Well, it's a good thing that Antarctic Sea Ice just reached the highest level ever seen, according to NASA.:
“There hasn’t been one explanation yet that I’d say has become a consensus, where people say, ‘We’ve nailed it, this is why it’s happening,’” Parkinson said. “Our models are improving, but they’re far from perfect. One by one, scientists are figuring out that particular variables are more important than we thought years ago, and one by one those variables are getting incorporated into the models.”
Don't try telling me about the Arctic, either. We wouldn't want to be skeptical of the scientists, right?
when more recent developments have proven that the passenger cars and Class 1 trucks can meet these fuel economy and emissions standards when the automakers choose to work to develop them
I thought based on the article, this should read: when more recent developments have proven that the passenger cars and Class 1 trucks can meet these fuel economy and emissions standards when the automakers engineers adjust tire pressure and doctor the fuel
Seriously, when a government says "You must meet these standards" and people prefer to buy cars which don't sacrifice weight/power/cost/etc... to meet those standards, is it any wonder there is going to be cheating going on?
Normal seaport docks today adjust using floats for tidal changes with as much as 30-40 foot differences between low and high tide in some places. Any "climate change" adjustments to sea level will be lost in the noise.
I thought covering the myth of "Can you really make a home-made nuclear bomb with information from your local library?" was what Mythbusters had planned for their final episode and they were going to set off a real one in Alameda for the high speed cameras as their grand finale....
It would be cheaper just to setup a few new dedicated "local" airports and provide free flights to anyone who wanted one than it will be to build this train system.
If you value $8 more than a couple of hours of your time, then you go to the state run DMV. If you value your time more, then you go to the privately run one. Anyone of the working poor are going to want to work their job rather than have to ask their boss for a few hours off to go to the DMV. Of course, the state run ones are only open during a shortened work day.
In the meantime, the competition on the private side keeps them fast, efficient and with good customer service, because otherwise you just go to the one that's run better.
Everyone who pays to go to a privately run DMV reduces the workload and lines at the state DMV by that person, so it also benefits those going to the state run DMV.
The biggest problem is that they haven't figured out how to privatize the driver's license part of the DMV, so that still entails a very long process for people getting their license for the first time. On the day she got her license, it took 6 hours for my daughter and I to get her through the process. Wasn't helped by the fact that the road test folks took a 2 hour lunch break in the middle of the day, so after waiting through multiple paperwork lines in the morning, we then had to wait for them to come back in the afternoon. She needed me to drive her there and needed my car for the test and signature for the paperwork, so it cost me an entire day of PTO in order to help her through the final process. I'd have gladly paid $50-$100 bucks for it to only take the actual time spent not waiting, i.e. about 30 minutes.
Here's your shot for intellectual honesty, as compared to just hating on Republicans.
In the current 2015-2016 election cycle, who is the top recipient of money from "big Pharma", as you call them, almost 40% higher than the next closest candidate?
I bet Hillary Clinton just jumped to the top of your mind there, right? Health industry in general? Hillary, by 2.5x the next closest candidate.
Face it, if you look at the records, the industries donate to whoever they think might win. There isn't an ideological bias in their donations, there is a bias towards giving money to anyone who may end up writing or enforcing laws which affect them.
No need to imagine. Lots of states have privately run DMVs for car title-related stuff now. You walk in, talk to someone immediately, hand over your paperwork, they help you with real customer service and then at the end of the 10 minute process they tack on a $6-8 extra "fee" for not having to wait several hours at the still existing government-run ones.
Can't we just have the governments of the world assign all the underutilized female STEM workers (you know, all the ones employers aren't hiring frequently enough, judging by our weekly/. articles) to dedicate themselves to creating solutions to global warming?
Or hey... we could just wait until the scientific "consensus" catches up with reality...
All media has bias. It's inherent in the role of choosing stories to emphasize and how to cover them. People naturally choose what interests them, what they think is important, etc... People generally don't recognize it when they mostly agree with the underlying premise it's based on and thus consider it reasonably "unbiased".
By default, I'd expect the BBC's reporters to have at least an "educated brit" bias, for example. Likely average left-wing politically (with probably a few noticeable exceptions, even more noticeable for their rarity) of the general population based on their chosen profession.
Insisting the BBC is unbiased says more about your own cultural background and personal biases than it does about the BBC. It's like the old joke about how the intelligence of someone is defined by how much they agree with me on everything...
It sounds more like the BBC is just biased in a way which you happen to agree with. Forcing their audience to pay anyway just substitutes the bias of the journalists or their bosses for the the bias from needing to be useful and relevant to the people watching.
In the same manner, you could do a study that receiving welfare or jobless benefits causes premature births, or not having a second car causes premature births, or living near railroad track causes premature births, etc.... basically anything which also correlates with low income/living in the poorer part of town.
From the abstract: "There were no associations of activity with Apgar score, small for gestational age birth, or term birth weight (after adjustment for year). In a posthoc analysis, there was an association with physician-recorded high-risk pregnancy identified from the problem list" In other words, the babies weren't obviously less healthy, but there were more high-risk pregnancies (high risk factors happen before the wells began, at the start of pregnancy) associated, almost as if the premature births and well placement correlation was from some other outside cause...
Bottom line, if you have a choice over an area of where to put a fracking wellhead, you're going to pick the cheapest place to put it, which will correlate with lower income for the neighbors.
This issue is now a legacy of the "war on poverty/great society", not of slavery, nor of racism. Entire books have been written on the evidence proving that. See "Conquest and Cultures" (or many free online columns) by Thomas Sowell, raised by a single mother housemaid, yet a non-affirmative action Harvard graduate in 1958.
The murder rate among blacks in 1960 was half of what is was in 1980. In 1960 the vast majority of black children were raised in two-parent households. By 1990 the majority were being raised by single parents. Those changes aren't a legacy of slavery.
Also, racism doesn't explain why black immigrants are so much more successful than native blacks, or why even when there is official racism against certain Asian groups in a country, they still do better in that country. Culture does. A racist in a school situation or a job interview, just judging based on skin color, can't tell what country your parents came from, but your behavior is influence by their culture.
We tend to look at current American black issues and ascribe them to the results of slavery, but the fact is that effects of slavery and life for blacks were getting better for almost 100 years, then suddenly many things some people like to ascribe to the legacy of slavery started to have progress slow down and then began getting worse. It makes no logical sense that the impact of slavery on black family unity would suddenly begin to make things worse 100 years later, but not before that.
Religion demands that you take the word of some unknown person having a revelation thousands of years ago as the truth for some pretty important questions.
From this statement, please consider you may have a limited understanding of religion, likely prejudiced based on what you grew up with, rather than something you've studied scientifically?
Would it shock you to learn of at least one religion which tells potential converts, "Don't take our word for it just because we (or someone thousand of years ago) says it, here, read this information, think about it, then test what we're saying by asking God for yourself and get your own answer directly from God about the truth of it?"
Sure, there are some religions who essentially declare "God is dead" and doesn't communicate with man anymore, but if he spoke to prophets in the distant past, why wouldn't he communicate with them now? And if with them, why not with you directly as well? In ways which are unmistakable, not relying on someone else's interpretation?
Learning to read music is required for learning to play, hence why I used it in my example. What you didn't do was _only_ memorize note positions for the first few years. Instead, you probably started attempting to actually play your instruments almost right away, not after years of memorization to learn to read music, and after a short time spent the majority of your time practicing actually playing the instrument, not practicing reading music without touching it.
The current standard U.S. school model has this same issue with most other subjects as well, with typically the notable exceptions of Art and Music, which tend to be taught by practitioners thereof, rather than your standard teaching college graduate.
Can you imagine if learning a musical instrument started with, "Let's memorize all the different note positions/letters on the treble and bass clefs, but we'll worry about actually playing some music when you're in college..."
Exactly. You can lose your real life wallet and thus lose access to your bank and credit accounts, but those methods have a backup authentication system in place which people end up using all the time.
Someone with any serious amounts of bitcoins would be well advised to rent a bank safety deposit box (or two) and store an off-line backup of the key data required to reclaim their bitcoin addresses if they lost them.
Neither one helps you if someone robs your account by stealing your CC info or your encryption keys, so you still want to consider a more secure system of preventing "spending" out of an account with a balance over whatever amount you find devastating to lose.
The "wallet" in the article is really just your private key to be able to decrypt a set of bitcoin addresses which have had coins associated with it. It's not really a great analogy. The actual "wallet" is the blockchain, which is spread everywhere in the world. You just can't make a withdrawal (you _can_ make a deposit) from it without your private key to prove it's really you requesting the transfer.
Like any other sort of encryption, if you have the private key and passphrase, you can read it (and spend the coins), if you don't, you can't. You don't want your private key sitting out there everywhere, you want it securely stashed. Hence using two different set of private keys, one on the public server handling transactions and another in a more secure location associated with the address of your long-term storage. It's more like having both a checking and savings account. If you're making money, you want to periodically transfer it out of checking and into savings and you don't typically withdraw from your savings all day long like you do your checking account. So you're ok with having to jump through an extra hoop or two in order to ensure your savings can't get phished out of your account.
TLS cert chains work in a similar fashion. The private keys for the internet facing services are out on servers everywhere. The Certificate Authority is setup on a hopefully secured server to issue new ones. The root private certificate which can be used to manage the CAs is ideally on an air-gapped machine where you have to have specific permission to access it.
Anyone have an idea of why submitting the same story yesterday morning (http://slashdot.org/submission/4917489/chinese-tech-startups-hiring-cheerleaders-for-programmers) doesn't seem to show even in the firehose and shows as still pending to me, but "HughPickens.com" (nothing promotional there...) with the same primary link and who seems to submit stories daily has already been included and posted?
Granted, you can certainly make an argument that he quoted more from the article in his post and say that's superior... I'm mostly trying to figure out why the story submission I made never even seemed to appear on the firehose and is still pending, while this duplicate of it seems to have passed it by. Is there a submission process glitch?
Hillary's e-mail server could have been much more secure than the State Department's system.
We do have a few details on it.... for example, the server was located in the bathroom "server rack" in a NYC townhouse of a very-small ISP.
Pretty sure with that kind of physical security, anyone who really wanted to could walk in and grab a copy of her emails. The real crime is that none of her political opponents realized in time how easy it would have been...
"Each person’s vote in the 2013 election takes up about 27½ inches of the electronic machine’s paper trail. Each roll from the 2014 election is 385 feet long, and stored in 42 boxes that are not segregated by precinct or voting district."
Definitely not as easy as making a photo copy. Maybe they could let her pay to hire someone to sort through, find the right roll (without damaging anything), then carefully unroll and photograph it for later study before re-rolling it?
One issue of course would be that the voting registry (which is public already and contains who voted and is time stamped, so also in what order) could very easily be used to guesstimate matching up specific people with specific votes, as the roll is going to be in chronological order as well. I'm not totally familiar with Kansas law, but there's a good chance they're legally supposed to have a secret ballot.
And yet... David Weber has been publishing for 25 years and never even been nominated for a Hugo in all that time, but he's just one of those Baen authors, right?
The Sad Puppies point isn't that it's not ok to nominate left-wing authors, or women, or minorities, etc... they nominated some themselves, but that your publishing house or your SJW credentials shouldn't be the most important thing for the results of the vote, the story you wrote should be.
How about "The best Science Fiction story should always win" concept, as opposed to "The most politically correct story or author someone can pass off as as slightly related to science fiction wins".
But in recent years, as sci-fi has expanded to include storytellers who are women, gays and lesbians, and people of color, the Hugos have changed, too. At the presentation each August, the Gods with the rockets in their hands have been joined by Goddesses and those of other ethnicities and genders and sexual orientations, many of whom want to tell stories about more than just spaceships.
While on the other hand, most SF fans like stories about spaceships as part of their science fiction, hence the rocket shape of the award.
But no, mustn't have anyone who isn't on-board with the latest politically correct dinosaur win!
I'm sure the fans can't wait until next year, when a concentrated campaign will emerge to vote one particular non-SJW in each category as the winner, turning their own tactics (block voting on one option and refusing to even consider the quality of others and vote for the "best") on their head.
Governments, at least if they deserve the name, first and foremost have the goal of keeping a country running. There you actually have the chance that the service provided IS the primary goal.
There's a whole branch of economics which completely contradicts that, so let's start with some examples... can you name a few governments among the 196 or so in the world today which "deserve the name" under your definition and we can see how the people in those governments actually behave?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's a good thing that Antarctic Sea Ice just reached the highest level ever seen, according to NASA.:
Don't try telling me about the Arctic, either. We wouldn't want to be skeptical of the scientists, right?
And don't get me started on Solar cycles...
I thought based on the article, this should read:
when more recent developments have proven that the passenger cars and Class 1 trucks can meet these fuel economy and emissions standards when the automakers engineers adjust tire pressure and doctor the fuel
Seriously, when a government says "You must meet these standards" and people prefer to buy cars which don't sacrifice weight/power/cost/etc... to meet those standards, is it any wonder there is going to be cheating going on?
Normal seaport docks today adjust using floats for tidal changes with as much as 30-40 foot differences between low and high tide in some places. Any "climate change" adjustments to sea level will be lost in the noise.
I thought covering the myth of "Can you really make a home-made nuclear bomb with information from your local library?" was what Mythbusters had planned for their final episode and they were going to set off a real one in Alameda for the high speed cameras as their grand finale....
It would be cheaper just to setup a few new dedicated "local" airports and provide free flights to anyone who wanted one than it will be to build this train system.
If you value $8 more than a couple of hours of your time, then you go to the state run DMV. If you value your time more, then you go to the privately run one. Anyone of the working poor are going to want to work their job rather than have to ask their boss for a few hours off to go to the DMV. Of course, the state run ones are only open during a shortened work day.
In the meantime, the competition on the private side keeps them fast, efficient and with good customer service, because otherwise you just go to the one that's run better.
Everyone who pays to go to a privately run DMV reduces the workload and lines at the state DMV by that person, so it also benefits those going to the state run DMV.
The biggest problem is that they haven't figured out how to privatize the driver's license part of the DMV, so that still entails a very long process for people getting their license for the first time. On the day she got her license, it took 6 hours for my daughter and I to get her through the process. Wasn't helped by the fact that the road test folks took a 2 hour lunch break in the middle of the day, so after waiting through multiple paperwork lines in the morning, we then had to wait for them to come back in the afternoon. She needed me to drive her there and needed my car for the test and signature for the paperwork, so it cost me an entire day of PTO in order to help her through the final process. I'd have gladly paid $50-$100 bucks for it to only take the actual time spent not waiting, i.e. about 30 minutes.
Here's your shot for intellectual honesty, as compared to just hating on Republicans.
In the current 2015-2016 election cycle, who is the top recipient of money from "big Pharma", as you call them, almost 40% higher than the next closest candidate?
I bet Hillary Clinton just jumped to the top of your mind there, right? Health industry in general? Hillary, by 2.5x the next closest candidate.
Face it, if you look at the records, the industries donate to whoever they think might win. There isn't an ideological bias in their donations, there is a bias towards giving money to anyone who may end up writing or enforcing laws which affect them.
No need to imagine. Lots of states have privately run DMVs for car title-related stuff now. You walk in, talk to someone immediately, hand over your paperwork, they help you with real customer service and then at the end of the 10 minute process they tack on a $6-8 extra "fee" for not having to wait several hours at the still existing government-run ones.
Can't we just have the governments of the world assign all the underutilized female STEM workers (you know, all the ones employers aren't hiring frequently enough, judging by our weekly /. articles) to dedicate themselves to creating solutions to global warming?
Or hey... we could just wait until the scientific "consensus" catches up with reality...
All media has bias. It's inherent in the role of choosing stories to emphasize and how to cover them. People naturally choose what interests them, what they think is important, etc... People generally don't recognize it when they mostly agree with the underlying premise it's based on and thus consider it reasonably "unbiased".
By default, I'd expect the BBC's reporters to have at least an "educated brit" bias, for example. Likely average left-wing politically (with probably a few noticeable exceptions, even more noticeable for their rarity) of the general population based on their chosen profession.
Insisting the BBC is unbiased says more about your own cultural background and personal biases than it does about the BBC. It's like the old joke about how the intelligence of someone is defined by how much they agree with me on everything...
... the BBC isn't as massively biased ...
It sounds more like the BBC is just biased in a way which you happen to agree with. Forcing their audience to pay anyway just substitutes the bias of the journalists or their bosses for the the bias from needing to be useful and relevant to the people watching.
Exactly. What they've done is managed to replicate this study that socioeconomic factors impact premature births by finding something that correlates with low socioeconomic status and then not adjusting for it.
In the same manner, you could do a study that receiving welfare or jobless benefits causes premature births, or not having a second car causes premature births, or living near railroad track causes premature births, etc.... basically anything which also correlates with low income/living in the poorer part of town.
From the abstract: "There were no associations of activity with Apgar score, small for gestational age birth, or term birth weight (after adjustment for year). In a posthoc analysis, there was an association with physician-recorded high-risk pregnancy identified from the problem list" In other words, the babies weren't obviously less healthy, but there were more high-risk pregnancies (high risk factors happen before the wells began, at the start of pregnancy) associated, almost as if the premature births and well placement correlation was from some other outside cause...
Bottom line, if you have a choice over an area of where to put a fracking wellhead, you're going to pick the cheapest place to put it, which will correlate with lower income for the neighbors.
This issue is now a legacy of the "war on poverty/great society", not of slavery, nor of racism. Entire books have been written on the evidence proving that. See "Conquest and Cultures" (or many free online columns) by Thomas Sowell, raised by a single mother housemaid, yet a non-affirmative action Harvard graduate in 1958.
The murder rate among blacks in 1960 was half of what is was in 1980. In 1960 the vast majority of black children were raised in two-parent households. By 1990 the majority were being raised by single parents. Those changes aren't a legacy of slavery.
Also, racism doesn't explain why black immigrants are so much more successful than native blacks, or why even when there is official racism against certain Asian groups in a country, they still do better in that country. Culture does. A racist in a school situation or a job interview, just judging based on skin color, can't tell what country your parents came from, but your behavior is influence by their culture.
We tend to look at current American black issues and ascribe them to the results of slavery, but the fact is that effects of slavery and life for blacks were getting better for almost 100 years, then suddenly many things some people like to ascribe to the legacy of slavery started to have progress slow down and then began getting worse. It makes no logical sense that the impact of slavery on black family unity would suddenly begin to make things worse 100 years later, but not before that.
Religion demands that you take the word of some unknown person having a revelation thousands of years ago as the truth for some pretty important questions.
From this statement, please consider you may have a limited understanding of religion, likely prejudiced based on what you grew up with, rather than something you've studied scientifically?
Would it shock you to learn of at least one religion which tells potential converts, "Don't take our word for it just because we (or someone thousand of years ago) says it, here, read this information, think about it, then test what we're saying by asking God for yourself and get your own answer directly from God about the truth of it?"
Sure, there are some religions who essentially declare "God is dead" and doesn't communicate with man anymore, but if he spoke to prophets in the distant past, why wouldn't he communicate with them now? And if with them, why not with you directly as well? In ways which are unmistakable, not relying on someone else's interpretation?
Learning to read music is required for learning to play, hence why I used it in my example. What you didn't do was _only_ memorize note positions for the first few years. Instead, you probably started attempting to actually play your instruments almost right away, not after years of memorization to learn to read music, and after a short time spent the majority of your time practicing actually playing the instrument, not practicing reading music without touching it.
It's not just science.
The current standard U.S. school model has this same issue with most other subjects as well, with typically the notable exceptions of Art and Music, which tend to be taught by practitioners thereof, rather than your standard teaching college graduate.
Can you imagine if learning a musical instrument started with, "Let's memorize all the different note positions/letters on the treble and bass clefs, but we'll worry about actually playing some music when you're in college..."
Exactly. You can lose your real life wallet and thus lose access to your bank and credit accounts, but those methods have a backup authentication system in place which people end up using all the time.
Someone with any serious amounts of bitcoins would be well advised to rent a bank safety deposit box (or two) and store an off-line backup of the key data required to reclaim their bitcoin addresses if they lost them.
Neither one helps you if someone robs your account by stealing your CC info or your encryption keys, so you still want to consider a more secure system of preventing "spending" out of an account with a balance over whatever amount you find devastating to lose.
The "wallet" in the article is really just your private key to be able to decrypt a set of bitcoin addresses which have had coins associated with it. It's not really a great analogy. The actual "wallet" is the blockchain, which is spread everywhere in the world. You just can't make a withdrawal (you _can_ make a deposit) from it without your private key to prove it's really you requesting the transfer.
Like any other sort of encryption, if you have the private key and passphrase, you can read it (and spend the coins), if you don't, you can't. You don't want your private key sitting out there everywhere, you want it securely stashed. Hence using two different set of private keys, one on the public server handling transactions and another in a more secure location associated with the address of your long-term storage. It's more like having both a checking and savings account. If you're making money, you want to periodically transfer it out of checking and into savings and you don't typically withdraw from your savings all day long like you do your checking account. So you're ok with having to jump through an extra hoop or two in order to ensure your savings can't get phished out of your account.
TLS cert chains work in a similar fashion. The private keys for the internet facing services are out on servers everywhere. The Certificate Authority is setup on a hopefully secured server to issue new ones. The root private certificate which can be used to manage the CAs is ideally on an air-gapped machine where you have to have specific permission to access it.
Anyone have an idea of why submitting the same story yesterday morning (http://slashdot.org/submission/4917489/chinese-tech-startups-hiring-cheerleaders-for-programmers) doesn't seem to show even in the firehose and shows as still pending to me, but "HughPickens.com" (nothing promotional there...) with the same primary link and who seems to submit stories daily has already been included and posted?
Granted, you can certainly make an argument that he quoted more from the article in his post and say that's superior... I'm mostly trying to figure out why the story submission I made never even seemed to appear on the firehose and is still pending, while this duplicate of it seems to have passed it by. Is there a submission process glitch?
Hillary's e-mail server could have been much more secure than the State Department's system.
We do have a few details on it.... for example, the server was located in the bathroom "server rack" in a NYC townhouse of a very-small ISP.
Pretty sure with that kind of physical security, anyone who really wanted to could walk in and grab a copy of her emails. The real crime is that none of her political opponents realized in time how easy it would have been...
"Each person’s vote in the 2013 election takes up about 27½ inches of the electronic machine’s paper trail. Each roll from the 2014 election is 385 feet long, and stored in 42 boxes that are not segregated by precinct or voting district."
Definitely not as easy as making a photo copy. Maybe they could let her pay to hire someone to sort through, find the right roll (without damaging anything), then carefully unroll and photograph it for later study before re-rolling it?
One issue of course would be that the voting registry (which is public already and contains who voted and is time stamped, so also in what order) could very easily be used to guesstimate matching up specific people with specific votes, as the roll is going to be in chronological order as well. I'm not totally familiar with Kansas law, but there's a good chance they're legally supposed to have a secret ballot.
And yet... David Weber has been publishing for 25 years and never even been nominated for a Hugo in all that time, but he's just one of those Baen authors, right?
The Sad Puppies point isn't that it's not ok to nominate left-wing authors, or women, or minorities, etc... they nominated some themselves, but that your publishing house or your SJW credentials shouldn't be the most important thing for the results of the vote, the story you wrote should be.
How about "The best Science Fiction story should always win" concept, as opposed to "The most politically correct story or author someone can pass off as as slightly related to science fiction wins".
From the wired story linked above:
But in recent years, as sci-fi has expanded to include storytellers who are women, gays and lesbians, and people of color, the Hugos have changed, too. At the presentation each August, the Gods with the rockets in their hands have been joined by Goddesses and those of other ethnicities and genders and sexual orientations, many of whom want to tell stories about more than just spaceships.
While on the other hand, most SF fans like stories about spaceships as part of their science fiction, hence the rocket shape of the award.
But no, mustn't have anyone who isn't on-board with the latest politically correct dinosaur win!
I'm sure the fans can't wait until next year, when a concentrated campaign will emerge to vote one particular non-SJW in each category as the winner, turning their own tactics (block voting on one option and refusing to even consider the quality of others and vote for the "best") on their head.
Governments, at least if they deserve the name, first and foremost have the goal of keeping a country running. There you actually have the chance that the service provided IS the primary goal.
There's a whole branch of economics which completely contradicts that, so let's start with some examples... can you name a few governments among the 196 or so in the world today which "deserve the name" under your definition and we can see how the people in those governments actually behave?
After all, how many lives has the FDA cost? What medical devices are we missing because the FDA delays them?
What you seem to see as a feature (long delays and hoops to jump through for government approvals), others have identified as a bug in the system.