So the deniers are always wrong? Even when the proponents change their models to reveal that they were right?
You sound like a creationist. It's how science works. Theories get refined. Refinements in the theory of evolution don't mean Darwin was wrong. Refinement in the clime models don't mean that there's no such thing as global warming. It just means we understand it a bit better now, which is a good thing.
Hopefully reports like this are taken as good news not fuel for the skeptics and deniers. Good news because we have a better chance and perhaps more time at managing with increased CO2
Or set more ambitious goals. 2 degrees rise in temperature sounds like an awful lot to me. The last ice age was only 4 degrees colder than it is now, yet that difference is enough to make the difference between a lot of dry land and a big sea separating Britain from the rest of Europe.
What accounts for the new ice-age we are entering, with year-to-year glacial expansion, and London's prospective 3rd white Christmas in a row?
Glacial expansion? I'm very interested in a link about growing glaciers. My impression is that most major glaciers (other than East Antarctica, obviously) are shrinking.
Also, keep in mind that London is not the entire world. Amsterdam is also having its second white Sinterklaas in a row (after decades of not even having any white Christmasses), but that means nothing on a global scale. It's perfectly possible for north-west Europe to become colder while the rest of the world gets warmer. Consider that we're at the same latitude as Moscow and Calgary. It's the warm gulf stream that's keeping us warm. Without it, expect an ice age in Europe, despite warming in the rest of the world.
Exactly. This basically means you don't get sick leave at all. It all comes out of your own pocket; either from your vacation or you don't get paid.
I like RollingThunder's PWB days, though. I like the idea that you can say: I'm not really ill, and I know this is short notice, but I really really don't feel like working today. A limited number of times, and presumably unpaid. That sounds like such a great idea that I'll use it if I ever start my own company.
the "find a good alternative" is the hard part. There really is little to no choice:(
Maybe we need another big credit card company. One that advertises with how Visa and MasterCard engage in political censorship, and promises to only act as politically neutral infrastructure.
I propose the name LiberCard.
We got to use Paypal, and are forced to use them due to practical market monopoly. However, that never was my primary choice, and i wish i did not have to use Paypal.
For receiving payments, there are a lot of other options. Many such payment services accept all credit cards, so customers don't need to have an account with them. But so many stores accept PayPal that a PayPal account is really convenient for me. I guess I'll have to do without that convenience for now.
I wonder if Google Checkout can be tied to a Dutch banking account. That would cut credit cards out of the loop. But enough people need to do it to make all the PayPal shops start accepting Google Checkout.
Too bad. They're essentially a "common carrier" for funds and should have to act that way.
Thanks for phrasing it that way. It's exactly the problem. They're part of the payment infrastructure, and that needs to be reliable. MasterCard is proving to be unreliable, and likely to engage in political censorship. It's like coins that refuse to be paid to someone because the person who made the coins doesn't like what the other is saying. You can't have that if you want a reliable economic infrastructure.
In America, distributing classified documents is illegal. They stopped allowing people to send money to a criminal (in their jurisdiction) company. Case closed.
Has Wikileaks been convicted by a court of law? If not, MasterCard is taking the place of the judge here.
Also, does this mean MasterCard will stop doing business with the New York Times, the Guardian, etc? Or are they merely picking on the weakest victim they can find?
Whoever is doing it, such attacks are just plain wrong. Attacking infrastructure may be harmful and amounts to terrorism.
The real problem here is that the infrastructure itself is proving itself unreliable by willfully engaging in political vigilantism. The attack, though equally wrong, is just payback in kind.
Had PayPal and MasterCard remained neutral and reliable, they wouldn't have had any problems. It's not like they received a court order demanding that they close Wikileak's account. It was their own choice to do this, and it's a wrong choice.
In any case, I just canceled my PayPal account, and explained why. That's the correct way to protest, I think. Now I need to figure out how to cancel my MasterCard, and find a good alternative.
Or just don't use CCs outside of online purchases.
I only have mine for online purchases. It's not like they're good for anything else. Well, payment abroad, perhaps, but I think it's only the US where they're really more convenient than other forms of payment. And I don't plan to submit to their nude scan/groping check any time soon.
So, yeah, online purchases. What other alternatives are there?
That's a problem. I'm quite willing to drop MasterCard is there's a good alternative. The main requirement is that it needs to be accepted by all web shops. So that restricts my options to PayPal, Visa and MasterCard, I think.
I haven't read TFA, but I've read other criticisms of the NASA research, and they said that the microbes had plenty of access to phosphor. And if that's the case, then NASA's assumption that arsenic replaced phosphor in the DNA gets really tenuous.
In fact, I had that very same suspicion when I first read about it. Instead of proving that the DNA contained arsenic instead of phosphor, it really sounded like they just assumed it, because there was so much arsenic and so little phosphor in the environment. Well, sorry, but an assumption that something might be true is just nowhere near as groundbreaking as proof that it really is.
I really hope they do manage to prove that DNA can be based on different elements, but for now I agree with the critics that they haven't done that yet.
What happens if you go on vacation, and later you get sick? Taking sick leave out of vacation seems kinda defeating the purpose of both sick leave and vacation. What if you're sick for more than 19 days?
As much as I hate the canard about "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide", there is a valid corollary: "If you've done nothing wrong, you won't get caught".
I know. I'm just pointing out that the psychological ability to raise kids is more important. People have kids because they think it's a nice addition to their lifestyle, or because they think kids are cute, or because they think they're supposed to. What they should be thinking about is whether they're actually ready for that kind of responsibility.
Raising a kid is a bigger responsibility than a job or a mortgage. It's worth taking seriously. And many people under 24 are still working on their own education and building their own life. You need to know how to take care of yourself before you can take care of someone else.
The biological optimum is pretty irrelevant in this medical age.
My guess is that as kids, they've been taught to share. So that's what they do.
If you want your kids to not become a filesharer, berate them whenever they share their toys with other kids. Developing a sense of morality starts at a young age.
Like it or not, there's no difference between walking into a 7-11 and stealing a 99 cent candy bar than there is pulling the latest 99 cent song of choice off of The Pirate Bay.
Like it or not, but there's a huge difference between the two. For one thing, songs don't cost 99 cents on Pirate Bay. For another, by downloading that song, you're not depriving someone else of the use of that good, which is the very basis of the definition of theft. You might be violating someone's copyright, but that's a whole different thing.
Actually, no, this is a Republic, not a democracy (assuming "this" refers to the United States).
You say that as if those two are at odds with each other. They're not; they're orthogonal. There are many democratic republics in the world.
I agree that democracy in the US leaves a lot to be desired, with its lack of proportional representation, two-party system and the big role that money plays. It's arguably closer to a plutocracy than a democracy.
The whole point of the US government is that there are checks and balances even against the people.
I thought the checks and balances were supposed to be against the people in power. Not so much the people in general.
It shouldn't be possible to deprive people of their rights just because a significant number of people think it proper.
Of course. But that also means you need to think about what really would be the right thing in this case. Hint: that's not necessarily what big industry says it is.
24-25 is biologically pretty much the later end of optimum time to have first kids - waiting until 30+ for your first kid is due to quite unnatural social pressure and is not really that good to the kid and the family in many different aspects.
That's nonsense. 30 is a perfectly fine age for having kids. And recent research showed that women who have kids late end up happier than women who don't have kids at all, who in turn end are still happier than women who have their kids early. And I'd say a happy mom is a pretty big factor in what's good for the family and the children.
Sure, you're biologically perfectly capable of having children when you're 20, but are you psychologically equipped to raise them properly? IMO 24-25 is the early end of the optimum time to have kids.
"I have a bomb, open the cockpit or I push the button"
But why would you need a bomb in order to say that? How does the TSA groping help prevent this? Are you really going to check whether the guy has a real bomb before you open the door?
Slashdot Mirror
Doublethink detected!
So the deniers are always wrong? Even when the proponents change their models to reveal that they were right?
You sound like a creationist. It's how science works. Theories get refined. Refinements in the theory of evolution don't mean Darwin was wrong. Refinement in the clime models don't mean that there's no such thing as global warming. It just means we understand it a bit better now, which is a good thing.
Hopefully reports like this are taken as good news not fuel for the skeptics and deniers. Good news because we have a better chance and perhaps more time at managing with increased CO2
Or set more ambitious goals. 2 degrees rise in temperature sounds like an awful lot to me. The last ice age was only 4 degrees colder than it is now, yet that difference is enough to make the difference between a lot of dry land and a big sea separating Britain from the rest of Europe.
What accounts for the new ice-age we are entering, with year-to-year glacial expansion, and London's prospective 3rd white Christmas in a row?
Glacial expansion? I'm very interested in a link about growing glaciers. My impression is that most major glaciers (other than East Antarctica, obviously) are shrinking.
Also, keep in mind that London is not the entire world. Amsterdam is also having its second white Sinterklaas in a row (after decades of not even having any white Christmasses), but that means nothing on a global scale. It's perfectly possible for north-west Europe to become colder while the rest of the world gets warmer. Consider that we're at the same latitude as Moscow and Calgary. It's the warm gulf stream that's keeping us warm. Without it, expect an ice age in Europe, despite warming in the rest of the world.
Exactly. This basically means you don't get sick leave at all. It all comes out of your own pocket; either from your vacation or you don't get paid.
I like RollingThunder's PWB days, though. I like the idea that you can say: I'm not really ill, and I know this is short notice, but I really really don't feel like working today. A limited number of times, and presumably unpaid. That sounds like such a great idea that I'll use it if I ever start my own company.
What's most funny about this is, IMO, is that their criticism isn't peer reviewed and they likely haven't attempted to recreate NASA's experiments,
I've heard of an experiment with a purer environment without any phosphor at all, and there the microbes didn't multiply.
the "find a good alternative" is the hard part. There really is little to no choice :(
Maybe we need another big credit card company. One that advertises with how Visa and MasterCard engage in political censorship, and promises to only act as politically neutral infrastructure.
I propose the name LiberCard.
We got to use Paypal, and are forced to use them due to practical market monopoly. However, that never was my primary choice, and i wish i did not have to use Paypal.
For receiving payments, there are a lot of other options. Many such payment services accept all credit cards, so customers don't need to have an account with them. But so many stores accept PayPal that a PayPal account is really convenient for me. I guess I'll have to do without that convenience for now.
I wonder if Google Checkout can be tied to a Dutch banking account. That would cut credit cards out of the loop. But enough people need to do it to make all the PayPal shops start accepting Google Checkout.
Too bad. They're essentially a "common carrier" for funds and should have to act that way.
Thanks for phrasing it that way. It's exactly the problem. They're part of the payment infrastructure, and that needs to be reliable. MasterCard is proving to be unreliable, and likely to engage in political censorship. It's like coins that refuse to be paid to someone because the person who made the coins doesn't like what the other is saying. You can't have that if you want a reliable economic infrastructure.
In America, distributing classified documents is illegal. They stopped allowing people to send money to a criminal (in their jurisdiction) company. Case closed.
Has Wikileaks been convicted by a court of law? If not, MasterCard is taking the place of the judge here.
Also, does this mean MasterCard will stop doing business with the New York Times, the Guardian, etc? Or are they merely picking on the weakest victim they can find?
Whoever is doing it, such attacks are just plain wrong. Attacking infrastructure may be harmful and amounts to terrorism.
The real problem here is that the infrastructure itself is proving itself unreliable by willfully engaging in political vigilantism. The attack, though equally wrong, is just payback in kind.
Had PayPal and MasterCard remained neutral and reliable, they wouldn't have had any problems. It's not like they received a court order demanding that they close Wikileak's account. It was their own choice to do this, and it's a wrong choice.
In any case, I just canceled my PayPal account, and explained why. That's the correct way to protest, I think. Now I need to figure out how to cancel my MasterCard, and find a good alternative.
Or just don't use CCs outside of online purchases.
I only have mine for online purchases. It's not like they're good for anything else. Well, payment abroad, perhaps, but I think it's only the US where they're really more convenient than other forms of payment. And I don't plan to submit to their nude scan/groping check any time soon.
So, yeah, online purchases. What other alternatives are there?
That's a problem. I'm quite willing to drop MasterCard is there's a good alternative. The main requirement is that it needs to be accepted by all web shops. So that restricts my options to PayPal, Visa and MasterCard, I think.
I haven't read TFA, but I've read other criticisms of the NASA research, and they said that the microbes had plenty of access to phosphor. And if that's the case, then NASA's assumption that arsenic replaced phosphor in the DNA gets really tenuous.
In fact, I had that very same suspicion when I first read about it. Instead of proving that the DNA contained arsenic instead of phosphor, it really sounded like they just assumed it, because there was so much arsenic and so little phosphor in the environment. Well, sorry, but an assumption that something might be true is just nowhere near as groundbreaking as proof that it really is.
I really hope they do manage to prove that DNA can be based on different elements, but for now I agree with the critics that they haven't done that yet.
I don't do a lot of database work, but when I do, I'm glad I can write my queries in lowercase. Looks much better that way.
What happens if you go on vacation, and later you get sick? Taking sick leave out of vacation seems kinda defeating the purpose of both sick leave and vacation. What if you're sick for more than 19 days?
As much as I hate the canard about "if you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide", there is a valid corollary: "If you've done nothing wrong, you won't get caught".
Tell that to Julian Assange.
I know. I'm just pointing out that the psychological ability to raise kids is more important. People have kids because they think it's a nice addition to their lifestyle, or because they think kids are cute, or because they think they're supposed to. What they should be thinking about is whether they're actually ready for that kind of responsibility.
Raising a kid is a bigger responsibility than a job or a mortgage. It's worth taking seriously. And many people under 24 are still working on their own education and building their own life. You need to know how to take care of yourself before you can take care of someone else.
The biological optimum is pretty irrelevant in this medical age.
My guess is that as kids, they've been taught to share. So that's what they do.
If you want your kids to not become a filesharer, berate them whenever they share their toys with other kids. Developing a sense of morality starts at a young age.
Like it or not, there's no difference between walking into a 7-11 and stealing a 99 cent candy bar than there is pulling the latest 99 cent song of choice off of The Pirate Bay.
Like it or not, but there's a huge difference between the two. For one thing, songs don't cost 99 cents on Pirate Bay. For another, by downloading that song, you're not depriving someone else of the use of that good, which is the very basis of the definition of theft. You might be violating someone's copyright, but that's a whole different thing.
Actually, no, this is a Republic, not a democracy (assuming "this" refers to the United States).
You say that as if those two are at odds with each other. They're not; they're orthogonal. There are many democratic republics in the world.
I agree that democracy in the US leaves a lot to be desired, with its lack of proportional representation, two-party system and the big role that money plays. It's arguably closer to a plutocracy than a democracy.
The whole point of the US government is that there are checks and balances even against the people.
I thought the checks and balances were supposed to be against the people in power. Not so much the people in general.
It shouldn't be possible to deprive people of their rights just because a significant number of people think it proper.
Of course. But that also means you need to think about what really would be the right thing in this case. Hint: that's not necessarily what big industry says it is.
I thought it was "snowmageddon" or the "snowpocalypse" or something. But I admit I tend to get that kind of US news from The Daily Show.
24-25 is biologically pretty much the later end of optimum time to have first kids - waiting until 30+ for your first kid is due to quite unnatural social pressure and is not really that good to the kid and the family in many different aspects.
That's nonsense. 30 is a perfectly fine age for having kids. And recent research showed that women who have kids late end up happier than women who don't have kids at all, who in turn end are still happier than women who have their kids early. And I'd say a happy mom is a pretty big factor in what's good for the family and the children.
Sure, you're biologically perfectly capable of having children when you're 20, but are you psychologically equipped to raise them properly? IMO 24-25 is the early end of the optimum time to have kids.
"I have a bomb, open the cockpit or I push the button"
But why would you need a bomb in order to say that? How does the TSA groping help prevent this? Are you really going to check whether the guy has a real bomb before you open the door?
Then why don't they try, I dunno, maybe writing their own games instead of leeching off the work of others!
Because they're having too much fun playing their "crack the DRM" game. They don't do it for profit, they do it for fun.
Doesn't that mean you can just change the checksum in the data section?