What do you propose to collect independent data from 1950 to 2010? Time travel? Of course you have to rely on global climate researchers.
It would also have to be a very far sighted researcher to created biased data back in the 50s. There would have to be an incredibly massive conspiracy to skew the data decades before the theories were postulated.
"Hey, let's make our data look like it is getting warmer and see where that takes us."
My sister still used the original 386 running Windows 3.1 that I set up for her many years ago. I have thrown out countless computers since then that would blow that system out of the water, but she has no interest in upgrading it.
She just runs a few games and Word 6. I really have no argument to use to convince her to upgrade, because it still does what she wants. There isn't anything that she can't do now. (Obviously she doesn't access the Internet)
How many times have we seen this sort of argument as contained in TFA:
It accused those seeking action on climate change of riding a "gravy train" and their efforts would "ultimately lock billions of human beings into long-term poverty".
So in other words, they accuse the climate change scientists of of acting in their own financial interests by being alarmists and then also complain about how doing something about the problem will adversely affect the financial interests of the skeptics. It is a massive double standard!
They claim that scientists toe the climate change line to get grants, and yet can you imagine how much definitive proof against man-made climate change would be worth to businesses? Any scientist who was in it for the money could name their price (or at least, their wife could name her price to be a consultant to industry).
The problem with this debate is that one side has to prove their claims, while the other side just needs to create doubt by using unsubstantiated and even sometimes completely discredited claims. In this case, claiming that the other side is on the "gravy train" isn't supported by any evidence at all, and yet there is no way to disprove it either. In all the leaked emails regarding this, where was the shred of evidence that anybody was trying to rort taxpayers money?
After all, didn't a Google executive pretty much tell us that if we've nothing to hide we've nothing to fear
Absolutely. If only Google had said that the reason it didn't want the data released was to protect the privacy of their staff. Then they might have managed to claw back some street cred.
My theory is that in an effort to reduce workplace distractions, the majority of their staff have no sexual organs at all. Google simply wants to protect them from embarrassment, even though the staff have literally have nothing to hide!
That's true, but only because you define left to mean those people who advocate climate change (in which case it is a self fullfilling definition). If you on having to label people as left/right then, sure, those on the "left" will defend warming. But that does not mean that all people who defend warming are politically motivated. Some of them might also be non-biased scientists who have examined the data and come to an informed conclusion.
Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995
And what do you conclude from this? That it is getting colder (like a lot of denialists claim)? That it is not changing at all? Or that it is still getting warmer, but just at a slower rate than before? Seriously, what does your quote prove?
Even if it was getting colder, does this falsify the climate change research? If you have a look at the graph of global temperature, does the current conditions have any precedent? The temperature does rise and fall (sometimes over an entire decade), and yet the overall trend keeps going up.
How many more "mistakes", falsifications, and fabrications need to be exposed before this scam goes buh-bye?
All of them. OK, maybe just the majority of them. The IPCC report is nearly 3000 pages long. Come back with more than a handful of mistakes in it before you call it busted.
That's not saying much. It is just the blinkered view that pundits get in regards to Apple. We already have people talking about iPad killers before it is even released.
When it comes to usability and design, the iPhone is the yardstick that other phones are being measured against.
Having watched my mother-in-law recently trying out her new iPhone, I have the say that the usability is overrated. There are too many places where you have to suck-it-and-see to work out the user interface. You have to tap on everything just to find out what is an active control. I found myself being uncertain whether something was going to open another application/screen or actually start making a call. Why should I have to be worried that I will inadvertently make a call?
I eventually got into the habit of doing test scrolls in case there were other hidden controls beyond the current screen because there was no visual indication that you need to scroll (like a scrollbar or a "Page 1 of 3").
Once you get to know the quirks of the interface then I am sure that it is OK, but as a new user experience I have been less than whelmed. I think that people have just been bamboozled by the flashy transitions between screens.
But they were the ones who put the word pirate in the name of their site. In your example, the city would be called Boozer City.
Which I think does exist somewhere in Australia. I might be wrong, because I have been alternating between rum and beer, so I have no idea what is going on here. Hmm, and I am currently downloading some TV episodes at the moment. Oh crap! I am that pirate in Boozer City!
That is a bit rich considering that OpenOffice does exactly the same thing. From TFA:
As OpenOffice.org 3.2 currently requires a superset of the ODF 1.2 specification, the software now warns users when ODF 1.2 Extended features have been used.
Yes, I agree that it would be nice if some office product would correctly support the file format standard that it spawned.
What's really happened here is that we voted a party in, and then they changed their minds and have gone on a giant censorship rampage for no reason.
Actually, the great firewall of Australia was one of their policies prior to the election, it was just that nobody was interested. Both Labor and the Coalition tried to on-up each other and make their censorship policy worse than the each other to court the Catholic vote.
That was why I voted for the smaller parties and independants first before any of the majors.
The scientific process is to invalidate a study if the results cannot be reproduced by anyone else. That way you can eliminate all potential problems like coding errors, invalid assumptions, faulty equipment, mistakes in procedures, and 100 of the other things that can produce dodgy results.
It can be misleading to search through the code for mistakes when you don't know which code was eventually used in the final results (or in which order). I have accumulated quite a lot of snipits of code that I used to fix a particular need at the time. I am sure that many of these hacks were ultimately unused because I decided to go down a different path in data processing. Or the temporary tables used during processing is no longer around (or in a changed format since the code was written). There is also the problem of some data processing being done by commercial products.
It's just too hard. The best solution is to let science work the way it has found to be the best. Sure you will get some bad studies, but these will eventually be fixed over time. The system does work, whether vested interests like it or not.
Were you not around when Microsoft bribed and stacked the ISO meetings
All this has absolutely nothing to do with what the grand parent asserted. Obarthelemy claimed that the author of the report didn't think that OOXML was a standard. This was not backed up by the article. Also, at no stage did I make any judgement on whether OOXML was a standard or not, so telling me to go look up Google is not relevant.
As it happens I am well aware of what went on during the standards approval process. I suggest that a flawed standard is still a standard. The current ODF standard has its own flaws too, which is how Microsoft was able to stick to the letter of the standard in their implementation and still get chided for not being compatible with OpenOffice.org. This means that ODF contains its own versions of the famous "do like Word97". Does that make it not a standard too?
Fortunately, the next version of the ODF standard will fix these limitations. I think a lot of the problems stemmed from not specifying the spreadsheet functions. While I can understand why they wouldn't want to fix the standard to a specific set of functions (thus limiting what each program can add), but they should at least have some base functions in it, and also have a known way of implementing program specific extra functions.
When trying to debunk an obvious lie (such as "OOXML is a standard"), one reasonably visible dis-believer might be enough.
Except nowhere does the original article say that OOXML is not a standard. It does say that it "is not a standard that's in sync with the way one looks at documents in 2010", but that is actually refering to it as a standard. It is a strange claim too, given that the standard must really be in sync with the way one looks a documents because it is used by the most popular office application out there.
Office Open XML? Why not Word Open XML (WOX)? Microsoft Open XML Interchange (MOXI)?
I agree that OOXML is an unfortunate name, but naming a standard after a specific product or company name will not lend itself to becoming a standard format used by all your competitors. After all, ODF does not mention its pedigree either.
If they grab the windows search index file then they'd have a map to everything else?
Which is why they lock down the security on those files so that you can't access them. On Windows 7 I can't see anything below \ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data. I don't have search on XP to see the permissions there. I would imagine that even if you have permissions to see the files, they would be open in exclusive mode by the search service.
Why would Microsoft say "it would reduce its retention time to six months, but only if its rivals followed suit"? What difference does it make what their competitors do in this regard? How does keeping the IP data for longer give them any real advantage?
Sure they can target advertisments based on my search queries, but then they can also do it based on the current site that I'm on. At least they know what I am reading know is still relevant to me. Ever since the court case, I'm not interested in that thing I was searching for 6 months ago. (Oh, what a giveaway!)
The fact that they resisted voluntarily reducing the retention time suggests that they are doing something that I would prefer that they didn't do. I just don't know what it is.
Microsoft handed over search data without being forced to do so.
Oh please! According the your cited article, Microsoft gave away "aggregated query data, not search results, that did not include any personally identifiable information". Google does this all the time!
Microsoft was caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
Actually, it wasn't their hand in the cookie jar. They had licenced the code from Intel, who had contracted the same firm that Apple used to port Quicktime to Windows. There is 2 degrees of separation.
I think that it was more the look and feel lawsuit that they really wanted to go away. Microsoft had already purged the offending code from Video for Windows, and (according to Microsoft) they had been attempting to talk with Apple to find out what code was disputed to be able to remove it. I doubt the lawsuit would have gone against them.
Alright, I'll bite. Those people who stupidly purchased DRMed music with PlaysForSure have until the end of 2011 to backup their music to CD. Microsoft Java was supported for 8 years after Microsoft were forced to discontinue the product as part of the settlement of Sun's lawsuit. COM is still in use today. I don't understand why that is on your list.
I just typed amazon and pressed CTRL+ENTER and I went straight to http://www.amazon.com/. Pressing just ENTER resulted in a Bing search.
Maybe they stuffed up the feature in IE7, but IE8 does exactly what you want. And I didn't even know about any reg hacks, so I certainly haven't done it on this computer.
There is a configuration option to switch off searching from the address bar. It is a feature that predates the separate search field. Still, it hardly seems like a deal breaker just because you have done one search instead of receiving an error message.
Slashdot Mirror
Well it's very pretty, but what about it do you find interesting?
What do you propose to collect independent data from 1950 to 2010? Time travel? Of course you have to rely on global climate researchers.
It would also have to be a very far sighted researcher to created biased data back in the 50s. There would have to be an incredibly massive conspiracy to skew the data decades before the theories were postulated.
"Hey, let's make our data look like it is getting warmer and see where that takes us."
My sister still used the original 386 running Windows 3.1 that I set up for her many years ago. I have thrown out countless computers since then that would blow that system out of the water, but she has no interest in upgrading it.
She just runs a few games and Word 6. I really have no argument to use to convince her to upgrade, because it still does what she wants. There isn't anything that she can't do now. (Obviously she doesn't access the Internet)
How many times have we seen this sort of argument as contained in TFA:
It accused those seeking action on climate change of riding a "gravy train" and their efforts would "ultimately lock billions of human beings into long-term poverty".
So in other words, they accuse the climate change scientists of of acting in their own financial interests by being alarmists and then also complain about how doing something about the problem will adversely affect the financial interests of the skeptics. It is a massive double standard!
They claim that scientists toe the climate change line to get grants, and yet can you imagine how much definitive proof against man-made climate change would be worth to businesses? Any scientist who was in it for the money could name their price (or at least, their wife could name her price to be a consultant to industry).
The problem with this debate is that one side has to prove their claims, while the other side just needs to create doubt by using unsubstantiated and even sometimes completely discredited claims. In this case, claiming that the other side is on the "gravy train" isn't supported by any evidence at all, and yet there is no way to disprove it either. In all the leaked emails regarding this, where was the shred of evidence that anybody was trying to rort taxpayers money?
After all, didn't a Google executive pretty much tell us that if we've nothing to hide we've nothing to fear
Absolutely. If only Google had said that the reason it didn't want the data released was to protect the privacy of their staff. Then they might have managed to claw back some street cred.
My theory is that in an effort to reduce workplace distractions, the majority of their staff have no sexual organs at all. Google simply wants to protect them from embarrassment, even though the staff have literally have nothing to hide!
That's true, but only because you define left to mean those people who advocate climate change (in which case it is a self fullfilling definition). If you on having to label people as left/right then, sure, those on the "left" will defend warming. But that does not mean that all people who defend warming are politically motivated. Some of them might also be non-biased scientists who have examined the data and come to an informed conclusion.
Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995
And what do you conclude from this? That it is getting colder (like a lot of denialists claim)? That it is not changing at all? Or that it is still getting warmer, but just at a slower rate than before? Seriously, what does your quote prove?
Even if it was getting colder, does this falsify the climate change research? If you have a look at the graph of global temperature, does the current conditions have any precedent? The temperature does rise and fall (sometimes over an entire decade), and yet the overall trend keeps going up.
How many more "mistakes", falsifications, and fabrications need to be exposed before this scam goes buh-bye?
All of them. OK, maybe just the majority of them. The IPCC report is nearly 3000 pages long. Come back with more than a handful of mistakes in it before you call it busted.
New phones are being touted as "iPhone killers"
That's not saying much. It is just the blinkered view that pundits get in regards to Apple. We already have people talking about iPad killers before it is even released.
When it comes to usability and design, the iPhone is the yardstick that other phones are being measured against.
Having watched my mother-in-law recently trying out her new iPhone, I have the say that the usability is overrated. There are too many places where you have to suck-it-and-see to work out the user interface. You have to tap on everything just to find out what is an active control. I found myself being uncertain whether something was going to open another application/screen or actually start making a call. Why should I have to be worried that I will inadvertently make a call?
I eventually got into the habit of doing test scrolls in case there were other hidden controls beyond the current screen because there was no visual indication that you need to scroll (like a scrollbar or a "Page 1 of 3").
Once you get to know the quirks of the interface then I am sure that it is OK, but as a new user experience I have been less than whelmed. I think that people have just been bamboozled by the flashy transitions between screens.
But they were the ones who put the word pirate in the name of their site. In your example, the city would be called Boozer City.
Which I think does exist somewhere in Australia. I might be wrong, because I have been alternating between rum and beer, so I have no idea what is going on here. Hmm, and I am currently downloading some TV episodes at the moment. Oh crap! I am that pirate in Boozer City!
Yes, I will voluntarily give my money to pirates.
That is a bit rich considering that OpenOffice does exactly the same thing. From TFA:
As OpenOffice.org 3.2 currently requires a superset of the ODF 1.2 specification, the software now warns users when ODF 1.2 Extended features have been used.
Yes, I agree that it would be nice if some office product would correctly support the file format standard that it spawned.
What's really happened here is that we voted a party in, and then they changed their minds and have gone on a giant censorship rampage for no reason.
Actually, the great firewall of Australia was one of their policies prior to the election, it was just that nobody was interested. Both Labor and the Coalition tried to on-up each other and make their censorship policy worse than the each other to court the Catholic vote.
That was why I voted for the smaller parties and independants first before any of the majors.
The scientific process is to invalidate a study if the results cannot be reproduced by anyone else. That way you can eliminate all potential problems like coding errors, invalid assumptions, faulty equipment, mistakes in procedures, and 100 of the other things that can produce dodgy results.
It can be misleading to search through the code for mistakes when you don't know which code was eventually used in the final results (or in which order). I have accumulated quite a lot of snipits of code that I used to fix a particular need at the time. I am sure that many of these hacks were ultimately unused because I decided to go down a different path in data processing. Or the temporary tables used during processing is no longer around (or in a changed format since the code was written). There is also the problem of some data processing being done by commercial products.
It's just too hard. The best solution is to let science work the way it has found to be the best. Sure you will get some bad studies, but these will eventually be fixed over time. The system does work, whether vested interests like it or not.
Were you not around when Microsoft bribed and stacked the ISO meetings
All this has absolutely nothing to do with what the grand parent asserted. Obarthelemy claimed that the author of the report didn't think that OOXML was a standard. This was not backed up by the article. Also, at no stage did I make any judgement on whether OOXML was a standard or not, so telling me to go look up Google is not relevant.
As it happens I am well aware of what went on during the standards approval process. I suggest that a flawed standard is still a standard. The current ODF standard has its own flaws too, which is how Microsoft was able to stick to the letter of the standard in their implementation and still get chided for not being compatible with OpenOffice.org. This means that ODF contains its own versions of the famous "do like Word97". Does that make it not a standard too?
Fortunately, the next version of the ODF standard will fix these limitations. I think a lot of the problems stemmed from not specifying the spreadsheet functions. While I can understand why they wouldn't want to fix the standard to a specific set of functions (thus limiting what each program can add), but they should at least have some base functions in it, and also have a known way of implementing program specific extra functions.
Office Open XML.
As in:
Yes, by the end I was pulling them from the Office Suite page. The point is, office is a generic term for a suite of software.
When trying to debunk an obvious lie (such as "OOXML is a standard"), one reasonably visible dis-believer might be enough.
Except nowhere does the original article say that OOXML is not a standard. It does say that it "is not a standard that's in sync with the way one looks at documents in 2010", but that is actually refering to it as a standard. It is a strange claim too, given that the standard must really be in sync with the way one looks a documents because it is used by the most popular office application out there.
Office Open XML? Why not Word Open XML (WOX)? Microsoft Open XML Interchange (MOXI)?
I agree that OOXML is an unfortunate name, but naming a standard after a specific product or company name will not lend itself to becoming a standard format used by all your competitors. After all, ODF does not mention its pedigree either.
If they grab the windows search index file then they'd have a map to everything else?
Which is why they lock down the security on those files so that you can't access them. On Windows 7 I can't see anything below \ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data. I don't have search on XP to see the permissions there. I would imagine that even if you have permissions to see the files, they would be open in exclusive mode by the search service.
Why would Microsoft say "it would reduce its retention time to six months, but only if its rivals followed suit"? What difference does it make what their competitors do in this regard? How does keeping the IP data for longer give them any real advantage?
Sure they can target advertisments based on my search queries, but then they can also do it based on the current site that I'm on. At least they know what I am reading know is still relevant to me. Ever since the court case, I'm not interested in that thing I was searching for 6 months ago. (Oh, what a giveaway!)
The fact that they resisted voluntarily reducing the retention time suggests that they are doing something that I would prefer that they didn't do. I just don't know what it is.
Microsoft handed over search data without being forced to do so.
Oh please! According the your cited article, Microsoft gave away "aggregated query data, not search results, that did not include any personally identifiable information". Google does this all the time!
I also equate being subpoenaed to being forced.
We want privacy - give it to us.
Who is this we you speak of?
Obviously we can't tell you that. It's private!
Microsoft was caught with their hands in the cookie jar.
Actually, it wasn't their hand in the cookie jar. They had licenced the code from Intel, who had contracted the same firm that Apple used to port Quicktime to Windows. There is 2 degrees of separation.
I think that it was more the look and feel lawsuit that they really wanted to go away. Microsoft had already purged the offending code from Video for Windows, and (according to Microsoft) they had been attempting to talk with Apple to find out what code was disputed to be able to remove it. I doubt the lawsuit would have gone against them.
Alright, I'll bite. Those people who stupidly purchased DRMed music with PlaysForSure have until the end of 2011 to backup their music to CD. Microsoft Java was supported for 8 years after Microsoft were forced to discontinue the product as part of the settlement of Sun's lawsuit. COM is still in use today. I don't understand why that is on your list.
I just typed amazon and pressed CTRL+ENTER and I went straight to http://www.amazon.com/. Pressing just ENTER resulted in a Bing search.
Maybe they stuffed up the feature in IE7, but IE8 does exactly what you want. And I didn't even know about any reg hacks, so I certainly haven't done it on this computer.
There is a configuration option to switch off searching from the address bar. It is a feature that predates the separate search field. Still, it hardly seems like a deal breaker just because you have done one search instead of receiving an error message.