Predictions are rarely that specific. They're not going to tell you that's there's a fresh water "plume" as TFA so indicates. What predictions do is give you trends, and the effect of these trends on the overall system. The predicted effects are also not specific, but instead the prediction of more trends.
Reality is a little different. There's a lot of noise in the system. The variances of what happens and is expected to happen can be extreme. But the average--the predicted trend--will remain barring unaccounted for variables that may make things much worse or much better. This plume may be a part of the trend. Or it may be one such deviation from the system. Or it could be an unaccounted for variable that's about to accelerate the glacial melt timeline significantly.
Only time will tell whether the initial predictions still hold after this. And if the data doesn't support it, it will be revised. But I can't imagine that 20+ years worth of data supporting the predicted trend will be outright reversed by one event. To even fancy such a notion so would be wishful thinking indeed. More likely, things will either get a little better, or a little worse.
Of course, there actually is a point of no return that we are quickly approaching, and even if things go better than expected for us and the predictions are on the high side, we'll still end up there if we don't change our lifestyles. There's a huge amount of methane stored in the Siberian tundra. Methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2. It's a missile compared to the bullet that the trapped CO2 in glacial ice would be. As the tundra begins to defrost, methane gets released into the atmosphere. When the climate reaches the point where the permafrost is no longer permanent, no amount of CO2 emissions cuts will be able to prevent the sudden release of greenhouse gas into the environment. And at that point, everyone might as well start staking their turf on high ground.
The U.S. is supposed to be like the European Union. A single whole but composed of multiple sovereign governments that retain most of the power to themselves.
FTFY.
Actually, the U.S. is more of a federation than a confederation, which is what the EU is more like. For the historically challenged, we tried the confederation and it didn't work.
The EU's central organization is much weaker than the federal government of the U.S. Membership is voluntary, and states can leave or be kicked out. Trying to secede or kick another state out of the U.S. doesn't end well, as history has shown.
There was supposed to be a balance between states' powers and federal powers. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. The federal government has violated the sovereignty of the states time and again, but people are complacent and not interested in such affairs. Again, the last time this happened, there was war. A lot of war.
I once worked at a place where the Windows group policy was to enter the username on all logins (it was really to wipe the previous username). So unlike most other Windows shops, you had to type both to log in. The system was set up so that we get messages about repeated erroneous logins, including the computer name, username, and time. We use to get notices all the time that someone was logging into a particular computer with usernames like S33Y0uL@t3r and !L0veY0u.
Any little thing is the spark. You need kindling like discontent in the general population for a fire. Or, when the atmosphere itself becomes toxic, you get an explosion.
...that he's complaining the fact that expression is in the citizens' hands and thereforce culture is being lost, or that he's implying the idea that culture is derived from and only consists of media that's filtered through a large company.
Content being in the user's hands is actually a positive for culture. Culture thrives on the freedom of expression. Its very existence is predicated on it. The more widespread the particular instance of expression, the stronger the culture.
I can see why he might be complaining that U.S. popular culture is displacing Canadian popular culture (U.S. popular culture is by and large obnoxious and trashy in all respects), but that has nothing to do with either of his positions. Maybe instead, he should complain that parents aren't teaching their children properly, or that Canadian culture isn't well-defined enough for children to sufficiently differenciated it from U.S. culture. Both make more argumentative sense if he's decrying the loss of Canadian culture through the infiltration of U.S. popular culture.
As it were, he just comes across as trying to assert that the natural number 1 is equivalent to the logarithmic.
You forgot the caveat: he hasn't done any of these things yet.
I'll be willing to bet that if he gets as wealthy and influential as the folks running the MPAA and RIAA shows, he'd be doing the same thing. In the fight against oppression, yesterday's ally will become tomorrow's enemy. That's just how things are.
It's not their duty per se, but they're the only ones who have any standing in getting the data back. It's your duty to ensure that your data is safe, whether that means keeping a local backup, or uploading it to multiple providers. Unless you signed some kind of contract with your host, just because your data is being hosted there does not entitle you to any protections.
Now, a large cloud provider like Amazon might be able to maintain AWS service even if their US servers get seized, but only because they have servers in other countries that may not be simultaneously seized.
Provisions in SOPA get around that bit by disabling the DNS outright so that the load balancing can't even kick in.
Government organizations may be incompetent from your standpoint, but they're incredibly competent from theirs: which is to funnel taxpayer money into private interests. If said private interests are threatened, you get to witness what they're actually capable of.
It's not merely untenable. It's ridiculous, irrespective of copyright.
Content gets produced. If somebody wants to pay for its consumption, they will pay for it. If they don't, they won't. Even with government-sanctioned monopolies, there's no guarantee that the creation of content itself will automatically produce value. It doesn't. Value is ascribed to the content by the people consuming it.
For example, I'm producing content right now by writing this. But nobody's going to want to pay to read it. Hell, some people might demand that I pay them because it was such a waste of their time. I have as much a right to make money from this content, as companies have a right to make money from their products. Which is to say, I will make money if someone's willing to pay for it, and I will not if they're not so inclined.
Like everything else, content is only worth as much as someone's willing to pay for it. To think that content is somehow automatically valuable is not just ignorant and naive, it's an outright denial of reality.
You should explain that the big deal for Wikipedia is that if one of these bills were passed, someone (or some company) can claim one of Wikipedia's pages is infringing on said entity's copyrights and have Wikipedia temporarily taken down without presenting any actual evidence of that infringement. As Wikipedia has many pages, its content is user-generated, and the full history of each page is maintained, not only can this inadvertently be true, but it can be repeated over and over again until the people running Wikipedia either quits out of frustration or becomes irrelevant due to the continuous downtime.
You can also add that while Wikipedia may have the legal resources to fight such claims, it is firstly resources better off used to maintain and grow their services instead of fighting potentially frivilous but immediately damaging claims, and secondly that the individual blogger, personal sites, and sites run by smaller organizations will not have access to such legal resources, and will be forced to shut down indefinitely without recourse. If your acquaintance has a personal site or blog, you can point out that an infringement claim can come from anyone, especially from competitors looking to steal page views from your acquaintance's blog, or from enemies your acquaintance may have made by writing something offensive to that individual, or even (though it's a stretch) from mobs like Anonymous who may just do it for the lulz.
The only winners of this are the entities who don't have an internet presence, and don't care to.
Nah, the media is just a very small portion of it. In fact, newspapers are mostly against the such laws.
The ones driving these laws are the "content industry." Books, television shows, movies, etc. They are unfortunately much bigger than the newspaper industry. And there's significant integration as well, though there are still plenty of newspapers out there not affiliated with some other major media organization.
I don't know how you guys do it, but I think it's time to get yourself another MP then. Perhaps somebody who won't bend over backwards for industry groups and your former colony.
That you can watch this batshit craziness go on and still not implode is damned near amazing.
Just wait another 5 years.
The IP war in the U.S. and other first world countries is this generation's equivalent to the space race of the former U.S.S.R. and (much of) the second world.
Well, there's also the chance that since something's going to be up to a year behind in terms of security fixes, the browser is inherently less secure than the regular version.
In a corporate, tightly managed, closed environment, where few have administrative privileges and there's a huge firewall blocking everything but port 80 and 21 access to other machines, as well as constantly monitoring communications, I suspect it's ok to use a less secure browser. However, on a home user's machine, where pretty much anything goes, the version with the most up-to-date security patches would be the preferable one to use.
Or, it could be what you just said, that FF management is too arrogant to admit they were wrong. Frankly, I think the fact that the ESR is inherently less secure because they only do security updates once a year is more indicative of that than the publicity, but that's just my interpretation of the events.
A usable design will not bring attention to itself when examined critically, certainly, but it doesn't have to be borning. It just has to be intuitive. And it has to draw the user to where the user wants to go, as opposed to where the programmer or computer wants the user to be.
Boring and efficient is the little square power button inside the Windows Vista/7 start menu (ignore the other options next to it--that bit sucks and makes the little square button worse that it could be). But it's not the best design. A better design might be a button that is labeled "shutdown" somewhere in the start menu. You can use the drop-down for this purpose, and it would be made tons better if the drop-down actually showed the action that hitting the power button would perform, instead of being a submenu.
However, the start menu button itself is an example of good design. The user is drawn to it because of its size relative to the task bar, and the function is apparent because it's round and resembles a--you guessed it--power button. The designer recognized that people hit the power button to both turn on and turn off something. So to "turn on" a program, that's where to go.
Cognitive function does not decline with ALS. Most nervous diseases will destroy the mind as well as the body, so that when the body finally dies, the mind really isn't there anymore. Not so with ALS. It's one of the real tragedies of the disease. You're literally watching yourself waste away, unable to do anything about it. You know the progress of your disease, and you can still literally put a number to the time you have remaining.
The diagnosis itself is incredibly disheartening. There are no known treatments for it--not even give it a fighting chance like cancer. The cause itself is completely unknown, though it's linked to both neurotoxins and head trauma (but specific causes are unknown).
Hawking is lucky--very lucky--that while his disease has wasted most of his nervous and muscular system away, the most important parts remain intact. And for 50 years, no less, when most people live 1 to 2 years at the very most. Granted, he also got the disease fairly early, but so has many others, and not to the same effect.
You have to start somewhere. It's not pretty, and it's not perfect, but without a beginning, you're never getting there.
It is naive to even imagine that you'll get it right the first time. An issue as complex as this would need to go through several iterations just to cover all of the exceptions and finge cases, even if most of it works out the first time around.
How about just lying? Or, if you're more Hanlon-inclined, how about being too lazy to fact-check?
Do you really think that if many of these people actually knew what they were talking about, that they'd be spouting the crap that they do? Usually, they're ignorant, and willfully remain that way, so that they can maintain their stance without appearing morally bankrupt--to themselves.
Considering planes are designed to stay afloat for as long as possible when they land in water, you may not actually be wrong there, at least with respect to the cargo doors.
You should read up on the FBI in its conception, during Hoover's reign. Contempt for the rule of law would the mildest description of their "philosophy."
How is the FBI different now from when they were being led by Hoover? The correct question you should be asking is, are they any different now than then?
Slashdot Mirror
Predictions are rarely that specific. They're not going to tell you that's there's a fresh water "plume" as TFA so indicates. What predictions do is give you trends, and the effect of these trends on the overall system. The predicted effects are also not specific, but instead the prediction of more trends.
Reality is a little different. There's a lot of noise in the system. The variances of what happens and is expected to happen can be extreme. But the average--the predicted trend--will remain barring unaccounted for variables that may make things much worse or much better. This plume may be a part of the trend. Or it may be one such deviation from the system. Or it could be an unaccounted for variable that's about to accelerate the glacial melt timeline significantly.
Only time will tell whether the initial predictions still hold after this. And if the data doesn't support it, it will be revised. But I can't imagine that 20+ years worth of data supporting the predicted trend will be outright reversed by one event. To even fancy such a notion so would be wishful thinking indeed. More likely, things will either get a little better, or a little worse.
Of course, there actually is a point of no return that we are quickly approaching, and even if things go better than expected for us and the predictions are on the high side, we'll still end up there if we don't change our lifestyles. There's a huge amount of methane stored in the Siberian tundra. Methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2. It's a missile compared to the bullet that the trapped CO2 in glacial ice would be. As the tundra begins to defrost, methane gets released into the atmosphere. When the climate reaches the point where the permafrost is no longer permanent, no amount of CO2 emissions cuts will be able to prevent the sudden release of greenhouse gas into the environment. And at that point, everyone might as well start staking their turf on high ground.
The U.S. is supposed to be like the European Union. A single whole but composed of multiple sovereign governments that retain most of the power to themselves.
FTFY.
Actually, the U.S. is more of a federation than a confederation, which is what the EU is more like. For the historically challenged, we tried the confederation and it didn't work.
The EU's central organization is much weaker than the federal government of the U.S. Membership is voluntary, and states can leave or be kicked out. Trying to secede or kick another state out of the U.S. doesn't end well, as history has shown.
There was supposed to be a balance between states' powers and federal powers. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case. The federal government has violated the sovereignty of the states time and again, but people are complacent and not interested in such affairs. Again, the last time this happened, there was war. A lot of war.
I once worked at a place where the Windows group policy was to enter the username on all logins (it was really to wipe the previous username). So unlike most other Windows shops, you had to type both to log in. The system was set up so that we get messages about repeated erroneous logins, including the computer name, username, and time. We use to get notices all the time that someone was logging into a particular computer with usernames like S33Y0uL@t3r and !L0veY0u.
Any little thing is the spark. You need kindling like discontent in the general population for a fire. Or, when the atmosphere itself becomes toxic, you get an explosion.
...that he's complaining the fact that expression is in the citizens' hands and thereforce culture is being lost, or that he's implying the idea that culture is derived from and only consists of media that's filtered through a large company.
Content being in the user's hands is actually a positive for culture. Culture thrives on the freedom of expression. Its very existence is predicated on it. The more widespread the particular instance of expression, the stronger the culture.
I can see why he might be complaining that U.S. popular culture is displacing Canadian popular culture (U.S. popular culture is by and large obnoxious and trashy in all respects), but that has nothing to do with either of his positions. Maybe instead, he should complain that parents aren't teaching their children properly, or that Canadian culture isn't well-defined enough for children to sufficiently differenciated it from U.S. culture. Both make more argumentative sense if he's decrying the loss of Canadian culture through the infiltration of U.S. popular culture.
As it were, he just comes across as trying to assert that the natural number 1 is equivalent to the logarithmic.
You forgot the caveat: he hasn't done any of these things yet.
I'll be willing to bet that if he gets as wealthy and influential as the folks running the MPAA and RIAA shows, he'd be doing the same thing. In the fight against oppression, yesterday's ally will become tomorrow's enemy. That's just how things are.
It's not their duty per se, but they're the only ones who have any standing in getting the data back. It's your duty to ensure that your data is safe, whether that means keeping a local backup, or uploading it to multiple providers. Unless you signed some kind of contract with your host, just because your data is being hosted there does not entitle you to any protections.
Now, a large cloud provider like Amazon might be able to maintain AWS service even if their US servers get seized, but only because they have servers in other countries that may not be simultaneously seized.
Provisions in SOPA get around that bit by disabling the DNS outright so that the load balancing can't even kick in.
That was the point, and has been the point all along: to break the internet to preserve the corporate dinosaurs.
Isn't that what Freenet is? And haven't they been working on a darknet version that does exactly what you propose: be limited to only known hosts?
Government organizations may be incompetent from your standpoint, but they're incredibly competent from theirs: which is to funnel taxpayer money into private interests. If said private interests are threatened, you get to witness what they're actually capable of.
It's not merely untenable. It's ridiculous, irrespective of copyright.
Content gets produced. If somebody wants to pay for its consumption, they will pay for it. If they don't, they won't. Even with government-sanctioned monopolies, there's no guarantee that the creation of content itself will automatically produce value. It doesn't. Value is ascribed to the content by the people consuming it.
For example, I'm producing content right now by writing this. But nobody's going to want to pay to read it. Hell, some people might demand that I pay them because it was such a waste of their time. I have as much a right to make money from this content, as companies have a right to make money from their products. Which is to say, I will make money if someone's willing to pay for it, and I will not if they're not so inclined.
Like everything else, content is only worth as much as someone's willing to pay for it. To think that content is somehow automatically valuable is not just ignorant and naive, it's an outright denial of reality.
You should explain that the big deal for Wikipedia is that if one of these bills were passed, someone (or some company) can claim one of Wikipedia's pages is infringing on said entity's copyrights and have Wikipedia temporarily taken down without presenting any actual evidence of that infringement. As Wikipedia has many pages, its content is user-generated, and the full history of each page is maintained, not only can this inadvertently be true, but it can be repeated over and over again until the people running Wikipedia either quits out of frustration or becomes irrelevant due to the continuous downtime.
You can also add that while Wikipedia may have the legal resources to fight such claims, it is firstly resources better off used to maintain and grow their services instead of fighting potentially frivilous but immediately damaging claims, and secondly that the individual blogger, personal sites, and sites run by smaller organizations will not have access to such legal resources, and will be forced to shut down indefinitely without recourse. If your acquaintance has a personal site or blog, you can point out that an infringement claim can come from anyone, especially from competitors looking to steal page views from your acquaintance's blog, or from enemies your acquaintance may have made by writing something offensive to that individual, or even (though it's a stretch) from mobs like Anonymous who may just do it for the lulz.
The only winners of this are the entities who don't have an internet presence, and don't care to.
Nah, the media is just a very small portion of it. In fact, newspapers are mostly against the such laws.
The ones driving these laws are the "content industry." Books, television shows, movies, etc. They are unfortunately much bigger than the newspaper industry. And there's significant integration as well, though there are still plenty of newspapers out there not affiliated with some other major media organization.
Uh, yeah, veering us into a much closer brick wall whereby the end result would be neither car nor wall falls under my definition of "save" too.
As to GP, the only person who can save you is yourself.
I don't know how you guys do it, but I think it's time to get yourself another MP then. Perhaps somebody who won't bend over backwards for industry groups and your former colony.
That you can watch this batshit craziness go on and still not implode is damned near amazing.
Just wait another 5 years.
The IP war in the U.S. and other first world countries is this generation's equivalent to the space race of the former U.S.S.R. and (much of) the second world.
Heh, there's an add-on to detect add-on compatibility? What happens when the add-on campatibility reporter becomes incompatible? Stack overflow?
Well, there's also the chance that since something's going to be up to a year behind in terms of security fixes, the browser is inherently less secure than the regular version.
In a corporate, tightly managed, closed environment, where few have administrative privileges and there's a huge firewall blocking everything but port 80 and 21 access to other machines, as well as constantly monitoring communications, I suspect it's ok to use a less secure browser. However, on a home user's machine, where pretty much anything goes, the version with the most up-to-date security patches would be the preferable one to use.
Or, it could be what you just said, that FF management is too arrogant to admit they were wrong. Frankly, I think the fact that the ESR is inherently less secure because they only do security updates once a year is more indicative of that than the publicity, but that's just my interpretation of the events.
A usable design will not bring attention to itself when examined critically, certainly, but it doesn't have to be borning. It just has to be intuitive. And it has to draw the user to where the user wants to go, as opposed to where the programmer or computer wants the user to be.
Boring and efficient is the little square power button inside the Windows Vista/7 start menu (ignore the other options next to it--that bit sucks and makes the little square button worse that it could be). But it's not the best design. A better design might be a button that is labeled "shutdown" somewhere in the start menu. You can use the drop-down for this purpose, and it would be made tons better if the drop-down actually showed the action that hitting the power button would perform, instead of being a submenu.
However, the start menu button itself is an example of good design. The user is drawn to it because of its size relative to the task bar, and the function is apparent because it's round and resembles a--you guessed it--power button. The designer recognized that people hit the power button to both turn on and turn off something. So to "turn on" a program, that's where to go.
Cognitive function does not decline with ALS. Most nervous diseases will destroy the mind as well as the body, so that when the body finally dies, the mind really isn't there anymore. Not so with ALS. It's one of the real tragedies of the disease. You're literally watching yourself waste away, unable to do anything about it. You know the progress of your disease, and you can still literally put a number to the time you have remaining.
The diagnosis itself is incredibly disheartening. There are no known treatments for it--not even give it a fighting chance like cancer. The cause itself is completely unknown, though it's linked to both neurotoxins and head trauma (but specific causes are unknown).
Hawking is lucky--very lucky--that while his disease has wasted most of his nervous and muscular system away, the most important parts remain intact. And for 50 years, no less, when most people live 1 to 2 years at the very most. Granted, he also got the disease fairly early, but so has many others, and not to the same effect.
It's not luck. It's a special case that progresses very slowly, and does not attack his vitals. They determined this even way back.
You have to start somewhere. It's not pretty, and it's not perfect, but without a beginning, you're never getting there.
It is naive to even imagine that you'll get it right the first time. An issue as complex as this would need to go through several iterations just to cover all of the exceptions and finge cases, even if most of it works out the first time around.
How about just lying? Or, if you're more Hanlon-inclined, how about being too lazy to fact-check?
Do you really think that if many of these people actually knew what they were talking about, that they'd be spouting the crap that they do? Usually, they're ignorant, and willfully remain that way, so that they can maintain their stance without appearing morally bankrupt--to themselves.
Considering planes are designed to stay afloat for as long as possible when they land in water, you may not actually be wrong there, at least with respect to the cargo doors.
You should read up on the FBI in its conception, during Hoover's reign. Contempt for the rule of law would the mildest description of their "philosophy."
How is the FBI different now from when they were being led by Hoover? The correct question you should be asking is, are they any different now than then?