A citation at least. One that can be debated as to its correctness or applicability. Being a single location, especially at one end of the planet, it's hard to correlate it to the rest of the planet.
More global citations may include here or here, both of which throw some concern on taking your citation as the ultimate word.
Basically, for a theory to hold as correct and significant, it must surpass the noise in its environment. Here, anthropogenic sources of global climate change need to surpass the noise in history that predates those sources. They don't. This means that if they exist, they are not significant. That doesn't mean, however, that they are not significant for the arctic.
Oh, and as far as its correctness, I do have to wonder about this quote from page 2 (yes, I'm reading the citations):
"The big issue is, when you melt ice, the sea level rises -- that's a global issue, and that has major impacts."
Um, this is the arctic. When you melt that ice, the sea level will remain unchanged. Perhaps if they don't know the basics of volume-mass correlations of floating bodies, which I re-learned in my first year of university, the rest of their science might be a bit suspect, too. Just saying. Now, if they were talking about the Antarctic, well, that's another story, since much of that ice isn't floating, it's held on top of actual landmass. Ok, so if they're referring to ice being lost from Alaska, Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Greenland, etc., there'd be some rise. But, again, we need to talk about significance. Crying wolf over small things is not endearing. And won't help the movement over the long term as people get upset about being called to rallies over those small things, and will assume that should a big thing occur (like melting of the antarctic) it'll just be another cry of wolf and be ignored.
I despise the ribbon more than MS itself. What is it in the human psyche that insists on breaking things that work? There are so many other issues to address -- why screw up a perfectly usable user interface, by replacing it with an illogical hodge-podge that, if nothing else, requires user retraining? What problem is being solved? And is it really being solved?
Simple. Microsoft has dozens, if not hundreds, of user-interface and user-centered-design people. If they aren't changing the UI, these people are doing nothing but twiddling their thumbs. That's an obvious waste of salary dollars. This would make them prime candidates for being laid off should a recession appear. Instead, by creating change and churn, they can point to said change when their performance reviews come up to validate their salary, nay, their even existence. Management buys it, and their jobs are saved for another year.
Nowhere in there is it required that it be an improvement, merely change with some sort of pre-release rationalisation on why it is an improvement based on questionable user testing on whichever wasted street people wandered in for the free food during the tests.
Define "accurate". Also note if there is any change in accuracy over those 250+ years. Also note if there is any change in scope in the same time period (how many locations recording temperatures, which continents, how often temperatures are recorded). Also note in your definition whether any recording stations have substantial environment changes, such as moving from one side of a city to another (especially from up-wind to down-wind), or such as encroaching civilisation resulting in massive amounts of heat-absorbing substances (such as asphalt roads) being nearby that weren't there earlier on (say in the mid 1700s).
Maintaining other variables constant is a key requirement when attempting to measure change due to some theory, regardless of which area in science it is. Trying to claim changes, even if they exist, when your ability to measure changes over time is misleading at best, or more likely incompetence or, at worst, fraudulent. You need to control your control variables, and your measuring stick is one of those. A temperature reading from a location that was a field 30km from civilisation in 1930, but the middle of an international airport in 1980 is simply not directly comparable. Comparing "average" readings done hourly with a thermometer accurate to 0.01C vs readings from the same location from 100 years ago that were done, at best, daily, sometimes in the morning and sometimes in the afternoon, to the nearest full degree C, is not directly comparable (and adjusting them to make them comparable may be impossible).
In 20 years, assuming we can globally keep our weather stations in the same environment situations as they are now, maybe we'll have some data. Right now, I'm not convinced. Ice core samples over longer term where they're all measured with modern tools are much better ways to compare long-term temperatures because we're at least holding the measuring stick as constant. It just doesn't do well at low granularities, such as decade-by-decade, nevermind day-by-day.
Interesting. That's not a citation, merely a pointer to an organisation whose mandate it is to report on climate change. From your link:
The preparation of the AR5 pursues the overall mandate of the Panel, the main activity of which is to prepare at regular intervals of five to seven years comprehensive assessment reports about climate change.
If this were mandate by Bush & Co.,/.ers would be all over it, pointing out, and rightfully so, that an organisation whose mandate it is to report on something necessarily has a vested interest in it, because if the underlying item being reported on went away or proved fraudulent, then the organisation would also go away.
That said, the URL you point to doesn't actually have evidence itself, though another link on the same site might. As far as a citation for the above claim is concerned, this does not qualify. Please try again, though.
The plural of anecdote is not data. When you're only using one household, you need a lot of time to put together enough data to form a hypothesis ("CFLs are a net benefit over incandescents") and then be able to falsify it. If, instead, he had used 20 households for a year, he'd have similar amounts of data, but taken much less timespan to reach his conclusions.
I have a single EE degree and came to the same conclusion after about two days with CFLs when the first one burned out. But I'm under no delusions that mine is an anecdotal-based conclusion, not a data-based conclusion.
Why? Simple. Conflict of interest, and the appearance of impropriety. They stand to make money from the thief (or whoever they fence it to, or whoever the fence sells it to). They will make money from stolen goods. This is not the case for products that do not have on-going service charges applied. This appears to be a conflict of interest between them and their primary customers.
By helping track down a device reported stolen, they can appear to be above base profit motives, and, instead, appear to help deter crime. This would make their devices more valuable because thieves would be less interested in stealing the devices if they knew they could be tracked, or, at the very least, that the device could not be registered to someone else without the original owner explicitly okaying it.
There is a concern with legitimate resale of these devices, of course, but it doesn't take much imagination to deal with this (original owner calling in to cancel "for the purposes of resale" vs "because the damned thing was stolen"). What if someone sells you such a device and then reports it stolen? About the same thing as when someone sells you a car and reports it stolen: the police get involved and work through the stories, eventually arresting the guy who falsely reported it stolen. In this case, probably a civil suit, which would gain the buyer the ability to send a subpoena to the manufacturer to find the original owner's name and address in case you didn't already have it, although going to the police with a report of fraud would probably work, too. We already have laws dealing with this, so it really isn't a problem.
I see no reason why a company shouldn't be helpful to their customer, especially one that is paying a recurring fee for continued use (e.g., OnStar).
Oh, and, yes, you call the car manufacturer (in the case of OnStar-enabled vehicles, and probably others) to ask them to disable the vehicle. You may need a police report, and it may need to be the police contacting OnStar for you, but it's still basically you causing the manufacturer to be notified and the vehicle disabled (safely). OnStar even advertises this as a feature. (I have a 2007 Saturn VUE Hybrid. I've cancelled OnStar, but got an earful when I bought the thing new, as well as when I cancelled and they turned on the heat trying to convince me not to cancel.)
How is that different from the rest of our lives? We take on 500lbs of armour to our vehicles for safety purposes and wonder why fuel economy stinks. Well, duh.
I wonder how much trouble I'd get into if I put on a ski mask, in the middle of summer, and walked into my local bank, walked up to the ATM, put in my own card, took out some cash, and walked out. Would I even get back to the door, or would the police already be there to arrest me while I was trying to take out the cash?
Maybe if I were independently wealthy and had time on my hands to take the police down a notch or two I'd try something like this. In the meantime, though, I don't think I can afford the lunacy of fighting the cops.
That's why the server sit is only 8 miles away.. It's close enough that you can drive over and hit 'reset' once a day, if you have to.
That seems like a lot of wasted gas, all those cars going back and forth between the DC and the development campus. Maybe they should use an express shuttle to get more employees going back and forth at a time, and save on fuel.
And here I thought that the whole idea of "no taxation without representation" would mean something. Corporations are being taxed, but do not get to vote. In many countries, that may make sense. But in the country whose existence was catapulted by the Boston Tea Party(*), there does seem something untoward going on.
(*) Yes, I know that wasn't "the" deciding factor, nor the final act. But, as wikipedia says, it was a key event, and the reasons for it seem apropos for mentioning in this context.
It's not that there are "enough" people outside the US who are wise enough to keep this from happening, it's whether there are the right unwise people in the right positions to be convinced to enact it anyway. Microsoft does not need to convince everyone outside of the US. They only need to convince the lawmakers in other countries. That is a much smaller target zone, one that they have enough money to achieve. It's now a matter of whether they want to spend that much money or not.
Because once you've done it once, doing it a second time ought to be much cheaper. And once you've worked out the kinks in a "small-scale" project, it's easier to ramp up to bigger projects in the future.
Think of this as costing about $1,428.57 per home, plus about a $20.6B investment in future technologies that the whole world will benefit from, assuming it works.
Doesn't sound like it. Market forces at play... except that Google has a near monopoly in one area, and could be using that to extend into other areas, just like how IE got its dominance in the first place. We'll need to see more details before wondering if this could be anti-competitive (leveraging one monopoly illegally in another area).
I highly doubt they were interested in "cheating" athletes. They were interested in athletes who were doing illegal drugs. The difference is that cheating my involve legal substances, and I doubt the government was interested in those. Instead, they were looking for drugs in their systems that the athlete in question probably did not have a legal prescription for, including controlled drugs that one cannot get via prescription.
And the court said, "That's fine, but to go searching for it in these computer records, you need a warrant for THAT individual. Having a search warrant for information regarding others does not allow you to peruse at will."
Though that's the original saying, the OP may be referring to whiskey pudding where the pudding is supposed to remain 86 proof. Really. The proof is in the pudding. Eat up me hearties yo-ho. Errr...
On a more serious note, I didn't even know this existed until I dreamt up "whiskey pudding", put it into google, and found this as the first hit. A non-porn version of rule 34, I suppose.
Of course some of it is created by us. My car still burns gas, my BBQ uses natural gas, as does my furnace and hot-water heater. I'm creating some. The question isn't whether some is anthropogenic, it's whether what we're throwing in the air is somehow making the planet unnaturally worse for our ecosystem. That 400 (or 200) million years ago, there was an order of magnitude more CO2 in the atmosphere than today, even with whatever amount of CO2 we're pumping out (we can debate the amount, but it's moot: the total is still an order of magnitude lower), pretty much shows that the planet has dealt with much higher levels. Even looking at average temperatures over that time period shows that we're actually in a cold spell right now, and that the planet really should be much warmer. And the fact that life still exists shows that even at the warmer temperatures, the planet's ecosystems can survive. Even humans, as recent arrivals to the system will survive simply because we're able to adapt via technology even if not through evolution.
The alarmism is wrong-headed, just based on that graph alone, IMO.
How much pre-industrial? You mean like 400 million years ago? I wonder what humans were burning to create those levels. We apparently did an awesome job over the next 100 million years to get the CO2 levels down, so maybe all we need to do is check our own history to see what we did. It'll work again, I'm sure, whatever it was.
I agree with your conclusion that more competition would drive out those who seek to limit services, but I seriously question your method.
As opposed to now, where one agency of the feds has to undo some of the damage done by the states to their own citizens? I think the OP's suggestion makes more sense.
Slashdot Mirror
A citation at least. One that can be debated as to its correctness or applicability. Being a single location, especially at one end of the planet, it's hard to correlate it to the rest of the planet.
More global citations may include here or here, both of which throw some concern on taking your citation as the ultimate word.
Basically, for a theory to hold as correct and significant, it must surpass the noise in its environment. Here, anthropogenic sources of global climate change need to surpass the noise in history that predates those sources. They don't. This means that if they exist, they are not significant. That doesn't mean, however, that they are not significant for the arctic.
Oh, and as far as its correctness, I do have to wonder about this quote from page 2 (yes, I'm reading the citations):
"The big issue is, when you melt ice, the sea level rises -- that's a global issue, and that has major impacts."
Um, this is the arctic. When you melt that ice, the sea level will remain unchanged. Perhaps if they don't know the basics of volume-mass correlations of floating bodies, which I re-learned in my first year of university, the rest of their science might be a bit suspect, too. Just saying. Now, if they were talking about the Antarctic, well, that's another story, since much of that ice isn't floating, it's held on top of actual landmass. Ok, so if they're referring to ice being lost from Alaska, Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Greenland, etc., there'd be some rise. But, again, we need to talk about significance. Crying wolf over small things is not endearing. And won't help the movement over the long term as people get upset about being called to rallies over those small things, and will assume that should a big thing occur (like melting of the antarctic) it'll just be another cry of wolf and be ignored.
I despise the ribbon more than MS itself. What is it in the human psyche that insists on breaking things that work? There are so many other issues to address -- why screw up a perfectly usable user interface, by replacing it with an illogical hodge-podge that, if nothing else, requires user retraining? What problem is being solved? And is it really being solved?
Simple. Microsoft has dozens, if not hundreds, of user-interface and user-centered-design people. If they aren't changing the UI, these people are doing nothing but twiddling their thumbs. That's an obvious waste of salary dollars. This would make them prime candidates for being laid off should a recession appear. Instead, by creating change and churn, they can point to said change when their performance reviews come up to validate their salary, nay, their even existence. Management buys it, and their jobs are saved for another year.
Nowhere in there is it required that it be an improvement, merely change with some sort of pre-release rationalisation on why it is an improvement based on questionable user testing on whichever wasted street people wandered in for the free food during the tests.
Just wait for what they'll do next year.
So, um, which side of the debate are you on, anyway?
He's obviously saying that "Freeware" is the only way that malware can attack your system, so therefore he thinks that Windows is "Freeware"!
Maybe he lives in China?
Define "accurate". Also note if there is any change in accuracy over those 250+ years. Also note if there is any change in scope in the same time period (how many locations recording temperatures, which continents, how often temperatures are recorded). Also note in your definition whether any recording stations have substantial environment changes, such as moving from one side of a city to another (especially from up-wind to down-wind), or such as encroaching civilisation resulting in massive amounts of heat-absorbing substances (such as asphalt roads) being nearby that weren't there earlier on (say in the mid 1700s).
Maintaining other variables constant is a key requirement when attempting to measure change due to some theory, regardless of which area in science it is. Trying to claim changes, even if they exist, when your ability to measure changes over time is misleading at best, or more likely incompetence or, at worst, fraudulent. You need to control your control variables, and your measuring stick is one of those. A temperature reading from a location that was a field 30km from civilisation in 1930, but the middle of an international airport in 1980 is simply not directly comparable. Comparing "average" readings done hourly with a thermometer accurate to 0.01C vs readings from the same location from 100 years ago that were done, at best, daily, sometimes in the morning and sometimes in the afternoon, to the nearest full degree C, is not directly comparable (and adjusting them to make them comparable may be impossible).
In 20 years, assuming we can globally keep our weather stations in the same environment situations as they are now, maybe we'll have some data. Right now, I'm not convinced. Ice core samples over longer term where they're all measured with modern tools are much better ways to compare long-term temperatures because we're at least holding the measuring stick as constant. It just doesn't do well at low granularities, such as decade-by-decade, nevermind day-by-day.
Sure.
Interesting. That's not a citation, merely a pointer to an organisation whose mandate it is to report on climate change. From your link:
The preparation of the AR5 pursues the overall mandate of the Panel, the main activity of which is to prepare at regular intervals of five to seven years comprehensive assessment reports about climate change.
If this were mandate by Bush & Co., /.ers would be all over it, pointing out, and rightfully so, that an organisation whose mandate it is to report on something necessarily has a vested interest in it, because if the underlying item being reported on went away or proved fraudulent, then the organisation would also go away.
That said, the URL you point to doesn't actually have evidence itself, though another link on the same site might. As far as a citation for the above claim is concerned, this does not qualify. Please try again, though.
Edmonton has its share of loons, too.
The plural of anecdote is not data. When you're only using one household, you need a lot of time to put together enough data to form a hypothesis ("CFLs are a net benefit over incandescents") and then be able to falsify it. If, instead, he had used 20 households for a year, he'd have similar amounts of data, but taken much less timespan to reach his conclusions.
I have a single EE degree and came to the same conclusion after about two days with CFLs when the first one burned out. But I'm under no delusions that mine is an anecdotal-based conclusion, not a data-based conclusion.
Why? Simple. Conflict of interest, and the appearance of impropriety. They stand to make money from the thief (or whoever they fence it to, or whoever the fence sells it to). They will make money from stolen goods. This is not the case for products that do not have on-going service charges applied. This appears to be a conflict of interest between them and their primary customers.
By helping track down a device reported stolen, they can appear to be above base profit motives, and, instead, appear to help deter crime. This would make their devices more valuable because thieves would be less interested in stealing the devices if they knew they could be tracked, or, at the very least, that the device could not be registered to someone else without the original owner explicitly okaying it.
There is a concern with legitimate resale of these devices, of course, but it doesn't take much imagination to deal with this (original owner calling in to cancel "for the purposes of resale" vs "because the damned thing was stolen"). What if someone sells you such a device and then reports it stolen? About the same thing as when someone sells you a car and reports it stolen: the police get involved and work through the stories, eventually arresting the guy who falsely reported it stolen. In this case, probably a civil suit, which would gain the buyer the ability to send a subpoena to the manufacturer to find the original owner's name and address in case you didn't already have it, although going to the police with a report of fraud would probably work, too. We already have laws dealing with this, so it really isn't a problem.
I see no reason why a company shouldn't be helpful to their customer, especially one that is paying a recurring fee for continued use (e.g., OnStar).
Oh, and, yes, you call the car manufacturer (in the case of OnStar-enabled vehicles, and probably others) to ask them to disable the vehicle. You may need a police report, and it may need to be the police contacting OnStar for you, but it's still basically you causing the manufacturer to be notified and the vehicle disabled (safely). OnStar even advertises this as a feature. (I have a 2007 Saturn VUE Hybrid. I've cancelled OnStar, but got an earful when I bought the thing new, as well as when I cancelled and they turned on the heat trying to convince me not to cancel.)
How is that different from the rest of our lives? We take on 500lbs of armour to our vehicles for safety purposes and wonder why fuel economy stinks. Well, duh.
I wonder how much trouble I'd get into if I put on a ski mask, in the middle of summer, and walked into my local bank, walked up to the ATM, put in my own card, took out some cash, and walked out. Would I even get back to the door, or would the police already be there to arrest me while I was trying to take out the cash?
Maybe if I were independently wealthy and had time on my hands to take the police down a notch or two I'd try something like this. In the meantime, though, I don't think I can afford the lunacy of fighting the cops.
That's why the server sit is only 8 miles away.. It's close enough that you can drive over and hit 'reset' once a day, if you have to.
That seems like a lot of wasted gas, all those cars going back and forth between the DC and the development campus. Maybe they should use an express shuttle to get more employees going back and forth at a time, and save on fuel.
s/on the Internet/in management/
Am I the only one that read that last word as if it changed the "nd" to "ck"? And then mentally responded, "of course it does" ?
And here I thought that the whole idea of "no taxation without representation" would mean something. Corporations are being taxed, but do not get to vote. In many countries, that may make sense. But in the country whose existence was catapulted by the Boston Tea Party(*), there does seem something untoward going on.
(*) Yes, I know that wasn't "the" deciding factor, nor the final act. But, as wikipedia says, it was a key event, and the reasons for it seem apropos for mentioning in this context.
I see you're an optimist.
It's not that there are "enough" people outside the US who are wise enough to keep this from happening, it's whether there are the right unwise people in the right positions to be convinced to enact it anyway. Microsoft does not need to convince everyone outside of the US. They only need to convince the lawmakers in other countries. That is a much smaller target zone, one that they have enough money to achieve. It's now a matter of whether they want to spend that much money or not.
/me is still confused.
$ perl -le 'print ( (1.0 * hex 54) / (1.0 * hex 24))'
2.33333333333333
Your MS Calculator is still the joke.
Because once you've done it once, doing it a second time ought to be much cheaper. And once you've worked out the kinks in a "small-scale" project, it's easier to ramp up to bigger projects in the future.
Think of this as costing about $1,428.57 per home, plus about a $20.6B investment in future technologies that the whole world will benefit from, assuming it works.
Doesn't sound like it. Market forces at play ... except that Google has a near monopoly in one area, and could be using that to extend into other areas, just like how IE got its dominance in the first place. We'll need to see more details before wondering if this could be anti-competitive (leveraging one monopoly illegally in another area).
I highly doubt they were interested in "cheating" athletes. They were interested in athletes who were doing illegal drugs. The difference is that cheating my involve legal substances, and I doubt the government was interested in those. Instead, they were looking for drugs in their systems that the athlete in question probably did not have a legal prescription for, including controlled drugs that one cannot get via prescription.
And the court said, "That's fine, but to go searching for it in these computer records, you need a warrant for THAT individual. Having a search warrant for information regarding others does not allow you to peruse at will."
Though that's the original saying, the OP may be referring to whiskey pudding where the pudding is supposed to remain 86 proof. Really. The proof is in the pudding. Eat up me hearties yo-ho. Errr...
On a more serious note, I didn't even know this existed until I dreamt up "whiskey pudding", put it into google, and found this as the first hit. A non-porn version of rule 34, I suppose.
Real geeks open their disks to cosmic radiation and read the butterflies.
Of course some of it is created by us. My car still burns gas, my BBQ uses natural gas, as does my furnace and hot-water heater. I'm creating some. The question isn't whether some is anthropogenic, it's whether what we're throwing in the air is somehow making the planet unnaturally worse for our ecosystem. That 400 (or 200) million years ago, there was an order of magnitude more CO2 in the atmosphere than today, even with whatever amount of CO2 we're pumping out (we can debate the amount, but it's moot: the total is still an order of magnitude lower), pretty much shows that the planet has dealt with much higher levels. Even looking at average temperatures over that time period shows that we're actually in a cold spell right now, and that the planet really should be much warmer. And the fact that life still exists shows that even at the warmer temperatures, the planet's ecosystems can survive. Even humans, as recent arrivals to the system will survive simply because we're able to adapt via technology even if not through evolution.
The alarmism is wrong-headed, just based on that graph alone, IMO.
How much pre-industrial? You mean like 400 million years ago? I wonder what humans were burning to create those levels. We apparently did an awesome job over the next 100 million years to get the CO2 levels down, so maybe all we need to do is check our own history to see what we did. It'll work again, I'm sure, whatever it was.
I agree with your conclusion that more competition would drive out those who seek to limit services, but I seriously question your method.
As opposed to now, where one agency of the feds has to undo some of the damage done by the states to their own citizens? I think the OP's suggestion makes more sense.