The land mines themselves could easily be defined as "autonomous killing bots". Unfortunately there are no universal bounds to the atrocities of war and I doubt legal semantics can ever fundamentally change that equation.
Volcanos also provide a repeatable aerosol experiment, about once a decade there's an eruption large enough to very slightly dip the global temperature for a year or two after the event, Mt Pinatubo is the classic example.
experimental results on a planetary scale you would like to share.
We have had experimental results for quite some time. Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher pushed for an international cap and trade on sulphur emissions in the late 80's and won. Sulphur emissions were having a slight cooling effect on the planet as do the current aerosol emissions from China. However, the reason the emissions were curbed under international treaties was to reduce acid rain that had become a serious problem in the N hemisphere. I'm not a fan of Reagan or Thatcher but this is one thing they got right (probably because Maggie was a Chemist at Oxford). Thatcher was also the first world leader to take AGW seriously.
Aerosols are the grain of truth in the misleading denier claim that "in the 70's they predicted global cooling". The various "clean air" acts of western nations in the 60's and 70's contributed to AGW by removing much of the aerosols but they still have a significant effect on climate. The clean air acts themselves were introduced because too many people were dying early from respiratory problems, the "pea soup" fog phenomena of the first half of the 20th century was so named because of it's greenish-yellow colour, not because it was thick.
In other words: We know from past experience that sulfur and other some other aerosols from coal fired plants will cool the planet, but we also know that the "aerosol fix" is worse than the current problem. Conversely the same plants will output soot and CO2 which both warm the planet. The obvious fix is to stop the current "experiment" of burning coal for energy as quickly as possible by focusing on renewables, but that frightens some people's wallets so much that they are willing to consider any option that is not the obvious fix, even a suicidal one such as that proposed in TFA. (while claiming it's the greenies who want to kill all humans).
Bullshit. Both the victims and perpetrators of random violence are overwhelmingly male. However, domestic violence is not random violence, victims of domestic violence are overwhelmingly female. The sexes are NOT equal in physical strength, the average male has 1.5X the upper body strength of a similar sized female and twice the strength of grip in their hands, it's almost always the unarmed female who ends up in hospital when push turns to shove.
Dyson is a skeptic, not a denier. He has stated on multiple occasions that agrees with the consensus position that human emissions are responsible for most, if not all, of the warming. Most of his criticisms appear to be about he would solve the same problem with a Dyson Sphere, eg: GM trees that grow diamonds.
Zero. Gore put his money where his mouth was and made an educational movie, the profit went straight back into his educational foundation, not his pocket. Gore is worth ~$100m, none of it has come from his activism on AGW, that activity has COST him money.
The thousands of scientists who help compile the IPCC reports do it for free, none of them get a dime from the IPCC, at best they get their regular salary from their university. The IPCC has a $5-6M annual budget, most of it is spent on conference rooms and transport, there are a handful of full time admin staff. The IPCC accounts are published on their website for all to see. The money comes from individual nation states, last time I look there were about 130 nations on the donor list representing every colour of the political rainbow.
Most people in the climate science community will not be surprised that Soon was on the FF payroll.
Looks exactly the same to me, people wanting compensation for their idiotic complaint. Who would go to the trouble of starting a class action suit over this sort of trivia? Is it really disgruntled customers or is it a competitor playing a dirty PR game?
The reason I would avoid Uber stock is their business model falls foul of the law in most of the countries where they operate, only a matter of time until they are shut down. A comparison to Kazza's business model would be more apt than snapchat but I agree the eyeball market is saturated these days.
You can justifiably blame the state for lack of opportunity, but there's nobody to blame for a lack of morals other than yourself. And before you ask - I have walked many miles in a poor man's shoes.
The massive slashdot paradox in this thread? - In other stories the NSA are seen as omnipotent hackers who know more about me than my closest friends, but in this thread they suddenly don't know their arse from their elbow?
So rather than isolating and repairing the hole they should bulldoze everything and build another one and just hope it doesn't have the same hole? - sound like a government plan to me.
Yeah, I had a luggable trinitron that worked for 30+yrs, the only reason my daughter threw it out was because all the (Aussie) TV stations changed to the new frequency. Sony had a reputation for quality and innovation in the 70's & 80's but they pissed that away, I think the rot set in after their huge success with the walkman. They don't need to sell off the rest of the company's arms to fix that.
It's Scotland Police, nothing to do with Scotland yard or Ireland. Scotland is the land where cops punch out suicide bombers while their still on fire! They don't need no stinking coding error to cover their tracks, they just have to glare at the server and it will forget everything it knows.
Yep, if the coder followed procedures, not his fault, if there were no procedures also not his fault. Inadequate testing regime, again, not his fault. Anyone in the business of coding for more than an hour knows serious coding errors like this happen all the time in development. If these expected errors manage to navigate the layers of testers and admins between check-in and production then someone else screwed-up, either that or there's a hole in the test/delivery procedures.
Don't have layers of testers and admins between check-in and production? Again, not the coders fault - since no coder worth their paycheck is so foolish as to boast his code does not require independent testing. It's the same deal with jobs such a welding pipelines, the welder is expected to have the requisite skills and training to produce quality work to a deadline, they are definitely not asked to guarantee every weld is fit for purpose, the inspector with the x-ray machine does that. No matter how good you QA regime is, at the end of the day software will still have bugs, and pipelines will occasionally explode. The best one can hope for is to not repeat the same mistake twice, and even that seems unattainable since it requires an absence of incompetence and malice.
I just wonder how much longer before software testing will get the respect it deserves.
I think the bottom line there is that many devs and testers don't realise that when they disagree about "what it should do" they are doing their job. Both groups exists to throw work at each other until both are in agreement. Often there's also some testing effort from the customer and the in-house testers are the meat in the sandwich when they ask questions. Three layers of testers is not uncommon, the third being a completely independent group between tester and customer tester.
I've seen the testers job and read more test plans than I care to remember, a tester that has the tenacity of a dog with a bone over minor points annoys the shit out of me but gets my utmost respect, bonus points because someone has to do it and I certainly don't want the job.
Wankers who swallow the latest conspiracy theory are the root problem, I wish the UN would do something about them, perhaps spraying them with valium from high altitude would work.
Enthusiastically read "Emperor's New Mind" when it hit the bookstores. I was expecting something brilliant from Penrose but was very disappointed with the metaphysical contents. Many brilliant people engage in wild speculation, I think to some degree it comes with the gift of genius. For instance the vast bulk of Newton's papers were theological rants, full of wacky claims such as "Jesus was sent to Earth to operate the levers of gravity". He also wrote almost a million words on the numerology of 666. Of course Newton also wrote what is arguably the most important and influential document in modern science, that's why we don't call Newton a 'crackpot', even though he clearly behaved like one at times.
In his younger years, Penrose was brilliant and made great contributions to mathematical physics.
Yep, being wrong is easy, anyone can do it. Penrose still has a track record that makes him one of the top mathematicians alive today, and he does have a point in that neural nets do appear to be insufficient to reproduce consciousness. Just a shame that such a talent has been sidetracked into looking for an answer in metaphysical mumbo-jumbo for the last couple of decades.
Yes, but there's often a hell of a racket shortly after predator spots prey. And then there's sex, when one frog is croaking for a mate a fox can easily home in on it, when tens of thousands are doing it all at the same time even the fox's huge ears cannot pinpoint an individual frog unless it's almost standing on it. Disorientating predators with omni-directional noise is a common tactic for a variety of small critters. In certain years large green cicadas here in Oz fill the trees for a few weeks in summer, the high pitched noise can be that loud that it hurts your ears. There are millions of them each about the size of a man's thumb, making a huge racket, but spotting one in a tree takes a surprising amount of searching and luck.
Nature's noisy orgies are short and seasonal, for the rest of the year(s) between events the same location will be almost silent.
In 1980 I moved from inner suburban Melbourne to a sawmill town which is now a ghost town in the middle of a huge national park that straddles the NSW/VIC border. The town had about a dozen houses, a sawmill and a dairy farm, there were no other humans for at least 50km in every direction. The first few nights I found it difficult to sleep, bellowing cows, a chorus of frogs, barking of wild dogs, squealing of feral pigs, owls hooting, etc, all combined to make a huge racket all night long. Midday was the quietest, the mill was silent due to lunch and the birds were quiet because of the midday heat. The sheer volume of the morning chorus of birds while walking to work is something I will never forget. Since the 80's I've spent a lot of time in the bush, camping with my kids, etc. Never have I come across another place with such prolific (and loud) wildlife. I feel privileged to have lived and worked in such a place and even though it meant losing my house and job at the time, I'm glad it is now a national park.
Slashdot Mirror
The land mines themselves could easily be defined as "autonomous killing bots". Unfortunately there are no universal bounds to the atrocities of war and I doubt legal semantics can ever fundamentally change that equation.
Volcanos also provide a repeatable aerosol experiment, about once a decade there's an eruption large enough to very slightly dip the global temperature for a year or two after the event, Mt Pinatubo is the classic example.
experimental results on a planetary scale you would like to share.
We have had experimental results for quite some time. Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher pushed for an international cap and trade on sulphur emissions in the late 80's and won. Sulphur emissions were having a slight cooling effect on the planet as do the current aerosol emissions from China. However, the reason the emissions were curbed under international treaties was to reduce acid rain that had become a serious problem in the N hemisphere. I'm not a fan of Reagan or Thatcher but this is one thing they got right (probably because Maggie was a Chemist at Oxford). Thatcher was also the first world leader to take AGW seriously.
Aerosols are the grain of truth in the misleading denier claim that "in the 70's they predicted global cooling". The various "clean air" acts of western nations in the 60's and 70's contributed to AGW by removing much of the aerosols but they still have a significant effect on climate. The clean air acts themselves were introduced because too many people were dying early from respiratory problems, the "pea soup" fog phenomena of the first half of the 20th century was so named because of it's greenish-yellow colour, not because it was thick.
In other words: We know from past experience that sulfur and other some other aerosols from coal fired plants will cool the planet, but we also know that the "aerosol fix" is worse than the current problem. Conversely the same plants will output soot and CO2 which both warm the planet. The obvious fix is to stop the current "experiment" of burning coal for energy as quickly as possible by focusing on renewables, but that frightens some people's wallets so much that they are willing to consider any option that is not the obvious fix, even a suicidal one such as that proposed in TFA. (while claiming it's the greenies who want to kill all humans).
If WP's facts don't line up with your political preconceptions, try Conservapedia
but in reality women do it just as much
Bullshit. Both the victims and perpetrators of random violence are overwhelmingly male. However, domestic violence is not random violence, victims of domestic violence are overwhelmingly female. The sexes are NOT equal in physical strength, the average male has 1.5X the upper body strength of a similar sized female and twice the strength of grip in their hands, it's almost always the unarmed female who ends up in hospital when push turns to shove.
Dyson is a skeptic, not a denier. He has stated on multiple occasions that agrees with the consensus position that human emissions are responsible for most, if not all, of the warming. Most of his criticisms appear to be about he would solve the same problem with a Dyson Sphere, eg: GM trees that grow diamonds.
There are nations with left hand and right hand auto driving.
Yep we drive on the left in Oz, the first time I went to Europe I wondered why I was having so much trouble walking around the shopping mall.
Zero. Gore put his money where his mouth was and made an educational movie, the profit went straight back into his educational foundation, not his pocket. Gore is worth ~$100m, none of it has come from his activism on AGW, that activity has COST him money.
The thousands of scientists who help compile the IPCC reports do it for free, none of them get a dime from the IPCC, at best they get their regular salary from their university. The IPCC has a $5-6M annual budget, most of it is spent on conference rooms and transport, there are a handful of full time admin staff. The IPCC accounts are published on their website for all to see. The money comes from individual nation states, last time I look there were about 130 nations on the donor list representing every colour of the political rainbow.
Most people in the climate science community will not be surprised that Soon was on the FF payroll.
PC = Politically Correct.
Looks exactly the same to me, people wanting compensation for their idiotic complaint. Who would go to the trouble of starting a class action suit over this sort of trivia? Is it really disgruntled customers or is it a competitor playing a dirty PR game?
The reason I would avoid Uber stock is their business model falls foul of the law in most of the countries where they operate, only a matter of time until they are shut down. A comparison to Kazza's business model would be more apt than snapchat but I agree the eyeball market is saturated these days.
Take your word for it, I was working from memory. The medal must be a great conversation starter for him....
You can justifiably blame the state for lack of opportunity, but there's nobody to blame for a lack of morals other than yourself. And before you ask - I have walked many miles in a poor man's shoes.
Did I miss anything?
The massive slashdot paradox in this thread? - In other stories the NSA are seen as omnipotent hackers who know more about me than my closest friends, but in this thread they suddenly don't know their arse from their elbow?
So rather than isolating and repairing the hole they should bulldoze everything and build another one and just hope it doesn't have the same hole? - sound like a government plan to me.
Sounds like someone wants Sony to give up doing everything except the thing the journalist is interested in.
I suspect the 'journalist' is actually a disgruntled 8yo who recently stopped blaming Santa's elves for the poor quality..
Yeah, I had a luggable trinitron that worked for 30+yrs, the only reason my daughter threw it out was because all the (Aussie) TV stations changed to the new frequency. Sony had a reputation for quality and innovation in the 70's & 80's but they pissed that away, I think the rot set in after their huge success with the walkman. They don't need to sell off the rest of the company's arms to fix that.
It's Scotland Police, nothing to do with Scotland yard or Ireland. Scotland is the land where cops punch out suicide bombers while their still on fire! They don't need no stinking coding error to cover their tracks, they just have to glare at the server and it will forget everything it knows.
Management failed.
Yep, if the coder followed procedures, not his fault, if there were no procedures also not his fault. Inadequate testing regime, again, not his fault. Anyone in the business of coding for more than an hour knows serious coding errors like this happen all the time in development. If these expected errors manage to navigate the layers of testers and admins between check-in and production then someone else screwed-up, either that or there's a hole in the test/delivery procedures.
Don't have layers of testers and admins between check-in and production? Again, not the coders fault - since no coder worth their paycheck is so foolish as to boast his code does not require independent testing. It's the same deal with jobs such a welding pipelines, the welder is expected to have the requisite skills and training to produce quality work to a deadline, they are definitely not asked to guarantee every weld is fit for purpose, the inspector with the x-ray machine does that. No matter how good you QA regime is, at the end of the day software will still have bugs, and pipelines will occasionally explode. The best one can hope for is to not repeat the same mistake twice, and even that seems unattainable since it requires an absence of incompetence and malice.
I just wonder how much longer before software testing will get the respect it deserves.
I think the bottom line there is that many devs and testers don't realise that when they disagree about "what it should do" they are doing their job. Both groups exists to throw work at each other until both are in agreement. Often there's also some testing effort from the customer and the in-house testers are the meat in the sandwich when they ask questions. Three layers of testers is not uncommon, the third being a completely independent group between tester and customer tester.
I've seen the testers job and read more test plans than I care to remember, a tester that has the tenacity of a dog with a bone over minor points annoys the shit out of me but gets my utmost respect, bonus points because someone has to do it and I certainly don't want the job.
Wankers who swallow the latest conspiracy theory are the root problem, I wish the UN would do something about them, perhaps spraying them with valium from high altitude would work.
As Michael Crichton wrote:... Proving that even a broken watch can be right.
In his younger years, Penrose was brilliant and made great contributions to mathematical physics.
Yep, being wrong is easy, anyone can do it. Penrose still has a track record that makes him one of the top mathematicians alive today, and he does have a point in that neural nets do appear to be insufficient to reproduce consciousness. Just a shame that such a talent has been sidetracked into looking for an answer in metaphysical mumbo-jumbo for the last couple of decades.
Yes, but there's often a hell of a racket shortly after predator spots prey. And then there's sex, when one frog is croaking for a mate a fox can easily home in on it, when tens of thousands are doing it all at the same time even the fox's huge ears cannot pinpoint an individual frog unless it's almost standing on it. Disorientating predators with omni-directional noise is a common tactic for a variety of small critters. In certain years large green cicadas here in Oz fill the trees for a few weeks in summer, the high pitched noise can be that loud that it hurts your ears. There are millions of them each about the size of a man's thumb, making a huge racket, but spotting one in a tree takes a surprising amount of searching and luck.
Nature's noisy orgies are short and seasonal, for the rest of the year(s) between events the same location will be almost silent.
In 1980 I moved from inner suburban Melbourne to a sawmill town which is now a ghost town in the middle of a huge national park that straddles the NSW/VIC border. The town had about a dozen houses, a sawmill and a dairy farm, there were no other humans for at least 50km in every direction. The first few nights I found it difficult to sleep, bellowing cows, a chorus of frogs, barking of wild dogs, squealing of feral pigs, owls hooting, etc, all combined to make a huge racket all night long. Midday was the quietest, the mill was silent due to lunch and the birds were quiet because of the midday heat. The sheer volume of the morning chorus of birds while walking to work is something I will never forget. Since the 80's I've spent a lot of time in the bush, camping with my kids, etc. Never have I come across another place with such prolific (and loud) wildlife. I feel privileged to have lived and worked in such a place and even though it meant losing my house and job at the time, I'm glad it is now a national park.