You'd have better luck on the MW bands, but that of course requires a General or better ticket. From what I understand, designing transmitters (or receivers) for multi-hundred MHz frequencies is substantially more difficult as the tolerances are much lower than required for anything between 0.1-30MHz.
What the hell are you talking about? Seriously - I literally don't understand what the sentences in your comment have to do with each other.
Prohibition was a terrible idea. I'm not sure where you thought I endorsed it - the bootlegging comment was in the vein of "activity that mobsters make money with". And prohibition more or less created organized crime out of thin air. The same organized crime that we needed new kinds of laws (like RICO) to combat. The problem was you had a bunch of guys who could keep their hands "clean enough" while running a crime syndicate, and they were very hard to pin down because they did very little directly and their members would deny - to the last - being commanded by the don. But simply being a member of the organization, if the organization is demonstrably criminal (specific numbers and types of crimes need to be committed in a time period), you can shut it down.
The organized criminal syndicates running the botnets we see today are just that - organized criminal syndicates, of the very type specifically targeted by RICO laws. Hence my snarky first sentence. They work together in a distributed fashion, perpetrating mass crime across a large number of victims. And they all claim that they worked alone, when it's clear to everyone that they didn't.
Unless you're disagreeing with the very idea of making botnets and other computer crime illegal, in which case I have nothing to say.
I'm not sure about the "[my] guy in the Big Office" comment and where it fits in. I'll just say that anarchy is a nice idea, but people figured out a few dozen thousand years ago (at least) that it doesn't work. We need a competent - but limited - government to make the laws, and enforcement to uphold them, to even have a society at all. To quote a great man named Jon Stewart: "Government isn't perfect, but some of us wish it was better - not gone." People have actually thought about this stuff before, you know.
There's a major difference here, in that it's not intended to be rhetorical or metaphorical. Taking somebody's land forcefully is rape in the symbolic sense, while accusing somebody of sticking fingers in vagina is rape in the literal sense. If it didn't happen as described, or was exaggerated from the overly-intrusive-but-standard pat-down, it is absolutely defamatory. It's just as defamatory as someone accusing their ex-boyfriend of rape because they felt unappreciated- he "raped" her feelings in the metaphorical sense, but if the description was left out then it sounds like an accusation of a serious crime.
And this wasn't metaphorical. She accused the woman of a sexual assault, and then said it "felt like" rape. If that's not tantamount to a criminal accusation, I don't know what is. Defamation laws are designed for things like this - I can't go around telling everybody that my neighbor likes to shoot up heroin, either - people take what they hear seriously, for better or worse, and he could lose his job over it. Unless it's true, it'd be my fault, and he should be able to recover damages from me.
There's a not-so-fine-line between a security patdown at an airport and rape. I'm no fan of them either, I don't think they work, and I think they're highly invasive - but they're not sexual assault. And yes I have experienced them, as has my girlfriend. She didn't like them either, but the woman performing them clearly just wanted to go home, so rather than accusing her of rape, she wished her a good afternoon (and got a tired 'thanks') and berated that they were forced to do that job.
As for Godwin, well the funny thing is - yes, the average German citizen, even the average SS officer, was typically granted at least the benefit of the doubt. Essentially, you had a lot of good people who felt like they had no other option. There's books and plays about that very subject - it doesn't even rise to the level of Milgram because people don't typically consider even an intrusive security patdown to be something overly offensive. TSA officers aren't exactly highly-paid; when a policy like enhanced patdowns comes down the line, there's not many who would rather quit their job and risk dipping into poverty over a relatively minor procedural change to the patdowns they are already doing. That's without even going into those that actually think it's improving safety, and are really just trying to help. Should I blame every single McDonalds cook for the effect their food has on people, especially the lower class who have fewer choices? How about meter maids, because I don't like parking tickets? I try to blame the people responsible for my misfortunes, rather than the guy who happens to be involved, but then again I'm not an asshole. I've had shitty jobs too.
I stand by my point. If she is accusing the woman of a criminal action, she needs to talk to the police and try to get the DA involved, or she needs her lawyer to file charges. If she has, blogging about the trial in progress is bad form at best and the judge would not be happy about it. If there's no trial in progress because she doesn't want to press charges, she has no business accusing somebody of a crime. The story can be effectively told without names, if what she's actually protesting is the patdown procedure itself. If she's got a problem with her *specific* patdown and she thinks it was assault, she needs to talk to the police - as I said above.
All the talk on this article is actually scaring me a bit. I thought Slashdot was more nuanced than this. I've essentially been watching a mob with torches and pitchforks - a mob that doesn't even have half of *one side* of this story. But the best mobs never do have any idea exactly what they're rising against.
This is a serious accusation on the part of the blogger. If she's exaggerating, which sure as hell sounds to be the case, this is an up-and-down defamation case. "So-and-so raped me" when that's not the case stands a fantastically good chance of ruining that individual's reputation and causing them problems in their future prospects, particularly if it's all over Google when you type in her name.
If the alleged event actually did take place, blogs are the wrong place to rant about it, particularly publicly. If it were true, it'd be a job for the police, lawyers, and the courts. The fact that this vitriol is all over a blog suggests to me that it was a search performed "properly" that this person didn't like.
I hate the TSA. I don't like their employees, who frequently are powertripping. But there's no convincing evidence that this actually happened as described - and if the employee was doing her job the way she had to do it, why ruin her life? The problem is the policy of her employer. Complain all you want about the search if you don't like it, call the police and a lawyer if you believe it crossed the line, but don't ruin an individual's life without cause.
The barista at Starbucks fucked up my coffee by using burnt beans (what do you mean that's what Starbucks coffee tastes like?). So I went and wrote a blog entry, using her name and blaming her personally, where I likened drinking that coffee to being poisoned. That's not OK.
I didn't RTFA (this is Slashdot, after all). It could be that this did happen as described, (which is definitely not OK), the DA wasn't interested in prosecuting it, and she couldn't afford a lawyer so she's fighting back the only way she could by naming the perpetrator publicly. That's certainly possible, but the style of language doesn't convince me.
Right, but even today the phone lines are more protected than IP traffic, and more difficult to "root" remotely. Somebody can get into your server, log some traffic or copy some files, and disappear with no trace but the IP of the box they rooted in Russia. Hard to do anything about that, if you're the police. But standard wiretapping seems to be taken more seriously, there's usually more evidence, and so it's easier to catch someone for it.
Let's say you need to explain to a customer/patient/etc that their information was stolen. "Somebody wiretapped the phone line" is easier to understand, and taken more sympathetically, than "we didn't secure our boxes properly enough for these Russians (we think) and it seems like maybe they got it".
They would be, if they sold their cars as toys. But the difference is, the average person understands that cars are dangerous. There's tests and licenses and things that at least attempt to enforce a minimum standard on competency.
But this is more dangerous than a car. You can't jump out of the way of it, you can't avoid it, and you'll never see it coming. It's more like a bullet that is virtually guaranteed to hit your eyes. But it's fired from something that looks like and is sold as a toy, and continuously.
No, it won't kill you. Yes, it will blind you. And there's nothing you can do about it without wearing goggles.
Here's the thing to realize, where this is different from a gun - If I take this to a stadium, turn it on, and scan it around the stadium for a few seconds, I will blind somewhere between *dozens* and *hundreds* of people. Even an automatic rifle won't do that - the fire rate isn't continuous.
That's what's scary. And people understand that guns are dangerous, for the most part. Only a psychopath would shoot up a stadium like I described, but a stupid drunk idiot might think the second scenario was "really cool".
The protection of radio spectrum goes both ways, though. I'm a pretty fucking big fan of the idea that there's nobody else on the frequency my ambulance squad uses to communicate with our dispatcher and the police, or the paramedics, or other agencies. And that's only because the FCC has a very big stick to hit people with if they violate it. If people or businesses thought they could get away with co-opting public safety frequencies, you bet your ass they would.
And you don't have to think very hard to come up with countless other problems with an unregulated spectrum. Everything from cordless phones to RC cars to WiFi would become useless as people just shat all over the spectrum because it was easy and convenient to do so. Things like allocation and emissions regulations keep the spectrum useful in the same way that a drivers' license keeps the roads useful to everybody. Even the most anarchist person must recognize the tragedy of the commons, even if he doesn't like the solution - at least if he's intellectually honest.
Fair enough, I was being hyperbolic and I freely admit. However, the fact remains:
A 2010 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States (PNAS) reviewed publication and citation data for 1,372 climate researchers and drew the following two conclusions:
(i) 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC (Anthropogenic Climate Change) outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers
In any case, that's not the point. The point is about this paper, and specifically what it does not do - which is credibly and rigorously address the arguments made by others that it contradicts. Rather than addressing that point - which is the point of this article, because it's why the editor resigned - you start swearing and engaging in ad-homenim attacks. Then you assert that you speak for the crowd, which is irrelevant even if it were true, and then invent motives to make me seem like some sort of trickster, which conveniently means that you don't need to address the content of the post. Were you reading the Wikipedia page listing fallacies and just itching to try some out?
This is the problem with trying to discuss climate science, or any other belief-driven issue, with people. There are many, many things to have a legitimate disagreement over when it comes to the science. Are the models good enough? Is the data good enough? The scientific consensus says yes, but there is room to disagree. Is the consensus strong enough to warrant action, particularly the drastic action called for? Is the cost of being wrong too great?
But instead you call me an asshole. How very constructive.
Literally thousands of papers, all dealing in numbers, have shown that the climate is warming. Almost all of them (well more than consensus) show that human activities are responsible. These are the "scientific arguments" that the editor refers to - the thousands of papers that make the case for AGW. Meanwhile, the author's rebuttal discusses a different opponent - those "generalities and talking points". He does not seem to be addressing flaws - systemic or particular - in any individual or collective model of the long-term climate. I've read his paper, and while I'm not a climatologist, I have studied climate and I do know quite a bit about academic research. Not properly addressing related work, particularly when you refute it, is amateur hour. And he doesn't do it properly. You can't say "they're wrong" without extremely detailed specifics, none of which he provided. It's all in broad strokes. The point is to refute your critics before they say anything, as in "yes, we know we don't have a number for this factor but here's why we think it's unimportant".
And this paper is only 11 pages long, two of which aren't content. A little short to refute 3 decades worth of work by thousands of people. While this is a very specific topic (confounding factors getting in the way of observing the impact of the sun), it has been extensively studied. Saying "they screwed up in their understanding", without a ton of detail, is either a high-school level mistake, or violent handwaving. And it shouldn't have been published without those details, which is why the guy responsible is resigning.
Science is more than a convenient process. It's a way of thinking about the world rationally. Creationism isn't science.
I have no faith in somebody's intellectual capability if they are willing to throw reason out the window because it challenges their beliefs. Particularly if that person is a scientist. Creationism is almost the embodiment of unscientific thinking - roughly, an unwillingness to question the world and the state it's in. How does one think scientifically about one part of the world, and not others? You either appreciate the scientific way of looking at the world, or you don't.
I am a strict atheist, I make no bones about it. But I know a lot of people whose religion is in metaphors, and they understand the importance of the Creation myth to their religion and its structure, but don't actually think it happened. Genesis is important to them for realizing their place in the world, not that it literally took 7 days a few thousand years back.
Though I'd say that those who actually believe that a document written in Aramaic, translated to Hebrew and Latin, and finally to English, is the literal word of God have some serious comprehension issues to begin with. I've met people who literally thought the Bible was written in English.
Well that's exactly the point. You already pick up the tab for those people, but in the least efficient (economically) way possible. They just get taken to the ER, and you pay for it in your premiums because they just charge your insurance more to make up the difference. It's a vicious cycle, because then less people can afford insurance.
That's the problem - single-payer healthcare makes the most economic sense and reduces inefficiency. The humanitarian benefits are almost a side effect.
If you're not trolling, you're an asshole. The very notion of society is that we can all pitch in for the common interest, for everybody's benefit. And the only mandatory vaccines are those for school children - because schools are the very places in which one might contract measles.
I am sickened by you in particular, and sad for humanity in general, because there are so many people like you that are terrified that somebody, somewhere might benefit from your actions - even if they aren't outwardly altruistic. It's a sort of militant selfishness, or perhaps overly zealous spite, that I literally can't comprehend. Especially when the "benefit" in this case is some poor kid not dying
Good for you. We'll come and dump 4 feet of snow on you overnight, and "laugh at the big deal you make out of it" as you try desperately to dig yourselves out with no/not enough plows, shovels, snowblowers, and tire chains.
Look. Different regions get different types of weather. How'd your last ice storm go? Because ours gave us a day or two of trouble. Same with the blizzard we had this winter - 4 feet of snow in one day, and cleared out the next. But that's because we plan for snow, ice, and harsh winters in general. Oh your car won't start? Should have used a block heater, how stupid of you. But you'll only need it once? Drama queen...
In the Northeast, we don't get hurricanes, tornadoes, or earthquakes. In California, you don't get much snow or ice, or sub-zero temperatures (or tornadoes). So you have building codes that handle earthquakes, and we have plows and snowblowers. We plan for typical events, and don't waste our limited resources on highly unusual events. Neither of us would be very prepared for an F3 blowing through town, but are you going to call yourself a drama queen for being bummed that your house is a half-mile in the air?
I think people do this to feel superior. I don't get it. But New Englanders were doing the same thing when DC shut down over 3 inches of snow, so it's not just you.
Counter-Strike is about the most serious that games get. Playing against even a moderately-good CS player, while on a gamepad, is a fantastic way to get your ass kicked up and down. Keyboard and mouse is the only way they have a hope of being a challenge. There's just no way on a console to turn rapidly but precisely. You can turn quickly, but imperfectly - or slowly but precisely. You can't fling the mouse across your desk and stop at the right spot.
So this is kind of a given for there to be any meaningful cross-platform play.
My UID says I've been here for at least a few years. Actually, I joined in 2005... I was 14 at the time. Now, I'm a third-year computer science major at a respected university, and I still read Slashdot every day. Without meaning to sound sappy, I'm not sure I would be the person I am today without/. . In my small high school, it's how I knew that there were a lot of people who had the same interests as I did, and that it didn't matter that I didn't fit in.
So thanks Taco, for making Slashdot. I've stuck with it all these years (I even liked D2!) and I hope your departure doesn't imply change. But I've always felt like you had a powerful presence that kept out a lot of nonsense, even when you weren't posting as much.
Good luck in all your future endeavors, seriously.
My desk started shaking around. I was more confused than anything else. My immediate impression was of some big truck passing outside, but I'm in a building far too large to be affected by that, so I finally came to the conclusion that it must've been an earthquake. Twitter confirmed the suspicion...
Apparently it was felt all the way up the east coast. Pretty intense, by far the largest earthquake ever recorded in the area according to the USGS. The talking head on the news suggested that because this area is so geologically inactive, the crust is very cold and "bell-like" so even minor quakes tend to travel, in a way that a more plastic crust would not facilitate.
No damage here, nor injuries, but everyone felt it. My university issued a public safety alert.
This is a stupid article, but you're being foolish. Nobody's talking about punishing people for breathing (except this retarded article..). In fact, nobody seriously objects to you burning wood.
The problem is carbon that's been squirreled away in the ground for hundreds of thousands of years. We're getting very good at "liberating" it back into the atmosphere, vastly faster than it's resequestered.
So people talking about the problem of cars that run on gas or diesel, or power plants that burn coal, are talking about the problem of "old" carbon that's been reintroduced. Even if you burn wood to heat your house (like my uncle), you're releasing carbon that was recently sequestered. Not a big deal.
And the reason this article is stupid is because the cow farts' carbon comes from the grass they ate, which pulled that carbon out of the atmosphere only a few months before.
The problem of global warming is that the cycle has been broken. Plants took up carbon, animals ate plants, animals ate other animals, they exhaled and eventually died and rotted, and the carbon went back into plants. Some of those plants were algae, and over a geologic period of time, they turned into the coal and oil and gas that we're using now. And boy are we using it - we've taken about 200 years to release millions of years worth of sequestered carbon.
Can you really blame people for being nervous about that? Particularly when you realize that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas?
Why do you assume that you wouldn't have a firewall for your internal network, even if it's publicly-routable? People have a bad habit of conflating NAT and security...
Every host on the Internet is "supposed" to be able to directly address every other host, but for firewalls of course. A flat address space simplifies things tremendously.
Imagine if your network printer worked from Starbucks, because it was just one fixed address on the Internet. Or you could bookmark your TiVo's web interface without any port forwarding, or some nasty polling interface involved to schedule shows on their servers. IPv6, by reinstating end-to-end connectivity, will do this.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd have better luck on the MW bands, but that of course requires a General or better ticket. From what I understand, designing transmitters (or receivers) for multi-hundred MHz frequencies is substantially more difficult as the tolerances are much lower than required for anything between 0.1-30MHz.
Is your name Philip J. Fry?
What the hell are you talking about? Seriously - I literally don't understand what the sentences in your comment have to do with each other.
Prohibition was a terrible idea. I'm not sure where you thought I endorsed it - the bootlegging comment was in the vein of "activity that mobsters make money with". And prohibition more or less created organized crime out of thin air. The same organized crime that we needed new kinds of laws (like RICO) to combat. The problem was you had a bunch of guys who could keep their hands "clean enough" while running a crime syndicate, and they were very hard to pin down because they did very little directly and their members would deny - to the last - being commanded by the don. But simply being a member of the organization, if the organization is demonstrably criminal (specific numbers and types of crimes need to be committed in a time period), you can shut it down.
The organized criminal syndicates running the botnets we see today are just that - organized criminal syndicates, of the very type specifically targeted by RICO laws. Hence my snarky first sentence. They work together in a distributed fashion, perpetrating mass crime across a large number of victims. And they all claim that they worked alone, when it's clear to everyone that they didn't.
Unless you're disagreeing with the very idea of making botnets and other computer crime illegal, in which case I have nothing to say.
I'm not sure about the "[my] guy in the Big Office" comment and where it fits in. I'll just say that anarchy is a nice idea, but people figured out a few dozen thousand years ago (at least) that it doesn't work. We need a competent - but limited - government to make the laws, and enforcement to uphold them, to even have a society at all. To quote a great man named Jon Stewart: "Government isn't perfect, but some of us wish it was better - not gone." People have actually thought about this stuff before, you know.
...being used against organized crime. News at 11.
Seriously, most cracking and virus-creation is for the money these days. It's the new bootlegging. Is this supposed to be controversial?
There's a major difference here, in that it's not intended to be rhetorical or metaphorical. Taking somebody's land forcefully is rape in the symbolic sense, while accusing somebody of sticking fingers in vagina is rape in the literal sense. If it didn't happen as described, or was exaggerated from the overly-intrusive-but-standard pat-down, it is absolutely defamatory. It's just as defamatory as someone accusing their ex-boyfriend of rape because they felt unappreciated- he "raped" her feelings in the metaphorical sense, but if the description was left out then it sounds like an accusation of a serious crime.
And this wasn't metaphorical. She accused the woman of a sexual assault, and then said it "felt like" rape. If that's not tantamount to a criminal accusation, I don't know what is. Defamation laws are designed for things like this - I can't go around telling everybody that my neighbor likes to shoot up heroin, either - people take what they hear seriously, for better or worse, and he could lose his job over it. Unless it's true, it'd be my fault, and he should be able to recover damages from me.
There's a not-so-fine-line between a security patdown at an airport and rape. I'm no fan of them either, I don't think they work, and I think they're highly invasive - but they're not sexual assault. And yes I have experienced them, as has my girlfriend. She didn't like them either, but the woman performing them clearly just wanted to go home, so rather than accusing her of rape, she wished her a good afternoon (and got a tired 'thanks') and berated that they were forced to do that job.
As for Godwin, well the funny thing is - yes, the average German citizen, even the average SS officer, was typically granted at least the benefit of the doubt. Essentially, you had a lot of good people who felt like they had no other option. There's books and plays about that very subject - it doesn't even rise to the level of Milgram because people don't typically consider even an intrusive security patdown to be something overly offensive. TSA officers aren't exactly highly-paid; when a policy like enhanced patdowns comes down the line, there's not many who would rather quit their job and risk dipping into poverty over a relatively minor procedural change to the patdowns they are already doing. That's without even going into those that actually think it's improving safety, and are really just trying to help. Should I blame every single McDonalds cook for the effect their food has on people, especially the lower class who have fewer choices? How about meter maids, because I don't like parking tickets? I try to blame the people responsible for my misfortunes, rather than the guy who happens to be involved, but then again I'm not an asshole. I've had shitty jobs too.
I stand by my point. If she is accusing the woman of a criminal action, she needs to talk to the police and try to get the DA involved, or she needs her lawyer to file charges. If she has, blogging about the trial in progress is bad form at best and the judge would not be happy about it. If there's no trial in progress because she doesn't want to press charges, she has no business accusing somebody of a crime. The story can be effectively told without names, if what she's actually protesting is the patdown procedure itself. If she's got a problem with her *specific* patdown and she thinks it was assault, she needs to talk to the police - as I said above.
All the talk on this article is actually scaring me a bit. I thought Slashdot was more nuanced than this. I've essentially been watching a mob with torches and pitchforks - a mob that doesn't even have half of *one side* of this story. But the best mobs never do have any idea exactly what they're rising against.
This is a serious accusation on the part of the blogger. If she's exaggerating, which sure as hell sounds to be the case, this is an up-and-down defamation case. "So-and-so raped me" when that's not the case stands a fantastically good chance of ruining that individual's reputation and causing them problems in their future prospects, particularly if it's all over Google when you type in her name.
If the alleged event actually did take place, blogs are the wrong place to rant about it, particularly publicly. If it were true, it'd be a job for the police, lawyers, and the courts. The fact that this vitriol is all over a blog suggests to me that it was a search performed "properly" that this person didn't like.
I hate the TSA. I don't like their employees, who frequently are powertripping. But there's no convincing evidence that this actually happened as described - and if the employee was doing her job the way she had to do it, why ruin her life? The problem is the policy of her employer. Complain all you want about the search if you don't like it, call the police and a lawyer if you believe it crossed the line, but don't ruin an individual's life without cause.
The barista at Starbucks fucked up my coffee by using burnt beans (what do you mean that's what Starbucks coffee tastes like?). So I went and wrote a blog entry, using her name and blaming her personally, where I likened drinking that coffee to being poisoned. That's not OK.
I didn't RTFA (this is Slashdot, after all). It could be that this did happen as described, (which is definitely not OK), the DA wasn't interested in prosecuting it, and she couldn't afford a lawyer so she's fighting back the only way she could by naming the perpetrator publicly. That's certainly possible, but the style of language doesn't convince me.
Right, but even today the phone lines are more protected than IP traffic, and more difficult to "root" remotely. Somebody can get into your server, log some traffic or copy some files, and disappear with no trace but the IP of the box they rooted in Russia. Hard to do anything about that, if you're the police. But standard wiretapping seems to be taken more seriously, there's usually more evidence, and so it's easier to catch someone for it.
Let's say you need to explain to a customer/patient/etc that their information was stolen. "Somebody wiretapped the phone line" is easier to understand, and taken more sympathetically, than "we didn't secure our boxes properly enough for these Russians (we think) and it seems like maybe they got it".
They would be, if they sold their cars as toys. But the difference is, the average person understands that cars are dangerous. There's tests and licenses and things that at least attempt to enforce a minimum standard on competency.
But this is more dangerous than a car. You can't jump out of the way of it, you can't avoid it, and you'll never see it coming. It's more like a bullet that is virtually guaranteed to hit your eyes. But it's fired from something that looks like and is sold as a toy, and continuously.
No, it won't kill you. Yes, it will blind you. And there's nothing you can do about it without wearing goggles.
Here's the thing to realize, where this is different from a gun - If I take this to a stadium, turn it on, and scan it around the stadium for a few seconds, I will blind somewhere between *dozens* and *hundreds* of people. Even an automatic rifle won't do that - the fire rate isn't continuous.
That's what's scary. And people understand that guns are dangerous, for the most part. Only a psychopath would shoot up a stadium like I described, but a stupid drunk idiot might think the second scenario was "really cool".
The protection of radio spectrum goes both ways, though. I'm a pretty fucking big fan of the idea that there's nobody else on the frequency my ambulance squad uses to communicate with our dispatcher and the police, or the paramedics, or other agencies. And that's only because the FCC has a very big stick to hit people with if they violate it. If people or businesses thought they could get away with co-opting public safety frequencies, you bet your ass they would.
And you don't have to think very hard to come up with countless other problems with an unregulated spectrum. Everything from cordless phones to RC cars to WiFi would become useless as people just shat all over the spectrum because it was easy and convenient to do so. Things like allocation and emissions regulations keep the spectrum useful in the same way that a drivers' license keeps the roads useful to everybody. Even the most anarchist person must recognize the tragedy of the commons, even if he doesn't like the solution - at least if he's intellectually honest.
Fair enough, I was being hyperbolic and I freely admit. However, the fact remains:
In any case, that's not the point. The point is about this paper, and specifically what it does not do - which is credibly and rigorously address the arguments made by others that it contradicts. Rather than addressing that point - which is the point of this article, because it's why the editor resigned - you start swearing and engaging in ad-homenim attacks. Then you assert that you speak for the crowd, which is irrelevant even if it were true, and then invent motives to make me seem like some sort of trickster, which conveniently means that you don't need to address the content of the post. Were you reading the Wikipedia page listing fallacies and just itching to try some out?
This is the problem with trying to discuss climate science, or any other belief-driven issue, with people. There are many, many things to have a legitimate disagreement over when it comes to the science. Are the models good enough? Is the data good enough? The scientific consensus says yes, but there is room to disagree. Is the consensus strong enough to warrant action, particularly the drastic action called for? Is the cost of being wrong too great?
But instead you call me an asshole. How very constructive.
Holy strawman Batman! (not you, him)
Literally thousands of papers, all dealing in numbers, have shown that the climate is warming. Almost all of them (well more than consensus) show that human activities are responsible. These are the "scientific arguments" that the editor refers to - the thousands of papers that make the case for AGW. Meanwhile, the author's rebuttal discusses a different opponent - those "generalities and talking points". He does not seem to be addressing flaws - systemic or particular - in any individual or collective model of the long-term climate. I've read his paper, and while I'm not a climatologist, I have studied climate and I do know quite a bit about academic research. Not properly addressing related work, particularly when you refute it, is amateur hour. And he doesn't do it properly. You can't say "they're wrong" without extremely detailed specifics, none of which he provided. It's all in broad strokes. The point is to refute your critics before they say anything, as in "yes, we know we don't have a number for this factor but here's why we think it's unimportant".
And this paper is only 11 pages long, two of which aren't content. A little short to refute 3 decades worth of work by thousands of people. While this is a very specific topic (confounding factors getting in the way of observing the impact of the sun), it has been extensively studied. Saying "they screwed up in their understanding", without a ton of detail, is either a high-school level mistake, or violent handwaving. And it shouldn't have been published without those details, which is why the guy responsible is resigning.
Science is more than a convenient process. It's a way of thinking about the world rationally. Creationism isn't science.
I have no faith in somebody's intellectual capability if they are willing to throw reason out the window because it challenges their beliefs. Particularly if that person is a scientist. Creationism is almost the embodiment of unscientific thinking - roughly, an unwillingness to question the world and the state it's in. How does one think scientifically about one part of the world, and not others? You either appreciate the scientific way of looking at the world, or you don't.
I am a strict atheist, I make no bones about it. But I know a lot of people whose religion is in metaphors, and they understand the importance of the Creation myth to their religion and its structure, but don't actually think it happened. Genesis is important to them for realizing their place in the world, not that it literally took 7 days a few thousand years back.
Though I'd say that those who actually believe that a document written in Aramaic, translated to Hebrew and Latin, and finally to English, is the literal word of God have some serious comprehension issues to begin with. I've met people who literally thought the Bible was written in English.
Language processing in the brain is a strange beast. I read "I <LF> 've" and recognized "I've", missing the 'ha'
Bonus points if you caught the fact that I didn't escape my <s and >s - something I should've picked up if I used the mandatory preview.
Ugh.
Scripted? Not necessary.
should do it.
Presumably it's because the ' key is next to the key, and he didn't use the mandatory preview.
Well that's exactly the point. You already pick up the tab for those people, but in the least efficient (economically) way possible. They just get taken to the ER, and you pay for it in your premiums because they just charge your insurance more to make up the difference. It's a vicious cycle, because then less people can afford insurance.
That's the problem - single-payer healthcare makes the most economic sense and reduces inefficiency. The humanitarian benefits are almost a side effect.
If you're not trolling, you're an asshole. The very notion of society is that we can all pitch in for the common interest, for everybody's benefit. And the only mandatory vaccines are those for school children - because schools are the very places in which one might contract measles.
I am sickened by you in particular, and sad for humanity in general, because there are so many people like you that are terrified that somebody, somewhere might benefit from your actions - even if they aren't outwardly altruistic. It's a sort of militant selfishness, or perhaps overly zealous spite, that I literally can't comprehend. Especially when the "benefit" in this case is some poor kid not dying
Fuck you.
Good for you. We'll come and dump 4 feet of snow on you overnight, and "laugh at the big deal you make out of it" as you try desperately to dig yourselves out with no/not enough plows, shovels, snowblowers, and tire chains.
Look. Different regions get different types of weather. How'd your last ice storm go? Because ours gave us a day or two of trouble. Same with the blizzard we had this winter - 4 feet of snow in one day, and cleared out the next. But that's because we plan for snow, ice, and harsh winters in general. Oh your car won't start? Should have used a block heater, how stupid of you. But you'll only need it once? Drama queen...
In the Northeast, we don't get hurricanes, tornadoes, or earthquakes. In California, you don't get much snow or ice, or sub-zero temperatures (or tornadoes). So you have building codes that handle earthquakes, and we have plows and snowblowers. We plan for typical events, and don't waste our limited resources on highly unusual events. Neither of us would be very prepared for an F3 blowing through town, but are you going to call yourself a drama queen for being bummed that your house is a half-mile in the air?
I think people do this to feel superior. I don't get it. But New Englanders were doing the same thing when DC shut down over 3 inches of snow, so it's not just you.
sub par strategy
AWPers
But you repeat yourself
</troll>
Counter-Strike is about the most serious that games get. Playing against even a moderately-good CS player, while on a gamepad, is a fantastic way to get your ass kicked up and down. Keyboard and mouse is the only way they have a hope of being a challenge. There's just no way on a console to turn rapidly but precisely. You can turn quickly, but imperfectly - or slowly but precisely. You can't fling the mouse across your desk and stop at the right spot.
So this is kind of a given for there to be any meaningful cross-platform play.
My UID says I've been here for at least a few years. Actually, I joined in 2005... I was 14 at the time. Now, I'm a third-year computer science major at a respected university, and I still read Slashdot every day. Without meaning to sound sappy, I'm not sure I would be the person I am today without /. . In my small high school, it's how I knew that there were a lot of people who had the same interests as I did, and that it didn't matter that I didn't fit in.
So thanks Taco, for making Slashdot. I've stuck with it all these years (I even liked D2!) and I hope your departure doesn't imply change. But I've always felt like you had a powerful presence that kept out a lot of nonsense, even when you weren't posting as much.
Good luck in all your future endeavors, seriously.
My desk started shaking around. I was more confused than anything else. My immediate impression was of some big truck passing outside, but I'm in a building far too large to be affected by that, so I finally came to the conclusion that it must've been an earthquake. Twitter confirmed the suspicion...
Apparently it was felt all the way up the east coast. Pretty intense, by far the largest earthquake ever recorded in the area according to the USGS. The talking head on the news suggested that because this area is so geologically inactive, the crust is very cold and "bell-like" so even minor quakes tend to travel, in a way that a more plastic crust would not facilitate.
No damage here, nor injuries, but everyone felt it. My university issued a public safety alert.
Very strange.
There is a google plus app. Been one for weeks.
This is a stupid article, but you're being foolish. Nobody's talking about punishing people for breathing (except this retarded article..). In fact, nobody seriously objects to you burning wood.
The problem is carbon that's been squirreled away in the ground for hundreds of thousands of years. We're getting very good at "liberating" it back into the atmosphere, vastly faster than it's resequestered.
So people talking about the problem of cars that run on gas or diesel, or power plants that burn coal, are talking about the problem of "old" carbon that's been reintroduced. Even if you burn wood to heat your house (like my uncle), you're releasing carbon that was recently sequestered. Not a big deal.
And the reason this article is stupid is because the cow farts' carbon comes from the grass they ate, which pulled that carbon out of the atmosphere only a few months before.
The problem of global warming is that the cycle has been broken. Plants took up carbon, animals ate plants, animals ate other animals, they exhaled and eventually died and rotted, and the carbon went back into plants. Some of those plants were algae, and over a geologic period of time, they turned into the coal and oil and gas that we're using now. And boy are we using it - we've taken about 200 years to release millions of years worth of sequestered carbon.
Can you really blame people for being nervous about that? Particularly when you realize that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas?
Why do you assume that you wouldn't have a firewall for your internal network, even if it's publicly-routable? People have a bad habit of conflating NAT and security...
Every host on the Internet is "supposed" to be able to directly address every other host, but for firewalls of course. A flat address space simplifies things tremendously.
Imagine if your network printer worked from Starbucks, because it was just one fixed address on the Internet. Or you could bookmark your TiVo's web interface without any port forwarding, or some nasty polling interface involved to schedule shows on their servers. IPv6, by reinstating end-to-end connectivity, will do this.