Struth mate, you make a good argument and it is I who is humbled by your greater knowledge on the subject. I was thinking more along the lines of the general population's tolerence level for things like police brutality, racisim, "poofta bashers", wife bashers, etc.
I agree both Whitlam and Fraser had the political balls to tackle those attitudes. Your 1988 date rings true, this is around the time when shows like "A Current Affair" gave up all pretexts of being informative and became mouthpieces for the Pauline Hanson's in our counrty who seem to belive there was too much democracy in the 60's and 70's and want to wind it back to the 50's. Oddly enough the state owned media are now the closest thing we have to an independent media.
I support "law and order" in the true sense of the term, cases such as David Hicks and the Bali Nine demonstrated to me that both major parties do not. I don't think the situation is hopeless, if it was that bad I wouldn't be able to read your post much less agree with it.;)
"The apogee of civil liberties in Western Society was experienced in the 1970s, we're on the (long?) downhill run"
I was born in 1959, that is not my recollection of the 70's. Civil liberties in the west hit a speed bump with 911 and we are are still regaining our composure but overall they are still in much better shape than they were in the 70's.
In other words "the good old days" were not that good.
I strongly agree with your post and I do not support the death penalty.
However Australian prisons have not gone as far down the corporate path as the US has. I have a relative who IMHO is criminally insane but is held in a normal prison. 15yrs ago she was an attractive, popular teenager with excellent grades at school, she "went off the rails" after she hooked up with a sadistic boyfriend and had two kids to him at a very young age. Everyone tried to help her, but she got hooked on speed and became sadistic herself, before she turned 21 her children were taken off her and the boyfriend for their own safety. She was later convicted of accesory to murder because she helped the boyfriend dispose of a body in a suitcase. A few days after she was realsed she deliberately set fire to the boarding house she was living in and killed several sleeping residents.
What do you do with that sort of phycopath other than seperate them from society? - I honestly don't have any answers, just questions as to what the hell happened to the mind of the little girl who was so full of life? I can blame her, I can blame the boyfriend, I can blame the hard drugs, but the truth is there is no explaination, and in her case there is no rational alternative to confinement.
"In other words if you lock someone up in a room with nothing but a pile of food,books and some weights equipment for a few years they probably come out more than somewhat messed up in the head."
If you replace the word "weights" with "computer" you have a good definition of the stereotypical slashdoter.
Woosh? - I'm talking about knowing they are keeping sensitive bussiness information SAFE from the prying eyes of curious admin staff. There is more to protecting some kinds of data than simply backing it up.
"The owners may want to do that if the computers were used for storing some confidential information. Such a backup cannot be stored on your shelf among books and other assorted DVDs. If the owners know what they are doing, they perform backup of those computers themselves, and keep the media at home"
That's a very good point, it's quite likely that the owners know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it. You won't get far in business by blindly trusting everyone who works for you.
"we have to show them that we are doing scans of our network looking for vulnerabilities, but all they want is a log with someones name and a date on it."
I assume the audit is to pass some sort of accreditation rather than to catch cheats. If so then their job is exacltly what you have described, ie: check the company procedures comply with the standard and ask for evidence that they are being followed.
Rubbing their nose in it with a useless disclaimer is not going to end well. Presumably the policy has been written down, meaning the owners have authorised the policy either explicitly or by delegation, therefore his arse is already covered if HE follows it. You can respectfully remind the owners of their own policy but provided no laws are broken they are free to make and break policy as they see fit, employees do not have the same privlages.
I recall reading a headline in the 70's stating, "Scientists discover rings around Uranus". The same paper when reporting on Virgin airlines problems with terminal allocations at Sydney airport summed it up with the headline "Virgin gets shafted".
Controls like this are not really a new thing. Encryption techniques used to be considered a munition by most western countries and their export was strictly controlled after WW2. Products such as PGP made a mockery of those laws since the code could be changed from illegal to legal by editing a single #define. The response from governments appears to have been to drop the laws controlling the export specific technology and replace them with laws controlling all exports to specific groups/nations.
The US is very serious about those laws as was demonstrated when two charity workers were jailed for 65yrs for sending money to palestinians via Hamas despite the fact that prosecuters did not accuse them of directly funding terrorist activities.
You beat me to it, I also find this the most interesting part of the TFA. I wonder if this unusual property is more or less pronunced in carbon than it is in water, ie: do the diamondbergs float higher or lower in the liquid carbon than icebergs do in liquid water?
"it's almost like you are abandoning a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in the cage or something."
Ouch!
Having dug deeper into the issue and reading the IPCC statement on the subject, I agree that the paragraph in question was not properly referenced. The fact that the 2035 date was lifted from a WWF report does not in itself imply the WWF report was not properly referenced but it does show that in this case the IPCC failed to follow their own procedures and used a third hand source.
It is by far the sloppiest bit of work to come out of the IPCC in 20yrs (that I am aware of), and I was too quick to write it off as a simple typo. However it does not change my opinion that the reports are "one of the most robust surveys of peer-reviewed work ever undertaken on a single question". Addressing the error in the manner that they have will assist in making the reports more robust but nothing they do can ever bridge the gap between usefull and perfect.
I don't read the quotes in your post the way you do. I read it as saying it's a good thing to engage in risk management regardless of AGW's influence and I belive the natural disasters they are talking about wrt AGW are related to higher sea levels and increaed inidence of drought. Where they do draw a link between AGW and increased risk they clearly cite their references...eg:
"Disaster risk reduction tends to focus on sudden and short-lived disasters, such as floods, storms, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and has tended to place less emphasis on ‘creeping onset’ disasters such as droughts. Many disasters covered by disaster risk reduction are not affected by climate change. However, there is an increasing recognition of the linkages between disaster risk reduction and adaptation to climate change, since climate change alters not only the physical hazard but also vulnerability. Sperling and Szekely (2005) note that many of the impacts associated with climate change exacerbate or alter existing threats, and adaptation measures can benefit from practical experience in disaster risk reduction. However, some effects of climate change are new within human history (such as the effects of sea-level rise), and there is little experience to tackle such impacts."
If you are trying to say that people have blown the discussion out of all proportinon by cliaming AGW will cause more hurricanes then I agree. I will also agree that your referenced paragraphs use stronger language than I would. I think you have homed in on some weak spots in the science and I genuinely admire that part of your skepticisim but if your trying to say the loss of Artic ice has not been observed, was not predicted 20yrs ago, and has nothing to do with AGW then it is you who is not being very sciency. You may want to look up the history of a phenomena that is now called "polar amplification".
Palentology vs climatology:
How old something is does not impact on it's validity, however just to set the record straight. The IR absorbtion properties of CO2 were predicted by Fourier in 1824, Fourier's prediction was confirmed experimentally by Farady in the 1850's. A guy called Arrhenius first voiced the idea human emmissions could warm the planet in 1896. The US national acedemies of science first told the US government that they had observed a human induced warming singnal in the 1950's and have not changed their claim since. Al Gore came along with a slide show in 2005 and gets all the blame/credit.
BTW: The study of ancient climate is called paleoclimatology, as the name suggests, practitioners of paleoclimatology are well versed in both palentology and climatology. The take home message from the study of ancient climate is that life itself has played a large role in determining the composition of our atmosphere and climate is very sensitive to small changes in the composition.
"Robust ? A dyslexic typo ? Unpaid ? Best answers available ?"
No scientist has ever been paid a cent by the IPCC, this is standard practice for all scientific reviewers no matter what subject they are reviewing or who they are reviewing it for. The IPCC's entire budget is $5-6M/yr and is sourced from hunereds of politically diverse nations, it is spent on conference facilities, plane tickets, and a couple of paid admin staff. It was a typo. The other two are subjective opinions.
"Your BS detector needs recalibration."
I don't think so, it's picking up your bullshit loud and clear.
1. Can you point to the page where the IPCC claims an observed correlation?
2. You do realise it was climate scientists who discovered the Milankovitch cycles, right? Do you also realise that climate scientists say Milankovitch cycles cannot explain the current warming?
3. Where does your NASA link say that winds are causing the Artic sea ice to melt? It says what little ice is left is being blown into warmer water.
I appreciate that you have gone to a lot of trouble to distort the information you are presenting but frankly you are wasting your time if you expect me to swallow.
Can you tell me why you trust Khandekar who hails from the Fraser Institute. The Fraser institute is famous for providing Phillip Morris with "scientists" to convince you that smoking is harmless. Can you point to where they have acknowleged thier "error" on the effects of smoking?
To paraphrase the late George Carlin - They call it Pajamas media, because you have to be asleep to believe it.
If you have a transcript of the entire conversation then perhaps I could make a serious comment. As it stands you have a sound bite from a highly questionable source with a strong track record of misquoting climate scientists ( Dr. Mojib Latif springs to mind as an instructive example ).
By your own standards, that link should never have made it into your post.
I used to think self praise was worthless, after reading your defense of a well known creationist I now believe it to be a good indicator of gullibility.
Slashdot Mirror
Struth mate, you make a good argument and it is I who is humbled by your greater knowledge on the subject. I was thinking more along the lines of the general population's tolerence level for things like police brutality, racisim, "poofta bashers", wife bashers, etc.
;)
I agree both Whitlam and Fraser had the political balls to tackle those attitudes. Your 1988 date rings true, this is around the time when shows like "A Current Affair" gave up all pretexts of being informative and became mouthpieces for the Pauline Hanson's in our counrty who seem to belive there was too much democracy in the 60's and 70's and want to wind it back to the 50's. Oddly enough the state owned media are now the closest thing we have to an independent media.
I support "law and order" in the true sense of the term, cases such as David Hicks and the Bali Nine demonstrated to me that both major parties do not. I don't think the situation is hopeless, if it was that bad I wouldn't be able to read your post much less agree with it.
"The apogee of civil liberties in Western Society was experienced in the 1970s, we're on the (long?) downhill run"
I was born in 1959, that is not my recollection of the 70's. Civil liberties in the west hit a speed bump with 911 and we are are still regaining our composure but overall they are still in much better shape than they were in the 70's.
In other words "the good old days" were not that good.
> Fortunately, that quarter of a tank will still get us as far as we need to go and then some.
And where is it that we're going?
I don't know, the editor tacked that bit on.
I strongly agree with your post and I do not support the death penalty.
However Australian prisons have not gone as far down the corporate path as the US has. I have a relative who IMHO is criminally insane but is held in a normal prison. 15yrs ago she was an attractive, popular teenager with excellent grades at school, she "went off the rails" after she hooked up with a sadistic boyfriend and had two kids to him at a very young age. Everyone tried to help her, but she got hooked on speed and became sadistic herself, before she turned 21 her children were taken off her and the boyfriend for their own safety. She was later convicted of accesory to murder because she helped the boyfriend dispose of a body in a suitcase. A few days after she was realsed she deliberately set fire to the boarding house she was living in and killed several sleeping residents.
What do you do with that sort of phycopath other than seperate them from society? - I honestly don't have any answers, just questions as to what the hell happened to the mind of the little girl who was so full of life? I can blame her, I can blame the boyfriend, I can blame the hard drugs, but the truth is there is no explaination, and in her case there is no rational alternative to confinement.
"In other words if you lock someone up in a room with nothing but a pile of food,books and some weights equipment for a few years they probably come out more than somewhat messed up in the head."
If you replace the word "weights" with "computer" you have a good definition of the stereotypical slashdoter.
Woosh? - I'm talking about knowing they are keeping sensitive bussiness information SAFE from the prying eyes of curious admin staff. There is more to protecting some kinds of data than simply backing it up.
"The owners may want to do that if the computers were used for storing some confidential information. Such a backup cannot be stored on your shelf among books and other assorted DVDs. If the owners know what they are doing, they perform backup of those computers themselves, and keep the media at home"
That's a very good point, it's quite likely that the owners know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it. You won't get far in business by blindly trusting everyone who works for you.
"we have to show them that we are doing scans of our network looking for vulnerabilities, but all they want is a log with someones name and a date on it."
I assume the audit is to pass some sort of accreditation rather than to catch cheats. If so then their job is exacltly what you have described, ie: check the company procedures comply with the standard and ask for evidence that they are being followed.
Rubbing their nose in it with a useless disclaimer is not going to end well. Presumably the policy has been written down, meaning the owners have authorised the policy either explicitly or by delegation, therefore his arse is already covered if HE follows it. You can respectfully remind the owners of their own policy but provided no laws are broken they are free to make and break policy as they see fit, employees do not have the same privlages.
"... no text needed, if you can't figure it out then go have a drink.."
I respectfully suggest you stop drinking and re-read his post.
Yeah but the catch is you need obscene amounts of unobtainium to get there.
"The economy of mining other planets...[snip]...the only uses I know of for diamonds at the moment are cutting things and getting laid."
Cost is irrelevant, history clearly demonstrates the prospect of getting laid has moved mountains.
Get a one-way ticket and pay for the return journey in gold?
Offtopic? - C'mon mods where's your sense of humour?
I recall reading a headline in the 70's stating, "Scientists discover rings around Uranus". The same paper when reporting on Virgin airlines problems with terminal allocations at Sydney airport summed it up with the headline "Virgin gets shafted".
Controls like this are not really a new thing. Encryption techniques used to be considered a munition by most western countries and their export was strictly controlled after WW2. Products such as PGP made a mockery of those laws since the code could be changed from illegal to legal by editing a single #define. The response from governments appears to have been to drop the laws controlling the export specific technology and replace them with laws controlling all exports to specific groups/nations.
The US is very serious about those laws as was demonstrated when two charity workers were jailed for 65yrs for sending money to palestinians via Hamas despite the fact that prosecuters did not accuse them of directly funding terrorist activities.
You beat me to it, I also find this the most interesting part of the TFA. I wonder if this unusual property is more or less pronunced in carbon than it is in water, ie: do the diamondbergs float higher or lower in the liquid carbon than icebergs do in liquid water?
"it's almost like you are abandoning a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in the cage or something."
Ouch!
Having dug deeper into the issue and reading the IPCC statement on the subject, I agree that the paragraph in question was not properly referenced. The fact that the 2035 date was lifted from a WWF report does not in itself imply the WWF report was not properly referenced but it does show that in this case the IPCC failed to follow their own procedures and used a third hand source.
It is by far the sloppiest bit of work to come out of the IPCC in 20yrs (that I am aware of), and I was too quick to write it off as a simple typo. However it does not change my opinion that the reports are "one of the most robust surveys of peer-reviewed work ever undertaken on a single question". Addressing the error in the manner that they have will assist in making the reports more robust but nothing they do can ever bridge the gap between usefull and perfect.
fixed WP link
I don't read the quotes in your post the way you do. I read it as saying it's a good thing to engage in risk management regardless of AGW's influence and I belive the natural disasters they are talking about wrt AGW are related to higher sea levels and increaed inidence of drought. Where they do draw a link between AGW and increased risk they clearly cite their references...eg:
"Disaster risk reduction tends to focus on sudden and short-lived disasters, such as floods, storms, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and has tended to place less emphasis on ‘creeping onset’ disasters such as droughts. Many disasters covered by disaster risk reduction are not affected by climate change. However, there is an increasing recognition of the linkages between disaster risk reduction and adaptation to climate change, since climate change alters not only the physical hazard but also vulnerability. Sperling and Szekely (2005) note that many of the impacts associated with climate change exacerbate or alter existing threats, and adaptation measures can benefit from practical experience in disaster risk reduction. However, some effects of climate change are new within human history (such as the effects of sea-level rise), and there is little experience to tackle such impacts."
If you are trying to say that people have blown the discussion out of all proportinon by cliaming AGW will cause more hurricanes then I agree. I will also agree that your referenced paragraphs use stronger language than I would. I think you have homed in on some weak spots in the science and I genuinely admire that part of your skepticisim but if your trying to say the loss of Artic ice has not been observed, was not predicted 20yrs ago, and has nothing to do with AGW then it is you who is not being very sciency. You may want to look up the history of a phenomena that is now called "polar amplification".
Palentology vs climatology:
How old something is does not impact on it's validity, however just to set the record straight. The IR absorbtion properties of CO2 were predicted by Fourier in 1824, Fourier's prediction was confirmed experimentally by Farady in the 1850's. A guy called Arrhenius first voiced the idea human emmissions could warm the planet in 1896. The US national acedemies of science first told the US government that they had observed a human induced warming singnal in the 1950's and have not changed their claim since. Al Gore came along with a slide show in 2005 and gets all the blame/credit.
BTW: The study of ancient climate is called paleoclimatology, as the name suggests, practitioners of paleoclimatology are well versed in both palentology and climatology. The take home message from the study of ancient climate is that life itself has played a large role in determining the composition of our atmosphere and climate is very sensitive to small changes in the composition.
"Robust ? A dyslexic typo ? Unpaid ? Best answers available ?"
No scientist has ever been paid a cent by the IPCC, this is standard practice for all scientific reviewers no matter what subject they are reviewing or who they are reviewing it for. The IPCC's entire budget is $5-6M/yr and is sourced from hunereds of politically diverse nations, it is spent on conference facilities, plane tickets, and a couple of paid admin staff. It was a typo. The other two are subjective opinions.
"Your BS detector needs recalibration."
I don't think so, it's picking up your bullshit loud and clear.
1. Can you point to the page where the IPCC claims an observed correlation?
2. You do realise it was climate scientists who discovered the Milankovitch cycles, right? Do you also realise that climate scientists say Milankovitch cycles cannot explain the current warming?
3. Where does your NASA link say that winds are causing the Artic sea ice to melt? It says what little ice is left is being blown into warmer water.
I appreciate that you have gone to a lot of trouble to distort the information you are presenting but frankly you are wasting your time if you expect me to swallow.
"Someone want to remind me why I should trust the IPCC (or climate "science") again?"
Because they not only acknowledge their errors but prominently link to the acknowledgement on their main reports page.
Can you tell me why you trust Khandekar who hails from the Fraser Institute. The Fraser institute is famous for providing Phillip Morris with "scientists" to convince you that smoking is harmless. Can you point to where they have acknowleged thier "error" on the effects of smoking?
To paraphrase the late George Carlin - They call it Pajamas media, because you have to be asleep to believe it.
If you have a transcript of the entire conversation then perhaps I could make a serious comment. As it stands you have a sound bite from a highly questionable source with a strong track record of misquoting climate scientists ( Dr. Mojib Latif springs to mind as an instructive example ).
By your own standards, that link should never have made it into your post.
"I'm wise enough..."
I used to think self praise was worthless, after reading your defense of a well known creationist I now believe it to be a good indicator of gullibility.
"how can you explain away what this guy has said"
/sarcasm
I see your point, the Daily Mail is world renowned as a beacon of truth shinning it's light on the cockroaches of science.