I understood the writeup very well. It goes directly to the heart of the debate, for me at least.
The global climate change issue has morphed from a brief global cooling 'scare', to global warming debate, and now global climate 'change'. During these changing arguments, I've become convinced of these beliefs:
1- Many parties have ulterior or hiden motives. These vary from wanting to advance their cultural or political policies to wanting to prevail in a factual or scientific debate, and others. I also have an ulterior motive in this debate, and of course I see mine as honest and true, and of course just as I assume everyone else does.
2- All parties seem prepared to use whatever eivdence supports their motives, and discredit the rest. Just as the writeup would suggest.
3- This is not new, and is (I propose) evident beyond contradiction to anyone who engages in minimal critical analysis of the issue. If it wasn't evident to you earlier, you are not paying attention, or not trying very hard at all.
4- Many parties purposefully either fabricate or embellish the evidence they present to make their case. Some do so despite knowing of contrary evidence, and some simply refuse to consider any other evidence at all.
5- Many who make their eivdence fit the argument have good intentions, and seem genuinely to not understand why others, seeing this, tend to mistrust their argument entirely.
Early on, when 'cooling' became 'warming', I started asking why this was so important. And one of the first things I learned was that many who joined the debate and believed that warming was occurring, and that it was man-caused, and could 'only' be solved by reducing our impact on the planet, was that they already wanted us to 'reduce our impact' on the planet, and this was the latest and hopefully (for them) conclusive argument . Scientists rarely like to admit mistakes (neither do I) so many climatologists are engaged in futher analysis of their data to make it fit when reality doesn't quite match with their predictions. Looking at the work done to adjust, normalize, and clean up this data to make it fit leaves me, in particular distrustful of their process.
So this dovetails nicely into the anti-capitalist/industrial/consumer movement's goals, and the anti-population growth movement similarly will love this. Basically, they love anything bad for me. I'm just part of the 98% in America trying to get along, doing infinitely better than 90% of the rest of the world. I have a roof to sleep under, and something to keep me off the ground when I do - that makes me better off then most of the world. Add in my access to safe drinking water, and I probably do better than 95% or more of the world. My big complaint is how thick my steaks are.
So I do come to the debate with a very strong 'prove it!' attitude, and when the climate change proponents/worriers are so often aligned with the movements to take from me as much as they can, I rationally (if not logically) react with caution. Actually, skepticism, tainted with outright rejection. these groups can make no scientific argument - they are not motiviated by science.
And the scientists are largely so invested in protecting their reputations that I consider their arguments self-serving at best.
If warming is real, and we can stop it, I'm also conce
I dealt with GSA a lot during the 90s and 00s. Buying hardware, after the requirements were set, was as simple as opening the GSA catalog sent by Compaq, matching up the base systems, adding options, and giving the polite person on the other end of the phone line your PO/requisition number. Delivered. If you had a local servicing outfit (like mine) taking the service call, we could call Compaq and get warranty parts with a serial number, no fancy invoice copy required. LOts of it came with 3 year warranty.
But goverment purchasing got all optimized and enhanced, and now you can't buy anything in less than a year.
Oh, and when HP absorbed Compaq, they pretty much dismissed the Compaq goverment sales department, since it was NIH. And no one liked working with HP's government sales group, since they were incompetent especially in service. Rumor was that some of the Compaq people came back, but too late - lots of agenies started bying elsewhere.
feh. Our Federal government is incompetent at nearly every level. It can hardly get worse, and dismissing everyone to start over would not be as bad as it might be letting them continue grinding away.
When I had a hospital gig, we knew back in 1995 that time would need to be syncronized amongst all the servers etc. We ran a local time server synched to a Tier 1 NTP server which was fortuitiously about 180 miles away. It has since gone to restricted access, but it's nailed to the USNO, and is still a Stratum One server. I bet they still use it as reference.
But even in 1995, NetWare servers were well behaved and accept NTP, and we set workstation time on login. As other servers came on, we went through the inevitable 'my server is more accurate' and blew them off until the Sun server showed up,and they refused to use our NTP. Fine. Took two weeks to resolve a 300ms difference, and then I watched as they re-fixed the error and synched with the NTP server they initially refused to use. In fariness, it was not SUN engineers involved, but they were arrogant enough to qualify.
Time is important to networks.
We did not, however, have any way to manage time on 'devices', such as infusion appliances etc. I do NOT think of an EMR as a 'medical device'. Nor do I think of the EMR sytem that way either. But if time isn't being synched on your network, you got some other problems, I suspect, that are not making your work easier or efficient as a network admin.
apply this to all media, including print and radio.
What? You can't really verify someone's identity when they call in to a radio show? And those letters to-the-editor are similarly also difficult to ascertain the true authorship of?
Oh my, we've NEVER had any way to do this? The horror!
We sometimes kid around here, and one of our favorite bits of dark humor is that SAP is 'Satan's preferred method of interaction with our world".
Little did we know. It's not enough to gouge their customers, or to steal from them, but they have to diversify and thieve from the general public DIRECTLY, not merely via their surrogates, their blighted customers.
All this for $30,000. This bonehead now takes Martha Stewart's place as 'dumbest rich person in the U.S.A'.
There are, essentiually, two options for social networking sites:
1. Total freedom. 2. Censorship and/or denial.
No middle ground. But then this is freedom. You are either free, or you are not. No middle ground. Freedom in some things does not change the lack of freedom in others.
Crap, now I sound like a Libertarian. I hate that.
Might want to ask the fish also. they see it as a major stumbling block. Or did, when they were around, but the Hoover dam is a substantial impediment to their reaching those spawning grounds, so they, well, gave up.
Other smaller dams did as much damage. Atlantic Salmon didn't need the extra tress, but this contributed to their becoming rare as they are now. I've caught my last Atlantic Salmon quite some time ago. Somehow the Pacific varieties have survived. Apparently the Japanese and Norweigans don't drive over there and fish them out.
"always thought it was bad to prevent water from returning to the sea"
I dare you to try. You may delay it, but the water will return to the sea. No matter what clever little trick we try, unless we bottle it and hide it in salt caves.
But the water will eventually go where it goes. Ask any homeowner who's had the pleasure of a leak. Water extracted from an aquifer will go around and some will take its place and replenish the aquifer. If you draw too much out, sure, the aquifer will be depleted, but rain wil usually refill it.
When I lived in Maine, I understood water fairly well. My hometown is served by two poinds, which are owned entirely by the water district, both fed by aquifers, clear enough to look 150 feet straight down from the air and see the bottom. Better water than you can buy. When I was living further south in Maine, I had the opportunity to visit someone who had a well dug stupendously deep (+600ft) and drank water that flowed from an aquifer that fed the Poland Spring - I was drinking their well water after it got by the pipes that otherwise extracted it to be sold. this went further west and spilled into the lake that supplied the city I lived in at the time, again water others would pay for, except that this lake had boats with motors in it, and still a few camps that had not diverted their waste asd required by law. change comes slowly.
Good water I appreciate. Out here in Arizona, too much calcium and chlorine. Tastes like bath water or public pool. Bleagh.
A lot of the Colorado River 'evaporates' into Arizona etc. before it trickles into Mexico. We call it 'water supply'.
I know. I drink some of it every day, and evaporate it into the local aquifers, shallow though they are. And we drink it again and again before it eventually evaporates from my pool (or others, or our tiny little lawns) and goes elsewhere.
You may want to refer to this 'evaporation' as 'use'.
One of my cousins has worked for a pharmaceutical company for a few decades as a statistician. Her job is to evaluate research and report on the validity of the analysis. She has told me often that she rejects a lot more than she accepts, and her bosses have always implored her to challenge the findings she's been given, to prevent what we are discussing as 'positive bias' (or as they put it, 'avoiding recalls, liability, and financial ruin'). She calls it 'lying' or 'wishful thinking', if she's feeling charitable. And her opinion of some researchers is that they are gifted, but blinded by their fervent wishes to be successful. And yes, delivering products to save lives and ease suffering is secondary to 'success' for many of them. They don't, as she puts it, 'get the concepts of liability or deceit'. All they want is a bigger lab, more assistants, and an unassailable position. That's all. And a nice hot cup of tea, I'm sure.
My favorite quote from her: "That's a statistical test they use to make data out of noise".
Positive bias is inevitable. Probably started before Galileo, and of course he struggled with that a lot. No less a problem today, though we punish heretics somewhat more humanely today. We either premote them to government jobs when we agree, or we fire them when we don't. Not many go to the stocks any more.
If they were trying to be like Apple, there would be maybe 12 browsers to choose from. More if you count the forks and derivatives. Not including Lynx or Line Mode Browser.
..is not at all opposed to U.S. law saying that advertisments with edited or modified depictions of models should dislose that fact, and plainly enough to be easily seen and understood.
The fashion industry pretty much depends on peddling fantasy, from the fantasy that what you wear will improve your life in any way, from the superficial to the profound, and shouldn't be too offended that we ask them to admit that.
Of course they won't like it, since that may break the spell, but hey - you abuse the magic, it comes back at ya.
So how do we institute ANY 'truth in advertising'? Seriously, the concept is pretty much nonfunctional. We regularly see ads promoting some supplement with the facetious disclaimer that it is not intended as a treatment for anything, despite the ad plainly stating that if you want to improve|enhance|support your immune|sexual|youth|whatever function, 'use this'.
Seriously? We wanna do that? Wow.
Israel, on the other hand, is free to do what they want. Their country.
ps - Any stats on how many girls are starving themselves to death in response to these altered pics in ads?
Slashdot Mirror
Great, my html is lacking.
First article:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/29/us-sea-level-ice-idUSBRE82R13E20120329
Second article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/20/world-aquifers-rising-sea-levels
Sometimes, I make myself weep.
I understood the writeup very well. It goes directly to the heart of the debate, for me at least.
The global climate change issue has morphed from a brief global cooling 'scare', to global warming debate, and now global climate 'change'. During these changing arguments, I've become convinced of these beliefs:
1- Many parties have ulterior or hiden motives. These vary from wanting to advance their cultural or political policies to wanting to prevail in a factual or scientific debate, and others. I also have an ulterior motive in this debate, and of course I see mine as honest and true, and of course just as I assume everyone else does.
2- All parties seem prepared to use whatever eivdence supports their motives, and discredit the rest. Just as the writeup would suggest.
3- This is not new, and is (I propose) evident beyond contradiction to anyone who engages in minimal critical analysis of the issue. If it wasn't evident to you earlier, you are not paying attention, or not trying very hard at all.
4- Many parties purposefully either fabricate or embellish the evidence they present to make their case. Some do so despite knowing of contrary evidence, and some simply refuse to consider any other evidence at all.
5- Many who make their eivdence fit the argument have good intentions, and seem genuinely to not understand why others, seeing this, tend to mistrust their argument entirely.
Early on, when 'cooling' became 'warming', I started asking why this was so important. And one of the first things I learned was that many who joined the debate and believed that warming was occurring, and that it was man-caused, and could 'only' be solved by reducing our impact on the planet, was that they already wanted us to 'reduce our impact' on the planet, and this was the latest and hopefully (for them) conclusive argument . Scientists rarely like to admit mistakes (neither do I) so many climatologists are engaged in futher analysis of their data to make it fit when reality doesn't quite match with their predictions. Looking at the work done to adjust, normalize, and clean up this data to make it fit leaves me, in particular distrustful of their process.
Now we read some articles on ice melt, , and I'm left wondering how this could have occurred 14,000 years ago before industrialization, and if it could be happening now for those reasons, and nothing we can do would stop it. And the article I linked to doesn't explain much at all. And then this article blames fresh water consumption. We fix this by what, reducing population? Or just becoming more efficient users? Population growth wipes out all but the most aggressive and costly conservation, and then only if we ignore the developing world.
So this dovetails nicely into the anti-capitalist/industrial/consumer movement's goals, and the anti-population growth movement similarly will love this. Basically, they love anything bad for me. I'm just part of the 98% in America trying to get along, doing infinitely better than 90% of the rest of the world. I have a roof to sleep under, and something to keep me off the ground when I do - that makes me better off then most of the world. Add in my access to safe drinking water, and I probably do better than 95% or more of the world. My big complaint is how thick my steaks are.
So I do come to the debate with a very strong 'prove it!' attitude, and when the climate change proponents/worriers are so often aligned with the movements to take from me as much as they can, I rationally (if not logically) react with caution. Actually, skepticism, tainted with outright rejection. these groups can make no scientific argument - they are not motiviated by science.
And the scientists are largely so invested in protecting their reputations that I consider their arguments self-serving at best.
If warming is real, and we can stop it, I'm also conce
I dealt with GSA a lot during the 90s and 00s. Buying hardware, after the requirements were set, was as simple as opening the GSA catalog sent by Compaq, matching up the base systems, adding options, and giving the polite person on the other end of the phone line your PO/requisition number. Delivered. If you had a local servicing outfit (like mine) taking the service call, we could call Compaq and get warranty parts with a serial number, no fancy invoice copy required. LOts of it came with 3 year warranty.
But goverment purchasing got all optimized and enhanced, and now you can't buy anything in less than a year.
Oh, and when HP absorbed Compaq, they pretty much dismissed the Compaq goverment sales department, since it was NIH. And no one liked working with HP's government sales group, since they were incompetent especially in service. Rumor was that some of the Compaq people came back, but too late - lots of agenies started bying elsewhere.
feh. Our Federal government is incompetent at nearly every level. It can hardly get worse, and dismissing everyone to start over would not be as bad as it might be letting them continue grinding away.
When I had a hospital gig, we knew back in 1995 that time would need to be syncronized amongst all the servers etc. We ran a local time server synched to a Tier 1 NTP server which was fortuitiously about 180 miles away. It has since gone to restricted access, but it's nailed to the USNO, and is still a Stratum One server. I bet they still use it as reference.
But even in 1995, NetWare servers were well behaved and accept NTP, and we set workstation time on login. As other servers came on, we went through the inevitable 'my server is more accurate' and blew them off until the Sun server showed up,and they refused to use our NTP. Fine. Took two weeks to resolve a 300ms difference, and then I watched as they re-fixed the error and synched with the NTP server they initially refused to use. In fariness, it was not SUN engineers involved, but they were arrogant enough to qualify.
Time is important to networks.
We did not, however, have any way to manage time on 'devices', such as infusion appliances etc. I do NOT think of an EMR as a 'medical device'. Nor do I think of the EMR sytem that way either. But if time isn't being synched on your network, you got some other problems, I suspect, that are not making your work easier or efficient as a network admin.
apply this to all media, including print and radio.
What? You can't really verify someone's identity when they call in to a radio show? And those letters to-the-editor are similarly also difficult to ascertain the true authorship of?
Oh my, we've NEVER had any way to do this? The horror!
We sometimes kid around here, and one of our favorite bits of dark humor is that SAP is 'Satan's preferred method of interaction with our world".
Little did we know. It's not enough to gouge their customers, or to steal from them, but they have to diversify and thieve from the general public DIRECTLY, not merely via their surrogates, their blighted customers.
All this for $30,000. This bonehead now takes Martha Stewart's place as 'dumbest rich person in the U.S.A'.
Wonder how he will look in orange.
There's always an outlet. It will overflow somewhere.
Just let it go. I no longer get mod points no matter my karma or mod ups. Never.
Depends on your location and context...
There are, essentiually, two options for social networking sites:
1. Total freedom.
2. Censorship and/or denial.
No middle ground. But then this is freedom. You are either free, or you are not. No middle ground. Freedom in some things does not change the lack of freedom in others.
Crap, now I sound like a Libertarian. I hate that.
"Like in Switzerland, where citizens can directly vote issues they feel important"
Sounds like California. And several other states.
It's our fault, we are usign too much water and upsetting the balance.
Bad humans! Be gone!
Riiiiiight...
Might want to ask the fish also. they see it as a major stumbling block. Or did, when they were around, but the Hoover dam is a substantial impediment to their reaching those spawning grounds, so they, well, gave up.
Other smaller dams did as much damage. Atlantic Salmon didn't need the extra tress, but this contributed to their becoming rare as they are now. I've caught my last Atlantic Salmon quite some time ago. Somehow the Pacific varieties have survived. Apparently the Japanese and Norweigans don't drive over there and fish them out.
"always thought it was bad to prevent water from returning to the sea"
I dare you to try. You may delay it, but the water will return to the sea. No matter what clever little trick we try, unless we bottle it and hide it in salt caves.
But the water will eventually go where it goes. Ask any homeowner who's had the pleasure of a leak. Water extracted from an aquifer will go around and some will take its place and replenish the aquifer. If you draw too much out, sure, the aquifer will be depleted, but rain wil usually refill it.
When I lived in Maine, I understood water fairly well. My hometown is served by two poinds, which are owned entirely by the water district, both fed by aquifers, clear enough to look 150 feet straight down from the air and see the bottom. Better water than you can buy. When I was living further south in Maine, I had the opportunity to visit someone who had a well dug stupendously deep (+600ft) and drank water that flowed from an aquifer that fed the Poland Spring - I was drinking their well water after it got by the pipes that otherwise extracted it to be sold. this went further west and spilled into the lake that supplied the city I lived in at the time, again water others would pay for, except that this lake had boats with motors in it, and still a few camps that had not diverted their waste asd required by law. change comes slowly.
Good water I appreciate. Out here in Arizona, too much calcium and chlorine. Tastes like bath water or public pool. Bleagh.
You must be using Sense. Your Friend Stream combines Facebook and Twitter, so you get most of your shit in one stream.
The rest of the shit is from that damned Yahoo! gizmo you installed. Same as your PC. Keyword 'mail'.
A lot of the Colorado River 'evaporates' into Arizona etc. before it trickles into Mexico. We call it 'water supply'.
I know. I drink some of it every day, and evaporate it into the local aquifers, shallow though they are. And we drink it again and again before it eventually evaporates from my pool (or others, or our tiny little lawns) and goes elsewhere.
You may want to refer to this 'evaporation' as 'use'.
- Social Security; being bankrtupted by government inaction AND actions.
- Failure to enforce immigration law, with measurable damages done to citizens and legal immigrants alike.
And shall we go on?
Or, we could take a more lengthy but direct approach. Vote them all out until they get it.
Pah! Crazy talk!
One of my cousins has worked for a pharmaceutical company for a few decades as a statistician. Her job is to evaluate research and report on the validity of the analysis. She has told me often that she rejects a lot more than she accepts, and her bosses have always implored her to challenge the findings she's been given, to prevent what we are discussing as 'positive bias' (or as they put it, 'avoiding recalls, liability, and financial ruin'). She calls it 'lying' or 'wishful thinking', if she's feeling charitable. And her opinion of some researchers is that they are gifted, but blinded by their fervent wishes to be successful. And yes, delivering products to save lives and ease suffering is secondary to 'success' for many of them. They don't, as she puts it, 'get the concepts of liability or deceit'. All they want is a bigger lab, more assistants, and an unassailable position. That's all. And a nice hot cup of tea, I'm sure.
My favorite quote from her: "That's a statistical test they use to make data out of noise".
Positive bias is inevitable. Probably started before Galileo, and of course he struggled with that a lot. No less a problem today, though we punish heretics somewhat more humanely today. We either premote them to government jobs when we agree, or we fire them when we don't. Not many go to the stocks any more.
That's a left winger's response.
*whoosh*
If they were trying to be like Apple, there would be maybe 12 browsers to choose from. More if you count the forks and derivatives. Not including Lynx or Line Mode Browser.
..is not at all opposed to U.S. law saying that advertisments with edited or modified depictions of models should dislose that fact, and plainly enough to be easily seen and understood.
The fashion industry pretty much depends on peddling fantasy, from the fantasy that what you wear will improve your life in any way, from the superficial to the profound, and shouldn't be too offended that we ask them to admit that.
Of course they won't like it, since that may break the spell, but hey - you abuse the magic, it comes back at ya.
So how do we institute ANY 'truth in advertising'? Seriously, the concept is pretty much nonfunctional. We regularly see ads promoting some supplement with the facetious disclaimer that it is not intended as a treatment for anything, despite the ad plainly stating that if you want to improve|enhance|support your immune|sexual|youth|whatever function, 'use this'.
Seriously? We wanna do that? Wow.
Israel, on the other hand, is free to do what they want. Their country.
ps - Any stats on how many girls are starving themselves to death in response to these altered pics in ads?
You fed it, your problem now. I can send bill to you? Ja?
My doc already does this, except for the 'minor' surgical procedures. In fact, a tech takes my vitals, confirms symptoms, and even draws for tests.
My doc still hands me meds when he has them, though.
I use Smozzy from time to time for little things, and revel in the absurdity if it.