There's nothing particularly "stunning" about the conclusion that modern average global temperatures are higher than temperatures measured or deduced in the last several hundred years.
What was stunning about it was that all the proxy variation and variation between the three sources was wiped out at the splice points, and a remarkably consistent picture of all three graphs rising in dramatic fashion was shown instead.
The aren't "blended." They are identified and separately labeled, as you can see from the actual graph in question (p. 3)
You're looking at the wrong graph. The graph that Phil Jones was talking about was this one, supplied for a WMO report.
While there was some talk about erasing mail, there is no evidence that any mail was actually erased. (Hardly surprising...if they'd actually erased the email, surely they would have also erased the email suggesting that they erase emails) So apparently, cooler heads prevailed.
The leaked email was taken from a backup server. Phil Jones also said he deleted email: "About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little - if anything at all."
We also know that Jones explicitly told his colleagues to erase email:
"Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."
Are you going to keep on making up excuses for this? The fact that he sent that email is bad enough.
"For some years prior to the coming into force of the general right of access to information under FoIA, CRU had received requests for data, including station identifiers. An example of the attitude to these requests is given in the following e-mail extract:
Jones to Mann on 2nd February 2005 (1107454306.txt): "And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who'll say we must adhere to it !""
What they wanted was all the data so they could verify how they came up with their results. This includes raw data as well as any meta-data and derived data, along with any code.
Oh I agree, but if the customers want a system that can handle connections from 10000 users at a time - who am I to tell them they can't do it ?
Who said not to? That doesn't mean you push the server to 95% memory capacity where a small amount of variation will put you over 100%. Either get more memory, another server, or figure out why you are using so much memory. Blaming the JVM footprint when you've got 32GB while also talking about Perl tells me that you just don't know what you are talking about.
A server gets put down and is expected to stay stable even if it's pushed to 100% memory at times
This is truly idiotic. Even the kernel has variable memory usage. Once you go over 100% your machine is going to start thrashing and your performance is going to go all to hell.
That's because your experience is obviously... a bit more limited.
Why, because I'm not huffing and puffing like you are? I judge you on your technical statements, not some e-peen Slashdot resume.
The CCE review I linked to disputes this, as does the email from Jones himself which shows him using it as cover. The email was quoted in the review, and it is quite damning. He just didn't want McIntyre to critique it. The data was handed out to other researchers.
There was no intentional deceit over "hiding the decline" and mathematical "tricks". That is just bizarro land.
What's bizarro is that you can interpret "hide the decline" as anything but deceit. No, it's not "OMG global warming is all a fraud!!!", but the intent was to hide a discrepancy. And there's just no excuse for showing three separate graphs from different sources, largely based on proxies, and then blending in a single data set at the end to give you a consistent hockey stick.
Erasing email, and deleing data was/not/ done
You don't know this. The email that was leaked was from a backup server. What we do know is that Jones explicitly asked people to erase email.
but the actors involved were expressing immense frustration at people like you, who speak, but don't listen, and keep speaking for years and years about the same nonsense, without ever stopping to learn something.
See how you whitewash an explicit request do delete email? As for people like McIntyre, he found acknowledged faults in Mann's original paper. He's also responsible for correcting GISS temperature data. In short, you're doing exactly what you accuse others of. Maybe you should learn something yourself. Science isn't a priesthood.
The noise is 99% from the denialists
Also from alarmists too. Funny that I didn't hear climate scientists or the media calling out Al Gore for his ridiculous "Inconvenient Truth" presentation. There were also the alarmist "accidents" like the Himalayan glacier melt going into the IPCC report.
You should watch this talk so that you KNOW exactly what role you are playing in this affair.
I'm playing the "integrity in science" role. You're playing the "downplay serious issues for the sake of politics" role.
You are talking about a single graph that was arguably misleading, in that it was not clearly labeled to indicate that tree ring data known to be incorrect, based upon actual temperature readings, had been dropped and the correct actual temperature data shown instead
You don't label three sources of data that show variation on a single graph which then all remarkably converge to the same stunning conclusion. You just don't do that. There's nothing arguable about it.
so even if you misunderstood what the graph depicted, you would still draw the correct conclusions about the temperature trend.
The key is matching the historical proxy data to the thermometer data, which only goes back to 1850. What's deceptive is making it look like the proxy data from separate studies matches the real temps when they were just blended.
And then there's still also the issue of withholding data and erasing email. You just can't behave this way as a lead scientist, especially when you are talking about the fate of global economies.
Apologists: Ignore intentional deceit, withholding of data, and a conspiracy to erase email, all of which was admonished in the CCE review. Act indignant when called out on it.
There's definitely a lot of noise, but it's not all one-sided.
You do realize that the cache is in MEMORY right ? The SAME memory where applications and data has to live ? So you realize that the first thing the OS does when memory use gets high is to shrink the cache ? When the load on your apps from having ten-thousand concurrent connections each doing heavy-load transactions is pushing a 32Gb ram server to 95% memory use, for all matter of practice there IS no cache.
That's quite ridiculous. Nobody with a clue runs their server to 95% memory capacity, and even if they did, the cache required for a single JVM is going to be on the order of 100MB, not gigs.
And if you're talking 10,000 concurrent connections, startup time and caches are not the issue. This isn't a problem with Java, it's a problem with your app. You're not going to magically shrink the memory requirements where you are pushing the limits of 32 gigs by switching from Java to Perl.
but make no mistake what I DO for a living is design server and OS platforms for high-vollume, heavy load applications to operate in
So you say, but it doesn't mean you actually are an expert at it. Everything you've said so far leads me to believe the opposite.
"It seems that much of the startup time is due to IO-bound operations rather than JVM initialization or class loading (the rt.jar class data file alone is 40 MB and the JVM must seek a lot of data in this huge file).[25] Some tests showed that although the new Split bytecode verification technique improved class loading by roughly 40%, it only translated to about 5% startup improvement for large programs.[58]
Albeit a small improvement it is more visible in small programs that perform a simple operation and then exit, because the Java platform data loading can represent many times the load of the actual program's operation.
Beginning with Java SE 6 Update 10, the Sun JRE comes with a Quick Starter that preloads class data at OS startup to get data from the disk cache rather than from the disk."
[25]: ""At the OS level, all of these megabytes have to be read from disk, which is a very slow operation. Actually, it's the seek time of the disk that's the killer; reading large files sequentially is relatively fast, but seeking the bits that we actually need is not. So even though we only need a small fraction of the data in these large files for any particular application, the fact that we're seeking all over within the files means that there is plenty of disk activity. "
Both compiled and interpreted languages however do get copy-on-write and the library once loaded is already loaded for ALL programs that need access to it, only in the event that a program changes something in the library's own memory space does that chunk get copied into private memory and even then it's a memory-to-memory copy.
You must be speaking of mod_perl in particular, because by default if you run two separate interpreters in two separate processes they will not share libraries unless they are native.so libraries.
And if it's a server you're talking about, then there's only one JVM anyways running multiple threads.
On a server with maxed out ram, I can show how 9/10 times 95% of the ram is tied up by the java portions of our stack - not the mod_perl or python parts (and this while java is the smallest part of the stack - even if you include glassfish as part of the java stack).
Java EE servers aren't designed to run as a small footprint because it takes an "everything and the kitchen sink" design. That said, if you are eating up all the ram on the server it's because of your app code, not Java.
At best it makes the files that are used the most accessed faster, it will never be so perfect that you can completely ignore seek times when building high-performance applications, and no programmer who does that for a living ever would.
Only if your "high performance application" entails starting up a new process every time that won't be in the cache.
You talked about command line apps, and that's only one example, unless you are talking about "particularly the RoR setup beats it hand's down though", which I find unbelievable unless you've got a cite.
As for the Unix command line, I'm willing to bet Java would do fine. Files are all cached in memory these days.
Nature magazine has a scathing rebuttal of this particular point.
Link?
I have watched this video, and it is a perfect example of the confirmation bias in play. Without the confirmation bias, climategate would not exist, because it evaporates when you actually apply scientific thinking.
The person giving the lecture is a respected physicist who in general supports the global warming hypothesis. You can see the full lecture where that clip is taken from here. As a scientist, the man knows bad science when he sees it.
There is confirmation bias, and you've got it in spades. You never, and I mean never, show a graph from separate sources and then surreptitiously blend in another data source to make it look like they are all in agreement. That's what Jones did, and that went way beyond what any of the other graphs did in their original reports, which he listed as the sources for the graph in the legend.
There is no proof of any conspiracy
He told his colleagues to erase email. All the bullshitting to prevent releasing the data is in the email. This is pure politics, not science. In science you don't cover up discrepancies, and that is exactly what "hide the decline" means, especially when there isn't good science to explain it (speculation is not good science). A scientist should also welcome transparency.
Search youtube for greenman3610, and climate gate to find 4 videos on the subject.
I watched the first one, and the only excuse he gave for the Jones graph was that it was meant for non-specialists, though I hardly consider a report for "World Meteorological Organization" excuses such deceitful simplification.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. I've already mentioned the concrete things he did, and you come back with "how they expressed themselves in private emails".
The graph Phil Jones generated, in which he describes using a "trick" to "hide the decline", was deceitful. He spliced together proxy data with real data. An Anonymous Coward already posted a YouTube link. This went way beyond what Mann did in his original paper, which was already pretty dubious.
Phil Jones has a repeated history of refusing to hand over data with bullshit excuses. In that light, threatening to delete the data rather than hand it over isn't just some scientist expressing himself. Science is supposed to be done in the spirit of openness and transparency, yet he was doing exactly the opposite.
He also told other researchers to erase email. This, actually, is conspiracy.
I agree, that sentiment isn't called for. However, when a lead scientists behaves badly, and the issue is whitewashed over, both by the scientific community and activists, then trust is rightfully diminished.
Phil Jones should never had acted as he did, and once the mistake was aired, it should have been admitted. Continuing to gloss over the issue as if nothing wrong occurred just makes people even more distrustful, and tarnishes science as a whole.
This is a whitewash. Phil Jones was a deceitful scientist -- there is no other way to describe what he did with that graph. He'd rather delete data than have people question it, and he asked other people to erase email. To say "that is all you get", that's crazy. The man should have been forced to resign, because he made his whole profession look bad. It becomes even worse when other people defend what he did, clearly showing that politics is more important to them than science.
What you described as features for bad programmers in Java were safety features. The only really valid claim you'd have for Perl was the horrid syntax and abundant magic, but you didn't mention those. You also can't explain why PHP is so popular and full of mediocre programmers when it's essentially Perl for the Web.
You have Phil Jones to blame. The graph he produced when talking about the "trick" was, in fact, deceitful, even if Mann's original graph wasn't. Phil Jones was also the one recorded in email saying that he'd rather delete data than release it, and also the one to ask other researchers to erase email.
I don't think there's a vast conspiracy among climate scientists, but the science was definitely politicized and oversold.
Did you really choose Perl as your unsafe language? I thought you were going to describe C. Perl copies lists and strings by default because it's the safe thing to do, even though it is inefficient. Perl added "use strict" and it is widely encouraged and used. Perl doesn't enforce public and private because it is a dynamic language derived from shell programming, and its object-oriented features were tacked on with superglue.
Perl does have a lot of crazy magic and syntax, but that's just a reflection of the designer. Lots of good programmers don't like it, and hence Python was born.
The reason you have more bad Java developers is because that's the language business gravitated to after tons of bad developers were making a mess in other languages, like C and C++. As another example, PHP, has a lot of confusing design choices and lots of ways to screw up, but tons of programmers use it, bad ones included, because it's a very popular language on the Web.
You can't deny that the majority of leading Hollywood actresses are generally considered beautiful. You would never see a mainstream Hollywood movie opening up with a closeup shot that shows an older heroine with bad skin, made to look about as bad as possible with the lighting.
As for her body, manly arms and shoulders are a turnoff, so I'd give it a seven at best. And her skin -- watch the very beginning of the movie in high def. It doesn't look so bad in the other shots, though, but a bad first impression is a killer. I don't know what the directory was thinking, unless he was going for gritty and plain.
And you're really going to call a girl that you rated 7.5 "hot"? That'd be "mildly attractive" at best.
Easy. Post a negative opinion that comes off as mean-spirited, and those that don't agree will come out of the wood-work. After that, nobody is going to want to defend you, even if they agree.
The fact is that you're wrong. While you'll never get everybody to agree on what is attractive, there are common standards, such as youthfulness, clear and supple skin, and for a woman, curves in the right places. The leading women in Hollywood are generally agreed to be attractive for a reason.
The director actually chose to go with a closeup shot in the very beginning that shows the actress's skin, which is fairly bad, especially the way it was lit. Maybe this is intentional and they were going for gritty, but too much realism can ruin a movie.
The plain truth is that she wasn't attractive to look at. Of course her physicality fits in with the role, but one of the reasons Hollywood is successful is because they make movies with people we want to look at for over an hour.
Take somebody like the actress who played Trinity in the Matrix. She wasn't a classic beauty or a glam girl, but she was still attractive. That's why Hollywood goes through tons of auditions to get the right person.
Slashdot Mirror
There's nothing particularly "stunning" about the conclusion that modern average global temperatures are higher than temperatures measured or deduced in the last several hundred years.
What was stunning about it was that all the proxy variation and variation between the three sources was wiped out at the splice points, and a remarkably consistent picture of all three graphs rising in dramatic fashion was shown instead.
The aren't "blended." They are identified and separately labeled, as you can see from the actual graph in question (p. 3)
You're looking at the wrong graph. The graph that Phil Jones was talking about was this one, supplied for a WMO report.
While there was some talk about erasing mail, there is no evidence that any mail was actually erased. (Hardly surprising...if they'd actually erased the email, surely they would have also erased the email suggesting that they erase emails) So apparently, cooler heads prevailed.
The leaked email was taken from a backup server. Phil Jones also said he deleted email: "About 2 months ago I deleted loads of emails, so have very little - if anything at all."
We also know that Jones explicitly told his colleagues to erase email:
"Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't
have his new email address.
We will be getting Caspar to do likewise."
Are you going to keep on making up excuses for this? The fact that he sent that email is bad enough.
Which data are you talking about?
It's in the review I cited earlier:
"For some years prior to the coming into force of the general right of access to information under FoIA, CRU had received requests for data, including station identifiers. An example of the attitude to these requests is given in the following e-mail extract:
Jones to Mann on 2nd February 2005 (1107454306.txt):
"And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who'll say we must adhere to it !""
What they wanted was all the data so they could verify how they came up with their results. This includes raw data as well as any meta-data and derived data, along with any code.
Oh I agree, but if the customers want a system that can handle connections from 10000 users at a time - who am I to tell them they can't do it ?
Who said not to? That doesn't mean you push the server to 95% memory capacity where a small amount of variation will put you over 100%. Either get more memory, another server, or figure out why you are using so much memory. Blaming the JVM footprint when you've got 32GB while also talking about Perl tells me that you just don't know what you are talking about.
A server gets put down and is expected to stay stable even if it's pushed to 100% memory at times
This is truly idiotic. Even the kernel has variable memory usage. Once you go over 100% your machine is going to start thrashing and your performance is going to go all to hell.
That's because your experience is obviously ... a bit more limited.
Why, because I'm not huffing and puffing like you are? I judge you on your technical statements, not some e-peen Slashdot resume.
Data was withheld because of legal constraints.
The CCE review I linked to disputes this, as does the email from Jones himself which shows him using it as cover. The email was quoted in the review, and it is quite damning. He just didn't want McIntyre to critique it. The data was handed out to other researchers.
There was no intentional deceit over "hiding the decline" and mathematical "tricks". That is just bizarro land.
What's bizarro is that you can interpret "hide the decline" as anything but deceit. No, it's not "OMG global warming is all a fraud!!!", but the intent was to hide a discrepancy. And there's just no excuse for showing three separate graphs from different sources, largely based on proxies, and then blending in a single data set at the end to give you a consistent hockey stick.
Erasing email, and deleing data was /not/ done
You don't know this. The email that was leaked was from a backup server. What we do know is that Jones explicitly asked people to erase email.
but the actors involved were expressing immense frustration at people like you, who speak, but don't listen, and keep speaking for years and years about the same nonsense, without ever stopping to learn something.
See how you whitewash an explicit request do delete email? As for people like McIntyre, he found acknowledged faults in Mann's original paper. He's also responsible for correcting GISS temperature data. In short, you're doing exactly what you accuse others of. Maybe you should learn something yourself. Science isn't a priesthood.
The noise is 99% from the denialists
Also from alarmists too. Funny that I didn't hear climate scientists or the media calling out Al Gore for his ridiculous "Inconvenient Truth" presentation. There were also the alarmist "accidents" like the Himalayan glacier melt going into the IPCC report.
You should watch this talk so that you KNOW exactly what role you are playing in this affair.
I'm playing the "integrity in science" role. You're playing the "downplay serious issues for the sake of politics" role.
You are talking about a single graph that was arguably misleading, in that it was not clearly labeled to indicate that tree ring data known to be incorrect, based upon actual temperature readings, had been dropped and the correct actual temperature data shown instead
You don't label three sources of data that show variation on a single graph which then all remarkably converge to the same stunning conclusion. You just don't do that. There's nothing arguable about it.
so even if you misunderstood what the graph depicted, you would still draw the correct conclusions about the temperature trend.
The key is matching the historical proxy data to the thermometer data, which only goes back to 1850. What's deceptive is making it look like the proxy data from separate studies matches the real temps when they were just blended.
And then there's still also the issue of withholding data and erasing email. You just can't behave this way as a lead scientist, especially when you are talking about the fate of global economies.
Apologists: Ignore intentional deceit, withholding of data, and a conspiracy to erase email, all of which was admonished in the CCE review. Act indignant when called out on it.
There's definitely a lot of noise, but it's not all one-sided.
You do realize that the cache is in MEMORY right ? The SAME memory where applications and data has to live ? So you realize that the first thing the OS does when memory use gets high is to shrink the cache ?
When the load on your apps from having ten-thousand concurrent connections each doing heavy-load transactions is pushing a 32Gb ram server to 95% memory use, for all matter of practice there IS no cache.
That's quite ridiculous. Nobody with a clue runs their server to 95% memory capacity, and even if they did, the cache required for a single JVM is going to be on the order of 100MB, not gigs.
And if you're talking 10,000 concurrent connections, startup time and caches are not the issue. This isn't a problem with Java, it's a problem with your app. You're not going to magically shrink the memory requirements where you are pushing the limits of 32 gigs by switching from Java to Perl.
but make no mistake what I DO for a living is design server and OS platforms for high-vollume, heavy load applications to operate in
So you say, but it doesn't mean you actually are an expert at it. Everything you've said so far leads me to believe the opposite.
And if you think file access time has anything to do with java's slower startup times you are an idiot not worth debating with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_performance#Startup_time
"It seems that much of the startup time is due to IO-bound operations rather than JVM initialization or class loading (the rt.jar class data file alone is 40 MB and the JVM must seek a lot of data in this huge file).[25] Some tests showed that although the new Split bytecode verification technique improved class loading by roughly 40%, it only translated to about 5% startup improvement for large programs.[58]
Albeit a small improvement it is more visible in small programs that perform a simple operation and then exit, because the Java platform data loading can represent many times the load of the actual program's operation.
Beginning with Java SE 6 Update 10, the Sun JRE comes with a Quick Starter that preloads class data at OS startup to get data from the disk cache rather than from the disk."
[25]: ""At the OS level, all of these megabytes have to be read from disk, which is a very slow operation. Actually, it's the seek time of the disk that's the killer; reading large files sequentially is relatively fast, but seeking the bits that we actually need is not. So even though we only need a small fraction of the data in these large files for any particular application, the fact that we're seeking all over within the files means that there is plenty of disk activity. "
Both compiled and interpreted languages however do get copy-on-write and the library once loaded is already loaded for ALL programs that need access to it, only in the event that a program changes something in the library's own memory space does that chunk get copied into private memory and even then it's a memory-to-memory copy.
You must be speaking of mod_perl in particular, because by default if you run two separate interpreters in two separate processes they will not share libraries unless they are native .so libraries.
And if it's a server you're talking about, then there's only one JVM anyways running multiple threads.
On a server with maxed out ram, I can show how 9/10 times 95% of the ram is tied up by the java portions of our stack - not the mod_perl or python parts (and this while java is the smallest part of the stack - even if you include glassfish as part of the java stack).
Java EE servers aren't designed to run as a small footprint because it takes an "everything and the kitchen sink" design. That said, if you are eating up all the ram on the server it's because of your app code, not Java.
At best it makes the files that are used the most accessed faster, it will never be so perfect that you can completely ignore seek times when building high-performance applications, and no programmer who does that for a living ever would.
Only if your "high performance application" entails starting up a new process every time that won't be in the cache.
You talked about command line apps, and that's only one example, unless you are talking about "particularly the RoR setup beats it hand's down though", which I find unbelievable unless you've got a cite.
As for the Unix command line, I'm willing to bet Java would do fine. Files are all cached in memory these days.
Nature magazine has a scathing rebuttal of this particular point.
Link?
I have watched this video, and it is a perfect example of the confirmation bias in play. Without the confirmation bias, climategate would not exist, because it evaporates when you actually apply scientific thinking.
The person giving the lecture is a respected physicist who in general supports the global warming hypothesis. You can see the full lecture where that clip is taken from here. As a scientist, the man knows bad science when he sees it.
There is confirmation bias, and you've got it in spades. You never, and I mean never, show a graph from separate sources and then surreptitiously blend in another data source to make it look like they are all in agreement. That's what Jones did, and that went way beyond what any of the other graphs did in their original reports, which he listed as the sources for the graph in the legend.
There is no proof of any conspiracy
He told his colleagues to erase email. All the bullshitting to prevent releasing the data is in the email. This is pure politics, not science. In science you don't cover up discrepancies, and that is exactly what "hide the decline" means, especially when there isn't good science to explain it (speculation is not good science). A scientist should also welcome transparency.
Search youtube for greenman3610, and climate gate to find 4 videos on the subject.
I watched the first one, and the only excuse he gave for the Jones graph was that it was meant for non-specialists, though I hardly consider a report for "World Meteorological Organization" excuses such deceitful simplification.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. I've already mentioned the concrete things he did, and you come back with "how they expressed themselves in private emails".
The graph Phil Jones generated, in which he describes using a "trick" to "hide the decline", was deceitful. He spliced together proxy data with real data. An Anonymous Coward already posted a YouTube link. This went way beyond what Mann did in his original paper, which was already pretty dubious.
Phil Jones has a repeated history of refusing to hand over data with bullshit excuses. In that light, threatening to delete the data rather than hand it over isn't just some scientist expressing himself. Science is supposed to be done in the spirit of openness and transparency, yet he was doing exactly the opposite.
He also told other researchers to erase email. This, actually, is conspiracy.
I agree, that sentiment isn't called for. However, when a lead scientists behaves badly, and the issue is whitewashed over, both by the scientific community and activists, then trust is rightfully diminished.
Phil Jones should never had acted as he did, and once the mistake was aired, it should have been admitted. Continuing to gloss over the issue as if nothing wrong occurred just makes people even more distrustful, and tarnishes science as a whole.
This is a whitewash. Phil Jones was a deceitful scientist -- there is no other way to describe what he did with that graph. He'd rather delete data than have people question it, and he asked other people to erase email. To say "that is all you get", that's crazy. The man should have been forced to resign, because he made his whole profession look bad. It becomes even worse when other people defend what he did, clearly showing that politics is more important to them than science.
What you described as features for bad programmers in Java were safety features. The only really valid claim you'd have for Perl was the horrid syntax and abundant magic, but you didn't mention those. You also can't explain why PHP is so popular and full of mediocre programmers when it's essentially Perl for the Web.
You have Phil Jones to blame. The graph he produced when talking about the "trick" was, in fact, deceitful, even if Mann's original graph wasn't. Phil Jones was also the one recorded in email saying that he'd rather delete data than release it, and also the one to ask other researchers to erase email.
I don't think there's a vast conspiracy among climate scientists, but the science was definitely politicized and oversold.
I did say in SOME situations
I've never heard of Ruby or Python outperforming Java, Rails included. Do you have a cite?
Alternatively, why are bloated apps written in C++ just as slow to load?
The correct use of apostrophe is grammar, not spelling, as it concerns syntax.
Did you really choose Perl as your unsafe language? I thought you were going to describe C. Perl copies lists and strings by default because it's the safe thing to do, even though it is inefficient. Perl added "use strict" and it is widely encouraged and used. Perl doesn't enforce public and private because it is a dynamic language derived from shell programming, and its object-oriented features were tacked on with superglue.
Perl does have a lot of crazy magic and syntax, but that's just a reflection of the designer. Lots of good programmers don't like it, and hence Python was born.
The reason you have more bad Java developers is because that's the language business gravitated to after tons of bad developers were making a mess in other languages, like C and C++. As another example, PHP, has a lot of confusing design choices and lots of ways to screw up, but tons of programmers use it, bad ones included, because it's a very popular language on the Web.
The problem is that while there are subjective differences of opinion, there are also objective generalities:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_attractiveness
You can't deny that the majority of leading Hollywood actresses are generally considered beautiful. You would never see a mainstream Hollywood movie opening up with a closeup shot that shows an older heroine with bad skin, made to look about as bad as possible with the lighting.
As for her body, manly arms and shoulders are a turnoff, so I'd give it a seven at best. And her skin -- watch the very beginning of the movie in high def. It doesn't look so bad in the other shots, though, but a bad first impression is a killer. I don't know what the directory was thinking, unless he was going for gritty and plain.
And you're really going to call a girl that you rated 7.5 "hot"? That'd be "mildly attractive" at best.
Easy. Post a negative opinion that comes off as mean-spirited, and those that don't agree will come out of the wood-work. After that, nobody is going to want to defend you, even if they agree.
The fact is that you're wrong. While you'll never get everybody to agree on what is attractive, there are common standards, such as youthfulness, clear and supple skin, and for a woman, curves in the right places. The leading women in Hollywood are generally agreed to be attractive for a reason.
The director actually chose to go with a closeup shot in the very beginning that shows the actress's skin, which is fairly bad, especially the way it was lit. Maybe this is intentional and they were going for gritty, but too much realism can ruin a movie.
Ah. An anime fan.
Not really.
Hey, I like it too, but real women have their advantages.
If by "real", maybe you mean "average". They have their roles, but not as the feature role in a film.
You're not thinking, because you are denying that placing restrictions on what may be copied is the opposite of freedom.
The plain truth is that she wasn't attractive to look at. Of course her physicality fits in with the role, but one of the reasons Hollywood is successful is because they make movies with people we want to look at for over an hour.
Take somebody like the actress who played Trinity in the Matrix. She wasn't a classic beauty or a glam girl, but she was still attractive. That's why Hollywood goes through tons of auditions to get the right person.