Look, for most flights, there's just not a lot to do in between take-off and landing. What are the pilot and co-pilot supposed to do on long flights, where the auto-pilot is doing everything for several long hours, just sit there and stare into space? I'd rather they be keeping their minds awake and alert by playing a video game than getting bored and dozing off.
What's next, will they ban reading and talking to each other in flight, too? I'm all for regulations about what they can and can't do just before, during, and after take-off and landing, but this categorical ban seems like good politics but bad policy.
How did Gizmodo out him? I mean yes, they disclosed his name to the public, but there's no danger to the poor guy from the pubic.
Gizmodo had nothing to do with outing him to Apple, his employer. You saw the barcodes and ID numbers on the product? Apple doesn't let its top secret prototypes out the door without knowing to whom they've been assigned. It was inevitable that Apple would discover Gray's identity once photos of the exterior were released or the phone was returned to Apple. Gizmodo bears ZERO responsibility for what Apple does or does not do to Gray. Apple didn't need Gray's help for that.
Heck, Apple knew about Gray before Gizmodo ever ran an article. Why do you think the phone was bricked by the time Gizmodo got it? Guarantee you that either Gray voluntarily fessed-up or there's some mandatory "show me your top secret device" daily check run by Apple. Apple knew it was missing long before Gizmodo got the phone, and they knew who it had been assigned to.
lol
Clearly, you are correct, as the post to which I replied has now been modified "+5, Informative". Now I know the secret to great karma... call all those concerned with children alarmist fascists, and slip in a side comment calling politicians fucking dumb. Man, how could I have not realized this for so long?!?!?!?
You didn't log into the service in the initial days of operation, then. That's NOT what happened at all for people who clicked "no" on that initial splash screen.
By the way, you might want to go to the Google dashboard and take a look at it to see if you have any "followers" or other data being exposed by Buzz that you're unaware of.
No, no, no. You don't understand what Buzz did. Once Google auto-completed the contacts list, that list was PUBLIC. There's nothing in TFA to suggest that the 9 year old girl had been corresponding with the "sexually charged username." If the girl activated Buzz (which was very, VERY easy to do without realizing what Google was doing to you) in the first day or two of its operations, then all of her 9 year old friends would be listed automatically as her followers, and THAT list of followers was made public. Google changed it pretty quick, because it was just so freakin' ridiculously bad, but that's how it worked the first few days of operation. After that, Google restricted it so that if you didn't have a public profile, your name wouldn't show up in anybody's public list of followers, and you could decide whether to make your list of followers public or not, but the initial defaults was PUBLIC for everything associated with Buzz.
THAT was the problem with Buzz. If you had a Gmail account, suddenly one day, BOOM! You had a Buzz account, too. There's a great deal of debate whether any action at all on the user's part was required in the initial launch to create the publicly shared "followers" list based on your contacts, but at most, a very poorly worded "confirmation" button was clicked. Even if you told Google, on the splash page announcing Buzz, that you were not interested in learning more about it, a "Buzz" label was still placed on your Gmail page, and clicking that link most definitely activated a "Buzz" account. It's really a misnomer to talk of a separate "Buzz" account, because it was part and parcel, and remains so, of the Gmail service. Even now, having turned off every bit of Buzz that I possibly can with Google, it's still possible for people to "follow" my Gmail account. They can't actually see anything I do, Google swears to me, but the mere fact that I can have followers means that just by virtue of having a Gmail account, I am at least some part of the Buzz system.
In other words, it ain't the parents' fault that the child had a Buzz account. Facebook, yeah, you can hold the parents responsible for that, because it takes actual conscious action by a user to go to Facebook and create an account and give it information about yourself. Google removed that hassle from us by adding us into Buzz whether we wanted to or not.
Buzz is the most obnoxious and evil thing Google has ever done.
It's not nearly as stupid as it sounds! Years ago, I was an assistant prosecutor. On my first day, somebody told me horror stories about a previous DA. The first lesson you learned was, when the DA told you to dismiss somebody's DUI charge, get the order in writing. The SECOND lesson you learned was, make a copy of that writing and take it home and lock it in your safe.
The boss man is ALWAYS in ultimate control of the contents of the office computer system. If he wants to make an e-mail disappear (for all practical purposes, short of a lawsuit and discovery ordered by a judge in a lawsuit), he can.
Now, triplicate is a bit much, and I'd be more selective about which e-mails I really need hard copies of, but the idea of printing out the e-mail and taking it home so nobody can accuse you later of having acted on your own? That's just a good idea.
The census data is absolutely useless to medical researchers. "Black" doesn't describe anything about an individuals genetic code other than melanin content. The genetic variation among "black" people is as great or even greater than the genetic variation between any given black person and white people. "Asian" is used by the census generally to describe anybody from about Pakistan eastward, lumping Indians with Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese, all of which are very distinct from each other.
And what constitutes "black" and "white" today, anyway? Is Tiger Woods black, asian, or what? Are his kids black or white? Do you want to bring back the old "one drop" test, so if any of your ancestors are black, you are deemed black?
Demographers are among those who continue to insist that we define our society by skin color, so I don't feel much need to help them out. I also put American for race.
It's not simply one or two graphs. Hopefully, he will help steer the design of the web interface for the site itself, so that users will be able to easily find and display the data they are looking for. Much of his work is also in interface design, not merely the production of graphs and charts.
I didn't say you did make that argument. The commenter "faraway" did, in a reply to you.
As for a response to your comment, something approaching 40% to 50% of my income goes to taxes, combined federal, state, and local. If I work 40 hours a week, that's 20 hours a week extra that I'm working, just to pay those taxes. Now, some of those taxes goes for things that legitimately benefit the public as a whole, and are more efficiently provided through government (roads, law enforcement, fire protection, etc.).
I don't consider medical care one of those things. I believe that each individual's FIRST obligation, with their money, is to provide for the necessities of their own life, and that of their family. Food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. Show me somebody who has tried all they can to earn enough money to pay for those things, and can't, and I'm happy to fund through taxes a government program to assist with those, as an act of charity. Show me somebody who believes they are ENTITLED to have me pay for their medical care, and I'll say get the hell out of my face. Get a smaller house, a smaller car, less cable tv, whatever it takes so that you can afford the necessities of life. If, and only if, you truly can't afford those necessities do I recognize any sort of moral obligation to assist you.
I agree with a good deal of that. Just a few quibbles. I'm not sure what you mean by "our coverage is less." We have fewer people covered directly by insurance, that's true. But we do have Medicaid which pays for an awful lot of care for really poor folks. And we already have government-paid medical insurance for old people. And there's the s-chip program which provides substantial insurance for young children and pregnant women. We don't have "universal" insurance, true, but the folks without ANY safety net mostly haven't applied for the right government programs. The people screwed the most are the middle class, who don't qualify for those programs, but who must spend a lot of money to obtain the highest quality health insurance.
Also, it's not at all clear from the statistics that our on-average shorter life span is caused by or even depends upon healthcare. If you look at specific survival types that DO depend on healtcare quality and access to it, the U.S. looks much better. Most of our cancer survival rates, for example, are substantially better than those in Europe and Canada. Life style choices probably have a much bigger role to play. The U.S. also generally treats many more severely premature infants as having been "born alive" for infant mortality purposes, births that would elsewhere count as "stillborn." This inflates our infant mortality numbers compared to those other countries, even though the real net result is that we have saved more lives through such methods than the other countries.
I agree that the Republicans haven't pushed in the past as they should for market-oriented healthcare solutions. We currently have the worst of both worlds, something equivalent to privatized socialized medicine. The "first dollar" syndrome and HMOs encourage consumers to consume more healthcare without paying any more costs directly, while the HMO has the profit incentive to reduce care. If we restructured to focus more on catastrophic care coverage with high deductibles, combined with health savings accounts to fund routine medical payments up to that deductible amount, the consumer would have a strong incentive to consider price in obtaining coverage, and prices would soon fall. And there'd be a lot less bureaucratic red tape.
Oh, yes... the ever popular "conservatives are racist" retort. Popular with those too mentally feeble to make actual arguments, and who thus can only falsely slander and name-call.
Well, yeah. Duh. I didn't complain about insurance. I complained about the poster who thought that being forced to work 15 hours each week to PAY for that insurance constituted the equivalent of "indentured servitude." I've no complaint at all that the money I pay to insurance goes in a pool with all the other money actually PAID by other people with their own money (not tax money taken from me) to be paid out in benefits to whoever in the insurance pool is entitled to the money under the terms of the policy I agreed to.
As opposed to what? Somebody else trading 15 hours of THEIR life simply so YOU can live a healthy life? That's the part that sounds like indentured servitude to me. Oh my gosh! You have to work 30 hours a week to pay for the food and lodging you and your family need, simply to stay alive? Oh, the horror!
You want the benefits of medical care, you pay for the benefits of medical care. Why should money I earn be taxed and used to pay for benefits for you? Indentured servitude is what I'm experiencing when 40% of my paycheck goes to pay for medical care and other services for OTHER people besides myself and my family.
There's a fair amount of research on the performance of memory and how our recall of events and things is affected by the very act of being questioned about and actively recalling those memories. Before I relied on this for much of anything, I'd want to see some pretty well controlled studies on just how accurate it is.
For example, they should put the test subjects under some kind of stress, have them look at the person they will have to describe and have sketched, then put them in front of the software (do a control group using traditional sketch-artist techniques, while you're at it. You should be able to do an objective evaluation of the accuracy of the sketch by mathematically comparing it (using existing algorithms developed for facial recognition) to determine just how close the resemblance is.
The e-mailer says: "if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC..." (emphasis added). "Say" sure sounds like he's free-handing it to make it fit better. Where does he ask "what do you think might have caused this blip"? Where does he in anyway try to determine what's caused it? Perhaps there's more e-mails in there where they struggle with this issue, trying to figure out what's really causing the blip. But they sure don't do it here.
He says he chose the.15 degC figure "deliberately" and then explains the consequences of that choice... but all of the consequences are focused just on how it still leaves a blip, because he thinks "one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip." The next sentence, about other blips showing a land blip of 1.5 to 2 times the ocean blip, fits a bit with your theory, but he doesn't appear to be calculating backwards from the 1.5 to 2 times figure, he doesn't seem to have applied any particular adjustment formula that can be consistently applied to all blips. He just thinks that this one particular blip should be adjusted by.15 degC, to make it fit better.
While we're demanding completeness, let's look at this quote from the e-mails (that's not a pinpoint cite to the comment; you'll have to search for the text):
Phil,
Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly
explain the 1940s warming blip.
If you look at the attached plot you will see that the
land also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know).
So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC,
then this would be significant for the global mean — but
we’d still have to explain the land blip.
I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an
ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of
ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common
forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of
these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are
1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips — higher sensitivity
plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things
consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from.
Removing ENSO does not affect this.
It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip,
but we are still left with “why the blip”.
When you read a large number of the e-mails, it becomes clearer and clearer just how much their data must be massaged and adjusted in order to reach the results they have. I don't say that their adjustments are good or bad, simply that the mere making of so many free-hand adjustments reduces the possibility that their conclusions are in fact correct. It's very hard to tell, without digging into the raw data which they won't release, how much of the claimed warming is really real, and how much shows up only because of the assumptions and conclusions and adjustments they have chosen to use.
Got nothing to do with experiments in progress. Dr. Phil Jones, the head of the organization whose e-mail was hacked, once said:
Even if WMO agrees, I will still not pass on the data. We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.
They are hiding behind alleged confidentiality agreements they supposedly have with scientists who, according to them, provided some of the data. But they won't even so much as identify, as best I can tell today, those scientists, so that the data could be requested from them directly.
Scientists who refuse to release raw data when serious questions are raised about their conclusions are not real scientists, and their work is entitled to no credibility whatsoever.
As for due time, the House has passed an enormous "cap and trade" bill based on the conclusions of the global warming scare crowd... these scientists who refuse to release their data. I've got no problem waiting for more research... so long as we don't enact massive tax increases and other major interference in the economy while we wait. They are the ones demanding immediate action, however, so they have no right to say "let's wait for more data and more research" before releasing the data which they claim supports their fatalistic conclusions.
Part of the problem is that the global warming proponents whose e-mails were hacked have REFUSED to release the data upon which they rely. In fact, the e-mails discovered are chock-full of references to their efforts to fight against any disclosure of much of their data. Other e-mails routinely discuss efforts to manipulate and massage the data to account for various political difficulties the data are causing them. For example, one e-mail discusses using a particular modifier to minimize a warming "blip" in the 1940s, without making the "blip" go away entirely, because it appears in both the sea temp and the land temp data.
So you're right, e-mail isn't data. But that cuts both ways, and in this case particularly hard against the global warming fear-mongerers.
A computer-implemented method, comprising: associating a sparkline with a location in a document to provide a visual representation of one or more data values included in the document; associating with the sparkline a data source within the document including the one or more data values;
That's part of Claim 1. Here's Claim 6 in its entirety:
6. A computer-implemented method, comprising: associating a sparkline with a location in a document to provide a visual representation of one or more data values included in the document; associating with the sparkline a data source within the document including the one or more data values; generating the sparkline by generating the visual representation based on the one or more data values with a matrix of points to be presented at the associated location in the document; presenting the sparkline at the associated location in the document; and configuring the sparkline to be regenerated when one or more of the data values in the data source change.
Putting a graph in-line with text. What a really novel concept! In fact, sparklines, as described by Prof. Tufte, are primarily for the purpose of being included in a particular location in the document, in-line with other text. There's no novel "method" of doing this presented. The flowchart for the process given in the illustrations provided with the application is the same as any flowchart for dynamically presenting data in graphical form: generate the chart; look to see if the data has been changed; if yes, change the chart and regenerate.
Frankly, I don't see what the patent covers that's any different from what MS' charting functions already provide. The examples given with the patent all show data embedded in a cell (which would be a welcome change, and perhaps is novel), but the text of the claims simply says "a location in the document" and surely current Excel charts are placed in some location in their document, though not actually within a cell. If the novelty is the method for embedding graphs generally in a cell, then that would really need to be spelled out more, and of course the "sparklines" label would be inaccurate.
Yes, since I was providing the link, I didn't list the specific details in my summary.
And yes, running over somebody while driving drunk is vehicular homicide, a different crime, which carries a substantially lesser penalty.
Accidentally shooting someone while illegally trespassing on their land would probably be classified as manslaughter under La. law, which covers both intentional killings made in the heat of passion (i.e., you catch your wife in bed with another man, snap and kill them both... but do it right away; if your blood has time to "cool" before you shoot them, it'll be murder) and killings made accidentally while in the course of committing any felony not listed in the murder statutes or any misdemeanor "directly affecting the person." If you hit somebody with you fist, say, that's simple battery, a misdemeanor directly affecting the person. If the guy falls down, hits his head on the edge of the coffee table, and dies, then you're guilty of manslaughter. Trespass is generally a misdemeanor, and probably wouldn't be considered to be "directly affecting the person," so your second example would probably be negligent homicide, but only if you were grossly negligent.
You're welcome.
But besides criminals not always thinking things through that closely, and there are a lot bigger factors influencing their decisions in such crises, they still have a strong incentive to not go ahead and shoot everybody else. Second degree murder (from the accidental death during the robbery) carries only life in prison. But the first degree murder they'd get from killing everybody else will earn them the death penalty, and we in Louisiana aren't too squeamish about imposing the death penalty.
The accidental law does provide a strong incentive for the robber to be very careful with his weapons and so forth, if he is rational enough to realize the consequences. Of course, since the penalty for armed robbery here is up to 99 years in prison, the robber probably wasn't thinking too much about the consequences one way or the other.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, for most flights, there's just not a lot to do in between take-off and landing. What are the pilot and co-pilot supposed to do on long flights, where the auto-pilot is doing everything for several long hours, just sit there and stare into space? I'd rather they be keeping their minds awake and alert by playing a video game than getting bored and dozing off. What's next, will they ban reading and talking to each other in flight, too? I'm all for regulations about what they can and can't do just before, during, and after take-off and landing, but this categorical ban seems like good politics but bad policy.
How did Gizmodo out him? I mean yes, they disclosed his name to the public, but there's no danger to the poor guy from the pubic. Gizmodo had nothing to do with outing him to Apple, his employer. You saw the barcodes and ID numbers on the product? Apple doesn't let its top secret prototypes out the door without knowing to whom they've been assigned. It was inevitable that Apple would discover Gray's identity once photos of the exterior were released or the phone was returned to Apple. Gizmodo bears ZERO responsibility for what Apple does or does not do to Gray. Apple didn't need Gray's help for that. Heck, Apple knew about Gray before Gizmodo ever ran an article. Why do you think the phone was bricked by the time Gizmodo got it? Guarantee you that either Gray voluntarily fessed-up or there's some mandatory "show me your top secret device" daily check run by Apple. Apple knew it was missing long before Gizmodo got the phone, and they knew who it had been assigned to.
lol Clearly, you are correct, as the post to which I replied has now been modified "+5, Informative". Now I know the secret to great karma... call all those concerned with children alarmist fascists, and slip in a side comment calling politicians fucking dumb. Man, how could I have not realized this for so long?!?!?!?
You didn't log into the service in the initial days of operation, then. That's NOT what happened at all for people who clicked "no" on that initial splash screen. By the way, you might want to go to the Google dashboard and take a look at it to see if you have any "followers" or other data being exposed by Buzz that you're unaware of.
No, no, no. You don't understand what Buzz did. Once Google auto-completed the contacts list, that list was PUBLIC. There's nothing in TFA to suggest that the 9 year old girl had been corresponding with the "sexually charged username." If the girl activated Buzz (which was very, VERY easy to do without realizing what Google was doing to you) in the first day or two of its operations, then all of her 9 year old friends would be listed automatically as her followers, and THAT list of followers was made public. Google changed it pretty quick, because it was just so freakin' ridiculously bad, but that's how it worked the first few days of operation. After that, Google restricted it so that if you didn't have a public profile, your name wouldn't show up in anybody's public list of followers, and you could decide whether to make your list of followers public or not, but the initial defaults was PUBLIC for everything associated with Buzz.
THAT was the problem with Buzz. If you had a Gmail account, suddenly one day, BOOM! You had a Buzz account, too. There's a great deal of debate whether any action at all on the user's part was required in the initial launch to create the publicly shared "followers" list based on your contacts, but at most, a very poorly worded "confirmation" button was clicked. Even if you told Google, on the splash page announcing Buzz, that you were not interested in learning more about it, a "Buzz" label was still placed on your Gmail page, and clicking that link most definitely activated a "Buzz" account. It's really a misnomer to talk of a separate "Buzz" account, because it was part and parcel, and remains so, of the Gmail service. Even now, having turned off every bit of Buzz that I possibly can with Google, it's still possible for people to "follow" my Gmail account. They can't actually see anything I do, Google swears to me, but the mere fact that I can have followers means that just by virtue of having a Gmail account, I am at least some part of the Buzz system. In other words, it ain't the parents' fault that the child had a Buzz account. Facebook, yeah, you can hold the parents responsible for that, because it takes actual conscious action by a user to go to Facebook and create an account and give it information about yourself. Google removed that hassle from us by adding us into Buzz whether we wanted to or not. Buzz is the most obnoxious and evil thing Google has ever done.
It's not nearly as stupid as it sounds! Years ago, I was an assistant prosecutor. On my first day, somebody told me horror stories about a previous DA. The first lesson you learned was, when the DA told you to dismiss somebody's DUI charge, get the order in writing. The SECOND lesson you learned was, make a copy of that writing and take it home and lock it in your safe. The boss man is ALWAYS in ultimate control of the contents of the office computer system. If he wants to make an e-mail disappear (for all practical purposes, short of a lawsuit and discovery ordered by a judge in a lawsuit), he can. Now, triplicate is a bit much, and I'd be more selective about which e-mails I really need hard copies of, but the idea of printing out the e-mail and taking it home so nobody can accuse you later of having acted on your own? That's just a good idea.
The census data is absolutely useless to medical researchers. "Black" doesn't describe anything about an individuals genetic code other than melanin content. The genetic variation among "black" people is as great or even greater than the genetic variation between any given black person and white people. "Asian" is used by the census generally to describe anybody from about Pakistan eastward, lumping Indians with Koreans, Japanese, and Chinese, all of which are very distinct from each other. And what constitutes "black" and "white" today, anyway? Is Tiger Woods black, asian, or what? Are his kids black or white? Do you want to bring back the old "one drop" test, so if any of your ancestors are black, you are deemed black? Demographers are among those who continue to insist that we define our society by skin color, so I don't feel much need to help them out. I also put American for race.
It's not simply one or two graphs. Hopefully, he will help steer the design of the web interface for the site itself, so that users will be able to easily find and display the data they are looking for. Much of his work is also in interface design, not merely the production of graphs and charts.
I didn't say you did make that argument. The commenter "faraway" did, in a reply to you. As for a response to your comment, something approaching 40% to 50% of my income goes to taxes, combined federal, state, and local. If I work 40 hours a week, that's 20 hours a week extra that I'm working, just to pay those taxes. Now, some of those taxes goes for things that legitimately benefit the public as a whole, and are more efficiently provided through government (roads, law enforcement, fire protection, etc.). I don't consider medical care one of those things. I believe that each individual's FIRST obligation, with their money, is to provide for the necessities of their own life, and that of their family. Food, clothing, shelter, and medical care. Show me somebody who has tried all they can to earn enough money to pay for those things, and can't, and I'm happy to fund through taxes a government program to assist with those, as an act of charity. Show me somebody who believes they are ENTITLED to have me pay for their medical care, and I'll say get the hell out of my face. Get a smaller house, a smaller car, less cable tv, whatever it takes so that you can afford the necessities of life. If, and only if, you truly can't afford those necessities do I recognize any sort of moral obligation to assist you.
I agree with a good deal of that. Just a few quibbles. I'm not sure what you mean by "our coverage is less." We have fewer people covered directly by insurance, that's true. But we do have Medicaid which pays for an awful lot of care for really poor folks. And we already have government-paid medical insurance for old people. And there's the s-chip program which provides substantial insurance for young children and pregnant women. We don't have "universal" insurance, true, but the folks without ANY safety net mostly haven't applied for the right government programs. The people screwed the most are the middle class, who don't qualify for those programs, but who must spend a lot of money to obtain the highest quality health insurance. Also, it's not at all clear from the statistics that our on-average shorter life span is caused by or even depends upon healthcare. If you look at specific survival types that DO depend on healtcare quality and access to it, the U.S. looks much better. Most of our cancer survival rates, for example, are substantially better than those in Europe and Canada. Life style choices probably have a much bigger role to play. The U.S. also generally treats many more severely premature infants as having been "born alive" for infant mortality purposes, births that would elsewhere count as "stillborn." This inflates our infant mortality numbers compared to those other countries, even though the real net result is that we have saved more lives through such methods than the other countries. I agree that the Republicans haven't pushed in the past as they should for market-oriented healthcare solutions. We currently have the worst of both worlds, something equivalent to privatized socialized medicine. The "first dollar" syndrome and HMOs encourage consumers to consume more healthcare without paying any more costs directly, while the HMO has the profit incentive to reduce care. If we restructured to focus more on catastrophic care coverage with high deductibles, combined with health savings accounts to fund routine medical payments up to that deductible amount, the consumer would have a strong incentive to consider price in obtaining coverage, and prices would soon fall. And there'd be a lot less bureaucratic red tape.
Oh, yes... the ever popular "conservatives are racist" retort. Popular with those too mentally feeble to make actual arguments, and who thus can only falsely slander and name-call.
Well, yeah. Duh. I didn't complain about insurance. I complained about the poster who thought that being forced to work 15 hours each week to PAY for that insurance constituted the equivalent of "indentured servitude." I've no complaint at all that the money I pay to insurance goes in a pool with all the other money actually PAID by other people with their own money (not tax money taken from me) to be paid out in benefits to whoever in the insurance pool is entitled to the money under the terms of the policy I agreed to.
Oh, it's protection money, then? Like the mob used to demand, to protect you from them setting fire to it?
As opposed to what? Somebody else trading 15 hours of THEIR life simply so YOU can live a healthy life? That's the part that sounds like indentured servitude to me. Oh my gosh! You have to work 30 hours a week to pay for the food and lodging you and your family need, simply to stay alive? Oh, the horror! You want the benefits of medical care, you pay for the benefits of medical care. Why should money I earn be taxed and used to pay for benefits for you? Indentured servitude is what I'm experiencing when 40% of my paycheck goes to pay for medical care and other services for OTHER people besides myself and my family.
If they do that, I will shoot the people responsible!
Eventually.
After just one more turn...
Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care?
25 or 6 to 4...
There's a fair amount of research on the performance of memory and how our recall of events and things is affected by the very act of being questioned about and actively recalling those memories. Before I relied on this for much of anything, I'd want to see some pretty well controlled studies on just how accurate it is. For example, they should put the test subjects under some kind of stress, have them look at the person they will have to describe and have sketched, then put them in front of the software (do a control group using traditional sketch-artist techniques, while you're at it. You should be able to do an objective evaluation of the accuracy of the sketch by mathematically comparing it (using existing algorithms developed for facial recognition) to determine just how close the resemblance is.
The e-mailer says: "if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC..." (emphasis added). "Say" sure sounds like he's free-handing it to make it fit better. Where does he ask "what do you think might have caused this blip"? Where does he in anyway try to determine what's caused it? Perhaps there's more e-mails in there where they struggle with this issue, trying to figure out what's really causing the blip. But they sure don't do it here.
.15 degC figure "deliberately" and then explains the consequences of that choice... but all of the consequences are focused just on how it still leaves a blip, because he thinks "one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip." The next sentence, about other blips showing a land blip of 1.5 to 2 times the ocean blip, fits a bit with your theory, but he doesn't appear to be calculating backwards from the 1.5 to 2 times figure, he doesn't seem to have applied any particular adjustment formula that can be consistently applied to all blips. He just thinks that this one particular blip should be adjusted by .15 degC, to make it fit better.
He says he chose the
Sure sounds like he's free-handing it to me.
When you read a large number of the e-mails, it becomes clearer and clearer just how much their data must be massaged and adjusted in order to reach the results they have. I don't say that their adjustments are good or bad, simply that the mere making of so many free-hand adjustments reduces the possibility that their conclusions are in fact correct. It's very hard to tell, without digging into the raw data which they won't release, how much of the claimed warming is really real, and how much shows up only because of the assumptions and conclusions and adjustments they have chosen to use.
They are hiding behind alleged confidentiality agreements they supposedly have with scientists who, according to them, provided some of the data. But they won't even so much as identify, as best I can tell today, those scientists, so that the data could be requested from them directly. Scientists who refuse to release raw data when serious questions are raised about their conclusions are not real scientists, and their work is entitled to no credibility whatsoever. As for due time, the House has passed an enormous "cap and trade" bill based on the conclusions of the global warming scare crowd... these scientists who refuse to release their data. I've got no problem waiting for more research... so long as we don't enact massive tax increases and other major interference in the economy while we wait. They are the ones demanding immediate action, however, so they have no right to say "let's wait for more data and more research" before releasing the data which they claim supports their fatalistic conclusions.
Part of the problem is that the global warming proponents whose e-mails were hacked have REFUSED to release the data upon which they rely. In fact, the e-mails discovered are chock-full of references to their efforts to fight against any disclosure of much of their data. Other e-mails routinely discuss efforts to manipulate and massage the data to account for various political difficulties the data are causing them. For example, one e-mail discusses using a particular modifier to minimize a warming "blip" in the 1940s, without making the "blip" go away entirely, because it appears in both the sea temp and the land temp data. So you're right, e-mail isn't data. But that cuts both ways, and in this case particularly hard against the global warming fear-mongerers.
That's part of Claim 1. Here's Claim 6 in its entirety:
Putting a graph in-line with text. What a really novel concept! In fact, sparklines, as described by Prof. Tufte, are primarily for the purpose of being included in a particular location in the document, in-line with other text. There's no novel "method" of doing this presented. The flowchart for the process given in the illustrations provided with the application is the same as any flowchart for dynamically presenting data in graphical form: generate the chart; look to see if the data has been changed; if yes, change the chart and regenerate. Frankly, I don't see what the patent covers that's any different from what MS' charting functions already provide. The examples given with the patent all show data embedded in a cell (which would be a welcome change, and perhaps is novel), but the text of the claims simply says "a location in the document" and surely current Excel charts are placed in some location in their document, though not actually within a cell. If the novelty is the method for embedding graphs generally in a cell, then that would really need to be spelled out more, and of course the "sparklines" label would be inaccurate.
Yes, since I was providing the link, I didn't list the specific details in my summary. And yes, running over somebody while driving drunk is vehicular homicide, a different crime, which carries a substantially lesser penalty. Accidentally shooting someone while illegally trespassing on their land would probably be classified as manslaughter under La. law, which covers both intentional killings made in the heat of passion (i.e., you catch your wife in bed with another man, snap and kill them both... but do it right away; if your blood has time to "cool" before you shoot them, it'll be murder) and killings made accidentally while in the course of committing any felony not listed in the murder statutes or any misdemeanor "directly affecting the person." If you hit somebody with you fist, say, that's simple battery, a misdemeanor directly affecting the person. If the guy falls down, hits his head on the edge of the coffee table, and dies, then you're guilty of manslaughter. Trespass is generally a misdemeanor, and probably wouldn't be considered to be "directly affecting the person," so your second example would probably be negligent homicide, but only if you were grossly negligent.
You're welcome. But besides criminals not always thinking things through that closely, and there are a lot bigger factors influencing their decisions in such crises, they still have a strong incentive to not go ahead and shoot everybody else. Second degree murder (from the accidental death during the robbery) carries only life in prison. But the first degree murder they'd get from killing everybody else will earn them the death penalty, and we in Louisiana aren't too squeamish about imposing the death penalty. The accidental law does provide a strong incentive for the robber to be very careful with his weapons and so forth, if he is rational enough to realize the consequences. Of course, since the penalty for armed robbery here is up to 99 years in prison, the robber probably wasn't thinking too much about the consequences one way or the other.