I don't think NASA suffered from Dogma - more of an abundance of caution. Even know, I don't know how they can tell that the structures seen in the pictures are actual water, and not just sand that behaves similarly to a liquid.
Personally, I'll believe the H2O theory when someone actually pokes one of those areas, and they find water in either ice or liquid form.
And you still don't have a clue. I worked for a company that was hit by a DDOS attack. Their Tier I network provider was so swamped that they switched off all traffic to the company (and this was a company whose entire business relied on its website being up). No matter how many redundant pipes you buy, there is always the possibility of being hit with more traffic. Unless you buy 50% of the worldwide bandwidth. I'd like to see you try that.
And at that point, it becomes a question of how you deal with a DDOS attack. Are you prepared? Can you work with your provider? Can you filter properly? Identify legitimate and illegitimate traffic? All important stuff that's vital for surviving these things.
Alpha-radiation poisons are one of the very few poisons where even if you identify the poison that was administered, there is nothing you can do. In essence, once you have administered the poison, the guy is dead. Even if he doesn't know it yet. As for why they didn't use good ol' fashioned lead poisoning... I suspect that it is harder to find out who administered polonium as opposed to a couple of slugs to the head.
This does denote a very sophisticated organization though. Polonium is not easy to obtain, and most people don't think polonium when they want to off someone. As a matter of fact, the method of death often points to the group - everyone's got their favorite methods.
The energy of the light bulb (didn't read the article, I'm assuming that's what was used) is radiated out in a sphere. If more of the energy is absorbed by a larger container, or a container more closely positioned to the light, or any other method of more efficiently using the light radiated by the bulb, you can dramatically scale up the efficiency of the process. That's why incident light energy is generally measured in W/m^2, not straight W.
Easy answer - in a closed system, total entropy will always increase. Which means that the bigger the system is that you consider, the less likely it is easy that you will actually be able to truly generate energy. At some point, it all boils down to shifting energy from one place to another, or storing it for use at a later time. Which means that by definition, you will use waste at least some energy in that process.
The real question is: what's the cost of producing energy in this fashion, and are we willing to bear the cost? This approach looks pretty damn spiffy: enviromentally degradable input and output, solar energy used for input.... far better than anything else I've seen so far. Sign me up.
As the GP said, you can't prove scientific theories like you can prove mathematical theorems. You find supporting evidence for it, and at some point, you accept the theory as a pretty darn good descriptor of what's actually going on.
As for the entire law vs hypothesis thing - complete claptrap as well. There's no rhyme or reason why something is a law versus a theory. Generally, laws of physics come from the time when science was still lumped together with ethics and neurology under philosophy (with science called natural philosophy, if I remember correctly). It came from the idea that the universe is ordered, and that there are laws that govern it. All we had to do was find out what those laws were. Now we know (a little) better.
True. Animation separates the men from the boys, and is fiendishly hard to get right. However, if mario's animation is complex, the animation in Splinter Cell: Double Agent is miles beyond that. Again, the problem is the same: approximating something using 5 frames is a lot easier than when you have to make it believable from multiple angles at 60 fps.
Here's the problem with high-resolution graphics and lots of polygon-pushing: someone has to create the art for it. In Mario's times, you only needed to be able to approximate a plumber using about 200 pixels and 256 colors. Quite frankly, I can do that. In about 1 hour. For $5. Well, okay - I probably would have to get an artistically inclined friend to do it who knows how to handle Paintshop. But the point is that I don't have to worry about shading, proportionality, or anything like that. Compare that with today's creatures: they need to look good while at a resolution of 1920*1080, have proper normal maps, be based on great-looking models made by quality artists (no sucky part-time artist will be able to make stuff that looks good with these requirements). Not only that, but you need lots of art. Far more than for other games that didn't have that space or that processing power. Let's see - 6 million dollars, assuming 50K per artist, that comes to about 50 artists working for 2 years on a game. Sounds about right these days, especially when you're talking big-budget game.
Can you make low-budget games? Sure can. But expect to get ripped on sucky graphics, just like the Wii Sports series did.
Note to yourself - every console ever launched followed the same curve that you described. All newly launched consoles are outsold by their predecessors for about a year - then things start to get rolling. As for being behind the sales curve of the original XBox...got some sources for that? Can't find anything outside of XBox 360 currently selling better now than the XBox was selling when it was still current generation.
You forget one problem - the instant we become the barbaric exterminators with nukes, we will not face a sect of 100,000 people anymore, but every muslim nation in the world. Since some of those are also armed with nukes, I'd say that puts us at a disadvantage. Sorry, but your view will result in the US being little more than radiation land with some farmers surviving in the rockies.
And exactly where do you think those changes in trends come from? From people who have been shown that IF nothing is done, all hell will break loose, and that therefore things need to BE done. Way to ignore the effect, buddy.
Define value for a shareholder. Once shareholders move beyond just expecting the biggest paycheck possible from a corporation, corporations will stop just looking at the bottom (or top) line for the current quarter. Part of the problem with corporate greed is that shareholders have been largely complicit in it, even encouraging it. Thankfully, that is starting to change, with some shareholders (and funds) only investing in ethical corporations.
Not quite true. What happened was that initially, Blizzard set the rested to 100% exp, and had a "tired" state, in which people would only gain 50% of the exp gained in the normal state. Massive outcry followed from what were indeed hardcore players. "No fair - people who play less are almost as high level as me with no life!" What did Blizzard do? It renamed the normal state to rested, and the tired state to normal. It also said that the rested state would gain twice as much experience as as the normal state.
In essence, they changed two words in their system. The entire underlying system stayed absolutely the same. What happened next? There was peace. Amazing what a mere two words can do to the perception of fairness of hardcore grinders.
Personally, I find WoW to be quite the grind as well - but at least you get enough exp from quests to make questing a better value than straight-up monster grinding. Other than that, I find it a fairly average RPG.
Hey, got some data for those nice little statements there? Cuz I got about 20 odd papers that disagree with each and everyone of them. Sadly, I can't debate yours, because as far as I can tell, you pulled them out of your ass.
OK. So you reject an argument via authority. Good for you. Now where's your analysis of the situation? Of the data? The models? What - nothing at all?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if you don't want to discuss the science of Global Climate Change, and don't want to accept as authorities people who have studied the topic for a good chunk of their lives, Shut The Fuck Up. Be apathetic, but don't pretend you're being anything else. All you're doing is looking for an excuse for why anyone should listen to what you have to say, even though you have nothing to say.
Quite frankly, people who trot out this "follow the money!" and "break the consensus!" crap are worse than the people who are trotting out warming on Mars as proof that it's all natural. One can lead to a productive discussion, the other one doesn't.
They're using Citrix? No wonder they have issues. Citrix is a pain to implement, to use and to monitor. It's nice that people don't have to install anything locally anymore, but that also means that the local processing power is lost. If they're planning on having some 50000 odd users run heavy duty apps through the same citrix cluster.... no wonder they're hosed.
Remember that we're talking application uptime, not server uptime. This means that for any multi-server and multi-tier application, application uptime is essentially the product of the uptime of all servers that make up the app. Factor in that windows makes up the bulk of application servers and that people often have weekly scheduled downtimes that are in the hours, and 99.5% is actually quite ambitious.
It's a test. Any real nerd would be able to not only find her real address, but would also create a Google Maps Mashup that would show all her past, present and future addresses. Especially if they're versed in time-travel grammar.
As I mentioned in a different post, you can still make informed decisions by checking how others present their position. The bat-shit crazy ones generally commit logical fallacies right and left, talk of conspiracy theories and generally don't follow proper protocol in their studies. Furthermore, I don't have to take just one study as the final answer. Instead, I can wait to see how scientific discussions pan out. Does a consensus appear? What is the consensus based on? Overwhelming data, or lack of data? Does it fit into what I know about science, or personal experience? Is my personal experience relevant?
You're right, you can't simply postpone making a decision on everything where you aren't the world's foremost expert. But using who paid whom as a metric is completely useless.
If you judge without knowing facts, you are indeed guilty of a moral failing - or at least committing a logical fallacy.
Here's a simple way of figuring out who to trust without becoming a subject matter expert yourself: check how they present their argument. Do they make snide remarks? Do they try to be as clear as possible, or do they try to obfuscate? Do their arguments contain logical fallacies? Does their methodology match generally agreed upon scientific standards? If yes, then you can place a decent amount of trust in them. Not only that, but you can get an understanding of what's going on as the scientific debate pans out. Then you can start to form an opinion - even if it's only on the level of "these guys sound pretty reasonable, I'm gonna stick with them." Yes, I do use trust metrics when I don't understand the matter at hand. But I then try to stay out of discussions about the merits of different positions on that subject, because I have no idea what's actually going on.
Using the who paid whom metric though leads nowhere, as no one is agenda-free. Not only that, but it is damn near impossible to prove that someone wasn't unduly influenced by outside sources. The net result of this approach is that you throw your support behind people who you already trust - and this is now a political game.
Couple of links for you to peruse. Not that I think that'll change anything for you, as every last one of your points is either wrong or based on localized data (which Global Climate Change doesn't talk about).
2) Localized data set for a global climate model. Not relevant.
3) Your point that the water problem can be solved by engineering is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Though the original point itself has the problem of using a local datapoint to support a global climate event.
4) I'd say as well that no one said we'd have crop failures now. Give it another 50 years or so. Though deadly heat waves were rampant across the world last year.
5) No one said that local climates are directly to global trends. Not only that, but no paper argued that there'd be a linear increase in hurricane strength in the Golf of Mexico.
7) In the same article you listed, there's this little quote. "Finally, Joughin says that two nearby West Antarctic glaciers are thinning rapidly, so the trend cannot be extended across the continent." It's at the end of the article, so I can understand why you didn't see it. Just for kicks, from the same site, here's another link: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6962/ Just google for Antarctic Ice sheet for more of the same.
8) Now you're either plain lying, or deliberately ignoring facts. In the 60s, the Ozone layer was fine. For the data, see here: http://www.atm.ch.cam.ac.uk/tour/part2.html/. Or just google for Ozone layer Antarctic.
I'm glad that people who deny Global Climate Change have such lousy arguments. It means there's plenty of money to be made from them once real issues hit.
You mentioned it yourself: "once the data is brought out into the public space". That's the only time that you can tell whether someone is a shill or not. Anything else is playing politics with science.
And simply being accepted into a peer-reviewed journal doesn't mean too much either. Peer reviewers don't redo the experiments, they simply go over methodology, theory and data set and make sure there isn't anything too glaring in there. They can still miss plenty of stuff, or let stuff slide they aren't sure about. What matters is if other people, using different methods and different datasets, come to the same conclusion. Then you can start taking things seriously.
But it still all boils down to this: you either become educated enough yourself to understand what the papers talk about, or you leave the talking to the people who do. There's no need to add even more politics to science discussions.
Err, no. Meta-contributing is not contributing. It's doing squat. This form of meta-contributing simply assumes that someone in a specific group will cause others to lie.
some of us have come up with better metrics to judge what "experts" say.
ROFL. Better metrics? You've got to be kidding me. Better metrics than understanding the subject matter? Like what? How much money someone pays someone else? Who pays whom? All you're doing is identifying whether someone draws money from someone you don't like. At that moment, you're politicizing what should be a scientific debate. At that moment, you become part of the problem that surrounds the Global Warming debate.
I'm not saying that you should blindly trust anything that a tobacco company says about the effects of smoking. What you should do is not blindly trust anybody, and instead verify what's being said. Sadly, that seems to be too much work for some people.
I'd like to add that before he replies, he should check his arguments with realclimate.org, noaa.gov and ipcc.ch. Or, alternatively, actually read the papers (all of them, not just the ones that agree with his position). I haven't seen anything new in about 2 years.
Please stop. Now. This entire crap about who is paying who is completely useless and counter-productive. If you play this game, nothing will happen, as everyone is paid by someone, and it is impossible to prove that someone is completely disinterested and unbiased. Not only that, but it is utterly impossible, and irrelevant to boot.
The only thing that really matters is whether what people say holds up under scrutiny. Is the data they use accurate? Are their conclusions valid? Do their theories agree with their data? Can their theories be falsified? Did they use proper methodologies when testing their theories and collecting their data? Did they cherry-pick?
What's that you say? That's hard? Tough shit. If you can't handle a rigorous discussion, shut the fuck up. You're not contributing. No matter what your mom or your school teacher told you.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think NASA suffered from Dogma - more of an abundance of caution. Even know, I don't know how they can tell that the structures seen in the pictures are actual water, and not just sand that behaves similarly to a liquid.
Personally, I'll believe the H2O theory when someone actually pokes one of those areas, and they find water in either ice or liquid form.
And you still don't have a clue. I worked for a company that was hit by a DDOS attack. Their Tier I network provider was so swamped that they switched off all traffic to the company (and this was a company whose entire business relied on its website being up). No matter how many redundant pipes you buy, there is always the possibility of being hit with more traffic. Unless you buy 50% of the worldwide bandwidth. I'd like to see you try that.
And at that point, it becomes a question of how you deal with a DDOS attack. Are you prepared? Can you work with your provider? Can you filter properly? Identify legitimate and illegitimate traffic? All important stuff that's vital for surviving these things.
Alpha-radiation poisons are one of the very few poisons where even if you identify the poison that was administered, there is nothing you can do. In essence, once you have administered the poison, the guy is dead. Even if he doesn't know it yet. As for why they didn't use good ol' fashioned lead poisoning... I suspect that it is harder to find out who administered polonium as opposed to a couple of slugs to the head.
This does denote a very sophisticated organization though. Polonium is not easy to obtain, and most people don't think polonium when they want to off someone. As a matter of fact, the method of death often points to the group - everyone's got their favorite methods.
The energy of the light bulb (didn't read the article, I'm assuming that's what was used) is radiated out in a sphere. If more of the energy is absorbed by a larger container, or a container more closely positioned to the light, or any other method of more efficiently using the light radiated by the bulb, you can dramatically scale up the efficiency of the process. That's why incident light energy is generally measured in W/m^2, not straight W.
Easy answer - in a closed system, total entropy will always increase. Which means that the bigger the system is that you consider, the less likely it is easy that you will actually be able to truly generate energy. At some point, it all boils down to shifting energy from one place to another, or storing it for use at a later time. Which means that by definition, you will use waste at least some energy in that process.
The real question is: what's the cost of producing energy in this fashion, and are we willing to bear the cost? This approach looks pretty damn spiffy: enviromentally degradable input and output, solar energy used for input.... far better than anything else I've seen so far. Sign me up.
As the GP said, you can't prove scientific theories like you can prove mathematical theorems. You find supporting evidence for it, and at some point, you accept the theory as a pretty darn good descriptor of what's actually going on.
As for the entire law vs hypothesis thing - complete claptrap as well. There's no rhyme or reason why something is a law versus a theory. Generally, laws of physics come from the time when science was still lumped together with ethics and neurology under philosophy (with science called natural philosophy, if I remember correctly). It came from the idea that the universe is ordered, and that there are laws that govern it. All we had to do was find out what those laws were. Now we know (a little) better.
True. Animation separates the men from the boys, and is fiendishly hard to get right. However, if mario's animation is complex, the animation in Splinter Cell: Double Agent is miles beyond that. Again, the problem is the same: approximating something using 5 frames is a lot easier than when you have to make it believable from multiple angles at 60 fps.
Here's the problem with high-resolution graphics and lots of polygon-pushing: someone has to create the art for it. In Mario's times, you only needed to be able to approximate a plumber using about 200 pixels and 256 colors. Quite frankly, I can do that. In about 1 hour. For $5. Well, okay - I probably would have to get an artistically inclined friend to do it who knows how to handle Paintshop. But the point is that I don't have to worry about shading, proportionality, or anything like that. Compare that with today's creatures: they need to look good while at a resolution of 1920*1080, have proper normal maps, be based on great-looking models made by quality artists (no sucky part-time artist will be able to make stuff that looks good with these requirements). Not only that, but you need lots of art. Far more than for other games that didn't have that space or that processing power. Let's see - 6 million dollars, assuming 50K per artist, that comes to about 50 artists working for 2 years on a game. Sounds about right these days, especially when you're talking big-budget game.
Can you make low-budget games? Sure can. But expect to get ripped on sucky graphics, just like the Wii Sports series did.
Note to yourself - every console ever launched followed the same curve that you described. All newly launched consoles are outsold by their predecessors for about a year - then things start to get rolling. As for being behind the sales curve of the original XBox...got some sources for that? Can't find anything outside of XBox 360 currently selling better now than the XBox was selling when it was still current generation.
You forget one problem - the instant we become the barbaric exterminators with nukes, we will not face a sect of 100,000 people anymore, but every muslim nation in the world. Since some of those are also armed with nukes, I'd say that puts us at a disadvantage. Sorry, but your view will result in the US being little more than radiation land with some farmers surviving in the rockies.
And exactly where do you think those changes in trends come from? From people who have been shown that IF nothing is done, all hell will break loose, and that therefore things need to BE done. Way to ignore the effect, buddy.
Define value for a shareholder. Once shareholders move beyond just expecting the biggest paycheck possible from a corporation, corporations will stop just looking at the bottom (or top) line for the current quarter. Part of the problem with corporate greed is that shareholders have been largely complicit in it, even encouraging it. Thankfully, that is starting to change, with some shareholders (and funds) only investing in ethical corporations.
Not quite true. What happened was that initially, Blizzard set the rested to 100% exp, and had a "tired" state, in which people would only gain 50% of the exp gained in the normal state. Massive outcry followed from what were indeed hardcore players. "No fair - people who play less are almost as high level as me with no life!" What did Blizzard do? It renamed the normal state to rested, and the tired state to normal. It also said that the rested state would gain twice as much experience as as the normal state. In essence, they changed two words in their system. The entire underlying system stayed absolutely the same. What happened next? There was peace. Amazing what a mere two words can do to the perception of fairness of hardcore grinders. Personally, I find WoW to be quite the grind as well - but at least you get enough exp from quests to make questing a better value than straight-up monster grinding. Other than that, I find it a fairly average RPG.
Hey, got some data for those nice little statements there? Cuz I got about 20 odd papers that disagree with each and everyone of them. Sadly, I can't debate yours, because as far as I can tell, you pulled them out of your ass.
OK. So you reject an argument via authority. Good for you. Now where's your analysis of the situation? Of the data? The models? What - nothing at all?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: if you don't want to discuss the science of Global Climate Change, and don't want to accept as authorities people who have studied the topic for a good chunk of their lives, Shut The Fuck Up. Be apathetic, but don't pretend you're being anything else. All you're doing is looking for an excuse for why anyone should listen to what you have to say, even though you have nothing to say.
Quite frankly, people who trot out this "follow the money!" and "break the consensus!" crap are worse than the people who are trotting out warming on Mars as proof that it's all natural. One can lead to a productive discussion, the other one doesn't.
They're using Citrix? No wonder they have issues. Citrix is a pain to implement, to use and to monitor. It's nice that people don't have to install anything locally anymore, but that also means that the local processing power is lost. If they're planning on having some 50000 odd users run heavy duty apps through the same citrix cluster.... no wonder they're hosed.
Remember that we're talking application uptime, not server uptime. This means that for any multi-server and multi-tier application, application uptime is essentially the product of the uptime of all servers that make up the app. Factor in that windows makes up the bulk of application servers and that people often have weekly scheduled downtimes that are in the hours, and 99.5% is actually quite ambitious.
It's a test. Any real nerd would be able to not only find her real address, but would also create a Google Maps Mashup that would show all her past, present and future addresses. Especially if they're versed in time-travel grammar.
As I mentioned in a different post, you can still make informed decisions by checking how others present their position. The bat-shit crazy ones generally commit logical fallacies right and left, talk of conspiracy theories and generally don't follow proper protocol in their studies. Furthermore, I don't have to take just one study as the final answer. Instead, I can wait to see how scientific discussions pan out. Does a consensus appear? What is the consensus based on? Overwhelming data, or lack of data? Does it fit into what I know about science, or personal experience? Is my personal experience relevant?
You're right, you can't simply postpone making a decision on everything where you aren't the world's foremost expert. But using who paid whom as a metric is completely useless.
If you judge without knowing facts, you are indeed guilty of a moral failing - or at least committing a logical fallacy.
Here's a simple way of figuring out who to trust without becoming a subject matter expert yourself: check how they present their argument. Do they make snide remarks? Do they try to be as clear as possible, or do they try to obfuscate? Do their arguments contain logical fallacies? Does their methodology match generally agreed upon scientific standards? If yes, then you can place a decent amount of trust in them. Not only that, but you can get an understanding of what's going on as the scientific debate pans out. Then you can start to form an opinion - even if it's only on the level of "these guys sound pretty reasonable, I'm gonna stick with them." Yes, I do use trust metrics when I don't understand the matter at hand. But I then try to stay out of discussions about the merits of different positions on that subject, because I have no idea what's actually going on.
Using the who paid whom metric though leads nowhere, as no one is agenda-free. Not only that, but it is damn near impossible to prove that someone wasn't unduly influenced by outside sources. The net result of this approach is that you throw your support behind people who you already trust - and this is now a political game.
1) http://www.firstscience.com/site/articles/gribbin. asp/ There's plenty more with a quick google. Ignorance does not mean actual absence of data.
2) Localized data set for a global climate model. Not relevant.
3) Your point that the water problem can be solved by engineering is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Though the original point itself has the problem of using a local datapoint to support a global climate event.
4) I'd say as well that no one said we'd have crop failures now. Give it another 50 years or so. Though deadly heat waves were rampant across the world last year.
5) No one said that local climates are directly to global trends. Not only that, but no paper argued that there'd be a linear increase in hurricane strength in the Golf of Mexico.
6) http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/03/03 25_030325_belizereefs.html/ Google for Coral Bleaching if you want to find out more what causes coral reefs to die. And no, contrary to your whishful thinking, it isn't divers that cause it.
7) In the same article you listed, there's this little quote. "Finally, Joughin says that two nearby West Antarctic glaciers are thinning rapidly, so the trend cannot be extended across the continent." It's at the end of the article, so I can understand why you didn't see it. Just for kicks, from the same site, here's another link: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6962/ Just google for Antarctic Ice sheet for more of the same.
8) Now you're either plain lying, or deliberately ignoring facts. In the 60s, the Ozone layer was fine. For the data, see here: http://www.atm.ch.cam.ac.uk/tour/part2.html/. Or just google for Ozone layer Antarctic.
I'm glad that people who deny Global Climate Change have such lousy arguments. It means there's plenty of money to be made from them once real issues hit.
You mentioned it yourself: "once the data is brought out into the public space". That's the only time that you can tell whether someone is a shill or not. Anything else is playing politics with science.
And simply being accepted into a peer-reviewed journal doesn't mean too much either. Peer reviewers don't redo the experiments, they simply go over methodology, theory and data set and make sure there isn't anything too glaring in there. They can still miss plenty of stuff, or let stuff slide they aren't sure about. What matters is if other people, using different methods and different datasets, come to the same conclusion. Then you can start taking things seriously.
But it still all boils down to this: you either become educated enough yourself to understand what the papers talk about, or you leave the talking to the people who do. There's no need to add even more politics to science discussions.
I'm not saying that you should blindly trust anything that a tobacco company says about the effects of smoking. What you should do is not blindly trust anybody, and instead verify what's being said. Sadly, that seems to be too much work for some people.
I'd like to add that before he replies, he should check his arguments with realclimate.org, noaa.gov and ipcc.ch. Or, alternatively, actually read the papers (all of them, not just the ones that agree with his position). I haven't seen anything new in about 2 years.
Please stop. Now. This entire crap about who is paying who is completely useless and counter-productive. If you play this game, nothing will happen, as everyone is paid by someone, and it is impossible to prove that someone is completely disinterested and unbiased. Not only that, but it is utterly impossible, and irrelevant to boot.
The only thing that really matters is whether what people say holds up under scrutiny. Is the data they use accurate? Are their conclusions valid? Do their theories agree with their data? Can their theories be falsified? Did they use proper methodologies when testing their theories and collecting their data? Did they cherry-pick?
What's that you say? That's hard? Tough shit. If you can't handle a rigorous discussion, shut the fuck up. You're not contributing. No matter what your mom or your school teacher told you.