The potential for damage with this kind of error almost can't be overstated....
You think you paid your taxes? The government may not agree.
Exactly. I photocopy a lot of documents and put them in my files to substantiate finances. So, the numbers may have been changed and my photocopies aren't accurate.
so the piece doesn't explicitly state that there is a relationship, but it suggests there is one.
Correct. The data given as a putative "response" is irrelevant to the question on so many levels it hurts. It doesn't state what the connection between sunspots and solar activity is; it shows the normal 11-year sunspot cycle, not anything different or unusual, and it shows only about one and a half cycles, not enough of a long term time series to even judge whether sunspot number (much less solar output) is going up or down.
So, with respect to the request, "Could you give a citation for that 'lowered solar output?' "-- fail.
But-- as you go on to demonstrate-- it does serve excellently to completely change the subject, and thus does its job of distracting people from noticing that there is no evidence whatsoever for the original assertion by changing the topic to a discussion of the relationship between sunspots and climate.
Well, zero, because of course you wouldn't send the DVD to Mars; you'd copy the poems onto memory. Five poems, at seventeen syllables per poem, what do you figure, a few hundred bytes? It's unlikely that the every byte of the computer's RAM is completely used, so just put the poems in the unused space. Weight: zero.
This reminds me of an old story. There was an aircraft in which the design was coming in overweight, so an accountant was assigned to be the "weight czar," to account for the mass of every subsystem and see how it could be made lighter. This weight czar was very annoyed when one subsystem, software, listed their weight contribution as "zero." He went over to the computer department, asked for the prototype software that went into the aircraft, and walked out with a huge stack of computer cards (this was some years back. Don't interrupt.) . He summoned the software team to a meeting, and shouted "You list zero for the weight of your software, but" (plunks down the stack of cards) "here is is, and this DOES NOT WEIGHT NOTHING! Don't try to fool me!" The lead software engineer went up to the stack of cards. He said "You don't understand. The software isn't the cards." He picked up one card and showed it to the accountant. "The software is the HOLES."
That is a graph of sunspot number. The question was about "lowered solar output."
This is amazingly typical of internet arguments, especially by the greenhouse-effect denying community. When asked to show data supporting their assertion, they show something else entirely, but since it's a graph with numbers and such, it looks scientific. It's a win-win argument for the deniers: readers who aren't familar with the field say "oh, they have data: they must be right." And for people who do understand that the data is irrelevant, in the worst case, it sidetracks the argument onto a completely irrelevant discussion of what the connection between sunspot number is to solar output.
While I personally agree with the sentiment, when NASA budgets are tight, why do something like this?
possibly because the cost is nothing?
This was done by the University of Colorado. The only cost was the cost of a web-page and a database. The contest itself was crowdsourced-- they didn't even even have to pay the judges.
Meh. That link basically says that there are different results from different benchmarks. It says that it's a "not uncommon assertion" that companies "have attempted in the past to "manipulate" benchmarks", but that's not the same as finding code that overclocks the chip specifically when it's running benchmark programs
The first thing that would help, if you want good bug reports from users, is to give some indication that you actually PAY ATTENTION to anything users tell you.
I have never seen any hint that this is the case. The BEST I've ever got for a bug report is a "thank you for your interest in our product" reply written by a robot.
My first suggestion: Every developer should be forced to spend at least one day doing front-line support, so that they will begin to have some idea of what is actually broken.
If you make the assertion that humans interact based on recently acquired positive feedback patterns more so than our inherent genetically evolved traits we've had for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years...
Both.
Humans have this thing called culture. It allows us to engage in complicated behaviors that, while they may be based on the pre-programmed genetic templates, can be far more sophisticated and powerful than the instinctive behaviors programmed into our genes.
Yes, even trolls. The ability to say stupid things on the internet is not, in fact, instinctive behavior (monkeys do not type even badly-spelled English sentences on blogs) but is cultural behavior. Culture comprises learned things. Just because we don't learn it in school (well, not explicitly) doesn't mean it's not learned-- it's acquired in our interactions with others.
Funny thing about clouds... they increase reflectivity. As the temperatures go up more water vapour goes up into the sky to form clouds, which reflect incoming light and heat and provide a cooling effect. i.e.: it's self-regulating.
They reflect incoming light. and outgoing heat.
To first order, in fact, clouds don't have a significant effect on average temperature (if they reflect incident light and exiting infrared equally well, the effects cancel). They do have a big effect on the day/night temperature variation (cloud-free days have high daytime temperatures and low nighttime temperature.
Since there hasn't been a significant increase in rocket launches in the last two years, rocket launches can't be the explanation for an increase in noctilucent clouds in the last two years.
Having recently finished as BA in history I feel it safe to say people are violent creatures....
Yes, but humans are also social creatures. We interact based on the patterns we pick up from our society, and the positive and negative feedback cues that our social interactions give us. If you spend a lot of your time interacting with video games, you learn to interact based on the patterns you learn in video games. That's not the only influence on your behavior; it's not even the main influence on your behavior-- but it is one influence on your behavior.
Unless you spend more than eight hours a day playing violent video games. In that case, it probably is the main influence on your behavior.
And some people do play more than eight hours a day of violent video games.
Sweden refused to have the workings of their legal system dictated to them by a fugitive? I can't thing of many countries where that would wash.
"Wanted for questioning" and "fugitive" are not the same thing.
True. He is both wanted for questioning and a fugitive.
Further, what he's "wanted for questioning" about isn't a crime in the United Kingdom
Actually, it is. More particularly, though, he agreed to present himself to British Justice system on request-- that was a condition of his bail-- and, instead, he skipped out. So now he is a fugitive from justice in both Britain and Sweden.
That Sweden won't guarantee him safe passage (i.e. "We won't extradite you to the USA") you can surmise that extradition to the United States is the sole purpose of getting him to Sweden in the first place.
You can assume no such thing. In general, legal systems don't do negotiations with people wanted for questioning. Assange has come up with a continuously changing list of excuses why he doesn't want to go to Sweden to answer questions about rape charges, and the excuses evolve to fit whatever he seems to think will best please the audience. Since he could end up facing rape charges, one can see why he might want to not visit the police in Sweden. Possibly he should go to Switzerland, where he could join Roman Polanski, also fugitive from rape charges.
He posted 240,000 pounds as bail, and as conditions of his release, agreed to turn over his passport, wear a GPS tracking device, visit police once daily, and agreed to a 10 p.m curfew.
He skipped out on the bail (and in doing so, forfeitting about half a million dollars put up on his behalf by people who trusted him). He's a fugitive, by definition.
I do want to point out that Assange is not facing U.S. justice. What he is "uninterested in facing" is a return to Sweden to be questioned on rape charges.
He says that if he's sent to Sweden, Sweden will extradite him to the U.S.. There's no actual evidence for that, and no real reason to believe it.
So, you're saying that you want to censor everybody else in the world in order to keep you from "accidentally" viewing material you personally don't want to see.
That is not an acceptable argument.
I'm going to have to go donate some money to the ACLU and ask them to spend it on an education campaign; obviously there are still a lot of people who don't have a clue about the first amendment.
What is the point of automatically removing child porn so it's not searchable. That's not the problem with child porn.
The problem with child porn is real children are being really abused to make it. Making it "not searchable" doesn't stop that..
The point, I would expect, is that by removing the channel by which it circulates puts a barrier between the demand and the source, and hence reduces the incentive to make it. That would reduces the amount which is made.
Arresting the people who are making it does.
I don't think that this proposal was intended to be instead of arresting the people who make it.
With that said, your point "The problem with child porn is real children are being really abused to make it." is a good one. By that argument, any such material which was not produced using real children-- anime, comics, art, even photorealistic digital modelling-- should not be included in the category.
Yes, English had double negatives at least as late as Shakespeare's time, but no longer.
Two main exceptions, slang ("we don't take no guff from nobody"), and simply redoubling the negative ("you should never never never do that. That's a no no.")
Wait-- "NSA officials have repeatedly denied under oath to Congress that even producing an estimate... is impossible. "
They denied that it's impossible? So, it's possible.
This may be the worst-written summary ever, since it says exactly the opposite of what the headline says. Could slashdot find some people who understand double negatives?
That's correct, the sentences as written in the summary are nearly meaningless. They specify a sentence of between zero and infinity years.
"...Meanwhile the maximum sentence possible for cyberattacks against 'critical infrastructure,' such as power plants, transport networks and government networks would be at least five years in jail."
...The draft directive, which updates rules that have been in place since 2005, would also introduce a maximum penalty of at least three years' imprisonment for creating botnets."
Since "maximum" means "no more than" and "at least" means "minimum", they have specified a minimum of the maximum... which means, there is no maximum of the maximum specified. And there's no minimum specified, either. So the rules don't specify either minimum or maximum.
Slashdot Mirror
The potential for damage with this kind of error almost can't be overstated. ...
You think you paid your taxes? The government may not agree.
Exactly. I photocopy a lot of documents and put them in my files to substantiate finances. So, the numbers may have been changed and my photocopies aren't accurate.
so the piece doesn't explicitly state that there is a relationship, but it suggests there is one.
Correct. The data given as a putative "response" is irrelevant to the question on so many levels it hurts. It doesn't state what the connection between sunspots and solar activity is; it shows the normal 11-year sunspot cycle, not anything different or unusual, and it shows only about one and a half cycles, not enough of a long term time series to even judge whether sunspot number (much less solar output) is going up or down.
So, with respect to the request, "Could you give a citation for that 'lowered solar output?' "-- fail.
But-- as you go on to demonstrate-- it does serve excellently to completely change the subject, and thus does its job of distracting people from noticing that there is no evidence whatsoever for the original assertion by changing the topic to a discussion of the relationship between sunspots and climate.
On that subject, the best data at the moment seems to show that the onset of the "little ice age" cooling was correlated with volcanic eruptions, and hid little or nothing to do with sunspots.
http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/02/eruptions-not-quiet-sun-may-have-triggered-little-ice-age/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=volcanoes-may-have-sparked
Well, zero, because of course you wouldn't send the DVD to Mars; you'd copy the poems onto memory. Five poems, at seventeen syllables per poem, what do you figure, a few hundred bytes? It's unlikely that the every byte of the computer's RAM is completely used, so just put the poems in the unused space. Weight: zero.
This reminds me of an old story. There was an aircraft in which the design was coming in overweight, so an accountant was assigned to be the "weight czar," to account for the mass of every subsystem and see how it could be made lighter. This weight czar was very annoyed when one subsystem, software, listed their weight contribution as "zero." He went over to the computer department, asked for the prototype software that went into the aircraft, and walked out with a huge stack of computer cards (this was some years back. Don't interrupt.) . He summoned the software team to a meeting, and shouted "You list zero for the weight of your software, but" (plunks down the stack of cards) "here is is, and this DOES NOT WEIGHT NOTHING! Don't try to fool me!" The lead software engineer went up to the stack of cards. He said "You don't understand. The software isn't the cards." He picked up one card and showed it to the accountant. "The software is the HOLES."
Could you give a citation for that "lowered solar output?" Because wikipedia disagrees with you.
Nasa http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/SunspotCycle.shtml
(And just so you dont have to read that long complicated article here is a link to a nice picture)
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_predict_l.gif
That is a graph of sunspot number. The question was about "lowered solar output."
This is amazingly typical of internet arguments, especially by the greenhouse-effect denying community. When asked to show data supporting their assertion, they show something else entirely, but since it's a graph with numbers and such, it looks scientific. It's a win-win argument for the deniers: readers who aren't familar with the field say "oh, they have data: they must be right." And for people who do understand that the data is irrelevant, in the worst case, it sidetracks the argument onto a completely irrelevant discussion of what the connection between sunspot number is to solar output.
This data addresses your argument.
While I personally agree with the sentiment, when NASA budgets are tight, why do something like this?
possibly because the cost is nothing?
This was done by the University of Colorado. The only cost was the cost of a web-page and a database. The contest itself was crowdsourced-- they didn't even even have to pay the judges.
Cool.
Now what they need is an app that detects when it's pointed at the ground, and snaps a couple of pictures!
Here you go
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-57593426-92/debate-sparked-about-benchmark-for-intel-arm-chips/
Meh. That link basically says that there are different results from different benchmarks. It says that it's a "not uncommon assertion" that companies "have attempted in the past to "manipulate" benchmarks", but that's not the same as finding code that overclocks the chip specifically when it's running benchmark programs
/. karma points are worth something?
How do I trade them in for valuable stuff?
The first thing that would help, if you want good bug reports from users, is to give some indication that you actually PAY ATTENTION to anything users tell you.
I have never seen any hint that this is the case. The BEST I've ever got for a bug report is a "thank you for your interest in our product" reply written by a robot.
My first suggestion: Every developer should be forced to spend at least one day doing front-line support, so that they will begin to have some idea of what is actually broken.
I'd just reckon that the job market sucks no matter what the age even in SF
Outside the little bubble of Silicon Valley, it's a lot worse if you're young than if you're old.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/07/jobless-rate-for-poor-black-te.html
If you make the assertion that humans interact based on recently acquired positive feedback patterns more so than our inherent genetically evolved traits we've had for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years...
Both.
Humans have this thing called culture . It allows us to engage in complicated behaviors that, while they may be based on the pre-programmed genetic templates, can be far more sophisticated and powerful than the instinctive behaviors programmed into our genes.
Yes, even trolls. The ability to say stupid things on the internet is not, in fact, instinctive behavior (monkeys do not type even badly-spelled English sentences on blogs) but is cultural behavior. Culture comprises learned things. Just because we don't learn it in school (well, not explicitly) doesn't mean it's not learned-- it's acquired in our interactions with others.
Funny thing about clouds... they increase reflectivity. As the temperatures go up more water vapour goes up into the sky to form clouds, which reflect incoming light and heat and provide a cooling effect. i.e.: it's self-regulating.
They reflect incoming light. and outgoing heat.
To first order, in fact, clouds don't have a significant effect on average temperature (if they reflect incident light and exiting infrared equally well, the effects cancel). They do have a big effect on the day/night temperature variation (cloud-free days have high daytime temperatures and low nighttime temperature.
Since there hasn't been a significant increase in rocket launches in the last two years, rocket launches can't be the explanation for an increase in noctilucent clouds in the last two years.
Having recently finished as BA in history I feel it safe to say people are violent creatures....
Yes, but humans are also social creatures. We interact based on the patterns we pick up from our society, and the positive and negative feedback cues that our social interactions give us. If you spend a lot of your time interacting with video games, you learn to interact based on the patterns you learn in video games. That's not the only influence on your behavior; it's not even the main influence on your behavior-- but it is one influence on your behavior.
Unless you spend more than eight hours a day playing violent video games. In that case, it probably is the main influence on your behavior.
And some people do play more than eight hours a day of violent video games.
"USED TO"??
So, what are they doing now?
I wonder what the statue of limitations are for the crime he is being charged in the US?
He hasn't been charged with a crime in the U.S..
There's no actual evidence for that, and no real reason to believe it.
You have got to be kidding. No real reason to believe it? There is no real reason not to believe it.
It turns out that "no reason not to believe something" is not, in fact, a good reason to believe something.
Sweden refused to have the workings of their legal system dictated to them by a fugitive? I can't thing of many countries where that would wash.
"Wanted for questioning" and "fugitive" are not the same thing.
True. He is both wanted for questioning and a fugitive.
Further, what he's "wanted for questioning" about isn't a crime in the United Kingdom
Actually, it is. More particularly, though, he agreed to present himself to British Justice system on request-- that was a condition of his bail-- and, instead, he skipped out. So now he is a fugitive from justice in both Britain and Sweden.
That Sweden won't guarantee him safe passage (i.e. "We won't extradite you to the USA") you can surmise that extradition to the United States is the sole purpose of getting him to Sweden in the first place.
You can assume no such thing. In general, legal systems don't do negotiations with people wanted for questioning. Assange has come up with a continuously changing list of excuses why he doesn't want to go to Sweden to answer questions about rape charges, and the excuses evolve to fit whatever he seems to think will best please the audience. Since he could end up facing rape charges, one can see why he might want to not visit the police in Sweden. Possibly he should go to Switzerland, where he could join Roman Polanski, also fugitive from rape charges.
Fugitive implies guilt.
No it does not. Buy a dictionary.
He posted 240,000 pounds as bail, and as conditions of his release, agreed to turn over his passport, wear a GPS tracking device, visit police once daily, and agreed to a 10 p.m curfew.
He skipped out on the bail (and in doing so, forfeitting about half a million dollars put up on his behalf by people who trusted him). He's a fugitive, by definition.
"Uninterested in facing U.S. justice..."
I do want to point out that Assange is not facing U.S. justice. What he is "uninterested in facing" is a return to Sweden to be questioned on rape charges.
He says that if he's sent to Sweden, Sweden will extradite him to the U.S.. There's no actual evidence for that, and no real reason to believe it.
So, you're saying that you want to censor everybody else in the world in order to keep you from "accidentally" viewing material you personally don't want to see.
That is not an acceptable argument.
I'm going to have to go donate some money to the ACLU and ask them to spend it on an education campaign; obviously there are still a lot of people who don't have a clue about the first amendment.
What is the point of automatically removing child porn so it's not searchable. That's not the problem with child porn.
The problem with child porn is real children are being really abused to make it. Making it "not searchable" doesn't stop that. .
The point, I would expect, is that by removing the channel by which it circulates puts a barrier between the demand and the source, and hence reduces the incentive to make it. That would reduces the amount which is made.
Arresting the people who are making it does.
I don't think that this proposal was intended to be instead of arresting the people who make it.
With that said, your point "The problem with child porn is real children are being really abused to make it." is a good one. By that argument, any such material which was not produced using real children-- anime, comics, art, even photorealistic digital modelling-- should not be included in the category.
Yes, English had double negatives at least as late as Shakespeare's time, but no longer.
Two main exceptions, slang ("we don't take no guff from nobody"), and simply redoubling the negative ("you should never never never do that. That's a no no.")
Wait-- "NSA officials have repeatedly denied under oath to Congress that even producing an estimate... is impossible. "
They denied that it's impossible? So, it's possible.
This may be the worst-written summary ever, since it says exactly the opposite of what the headline says. Could slashdot find some people who understand double negatives?
That's correct, the sentences as written in the summary are nearly meaningless. They specify a sentence of between zero and infinity years.
"...Meanwhile the maximum sentence possible for cyberattacks against 'critical infrastructure,' such as power plants, transport networks and government networks would be at least five years in jail."
Since "maximum" means "no more than" and "at least" means "minimum", they have specified a minimum of the maximum... which means, there is no maximum of the maximum specified. And there's no minimum specified, either. So the rules don't specify either minimum or maximum.