There are a multitude of cyclical climate events that make up part of the models used in AGW theory.
Yes! They are so intimately part of climate change models that it would be impossible to not study cyclical properties. That is why the statement doesn't make sense to me -- it would be like saying "we want you to study climate and focus on molecules", or some other completely generic and inseparable property abundant in every aspect it. And then they call it "cyclical climate change", as if there existed some kind of separate theory of the climate that is purely cyclical. As opposed to what? Linear climate change? Like you said yourself: "You simply can't even begin to have a valid theory if you do not take them into account".
The only plausible reason I can see why they would give that kind of directive to the researchers, is that they have read a claim from someone that "it could all be cyclical" (insinuating somehow not caused by the huge increase in greenhouse gases), and instead of actually trying to understand some of the science, or even the scientific process in general, they buy into those kind of vague, unspecified myths, and now want the scientists on "their" payroll to "investigate" them, nonsensical as they may be.
Either that or pure malice, but since I firmly subscribe to Hanlon's razor, I'm going for scientific illiteracy over malice.
If you don't have any understanding of the noise, how can you detect the signal?
You can't, which is of course why that is pretty much all climate research consists of -- separating and modelling different forcings and interactions, some of them caused by human activity, most of them natural. Really, how did you figure climate researchers arrived to the conclusions there are today? Have you even looked at any research?
I don't even know what they mean by "cyclical climate change". There are multiple factors affecting the average energy in the climate system, greenhouse gases (primarily carbon dioxide) and solar irradiation being the most important ones. You need both to explain temperature trends, not only the current ones but historical. It has been studied by many researchers to great detail, and it is being studied still more.
By telling the researchers to "look at 'cyclical' climate change", you are telling them to lock in to a conclusion, that climate changes cyclically, instead of studying and understanding the mechanisms that causes change. It is probably one of the most blatant and ignorant attempt and controlling science for political motives I have seen.
If you don't want the internet to be US-centric then it's easy to solve it- make your own country a more appealing place to setup shop. The US offers relative stability in terms of economy, infrastructure, and laws, and if you look at the planet and where communications lines run it's "centralized".
What is your point, actually? Are you suggesting that having stability and thereby attracting service providers justifies using those service providers to spy on people? And if you don't live in a country with an economy comparable to the US, you deserve to be spied upon, because it's your own fault for not "solving it"? It's "easy to solve", after all.
I'm not really a fan of those FTFY kind of comments, but for the sake of your own education:
[T]he controversy in the US is that they got caught doing it to US citizens.
I can assure you, that is not what is the controversy elsewhere.
If you want daylight-like colour, there are other alternatives than LEDs. Ceramic metal halide lamps, for example, have excellent colour rendering and about the same efficiency and life expectancy as LEDs, at a significantly lower cost. The main drawback is that they take a while to fire up, but that isn't really a problem with street lights.
Re:This is a real problem and conflict of interest
on
How Science Goes Wrong
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· Score: 1
I can't speak for biology since I've only had superficial contact with that field, but the fields related to my profession are far from isolated ecosystems. Not to say there aren't problems with the system of scientific research and the way it's funded that should be addressed, but from my experience, bottom line is that it works.
Re:This is a real problem and conflict of interest
on
How Science Goes Wrong
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· Score: 1
And I presume you can back that description up somehow, or is it all conjecture? You see, I'm the kind of person who actually do check sources, thoroughly.
How you say it works doesn't match my experience. If you discover something that's actually relevant and useful, your results will be replicated, one way or another. There is no getting away from that. If for no other reason, it will happen as soon as someone tries to build upon or improve it. And until your results have been verified by someone else, your conclusions are just going to remain in a sort of "unconfirmed" state in the scientific community. Simply being published doesn't make something a scientific fact.
Re:This is a real problem and conflict of interest
on
How Science Goes Wrong
·
· Score: 2
But you gain recognition and get published if you prove someone else wrong. And your academic progress is hampered if someone shows your results to be flawed. I think you are ignoring the competitive element.
That said, there is a problem with the current trend of grants being based strongly on the number of published papers, as it waters down the content of each paper and gets in the way of basic, long term research where there is no guarantee for "quarterly research results".
I'm sure that if they had not destroyed the docs, it would have been spun something like: "Even though the government informed them that these documents were sensitive to national security, they kept them. So they knew what they were doing was wrong." (See, you can get to the same conclusion either way, if you really want to.)
Again, it depends on how you want to define trust. I trust (within reasonable bounds) that they will behave according to a certain morality -- a morality to which I may not agree with, but one that I know and understand.
My impression is that you prefer to define their behaviour as lies, in order to invoke the immorality commonly associated with lies. In a sense: if what they do is similar to and just as bad as lies, we should value them equally. And in that regard, I think you are missing my point. I am not making an argument about the ethics of their behaviour. And actually, I would contend that that question is independent of what terminology we choose in order to label it -- their actions remain the same regardless.
What I am saying is that it is relevant, from a pragmatic standpoint, to differentiate between (technically) truthful but deceptive statements, and blatant lies, irrespectively of which of them is more or less immoral. If you want to use other words to describe that, then by all means feel free to do so. Mixing them up, on the other hand, is, well, a bit deceptive...
Well, if you want to get into a discussion about semantics, maybe. My point is that you can trust them, after a fashion. And, consequently, that the notion that they are all just liars, so there is no point in listening to them, is flawed. Hence, the distinction is relevant.
Then we could of course discuss whether any deception is equally immoral, regardless of whether it is a technically truthful statement or not, but that would be to head off on a tangent, so I'm going to leave it at your comments and my own insinuations.
I don't know, to me it's about as predictable and unnuanced as a so called fanboi comment. I read it as a satirically formulated straw man argument in support of a cynical standpoint that one should put absolutely zero trust in anything a government or corporation says. A standpoint which I find rather disingenuous.
Certainly they could lie to us, but most likely they are not. For whatever reason, many corporate leaders and politicians seem to adhere to a curious ethic where blatant lies are shunned, while deception or dishonest interpretations are perfectly okay. There is a difference between the two, because the latter can help you penetrate and understand what they are really saying. If you look at the carefully selected wordings of public statements, you can often get a clue as to what they are actually avoiding to say, instead of just dismissing everything as "lies".
Just to give you an example from recent public discourse: When a big cloud service provider says something along the lines of: "we have not given the NSA direct access to our servers", they are probably speaking the truth. Assuming that, it suddenly tells us something about how the NSA actually has been spying; namely by intercepting the traffic between the servers, possibly on site. Otherwise, the company would probably have said "we have not given the NSA direct access to our data centres", or something similar. The key is what they are not saying, and what words they are using.
In this particular case, some obvious question would be: How many surfaces were manufactured? Are we talking about all of them, or a first (perhaps small) batch? How should we quantify "close" (to selling out)? With the correct interpretations to these questions, they are probably not lying.
I used to run DD-WRT once, and liked the configurability and stability. However, a gigantic security hole found in 2009 pretty much destroyed all my confidence in the competence of the maintainers with regard to security. Basically, it would execute commands (as root!) directly from the url of a request to the management interface. All an attacker would need to do is get you to click an embedded link somewhere, and you are owned. (My link above is safe, by the way -- did you click on it?)
...with the risk of hanging on to cracked and exploitable copies. Are you sure that's the better alternative?
Re:Why do we even go to these orgs anymore...
on
Did NIST Cripple SHA-3?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
If they found a weakness in Twofish, and wanted the world to migrate to a crypto algorithm that they have an attack against, then wouldn't it just have been easier to select Twofish instead of Rijndael for the AES specification in the first place? They were both finalists.
Look, it certainly seems like the NSA has tried to meddle with crypto standards in order to have an attack vector, and I can agree that a certain amount of paranoia is in order, but the theories you propose are so convoluted that, of all things the NSA might have cooked up, that has to go far down on the list. What is even to say people switch to Twofish if they switch, and not one of the other AES finalists? Or use both Twofish and Rijndael simultaneously for that matter?
Besides, the weakest part of most crypto systems (disregarding implementation and usage for a moment), is probably the key exchange/management algorithms. And from what I have understood, that is where the indications of standards manipulations have been.
I'm not suggesting that people should necessarily switch from AES to Twofish, or that Twofish is more secure. I don't even think Bruce is saying that. But I find the idea that the NSA would somehow be behind some kind of covert manipulation scheme to get people to switch to Twofish simply extremely unlikely. If nothing else, for the simple reason that I don't see it happening anyway. Could the NSA be sitting quietly on a weakness? Sure. But in that case I would be more worried about EC, and to an extent RSA. That is, if we limit ourselves to the theoretical component, and disregard the obvious target: implementations.
Re:Why do we even go to these orgs anymore...
on
Did NIST Cripple SHA-3?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It would be an insanely unlikely coup. Think about what you are suggesting: First they get the entire world to use AES, to the point where leading CPU manufacturers have even included special instructions in the hardware specifically for encoding and decoding AES. They do this only so that an alternative algorithm (Twofish) would get less scrutiny by independent researchers for a number of years. They then orchestrate an elaborate leak indicating that they have attacks against some unnamed publicly used crypto algorithm. Meanwhile, or even before that, they have recruited an established and well known writer and cryptographist, and have him attack them openly in the public debate, only to give an apparent credibility to the algorithms he has designed. The intent of this is to get everyone in the industry to suddenly switch all cryptography to his somewhat less scrutinised algorithm (probably after reading about it on Slashdot), despite the fact that the author, who they had recruited to attack them, still claims that the math behind AES is solid, and despite the fact that replacing AES would now require replacing hardware and software that permeates our entire society at enormous costs.
If there is ever a time for the tinfoil hat metaphor...
The term "climate change" pre-dates "global warming". The former has been used at least since the 1950's. See for example The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change, Plass, Gilbert N., 1955 (link).
Also note that the UN panel (established in 1988) is named the "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change", not Global Warming.
If you argument is that an atrocious act somehow resulted in the smallest amount of total (civilian?) deaths, compared to whatever events could have occurred otherwise -- an argument which, like I said, I don't even agree to on principle -- then certainly the burden of proof is on you to show that. Why bomb two cities and not one? Why civilian targets and not military? Why not wait longer between the first bomb and the second? Why not bomb mount Fuji or some other symbolic object instead? Why not warn the inhabitants before bombing? There are hundreds of alternatives, if you bother to think about it.
I just find it a bit rich that you accuse the USA of "having done inexcusable acts of barbarity" by dropping the two bombs when the inexcusable acts of barbarity committed by both Germany and Japan are well documented [...]
Yes, for the umpteenth time, I know that! What does that have to do with anything? This is a discussion about nuclear weapons. What's with this pre-school level logic that keeps coming up; do you believe two wrongs make one right?
Furthermore, the difference is that if you gather a bunch of Germans and ask them about it, they will admit to that description, which is the entire point of my argument.
Since this discussion is going in circles, this will be my final post in this thread. Sorry about that, but I just don't have the time for it.
I think they should have not dropped the bombs. And if they did, I think they should have dropped only one, and not on a densely populated civilian target.
Underneath your question lies the assumption that the circumstances somehow forced them to commit these acts, and that they didn't have an option. I don't agree to that.
I also don't buy the utilitarian argument. Not only is it speculative to the extreme (and I could argue that the war would have ended anyway), but I find it fallacious on its very principle. If not, why not use nukes in more wars? And why not use biological and chemical weapons as well? Why not rape the wives and kill the children of enemy soldiers that refuse to give up, to break their morale?
It seems to me that you are rationalising, because the idea of the US having done inexcusable acts of barbarity doesn't fit with self-image of being a righteous nation under God (or whatever you want to call it).
People are not evil, deeds are. There is no point in passing judgement on individuals who are long gone, but it is important to recognise what they did in the name of a nation and a people that is still here today. This isn't limited to the US, just because we happen to be discussing that now, nor to the nuclear bombings for that matter, as far as historical events are concerned.
That's one part of the equation; a few big titles is more or less necessary for them to stand a chance at all. But they still need someone to produce the consoles cheaply (if they cost like a gaming PC it'll never compete with XBone or PS4), and that requires volume, which in turn requires a huge initial investment and commitment. I'm not saying it's impossible, and as a Linux user, once a gamer myself I really hope they succeed, but they only way I'd bet on it is if they've managed to attract some of the big players in the hardware industry (e.g. Samsung, LG, Asus, Acer) that might be interested in grabbing piece of the console gaming pie and are willing to chip in some serious resources to do it.
It's not going to be easy. Bootstrapping a console ecosystem is immensely expensive. You need to become big very quickly, or you get a negative feedback cycle where you have few users, leading to few games being developed for it, leading to fewer users, and so on. To an extent, they can leverage their PC gaming presence, but it's still going to be an extra cost for developers to support an additional platform, which they aren't going to take unless there is a significant market there. And if the consoles are much more expensive than the competition, it'll be a tough sell to console gamers. If they don't have the economy of scales, they'll have to subsidise the hardware, and that costs serious bucks. Microsoft took an enormous investment when they entered the console market with the original XBox.
I'm thinking their best bet is to make it an open specification for which they develop a standard software stack, kind of like Android did for smart phones. That way, they can get hardware vendors (Samsung et al.) to make the heavy lifting.
Yes, I know that the US firebombed Tokyo and several other cities, and that those bombings caused hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. Why do you presume that I think they were any better?
I also don't get what Germany and Russia have got to do with anything. We are discussing the nuclear bombings of Japan. If I were discussing Russian history with Russians, you bet I would be pointing fingers! There is nothing precluding me from recognising more than one barbarity. As far as Germany is concerned, I wouldn't need to have this discussion with a German when it comes to the holocaust.
Honestly, both of those arguments have got to be among the lousiest you could find. The first basically amounts to something like "Yeah well, we also did much worse things. So there!", and the second is what I would expect form a child, trying to excuse a mischief by the fact that other children did something similar.
You can call it whatever you want, but putting a label on a situation doesn't somehow suspend moral. There are choices in a war just like there are at any other time, and people are responsible for them. If the Japanese had possessed nuclear weapons, and used them to obliterate New York and Washington before the war ended, do you think that would have been found acceptable?
I get that people sometimes do horrible things when they are under pressure. I can even accept it, if those who are responsible have the conscience and dignity enough to fully recognise their actions and their consequences, and deal with their history honestly without rationalising or looking for excuses.
I'm not really sure what your point is regarding the firebombing of Tokyo, the scale of which I am already fully aware. Did you think I was okay with it, and by extension should be okay with the atomic attacks?
One can of course argue about hypotheticals, but the fact remains that the US chose to two densely populated civilian targets, with the intent to massacre as many civilians as possible, as efficiently as possible, most of them women, children and elderly. They did this without warning, and they chose to drop two bombs with such a short interval that the Japanese hardly had a chance to fathom what had happened before the second one dropped. The original plan even was to drop four, but they apparently had the decency to change their minds before manufacture of the other two had finished.
No matter what rational one can come up with, there is no other word for those actions that atrocities. That a lot of Americans will not recognize this, I personally find despicable. As former US Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara said, quoting General LeMay: ""If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?".
Ironically, your comment and the comment you respond to shows exactly how easily one can get caught up in the details of the complexity, and forget about the underlying logic.
Save for the effect of fluid intake/loss (causing temporary changes in weight), the GGP was pretty much spot on. Your weight change is the difference between energy consumption and energy expenditure. The only reason you are able to gain muscle mass when exercising (and I then assume you mean weight lifting, since endurance exercise doesn't really cause muscle hypertrophy), is because you are eating enough. Try exercising while fasting, and I will guarantee you that there is no weight gain whatsoever.
The difference when exercising is that you increase energy expenditure (the "calories spent" part of the equation), and that you gain weight in the form of muscle mass instead of or as well as adipose tissue (i.e. "fat"), provided that you eat enough.
Slashdot Mirror
There are a multitude of cyclical climate events that make up part of the models used in AGW theory.
Yes! They are so intimately part of climate change models that it would be impossible to not study cyclical properties. That is why the statement doesn't make sense to me -- it would be like saying "we want you to study climate and focus on molecules", or some other completely generic and inseparable property abundant in every aspect it. And then they call it "cyclical climate change", as if there existed some kind of separate theory of the climate that is purely cyclical. As opposed to what? Linear climate change? Like you said yourself: "You simply can't even begin to have a valid theory if you do not take them into account".
The only plausible reason I can see why they would give that kind of directive to the researchers, is that they have read a claim from someone that "it could all be cyclical" (insinuating somehow not caused by the huge increase in greenhouse gases), and instead of actually trying to understand some of the science, or even the scientific process in general, they buy into those kind of vague, unspecified myths, and now want the scientists on "their" payroll to "investigate" them, nonsensical as they may be.
Either that or pure malice, but since I firmly subscribe to Hanlon's razor, I'm going for scientific illiteracy over malice.
If you don't have any understanding of the noise, how can you detect the signal?
You can't, which is of course why that is pretty much all climate research consists of -- separating and modelling different forcings and interactions, some of them caused by human activity, most of them natural. Really, how did you figure climate researchers arrived to the conclusions there are today? Have you even looked at any research?
I don't even know what they mean by "cyclical climate change". There are multiple factors affecting the average energy in the climate system, greenhouse gases (primarily carbon dioxide) and solar irradiation being the most important ones. You need both to explain temperature trends, not only the current ones but historical. It has been studied by many researchers to great detail, and it is being studied still more.
By telling the researchers to "look at 'cyclical' climate change", you are telling them to lock in to a conclusion, that climate changes cyclically, instead of studying and understanding the mechanisms that causes change. It is probably one of the most blatant and ignorant attempt and controlling science for political motives I have seen.
If you don't want the internet to be US-centric then it's easy to solve it- make your own country a more appealing place to setup shop. The US offers relative stability in terms of economy, infrastructure, and laws, and if you look at the planet and where communications lines run it's "centralized".
What is your point, actually? Are you suggesting that having stability and thereby attracting service providers justifies using those service providers to spy on people? And if you don't live in a country with an economy comparable to the US, you deserve to be spied upon, because it's your own fault for not "solving it"? It's "easy to solve", after all.
I'm not really a fan of those FTFY kind of comments, but for the sake of your own education:
[T]he controversy in the US is that they got caught doing it to US citizens.
I can assure you, that is not what is the controversy elsewhere.
If you want daylight-like colour, there are other alternatives than LEDs. Ceramic metal halide lamps, for example, have excellent colour rendering and about the same efficiency and life expectancy as LEDs, at a significantly lower cost. The main drawback is that they take a while to fire up, but that isn't really a problem with street lights.
I can't speak for biology since I've only had superficial contact with that field, but the fields related to my profession are far from isolated ecosystems. Not to say there aren't problems with the system of scientific research and the way it's funded that should be addressed, but from my experience, bottom line is that it works.
And I presume you can back that description up somehow, or is it all conjecture? You see, I'm the kind of person who actually do check sources, thoroughly.
How you say it works doesn't match my experience. If you discover something that's actually relevant and useful, your results will be replicated, one way or another. There is no getting away from that. If for no other reason, it will happen as soon as someone tries to build upon or improve it. And until your results have been verified by someone else, your conclusions are just going to remain in a sort of "unconfirmed" state in the scientific community. Simply being published doesn't make something a scientific fact.
But you gain recognition and get published if you prove someone else wrong. And your academic progress is hampered if someone shows your results to be flawed. I think you are ignoring the competitive element.
That said, there is a problem with the current trend of grants being based strongly on the number of published papers, as it waters down the content of each paper and gets in the way of basic, long term research where there is no guarantee for "quarterly research results".
I'm sure that if they had not destroyed the docs, it would have been spun something like: "Even though the government informed them that these documents were sensitive to national security, they kept them. So they knew what they were doing was wrong." (See, you can get to the same conclusion either way, if you really want to.)
Again, it depends on how you want to define trust. I trust (within reasonable bounds) that they will behave according to a certain morality -- a morality to which I may not agree with, but one that I know and understand.
My impression is that you prefer to define their behaviour as lies, in order to invoke the immorality commonly associated with lies. In a sense: if what they do is similar to and just as bad as lies, we should value them equally. And in that regard, I think you are missing my point. I am not making an argument about the ethics of their behaviour. And actually, I would contend that that question is independent of what terminology we choose in order to label it -- their actions remain the same regardless.
What I am saying is that it is relevant, from a pragmatic standpoint, to differentiate between (technically) truthful but deceptive statements, and blatant lies, irrespectively of which of them is more or less immoral. If you want to use other words to describe that, then by all means feel free to do so. Mixing them up, on the other hand, is, well, a bit deceptive...
Well, if you want to get into a discussion about semantics, maybe. My point is that you can trust them, after a fashion. And, consequently, that the notion that they are all just liars, so there is no point in listening to them, is flawed. Hence, the distinction is relevant.
Then we could of course discuss whether any deception is equally immoral, regardless of whether it is a technically truthful statement or not, but that would be to head off on a tangent, so I'm going to leave it at your comments and my own insinuations.
I don't know, to me it's about as predictable and unnuanced as a so called fanboi comment. I read it as a satirically formulated straw man argument in support of a cynical standpoint that one should put absolutely zero trust in anything a government or corporation says. A standpoint which I find rather disingenuous.
Certainly they could lie to us, but most likely they are not. For whatever reason, many corporate leaders and politicians seem to adhere to a curious ethic where blatant lies are shunned, while deception or dishonest interpretations are perfectly okay. There is a difference between the two, because the latter can help you penetrate and understand what they are really saying. If you look at the carefully selected wordings of public statements, you can often get a clue as to what they are actually avoiding to say, instead of just dismissing everything as "lies".
Just to give you an example from recent public discourse: When a big cloud service provider says something along the lines of: "we have not given the NSA direct access to our servers", they are probably speaking the truth. Assuming that, it suddenly tells us something about how the NSA actually has been spying; namely by intercepting the traffic between the servers, possibly on site. Otherwise, the company would probably have said "we have not given the NSA direct access to our data centres", or something similar. The key is what they are not saying, and what words they are using.
In this particular case, some obvious question would be: How many surfaces were manufactured? Are we talking about all of them, or a first (perhaps small) batch? How should we quantify "close" (to selling out)? With the correct interpretations to these questions, they are probably not lying.
I used to run DD-WRT once, and liked the configurability and stability. However, a gigantic security hole found in 2009 pretty much destroyed all my confidence in the competence of the maintainers with regard to security. Basically, it would execute commands (as root!) directly from the url of a request to the management interface. All an attacker would need to do is get you to click an embedded link somewhere, and you are owned. (My link above is safe, by the way -- did you click on it?)
...with the risk of hanging on to cracked and exploitable copies. Are you sure that's the better alternative?
If they found a weakness in Twofish, and wanted the world to migrate to a crypto algorithm that they have an attack against, then wouldn't it just have been easier to select Twofish instead of Rijndael for the AES specification in the first place? They were both finalists.
Look, it certainly seems like the NSA has tried to meddle with crypto standards in order to have an attack vector, and I can agree that a certain amount of paranoia is in order, but the theories you propose are so convoluted that, of all things the NSA might have cooked up, that has to go far down on the list. What is even to say people switch to Twofish if they switch, and not one of the other AES finalists? Or use both Twofish and Rijndael simultaneously for that matter?
Besides, the weakest part of most crypto systems (disregarding implementation and usage for a moment), is probably the key exchange/management algorithms. And from what I have understood, that is where the indications of standards manipulations have been.
I'm not suggesting that people should necessarily switch from AES to Twofish, or that Twofish is more secure. I don't even think Bruce is saying that. But I find the idea that the NSA would somehow be behind some kind of covert manipulation scheme to get people to switch to Twofish simply extremely unlikely. If nothing else, for the simple reason that I don't see it happening anyway. Could the NSA be sitting quietly on a weakness? Sure. But in that case I would be more worried about EC, and to an extent RSA. That is, if we limit ourselves to the theoretical component, and disregard the obvious target: implementations.
It would be an insanely unlikely coup. Think about what you are suggesting: First they get the entire world to use AES, to the point where leading CPU manufacturers have even included special instructions in the hardware specifically for encoding and decoding AES. They do this only so that an alternative algorithm (Twofish) would get less scrutiny by independent researchers for a number of years. They then orchestrate an elaborate leak indicating that they have attacks against some unnamed publicly used crypto algorithm. Meanwhile, or even before that, they have recruited an established and well known writer and cryptographist, and have him attack them openly in the public debate, only to give an apparent credibility to the algorithms he has designed. The intent of this is to get everyone in the industry to suddenly switch all cryptography to his somewhat less scrutinised algorithm (probably after reading about it on Slashdot), despite the fact that the author, who they had recruited to attack them, still claims that the math behind AES is solid, and despite the fact that replacing AES would now require replacing hardware and software that permeates our entire society at enormous costs.
If there is ever a time for the tinfoil hat metaphor...
The term "climate change" pre-dates "global warming". The former has been used at least since the 1950's. See for example The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change, Plass, Gilbert N., 1955 (link).
Also note that the UN panel (established in 1988) is named the "Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change", not Global Warming.
They never really "changed it".
If you argument is that an atrocious act somehow resulted in the smallest amount of total (civilian?) deaths, compared to whatever events could have occurred otherwise -- an argument which, like I said, I don't even agree to on principle -- then certainly the burden of proof is on you to show that. Why bomb two cities and not one? Why civilian targets and not military? Why not wait longer between the first bomb and the second? Why not bomb mount Fuji or some other symbolic object instead? Why not warn the inhabitants before bombing? There are hundreds of alternatives, if you bother to think about it.
I just find it a bit rich that you accuse the USA of "having done inexcusable acts of barbarity" by dropping the two bombs when the inexcusable acts of barbarity committed by both Germany and Japan are well documented [...]
Yes, for the umpteenth time, I know that! What does that have to do with anything? This is a discussion about nuclear weapons. What's with this pre-school level logic that keeps coming up; do you believe two wrongs make one right?
Furthermore, the difference is that if you gather a bunch of Germans and ask them about it, they will admit to that description, which is the entire point of my argument.
Since this discussion is going in circles, this will be my final post in this thread. Sorry about that, but I just don't have the time for it.
I think they should have not dropped the bombs. And if they did, I think they should have dropped only one, and not on a densely populated civilian target.
Underneath your question lies the assumption that the circumstances somehow forced them to commit these acts, and that they didn't have an option. I don't agree to that.
I also don't buy the utilitarian argument. Not only is it speculative to the extreme (and I could argue that the war would have ended anyway), but I find it fallacious on its very principle. If not, why not use nukes in more wars? And why not use biological and chemical weapons as well? Why not rape the wives and kill the children of enemy soldiers that refuse to give up, to break their morale?
It seems to me that you are rationalising, because the idea of the US having done inexcusable acts of barbarity doesn't fit with self-image of being a righteous nation under God (or whatever you want to call it).
People are not evil, deeds are. There is no point in passing judgement on individuals who are long gone, but it is important to recognise what they did in the name of a nation and a people that is still here today. This isn't limited to the US, just because we happen to be discussing that now, nor to the nuclear bombings for that matter, as far as historical events are concerned.
That's one part of the equation; a few big titles is more or less necessary for them to stand a chance at all. But they still need someone to produce the consoles cheaply (if they cost like a gaming PC it'll never compete with XBone or PS4), and that requires volume, which in turn requires a huge initial investment and commitment. I'm not saying it's impossible, and as a Linux user, once a gamer myself I really hope they succeed, but they only way I'd bet on it is if they've managed to attract some of the big players in the hardware industry (e.g. Samsung, LG, Asus, Acer) that might be interested in grabbing piece of the console gaming pie and are willing to chip in some serious resources to do it.
It's not going to be easy. Bootstrapping a console ecosystem is immensely expensive. You need to become big very quickly, or you get a negative feedback cycle where you have few users, leading to few games being developed for it, leading to fewer users, and so on. To an extent, they can leverage their PC gaming presence, but it's still going to be an extra cost for developers to support an additional platform, which they aren't going to take unless there is a significant market there. And if the consoles are much more expensive than the competition, it'll be a tough sell to console gamers. If they don't have the economy of scales, they'll have to subsidise the hardware, and that costs serious bucks. Microsoft took an enormous investment when they entered the console market with the original XBox.
I'm thinking their best bet is to make it an open specification for which they develop a standard software stack, kind of like Android did for smart phones. That way, they can get hardware vendors (Samsung et al.) to make the heavy lifting.
Yes, I know that the US firebombed Tokyo and several other cities, and that those bombings caused hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. Why do you presume that I think they were any better?
I also don't get what Germany and Russia have got to do with anything. We are discussing the nuclear bombings of Japan. If I were discussing Russian history with Russians, you bet I would be pointing fingers! There is nothing precluding me from recognising more than one barbarity. As far as Germany is concerned, I wouldn't need to have this discussion with a German when it comes to the holocaust.
Honestly, both of those arguments have got to be among the lousiest you could find. The first basically amounts to something like "Yeah well, we also did much worse things. So there!", and the second is what I would expect form a child, trying to excuse a mischief by the fact that other children did something similar.
You can call it whatever you want, but putting a label on a situation doesn't somehow suspend moral. There are choices in a war just like there are at any other time, and people are responsible for them. If the Japanese had possessed nuclear weapons, and used them to obliterate New York and Washington before the war ended, do you think that would have been found acceptable?
I get that people sometimes do horrible things when they are under pressure. I can even accept it, if those who are responsible have the conscience and dignity enough to fully recognise their actions and their consequences, and deal with their history honestly without rationalising or looking for excuses.
I'm not really sure what your point is regarding the firebombing of Tokyo, the scale of which I am already fully aware. Did you think I was okay with it, and by extension should be okay with the atomic attacks?
One can of course argue about hypotheticals, but the fact remains that the US chose to two densely populated civilian targets, with the intent to massacre as many civilians as possible, as efficiently as possible, most of them women, children and elderly. They did this without warning, and they chose to drop two bombs with such a short interval that the Japanese hardly had a chance to fathom what had happened before the second one dropped. The original plan even was to drop four, but they apparently had the decency to change their minds before manufacture of the other two had finished.
No matter what rational one can come up with, there is no other word for those actions that atrocities. That a lot of Americans will not recognize this, I personally find despicable. As former US Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara said, quoting General LeMay: ""If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?".
Ironically, your comment and the comment you respond to shows exactly how easily one can get caught up in the details of the complexity, and forget about the underlying logic.
Save for the effect of fluid intake/loss (causing temporary changes in weight), the GGP was pretty much spot on. Your weight change is the difference between energy consumption and energy expenditure. The only reason you are able to gain muscle mass when exercising (and I then assume you mean weight lifting, since endurance exercise doesn't really cause muscle hypertrophy), is because you are eating enough. Try exercising while fasting, and I will guarantee you that there is no weight gain whatsoever.
The difference when exercising is that you increase energy expenditure (the "calories spent" part of the equation), and that you gain weight in the form of muscle mass instead of or as well as adipose tissue (i.e. "fat"), provided that you eat enough.