"I am not sure where you are getting the 2,500 number"
Here is the first reputable reference I found with a simple google search. Skip down to the section on peer-review (para 3). Note that not one of these scientists (including the handfull of lead aurthors) are paid to do this tedious and thankless job. The ippc has a budget of $5-6M/yr which is sourced from ~300 politically diverse nations (all hypnotised by Al Gore apparently). They have 2 or 3 permenant staff and the rest is spent on airfares and confrence facilities, etc, their budget is available on their website for the genuinely curious.
The ippc reports of which I only posted the latest summary, is widely regarded by scientists as one of the most robust reviews of any scientific question in the history of mankind. Virtually every national scientific body on the planet is represented.
And please stop cherry-picking data to suit your predetermined conclusions, it insults both of our intelligences.
For values of "few" that are around 2500. Your servey link agrees with my consensus link. My consensus is very conservative if you consider the fact they underestimated artic ice loss by 40%.
Mate, pull your head out of your asre and take a look around you, truthers, birthers, creationists, anti-vaccinationists, NWO conspiracy theorist, AGW deniers and greenpeace. All onboard the ship of fools.
Meanwhile most people here in SE Australia (educated or otherwise) know all two well that a "slight change" in weather patterns can really screw up a civilization. Grain harvest have been cut in half for 8 out the last ten years, billions of dollars of hydro infrastucture built in Tasmaninia in the 90's sits idle for lack of water, the high tech bass-link cable that was to be used to export that power to the mainland is now used to import power. Firestorms convert forrest into grassland, and grassland into desert, the dust from which can be seen on most mornings simply by looking at your car. Lakes that have survived for tens of thousands of years become toxic and whole forrests of 600yo red gums wither and die. Every state capital in the country has been forced to ration water while thier governments spend billions building some of the world's largests desal plants. Had this happened over geological time scales nobody except geologists would have noticed.
Now I have never been to WI but I hear from reliable sources it is also experiencing drought conditions. Tell me, do they teach history in WI?
"We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces... I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir." - Carl Sagan, Demon Haunted World (Science as a candle in the dark).
Agreed, simple is far from simple to achive and it's inherent beauty is rarely appreciated. I would like to add Turing's UCM, Godel's incompleteness theory, Feynman diagrams and the periodic table to your list of examples.
"Yeah, I didn't want to give away my analytical three body solution."
I don't blame you. Personally I would like to see great genius rewarded with the traditional immortality of fame rather than a patent but I have no philosophical objections to said genius making an exclusive buck from it while they are alive. If a balance can be struck where patents can provide that without crippling the rest of the software industry then it's a GoodThingTM.
I agree scaring one camel away is not a problem, the worst case senario is you get covered in snot. But 6000 frightened camels could really fuck up your day.
There is no law in Oz against shooting a camel with a bolt action 303 or similar weapon, in fact the government encourages the practice. This is not Texas, the town is a dirt poor native settlement with very few people, there would be a few shotguns and 22's for hunting dinner but both of these weapons would do little more than panic a herd of 6000 camels, until now there was no need to spend what little money they have on more powerfull/expensive weapons/ammo.
"There is simply no reason, in this day and age, to be menaced by any animal large enough to shoot."
These people are not living in your "day and age". There are about 300 dirt poor aborigines in Docker river including women and children, between them all there would probably be a few dozen shotguns and.22 rifles that they use to put oversized lizards on the dinner table. Attacking a camel with either of those weapons would do little except piss it off.
6000 camels in town of 300 poorly equiped natives is definitely a public menace, which is why the government are sending in proffesional shooters with better weapons and more ammo.
Good idea but I think you are underestimating the scale and isolation of the Australian outback. Camels are considered vermin as are ferral horses, donkey's, goats, pigs, water buffallo, deer, rabbits, cats, dogs, etc. It's already open season all year round on all of these imported critters. In other words there are too many camels and not enough people. Some (like those in the article) will end up as pet food but the camels major predator here in Oz is the diesel train, the stupid fuckers tend to run single file up the tracks insead of stepping off to one side.
I dont doubt Rupert's clout or cunning and I think google are doing this as a defensive measure against that potent combination. It could be argued that Google are "stealing" content by bypassing the paywall, an unlocked door is not a licence to walk into a warehouse and take what you want, etc. Not saying that is a logical argument but I'm talking about lawyers not logic. It not going to hurt google's bottom line to defuse that argument by voulentarily gaurding the door of someone else's warehouse.
As to the advertising model, so far it has done nothing except pay for a very large chunk of the infrastructure that is the internet. The world is full of skilled amatures who do things that others demand money for ( re: OSS ) and it's also full of proffesionals who will give content away in order to draw a crowd for their own sponsers. And then there are a surprising number of people like me who are willing to toss a coin into the hat of sites such as slashdot in appreciation of their efforts (I just noticed my last donation has worn off). The barrier to global publishing for said amatures and proffesionals alike is virtually non-existant because they can rent the publishing machinery for a pitance.
This is why google can make money hand over fist indexing other people's content and it's also the reason why paywalled content has been, and will continue to be, a failure (except for quality porn it would seem).
The genie is out of the bottle and has conjured up new moguls, they are not going sit idly by and allow the Rupert's of the world to put their creator back in the bottle. The only people who have the clout to do that are governments (re:China) and even they are restricted by international borders.
"[Optus] offerings are overpriced and plagued with poor service."
They are more or less the same as Telstra on price, but yes cheaper deals can be had. However my experience with the Optus internet service over the last decade has been exemplory. The rare connectivity problems I have had have been sorted quickly and cheerfully, their frontline helpdesk operators understand such terms as ping and ipconfig. Since I often work from home, that level of service is important enough to me to keep paying the ~$20/month premium.
I can't say the same for their phone service (the two services are semi-seperate entities). For several months they kept sending me two different bills for the same phone, each month I would ring up pay one bill, be assured it wouldn't happen again, then wait to have my phone cut off because I hadn't paid the other one. It was not helpfull that the first line of defense on their hopedesk was a dollar a day slave chained to a desk in Bangladesh asking me "are you sure it is not your internet bill". Needless to say I no longer use them for the phone.
Having said all that, we do at least get the opportunity to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea.
"disassembly would be the equivalent of you giving me your 3 body formula"
Yes.
F=MA is a trivial example. There are some amazing algorithims in operations research (logistics basically). Even though I passed my CS/OR degree with flying colours 20yrs ago I still don't understand WHY they work, just that they do.
I was trying to point out that copying/imitating via white box techniques is a problem, but copying/imitating with black box techniques is impossible unless you can guess (say) F=MA from the transform table, in which case the "invention" in question is obvious to a practioner of the art.
Ok assuming I accept the beat-up about the emails, how does that change my mind about the science other than one graph that was not published? PJ and the UEA are hardly the only people working on this, yes they are an important data center for climate research but they are other independenet data set that are equally as important and they conccur with the UEA's data.
To give an unrelated but conceptually similar example, Piltdown man is possibly the most infamous scientific fraud in history but it certainly does not change my mind about evolution.
Randi has also been a personal hero of mine since Uri Geller was a big deal in the 70's. As for money are you seriously saying that the FF industry who are possibly the most powerfull economic force on the planet are not funding psuedo-skeptical think tanks such as CEI and the heartland institute? How do the AWG crowd have more to gain than the coal industry has to lose? And even if PJ was getting similar sums of money from governments grants, where does he spend it, on PR or published research? Please do answer that question with NWO conspiracy crap, I've been hearing that since the 60's and Sagan (my other heroic skeptic) would spin in his grave at that nonesense.
I agree with your implied sentiment that the whole thing is a dark day for science but not for the same reason as you do. PJ has now voulantarily stepped down from his position.
The key to scientific skepticisim is self-skepticisim. You did not address any of the questions in my previous post and I'm skeptical you will address any of the questions posed in this post.
Constructing a transform table from input/output observations will tell you what the black box does but it will not tell you how it does it. For example let's pretend I am a genius and I have figured out an analytical solution to the three body problem. You observe my black box and create a transform table. However without my insight you are still left scratching your head as to how the black box can perform the transformation so rapidly and accurately when the only known way to approximate a solution is via numerical analysis.
Clean room is a black box by another name. Again by definition you cannot know how the black box performs it's task (the algorithim). Sure you could guess the right answer but if it's that's obvious then why would it be patentable?
I certainly don't want people to give away their "hard work" and throwing out copyright would also throw out the GPL that my comrades here at socilistdot are so fond of. However if the algorithim/invention is so obvious that it can be guessed by observing a black box then I would argue the inventor has not "worked" hard enough to earn a state sponsered monopoly on the idea.
Dissasembly is of course a white box that allows you to copy the algorithim without necassarily understanding it. This may or may not come under the perview of copyright or trade secrets but I will leave that argument to someone with a better understanding of law.
"Stop posting grossly incorrect statements about a field you know nothing about." - Have you checked your arse for bite marks?
No, it was experience based, track record, follow the money, all that stuff. But lets assume you are correct, in what way is your faith that they cooked the books any different?
"The ultimate test of a scientist is if he is ready to completely change his mind in response to new evidence."
Agreed, except for the highlighted nit-pick. Do you have any such evidence? On this subject I would actually love to change my mind but I am unwilling to knowingly engage in wishfull thinking.
"Do you think you could pass this test?"
According to you I already have passed the test since I was unconvinced from the early 80's thru to the late 90's. Likewise I'm pretty sure you didn't mean to give the impression that Al Gore is a scientist just because he changed his mind in 1989 due to new evidence from Hannsen.
How do you score on your own test? Are you even willing to take the test or are you going to continue to make your argument so tenuous that your brain snaps under the strain?
Slashdot Mirror
"I am not sure where you are getting the 2,500 number"
/yr which is sourced from ~300 politically diverse nations (all hypnotised by Al Gore apparently). They have 2 or 3 permenant staff and the rest is spent on airfares and confrence facilities, etc, their budget is available on their website for the genuinely curious.
Here is the first reputable reference I found with a simple google search. Skip down to the section on peer-review (para 3). Note that not one of these scientists (including the handfull of lead aurthors) are paid to do this tedious and thankless job. The ippc has a budget of $5-6M
The ippc reports of which I only posted the latest summary, is widely regarded by scientists as one of the most robust reviews of any scientific question in the history of mankind. Virtually every national scientific body on the planet is represented.
And please stop cherry-picking data to suit your predetermined conclusions, it insults both of our intelligences.
For values of "few" that are around 2500. Your servey link agrees with my consensus link. My consensus is very conservative if you consider the fact they underestimated artic ice loss by 40%.
Mate, pull your head out of your asre and take a look around you, truthers, birthers, creationists, anti-vaccinationists, NWO conspiracy theorist, AGW deniers and greenpeace. All onboard the ship of fools.
Meanwhile most people here in SE Australia (educated or otherwise) know all two well that a "slight change" in weather patterns can really screw up a civilization. Grain harvest have been cut in half for 8 out the last ten years, billions of dollars of hydro infrastucture built in Tasmaninia in the 90's sits idle for lack of water, the high tech bass-link cable that was to be used to export that power to the mainland is now used to import power. Firestorms convert forrest into grassland, and grassland into desert, the dust from which can be seen on most mornings simply by looking at your car. Lakes that have survived for tens of thousands of years become toxic and whole forrests of 600yo red gums wither and die. Every state capital in the country has been forced to ration water while thier governments spend billions building some of the world's largests desal plants. Had this happened over geological time scales nobody except geologists would have noticed.
Now I have never been to WI but I hear from reliable sources it is also experiencing drought conditions. Tell me, do they teach history in WI?
Because they're aborigines not amazonians. I've never tried to kill a Camel with a boomerang but I imagine it would be difficult.
Look, what's the scientific consensus that we have?
Yes most are deluded amatures, I wonder where their delusions come from. Sourcewatch is your friend.
A nature editorial is generally considered informative, unless of course it refutes your religion.
"We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces... I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir." - Carl Sagan, Demon Haunted World (Science as a candle in the dark).
"obvious... after you know how they work."
Agreed, simple is far from simple to achive and it's inherent beauty is rarely appreciated. I would like to add Turing's UCM, Godel's incompleteness theory, Feynman diagrams and the periodic table to your list of examples.
"Yeah, I didn't want to give away my analytical three body solution."
I don't blame you. Personally I would like to see great genius rewarded with the traditional immortality of fame rather than a patent but I have no philosophical objections to said genius making an exclusive buck from it while they are alive. If a balance can be struck where patents can provide that without crippling the rest of the software industry then it's a GoodThingTM.
I agree scaring one camel away is not a problem, the worst case senario is you get covered in snot. But 6000 frightened camels could really fuck up your day.
There is no law in Oz against shooting a camel with a bolt action 303 or similar weapon, in fact the government encourages the practice. This is not Texas, the town is a dirt poor native settlement with very few people, there would be a few shotguns and 22's for hunting dinner but both of these weapons would do little more than panic a herd of 6000 camels, until now there was no need to spend what little money they have on more powerfull/expensive weapons/ammo.
"There is simply no reason, in this day and age, to be menaced by any animal large enough to shoot."
.22 rifles that they use to put oversized lizards on the dinner table. Attacking a camel with either of those weapons would do little except piss it off.
These people are not living in your "day and age". There are about 300 dirt poor aborigines in Docker river including women and children, between them all there would probably be a few dozen shotguns and
6000 camels in town of 300 poorly equiped natives is definitely a public menace, which is why the government are sending in proffesional shooters with better weapons and more ammo.
Good idea but I think you are underestimating the scale and isolation of the Australian outback. Camels are considered vermin as are ferral horses, donkey's, goats, pigs, water buffallo, deer, rabbits, cats, dogs, etc. It's already open season all year round on all of these imported critters. In other words there are too many camels and not enough people. Some (like those in the article) will end up as pet food but the camels major predator here in Oz is the diesel train, the stupid fuckers tend to run single file up the tracks insead of stepping off to one side.
I dont doubt Rupert's clout or cunning and I think google are doing this as a defensive measure against that potent combination. It could be argued that Google are "stealing" content by bypassing the paywall, an unlocked door is not a licence to walk into a warehouse and take what you want, etc. Not saying that is a logical argument but I'm talking about lawyers not logic. It not going to hurt google's bottom line to defuse that argument by voulentarily gaurding the door of someone else's warehouse.
As to the advertising model, so far it has done nothing except pay for a very large chunk of the infrastructure that is the internet. The world is full of skilled amatures who do things that others demand money for ( re: OSS ) and it's also full of proffesionals who will give content away in order to draw a crowd for their own sponsers. And then there are a surprising number of people like me who are willing to toss a coin into the hat of sites such as slashdot in appreciation of their efforts (I just noticed my last donation has worn off). The barrier to global publishing for said amatures and proffesionals alike is virtually non-existant because they can rent the publishing machinery for a pitance.
This is why google can make money hand over fist indexing other people's content and it's also the reason why paywalled content has been, and will continue to be, a failure (except for quality porn it would seem).
The genie is out of the bottle and has conjured up new moguls, they are not going sit idly by and allow the Rupert's of the world to put their creator back in the bottle. The only people who have the clout to do that are governments (re:China) and even they are restricted by international borders.
"Utter rubbish. Newton lived in the 17th & 18th Centuries"
;)
I was talking about Frank Newton....
"[Optus] offerings are overpriced and plagued with poor service."
They are more or less the same as Telstra on price, but yes cheaper deals can be had. However my experience with the Optus internet service over the last decade has been exemplory. The rare connectivity problems I have had have been sorted quickly and cheerfully, their frontline helpdesk operators understand such terms as ping and ipconfig. Since I often work from home, that level of service is important enough to me to keep paying the ~$20/month premium.
I can't say the same for their phone service (the two services are semi-seperate entities). For several months they kept sending me two different bills for the same phone, each month I would ring up pay one bill, be assured it wouldn't happen again, then wait to have my phone cut off because I hadn't paid the other one. It was not helpfull that the first line of defense on their hopedesk was a dollar a day slave chained to a desk in Bangladesh asking me "are you sure it is not your internet bill". Needless to say I no longer use them for the phone.
Having said all that, we do at least get the opportunity to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea.
"disassembly would be the equivalent of you giving me your 3 body formula"
Yes.
F=MA is a trivial example. There are some amazing algorithims in operations research (logistics basically). Even though I passed my CS/OR degree with flying colours 20yrs ago I still don't understand WHY they work, just that they do.
I was trying to point out that copying/imitating via white box techniques is a problem, but copying/imitating with black box techniques is impossible unless you can guess (say) F=MA from the transform table, in which case the "invention" in question is obvious to a practioner of the art.
I wasn't arguing for software patents, I agree with what you say.
"Sure, some people play the odds"
Yep, those people are usually refered to as "the house".
Appologies, you did address one question.
Ok assuming I accept the beat-up about the emails, how does that change my mind about the science other than one graph that was not published? PJ and the UEA are hardly the only people working on this, yes they are an important data center for climate research but they are other independenet data set that are equally as important and they conccur with the UEA's data.
To give an unrelated but conceptually similar example, Piltdown man is possibly the most infamous scientific fraud in history but it certainly does not change my mind about evolution.
Randi has also been a personal hero of mine since Uri Geller was a big deal in the 70's. As for money are you seriously saying that the FF industry who are possibly the most powerfull economic force on the planet are not funding psuedo-skeptical think tanks such as CEI and the heartland institute? How do the AWG crowd have more to gain than the coal industry has to lose? And even if PJ was getting similar sums of money from governments grants, where does he spend it, on PR or published research? Please do answer that question with NWO conspiracy crap, I've been hearing that since the 60's and Sagan (my other heroic skeptic) would spin in his grave at that nonesense.
I agree with your implied sentiment that the whole thing is a dark day for science but not for the same reason as you do. PJ has now voulantarily stepped down from his position.
The key to scientific skepticisim is self-skepticisim. You did not address any of the questions in my previous post and I'm skeptical you will address any of the questions posed in this post.
Constructing a transform table from input/output observations will tell you what the black box does but it will not tell you how it does it. For example let's pretend I am a genius and I have figured out an analytical solution to the three body problem. You observe my black box and create a transform table. However without my insight you are still left scratching your head as to how the black box can perform the transformation so rapidly and accurately when the only known way to approximate a solution is via numerical analysis.
Clean room is a black box by another name. Again by definition you cannot know how the black box performs it's task (the algorithim). Sure you could guess the right answer but if it's that's obvious then why would it be patentable?
I certainly don't want people to give away their "hard work" and throwing out copyright would also throw out the GPL that my comrades here at socilistdot are so fond of. However if the algorithim/invention is so obvious that it can be guessed by observing a black box then I would argue the inventor has not "worked" hard enough to earn a state sponsered monopoly on the idea.
Dissasembly is of course a white box that allows you to copy the algorithim without necassarily understanding it. This may or may not come under the perview of copyright or trade secrets but I will leave that argument to someone with a better understanding of law.
"Stop posting grossly incorrect statements about a field you know nothing about." - Have you checked your arse for bite marks?
"Your argument was faith-based"
No, it was experience based, track record, follow the money, all that stuff. But lets assume you are correct, in what way is your faith that they cooked the books any different?
"The ultimate test of a scientist is if he is ready to completely change his mind in response to new evidence."
Agreed, except for the highlighted nit-pick. Do you have any such evidence? On this subject I would actually love to change my mind but I am unwilling to knowingly engage in wishfull thinking.
"Do you think you could pass this test?"
According to you I already have passed the test since I was unconvinced from the early 80's thru to the late 90's. Likewise I'm pretty sure you didn't mean to give the impression that Al Gore is a scientist just because he changed his mind in 1989 due to new evidence from Hannsen.
How do you score on your own test? Are you even willing to take the test or are you going to continue to make your argument so tenuous that your brain snaps under the strain?
Opps, I meant OP, not GP