The Xbox 360 may currently be the best selling console, but it's definitely not the most common; both the DS and the Wii have it beat (as does the PS2, by the way).
All that really indicates is that the Xbox 360's price dropped recently; at E3, MSFT announced a $50 price drop on the old models, while both the Wii and PS3 are still at their old prices. Price drops may temporarily increase the velocity of sales, but don't necessarily have a permanent effect.
Well, while I don't disagree, I think the popular usage of "news" has long since ceased to mean "objective discovery and reporting of facts and implications of those facts".
You know, "news" never actually meant that. That's just a marketing angle television news came up with in order to appeal to the broadest market; actual journalists have rarely if ever been objective.
HP doesn't even try to hide that their support is outsourced to India. If you log-on to their professional support, you can tell right away by the names.
What I really hate is when they tell their outsourced tech support representatives to lie to you about their names. They don't do it quite so much over the phone any more (I guess that's just too blantant), but you still get it in e-mail and chat conversations - you'll get people who claim their name is "John", but use the word "query" instead of "question" (which is something I've never seen a westerner do), or use other weird phrasings that I guess are common in India.
Also, I have to say that Adobe tech support is quite possibly the absolute worst tech support I've ever seen from a major company. They've actually outright lied to me just to get me off the phone.
(my company had bought licenses for Adobe Acrobat Standard, and I couldn't figure out how to download the actual software from anywhere. I thought maybe I could use the licenses on the Acrobat Pro demo and maybe it would activate as Standard, but it wasn't working. I explained this to Adobe tech support, and asked if there was a specific download for Acrobat Standard. They didn't know, so after being bounced around for a while the guy told me that it was probably because I had licenses for "the international version of Acrobat", and I'd downloaded the English-only version. There is no "international" version of Acrobat, as far as I can tell - just different versions for different language-sets. The real solution was that I had to pay another $20 just for the privilege of downloading Acrobat Standard, but I had the joy of figuring that out for myself (and that $20 wasn't coming back if I'd gotten it wrong))
I have a family member who is a hero in my eyes. Do you know why? Because he works three jobs and makes sacrifices so he can send all of his children to private school. He was careful to choose one that does not exhibit this kind of institutionalized madness. When he says he loves his children and cares about their well-being, he's willing to do whatever it takes to back that up with action.
That's good, but not everyone has non-religious private schools in their area - and I don't see how sending your child to a private Catholic school is anything more than a different kind of "institutionalized madness".
Further, his children would probably have a far better life if he dropped two of those jobs, sent them to public school, and then spent afternoons and evenings with them. Children need their parents far more than they need private school, and heck he could even do some after-class homeschooling.
Do you know how long the IPCC report is? It's effing huge. If the worst things the denialists can find after going through it with a fine toothed comb are what amounts to a typo, a misstatement, and a bad calculation, that is amazing.
Further, the physical sciences basis for global warming remains unchanged and completely unchallenged. The only thing we are quibbling about (indeed, what you're so concerned about in your post) are what the actual effects of global warming will be, not whether or not it is happening.
It's like that old apocryphal story about Winston Churchill - we've already agreed that global warming is happening, now we're just haggling over how painful it will be. For some reason, people seem to think that if they haggle the pain down a little, the "already agreed" part will go away.
When Nvidia released the GeForce 9800, I looked at my old ATI Radeon 9800 and realized I would never be able to keep up with those stupid naming schemes. Now I just rely on sites that run the things through benchmarks and buy the one at the top of the price/performance curve.
Yeah, Nokia just makes the world's most popular phone, that doesn't mean they know anything about smartphone OS design.
It does, however, mean they know a whole hell of a lot about phone design, which seems to be the one major complaint most people have about smartphones - they may be extra smart, but they're light on the "phone" (just see Apple's iPhone 4 antenna thing!). If Nokia can come up with a smartphone that's also a really really good phone, then there might be something worthwhile there - especially if they manage to introduce it at a price point that world markets can appreciate. After all, there's up-and-coming businessmen in poorer countries who may not be able to afford a modern smartphone, but would still like to check their e-mail and do other business-y stuff. If Nokia can get in on that like they got in on the spread of cellphones with the 1100, they're pretty golden.
Indeed! The parking structure where I work has Prop 65 signs everywhere. This made no sense to me at first - it's just a giant pile of concrete, rebar, fluorescent lights and asphalt, surely none of that causes cancer right? Then I realized what's likely to be the case: people put cars in parking structures, and car exhaust is known by the state of California to cause cancer. And there's no way around that unless you're willing to not park cars in a parking structure.
That's basically how you have to handle Steam: for any given game, pick a price at which you will buy that game. Even after playing the demo, I wasn't going to spend $50 on Just Cause 2; however, $25 was a far more reasonable price (I also picked up some half-off DLCs at the same time; the parachute rockets were totally worth it, the weapons you can't get any more ammo for in-game not so much).
However, in doing that you have to realize that within a couple of months of your purchase, the price will go down further. I fully expect to see Just Cause 2 for $20 or $15 during the inevitable Thanksgiving or Christmas sales, but that's okay with me - the fun I get over the next few months more than makes up for the $5 or $10 I lost by buying early.
Just FYI, that was a special sale that was going on last week, with multiple games discounted every day; usually what happens is that there's one game on sale between Tuesday and Thursday, and then one sale over the weekend (though neither of these is guaranteed).
However, they do frequently have awesome sales like this, usually around holidays. Last year's Thanksgiving and Christmas sales were particularly epic, and of course who can forget free Portal with the Mac launch?
I believe you are correct, sir. Either he is filtering what she actually said through his own words, or he made her up out of whole cloth. My little sister is in the same age range, and although she tries to mimic the way I type when we e-mail or chat (you know, with real capitalization and grammar and suchlike), she always ends up making at least some mistakes.
Throughout the whole exchange, this girl makes almost no errors - an intentional "u" instead of "you" in the first e-mail (which is quite odd when juxtaposed with the proper capitalization, but that happens in some clients), a couple of missed caps in the fourth e-mail (which is again odd when contrasted with the first e-mail; different clients, perhaps?), and that's about it.
No homonym mixups, no further abbreviations that I can see, no Internet talk at all. Hell, her writing is even stylistically sound - no doubled punctuation (which is quite common), no overuse of ellipses (which I know I was guilty of until college, even), relatively simple and to the point, doesn't get lost in her own verbiage when trying to make a point.
She's a far better writer than I was at that age, which is possible - however, I was pretty good at it according to all those standardized tests, and he randomly picked her out of a sample of 400 users on one sheet music trading website? That's kind of odd, but I guess a sheet music trading website would self-select for higher literacy. On the other hand, she does kiss his ass to an absolutely astonishing degree, calling him a "genius" no less than three times while heaping other praise on him. You'd think that if she was grumpy about him contacting her personally she might tone it down a little, especially if she didn't recognize his name right off (see her first e-mail).
Further, and somewhat more damning in my mind, are the timestamps. His mail client has to be one of the retarded ones that doesn't translate sender time zones to your local time, because otherwise this Brenna not only pirates sheet music but is also capable of time-travel. This makes getting an accurate idea of how long it took them to write their various e-mails more of a pain in the butt.
However, according to his blog, Jason would have most likely been writing from either LA or Italy; it's pretty obvious from the first exchange that he's not writing from GMT+2 to the USA, so I'm going to assume that he was writing from Pacific Standard Time. Given that, the only reasonable place for Brenna to be is Hawaii, after the aforementioned time-traveling; just look at the timestamp on her fourth e-mail compared to the one she's responding to. So we have a highly literate, sheet-music trading teenager who lives in Hawaii (of all places), with its teeny tiny population, who just happened to be part of a random sample of 400 people on a sheet music trading site. This is getting less likely by the minute, though that's not saying much from a statistical perspective.
This brings up another problem, though: her great big "Bill" example, with perfect grammar and spelling and reasonable style, was written over the course of (at most) twelve minutes! Maybe I'm just weird, but that seems like a ridiculously short amount of time to write an example like that, especially when you're writing to someone who actually matters to you (she called him a "genius", remember?). She has to see the e-mail, compose her thoughts, write it up, maybe check it, and send the reply, all in the course of twelve minutes - and then she comes up with that cogent and well-written argument? Hmm.
And as she mentions before, it's her iPod that puts the name "Eleanor" on her outgoing e-mails. Clearly at least some of the e-mails were written from it, as the guy refers to her as Eleanor once or twice (unless this intelligent teenager doesn't know the difference between an iPod and a mac, which would make Steve Jobs cry). However, this does mean that she's managed to type pretty quickly on that thing; if she wrote the Bill e-mail on it, she maintained at least 20 WPM
Well but that's the thing - this cipher can be described as a specific case of "substitution cipher, except you permute the key after every character in deterministic manner 'x'". Note that a Vignere cipher can be described in much the same way, except it's a shift cipher instead of a substitution cipher (the difference is that the key to a substitution cipher is a permutation on the alphabet, whereas a shift cipher's key is just a shift of the alphabet).
The question boils down to: "is substitution cipher with some sort of non-random key permutation worthwhile?" The answer is probably no (and if you allow random key permutations, then it's basically a one-time pad). Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if this thing is only a little bit more secure than a sort of Vignere cipher hybrid that uses a list of substitution ciphers instead of a list of shift ciphers.
So yeah, while this might have been useful in the roaring twenties, it's peanuts compared to modern cryptography.
Well, just think about it: in a substitution cipher, the "key" is a permutation of the alphabet (i.e, a -> q, b -> w, etc). If you used this device without the "twizzling" step, it would be exactly like a plain old sub cipher. I just don't see how that twizzle step injects enough entropy into the system for this to be significantly more secure than even a Vignere cipher with a sufficiently long keyword, and that you can do with pen, paper and a good memory.
Basically, if nobody ever broke the known-plaintext ciphertexts, it's more likely to be because nobody cared enough to reverse-engineer this guy's algorithm than because of any actual cryptographic considerations.
Chalk up another win for security through obscurity!
... because China is going to invade us with which navy, exactly?
If we spent twice as much as they do on the military, then yes, I might agree with your sentiment - we shouldn't cut spending, because maybe they might invade, who knows, but really that would be bad for business all around so they might not and anyway they don't really have the capacity to move that many people.
However, our military spending isn't just twice as much as China's - we spend TWENTY times as much as China. We could cut our military spending to one-tenth of what it currently is, and we'd still be spending more than any other country.
Fossil fuels are composed of carbon that's been sitting in the ground for millenia. Carbon itself comes in three different isotopes: C12, which is stable; C13, which is also stable; and C14, which is unstable. We know what the ratio of C14 to C12 and C13 is in living plants and animals; because of the way C14 is formed various reasons^W^W in the upper atmosphere, we're pretty certain that these ratios are relatively stable over time (barring unlikely events like animals or plants that live in radioactive areas).
I would like to see a climate model that correctly "predicts" the past, given real input data, and from current data correctly predicts the climate ten years out. We've been seeing these model predictions from some 15 years now, and none of them have ever proven close to accurate.
First, we can't actually do that. That's why we've been seeing bad predictions; the models aren't perfect. We have neither sufficiently accurate temperature data to prove such models true for any period but the modern era, nor a good enough understanding of how the climate works in order to create those models in the first place. So yes, this is probably why your previous request was met with "we can't do that". You are literally asking for evidence we cannot (currently) provide; you don't seem to know what the actual evidence for global climate change is.
Fortunately, the proof of global warming doesn't lie in the models. It comes from some basic physics - indeed, basic physics that has been known since the very, very early 1900s. Back then, Svante Arrhenius published the following (true) statement:
... if the quantity of carbonic acid increases in geometric progression, the augmentation of the temperature will increase nearly in arithmetic progression.
Or in other words, as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere goes up, so does the temperature. There's really nothing fancy going on: more carbon in the atmosphere absorbs various wavelengths of light and emits them as infrared, increasing the average temperature of the planet.
So, is the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere increasing? As far as we can tell, yes it is. We can take core samples of various things (like earth or ice or mud) and using various indicators figure out what the CO2 concentration was in the past, to a certain margin of error. We've uniformly found it to be increasing over time during the modern era (This and the previous point are all you need to predict global warming).
Is the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels? Although this question isn't directly related to global warming, it might help with mitigation. Unfortunately, the answer is yes. Fossil fuels are composed of carbon that's been sitting in the ground for millenia. Carbon itself comes in three different isotopes: C12, which is stable; C13, which is also stable; and C14, which is unstable. We know what the ratio of C14 to C12 and C13 is in living plants and animals; because of the way C14 is formed various reasons, we're pretty certain that these ratios are relatively stable over time (barring unlikely events like animals or plants that live in radioactive areas).
While a thing is alive, it absorbs carbon from its environment (through a complex process known as "eating"); this carbon gets used in its tissues. Thus, while a thing is alive, the ratio of C14 to other forms of carbon in its tissues is roughly the same as the ratio in its environment. As soon as the thing dies (and if it dies in certain conditions, like the ones that create oil), it stops absorbing new carbon from its environment. The C14 currently in the organism then starts decaying at a known rate. This is how we do carbon dating (compare C14 to C12, basically), but that's not relevant to the current discussion - the half-life of C14 is something on the order of six thousand years, so if we're pulling up oil that was formed a million years ago, there's gonna be basically zero C14 in it.
Thus, when we measure atmospheric carbon ratios (incidentally, using the exact same technique as the one used in radiocarbon dating), we would expect atmospheric CO2 levels to be significantly "older" than they should be, if fossil fuels are adding a significant amount of carbon to the atmosphere (we measure "should" based on the reactions in the atmosphere that create C14
Meh, going to school is no indication that you know what the hell you're doing. In a class I took, the TA (a PhD student) provided a text filtering algorithm. It was supposed to convert all contiguous whitespace into single spaces, all letters to upper case, and strip out everything else.
The code was a mess of magical numbers, buggy, and slow. He didn't use a single character constant - it was completely unreadable unless you immediately know that 97 == 'a', 122 == 'z', 32 == ' ' and 32 == 'a' - 'A'; he didn't realize that newlines count as whitespace, so there were a lot of conjoined words; if you ran it on a novel-length source text (and we were using Project Gutenberg source texts, so all of them were), it would take 20 minutes to filter a thousand words. That is simply unacceptable for something that can be replaced by with two regular expressions and a call to toUpperCase.
And this is from a guy who was getting a PhD in Computer Science. I know it's mostly theoretical, but if you can fuck a simple text filter up that badly you need to find something else to do with your life.
As far as CAGW goes, there is a fundamental chain of proofs that have to occur before it can be taken as reasonably proven. These start with the claim that the Earth is warming and end with the claim that therefore catastrophe will result.
Have you read the IPCC working group reports? They cover that chain of proofs pretty well.
If you have and you still don't think that global climate change has been proven, what level of evidence would it take to prove it to you? After all, you use the quotation that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; what level of evidence would you consider to be extraordinary for the theory of global climate change?
Honestly though, I'm not certain I'll get a reasonable answer from you. The two links you provided are pretty tangential to your point. Don't like the US surface station data? Well, the European and Japanese surface station data shows the same trends. Don't like any surface station data? Well, the satellite data shows the same trends. Hell, even the decrease in average bird sizes over the last 46 years is indicative of an upward trend in average temperature. Even data from studies that are entirely unrelated to climate science show indications of increasing average temperatures! How is that not extraordinary?
Re:Plagiarism? or Ghost writing? Outsourcing?
on
Plagiarism Inc.
·
· Score: 1
Today he writes a most impressive and successful political/cultural blog (Hi Roy!) but really ought to be writing fiction because the motherfucker's a pistol.
Always good to see people who are intolerant of Christians. If you can be tolerant of gays, and tolerant of people speaking ideas you disagree with, why can't you be tolerant of Muslims, Jews, and Christians too? They have as much right to "pursue happiness" as anybody else, even if you disagree with their religious philosophy.
Hah! I love it. Since when is disagreement intolerance? Since when is it intolerance to point out the fact that people who believe in prophecy and mysticism and all that shit are more likely to be uneducated? Everyone has the right to pursue happiness, but if you come into a public forum with policies based on prophecy I have every right to shut you down with reality-based counterarguments.
I tolerate Christians, and I'm sure the GP does too - after all, neither of us is out there campaigning for a Christian death penalty or anything like that. I just don't think they're right about anything unique to their religion, from the existence of the soul onwards. I'm not going to pass laws trying to keep you from believing whatever you want, but if you make statements supported only by dogma or base real human policy on bullshit prophecies, I will (verbally or textually) cut you off at the knees. That's not intolerance of Christianity; that's intolerance of bad ideas, which no one has any right to.
Just FYI, the guy who wrote that was most likely on some Middle Ages equivalent of LSD. It's a single throwaway line in a book full of random shit; the fact that what he said just barely manages to be relevant right now is more coincidence than anything else.
If you throw enough shit at a wall, at least some of it will stick. That doesn't mean it's glue.
kdawson or samzenpus would have to post it, and they're too busy worshiping at their secret Gates shrine or looking at pictures of cats with bad grammar, respectively.
Slashdot Mirror
The Xbox 360 may currently be the best selling console, but it's definitely not the most common; both the DS and the Wii have it beat (as does the PS2, by the way).
All that really indicates is that the Xbox 360's price dropped recently; at E3, MSFT announced a $50 price drop on the old models, while both the Wii and PS3 are still at their old prices. Price drops may temporarily increase the velocity of sales, but don't necessarily have a permanent effect.
And the most convenient!
The analogy works!
You know, "news" never actually meant that. That's just a marketing angle television news came up with in order to appeal to the broadest market; actual journalists have rarely if ever been objective.
What I really hate is when they tell their outsourced tech support representatives to lie to you about their names. They don't do it quite so much over the phone any more (I guess that's just too blantant), but you still get it in e-mail and chat conversations - you'll get people who claim their name is "John", but use the word "query" instead of "question" (which is something I've never seen a westerner do), or use other weird phrasings that I guess are common in India.
Also, I have to say that Adobe tech support is quite possibly the absolute worst tech support I've ever seen from a major company. They've actually outright lied to me just to get me off the phone.
(my company had bought licenses for Adobe Acrobat Standard, and I couldn't figure out how to download the actual software from anywhere. I thought maybe I could use the licenses on the Acrobat Pro demo and maybe it would activate as Standard, but it wasn't working. I explained this to Adobe tech support, and asked if there was a specific download for Acrobat Standard. They didn't know, so after being bounced around for a while the guy told me that it was probably because I had licenses for "the international version of Acrobat", and I'd downloaded the English-only version. There is no "international" version of Acrobat, as far as I can tell - just different versions for different language-sets. The real solution was that I had to pay another $20 just for the privilege of downloading Acrobat Standard, but I had the joy of figuring that out for myself (and that $20 wasn't coming back if I'd gotten it wrong))
That's good, but not everyone has non-religious private schools in their area - and I don't see how sending your child to a private Catholic school is anything more than a different kind of "institutionalized madness".
Further, his children would probably have a far better life if he dropped two of those jobs, sent them to public school, and then spent afternoons and evenings with them. Children need their parents far more than they need private school, and heck he could even do some after-class homeschooling.
Do you know how long the IPCC report is? It's effing huge. If the worst things the denialists can find after going through it with a fine toothed comb are what amounts to a typo, a misstatement, and a bad calculation, that is amazing.
Further, the physical sciences basis for global warming remains unchanged and completely unchallenged. The only thing we are quibbling about (indeed, what you're so concerned about in your post) are what the actual effects of global warming will be, not whether or not it is happening.
It's like that old apocryphal story about Winston Churchill - we've already agreed that global warming is happening, now we're just haggling over how painful it will be. For some reason, people seem to think that if they haggle the pain down a little, the "already agreed" part will go away.
When Nvidia released the GeForce 9800, I looked at my old ATI Radeon 9800 and realized I would never be able to keep up with those stupid naming schemes. Now I just rely on sites that run the things through benchmarks and buy the one at the top of the price/performance curve.
Yeah, Nokia just makes the world's most popular phone, that doesn't mean they know anything about smartphone OS design.
It does, however, mean they know a whole hell of a lot about phone design, which seems to be the one major complaint most people have about smartphones - they may be extra smart, but they're light on the "phone" (just see Apple's iPhone 4 antenna thing!). If Nokia can come up with a smartphone that's also a really really good phone, then there might be something worthwhile there - especially if they manage to introduce it at a price point that world markets can appreciate. After all, there's up-and-coming businessmen in poorer countries who may not be able to afford a modern smartphone, but would still like to check their e-mail and do other business-y stuff. If Nokia can get in on that like they got in on the spread of cellphones with the 1100, they're pretty golden.
Indeed! The parking structure where I work has Prop 65 signs everywhere. This made no sense to me at first - it's just a giant pile of concrete, rebar, fluorescent lights and asphalt, surely none of that causes cancer right? Then I realized what's likely to be the case: people put cars in parking structures, and car exhaust is known by the state of California to cause cancer. And there's no way around that unless you're willing to not park cars in a parking structure.
That's basically how you have to handle Steam: for any given game, pick a price at which you will buy that game. Even after playing the demo, I wasn't going to spend $50 on Just Cause 2; however, $25 was a far more reasonable price (I also picked up some half-off DLCs at the same time; the parachute rockets were totally worth it, the weapons you can't get any more ammo for in-game not so much).
However, in doing that you have to realize that within a couple of months of your purchase, the price will go down further. I fully expect to see Just Cause 2 for $20 or $15 during the inevitable Thanksgiving or Christmas sales, but that's okay with me - the fun I get over the next few months more than makes up for the $5 or $10 I lost by buying early.
Just FYI, that was a special sale that was going on last week, with multiple games discounted every day; usually what happens is that there's one game on sale between Tuesday and Thursday, and then one sale over the weekend (though neither of these is guaranteed).
However, they do frequently have awesome sales like this, usually around holidays. Last year's Thanksgiving and Christmas sales were particularly epic, and of course who can forget free Portal with the Mac launch?
I believe you are correct, sir. Either he is filtering what she actually said through his own words, or he made her up out of whole cloth. My little sister is in the same age range, and although she tries to mimic the way I type when we e-mail or chat (you know, with real capitalization and grammar and suchlike), she always ends up making at least some mistakes.
Throughout the whole exchange, this girl makes almost no errors - an intentional "u" instead of "you" in the first e-mail (which is quite odd when juxtaposed with the proper capitalization, but that happens in some clients), a couple of missed caps in the fourth e-mail (which is again odd when contrasted with the first e-mail; different clients, perhaps?), and that's about it.
No homonym mixups, no further abbreviations that I can see, no Internet talk at all. Hell, her writing is even stylistically sound - no doubled punctuation (which is quite common), no overuse of ellipses (which I know I was guilty of until college, even), relatively simple and to the point, doesn't get lost in her own verbiage when trying to make a point.
She's a far better writer than I was at that age, which is possible - however, I was pretty good at it according to all those standardized tests, and he randomly picked her out of a sample of 400 users on one sheet music trading website? That's kind of odd, but I guess a sheet music trading website would self-select for higher literacy. On the other hand, she does kiss his ass to an absolutely astonishing degree, calling him a "genius" no less than three times while heaping other praise on him. You'd think that if she was grumpy about him contacting her personally she might tone it down a little, especially if she didn't recognize his name right off (see her first e-mail).
Further, and somewhat more damning in my mind, are the timestamps. His mail client has to be one of the retarded ones that doesn't translate sender time zones to your local time, because otherwise this Brenna not only pirates sheet music but is also capable of time-travel. This makes getting an accurate idea of how long it took them to write their various e-mails more of a pain in the butt.
However, according to his blog, Jason would have most likely been writing from either LA or Italy; it's pretty obvious from the first exchange that he's not writing from GMT+2 to the USA, so I'm going to assume that he was writing from Pacific Standard Time. Given that, the only reasonable place for Brenna to be is Hawaii, after the aforementioned time-traveling; just look at the timestamp on her fourth e-mail compared to the one she's responding to. So we have a highly literate, sheet-music trading teenager who lives in Hawaii (of all places), with its teeny tiny population, who just happened to be part of a random sample of 400 people on a sheet music trading site. This is getting less likely by the minute, though that's not saying much from a statistical perspective.
This brings up another problem, though: her great big "Bill" example, with perfect grammar and spelling and reasonable style, was written over the course of (at most) twelve minutes! Maybe I'm just weird, but that seems like a ridiculously short amount of time to write an example like that, especially when you're writing to someone who actually matters to you (she called him a "genius", remember?). She has to see the e-mail, compose her thoughts, write it up, maybe check it, and send the reply, all in the course of twelve minutes - and then she comes up with that cogent and well-written argument? Hmm.
And as she mentions before, it's her iPod that puts the name "Eleanor" on her outgoing e-mails. Clearly at least some of the e-mails were written from it, as the guy refers to her as Eleanor once or twice (unless this intelligent teenager doesn't know the difference between an iPod and a mac, which would make Steve Jobs cry). However, this does mean that she's managed to type pretty quickly on that thing; if she wrote the Bill e-mail on it, she maintained at least 20 WPM
Well but that's the thing - this cipher can be described as a specific case of "substitution cipher, except you permute the key after every character in deterministic manner 'x'". Note that a Vignere cipher can be described in much the same way, except it's a shift cipher instead of a substitution cipher (the difference is that the key to a substitution cipher is a permutation on the alphabet, whereas a shift cipher's key is just a shift of the alphabet).
The question boils down to: "is substitution cipher with some sort of non-random key permutation worthwhile?" The answer is probably no (and if you allow random key permutations, then it's basically a one-time pad). Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if this thing is only a little bit more secure than a sort of Vignere cipher hybrid that uses a list of substitution ciphers instead of a list of shift ciphers.
So yeah, while this might have been useful in the roaring twenties, it's peanuts compared to modern cryptography.
Well, just think about it: in a substitution cipher, the "key" is a permutation of the alphabet (i.e, a -> q, b -> w, etc). If you used this device without the "twizzling" step, it would be exactly like a plain old sub cipher. I just don't see how that twizzle step injects enough entropy into the system for this to be significantly more secure than even a Vignere cipher with a sufficiently long keyword, and that you can do with pen, paper and a good memory.
Basically, if nobody ever broke the known-plaintext ciphertexts, it's more likely to be because nobody cared enough to reverse-engineer this guy's algorithm than because of any actual cryptographic considerations.
Chalk up another win for security through obscurity!
... because China is going to invade us with which navy, exactly?
If we spent twice as much as they do on the military, then yes, I might agree with your sentiment - we shouldn't cut spending, because maybe they might invade, who knows, but really that would be bad for business all around so they might not and anyway they don't really have the capacity to move that many people.
However, our military spending isn't just twice as much as China's - we spend TWENTY times as much as China. We could cut our military spending to one-tenth of what it currently is, and we'd still be spending more than any other country.
Correction:
First, we can't actually do that. That's why we've been seeing bad predictions; the models aren't perfect. We have neither sufficiently accurate temperature data to prove such models true for any period but the modern era, nor a good enough understanding of how the climate works in order to create those models in the first place. So yes, this is probably why your previous request was met with "we can't do that". You are literally asking for evidence we cannot (currently) provide; you don't seem to know what the actual evidence for global climate change is.
Fortunately, the proof of global warming doesn't lie in the models. It comes from some basic physics - indeed, basic physics that has been known since the very, very early 1900s. Back then, Svante Arrhenius published the following (true) statement:
Or in other words, as the amount of carbon in the atmosphere goes up, so does the temperature. There's really nothing fancy going on: more carbon in the atmosphere absorbs various wavelengths of light and emits them as infrared, increasing the average temperature of the planet.
So, is the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere increasing? As far as we can tell, yes it is. We can take core samples of various things (like earth or ice or mud) and using various indicators figure out what the CO2 concentration was in the past, to a certain margin of error. We've uniformly found it to be increasing over time during the modern era (This and the previous point are all you need to predict global warming).
Is the increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere due to the burning of fossil fuels? Although this question isn't directly related to global warming, it might help with mitigation. Unfortunately, the answer is yes. Fossil fuels are composed of carbon that's been sitting in the ground for millenia. Carbon itself comes in three different isotopes: C12, which is stable; C13, which is also stable; and C14, which is unstable. We know what the ratio of C14 to C12 and C13 is in living plants and animals; because of the way C14 is formed various reasons, we're pretty certain that these ratios are relatively stable over time (barring unlikely events like animals or plants that live in radioactive areas).
While a thing is alive, it absorbs carbon from its environment (through a complex process known as "eating"); this carbon gets used in its tissues. Thus, while a thing is alive, the ratio of C14 to other forms of carbon in its tissues is roughly the same as the ratio in its environment. As soon as the thing dies (and if it dies in certain conditions, like the ones that create oil), it stops absorbing new carbon from its environment. The C14 currently in the organism then starts decaying at a known rate. This is how we do carbon dating (compare C14 to C12, basically), but that's not relevant to the current discussion - the half-life of C14 is something on the order of six thousand years, so if we're pulling up oil that was formed a million years ago, there's gonna be basically zero C14 in it.
Thus, when we measure atmospheric carbon ratios (incidentally, using the exact same technique as the one used in radiocarbon dating), we would expect atmospheric CO2 levels to be significantly "older" than they should be, if fossil fuels are adding a significant amount of carbon to the atmosphere (we measure "should" based on the reactions in the atmosphere that create C14
Meh, going to school is no indication that you know what the hell you're doing. In a class I took, the TA (a PhD student) provided a text filtering algorithm. It was supposed to convert all contiguous whitespace into single spaces, all letters to upper case, and strip out everything else.
The code was a mess of magical numbers, buggy, and slow. He didn't use a single character constant - it was completely unreadable unless you immediately know that 97 == 'a', 122 == 'z', 32 == ' ' and 32 == 'a' - 'A'; he didn't realize that newlines count as whitespace, so there were a lot of conjoined words; if you ran it on a novel-length source text (and we were using Project Gutenberg source texts, so all of them were), it would take 20 minutes to filter a thousand words. That is simply unacceptable for something that can be replaced by with two regular expressions and a call to toUpperCase.
And this is from a guy who was getting a PhD in Computer Science. I know it's mostly theoretical, but if you can fuck a simple text filter up that badly you need to find something else to do with your life.
Have you read the IPCC working group reports? They cover that chain of proofs pretty well.
If you have and you still don't think that global climate change has been proven, what level of evidence would it take to prove it to you? After all, you use the quotation that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence; what level of evidence would you consider to be extraordinary for the theory of global climate change?
Honestly though, I'm not certain I'll get a reasonable answer from you. The two links you provided are pretty tangential to your point. Don't like the US surface station data? Well, the European and Japanese surface station data shows the same trends. Don't like any surface station data? Well, the satellite data shows the same trends. Hell, even the decrease in average bird sizes over the last 46 years is indicative of an upward trend in average temperature. Even data from studies that are entirely unrelated to climate science show indications of increasing average temperatures! How is that not extraordinary?
All that and no link? Geez.
Hah! I love it. Since when is disagreement intolerance? Since when is it intolerance to point out the fact that people who believe in prophecy and mysticism and all that shit are more likely to be uneducated? Everyone has the right to pursue happiness, but if you come into a public forum with policies based on prophecy I have every right to shut you down with reality-based counterarguments.
I tolerate Christians, and I'm sure the GP does too - after all, neither of us is out there campaigning for a Christian death penalty or anything like that. I just don't think they're right about anything unique to their religion, from the existence of the soul onwards. I'm not going to pass laws trying to keep you from believing whatever you want, but if you make statements supported only by dogma or base real human policy on bullshit prophecies, I will (verbally or textually) cut you off at the knees. That's not intolerance of Christianity; that's intolerance of bad ideas, which no one has any right to.
Just FYI, the guy who wrote that was most likely on some Middle Ages equivalent of LSD. It's a single throwaway line in a book full of random shit; the fact that what he said just barely manages to be relevant right now is more coincidence than anything else.
If you throw enough shit at a wall, at least some of it will stick. That doesn't mean it's glue.
Empathy without intelligence means that you will never breed (see e.g, Slashdot).
kdawson or samzenpus would have to post it, and they're too busy worshiping at their secret Gates shrine or looking at pictures of cats with bad grammar, respectively.
To be specific: $150,000 is enough for about sixteen years of world-class education at the Universities of California - including food and board.