. I have been using Kubuntu at work, home and on my netbook for the last three years, and I changed jobs in the meantime. My list of issues:
In 2007 (I think it was Feisty) the NVidia driver did not support Xinerama, so no rotating cube on my two monitors at work. Fixed in Gutsy.
Running on Karmic beta, cryptsetup would not halt the accelerated bootup process, giving me no time to type the passphrase to my encrypted volume. Had to do it after bootup. Fixed with RC.
Running on Karmic beta, PulseAudio died on me when I logged in for the second time. Fixed with RC.
Running on Karmic beta, text consoles (not emulators, the Ctrl-Alt-Fn ones) did not work due to kernel framebuffer issues. Fixed with RC.
So really: only one cosmetic issue ages ago, and three minor issues that could be expected in a beta.
At my previous job, the Ubuntu server we used for SVN repository, internal wiki, and a bunch of other services lasted more than a year, and by this time more time than I ever was on that job, without a single reboot.
This post will be down-modded to -1, Flamebait, Troll, or Overrated, [...]
Would fit you well: you stated blatant falsehoods, talking about your personal feelings toward Linux (about which no one here nor elsewhere cares) with no argumentation nor facts whatsoever.
Slashdot Mirror
There, corrected that for you.
Italian guy here. Studied what an imprimatur was and its implications in literature in high school. In Galileo's times, imprimaturs ("be it printed", Latin) were necessary to print books in several areas of Italy, including, of course, the Papal States and all states that cared about good relationships with Rome. Therefore, obviously had Galileo to falsify one to publish a book, he would not have been able otherwise.
On the other hand, imprimaturs were widely recognised as marks of bad quality publications. They caused the same reaction that a label reading "this videogame has been approved by the Christian union of concerned mothers" would today.
No book worth reading has ever received the imprimatur, to my knowledge.
And how do you know all those things were wrong? Guess what, the consensus told you. So your best strategy is to always follow the consensus, unless you want to invest a decade or so becoming an expert yourself. If you want someone with an immutable and infallible truth, ask a priest or an astrologist.
I would guess that stems from the fact that Syria is still technically at war with Israel, and that Israel bombs Syria once in a while.
Have you heard about the Cuban Five? They infiltrated a Miami-based terror network, and instead of going the Mossad way of killing them, or the CIA way of abducting them, they actually handed over the information to American authorities.
Instead of arresting international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, the FBI arrested the agents who had done the work for them. The five were then convicted to ludicrous prison terms in a trial in Miami, while Posada Carriles is still a free man.
Ok, in this case it was not "handing out free stuff to political groups", it was more like "handing out critical security information to the host government".
I think they do. 60 dB is the level that should be kept. There is a directive on rail traffic and a research initiative on noise reduction.
The article is penned by authors of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, an "institute" with just 6 faculty members, among which two sons of institute head Arthur Robinson, Noah and Zachary. A 50% incidence of nepotism? How can this be considered a serious research institution?
To further discredit the paper's first author, who is also the head of the OISM, I will mention he has signed the Discovery Institute's Dissent from Darwin petition.
Now, in addition to the shaky credibility of the authors, you say this paper has not passed peer review. I'll stick with the judgement of serious scientists, thank you very much.
That's impossible. Only scientists with proven track record are competent enough to review a scientific paper. There might be an amateur or two with the right stuff, but for a referee (who generally does not have specific competence) it would be impossible to know whether they were actually knowledgeable or just posing.
Also, that "subversion" of the peer-review process you talk about was nothing evil. Some researchers felt that a journal was publishing bullshit, and advised people to shun it. That's like the old adage "Don't feed the trolls" on the Intertubes. If the deniers really were right, people would gradually flock to their journal anyway, and the other journals would die out.
I am a scientist. I know that there are bad papers around. I found one last month with four sign errors in thermodynamics, one for each term, which made the final equation right—no idea how that got past peer review. Peer review is certainly not perfect, but it is the best possible system.
You don't need to get drunk to be unable to drive. A couple of beers will already put you "under the influence", as far as laws are concerned.
For the umpteenth time: this is irrelevant. What is dangerous about radiation poisoning is its concentration, not its absolute value. Our bodies, and pretty much every life form on the planet, has evolved with the ability to withstand a certain amount of background radiation. If you dilute the radiation enough, the problem will go away. So stop saying that the total amount of radiation released from a coal power plant makes it more dangerous than waste from a nuclear plant.
You may claim that, at nominal conditions, nuclear plants are cleaner than coal plants. You may even claim that nuclear waste does not give the same problems as coal combustion products. But claiming that coal power causes are more dangerous than nuclear power from the point of view of radiation poisoning is nuts.
Yet, those very corrupt politicians are pushing the "fast trial" reform, which will cancel this trial, since the facts date back to 2006.
Under the proposed (and likely going to be approved, unless they figure out something worse) fast-trial law, any trial lasting more than 2 years (counting from end of investigations) in any of the three degrees of appeal of the Italian justice system will be considered a mistrial. The average duration of a trial is currently 7 and a half years, you do the math.
The reason is to avoid Berlusconi from being found guilty in an open-and-shut witness-corruption case he has been dragging for months.
You forgot, he actually made him look literate.
.That is completely false. Torino comes from the celtic word Tau, which means mountain (meaning the Alps, definitely not small). It was later adapted by the Latins into Augusta Taurinorum. Your story is completely false, especially since Turin never had a particular civilisation to boast of in ancient times.
On the other hand, the comma is graphically stronger and more visible. The period is so graphically weak that we have the rule to use an upper-case letter after it to make sure people do not miss it.
I was not replying to a Dutchman AFAIK. I assume you have no problem with light drugs, so that makes you coherent.
Personally I am for legalising light drugs up to alcohol, and banning tobacco and heavy drugs. Growing up with smoking parents may have influenced me.
Anyway, since you are Dutch, your society has a social safety net. Smokers are hurting your society by weighing on the public health care system. Someone has to take care of all those wasted lungs, and lung cancer takes a hell of a long time to kill a person.
Y'know, I'm from Italy. That's exactly the same thing mafiosi say all the time. They're just "catering people's needs" and when they shoot people is a business between them, without hurting anyone else in society. That's called omertà and that's a very dangerous attitude that has nothing to do with freedom.
While the law should IMO not legislate on your sexual practices, laws are still valid in your house.
Curious. Marijuana is way less addictive and toxic than cigarettes or alcohol, and I am pretty sure that you are not allowed to smoke it at home, in most of the US at least. And last time I checked yes, penalties could be quite harsh, all the way to jail time.
Now, either you are for legalisation of hash and light drugs, OR you are for a smoking ban (at least to the level of light drugs), OR you have a serious case of doublethink.
And, just to remind you: no, you are not allowed to do as you please just because it's your home. You cannot beat your wife, raise your army, print money or shoot people, and you cannot do bunches of other things. Actually the only thing that I can think of that would be OK inside your home and illegal outside is walking around naked.
Long time, but I do not remember it that way. WC4 was my favourite since it had a solid plot with a few twists, compared to WC3 where Chris Roberts was still experimenting and used the classic evil-aliens-we-must-exterminate plot. For some part of WC4 you could actually choose sides (though the plot had to converge at some point).
What really killed the series was WC5. Bad acting, bad plot, no details ever given about the enemies, gameplay not significantly improved.
How was the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact different from the Munich agreement? In MA, France and England try to get Hitler to expand East, fight Stalin and let them fight it out. In MR, Stalin pulls off the exact same thing, turning Adi West, and serving the ball back to England and France.
Considering Stalin's previous and later crimes, this was simply a clever diplomacy move aimed at forcing England and France into the war they wanted to dodge.
All things considered, it is probably for the better: had Hitler attacked the Soviet Union first, he may actually have been successful since he would have had no distractions on the western front, and even as things went he got his troops into Stalingrad and a few kilometres away from Leningrad and Moscow centres. After that, he would have had no obstacles east and could have taken the rest of Europe with ease.
The link for those too lazy to copy and paste it into the address bar....
If they all have a vested interest in keeping it, yes.
As I already wrote in this thread production quotas in OPEC are set according to reserve estimates, which are a very fuzzy business. Everybody cheats, everybody knows the others are cheating, and everybody knows it is impossible to prove others are cheating because reserve estimation is only a wild guess.
Also, this is not really that big of a secret. Read about it years ago in a nice book, "The end of oil". This may be the first time you hear about it, but don't think this is the first time the issue surfaces.
You must be new here to OPEC. Let me be your guide.
OPEC exists to maximise the profits of its member countries. To avoid countries from competing against each other and thus lowering the price, there are production quotas.
Quotas are determined for each country based on its reserves.
Reserves are, however, only a rough estimation, because no one can go kilometres underground and survey the oil fields. They only have a few holes, pressure vs. flow data, composition and little more.
As a result, a geologist from Whatsamatterstan is asked from his minister: how much oil reserves do we have? If you say X, we make Y. If you say 2*X, we make 2*Y, and I will be happier. If you say X/2, I will hire another geologist.
So, as a result, reserve estimates within OPEC have a strong incentive to be exaggerated. In order to maximise profits, a country has to put a straight face until oil is really not flowing any more: if they let out the news that they cheated about reserves, they cannot sell oil at the same rate any more, and (not sure about OPEC by-laws) may face fines. So they will always deny any exaggeration in estimates until the bitter end.
Saudi Arabia, in particular, has an enormous incentive to lie about their cheap oil: they have a leadership position in OPEC because they have the largest reservoirs and the cheapest oil (used to be $2/barrel at production), which means they can keep everybody else who may disobey them in line by flooding the market, thereby sinking price, thereby hitting their profits. If they were to hit peak oil, that country would suddenly be powerless, useless to the US as a strategic ally, and will lose its position of prominence (most likely) to Iran, which you may guess will start a long domino effect.
You are thinking only in economic terms. At some point there is an absolute economic limit when you are using as much energy to extract and process the oil as the energy you actually get out of it.
So, there are reserves that are "unattainable" because it is not energetically sane to extract, and they will never be economically feasible no matter the price.
Keep in mind that already now extracting only 50% of the oil of a reservoir is not considered that bad (and that's secondary recovery already, when you flush with water to get more oil out).
... and kick whoever modded this troll up. Flash on Ubuntu has been available since ages.
I don't think paying CEOs according to performance will work. That's actually already been done and there are unintended consequences. A CEO who knows he is going to be paid a certain fraction of net profit will run the company into the ground by seeking short-term profit (in the long-term he will be elsewhere), for example cutting on research and maintenance.
I think the core of the problem is rather that there is a too large concentration of power in the hands of CEOs, which is too easy for them to abuse. No idea exactly how to organise everything so that the problem will go away, but maybe democratising companies and mandating maximum/minimum salary ratios (say, CEO.salary() / Janitor.salary() < 20) could be a way to try.
Running on Kubuntu now. I have been using Kubuntu at work, home and on my netbook for the last three years, and I changed jobs in the meantime. My list of issues:
So really: only one cosmetic issue ages ago, and three minor issues that could be expected in a beta.
At my previous job, the Ubuntu server we used for SVN repository, internal wiki, and a bunch of other services lasted more than a year, and by this time more time than I ever was on that job, without a single reboot.
Would fit you well: you stated blatant falsehoods, talking about your personal feelings toward Linux (about which no one here nor elsewhere cares) with no argumentation nor facts whatsoever.