However since then there has been a growing stream of "cool" coming from space exploration - mostly cool engineering, discoveries, and Hubble style pictures, where the heroes are off camera.
NASA shot Cassini through gaps in the rings of Saturn, twice! However, if you want to see reckless then watch Armstrong navigate onto the moon in a tinfoil box.
RP is an ideological loon but he is spot on with his drug policy. There's not a snowballs chance in hell he will become anything more than an old man ranting on a street corner, not because he has a sane drug policy but because he has insane economic/foreign policies.
Thing is from what I've seen of RP and his selfish band over the last decade, most of them are against corporate welfare just as much as they are against social welfare, (despite the fact they rarely understand either). Since he is firmly against corporate welfare he will never get the nod from the real fascists within the GOP, he will always be their crazy uncle that lives in the basement.
Oh and BTW, even if RP was a closet fascist, paying "unfair" taxes does not mean you are living in a fascist state, even the most brainwashed RP worshipers understand that much.
Ok, I'll feed you. You're not impressed because (like my wife) you simply don't understand the difficulty of the problem. Watson's Jeopardy answers are in the form of a question and performed in realtime, it is not plugged into a database of questions, it extracts relationships from data via an algorithm (ie: it learns), different from how humans learn, but demonstrably superior to any human in terms of both speed and accuracy.
Massive large projects like this almost always end in utter failure.
I can think of quite a few successful ones between the Manhattan Project and the LHC
Even the IBM cat brain project failed to accomplish much.
This is a continuation of IBM's "cat brain" (Blue Brain Project), it's got a new name to reflect the fact it's no longer just IBM paying the bills. The reason it has been given taxpayer bucks is because the "cat brain" was very successful from a scientific POV. The main goal of the project has always been medical research, AI is a sub-goal.
Intelligence is much more complicated than a mere randomly connected neural network.
IBM's Watson convincingly disproves your hypothesis. Besides this project is based on anatomical correctness, it's a detailed physical model of a real brain for medical research via simulation, nothing random about it. It is hoped that creating such a model will give us new insights in how the brain works in the same way "numerical wind tunnels" have given us new insights into engineering.
My dad retired in the 80's, he was chief (mechanical) engineer at a large firm, computer simulation was just starting to appear in the industry. Today there is not a hope in hell of winning a major engineering contract without it. Computer modeling has revolutionized both industry and science since I left HS in the mid-seventies, there are no signs that revolution is losing momentum, in fact just the opposite.
I haven't read the singularity book, however it seems to me, our species may be heading down the same evolutionary path as ants, in that an ants nest can be considered a single intelligent organism (the Borg, if you prefer). Many people claim that the difference is that ants had no choice, but I doubt humans are totally immune to evolution just because our technology now allows us to air-condition our buildings like ants have been doing for millions of years.
Guess what, if everyone thought like you do and believed the US dollar was worthless, it would be worthless. Same deal with gold, silver, sea shells, or any other token used to simplify trade. Currency works on trust, period! The fact is international investors trust US treasury bonds more than they trust gold.
the U.S. government has effectively banned internet gambling...[snip]... it's basically an internal U.S. matter.
No, if the US banned online gambling outright there would not be a problem. The problem is they allow US companies to run gambling sites but will not allow companies from other nations to compete under the same laws (such as paying tax). The other member countries are also obliged to allow US companies to offer gambling in their country under the same regulatory regime as their local companies.
Disadvantaging overseas competition is called "protectionism", it gives domestic companies an "unfair" advantage. One of the reasons the WTO was set up was to discourage protectionism, that's why the WTO has punished the US.
It will end badly for pretty much everyone involved.
No, the US will simply ignore it, it's a very cheap alternative to a trade war.
I have the documentary in my collection, there is no "deliberate trickery". As the OP stated, it was a manufactured controversy intended to punish Attenborough for his views on AGW. You'd have to be a complete moron to fall for such a transparent attempt to assassinate his character.
The key issue (that I see) can lead to abuse is the widespread phenomenon of 'plea bargaining'.
Bingo, been saying that for years. I'm also assuming they are judged by the quantity of convictions, not the quality of the charges. Other western nations seem to be able to get guilty pleas without turning the whole thing into a Turkish bazaar, so it's certainly possible that it could be improved by democratic oversight. The fact that someone in the US is 7X as likely as someone in the EU to be locked up is a pretty strong signal that there is a systemic problem within the US justice system.
Yeah the Daily Fail tried to discredit Attenborough but all they did was drag their own reputation deeper down the gutter. Why? - Because Attenborough's persona and 50yr track record is such that people see his face and they know it's legit.
punishing more developed countries while letting other ones off the hook
The "punishment" was to include the past emissions of developed nations in the accounting. In other words when Kyoto was drawn up the developed world had already pumped out a half a trillion tons, the idea was to balance that with the virtually zero emissions of other nations. The US and Australia were among the few western nations who disagreed with that principle.
is actual fact independent of scientific consensus?
The problem with this common question is that way too many people do not understand what the word "fact" means in a scientific context. Outside of axiomatic systems we don't have any "facts", we only have observations, also note that the fundamental axioms of mathematics are assumptions agreed by "consensus", not fact.
"Scientific consensus" is just the modern term for what Karl Popper called "the republic of science". It means that no single authority/observation/calculation has the strength of "scientific fact" (or "well established science" if you prefer). At no point in the process of strengthening a "scientific fact" does it become "actual fact", but that's ok because we do not pursue science as a path to absolute truths, we pursue it because of its track record of utility to mankind (and the 'fact' that humans are more curious than the proverbial cat).
As for the "flat world" canard, the well known skeptic Asimov had something to say about that in his short essay The relativity of wrong.
Even the last IPCC report didn't reach that conclusion.
Well duh, the IPCC do not provide any economic calculations or conclusions. They provide the best available reports on what is happening and what the trends are doing, they then advise policy makers what problems are likely to occur and what can be done to mitigate or avoid them.
Furthermore, all those studies have methodological errors.
So where are the studies refuting the likes of Stern, the IMF, and other hard nosed bean counters?
Just some nitpicks.
Fourier died in 1830, he predicted the properties of C02 in 1824 while developing spectroscopy.
Tyndal confirmed the prediction by experiment in the 1850's
The first mention of AGW was in 1896 by a guy called Arrhenius, he woefully underestimate the growth in emissions and estimated it would take 3000yrs for CO2 to double.
Arrhenius was largely ignored for 50yrs, it was believed that the spectrum of H2O overlapped and overwhelmed that of CO2. The "problem" during those 50yrs was explaining the ice ages.
In the 1950's work on heat seeking missiles improved spectroscopes to the point it could be shown that the two spectra were interleaved not overlapped.
it *started* with substantial political and corporate interests framing it as certain and apocalyptic
Why do people believe this shit when it is so fucking simple to refute. Also you have got the various organizations all muddled up. The IPCC is purely for scientific review, it does not "do science", it does not have it's own scientists, nor does it pay a dime to any of the ~2500 scientists who donate their time to write the reports. Their budget is available on their site, it's a modest $5-6 million a year sourced from over 100 nations of all political colours, most of this is spent on airfares and conference rooms and salaries for 3-4 full time admin staff.
Just to be clear, the UNFCCC is where the political haggling takes place.
All of your suggestions of how they should conduct themselves before doing anything have been done to death, you simply have not been paying attention. Your sense of fair play has allowed vested interest to pull the wool over your eyes and insert FUD into your brain.
they have generally missed or skipped peer-reviewed research contradicting the apocalyptic GW scenarios for the past five years
Despite the fact you leave the word " apocalyptic" undefined could you link to what you consider the best three example of this hidden treasure trove?
Neutral parties are also smart enough to still ask what that rate of change is
Currently 0.14degC/decade, however the rate of change itself is also accelerating.
I find it very hard to believe you are making these basic mistakes and have also researched the subject for yourself. Forget the idea that you are neutral, your not and I'm not. Question your own assumptions and use reputable sources, then come back and look at your post. When you figure out who has been misleading you will probably get very angry, I know I did. Fool me once shame on you and all that...
Seriously, isn't it written somewhere, "Never try to threaten the guy who's holding the big guns?" It's tactically a bad move.
Indeed, they are shooting at a hippopotamus with a.22, at best they are just pissing it off. The intellectually curious are trapped in open ground between them and in grave danger of being trampled or shot.
It has the potential to be either or somewhere in between, people who are certain they have fore-knowledge of the social consequences of this particular experiment are reveling more about themselves than the future.
Slashdot Mirror
- An obscure library bug triggered by a magic string.
- In the latest version.
Agree! Watched it live on TV as a 10yo. :)
However since then there has been a growing stream of "cool" coming from space exploration - mostly cool engineering, discoveries, and Hubble style pictures, where the heroes are off camera.
NASA shot Cassini through gaps in the rings of Saturn, twice! However, if you want to see reckless then watch Armstrong navigate onto the moon in a tinfoil box.
The Tobacco Industry would be delighted to sell you dope, naturally it doesn't want you growing your own dope.
RP is an ideological loon but he is spot on with his drug policy. There's not a snowballs chance in hell he will become anything more than an old man ranting on a street corner, not because he has a sane drug policy but because he has insane economic/foreign policies.
Thing is from what I've seen of RP and his selfish band over the last decade, most of them are against corporate welfare just as much as they are against social welfare, (despite the fact they rarely understand either). Since he is firmly against corporate welfare he will never get the nod from the real fascists within the GOP, he will always be their crazy uncle that lives in the basement.
Oh and BTW, even if RP was a closet fascist, paying "unfair" taxes does not mean you are living in a fascist state, even the most brainwashed RP worshipers understand that much.
Ok, I'll feed you. You're not impressed because (like my wife) you simply don't understand the difficulty of the problem. Watson's Jeopardy answers are in the form of a question and performed in realtime, it is not plugged into a database of questions, it extracts relationships from data via an algorithm (ie: it learns), different from how humans learn, but demonstrably superior to any human in terms of both speed and accuracy.
Ang will settle for anything with a tiger in it.
It's no secret that Ang's long term goal is to own cat videos.
Massive large projects like this almost always end in utter failure.
I can think of quite a few successful ones between the Manhattan Project and the LHC
Even the IBM cat brain project failed to accomplish much.
This is a continuation of IBM's "cat brain" (Blue Brain Project), it's got a new name to reflect the fact it's no longer just IBM paying the bills. The reason it has been given taxpayer bucks is because the "cat brain" was very successful from a scientific POV. The main goal of the project has always been medical research, AI is a sub-goal.
Intelligence is much more complicated than a mere randomly connected neural network.
IBM's Watson convincingly disproves your hypothesis. Besides this project is based on anatomical correctness, it's a detailed physical model of a real brain for medical research via simulation, nothing random about it. It is hoped that creating such a model will give us new insights in how the brain works in the same way "numerical wind tunnels" have given us new insights into engineering.
My dad retired in the 80's, he was chief (mechanical) engineer at a large firm, computer simulation was just starting to appear in the industry. Today there is not a hope in hell of winning a major engineering contract without it. Computer modeling has revolutionized both industry and science since I left HS in the mid-seventies, there are no signs that revolution is losing momentum, in fact just the opposite.
I haven't read the singularity book, however it seems to me, our species may be heading down the same evolutionary path as ants, in that an ants nest can be considered a single intelligent organism (the Borg, if you prefer). Many people claim that the difference is that ants had no choice, but I doubt humans are totally immune to evolution just because our technology now allows us to air-condition our buildings like ants have been doing for millions of years.
When reading The Stand you really start to notice just how much people cough,sneeze and sniffle.
Guess what, if everyone thought like you do and believed the US dollar was worthless, it would be worthless. Same deal with gold, silver, sea shells, or any other token used to simplify trade. Currency works on trust, period! The fact is international investors trust US treasury bonds more than they trust gold.
OTOH, without banks there is no middle class.
Economics: AKA the dismal science"
the U.S. government has effectively banned internet gambling...[snip]... it's basically an internal U.S. matter.
No, if the US banned online gambling outright there would not be a problem. The problem is they allow US companies to run gambling sites but will not allow companies from other nations to compete under the same laws (such as paying tax). The other member countries are also obliged to allow US companies to offer gambling in their country under the same regulatory regime as their local companies.
Disadvantaging overseas competition is called "protectionism", it gives domestic companies an "unfair" advantage. One of the reasons the WTO was set up was to discourage protectionism, that's why the WTO has punished the US.
It will end badly for pretty much everyone involved.
No, the US will simply ignore it, it's a very cheap alternative to a trade war.
I have the documentary in my collection, there is no "deliberate trickery". As the OP stated, it was a manufactured controversy intended to punish Attenborough for his views on AGW. You'd have to be a complete moron to fall for such a transparent attempt to assassinate his character.
The key issue (that I see) can lead to abuse is the widespread phenomenon of 'plea bargaining'.
Bingo, been saying that for years. I'm also assuming they are judged by the quantity of convictions, not the quality of the charges. Other western nations seem to be able to get guilty pleas without turning the whole thing into a Turkish bazaar, so it's certainly possible that it could be improved by democratic oversight. The fact that someone in the US is 7X as likely as someone in the EU to be locked up is a pretty strong signal that there is a systemic problem within the US justice system.
Yeah the Daily Fail tried to discredit Attenborough but all they did was drag their own reputation deeper down the gutter. Why? - Because Attenborough's persona and 50yr track record is such that people see his face and they know it's legit.
punishing more developed countries while letting other ones off the hook
The "punishment" was to include the past emissions of developed nations in the accounting. In other words when Kyoto was drawn up the developed world had already pumped out a half a trillion tons, the idea was to balance that with the virtually zero emissions of other nations. The US and Australia were among the few western nations who disagreed with that principle.
Conway's Game of Life is one I would include in the history of CS.
is actual fact independent of scientific consensus?
The problem with this common question is that way too many people do not understand what the word "fact" means in a scientific context. Outside of axiomatic systems we don't have any "facts", we only have observations, also note that the fundamental axioms of mathematics are assumptions agreed by "consensus", not fact.
"Scientific consensus" is just the modern term for what Karl Popper called "the republic of science". It means that no single authority/observation/calculation has the strength of "scientific fact" (or "well established science" if you prefer). At no point in the process of strengthening a "scientific fact" does it become "actual fact", but that's ok because we do not pursue science as a path to absolute truths, we pursue it because of its track record of utility to mankind (and the 'fact' that humans are more curious than the proverbial cat).
As for the "flat world" canard, the well known skeptic Asimov had something to say about that in his short essay The relativity of wrong.
Even the last IPCC report didn't reach that conclusion.
Well duh, the IPCC do not provide any economic calculations or conclusions. They provide the best available reports on what is happening and what the trends are doing, they then advise policy makers what problems are likely to occur and what can be done to mitigate or avoid them.
Furthermore, all those studies have methodological errors.
So where are the studies refuting the likes of Stern, the IMF, and other hard nosed bean counters?
Just some nitpicks.
Fourier died in 1830, he predicted the properties of C02 in 1824 while developing spectroscopy.
Tyndal confirmed the prediction by experiment in the 1850's
The first mention of AGW was in 1896 by a guy called Arrhenius, he woefully underestimate the growth in emissions and estimated it would take 3000yrs for CO2 to double.
Arrhenius was largely ignored for 50yrs, it was believed that the spectrum of H2O overlapped and overwhelmed that of CO2. The "problem" during those 50yrs was explaining the ice ages.
In the 1950's work on heat seeking missiles improved spectroscopes to the point it could be shown that the two spectra were interleaved not overlapped.
In 1958 the national academies first warned the US government that CO2 was warming the earth, their confidence in that warning has done nothing but strengthen since that time.
it *started* with substantial political and corporate interests framing it as certain and apocalyptic
Why do people believe this shit when it is so fucking simple to refute. Also you have got the various organizations all muddled up. The IPCC is purely for scientific review, it does not "do science", it does not have it's own scientists, nor does it pay a dime to any of the ~2500 scientists who donate their time to write the reports. Their budget is available on their site, it's a modest $5-6 million a year sourced from over 100 nations of all political colours, most of this is spent on airfares and conference rooms and salaries for 3-4 full time admin staff.
Just to be clear, the UNFCCC is where the political haggling takes place.
All of your suggestions of how they should conduct themselves before doing anything have been done to death, you simply have not been paying attention. Your sense of fair play has allowed vested interest to pull the wool over your eyes and insert FUD into your brain.
they have generally missed or skipped peer-reviewed research contradicting the apocalyptic GW scenarios for the past five years
Despite the fact you leave the word " apocalyptic" undefined could you link to what you consider the best three example of this hidden treasure trove?
Neutral parties are also smart enough to still ask what that rate of change is
Currently 0.14degC/decade, however the rate of change itself is also accelerating.
what the error bars are on those models
You mean like this?
I find it very hard to believe you are making these basic mistakes and have also researched the subject for yourself. Forget the idea that you are neutral, your not and I'm not. Question your own assumptions and use reputable sources, then come back and look at your post. When you figure out who has been misleading you will probably get very angry, I know I did. Fool me once shame on you and all that...
We can probably disband the UN, you seem to have " telling every country on earth what they should be doing" covered,
Seriously, isn't it written somewhere, "Never try to threaten the guy who's holding the big guns?" It's tactically a bad move.
Indeed, they are shooting at a hippopotamus with a .22, at best they are just pissing it off. The intellectually curious are trapped in open ground between them and in grave danger of being trampled or shot.
It has the potential to be either or somewhere in between, people who are certain they have fore-knowledge of the social consequences of this particular experiment are reveling more about themselves than the future.