I will, as soon as you support that Baillie was saying what you claim he was saying (to wit, that Mann et al 2008 used tree ring records improperly). Neither you nor the website you linked to support that claim. Your facts consist of a quote from a paleoecologist that oak ring data is dangerous to use in temperature reconstructions (and in this specific instance, he's talking in the context of oak ring data that was acquired by someone who has no statistical or scientific background), and that oak ring data was used in a paper by Mann et al. You do not have evidence that the oak ring data in Mann et al was actually used for the temperature part of the reconstruction; you do not have evidence that, if the oak ring data in Mann et al was used for the temperature part of the reconstruction, proper measures were not taken to make the data okay to use.
So please, cite the part of the paper where raw, unprocessed tree ring data was used in a temperature reconstruction. I know I'll be looking for it when I get back home.
I like how the people who advocate a capitalistic free market are also frequently the same people who advocate that all data should be held in common. To each according to his needs, after all, and we need that data! Who cares if that means that the people who went through all the hard effort of actually gathering the stuff will end up getting scooped with their own research.
But there are tree rings we've found that match well with the ice core samples we've drilled, and have higher fidelity. Wouldn't that mean that tree rings are good high-resolution temperature proxies for the ages where we have ice core samples?
Anyway, what Michael Baillie was talking about there is that some dude used the British FOIA to get a bunch of his tree ring samples for fun, basically, because he doesn't really have the means or knowledge to analyze them. Michael is quoted as saying "you can't get temperature from the samples he got". That is not saying "you can never get temperature from oak samples".
Then the site goes on to complain about how Mann et al used 119 oak ring chronologies. This is not necessarily a problem, because Michael Baillie's point is that oaks are more susceptible to differences in rainfall than to differences in temperature. Well hey, what if we know (from other records) what the variation in rainfall was during the period of those 119 chronologies, and then subtract out that signal? We'd get temperature, plus some error! Man, this is almost like science. I have no idea if this is what they do, but maybe you could ask someone on RealClimate about that since you seem to care about it a lot. You've got to be fair and balanced, after all.
Note also that those 119 oak ring chronologies were only used in the paper. That doesn't mean that they were just slapped in there without any processing, or that they weren't well chosen, or that they're even a major part of it. Basically, unless you know a lot more about climatology, it's really difficult to say from the scanty details provided there whether or not this is warranted.
It's ending with a whimper all right - a whimper is all that will show up on the news media outlets that trumpeted the e-mails to high heaven.
This is what always happens. "Amazing discovery! Free energy within five years!" gets front page headlines, but "Scientists retract bullshit claims that nobody in the field believed in the first place" gets put on page 40, right after the obituaries.
That's okay though, because the e-mails have already served their purpose; I'm sure we'll be hearing that moronic refrain of "hide the decline! Hide the decline!" for the next three or four years, regardless of its basis in reality. All that really matters is that the initial narrative was sufficiently plausible to gain a life of its own.
Aquaria confused me to no end; in the very beginning, you talk to someone - and then apparently your character has never talked to anyone? What? I had no idea what was going on; it seemed like for no real reason the main character suddenly decided to go exploring, despite having been content with life before that.
I actually can't spell a number of words that I type regularly - I think the word and my muscle memory produces the finger movements required to enter them.
Actually, that's just AutoCorrect coming back to bite you in the ass. I can't even spell "receive" properly any more, because the spelling gets corrected silently.
Being gay is probably genetic.There's physical differences in the brains of gays.
I've pointed this out before but was moderated into oblivion. What you're saying is true. These differences clearly show up in MRIs. They have different brain chemistry - just as normal males and females also differ; whereby gays match neither.
You know, just because different brain structures show up in an MRI doesn't mean that they're genetic; for instance, if you're a taxi driver, your brain has probably changed in order to better store a map of your area. It's difficult to tell, post hoc, whether or not consistent differences in gross brain structures* cause or are caused by different behaviors. However, by your "logical conclusion", being a taxi cab driver is a disease.
Furthermore, it doesn't matter how much being gay is due to nature or due to nurture. We don't discriminate against people because they choose to ferry passengers in a car all day long; we don't discriminate against people because they're immoral dickwads; we don't discriminate against people because they're completely asocial and spend all their free time trolling Slashdot; we shouldn't discriminate against people because they choose to have hot hot gay sex all night long. As long as it doesn't impair your ability to be happy and function in society, there's no need to classify it as a disease.
He guessed the reset question. It was something along the lines of "Where did you meet your husband?". He did a bit of Internet stalking, found an interview where she'd given a general area, and made a couple of educated guesses.
This is why there should only be another password behind your password reset question (much like Bruce Perens' beard).
However, if you're going to describe the construction of a unified system of hardware, standards and maintenance procedures providing reliable telephone service across the entire United States, plus pioneering trans-oceanic telecommunications, plus pioneering work on the transistor, the laser, television, Unix, and a myriad of other technologies as "nothing" then I'm going to have to ask to see your credentials.
We're talking business here, not achievements.
"Discover the transistor" wasn't Ma Bell's business model. Their business model was "be the phone company". The way this worked was that they maintained the infrastructure that they had built (frequently with government help), and got paid for it. The maintenance didn't take very much money at all, and since they were the phone company, it didn't have to be good; they didn't spend a lot on it.
So yes, their business model was to do (almost) nothing and get paid for it. With the filthy lucre they acquired from that business model, they funded one of the greatest private R&D operations ever - but that didn't have much to do with their business model, it was mainly because they could.
Everybody seems to think that in order to have a product you must have competition, when in fact the perfect business model flourishes on no competition.
Note that Ma Bell had the perfect business model - they did (almost) nothing, and people paid them for it. Perfect for business is almost exactly the opposite of perfect for people.
If we go back to the original law - life of the initial copyright holder + a small extension past that, and only real-live human beings can be considered to be initial copyright holders
Actually, the original American law was 14 years + 14 years if you wanted an extension.
The thing is, though, I would argue that the current author's life + 70 years or 120 years for a corporation is effectively unconstitutional. The Constitution states that Congress only has the power to secure things like copyrights for a limited time. If something is published in my lifetime, it is under copyright for an unlimited duration from my perspective - I will not live to be my current age + 120, or the rest of the author's life + 70 years, no matter what advances in medical science come about.
Basically, if something is published when I am born and it will not be in the public domain before I die, it is copyrighted for an unlimited time from my perspective.
I mean, why would I ever find awkward phrases like "Do you have snakes that come in sometimes? Don't stand for that shit!" hilarious?
.... because you've read Skymall, and that is actually what the writing in the magazine is like? The whole thing is one giant ball of awkward, badly-written text that you read only because there's absolutely nothing else to do, and sometimes the products are unintentionally hilarious (like the hearing aid that looks like a Bluetooth headset).
More like literally ten million in 2006. That DHS publication states that there are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in all states. California has the bulk of them, and honestly it's not that bad here.
It's funny, really - Arizona, a state with the population of 6 million citizens, has passed this law specifically so that they can more easily target 0.5 million illegal aliens.
I think people just don't realize the scale of the numbers involved in these things.
Yes, and Arizona is (potentially) punishing him for their problems with the federal immigration system. Totally reasonable, right? It's far better that one legal alien get deported by accident than a hundred illegal aliens go free, it's not like they're people or anything.
As it stands right now immigration law is intentionally not being enforced for political purposes. IE: to allow as many illegal immigrants in as possible, so that they can be granted amnesty by Democrats registered as Democrats and vote Democrat, thus granting the Democrat party POWER in perpetuity.
Errr... how, exactly, do you know this is going to happen? You do realize that granting amnesty to all illegal aliens is basically politically impossible, right? Further, even if it does happen, it won't have that much of an effect; even if you assume that all illegal aliens who are granted amnesty vote, and vote Democrat, the following will happen in the next Presidential election:
3 million more people will vote Democrat in California, which will profoundly change how that state votes except for the part where it won't.
1.5 million more people will vote Democrat in Texas, which would be just barely enough to tip a Presidential election assuming nobody actually cares that we just granted amnesty to 1.5 million illegal immigrants.
1 million more people will vote Democrat in Florida, which will give the Democrats more of a lead there
Half a million more people will vote Democrat in Illinois, New York, Arizona, New Jersey and Georgia, which might just barely tip Arizona and Georgia over to the Democrats but won't matter to the other states because they're already Democrat.
Beyond that, the numbers get small enough that they won't really affect state elections significantly more than a well-crafted ad campaign.
So basically, your conspiracy theory consists of the Democrats expending a metric shitload of political capital (which they have so much of, now that health care's just barely scraped by) in order to grant amnesty to illegal aliens, and then with those extra now-legal alien votes they'll win Texas and Florida, but only if the local Republicans are completely retarded and don't campaign on the fact that there's a ton of scary brown people who can vote now. If the Republicans can't leverage something like this into a massive voter turnout that far exceeds the Democrat's gains, they don't deserve to be a political party.
And this is assuming that all illegal aliens will vote (they won't; I'd expect to see only moderate turnout - after all, it's not like a minimum wage employee can just take off to go vote, no matter what the law says) and that all illegal aliens will vote Democrat (they won't; at least a few of them hold conservative views).
It honestly sounds like this conspiracy theory of yours is just your way of internally justifying your racism. There's basically no way what you say could come to pass, and if it did come to pass the results aren't what you think they would be, but in the mean time it means you can hate brown people as much as you want because they're part of a scheme against you.
It's about limiting it to as small an amount as possible, to ensure that as many kids grow up to be productive members of society as possible.
... who then go "Holy shit, I can buy all the booze and cigs I want!" and proceed to overindulge, because their parents never bothered to teach them moderation - after all, you can't give alcohol to your kids.
Prime example: During the last Presidential election the McCain campaign was accused of "stealing" the song "Barracuda". Yet WEEKS of hay were made from a literal non-story because the original artist didn't like the McCain camp using it, despite them having met the legal requirements for use.
Weeks of hay? I hadn't even heard of this until now, and I was paying some attention to the 2008 campaigns.
Further, now that I look it up, it doesn't seem to be the case that anyone was saying the McCain campaign stole the song, or even used it illegally; the hay was made over the fact that the artists just didn't agree with his political views, and as such requested that he not use it. Due to our wonderful copyright system, the people who created the song no longer had any sort of control over the actual usage of the song, and as such their request was ignored by the McCain campaign.
Indeed, as far as I can tell none of those "leftist 'news' sources" said or even implied that the McCain campaign used Barracuda illegally; all they cared about was that the band that created that song did not wish for it to be used in that way.
And yet despite this, you somehow managed to completely avoid addressing the three instances of potential Republican music-stealing that the GP actually brought up.
Judging from your signature, this seems to be a consistent pathology in your thinking.
I never thought I would defend Symantec after they got out of their compiler business and started pushing garbage, but it should be pointed out that the fake AVs aren't actually doing anything, and it is thus easy to win in total resource usage.
And Symantec isn't doing anything practical either, or else this fake AV window wouldn't be showing up on my end user computers:)
We've had a couple of these at work - not fake AVs, but some weird thing that seems to change the Active Desktop so that it looks like there's an antivirus window.
The funny thing is that they look a lot more like an anti-virus program than our actual antivirus. They have this really slick fake "scanning" window that looks like something Apple would come up with if they had to design an AV scanner, while our real AV software looks like a piece of junk some poor Russian hacker cobbled together. It's sad really; the fake AVs have Symantec beat in everything from total resource usage to looks.
This is some RTS game on a limited map. In an active engagement, US troops are more than a match for insurgents. But when the enemy can hide anywhere and more anywhere, you must defend everywhere. You need a force that can counter them anywhere they might appear. Hence, you need a much bigger force.
One-time pad isn't a DRM scheme. His generalization is true for DRM, which is what he was talking about.
It's defective by design, after all - they want to create an encryption scheme such that Alice can securely send a game to Bob and Bob cannot create copies of it, but Eve has electrodes in Bob's brain and knows everything he does or thinks or sees or hears. It's just not possible unless you remove the electrodes.
Slashdot Mirror
I will, as soon as you support that Baillie was saying what you claim he was saying (to wit, that Mann et al 2008 used tree ring records improperly). Neither you nor the website you linked to support that claim. Your facts consist of a quote from a paleoecologist that oak ring data is dangerous to use in temperature reconstructions (and in this specific instance, he's talking in the context of oak ring data that was acquired by someone who has no statistical or scientific background), and that oak ring data was used in a paper by Mann et al. You do not have evidence that the oak ring data in Mann et al was actually used for the temperature part of the reconstruction; you do not have evidence that, if the oak ring data in Mann et al was used for the temperature part of the reconstruction, proper measures were not taken to make the data okay to use.
So please, cite the part of the paper where raw, unprocessed tree ring data was used in a temperature reconstruction. I know I'll be looking for it when I get back home.
I like how the people who advocate a capitalistic free market are also frequently the same people who advocate that all data should be held in common. To each according to his needs, after all, and we need that data! Who cares if that means that the people who went through all the hard effort of actually gathering the stuff will end up getting scooped with their own research.
But there are tree rings we've found that match well with the ice core samples we've drilled, and have higher fidelity. Wouldn't that mean that tree rings are good high-resolution temperature proxies for the ages where we have ice core samples?
Anyway, what Michael Baillie was talking about there is that some dude used the British FOIA to get a bunch of his tree ring samples for fun, basically, because he doesn't really have the means or knowledge to analyze them. Michael is quoted as saying "you can't get temperature from the samples he got". That is not saying "you can never get temperature from oak samples".
Then the site goes on to complain about how Mann et al used 119 oak ring chronologies. This is not necessarily a problem, because Michael Baillie's point is that oaks are more susceptible to differences in rainfall than to differences in temperature. Well hey, what if we know (from other records) what the variation in rainfall was during the period of those 119 chronologies, and then subtract out that signal? We'd get temperature, plus some error! Man, this is almost like science. I have no idea if this is what they do, but maybe you could ask someone on RealClimate about that since you seem to care about it a lot. You've got to be fair and balanced, after all.
Note also that those 119 oak ring chronologies were only used in the paper. That doesn't mean that they were just slapped in there without any processing, or that they weren't well chosen, or that they're even a major part of it. Basically, unless you know a lot more about climatology, it's really difficult to say from the scanty details provided there whether or not this is warranted.
It's ending with a whimper all right - a whimper is all that will show up on the news media outlets that trumpeted the e-mails to high heaven.
This is what always happens. "Amazing discovery! Free energy within five years!" gets front page headlines, but "Scientists retract bullshit claims that nobody in the field believed in the first place" gets put on page 40, right after the obituaries.
That's okay though, because the e-mails have already served their purpose; I'm sure we'll be hearing that moronic refrain of "hide the decline! Hide the decline!" for the next three or four years, regardless of its basis in reality. All that really matters is that the initial narrative was sufficiently plausible to gain a life of its own.
Aquaria confused me to no end; in the very beginning, you talk to someone - and then apparently your character has never talked to anyone? What? I had no idea what was going on; it seemed like for no real reason the main character suddenly decided to go exploring, despite having been content with life before that.
Actually, that's just AutoCorrect coming back to bite you in the ass. I can't even spell "receive" properly any more, because the spelling gets corrected silently.
It's almost like... there's more than one fanboy on Slashdot! How could this be!?
So what you're saying is, it takes lots of training to convince yourself it's not just a mind game? Kind of like the Trinity, I suppose.
You know, just because different brain structures show up in an MRI doesn't mean that they're genetic; for instance, if you're a taxi driver, your brain has probably changed in order to better store a map of your area. It's difficult to tell, post hoc, whether or not consistent differences in gross brain structures* cause or are caused by different behaviors. However, by your "logical conclusion", being a taxi cab driver is a disease.
Furthermore, it doesn't matter how much being gay is due to nature or due to nurture. We don't discriminate against people because they choose to ferry passengers in a car all day long; we don't discriminate against people because they're immoral dickwads; we don't discriminate against people because they're completely asocial and spend all their free time trolling Slashdot; we shouldn't discriminate against people because they choose to have hot hot gay sex all night long. As long as it doesn't impair your ability to be happy and function in society, there's no need to classify it as a disease.
*Yes I know they're all gross
That's because you never get linked to the bad, shallow and boring videos, obviously.
He guessed the reset question. It was something along the lines of "Where did you meet your husband?". He did a bit of Internet stalking, found an interview where she'd given a general area, and made a couple of educated guesses.
This is why there should only be another password behind your password reset question (much like Bruce Perens' beard).
We're talking business here, not achievements.
"Discover the transistor" wasn't Ma Bell's business model. Their business model was "be the phone company". The way this worked was that they maintained the infrastructure that they had built (frequently with government help), and got paid for it. The maintenance didn't take very much money at all, and since they were the phone company, it didn't have to be good; they didn't spend a lot on it.
So yes, their business model was to do (almost) nothing and get paid for it. With the filthy lucre they acquired from that business model, they funded one of the greatest private R&D operations ever - but that didn't have much to do with their business model, it was mainly because they could.
Note that Ma Bell had the perfect business model - they did (almost) nothing, and people paid them for it. Perfect for business is almost exactly the opposite of perfect for people.
But then, what is?
Actually, the original American law was 14 years + 14 years if you wanted an extension.
The thing is, though, I would argue that the current author's life + 70 years or 120 years for a corporation is effectively unconstitutional. The Constitution states that Congress only has the power to secure things like copyrights for a limited time. If something is published in my lifetime, it is under copyright for an unlimited duration from my perspective - I will not live to be my current age + 120, or the rest of the author's life + 70 years, no matter what advances in medical science come about.
Basically, if something is published when I am born and it will not be in the public domain before I die, it is copyrighted for an unlimited time from my perspective.
More like literally ten million in 2006. That DHS publication states that there are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in all states. California has the bulk of them, and honestly it's not that bad here.
It's funny, really - Arizona, a state with the population of 6 million citizens, has passed this law specifically so that they can more easily target 0.5 million illegal aliens.
I think people just don't realize the scale of the numbers involved in these things.
Yes, and Arizona is (potentially) punishing him for their problems with the federal immigration system. Totally reasonable, right? It's far better that one legal alien get deported by accident than a hundred illegal aliens go free, it's not like they're people or anything.
Errr... how, exactly, do you know this is going to happen? You do realize that granting amnesty to all illegal aliens is basically politically impossible, right? Further, even if it does happen, it won't have that much of an effect; even if you assume that all illegal aliens who are granted amnesty vote, and vote Democrat, the following will happen in the next Presidential election:
Beyond that, the numbers get small enough that they won't really affect state elections significantly more than a well-crafted ad campaign.
So basically, your conspiracy theory consists of the Democrats expending a metric shitload of political capital (which they have so much of, now that health care's just barely scraped by) in order to grant amnesty to illegal aliens, and then with those extra now-legal alien votes they'll win Texas and Florida, but only if the local Republicans are completely retarded and don't campaign on the fact that there's a ton of scary brown people who can vote now. If the Republicans can't leverage something like this into a massive voter turnout that far exceeds the Democrat's gains, they don't deserve to be a political party.
And this is assuming that all illegal aliens will vote (they won't; I'd expect to see only moderate turnout - after all, it's not like a minimum wage employee can just take off to go vote, no matter what the law says) and that all illegal aliens will vote Democrat (they won't; at least a few of them hold conservative views).
It honestly sounds like this conspiracy theory of yours is just your way of internally justifying your racism. There's basically no way what you say could come to pass, and if it did come to pass the results aren't what you think they would be, but in the mean time it means you can hate brown people as much as you want because they're part of a scheme against you.
Weeks of hay? I hadn't even heard of this until now, and I was paying some attention to the 2008 campaigns.
Further, now that I look it up, it doesn't seem to be the case that anyone was saying the McCain campaign stole the song, or even used it illegally; the hay was made over the fact that the artists just didn't agree with his political views, and as such requested that he not use it. Due to our wonderful copyright system, the people who created the song no longer had any sort of control over the actual usage of the song, and as such their request was ignored by the McCain campaign.
Indeed, as far as I can tell none of those "leftist 'news' sources" said or even implied that the McCain campaign used Barracuda illegally; all they cared about was that the band that created that song did not wish for it to be used in that way.
And yet despite this, you somehow managed to completely avoid addressing the three instances of potential Republican music-stealing that the GP actually brought up.
Judging from your signature, this seems to be a consistent pathology in your thinking.
And Symantec isn't doing anything practical either, or else this fake AV window wouldn't be showing up on my end user computers :)
We've had a couple of these at work - not fake AVs, but some weird thing that seems to change the Active Desktop so that it looks like there's an antivirus window.
The funny thing is that they look a lot more like an anti-virus program than our actual antivirus. They have this really slick fake "scanning" window that looks like something Apple would come up with if they had to design an AV scanner, while our real AV software looks like a piece of junk some poor Russian hacker cobbled together. It's sad really; the fake AVs have Symantec beat in everything from total resource usage to looks.
An strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
One-time pad isn't a DRM scheme. His generalization is true for DRM, which is what he was talking about.
It's defective by design, after all - they want to create an encryption scheme such that Alice can securely send a game to Bob and Bob cannot create copies of it, but Eve has electrodes in Bob's brain and knows everything he does or thinks or sees or hears. It's just not possible unless you remove the electrodes.