Anybody notice that the article linked about the supposed increased death rate for small cars is labelled: "For immediate release: Wednesday, February 13, 2002"
Yes, the summary is biased. As the article points out, it is in fact the large cars that are dangerous-- they are, however, dangerous to the smaller cars. Making cars smaller doesn't result in more deaths-- unless you have large cars on the road as well. It is the larger cars that are killing people. (and the bogus statistic comes from the "National Center for Policy Analysis"-- read: political action group paid to shill for oil companies.)
There's also the issue that security is annoying. Whether it's changing your password monthly or...
I've never understood why "change your password monthly" has become the poster child for security advice most often mandated by IT departments. On the list of things to make security stronger, this wouldn't even be in the top one hundred, and in fact, I suspect frequent password changes make security weaker.
("Never use the same password on two different systems" would have been my number one choice for advice.)
Mostly I find the bells and whistles of new browsers to be useless... but a tool to mute the bells and whistles now that's actually something I'd like.
"It takes someone who knows what they're doing and who DOES NOT HAVE AN AX TO GRIND to get it right."
I agree 100 %... unfortunately it seems that everyone who has come to any definitive conclusion has an axe to grind.
Sorry, no.
The correct statement is "anybody who has come to any definite conclusion will be accused of having an axe to grind by institutions attempting to obfuscate the science of global warming.
There is some good news, though. Apparently Exxon Mobil has decreased the amount of funding they have been giving to groups trying to cast doubt on the science of global warming-- from five million dollars a year in 2005, down to less than $800,000 per year in 2010. (They'd said that they would stop financing them entirely, but I guess for a trillion dollar corporation, dropping by a factor of 6 is pretty impressive.)
Jeez, dude, do you think we're idiots? Here is the beginning of that paragraph, which you so conveniently left out:
"Determination of whether regression coefficients at various non-zero time lags might provide a more accurate estimate of feedback has been recently explored by [14], but is beyond the scope of this paper. Our preliminary work on this issue suggests no simple answer to the question...."
Fine. The sentence which I didn't quote can be summarized: "Also, some other people tried a different analysis technique on the regression coefficient, but we aren't going to talk about that."
...So their conclusion is perfectly valid: if there is no way to "accurately diagnose" the effects of feedback, then the models we are told to believe in are deeply flawed.
But they didn't say that there is no way to accurately diagnose the effects of feedback. What they said was that they couldn't do it from this particular analysis technique.
I'd take it a step further - I think that they're making the claim that there is *no* particular technique that can accurately discriminate the feedback function.
That would be an interesting result indeed. However, it's not what they said. Their claim is "feedback cannot be accurately diagnosed from the co-variations between radiative flux and temperature-- which is to say, using the technique they used.
and by saying that it is not possible to track this function, this blows a hole in the previous theories.
No, it doesn't blow any holes in previous theories because none of the previous theories use correlation coefficient of the random variations as a means to calculate the feedback parameters. It's a new technique.
It's actually a kind of clever way to try to back out the feedback parameters out of the random noise in the data set. It's rather a pity that they say it doesn't work, but that's the way it goes-- not everything you try works. Basically, they're saying that the radiative feedback should be instantaneous, while the non-radiative feedback will lag the forcing function, so if you look for the lag part, this will tell you about the non-radiative feedback. But, unfortunately, they don't have a good physics-based model of how much the non-radiative feedback will lag by-- in essence, they have to have the problem solved already in order to solve it.
In any case, though, the paper conceded the basic premises of anthropogenic global warming right from the start: what it's trying to analyze is how strong the effect is, not whether it is there. Even if their technique worked, it would tweak the model, not "blow holes" in it.
If you actually read the paper and not the incredibly hyped press releases, the paper basically disclaims the validity of its own results. Note the following paragraph, immediately before the conclusions:
Our preliminary work on this issue suggests no simple answer to the question. We conclude that the fundamental obstacle to feedback diagnosis remains the same, no matter what time lag is addressed: without knowledge of time-varying radiative forcing components in the satellite radiative flux measurements, feedback cannot be accurately diagnosed from the co-variations between radiative flux and temperature.
The entire paper is about to trying to analyze the feedback from the co-variation between radiative flux and temperature-- this sentence basically says that, in their analysis, the analysis cannot be done accurately.
Basically, the paper does not "blow holes in global warming"-- what it does is say that this particular technique is not able to accurately discriminate the feedback function.
But that's not true. Every SSD on the chart has a lower failure rate in the small section proceeding the 6 - 12 month mark.
??
Apparently we are looking at different graphs. The graph I'm looking at is the one linked in the summary above, here: http://media.bestofmicro.com/4/A/302122/original/ssdfailurerates_1024.png In the "small section proceeding the 6 - 12 month mark" that you refer to, the highest failure rate is the light green curve, labelled "SLC SSD (Ku 2011)", while the lowest failure rate is the red curve, labeled "HDD (Schroeder 2007)".
The red HDD curve remains the lowest out to 2.5 years, which is farther out than any of the data on SDD.
Did the poster even look at the chart he linked to?
Did you? Apparently not.
Ignore the dashed lines-- those curves are not data, they are "projection." The chart has no data on SSD failures late in the lifetime. So, when you say "...SSD failures only exceed HD failures very early on in their lifetimes," that is equivalent to saying "SSD failures only exceed HD failures in the region of the graph for which there is data."
The chart linked is not terribly useful, since the legend doesn't really explain what the curves are (three completely different curves with the same label, HDD Schroeder 2007).
Law enforcement just can't grasp the concept of Anonymous' lack of a solid hierarchy.
This sentence relies on a vast web of assumptions. Where does your knowledge of the hierarchy of "Anonymous" come from? It comes from Anonymous. Actually, no, worse-- it comes from spokespersons who claim (without proof) to be representing Anonymous. Is there any actual reason to believe anything about Anonymous, or how it is structured?
Sure they could infiltrate Anonymous, and they'd have as much influence as any other one participant, which is very little.
This sentence relies on a vast web of assumptions, the main one of which is the belief that, even in the absence of a hierarchy, all participants have equal amounts of influence. In the real world, some people are more equal than others. So, here's the question: suppose there were a secret organization with vast resources that were pretending to be "just another participant," but in fact had a practical knowledge of politics, which is to say: means and methods of how to influence decisions without overtly seeming to. Would they be able to influence a community of politically naive engineer/hacker/teenager/angry-young-men/prankster/techno-anarchists?
The answer to that question is: I don't know.
However, I don't think that you can say a-priori that they would not be able to do so.
The nice disadvantage of covering a roof with solar panels is that in case of a fire barely or no water will reach the fire.
If your roof lets water in, yr doing it wrong. The whole point of a roof is to not water through.
(The reason that the firefighters spray water on a roof in the first place is to keep old-fashioned asphalt shingles from igniting-- if the roof is fireproof, that's a feature, not a bug. By the time the roof has burned through enough to let water into the house, it's pretty much too late to save the building.)
Actually, considering how expensive it is to re-roof a house, if you reroof with solar panels instead of shingles, it's not all that much more expensive.
What, why shouldn't you be able to paint shingles? Use acrylic paint.
The shingles themselves aren't actually asphalt, you know--they are fiberglass. The easiest solution is to wait until next time you reshingle the roof, and then reshingle with white shingles.
Of course, you'd want to use black shingles in places where the heating bills are greater than the air-conditioning bills, and white shingles in places where the air-conditioning bills are greater than the heating bills. But that's not really a good calculation-- you get more solar energy in summer than winter, so you all other things equal, you lose more in air conditioning due to summer heating on a black roof than you gain from lower heating bills due to winter heating on a black roof. So better metric is to use white shingles if (airconditioning bills) times (summer solar energy input) is greater than (winter heating bills) times (winter solar energy input).
However, a better solution YET is to plant deciduous trees around the house, which will shade the house in summer, and then lose their leaves in winter. Problem solved!
...The idea behind this is to 'Go Green' by stopping the use of Petroleum-based plastic frames...
Just as a quick, back-of-the-envelope estimate, what fraction of the world petroleum usage do you think is used for plastic eyeglass frames? Order of magnitude is fine.
Or, in this case, can have positive consequences depending on where you live. Canada for example is expected to have significant benefits from global warming over the rest of this century, due to things like the opening of the northwest passage allowing new shipping lanes in the arctic and exploiting the arctic's natural resources, as well as (what is more important in the longer term) an increase in arable land due to melting of the permafrost which raises the country's capacity for farming as well as livable land for development....
If the deniers were trying to make the case that there are benefits to climate warming, it wouldn't bother me in the last. That's a defensible position-- not one that the green lobby likes, of course, but nevertheless a plausible case to make. It's the ones saying "It's a hoax! The scientists are corrupt! It's a fraud!" that I object to.
...I do find it amusing that the countries that worked hardest to defeat international accords to limit greenhouse emissions were Canada, Russia, and Norway. But it's probably just a coincidence: these are also three countries that have large fossil-fuel reserves, and hence very large political lobbies for the fossil-fuel industry.
What funding source were you thinking of that has a financial interest comparable to the trillion dollar profits of the fossil-fuel companies?
You really don't think that any technology is going to be replacing fossil-fuel? Or that those technologies won't earn anyone any money? Really?
Let me get this right: you are seriously suggesting that the solar energy industry is conducting a multi-million dollar campaign to make money by by funding science intended to mislead the public about global warming? Do you have the slightest idea of the size of the entire solar energy industry compared to, say, the very smallest oil company?
Do you have any evidence suggesting that these companies proposing alternate energy sources are a major source of the funding for fundamental climate science?
many climatologist on both sides of the discussion are employed by people who take a particular interest in one outcome or another.
What do you mean by "both sides"? Really? What funding source were you thinking of that has a financial interest comparable to the trillion dollar profits of the fossil-fuel companies?
That's the party line of the climate-change deniers: "Oh, it doesn't matter that the so-called skeptics are all funded by fossil-fuel companies, because both sides are funded by dirty money."
But, oddly, when there is even a rumor that a climate scientist has received as much as a lunch paid for by a source that is not absolutely spotlessly apolitical, isn't it amazing how the blogosphere lights up with accusations of how climate change is "bought and paid for." (Even when the rumor turns out to be unrelated to actual fact.)
Not surprising; the main source of critiques that attempt to discredit climate science is the "Heartland Institute," which doesn't state its funding sources, except to say it's funded by "foundations and corporations"... but reading the budget information from Exxon Mobil shows those "foundations and corporations" tend to be fossil fuel companies, and fossil-fuel funded institutes like the American Petroleum Institute.
Yes, and if people only ever needed one password and didn't need to change it that would be fine.
However, the very first rule of strong passwords is to never use the same password on two different systems. So "it's trivially easy to get a strong password" is useless; you need to say "it's trivially easy to get fifty strong passwords and remember which password gets into which system."
(I actually have more than fifty passwords, but let's call it fifty for now.)
But a lot of systems these days also require you to change them every 90 days or so, and not re-use any of your last ten passwords, so what you really really meant to say is "it's trivially easy to get five hundred strong passwords, and remember which password gets into which system, and which one is the current password and which ones were old passwords that aren't used anymore."
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody notice that the article linked about the supposed increased death rate for small cars is labelled:
"For immediate release: Wednesday, February 13, 2002"
Yes, the summary is biased. As the article points out, it is in fact the large cars that are dangerous-- they are, however, dangerous to the smaller cars.
Making cars smaller doesn't result in more deaths-- unless you have large cars on the road as well. It is the larger cars that are killing people. (and the bogus statistic comes from the "National Center for Policy Analysis"-- read: political action group paid to shill for oil companies.)
There's also the issue that security is annoying. Whether it's changing your password monthly or...
I've never understood why "change your password monthly" has become the poster child for security advice most often mandated by IT departments. On the list of things to make security stronger, this wouldn't even be in the top one hundred, and in fact, I suspect frequent password changes make security weaker.
("Never use the same password on two different systems" would have been my number one choice for advice.)
Mostly I find the bells and whistles of new browsers to be useless... but a tool to mute the bells and whistles now that's actually something I'd like.
"It takes someone who knows what they're doing and who DOES NOT HAVE AN AX TO GRIND to get it right."
I agree 100 % ... unfortunately it seems that everyone who has come to any definitive conclusion has an axe to grind.
Sorry, no.
The correct statement is "anybody who has come to any definite conclusion will be accused of having an axe to grind by institutions attempting to obfuscate the science of global warming.
There is some good news, though. Apparently Exxon Mobil has decreased the amount of funding they have been giving to groups trying to cast doubt on the science of global warming-- from five million dollars a year in 2005, down to less than $800,000 per year in 2010. (They'd said that they would stop financing them entirely, but I guess for a trillion dollar corporation, dropping by a factor of 6 is pretty impressive.)
Jeez, dude, do you think we're idiots? Here is the beginning of that paragraph, which you so conveniently left out:
"Determination of whether regression coefficients at various non-zero time lags might provide a more accurate estimate of feedback has been recently explored by [14], but is beyond the scope of this paper. Our preliminary work on this issue suggests no simple answer to the question. ..."
Fine. The sentence which I didn't quote can be summarized: "Also, some other people tried a different analysis technique on the regression coefficient, but we aren't going to talk about that."
...So their conclusion is perfectly valid: if there is no way to "accurately diagnose" the effects of feedback, then the models we are told to believe in are deeply flawed.
But they didn't say that there is no way to accurately diagnose the effects of feedback. What they said was that they couldn't do it from this particular analysis technique.
I'd take it a step further - I think that they're making the claim that there is *no* particular technique that can accurately discriminate the feedback function.
That would be an interesting result indeed. However, it's not what they said. Their claim is "feedback cannot be accurately diagnosed from the co-variations between radiative flux and temperature-- which is to say, using the technique they used.
and by saying that it is not possible to track this function, this blows a hole in the previous theories.
No, it doesn't blow any holes in previous theories because none of the previous theories use correlation coefficient of the random variations as a means to calculate the feedback parameters. It's a new technique.
It's actually a kind of clever way to try to back out the feedback parameters out of the random noise in the data set. It's rather a pity that they say it doesn't work, but that's the way it goes-- not everything you try works. Basically, they're saying that the radiative feedback should be instantaneous, while the non-radiative feedback will lag the forcing function, so if you look for the lag part, this will tell you about the non-radiative feedback. But, unfortunately, they don't have a good physics-based model of how much the non-radiative feedback will lag by-- in essence, they have to have the problem solved already in order to solve it.
In any case, though, the paper conceded the basic premises of anthropogenic global warming right from the start: what it's trying to analyze is how strong the effect is, not whether it is there. Even if their technique worked, it would tweak the model, not "blow holes" in it.
If you actually read the paper and not the incredibly hyped press releases, the paper basically disclaims the validity of its own results. Note the following paragraph, immediately before the conclusions:
Our preliminary work on this issue suggests no simple answer to the question. We conclude that the fundamental obstacle to feedback diagnosis remains the same, no matter what time lag is addressed: without knowledge of time-varying radiative forcing components in the satellite radiative flux measurements, feedback cannot be accurately diagnosed from the co-variations between radiative flux and temperature.
The entire paper is about to trying to analyze the feedback from the co-variation between radiative flux and temperature-- this sentence basically says that, in their analysis, the analysis cannot be done accurately.
Basically, the paper does not "blow holes in global warming"-- what it does is say that this particular technique is not able to accurately discriminate the feedback function.
But that's not true. Every SSD on the chart has a lower failure rate in the small section proceeding the 6 - 12 month mark.
??
Apparently we are looking at different graphs. The graph I'm looking at is the one linked in the summary above, here: http://media.bestofmicro.com/4/A/302122/original/ssdfailurerates_1024.png
In the "small section proceeding the 6 - 12 month mark" that you refer to, the highest failure rate is the light green curve, labelled "SLC SSD (Ku 2011)", while the lowest failure rate is the red curve, labeled "HDD (Schroeder 2007)".
The red HDD curve remains the lowest out to 2.5 years, which is farther out than any of the data on SDD.
Did the poster even look at the chart he linked to?
Did you? Apparently not.
Ignore the dashed lines-- those curves are not data, they are "projection." The chart has no data on SSD failures late in the lifetime. So, when you say "...SSD failures only exceed HD failures very early on in their lifetimes," that is equivalent to saying "SSD failures only exceed HD failures in the region of the graph for which there is data."
The chart linked is not terribly useful, since the legend doesn't really explain what the curves are (three completely different curves with the same label, HDD Schroeder 2007).
Law enforcement just can't grasp the concept of Anonymous' lack of a solid hierarchy.
This sentence relies on a vast web of assumptions. Where does your knowledge of the hierarchy of "Anonymous" come from? It comes from Anonymous. Actually, no, worse-- it comes from spokespersons who claim (without proof) to be representing Anonymous. Is there any actual reason to believe anything about Anonymous, or how it is structured?
Sure they could infiltrate Anonymous, and they'd have as much influence as any other one participant, which is very little.
This sentence relies on a vast web of assumptions, the main one of which is the belief that, even in the absence of a hierarchy, all participants have equal amounts of influence. In the real world, some people are more equal than others. So, here's the question: suppose there were a secret organization with vast resources that were pretending to be "just another participant," but in fact had a practical knowledge of politics, which is to say: means and methods of how to influence decisions without overtly seeming to. Would they be able to influence a community of politically naive engineer/hacker/teenager/angry-young-men/prankster/techno-anarchists?
The answer to that question is: I don't know.
However, I don't think that you can say a-priori that they would not be able to do so.
http://www.google.com/search?&rls=en&q=solar+shingles&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
The nice disadvantage of covering a roof with solar panels is that in case of a fire barely or no water will reach the fire.
If your roof lets water in, yr doing it wrong. The whole point of a roof is to not water through.
(The reason that the firefighters spray water on a roof in the first place is to keep old-fashioned asphalt shingles from igniting-- if the roof is fireproof, that's a feature, not a bug. By the time the roof has burned through enough to let water into the house, it's pretty much too late to save the building.)
Actually, considering how expensive it is to re-roof a house, if you reroof with solar panels instead of shingles, it's not all that much more expensive.
What, why shouldn't you be able to paint shingles? Use acrylic paint.
The shingles themselves aren't actually asphalt, you know--they are fiberglass. The easiest solution is to wait until next time you reshingle the roof, and then reshingle with white shingles.
Of course, you'd want to use black shingles in places where the heating bills are greater than the air-conditioning bills, and white shingles in places where the air-conditioning bills are greater than the heating bills. But that's not really a good calculation-- you get more solar energy in summer than winter, so you all other things equal, you lose more in air conditioning due to summer heating on a black roof than you gain from lower heating bills due to winter heating on a black roof. So better metric is to use white shingles if (airconditioning bills) times (summer solar energy input) is greater than (winter heating bills) times (winter solar energy input).
However, a better solution YET is to plant deciduous trees around the house, which will shade the house in summer, and then lose their leaves in winter. Problem solved!
...The idea behind this is to 'Go Green' by stopping the use of Petroleum-based plastic frames...
Just as a quick, back-of-the-envelope estimate, what fraction of the world petroleum usage do you think is used for plastic eyeglass frames? Order of magnitude is fine.
Meteorologists have known about this for some time.
The common term for it is "contrails."
Yes, it's well known that contrails sometimes to grow into cloud cover. (High altitude thin clouds, not puffy cumulus ones). This is not news.
Or, in this case, can have positive consequences depending on where you live. Canada for example is expected to have significant benefits from global warming over the rest of this century, due to things like the opening of the northwest passage allowing new shipping lanes in the arctic and exploiting the arctic's natural resources, as well as (what is more important in the longer term) an increase in arable land due to melting of the permafrost which raises the country's capacity for farming as well as livable land for development....
If the deniers were trying to make the case that there are benefits to climate warming, it wouldn't bother me in the last. That's a defensible position-- not one that the green lobby likes, of course, but nevertheless a plausible case to make. It's the ones saying "It's a hoax! The scientists are corrupt! It's a fraud!" that I object to.
...I do find it amusing that the countries that worked hardest to defeat international accords to limit greenhouse emissions were Canada, Russia, and Norway. But it's probably just a coincidence: these are also three countries that have large fossil-fuel reserves, and hence very large political lobbies for the fossil-fuel industry.
What funding source were you thinking of that has a financial interest comparable to the trillion dollar profits of the fossil-fuel companies?
You really don't think that any technology is going to be replacing fossil-fuel? Or that those technologies won't earn anyone any money?
Really?
Let me get this right: you are seriously suggesting that the solar energy industry is conducting a multi-million dollar campaign to make money by by funding science intended to mislead the public about global warming? Do you have the slightest idea of the size of the entire solar energy industry compared to, say, the very smallest oil company?
Do you have any evidence suggesting that these companies proposing alternate energy sources are a major source of the funding for fundamental climate science?
many climatologist on both sides of the discussion are employed by people who take a particular interest in one outcome or another.
What do you mean by "both sides"? Really? What funding source were you thinking of that has a financial interest comparable to the trillion dollar profits of the fossil-fuel companies?
That's the party line of the climate-change deniers: "Oh, it doesn't matter that the so-called skeptics are all funded by fossil-fuel companies, because both sides are funded by dirty money."
But, oddly, when there is even a rumor that a climate scientist has received as much as a lunch paid for by a source that is not absolutely spotlessly apolitical, isn't it amazing how the blogosphere lights up with accusations of how climate change is "bought and paid for." (Even when the rumor turns out to be unrelated to actual fact.)
Not surprising; the main source of critiques that attempt to discredit climate science is the "Heartland Institute," which doesn't state its funding sources, except to say it's funded by "foundations and corporations"... but reading the budget information from Exxon Mobil shows those "foundations and corporations" tend to be fossil fuel companies, and fossil-fuel funded institutes like the American Petroleum Institute.
Yes, and if people only ever needed one password and didn't need to change it that would be fine.
However, the very first rule of strong passwords is to never use the same password on two different systems. So "it's trivially easy to get a strong password" is useless; you need to say "it's trivially easy to get fifty strong passwords and remember which password gets into which system."
(I actually have more than fifty passwords, but let's call it fifty for now.)
But a lot of systems these days also require you to change them every 90 days or so, and not re-use any of your last ten passwords, so what you really really meant to say is "it's trivially easy to get five hundred strong passwords, and remember which password gets into which system, and which one is the current password and which ones were old passwords that aren't used anymore."
And that's not so trivial.
The distribution certainly looks like it follows Benford's law (probability of initial digit being n is logarithmic).
In fact, to within noise, the graph of Benford's law http://mathworld.wolfram.com/BenfordsLaw.html
is nearly indistinguishable from the graph in the article (original source: http://amitay.us/blog/files/most_common_iphone_passcodes.php )