It's funny - since you show up on my freak list, you get a bonus point and always pop up very nicely during discussions. For all your claims to want to discuss the science of Climate Change, you have never done any of it. Instead, you're quite happy to just engage in sophistic (not to mention incorrect) arguments regarding people's oratory approaches or their hidden agendas.
As for mentioning petitions and abstracts - I'm just wondering why you didn't mention the petition of scientists that accuse the US government of politicizing science in order to hide evidence of global warming, or why you prefered the abstract of a little known organization (complete with a peculiar obsession with data from the sargasso sea) to the abstract of the IPCC.
Please, do enlighten us on your reasons. If nothing else, it'll be fun to see you flail around.
Dunno about you, but the AI and gamne design lectures I attended where in-depth, well thought out and cutting-edge (at least with respect to dev shops). Yeah, I had just finished my masters in AI and most of that stuff was old hat to me, but for anyone who hadn't specialized in AI and wanted to find out more about it, the lectures were the place to go: a quick primer on what works and what doesn't, and what to bone up on if you want to improve your games.
Maybe I went to the lectures who weren't given by people with too much ego and too little interest in helping otherss.
Since I already replied to the second of your idiotic rants, I might as well go the full distance.
1) Define Freedom in iraq. Freedom to vote? Or freedom to be tortured by death squads from the other religious/ethnic groups? 2) Show me a quote of someone blasting Bush for wanting to remove a known dictator or bad man. Oh, wait. That didn't happen. He gets blasted for lying about why he wants to go to Iraq and about completely botching the job once there. 3) Show me a quote of someone calling Khatami a voice of reason. Blogs don't count btw, as it's too easy to find some idiot who thinks that being able to create a post on the Internet makes them insightful. Oh wait, that hasn't happened either. 4) I didn't know that muslim suicide bombers can talk. After all, they're generally dead. Oh, you mean the videos that surface after the suicide bomber is dead? Woo, you figured out that they are propaganda. Good job. What's your point again? That some people lie? Really? I had no idea. What you missed is that no one takes grievances of suicide bombers seriously. You're confusing that with people trying to figure out how to stop people from becoming suicide bombers, as it is nearly impossible to stop a suicide bombers once they've made up their mind. 5) Everyone in Guantanamo is a suicide bomber? Really.... And you know that how? Because Bush said so? I guess he changed his mind on a couple of hundred of the inmates there who have been released back to their countries without so much as an "Sorry 'bout that." 6) Anyone who talks about a woman gets beheaded? Wow, nice hyperbole. That's how you get some pretty lynchings. Make up some crap, yell about it, then go kill everyone about whom you made shit up. Worked very nicely for the KKK and a bunch of other people in the US until recently.
I have to say, to be so far off-base in nearly every sentence of yours takes some serious skill in reality-avoidance. Can I have your name? I'd like to stay as far away as possible from you. Just in case you mistake me for one of those freedom-hating towel-heads.
Shit. Mod points, and instead I decide to reply. I guess I'm in a "Feed-the-troll" mood today.
Quran 8:12 is not a verse. I'm guessing you simply copied and pasted that info from the vast sea of Christian blogs who throw out verse numbers and quotations to support their position that Islam is evil. Not to mention that the first page of Google search shows about half a dozen different locations (and quotation methods) for that quote. So I'm gonna go out on a tangent and say that you have no clue about the Koran, and are simply quoting what others have told you about it.
Secondly, don't go around throwing one-liners from a religious text. The Old Testament shows a fantastically vindictive, authoritation and cruel god. It's trivial to find quotes from the Bible that are just as genocidal and cruel as anything in the Koran. With that quote, you're simply demonstrating your own ignorance, bias, cluelessness and lack of independent thinking.
As for Bush fighting for freedom... hah! I didn't see him leading any charge. Oh, you meant he ordered others to fight for freedom? Alright, let's look at then at the results of his leadership - for example, the current state of affairs in Iraq. Iraqis have the freedom to vote, protest, be abducted, tortured, shot, car-bombed, work, frolic and otherwise live merry and free lives. Yes, what an accomplishment. What's the freedom to vote when you don't know whether your next grocery run will run in complete bloodshed? Or that whomever you vote for will sell you out to his tribe? Oh, I forgot. Freedom is always Good. Especially if you're safe in the US from any terrorist attacks.
Nice troll, really. You managed to turn an article on game developers working for more art in their games into a demonstration on how exactly Bush turned Iraq into a breeding ground for terrorists worldwide. Good job. Now go away, or I shall taunt you again.
Remember, these are sales in Japan, where xbox bombed and xbox 360 bombed worse, at first anyway. Say what? From the FIRST sentence of the article: "The NPD Group has finally released its data for the month of January, and it was yet another stellar period for the U.S. video game industry. "
This is the US we're talking about. In Japan, I believe the X360 is being outsold by the Dreamcast (kidding, but close). If the X360 would be outselling the PS3 in Japan, Sony might as well just go home.
They also take a while, (about 30 sec. to a minute) to reach full brightness and some of them flicker or pulsate until they get fully warmed up.
Note the ones I use. They take about 0.5 of a second to actually turn on, but then are at full brightness. They also do not flicker or pulsate. Though I do admit that I don't like the color light they produce. For anyone interested - these are standard GE bulbs that came from Home Depot. YMMV depending on what you buy.
Not only that, but it also demonstrates the danger of pulling out a single paper as being the last word on a particular topic. Unless you are damn sure that lots of people have gone over it and done some in-depth verification on it, it's better to wait for confirmation than to take it at face value.
This is how scientific consensus is important. In a "yup, I checked it, I got the same thing" way, not in a let's-vote-like-we're-voting-for-congress way.
Good point. It isn't so much that they're in cahoots, it is that each party gets something very important from the other for which they are willing to endure quite a bit of pain. Local governments are willing to turn a blind eye towards creating a monopoly, as long as they get the money. Telcos are willing to tolerate the extortion money as long as they keep their monopoly status.
You obviously haven't driven on Pennsylvania's interstates. Potholes the size of wheels that were present during my entire college stint, resurfacing that forces you to carefully miss the inch-high height-difference that runs inside your lane, etc. etc. etc. Things might have changed by now, but when I was there, I was reminded of dirt roads in the backcountry more than of a real interstate system. California is better, but still not up to French or German standards.
I live in one of the most densely populated regions in the US and arguably the center of the tech industry. Yet my choice for broadband is either a single cable company, SBC or several CLECs like Speakeasy. Not only that, but in the last couple of places that I lived, I always was at the max range of the DSLAM, which meant that my connection was regularly crap.
The problem is not location. The problem is local governments being cahoots with telecom monopolies who love nothing more than charging through the roof for crap connections. Yes, other nations have telecom monopolies as well, but for some reason they're not facing the same kind of problems. I suspect that the difference is that with a state monopoly, you can vote for change. With a government sanctioned economic monopoly, you can only bend over.
Eh. I'm often quite embarrassed to admit that I did research in astrophysics during undergrad.:) You're right in your taylor series approximation - I skipped that portion. I guess it wasn't so much that you were wrong on anything as that I wasn't used to seeing your equations as conclusions, but more as intermediate steps... Good to get a reminder on these things.
What the.... sigh. Something that ought to be pointed out here is that E=mc^2 is generally understood to be E=m0c^2, where m0 is rest mass. Very rarely is this equation used for total energy (Kinetic + rest energy). See good ol Wikipedia for more info.
Also, for v much smaller than c, 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) approaches 1, as v^2/c^2 approaches 0.
The difference with greenhouse gases is that there is more than just correlation - there's also a theory behind it that provides causation, along with predictions that can be verified.
I would love to have people stop linking directly to realclimate.org. There's some good stuff on there, but it'd be better if people use realclimate.org to find the original papers.
For someone who wants to remove politics and authority from science, you spend precious little time discussing the actual science. Come again once you're done reveling in your own greatness.
I think most of the global warming crowd conveniently forget that by far the biggest determinant of Earth's climate is this object about 150 million kilometers from us called the Sun.
True. You remove the sun, and we turn into pluto. Now quantify that effect. Exactly how much does a change in the output of the sun affect the temperature on the earth? Note: correlation != causation.
But getting back on topic, scientists have noted that almost every planet in our Solar System is experiencing a warmup during the last 4-5 years.
Just flat out wrong. Find the research papers (not a blog) that demonstrate this. I hope that you'll learn in the process not to equate someone's opinion with science.
Wow. If you want to talk debate theory, you ought to know that there are specific instances when an appeal to authority is the proper way to proceed (or are you also arguing with cops who give you a ticket that they shouldn't argue from authority?), such as when legitimate experts on a specialized subject are quoted in the debate (see the last section in the entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_authority).
It's nice to see though that the arguments against global warming are getting this weak. It means that we finally might see some action on it.
No. The idea is that there ought to be no need at this point to go over some very basic aspects of global climate change. The concept that global warming does not mean that all places everywhere will show at all times the same small increases in temperatures is one of them. It isn't everybody's responsibility to spoon feed you every single thing about everything.
... until the experiment has been independently reproduced and there is some more data on whether and how much cosmic radiation affects our climate. So far, there is one paper on this topic (July 2002 issue of Journal of Geophysical Research-Space Physics), and not much else. The experiment is interesting, but rather tenuous in its conclusions. We have a potential mechanism, along with some ways on testing the validity of its predictions. But it's far too early to make this anymore than it is - an idea that needs further exploring.
Further, if these pictures are ultimately released, future damage may be done to these minors' careers or personal lives.
Yes, let's protect potential future damage to their lives or careers by ending them early! What the fuck???? I can't believe that this was an actual reasoning.
This is unbelievable on so many levels. As the monitory opinion states, it's ok to have sex, as long as you don't document it. Protection from hypothetical damage allows for doing actual damage. Consensual, legimitate and accepted practices can lead to association with scum of the earth practices.
The more I see, the less I think I'll raise kids in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny AND true! France wouldn't be able to function without being able to make fun of the British. Someone please mod the parent insightful.
Mod points be damned.
It's funny - since you show up on my freak list, you get a bonus point and always pop up very nicely during discussions. For all your claims to want to discuss the science of Climate Change, you have never done any of it. Instead, you're quite happy to just engage in sophistic (not to mention incorrect) arguments regarding people's oratory approaches or their hidden agendas.
As for mentioning petitions and abstracts - I'm just wondering why you didn't mention the petition of scientists that accuse the US government of politicizing science in order to hide evidence of global warming, or why you prefered the abstract of a little known organization (complete with a peculiar obsession with data from the sargasso sea) to the abstract of the IPCC.
Please, do enlighten us on your reasons. If nothing else, it'll be fun to see you flail around.
Dunno about you, but the AI and gamne design lectures I attended where in-depth, well thought out and cutting-edge (at least with respect to dev shops). Yeah, I had just finished my masters in AI and most of that stuff was old hat to me, but for anyone who hadn't specialized in AI and wanted to find out more about it, the lectures were the place to go: a quick primer on what works and what doesn't, and what to bone up on if you want to improve your games.
Maybe I went to the lectures who weren't given by people with too much ego and too little interest in helping otherss.
Since I already replied to the second of your idiotic rants, I might as well go the full distance.
1) Define Freedom in iraq. Freedom to vote? Or freedom to be tortured by death squads from the other religious/ethnic groups?
2) Show me a quote of someone blasting Bush for wanting to remove a known dictator or bad man. Oh, wait. That didn't happen. He gets blasted for lying about why he wants to go to Iraq and about completely botching the job once there.
3) Show me a quote of someone calling Khatami a voice of reason. Blogs don't count btw, as it's too easy to find some idiot who thinks that being able to create a post on the Internet makes them insightful. Oh wait, that hasn't happened either.
4) I didn't know that muslim suicide bombers can talk. After all, they're generally dead. Oh, you mean the videos that surface after the suicide bomber is dead? Woo, you figured out that they are propaganda. Good job. What's your point again? That some people lie? Really? I had no idea. What you missed is that no one takes grievances of suicide bombers seriously. You're confusing that with people trying to figure out how to stop people from becoming suicide bombers, as it is nearly impossible to stop a suicide bombers once they've made up their mind.
5) Everyone in Guantanamo is a suicide bomber? Really.... And you know that how? Because Bush said so? I guess he changed his mind on a couple of hundred of the inmates there who have been released back to their countries without so much as an "Sorry 'bout that."
6) Anyone who talks about a woman gets beheaded? Wow, nice hyperbole. That's how you get some pretty lynchings. Make up some crap, yell about it, then go kill everyone about whom you made shit up. Worked very nicely for the KKK and a bunch of other people in the US until recently.
I have to say, to be so far off-base in nearly every sentence of yours takes some serious skill in reality-avoidance. Can I have your name? I'd like to stay as far away as possible from you. Just in case you mistake me for one of those freedom-hating towel-heads.
Shit. Mod points, and instead I decide to reply. I guess I'm in a "Feed-the-troll" mood today.
Quran 8:12 is not a verse. I'm guessing you simply copied and pasted that info from the vast sea of Christian blogs who throw out verse numbers and quotations to support their position that Islam is evil. Not to mention that the first page of Google search shows about half a dozen different locations (and quotation methods) for that quote. So I'm gonna go out on a tangent and say that you have no clue about the Koran, and are simply quoting what others have told you about it.
Secondly, don't go around throwing one-liners from a religious text. The Old Testament shows a fantastically vindictive, authoritation and cruel god. It's trivial to find quotes from the Bible that are just as genocidal and cruel as anything in the Koran. With that quote, you're simply demonstrating your own ignorance, bias, cluelessness and lack of independent thinking.
As for Bush fighting for freedom... hah! I didn't see him leading any charge. Oh, you meant he ordered others to fight for freedom? Alright, let's look at then at the results of his leadership - for example, the current state of affairs in Iraq. Iraqis have the freedom to vote, protest, be abducted, tortured, shot, car-bombed, work, frolic and otherwise live merry and free lives. Yes, what an accomplishment. What's the freedom to vote when you don't know whether your next grocery run will run in complete bloodshed? Or that whomever you vote for will sell you out to his tribe? Oh, I forgot. Freedom is always Good. Especially if you're safe in the US from any terrorist attacks.
Nice troll, really. You managed to turn an article on game developers working for more art in their games into a demonstration on how exactly Bush turned Iraq into a breeding ground for terrorists worldwide. Good job. Now go away, or I shall taunt you again.
Remember, these are sales in Japan, where xbox bombed and xbox 360 bombed worse, at first anyway.
Say what? From the FIRST sentence of the article: "The NPD Group has finally released its data for the month of January, and it was yet another stellar period for the U.S. video game industry. "
This is the US we're talking about. In Japan, I believe the X360 is being outsold by the Dreamcast (kidding, but close). If the X360 would be outselling the PS3 in Japan, Sony might as well just go home.
Just like fountain pens compete with pencils, right?
Not only that, but it also demonstrates the danger of pulling out a single paper as being the last word on a particular topic. Unless you are damn sure that lots of people have gone over it and done some in-depth verification on it, it's better to wait for confirmation than to take it at face value.
This is how scientific consensus is important. In a "yup, I checked it, I got the same thing" way, not in a let's-vote-like-we're-voting-for-congress way.
Good point. It isn't so much that they're in cahoots, it is that each party gets something very important from the other for which they are willing to endure quite a bit of pain. Local governments are willing to turn a blind eye towards creating a monopoly, as long as they get the money. Telcos are willing to tolerate the extortion money as long as they keep their monopoly status.
You obviously haven't driven on Pennsylvania's interstates. Potholes the size of wheels that were present during my entire college stint, resurfacing that forces you to carefully miss the inch-high height-difference that runs inside your lane, etc. etc. etc. Things might have changed by now, but when I was there, I was reminded of dirt roads in the backcountry more than of a real interstate system. California is better, but still not up to French or German standards.
I live in one of the most densely populated regions in the US and arguably the center of the tech industry. Yet my choice for broadband is either a single cable company, SBC or several CLECs like Speakeasy. Not only that, but in the last couple of places that I lived, I always was at the max range of the DSLAM, which meant that my connection was regularly crap.
The problem is not location. The problem is local governments being cahoots with telecom monopolies who love nothing more than charging through the roof for crap connections. Yes, other nations have telecom monopolies as well, but for some reason they're not facing the same kind of problems. I suspect that the difference is that with a state monopoly, you can vote for change. With a government sanctioned economic monopoly, you can only bend over.
Eh. I'm often quite embarrassed to admit that I did research in astrophysics during undergrad. :) You're right in your taylor series approximation - I skipped that portion. I guess it wasn't so much that you were wrong on anything as that I wasn't used to seeing your equations as conclusions, but more as intermediate steps... Good to get a reminder on these things.
What the.... sigh. Something that ought to be pointed out here is that E=mc^2 is generally understood to be E=m0c^2, where m0 is rest mass. Very rarely is this equation used for total energy (Kinetic + rest energy). See good ol Wikipedia for more info. Also, for v much smaller than c, 1/sqrt(1-v^2/c^2) approaches 1, as v^2/c^2 approaches 0.
The difference with greenhouse gases is that there is more than just correlation - there's also a theory behind it that provides causation, along with predictions that can be verified. I would love to have people stop linking directly to realclimate.org. There's some good stuff on there, but it'd be better if people use realclimate.org to find the original papers.
For someone who wants to remove politics and authority from science, you spend precious little time discussing the actual science. Come again once you're done reveling in your own greatness.
Does that mean that you actually would like to live on Venus?
True. You remove the sun, and we turn into pluto. Now quantify that effect. Exactly how much does a change in the output of the sun affect the temperature on the earth? Note: correlation != causation.
Just flat out wrong. Find the research papers (not a blog) that demonstrate this. I hope that you'll learn in the process not to equate someone's opinion with science.
Wow. If you want to talk debate theory, you ought to know that there are specific instances when an appeal to authority is the proper way to proceed (or are you also arguing with cops who give you a ticket that they shouldn't argue from authority?), such as when legitimate experts on a specialized subject are quoted in the debate (see the last section in the entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_authority).
It's nice to see though that the arguments against global warming are getting this weak. It means that we finally might see some action on it.
No. The idea is that there ought to be no need at this point to go over some very basic aspects of global climate change. The concept that global warming does not mean that all places everywhere will show at all times the same small increases in temperatures is one of them. It isn't everybody's responsibility to spoon feed you every single thing about everything.
... until the experiment has been independently reproduced and there is some more data on whether and how much cosmic radiation affects our climate. So far, there is one paper on this topic (July 2002 issue of Journal of Geophysical Research-Space Physics), and not much else. The experiment is interesting, but rather tenuous in its conclusions. We have a potential mechanism, along with some ways on testing the validity of its predictions. But it's far too early to make this anymore than it is - an idea that needs further exploring.
3 1080631.htm
Besides, can we link to something more than someone's blog? Here's a link that has a lot more substance and not so much speculation: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/07/0207
That's fine and dandy, except no one got raped or killed. This was consensual.
Yes, let's protect potential future damage to their lives or careers by ending them early! What the fuck???? I can't believe that this was an actual reasoning.
This is unbelievable on so many levels. As the monitory opinion states, it's ok to have sex, as long as you don't document it. Protection from hypothetical damage allows for doing actual damage. Consensual, legimitate and accepted practices can lead to association with scum of the earth practices.
The more I see, the less I think I'll raise kids in the US.
Got a source for that data? Or are your numbers part of the 76% that are made-up on the spot?