The critical question is who judges the quality. This music (I'm listening to it now), is a little simplistic, but pleasant enough. It sounds like a Sine wave on the keyboard - comparisons to Mozart are premature. But what I want to know is did the computer run its algorithms many times and eventually the programmer picked the best and said: "Behold!" We're not there until the machine itself says: "This one" and tells the programmer which is the best piece it's done.
Left brain - Right brain is some outmoded New Age nonsense. Let it die.
What gets me is the way the summary immediately shows two similarly uninformed prejudices. Firstly, that if a machine could write a symphony like Mozart, then those symphonies are less special. No, just no. Clearly the summary writer doesn't actually listen to or value this sort of music (I do) because if they did, then they would realise that the music has a worth all of its own because it is beautiful, not just an attitude of 'I should respect this because a person with skill did it." The second assumption, even more grotesque, is that if a machine can do it, maybe there is no "soul" to music at all. There's so much wrong with this second part that I could barely begin. They suppose that soul is an exclusive property of humans, that a machine can never share that property. They presume such a property exists as a noun, rather than a way of describing an interaction and they presume that "soul" must be provided from the musician to the listener, not that a listener can bring a spiritual quality to what they appreciate themselves. When a beautiful landscape makes one feel spiritual, is that because someone infused it with "soul"? Or is it simply the onlooker's appreciation of beauty? Why is that mysteriously subtracted from music depending on its source?
Good for the creators of this. It reminds me of the music in the spaceship in Douglas Adam's "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency". I'll tell you this - if mankind is going to be crushed / superceded / patronised by a future AI, I'd rather it was one that understood music, than one that did not. Lets leave the repeating meme of: "machines are superior in lots of ways but we're still better because we have this essential human capacity to love / enjoy music / create art / self-sacrifice / humany-humanness" to Star Trek and other technophobic media and people. If music is beautiful and good for us, then by all means let machines offer us their compositions. Aren't some people always complaining about how machines dehumanize and have no "soul"? Fine, let's not complain when it appears we can make ones that don't.
For some reason, I have an image in my mind of Summer Glau as a Terminator, quietly performing her ballet. Of course, that may have nothing to do with reading this story.;)
Ok so basically you want to completely download the game, install it and then run it in a browser as if it wasn't a desktop game... with all the limitations of browser... knowing that you've just installed it... as a desktop game... freaky...
Not really, no. I'm not a gamer so I wondered if there could be a common ground of textures that can be shared between different browser-based games. You're implying that the overwhelming bulk of a game is textures and that having a common pool of textures is "completely downloading the game". That seems unlikely. Surely there is a lot more besides this?
I said: "which I understand both has more features than OpenGL and is more suited to fast, game-style graphics rendering", shortly followed by "but this is a reason that this new plugin has an advantage, is it not? I'm not an expert and interested in counter-arguments, though."
You would think people would take the opportunity to actually answer this rather than misrepresent what I said (D3D rather than DirectX) and then heap negative mods of Troll and Flamebait on me. Thank you for an actual factual answer. So you're saying that OpenGL has parity with DirectX 11 in terms of functionality, then? Someone could have just said that in the first place. As stated, it wasn't how I understood things. What about performance? I had also understood that OpenGL was more rigourous and suited to excellently rendering things not in real-time, whilst DirectX took shortcuts and was more geared toward fast output. Is this not the case?
Just consider, many people actually believe the FUD the GP wrote.
It wasn't FUD, it was a genuine question. But it seems unwelcome questions just get modded as Flamebait and Troll around here. Besides which, I said DirectX, not D3D. DirectX has a lot of features that OpenGL doesn't as I understand it. Are you saying this is not the case? Sorry - that's another question which probably means I deserve more Flamebait and Troll mods. Clearly only absolute certainty suits the Slashdot mods.
HTML + CSS make for a lovely and consistent (okay - consistent enough) interface that's easy (okay - easy enough) to develop. Maybe if it were more common to use a HTML renderer outside of the browser and had a nice way of manipulating the DOM other than javacscript, then web apps would be taking less of the local programs' turf. Or maybe there are easy ways to do these things and I just don't know about them.
We may see some come back when SVG gets more integrated into the OS desktop and some tools for this start to become more common. That would open up the look and feel and easy development of web-style apps to the blistering power of local, non-browser based programs. Can you imagine HTML+CSS+SVG running as a local C++ program? Beauty and power in one sleek package. If anyone knows more about things like this, let me know. I'm sure I'm not the first to speculate in this direction.
Can't textures be cached? What if my OS comes with 200MB of standard texture files? What if I can get a debian package of them and just keep it updated? I don't actually know how large texture files are so I'm genuinely open to persuasion on this. However, if people are willing to accept "you must download Silverlight / Flash / Codec X to play this movie", I can well see them installing a textures file. Even 500MB is insignificant for a lot of users as a one-time download or differential updates. And hard drive space for this is mostly irrelevant.
WebGL can't use DirectX which I understand both has more features than OpenGL and is more suited to fast, game-style graphics rendering. I'm partly playing Devil's Advocate here as I'd love to see purely Free Software solutions, but this is a reason that this new plugin has an advantage, is it not? I'm not an expert and interested in counter-arguments, though.
On the subject of plugins, amen to that, but I don't think it will play out that way. OS, applications and browser will increasingly merge, I think. We wont give up on plugins so much as the concept becomes increasingly ill-fitting. Time was when I would be downloading all sorts of programs to carry out my work, these days anything that can be is becoming a web app, and what "can be" is becoming a broader definition every year.
Mind you, in a few years time, there will be quad-core DDR3 machines all over the place, pretty much all your applications will be a horrible pile of javascript with a HTML renderer on top and someone will come up with the radical notion of creating downloadable binaries written in C++ and the world will be revolutionized by the amazing speed and power of it - and we'll come full circle.;)
Sorry - I now see what you were saying. Visible light gets absorbed and re-emitted as infrared which the CO2 absorbs. That's a good point. How do we know that it isn't balanced by increased CO2 in the upper atmosphere reflecting more infrared radiation back into Space? These aren't simple issues and your condemnation of another poster for not seeing it as simple is inappropriate.
Re-read the text you quoted, it says why your assertion is irrelevant.
I'm not quite seeing it. You're saying that CO2 keeps heat in by stopping it escaping through absorbtion and re-radiation back in toward the Earth. But you agree that CO2 in the upper atmosphere cuts down on the infrared radiation reaching the earth in the first place. How do you know that the former effect exceeds the latter, and not the other way around. I never said that heating of the atmosphere should be "neutral in impact" which you say I did. I never asserted anything like that. How do you know that an increase in CO2 should have no effect on warming of the Earth from the Sun. Maybe it increases it by trapping heat below, maybe it decreases it by catching infrared radiation before it reaches the Earth and re-radiates it back out into Space, maybe the effect of either of these is negligible in comparison to other varying factors.
You tell me to re-read the text and see why my assertion is irrelevant. If you re-read mine you'll find that I asserted nothing, merely asked questions. Your post was a scornful-sounding "of course CO2 causes warming - it absorbs IR" and "just because you don't understand this, doesn't mean nobody else does." I think my questions have illustrated that this response is unjustified. The possible impact of increased CO2 in the upper atmosphere is complicated and you have yet to actually answer my questions, just stated that an assertion which I did not make "is irrelevant."
CO2 is transparent in visible light and opaque to infrared (heat) light.
When visible sunlight hits a material surface a portion of it is absorbed and converted to heat.
CO2 in the atmosphere doesn't let all of that heat re-radiate back out to space, resulting in a net energy gain for the systerm.
How do you know that CO2 in the upper atmosphere absorbing infrared radiation doesn't more easily re-radiate it back out into space rather than letting it otherwise descend lower if the CO2 wasn't there, to lead to a greater degree of cooling? After all, if CO2 in the upper atmosphere wasn't absorbing infrared, that same radiation would be striking the Earth's land and (more so) oceans, heating them up. In either case, heat is absorbed by the total system, but it seems likely that (a) heat more easily escapes back into space from the upper atmosphere than down at ground level, and (b) that atmospheric CO2 has less capacity to absorb heat before radiating it back out than does the world's oceans.
Now maybe there are answers to these. If so, I'm interested to hear them. But I think the questions themselves show that your casual assertion that CO2 absorbs infrared therefore more CO2 must lead to global warming, is unwise.
Not conspiracy, proven fact. From this email by Phil Jones, head of the Climate Research Unit (very influential leader of AGW hypothesis):
I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep
them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !
Cheers
Phil
There you go - one of the most influential and powerful AGW proponents using his influence to keep journals from printing papers that contradicted some of the basis for his work. Even if he has to "redefine what peer-reviewed literature is!"
There is even more supression in the mainstream media.
There are fortunes being made from the AGW proponents also. The head of the CRC (that group that fudged their data) has made a personal fortune from it and I can tell you that in Universities across the land, academics from every quarter have been jamming AGW elements into their work to claw in grant money. If you are saying that financial interest undermines respect for an argument, then you'd better take a look at both sides. Meanwhile skeptics will continue to sit in the middle saying: "show me".
They weren't "a few scientists". They were some of the most eminent and leading scientists in the hypothesis of AGW. And they weren't "might have been dishonest". They were grossly dishonest, discarding data that contradicted their desired conclusions, concealing that they had done so, pressuring scientific journals not to publish research that went against their own. And their work was also cited and used as a basis for a lot of others' work as well as informing a lot of government policy on the environment in both the UK and the USA. How does that tally with your "a few scientists might have been dishonest." One of the things that annoys me is how some try to misrepresent criticism of these people as being motivated by political bias and keep repeating strawmen saying what skeptics "believe" so that it can be torn down (i.e. saying that skeptics dismiss their work because they made positive remarks about a skeptical scientist's death - one of the CRC scientists may have madde such remarks, but that's not why skeptics have problems with this research). Equally I get annoyed when people lump multiple issues in together for the sake of dismissing one. For example, this Lomberg person seems to have talked a lot of crap about deforestation and extinctions not happening when they plainly are. That doesn't mean you can dismiss all skepticism about AGW because he also happened to be critical of that.
If people wonder why there is increasing irritation with many that insist AGW must be true, you have only to look at the way debate on the subject is being stifled. I'll give you a direct example: The Independent, a major national newspaper in the UK printed a sprawling opinion piece condemning skeptics of AGW for all sorts of reasons (but none of them to do with science). The article was guilty of many of the things that it accused skeptics of doing and pretty much could be boiled down to "this is right because I say it is right and questioning is wrong". The Independent has a comments section and when many readers, not even all skeptics, started levelling criticism at this article, the entire comments section was deleted because it was going against the papers position on AGW. I rarely buy the paper since that incident.
Also, you talk about hard data that "Climate Change is happening". This is also a straw man. Few (any?) skeptics say that the climate changes - it obviously does all the time. They question (a) whether and how much it will warm and (b) how much of the effect is down to man's activity and (c) how much of the change due to man's activity is due to CO2. The last is frequently glossed over by those that wish to dismiss critics of AGW. So please do not misrepresent skeptics' arguments.
You are completely right. Why? Because any given "ism" is applying different standards to individuals based on the category that you assign to them. If someone says ____ism is less significant when it's group X, then you are implicitly accepting the premise that someone's membership of a category you assign them is more important than their individuality. Everyone is just a person and the moment you say there are different standards according to race / age / gender / whatever, you are denigrating that individuality.
If I don't accept that my arbitrary membership of a given race or gender or age group is more important than my own actions and beliefs, then who else has the right to determine that prejudice I face is any more or less important than anyone else's based on what groups you assign me to?
There's no such thing as "reverse racism". There's just racism. There's no such thing as "reverse sexism", there's just sexism.
While your point may be valid, I have a system without swap but with a hard drive (three actually). Why? Because I never want it to use swap. Ever. I loathe the idea that my system should resort to that. If I ever find it suffering due to lack of memory, I shall buy more. Elininating swap is done on aesthetic grounds. I renounce it entirely!
He, like a lot of other people in this thread, seem to say "equal opportunity" when they mean "affirmative action". I don't know why this is, but I'm starting to get the impression that a lot of US laws or media have actually confused the terms themselves, saying that ethnic quotas are "equal opportunity". They are not. Equal opportunity can only apply to individuals. Ethnic quotas are a form of affirmative action and very dubious indeed.
The States has serious issues whereby many actually do think that there is something wrong with a particular group but that if they keep changing words fast enough then they can outpace the prejudiced and keep ahead of them. Bollocks. You can see the progression with all sorts of terms - from negro to black to coloured to black to African-American and on again. (knew a black guy from Mozambique who hated how lots of people in the US called themselves African). Oriental to Asian. Cretin to Spastic to Retarded to Learning Disability. On and on, any word that some idiots have an issue with, another group takes it upon themselves to start condemning the word instead of the attitude. The correct response is to say that there's nothing fucking wrong with being black and saying someone is black is not an insult - just a fact if they are and a bizarre statement if they're not. Why should "Oriental" be an insult? Unless you think there's something wrong with being an oriental, then it's just a statement of fact. And if you change the words, then you're implicitly accepting that there is something wrong with being "oriental" and that you wish to disguise or gloss-over that fact.
Yeah, those darn leftist professors. Like how the students in Iran that protest their government are doing so because they're incited by "leftist professors". Or students protesting against the communists in Soviet Russia or during Ukraine's "Orange Revolution". How about all those students protesting against the Iraq war in the USA and the UK? Was that a "left-right" issue. What about the university-based protests in Greece last year against police who beat a young man to death. Did they have a leftist agenda? Or could it be that you just see the world in your own terms, ignoring that students have historically protested against tyranny, regardless of how it dresses itself up.
Don't be so quick to dismiss or condemn or suggest that students are simple cattle that do something "impressively stupid" without right information. What exactly is "impressively stupid" about protesting any of the examples I gave? Or indeed protesting censorship laws that have been mis-represented to the public which is what the GP was talking about?
You have a very fitting username. Protesting an embassy is equivalent to floundering and filling your lungs with water? I'd propose a better analogy, but unlike you, I don't think anyone here is stupid enough to require an analogy in order to understand what protesting an embassy is.
But you be a floater as long as you like. Hmmmm. There's a bad analogy in there.;)
Really guys, naming your protest after female anatomy does nothing to help the cause. It is immature and reeks of disorganization.
Why? Seriously, why should it be immature? If there was ever a cause where it was appropriate to use the word tits in your movement, it's this one. One of the best ways to undermine censorship is with humour. This sort of full-frontal, in your face attitude is a good thing. Whereas I think your advocation of invading people's privacy and smearing them for doing legal things is nasty. This law is wrong and I argue against it on those grounds, not by adopting the same tactics as those who oppose me and making the legislative process a battle of who can make the other party look worst. Aside from that, when you use these tactics, you state that you believe these things are indeed bad. If you start leaping up and down pointing at your opponents saying "look - they got wasted, look they browsed porn", then you really undermine your efforts to stop people being judged / condemned for getting wasted or browsing porn, do you not?
And what would you do if you found proponents of these laws really didn't commit adultery, get wasted in public
Being college-aged is a negative quality, now? Historically, students have been some of the most vocal in protecting our rights. If your point is that people of this age have less influence on society than older people, well I'd say that young people today are the adults of tomorrow and I'd sooner see college-age people protesting and hopefully retaining those attitudes and sympathies as they get older, than not see them protesting.
As regards basement-dwelling and eating cheetos, well you have no idea where they're living or what they're eating. Neither, by the way, did I realise affects your political activism.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you love it when you get modded Flamebait by people who can't even notice obvious details... like usernames.
The critical question is who judges the quality. This music (I'm listening to it now), is a little simplistic, but pleasant enough. It sounds like a Sine wave on the keyboard - comparisons to Mozart are premature. But what I want to know is did the computer run its algorithms many times and eventually the programmer picked the best and said: "Behold!" We're not there until the machine itself says: "This one" and tells the programmer which is the best piece it's done.
Left brain - Right brain is some outmoded New Age nonsense. Let it die.
What gets me is the way the summary immediately shows two similarly uninformed prejudices. Firstly, that if a machine could write a symphony like Mozart, then those symphonies are less special. No, just no. Clearly the summary writer doesn't actually listen to or value this sort of music (I do) because if they did, then they would realise that the music has a worth all of its own because it is beautiful, not just an attitude of 'I should respect this because a person with skill did it." The second assumption, even more grotesque, is that if a machine can do it, maybe there is no "soul" to music at all. There's so much wrong with this second part that I could barely begin. They suppose that soul is an exclusive property of humans, that a machine can never share that property. They presume such a property exists as a noun, rather than a way of describing an interaction and they presume that "soul" must be provided from the musician to the listener, not that a listener can bring a spiritual quality to what they appreciate themselves. When a beautiful landscape makes one feel spiritual, is that because someone infused it with "soul"? Or is it simply the onlooker's appreciation of beauty? Why is that mysteriously subtracted from music depending on its source?
Good for the creators of this. It reminds me of the music in the spaceship in Douglas Adam's "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency". I'll tell you this - if mankind is going to be crushed / superceded / patronised by a future AI, I'd rather it was one that understood music, than one that did not. Lets leave the repeating meme of: "machines are superior in lots of ways but we're still better because we have this essential human capacity to love / enjoy music / create art / self-sacrifice / humany-humanness" to Star Trek and other technophobic media and people. If music is beautiful and good for us, then by all means let machines offer us their compositions. Aren't some people always complaining about how machines dehumanize and have no "soul"? Fine, let's not complain when it appears we can make ones that don't.
For some reason, I have an image in my mind of Summer Glau as a Terminator, quietly performing her ballet. Of course, that may have nothing to do with reading this story.
Not really, no. I'm not a gamer so I wondered if there could be a common ground of textures that can be shared between different browser-based games. You're implying that the overwhelming bulk of a game is textures and that having a common pool of textures is "completely downloading the game". That seems unlikely. Surely there is a lot more besides this?
I said: "which I understand both has more features than OpenGL and is more suited to fast, game-style graphics rendering", shortly followed by "but this is a reason that this new plugin has an advantage, is it not? I'm not an expert and interested in counter-arguments, though."
You would think people would take the opportunity to actually answer this rather than misrepresent what I said (D3D rather than DirectX) and then heap negative mods of Troll and Flamebait on me. Thank you for an actual factual answer. So you're saying that OpenGL has parity with DirectX 11 in terms of functionality, then? Someone could have just said that in the first place. As stated, it wasn't how I understood things. What about performance? I had also understood that OpenGL was more rigourous and suited to excellently rendering things not in real-time, whilst DirectX took shortcuts and was more geared toward fast output. Is this not the case?
It wasn't FUD, it was a genuine question. But it seems unwelcome questions just get modded as Flamebait and Troll around here. Besides which, I said DirectX, not D3D. DirectX has a lot of features that OpenGL doesn't as I understand it. Are you saying this is not the case? Sorry - that's another question which probably means I deserve more Flamebait and Troll mods. Clearly only absolute certainty suits the Slashdot mods.
HTML + CSS make for a lovely and consistent (okay - consistent enough) interface that's easy (okay - easy enough) to develop. Maybe if it were more common to use a HTML renderer outside of the browser and had a nice way of manipulating the DOM other than javacscript, then web apps would be taking less of the local programs' turf. Or maybe there are easy ways to do these things and I just don't know about them.
We may see some come back when SVG gets more integrated into the OS desktop and some tools for this start to become more common. That would open up the look and feel and easy development of web-style apps to the blistering power of local, non-browser based programs. Can you imagine HTML+CSS+SVG running as a local C++ program? Beauty and power in one sleek package. If anyone knows more about things like this, let me know. I'm sure I'm not the first to speculate in this direction.
Can't textures be cached? What if my OS comes with 200MB of standard texture files? What if I can get a debian package of them and just keep it updated? I don't actually know how large texture files are so I'm genuinely open to persuasion on this. However, if people are willing to accept "you must download Silverlight / Flash / Codec X to play this movie", I can well see them installing a textures file. Even 500MB is insignificant for a lot of users as a one-time download or differential updates. And hard drive space for this is mostly irrelevant.
WebGL can't use DirectX which I understand both has more features than OpenGL and is more suited to fast, game-style graphics rendering. I'm partly playing Devil's Advocate here as I'd love to see purely Free Software solutions, but this is a reason that this new plugin has an advantage, is it not? I'm not an expert and interested in counter-arguments, though.
On the subject of plugins, amen to that, but I don't think it will play out that way. OS, applications and browser will increasingly merge, I think. We wont give up on plugins so much as the concept becomes increasingly ill-fitting. Time was when I would be downloading all sorts of programs to carry out my work, these days anything that can be is becoming a web app, and what "can be" is becoming a broader definition every year.
Mind you, in a few years time, there will be quad-core DDR3 machines all over the place, pretty much all your applications will be a horrible pile of javascript with a HTML renderer on top and someone will come up with the radical notion of creating downloadable binaries written in C++ and the world will be revolutionized by the amazing speed and power of it - and we'll come full circle.
Sorry - I now see what you were saying. Visible light gets absorbed and re-emitted as infrared which the CO2 absorbs. That's a good point. How do we know that it isn't balanced by increased CO2 in the upper atmosphere reflecting more infrared radiation back into Space? These aren't simple issues and your condemnation of another poster for not seeing it as simple is inappropriate.
I'm not quite seeing it. You're saying that CO2 keeps heat in by stopping it escaping through absorbtion and re-radiation back in toward the Earth. But you agree that CO2 in the upper atmosphere cuts down on the infrared radiation reaching the earth in the first place. How do you know that the former effect exceeds the latter, and not the other way around. I never said that heating of the atmosphere should be "neutral in impact" which you say I did. I never asserted anything like that. How do you know that an increase in CO2 should have no effect on warming of the Earth from the Sun. Maybe it increases it by trapping heat below, maybe it decreases it by catching infrared radiation before it reaches the Earth and re-radiates it back out into Space, maybe the effect of either of these is negligible in comparison to other varying factors.
You tell me to re-read the text and see why my assertion is irrelevant. If you re-read mine you'll find that I asserted nothing, merely asked questions. Your post was a scornful-sounding "of course CO2 causes warming - it absorbs IR" and "just because you don't understand this, doesn't mean nobody else does." I think my questions have illustrated that this response is unjustified. The possible impact of increased CO2 in the upper atmosphere is complicated and you have yet to actually answer my questions, just stated that an assertion which I did not make "is irrelevant."
How do you know that CO2 in the upper atmosphere absorbing infrared radiation doesn't more easily re-radiate it back out into space rather than letting it otherwise descend lower if the CO2 wasn't there, to lead to a greater degree of cooling? After all, if CO2 in the upper atmosphere wasn't absorbing infrared, that same radiation would be striking the Earth's land and (more so) oceans, heating them up. In either case, heat is absorbed by the total system, but it seems likely that (a) heat more easily escapes back into space from the upper atmosphere than down at ground level, and (b) that atmospheric CO2 has less capacity to absorb heat before radiating it back out than does the world's oceans.
Now maybe there are answers to these. If so, I'm interested to hear them. But I think the questions themselves show that your casual assertion that CO2 absorbs infrared therefore more CO2 must lead to global warming, is unwise.
I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is !
Cheers
Phil
There you go - one of the most influential and powerful AGW proponents using his influence to keep journals from printing papers that contradicted some of the basis for his work. Even if he has to "redefine what peer-reviewed literature is!"
There is even more supression in the mainstream media.
There are fortunes being made from the AGW proponents also. The head of the CRC (that group that fudged their data) has made a personal fortune from it and I can tell you that in Universities across the land, academics from every quarter have been jamming AGW elements into their work to claw in grant money. If you are saying that financial interest undermines respect for an argument, then you'd better take a look at both sides. Meanwhile skeptics will continue to sit in the middle saying: "show me".
They weren't "a few scientists". They were some of the most eminent and leading scientists in the hypothesis of AGW. And they weren't "might have been dishonest". They were grossly dishonest, discarding data that contradicted their desired conclusions, concealing that they had done so, pressuring scientific journals not to publish research that went against their own. And their work was also cited and used as a basis for a lot of others' work as well as informing a lot of government policy on the environment in both the UK and the USA. How does that tally with your "a few scientists might have been dishonest." One of the things that annoys me is how some try to misrepresent criticism of these people as being motivated by political bias and keep repeating strawmen saying what skeptics "believe" so that it can be torn down (i.e. saying that skeptics dismiss their work because they made positive remarks about a skeptical scientist's death - one of the CRC scientists may have madde such remarks, but that's not why skeptics have problems with this research). Equally I get annoyed when people lump multiple issues in together for the sake of dismissing one. For example, this Lomberg person seems to have talked a lot of crap about deforestation and extinctions not happening when they plainly are. That doesn't mean you can dismiss all skepticism about AGW because he also happened to be critical of that.
If people wonder why there is increasing irritation with many that insist AGW must be true, you have only to look at the way debate on the subject is being stifled. I'll give you a direct example: The Independent, a major national newspaper in the UK printed a sprawling opinion piece condemning skeptics of AGW for all sorts of reasons (but none of them to do with science). The article was guilty of many of the things that it accused skeptics of doing and pretty much could be boiled down to "this is right because I say it is right and questioning is wrong". The Independent has a comments section and when many readers, not even all skeptics, started levelling criticism at this article, the entire comments section was deleted because it was going against the papers position on AGW. I rarely buy the paper since that incident.
Also, you talk about hard data that "Climate Change is happening". This is also a straw man. Few (any?) skeptics say that the climate changes - it obviously does all the time. They question (a) whether and how much it will warm and (b) how much of the effect is down to man's activity and (c) how much of the change due to man's activity is due to CO2. The last is frequently glossed over by those that wish to dismiss critics of AGW. So please do not misrepresent skeptics' arguments.
You are completely right. Why? Because any given "ism" is applying different standards to individuals based on the category that you assign to them. If someone says ____ism is less significant when it's group X, then you are implicitly accepting the premise that someone's membership of a category you assign them is more important than their individuality. Everyone is just a person and the moment you say there are different standards according to race / age / gender / whatever, you are denigrating that individuality.
If I don't accept that my arbitrary membership of a given race or gender or age group is more important than my own actions and beliefs, then who else has the right to determine that prejudice I face is any more or less important than anyone else's based on what groups you assign me to?
There's no such thing as "reverse racism". There's just racism. There's no such thing as "reverse sexism", there's just sexism.
While your point may be valid, I have a system without swap but with a hard drive (three actually). Why? Because I never want it to use swap. Ever. I loathe the idea that my system should resort to that. If I ever find it suffering due to lack of memory, I shall buy more. Elininating swap is done on aesthetic grounds. I renounce it entirely!
Yes, they too play their role. Sometimes postively and sometimes, as you point out, negatively.
He, like a lot of other people in this thread, seem to say "equal opportunity" when they mean "affirmative action". I don't know why this is, but I'm starting to get the impression that a lot of US laws or media have actually confused the terms themselves, saying that ethnic quotas are "equal opportunity". They are not. Equal opportunity can only apply to individuals. Ethnic quotas are a form of affirmative action and very dubious indeed.
The States has serious issues whereby many actually do think that there is something wrong with a particular group but that if they keep changing words fast enough then they can outpace the prejudiced and keep ahead of them. Bollocks. You can see the progression with all sorts of terms - from negro to black to coloured to black to African-American and on again. (knew a black guy from Mozambique who hated how lots of people in the US called themselves African). Oriental to Asian. Cretin to Spastic to Retarded to Learning Disability. On and on, any word that some idiots have an issue with, another group takes it upon themselves to start condemning the word instead of the attitude. The correct response is to say that there's nothing fucking wrong with being black and saying someone is black is not an insult - just a fact if they are and a bizarre statement if they're not. Why should "Oriental" be an insult? Unless you think there's something wrong with being an oriental, then it's just a statement of fact. And if you change the words, then you're implicitly accepting that there is something wrong with being "oriental" and that you wish to disguise or gloss-over that fact.
Yeah, those darn leftist professors. Like how the students in Iran that protest their government are doing so because they're incited by "leftist professors". Or students protesting against the communists in Soviet Russia or during Ukraine's "Orange Revolution". How about all those students protesting against the Iraq war in the USA and the UK? Was that a "left-right" issue. What about the university-based protests in Greece last year against police who beat a young man to death. Did they have a leftist agenda? Or could it be that you just see the world in your own terms, ignoring that students have historically protested against tyranny, regardless of how it dresses itself up.
Don't be so quick to dismiss or condemn or suggest that students are simple cattle that do something "impressively stupid" without right information. What exactly is "impressively stupid" about protesting any of the examples I gave? Or indeed protesting censorship laws that have been mis-represented to the public which is what the GP was talking about?
You have a very fitting username. Protesting an embassy is equivalent to floundering and filling your lungs with water? I'd propose a better analogy, but unlike you, I don't think anyone here is stupid enough to require an analogy in order to understand what protesting an embassy is.
But you be a floater as long as you like. Hmmmm. There's a bad analogy in there.
Why? Seriously, why should it be immature? If there was ever a cause where it was appropriate to use the word tits in your movement, it's this one. One of the best ways to undermine censorship is with humour. This sort of full-frontal, in your face attitude is a good thing. Whereas I think your advocation of invading people's privacy and smearing them for doing legal things is nasty. This law is wrong and I argue against it on those grounds, not by adopting the same tactics as those who oppose me and making the legislative process a battle of who can make the other party look worst. Aside from that, when you use these tactics, you state that you believe these things are indeed bad. If you start leaping up and down pointing at your opponents saying "look - they got wasted, look they browsed porn", then you really undermine your efforts to stop people being judged / condemned for getting wasted or browsing porn, do you not?
And what would you do if you found proponents of these laws really didn't commit adultery, get wasted in public
Being college-aged is a negative quality, now? Historically, students have been some of the most vocal in protecting our rights. If your point is that people of this age have less influence on society than older people, well I'd say that young people today are the adults of tomorrow and I'd sooner see college-age people protesting and hopefully retaining those attitudes and sympathies as they get older, than not see them protesting.
As regards basement-dwelling and eating cheetos, well you have no idea where they're living or what they're eating. Neither, by the way, did I realise affects your political activism.
There doesn't seem much point for TV. It would be nice for computer desktops though where I actually could find uses for a 3D desktop model.