If you really want to keep something exclusive, keep it hidden, call it a trade secret, and sue anyone who leaks it. Unless you are Einstein, someone else will think of it fairly soon anyway, because it's obvious to those at the leading edge of whateever specialty, so keeping it a secret may be bad social form but is not really harmful.
I didn't mean that the link would necessarily work. (Take you to content). Just that the act of linking to a published http url on on the world wide web must be considered a legal act.
The name "World Wide Web" implies this. This was the fundamental intent of the core technology that has enabled the mainstream and worldwide use of the Internet. Either the web as a whole is illegal, or linking to whatever links are published must be legal. Anything else is not practically administrable, is prima face ridiculous, and must be considered a nullity by any competent legal jurisdiction.
When scientists first noticed the problem, 40 or so years ago, it was generally referred to as global warming. The term "global warming" is a way of saying "climate change with a net change toward warmer."
Later, skeptics, denialists, industry shills, right-wing politicians, call them what you will, changed the "framing" of the issue by calling it "climate change". "Climate change" is: a) a vaguer and less specific term - says less about the important aspect of what's different. b) introduces confusion in the weak-minded with normal "background" climate variation. c) Does not convey that there may be a dangerous trend in one particular direction, away from a previous equilibrium. d) Sounds less serious because it is not evident from the term that it is a global-scale difference.
So, in short, those who want to shroud the issue in doubt and confusion use the term climate change. Those who want to be straightforward about the essential new factor call it global warming.
Yes. Those with crazy predictions should stop. Those with rational, probable ones please keep predicting. Focussing on what is happening now will make us miss those events we are actively and preventably causing whose timeframes are measured in the 100s of years. And those will tend to be the important, game-changing events.
Umm. Unfortunately, nature, and physics, chemistry etc, are not simple enough for most people to (bother to) comprehend.
Unfortunately our collective activity is profoundly f***ing up nature and climate in rather physically and chemically complex ways; in ways that take too long for most human individuals to comprehend (i.e. slightly longer than their individual lifespan) but are unfortunately near-instantaneous from our planet's and our species' point of view.
Those who know how to know things do know pretty much what's going on, that is, what we are doing to the place.
Unfortunately most people can't figure it out or don't give a shit.
In the immortal words of Pris: "Then we're stupid and we'll die!"
The ones writing scientific articles in the peer-reviewed scientific journals. You know, the ones who have spent 10 years post-secondary science education studying the details of the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans to the level of accepted PhD thesis, then gone on to do say 5-years post-doctoral research in a relevant specialty, then conducted accepted peer-reviewed research in these fields for years or decades.
Those ones. Especially the ones that have no funding associations with the fossil fuel industry.
If you seriously have no clue as to how to evaluate the credibility of sources of information, you're in a deep morass of ignorant hurt.
If you're too stupid to get that there can still be SIGNAL of anthropegenic global warming in the NOISE of random CLIMATE VARIATION, you don't belong on slashdot. Go argue on a reality TV show fan site or something. J@sus!
Oh get off your high horse. I'm a comp sci in the aforementioned country and I've written software engineer on my passport application 5 times or so. Come and get me.
Let me ask this: If I were bio-engineering new life-forms out of yeast-cells and 4 bottles of amino acids in Canada, and had a PhD in Biology, what would my job title be (other than "irresponsible d*ckhead" of course)?
"No one in software cares about titles like they do. Neither do they care about quality control or standards."
As a practicing Software Systems Engineering Architect, I strongly resemble that remark!!!!
Seriously, though. Software could stand better quality control standards (although it's pretty much always management that precludes effective or comprehensive testing and careful meticulous sanely-paced development, but I digress.) But in general, software is too complex to certify for correctness, particularly at anywhere near the rate that it is innovated these days. I would never, ever, sign something saying a piece of software (longer than about 5 lines of code) was verified correct and safe. Nor should anyone else. There are mathematical laws proving that you cannot be sure of this sort of thing. You can't in general say whether a given program will halt, given a new input, so you can't say whether it will halt returning the correct value.
"Unlike software, where usually the worst that happens is buggy software that needs fixing, faulty infrastructure can cost lives inmediately"
Are you out of your mind? Most machines and buildings made today are controlled substantially by software. Your car, your office building's CO2-sensor-based HVAC system, your hospital patient-monitoring and dosing equipment, your airplane, your traffic lights.... need I go on?
Actually, neither the term "software consulting engineer" nor "consulting software engineer" fall under that law, because they are not an abbreviation nor a combination of the precluded titles.
Besides, software engineering is not electrical, civil, or mechanical engineering. Software is not necessarily based, even indirectly, on electrical stuff (there are just now emerging, optical computing chips / programmable circuits, not to mention that a thousand people standing in a football field holding up black or white cards on cue can run software.). Or it may be based so indirectly on the electrical stuff that system-layer-boundary arguments could establish independence. e.g. If I am a taxi driver operating an electric car, do I have to be an electrical engineer? No. Neither do I have to be one to write software for an electrical computer.
The use of THIS in the context above is sloppy, lazy, completely ambiguous, and a symptom of lack of effective mastery of vocabulary. For all practical purposes, it has no meaning (because it could have so many) so leave it out.
It's in the same vein as these sorts of conversations: Like, I go, and then he goes. Like y'know, whatever! It was like, totally random. So I go,... and she goes,...then he goes... THIS I like totally went...NO WAY!
In other words, a sadly vocabulary-free, grammar-free way of communicating using a severely abridged form of the language. Descriptions of situations need to be played out, using exact repetition of what was said mixed with a haze of of really imprecise metaphors.
You will never be president if you speak "like" that.
I want the wild wild web, where the deer and the antelope roam, and the skies are (not cloudy) all day, not some locked-down police-state prison-cell silo-world of commercial money-sucking, mind-***king apps.
The practical answers is to tack on a punitive carbon tax to fossil fuel.e.g. an extra $4 per gallon for gas and rising.
Direct all the revenue from this to basic research into fossil-fuel-free energy and transportation technologies. Preferably focus on research into technologies other than conventional nuclear, since it's already had 70 years of government research funding.
The reason the voices backing the science side of the debate become shrill is in response to your side's refusal to allow these sort of effective measures to take place. You have to yell pretty loud to get through to people with their head in the sand and people with their hands clamped over their ears repeating "la la la" over and over to themselves.
While I agree that many people are deceived (or worse, completely unthinking) on many important topics, I think it is a bit of an abdication of judgement to just blanket say "Oh they're all equally deceived or all equally unable/unwilling to think."
There are important gradations in this, in often the people on one side of these polarizing issues will be thinking a lot less clearly, openly, and logically than those on the other side.
But if we throw up our hands and say in a post-modern way: "Who can tell who's thinking better or with a more solid base of fairly well established fact - it's all shyte." then we are actually aiding and abetting those who pretty deliberately don't think well or think through fully and prefer to use rhetorical tricks to argue their case because it suits their interests.
I would put the complaint as "Many people argue (and form worldviews) out of pure short-term self interest regardless of the obvious facts." rather than "both sides are equally bad at drawing well-founded rational conclusions well."
If you don't think its even possible to draw well-founded rational conclusions about something that are somewhat objectively more connected to an evidence-based, proven-theory-based view of the world, then that is a truly bleak and cynical view, and one that I think aids the deliberate obfuscators.
- You in particular? chance. - You as an instance of human form? A long series of evolutionary adaptations, some general for any living thing, some more particular to the particular environment, but in general just following a process of "the information patterns which build more survival-capable, metabolism-capable, reproduction-capable, more homeostatic containers for themselves tend to continue on and other similar information patterns tend to not persist as much on average, til those other information patterns are not embodied in any matter-energy around here at all any more, but the more capable life-program information is still embodied, and is still gradually extending its sustained information-size and is thereby generalizing (widening) the set of environment types it can survive in, and/or increasing its probability of survival in fixed environments if that's what it's stuck with.
"Is there a purpose to this arbitrary existence?"
- Purpose implies a subject. (something or someone that the purpose assists.) Purpose for whom or for what? Every living organism, and each of their constituent cells you could say, and their species you could say, kind of takes on a purpose of maintaining its own form over time, a purpose of avoiding destructive perturbation. But that is just a manner of speaking. Yes the thing acts so as to maintain itself (or more precisely to maintain its core information pattern), but it only does by a sort of anthropic principle argument that goes "if it didn't do that kind of thing, in general, and enough of it, and sucessfully enough, then it wouldn't be here for us to be asking why is it doing that?" You can say the information-pattern generated-and-governed thing acts with the PURPOSE of maintaining its self, its order, and thus its core information pattern's longevity of embodiment in the vicinity, but that would just be imposing that concept of purpose from the outsider's perspective. It's just acting in its "Sine qua non" way. It's here because it acts that way. It acts that way because it is a successful way of making it still be here.
"Is this existence unique?"
- You in particular, yes, in many ways, from core information (genetics), epi-genetics, circumstance, mind-recorded experience and consequent mental state and attitude and consequent biased perceptions. But on the other hand, your particular fairly stable patterned configuration of 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon atom (and the 1% of you that is other atoms) is much much much more similar in configuration to every other human being's patterned configuration of 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms than it is similar to the configuration of any other group of 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon atoms in the universe.
- And more generally, "life is a particular form of the motion of matter" (A. Oparin) and came about just due to the normal operation of the laws of physics and information theory on patterns of matter and energy in the universe. Life is a tendency of matter and energy in certain thermodynamic regimes that have suitable ranges of amounts of various kinds of light and heavy atoms in the vicinity. Given that our Universe is at least 1000 times the size of the extent of it we can observe, and that the observable part contains maybe 500 million galaxies with 200-400 million stars each, it would be surprising in the extreme if life-order has not emerged in many other places. And since information processing by life-forms is a ubiquitous general-purpose strategy for life continuance, and since information-processing about the environment leads to a an obvious adaptive improvement strategy of increasing general perception and intelligence for some life forms, the presence of other intelligent life forms, at some times in some places, is assured.
Slashdot Mirror
No software or algorithm patents.
If you really want to keep something exclusive, keep it hidden, call it a trade secret, and sue anyone who leaks it.
Unless you are Einstein, someone else will think of it fairly soon anyway, because it's obvious to those at the leading edge of whateever specialty, so keeping it a secret may be bad social form but is not really harmful.
That!
Caution: Do not view or download these images onto your computer:
http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/tratong/tratong1202/tratong120200024/12605645-momma-pig-feeding-baby-pigs.jpg
http://i1117.photobucket.com/albums/k582/oneh2obabe1/Pigs%20n%20Pups/baby_pigs_1.jpg
http://cdn5.teen.com/wp-content/gallery/piglets/painted-piglets.jpg
I didn't mean that the link would necessarily work. (Take you to content). Just that the act of linking to a published http url on on the world wide web must be considered a legal act.
The name "World Wide Web" implies this. This was the fundamental intent of the core technology that has enabled the mainstream and worldwide use of the Internet.
Either the web as a whole is illegal, or linking to whatever links are published must be legal. Anything else is not practically administrable, is prima face ridiculous, and must be considered a nullity by any competent legal jurisdiction.
its linkable
Say you're fighting a fire.
One of the best mitigation measures is to stop pouring gasoline on it.
I'm sorry, What?
You are a little bit confused.
When scientists first noticed the problem, 40 or so years ago, it was generally referred to as global warming.
The term "global warming" is a way of saying "climate change with a net change toward warmer."
Later, skeptics, denialists, industry shills, right-wing politicians, call them what you will, changed the "framing" of the issue
by calling it "climate change".
"Climate change" is:
a) a vaguer and less specific term - says less about the important aspect of what's different.
b) introduces confusion in the weak-minded with normal "background" climate variation.
c) Does not convey that there may be a dangerous trend in one particular direction, away from
a previous equilibrium.
d) Sounds less serious because it is not evident from the term that it is a global-scale difference.
So, in short, those who want to shroud the issue in doubt and confusion use the term climate change.
Those who want to be straightforward about the essential new factor call it global warming.
Global warming has already been forecast http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review to cost much more than slowing it down/preventing it would cost.
I guess those externalities in economic models (and fossil-fuel price and fossil-fuel-based product prices) weren't so external after all.
Who would have guessed that the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment?
Yes. Those with crazy predictions should stop. Those with rational, probable ones please keep predicting.
Focussing on what is happening now will make us miss those events we are actively and preventably causing
whose timeframes are measured in the 100s of years. And those will tend to be the important, game-changing
events.
Umm. Unfortunately, nature, and physics, chemistry etc, are not simple enough for most people to (bother to) comprehend.
Unfortunately our collective activity is profoundly f***ing up nature and climate in rather physically and chemically complex ways; in ways that take too long for most human individuals to comprehend (i.e. slightly longer than their individual lifespan) but are unfortunately near-instantaneous from our planet's and our species' point of view.
Those who know how to know things do know pretty much what's going on, that is, what we are doing to the place.
Unfortunately most people can't figure it out or don't give a shit.
In the immortal words of Pris: "Then we're stupid and we'll die!"
Unfortunate.
a hunter with a kazoo and decoy
I knew this time would come.
The ones writing scientific articles in the peer-reviewed scientific journals.
You know, the ones who have spent 10 years post-secondary science education studying the details of the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere and oceans to the level of accepted PhD thesis, then gone on to do say 5-years post-doctoral research in a relevant specialty, then conducted accepted peer-reviewed research in these fields for years or decades.
Those ones. Especially the ones that have no funding associations with the fossil fuel industry.
If you seriously have no clue as to how to evaluate the credibility of sources of information, you're in a deep morass of ignorant hurt.
should read: anthropogenic
If you're too stupid to get that there can still be SIGNAL of anthropegenic global warming in the NOISE of random CLIMATE VARIATION, you don't belong on slashdot. Go argue on a reality TV show fan site or something. J@sus!
When can I freakin' get one???
3-wheeler, covered, a bit of seat heat and minimal climate control, and a cheap base price like other tiny cars.
Hello..... I've been waiting at least 5 years and seeing an endless stream of cool non-production car-show concepts and test prototypes.
"Show me the MINI !"
Oh get off your high horse. I'm a comp sci in the aforementioned country and I've written software engineer on my passport application 5 times or so.
Come and get me.
Let me ask this: If I were bio-engineering new life-forms out of yeast-cells and 4 bottles of amino acids in Canada, and had a PhD in Biology, what would my job title be (other than "irresponsible d*ckhead" of course)?
"No one in software cares about titles like they do. Neither do they care about quality control or standards."
As a practicing Software Systems Engineering Architect, I strongly resemble that remark!!!!
Seriously, though. Software could stand better quality control standards (although it's pretty much always management that precludes effective or comprehensive testing and careful meticulous sanely-paced development, but I digress.)
But in general, software is too complex to certify for correctness, particularly at anywhere near the rate that it is innovated these days. I would never, ever, sign something saying a piece of software (longer than about 5 lines of code) was verified correct and safe. Nor should anyone else. There are mathematical laws proving that you cannot be sure of this sort of thing. You can't in general say whether a given program will halt, given a new input, so you can't say whether it will halt returning the correct value.
"Unlike software, where usually the worst that happens is buggy software that needs fixing, faulty infrastructure can cost lives inmediately"
Are you out of your mind? Most machines and buildings made today are controlled substantially by software. Your car, your office building's CO2-sensor-based HVAC system, your hospital patient-monitoring and dosing equipment, your airplane, your traffic lights.... need I go on?
Actually, neither the term "software consulting engineer" nor "consulting software engineer" fall under that law, because they are not an abbreviation nor a combination of the precluded titles.
Besides, software engineering is not electrical, civil, or mechanical engineering. Software is not necessarily based, even indirectly, on electrical stuff (there are just now emerging, optical computing chips / programmable circuits, not to mention that a thousand people standing in a football field holding up black or white cards on cue can run software.). Or it may be based so indirectly on the electrical stuff that system-layer-boundary arguments could establish independence. e.g. If I am a taxi driver operating an electric car, do I have to be an electrical engineer? No. Neither do I have to be one to write software for an electrical computer.
If you aren't willing to be sued if your software fails or if your train drives into a car you aren't an engineer.
Fixed that for you.
The use of THIS in the context above is sloppy, lazy, completely ambiguous, and a symptom of lack of effective mastery of vocabulary. For all practical purposes, it has no meaning (because it could have so many) so leave it out.
It's in the same vein as these sorts of conversations: ...then he goes...
Like, I go, and then he goes.
Like y'know, whatever!
It was like, totally random.
So I go,... and she goes,
THIS
I like totally went...NO WAY!
In other words, a sadly vocabulary-free, grammar-free way of communicating using a severely abridged form of the language.
Descriptions of situations need to be played out, using exact repetition of what was said mixed with a haze of of really
imprecise metaphors.
You will never be president if you speak "like" that.
I want the wild wild web, where the deer and the antelope roam, and the skies are (not cloudy) all day, not some locked-down police-state prison-cell silo-world of commercial money-sucking, mind-***king apps.
The practical answers is to tack on a punitive carbon tax to fossil fuel.e.g. an extra $4 per gallon for gas and rising.
Direct all the revenue from this to basic research into fossil-fuel-free energy and transportation technologies.
Preferably focus on research into technologies other than conventional nuclear, since it's already had 70 years of government research funding.
The reason the voices backing the science side of the debate become shrill is in response to your side's refusal to allow these sort
of effective measures to take place. You have to yell pretty loud to get through to people with their head in the sand and people with their hands clamped over
their ears repeating "la la la" over and over to themselves.
While I agree that many people are deceived (or worse, completely unthinking) on many important topics, I think it is a bit of an abdication of judgement to just blanket say "Oh they're all equally deceived or all equally unable/unwilling to think."
There are important gradations in this, in often the people on one side of these polarizing issues will be thinking a lot less clearly, openly, and logically than those on the other side.
But if we throw up our hands and say in a post-modern way: "Who can tell who's thinking better or with a more solid base of fairly well established fact - it's all shyte." then we are actually aiding and abetting those who pretty deliberately don't think well or think through fully and prefer to use rhetorical tricks to argue their case because it suits their interests.
I would put the complaint as "Many people argue (and form worldviews) out of pure short-term self interest regardless of the obvious facts." rather than "both sides are equally bad at drawing well-founded rational conclusions well."
If you don't think its even possible to draw well-founded rational conclusions about something that are somewhat objectively more connected to an evidence-based, proven-theory-based view of the world, then that is a truly bleak and cynical view, and one that I think aids the deliberate obfuscators.
"Why am I here?"
- You in particular? chance.
- You as an instance of human form? A long series of evolutionary adaptations, some general for any living thing, some more particular to the particular environment, but in general just following a process of "the information patterns which build more survival-capable, metabolism-capable, reproduction-capable, more homeostatic containers for themselves tend to continue on and other similar information patterns tend to not persist as much on average, til those other information patterns are not embodied in any matter-energy around here at all any more, but the more capable life-program information is still embodied, and is still gradually extending its sustained information-size and is thereby generalizing (widening) the set of environment types it can survive in, and/or increasing its probability of survival in fixed environments if that's what it's stuck with.
"Is there a purpose to this arbitrary existence?"
- Purpose implies a subject. (something or someone that the purpose assists.) Purpose for whom or for what?
Every living organism, and each of their constituent cells you could say, and their species you could say, kind of takes on a purpose of maintaining its own form over time, a purpose of avoiding destructive perturbation. But that is just a manner of speaking. Yes the thing acts so as to maintain itself (or more precisely to maintain its core information pattern), but it only does by a sort of anthropic principle argument that goes "if it didn't do that kind of thing, in general, and enough of it, and sucessfully enough, then it wouldn't be here for us to be asking why is it doing that?" You can say the information-pattern generated-and-governed thing acts with the PURPOSE of maintaining its self, its order, and thus its core information pattern's longevity of embodiment in the vicinity, but that would just be imposing that concept of purpose from the outsider's perspective. It's just acting in its "Sine qua non" way. It's here because it acts that way. It acts that way because it is a successful way of making it still be here.
"Is this existence unique?"
- You in particular, yes, in many ways, from core information (genetics), epi-genetics, circumstance, mind-recorded experience and consequent mental state and attitude and consequent biased perceptions.
But on the other hand, your particular fairly stable patterned configuration of 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon atom (and the 1% of you that is other atoms) is much much much more similar in configuration to every other human being's patterned configuration of 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms than it is similar to the configuration of any other group of 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon atoms in the universe.
- And more generally, "life is a particular form of the motion of matter" (A. Oparin) and came about just due to the normal operation of the laws of physics and information theory on patterns of matter and energy in the universe. Life is a tendency of matter and energy in certain thermodynamic regimes that have suitable ranges of amounts of various kinds of light and heavy atoms in the vicinity. Given that our Universe is at least 1000 times the size of the extent of it we can observe, and that the observable part contains maybe 500 million galaxies with 200-400 million stars each, it would be surprising in the extreme if life-order has not emerged in many other places. And since information processing by life-forms is a ubiquitous general-purpose strategy for life continuance, and since information-processing about the environment leads to a an obvious adaptive improvement strategy of increasing general perception and intelligence for some life forms, the presence of other intelligent life forms, at some times in some places, is assured.