And why the f#*k would it be more likely that life started on Mars than here on Earth ? I mean for what possible reason would it make sense that life began somewhere else and was then magically transported here through the cold vacuum of space. Mars hardly had the ideal environment to bootstrap life, even hundreds of millions of years ago, and especially when compared to early Earth.
We know that here on Earth, all the necessary building blocks were in place and that conditons were right for basic proteins to form, and from there we just mix it all together in the pot for a few million years and *bazinga*... life!
I get really frustrated whenever I read (fairy) stories about life originating on some extra-terrestrial body (comet, asteroid, planet) because even if (against the massively implausible odds) it originated elsewhere, it must have started there by the exact same mechanisms as postulated for life beginning on Earth. Occams razor says enough for me. Eveyone else is just looking for grant funding.
If you want to suggest that life originated somewhere else, you need to convince me that it couldn't have equally plausibly started here too.
And if Apple doesn't want to enter into negitiations with Motorola over the rate of the license then it is not operating in good faith. Other handset manufacturers have licensed Mototola's standards esdsential patents, probably by being reasonable and negotiating like normal people. Apple have played hardball here by refusing to negotiate up front and going straight to court instead.
Groklaw, as usual, have a good summary here: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20121105153442192
Please let me know when you start "talking science at me" because so far all I see is pseudo-science dressed up as an (un-falsifyable) hypothesis. Come back when you can show me that any recent trends are anything other than natural variablility caused by any of several hundred factors all unrelated to human activity, eg. Sunspots/solar activity, El Nino, PDO. etc. Your climate psience champions are unwilling/unable to release their figures, stonewall any attempts to reproduce their work or check their calculations, and are generally obstructive to any kind of scruitiny yet we are expected to dramatically change the economy of the entire world on just their say-so.
It's even highly questionable whether there actually has been any warming that isn't simply down to mis-reading the temperature proxies used to construct a historical climate record. And even if we are faced with a dramatic warming of the climate (which I simply don't believe) the human race as a whole can simply move to higher lattitudes and inland from the coast over the next 50-100 years. It's not like we're not extremely adaptable as a species. It would be way more cost effective than crippling billions of people with increased energy costs today.
As a counterpoint for anecdotal evidence, you may want to read the news stories about record heatwaves through the US over the past month...
Yeah this is nice. If the weather is warmer, it's because of global warming. If it gets colder it's also global warming. You guys are hilarious. Any kind of evidence, either warmer or cooler somehow manages to support your hypothesis. You can't really expect me to take you seriously if this is your line of argument.
You need a lesson in logic. This isn't what I said and is a non-sequitur. There's no point in me wasting my time arguing with an idiot who can't follow a reasoned line of thinking, so I won't bother.
Of course not, but as many people have observed, a statistical correlation is often Ma Nature's way of saying "Hey, look over here; there's something going on that may be important to you."
Yeah, and just as often, it isn't. All you have is correlation. Maybe sunspots are driving both variables up and neither one causes the other. Maybe it's pixies dancing. This isn't science and after recent revelations in the wake of Climate-gate, neither is "Climate Science". It's Climate Shamanism or Climate Theology. Take your pick. You can no longer take at face value any proclamations coming from "climate scientists". I've had more reliable predictions from horoscopes so forgive me if I file this latest piece of alarmism in same category..
The ability to trust any reports from the IPCC or CRU is gone, and scientists are going to need years to rebuild that trust.
We have more than a mere correlation between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and temperature rise.
No actually that is all you have. There's plenty of historical evidence to indicate that temperature rise leads the atmospheric CO2 increase. The mechanism by which CO2 is theorised to retain heat is poorly understood and far from proven. Water vapour has a far higher heat capacity to act as a greenhouse gas and yet isn't accounted for in most of the models,
The consequences on the global economy of attempting to remove carbon from our daily lives will dramatically impact the livelyhood of billions of people who will face hardship, poverty and hunger because of the increased costs of energy. You have the bare faced gall to quote economic impact about removing carbon dioxide just so a few beach-front properties avoid a miniscule risk of higher sea levels.
Finally, I'm sitting here looking out the window watching it snow for the first time in ~70 years and have to seriously question your assumptions that the planet is even warming at all.
"ZOMG! It's worse than we thought!"....again...and again.... Global Alarmism. Not global warming. Let's cripple the economies of all nations on the planet, resulting in increased poverty, hunger and hardship for billions of people just to keep some potential problems with sea-front property in the western world, at bay.
As far as arctic ice goes, maybe you should investigate why Greenland is called "Greenland". Hint" We weren't all driving SUVs when the Vikings went exploring so it wasn't caused by humans.
Citation required....
When the dinosaurs ruled the planet, temperatures were quite significantly higher than they are now, and the ecosphere supported an abundance of highly successful flora and fauna.
How about on your world, we reduce the amount of atmospheric CO2 to less than 100ppm? We have no real idea what the consequences of geoengineering on a planetary scale are, and they could equally well be detrimental to the survival of life on Earth.
OK, so what is the infection vector exactly ? How does it attach to.bashrc or.login ? Did some user save it to the Gnome/KDE startup folder ?
You're a moron.
if an approval by NASA isn't good enough, I don't know what will be.
This is known as an "appeal to authority". The case for science will stand on its own irrespective of who is stating it. NASA has no more authority to spout the "truth" than Joe Sixpack.
Here's a clue: Would you trust NASA to land a probe on Mars 100% of the time, or return a Shuttle crew to earth 100% of the time simply because "shucks, they're NASA. They know their shit."
Guess what. NASA makes mistakes. Their scientists are human and are driven by the same failings and weaknesses as the rest of us. If you want an alernative perspective, try googling "Judith Curry" for an example of a real scientist who holds a different view.
I haven't seen any information contrary to the hypothesis of AGW.
Well of course not. You've never looked for it. But such evidence is widely available if you simply search for it.
You may also find evidence that the sun rises and sets each day if you didn't spend all your time living in your mom's basement.
What the hell is a "scientific worldview" ? I'm highly atheistic and absolutely reject CAGW. I have zero financial investment in this, apart from the massive increase in taxation I'll face if the idiot politicians try to tax carbon off the face of the earth.
Are you seriously telling me that the place where the dead body fell to the ground, isn't the crime scene?
YES! 1000 times Yes. If I murder someone in London and drop the dead body in New York, where do you think the crime scene is ? (Hint: It's not New York.)
But it is unequivocal that we are poisoning the earth. Pollution is destroying our food and water supply. It is giving our children asthma. It's wiping out some species and mutating others.
Whoa! Hold on there cowboy. Them's fighting words. You went from some almost rational points to complete incomprehensible babbling without stopping to pick up a shred of evidence on the way. You even managed to slip in a "think of the children" plea. Were you trying for extra credit from other AGW lemmings ?
In one breath you say "no one knows what will happen" and then, without pausing to stop and think, say "our current liefstyle is not sustainable". Well which one is it ? Either you know our current lifestyle is not sustainable or you don't know anything about our current lifestyle.
Maybe some remedial classes in critical thinking are in order.
Of course, no system is immune from the booze-n-hookers style of temptation, but that's someone else's job; I'm just here to install and configure software.:)
OK, where do I sign up for the booze-n-hookers job ?
"How, exactly, did the DNA get *onto* the swab in the first place?"
How about looking in the factory where they made the contaminated cotton swabs. And presumably the PCR method is so sensitive that it picks up the merest trace element.
So you're suggesting that this cotton swab factory employs only one and only one woman who packs every cotton swab on the assembly line ??!!
If not, why didn't the test pick up DNA from every other employee packing cotton swabs ? What is special about this one individual that has allowed her to contaminate every single cotton swab to be produced ?
What sort of hoops did this person supposedly go through to Google a site which charges for OpenOffice.org ??
Going to www.google.de and searching for "openoffice" goes straight to the official de.openoffice.org web-site. Similarly for 4 of the first 5 results are OpenOffice.org sites and the top 10 results all appear to be legitimate.
I wager it would be very difficult even for a n00b to get to a scam site accidentally therefore I call this story BS.
Unless you happen to be a medical expert of sufficient calibre to run the experiments yourself, you rely on others to supply you accurate knowledge about the subject. Unless you are an expert in every subject, there are bound to be potential decisions regarding the welfare of your child where you have little choice but to go off half-cocked, since you simply have no way to know for sure what the results of each choice might be, and at what probability.
Strawman!!! You don't have to be a medical expert to do a little basic background reading. Years of scientific literatue, medical journals and clinical trial results can tell you what you need to know. That doesn't qualify as going off half-cocked. Watching some crackpot celebrity ranting on about the dangers of vaccines on the other hand, does.
Ah yes, that would explain it. There's something about children which seems to turn people's brains off, allowing them to both spout and believe unbelievably stupid statements without recognizing them as such. Must be some kind of hormonal thing.
What a tosser. Or is it the fact that you also have kids which has disabled your brain too ?
Your ancestors (metaphorically) crawled out of the slime, in order to explore new environments and face new challenges when rational thinking would have left them happily swimming in sludge and sucking mud through their teeth.
Progress isn't founded solely on rational thinking and your existence here with the ability to trade insults over a complex system like the internet, proves it.
If the narrow-minded thinking that you've displayed was the norm, no one (historically) would have invested any time or effort in anything other than obtaining food and shelter. Arts, literature, culture, science and technology are all the result of having the ability to dream "irrationally" of something else.
You can probably thank someone else's ancestors for that. We can only hope that your particular branch of the evolutionary tree doesn't contribute any further to the gene pool.
Slashdot Mirror
And why the f#*k would it be more likely that life started on Mars than here on Earth ? I mean for what possible reason would it make sense that life began somewhere else and was then magically transported here through the cold vacuum of space. Mars hardly had the ideal environment to bootstrap life, even hundreds of millions of years ago, and especially when compared to early Earth.
We know that here on Earth, all the necessary building blocks were in place and that conditons were right for basic proteins to form, and from there we just mix it all together in the pot for a few million years and *bazinga*... life!
I get really frustrated whenever I read (fairy) stories about life originating on some extra-terrestrial body (comet, asteroid, planet) because even if (against the massively implausible odds) it originated elsewhere, it must have started there by the exact same mechanisms as postulated for life beginning on Earth. Occams razor says enough for me. Eveyone else is just looking for grant funding.
If you want to suggest that life originated somewhere else, you need to convince me that it couldn't have equally plausibly started here too.
And if Apple doesn't want to enter into negitiations with Motorola over the rate of the license then it is not operating in good faith. Other handset manufacturers have licensed Mototola's standards esdsential patents, probably by being reasonable and negotiating like normal people. Apple have played hardball here by refusing to negotiate up front and going straight to court instead. Groklaw, as usual, have a good summary here: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20121105153442192
Please let me know when you start "talking science at me" because so far all I see is pseudo-science dressed up as an (un-falsifyable) hypothesis. Come back when you can show me that any recent trends are anything other than natural variablility caused by any of several hundred factors all unrelated to human activity, eg. Sunspots/solar activity, El Nino, PDO. etc.
Your climate psience champions are unwilling/unable to release their figures, stonewall any attempts to reproduce their work or check their calculations, and are generally obstructive to any kind of scruitiny yet we are expected to dramatically change the economy of the entire world on just their say-so.
It's even highly questionable whether there actually has been any warming that isn't simply down to mis-reading the temperature proxies used to construct a historical climate record. And even if we are faced with a dramatic warming of the climate (which I simply don't believe) the human race as a whole can simply move to higher lattitudes and inland from the coast over the next 50-100 years. It's not like we're not extremely adaptable as a species. It would be way more cost effective than crippling billions of people with increased energy costs today.
Here's something for this observation too - http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-03-global-snowstorms-scientists.html
As a counterpoint for anecdotal evidence, you may want to read the news stories about record heatwaves through the US over the past month...
Yeah this is nice. If the weather is warmer, it's because of global warming. If it gets colder it's also global warming. You guys are hilarious. Any kind of evidence, either warmer or cooler somehow manages to support your hypothesis. You can't really expect me to take you seriously if this is your line of argument.
You need a lesson in logic. This isn't what I said and is a non-sequitur.
There's no point in me wasting my time arguing with an idiot who can't follow a reasoned line of thinking, so I won't bother.
Of course not, but as many people have observed, a statistical correlation is often Ma Nature's way of saying "Hey, look over here; there's something going on that may be important to you."
Yeah, and just as often, it isn't. All you have is correlation. Maybe sunspots are driving both variables up and neither one causes the other. Maybe it's pixies dancing. This isn't science and after recent revelations in the wake of Climate-gate, neither is "Climate Science". It's Climate Shamanism or Climate Theology. Take your pick. You can no longer take at face value any proclamations coming from "climate scientists". I've had more reliable predictions from horoscopes so forgive me if I file this latest piece of alarmism in same category..
The ability to trust any reports from the IPCC or CRU is gone, and scientists are going to need years to rebuild that trust.
We have more than a mere correlation between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and temperature rise.
No actually that is all you have. There's plenty of historical evidence to indicate that temperature rise leads the atmospheric CO2 increase. The mechanism by which CO2 is theorised to retain heat is poorly understood and far from proven. Water vapour has a far higher heat capacity to act as a greenhouse gas and yet isn't accounted for in most of the models,
The consequences on the global economy of attempting to remove carbon from our daily lives will dramatically impact the livelyhood of billions of people who will face hardship, poverty and hunger because of the increased costs of energy. You have the bare faced gall to quote economic impact about removing carbon dioxide just so a few beach-front properties avoid a miniscule risk of higher sea levels.
Finally, I'm sitting here looking out the window watching it snow for the first time in ~70 years and have to seriously question your assumptions that the planet is even warming at all.
"ZOMG! It's worse than we thought!"....again...and again.... Global Alarmism. Not global warming.
Let's cripple the economies of all nations on the planet, resulting in increased poverty, hunger and hardship for billions of people just to keep some potential problems with sea-front property in the western world, at bay.
As far as arctic ice goes, maybe you should investigate why Greenland is called "Greenland". Hint" We weren't all driving SUVs when the Vikings went exploring so it wasn't caused by humans.
Citation required....
When the dinosaurs ruled the planet, temperatures were quite significantly higher than they are now, and the ecosphere supported an abundance of highly successful flora and fauna.
How about on your world, we reduce the amount of atmospheric CO2 to less than 100ppm?
We have no real idea what the consequences of geoengineering on a planetary scale are, and they could equally well be detrimental to the survival of life on Earth.
Does slashdot even have editors anymore?
Yes, but they seem to think global warming is fiction.
Ah good. The editors are right. CAGW is fiction.
How many times do you blinkered warmists need to have it spelled out to you. Correlation != causation.
OK, so what is the infection vector exactly ? How does it attach to .bashrc or .login ? Did some user save it to the Gnome/KDE startup folder ?
You're a moron.
if an approval by NASA isn't good enough, I don't know what will be.
This is known as an "appeal to authority". The case for science will stand on its own irrespective of who is stating it. NASA has no more authority to spout the "truth" than Joe Sixpack.
Here's a clue: Would you trust NASA to land a probe on Mars 100% of the time, or return a Shuttle crew to earth 100% of the time simply because "shucks, they're NASA. They know their shit."
Guess what. NASA makes mistakes. Their scientists are human and are driven by the same failings and weaknesses as the rest of us. If you want an alernative perspective, try googling "Judith Curry" for an example of a real scientist who holds a different view.
I haven't seen any information contrary to the hypothesis of AGW.
Well of course not. You've never looked for it. But such evidence is widely available if you simply search for it. You may also find evidence that the sun rises and sets each day if you didn't spend all your time living in your mom's basement.
What the hell is a "scientific worldview" ? I'm highly atheistic and absolutely reject CAGW. I have zero financial investment in this, apart from the massive increase in taxation I'll face if the idiot politicians try to tax carbon off the face of the earth.
YES! 1000 times Yes. If I murder someone in London and drop the dead body in New York, where do you think the crime scene is ?
(Hint: It's not New York.)
Why didn't the store just buy solar panels?
Have you ever been to England ??
Have you been to Howick or Pakuranga recently ?
Whoa! Hold on there cowboy. Them's fighting words. You went from some almost rational points to complete incomprehensible babbling without stopping to pick up a shred of evidence on the way. You even managed to slip in a "think of the children" plea. Were you trying for extra credit from other AGW lemmings ?
In one breath you say "no one knows what will happen" and then, without pausing to stop and think, say "our current liefstyle is not sustainable". Well which one is it ? Either you know our current lifestyle is not sustainable or you don't know anything about our current lifestyle.
Maybe some remedial classes in critical thinking are in order.
Of course, no system is immune from the booze-n-hookers style of temptation, but that's someone else's job; I'm just here to install and configure software. :)
OK, where do I sign up for the booze-n-hookers job ?
Everyone knows that the queen doesn't have an iPod, she has a onePod!
There, fixed that for you.
"How, exactly, did the DNA get *onto* the swab in the first place?"
How about looking in the factory where they made the contaminated cotton swabs. And presumably the PCR method is so sensitive that it picks up the merest trace element.
So you're suggesting that this cotton swab factory employs only one and only one woman who packs every cotton swab on the assembly line ??!!
If not, why didn't the test pick up DNA from every other employee packing cotton swabs ? What is special about this one individual that has allowed her to contaminate every single cotton swab to be produced ?
What sort of hoops did this person supposedly go through to Google a site which charges for OpenOffice.org ??
Going to www.google.de and searching for "openoffice" goes straight to the official de.openoffice.org web-site. Similarly for 4 of the first 5 results are OpenOffice.org sites and the top 10 results all appear to be legitimate.
I wager it would be very difficult even for a n00b to get to a scam site accidentally therefore I call this story BS.
Unless you happen to be a medical expert of sufficient calibre to run the experiments yourself, you rely on others to supply you accurate knowledge about the subject. Unless you are an expert in every subject, there are bound to be potential decisions regarding the welfare of your child where you have little choice but to go off half-cocked, since you simply have no way to know for sure what the results of each choice might be, and at what probability.
Strawman!!! You don't have to be a medical expert to do a little basic background reading. Years of scientific literatue, medical journals and clinical trial results can tell you what you need to know. That doesn't qualify as going off half-cocked. Watching some crackpot celebrity ranting on about the dangers of vaccines on the other hand, does.
Ah yes, that would explain it. There's something about children which seems to turn people's brains off, allowing them to both spout and believe unbelievably stupid statements without recognizing them as such. Must be some kind of hormonal thing.
What a tosser. Or is it the fact that you also have kids which has disabled your brain too ?
Whoosh!
Your ancestors (metaphorically) crawled out of the slime, in order to explore new environments and face new challenges when rational thinking would have left them happily swimming in sludge and sucking mud through their teeth.
Progress isn't founded solely on rational thinking and your existence here with the ability to trade insults over a complex system like the internet, proves it.
If the narrow-minded thinking that you've displayed was the norm, no one (historically) would have invested any time or effort in anything other than obtaining food and shelter. Arts, literature, culture, science and technology are all the result of having the ability to dream "irrationally" of something else.
You can probably thank someone else's ancestors for that. We can only hope that your particular branch of the evolutionary tree doesn't contribute any further to the gene pool.