At LACon II, back in '84, Larry and Jerry auctioned off the right to be a character in the book, with the authors consulting with the winners on personality and, if needed, way of dying. The proceeds went to paying off the mortgage on the LASFS clubhouse and the book they eventually wrote was Fallen Angels. That's why all the "in jokes" and references. A good friend of mine first learned about LASFS by reading that book and getting curious.
Of course the thing was written to be a mini-series I think...
Not that I know of, and I know both of the authors personally. When they first came up with the idea and told their publisher about how aliens would throw an asteroid at the Earth, his reply was, "Forget the aliens, write about the asteroid." They changed the asteroid to a comet and wrote Lucifer's Hammer, then came back to the alien invasion story. This got them two best sellers for the price of one idea.
Don't worry, this isn't from TFA. I read once that when the $600 hammers were sold to the Pentagon the rules said that if a part required a tool for installation, the supplier had to make and supply the tools, not buy them from somebody else and resell them. The company involved had no desire to make hammers or any other tool, but the Pentagon insisted because of stupid rules. Remember: nobody said the incident made sense, but that's supposedly why it happened.
What that article doesn't tell you is that the company who sold the Pentagon those hammers didn't want to be making them in the first place. Pentagon procurement rules said that if installing a part required a tool, the company making the part must make and supply the tool. Setting up a special production line for a small number of hammers cost so much that the only way the company could break even was to charge $600 each for them, but the procurement officers didn't care, they insisted that they be supplied. Alas, I don't have a cite for this or I'd give it, but that's the way I heard the story. Same thing (probably) for those expensive toilet seats.
...Ubuntu requires people know how to configure their wireless card on the command-line.
This isn't, or at least shouldn't be a deal-breaker because it only needs to be done once. When IT installs Ubuntu on a corporate laptop, this should include logging in, setting up the wireless card and doing any other finicky, fiddly bits that need to be done to get everything working. By the time the user gets the laptop, all of that should have been done, just like any custom driver installations under Windows should be finished.
I never said I expected them to run a line across the fence for 50' for him, just that I hoped they did. After all, every once in a while somebody accidentally does the right thing even in a telco.
Geography isn't always enough when estimating connection speed. When I did tech support for an ISP, I ran across a case where a caller was right next door to the telco, but too far away for ADSL. That's right, he was 50' from the office but still too far away. Why, you ask? Well, it seems that the line went out in a great big loop and his house was way out at the wrong end of the loop. I never heard what happened, but I hope the telco was nice enough to run a line out for him.
How do gun-shot fatalities help explain cancer deaths? They don't. Why do you think that the current warming trend must have the same causes as much more gradual warming trends in the past?
They don't, obviously. I'm just pointing out that current warming trends could be caused without human intervention, and using historical records as evidence. I'm not saying that human activity isn't having an effect, but that there's no need to postulate that it couldn't be happening if we weren't spewing CO2 into the air.
Not true. They are in almost complete agreement that it is primarily anthropogenic in nature, and that greenhouse gases are the anthropogenic culprit.
How does this help to explain the Early Medieval Warm Period? From 800-1200 or so there was a Viking colony on the west coast of Greenland, living as dairy farmers. When Lief Erikson visited the New World he named part of Nova Scotia Vineland because of all the wild grapes he found. At about the same time, there were vineyards in England producing wine. It's hard for me to believe that all this was caused by anthropogenic causes or that those causes suddenly vanished causing the Little Ice Age that followed.
The Earth's average temperature is constantly changing, sometimes going up, sometimes down and right now it happens to be going up. Don't panic, it will go down again, possibly farther than you'd like.
Actually, we've gotten to the politicised stage where it's hard for papers with contrarian ideas to get past peer review. The only reason this study is such big news is that it's taken this long for a paper like this to get published. There's big money involved in being a true believer in CO2 being the be-all and end-all in Global Warming and lots of "scientists" will say whatever gets them grants.
That's not a strawman, it's just the way things are. Consensus does not decide the facts, any more than correlation proves causation. (You do know about that, don't you?) Clearly you need to learn to comprehend what you read because I didn't deny Global Warming, just pointed out that the consensus on the cause isn't evidence of what the cause really is.
A very well-balanced, well-reasoned reply, and I can't argue with it. (Oh, I could, I suppose, but my heart wouldn't be in it.) We seem to agree that running out and dong something drastic just to be Doing Something About Global Warming isn't likely to be the best idea, any more than refusing to look at the problem would be.
I don't care if the entire community of climatologists have come to the consensus that anthropocentric global warming, and the contributions of carbon dioxide, are unequivocal, unambiguous, and compelling.
Ah yes, I was wondering when somebody was going to bring up consensus as though it were an irrefutable argument. When it comes to facts, consensus only means that everybody agrees, it doesn't mean they're right. (or wrong either, for that matter) There was once a consensus that the world was flat; did that make the world flat? There was once a consensus that there were exactly four elements; did that make this true? There was a consensus that life could be generated spontaneously from dead matter; did that make spontaneous generation a fact? I could go on and on, but I think you get my drift.
I'm not saying that global warming isn't happening; there's ample evidence that it is. I'm also not saying that pouring C02 into the atmosphere can't have an effect. I am, however, saying that we don't know, yet, how much of an effect it's having and if it's significant, how much we have to cut back to stop things from getting worse. Before we do anything drastic, we need to find out the answers to those questions, and we can probably find out fairly quickly for "only" about $25,000,000. I'm not asking for endless studies, or decades of time, just time to do some simple, basic, fundamental research on just what's going on, for a lot less than Kyoto would cost us.
Thank you, but no. I prefer my words the way I wrote them, without going through the filter of somebody else's preconceptions. I wouldn't be surprised that the money-mongers are conservative and the artists liberal, but how many of the money-mongers have creative control?
Absolutely correct. Liberals control the world. Sucks to be a poor, oppressed, powerless right winger these days.
But I'm not a right winger, I'm a Moderate. (Yes, a tad to the right of center, but I'm not a Conservative by any means.) Of course, you might consider anybody who's not a Liberal to be a right winger, but that's your problem, not mine.
I might add that I'm not claiming that Liberals control the world, just that most of the people with power in Hollywood seem to be Liberals today.
Seriously. I don't care WHY you think the Earth is warming, all I care about is people trying to DO something about it.
Because if we try to change what's going on without understanding the situation we might easily decide on a cure that's totally ineffective. If C02 emissions aren't a major factor (And I'm not saying they aren't.) then lowering them won't help much, if at all. It's better to spend a little money learning what's really going on before we spend a huge amount of money on possibly useless countermeasures.
I'd like to see a reply to his "documentary" called "Inconvenient Facts." Al Gore is nothing more or less than a phony, and I'd love to see him called on it. Of course, if it were made, it'd be almost impossible to get it publicized or into theaters because it wouldn't say what Hollywood Liberals want said.
If all you're doing is talking to people, opening tickets and transferring them to somebody else, you're not doing tech support, no matter what your job title is. You're nothing but a receptionist. Get a job where you actually have to diagnose and solve problems for callers. Judging by what you wrote, that's probably "Tier II" for your company, even though you're probably over-qualified for it. (I suspect that your Tier II reads scripts, and Tier III, if there is one, is actually paid to think.) In any case, try getting a position where you get to use your skills instead of just opening trouble tickets.
The burden of proof doesn't seem to be on them as much as it would be on the DA in a murder trial.
That's because these are civil suits, where the standard is "the preponderance of evidence," not a criminal trial where the standard is "To a moral certainty and beyond a reasonable doubt." That is, in a civil suit, if you think the plaintif's claims are probably true, you must vote for them even if you're not sure. I know, because I've been a juror in a civil suit.
Yes, but that still means that half of the problems you have are caused by Windows itself. Back in the old DOS days, before GUIs, 99.44% of all problems were caused by programs because DOS was well behaved. If we've learned so much since then, why can't Microsoft make a version of Windows that's as well behaved as DOS?
I'm just wondering when those people who are standing so steadfast against reality will admit that they've been wrong.
I think the reason is that for most people, global warming means "global warming caused by human activity." That, of course, has yet to be proven. Alas, too many people take it for granted that global warming is caused by, and only by human activity and tend to insult anybody who doesn't agree with them.
Slashdot Mirror
At LACon II, back in '84, Larry and Jerry auctioned off the right to be a character in the book, with the authors consulting with the winners on personality and, if needed, way of dying. The proceeds went to paying off the mortgage on the LASFS clubhouse and the book they eventually wrote was Fallen Angels. That's why all the "in jokes" and references. A good friend of mine first learned about LASFS by reading that book and getting curious.
Not that I know of, and I know both of the authors personally. When they first came up with the idea and told their publisher about how aliens would throw an asteroid at the Earth, his reply was, "Forget the aliens, write about the asteroid." They changed the asteroid to a comet and wrote Lucifer's Hammer, then came back to the alien invasion story. This got them two best sellers for the price of one idea.
Don't worry, this isn't from TFA. I read once that when the $600 hammers were sold to the Pentagon the rules said that if a part required a tool for installation, the supplier had to make and supply the tools, not buy them from somebody else and resell them. The company involved had no desire to make hammers or any other tool, but the Pentagon insisted because of stupid rules. Remember: nobody said the incident made sense, but that's supposedly why it happened.
What that article doesn't tell you is that the company who sold the Pentagon those hammers didn't want to be making them in the first place. Pentagon procurement rules said that if installing a part required a tool, the company making the part must make and supply the tool. Setting up a special production line for a small number of hammers cost so much that the only way the company could break even was to charge $600 each for them, but the procurement officers didn't care, they insisted that they be supplied. Alas, I don't have a cite for this or I'd give it, but that's the way I heard the story. Same thing (probably) for those expensive toilet seats.
This isn't, or at least shouldn't be a deal-breaker because it only needs to be done once. When IT installs Ubuntu on a corporate laptop, this should include logging in, setting up the wireless card and doing any other finicky, fiddly bits that need to be done to get everything working. By the time the user gets the laptop, all of that should have been done, just like any custom driver installations under Windows should be finished.
I never said I expected them to run a line across the fence for 50' for him, just that I hoped they did. After all, every once in a while somebody accidentally does the right thing even in a telco.
Geography isn't always enough when estimating connection speed. When I did tech support for an ISP, I ran across a case where a caller was right next door to the telco, but too far away for ADSL. That's right, he was 50' from the office but still too far away. Why, you ask? Well, it seems that the line went out in a great big loop and his house was way out at the wrong end of the loop. I never heard what happened, but I hope the telco was nice enough to run a line out for him.
They don't, obviously. I'm just pointing out that current warming trends could be caused without human intervention, and using historical records as evidence. I'm not saying that human activity isn't having an effect, but that there's no need to postulate that it couldn't be happening if we weren't spewing CO2 into the air.
How does this help to explain the Early Medieval Warm Period? From 800-1200 or so there was a Viking colony on the west coast of Greenland, living as dairy farmers. When Lief Erikson visited the New World he named part of Nova Scotia Vineland because of all the wild grapes he found. At about the same time, there were vineyards in England producing wine. It's hard for me to believe that all this was caused by anthropogenic causes or that those causes suddenly vanished causing the Little Ice Age that followed.
The Earth's average temperature is constantly changing, sometimes going up, sometimes down and right now it happens to be going up. Don't panic, it will go down again, possibly farther than you'd like.
Actually, we've gotten to the politicised stage where it's hard for papers with contrarian ideas to get past peer review. The only reason this study is such big news is that it's taken this long for a paper like this to get published. There's big money involved in being a true believer in CO2 being the be-all and end-all in Global Warming and lots of "scientists" will say whatever gets them grants.
That's not a strawman, it's just the way things are. Consensus does not decide the facts, any more than correlation proves causation. (You do know about that, don't you?) Clearly you need to learn to comprehend what you read because I didn't deny Global Warming, just pointed out that the consensus on the cause isn't evidence of what the cause really is.
One nice, easy way to get C02 our of the atmosphere is to plant more trees. Makes the eco-freaques and the Greens too!
A very well-balanced, well-reasoned reply, and I can't argue with it. (Oh, I could, I suppose, but my heart wouldn't be in it.) We seem to agree that running out and dong something drastic just to be Doing Something About Global Warming isn't likely to be the best idea, any more than refusing to look at the problem would be.
Ah yes, I was wondering when somebody was going to bring up consensus as though it were an irrefutable argument. When it comes to facts, consensus only means that everybody agrees, it doesn't mean they're right. (or wrong either, for that matter) There was once a consensus that the world was flat; did that make the world flat? There was once a consensus that there were exactly four elements; did that make this true? There was a consensus that life could be generated spontaneously from dead matter; did that make spontaneous generation a fact? I could go on and on, but I think you get my drift.
I'm not saying that global warming isn't happening; there's ample evidence that it is. I'm also not saying that pouring C02 into the atmosphere can't have an effect. I am, however, saying that we don't know, yet, how much of an effect it's having and if it's significant, how much we have to cut back to stop things from getting worse. Before we do anything drastic, we need to find out the answers to those questions, and we can probably find out fairly quickly for "only" about $25,000,000. I'm not asking for endless studies, or decades of time, just time to do some simple, basic, fundamental research on just what's going on, for a lot less than Kyoto would cost us.
Thank you, but no. I prefer my words the way I wrote them, without going through the filter of somebody else's preconceptions. I wouldn't be surprised that the money-mongers are conservative and the artists liberal, but how many of the money-mongers have creative control?
But I'm not a right winger, I'm a Moderate. (Yes, a tad to the right of center, but I'm not a Conservative by any means.) Of course, you might consider anybody who's not a Liberal to be a right winger, but that's your problem, not mine.
I might add that I'm not claiming that Liberals control the world, just that most of the people with power in Hollywood seem to be Liberals today.
Because if we try to change what's going on without understanding the situation we might easily decide on a cure that's totally ineffective. If C02 emissions aren't a major factor (And I'm not saying they aren't.) then lowering them won't help much, if at all. It's better to spend a little money learning what's really going on before we spend a huge amount of money on possibly useless countermeasures.
I'd like to see a reply to his "documentary" called "Inconvenient Facts." Al Gore is nothing more or less than a phony, and I'd love to see him called on it. Of course, if it were made, it'd be almost impossible to get it publicized or into theaters because it wouldn't say what Hollywood Liberals want said.
If all you're doing is talking to people, opening tickets and transferring them to somebody else, you're not doing tech support, no matter what your job title is. You're nothing but a receptionist. Get a job where you actually have to diagnose and solve problems for callers. Judging by what you wrote, that's probably "Tier II" for your company, even though you're probably over-qualified for it. (I suspect that your Tier II reads scripts, and Tier III, if there is one, is actually paid to think.) In any case, try getting a position where you get to use your skills instead of just opening trouble tickets.
That's because these are civil suits, where the standard is "the preponderance of evidence," not a criminal trial where the standard is "To a moral certainty and beyond a reasonable doubt." That is, in a civil suit, if you think the plaintif's claims are probably true, you must vote for them even if you're not sure. I know, because I've been a juror in a civil suit.
Yes, but that still means that half of the problems you have are caused by Windows itself. Back in the old DOS days, before GUIs, 99.44% of all problems were caused by programs because DOS was well behaved. If we've learned so much since then, why can't Microsoft make a version of Windows that's as well behaved as DOS?
The correct moderation for this is -1 Cheapshot.
Yes: ponies! Lots and lots of pink ponies!
OMG!!! PONIES!
I think the reason is that for most people, global warming means "global warming caused by human activity." That, of course, has yet to be proven. Alas, too many people take it for granted that global warming is caused by, and only by human activity and tend to insult anybody who doesn't agree with them.
Just stay in either the San Fernando or San Gabriel valleys. Lots of mountains between you and the ocean, and you're still in LA County.