The point is that they knew about the earth getting warmer (and temperature swings) back then, and had a theory for it.
That theory has become one of many, and is no more accurate than any of the others just because people believed it for a long time. It could be argued that theory is probably less accurate than current existing theories because people obviously felt that they needed to come up with new theories that would more accurately describe empirical data which the old theory didn't.
In any case, the only theory which will end up mattering is the one which accurately answers most of our questions, given all of the data that we have been collecting about climate change.
When I was in grade school (back in the 60's) our science class was taught that the Earth behaves like a self-regulating system (think house thermostat).
The 60's were a _long_ time ago, and climatologists have learned a lot since then. All but a fanatic few are sure humans are causing some kind of effect in the environment, although they are still arguing about the size of the effect.
Your grade school teacher's "minor up swing" may be significant enough to end up killing billions of humans over time (or cause them to kill each other), although from the planet's geologic viewpoint it might not be such a big deal.
If you want to argue climatology, use _current_ data to make your judgements, not the highly-simplified and severely-out-of-date stuff you got back in grade school.
Perhaps a compromise is for patent examiners to assign a rating to the patent.
A different compromise might be to enforce a limited number of patents that can be enforced at any time (n patents, where n is some "reasonable" number that can be searched through by anyone to see if they are violating anything).
If a proper competitive-style selection process (auction process of some kind?) is institutionalized to select which applications are actually granted patent privileges, then most of the stupid patents should get weeded out since nobody would want to pay for a patent which is likely to get thrown out in court (and there will be lots of people trying to do so to free up more of the precious patent slots).
Yeah, and if you implement _anything_, make sure you read the the entirety of the document for every single patent filed in every single country which you might be potentially violating.
Shouldn't be more than a 100,000 or so documents to read through for a Hello, World! program - no problem!
Obviously the first is religious fundamentalism, but the second is clearly sane, rational thought rooted in the scientific method.
Actually, they're both clearly _not_ related to the scientific method. Unless you know of a foolproof way to test whether that omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent power exists or not.
It's completely unproven that the simplest answer is always correct
That's a common misstatement of Occam's Razor, but that's not what the Razor says.
A more accurate statement (but still paraphrased) is that, given one or more theories which explain all the observables, you should use the theory which seems simpler until you discover that it doesn't explain all the observables.
It's just a logical way of making a choice out of the infinite number of ways that any particular set of observables could come about if you allowed infinite complexity.
IBM will hire a machine shop & a clean room to rebuild an old hard drive from scratch for you, if they're paid enough. I'm not sure too many people have that amount of cash practically available though.
It might be interesting to enforce a maximum number of enforceable patents at any given time.
Not only would it make it easier to search the patent database for violations (given a small enough max # of patents), but if you include some kind of competitive process for the granting of the patent "slots", then the process should weed out a lot of the worthless patents.
Would you rather have inventors keep them as trade secrets and have that innovation squirreled away 'forever'?
I'd rather that inventors be able to use the fruits of their own "innovation" without worrying about someone else coming along and legally squashing them. There are very few "innovations" noawadays that people won't come up with independently given that they are trying to solve the same problem(s).
If someone can't figure out how to make a buck off their own ideas in the face of competition, then there's no reason to give them the power to stop other people from developing their own ideas.
If you can't protect the data, then it might be interesting to require that you be able to find out exactly who was asking for it (the real person, not a fictional identity).
Which is supposedly impossible due to the Uncertainty Principle (and the "virtual particle" sea), so that's not really an issue.
Besides, from what I remember (very vaguely), the background radiation permeating the universe makes even deep space at about 2deg Kelvin, so you have to go to extreme measures to try and get even close to absolute zero.
I think that any spacecraft capable of operating at Pluto's orbit is probably going to use an RTG (radiation thermal generator) for power supply (like the Voyagers did). I don't think solar panels will gather enough energy at that distance to power anything significant (unless the panels were absolutely humongous). Nuclear radiation probably doesn't care too much about what the ambient temperature is.
Why does it matter whether the cycle is natural or not? Even if it did turn out to be a natural variation in climate, it's still going to have exactly the same effect on us as if it were caused by us.
What matters is whether or not the change in the world's weather patterns is going to make life on this planet difficult for us humans, and we don't really need a long historical analysis in order to determine that - we just need the short-term data & some decent climate models. And most of our current models are telling us that we're in deep doodoo and digging a hole deeper every day.
I'm not hearing any plans from our so-called leaders about what we are going to do about it - the loudest voices seem to be saying that we shouldn't do squat because they don't want to pay for it.
Even if we are incapable of changing the actual climate, then we should actually have a plan on how we (humanity) can adapt our lives to accomodate the changing conditions, but as far as I can tell the people with power & money are perfectly content to let the poor get fucked over while they (the well-off) are free to move to wherever is most comfortable to live.
Of course, one of the problems with hydrogen is that it tends to leak through just about any kind of material since it's such a damn small molecule, so you need to keep replenishing it.
We (meaning the sane, not-in-denial people) are pretty damn sure the atmosphere (when taken as a whole) is retaining more heat energy than it has in the past.
The only argument is cause & the actual amount of additional heat energy, but there is no argument except in the minds of lunatics or ideologues that it is actually occurring.
I think you and I are using different definitions of "ownership".
To me, the examples of ownership that you have are described are merely about "possession" - a cat might realize that a particular piece of property has been claimed by another cat (through marking for example), but if the first cat feels strong & aggressive enough (and desires that piece of property of course), it will claim that piece of property for itself without expecting any uninvolved cats to stop it.
This is just "might-makes-right", with some physical identification to register a claim on a particular piece of property. Even the group action to steal property does not reflect the concept of ownership as I understand it. I do not call it "ownership".
To me, ownership implies that there is a societal mechanism to enforce tht concept of property, even against the strong individuals. If you have an example of cats using such a societal mechanism, please describe it.
You'll have to provide a legit reference about cat "peers" enforcing ownership before I'll take you seriously - it goes against everything that I've read about them so far.
Cats recognize _possession_, and a strong aggressive cat is quite willing to take those possessions from another cat if it wants them & thinks it is strong enough to do it without getting hurt. Unlike humans, the other cats won't gang up on the big cat to enforce the concept of "ownership".
It's stupid to anthromorphize animals to make a social argument about humans, especially when the behavior of the animals that you pick doesn't buttress your argument.
In those (few) cases where there appears to be a direct conflict, my explanation is that the bible was never meant to be a technical manual, the transcribers were not technical writers and whatever technical details there may have been were probably horribly mangled in the translation from god's language to Hebrew (or whatever language Moses spoke), and then from the stone tablets to the various languages we now read the bible in).
Or the more probable explanation is that it's all a bunch of B.S. (aside from the miscellaneous historical details), and just the result of a bunch of fanatics who were desperately seeking purpose in an uncaring world.
Either way, no one can absolutely say with any certainty what happens to them after they die - rejoining the Tao has just as much evidence for it as entering a Heaven or Hell, or as much evidence as the possibility that our souls might turn into little purple Gummi Bears secreted from the nose of an aardvark, i.e., none. There's no way to tell, and for those people who are concerned with observing the "real" world (i.e., scientists), it's a useless question to pursue (at least as far as their scientific inquiries are concerned).
Slashdot Mirror
That theory has become one of many, and is no more accurate than any of the others just because people believed it for a long time. It could be argued that theory is probably less accurate than current existing theories because people obviously felt that they needed to come up with new theories that would more accurately describe empirical data which the old theory didn't.
In any case, the only theory which will end up mattering is the one which accurately answers most of our questions, given all of the data that we have been collecting about climate change.
The 60's were a _long_ time ago, and climatologists have learned a lot since then. All but a fanatic few are sure humans are causing some kind of effect in the environment, although they are still arguing about the size of the effect.
Your grade school teacher's "minor up swing" may be significant enough to end up killing billions of humans over time (or cause them to kill each other), although from the planet's geologic viewpoint it might not be such a big deal.
If you want to argue climatology, use _current_ data to make your judgements, not the highly-simplified and severely-out-of-date stuff you got back in grade school.
A different compromise might be to enforce a limited number of patents that can be enforced at any time (n patents, where n is some "reasonable" number that can be searched through by anyone to see if they are violating anything).
If a proper competitive-style selection process (auction process of some kind?) is institutionalized to select which applications are actually granted patent privileges, then most of the stupid patents should get weeded out since nobody would want to pay for a patent which is likely to get thrown out in court (and there will be lots of people trying to do so to free up more of the precious patent slots).
Yeah, and if you implement _anything_, make sure you read the the entirety of the document for every single patent filed in every single country which you might be potentially violating.
Shouldn't be more than a 100,000 or so documents to read through for a Hello, World! program - no problem!
Incorrect. A bad model will at least let you put together experiments to tell you that the model is bad.
Actually, they're both clearly _not_ related to the scientific method. Unless you know of a foolproof way to test whether that omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent power exists or not.
How will you know you've got the _right_ higher being?
Odin might be kinda PO'd at all the unbelievers he has to sort out.
Guess you'll have to wait until you're dead to find out.
It's impossible to prove or disprove ID: "an all-powerful Creator did it, and did in it such a way to make you think otherwise!"
That's why it's not science, and never will be.
That's a common misstatement of Occam's Razor, but that's not what the Razor says.
A more accurate statement (but still paraphrased) is that, given one or more theories which explain all the observables, you should use the theory which seems simpler until you discover that it doesn't explain all the observables.
It's just a logical way of making a choice out of the infinite number of ways that any particular set of observables could come about if you allowed infinite complexity.
IBM will hire a machine shop & a clean room to rebuild an old hard drive from scratch for you, if they're paid enough. I'm not sure too many people have that amount of cash practically available though.
It might be interesting to enforce a maximum number of enforceable patents at any given time.
Not only would it make it easier to search the patent database for violations (given a small enough max # of patents), but if you include some kind of competitive process for the granting of the patent "slots", then the process should weed out a lot of the worthless patents.
I'd rather that inventors be able to use the fruits of their own "innovation" without worrying about someone else coming along and legally squashing them. There are very few "innovations" noawadays that people won't come up with independently given that they are trying to solve the same problem(s).
If someone can't figure out how to make a buck off their own ideas in the face of competition, then there's no reason to give them the power to stop other people from developing their own ideas.
Too bad she only goes for the healthy studs. :-)
The geeks still aren't cut any slack
If you can't protect the data, then it might be interesting to require that you be able to find out exactly who was asking for it (the real person, not a fictional identity).
Which is supposedly impossible due to the Uncertainty Principle (and the "virtual particle" sea), so that's not really an issue.
Besides, from what I remember (very vaguely), the background radiation permeating the universe makes even deep space at about 2deg Kelvin, so you have to go to extreme measures to try and get even close to absolute zero.
I think that any spacecraft capable of operating at Pluto's orbit is probably going to use an RTG (radiation thermal generator) for power supply (like the Voyagers did). I don't think solar panels will gather enough energy at that distance to power anything significant (unless the panels were absolutely humongous). Nuclear radiation probably doesn't care too much about what the ambient temperature is.
Why does it matter whether the cycle is natural or not? Even if it did turn out to be a natural variation in climate, it's still going to have exactly the same effect on us as if it were caused by us.
What matters is whether or not the change in the world's weather patterns is going to make life on this planet difficult for us humans, and we don't really need a long historical analysis in order to determine that - we just need the short-term data & some decent climate models. And most of our current models are telling us that we're in deep doodoo and digging a hole deeper every day.
I'm not hearing any plans from our so-called leaders about what we are going to do about it - the loudest voices seem to be saying that we shouldn't do squat because they don't want to pay for it.
Even if we are incapable of changing the actual climate, then we should actually have a plan on how we (humanity) can adapt our lives to accomodate the changing conditions, but as far as I can tell the people with power & money are perfectly content to let the poor get fucked over while they (the well-off) are free to move to wherever is most comfortable to live.
But, of course, you need to make sure that the amount of gas that you have inside your bag weighs less than the amount of air that it is displacing.
Of course, one of the problems with hydrogen is that it tends to leak through just about any kind of material since it's such a damn small molecule, so you need to keep replenishing it.
That's not truth.
We (meaning the sane, not-in-denial people) are pretty damn sure the atmosphere (when taken as a whole) is retaining more heat energy than it has in the past.
The only argument is cause & the actual amount of additional heat energy, but there is no argument except in the minds of lunatics or ideologues that it is actually occurring.
Jeez, you must really hate those guys to try and get them on the Homeland Security watchlist like that.
I think you and I are using different definitions of "ownership".
To me, the examples of ownership that you have are described are merely about "possession" - a cat might realize that a particular piece of property has been claimed by another cat (through marking for example), but if the first cat feels strong & aggressive enough (and desires that piece of property of course), it will claim that piece of property for itself without expecting any uninvolved cats to stop it.
This is just "might-makes-right", with some physical identification to register a claim on a particular piece of property. Even the group action to steal property does not reflect the concept of ownership as I understand it. I do not call it "ownership".
To me, ownership implies that there is a societal mechanism to enforce tht concept of property, even against the strong individuals. If you have an example of cats using such a societal mechanism, please describe it.
You'll have to provide a legit reference about cat "peers" enforcing ownership before I'll take you seriously - it goes against everything that I've read about them so far.
Cats recognize _possession_, and a strong aggressive cat is quite willing to take those possessions from another cat if it wants them & thinks it is strong enough to do it without getting hurt. Unlike humans, the other cats won't gang up on the big cat to enforce the concept of "ownership".
It's stupid to anthromorphize animals to make a social argument about humans, especially when the behavior of the animals that you pick doesn't buttress your argument.
Or the more probable explanation is that it's all a bunch of B.S. (aside from the miscellaneous historical details), and just the result of a bunch of fanatics who were desperately seeking purpose in an uncaring world.
Either way, no one can absolutely say with any certainty what happens to them after they die - rejoining the Tao has just as much evidence for it as entering a Heaven or Hell, or as much evidence as the possibility that our souls might turn into little purple Gummi Bears secreted from the nose of an aardvark, i.e., none. There's no way to tell, and for those people who are concerned with observing the "real" world (i.e., scientists), it's a useless question to pursue (at least as far as their scientific inquiries are concerned).