Because everything past a certain time period is extrapolation. That is, while we have had thermometers and have been measuring for the last ~150 years, all the ice cores, tree rings, etc are maped to temperature based upon those thermometer readings. Add to that issues of how much moisture, orbital alignment, solar output changes, and other things might skew the figures of what has so far been in a measured decimal increase in global temperature, and the models want as accurate data as they can to remove the risk of even minor error skewing the results.
Btw, it's funny how there's so much complaint about the "falseness" of the climate science yet there's a willingness to use the climate scientists' own "raw" ice core data to temperature mapping. What if there's some sort of, oh, hidden agenda by the climate scientists to make the past look warmer? It's all a trick! I want to see the real raw ice core data and create my own appropriate mapping function!
The problem with AGW is that we are being asked to choose between a half-ton of prevention and a pound of cure.
Last I checked, the damage that will result from just sea level rise is a lot more than "a pound" compare to a half-ton of prevention.
And the half-ton has practically zero chance of working.
For this, you might well be right. We very well might be too late for anything but CO2 sequestering to actually work. Even if not to late already, it's unlikely that the US, China, etc will agree in time. The best chance we might have is to limit the damage, and to that, yes, the ratio might be closer to a half-ton of "prevention" to a pound of cure.
In the end, the real issue is the energy crisis of having so many countries competing for so much oil. Pragmatically dealing with might be a better reason to act now. But, given how long the US and China have waited to even consider real action over the climate, I doubt they'll preemptively do much in that arena either.
Every year for the last ten years has been setting record temperatures.
Wrong, unless you are talking about localized records, in which case that will always be true.
Its been cooling a bit for the last 8 years... the trend began in 2002. You are either making things up, or repeating what you heard from someone else who was making things up.
Actually, it's more obviously the other way around. Localized records have shown cooling tends in some locations (the US was rather cool in 2009), yet the global trends show overall warming. You can see that in the temperature record since 1880. Now, those cooled areas do match up with some areas with higher temperature, but it's unlikely that your or I were in one of those areas. Besides, the poles are general were more relative warming has occurred, and it's that which is most worrying to people who lives near coastlines.
Are there no independant botanists either? Are they all involved with some big conspiracy to hide the fact that all the leaders of the world are actually vegetables?
The real question is, are there no independent meteorologists? It's funny, actually. As much as there are those who point at how bad weather forecasting is and use it is a proof of our feeble understanding of the weather, there's very few people who would ignore a "weather winter advisory". Perhaps because the threat is life or death? Perhaps because an ounce of prevent is worth a pound of cure? It's funny how that mindset is ignored when it comes to the climate. But, then, I guess it's the point that group, long-term change is resisted more than independent, short-term change. If anything, the grand conspiracy would seem to be with the general populace, not the scientists.
No, you'd see the bog standard "what would a reasonable person understand the statement to mean" being applied.
Which goes back to the first episode of Bullshit. If you announce quite clearly that bullshit/motherfucker == lie/conman, then a reasonable person would take it that you're calling the people in question frauds and the statement they make lies and/or deception. If what Penn's wish to not have to deal with lawsuits was true, he would have simply left the bullshit and motherfucker comments with the obscurity of if they had more meaning than the words intrinsically have. Instead, I think Penn believed the actual chance of lawsuits was actually pretty low and he was something of an idiot in hoping that judge would be so stupid as to summarily drop any suit presuming the whole "vulgar abuse" angle would magically settle things and the judge wouldn't exert any effort of thought on the obvious code messages Penn explicitly stated he was crafting.
end user... don't want to muck around with downloading "non-free" [video] drivers
Funny. Isn't that precisely what you said you had to do to get 3D working for Windows 7?
... compiling kernel wrappers or running a script to do so, etc.
I don't think users care one way or another about having to run a script. They do care if running a script means doing something non-standard to the distro. Ie, if the distro's package manager does all that compiling, script-running, etc as a by-product of installing "nvidia-drivers", then they can be quite oblivious to how it all works under the hood.
Some distros make this pretty easy,
That's something of a tautology. There's so many Linux distros out there, that "some" applies to just about every qualifier you can give except "it uses the Linux kernel". Now, as for what "end users" tend to use, virtually all of those distros make it easy.
but not all and it's an extra step that could potentially confuse or trip up the end user who doesn't care about the politics of Open Source.
It's not "an extra step" as far as most end users are aware because the package manager automagically takes care of it. In fact, odds are good the installer will automagically install the driver as well, so not only is there no extra step, there's actually less steps than Windows because no driver has to be manually downloaded.
You can only pump so much oil out of the ground at one time
without collapsing the price.
What, you think OPEC is a charity?
It is in the best interest of OPEC to keep the price of oil at or around the oligarchy price (the oligarchy analogy of the monopoly price). If the price goes enough above that price, people will use enough less oil that they'll be worse off (consider that OPEC doesn't simply charge $1 million/barrel of oil...even if there were no threat of invasion). More importantly, currently, the price of oil is high enough (above ~$50/barrel, IIRC) that tar sands and oil shales are price competitive against normal oil wells. With the amount of oil available in tar sands and oil shales, such a situation significantly reduces OPEC's strength as an oligarchy.
In short, OPEC might very well try to keep the price at $49/barrel, but at $80/barrel a lot of people are buying tar sand oil instead of their oil.
Let's say we can cool the earth one degree by spending a trillion dollars. Is it worth the investment? What do we really get out of it? How many other problems could have been fixed with that money?
If it were a mere one trillion dollars for the whole world, it'd really be a drop in the bucket and well worth the investment. Aside from the issue of ROI, one has to consider the externalities of not spending the trillion dollars. Look at the mostly current financial/economic crisis. How much do you think that cost countries? How much do you think will be the cost of long-term shifting weather patterns? I'd imagine it might trivially be a lot more than most people would care to stomach compared to doing something now.
2) The current approach to fighting climate change is wrong.
UN treaties and money aren't going to stop the developing world from using fossil fuels. The only surefire way to get off of coal is to develop something that is cheaper. Instead of giving money to developing countries to bribe them not to pollute, we should invest the money in new technology, so that in 10, 20, 30 years we can say "here, this is cheaper than coal and doesn't pollute".
Funny, but that's the main reason cap and trade is such a good idea. It causes developed countries to start polluting significantly less, raises the current costs of coal/oil/etc (inherently making long-term investments in other energy sources possibly viable), allows for the collected taxes to be pushed into new energy technology, and hopefully the result will be energy that effectively is cheaper than the coal/oil/etc's original price. Even if the whole energy technology step doesn't work to produce something cheaper than coal/oil/etc, the system will both have proven that you can still be a developed country using massively less amounts of coal/oil/etc per capita (meaning developed countries, mimicking developed countries, need not believe they'll tank for what might others seem a reckless course of action) and almost certainly have higher efficiency technology to export to other countries so they'll inherently use less coal/oil/etc (since the efficiency technology will have been created in a [mostly] market based system and should be generally economical sound anywhere).
What if climate change causes political destabilization so we don't have enough time to get finished?
We're going to see that anyways. China has already taken some pretty bold steps about securing oil supplies for its developing economy. That's a major reason for the great increase in the price of oil; that is, if China hadn't been securing and using those oil wells, other western powers would have for their still increasing oil consumption. You can only pump so much oil out of the ground at one time, and so at some point Americans and Chinese will no longer be able to simply expand through more oil extraction. At that point, increasing the efficiency of technology will be necessary. In the interim, both China and America's economy will suffer rather badly (the US needs ~2.5% economic growth yearly just to maintain itself and China needs something close to ~10%) as oil prices will skyrocket.
We need to be developing alternative energies and efficiency technology now and not wait until "the market" takes care of things. "The market" doesn't take into consideration that while it might work hypothetically in a perfect world given enough time, in the real world a drastic short-term change in supply or demand can result in the sort of political instability that results in a lot of "force" upon a lot of people. And that can be very unpleasant for everyone involved.
Now everybody knows that these laptops have hidden cameras, so they'll just tape over them.
No, odds are good that taping over the hidden cameras will be a punishable offense. Perhaps it can be conspiracy to engage in theft, considering their given lame excuse for the camera.
So there's little chance that the cameras will ever actually be used to identify any thief now.
Odds are good, only idiot thieves would have been caught anyways...and they would have likely been caught anyways. Ie, idiot thieves would neither (a) wipe the HD (and the spying software) nor (b) boot from a clean medium to investigate the laptop's data (and hence not run/load the spying software). Of course, if you're not wiping the HD, you're likely to be caught at some point with significant evidence that the laptop you sold/are using is stolen. And if you're simply running the built-in software, odds are good that you'll visit some website, be auto-logged in, and in your snooping into the persons account be pretty traceable by your IP address.
Now, if they had some sort of hardware GPS device that could be remotely activated and give the GPS unit's location, that'd be a whole other story. Of course, a thief could still potentially rip out the GPS device (presuming it's not well integrated into the motherboard), but it'd be a lot less obvious that a school would pay for the expense of an always-available GPS and would be a much better deterrent to *announce* the damn device. No, the odds are good that school officials presumed they owned the laptop and could remotely access the webcam whenever they pleased.
That they would later try to justify it with some school-wide policy or point out specific misdeeds to justify it really doesn't cover the obvious issues that (a) a thief could likely be another minor student and (b) you could catch said thief in a sexual act (age of consent is 16 in Pennsylvania). In short, the simple fact that the produced images from a hidden camera are such a hot bed for possibly criminal action (I mean, what part of "hidden camera" and "school" sounds like a good idea?) really shows a severe lack of forethought at minimum and at worst a casual massive overextension of authority. I mean, what sort of legal predicament would an actual full-time, legal guardian be in for placing a hidden camera in their 16 year old child's bedroom?
You're missing the point; the GP was comparing Google's actions to the MO of Microsoft.
And this is precisely Microsoft's MO: buy out a company/person, kill off the product they produced, and maybe integrate some of the technology into a future product.
Many people in this thread seem to be blowing things way out of proportion and trying to make Google look worse than Microsoft and Apple look like the victim.
Some people are trying to make Google look like Microsoft, not worse than them. If that were the comment I were responding to, then I wouldn't have said anything. Instead, the person tried to defend Google's actions. As for victims, the only victim I see are iPhone users. I could bugger all care about whether Google's actions hurt Apple.
Apple and Google are about equally evil, with Apple perhaps being more on the evil side because of it's lockin, random banning of apps, closed dev environment, and (meager) support of DRM. But neither of them are anywhere near as bad as Microsoft.
Yea. Apple is evil. They're no victim.
Anyone who's been in the computing industry for a long enough time can tell you that (unless they have an agenda). Personally, I'm not fond of Apple; the only reason they are not in Microsoft's position is that Microsoft kept all the power (and abused it) to itself. If it hadn't of been for Microsoft, *everyone* would be bitching about Apple; they're really not all that different.
Feel free to bitch about Apple. It doesn't bother me. Feel free to bitch about Microsoft. It doesn't bother me. Feel free to bitch about Google. It doesn't bother me. What does bother me is when one company's (or person's) evil is used to justify the evil of another in so far as people simply acquiesce to that evil. Even if evil is necessary to combat evil, it doesn't make any of the evil non-evil. In this case, there's no particularly pressing reason for Google to be evil.
As for Google, I don't trust them either; that's why I don't use their email or their phone. Still, given the choice between working for/with Google or Apple, I'd go with Google in a heartbeat. I doubt Apple would pay me to write Linux software:)
Well, it's all a matter of level of trust. You can never wholly trust any organization (even the FSF) because invariably organizations are made out of multiple people who inherently share at least slightly different views on things. But, yes, I'd likely trust Google over Apple in many circumstances.
Really, at what point was there a need to pull sale?
At the point Google realized it was cutting out the ads on Google mail?
Except as others, further down in the comments, note that there are places were Google has allowed for activity that cut into ad sales for Gmail (IMAP, specifically). So, that doesn't a particularly consistent reason.
At the point that they decided it would take too many resources to support or continue development?
Perhaps, but if it only took one person to support and develop the application up until this point, it's hard to believe that it'd take any more after Google's acquisition. More to the point, even if they chose to no longer support or continue development, unless Apple requires that sort of thing to remain in the App Store, what not just continue sale with the disclaimer "This App is no longer supported"?
Also note, we have no idea whether the *author* pulled it of his own free will, or Google forced him to. Considering he was successful enough with this app, if he had wanted to keep working on it, he would have.
"'Google and reMail have decided to discontinue reMail's iPhone application, and we have removed it from the App Stor
why shouldn't people have the option to continue to buy
Maybe there is a right that I am not aware of? (I can't even believe I am brining up this point)
Who said anything about "a right"? People (me included) are complaining that Google's actions are counter to what its [unofficial] motto of "Don't be evil" would suggest and point out the actions are like those of Microsoft. The only seeming defense offered by the GGP was one of "well, they bought him off" which is exactly what Microsoft has been known to do. This is clearly all a point of PR and what people at the social level choose to do. No one was discussing the legality of it, since it's all very clearly legal.
Yes. Their option was to hire on talent and reward the original creator of something they found interesting; or create their own, integrate it, somehow subtly alter their backend to break the competitor's work, and destroy their competitor's user base (along with any hope of making money).
The "subtly alter their backend" part is unnecessary; without it it would be standard competition and reasonably acceptable if independent development was cheaper than acquisition of the extant technology. And there's nothing in the first option that prevents them from continuing development of reMail (if they wanted to rebrand it, they could, you know, rebrand it, upload the new App, *then* take down the old reMail). And if/when they can offer a replacement for the newer rebranded reMail App through some other way for iPhone users, they could take down that rebranded reMail App. Really, at what point was there a need to pull sale?
... and the potential to integrate the app into the google codebase
... while killing the application in the interim for no apparent reason.
Even if it's the case that Google eventually integrates the feature into their code base, why shouldn't people have the option to continue to buy and use* the iPhone Search App if they so choose? This is no different, really, than Microsoft pushing people off Windows XP...except at least Microsoft has *some* software as a replacement.
Perhaps I'd be singing a different tune if reMail's features were already being made available through a Google and it was comparable to the reMail App, but we're simply not there yet. Microsoft routinely did the same thing throughout the 90s: buy (or attempt to buy) a product/company that was popular, drop sale of the product ASAP, eventually integrate an inferior version of the product in DOS/Windows (most often focusing more on extending Microsoft's reach than providing a great product), and watching as people who bought the old product eventually switch because it's rather pointless to hold on to a dead product that will never be updated again. If Microsoft (or Google) really cared about their customers, they would have continued development and sale of the product and integrated features based upon what users wanted (this could be determined in large part on the point at which almost all users stop buying the standalone product because the integrated version is good enough**).
*Yes, people can still continue to use the App if they already bought it, but tough luck to everyone who would have bought it who now has to wait and hope that Google eventually builds a replacement that works on their phone.
**Ironically enough, Microsoft seemed perfectly willing to do this with their own products (Windows Plus! and Outlook spring to mind). The simple fact that development teams were required to create a product worth buying above the minimal standard instead of being able to slub along with the knowledge that people didn't really have a choice in which option they'd like (since options were removed) seemed to spur some good competition. In general, if what Microsoft (or Google) offers as the standard is so good, then there shouldn't even be market for the supplemental software (and yes, sometimes people are idiots and this assumption fails), so continued development should have been halted when it no longer was profitable***.
***Obviously, this isn't simply by the standard of Microsoft/Google; for companies like Microsoft or Google, $100,000/year on a product might appear horrible, but it's pretty decent for one self-employed developer. But clearly, cutting off sale of the product right-off makes it impossible to even evaluate profitability.
The state of Washington is not $2.8 billion in debt because corporate taxes are too low or because Microsoft makes too much money. The state government is in debt because they insist on spending vastly more money than they actually have available.
No one has claimed Microsoft makes too much money. Corporate taxes should not be raised currently because that's bad for the recession. The state government is in debt in part because of the recession, in part because virtually no state is well structured to continue taking in sufficient taxes for programs during a recession, in part because tax payers are unwilling to create a "recession fund" in the event of a recession, and in part because politicians are unwilling to leave alone a "recession fund" seeing as it'd amount to a large amount of money that could be abused for their own political objectives.
Acknowledging all the that, the seeming best course of action would seem to be to cut spending in the short term, have the federal government borrow money to pay for the budget short falls in the short term (they already did that for last year, although it didn't cover all of the budget short falls), having the federal government pay off the effective loan to the states with higher taxes after the recession, and for people to acknowledge that the federal governments powerful ability to borrow money for the whole of the United States is a valuable asset and not simply a huge deficit crisis* (although there is one already, but then that's based heavily on absurd federal level politicians (Democrats and Republicans) who were unwilling to raise taxes in good economic times to actually start paying off the national debt and significantly cut spending (both entitlements and military spending)).
In short, it's been a cluster fuck of tax payers unwilling to pay higher taxes and their elected representatives who will keep raising their spending anyways. All-in-all, I'd say the problem is the citizens.
*This is something Alexander Hamilton (and presumably others before him) realized. For all the complaints about China owning so much of the US's debt, they're clearly now even more committed in the United States succeeding so the US may pay off that debt in the future.
If you want to amend the constitution to forbid citizens from owning nukes, it should not be difficult to do so, since it's likely there's popular consensus on that matter.
I refer you to the War Powers Act and the current situation when it comes to war with Congress and the President, specifically in relationship to Congress' "controlling the purse strings" in waging war and the President's control over ICBM. Quite simply, there's hardly even a clear consensus on the matter with the government and its own nuclear weapons.
So what you are saying is because the entire cause for this research being 'climate change' (yeah, not just an off handed comment) it doesn't mean this is 'climate change' related science?
Yes, it's "climate changed related", just as the physicist with the research that had to deal with climate changed related higher rainwaters would be climate changed related. That doesn't make the person a "climate change scientist" nor his opinion that of all climate change scientists. Now, it's likely he believes in climate change, but then most scientists do.
So in short what you are saying is it doesn't matter what the entire focus of the scientists statements and TFA was about;
Let's see. One scientist mentioned that one of the things he finds annoying is Rush Limbaugh's voice and included it as part of a test of beetle annoying sounds. TFA focuses on it, even going as far as to create a false headline. You focus on just the Rush Limbaugh part of his experiment, apparently not upset at all that a scientist would dare voice his annoyance of Guns N' Roses. I note that it was clownish to use Rush Limbaugh mostly because it created some undeserved publicity, but that clearly you and I arguing over (and focusing on) the issue would make us either hypocrites or really that we just don't really care that much over it being clownish.
what matters is we must assume this is top notch science because it's science and all other evidence to the contrary is irrelevant.
This is not "top notch science". Most science is not "top notch science". Like most things, it was rather mundane. Was it important? Maybe. Was it a waste of money? Possibly. But, then, that'll be rather hard to gauge for quite some time. It's not like you can slap a dollar value on most research with some knowledge of how much that information can be turned into applicable technology; and the little that goes that way is almost invariably built upon a mountain of mundane research like this.
It sounds like the beetle is a pest, but I don't know how viable a sound system deterrent would actually be. And developing it for other species might not work. On the other hand, this knowledge might work in another way. Specifically, it sounds like the beetles attack each other thinking that each other beetle is threatening them. If that is the case, perhaps there are other ways to stimulate the same behavior that is cost effective.
Once you get past the sensationalizing media and start to understand what the scientists were trying to say, you can actually possibly learn something. If nothing else, that's the reason I read the article anyways. Why did you?
Name of TFA: "Heavy-Metal Music, Other Sounds Aimed at Beetle Pests" Subtitle: "A novel approach to controlling tree-destroying beetles uses piped-in rock music and backward recordings of Rush Limbaugh." Name of TFA on slashdot: "Bark Beetles Hate Rush Limbaugh and Heavy Metal"
So...the media sensationalized and/or got wrong what worked. And here I thought you were complaining about science, not how science is reported...
...NOW if you RTFA you would know that 'climate change' WAS part of the conversation: ""beetles have their place in the ecosystem too, of course, but climate change and human activities have allowed beetles to take over more than they should. To combat such infestations, scientists thought up the "nastiest, most offensive sounds" ""
Wow. So, if a physicist makes an off-hand comment about heavier rains due to global warming (something that research papers by "global warming scientists" predict), he's a "global warming scientist"?
If you think this is science and how science should be presented, targeting political figures, then you only add to my argument about the poor state of science.
Actually, I made the point that the media is obsessing over the irrelevance of the science. And so have others. But, then, that's a complaint in most part about the media.
How about if I paint Democrats as crime-loving, drug-abusing apologist for brain-washers, drug-dealers, child-molesters, corrupt unions, organized crime, and illegal aliens who drive down the wages of working Americans by taking jobs under the table that pay less than minimum wage?
Isn't that the Republican's anti-Democrat slogan already? Truthfully, it is precisely this reason that when the media finds Republicans doing such things they harp on it so much and when Democrats do it they tend to ignore it. Hypocracy is news. Follow some known sterotype really isn't.
On the bright side, eventually all the scandals with Republicans will taint the party so badly, the media will ignore them too with their amoral activities. On the down side, perhaps they'll then start focusing on Republican's insane "tax less, but never manage to cut spending enough to counter the lost revenue". Tax and spend might be bad, but thinking first "how can I take in less revenue to pay for my budget" is just loony.
The 'most annoying sound' was a biased opinion of one scientists: ""the most annoying sound" his colleague, Reagan McGuire, "could think of was Rush Limbaugh or rock music.""(from TFA)
Yep, one scientist (truck-driver-turned-research assistant, specifically) thought that certain human based sounds he found offensive might offend the beetles.
In fact the assumption of it 'working' is wrong because: "[Richard Hofstetter] and his colleagues found that while Limbaugh and the heavy metal initially bothered the beetles, the insects mostly ignored the sounds after a while."(from TFA)
Yep, they proved rather nicely that beetles will ignore various human based sounds. That's some good science.
So what did we learn? 1. Beetles don't like loud 'stuff', but after a while they get used to it.
Not quite. Beetles don't like loud 'beetle' stuff and will become very aggressive over it. Beetles will ignore loud 'human' stuff.
2. Global warming scientists don't like Rush Limbaugh
Funny how "one scientist" (who, btw, works at the Northern Arizona University School of Forestry lab, which sounds like it's interest in trees, not the climate) becomes "[All] global warming scientists". It'd be just as well if the same person had chosen Al Frankin or whoever they wished, really. The results would have been the same.
3. Science is a lost discipline, replaced by partisan political calculation.
Perhaps for you. It's funny how you're not offended at all that Reagan McGuire doesn't like Queen or Guns N' Roses. But, keep on harping on how he doesn't like Rush Limbaugh either. Clearly it's he, not you, with the political calculations.
4. Tax payers yet again fund clown-pseudo-science.
You well admit that their first hypothesis, that loud Queens, Guns N' Roses, and Rush Limbaugh might aggravate the beetles, was tested and proven incorrect. Hence, they falsified their hypothesis, a rather critical part of science. After, they created a new hypothesis (beetles might well hate loud beetle noise), and tested it out and found that their second hypothesis seemed correct (although it'd take more tests to verify it was the beetle sound specifically and not various other factors). Overall, it sounds like good science. And if some less polarizing celebrity had been suggested as an annoying sound (Fran Drescher's nasal voice seems like an obvious choice), I doubt you'd say a thing.
The only way, then, I see it as clownish is that instead of choosing a different voice, to avoid any reasonably possibly contrived controversy, they allowed the Rush Limbaugh suggest to be used. I wouldn't go as far as say that lack of oversight was a conspiracy to gain publicity, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone involved well knew that the research might be used by someone in the media and hence would drive a bit more attention to their research. Of course, if people like you or me really cared about ending such clownishness, we wouldn't even be talking about the research at all.
I'm pretty sure the NTAPI was largely documents in the 3.51 days, with the docs accompanying the 3.51 DDK.
It appears that NtCreatFile wasn't documented until the 2000 DDK. Given that's a rather critical function of an OS API, I'm not sure if you're correct.
It has never really been a secret, though of course people who write Windows drivers for a living benefit from mangement thinking it is....
Internally, there's a huge divide at Micrsoft between the apps guys, who use Visual Studio to do their work, and the kernel guys, who use SlickEdit and C and view everyone else as inferior. Not only is the kernel stuff undocumented in Visual Studio, it's entirely the wrong toolkit.
Even if it wasn't a secret, per se, it does sound like efforts were made to obfuscate the information. Considering most Visual Studio developers are of the VB kind, I can understand why documentation would focus on using the Win32 API. Still, it seems a bit extreme to outright exclude such information. But, then, having a whole other toolkit just for kernel stuff seems a bit extreme as well.
The Windows DDK is (or at least was, a few years ago) far closer to the style of work Unix guys are used to.
While that's good to know, why would I ever think to look in the *driver* development kit to develop a console or gui application? Even if you're correct that as early as the 3.51 DDK mostly documented the NTAPI (I'm not entirely sure how much of NTinternals.net really covers [previously] undocumented NTAPI stuff), there was enough obfuscation to make some developers become Window development superstars of a sort because core parts of the OS are unknown to the general development population. Overall, that really doesn't seem a net positive.
the EULA is rarely enforced in a fashion most people would notice or would care about.
If this is the case, is there really an issue? If they tried to enforce it, a bunch of people would probably realize they are doing silly things and stop giving them money...
So, if it's not really an issue, why don't they change the EULA? Because it costs money to fix the EULA? Or because it gives them the ability to selectively enforce it? Clearly there's something evil about selective enforcement, and that itself is really an issue.
If millions of people dont seem to care, and you arent being affected by said EULA (since you arent accepting it), then why have you made it your job to care for them?
Who said I cared for them? Hundreds of millions don't care. Hundreds of thousands, include me, do care. We're such a minority, we have no traction to change things.
We all get it, MS's EULAs suck, I dont know about everyone else, but I got over the outrage a long time ago. When I use windows, I comply with the EULA, and if my customers have an issue, i just put the activation phone call on speaker so they can hear for themselves what I have to go through. Its not my problem, if activation doesnt work for a client they know whose fault it is, and if it doesnt work for me, I repartition my drive to some form of linux until I get over it.
Yea, pragmatically, there's nothing that can be done. That's my point.
If youre on some crusade to get MS to make their EULA into some form of the GPL, then I'm sorry, youre wasting your time.
I'm not even remotely suggesting that, except to the point that MS's EULA should be optional; ie, if MS wants to grant me extra things in exchange for indemnifying them against defects in their software, I have no problem being given a choice on the matter (and I don't mean either agreeing to MS's EULA or not using Windows).
Most people just dont care about this and youre not going to change that on your own.
Exactly. I can't change the world, so it's bullshit every time someone says "you should vote with your dollars to change things". Clearly that won't work in this instance.
If youre a tech, your job is to comply with whatever licensing you buy into, no matter what "Im changing the world with my piracy" bullshit you may want to buy into.
This has nothing to do with piracy, but thanks for throwing that in there as if that had anything to do with my complaints about MS's EULA.
I haven't given MS money in ages. Their EULA hasn't changed yet. Perhaps it's because millions of people are too apathetic to care since the EULA is rarely enforced in a fashion most people would notice or would care about.
Or, in other words, thanks to people like Mark Russinovich, Bryce Cogswell, and various MS authors, NTAPI is now largely documented. So, now Windows is approaching the point that people could readily write very useful, fundamental utilities as easily as they could on Linux. That's certainly a step up, but it doesn't sound like the most proactive of situations on Microsoft's part. But, then, I was under the impression MS didn't really want the NTAPI documented, so they could change it if it became necessary (specifically in fixing bad design, which almost all APIs invariably develop if they're used over long spans of time; you should look at Linux's syscall table for an example) without worrying about backwards compatibility. So, it'd seem to me to be rather a mixed blessing for Windows to be approach Linux parity.
Scientists would just be wasting valuable resources in dealing with people like yourself. Just like democrats would be wasting their time talking at a Tea Party convention, or Republicans would be wasting their time at a MoveOn.org convention.
This is one part I disagree with. There is something of value when one sees "the enemy" and discovers that although their methods are different, they are interested in the same goals as you. When one starts to see that, one can start to work with "the enemy" towards those goals. As long as you believe your methods are sound, you should be able to stick to them, and perhaps your cooperation will convince them that your methods are better. Is it a perfect solution? Does it always work? Of course not. But, in the end, the people you speak of are part of the community of people which acts and are acted upon. Without consideration for them, how can you truly justify what you do to them? How do you really expect to reach your goals if you refuse to work with them?
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Because everything past a certain time period is extrapolation. That is, while we have had thermometers and have been measuring for the last ~150 years, all the ice cores, tree rings, etc are maped to temperature based upon those thermometer readings. Add to that issues of how much moisture, orbital alignment, solar output changes, and other things might skew the figures of what has so far been in a measured decimal increase in global temperature, and the models want as accurate data as they can to remove the risk of even minor error skewing the results.
Btw, it's funny how there's so much complaint about the "falseness" of the climate science yet there's a willingness to use the climate scientists' own "raw" ice core data to temperature mapping. What if there's some sort of, oh, hidden agenda by the climate scientists to make the past look warmer? It's all a trick! I want to see the real raw ice core data and create my own appropriate mapping function!
Last I checked, the damage that will result from just sea level rise is a lot more than "a pound" compare to a half-ton of prevention.
For this, you might well be right. We very well might be too late for anything but CO2 sequestering to actually work. Even if not to late already, it's unlikely that the US, China, etc will agree in time. The best chance we might have is to limit the damage, and to that, yes, the ratio might be closer to a half-ton of "prevention" to a pound of cure.
In the end, the real issue is the energy crisis of having so many countries competing for so much oil. Pragmatically dealing with might be a better reason to act now. But, given how long the US and China have waited to even consider real action over the climate, I doubt they'll preemptively do much in that arena either.
Actually, it's more obviously the other way around. Localized records have shown cooling tends in some locations (the US was rather cool in 2009), yet the global trends show overall warming. You can see that in the temperature record since 1880. Now, those cooled areas do match up with some areas with higher temperature, but it's unlikely that your or I were in one of those areas. Besides, the poles are general were more relative warming has occurred, and it's that which is most worrying to people who lives near coastlines.
The real question is, are there no independent meteorologists? It's funny, actually. As much as there are those who point at how bad weather forecasting is and use it is a proof of our feeble understanding of the weather, there's very few people who would ignore a "weather winter advisory". Perhaps because the threat is life or death? Perhaps because an ounce of prevent is worth a pound of cure? It's funny how that mindset is ignored when it comes to the climate. But, then, I guess it's the point that group, long-term change is resisted more than independent, short-term change. If anything, the grand conspiracy would seem to be with the general populace, not the scientists.
Which goes back to the first episode of Bullshit. If you announce quite clearly that bullshit/motherfucker == lie/conman, then a reasonable person would take it that you're calling the people in question frauds and the statement they make lies and/or deception. If what Penn's wish to not have to deal with lawsuits was true, he would have simply left the bullshit and motherfucker comments with the obscurity of if they had more meaning than the words intrinsically have. Instead, I think Penn believed the actual chance of lawsuits was actually pretty low and he was something of an idiot in hoping that judge would be so stupid as to summarily drop any suit presuming the whole "vulgar abuse" angle would magically settle things and the judge wouldn't exert any effort of thought on the obvious code messages Penn explicitly stated he was crafting.
Funny. Isn't that precisely what you said you had to do to get 3D working for Windows 7?
I don't think users care one way or another about having to run a script. They do care if running a script means doing something non-standard to the distro. Ie, if the distro's package manager does all that compiling, script-running, etc as a by-product of installing "nvidia-drivers", then they can be quite oblivious to how it all works under the hood.
That's something of a tautology. There's so many Linux distros out there, that "some" applies to just about every qualifier you can give except "it uses the Linux kernel". Now, as for what "end users" tend to use, virtually all of those distros make it easy.
It's not "an extra step" as far as most end users are aware because the package manager automagically takes care of it. In fact, odds are good the installer will automagically install the driver as well, so not only is there no extra step, there's actually less steps than Windows because no driver has to be manually downloaded.
It is in the best interest of OPEC to keep the price of oil at or around the oligarchy price (the oligarchy analogy of the monopoly price). If the price goes enough above that price, people will use enough less oil that they'll be worse off (consider that OPEC doesn't simply charge $1 million/barrel of oil...even if there were no threat of invasion). More importantly, currently, the price of oil is high enough (above ~$50/barrel, IIRC) that tar sands and oil shales are price competitive against normal oil wells. With the amount of oil available in tar sands and oil shales, such a situation significantly reduces OPEC's strength as an oligarchy.
In short, OPEC might very well try to keep the price at $49/barrel, but at $80/barrel a lot of people are buying tar sand oil instead of their oil.
If it were a mere one trillion dollars for the whole world, it'd really be a drop in the bucket and well worth the investment. Aside from the issue of ROI, one has to consider the externalities of not spending the trillion dollars. Look at the mostly current financial/economic crisis. How much do you think that cost countries? How much do you think will be the cost of long-term shifting weather patterns? I'd imagine it might trivially be a lot more than most people would care to stomach compared to doing something now.
Funny, but that's the main reason cap and trade is such a good idea. It causes developed countries to start polluting significantly less, raises the current costs of coal/oil/etc (inherently making long-term investments in other energy sources possibly viable), allows for the collected taxes to be pushed into new energy technology, and hopefully the result will be energy that effectively is cheaper than the coal/oil/etc's original price. Even if the whole energy technology step doesn't work to produce something cheaper than coal/oil/etc, the system will both have proven that you can still be a developed country using massively less amounts of coal/oil/etc per capita (meaning developed countries, mimicking developed countries, need not believe they'll tank for what might others seem a reckless course of action) and almost certainly have higher efficiency technology to export to other countries so they'll inherently use less coal/oil/etc (since the efficiency technology will have been created in a [mostly] market based system and should be generally economical sound anywhere).
We're going to see that anyways. China has already taken some pretty bold steps about securing oil supplies for its developing economy. That's a major reason for the great increase in the price of oil; that is, if China hadn't been securing and using those oil wells, other western powers would have for their still increasing oil consumption. You can only pump so much oil out of the ground at one time, and so at some point Americans and Chinese will no longer be able to simply expand through more oil extraction. At that point, increasing the efficiency of technology will be necessary. In the interim, both China and America's economy will suffer rather badly (the US needs ~2.5% economic growth yearly just to maintain itself and China needs something close to ~10%) as oil prices will skyrocket.
We need to be developing alternative energies and efficiency technology now and not wait until "the market" takes care of things. "The market" doesn't take into consideration that while it might work hypothetically in a perfect world given enough time, in the real world a drastic short-term change in supply or demand can result in the sort of political instability that results in a lot of "force" upon a lot of people. And that can be very unpleasant for everyone involved.
No, odds are good that taping over the hidden cameras will be a punishable offense. Perhaps it can be conspiracy to engage in theft, considering their given lame excuse for the camera.
Odds are good, only idiot thieves would have been caught anyways...and they would have likely been caught anyways. Ie, idiot thieves would neither (a) wipe the HD (and the spying software) nor (b) boot from a clean medium to investigate the laptop's data (and hence not run/load the spying software). Of course, if you're not wiping the HD, you're likely to be caught at some point with significant evidence that the laptop you sold/are using is stolen. And if you're simply running the built-in software, odds are good that you'll visit some website, be auto-logged in, and in your snooping into the persons account be pretty traceable by your IP address.
Now, if they had some sort of hardware GPS device that could be remotely activated and give the GPS unit's location, that'd be a whole other story. Of course, a thief could still potentially rip out the GPS device (presuming it's not well integrated into the motherboard), but it'd be a lot less obvious that a school would pay for the expense of an always-available GPS and would be a much better deterrent to *announce* the damn device. No, the odds are good that school officials presumed they owned the laptop and could remotely access the webcam whenever they pleased.
That they would later try to justify it with some school-wide policy or point out specific misdeeds to justify it really doesn't cover the obvious issues that (a) a thief could likely be another minor student and (b) you could catch said thief in a sexual act (age of consent is 16 in Pennsylvania). In short, the simple fact that the produced images from a hidden camera are such a hot bed for possibly criminal action (I mean, what part of "hidden camera" and "school" sounds like a good idea?) really shows a severe lack of forethought at minimum and at worst a casual massive overextension of authority. I mean, what sort of legal predicament would an actual full-time, legal guardian be in for placing a hidden camera in their 16 year old child's bedroom?
And this is precisely Microsoft's MO: buy out a company/person, kill off the product they produced, and maybe integrate some of the technology into a future product.
Some people are trying to make Google look like Microsoft, not worse than them. If that were the comment I were responding to, then I wouldn't have said anything. Instead, the person tried to defend Google's actions. As for victims, the only victim I see are iPhone users. I could bugger all care about whether Google's actions hurt Apple.
Yea. Apple is evil. They're no victim.
Feel free to bitch about Apple. It doesn't bother me. Feel free to bitch about Microsoft. It doesn't bother me. Feel free to bitch about Google. It doesn't bother me. What does bother me is when one company's (or person's) evil is used to justify the evil of another in so far as people simply acquiesce to that evil. Even if evil is necessary to combat evil, it doesn't make any of the evil non-evil. In this case, there's no particularly pressing reason for Google to be evil.
Well, it's all a matter of level of trust. You can never wholly trust any organization (even the FSF) because invariably organizations are made out of multiple people who inherently share at least slightly different views on things. But, yes, I'd likely trust Google over Apple in many circumstances.
Except as others, further down in the comments, note that there are places were Google has allowed for activity that cut into ad sales for Gmail (IMAP, specifically). So, that doesn't a particularly consistent reason.
Perhaps, but if it only took one person to support and develop the application up until this point, it's hard to believe that it'd take any more after Google's acquisition. More to the point, even if they chose to no longer support or continue development, unless Apple requires that sort of thing to remain in the App Store, what not just continue sale with the disclaimer "This App is no longer supported"?
"'Google and reMail have decided to discontinue reMail's iPhone application, and we have removed it from the App Stor
Who said anything about "a right"? People (me included) are complaining that Google's actions are counter to what its [unofficial] motto of "Don't be evil" would suggest and point out the actions are like those of Microsoft. The only seeming defense offered by the GGP was one of "well, they bought him off" which is exactly what Microsoft has been known to do. This is clearly all a point of PR and what people at the social level choose to do. No one was discussing the legality of it, since it's all very clearly legal.
The "subtly alter their backend" part is unnecessary; without it it would be standard competition and reasonably acceptable if independent development was cheaper than acquisition of the extant technology. And there's nothing in the first option that prevents them from continuing development of reMail (if they wanted to rebrand it, they could, you know, rebrand it, upload the new App, *then* take down the old reMail). And if/when they can offer a replacement for the newer rebranded reMail App through some other way for iPhone users, they could take down that rebranded reMail App. Really, at what point was there a need to pull sale?
... while killing the application in the interim for no apparent reason.
Even if it's the case that Google eventually integrates the feature into their code base, why shouldn't people have the option to continue to buy and use* the iPhone Search App if they so choose? This is no different, really, than Microsoft pushing people off Windows XP...except at least Microsoft has *some* software as a replacement.
Perhaps I'd be singing a different tune if reMail's features were already being made available through a Google and it was comparable to the reMail App, but we're simply not there yet. Microsoft routinely did the same thing throughout the 90s: buy (or attempt to buy) a product/company that was popular, drop sale of the product ASAP, eventually integrate an inferior version of the product in DOS/Windows (most often focusing more on extending Microsoft's reach than providing a great product), and watching as people who bought the old product eventually switch because it's rather pointless to hold on to a dead product that will never be updated again. If Microsoft (or Google) really cared about their customers, they would have continued development and sale of the product and integrated features based upon what users wanted (this could be determined in large part on the point at which almost all users stop buying the standalone product because the integrated version is good enough**).
*Yes, people can still continue to use the App if they already bought it, but tough luck to everyone who would have bought it who now has to wait and hope that Google eventually builds a replacement that works on their phone.
**Ironically enough, Microsoft seemed perfectly willing to do this with their own products (Windows Plus! and Outlook spring to mind). The simple fact that development teams were required to create a product worth buying above the minimal standard instead of being able to slub along with the knowledge that people didn't really have a choice in which option they'd like (since options were removed) seemed to spur some good competition. In general, if what Microsoft (or Google) offers as the standard is so good, then there shouldn't even be market for the supplemental software (and yes, sometimes people are idiots and this assumption fails), so continued development should have been halted when it no longer was profitable***.
***Obviously, this isn't simply by the standard of Microsoft/Google; for companies like Microsoft or Google, $100,000/year on a product might appear horrible, but it's pretty decent for one self-employed developer. But clearly, cutting off sale of the product right-off makes it impossible to even evaluate profitability.
No one has claimed Microsoft makes too much money. Corporate taxes should not be raised currently because that's bad for the recession. The state government is in debt in part because of the recession, in part because virtually no state is well structured to continue taking in sufficient taxes for programs during a recession, in part because tax payers are unwilling to create a "recession fund" in the event of a recession, and in part because politicians are unwilling to leave alone a "recession fund" seeing as it'd amount to a large amount of money that could be abused for their own political objectives.
Acknowledging all the that, the seeming best course of action would seem to be to cut spending in the short term, have the federal government borrow money to pay for the budget short falls in the short term (they already did that for last year, although it didn't cover all of the budget short falls), having the federal government pay off the effective loan to the states with higher taxes after the recession, and for people to acknowledge that the federal governments powerful ability to borrow money for the whole of the United States is a valuable asset and not simply a huge deficit crisis* (although there is one already, but then that's based heavily on absurd federal level politicians (Democrats and Republicans) who were unwilling to raise taxes in good economic times to actually start paying off the national debt and significantly cut spending (both entitlements and military spending)).
In short, it's been a cluster fuck of tax payers unwilling to pay higher taxes and their elected representatives who will keep raising their spending anyways. All-in-all, I'd say the problem is the citizens.
*This is something Alexander Hamilton (and presumably others before him) realized. For all the complaints about China owning so much of the US's debt, they're clearly now even more committed in the United States succeeding so the US may pay off that debt in the future.
I refer you to the War Powers Act and the current situation when it comes to war with Congress and the President, specifically in relationship to Congress' "controlling the purse strings" in waging war and the President's control over ICBM. Quite simply, there's hardly even a clear consensus on the matter with the government and its own nuclear weapons.
Yes, it's "climate changed related", just as the physicist with the research that had to deal with climate changed related higher rainwaters would be climate changed related. That doesn't make the person a "climate change scientist" nor his opinion that of all climate change scientists. Now, it's likely he believes in climate change, but then most scientists do.
Let's see. One scientist mentioned that one of the things he finds annoying is Rush Limbaugh's voice and included it as part of a test of beetle annoying sounds. TFA focuses on it, even going as far as to create a false headline. You focus on just the Rush Limbaugh part of his experiment, apparently not upset at all that a scientist would dare voice his annoyance of Guns N' Roses. I note that it was clownish to use Rush Limbaugh mostly because it created some undeserved publicity, but that clearly you and I arguing over (and focusing on) the issue would make us either hypocrites or really that we just don't really care that much over it being clownish.
This is not "top notch science". Most science is not "top notch science". Like most things, it was rather mundane. Was it important? Maybe. Was it a waste of money? Possibly. But, then, that'll be rather hard to gauge for quite some time. It's not like you can slap a dollar value on most research with some knowledge of how much that information can be turned into applicable technology; and the little that goes that way is almost invariably built upon a mountain of mundane research like this.
It sounds like the beetle is a pest, but I don't know how viable a sound system deterrent would actually be. And developing it for other species might not work. On the other hand, this knowledge might work in another way. Specifically, it sounds like the beetles attack each other thinking that each other beetle is threatening them. If that is the case, perhaps there are other ways to stimulate the same behavior that is cost effective.
Once you get past the sensationalizing media and start to understand what the scientists were trying to say, you can actually possibly learn something. If nothing else, that's the reason I read the article anyways. Why did you?
So...the media sensationalized and/or got wrong what worked. And here I thought you were complaining about science, not how science is reported...
Wow. So, if a physicist makes an off-hand comment about heavier rains due to global warming (something that research papers by "global warming scientists" predict), he's a "global warming scientist"?
Actually, I made the point that the media is obsessing over the irrelevance of the science. And so have others. But, then, that's a complaint in most part about the media.
Isn't that the Republican's anti-Democrat slogan already? Truthfully, it is precisely this reason that when the media finds Republicans doing such things they harp on it so much and when Democrats do it they tend to ignore it. Hypocracy is news. Follow some known sterotype really isn't.
On the bright side, eventually all the scandals with Republicans will taint the party so badly, the media will ignore them too with their amoral activities. On the down side, perhaps they'll then start focusing on Republican's insane "tax less, but never manage to cut spending enough to counter the lost revenue". Tax and spend might be bad, but thinking first "how can I take in less revenue to pay for my budget" is just loony.
Yep, one scientist (truck-driver-turned-research assistant, specifically) thought that certain human based sounds he found offensive might offend the beetles.
Yep, they proved rather nicely that beetles will ignore various human based sounds. That's some good science.
Not quite. Beetles don't like loud 'beetle' stuff and will become very aggressive over it. Beetles will ignore loud 'human' stuff.
Funny how "one scientist" (who, btw, works at the Northern Arizona University School of Forestry lab, which sounds like it's interest in trees, not the climate) becomes "[All] global warming scientists". It'd be just as well if the same person had chosen Al Frankin or whoever they wished, really. The results would have been the same.
Perhaps for you. It's funny how you're not offended at all that Reagan McGuire doesn't like Queen or Guns N' Roses. But, keep on harping on how he doesn't like Rush Limbaugh either. Clearly it's he, not you, with the political calculations.
You well admit that their first hypothesis, that loud Queens, Guns N' Roses, and Rush Limbaugh might aggravate the beetles, was tested and proven incorrect. Hence, they falsified their hypothesis, a rather critical part of science. After, they created a new hypothesis (beetles might well hate loud beetle noise), and tested it out and found that their second hypothesis seemed correct (although it'd take more tests to verify it was the beetle sound specifically and not various other factors). Overall, it sounds like good science. And if some less polarizing celebrity had been suggested as an annoying sound (Fran Drescher's nasal voice seems like an obvious choice), I doubt you'd say a thing.
The only way, then, I see it as clownish is that instead of choosing a different voice, to avoid any reasonably possibly contrived controversy, they allowed the Rush Limbaugh suggest to be used. I wouldn't go as far as say that lack of oversight was a conspiracy to gain publicity, but it wouldn't surprise me if someone involved well knew that the research might be used by someone in the media and hence would drive a bit more attention to their research. Of course, if people like you or me really cared about ending such clownishness, we wouldn't even be talking about the research at all.
It appears that NtCreatFile wasn't documented until the 2000 DDK. Given that's a rather critical function of an OS API, I'm not sure if you're correct.
Even if it wasn't a secret, per se, it does sound like efforts were made to obfuscate the information. Considering most Visual Studio developers are of the VB kind, I can understand why documentation would focus on using the Win32 API. Still, it seems a bit extreme to outright exclude such information. But, then, having a whole other toolkit just for kernel stuff seems a bit extreme as well.
While that's good to know, why would I ever think to look in the *driver* development kit to develop a console or gui application? Even if you're correct that as early as the 3.51 DDK mostly documented the NTAPI (I'm not entirely sure how much of NTinternals.net really covers [previously] undocumented NTAPI stuff), there was enough obfuscation to make some developers become Window development superstars of a sort because core parts of the OS are unknown to the general development population. Overall, that really doesn't seem a net positive.
So, if it's not really an issue, why don't they change the EULA? Because it costs money to fix the EULA? Or because it gives them the ability to selectively enforce it? Clearly there's something evil about selective enforcement, and that itself is really an issue.
Who said I cared for them? Hundreds of millions don't care. Hundreds of thousands, include me, do care. We're such a minority, we have no traction to change things.
Yea, pragmatically, there's nothing that can be done. That's my point.
I'm not even remotely suggesting that, except to the point that MS's EULA should be optional; ie, if MS wants to grant me extra things in exchange for indemnifying them against defects in their software, I have no problem being given a choice on the matter (and I don't mean either agreeing to MS's EULA or not using Windows).
Exactly. I can't change the world, so it's bullshit every time someone says "you should vote with your dollars to change things". Clearly that won't work in this instance.
This has nothing to do with piracy, but thanks for throwing that in there as if that had anything to do with my complaints about MS's EULA.
I haven't given MS money in ages. Their EULA hasn't changed yet. Perhaps it's because millions of people are too apathetic to care since the EULA is rarely enforced in a fashion most people would notice or would care about.
Or, in other words, thanks to people like Mark Russinovich, Bryce Cogswell, and various MS authors, NTAPI is now largely documented. So, now Windows is approaching the point that people could readily write very useful, fundamental utilities as easily as they could on Linux. That's certainly a step up, but it doesn't sound like the most proactive of situations on Microsoft's part. But, then, I was under the impression MS didn't really want the NTAPI documented, so they could change it if it became necessary (specifically in fixing bad design, which almost all APIs invariably develop if they're used over long spans of time; you should look at Linux's syscall table for an example) without worrying about backwards compatibility. So, it'd seem to me to be rather a mixed blessing for Windows to be approach Linux parity.
This is one part I disagree with. There is something of value when one sees "the enemy" and discovers that although their methods are different, they are interested in the same goals as you. When one starts to see that, one can start to work with "the enemy" towards those goals. As long as you believe your methods are sound, you should be able to stick to them, and perhaps your cooperation will convince them that your methods are better. Is it a perfect solution? Does it always work? Of course not. But, in the end, the people you speak of are part of the community of people which acts and are acted upon. Without consideration for them, how can you truly justify what you do to them? How do you really expect to reach your goals if you refuse to work with them?