Detection, yes. But what good does it do us? Isn't SETI supposed to find other intelligent life in the universe for the purpose of eventually making contact? It's gonna be really tough to get in touch with anyone whose entire star system (and probably any colonies they may have had in nearby star systems) got blown up 50,000 years ago.;)
You're saying that the Slashdot editors deliberately misquoted you? And here we thought that the crappy article blurbs were due to crappy submissions - it turns out after all that the editors actually are editing submissions for style, content, link-checks, and so forth... just in the wrong direction.
I'm not going to paste it. But I am going to point something out - people (myself often included) complain about the quality of writing and editing here on Slashdot, but evidently this site isn't alone. From the article:
For example, say
your browsing a web page with numerous addresses on it. AutoLink will turn each of those addresses into direct links to the Google Maps database.
That's a part of the article quoting someone else, though, so here is something written directly by the actual article author (who has "nearly 15 years of... journalism and communications experience" and should know better):
In addition to addresses, it will also add links for ISBNs, package tracking numbers, and vehicle identification numbers. This all has Greg Linden a bit spooked. I agree. How come nobody is crying foul here? Remember all the heat Microsoft took over its planned Smart Tags feature a few years ago? Gary
eludes to it, but I think that there should be more discussion here.
Why don't journalists and communications people have to learn the language they're communicating in before being given jobs or keeping jobs for 15 years? Imagine if you walked into a job interview for a position writing Java code and couldn't answer what the difference is between while and if... you would not walk out with a job offer. The writing professions should be held to no less a standard, but we're letting them get away with it. Why?
N.B. for the people who haven't spotted what's wrong, either because English is a second language or because they are fellow victims of the educational system that produced this article's author.. "Your" is the second-person possessive, whereas "you're" is the correct spelling of the homophone that means "you are," the intended meaning here. I am willing to let contractions slide in journalism, but at least spell them correctly. The "each"/"links" problem is a parallelism thing - the meaning inherent in the way it is worded is that each address will be turned into more than one link, whereas the intended meaning was probably that "AutoLink will turn each of those addresses into a direct link to the Google Maps database." Finally, "to elude" has a meaning similar to "to evade." The word intended here is "allude," meaning "to make an indirect reference." Both come from the same Latin root, ludere, but the difference between prefixing with e and with ad is quite significant.
Once again, I have to lodge a complaint with the Slashcode team regarding the absence of a "+1 On-Topic Futurama Reference" moderation option. It would, of course, be complemented by a "-1 Simpsons Did It" option.
That's just the problem: I doubt the accuracy and reliability of the methodology used in creating the data set on which those observations are based. You saying "they being well accepted as they are" is just further evidence that the entire thing is built on a consensus, not on hard, solid, scientific data.
there is no information of another period of time when the planet heated so much
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I've said that elsewhere in this thread, and it applies here. There are other fallacies involved in your statement, including that it's a plain-as-day red herring, but it all boils down to one thing: we don't have evidence enough to support any conclusion.
What is the scientific methodology for reaching the conclusion you have presented? For that matter, what scientific methodology is used to measure the global average temperature right now, in 2005? What was that method in 1905? 1805? How about 7995 B.C.? What measurements can be made of the global average temperature before the last ice age? How about before the prior ice ages?
The truth is that the only remotely accurate data points for the global average temperature that we have are younger than the period of time relevant to your conclusion.
I do my best to be civil and intelligent, because either one alone is no good. I honestly don't know enough to say in either direction that accelerated global warming is a reality. It's clear that the world is warming up, and has been for the past 10,000 years or so. In fact, the geological record indicates that right now we're still in a cold spell compared to the average for the planet. (And, just like the average person, there is no actual example of the average climate, but that's just where the middle is between warm spells and cold spells.)
Personally, I believe that the climate is cyclical. I also don't believe that anything mankind can do will sufficiently alter the cycle. Global warming isn't really a fear for the planet, but a fear for survival. Just like eugenics and nuclear winter (both analogies borrowed from Michael Crichton, who may or may not have borrowed them from elsewhere), the fear is not that the world will end, but rather that we won't be around to enjoy it anymore.
I am not arrogant enough about my species to think that we are truly capable of driving ourselves to extinction any quicker by global warming than we will be overdependence on medical technology or inability to divert a killer meteorite.
I do, however, think that global warming is worth scientific study. We didn't have accurate digital thermometers in the 1400's. Even in 1900, do you think the people taking temperatures around the globe were more concerned with an accurate reading or with finishing their breakfast and reading the temperature an hour late and carelessly, so they could get back inside where it was warm? I think that the evidence-collecting tools relied upon by global warming believers are not sufficiently reliable or accurate to justify joining Kyoto and suffering the economic consequences.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, on either side of the global warming controversy. I just wish that the "scientists" would spend more time trying to understand the environment than they do trying to make other people agree with their limited understanding of it.
Yep. Discovery is about both sides knowing the whole story, so that you don't end up two months into the actual trial when you figure out you have no claim against the defendant. SCO v. IBM is an exception, where the plaintiff knew they had no claim before they started discovery, but went digging for one anyhow. I don't think we should judge the federal court system based in any part on SCO v. IBM.
The real problem is that there are two kinds of science today. There is science, as in a traditional pursuit of natural knowledge through experimentation, and there is politicized science, as in people believing things because they are told to believe them. One of these receives media attention, and that's the one that the masses actually care about.
IANALY and I haven't read the PDF, but it seems to me from what I have read that the proposed amendments relate mostly to discovery. Discovery under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (those being the rules to be amended here) is multi-facted.
As I see it, the big one here is the discovery device of document requests. You (a lawyer for party A) send a request for production of documents to party B, for instance "All sales records for the period from January 1, 1999 through January 1, 2002." And they have to comply, as long as the documents meet certain requirements (none of which is admissibility; rather, the general rule on discovery is that the request must be "reasonably calculated to lead to admissible evidence").
The problem is that it might be unreasonably burdensome to say "I want a copy of every internal e-mail for the years 1999-2001." These amendments probably address situations like that, and the controversy is where to draw the line.
On one side are corporations who want neither to retain every internal e-mail for a year (do you want to work in an IT department that retains terabytes of mundane "Lunch at Baja Fresh?" e-mails every year?) nor to give their internal e-mails to the guys on the other side of the "v." in a civil lawsuit. On the other side are people who don't want corporations destroying all sorts of critical evidence and getting away with it just because it's not on paper.
My thought is that, if a double standard will come into play here, it will be more blatant than you're thinking. The rules will not be laxer for accusations of copyright infringement. Rather, they could simply be different for natural persons than they are for corporate entities. It'd be very hard to argue, however, that corporations should have less of a burden of document production than individuals, when corporations will almost invariably have better retention as a matter of both corporate policy and technology budget.
It is, however, perfectly possible that the amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (note to other posters using terms such as "guilty": these rules do not apply to criminal trials, only to civil lawsuits) will not be biased one way or the other.
Although Michael Crichton has also compared Eugenics to Global Warming (in an appendix to his novel State of Fear), I am in no way obligated to cite him when I neither quote nor paraphrase his work and do not even rely on any of his work for what I wrote.
Now, even if I should cite him, why in the hell would I put in quotes that which he didn't say? Lying about what someone said is plagiarism, too.
Eugenics is a good analogy to global warming precisely because there lies some truth behind it. The problem with eugenics wasn't outright scientific incorrectness at its core, but rather that it became politicized. The political process turned it from "selective breeding can improve the species" to "sterilize/euthanize everyone not selected" and then the selection process became more and more political and less and less scientific.
At the heart of global warming lie several solid scientific theories. The Earth is warmer in 2000 than in 1900, at least according to the measurement techniques available in each of those years. The ozone layer plays a part in global temperature. The ozone layer fluctuates with time.
But the political process has turned us away from legitimate research and toward emotional, reactionary, and outright half-baked "solutions" to problems that may not even exist, or may not even be problems.
If you enjoyed that speech, you'd love his book State of Fear. To those moderators and commentators who are going to tell me "But that's a novel, what kind of idiot are you for looking to a work of fiction instead of the scientific consensus?!?": Crichton's novel is, indeed, a work of fiction. However, Crichton does two things differently from the scientific consensus on global warming:
He tells you right on the cover that it's fiction
He did more scientific research in writing that novel than most global warming pundits do in their own field
There was another scientific theory that attained "scientific consensus," and everyone who was anyone believed that life as they knew it would end if something was not done. As a result, massive programs were undertaken to ensure that this would not happen. Connecticut was the first of the United States to enact laws, in 1896. The Carnegie Institution funded research into solutions starting in 1904. In 1910, a centralized research facility was set up, and in 1924 federal law was passed to further curtail the effects of this theoretical phenomenon.
Although we can look back and clearly see that the consensus was wrong, at the time the methods and results were almost universally believed to be entirely legitimate science. Detractors, no matter how credible or scientifically convincing, were either ignored or ridiculed for deviating from the broad scientific consensus.
Of course, the United States was, at the time, only the second most active nation in its attempts to curtail the effects of the disaster impending for all of humanity. Germany was more ambitious and probably more successful in its advances of eugenics, the theory essentially that the gene pool is decaying and needs to be carefully maintained by selective breeding, specifically excluding those "unfit" to carry on the race.
Consensus has exactly as much weight in science as it does on the playground: the only effect is that those who dare disagree (no matter how correct they are) are beaten up and called names. If that's the kind of support you use to justify your beliefs, then you have no place in science. Unfortunately, global warming believers have taken their place regardless of its nonexistence. And they win you over by fear ("Humanity will not survive!") and by false dichotomy ("If you're not with us, you're against the environment!"). (See Wikipedia's list of logical fallacies, quite a few of which apply to arguing that global warming is reality and not just a theory.)
The US didn't join Kyoto because Kyoto is meaningless, not because the US is anti-environment. (And whether the latter is the case or not depends on a lot of factors, but is irrelevant to this discussion nonetheless.)
comp.lang.lisp is fabulous. When I was involved there (lost my ISP with a good news server and have tried paying for a news server but demanded a refund due to absolutely terrible quality and desolate group population and message retention), I was really impressed not only by the community but also by some of the names that would show up to post from time to time.
Slashdot sends interviews off to famous programming language architects once in a blue moon. On comp.lang.*, you occasionally discuss language design features with the guy who invented them on a personal basis.
I have to disagree. Google Groups is great for reading anything over a week old, but for keeping up-to-date or having any kind of discussion, it is abysmal at best. What took me less than 24 hours when I had Cox cable internet with Usenet access in Phoenix can take upwards of two weeks using Google Groups.
But it is phenomenal for read-only access to things a week or more old, and by "or more" I mean back to the Pleistocene era.
Slashdot Mirror
Detection, yes. But what good does it do us? Isn't SETI supposed to find other intelligent life in the universe for the purpose of eventually making contact? It's gonna be really tough to get in touch with anyone whose entire star system (and probably any colonies they may have had in nearby star systems) got blown up 50,000 years ago. ;)
All I have to say is "Karma to burn" ... this is my burnin' week. ;)
Are you sure it wasn't "USS Voyager self-destruct sequence, in 10, 9, 8, ..." ?
You're saying that the Slashdot editors deliberately misquoted you? And here we thought that the crappy article blurbs were due to crappy submissions - it turns out after all that the editors actually are editing submissions for style, content, link-checks, and so forth ... just in the wrong direction.
I wish you had posted non-anonymously so I could tell if you're being funny or trying to be smart. I sincerely hope for the former.
I'm not going to paste it. But I am going to point something out - people (myself often included) complain about the quality of writing and editing here on Slashdot, but evidently this site isn't alone. From the article:
That's a part of the article quoting someone else, though, so here is something written directly by the actual article author (who has "nearly 15 years of ... journalism and communications experience" and should know better):
Why don't journalists and communications people have to learn the language they're communicating in before being given jobs or keeping jobs for 15 years? Imagine if you walked into a job interview for a position writing Java code and couldn't answer what the difference is between while and if ... you would not walk out with a job offer. The writing professions should be held to no less a standard, but we're letting them get away with it. Why?
N.B. for the people who haven't spotted what's wrong, either because English is a second language or because they are fellow victims of the educational system that produced this article's author.. "Your" is the second-person possessive, whereas "you're" is the correct spelling of the homophone that means "you are," the intended meaning here. I am willing to let contractions slide in journalism, but at least spell them correctly. The "each"/"links" problem is a parallelism thing - the meaning inherent in the way it is worded is that each address will be turned into more than one link, whereas the intended meaning was probably that "AutoLink will turn each of those addresses into a direct link to the Google Maps database." Finally, "to elude" has a meaning similar to "to evade." The word intended here is "allude," meaning "to make an indirect reference." Both come from the same Latin root, ludere, but the difference between prefixing with e and with ad is quite significant.
Imagine an Etch-a-Sketch for the new millennium! Finally! (And with a touch-screen, it could be a Lite Brite, too!)
Posting 4 sources and then Google News? Too bad there's not a mod for "Internally redundant." ;)
Tea, as in "tea, Earl Grey, hot."
Once again, I have to lodge a complaint with the Slashcode team regarding the absence of a "+1 On-Topic Futurama Reference" moderation option. It would, of course, be complemented by a "-1 Simpsons Did It" option.
That's just the problem: I doubt the accuracy and reliability of the methodology used in creating the data set on which those observations are based. You saying "they being well accepted as they are" is just further evidence that the entire thing is built on a consensus, not on hard, solid, scientific data.
there is no information of another period of time when the planet heated so much
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I've said that elsewhere in this thread, and it applies here. There are other fallacies involved in your statement, including that it's a plain-as-day red herring, but it all boils down to one thing: we don't have evidence enough to support any conclusion.
What is the scientific methodology for reaching the conclusion you have presented? For that matter, what scientific methodology is used to measure the global average temperature right now, in 2005? What was that method in 1905? 1805? How about 7995 B.C.? What measurements can be made of the global average temperature before the last ice age? How about before the prior ice ages?
The truth is that the only remotely accurate data points for the global average temperature that we have are younger than the period of time relevant to your conclusion.
I do my best to be civil and intelligent, because either one alone is no good. I honestly don't know enough to say in either direction that accelerated global warming is a reality. It's clear that the world is warming up, and has been for the past 10,000 years or so. In fact, the geological record indicates that right now we're still in a cold spell compared to the average for the planet. (And, just like the average person, there is no actual example of the average climate, but that's just where the middle is between warm spells and cold spells.)
Personally, I believe that the climate is cyclical. I also don't believe that anything mankind can do will sufficiently alter the cycle. Global warming isn't really a fear for the planet, but a fear for survival. Just like eugenics and nuclear winter (both analogies borrowed from Michael Crichton, who may or may not have borrowed them from elsewhere), the fear is not that the world will end, but rather that we won't be around to enjoy it anymore.
I am not arrogant enough about my species to think that we are truly capable of driving ourselves to extinction any quicker by global warming than we will be overdependence on medical technology or inability to divert a killer meteorite.
I do, however, think that global warming is worth scientific study. We didn't have accurate digital thermometers in the 1400's. Even in 1900, do you think the people taking temperatures around the globe were more concerned with an accurate reading or with finishing their breakfast and reading the temperature an hour late and carelessly, so they could get back inside where it was warm? I think that the evidence-collecting tools relied upon by global warming believers are not sufficiently reliable or accurate to justify joining Kyoto and suffering the economic consequences.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, on either side of the global warming controversy. I just wish that the "scientists" would spend more time trying to understand the environment than they do trying to make other people agree with their limited understanding of it.
Yep. Discovery is about both sides knowing the whole story, so that you don't end up two months into the actual trial when you figure out you have no claim against the defendant. SCO v. IBM is an exception, where the plaintiff knew they had no claim before they started discovery, but went digging for one anyhow. I don't think we should judge the federal court system based in any part on SCO v. IBM.
I'll see you there! >8^)
The real problem is that there are two kinds of science today. There is science, as in a traditional pursuit of natural knowledge through experimentation, and there is politicized science, as in people believing things because they are told to believe them. One of these receives media attention, and that's the one that the masses actually care about.
If I go to this film in the theater, and I see anyone sans towel, I'm going to be very depressed, and I will probably panic as a result.
IANALY and I haven't read the PDF, but it seems to me from what I have read that the proposed amendments relate mostly to discovery. Discovery under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (those being the rules to be amended here) is multi-facted.
As I see it, the big one here is the discovery device of document requests. You (a lawyer for party A) send a request for production of documents to party B, for instance "All sales records for the period from January 1, 1999 through January 1, 2002." And they have to comply, as long as the documents meet certain requirements (none of which is admissibility; rather, the general rule on discovery is that the request must be "reasonably calculated to lead to admissible evidence").
The problem is that it might be unreasonably burdensome to say "I want a copy of every internal e-mail for the years 1999-2001." These amendments probably address situations like that, and the controversy is where to draw the line.
On one side are corporations who want neither to retain every internal e-mail for a year (do you want to work in an IT department that retains terabytes of mundane "Lunch at Baja Fresh?" e-mails every year?) nor to give their internal e-mails to the guys on the other side of the "v." in a civil lawsuit. On the other side are people who don't want corporations destroying all sorts of critical evidence and getting away with it just because it's not on paper.
My thought is that, if a double standard will come into play here, it will be more blatant than you're thinking. The rules will not be laxer for accusations of copyright infringement. Rather, they could simply be different for natural persons than they are for corporate entities. It'd be very hard to argue, however, that corporations should have less of a burden of document production than individuals, when corporations will almost invariably have better retention as a matter of both corporate policy and technology budget.
It is, however, perfectly possible that the amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (note to other posters using terms such as "guilty": these rules do not apply to criminal trials, only to civil lawsuits) will not be biased one way or the other.
Although Michael Crichton has also compared Eugenics to Global Warming (in an appendix to his novel State of Fear), I am in no way obligated to cite him when I neither quote nor paraphrase his work and do not even rely on any of his work for what I wrote.
Now, even if I should cite him, why in the hell would I put in quotes that which he didn't say? Lying about what someone said is plagiarism, too.
Eugenics is a good analogy to global warming precisely because there lies some truth behind it. The problem with eugenics wasn't outright scientific incorrectness at its core, but rather that it became politicized. The political process turned it from "selective breeding can improve the species" to "sterilize/euthanize everyone not selected" and then the selection process became more and more political and less and less scientific.
At the heart of global warming lie several solid scientific theories. The Earth is warmer in 2000 than in 1900, at least according to the measurement techniques available in each of those years. The ozone layer plays a part in global temperature. The ozone layer fluctuates with time.
But the political process has turned us away from legitimate research and toward emotional, reactionary, and outright half-baked "solutions" to problems that may not even exist, or may not even be problems.
- He tells you right on the cover that it's fiction
- He did more scientific research in writing that novel than most global warming pundits do in their own field
And it's a darn good read.There was another scientific theory that attained "scientific consensus," and everyone who was anyone believed that life as they knew it would end if something was not done. As a result, massive programs were undertaken to ensure that this would not happen. Connecticut was the first of the United States to enact laws, in 1896. The Carnegie Institution funded research into solutions starting in 1904. In 1910, a centralized research facility was set up, and in 1924 federal law was passed to further curtail the effects of this theoretical phenomenon.
Although we can look back and clearly see that the consensus was wrong, at the time the methods and results were almost universally believed to be entirely legitimate science. Detractors, no matter how credible or scientifically convincing, were either ignored or ridiculed for deviating from the broad scientific consensus.
Of course, the United States was, at the time, only the second most active nation in its attempts to curtail the effects of the disaster impending for all of humanity. Germany was more ambitious and probably more successful in its advances of eugenics, the theory essentially that the gene pool is decaying and needs to be carefully maintained by selective breeding, specifically excluding those "unfit" to carry on the race.
Consensus has exactly as much weight in science as it does on the playground: the only effect is that those who dare disagree (no matter how correct they are) are beaten up and called names. If that's the kind of support you use to justify your beliefs, then you have no place in science. Unfortunately, global warming believers have taken their place regardless of its nonexistence. And they win you over by fear ("Humanity will not survive!") and by false dichotomy ("If you're not with us, you're against the environment!"). (See Wikipedia's list of logical fallacies, quite a few of which apply to arguing that global warming is reality and not just a theory.)
The US didn't join Kyoto because Kyoto is meaningless, not because the US is anti-environment. (And whether the latter is the case or not depends on a lot of factors, but is irrelevant to this discussion nonetheless.)
comp.lang.lisp is fabulous. When I was involved there (lost my ISP with a good news server and have tried paying for a news server but demanded a refund due to absolutely terrible quality and desolate group population and message retention), I was really impressed not only by the community but also by some of the names that would show up to post from time to time.
Slashdot sends interviews off to famous programming language architects once in a blue moon. On comp.lang.*, you occasionally discuss language design features with the guy who invented them on a personal basis.
I have to disagree. Google Groups is great for reading anything over a week old, but for keeping up-to-date or having any kind of discussion, it is abysmal at best. What took me less than 24 hours when I had Cox cable internet with Usenet access in Phoenix can take upwards of two weeks using Google Groups.
But it is phenomenal for read-only access to things a week or more old, and by "or more" I mean back to the Pleistocene era.