It's not tribalism, or even "us vs. them". It's absolutism. Absolutism is the shortened form of absolute extremism. The real world is full of grays. The only thing absolute is mathematics, which is a different domain than the real world.
Fortunately, mathematicians know that they're dealing in the abstract world and not in the real world (whether they're interested in the real world is a different matter). But other people, such as engineers, seem to have trouble comprehending this.
Climate science is hard. It's so hard even the experts don't completely understand it. And to even become an expert relies on knowledge about hundreds, even thousands of otherwise independent systems, as well as how they tie in together on the planet to form climate.
To expect Joe Sixpack to use climate science as the basis of their rationale behind whether to accept AGW is unreasonable. For the average person, there are only two ways to make up their mind: 1) trust other people or 2) trust their own observations.
You can see the problem with #1 right off the back. Which "other people" should Joe Sixpack trust? Scientists are people. Their religious leader, or the local politician, or their next door neighbor are all people as well. What differentiates a scientist from all those other people? Well, a scientist has a degree certifying the person's knowledge in an area. Only, a certificate is merely a piece of paper. Accepting that the degree implies expertness is a matter of trust as well. But what about all those other people, i.e. religious leader, politician, or neighbor? Those people are closer to Joe Sixpack. They have a constant and direct influence on their lives, and have already gained some measure of trust.
At this point, the more introspective and thoughtful Joe Sixpack would recognize that the latter group of people are not experts on the matter. So yeah, they might be trustworthy in the eyes of Joe Sixpack, but they probably know nothing about the climate and how it works (sure, if they're lucky, they live near a climate scientists, but that's rare). So they discard option #1, and go for option #2.
The human mind is not very good at processing things as vast and as complex as the climate. They cannot memorize and graph even two years worth of data inside their heads, not to mention ten (some people cannot even add inside their heads, but they're a special breed). They cannot correlate a special event in California with a special event in Europe. But they are good at processing the current day's weather, and drawing simple patterns based on notable weather anomalies. So that's exactly what they do.
So now that I've established the parameters of the problem, I leave everyone else to come up with solutions. No matter the solution, it involves at least interjecting into either the first or the second option. And to make things more complicated, there are big companies who are messing around with the first option already, and they have tons more money than most individuals to throw at the task.
The ones with a good science education do. Why do you think there's so much money and effort going into attacking science in the classroom? The key is not the results of science itself, but the process by which it is done.
How many commercially owned properties are earning a 10% profit margin even at release?
Commercially-owned properties might be dissolved after 12 years if they're not viable (a good thing), but personally-owned properties won't, because those are the ones that have the highest profit margins. Of course, there'll be ways for a company to try to take advantage of the eventual copyright expiration by making all of the revenue but passing very little of it to the actual holder. But it's 12 years before that happens, and that's a long time to wait for most corporations these days.
That's because Republicans before Nixon were not conservative, but progressive, even liberal. Then LBJ had to show up and turn everything upside down. Republicans were suddenly the conservative, and the bible thumpers while Democrats were the poor, the liberal and practically everybody else. Then, Reagan came along and added the rich to the party and it's been a mix of batshit insane and control freak since then.
If he runs, he will be buried by the Republican and Democrats. If the statement cannot be done figuratively, it will be done literally.
Remember all those laws they keep passing? You or somebody close to you has broken them, is breaking them, or will break them at any time.
Sincerely,
The ones actually holding the power in this country.
P.S. We are not you.
P.P.S We only let you think that it's you running the show, because we don't want you trying to jump out of the pot and possibly breaking it in the process. It's a very expensive pot from a long time ago, and we're very cheap.
P.P.P.S You're free to tell anybody you want about this. You can even show them this letter as proof. They'll just laugh and shake their heads as they walk away.
Actually, the U.S. did, and still does, have colonies. And while the rest of Europe has moved away from colonization and imperialism, the U.S. is still kinda stuck in that mentality. Only, it's not doing it so overtly. Just a regime change here, an overthrow there...
Diesel-powered and electric-powered locomotives are not a major source of CO2 emissions. Putting a nuke on rails nets very little benefit, while the increased risk is fairly substantial. The risk-reward ratio is simply not where it needs to be. It'd be safer and more efficient to build a large nuclear power plant that provides the power to the locomotive via a third rail. And diesel locomotive engines are already several times less polluting than diesel truck engines.
There's a reason why only ocean-worthy military vessels are powered by nukes. It's too risky to be operated by civilians who are usually poorly-trained and of uncertain discipline, and too risky to be operated in populated areas. Even if it ran through remote areas, you wouldn't want to have to condemn small bits of land after every major accident.
Yeah, like iTunes, Apple neglected it. Or rather, they didn't really do anything special to make sure it just worked.
Which is why nobody uses QuickTime anymore. Back in the day, Real and Realplayer was the crapware, and QuickTime was the premium codec. Now, it's Flash, and for good reason. Flash does not take over your system, even if it's got its shares of security holes.
It's not just looks. Space is also at a premium in many places. To state the obvious, having one box that's the monitor and PC takes up less space than having a monitor and a separate mid-tower or even desktop.
Joe average will tend to make his purchasing decision based on which machine has the largest list of features and the biggest numbers (works the same for stereos, TV's, etc).
I've been burned more than once when I bought something that didn't list a particular obvious and supposedly-ubiquitous feature, and ended up with a product that didn't have that feature.
The feature list never tells you what the product cannot do, only what it can do. Trying to figure out what it doesn't do is like trying to prove a negative.
So nowadays, if a feature is not on the list (and there's no further information on it online, which is not as easy to come by as you might think), I don't buy it.
Totally unneeded. Vendor updating slows computers needlessly. If there is a critical driver update, it gets pushed to MS and will be downloaded with Windows Update.
Any such updates are not considered critical by the automatic update service, and so you'd have to go to the Windows Update site to get it. This may appear to be a trivial step, but for less-savvy users, it's the difference between having the most recent driver and not.
And it's anecdotal, but I find that Windows Update is a bit late on the driver side.
In terms of usage by "criminals for illegal transactions and people who want to avoid income tax" (which for some reason, is not redundant or doubly so), I think USD tops the list. And I'm haven't even counted the investment banks, who are also doing a whole lot of stealing, just legally.
Seeing as how USD is such a huge vehicle for such nefarious activities, maybe we should avoid using the U.S. dollar too.
Ideally, they'd just pull the app from the Apple store and make it an Android exclusive. Put a message on their site kinda like this:
"Due to Apple's policies regarding international trademarks, we have decided to make our app exclusive to the Android platform."
Of course, it doesn't quite work that way in real life. Someone like Rovio might be able to get away with it, but for everyone else, their users are just going to switch to a different, but similar app. And these small developers really cannot afford to lose all their iOS users.
What about all the cops not caught on video abusing their authority, not lying about the facts, not comittig crimes, etc.?
Funny you should phrase it that way. Whether it was caught on video or not still makes it a crime, or at least a perversion of the justice system. That it's not provable only means that it cannot be proven and said offender cannot be found guilty in a court of law, not that it didn't occur or that it wasn't a perversion of justice.
So in Mississippi, 5 DVD's and 1 CD is approximately equivalent to 1.5 rape victims in the eyes of the justice system. That's real good to know.
Actually, rapists have to be on those sex offenders lists when they get out, which is basically a life sentence. Maybe it's better to compare it to some other crime, like manslaughter.
More likely, other spy agencies are storing online data on U.S. citizens, while the NSA stores data on citizens of other countries. Then, they trade information as needed.
Though from what I heard, the NSA has probably removed the U.S. citizen filters, so that it's keeping data on practically everybody under the sun.
I clicked on the first link on your post and did a doubletake when it opened up. I had to double check the URL to make sure I hadn't inadvertantly found myself looking at a cheap Wordpress skin of some sort.
And the security certificate for the https version is wrong, so that made it even worse.
I finally typed windows.microsoft.com in manually to confirm that I was actually at the Microsoft Windows site and not some random Joe's blog on Windows.
That having been said, this add-on is news to me as well. I always thought XP mode meant the compatibility mode. This is more like a XP VM on 7.
Except Microsoft is locking down Metro with ridiculous restrictions. The x86 version will still run any code, but the ARM version, which Microsoft needs to push for this initiative to be successful, is completely locked down.
To ultimately succeed, Microsoft needs to walk the fine line between control and freedom. Apple has cornered the control end of the spectrum, and Google is taking over the freedom end. Unfortunately, Microsoft seems to be failing this by trying to mimic Apple and asserting too much control.
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It's not tribalism, or even "us vs. them". It's absolutism. Absolutism is the shortened form of absolute extremism. The real world is full of grays. The only thing absolute is mathematics, which is a different domain than the real world.
Fortunately, mathematicians know that they're dealing in the abstract world and not in the real world (whether they're interested in the real world is a different matter). But other people, such as engineers, seem to have trouble comprehending this.
Climate science is hard. It's so hard even the experts don't completely understand it. And to even become an expert relies on knowledge about hundreds, even thousands of otherwise independent systems, as well as how they tie in together on the planet to form climate.
To expect Joe Sixpack to use climate science as the basis of their rationale behind whether to accept AGW is unreasonable. For the average person, there are only two ways to make up their mind: 1) trust other people or 2) trust their own observations.
You can see the problem with #1 right off the back. Which "other people" should Joe Sixpack trust? Scientists are people. Their religious leader, or the local politician, or their next door neighbor are all people as well. What differentiates a scientist from all those other people? Well, a scientist has a degree certifying the person's knowledge in an area. Only, a certificate is merely a piece of paper. Accepting that the degree implies expertness is a matter of trust as well. But what about all those other people, i.e. religious leader, politician, or neighbor? Those people are closer to Joe Sixpack. They have a constant and direct influence on their lives, and have already gained some measure of trust.
At this point, the more introspective and thoughtful Joe Sixpack would recognize that the latter group of people are not experts on the matter. So yeah, they might be trustworthy in the eyes of Joe Sixpack, but they probably know nothing about the climate and how it works (sure, if they're lucky, they live near a climate scientists, but that's rare). So they discard option #1, and go for option #2.
The human mind is not very good at processing things as vast and as complex as the climate. They cannot memorize and graph even two years worth of data inside their heads, not to mention ten (some people cannot even add inside their heads, but they're a special breed). They cannot correlate a special event in California with a special event in Europe. But they are good at processing the current day's weather, and drawing simple patterns based on notable weather anomalies. So that's exactly what they do.
So now that I've established the parameters of the problem, I leave everyone else to come up with solutions. No matter the solution, it involves at least interjecting into either the first or the second option. And to make things more complicated, there are big companies who are messing around with the first option already, and they have tons more money than most individuals to throw at the task.
People don't do that.
The ones with a good science education do. Why do you think there's so much money and effort going into attacking science in the classroom? The key is not the results of science itself, but the process by which it is done.
How many commercially owned properties are earning a 10% profit margin even at release?
Commercially-owned properties might be dissolved after 12 years if they're not viable (a good thing), but personally-owned properties won't, because those are the ones that have the highest profit margins. Of course, there'll be ways for a company to try to take advantage of the eventual copyright expiration by making all of the revenue but passing very little of it to the actual holder. But it's 12 years before that happens, and that's a long time to wait for most corporations these days.
not try to tell them that you know better than they do what would be good for them.
Funny they keep saying it's the Democrats who do that.
Secret is, they both do. Just in different ways. And with vastly different consequences.
That's because Republicans before Nixon were not conservative, but progressive, even liberal. Then LBJ had to show up and turn everything upside down. Republicans were suddenly the conservative, and the bible thumpers while Democrats were the poor, the liberal and practically everybody else. Then, Reagan came along and added the rich to the party and it's been a mix of batshit insane and control freak since then.
Dear Anonymous Coward,
If he runs, he will be buried by the Republican and Democrats. If the statement cannot be done figuratively, it will be done literally.
Remember all those laws they keep passing? You or somebody close to you has broken them, is breaking them, or will break them at any time.
Sincerely,
The ones actually holding the power in this country.
P.S. We are not you.
P.P.S We only let you think that it's you running the show, because we don't want you trying to jump out of the pot and possibly breaking it in the process. It's a very expensive pot from a long time ago, and we're very cheap.
P.P.P.S You're free to tell anybody you want about this. You can even show them this letter as proof. They'll just laugh and shake their heads as they walk away.
Why do you think copyright (and other "IP") legislation has only gotten stronger, not weaker.
I'll take the crazy guy any day. At least I know where he stands.
Actually, the U.S. did, and still does, have colonies. And while the rest of Europe has moved away from colonization and imperialism, the U.S. is still kinda stuck in that mentality. Only, it's not doing it so overtly. Just a regime change here, an overthrow there...
Diesel-powered and electric-powered locomotives are not a major source of CO2 emissions. Putting a nuke on rails nets very little benefit, while the increased risk is fairly substantial. The risk-reward ratio is simply not where it needs to be. It'd be safer and more efficient to build a large nuclear power plant that provides the power to the locomotive via a third rail. And diesel locomotive engines are already several times less polluting than diesel truck engines.
There's a reason why only ocean-worthy military vessels are powered by nukes. It's too risky to be operated by civilians who are usually poorly-trained and of uncertain discipline, and too risky to be operated in populated areas. Even if it ran through remote areas, you wouldn't want to have to condemn small bits of land after every major accident.
Yeah, like iTunes, Apple neglected it. Or rather, they didn't really do anything special to make sure it just worked.
Which is why nobody uses QuickTime anymore. Back in the day, Real and Realplayer was the crapware, and QuickTime was the premium codec. Now, it's Flash, and for good reason. Flash does not take over your system, even if it's got its shares of security holes.
It's not just looks. Space is also at a premium in many places. To state the obvious, having one box that's the monitor and PC takes up less space than having a monitor and a separate mid-tower or even desktop.
Joe average will tend to make his purchasing decision based on which machine has the largest list of features and the biggest numbers (works the same for stereos, TV's, etc).
I've been burned more than once when I bought something that didn't list a particular obvious and supposedly-ubiquitous feature, and ended up with a product that didn't have that feature.
The feature list never tells you what the product cannot do, only what it can do. Trying to figure out what it doesn't do is like trying to prove a negative.
So nowadays, if a feature is not on the list (and there's no further information on it online, which is not as easy to come by as you might think), I don't buy it.
Totally unneeded. Vendor updating slows computers needlessly. If there is a critical driver update, it gets pushed to MS and will be downloaded with Windows Update.
Any such updates are not considered critical by the automatic update service, and so you'd have to go to the Windows Update site to get it. This may appear to be a trivial step, but for less-savvy users, it's the difference between having the most recent driver and not.
And it's anecdotal, but I find that Windows Update is a bit late on the driver side.
In terms of usage by "criminals for illegal transactions and people who want to avoid income tax" (which for some reason, is not redundant or doubly so), I think USD tops the list. And I'm haven't even counted the investment banks, who are also doing a whole lot of stealing, just legally.
Seeing as how USD is such a huge vehicle for such nefarious activities, maybe we should avoid using the U.S. dollar too.
Ideally, they'd just pull the app from the Apple store and make it an Android exclusive. Put a message on their site kinda like this:
"Due to Apple's policies regarding international trademarks, we have decided to make our app exclusive to the Android platform."
Of course, it doesn't quite work that way in real life. Someone like Rovio might be able to get away with it, but for everyone else, their users are just going to switch to a different, but similar app. And these small developers really cannot afford to lose all their iOS users.
What about all the cops not caught on video abusing their authority, not lying about the facts, not comittig crimes, etc.?
Funny you should phrase it that way. Whether it was caught on video or not still makes it a crime, or at least a perversion of the justice system. That it's not provable only means that it cannot be proven and said offender cannot be found guilty in a court of law, not that it didn't occur or that it wasn't a perversion of justice.
So in Mississippi, 5 DVD's and 1 CD is approximately equivalent to 1.5 rape victims in the eyes of the justice system. That's real good to know.
Actually, rapists have to be on those sex offenders lists when they get out, which is basically a life sentence. Maybe it's better to compare it to some other crime, like manslaughter.
More likely, other spy agencies are storing online data on U.S. citizens, while the NSA stores data on citizens of other countries. Then, they trade information as needed.
Though from what I heard, the NSA has probably removed the U.S. citizen filters, so that it's keeping data on practically everybody under the sun.
I clicked on the first link on your post and did a doubletake when it opened up. I had to double check the URL to make sure I hadn't inadvertantly found myself looking at a cheap Wordpress skin of some sort.
And the security certificate for the https version is wrong, so that made it even worse.
I finally typed windows.microsoft.com in manually to confirm that I was actually at the Microsoft Windows site and not some random Joe's blog on Windows.
That having been said, this add-on is news to me as well. I always thought XP mode meant the compatibility mode. This is more like a XP VM on 7.
It is beyond me why you would expect anyone here to have any experience with faking things.
...while desktop users have to go into the Metro interface and gesture wildly for certain settings.
Except Microsoft is locking down Metro with ridiculous restrictions. The x86 version will still run any code, but the ARM version, which Microsoft needs to push for this initiative to be successful, is completely locked down.
To ultimately succeed, Microsoft needs to walk the fine line between control and freedom. Apple has cornered the control end of the spectrum, and Google is taking over the freedom end. Unfortunately, Microsoft seems to be failing this by trying to mimic Apple and asserting too much control.
Actually, they pretty much did. She married Bill Gates, and who do you think really holds the power in that house?