Agreed. It was half meant as a joke. Clearly nobody actually uses the model that predicts next Tuesday's rainfall to predict the climate in 2050, that'd be absurd. The two are unrelated. I was merely aiming to demonstrate that computer models that are used to predict _any_ kind of non-trivial event n time in the future are far from perfect, even for relatively small values of n. Some people treat model predictions as gospel.
People generally call a weather report accurate if the events predicted happen on that day in an area 1 km^2 in size. If the IPCC report talks about yearly rainfall in a 100 by 100 km area it would be the average of 3.6 million data points from your weather report. Those two are quite different, especially in relation to the average size of a weather event.
Again, I agree with you. But keep in mind that your die roll scenario is very simplistic, and you have almost perfect knowledge about your die system beforehand. There are a very small set of assumptions that are, for the general case, very reasonable ('the die you using has been manufactured correctly, and is not weighted awkwardly', for example). The number of variables involved is extremely low. The behaviour of the system is very well understood and highly predictable.
Anybody who claims that they can predict the state of a highly complex, chaotic, and imperfectly understood system 50 years from now with the sort of accuracy you enjoy in your die roll scenario is lying to you.
This is why I said:
Note: This doesn't say anything about the accuracy of climate models. It just says that the inaccuracy of weather models does *neither* support nor contradict the assumption that our current climate models are accurate enough to base policy decisions on their predictions.
Yes, there are an awful lot of guesstimated parameters (in some cases they're not only guessing the value of the parameter but whether that parameter exists at all) and my main problem with all those predictions for 2100 is that I suspect a lot of those parameters were tweaked until the results appeared reasonable.
I suspect that without any proof or strong indication; I haven't read any of the relevant reports, I don't know the people and don't know how they got to those assumptions; IOW my doubts are straight out of my donkey, which btw. is why I didn't mention those.
My comment was solely about your incorrect assumption that the accuracy (or lack thereof) of the weather forecast is any indication for the accuracy of climate models. And therefore my dice analogy *is* correct. Simplistic or not, there exists no way to predict the result of a die roll but very accurate models for the average of a large number of rolls. If you have doubts about our climate models post some examples of insufficiently understood parameters (and there are lots), but don't support a valid point with an invalid argument.
A lot of analysis is devoted to the predictions of these models, yet very little analysis seems to be devoted to the accuracy of the models in question. Lets see the source code for their models. Lets see all the assumptions on which they are built. I don't trust predictions that come out of black boxes. They're not repeatable.
Are you sure? I'd guess that you should be able to get the assumptions and methodologies for most of the models used for the IPCC reports, but most of those wouldn't be repeatable without a supercomputer. But you can't hardly argue that a researcher shouldn't use the best equipment available for his/her research just to make it more easily repeatable for other people.
If you have any sources on models being black boxes and scientists refusing to share their methodology they would really interest me.
Btw. the bold parts aren't meant to be screaming or anything, my reply just got awfully long and I wanted to highlight those two parts. =)
Which generally can't even predict what weather I'm going to have at the end of this week, never mind in the year 2050.
Argh, repeat after me:
WEATHER != CLIMATE
I don't know whether you actually believe what you wrote or if it was just a joke but too many people do believe that shit, so please refrain from repeating it.
Just because I can't predict the result of a single die roll doesn't mean I can't predict that the average of a million rolls will be close to 3.5 (unless someone's been cheating =)
Note: This doesn't say anything about the accuracy of climate models. It just says that the inaccuracy of weather models does *neither* support nor contradict the assumption that our current climate models are accurate enough to base policy decisions on their predictions.
Oh, c'mon, this is as lame as your run-of-the-mill "definatly" or "nucular".
I really feared today's Spelling Nazi Competition would once again be a forgettable bore but then edwardpickman saved us with this nugget:
As contributions from China and developing countries to CO2 increase the problem will excellorate
Ladies and Gentlemen, we've got ourselves a winner!
Now I hope they make it simple to use and search (Amazon's is clunky, only shows a couple pages and incompatible with many browsers.)
Which browsers? It works fine in IE, Firefox, Opera, Konqueror and probably Safari (don't have a Mac but it says it does =). I assume you use Lynx?
I hope those publishers will allow Amazon to provide the same content as their own service, although I assume there'll be restrictions for technical books because for those it's generally easier to use their online versions exclusively (compared to novels).
The Shuttle's launching off the Mobile Launcher Platform. Unlike a clamshell it's directly below the exhaust and it is even mobile (as the name implies; btw. the parts of the clamshell would need to be "mobile" as well, to open and close that thing, but unlike the MLP the engines wouldn't need to be 5m below the SLBs.
I think the "which browser is faster" comparisons are (or should be) a thing of the past. If you didn't buy your PC last century there's not much of a speed difference to be had. Some browsers might cache better than others but if I think I'm gonna need that page again, I generally just open the link in a new tab anyway.
Nowadays if some page's slow to load I think "slow page" instead of "slow browser".
OTOH I use *lots* of tabs and there are major differences in memory consumption. On my PC Opera needs about 250-350MB of RAM for 100 tabs, Konqueror 400 and Firefox between 800 and 1.5GB.
Why? Colonizing the moon is a drastically different undertaking from colonizing Mars. The moon is essentially a vacuum. It's cold. It has no useful resources to speak of (and no, He3 won't be useful any time soon). 1/6th Earth's gravity. And it's fairly close.
That's the beauty of doing the Moon first. A colony on the Moon is harder than on Mars in most respects. Due to the lack of an atmosphere the sand on the Moon is some of the most abrasive stuff you'll be able to find and the lack of gravity has massive implications for astronaut health and will make many tasks very tedious.
OTOH, *if* something goes really wrong, you won't have to wait for a launch window, you won't give up years and years of work and you won't need a year to get back to Earth.
Someone gets cancer? Back to Earth! No need to wait for spring. Your water supply went the way of the Dodo? Back to Earth!...
The Moon makes such an excellent training exercise because like in just about any other exercise that's worth its money the problems you face are harder than the real thing while the risks are considerably lower. It also allows us to perfect much of the everyday equipment so it can resist the daily wear and tear and break gracefully while we wait for a better solution to get a spacecraft from here to Mars in a reasonable timeframe.
Congratiulations mods. It's refreshing to see that despite an asshat ratio of 20% (atm) there's still enough brains distributed among/. mods that deadpan jokes aren't automatically modded into oblivion.
A0 is 1 m^2. The aspect ratio of all As is 1:sqrt(2) for obvious reasons.
The reason they went with a nice area instead of a nice width/length, is that the sqrt(2) would ruin the niceness for all but one size anyway and this way paper weight can be easily measured in g/m^2. E.g. your average 80g/m^2 A4 page weighs 5g.
This is the official thread for all those Apple fanboys who crashed any thread on new cellphones over the years with their "boohoo, a device should only do one thing" spiel.
In this thread I want to give you the opportunity to state whether your earlier trolling against cellphones with mp3 playback functionality was 100%-Apple-fanboyism or if you stand by it and think the iPhone should never have happened. Thx.
The two games I'd buy for the 360 atm are Table Tennis (you know you want it =P) and Chromehounds (gimme Mechwarrior 5).
A budget party game and a Mech simulation -that everyone says is flawed but is nevertheless the best thing for starved Mechwarrior 2 nostalgics- are just not enough to justify $400 imho.
The PS3's pricing is crazy and I'm just too sick of Wii fanboys to consider buying a Wii, so consider me completely underwhelmed by the next generation.
So based on anecdotal evidence you come to the conclusion that all Germans have a Nazi gene making them racists? You are aware that this statement itself is racist? Not to mention pointless. 5 mins on Google could provide half a dozen anecdotes of disgusting behaviour by just about any nationality.
Of course, if you were German your post itself would provide another anecdote on how Germans are racists. =)
WarCraft 3 has been in steady development for the last few years, and has lured strategy fans with its impressive feature list and lush graphics - but probably more alluring, just the sheer thought of another Blizzard title in the WarCraft strategy universe. Millions of gamers around the world have been drooling at the mouth for this title, to such an extend that it prompted an unprecedented pre-sales figure of over 4.5 million copies.
This doesn't necessarily mean that more than 10% of WoW players had played Warcraft 3, but both Warcraft and Blizzard were very well known names (especially in Korea) and gave WoW the early buzz it needed.
I don't try to block all banner ads (in fact sometimes I even click on one =), just those in Flash, flashing, moving, annoying and sometimes even with sound. So I don't really need regexps for Opera but I see your point.
I miss flashblock and its pdf equivalent, though. I prefer it if plugins are only loaded on demand. Oh and Firesomething.
Why don't you want to use both Qt and GTK? Unless you're really short on RAM it shouldn't be too much of a problem. In the GNOME/KDE 1.x times my DE was KDE but I used GTK apps almost exclusively. I'm Pro-Choice so to speak =)
You can right-click on images in Konqueror. The menu has two entries "Block Image" and "Block Images from (domain that image's from)". So you don't have to do it in the settings. The "Block Image" option also gives you an edit dialog where you can adjust the filter rule.
In Opera you have to right-click *not* on the image but somewhere on the background. It will then highlight the images on the page and you can click on those you want to block.
Konqueror->Settings->Configure Konqueror->AdBlock Filters. You *can* use regexps by putting them between "/"s (Just press Shift+F1 for a tooltip on how to do it)
I have to say, I would switch over to Opera too, IF there was a way of using regexp based filtering like the adblock extension.
Do you really need regexps? If a simple * wildcard is enough you can use Opera too (I don't think it supports regexps but I've never actually tried it). Right-click on any page->Block content...
I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. I immediately ran over and said, "Stop! Don't do it!" "Why shouldn't I?" he said. I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!" "Like what?" "Well... are you religious or atheist?" "Religious." "Me too! Are you Christian or Jewish?" "Christian." "Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?" "Protestant." "Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?" "Baptist." "Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?" "Baptist Church of God." "Me too! Are you Original Baptist Church of God, or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?" "Reformed Baptist Church of God." "Wow! Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915?" "Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915!" To which I said, "Die, heretic scum!" and pushed him off.
This whole KDE-GNOME pissing contest is a joke especially when it's not about the merits and features of the DE in question but about FUD and lies.
If someone honestly believes in the underpants gnomes more power to him, as long as he *doesn't* try to ram the New Pantgelium (written on old underpants no less) down my throat or gathers 3000 of his fellow believers in a Mega-Laundromat for Justice Sunday IV, broadcast live on SoxNews.
and avoid them like hell. Anything done under such debatable license, and anything done in conjunction with microsoft, i would avoid like hell.
But to the PHB who isn't really convinced he wants that Linux thingy anyway it might make an impression if the Novell salesguy tells him that MS guarantees they won't sue him if he buys Novell but might if he uses Red Hat.
The nature of language is that you must maintain it in order to prevent it from devolving. You must be carefull to separate the jargon from the main language. If we say LOL out loud, it would definitely mean some sort of devolvation.
According to what metric would adding a new word to a language be some kind of devolution? Noone forces you to use it and it doesn't reduce your ability to express yourself with existing words. This is like France's crusade against the word "computer" and it makes even less sense for English because half the language's derived from French or directly from Latin.
Using "literally" when you mean "figuratively" is what I'd call devolution because you rob the language of an easy way of saying "literally" just to add one more possibility to the myriad of existing ones to express that you don't really mean what you're saying.
Slashdot Mirror
People generally call a weather report accurate if the events predicted happen on that day in an area 1 km^2 in size. If the IPCC report talks about yearly rainfall in a 100 by 100 km area it would be the average of 3.6 million data points from your weather report. Those two are quite different, especially in relation to the average size of a weather event.
Again, I agree with you. But keep in mind that your die roll scenario is very simplistic, and you have almost perfect knowledge about your die system beforehand. There are a very small set of assumptions that are, for the general case, very reasonable ('the die you using has been manufactured correctly, and is not weighted awkwardly', for example). The number of variables involved is extremely low. The behaviour of the system is very well understood and highly predictable.
Anybody who claims that they can predict the state of a highly complex, chaotic, and imperfectly understood system 50 years from now with the sort of accuracy you enjoy in your die roll scenario is lying to you.
This is why I said:
Yes, there are an awful lot of guesstimated parameters (in some cases they're not only guessing the value of the parameter but whether that parameter exists at all) and my main problem with all those predictions for 2100 is that I suspect a lot of those parameters were tweaked until the results appeared reasonable.I suspect that without any proof or strong indication; I haven't read any of the relevant reports, I don't know the people and don't know how they got to those assumptions; IOW my doubts are straight out of my donkey, which btw. is why I didn't mention those.
My comment was solely about your incorrect assumption that the accuracy (or lack thereof) of the weather forecast is any indication for the accuracy of climate models. And therefore my dice analogy *is* correct. Simplistic or not, there exists no way to predict the result of a die roll but very accurate models for the average of a large number of rolls. If you have doubts about our climate models post some examples of insufficiently understood parameters (and there are lots), but don't support a valid point with an invalid argument.
A lot of analysis is devoted to the predictions of these models, yet very little analysis seems to be devoted to the accuracy of the models in question. Lets see the source code for their models. Lets see all the assumptions on which they are built. I don't trust predictions that come out of black boxes. They're not repeatable.
Are you sure? I'd guess that you should be able to get the assumptions and methodologies for most of the models used for the IPCC reports, but most of those wouldn't be repeatable without a supercomputer. But you can't hardly argue that a researcher shouldn't use the best equipment available for his/her research just to make it more easily repeatable for other people.
If you have any sources on models being black boxes and scientists refusing to share their methodology they would really interest me.
Btw. the bold parts aren't meant to be screaming or anything, my reply just got awfully long and I wanted to highlight those two parts. =)
Argh, repeat after me:
WEATHER != CLIMATE
I don't know whether you actually believe what you wrote or if it was just a joke but too many people do believe that shit, so please refrain from repeating it.
Just because I can't predict the result of a single die roll doesn't mean I can't predict that the average of a million rolls will be close to 3.5 (unless someone's been cheating =)
Note: This doesn't say anything about the accuracy of climate models. It just says that the inaccuracy of weather models does *neither* support nor contradict the assumption that our current climate models are accurate enough to base policy decisions on their predictions.
Lame
Thank god, you didn't even try that one...
Oh, c'mon, this is as lame as your run-of-the-mill "definatly" or "nucular".
I really feared today's Spelling Nazi Competition would once again be a forgettable bore but then edwardpickman saved us with this nugget:
As contributions from China and developing countries to CO2 increase the problem will excellorate
Ladies and Gentlemen, we've got ourselves a winner!
Which browsers? It works fine in IE, Firefox, Opera, Konqueror and probably Safari (don't have a Mac but it says it does =). I assume you use Lynx?
I hope those publishers will allow Amazon to provide the same content as their own service, although I assume there'll be restrictions for technical books because for those it's generally easier to use their online versions exclusively (compared to novels).
The Shuttle's launching off the Mobile Launcher Platform. Unlike a clamshell it's directly below the exhaust and it is even mobile (as the name implies; btw. the parts of the clamshell would need to be "mobile" as well, to open and close that thing, but unlike the MLP the engines wouldn't need to be 5m below the SLBs.
Nowadays if some page's slow to load I think "slow page" instead of "slow browser".
OTOH I use *lots* of tabs and there are major differences in memory consumption. On my PC Opera needs about 250-350MB of RAM for 100 tabs, Konqueror 400 and Firefox between 800 and 1.5GB.
That's the beauty of doing the Moon first. A colony on the Moon is harder than on Mars in most respects. Due to the lack of an atmosphere the sand on the Moon is some of the most abrasive stuff you'll be able to find and the lack of gravity has massive implications for astronaut health and will make many tasks very tedious.
OTOH, *if* something goes really wrong, you won't have to wait for a launch window, you won't give up years and years of work and you won't need a year to get back to Earth.
Someone gets cancer? Back to Earth! No need to wait for spring. Your water supply went the way of the Dodo? Back to Earth! ...
The Moon makes such an excellent training exercise because like in just about any other exercise that's worth its money the problems you face are harder than the real thing while the risks are considerably lower. It also allows us to perfect much of the everyday equipment so it can resist the daily wear and tear and break gracefully while we wait for a better solution to get a spacecraft from here to Mars in a reasonable timeframe.
Winston Churchill once said, Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most times he will pick himself up and carry on.
Congratiulations mods. It's refreshing to see that despite an asshat ratio of 20% (atm) there's still enough brains distributed among /. mods that deadpan jokes aren't automatically modded into oblivion.
The reason they went with a nice area instead of a nice width/length, is that the sqrt(2) would ruin the niceness for all but one size anyway and this way paper weight can be easily measured in g/m^2. E.g. your average 80g/m^2 A4 page weighs 5g.
In this thread I want to give you the opportunity to state whether your earlier trolling against cellphones with mp3 playback functionality was 100%-Apple-fanboyism or if you stand by it and think the iPhone should never have happened. Thx.
I, for one, welcome our new xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx.
A budget party game and a Mech simulation -that everyone says is flawed but is nevertheless the best thing for starved Mechwarrior 2 nostalgics- are just not enough to justify $400 imho.
The PS3's pricing is crazy and I'm just too sick of Wii fanboys to consider buying a Wii, so consider me completely underwhelmed by the next generation.
The major number of KDE releases denotes binary compatibility not features.
Of course, if you were German your post itself would provide another anecdote on how Germans are racists. =)
WarCraft 3 has been in steady development for the last few years, and has lured strategy fans with its impressive feature list and lush graphics - but probably more alluring, just the sheer thought of another Blizzard title in the WarCraft strategy universe. Millions of gamers around the world have been drooling at the mouth for this title, to such an extend that it prompted an unprecedented pre-sales figure of over 4.5 million copies.
This doesn't necessarily mean that more than 10% of WoW players had played Warcraft 3, but both Warcraft and Blizzard were very well known names (especially in Korea) and gave WoW the early buzz it needed.
I miss flashblock and its pdf equivalent, though. I prefer it if plugins are only loaded on demand. Oh and Firesomething.
Why don't you want to use both Qt and GTK? Unless you're really short on RAM it shouldn't be too much of a problem. In the GNOME/KDE 1.x times my DE was KDE but I used GTK apps almost exclusively. I'm Pro-Choice so to speak =)
You can right-click on images in Konqueror. The menu has two entries "Block Image" and "Block Images from (domain that image's from)". So you don't have to do it in the settings. The "Block Image" option also gives you an edit dialog where you can adjust the filter rule.
In Opera you have to right-click *not* on the image but somewhere on the background. It will then highlight the images on the page and you can click on those you want to block.
I have to say, I would switch over to Opera too, IF there was a way of using regexp based filtering like the adblock extension.
Do you really need regexps? If a simple * wildcard is enough you can use Opera too (I don't think it supports regexps but I've never actually tried it). Right-click on any page->Block content...
This whole KDE-GNOME pissing contest is a joke especially when it's not about the merits and features of the DE in question but about FUD and lies.
Oh, and I use KDE btw. =)
That's because it's almost a word for word copy of MS's original mail.
http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse/2006-11/msg0378 8.html
The size of Mark's reality distortion field gets scary if you just look at the /. thread.
If someone honestly believes in the underpants gnomes more power to him, as long as he *doesn't* try to ram the New Pantgelium (written on old underpants no less) down my throat or gathers 3000 of his fellow believers in a Mega-Laundromat for Justice Sunday IV, broadcast live on SoxNews.
But to the PHB who isn't really convinced he wants that Linux thingy anyway it might make an impression if the Novell salesguy tells him that MS guarantees they won't sue him if he buys Novell but might if he uses Red Hat.
According to what metric would adding a new word to a language be some kind of devolution? Noone forces you to use it and it doesn't reduce your ability to express yourself with existing words. This is like France's crusade against the word "computer" and it makes even less sense for English because half the language's derived from French or directly from Latin.
Using "literally" when you mean "figuratively" is what I'd call devolution because you rob the language of an easy way of saying "literally" just to add one more possibility to the myriad of existing ones to express that you don't really mean what you're saying.