I heard that quote on NPR this morning, and I couldn't believe it. The Surgeon General, the nation's doctor, is supposed to strike a balance between being a team player and telling the truth? Wow. Have politicians really become that warped that they don't even hear the massive problem with a statement like this? Has it become officially sanctioned, approved and legitimized that lying is being a good team player? Even when the health of the nation is at stake?
Some days, I feel like we should take all politicians, shoot them, and start fresh.
I love it when people bring up the Y2K bug or the ozone hole when talking about doom&gloom that didn't come about. It conclusively proves that they have no idea what the hell they're talking about. It's just a shame that there isn't a cosmic idiocy hammer that strikes anyone who displays such wilfull ignorance.
#1 Local weather stations aren't the only input. #2 Very few are actually at airports - and airports (aerodromes) were tarmac based since after WW1. #3 Being within 30 feet of an AC exhaust (especially small window based ones) means squat for the local temperature. #4 Local encroachment does not yield a small but systematic increase in temperature - it yields spikes. #5 Average temperature readings from a population of sensors cancel out local variations. #6 A systematic temperature increase is a systematic temperature increase, regardless of source.
Yes, the individual sensors record the heat-island effect that is found in urban environments. Congratulations. You found out something that is 15 years old. Yes, urban environments are warmer than non-urban environments.
However, you are an idiot if you believe that you are the first to think of this. Not only that, but carefully check the trend of both graphs shown on the homepage: after 1950, they both trend upward. And that's the key part: regardless of where you are, where you look at, temperature trends are on the up tick. Steadily. Some parts see heavier up ticks than others. But the end result is the same: things are getting warmer.
Local construction does play a part, but it merely exacerbates a trend that shows up everywhere you look.
Yes, but few are as distracting as "Jack in the box come back of the year", or something like that. I understand ads, I know how to skip the annoying ones, but this stuff just confuses the hell out of me. Especially if the connection is not there... like in a lot of the games now.
Personally, I don't care much about achievements to begin with. Now having them sponsored... complete and utter nonsense. I already cringe when I see them on ESPN, I'll cringe even more when I'll see them in a game I PAID MONEY FOR! Maybe in a free game I'll accept it, but this is just nonsense.
Or we could, I don't know, just use the friggin official definition of what makes an agent covert... but it seems to me you'd rather substitute your own Hollywood-inspired fantasies for that.
So you'd like to have powerful state assemblies dictating one-size-fits-all laws that don't really work for 49% of the state's population? Newsflash - people are either not as special as you'd like to think (those one-size-fits-all civil rights legislations come to mind), and governments for smaller constituencies have the ability to REALLY fuck minorities, as your likelihood to find a majoritarian group of asshats increases as you decrease population size.
Personally, I'm quite happy that I can go anywhere in the US and be guaranteed a certain minimum set of laws. I'd be even happier if I could go anywhere in the world and be guaranteed the same set of minimum laws everywhere. Now, that doesn't address the overall idiocy of lawmakers at any level, but I don't think that that's what your complaint was about.
Wow, I'd really like to know how you determine that a cover operative wasn't covert. I mean, the original story ran under the tagline "cover operative", she had been a covert operative (as in, the CIA sent her out as a cover operative), and her mission had not been declassified yet.
And yet, you have no problems sitting in judgment on what constitute a covert operative? Why don't you leave that to the people who run covert operations? Or would that mean that an actual crime had been committed, for which heads should have rolled?
No one so far has been able to explain to me why this wasn't a crime outside of some handwaving of "oh, she wasn't REALLY cover." The only thing I can think of is that the executive has the ability to declassify things, and it would have been trivial to declassify her status and her operations. Which to me simply means that Bush would again have proven how disastrous of a president he is.
Einstein was an alien. The hair should have given it away anyway.
If anybody's wondering, I'm referring to his "Annus Mirabiliis" - the year he published three ground-breaking papers on three different topics. Yeah, yeah, physics jokes. Sue me.:p
"Mr. President, we found a scenario in which Iraq will become th 52nd US State, oil will flow freely, WMDs were found in Saddam's closet, and bin-Laden was found in his bedroom." "Excellent! Invade!"
Not only would every country near the north pole do the same, they ARE doing the same thing - it's right there in the listed article. Personally, I'm not worried about Denmark becoming a major supplier of gas and oil. I'm pretty sure though that Russia has no problems cutting off oil to exert political pressure.
As for modding my comment as flamebait - read some international news, buddy. That stuff is essentially straight from Putin's mouth.
... that's exactly what I'm referring to. Putin and his Russian nationalists might be no more than 2 bit thugs, but they are 2-bit thugs with huge energy reserves, a chip on their shoulder and the knowledge that energy makes the world go 'round. Throw in the fact that the EU is currently comprised of stubborn members with wildly diverging goals, and the whole thing has the potential to spiral downwards very quickly.
Russia is trying to expand the size of its energy hammer.
It's nice to see that Putin is trying to bring back the good old times of the Cold War, MAD and Europe as ground zero for Russia's battle for world supremacy.
Prince gets it, and the RIAA executive gets it as well. That's the beauty of it.... both see the future of music, see what the intrinsic value of a music (or any art) recording is, and see who's going to be out of business if things continue this way.
Personally, I love this development. Prince again shows that he understands the music business far better than nearly any artist or executive out there, and the music executives are shown quaking in fear. And, like others pointed out, I'd love to see how the exec's statement will be spun at the next anti-trust/download damage hearings. Nothing like being caught red-handed threatening artists with black-listing and openly stating that a music recording has close to zero inherent value.
I need to make it a point to see Prince in concert - gotta support gusto like this.
More specifically, some of his short stories with Tichy (or was it Pirx? I can't keep the two apart) and the two constructors. In his mind, having every need met by robots would lead to a population of fundamentally content beings, but whose activities are exactly zero.
One answer: mathematical modeling of the shape. Topology is one area that is handmade for this stuff, and I believe Washington (working from memory here, so please correct me) already implemented something like that. Want to make a donut voting district? Complex topological shape, try again. The main problem is creating the mathematical model of the voting district. I'm sure lawyer-weasels can drag out the process of approving the mathematical model of the proposed district, rendering it rather ineffective.
Just short of that, I like Ahnuld's proposal, as it at least removes the main problem behind gerrymandering: conflict of interest. Judges might have party affiliations, but at least their jobs don't depend on the rejigging of voting districts.
On a side note, I'm astounded at the number of conflicts of interests that are allowed to persist in the current political system. People get to vote on their own salary increases? Get to vote on whether they need auditing of their finances? Am I the only one who sees this as just inviting abuse?
Of course. I mean, it's inconceivable that there are multiple mechanisms for increasing CO2 levels, and that burning fossil fuels contributes anything to the CO2 content in the atmosphere.
How is the Chinese leadership Communist? Please describe specific ideologies, approaches and goals that show their communist tendencies. I'm just wondering how you're going to manage that without resorting to the American definition of Communism: "authoritarian government with populist crowd control methods that doesn't like the US".
Ick - you're studying military intelligence, and this is the best they can teach you? Scary. Looks like there's at least another Iraq-style intelligence fiasco in our future. In case you're wondering, that fiasco was one of analysis and conclusion, not of data.
As the gp stated, China is primarily authoritarian these days. Their communist ideology has been greatly softened, to the point where the official hero is not the little worker bee anymore, whose path to glory consisted of sowing his comrades' shoes at night and in anonymity. Instead, party propaganda is trying to leverage old sages like Lao Tse to cement their authority.
Communism is nothing but a tool for political control in the hands of the Chinese Central Authority. They realized that the consistent pursuit of communism won't turn them into an economic super power, even if it provided the easiest way to justify and cement their claim as the supreme political authority in the land. Instead, their rediscovered love of mercantilism needs a different type of political justification - hence their shift away from strict communism and towards historical/legendary chinese philosophers.
I'm not sure what to make of your rabid attachment to the idea that China is a communist country. All I can say is that you're completely missing the picture, and have absolutely no understanding about what drives China, where it wants to be and how it intends to get there. For a quick and dirty primer on China today, read this: http://www.economist.com/countries/China/. You might claim that everyone around you has been successfully brain washed by China, but I contend that you're obsession with communists has prevented you from seeing China's evolution from its hard-core communism in the 60s towards an economic, political and military super power whose preferred ideology is the one that gets them there.
Usually what you do is use all the data you can find. Then you rerun history and see how it comes out. The closer is comes to real history, the stornger you say your model is, and the better you feel about using it predictively.
Have you done statistical modeling? That's absolutely not how you tune or train your model. Generally, you take 80% of your data to tune/train, and test it on the last 20% (if you have a lot of data available).
In short, you're saying that any model that uses historical data for parameter tuning has no predictive power. I think statisticians would disagree with you, for the same reason the parent mentioned: a statistical model doesn't care whether you know the data it is being tested with, as long as it doesn't know the data.
However, I would agree that trying to model complex human behaviors with statistical models is fraught with pitfalls. No one has been able to properly model the stock market behavior over arbitrary lengths of time, which means I think that statistical models of war are similarly incomplete. It would be interesting to see though how it holds up.... the problem with assigning probabilities to one-time events is that you do not know whether their occurrence is statistically probable or not. Since there won't be another Iraq war to remove Saddam Hussein, we don't know whether the failure predicted by the model supports it.
I find it somewhat disturbing that a corporation is allowed to decide how I interact with my community - especially if that interaction does not interfere with local zoning ordinances or the criminal code. I find it even more disturbing that you advocate not challenging them in court - presumably because I stand no chance of competing with their deep pockets and pre-paid lawyers (and I'd agree with that recommendation). What happens when the normal way of redressing injustices is not accessible to the general population? Finally, I'd argue that the NCAA is not interested if anyone else makes money off of their events - they're far more interested in protecting their existing revenue streams.
I was talking about talking/writing to friends while the game is on-going. Tell me: what's the difference between the following two text messages?
"UNC gslam!!!!!"
"UNC Pedro gslam w 2 O in 7th - crowd goes wild"
Or, two emails:
"OMG - Pedro just hit a grandslam in the bottom of the 7th - we're up by 3!!! Everyone's dancing, and the other team is in shambles - they're having a conference on the mound!!!"
"UNC's Pedro hits grandslam in the bottom of the 7th with 2 outs - count was 2-1, and he hit a high fastball over the left field fence. Coach is approaching the mound for a quick conference with his pitcher."
What happens if the email is sent to multiple recipients? Posted on a forum? A blog? Comes with video? Where do you draw the line? That's the point of the article - if you can get ejected over blogging a live game, can you get ejected for emailing others about it? Talking to your friends about it? Conference calling other people in?
What the NCAA just discovered is that their press rights aren't nearly as valuable as they thought they were, and are now trying to create artificial scarcity. Considering that the NCAA is supposed to be about student athletes and not big money, this is a double shame.
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I heard that quote on NPR this morning, and I couldn't believe it. The Surgeon General, the nation's doctor, is supposed to strike a balance between being a team player and telling the truth? Wow. Have politicians really become that warped that they don't even hear the massive problem with a statement like this? Has it become officially sanctioned, approved and legitimized that lying is being a good team player? Even when the health of the nation is at stake?
Some days, I feel like we should take all politicians, shoot them, and start fresh.
I love it when people bring up the Y2K bug or the ozone hole when talking about doom&gloom that didn't come about. It conclusively proves that they have no idea what the hell they're talking about. It's just a shame that there isn't a cosmic idiocy hammer that strikes anyone who displays such wilfull ignorance.
Who the hell modded this informative??
#1 Local weather stations aren't the only input.
#2 Very few are actually at airports - and airports (aerodromes) were tarmac based since after WW1.
#3 Being within 30 feet of an AC exhaust (especially small window based ones) means squat for the local temperature.
#4 Local encroachment does not yield a small but systematic increase in temperature - it yields spikes.
#5 Average temperature readings from a population of sensors cancel out local variations.
#6 A systematic temperature increase is a systematic temperature increase, regardless of source.
Yes, the individual sensors record the heat-island effect that is found in urban environments. Congratulations. You found out something that is 15 years old. Yes, urban environments are warmer than non-urban environments.
However, you are an idiot if you believe that you are the first to think of this. Not only that, but carefully check the trend of both graphs shown on the homepage: after 1950, they both trend upward. And that's the key part: regardless of where you are, where you look at, temperature trends are on the up tick. Steadily. Some parts see heavier up ticks than others. But the end result is the same: things are getting warmer.
Local construction does play a part, but it merely exacerbates a trend that shows up everywhere you look.
Yes, but few are as distracting as "Jack in the box come back of the year", or something like that. I understand ads, I know how to skip the annoying ones, but this stuff just confuses the hell out of me. Especially if the connection is not there... like in a lot of the games now.
Personally, I don't care much about achievements to begin with. Now having them sponsored... complete and utter nonsense. I already cringe when I see them on ESPN, I'll cringe even more when I'll see them in a game I PAID MONEY FOR! Maybe in a free game I'll accept it, but this is just nonsense.
Or we could, I don't know, just use the friggin official definition of what makes an agent covert... but it seems to me you'd rather substitute your own Hollywood-inspired fantasies for that.
So you'd like to have powerful state assemblies dictating one-size-fits-all laws that don't really work for 49% of the state's population? Newsflash - people are either not as special as you'd like to think (those one-size-fits-all civil rights legislations come to mind), and governments for smaller constituencies have the ability to REALLY fuck minorities, as your likelihood to find a majoritarian group of asshats increases as you decrease population size.
Personally, I'm quite happy that I can go anywhere in the US and be guaranteed a certain minimum set of laws. I'd be even happier if I could go anywhere in the world and be guaranteed the same set of minimum laws everywhere. Now, that doesn't address the overall idiocy of lawmakers at any level, but I don't think that that's what your complaint was about.
Wow, I'd really like to know how you determine that a cover operative wasn't covert. I mean, the original story ran under the tagline "cover operative", she had been a covert operative (as in, the CIA sent her out as a cover operative), and her mission had not been declassified yet.
And yet, you have no problems sitting in judgment on what constitute a covert operative? Why don't you leave that to the people who run covert operations? Or would that mean that an actual crime had been committed, for which heads should have rolled?
No one so far has been able to explain to me why this wasn't a crime outside of some handwaving of "oh, she wasn't REALLY cover." The only thing I can think of is that the executive has the ability to declassify things, and it would have been trivial to declassify her status and her operations. Which to me simply means that Bush would again have proven how disastrous of a president he is.
Einstein was an alien. The hair should have given it away anyway.
:p
If anybody's wondering, I'm referring to his "Annus Mirabiliis" - the year he published three ground-breaking papers on three different topics. Yeah, yeah, physics jokes. Sue me.
... I think this will lead to the opposite.
"Mr. President, we found a scenario in which Iraq will become th 52nd US State, oil will flow freely, WMDs were found in Saddam's closet, and bin-Laden was found in his bedroom."
"Excellent! Invade!"
Not only would every country near the north pole do the same, they ARE doing the same thing - it's right there in the listed article. Personally, I'm not worried about Denmark becoming a major supplier of gas and oil. I'm pretty sure though that Russia has no problems cutting off oil to exert political pressure. As for modding my comment as flamebait - read some international news, buddy. That stuff is essentially straight from Putin's mouth.
... that's exactly what I'm referring to. Putin and his Russian nationalists might be no more than 2 bit thugs, but they are 2-bit thugs with huge energy reserves, a chip on their shoulder and the knowledge that energy makes the world go 'round. Throw in the fact that the EU is currently comprised of stubborn members with wildly diverging goals, and the whole thing has the potential to spiral downwards very quickly.
Russia is trying to expand the size of its energy hammer. It's nice to see that Putin is trying to bring back the good old times of the Cold War, MAD and Europe as ground zero for Russia's battle for world supremacy.
Prince gets it, and the RIAA executive gets it as well. That's the beauty of it.... both see the future of music, see what the intrinsic value of a music (or any art) recording is, and see who's going to be out of business if things continue this way.
Personally, I love this development. Prince again shows that he understands the music business far better than nearly any artist or executive out there, and the music executives are shown quaking in fear. And, like others pointed out, I'd love to see how the exec's statement will be spun at the next anti-trust/download damage hearings. Nothing like being caught red-handed threatening artists with black-listing and openly stating that a music recording has close to zero inherent value.
I need to make it a point to see Prince in concert - gotta support gusto like this.
More specifically, some of his short stories with Tichy (or was it Pirx? I can't keep the two apart) and the two constructors. In his mind, having every need met by robots would lead to a population of fundamentally content beings, but whose activities are exactly zero.
One answer: mathematical modeling of the shape. Topology is one area that is handmade for this stuff, and I believe Washington (working from memory here, so please correct me) already implemented something like that. Want to make a donut voting district? Complex topological shape, try again. The main problem is creating the mathematical model of the voting district. I'm sure lawyer-weasels can drag out the process of approving the mathematical model of the proposed district, rendering it rather ineffective.
Just short of that, I like Ahnuld's proposal, as it at least removes the main problem behind gerrymandering: conflict of interest. Judges might have party affiliations, but at least their jobs don't depend on the rejigging of voting districts.
On a side note, I'm astounded at the number of conflicts of interests that are allowed to persist in the current political system. People get to vote on their own salary increases? Get to vote on whether they need auditing of their finances? Am I the only one who sees this as just inviting abuse?
Just because someone modded you up, I thought I'd pull up the first page of results of a quick google search. Lokiee there....
Of course. I mean, it's inconceivable that there are multiple mechanisms for increasing CO2 levels, and that burning fossil fuels contributes anything to the CO2 content in the atmosphere.
How is the Chinese leadership Communist? Please describe specific ideologies, approaches and goals that show their communist tendencies. I'm just wondering how you're going to manage that without resorting to the American definition of Communism: "authoritarian government with populist crowd control methods that doesn't like the US".
Ick - you're studying military intelligence, and this is the best they can teach you? Scary. Looks like there's at least another Iraq-style intelligence fiasco in our future. In case you're wondering, that fiasco was one of analysis and conclusion, not of data.
As the gp stated, China is primarily authoritarian these days. Their communist ideology has been greatly softened, to the point where the official hero is not the little worker bee anymore, whose path to glory consisted of sowing his comrades' shoes at night and in anonymity. Instead, party propaganda is trying to leverage old sages like Lao Tse to cement their authority.
Communism is nothing but a tool for political control in the hands of the Chinese Central Authority. They realized that the consistent pursuit of communism won't turn them into an economic super power, even if it provided the easiest way to justify and cement their claim as the supreme political authority in the land. Instead, their rediscovered love of mercantilism needs a different type of political justification - hence their shift away from strict communism and towards historical/legendary chinese philosophers.
I'm not sure what to make of your rabid attachment to the idea that China is a communist country. All I can say is that you're completely missing the picture, and have absolutely no understanding about what drives China, where it wants to be and how it intends to get there. For a quick and dirty primer on China today, read this: http://www.economist.com/countries/China/. You might claim that everyone around you has been successfully brain washed by China, but I contend that you're obsession with communists has prevented you from seeing China's evolution from its hard-core communism in the 60s towards an economic, political and military super power whose preferred ideology is the one that gets them there.
Have you done statistical modeling? That's absolutely not how you tune or train your model. Generally, you take 80% of your data to tune/train, and test it on the last 20% (if you have a lot of data available).
In short, you're saying that any model that uses historical data for parameter tuning has no predictive power. I think statisticians would disagree with you, for the same reason the parent mentioned: a statistical model doesn't care whether you know the data it is being tested with, as long as it doesn't know the data.
However, I would agree that trying to model complex human behaviors with statistical models is fraught with pitfalls. No one has been able to properly model the stock market behavior over arbitrary lengths of time, which means I think that statistical models of war are similarly incomplete. It would be interesting to see though how it holds up.... the problem with assigning probabilities to one-time events is that you do not know whether their occurrence is statistically probable or not. Since there won't be another Iraq war to remove Saddam Hussein, we don't know whether the failure predicted by the model supports it.
I find it somewhat disturbing that a corporation is allowed to decide how I interact with my community - especially if that interaction does not interfere with local zoning ordinances or the criminal code. I find it even more disturbing that you advocate not challenging them in court - presumably because I stand no chance of competing with their deep pockets and pre-paid lawyers (and I'd agree with that recommendation). What happens when the normal way of redressing injustices is not accessible to the general population? Finally, I'd argue that the NCAA is not interested if anyone else makes money off of their events - they're far more interested in protecting their existing revenue streams.
I was talking about talking/writing to friends while the game is on-going. Tell me: what's the difference between the following two text messages?
"UNC gslam!!!!!"
"UNC Pedro gslam w 2 O in 7th - crowd goes wild"
Or, two emails:
"OMG - Pedro just hit a grandslam in the bottom of the 7th - we're up by 3!!! Everyone's dancing, and the other team is in shambles - they're having a conference on the mound!!!"
"UNC's Pedro hits grandslam in the bottom of the 7th with 2 outs - count was 2-1, and he hit a high fastball over the left field fence. Coach is approaching the mound for a quick conference with his pitcher."
What happens if the email is sent to multiple recipients? Posted on a forum? A blog? Comes with video? Where do you draw the line? That's the point of the article - if you can get ejected over blogging a live game, can you get ejected for emailing others about it? Talking to your friends about it? Conference calling other people in?
What the NCAA just discovered is that their press rights aren't nearly as valuable as they thought they were, and are now trying to create artificial scarcity. Considering that the NCAA is supposed to be about student athletes and not big money, this is a double shame.