Wow, you have a bit of a chip on your shoulder, don't you? This isn't about Bush's use of presidential powers, or about whose fault is what. Focus a bit. This is about what a president can do, and where the recent expansion of presidential powers came from. And if you base your assessment of what a president can do on what candidates tell you... god help us all.
If what you're saying is true, Earth should already be like Venus is today, and should have been so millions of years ago.
No, what he's saying is that there is a positive feedback mechanism that will keep going until a particular part of that mechanism stops running. That would be the supply of methane in permafrost and at the bottom of the ocean.
Your prediction is that once it gets warm, it keeps getting warmer and warmer and warmer until it becomes a new sun, or whatever absurd conclusion you're making.
Straw man and hyperbole. He didn't say that. Furthermore, you're the only one making absurd predictions - and putting them in the mouths of other people.
But instead you'd rather flip the bird at a guy who owns an SUV, blame everything on him, then look at your own smug face in the mirror while you beat off.
No idea how you got that from a comment that essentially says "hey, you're timescale assessment is wrong." Could you be projecting?
Oh by the way, you're a liberal hippie fag, dont reply, because everything you say is either DEAD WRONG, or just self-masturbatory preaching to the choir.
Ignoring the liberal application of random insults and assumptions, you seem to a) engage in the same black-and-white thinking you were decrying two sentences earlier, and b) equate being right with self-masturbatory preaching. Can't handle the truth, can you?
The funny part is that you will be the least prepared for the coming trouble. Have fun. Liberals have guns, too.
Yes, because the US president has full power to do whatever the fuck he wants. Why is it that so many Americans think that the president is some kind of all-powerful dictator? Did you fall asleep during civics class? Or do you think that every president gets handed a do-what-you-want cudgel like Bush did with 9/11?
Forgot to divide by '2' and that screwed up everything else
You got a D on an exam because you forgot to divide by 2 somewhere? I see three possibilities: * You didn't show your work, and you got 0 points for the problem because you only showed the wrong answer. * You are leaving out all the other problems you got wrong that contributed to the D * You had a lousy teacher/grader, who considers a missing division by 2 to be as bad as not knowing anything about thermodynamics at all.
Personally, the last part is a pet peeve of mine. With grades being all you have to show for in school, nuking someone for just getting a small step wrong somewhere is idiotic and counter productive. The goal isn't to get people to memorize things, but instead to understand concepts. Details can easily be looked up. That said, the other pet peeve of mine were students who complained I gave zero points on a problem when they had forgotten to divide by two - but only gave me the anwer. If you want partial credit, don't be lazy - show your work.
Or, alternatively, let's keep all the low-knowledge jobs in-country and prevent other countries from increasing their standards of living, so that they can't buy US products and services.
A healthy world market is GOOD for the US job market, despite what all the short-sighted people are trying to tell you.
That's because boobies are hot, and mansausage isn't.
On a more serious note, these are two incidents. Anyone trying to reach broad conclusions from two data points will be able to do so easily. After all, you can fit any curve you want through two points. I'd be more interested what happens after we've had a few hundred strips take place.
I've often gotten the impression that IT is perceived by management as Janitorial services, or Corporate Archives, or the company cafeteria by companies that are not directly selling IT services themselves, as well as government agencies in general.
IT that is not customer facing is in fact still a support service.
I think you've fallen into the same perception trap that you correctly outlined in your first sentenced. I might be biased, having spent most of my professional life in the IT guts of various companies, but here's how I see it: * IT does indeed have a perception problem, and it centers two items: people only see IT's impact when things go wrong, and they don't realize what IT can do for them * IT's perception problems can only be resolved at the strategic level, and that's where a CIO/CTO earns his keep.
The way I look at IT and at how it is used/implemented in various places, it is the single biggest driver for efficiency across all departments. No other department is as singularly responsible for allowing people to do the work they're hired to do. Think about what would happen if email disappers (and isn't replaced by some similar technology): sales would grind to a halt very quickly. And that's just a tiny aspect. Want data about how sales is doing? IT needs to be involved to get at the data, store the data, and maintain the tools used to display the data. Want data about absenteeism? IT to the rescue. And so on. IT holds the keys to everything in a company - if it is done correctly.
As a result, if IT is looked at strictly as a cost center, that's a failing of both the head of IT to properly position what his/her department is doing, and a failing of the other executives to understand what data they need to do their job and to ask IT for it. In my opinion, IT drives efficiency. That requires data, tools, and savvy head of IT who can sell the capabilities of IT. It is possible to relegate IT to the role of a high-tech janitor, but you're missing out.
Sorry, but that's the reality. At least, as well as I can tell. As for leaving politics out of something: that's virtually impossible. Everything that touched more than one person is politics. Lastly, there are libertarians and then there are libertarians. Unfortunately, the term has been so corrupted by Ayn Rand wannabes that it is virtually impossible to use properly anymore.
Except that wireless ISPs suffer massively from frequency shortages. The only way for an ISP to do more than email and light browsing is fiber backbones and wired access. There's a reason Sonic.net got out of the wireless business.
This is exactly right. The Internet is by definition a network of private/public networks. The reason the Internet took off is because all those network operators realized that the benefits they gained from openly interoperating was much greater than the benefits they could leverage from offering a walled garden (AOL anyone).
Now that some private networks are big enough, and have gotten an idea of what people might want to do with a network, they're starting to wall off and charging rent. Comcast might be able to squeeze out some temporary profits, but it will most definitely be temporary. The Internet would collapse into a series of AOLs, innovation will die off, and it'll all be quiet until the concept of an open Internet is revived.
This is a classic case of killing the goose with golden eggs.
Nonsense. Number one, it's not half the bandwidth, unless you somehow count magical pixie dust compression on Comcast's side. You could be arguing that it travels less far, because the data already resides on Comcast's network (Hulu being sponsored/owned/controlled in part by Comcast), but that has nothing to do with bandwidth, and all to do with.... wait for it... Net Neutrality. In one case, the same packets (assuming the very same file exists on both Netflix and on Hulu), are traveling through the Comcast network, with an endpoint in a Comcast controlled network. In the other case, it is traveling through the Comcast network with an endpoint outside of the Comcast controlled network.
This is EXACTLY what Net Neutrality is about it.
And this is EXACTLY what everybody has been screaming bloody murder about since the ISPs got in bed with content, and since ISPs became big enough to be monopoly/duopoly providers. This exact beehavior was predicted by a number of people, and it will end in * Internet access that works exactly like cable channel access * a death sentence for any site that isn't paying off the ISPs to be on a special access program
Let me guess: you also complain about IT twiddling their thumbs when the network is running, right? Or about support staff taking a two hour break in the afternoon to play SC2 when things are just fine and dandy?
Here's a little secret: you can either staff optimally for when everything's fine, or you can staff optimally for when the shit hits the fan. If you choose option 1 though, don't complain to me though that nothing gets done when shit hits the fan, because everyone is completely overworked.
At the risk of incurring the wrath of libertarians (they seem to have a lot of mod points recently), I'm thinking you're either a tea partier, a MBAer or a libertarian. It's the main places where I see this sort of thinking come from.
He was fired for being corrupt, not for being a sanctimonious douche bag? Kinda my point. And he might have lost the first few states, but they were basically all proportionate - once he pulled even with Romney in Iowa and polled ahead of Romney in a number of other states, it was hard to tell what was going to happen. Romney can thank his money and organizational skills for pulling this off.
I thought this battle had been fought and won in the VCR times.
You know what - I'm trying really hard to be a law-abiding copyright user. But I'm getting to the point where I really don't care anymore. Fuck the content providers. I can always send artists a check, support companies via kickstarter, or directly contribute in other ways. But I know how to rip, I know how to store, and I can create a darknet for friends and family. I have most of the hardware and software in place, and I expect that over the next few years, I'll actually have a nice library of movies (thank you, library), music (thank you, friends) and books that is sitting on my personal storage server, and freely available to anyone I give access to. The server is sitting behind a firewall, and nobody knows about it unless I tell them the secret knock.
Have fun, MPAA/RIAA. Welcome to your worst nightmare.
Is that why Santorum at some point had a shot at getting the Republican nomination? Granted, things finally turned around, but for a while there, it wasn't obvious that Romney would beat Santorum. Don't forget that Santorum was governor of Pennsylvania, too.
We're not at that level of crazy yet, but there are plenty of people working feverishly to achieve parity with India and Saudia Arabia.
For the same reason that free-loaders in general are shunned from all societies: because you are piggy-backing on the effort that others are putting into improving social conditions in general, without providing anything in return.
I'm really not sure why that concept is so hard to understand.
So in short, you base your calculations solely on what happens to your kid and toss away every impact on anyone around you. That's what I thought - you are indeed evil. And you're right, the odds are that I will shoot you is low. That just leads to jail. Far more effective to change the laws around mandatory vaccinations, and to change the mindset of the public to regard anti-vaxxers in the same light as serial killers. Vigilante justice is reserved to the rare times where it either prevents a crime or the chance to get away is 100%.
By the way, you made a mistake in your calculations. The correct calculation includes the odds that someone - not just me - wants to exact some revenge on you for not vaccinating your kids and spreading a deadly disease. Do you still feel lucky?
In any case, I simply hate the use of the term 'consensus' when talking about a 'theory'...especially a 'scientific theory', that's not the appropriate use of the term...theories are or are not correct within their realm of prediction, there is no consensus...
Well..... to some extent, I can see your point. However, it is useful to bear in mind Asimov's point about what truth means in terms of science. The theory that the earth is round is useful, and many people agree that it is indeed. The theory that the earth is an oblate spheroid is also useful, and a few people prefer that theory over the one that the earth is round, because they need the more precise predictions that that theory makes. To then argue that there is no consensus on what the earth looks like is disingenuous: there is disagreement over the detail of the data points and theory used to model the data points, but by and large, people agree on the basics. That's scientific consensus. It applies to both data and theory, and does so independently.
To bring Climate Science back in: there is very solid consensus on the data that has been collected, and there is solid consensus on the accuracy of various models used to make predictions about climate changes. Can it get better? Of course, and I sure hope it does. But there is consensus on what the models look like, and what the future might look like. And that's important when making policy decisions.
And the total temperature forcing of methane is less - significantly less - than the one of human-produced CO2. That's the point. Water vapor is basically irrelevant in the discussion of what drives temperature, and methane gets completely obliterated by CO2.
I'm sure if they would have a more relevant experience than "Astronaut", they would have listed it. Since they did list things like Astronaut, I'm assuming that that's what they want me to think of when I consider their petition. If they don't want me to judge them based on what information they're putting out, then... well, I can't help them.
You haven't factored in the odds that I will shoot you if your kid(s) give my kid some disease like pertussis, diphteria or chicken pox, and my child happens to die from it.
What, you think I'm just gonna let you get away with killing my child because you were too lazy to go to the doctor and put up with a cranky kid?
However, if you make an argument that relies completely on the authority of the speaker, it is common sense to check the credential of the speaker(s). In this case, the credentials of most of the petitioners are found to be pretty lacking. It would be entirely different if these people had gotten together to publish a study with data, data analysis and findings based on the data analysis.
Well, here's the thing: these people are not making an argument in scientific circles, they are making a public appeal to a public servant to change what the agency he is in charge of is doing.
As a result, the only thing that the petitioners have that adds weight to their argument is their authority in the field. That means that it is entirely valid to look at their authority in that field, conclude it is close to zero, and refer them to reframe their objections in scientific traditions - i.e. to publish their objections to the science in peer-reviewed journals.
The problem isn't so much that the petitioners are being dismissed as non-climate-scientists. It is that the petitioners are trying to leverage authority in one field to argue from authority in a completely different field. No one bats an eye if an engineer wants to publish a paper in a journal. But if they want to be taken at their word, they better make sure their credentials are in order. And while 2-3 of the petitioners could pass as authorities on climate science (even in a limited scope), the rest really don't.
And that's why they're being told STFU and publish.
Slashdot Mirror
The speed of light is known with a precision that goes quite beyond that. After that, the timing is a simple question of arithmetic.
Wow, you have a bit of a chip on your shoulder, don't you? This isn't about Bush's use of presidential powers, or about whose fault is what. Focus a bit. This is about what a president can do, and where the recent expansion of presidential powers came from. And if you base your assessment of what a president can do on what candidates tell you... god help us all.
If what you're saying is true, Earth should already be like Venus is today, and should have been so millions of years ago.
No, what he's saying is that there is a positive feedback mechanism that will keep going until a particular part of that mechanism stops running. That would be the supply of methane in permafrost and at the bottom of the ocean.
Your prediction is that once it gets warm, it keeps getting warmer and warmer and warmer until it becomes a new sun, or whatever absurd conclusion you're making.
Straw man and hyperbole. He didn't say that. Furthermore, you're the only one making absurd predictions - and putting them in the mouths of other people.
But instead you'd rather flip the bird at a guy who owns an SUV, blame everything on him, then look at your own smug face in the mirror while you beat off.
No idea how you got that from a comment that essentially says "hey, you're timescale assessment is wrong." Could you be projecting?
Oh by the way, you're a liberal hippie fag, dont reply, because everything you say is either DEAD WRONG, or just self-masturbatory preaching to the choir.
Ignoring the liberal application of random insults and assumptions, you seem to a) engage in the same black-and-white thinking you were decrying two sentences earlier, and b) equate being right with self-masturbatory preaching. Can't handle the truth, can you?
The funny part is that you will be the least prepared for the coming trouble. Have fun. Liberals have guns, too.
Yes, because the US president has full power to do whatever the fuck he wants. Why is it that so many Americans think that the president is some kind of all-powerful dictator? Did you fall asleep during civics class? Or do you think that every president gets handed a do-what-you-want cudgel like Bush did with 9/11?
Forgot to divide by '2' and that screwed up everything else
You got a D on an exam because you forgot to divide by 2 somewhere? I see three possibilities:
* You didn't show your work, and you got 0 points for the problem because you only showed the wrong answer.
* You are leaving out all the other problems you got wrong that contributed to the D
* You had a lousy teacher/grader, who considers a missing division by 2 to be as bad as not knowing anything about thermodynamics at all.
Personally, the last part is a pet peeve of mine. With grades being all you have to show for in school, nuking someone for just getting a small step wrong somewhere is idiotic and counter productive. The goal isn't to get people to memorize things, but instead to understand concepts. Details can easily be looked up. That said, the other pet peeve of mine were students who complained I gave zero points on a problem when they had forgotten to divide by two - but only gave me the anwer. If you want partial credit, don't be lazy - show your work.
Indeed. I think the most impressive part about this troll is that it actually managed to be taken seriously and modded UP.
Or, alternatively, let's keep all the low-knowledge jobs in-country and prevent other countries from increasing their standards of living, so that they can't buy US products and services.
A healthy world market is GOOD for the US job market, despite what all the short-sighted people are trying to tell you.
That's because boobies are hot, and mansausage isn't.
On a more serious note, these are two incidents. Anyone trying to reach broad conclusions from two data points will be able to do so easily. After all, you can fit any curve you want through two points. I'd be more interested what happens after we've had a few hundred strips take place.
I've often gotten the impression that IT is perceived by management as Janitorial services, or Corporate Archives, or the company cafeteria by companies that are not directly selling IT services themselves, as well as government agencies in general.
IT that is not customer facing is in fact still a support service.
I think you've fallen into the same perception trap that you correctly outlined in your first sentenced.
I might be biased, having spent most of my professional life in the IT guts of various companies, but here's how I see it:
* IT does indeed have a perception problem, and it centers two items: people only see IT's impact when things go wrong, and they don't realize what IT can do for them
* IT's perception problems can only be resolved at the strategic level, and that's where a CIO/CTO earns his keep.
The way I look at IT and at how it is used/implemented in various places, it is the single biggest driver for efficiency across all departments. No other department is as singularly responsible for allowing people to do the work they're hired to do. Think about what would happen if email disappers (and isn't replaced by some similar technology): sales would grind to a halt very quickly. And that's just a tiny aspect. Want data about how sales is doing? IT needs to be involved to get at the data, store the data, and maintain the tools used to display the data. Want data about absenteeism? IT to the rescue. And so on. IT holds the keys to everything in a company - if it is done correctly.
As a result, if IT is looked at strictly as a cost center, that's a failing of both the head of IT to properly position what his/her department is doing, and a failing of the other executives to understand what data they need to do their job and to ask IT for it. In my opinion, IT drives efficiency. That requires data, tools, and savvy head of IT who can sell the capabilities of IT. It is possible to relegate IT to the role of a high-tech janitor, but you're missing out.
Sorry, but that's the reality. At least, as well as I can tell. As for leaving politics out of something: that's virtually impossible. Everything that touched more than one person is politics. Lastly, there are libertarians and then there are libertarians. Unfortunately, the term has been so corrupted by Ayn Rand wannabes that it is virtually impossible to use properly anymore.
Except that wireless ISPs suffer massively from frequency shortages. The only way for an ISP to do more than email and light browsing is fiber backbones and wired access. There's a reason Sonic.net got out of the wireless business.
This is exactly right. The Internet is by definition a network of private/public networks. The reason the Internet took off is because all those network operators realized that the benefits they gained from openly interoperating was much greater than the benefits they could leverage from offering a walled garden (AOL anyone).
Now that some private networks are big enough, and have gotten an idea of what people might want to do with a network, they're starting to wall off and charging rent. Comcast might be able to squeeze out some temporary profits, but it will most definitely be temporary. The Internet would collapse into a series of AOLs, innovation will die off, and it'll all be quiet until the concept of an open Internet is revived.
This is a classic case of killing the goose with golden eggs.
Nonsense. Number one, it's not half the bandwidth, unless you somehow count magical pixie dust compression on Comcast's side. You could be arguing that it travels less far, because the data already resides on Comcast's network (Hulu being sponsored/owned/controlled in part by Comcast), but that has nothing to do with bandwidth, and all to do with.... wait for it... Net Neutrality. In one case, the same packets (assuming the very same file exists on both Netflix and on Hulu), are traveling through the Comcast network, with an endpoint in a Comcast controlled network. In the other case, it is traveling through the Comcast network with an endpoint outside of the Comcast controlled network.
This is EXACTLY what Net Neutrality is about it.
And this is EXACTLY what everybody has been screaming bloody murder about since the ISPs got in bed with content, and since ISPs became big enough to be monopoly/duopoly providers. This exact beehavior was predicted by a number of people, and it will end in
* Internet access that works exactly like cable channel access
* a death sentence for any site that isn't paying off the ISPs to be on a special access program
Welcome to the future Internet. It's called TV.
Let me guess: you also complain about IT twiddling their thumbs when the network is running, right? Or about support staff taking a two hour break in the afternoon to play SC2 when things are just fine and dandy?
Here's a little secret: you can either staff optimally for when everything's fine, or you can staff optimally for when the shit hits the fan. If you choose option 1 though, don't complain to me though that nothing gets done when shit hits the fan, because everyone is completely overworked.
At the risk of incurring the wrath of libertarians (they seem to have a lot of mod points recently), I'm thinking you're either a tea partier, a MBAer or a libertarian. It's the main places where I see this sort of thinking come from.
He was fired for being corrupt, not for being a sanctimonious douche bag? Kinda my point. And he might have lost the first few states, but they were basically all proportionate - once he pulled even with Romney in Iowa and polled ahead of Romney in a number of other states, it was hard to tell what was going to happen. Romney can thank his money and organizational skills for pulling this off.
I thought this battle had been fought and won in the VCR times.
You know what - I'm trying really hard to be a law-abiding copyright user. But I'm getting to the point where I really don't care anymore. Fuck the content providers. I can always send artists a check, support companies via kickstarter, or directly contribute in other ways. But I know how to rip, I know how to store, and I can create a darknet for friends and family. I have most of the hardware and software in place, and I expect that over the next few years, I'll actually have a nice library of movies (thank you, library), music (thank you, friends) and books that is sitting on my personal storage server, and freely available to anyone I give access to. The server is sitting behind a firewall, and nobody knows about it unless I tell them the secret knock.
Have fun, MPAA/RIAA. Welcome to your worst nightmare.
Is that why Santorum at some point had a shot at getting the Republican nomination? Granted, things finally turned around, but for a while there, it wasn't obvious that Romney would beat Santorum. Don't forget that Santorum was governor of Pennsylvania, too.
We're not at that level of crazy yet, but there are plenty of people working feverishly to achieve parity with India and Saudia Arabia.
So why do you care?
For the same reason that free-loaders in general are shunned from all societies: because you are piggy-backing on the effort that others are putting into improving social conditions in general, without providing anything in return.
I'm really not sure why that concept is so hard to understand.
So in short, you base your calculations solely on what happens to your kid and toss away every impact on anyone around you. That's what I thought - you are indeed evil. And you're right, the odds are that I will shoot you is low. That just leads to jail. Far more effective to change the laws around mandatory vaccinations, and to change the mindset of the public to regard anti-vaxxers in the same light as serial killers. Vigilante justice is reserved to the rare times where it either prevents a crime or the chance to get away is 100%.
By the way, you made a mistake in your calculations. The correct calculation includes the odds that someone - not just me - wants to exact some revenge on you for not vaccinating your kids and spreading a deadly disease. Do you still feel lucky?
Have a nice day.
In any case, I simply hate the use of the term 'consensus' when talking about a 'theory'...especially a 'scientific theory', that's not the appropriate use of the term...theories are or are not correct within their realm of prediction, there is no consensus...
Well..... to some extent, I can see your point. However, it is useful to bear in mind Asimov's point about what truth means in terms of science. The theory that the earth is round is useful, and many people agree that it is indeed. The theory that the earth is an oblate spheroid is also useful, and a few people prefer that theory over the one that the earth is round, because they need the more precise predictions that that theory makes. To then argue that there is no consensus on what the earth looks like is disingenuous: there is disagreement over the detail of the data points and theory used to model the data points, but by and large, people agree on the basics. That's scientific consensus. It applies to both data and theory, and does so independently.
To bring Climate Science back in: there is very solid consensus on the data that has been collected, and there is solid consensus on the accuracy of various models used to make predictions about climate changes. Can it get better? Of course, and I sure hope it does. But there is consensus on what the models look like, and what the future might look like. And that's important when making policy decisions.
And the total temperature forcing of methane is less - significantly less - than the one of human-produced CO2. That's the point. Water vapor is basically irrelevant in the discussion of what drives temperature, and methane gets completely obliterated by CO2.
I'm sure if they would have a more relevant experience than "Astronaut", they would have listed it. Since they did list things like Astronaut, I'm assuming that that's what they want me to think of when I consider their petition. If they don't want me to judge them based on what information they're putting out, then... well, I can't help them.
You haven't factored in the odds that I will shoot you if your kid(s) give my kid some disease like pertussis, diphteria or chicken pox, and my child happens to die from it.
What, you think I'm just gonna let you get away with killing my child because you were too lazy to go to the doctor and put up with a cranky kid?
However, if you make an argument that relies completely on the authority of the speaker, it is common sense to check the credential of the speaker(s). In this case, the credentials of most of the petitioners are found to be pretty lacking. It would be entirely different if these people had gotten together to publish a study with data, data analysis and findings based on the data analysis.
Well, here's the thing: these people are not making an argument in scientific circles, they are making a public appeal to a public servant to change what the agency he is in charge of is doing.
As a result, the only thing that the petitioners have that adds weight to their argument is their authority in the field. That means that it is entirely valid to look at their authority in that field, conclude it is close to zero, and refer them to reframe their objections in scientific traditions - i.e. to publish their objections to the science in peer-reviewed journals.
The problem isn't so much that the petitioners are being dismissed as non-climate-scientists. It is that the petitioners are trying to leverage authority in one field to argue from authority in a completely different field. No one bats an eye if an engineer wants to publish a paper in a journal. But if they want to be taken at their word, they better make sure their credentials are in order. And while 2-3 of the petitioners could pass as authorities on climate science (even in a limited scope), the rest really don't.
And that's why they're being told STFU and publish.