I'd settle for 500 years of accurate, precise (with an error no greater than 0.05C) temperature measurements from at least 5000 sites scattered reasonably uniformly over the globe.
Plus CO2 levels at each site at the same times as the temperature measurements.
I'll provide you with it, as soon as you provide me with proof of your existence, including genetic material from every member of your family from the past 500 years, and a detailed log of your activities from the day you were born to the present including global coordinates at every minute with an error no greater than 2 meters.
No, a simple ID or a driver's license won't do, as I'd only have your (alleged) current self to check them against. Ohh, and I also want a pony, thanks.
In the "criteria by which it can be satisfied" it was implied, I believe, that it had to be an objective one. "Make me glad" is subjective, "show me the result" implies "a positive result" which is also subjective (otherwise it'd be irrelevant as every action results in a reaction of some kind), and "wasting my time" is similarly subjective.
That the science and politics of GW and especially AGW have blurred into a horrid muddle such that even the raw data (where it hasn't been destroyed) isn't trustworthy. Therefore basing multi-trillion dollar reordering of the world's economy on it is stupid. Therefore The Won trying to ram a New Deal on Carbon down our thoats by hook (Copenhagan) or crook (EPA) isn't even on the same planet with science, it is ideology, pure and simple.
Except they have nothing to do with each other. It's been shown already that increases of CO2 produce harmful effects unrelated to those of Global Warming and, therefore, that we should reduce our emissions rather than continue increasing it, the whole Global Warming thing is to see *how* fucked up are we, nothing more. This "New Deal" of yours is a necessity, regardless of what you may believe with respect to Global Warming.
So on the one hand we might all be Doomed! yet the only proposed solution to the possibility is 100% certain to produce ruin.
Let us assume you're right, and that as result of the proposed measures to combat contamination levels the world's economy would collapse. How the *HELL* is that comparable to an unhabitable planet!? now, I know, truth isn't based on what option is "less bad" so it has little relevance on the debate at hand but still, your attempts at equating both scenarios is stupid and reeks of bias.
Instead they let Al Gore ride in and turn the whole thing into a crappy PowerPoint, then into a movie and finally ride it to become the Nobel Goracle with a hundred million dollar personal forture riding on a pet theory that just happened (amazing coincidence, Trust Me!) to require the exact same policies his ilk had been pushing since Karl Marx defiled the Earth with his presence.
I thought you were *decrying* the concept of "shooting the messenger", weren't you? it's obvious that Global Warming is an issue that has trascended science into economics, politics and plain old propaganda, but the fact that both sides have nutjobs defending them doesn't mean the other one is automatically right.
If, just if, next year's average is actually colder, will that make a difference ? No, they'll simply declare "localized variation" as always. Funny how when the data agrees with their guesstimate, it's "valid", but when it disagrees, it's "localized variation".
No, in both cases it's "localized variation", much like if it rains tomorrow it doesn't change the fact that it's still summer. You have to look at a much bigger picture than a single year to see the trends climatologists are warning of.
Now I'm not a PhD, hell I didn't even finish college, but common sense, gut instinct and 41 years in the school of life tells me something smells bad about the whole AGW agenda.
Funny. Common sense, gut instinct and 23 years in the school of life have taught me that common sense, gut instinct and years not spent actually studying the field are hardly better than random chance when deciding on problems requiring a proper education to solve. In science, intuition is a bitch, just look at Quantum Physics.
And if the 75% or whatever percentage of "common schmucks" feel this way, how successful do you think any emission reduction efforts will be ?
As much as taxes are, if implemented properly. Few like paying taxes, but as long as the ones in charge remember the old adage of TANSTAAFL and keep the dogs handy they shall continue to be paid.
For a bloody good read, try Tom Clancy's "State of Fear". It puts an awful lot of these issues into the perspective of the common man.
Minor correction: the author of "State of Fear" is Michael Crichton, not Tom Clancy. Minor note: Tom Clancy wrote a novel with roughly the same themes in "Rainbow Six", which inspired the game series of the same name. Major correction: I am a huge fan of Clancy at least, but both guys are biased as hell when it comes to politics so don't try to read too much into their novels: they may be fun, but they have even less to do with reality as Fox News' news reports.
I had my first hands-on with Windows 7 today. I'm somewhat bewildered. In what way is this not Vista 1.1?
Performance.
Certainly nothing that justifies the same folks who've said all along that Vista was "bad" to say that 7 is "awesome".
Other than its horrible performance, fully-updated Vista is actually quite a good OS. Fresh off release, however, was a vastly different story. It did merit every single "bad" adjective attached to it and then some.
Worry not, we'll remember this, when we laugh our ass off playing in a hacked server with a pirated copy of your game.
As a fellow South American, I'd suggest you go play something else instead. You avoid benefiting them through Network Effect, you avoid making your country look like a haven for copyright infringement, and most importantly, you also avoid making a moron out of yourself.
Well, Dragon Age: Origins at least provided a plethora of pre-order bonuses, and I believe Borderlands didn't but it did had a price discount at least.
CoD:MW2? neither. Buying it an hour before release vs buying it an hour after it only meant you'd theoretically play two hours sooner (in practice, servers were swarmed so you couldn't play 'til next day or so anyways), in exchange for foregoing reading early adopters' impressions and problems beforehand.
Yes, paedophiles exist, and so does child porn, but the NUMBER of paedophiles hasn't increased, has it?
It most likely has, along with the rest of the human race. The percentage, on the other hand, I'd bet that it has stayed pretty much constant for the past few centuries or so.
But I agree with the spirit of your post, reminds me of that old quote, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". Poor Roosevelt must be turning in his grave seeing so many people shitting their pants with any mention of pedophiles, terrorists, rapists and such that appears on modern media.
how many of todays Perl and PHP website scripting security issues would evaporate if the authors were forced to write in a less flexible language that took a few moments to actually compile before being enabled?
None. Contrary to popular belief, lower-level languages don't make shitty programmers competent.
Back in the old days people would get fired, for what modern developers do in writing sloppy code, bloated code, and stuff that barely even passes QA testing.
Back in the old days, businesses hired a dozen experienced professionals to write stuff that today is given as an assignment to first-year software engineering students.
Its not that new programmers do the same things with less work, its that they do more for the same amount of work. They're not lazy, its just the "old ways" are inefficient.
Welcome to modern politics. Name one influential political party that doesn't do that, and I'll name you a political party you don't know anything about.
Maybe some of it has to do with me using a USB audio device
Yes, it does. I've got three systems, gXine, Totem, Mplayer and VLC installed on every one of them and they all work perfectly out of the box, but two of my PCs have an internal sound card and the other one uses the integrated one, no USB devices of any kind are involved.
Also, I haven't personally tried it yet but I've heard that Kubuntu is far buggier than the rest of its *buntu brethren so some of your problems may be originating there as well.
Linux compatibility is handled by Mono's Moonlight project, and I doubt they'll be retarded enough to implement this functionality in such a stupid, problematic way.
Great post, thank you. Here's hoping the Mac brigade doesn't turn you into BBQ for it.
Personally, I switched to Linux back then when GTK was a steaming pile of ugly shit, you needed to know how to edit shell scripts, and you had to configure half the system by hand to have a hope of having a decent experience with it. Sure, nowadays it's as easy as putting the CD in and clicking "OK" a couple times, but I still don't regret jumping into it early on: when my friends complained about the stupidization of Windows XP's configuration panels I could tell them I had no such problem, and when they complained about Vista's performance I'd tell them I was still using the same computer as five years ago and still enjoying it.
I'm sure the same will happen eventually on phones, if it hasn't already. Whenever my current PDA and/or phone bites the dust, I'm switching to a Nokia n900 myself. Perhaps it'll be the nightmarish experience that iPhone users warn me it is, perhaps it'll just be Yet Another Nokia Phone but either way, I'm sure the time expense of learning it will be worth it specially once I get a ssh client in there.
You don't get Freedom by asking your overlords nicely for it, you get it by taking an active hand in building it for yourself. And buying a locked-down, brickable-at-any-moment phone isn't a good way to do it.
Wrong. Console games were higher with the release of next gen. systems as they always are because the customer base is smaller, but the average price of an XBox 360 game on release now has dropped from around the £37 mark down to the £32 mark. Many are only £29.99 now where previously they were £34.99, the rest are £34.99 where they were £39.99. CoD MW2 could be picked up for only £26.99 on release night from some supermarkets here in the UK. Console game prices have most certainly not increased in price and are certainly only decreasing.
In the UK, perhaps. Here in South America, however, console games used to be around US$60 at release and drop to US$30-40 afterwards but now they go for US$70-80 and only drop to US$55-60 after time has passed.
PC games on the other hand used to be priced around the same as console games, but modern ones cost now US$50 at release, getting as low as $25-30 after a few months.
Wrong again. You're confusing piracy (and potentially cheating) which Microsoft bans for and importing (importing is not gaming the system), the two things are different. Some Xbox games are region free such as CoD MW2, many people in the UK imported this from the US as it was cheaper and there is no problem using an imported title on a UK system whatsoever. Some games are region locked and wont work, but sites like PlayAsia (http://www.play-asia.com/) have a business around imports.
It's not just "piracy" or "cheating" but also using it as a media box. You could argue that breaking the protections against it inherently makes the machine vulnerable to "piracy", of course, but then I could argue that it shouldn't be necessary nor punishable by itself. Different ways to 'game' the system and go against the platform-maker's wishes without actually breaking the law, both give similar results.
"Philosophy" not only sounds much nicer than "religion", it's far more accurate. Stallman doesn't argue that you should worship the GPL as your only God because He commands so, he simply states that using it and similar Free Software licenses will lead to a better world for everybody. Agree with him or not, that can hardly be called "religion", unless you have an axe to grind.
Slashdot Mirror
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
I'd settle for 500 years of accurate, precise (with an error no greater than 0.05C) temperature measurements from at least 5000 sites scattered reasonably uniformly over the globe.
Plus CO2 levels at each site at the same times as the temperature measurements.
I'll provide you with it, as soon as you provide me with proof of your existence, including genetic material from every member of your family from the past 500 years, and a detailed log of your activities from the day you were born to the present including global coordinates at every minute with an error no greater than 2 meters.
No, a simple ID or a driver's license won't do, as I'd only have your (alleged) current self to check them against. Ohh, and I also want a pony, thanks.
In the "criteria by which it can be satisfied" it was implied, I believe, that it had to be an objective one. "Make me glad" is subjective, "show me the result" implies "a positive result" which is also subjective (otherwise it'd be irrelevant as every action results in a reaction of some kind), and "wasting my time" is similarly subjective.
That the science and politics of GW and especially AGW have blurred into a horrid muddle such that even the raw data (where it hasn't been destroyed) isn't trustworthy. Therefore basing multi-trillion dollar reordering of the world's economy on it is stupid. Therefore The Won trying to ram a New Deal on Carbon down our thoats by hook (Copenhagan) or crook (EPA) isn't even on the same planet with science, it is ideology, pure and simple.
Except they have nothing to do with each other. It's been shown already that increases of CO2 produce harmful effects unrelated to those of Global Warming and, therefore, that we should reduce our emissions rather than continue increasing it, the whole Global Warming thing is to see *how* fucked up are we, nothing more. This "New Deal" of yours is a necessity, regardless of what you may believe with respect to Global Warming.
So on the one hand we might all be Doomed! yet the only proposed solution to the possibility is 100% certain to produce ruin.
Let us assume you're right, and that as result of the proposed measures to combat contamination levels the world's economy would collapse. How the *HELL* is that comparable to an unhabitable planet!? now, I know, truth isn't based on what option is "less bad" so it has little relevance on the debate at hand but still, your attempts at equating both scenarios is stupid and reeks of bias.
Instead they let Al Gore ride in and turn the whole thing into a crappy PowerPoint, then into a movie and finally ride it to become the Nobel Goracle with a hundred million dollar personal forture riding on a pet theory that just happened (amazing coincidence, Trust Me!) to require the exact same policies his ilk had been pushing since Karl Marx defiled the Earth with his presence.
I thought you were *decrying* the concept of "shooting the messenger", weren't you? it's obvious that Global Warming is an issue that has trascended science into economics, politics and plain old propaganda, but the fact that both sides have nutjobs defending them doesn't mean the other one is automatically right.
If, just if, next year's average is actually colder, will that make a difference ? No, they'll simply declare "localized variation" as always. Funny how when the data agrees with their guesstimate, it's "valid", but when it disagrees, it's "localized variation".
No, in both cases it's "localized variation", much like if it rains tomorrow it doesn't change the fact that it's still summer. You have to look at a much bigger picture than a single year to see the trends climatologists are warning of.
Now I'm not a PhD, hell I didn't even finish college, but common sense, gut instinct and 41 years in the school of life tells me something smells bad about the whole AGW agenda.
Funny. Common sense, gut instinct and 23 years in the school of life have taught me that common sense, gut instinct and years not spent actually studying the field are hardly better than random chance when deciding on problems requiring a proper education to solve. In science, intuition is a bitch, just look at Quantum Physics.
And if the 75% or whatever percentage of "common schmucks" feel this way, how successful do you think any emission reduction efforts will be ?
As much as taxes are, if implemented properly. Few like paying taxes, but as long as the ones in charge remember the old adage of TANSTAAFL and keep the dogs handy they shall continue to be paid.
For a bloody good read, try Tom Clancy's "State of Fear". It puts an awful lot of these issues into the perspective of the common man.
Minor correction: the author of "State of Fear" is Michael Crichton, not Tom Clancy.
Minor note: Tom Clancy wrote a novel with roughly the same themes in "Rainbow Six", which inspired the game series of the same name.
Major correction: I am a huge fan of Clancy at least, but both guys are biased as hell when it comes to politics so don't try to read too much into their novels: they may be fun, but they have even less to do with reality as Fox News' news reports.
And a mirror here (from TFA's comments) in case the above goes belly-up due to the Slashdot effect.
If both are armed, at least the woman has a fighting chance. If he's drunk and she's sober, my money is on the woman.
Why? improved reflexes and rational capacity apply even more to knives than guns, yet they seem to do jack shit so far.
A firearm is a great equalizer. A small 9mm pistol takes down an attacker the same way whether it is fired by a little old lady or a weight lifter.
Or a drunk husband. In a gunfight, he who decides when and where it begins has the advantage, and in 99% of the cases that won't be the sober wife.
If you consider 480p "craptacular", you're so far out of the mainstream even the word "nerd" falls painfully short.
I had my first hands-on with Windows 7 today. I'm somewhat bewildered. In what way is this not Vista 1.1?
Performance.
Certainly nothing that justifies the same folks who've said all along that Vista was "bad" to say that 7 is "awesome".
Other than its horrible performance, fully-updated Vista is actually quite a good OS. Fresh off release, however, was a vastly different story. It did merit every single "bad" adjective attached to it and then some.
Worry not, we'll remember this, when we laugh our ass off playing in a hacked server with a pirated copy of your game.
As a fellow South American, I'd suggest you go play something else instead. You avoid benefiting them through Network Effect, you avoid making your country look like a haven for copyright infringement, and most importantly, you also avoid making a moron out of yourself.
I'd suggest Red Orchestra, personally.
Well, Dragon Age: Origins at least provided a plethora of pre-order bonuses, and I believe Borderlands didn't but it did had a price discount at least.
CoD:MW2? neither. Buying it an hour before release vs buying it an hour after it only meant you'd theoretically play two hours sooner (in practice, servers were swarmed so you couldn't play 'til next day or so anyways), in exchange for foregoing reading early adopters' impressions and problems beforehand.
Decades later, the PC or laptop auction winner would be lucky to get the device to do anything worthwhile compared to modern systems.
Compared to modern systems, Typewritters suck even moreso. That's why we stopped using them, remember?
Yes, paedophiles exist, and so does child porn, but the NUMBER of paedophiles hasn't increased, has it?
It most likely has, along with the rest of the human race. The percentage, on the other hand, I'd bet that it has stayed pretty much constant for the past few centuries or so.
But I agree with the spirit of your post, reminds me of that old quote, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". Poor Roosevelt must be turning in his grave seeing so many people shitting their pants with any mention of pedophiles, terrorists, rapists and such that appears on modern media.
Ohh, and happy birthday :)
how many of todays Perl and PHP website scripting security issues would evaporate if the authors were forced to write in a less flexible language that took a few moments to actually compile before being enabled?
None. Contrary to popular belief, lower-level languages don't make shitty programmers competent.
Back in the old days people would get fired, for what modern developers do in writing sloppy code, bloated code, and stuff that barely even passes QA testing.
Back in the old days, businesses hired a dozen experienced professionals to write stuff that today is given as an assignment to first-year software engineering students.
Its not that new programmers do the same things with less work, its that they do more for the same amount of work. They're not lazy, its just the "old ways" are inefficient.
Welcome to modern politics. Name one influential political party that doesn't do that, and I'll name you a political party you don't know anything about.
Prove it.
Maybe some of it has to do with me using a USB audio device
Yes, it does. I've got three systems, gXine, Totem, Mplayer and VLC installed on every one of them and they all work perfectly out of the box, but two of my PCs have an internal sound card and the other one uses the integrated one, no USB devices of any kind are involved.
Also, I haven't personally tried it yet but I've heard that Kubuntu is far buggier than the rest of its *buntu brethren so some of your problems may be originating there as well.
Yeah, Ubuntu should associate themselves with sports teams and cheerleaders instead. C'mon, didn't we learn anything in high school?
True, but for that there's, oh, every other OS on the face of this planet. I'd recommend Minix, just for kicks.
Linux compatibility is handled by Mono's Moonlight project, and I doubt they'll be retarded enough to implement this functionality in such a stupid, problematic way.
Great post, thank you. Here's hoping the Mac brigade doesn't turn you into BBQ for it.
Personally, I switched to Linux back then when GTK was a steaming pile of ugly shit, you needed to know how to edit shell scripts, and you had to configure half the system by hand to have a hope of having a decent experience with it. Sure, nowadays it's as easy as putting the CD in and clicking "OK" a couple times, but I still don't regret jumping into it early on: when my friends complained about the stupidization of Windows XP's configuration panels I could tell them I had no such problem, and when they complained about Vista's performance I'd tell them I was still using the same computer as five years ago and still enjoying it.
I'm sure the same will happen eventually on phones, if it hasn't already. Whenever my current PDA and/or phone bites the dust, I'm switching to a Nokia n900 myself. Perhaps it'll be the nightmarish experience that iPhone users warn me it is, perhaps it'll just be Yet Another Nokia Phone but either way, I'm sure the time expense of learning it will be worth it specially once I get a ssh client in there.
You don't get Freedom by asking your overlords nicely for it, you get it by taking an active hand in building it for yourself. And buying a locked-down, brickable-at-any-moment phone isn't a good way to do it.
Wrong. Console games were higher with the release of next gen. systems as they always are because the customer base is smaller, but the average price of an XBox 360 game on release now has dropped from around the £37 mark down to the £32 mark. Many are only £29.99 now where previously they were £34.99, the rest are £34.99 where they were £39.99. CoD MW2 could be picked up for only £26.99 on release night from some supermarkets here in the UK. Console game prices have most certainly not increased in price and are certainly only decreasing.
In the UK, perhaps. Here in South America, however, console games used to be around US$60 at release and drop to US$30-40 afterwards but now they go for US$70-80 and only drop to US$55-60 after time has passed.
PC games on the other hand used to be priced around the same as console games, but modern ones cost now US$50 at release, getting as low as $25-30 after a few months.
Wrong again. You're confusing piracy (and potentially cheating) which Microsoft bans for and importing (importing is not gaming the system), the two things are different. Some Xbox games are region free such as CoD MW2, many people in the UK imported this from the US as it was cheaper and there is no problem using an imported title on a UK system whatsoever. Some games are region locked and wont work, but sites like PlayAsia (http://www.play-asia.com/) have a business around imports.
It's not just "piracy" or "cheating" but also using it as a media box. You could argue that breaking the protections against it inherently makes the machine vulnerable to "piracy", of course, but then I could argue that it shouldn't be necessary nor punishable by itself. Different ways to 'game' the system and go against the platform-maker's wishes without actually breaking the law, both give similar results.
"Philosophy" not only sounds much nicer than "religion", it's far more accurate. Stallman doesn't argue that you should worship the GPL as your only God because He commands so, he simply states that using it and similar Free Software licenses will lead to a better world for everybody. Agree with him or not, that can hardly be called "religion", unless you have an axe to grind.
Which is why ideally every country on Earth should have nuclear weapons.
Thought so.