If you had said literary critics instead of authors, I'd have bought it. In The Number of The Beast there was a literary convention where they housed the critics in a Klein bottle (entrance but no exit) and provisions were by the Kilkenny Cats method.
The old man was practical about authorship - it was indoor work with no heavy lifting, and paid better than honest work.
1. Can you point to the page where the IPCC claims an observed correlation?
I'm sure you could find more, but five seconds on Google was helpful. That would be Page 5 of this (pdf) document:
Given the urgency and scale of the adaptation challenge it is imperative to learn from long
experience in managing-- and reducing--the risk of extreme climate events, such as floods,
droughts, storms and extreme temperatures. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report recognises
the opportunity to advance adaptation through the use of such policies and tools. In particular,
it states: "Reducing vulnerability to current climatic variability can effectively reduce
vulnerability to increased hazard risk associated with climate change."
To be fair, this is a separate document but fortunately there are footnotes:
From the first reference not only do they find correlation, they have a proposed action response:
The International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (1990 to 1999) led to a fundamental shift in the way disasters are viewed: away from the notion that disasters were temporary disruptions to be managed by humanitarian responses and technical interventions and towards a recognition that disasters are a function of both natural and human drivers (ISDR, 2004; UNDP, 2004). The concept of disaster risk management has evolved; it is defined as the systematic management of administrative decisions, organisations, operational skills and abilities to implement policies, strategies and coping capacities of society or individuals to lessen the impacts of natural and related environmental and technological hazards (ISDR, 2004). This includes measures to provide not only emergency relief and recovery, but also disaster risk reduction (ISDR, 2004); i.e., the development and application of policies, strategies and practices designed to minimise vulnerabilities and the impacts of disasters through a combination of technical measures to reduce physical hazards and to enhance social and economic capacity to adapt. Disaster risk reduction is conceived as taking place within the broad context of sustainable development (ISDR, 2004).
2. The wiki page does not exist. Paleontologists have known about these thermal cycles since long before there was a "climate science", and astronomers have some interesting explanations for some of them. It's the only reasonable explanation for why glaicial morain should lie on top of a limestone bed that caps a coal bed that contains fossils of ferns.
3. What you said - it's what I said. Did you have an argument or are you going to stick with the "OMG AGWs are melting our arctic icecap!" when it's clearly not true? That's not very sciency.
If the global temperatures of the year 1890 continue to cool at the current rate, our forebears soon will have all frozen to death before our grandparents could be conceived, and we'll disappear in a poof of paradox.
Man-made CO2 emissions aren't really man-made. You see, there was CO2 in the air, and plants used solar energy to convert that CO2 to sugars and hydrocarbons, trapping the carbon with the hydrogen from water and discarding the oxygen from the water and the CO2. The plants lived and died and then were sequestered for a long time, until brought out by humans who set the CO2 free again.
Lots of other methods of sequestration occur - in limestone for example, where we're a lot less likely to release the CO2 unless we're heating it to make mortar or cement. So over time the processes of life sequester CO2 as part of their energy cycle, much of which is deposited on the floor of the oceans where we'll never get at it.
But the CO2 was in the air before, and putting it back into the air won't make the Earth any worse off than it was when that same CO2 was in the air before. Increasing partial pressures of CO2 improve the effectiveness of photosynthesis - it's like airborne fertilizer.
I do not agree that this was more than a dyslexic typo that went unchallenged for far too long.
It's a good thing the correlation between global warming and extreme weather disasters like hurricanes and floods in the same report is still on a sound foundation then. Oh, wait...
When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses."
Ouch.
The climate is warming. The climate has been warming from 10,000-15,000 years, and we should be glad of that. It's hard to grow crops on a glacier. 15,000 years ago much of the US was under immense glaciers, as was much of Europe. Now they are not in our current Holocene epoch, which is why this is called an "inter-glacial period." There's are various natural cycles going on here, with spans of twenty and eighty thousand years roughly. My minivan's emissions did not cause the end of the Wisconsin Glacial epoch. After a few more thousand years the cycle will once again reverse - and the glaciers will return. When they do we're all going to have to try to fit into North Africa, Eastern China, and equatorial South America. I suspect the locals will have a problem with that when the time comes. And yeah, I know you know all this.
I am also aware that nobody has a good understanding of the dynamics of large chunks of melting ice, this is obvious if you look at how woefully the 2007 IPCC reports underestimated the loss of Artic sea ice.
I'm pretty sure that the dynamics of melting ice in large chunks and small are that if the ice gets too warm, it melts. The loss of arctic ice is attributed by NASA not to warming but to winds pushing the ice onto currents that conveyed it out of the arctic.
Nghiem said the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds. "Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic," he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.
Quit scaring people with your pseudo-scientific dendro-science. We're on to your game. The sky is not falling. Well, the sky is falling, but it's falling far more slowly than you say it is, and in the opposite direction. Let us sit under the magic warm-monger tree and contemplate understanding natural cycles a bit more thoroughly before we deliberately attempt to manipulate them.
The patent wars are about to get really ugly. Just about everybody is gunning for an injunction against everybody else, especially in the forefront of innovation like cellular phones, ebooks, netbooks, tablets, user interfaces, networks and wireless communications, memory technologies and so on.
It's a jungle out there, and I can think of no better example of how patents prevent progress. Nobody can make anything without getting sued to oblivion. The lawyers are making five times what the engineers are - a disparity that gets worse with every passing year. Lawyers never invented anything but arguments and flights of fancy. It's just not possible to enter business. The system is broken.
You're all brave now that the thread is old and nobody who watches this stuff will read it. That's a clue that I need to be alert to debunk your crap in current threads, so thanks for the heads up.
I made no mistake. I'm quite aware of the "somehow". It's called evangelism. It's a recognized part of the strategy, immoralized in the Halloween documents and the Comes documents.
This mind bending is actually the entirety of Microsoft's value add. Everything else they bought - and ruined. In terms the average slashdotter will understand: it's the dark side of The Force. In more common terms it's Power Selling - the art of convincing somebody that your brand is worth paying extra for when it adds nothing - in fact, when it subtracts much from security, reliability and utility - and in fact actually restricts the freedom of users to use innovations that would benefit them because they are outside the scope of commercial software.
How Microsoft makes the ability of enterprises to maintain their data over the long term a complete impossibility and then sells that as a valuable feature is a ridiculous example of the power of persuasion over observable facts. Yet they continue to do it over and over again, turning my preferred career path into a theatre of the absurd.
Apple products: I'm looking for a mainstream PC product that I can buy that equates in performance, app compat, battery life, media flexibility and utility to my 2 year old iPod Touch. I'm not seeing it. W7 doesn't run on ARM and it never will. WinMo looks like Windows 3.1 and relies on vendors to build the interface because apparently all the WinMo developers with UI experience were let go. They rebooted the WinMo team last March, and it's likely they'll be a couple years before the new team is ready with a product that's worthy of the name WinMo 7. Redmond may come out with a product by that name, but we'll only enjoy a good laugh over it.
And then when our slates, our phones and many of our PCs are "powered by" non-MS technologies and they're powerful, useful and reliable, then what? Every patch Tuesday, every morning while our W7 machines boot, every time our systems freeze or shut down unexpectedly we'll get our hero points by whipping out our iPad, Nexus Two, LiMo Slates and getting the job done under adverse conditions. Big win for those with foresight and a Darwin moment for those without. We'll look back at our PC's with Windows as the slow cousins we have to encourage to finish the race so they can get a trophy in the special olympics.
Microsoft has finally awakened to the fact that they're fighting for their life here. It's good that they've woken up in that Redmond ivory tower - it means they'll finally have to start thinking about what products we might want, how they can increase demand be delivering features and security. This is a lot better than the previous model of telling us what we should want. It's bad because it's easier to kill a sleeping giant than one that's alert and fighting.
It's bad in that once awakened, they fight hard and take no prisoners. It means they will induce more OEMs to force Bing on us - in fact word has it they're negotiating with Apple for just that. I hope that Jobs will be enough offended by the idea of a "Bing powered iPhone" to prevent that. Not only are they forcing the search engine, but they want top billing. That's hubris. I would be offended too if I engineered this device that swept the mobile phone world, only to find that someone else who did everything they could to prevent it wanted to claim they "powered" it. It would take a lot of money to assuage my ire. Office 11, crippled in the usual ways, would not cut it for me, and I don't think Steve Jobs is dumb enough to take that deal.
Regardless this represents a phase change in their strategy that we should be alert to.
No, there doesn't have to be a happy medium. There really really doesn't. When it's time to go on the cart, you go on the cart. There is no middle ground between alive and dead. When it's time for carriage makers and buggy whip manufacturers to shuffle off this mortal coil, to vanish into the (history of) pages of wikihistory, then it's time. There's no way you can wish some alternative course into being, any more than you can pray a dead relative back to life.
They had their day in the sun, and now it's done. Their day is over and there is nothing they can do about it. The best they can hope for is to shuffle off the stage with grace before they fall over, embarrassing both themselves and their audience.
20 years ago my hometown paper was a respectable rag - 7 daily sections, quality editorial, quality reportage of local events. The daily edition was nearly an inch thick. Today it's more of a leaflet most of the week, and almost entirely ads. I can't bear to sort through it for stuff relevant to my interests. I expect it to fold in a few more years.
The end of the local newspaper era is also the end of the era when a battalion of young boys would get up at 4 a.m. 365 days a year and deliver papers no matter what the weather. I'm sure our youth are losing some character building work here, and I suspect that will be the greatest loss.
It's Microsoft that has somehow convinced the OEM world outside of Apple that innovative, performant and stylish PC products are "niche" products to be avoided. They have somehow pursuaded the world's largest PC producers to pursue the course of cranking out generation after generation of low-margin commodity vanilla platforms that they have to move millions of to break even. The OEMs then utterly rely on Microsoft's Market Development Funds to buy advertising and promotions to create the illusion of product differentiation - and incidentally give Microsoft obscene negotiating leverage. This leaves the lucrative high-unit-margin premium platform space to Apple who's riding that pony to the bank with unheard of margins and profits.
Of course because Apple's making their own profits they don't need advertising money from anybody else - and they're making the most of their advertising spend by developing memes that people spread on their own because they're entertaining in and of themselves. My friends and I pass around links to Microsoft's advertising videos too, but that's probably not a good thing for Microsoft. The entertainment value there is that the videos are painfully awkward and don't inspire trust and confidence in the company or product or make them "cool".
But I doubt this will ever happen. What he said was "third rate". I'll agree with you - the whole holding Mac Office over their heads like it's the Holy Grail is just absurd. Especially when they defeature it and deliver it late like they do. This is just the sort of gamesmanship that prevents Apple from taking them seriously as a partner. That and the fact that he's right - they really do have no taste.
On the other hand it might make sense. Microsoft at least is a company Apple knows they can reliably handle. Google doesn't have that attribute. Ok, I'm not sure how this one will work out. It will be interesting.
As long as after work you keep your skills up on modern tech, taking the customer's money to do the stupid thing is a wise course. Advising them, giving the chance, telling them that it's stupid is the moral choice but if not asked there's no shame in doing what you can with what you've got.
Actually there's an opportunity here - but I'm not going to enumerate it because then you'll be competing with me.
Tied to a chair with bedsores, sedated to keep you from becoming troublesome, and spoon fed whirled peas. Be careful what you wish for.
Deaths can be prevented, but when you see the term "preventable deaths" in the press they're never using it correctly. You prevent deaths with condoms, birth control pills, and poor oral hygiene - by preventing the lives from starting.
Slashdot Mirror
If you had said literary critics instead of authors, I'd have bought it. In The Number of The Beast there was a literary convention where they housed the critics in a Klein bottle (entrance but no exit) and provisions were by the Kilkenny Cats method.
The old man was practical about authorship - it was indoor work with no heavy lifting, and paid better than honest work.
1. Can you point to the page where the IPCC claims an observed correlation?
I'm sure you could find more, but five seconds on Google was helpful. That would be Page 5 of this (pdf) document:
Given the urgency and scale of the adaptation challenge it is imperative to learn from long experience in managing-- and reducing--the risk of extreme climate events, such as floods, droughts, storms and extreme temperatures. The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report recognises the opportunity to advance adaptation through the use of such policies and tools. In particular, it states: "Reducing vulnerability to current climatic variability can effectively reduce vulnerability to increased hazard risk associated with climate change."
To be fair, this is a separate document but fortunately there are footnotes:
1 IPCC, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Chapter 20.5 pg 821. 2 IPCC, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Chapter 20.9 pg 837. 3 IPCC, Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, Chapter 20.5 pg 820
From the first reference not only do they find correlation, they have a proposed action response:
The International Decade for Natural Disaster Reduction (1990 to 1999) led to a fundamental shift in the way disasters are viewed: away from the notion that disasters were temporary disruptions to be managed by humanitarian responses and technical interventions and towards a recognition that disasters are a function of both natural and human drivers (ISDR, 2004; UNDP, 2004). The concept of disaster risk management has evolved; it is defined as the systematic management of administrative decisions, organisations, operational skills and abilities to implement policies, strategies and coping capacities of society or individuals to lessen the impacts of natural and related environmental and technological hazards (ISDR, 2004). This includes measures to provide not only emergency relief and recovery, but also disaster risk reduction (ISDR, 2004); i.e., the development and application of policies, strategies and practices designed to minimise vulnerabilities and the impacts of disasters through a combination of technical measures to reduce physical hazards and to enhance social and economic capacity to adapt. Disaster risk reduction is conceived as taking place within the broad context of sustainable development (ISDR, 2004).
2. The wiki page does not exist. Paleontologists have known about these thermal cycles since long before there was a "climate science", and astronomers have some interesting explanations for some of them. It's the only reasonable explanation for why glaicial morain should lie on top of a limestone bed that caps a coal bed that contains fossils of ferns.
3. What you said - it's what I said. Did you have an argument or are you going to stick with the "OMG AGWs are melting our arctic icecap!" when it's clearly not true? That's not very sciency.
If the global temperatures of the year 1890 continue to cool at the current rate, our forebears soon will have all frozen to death before our grandparents could be conceived, and we'll disappear in a poof of paradox.
Man-made CO2 emissions aren't really man-made. You see, there was CO2 in the air, and plants used solar energy to convert that CO2 to sugars and hydrocarbons, trapping the carbon with the hydrogen from water and discarding the oxygen from the water and the CO2. The plants lived and died and then were sequestered for a long time, until brought out by humans who set the CO2 free again.
Lots of other methods of sequestration occur - in limestone for example, where we're a lot less likely to release the CO2 unless we're heating it to make mortar or cement. So over time the processes of life sequester CO2 as part of their energy cycle, much of which is deposited on the floor of the oceans where we'll never get at it.
But the CO2 was in the air before, and putting it back into the air won't make the Earth any worse off than it was when that same CO2 was in the air before. Increasing partial pressures of CO2 improve the effectiveness of photosynthesis - it's like airborne fertilizer.
I'm guessing you're not in Canada.
That's why WSJ's article on the IE exploit patch was titled "Microsoft Makes Web Browser More Secure."
It's all in how you tell the story.
I do not agree that this was more than a dyslexic typo that went unchallenged for far too long.
It's a good thing the correlation between global warming and extreme weather disasters like hurricanes and floods in the same report is still on a sound foundation then. Oh, wait...
When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses."
Ouch.
The climate is warming. The climate has been warming from 10,000-15,000 years, and we should be glad of that. It's hard to grow crops on a glacier. 15,000 years ago much of the US was under immense glaciers, as was much of Europe. Now they are not in our current Holocene epoch, which is why this is called an "inter-glacial period." There's are various natural cycles going on here, with spans of twenty and eighty thousand years roughly. My minivan's emissions did not cause the end of the Wisconsin Glacial epoch. After a few more thousand years the cycle will once again reverse - and the glaciers will return. When they do we're all going to have to try to fit into North Africa, Eastern China, and equatorial South America. I suspect the locals will have a problem with that when the time comes. And yeah, I know you know all this.
I am also aware that nobody has a good understanding of the dynamics of large chunks of melting ice, this is obvious if you look at how woefully the 2007 IPCC reports underestimated the loss of Artic sea ice .
I'm pretty sure that the dynamics of melting ice in large chunks and small are that if the ice gets too warm, it melts. The loss of arctic ice is attributed by NASA not to warming but to winds pushing the ice onto currents that conveyed it out of the arctic.
Nghiem said the rapid decline in winter perennial ice the past two years was caused by unusual winds. "Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic," he said. When that sea ice reached lower latitudes, it rapidly melted in the warmer waters.
Quit scaring people with your pseudo-scientific dendro-science. We're on to your game. The sky is not falling. Well, the sky is falling, but it's falling far more slowly than you say it is, and in the opposite direction. Let us sit under the magic warm-monger tree and contemplate understanding natural cycles a bit more thoroughly before we deliberately attempt to manipulate them.
The patent wars are about to get really ugly. Just about everybody is gunning for an injunction against everybody else, especially in the forefront of innovation like cellular phones, ebooks, netbooks, tablets, user interfaces, networks and wireless communications, memory technologies and so on.
It's a jungle out there, and I can think of no better example of how patents prevent progress. Nobody can make anything without getting sued to oblivion. The lawyers are making five times what the engineers are - a disparity that gets worse with every passing year. Lawyers never invented anything but arguments and flights of fancy. It's just not possible to enter business. The system is broken.
You're all brave now that the thread is old and nobody who watches this stuff will read it. That's a clue that I need to be alert to debunk your crap in current threads, so thanks for the heads up.
I made no mistake. I'm quite aware of the "somehow". It's called evangelism. It's a recognized part of the strategy, immoralized in the Halloween documents and the Comes documents.
This mind bending is actually the entirety of Microsoft's value add. Everything else they bought - and ruined. In terms the average slashdotter will understand: it's the dark side of The Force. In more common terms it's Power Selling - the art of convincing somebody that your brand is worth paying extra for when it adds nothing - in fact, when it subtracts much from security, reliability and utility - and in fact actually restricts the freedom of users to use innovations that would benefit them because they are outside the scope of commercial software.
How Microsoft makes the ability of enterprises to maintain their data over the long term a complete impossibility and then sells that as a valuable feature is a ridiculous example of the power of persuasion over observable facts. Yet they continue to do it over and over again, turning my preferred career path into a theatre of the absurd.
Apple products: I'm looking for a mainstream PC product that I can buy that equates in performance, app compat, battery life, media flexibility and utility to my 2 year old iPod Touch. I'm not seeing it. W7 doesn't run on ARM and it never will. WinMo looks like Windows 3.1 and relies on vendors to build the interface because apparently all the WinMo developers with UI experience were let go. They rebooted the WinMo team last March, and it's likely they'll be a couple years before the new team is ready with a product that's worthy of the name WinMo 7. Redmond may come out with a product by that name, but we'll only enjoy a good laugh over it.
And then when our slates, our phones and many of our PCs are "powered by" non-MS technologies and they're powerful, useful and reliable, then what? Every patch Tuesday, every morning while our W7 machines boot, every time our systems freeze or shut down unexpectedly we'll get our hero points by whipping out our iPad, Nexus Two, LiMo Slates and getting the job done under adverse conditions. Big win for those with foresight and a Darwin moment for those without. We'll look back at our PC's with Windows as the slow cousins we have to encourage to finish the race so they can get a trophy in the special olympics.
Microsoft has finally awakened to the fact that they're fighting for their life here. It's good that they've woken up in that Redmond ivory tower - it means they'll finally have to start thinking about what products we might want, how they can increase demand be delivering features and security. This is a lot better than the previous model of telling us what we should want. It's bad because it's easier to kill a sleeping giant than one that's alert and fighting.
It's bad in that once awakened, they fight hard and take no prisoners. It means they will induce more OEMs to force Bing on us - in fact word has it they're negotiating with Apple for just that. I hope that Jobs will be enough offended by the idea of a " Bing powered iPhone " to prevent that. Not only are they forcing the search engine, but they want top billing. That's hubris. I would be offended too if I engineered this device that swept the mobile phone world, only to find that someone else who did everything they could to prevent it wanted to claim they "powered" it. It would take a lot of money to assuage my ire. Office 11, crippled in the usual ways, would not cut it for me, and I don't think Steve Jobs is dumb enough to take that deal.
Regardless this represents a phase change in their strategy that we should be alert to.
Take this piece for example.
No, there doesn't have to be a happy medium. There really really doesn't. When it's time to go on the cart, you go on the cart. There is no middle ground between alive and dead. When it's time for carriage makers and buggy whip manufacturers to shuffle off this mortal coil, to vanish into the (history of) pages of wikihistory, then it's time. There's no way you can wish some alternative course into being, any more than you can pray a dead relative back to life.
They had their day in the sun, and now it's done. Their day is over and there is nothing they can do about it. The best they can hope for is to shuffle off the stage with grace before they fall over, embarrassing both themselves and their audience.
If you want to hold your own on slashdot:
How is this not journalism?
link.
20 years ago my hometown paper was a respectable rag - 7 daily sections, quality editorial, quality reportage of local events. The daily edition was nearly an inch thick. Today it's more of a leaflet most of the week, and almost entirely ads. I can't bear to sort through it for stuff relevant to my interests. I expect it to fold in a few more years.
The end of the local newspaper era is also the end of the era when a battalion of young boys would get up at 4 a.m. 365 days a year and deliver papers no matter what the weather. I'm sure our youth are losing some character building work here, and I suspect that will be the greatest loss.
The YouTube for this article is here.
Henny Penny and Sammy Swine were considering opening a restaurant together. When it came time to select the menu, Henny Penny suggested ham & eggs.
"I don't think so," said Sammy. "I would be committed, but you would only be involved."
Sendo q.v.
They're also committed to Plays4Sure, MS Java and COM.
It's Microsoft that has somehow convinced the OEM world outside of Apple that innovative, performant and stylish PC products are "niche" products to be avoided. They have somehow pursuaded the world's largest PC producers to pursue the course of cranking out generation after generation of low-margin commodity vanilla platforms that they have to move millions of to break even. The OEMs then utterly rely on Microsoft's Market Development Funds to buy advertising and promotions to create the illusion of product differentiation - and incidentally give Microsoft obscene negotiating leverage. This leaves the lucrative high-unit-margin premium platform space to Apple who's riding that pony to the bank with unheard of margins and profits.
Of course because Apple's making their own profits they don't need advertising money from anybody else - and they're making the most of their advertising spend by developing memes that people spread on their own because they're entertaining in and of themselves. My friends and I pass around links to Microsoft's advertising videos too, but that's probably not a good thing for Microsoft. The entertainment value there is that the videos are painfully awkward and don't inspire trust and confidence in the company or product or make them "cool".
But I doubt this will ever happen. What he said was "third rate". I'll agree with you - the whole holding Mac Office over their heads like it's the Holy Grail is just absurd. Especially when they defeature it and deliver it late like they do. This is just the sort of gamesmanship that prevents Apple from taking them seriously as a partner. That and the fact that he's right - they really do have no taste.
On the other hand it might make sense. Microsoft at least is a company Apple knows they can reliably handle. Google doesn't have that attribute. Ok, I'm not sure how this one will work out. It will be interesting.
As long as after work you keep your skills up on modern tech, taking the customer's money to do the stupid thing is a wise course. Advising them, giving the chance, telling them that it's stupid is the moral choice but if not asked there's no shame in doing what you can with what you've got.
Actually there's an opportunity here - but I'm not going to enumerate it because then you'll be competing with me.
That admin has a hot rack.
Even Microsoft wouldn't do that. They would be in danger of losing the data.
/ducks, runs.
And slashdot, of course.
Tied to a chair with bedsores, sedated to keep you from becoming troublesome, and spoon fed whirled peas. Be careful what you wish for.
Deaths can be prevented, but when you see the term "preventable deaths" in the press they're never using it correctly. You prevent deaths with condoms, birth control pills, and poor oral hygiene - by preventing the lives from starting.
When you're straining that hard to hate Google, does it hurt? Is there like a moral hernia you could give yourself doing that?