It was hard to escape the conclusion that Crichton was a guy who would believe literally anything anyone told him...I was somewhat surprised to see him arguing in favor of more objective thinking in the global-warming debate
Have you considered that, well before the time Crichton wrote State of Fear, climate change denialism had become the woo-woo position?
For whatever reason, climate change denialists got to him first, and made him feel cleverer and more imaginative than everyone else for listening to them. What if climate change is a conspiracy of poor environmental interests? Well, what if a powerful woman sexually harassed a man?
Could have been much worse-- could have been 9/11 truthers.
Some would say that the peace prize gets undue respect from sharing it's name with the science prizes.
That's rich, considering the peace prize was stipulated in Nobel's will, and the "the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel" (which "some critics" might find more politically agreeable) was designed half a century later to ride on the Nobel coattails.
science prizes are given a long time after the fact, for discoveries that has really truly held up
Giving out prizes contemporaneously is always risky, it's much easier when history has been written; that's why it took so long to give Luc Montagnier the award.
The problem with the Economics prize (and to a lesser extent with the Peace prize) is that they're too contemporary.
For Peace, it's probably inevitable that selection will be driven by current events.
For Economics, they've just ran out of worthwhile awardees. Perhaps this year they should give it to the EU bank regulators for managing to avoid the destruction of their economy thus far.
I think that I understand the reasoning of anonymous actions
Really? Care to explain why Anonymous spends weekends Rickrolling Scientology offices? Because I don't think you understand Anonymous actions at all. If you really think this is political retaliation, you're way off.
As far as I can tell, the culture of Anonymous is basically arrogant nihilism. Their messageboards encourage amusing punishment of people they believe deserve it -- the stupid or ignorant.
Like Sarah Palin, who ignorantly used a Yahoo Mail account with stupid easily guessable password questions for her public email.
StartCom is free and already supported by Firefox.
Mozilla just wants CAs to offer some level of accountability and identity verification. Their CA certificate policy is explicit in its requirements.
I don't see the point in having Verisign certificates eveywhere, but I also don't see why you should blindly trust a Robot Certificate Authority like CACert, without further assurances.
It's worse than that. Powell knew invading Iraq was a bad idea ("Powell Doctrine"), knew the war was built on lies (see his aide Larry Wilkerson's interviews), was capable of stopping the war if he exposed the lies in the media...
and he went ahead and gave a false presentation to the UN about Iraq's nonexistent "weapons of mass destruction" anyway!
And that resulted in the Iraq War.
Colin Powell -- tragedy. Actually, only a small tragedy, because it's apparent he was always a company man and lacked convictions.
If you still have any respect for him, you're not paying attention.
Is the Laffer curve "inherently idiotic"? As a theoretical construction, no; in reality, in the current tax regime, yes. Do you really think people are likely to put down their keyboards and stop working if the tax rate increases from 30 to 35%? Preposterous.
Of course, data trumps theory. If there's any data suggesting that we're to the right of the Laffer peak, I have not seen it. And when even right-wingers' data show that raising taxes raises revenue, you really have to wonder whether there is any scrap of data anywhere in the world to support their position.
Which is worse, McCain skipping, or Obama present and voting yea?
Obama voted to strip immunity out of the bill (leaving in a bunch of less offensive spying related stuff).
When that failed, he voted for the bill anyway.
McCain loves the idea of telecom immunity, and would have voted for it both times.
So Obama is better. I don't (entirely) blame him for his inability to get rid of the disgraceful immunity provision. Every single Republican, and a number of bad Democrats, wanted their telecom lobbyist friends to get it.
Seriously, you're using the location bar wrong. Why would you expect a search for "s" to be determinate? And why spend time hunting with the mouse when you can type?
It's like the Google search suggestion feature from Firefox 2; it's fun for about a minute to see what popular sites and queries begin with "s". Then you start using it the way it's supposed to be used, and it becomes useful.
p.s. I hear you can train it so that "slashdot.com" is the #1 result for "s".
Actually, they probably did it for next to nothing, anticipating all the free press coverage they would get.
This very "press hit" on slashdot is a good example of what they were aiming at.
(Although in this specific case, they deserve the good press they're getting.)
You tell 'em. When those Minnesota politicians came along with their funny accents asking to repair some damn highway bridge, you bet I told them where to stick their pork projects!
Look, it's not the government you're cheating when you evade sales and use taxes -- it's me. And everyone else you know. Because we have to pay your share.
The fact that Ms. Smith sees it from the government's point of view is bad public relations, but it doesn't change the facts of the matter.
The fees we pay for shipping and handling cover the road fees required to bring the product to our door.
No they don't.
"Handling" compensates the retailer for the cost of distribution.
"Shipping" pays for the mail service to bring it to your door, including mail sorting, mail trucks, and the postman.
Nothing in that equation pays for the cost of building roads (except very fractionally through gas taxes); fire and police protection for warehouse facilities and postal sorting offices; police protection against mail robberies; policing so your packages don't get stolen off your doorstep; etc. etc.
But exactly what are they supposed to do when Bush would veto anything meaningful? Remember they need 2/3 of both the House and the Senate, they currently have 1/2 (barely), and the Republicans in the House and Senate will never vote for anything that would contradict or rein in their Great Leader in the War on Terror.
In the Nixon era, at least some of the Republicans were moderate and could be counted on to vote their consciences and impeach. Not anymore. It's been a decade or two since that was true (Gingrich's revolution).
I agree that the Democrats could be doing much harsher oversight (starting with having the Capitol Police arrest Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten for contempt of Congress, and dragging them in to Congress to testify).
But your expectations exceed the capabilities of our system of government, so long as one of the parties is operating as a cabal and ignoring the will of the people.
Wrong, it's not a speculative footnote, it's a citation of another DOJ legal opinion, written by the same crew of hacks, which remains secret and unreleased.
It took us 5 years to get the memo in TFA out of the Administration, mainly because it's so un-American, incriminating and incompetently lawyered that the Administration was reluctant to release it.
Why do you think the classified opinion in the footnote is still classified?
BTW, you misunderstand the nature of these legal opinions. We're not talking about a speculative law review article here, of the "If an AI passed the Turing test would it have legal rights?" variety. The Department of Justice isn't in that business. These memos are professional opinions requested by Bush and his administration cronies to provide legal cover for operations they wanted to undertake, or had already begun.
Sorry, where's your evidence that it was "written in response to the question of what the military could legally do if the US was invaded...and in [sic] middle of [sic] gunfight with known terrorists."?
The Bush administration always claimed the US was ALREADY engaged in warfare in its own territory. That was how they justified their arrest of US Citizen Jose Padilla in Chicago, and his transfer to military internment camp at Guantanamo.
FTFA:
As the DOJ sees it, "In the present conflict, unlike in the Korean War, the battlefield was brought to the United States..."
P.S. Your Soviet Russian syntax isn't exactly helping you in this debate.
From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. The title of Senior Lecturer is distinct from the title of Lecturer, which signifies adjunct status. Like Obama, each of the Law School's Senior Lecturers has high-demand careers in politics or public service, which prevent full-time teaching. Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined.
The Republicans want spying. It's popular with their constituents, who have been led to believe that the President^H^H^H^HCommander in Chief^H^H^H^HGod's Anointed One can direct "patriotic corporate citizens" to do anything he wants (and declare them immune from prosecution later).
Democrats, with the exception of a few yahoos, pretty much want the rule of law to be upheld. As do many of their civil libertarian supporters. They don't want widespread domestic surveillance, and they don't want legislative immunity for the telco wrongdoers.
Actually according to the Supreme Court's Daubert decision, it's judges who are asked to be the "gatekeepers" who exclude unreliable and irrelevant science.
So don't blame the juries. If the science is really bad, it shouldn't be put in front of a jury in the first place. Blame the judges, the out of control prosecutors, and maybe the overworked public defenders.
Without access to the uncensored real Internet, how exactly do you think Chinese people will find out about the atrocities committed by their government in their name?
Well, Steve Grossberg has always believed that every discovery in neural networks and AI is isomorphic to Adaptive Resonance Theory. That's why he never needs to cite anyone except himself!
It's true that ART was an early unsupervised learning model, and it's true that some of its innovations were rediscovered later by others. But by now there's a lot going on in the field that has no real connection with ART.
I'm not a fan of Numenta, BTW -- I think Hawkins should get back to doing what he does well and build me a new Treo.
So both sides here are capable of making mistakes. The advantage of the mainstream climate community is its robustness. Both its data sources and its models are multiply redundant. This is not the case with the skeptics' criticisms.
The other difference between the sides is that every time the skeptical side finds anything they consider a flaw, no matter how niggling (e.g. a few poorly sited surface stations), they tout it to high heaven as evidence that global warming is WRONG WRONG WRONG. Frankly, that's the behavior of cranks, which is why I am sorely tempted to call them "denialists" rather than "skeptics."
Slashdot Mirror
It was hard to escape the conclusion that Crichton was a guy who would believe literally anything anyone told him...I was somewhat surprised to see him arguing in favor of more objective thinking in the global-warming debate
Have you considered that, well before the time Crichton wrote State of Fear, climate change denialism had become the woo-woo position?
For whatever reason, climate change denialists got to him first, and made him feel cleverer and more imaginative than everyone else for listening to them. What if climate change is a conspiracy of poor environmental interests? Well, what if a powerful woman sexually harassed a man?
Could have been much worse-- could have been 9/11 truthers.
11 different wired keyboard models bought between 2001 and 2008
I'm assuming my IBM Model M is safe, then...security through obscurity is your best friend.
Some would say that the peace prize gets undue respect from sharing it's name with the science prizes.
That's rich, considering the peace prize was stipulated in Nobel's will, and the "the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel" (which "some critics" might find more politically agreeable) was designed half a century later to ride on the Nobel coattails.
science prizes are given a long time after the fact, for discoveries that has really truly held up
Except for the frontal lobotomy
Giving out prizes contemporaneously is always risky, it's much easier when history has been written; that's why it took so long to give Luc Montagnier the award.
The problem with the Economics prize (and to a lesser extent with the Peace prize) is that they're too contemporary.
For Peace, it's probably inevitable that selection will be driven by current events.
For Economics, they've just ran out of worthwhile awardees. Perhaps this year they should give it to the EU bank regulators for managing to avoid the destruction of their economy thus far.
they may even have as much or more public recognition by now than the ACLU.
I'll believe that when I hear right-wing propagandist bloated blowhards competing to create inane bacronyms for EFF like they have for ACLU
Thanks for reading TFA, but it's the New Scientist, so you can't actually expect much in the way of accuracy or repeatability.
I'm just grateful they didn't compose some bogus algebraic equation for spin. Something pseudo-incomprehensible like
b^z/(s^2+e^2*0.84+q)
That's what the British pop sci press would normally do.
I think that I understand the reasoning of anonymous actions
Really? Care to explain why Anonymous spends weekends Rickrolling Scientology offices? Because I don't think you understand Anonymous actions at all. If you really think this is political retaliation, you're way off.
As far as I can tell, the culture of Anonymous is basically arrogant nihilism. Their messageboards encourage amusing punishment of people they believe deserve it -- the stupid or ignorant.
Like Sarah Palin, who ignorantly used a Yahoo Mail account with stupid easily guessable password questions for her public email.
Global Cooling was a big theory in the 70s. It's like clothing
Specifically, global cooling was like the polyester disco jumpsuit.
You saw a lot of them in the media back in the 70s...but you sure didn't see them on many scientists.
StartCom is free and already supported by Firefox.
Mozilla just wants CAs to offer some level of accountability and identity verification. Their CA certificate policy is explicit in its requirements.
I don't see the point in having Verisign certificates eveywhere, but I also don't see why you should blindly trust a Robot Certificate Authority like CACert, without further assurances.
It's worse than that. Powell knew invading Iraq was a bad idea ("Powell Doctrine"), knew the war was built on lies (see his aide Larry Wilkerson's interviews), was capable of stopping the war if he exposed the lies in the media...
and he went ahead and gave a false presentation to the UN about Iraq's nonexistent "weapons of mass destruction" anyway!
And that resulted in the Iraq War.
Colin Powell -- tragedy. Actually, only a small tragedy, because it's apparent he was always a company man and lacked convictions.
If you still have any respect for him, you're not paying attention.
Is the Laffer curve "inherently idiotic"? As a theoretical construction, no; in reality, in the current tax regime, yes. Do you really think people are likely to put down their keyboards and stop working if the tax rate increases from 30 to 35%? Preposterous.
Of course, data trumps theory. If there's any data suggesting that we're to the right of the Laffer peak, I have not seen it. And when even right-wingers' data show that raising taxes raises revenue, you really have to wonder whether there is any scrap of data anywhere in the world to support their position.
Which is worse, McCain skipping, or Obama present and voting yea?
Obama voted to strip immunity out of the bill (leaving in a bunch of less offensive spying related stuff).
When that failed, he voted for the bill anyway.
McCain loves the idea of telecom immunity, and would have voted for it both times.
So Obama is better. I don't (entirely) blame him for his inability to get rid of the disgraceful immunity provision. Every single Republican, and a number of bad Democrats, wanted their telecom lobbyist friends to get it.
Try typing "sl" instead.
Seriously, you're using the location bar wrong. Why would you expect a search for "s" to be determinate? And why spend time hunting with the mouse when you can type?
It's like the Google search suggestion feature from Firefox 2; it's fun for about a minute to see what popular sites and queries begin with "s". Then you start using it the way it's supposed to be used, and it becomes useful.
p.s. I hear you can train it so that "slashdot.com" is the #1 result for "s".
Actually, they probably did it for next to nothing, anticipating all the free press coverage they would get. This very "press hit" on slashdot is a good example of what they were aiming at. (Although in this specific case, they deserve the good press they're getting.)
Look, it's not the government you're cheating when you evade sales and use taxes -- it's me. And everyone else you know. Because we have to pay your share.
The fact that Ms. Smith sees it from the government's point of view is bad public relations, but it doesn't change the facts of the matter.
No they don't.
"Handling" compensates the retailer for the cost of distribution.
"Shipping" pays for the mail service to bring it to your door, including mail sorting, mail trucks, and the postman.
Nothing in that equation pays for the cost of building roads (except very fractionally through gas taxes); fire and police protection for warehouse facilities and postal sorting offices; police protection against mail robberies; policing so your packages don't get stolen off your doorstep; etc. etc.
Now Wheeler will finally have the chance to find out what happened to that suitcase he lost on the train.
You know, the one full of thermonuclear weapons secrets.
Or maybe his heirs will find it in the attic.
In the Nixon era, at least some of the Republicans were moderate and could be counted on to vote their consciences and impeach. Not anymore. It's been a decade or two since that was true (Gingrich's revolution).
I agree that the Democrats could be doing much harsher oversight (starting with having the Capitol Police arrest Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten for contempt of Congress, and dragging them in to Congress to testify).
But your expectations exceed the capabilities of our system of government, so long as one of the parties is operating as a cabal and ignoring the will of the people.
It took us 5 years to get the memo in TFA out of the Administration, mainly because it's so un-American, incriminating and incompetently lawyered that the Administration was reluctant to release it.
Why do you think the classified opinion in the footnote is still classified?
BTW, you misunderstand the nature of these legal opinions. We're not talking about a speculative law review article here, of the "If an AI passed the Turing test would it have legal rights?" variety. The Department of Justice isn't in that business. These memos are professional opinions requested by Bush and his administration cronies to provide legal cover for operations they wanted to undertake, or had already begun.
The Bush administration always claimed the US was ALREADY engaged in warfare in its own territory. That was how they justified their arrest of US Citizen Jose Padilla in Chicago, and his transfer to military internment camp at Guantanamo. FTFA:
P.S. Your Soviet Russian syntax isn't exactly helping you in this debate.
The Republicans want spying. It's popular with their constituents, who have been led to believe that the President^H^H^H^HCommander in Chief^H^H^H^HGod's Anointed One can direct "patriotic corporate citizens" to do anything he wants (and declare them immune from prosecution later).
Democrats, with the exception of a few yahoos, pretty much want the rule of law to be upheld. As do many of their civil libertarian supporters. They don't want widespread domestic surveillance, and they don't want legislative immunity for the telco wrongdoers.
If you want a moral compass, go read Senator Chris Dodd's website (Democrat - Connecticut). Or if you want to be cynical in an informed way, go read Glenn Greenwald.
So don't blame the juries. If the science is really bad, it shouldn't be put in front of a jury in the first place. Blame the judges, the out of control prosecutors, and maybe the overworked public defenders.
Without access to the uncensored real Internet, how exactly do you think Chinese people will find out about the atrocities committed by their government in their name?
Well, Steve Grossberg has always believed that every discovery in neural networks and AI is isomorphic to Adaptive Resonance Theory. That's why he never needs to cite anyone except himself!
It's true that ART was an early unsupervised learning model, and it's true that some of its innovations were rediscovered later by others. But by now there's a lot going on in the field that has no real connection with ART.
I'm not a fan of Numenta, BTW -- I think Hawkins should get back to doing what he does well and build me a new Treo.
The funny thing is that Steve MacIntyre, the climate skeptic who identified the error, has a history of hyping models with even worse errors like degrees/radians confusion.
So both sides here are capable of making mistakes. The advantage of the mainstream climate community is its robustness. Both its data sources and its models are multiply redundant. This is not the case with the skeptics' criticisms.
The other difference between the sides is that every time the skeptical side finds anything they consider a flaw, no matter how niggling (e.g. a few poorly sited surface stations), they tout it to high heaven as evidence that global warming is WRONG WRONG WRONG. Frankly, that's the behavior of cranks, which is why I am sorely tempted to call them "denialists" rather than "skeptics."