No offence, but who the hell modded you up? That's the stupidest comment I've seen at +4 for... God knows how long.
For one thing, deliberately removing SOME CO_2 from the atmosphere would be a SMALL step towards balancing our own actions - i.e. digging up sequestered hydrocarbons and throwing them into the atmosphere. It would be an amazing event if we had the technology to balance our own actions, let alone remove further carbon from the active cycle.
1) CO_2 is a greenhouse gas, like many other gases but this is the one that we're causing problems with. Attempting to maintain the status quo is infinitely smarter than changing the composition of the atmosphere then waiting to see what happens which you seem to advocate.
2) Global climate change might result in more productive farm land if we're lucky but regardless it's much more certain to change the distribution of the productive land which would certainly result in massive changes in population distribution. Consider what would happen if Canada became more productive but the USA dried up like north africa, for instance, or a similar situation with China/Siberia.
3) Well, maybe it will all turn out OK if we cross our fingers and hope real hard, but have you ever heard a credible source advocate that? It's a stupid bet however you look at it, except maybe from the angle of short term profits at the exclusion of all else.
And perhaps the poor plants will starve... um, yeah. Because we're somehow going to magically remove THAT MUCH CO_2 from the atmosphere. As I said at the start of my comment, it would take a heroic effort to balance our own actions, let alone go further. And why would we want to anyway?
So in summary, what were the mods smoking and where can I get some?
Am I missing something here? How do you plan to use the carbon to generate electricity? My poor understanding of organic chemistry tells me that you get energy from hydrocarbons by breaking those tasty C-H bonds which leaves the cruddy CO_2 that's causing the problem. Sure, biofuels work like you suggest but they've already turned the C back into hydrocarbons by storing energy from elsewhere such as photosynthesis.
I haven't seen the student site but can't really imagine why it would be considered a parody.
I haven't seen it either, but from the wording in TFS (deducing from the summary is a stretch, I know, but go with me here) it sounds like she created a fake MySpace profile of the principal where 'he' listed his various salacious hobbies and sexual preferences, not posted on MySpace as herself accusing him of those things. Actually, TFS directly says the site was an obvious parody.
I'm not well versed on the criteria for parody in American law, but I suspect that the requirements don't involve artistic merit or actually being funny to anyone over the age of 18.
I think the main point is that you shouldn't cite secondary sources for academic work. Wikipedia is mentioned by name because it happens to be 1. very popular and 2. by definition a secondary source. Anything that is on Wikipedia should be able to be reconstituted from the primary sources it cites.
You also shouldn't cite shitty primary sources, but that's a different issue.
It's not a popular opinion to express on slashdot, but that's why I use opera. I don't do web development or anything horrendously complicated where I would want to modify the browser myself, so it's extremely convenient for me to use a browser which comes with those things like adblocking (and a mail/RSS client) built in and tuned by someone else who knows what they're doing. I use Firefox from time to time too, but even after spending a couple of hours wading through the available extensions I couldn't get it tuned up quite the way I wanted.
On that note, I'm surprised that nobody (that I know of) releases 'distributions' of Firefox, bundled with some standard extensions. It seems a pretty obvious service to offer.
(bollocks. Repost with proper formatting, Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs!)
...[exploiting a password recovery system is] by any standards, "hacking"...[reading mail in another person's account is] again, by any standard standard, hacking.
No. No, it's really not. By some standards yes, but being so insistent that it's hacking is just plain wrong. I understand that be gained access to the account by guessing the answer to the password recovery question. There was no abuse of the program (user: Sarah^ SELECT * FROM PASSWORDS...) or circumvention of security measures - the security just sucked because she used an obvious password recovery hint. Sure, it was wrong and all that and was obviously against the wishes of the account owner, but it's on the same scale as reading somebody's email when they forget to log out of a public terminal. It's an abuse of privacy but calling it 'hacking' is just being melodramatic.
...[exploiting a password recovery system is] by any standards, "hacking"...[reading mail in another person's account is] again, by any standard standard, hacking.
No. No, it's really not. By <i>some</i> standards yes, but being so insistent that it's hacking is just plain wrong. I understand that be gained access to the account by guessing the answer to the password recovery question. There was no abuse of the program (user: Sarah^ SELECT * FROM PASSWORDS...) or circumvention of security measures - the security just sucked because she used an obvious password recovery hint. Sure, it was wrong and all that and was obviously against the wishes of the account owner, but it's on the same scale as reading somebody's email when they forget to log out of a public terminal. It's an abuse of privacy but calling it 'hacking' is just being melodramatic.
Beware the Overton Window! A very important concept, although I haven't seen it mentioned here yet.
Briefly, you can game the belief that the middle ground is where the proper solution lies by adopting an extreme version of your actual beliefs so that the 'middle' is closer to what you actually want.
I thought that seemed like a weird statement, so I looked it up. They were at 12,000 feet which would explain the thin air. I don't think a more sensibly located data centre would have that problem.
Hmm, yes, not quite what I was thinking of though. Basil Fawlty is a terrible person and does not succeed, but he is not as... impotent... as the characters in Seinfeld. He's supremely confident in himself and takes decisive but disastrous action. Not that different from Kramer I suppose, but in a different context. On reflection I didn't mind Kramer as much as the other characters. I must admit in embarrassment that I haven't seen the Office.
The problem of course is that I don't know exactly what annoys me about the Seinfeld characters.
Seinfeld is an actor who built his reputation on a sitcom in which the other characters were, for the most part, losers.
Slightly off-topic rant about comedy. Seinfeld always struck me as a loser too, that's why I didn't like the show. You have to have at least one character that the audience wants to identify with. My impression of the show was that it was about self-centred idiots who got themselves into trouble which they dealt with through cowardice, panic and tricking other even less likeable characters.
There's a flavour of comedy I only see from American TV which I think plays to making the audience feel superior to the characters. It's not quite the same as slapstick or character comedy because the character just doesn't have any redeeming features. I get that feeling most strongly from a character on The Simpsons - I think his name is Gill - a bit character who pops up occasionally to fail at some endeavour and fret about how he won't be able to make payments on his second-hand car now and he'll have nowhere to sleep. Ha ha? The worst part is that he doesn't even fail spectacularly, through any particular fault of his own or because he aimed beyond his reach.
Please note that I think American TV produces a lot of wonderful comedy and this vein of humour is by no means dominant or even very prominant, just unusual in that I don't see it from British TV and I find it unfunny - even upsetting in extreme cases.
So you're saying that as a practical matter, even evidence-based reasoning is rejected if it's unpopular? That's true, and I'm acquainted with Kuhn, although it's been a few years. The change from geocentric to heliocentric cosmology is very interesting but it was a change from old science to new science, with plenty of politicking and shennanigans thrown in.
I suppose you're talking about the scientific establishment, where I'm talking about the scientific ideal the establishment tries to live up to (I admit I was being sloppy by over-simplifying science as being merely evidence-based reasoning).
What were we talking about again? Teaching alternative theories in science class. Some statements:
Science class in school is, sadly, where students learn about the results of science rather than how to do science
It would be good to teach about how scientific theories are developed
It would be good to teach about competition between scientific theories
It would be good to teach about heuristics used to decide which theories to develop (see cold fusion)
It would be good to teach about the difference between scientific theories and pseudoscience
It would be bad to teach that pseudoscience is valid competition to science
It would be bad to teach that pseudoscience is a useful alternative to science
I think that would work out fine as a module in a school science curriculum rather than a university philosphy course where I learned it.
---------------------
Now that polite discussion is out of the way;...but you would simply reject [a creationist's] interpretation of the evidence in the same way that Copernicanism was rejected for so long.
Thanks for pigeonholing me, I won't feel bad about returning the favour.
let's talk about these creationists and their hypothetical evidence based reasoning. Straight up: do you believe that creationism is a valid alternative to evolution, or are you just playing around? I claim that creationism (specifically the modern YEC movement) is unscientific, is not evidence based, is thinly veiled Christian literalist dogma and has no place being taught in schools except as an example of the opposite of a good idea. Disagree with that?
A creationist could argue from evidence in a scientific manner, and should be listened to if they do. I'm sure old earth creationists can work productively and even brilliantly in most scientific fields - but how would they make an evidence-based argument about creationism? The qualities of good scientific theories, parsimony and predictive power, are cast aside; the usual evidence is 'The Bible' (appeal to privileged authority) and above all it is unfalsifiable. If you've studied Kuhn rather than a reading potted summary that shouldn't be incomprehensible jargon, but I suspect there's been an essay passed around in creationist circles which mentions Kuhn and paradigm shifts without actually going into messy details, like how religious beliefs utterly fail as scientific theories.
I'm very sorry if I've mistaken you for a creationist when you're not - my anti-creationism rant is on a hair trigger these days. Kuhn is very interesting, and I'm quite fascinated by the practicalities of doing good science in the face of politics, grants, popularity contests and marketing. I'm quite offended that his work is misrepresented by some creationists as an attack on the objectivity of science rather than an investigation into how scientists choose between plausibly competing scientific theories.
As a matter of interest, what evidence-based reasoning is not tolerated by modern science and what do you mean by 'not tolerated' (was this just an allusion to creationism)? I know there are subjects such as cold fusion where there might be potential but the theory is currently out of favour because of lack of results/scientific misconduct. This seems reasonable to me on the grounds that 1. other more promising leads are being followed 2. if any actual results arise I expect the mainstream science to eagerly adopt the theory.
I don't follow the bit about the teaching of alternatives in science as promoting closed-mindedness, though.
Teaching about alternative scientific theories in science isn't a problem (although my teachers at school said they stuck to the accepted theory because they didn't want to muddy the waters for the students who were struggling with the material, but I digress), teaching an alternative to science, in science class is a problem.
Scientific enquiry is about figuring out which idea is right based on evidence; an alternative to science by definition ignores or dilutes evidence based reasoning (because the alternative didn't, it would be simply another branch of science). The rejection of evidence based reasoning would be the closed-mindedness in question.
The claim that your time is 'worth' $40/hr is based on the (poor) assumption that you can just work some more hours if you want to. You work two hours to make $80, pay the plumber $40 for his two hours and come out $40 ahead. It also assumes that you gain no benefit yourself from mucking around with the plumbing relative to doing some more stressful coding during your weekend.
I agree with you. Lately I've been cooking a lot - doing things like making bread or pasta or soup from scratch that nobody really does themselves in this day and age. Even counting up the ingredients cost and ignoring the time I spend I think it's cheaper to just buy even a decent quality packet of whatever from the supermarket, but I find it relaxing and fun. Each meal is like a mini coding project, except it has a well defined end point, I am the customer so I can set whatever requirements I like and feature creep results in tastiness.
On a related note, perhaps you're the right person to address a musing that's been a-brewing in my mind while I've been reading down the comments.
If you're the LSE, isn't it likely to be 1) easier 2) cheaper and 3) more realistic to achieve 'five-nines' uptime by having two redundant but fully operational 'three-nines' systems and hoping they don't both crap out at the same time? You could even have the two systems in constant competition with each other, where the traders will typically use whichever system is better at that point in time and the maintaining company gets a bonus for having developed the system which is actually in use.
Or, for example, when the system was upgraded to this windows based version, how much would it have cost them to keep the old system (possibly even leave it connected and powered up, for god's sake) as an emergency backup in case the unthinkable happened and the new developers blew their five nines contract? I don't know anything about how the stock exchanges operate, but I've been lead to believe that the LSE going down for a day cost a lot of powerful people a fuck of a lot of money.
Bottom line, there's somebody at the LSE who signed off on the decision to not only use a windows based solution when a stripped down custom OS may have been much more appropriate (flashbacks to Diebold voting machines), but to use entirely and only windows on the promise of a vendor. I imagine whoever that was, they'll be looking as uncomfortable as the vendors are.
I know it's not what you meant, but you just reminded me that the FPS style of ultima 7 (i.e. ultima underworld II) was frickin' fantastic. That's all.
Don't be fooled by this guy! He's not really talking about physics. I saw some 'particle physics' equations left on a whiteboard the other day. A postgrad told me it was important physics and I wouldn't understand, but I'm sure there's some kind of hidden message:
That's generally good advice but Fallout 3 may be a special case, as Oblivion was, where the PC version has access to a HUGE community mod base that will be unavailable for the console versions. Worth looking in to before making any commitments.
Slashdot Mirror
No offence, but who the hell modded you up? That's the stupidest comment I've seen at +4 for... God knows how long.
For one thing, deliberately removing SOME CO_2 from the atmosphere would be a SMALL step towards balancing our own actions - i.e. digging up sequestered hydrocarbons and throwing them into the atmosphere. It would be an amazing event if we had the technology to balance our own actions, let alone remove further carbon from the active cycle.
1) CO_2 is a greenhouse gas, like many other gases but this is the one that we're causing problems with. Attempting to maintain the status quo is infinitely smarter than changing the composition of the atmosphere then waiting to see what happens which you seem to advocate.
2) Global climate change might result in more productive farm land if we're lucky but regardless it's much more certain to change the distribution of the productive land which would certainly result in massive changes in population distribution. Consider what would happen if Canada became more productive but the USA dried up like north africa, for instance, or a similar situation with China/Siberia.
3) Well, maybe it will all turn out OK if we cross our fingers and hope real hard, but have you ever heard a credible source advocate that? It's a stupid bet however you look at it, except maybe from the angle of short term profits at the exclusion of all else.
And perhaps the poor plants will starve... um, yeah. Because we're somehow going to magically remove THAT MUCH CO_2 from the atmosphere. As I said at the start of my comment, it would take a heroic effort to balance our own actions, let alone go further. And why would we want to anyway?
So in summary, what were the mods smoking and where can I get some?
Am I missing something here? How do you plan to use the carbon to generate electricity? My poor understanding of organic chemistry tells me that you get energy from hydrocarbons by breaking those tasty C-H bonds which leaves the cruddy CO_2 that's causing the problem. Sure, biofuels work like you suggest but they've already turned the C back into hydrocarbons by storing energy from elsewhere such as photosynthesis.
You're being unfair, but they have a plan.
They're going to rename it the Large Mojave Collider and prove that its just bad press that is making them look bad.
It's about time. 'Collisions of nothing' might have worked for Seinfeld, but it doesn't have enough impact for particle physics.
I haven't seen the student site but can't really imagine why it would be considered a parody.
I haven't seen it either, but from the wording in TFS (deducing from the summary is a stretch, I know, but go with me here) it sounds like she created a fake MySpace profile of the principal where 'he' listed his various salacious hobbies and sexual preferences, not posted on MySpace as herself accusing him of those things. Actually, TFS directly says the site was an obvious parody.
I'm not well versed on the criteria for parody in American law, but I suspect that the requirements don't involve artistic merit or actually being funny to anyone over the age of 18.
Darkness? Sleeping? That sounds like a great idea! I'll try it right after I hit the next waypoint...
I think the main point is that you shouldn't cite secondary sources for academic work. Wikipedia is mentioned by name because it happens to be 1. very popular and 2. by definition a secondary source. Anything that is on Wikipedia should be able to be reconstituted from the primary sources it cites.
You also shouldn't cite shitty primary sources, but that's a different issue.
It's not a popular opinion to express on slashdot, but that's why I use opera. I don't do web development or anything horrendously complicated where I would want to modify the browser myself, so it's extremely convenient for me to use a browser which comes with those things like adblocking (and a mail/RSS client) built in and tuned by someone else who knows what they're doing. I use Firefox from time to time too, but even after spending a couple of hours wading through the available extensions I couldn't get it tuned up quite the way I wanted.
On that note, I'm surprised that nobody (that I know of) releases 'distributions' of Firefox, bundled with some standard extensions. It seems a pretty obvious service to offer.
(bollocks. Repost with proper formatting, Use the Preview Button! Check those URLs!)
...[exploiting a password recovery system is] by any standards, "hacking"...[reading mail in another person's account is] again, by any standard standard, hacking.
No. No, it's really not. By some standards yes, but being so insistent that it's hacking is just plain wrong. I understand that be gained access to the account by guessing the answer to the password recovery question. There was no abuse of the program (user: Sarah^ SELECT * FROM PASSWORDS...) or circumvention of security measures - the security just sucked because she used an obvious password recovery hint. Sure, it was wrong and all that and was obviously against the wishes of the account owner, but it's on the same scale as reading somebody's email when they forget to log out of a public terminal. It's an abuse of privacy but calling it 'hacking' is just being melodramatic.
...[exploiting a password recovery system is] by any standards, "hacking"...[reading mail in another person's account is] again, by any standard standard, hacking.
No. No, it's really not. By <i>some</i> standards yes, but being so insistent that it's hacking is just plain wrong. I understand that be gained access to the account by guessing the answer to the password recovery question. There was no abuse of the program (user: Sarah^ SELECT * FROM PASSWORDS...) or circumvention of security measures - the security just sucked because she used an obvious password recovery hint. Sure, it was wrong and all that and was obviously against the wishes of the account owner, but it's on the same scale as reading somebody's email when they forget to log out of a public terminal. It's an abuse of privacy but calling it 'hacking' is just being melodramatic.
Beware the Overton Window! A very important concept, although I haven't seen it mentioned here yet.
Briefly, you can game the belief that the middle ground is where the proper solution lies by adopting an extreme version of your actual beliefs so that the 'middle' is closer to what you actually want.
This is the stupidest use of the 'correlationisnotcausation' tag yet! TFS ONLY mentions correlation. Is this some grand troll attempt?
I thought that seemed like a weird statement, so I looked it up. They were at 12,000 feet which would explain the thin air. I don't think a more sensibly located data centre would have that problem.
I believe disbarred is the term, but anything involving blunt instruments is fine by me.
Hmm, yes, not quite what I was thinking of though. Basil Fawlty is a terrible person and does not succeed, but he is not as... impotent... as the characters in Seinfeld. He's supremely confident in himself and takes decisive but disastrous action. Not that different from Kramer I suppose, but in a different context. On reflection I didn't mind Kramer as much as the other characters. I must admit in embarrassment that I haven't seen the Office.
The problem of course is that I don't know exactly what annoys me about the Seinfeld characters.
Seinfeld is an actor who built his reputation on a sitcom in which the other characters were, for the most part, losers.
Slightly off-topic rant about comedy. Seinfeld always struck me as a loser too, that's why I didn't like the show. You have to have at least one character that the audience wants to identify with. My impression of the show was that it was about self-centred idiots who got themselves into trouble which they dealt with through cowardice, panic and tricking other even less likeable characters.
There's a flavour of comedy I only see from American TV which I think plays to making the audience feel superior to the characters. It's not quite the same as slapstick or character comedy because the character just doesn't have any redeeming features. I get that feeling most strongly from a character on The Simpsons - I think his name is Gill - a bit character who pops up occasionally to fail at some endeavour and fret about how he won't be able to make payments on his second-hand car now and he'll have nowhere to sleep. Ha ha? The worst part is that he doesn't even fail spectacularly, through any particular fault of his own or because he aimed beyond his reach.
Please note that I think American TV produces a lot of wonderful comedy and this vein of humour is by no means dominant or even very prominant, just unusual in that I don't see it from British TV and I find it unfunny - even upsetting in extreme cases.
So you're saying that as a practical matter, even evidence-based reasoning is rejected if it's unpopular? That's true, and I'm acquainted with Kuhn, although it's been a few years. The change from geocentric to heliocentric cosmology is very interesting but it was a change from old science to new science, with plenty of politicking and shennanigans thrown in.
I suppose you're talking about the scientific establishment, where I'm talking about the scientific ideal the establishment tries to live up to (I admit I was being sloppy by over-simplifying science as being merely evidence-based reasoning).
What were we talking about again? Teaching alternative theories in science class. Some statements:
I think that would work out fine as a module in a school science curriculum rather than a university philosphy course where I learned it.
---------------------
Now that polite discussion is out of the way; ...but you would simply reject [a creationist's] interpretation of the evidence in the same way that Copernicanism was rejected for so long.
Thanks for pigeonholing me, I won't feel bad about returning the favour.
let's talk about these creationists and their hypothetical evidence based reasoning. Straight up: do you believe that creationism is a valid alternative to evolution, or are you just playing around? I claim that creationism (specifically the modern YEC movement) is unscientific, is not evidence based, is thinly veiled Christian literalist dogma and has no place being taught in schools except as an example of the opposite of a good idea. Disagree with that?
A creationist could argue from evidence in a scientific manner, and should be listened to if they do. I'm sure old earth creationists can work productively and even brilliantly in most scientific fields - but how would they make an evidence-based argument about creationism? The qualities of good scientific theories, parsimony and predictive power, are cast aside; the usual evidence is 'The Bible' (appeal to privileged authority) and above all it is unfalsifiable. If you've studied Kuhn rather than a reading potted summary that shouldn't be incomprehensible jargon, but I suspect there's been an essay passed around in creationist circles which mentions Kuhn and paradigm shifts without actually going into messy details, like how religious beliefs utterly fail as scientific theories.
I'm very sorry if I've mistaken you for a creationist when you're not - my anti-creationism rant is on a hair trigger these days. Kuhn is very interesting, and I'm quite fascinated by the practicalities of doing good science in the face of politics, grants, popularity contests and marketing. I'm quite offended that his work is misrepresented by some creationists as an attack on the objectivity of science rather than an investigation into how scientists choose between plausibly competing scientific theories.
As a matter of interest, what evidence-based reasoning is not tolerated by modern science and what do you mean by 'not tolerated' (was this just an allusion to creationism)? I know there are subjects such as cold fusion where there might be potential but the theory is currently out of favour because of lack of results/scientific misconduct. This seems reasonable to me on the grounds that 1. other more promising leads are being followed 2. if any actual results arise I expect the mainstream science to eagerly adopt the theory.
I don't follow the bit about the teaching of alternatives in science as promoting closed-mindedness, though.
Teaching about alternative scientific theories in science isn't a problem (although my teachers at school said they stuck to the accepted theory because they didn't want to muddy the waters for the students who were struggling with the material, but I digress), teaching an alternative to science, in science class is a problem.
Scientific enquiry is about figuring out which idea is right based on evidence; an alternative to science by definition ignores or dilutes evidence based reasoning (because the alternative didn't, it would be simply another branch of science). The rejection of evidence based reasoning would be the closed-mindedness in question.
For that matter, there aren't enough opening parentheses either.
The claim that your time is 'worth' $40/hr is based on the (poor) assumption that you can just work some more hours if you want to. You work two hours to make $80, pay the plumber $40 for his two hours and come out $40 ahead. It also assumes that you gain no benefit yourself from mucking around with the plumbing relative to doing some more stressful coding during your weekend.
I agree with you. Lately I've been cooking a lot - doing things like making bread or pasta or soup from scratch that nobody really does themselves in this day and age. Even counting up the ingredients cost and ignoring the time I spend I think it's cheaper to just buy even a decent quality packet of whatever from the supermarket, but I find it relaxing and fun. Each meal is like a mini coding project, except it has a well defined end point, I am the customer so I can set whatever requirements I like and feature creep results in tastiness.
On a related note, perhaps you're the right person to address a musing that's been a-brewing in my mind while I've been reading down the comments.
If you're the LSE, isn't it likely to be 1) easier 2) cheaper and 3) more realistic to achieve 'five-nines' uptime by having two redundant but fully operational 'three-nines' systems and hoping they don't both crap out at the same time? You could even have the two systems in constant competition with each other, where the traders will typically use whichever system is better at that point in time and the maintaining company gets a bonus for having developed the system which is actually in use.
Or, for example, when the system was upgraded to this windows based version, how much would it have cost them to keep the old system (possibly even leave it connected and powered up, for god's sake) as an emergency backup in case the unthinkable happened and the new developers blew their five nines contract? I don't know anything about how the stock exchanges operate, but I've been lead to believe that the LSE going down for a day cost a lot of powerful people a fuck of a lot of money.
Bottom line, there's somebody at the LSE who signed off on the decision to not only use a windows based solution when a stripped down custom OS may have been much more appropriate (flashbacks to Diebold voting machines), but to use entirely and only windows on the promise of a vendor. I imagine whoever that was, they'll be looking as uncomfortable as the vendors are.
You think you've got it bad? I'm allergic to his mom you insensitive clod!
I'd rather no-one mentioned that unfortunate rash.
I know it's not what you meant, but you just reminded me that the FPS style of ultima 7 (i.e. ultima underworld II) was frickin' fantastic. That's all.
Don't be fooled by this guy! He's not really talking about physics. I saw some 'particle physics' equations left on a whiteboard the other day. A postgrad told me it was important physics and I wouldn't understand, but I'm sure there's some kind of hidden message:
egkino artypino => ablino-2, idayfrino
Exactly. It seems like a system set up to be gamed, by both prosecution and defence.
(I am also from outside the US, not sure if that was clear from my OP)
That's generally good advice but Fallout 3 may be a special case, as Oblivion was, where the PC version has access to a HUGE community mod base that will be unavailable for the console versions. Worth looking in to before making any commitments.