"Who cares? Murders happen every day. It shouldn't surprise anyone that there are murders in this country."
"But isn't it your obligation to take down in the evidence I have in order to help catch the criminal?"
"Not my problem. Come back when you have a juicy crime to report. Something exciting, and maybe titillating, like a rape charge or a kidnapped showgirl. Then we might do something about it."
My mistake, I didn't realize Murdoch became a naturalized American citizen.
Nevertheless, virtually every foreign newspaper has at some time published editorials trying to influence American policy, and every news organization in the world that is worth a damn has released classified documents at some point.
Releasing a stream of illegally-released classified information from a democratic nation?
Your poor wording aside, it is not illegal to publish classified documents as decided by the Supreme Court in New York Times Co v United States. Leaking classified documents is only a crime for government employees.
Too bad people can't see this for what it is: a foreign national releasing illegally-obtained classified information in a coordinated effort to deliberately try to influence public opinion and US policy.
Other than your claim that Assange obtained the documents illegally, which I just showed to be a complete lie, that description applies equally well to Rupert Murdoch, but I don't see you calling for his arrest.
not the government that works on behalf of the people
If you had bothered to read even a fraction of what Wikileaks put out you wouldn't be so ignorant as to make the claim that the US government works "on behalf of the people".
It results in an environment where closed and repressive societies have an advantage in the information realm over open and democratic societies.
Did it even occur to you that you just spent your entire post attacking someone who has done nothing illegal and arguing that the media should shut up and only publish whatever information the government decides they should? Sounds like you would enjoy living in a closed and repressive society to me.
With the mixed signals Sweden is sending, he should be careful. They could say they want him tonight, but by the next morning they might change their mind.
I was responding to a post about the review's conclusions, not the scientific validity of the proxies, so obviously I didn't respond to McKitrick's claims. Don't insult me because I'm not discussing the topic that you so desperately want to debate. Start a new post if you can't stay on topic.
"If they were intentionally misleading the public, why would they omit the data from a later publication with much wider circulation?"
A report for the WMO has a wider circulation than NATURE, arguably the most prestigious science journal in the world? Are you kidding me?
The later publication contains all the information necessary to find the original articles. Anyone who actually deserves the label 'skeptic', instead of 'blind-faith conspiracy theorist' would have looked up the original articles by Mann and other to see how the proxy data was used to make the graph. Are you actually arguing a cover-up of data that is publicly available in the most prestigious journal in science? What kind of cover-up involves covering up material that is already in the public domain?
If people like McKitrick are too damn lazy to check sources that's a mark against them.
"Intentionally supplying misleading figures is scientific misconduct"
Yes, it is. Except the report did not claim anywhere that it was intentional. Nor was it, considering that the dropping of tree ring data was made explicit in the original paper where the graph was used:
In one of the most notorious leaked e-mails, Jones, referring to the WMO report graph, described how he had "just completed Mike's trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years". Jones was referring to the fact that climatologist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in University Park had used direct temperature measurements to reconstruct temperatures over the past 20 years or so in a graph in an earlier Nature paper [2]. However, while Mann and his colleagues had clearly labelled which temperature lines were derived from direct measurements and which referred to proxy data, the graph submitted by Jones for the WMO report did not.
- UK climate data were not tampered with
If they were intentionally misleading the public, why had the same graph already been published with the missing information?
"What does bother me is the attempt to pass off the results of incompetent software engineering as valid science."
The evidence of your post tells me that the misrepresentation of facts doesn't seem to bother you at all.
Unfortunately, most of the newspapers in Canada are owned by one company, CanWest Global, which has exerted its editorial control over city papers so they match the the political leanings of its owners (first helping the Liberal party, now the Conservatives).
In their world, politicians acting on voters wishes is 'buying votes', while lobbyists using the promise of campaign contributions to get favourable legislation passed is 'Democracy in Action'.
It's the same kind of logic that makes 30 copies of crappy pop songs worth over a million dollars.
This act of preventing a future event is known as "bilking" and is a pretty sound argument against time travel. However, bilking is impossible for entangled particles.
I'm talking about backwards causation as a general principle.
On macroscopic scales not much changes since backward causes are limited...
Says who? What is the definitive study of backwards causation? I'd like to see some sources which claim that violating causality would not cause experimental problems. What about simple particle physics experiments where we are working on microscopic scales?
Moreover, sometimes science and mathematical calculations are hard. But that's the way the world is and the simplicity of calculations can't stand against the reality of observations. Calculation difficulties have been around since the three body problem.
You're not understanding my point. I didn't say the calculations or experiments would be difficult. I said that in any experiment where future events would have to be taken into account, you couldn't make definitive statements about your results. If I do an experiment to show A causes B and future events can also cause B, there is no way for me to state definitively that a seemingly positive result is caused by A and not some future event I can't control for. This is what makes causality so essential for science.
Particles are just as likely to be influenced by future interactions as they are by past interactions
This seems to be a poor understanding of time reversal symmetry. Particle physics works if you run time forward, or if you flip its sign and run time backwards. But that does not mean the same thing as what you said above. You can look at an experiment with each event in reverse, but you can't, for instance, say that event 2 was caused by event 1, but event 1 was caused by event 3. It only can follow the laws of physics if the causal order is 123 or 321.
The idea of 'backwards' causation has obvious major problems. First of all, you run into causal paradoxes. But more importantly, if the outcome of your experiment rests on future events, how can you do science? Every result becomes meaningless because you don't know if a future event caused it.
Um, we HAVE been seeing this cooling trend for a few years now, which is why misanthropic environmental hate groups have been trying to scrub the phrase "Global Warming" from the public lexicon and replace it with "Global Climate Change."
It's the same stupid bullshit I heard in 1999. Every time year X is cooler than year X-1, the same idiots come out claiming we're 'through the peak' and global warming is over. Do they know that regular global cycles act on top of global warming? Do they understand that two data points is not a trend?
Honestly, the fact that stupid shit like this gets +5 informative just shows how ignorant this community is when it comes to climate science.
They are not suggesting making the exit smaller, they are suggesting that an obstacle is placed further from the door to reduce the number of paths to the door and keep the number of people trying to push through the exit at any given time to a minimum. See Fig. 18 in the arXiv paper if you want to look at a diagram of this.
Interestingly enough, these results seem to have been known for a while (probably based on anecdotal evidence). I distinctly remember my fluid mechanics teacher telling our class almost exactly the same thing in 2006, explaining that a crowd headed for the exit behaved in similar ways to a fluid trying to pass through a small opening.
The equations describing gravitational waves do result from a simplifying approximation of Eintstein's equations, but it's the sort of simplifying approximation that really has to be quite accurate in many circumstances.
In fact, IIRC, it is the exact same approximation often used when looking at EM radiation from a source: the approximation is that the source is small, localized and far away from you.
Their example fails because they chose a number that has no significance on its own without including a unit of measurement. If you search 58.44 grams, instead of just the number, you get plenty of relevant results. And look at what happens if you take a famous unitless number from chemistry and do a google search. Again, plenty of good results.You can try it with the speed of light as well. A search for 3x10^8 yields nothing, but 3x10^8 m/s gives you the Wikipedia page for Speed Of Light. And as far as I can tell, Google gives you good results for useful numbers in Mathematics like the golden ratio. So I don't see what the problem is.
3 a: to reduce drastically especially in number (cholera decimated the population)
b: to cause great destruction or harm to (firebombs decimated the city) (an industry decimated by recession)
So you would consider allowing someone to sue a telecom for allowing the government listen in on his or her phone conversations to grandma more important than the new protections put into the bill, namely requiring warrants for any American that happens to be wiretapped and putting the court back in the loop for said warrants?
More bullshit. It was already illegal to spy on Americans without warrants, you idiot. That's why the Telecoms BROKE THE LAW when they allowed Bush to tap phones without warrants. That's why they needed votes from spineless politicians like Obama to grant them immunity.
Do you even read the fucking articles you post before you lie about what they say? Or even the damn title?
Obama's surveillance vote spurs blogging backlash:Sen. Barack Obama's vote for a federal surveillance law that he had previously opposed has sparked a backlash from his online advocates, who had energized his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Money Quote:
The Senate voted Wednesday on the bill updating FISA -- which had a provision to shield telecommunications companies that had cooperated in the surveillance. Obama joined the 68 other senators who voted to send the bill to the president's desk.
I don't give two shits about what failed amendments he voted for. In the end he was asked to vote on a bill that offered immunity for telcos and he did. If he cared the least bit about keeping the telecoms accountable, he would have voted against the bill itself. End of discussion.
What's even more frightening is that they modded you informative when it's public record that he voted to strip the immunity provisions out although the amendment failed.
What's frightening is that there are 4 people who modded you up without reading the article you posted.
It also doesn't help that there is an entire industry which exists to provide talking points to people too ignorant or busy to care about issues that affect them. The best opinion polls can do is tell you which side has the better PR machine.
I can't believe no on Slashdot has pointed out that.015 cents != a penny and a half.015 dollars = a penny and a half.
No one pointed out the mistake because a) it is mentioned in the summary ("Looks like AT&T didn't learn from Verizon's inability to do math") and b) everyone here knows how to do elementary school arithmetic, so no one felt the need to point out the obvious.
We can't create stuff that goes faster than the speed of light, but we can create stuff that goes faster than the speed of sound. And just as you can't go fast enough to come back through an event horizon, information can't propagate fast enough in the experiment to go back across the subsonic/supersonic boundary. This shows us what it looks like to be in a situation like that of a black hole.
That's exactly right. What they have done is create an acoustic event horizon. It doesn't hold all the same properties as a real black hole, but as Korn says, there is a chance that you can see Hawking Radiation and possibly BH evaporation from this experiment. There has already been a paper suggesting that you can see Hawking radiation by looking at the density correlation functions of the BEC.
I appreciate your concern for me, and you both have given me hope because as opposed to pointless name calling, the discussion ended amicably! Good job!
Standards for discourse are shamefully low on the Internet, aren't they?:)
but because I have a little voice in the back of my head saying its not ethical. If hulu, adult swim, or any other content provider doesn't want me to have content... fine. I won't support them.
The ethics of getting around these blocks are considerably less clear than, say, the ethics of downloading torrents, in my opinion. The reason these blocks exist is because networks like NBC sell off the exclusive right to broadcast their shows in Canada to Canadian networks like CTV and Global. In their view, allowing Canadians access to Hulu so they can watch Law and Order: CI would be a violation of their contract giving CTV the rights to broadcast the show exclusively in Canada. But as a side effect, we are also refused access to shows like The Tonight Show, which are not broadcast on Canadian networks. So in cases like that, where no one is harmed by us watching the show on Hulu (and their advertisers benefit from us watching their ads), I can't see any ethical problems. Eventually (hopefully), these contracts will expire and on demand television will be available to everyone on the Internet. But that day may be far off in the future, and good television is on right now.
Slashdot Mirror
"I just witnessed a murder!"
"Who cares? Murders happen every day. It shouldn't surprise anyone that there are murders in this country."
"But isn't it your obligation to take down in the evidence I have in order to help catch the criminal?"
"Not my problem. Come back when you have a juicy crime to report. Something exciting, and maybe titillating, like a rape charge or a kidnapped showgirl. Then we might do something about it."
My mistake, I didn't realize Murdoch became a naturalized American citizen. Nevertheless, virtually every foreign newspaper has at some time published editorials trying to influence American policy, and every news organization in the world that is worth a damn has released classified documents at some point.
Releasing a stream of illegally-released classified information from a democratic nation?
Your poor wording aside, it is not illegal to publish classified documents as decided by the Supreme Court in New York Times Co v United States. Leaking classified documents is only a crime for government employees.
Too bad people can't see this for what it is: a foreign national releasing illegally-obtained classified information in a coordinated effort to deliberately try to influence public opinion and US policy.
Other than your claim that Assange obtained the documents illegally, which I just showed to be a complete lie, that description applies equally well to Rupert Murdoch, but I don't see you calling for his arrest.
not the government that works on behalf of the people
If you had bothered to read even a fraction of what Wikileaks put out you wouldn't be so ignorant as to make the claim that the US government works "on behalf of the people".
It results in an environment where closed and repressive societies have an advantage in the information realm over open and democratic societies.
Did it even occur to you that you just spent your entire post attacking someone who has done nothing illegal and arguing that the media should shut up and only publish whatever information the government decides they should? Sounds like you would enjoy living in a closed and repressive society to me.
With the mixed signals Sweden is sending, he should be careful. They could say they want him tonight, but by the next morning they might change their mind.
And from basic logic, not not guilty is the same thing as guilty. So logically, he must be guilty if he's not not guilty.
I rest my case.
I was responding to a post about the review's conclusions, not the scientific validity of the proxies, so obviously I didn't respond to McKitrick's claims. Don't insult me because I'm not discussing the topic that you so desperately want to debate. Start a new post if you can't stay on topic.
"If they were intentionally misleading the public, why would they omit the data from a later publication with much wider circulation?"
A report for the WMO has a wider circulation than NATURE, arguably the most prestigious science journal in the world? Are you kidding me?
The later publication contains all the information necessary to find the original articles. Anyone who actually deserves the label 'skeptic', instead of 'blind-faith conspiracy theorist' would have looked up the original articles by Mann and other to see how the proxy data was used to make the graph. Are you actually arguing a cover-up of data that is publicly available in the most prestigious journal in science? What kind of cover-up involves covering up material that is already in the public domain? If people like McKitrick are too damn lazy to check sources that's a mark against them.
"Intentionally supplying misleading figures is scientific misconduct"
Yes, it is. Except the report did not claim anywhere that it was intentional. Nor was it, considering that the dropping of tree ring data was made explicit in the original paper where the graph was used:
In one of the most notorious leaked e-mails, Jones, referring to the WMO report graph, described how he had "just completed Mike's trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years". Jones was referring to the fact that climatologist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in University Park had used direct temperature measurements to reconstruct temperatures over the past 20 years or so in a graph in an earlier Nature paper [2]. However, while Mann and his colleagues had clearly labelled which temperature lines were derived from direct measurements and which referred to proxy data, the graph submitted by Jones for the WMO report did not.
- UK climate data were not tampered with
If they were intentionally misleading the public, why had the same graph already been published with the missing information?
"What does bother me is the attempt to pass off the results of incompetent software engineering as valid science."
The evidence of your post tells me that the misrepresentation of facts doesn't seem to bother you at all.
Unfortunately, most of the newspapers in Canada are owned by one company, CanWest Global, which has exerted its editorial control over city papers so they match the the political leanings of its owners (first helping the Liberal party, now the Conservatives).
In their world, politicians acting on voters wishes is 'buying votes', while lobbyists using the promise of campaign contributions to get favourable legislation passed is 'Democracy in Action'.
It's the same kind of logic that makes 30 copies of crappy pop songs worth over a million dollars.
This act of preventing a future event is known as "bilking" and is a pretty sound argument against time travel. However, bilking is impossible for entangled particles.
I'm talking about backwards causation as a general principle.
On macroscopic scales not much changes since backward causes are limited...
Says who? What is the definitive study of backwards causation? I'd like to see some sources which claim that violating causality would not cause experimental problems. What about simple particle physics experiments where we are working on microscopic scales?
Moreover, sometimes science and mathematical calculations are hard. But that's the way the world is and the simplicity of calculations can't stand against the reality of observations. Calculation difficulties have been around since the three body problem.
You're not understanding my point. I didn't say the calculations or experiments would be difficult. I said that in any experiment where future events would have to be taken into account, you couldn't make definitive statements about your results. If I do an experiment to show A causes B and future events can also cause B, there is no way for me to state definitively that a seemingly positive result is caused by A and not some future event I can't control for. This is what makes causality so essential for science.
Particles are just as likely to be influenced by future interactions as they are by past interactions
This seems to be a poor understanding of time reversal symmetry. Particle physics works if you run time forward, or if you flip its sign and run time backwards. But that does not mean the same thing as what you said above. You can look at an experiment with each event in reverse, but you can't, for instance, say that event 2 was caused by event 1, but event 1 was caused by event 3. It only can follow the laws of physics if the causal order is 123 or 321.
The idea of 'backwards' causation has obvious major problems. First of all, you run into causal paradoxes. But more importantly, if the outcome of your experiment rests on future events, how can you do science? Every result becomes meaningless because you don't know if a future event caused it.
Um, we HAVE been seeing this cooling trend for a few years now, which is why misanthropic environmental hate groups have been trying to scrub the phrase "Global Warming" from the public lexicon and replace it with "Global Climate Change."
What the fuck are you talking about?
It's the same stupid bullshit I heard in 1999. Every time year X is cooler than year X-1, the same idiots come out claiming we're 'through the peak' and global warming is over. Do they know that regular global cycles act on top of global warming? Do they understand that two data points is not a trend?
Honestly, the fact that stupid shit like this gets +5 informative just shows how ignorant this community is when it comes to climate science.
They are not suggesting making the exit smaller, they are suggesting that an obstacle is placed further from the door to reduce the number of paths to the door and keep the number of people trying to push through the exit at any given time to a minimum. See Fig. 18 in the arXiv paper if you want to look at a diagram of this.
Interestingly enough, these results seem to have been known for a while (probably based on anecdotal evidence). I distinctly remember my fluid mechanics teacher telling our class almost exactly the same thing in 2006, explaining that a crowd headed for the exit behaved in similar ways to a fluid trying to pass through a small opening.
The equations describing gravitational waves do result from a simplifying approximation of Eintstein's equations, but it's the sort of simplifying approximation that really has to be quite accurate in many circumstances.
In fact, IIRC, it is the exact same approximation often used when looking at EM radiation from a source: the approximation is that the source is small, localized and far away from you.
Their example fails because they chose a number that has no significance on its own without including a unit of measurement. If you search 58.44 grams, instead of just the number, you get plenty of relevant results. And look at what happens if you take a famous unitless number from chemistry and do a google search. Again, plenty of good results.You can try it with the speed of light as well. A search for 3x10^8 yields nothing, but 3x10^8 m/s gives you the Wikipedia page for Speed Of Light. And as far as I can tell, Google gives you good results for useful numbers in Mathematics like the golden ratio. So I don't see what the problem is.
Hey, as long as they include this kind of hard-hitting news, I'm sure there will be some people who will pay for a subscription.
Main Entry: decimate
Function:transitive verb
3 a: to reduce drastically especially in number (cholera decimated the population)
b: to cause great destruction or harm to (firebombs decimated the city) (an industry decimated by recession)
So you would consider allowing someone to sue a telecom for allowing the government listen in on his or her phone conversations to grandma more important than the new protections put into the bill, namely requiring warrants for any American that happens to be wiretapped and putting the court back in the loop for said warrants?
More bullshit. It was already illegal to spy on Americans without warrants, you idiot. That's why the Telecoms BROKE THE LAW when they allowed Bush to tap phones without warrants. That's why they needed votes from spineless politicians like Obama to grant them immunity.
Obama's surveillance vote spurs blogging backlash:Sen. Barack Obama's vote for a federal surveillance law that he had previously opposed has sparked a backlash from his online advocates, who had energized his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Money Quote:
The Senate voted Wednesday on the bill updating FISA -- which had a provision to shield telecommunications companies that had cooperated in the surveillance. Obama joined the 68 other senators who voted to send the bill to the president's desk.
I don't give two shits about what failed amendments he voted for. In the end he was asked to vote on a bill that offered immunity for telcos and he did. If he cared the least bit about keeping the telecoms accountable, he would have voted against the bill itself. End of discussion.
What's even more frightening is that they modded you informative when it's public record that he voted to strip the immunity provisions out although the amendment failed.
What's frightening is that there are 4 people who modded you up without reading the article you posted.
It also doesn't help that there is an entire industry which exists to provide talking points to people too ignorant or busy to care about issues that affect them. The best opinion polls can do is tell you which side has the better PR machine.
Or Fermilab's results may not be accurate.
Both CDF and DZero are at Fermilab. Like the LHC, Fermilab houses many separate experiments under the same roof.
I can't believe no on Slashdot has pointed out that .015 cents != a penny and a half .015 dollars = a penny and a half.
No one pointed out the mistake because a) it is mentioned in the summary ("Looks like AT&T didn't learn from Verizon's inability to do math") and b) everyone here knows how to do elementary school arithmetic, so no one felt the need to point out the obvious.
To make an obvious point: You can ban books, you can burn books, but try to remove a literary work from the Internet and see how far you get.
We can't create stuff that goes faster than the speed of light, but we can create stuff that goes faster than the speed of sound. And just as you can't go fast enough to come back through an event horizon, information can't propagate fast enough in the experiment to go back across the subsonic/supersonic boundary. This shows us what it looks like to be in a situation like that of a black hole.
That's exactly right. What they have done is create an acoustic event horizon. It doesn't hold all the same properties as a real black hole, but as Korn says, there is a chance that you can see Hawking Radiation and possibly BH evaporation from this experiment. There has already been a paper suggesting that you can see Hawking radiation by looking at the density correlation functions of the BEC.
I appreciate your concern for me, and you both have given me hope because as opposed to pointless name calling, the discussion ended amicably! Good job!
Standards for discourse are shamefully low on the Internet, aren't they? :)
but because I have a little voice in the back of my head saying its not ethical. If hulu, adult swim, or any other content provider doesn't want me to have content... fine. I won't support them.
The ethics of getting around these blocks are considerably less clear than, say, the ethics of downloading torrents, in my opinion. The reason these blocks exist is because networks like NBC sell off the exclusive right to broadcast their shows in Canada to Canadian networks like CTV and Global. In their view, allowing Canadians access to Hulu so they can watch Law and Order: CI would be a violation of their contract giving CTV the rights to broadcast the show exclusively in Canada. But as a side effect, we are also refused access to shows like The Tonight Show, which are not broadcast on Canadian networks. So in cases like that, where no one is harmed by us watching the show on Hulu (and their advertisers benefit from us watching their ads), I can't see any ethical problems. Eventually (hopefully), these contracts will expire and on demand television will be available to everyone on the Internet. But that day may be far off in the future, and good television is on right now.